Letters From Prague

by Sue Gee

  People walked past her; somebody said, ‘You okay?’

  It was the young American, the boy she had met by Jan Palach’s grave.

  ‘Hey – you again.’

  She looked at him blankly.

  He came towards her. ‘Listen, you don’t look too good –’

  ‘Go away, go away.’ She was incoherent. She turned aside: she was by the open door of the Memorial Hall; she walked inside: swiftly, blindly.

  The Memorial Hall housed the poems and paintings done by the children of Terezín, the model concentration camp outside Prague. They were hung on bare walls; strands of barbed wire evoked the camp perimeter. The children had painted gardens, flowers, butterflies. They had painted hangings, dark skies, grimacing faces; children, herded away. And then they had been herded away, to the death camps over the border.

  Harriet walked round the two rooms, looking at these harrowing images from the past.

  The past is more real to me than my own life –

  That was no longer true.

  After a while, she came out again. The young American boy had gone. She walked past the cemetery walls, looking straight ahead, and rapidly beneath the trees alongside, down to Jan Palach Square, along Kaprova, and into the Old Town Square. The clock was striking five. She did not stop to look up at the procession of saints, or listen to Death ring out his warning. She walked rapidly over the cobbles, and into Celetna, catching the tram to Žižkov, where Marsha – to whom, all afternoon, she had not given a thought – was waiting for her.

  Chapter Six

  In the early 1880s, towards the end of his life, Marx took the water at Karlovy Vary. Better known to the world as Karlsbad, the spa town in western Bohemia, set on the steep wooded banks of the River Tepla, was a belle époque dream, all pastel-coloured houses with façades like iced cakes, and shops as fine as Vienna’s. A little funicular railway ran up and down the hillside: at the top, you could walk amongst oak and beech trees and admire the view. In the town, after rising at six to take the waters, you might indulge yourself with coffee and rich Torten, dance flirtatious afternoons away to a string quartet, visit the theatre with frescoes and swishing curtain by Gustav Klimt.

  Everyone, celebrated and obscure, came to Karlsbad. Goethe enjoyed romantic assignments, Schiller drank eighteen cure cups of the sparkling salty waters. Gushing from deep springs and geysers, they were reputed to cure almost everything.

  But even then, mine workings were encroaching on the mineral-rich land beneath the Krus˘ne Hory mountains, along the German-Czech border of northern Bohemia. Mining companies dug for porcelain clay, and for lignite, which fuelled the factories being built alongside. Northeast of Karlsbad, some ninety kilometres from Prague, stood the lovely spa town of Teplice – concerts, swans on the lakes, a château, the drawing room of Europe – visited by Wagner, Liszt and Beethoven. Nearby, mine workings breached an underwater lake, flooding the natural springs.

  Already, here and there, the smell of burning lignite hung in the air. Already sulphurous yellow fumes rose from the factory chimneys, drifting in and out of the clouds.

  ‘The alternative,’ said Karel, overtaking a lorry, ‘is nuclear power. The issue of nuclear power is dividing Bohemia in two.’ He glanced in the rear-view mirror. ‘Marsha? I am alarming you with my driving? Gaby is used to me, but you must say if I drive too fast.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Marsha, squashed up next to Gaby and Hanna. ‘It’s fun.’

  ‘Harriet?’ He turned towards her. ‘You are quiet this morning. Perhaps I am talking too much?’

  ‘No, no. I’m listening.’

  She looked away, gazing at the countryside. They were travelling in Karel’s bright red Skoda, towards the German border, on the road from Prague to Berlin. Yesterday had been a blur, Karel too busy to see them and Harriet too filled with emotion to know what to do – with herself, or with Marsha. In the end, after wandering among stalls and markets, she had looked in an English-language entertainments guide and taken her to a puppet theatre in a street off the Old Town Square. They sat in the darkness watching Czech fairytales unfold on a tiny stage; Black paper silhouettes made forests and castles; pinpricks of stars illuminated the progress of clicking wooden feet down paths full of danger; goblin voices croaked from beneath the footlights. Marsha was entranced.

  ‘Didn’t you like it?’ she asked, as they came out into the crowded little foyer. ‘You’re not saying anything.’

  ‘Sorry. Perhaps I’m under a spell.’

  They walked back to Mala Strana over the Charles Bridge, stopping, as usual, to look at the stalls of painted eggs and cheap wooden toys, and listen to buskers’Mozart float across the water.

  ‘I feel really at home here now,’ said Marsha.

  Back in the pension, Harriet telephoned Hugh, letting Marsha speak first this time.

  ‘We’re going out to the country tomorrow,’ she told him. ‘With Karel. We’re going to visit your power station place. Love to Susanna. Here’s Mum.’

  She handed the receiver to Harriet and wandered out to the courtyard.

  ‘Hugh? How is she?’

  ‘She’s low, but she’s coming home tomorrow. We seem to have found someone she can talk to – a priest turned therapist. He seems okay, the clinic found him –’ He sounded drained, exhausted. ‘This isn’t exactly my territory …’

  ‘Oh, Hugh – I’m so sorry. Would you not like me to come?’

  ‘No, no – well be all right. What about you, how are you? I hope all this hasn’t clouded –’

  She could not speak.

  ‘Harriet?’

  ‘It’s okay –’ She felt tears well up, and put her hand to her mouth.

  ‘Darling –’

  ‘Don’t, don’t, it’s okay, I’m fine. Talk to you soon.’

  She put down the receiver and leaned against the wall by the mirror, feeling grief and pain make war within her, looking out over the darkening courtyard. Marsha was sitting at the table.

  ‘You coming out, Mum?’

  ‘Yes, in a minute.’

  ‘It’s nice out here.’

  Harriet drew a breath. She went to sit beside her. The pigeons on the rooftop were murmuring contentedly, settling for the night.

  The camp at Terezín stood on the road from Prague to Berlin, but Harriet, in the end, had been unable to contemplate a visit. To read of it was enough; to see the children’s pictures in Josefov had been enough. And Marsha and Gaby were too young to be taken through gates bearing the slogan ARBEIT MACHT FREI, to follow a tour of the barracks, the railway tracks, the scaffold. They drove past the turn-off without mentioning it to the children; only to Hannah, squeezed on the back seat between them, did Karel give a nod as they passed the sign, and she made no comment.

  They drove on, through gently undulating countryside, farmland, fed by the river Labe. To the east, towards Karlovy Vary, lay the great hop-growing regions. Here, Harriet looked out of the window at harvested fields full of stubble and stooks, at tractors moving along the skyline, cattle swishing away flies beneath the trees.

  It was mid-morning, the sun climbing the sky, but the air through the open car windows felt cooler than in the city streets. She leaned back in her seat, adjusting the worn belt and listening to the girls singing pop songs they both knew from the radio; to Hannah’s good-humoured reproaches when they grew too shrill; and to Karel, rehearsing the issues of the day as they made their way towards the old spa town of Teplice, near to where Hugh had made his investment.

  She was trying not to think of Hugh in any other context. She was trying not to think of Susanna, the morning they had visited his office in the immaculately clean street near the Parliament building in Brussels: her back to the window, fingering her wristwatch, observing them all, set apart.

  ‘Susanna?’

  Yes?

  ‘I should so like to get to know you better.’

  ‘Now is not the moment.’

  ‘It never is.’

  ‘No.�
�� She lifted her hands to her head and clasped it – briefly, but as if she couldn’t help herself, as if she were trying to hold everything in place –

  Harriet, trying to concentrate on what Karel was saying, put her hands to her own head for a moment. She was trying not to think of Susanna; she was trying to banish the continual reliving of a more recent conversation, held amongst gravestones, walking alongside someone heavy and tall and sombre.

  ‘You see this is something of a real dilemma.’ Karel was saying. ‘There is this very serious pollution of a whole region from power stations on which the rest of us are quite dependent: for energy, for heavy industry. So. We look for an alternative. In the past there was the possibility of gas from our friends in the Soviet Union, and naturally we have resisted this idea, because such dependence could mean we are held to ransom.’ He pulled out, passing a car piled high with hay bales. ‘The other alternative is nuclear power, and here is the split. In the north, where our children are wearing gas masks as they walk to school in the winter, nuclear power seems clean and safe – so long as it comes from somewhere else. In the south, perhaps you know of this, we have such a reactor, on the Vltava, near Temelin. It is close to the Austrian border. It is designed to be the largest nuclear power station in the world. And naturally, no one near Temelin wishes to live in the shadow of something that is untested, that is resembling Chernobyl. There is a report on the possible dangers even before this disaster, which they try to keep a secret. Since Chernobyl, Greenpeace have been kind enough to draw attention by dropping a banner down the side of one of the cooling towers – perhaps, in the British press, you have seen pictures?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Harriet, welcoming distraction. ‘And I thought of you –’

  He turned to smile at her. ‘As you looked on the television in Wenceslas Square, I think, in 1989 –’

  ‘Yes.’ She returned the smile. Cool air blew back her hair; they were driving fast, and the landscape was changing: undulating arable fields became rolling hills of pasture, dotted with sheep. ‘On every hill a castle, in every woods a château; rivers and forests and soaring skies –’ Travel-guide, picture-book Bohemia, with no sign, yet, of the ravages both Hugh and Karel had talked about.

  ‘You okay in the back?’ she asked Marsha.

  ‘How long till we get there?’

  She looked at Karel.

  ‘Until Teplice? Perhaps a half-hour, forty minutes? It is a place to remember: somewhere once so lovely but ruined now.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Marsha, ‘you said.’

  Karel raised an eyebrow at her in the mirror.

  Harriet felt Marsha go red. ‘She didn’t mean to sound rude.’

  ‘No,’ said Marsha. ‘I didn’t.’ And then, in a rush, ‘It’s because I feel okay with you. I feel I can say what I want. Sometimes it comes out wrong.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Karel. ‘We all have such moments.’ He gave her an almost imperceptible wink; he spoke to his mother and Gaby in Czech: they were enjoying this day out of the city? They needed to stop, to stretch their legs? Harriet, aware that this was roughly what he must be asking, thought once again: he’s kind, he’s generous and sensitive. And although their recent encounter with Danielle had been eclipsed by what had felt like a much more important meeting since, she did now wonder, as they drove on: what happened between them? How could anyone wish to leave him?

  She wondered, but she did not enquire. Now was not the moment.

  ‘So?’ she asked, seeking refuge, once again, in issues of the public domain, as he turned back to her. ‘You were saying. What is the answer to this dilemma?’

  ‘Your brother is helping to find it,’ he said seriously. ‘It is very important, this kind of investment from the western banks. But perhaps it is something of a stopgap. In the end, it will not be only a question of curbing pollution, but of finding a real alternative. When that happens, it will bring another problem: at present there are many people employed in these power stations. Unemployment is something new to us, as in East Germany. In places like Teplice there are already unpleasant meetings between the skinheads and the workers from other countries. And with the gypsies, too.’

  ‘Are there? As in East Germany?’

  ‘It is not yet so serious, I think, but certainly there is an element –’ He pulled out to overtake a tourist caravan, then swung back sharply as a speeding car approached. ‘Excuse me.’ He looked at her, drumming his hands on the wheel.

  ‘You know something of the situation in Germany? Perhaps in Berlin –’

  ‘Berlin was horrible,’ said Marsha, from the back.

  He looked in the mirror. ‘I am sorry to hear it.’

  ‘We got caught up in an unpleasant incident,’ said Harriet flatly.

  ‘You mean we nearly got killed.’ Marsha leaned forward. ‘We went to visit this factory, and on the way back Mum had to stop and look at a sort of refugee place, and there were skinheads there, and –’

  ‘Marsha –’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I really don’t want to talk about that now.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Please.’ Harriet could hear herself sound sharp. ‘I just don’t, okay?’

  Karel reached back for Marsha’s hand. ‘Leave it, little one, yes? For now.’

  Marsha sat back. Karel said something in Czech. There was a rustle of sweet papers from Hannah’s bag.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Harriet, as they drove on.

  He glanced at her. ‘It is the memory of this incident which has been distressing you?’

  She looked away again. ‘Not entirely, no.’

  They were close to the German border now: much of the traffic heading towards them bore D numberplates; touring families in Volkswagen estate cars crammed with holiday luggage sped towards Prague; heavy articulated lorries climbed the hills, turning off to Usti nad Labem, and Litvinov, returning to Dresden and Leipzig. Hitchhikers with backpacks stood on the other side of the road, holding up cards.

  ‘Everyone wants to go to Prague,’ said Marsha.

  ‘And Czechs wish to go to Dresden.’ Karel indicated young girls stationed at intervals on the near side. ‘They are hoping for German clients,’ he said to Harriet, and from the back of the car came a disapproving murmur of Czech from his mother.

  Distant mountains came into view; they reached the brow of a hill and Karel drew into the roadside. There was a worn flat area on the verge: he pulled over, and stopped the car.

  ‘And so,’ he said drily, opening his door and gesturing to them all, ‘behold the view.’

  They clambered out, stood on the hilltop and beheld. Ahead was the Krus˘ne Hory range: dark, forested with conifers. Below, stretching for mile upon mile, were the devastated foothills. Mineworkings, filthy factory buildings, sprawling prefabricated estates: they lay in the shadow of the mountains on a sea of mud.

  Bulldozers crawled from site to site, towering chimneys belched vaporous smoke, black and evil yellow, into hazy sky.

  ‘Dear God,’ said Harriet, half to herself.

  ‘Look,’ said Karel. ‘Let me show you.’ He pointed to the north, where dense low cloud hung above the outskirts of a town. ‘The chemical plant at Litvinov. When the emissions are too high, red lights flash on the road, and you must switch off your engine.’ He had his hands on Harriet’s shoulders; he turned her so that she was looking west. ‘See those cooling towers? Those are the power stations of Tusmice and Prunerov.’

  He released her; he spread his arms. ‘You see the mud? There used to be small villages – they have all been flattened, to make way for these developments. You see the forests on the mountainside? Marsha – you see where I am pointing? All through, the trees are dying. It is not possible to see from here, but I assure you that if we were to drive up into those mountains you would see not trees but skeletons. And the silence –’ He shook his head. ‘All such forests are quiet and still, but there … it is something eerie.’

  Marsha was frowning, looking from side to side. �
��It’s horrible. It’s real pollution.’

  ‘Yes. Because they are mining the brown coal and also they are burning it: in these power stations, in the factories, the heavy industry plant, the chemical plant … It is an onslaught. If it were winter I should not bring you here. In winter all this makes a great smog: it can make you ill.’

  ‘It smells even now,’ she said. ‘Where’s Hugh’s power station?’

  ‘If it is near Teplice, it is probably the one you can see to your right.’ He turned her round, and pointed. They all looked towards a squat, ugly line of buildings beyond a distant town. ‘There, the sulphur is filtered out, it is not so dangerous.’

  ‘Can we go and see it?’

  ‘Go right up to it? No. There are high fences all round such places, Marsha, there are many restrictions. But we can drive to the town. Perhaps, if anyone still wishes to eat, we can have lunch.’

  There were swans, still, on the lake, but the château was now a museum. The blocks of nineteenth-century houses along the main street were still standing, but the paint was peeling, like the bark on the lime trees, whose blackened leaves lay here and there on the pavements. There was a park, there was a sky-blue swimming pool, but the air, even on a summer’s day, was faintly acrid, and a haze that had nothing to do with the weather hung over the park, the shuttered houses, the empty school playground and ill-stocked shops. There were few people about. It was not quite a ghost town, but it had that quality, and when they had parked the car and were walking through the quiet streets looking for somewhere to eat they fell into silence themselves, as if they, too, had to live here, amidst a desolate landscape, dreading the winter.

  But the place had to survive, and there were two or three hotel restaurants. They chose one on the corner of a fading square – cobbles, a bicycle propped against a tree, a child going home with a loaf of bread. Leaves fell with a papery rustle. A dull-coated cat sat on the steps of the hotel, blinking in the sun.

  ‘He’s nice, this cat,’ said Marsha, and she and Gaby stopped to stroke him. ‘It’s like Berlin, seeing a hotel cat again.’