On another night, she had stumbled upon the dress which had cloaked her first pregnancy, its ample pleats expanding with the months, its little white collar above the darkness of wool already a premonition of the school girl ways which were soon to inhabit the house. She had been happy then, full of the vigour of new life, which seemed also to quieten her dead.
One morning, as she was burrowing about to find a half-remembered scarf, she had come across the grey tweed sheath she had worn to give her first seminar. Its clean, skilfully cut lines, the subtle detail of darts at waist and neck and cuffs, reminded her that she had said to Michel as she tried thoughts out on him, that she wanted her talk to be as well constructed as this garment. She remembered acutely then how their years together, even when everything else was at a low ebb, had been marked by a passionate exchange of ideas and she tasted again the tart and sometimes acid sharpness of his mind.
Not far from the sheath hung the wine-dark gown she had worn for her first dinner at the Elysée Palace. It was on that night that she had whispered her desires and plans in the President’s ear and had been rewarded with official sanction, as well as the site for the first of several congresses which brought Eastern European writers and poets and thinkers to the West.
Seeing the gown had given her an idea and she had brought it out and tried it on. She worried whether the décolletage was too low for the piano scale of bones which these days worked its way down from her neck, but on a whim she had rung her dressmaker and the dress now hung in anticipation at the front of the wardrobe, waiting for the event Stephen had told her he would most probably miss.
Simone glanced at it now as she opened the door of the closet and approved of her commemorative act. She scolded herself a little nonetheless. She knew that her prolonged visits here bore the distinctive seal of an old woman’s silliness. But she didn’t care. Increasingly she delighted in her treasure trove, the flutter of silk which brought back light-hearted affairs - the Russian poet pouring his soul out to her knees, the stiff-necked politician she had taught to laugh, a stream of friends she remembered with nothing but affection.
She moved slowly round the racks, pushing back hangars, letting her fingers caress materials. She had almost reached the very back of the room when she saw it, half hidden by a thick coat. A single breasted woollen suit in deepest brick. Michel had chosen it for her because of the colour and she had loved it because of the ample cuffed pockets and the long centre-back kick pleat made to match her strides. It was the suit she had worn on her first return visit to Prague. She shuddered at the acts the garment brought to the fore. But it was right that she should stumble upon it tonight. She stared at it for a moment, then carried it to the front of the room, as if its visible presence would ensure a resolve which threatened to disappear by morning.
It was odd that from those earlier days of her first marriage, her marriage to Staszek, she had kept nothing. Perhaps because he was as irretrievably lost as her first youth. Or more accurately, she scoffed at herself, because she had once wanted emphatically to obliterate that past. She had come to Michel from her father’s house with little more than a single valise.
Simone rummaged through racks, shifted garments. Could she have given away the particular dress she was looking for in another fit of deliberate effacement?
From beneath a black coat, a beam of colour caught her eye. There it was, a yellow so ripe she should never have considered it. But she had wanted to be bright that spring, deliberately cheerful, so as to wake from her year-long mourning for Michel. It had been a good marriage, a solid partnership in every respect. And suddenly, it was over. She was alone. More so with each passing day as her teen-age daughters leapt into the galloping intensity of a decade ear-marked for youth.
Simone released the dress from the sombre coat which cloaked it and stared at it. A geometric A-line in woollen gabardine, fashionably short and pert in the style of the time, and with a striped jacket; too youthful, she had thought even then, for what were her forty-two years. But the girls had encouraged her, declared she could now pass as their older sister.
A dreamy expression on her face, Simone carried the dress back to her bed and lay down beside it.
Prague in the spring of 1968. That was where the dress had gone. And she inside it. Pauline, a journalist friend, had insisted Simone accompany her. She needed someone beside her who understood the language, who understood the ways. Simone’s protests that she hadn’t been back to Prague for some fifteen years, that she would probably understand little more than the language, had been half-hearted. In truth, she now wanted to go, though she couldn’t altogether understand the desire. Perhaps it was simply because a sufficient number of years had passed. Perhaps it had something to do with Michel’s death. Whatever the case, she was curious: about her own reactions as well as about the new political openings that year had brought.
As a child, she had adored Prague, where her diplomat father had been stationed before the war. She had loved the steep twisting streets which lost themselves as they groped towards the fairy-tale hulk of a castle; the candy floss pink of the French Embassy, the snow clad-roofs, the mist which rose from the curving river and shrouded the city in magic.
She had loved Cook with his floppy pudding of a hat who conjured up sprites and goblins and wizards with the same ease as he stuffed dumplings and transformed left-overs into tangy sauces and surprising pies. She had loved his avid piggy gleam and his shiny, perspiring cheeks; the way his mouth would form into an intent silent circle as he had her taste a smidgen of soup or sniff a sour apple tart. The rest of the time it was always moving. It was Cook who stood like an icon over that golden period of her childhood. He who had really taught her Czech and with it, embued her with his own version of history.
It was from Cook that she first heard of the great and mad Rudolf II, his humour as black as his garb, who had moved the centre of Empire from Vienna to Prague in the sixteenth century. And with Rudolf came natural scientists and unnatural alchemists, makers of tricky mirrors and makers of devilish homunculi, astronomers and astrologers, Tycho Brahe with his astrolabes and measurements and artificial golden nose and earless English sorcerers who could turn base metal into the life-giving elixirs Rudolf desired above all else.
As Cook chopped onions and carrots and threw them into a vat of a pot, he would list the contents of Rudolf’s cabinet of curiosities: shells of topaz and jasper and agate, rhinoceros horns, a head of Polyphemus, musical clocks and grandfather clocks and trumpeting clocks, spectacles of all sizes and shapes, nails from Noah’s Ark, crocodile and lizard casts, chalices for boiling poisons and potions, stuffed ostriches, mandrake roots reclining like little men on velvet cushions. The list grew, added on to, repeated from day to day, until the pots were full. And always and ever as the lid went on, Cook would say, ‘Oh yes, I almost forgot the most important of all: a lump of earth from the Hebron Valley, the very lump of earth from which Yahweh, that’s God to you, formed Adam.’
Yes, Cook had given her his version of history. Not so very different from his version of magic.
‘See,’ he had said to her one day as he kneaded dough with fat, deft fingers. ‘This is how you make a golem.’ He had cackled merrily, poked and prodded until the dough produced the rotund shape of a man with an imbecile’s grin and hands as large as shovels. ‘We can all be gods.’
‘A golem?’ Simone had queried.
‘You don’t know what the golem is? And you a nice little dark-eyed girl with a Jewish mother! Why Rabbi Jehuda Loew, King Rudolf’s friend, made the first golem, right down there in the Josefov. He took some mud, some earth and just like his God created a man.’
With a high-pitched cackle, Cook had poised a floppy hat on his creation’s head. ‘Now comes the difficult part. We’re meant to walk our little man round in a circle 462 times while we recite the letters of the tetragram, backwards, forwards, inside out. That’s Jehovah in four letters to you.’
But instead of walking, Coo
k had simply tweaked her cheek and popped his little man into the oven. ‘Short cut,’ he had said. ‘I’m too lazy for all that walking. And anyhow, it’s probably better to eat our Golem before he eats us.’
So they had eaten Cook’s Golem, all rotund and golden brown with raisin dark eyes. And while they had eaten Cook had told her ever more and wilder stories. About an ugly, clumsy Golem who was a good servant to the Rabbi until he cast eyes on his daughter and fell madly in love with her and stole her away. The Rabbi had then to track him, come upon him secretly in the night and whip the name of God from his month so that the Golem went limp and reverted to his muddy state.
He told her how another Golem, an envious clod, had organized a rebellion against his master, and could only be put down when the E of Emet, the Hebrew for truth, was wiped from his brow leaving only Met which means death.
Simone turned over on her bed and sighed. Yes, she had swallowed Cook’s magical history as readily as she had swallowed his thick slabs of yeasty bread with their coating of plum jam. Until Staszek had come along and opened her eyes to a grimmer version of the world. One where another kind of golem, with a small moustache on his face and hatred in his heart, was running rampant.
Staszek. She didn’t want to think of him. Not now. She fingered the heavy texture of the yellow dress and forced her mind to the Spring of ‘68.
The city had appeared to her in all its golden beauty during those weeks, as if Cook’s aegis had been restored. Everything was bright with the vivacity of a dawning freedom, the bad days as lost to her as they seemed to be to the Czechs she encountered.
Pauline and she had stayed in the shabby splendour of the Europa Hotel. From her window, she could see the euphoric crowds gathering in Wenceslas Square. Their jubilation had infected her. The world was changing, none too soon.
They spent their days in interviews with politicians and playwrights and members of the Writers Union and students. In the evenings, they crowded into theatres or steamy, smoke-filled bars rife with the odours of excitement and sour beer and herby Becherovka.
It was in one of these that she had met him on her third evening in Prague. He had squeezed in beside her on the long narrow bench and given her a look of such pure delight that she had assumed they might know each other. They didn’t. It was Pauline he had met that morning in the course of a series of student interviews. But everyone behaved like an old friend during those weeks, all conventions of correct behaviour forgotten. And he was beautiful. He had a vivid freshness of face, a gleam of hair, a newly-laundered look about him. Except for his mouth, which curled with wry intelligence. In the heat of the evening’s discussion, she had learned little more about him than that he was a student. And had confirmation of that humorous intelligence.
Later, in her hotel room there was more. Much more.
As he had brought her fingers to the taut stretch of his skin, a shiny newness of stomach and chest which glowed in its obliviousness to time, he had woken a long-forgotten passion in her. An ache composed of greed and longing. It had grown over that long night and the subsequent days, so that in the midst of meetings or dinners she had to reach out and touch him. And when he wasn’t there, she could smell him on her skin, feel the brush of his thigh on hers as she stepped off the pavement or pulled on her stockings. She wanted to press her fingers against his groin, to sniff the sweat of him, rub herself against his moistness.
An older woman’s mad passion, as unreasonable and inconsolable as an infant’s tantrum.
As the days grew into weeks and Pauline had long gone, the inappropriateness of it filled her with terror. He was eighteen. A Himalaya of time separated them. Yet she would have done anything to seduce him into coming home with her. As years ago, she had tried to do with Staszek.
And then, one night, as they lay on the bed in the shabby grandeur of that hotel room, he had started, as lovers do, to reminisce about his childhood. What he had told her had made her blood run cold.
She couldn’t convey the burden of it to him. She had invented a story, a telegram from Paris, she had to go back. They would meet again perhaps. She had attempted kindness, but been deliberately vague.
The next day, she had fled, never to return to Prague.
During those first aching months back in Paris, she had been haunted by a story an African friend had told her. She thought of it as the clay sister story. It told of a peculiar rite of passage. In the southern African tribe which was its home, boys and girls were reared separately in the years leading to puberty. During those years they were taught the secrets of love and the intricate pleasures of their bodies. Then at an appointed date, boy met girl for a single night of love. In preparation for the tryst, the girl was wrapped in clay - became a hardened doll to be cracked open by her lover. Released, she could share with him all the stored knowledge and desire of the separate years. But only for that one night.
Simone had felt like that clay wrapped figure, but one whose age-hardened carapace had been cracked open to release too much yearning. She had miraculously been allowed to extend the single night of love into several. But like the clay sister, she had to retreat, never to share more than words with her youthful lover again. Or the order of the known universe would crumble.
So with a struggle she had wrapped her carapace round her again. And like a good clay sister, she had done her best for her now untouchable young lover. She had tried to look after him in whatever little ways were open to her. She had sent representatives. Eventually, when the pain had abated. But she had never had the courage of honesty. That had cost her dearly in more ways than she liked to think of.
And now honesty was long overdue.
With a little shiver, Simone returned the yellow dress to her wardrobe. It was not, she consoled herself, that she hadn’t take up the strings of her life again after that. She had worked harder than ever. There had been other affairs too. She did not have the instincts of a puritan. And her bones had served her well, had allowed her to pass for many years as an attractive woman of uncertain age. But the ache those weeks in Prague had woken in her, that longing, those hidden recesses of the romantic she had forgotten she had once been, had never surfaced again.
The guilt had, though, so hot and shaming that she had allowed herself to fall prey to the menace of revelation. No longer, she vowed.
When dawn edged its way round the heavy curtains of her bedroom, Simone rose. She granted herself the pleasure of a cup of coffee. Then she positioned herself at her desk and began a series of phone calls. After the third, she rang Stephen.
‘I will take you up on your invitation, Stephen. Book me a room. At the Europa. For next week. It will do me good.’
She said it with a forced cheerfulness, but perhaps he didn’t notice the strain. He sounded subdued.
For good measure, she added. ‘And don’t worry too much about Ariane. I imagine she’s alright.’
PART TWO
-8-
_________
The Prague airport terminal stood white and functional against a slate sky. Wind whipped unhitched baggage trolleys and stray scraps of litter into erratic motion. Signs clattered on rusty hinges. Tourists, hats and bags awry, gazed round, veiled suspicion or bemusement on their faces. Oblivious to weather, the new kind of Czech businessman, poured orders into mobile phones.
As the airport shuttle wheezed slowly into motion, Stephen Caldwell steadied the case on his lap and breathed the covert sigh of relief which over the years had become habitual. A driving, icy rain spread in rivulets against the window. In the past he had welcomed the rain which cloaked his movements. Now that the iron curtain had been replaced by the more permeable one of bank notes, he would perhaps have preferred a little sun.
It had taken him a mere fifteen minutes to get from plane to coach. Customs officials, if existent, were invisible. Police presence took the form of a single young man in uniform standing at flagrant ease. The woman at passport control had smiled at him and said thank-you. Of such small a
bsences and pleasantries was democracy made.
Not so very long ago he would have spent far longer in the airport building, calling on all his reserves of diffidence and patience to see him through. Bringing to bear, too, as he had discovered after his first few journeys, a certain flair for dissimulation. It had become clear to him that he revelled in both the danger and the masquerade of it. He was the young scientist travelling to consult with colleagues, to take part in a seminar or conference in Budapest or Moscow or Prague or Warsaw. He was also more. He was a courier, a carrier of illicit information, an agent of openness in an over-policed world where the state considered ideas as to be as potentially explosive as bombs.
The more was what he had loved. The rush of adrenalin at border crossings, the fear, the transgressive schoolboy secrecy of it. Perhaps he had simply not committed enough trespasses as a child.
It occurred to him, as the coach clattered over the tram lines and cobble stones of the first of the Prague suburbs, that he still missed the excitement of it all.
How many years ago was it that he had first made the journey? By train, in those days, from Paris to Vienna and finally a coach to Prague. 1978, the summer of his twenty-second birthday, the year he had met Simone. It was she who had set him up to it.
When he had arrived at her house to collect the parcel she had asked him to deliver to a friend in Prague, he had quickly realised that this was no ordinary favour. She had handed him a large envelope and with something of a challenge in her voice, had told him to look through it.
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