‘I don’t want the consulate. I want to speak directly to Mr Wareham. Samuel Wareham,’ he adds, suddenly remembering the posh guy’s first name. ‘My name’s James Borthwick. Tell him Lenka told me to contact him. It’s about her.’
There’s a moment’s hesitation. He can sense the operator wondering about the importance or otherwise of this unknown voice with its Northern accent. ‘Hold the line please.’ There’s a pause. Silence on the line, just the rush of static in the earphone. Then the sound of the operator again. ‘I’m afraid Mr Wareham is unavailable at the moment. May I take a message?’
47
At the entrance to the Charles Bridge there was a Russian checkpoint. Only the day before TV crews had been filming that British pop group, with everyone basking in the fiction that the country was in the process of joining Western pop culture; now half a dozen Russian soldiers were rifling people’s bags and searching them for offensive items. But the procedure was less to do with security, more plain highway robbery: they were taking cameras, pens, wristwatches, anything that might have pecuniary value. A young soldier – a mere boy – advanced on Sam as he moved to go through. Sam waved his diplomatic pass. ‘Britanskoye posol’stvo,’ he said. British embassy. The soldier hesitated. Standing downwind of him Sam caught the sour scent of stale sweat. There was a brief conversation between the soldier and his officer before Sam was waved through onto the bridge.
The bridge itself was already daubed with graffiti. Red stars and black swastikas in intimate conjunction, BREZHNEV = HITLER chalked on the parapet in case you’d missed the point. In one place a Cyrillic scrawl exhorted the Russians to ИДИТЕ ДОМОЙ! GO HOME! On either side of the bridge the embankments had become a tank park, Soviet armour lying like a great, articulated reptile alongside the water’s edge. Gunfire punctuated the morning, while from the crowded buildings of the Old Town came a noise like the roar of a football crowd. Sam went on, past the statue of the emperor Charles IV, hung now with a Czechoslovak flag, past the incurious gaze of soldiers, towards whatever was happening in the heart of the city. The streets, the squares were rancid with the smell of the occupiers – diesel fumes, hot metal, unwashed bodies. The act of walking, hurrying, almost running, distracted him from his feelings, which were visceral, a sensation of vomit, a feeling of fear lying just below the sternum and spreading up the spine to his brain.
Memories of that walk became confused in retrospect, so that he could no longer plot the exact route he took through the streets of the Old Town. There was the incongruity of tanks in narrow streets, of armoured vehicles confronting trams, of soldiers ringed by arguing men and women. Roads were blocked. Trams tipped over as barricades. A bus driven into a shop front. Smoke and dust eddying in the narrow spaces. Groups of youths waved banners while a motorbike drove past distributing copies of Rudé Právo. Bullets pockmarked buildings. Façades were smashed and broken stonework lay on the pavements. The National Museum at the head of Wenceslas Square, dark grey with urban soot, bore white spots where shells had hit. On Vinohradská there was a litter of overturned vehicles blocking access to the radio station. Tanks had ground their way through the debris, spewing clouds of exhaust fumes. Guns fired. Boys argued with tanks. Flags waved. Girls screamed.
At one street corner an argument was going on between a dozen youths and a young Russian officer. Their common language was an amalgam of Czech and Russian. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘We came to help.’
‘We don’t need your help. You can see that. So go back home.’
‘We were invited.’
‘By whom? Not by the people.’
‘By your leaders.’
‘Dubček didn’t invite you. Císař didn’t invite you. Svoboda didn’t invite you. So what are you doing here?’
‘We came to help.’
So it went on, a circular litany with no end in sight.
As he stood in the midst of this chaos, Sam’s fear gave way to a curious sense of detachment, as though the ferment all around were happening in some other, parallel world. These tanks, these soldiers, the blunt fact of their presence had all been inevitable. What had people expected? What had Lenka and her friends, with their fifteen minutes of freedom, imagined would happen? This was reality. The last eight months had been but a dream.
A group of protesters walked past chanting Dubček’s name. They parted and flowed round him like water round an obstacle, like the river that had flowed round Lenka as she stood there in the stream. A gunshot rang out. People flinched and scattered, but Sam had learned from his national service basic training that you never hear the report of the shot that hits you, so that particular bullet, echoing between the buildings, was safe for him at least. He had never felt so indifferent to risk.
He walked on. The steel rasp of tank tracks ground paving stones to dust. Sunlight through smoke. The smell of oil. A fire blazed beneath an armoured car while the crew tried to beat out the flames, just as people would try to beat out the flames of Jan Palach’s body in five months’ time in more or less the same place. A passing motorcyclist shouted, ‘Take these!’ and thrust a bundle of leaflets at him. He walked on, handing the leaflets out to anyone he passed, not really caring what the leaflet said – the simple act was enough. Was this what combat was like: fear transcended to become something close to euphoria? He came across a young man also distributing leaflets. There was an absurd hiatus during which they compared leaflets and found them to be different. ‘That’s good, then,’ the youth decided. He wore a black leather jacket and jeans. His hair was down to his collar. A badge of some kind. ‘You German?’ he asked.
‘English.’
‘You speak good Czech.’
A lorry roared past filled with kids yelling and waving the Czechoslovak flag, chanting Dubček, Dubček, Dubček! ‘Oh, one thing. You don’t know a girl called Konečková, do you? Lenka Konečková?’
A frown. ‘I’ve heard of her. A journalist?’
‘She writes a bit. And speaks on the radio sometimes. Have you seen her?’
The youth shook his head, indicating the chaos all around. ‘I wouldn’t know her by sight anyway.’
‘Blonde, tall.’
The youth laughed. ‘Aren’t they all?’
Sam walked on, handing people leaflets until his supply vanished. What else to do? On the embankment there were groups of people arguing with the tank crews. Slogans had been chalked on the steel hulls – swastikas, hangmen, the exhortation to ‘go home’ in Russian, in Czech, even, presumably with an eye on the news media, in English.
‘When’s that guy from the embassy going to ring back?’
‘Why don’t you ring him again?’
‘Because he’s too busy to take my call.’
‘You don’t know that.’
‘That’s what she said. Anyway, maybe he already knows.’
They have been bickering like this ever since they came back to the flat. What else is there to do? Once it was different. Once there was that mutual attraction of a kind, but it was always a fragile thing, and now they are kept together by no more than the kind of tension that keeps oil droplets together in water – a shared reaction to the unintelligible world around them. Outside in the streets people argue with tanks in a language they cannot comprehend; here in the cramped living room the TV shows a serious young woman talking to the camera in a blizzard of incomprehensible Czech. Whenever the transmission goes off the air, James retunes it to another channel and the picture returns. The announcer appears to be sitting in a room with bare walls, except for the Czechoslovak flag that has been roughly draped behind her. Every now and again she is interrupted by poor-quality film of tanks in the street. A bus lies on its side and one of the tanks goes at it like a petulant child, bashing it again and again, trying to climb over. People jeer from the sidelines. The building beyond the fallen bus has československý rozhlas across the front. They wonder whether a figure, caught for an instant on the edge of the picture, is Lenka. They wonder where she is now.