Prague Spring

18

It’s the random element of hitchhiking that appeals. Like the tossing of a coin, your progress depends on the workings of pure chance. Perhaps it’s a metaphor for life, then – random encounters, random occurrences, random partings on to which you try and impose the logic and thrust of a narrative. Thus they reach the border at a bridge where the River Saar converges with one of its tributaries and where they move from Germany across the border into France as much by the machinations of chance as through any conscious choice. A cursory examination of their passports on the German side is followed by a sharp, officious one on the French side where the uniformed official handles their documents with the manner of a health worker handling clothing contaminated with anthrax. He asks, ‘Where are you going?’ as though staying put was certainly not a possibility.

Ellie plucks a name out of the air. ‘Strasbourg.’

‘Paris,’ he suggests.

‘J’ai dit Strasbourg. On va à Strasbourg.’

He sniffs. He knows their destination is Paris, where they will cause mayhem on the Boul’ Mich’. Turning to James he demands his rucksack, and for a few minutes rummages through the chaos of things inside, finding nothing more offensive than old socks and worn underpants. Then he points to Ellie’s pack, flipping his middle finger upwards in a gesture that is almost, but not quite, obscene. ‘Ouvrez.’

Ellie unslings her rucksack and begins to take out her scant possessions – rolled T-shirts, folded underwear, a wash bag, the battered tin of Gold Flake, a couple of paperback books, a small towel, not much else – and lay them out. The policeman prods them thoughtfully before tapping the Gold Flake tin. ‘Ouvrez.’

James’s heart lurches. Ellie does as she is told, levering open the lid to expose golden, mossy shreds of tobacco and a packet of cigarette papers. The policemen raises the tin to his nose and sniffs while Ellie smiles beatifically at him; only James recognises the true message behind that smile. It says, as plain as a raised middle finger, ‘Fuck you.’

Thoughtfully, the policeman hands the tin back and contemplates the pair of them with distaste. Then he cocks his head dismissively. ‘Allez, filez.’

And so they move on into the vasty fields of France – Eleanor’s quotation, of course – and go where the lifts take them. But lifts are rare. The road is their world, the verge their environment. There are wild flowers amongst the grasses – peas, vetch, catchfly. Bees hum around them, butterflies flicker in the sunlight like scraps of foil blown by the wind. It is a kind of idyll, despite their rucksacks and their sweat-stained shirts and blistered feet. They feel both free and captive, trapped by their straps and the load of their packs and the distance they can walk, yet unburdened of all other encumbrance – parents or work or any obligation except to themselves. And gradually – this is the absurd thing – James comes to feel an enormous gratitude towards Eleanor for bestowing on him this sensation of detachment and contentment. Just the delight of being there in the midst of this vast and peaceful countryside without any bonds between himself and home. It is as though he has been transformed into something entirely new – ageless, careless, indifferent.

‘You know what?’

‘What?’ They sit on the verge watching an empty route départementale stretch away into the distance in either direction. She is lying back against her rucksack. Her eyes are closed and the sun has caught her face, smacked her cheeks pink, given her a dusting of pollen. Her T-shirt is splashed with a tie-dyed sunburst, damp with sweat in the armpits. He thinks, because he is an incorrigible romantic, that she looks entirely lovely. And, although instinct tells him how dangerous this thought is, how vulnerable it leaves him, he thinks also that he may be in love with her.

‘I feel really happy.’

She opens her eyes and smiles. ‘How sweet,’ she says. ‘Naive, but sweet.’

So there they are, Eleanor and James, by the roadside in the midst of the peaceful and bucolic delights of a countryside, a country, a continent, apparently, although not actually, untouched by political dispute. Fando and Lis on the road to Tar, Lis at the moment unfastening the waistband of her jeans and reaching her hand inside her underpants to pull out the stash. Fando watches in fascination as she rolls, with that fluid-fingered dexterity, a joint, lights it, drags meditatively on it, holds the smoke inside her head and then slowly, reluctantly, like someone surrendering to the inevitability of death, lets it out.

‘Here.’ She hands the joint to him. And he wonders, as he takes it and draws the cloying smoke inwards, whether there is going to be a repetition of what happened two days ago in the cherry orchard. Could it happen even out here in the open air, his hand pushed down the front of her jeans where she hides that other, infinitely delicate, infinitely supple and surprising stash?

You never know your luck.

Lying side by side they smoke, passing the joint back and forth, watching the sky and the hills. Slightly zonked out, slightly high, laughing at things that probably aren’t really that funny, he imagines, remembers, sees shapes in the clouds that remind him of —

She leaps to her feet.

‘Hey, what you doing?’

‘A lift, you twit.’ She yanks out her thumb. The vehicle – a battered van, one of those ugly Citroën things that looks like a pig – grows larger in the perspective of the tarmac, flies past them at some speed, before skidding to a halt fifty yards down the road.

Ellie pinches off the glowing end of the joint, snaps the dead remainder away in her Gold Flake tin, grabs her rucksack and gives James a kick in the side. ‘Come on, shift your arse.’ He shambles to his feet and struggles after her, fighting a vague hilarity within, the sense that this doesn’t matter, this striving after progression, feeling instead that things are what is really important – the flowers buzzing in his brain, the ant crawling up his arm, the clouds gathering in the sky above, the warm declivities of Ellie’s body that have gathered in his imagination.

‘This is fucking silly,’ he calls out as he runs. His brain seems to undulate within his skull, as though it were on gimbals. Suddenly he feels sick. ‘Why don’t we just—?’

‘Hurry up!’

The door of the van slides open. She has thrown her backpack inside and is urging him on. He runs, stumbles, trips, feels the taste of smoke in his gut and an abrupt sensation of rebellion immediately below his diaphragm. And then the flavour of vomit, sour and bilious, erupts into his mouth. He turns, bends forward and heaves the scant contents of his stomach into the ditch.

‘Come on, James! For Christ’s sake!’

For a moment he’s on his knees, eructating. And then he’s unsteadily on his feet once more, staggering towards the van like a soldier under fire running for the helicopter. He flings himself into the vehicle and lies prostrate, submitting himself to Ellie’s ministrations, which mainly consist of a few sips of water and rough sympathy: ‘It happens like that, sometimes. Just a reaction. You’ll soon get over it.’

‘What’s the trouble back there?’ the driver calls. They’re moving, the engine clattering, the van lurching from side to side as they breast curves.

‘Something he ate.’

‘Not you, I hope.’

Laughter. The voice, the laughter are American. Faces turn within the shadows of the van. Teeth and hair, lots of teeth and lots of hair; the glint of a pair of granny spectacles. There are two in the front, another two figures in the shadows of the back, where are piled loudspeakers and guitars, a keyboard, electrical gear, shapes that might be drums. And sleeping bags and cooking things, all muddled into the complex smell of food and sweat and the cloying scent of smouldering joss sticks. James feels his stomach heave once more. ‘Where you folks headed for?’ the driver calls over his shoulder.

‘Strasbourg.’

‘We’ll take you to Strasbourg. You going to Strasbourg, we’ll take you to Strasbourg. Fuck it, why not? There’s a bridge across the Rhine there, isn’t there?’

‘Yes, there is.’

‘Sounds like a fucking war film. Bridge Over the River Rhine. We’re headed for Prague. That’s where it’s at, man. Got a gig there in a few days. But we’ll take you to fucking Strasbourg if you wanna go to fucking Strasbourg.’

They are, it transpires, a rock group called the Ides of March, on what they laughingly call their European tour. ‘Name’s classical, man. It’s like March fifteen in old Roman. But it’s also where we come from – March, Idaho, founded March fifteen, eighteen thirty-six by this one guy called Isaiah March. How’s that for cool? This guy, March, creates this place March, on the Ides of March.’ There is incredulous laughter, as though this has only just occurred to them. ‘But folks just call us the Ides ’cos it’s easier to recall.’

James sits silent, propped against the side of the van, nursing his swimming head and trying to calm his rebelling stomach. There is an exchange of names: John, Phil, Archer and Elliot. John is the driver, rhythm guitarist and leader of the group. Elliot and Phil are the guys in the back lying amongst sleeping bags, one the bass player, the other, Elliot, the lead guitarist who writes the numbers that they sing when they’re not covering the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. He has long hair, a rodent face and an empty grin.

‘D’you wanna hear?’ John the driver asks. ‘Give ’em “Rubicon”, Elliot. Elliot and Ellie – hey, you two should get together!’

‘Rubicon?’ Ellie says, attempting to deflect the idea.

‘Yeah, it’s like a river that Julius Caesar crossed, ain’t that right, Elliot? He knows stuff. He was majoring in classics before he dropped out.’

‘Where was that?’

‘In Italy, that right, Elliot? It’s a river in Italy that Caesar crossed. It meant he was going to become emperor or some shit.’

‘Not the river. The university that he dropped out of.’

‘Oh, man, got yah! Yeah, that’s real comic. You mean one thing, I understand another. UCLA. That’s right? UCLA.’

Elliot grunted some kind of acknowledgement. UCLA it was.

‘So give it to them, Elliot. Come on, man. “Rubicon”.’

With little enthusiasm Elliot takes up his guitar and begins to pick at it. The dead, unamplified sound is barely audible above the engine noise. His voice is rough and almost tuneless:

The others sing along, adding ‘yeah, man’ and ‘it’s gonna be a’right’ as they think fit. Archer beats out the time on the dashboard. The second verse, encountered as one might stumble into something in the dark, is not unlike the first.

Then they repeat the first verse and that seems to be it. Ellie applauds. Elliot grins at her, white teeth and white eyes gleaming from the shadows of the van. He speaks in a whisper, almost as though he has an obstruction in the back of his throat. ‘It’s pussy,’ he murmurs. ‘The Rubicon. Know what I mean? Her pussy.’

‘I think I’d sort of understood that.’

He reaches out and touches Ellie’s shoulder. ‘You wanna make out?’

‘No, thank you.’

James dozes, barely noticing what is going on, his head swirling, the line Let me cross your Rubicon going round and round in the vortex. The words seem important, as though bearing a significance as great as any biblical text. It is Ellie’s Rubicon he wishes to cross, and not really cross but dive into it and splash around. Alea iactum est, he remembers.

‘Alea iactum est,’ he says out loud, seeing the coincidental significance of it.

‘Iacta,’ Ellie says, throwing the correction over her shoulder as she argues with the guitarist.

‘What’s that, man?’ the driver asks. ‘That French?’

‘Latin,’ James mumbles, surprised at his own knowledge. ‘The die is cast. It’s what Julius Caesar said when he crossed the Rubicon.’ But he’s more interested in the quiet, suppressed argument that Ellie and Elliot are having. He hopes it is not her Rubicon they are discussing. ‘Right,’ Elliot says. ‘Sure.’ And gropes around in the bag he carries and pulls out money.

‘Hey!’ James exclaims. He intends a sharp interjection but the sound comes out more like a yelp of surprise.

‘Cool it, man,’ Elliot says. ‘Just let it be.’

The van slows abruptly and they begin to snake through the narrow streets of a town. Horns blare, in French. The gears of the van grate. ‘Son of a bitch!’ John shouts from behind the wheel. ‘Not used to a manual shift,’ he explains to his passengers. The road begins to descend into the wide flood plain of the river Rhine. Whatever has been going on between Ellie and Elliot is concluded. Elliot sags back into the sleeping bags while the rest of the Ides sing, Archer the drummer beating time on the dashboard, Elliot strumming vaguely at his empty guitar. They sing ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, ‘Yellow Submarine’, ‘Light My Fire’, anything that comes to mind. Something called ‘White Light White Heat’. And, of course, ‘Rubicon’. Perhaps the Rhine will be their Rubicon – they have been booked to play in Prague by someone they met in Paris, a Czech who told them about the music scene in his home city. ‘The Czechs are, like, crossing a Rubicon, aren’t they?’ John suggests. ‘Saying fuck you to the Soviets. Hey, maybe Elliot can write us another verse.’

Elliot grunts and ponders the proposal. ‘We’re gonna cross the Rubicon,’ he sings:

‘We’re going to be free

We’re gonna cross the Rubicon

And choose democracy.’

‘How about that?’ cries John, hammering his fist on the steering wheel. ‘That’ll drive the Czech kids wild.’

‘Or maybe,’ Elliot adds vaguely, ‘the other way round.’

Ellie has moved away from him and closer to James. She holds his hand in a rare demonstration of affection. ‘You OK?’

He shakes his head. The whole world moves.

‘It’ll soon wear off.’

They come to the outskirts of Strasbourg, the supermarkets, filling stations, small factories and warehouses, a brewery, all the detritus deposited by a modern town around itself, like an animal shitting round its own nest. Then the buildings crowd in and the road dives beneath railway lines and over water and reaches the centre, part timber-framed, part a local sandstone the colour of bruised flesh. The timber is painted in a variety of colours, like an old lady tarted up with eyeshadow on her eyelids, lipstick on her impoverished lips, rouge on her cheeks.

‘Looks a real cool place,’ John the driver decides, peering through the windscreen.

‘Yeah,’ agrees Archer. ‘Old.’

‘Cute,’ Ellie offers.

‘Yeah, cute.’

‘Look, you can put us down anywhere. Just here’ll be fine.’

They pull over at the edge of a square. A sign points towards Le Rhin, République Fédérale d’Allemagne. John turns round. ‘Hey, guys, you sure you don’t want to come on with us?’

‘Go on, man,’ says Elliot. He grins at Ellie and mouths the word Rubicon.

‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ she replies. ‘We’ll get off here. Going south, you see.’

Elliot leers and points. ‘Down south?’

‘Italy.’

‘Right, Italy.’ He nods vaguely. There are plenty more Rubicons in the lives of men. Ellie slides the door open and leaps out, dragging her rucksack after her. Dutifully, a little unsteadily, James follows, pursued by cheers from inside the dark cave. Archer, the drummer, leans out of the front window and beats a paradiddle on the side door. There are whoops and yells as the van pulls away in a squeal of tyres. Pedestrians stare.

James feels relief, as though some kind of danger has been overcome. ‘Let’s find somewhere to stay,’ Ellie says. ‘We passed a pension a couple of streets back.’

‘We can’t afford a pension.’

‘We’re not going to pitch your bloody tent in the middle of the town, are we? Anyway, Elliot’s paying.’

‘Elliot?’

‘I sold him the grass.’

‘The grass? For God’s sake, why?’

‘Don’t want you turning into a pothead, that’s why.’ There’s something approaching affection in her expression.

‘Why should I?’

‘I could see it in your eyes. My advice? Stay clear. Keep clean and simple like you were. It suits you. You don’t want to end up like that cretin.’ Which is something of a relief, because, in his befuddled state, he almost fancied Ellie and Elliot as intertwined as their names, crossing and recrossing each other’s Rubicons. Now she marches on alone, slight and indomitable, down a narrow street where an ancient sign announces Pension Alsace.

The hallway of the pension is narrow and dark brown and smells of mould and vinegar. A framed print of women in traditional costume hangs on the wall nearby but the Madame in charge of the place has long ago abandoned any decorative dress in favour of what appears to be a nut-brown sack. At Ellie’s peremptory ringing of the reception bell, she emerges from somewhere in the back and regards the two new customers with a mixture of contempt and suspicion. ‘Oui?’

Ellie smiles. She can do that, smile warmly to disperse all doubts. She is small and sharp and able, while James feels large and clumsy and incompetent. Her language helps, the French she learned at school, polished on holidays in France and finally, James has subsequently discovered, buffed up with a six-month exchange with a family in Bordeaux. So the two ladies smile at each other and trade polite greetings and icy compliments while the visitors’ passports are examined as thoroughly as by any border policeman. The woman looks up and says something to Ellie in which the words mariés and épouse seem to feature, along with the word catholique. Ellie’s smile is like a razor cut. Bien sûr, she replies. Notre lune de miel, she insists. Étudiants, she explains. The woman ponders the matter for a while before squirrelling the passports away in exchange for two forms to be filled in with enough details for a job application. ‘Ça va,’ she agrees grudgingly once the forms are completed, and hands over a key with a brass label inscribed with 301. ‘Seulement une nuit.’ As though more than one night might lead to moral complications she can hardly tolerate.

‘What was that all about?’ James asks as they climb the stairs – there is, of course, no lift. ‘Are we—’

‘Married, yes.’

‘Married? What the—?’

‘If we weren’t married, there wouldn’t have been a deal at all. Madame is a very devout Catholic. At least that’s what she claims. So if we weren’t a newly-wed couple she’d have insisted on separate rooms. And I wasn’t going to pay for two.’

The room is on the top floor, crouching beneath the eaves. It’s halfway between an abandoned attic and a dormitory, a twisted, asymmetrical space divided with wooden beams and posts, with a double bed at one end and two single beds halfway down. There’s a washbasin but no bathroom. The bathroom is off the landing, shared with whoever occupies the other room up there under the roof tiles.

‘So here we are,’ Ellie says, contemplating their little retreat. She seems awkward, as though she hasn’t really been expecting this. Somehow a shared room is more intimate than a shared tent. ‘I’m going to have a shower, and then we’d better get something to eat.’

Which is putting off all the awkward implications. Married, even. And a shared bed will be necessary evidence. James the scientist thinks these thoughts amongst many others as she darts off to the bathroom and comes back with hair somehow more ordered – that vivacious cloud of pale gold – and T-shirt changed (the old one washed and laid out on the tiles outside one of the dormer windows) and even – is this possible? – a dash of lipstick on those eloquent lips. They go out, taking Madame’s recommendation, to a small bistro round the corner that serves local food at a good price, where they share a pichet of Alsatian wine, and then another when the first – faintly sweet and scented – disappears with silken ease. Ellie laughs, relaxes, smokes, seems altogether different from the sharp and prickly woman she can be. Her eyes glisten. Her lips shine. Or is it the other way round? She even bums a cigarette off the men – a trio of builders – at the next table. Does she want to join them for a beer? No, she doesn’t, although it was kind of them to ask. She is with her fiancé, thank you.

He can come too, if he wants.

Actually, they are on their honeymoon. Lune de miel.

Much ribald laughter and understanding.

Back in their room – their room; the sexual thrill of that collective pronoun – she stands beside the bed, looking at him with that strange, out-of-focus look she has. The only illumination is a single bedside light – the other one doesn’t work and the ceiling light is a harsh, bare bulb that she turned off with a shriek of horror as soon as it came on – so her figure is blurred, like something sketched in charcoal, thrown into relief and shadowed with grey. ‘So,’ she says, giving a little smile and pulling her T-shirt over her head. She has nothing on underneath. He knows that, of course. He has watched her at length, already observed the fluid shifting of things beneath the cotton, but despite the strange intimacies they have already shared, this is the first time he has seen her breasts. When she shakes her hair out they move loosely, pale in the half-light. He tries, and fails, to avert his eyes, but why should he bother? She appears heedless of his gaze, dropping her jeans round her ankles, kicking them away and slipping under the bedclothes with blithe indifference. He sits on his side of the bed to try and keep things to himself.

Then what happens? These things get forgotten over time, the details lost, merged into other moments, blurred like the charcoal edges of a smudged drawing. But it goes something like this: he lifts the bedclothes – some kind of limp eiderdown – and slides beneath. She snaps off the light so that the only illumination comes through the threadbare curtains from street lights outside. He rolls over in the bed to face her and they lie there between the sheets, a foot apart, a whole confusing concatenation of lusts and inhibitions apart. In the half-light he can make out the whites of her eyes and the secret gleam of teeth. She breathes softly.

‘Ellie,’ he says and leaves her name there in the narrow shadows between them.

‘What?’

Moving closer he touches his lips against hers. Her lips are closed, as though opening them would open a window on her soul through which all manner of things might be revealed. But she doesn’t stop his hand, which crosses the divide and touches her breast and the small nub of her nipple. Doesn’t that signify arousal? He doesn’t know. Acceptance? He doesn’t know anything, really.

Still she doesn’t move.

‘I don’t understand what you want, Ellie.’

‘Why should you?’

‘Because of what happened in the tent.’

A breath of laughter in his face. ‘Messy, in more ways than one.’

‘But we did it. And now I want to make love to you. Properly.’ He says it almost without considering, as though to surprise himself as much as her.

She looks steadily at him, her head on the pillow, mere inches away but a whole world apart. ‘You’ve been very good, you know that? Not pushy, not protesting your devotion or anything nauseating like that. You’ve not really used the L word at all, except just then – that horrible expression “making love”.’

‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘You don’t know? And you a scientist. Haven’t you read The Naked Ape? Of course you have. Well, we’re just animals, aren’t we? We mate, promiscuously, most of us. We grunt and sweat and get all wrapped up in each other’s fluids and we call it by the same word as we use for our relationship with the eternal creator of the universe. Love. Not very convincing.’

‘So what do you want to call it? Fucking?’

‘That’s what it is, isn’t it?’

‘So, are we going to do it? I mean, if it’s just some physical function—’

‘But it’s not, is it? Not just some physical function. That wanking thing, maybe. But not fucking. Not your sticking your penis inside me.’

James has never had a conversation like this before: he has never really heard the word ‘fuck’ mouthed by such articulate and feminine lips. A part of him to do with chapels and Wesleyan Nonconformism and pure Northern prudery is profoundly shocked; while another part, to do with biology and, in particular, the organ between his legs, is profoundly excited. He wants her to be clinging to him and whispering that word in his ear.

‘I mean,’ she continues, ‘it signifies, doesn’t it? It’s not called intercourse for nothing. And it also brings with it the other things – childbearing, motherhood, procreation.’

‘I don’t think we’re quite ready for that.’

He’ll remember that laugh. He likes making her laugh. It is the principal weapon he possesses. ‘Don’t worry about that. I’m on the pill, although I did miss one in Zeebrugge. But I like an element of risk.’ She pauses, as though struck by a sudden idea. ‘You’re not a virgin, are you?’

‘Of course I’m not.’

‘Of course?’

‘Did you imagine I was?’ He hopes he sounds worldly-wise, but in fact his previous experience of sex is limited to one partner, a girl called Muriel, known, because she hated the name, as Mu. Mu was a fellow pupil at his grammar school but she left before the sixth form for reasons that were never quite clear, and went to work behind the counter in Boots, selling, amongst other things, condoms to grown men and blushing boys. It was to Mu that he happily lost his virginity, although he was fairly sure that she had mislaid hers long before, and in the same careless manner with which she conducted much of her life. After his first term at university she had dumped him because she said, despite his protests, that things were no longer the same between them, were they? ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ she said, ‘you’ve become posh.’

And here he was now, phoney posh lying in bed with proper posh in a cheap hotel somewhere in the middle of France; and she was saying fuck to him without turning a hair.

‘Anyway, you did agree that we wouldn’t have sex,’ Ellie pointed out. ‘When we talked about it, you did agree.’

‘You agreed, with yourself. I said nothing.’

‘So it’s up to me?’

‘Of course it’s up to you.’

She considers him, head on one side. ‘Well, I’ve decided that you’re quite nice and we’re quite good together and so if you like we can…’ She doesn’t say the word. He waits for her to say it but she doesn’t.

In the event, nothing much. She lies beneath him and lets him in and he feels that eloquent slide, that momentary sensation of danger and delirium that is like slithering over a cliff and discovering you can fly. But quite soon the flight comes to an abrupt end in a paltry climax and he slips out of her almost surreptitiously, vaguely aware that he should do something for her despite the fact that she doesn’t seem to want anything, having turned away from him almost immediately and composed herself for sleep.

‘Was that all right?’ he whispers over her shoulder.

‘Fine,’ she replies. ‘Fine.’

Reaching over he kisses her cheek and finds it damp with tears. ‘Are you all right?’

Her voice mutters into the crook of her arm. ‘Go to sleep. I told you, I’m fine.’

Tears. Enigmatic things. If you ever doubt the concept of mind over matter, then think of tears. The most effluent manifestation of grief, but also of nothing at all. Almost as contagious as a yawn.

So what were Eleanor Pike’s tears for?

Next morning she’s up early, too quick to allow a repeat of what had happened the evening before. She doesn’t allude to it either as they pack their things and go down to the reception desk to pay. Whatever it was might never have been.

‘I want to look round,’ she tells him as they leave the pension. ‘I want to see the city.’ She says it as though she is pitching for an argument and expects him to object. So they spend the morning like tourists, winding their way through the medieval streets of the Grand Île, peering round the ancient gloom of the cathedral, even taking a boat trip on the canals that intersect the city. They have lunch at a table on the pavement and share another pichet of Alsace wine and for most of the time Ellie seems happy, distracted by the sights, content to forget what happened the evening before and might happen again; but over lunch there is a change. ‘Let me tell you,’ she says and then leaves the telling hanging in the air.

‘Tell me what?’

She looks at him with a little twisted expression then glances down. ‘About last night.’

‘What about last night?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘I’m not sure I do.’ He wishes he hadn’t said it like that, the tone all wrong, making the neutral expression almost an accusation. She fiddles with things on the exiguous table, the salt cellar, her wine glass, a spoon, almost as though to distract his attention. ‘I wasn’t very good, was I?’

‘You weren’t very good?’

‘I didn’t… oh, I don’t know, react. Not as you’re meant to.’

‘As you’re meant to?’

‘Look, if you’re going to repeat everything I say—’

‘I’m sorry, I’m trying to understand.’

‘There’s nothing much to understand. I don’t enjoy it. That’s it, really. I’ve never, you know, enjoyed it. I can’t… let myself go. That’s what you’ve got to do, isn’t it? Let yourself go. Ecstasy, religious or sexual. All much the same. Both involve letting go. But I can’t. Not with Kevin, not with anyone else. And now, not with you. Whom I trust.’

Words and images stumble round his brain, bumping into each other like drunks in the dark. He feels overwhelmed by the concept of trust.

‘It’s my parents. Everyone accuses them, but it’s true. My mother, really, not my father. I love my father, worship, perhaps, which can’t be healthy. But my mother…’ She gives a little laugh, empty of all amusement. And then she tells him. Sitting there at the pavement café in the summer sunshine, she tells him about her mother and what she did with somebody or other. An uncle? A cousin? Both? Going off for long, belligerent, adulterous, alcoholic weekends or something, leaving her father shut away in his study, needing comfort, which Ellie, a devoted daughter, offered.

‘Comfort?’

She looks at him for a moment, then away across the square at the shifting tide of anonymous tourists. ‘He seems a strong man, doesn’t he? But he’s not. Not weak but…’ She hesitates, considering. ‘Vulnerable. I adore him. And he adores me.’

‘What comfort?’

‘There were bitter arguments when my mother came home. Rows, fights. I tried my hardest to protect him. It seems ridiculous, doesn’t it? A child trying to shield her own father? My brother was away at boarding school, so there was just me, crushed between the two of them. You know what happens to something when you crush it? Either it breaks up into little pieces or it becomes hard.’ She laughs faintly. ‘I’ve done both.’

The waiter appears and asks if they want anything else. More wine, perhaps? A dessert? Perhaps that interruption is a good thing, killing the question he has tried to ask and she has avoided: what comfort?

When the man has gone, she continues, almost as though the answer has already been given. ‘And then she’d do the religious thing, go off to some bloody convent to confess her sins and become a holy little wife again. Until the next time. The eternal grind of sin and confession and absolution. Of course I reasoned it all away as I grew up – I could just shrug it off, break away, find another version of love and affection. Except I didn’t. Couldn’t, in fact. I couldn’t let myself go, ever. Not with Kevin, not with half a dozen other boys before him. And then you came along, and I thought, yes, why not. Maybe with him. You see’ – she glances up at him for a moment – ‘you’re so fucking nice. That’s why I’m telling you this.’

James was suddenly aware that niceness was something one shouldn’t be. ‘No, I’m not.’

‘But you are. You can’t help it, but you are. And I thought maybe it’d be different with you.’ She looks directly at James and he recognises the pinched, sorrowful expression that Lis wore throughout the play. ‘But it isn’t.’

‘In the tent…’ James leaves the rest unsaid. In his mind is an already confused memory – a suffusion of orange light, pale ochre limbs moving, heat, a cry, a moment of ecstasy.

She shakes her head. ‘What’s that? Neurones firing, synapses activating, you ought to know. It’s just a bit of biology. But there’s no connection. Don’t you see how right Forster was?’

‘Forster?’

‘E. M. Forster. You know? You must know. Howard’s End.’ A fractional pause to gather her thoughts. ‘Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted and human love will be seen at its highest. That’s what I can’t do.’

The quotation gives it away: it has become one of those Oxford conversations he has learned to despise. All theory and no fact. Head in the clouds and feet at least six inches off the ground. He can’t do anything to stop her now. ‘It’s Forster’s metaphor,’ she continues. ‘Well, Margaret Schlegel’s in the book, but it’s Forster himself, of course. Prose is here and now, you sitting there across the table, me here, us talking together, being friends, being happy in each other’s company. And passion is that moment of… what? Ecstasy?’ She frowns, correcting herself as though it matters: ‘Human love will be seen at its height. Height, not highest. That’s what Margaret Schlegel thinks. You connect the two, the prose and the passion, with love. But I cannot.’ She opens her hands as though to display their emptiness. ‘Don’t you see, I want to love. You or someone. Anyone. But I just cannot. I live in fragments, that’s the trouble, small, hard fragments.’

There is, at that summer holiday pavement bistro, with its easy indolence, its chequered tablecloths and blackboard chalked with the plats du jour, a pause. James doesn’t know what to say. As far as he’s concerned it’s all nonsense, this self-examination. It’s the nonsense of psychology and the nonsense of philosophy. All we are is animals – complex animals, of course, but animals nevertheless. And what we do is what we do and what we feel is what we feel and the important thing is just to get on with it. So it’s Ellie who steps into the pause and makes it hers. ‘You know why Kevin and I broke up?’ She answers her own question before he has any need to guess. ‘The real reason, I mean. It wasn’t his politics. Compared with this, I couldn’t give a fuck about politics, and anyway he isn’t the fascist I’ve said he is. He wanted love, that was the trouble. Although he never put it in those words – he’d never read Forster in his life – he wanted me to build that bridge, and when he found I couldn’t he just got angry. Told me I was frigid. Shouted at me, called me an emotional cripple, said he wanted someone who could show love for him, real love, not some intellectualised version of it.’

Anything James might say will be wrong. He knows that. This girl who seemed so self-assured is as fragile as an eggshell. Yet there were no tears, that was his thought when he reflected on this conversation later. Such a moment of high emotion but no tears. Her expression appeared inverted, as though she was looking in on herself and finding nothing there. ‘I’ve never told anyone all this. Except you.’

‘Does that make me special?’

She shakes her head, as though to toss the question aside. ‘I wanted to explain, that’s all. You seem… worth explaining it to.’

‘More than Kevin?’

‘Kevin would never have understood. I’m not sure that you do, but at least you’re sympathetic.’

But perhaps he is wrong – perhaps there are tears in her eyes. Not flowing down her cheeks or anything too dramatic. Just glistening. He reaches out across the table to take her hand, and for a moment they sit there, holding hands across the table like any young couple who have just become lovers. Then she withdraws and blinks and the eyes seem dry once again. ‘That’s the problem,’ she says. ‘I live in fragments. I’ve tried to put them back together but I can’t. The pieces no longer fit.’

19

They leave the debris of that conversation at the bistro table and walk into the Place Kléber where, amongst the tourists and beside an antique carousel, they examine their map and the possibilities. Another coin. Heads to Germany, Austria and the Brenner Pass, or tails to Switzerland, the St Gotthard and Milan. Ellie laughs. The spinning coin delights her, like a child placated with a new toy. It rattles on the paving stones and lies head up, glinting in the sunshine – ‘heads’ in this case being a wistful woman striding across the obverse, casting seeds in her wake.

So they sling their backpacks and set off towards the river, towards another approximate border control, with Ellie apparently purged of her nightmares for the moment, talking and laughing and being once more the girl with the acute mind that he worshipped from afar and now cherishes from close to. On the German side of the river they get a lift in a van going south towards Freiburg, and from there they take the road into the Schwarzwald, the Black Forest, the home of cuckoo clocks and cherry cakes and, Ellie points out, the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger. Afternoon turns into a gentle sunlit evening. Dark, foreboding hillsides are mitigated by the warm valley. They walk along an immaculate verge past meadows of trimmed velvet where perfectly groomed cows ruminate on a benign future of grass and cud and milk. Little traffic passes and there is scant prospect of a lift, but James doesn’t mind. This is a kind of heaven in which the word transport takes on a different meaning. Not buses and trains and soot and oil, but a transport of delight, in Ellie’s company. Yet the dark forests are still there, on either side of the valley.

‘So what’s it going to be this evening?’ she asks as they pause to consult the map. Ahead, in the depths of the forest, there’s a place called Titisee beside a lake. A green delta symbolises a campsite. ‘Your bloody tent again?’

‘Unless we can afford another luxury hotel.’

It’s strange that they should be back to their old relationship. Almost as though the events in Strasbourg have not taken place. But they have. He sees her in a different light now, the soft light of the Black Forest evening and the harsh light of her vulnerability. She is scarred; possibly scared. And yet she is still Eleanor, with her assumed self-confidence and her caustic tongue. And she has let him make love to her. The very thought of what has been and might be again almost brings his heart to a halt. Or makes it beat twice as fast. He can’t tell which.

She hoists her rucksack onto her back and walks on ahead of him. ‘About what I was saying at lunch,’ she calls back.

‘What about it?’

‘Forget it, just forget it, okay? I was babbling on. Just forget it and it’ll be like it was before.’

‘But it’s not like before, is it?’

She looks round, sharply. ‘Of course it is.’

‘No, it’s not. For Christ’s sake, Ellie—’

She stops, her face tight with anger. ‘Look, I don’t want sympathy. Still less do I want pity. I’m not a head case, so don’t try and treat me like one. Just take me on my own terms and we’ll see what happens, OK?’

He hesitates, not knowing whether to argue back. And that is the moment when the car – a Volkswagen Beetle – clatters past them and slows to a halt.

Whatever the circumstances there is a small thrill of apprehension about a successful hitch. The vehicle – car, van, lorry – waits, anonymous and indifferent but pregnant with possibility. Where will it take you? Whom does it conceal? What secrets does it hide? It puts your own momentary circumstances into perspective.

They hurry to find out.

Inside the car there’s a disparate couple, a young man driving and a middle-aged woman in the passenger seat. The man appears tall, folded awkwardly into the seat behind the steering wheel. He’s good-looking in the rather daunting way of blond, blue-eyed Germans, while the woman is smaller, with grey hair scraped back into a bun and inquisitive, beetle-bright eyes. Perhaps she writes detective stories. Perhaps she is actually an amateur detective, a Miss Marple of Germany.

The man climbs out and asks, in English, ‘Are you looking for a lift?’

They are, of course they are. He holds the door open for them to climb in. ‘Is there room? It is a small car and there is not much room.’

But they manage, squeezing Ellie’s pack into the exiguous space behind the rear seat while James sits with his own on his lap. Ellie crowds against him, thigh against thigh in smiling complicity.

‘I hope you are not too uncomfortable,’ the driver says as they set off. ‘Where are you going? I am afraid we are not going far.’

James takes charge of their side of the conversation, happy that, amongst other things, Ellie no longer has the language advantage. ‘We’re heading towards Austria. Lake Constance, somewhere like that. But we need somewhere for the night. We’ve got a tent.’

‘Ah, you are looking for a camping site. There are camping sites where we are going. Titisee, you know Titisee?’

‘We’ve seen it on the map.’

‘It is very pretty there. A lake. There is boating. There are water sports.’ It sounds as though he has learned phrases from a guidebook and polished them into a simulacrum of fluent language. His passenger half-turns to see what species of beast they have caught. Her face is serious, as though they may have committed some kind of transgression. ‘It says GB on your pack. Does that mean you are British?’

James wonders. Thoughts of the war come to mind. Resentment, rancour, enmities festering beneath a superficial gloss of liberal progress. His tone is almost apologetic. ‘Yes, it does.’

‘Are you students?’

‘Yes, we are.’

‘Are you at university?’

‘Yes.’

‘Which one?’

‘Oxford.’

‘Which college?’

The question is a surprise. James names his, with the faint feeling that he is handing over some kind of secret code.

‘Ah,’ the woman says. ‘Do you know Professor Hubert?’

Professor Hubert. A tall, stooped figure who paces the quad with his gown billowing and his hair awry. Professor Hubert who smiles benignly on one and all. ‘Yes, I do. I mean, not personally. But I know who he is. Maybe I’ve said good morning to him a couple of times.’

‘Professor Hubert is a great friend of mine,’ she announces. ‘He is a fine musicologist.’

Memories of the war – folk memories, mediated by films and War Picture Library comics – fade. James nudges Ellie. ‘I just thought Hubert was an old codger who dispensed sherry at his tutorials.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I heard someone say.’

‘Actually, he’s a leading authority on Monteverdi.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I went to a talk he gave at the Bach Festival.’

The woman looks round sharply, as though they have been caught talking in class. She has a kind of haggard beauty, like a cliff face eroded by weathering but still full of grandeur. ‘You mention the Bach Festival,’ she says in her measured, clipped English. ‘It is there that I know Professor Hubert. I am playing there many years now.’

‘Playing?’

‘I am a cellist. I am Birgit Eckstein and this is my nephew, Horst von Eberhafen.’ There is a rapid exchange of words with her nephew. She turns round again. ‘We are thinking that maybe you can erect your tent in our garden, if you would like. We are having a big garden. And you may use our facilities – for shower and wash – so that will be like a campsite, no?’

‘That’s very kind of you,’ Ellie says. ‘I’m sure it would be much better than a campsite.’

‘And maybe you can have dinner with us. Would you like that? I have a simple house, but interesting.’

The car has left the valley and is winding up forested slopes, stuttering across a high, wooded plateau. The sun catches the tops of the hills, imposing a dangerous flush of pink on the black trees. After a while they turn off the road and up a gravel drive. The house – simple but interesting – lies against a wooded slope at the back of an expansive lawn. It is like something out of fairy tales, a Hansel and Gretel house built entirely of wood, clad in wood, even tiled in wood – ‘It is called Schindel,’ Horst informs them, adding that he believes the word also appears in English, as ‘shingle’. The roof slopes down almost to head height. There are dormer windows like startled eyes. Quaint benches guard either side of the front door, while pots of pelargoniums illuminate the window ledges. A doorbell hangs on a spiral spring.

Frau Eckstein almost apologises as they climb out of the car. ‘It is perhaps not as ancient as your Oxford colleges, but it is old, perhaps the oldest in this area. The sixteenth century. You may look if you wish.’

They dump their rucksacks on the edge of the lawn and follow the woman into her domain, feeling more and more like Hansel and Gretel in thrall to their captor. Inside there is the resinous scent of wood, the murmur of flexing floorboards, a sensation of quiet, considered age. They duck beneath beams and edge around posts. The stairs are like companionways, the floors like decking. The whole building creaks and shifts around them like a sailing ship under way through the tides of history. Occasional gaps between the floorboards give glimpses into the room below. ‘That does not make it a very private place,’ Frau Eckstein observes, laughing to signal the little pleasantry. ‘But the bathroom is at least of the twentieth century.’

And indeed, amongst all the woodwork, the bathroom gleams like a pathology lab. There is a white bath, and a bidet with its vague suggestion of sexual impropriety, and a shower cabinet that might be suitable for beaming you up to some orbiting star ship. But when they return to the ground floor it is to the pièce de résistance: the music room.

They stand at the door and peer in. The interior is redolent with beeswax. A grand piano stands at the centre like a coffin on a catafalque. Cellos, half a dozen cellos, some cased, some naked, gather round like solemn mourners. Photographs of the dead decorate the walls like saints in a chancel. One shows a balding, stout figure and is inscribed with a flourish de Birgit con cariño, Pablo. ‘Casals,’ Frau Eckstein remarks with a careless wave of one hand. Another frame encompasses the austere, aquiline face of Paul Tortelier. ‘We were very close,’ she explains, picking the picture up and gazing at it fondly. ‘At the conservatoire in Paris.’ She replaces it with loving care and indicates another, which shows a younger version of herself, rather stern, rather beautiful, sewn into a long, flared dress and standing beside a moustachioed man with piercing eyes. ‘Toscanini.’ And another – ‘Furtwängler’ – before she looks at Ellie and James with careful eyes, as though measuring them up for something, the cooking pot perhaps. ‘Do you enjoy the cello?’

‘I love the cello,’ Ellie says. ‘I saw Jacqueline du Pré playing the Elgar at the Royal Festival Hall. She was wonderful.’

The woman sighs, a fraction impatient. ‘Ah, Jackie, dear Jackie. Great talent but rather too much emotion, I fear. Emotion will always find you out in the end.’ She touches one of the instruments. ‘This is my Guadagnini. Perhaps I will play it for you after supper. Would you like that?’

Of course they would, even if, in James’s case, they really wouldn’t, because the whole stuff of classical music, the seriosity of it, the long gowns and stiff collars and tailcoats, bores him. Guadagnini? What the fuck does that mean?

‘But first you must make yourselves comfortable. You must pitch your tent, must you not? Before it gets dark. I am sorry I cannot offer you a room, but with Horst here, you see we have no place. It is not a big house. But it is a bit like being children again, no? Pitching your tent on the lawn, I mean.’

Ellie seems delighted at another little point of contact. ‘I used to do that with my brother!’

‘Of course you did. Everyone does.’ Which somehow makes it less remarkable. ‘And you must use the bathroom if you wish. This, I remember, is the bad thing of camping, that you often have no bathroom.’

So they pitch their tent in the dusk, keeping their voices low to avoid being overheard, giggling like children as they crawl around inside the tent and try to sort things out. What do they think of their hostess?

A sharp old witch.

Rather beautiful. A kindly witch.

Did you see her fingers? Lobster claws. All that cello-playing.

And what was that Gwadaninny business?

Guadagnini. The cello maker. Second only to Stradivarius. Don’t you know anything? It’s probably worth hundreds of thousands.

Not as much as Horst, I’ll bet. Von Eberhafen, no less.

Prussian?

Nazi?

What was she doing during the war, do you think?

Playing to the troops, I suppose.

And Horst? Strutting around eastern Poland shooting Jews in the neck?

He’d only have been about ten.

Hitler Youth, then. Longing to get into action and shoot Jews in the neck.

They take turns to use the bathroom. The kindly witch has put out towels for them. ‘Make yourselves at home,’ she says, seeing James climbing the stairs. ‘Dinner will be ready in half an hour. Is that all right? Just come in and find us in the dining room.’

The dining room is on the opposite side of the hall from the music room, a wood-panelled cigar box of a space with a tiled stove in one corner and wall lamps that mimic gas lights. They sit at a polished slab of wood while a small, silent woman – ‘This is Frau Weber’ – brings food in from the kitchen. Conversation is awkward and incidental – how lovely the house, how beautiful the dining room, how fine the setting.

‘We had only gas lighting until after the war,’ Frau Eckstein explains, ‘but when my husband came back we decided to move finally into the twentieth century.’

Her husband? Suddenly there is a human shape amongst the inanimate shadows in the corners of the room. Where is her husband? And where has he returned from, with his ideas of finally joining the twentieth century?

‘Your husband?’ James asks.

‘My husband is not alive now. He was sent to the Eastern Front and the Russians took him prisoner. He did not come back until 1952 and then he was no longer’ – she pauses and considers carefully what words to use – ‘the same. Physically. So he did not live many more years. But at least he died in freedom.’

Horst reaches across the table and takes his aunt’s hand. In his precise, perfectly enunciated English, he explains. ‘Onkel Julius was a courageous man. A doctor of medicine of great learning who did not like the National Socialist ideas of science. That was why he was sent to the Russian front.’

‘But it was also why he survived being a prisoner,’ his aunt adds. ‘Because it was a skill that the Russians valued. So he survived in the camps as a doctor and at last he came home.’

There is a silence while they contemplate this, the kind of silence you wish someone would break. James offers himself up as a sacrificial lamb: ‘My father was in the army. During the war. The Royal Army Service Corps. RASC.’

‘I am sure he was also a brave man.’

‘I don’t know about that. They used to say Run Away Someone’s Coming.’

Frau Eckstein looks puzzled. ‘I do not understand. Did your father run away?’

Ellie giggles. Lamely, James explains. ‘Royal Army Service Corps, R-A-S-C. Run Away Someone’s Coming. It’s a joke.’

‘Ah, an English joke.’

‘Ironic English humour,’ Horst adds.

Frau Eckstein does not attempt a smile. ‘I expect he did his duty,’ she decides, ‘just as my husband did. That was all that most Germans wanted to do. The sadness is that now their courage cannot be acknowledged by the nation, only by their families and friends. Do you see what I mean? Great Britain can celebrate in public while we can only weep in private. Both my husband and my brother—’

‘That is, my father,’ said Horst.

‘— they died for what? A country that no longer even exists.’ She thinks for a moment, then looks as though she has made up her mind. ‘Do you know what my brother did? Of course you do not. How could you? My brother was a member of the so-called Kreisauer Kreis. How would you say that? The Kreisau Circle? This was a group which met to plan for a Germany after National Socialism, for when the country would be finished with the Hitler regime. They were arrested, many of them, after the…’ She hesitates. For the first time her otherwise impeccable English lets her down and she glances at her nephew for help. ‘Das Attentat vom zwanzigsten Juli.’

‘The plot of July against Hitler,’ Horst explains.

‘My brother – Horst’s father – was brought before the Volksgerichtshof—’

‘— the Nazi People’s Court.’

‘And was sentenced to death. But he cheated them of that.’

Horst wears the expression of a mask – unwavering, as though his face were pressed out of papier-mâché and glued in place. ‘He hanged himself in his cell,’ he says. ‘I was six years old. My mother told me he had died in the war. It wasn’t until I was fourteen that I learned the truth.’

Frau Eckstein puts her knife and fork to rest as though to bring the discussion to a conclusion. ‘While Frau Weber clears the table, I think I will play something for you,’ she says, rising from her chair. Solemnly they follow her to the music room, like mourners going to view the deceased. One expects flowers round the coffin, relatives in black, guttering candles. Horst sits at the keyboard while Ellie and James take two chairs as instructed and wait in dutiful silence. Frau Eckstein hitches up her skirt and sits down, pulling the cello – the beloved Guadagnini – into the open embrace of her legs. Her nephew gives her a note on the piano and there is a moment of strange discord while she tunes her instrument. Then she settles. ‘Bach, of course,’ she announces. ‘The cello suite in C minor. The prelude.’

And she begins, making exact, articulate movements of hands and arm, like a craftsman assembling something out of intricate pieces of wood. But what emerges from this complex labour is not a thing but an ephemeral sound emanating from the body of the instrument like a human voice from the depths. The woman’s eyes are closed. Her head, her whole body, sways to the tempo of the music. It seems to James, who is entirely ignorant of these things, that she is drawing her bow across the raw, exposed surface of her nerves. And the whole room resonates to the cry.

When the piece comes to an end there is a silence louder than any of the extraneous sounds, louder than the shifting of a chair or the breathing of any of the listeners or the faint touch of her bow on the floor as she lays it down. She opens her eyes and looks at her audience. Ellie is in tears. ‘That was wonderful,’ she whispers, and it was, full of wonder even to James’s untutored ear.

‘How do you do that?’ He feels foolish as soon as the words are uttered, but the woman smiles kindly on him.

‘You know the Oxford joke about lawns? Professor Hubert told it to me when we were in your college: a tourist from America sees the lawn in an Oxford college and asks to the gardener how he can have a lawn like that. He would like one at his house back home. What is the secret? And the gardener says, well, you plants it and you waters it, and then you rolls it and you mows it for two hundred years…’

She does it quite well, even an attempt at the gardener’s accent. You rolls it and you mows it. They laugh.

‘So, it is almost like that with playing the instrument,’ she says. ‘Not two hundred years, of course, although this instrument itself has more than that, but many years and much playing. Every day for, perhaps, eight hours. It is not practice, it is study. Like you study the subject you do at university. Only for a lifetime.’

Attempting irony, James says, ‘That counts me out, then.’

‘You play no instrument?’

‘I fiddled about with the guitar for a bit. Strumming chords, not much more. R&B, pop, you know the kind of stuff.’

But she doesn’t really. She doesn’t know Rhythm and Blues. She knows of the Beatles – ‘some good harmonies’ – she knows about Elvis Presley. But not the Rolling Stones or the Animals or anything of that kind.

‘I think,’ Horst decides, clearly bored with the conversation, ‘that we go back to the dining room where Frau Weber has presented one of her excellent Apfelkuchen.’

And over the apple pie they talk of other things, of where Ellie and James are going, both in the next days and in life; and where Horst is going – into politics, as a member of the SPD and a devotee of its leader, Willy Brandt – although in the immediate future he is accompanying his aunt to Prague.

‘Prague?’

‘Tomorrow we are going.’

‘I have some master classes at the conservatoire,’ she explains. ‘And then a concert with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. It is something I have done for years now. This time it will be the Dvořák. Maybe’ – she smiles – ‘maybe it is always the Dvořák. But I will also play the Brahms Double Concerto with a young Russian violinist. The conductor will be Gennady Egorkin. Do you know Egorkin?’

‘By name,’ says Ellie.

‘He is celebrated,’ she says reprovingly, as though mere recognition of the name is not sufficient, ‘both for his conducting and his piano. One of the great musicians of our age. But he is known also for his – how do you say it? – outspokenness against the system. At the present time he cannot travel to the West, I believe, but to Czechoslovakia this is possible.’

‘Only yesterday we met some other musicians going to Prague,’ James says.

‘Who are these musicians? Perhaps I know them?’

‘I don’t think so. A group called the Ides of March.’

‘A chamber group?’

‘A rock group.’

Her face falls.

‘American,’ James explains. ‘Four of them. Long hair, Mexican moustaches, torn jeans. Guitars and drums.’

‘Oh.’ For a moment she looks downcast, but then she manages a glimpse of optimism. ‘Yet Prague is still a beautiful city, even with such people. One of the most beautiful cities in the world. And what is happening there now deserves our support, do you not think? Even the support of your Ides of March.’

Of course they agree. It is wonderful, really, the way the people are having their say. And how they are all behind Dubček and his allies. Even Ellie, who hasn’t yet worked out a way to brand the reformers as bourgeois lackeys of the capitalist world, agrees. Indeed, she waxes positively lyrical about Dubček’s socialists as she and James eat their strudel. Perhaps Czechoslovakia is showing the way to the future. Socialism with a human face. Isn’t that wonderful? An ideal. Something to believe in.

‘I don’t think so,’ says Frau Eckstein drily. ‘I think I have already seen too much of idealism and belief to have any faith in either.’

They leave the house into a night that has the chill of high places beneath a cloudless sky. The moon casts a bleak, monochrome light as they blow up their airbeds, lay out their sleeping bags and struggle to undress within the narrow confines of the tent. Ellie seems changed both by her confession in Strasbourg and by Frau Eckstein’s playing. There is something fragile about her, something tearful and dependent which is quite unlike the girl he thought he knew. They cling together like a couple adrift after a shipwreck. ‘Isn’t she wonderful?’ she says, speaking of Frau Eckstein. ‘Isn’t she just the most beautiful woman?’ Her head is nestled against his neck. For the first time ever, he feels that she has some kind of dependence on him.

‘You’re in love with her.’

She punches him lightly in the ribs. ‘With her music.’

‘It was all right.’

‘All right? The music was judging you, you weren’t judging the music.’

‘I said it was all right.’

‘It is not enough to find it all right. You’ve got to find it,’ she pauses, considering, ‘transcendent.’

‘I don’t even know what transcendent means.’

‘Uplifting. Outlifting. Is there such a word? Taking you out of yourself, out of the world. Transporting you out of the material world and into something beyond.’

‘That sounds like religion. You don’t have religion.’

‘It’s just a feeling. Like getting high.’

‘Maybe you shouldn’t have sold that weed.’

She laughs softly against his shoulder. What has happened? Metaphors pile up in his mind. A dam has burst. A wall has been breached. Something, some hard carapace has at least been cracked. He bends his head and buries his face in her hair.

‘Maybe we should go,’ she says thoughtfully.

‘Go where?’

‘Go to hear her play. In Prague.’

‘For God’s sake, we’ve planned on Greece, haven’t we?’ He imagines olive groves, parched hillsides, cool wine and hot nights. Not some godforsaken city in Eastern Europe. ‘We can’t change our ideas now.’

He feels her shrug. ‘It was just a thought,’ she says.

20

The next morning, after breakfast, there are fond farewells at the house. ‘You are like my children,’ Frau Eckstein confesses in a moment of surprising sentimentality. She kisses James on both cheeks, hugs Ellie to her like a daughter. ‘You must keep yourselves safe,’ she admonishes them, as though safety were a thing one could choose to have or not.

Horst drives them the short way to the nearest main road. He is full of instructions and information, delivered in the manner of the academic, as though what he says is an enormous joke if only you can see through the solemn façade. Apparently Donaueschingen is not really the source of the Donau, the Danube, at all. Instead the geographical honour ought to lie with the town of Furtwangen, a full 48 kilometres further upstream. There a stream called the Breg rises and runs down into what the whole world recognises as the Danube. So, is Furtwangen the true source of the river? And should the river be renamed the Breg, causing consternation and chaos amongst cartographers the world over? ‘This important matter has never been resolved,’ he tells them as he drops them at a convenient lay-by. ‘Another curious thing is that here we are only about thirty kilometres from the Rhine. The Rhine going one way, the Danube going the other. Ships that pass in the night, isn’t that what you say?’ He looks up at them from within the prison of his own car. ‘It is perhaps a metaphor for life. Auf Wiedersehen, meine Freunde. Perhaps in Prague.’

‘Perhaps,’ says Ellie.

‘I am a bit envious,’ he calls out, ‘of your freedom.’

That paradox once again. The freedom and the restriction – they can go anywhere they wish, but unless a vehicle stops for them they can go almost nowhere at all. Thus the journey resumes – short lifts (a van, a car) – eastwards out of the Black Forest towards… where? All around them is a vast expanse of southern Germany. James has never seen such size, the forests and fields going on to the horizon, seemingly unmarred by towns or cities. And the immaculate nature of the land, the roadside verge manicured, the fences polished, the woods perfectly trimmed. How is all this possible? The places he knows – Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Oxfordshire – shrink in memory to small, scruffy domains, while this, the map tells him, is only a fragment of Germany, called, apparently, Baden-Württemberg, which name evokes memories of model soldiers in shakoes and bearskins, fighting for statelets – the Grand Duchy of Baden, the Kingdom of Württemberg – that no longer exist outside of the history books.

A lift drops them at a junction where a signpost points right towards Konstanz, Lindau and Austria, or left towards Memmingen, Ulm and München. Ulm seems familiar. A treaty? A battle?

Ellie unfolds the map. ‘So we go right,’ James says. ‘To Austria.’

What does Austria mean? The Alps. Vienna. The Waltz, the Blue Danube, which is this same river whose source, nothing more than a stream, is fought over by two neighbouring towns. Ellie turns the map thoughtfully. ‘Or we change plans…’

‘Change plans?’

She points, to München and beyond. ‘Why not go to Prague?’

‘What?’

She smiles encouragingly. ‘Wouldn’t it be great? We’d see her perform. Frau Eckstein, I mean. And we’d see what it’s really like there.’

‘But we’ve planned—’

‘And the Ides. That’d be cool.’ She is bright and excited, suddenly enthralled by her idea. ‘We’re free, for Christ’s sake. We don’t have to do anything. And this… it’d be a bit of history, the kind of thing we’ll regret not having done. Italy we can see anytime, or Greece. But Czechoslovakia is now!’ She waves the map as though that might conjure lifts out of the air. ‘How far can it be? A few hours.’

‘It’s the other side of the bloody Iron Curtain.’

‘So what?’

‘Are you serious?’

But of course she’s serious. Her eyes are alight with a brighter fire than James has ever managed to ignite. He looks around. To the south are distant hills, with the Alps beyond them, out of sight but not out of mind. He has never seen the Alps. The biggest mountains he has known are in the Lake District and North Wales. When you are that ignorant novelty becomes the norm.

‘Let’s toss for it,’ he decides. ‘Heads we continue as planned. Tails—’

‘What’s tails?’

He shows the coin. A Deutschmark. ‘The eagle.’

‘So, eagle we go to Prague.’

‘If they’ll let us in.’

‘If they don’t, we just carry on as before.’ There is no further argument. Tossing a coin resolves everything. The coin sings in the air and falls at their feet. The eagle.

21

‘What about a trip to Munich?’ Sam asked her.

Lenka’s eyes widened. ‘Munich?’

How do you measure distance? Munich was a mere two hundred miles away, yet beyond imagining. It was just over the border yet it was beyond the Pale. He might as well have suggested visiting the far side of the moon.

‘I’ve got to deliver diplomatic bags to the consulate and there’ll be plenty of room in the car. I’ll have to take the security man along, but he’s a mate and he’ll turn a blind eye. All you need is your passport. You do have a passport, don’t you?’

Her eyes glistened. Behaving as you please was a new experience, doing your own thing something that you needed to practise. But yes, she did have a passport, issued for a student conference in Budapest the previous year. The only time she had ever been out of the country. But she’d need an exit visa, which would take a few days and three hundred crowns. Something like that. She made a face.

‘You’re my guest,’ Sam assured her, and felt a strange, erotic thrill at the idea of giving her the money.

They travelled in an embassy car, a large, sagging Humber Super Snipe designed to demonstrate the importance of British manufacturing in a world of Tatra and Škoda. The two of them sat in the back while Derrick, ex-police sergeant and head of security at the embassy, drove. ‘They’ll think we’re the ambassador and his wife,’ Sam said.

Lenka giggled. The trip had transformed into something like a school prank, vaguely illicit yet harmless enough. They sat close together in the back, their hands intertwined in her lap, below the sight line of the driver’s reflected eyes. Sam experienced a terrible intensity of sensation, focused on the touch of her thigh against his, the grasp of her strong fingers, the warmth of her body. He wanted to make love to her, there and then, on the hot leather of the back seat of the embassy car as it swayed and lurched round corners and over switchbacks through the Bohemian countryside towards Pilsen. And he even wondered whether it might be possible to do it without the sergeant, with his tired, suspicious eyes, ever noticing.

Perhaps not.

As always there was barely any traffic on the roads, and after Pilsen they entered a landscape almost empty of people, as though war was imminent and the inhabitants had been evacuated. Warnings were posted along the road.

Sam felt Lenka tense beside him. But the embassy car drove blithely on into the no-man’s-land that cut a swathe right through the centre of Europe. The first line of fencing appeared, running north and south away into the distance, over fields and through woods.

But they entered with sublime indifference, confident in their diplomatic plates, their diplomatic immunity from all interference. Watchtowers appeared on either side, marching above double fencing that was twice as tall as a man. Ahead was the checkpoint itself, with striped barriers like barbers’ poles. A few vehicles had collected against the gates like detritus in a stream. The Humber came to a halt in the reserved lane. Lenka’s grip tightened.

‘They know we’re coming,’ Sam assured her. ‘All diplomatic cars have to cross at this point. We inform them we’re crossing and more or less at what time. It’s all perfectly normal. They probably won’t even look at our papers.’

But they did. One of the guards, a mere child, leant in at the window and took the driver’s passport and diplomatic pass and called something out to his colleague behind him. Sam could hear Lenka’s sharp intake of breath, feel the tension in her body. She held her breath and waited. Sam got out of the car. ‘Is there a problem? Do you want to see the bags?’ The boot was opened and the guards peered in at canvas pouches with their diplomatic seals. Sam smiled, proffering documents. The senior guard refused the offer and told the younger one that he should have just waved them through. ‘No bother at all,’ Sam assured him. He reached into the boot, picked up a carton of two hundred cigarettes and proffered it to them. Players Please. ‘Here, split it among your mates.’

There were smiles all round now. Even laughter. One of them tried out his English. ‘Beatles, you like Beatles?’

‘Beatles are great,’ Sam assured him. ‘But Rolling Stones are better.’ More laughter. He got back into the car, then leant out of the window as though struck by a thought. ‘Just so you know,’ he told them, ‘we’ll be back tomorrow evening.’ The guards grinned and nodded. Derrick slipped the car into gear and allowed it to run forward, down the slope towards the bottom of the valley.

Lenka let her breath go. ‘Why,’ she asked in a whisper, ‘must I be afraid of them?’ And then a hint of panic came into her voice, like the fluttering of a warning flag in the wind: ‘I don’t have an exit stamp. They didn’t give me an exit stamp. If I don’t have an exit stamp they won’t let me back in.’

‘Of course they will. At the worst it’ll be another carton of cigarettes.’

‘Is that right?’

‘Of course it’s right.’

They crossed the bridge and drove up to the border post on the West German side. The black two-headed eagle flew in the warm breeze. There were more uniforms, a cursory glance at the driver’s documents and a salute from one of the guards. An American soldier watched from afar, leaning on the steering wheel of his jeep, chewing gum. The Iron Curtain had been crossed.

A day and a night in Munich. Their hotel was decked out in wood panelling and wrought iron and enough Gemütlichkeit to satisfy a multitude of American tourists. After they had settled in, they wandered through the narrow streets of the Altstadt. Sam suggested visiting the Frauenkirche and the Neues Rathaus, but Lenka demurred. ‘We have,’ she pointed out, ‘many grand buildings in Prague.’ Instead she wanted to see the shops, where she marvelled at the superabundance of goods on display. Sam followed her, trying to read her mood. It took him time to understand that the reason she looked but never considered buying was that she simply didn’t have the money. The few deutschmarks she had changed from Czechoslovak crowns were enough to buy little more than a few cups of coffee.

‘I’ll buy you a present,’ he suggested. ‘A dress. Is that what you’d like?’

‘You don’t have to.’

‘But I want to.’

She considered the matter as she considered many things, with a faint frown of concentration, as though she were facing some kind of political or moral dilemma. ‘All right,’ she said eventually. ‘But only because you want to.’

They decided on a department store on Marienplatz, a building from the 1930s that nestled, and nestles still, against the neo-Gothic absurdities of the Neues Rathaus. The interior was heady with perfume and lit by crystal chandeliers. It was as though they had wandered into a piece of elaborate and tasteless costume jewellery; amidst all the glitter Lenka seemed like an uncut diamond, plain of dress and manner but clearly more beautiful than any of the treasures on display. Beneath the obsequious eye of a shop assistant, she tried things on – skirts of varying shortness, dresses with differing necklines, trousers, trouser suits – finally settling on a halterneck dress printed in squares of primary colour.

Very Mondrian, the shop assistant told her, producing scarves, necklaces, handbags that involved further expenditure but would, she assured her hesitating client, bring the whole ensemble to some kind of perfection. ‘These things are very swinging London.’ A thoughtful pause. ‘Although Madam is not English, I think.’

‘Madam is Czech,’ Lenka said.

There was a moment’s hesitation in the woman’s flow of superlatives. ‘Czech is very interesting,’ she said.

Later they had lunch at a café and afterwards strolled in the English Garden. The afternoon seemed trance-like, suffused with sunshine and pollen and the strong scent of anticipation. The agonies and excitements of Prague were matters affecting other people on the far side of the world. ‘Can we stay here for ever?’ Lenka asked. She knew the answer but at that moment all things seemed possible. One might for ever stroll hand in hand over landscaped lawns and think only of the forthcoming evening and the intense and humid night to follow.

Next morning they shopped for those items that could accompany them as part of the diplomatic bag – deodorants, soap, all the things you couldn’t find on the other side. Stockings, silk underwear, an Hermès scarf. To Lenka it seemed both a subject of amusement – ‘That is the trouble with everyone in the West: they are obsessed with things’ – and a source of bitterness – ‘Why is there so much, and yet we have so little? Didn’t Germany lose the war? and yet here they are, like victors.’

After lunch Sam left her at the hotel and took their haul to the consulate to pack it away in the boot of the Humber, sealed in those canvas bags inscribed with HBM DIPLOMATIC SERVICE. There was the feeling of end of holiday, of bathos, of anticlimax. With Derrick driving, he went back to collect Lenka. Derrick got out to put their luggage in the boot while Sam held the door open for Lenka to get in. There was that manoeuvre of long legs, a glimpse of thigh that reminded him of saying goodbye to Steffie. That moment seemed ages ago, part of another world that he had inhabited. In just a handful of days this woman had strolled into his life with her particular mixture of innocence and recklessness and taken it over. He could hear the tut-tutting from senior diplomats, smell the scorched odour of disapproval among the office staff, see outrage and betrayal in Steffie’s face. He wondered whether he cared and decided that he didn’t because – this was the disturbing thing – beside Lenka they all paled into insignificance.

Once settled back in the car, Derrick’s eyes glanced in the mirror at the two passengers in the back. ‘You owe me one, Sam,’ he said.

‘Two. And a packet of crisps.’

22

It takes them two days. Two days, five arguments, one night in the tent somewhere in the environs of Regensburg. From Regensburg they follow the haphazard path of lifts through forested hills and open farmland. The size of the country dwarfs the two of them, reduces them to figures in a landscape, ants crossing the vastness of the place. By the afternoon of the second day a swathe of forest lies across their path as they plod through the empty heat. Occasionally a car goes by but no one stops. An American army jeep passes them travelling in the opposite direction, followed by a German military vehicle. A helicopter chutters in the sky away to the south. And there is something else in the air – a sense of threat, of fear, of moment, the kind of feeling you might have approaching the edge of a precipice. Iron Curtain. The phrase dominates their progress. On their map it is marked in a forbidding red, a serpentine line without obvious rhyme or reason, marked Staatsgrenze. Staatsgrenze is, they discover after thumbing through a phrasebook purchased in Regensburg, State Border.

What goes on beyond that line is as unknown as the blank spaces on a medieval map. Here be dragons. Ellie looks accusingly at the empty landscape ahead, the hills and woods, a winding valley with its occasional and indifferent farmhouses.

‘I suppose we just walk,’ James says.

‘What’s the choice?’

The choice, he almost adds, is to give up this fucking idiot idea and continue south as they originally intended, to Italy and the sunshine. But Ellie holds the ultimate card, the one that trumps every argument, the one she deployed with such devastating skill in the damp camp in Regensburg when they argued about it – you go to Italy if that’s what you want, but I’m going to Prague. By myself if necessary.

The fact is, he doesn’t want to lose her. Fando is held in thrall by Lis.

So they walk on towards the border with the stolid plod of soldiers tramping, while indifferent cars go past, a few in their direction, more the other way, westwards, away from whatever it is that lies ahead. A sign says Waidhaus, 3 Kilometer and warns Staatsgrenze. They walk again, and again no one stops. Waidhaus is a collection of dull, stolid houses around a central square with a blue and white striped maypole. Outside the town a sign commands

But ironically it is the American army which comes to the rescue, a jeep that draws up alongside them. The driver leans on the steering wheel and regards them with amused curiosity. He’s chewing gum. His face has an open all-American smile, a farm boy used to vast fields and a huge sky. Perhaps at home here in Bavaria. He wears khaki fatigues with sergeant’s stripes and a shoulder flash showing a fleur-de-lys with the motto Toujours Pret.

‘Where y’all goin’ then?’ he asks.

‘Why d’you want to know?’ Ellie says. ‘Are you going to arrest us or something?’

He laughs. ‘Thought you might need a ride somewhere, ma’am. I passed you a while back and you sure haven’t moved on a whole lot. ’Course, I can always leave you at the roadside if that’s what you want.’

She bridles. Is that the word? It conjures up horses and struggling riders and reins. The sound of whinnying in the air. Police horses in Grosvenor Square. She shouted Pigs! at the police and chanted Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh! and tried, rather ineffectually, to get through the main doors of the American embassy – behind which, so the rumour went, armed marines stood ready to open fire on any intruders. ‘Why aren’t you in Vietnam?’ she demands, her tone laden with sarcasm.

‘Because I was lucky.’

‘So what are you doing here?’

‘With the Second Armored Cavalry, supporting our German friends and allies. Look lady, I can’t stay here all day talking with you. If you don’t want a ride then I’ll have to move on—’

‘We’re going to Prague,’ James says.

Amusement steps down the alphabet, as so often, to bemusement. ‘Is that right? Well, I’m sorry to say I can’t take you quite that far, but I’ll take you to the border if you like. No one else is gonna give you a ride around here.’

Ellie looks enquiringly at James. As far as he is concerned there is no question to answer. They climb into the vehicle.

‘We’re not meant to carry civilians,’ the sergeant explains as he shoves the jeep into gear, ‘but if I found you in the border zone I could log you as an AVI. That’s Avoidance of Incident.’ There’s a radio in the back of the jeep. As he drives he reaches over for the handset and talks to someone in that peculiar, truncated language the military use: Echo Foxtrot found two Civs near the border and is escorting them to the checkpoint. A disembodied voice squawks back at him through the earphone. ‘Affirmative, Echo Foxtrot,’ it says.

The driver is called Chester. Chester B. Falk, Sergeant First Class. From Tennessee. ‘Along with Davy Crockett,’ he says. ‘You folks been to Tennessee? No? That’s no surprise. No one ever has but everyone has heard of it, because of Davy Crockett. Ain’t that a thing? What about you folks? Where you from? England, I’m guessing.’

‘I’m from Sheffield,’ James says.

‘Hey, we have a Sheffield in Alabama.’

Ellie is in the back of the jeep, with the rucksacks. She didn’t deign to sit with the soldier in the front. ‘I daresay the English one was named after it,’ she calls out.

‘I don’t think so,’ the sergeant replies. ‘England’s a whole lot more historic than the US.’

‘I was being ironic.’

He laughs. ‘We simple folk don’t do irony.’ Which seems to James pretty ironic in itself. They pass a further sign warning of the approaching border. Sergeant Falk glances round at his passengers. ‘You wanna see?’

‘What?’

‘The border. The goddam Iron Curtain. ’Cause I’m meant to have picked you up there, so we had better make an alibi, hadn’t we?’

The jeep decelerates and turns off the main road onto a farm track between fields of wheat. They bump over potholes, pass through a collection of farm buildings and come out onto the side of a shallow valley. A tractor is at work, dragging a plough through the heavy loam of the nearest field. As the machine turns at the end of the furrow, the driver catches sight of the stationary jeep and raises his hand in some kind of salute. Falk gives a jaunty wave in return.

‘That’s it, folks. The border between East and West.’

‘Where?’

‘Stream at the bottom of the valley.’ A concrete road runs parallel with the stream on their side of the valley; the far side is forest, implacable ranks of black pines stretching away in both directions.

‘Is that all?’

Sergeant Falk smiles. He’s done this before. Same view, same laconic remarks. ‘Pretty regular we get folks straying across the border. Step over the stream and you’re in the CSSR. Sometimes even our own patrols. But you can’t go far because it ain’t quite that simple.’ He turns the jeep onto the concrete road and drives south to where there is a break in the trees on the far side, a gap about a hundred yards wide where you can see through the forest into the world beyond, into the East.

‘There’s also that.’

Drawn across the far end of the break is the Curtain. More wire than iron, it cuts across the space about five hundred yards away, a barrier of fencing apparently as fragile and translucent as gauze. Beyond the fence is a watchtower, a spider creature supported on slender legs with the sky glinting on its several eyes. It might just have paused in its progress across the countryside in order to examine the jeep and its three passengers.

The engine of the jeep ticks as it cools. The tractor groans in the background, arguing with the heavy loam, while birds sing, as they will whatever the geopolitical circumstances. Far away the helicopter flies higher than most birds. Sergeant Chester reaches below the dashboard of the jeep, takes up a pair of binoculars and hands them to James. ‘Have a look. The Reds usually build the fences about a mile back from the actual border, but just here it comes closer. Something to do with the lie of the land, I guess. So we bring visitors here to have a look-see.’

James puts the binoculars to his eyes. The spider’s body leaps towards him as though he’s examining it under a microscope. The beast is peopled, two figures moving vaguely behind the windows, watching him watching them. He pans down the creature’s stick legs to the ground. In front of it there are two parallel lines of fencing, flattened together by foreshortening. He can pick out barbed wire coiled along the tops of both lines and guess at about fifty yards of cleared soil between the two. Beyond the watchtower is a parallel road to match the one that they are on.

Wordlessly, he hands the binoculars to Ellie.

‘The question is,’ Chester muses, ‘what’s it for? If it’s to keep us out then it sure ain’t gonna work. A Patton tank’d go through that like a tractor through a picket fence. They know that and we know that. So what’s it for?’ He glances round at his audience as though looking for an answer. ‘Easy, really. It’s to keep their people in. If you’ll excuse ma French, lady, you’re looking into the biggest fucking prison camp the world has ever seen.’

There’s a significant pause before Ellie summons an answer. ‘It’s not as simple as that. Look at what’s happening in Czechoslovakia at this very moment. There’s freedom. They’ve abandoned censorship. They’re allowing political meetings. And foreign travel.’

The soldier looks doubtful. ‘When you’re in the military you see the world through military eyes, ma’am. All I see is the Russkis just waitin’ on the borders to pay a fraternal visit to their Czechoslovakian brothers.’ He puts the jeep in gear and they move slowly along the track, away from the implacable gaze of the watchtower. ‘And when that happens, it’s game over.’

They reach the main road. Falk waits for a tourist coach to pass and then pulls out and turns left to follow the coach towards the border. The road dips down towards the bottom of the valley, but just before the stream there’s the German customs post. It has the look of a railway station about it, with most of the trains delayed or cancelled. There are barriers striped like barbers’ poles and German police standing around doing not very much. A concrete building flies the black, red and gold of the Federal Republic, while a signpost holds up a black eagle like a medieval shield on the end of a lance. In an adjacent car park are half a dozen cars and three lorries. Over to the right another building flies the stars and stripes and the union jack as well as the German flag. Beyond the border post the road dips down to the bottom of the valley, crosses a narrow bridge, then climbs up through the trees and disappears into the East.

‘There we are,’ the sergeant says. ‘I don’t go any further than here. Once you’re over the border Czechoslovak border control is about one K further up the road. So they tell me.’

James and Ellie climb out of the jeep. ‘You kids look after yourselves,’ the sergeant says, ‘and give my regards to Mr Dooby Check if you see him.’ He turns the jeep round, waves jauntily to the German border guards and drives off.

James and Ellie contemplate the possibilities. As they watch, a single car appears on the Czechoslovak side and crosses the bridge towards the West German barriers. A border guard examines the driver’s documents while his colleague walks round the car, inspecting it with scant respect.

‘A Škoda,’ James says.

‘What’s a Škoda?’

‘The car is. How can you tell a Škoda from a Jehovah’s Witness?’

‘No idea, but you’re going to tell me.’

‘You can close the door on a Jehovah’s Witness.’

Gratifyingly, she laughs. They watch the border guard complete his inspection and allow the car to clatter its way past them into the West. Then they sling their rucksacks onto their shoulders and walk down the slope to the barrier.

The German border guard is indifferent, taking their passports with barely a glance at the owners, flicking through the documents like a cardsharp before handing them back as though they are tainted. ‘You are to Czechoslovakia going? They will not let you pass – you have no visas.’

They haven’t thought of visas.

‘Don’t they issue them at the border?’

‘Who knows? At the moment anything is possible.’ He points up the hill on the other side. ‘Seven hundred metres, Czechoslovak control. Stay on the road or…’ He makes a gesture, a pistol firing.

‘This is stupid,’ James protests to Ellie. ‘You heard. We need visas. We haven’t got them so we’ll not be able to get in. We should turn round. There’s no point.’

‘Of course there’s a point. We’ll blag our way in. A bit of a smile, a bit of bullshit. It’ll be all right.’

The barrier – a barber’s pole, a jousting lance – rises for them and they walk down the slope towards the bridge, Ellie first, James half a pace behind. Notices are everywhere – warnings, exhortations, threats.

Across the hollow boards of the bridge the language changes into one that means even less to them:

Ellie leafs through the pocket Czech dictionary they bought off someone at the campsite in Regensburg. Probíhají doesn’t feature. ‘Looks like prohibition of some kind.’ Vodni tok is ‘stream’. Warning! she decides. State border. Forbidden to cross the stream. Which, despite James’s protests, is precisely what they have just done, and are now stumping up the slope beyond, into no-man’s-land, between ranks of silver birch that stand like sentinels forbidding trespass into the pine forest beyond. It’s a long walk in the afternoon sun. A few cars pass them going out, the passengers staring through the windows; more cars pass going in, Volkswagens, Borgwards, NSUs, loaded with camping equipment. The Czechoslovak border post approaches, shimmering out of the hot air from the tarmac. Signs shout at them.

Border guards observe their approach to the barrier with indifference. There’s a queue of cars warming up the summer air. Rows of parked cars to one side. Coaches drawn up like ships at a quayside. People line up at a concrete building with small windows whose blurred glass panes have never been cleaned. From the open door of an office music emerges as though from the throat of a tin man, something vaguely Beatles, vaguely Beach Boys.

One of the guards snaps his fingers. ‘Pas,’ he demands.

They hand over their passports. Ellie smiles. Smiles appear to be a newcomer to the border guard’s repertoire of expressions. He attempts one with scant success. He is no older than they, a pale youth with a prominent Adam’s apple and a scattering of acne pustules across his cheeks. He examines the documents with curiosity. ‘English,’ he says.

‘English,’ Ellie agrees. ‘Anglický.’

‘Beatles,’ he says. ‘Liverpool.’

But there’s a change in the music emerging from the transistor radio inside the office. No longer approximately Beatles, it is now plainly and excruciatingly ‘Puppet On A String’. In Czech. Ellie begins to sing along with the music, in English.

The guard smiles. This is a real smile, displaying a graveyard of teeth. ‘Přenosilová,’ he says. ‘Loutka.’

‘Sandie Shaw,’ Ellie responds, guessing.

A second guard joins in. ‘Foots. Naked foots.’ And then adds something in Czech – a tripping, splintered sound like the snapping of bones – which makes his colleague laugh out loud. ‘No vísum,’ the first guard points out, handing the passports back with something like a hint of regret. He gestures towards the customs house where already people are crowding.

They join a queue. German is spoken all around. Someone tries to explain in English and they hear a story of displacement and desolation that they only half-understand. ‘Once we live here,’ the man tells them. ‘Now we are as tourists coming.’

They edge forward along the pathways of bureaucracy. Inside the building is the smell of old concrete and stale sweat, and perhaps, lurking in the background, a hint of urine. Glum men sit at desks and administer the stamps of acceptance and authenticity with a device like a miniature guillotine. The mechanism descends, and there, on the page marked ‘visas’, is a new imprimatur: čESKOSLOVENSKÉ VÍSUM. A few endorsements, a flash of a pen, a date stamp against VSTUPNÍ and all is done. Money changes hands through a metal grille. For their traveller’s cheques they receive bundles of used notes denominated in Czechoslovak koruny. Questions are waved away. They move on, through further passageways and out into the afternoon sunshine on the inside of the Iron Curtain.

Border

It is interesting to contemplate the border they have just crossed. A curtain of iron – well, chain-link fencing, barbed wire and free-fire zones – but at the same time a mere line on a map between forest and forest, between mountain and mountain, between farmland and farmland. Between states, yes, the old kingdom of Bavaria, once ruled by mad King Ludwig, and the Austrian Empire, but a border between German and German, created during wars of religion and wars of politics and power, and culminating in the final border to end all borders, drawn on a map at the château of Saint-Germain-en-Laye near Paris in the year of peace, 1919, when the state of Czechoslovakia, mainly an amalgam of Czechs and Slovaks (who almost shared a language but little else), was created out of bits and pieces of the Austria-Hungary Empire. But here, with brilliant historical irony, the border meandered down stream valleys and along watersheds and failed entirely to take into account the language on the ground, neatly separating German speaker from German speaker and thereby planting the seeds of the next war which would bring the whole of the continent, indeed much of the whole world, to its knees in the bloodiest and nastiest conflict of all time.

Shortly after the end of that war, in the month of October 1945, in what President Beneš of the newly liberated Czechoslovakia called, with fantastic insensitivity, ‘the final solution to the German question’, the German speakers on the eastern side of the border (approximately two million of them) were systematically driven over this border to join their cousins on the western side. Thus, in the last sixty years of its effective life, the border became a linguistic barrier as well as a political one.

In the autumn of 1989, with the collapse of the Soviet empire, the watchtowers were dismantled and the barbed-wire fences uprooted. Finally in December 2007 the Czech Republic signed the Schengen Agreement and the border entirely disappeared, one hopes for ever. No barbed wire, no customs posts, nothing more than an almost forgotten line drawn on the map. More than that, the crossing point where James and Eleanor entered Czechoslovakia in 1968 was, by 1997, bypassed by a new motorway a mile to the south, so that road traffic now flows back and forth with only a ritual road sign to tell the driver that he has moved from one country to another. And yet… Czech and German biologists have discovered that the red deer that roam the Bohemian forest are still keeping to their respective sides of the border, Czech deer on the east, Bavarian deer on the west. These deer cannot have been alive during the period of the Iron Curtain, so it seems that they have been taught by their parents, perhaps their grandparents. Thus the last trace of the Cold War division lies only within the brains of Cervus elaphus, the red deer.

23

James and Ellie walk away from this border, into the world beyond. Emptiness strikes them. They see woods, and fields, some cultivated, some derelict, but no people. A scatter of abandoned houses. Little traffic except for the West German cars that have been queuing at the border and are now driving past, indifferent to the lonely plod of Fando and Lis towards an unknown Tar.

Finally a tractor stops for them. The driver is dark, weather-beaten, more like a sailor than a farmer. ‘Rom,’ he says, beating his chest. They have no means of communication with him but they presume that’s his name. Frowning, talking volubly, Rom takes them as far as a hamlet where there are more abandoned houses and a few modern concrete ones, where loudspeakers on telegraph poles play music to no one at all. The tractor goes off up a track running through the fields, leaving them on the tarmac road with nothing to do but walk. Along the roadside are fruit trees laden with fruit – cherries, plums, apples. They walk, eating ripe plums. It’s late afternoon and there’s the matter of where to spend the night. No hotels, no pubs, no campsites in this desolate corner of Europe. The space around them seems to grow larger, vast and empty. ‘Plenty of places to put the tent up,’ James observes. ‘Only danger will be being eaten by bears.’

‘Is that a joke? I presume it is a joke. Anyway, I’ve had it with your bloody tent.’

He ignores her and keeps on walking. Perhaps one of those abandoned houses which they passed a while back? Perhaps the ditch beside the road? Perhaps that line of forest away to the right? They plod onwards…

24

Afternoon sunshine on the forests and fields of Bohemia. The embassy car reversed the route of the day before, passing through the West German border post without let or hindrance, crossing the bridge over the stream and climbing the slope through no-man’s-land towards the Czech customs post. The car slowed to a crawl. There was a queue of cars at the normal channel, a jaunty wave of recognition as the Humber moved towards the reserved lane. The barrier went up. Lenka relaxed her grip.

‘Not even a carton of cigarettes,’ Sam said. ‘But a pint for Derrick.’

‘Two, you said. And none of that fizzy Czech stuff. Watneys.’

The car cruised on. Ahead two figures appeared at the edge of the road. Long hair and jeans. The usual uniform. ‘Hitchhikers,’ Derrick said. His policeman’s mind came into play. Regulations were regulations no matter where you were. ‘Shouldn’t be hitchhiking in the border zone. Could find themselves inside.’ He slowed and pulled out to pass them. Sam glanced out of the side window. GB.

‘Better stop, Derrick. Otherwise the police will pick them up and the consular department will have to deal with it. No end of a fuss.’

The car came to a slow and reluctant halt. Lenka looked round. The two hitchers were shuffling forward under the weight of their rucksacks, looking bedraggled and grimy. A boy with a fledgling beard. A girl with chaotic hair.

‘Bloody kids,’ said Derrick.

Sam opened the door and climbed out as the couple approached. ‘Going to Prague?’

They came to a panting halt beside the car. ‘You’re English,’ the boy said. ‘I wondered what a Humber was doing here.’

‘Embassy car, actually. You’re lucky. It’s forbidden to hitchhike in the border zone. You could have got yourselves arrested.’

‘So sir’s come to tell us off, has he?’ the girl said.

‘Actually, he’s come to offer you a lift.’ Sam opened the boot of the car. ‘You may put your packs in with Her Majesty’s diplomatic bags as long as you can assure me that they do not contain any illegal substances. My name’s Samuel Wareham, by the way. Sam to friends and associates, but you may call me “sir” if you like.’

Chastened, the pair climbed into the back seat. A faint smell of unwashed bodies accompanied them. Lenka edged up to give them room and Sam took his place in front. ‘I’m Ellie,’ the girl said. ‘He’s James.’

‘From Oxford,’ the boy added.

‘City or university?’

‘University.’

‘Which college?’

He told him. ‘And Ellie’s at St Hilda’s.’

‘And you’re going to Prague…?’

‘To suss the place out, really. Spur-of-the-moment decision. And to hear Birgit Eckstein play.’

‘Are you musicians?’

‘We know her.’

‘Do you indeed?’

The girl explained – hitching through the Black Forest, a lift from a couple of Germans, one of whom was the cellist. ‘So we thought—’

The boy interrupted. ‘No thought involved, just the toss of a coin. Italy or here, that was the choice.’ His accent was from the North. South Yorkshire, Sam thought. Other side of the Pennines from Derrick. Chip on his shoulder, but that was hardly his fault when he found himself confronted by Oxford.

‘So you’ve opted for Slav drama, rather than Italian opera? Well, be careful. Prague’s all very exciting at the moment, but if you want to avoid getting into trouble, be careful what you do or say.’

‘Is that sir talking?’ the girl said.

‘Just a piece of advice. We don’t want to be arranging consular visits and trying to contact your parents to explain that their little darlings are in Pankrác prison.’

‘You didn’t do that for me when I was arrested in Paris last May.’

‘What were you doing there? Playing at revolutions? Here they have them for real – and that’s why it’s so dangerous. Ask Lenka.’

From her corner Lenka made a little moue of distaste. ‘I don’t want to talk about things. They’re young. Let them enjoy themselves.’

‘As long as it’s not at the taxpayer’s expense.’

‘Aren’t you enjoying yourself at the taxpayer’s expense?’ the girl said.

Sam laughed. She was a snappy young lady and would, he didn’t doubt, make a shrewish woman. ‘You’d make a good politician. Where are you staying in Prague?’

‘No idea,’ the boy replied. ‘A hostel or something.’

‘It’s not easy, accommodation in Prague. There’s a chronic shortage of beds, just like there’s shortages of everything else. It’s the result of a command economy. If no one has ordered hostels and hotels, hostels and hotels don’t get built.’

‘I can help maybe,’ said Lenka. ‘You can have my room.’ She glanced at Sam. ‘For a few days?’ She wasn’t intending to go back to her mother’s exiguous flat, he could see that by her look. Sam thought about Steffie and her reluctance to move in with him. Just the occasional night. Perhaps a weekend. ‘We have to recognise the proprieties,’ she had warned him whenever he’d suggested a more permanent arrangement. She had sounded like someone in a pre-war drawing-room drama. And now Lenka was looking at him with that knowing smile, as though proprieties meant nothing.