Letters From Prague (20 page)

‘Okay, okay.'

A group of young men came noisily towards them, carrying beer cans. Harriet put her hand on Marsha's arm; they stepped aside.

The Hotel Kloster, when they came to it, looked what it was: cheap, which was why Harriet had chosen it. Probably much too cheap, and she should have booked a pension, and why hadn't she? Because she had wanted something different for each city, when she had planned this journey: family in Brussels, a hotel in Berlin, a pension room in Prague, where hotel rooms now were astronomical.

So. Here they were. They carried their bags up shallow steps towards glass doors which needed cleaning. Beyond them, a girl with peroxided hair, hooped earrings and black nail varnish sat at a desk turning the pages of a magazine. The hall was lit by a neon strip and had brown flock wallpaper, television blared from a lounge. They crossed the carpet to the desk and coughed.

‘Guten Tag.' The peroxided girl looked up, unsmiling.

‘We have booked a room,' said Harriet, and produced her confirmation slip.

The girl consulted the register, pushed it across for signature, reached for a key from a rack behind her. Harriet, signing, saw the magazine she had been reading, and hoped that Marsha hadn't. She took the key; the girl nodded towards stairs behind her. They were on the third floor, breakfast was between seven and nine. The girl went back to her magazine, sighing as the telephone rang beside her.

Harriet and Marsha climbed narrow stairs lit by a time switch.

‘All right?' Harriet pressed the switch on the second-floor landing, just to be sure.

‘Yes,' said Marsha uncertainly. A lavatory flushed and a man came out; he nodded to them and disappeared into a bedroom. The doors to all the rooms were fire doors: solid, ugly, unpanelled. Apart from the man, they saw no one, and could no longer hear the television from downstairs. The silence peculiar to hotel landings – everything going on behind closed doors, between strangers – followed them up to the third floor. What have I done? thought Harriet. What on earth are we doing here?

‘Thirty-four,' said Marsha, behind her. ‘That's us.'

‘Well done.'

They went in, putting the light on.

Twin beds with dull green covers took up most of the room, set at right angles to the door. A shiny wardrobe stood by the window; a basin was opposite. There was a cheap wooden cabinet between the beds, a list of fire regulations pinned on the wall. That was it.

‘Well,' said Harriet. ‘At least it's clean.'

Marsha crossed the narrow space between the foot of the beds and the wardrobe and looked out of the window. Harriet turned back the covers. Marsha returned and sank on to a bed.

‘It's awful,' she said miserably. ‘It's awful.'

‘Oh, come on,' said Harriet, knowing it was. ‘It's not that bad.'

‘I hate it. I wish we'd never come.'

‘Oh, Marsha, please –'

‘Please what? Why on earth did you choose this place?'

‘It's cheap,' said Harriet. ‘It's cheap. We can't afford to go splashing out –' She trailed off under Marsha's reproachful gaze.

‘Why couldn't we have stayed in Brussels? I loved it. We don't
know
anyone here.'

Harriet tried to rally. She opened her mouth for a lecture – adaptability, readiness for different circumstances when travelling, kindness to tired mothers. She closed it again, feeling dreadful. Poor little girl.

‘And I'm
hungry.
‘

‘I know. So am I.' She went over, and gave her a hug. ‘I'll tell you what we'll do. Well wash and brush up and go out for supper. Ill take you to a café and well have something hot and come back and have a good night's rest, and in the morning it'll all look nicer, I promise.' Silence. ‘It usually does.'

And it had better, she thought, as Marsha, somewhat comforted, got off the bed and went downstairs to the lavatory. She crossed to the window, and stood looking down on to the street, so bright and busy, so strange, so far from home.

Well. This was something of how Karel must have felt: on his arrival in London, and on his departure, returning to an occupied city – alienated, distanced, afraid.

The sky was darkening. Harriet stood watching the traffic lights change, and the cars move off beneath them; she watched the revolving lights of a nightclub sign, further along, and she had, all at once, such a powerful memory, of such a different place: of a wet spring evening twenty-four years ago, and she curled up in the striped armchair by her bedroom window, reading – struggling to read – a letter from Prague. That was where this journey had begun. The letters were all in her suitcase, in their wooden box.

And surely, she thought now, leaning against the glass, I cannot be doing all this for nothing. Surely, when we get to Prague, I shall find – what shall I find?

She turned from the window, hearing Marsha's step on the stairs.

‘You have no idea how much darkness there is in Berlin during the winter,' wrote Rosa Luxemburg, coming home to her rooms in Cranach Strasse, from walks beneath bare trees in the Tiergarten. ‘How I long for sunshine.'

When Marx died, Rosa Luxemburg was twelve. She came to Berlin when she was twenty-seven. It was 1898 and she, the daughter of Polish Jews, educated in Warsaw and Zurich, had taken German citizenship through a marriage of convenience to a socialist émigré in Basle. Turn-of-the-century Berlin was in nationalist, expansionist mood. Rosa, a revolutionary, an independent spirit, collaborated with a radical lawyer, Karl Liebknecht, on a wing of the German Socialist Party. War was in the air. As the new century advanced, Rosa organised demonstrations, on Sunday afternoons.

On 1 August, 1914, the Kaiser addressed a crowd of a hundred thousand from a balcony on the Royal Palace. The country was at war with Russia.

‘I no longer know parties,' he declared, his voice filled with emotion. ‘I know only Germans …'

The crowd roared.

Troops, troop trains, music, flowers, waving girls.

Rosa and Karl published an open letter denouncing an imperialist conflict. They formed the Spartacist League: socialists opposed to the war.

The euphoric mood of the city changed. There were power cuts, rations, rising prices, curfews. Rosa wrote: ‘Gone are the patriotic street demonstrations … No longer do we see laughing faces from train windows …'

She and Karl were arrested on charges of conspiracy.

He was sent to bury the dead on the Russian front, she to a cell in Spandau prison. She smuggled out letters, calling for revolution.

By the time Karl returned, war casualties were mounting; Berlin was sustained by a black market. In May, 1916, he addressed thousands on an anti-war demonstration in Potsdamer-Platz. He was rearrested. Waves of strikes were staged in his support. In January 1917 almost half a million stopped work. The police were everywhere, the city on the brink of civil war.

In October, Liebknecht was released. By now, the Kaiser was a distant figurehead, all power in the hands of the generals. On 9 November he fled with his family to Belgium in a dramatic abdication; that day, Liebknecht proclaimed a socialist republic from the balcony of the Palace. Rosa, released, was convinced that a revolution throughout Germany, not just in Berlin, was needed to overthrow capitalism.

In January 1919 street violence gripped the city. The right-wing
Freikorps
struck: Rosa and Karl were arrested and murdered. Her body was thrown in to the icy waters of the Landwehr Kanal, flowing past the winter-bare trees of the Tiergarten.

The dining room of the Hotel Kloster was gloomy, and largely occupied by silent men in suits, but among them an elderly American couple smiled from their table and wished Harriet and Marsha good morning – cheered, it was obvious, by the presence of a child. They had a granddaughter just about the same age – how old might Marsha be, exactly? She told them she was almost ten.

‘And you're having your birthday here in Berlin? My, that's exciting.'

Marsha, with a polite smile, gave her attention to the table, gazing at plates of cold sausage, smooth, milk-white cheeses, dark bread in a basket.

‘It's like lunch.'

There were little plastic pots of jam, a steaming pot of coffee.

‘Tuck in,' said Harriet, pouring. ‘Make the most of it.' She drank, and looked at her guidebook, planning the day.

Later, when they went out, the weather was windy and bright. They stood at a bus stop on Grünewald Strasse, feeling better. Racing clouds streamed through a light, high sky and the bus, which came soon, was a cheerful yellow. They sat on the top deck as they rode through the city, travelling north. Harriet told Marsha a little about the rubble women, a little about Rosa: her passion and vision, her brutal, tragic end.

Marsha half listened, looking down out of the window, on to the traffic, the to and fro on the pavements, the wind in the summery trees.

Knowledge pales beside imagination, Harriet had always known that, but imagination can deceive and disappoint. There is much to be said for the solid reassurance of facts.

So. The Tiergarten. Harriet knew, from the map, and from one or two tourist brochure photographs, something of what its scale must be. But such a poetic name had nonetheless evoked for her, in London, trees, tears, water, walks in winter – a winter garden, indeed, with all its austere, seductive melancholy: frost on hard-pruned roses, ice on the pond, the crunch of feet on damp gravel.

It was not like that. They were here in late summer, and the Tiergarten was vast: acres of wooded parkland in the centre of the city which did, indeed, contain much water – bordered by the winding ribbons of the Spree to the north, and the Landwehr Kanal to the south, with great stretches of lake between – but was also crossed by roads, and speeding traffic, no more a quiet winter garden than Hyde Park.

Bisecting it from west to east, from Ernst Reuter Platz to the mighty Brandenburg Gate, ran the boulevard along which Prussian huntsmen had sounded their horns, where their carriages had taken the air. Charlottenburg Chaussee, it was called then. In the 1930s, when Hitler came to power, it became the East-West Axis, a favourite place for Nazi processions and torchlit rallies; in the Battle of Berlin it was bombed to pieces. Now it had another name, commemorating the summer's day in 1953 when impoverished workers throughout East Germany came out on strike. The Soviet forces moved in swiftly: in the riots that followed, four hundred people died.

In their memory, the boulevard became Strasse 17 Juni, and forty years later, on a bright August morning, Hariet and Marsha were walking up from the south side of the Tiergarten towards it, alongside the canal. Behind them was Cornelius Bridge, and the little sculpture commemorating Rosa Luxemburg.

‘There's a demonstration in her memory every year,' Harriet told Marsha. ‘On the day of her death. She was a communist, she followed Marx, but she believed in freedom and free speech and individual rights. She helped the wall come down, in a way – people put up her words on banners.'

Leaves blew into the water; ahead were boating lakes, to their left the Zoo, on Hardenbergplatz.

‘Can we go?' asked Marsha, hearing shrieks and roars.

‘What about for your birthday? Anyway, I thought you didn't approve of zoos.'

‘I don't, but –' She trailed off, watching a family walking ahead of them: two sisters, perhaps six and eight; a little boy of about three, let out of his pushchair, darting. His sisters moved quickly towards him as he neared the water's edge; behind them, the parents kept an eye, walking arm in arm. Squawks and trumpetings came from the zoo as they drew near; a balloon seller stood at the gate.

You don't approve, but you need something for children, Harriet thought, looking at Marsha looking at this little scene. Something more your size, to settle you down in a strange city.

She said: ‘Have I been going on at you? Too much history?'

Marsha took her hand. They were together again. ‘A bit. I mean it is interesting, sometimes, the rubble women and things, but –'

‘I know. I'm sorry, I'll shut up. We'll go to the zoo if you'd really like to.'

She said she would really like to; they went through an entrance like a pagoda, paying through the nose.

A zoo is a zoo, at least in Europe, the contentment or despair of its inhabitants dependent on much the same factors in London, Paris or Berlin. This one was spacious, and well laid out, and some of the cages seemed too small and some seemed tolerable. Marsha, anyway, enjoyed it. She and Harriet wandered in and out of the ape house, peered at bushbabies in the nocturnal rooms, enjoyed the penguins. It reminded Harriet of weekends when Marsha was little, and had not learned to disapprove of things: when it had been enough to be together and enjoy a park, a playground, a Sunday afternoon at the zoo.

‘Look at him – oh, Mum, quick, do look.'

They gazed at a vulture, hunched on his perch, lifting and examining scaly grey feet, each horny toe. When he had finished, he stretched out huge clipped wings, flapped and refolded them, and fell asleep.

‘Had enough for one day.'

‘He's bored,' said Marsha, more accurately, and then, ‘I do hope Victor's all right.'

‘I'm sure he is.'

There was a crowded playground: she broke into a run. And for twenty minutes or more Harriet sat on a bench in the sun, watching her clamber and swing amongst dozens of German schoolchildren, enjoying their summer holidays. It was over a week since Marsha had been with other children. In Brussels, once the ice had melted, that had not seemed to matter at all – she was too busy making the most of Hugh and Susanna. Now, without family, it began to feel as though it might be too much for her. Had she been foolish? Harriet asked herself again. Planning the journey in London it had felt essential to visit Berlin
en route.
Karel had passed through here, crossing the ‘anti-Fascist protection wall', a border observed by armed guards in watchtowers, patrolled by dogs: a place of death which had always been, for her, a potent symbol of what had made him go back to Prague and leave her. Now that wall was down, bringing in its wake governments all over Eastern Europe. Berlin, with its violent history, such a passionately beating heart at the heart of the continent, was reunited.