Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City (15 page)

'There it is,' he said, 'the axis: Washington, Tel Aviv, Bucharest.' Then he sat back and folded his arms.

Jan, I could see, shared my doubts about all this, frowning into the middle distance and running his fingers through his scant beard. Neither of us, however, was willing to speak up. It is the nature of secret knowledge such as Phil claimed to possess that it is unverifiable, and therefore unchallengeable. Why had we heard nothing of Reagan supporting
of the CIA training Romanian security police, of Israel supplying weapons to Bucharest? Because it's all a secret, of course, stupid! And it might all be true, too. The CIA had tried to kill Castro with an exploding cigar. One of Jimmy Carter's people had gone to Teheran bearing a cake and a copy of the Koran as gifts for the mad mullahs with whom he was to negotiate. Anything is possible.

The snow outside was turning to sleet, falling slantwise sluggishly in the light of the street lamps and extinguishing itself in the dark surface of the river. Although night had fallen it was still early, and Phil had the ominous look of a reality instructor warming to his task. Then Jan asked him if he had spoken to
since his arrival in Prague. He shrugged. Now it was Jan's turn to smile and shake his head. He fished in the pockets of his jeans and came up with a coin and went to the telephone beside the gasping espresso machine. Who is
I asked? Philip shrugged again. 'A girl,' he said. He looked vexed; he had hardly begun to tap into his store of secret knowledge, the great world's arcana. After a brief and what seemed furtive conversation on the telephone Jan came back to the table. Katefina was at home, and was having a party, and we were invited. A girl. We paid and left.

Praguers are the most circumspect of city dwellers. Travellers on trams and in the metro carefully remove the dust jackets of books, no matter how innocuous, that they have brought to read on the journey; some will even make brown-paper covers to hide the titles of paperbacks. Understandable, of course in a city for so long full of informers, and old habits die hard. Likewise, our brief journey to
apartment had the air of the credits sequence of a 1960s espionage movie. First there was Jan on the telephone in the cafe cupping his hand over the receiver and raising a protective shoulder to the room as if he thought there might be a lip reader on the premises, then we were outside, three hunched figures on an empty avenue, walking cliches, shouldering against the wind and the darkness and the gusts of flabby sleet, spies who went out into the cold for a rendezvous with the woman called
After we had waited for a numbing ten minutes at a corner rank an ancient taxi wheezed up and, eager as eskimos, we piled into its leather-and-cigarette-smoke-smelling back seat, huddling together for warmth.

Taxis are another of Prague's mysteries. They seem to congregate and swim in protective shoals, like a species of large, unlovely, shy sea creature. Until 1989 they were run by the Prague Transport Corporation, which meant they were dependable to some degree, but now they are all privately owned, with the results that one might expect. It is impossible to flag down a taxi, if you are a foreigner, or at least I have never succeeded in doing so. There must be a set of coded signals known only to native Praguers. Often I have stood on the pavement wanly waving as cab after cab plunged past, every one of them empty, only to have some leather-jacketed fellow with the regulation drooping moustache step nimbly past me and, like an expert bidder at an auction, lift one finger, or flex an eyebrow, at which a taxi I had not even seen approach would slew across three lanes of blaring traffic and pull to a smoking halt at the kerb with its back door already swinging open. Nowadays one is warned off taxis altogether. On my most recent visit to the city the first thing I saw when I entered my hotel room was a notice from the manager cheerily assuring me - 'Dear Honoured Guest!' - that if I were to hail a cab in the street I would almost certainly be charged an exorbitant rate, with the additional hint that this would like be the least of the evils that would befall me; instead, I should ask reception to call a car from their own private service. I assumed this was a piece of strategic exaggeration on the part of the hotel, but when I checked with a diplomat from the Irish embassy he told me how a few nights before he had taken a taxi from the railway station to his home and even though the meter registered 600 crowns the driver insisted on charging 6,000. Did you pay, I asked him? 'Oh, I paid,' he said grimly, breathing heavily down his nostrils. It seemed best to drop the subject.

I heard
sneeze before I saw her. She lived on Slezska Avenue, on the eastern side of the city, in a big, blank apartment block behind one of those grey, many-windowed cliff-faces so characteristic of Eastern Europe.
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There was an open entranceway of grey concrete where a naked bulb was burning, and a clanging grey metal door which
had to use both hands to haul open. She was, indeed, a very Eva, and was even wearing a tight black sweater with a polo neck, and black leather boots. She was very beautiful, with a sharp, heart-shaped face and thin, long, pale hands and long, slender legs. Particularly appealing were those deep shadows, of a pale plum shade, under her eyes, so characteristic of Eastern European women. She gave a loud, liquid snuffle, and smiled. The wings of her nose were red and raw, and she was clutching a sodden tissue. Jan and Philip kissed her on the cheek. With me she shook hands. 'Oh,' she said, 'forgib me, I hab such a code.'

Her apartment consisted of a single, enormous room furnished sparsely with a lopsided sofa, some straight-backed chairs, a mahogany table with carved legs - lugubrious survivor of a bygone bourgeois age - an overflowing bookcase, and an elaborate stereo system housed in an upright black perspex cabinet. There was a tiny fireplace with a tiled surround, the fireless grate already half filled with wadded paper hankies. The only source of heating that I could see in the room was a small hot-air blower, an oddly animate-seeming appliance that squatted froglike in the middle of the floor, its mouth wide open and its engine whirring at full though inadequate blast. Obviously Jan and Phil and I were much too early, for not only were there no other guests present, but there were no visible signs of any preparations for the party.
turned the sofa sideways-on to the fireplace while Jan and Philip brought forward the straight-backed chairs. As this was my first visit, the rules of hospitality insisted, it seemed, that I must sit on the sofa, with the result that I spent the entire evening in a vaguely helpless, semi-recumbent sprawl, peering up waiflike at the others perched on their grown-up chairs. Every so often I would drag myself upright, wriggling and grunting, only to subside again inexorably into the bumpy upholstery wallowing around me like quicksand. In a far corner of the room there was a tall refrigerator, big as a packing crate, from which
fetched a bottle of freezing wine, Moravian, slightly fizzy, and sickly sweet, which we drank from tumblers. At regular intervals Katefina would be overcome by a sneezing fit - really, for such a slight and delicately made girl she sneezed with remarkable force - at the end of which she would blow her nose violently, as if to punish it for its betrayals, crush the tissue in her fist and with rueful aplomb toss it into the grate to join the steadily growing slushy white mountain of its fellows. What did we talk about? Philip rehearsed his Romanian adventures, and Jan gave us a long, rambling account of a fist fight he had got himself into late one drunken night outside a bar in a small town somewhere in windy Wisconsin. The point of the story was that his opponent turned out to be a second-generation Pole whose parents, old-style Marxists, had been imprisoned in the McCarthy era. When this bond was discovered, Jan and his new friend went back into the bar and spent the rest of the night drinking vodka and discussing Polish politics. 'Of course,' Philip said when Jan had finished his tale, 'Lech Walesa is in the pay of the KGB, as everybody knows.'