Саймон Моуэр - Prague Spring

‘Mr Wareham is a cynic,’ Lenka warned. ‘He doesn’t understand the power of an idea.’ She was holding onto his arm, tethering him to their earnest conversation as though otherwise he might float up in the warm air and go sailing away over the river and the city like a golem, back to the West perhaps. It pleased him, this display of ownership, this assumed knowledge of the workings of his mind.

‘I’m a realist,’ he said.

They laughed at that. ‘You haven’t lived here long enough,’ Zdeněk said. ‘No one can live in this place for long and still believe in reality.’

One of the group had a camera. While they talked he moved around them taking shots – close-ups, figures seen through beer glasses, candid shots. They laughed and made faces and got him angry because they weren’t taking his art seriously. When Sam produced his own camera – a neat little Japanese compact he’d bought duty-free in Berlin – there was even more laughter. ‘Tourist!’ they called, as though it were an insult. But he managed to get them to pose more or less sensibly for one shot. The flash gave its milliseconds of brilliant, zirconium flare and held the group in stark immobility on the retina of any watchers and on the film itself.

When it was time to go – the musicians had packed their instruments away, the waiters were stacking the chairs – the group of friends broke up, as such groups do, with promises and exhortations, with kisses and embraces, with awkward last-minute discussions on the pavement of the embankment. There was a moment when Lenka might have gone with Jitka and her husband, but then the moment was past and the couple had gone and Sam and Lenka were alone, walking together towards the bridge. He said something about his car and driving her to Jitka’s flat, wherever that was, but nothing was decided. Holding hands, talking about not very much, they walked across the river, over the Charles Bridge between the two rows of grimy statues that made it seem like walking up the aisle of a church. Ahead was the altar of the nation, Hrad , the Castle, lifting its shoulders to blot out the night sky. Lights were on up there, officials at work in the engine room of the ship of state, desperate to avoid the icebergs ahead, while down here two people were negotiating the first moves in a relationship. In the secluded cobbled square in front of his apartment building he stopped, keys in hand, beside his car. ‘My flat’s just here. Do you want to come up?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course I do.’ The ‘of course’ was curious. He unlocked the outside door and led the way upstairs. Why should this be so easy? With Stephanie it had taken weeks, circling round each other like animals as likely to kill as to love; but this was so straightforward. They both knew where they were going and why.

‘Nice place,’ Lenka remarked when he opened the door to his apartment.

‘Goes with the job.’ He showed the way through to the sitting room. ‘Do you want anything? A beer? Coffee?’

‘A glass of water,’ she said. ‘And the bathroom.’

‘Of course.’

Why was everything ‘of course’? Was it all so obvious, preordained and inevitable? Ineluctable. One of those words with no antonym, no ‘eluctable’ to make things easy to get out of. Maybe the word should be invented, for the benefit of diplomats.

When she came back there was something scrubbed about her face, as though she had stripped it of all artifice. Perhaps she had just taken off her makeup and brought her appearance back to how she’d been when they’d first met. It gave a vulnerable cast to her expression, made her look rather plain but somehow more attractive. Wide jaw and high, Slavic cheekbones. Pale blue eyes. A face that had come a long way, out of the Asian steppe thousands of years ago to end up here in his living room with the view of the bridge out of the window. He knew this was fanciful nonsense but the conceit pleased him.

They kissed, gently, thoughtfully, exploring each other’s taste and texture, eyes watching. Steffie had always closed her eyes when kissing. She’d seen it done like that on the films, but Lenka watched him closely all the time, as though measuring him up, assessing what his intentions might be. ‘You don’t have to get back to Jitka’s?’ he asked.

A small smile. ‘Are you looking for an escape? I have my own key.’

He put some music on – that Janáček piano music seemed appropriate – and led the way into the bedroom. They undressed, rather shyly at first, watching each other cautiously. If he had expected passion and frenzy, that was not what he got. Instead they lay on the bed touching very gently, moving slowly, watching each other’s eyes, sensing how things – heartbeat, expression, breathing – change. How bodies can be measured and vibrant, as though under a great tension, like the strings of a cello.

Afterwards, they dozed, touched each other again, dozed, kissed, dozed again. Sam realised, amongst many other things, that he felt unconscionably happy. It cannot last, he thought.

And then he slept and so, presumably, did she.

When he came back from the bathroom in the cool light of dawn Lenka was awake. Her face seemed blurred with sleep, the features ill-defined, her hair a chaotic cloud across the pillow. ‘What’s the time?’

‘Six-thirty.’

‘It’s early. Come back to bed.’

He stood, looking down on her. Already regrets were coalescing in his mind. What did a night like this mean? What did it mean to her? What did it mean to him? He knew how dangerous it all might be. Diplomats were warned about it time and again, warned of blackmail, warned of beautiful women who will flatter a man’s self-image and wheedle information out of him. Swallows, the Soviets called them, swallows, with its hints of what they might do to you, and, correspondingly, what you might do as a result – swallow them hook, line and sinker. It was worse if you were queer – they’d find pretty boys who’d suck your cock while the film cameras whirred away behind one-way glass mirrors. Look at Vassall. A clerk in the naval attaché’s staff in the British embassy in Moscow, he had been famously set up by the KGB, famously photographed pleasuring and being pleasured, and was now famously languishing in Wormwood Scrubs. Of course, Sam told himself, he was running nothing like that kind of risk. No wife to worry about. No heavy-handed policeman to arrest him for indecent behaviour. As Eric Whittaker, his boss, had memorably observed, ‘If you’re going to blow your nose, for God’s sake make sure that the handkerchief is clean.’ Well, Sam’s handkerchief, folded and pressed, had certainly been clean enough up to now because Stephanie was British and worked at the embassy. The worst that might have happened was a raised eyebrow from the ambassador’s wife and a suggestion from the ambassador himself that Sam make an honest woman of the gel. Which would have meant Stephanie resigning her job, the archaic ways of the Foreign Office insisting on the spinsterhood of its female employees. But that hadn’t happened. The ambassadress had said nothing, while he and Stephanie had spent three months more or less together before she got that posting back to London that she couldn’t turn down because her mother was unwell and she was needed to help her father deal with the problem. Aged parents, an only child. It wasn’t easy. The intention was to keep in touch and catch up when Sam got back to London, which would be in eighteen months.

In the meantime, what would happen to their oblique, tense relationship, based as it was on emotions never fully expressed and intentions never fully articulated?

Half-smiling, Lenka looked up at him from the bed. Nothing tense or oblique at this precise moment. He reached down and pulled the sheet aside to expose her to the cool light of dawn. Steffie would have cried in protest and struggled to cover herself. Lenka didn’t move, just lay there beneath his gaze, imperfect and erotic, and so unlike Stephanie as to belong to a different gender altogether. Lenka had a body; Steffie had a figure. Lenka had a scent; Steffie had perfume. Steffie’s perfume was alluring enough – something floral, hints of jasmine and citrus and sandalwood – but Lenka’s scent was different. Ripe and dark. Something sour, astringent. Mammal, organic. He recognised it from someone else, the first woman he had ever loved when he was young and naive. She had been a generation older, a strange, wayward woman who had taught him passion but not constancy. Standing over Lenka, he felt that familiar stirring. Lust? Love? Something beyond words, expressible only by actions.