Letters From Prague (42 page)

‘Thank you.'

They walked on. He said: ‘For all I know, they could be shopping lists. But I don't think they are. And I do find the idea moving – all that hope, all that longing, left for the wind to blow across a graveyard.'

She could not speak. This was the man she had once dismissed? This was the loud, intrusive guest?

At length she said, again with infinite caution, ‘Susanna left a message, too. I do not begin to understand it –'

‘No.' He felt in his pocket, then lit a cigarette, dropping the lighter back. ‘I'm sorry, I suppose I shouldn't.'

‘Everyone smokes in Prague.'

‘But not here.' He inhaled deeply.

She said, remembering the starry sky above Malá Strana, leaning out of the window, the night of the telephone call, ‘Since Berlin – since what has happened – sometimes I've wondered if you're the person Susanna needs, in spite of everything – you're the one who understands her, and can help her –'

‘On the contrary.' He drew in smoke again, almost violently; he let it out again in a great stream. ‘I am the last person to help Susanna.'

‘Because –'

‘Because I can't even help myself. Because I ruin every bloody thing I touch, that's why.'

‘Christopher –'

‘What?' He was smoking, pacing, looking at the ground. ‘Here we are again,' he said bitterly. ‘Because somebody tried to kill herself.'

‘Not just because –'

‘Isn't it? Listen.' He threw the cigarette to the ground, crushed it with his foot, kicked over a covering of earth. ‘Listen. I want to talk to you. I wanted to see you, I've seen you. I'm going to talk, if you will be kind enough to listen, and then we shall say goodbye.'

She said bleakly: ‘Go on.'

He said: ‘I'm divorced. You're divorced. The whole fucking world is divorced, these days.'

Karel, also. She thought of the box on the chest of drawers, the two rings, side by side.

‘And your parents?'

‘My parents are happy,' she said. ‘They have a good marriage, I think.'

‘How reassuring. Perhaps that explains your fundamental good sense. My parents hated each other. They split up when I was four, then they tried again, then it didn't work. I was sent off to boarding school, out of the way of the rows. That's where I met your nice brother.'

‘Yes.'

Pritchard was a bit of a bully in those days – we kept an eye on him
–

Did he ever do anything to harm you?

No, never, he just had a reputation
–

‘Most of the rest of my life I've told you about – an edited version, anyway. In Berlin. But that's where it all began, I think. I was abandoned. Bring on the violins. It almost killed me.'

There were others in the cemetery: middle-aged women were talking quietly, a man in a skull-cap was leading a child, pointing things out on the gravestones. Christopher walked away from them all; Harriet followed.

He said: ‘I did various unpleasant things to people at school. That's not so uncommon. Bullying in distant places, coming home in the holidays to listen to your parents tear each other apart. All term I wanted to go home, all holidays I wanted to go back to school. Jesus. You can't talk about yourself to your teachers, you can't talk to your parents – it all gets sat on, and buried. That's how I understand Susanna – not her particular brand of self-hatred, it's true, but the fact of its existence, the feelings that go with it. That doesn't mean I can help her. We almost destroyed each other, I told you.'

He lit another cigarette; disapproving glances came across the cemetery.

‘They're right, they're right, everyone's right except me.'

‘Christopher – I care so much for you …'

It was true, it was true.

He shook his head. ‘You wouldn't, Harriet, not if you got to know me.'

That's what Susanna had said, weeping in the little garden behind the Grand Place, rubbing her foot in the gravel, over and over, a bear in a cage –

‘Christopher, please –'

‘What? Too much self-pity? It's true – you wouldn't like me. I thought in Berlin – when we were talking – I thought perhaps – It's hopeless. I'm eaten away. All the feelings you sit on come out in the end: all that fucking misery has to get out somehow. With me it was risks, and dangerous money. I fell foul, I told you, I'm still paying for it, literally. I do things you wouldn't believe –'

‘That's enough,' said Harriet, her hands to her face. ‘Stop. Please. I don't want to hear any more.'

He stopped, dead in his tracks. ‘You see? What did I tell you?'

‘No, no, I mean just for now – it's too much, after hearing about Susanna, I'm too upset – perhaps all this touches a chord in myself, I don't know. But for now – I think you should stop. I think we should go somewhere else, and sit quietly, and try to be calm –'

He walked towards the wall, he leaned against it, smoking. He ground the cigarette underfoot.

‘A desecration.'

‘It is, rather.'

He nodded. ‘I'm sorry. I've alarmed you, I've upset you, I shouldn't have come to meet you.'

‘It was I who asked to meet you.'

‘Yes, so it was. But even so –' He rubbed at his cheek. ‘You're right: that's enough, now.' He looked at her, full in the face, as she stood before him. ‘How is your reunion? How is your friend?'

She looked back at him. She swallowed. ‘He's terribly nice.'

‘I'm sure.'

‘But –'

‘But nothing.' He held out his hand; she took it. They went on standing there, just a foot or two apart, holding hands, looking in each other's eyes, exploring each other's faces. Around them were the sounds of departing footsteps, and birds, and distant traffic. Then he drew her to him, and turned her round, and held her against his chest, his arms round her, his chin resting on her head.

They stood for a while without speaking, quiet and close.

‘There's another message,' he said at last.

‘Where?'

‘Just there, to your right, see?'

She looked. It was there: a torn scrap of paper, a smooth white stone.

‘Where do they come from, all these stones and pebbles?'

‘I don't know. People bring them, I suppose. Perhaps I should have brought one. Perhaps I should leave you a message. Yes? What do you think?' He buried his face in her hair, she leaned back, brushing her face against his.

‘What would it say? Your message.'

He was silent. ‘Who knows?
Dear Harriet, I have fallen in love with you, but I wouldn't make you happy.
Something like that. Bring on the violins.'

She turned in his arms, her mouth met his. There came oblivion, the taste of cigarettes.

‘Christopher –'

Across the cemetery, somebody coughed. They drew apart.

‘A desecration.'

‘Yes.'

‘Come on.' He took her hand; they walked in the deepest silence back towards the gate. Harriet looked down at the caked earth. The first dry leaves of late summer, or early autumn, were falling, now and then, to the ground, brushing the stones. She was trembling.

She said, as they came to the gate, not looking at him, speaking unsteadily, ‘I don't want to say goodbye.'

‘I thought I should be saying that to you,' he said slowly.

‘But –'

‘But I wouldn't make you happy. I know it. I know myself. I'm very sorry.'

They were standing outside on the street again. Passers-by came and went.

Harriet looked at Christopher, heavy and tall and sombre. She thought: I want to lie naked before this man in a shuttered room, and have him stand naked before me –

She closed her eyes.

‘Goodbye.' He kissed her hair: the gentlest, most tender touch. And then he walked away from her.

So. This was love. So complex, so full of pain.

Harriet stood at the entrance: a synagogue on one side, a Memorial Hall on the other. She thought: I must distract myself. I am not used to feelings like this. I don't know what to do when I feel like this.

People walked past her; somebody said, ‘You okay?'

It was the young American, the boy she had met by Jan Palach's grave.

‘Hey – you again.'

She looked at him blankly.

He came towards her. ‘Listen, you don't look too good –'

‘Go away, go away.' She was incoherent. She turned aside: she was by the open door of the Memorial Hall; she walked inside: swiftly, blindly.

The Memorial Hall housed the poems and paintings done by the children of Terezín, the model concentration camp outside Prague. They were hung on bare walls; strands of barbed wire evoked the camp perimeter. The children had painted gardens, flowers, butterflies. They had painted hangings, dark skies, grimacing faces; children, herded away. And then they had been herded away, to the death camps over the border.

Harriet walked round the two rooms, looking at these harrowing images from the past.

The past is more real to me than my own life
–

That was no longer true.

After a while, she came out again. The young American boy had gone. She walked past the cemetery walls, looking straight ahead, and rapidly beneath the trees alongside, down to Jan Palach Square, along Kaprova, and into the Old Town Square. The clock was striking five. She did not stop to look up at the procession of saints, or listen to Death ring out his warning. She walked rapidly over the cobbles, and into Celetna, catching the tram to Žižkov, where Marsha – to whom, all afternoon, she had not given a thought – was waiting for her.

In the early 1880s, towards the end of his life, Marx took the water at Karlovy Vary. Better known to the world as Karlsbad, the spa town in western Bohemia, set on the steep wooded banks of the River Tepla, was a
belle époque
dream, all pastel-coloured houses with façades like iced cakes, and shops as fine as Vienna's. A little funicular railway ran up and down the hillside: at the top, you could walk amongst oak and beech trees and admire the view. In the town, after rising at six to take the waters, you might indulge yourself with coffee and rich
Torten
, dance flirtatious afternoons away to a string quartet, visit the theatre with frescoes and swishing curtain by Gustav Klimt.

Everyone, celebrated and obscure, came to Karlsbad. Goethe enjoyed romantic assignments, Schiller drank eighteen cure cups of the sparkling salty waters. Gushing from deep springs and geysers, they were reputed to cure almost everything.

But even then, mine workings were encroaching on the mineral-rich land beneath the Krus˘ne Hory mountains, along the German-Czech border of northern Bohemia. Mining companies dug for porcelain clay, and for lignite, which fuelled the factories being built alongside. Northeast of Karlsbad, some ninety kilometres from Prague, stood the lovely spa town of Teplice – concerts, swans on the lakes, a château, the drawing room of Europe – visited by Wagner, Liszt and Beethoven. Nearby, mine workings breached an underwater lake, flooding the natural springs.

Already, here and there, the smell of burning lignite hung in the air. Already sulphurous yellow fumes rose from the factory chimneys, drifting in and out of the clouds.

‘The alternative,' said Karel, overtaking a lorry, ‘is nuclear power. The issue of nuclear power is dividing Bohemia in two.' He glanced in the rear-view mirror. ‘Marsha? I am alarming you with my driving? Gaby is used to me, but you must say if I drive too fast.'

‘I'm fine,' said Marsha, squashed up next to Gaby and Hanna. ‘It's fun.'

‘Harriet?' He turned towards her. ‘You are quiet this morning. Perhaps I am talking too much?'

‘No, no. I'm listening.'

She looked away, gazing at the countryside. They were travelling in Karel's bright red Skoda, towards the German border, on the road from Prague to Berlin. Yesterday had been a blur, Karel too busy to see them and Harriet too filled with emotion to know what to do – with herself, or with Marsha. In the end, after wandering among stalls and markets, she had looked in an English-language entertainments guide and taken her to a puppet theatre in a street off the Old Town Square. They sat in the darkness watching Czech fairytales unfold on a tiny stage; Black paper silhouettes made forests and castles; pinpricks of stars illuminated the progress of clicking wooden feet down paths full of danger; goblin voices croaked from beneath the footlights. Marsha was entranced.

‘Didn't you like it?' she asked, as they came out into the crowded little foyer. ‘You're not
saying
anything.'

‘Sorry. Perhaps I'm under a spell.'

They walked back to Mala Strana over the Charles Bridge, stopping, as usual, to look at the stalls of painted eggs and cheap wooden toys, and listen to buskers'Mozart float across the water.

‘I feel really at home here now,' said Marsha.

Back in the pension, Harriet telephoned Hugh, letting Marsha speak first this time.

‘We're going out to the country tomorrow,' she told him. ‘With Karel. We're going to visit your power station place. Love to Susanna. Here's Mum.'

She handed the receiver to Harriet and wandered out to the courtyard.

‘Hugh? How is she?'

‘She's low, but she's coming home tomorrow. We seem to have found someone she can talk to – a priest turned therapist. He seems okay, the clinic found him –' He sounded drained, exhausted. ‘This isn't exactly my territory …'

‘Oh, Hugh – I'm so sorry. Would you not like me to come?'

‘No, no – well be all right. What about you, how are you? I hope all this hasn't clouded –'

She could not speak.

‘Harriet?'

‘It's okay –' She felt tears well up, and put her hand to her mouth.