Faced with his boss he felt no more than a kind of exhaustion. ‘She’s in a coma, Eric.’
‘Coma? Who?’
‘Lenka. The woman whose name you forgot. The woman I couldn’t have with me because they weren’t letting their own people take refuge in foreign embassies.’
Whittaker looked shocked. It was rare to see him disconcerted. He just had single interrogatives to deal with, like someone struggling with a new language. How? Why? When? He seemed sorry, he was sorry. And shocked and appalled and distraught and all those other emotions one lays claim to at moments of consternation, whereas Sam felt only the cold hand of anger descend once more.
‘If you want to go home, old fellow…’
But Sam shook his head. ‘Brooding on my own is the last thing I need, Eric. Tell me what I can do.’
Whittaker considered. ‘You are our Russian specialist. You can talk to them better than anyone else we have. Perhaps you can get on the phone to the Soviet embassy, to whoever you have some sort of understanding with, and explain to them that we are proposing to evacuate a substantial number of our citizens by road and we need their understanding and cooperation. Because with their little toy soldiers all over the place, trigger-happy and frightened out of their wits, this whole circus parade could go horribly wrong.’
Sam smiled. It was not a smile of amusement or even complicity. It was a smile of something close to despair. ‘I can do that, Eric,’ he said. ‘I know just the man to talk to. But he’ll not be able to guarantee that poor frightened Ivan won’t pull the trigger of his Kalashnikov. After all, I doubt anyone was given the order to fire the bullet that hit Lenka. And yet there she is, unconscious in a hospital bed.’
Whittaker winced. Sam watched him for a moment, then nodded and went to his office.
Zdeněk has come from the hospital, come from seeing Lenka. Ellie and James try and talk with him, although it’s not easy to communicate across the barriers of language and anger. But medical words are more or less the same in English as in Czech. That’s the way with such vocabulary – an international language of disaster. Kóma, he says. Trauma. Ventilátor.
‘I think,’ he says, ‘she die.’
Ellie weeps. It’s a shock to imagine her broken like that. James feels sad enough but, hey, it’s not the end of the world, not yet. Lenka’s world maybe, yet she’s still alive, isn’t she? There’s always hope. But Ellie weeps and somehow he envies her weeping, the fact that she can have access to a great well of feeling that seems denied to him.
Outside, the city drags wearily towards evening. Guns are fired in the gathering darkness, lines of tracer arcing through the sky like a blizzard of shooting stars. Perhaps this is to signify the beginning of a curfew imposed by the occupying forces and announced by posters plastered all over the city. Perhaps it is just the city weeping for its lost freedom and not to be comforted.
Jitka returns late, her face drawn in anguish. When asked how Lenka is she merely confirms what her husband has already conveyed, that Lenka lies on the borderline between the living and the dead, neither one thing nor the other, like the country itself, neither free nor captive.
Zdeněk leaves. There are things to do during the night. Posters to be made, plans to be laid, a petition to be composed and names of collaborators to be published in the streets: Kolder, Indra, Biľak, Jakeš, others. Names that will live in infamy. Jitka talks into the night, her sharp, frantic, mind jumping from one thing to another. ‘What will you do?’ she asks them. ‘You cannot stay here. It is dangerous for you. And perhaps for us.’
James tells her about his contact with the embassy. ‘Tomorrow, they told us, wait until tomorrow.’
‘We don’t want to leave you,’ Ellie says.
‘You have to,’ says Jitka. ‘You have to. There is nothing here to stay for.’
She might have been speaking for a whole people.
50
Sam spent the evening with Harold Saumarez, discussing how to deal with the Russian musicians. The SIS man had come up with a plan to get them out, a careful construct of cars and hiding places and false passports, with decoys and extras just to confuse the issue. Whisky made the whole idea seem plausible, but against Lenka’s injury it seemed a kind of blasphemy to be talking of saving the Russians while she lay unconscious in hospital. When Sam explained what had happened, Harold offered a bluff sort of comfort: ‘Don’t you worry, old chap. The one thing these fellows can do is medicine. She’ll be right as rain, just you wait and see.’
The whisky bottle was half-empty when he left after midnight, dismissing any suggestion that there might be a curfew or that he might be subject to it. From the sitting room window, Sam watched him cross the square in front of the building undisturbed, and disappear round the corner. The Tatra that had been there earlier was nowhere to be seen.
His bedroom – his and Lenka’s bedroom – was a refuge of a kind, filled with her possessions as though she had been there for months rather than… how long was it? Days or weeks? Time seemed distorted, both stretched and compressed by the gravitational fields of events swirling around him, by the shock and the misery, the fear and the hate. Disconsolately, he tidied up her things, scraps of underwear, her shoes, stockings, some books, pages of articles she had typed, including the last one about her encounter with Dubček, written but never submitted and no chance of publication now. He tried to put some items together that he might take to the hospital for her – toothbrush, soap, her hairbrush, a hand towel – but he really didn’t know what might be needed. Her nightdress, still redolent of her presence, lay where she had tossed it over the back of a chair. He picked it up and held it to his face, breathing in her scent, remembering. He didn’t put it aside with the other things but instead climbed into bed and tried to sleep, with the nightdress clutched to him like a comforter to a child.
Dawn seeped into the city, bringing with it the dashed hopes of another day. Tanks still blocked the bridges over the river. Armoured cars still guarded the offices of state. The radio still broadcast defiance, exhorting listeners to take no notice of the renegade Radio Vltava and listen only to those voices they could recognise and trust. Do nothing to provoke the occupying forces, it said, but give them no help. Deny them even a drop of water. Say only that if they come as peaceful tourists driving Ladas then you will happily show them round your beautiful city; but as they have come in uniform and driving tanks you will not even look at them.
Sam rang Jitka’s number as early as he dared. Her familiar voice was almost a comfort as he struggled to betray no panic, no sign of the desperation that bubbled up inside him. ‘Lenka? How’s Lenka?’ But there was no news. Jitka was going to the hospital as soon as she could. ‘I’ll try to get over there sometime today,’ he told her. ‘It’s just that everything’s happening here.’ And he felt stupid saying that, because everything was happening everywhere at the moment, wasn’t it? To Lenka and Jitka and her kind much more than to the pampered foreigners who had their safety nets, their diplomatic immunities, their escape lines, their ways out.
‘Could you put one of the English kids on the line?’ he asked as she was about to hang up. ‘I need to speak to them.’
Words sounded in the background, and then the flat, Northern vowels of James’s voice came on the line. ‘’Ullo. It’s James here.’
‘This is Sam Wareham. Are you ready to go? We did speak yesterday.’