Letters From Prague (18 page)

‘Elise? We're stopping for lunch.'

The voices of the
Trümmerfrauen
, the rubble women, the tap of their trowels, broke the silence. They did it for extra rations, and they did it because there were hardly any men left to do anything. They were dead, they were missing, they were on crutches.

Houses, department stores, familiar corner shops, once-crowded cafés and bars had been blown to bits. Whole districts were without gas, electricity, sewage, water. The Tiergarten, Prussian hunting and pleasure grounds, all lakes and woodland and light and air, crossed by a great boulevard rolling towards the Brandenburg Gate, was a sea of mud and uprooted trees. Those trees still standing, blackened and scarred, were hacked down for firewood as winter approached. As winter approached, people were still living in cellars: overcrowded, insanitary, cold, a breeding ground for disease. Streams of refugees poured westwards, and were held in bleak transit camps, huddled over their bundles, waiting for transport. Shivering queues stretched to soup kitchens out in the street, fires burned, smoke rose from the ruins.

Tap tap. Chip chip chip.

Red flags flew, then the city was quartered: Russian in the east, the Allied British, American and French sectors in the west. Europe had become two continents: an Iron Curtain came down between them. Later, a wall went up. Then it came down again – every last graffiti-sprayed bit of it.

Bang bang. Chip chip chip.

‘My first thought was: I'm the one who has been walled in. They have built a wall around me.'

Harriet, in the buffet car, gazed out of the window at forested hillsides and felt those words, as if in a dream, take hold of her. They came from an untranslated novel,
The Forbidden Room
, written over a decade ago by Helga Schubert. A writer Harriet had never heard of, until she came across her one evening last winter in a history of Berlin.

She had put the book down on a pile of books – all that reading, all that preparation – and let the stark, frightened sentences sink into her. She wrote them down, in the thick black notebook tipped in Chinese red, got up, and put some more coal on. She went to the kitchen for coffee and stood leaning against the worktop, thinking: I'll remember those words when I get there, when I walk where the wall used to be. Then the kettle came to the boil, and the phone rang, and she forgot them.

Now, as Marsha slept in their own carriage, and Christopher Pritchard, sitting unwelcomely opposite at the table, put down his glass of beer and lit another cigarette, they came back –

I'm the one who has been walled in
…

Cologne was far behind them, Berlin lay hours ahead. Of course, thought Harriet, looking out at the blue-green, densely planted firs, hearing Christopher's heavy inhalation of smoke: that is the essence, the heart of how it must have felt. Not just a city, but a room, a life.

Christopher blew smoke towards her; she waved it away. He apologised. He said: ‘I do find this extraordinary.'

‘Yes,' said Harriet, turning from the window with reluctance. Her peaceful, thoughtful journey had been snatched away. ‘I thought you were flying to Prague.'

‘I didn't say so.'

‘I assumed –'

‘I assumed you were. Why aren't you?'

‘Why aren't you?' she countered, unwilling to be drawn.

He drew on his cigarette again. ‘I could say it's because I like train journeys, but the truth is partly that I have business en route in Berlin and Dresden, and partly that I can't afford to fly. Things are a bit tight at the moment.'

‘Oh.' Harriet recalled the Cockatrice, the lunch, the insistence: ‘This is on me.' She recalled the credit card with which he had paid, and recalled, too, the look exchanged with Susanna. She said, unable to resist unleashing some of her fears then, and resentment now: ‘I thought things were going well for you.'

‘They are, on the whole.' He sounded defensive, equally irritated. ‘It's just at the moment, that's all.'

‘I'm sorry,' she said distantly, and another silence fell.

The train hummed smoothly along the track. Like Marsha, she had been disappointed at how modem and clean it all was. She had wanted to reclaim everything she had imagined about Karel's journey, twenty-five years ago: doors slamming shut on smoke-filled compartments, a cheap
couchette
whose dull red vinyl seats were marked with cigarette burns, a crowded corridor with an attendant making tea in glasses in an ill-lit cubbyhole. Instead, there was this air-conditioned gleaming white interior with clean upholstery, fresh-brewed coffee, almost soundless progress. ‘Proof,' as the brochure from the German Tourist Office had informed her, ‘that the transport problems of today and tomorrow can be solved by intelligent and purposeful planning.' All that remained of Harriet's imagined journey was the smoke from Christopher Pritchard's cigarette – allowable only in the buffet – which was making her cough.

‘Sorry,' he said, and stubbed it out. He drained his glass of beer and tried again. ‘What about you? How come you're not flying direct?'

She felt nervousness and tension unfurl within her, as if she had been caught at Customs, concealing her real purpose. She fiddled with her spoon. ‘I like trains. I like being able to see where I'm going.' She could feel him looking at her intently.

He said: ‘I get the feeling there's more to it than that, but I'm not going to pry. Even though it might seem that fate had placed us not just on the same route but the same train. Don't you find that remarkable?'

‘Yes,' she said brusquely. ‘I've already said so,' and turned again to the window. The afternoon sun was beginning to sink towards the hills; the shadows of slow-moving clouds passed over the fir trees. It would be evening when they arrived in Berlin. As yesterday, when she had been talking to Hugh, walking along the canal, she had now a moment of real apprehension. How foolish to arrive in an unknown city as darkness fell, a woman and child with no one to meet or escort them as they looked for their hotel. She could feel Christopher's eyes upon her, watching her carefully averted face. The afternoon sun was taken by one of the clouds; the hills became sombre and still.

‘Harriet?'

‘Yes?' Her tone was as light as she could make it, but she knew it sounded strained.

‘What's the matter?'

‘Nothing.'

She thought: I sound like Susanna, this isn't like me, I must pull myself together –

She turned to say: I must go and see if Marsha's okay, I've left her too long, and of course I'm perfectly all right, why ever shouldn't I –

She saw him looking at her with genuine concern, and interest, and a gleam of humour.

He said: ‘I really do infuriate you, don't I?'

‘I wouldn't say that –'

‘You wouldn't, but you do. With every gesture, every word you cast in my direction, ever since we met. You couldn't make it clearer. I'm sorry I'm on your train, and I'm sorry I exist, but that's how it is. Shall we try to make the best of it?' And then he smiled at her, a warm, direct smile which after those melancholy moments looking out at the brooding forest did feel cheering. She smiled back.

‘That's better,' he said. ‘You look almost presentable now. Should we go and check on your daughter?'

What was this ‘we'?

‘I'll go,' said Harriet. ‘I'm sure she's all right.'

‘Like her mother.' He looked at her quizzically, and she rose, ignoring the look.

‘I'll be back in a few minutes.'

‘I'll try and wait.'

This time she laughed.

‘Steady on,' said Christopher.

She found Marsha as she had left her, leaning against the head-rest, hair falling across her face, breathing in the light, almost imperceptible fashion of childhood. When did your breathing start to slow down, grow heavy? When you were troubled, perhaps. Marsha, sleeping peacefully, her hands in her lap, could not have looked further from sadness or distress. Across the table the large German woman looked up from her magazine and smiled, showing bad teeth. Beside her, the husband snored, lolling.

Harriet said again in her broken German: ‘I am in the buffet car. If my daughter wakes –'

The woman nodded. She would tell her.

Harriet made her way back. Two businessmen were drinking at the bar. She looked along the carriage to the table where Christopher was sitting, his back to her, looking out of the window; wanting to get a new sense of this man, unchallenged by him and unobserved. So far she had seen him only in the company of others, finding him on both occasions intrusive, insensitive, overbearing. That, too, was how Marsha had experienced him. And yet – standing now in the lit-up little bar, with its shining glasses and rich smell of beer and coffee, fresh bread and sausage, she recalled other feelings about him: her realisation, as he rose to greet her in Hugh and Susanna's drawing room, that this could be someone of real presence – not overbearing, but simply powerful. She remembered once again his look across the table at Susanna in the restaurant: so intent, so serious, so full of desire. What had her own feelings been at that moment? Unease and astonishment. Fear for her brother, but more than that. Fear for herself, at being excluded?

He would take and hold my hand two minutes; he would touch my cheek with his lips for the first, last, only time
…

Beside her the two men in suits laughed loudly, much as Christopher sometimes laughed: to fill a silence. Harriet moved away from them, and a little towards him, so that, in profile, she could see his face. He was smoking again, looking out of the window, where the view had changed: no longer the high forested hills, but farmland, rolling and open, dotted with neat red-roofed houses and barns. A poster for a prosperous land. The sun came out and the sun went in again, and Harriet stood watching this huge, heavy man, his expression, in repose, distant and withdrawn as he drew on his cigarette; sensing his loneliness and strength.

They sat over their empty glass and coffee cup, and he said it was a good thing it was Sunday, and the train uncrowded, or they'd have had to move and give someone else their table. He asked if he could get her another coffee, and she said no, she was fine, and then changed her mind. She sat at the table and watched him standing amongst the handful of other passengers at the bar, towering over them as the white-coated attendant poured from a steaming glass jug. She realised she was enjoying this moment, cherishing it even: watching him and waiting for his return, being looked after, having things done for her. She remembered how in the last days in Brussels she had imagined this journey; independent and free, in charge. Well. There was plenty of time.

He turned from the bar and came back to her, guarding the cup with his left hand from the slight tremor in his right, which threatened to spill the coffee everywhere. Have I noticed that before? she wondered, and remembered that she had: when he raised his glass, when he reached across a table for something – a bottle, a dish – it wasn't there always but sometimes it was, causing one thing to knock against another, a moment quickly glossed over.

He looked up and saw her, watching, and gave her a smile which this time was suddenly awkward. Harriet thought: he's afraid – of me, of this moment – and then: so am I – oh, I don't want this.

He had reached the table; he put down the coffee and some of it spilt in the saucer and he sat down, spilling some more, and looked at her.

‘Well,' he said slowly. ‘Here we are again.'

There was another silence. Someone moved past them; beyond the window the clouds grew denser, broken every now and then by a struggling sun, touching a barn, a slow-moving tractor in a distant field, a line of poplars. A few drops of rain fell against the glass, then trickled away to nothing. They passed a canal, and two people cycling alongside, followed by a dog, some kind of terrier. Then they were gone.

Christopher said: ‘I probably shouldn't say this, but beneath the hostilities I do feel we have a kind of understanding. Do you feel that?'

Harriet turned her coffee spoon over and over. DEUTSCHES BUNDESBAHN was imprinted in small deep letters all along the back.

‘Perhaps.' She raised her head and looked at him, at the dark hair in need of a trim, the open-pored skin, large features, ordinary mouth. An ordinary face, in fact, but –

He said: ‘This is, as it were, a sentimental journey. For you, I mean.'

‘I suppose so.'

‘Retracing footsteps? You said you'd never been to Prague.'

‘I haven't, but … I know someone there. Well, I used to. It's a very long time ago.'

‘Most sentimental journeys begin a long time ago.' He looked at her ringless fingers. ‘You're not married.'

‘Divorced. That's also a long time ago.' She hesitated. ‘You –'

‘I'm also divorced, I think I told you. Like my parents – yea, into the second generation. Most people these days have split up, don't you find?'

She was about to say, ‘Hugh and Susanna –' and then stopped abruptly, saying instead, ‘How long were you married?'

‘Not long. I don't want to talk about it now.'

‘Sorry.'

‘A while. Perhaps another time.'

‘Okay.' And she took the conversation back to what was manageable. ‘Tell me about Berlin.'

‘There used to be a wall there, and now there isn't.'

She looked at his deadpan expression and began to laugh. ‘I want to go and see it. Where it was.'

‘Of course. Everyone does. Beware of counterfeit bits of it – they'll rip you off as soon as look at you on the stalls round Checkpoint Charlie.'

‘How will I know what's real?'

‘How, indeed? I've been asking myself that all my life.'

‘Ha ha. How shall I really tell?'

‘Well – perhaps you'll allow me to show you.'