‘I’m trying to purge it. Look…’ Sam hesitated, looking round, trying to work out if there was anyone else with particular claims on this girl – what was her name? Lenka? – but it seemed she was on her own. He thought of Stephanie somewhere in West Germany, chatting happily to Jenny – her old school chum – about life on the other side of the Iron Curtain, about Prague and her job, and, presumably, about Sam. Saying what? That they were sort of engaged. An understanding, really. Imagine being a dip’s wife! But the relationship wasn’t always easy… ‘Do you want to come for a drink when you’re finished here? So we can have a chat. In Czech.’
She shrugged. ‘And I can tell you how you go wrong? Sure.’
And then the rest of the meeting, the voting, the passing of motions, the arguing and the applauding, and all the time the girl called Lenka sitting on the other side of the nave from him, taking notes some of the time but also glancing across at him. The occasional conjunction of eyes. The suggestion of a smile. At the end of the speeches a young girl mounted the rostrum, carrying a guitar. People applauded as this approximate Joan Baez lookalike stood there in the crossing of the ex-church, looking faintly diffident, slightly dishevelled, watching the audience with something like embarrassment. ‘We’ve even got an anthem,’ she announced into the microphone. Lenka glanced across at Sam with a deprecating smile while the singer fiddled with a capo and then struck the first chord. It was all predictable enough: ‘We Shall Overcome’, sung without the evangelical fervour that seemed to characterise it in the West but with something that only central Europe could manage – a kind of bitter irony. We shall overcome some day, perhaps, but surely not now. No one sang along but at the end, everyone clapped. And standing there beneath the dome of the deconsecrated church, Lenka Konečková looked directly across at Sam and smiled. As though there was a joke to be shared.
He smiled back, wondering about Stephanie beetling around the German countryside in her Beetle. What would she think of the look that Lenka Konečková was even now directing back across the church at him, a blend of amusement and curiosity that brought with it disturbing possibilities? Surely this encounter was entirely innocent; but innocence could so easily spill over into guilt.
After the meeting they went to a well-known pivnice a few streets away where, it was said, Bohumil Hrabal would come in for a glass of Pilsner most days. ‘They say that about every pub in the city,’ was Sam’s view. ‘He’d be pissed as a newt if it were true.’
Pissed as a newt. Lenka laughed at his attempts to provide a translation. They found an unoccupied alcove where they could talk. Beer came. They drank a bit, looking at one another all the time, finding out how things were as much by glance and manner as by words. Lenka was at the university, doing a master’s degree in English. Why English? That shrug. Because it’s not Russian. He laughed. And she did some writing for one of the literary journals that had sprung up like mushrooms feeding on the rich humus of free speech. And the occasional piece for Czechoslovak radio. She was twenty-five years old, which made Sam feel almost fatherly; but she knew things far beyond her two and a half decades, he could see that. The conversation soon veered away from the personal to politics. Politics were on everyone’s lips, how things had changed since censorship was abandoned and where things might go next. What would happen when Dubček and his supporters confronted Brezhnev and the rest of the Soviet Politburo. ‘So what does Mr Samuel think will take place?’ Lenka asked. ‘All we want is to continue with free expression. Freedom to say what the hell we please and do what the hell we please. Will they let us?’
‘Depends what you say and what you do.’
‘We don’t know in advance. That’s what makes it so exciting.’
Sam considered the matter carefully, as though he had been asked it by the Head of Chancery. ‘The Party has made its decision, hasn’t it? Abandoning censorship was the point of no return.’
‘They could try to bring it back.’
‘Difficult to put the genie back in the bottle.’
‘Maybe the Russians will force them?’
‘I don’t think the Soviet Politburo really knows what to do at the moment. They’ve got troops left here since the spring manoeuvres and they don’t know whether to withdraw them or not. There are various currents within the Kremlin itself, although Brezhnev himself is a hawk and he’s the one who really matters. But there are other issues to consider, like the other Warsaw Pact countries, the fraternal allies. Romania, for example. What will Ceaușescu’s position be? And Hungary’s? Kádár needs to be brought on board. I imagine a lot of his sympathies are with Dubček. So any final decision is balanced on a knife-edge. But of course the main players are the Russians.’
Lenka laughed, running fingers through her hair. ‘You know what I think? I think, fuck Russians. And fuck the fraternal allies.’ That frank wide-open gaze. He had that feeling again, clotted at the base of his throat, like a sudden growth.
‘What about lunch,’ he suggested, not wanting this encounter to die. ‘I must get back to the office now but what about tomorrow? Let me buy you lunch tomorrow. I’ve got a meeting at the foreign ministry in the morning. And then…’
She took a moment to consider, as though assessing him and the implications of his invitation. When she answered, her tone seemed almost indifferent. ‘Why not?’
Masaryk
The Černín Palace guards its secrets as assiduously as a bank guards its vaults. Home to the Czechoslovak ministry of foreign affairs, the building sits across the ridge of land outside the gates of Prague Castle, the Hrad, as though blocking the way from the Castle to the West and freedom. Not for nothing had it been the seat of the Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia during the Nazi occupation. But the biggest secret of all, hidden within the walls of this monstrous, monotonous building, was the one that stood prominently in Sam’s mind whenever he had an appointment here. It concerned the fate of Jan Masaryk, son of the first president of independent Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Masaryk, and it came down to the question: did he jump or was he pushed?
By March 1948 Masaryk, who had spent the war in London with the Czechoslovak government in exile, was foreign minister of the Czechoslovak Republic. More than that, he was the only non-communist minister not to have resigned in protest at the communist power grab of February. He was also middle-aged (sixty-one), lonely (a divorcee), mentally fragile (bipolar disorder) and disillusioned (who wouldn’t be?). In the early morning of 10 March his body was found lying on the paving of an inner courtyard of the Černín Palace. He was wearing pyjamas and lay forty-seven feet directly beneath the open bathroom window of his official apartment on the third floor.
Did he jump or was he pushed?
Two decades later, Sam Wareham walked over to the window of the anteroom and looked down on that selfsame courtyard. Bright sunlight dissected the space with sharp diagonals of shadow. Small ornamental trees. Basalt paving stones. Somewhere down there Jan Masaryk’s body had lain on that cold March morning.
Did he jump or was he pushed?
Outside the anteroom, in the corridors of the ministry through which Sam had been led by a uniformed flunkey, was the kind of chaos one expects in a beehive threatened by a bear. People hurried from office to office clutching files. Phones rang the second the receiver was replaced. Meetings were scheduled and rescheduled, then broken off because something more important had just cropped up. Oblivious to all this, Sam stood at the window and wondered.