The Things We Do For Love

by Lisa Appignanesi

  As she walked towards her hotel, Simone felt she had grown vast wings and like a nemesis could pursue her prey with deadly force wherever she might run. But the dream of power vanished all too quickly. Towards the centre of town, she found her path blocked by a procession. Young Communists, bright red scarfs round their necks, waved banners. Song poured from them. Their faces radiated inane smiles of communal optimism. As surely as if she had been there, she could see Karolina beatific in their midst, immune to the individual human price of that unthinking collective joy.

  That night, amidst the rattling water pipes and musty smells of her hotel, she lay in bed and wept hot impotent tears. A bloated Karolina paraded through her dreams, as vast and many tentacled as the Party itself, an icon painted in primary colours, with arm thrust heroically upward and innocent smile veiling venomous intrigue. She woke feeling paralysed. The realisation that there was nothing she could do had crept icily over her limbs and rendered her numb. Karolina was shielded from any individual sense of responsibility by her total identification with the Party.

  With movement came the vague notion that she would somehow have to isolate Karolina from the protection of the group. Disgrace her in some way. And perhaps in that isolation, she could rupture her stolid immunity, impel her to some realisation of her guilt.

  As if in a dream, she dressed herself in her best Western clothes, a new single breasted woollen suit in deepest brick which Michel had chosen for her, a perky matching hat. Without thinking about it, she armed herself with what might be presents - two brightly wrapped boxes containing a scarf, a bottle of Channel, those suspicious foreign goods the regime considered anathema. Bearing these, she marched to Karolina’s office, demanded in a loud heavily accented voice to be allowed to see her, claimed she was an old friend, had brought her presents. She made a fuss, insisted.

  Either because he was cowed or simply because he wanted to get rid of this potentially contagious alien virus, the man at the front desk directed her towards a room where Karolina was addressing a group about the goals of the latest railway plan.

  Simone made her entry as conspicuous as possible, not that in her present attire she could have done anything else. Karolina’s eyes rested on her for a moment. Effusively Simone waved a gloved hand, beamed, put down her boxes with maximum display. She was rewarded with a stumble in Karolina’s speech, a fluttering nervousness in the hand she raised to turn her sheet of paper.

  The lecture was soon finished. Simone positioned herself at the door. No sooner had Karolina approached it, than Simone flung her arms around her and started speaking rapidly and noisily in French and then in that heavily accented Czech she had found somewhere.

  ‘I’m so happy to see you. I’ve brought you such lovely things. How well they’ll suit you.’

  Karolina squirmed, said nothing, nodded at members of the group, turned to walk brusquely towards the stairs. Simone was right beside her.

  ‘It’s so good of you to make a little time for me. I know how busy you must be.’ Simone kept her voice loud, chattered inanely all the way to Karolina’s office, slipped in before her.

  Karolina closed the door and leaned heavily against it. Her breath was audible. ‘What do you want? What on earth do you want.’

  ‘Just a little of your time,’ Simone said sweetly. She deposited her packages with a thump on the laden desk.

  ‘I don’t have any time.’

  ‘You’ll make some.’ Simone started to pace from desk to window to filing cabinet. Above the desk, she noticed, there was a picture of a dour President Gottwald. She stopped and stared at it, then turned on Karolina.

  ‘You remember you told me I would be Staszek’s ruin? You remember, don’t you? So I left. Left him to your mercies, your marriage bed.’ A strangled laugh rose to her throat. ‘And then what? Arrest, torture. And now he’s dead. Dead, do you hear?’ She was shaking Karolina by the shoulders. She hadn’t known she was shaking her and she stopped now. There were odd red blotches on the woman’s face. Simone stared at her, lowered her voice from its scream. ‘I want to know exactly what happened to Staszek. I want to know when you started sleeping with him. I want to know how you coerced him to get rid of me. You denounced him, didn’t you? To save your own thick ugly skin. Your old comrade. Your husband.’

  The woman slapped her hard across the face, looked at her as if she were a dog in need of discipline, some stubborn peasant ripe for re-education.

  ‘Someone should have done that to you long ago,’ she hissed. ‘Now get out of here. You’re demented. And Staszek… Staszek was a coward. And a traitor. Yes.’ Her eyes reached for some distant horizon which could provide confirmation of her words. ‘A traitor. A saboteur.’ She looked back at Simone, her face contorted with hatred. ‘I should have known it was too late for him after you had got your selfish, sticky paws on him. Now, out.’

  She opened the door and with an imperious gesture pointed Simone towards it.

  ‘Not that easy.’ Simone moved in the opposite direction, slid into the chair behind the desk.

  ‘Right. If you won’t go of your own accord, I’ll get someone to make you. You won’t like that.’ She laughed harshly as she turned, strode heavily down the corridor, each of her angry steps clearly audible.

  Simone looked at the empty space where Karolina had been and then down at the desk in front of her. There was some kind of map there, photographs of fields and railway lines and wooden cabins taken from the air, an assortment of papers. In a trance which seemed to float above her rage, she picked these up and folded them into her bag, tucked the larger ones beneath her coat. For good measure she pulled open one of the cabinets and randomly picked out some files. With the calm gestures of a sleep-walker, she walked out of the door and down the stairs, a smile plastered on her face for the benefit of passers-by. Outside she quickened her pace, leapt onto a tram which took her back to the hotel. She packed hastily, addressed some letters. There was a night train she could catch. Better that than the morning train she was scheduled to be on. She didn’t want to spend another minute in the city.

  The building where Simone had last seen Karolina was now covered in scaffolding and plastic sheets. A tasteful sign in blue and yellow announced the soon to be opened offices of a Japanese computer firm. Simone took a deep breath and peered through the open doors. Tins of paint lined the lobby. A man in overalls stood atop a rickety ladder and wielded a dripping brush. He shouted something at her. As she turned away a flash startled her. She slipped on the step, fell to the ground.

  ‘Sorry, sorry.’ A man was standing beside her, helping her up. A camera drooped from his neck. ‘Very sorry,’ he said, his ‘r’s’ lilting into ‘l’s’. ‘You okay, now?’

  Simone leaned heavily on his arm, felt pain whip through creaking limbs. ‘Yes. Thank-you. I lost my balance.’ She tried to turn her wince into a smile.

  He smiled back, bowed. ‘I help you. You have car?’ He walked down the hill with her, until feeling her legs grow steadier, she urged him away. Beneath the cover of her coat, she rubbed her thighs and flinched. Coffee. That was what she needed. Across the street she spied one of those new pine and whitewashed cafés.

  Gratefully she sank into a pink-bolstered chair, treated herself to apple cake and milky coffee.

  She had needed to fall, Simone told herself. To feel something of the pain which had impelled her towards her next act of treachery. Unplanned, yet somehow inevitable.

  She had gotten on the train that night, had dozed fitfully while it clattered and clanked its way through darkened countryside. At the German border, she had been woken by guards. They scrutinized her passport, examined her face with steely eyes. Then they had gestured towards her suitcase. She had unlocked it for them.

  Right at the top lay the files and photos and maps she had taken from Karolina’s desk. These they scanned with darkening faces.

  ‘What are these?’ The taller one asked.

  ‘I have no idea.’ Simone said truthfully. She fo
und herself batting her eyelashes, behaving like a flighty, flirtatious girl. ‘A friend asked me to take them to Paris. So, of course, I said yes.’

  ‘Who was the friend?’ The smaller one quizzed her. He had thick ruddy eyelashes which met above his nose.

  ‘I don’t want to get her into trouble,’ Simone demurred.

  ‘You’re in trouble,’ the taller one said. He poked his finger at the stamp of the Ministry of Transport and exchanged glances with his partner. Within a second, they had all but lifted her from her seat and marched her and her suitcase off the train.

  ‘But…’ She allowed herself an astonished laugh. ‘You don’t think I’m a spy, do you? Would a spy be so stupid as to carry papers at the very top of a suitcase?’

  They didn’t answer. They simply tightened their grip on her arms and half-carried her towards the end of the station platform. Here she was unceremoniously thrust into a cell, with bare stone walls and a recess which served for a bench. The heavy bars of the door clanged and shook as they shut. Her suitcase went with the guards. She could see them walking off with it, could see the train chug away moments later. And then there was only night and cold and a single station lamp illuminating an abandoned cattle car.

  She shivered in the damp cold, but she didn’t allow herself to be afraid. She thought of Staszek whose cell wouldn’t have allowed a view and gripped the bars and shook them and waited. Some forty minutes passed and then a small man in a thick grey coat appeared beside the taller guard. He had a thin, pointed face, stubbled with that morning’s beard. Rounded specs sat astride his nose, half masking watery blue eyes. His hands moved continuously as he talked.

  ‘Simone Lalande Debray?’

  ‘Yes.’ Simone stood to attention, examined the scrapes and scratches on the stone floor.

  ‘Born Paris, 1926. Married Prague 1947 to Stanislaw Mánes. Divorced 1950. Remarried Paris 1951. Husband, Michel François Debray, Head of Division, French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Two Children.’

  ‘Correct.’ Simone hid her sudden desire to laugh.

  ‘Purpose of visit to Prague?’

  ‘I was part of a delegation from the French Communist Party.’

  The man grunted. ‘And these papers found in your case? Who gave them to you?’

  Simone hesitated, met the eyes of the uniformed guard, cleared her throat. ‘Karolina Dostolova,’ she murmured.

  The guard noted the name.

  ‘Address?’

  She eyed the ground. ‘I saw her at the Ministry of Transport. But… She’s an old acquaintance.’

  The men exchanged glances.

  ‘I don’t want…’

  ‘We are not interested in what you want,’ the man barked. ‘Destination of the papers?’

  ‘Karolina asked that I give them to…’ she paused, ‘what was his name now. I wrote it down somewhere, maybe in my case. Oh yes. Dr. Osustky. Stefan Osustky.’ She named the man who had headed up a Czech exile government. ‘I don’t know him, but she said he was a friend.’

  With a sudden expression of greed, the small man passed his tongue over his lips.

  ‘But look,’ Simone hurried on. ‘You can keep it all. I don’t care. I was just doing Karolina a favour. And I have to get home to my children. I have to get on the next train. You can phone the French Embassy in Prague. Monsieur Roland. He’ll vouch for me. Or the Ambassador himself, though it would be silly to disturb Yves on such a minor matter.’

  The two men walked away without a word.

  Simone sat in the cell and waited. She told herself that these were minor officials, that they would be impressed by the names she had dropped. That she herself was not worth starting an international incident over. That they had what they wanted. That it might even earn them a promotion. She allowed herself a moment’s tingle of delight over the trouble she would cause Karolina. She could sniff the fear gathering in Karolina’s armpits as she noticed the missing papers, as her superior called her in. She didn’t want to think any further than that. But as the long night merged into a grey dawn and the birds began their song and still no one had come to unlock her cell door, she began to think that she had perhaps over-reached herself.

  It was only when the distant roar of a morning train had already begun to make itself felt in the rattling door of her cell that two new guards appeared and released her. She was handed her passport and her suitcase and without a word bundled onto the train. By the time she reached Paris, she was calm. The desire for vengeance that had obsessed her for so long had burnt itself out in the action of those last days.

  Simone took a long puff of her cigarette and sipped the coffee in its white Swedish mug. Over the next years, she reflected, she had buried the Staszek of life and limb and kisses and gesture, buried her first love, deep in the recesses of her mind. He grew diffuse, depersonalized, became a kind of fuelling energy for the entirety of her life’s work, as if she had to live for two, but the other, the lost one, could never be named.

  She also buried Karolina, though it was not until later that she learned she had helped to bury her in fact as well as mind. Of this she was deeply ashamed. Infuriated by Karolina’s stolid condemnation of Staszek, her lack of grief, her denial of any ordinary emotion, she had ended up by using the tactics of the regime itself. Trapped in the logic of vengeance, her own messy bundle of jealousy and spite had translated itself into an act which was equivalent to that of the everyday informer or Party hack. She didn’t altogether forgive herself, but she forgot. Forgot conveniently until her nose was rubbed in the mud and she herself was threatened with disgrace.

  It was an exemplary tale, Simone told herself with grim self-derision as she stubbed out her cigarette. A very modern tale which had countless parallels in eastern Europe, though hers had in part played itself out in the West. It was too bad that she was one of its actors and now felt impelled to tell it and suffer its shame.

  At five o’clock, as promised, Simone made her way to the mezzanine of the hotel where the Congress delegates were gathering for drinks. She had taken a rest that afternoon to gather her strength. A long soak in a fragrant bath had eased some of the pain of her fall. And she had dressed carefully, cast aside a grey dress for the emphatic bottle green of her favourite Chanel suit. She didn’t want to shock him with the signs of her age.

  The room was bright with low shafts of late afternoon sun. They slanted across the burgundy carpet, lit faces with an inquisitorial beam, bounced off the silver trays and sparkling glass of the long buffet table. In a far corner, the harsher glare of television spots, created a makeshift studio.

  Pausing at the door, Simone reflected that she would have preferred a kinder setting. She walked slowly into the crowd and looked for Stephen.

  Before she could find him, a voice accosted her.

  ‘Simone. Well, what about that!’

  Simone turned to find Ted Knight striding towards her. He was wearing his charming, inane, smile above a fashionably collarless shirt and a roomy suit.

  ‘I didn’t expect to see you in Prague.’

  ‘I was hardly expecting to see you either.’

  ‘Oh?’ His eyes glinted. A muscle played in his cheek. ‘I’d hoped that just maybe…’

  ‘Don’t flatter yourself, Edward.’ Simone muted the spikiness in her tone with a soft laugh. ‘I haven’t come for you.’

  He kissed her cheek familiarly, his large hand resting on her shoulder. ‘What then? I didn’t know you were interested in this lot.’ He waved towards the room.

  ‘Stephen Caldwell invited me.’ She watched his face carefully. The muscle had started its work again.

  ‘I didn’t realise you two knew each other.’

  ‘You can’t know everything, Ted. For all your sharp eyes. Now I really must find Stephen.’ She pulled away from him, but he was right at her heels.

  ‘Anything else you want to tell me? You’re not going to do anything foolish, Simone?’ His voice was low in her ear, a tense whisper with a hint of menace.


  She steadied her own and met his eyes with a challenge. ‘Not by my reckoning, no. But look, there’s Stephen now.’

  Stephen waved her towards his little group, introduced her. She half caught a mixture of German, Italian and Slav names, scientists, journalists, a philosopher.

  A man with a double chin and red striped braces was enthusing about the breeding of superplants which contained all necessary proteins and amino acids - a vital food supplement to indigenous crops for the poorer nations. A woman with an Italian accent protested. This was simply colonialism by another name - a genetic colonialism which would make the poorer nations dependent on the rich in a new way.

  ‘Living beings are not merely survival machines,’ a bearded man intervened. ‘Life cannot be transformed into a mechanical order, a question of arithmetic in which low-priced fodder is converted into high priced flesh. Cows are…’

  A second woman interrupted, a teasing expression on her face. ‘You Germans are so sensitive. You worry so much. Not all science is Nazi science. What do you say, Dr. Caldwell?’ She turned towards Stephen. ‘You know Gino Salvatore here is doing a piece for La Republicca on ethics. How heavily should we scientists be regulated? Do we need restraints?’

  ‘I don’t like talking to journalists,’ Stephen grinned but his eyes were serious. ‘It’s curious. But no matter how boring and ordinarily sensible real scientists in fact are, the media somehow manages to transform us into holy saviours or dangerous Dr. Frankensteins poised to unleash terror on the world. Or at best uncontrollable boys toying with powerful chemistry sets.’ He laughed. ‘I’m afraid I’ve just intimated that to the cameras, amongst more important matters.’

  ‘You’re not gonna tell me you guys are just like everyone else!’ Ted exclaimed.

  ‘I’m afraid so. We’re just as exposed to social forces as anyone else and we’re shaped by them. With very few exceptions, we function within the usual moral, political and financial constraints. At my end of the scientific wood, as you know too well, Ted, the financial usually dominates. Governments or private companies decide what research is to be invested in. At best, social need with a sprinkling of fashion combines with market interest. But that’s enough of that.’