Саймон Моуэр - Prague Spring

‘That sounds like religion. You don’t have religion.’

‘It’s just a feeling. Like getting high.’

‘Maybe you shouldn’t have sold that weed.’

She laughs softly against his shoulder. What has happened? Metaphors pile up in his mind. A dam has burst. A wall has been breached. Something, some hard carapace has at least been cracked. He bends his head and buries his face in her hair.

‘Maybe we should go,’ she says thoughtfully.

‘Go where?’

‘Go to hear her play. In Prague.’

‘For God’s sake, we’ve planned on Greece, haven’t we?’ He imagines olive groves, parched hillsides, cool wine and hot nights. Not some godforsaken city in Eastern Europe. ‘We can’t change our ideas now.’

He feels her shrug. ‘It was just a thought,’ she says.

The next morning, after breakfast, there are fond farewells at the house. ‘You are like my children,’ Frau Eckstein confesses in a moment of surprising sentimentality. She kisses James on both cheeks, hugs Ellie to her like a daughter. ‘You must keep yourselves safe,’ she admonishes them, as though safety were a thing one could choose to have or not.

Horst drives them the short way to the nearest main road. He is full of instructions and information, delivered in the manner of the academic, as though what he says is an enormous joke if only you can see through the solemn façade. Apparently Donaueschingen is not really the source of the Donau, the Danube, at all. Instead the geographical honour ought to lie with the town of Furtwangen, a full 48 kilometres further upstream. There a stream called the Breg rises and runs down into what the whole world recognises as the Danube. So, is Furtwangen the true source of the river? And should the river be renamed the Breg, causing consternation and chaos amongst cartographers the world over? ‘This important matter has never been resolved,’ he tells them as he drops them at a convenient lay-by. ‘Another curious thing is that here we are only about thirty kilometres from the Rhine. The Rhine going one way, the Danube going the other. Ships that pass in the night, isn’t that what you say?’ He looks up at them from within the prison of his own car. ‘It is perhaps a metaphor for life. Auf Wiedersehen, meine Freunde . Perhaps in Prague.’

‘Perhaps,’ says Ellie.

‘I am a bit envious,’ he calls out, ‘of your freedom.’

That paradox once again. The freedom and the restriction – they can go anywhere they wish, but unless a vehicle stops for them they can go almost nowhere at all. Thus the journey resumes – short lifts (a van, a car) – eastwards out of the Black Forest towards… where? All around them is a vast expanse of southern Germany. James has never seen such size, the forests and fields going on to the horizon, seemingly unmarred by towns or cities. And the immaculate nature of the land, the roadside verge manicured, the fences polished, the woods perfectly trimmed. How is all this possible? The places he knows – Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Oxfordshire – shrink in memory to small, scruffy domains, while this, the map tells him, is only a fragment of Germany, called, apparently, Baden-Württemberg, which name evokes memories of model soldiers in shakoes and bearskins, fighting for statelets – the Grand Duchy of Baden, the Kingdom of Württemberg – that no longer exist outside of the history books.

A lift drops them at a junction where a signpost points right towards Konstanz, Lindau and Austria, or left towards Memmingen, Ulm and München. Ulm seems familiar. A treaty? A battle?

Ellie unfolds the map. ‘So we go right,’ James says. ‘To Austria.’

What does Austria mean? The Alps. Vienna. The Waltz, the Blue Danube, which is this same river whose source, nothing more than a stream, is fought over by two neighbouring towns. Ellie turns the map thoughtfully. ‘Or we change plans…’

‘Change plans?’

She points, to München and beyond. ‘Why not go to Prague?’

‘What?’

She smiles encouragingly. ‘Wouldn’t it be great? We’d see her perform. Frau Eckstein, I mean. And we’d see what it’s really like there.’

‘But we’ve planned—’

‘And the Ides. That’d be cool.’ She is bright and excited, suddenly enthralled by her idea. ‘We’re free, for Christ’s sake. We don’t have to do anything. And this… it’d be a bit of history, the kind of thing we’ll regret not having done. Italy we can see anytime, or Greece. But Czechoslovakia is now!’ She waves the map as though that might conjure lifts out of the air. ‘How far can it be? A few hours.’

‘It’s the other side of the bloody Iron Curtain.’

‘So what?’

‘Are you serious ?’

But of course she’s serious. Her eyes are alight with a brighter fire than James has ever managed to ignite. He looks around. To the south are distant hills, with the Alps beyond them, out of sight but not out of mind. He has never seen the Alps. The biggest mountains he has known are in the Lake District and North Wales. When you are that ignorant novelty becomes the norm.

‘Let’s toss for it,’ he decides. ‘Heads we continue as planned. Tails—’

‘What’s tails?’

He shows the coin. A Deutschmark. ‘The eagle.’

‘So, eagle we go to Prague.’

‘If they’ll let us in.’

‘If they don’t, we just carry on as before.’ There is no further argument. Tossing a coin resolves everything. The coin sings in the air and falls at their feet. The eagle.

‘What about a trip to Munich?’ Sam asked her.

Lenka’s eyes widened. ‘ Munich ?’

How do you measure distance? Munich was a mere two hundred miles away, yet beyond imagining. It was just over the border yet it was beyond the Pale. He might as well have suggested visiting the far side of the moon.

‘I’ve got to deliver diplomatic bags to the consulate and there’ll be plenty of room in the car. I’ll have to take the security man along, but he’s a mate and he’ll turn a blind eye. All you need is your passport. You do have a passport, don’t you?’

Her eyes glistened. Behaving as you please was a new experience, doing your own thing something that you needed to practise. But yes, she did have a passport, issued for a student conference in Budapest the previous year. The only time she had ever been out of the country. But she’d need an exit visa, which would take a few days and three hundred crowns. Something like that. She made a face.

‘You’re my guest,’ Sam assured her, and felt a strange, erotic thrill at the idea of giving her the money.

They travelled in an embassy car, a large, sagging Humber Super Snipe designed to demonstrate the importance of British manufacturing in a world of Tatra and Škoda. The two of them sat in the back while Derrick, ex-police sergeant and head of security at the embassy, drove. ‘They’ll think we’re the ambassador and his wife,’ Sam said.

Lenka giggled. The trip had transformed into something like a school prank, vaguely illicit yet harmless enough. They sat close together in the back, their hands intertwined in her lap, below the sight line of the driver’s reflected eyes. Sam experienced a terrible intensity of sensation, focused on the touch of her thigh against his, the grasp of her strong fingers, the warmth of her body. He wanted to make love to her, there and then, on the hot leather of the back seat of the embassy car as it swayed and lurched round corners and over switchbacks through the Bohemian countryside towards Pilsen. And he even wondered whether it might be possible to do it without the sergeant, with his tired, suspicious eyes, ever noticing.

Perhaps not.