Саймон Моуэр - Prague Spring

They pass occasional tanks on the roadside, old Shermans, painted the colour of shit and mounted on concrete plinths as memorials to what happened here a quarter of a century ago, the Ardennes counter-attack, the Battle of the Bulge, the last ferocious assault by the German army on the advancing Western Allies before the Rhine. Rolling hills and scattered woodland rise ahead of them, a mellow landscape that is difficult to imagine in winter, in the cold and fog of war. Now it’s a lacklustre summer Sunday, with the few cars that pass full of families out for a meander round the countryside. No lift seems likely.

‘Where do we go from here, Ellie?’ James asks.

‘Luxembourg. Isn’t that the idea?’

‘That’s not what I meant and you know it.’

‘It’s what you asked. Where do we go from here? You asked it.’

‘I mean us.’

‘Ooz?’ She says it with a faux Northern accent.

They walk on. He knows the danger of pleading. Instinct warns him. ‘It’s just that after what we’ve done…’

‘What have we done? I was stoned, you touched me up, I gave you a wank. Does that make us married?’

Cars pass by. Frustration rises with the temperature of the day. ‘You know your trouble, James?’ she says. ‘I thought you were honest working-class but actually you’re just bourgeois like everyone else.’

‘I’m not working-class or bourgeois. I’m just a bloke.’

‘A bloke? Being a bloke is as bourgeois as you can get.’

Luxembourg. One of those privileged city statelets that European history has allowed to survive amongst the big boys. Monaco, Andorra, San Marino, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, cunning dwarfs who have succeeded in getting by in a world of giants, this one perched on rocks above a gorge. From towers, walls, bastions, bridges it regards two sweating hitchhikers with regal indifference. Lifts are few, shops are closed, businesses suspended, the Luxembourgeois are living up to their name, being both luxe and bourgeois , by going to church en famille and afterwards eating vast lunches that undoubtedly involve pork and potatoes. Ignored by them all, Fando and Lis climb up into the old town and find a pavement café where they dump their rucksacks and sit under a plane tree and drink beer. James unfolds the map. The German–French border, a fault line in the structure of Europe, meanders its way south from where they are. They debate the relative merits of left or right, east or west, Germany or France, Saarbrücken or Metz. It is like playing snooker, trying to think ahead, trying to judge where you should be one shot after the next. For the moment Ellie seems content as she traces the possible routes. When she is happy it is wonderful, like the sun coming out.

‘Let’s toss,’ she suggests. ‘I’ve always liked the idea of running your life by the toss of a coin.’

‘Or a dice. Throwing a dice.’

‘A die. One die, two dice.’

‘Pedant. Anyway, we all die.’

‘It’s a good idea for a novel. Using dice to govern your life. And at the end, you die.’

‘Called what?’

She thinks for a moment, frowning. ‘ Alea iacta est . The Die is Cast. No, The Dice Man Cometh.’

‘The Tosser,’ he suggests, and wins her laughter. She is, he decides for the hundredth time, entirely lovely like that. No makeup, her hair in disorder, her features strongly shaped, giving her a look that is a fraction older than her real age. Unusual in a girl. He feels like a younger brother at times, which is not what he wants.

‘Well, go on then. Toss.’

He takes a coin from his pocket, a half-crown that still lies there amongst the Belgian and Luxembourg francs he has already collected. He holds the coin poised on his curled forefinger, his thumb cocked beneath.

She stops him. ‘Wait, there’s another possibility.’

‘What?’

‘It’s Sunday. Crap hitching, you said so yourself.’ She looks round the little square. ‘We could stay the night here.’

‘Where?’

‘Not in your bloody tent. A hostel perhaps, or a pension .’

‘Heads we stay, tails we move on.’ The coin rings out, flickering in the sunshine, and comes up heads.

The auberge de jeunesse is in the ditch below the city ramparts, down by the river, with a railway viaduct looming over the roofs. It’s an ancient, dank building that might once have been a factory of some kind. ‘Looks like one of the Yorkshire mill towns,’ James decides, which pleases Ellie. She seems to derive a certain satisfaction at the idea of living amongst the proletariat. But the only proletarians here are the transient occupants of the hostel, a disparate collection of Americans, Australians, New Zealanders, leavened with German, French and Dutch. Everyone smiles naively across the various language divides, exchanging mispronounced words of greeting but little else. Banality is the order of the day. ‘This town is so old ,’ one of the Americans exclaims. ‘And amazing. I mean, who’s heard of Luxembourg ? And here it is – walls and towers and stuff, and real cute.’

Ellie becomes a focus of attention and James feels angry at the loss of her, annoyed that she has enthusiastically embraced this kind of communal living, even laughing and agreeing with the American about the age and cuteness of the town. She flirts with an Australian youth who wants to know all about Paris, argues with another American – or is he Canadian? – who is insisting that de Gaulle is once again the saviour of France. And he understands, with a sudden shock, that she might just as well decide to go off with someone else to somewhere else; that there is little keeping the two of them together. At least Lis had been bound to Fando by bonds of dependence.

That evening they eat an impoverished meal with a dozen others in the gloomy refectory. The talk is all the Vietnam War and the approaching American election and what a shit LBJ is but thank God he’s going and how two of the Americans are evading the draft. Afterwards someone produces a guitar. That was the curse of those days – someone always had a guitar and the ability to strum a few chords and all of a sudden it ain’t me babe and we’re no longer thinking twice about whether there’s any real talent because it’s all right. At eleven o’clock an argument breaks out with the warden over whether too much noise is being made, and the group breaks up. Ellie goes outside with the Australian. James follows.

‘A smoke,’ she says, seeing accusation in his face. ‘That’s all.’

The Australian grins. His name is Declan. ‘Hey,’ he says, ‘I don’t want to get in anybody’s way.’ He has blond hair and scorched skin. James can imagine him at a Pacific beach, surfing or wrestling sharks or something else requiring much muscle and little brain.

‘It’s just James,’ Ellie tells him. She has her Gold Flake tin open and is rolling a cigarette with great concentration. ‘You’re not in his way.’

‘Aren’t you two together?’

‘That’s right, we aren’t together. Just friends.’ She strikes a match, lights the cigarette and blows smoke away as though dismissing the very idea of friendship.

‘For fuck’s sake.’

‘Hey, don’t get riled, mate.’

There is a moment when James considers staying and arguing, with Ellie, not with the Australian. But he knows it would be pointless. Ellie is best left alone when she is in this kind of mood, so he just turns away and goes off to the men’s dormitory to sleep on a top bunk and wonder what she is doing apart from flirting with the Australian and smoking her home-rolled ciggies.

He drifts off into a disturbed sleep. Trains rattle overhead throughout the night. In the men’s dormitory, lying in racks like overgrown fruit, they groan and complain in their sleep. A couple – is the female voice Ellie’s? The sound is too indistinct to identify – argue for hours in the street outside the hostel. Morning leaks light through veils of grey cloud and James feels he hasn’t slept more than an hour or two.