‘I didn’t,’ says James, and they laugh.
The conversation slips back into Czech for Zdeněk’s sake. But he’s reading the newspaper – RUDÉ PRÁVO the masthead announces – leafing through the pages, throwing out critical comments here and there. He says something that includes the musicians’ names, Gennady Egorkin and Nadezhda Pankova. Jitka translates: ‘It says the couple have disappeared from their hotel and no one knows where they are.’
Zdeněk adds something. Jitka protests. ‘He says the man is doing indecent things with his violinist. He says all violinists are like that.’ She blushes. ‘Which is not true.’
The train trundles on, through the countryside now – fields, farms, forest, glimpses of a river through the trees. They finally leave it at a halt somewhere on the edge of a small town whose name seems impossible to pronounce, all consonants and no vowels.
The group sets off down a rough lane and into the woods. It’s like a childhood adventure, walking in the forest, along paths that are hard to follow, in directions that James can’t understand. And it is quite unlike anything in Britain, where almost always you walk and climb in open country, on the fells, on the moors, on the bareback mountains; but here there are miles and miles of forest, holding in their shadows something Slavic, something mysterious and mythic, echoing with birdsong as though it’s a cathedral dedicated to some ancient sylvan deity.
They walk on, talking, laughing, occasionally diverting from the path to forage for berries or mushrooms. These are city people suddenly revealed in different guise, in foresters’ garb, at ease in this strange world that seems so distant from the city. Above all, Zdeněk appears truly at home here, identifying plants and mushrooms, pausing to listen and point as, silently, deer cross their path like shadows in the half-light beneath the canopy of leaves. He smells the scent of a fox, points to cones gnawed down by squirrels, shows where boar have been rooting, identifies polecat droppings. There’s an unreal quality to the whole expedition, going from a place Ellie and James have never heard of to a place they don’t know, that is spoken of only in vague, allusive terms by their hosts. You will see. A strange place. An old ruin. A place whose name, if it has a name, is uncertain. We just call it Hrádek.
It isn’t long before they break out of the trees onto a bare promontory and there it is, Hrádek, which means little castle, and that is what it is, the mere bones of a place, the skeleton of a structure that has long since died – a broken circuit of walls, a tracery of outbuildings, a roofless inner keep and a shattered tower. A metal notice, peppered with shot, warns visitors – Pozor! – of unspecified danger. Far below the battlements a river winds through a narrow gorge. And beyond that is a view, a sudden, startling view of miles and miles of wooded hills running away to the east. How far does it go? Because it seems endless, this procession of forest, as though it will not end until it has become other places whose names James barely knows – the Tatra, the Carpathians, the great Russian steppe, the Urals. He thinks of the Pennines rising up behind his home town. How small they seem in memory.
The group sits for a while in the afternoon sun, amongst the ruins of a castle that once belonged to a Boleslav or a Vladislav, Duke of Bohemia, listening to birdsong and the soft movement of the breeze through the trees. Zdeněk sits apart, his face without expression. Jitka is her usual animated self, like a small, sleek rodent. Occasionally she looks directly at James for a moment longer than one might expect. He remembers the touch of her mouth when they were dancing and wonders whether she remembers too, and if she does what she thinks about it. Ellie sits beside Lenka, who is cool and distant.
‘This is very kind of you,’ Ellie tells her. ‘To bring us with you. It’s lovely here.’
Lenka’s smile is tired, as though there are other things on her mind. ‘It is Čechy. What you call Bohemia. It is right that you see it. Everything is not Prague.’ And then she does what to James seems a curious thing: she puts her arm round Ellie. And Ellie moves towards her, puts her head on Lenka’s shoulder, seems, for that moment in the sun, a close friend. Perhaps more. Is that the kind of friendship that women may have and he has never understood? A kind of idyll. Manet might have painted it, or one of the Impressionists. The viewer might ponder the relationship between the various figures, the two men sitting apart, a dark girl who moves between them, laughing at something, two women who sit together, one with her arm round the other.
The tableau is soon broken by the arrival of others on the scene, three men and a woman who come blundering through the trees and are greeted with cries of surprise and delight, as though their coming had not been planned. There are introductions, a bit of fractured English. Lenka translates: these are old friends of Zdeněk and Jitka, childhood friends of Zdeněk, in fact. It is a kind of tradition for them to gather here at the Hrádek in August, something they started years ago when they were all at the local school and have kept up ever since. So for a while the castle is theirs. They gather wood and make a fire against the wall of the inner keep where the stones are soot-blackened beneath the shaft of an ancient chimney. They forage for mushrooms, with Zdeněk’s friends showing remarkable mycological knowledge. And then, as the sun goes down and the evening sets in, they cook sausages and bake potatoes and open the beer that everyone has brought. Afterwards they sing songs round the campfire like an advertisement for the Boy Scouts from the 1930s, Zdeněk and Jitka playing guitar and violin. Some of the music is familiar – American folk songs, Peter, Paul and Mary stuff with a bit of Joan Baez thrown in – but some is quite foreign to Ellie and James. Zdeněk strums the guitar well enough, but it is Jitka’s playing that captivates, the classical violinist transfigured by the flicker of her bow and the shadows of the castle ruins and the uncertain firelight into something elemental – as though she has been revealed in her true form, which is Romany, Gypsy, Cikánka.
One of Zdeněk’s friends – James has forgotten the names – has a bottle of slivovice which he passes round. Cigarettes are lit; someone rolls a joint, about which there’s a heated discussion between the girl and one of the boys. But still the joint goes round while Zdeněk strums his guitar and Jitka sings now about going to San Francisco and being sure to wear some flowers in your hair, which James has always thought a bloody silly idea but which appeals to him at this moment, especially as when she has finished singing she comes over and sits close to him on the edge of the shadows round the fire, close enough to touch, shoulder to shoulder. He can smell her in the cooling air, the heat of her, her faint, tart scent.
‘I was in San Francisco,’ she tells him, as if that somehow justifies the song. ‘With the youth orchestra. It is an interesting place.’ Her husband and two friends are singing some kind of comic, call-and-response song. Everyone laughs. The joke is plainly that everyone knows the joke in advance.
‘Why did you come back?’ James asks. ‘Why didn’t you stay there?’
In the darkness he can see the gleam of her teeth as she smiles. ‘Why does anyone do anything?’
‘There must be a reason.’
‘Reasons, many of them. Because of Zdeněk. Because things were changing here. Because I missed my home. All those reasons. Anyway, my scholarship was for six months, so when it finished I just came back.’
Lenka is trying to teach Ellie the words of the song. Words without comprehension, an eternal problem. They laugh over the difficulties.
‘And now?’
‘Now I am trapped.’