Letters From Prague (23 page)

‘I had a meeting nearby. And also, of course, I was curious to see how you were getting on. How have you been getting on?'

‘Okay, thanks. We've probably tried to see a bit too much in a hurry, you know what it's like –' She told him about yesterday – the Zoo, the Tiergarten and the Ku'damm in the heat, and today's long walk along to Alexanderplatz.

Christopher listened, running his thumb along a little groove in the wall.

‘You must be exhausted. And it's all very large-scale and public, where you've been.' He nodded towards Marsha, watching the kittens, who were suckling now as their mother stretched out in the sun. ‘Isn't it a bit much for her?'

‘Probably.' Harriet might have felt defensive, but the warmth of the courtyard and the sleepy contentment of the cat made it difficult. ‘That's why it's nice to be here – quite unexpected. How did you find this place?'

‘The proprietor's nephew is a business contact. Dieter Scheiber, a nice man. They're an interesting family, the Scheibers, they've hung on to this hotel for three generations. It was badly damaged in the war, like everything else, and then of course it was nationalised. When I came here in '88 it was a rundown dump, but of course it was cheap, which is why I used it.'

Harriet looked at him. ‘I didn't realise you'd been coming here for so long.'

He made a gesture: does it all need explaining? ‘Passing through. Looking about. That's another story. Anyway, ever since the war old grandfather Scheiber had held on to the title, and before he died he passed it on to his son Ernst – that's who you've met, he's running it now. In 1990 he was able to produce the papers. There was a lot of kerfuffle, but in the end he was able to reclaim the place and he's been restoring it ever since, bringing in family furniture again, putting it right. He's doing a good job, don't you think?'

‘I do. It's lovely. And what about the nephew? Dieter. You're still in touch?'

‘Absolutely. I've just been to see him.' He pulled out his cigarettes and lit up. Again, Harriet noticed the slight but perceptible tremor. ‘Until '89 Dieter was managing a section of a nationalised factory on the outskirts of Marzahn. That's a few miles further east. Godforsaken place – grim before '89 and pretty grim now.'

‘Would you take me there? I really want to see –'

He hesitated. ‘I'm not sure about that. Not much fun for Marsha, for a start.'

‘Well. Tell me about it, anyway.'

‘I've said – grim. Cheap 1970s housing, high-rise misery. Unemployment, rising crime, drugs. Desolation city.' He inhaled deeply. ‘But in early 1990 Dieter saw the chance of a break. He got in touch with an old family friend in the West, chap called Steffen Wilkendorf. That's who I was seeing yesterday. Dieter persuaded him to invest in the factory, try to make a go of private enterprise. Wilkendorf & Scheiber – they make paints and industrial dyes: for textiles and stuff. It's still early days, but they haven't gone under yet. Dieter's the man at the workface, and since I managed to help them out a bit in Bohemia I get a discount here at the hotel. So that's handy.'

‘Hugh's investing in Bohemia,' said Harriet thoughtfully.

Christopher looked away for a minute. ‘That's right. He's financing a desulphurisation unit, isn't he? But Wilkendorf & Scheiber are small fry, nothing on Hugh's scale. Anyway –' Ash fell to the ground; he rubbed at it with his foot. ‘Can I get you another coffee?'

‘No, no, I'm fine, thanks.'

‘I think I might go and get a beer.'

‘Of course.' She watched him go back into the house and sat thinking. Christopher talked like someone who knew his way around – he clearly did know his way around, he'd been coming to Berlin for years. He was, it would seem, doing well. Then why the shoestring trip on the train, the constant references to being short of money – needing a cheap hotel in the Eighties, needing a discount now?

‘Mum,' said Marsha. ‘I'm starving.'

‘Even after that enormous breakfast?'

‘That was hours ago.'

Harriet looked at her watch. So it was.

‘I'm hungry, too.' Christopher had returned, and was stubbing his cigarette out on the wall. He flicked it away to a corner and Marsha watched with distaste. He saw her expression and laughed. ‘Nice people don't do that.' She looked away in embarrassment. ‘Oh, come on, I'm only teasing. Let's go in and see what they can do for us.'

Marsha looked at Harriet. ‘Can't we eat out here?'

‘Marsha –'

‘We could do,' said Christopher, and they did. Herr Scheiber put a cloth on a table beneath the apple tree. He brought out a platter of cheeses, a basket of rye bread, a bowl of fruit. He gave Marsha a Coke, and Christopher another beer and Harriet a small carafe of wine, and they sat eating and drinking and watching cat and kittens fall asleep in the sun. It could hardly have been more delightful, and Harriet said so, adding, with a glass of wine inside her and in an unthinking moment, that in two days'time it was Marsha's birthday.

‘Is it really?' Christopher reached for the cheeses. ‘In that case we must celebrate. How old will you be, Marsha?'

‘Ten,' said Marsha, and gazed fixedly at the kittens. Harriet kicked herself.

Christopher said: ‘I'm sorry, how presumptuous of me. I'm sure you have your own plans …' He dug his knife into a drooling piece of Brie. ‘Who'd like a bit of this?'

The moment passed; it grew hotter. Even in the dappled shade of the apple tree sweat trickled down Christopher's forehead. He wiped it away, and leaned back against his chair, where his jacket was hung. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, a pale striped green; there was no concealing now, as he lifted his arms behind his head, yawning, the bulge of his stomach – bare freckled skin visible, even, between two straining buttons. Marsha reached for an orange.

‘Coffee?' he asked Harriet. ‘We could have it inside.'

‘Yes, that would be nice.'

One of the kittens was mewing; Marsha turned, and picked it up. ‘I want to stay out here.'

‘Okay.'

Harriet finished a peach. Christopher picked up his cigarettes and lighter.

‘Right,' he said, rising. ‘Let's go.'

She followed him into the house.

The dining room which Harriet had glimpsed from the hall faced on to the street. Herr Scheiber had closed the shutters, or almost closed them, and shafts of afternoon sunlight slanted into the room, spinning with dust. There were only five or six tables, and only two other guests, a couple of businessmen, cradling brandies. The bird in the glass case, some kind of hawk, glared from a mossy branch as they went past the sideboard. Bottles and decanters clinked at their footsteps.

‘That bird doesn't like me,' said Christopher, leading the way. ‘Can't think why.'

They sat at a table between the windows. Coffee was brought in by a girl they had seen in the kitchen, and served on a little red tray.

‘Scheiber's granddaughter,' said Christopher, when he had thanked her; she went over to the two men in the corner, who were asking for the bill. He sat back, and lit another cigarette, watching Harriet pour. Smoke drifted in and out of the shafts of sunlight. ‘Well,' he said slowly. ‘Here we are again.'

‘Indeed.' Harriet put down the jug and looked at him. She waved away smoke. ‘How many do you have a day?'

‘Too many. I've tried to give up and I can't. One of the few pleasures left to me.'

‘Dear, dear.' She sipped her coffee. ‘You realise you're running a terrible risk.'

‘What with my weight and all.' He inhaled again, more deeply. ‘Too bad. Who cares?' He raised his coffee cup. ‘Cheers.'

‘Cheers.'

The businessmen at the corner table were pulling out wallets, signing for credit cards, leaving a tip. Harriet was aware of these sounds, but she was also thinking of another table; in the dining room in Brussels, as the sky beyond the window grew dark; of Christopher leaning across to light a cigarette in one of the candles reflected in the polished surface, narrowing his eyes in the light.
‘They're sexy as hell, and they kill you,'
he'd said to Susanna. Did he really not care?

The two men got up to go; Scheiber's granddaughter saw them to the door with a smile. Out in the street, footsteps went past the shuttered windows, and voices faded. The girl came back and cleared their glasses and coffee cups; then she was gone.

Harriet looked at Christopher, smoking, watching her. She became acutely aware of the quietness and emptiness of the room, the whiteness of the linen, the stillness broken by the spinning dust in the beams of light. She, who was always busy, always moving quickly on to what came next, on impulse wanted to stretch out her arms, to open herself – to the place, the space, the atmosphere it contained, and she felt as if all this were all of a sudden narrowing: forced, like the light at the gap in the shutters, into something with a timeless intensity: a single, unforgettable moment, on which you might look back for the rest of your life, thinking:
then.
That's when it was.

‘Harriet?'

‘Yes.'

‘What are you thinking?'

‘I suppose,' she said carefully, ‘I'm thinking about you.'

‘Yes?'

They looked at each other; Harriet looked away. The stillness of the room possessed her; she looked back; she said, as though something were making her say it, ‘Tell me about your wife.'

‘My ex-wife.'

‘Yes.'

He stubbed out his cigarette in a thin, beaten metal ashtray, the kind of thing you never saw in England now – something else which seemed uniquely to belong to this room, this moment.

‘My wife was – my wife is –' He shut his eyes for a moment, then opened them, looking beyond her. ‘Susanna knows about my wife, but it's a long story.'

She felt her stomach contract.

Footsteps crossed the hall, came in through the open doorway. The bottles on the sideboard clinked.

‘You're being an awfully long time,' said Marsha. ‘Can we go swimming now?'

The swimming pool was set within a modern housing complex in Ernst Thälmann Park, on the other side of Dimitroff Strasse, a busy thoroughfare to the north of the hotel. They crossed at the lights. Petrol fumes shimmered in the heat and Christopher wiped his brow.

‘I'll be glad to get in the water, won't you, Marsha?'

‘Yes.' She had not wanted to get in the water with Christopher, that had been abundantly clear to Harriet as the three of them sat in the shuttered dining room making plans. Marsha's legs swung beneath the table; she kicked Harriet, sharply, when Christopher had suggested accompanying them to show them the way. Harriet frowned at her, with almost equal sharpness, feeling what she did not often feel with Marsha: a real resentment. The moment of stillness had been taken away, the moment of revelation postponed. Was she never to have adult company without interruption? Marsha looked hurt; Harriet felt guilty.

Now, Marsha said to her: ‘It won't be like this in Prague, will it?'

‘What do you mean?' And please don't say, under your breath, ‘
He
won't be with us, will he?' willed Harriet, following Christopher's stride along the pavement.

‘So hot all the time.'

‘Oh. No, I shouldn't think so.'

‘And
he
won't be with us all the time, will he?'

Harriet almost smacked her. Unheard of. ‘Ssh!'

‘He can't hear us.'

Christopher turned and slowed for them to catch up. ‘Almost there.'

The entrance to the little park was dominated by a gigantic piece of sculpture: a head and clenched fist, sprayed violently with graffiti.

‘That's not Marx,' said Marsha.

‘No. But Thälmann was an important communist figure in the thirties. The Nazis murdered him, and this thing was put up in his memory after the war.' He nodded towards the graffiti. ‘He seems to have fallen out of favour again.'

Skateboarders swooped in the sun up and down the concrete slopes beyond the statue; well-kept high-rise blocks rose from well-kept greenery.

‘This was a sort of GDR showpiece,' said Christopher. ‘Something smart and modern amidst the tenements: something to aspire to. Not that many tenement-dwellers were rehoused here – I think you had to be one of the card-carrying elite to get one of these apartments. It's all a bit luxurious in its way –' He was guiding them through the skateboarders, at whom Marsha glanced with longing, and up shallow steps to a precinct of shops and restaurants. ‘Hence, everything on tap – even nurseries, I think, no doubt with pictures of Ulbricht and Honecker on the walls. Hence the swimming pool. Mind you, it's pretty basic – don't expect a wave machine or anything, Marsha.'

‘I don't like wave machines anyway.'

The entrance to the pool was on the far side of the precinct. Inside, they found green and white tiles, a bored-looking girl behind glass. Shrieks and splashes sounded from beyond swing doors.

Christopher paid for them.

‘I thought you were broke,' said Harriet.

‘Not that broke.'

They made their way to separate changing rooms. The women's was high and echoing, with scuffed green doors to the cubicles and an old-fashioned, bathhouse feel to them.

‘Marsha,' said Harriet, as they went in.

‘What?' she asked guardedly.

‘Can you just try? He's giving us a lovely day. Think of the lunch. Think of the kittens.'

‘He talked about
drowning.
‘

‘Oh, come on – he wasn't serious, it's just his manner.'

Marsha went into an empty cubicle and locked the door. ‘How come,' she asked through the plywood division, ‘how come you like him so much all of a sudden?'

‘I didn't say I did like him so much.' Harriet locked her own door, and hung her own bag on the hook.