Prague Spring

25

The girl called Lenka has, it seems, taken them under her wing. James had thought her cold and indifferent when they first encountered her in the embassy car with that stuck-up Wareham bloke, but it appears he was wrong. Under her wing, in hand, whatever turn of phrase you choose. She’s given up the room she rents in a friend’s flat in the New Town, an area of largely nineteenth-century buildings beyond the square that everyone has heard of in the West, the square that isn’t a square, named after the king who wasn’t a king – Václavské náměstí, Wenceslas Square. ‘There you are,’ she says, handing them over to their new hosts. ‘You will be happy.’ Which is unlikely but full of good intent.

The flat is cramped and, despite being up under the roofs, cave-like. The ceilings slope, things are stacked in the awkward space where the ceiling meets the floor, the doors are low enough to catch out those unwilling to bow their heads. An upright piano occupies one wall of the living room, a poster by Alfons Mucha another. There is a family photograph – my grandparents, Jitka says – of a couple staring disapprovingly out of the Austria-Hungary Empire into the People’s Republic of Czechoslovakia. A violin case stands against the wall beside a gramophone and a cabinet of records. Their hosts are musicians, a violinist with one of the orchestras of the city and a composer. Jitka is the violinist’s name. She’s a sharp, nervous woman with a fine face that hasn’t quite discovered how to be beautiful but is instead merely trying to be interesting. Dark eyes and a sharp nose. A mole like a small blackcurrant above the corner of her mouth. Jitka is what everyone calls her, but her given name is Judita, the Czech version of Judith, she explains. Then she looks faintly embarrassed, as though such things don’t really matter. ‘You call me Jitka.’

Jitka’s English is good. Not as fully developed as Lenka’s but more colloquial. She spent six months in America, on an exchange, playing in a youth orchestra in New York. She knows the West… and now, she says, we will become like the West. If the Russians allow us.

Zdeněk, her husband, mutters something that Jitka translates. ‘He says I should have stayed there.’ She laughs to show it’s a joke. ‘It was just before we married. I guess he means I could have stayed there and gotten him to join me. Or maybe that he is not happy being married to me.’ More laughter, weaker this time, which makes it even less convincing. Zdeněk scowls. Composing seems to involve great anguish, because he wears an expression of grim disenchantment – they call him Bručoun, Jitka says, which is the name for Grumpy, the bad-tempered dwarf in the Snow White cartoon. ‘But he is also very political,’ she says. ‘Maybe we are all political these days.’

The room that Lenka has vacated for them is a contrast to the rest of the flat – strangely feminine, like a teenager’s bedroom. A painting of horses galloping on a beach, family photographs on the dressing table, one of them showing a young couple holding aloft a baby that may be Lenka herself, another showing her as a young girl dressed in some kind of uniform. Apart from these, an older photo shows a solemn couple standing amongst the props of a photographer’s studio – a classical column, a bowl of flowers. On the bed a teddy bear sits waiting for an owner who has surely grown up and gone away. The bed itself threatens more than it promises.

After unpacking their things Ellie and James discuss the price of the room with Jitka. She wants payment in dollars. ‘We need the dollars. For when we go abroad.’

‘It’ll have to be pounds. We’ve only got sterling.’

Pounds will do. Hard currency is what matters. Jitka apologises, as though renting the room to them is somehow wrong. On the occasional street corner in the centre of the city touts offer koruny for dollars at four times the official exchange rate. ‘Be careful doing that,’ Jitka warns. ‘Police often pretend to do it in order to catch you. If you want, it is better if I do any exchange for you. This,’ she adds in parenthesis, ‘is what we’re reduced to.’

Her husband smokes, thin, dark cigarettes with a powerful smell that seems to have been absorbed into the fabric of the flat. He works in the living room at the upright piano on which he plays figures while scribbling the spidery signs of musical notation on sheets of manuscript paper. His wish is to compose symphonies and concertos; his job is to write jingles for television. Ellie and James try to talk music with them. Ellie is better at this of course, but they both have the connection with Frau Eckstein to relate. Does Jitka know Birgit Eckstein?

A squeal of delight. Of course! Birgit Eckstein is giving a concert. Jitka plays in the orchestra. She can get tickets if they want. ‘Here in Prague there is much music. More than in New York or London, I think. The government puts money into music because you cannot see the politics in music.’

James asks how much the tickets will be and Jitka laughs, embarrassed. ‘No, a gift from me to you.’

At night James and Ellie can hear Jitka and her husband through the thin partition walls making love in the next room. ‘Making love’ seems a misnomer: it is an urgent, painful sound, like people at manual labour of some repetitive kind, working in a factory making useless products for a socialist command economy.

Next morning they venture out into the city, with an agreement to meet Lenka for coffee at the Kavárna Slavia. ‘It is where all writers get together,’ she explained when they made the arrangement. ‘Everyone argues. It will be interesting.’

So James and Ellie wander the streets of Nové Město, the New Town, finding them drab and dusty. The few shops have plain windows and sparsely packed shelves. The buildings, nineteenth-century most of them, appear tarnished and battered, like pieces of forgotten family silver found behind a locked door. Advertisements seem half-hearted, as though there is little point in making much impact because no one’s really buying. Trams packed with people clang and grind along the wider roads. In Wenceslas Square there’s some kind of public meeting: a speaker harangues a small crowd. Flags fly. Perhaps it’s a celebration of some kind, but it’s impossible to tell. As they walk away a man darts out of a side street and tries to sell them something. James assumes it’s sex of some kind; Ellie imagines stolen goods. But it’s just money he wants to sell, Czech crowns for hard currency. ‘Good rate,’ he says, presumably the only English he knows.

The café where they are to meet Lenka is on the corner of National Street, overlooking the river and immediately opposite the proud but grimy bulk of the National Theatre. Inside there is noise and the smell of coffee and cigarettes. People come and go, greeting, talking, arguing, ordering against the shrill percussion of china against metal. Waiters patrol between the tables with trays held high. Surreptitiously Lenka points out one particular table that is full of discussion or argument, it is hard to tell which. ‘There they are,’ she whispers, as though they are specimens – rare birds, perhaps – that might be frightened away by any sudden movement on the part of observers. She mentions names that mean nothing – Collage, Herschel, Cherney – while James and Ellie watch discreetly but uncomprehending. ‘It is like Paris,’ Lenka explains, without admitting that she has never been there. ‘Writers and philosophers discussing in the cafés.’

The idea appeals to Ellie. She wants to know all about it, about the writers and the philosophy, about the demonstration in Wenceslas Square and the arguments all around them. There’s the frustration of not being able to decipher a single word. Shop fronts, newspaper headlines, protest banners, all equally opaque. ‘What’s going on? What’s happening?’ she asks.

Lenka looks helpless. ‘The Russians want one thing, we want another, and so there are meetings to talk. Meetings, meetings. Words, words, words. They speak of fraternal comrades and all kinds of kec. What’s kec? Rubbish, nonsense. But everyone knows that Brezhnev holds a gun to Dubček’s head and Dubček dares him to pull the trigger.’

‘Russian roulette.’

Lenka manages a dry laugh. ‘Ruská ruleta. You see it is not so difficult – we say the same thing. But this is true, that Dubček understands Russians – he lived many years in Russia, he speaks perfect Russian – but Brezhnev understands nothing of us. So, you see Dubček wins. That, at least, is what we hope.’

Jitka joins them at their table. Both women seem excited by the presence of these visitors from the West. There are things to discuss – what Ellie and James should see, what they should do. There are so many sights in this city. An English guidebook has been found. Plans have to be made. It is so exciting. Even Ellie is excited. If she has been in a bad mood in the last few days, all is now changed with this experience of her first socialist country, the one with the human face.

When James asks why they are being so helpful neither woman is the least bit disconcerted by his question. ‘Because we want to make you love our city,’ Jitka says. ‘We want to make the whole world love our city.’

Lenka interrupts. ‘In the West no one knows anything about Prague. They try to forget Prague after they betrayed us in 1938. Do you know about 1938?’

‘The Munich accord?’

‘Accord? Does accord mean agreement? But we did not agree to anything. Mnichovská zrada, that is what we call it. The Munich betrayal. And because of this betrayal we are forgotten, our country is forgotten, Prague is forgotten, and who cares that it is most beautiful city in Europe? So we need people like you to help the world rediscover our city and our country. And to protect it against the Russians.’

One of the writers, a short, gingery man in a leather jacket, gets up and walks past their table. He gives a toothy smile, pausing to greet Lenka in the way that you do when you’re not certain whether you recognise someone or not. There’s a brief exchange in Czech, a blizzard of consonants. Lenka agrees with something said, laughs and offers a comment that clearly refers to English students rescued from the streets.

‘Ahoj,’ he says to them, sounding bizarrely nautical in this landlocked country. ‘Here is good,’ he tells them and they agree, it is good. ‘Very interesting.’

But he has to go. Clearly something calls him. ‘Čau,’ he says, the Italian ciao borrowed just to show how bright and carefree Czechoslovakia has become. They watch him leave, going out through the door into the street and glancing back at the last minute to give a jaunty little wave. ‘He is a writer of plays,’ Lenka explains. ‘Very important.’

Ghosts

That writer of plays is a ghost now, just another of the city’s many ghosts, for Prague is a truly haunted place. You can feel them around you. Some of them are just that, mundane ghosts that the tourist trade loves – golems, headless knights, wronged women, all that kind of thing – but there are others, there are others. The ghosts of the tens of thousands of Prague Jews killed by the Nazis, for example. Or the ghost of Franz Kafka, that anxiety-ridden man with the beady eyes and the sharp, inquisitive features (a rodent? a bird?) who pinned humanity to the pages of his fiction like so many insect specimens.

Although he was a Jew, Kafka escaped being murdered by the Nazis by dying of TB in 1924 (his three sisters were not so lucky) but his ghost still haunts the city, along with the spirit of his greatest novel, the one he never finished and never wanted published, the one he called Das Schloss, The Castle. But when people here refer to the Castle, they are not talking of Kafka’s masterpiece, which in Czech goes by the title Zámek, ‘Château’, but rather the seat of the president, as one might talk of the White House in the USA. And there it is, on the far side of the river as seen beyond the arguing writers through the windows of the Café Slavia: Hrad, Das Schloss, The Castle, dominating the town beneath, whose resigned inhabitants accept every complex, tortuous, irrational, absurd edict generated by the various organs of bureaucratic power – Federal Assembly, Party apparatus, Ministry – but signed off by the principal inhabitant of the Castle. Indeed, in his novel Kafka might almost have been prophesying the state that has come to pass in his home city less than three decades after his death, where fear is integral and endemic, where bureaucracy shuffles the cards and then loses them, where you are what the files say you are, where all is happy because it is decreed to be happy, and all is successful because that is what success is.

Other ghosts in the shadow of The Castle? Jaroslav Hašek for one, father of the Good Soldier Švejk. Hašek’s lifespan coincided almost exactly with Kafka’s (both were born in 1883; Hašek died one year before Kafka), but in every other way, both literary and personal, they occupy the opposite ends of any spectrum you care to invent. Drunk against teetotal, riotous extrovert against diffident introvert, bigamist against celibate, hilarious against sombre. Czech against German. Gentile against Jew.

But now all has changed. It is the summer of 1968 and the man in the high castle is a genial and white-haired war hero who goes by the name of Svoboda, which, in one of those coincidences of meaning that make one sure there is an ironist in heaven, means ‘Freedom’. And the man more or less in charge of the Party and therefore holding the reins of power in the country as a whole is some kind of interloper, a tall and gangling Slovak with a long nose and a warm smile and a tendency, dangerous amongst rulers, to consider the true feelings of the man and woman in the street. So now the writers and philosophers are talking at the café tables, writing freely at their desks, publishing in Literární listy and Reportér. A mere Two Thousand Words – the journalist Ludvík Vaculík’s famous June manifesto – has shaken the foundations of the socialist state. People can say what the hell they please and there is tacit concordance between the Party and the Castle because the Švejks are, for the moment, no longer in the ascendancy. Instead it’s socialismus s lidskou tváří, socialism with a human face, while the Soviet Union gathers the fraternal parties together on the banks of the Danube, in Bratislava, for a conference where they all swear that, while claiming ‘unwavering loyalty to Marxism-Leninism, each fraternal party may decide questions of further socialist development in a creative way, taking into account specific national features and conditions’.

It was during this Bratislava conference that a letter from five anti-reformist members of the Presidium of the Czechoslovak Communist Party was passed to a member of the Soviet Politburo to be handed directly to Leonid Brezhnev. This letter, the so-called ‘letter of invitation’, implored Brezhnev to intervene in Czechoslovakia ‘with all means at your disposal’ in order to save the country from the ‘imminent danger of counter-revolution’. So that there would be no misunderstanding, this invitation was written in Russian, with a plea to treat it with the utmost secrecy (prior to 1992, when it was released from the Russian State Archives, its existence was no more than a rumour). This treacherous missive, the excuse that the Soviets needed to give an aura of legality to their invasion, was passed to the intermediary in exactly the place where shit and piss is always passed, in the gents’ lavatory of the conference building.

What, I wonder, do the ghosts of Kafka and Hasěk say to each other about all this as they meet on the ghostly Prague streets? Or do they merely nod and pass by on the other side, the one off to haunt his favourite brothel, the other to the pub?

26

Things to see, places that live on in postcards sent to parents and friends – Tyn Square with the stiletto spires of the church of Our Lady standing over it, the Charles Bridge where musicians busk until moved on by the police, the Art Nouveau marvels of the Municipal House just near the medieval Powder Tower which has Gothic needles at the brim of its tall, pointed hat. Even the building and the room where Vladimir Ilyich Lenin founded the Bolshevik Party of Russia. Lenka will write about their visit, a piece for Student on how the Prague Spring is perceived by two students from the famous University of Oxford.

‘You will be famous in Czechoslovakia,’ Lenka tells them. It’s unclear whether her tone is ironic or not.

Another place that she wants to show them is something unique to her city. ‘You must take the memory of this back with you to England,’ she says. ‘This is very special.’

The building is a squat, secretive place hunched below the level of the pavement as though endeavouring to sit out the harsh storm of the twentieth century. A synagogue. They follow her inside only to discover that the storm is within, a blizzard that stings the eyes and batters on the mind. Not snow or sleet but names. Names everywhere, names on the walls, names on the arches and the alcoves, ranks of names like figures drawn up on some featureless Appellplatz. Names and dates: given names and dates in black, surnames in blood. Dates of birth and dates of death. Seventy-seven thousand seven hundred and ninety-seven of them, names so crowded that they appear to merge one into the other and become just one name, which is the name of an entire people – all the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia who died in the camps.

Lenka speaks very quietly, looking up at the rows and rows of careful lettering. Ellie and James stand beside her, neither of them understanding what to do with this. They have both read about the camps in books, seen them in photographs, watched the horror on film, of course they have. They know the facts and the figures. But this is none of those things – this is just a list of names.

Lenka peers upwards, pointing. ‘My grandparents are there.’

There’s a shock of the unexpected, like a physical blow. ‘Your grandparents?’

‘Vadinský Elias and Vadinská Sára.’

They try to follow her finger and make them out, as though the sight of the names will somehow mean a sight of the couple itself, her father’s parents, who stare out of the photo frame on the dressing table in her room in Jitka’s flat.

‘Yes, I can see them,’ James says, but he can’t. It’s just that he doesn’t want to disappoint her. He tries some mental calculation, guessing at her age. ‘How did your father…?’ The question fades away but, of course, Lenka understands what he intends.

‘How did he survive? He was part of the communist underground. For the first years of the war he was in hiding, then things got too difficult and he escaped to Moscow.’ She’s still staring up, perhaps so they cannot see her expression. ‘My mother was already pregnant with me by then, but she was a Christian so she was as safe as anyone could be. But the rest of my father’s family stayed in Prague and they were not safe. His sister, my cousins, all of them’ – looking hopelessly round the white space and the myriad of names – ‘they are all here somewhere.’

Here and not here. The fleeting nature of presence marked only by shadows on photographic paper and names inked onto the wall of a synagogue.

‘Perhaps he always had – what do you call it? The guilt of the survivor.’

Later they make their way outside, into the old cemetery where a narrow pathway leads through a chaos of tombs and headstones to nowhere in particular. The air is ripe with the smell of earth and mould and weathered stone. ‘This is just a historical cemetery. There is also a very big modern Jewish cemetery in Žižkov.’ A pause. The sound of birds in the trees, traffic in the street beyond the walls. ‘But of course now there are no Jews.’

No Germans in the border areas, no Jews in Prague, dissidents dead or in prison or relegated to menial work out of the public eye; a country defined by its absences. Until the last few months, that is, and these moments of strange, frenetic freedoms.

That afternoon, after the synagogue, she takes them to a political meeting in one of the many theatres of the city. The auditorium – black stage, black curtains and backdrop – is packed with an audience as vocal as the people up on the stage. Jitka’s husband is there behind the microphone, his voice as sharp as a blade, while Jitka herself is in the audience. Lenka provides some kind of summary translation of the speeches. There is argument, debate, laughter as well as shouting. Her boyfriend from the embassy is there as well. James has forgotten the man’s name. ‘Samuel Wareham,’ Ellie whispers. ‘His father’s at New College. A physiologist.’

How does she know these things? Physiology is more in James’s line than hers, and yet he hasn’t made the connection. He feels stupid and naive, possessed only of limited knowledge that is useful to no one. Then, as they watch the proceedings on stage, the focus of the whole theatre shifts, rotates, swirls giddily round in a vortex until, absurdly, they have become the centre of attention.

‘Representatives from English University of Oxford,’ Jitka’s husband cries over the loudspeakers, pointing at them. Lenka is telling them to stand up and take a bow. Voices in broken English are all around, urging them on. Zdeněk, that’s his name, is calling them to come up on stage, to speak on behalf of the famous University of Oxford.

‘I can’t speak on behalf of anyone but myself,’ James protests. People laugh. People applaud. People stamp their feet and cheer. Lenka has him by the hand and is pulling him down the aisle. Ellie is quite happy with the whole thing, as though this is some ridiculous revolutionary drama put on by the Oxford Revolutionary Socialist Students. But for James they are Fando and Lis, clambering onto the stage, finally arriving in the fantasy city of Tar. They are bathed in light. Zdeněk is showing them where to stand.

‘Greetings from Oxford!’ Ellie yells into the microphone. Her voice is edged with nerves but the audience cheer appreciatively. ‘Greetings from the students of Oxford and greetings from the workers of Oxford.’ More cheers. She’s growing in confidence, standing small and indomitable before the crowd. ‘Socialism has a human face!’ she shouts, and those that do understand explain to those that don’t. The cheering grows. ‘Nothing,’ she cries, ‘is more powerful than an idea whose time has come! You can resist the invasion of armies but no one can resist the invasion of an idea!’

James has never seen her like this, doing her Pasionaria thing. The audience cheer and he stands there reflected in the light that falls on Ellie. They both smile and wave. In the wings Lenka is there to congratulate them and lead them back to their seats with the audience watching and still applauding and the English guy, Sam Whatever, smiling wryly at them and saying ‘quite a rabble-rouser’, in that nasty, sarcastic manner that people like him possess. Schoolmasterly. It gives James the shivers.

27

The building is close to the river, close to Kampa with its ancient waterwheels and historic flour mills. With conscious reference to the club in Liverpool this place is called Kaverna. It consists of brick-lined storerooms, like an ancient vaulted church of three naves with arches leading from one to the other. Each nave is packed with worshippers heaving and gyrating as though in the throes of religious ecstasy. The walls are painted black, so illumination is limited to small pools of light. The air is rank with sweat and smoke. At one end of the central nave is a wooden stage raised two feet from the floor. On it, bathed in the uncertain light from three spots and flanked by speakers, are the musicians. Their name is blazoned on the bass drum: THE IDES OF MARCH.

The leader, John, stands centre stage like a preacher in a revivalist meeting, his mouth almost enveloping the microphone, his voice booming round the vaulted ceiling: ‘I don’t understand what the fuck anyone is saying!’

His audience cheer.

‘Y’all off your heads!’

They cheer some more.

‘Just a couple a days ago we crossed our own Rubicon – the Iron fucking Curtain!’

Laughter from those who have understood.

‘That’s’ – he glances at a scrap of paper in his hand – ‘Shelezna-shoustani-opona to you.’

More laughter. Cheering and laughter.

‘An’ we find you cats all spaced out here on the far side, just like the kids back home. So now we gonna sing about it.’

More cheers. Those who understand make some kind of translation for those who don’t. The drummer – it’s Archer, isn’t it? – begins a thumping beat, the bass guitar adds a grating undercurrent of threat and they launch into their signature song, adapted for the occasion:

The audience cheer like a football crowd, singing along with the chorus. Democracy they understand. Rubicon, as well. Free, they comprehend free. There is a guitar solo with Elliot, all teeth, long hair and ragged beard, playing his instrument as though it’s a girl’s body laid out across his hips.

Ellie is dancing, smoking and dancing, her arms above her head, her hair loose, eyes glazed, mouth pulled into some kind of smile. From the small stage Elliot points her out and ejects new words into the microphone:

People circle Ellie, clapping in time with the beat, while James watches from the sidelines, nursing a beer. He feels trapped, by circumstance, by language, by the girl even now gyrating in the midst of her little circuit of admirers. The temperature of the place rises. Jitka is there – they persuaded her to come, although, thank God, her husband refused the invitation. She is spiky and angular and strangely awkward with the tempo, but at least she is enjoying the gig, laughing with Ellie, circling round her while beyond them the music thunders on.

James goes over to the bar, where the beer is cheap and if you like you can chase it down with hard, white plum brandy. He finishes a beer and rejoins the crowd, feeling detached as he always does in this kind of setting, wondering where the ecstasy lies. Ellie grins at him out of her mop of unruly hair but barely seems to recognise him. They’re playing an Animals number now – ‘We gotta get outta this place,’ John screams into the mike – followed by something slow, a piece of blues with the guitarist, Elliot, wringing pain out of his guitar and John bemoaning the fact that she, whoever she is, has been gone fourteen long days and he’s praying to the Lord not to take his love away.

Later, James is out in the cool night, wandering along the water’s edge. The sound of the concert comes to him dulled by heavy walls – a drumbeat from the bowels of the earth. Beside him the river flows past, a great dark weight of water shining like obsidian. Lights from the other side reflect off the surface, but the impression is that they are immersed deep within the liquid, gleaming from the depths, shimmering with the passage of waves overhead.

Someone, a mere silhouette, approaches and says something in Czech. ‘Prominyte,’ James replies helplessly. ‘Anglitzky.’ I’m sorry. English. That’s almost all he knows, along with a few other stock phrases that Lenka has taught him. He’s sure the pronunciation is wrong but he doesn’t really care. And anyway, why the fuck is he apologising for being English and not being able to get his tongue round this impossible language?

The figure – a male of indeterminate age – stands looking out across the river. There’s the glow of a cigarette. ‘Where you from?’ he asks.

‘You speak English?’

‘Little.’

‘Sheffield.’

‘Ah.’ The man smokes, one can imagine thoughtfully. Perhaps he’s trying to marshal his knowledge of English geography. ‘Student?’

‘Yes.’

‘I work three years in London.’

‘Really?’

‘Czechoslovak embassy. Kensington Palace Gardens. You know Kensington Palace Gardens?’

‘Not really.’

‘Is very beautiful. Very private.’

‘And now what do you do?’

The man pauses and takes another drag on his cigarette. ‘I watch people. You perhaps.’

At first James feels only bewilderment. ‘You what?’

‘And your girl. And these Americans, what are they called? Ides of March. And all these kids.’

‘You watch us? Are you some sort of pervert?’

The man laughs. A faint gleam of teeth. ‘Maybe you could say perversion, but it is my job. To watch people.’

‘Your job?’

‘In London it was important people. Cabinet ministers, members of your parliament, civil servants. But now? Students like you.’

‘What the fuck are you talking about? Are you police?’

‘Police, yes. Something like that.’

‘Why should I believe you?’

‘No need to believe. Not at all.’

‘So why are you telling me this?’

The man pauses. The dull beat of music comes from the building behind them. Light leaks out across the grass as a door is opened, letting out a sudden flood of sound. There’s a shriek of laughter and two shadows running. ‘Perhaps I am warning you. You’re having fun. It’s an adventure, isn’t it? Lots of good kids, lots of cheap beer and laughter. Music, all that kind of stuff. Girls. But don’t make mistake. Here can be, will be, very dangerous.’ He flicks his lit cigarette end into the darkness, so that it spins over and over, a small, angry fire, and vanishes into the river. And then the shadow, like its cigarette, has gone.

Bewilderment is overtaken by a kind of nausea. James walks back to the lights and the noise. Inside the sweltering space, recorded music is being played. The Ides’ instruments lie around the stage like the debris after a fight. Some of the audience are dancing but most are just waiting for the next set. There’s Jitka talking with some people.

‘Have you seen Ellie?’

She grins. ‘You wanna meet my friends?’ Wanna. Her American intonation is exaggerated. There’s an exchange of greetings, smiles, nodding, the fumbling of language. Hi. Ahoj. Nazdar.

‘I want to find Ellie,’ he insists.

‘She’s around some place. I saw her going out.’

He excuses himself and pushes on through the crowd towards the far door. Archer, the drummer, is there with his arm round the waist of a whey-faced girl, his free hand clutching a bottle of beer.

‘Where’s Ellie?’

The drummer’s eyes are clouded. ‘Who’s Ellie?’

‘You know. The English girl. You gave us a lift in France, remember?’

‘Oh, yeah.’ A vague gesture, a grin. ‘Saw her with Elliot, man. Out back. The van.’ He squeezes the girl and she emits a little shriek of delight, like a doll that cries out when tipped over.

The van.

James pushes through the door. Beyond there’s a courtyard where people stand in groups smoking, talking, drinking. Parked against the far wall is the van. The Ides of March, it says on the side panel. Childlike flowers – daisies, buttercups – are painted across the corrugations. There’s something of the cash box about the vehicle. Riveted panels, doors closed and sealed, the sum inside unknown.

Ellie and Elliot. An assonance of names. James can imagine an assonance of bodies. Possibilities crowd in on him. He wants to know and he doesn’t want to know. He wants to see and yet he doesn’t want to see. He crosses the courtyard and goes round the back of the van and peers in through the single rear window. Within are variegated shadows and a chaos of stuff – boxes, blankets, sleeping bags, clothes – in the midst of which an octopoid creature writhes, tentacles spread, in the throes of ecstasy or death.

He looks away. If he looks away maybe nothing has happened. If he looks away, maybe everything will be as it was before. Behind him guitars clash and drums sound like thunder. Feedback screeches through the building and out into the night and a voice calls over the sound system, ‘Elliot? Hey, can you hear me? Where the fuck is Elliot?’ The name booms out into the night. ‘Calling Elliot! Come in Elliot!’

There’s noise inside the van, animal scrabbling. He waits, watching, until the side door of the van slides opens and Elliot emerges, all teeth and beard and seaweed hair, swearing and pulling at his trousers. He slides the door shut behind him and hurries across the courtyard. James runs forward and grabs him. ‘Who’s that in there?’ he demands.

Elliot stumbles, looks confused.

‘In the van. Who was in the van with you?’

The man shakes his head, eyes clouded. ‘A chick, man, a chick. What the fuck’s it got to do with you?’ He throws off James’s grasp and disappears into the building. All around people are pushing their way back into the venue while James stands there against the stream, wondering. Cowardice confronts him. To know or not to know. Ellie or not Ellie?

Spin a fucking coin. Heads, you open the door. Tails, you walk away.

He doesn’t even dare trust the decision to the coin. Instead, he goes back inside the Kaverna, where the audience are clapping and cheering expectantly and the Ides are on stage again, strapping on their guitars, John fiddling with his microphone – ‘How y’all doing folks?’ – and Archer hitting the cymbals, sending splinters of sound crashing around in the narrow space. Elliot is there, his fingers snaking across the strings of a Fender Stratocaster as they snake across James’s fevered imagination. John throws out his arms. ‘Beware, The Ides of March!’ There’s cheering, even some screaming, and the band breaks into ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, jingle-jangling its way through the specious phrases while James pushes amongst the crowd looking for Ellie, the Ellie that isn’t in the van, the Ellie who doesn’t pull her knickers down for stoned guitarists, the Ellie who, so her father warned him, has a mind that lives on fantasy. Jitka’s there but where is Ellie? ‘Take me on a trip,’ the Ides sing, ‘upon your magic swirling ship’ and Jitka lifts her arms and puts them round his neck. ‘Haven’t you found Ellie?’ she mouths against the sound of the band.

‘No idea where she’s gone.’

She casts her dancing spell his way and they move in some kind of harmony, for a moment pressed hard together. She is small and sharp and surely she wants to be kissed. There’s that mole on her upper lip. He leans towards her and for a moment their mouths touch before she pulls away laughing, tapping his lips with her agile, violinist’s forefinger. ‘Bad boy,’ she mouths. He turns and sways, careless of what he does, indifferent to whether he is or might be a bad boy. And Ellie’s there in front of him, dancing with the pair of them, her eyes glazed, her hair a disordered cloud. Jitka laughs silently. James leans towards Ellie’s head and shouts against the noise. ‘Where have you been?’

She mouths the words: ‘A walk. Fresh air.’

He knows it’s not true, hopes it is. ‘I was looking for you.’

‘I had a smoke.’ She pulls him closer so that her voice booms in his ear. Laughing and talking at the same time: ‘I’m stoned.’

‘Where did you get the stuff?’

‘You want some?’

‘No.’

She moves her head in time with the music like some kind of automated doll. The music jangles on, replete with all the platitudes of the age – magic swirling ships and smoke rings of your mind and all that stuff – while the crowd sways and waves, for the moment quite indifferent to the threats that encircle them. Music, they feel, can overcome anything – the Vietnam War, the Warsaw Pact, all hate, all violence, all the grim realities of life.

After the gig comes the sad, post-coital let-down. People hanging around outside the venue, their ears still singing. Others drifting away into the night. There’s calling and fractured laughter. Equipment is being carried out of the side entrance into the group’s van. And on the footpath alongside the river James and Ellie have a seething row.

‘What the fuck were you doing?’

‘I was doing whatever I please.’

‘You were with him in the van.’

‘And if I was, what’s it got to do with you?’

‘I just want to know.’

‘You mean you have some kind of rights over my body?’

‘Of course I don’t.’

‘Well, then.’

It’s the kind of argument that goes nowhere, just turns round and round with only occasional forays into a dangerous world outside the circle. ‘So what do you want to do? Go off with him?’

‘He’s a hell of a lot more interesting than you.’

They make their way back to the flat, walking through the ancient empty streets that might belong to any European city. Jitka went earlier – something about Zdeněk expecting her. She reminded him of the address and how to get there. ‘Half an hour to walk,’ she said. ‘It’s easy. Or maybe you can find a taxi. But beware – they cheat foreigners.’

Still arguing in a desultory fashion, James and Ellie walk back across the river, past the now shuttered café where they met Lenka, through streets he does not know to an address he can barely understand. There are few pedestrians around and less traffic. Shops shuttered, bars closed. At one point a police car slows down beside them and a pallid face looks them over before deciding that they are what they seem to be, just a couple walking home. No threat to the Socialist Republic, at least not for the moment. At first Ellie is acquiescent, but later, as the walking goes on, as they wander back and forth through streets already visited, she begins to complain. Complaint is a relief. He can tell her to shut up and not care whether she is offended or not. So, snapping at each other exactly as in the play, Fando and Lis walk on, unobstructed and unchallenged, turning past corners they maybe recognise, and buildings perhaps they’ve seen before, until James finally identifies the one they have been searching for and manages to open the street door with the key that Jitka gave him. Together, his arm round Ellie, they climb the stairs to reach the crouched landing on the fifth floor. As silently as he can he opens the door to the flat and they creep inside. But still they have to pass the tiny room where Jitka and her husband sleep, where a figure with Jitka’s dimensions emerges from the shadows, saying something in Czech. ‘It’s just us,’ James whispers. ‘Sorry we’re late, we got lost.’

There’s a murmured acknowledgement, some further whispering, a collision with a piece of unseen furniture and a suppressed oath from Ellie before they gain the sanctuary of the bedroom. He feels for the switch. The light, when it comes on, is the colour of piss. Ellie is a ragged, morose figure standing resentfully at the foot of their bed. ‘Turn that fucking thing off.’

He kills the light and plunges them back into a deeper darkness than before. It’s easier in the darkness, easier to creep to the bathroom and back, easier to undress in total darkness not knowing what will happen when they come together in the bed, easier to slide beneath the sheet from opposite sides and lie on their backs in the dark.

He wants to touch her but doesn’t dare. ‘Ellie?’ he says softly.

‘What do you want?’

‘Were you with Elliot?’

‘Elliot’s a creep. Why the hell would you think that?’

‘Were you with him?’

There’s a little breath of sarcastic laughter in the darkness. ‘You’re jealous.’

He remembers her words, snapped at him impatiently: you’re jealous of what you already possess; envious of what someone else has. ‘Of course I’m jealous.’

‘That’s very bourgeois of you. But sweet.’

‘But were you? There was someone in the van with him.’

‘How do you know that? Were you spying? How pervy. What did you see?’

‘Never mind what I saw—’

‘Well you obviously do.’

He thinks of her father, the barrister, cross-examining a witness to expose the truth. ‘I saw him with a woman, in the van. Fucking.’

‘And you think it might have been me?’

‘You weren’t around anywhere. Someone said you were in the van.’

‘Someone said,’ she repeats, her tone laden with sarcasm. There is a silence. And then her voice in the darkness: ‘Anyway, if it was me, what would you do?’

It’s a good question. What would he do? ‘I just need to know, that’s all.’

‘I don’t think need has anything to do with it. You want to know. You want to know what I do with my body.’

‘Don’t be daft.’

‘It’s ownership, isn’t it? You want to own my body, and the thought of my sharing it with other men – Elliot or whoever – makes you think you’ve been robbed of something that’s yours. But it’s my body, to do with what I like.’

‘You’re putting words into my mouth.’

‘I don’t think I am. I think you are a typical bourgeois male chauvinist.’

And with that she turns away from him and goes to sleep. James lies beside her in the narrow bed. Still he doesn’t know. Was that her in the van with Elliot, or not?

In the morning she claims to remember little of the evening before. ‘What happened?’ she asks, sitting up in bed, her hair in chaos, her face pale and drawn. As she looks round the cramped room she gives strange glimpses of her mother. ‘God, I feel awful. Did I behave badly?’

‘You weren’t at your most charming.’

‘You say that just to get your own back.’ The sheet has slipped from her shoulders. Her small breasts look limp, like discarded balloons after the party. ‘The music was good. I remember the music.’ A sudden, sideways glance. ‘Did I do things I have to apologise for?’

‘If you don’t remember them, I don’t think they count.’

‘How very Jesuitical of you. Did we…?’

‘No.’

‘I thought not. I remember a long walk, going round and round in circles.’ She slips out of bed and roots around amidst the mess for a T-shirt. ‘God, I feel awful.’

Watching her, James feels intimacy alloyed with indifference. It’s how he imagines a marriage might be after many years, when love has died and familiarity has taken its place. While she goes to the bathroom he gets dressed and finds Jitka in the tiny kitchen making coffee. Her husband has gone out early. Something to do with his work. She looks at James with quiet, thoughtful eyes. ‘Did you have a good time last evening?’

He smiles at her and wonders, thinking of how he danced with her, pressed up hard against her for a moment, touching his lips on hers.

‘It was fun. The music was good, wasn’t it?’

She laughs. ‘The music was bad. But it was still fun.’ She pushes past him in the narrow space, resting her hand on his waist for a fraction of a second longer than one might expect.

28

That evening there is the Birgit Eckstein concert, in a nineteenth-century auditorium named after a prince of an empire that no longer exists. The orchestra – the sharp figure of Jitka is there in the first violins – is flanked by gilded columns and backed by the façade of a Greek temple. Overhead is a ceiling of plasterwork in blue and gold, while all around are fluted pillars and pilasters. Into the focus of this comes first the conductor, the Russian Gennady Egorkin, a sharp, anxious man with a receding hairline that makes him look older than he is. He stands on his little podium and faces the applause with something like apprehension. Then the fragile figure of Birgit Eckstein appears in the wings, looking a little like a cleaning lady who has just found a cello lying round the place, picked it up and wandered onto the stage to find the owner. But she is the owner, and Egorkin holds her hand aloft to display the fact while she gazes round with faint bemusement at the audience. The applause engulfs the pair of them. It echoes from the nymphs and satyrs, thunders on the boards, resonates in the instruments. As it slowly dies away Frau Eckstein takes her seat, hitches up her skirts and pulls the cello to her. Her Guadagnini, an Italian gigolo clutched between her legs.

There follows an intense silence. One thousand people anticipating the moment. Egorkin bows faintly towards Eckstein, then turns to the orchestra. Maybe everything is to his satisfaction. If so, he raises his baton to start, like an artist putting his brush to canvas, and with quiet care paints the first notes – solemn, pensive strokes, a theme played back and forth between woodwind and strings while Birgit Eckstein sits immobile on her plinth, as though cast in pewter. It is only when the orchestra seems about to reach some kind of conclusion that suddenly, almost unexpectedly, she moves to strike her cello. That act brings about a kind of miracle, something strangely organic, a fusion between the sensuous curves of the instrument and the sharp angles of Birgit Eckstein’s small frame, the two contrasting shapes becoming one sonorous body resonating throughout the auditorium, crying out in tones that are almost human. Is it a lament for something innocent that is lost for ever? James tries to cling to the notes as they circle round him, but they are ephemeral, evanescent, each following the other and all dying away before he can work out what to do with them. It is the totality that matters, not the fragments; the whole complex wave equation, not the individual terms. And as he listens, emotion creeps up on him without his being aware of it, like a thief in the night coshing him from behind. His nose stings and his eyes smart. Frau Eckstein’s small figure clutches at the body of the cello, grips its torso between her legs, sways with it, senses – you can tell, from the body of the auditorium you can tell – the vibrations of it with her thighs and her belly as she draws her bow across the strings as though fingering the flesh of a lover. He had never imagined that anything to do with classical music could be so blatantly sexual. And he senses Ellie beside him feeling the same thing. What she cannot experience with sex she can capture here – possession, surrender, the absorption of self into something greater than the individual. Perhaps she knows it. She grips his hand with tight talons while the crescendos, the climaxes, the agonising slides into the depths, the slow, meditative passages work their way through the hall and into the thousand listening minds.

After the performance there is applause and bowing and a bouquet of flowers. While the orchestra stands, the indomitable soloist leaves for the wings before being called back to further plaudits, a strange ritual that takes on some of the qualities of a dance, the conductor holding high her hand as though leading her in a gavotte, Birgit Eckstein carrying her cello with the other, the orchestra players making their own little gestures of applause, the whole thing choreographed by obscure tradition. People call for an encore and on her third re-entry Frau Eckstein offers a faint smile and steps back onto the podium. There is immediate silence. She sits, composes herself for a moment, then lifts her bow, and from the first chord James knows, with the sudden thrill of arcane knowledge, what it will be – the Prelude from Bach’s C-minor cello suite. When the piece comes to the end amidst the storm of more applause, he is in tears.

A novel experience, that, to be moved to tears by the abstract sounds of music. In fact, a first for James. Something to do with the instrument itself, so close to the human voice in tone and timbre, but also something to do with the shock of familiarity, that he knew the player and also that he knew what she was going to play as an encore and recognised it as soon as she struck the first note.

29

After the Dvořák came the interval. All the usual milling around, people not knowing exactly what to say about what they had just heard and what was to come. Sam wondered whether to try and find a drink, but Eric Whittaker was somewhere in the auditorium, and Madeleine with him. And Lenka had brought along those bloody hitchhikers she seemed to have adopted, which made things that bit more awkward. The girl was fine but the boy had seemed out of place in a concert hall. He had even started to applaud after the first movement of the Dvořak until the girl – Ellie, wasn’t it? – hushed him to silence.

‘So why the hell don’t people clap when it’s so good?’ he was demanding as they stood around in the aisle, stretching their legs.

‘Because they don’t,’ the girl retorted.

Sam noticed the Whittakers and couldn’t avoid catching Madeleine’s eye. He excused himself and made his way to the back of the auditorium where there was a fraught conversation in which Eric extolled the virtues of the Elgar Cello Concerto above the Dvořák while Madeleine strained to see who Sam had brought with him.

‘What’s next?’ Eric asked, trying to read the programme. ‘The Brahms Double Concerto, is it?’

Sam translated for him. ‘A Russian violinist called Nadezhda Pankova. Can’t say I’ve heard of her. Apparently studied at the Moscow Conservatory under Igor Oistrakh. Second place in the 1966 Wieniawski Competition in Poznan and third place in the International Tchaikovsky Competition, 1965.’

‘Hardly a star,’ Eric remarked. ‘Studied under Oistrakh? How many thousands?’

A bell rang; people filed back into the auditorium. Madeleine touched Sam’s wrist. ‘Who is the lovely lady, Sam?’

‘A friend.’

‘The friend looks very attractive.’

He feigned indifference. ‘And a couple of hitchhikers she’s taken under her wing. I think I’d better get back…’

They filed back into their seats and settled. The orchestra was returning, followed by Egorkin himself, who now faced the audience with clenched hands held aloft in some kind of demonstration of solidarity. A Russian saluting the Czechs. The applause rose appreciatively, a tide of enthusiasm borne on their awareness of his reputation, his public protest over the trial in Moscow of the dissidents Daniel and Sinyavsky and the subsequent withdrawal of permission for him to travel to the West. They knew well enough where his sympathies lay.

Further applause greeted the soloists, Birgit Eckstein leading the way as befitted the senior player, followed by the young violinist, bringing with her a small reputation, promising abilities and a condescending smile from Birgit Eckstein. Yet, as the pair acknowledged the applause, the young woman’s flame-red evening dress quite consumed Eckstein’s charcoal grey.

There was that collective settling before the music began. And then the conductor raised his baton and launched the piece, the Brahms Double Concerto, a complex interplay of orchestra, violin and cello in which the young Pankova fenced with the more experienced cellist and matched passage for passage, thrust for thrust, always keeping her opponent at bay, all of this without either looking at the other, as though they were two swordsmen fighting blind. Except towards the end of the final movement when the women glanced at each other for a moment, and smiled.

Applause. A tumult of applause. Catharsis.

Afterwards, in a pillared room with views over the river, there was a reception in honour of the musicians. The conductor was there with a small escort from the Soviet embassy to keep him company, while the Soviet ambassador himself, stout, bespectacled and grim, watched in disapproval. Beside him stood the minister for cultural affairs and the mayor of Prague, beaming on everyone as though they were to take the credit. Guests, journalists, photographers clustered round the soloists. Glasses of Moravian wine were raised in salute. Flashbulbs popped like bursts of summer lightning. Thankfully, Eric and Madeleine had gone, in the name of duty, to some diplomatic event or other on the other side of town.

Sam led Lenka towards the Russian group. ‘I don’t want to speak with them,’ Lenka protested, but Sam only laughed. ‘You can do what you please, but if diplomats applied that criterion we’d never talk to anybody.’

Reluctantly the conductor’s guardians edged aside to let them through to the great man. There was a shaking of hands. Lenka was introduced. Surprise was expressed at Sam’s fluent Russian and at Egorkin’s near-fluent English. ‘But my friends here do not like it when I speak in English. They fear I am saying dangerous things.’ He laughed, slipping back into Russian to the obvious relief of the escort. They discussed the performance, the emotional impact of the Dvořák, the technical difficulties of the Brahms. It was hard for a young violinist to perform the Double Concerto with a cellist of such standing as Frau Eckstein, but Nadezhda Nikolayevna had achieved it with brilliance, didn’t Mr Wareham agree?

Of course he did.

‘You must come to one of our recitals,’ Egorkin said. ‘I will accompany Nadezhda Nikolayevna on the piano. We play in Brno, of course, and Ostrava, but also Marienbad. Perhaps you will make it to Marienbad? It would be good to have a sympathetic ear in the audience.’ There was a sudden and surprising tone of pleading in his voice. ‘Please come. Perhaps there we can speak more freely. I will give you tickets so you cannot refuse.’ He glanced round and summoned the violinist from where she was talking with a journalist. She came obediently, more like a secretary than a principal performer. ‘We will have tickets for Marienbad sent to this gentleman. Mr…?’

‘Wareham.’

Further introductions were made. Hands were shaken. Pankova’s were small and slender but with a sharp grip. She wrote the name Wareham into a little notebook in careful Latin characters. ‘Mr Wareham is at the British embassy,’ Egorkin explained. He glanced at Lenka. ‘Two tickets, of course.’

‘Yes, but I’m not sure—’

‘You cannot be sure to come?’ The Russian made an expression of exaggerated disappointment. ‘But you must come, Mr Wareham. We will be playing the Kreutzer Sonata, which everyone knows, but particularly the Janáček, which no one knows but everyone should. Do you know it? It is very beautiful and deeply mysterious. Full of the soul of this wonderful country.’ And then one of the Russian embassy people had stepped in with an approximation of a smile and the suggestion that Comrade Egorkin and Comrade Pankova had other commitments to meet and could not spend too much time talking to just two guests.

‘I would be most sad if you cannot make it,’ Egorkin said, giving a jaunty salute as he and the violinist were encouraged away.

30

They wait while the diminutive grey figure of Birgit Eckstein sips mineral water and talks to someone from Czech Radio. James feels awkward and embarrassed but Ellie is determined. Jitka has managed to get them this far, into the room where Frau Eckstein sits and brings her mind back from Dvořák and Brahms to focus on the commonplace and the trivial. ‘We’ve come all this way in order to hear her,’ Ellie insists. ‘We can’t just walk away.’

When the interview is over Frau Eckstein looks round vaguely at the two of them, saying something in German. Even without knowing a word of the language, James can tell what she is saying. Who are these people? Are they students?

‘Hello, Frau Eckstein.’

She doesn’t recognise them.

‘Frau Eckstein,’ Ellie says. ‘It’s us. Eleanor and James. We stayed at your house a few days ago. We came to Prague, just as you said. To hear you play.’

A vague smile, as though she is tolerant of things the young will do, absurd things like cross the Iron Curtain on a whim. Somehow James expected more – an explosion of surprise, an embrace, a motherly welcome. ‘I remember. Yes, I remember.’

But perhaps she doesn’t even really remember them – just two hitchers picked up on the road and given a place to pitch their tent for the night. Nothing much. ‘The Bach,’ he says, as though to give her something on which to fix her memory. ‘You played that for us. In your music room.’

‘Of course I did. That is always my encore piece.’

Always my encore piece. Understanding dawns that, far from being spontaneous, an encore may be something practised, anticipated, given out like sweets to adoring children.

‘Ellie and I thought you played wonderfully.’

The woman shakes her head. She’s tired, bothered by all the fuss. ‘What do you know? I played poorly but only I know it.’ A bitter laugh. ‘I play poorly and the people applaud just the same. What do they know? Dvořák himself disliked the cello as a solo instrument, do they know that? He said the instrument’s middle register is fine but the upper voice squeaks and the lower voice growls. Did you know that? That maybe should be a lesson for you – it is quite possible for an artist not to understand his own art.’

She turns. There’s a photographer trying to get her to look his way. Flashes bounce around the room. She looks peeved. No she will not pose with her cello. The cello is for playing, not posing. ‘These people,’ she says, with a tired and colluding smile towards Ellie and James, ‘they are vulgar and they know nothing.’