The History Room (23 page)

‘She had a change of heart.’

Merry said nothing for a while.

‘That’s where we’re going now, the old house?’ She sounded grateful to skirt off towards a different topic.

‘If it’s still there. Papa was dead by the time I left. My mother wept when I told her my plans but she gave me her blessing.’

‘So she sent you both off: you and Hana?’

‘She kept asking Hana if she were sure that she was doing the right thing. Hana’s parents were dead. She lived with a cousin in Prague. Nobody really minded what Hana did. Apart from
me.’

His voice was steady. He was worried about sounding like that young man – boy, really, not a headmaster in late middle age.

‘Tell me about her.’

‘She was an art student. Very talented. Fascinated by colours and textures.’ The words were starting to come out now. ‘Everyone had noticed her from the first few weeks of
starting at the academy.’

‘Was she pretty?’

Would it break Meredith’s heart if he told her? Would she think he was somehow betraying her mother?

‘She was vibrant. Fiery, almost, at times.’ He remembered her sharp tongue; the soft reconciliations. ‘She was a typical Czech young woman: feminine, but strong and impatient.
When she heard of my plans to come to the West she was scornful at first. She was an ardent Communist and she’d distrusted the Velvet Revolution. At first. Then she’d revelled in the
freedom.’ They’d hatched plans about all the galleries they were going to visit in Paris and New York. Perhaps she’d imagined it would only be temporary; an adventure lasting no
more than a couple of months, before things quietened down and she could return to Prague.

Even so, he was almost surprised that she agreed to come with him. He had never been so sure that she felt for him what he felt for her.

‘On the train from Prague we fell in with another group of students who wanted to come west,’ he told Merry. ‘We shared their food. Sausage and ham. It tasted good enough at
the time but it was warm on the train and I wondered how long they’d had the food. Later on, Hana started to feel sick. She vomited at my mother’s house the morning we left on our
bicycles for the border. My mother said it was just nerves and made her drink some camomile tea she made for her. We left my mother’s house . . .’ He had to stop. He could see it as
clearly as if it were happening again now: his mother at the door waving to her only son. They’d got up early so that the other people in the house wouldn’t notice what was happening.
Mama didn’t trust them.

They turned off the road, onto a lane seemingly leading into the gloom of a wood. ‘This was all cut back last time I was here,’ he said. ‘It’s grown. And back after the
war there were still houses along the road. Look, you can make out their outlines in the grass.’

He showed her the rectangles of the long-gone houses. Then he turned the car again, up a rutted track which looked barely wide enough to take a vehicle. ‘Once it had a proper
gatehouse,’ he said. They bumped along for about fifty metres. Then he stopped. ‘Oh.’ He got out. Merry followed.

Nothing. Not even bricks on the ground. The remnants of a garden still struggled to find a meaning for themselves. Apples and plums had fallen to the ground and rotted there. ‘I always
thought they’d leave it alone. They had done after the war.’

‘When you wrote to your mother before she died she must have told you what had happened here?’

‘Many of her letters never reached me. Perhaps the ones that were lost in transit were the ones describing . . . this.’

He shook his head. ‘I should have done more research before we came out. Looked at . . . what’s that place you have on the Internet, Meredith?’

‘Google Maps?’

‘That’s the one. I knew we should do that but I was superstitious.’ Superstitious, he, the rational headmaster. He walked to a fallen tree and sat on the trunk.
‘I’m not surprised, not really.’

She was looking at him, her expression tender. She reminded Karel again of his mother. She might have been Mama. He might have been the boy he’d been over forty years ago, not daring to
look over his shoulder as he headed for the West. Young enough to be excited and accompanied by his girlfriend. That boy thought he’d only be away for a few years at most, until there was
another revolution or until the western powers warned the Russians to back off. It was the sixties. Everything was changing, all over Europe, all around the world.

But that had never happened. Not for another forty years, anyway. And by that time he was the middle-aged headmaster with his own family and a life that had been completely redesigned and had
gone smoothly and perfectly. Until this year.

‘Can we look around a bit?’

As he walked around the rectangular outline on the grass he could make out where the rooms would all have been. This had been a large house. He walked his
way through the ground floor: the dining room and the formal reception room they’d hardly ever used because dinner parties were not commonplace in the Czechoslovakia of the sixties; the
kitchen, where the large stove had emitted its constant, comforting warmth. He couldn’t remember what all the other rooms had been. His bedroom had been immediately above the kitchen, a good
place to sleep in winter because the heat of the stove permeated the floorboards. Hana had shared it illicitly on that last night at home. She’d sweated as she lay beside him. He’d
thought it was just the warmth of the room that had caused it but perhaps she’d been . . . he shrugged away the thought, unable to think these thoughts when his younger daughter paced the
grass just metres away.

Free love wasn’t widely accepted back then. Even Karel’s art school friends were secretive about sex. But he’d needed Hana that last night. It would have been unbearable
otherwise to wake in his old bedroom, see his books on the shelf, his early paintings and sketches, the few sports medals and trophies he had won as a child, and know he was looking at them for the
last time.

He turned so that he was looking back up the track down which they’d driven. ‘Let’s go,’ Merry said. ‘This is too sad.’ She sounded flat, as though she could
feel the past seeping through the grass.

They bumped back down the track.

Meredith

I didn’t ask him where we were going now. The signs to Germany,
Nemecko
, were clearly marked. Dad’s face was set in an expression of concentration. We sat in
silence for half an hour as we drove through the empty countryside.

We were only a kilometre or two away from the border when he pulled off the highway. There were more signs of life now. Big German Mercedes cars heading east from Bavaria on shopping trips. Food
and clothes were cheaper here, the woman in the inn had told us. In the bigger villages and towns Vietnamese markets flogged tat to tourists and girls handed out cards for lap-dancing clubs.

Dad slowed the car. He pointed at the grassy verge beside the forest. ‘Somewhere round here is where Hana started saying she couldn’t go on any further, she felt too ill. We argued
the point for about half an hour, even though she kept having to go off to be sick in the bushes. I told her she couldn’t give up so close to the border, a new life was waiting for her. She
said she didn’t want to leave. I was being cruel to try and force her. I should leave her and go on with my dream of capitalism.’

I stared at the roadside and saw them there, the young couple; he begging, imploring, she resting her head in her hands.

Karel

Hana put her head in her hands and started to weep. He’d never seen her cry before. He’d take her back to Prague, or at least back to Mama’s for the
night.

‘We’ll wait until you feel better. What’s another day or so? The Russians aren’t here yet.’

She looked up and stared at him as though looking for something in him. It was a long stare. ‘What?’ he said.

She placed a hand over her mouth. ‘I need to . . .’ She got up slowly and shuffled into the darkness of the woods, leaving him with her bag and bike. When she’d walked about
twenty metres in she turned. ‘Don’t worry about me, Karel.’ And she sounded stronger. She gave him a smile that was almost her normal dazzling one. He watched her walk away into
the gloom. Bushes rustled and he heard the snap of a branch. ‘Are you all right?’ he called after her.

She said something in reply. He couldn’t make all of it out but he heard her tell him just to wait. So he waited. For half an hour he waited. Then he grew panicky. She might have fainted,
might be lying there unconscious in the undergrowth. He got up and followed her into the forest. There was no sign of her. He walked around for about an hour calling and calling. Once he thought he
caught a glimpse of her in the trees but that might just have been imagination. Or perhaps a deer running through the undergrowth. Bushes rustled and he spun round, expecting to see her behind him.
Then there was nothing.

Meredith

She left you?
I didn’t speak the words; they stayed in my head.

‘Was she the girl in the mural?’ I asked instead.

He nodded.

I barely needed to ask the question. He’d tried to forget about her and most of the time he’d been successful but then she’d burst back into his consciousness and he’d
painted her on the wall. Only to cover her up again. Nobody would have known she was there if I hadn’t scraped the paint off all those years ago and exposed her. What had my mother said? Had
she questioned Dad?

‘But you looked for her?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you never heard from her again?’

‘No. Once I was in Abingdon, I tried writing to the last address she’d been living at before we left Prague. But I never had an answer. Perhaps the letter didn’t get through to
Hana. Perhaps she got it and replied but her letter didn’t reach me. Or perhaps . . .’ He switched on the engine.

Perhaps she simply hadn’t wanted to reply. Perhaps her feelings for him simply hadn’t been as powerful as his for her. Or her trepidation at the thought of crossing the border was
too strong. I imagined him walking along the water meadows of the Thames around Abingdon, staring at the water, wondering what had happened to her. I felt the space between myself and my father
shrink as my sympathy for him grew.

‘We should start back for Prague now.’ He sounded like himself again, like his assured, headmasterly self.

‘It all feels so rushed.’ I hadn’t been able to persuade him to take any more time away from Letchford, not even just the Monday, the first day back after half-term. ‘Is
there time to see your mother’s grave?’

‘She’s not buried here. When she lost the house she moved north, to a job as an auxiliary nurse in an industrial town near the Polish border. She’s buried up there. My father
is buried near the work camp where he died.’

I said nothing. This unknown Czech part of my family was starting to exert a pull on me. I longed to know more about my grandmother and grandfather.

‘We will come back, Meredith. I promise you. We’ll put flowers on your grandparents’ graves. Now I’ve been back this time I want to return.’ There was a new
firmness in his tone now.

‘Could we just drive to the border quickly? Without crossing it, I mean? Just to look.’

‘I suppose so.’

It gave us time to think. We pulled up about a hundred yards from the frontier. It was quiet, too early in the morning for traffic to have built up. As it was just a minor crossing there was
none of the sleaze surrounding the more important crossings into Germany. As far as I could see the trees ahead looked just like the trees behind us. A black BMW with German plates drove past us,
an elderly couple sitting in it, laughing. Visiting a childhood home, perhaps. Reminiscing. Their past all easily confrontable, innocent. We sat staring at the forest for a few minutes.

‘There is just one thing we have time to do in Prague before we catch our plane.’

I turned an enquiring eye towards him.

‘It’s hard to explain. But there’s someone who might still be alive, someone I should see.’

‘Hana?’

He ran his fingers round the steering wheel. ‘I only have her cousin’s address, though. And she may have died or moved away years ago.’

I wondered whether he’d have married Hana if she’d continued the journey west with him. I thought of my mother and bit my lip. If Dad and Hana had continued their journey together I
wouldn’t be here. My life seemed to fracture as I considered this parallel history. No me. No Clara. No telephone ringing in that army house to tell me that my husband had been blown up. A
girl changing her mind on the grassy side of a quiet Czech road had brought me into existence.

There was much to ask, but I found the questions stuck to my lips and wouldn’t form themselves into words. I sat and watched the traffic on the roads leading us to the auto-route back to
Prague. We drove in near silence, Dad briefly telling me something about the town of Pilsen as we bypassed it, stopping once for petrol and coffee. A frown came over Dad’s face as we reached
the south-western suburbs. ‘It looks so different with all these modern tower blocks. And there’s so much more traffic.’

‘Had the tanks arrived by the time you left?’ I was imagining the pounding of their tracks across the cobbles in the old part of the city, the people running out with handwritten
signs pleading with the soldiers to turn back.

‘Yes. Enough of them to make it clear the Soviets meant business. We didn’t hang around to find out whether more troops were on their way. They’d already taken control of the
airport by then.’ He was frowning at the roads and buildings. ‘I think I remember where I am now.’

The hire car people had given us a map of Prague and its suburbs and I unfolded it.

After a mis-turn the wrong way round the ring road and a few other minor mistakes we pulled up outside a baroque church in a suburb to the west of the Vlatava; I’d given up trying to work
out exactly which one it was. The streets were on the up, I thought. Signs of increased prosperity, even though there were still plenty of black-clothed elderly women and old cars.