‘Does she perhaps work for the British embassy?’ the youth asked, as though that might explain everything.
Sam clutched at that particular straw. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘she works at the British embassy.’
The soldier seemed to relax. ‘Then you may visit. You will park over there’ – he pointed ahead where cars were drawn up in military ranks – ‘and you will go with an escort.’
Military it might be, but the sensations were the same as the civilian hospital – the same long, uniform corridors, the same harsh lighting, the same smells and sounds. Eventually the escort brought him to the department of neurosurgery, where no one else waited under the plain, unshaded bulbs of čekárna, the waiting room. There were a dozen metal-framed chairs with plastic seats and backs. A framed photograph adorned the walls, a portrait of the president, white-haired and smiling and looking as though Spencer Tracy had auditioned successfully for the part. Two ashtrays on aluminium stands underpinned the room with the smell of stale cigarette smoke. The escort left. Taking the cue from the ashtrays, Sam lit a cigarette and waited. A nurse glanced in on him but disappeared before he had time to speak. Was he even in the right place? Somewhere a phone rang but no one answered and the ringing went on and on. He got up, went to the door and looked down empty corridors. Nothing. There was the feeling that he was actually in the final, never completed, never even started Kafka novel – Das Krankenhaus, The Hospital.
Samuel W. awoke one day to find himself in a deserted hospital…
Finally a footfall sounded in the corridor and he looked up to find a doctor standing at the door. His white coat bore military tabs on the collar. A major. ‘I understand you are asking after a patient.’
Sam stubbed out his cigarette. ‘That’s right. I was told she’d been transferred here.’
‘And your name is?’
‘Samuel Wareham. I’m at the British embassy.’
The major nodded. ‘Come with me, please.’
They went up a floor and along further corridors. Doors bore nameplates with titles and ranks – generálmajor prof. MUDr; plk. prof. MUDr – and then there was yet another waiting room, only this one had a photograph of the president shaking hands warmly with Marshall Zhukov. Glass doors led to a balcony but it was dark outside and the windows did little more than mirror the room itself and the two people waiting there. Lenka’s mother was one, standing in the centre of the room like a ruined reflection of her daughter. Beside her, with his arm protectively round her waist, was the same man Sam and Lenka had encountered at the hotel in Mariánské Lázně, the man who had once been her mother’s lover and then, in a perverse succession, had become Lenka’s own. Pavel Rovnák.
‘Paní Konečková,’ Sam said. ‘I’m so sorry we have to meet again like this.’
The woman nodded, as though he was confirming something she had long expected, as if all this was the conclusion to some explanation she had been attempting in their previous encounter in her tiny, stained flat. This is what happens. This is what belief does.
Sam turned to the man. ‘Pane Rovnák.’ The two men shook hands. No surprise registered in the mother’s face that he and Rovnák already knew one another, so he assumed he had already been discussed, his presence here mulled over, explained, considered. ‘What’s happening?’ he asked. ‘I was told—’
‘She’s in the operating theatre,’ Rovnák said. ‘In the best possible hands.’
‘I saw her at the other hospital. Why was she transferred? Why a military hospital?’
‘It’s the best we have.’
‘Pavel arranged it,’ the woman said, as though that explained everything.
‘And she’s being operated on now, you say?’
‘That’s right.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Over two hours now.’
There was a strange abstraction about the scene, that they were here in this soulless room and Lenka was somewhere near, unknowing, lying prone beneath glaring lights with surgeons stooped over her like priests at a mummification.
‘What do the surgeons say?’
Rovnák didn’t answer immediately, but solicitously sat Lenka’s mother down in one of the chairs; then he took Sam’s arm to lead him away through the glass door onto the balcony. There was something paternal about the man’s behaviour, as though it was his daughter rather than his former lover who now lay beneath the surgeon’s scalpel. He lit a cigarette, offered one to Sam. They stood side by side in the cool evening air, smoking and looking out over the hospital complex. There were people moving along the dimly lit paths between the buildings, nurses and orderlies as white as ghosts. Sirens sounded in the distance. Ambulances drove in, blue lights flashing. Perhaps something had occurred in the city, some incident between the occupation forces and civilians. Presumably injured Russian soldiers would be brought here for treatment.
Rovnák spoke. His voice was level and emotionless, as though he were talking about the weather. ‘The chances are about even, that’s what I was told.’
‘The toss of a coin?’
‘If you want to put it like that. Even if they are successful, she may have suffered brain damage. When they spoke to Kateřina they appeared more optimistic and less precise. They talked of modern techniques, how so much can be done.’ He pondered the matter of modern techniques as though he didn’t believe it either. The burning end of his cigarette glared like an angry eye. ‘I love her, you know that? Whatever she may have told you.’
Strangely, Sam found that he rather liked the man. There was something matter-of-fact about him, something honest. ‘I can understand that. I love her too. And I’m sure she’ll come through.’
‘How can you be sure? As you said, the spin of a coin.’
‘It’ll come up heads.’ He wondered whether his confidence in the ability of these unknown military surgeons was entirely misplaced. ‘How did you get her admitted here?’ he asked. ‘I though it was reserved for the military.’
‘And the Party.’
‘But Lenka’s not a member of the Party. And neither is her mother.’
Rovnák smiled wryly. ‘But I am. And I’ve always looked after them.’ He said no more, just smoked and looked at what passed as a view. Finally he asked, ‘Do you know what happened to her?’
‘Lenka?’
‘Of course Lenka. Who else?’
‘Only what I’ve heard from her friends. She was at the radio station yesterday morning, when they were barricading the place against the Russians troops. A stray bullet or something.’
The man turned towards Sam. His voice rose out of its flat calm. ‘You could have stopped her.’
‘I could have stopped her? What do you mean by that?’
Quite unexpectedly, absurdly really, there was anger in the man’s face. ‘She’d dropped those foolish friends of hers and moved in with you, hadn’t she? You’d turned her head. Trips to Mariánske Lázně. Even to Munich. You had her that close and yet you let her go.’
‘How do you know all this?’
Rovnák looked away again, as though something in the darkness had attracted him. When he spoke again it was tangential to Sam’s question. ‘She phoned me yesterday morning from your house. Wanted to know what was happening. I told her to keep away, but it’s not easy to persuade someone on the end of the phone. But you could have stopped her.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. She’s an adult – she can decide what to do and what not to do. And she was determined to go into the city to see what was happening.’