Саймон Моуэр - Prague Spring

One of Zdeněk’s friends – James has forgotten the names – has a bottle of slivovice which he passes round. Cigarettes are lit; someone rolls a joint, about which there’s a heated discussion between the girl and one of the boys. But still the joint goes round while Zdeněk strums his guitar and Jitka sings now about going to San Francisco and being sure to wear some flowers in your hair, which James has always thought a bloody silly idea but which appeals to him at this moment, especially as when she has finished singing she comes over and sits close to him on the edge of the shadows round the fire, close enough to touch, shoulder to shoulder. He can smell her in the cooling air, the heat of her, her faint, tart scent.

‘I was in San Francisco,’ she tells him, as if that somehow justifies the song. ‘With the youth orchestra. It is an interesting place.’ Her husband and two friends are singing some kind of comic, call-and-response song. Everyone laughs. The joke is plainly that everyone knows the joke in advance.

‘Why did you come back?’ James asks. ‘Why didn’t you stay there?’

In the darkness he can see the gleam of her teeth as she smiles. ‘Why does anyone do anything?’

‘There must be a reason.’

‘Reasons, many of them. Because of Zdeněk. Because things were changing here. Because I missed my home. All those reasons. Anyway, my scholarship was for six months, so when it finished I just came back.’

Lenka is trying to teach Ellie the words of the song. Words without comprehension, an eternal problem. They laugh over the difficulties.

‘And now?’

‘Now I am trapped.’

The fire burns down, the singing becomes sporadic. Mummified in sleeping bags they lie down amongst the castle ruins, Ellie beside Lenka, talking with her in the dark, a soft, earnest sound. James wanders away, round one of the walls, feeling detached from the expedition, indifferent to Ellie, thoughtful about Jitka. He finds his place away from the others, out of mind. The moon, a half-moon, is rising above distant trees. Shadows shift in the darkness. A darker shadow comes round the end of the wall and coalesces above him.

‘Are you all right?’ Jitka asks, kneeling down. ‘I saw you go. I don’t want you to be left out.’

‘I’m all right.’

‘With Ellie, everything isn’t good is it?’

He feigned indifference. ‘We’re friends. We get on well enough.’

‘Not lovers?’ Perhaps it’s the dark that makes it easier to ask direct questions like that.

‘We were. Maybe not now.’

There’s a silence between them. The sounds all around – the shifting of leaves, the creep of nocturnal animals, the hoot of a tawny owl, the muttered talk from the other side of the wall – do nothing to erode this particular silence. Her shadow comes closer to his face until he can feel the warmth of her breath and then that same touch as in the Ides’ gig a few days ago, lips soft like mushrooms with the taste of her saliva now – beer, grilled sausage, slivovice . He puts up a hand, perhaps to hold her off because her husband is there, just the other side of the wall. Yet whatever he intends is not what happens because he finds only the loose edge of her T-shirt and her naked belly beneath, and then – her mouth on his, their tongues intertwining – her breasts hanging loose. He cups one, feels its ripe softness and the hard nub of her nipple, and for a moment they are like that, mouth on mouth, hand on breast. Then she pulls away and is gone, back to the other side of the ruined wall, back to the dying embers of the fire and her marriage to Zdeněk.

That moment of communion is something James will remember for the whole of his life, an instant of intimacy in the midst of a Bohemian forest transfigured into something almost eternal. As eternal as events can be in a human existence. He’ll remember it when other, not dissimilar moments are long forgotten, when Ellie is no more than a fond memory, when Jitka herself, entirely unbeknownst to him, has left Zdeněk, left her country, gone to America and found work as a teacher of violin and occasional orchestral player in New York, to be knocked down and killed by a car when crossing a street in Chicago in 1978.

That’s the way things work out. There’s no plan, no narrative thread. They just happen. You may as well roll a die.

Dawn light leaks into the ruins of the castle. Figures emerge from sleeping bags, yawning and stretching and pulling on clothes with scant regard for modesty. There’s the chill of early morning, the faint sensation of the evening before not having been worth the discomfort of the present. Someone kicks the embers of the fire to let them burn out. Others make their way down a precipitous path into the gorge below the castle, to the edge of the river where they wash approximately. The water is cold, as though it has come from high up and far away. Apparently indifferent to her audience, Lenka strips off completely and walks into the water until it’s up to her waist. The others watch, laughing and calling and daring her to go right in. On an impulse Ellie pulls off her own T-shirt and shorts and stumbles in to join her. For a moment they are close together, squealing and splashing, their two bodies a vivid contrast, the one tall and languid, the other small and quick. James watches with a peculiar, embarrassed focus, thinking how incongruous they seem in this wild place, and how far away from nature the human body has evolved to become pallid, almost hairless, awkward and vulnerable.

‘Stop staring!’ Ellie calls. There’s laughter.

Later the two bathers find a place apart to dry in the sun. James catches a glimpse of them through the trees, Ellie lying on her side with her hand on Lenka’s shoulder, then moving down out of sight, obscured by Ellie’s own body, Lenka laughing and lying back. And Ellie leaning forward.

He moves away hurriedly, fearful of being seen, fearful of the damage it might do.

They throw earth on the fire to extinguish it, look round their makeshift campsite for any scraps left behind, then shoulder their rucksacks and begin the return through the forest. Jitka walks with James; Zdeněk with his three friends; Ellie walks behind with Lenka. Ellie and Lenka are holding hands, which James notices as he turns to call something. He wants to hold Jitka’s hand. He wants some recognition of what happened in the dark the previous evening, a further moment of contact that can mean something to the two of them. It comes when she stumbles on a boulder and he grabs hold of her to keep her from falling, a squeeze of her hand that no one but she would ever notice, holding her up a moment longer than is necessary. ‘You saved my life,’ she says, and laughs.

The train back to Prague is less crowded than the one that brought them. It’s the holiday month, so who wants to be going back to the city? They talk about their plans, or their lack of plans. ‘I guess we’ll be moving on next week,’ James suggests, but Ellie disagrees. Sitting close to Lenka she looks at her with eyes that hint at something more than affection. Revelation, perhaps. She has been captivated by a constellation of things – the country, the spirit of place and Lenka herself. ‘Lenka thinks I could find work here. People want help with English now that so much is changing.’

Lenka shrugs. ‘It would not be legal. But for a few weeks…’

James remembers the two of them naked in the river, splashing and laughing, then lying on the bank to dry. He wonders about Lenka and about her boyfriend, the supercilious guy from the British embassy. What are her motives in all this? What does she do in the privacy of her own life? That evening, crushed into their bedroom in Jitka’s flat, he and Ellie talk about matters of the heart and the head, Ellie hovering on the edge of confession. ‘She’s so beautiful,’ she says. ‘Don’t you think so?’