Prague Spring

15

Sunday lunch with Lenka and her mother. He wondered why he had agreed to the idea and what the implications were behind it, but she had seemed so pleased that he had accepted the invitation. ‘She’ll understand,’ Lenka insisted. ‘Someone from the British embassy whom I found at one of the meetings. She’ll be interested.’ A knowing smile. ‘And she will like you, I think. Your šarm.’

Perhaps it was that assurance that made the whole expedition all right. He was good at ‘sharm’.

Her mother lived in one of those concrete apartment blocks – paneláky – built on the outskirts of the city after the war, part of that halo of concrete that forms a hideous modern setting to the jewels of old Prague. Her allotted portion was a sixth-floor two-room flat with thin walls and the sound of the neighbours having a row next door. Her mother was a florid woman in her mid-forties who still showed hints of a beauty that her daughter had inherited. Kateřina Konečková was her name: ‘Katherine, possession of Koneček’, whoever Koneček might have been. She stained the tiny apartment with her presence, with the smell of cigarette smoke and a clinging and rosaceous perfume that she wore. When she shook Sam’s hand it was with caution, as though mere contact might be dangerous. ‘What are you then, a spy?’ she asked, and to show it was a joke – which it wasn’t – she attempted a smile. Perhaps it was his ability with the language that made her suspicious. Foreigners didn’t speak Czech, not even bad Czech. They spoke Russian, maybe, or German.

‘I’ve told you all about Sam, Maminka.’ Lenka’s tone was impatient. She was a child again, doting on her mother yet at the same time apprehensive, as though fearing what she might say or do and what impression she might make.

‘Not a spy,’ Sam assured her. ‘I’m a diplomat.’

‘There’s a difference?’

‘One tells lies and pretends they’re the truth; the other just tells lies.’

The woman gave a bitter, rasping laugh. ‘Which is which?’ She wasn’t what Sam had expected – there was more than mere shrewdness in her look, there was a sharp intelligence. ‘And you expect me to feed you, do you?’

‘We offered to take you out to lunch, Maminka.’

‘You know it’d be dangerous to be seen with a foreigner in public. Especially one from the British embassy.’

Lenka sounded exasperated. ‘I keep telling you, Maminka, things are different these days. Things have changed.’

Her mother snorted derisively. ‘You have no memory, that’s the trouble with the young.’ She looked at Sam as though for confirmation, thus placing him squarely in the company of her generation. ‘They think they can do everything now. Freedom and love and all that rubbish. What will they be saying when the Russians invade, I wonder.’

‘They won’t, Maminka. Dubček will come to a compromise, you’ll see. We’ll give a bit and get on with things as we want.’

‘Dubček is no different from the others. He just smiles, that’s all. What does Mr Diplomat think?’

‘Mr Diplomat thinks it is time to prepare the lunch.’

She laughed, a throaty, sarcastic sound. ‘Conciliation without answering the question,’ she decided. ‘Typical of his kind.’

In one corner of the living room was a kitchen area where they unloaded the bag they had brought. A large tin of shin of pork. Cabbage, potatoes. Two bottles of a Nuits Saint-Georges. Her mother watched with wonder as they stacked the things on the narrow shelf beside the cooker. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ she asked. ‘Tuzex?’

‘We can get things through the embassy,’ Sam said.

‘We?’

‘I can.’ Sam was adept at sensing mood. Picking up vibrations, Stephanie would have said. He could sense vibrations from Lenka’s mother now – vibrations both good and bad. Jealousy and envy on the one side and the faint bat-squeak of curiosity on the other. The way she looked at him. What, he wondered, did she know about Lenka’s previous adventures? And where – because Lenka had said nothing about her father – where was Mr Koneček?

‘So you are not an optimist?’ he asked, once the pork was in the oven and they had opened one of the bottles of wine. ‘About what will happen to the country, I mean.’

They were sitting on upright chairs round the narrow dining table. The older woman smoked and drank and considered him with something that resembled contempt. ‘I know what happens to idealists. People like Lenka. They are just as their parents were twenty years ago. Just like I was.’

‘You were?’

‘Oh, yes. Twenty years ago I believed. I was a Party member just like my husband. A true believer. When they arrested Milada Horáková I believed she was guilty. When she was on trial, I even signed a petition calling for her execution. When they executed her, I cheered.’

He knew about Horáková, of course. You couldn’t read up about the country, as he had for the six months he was on the Czechoslovak desk in London, without knowing. Milada Horáková. One of the emblematic figures of twentieth-century Mitteleuropa, encompassing in her life all of the tragedies of that time and that place.

‘And then?’

The woman looked at him with cold eyes. ‘And then they came for us.’

Horáková

It’s difficult to know where to begin with the story of Milada Horáková, but not difficult to know where to end: on a rope in the Pankrác prison in Prague on 27 June 1950 at five thirty-five in the morning. She was just forty-eight years old.

How do you measure heroism? How do you describe it?

Before the Second World War, in those distant, heady days of Czechoslovak liberal democracy, Horáková was a mother and a wife, a prominent member of the Czech Socialist Party, an active lawyer and a powerful advocate of women’s rights. After the Munich Agreement and the subsequent annexation of the Czech lands by Hitler’s Germany, she became a member of the Czech resistance. Along with her husband, she was arrested by the Gestapo in 1940 and eventually imprisoned in Theresienstadt concentration camp. Later she was moved to various German prisons and eventually came to trial before a German court in Dresden. She was found guilty and condemned to death. This sentence was subsequently commuted to life imprisonment and she was moved to the women’s prison in Aichach in Bavaria from where she was freed by American forces in 1945.

Is that enough?

The thing about Milada Horáková is that she never gave up. After her liberation she returned to Prague, to her husband who had also survived imprisonment, and their daughter, who, in the absence of her parents, had been looked after by relatives. Immediately Horáková rejoined the Socialist Party and was elected to the Czech National Assembly. She argued, as she had always argued, for freedom, for women’s rights, for decency.

Once the Communist Party grabbed the reins of power in 1948, Horáková was forced to resign her seat in the national assembly. Nevertheless she refused to be silenced. An outspoken advocate for freedom and democracy, she remained a thorn in the side of the leadership. On 27 September 1949 she was arrested by the secret police once again, only this time it was the Communist StB (State Security) rather than the Gestapo. Along with a dozen other friends and associates she was subjected to the first of the communist regime’s show trials, facing the charge of being part of a counter-revolutionary conspiracy to overthrow the new government. She was offered clemency if she signed a confession of guilt, but she refused. During the public trial, while the other accused read out confessions that had been prepared for them by the prosecution, Milada Horáková refused to admit any guilt and spoke out for the truth. She, along with three others, was condemned to death.

Is that enough? The measurement of heroism is so difficult that sometimes we find ourselves gainsaying it. Even Milada Horáková herself wondered about what she had done, writing in the very last letter from prison to her daughter:

It was after she wrote that letter that they took her out and hanged her from a hook in the ceiling. There was no drop. According to the official report, Milada Horáková took fifteen minutes to die, by strangulation, hanging on the end of the rope.

Is that enough?

It’s not a competition, is it? But by any standards Milada Horáková must rate as one of the greatest heroes of the twentieth century.

16

Lenka’s mother opened a drawer in the table and took out a photograph, a snapshot of a young couple sitting on a rock. The pair were wearing hiking boots. The woman – a version of herself, an earlier, happy, clear, vivid version (a version, too, of Lenka) – was laughing at the camera, but the man was doing nothing more than smile, a little ironically, as though he already knew there was little to be amused by.

‘There we are, in our Marxist-Leninist dawn,’ the woman said. ‘Weren’t we beautiful? We saw the future as something wonderful to imagine. Certainly not this.’

‘This’ meant the narrow, two-room apartment with thin walls and grey plaster, and the sensation of being in some kind of concrete storage tank. ‘This’ meant Horáková dead. ‘This’ meant Soviet troops on Czech soil and a summons from Moscow to the Czech leadership to attend an emergency meeting at a railway junction on the border of the Soviet Union. ‘This’ meant her whole world. She replaced the photo with care.

‘So what happened?’ Sam dared to ask.

The woman drew on her cigarette, considering him through the smoke. ‘Do you know about Slánský?’

The name sounded like a cymbal struck. Of course he knew about Slánský. He knew about Horáková; he knew about Slánský. Slánský was a Party hack, the kind of man to dismiss bourgeois freedoms with a derisive sweep of the hand, the architect of the communist coup of 1948 and, thereby, the man who became the right hand of the Party leader, Klement Gottwald.

‘The Party was like a monster,’ the woman said. ‘First it consumed its enemies – Horáková and her kind – and then it turned on its own members. What was the name of the Greek god who devoured his own children?’

‘Cronus.’

‘That’s right. So, like Cronus, the Party devoured its own children, Slánský, Clementis and the others. How many in all? Fifteen, sixteen? Espionage on behalf of Western capitalist powers, counter-revolution, all kinds of trumped-up charges. What do they call it? Show trial. Like something you might put on in the theatre. That’s what it was, the theatre of the absurd.’

She nodded in Lenka’s direction. ‘She was only a baby. She remembers nothing about it. Have you heard of Margolius? Rudolf Margolius?’

Was she testing him, seeing how much he knew and therefore how much he was worth? ‘He was a Czech trade representative,’ Sam said, ‘dealing with Western countries.’

The woman nodded, drawing on her cigarette as though sucking in courage. ‘Well, Rudolf Margolius worked with my husband. They were part of the Czechoslovak delegation in London, trying to set up trade deals that would benefit the country. Trying to earn hard currency for the country, that’s what they were doing. The ministry of foreign trade. And that was why they were arrested, along with Slánský and the rest. They’d been abroad, so they must be guilty.’

She talked some more, eager to explain to someone who would listen. Her husband was a clever man, too clever for his own good. If you were stupid then you got on. You did what you were told and nothing more. Don’t show any initiative, don’t show any imagination, above all, don’t show any intelligence. That was the way to progress. It’s not much different now. ‘He negotiated with Harold Wilson,’ she added. ‘Do you know Mr Harold Wilson?’

Sam tried a smile. ‘Not personally. He’s a little above my grade.’

The woman didn’t smile back. Instead she made a face, as though she had eaten something distasteful. ‘My husband didn’t say much about his work but he told me about this man, Wilson. So when my husband was in prison, I wrote to Wilson for some kind of help. It seems futile, doesn’t it? But what else could I do? I was helpless, powerless, just an irrelevance as far as the Party was concerned. My husband was on trial for his life but I could go fuck.’

‘Maminka!’

She waved Lenka’s protest away. ‘I thought, maybe this Wilson can help. Does that sound crazy? But I was crazy. I wasn’t allowed even to visit my husband in prison. Just one letter a month, and nothing in it about what was happening to him. So I thought about what Lukáš had told me about his visits to London and I got this Wilson’s title exact so that the letter would reach the correct person: President of the Board of Trade, that was it.’ She said the title in some kind of English and looked at Sam for approval, to see if she had got it right.

He nodded.

‘I wrote the letter myself and had a friend translate it into English. I begged this Wilson for help, asked him to write and explain to the judge that my husband was an honourable man who never did anything other than try to get the very best for his country in the negotiations. And surely, being a fellow socialist, this Wilson would be able to confirm that this was so. Wilson is a socialist, isn’t he?’

‘Of a kind.’

‘So, a kind of socialist. A bourgeois, Western socialist. I got someone to smuggle the letter out of the country because you couldn’t just put something like that in the post.’

‘And what happened?’

She gave a wry smile, as though disappointment was only to be expected. ‘Nothing happened. I never heard from him.’

Sam felt a moment of shame. ‘Wilson should have replied. Something. Anything.’

‘But he didn’t. And now he is your prime minister.’ She got up and went over to the cooker to check the food in the oven, talking all the time. Perhaps it was a sign of the liberalisation in the country that she felt she could tell the story. ‘They were Jews, you know that? Most of them were Jews.’ The Czech word židi rang round the room. ‘My husband’s parents were Jews but he was an atheist, a communist, a good communist. But they treated him like a traitor and a Jew.’

‘Mother, please,’ said Lenka. ‘This was meant to be a happy occasion. Sunday lunch. A family thing.’

‘We have no family,’ her mother snapped. ‘Two people isn’t a family, it’s just survivors clinging to the wreckage.’ The oven door slammed shut. Sam tried to step around the obstacle that lay in the path of further discourse. ‘Weren’t they all’ – he struggled for the correct word – ‘made good in 1963?’ That was all he could manage: exonerated, absolved, acquitted, exculpated. All words beyond Sam’s vocabulary in Czech.

Kateřina laughed. It was the kind of laugh you heard often enough in Prague, the laughter of contempt and resignation. ‘What good was that to me? By then he was ten years dead.’

Lenka was still holding the snapshot of the couple sitting on a rock. Perhaps to her the world of that snapshot seemed too far away, another time in another country of which she knew nothing. Perhaps that faintly smiling figure who had been her father was a creature of myth. Yet for an adult, for her mother, it was a mere sixteen years.

‘He doesn’t even have a grave, do you know that? I don’t know what they did with his body. They just told me of his death by letter. It took me a year even to get an official death certificate. And now—’

‘Now?’

‘A few months ago they sent me a medal, his medal. The Order of the Republic.’ She made a sound that was halfway between a laugh and a cry. ‘And now they say they want to give me compensation. But I don’t want their medals or their money. I want my husband back.’

That was the moment when Sam feared she might weep. But she didn’t. There was something hard and dry about her face, as though the tears had long since drained away like water through the limestone of the Moravian karst.

‘I not only lost him, I even had to lose his name. He was Vadinský, Lukáš Vadinský. I was Kateřina Vadinská. But someone, a friend, advised me to go back to my unmarried name, so that was what I did. Konečková.’ She smiled bitterly. ‘Another betrayal.’

‘It’s the past, Maminka,’ Lenka said. ‘Things have already changed. And they are changing still.’

Her mother ignored her words. She began to lay the table with ill-matched plates, cutlery that you might find in a cheap café, a cruet set of Bohemian cut glass, two stemmed wine glasses and a tumbler. She shook her head. ‘The past,’ she said, ‘is all we have. It just repeats itself.’

‘She liked you,’ Lenka said.

They were outside, walking between the paneláky. There was a Sunday sense of lassitude about the place. Kids were kicking a football around on a worn scrap of grass, but that was the only real activity. A bench of four old men argued about something. No doubt their wives were at home washing dishes.

‘I thought she was cleverer than that,’ Sam said.

His car was parked round the corner, next to a Trabant and a row of chained bicycles. Someone had written Umyj mne, wash me, in the dust of the rear window. One of the kids, no doubt. They drove away, avoiding the footballers.

‘Your mother is quite a force,’ he said, but Lenka felt the need to apologise on her behalf. ‘She shouldn’t have talked like that, she said. ‘She should keep private matters private.’

‘She needed to talk,’ Sam said. ‘She’s a brave woman.’

The girl was silent. He knew she was looking at him. Those eyes that were the most intense cerulean blue. He wondered what she was thinking, whether she was measuring him up for something. If so, what?

17

He took an afternoon off and they went swimming. They decided on a place out of the city, on the river where Sam had been with Steffie once or twice. He hadn’t told Lenka that bit. A place he knew, that was all he told her. She’d like it.

So they packed picnic things in his Mercedes and set off, and it wasn’t long before he spotted the car following. In the last few months this sort of thing had grown rarer, as though even the security services had been tainted by the infection of liberalisation, but there it was, plain enough, an anonymous Škoda on his tail, like a faithful dog tagging after them, turning where they turned, slowing when they slowed, remaining all the time about one hundred metres behind. They made their way south of the city and after a while took a rough road that led amongst wooded hills close to the river’s edge where you could park the car easily enough. The Škoda didn’t appear. Perhaps it was waiting somewhere out of sight, knowing that there was no other way out.

He turned the engine off. Silence rushed into the enclosed world of the Mercedes. ‘How’s this?’

Lenka’s expansive smile, a gleam of naked gum. ‘It’s lovely.’ He felt that torrent of desire and affection, a dangerous complex of emotion over which he had no control. He leant towards her and kissed her, tasting the cigarette she had been smoking and the coffee she had drunk earlier, as though kissing her was to snatch a small part of her quotidian life and make it his as well.

They got out of the car and took their things from the boot. Not far away was a settlement of those small wooden cabins that Czechs use as country retreats – chaty. They were like beach huts on the English coast: the same clapboard constructions in vivid primary colours, the same defiant sense of pride. But these didn’t have uniformity. They might be put together out of anything: offcuts from a timber yard, corrugated iron, tarpaper, panels from an ancient car, barrels from a brewery. An old man watched from his garden as they carried their picnic things down through the trees to the water’s edge. The air was hot and still. The water flowed over stones and around spits of gravel with Smetana’s scurrying rhythms. Things moved in the woods that bordered the space. Birds sang. An egret, sinuous and chalk white, stood in the water on the far side, keeping one cautious eye on the intruders.

Sam took up his camera and snapped some photos: Lenka tossing her hair, Lenka holding up a hand to keep the camera off her face, Lenka smiling, Lenka frowning. ‘I will swim,’ she declared in that matter-of-fact tone she adopted when speaking English, as though everything were a statement of fact and the subjunctive never existed. ‘And no photos.’ She shook loose her hair, pulled her dress over her head and dropped it at her feet. When he’d been here before, Stephanie had struggled beneath her towel and finally emerged in a modest one-piece bathing costume. Lenka was made of sterner stuff. As unconcerned as if she were in the bathroom at home, she tossed her brassiere aside, stepped out of her underpants and stood for a moment contemplating the river. There was something hieratic about her narrow, pale body, like a figure from Slavic myth, a rusalka. He’d seen the opera with Steffie the previous autumn at the National Theatre with Milada Šubrtová playing the title role of the water nymph who falls in love with a human. It’s the age-old problem of a demigod getting tied up with a mortal, and you know it’s never going to work, however eloquently Rusalka may appeal to the moon.

Sam took up the camera again, quietly, so as not to disturb his prey. If he thought of their escort, he didn’t really care. The dirty buggers could peer at her through the trees with binoculars if that pleased them. Play with themselves if they liked. He’d not mentioned their presence to Lenka because he didn’t want to spoil the day. The camera shutter gave its little secretive clap of satisfaction. Apparently indifferent either to the camera or to anyone else who might have been watching, Lenka the water nymph stepped forward onto the pebbles, then on into the flow. The camera snatched at successive images. The water rose from ankle to calf, to thigh, over her pale buttocks and up to her waist, as though she were being assumed back into her natural element. The egret stretched its legs and flew away. Sunlight glittered on the water all around. Finally Lenka launched herself into the stream, her hair floating free on the surface like weed.

‘You aren’t coming in,’ she called back. Was it a question or a statement of fact? He hid the camera away, stripped off hurriedly and joined her in the water, conscious of his own bony, angular masculinity that seemed only graceless and maladroit beside her loveliness. She laughed and splashed. White masses wobbled and shimmered beneath the surface. He felt cool flesh and rough hair and wet lips and suddenly, drifting in the current, they were doing, more or less, what they had done before only in the cloistered privacy of his bedroom – a bohemian act in the middle of rural Bohemia, surrounded by her woods and fields, enveloped by the waters of the Vltava. Rusalka.

‘You are not ashamed, are you?’ she asked when, quite suddenly, it was all over.

‘Rather overwhelmed,’ he admitted.

‘Don’t worry, you will not drown.’

Later they towelled themselves dry and lay in the sun. A breeze had got up to bring some kind of cool to the day. They ate sandwiches and drank beer and talked, and when they’d finished eating she lit a cigarette, one of the American ones he had given her, blew smoke away into the warm air and asked about Štěpánka. She called her Štěpánka, not Steffie or Stephanie. Štěpánka, as though Lenka were subsuming her into the Slav world.

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘I want to understand.’ A knowing smile. ‘She is perhaps competition.’

He reached out and took the cigarette from her mouth. He could feel the dampness of her saliva on the tip as he put it to his lips. ‘She works for the foreign service. I told you that. Not a diplomat. A secretary. And she’s just gone back to England. Posted. Our relationship is on hold, do you understand? Paused. A cooling-off period.’

‘Was it hot before?’

‘Lukewarm.’

She didn’t know the word. He explained – tepid, between hot and cold – and she lighted on the Czech word with delight: ‘Vlašný! So is Štěpánka a beautiful, vlašnou English rose?’

‘I suppose she is.’

‘And are you going to get married?’

‘We’ve talked about it.’

‘Diplomatically?’

‘Very diplomatically.’

She laughed at the possibility of Sam contemplating marriage to this lukewarm English rose. ‘That means you have made no decision. Diplomats never make decisions, do they? They always refer back to their masters.’

‘But this time—’

‘There is no master. And you cannot make up your mind. Of course she is not your first girl. There have been many others. So by now you should know.’

He laughed. She had a wonderful capacity for making him laugh. Whether this was intentional on her part he wasn’t sure.

‘So tell me about these other girls who have made you so without decision.’

‘All of them?’

‘Will it take too long? The first, then. Tell me about the first.’

So he told her. A brief outline of part of the story: a friend of his mother’s, older than he by some years. Ten, twelve years, maybe. A brief, chaotic affair that lost him his virginity and gave him, what? some kind of understanding of what devotion might be. Love? He wasn’t sure. ‘It was just before I went to university. She made a great impression on me.’

‘And what happened to her?’

‘We… lost touch. She went away. Abroad.’ He shrugged off that part of his life that had meant so much at the time and was now consigned to the scrapheap of memory. ‘Now you tell me,’ he said, as though it were a game. Confessions, a kind of Chinese whispers, the message being passed from one to another and mangled in the process. ‘Now it’s your turn.’

She took the cigarette back. ‘You remember what Zdeněk said that evening?’

‘Zdeněk?’

‘Jitka’s husband. The composer. He said that here no one can live very long and still believe in reality. It is true. You have to remember it. Perhaps now for the first time we are beginning to live reality. It is like waking up from a bad dream. Suddenly all those things that were impossible during the bad dream become possible. We can say what we like, go places that we want, we can even try to forget the bad dream. If the Russians come with their guns and their tanks, then we will go back to the bad dream again and reality will disappear, but for the moment…’

She paused, smoking, looking away across the river to the woods on the far side. Of course he wondered what she was thinking, but there was something inscrutable about her expression that made reading her difficult. After a while she seemed to make up her mind. ‘So, in the dream – the bad dream – there was a party official, aparátník, my mother knew. I think he had known my father. Anyway, he was my mother’s friend. The usual thing: she gave him what he wanted, he used his influence on our behalf. What do the Americans say? A deal. I used to go to play with friends when he came to call. “Good day, Comrade Rovnák. What a shame, I was just going out.” That kind of thing. It was through him that we were allowed back to Prague.’

‘Allowed back?’

‘That is another part of the bad dream. After my father’s conviction we were not allowed to live in Prague. So we lived in Pardubice, and this aparátník, he found her a better job, back in the city. Cleaning an office rather than cleaning the streets. His office, in fact. And he got us the flat. Actually, I think she quite liked him. Of course he had a wife and children, but she was on her own and there he was, a man who would look after her a bit. Comforting, I guess.’ She stubbed out the cigarette on a stone. ‘And then he turned his attention to me. I was fifteen. He waited, you see. Until I was old enough.’

‘Fifteen?’

‘That is the age here. But the thing was, I wanted him. I think… oh, I don’t know. Jealousy, perhaps. I was jealous of my mother. She had her man and I wanted him. The funny thing was, like my mother said about herself, he was a believer. He believed in socialismus, the path towards a communist heaven. Often he would tell me about his family, his wife and his two children, what a good socialist mother she was, how excellent the children were in the Pioneers. You must be like that, Lenička, he would say to me. You must be dutiful and loyal to the Party. This is when we were in bed, after we had fucked.’

Sam thought of the SIS man called Harold Saumarez, with his access to secret records, his collection of sins and deceptions and betrayals. ‘And what happened?’

She looked round at Sam with a little smile. ‘One day he told me that he was very bad, that we shouldn’t be doing what we were doing, that he couldn’t betray his wife any longer and he would have to stop seeing me. I was heartbroken and he was heartbroken. I think someone had got to know. The StB, who knows? People are always watching and whispering. Anyway, he promised me that he loved me and that he would see that I could get a place at university – because otherwise, because of my father, as Lenka Vadinská, I was banned. And he did all that.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘You see how good and bad can be mixed up together? Was he good or was he bad? I never managed to work it out, and it worried me until I decided that there is no good or bad, there is just what hurts people and what doesn’t hurt people. He didn’t hurt his wife because she didn’t know about me. He hurt me but only a little because I was young and could learn from my experience. And he didn’t really hurt my mother because she was happy enough to let me take over. And he got me into university.’

‘Doesn’t that make him quite good?’

She made a face. ‘You see, you use that word. Good. It is very bourgeois. He didn’t hurt too much, that is what I think. You are always going to hurt a bit, someone. Maybe you will hurt Štěpánka, maybe she will hurt you. Just make it a little hurt if you can.’

‘And what about me and you? Will we hurt each other?’

There was a silence, not the dreadful silence of the safe room at the heart of the embassy, which had the kind of artificial silence that seems to suck the hearing out of your ears, but instead one of those country silences that is never quiet, filled as it is with birdsong and bee sound and the scurrying of animals and water. ‘I don’t think I am easy to hurt,’ she said.

Reluctantly they carried their things back to the car. Contrary to popular rumour, paradise is finite. The old man who had watched them arrive was no longer to be seen. The wooden huts were closed and locked. The slamming of the car boot seemed a hideous intrusion on the quiet of the afternoon. He started the engine and they drove further along the track, just to see where it led, that was the idea. And to try and shake off the mood of anonymous threat that had descended on the afternoon. But after a mile or so through birch woods the way forward was blocked by a military vehicle, an armoured car of some kind, the colour of mud, ugly as all such vehicles are.

Sam brought the car to a halt. ‘What the hell’s this?’ He reached beneath his seat for the camera.

‘What are you doing?’ There was an edge in Lenka’s voice that he had not heard before. As though it were fractured and might fall to pieces at any moment.

‘A photo, before anyone appears.’

‘You are a spy!’

‘Just my job. Any opportunity.’ The vehicle sat there dumbly, like a prizefighter asleep. It was four-wheeled, with a boat-shaped hull and sloping superstructure capped with a machine gun. He propped the camera on the dashboard and snapped a frame, wound the film on and took another shot. Then another.

‘What is it?’

‘Czechoslovak army? Who knows? No markings.’ He pushed the camera under his seat and began to edge the car forward.

It was at that moment that a soldier appeared from behind the vehicle. He wore khaki trousers and a striped sweatshirt of the kind that French fishermen wear in comic films. There were no distinguishing marks of any kind on his clothing, no rank badges, no insignia; and nothing comic. Sam wound down the window and leant out. ‘We want to go through.’

The man stood and watched, as though he hadn’t understood. Beyond the vehicle other soldiers could be seen. Some of them carried weapons. They’d been doing something in the shallows of the river. Just visible through the trees was an inflatable boat with an outboard engine.

Sam climbed out of the car.

‘Stůj!’ the soldier called. Halt!

Sam smiled uncomprehendingly, walking towards the soldier with his hands outspread and talking a mixture of Czech and English and ignoring Lenka calling out from inside the car, calling for him to come back. ‘We just want to go swimming, you see? Me and my friend. Plavání. Plavání.’ He even made the gesture of the breaststroke, just to make things clearer.

There was panic in the soldier’s eyes. He called something over his shoulder. Sam could make out the words ‘Comrade Lieutenant.’ And then he understood what he had really heard – not the Czech Stůj! but the Russian stoy! Not the Czech soudruh but the Russian tovarich. An officer appeared from behind the armoured car. He was wearing a shirt with rank badges that Sam recognised as Czech. His face was wooden, the face of authority, prepared, under any circumstances, to deny whatever was being requested. ‘You can’t come past,’ he said in Czech. ‘Military zone.’

Sam the idiot looked blank. ‘Nemluvím Cesky,’ he said. ‘Promiňte.’ And then, in English, making sweeping gestures with his arms. ‘I’ve been here before, with my girlfriend. Swimming.’

The man frowned. ‘Anglicky?’

‘Yes, Anglicky. Diplomat.’ He pointed back to the car. ‘You see? Diplomatic plates. Diplomatická. CD.’

The lieutenant snapped his fingers beneath Sam’s nose. ‘Dokumenty.’

There was a suspicious examination of passport and diplomatic pass, as though all such things were forgeries. ‘Pojď,’ he said.

Sam glanced back to the car, at Lenka’s anxious face peering through the windscreen. He gave a little sign of confidence – a grin, a brief thumbs-up. Then he was following the officer round the back of the vehicle where a sweaty soldier was crouched over a radio transmitter and another man – small, malevolent – sat reading a typed report. He wore khaki uniform but, again, without distinguishing marks. His battledress was tightly buttoned despite the heat. There was a brief exchange of words between him and the lieutenant, of which Sam was the subject. His papers were examined once again, with similar disdain.

‘You English?’ the malevolent man asked, in English.

‘Yes,’ Sam said. He smiled benevolently. This he enjoyed. He felt the cast-iron protection that his diplomatic status gave him, spiced with a hint of risk, a shiver of apprehension. His only real worry was Lenka, sitting anxiously in the car, with no diplomatic insurance and only the flimsy protection of association with himself. But what he knew now made any risk – surely small enough – worthwhile. ‘I’m here with my girlfriend. We were going swimming. If you like you can ring the British embassy. Or the ministry of foreign affairs. They will confirm my accreditation.’

Malevolent seemed to find this amusing. ‘You have no business swimming here, Mr Diplomat,’ he said, and Sam recognised the accent, from long days spent at the language school in Cambridge. Not only the words but the intonation, the cadence, the timbre. It was part of his psyche. Russian.

‘Well, maybe we should go somewhere else.’

‘Maybe you should.’ The man thought for a moment, then looked past Sam to the lieutenant. ‘Bring the girl.’

‘Hey, that’s not necessary—’

Malevolent raised his hand to silence him. The soldier went and a few moments later a car door slammed and the sound of Lenka’s voice was raised in some kind of protest. Protest had become a new habit amongst her generation. They felt they ruled the streets and the meetings. They could answer the police back, snap at officials, demand rights they never even knew existed. She came round the corner of the vehicle flushed with anger. Anger and fear, a dangerous combination. Sam gestured her to be quiet but it was Malevolent who achieved that. ‘Shut up!’ he demanded, and she did exactly that, startled by his peremptory command: Sklapni! The lieutenant took her papers and glanced at them. ‘Student,’ he told Malevolent, as though that explained everything. He passed the evidence over.

Sam took her hand, willing her to be silent, pulling her close to give her some kind of comfort. Her hand was damp with sweat. He seemed to feel her fear, crawling beneath his skin like the scurrying of insects.

‘And at the moment Miss Konečková is studying English, is she, Mr Diplomat?’ Malevolent said.

‘I help her with her English, yes. And she helps me with my Czech.’

‘I’m sure she does. And with your swimming.’

‘And with my swimming.’

‘Once upon a time a comrade had to report any contact made with a foreigner, you know that?’

‘Things have changed now.’

‘Yes, they have.’ He seemed to consider the changes, for good or for ill. Finally he handed Sam’s documents back. ‘But some things do not change. This is an exercise of the Czechoslovak People’s Army and you may not pass. I suggest you go home now how you came, to good cuppa of English tea. You are lucky – understand this clearly – you are lucky I do not arrest you for spying.’

Sam nodded, as though the point was fair. He turned to Lenka. He could see sweat glistening on her brow, beads of moisture on her upper lip, trapped in the faint blonde down. ‘We’d better go.’

‘My papers,’ she said.

There was a moment of stasis. Malevolent pondered the matter, tapping Lenka’s identity card in the palm of his hand and looking at the girl. You could see the conflict in his expression – he knew his power over her and his weakness in the face of Sam’s diplomatic status. The radio jabbered something and the operator hastily put his earphones on. Finally Malevolent nodded, passed Lenka’s identity card to the lieutenant, who dutifully handed it back. ‘Comrade Konečková should think herself lucky,’ the lieutenant said.

She was about to reply. She was about to explode with anger at being talked to like that. Sam took her arm. ‘Discretion,’ he murmured, ‘is the better part of valour.’

‘What?’

‘It doesn’t matter. Just walk away.’

Holding her tightly he measured their steps round the armoured car and over to the Mercedes. Sam held the passenger door open for her. By the time he got round to the other side, her anger had abated, along with her fear. He started the engine and screwed round to back the car up the track. ‘I thought they would arrest us,’ she said quietly.

‘They don’t arrest diplomats. Not unless they want to cause an international incident.’

‘Me, then. Why didn’t you just turn away right at the start?’

‘Because I wanted to see for sure.’

‘See what? That soldiers are shits? That if you put a reasonable man in uniform he turns into an ape?’

They reached an opening off the track where he could turn the car. ‘Didn’t you notice?’

‘Notice what?’

‘They’re Russian.’

‘Russian?’

‘You heard what I said. They’re Russian. There’s that Czech officer as a front man but the others were Russian. No insignia on their uniforms, nothing. A Red Army reconnaissance unit of some kind. That guy spoke near-perfect English, but his accent was Russian. Whoever heard of a middle-ranking Russian officer speaking English? He’s GRU.’

‘What’s GRU?’

‘Soviet military intelligence.’ They drove on in silence, bumping over the rough track the way they had come, before turning onto the tarmac road. ‘Where are we going?’ Lenka asked.

‘Back home.’

‘Why?’

‘Got to see a man about a dog.’ He attempted to render it in Czech but met, as he expected, only bewilderment.

‘A dog?’

‘It’s an English saying. Rather old-fashioned. Means I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘It’s about the Russians, isn’t it?’ And she nodded an answer to her own question. ‘It’s always the fucking Russians.’

Back in his flat he offered her some records to play. Steffie’s Sergeant Pepper or something by the Incredible String Band. He wasn’t really sure of her taste. Janáček, if that was what she wanted. Or anything from the small collection of classics that he had. Mozart, surely she’d be happy with Mozart. There was the Prague Symphony, or was that too obvious? Then he shut himself in the bathroom to develop the film. It didn’t take long. He was practised at fiddling around in the changing bag, rolling the film onto the spiral by feel, before shutting it away in the developing tank secure from the deadly intrusion of light. Then the solutions, that little bit of alchemy that always fascinated him – developer, fixer, wash, each carefully measured and warmed to 20°C, each procedure timed with the clock brought in from the kitchen. It was the chemistry he had missed out on at school, a few simple chemicals turning blank acetate into tiny negative shadows of past moments: light rendered dark, black painted white. From the sitting room came silence as Lenka changed a record before the blaring trumpets of Janáček’s Sinfonietta broke the peace. He waited while the brass sounded and the clock ticked out the seconds and the developing solutions performed their magic. When the time was up he extracted the film from the tank, unwound it from the spool and hung it over the bath just as Steffie had once hung knickers and stockings. A plastic squeegee took the wash away. He held up the film to the light and examined the negative images: Lenka sitting on the rug; Lenka smoking and laughing; Lenka frowning; Lenka standing naked in the river, white trees in the background, her flesh dark, her buttocks almost black. If you caught the negative at the right angle to the light, you could achieve the small miracle of glimpsing it in reverse, in positive, just as it would be when printed. A ghostly effect that vanished as soon as you changed the angle. He’d print them when he had time, but for the moment he took scissors and cut off the last three frames. These were not for private contemplation. Not for his memories.

‘A stroll in the garden, Harold,’ he suggested on the phone. ‘Got something that might amuse you.’

In the embassy garden, surrounded by the bushes and the trees, Sam passed over the small fragments of film. ‘Some more pictures for you, Harold. Developed it myself this time, but no time to print.’

Harold didn’t deign to look at the negatives, merely sequestered them in his pocket. ‘What do they show?’

‘Nothing particularly exciting, I’m afraid. Not like the Sukhoi I got for you last year. Just an armoured car. But here’s the thing – it’s got no markings and neither had the crew. No unit insignia, no rank badges, nothing. They were trying their best to be Czech, even had a Czechoslovak liaison officer with them. But they were Russian. GRU, I guess. Special forces reconnaissance team. What are they called? Spetsnaz.’

‘Where was this?’

‘Upriver from here.’ He gave the place. He could show him on the map if necessary. ‘They’re here, Harold. Little more than half an hour’s drive away. A nasty bugger speaking almost perfect English—’

‘You spoke with them?’

‘Of course I did. I’m a diplomat. Diplomats speak to people. It’s what we’re good at – in fact it’s almost the only thing we’re good at. And all they saw was a bumbling dip, out for a bit of hokey-pokey with his Czech girlfriend.’

‘That was your cover?’

‘Hardly cover, old chap. The plain and simple truth. By the way, quite unprompted she told me everything about her dalliance with the minister. More innocent victim than Mata Hari. You can rule her out as an agent.’

Harold made a small grunt of scepticism. In the bushes the dog crouched in that strained and slightly self-conscious way they have when relieving themselves. ‘That’s H.E.’s dog, you know that?’ he said. ‘Surely they shouldn’t let it shit in the embassy gardens.’

‘If he’s the ambassador’s dog, I presume he can shit wherever he pleases.’

Harold sniffed disapprovingly. ‘These Russians. How can you be sure?’

‘I’m a Russian specialist. You know that. I know my Tolstoy from my Turgenev, and I certainly know a Russian stoy from a Czech Stůj.’

‘The whole country has been crawling with Red Army. Those so-called spring manoeuvres. Why should your encounter be anything special?’

‘Precisely because the last Soviet units were meant to have returned to base by now. Wasn’t that part of the agreement at Čierna nad Tisou? And because they were pretending not to be Russians. As I said: no unit badges, no insignia, with a Czechoslovak liaison officer positively flaunting his. And the fellow in charge, the fellow I spoke to. Excellent English. You tell me what the chances are of finding a random Russian officer who happens to speak good English. Zero. So, GRU. ’

The secretary appeared, calling for the dog. ‘Come on, Rumpus.’ The dog came, but only because she was holding out a treat for him. As she led the animal away towards the embassy building, she waved at Sam. ‘Have you heard from Steffie?’

‘A few days ago.’

‘That’s good. We had a postcard from somewhere in West Germany and Angela got one from Henley or wherever she is. But nothing more. Give her my love when you write.’

‘Of course I will.’

A curious concept: love as an asset to be packaged in an envelope and passed on to a third party. Linda sends her love, even though she lets the ambassador’s dog crap in the flowerbeds.

But does Sam also send his?

‘Write it up,’ Harold told him. ‘For my eyes only. Everything that happened – it’s all grist to the mill. Shame you didn’t get more photos.’

‘Someone,’ Dorothy said when Sam got back to the office, ‘has got to do a bag run.’ She looked up at him over her spectacles, as though he might be able to organise such a thing even if her boss couldn’t. ‘There’s all this stuff to go.’

‘Nuremberg?’

‘Munich. The consulate-general.’

‘I’ll do it.’

‘I thought you were ever so busy.’

‘I am, but I’m prepared to make a sacrifice to get you out of a hole.’

She blushed faintly. ‘Do I book you a hotel for the night?’

‘Surely you’re not suggesting that I can do there and back in one day.’