She turns and hurries away, half-running towards the museum at the top of the square where the tanks are lined up, leaving Ellie smarting as though she has been suddenly and unaccountably struck in the face. As if to confirm the words of warning a battered lorry roars into the square from the direction of the river. The vehicle is crowded with young men and on the bonnet sits a youth holding aloft a flag, a Czechoslovak flag smeared with blood. The watchers make noise, something between a cry of despair and a shout of triumph, as though spilt blood is a catharsis of some kind.
‘Go,’ Jitka says. ‘This is not safe. Go back to the flat and get your things. If they find English here…’ She gestures helplessly and turns to follow Lenka.
When Ellie moves to follow James grabs at her. She shakes him off. ‘I’m not fucking running away,’ she yells. The moment of indecision is over: she hurries after the other women. James follows as well. Pushing through the crowd up the sloping boulevard, there is the sensation of things moving out of control, of chaos blundering onto the scene. Lenka is ahead of them, taller than others around her. From somewhere a shot rings out but no one falls, nothing happens, the people just move on up the square towards the national museum whose soot-blackened façade is pitted with white scars. Tanks stand like boulders in the stream of people. There’s shouting. Stones are thrown. People are running around the side of the museum into Vinohradská. Further on, buses and lorries have been parked across the roadway as a barricade. Smoke and dust drift over the scene. Flags wave, a nation of flags, used to being called out in unison on patriotic parades but now jeering and derisive; the unison is in the chaos. A Soviet flag burns. Careless crowds confront tanks before the dull concrete building that bears its name across its façade: Československý Rozhlas.
There’s Lenka, pushing past a bus. Jitka runs towards her, and Ellie and James follow, blindly, not knowing what to do. A tank grinds and turns, its tracks screeching on the paving stones, its gun sweeping in an arc. Lenka looks back at them, then falls. Jitka and Ellie don’t see it – they’re watching the tank – but James does. A moment acid-etched into his memory, cut into the neurones and the synapses even as the rest of the morning fades into a uniform blur of movement and noise. Lenka pushing between the bus and a car, then falling.
There are screams. But there are screams everywhere. People huddle round. The tank moves forward and rams into the bus, like a spoilt child fed up with his toys. The smash and tear of armour against thin steel as the bus pitches over. People are lifting a figure out of the way, screaming at the smashing tank, scurrying with their burden to the side of the street to some kind of safety in the lee of a building. There are flames at the barricade now, a truck on fire, its fuel leaking out and blazing. Soldiers, civilians scatter away. A tank, engulfed in flames, smashes forward in some kind of animal panic, then reverses to back out of the fire. And Lenka lies on the pavement with people crowding round her and Jitka on her knees beside her and Ellie and James standing by helplessly.
There’s blood. Someone tries to staunch a wound behind her ear. Someone else folds a coat and eases it beneath her head. Words fly around. James makes out ambulance and doktor. A siren sounds and someone appears with a stretcher. They bundle Lenka onto the stretcher and carry her down a side street to where an ambulance is waiting, its rear doors open. Jitka follows, turning to Ellie and James and shouting, ‘Go! Go back to the flat! I’ll telephone when I can.’ She climbs in after the stretcher, the doors slam and the vehicle moves off, its siren wailing.
Ellie and James make their way through the city, a frightened city, a city with the air sucked out of it by the vacuum of Wenceslas Square and Vinohradská. They ask themselves pointless questions – Was she alive? How did it happen? Did she hit her head? – questions with no answer. The occasional car drives by with people waving flags from the open windows. People run, going nowhere in particular. The barbarians have actually come and nothing anyone has expected has come to pass. The occasional sign of normality – a man sweeping the pavement, two women arguing about something, a queue at a shop beneath a sign that says potraviny – lends an air of strangeness to the morning, as though all these people are playing a part in a film and merely waiting for the cameras to roll. From the queue someone shouts out to them. James spreads his hands helplessly. ‘Anglický,’ he calls back.
English? What are English doing here? People in the queue stare after them as they hurry past, Fando and Lis hurrying through the streets of Tar, trying to make sense of it all. Somewhere they take a wrong turning and emerge onto the embankment of the river, into sudden sunlight with a view across the water to the Malá Strana and the wooded hill of Petřín. A convoy of army lorries grinds past, filled with soldiers. Their features are vaguely Mongol, as though they might have come from the further reaches of the Soviet empire, the endless steppe of central Asia rather than the crowded buildings of a European city. Passers-by shout abuse but they take no notice. Further on three armoured personnel carriers are parked on the pavement surrounded by a group of young men, arguing with the crew members. A tram rattles by, passengers staring out at the parked armoured vehicles and the arguments while Ellie and James stand on the other side of the road, on the other side of the gulf of language, understanding nothing. But they understand well enough when the argument round the armoured car becomes heated, a protester climbing on the front of the vehicle and gesturing with his fist. A Russian soldier lowers his rifle and points it at his tormentor’s head. Is it an empty threat, a piece of absurd bravado? Theatre, perhaps, the one actor shaking his fist, the other pointing his weapon. And then these things happen. They seem to happen simultaneously, although logic says that there is a sequence of cause and effect. But still they appear simultaneous: the report of the gun, a deafening crack close to James and Ellie, the sting of stone beside James’s head, a scream, people scattering away from the shooter. James grabs Ellie’s hand and pulls her round the corner into the cover of the buildings. He feels a sense of detachment, as though none of this is happening to him. Yet when he touches the side of his face his hand comes away with blood on it.
Ellie gives a cry of alarm. ‘God almighty. Are you all right?’ Her voice sounds muffled to him, as though she is speaking underwater.
‘What the fuck’s happening?’ he asks, bewildered. He’s shivering now, as though with cold. First Lenka and now him. Ellie’s being motherly, reaching up and moving his hand away so she can see better, producing a handkerchief and dabbing at his cheek. ‘It’s just a graze. A bit of stone or something.’
His right ear sings in protest at whatever has been done to it. In the distance there’s more gunfire, the rapid rattle of a machine gun, while out of sight round the corner the armoured cars have started their engines and are driving away, people shouting after them.
She takes his arm. ‘Come on, let’s get back to the flat.’
45
The embassy was in an uproar. Phones rang incessantly. Teleprinters chuttered out reams of paper. Secretaries scurried from office to office with flimsies to be read, to be acted on, to be contradicted within minutes. Meetings were called one moment, to be cancelled the next. London wanted to know everything when there was nothing to know beyond what Czechoslovak radio reported. Furthermore – insult heaped upon injury – the embassy lay at the head of a short cul-de-sac and access was now blocked by a Russian armoured car lying across the entrance like a beached boat across the mouth of a harbour.