Letters From Prague (37 page)

‘They get on well,' said Karel, putting the boat down on a bench.

‘Yes, I'm so pleased. I think it's hard for Marsha sometimes, being an only child.'

He shrugged. ‘It does not seem to trouble Gaby, she is mostly content. I also was an only child – I was happy, I think. And in any case – Prague is full of only children. Like East Berlin, I believe; like much of Eastern Europe. When times are difficult, the birth rate falls. It was difficult until recently to think of having more than one child.' He looked at her. ‘But you would have liked another?'

‘I think so. But my husband left when Marsha was still a baby –'

‘It must have been hard for you.'

‘We've survived.' She stepped out of the way of a toddler with a pushcart. ‘Anyway,' she said carefully, ‘you are also divorced.'

‘Again, it is rather common: families live on top of one another, times are difficult, there are problems. Domestic life makes Danielle restless – she likes to work, to be free. She is happier now, I think, living in her own place, and my mother likes to take care of Gabrielle. And Danielle and I are friends.'

‘Yes. Gabrielle said that.'

And what about him? Was he happy? Had this splitting of a family asunder left no mark?

He called to Gaby, pointing to the boat: she should keep an eye.

They walked round the playground, they walked along the path. Late-blooming roses stood in the flowerbeds, petals lay on the earth.

‘We still haven't talked about your work,' she said.

‘We have not talked about your work. You say you are teaching now?'

‘Yes. I teach in a comprehensive – a secondary school – in west London. I run the history department.'

‘That must be very interesting.'

‘It's hard work.'

‘Of course. But important, yes? What is more important than history?'

Someone was scattering bread on the path: a flutter of pigeons alighted. Harriet and Karel stepped round them, and walked on round the park, beneath the trees.

‘I do want to know about you,' she said. ‘What you've been doing, what happened to you, when you came back. But only if you want –'

‘I want.' He smiled at her. ‘Everyone is talking, now. East to West, West to East.'

We are one people.

So are we
–

He said: ‘When we met I was in the second year at the university, I think. After the invasion it was difficult at first to resume my studies: the department was undergoing a certain amount of restructuring, as they called it. There were revisions to the syllabus. You can imagine.'

‘I can.'

‘
I hope to study law again one day, but at present I am working as a porter
…'

‘But then the department reopened, and we began again. I used to have interesting conversations with my father in those days. He was a communist since before the war: he believed very strongly, but for him it was associated with a humanitarian perspective, you know. It was after '53, after Stalin's death, when the party members of his generation saw the light. And then there was Hungary, in '56, the uprising – the shock of that. Totalitarianism. Ruthless. We could not believe that what happened to Hungary would happen to us, but of course in the end it came. My father's spirit was broken the day the tanks came in. I think it helped his death, truly. But for me, for my generation: we had to fight, to resist.'

Harriet listened. She and Karel had come full circle: she glanced towards the swings. The girls were off them now, spinning on a roundabout. Sunlight flickered on the path as they walked on.

‘So,' Karel was saying. ‘After I qualified I had a low-grade job in a lawyer's office, but I did what I could for the resistance. Danielle also we were members of the same group. I wrote a little, I smuggled a few books – nothing dramatic, you understand, but it was extremely dangerous to do anything dramatic. I was a signatory of the Charter in '77. I was arrested, I was interrogated, I was watched, but perhaps not important enough to send to prison.'

‘You were brave,' said Harriet. ‘You were very brave.'

He spread his arms. ‘All this is what many people could tell you, Harriet, it is not so special. And for everyone like me there were thousands more resisting in their minds, you know – an internal exile.'

They have built a wall around me
–

‘And now?' she asked.

His hands were in his pockets, he was walking fast. ‘You told me a little about your brother – you see, I am interested because I had a little to do with these issues in those days. In 1983 I have a friend in the Ecology Section who is helping to prepare a secret report. There is much anxiety about pollution – everyone knows the water is becoming unsafe, that the air in Bohemia is disgusting. This report makes a list of such things – it makes very unpleasant reading when it is published by the Academy of Sciences and it is at once suppressed. But one or two people in Charter 77 leak it to the West – it is these kind of things that build up towards a climate for the Revolution, you know. This issue is so important for us, it is a symbol of the repression, this pollution even of the air we breathe. It is a human rights issue. And you criticise – you are a dissident So. After the Revolution I maintain this interest – I am working now in civil rights, but I have my old Green friends, and I keep watch.'

‘Do you know this plant Hugh is investing in? Could you take me there?'

‘I know of it. I should be happy to take you. How long are you staying?'

‘A week.'

They had walked round the park three times at least, he talking, she listening, both looking straight ahead. The girls were off the roundabout now, and were coming towards them over the grass.

He said, watching the girls. ‘Is it true what Marsha said? Did you really come all this way to see me?'

She studied the ground. ‘Well – yes.'

‘I am very touched,' he said, and then they looked at each other, and then the ice was broken.

It had grown very hot, and Marsha, Harriet could see, was beginning to tire. They sat on a bench in the shade and rested, watching small children trundle past on bicycles, and people playing catch on the grass. The centre of Prague might be full of tourists and McDonalds, but here, thought Harriet, they could surely be back in the 1950s, when Karel had come with his grandfather to sail a little blue boat on the pond, and the world woke up to Stalin.

Marsha yawned. Karel yawned.

‘Excuse me – it has been a busy week.'

‘You haven't had your Saturday rest,' said Gabrielle.

‘I'm sorry, Karel,' said Harriet. ‘We've disturbed your routine …'

‘You have, it is thoughtless of you. I should say to you: you travel eight hundred miles to visit, I'm sorry, I'm having a rest.'

They all laughed, getting up to go, walking back through the hot narrow streets, climbing the now welcome cool stairs to the apartment. Hannah was out, visiting a friend. She had left a note on the kitchen table, and a cake. No one could eat a crumb.

Karel put the little boat back in the cupboard. He opened the windows and gave the girls glasses of Coke, which they took back to the sitting room, to watch Czech television. He and Harriet sat at the kitchen table, drinking their lemon tea.

‘This is so nice,' said Harriet. ‘Thank you for looking after us so well.'

‘It is a great pleasure.'

Voices and the sounds of occasional traffic drifted up from the street; looking out of the open window Harriet's eyes rested once more on the trees of the Olsanská Cemetery. She thought of the morning, and of visiting Kafka's grave in the New Jewish Cemetery beyond: of its emptiness and melancholy, and the sadness she had felt there, thinking of Christopher and Susanna.

‘
I have scarcely anything in common with myself
–'

Karel was not like that. He knew who he was: she could feel it.

She said, sensing now that she did not have to keep to impersonal conversation: ‘This morning, out there in the cemetery – the Jewish Cemetery – I had a great feeling of sadness.'

‘I am sorry to hear that.'

‘Not for me, or at least I don't think so. For people I've got to know recently – quite a lot of things have happened on this journey. I wasn't expecting them.'

‘No. That is the nature of journeys. Perhaps you will tell me?'

‘Yes. But perhaps not yet.'

The curtain stirred at the open window, voices came up from the street again, and then it was quiet. They sat looking at each other.

She said: ‘I kept all your letters.'

‘Yes,' said Karel. ‘I did the same.'

The sun sank lower, the air became tranquil and still. The city was bathed once again in the rich golden light which Harriet and Marsha had first experienced yesterday, leaning out of their pension window, looking over the tiled rooftops of the Little Quarter.

Now, they were sitting at a café table near the Jan Hus monument in the Old Town Square, on their way home. Karel and Gaby had seen them to the tram stop in Žižkov; they were meeting them here for lunch tomorrow, but getting off the second train, in Celetna, Harriet had not been able to resist walking through, and getting a first glimpse.

‘We're in time to hear the Astronomical Clock strike six,' she told Marsha.

‘Big deal.' But Marsha, though tired, was in a good mood as they made their way through the throngs of tourists, past medieval houses with freshly painted façades in shades of ochre, pink and green, and came out into the square. They found, after searching, an empty table; they found, in a while, a waiter; they sat drinking lemonade and looking about them.

‘This place reminds me of somewhere,' said Marsha, surveying the cobbles, the pastel-coloured houses, mellow in the evening sun. She frowned. ‘I know – it's that place in Brussels, where we went the first morning.'

‘The Grand Place,' said Harriet. ‘Yes, you're right. I thought we might phone Susanna and Hugh this evening – would you like that? To tell them we've got here?'

‘And that we've found Karel. And Gaby. And that they're really nice.'

‘Is Karel how you'd imagined?'

‘Even better. He's
lovely.
Why did you stop me, at lunch, saying what I thought?'

‘I suppose I was still rather nervous. I wasn't quite sure what you were going to say.'

‘Only that I thought he was lovely. Can't I say things like that?'

‘Sometimes you can, and sometimes you can't.' Harriet finished her drink. ‘And I don't just mean because of me, either. I mean for yourself, when you grow up. Declaring yourself can be –' She broke off. ‘Why am I lecturing you? What's the time?'

Marsha looked at her watch. ‘It's half-past five, and I don't know what you're talking about.' She sipped her lemonade. ‘Half the time I don't know what Gaby and Karel are talking about, either. How come Gaby speaks such good English? Why can't I learn Czech?'

‘Why can't you? Behold the phrase book.' Harriet pulled it out from her shoulder bag. ‘Look: greetings, food, where is the railway station, days of the week …' She passed it over. ‘What's dumplings in Czech?'

It was unpronounceable. Marsha tried greetings, practising Dobry den, good day.

‘That's easy.'

‘That's what Karel said this morning, when we met.'

‘Is it? Didn't he say Darling-Harriet-I-thought-I'd-never-see-youagain-come-into-my-arms?'

‘No, he didn't. Don't be so silly.'

They sat contentedly for a few minutes, looking things up and trying to pronounce them. Some of the words were given in Slovak, too, which didn't help.

‘The months of the year aren't too bad,' said Harriet, when they'd given up on Thursday, which had five consonants before a vowel. ‘They're rather poetic, and apt. Look – January is leden – ice, February is unor – hibernation … June is red, and July is redder.'

‘What's August, where we are now?'

‘Sickle. For the harvest. And so it goes on. The year ends with leaves falling, and supplication.'

‘What's supplication?'

‘Begging for something. It's almost religious, like a prayer. That is rather beautiful, I must say.' She put the book down. ‘There's a calendar showing the months on the Astronomical Clock. Come on, it must be almost six.'

‘Ten to.' Marsha looked at her watch with affection. ‘Thank you for this, I do love it. Mind you,' she added with insight, ‘I'd love anything today.'

They walked hand in hand across the square, to where a group of tourists was gathering on the mosaic of blue and grey cobbles beneath the Town Hall Tower, gazing upwards. Two great dials were set one above the other in the facade, watched over by painted stone figures.

‘Why is there a skeleton?'

‘That's Death, waiting.'

Above stood an angel, between two shuttered windows.

‘When the clock strikes,' said Harriet, who had slipped into the guidebook on the tram, ‘you'll see the windows open and the Twelve Apostles go past the angel.'

‘See who?'

Harriet sighed and explained. ‘In medieval times,' she went on, ‘They believed that the clock didn't just record the passing hours, it actually created them.'

‘Like God.'

‘Like God. Look. The inner circle of the dial below has the signs of the zodiac, can you see?'

Marsha craned her neck. ‘Not really. Which one's Virgo? That's me, isn't it?'

‘Yes. We'll have to buy a postcard, so we can see properly.'

‘What sign is Karel?'

‘I don't know.'

‘What do you think?'

‘Libra,' said Harriet, without a moment's hesitation. ‘I don't believe a word of it, but Libra. Balance.'

She moved out of the way of a large German knapsack. For a moment she remembered the young American, at Jan Palach's grave, then she forgot him again.