He said, "You are a little fool. You don’t know what you are talking about. Don’t provoke me."
I burst out laughing. I said, "You mean, this particular hen should not be cackling just now?"
Soon after dinner I said I wanted to leave, and Ferdinand, as a matter of course, saw me home. It had stopped raining and we walked all the way to the hotel. By then a new storm was rising and the first heavy drops began to fall. "Come upstairs and have a last drink with me," I said.
It was about ten o’clock. We took a seat on one of the blue-plush benches facing the arch with the naked statue and gave our orders to the headwaiter. When the elderly waitress arrived, she murmured while setting down our glasses, "Begging your pardon, madam, but the gentleman over there has been sitting alone there for the last hour and looking very sad."
"Never mind," I said, "let him sit and look sad." And glancing sideways I saw the Russian sitting five empty tables away from ours, with his back turned to the door and not facing us directly. He was reading a newspaper.
"What’s all this about?" asked my cousin indifferently.
"Oh, it’s just ...," I began, still watching the Russian, and paused when I saw a stranger greet him and join him at his table. He was a conspicuous-looking man, not only because of his cornflower-blue suit but because of his striking appearance; he had thick white-blond hair and a handsome lean face, as though carved with a few strokes of a hatchet.
"It’s only . . . ," I started again. "There is a man over there ..." I halted with embarrassment. "I happen to know him. I sometimes meet him here and we talk."
"Good God," said my cousin, who had been following my glance. I was taken aback at the sound of his voice. It was very low and sounded as though he had gone pale with fright. "What is he?" he asked.
"He is a Russian."
"Good God," he said once more.
"What’s so dreadful about him?" I asked. And then it occurred to me with great relief that it was probably the handsome striking white-blond stranger whom he had meant. I said gaily, "Which one of the two do you mean? If it’s the cornflower, I’ve never seen him before."
"Oh, that one," said my cousin impatiently. "Who cares? It’s the other one I mean, for heaven’s sake. How long have you known him? How did you meet him?"
"I met him here in the coffeehouse," I said. "You know how it is. And if you are going to tell me that I am a married woman with a husband and a child, I am going to scream," and I forced myself to laugh.
I knew quite well that my cousin had not spoken with moral indignation, and that as a former cavalryman he treated amorous irregularities of any kind with careless amusement. I had made the remark as a desperate attempt to ignore the fear which so obviously had seized him.
"A coffeehouse acquaintance," he said slowly, as though pronouncing a monstrosity. "What does he do?"
"I don’t know exactly; he never told me," I said. "It’s something with a laboratory."
"It wouldn’t matter even if he had told you," said my cousin, "because they always have a genuine job of work as a cover."
"How do you mean?"
"How dim can you be?" asked my cousin.
"How do you mean?"
"But don’t you see," said my cousin, "the fellow is a typical secret intelligence man? He belongs to what we call the obscure force."
"And how dim can you get?" I replied heatedly. "He’s got a degree in physics and he’s worked in Hungary and in Romania. He sometimes travels because of his work, and he’s divorced and has a daughter—"
"Stop it," he said. "Of course he’s told you his story. They all have a story—they can’t just say they’ve dropped from the sky. And the claptrap about divorce and daughter fills it in and makes it less fake."
"He isn’t fake," I said. "He’s highly educated, he’s simply dripping with Latin and Greek. You can’t fake reeling off the prepositions governing the dative and the accusative, the way he did once to exasperate me, and then he recited the rules about the forms of the aorist till I felt like screaming. And he’s not a Party member—he won’t join. He’s not even a Communist, so there."
"Not even a Communist," repeated my cousin. "Not even a . . . Of all the— Can’t you see that’s part of his story, to put you off your guard? And you really believe he is not a comrade, only because he said so?"
"You are being idiotic," I said. "The only comrades you know were your horses, and you’ve told me yourself how in the war you wouldn’t eat horse meat because it would have meant eating your comrades. And there is nothing to put me off guard with him. Just to show you how wrong you are, he is the soul of discretion, and he’s never ever asked me a single question about myself."
"Naturally," said my cousin. "That’s because he’s found out all he wants to know about you from his sources. Don’t you see, even dumb as you are, that this again proves it? How long have you known him?"
"All the time I’ve been here," I said. "I met him on the second day I arrived."
"Good God," said my cousin, in a voice blanched with fear. "That clinches it. You get here, and straightaway they put him on to you."
"You’re as daft as a brush," I said. "He talked to me because he liked me. What’s so unusual about that? Let me tell you, when I got out of the number seven tramway the first evening, a man accosted me and wanted to go along with me. And when I had lunch at the Praha, a man followed me out to the cloakroom and tried to pick me up. And when I had coffee at Berger’s, a man left as soon as he saw I was paying, and waited for me on the stairs and wanted to go off with me. They all were secret intelligence, of course."
He gave me a reproachful, exasperated look. "It sticks out a mile," he said. "But you haven’t been through what we have been through here, so you can’t know. I have learned how to pick out the plainclothesmen in public places. But this is worse, much worse. Of course he’s highly educated, as you say—that I don’t doubt. He’s got to be; he’s washed with all waters."
For a while we continued silent, and because I found my cousin ridiculously pitiful, I decided to stop protesting. I said reasonably, "If you were right, why waste him on me? I am nothing and nobody."
"You haven’t got to the end yet," said my cousin. "You don’t know what use he will find for you. Just before you leave he will put the pressure on."
"Make me earn my keep," I said, and burst out laughing.
"And to think," said my cousin, pointedly ignoring my merriment, "that I had to come here with you and that he has seen me."
"So what?" I said. "There are worse sights than you. You know how we used to tease you that you looked exactly like the Prince of Wales? Now you look like the Duke of Windsor."
"Look over there," said my cousin. "The oldish couple. He’s smoking. And the old girl has turned her chair away from the table. She’s been like that all the time, they got here shortly after us."
"I didn’t notice," I said.
"All the time she’s been watching us," he insisted.
"She’s looking at my dress," I said. "Everybody here notices my rags. To them they are simply heaven. It’s pathetic. And you yourself—I don’t know how you do it, but you still manage to live up to your former legend. You stick out a mile with your English tweeds."
"She isn’t admiring us," he said. "Do you know what she is doing? She is too far away to overhear what we are saying, and yet she is listening to every word. She’s lip-reading."
"You are crazy."
"I may seem crazy to you," he said. "I know full well that you think I’m suffering from ideas of persecution, but you haven’t lived here since the war. And I’ll tell you something more. When I get up to go now, I’ll be followed by somebody and trailed all the way home. Because I’m suspect now, just by sitting with you, and being your cousin makes it worse."
"I give up," I said. I looked once more in the direction of the Russian. He was alone now; I had not noticed the other one leaving. "There you are," I said to Ferdinand. "The cornflower has faded away. Been sent off to
relay a message. He’ll climb to the top of the church tower wrapped in a scarlet cloak so that nobody will think him conspicuous, and signal with a torch straight to Moscow."
My cousin asked about the hour of my flight to London in two days. "I shan’t be able to see you tomorrow," he said, "because of my work. But I’ll fetch you from the hotel the day after tomorrow and see you to the airport."
While he paid, the waitress gave me a tenderly reproachful glance. I hoped my cousin did not observe it; I reflected that if the elderly kindhearted woman had not been on duty that evening, the whole scene with my cousin would have been avoided and he would never have known of the Russian’s existence. And yet, a few moments later I realized that the scene would have been unavoidable after all, because as we were leaving, the Russian rose from his seat. He caught up with us before we reached the door. "I kiss your hand, milostivá paní," he said. "Forgive me, I only wanted to inquire if you too are departing now?"
"This is my cousin Ferdinand—Mr. Blonik," I said.
The Russian barely gave him a look and bowed slightly.
"I’m only seeing my cousin out," I said.
"In that case," said the Russian, "may I hope you will return and give me the pleasure of your company for a while?"
"Of course," I said. "I’ll be with you in a minute."
He inclined his head toward me, then toward my cousin, and turned away.
Ferdinand gave me a significant look and raised his chin. I glanced in the direction he wanted me to look. The Russian was not returning to his table; he went out ahead of us, through the swinging glass doors, past the cloakroom, where the attendant was knitting behind her counter, and then he was out of sight. If he had gone down the stairs we would have seen him, so he must have entered either the washroom or the telephone booth. "What do you say now?" asked Ferdinand. I did not reply. My cousin added, "Whatever he is or isn’t, he certainly is Russian. That accent he can’t get rid of or he would have done it. It’s like a watermark on a banknote; it gives the show away every time."
After my cousin had received his coat—it was his old officer’s trench coat—we dawdled in the lobby, talking, neither of us admitting that we were interested to see from which door the Russian would emerge. He did not appear. After a few minutes we descended the stairs and bid each other good-bye in the foyer of the hotel with a show of exaggerated heartiness.
When I returned to the coffeehouse, the Russian was at his table. He rose, smiling. "Let’s go, shall we," he said, "unless you want another drink."
"I don’t."
"That’s splendid," he said.
"I’m sorry I kept you waiting so long," I said. "But after all those years, there is so much to talk about."
"Well, well."
"I’m awfully glad I did manage to find my cousin," I said. "At first I thought . . . I didn’t have a clue."
"You don’t look pleased, though," he said.
"Oh, that’s because . . . ," I said, haltingly, and looked searchingly into his face.
"Because he made a remark about me," said the Russian. He closed his long lips tightly. His countenance had the same expression as on our first evening, when I had observed him listening to that man, as though expecting to be told something with which he was familiar but which he did not care to hear, anyway.
I took a deep breath. I was overwhelmed by a desire to see him flustered, shaken, just for once to shatter his sober self-possession, to see the sparks of the same fire he had shown when talking to me in his own tongue.
"He thinks you are secret intelligence," I said without taking my eyes off him.
To my furious disappointment he gave his resigned laughter. He said, "Is that all? I’m used to this. Before I was in the habit of coming here, I used to go to another coffeehouse, and I noticed that nobody ever would sit at a table next to mine if they could help it. In the end I asked the waiter, and he told me, ‘They all think you are secret intelligence.’ I don’t know what it is about me, and being Russian doesn’t help either, of course. Never mind. Let’s go."
The next evening, when we met in the coffeehouse, I said, "I shan’t come to your place tonight. My flight is at nine tomorrow, which means I must be at the airport at eight. I just couldn’t manage it—I’d be too nervous."
"I understand."
We sat on till eleven. I said, "Now, I think, it must be good-bye."
"Yes, but not here," he said. "There is something more I want to tell you, and it had better be said outside. Walk down the street with me, no further than the church, and I’ll walk you back to the hotel. I believe the rain has stopped just for once, mirabile dictu."
"Not mirabile at all," I said. "Now that I’m leaving, the good weather will set in."
"I’d rather have it rain and you stay on," he said.
It was mild outside; the sky was evenly clouded and it was still wet underfoot. I was walking down the street by the side of a man with whom I had spent most evenings and nights for six weeks, and of whom I knew the following: he was Russian and forty-two, brought up in a wine shop of poor parents, had worked previously in Romania and Hungary, had a degree in physics, was divorced two years ago, had a daughter of eight and a brother who was a general in the Russian army.
We were silent as we passed the length of the hotel building. Then he said, "You have been very good all along. You’ve never asked me a question about myself. Now, as you are leaving, I will tell you what I am. I am a physicist and I work for the army. I am a full colonel. They wanted to put me in uniform, but I managed to be spared that, at least. I cough on them, as you would express it, but I have no choice. I am on secret stuff, though I’d much rather be working on something else, and if I ever leave the army I shan’t be allowed out of the country for five years. I don’t want you to write to me; I shan’t write either. If you ever want to come back to me, I’ll be here for you—I’m strictly a one-woman man, that’s my unfortunate nature. I’ll always want you, you can rely on me."
We halted. "At least kiss me good-bye," I said. As soon as I had said it I knew it was a mistake. Like all good lovers, the Russian had never wasted time on kisses. Besides, with his sober bearing he had always abstained completely from any show of affection in public.
He bent down rigidly and with ill grace, and I put my arms around his neck and touched my lips on his cheek. I said, "And I never even learned how to pour out Turkish coffee because you always did it for me."
We made our way back without speaking. A waitress came out of the snack bar flanking the hotel entrance, carrying a tray with a mayonnaise salad, and at that moment there came to us the music from the radio outside, playing the bars of the song which says, "You wait, I’ll tell how you went after me, you wait, I’ll tell what you wanted to get. In the garden a rose, under the window a kiss."
"Drat these folk tunes," the Russian said.
I RETURNED to Prague in 1968, three years after I had left, on a Friday in the first week of June. On the first night I was given a room in a good old hotel behind the gunpowder tower, in the center of the town. On the next day I was told that no accommodation of any kind could be found for me, not even in the second-rate hotel where I had stayed previously, and I was sent to a room in a private flat behind the national museum.
The owner’s family was ill pleased at my moving in at such short notice; they had intended to leave in the afternoon for a weekend in the country. I assured them that I would be able to make my own breakfast, would turn off the gas, would double-lock the front door when going out, and would write down every call I made on the telephone. By then it was not necessary to continue with my enumeration of a lodger’s virtues; they told me that they would bring me back some cherries and strawberries, and that in the meantime I could have the run of the flat.
On Sunday morning I could not wait any longer. I took the tray with my milk and coffee into the dining room, poured out a cup, set it on a chair by the telephone, and opened the directory.
I had never had occasio
n to call the Russian by telephone, and had never looked up his number. It was easy to find. There was only one Blonik in the book, and the address was still the same. The only thing which struck me as not being right was the first name. It was not Konstantin, but Antonin, which is the Czech form of Anthony. He’s got two Christian names, I thought, and he doesn’t want to use the Russian-sounding Konstantin.
While I dialed I conjured up a woman’s voice answering, or his own, embarrassed and constricted, informing me that he was now married, saying brightly, "Of course I’ll be very glad to see you," and adding in a murmur, "but my wife must never know of this."
The call was answered on the first ring. "Blonik here," said a man’s voice. It was a baritone, and softer and weaker than the full hard voice that I recalled. Probably I had awakened him.
"It’s Edith," I said. "I only arrived from London the day before yesterday. How are you?"
"Yey-yey. Edith from London, it sounds like a blooming fairy tale," said the voice, a voice without the glitter of brocade, and to my consternation it spoke in the slangy way and dialectically colored speech peculiar to the inhabitants of Prague.
"But aren’t you Mr. Blonik?" I asked.
"Sure, but I don’t know any Edith, let alone an Edith from London, as sure as the cat crawls through the hole and the dog jumps over the fence."
"But I don’t understand," I said. "I used to know a Mr. Blonik in this very flat you are in now. He lived there."
"When was this?" he asked.
"Three years ago."
"That’s not possible," he said. "Because I’ve been in this flat for the last ten years, and I’m sitting tight on it, with both cheeks of my behind, don’t you worry, because this is a flat with all the comforts laid on, and there’s some who would trade a flat of four or five rooms in an old house for a small place like this. You have it mixed up with someone else in this house."
"Your flat is on the sixth floor," I said, "that’s the top floor, and as you get out of the lift, it’s the only door on the left. There is a roof terrace, not beautiful, but good for hanging out the washing."
The Darts of Cupid: Stories Page 16
