Саймон Моуэр - Prague Spring

Once settled back in the car, Derrick’s eyes glanced in the mirror at the two passengers in the back. ‘You owe me one, Sam,’ he said.

‘Two. And a packet of crisps.’

It takes them two days. Two days, five arguments, one night in the tent somewhere in the environs of Regensburg. From Regensburg they follow the haphazard path of lifts through forested hills and open farmland. The size of the country dwarfs the two of them, reduces them to figures in a landscape, ants crossing the vastness of the place. By the afternoon of the second day a swathe of forest lies across their path as they plod through the empty heat. Occasionally a car goes by but no one stops. An American army jeep passes them travelling in the opposite direction, followed by a German military vehicle. A helicopter chutters in the sky away to the south. And there is something else in the air – a sense of threat, of fear, of moment, the kind of feeling you might have approaching the edge of a precipice. Iron Curtain. The phrase dominates their progress. On their map it is marked in a forbidding red, a serpentine line without obvious rhyme or reason, marked Staatsgrenze . Staatsgrenze is, they discover after thumbing through a phrasebook purchased in Regensburg, State Border.

What goes on beyond that line is as unknown as the blank spaces on a medieval map. Here be dragons. Ellie looks accusingly at the empty landscape ahead, the hills and woods, a winding valley with its occasional and indifferent farmhouses.

‘I suppose we just walk,’ James says.

‘What’s the choice?’

The choice, he almost adds, is to give up this fucking idiot idea and continue south as they originally intended, to Italy and the sunshine. But Ellie holds the ultimate card, the one that trumps every argument, the one she deployed with such devastating skill in the damp camp in Regensburg when they argued about it – you go to Italy if that’s what you want, but I’m going to Prague. By myself if necessary.

The fact is, he doesn’t want to lose her. Fando is held in thrall by Lis.

So they walk on towards the border with the stolid plod of soldiers tramping, while indifferent cars go past, a few in their direction, more the other way, westwards, away from whatever it is that lies ahead. A sign says Waidhaus, 3 Kilometer and warns Staatsgrenze . They walk again, and again no one stops. Waidhaus is a collection of dull, stolid houses around a central square with a blue and white striped maypole. Outside the town a sign commands

But ironically it is the American army which comes to the rescue, a jeep that draws up alongside them. The driver leans on the steering wheel and regards them with amused curiosity. He’s chewing gum. His face has an open all-American smile, a farm boy used to vast fields and a huge sky. Perhaps at home here in Bavaria. He wears khaki fatigues with sergeant’s stripes and a shoulder flash showing a fleur-de-lys with the motto Toujours Pret .

‘Where y’all goin’ then?’ he asks.

‘Why d’you want to know?’ Ellie says. ‘Are you going to arrest us or something?’

He laughs. ‘Thought you might need a ride somewhere, ma’am. I passed you a while back and you sure haven’t moved on a whole lot. ’Course, I can always leave you at the roadside if that’s what you want.’

She bridles. Is that the word? It conjures up horses and struggling riders and reins. The sound of whinnying in the air. Police horses in Grosvenor Square. She shouted Pigs! at the police and chanted Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh! and tried, rather ineffectually, to get through the main doors of the American embassy – behind which, so the rumour went, armed marines stood ready to open fire on any intruders. ‘Why aren’t you in Vietnam?’ she demands, her tone laden with sarcasm.

‘Because I was lucky.’

‘So what are you doing here?’

‘With the Second Armored Cavalry, supporting our German friends and allies. Look lady, I can’t stay here all day talking with you. If you don’t want a ride then I’ll have to move on—’

‘We’re going to Prague,’ James says.

Amusement steps down the alphabet, as so often, to bemusement. ‘Is that right? Well, I’m sorry to say I can’t take you quite that far, but I’ll take you to the border if you like. No one else is gonna give you a ride around here.’

Ellie looks enquiringly at James. As far as he is concerned there is no question to answer. They climb into the vehicle.

‘We’re not meant to carry civilians,’ the sergeant explains as he shoves the jeep into gear, ‘but if I found you in the border zone I could log you as an AVI. That’s Avoidance of Incident.’ There’s a radio in the back of the jeep. As he drives he reaches over for the handset and talks to someone in that peculiar, truncated language the military use: Echo Foxtrot found two Civs near the border and is escorting them to the checkpoint. A disembodied voice squawks back at him through the earphone. ‘Affirmative, Echo Foxtrot,’ it says.

The driver is called Chester. Chester B. Falk, Sergeant First Class. From Tennessee. ‘Along with Davy Crockett,’ he says. ‘You folks been to Tennessee? No? That’s no surprise. No one ever has but everyone has heard of it, because of Davy Crockett. Ain’t that a thing? What about you folks? Where you from? England, I’m guessing.’

‘I’m from Sheffield,’ James says.

‘Hey, we have a Sheffield in Alabama.’

Ellie is in the back of the jeep, with the rucksacks. She didn’t deign to sit with the soldier in the front. ‘I daresay the English one was named after it,’ she calls out.

‘I don’t think so,’ the sergeant replies. ‘England’s a whole lot more historic than the US.’

‘I was being ironic.’

He laughs. ‘We simple folk don’t do irony.’ Which seems to James pretty ironic in itself. They pass a further sign warning of the approaching border. Sergeant Falk glances round at his passengers. ‘You wanna see?’

‘What?’

‘The border. The goddam Iron Curtain. ’Cause I’m meant to have picked you up there, so we had better make an alibi, hadn’t we?’

The jeep decelerates and turns off the main road onto a farm track between fields of wheat. They bump over potholes, pass through a collection of farm buildings and come out onto the side of a shallow valley. A tractor is at work, dragging a plough through the heavy loam of the nearest field. As the machine turns at the end of the furrow, the driver catches sight of the stationary jeep and raises his hand in some kind of salute. Falk gives a jaunty wave in return.

‘That’s it, folks. The border between East and West.’

‘Where?’

‘Stream at the bottom of the valley.’ A concrete road runs parallel with the stream on their side of the valley; the far side is forest, implacable ranks of black pines stretching away in both directions.

‘Is that all?’

Sergeant Falk smiles. He’s done this before. Same view, same laconic remarks. ‘Pretty regular we get folks straying across the border. Step over the stream and you’re in the CSSR. Sometimes even our own patrols. But you can’t go far because it ain’t quite that simple.’ He turns the jeep onto the concrete road and drives south to where there is a break in the trees on the far side, a gap about a hundred yards wide where you can see through the forest into the world beyond, into the East.

‘There’s also that.’

Drawn across the far end of the break is the Curtain. More wire than iron, it cuts across the space about five hundred yards away, a barrier of fencing apparently as fragile and translucent as gauze. Beyond the fence is a watchtower, a spider creature supported on slender legs with the sky glinting on its several eyes. It might just have paused in its progress across the countryside in order to examine the jeep and its three passengers.