The coin is finally spun at the roadside in the southern outskirts of the city, where signs point left to Remich and Saarbrücken and right to Thionville and Metz. It falls heads down, which means Germany and the Saarland. They walk to the left-hand fork, Ellie sticks out an arrogant little thumb and a car stops almost immediately. Spirits lift.
IV
15
Sunday lunch with Lenka and her mother. He wondered why he had agreed to the idea and what the implications were behind it, but she had seemed so pleased that he had accepted the invitation. ‘She’ll understand,’ Lenka insisted. ‘Someone from the British embassy whom I found at one of the meetings. She’ll be interested.’ A knowing smile. ‘And she will like you, I think. Your šarm.’
Perhaps it was that assurance that made the whole expedition all right. He was good at ‘sharm’.
Her mother lived in one of those concrete apartment blocks – paneláky – built on the outskirts of the city after the war, part of that halo of concrete that forms a hideous modern setting to the jewels of old Prague. Her allotted portion was a sixth-floor two-room flat with thin walls and the sound of the neighbours having a row next door. Her mother was a florid woman in her mid-forties who still showed hints of a beauty that her daughter had inherited. Kateřina Konečková was her name: ‘Katherine, possession of Koneček’, whoever Koneček might have been. She stained the tiny apartment with her presence, with the smell of cigarette smoke and a clinging and rosaceous perfume that she wore. When she shook Sam’s hand it was with caution, as though mere contact might be dangerous. ‘What are you then, a spy?’ she asked, and to show it was a joke – which it wasn’t – she attempted a smile. Perhaps it was his ability with the language that made her suspicious. Foreigners didn’t speak Czech, not even bad Czech. They spoke Russian, maybe, or German.
‘I’ve told you all about Sam, Maminka.’ Lenka’s tone was impatient. She was a child again, doting on her mother yet at the same time apprehensive, as though fearing what she might say or do and what impression she might make.
‘Not a spy,’ Sam assured her. ‘I’m a diplomat.’
‘There’s a difference?’
‘One tells lies and pretends they’re the truth; the other just tells lies.’
The woman gave a bitter, rasping laugh. ‘Which is which?’ She wasn’t what Sam had expected – there was more than mere shrewdness in her look, there was a sharp intelligence. ‘And you expect me to feed you, do you?’
‘We offered to take you out to lunch, Maminka.’
‘You know it’d be dangerous to be seen with a foreigner in public. Especially one from the British embassy.’
Lenka sounded exasperated. ‘I keep telling you, Maminka, things are different these days. Things have changed.’
Her mother snorted derisively. ‘You have no memory, that’s the trouble with the young.’ She looked at Sam as though for confirmation, thus placing him squarely in the company of her generation. ‘They think they can do everything now. Freedom and love and all that rubbish. What will they be saying when the Russians invade, I wonder.’
‘They won’t, Maminka. Dubček will come to a compromise, you’ll see. We’ll give a bit and get on with things as we want.’
‘Dubček is no different from the others. He just smiles, that’s all. What does Mr Diplomat think?’
‘Mr Diplomat thinks it is time to prepare the lunch.’
She laughed, a throaty, sarcastic sound. ‘Conciliation without answering the question,’ she decided. ‘Typical of his kind.’
In one corner of the living room was a kitchen area where they unloaded the bag they had brought. A large tin of shin of pork. Cabbage, potatoes. Two bottles of a Nuits Saint-Georges. Her mother watched with wonder as they stacked the things on the narrow shelf beside the cooker. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ she asked. ‘Tuzex?’
‘We can get things through the embassy,’ Sam said.
‘We?’
‘I can.’ Sam was adept at sensing mood. Picking up vibrations, Stephanie would have said. He could sense vibrations from Lenka’s mother now – vibrations both good and bad. Jealousy and envy on the one side and the faint bat-squeak of curiosity on the other. The way she looked at him. What, he wondered, did she know about Lenka’s previous adventures? And where – because Lenka had said nothing about her father – where was Mr Koneček?
‘So you are not an optimist?’ he asked, once the pork was in the oven and they had opened one of the bottles of wine. ‘About what will happen to the country, I mean.’
They were sitting on upright chairs round the narrow dining table. The older woman smoked and drank and considered him with something that resembled contempt. ‘I know what happens to idealists. People like Lenka. They are just as their parents were twenty years ago. Just like I was.’
‘You were?’
‘Oh, yes. Twenty years ago I believed. I was a Party member just like my husband. A true believer. When they arrested Milada Horáková I believed she was guilty. When she was on trial, I even signed a petition calling for her execution. When they executed her, I cheered.’
He knew about Horáková, of course. You couldn’t read up about the country, as he had for the six months he was on the Czechoslovak desk in London, without knowing. Milada Horáková. One of the emblematic figures of twentieth-century Mitteleuropa, encompassing in her life all of the tragedies of that time and that place.
‘And then?’
The woman looked at him with cold eyes. ‘And then they came for us.’
Horáková
It’s difficult to know where to begin with the story of Milada Horáková, but not difficult to know where to end: on a rope in the Pankrác prison in Prague on 27 June 1950 at five thirty-five in the morning. She was just forty-eight years old.
How do you measure heroism? How do you describe it?
Before the Second World War, in those distant, heady days of Czechoslovak liberal democracy, Horáková was a mother and a wife, a prominent member of the Czech Socialist Party, an active lawyer and a powerful advocate of women’s rights. After the Munich Agreement and the subsequent annexation of the Czech lands by Hitler’s Germany, she became a member of the Czech resistance. Along with her husband, she was arrested by the Gestapo in 1940 and eventually imprisoned in Theresienstadt concentration camp. Later she was moved to various German prisons and eventually came to trial before a German court in Dresden. She was found guilty and condemned to death. This sentence was subsequently commuted to life imprisonment and she was moved to the women’s prison in Aichach in Bavaria from where she was freed by American forces in 1945.
Is that enough?
The thing about Milada Horáková is that she never gave up. After her liberation she returned to Prague, to her husband who had also survived imprisonment, and their daughter, who, in the absence of her parents, had been looked after by relatives. Immediately Horáková rejoined the Socialist Party and was elected to the Czech National Assembly. She argued, as she had always argued, for freedom, for women’s rights, for decency.