Kateřina laughed. It was the kind of laugh you heard often enough in Prague, the laughter of contempt and resignation. ‘What good was that to me? By then he was ten years dead.’
Lenka was still holding the snapshot of the couple sitting on a rock. Perhaps to her the world of that snapshot seemed too far away, another time in another country of which she knew nothing. Perhaps that faintly smiling figure who had been her father was a creature of myth. Yet for an adult, for her mother, it was a mere sixteen years.
‘He doesn’t even have a grave, do you know that? I don’t know what they did with his body. They just told me of his death by letter. It took me a year even to get an official death certificate. And now—’
‘Now?’
‘A few months ago they sent me a medal, his medal. The Order of the Republic.’ She made a sound that was halfway between a laugh and a cry. ‘And now they say they want to give me compensation. But I don’t want their medals or their money. I want my husband back.’
That was the moment when Sam feared she might weep. But she didn’t. There was something hard and dry about her face, as though the tears had long since drained away like water through the limestone of the Moravian karst.
‘I not only lost him, I even had to lose his name. He was Vadinský, Lukáš Vadinský. I was Kateřina Vadinská. But someone, a friend, advised me to go back to my unmarried name, so that was what I did. Konečková.’ She smiled bitterly. ‘Another betrayal.’
‘It’s the past, Maminka,’ Lenka said. ‘Things have already changed. And they are changing still.’
Her mother ignored her words. She began to lay the table with ill-matched plates, cutlery that you might find in a cheap café, a cruet set of Bohemian cut glass, two stemmed wine glasses and a tumbler. She shook her head. ‘The past,’ she said, ‘is all we have. It just repeats itself.’
‘She liked you,’ Lenka said.
They were outside, walking between the paneláky. There was a Sunday sense of lassitude about the place. Kids were kicking a football around on a worn scrap of grass, but that was the only real activity. A bench of four old men argued about something. No doubt their wives were at home washing dishes.
‘I thought she was cleverer than that,’ Sam said.
His car was parked round the corner, next to a Trabant and a row of chained bicycles. Someone had written Umyj mne, wash me, in the dust of the rear window. One of the kids, no doubt. They drove away, avoiding the footballers.
‘Your mother is quite a force,’ he said, but Lenka felt the need to apologise on her behalf. ‘She shouldn’t have talked like that, she said. ‘She should keep private matters private.’
‘She needed to talk,’ Sam said. ‘She’s a brave woman.’
The girl was silent. He knew she was looking at him. Those eyes that were the most intense cerulean blue. He wondered what she was thinking, whether she was measuring him up for something. If so, what?
17
He took an afternoon off and they went swimming. They decided on a place out of the city, on the river where Sam had been with Steffie once or twice. He hadn’t told Lenka that bit. A place he knew, that was all he told her. She’d like it.
So they packed picnic things in his Mercedes and set off, and it wasn’t long before he spotted the car following. In the last few months this sort of thing had grown rarer, as though even the security services had been tainted by the infection of liberalisation, but there it was, plain enough, an anonymous Škoda on his tail, like a faithful dog tagging after them, turning where they turned, slowing when they slowed, remaining all the time about one hundred metres behind. They made their way south of the city and after a while took a rough road that led amongst wooded hills close to the river’s edge where you could park the car easily enough. The Škoda didn’t appear. Perhaps it was waiting somewhere out of sight, knowing that there was no other way out.
He turned the engine off. Silence rushed into the enclosed world of the Mercedes. ‘How’s this?’
Lenka’s expansive smile, a gleam of naked gum. ‘It’s lovely.’ He felt that torrent of desire and affection, a dangerous complex of emotion over which he had no control. He leant towards her and kissed her, tasting the cigarette she had been smoking and the coffee she had drunk earlier, as though kissing her was to snatch a small part of her quotidian life and make it his as well.
They got out of the car and took their things from the boot. Not far away was a settlement of those small wooden cabins that Czechs use as country retreats – chaty. They were like beach huts on the English coast: the same clapboard constructions in vivid primary colours, the same defiant sense of pride. But these didn’t have uniformity. They might be put together out of anything: offcuts from a timber yard, corrugated iron, tarpaper, panels from an ancient car, barrels from a brewery. An old man watched from his garden as they carried their picnic things down through the trees to the water’s edge. The air was hot and still. The water flowed over stones and around spits of gravel with Smetana’s scurrying rhythms. Things moved in the woods that bordered the space. Birds sang. An egret, sinuous and chalk white, stood in the water on the far side, keeping one cautious eye on the intruders.
Sam took up his camera and snapped some photos: Lenka tossing her hair, Lenka holding up a hand to keep the camera off her face, Lenka smiling, Lenka frowning. ‘I will swim,’ she declared in that matter-of-fact tone she adopted when speaking English, as though everything were a statement of fact and the subjunctive never existed. ‘And no photos.’ She shook loose her hair, pulled her dress over her head and dropped it at her feet. When he’d been here before, Stephanie had struggled beneath her towel and finally emerged in a modest one-piece bathing costume. Lenka was made of sterner stuff. As unconcerned as if she were in the bathroom at home, she tossed her brassiere aside, stepped out of her underpants and stood for a moment contemplating the river. There was something hieratic about her narrow, pale body, like a figure from Slavic myth, a rusalka. He’d seen the opera with Steffie the previous autumn at the National Theatre with Milada Šubrtová playing the title role of the water nymph who falls in love with a human. It’s the age-old problem of a demigod getting tied up with a mortal, and you know it’s never going to work, however eloquently Rusalka may appeal to the moon.
Sam took up the camera again, quietly, so as not to disturb his prey. If he thought of their escort, he didn’t really care. The dirty buggers could peer at her through the trees with binoculars if that pleased them. Play with themselves if they liked. He’d not mentioned their presence to Lenka because he didn’t want to spoil the day. The camera shutter gave its little secretive clap of satisfaction. Apparently indifferent either to the camera or to anyone else who might have been watching, Lenka the water nymph stepped forward onto the pebbles, then on into the flow. The camera snatched at successive images. The water rose from ankle to calf, to thigh, over her pale buttocks and up to her waist, as though she were being assumed back into her natural element. The egret stretched its legs and flew away. Sunlight glittered on the water all around. Finally Lenka launched herself into the stream, her hair floating free on the surface like weed.