Down amongst the penguins Jitka seemed transformed from the febrile woman of the political meetings into an elegant lady in a black evening gown. There was the sense of her beauty, even at this distance. But then, you so often had a sense of beauty with Czech women, at whatever distance you might choose. After a few minutes the conductor appeared, bobbing and weaving like a footballer through the ranks of players. He bowed to the audience and turned to the orchestra, holding out his hands to calm the storm of clapping. Then, when a perfect silence had been achieved, he raised his baton and unleashed the first crashing, portentous notes of Blaník, the sixth and final of Smetana’s cycle of tone poems, Má Vlast. It wasn’t on the programme, that was the point. The programme, on a roneoed sheet handed round amongst Lenka’s friends, had Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances and Martinů’s Sixth Symphony, not pieces of music that would have stirred Sam’s interest very much. But here, without warning, were the familiar tones of Blaník sending a pulse of excitement through the hall.
Má Vlast, My Homeland. Patriotism without kitsch, an almost impossible trick to pull off. Blaník tells of the legend that Václav, Good King Wenceslas of the Christmas carol, a kind of Bohemian King Arthur, waits beneath the Blaník mountain with a company of knights, ready to emerge and save the Czech people at their moment of greatest need, when they are threatened – legend has it – by four hostile armies. We may savour the bitter irony of that now, but then, on that hot summer evening in Prague, the music seemed a clarion call to the nation. The Russians, the East Germans, the Poles, the Hungarians would all be defied. Holding hands, the Czechs and the Slovaks would move forward into the sunlit uplands of freedom and prosperity. Socialism would show its human face to all mankind.
The audience listened transfixed throughout and, at the crashing end, stood as one to applaud. Lenka’s eyes were bright with tears. There was sweat certainly, sweat and tears mingling on her cheeks. Sam dared to put up his hand to brush them away and was blessed with a wry smile.
After the concert they all went – Jitka the violinist and half a dozen others – to a place on the river where a quartet was playing cool jazz. There were tables outside under the trees and food was served till late. Laughter, argument, beer in the warm night, the kind of thing one dreamed of even in socialist Czechoslovakia, especially in socialist Czechoslovakia now that it was finding this thrilling, novel freedom. They were joined after a while by the Strelnikov character himself, Jitka’s husband Zdeněk. He greeted Sam with enthusiasm. ‘My Englishman. I like my Englishman,’ he said. The talk was a blend of practical politics and speculative philosophy. Names were bandied around – Lukács, Marcuse – and concepts that bore names like reification and alienation. Sam felt old, an emissary from another generation. ‘What do you think?’ they kept asking him, hoping for an optimistic answer. He did a great deal of shrugging, verbally and literally. He had exhausted this kind of talk when he was at university, and working for the Foreign Office had killed any residual idealism there might have been. Where do our best interests lie? was the watchword of the diplomatic corps: pragmatism elevated to a political philosophy.
‘Mr Wareham is a cynic,’ Lenka warned. ‘He doesn’t understand the power of an idea.’ She was holding onto his arm, tethering him to their earnest conversation as though otherwise he might float up in the warm air and go sailing away over the river and the city like a golem, back to the West perhaps. It pleased him, this display of ownership, this assumed knowledge of the workings of his mind.
‘I’m a realist,’ he said.
They laughed at that. ‘You haven’t lived here long enough,’ Zdeněk said. ‘No one can live in this place for long and still believe in reality.’
One of the group had a camera. While they talked he moved around them taking shots – close-ups, figures seen through beer glasses, candid shots. They laughed and made faces and got him angry because they weren’t taking his art seriously. When Sam produced his own camera – a neat little Japanese compact he’d bought duty-free in Berlin – there was even more laughter. ‘Tourist!’ they called, as though it were an insult. But he managed to get them to pose more or less sensibly for one shot. The flash gave its milliseconds of brilliant, zirconium flare and held the group in stark immobility on the retina of any watchers and on the film itself.
When it was time to go – the musicians had packed their instruments away, the waiters were stacking the chairs – the group of friends broke up, as such groups do, with promises and exhortations, with kisses and embraces, with awkward last-minute discussions on the pavement of the embankment. There was a moment when Lenka might have gone with Jitka and her husband, but then the moment was past and the couple had gone and Sam and Lenka were alone, walking together towards the bridge. He said something about his car and driving her to Jitka’s flat, wherever that was, but nothing was decided. Holding hands, talking about not very much, they walked across the river, over the Charles Bridge between the two rows of grimy statues that made it seem like walking up the aisle of a church. Ahead was the altar of the nation, Hrad, the Castle, lifting its shoulders to blot out the night sky. Lights were on up there, officials at work in the engine room of the ship of state, desperate to avoid the icebergs ahead, while down here two people were negotiating the first moves in a relationship. In the secluded cobbled square in front of his apartment building he stopped, keys in hand, beside his car. ‘My flat’s just here. Do you want to come up?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course I do.’ The ‘of course’ was curious. He unlocked the outside door and led the way upstairs. Why should this be so easy? With Stephanie it had taken weeks, circling round each other like animals as likely to kill as to love; but this was so straightforward. They both knew where they were going and why.
‘Nice place,’ Lenka remarked when he opened the door to his apartment.
‘Goes with the job.’ He showed the way through to the sitting room. ‘Do you want anything? A beer? Coffee?’
‘A glass of water,’ she said. ‘And the bathroom.’
‘Of course.’
Why was everything ‘of course’? Was it all so obvious, preordained and inevitable? Ineluctable. One of those words with no antonym, no ‘eluctable’ to make things easy to get out of. Maybe the word should be invented, for the benefit of diplomats.
When she came back there was something scrubbed about her face, as though she had stripped it of all artifice. Perhaps she had just taken off her makeup and brought her appearance back to how she’d been when they’d first met. It gave a vulnerable cast to her expression, made her look rather plain but somehow more attractive. Wide jaw and high, Slavic cheekbones. Pale blue eyes. A face that had come a long way, out of the Asian steppe thousands of years ago to end up here in his living room with the view of the bridge out of the window. He knew this was fanciful nonsense but the conceit pleased him.
They kissed, gently, thoughtfully, exploring each other’s taste and texture, eyes watching. Steffie had always closed her eyes when kissing. She’d seen it done like that on the films, but Lenka watched him closely all the time, as though measuring him up, assessing what his intentions might be. ‘You don’t have to get back to Jitka’s?’ he asked.