Letters From Prague (33 page)

St Nicholas towered over and divided Malostranské Square: Harriet and Marsha, drinking their mineral water, taking their time, could see ahead of them its mighty copper dome and tower, overshadowing a cobbled hill lined with tramways. Awnings still shaded the café tables spilling on to the pavements, shops were still open, the last of the day's tourists were coming down the hill from the castle, stopping for a drink or making their way through the square towards Mostecka, the long sloping street which led to the Charles Bridge. Marsha and Harriet followed them, seeing the gleam of the sunset on water, passing through an arch between two massive Gothic gateways.

Black-headed gulls wheeled above the cobbled bridge, and over the broad Vltava. Barges rocked on their moorings, swans drifted beneath the buttressed arches, and a procession of stone saints all along the parapets stood in silhouete against the sinking sun. On the far side were the clustered buildings, the towers and spires and domes of the Old Town. For four hundred years this medieval bridge had been the only link between the two settlements. It had been a trade route, a battle ground in the Thirty Years War, a place of execution for Protestant martyrs. Now, as the sun fell on the water, a path of gold, it was crowded with students, with tourists, with hawkers and buskers.

A young man with a violin was playing
Eine kleine Nachtmusik
, very fast and not very well, but the effect even so was tuneful and light. People were wandering amongst stalls of painted eggs, postcards, secondhand books, a hot-dog stand. Everyone, it seemed, had a bottle of mineral water, and no one was in a hurry. The gulls wheeled, the sun sank lower, the violinist changed his tune to a slow and gentle air which floated out over the water.

‘I feel happy,' said Marsha.

‘Yes,' said Harriet, ‘so do I.'

They found a space betwen two statues on the parapet, next to one of the tall, copper-topped street lamps; they leaned on the stone, looking out over the river, spanned by bridge after bridge. To the south the right bank was lined with the buildings of the Old Town, the New Town, the suburb of Vysehrad; to the north it made a great, questioning meander, in whose curve lay Josefov, the old Jewish quarter, a once-walled ghetto whose slums had been razed to the ground at the end of the nineteenth century. A synagogue remained; so did the old cemetery, an overcrowded plot of broken headstones which Harriet intended to visit, Marsha permitting. She also intended to visit Kafka's grave, in the New Jewish Cemetery in Žižkov, near to where Karel's family had their apartment. Palach, also, was buried near there. Tomorrow, she thought, watching the lazy progress of swans, tomorrow I shall be walking along the street from where Karel used to write to me. I shall find his apartment building, I shall ring the bell …

Someone had lit a cigarette, and the smoke drifted past her. She turned, and saw a little stall selling packets of Marlboro – ‘Cheap Americans' – and for a moment her heart turned over.

Karel, lighting up in a long-ago summer, held the precious western cigarette between long thin fingers, inhaling, looking at her across a cheap brown table. He held her in his arms as they lay on an Indian cotton bedspread.

‘There must be many beautiful girls in Czechoslovakia.'

‘That is true. But none of them called Harriet'

She felt herself on the threshold of a journey, which began with the expression in his eyes and ended – where would it end?

There it was: the reason for her journey now, the moment which had brought her and Marsha halfway across Europe, to lean on the parapet of the Charles Bridge on a heavenly summer evening, filled with expectation.

And then there was someone else who smoked – far too heavily, embracing its danger – and Harriet, looking out over the water, recalled moments in the dining room of the Hotel Scheiber, the smoke wreathing in and out of a shaft of sunlight, a candle flame, a heavy, serious face across the table.

‘I suppose I did hit rock bottom … There's still a side of me which is – well, I suppose you could call it dangerous … Getting high on a risk – it's in my blood … But never again.' He smiled at her, a smile full of warmth and liking. ‘And now I have told you the worst, and now you know.'

Smoke drifted through the candlelight She thought: I am on the brink. We are on the brink –

Žižkov was set on a hill, a mixed district of nineteenth-century working-class tenement housing and postwar rebuilding, where new streets of skyscrapers and lingering cobbled alleys climbed to a strip of green. To the north, the strip overlooked the district of Karlin and the bend in the river; to the south was a windswept expanse of cemeteries. On this hill the Hussites had won their first battle; from this hill you could see much of the city spread out before you. Or you could do that by taking the lift to the top of a smooth grey television tower, in the south-west corner of the district, as Marsha and Harriet had done in Berlin; feeling the summer wind on their faces as they slowly revolved above Alexanderplatz.

They did not do that here. They came out of the metro station next along the line from the tower – Flora, on the comer of the cemetery – and began to climb the hill, walking up Jirinska, broad and straight and tree-lined. The cemetery was endless: row upon row of graves and tombstones crisscrossed by cobbled paths: how to begin to find Kafka's? Well, that was for later. Harriet looked at her Cedok map, searching for Baranova Street. It wasn't hard to find on the grid: they turned left, walking a couple of blocks, turning into a featureless thoroughfare where a local tram was humming to a halt. She checked the map once more. The centre was richly decorated with little symbols for churches and restaurants and museums, but here, apart from the cemeteries, was mostly as ordinary as the district itself – much as the winding streets of the Little Quarter had early this morning already been crowded with tourists, while here they were mostly among families doing the weekend shopping. She stepped aside for a young mother with a pushchair, and said to Marsha, ‘Karel's street is just off the next block. We turn right.'

‘He'd better be there, he'd better be there, if he isn't there I'll die.' Marsha skipped along the pavement.

‘It's Saturday morning,' said Harriet calmly. ‘It's a good time to find people in.' And a bad time to disturb them, after a hard week. She followed Marsha round the corner, keeping a measured pace, feeling her heart racing.

‘What number, what number, what number did you say?'

‘Slow down, calm down, you're making me terribly nervous.'

‘You're terribly nervous already.'

‘Nonsense.' Harriet looked about her. This street was narrower than Baranova, impassable for a tram or indeed anything but a small car or motorbike. It was quiet, with few people about, the morning sun slanting thinly from the far end on to windows where the curtains were still drawn, and narrow brick balconies where one or two women were taking down washing, or watering plants. A child ran out of a doorway and ran back in again; a man came out of a shop, opening his paper as he walked along the street, stopping to light a cigarette. Everyone smoked in Prague. Harriet glanced at his paper as he lit up and walked on.
Céský Expres
, a cheerful-looking tabloid. Žižkov had been a communist heartland even before the war: until a few years ago everyone would have been reading
Rude Prâvo
, the Party paper. Now, the fashionable broadsheet was
Lidové Noviny
, a samizdat publication all through the 1970s and 1980s, when many of its contributors, like Havel, had been signatories to Charter 77. These days it was revamped, readily available – she'd seen it at the metro kiosk this morning, amongst English-language papers like the
Prague Post
, and the dozens of western magazines.

What did Karel read? What had he been doing, all these years? He had grown up in this quiet, ordinary back street, a child of the working class for whose Party-member parents communism had turned sour, who had through his studies climbed into the intelligentsia, and made the classic trip to the West. And there he had met a nice young English girl …

A dog ran out of an alleyway; someone went past on a bike. Marsha reached for the map in Harriet's hand and turned it so she could read the address written upon the corner.

‘Six/eight. What does that mean?'

‘House number six, apartment number eight.' Harriet felt sick. They were intruders, they were unwanted. If they had been wanted, he would have answered her letter. To turn up on the doorstep uninvited and unannounced –

‘Mum,' said Marsha, giving the map back, ‘we're visiting, that's all. Don't look so dreadful and doomy.'

‘Sorry. Do I?'

‘Yes. If it's a problem we have a cup of coffee and go away again, okay?' She took her hand in motherly fashion, and led her along the street.

Harriet smiled at her weakly. ‘How right you are. How wonderful you are. Of course. That's just what we'll do.'

‘And here we are,' said Marsha.

They stood before the door.

It was dark blue, and needed repainting. Set into the wall alongside were the bells to ten apartments. Marsha looked questioningly at Harriet, reached up and pressed number eight. There was a buzz, a silence, a receiver lifted. A woman's voice.

‘Yes?' She sounded as though she were under water. ‘Hello?'

Harriet summoned guidebook phrases. ‘Good morning. Excuse me. I am from England.'

‘From England?'

‘Yes. From England. I am looking for Karel Miluvić.'

‘Karel is not here. He is –'

Harriet could not understand where he was.

‘I'm sorry?'

‘He is –'

Incomprehensible, beyond the guidebook. She said slowly: ‘I am sorry. I do not understand.'

There was a sigh, another unintelligible murmur. Then the buzzer sounded, and the door gave a click, and opened. Marsha and Harriet looked at one another, and went inside.

They found themselves in a chilly hall, beneath a winding stairwell. Doors to two apartments were to the right and left; light fell from a landing window. Far above a door was opened, and the woman's voice came down towards them.

‘Come up, please.'

They climbed the stone stairs, their footsteps loud and echoing. The metal handrail was painted green; the air felt cold and damp, acrid with stale cigarette smoke. They came to the second floor, the third. On the fourth landing the door to a dark interior was held open.

The woman at the doorway was in her late sixties. She was thickset; she wore a wraparound print pinafore over a brown polo-neck jumper and drooping skirt; her grey hair was plaited round her head. She looked at Harriet and Marsha with sharp dark eyes.

‘Yes?'

‘From London,' Harriet said again, panting after the climb. ‘Karel's friend. I am Harriet.' She gestured towards herself, and then to Marsha. ‘My –' but she could not remember ‘daughter', nor ‘child'. ‘Marsha,' she said, recovering her breath.

Footsteps sounded in the dark interior. The woman regarded Marsha and said something. From behind her came a child's voice in answer, and then a girl with long dark plaits and a bright, lively face appeared at the doorway. She looked at them, and they looked at her, and Harriet felt a quarter of a century tilt backwards and swing, like a great slice out of a clock, spinning her back to a summer's day and a basement room, and a lean, dark, lovely face gazing at her, as his daughter – so like, so unmistakably, perfectly like – was gazing at them now.

‘Gabrielle,' said the woman, and then, pointing at herself, ‘Hannah.'

Gabrielle smiled at Marsha.

‘I learn little English.' She looked enquiringly up at her grandmother, who nodded. ‘Please to come in.'

They sat at the table in a cramped tiled kitchen, and Karel's mother put coffee in a saucepan on the stove, moving slowly to a rack of shelves on the wall for cups. The kitchen was at the end of the passage and was unexpectedly sunny and light, with a large window taking up most of the end wall, overlooking the trees on Jindris˘ská Street, bordering the cemetery. Harriet, looking out, saw passing traffic, distant rows of graves. She looked back again, smelling strong, reheated coffee.

It was set before them, with a plate of fat iced biscuits. Hannah sat down heavily, saying something. Harriet caught Karel's name again.

‘My father is working,' Gabrielle translated. ‘His bureau is in Nove Mesto – New Town.'

‘Oh. Thank you.' Harriet smiled at her. She was sitting next to Marsha, politely passing biscuits. Marsha regarded them with interest, taking a pink one. She looked at Gabrielle.

‘How old are you?'

‘How old? Eleven years. You?'

‘Ten. I was ten in Berlin.'

‘Berlin?' Hannah frowned. ‘London?'

‘Yes, but –' Harriet stopped. How to convey it all? To say that she had been making a kind of pilgrimage across Europe in search of Gabrielle's father? It wasn't possible. ‘We are on our holidays,' she said simply. ‘Travelling. We just wanted to see if perhaps Karel –'

Gabrielle translated. Hannah looked carefully at Harriet.

‘How – how you know him?'

‘A long time ago,' Harriet said slowly, drinking her coffee. It was bitter, and very hot. ‘A long story. I wrote to him to tell him we were coming, but perhaps he did not get my letter.'

Hannah turned to Gabrielle, who was clearly enjoying her role. She translated, then said to Harriet: ‘I speak little English, my grandmother tiny, tiny.' She held up finger and thumb.

‘And my Czech even smaller,' said Harriet, putting her own finger and thumb even more closely together. They all smiled: agreeably, feeling their way with strangers.

‘My father's English is good.' Gabrielle spread her hands wide. ‘But I do not think a letter came.' She shrugged. ‘You would like to telephone the bureau?'