Prague Spring

36

The main Prague railway station, echoing to the sound of trains and people. They push and shove to get onto the train and keep up with the others. The entire youth of the city seems to be here, crowding onto these carriages at this moment, although Jitka says that they are already late, that they should have been on one of the earliest out of the station – that way you can get into the countryside when it is still fresh from the overnight cool. But Lenka has only just joined them, apologising for being late. She had some shopping to do. ‘Samuel cannot make it’, is all she says by way of explanation for his absence.

They crowd into a compartment where four of the places are already taken. Jitka has to sit on Zdeněk’s lap and the rucksacks are piled in anyhow, some on the overhead luggage racks, others on James’s lap. There is laughter, some broken English, much splintered Czech. Jitka has brought her violin; her husband has a guitar which he holds across Jitka’s front and manages to pick at while she laughs and wriggles. The train slides out of the station and traipses through the Prague suburbs. Lenka sits opposite James, a hint of anger lying behind her smile. She’s wearing shorts like something out of the army, except these shorts were probably hers when she was a thirteen-year-old and went on camping trips with the Pioneers or whatever, so they are disturbingly tight, folded in at her crotch in ways he can barely comprehend. And her legs. Blonde, strong, dusted with golden hairs that catch the light from the window as the train rounds a cliff above the river and the sun glares in at their crowded compartment for a moment. He hopes she doesn’t notice his eyes straying down there, but probably she does. You notice the direction of people’s eyeline, don’t you? Exactly where they’re looking, precisely where their glance strays, to the nearest millimetre.

What does she see in that diplomat bloke? What’s he got that James Borthwick doesn’t have?

Almost everything, including her.

Anyway, thank God he’s not here.

Jitka is still full of the wonders of the concert, the thrill of working with Gennady Egorkin and the brilliance of Pankova’s violin-playing. And Eckstein, of course, but the whole world already knows Birgit Eckstein.

‘I didn’t,’ says James, and they laugh.

The conversation slips back into Czech for Zdeněk’s sake. But he’s reading the newspaper – RUDÉ PRÁVO the masthead announces – leafing through the pages, throwing out critical comments here and there. He says something that includes the musicians’ names, Gennady Egorkin and Nadezhda Pankova. Jitka translates: ‘It says the couple have disappeared from their hotel and no one knows where they are.’

Zdeněk adds something. Jitka protests. ‘He says the man is doing indecent things with his violinist. He says all violinists are like that.’ She blushes. ‘Which is not true.’

The train trundles on, through the countryside now – fields, farms, forest, glimpses of a river through the trees. They finally leave it at a halt somewhere on the edge of a small town whose name seems impossible to pronounce, all consonants and no vowels.

The group sets off down a rough lane and into the woods. It’s like a childhood adventure, walking in the forest, along paths that are hard to follow, in directions that James can’t understand. And it is quite unlike anything in Britain, where almost always you walk and climb in open country, on the fells, on the moors, on the bareback mountains; but here there are miles and miles of forest, holding in their shadows something Slavic, something mysterious and mythic, echoing with birdsong as though it’s a cathedral dedicated to some ancient sylvan deity.

They walk on, talking, laughing, occasionally diverting from the path to forage for berries or mushrooms. These are city people suddenly revealed in different guise, in foresters’ garb, at ease in this strange world that seems so distant from the city. Above all, Zdeněk appears truly at home here, identifying plants and mushrooms, pausing to listen and point as, silently, deer cross their path like shadows in the half-light beneath the canopy of leaves. He smells the scent of a fox, points to cones gnawed down by squirrels, shows where boar have been rooting, identifies polecat droppings. There’s an unreal quality to the whole expedition, going from a place Ellie and James have never heard of to a place they don’t know, that is spoken of only in vague, allusive terms by their hosts. You will see. A strange place. An old ruin. A place whose name, if it has a name, is uncertain. We just call it Hrádek.

It isn’t long before they break out of the trees onto a bare promontory and there it is, Hrádek, which means little castle, and that is what it is, the mere bones of a place, the skeleton of a structure that has long since died – a broken circuit of walls, a tracery of outbuildings, a roofless inner keep and a shattered tower. A metal notice, peppered with shot, warns visitors – Pozor! – of unspecified danger. Far below the battlements a river winds through a narrow gorge. And beyond that is a view, a sudden, startling view of miles and miles of wooded hills running away to the east. How far does it go? Because it seems endless, this procession of forest, as though it will not end until it has become other places whose names James barely knows – the Tatra, the Carpathians, the great Russian steppe, the Urals. He thinks of the Pennines rising up behind his home town. How small they seem in memory.

The group sits for a while in the afternoon sun, amongst the ruins of a castle that once belonged to a Boleslav or a Vladislav, Duke of Bohemia, listening to birdsong and the soft movement of the breeze through the trees. Zdeněk sits apart, his face without expression. Jitka is her usual animated self, like a small, sleek rodent. Occasionally she looks directly at James for a moment longer than one might expect. He remembers the touch of her mouth when they were dancing and wonders whether she remembers too, and if she does what she thinks about it. Ellie sits beside Lenka, who is cool and distant.

‘This is very kind of you,’ Ellie tells her. ‘To bring us with you. It’s lovely here.’

Lenka’s smile is tired, as though there are other things on her mind. ‘It is Čechy. What you call Bohemia. It is right that you see it. Everything is not Prague.’ And then she does what to James seems a curious thing: she puts her arm round Ellie. And Ellie moves towards her, puts her head on Lenka’s shoulder, seems, for that moment in the sun, a close friend. Perhaps more. Is that the kind of friendship that women may have and he has never understood? A kind of idyll. Manet might have painted it, or one of the Impressionists. The viewer might ponder the relationship between the various figures, the two men sitting apart, a dark girl who moves between them, laughing at something, two women who sit together, one with her arm round the other.

The tableau is soon broken by the arrival of others on the scene, three men and a woman who come blundering through the trees and are greeted with cries of surprise and delight, as though their coming had not been planned. There are introductions, a bit of fractured English. Lenka translates: these are old friends of Zdeněk and Jitka, childhood friends of Zdeněk, in fact. It is a kind of tradition for them to gather here at the Hrádek in August, something they started years ago when they were all at the local school and have kept up ever since. So for a while the castle is theirs. They gather wood and make a fire against the wall of the inner keep where the stones are soot-blackened beneath the shaft of an ancient chimney. They forage for mushrooms, with Zdeněk’s friends showing remarkable mycological knowledge. And then, as the sun goes down and the evening sets in, they cook sausages and bake potatoes and open the beer that everyone has brought. Afterwards they sing songs round the campfire like an advertisement for the Boy Scouts from the 1930s, Zdeněk and Jitka playing guitar and violin. Some of the music is familiar – American folk songs, Peter, Paul and Mary stuff with a bit of Joan Baez thrown in – but some is quite foreign to Ellie and James. Zdeněk strums the guitar well enough, but it is Jitka’s playing that captivates, the classical violinist transfigured by the flicker of her bow and the shadows of the castle ruins and the uncertain firelight into something elemental – as though she has been revealed in her true form, which is Romany, Gypsy, Cikánka.

One of Zdeněk’s friends – James has forgotten the names – has a bottle of slivovice which he passes round. Cigarettes are lit; someone rolls a joint, about which there’s a heated discussion between the girl and one of the boys. But still the joint goes round while Zdeněk strums his guitar and Jitka sings now about going to San Francisco and being sure to wear some flowers in your hair, which James has always thought a bloody silly idea but which appeals to him at this moment, especially as when she has finished singing she comes over and sits close to him on the edge of the shadows round the fire, close enough to touch, shoulder to shoulder. He can smell her in the cooling air, the heat of her, her faint, tart scent.

‘I was in San Francisco,’ she tells him, as if that somehow justifies the song. ‘With the youth orchestra. It is an interesting place.’ Her husband and two friends are singing some kind of comic, call-and-response song. Everyone laughs. The joke is plainly that everyone knows the joke in advance.

‘Why did you come back?’ James asks. ‘Why didn’t you stay there?’

In the darkness he can see the gleam of her teeth as she smiles. ‘Why does anyone do anything?’

‘There must be a reason.’

‘Reasons, many of them. Because of Zdeněk. Because things were changing here. Because I missed my home. All those reasons. Anyway, my scholarship was for six months, so when it finished I just came back.’

Lenka is trying to teach Ellie the words of the song. Words without comprehension, an eternal problem. They laugh over the difficulties.

‘And now?’

‘Now I am trapped.’

The fire burns down, the singing becomes sporadic. Mummified in sleeping bags they lie down amongst the castle ruins, Ellie beside Lenka, talking with her in the dark, a soft, earnest sound. James wanders away, round one of the walls, feeling detached from the expedition, indifferent to Ellie, thoughtful about Jitka. He finds his place away from the others, out of mind. The moon, a half-moon, is rising above distant trees. Shadows shift in the darkness. A darker shadow comes round the end of the wall and coalesces above him.

‘Are you all right?’ Jitka asks, kneeling down. ‘I saw you go. I don’t want you to be left out.’

‘I’m all right.’

‘With Ellie, everything isn’t good is it?’

He feigned indifference. ‘We’re friends. We get on well enough.’

‘Not lovers?’ Perhaps it’s the dark that makes it easier to ask direct questions like that.

‘We were. Maybe not now.’

There’s a silence between them. The sounds all around – the shifting of leaves, the creep of nocturnal animals, the hoot of a tawny owl, the muttered talk from the other side of the wall – do nothing to erode this particular silence. Her shadow comes closer to his face until he can feel the warmth of her breath and then that same touch as in the Ides’ gig a few days ago, lips soft like mushrooms with the taste of her saliva now – beer, grilled sausage, slivovice. He puts up a hand, perhaps to hold her off because her husband is there, just the other side of the wall. Yet whatever he intends is not what happens because he finds only the loose edge of her T-shirt and her naked belly beneath, and then – her mouth on his, their tongues intertwining – her breasts hanging loose. He cups one, feels its ripe softness and the hard nub of her nipple, and for a moment they are like that, mouth on mouth, hand on breast. Then she pulls away and is gone, back to the other side of the ruined wall, back to the dying embers of the fire and her marriage to Zdeněk.

That moment of communion is something James will remember for the whole of his life, an instant of intimacy in the midst of a Bohemian forest transfigured into something almost eternal. As eternal as events can be in a human existence. He’ll remember it when other, not dissimilar moments are long forgotten, when Ellie is no more than a fond memory, when Jitka herself, entirely unbeknownst to him, has left Zdeněk, left her country, gone to America and found work as a teacher of violin and occasional orchestral player in New York, to be knocked down and killed by a car when crossing a street in Chicago in 1978.

That’s the way things work out. There’s no plan, no narrative thread. They just happen. You may as well roll a die.

37

Dawn light leaks into the ruins of the castle. Figures emerge from sleeping bags, yawning and stretching and pulling on clothes with scant regard for modesty. There’s the chill of early morning, the faint sensation of the evening before not having been worth the discomfort of the present. Someone kicks the embers of the fire to let them burn out. Others make their way down a precipitous path into the gorge below the castle, to the edge of the river where they wash approximately. The water is cold, as though it has come from high up and far away. Apparently indifferent to her audience, Lenka strips off completely and walks into the water until it’s up to her waist. The others watch, laughing and calling and daring her to go right in. On an impulse Ellie pulls off her own T-shirt and shorts and stumbles in to join her. For a moment they are close together, squealing and splashing, their two bodies a vivid contrast, the one tall and languid, the other small and quick. James watches with a peculiar, embarrassed focus, thinking how incongruous they seem in this wild place, and how far away from nature the human body has evolved to become pallid, almost hairless, awkward and vulnerable.

‘Stop staring!’ Ellie calls. There’s laughter.

Later the two bathers find a place apart to dry in the sun. James catches a glimpse of them through the trees, Ellie lying on her side with her hand on Lenka’s shoulder, then moving down out of sight, obscured by Ellie’s own body, Lenka laughing and lying back. And Ellie leaning forward.

He moves away hurriedly, fearful of being seen, fearful of the damage it might do.

38

They throw earth on the fire to extinguish it, look round their makeshift campsite for any scraps left behind, then shoulder their rucksacks and begin the return through the forest. Jitka walks with James; Zdeněk with his three friends; Ellie walks behind with Lenka. Ellie and Lenka are holding hands, which James notices as he turns to call something. He wants to hold Jitka’s hand. He wants some recognition of what happened in the dark the previous evening, a further moment of contact that can mean something to the two of them. It comes when she stumbles on a boulder and he grabs hold of her to keep her from falling, a squeeze of her hand that no one but she would ever notice, holding her up a moment longer than is necessary. ‘You saved my life,’ she says, and laughs.

The train back to Prague is less crowded than the one that brought them. It’s the holiday month, so who wants to be going back to the city? They talk about their plans, or their lack of plans. ‘I guess we’ll be moving on next week,’ James suggests, but Ellie disagrees. Sitting close to Lenka she looks at her with eyes that hint at something more than affection. Revelation, perhaps. She has been captivated by a constellation of things – the country, the spirit of place and Lenka herself. ‘Lenka thinks I could find work here. People want help with English now that so much is changing.’

Lenka shrugs. ‘It would not be legal. But for a few weeks…’

James remembers the two of them naked in the river, splashing and laughing, then lying on the bank to dry. He wonders about Lenka and about her boyfriend, the supercilious guy from the British embassy. What are her motives in all this? What does she do in the privacy of her own life? That evening, crushed into their bedroom in Jitka’s flat, he and Ellie talk about matters of the heart and the head, Ellie hovering on the edge of confession. ‘She’s so beautiful,’ she says. ‘Don’t you think so?’

‘You do.’

‘And you don’t?’

‘She’s all right.’

‘But you prefer Jitka?’

There’s a silence in the darkness. ‘Why do you say that?’

She laughs softly. ‘Because of the way you look at her. Because of the way she went to find you when we were at that ruin. What did you two get up to?’

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Nothing at all.’