Саймон Моуэр - Prague Spring

‘If I want a pee?’

‘I thought you were a Girl Guide. Just wander off into the cherry orchard and commune with nature.’

‘Sounds like Chekhov.’

‘Easier in those days.’

‘Easier?’

‘Long skirts and no knickers.’

‘They wore knickers!’

While they are arguing about that the little girl returns, silently bearing a large paper bag full of cherries like an offering to the gods who have blessed her with their presence. ‘ Merci beaucoup ,’ is all that James can manage, which seems paltry under the circumstances. ‘ Merci, merci. Très bon ,’ he adds despairingly.

The little girl laughs and runs off to tell her mother about the strange man who can’t really talk properly. Ellie is delighted with the gift. Perhaps it fits in with her idea of the generosity of the peasant class. ‘How kind. And it saves us having to steal them.’

So they sit together at the opening of the tent and eat their supper of bread and rillettes with cherries to follow. It is almost idyllic. Mainly Ellie talks, that quick, energetic talk, of what she thinks and what she intends, of how the day has gone and how she doesn’t really care about sleeping in a tent. ‘Actually,’ she concedes, ‘it’s quite fun.’

They take it in turns to wash at a tap on a nearby outhouse. Teeth are cleaned, armpits self-consciously splashed.

‘Now what?’ James asks. He blows up the airbeds, light-headed with the effort, then pushes them into the tent and stands up. The sun is setting, brushing peach and apricot into the cherry orchard. It is beautiful in the way that the ordinary can be beautiful. Just somewhere nondescript in Europe, in a cherry orchard amidst farmland where armies once tramped. And the tent is there between them, something between a double bed and a single coffin lying beneath the trees. Ellie dives inside. ‘I’ll tell you when,’ she calls from within.

He waits. Noises come from inside the tent, of movement, of things being taken off and stowed away. ‘Come,’ Ellie says, peremptorily. He unzips the entrance and peers in. She’s sitting cross-legged at the far end of the space, bathed in light strained through the fabric of the tent, shades of ochre and amber. She’s wearing a T-shirt and underpants and a smile; before her is what’s left of the bag of cherries and a tin of Gold Leaf tobacco.

‘Welcome to the tent of ungodliness,’ she says.

He crawls in to face her. What, he wonders, is expected of him? He struggles to take off his jeans in the confined space, and when he has finished and has sat himself opposite her she opens the tobacco tin. Rizla paper and mossy shreds of tobacco. The scent of something other than tobacco seeps into the close air, mingling not unpleasantly with the smell of socks and sweat. A pungent, earthy amalgam. He watches as she rolls the mixture into an expert cylinder. Her tongue emerges from its lair to moisten the margin of the paper.

‘What’s that?’

‘A smoke.’

‘I don’t smoke.’

‘You’ll try this, though.’

Understanding dawns. ‘You brought that with you? Through customs?’

‘Relax.’ Her smile is part amusement, part contempt, wholly challenging. A match flares and she takes a drag. Her inhalation isn’t perfunctory as with a cigarette. Instead she pulls the smoke in and holds it, breath suspended, eyes closed. The smell spreads through the narrow space, dark and fierce.

‘You’re mad.’

She laughs. ‘You’re a virgin. Here.’ She holds the thing out, damp at one end, smouldering threateningly at the other. ‘Let me take your virginity. Have a couple of tokes and then…’

‘Tokes?’

‘Drags.’

‘Then what?’

A faint giggle. ‘Then we’ll see. Go easy. Don’t want you to puke. Not in here.’

He takes the proffered joint, puffs at it and coughs. The smoke bites his throat. He feels his heartbeat rise. ‘This is stupid.’

She shakes her head, taking the joint back. ‘It just is . Trouble is all the adjectives we use. Adjectives kill things. Good and bad, moral and immoral, stupid and clever. It just is , James, it just is.’

The thing, the joint, the spliff – neither good nor bad, neither stupid nor clever, neither moral nor immoral – goes back and forth, briefly to James, rather longer to her because, she repeats, laughing again, he is just a virgin and shouldn’t take too much. His head starts to swim. His throat burns and he feels both sick and happy at the same time, a strange, disjointed sensation. Within the tent the orange light glows more vivid, as though the two of them exist within the compass of something organic, pulsing with blood. ‘Is that good?’ she asks and he agrees that, yes, it is good in its own, unusual way.

‘You see?’ she says, and he does see. He sees things very vividly, the precise shape of her sitting there a few feet away from him, flushed orange. Eyes wide and black. Lips black. A pout that is somewhere between surprise and amusement. Her bony knees up against her chest and the scribble of hair on her shins. The form of her toes that are unlike any toes he knows, which isn’t many, to be frank, but hers do seem unusually long, as though they might be able to grasp at a branch. Prehensile toes. A lemur, with those toes and those wide, black eyes. He laughs and coughs and the joint burns down and she produces a small pair of eyebrow tweezers in order to hold it to the bitter end. ‘There,’ she says as she takes her final puff, as though she has proved something by the whole exercise, something about his naivety and her wisdom and experience. Smiling vaguely – is there a joke that she might share with him? – she puts the tweezers away and closes the tobacco tin. Then she lifts her hips and slips her underpants off. ‘Now,’ she says in a matter-of-fact voice, lying down and parting her legs.

All he knows is things that are entirely physical – a swelling, a pulsing, the sensation of imminent explosion, a cloud of something like ecstasy filling his brain. Is this real? Is he, James Borthwick, really there? Is Eleanor Pike really there, stretched the length of the tent, longer laid out than her height when standing, the shadowy ochre of her legs and belly almost filling the whole crepuscular space? Or is she just a figment of his imagination? He touches her as though to make sure, feeling the dense texture of her skin, exploring the hard edge of her pelvis, stroking the silken plume of hair. His finger slips in. He tries to say something but she hushes him to silence. ‘Just that,’ she whispers, ‘just that.’

So he crouches over her while she pivots slowly on the axis of his finger, turning and twisting, lifting her hips up and down, even, at one point, issuing instructions – ‘Slower, slower, keep it slow’ – but mostly just emitting small exhalations that are almost musical in their pitch and intensity. And after a while – a long while when measured by the indolent clock that ticks inside his head – the music begins a crescendo, tempo and volume rising until she is convulsing and crying out like someone in pain. Then the pain or the pleasure or whatever is over and there is only grief left, grief and tears as he climbs on top of her and she twists her hips away, holding him and moving her hand so that he reaches his own paltry climax on her belly and has to scrabble for a handkerchief to clean up the mess. She turns away from him and his apologies and after a while there is the blessed palliative of sleep.

In the morning they barely speak as they pack up the tent, as though insults have been traded and arguments left unresolved. When he asks if she is upset, she pretends indifference. ‘I’m fine.’

When all is ready and their little camp is no more, they knock at the farm door to thank their hosts. The farmer’s wife invites them into her kitchen and offers them coffee with fresh bread and butter. They laugh and joke with her, or at least Ellie does; while James watches with something close to jealousy, that this unknown woman should be able to talk to Ellie whereas he cannot. That he could share the closest intimacy and yet can barely exchange pleasantries. Then they pat the little girl on the head (had she listened to the noises in the night?), say goodbye, shoulder their packs and set off on the road to Bastogne.