Letters From Prague (2 page)

Well. So this is love. So simple, so complete.

They lay upon the Indian bedspread and gazed into each other's eyes. Karel's were hazel, with interesting little flecks; Harriet's were grey, terribly ordinary, she knew, but in looking into his she did not feel ordinary.

‘Harriet,' he said slowly, stroking her hair.

‘Yes,' she said, and felt herself on the threshold of a journey, which began with the expression in his eyes, and ended – where would it end?

‘My beautiful Harriet.' He gathered her close.

‘There must be many beautiful girls in Czechoslovakia,' she murmured wistfully.

‘That is true.'

She buried her face in his neck, thinking of them all.

‘But none of them called Harriet.' Karel drew away, so that he could look at her again. ‘Never I think I will meet someone like you.'

‘Nor me.' She closed her eyes on all this happiness.

Above them the doorbell rang with a vengeance: gigantic feet came thundering down the stairs. The door was opened to enthusiastic greetings and closed as if to keep out armies. Another little puff of plaster came floating down through the sunlight, on to their feet.

‘I must go,' said Harriet.

He kissed her hand. ‘I wait for Friday.'

‘Me, too.'

He saw her to the door; she walked down the road to the tube in a dream.

Now, as they were approaching the restaurant hand in hand, she felt, still, as if such joy could not be quite real – even if it felt, also, as if it were the only real thing that had ever happened to her. Late afternoon sun and shadow barred the pavement; it seemed that only now did the pigeons murmuring on the ledges of Carnaby Street shop windows, and the screech of taxis in Regent Street have any meaning. She had lived in London all her life: Karel had brought it alive.

The tables by the restaurant windows were already occupied: people meeting early, after work, sat drinking herb tea from heavy stoneware cups, making their way through oat and apricot slices. She and Karel walked through the double glass doors as if they, too, were customers, and went through the restaurant to the back.

‘I'll see you at supper,' she said, reaching for the hessian apron on her peg. Another girl on the shift, already in her apron, came past them in the narrow corridor, and they greeted each other. Then Karel lifted Harriet's hand to his lips in a gesture which felt as though it said everything – you are mine, I shall see you soon – and disappeared through the swing doors into the kitchen. Harriet brushed her hair, hung up her bag on the peg and went out to the counter, thinking: I have everything I ever wanted. Please may it last for ever.

And it wasn't until the following morning, coming down late to breakfast in Thackeray Gardens, still in her nightdress and not quite awake, that she realised, seeing the faces of her parents and brother as they sat listening to the news, that nothing could last for ever, and that falling in love, which had seemed to encompass everything, was, in the scale of world events, only a little thing really. That evening, in the drawing room, she turned on the television; her family joined her and they all stood in silence: watching the tanks crawl through the beautiful streets of Prague, where people stood numbly: watching Czechoslovakia fall.

They stood on the Continental platform at Victoria station and waited for the train to Dover. It was four o'clock on an afternoon in autumn. All through August London had baked, the grass in Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens parched and brown, the air dry, the pavements dusty. Now it was a little cooler, the platform and empty track lit by a sun which felt melancholy and pale, even though it was still only just September.

It felt melancholy, but it would have done so today whatever the season. Ten weeks ago Karel had arrived in England. It was eight weeks since Harriet had walked into the restaurant kitchen, put down a trayful of stoneware plates next to the new washer-up and realised, with each returning trayful, how much she liked the look of him. It was three weeks since the Russian tanks had crossed the Czechoslovakian border, and during that time the look of Karel had changed.

Harriet had seen pounds drop off his lean frame overnight. She had seen fury and despair in a face which until now had been filled with interest and humour and affection. She had watched him watching the television in her parents'drawing room, smoking in a house where no one smoked, swearing in English and Czech in a house where no one, on the whole, ever swore, as modest, slant-eyed Mr Dubcek disappeared.

There were frightening rumours. Harriet made Karel endless cups of coffee and paced up and down the kitchen while the kettle came to the boil. What was he going to do?

This was what he was going to do. They stood on the platform, not touching or talking, waiting for the train. From Dover Karel would cross the Channel to Ostend; once there he would travel with his rucksack halfway across Europe: through Rotterdam, West Berlin, East Berlin, Dresden, crossing the heavily guarded German border and coming, at last, to Prague. A different city from the one he had left, full of hope: a city now under occupation, filled with resentment and fear.

‘What else can I do?' he had asked her, packing his things in the Earls Court basement.

You could stay with me
, thought Harriet bleakly, but she knew it was not possible. There was his family, his mother in tears on the telephone, on the single occasion he had managed to get through; there were all his friends, active in a crisis he could only watch on a foreign television. There was the expression in his eyes, his withdrawal from everything here: from the restaurant, from the bedsit, with its Indian bedspread and fading flowers; from her. Prague was his home, and home, at such a time, was everything.

‘Of course you must go,' she told him, and folded the bedspread and put it in a carrier bag to take home. Then: ‘Karel? You have this. Please.'

He took the bag and looked inside and smiled. It seemed such a long time since she'd seen that smile.

‘Keep it,' she said. ‘Go on.'

He nodded, raising her hand to his lips. ‘I keep and remember Harriet.'

They kissed, then, their first proper kiss for weeks, standing in the middle of the denuded room, oblivious to Australians overhead; oblivious, it felt for a while, to everything. But love, as Harriet rediscovered most sorrowfully then, cannot, in such circumstances, be allowed to cast a country to oblivion, and anyway had not been spoken of. Not really. They drew apart, and finished packing.

And now they stood on the Continental platform, and now the train was coming.

It drew to a halt, doors opened, travellers returned. Harriet watched couples reunited, families gathering up children and suitcases and going along to the barrier; she watched Karel, scanning the carriages as they walked down through the crowds to the front, looking for a seat: already, it seemed, a long way away from her.

They found a corner in a smoking compartment, facing the front, with a table. Karel stowed his rucksack in the rack overhead, Harriet clenched her hands in the pockets of her denim jacket and willed herself not to cry. He turned and looked at her; she burst into tears.

‘No, no,' he said, his face full of concern. ‘Please.'

People pushed past them; she sank into the seat opposite his. He leaned across the table and stroked her hair without speaking. She covered her face, and tried to stop.

‘Excuse me? Are these seats taken?'

She stopped. A healthy American couple in their fifties beamed down on them.

‘Please. No one.' Karel was indicating that the adjoining seats were free; healthy American suitcases were swung up on to the rack.

‘You have a cold?' the woman enquired kindly of Harriet, as she wiped her eyes.

For the first time in her life, but not the last, Harriet was rude to a total stranger.

‘I'm crying,' she said coldly. ‘Can't you tell the difference?'

‘Gee, I–'

‘Come on,' she said to Karel, all at once filled with anger: at America, at Russia, at the world. She got to her feet. ‘We can't say goodbye here.' She pushed blindly past the woman, past everyone, and out on to the platform again, not turning to see if he had followed.

He had followed. For a moment her anger included him, too, for leaving; then he put his arms round her and drew her close.

‘Fierce,' he said, and she could tell that he was smiling. ‘I did not know you are so fierce.'

‘Nor me,' she said, kissing his denim jacket, bought with savings from the restaurant after sending money home.

Further along the platform a whistle blew. They clung to each other, doors slammed. The whistle blew again; they, kissed for the last time.

‘Bon voyage,' said Harriet, and then, with wavering recall from last night's session with the dictionary, she struggled to say it in Czech.

‘Dobra.
Very good.'

Then Karel got back on the train again, and stood at the open window of the door. Beneath his dark hair his face was pale; he felt for a cigarette.

‘Good luck,' said Harriet, bravely. ‘Good luck, good luck.'

He nodded, lighting up, flicking away the match.

The last door slammed, the train began to move.

‘Write to me,' she said quickly, walking alongside. ‘Write and tell me everything.' She could see the Americans, smiling at her through the grimy window. Fools. Kind fools. They overtook her, the train was gathering speed.

‘Write!' she said again, breaking into a run.

‘Yes, yes.' He was leaning out of the window, cigarette held in graceful fingers.

People were waving all along the platform; there were other heads at other windows.

‘Goodbye!' called Harriet, waving too. ‘Goodbye, goodbye!'

‘Sbohem
!' he called back to her.
‘Sbohem
, Harriet!'

The carriages creaked and the train went faster. Then it was gone.

Rain fell steadily on to the pavements of Thackeray Gardens, on to the bare trees and iron railings bordering the pleasant square of lawn and shrubs and hard-pruned roses in the middle. It splashed on to Harriet's windowsill and against the curtained window, and she hardly heard it, curled up once again in the striped armchair with her letter, her small blue dictionary.

Dear Harriet, Vesele vanoće! Happy Christmas! I send you best wishes for the new year and I hope you are well
…

He had written to wish her a happy Christmas, and the letter had only just arrived. He had written in November, ten weeks after saying goodbye.

Ten weeks before Jan Palach's suicide.

Harriet looked across at the poster above her bureau. The blown-up black-and-white face of a young man looked out at her; beneath were his name, and the date of his death. On 16 January, 1969, he, a young student, had stepped out into Wenceslas Square, in the heart of Prague, and poured petrol all over his clothes. He had lit a match.

He had died five days later, on 21 January, in agony, in protest.

But not in vain, thought Harriet, looking at his photograph. Surely not in vain.

The poster came from Athena, in Oxford Street: it would not be on sale in Prague, though Palach's name would be on everyone's lips. Where had Karel been, when the match was lit? Had he gone running to Wenceslas Square?

London seems a very long way from me now. Since my return life has been
–

Something was crossed out here, and she could not understand what followed. It had taken her fifteen minutes to get this far, and the phrase book was not much help, not really. It was full of requests for the bill, the doctor, the chambermaid. What had life been for Karel? What was he trying to tell her?

I am living with my parents once more; it is
– something crossed out –
good to be with them again, but
– here the small fat censor of Harriet's imagination had been at work, with a vile black pen. She felt despairing. All these months and months of waiting, of giving up hope, and there was barely a line on the thin single page which she could understand. Why hadn't he written in English? Wasn't it safe?

I hope to study law again one day, but at present I am working as a porter. It is
– again, the black pen. Harriet was dose to tears. It was hardly worth having, this stiff, formal letter, with its careful crossings-out by Karel and the vicious deletions made by the censor. Then she thought of all the letterless mornings and afternoons she had endured, all the nights when she had gone to sleep with her arms round her pillow, hoping to dream of Karel, and she lifted the page to her lips. Of course it was worth having!

She looked at it again, scanning the Biroed words for a phrase, a particular phrase, which had never been used by either of them, in either language.
Miluji vás.
I love you.

It wasn't there. The letter ended as if to anyone:

I hope you will have time to write to me one day. I think of you. Karel.

Well, almost anyone. He thought of her. In the midst of such difficult days, he thought.

Harriet got up. She folded the letter and slipped it back in its cheap, grubby envelope and put it into her bureau pigeonhole. She looked at the pile of essays on the open flap, at Milton and Molière and
The Origins of World War II
, all heaped up on the floor.

She thought of her expensive school, with its view of Kensington Gardens, its library, its gleaming laboratory and airy polished hall, where a list of head girls was painted in gold on a wooden board on the wall. At the end of this summer, when she had left, her own name would be added: Harriet Pickering, 1968–69.

She went to the window and drew back the curtains; she stood looking out at the rain, falling through the neon halos of street lamps, drenching the well-laid lawn in the square, dripping off the trees, just in bud, and off the iron railings. Hundreds of miles away, behind the Iron Curtain, Karel was thinking of her. He was working for a pittance, unable to write, or study, unable to plan his life.