The Things We Do For Love

by Lisa Appignanesi

  He woke to the sound of footsteps, heavy and light, the creak of a door, his mother’s voice, soft, ‘Perhaps he came up here.’ He didn’t quite know where he was, but the satin told him. It was damp, snug. He hid further into it, making a swish of a sound like a bird’s wings. Then the lid of the box opened and he saw his father’s face, stern. Behind him the glare of a single bulb.

  ‘What on earth are you doing here, Stephen?’ His father heaved him out, held him up towards the light, shook him and the tear tumbled from his hand onto the floorboards with a clatter.

  ‘You gave us such a fright, Stephen,’ his mother was murmuring, but his father’s voice was louder. ‘Trying to steal it away, were you? Bad boy.’

  ‘On my wedding dress. Oh dear. He’s wet it.’

  He couldn’t see his mother’s face for the shaking and the bad, bad boy, but then his father put him down and he saw his mother looked sad. She had taken out the satin and was smoothing it around her, rubbing where the wet patch was.

  ‘Say sorry to your mother.’ His father looked very big and angry.

  ‘Don’t punish him.’ His mother had put her hand on his father’s arm. ‘Look he’s crying. He is sorry.’

  His father picked up the tear and held it to the light. ‘And all for this. I don’t believe it. I can’t believe it of you Stephen. A bauble. It’s not what you see and touch that counts. It’s what you can’t see. What’s important is what happens in your heart and mind. The invisible. Goodness. Do you understand?’

  Stephen didn’t know whether he understood. What he understood through his tears was that his father placed the jewel in his pocket and he never saw or touched it again.

  Stephen lay on the narrow hotel bed and watched the billowing curtains. Funny how that memory had come upon him, uncalled for. Unnecessary. How old could he have been? Four maybe. Or five. A silly little boy, spoiled by his mother and lectured to by his father. Had his father really said all that about the importance of what one couldn’t see? Like some puritan preacher. Or was his memory playing tricks on him?

  He shifted restlessly on the bed. It was probably why he’d gone off to stare into microscopes at things too small to see. Or more likely done a little perverse misinterpretation and collided the invisible with the secret. The secret as a site of meaning, like that old chest with its body-warmed satin. Or furtive ferryings to the East. The Puritan hatred for the material and visible leaving its secular legacy in the English hankering after spies and secrecy.

  With a grimace, Stephen turned his face into the pillow, There was a crackle of paper beneath him. He had left his messages unread on the bed. He switched on the light and looked at them now. There were four of them. Two from old friends wanting to meet up. One from a conference delegate. The last from Hanka who said she wanted to see him urgently.

  He glanced at his watch and picked up the telephone.

  Twenty minutes later he was standing in front of the Martin apartment. Hanka opened the door. She was a tall, slender woman with wide grey eyes, her hair gathered up in a loose sleek knot from which strands always descended. She had a penchant for wearing silky scarfs which she knotted around her throat in a variety of elaborate styles. It was the one thing Stephen always remembered about her attire. He had even on occasion brought her a scarf himself. He thought he recognized the one she was wearing this evening.

  ‘Stephen. It’s so good of you to come.’ She gestured him into the room he had last visited some two years ago and he looked round him covertly to see what changes had taken place with Jan’s departure. Everything seemed the same, the greying walls, crowded with posters and pictures, the tables covered with drooping cloths. Even the old portable typewriter sat on the tiny corner desk by the window. It was on this machine that Hanka had spent long hours typing the various clandestine books and articles which for so many years had helped to supplement the country’s official reading.

  ‘No, nothing has changed. Jan left everything behind him.’ Her tone was waspish and he couldn’t for a moment bring himself to meet her eyes. When he did, he saw that she had an ironic tilt to her lips.

  ‘Don’t be so embarrassed, Stephen. You’ll remember, some American wit said marriage for a woman was the exchange of the attention of many men for the inattention of one. Well, I have decided on the attention of many. It is not so bad. Now, it is not so bad.’ She glanced up at him flirtatiously.

  He cleared his throat. ‘And Eva?’

  She poured him a glass of wine as he sank into the worn brown sofa.

  ‘Eva is okay, beginning to work harder at school. She will come and say hello. Eva…’ She turned to call down the small corridor. ‘It is because of Eva I particularly wanted to see you. I knew Jan wouldn’t ask you.’

  A tall, slim girl Stephen didn’t recognize walked into the room. She had milky skin and pale hair and shy grey eyes and a coltish gait emphasized by the way she swung her hair.

  Hanka laughed. ‘You are amazed. You do not know our Eva. She is a young lady now.’

  ‘Hello, Dr. Stephen.’ The young lady lifted her cheek to him.

  He brushed it with his lips.

  ‘I do not think Dr. Stephen is used to kissing young ladies,’ Hanka said, adding to his discomfort.

  Eva perched on the sofa beside him. He had a distant memory of another girl with just that mixture of musing reticence coming to sit beside him in a room crowded with old furniture. Sonya. Of course. His breathing suddenly felt constricted. He fought for something to say, felt the cliches forming in his throat.

  ‘It’s true that I wouldn’t have known you. You’ve grown so much.’ He groped for another topic. ‘What are your favourite subjects in school?’

  ‘Science and English,’ Eva smiled at him shyly.

  ‘Yes,’ Hanka intervened. ‘That is why I thought it would be good for Eva to go to England. And we wished to ask you whether she could stay with you for a few weeks. Perhaps over Christmas. If you’re staying for another few days, she could even go back with you. Or next summer when she can attend a language course. She will not be much trouble. She is good at tidying up.’

  Stephen was intensely aware of the girl’s uncomfortable flush. He was also aware that he would have a lot of explaining to do to Tessa.

  Hanka seemed to read his mind. ‘You will have to check with your wife, of course. But you must tell her that Eva has always been a very good daughter. Quiet, not wild.’ She sought out Stephen’s gaze as if she needed its confirmation. ‘And I have told Eva that you will be like a father to her, a kind father. You will give her enough freedom, but not too much.’

  Stephen was transfixed by the word father, as if its context gave it an altogether different charge. He turned to Eva and struggled for what he hoped was a reassuring and fatherly look. Funny. When Tessa talked of children in his mind’s eye he pictured only squawling babies. But the babies grew up into Evas.

  ‘I think you might like Cambridge,’ he said. ‘It’s very small though. Not like Prague.’

  ‘I will like it. I will like to punt.’ She shaped her lips hesitantly over the last word, then smiled sweetly. ‘Do you have a piano?’

  Stephen nodded.

  ‘Eva is a good pianist,’ Hanka commented proudly, then rushed on. ‘But perhaps if your wife is not for it, you could find us another family? With children maybe. For the summer.’

  ‘I’m sure. I’m sure it will be fine.’ Stephen stole another glance at the girl. Sonya and not Sonya. Bolder, stronger, her own person. Yet with that trace. ‘Absolutely fine,’ he said with conviction in his voice.

  ‘Thank-you. Thank-you very much.’ Eva was all excitement tempered by politeness as Hanka shooed her off to bed.

  ‘She has been a great help to me these last months,’ Hanka remarked when they heard the bedroom door close. ‘It would have been much harder for me without her. And lonely too.’

  ‘Yes,’ Stephen suddenly had an uncomfortable inkling of the things he hoped she wouldn’t talk about. He reached for h
is glass.

  ‘I am almost unhappy to send her away, even for a little while. But it will be good for her, a special treat as you say.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said more emphatically.

  ‘Do you think your wife will agree?’

  Stephen stared toward the shadowy darkened window with its half-drawn curtains. It came to him that he didn’t know what Tessa would think. He hadn’t the slightest idea. It was odd to realise that. Odd and more than a little uncomfortable.

  -14-

  _____________

  ‘Not this morning, Stephen.’ Simone pushed away the breakfast plate of sweet cheese palacinky and took a last sip of thick Turkish coffee. ‘I’ll drop in on the Congress at the end of the day. We can have dinner together, if that suits. Right now, my taxi driver is waiting for me.’ She laughed girlishly, her eyes glowing with humour. ‘We’ve become great friends, Pan Hrdlicka and I. He’s told me his darkest secrets. He once took a trip to Moscow and enjoyed it. Not a fashionable opinion.’

  Stephen met her smile. ‘I’m glad you’re having a good time.’

  ‘That wasn’t quite what I said.’ She studied him. ‘On the other hand, you’re looking distinctly unwell. You aren’t still worrying about Ariane, are you?’

  He grimaced. ‘That, too.’ For a moment, he considered telling her about the suspected theft, but he didn’t want to burden her with problems that were altogether of his own making. He contented himself with saying, ‘I really do need to locate her. It’s urgent. For my peace of mind. You didn’t hear anything in Paris, did you?’

  Simone smoothed some crumbs from the cloth. ‘I have been making inquiries, Stephen. By the time I get back to Paris, there may be some news. If I could, you know, I would bring her here for you this very moment.’ She covered his hand with hers, gave him a reassuring squeeze. For a moment, she looked abstracted. She tapped her pencil abruptly on the table, then with a determined air, put it into her bag. ‘But we should carry on with our day. It’s a rare thing for me to say, but this is one I want to get through quickly.’

  ‘Oh?’ He looked at her curiously as she got to her feet, then rushed to help her with her coat. Something about her demeanour worried him.

  ‘Perhaps Antoinette … the girls,’ he stumbled, ‘should keep you company.’

  ‘No, no, Stephen. This is something I need to do alone. Until later, then.’

  At the entrance of the hotel, she waved him away and disappeared into the open door of a cab.

  As the taxi crossed the river into the Mala Strana, Simone felt she was embarking on the second stage of a pilgrimage - one that did not necessarily promise a healing relic at its destination. But then, she told herself sternly, she had never held out any hopes of salvation. The only promise at her journey’s end was that of a little lightness, a little surplus of truth which might indirectly, though only indirectly, be of use. Not necessarily to its principal player, either. She considered that for a moment, didn’t like her thoughts and put them away. One step at a time. She had only ever done things one step at a time.

  The immense dome and bell tower of the Church of St Nicholas loomed before them, as forbidding in its Counter-Reformation vastness as the Castle itself. Between and around the two, the streets climbed and clustered abutting on the palaces with their famous names, Buquoy and Thun-Hohenstein and Lobkowicz and Lichtenstein and Morzinsky. Stately portals and grand gardens, baroque statuary and blind cherubs. The streets of her childhood - now overlaid like some palimpsest with darker, more devious scratchings.

  Simone signalled the driver to a halt. ‘I’ll walk from here. It will do me good.’

  ‘But the cold!’ The man shivered. ‘You must take care. It is slippery.’

  So are my memories, Simone wanted to say, but she merely smiled and asked him to wait.

  She walked slowly, her feet inching their way along pavements made icy by their thin crust of snow. The slowness suited her. She strolled into the icy church and wondered what chinks and crevices had been used as dropping points in the dark days when the only truth was that ordained by the Party. She stopped at a bookshop to see what other truths or stories were now in circulation. Their cheapness or difficulty, rightness or wrongness, didn’t matter, she told herself. The importance lay in the multiplicity. Like nature. One rampant dominant weed which killed off all other strains of vegetation did not make for a healthy eco-system. Multiplicity was necessary to life.

  She paused to stare into the windows of boutiques and cafés, their simple pine furniture so patently new that she felt sure if she looked more closely she would spot the IKEA label. The marks of transition, a love affair with the other which had been forbidden. That too was necessary.

  She peered through scaffolding to examine how masons were handling the renovation of facades rich in leaf and tracery and festoons. She was in no hurry to arrive at her destination. No one was waiting for her, only a cluster of buried experience she had long denied - herself in another, a more vicious guise, hidden in a remote room in one of these buildings. Simone forced herself to remember.

  It was spring of 1953. Stalin was already dead, but the slow haemorrhaging of Eastern Europe continued. Through friends - she was no longer certain if it was through a contact in the French Communist Party or an Embassy official - she had had certain confirmation of Staszek’s death. The confirmation was no surprise. Since 1948 the Czech Party had already rid itself of over 100,000 of its members: it had charged them with spying or sabotage, condemned them to death or to labour camps that often meant the same thing. The specificity of the crimes was immaterial. The mere fact of being Jewish or intellectual, land-owner or army officer, unrepentant peasant or unrepentant believer was more than enough. So was drinking or working - too much or too little. Scapegoats were needed on whom to pin the dire state of the economy. Informers were everywhere. No amount of purging seemed to satisfy the Party’s voracity.

  Yet Karolina Dostolova remained unscathed, impassively survived everything, remained loyal to the workings of a Party which eliminated her closest comrades. The woman Simone held responsible for Staszek’s death, the woman who had stolen him from her, the woman for whom he had refused to accompany her to France, carried on rising through the Party hierarchy as bodies fell around her. Around this single fact all Simone’s rage over the crimes of Eastern Europe coalesced.

  It was hard for her to recapture that rage now as she inched her way along the streets which lay below the Castle. But then, she had woken with the acrid taste of anger on her tongue, felt its fierceness throughout the day, had fallen asleep with the sensation that she would choke on it in the night. Even the sturdy limbs of her two small girls couldn’t eradicate the fury she carried everywhere with her.

  She knew that she had to confront Karolina or go mad. She had no plan, no words that she could put to the meeting. But she knew she had to see her.

  For months, she had tried to obtain a visa and in April, it had finally come through. Her ostensible purpose was to accompany a small group of French Communist Party delegates on a tour of industrial sites. This she had done. She had done little else. To see old friends would cast suspicion on them. But towards the end of her visit, she had wrapped herself in an old raincoat which made her one of a muted crowd and had slipped away to stalk Karolina.

  As stealthily as if she had been born to it and without attracting the attention of the uniformed guard, Simone had for the length of a rainy afternoon paced the precincts of the Ministry of Transport building where she had found out Karolina worked and waited for her to appear. On the second afternoon she had been rewarded by the sight of a woman in a brown coat and a soft brown felt hat. As soon as she saw the tilt of the square jaw, the determined heave of briefcase and arms, she knew that she had found Karolina. She was walking with a man, slightly shorter than her, in a drab belted raincoat.

  Simone shadowed the couple for several blocks. Near Nerudova Street, the man headed off to the left and Karolina increased her pace. With a perverse flas
h of satisfaction as she hastened to her side, Simone noted that Karolina had thickened, that her bottom beneath her coat had an ungainly amplitude, that her cheeks were flushed with the exertion of her walk.

  ‘Karolina Dostolova,’ she said, so loudly that she saw the woman stiffen in fear as curious passers-by turned.

  ‘Yes. That’s me.’

  ‘I know it’s you. Who else could it be? One doesn’t forget the face of the woman who’s murdered one’s husband.’

  She hadn’t known she was going to say that. She hadn’t known she would shout it, so that not only Karolina, but people all around her stared. The hush in the street was tangible, as if a curtain had suddenly been raised before an audience who now waited for a drama to unfurl. On that stage, she saw the momentary shock of recognition on Karolina’s face, then a shuttered look, a tensing of shoulders.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. You must be mad. Who are you?’ Karolina’s voice was low, steady. ‘I will report you to the police.’

  At that word, people round them turned on their heels, hurried away. Karolina did the same. Simone pursued her, put a rough, staying hand on her arm. ‘You know very well who I am,’ she said in the same abrasive voice.

  Karolina shrugged her off. Her face was very pale, the pupils dark with apprehension. ‘Madwoman,’ she muttered and raced off towards the square, leapt onto a tram.

  Simone didn’t follow. She didn’t need to. As the tram clattered away, she met Karolina’s eyes with the full force of her long nurtured fury. The woman was frightened. She could almost smell her fear. It was good for Karolina to taste fear, to have it hover over her at night as it must for so long have hovered over Staszek.