Letters From Prague (41 page)

‘Gosh,' said Marsha. ‘Where is he?'

He was over in a far corner by a window overlooking the street. He was on the phone, wearing his glasses, leaning on his elbow, listening, playing with a pencil. Harriet had the impression of complete concentration, of someone who knew exactly what he was doing, as he nodded and answered, and made notes. Like Hugh, a little, but speedier, more driven.

‘Who do you think's Danielle?' asked Marsha.

‘Ssh. I don't know.'

‘I do. Bet you anything. Look over there.'

Harriet looked. A woman about her own age, perhaps a bit younger, was perched half on, half off a desk, laughing with a man at the next one. Glossy fair hair, cut in a swinging bob, scarlet lipstick, a linen suit with a short skirt which could have come from Paris. Perhaps it had. A woman of charm and vitality and self-possession: you could see it at a glance. Someone who could go anywhere, who knew what she wanted and made sure she got it: you could see that, too. And Harriet, taking all this in, had two thoughts assail her. The first that there was something of the
Zeitgeist
of the new Europe: confident, energetic catching up, racing towards the future. And, simultaneously, on quite another track: if Karel and I – if we continue – if we – It is possible I might know this woman all my life.

‘See?' said Marsha, beside her. ‘Don't you think?'

‘Sssh. Yes, think you're right.'

‘I'm always right.'

The woman became aware of being watched. She glanced round, saw Harriet and Marsha, and gave them a look both direct and curious. With a sudden gesture of understanding, she slid off the edge of her desk and crossed the room, her hand outstretched.

‘You are Harriet! Karel's friend, yes? And Marsha? I am Danielle. How do you do.'

‘How do you do.' They shook hands, and she called across the office. ‘Karel! What are you doing? Look who is here.'

He looked, lowering his glasses; Marsha laughed. He raised a finger; he finished his conversation, and came over. There were greetings, a kiss on the hand for each of them. Marsha blushed.

‘You must excuse me – I did not realise – So. You have met.' He was looking from one to the other.

‘We have,' said Harriet, and did not know what else to say for a minute. She waved a hand at the office and its activity. ‘This is all very –'

‘It is all very boring, perhaps,' said Danielle.

‘No, not at all –'

They followed her across to her desk.

‘You would like coffee? Tea? For you, Marsha? I am so pleased to meet you – Gaby has been telling me all about you. Now –' She had taken charge, she had taken over. Drinks appeared, and she questioned them with animation: about their journey, the place where they were staying, how long it was since Harriet and Karel had met. In 1968? So long ago!
Then!
Even before she and Karel themselves had known each other. She listened to their responses and glanced, now and then, at her watch.

‘You must be very busy,' said Harriet. Karel had returned to his desk, to take another call – ‘Excuse me, one moment –' She felt the intimacy they had begun to establish slip away. She was a visitor from England. Prague was full of visitors.

‘
There must be many beautiful girls in Czechoslovakia
–'

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

‘
But none of them called Harriet
–'

Had such moments ever taken place? Did they mean anything now?

They talked, they finished their coffee and Coke. Danielle hoped they would join them for lunch – Hannah was bringing Gaby down, they could eat at the Café Slavia, a few blocks away on Narodni. She was sure they would like it, most tourists did.

Yes, said Harriet, she had seen pictures.

‘You can't tell my mother anything,' said Marsha.

Danielle laughed. All mothers were the same. And then, after lunch, if they were really interested, she could show them something of a project she was working on, for one of her clients.

She picked up her jacket and bag.

They followed in her wake.

The Café Slavia was a dream, an art nouveau coffee house not far from the river, opposite the National Theatre, all cream and chocolate and brass interior, with opaque glass lamps on curving stems, a grand piano, round tables, ladies in hats. Havel used to come here, Karel told them: it had long been a writers'haunt, a place for talking, smoking, exchanging ideas. He did not seem to be here today. Hannah arrived – looking, in a skirt and blouse, as if she had made an effort but still felt out of place. Gaby, accompanying her, wore a dress.

‘I wish you had told us,' said Harriet, as they all sat down.

Karel shrugged. ‘I did not know. This is Danielle's idea.'

Danielle laughed. It had been a spur of the moment thought, when she had heard they were coming. She passed the menu. So. What would they have?

They had chicken in paprika sauce, a cucumber salad, fruit
compote.
They had coffee in tiny black and gold cups and Danielle paid the bill. And then she led them all outside again.

Karel had to return to the office for a meeting.

‘My apologies. I shall see you soon.'

They spent an hour or longer with Danielle, in a street behind the waterfront, looking at the restoration work being done on a fine baroque building. Plastic sheeting shrouded the upper floors, a skip stood on the pavement, there was dust everywhere. Danielle talked and talked. Her clients, a new property company, were running out of money; she was advising them about a loan, but suggesting that perhaps they might consider turning the ground floor into a restaurant. This was the kind of thing Karel had mentioned as helping to destroy a local community. Harriet, carefully, mentioned this, and rather wished she hadn't. Danielle produced papers from her briefcase; she quoted statistics detailing growth in the economy, the healthy effect of foreign tourism on restaurants of just such character. They followed her from room to empty room, smelling new plaster, picturing it all. Marsha and Gaby picked up workmen's tools and put them down again.

‘You will get filthy,' said Danielle.

And then, at last, the tour stopped, they were out in the street again, saying goodbye. Hannah and Gaby were accompanying Danielle back to the office, where they would wait for her to finish work. This evening, she was taking Gaby home to her own apartment, on the other side of Nove Mesto. Harriet and Marsha must come and see her there one evening, before their return to London: that would be a pleasure.

Perhaps, Hannah suggested, Marsha could come and see Gaby tomorrow? Harriet could have a little time to herself, if she wished.

They shook hands, they thanked Danielle; she gave them, both, the lightest kiss on each cheek. And then she was gone, turning the corner, down towards Charles Square, and Harriet and Marsha drew breath, and made for the river again, where they found a wooden bench and sat looking out at the water in an exhausted silence.

Harriet, in the pension bathroom, washing away the heat and fatigue of the afternoon in cloudy tap water, heard the low, single, continental note of the telephone sound through the house. She dried her hands and came out, wondering. Pani Maria was calling her, from the foot of the stairs. An English gentleman, in a phone box.

Harriet came down slowly to the dark little hall overlooking the courtyard. Outside, it was still very hot, though the sun was sinking. A few dry leaves fell from the tree, on to the cracked flagstones.

‘Hello?'

‘Harriet.'

‘Christopher.' Her stomach turned over. ‘How nice to hear you.'

‘And you.' He went straight to the point. ‘You said you had news of Susanna.'

‘Yes.' She drew a breath, leaning against the wall by the telephone table, seeing herself, very pale, in the mildewed mirror above. Pani Maria, in slippers, had gone out into the courtyard, she was sweeping the ground, as she did every evening, brushing up the day's accumulation of city dust, bread dropped from the table, fallen leaves.

She said: ‘It's not very good –' and told him, listening to the steady sweep sweep of the long rush broom, over and over the flags.

She found she was shaking again.

‘Christopher?'

‘Yes. Jesus.' He had gone white, she could feel it.

‘I want to see you.'

‘Yes.' He was thinking. ‘Tomorrow?' A pause. ‘I'll meet you in the saddest place in Prague.'

‘I know where that is,' she said, thinking of Kafka, of dandelions in uncut grass, clouds passing over the empty plots of land, but she didn't know.

Dark elder grew within the perimeter walls; birches and lime trees shaded raised, uneven ground, bare earth. In the Old Jewish Cemetery in Josefov, the gravestones stood so close together that in many places it was difficult to walk between them: they leaned against one another at angles, broken and grey, crammed into the ground. Lichen covered the worn reliefs of hands giving benediction, of jugs anointing; it crept into the crevices of Hebrew lettering; dates, verses, names of the dead.

Beyond the walls, the sound of traffic on the northern, art nouveau boulevard of Parizska was a distant hum. It was mid-afternoon. Harriet, who had left Marsha with Gaby and Hannah, walked in the heat past leafy Jan Palach Square, and along to the crossroads of Listo Padu and Brehova. She came to the cemetery entrance – a synagogue on one side, the Memorial Hall on the other – and went through.

Christopher was waiting beneath the trees, amidst the gravestones.

He was wearing his creased linen jacket, his hands in the pockets. He looked as he had looked the last time she saw him, in the hall of the Hotel Scheiber: heavy and tired and ill at ease, his face puffy, though the bruise had faded, had almost gone.

‘Hello.' He came towards her, unsmiling; he did not give her a kiss in greeting.

‘Hello.' Harriet looked up at him, nervous and uncertain.

‘Where's your daughter?'

‘With friends. Down in Žižkov.' She looked away.

‘Well –' he said abruptly, and turned, moving towards a narrow path.

Here we are again –

She did not say it. She moved alongside him; they walked where they could, amidst the stones. For over three hundred years, since the fifteenth century, this cramped plot had been the only burial ground for the Jews of Prague. As they died within the overcrowded ghetto, where four or five families shared a house, they were brought here, the earth reopened, another coffin dropped down on to those below. The ground was raised, as more bodies came; some of the stones, shifting, now marked the graves of the wrong family. The bodies lay eight, ten, twelve deep; Harriet and Christopher, two of the afternoon's visitors, were walking amongst ten or twelve thousand stones, above a hundred thousand bodies. In death, as in life, the Jews were crammed together.

In 1781, when the Emperor Josef granted an Edict of Toleration, the gates came off the walled ghetto. The district was given his name – Josefov – and a community was effectively destroyed: no separate schools, no Hebrew or Yiddish. Six years later the cemetery was closed: from that time, burials were in the New Jewish Cemetery which Harriet had visited.

In the war, yellow stars replaced medieval yellow cloaks. Then came the Holocaust, and the burial plots lay empty. And now, the cemetery where Harriet and Christopher were walking in a difficult silence was almost all that remained of the old Jewish Quarter. In a sweep-clean, expansionist mood at the end of the nineteenth century, when Prague had looked to Paris for an elegant, bourgeois city on which to model itself, every tenement, every little shop had been razed to the ground. Now there were only synagogues, a town hall, a museum; this densely populated graveyard, evoking the vanished lives of centuries.

And what of Susanna's life, which she had so nearly ended? What of Christopher, walking beside Harriet in silence, his hands in his pockets, looking straight ahead?

‘Not the best circumstances in which to meet,' he said at last.

‘No. I'm sorry.'

‘What for?'

‘I don't know. For Susanna, about Susanna – I've been thinking of her so much since we arrived. When I spoke to Hugh it was – I don't know – almost like a confirmation. I could feel something building up in me – it's hard to explain.'

Footsteps were passing the perimeter walls; the afternoon heat was intense. Birds rustled the leaves in the branches above them.

She said: ‘I visited Kafka's grave,' and she told him – or tried to tell him – of her feelings then: unease, desolation, her sense of Susanna's broken spirit.

She said, with great hesitation, ‘And I thought of you, too. In that way, in that context …'

He did not answer. They walked on, coming back to the entrance, continuing. Harriet was looking at the ground, at the caked earth, dappled with shade.

He said: ‘We should be here in winter. Let me show you something I find unbearably sad, and poetic.'

She lifted her head: he was indicating a gravestone with something resting on its worn flat rim: a pebble, and beneath it a piece of paper.

‘What's that?' She moved towards it.

‘A wish. A message. From someone to someone else, from lovers, from descendants to the Lord Jehovah – who knows? They leave them here all the time.' He crossed to the pebble, and lifted it; he unfolded the paper. They looked at a few Hebrew words, a signature. ‘Sometimes they're in Hebrew, but mostly in Czech. And visitors leave them. Like prayers in churches, you know?'

‘Yes.'

He refolded the paper. ‘Keep looking, there'll be more.'

‘What happens to them?'

‘No doubt they're collected. Mostly they're blown away by the wind. Then more come. People have been leaving them here for centuries. Tradition dates it back to the Exodus – nothing but stones to mark desert graves. There.' He replaced the pebble; she noticed, again, the tremor in his hands. ‘A little piece of history for you.'