The Things We Do For Love

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Without realising he had undressed, he found himself on the bed, his eyes latched to the ceiling. Tessa wasn’t like that, he told himself. She wouldn’t vanish without making a sign. But the more he thought about her, the less he suddenly felt he knew what she was like. Everything about her had coalesced into a single unscalable mountain: the desire for a child. They lived in its silent shadow, couldn’t see each other for its looming bulk.

  A child. Why should that obsessive desire tie him up in knots, render him impotent? It wasn’t like that with Ariane. Hadn’t been like that with that girl, Cary, almost a child herself. A sweet girl, he thought wistfully. He must write her a note. Make sure she was alright. Had found friends.

  The panic gripped him again. He closed his eyes and forced himself to breathe. Deep, slow, breaths.

  He was coming out of some large building, a church perhaps, no a train station with fat Mussolini columns and the pomp of a steep, broad staircase, a temple to technology. Half way down the stairs he stopped and waited. For a friend. Yes, he was waiting for a friend. Where was the friend? He couldn’t see him. Or was it a her? Not even down there amidst the file of waiting taxis. Old taxis. Yellow and quite old. Where was he? Anxiety filled him. Because of the waiting.

  He looked towards the taxi rank again. He saw his cases and his laptop on a small old-fashioned wooden trailer, like those one used to attach to cars when there was too much baggage to move. On top of the heap, a baby sprawled. A large baby, too big for the nappies it wore. But it shouldn’t have been there, so naked in the cold. He pulled his coat more closely round himself.

  His friend must have brought his cases there. But he didn’t know that child. Yet it was winking at him, its face like an old man’s. For a moment the face was familiar. Then the familiarity vanished and the strange baby started to wave.

  He looked round for his friend once more. Afraid now, he started to walk towards the taxi and his luggage. It was precious. But just as he neared it, the taxi pulled away. He shouted, hailed. No one paid any attention. He ran, ran and stumbled. Another taxi pulled up. He got into it, found himself muttering. ‘Follow that car.’

  They followed it. They followed it at a slow leisurely pace. Too slow. There was no hurry, the driver said in a strange language he could somehow understand. The city had narrow, clustered streets with steep roofs and innumerable turns and they took one corner, then another and another. They came to a bridge, crossed it at the same leisurely pace. Just as they reached its end, he saw the first taxi coming back the other way. There was a person next to the driver. He recognized the head. His friend. Recognized the driver, too. It was a woman with the regal carriage of Simone. And then car and friend and baggage and baby vanished, swallowed up by a fog so thick, it obliterated sight.

  Stephen woke in a panic of loss. It survived the alarm, the pacing through the empty house, the coffee. Persisted throughout his attempts to reconstruct the dream.

  He wasn’t sure what loss it was the dream signalled, but the sense of loss was so strong that it hollowed him out. He tried a list of possible losses. His work. The attempt to give it to Jan. Jan himself, the friend who wasn’t where he was meant to be at the station. Ariane. His youth. His sense of himself.

  And Tessa. Of course. The cases on the taxi trailer. They were hers. Brown canvas. He recognized them now. And the stairs in front of the station. They were like the Capitol stairs in Rome where they had spent a brief honeymoon. Tessa.

  A bitter taste in his mouth, he reached for the telephone.

  -11-

  ______________

  Sites where history has recently been made are not like other places. Their ordinariness is bleaker, crying out for a heroism no longer there, but not quite forgotten.

  As she sat by her window in the Grand Hotel Europa overlooking Wenceslas Square, Simone wished she could say that to Stephen. She found herself selfishly irritated by his absence, announced in the note the hotel receptionist had handed her yesterday. After all, she had come here in part for him.

  She tried, as she gazed out the window, to evoke the presence of a crowd which was not simply the gaggle of guitar-strumming tourist youth found in every big city. Antoinette was probably down there, together with that friend she had made at the hostel where she worked. They had both accompanied her - a last minute whim which she had been pleased to accommodate. The company did her good, particularly now that Stephen was away. It prevented her from disappearing altogether into the past.

  Her gaze travelled towards the helmeted head of Good King Wenceslas, the smooth flanks of the horse which, legend had it, would gallop him into action and save the Czechs in their hour of need.

  But the good king, Simone reflected, hadn’t budged, either for the Nazis or when the Russian tanks rolled in at the end of that summer of 1968 which had buried too many hopes. It had taken another twenty-one furtive, limping years for Dubćek to return to the balcony opposite, this time with Havel at his side, to proclaim the birth of a new era. Throughout Eastern Europe in that momentous year of 1989 the cheers of the crowd had been punctuated by the quiet flap of turning coats.

  She hadn’t come back here in ‘89, though she had gone to Berlin and Bucharest, to Moscow and Budapest.

  She wasn’t altogether certain she should have come back now either. Twenty-five years had passed. Too long a span to allow a graceful encounter. Stephen’s absence had dwindled her resolve.

  Perhaps she shouldn’t have chosen this hotel, brimming with the wrong memories. She had sat in the decaying grandeur of the café yesterday for too many hours and wallowed in them as the orchestra romanced its tunes. Memories which made the disclosure she was set on more difficult and brought her shredded old woman’s vanity into play. In the fin de siècle elegance of this hotel, she felt as faded as the silk brocade of its upholstery.

  Memory was sometimes easier than thought, certainly easier than action. Yet she needed to immerse herself in the grooves of those older memories, the ones she had denied for too long, so that she could meet the imperative she had set herself. The splintered dead bones of her story called out for the passionate flesh of history. Without it, she would emerge, even in her own eyes, as that pitiable thing - a jealous, guilty woman.

  She hadn’t rung anybody, neither professional contacts, nor that new breed of politicians with whom it might have been interesting to have an audience. She wasn’t here for work. And the few old friends she would have liked to see, Franci foremost amongst them, were dead. In this country one didn’t live as long.

  With a grimace of self-exasperation, Simone tugged on her coat. Shielded by its sleek fur she made her way out into the cold expanse of the square and turned quickly into the narrower streets of the old city.

  Coal smoke curled out of chimneys, just as it had done all those years ago. It wrapped the atmosphere in a heavy haze so that the houses loomed out at one, their outlines vaporous, animate. She followed the twisting streets and found herself on the edges of the old Jewish Quarter. As a girl, she had loved the din of hawkers shouting their wares, extolling the virtues of puppets and potato peelers, stuffed birds and cloudy gems in intricate settings. She had liked the reek of the streets less. If she closed her eyes, she could still smell it through the obliterating cold, a musty, acrid smell of sewage and cramped bodies and dank, ancient walls.

  At the entrance of the Old Jewish Cemetery, there was a queue of tourists. One had to purchase a ticket now to visit those hundred thousand bodies buried twelve deep beneath their higgledy piggledy stones.

  When she had walked here with Staszek, the cemetery had been empty. Staszek. Stanislaw Mánes, her new tutor, a philosophy student at the university, called in to teach her Czech. Instead he had instilled in her an ardour for social justice. A more personal ardour as well. Had she woken from childhood into a painful secret love for him on that very first meeting when they had strolled amidst these sloping, random headstones, clustered together like decaying teeth in the cavern of an ogre’s mouth? Her f
eet had been more solid on the ground then. Only her emotions stumbled.

  It was her thirteenth birthday. September 1938. She was a painfully shy and secretly romantic schoolgirl who had lived in too many countries and read too many books. On Wenceslas Square, they had seen columns of marching, uniformed men and two giant armoured cars, moving with ponderous menace. Staszek had told her that if she didn’t understand something or ran out of words, she must speak to him in French or in English. He no longer spoke German.

  She had stared up shyly at the dark, proud set of him, the wave of hair which tumbled over deep set eyes. ‘You mean you have forgotten how?’ She had queried him and seen those eyes flash contempt.

  She was either very young or very stupid, he had said, and she had flared in turn, declaring she was certainly not stupid.

  ‘No good Czech should speak the language of the Nazi enemy. Nor any good French person, for that matter,’ he had announced, his handsome face very pale against the jet of his hair.

  Simone smiled at herself. She had taken in his imperative and hardly breathed a word of German until after the war, though to his face she had protested and said German did not mean Nazi. It had been there far, far longer.

  In the silence of the cemetery, they had hushed their voices. It was in a whisper that he decoded the pictures on the tombs for her, the squawking chickens on either side of a head indicating an adulteress whose eyes had been pecked out, the scissors denoting a tailor, the tweezers a doctor.

  Beside Rabbi Loew’s imposing baroque sarcophagus, he had told her a story she suddenly remembered afresh.

  The great and ancient Loew, it was said, had a secret for keeping death at bay. He had learned it in his wise books. If he could concentrate on life and only on life, death would not touch him. In that way, during the plague, he had clutched hundreds from death and managed to survive himself. But one day, when he was already very old, his pretty little granddaughter gave him a splendid rose for his birthday. Enraptured by the gift, by the beauty of the rose, he bent to sniff it, his attention only on its beauty. And in that moment he fell down dead.

  Death had been hiding amidst the fragrant delicacy of its petals.

  It was funny how she remembered that story rather better than all the politics and readings from Marx which Staszek had introduced into their tutorials. Remembered it better than the painful moment when he had refused to come to their house any more because the French had signed their name to the Munich agreement and effectively sold Czechoslovakia to the Germans in the false hope of peace.

  Death had hovered over her relationship with him from the very beginning.

  Shivering despite her furs, Simone picked up a stone and laid it carefully on the Rabbi’s tomb. She and Staszek had done that then. They had also discovered that they both had Jewish mothers, though Staszek’s was already dead.

  With sudden decision, Simone hurried from the cemetery, hailed a taxi, and in clear, precise tones asked the driver whether he might consider taking her to Melnik.

  He frowned from beneath the peak of his cap, exclaimed ill-temperedly about the distance. Simone silenced him, told him she would pay the equivalent of his day’s takings. The frown transformed itself into a shrewd smile. His eyes fixed on her coat, he ushered her effusively into the back seat.

  ‘You’re Czech, but you had the good sense to leave, eh? When? In ‘68.’

  ‘I am not Czech,’ Simone said bluntly.

  ‘Beautiful town, Melnik!’ he exclaimed, eyeing her in the rear view mirror as he pulled away. ‘You want to visit the ossuary in the crypt of Saints Peter and Paul?’

  ‘No.’ Simone signalled her unwillingness for chit chat and leaned back in the seat with its bright animal covering of fake fur.

  She stared at the back of the driver’s head, the straggling line where hair met skin and collar. For a moment she found herself wondering, as she did with every encounter in countries of the former Soviet bloc, what the man had done before 1989. Had he worked for the secret police? Been an informer? Betrayed any and every friend?

  It did no good to think like that. The regimes had had more eyes and ears than they had citizens. Yet that was her problem. That was why she knew she was too old for this new world. She couldn’t wash herself altogether clean of suspicion. She couldn’t forget. It was far more expedient to forget. To bury the murky slate with its profusion of major and minor crimes and begin again. They were all, after all, mired in sins, smaller or greater. She was too.

  Repressing queasiness Simone turned her face to the grubby window and looked out. The grace of the city centre, the bridge over the racing river, had given way to the drab decay and grimy tenements of Holesovice. She had come to the exhibition grounds here with Staszek. But that was later. After the war. First there were those blissful snatches of time together in London.

  Her father had been posted to the French Embassy there in 1939. Soon he was engaged in clandestine operations for the Free French, so her mother and she saw him only at irregular intervals. When the bombs began, Simone was shunted off to live with a family in Wales. On her sixteenth birthday, she determined she had had enough of school and strangers and of a safety so nervously oppressive that any danger was preferable. She made her way back to the capital. The scars the city wore - the black ash, the heaps of rubble, the devastated shells of buildings - shook her. Yet in an odd way their very reality gave her a strength the laundered reports and gossip had sapped.

  She went directly to Bush House where her mother worked. She hovered round the busy reception area, noticed the difficulty the receptionist had with the babble of foreign tongues she was forced to confront. An idea lodged itself in Simone’s mind. At last, she might find a use for all those languages history had inflicted on her.

  Two months later, she was standing behind the reception desk. It was there that one afternoon towards mid-summer she found herself gazing into the proud face of a uniformed man with eyes of such an intense darkness that her throat grew instantly dry.

  ‘Staszek?’ The name had croaked out of her. ‘Don’t you recognize me?’

  A few hours later they were sitting in the hotel bar opposite and he was staring at her in a way which confirmed what she had only begun to suspect. She was a woman now, a woman men noticed, no longer that inconsequential, ungainly child - a prisoner of longing, confined in a body inappropriate to the emotions it contained.

  Now as they talked, his eyes never strayed from her face. She learned that he had left Prague, too late really, after the Nazis had already started their deadly reprisals against the rebellious Czech students. She learned how he had made his way stealthily across the mountains into Slovakia and from there through Hungary to the Balkans and by boat to France where he had joined a Czech division. He had tried to search her out in Paris, but there was no one in the house in Neuilly. He had worried for her.

  By the time he had finished his narrative, her hand lay between two of his, a snug, well-caressed creature which felt it had at last found its home.

  Two nights later, when her mother was working an evening shift, he came back with her. They were living then on two floors of a house which gave onto the lower end of Hampstead Heath, all glittering moonlit ponds and the tracery of trees and sprawling thickets. After work, she liked to sit by her window and watch the secret darkness steal upon the park. That night, they watched together, glasses of whisky magically in their hands. Before the shadows disappeared, they were kissing on the bed.

  She could still taste that first real kiss, the smoothness of his lips, the small gasp of his breath, the surprising echoes of his fingers on her skin, a melody which had found its counterpoint.

  The emotion she had hoarded over all those years cloaked everything in wonder, even the initial pain. His discovery of her became her discovery. She revelled in both, was amazed at what now became a mutual intensity, so strong, so avid and tender by turn, that she felt she had both come home and been cast out on dangerous seas. When the blare of a siren inte
rrupted their passion and exhorted them to take refuge, they looked into each others eyes and simply clasped each other more firmly. The only death which could impinge on them now was the death of separation. They both knew it. There was no need to speak.

  The next morning, hand firmly in hand they walked slowly down the street towards the bus which would take them away from each other for the length of the day. At the end of the street they saw it: the burnt out shell of a house, the firemen dousing the last flames. They gripped each other more tightly to fill the yawning space of horror. They had been spared. Their love had been sanctioned.

  As she gazed out of the cab window onto the slight roll of the wintry countryside, the old Simone with her thin old woman’s legs neatly sheathed in the best French stockings felt the tremble of the young Simone within her. It was odd, she told herself, that she could now recapture that trembling, smell the faint lemon-clean whiff of Staszek’s skin, feel the weight of him - though she no longer had a clear sense of the exact order of things which followed, the run of events which so intractably shaped their small individual history.

  Staszek was working with the Czech government in exile. He was part of an intelligence unit. For long stretches, he would be away and then he would come back for a week or two or three at a time and shower her with love. Once she knew, because of something he let slip in one of their extended nighttime conversations, so perhaps he wanted her to know, that he had been to the Soviet Union. At another time he described to her the elation, the relief which attended the sound of a parachute’s snap as it opened to the buffeting of air. But she didn’t know what fields the parachute had landed in. And she knew better than to ask.