The František Hospital was more reminiscent of a prison than a place of healing – a forbidding block of stone on the right bank of the river, with only a hint of Jugendstil decoration to alleviate its grim façade. Ambulances were coming and going. Sirens sounded. Soviet military vehicles provided the only elements of stasis as men in white overalls manoeuvred stretchers in through the doors. Most people moved on the edge of panic while Russian soldiers looked on with sublime indifference.
Sam pushed his way inside. In the entrance hall the familiar hospital stench of disinfectant papered over other smells – hints of ordure, the tang of blood, the scent of torn flesh and torn lives. At a desk he asked for Lenka by name but got nothing more than indifference. A passing nurse was more helpful, giving some sort of direction that he could try. He walked along corridors of institutional bleakness, past anonymous doors which gave an occasional glimpse of other lives, other problems, other disasters. Finally he knew that he had reached the right place when he saw a cluster of people gathered outside doors that said Neurologie.
Doctors and nurses hurried in and out. Occasionally a stretcher was wheeled through. Jitka was there, and her husband, Zdeněk. The others he recognised from that evening after the concert, and the political meetings he’d witnessed. Jitka detached herself from the others and came towards him. She had been weeping. He could see scorched eyes and flushed cheeks.
‘How is she? Can I see her? What happened?’ All questions that were easier to ask than to answer.
She gave a sketchy account. The barricades outside the radio building. Tanks, soldiers, vehicles blocking the way. Was there a gunshot? There had been firing. One moment Lenka was pushing past a wrecked car, the next she was on the ground with blood coming from her head. It seemed no one really knew.
A surgeon came out of the department, dressed in white and wearing an apron. Almost like a butcher. There was muttered discussion, talk of cranial trauma, of pressure on the brain. X-rays showed a foreign object – maybe a ricochet, maybe a shell fragment – lodged against the brain. After a while they were allowed in to see her, a few at a time, down the corridor into a bare room with two beds. Sam was next in line, after Jitka and Zdeněk.
Lenka was in the bed by the window, lying on her back. Her body, beneath sheet or shroud (it was impossible to say which), was preternaturally still. What is the difference between life and death? It seemed a debatable point. She was somewhere on the borderline between the two states, neither one thing nor the other, neither the lovely living rusalka wading into the flow of the river Vltava, nor yet a cadaver ready for burial. Her head was bandaged and her features were familiar in the way that the features in an indifferent portrait may be familiar – her and yet not quite her, recognisable but not convincingly lifelike. A bottle hanging over her dispensed liquid parsimoniously down a narrow tube into a vein while another tube came out from under the sheet and drained pale yellow liquid into a bottle on the floor. Perhaps these two flows, of liquid in and liquid out, were a sign of animation. A wider tube, held between her lips by surgical tape, emerged from her mouth and disappeared into the mechanical ventilator beside the bed. Although her chest rose and fell faintly, that was only in response to the black rubber bellows of the machine, which opened and closed repeatedly like a concertina playing the same notes over and over. But no musical sound came out, just a succession of sighs, as though the constant movement was infinitely tedious.
Sam stood beside the bed looking down on her and felt nothing. There’s no training for this, he thought. No experience, no guidance, no special knowledge. There was just the sight of her lying between a life and an end, and the vivid sensation of the fragility of the border itself which was nothing more than a narrow line over which one might step or be pushed in a moment. He thought probably that his heart was broken and that this is what it felt like – not overwhelming grief or anything like that, but just this void, this absence of feeling, as though the very part of him that might experience pain and misery was, in fact, broken.
After a while he did some of those things that you do, pointless things that bring some kind of comfort to the visitor if not the patient. He called her name and saw no response, touched her hand and felt no answering movement. After a few minutes like that he turned away and went out.
‘We have to be patient,’ another doctor was saying to the sorry little group outside in the corridor. He had other patients to attend to but she was being closely monitored, he could assure them of that. They were doing their very best for her. Now, if they would excuse him…
Sam stood with the others for a while, but it was too much like a gathering of mourners at a funeral. He had to go. He had to do things, anything to get away from this feeling of helplessness. ‘Let me know,’ he said to Jitka. ‘Any change at all. Do you have my number?’ Just in case he took out one of his cards and wrote the telephone number of the flat on it below the number of the embassy.
When he got back to his apartment building the Tatra was still parked outside on the cobblestones. He stopped beside the car. A face peered out at him, like a creature inside an aquarium, something that lives on the bottom and grubs around in the detritus for food. He rapped on the glass and the man wound the window down. There was a release of rancid air, the smell of stale sweat and cigarette smoke.
‘Why don’t you fuck off?’ Sam shouted. The man looked puzzled. ‘You heard me. People are dying thanks to your bloody Russian friends and all you do is sit in your car and obey orders. You’re just a couple of shits.’ His Czech was approximate but the meaning was clear enough, yet the man’s expression didn’t change. He just turned to his companion and shrugged, then wound the window back up.
In the flat, Egorkin was whining. This wasn’t right, that wasn’t right, he shouldn’t be cooped up like this, they shouldn’t be cooped up like this, they should have been taken to the embassy, the Americans would have done it better. Sam tried to focus on Egorkin in order not to think of Lenka. Egorkin he could deal with. His complaints he could deal with. ‘You don’t understand my importance in the world of music,’ the man insisted. But Sam knew full well that the embassy, the ambassador, the whole pyramidal ziggurat of the British Foreign Office right the way up through the ranks to the Permanent Under Secretary (who might sound ‘under’ and ‘secretary’ but was in fact lord high everything and Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George to boot), no one in this great artefact of state would actually want Gennady Ivanovich Egorkin if they ever came to know of his existence. They wouldn’t give a shit. The only people who would want him, presumably, were those worthy souls who commanded the cultural life of the country and politicians who would make a bit of political capital out of it. And the journalists who would work it up into a story.
‘Listen,’ he said to the man. ‘André Previn might think you’re the greatest thing since Toscanini, but at the moment, here in Prague, no one gives a toss about you. In fact, I’m the only friend you’ve got. So you’d better just shut up and play along to my tune.’
Egorkin looked as though he had been struck across the face.
‘And at the moment,’ Sam continued, ‘the woman I love, the woman whom I am going to marry, is lying critically ill in hospital. So believe it or not, Mr Egorkin, you are not even high on my own list of priorities.’
The fire of anger had burned itself out by the time he appeared in the embassy. ‘I needed you,’ Eric said when he saw him, ‘and you were nowhere to be found.’