Jitka’s English is good. Not as fully developed as Lenka’s but more colloquial. She spent six months in America, on an exchange, playing in a youth orchestra in New York. She knows the West… and now, she says, we will become like the West. If the Russians allow us.
Zdeněk, her husband, mutters something that Jitka translates. ‘He says I should have stayed there.’ She laughs to show it’s a joke. ‘It was just before we married. I guess he means I could have stayed there and gotten him to join me. Or maybe that he is not happy being married to me.’ More laughter, weaker this time, which makes it even less convincing. Zdeněk scowls. Composing seems to involve great anguish, because he wears an expression of grim disenchantment – they call him Bručoun, Jitka says, which is the name for Grumpy, the bad-tempered dwarf in the Snow White cartoon. ‘But he is also very political,’ she says. ‘Maybe we are all political these days.’
The room that Lenka has vacated for them is a contrast to the rest of the flat – strangely feminine, like a teenager’s bedroom. A painting of horses galloping on a beach, family photographs on the dressing table, one of them showing a young couple holding aloft a baby that may be Lenka herself, another showing her as a young girl dressed in some kind of uniform. Apart from these, an older photo shows a solemn couple standing amongst the props of a photographer’s studio – a classical column, a bowl of flowers. On the bed a teddy bear sits waiting for an owner who has surely grown up and gone away. The bed itself threatens more than it promises.
After unpacking their things Ellie and James discuss the price of the room with Jitka. She wants payment in dollars. ‘We need the dollars. For when we go abroad.’
‘It’ll have to be pounds. We’ve only got sterling.’
Pounds will do. Hard currency is what matters. Jitka apologises, as though renting the room to them is somehow wrong. On the occasional street corner in the centre of the city touts offer koruny for dollars at four times the official exchange rate. ‘Be careful doing that,’ Jitka warns. ‘Police often pretend to do it in order to catch you. If you want, it is better if I do any exchange for you. This,’ she adds in parenthesis, ‘is what we’re reduced to.’
Her husband smokes, thin, dark cigarettes with a powerful smell that seems to have been absorbed into the fabric of the flat. He works in the living room at the upright piano on which he plays figures while scribbling the spidery signs of musical notation on sheets of manuscript paper. His wish is to compose symphonies and concertos; his job is to write jingles for television. Ellie and James try to talk music with them. Ellie is better at this of course, but they both have the connection with Frau Eckstein to relate. Does Jitka know Birgit Eckstein?
A squeal of delight. Of course! Birgit Eckstein is giving a concert. Jitka plays in the orchestra. She can get tickets if they want. ‘Here in Prague there is much music. More than in New York or London, I think. The government puts money into music because you cannot see the politics in music.’
James asks how much the tickets will be and Jitka laughs, embarrassed. ‘No, a gift from me to you.’
At night James and Ellie can hear Jitka and her husband through the thin partition walls making love in the next room. ‘Making love’ seems a misnomer: it is an urgent, painful sound, like people at manual labour of some repetitive kind, working in a factory making useless products for a socialist command economy.
Next morning they venture out into the city, with an agreement to meet Lenka for coffee at the Kavárna Slavia. ‘It is where all writers get together,’ she explained when they made the arrangement. ‘Everyone argues. It will be interesting.’
So James and Ellie wander the streets of Nové Město, the New Town, finding them drab and dusty. The few shops have plain windows and sparsely packed shelves. The buildings, nineteenth-century most of them, appear tarnished and battered, like pieces of forgotten family silver found behind a locked door. Advertisements seem half-hearted, as though there is little point in making much impact because no one’s really buying. Trams packed with people clang and grind along the wider roads. In Wenceslas Square there’s some kind of public meeting: a speaker harangues a small crowd. Flags fly. Perhaps it’s a celebration of some kind, but it’s impossible to tell. As they walk away a man darts out of a side street and tries to sell them something. James assumes it’s sex of some kind; Ellie imagines stolen goods. But it’s just money he wants to sell, Czech crowns for hard currency. ‘Good rate,’ he says, presumably the only English he knows.
The café where they are to meet Lenka is on the corner of National Street, overlooking the river and immediately opposite the proud but grimy bulk of the National Theatre. Inside there is noise and the smell of coffee and cigarettes. People come and go, greeting, talking, arguing, ordering against the shrill percussion of china against metal. Waiters patrol between the tables with trays held high. Surreptitiously Lenka points out one particular table that is full of discussion or argument, it is hard to tell which. ‘There they are,’ she whispers, as though they are specimens – rare birds, perhaps – that might be frightened away by any sudden movement on the part of observers. She mentions names that mean nothing – Collage, Herschel, Cherney – while James and Ellie watch discreetly but uncomprehending. ‘It is like Paris,’ Lenka explains, without admitting that she has never been there. ‘Writers and philosophers discussing in the cafés.’
The idea appeals to Ellie. She wants to know all about it, about the writers and the philosophy, about the demonstration in Wenceslas Square and the arguments all around them. There’s the frustration of not being able to decipher a single word. Shop fronts, newspaper headlines, protest banners, all equally opaque. ‘What’s going on? What’s happening?’ she asks.
Lenka looks helpless. ‘The Russians want one thing, we want another, and so there are meetings to talk. Meetings, meetings. Words, words, words. They speak of fraternal comrades and all kinds of kec. What’s kec? Rubbish, nonsense. But everyone knows that Brezhnev holds a gun to Dubček’s head and Dubček dares him to pull the trigger.’
‘Russian roulette.’
Lenka manages a dry laugh. ‘Ruská ruleta. You see it is not so difficult – we say the same thing. But this is true, that Dubček understands Russians – he lived many years in Russia, he speaks perfect Russian – but Brezhnev understands nothing of us. So, you see Dubček wins. That, at least, is what we hope.’
Jitka joins them at their table. Both women seem excited by the presence of these visitors from the West. There are things to discuss – what Ellie and James should see, what they should do. There are so many sights in this city. An English guidebook has been found. Plans have to be made. It is so exciting. Even Ellie is excited. If she has been in a bad mood in the last few days, all is now changed with this experience of her first socialist country, the one with the human face.
When James asks why they are being so helpful neither woman is the least bit disconcerted by his question. ‘Because we want to make you love our city,’ Jitka says. ‘We want to make the whole world love our city.’
Lenka interrupts. ‘In the West no one knows anything about Prague. They try to forget Prague after they betrayed us in 1938. Do you know about 1938?’
‘The Munich accord?’
‘Accord? Does accord mean agreement? But we did not agree to anything. Mnichovská zrada, that is what we call it. The Munich betrayal. And because of this betrayal we are forgotten, our country is forgotten, Prague is forgotten, and who cares that it is most beautiful city in Europe? So we need people like you to help the world rediscover our city and our country. And to protect it against the Russians.’