Саймон Моуэр - Prague Spring

‘Embassy car, actually. You’re lucky. It’s forbidden to hitchhike in the border zone. You could have got yourselves arrested.’

‘So sir’s come to tell us off, has he?’ the girl said.

‘Actually, he’s come to offer you a lift.’ Sam opened the boot of the car. ‘You may put your packs in with Her Majesty’s diplomatic bags as long as you can assure me that they do not contain any illegal substances. My name’s Samuel Wareham, by the way. Sam to friends and associates, but you may call me “sir” if you like.’

Chastened, the pair climbed into the back seat. A faint smell of unwashed bodies accompanied them. Lenka edged up to give them room and Sam took his place in front. ‘I’m Ellie,’ the girl said. ‘He’s James.’

‘From Oxford,’ the boy added.

‘City or university?’

‘University.’

‘Which college?’

He told him. ‘And Ellie’s at St Hilda’s.’

‘And you’re going to Prague…?’

‘To suss the place out, really. Spur-of-the-moment decision. And to hear Birgit Eckstein play.’

‘Are you musicians?’

‘We know her.’

‘Do you indeed?’

The girl explained – hitching through the Black Forest, a lift from a couple of Germans, one of whom was the cellist. ‘So we thought—’

The boy interrupted. ‘No thought involved, just the toss of a coin. Italy or here, that was the choice.’ His accent was from the North. South Yorkshire, Sam thought. Other side of the Pennines from Derrick. Chip on his shoulder, but that was hardly his fault when he found himself confronted by Oxford.

‘So you’ve opted for Slav drama, rather than Italian opera? Well, be careful. Prague’s all very exciting at the moment, but if you want to avoid getting into trouble, be careful what you do or say.’

‘Is that sir talking?’ the girl said.

‘Just a piece of advice. We don’t want to be arranging consular visits and trying to contact your parents to explain that their little darlings are in Pankrác prison.’

‘You didn’t do that for me when I was arrested in Paris last May.’

‘What were you doing there? Playing at revolutions? Here they have them for real – and that’s why it’s so dangerous. Ask Lenka.’

From her corner Lenka made a little moue of distaste. ‘I don’t want to talk about things. They’re young. Let them enjoy themselves.’

‘As long as it’s not at the taxpayer’s expense.’

‘Aren’t you enjoying yourself at the taxpayer’s expense?’ the girl said.

Sam laughed. She was a snappy young lady and would, he didn’t doubt, make a shrewish woman. ‘You’d make a good politician. Where are you staying in Prague?’

‘No idea,’ the boy replied. ‘A hostel or something.’

‘It’s not easy, accommodation in Prague. There’s a chronic shortage of beds, just like there’s shortages of everything else. It’s the result of a command economy. If no one has ordered hostels and hotels, hostels and hotels don’t get built.’

‘I can help maybe,’ said Lenka. ‘You can have my room.’ She glanced at Sam. ‘For a few days?’ She wasn’t intending to go back to her mother’s exiguous flat, he could see that by her look. Sam thought about Steffie and her reluctance to move in with him. Just the occasional night. Perhaps a weekend. ‘We have to recognise the proprieties,’ she had warned him whenever he’d suggested a more permanent arrangement. She had sounded like someone in a pre-war drawing-room drama. And now Lenka was looking at him with that knowing smile, as though proprieties meant nothing.

The girl called Lenka has, it seems, taken them under her wing. James had thought her cold and indifferent when they first encountered her in the embassy car with that stuck-up Wareham bloke, but it appears he was wrong. Under her wing, in hand, whatever turn of phrase you choose. She’s given up the room she rents in a friend’s flat in the New Town, an area of largely nineteenth-century buildings beyond the square that everyone has heard of in the West, the square that isn’t a square, named after the king who wasn’t a king – Václavské náměstí, Wenceslas Square. ‘There you are,’ she says, handing them over to their new hosts. ‘You will be happy.’ Which is unlikely but full of good intent.

The flat is cramped and, despite being up under the roofs, cave-like. The ceilings slope, things are stacked in the awkward space where the ceiling meets the floor, the doors are low enough to catch out those unwilling to bow their heads. An upright piano occupies one wall of the living room, a poster by Alfons Mucha another. There is a family photograph – my grandparents, Jitka says – of a couple staring disapprovingly out of the Austria-Hungary Empire into the People’s Republic of Czechoslovakia. A violin case stands against the wall beside a gramophone and a cabinet of records. Their hosts are musicians, a violinist with one of the orchestras of the city and a composer. Jitka is the violinist’s name. She’s a sharp, nervous woman with a fine face that hasn’t quite discovered how to be beautiful but is instead merely trying to be interesting. Dark eyes and a sharp nose. A mole like a small blackcurrant above the corner of her mouth. Jitka is what everyone calls her, but her given name is Judita, the Czech version of Judith, she explains. Then she looks faintly embarrassed, as though such things don’t really matter. ‘You call me Jitka.’

Jitka’s English is good. Not as fully developed as Lenka’s but more colloquial. She spent six months in America, on an exchange, playing in a youth orchestra in New York. She knows the West… and now, she says, we will become like the West. If the Russians allow us.

Zdeněk, her husband, mutters something that Jitka translates. ‘He says I should have stayed there.’ She laughs to show it’s a joke. ‘It was just before we married. I guess he means I could have stayed there and gotten him to join me. Or maybe that he is not happy being married to me.’ More laughter, weaker this time, which makes it even less convincing. Zdeněk scowls. Composing seems to involve great anguish, because he wears an expression of grim disenchantment – they call him Bručoun , Jitka says, which is the name for Grumpy, the bad-tempered dwarf in the Snow White cartoon. ‘But he is also very political,’ she says. ‘Maybe we are all political these days.’

The room that Lenka has vacated for them is a contrast to the rest of the flat – strangely feminine, like a teenager’s bedroom. A painting of horses galloping on a beach, family photographs on the dressing table, one of them showing a young couple holding aloft a baby that may be Lenka herself, another showing her as a young girl dressed in some kind of uniform. Apart from these, an older photo shows a solemn couple standing amongst the props of a photographer’s studio – a classical column, a bowl of flowers. On the bed a teddy bear sits waiting for an owner who has surely grown up and gone away. The bed itself threatens more than it promises.

After unpacking their things Ellie and James discuss the price of the room with Jitka. She wants payment in dollars. ‘We need the dollars. For when we go abroad.’

‘It’ll have to be pounds. We’ve only got sterling.’

Pounds will do. Hard currency is what matters. Jitka apologises, as though renting the room to them is somehow wrong. On the occasional street corner in the centre of the city touts offer koruny for dollars at four times the official exchange rate. ‘Be careful doing that,’ Jitka warns. ‘Police often pretend to do it in order to catch you. If you want, it is better if I do any exchange for you. This,’ she adds in parenthesis, ‘is what we’re reduced to.’