The Things We Do For Love

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Each time he came back from or left for one of these expeditions, Staszek gripped her with fierce fingers. ‘You musn’t worry,’ he said, hoarse insistence in his voice. ‘I can’t allow myself to die with you to come back to. You know that. And there’ll be so much to do once this war is over. We can’t afford to die.’

  She believed him so that he could believe himself. She lived in a taut bubble of pure energy, working, volunteering for this and that, helping out where and whenever she could, as if time did not exist and was marked only by Staszek’s comings and goings. Having so recently been corralled in childhood helplessness, she was still young enough to feel omnipotent.

  Even her mother’s growing despair could do nothing to dent the golden capsule in which she floated. Her mother was worried, worried about everything and everyone, fretting and gnawing away at the fibre of herself as if continuous worry on an epic enough scale might actually alter the course of history. Beneath the worries with their objects clearly named and delineated - black-outs and buses and tubes and food - was a generalized anxiety which she couldn’t or wouldn’t put a name too, an intimation that the horror was even greater than the sum of her worries.

  The war had swallowed up her father. They hadn’t seen him since the previous year. Messages came only sporadically, sometimes delivered by an Englishman, sometimes by an old Embassy friend whose face was so devoid of expression, Simone thought he might as well have used a telephone to convey his ‘All well.’

  ‘The trouble with men,’ her mother said to her after one such visit, ‘is that they believe they can be heroes. They really believe heroes exist. They haven’t learned that heroism is all in the way you tell the story when you get home.’

  Simone had laughed and recounted her mother’s version of history to Staszek when she next saw him. His cheek had dimpled, but he had shaken his dark head and said no, no there really were those who behaved with absolute heroism.

  Simone teased, ‘At last, I have incontrovertible proof of your manhood.’

  She was always laughing and teasing in those days, partly perhaps to balance out her mother. Buried beneath her mother’s fears for her father, were another set of worries. One day Simone had come across a manilla file at the side of her mother’s bed. She opened it to find a series of newspaper clippings in a variety of languages. The clippings were mostly small, but each contained news of another horror, another humiliation visited upon the Jews of occupied Europe: yellow stars which had to be worn and paid for out of the family textile ration; cinemas, theatres, restaurants, shops, closed to them; huge round-ups and cattle-like transports to labour camps where conditions were appalling; an uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto followed by massive reprisals, the mass obliteration of starving men and women and children.

  Simone had closed the file before getting to its end and not looked at it again for the duration of the war, despite the fact that she could see its increasing thickness. Sometimes she thought that the thicker it grew, the more gaunt her mother became.

  It was to cheer her mother that she finally mentioned marriage to Staszek. He had told her - it must have been early in 1944 then - that he was going off and that this next expedition might be a long one. When they met again, he hoped the war would be over.

  They were walking on the Heath. Massed clouds filled the sky and beneath them the trees were skeletal in their bareness. As he looked out over the ponds to the crest of the incline where the shrubbery was dense, his expression was solemn. There were new lines on his face, she noticed, a deep, tense etching from nose to mouth. She had clutched his hand and simply said it, right out, blatantly: ‘Let’s get married before you go, Staszek.’

  His kiss had a taste of desperation. ‘We are married, Simone. In all the ways that count. After the war, when my country has laws and institutions one can live by, we’ll have that marriage sanctioned by the state.’

  She wasn’t upset. She understood how he felt and she trusted him utterly. But when she told her mother what Staszek had said, her mother had murmured, Cassandra-like, ‘He is afraid he will die.’

  After that, as the months passed with no sign of him she had begun to be afraid too. Maybe it was because of that fear that she hadn’t been able to sustain her mother. When they returned to Paris, the fear grew. Peace had opened the floodgates of the dead and their numbers now came pouring in, named and listed. Grandparents and relatives and friends. Her mother’s entire family, lost to the gas chambers of Auschwitz along with too many others.

  One evening when she came home from work, she found her mother in the garden of the house in Neuilly. She was surrounded by her paintings which had miraculously survived the occupation. In front of her a huge bonfire leapt and danced, its flames aqua and indigo, amber and scarlet, as they swallowed her life’s work - portraits of herself, of Simone as a child, landscapes and oils and watercolours.

  Simone’s attempts to stay her hand had served no purpose.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ her mother had patted her shoulder as if in a trance. ‘It is necessary.’

  When Simone met her eyes, she realised the necessity. Her mother’s haunted gaze was the one she met daily in the agency for missing persons where she worked. It was a look which spoke of an unassuageable guilt. The guilt of having been left alive when so many had died.

  Her father’s eyes didn’t have it. Guilt hadn’t taken hold of him in the same way, perhaps because he had spent his war fighting with the resistance. It was helplessness which bred that seething guilt in survivors.

  But her mother didn’t survive long. After the episode of the pictures, she refused to leave the house, refused to see the dawning life around her. She spent her days in the pictureless attic sifting through all the newspapers that could be bought for her.

  The file Simone had found by her bedside in England grew until it spilled out over the entire space of the attic, like some vast labyrinth of recorded horror. Trapped in her labyrinth, her mother came downstairs less and less until one evening, she asked that a cot be moved up for her. A week later, she was dead, her body as brittle as the paper which surrounded it.

  At the funeral, Simone was dry-eyed. The next day, she stayed home from work. Piece by piece, she read and burnt every scrap of her mother’s archive. When she had finished, she lay on her bed and hugged herself. It was time, she thought. Perhaps already too late. Time to seek out Staszek, from whom there had been no word. It was hardly surprising that letters like people might not find their destinations. Or was there more to it than that? She had to know now, before despair, kept at bay by that single hope, engulfed her. Unlike her mother, her father could manage without her. He could also help her find some kind of job at the Embassy in Prague.

  Bare fields had given way to small hillocks of vine, their branches fettered and coiled into rows as neat as a sewing machine’s stitches.

  ‘Ludmila vineyards,’ the taxi driver shot Simone a smiling glance, forcing her out of reverie. ‘Good wine. Good enough to fuel Mozart while writing Don Giovanni.’ He broke into a snatch of “mille tre”. The distance from Prague had visibly freed him into a jovial humour.

  ‘My wife is from near here. Very nice. Me, I come from Nitra in Slovakia. But now I am Czech. Citizen of the Czech Republic.’ He grinned.

  Simone met his smile for the first time. She was interested in the blithe tone with which he had pronounced that new designation, Czech Republic. Irony or celebration, she couldn’t tell.

  ‘And you feel Czech now?’ she asked him.

  ‘Czech, Slovak. What does it matter? I tell you something. My mother was Czech, my father, Slovak. I…I drive my taxi and only ask that they leave me alone with all their politics.’ He turned round to face her, almost forgetting his wheel and grinned again. ‘You know that story about the old man from the village they announced was the very centre of Europe?

  Simone shook her head.

  ‘A traveller like you, asks him where he’s from and he says, “Well, I was born in Austria, then lived in R
omania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, the Soviet Union, again in Czechoslovakia and finally Slovakia.” “You’ve moved around a lot,” the traveller says to him. “Oh no,” says the old man. “I’ve never left this village.”’

  He let out a barking laugh. Simone joined him.

  The floating borders of Eastern Europe. Moved by tanks and arms, by revolutions and wars and dictators and solemn treaties. Out of desire or fear, but always littered with corpses. People dying for nations which had no state or states which were not their nation.

  Death again. It wouldn’t leave her thoughts now that she had set out on this journey. The tethered vines had begun to look like so many crucifixes strung out on the hillside. She closed her eyes.

  It was the autumn of ‘46 when she arrived back in Prague. Everything was as she remembered it, despite the eight-year gap. The curve of the domes glittering in sunlight, the clatter of the trams, the sweep of the castle hill above the River. As if war had eluded the city.

  She learned soon enough how stone could lie.

  In the visa office of the French Embassy where she took up her job, there was a Czech woman of about her own age with whom she struck up an instant friendship. Franci Kupkova, a small, pert, blonde with fragile limbs and a cutting wit. On her second day in the office, they had lunch together in an arcade restaurant near the looming Church of St Nicholas. Simone told her new friend she was looking for an apartment.

  Before Franci could answer, a tub of a man with brilliantined hair approached them ‘Franci, my pretty little Franci,’ he leered at her friend. ‘And how are you today? Have you considered my proposition?’

  ‘The answer is still no, Pan Gurek,’ Franci plastered an artificial smile on her face which twisted into scorn as soon as the man’s back was turned.

  ‘Now that one could get you an apartment if you had the cash to show for it and were willing to deal with scum,’ Franci whispered to Simone. ‘He nabbed three huge ones from Jewish families who were forced out because of his shall we call it “intervention” at the beginning of the war and he’s been hanging on to them for dear life and money ever since. We need the communists to get rid of the likes of him. Introduce a little justice.’

  ‘How do you know him?’

  ‘I live in the same building. He was a sneaking collaborator. The worst kind, the kind who always pretends to be on the side of who he’s talking to, so you never know where you are. Now he’s trying to get me to move, offering me a bigger place somewhere else. Probably because he knows I have too much on him. He’s afraid I’ll report him.’ She crossed her arms with an angry shrug. ‘But I’ll ask around for you.’

  It was her first introduction to the hatreds and resentments which simmered beneath the bustling surface of the city. It was like Paris, but somehow more so, the anger and betrayals of occupation lying closer to the surface. Thousands of eyes peering suspiciously at each other.

  And there was another difference, she soon learned. Prague had been liberated by the Russians while the Americans stood idly by in Pilsen some fifty miles away. As a result, everything to do with Russia or Communism was in the first instance a good. In France too, the Communists had fought boldly in the Resistance, led it in many instances. But this rankling sense that it was the West which had sold the country to Hitler, that it was the Russians who had offered help when everyone else had abandoned it, did not exist. The French post-war battle of words between the left and the Gaullists, between capitalist and communist factions, was not ever and always settled by the emotional trump card - And who were our friends?

  Sometimes, in the midst of all this, she longed for England, an unoccupied soil where politics seemed at once simple and irrelevant.

  Simone didn’t want to be thrust into politics - the flare and anger and zealous passion of it, the loud, battering voices calling for retribution or peace. She felt the only passion she wanted was the quiet personal one of lying in bed of a morning with Staszek and looking out on the fresh green of a tree or capturing the mellow quivering highnote of a sonata as they had done when they played together in the old days. There had been too much of the other kind of passion.

  But the choice wasn’t hers. People talked of little else and she needed to talk to people. She was looking for Staszek. There was no sign of him at his old address and the neighbours knew or would say nothing.

  Some three weeks after her arrival, she was processing a new pile of visa applications when his name suddenly leapt out at her: Stanislaw Nikolaus Mánes. She clutched at her desk and tried to refocus her eyes. But the name kept its shape. The application gave the place of work as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. There was a phone number. She lifted the receiver blindly, thinking only that she hadn’t known his name was Nikolaus, not allowing herself to imagine the name could belong to anyone else.

  When she heard the voice she could barely bring herself to speak.

  They met that evening. He had suggested a bar not far from the Embassy, just beneath the Karlovi Most and she arrived far too early and threw the door open on a smoke-filled room filled with the smell of bodies and sour beer. The only seat she could find was at a crowded table. But it gave her a view of the door and she stared at it as if the figure she was looking for might never materialise.

  When she spotted him she realised that she had forgotten to breathe and a gasp came out of her, so loud that the people at the table turned to stare. He must have heard it too, for he was beside her a second later, his eyes vast in a face that was too thin.

  ‘Simone.’ He took her hand and held it between his. They gazed at each other. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t get up. She just sat there staring at him, watching the beauty of his features, watching his tense movements unfurl as he drew a chair close to her, noting how his hair had grown long, how it curled slightly at the nape, how his jacket was shiny from use at the elbow and flapped around him, how he flicked a cigarette from a pack and held it before lighting it, his attention only on her.

  ‘You’re here. You’re alive,’ she mumbled at last. She reached for one of the cigarettes, met his fingers half-way.

  ‘I’m alive.’ Irony suddenly played over his features. And something else she couldn’t quite read. ‘More or less.’

  ‘You…’ They both said it together and laughed nervously and tried again, ‘I…’

  She waved her hand at him. He caught it and brought it to his lips.

  ‘Let’s go upstairs. It’s quieter. I need to see you where it’s quieter.’

  They found a table in a corner from which the river could be glimpsed, Again the words wouldn’t come.

  ‘So how do you find Prague?’ he asked at last.

  ‘Fine.’ The question and answer both seemed to her inane. ‘But…’

  ‘I was just hoping to get a visa. I wanted to come to Paris and see you.’

  ‘So you knew I was in Paris?’

  ‘I assumed.’

  ‘And you didn’t write?’

  He shrugged, looked beyond her, towards the small window. ‘I didn’t know… There weren’t the words.’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘About you. About me perhaps.’ He lit another cigarette. ‘About what we are now.’

  ‘Oh.’ She suddenly felt dizzy. She put her hands to her face.

  ‘You used to do that as a child. I can see you so clearly. The concentration, shutting out the world. A funny serious little girl.’

  ‘Is that what I was?’ She looked at him. It wasn’t what she had intended to say. She wanted to talk about what he meant by not knowing, about their love, about the missing years. Why was it so hard? It had never been hard before,

  She picked at the food he had ordered for her, watched him do the same. She emptied her glass too quickly, ‘And your father?’ she asked.

  That blurry expression she had seen in so many came over his features so that she didn’t need his lips to confirm the answer.

  ‘He was shot,’ he lit another cigarette. ‘After Heydrich’s ass
assination, when the Nazis carried out their massive reprisals. Thousands of ours for one of theirs.’ A short dry laugh, more like a cry, erupted from him. ‘They probably knew I was with the government in London.’ He pushed his plate away.

  ‘You should eat,’ she heard herself saying. ‘You’re too thin.’

  That dry laugh again. ‘I’ve been thinner.’ He gripped her hand with sudden force. ‘Simone, why have you come to Prague?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’ Her heart was beating so hard, she thought it might burst her chest.

  ‘For me?’ he whispered, then turned away. ‘I don’t think I’m worth it. Not anymore.’ His face was a dull mask.

  ‘Where do you live, Staszek?’ She suddenly made up her mind.

  ‘Not far from here.’

  ‘Are you going to invite me over?’

  He looked at her with a seriousness she recognized. ‘If you’d like to be invited.’

  She nodded.

  ‘But you may not like it. It isn’t as nice as Hampstead.’

  Simone didn’t notice. Didn’t notice anything for days - until that first wave of the passion which had carried them off as they walked homeward, ebbed. Then she began to see the cracks in the wall above his head as he rested on the propped pillow, the dirty peeling paint, the dingy sheets, the newspaper covered crate which served as a bedside table. Through the window she could see only another wall.

  ‘We should find a place together,’ she said as he handed her a chipped cup of coffee.

  ‘It’s not so bad.’ He curled beside her, stroked her. ‘And you make it lovely.’

  She realized over the next weeks that he didn’t care about the apartment, didn’t notice it really except when he thought to see it through her eyes. He had lost all sense of secondary comforts. He was oddly abstracted from everything except the tasks at hand, the building of a future he talked about with daily relish as their present vanished into it. If she brought home some bright object, a poster to cover a damp spot, or a chair with a gracious curve, he would only focus on it if she drew his attention to it. He was pleased enough with its presence, but somehow oblivious. Importance did not reside there. She wondered about this, tried to work out if he had been different before, wasn’t sure.