Two hostile bishops can be used to block the advance of passed pawns since between them they control access to all squares of both colours.
Monday, October 21st
I shook Harvey and his head revolved on his folded arms until his cherubic features smiled at me sideways.
‘Let’s go,’ I said. Harvey reached for the bottle of slivovice.
‘Come along, Harvey,’ I said and unlocked his fingers from around the neck of the bottle. The old man blew his nose loudly into a handkerchief that was covered with the cross-hatching of meticulous darns.
The night was as clear as a planetarium. Once outside Harvey did a little gavotte and sang a tuneless, improvised song.
‘You’ve got to escalate or even quantify
For pre-emptive counter-strateg-y-y-y-y.’
The cross country detour was softened by the independent suspension of the slivovice. When we turned on to the sealed surface of the main road to Prague we began to pick up speed.
‘Did you hear all that, Harvey?’ I asked.
‘What do you think I am?’ said Harvey. ‘A goddamned snooper?’
‘Yes,’ I said and Harvey laughed and belched and went back to sleep until I woke him up.
‘Something ahead,’ I said.
‘An accident,’ said Harvey. He was sober. Harvey could get drunk like some people cat-nap. There was a vehicle with its lights on and a red and white illuminated bull’s-eye device was swinging in blurred arcs across the road.
I stopped the car. The man holding the signalling light was wearing a white crash-helmet, leather riding-breeches and a brown leather jacket with huge stiff red epaulettes. He tucked the signalling-lamp into the top of his black jack-boots as I wound down the window. He looked at us both, then said in German, ‘Who is the owner of this vehicle, please?’
He examined the insurance papers and the documents the hire company had given me and then he went over each page in our passports and tugged at the binding. Behind him was a motor-cycle and sidecar and on the far side of the road a jeep-like vehicle without lights. The man in the crash-helmet took our papers over to the jeep and I could hear the music of the voices; the questions were vibrato and flute-like Czech, but the decisions were played on a Russian bassoon. The two men in the jeep climbed out on to the road. One was dressed in the very English style of a Czech army officer, the other wore the uniform of a Russian corporal. They held the papers on the bonnet of the jeep and studied them with a flashlight before climbing back in. Then – still without switching on its lights – the jeep reversed at full speed a matter of twenty feet. Then the corporal gave it full lock and roared up the road, taking the pot-holes in easy style.
‘Follow,’ said the man in the white crash-helmet, pointing after the jeep.
‘Better follow it, boy,’ said Harvey. ‘There go our passports and in this country an American passport is worth more than a sixteen-ounce can of instant coffee.’
The jeep turned down a wide fire lane. We turned off the road after it; the rough ground hammered the suspension. Above us the tips of the firs almost closed out the stars as we sped down the long claustrophobic track like bugs in a hair-brush. Through the fire gaps I caught glimpses of rolling countryside, dusty in the white moonlight. The jeep slowed and in a clearing ahead a soldier in a brown anorak was waving a torch. It was a large clearing and a small farm fitted snugly into the corner of it. Inside the hollow feudal plan of the farmhouse a cobbled courtyard held half a dozen soldiers, some motor-cycles and a close-harmony quartet of dogs. I parked behind the jeep and climbed out of the car. A soldier pointed from the back seat of the jeep, the curved magazine of a Model 58 Assault gun peeping from his cradled arms. We obeyed his signal and stepped through the small door.
The building into which we were ushered had one simple wooden table standing amid straw, three hens moving sleepily and a staircase leading up to a landing where the army officer was standing. As we entered the doorway he said ‘Good evening’ in English. Harvey turned to me and began to relight his cigarette. Americans don’t often relight an inch of cigarette so I watched Harvey’s lips. He mouthed, OBZ1 under the cloak of his cupped hands. I didn’t nod.
The Czech army officer pointed to two grey weather-beaten chairs and Harvey and I sat. Harvey had thrown his match down and the officer went across to where it lay and planted a carefully polished boot on it. He looked at Harvey in an admonishing way that could have meant anything from ‘I wish this was your neck’ to ‘That’s how fires start’. The Czech officer had a face like a half-erased pencil drawing. His skin and his eyes were grey. His forehead was tall and his ears, nose and chin a little too long, like a wax doll that has been out in the sun. Behind him on the stairs was the Russian corporal intent on opening a bottle. The corporal smiled widely at us. ‘English,’ he said. ‘What a wonderful surprise, poputchik.’2
‘You know this guy?’ said Harvey.
‘Colonel Stok,’ I said. ‘Red Army Security Berlin.’ Stok pulled down the front of his brown soldiers’ summer-issue blouse with its corporal’s insignia.
One of the Czech soldiers brought in four thimblesize glasses and a plain tin the size of a floor polish tin.
‘Only the best we have for you, English,’ said Stok. The Czech smiled a tight smile, fixed like a piece of sadistically applied sticking-plaster; the slightest relaxation might rip his ears off. Stok prised the tin open. ‘Beluga,’ he said, holding it out to me. ‘They sent me Ocietrova at first but I said, “This is for our special foreign guest. We must have Beluga”.’ Inside the tin were the light-grey veiny spheres of caviare, almost as big as a tiny pea. Stok opened a packet of small wafers and spooned a large portion on to each. He poured the vodka until the tiny glasses brimmed above the rim. Stok held up a glass. ‘To travellers,’ said Stok.
‘Let’s make it motorists,’ I said.
The Czech ripped the sticking-plaster smile off with a sudden unexpected jerk. He would do himself an injury doing that one day.
‘To motorists,’ said Stok, ‘all over the world.’ We all drank and as Stok refilled the glasses he said, ‘Here in Prague they say that although the traffic police are communists the drivers are fascists, which would be all right if it were not that the pedestrians are anarchists.’
Stok was bubbling over with gaiety. He prodded Harvey and said, ‘I tell you a joke. The factory workers say that it’s impossible to do anything right. If you arrive five minutes early you are a saboteur; if you arrive five minutes late you are betraying socialism; if you arrive on time they say, “Where did you get that watch?”’ Stok laughed and spilled his drink. The Czech officer looked at him in shy disbelief and offered round his packet of Memfis cigarettes.
‘Another,’ said Stok. ‘Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Yes? Well socialism is exactly the reverse.’
Everyone laughed and swilled down another drink. Harvey was getting quite merry. He said to Stok, ‘Where do you get all these gags – Reader’s Digest?’
Stok grinned. ‘No, no, no, no – from people. That one about capitalism and socialism – we arrested a man for telling that this morning.’ Stok laughed his booming baritone laugh till the tears came into his eyes.
Harvey said to me softly, ‘Is he kidding?’
‘Who knows?’ I said.
The Czech walked under the oil lamp. Beside the huge gasometer of Stok he looked like a walk-on for La Bohème. He had a pair of soft leather gloves. He dragged them on and smoothed the creases around the fingers and flapped the cuffs backwards and forwards as he walked.
‘Eat, drink,’ Stok roared. The Czech began to shovel the caviare down like an automaton. Stok’s word was law.
We munched into the caviare, spooning it on to the wafer biscuits.
‘To Henry Ford,’ said Harvey holding up his glass.
Stok was doubtful. ‘If Henry Ford had been born in the Soviet Union, he would be a name I could drink to.’
‘If Henry Ford had been born in the Soviet Union,’ said Harvey, ‘he would still be making bicycles.’ Stok laughed.
Harvey lifted his glass again. ‘Henry Ford, philanthropist.’ The Czech officer asked what the word meant and Stok translated it. Harvey belched and smiled. It angered Stok.
Stok said, ‘You Americans are generous and we Russians are not. This is what you wish to say. Well, it is true that we do not give other nations gifts and bribes. We do not give them nuclear weapons. We give them very little money and very few guns. What we give other nations is encouragement. Encouragement and ideas. No amount of guns can fight ideas. In China, Laos and Cuba you have discovered that.’ Stok nodded to emphasize the point.
‘In China,’ said Harvey, ‘you have discovered it too.’
There was a moment of tension. I proposed an old Russian toast, ‘To my wife and my girl friend and to the woman I have yet to meet. I carry gifts for all three.’
Stok slapped his thigh in delight. We drank.
Then there was a toast to sputniks, the inventor of vodka, detour signs wherever they may be found, Shakespeare, Howard Johnson’s ice cream (twenty-eight different flavours), and that ‘famous English cathedral, St Pancras’. Then Stok held his glass up and proposed ‘Czechoslovakia’.
‘To Czechoslovakia,’ I said. ‘The best beer and animated films in the world. Where abortion is legal, homosexuality no offence and a divorce costs only ten pounds.’
‘I never know when you joke,’ said Stok.
‘Nor do I,’ I said. I downed the drink and so did the others. Stok refilled the glasses and said, ‘Death to the fascists.’
Harvey said ‘Fascists’, quietly. He looked around. ‘There is a deal of semantic confusion around that word. A sort of implied, inbuilt suggestion that there is a special counter-productive network of every bully, crook, swindler, rapist and short-order artist in the world confronting the gentle, honest, helpful, long-suffering, scholarly underpaid remainder.’ Harvey swayed slightly and tapped his chest violently. ‘Fascism is something in here. Right here in everyone in the world.’ Stok and the Czech officer were looking at Harvey in surprise.
Harvey held his glass of vodka and, drawing himself up to a position of attention, said in a slow, dignified voice, ‘We will drink to the death of fascism in Washington, in London …’ He waved his head at each town. ‘In Prague and in Moscow.’ He tapped the chests of each of us as he repeated the towns again. By a small error of judgement I got Prague and the Czech officer got London and Harvey had trouble finding a Washington chest until he remembered his own.
‘Yes,’ said Stok dully. It was a situation that well fitted the native land of Kafka and the Good Soldier Schweik. There were more toasts after that but Stok had lost a lot of his bounce.
‘Disadvantageous confrontation,’ Harvey pronounced when we were back in the car.
Two huge trucks rattled past towards the state factory, the huge painted registration numbers on their side almost obscured by dirt. I waited until the dust and dense black exhaust fumes drifted out of my headlight beams, then began the return trip to Prague.
‘Do you think he knew?’ Harvey kept asking me. ‘Is that what he meant by poputchik?’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. He was dying to talk.
‘You are right,’ Harvey said and dozed lightly as we drove back to Prague.
There were still plenty of people around when I parked outside the hotel. Here and there were groups of people in heavy overcoats sitting on wicker chairs in sidewalk cafés and making like it was Paris. The fat man in the kiosk was selling hot dogs to hungry pedestrians who all had transistor radios or battered brief-cases; some had both. Through the trees, big red and green neon signs were flashing and making strange abstract patterns in the shiny sides of passing trams.
‘Coffee,’ said Harvey and I nodded, because I knew that he would burst if he didn’t say what I already knew but would pretend to be surprised about.
The hotel foyer was full of brown aspidistras and green silver, the floor was visible through the holes in the carpet, and a gnome-like clerk was turning the pages of a vast dusty ledger. In the centre of the foyer were twelve pieces of plaid-patterned matching luggage, two small children in bright yellow sweatshirts, a woman in a grey woollen dress with a large leather handbag and a frail-looking man in large spectacles and a golf jacket.
‘Cold, cold, froid, say, Janie – what’s the German for cold?’ He turned to us as we entered. ‘Hey, look, will you tell this guy that we got to bath the kids and we need hot water? The hot water tap in the bathroom just isn’t working at all. Will you tell him …’
Harvey looked faintly annoyed that he’d been so easily tagged as an American. He said in German to the man behind the desk, ‘He needs hot water.’ The clerk said, ‘By the time the idiot has his luggage upstairs the hot water will be running.’
The tourist said, ‘You tell him that back home the health authorities would close a place like this down – the whole place is filthy.’
Harvey said to the clerk. ‘The gentleman’s mother was born in Prague – he says it’s like coming home.’ To the American he said, ‘The management regret the counterproductive difficulty with the thermostat but if you return to your room the water will be running hot in a moment or so.’
‘And tell him not to ask for someone to carry his baggage,’ said the clerk. ‘He’s not in the land of slavery now.’
The tourist said, ‘We have just the same trouble with our furnace at home.’
Harvey said, ‘I’m afraid the baggage porter’s mother is sick. If you could possibly manage a flexible response in order not to escalate the difficulties.’
‘Sure,’ said the tourist and he began to explain the whole thing to his wife while I grappled with the controls of the ancient lift. The tourist’s wife said to Harvey, ‘What time do the stores close downtown?’
Harvey said, ‘I’m a stranger here.’ The lift began to ascend.
‘They are going to fire me,’ Harvey said when we were finally in my room.
I opened the bottle of Black Label that I had bought on the plane. Harvey bounced full length on the hard bed with a great rumble of straining metal, and sang a snatch of his song, ‘You’ve got to escalate or even quantify,’ but he was no longer really drunk.
‘Official?’ I asked.
‘More or less,’ said Harvey. ‘The last time I went to see the Embassy Security Officer, he gave me a printed form called “The Foreign Service Retirement and Disability System”. What’s more they’ve got me working in the visa section with an FSO 83 leaning over my shoulder all day.’
‘And Jindriska?’ I said.
Harvey got to his feet and walked across to the wash basin. He selected a cake of soap from my open case. He sniffed at the soap. ‘Lemon,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said. He sniffed the soap again and then began to wash his hands. ‘She wants to stay here in some ways,’ Harvey said. ‘But she will do as I ask. There’s no point in my persuading her to go Stateside when there’s no slight chance of the State Department giving her a visa.’
‘You work in the visa department,’ I said.
‘That’s just what they are waiting for,’ said Harvey. He continued to wash his hands with Freudian preciseness. ‘… Hell, they’re right. I’m not complaining. I’m in the Political section, I’ve got no business falling in love with a Czechoslovak girl, but …’ He pulled a face at me in the mirror.
‘Maybe I should marry her,’ I said. ‘That would make her a British subject. Then you’ll have no trouble.’ Harvey wasn’t in a laughing mood. ‘Yeah,’ he said and continued to wash his hands until they had all but disappeared into great white boxing-gloves of sudsy lather. ‘You see,’ he said quietly, ‘that’s why those two comedians tonight gave me the jitters. I don’t know what I’d do if I found that Jindriska was … working for …’
‘Harvey,’ I said sharply, ‘don’t get so maudlin. Just treat your work like a mistress: don’t tell your wife about it wherever she was born.’ Harvey grinned. I said, ‘Stop trying to wash your troubles away and come and have a drink.’ I was wondering where I would get another friendly contact in Prague half as good as Harvey.
He rinsed and dried his hands a little awkwardly, smiled and took his drink. Down the corridor I could hear the American tourist saying, ‘Jiminy, Jane, there are no darned curtains at the window. I wonder which room those two guys are in.’ We heard him walk down the corridor in our direction. He stopped, then he called, ‘Is there a fellow American hereabouts?’
We listened to him calling all along the corridor. Then I said to Harvey, ‘Where do I meet this second guy who was in Treblinka camp?’
‘Jan-im-Glück’s brother,’ said Harvey, ‘they hate each other.’ He went and stared through the dingy lace into Wenceslas Square. ‘But if you want to see the death of your guy in writing he’ll be in the Pinkas synagogue at ten thirty in the morning. That’s in the Staré Mesto near the Ghetto section. There are several synagogues there but Pinkas is where he’ll be.’
‘I’ll be there,’ I said. I poured Harvey another drink. ‘I wish I knew what Stok was thinking,’ said Harvey.