Саймон Моуэр - Prague Spring

Sam took up the camera again, quietly, so as not to disturb his prey. If he thought of their escort, he didn’t really care. The dirty buggers could peer at her through the trees with binoculars if that pleased them. Play with themselves if they liked. He’d not mentioned their presence to Lenka because he didn’t want to spoil the day. The camera shutter gave its little secretive clap of satisfaction. Apparently indifferent either to the camera or to anyone else who might have been watching, Lenka the water nymph stepped forward onto the pebbles, then on into the flow. The camera snatched at successive images. The water rose from ankle to calf, to thigh, over her pale buttocks and up to her waist, as though she were being assumed back into her natural element. The egret stretched its legs and flew away. Sunlight glittered on the water all around. Finally Lenka launched herself into the stream, her hair floating free on the surface like weed.

‘You aren’t coming in,’ she called back. Was it a question or a statement of fact? He hid the camera away, stripped off hurriedly and joined her in the water, conscious of his own bony, angular masculinity that seemed only graceless and maladroit beside her loveliness. She laughed and splashed. White masses wobbled and shimmered beneath the surface. He felt cool flesh and rough hair and wet lips and suddenly, drifting in the current, they were doing, more or less, what they had done before only in the cloistered privacy of his bedroom – a bohemian act in the middle of rural Bohemia, surrounded by her woods and fields, enveloped by the waters of the Vltava. Rusalka.

‘You are not ashamed, are you?’ she asked when, quite suddenly, it was all over.

‘Rather overwhelmed,’ he admitted.

‘Don’t worry, you will not drown.’

Later they towelled themselves dry and lay in the sun. A breeze had got up to bring some kind of cool to the day. They ate sandwiches and drank beer and talked, and when they’d finished eating she lit a cigarette, one of the American ones he had given her, blew smoke away into the warm air and asked about Štěpánka. She called her Štěpánka, not Steffie or Stephanie. Štěpánka, as though Lenka were subsuming her into the Slav world.

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘I want to understand.’ A knowing smile. ‘She is perhaps competition.’

He reached out and took the cigarette from her mouth. He could feel the dampness of her saliva on the tip as he put it to his lips. ‘She works for the foreign service. I told you that. Not a diplomat. A secretary. And she’s just gone back to England. Posted. Our relationship is on hold, do you understand? Paused. A cooling-off period.’

‘Was it hot before?’

‘Lukewarm.’

She didn’t know the word. He explained – tepid, between hot and cold – and she lighted on the Czech word with delight: ‘ Vlašný ! So is Štěpánka a beautiful, vlašnou English rose?’

‘I suppose she is.’

‘And are you going to get married?’

‘We’ve talked about it.’

‘Diplomatically?’

‘Very diplomatically.’

She laughed at the possibility of Sam contemplating marriage to this lukewarm English rose. ‘That means you have made no decision. Diplomats never make decisions, do they? They always refer back to their masters.’

‘But this time—’

‘There is no master. And you cannot make up your mind. Of course she is not your first girl. There have been many others. So by now you should know.’

He laughed. She had a wonderful capacity for making him laugh. Whether this was intentional on her part he wasn’t sure.

‘So tell me about these other girls who have made you so without decision.’

‘ All of them?’

‘Will it take too long? The first, then. Tell me about the first.’

So he told her. A brief outline of part of the story: a friend of his mother’s, older than he by some years. Ten, twelve years, maybe. A brief, chaotic affair that lost him his virginity and gave him, what? some kind of understanding of what devotion might be. Love? He wasn’t sure. ‘It was just before I went to university. She made a great impression on me.’

‘And what happened to her?’

‘We… lost touch. She went away. Abroad.’ He shrugged off that part of his life that had meant so much at the time and was now consigned to the scrapheap of memory. ‘Now you tell me,’ he said, as though it were a game. Confessions, a kind of Chinese whispers, the message being passed from one to another and mangled in the process. ‘Now it’s your turn.’

She took the cigarette back. ‘You remember what Zdeněk said that evening?’

‘Zdeněk?’

‘Jitka’s husband. The composer. He said that here no one can live very long and still believe in reality. It is true. You have to remember it. Perhaps now for the first time we are beginning to live reality. It is like waking up from a bad dream. Suddenly all those things that were impossible during the bad dream become possible. We can say what we like, go places that we want, we can even try to forget the bad dream. If the Russians come with their guns and their tanks, then we will go back to the bad dream again and reality will disappear, but for the moment…’

She paused, smoking, looking away across the river to the woods on the far side. Of course he wondered what she was thinking, but there was something inscrutable about her expression that made reading her difficult. After a while she seemed to make up her mind. ‘So, in the dream – the bad dream – there was a party official, aparátník , my mother knew. I think he had known my father. Anyway, he was my mother’s friend. The usual thing: she gave him what he wanted, he used his influence on our behalf. What do the Americans say? A deal. I used to go to play with friends when he came to call. “Good day, Comrade Rovnák. What a shame, I was just going out.” That kind of thing. It was through him that we were allowed back to Prague.’

‘Allowed back?’

‘That is another part of the bad dream. After my father’s conviction we were not allowed to live in Prague. So we lived in Pardubice, and this aparátník , he found her a better job, back in the city. Cleaning an office rather than cleaning the streets. His office, in fact. And he got us the flat. Actually, I think she quite liked him. Of course he had a wife and children, but she was on her own and there he was, a man who would look after her a bit. Comforting, I guess.’ She stubbed out the cigarette on a stone. ‘And then he turned his attention to me. I was fifteen. He waited, you see. Until I was old enough.’

‘ Fifteen? ’

‘That is the age here. But the thing was, I wanted him. I think… oh, I don’t know. Jealousy, perhaps. I was jealous of my mother. She had her man and I wanted him. The funny thing was, like my mother said about herself, he was a believer. He believed in socialismus , the path towards a communist heaven. Often he would tell me about his family, his wife and his two children, what a good socialist mother she was, how excellent the children were in the Pioneers. You must be like that, Lenička, he would say to me. You must be dutiful and loyal to the Party. This is when we were in bed, after we had fucked.’

Sam thought of the SIS man called Harold Saumarez, with his access to secret records, his collection of sins and deceptions and betrayals. ‘And what happened?’

She looked round at Sam with a little smile. ‘One day he told me that he was very bad, that we shouldn’t be doing what we were doing, that he couldn’t betray his wife any longer and he would have to stop seeing me. I was heartbroken and he was heartbroken. I think someone had got to know. The StB, who knows? People are always watching and whispering. Anyway, he promised me that he loved me and that he would see that I could get a place at university – because otherwise, because of my father, as Lenka Vadinská, I was banned. And he did all that.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘You see how good and bad can be mixed up together? Was he good or was he bad? I never managed to work it out, and it worried me until I decided that there is no good or bad, there is just what hurts people and what doesn’t hurt people. He didn’t hurt his wife because she didn’t know about me. He hurt me but only a little because I was young and could learn from my experience. And he didn’t really hurt my mother because she was happy enough to let me take over. And he got me into university.’