The Night of Wenceslas (23 page)

I caught a juddering Skoda bus into town, and changed there to a tram which took me north of the river to the Stromovka district. There was a park here that I had seen advertised, the Julius Fucik Park of Culture and Rest. I went through the park gates and along the main path to the opposite entrance. There were a few gardeners hoeing and hosing; no one else. I paused outside the gates, lit a cigarette, went trudging back. The gardeners did not look up. Nobody had followed me. I left the park and returned to town.

All this took time and was hard on the feet. I had bulked out her father’s enormous shoes with two pairs of thick socks. They still slopped up and down, rubbing at my heels. The heat enabled me to carry the jacket over my arm, which was just as well; it fitted me like an overcoat. The trousers had needed turning up four inches and I had secured them with a pair of bicycle clips I had found in a drawer. There had also been a hammer in the drawer. It now weighed down my right hand jacket pocket. I thought I might need it.

I got off the tram before it reached the river and changed to another that would bring me out on the Embassy side. I had given much thought to my movements, and alighted when the conductress shouted, ‘For the Hradcany.’

I was on the Heights. The molten river glinted through the trees, and over the old town the air shimmered in the heat. I could see the little trams shuttling like toys along the embankment, and hear the distant sound of them, coming up in waves. A number of workmen, stripped to the waist, were laying cables on the hill. A warm breeze swayed the foliage.

I stood for a while getting my bearings. It was nearly twelve o’clock. The cluster of glistening palaces swam in the air currents. Below, a few hundred yards beyond the wavering pinnacles of the Hradcany, I could see a familiar cupola and steeple. I thought this would be the church of St Mikulase in the Malostranske. This was where I wanted to be.

It was hot as hell, a dry incinerator heat disturbed only slightly by the breeze rattling the foliage. I held my jacket by its hanger over my shoulder and mopped my forehead. Suddenly a factory
hooter went and from the old town below the clocks began to dong and boom. Twelve o’clock. Vlasta would be at the Slavia. The workmen had stopped on the instant, and were now squatting on the hillside drinking from bottles. I thought I needed a drink myself.

A steep path ran down through the greenery. I followed it, coming out to a street which skirted the Hradcany, and crossed over to the Schwarzenberg Palace square. I had walked here on the first night of my first visit. It was still familiar, hauntingly familiar as childhood. There were a number of kavarnas. I stopped in one and had a glass of ice-cold Pilsener, and continued on down. Not a lot of time for what I had to do.

I entered the Malostranske from the far side, where I had not been formerly and found the square as I expected crowded in the white lunch-time heat. The shops and offices were still letting out, girls arm in arm, chattering, gesticulating, bicycles weaving in and out, bells jangling.

I passed the Thunovska, saw the men still there, two on each corner, and went down the next street, running parallel with it. It was a narrow street of tall buildings, reeling in the heat. There were a number of small kavarnas and bars, all crowded; each, I hoped, with its quota of caretakers wetting their whistles. I didn’t want to meet any caretakers.

I went in the first big building, saw a lift shaft, stairs going up and down. I went down. There were broad stone steps, a green-tiled wall, a half landing. I continued on down. At the bottom of the stairs was a little glass-enclosed cubby hole of the kind one finds in public lavatories. The electric light was on. I waited for a moment, listening. No one was there. Beyond the cubby hole was a door, half-opened and leading to a boiler room and small urinal. A naked light bulb shone in the boiler room. A strong smell of fuel oil. I looked all round. No windows. No back way out. A little ventilation grating high up in the urinal; not, evidently, very effective.

I inspected all these features at speed, and went back up the stairs and out into the street again. A man was sitting on a
camp stool eating bread and sausage in the next building. After that a kavarna; four small shops; another office building – deserted. I went inside, found the same arrangement as in the first building, and went down the stairs again. Landing. Cubby hole. Door to boiler room.

It was in rather better shape than the first, a strong smell of carbolic predominating. The boiler was a large cylindrical affair with, beside it, a large heap of coke. I had seen no coke in the other building, and now looked around for a chute. There was no chute. There was a round iron ceiling hatch with a hinged iron ladder, folded back and clipped to a hook on the wall.

I undipped the ladder, drew it into position and climbed up. I waited for a moment under the hatch, listening for sounds of movement on top. None were discernible. I raised my arms and pushed.

The hatch was jammed.

I pushed, shoved, thumped, swore, sweated. The hatch remained jammed. I went up a rung, bent my head, got the back of my neck and shoulders to it, strained, heaved on the ladder. There was a slight sucking, glooping noise. The hatch gave. I went down a rung, paused, sweat running in my eyes, and tried again with my hands. It was heavy as hell, a slab of apparently solid iron, but it went up quite easily. I shifted it to one side, climbed up into the open air and found myself in an enclosed yard. There were a number of dustbins, a builder’s cart, an assorted pile of lumber. There was also a pair of double doors, bolted and padlocked. The lock looked rusty, but the key turned without trouble. I took off the lock, undid the bolts and stepped out into an alley. I drew the doors carefully behind me and went quickly up the alley. It ran back into the side street.

With something of the elation of Columbus catching his first sight of that good old stuff, dry land, I nipped back down the alley, locked and bolted the doors, hurried down the coal tip, pulled the hatch back in position and replaced the ladder. All that was called for now was some hours of the deepest and most impregnable seclusion. I was through with running away now.
I meant to walk directly into the Embassy. Give it eighteen hours, I thought, and I’d either be in there astounding all with my ingenuity; or I’d be in quite a different establishment, hoping, rather urgently, for death in some quick and hygienic form.

B
OILER
rooms in Czech commercial premises tend to be spacious and rambling apartments. For six months of the year the country is frozen; a powerful heating unit and a comprehensive system of plumbing are the minimal requirements for all centres of human congress.

The building I had chosen did not fall below the norm in this respect. The boiler room measured some forty feet square. There were enough cocks, taps, levers, dials, and asbestos-covered piping for the control room of a submarine. There were also two small cupboard-like rooms letting off it. One contained a broken chair, a camp-bed, a bag of soot, and numerous stoking implements; the other logs – no doubt an emergency fuel supply. There were not locks or bolts to either door. I took to the timber.

After a couple of hours I was beginning to regret it. I had scooped a hole for myself in the logs in one of the corners farthest from the door and lay there painfully uncomfortable and half stupefied in the musty heat.

I had learned to identify the sounds of the building; the sucking whine of the lift shaft, chairs scraping, the distant patter of typewriters. From time to time the caretaker came into the
boiler room. I heard him lighting his pipe once. He hawked and spat. But he didn’t come to the log cupboard. I lay in blackness, watching the crack of light under the door. Once when I moved there was a petrifying rumble of falling logs. After that I remained where I was, sweat trickling incessantly and itchingly all over my body.

I dozed and woke and dozed and woke, three or four times, I think. The last time when I blearily came to, the crack of light had vanished. I lay silently for a while, listening. The whine of the lift shaft had stopped. There was no movement of feet above; merely the shift and creak of an old building.

I clambered drunkenly out of the log pile, felt for the door and went into the boiler room. It was dark, but with a welcome sense of space. I waited in the centre of the room for a minute, listening. There was just the creak and rustle; distant sounds of traffic. I lit a match and went to the door. It was locked.

I’d forgotten to check where the light switch was, and spent several minutes fumbling around with matches before it occurred to me that it was probably on the other side of the door. I swore a bit at that. I had four matches left – and four cigarettes that I had brought with me from Barrandov. It would be a long night.

I thought I might as well make myself as comfortable as possible and got the camp bed out of the other cupboard. It was a telescopic affair of metal tubes and somewhat smelly canvas, and collapsed twice before I got the hang of it. I found myself operating with preternaturally delicate movements, afraid of the sound in the dark. I took my shoes off and lay out flat in the cavernous blackness and let my bruised and aching limbs throb back to life. The air was still warm and stuffy. I lay listening to my breathing and the dull churning of my heart.

I think I went off to sleep like that. I was tired as hell, sluggish and dazed with the crazy sequence of events. I came to after a bit with one leg lying numb on a metal support and my neck stiff. I wondered what time it was, and regretted the watch left on the bedside table at Barrandov. I sat up and lit a cigarette and went round the room with the match looking for a clock among the dials. There was no clock. It was very silent. My
body seemed heavy but rested. I thought I must have lain there for an hour or two. That would be, what – seven, eight o’clock? It might be dark outside. I thought I might risk opening the hatch.

I finished the cigarette and put my shoes back on and released the ladder. I went up slowly and listened at the top, and pushed the hatch up and listened again before sliding it to one side. Sky dark blue; welcome cool wetness. It was raining out there. I went up a couple of rungs and poked my head out. Gurgle of drains; wonderfully pleasant splashing – rainwater running out of loose guttering. Distantly clocks began chiming. Half past. Half past what?

I left the hatch off and went back down again and sat on the camp bed, listening. There were quite a lot of sounds. Trams, cars, bicycle bells; even a train hooting somewhere. The moon was not up yet; even so the night sky was surprisingly light; a circle of indigo in the black ceiling.

Another quarter struck. I thought I’d better leave the hatch off all night. There was little chance of anyone poking around in the yard. I thought over the plan I had conceived while lying in bed at Barrandov. Crazy. Wild. As crazy and wild as all the other things that had happened to me. But they had happened.

I lay back on the bed, but found it so uncomfortable now that I got up and fetched a log and draped my jacket round it as a neck rest. I smoked another cigarette like that. Two left.

The clocks began to chime. I counted. Seven, eight, nine, ten. Ten o’clock. About another eight hours to go, I thought. I ought to try and get some more sleep.

I was suddenly aware that I was hungry and felt in the jacket pocket for the packet of bread and sausage I had brought with me from Barrandov, and ate a hunk, lying back and watching the hatch and the rain glancing in.

They would be looking all over the town for me again in the rain, I thought. The Thunovska covered; all the approaches covered; standing there dripping in the rain. I wondered what Vlasta was doing. I wondered if they had taken in Baba’s husband for questioning, if they were knocking the poor devil
about I couldn’t remember him; could hardly remember Baba; a vague impression of a stout woman, a broad, warm lap, a wart near her eyebrow. She couldn’t have been very old; the Little Swine was her elder brother. He was – what? Fifty-five? Maminka was fifty-three. She would be about Maminka’s age. I wondered what she had died of.

I slept presently.

The boiler room was chill and grey when I awoke, and I sat up in a panic, thinking I’d overslept. But I hadn’t overslept. The clocks were chiming the preliminaries, and I heard the first hour-stroke sound. It was five o’clock. I counted, shivering with cold and fear. I’d remembered what I had to do the instant I sat up and my stomach had turned over.

My teeth were chattering. I got off the camp bed and put on the jacket and moved around stretching my body. I could see no possibility of going through with the plan. I felt acutely ill, stiff and clumsy, physically incapable of the effort required. I thought the minute I got out in the street the S. N. B. men would be on me like a shot, and would march me away numb and speechless.

I wondered if I should make provision to kill myself in the event of failure: to get in first and make it quicker. I had the hammer. But how the hell did you kill yourself with a hammer?

The door of the wood cupboard was open. There was a strong temptation to go back in there again, to bury myself and warm up, to live through another drugged and drowsy day.

I didn’t go back in the wood cupboard. I walked about the boiler room, circling the ladder. I lit another cigarette – one left – and smoked it in quick, nervous drags. The quarter past sounded. The half past. I was empty and hungry. But when, presently, I opened the packet of bread and sausage and tried to eat, I was sick. This physical misery, distracting me from the immediate problem, left me feeling a good deal calmer, and after it I sat quietly on the camp bed beneath the hatch, waiting.

Small, distant sounds of activity were coming from the waking world above. A train hooted, a car changed gear. There was no sound yet of the trams, or of that other special noise that I awaited

Just before six o’clock I lit my last cigarette and smoked it lingeringly down to a small stub, and stamped it out.

It was time to be off.

I went up the ladder
.

It was a still, grey morning, misty. I crossed the yard and unlocked the padlock and went out into the alley. The street was grey and damp from last night’s rain. It was quite deserted, the buildings sober and silent.

I made my way up to the top where it ran out to the Malostranske, and withdrew into a deep doorway. A few hundred yards away in the parallel Thunovska, the watchers would be waiting, too. We seemed to have the damp, silent world to ourselves.

It seemed a hell of a long time between the quarter and the half past. But at last the first stroke sounded. Immediately after – so close to the stroke that I wondered if I’d been mistaken – there was the sound I was expecting. I came out of the doorway, moved as near to the corner as I dared and waited there for a moment, straining my ears. I had not been mistaken. Between the strokes it came again, quite clearly. It was a milkman.

The cart came trundling round from behind St Mikulase, a blob of blue and white in the mist. I could hear the milkman exclaiming freely to his horse, boots ringing on the cobbles and bottles clanking, but I couldn’t see him. The horse drew the cart a few yards into the square and stopped, shaking its head up and down.

The milkman came then, a big, red, beefy fellow in a dark blue overall and a white peaked cap. He replenished his wire basket at the cart, roaring endearments at the horse, and went off clanking across the square to serve the far side. Each time he
returned to the horse he roared something that sounded like ‘
Whuyill! Whuyill!
’ in response to which the horse slopped forward a few yards and stopped again.

I thought
oh, Jesus Christ
, and withdrew again into the doorway to practise a few silent
whuyills
to myself. The milkman was working round from the right; the Thunovska was on my left. I watched him for ten minutes until the cart had drawn level with my corner, and then with mindless action stepped out from the doorway, gesticulating.

The milkman looked at me.

I beckoned frantically.

Head forward in inquiry, he walked over with his empty basket ‘What is it, comrade?’

He was sweating slightly; a smell of horses; an open, country face; a deep bass voice that awoke echoes from the early morning buildings. I wondered if it was arousing any interest on the corner of the Thunovska. It was certainly arousing the interest of the horse which had begun to look across in the most pointed way.

I whispered, ‘Quick, quick,’ in panic. ‘In here a minute.’

He followed me wonderingly into the doorway. ‘What’s the trouble, comrade? What is it?’

‘You go to the British Embassy?’

‘
Yoh, yoh
, the Embassy. Why do you want to know?’

‘It’s this,’ I said. ‘Look at this.’

Just at the last moment it was painfully hard to do it, the big sweating face so innocent.

‘Ά hammer, comrade – what of it?’

I hit him on the head with it, hard. He seemed to put out his hand and lean on me just as I did it. The wire basket crashed to the ground. He looked at me with eyes wide open in mystified inquiry and puffed and fell down.

I unbuttoned his overall, shaking with panic, and tore it getting it off him and on to me. I put on his peaked cap, picked up the wire basket and walked out of the doorway, out of the street, out into the Malostranske. I felt as if I were walking out to my execution. I was trembling violently in every limb.

The horse, which had not turned its head away since the milkman had walked over, regarded me curiously. I said, ‘
Whuyill!
’ It came out in a strangled bleat. The horse merely stared.
Oh, damn and blast you, bloody well whuyill
, urged it, putting out my hand to pat the large, dangerous head.

The horse bit me. It was not a sharp bite, more in the nature of a nip by a pair of nutcrackers, but painful. I stepped back and swore in its ear, softly but with great obscenity. I felt myself under acute observation. I had not dared turn round to the Thunovska. I doubted if they could have seen clearly in the mist my contretemps with the knowing animal. But the horse had not moved.

I went back to the cart and filled the basket with milk and cartons of sour cream, and turned blindly to walk to my goal.

I seemed to be walking for about two hours, on cotton wool, with my legs turned all to jelly. There were just two of them, one at each corner, buttoned-up and pinched in the grey mist.

I said, ‘
Dobry den
,’ gruffly, peaked cap slanted over my eyes.

‘
Dobry den
.’

‘More rain again, I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘Shouldn’t wonder.’

I was past. Unbelievably, I was past I

I walked up the Thunovska with my legs nearly collapsing under me. I turned in at the Embassy opening. The Union Jack, limp in the damp grey morning … courtyard … steps. …

There were big double doors, ornamental knockers, a bell push. I pressed it and heard the mad jangling inside somewhere. I was choked almost now, wits all away, nothing but the thumping of my heart, toes curled up hard inside my shoes.

There was no answer to the bell. I rang again, again, kept my finger on it. I didn’t dare slam the knockers, had no idea at all what to do. The S. N. B. men would grow suspicious soon. The milkman would come to shortly. I’d not hit him all that hard.

I stepped back from the door. Away to the left of the courtyard
was another door: consulate. There was also an archway. Maybe somewhere at the back, in some domestic bits of the building, retainers would be stirring. I couldn’t waste time investigating the possibilities of the archway. I thought,
Oh,
God, I’ve had it
, and pressed, pressed the bell again.
Open up,
get up, wake up, damn you!

‘You! Milkman! What are you doing?’

I turned. One of the buttoned-up men was standing at the entrance to the courtyard. My throat seemed to seize up. I opened my mouth speechlessly.

‘Leave your milk and come away.’

I said, ‘They told me – they told me to call.’

‘Put it down and leave.’

‘They want cream. The housekeeper said to call with sour cream. There’s a reception.’

He regarded me sourly. He seemed nonplussed. He did not venture into the courtyard, but remained there watching me.

I turned in panic, grasped the knockers and began slamming furiously. The noise echoed thunderously in the courtyard. No answer.