The Inversion Trial, a novel by Frank Foran

The Inversion Trial by Frank Foran

Part One
Home is the Twilight

1. Missed Midtones

When she hunched up her shoulders, as though against the weight of the stone, and began to climb down the steps, Kate Ashe saw that the passageway and the cavern below had been carved from solid rock and, though dimly lit, the walls of the long tunnelled entrance were ribbed in dark, and felt close about her. She almost shivered, though it was already March.

" I'm frozen, too!" she muttered.

“This is serious for some!” a man said on the stairway.

The stranger was closely examining one in a surrounding series of shots she could see had been taken in the snow, and a face, which entirely filled the lens, raw with the cold; to her eye, the picture seemed overexposed: this was a grainy print of a fat jowled gypsy, laughing so hard that his tonsils were on show, slightly blurred in motion, and you got the impression he could have swallowed the lens.

"So I can see!" she said, smiling.

The man she assumed to be a gypsy was wearing a shiny red suit, light cotton with wide lapels; a shirt she thought an incredible achievement of yellow - how had its maker accomplished that tone? - a purple silk neck scarf; and a most distinctive tie, which she was trying hard not to stare at, a repeating pelican in design on black and white. He was like a little bird himself, she thought.

The second exhibit was another black-and-white shot from last winter: the interior of a small living-room, at the far end of which, an ice-encrusted window was sharply in focus; in the more softened warmth of the foreground, a wild Gican was playing the huge blur of a violin that seemed extruded from the scene, turned up towards a lens that had magnified its proportions.

“I can almost hear the music!” the stranger said. “But you don’t play a double bass like that! I am afraid this will be all romantic observation, the worst form of social criticism! Anyway, he's a racist bastard, like all the rest! By the way, I’m Shams - a friend of Milan’s.”

“That's a violin!” Kate told him, at a loss for what else to say, but a little stung by his criticism of his 'friend', the young photographer. "Your English is excellent, Shams! And your friend, Milan's! Somehow, that seems strange to me, when you Czechs weren't permitted to come anywhere near us for so long! I suppose, even as you were studying, you were all hoping for a revolution..."

Tables had been pushed back against one dark stone face of the Strahov monastery crypt, and along another, the young photographer's work had been arranged through illuminated spots in the rock. The air tasted musty, making Kate feel rather thirsty; she had not had anything to drink since she left the plane; and though some weak attempt had been made in more recent days to refurbish the place with some modern fixtures and terracotta tiling, this was still a cold dark cave; Kate drew in her breath, as she finally shivered.

"I could do with something to drink!" she said. "Preferably, some hot tea!"

"Believe it or not," the stranger said, as she looked about her, "there's an underground pond in the lesser cave, but that one has been roped off; and I don't think it would be very wise to trespass! I do live here, but I’m from Pakistan."

“What do you do here?” she asked, slightly colouring at her mistake: she had assumed that this stranger was a Bohemian gypsy.

“What do you do,” Shams said, “not how do you do?" He laughed rather pleasantly, as he looked kindly into her face, and she felt herself recovering. "I am in business over here - and in Pakistan. Textiles - or as I prefer to call it, fashion! I am into design. How do you know Milan? And what's your name?"

"I'm Kate Ashe," she told him. His business in fashion certainly explained that yellow shirt, the pelican tie, and his extravagant style of dress. "I make jewellery back in Manchester," she said. "I'm a designer myself. Egerton, my boyfriend, is a painter."

She was oddly attired for a designer, he thought: amongst the smart outfits around them in the entrance to the cavern, Kate's yellow and purple mountain jacket struck him as overtly defensive, if ostentatiously practical, and perhaps rather more appropriate on this windy night and the rough stairs of a passageway down into a monastic crypt, where by comparison he felt at once less protected and slightly overdressed.

"Are you on your own here?" he asked.

"I'm with your friend, Milan," she said, "though he seemed in an awful hurry to get away from me! This is a bit of a break for me; and I hope to take a few photographs of my own! I'm meeting up with Egerton in a few days time, over in Slovakia; he's been climbing there in the High Tatras for the past week."

The High Tatras: that explained her clothing.

Kate hesitated for a second, thinking how she wished that she had flown to Bratislava with the painter last week, or at least gone straight out there to see him, without making this detour: after all, they were planning to come back to Prague, before returning to England, and they could have seen all this together!

"That's how we know Milan," she told him. "My boyfriend Egerton is a cousin of Ivan Krac, the famous Slovakian photographer who is going to make a speech down here about Milan's work - his only cousin, I think."

"Another Krac!" Shams said.

Kate had been determined to see Prague before flying on to Bratislava. Her flight that evening had arrived slightly early at Ruzyně, and she had had to wait for Milan. She had stood with her camera half way up the stairs overlooking the cavernous departure hall, which in 1990 seemed frozen in time. It was labelled with signs in Russian, though the Soviet troops would be taking the train home. The austere chamber, still littered with Cyrillic, had been unrelieved by a vast drabness of grey fields, or the racing cloud only just visible in the twilight, through a wall of smoked glass, and Kate had felt rather more strongly that she had been landed in the wrong half of Czechoslovakia, as she had taken her first photograph.

The young photographer, Milan Procházka had been recommended by Egerton's cousin, with whom he had only made contact a few months earlier in the first days of a revolution that was opening up the homeland he had never been able to visit. The family in England had not been in touch with him, since long before Egerton's father's death, and he had been keen to make amends for that, and finally meet up with Ivan Krac.

His cousin had seemed very glad to hear from them, and was looking forward to their first visit. Ivan had even posted her a photograph, so that when Milan Procházka had rushed through the doors, Kate had recognised him immediately. He was not yet twenty and wore his slightly greasy hair long to the shoulder, and naturally he had spots; but he had been very enthusiastic as he talked; and her first impression was that Milan seemed friendly enough. He was very smartly dressed. Barely taking time to introduce himself, the young photographer had begun to explain why he was late and in such a hurry to get away: it had turned out that he had been wintering amongst gypsies for two months on a state-built ghetto of high-rise flats, sharing their food and their lifestyle, and tonight he was to have his first exhibition, a display of 'the fruits' of what he termed his 'passionate immersion'. As 'the great Krac', the dissident photographer who was obviously Milan's mentor, as well as her boyfriend's cousin, would be speaking at his exhibition, Kate had been unable to refuse the unexpected invitation.

Hurrying her towards the exit, Milan had explained at a breakneck speed that, "Photographers like to capture the tide of events, but overlook the pools of humanity! Everybody now is shooting the revolution! And I despise them!

"These are a true people,” he had said, quicky, in his careful English, “a pure folk of spirit and music! To live amongst them is to see a more beautiful world - not primitive at all, but not forgetting the important things that we can: the spirit of music; and the body, alive in dance!”

"I'm a bit of a photographer myself," Kate had told him, "though I'm only an amateur! My boyfriend is a painter; you know that his father came from Slovakia. I make jewellery for a living; and even sell some of it - to a big store called Fragorna. So this sounds like just my kind of thing! I'd love to see your exhibition, Milan; and meet Ivan!"

The weather had been rather more blustery in Prague than Manchester, and they had taken the shelter of a taxi into the centre. After they had dropped off her luggage and hurriedly checked into her hotel, where Milan had been almost furious at the slowness of the receptionist, their driver had willingly raced the young photographer from the Old Town, across the beautiful river with its castle gently lit in green in the gathering twilight, and up through Smichov, which Milan had told her was a gypsy area and had been clearly dilapidated and deprived. Eventually they had come alongside the white walls of their destination, and after he had paid the driver, in spite of her protestations, Milan had led Kate into the grounds of the Strahov Monastery, where they had walked quickly up through a well maintained courtyard towards an open door into a small hillside. This was some place for a first exhibition! she had thought, but not without a pang of guilt: her own arrival had made Milan late, and as they had paused in the doorway and more of his guests had followed them up the path, through the most unwelcoming wind, he had seemed even more agitated, and made his excuses.

“I’m so sorry,” he had told her, “I can’t translate for you... Everything is described down below in Czech; so I’m afraid you may be in the dark - until you find Mr. Krac! At least you will be out of the wind!”

She had been left alone in the doorway, as Milan had rushed away from her down the steps. Then, as she had made her way into the passageway, she had met Shams.

“Please, don’t wait for me!” Milan was saying by one of the tables at the foot of the stairs. “Help yourself to drink... Somebody must pour for you, I think." He smiled up at Kate. "I brought it in from the country.”

He was pointing at a demijohn on a nearby table; the huge vat was filled to the narrow neck with a faint yellow liquid, the sight of which made Kate even more thirsty.

“It is white Moravian,” he told them. “You must taste it! This is home white, the best of the crop.” He began to pour, tipping the heavy glass vat on the table and catching the wine for them in paper cups.

“I see you’ve met Shams,” he said, as he handed Kate a tumbler. “We couldn’t drink red! Red is the Czechish colour, but Morava must be white!”

"Moravia," Shams said to her. "He's talking about the flag."

“What about Slovakia?” she asked, sipping at the wine, and at the same time thinking of Egerton over there.

“Ah, theirs is the little blue triangle,” Milan said, laughing and winking at Shams. “The Slovaks are very blue, I think, like our plums, before they lose their colour going into the Slivovice. You ever tried our plum-brandy, Kate?”

She shook her head, and Milan apologised for spilling some of that precious Moravian white, in his haste, before hurrying off again.

"This wine is rather good," she said.

Shams was looking at a photograph of children playing in the corroded shell of a car, and she studied it as well; the sunlight on the snow had been just too strong to avoid spoiling the capture, or Milan may have decided to let in more light to get this softened effect; but he had achieved, instead, nothing more than a ruinous wasteland in a picture that was all highlights. Framed by the blur of the wreck in a dazzling brightness of surrounding ice, one little boy held an immense steering wheel in his tiny hands; the others lay or hung about in various positions, some of them upside-down.

“Where are the midtones?" Shams said. "The dark has been filtered out! The label translates: ‘Another Scrapped Generation?' A shaming question, to be sure! A critical statement. My friend Milan has a social conscience.”

From his tone, and that wry smile, it seemed as though Shams doubted this, or even disapproved.

“That's no bad thing!” Kate said, taking another sip of her wine.

“Oh, I agree!” Shams said, looking serious once more. “But you will notice there isn’t a single gypsy down here; not here in the flesh!”

“Why is that?” she asked, almost colouring again, as she regretted how she had just assumed from the start Shams was a gypsy! "You’re right, as well," she said, "it’s as if Milan has been away on a foreign adventure in some secret world; but surely it was no great expedition, and these people are only a tramride away.”

“This is the attitude of even those who care,” Shams said, and he gave Kate a smile that she felt to be insincere. “Czech people see the gypsies in the harshest light! You know, they even force sterilization on their women! They ghettoise the race! There has been no adjustment in their view; they can’t conceive of mixing...”

“I don’t think that’s it!” Kate interrupted him, wanting to stick up for Milan, who from first impressions seemed on the whole to be conscientious, in spite of a slight absent-mindedness, and all that bustle. "They haven't got the time," she said. “It’s more likely, they prefer real life!”

“Ah, well put!” Shams said. “And of course, you are correct.” He waved his arm to include the gathering guests, looking at her, almost sadly. “This isn’t real life, Kate... But still,” he said, “I would have liked to have seen a token presence. To allay my own doubts, you understand?”

“A token presence would have been humiliating,” Kate said. “It is enough to be given insights into another world without displaying its... Well, all I am saying is that it shouldn’t be a freak-show!”

“I hope it’s a little more than that!”

Kate Ashe turned.

The young Czech photographer had caught only her last words, and he gave her a look of wounded professional pride.

“I’m sorry, Milan.”

She was suddenly upset and put down her drink.

Shams coughed politely, and he glanced sympathetically at this young Englishwoman who made jewellery in Manchester and felt the cold down here as much as he did. The Englishwoman's eyes were startlingly beautiful and slightly set apart, which had given her a frank and open expression from the start, whenever she had been smiling, but now that she was frowning, widened with a broad kind of sorrow; and he regretted the loss of that brightness and this burst of emotion that had so visibly transformed her. Of course, she had told him that she would be meeting up with her boyfriend, Egerton Krac, who was climbing in Slovakia; but for now, she was alone here in that waterproof purple and gold and the only person dressed against the storm outside, she seemed more in need of protection than before.

“Kate was explaining that it is enough to have these wonderful insights into gypsy life,” he told Milan, “without inviting them to stand around the place, some kind of animate exhibits! This was in the context of my remark that you haven’t invited any gypsies to your viewing! It is almost as though, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, in this exhibition, Milan, you have sought to create an ironic partition -.”

“I’m afraid that's true,” Milan said to Kate, “because none of the people in these snaps like this sort of thing! We do have our partitions! They wouldn't have come, not if I had begged them!”

People were hushing for quiet, and once again Milan was forced to leave them as a small but distinguished looking man with a grey goatee beard began speaking to what had now become a rapt audience, his thumbs in the pockets of a yellow waistcoat. There was a respectful silence for Ivan Krac, the well known photographer, as the incomprehensible buzz of his speech came to dominate the dark crypt, entirely filling its space, those mysterious words losing themselves, and then returning through the cavern, as if trying to re-find the listeners; his most indecipherable murmurs, shady catacoustics, as they bounced around, and could never quite be traced, back to the man who had spoken them, so that everything seemed finely strained to catch the speech as it went on and on around them.

Beyond understanding, Kate stood stock still and silent in the dark, as that disembodied voice seemed to fill her mind and flood her body, till she felt near to swooning in the shadows. Then, to break the spell, she concentrated instead on his partially lit face, thinking of a portrait in close-up for Egerton, and trying to block out the sound; though, as she took out her camera, steadying herself to take the picture, she doubted whether it would turn out to be a decent one. The speaker’s eyes danced on, around their own, glancing into the eyes of the others, as he developed his seductive theme in the dark.

Kate was standing some distance from Ivan in the cavern, and as she zoomed in and took her quick snapshot of Egerton's cousin, the flash of her Nikon didn't appear to reach him, or even seem to register in the dark; nobody looked around, as she put the camera back into her bag, feeling uncertain about the outcome of the shot, but rather more steady on her feet.

She could tell that this was more than individual praise for a photographer: it was an echo of universal celebration, deeper regard: after all, they were still in the midst of their revolution! Every word in Prague had sudden power! It had been a long speech, and at the end there was enthusiastic applause that thundered around the cave.

“What was he saying?” Kate asked Shams with her hands together.

“He was talking about the cavern,” Shams said, looking around them, “the soft dark down here, and a hard light, almost in secretion; there are no windows on to this exhibition, which makes it a perfect setting for work of such immersion!” He smiled wryly at her. “Beneath rock, against it, we can sense the injustice in Milan’s buried light - the softness of the dark denied: few shadows... Young Procházka achieves good bokeh, by which Krac means those soft backgrounds, out of focus; he shows us, in his foregrounds, our own fragmentation, open like this rock; but not thrown into any soft relief; instead, kept hard and sharp and separate in one expanse of unbroken light! With a depth of field so close, and an aperture, apparently, wide as his eye, my friend over there has passed the demanding test of full-consciousness!”

Shams was now laughing at these ideas, but Kate felt strangely drawn to Egerton’s cousin, who had made such an impact on her in the dark. “Complete rubbish, of course!” Shams was saying. “People who take black-and-white snaps miss out on the colours in life! There is a picture I would like you to see, Kate... It is authentic folk art: it was painted by a gypsy, not a wistful observer! I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude about my friend here.”

Kate smiled as Milan returned, still glowing from the speech. “Perhaps we could go on there tonight?” Shams suggested. "It isn't far away."

“Go where?” Milan asked.

“The discotheque Rostov,” Shams said, "though I won't be able to stay out tonight for very long; and I know you have a prior engagement, Milan! I thought Kate might like to see the huge painting of gypsies they have in there. You know the one..."

"Don't you like my own shots?" Milan asked him ironically; he clearly knew Shams very well. “Didn't you enjoy the speech?”

Shams laughed. “He is speaking as a photographer, of course,” he said to her. “I am surprised to find down here that any two photographers can agree. You all think in negatives, don’t you?”

Milan shook his head.

“There, you see!” Shams said.

“I meant Ivan's speech,” Milan said. He was looking towards his mentor. “When he left prison," he told Kate, "Ivan Krac had to work in a shop on Vodičkova street making passport-photographs for a people with limited access to travel; our visionary wasn’t even allowed to operate a camera!"

Kate knew of course that Ivan had been imprisoned in the Seventies when his work had been critical of the state; he had put together a book of images and ideas that had been banned, 'Dividing Lines: our Accented Edges', which she hadn't been able to read yet, in translation, though it had finally been published over here in Czech and Slovak.

"We knew sadistic times!" Milan said vehemently. "Today, Krac can run a publicity company, P.S.; but until this year he couldn’t get any of his work published at home, and the fees from abroad were stopped... But now things are different, thank God! It was a wonderful speech!"

Kate rather liked the huge colourful picture of a gypsy festival painted in a primitive style, which hung down in the lobby, but wondered what Egerton would think: he could be very critical, as a painter himself, and would probably consider the picture rather flat; climbing the spiral stair to the dancefloor of the disco Roskov, to which for some reason the old photographer had insisted on accompanying them, Kate and Shams had left Ivan Krac by himself, after he had assured them he was used to his own company and had survived longer periods in far worst places!

"It is nice to see some midtones!" she told Shams.

As they danced together, her thoughts were still on Slovakia and her boyfriend, the painter, Egerton Krac; but then they turned to the velvet revolution. As they had walked here, after Ivan and Shams had pointed out the hotel into which she had earlier registered, she had seen how the Civic Forum office, the centre of Havel’s revolt, fed electric cables out across the street; and Ivan Krac had told her that anybody could plug in! Realpolitik could be substituted at any time by the "gross domestic product", in one case, earlier this evening, four young boys with collar-length hair and a loose grasp on their guitars and the lyrics of Lennon and McCartney. From all she had been told, Wenceslas Square was filled with speeches by day and taken over by live bands at night; between the orations of the new politicians, the music flowed.

“Aci-eed!” another track began and some of the young Czech dancers seemed to be swept back by a hidden current, finding safety in the ballroom-grip of a partner; careless of beats-per-minute, they returned to a timing all their own. Between tracks, now no longer forbidden, the d.j. seemed to feel obliged to provide an authoritative synopsis of each song, the band and its place in the popular culture of the west. The deadpan perorations were as long as the records themselves, and Kate did not desire an interpreter.

"I am glad that like me, you prefer authenticity," Shams said. "Photography is at best another kind of reportage: it can never be art. Even with long hair and an appearance of the passion for creation, Milan can only ever make a record. In a way, I pity my friend."

He looked at his watch and told her that he would have to go on to the prearranged meeting he had mentioned earlier, and in silence they returned to the table downstairs, where the Pakistani took his leave. As he walked away, the fashion designer put on his jacket, placing a hand in each sleeve and then slowly raising both arms, ruffling the coat back up around his shoulders.

“Shams dances like a peacock,” Kate said, smiling at the old Slovak photographer, “he really struts and weaves; but at least he is trying!”

Ivan Krac laughed. “Shams is a walking display-case!" he said. "Our Prague streets have display-cases for newspapers, display-cases for graduation-bulletins, display-cases for everything; as his own display-case, your harlequin friend may be perfectly camouflaged -.”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Kate said. “I like peacocks -.”

“As a Czech, I rather like display-cases!” Ivan said, laughing.

"You know that I make jewellery," she said, "I have my own workshop; so I am interested in design."

"Yes, Egerton did mention it in a letter," he said. "Egerton's father, Miroslav, he was also a jeweller, as you must have been told. I knew Miroslav very well through my youth; we were very close; so I missed him, terribly, after he had gone! Communication, though, was restricted here! We couldn't afford to be open, even through the post! And I hardly heard from my young uncle again... Before the communists came to power, my own grandfather was a photographer, Kate, though he also liked to paint; and maybe that's where Egerton gets it from! I am so looking forward to meeting him at last, after you've been over there to see him in our Slovakian element, and you can return to Prague together!"

For a moment, Kate appeared slightly saddened and inward-looking, her beautiful wide set eyes downcast, so that the practiced photographer saw that she had been missing his cousin, deeply, for the past week, and was perhaps feeling even worse, and might not really want to talk about him here tonight.

"You could always go over there a little sooner," he said gently. "There's plenty of time for Prague. You should have come together!"

She was silent for a while, but then she smiled.

"You know, I thought that Shams was a gypsy," she said, "when I first saw him down in that poorly lit cavern tonight! What a place that is!”

“Sanskrit is related to Romany,” Ivan said, “and maybe Shams does have some distant gypsy blood! Perhaps we all do, after all. It is hardest to escape the deepest roots. That cavern, you know, has been named Hell by the people who run it now. Milan rented it for his exhibition. It's an apt description, don't you think? Didn't he tell you?"

“It was a great place for an exhibition," she said, "whatever they call it now! Milan didn't tell me, though he did tell me about a gypsy club, Narsis: it’s in the Old Town; and only gypsies go there - except for him.” Involuntarily, she found herself frowning back at Ivan, who looked at her with disapproval. “Do you know of it?” she said.

“Oh, of course, I’ve read about the place,” Ivan said. “That gypsy dive is one of our most disreputable nightspots! Even the police are afraid to go inside: they let them keep their own laws! Narsis should not be on your itinerary! I came along with you tonight, because I thought this place was bad enough...”

“I've been told that the police have vanished,” she said, thinking of missing midtones and the brightness that seemed the heart of the revolution in this sometimes grimmest of cities. “Your political prisoners have been released, your streets have become stages, and Prague is one big festival to liberation... Only, the gypsies aren’t invited; instead, they are painted out; they are behind a partition; even without the police around, they seem to be held prisoners in their own country!”

“Yes, that’s true," Ivan admitted. “Freedom is just beginning here; it will take some time to achieve truth and openness; and for the moment, this is another period of Czecho-Slovak inwardness and confinement, in which we will still have to wait for our delivery from silence and the dark! You know, this month is named Brezen in Czech, and by that we mean ‘Pregnancy’.”

“Really?” Kate said. “How lovely, for March, and the end of Winter!”

“Duben begins tomorrow,” Ivan told her, “and that means ‘Oak’. Unlike we Slovaks who followed Rome, the Czechs still follow nature! Like the great speed with which the Czechs are approaching capitalism, that is one thing in their favour! They have not elevated a single Roman god... January was ‘Ice’, Kate, and in a couple of months flaming June will be ‘Red’.”

"Do you miss Slovakia?" she asked him.

"The wintry east?" he said. "No, Kate, Prague is my home now, though it may be just as cold! The northern frontier of Bohemia is in Czech Krkonoše, the Giant Mountains, which the Germans called Riesengebirge or the everlasting peaks. The legend has it that giants formed the Krkonoše, when the earth was still soft, and its streams were created by the tears of giantesses, looking at their husband’s huge footprints, after they had left for good."

Ivan reminded Kate in some ways of her boyfriend, though he was smaller in stature and, of course, that much older; but there was something about the mouth, a faint echo of Egerton Krac; her eyes became downcast again, as she thought of the painter rock climbing alone in Slovakia.

"It sounds to me as if you do have some regret," she said, "like those wives of giants."

"I do fear that spring may never return to the Giant Mountains," he said, "where the forests have become deadwood! I was up in the Krkonoše recently and the trees are eerie, almost ghostly - like the lifeless, accusative fingers of slain giants, pointing up at our polluted skies: a great, forested graveyard, under the killing-clouds of Bohemia, East Germany and Poland!"

Kate recalled the legends, in which the giants had sprung from a vastness of ice in the Ginnunga-Gap, the cleft of clefts, before the gods were born, and every year they came westward to try to turn back the spring.

"Surely, you have had quite enough of them!" she said.

"In the tales they inhabit," Ivan said, "Balder 'the good' married Nanna, 'the blossom' - and 'Blossom' is the May over here in Czech! Maybe we should raise our glasses to that brighter prospect!"

"Blossom, speed thee well!" Kate said, raising her glass in a mock toast, to which he responded rather more seriously with his own.

"Speed thee well, indeed!" he said. "To you, and Egerton, and freedom!"

"I was in a disastrous play, ‘The Winter’s Tale’, at school," Kate told him, "and a friend Caitlin handled the sound-effects: they were terrible as well! She had rushed the recording of the storm. We had arrived in Bohemia; I couldn’t remember my own lines, listening to her thunder; but I recall them now: ‘Blossom, speed thee well!’ That's lovely, too! The month of blossom, Ivan... You know, I’ve been watching your young people dance, now that spring is here; and they don’t seem to know how to move - how to get away from the ice.”

“Maybe you can spot repression in a strobe-light!” Ivan said. “Freedom is a melt-water for the moment, Kate; and we can all be confused at times! After all, didn't Shakespeare make Bohemia an island? As we are facing the dance towards convergence, and the enlargement of Europe, this spring, this larger 'island' of Czecho-Slovakia is busily bracing herself against the noisesome gales of a great storm! The Wild Hunt of capitalist globalisation is finally again upon us! Your English Bard would have been familiar with the Herlathing, the Wild Hunt, as well as the tale of old king Herla - the ancient Briton who had given his name to it over in England; here, it was known as 'The Raging Host'. The Herlathing was the 'hurley-burley' of 'Macbeth', the greatest of storms, the enormous hullabaloo in the wild dancing of the wind: the presage of catastrophe, and a hint of Ragnarök to come! And the deafening chase was led by Odin, old king Herla, or Hel herself! Innocent victims caught in the path of those wild Norse riders in the sky could be snatched up, and carried away to the land of the dead! In Paris, that chase across the heavens was called Mesneé d’Hellequin, after the goddess of death; and in the eighteenth century, Hel’s host is said to have been witnessed in the moments before the French Revolution! The ancient Briton, Herla King, has also left Europe the word 'harlequin'; and that wild hunt for victims gave us the story of the Pied Piper, his piping the whistling of the wind, and the rats of Hamelin the souls of the dead."

"This night doesn't seem to bode too well for Prague!" she said, sipping her wine, and thinking like him of the blustery weather outside.

"Here, politics is breaking down," he said, "shattering into the conflicting rule of winter and summer, Skadi and Niörd. The Wild Hunt is upon us! And set against the convergence of nations, we have our separate identities to pursue! That is the icy reality of partition in the returning warmth of freedom! That's not to say that I am against break-up! As a photographer, I'm all for the progression of solitary perception! Slovakia is ready for her own run; and in 'Dividing Lines', I have argued for our separation! As I said down in Hell, tonight, man has perhaps modelled form on ruin and found his ultimate truth in detritus. He didn't learn to build until he had seen nature broken down and shattered. Chaos came first, whatever your mythology, as precondition to sharper form; all arises from the same grim confusion: nature, as she breaks down! The blossom withers, things fragment, and separation hurts; but nature is no more than a cynical physician, reacting to the inevitability of break-up! Did you know, only one in six embryos survive in nature? Healing may blister and scar, but it’s the way that we build, the way that tribes come together, construct a world and then, eventually, fall apart...”

“So the month beginning tomorrow," Kate said, "it might be better called -though only possibly - ‘Recovery’ - or Remission -.”

“But that would give us ‘Depression’,” he said, laughing, “for November! Or maybe, ‘Relapse’! Every year! What a depressing idea! But having said that, the beauty of capitalism for this old Slovak is that it can never succeed, Kate! Only when broken can we be healing; and only when healing will we be freed! What hope is left, once we have everything - once we are become equal to the material world? One is a lonely number! Shall we get some air before I have to leave?”

"That sounds like a good idea!" she said.

Outside, beneath the rooftop neon glow of the disco Roskov, high above Wenceslas Square, dark buildings spread into the shade of what was less than a square, more of a briefly emptied revolutionary parade; and on the far side of the street, loitering declarations formed a towering procession of what seemed to Kate cold, harsh words: ‘TERKOV’; ‘TRAKTUP’; ‘MOSKVATEC’; ‘KEMOFRACT’; as, still, the beacons of corporate socialism cut vast statements through the empty air.

2. The Wild Hunt

The Square that was really a boulevard was very quiet except for small groups of gypsies, Arab currency traders and a few people returning home, and instead of getting into a taxi Kate walked quickly past the empty Civic Forum stage and into the narrow street that led towards her hotel in the Old Town. Nobody was about, while up above her the sky streamed with the wind; but though it was racing overhead, there was still no sign of rain and the buildings seemed to protect her from the gale. She didn't think she had drunk too much wine, but just enough to feel a slight thrill in the air. This was the wild hunt! As she peered into doorways on either side of the narrow street, she eventually spotted the word ‘Narsis’ carved into the stone above an archway. The sign was unlit and nothing else hinted at the existence of a club. Kate pushed at the outer door and walked into a dim passageway, at the end which stood a small bright booth. These could just be apartments and this the home of a concierge. The huge man inside stood up quickly as she approached. He must be the doorman, she thought, as she fumbled for some money; and this must be the place. He was unkempt; his jowls unshaven; and he made a lot of noise.

“Achtung!” he bellowed. “Pozor!”

He didn't seem to want to admit her; and pointing at her camera, he was shaking his head; but when she put the Nikon into her bag, he still appeared to be uncertain. Kate slipped a large twenty-dollar note into the small hole in the window, and his face turned from dread to lasciviousness and then resolved itself into a permissive smile. He bowed to her and pointed to the door.

At the bottom of the long stairway, she was confronted by a mass of gypsies in their enormous basement dive, many of them reeling drunk, some whirling in dance or already fast asleep as a couple of waiters were busily serving wine at their tables. One man flung himself back in his chair, turning so that Kate could see all the tension across a dark, purpled face, as he vomited red liquid across a stained and threadbare carpet, and then, oblivious, turned back to his friends, taking another gulp of wine. This was no place to carry a camera openly, she thought; if it wasn't stolen, it might well be broken in anger; but she might risk a few surreptitious shots. The hurrying waiters began to make wide detours around the long dark patch of sick. Elsewhere, Kate could see smiles and laughter, and in the dancing of the middle-aged and overweight the signs of an unselfconscious freedom, half abandonment of any inwardness, half celebration of their ties. It was hand-to-hand dancing, a kind of twist for untamed folk, and as they violently arched and rapidly swirled and bent and clung together, Kate began to feel a little easier. As she discretely took out her camera, she could see that at least in here they were free.

But then a grossly overweight gypsy woman turned around and aimed a vicious slap at her, which caught her on the ear and sent her reeling sideways; she had dropped the Nikon, and quickly stooped to pick it up. An immense, beer-gutted man lurched menacingly towards her, sweating through his dirty vest. For a moment Kate was completely dazed as she backed away and kept her distance. Nothing had changed; the music hadn’t missed a beat and nobody was looking.

The waiters had vanished from sight, but a man at a nearby table was waving his hand, offering what seemed like an escape. He was with two girls, and Kate smiled at him weakly, but could not seem to move. She managed to put the camera back into her handbag, as the gypsy who had signaled staggered over, leaving behind his women, one of whom was half asleep across their table. He bowed and pointed at Kate and then at the dancefloor. She shook her head, feeling faint. He pointed again, the smile now rather strained, and Kate nodded.

He’s got a girlfriend, she thought; I saw them kissing.

He held her very close, pressing into her with his body and seeking her mouth with his own, as Kate tried to look as if she were enjoying the dance, stiffly suffering the gypsy’s close embrace and doing her best to avoid his lips until she could break free and get out of here. Her head snapped from side to side with the effort of keeping that mouth away and she felt sick and dizzy. This was nothing like dancing with Shams! She held out for one song and then refused the next one, adamant that she needed to sit down; but her lecherous partner would not leave her alone and one of his women had joined them. She was very drunk and she gave this westerner who had dared to join them down here with her camera a vicious glare. Kate pointed at the man and then at both the woman, nodding and telling her in sign-language that she knew that they were together and the woman nodded, smiling back. “Bratr,” she said fondly, stroking his cheek. The man grabbed her by the shoulders and kissed her on the mouth, then pulled back, laughing. Could he be her brother? He hung his dark head, looking up at Kate through his eyebrows, smiling.

The fat couple who had attacked her had gone from the dancefloor; but it was possible that they were watching her, somewhere in that impenetrable background of dimly lit tables cluttered with colourfully dressed gypsies nearest the lights on the dancefloor. "Where are the midtones?" Shams had asked her, down in Hell; and she knew that she had been seeking those missing midtones for herself, in venturing down into Narsis against Ivan's advice; but Kate had found, instead, this opening into a shadowland, bordering on real hell, and desperately wanted to be back in the light.

It seemed a long way back to the door and even then, there was an iron gate, the long stair and a second door above, before that lonely passageway into an empty street.

The gypsy went to revive his slumbering colleague and his lover or sister or friend stayed with Kate. It looked like they would be leaving together, but at least they were leaving. It was no use asking for help from the two red-coated waiters who had now returned, or the doorman upstairs; and through it all, hardly anybody had even looked up from their drinks or away from that riotous dancing towards her.

They climbed the stairs like a group of close friends, the less drunk gypsy woman hanging around Kate’s neck and her lecherous friend supporting the second, drunken woman. The way the man still leered back down at Kate chilled her and she had no way of detaching herself from his lover or sister or friend. She thought that she could probably outrun them once outside, and reach the Square, but for the moment she was held fast and as they hung together in the doorway a second man followed them out, greeting his friends warmly and then taking Kate roughly by her free arm. She screamed in the street, a short, high shriek that was cut off by his fingers round her throat.

Kate had told herself to keep calm and not to struggle; but this second gypsy pushed back her head, looking down into her eyes, and she saw that his own eyes were dark holes into a world where anything was possible. She fought the temptation to act in any way that might further provoke him. His hand around her throat relaxed, so at least she could breathe, but again he took her roughly by the arm. She was amazed at how calm she managed to feel while the gypsy woman was cuddling up to her, smiling and whispering as she touched Kate’s face with her own; obviously, she was trying to comfort her.

There was still a way out, or so Kate thought: they must be some kind of a family; they would let her go...

She relaxed a little, letting the man direct her back towards the Square that was really a revolutionary parade. They were bound to meet somebody! But instead of going into Wenceslas Square, they turned off between the empty market stalls, beyond which there was another square, a real one, though this one quite small, where they all stopped walking, as a man’s figure cut across it, his shadow elongated in the white light from the streetlamps.

“Help, please!” Kate shouted. "Help me! Help! I'm English!"

She was trying to pull away from the gypsy’s embrace, but the scurrying figure hardly glanced back, and the hand was tightened around her throat, as the long shadow vanished, the stranger disappearing into a narrow passageway. Following another empty street, they came out by the River Vltava, and began to cross a wide, empty bridge. Only one car passed them, and though Kate pulled the gypsy woman half off the pavement, waving her arms, the car didn’t even slow.

The gypsies staggered on, across the bridge, weaving erratically and sometimes stopping altogether for a bit of a rest. In the empty night, the bright lights from the bridge fell away into the pooling black, failing to break it. There was nothing left of beautiful Prague, she thought, and Ivan had been only too right about the wild hunt! Where were they going? They were a noisy bunch! They proceeded so slowly, yet nobody came!

The gypsies’ flat was high up in a dilapidated tenement near to the river on the side they called Smichov. It seemed derelict. Once they were through the door it was locked and bolted behind them and the keys removed. They were solid doors; and there were three locks. There was no escape.

Then Kate saw him, struck by realisation, not recognition, understanding that a familiar face here would not be her salvation. He stood surprised, uncertain in the doorway to a bedroom. He was looking down at the scuffed floorboards on the uncarpeted floor as the whole room glared in the light from a photographer’s lamp. Kate could briefly see a bed, illuminated, black satin sheets pulled back. She struggled out of the arms of the gypsy, but the man had already closed the door, as the woman in his arms passed out.

The gypsy, who had laid his burden on the floor, now pushed Kate roughly across the hallway, and through another door. He locked it noisily behind her. She fumbled across the wall, finding the light switch; and she screamed out his name. But he did not answer; and Kate was seized with dreadful panic, as she looked around the room, a large bedroom, the ceiling high, the only furniture another bed, the mattress bare. The window was blocked and the night outside blanked by a metal security shutter, its long bolts penetrating back from opaque plastic sheeting.

3. A Mountain Scene

Their former art teacher was also lost and badly needed sleep; if he went on like this he would not be able to help Kate or do anything to find her! Trying to paint a portrait from memory is like trying to snatch the palest moon from daylight with a camera, Egerton had once told his students when arranging some fruit for a spot of still life in Strangeways prison, and the jewellery maker's face in the painter's memory had become a pure study in partition. It was now three in the morning in the wilds of Slovakia, and unable to sleep, he had been looking for some time at the canvas leant against the wall of the lodge, as if waiting for Kate’s unfinished face to shift or materialise, either to fly away from him completely, or emerge from the weak light through some kind of magic. Why had he chosen to bring it with him? Had it been some kind of premonition? Could an unfinished portrait bring her back?

I have no homeland, he thought: I have found only a prison of inwardness in the land of my fathers, to which I am returned like a thief in my loss; and with the absence of roots, my whole life has been a series of thefts!

In Strangeways, his output had been theirs: the prisoners’ own; his crime more serious for having taken place behind bars, where the sitters had been captive, their condition inescapable. The prison's exhibition at the end of his tenure had left him reeling, and feeling himself already condemned. But hadn't the paint been a better medium and their interpretation in oils another means of escape? He had hung an installation a few feet from a self-portrait by Rodney and when he moved around behind it, placing a square of six prison bars fashioned from sprayed chrome in a metal frame between self and subject, seen from behind the makeshift bars the freedom in the paint had been disturbing, the contrasts in his solitary perception grotesque. So free, so easily caught; so willing, yet reluctant. He had almost dreaded the verdict of outsiders. Egerton felt his eyes closing in spite of himself, but still he could not find sleep. A few light steps could break the prisoner’s parole and put him back ‘inside’: he was at the mercy of the viewer, the have-a-go passer-by; and the frame was the reality in life, in Strangeways.

The painter opened his eyes. From dim light, and growing exhaustion, he could only see Rodney: her indistinct features had come to assume the aspect of the prisoner he had been working with ‘inside’; and then he was gone, too, and the portrait hung back, drifting: the pale face obscure, those beautiful wide set eyes translucent as bees' wings or the dried fruit of an ash.

The tables have been turned, Egerton thought.

When he had still heard nothing from Kate, after three whole days, the painter had moved behind bars himself, and especially in the darkness, the immense freedom of the High Tatras in his 'homeland' of Slovakia had turned into the worst kind of prison for one rootless Krac, as he had finally come to admit to himself that Kate Ashe was in some kind of trouble; and quite possibly even lost.

His Slovak climbing guide, Tomáš Lovas, had talked to the Prague police several times, and then Egerton had called his cousin, Ivan Krac - the photographer's young apprentice, Procházka, had no telephone; Ivan had explained how he had said goodbye to Kate three nights ago at a nightclub very close to her hotel in Prague, after she had promised that she would take a taxi; he had assumed that she had gone on early to Slovakia, when she failed to show up for lunch as arranged with him at the Hotel Europa the next day.

The sleepless night finally behind him, Egerton was eager to set off for Prague; but Tomáš had persuaded him to take some fresh air with him, first, before their long journey into the dust and pollution of the distant federal capital. The two men had not climbed far, but enough to take them up out of the tailend of the valley and place them on the keening mountainside with its vast peaked depth of view. Tomáš had known that this crisp air would be welcome and the height refreshing. He shared Egerton's sudden anxiety for the beautiful Englishwoman he had only seen in the paint, and this morning Tomáš was himself glad to feel the immense freedom of the mountains, a feeling that for him would always cry out across the sky and never return to source, the sort without echo or meeting-place, borne aloft on its own timeless heights, which are solitary, neverending and always carried beyond the self and the place it would possess. Freedom to Tomáš was barely sensed: like the distant joys of his lost love with Marcela, something absent rolled across the causeway of memory and fleetingly caressed the soul. This giant frame of home might have to be left behind for a while, but at least for him nature formed an endless, resonant attachment.

Turning his back on the sharp serrated edge of the High Tatras, tipped with the last of the winter's snow, the English painter looked down across a triangular wedge of rolling collective farmland in the Slovakian valley, his mouth open wide as he yawned. His new friend from Slovakia was looking up at him. For a moment Egerton returned his smile, forgetfully. Tomáš Lovas seemed to be standing on a solitary rock in a dead calm sea of the deepest clarity, a flawless world at his feet. The Hungarian-Slovak was a well-built, blond young man who dressed more like a lumberjack than a mountain-guide; he was careful with his appearance, retaining a conscript's cropped haircut and invariably maintaining a serious aspect, even through the now half forgotten moments of fun they had enjoyed.

“What do you call this?” Tomáš asked, pointing at a solitary tree.

“It's... it looks like an ash,” Egerton said, brought back down to earth.

“It was once feared,” Tomáš said, “because people thought its leaves weeped poison.”

“Wept!” Egerton said, but under his breath.

“The ground beneath it bears no life. You know why?”

“Roots again, Tomáš?” Egerton suggested.

“Yes, the roots,” Tomáš said. “They are as shallow as yours or mine! They drink up all the life.”

Egerton thought of all their greedy roots; and how he was back in his father's homeland to find his own, but now he could feel no attachment.

"There is no poison," Tomáš said, "though we fear it. Not all may be as it seems!"

A year ago, the only foreign visitors to Tomáš's lodge had been East Germans and Poles, loaded down with beer and salami, crampons and ice-axes; but even the domestic trade from the owners, the members of a Prague trades union, since the end of the cold war, had been put on ice. He had been delighted when Egerton had arrived with a small English climbing party; and they had immediately struck it off. Like the other westerners, the painter possessed the kind of climbing gear Tomáš had only ever seen in photographs in magazines, light, tightly functional but highly colourful materials, which worn by him, almost seemed to exaggerate a solitariness that had been apparent from the start and strike a contrast with the painter's air of quietness. He was not brash like the others, though he was powerfully built and had a climber's musculature, broad forearms and calves, prominent ridges down the front of his thighs and when he took off his shirt a remarkable horizontal muscle running down from his infrasternal notch to his solar plexus, a novel family feature the painter had told Tomáš now felt as though it wanted to throttle his heart. Egerton was not conventionally handsome, but had something very dark, almost gypsy about him that went deeper than colouring and helped set him apart. Tomáš had seen similar looking Slovaks, but they were very rare. Now, looking at his troubled face, he thought how tired he must be; instead of coming on to join them here, the beautiful girl in his portrait had gone missing; and in the absence of word from Kate Ashe, he had not slept for a few nights.

“Shall we go?” he said. “After this climb, you must sleep for an hour at least, my friend! Then I will drive you to Prague and we can look for Kate. We should arrive there in time to catch my friend Olga still at work. Her father is a lawyer who has connections at the Ministry of the Interior that may prove helpful; he was a 'red' himself, and for now the 'reds' are still there in power!”

They let themselves fall, carrying the scree with them, leaping with great strides through fluid cascades of still shattering rock and down through the petrified falls to the valley track where he had parked the battered truck.

He drove back in silence over the uneven road, then Tomáš led Egerton through the back door and up the stairs, pointed at a bunk and left the climber to lie into it, relieved at his wordless attention. Tomáš was right; he needed some rest. The painter closed his eyes and did sleep, but fitfully, and dreamt of a boat on a lake that was a mirror to those sheer, towering, white-tipped heights. Bobbing and floating across those sharpest reflections of mountains, the boat seemed to graze the stone, and the clear peaks were beneath him. He trailed a hand through the water, feeling slivers of ice form into useful grooves and tapering fingerholds; his arm dragged more heavily in the water, his hand felt the grip of a hold, and then he fell. As he awoke abruptly, he could hear the sound of wood being chopped above the roar of the nearby cataract, the repetitive impact of the axe like an endless measure in the throaty flow of nature, beating on and on; and he wondered whether it was Tomáš marking time against the waterfall.

Egerton was glad now that he had thought to pack a suit, and that his new friend would be coming with him to Prague; Tomáš had assured him that his own wardrobe included more than the lumberjack outfit. Lying still for a while longer, Egerton thought how his friend was an amateur who knew the routes he would never attempt and was excited by the possibility in every hold. He knew the difficult lines by heart. “No, up, and horizontally to the left,” he would shout. “Now, just by your ear - and diagonally down to your right.” Sometimes in the Slovak's voice there was a happy disregard for form and an assurance of its own, which would counter any mistake and carry his meaning.

Whilst waiting for Kate to join him, before they had feared her missing, Egerton had been climbing, often solo, or reading a book, ‘The Defying Routes Defined’, at which Tomáš had once pointed, laughing.

“What?” Egerton had said.

“Well, you don’t have any!" Tomáš had said. "Your single root over here is a cousin in Prague you never saw! You have a Slovak name, but all you know is England.”

“I’ve exchanged one set of roots for another?” he had said.

“Up - instead of down,” Tomáš had said, smiling, "the same, like me!"

Tomáš Lovas was what he termed ‘accidentally Slovak’, his ancestors having been part of the large Hungarian minority trapped by new borders that carved up the Austrian empire in Nineteen-eighteen. He knew how it felt to speak a second language and know in his heart that the words belonged to those who would like to oppress him. Even with freedom, his people were an island within an island: the lesser of two historically subjugated peoples. Though the vast fences they had called the iron curtain had come down, the finer partitions had thickened. Having so long felt themselves oppressed, first by Vienna and then by the Czechs, who had ruled their federation from Prague, the Slovaks had turned against their Hungarian neighbours, who had since the revolution become strangers in their own land! It seemed that with the return of freedom the fate of minorities was not so certain. Without solutions by dictat from Prague and Moscow, where were the answers to come from? There were attacks being made on Tomáš's Hungarian language, and demands for laws against their separate, still distinctive culture.

Egerton must have slipped back into sleep for a few moments, before reawakening, and now he was vainly trying to recall Kate’s words in his dream. What had she been telling him about his inwardness at his homecoming and the cruel hand of providence in their own partition? The sound of chopping had stopped. Where was Tomáš, the equally rootless Hungarian-Slovak? He sat up carefully, feeling her gone, the weight of her absence. Where was Kate? He must find her! Where had she gone? Sometimes the crushed when relieved of the burden of what crushed them complain for the first time of the pain; but the climber would rather bear any weight, and know the worst, than feel Kate's loss, alone, in this emptiness of perception; he breathed in slowly: perhaps she was safe; but in his memory, there was nothing, no voice, no presence, only the after-pain where she had touched him so hard, the greater hurt now her touch was gone.

4. The Adjusted Image

They soon joined that motorway that tied east to west, uniting a federation with the weakness of neglected tarmac under pressure; it was an internal road and had not been entirely left to nature under the old regime, but still their tyres scraped the faults and hit the holes. Tomáš drove the old Škoda at speed, but as he closed his eyes, Egerton felt safe, as if roped to a friend. Still on the verge of sleep, the painter strove not to picture Kate, but considered instead with his eyes tight shut a wider history of loss.

A people can wait a long time for its freedom. In waiting is born patience and endurance, the source of overriding hope. But in loss can be lost all meaning. A loss can become the haunting surrogate for the truth. The situation of loss has always to be temporary. Persisted with, it will triumph. Sung about, it will tighten its sickening hold. The movement for recovery is the most natural thing wherever it succeeds: the frightened, falling fledgling, catching back into a faithful current; the dangerously hanging climber recovering lost balance; his lost love... Tomáš changed lanes quickly to avoid a pot-hole, and the painter was suddenly in the rebounding tail-end of a swerve, looking around them on a long stretch of empty road.

Later in Prague, sitting in an armchair that seemed to have been designed for a child’s bedroom, Egerton Krac surveyed a tiny room for some evidence of its bloodstained past; but the signs had been cleared away in the recent conversion. Tomáš’s friend Olga had told them how she had stumbled across this Old Town shambles, when it had narrow, open drains lining the foot of each wall and meat hooks embedded in the ceiling. The new ground-floor shops and businesses around a tiny courtyard formed part of a former monastery, and this had been its slaughterhouse. There was not a single mark of its history, however, as the small office had been stripped and fashioned for anonymity.

He looked again at Olga Slídlová, the huge Slovak who had come up with the idea of marketing vegeburgers from a reconstructed abbatoir. Tomáš's friend was approaching thirty, and the bloom in her pretty face gave way to several folds below the chin, before disappearing into a high ruffled lace neckline; her vast bulk was enveloped in a golden robe, part one-piece dress, part cloak, and she even wore a small silver crucifix that accentuated the impression he had received of some ostentatious prioress of old. She must have run up the outfit herself, the painter thought, or had some seemstress make it up; there could be nothing like it in the shops.

It was for Tomáš's sake he had agreed to meet her; but her father, when Olga had called him, had said that he would be able to introduce them at the Interior Ministry the following afternoon; and Slídl Senior, however 'red' his past, might prove a useful ally in 'golden' Prague.

Their feet were almost touching in the restricted space between them and Olga smiled archly, her voluminous hips filling the tiny settee. “And so it has become my mission,” she said, “to win over their pork-eating souls! We will immerse them in vegeburgers, and then move on to microbiotics! You may think this an odd place to start on the task, Mr. Krac; but I’ll say one thing for those monks of old, they knew the value of tight spaces! We manage here perfectly!”

She narrowed her eyes, smiling at him.

Theresa, Olga's secretary rose apologetically as if feeling responsible for their close confinement. She was slightly bowed, as though the burden of this new capitalism under a gargantuan prioress in such a tight spot was a little too much for her. Olga turned about with some difficulty and gestured to her for some more coffee. As she did so, her fingers, surprisingly without a single ring, brushed against a pile of papers, which fell to the floor.

“I don't know what I would do without her!” she said to Tomáš in Slovak, as Theresa stooped to pick them up.

Beside her small desk, everything seemed to hand: without moving from her seat, Theresa could heat a meal, mix cocktails, defrost the fridge and copy documents. A coffee percolator nestled the word processor and Tomáš thought they might just interface. He tried to wrest some comfort from the wedge of his seat, fearing that he had become stuck.

"Forget coffee, shall we go out and party?" Olga said. "There's nothing you can do until tomorrow, and the night is young! I was going to go out, anyway, Tomáš. Maybe you would like to see some paintings, Mr. Krac, and get a taste of your homeland?"

They stood, and Egerton struggled out of the confinement of his own seat with some relief. "Paintings at night?" he said.

"It's an exhibition," Olga said, "though not the kind you may be used to!"

Outside in the gloomy courtyard she pointed out a sewer with her foot, catching its grid with the rim of the sole of her gold lamé bowed shoe and filling the night with its echo. “Everything slopes down towards this hole," she said, "and not so long before the communists came we would have been standing up to our ankles in blood; not a pleasant thought for a vegan!”

Egerton glanced up from the new doorway to where in contrast unrepaired hung the decrepit balconies of the residential tenants, their rents protected so their needs were overlooked. Here was the groundwork for a new hierarchy, with the restituted wealth at its renovated bottom. Above them, the clouded evening sky was framed in a small square daubed with the moon in defiance.

She led them back through the dark arched passageway into the Old Town street, talking once more of its Mediaeval builders. The stone around them leant her words some timeworn authority, throwing them back with hollow confidence, and Egerton tried to follow her, attempting to concentrate, whilst feeling that he, too, in his sense of homelessness, inwardness and gathering dread, was being directed back in time, those dark, twisting streets archaic, leading questions; and the painter could only think again of Kate, wondering in this maze whether they might be any nearer to finding to her.

They took a bus, and looking at the smear of her face in a window of yellow light over a spatter of drizzle that had begun to collect outside, Egerton briefly thought how he might paint Olga and what size of canvas he would need! Her bright figure was enormous in the speckled partition of glass. He had nothing to say, and they talked in their own language, leaving him alone with that great dread, physically centred below his infrasternal notch, and his vague plans for tomorrow. He would talk to his cousin, he thought; though theirs would be an unfortunate first meeting in the shadow of her loss.

The bus stopped after half an hour at what appeared to be its terminus beside paint-daubed garages at the edge of a grim scene dominated by high-rise blocks in one of the city's unknown suburbs. Olga led the way up some concrete steps into a spartan hall and they went upstairs to have a look at the paintings, which were all dark, sickening reds, livid yellows and depressing purples describing debauched or murderous scenes in blood, bile and beer.

Egerton was not surprised by any of this, but all the same, felt slightly nauseous. Olga and Tomáš also seemed dismayed by these abstracts from hell, and the three of them returned downstairs, where young people were pressing towards a small stage with mounting excitement. The music had become a slow, rhythmic beat. Some dancers began a crude performance on the stage, lying on the floor, convulsing grotesquely or getting off against the wooden scenery, but never each other. The room was hot, the beat mounting, and in hindsight, their painting had not been so bad.

They went on to find an 'underground' party, but finding himself back in a pitch dark doorway in the deathly quiet of another Old Town street, Egerton would not have guessed that there was a gathering anywhere nearby. "They always used abandoned places," Olga said in the dark, "so that the police wouldn’t find them. They did find some of them and even knocked them down! I mean, the police literally took a ball and chain to the venues. I think this is it!”

They had to feel their way through the total darkness of an outer passage and down a short flight of dilapidated stone steps, leading to a disused cellar, but then a light appeared, rescuing them from their blind uncertainty, as a door was opened on to a brightly illuminated cellar. The blare of punk music now painfully filled the painter's ears, as his hand left the slime of the wall. A young boy in ripped jeans, and randomly inserted pins through countless piercings, lurched towards Olga from a drunken dance, like some automaton, only to turn away and slam head-first into the brick of the wall and fall clumsily to the floor in front of the musicians. Egerton watched the self-destructive robot as it lay very still, and its friends, unconcerned, continued their dancing, a twitching mass of action, primed by drugs and alcohol; and a stronger wave of nausea struck him.

Outside, after some empty retching, the painter looked up at a couple of figures guarding the lintel of a Prague doorway, huge stone men, kneeling face-to-face and forming a powerful triangle with the carved muscle of their bodies; and at least they seemed paused with the night in a nobler attempt at celebration of a freedom he could barely sense; but they had no escape; and he thought of Kate, and cursed his hunt for those things running deep, back from his birth in England, which had always seemed to him to be disappearing, his lost roots, so tenuous they had not been worth finding: those things he had thought of as his centrality, here only going to earth, and forever hiding; Krac, his Middle European name, his shallow placing, and his life, with or without Kate, a dark omphalous without meaning.

After he had said to them that he was fine, they walked on, and then the broad Vltava appeared, and grateful for the slight breeze in the open air, the painter saw the vast steps on the other side of the river, which mounted into darkness, before disappearing into the hillside, like a pale trunk of great girth vanishing into a huge tree’s foliage, edged in black relief against the faintest blue of the early morning sky. When they finally reached it, crossing the bridge and ascending those towering steps, the door to the 'Totalitarian Zone' was a great squat square in what looked like a mausoleum. Inside the vast concrete 'tomb', a live band had stopped playing and young people sat around, laughing and talking in tightly knit groups dimly lit by candles on the rough dirt floor.

"So this is freedom..." Egerton said doubtfully, while Olga was trying to get back her breath.

“Once Stalin watched over us from up here," Tomáš said. "They pulled down the giant statue after Kruschev pulled the myth. This is what they left. Now the Party's over, they have named it the Totalitarian Zone for a new party."

"A few months ago, it looked like the young were in charge!" Olga said. "But now the night is their medium. The older people want it that way. It breaks down our revolutionaries into manageable units. The night can have their chaos; the old men want to hang on to the day! You may find my father a little strange at first," she told them, "but his heart is in the right place! He trained in law and worked with the Interior Ministry for many years, so he will be a useful guide for you over there; I do hope he can help you find Kate! The Ministry of the Interior is not a place you would like to visit on your own, Mr. Krac! The 'Moscow' metro station may have become 'The Angel'; but the staff of our totalitarian state still work in the Ministry, and the place casts a cold shadow."

Egerton shivered, seated in the dirt and the chill of Stalin's 'tomb'. "I can meet my cousin, Ivan, in the morning," he said to Tomáš, "and then we can both visit the Ministry, if that's all right with you?"

"What have I to fear?" Tomáš said.

5. The Picture Maker

Names are robbers or braggarts, or liars, or thieves, Egerton thought; and renaming reverses nothing: any name mourns a loss; they wanted to name the street Evropská, recalling Europa, the beautiful Phoenician girl abducted by Zeus in the form of a bull and carried off to sea; but if it were up to him right now, the painter would wipe out the names in his landlocked homeland altogether; he would gladly be left deaf as well as blind. Here ‘Lenin’ hung in the balance. Revolution seemed a business of printing off new maps. Samizdat was over; here was “What was that before?” After very little sleep, lost in returning history and his own inward dread, the painter felt, perhaps, as bitter as 'his' people, now, as they were trapped in the much wider struggle to recall.

“Leninova?” the taxi-driver repeated dubiously.

“Benešová - or Evropská,” Egerton corrected himself after a brief struggle to read what his friend had jotted down, and the driver nodded. Cousin Ivan’s office lay somewhere along the boulevard without a name or the street of three names. Number 2084. Tomáš had recorded three lines on a scrap of paper, an identity in triplicate. “Meter, prosím,” he said, remembering what his Hungarian-Slovak friend had told him about Prague taxi-drivers and pointing at the lifeless machine. Tomáš like everybody else still called it Leninova; some wanted to rename the boulevard for the continent and the first queen of Crete; but for the present the street to the airport seemed to be unofficially dedicated to the federation's second president, Edvard Beneš; though like so much else this had not quite caught on! What a sense of identity, Egerton thought: three names for the same Czech street!

The taxi driver suddenly screeched to a halt, as they entered a square by the river.

"Tankesti namesti!" the driver announced, switching off the meter.

Egerton could see the Tank, the Soviet tank, its gun pointing straight towards the river, but they were nowhere near 'Leninova'! This was Tank Square!

Cars had been left around the square at random, as their owners, a few of them carrying cameras, became part of the spectacle. Egerton and the taxi-driver got out to join them. The tank stood on a substantial stone plinth, a monument to the Soviet army that had liberated Prague from the Nazis in 1945, but what was more invasive today was the absence of camouflage in its new coating: the tank had been at once partly emasculated and brought into more open display by some local painter in the night, and looked no more than a giant toy finished in lurid pink. The sun emerged, and the sudden shadow of an adjacent crane was cast across the scene, its arm levering upwards on squat supports beside the machine of war.

As Egerton shaded his eyes from the sun, a man in the raised gantry swung a spray-gun towards the turret of the tank, taking aim, and then paused. Policemen spoke quietly into their radios or lightly touched their white holsters, but some of them were smiling.

A tall American television news reporter, in his attempt to position his head lower for the camera, had been standing for some time with his legs very far apart, his ungainly and painful stance attracting a great deal of attention, as his cameraman tried to get everything into shot behind; and the newsman was growing angry with the crowd, who had forced him through several 'takes', asking him direct questions, or merely passing comment, whenever he spoke to camera.

"Cut! Cut it again! Goddamit!" he shouted at them. "Can't you people see the pain I'm in? Can't you just shut the fuck up, for ten seconds?"

"We should get on!" Egerton said to the taxi-driver, pointing at their cab; but the driver shook his head, unsmiling.

“Nice tone!" Somebody had touched his elbow and the painter turned and smiled.

“Deadly as a strawberry milkshake,” Egerton said. “The straw gun! What's going on?”

“This is the joke of a young Czech artist,” the man told him. “This morning, he’s the talk of Moscow! He has been mixing things up here in the night, telling the police he had written instructions from the Ministry. The police believed him! It was only this morning when they saw the colour they had to blush!”

“It’s still too red for me!” a North American voice said behind them.

The man high up in his gantry seemed reluctant to begin the task, perhaps waiting for some guidance from above, or a signal from the police, or the foreign news crew down below; then, as the crowd watched, his paint leapt out, touching the pink with military-green precision, a fuzzed stain forming in the cream of the sunlit shake and moving gradually around its turret. The painter's eyes were drawn down to the flashes of red that flecked the policemen’s shoulders, and the old gold in the small communist stars they still displayed. He looked at the taxi driver who was watching without any expression.

"Here in newly liberated Prague, heart of Czechoslovakia" the American reporter was saying to camera, his long legs splayed, "we are witnessing a resurgence of free expression: a single tank becomes the focus in an attack on history by art... Right, that's it! Thank Christ for that!"

Painfully slowly, the newsman stood up straight at last, rubbing his aching thighs, and he and his crew were visibly overjoyed with a single sentence to inform the folks back home.

“Do you know what that says?” asked the man at Egerton's side, pointing up at the slogan, ‘Trojská Kun’, which had been daubed in white paint on the side of the gun.

“Horse of Troy,” he said; and he wondered how many people had been taken in, how many in this crowd were angered by this gift of pink that had wrapped their icon; how many still worshipped with the Trojans' innocence this interior design wheeled out to them by Moscow? The faces in the crowd, like the faces in any crowd, were simply blank or reflected mixed emotions.

“Also beware Bohemians bearing paint!” he said to the stranger, as he touched the taxi driver on the shoulder.

They got back into the cab, and drove across the river, where a steep, pot-holed road swept them into several hairpin bends. Clouds had rolled in to cover the hillside. The Strahov stadium slipped into view as the taxi took the last double-back bend up towards Leninova. Behind them, the city seemed to Egerton, when he turned his head to look, to lie asleep or forgetful, still 'golden' but all her names pushed aside; she was for now confused, a beautiful amnesiac: Prague too was lost! Against her near, shaded shoulder, stretched a livid scar, where the hillside had been broken, spilling out the ugly entrails of a new Metro station; and looking into the scar, the painter wondered what they would name it.
.

Ivan Krac was carefully tailored, barbered, and manicured. Dressed in a modest brown suit, he was rather on the short side, and the white flecks in shoulder length hair and that neat little beard made Egerton think of the recent frosts. His cousin seemed colder to him than he had expected, and obviously those years of repression and months in prison had marked him. He had only seen a couple of photographs of Ivan as a boy in the Fifties, and in the flesh he could spot no family resemblance. From the larger room beyond his office, the sound of typewriters clattered above the hiss of the coffee-percolator as they talked. Every now and then his secretary, Clara Skálová, came in and quietly rearranged some paperwork or prepared them fresh drinks; she was dressed entirely in pink, and had slightly bowed when they had been introduced, telling him how sorry she was to hear of his loss. Ivan had described his evening with Kate in some detail, but had really told the painter nothing new.

"Kate should never have come to Prague on her own!" he said again.

There was nothing Egerton could say in reply to something he had already told himself so many times.

"An exhibition of photography about gypsies is one thing," Ivan said, "but gypsies, pimps and black-marketeers, they all hang about the disco Roskov - and to be honest, I wasn't at all sure about Shams, either; so I thought I would make it a threesome! After Shams left, Kate mentioned ‘The Winter’s Tale’, Leontes’ false accusation against Hermione and the King of Bohemia... Hermione's baby, 'the lost one', Perdita, is victim of her father’s jealousy, and made a castaway on this 'island' of ours... ‘I doubt not then but innocence shall make,’ Hermione says at her trial, ‘False accusation blush, and tyranny Tremble at patience’! As a Slovak, who has seen enough of tyranny, I have always been impressed by Hermione’s faith, her innocence! Your father, my uncle and great friend Miroslav, who I still miss dearly, introduced me to that work before you were born, Egerton. It is such a great pity that we cannot talk more about him at a time like this... I mentioned the Wild Hunt, when mortals, caught up in the raging pursuit, could be kidnapped, and taken away to Hell. We were talking of freedom and the possibility of partition in these lands; but in light of this disaster, and all that's happened since, Perdita and the Wild Hunt seem rather odd things to have been discussing at all - with Kate herself lost!"

"She played the part of Antigonus at school," Egerton recalled and then he frowned. “You aren't sure about Shams," he said, "and that is disturbing enough! But how would you judge your young employee?”

“You mean Milan?" Ivan said. "He is an employee at P.S., though I am thinking of letting him go. As I say, I admire his spirit. He's an outgoing young man and a decent photographer with a genuine interest in social themes. I suggested that he meet Kate from the airport because I couldn't make it myself, though I managed to slip down to Hell to make a speech about his work.”

“You are thinking of letting him go?” Egerton said.

“Yes, I am afraid to say,” Ivan said, "I allowed him all that time away to immerse himself in gypsy culture, but to be honest with you, he is a little work-shy at the best of times! He isn't cut out for the publicity game, either; and I have no real use for a photographer who often fails to show up! He had also been helping himself to a little film stock on the side from my own store. I admire what he is doing, but I can hardly afford to finance it much further."

“So you distrust him as well as Shams!" he said.

“Not at all, Egerton,” he said, “or I wouldn't have sent him to meet Kate! He didn't even come along with us to the disco Roskov, did he? Anyway, I trust Milan implicitly - as long as there isn't any expensive film lying around! That's why he had the key my own store in the first place." He seemed to pause for a split second, glancing towards the door as though checking that the lady in pink was out of earshot, and around the mouth, the painter was shocked to recognise so late a clear resemblence to his father, Miroslav. "And at one time," he said, "I even leant him a key to Sandovisko.”

“Sandovisko?" the painter said.

“It’s a place in the homeland,” Ivan said, and again he glanced at the door. “Over in Slovakia. Recently returned to the family, so to speak. It's a folly, really: a lighthouse up in the mountains. The place is empty at the moment, and I told Milan he could use it last Christmas."

"Can you give me Milan's address?" he said.

Ivan scribbled it down on a notepad from memory, tore off the sheet and handed it to him.

The broad office window looked down on the long straight boulevard, once known as Leninova, and his cousin went and stood in front of the glass, his shape softened by the returning light, so that like the thoroughfare below, he seemed for the moment confused; by contrast, the circular design of his business logo on the opposite wall stood out sharply, so that it looked more real than Ivan Krac, as if having given life to an advertising and publicity company, the author of 'Dividing Lines: our Accented Edges' was being parted from his own definition by the light: in its own huge circle, a bean sprouted a vertical stalk, which split into a pair of tiny fronds to form the letters ‘P.S.’ beneath a smaller sun; but its shape made Egerton think of the lifeless circle around the mountain ash; then, briefly brought to mind his own and Tomáš's precarious and divided roots; and finally his growing fear that Kate Ashe could be lying in some shallow grave.

He concentrated on the image. Considering the colours, the single red hue might have been borrowed from their federal flag, though in that case, the painter thought, there was one colour missing: the red-on-white could represent the Czech and Moravian stripes, but where was Slovakia's blue? Perhaps his old Slovak cousin hoped in his heart for the partition of Czechoslovakia. Presumably, the sun was Ivan's business, the seed the client, and the shoots the projected results.

Hanging next to this large round graphic was one of his more famous photographs: a black-and-white shot with a slight blue cast, captured from behind the turret of a Russian tank, its Asian navigator looking down at the pale faces of Bratislavans, one of whom was placing flowers in the barrel of a gun that was still blurred in motion; the background, too, was softened, she alone in clear focus; and again Egerton thought of Kate, herself now out of the picture.

The painter could hardly begin to imagine this diffuse figure standing before the window clambering over steel armoury to experiment in gathering shadows with long exposure and near depth of field; but then the short Slovak stepped away from that gleaming partition of glass and seemed a little more substantial. As Ivan frowned at the painter, he appeared even more like his father Miroslav than before, and Egerton realised how alike they must be themselves, pehaps even down to that tensed muscle below the infrasternal notch.

“Now the tank looks like an ornament,” he told Egerton, “but at the time, I can tell you, all hell was breaking loose! Milan likes this picture, particularly..."

“I’m meeting my friend Tomáš Lovas at the Tank at twelve," Egerton said, "and we are going to visit the Ministry of the Interior with a Mr. Slídl, the father of Tomáš's friend, Olga. Apparently, he has 'connections'... But the investigators over there may not be so helpful with my enquiries; certainly not in passing on their contact details.”

“You have plenty of time, Egerton,” he said. “As I told you, I have already spoken with the chief investigator at the Ministry - Poláček, I think his name is... I am so sorry there is little more I can tell you; and you must get in touch, as soon as you learn anything yourself; just let me know if there is anything more I can do to help from my end. You will be at the Tank in fifteen minutes. It is a popular Prague meeting-place for us all, south of the river, bang outside the Defence Ministry; the names may change, but the tank remains!"

"So that was your Defence Ministry I saw on my way up here!" Egerton said. "The place seemed to be hanging back in stony embarrassment behind the strawberry milkshake some Czech artist had made of the tank! An American T.V. crew were trying to get the building into shot behind a crouching newsman, the Soviet tank and a towering crane; they were repainting it green as I came up here. It was done overnight; I was wondering if that could be why your secretary Clara wore pink this morning?"

Ivan laughed. "I heard about the pink overcoat on the radio," he said, "but not that it was being repainted green! I wonder how long this latest coat will last? They have arrested the young man who put on the first one." He glanced down out of the window at that Czech street, now unofficially named in triplicate. "Clara hasn't turned out in sympathy; she has worn no other colour than pink since I met her back in Sixty-eight. She has hardly changed... I only wish the Prague authorities could respond with as much haste to our own loss!"

6. Home in Partition

The train sped Egerton and Tomáš between marble-clad stations, the painter observing from dread the careworn faces in lines, the walls tunneling in around again, reflecting the features of the worn and the blind, their averting eyes and secretive minds, still daubed in the glass, against a buried system - the buried window, their buried features, the obliteration of form in ‘metro-metro-metro’... They were slowing down... ‘ME-tro, MEH-tro, MEHH-tro’. "Ukončete a výstup a nástup, dveře se zavírají!" the recording reminded them again: 'Finish leaving and boarding the train, the doors are closing!'

Tomáš discretely pointed out the cheaply printed, faded red title of ‘Spital’, the Communist ‘rag’, in the grip of one unrepentant passenger seated opposite them. He quietly told him that the paper was staffed by former police-writers who now gossiped about democracy with a vestigial claim to authority, while they retained their connections in the Ministry. "The gutter press," Egerton said, and Tomáš reminded him that like the French, the Czechs and Slovaks called it bulvár, the boulevard.

Mr. Slídl was nothing like his daughter Olga. The green trenchcoat around his thin frame seemed contrived, incongruous, and Tomáš thought the stubble on his face alone might have been a more honest camouflage; Olga had only ever hinted at his past, but his eyes were swift, his pose imported; he seemed unfashionably impatient; he quickly searched the faces of the commuters as though envious of their motion, and they glanced back at him with returning horror; these were the kind of eyes they had learned to avoid! When Slídl’s gaze reached Egerton, it passed on without hesitation. Then it returned, becoming more certain, before fixing on Tomáš beside him.

“Mr. Krac,” he said, strolling towards them, “I’ve been eager to meet you!”

“You know Tomáš,” Egerton said.

Slídl looked at Tomáš, but did not smile. "I haven't had the pleasure," he said, "though Olga has told me a great deal about you!"

There was something dark about his lower face that went deeper than the shadow of his beard. It seemed that his thin lawyer’s lips had been schooled into line. The mouth was a shady slit. His greeting was confined to those eyes, where in contrast, the enthusiasm seemed unbounded. “Don’t worry,” he said, “we’ll find Kate Ashe!”

It was some distance to the Ministry, and as they negotiated the crowded streets outside, Slídl talked continuously to Egerton, as though their revolution and the new democracy required his most skillful defence; the lawyer was striving to keep within earshot, but their fast pace in the crowd required some strategic footwork, which sometimes carried Slídl out into the road. His unbuttoned green trenchcoat bellowed out behind him as they hurried to their appointment. Slídl tried to catch Egerton’s elbow, his hand constantly at his arm and he was shadowing the painter closely. Whenever he looked, Egerton could see the lawyer's eyes darting about, predicting the movements of people, anticipating the traffic, amassing his evidence.

“I am interested in Kate Ashe,” Slídl said, back up on the pavement. “It’s fantastic! I have waited so long for this! I know these people. I’ve worked with them... They’ve sure had it coming to them - and maybe this case is a chance to hit them where it hurts. They’re sons-of bitches! All of them!”

Oblivious to the crowd, and confident in a cocoon of American English, Slídl subjected the police to a torrent of abuse, so that Egerton wondered whether he was really a suitable interpreter for a talk at the Ministry. Was all this bluster? Had he something to hide? And why was he so interested in Kate? What was his game?

“We’re looking for cooperation!” he said.

“But they’re bastards!” Slídl said. “They don’t cooperate! From what I hear, these days they don’t do anything! They sit back and they let things happen. We’ll give them hell! They deserve it! This case may be the chance to show them up for what they are - Communist trash!”

“We aren’t here looking for a fight, Mr. Slídl,” Egerton said, stopping and turning to face him. “My girlfriend has gone missing! Your daughter, Olga, said you were willing to help.”

Slídl got the message. “You know,” he said as he walked between them, “I never had the chance to practise law. I’m here, because I’m interested in the case. Nothing else. Olga won’t have said anything, of course, about our time in the States?” Egerton looked at Slídl. His gaze had become more reflective, those eyes settling a little. “I thought not,” the lawyer said. “When I got my law degree, I went into the foreign service. We were in New York; then down in Washington. You know,” he said fondly, “we were watched around the clock; I have never felt so safe as on the streets of New York.”

Olga and Tomáš had said nothing. Slídl was telling him by implication that he had been involved in the secret service and that he had been returned home following the revolution could only mean one thing. It was no wonder that he attacked those who had kept their jobs or that he needed so many alibis.

“You left the foreign service, then?” Egerton asked him.

“My heart was never in it,” Slídl said earnestly. “I liked the idea of travel, that was all. At the moment, I’m working on a project of my own. A hotel up in the Krkonoše - the Giant Mountains. I have some good connections down here! It's filling up for summer... In fact, I’m over-booked!”

As he was speaking, Egerton wondered what he had let himself in for; should he just be grateful for his help or offering Slídl his congratulations? Would the staff at the Ministry be familiar with this well-connected former secret service agent, an entrepreneur with a hotel overflowing with past contacts in the their northern mountains? Had Tomáš known? Why hadn’t Olga told them? Was she ashamed of him? Or did she think that it no longer mattered?

The Ministry of the Interior was a smoked glass tank of a building, its towering walls revealing nothing more than a reflection of the motionless sky, and the balance of strength and fragility in the wall of glass windows seeming a self-conscious pose against the dilapidated masonry that stood all around. They were escorted into a glass-walled waiting-room by a uniformed policeman who locked them inside. Slídl was quieter in this small, barely furnished holding-tank for visitors, as if he suspected that they could be overheard, or somehow the glass walls had even been bugged. "You have to watch you say," he mumbled like a ventriloquist, "some of these buggers can lipread!" The ground floor, at least, left no space for inwardness and privacy; and they could look clear through the wall, through the corridor, straight through to the rooms on the other side. The ‘lawyer’ gave them what appeared to be a look of reassurance and collusion, as if they were here to face interrogation, not to ask some questions, and Egerton turned away.

This had been the test-tube for a more open communism, prepared in its final days, but all the experiments with ‘truth’ were over; and he gazed at the staff beyond no doubt bulletproof glass partitions, guarding this final display-case for a dead regime. They wore the same old green, the communist stars still pinned at their shoulders. The silence here seemed to be necessary. This had been one of the most feared buildings in the country, a building clearly designed to inspire dread of the system and expose any opposition. The slowly working mouths of two officers talking in an adjacent fish-tank seemed to be gasping for air.

At last, a brown-suited man appeared through the glass wall, and he let himself through to greet them. He introduced himself as Slávek, the deputy to the investigating officer, and apologised to Egerton for "all this security" with a glassy smile. He led the way through several glass doors which were unlocked for them by uniformed officers. They passed through the crystal labyrinth, its glass partitions a compromise with openness, and Slávek told Egerton how in its last years, the years of ‘glasnost’ and ‘perestroika’ in Moscow, the Czech regime had reluctantly introduced its own answer to the gathering crisis: přestavba, ‘restructuring’; but the painter could only think again that this soundproof glass construction had not achieved its intention, the appearance of openness and reform.

Poláček, the investigating officer, wore the same brown suit, generous lapels hanging below the Seventies’ collar of a blue nylon shirt that somehow matched it to perfection. "He is very pleased to welcome you to the Ministry," Slídl interpreted for Egerton.

After shaking their hands, finger-ends yellowed with nicotine returned to an exploration of the cuts and grazes in his fag-burned desk. The furniture here had obviously been moved in some undercover operation from their old building. His nails were bitten down to the quick, catching on the splintered sides of those dirt-lined scars in the table. Under the window sat a badly scratched typewriter, an antiquated machine that seemed to have seen its share of sharp instruments, and the painter could see the smudged imprint of lettering on the rubber roller and noticed that a pair of keys had jammed.

While his deputy, Slávek , carefully scrutinised them, standing by the desk, Poláček sat looking out of the window as he spoke solemnly in Czech to Slídl. Tomáš looked very serious. It sounded like more bad news.

“He asks us if we heard, they found a body this morning,” Slídl told him, his mouth a slit. “Or rather, they have found somebody.”

“Oh, Jesus!” Egerton said.

The painter felt sick as Slídl seemed to pause for effect. “She was found in the lake at Slapy,” he said, “washed up at the dam; there had been no attempt to sink it -.”

“Kate?” Egerton managed to whisper. He was hardly able to speak.

Slídl merely shook his head and spoke quickly with Poláček.

"Don't worry, it isn't Kate!" Tomáš reassured him. "This was a much older woman, from what he said."

“Still no sign,” Slídl said. “They’re dragging the reservoir, just in case she’s in there as well... Are you alright, Mr. Krac? I’m sorry... I hadn’t expected this.”

Egerton had sunk uninvited into a chair.

“Please, a glass of water,” he said, and Tomáš spoke in Czech.

Poláček picked up the telephone.

“It’s coming,” Tomáš said.

After he had finished on the phone, Slídl listened to Poláček for a very long time, the investigator rarely looking at the lawyer, but fixing his eyes on the window. After a while, he stopped speaking and took a map from the drawer of his desk. Slídl bent over to look at it.

“She was struck from the front,” Slídl was saying as he studied the map. “She died from a single blow to the head. Blunt instrument.” He looked around at Egerton. “Very strong assailant.” he said. “Death was probably a couple of days ago, and instantaneous - though today they’ll be checking the lungs for water. This is a map of the lake.”

"This murder has nothing to do with Kate!" Tomáš whispered angrily.

Poláček was talking again, his eyes on the window, while Slídl pointed out the location on the map. Egerton looked away. The lawyer was listening to the investigator, still frowning.

“Today, your Foreign Office has been very busy,” Slídl said. “They demand a full-scale hunt. They also offer to send over some of their own men, if she isn't found by the end of the day... As you can imagine, this isn’t a proposal our friend here likes at all! The British imperial pigs are coming -.” As he said this, Poláček looked sharply across at Slídl, and they guessed at once that he could speak English. “Naturally, the Ministry is refusing outside help,” Slídl went on quickly. “Their own investigation is to be scaled-up... There’ll be ten officers drafted in full-time.”

“What have they come up with so far?” Egerton asked. “What have you discovered on your own?” he asked Poláček directly.

“Two men,” he said, “working alone - one problem, amongst many...”

“I asked what you have been doing?" he said. "That exhibition of Milan's in Hell... Do you have the guest-list - the names of the people who were invited?”

Poláček slowly shook his head.

“Have you questioned any of the guests?” Egerton asked. "What about Milan and this man Shams?"

“Not yet,” Poláček said. “No, we haven’t, Mr. Krac. It did not seem necessary... up till now. So far, since you first made contact, we have spoken with Ivan Krac, that's all. But the way we see it, if Miss Ashe fails to turn up, there are four immediate suspects: the cousins, Krac - first, the British citizen, Egerton Krac -.”

“That’s just absurd!” Tomáš said angrily.

“I’m a suspect?” Egerton said in disbelief.

"He was in Slovakia," Tomáš said. "I was with him."

“Please, bear with me,” Poláček said with practiced determination, finally looking at Egerton. “You have to be counted as a possible suspect. It is part of the procedure. I will not pretend otherwise. Second, there is Ivan Krac, your cousin - he was the last person to see Kate Ashe. Third, Milan Procházka, who invited Kate to that exhibition in Hell; he knew that they were going on to the disco Roskov. And fourth, there is Shams - we don’t have a surname; but we have been seeking him, since speaking to your cousin.”

"We've learned absolutely nothing!" Egerton said to Tomáš outside.

"There's a pub nearby," Slídl said. "It opens very early and very late for the type of people who work irregular hours.” He gave them a conspiratorial smile. “There will be people there who would like to meet to you... Maybe, even, Emil! They are, if you like, secret policemen - former colleagues of mine; good men, though; still working...”

“I think I could do with a stiff drink,” Egerton said, glancing at his friend. "Tomáš, do you mind?"

"I think we need something," he replied, "but I have promised to meet up with Lucia, an old friend of mine, this afternoon."

"A quick one, then," the painter said.

Slídl led them into the narrower streets of poorly maintained tenements, and when they arrived, the painter noticed that the sign above the entrance was some kind of fish, probably a carp. Having walked on the inside on the pavement, Egerton was the first through the door, and he was hit in the face by hot air and the roar from the already crowded bar. It was a heaving mass of people, most of them dressed in patched and faded blue workingmen’s overalls. There was beer everywhere, and the drinkers crammed together on their benches or stood elbow-to-elbow, making shouted declarations in the din, and raising, and gulping from their glasses, as one man; the painter noticed that behind the bar Stalin’s grubby portrait hung on pins.

“Over there!” Slídl shouted above the din, pointing and waving; and already, at the sight of him, one-by-one, men were leaving a bench to make room for the new arrivals at the far end, near a dirty wall.

Egerton squeezed in, clumsily working his way along the bench, followed by those who had moved out, who had waited to be reseated; they had now closed up behind him, and Tomáš and Slídl had found room for themselves on the other side of the table. Before Egerton had the chance to sit down, a foaming beer was placed in front of him.

“Whiskey, I think!” he shouted across at Tomáš over the noise.

“Rum,” Tomáš said, knowing that rum would be the only spirit here. "Make that rum for both of us!"

“This is Emil!” Slídl shouted, his hand now on the shoulder of the biggest man in the group. “The man I told you about. These three gentlemen are his colleagues - or rather, his assistants...”

Compared to his colleagues, Emil looked respectable: he was unshaven and a huge orange handle-bar moustache was mounted in grey stubble, slightly flecked with ginger. He swept the lank grey hair out of his eyes, a habitual motion, and briefly smiled. He was a big fish in this little pond, the painter thought. His eyes were cold, steady, probing; they had a quiet intensity, a hidden depth suggesting knowledge and a potential of menace. Two of the men in Emil’s retinue were gypsies, one of them, young, and almost handsome, the other man much older, his face lined with the livid blotch of a deep and ugly scar; and the third was white, and also shabbily dressed.

“Emil commiserates,” Slídl told him. “He asked what you think of Czech policemen after our meeting this morning! Emil despises them. He says they’re stupid sons-of-bitches.”

“How should I know?” Egerton said. “I don’t have to work with them.”

“Neither does Emil,” Slídl told him. “They don’t know him but he knows them... all their details. He says that he's sorry for your loss, but they have fat chance of finding Kate; he says they have more chance of preventing our own partition; he’s sure that the guilty will escape, as always! The police are clueless.”

“Can Emil help?” Egerton asked, looking over at him.

“These days Emil is trapped,” Slídl interpreted. “His hands are tied. He has to do what he’s told; and try to keep out of the way... They have to leave this one to the police; it isn’t their patch. But he says that he has his nose to the ground, and maybe he can point you in the right direction. Emil is a good Communist. He thinks the Party was stupid and remains stupid. Now, it is the democrats who are surfacing, gulping the air. They’re taking a hammering from the press for the bad things that are happening... It’s their snouts up in the air; and their heads on the block. For the moment, the Communists will lie still at the bottom! If the oxygen lasts, it will be the old fish who survive!”

The men were all smiling at him and the conversation had stopped.

“What’s the name of this pub?” Egerton asked Slídl.

“‘The Fatted Carp’,” he said.

Egerton kept his mouth shut; he had been told about carp in the fishmonger's barrels that lined the streets at Christmas, but it would have been impolite to remind Emil that none of the carp in a death-barrel survived, that the best any of them could hope for was slow suffocation.

Emil was smiling at them, sweeping the hair out of his eyes, and spoke for a few minutes to Slídl

"He wants you to know, there is a new market in sex," Slídl told him. "The government even leant a hand, very early on, with a parliamentary-committee to introduce soft porn at our newsstands! Would it surprise you to find out that the most organised Communist régime in Europe should now play host to its most organised rackets, as we head towards restitution of property, sheer, unfettered capitalism, and even the partition of Czechoslovakia? Emil says that sex is big business here. Some of its organisers have bank accounts; but they are known to flout the law; girls have been hurt, and taken against their will! If you want to get to the bottom of this, you should speak to somebody called Otto Harbinger at the Central Bank; tell him that Emil the Red sent you; he owes him a favour. He says you could also mention one particular girl the banker saw in Ostrava! Though Harbinger is an old Communist, he will talk to you, especially if you mention that girl from Ostrava."

7. Shifting the Balance

Only Slídl could have persuaded Harbinger to see him that same afternoon, but Egerton had decided that his daughter Olga would be preferable company, however she would be dressed today. After Slídl had spoken to the banker and arranged the meeting, Tomáš had phoned the lawyer's daughter at the monastery, and she had agreed to act as the painter's interpreter at the bank. They had had time, before then, to create an advertisement, from the text Egerton had constructed, and Olga had economised in the newspaper office outside which they had met; as she had cut down the ad. with the common Czech abbreviations, he had feared that all meaning was being abandoned in cruel strokes of revisionist shorthand.

“Prague is Praha is ‘Pha’,” she had told him. "P.H.A."

“I preferred the original,” he had said.

“I find this terribly exciting!” Olga said, as they entered the lobby of the central bank. Today she was wearing a comparatively sober light green dress beneath a black fur, and there was no sign of the crucifix. "I studied economics!" she said. She walked away from him, and then she turned. “You, know, this was at the heart of it. They say it was the youth, the media, the people; but what really brought about the revolution was the bankers.”

To her left was a canvas, an idyll of harvest-time, one of four huge paintings depicting the seasons through a partial haze of socialist realism. Sun-drenched fruit and corn lay strewn amongst well-fed peasantry. But her mood was more like the Spring that hung behind her in the cold marble hall, in which a people were marshalling the hidden seed and commanding its advance. “This musty palace was the scene of the action,” she said. “Through here the leaders came and learned the truth! That Socialism was past its sell-by-date. There were no buyers; only queues to sell! And in the end it was the bankers of Socialism who broke the news: the ideological vaults were empty; every idea had been withdrawn! The west had won.” Olga stamped her foot; she twirled gracefully, in spite of her bulk. “The Party was over.”

Egerton, smiling, looked back at Winter. The snow blue, the sky white, the faces ruddy, whipped by the wind. A pile of logs lay tied, ready for transport: winter fuel; and in the central bank’s lobby he could still feel the chill, its art nouveau splendour frozen in the spring. A palace, yes, but those tied logs were apt: the queues at the counters were so much kindling. He looked at the red surgical rope that held them in line, the now crumbled masonry, the crumpled faces of the tellers as they counted out their days, and all around them a butchered disharmony of architecture, grafts upon the original grafts, hardboard against marble, electronics over slips of paper in warm, deft hands, and the plastic sheeting slung out beneath the roof to catch the rainwater.

“Olga!” somebody shouted across the hall with the excitement seeming out of place or an echo from distant times. “Olga Slídlová!”

The caller was behind the counter, but threatening to leap over; she gave little jumps, pushing herself up with her hands. Beyond her, the bank staff carried on rather more slowly a dull routine, some standing about holding piles of paper as though their forms were precious last links, others staring blindly into the new computer screens that would soon replace them, occasionally chancing an entry, looking surprised when it worked. Some in the queues behind the red rope had begun to turn and speak to each other, on the edge of complaining. Here was what was wrong with the new democracy: young girls brazenly abusing their positions; all this freedom in which to lose one’s track, one’s place in line... Olga and the teller who had called her over were talking together with animation, leaning close, like lovebirds across the counter, oblivious to what he saw was a long suppressed anger in the eyes of those who were finally growing impatient.

Egerton guessed that they were college friends.

“You English?”

It was the man carrying the gun Egerton had noticed as they came in.

“Yes, I am,” he told him.

The man had come to stand very close to his side under the portrait of Winter. He was short and fat, and obviously proud of his golden badge, which he shoved out on the barrel of his chest. The guard was beaming, bright eyes in a round stubbled head, which moved ever so slightly from side to side as he smiled. “I know English too,” he said proudly.

“You’re the guard?” Egerton said, and the man nodded conspiratorially; an Englishman would never give him away! He straightened his back, pulling in his enormous stomach and saluting in was meant to be an informal ‘American’ style.

“Bank Security,” he said. ‘They come, I shoot.” He patted the gun at his side. “They come, you see! Every weekend: military firing range at Příbram. Bullseye! Bam. Bam. Bam.”

Egerton looked over at Olga, her huge frame still leant at her friend’s counter, kicking her heels at the people now muttering openly in the queue behind her.

“I must find my friend,” he said.

“Have a nice day!”

The guard was standing at ease, arms behind his back.

"You too!"

Egerton edged around the queue, climbing over the rope and feeling as if he had broken a golden rule; he almost expected a bullet in the back.

“This is Jana,” Olga said, turning. “She’s the Chief of Customer Services.”

“Congratulations!” Egerton said.

They began to talk again in Czech, and Egerton gazed back at the paintings. The seasons had got to him. He hadn't painted in a while. Something for Spring, he thought, and something of Prague; but not too dark. He was seeing everything too dark... Lighter. He sensed the cracked marble. Scored and faded counters. Bored, pale faces. He saw the queue, a procession, the celebration not of Spring, but of the bank’s rot... He was seeing everything too dark.

“You’re dreaming,” Olga said. “We’ve lost you.”

She was right. Bullseye! Bam. Bam. Bam.

The guard, catching his eye, saluted loosely.

"Mr. Krac?" The woman very nearly curtsied. “Please, follow me this way, please. I am sorry, it is past four o'clock; but pan Harbinger is only now ready.”

As they mounted the grand stairway with its red threadbare carpet, the woman turned. “He has just seen the Minister for Entrepreneurial Endeavour,” she said, “so he is very tired!”

The idea she might be joking was impossible to entertain.

On the first floor, there were the regulatory two doors, separated by a ‘hall’ of six inches, a fabrication of intimidation, this doubling of doors, the exaggeration of that narrow divide, an unwelcome-mat. The second door was opened inwards and they passed through into an anteroom.

“Please to wait here, please.” The woman passed into Harbinger’s office and Egerton looked out of the window. The luxurious, wood-panelled anteroom had an oceanic view of the red roofs of the Old Town like a myriad of vivid buoys against a pale blue sea. “You may come in,” the secretary said. “This is pan Harbinger, Chief of Banking.”

Otto Harbinger was a fit man in his fifties, trim in a blue pinstriped suit. In the half-light of his inner sanctum, where the curtains seemed always to be closed, the banker wore dark sunglasses, possibly due to some eye problem. He leant across the desk. “Happy to meet you, Mr. Krac!” he said, vigorously shaking his hand.

“Miss Slídlová,” Egerton said, turning. They shook hands, Otto hanging on slightly longer than was necessary.

“Delighted, Miss Slídlová!” He came around the desk. “Now, how can I help you?” he said, looking from one to the other. “I hear from Mr. Sidl that you are a friend of Emil, and are undertaking preliminary market studies.”

“There's some doubt about the nature of the market,” the painter said, as he took a photograph from his pocket. “She is called Kate Ashe. Have you ever seen her?”

Harbinger delicately accepted the photograph as though it was a rare banknote, and studied it carefully. Though the banker’s eyes were hidden, Egerton noticed a slight twitch under his lower lip.

“Very pretty!” he said. “Should I know her?”

“Not necessarily,” Egerton said. “In fact, it’s very unlikely. She is English, though she has disappeared here in Prague! She's my girlfriend. I have reason to believe from Emil the Red that you may have information that could be useful. Off the record, of course... He advised me to mention that girl from Ostrava.”

“He advises... mention of... a girl... from Ostrava?” Harbinger said, speaking very slowly, as though such a far-fetched scheme were beyond him. “I understood from Mr. Slídl that you were here on business... But really, this is no business of mine! Mr. Krac, you are in a bank, not a police-station! I’m its manager, not chief of security! How can I help?”

Harbinger moved behind his desk, but didn’t sit down; and he seemed a little uncertain, though behind the sunglasses his eyes weren't visible.

“We’ve spoken to a friend of yours,” the painter said, “who tells us that you’re familiar with the operations of at least one prostitution racket! So far, the police have not been informed. If you cooperate -.”

“I have nothing to hide!” Harbinger said angrily. “Mr. Krac!” he protested. “Emil is an old friend who has done me some service; we can talk; but I think maybe we should talk somewhere else... Certainly not here!” He stood up, and remembering Slídl mumbling behind those partitions of glass at the Ministry, Egerton wondered if this banker suspected his office was bugged. “We can meet tonight at this location.” He bent to scribble an address.

Even with directions, Van Gogh was difficult to find. Olga had never heard of it, though she did know the neighbourhood, a suburb of luxury villas built for Party members in the 1970s. Eventually, the taxi driver found the place, set back from the road that marked the border of this exclusive suburb with a poorer area. On one side were the garages, the patios of the Party elite and on the other the apartment blocks of workers. There was only one break in their bleak facade, and comfortably inside, reclined a broken-down hostelry called 'The Ruby'. Inside, the painter saw a now familiar scene of workers in 'regulation' blue overalls and dirty, battered boots, but also a few people 'slumming it' from across Van Gogh. The beer was flowing, a barman running around replacing the glasses before they were empty. Harbinger was already there and beside him at a dark wooden table sat a smartly dressed woman in a light coloured business-suit.

“Mr. Harbinger,” Egerton said as they joined him.

“Good evening,” the banker said. “You found it!”

“Yes, a hidden gem!” Egerton said.

"This is Miss Sarah Blighen," Harbinger said. "She's from Canada."

“Hi!” she said. "I work at GorPress; we moved here from Toronto."

"Hello, I'm Egerton Krac."

Already, a beer sat before him, and Egerton looked at Harbinger’s tab: there were six crooked strokes; they had been here for some time. The banker’s eyes could not be judged behind those sunglasses; but the Canadian by his side seemed to want to let him to go on. "My father was a worker,” Harbinger said. “They sent me higher. College. The Party. The Bank. To the very top. But as you can see, I live in a borderland with accented edges; and I am never sure which side I am on! Here we sit, knowing the old, tired system, seeing the little changes democracy will make: we manage a run-down economy for a run-down people; and they don’t pretend to understand what it is that we do; they ask no questions; but you know, they sympathise; my people, they know what it is, to face the hopeless task.” He removed his glasses; but his eyes were closed and he began to rub them gently with finger and thumb, another habitual movement, refined; and the eyes stayed closed, certainly until he had replaced them. “It is the blind who lead the blind,” he said wearily. “All we know is what the Americans want, what the west wants. We have a government that tours the world in brand new Mercedes gifted by the Germans, accepting its wishes. You call that freedom?” He didn’t seem to be blaming anybody, except perhaps the world that was now coming in. “The global market rules, Miss Blighen! Mr. Krac! The west controls it... We have the great hyphen-debate: will it be Czechoslovakia, but with a hyphen - or will all this talk escalate into the saga of partition, our lands in two words, with a real border between them?”

“The world has enough borders!” Sarah said. "I have no time for rules or margins! I love your wide open spaces, Otto! The countryside doesn't even have fences! If I want to see dividing lines, I only have to look at the arguments in my own country over Canada's roots and the roots of inflation."

"Banking was simple before," Harbinger said. "There was little incentive to make money. We moved money. We balanced budgets. We allowed the meeting of targets and met the demands of a command-economy. There was something noble in serving the people, the state, our great republic! But now we need profit. We need to compete, to drive on. You cannot imagine the change... Unscrupulous men with the basest of instincts are suddenly marked out for leadership. Men like me -” he shrugged his shoulders, suggesting that men like himself were somehow different, better, but fated now to fail.

“Men like me...” he repeated.

Another beer was slammed on to a round ceramic dish before Harbinger. “Maybe I am in the wrong place,” the banker said, “but in the place I inhabit, not even a border is firm! So you see, you mustn’t judge me!”

“Nobody's here to judge!” Egerton said. This was not what the painter wanted to hear, but it was Harbinger’s home ground; Sarah Blighen and the other customers gave him an edge; and what he had been saying to both of them was doubtlessly a defence, provided in advance on the ground he was preparing for something hopefully more substantial. Egerton made sympathetic noises in the beery hubbub, then Harbinger left for the toilet and the Canadian looked at him and smiled.

"How do you find Prague?" he made the effort to ask her.

“Turn left before Nuremburg!" she said, laughing. "No, honestly, I can’t decide whether it’s a subject for archaeology or spelaeology. Spades or torches! We call it the 'cave' at GorPress. Impressions? Too many churches, Mr. Krac, and not enough priests: a cave without bats! There’s something still masked and something still missing in folk themselves. There’s something more than gloom here: there’s an embittered malevolence that looms out at you wherever you go! It’s deeper than the kind of xenophobia I've seen elsewhere. It’s a street thing! It’s internecine. Between the folk! It’s frightening, the hate that’s still about! But it takes the breath away: the final settlement; the freed acoustics of Prague! The first, faltering voices; the arrangement of returning names... I know that in the dawn of freedom the people need a restorative, rather than another harsh purge! Every day, I talk to the believers who are clinging on. They still run their banks, their corporations. They manage this mutually engineered give-away, the privatisation of a corporate state. I can work with the internationals, the flush victors in their magnanimity and their pride; but it’s these struggling managers, the believers in the crumbling state, that keep the place alive..."

Egerton watched Harbinger as he returned across the bar. "Can you tell me anything about these rackets?" he said to him.

“These people work through various front companies," the banker said, "and through them, they have access to politicians, the media, the police. They’re taking advantage of the unstable conditions, the sudden lack of accountability, and the corruptibility of a dying bureaucracy -."

"Are you talking about German banks again?" Sarah asked him, smiling.

"The Germans want compensation for the Sudetenland," Harbinger said, "and as with Yugoslavia, Ms. Blighen knows that the partition of Czechoslovakia is the true aim of their foreign policy; they would still like to divide and rule! I have been explaining how Bavarian banks have put a mountain of economic pressure on the Slovaks to go their own way! But it isn't only the Germans, Mr. Krac! Everybody is at it! We are talking about more serious rackets, Ms. Blighen; and Mr. Krac's girlfriend may have been kidnapped!"

"Oh, I'm so sorry!" she said. "Why didn't you say?"

Harbinger took off his glasses, and his irises were a very light grey, and around them, a tired, unhealthy yellow, but the eyes very intense, so that Egerton could see why he chose to wear them. As Party placemen were replaced by business clients, that direct gaze would have lost its advantage, and become less welcome; maybe the Central Bank held Harbinger’s eyes in reserve against a day when intimidation might again be required.

“This is a sorry business,” the banker said. “A sordid, unpleasant affair... ”

“Less an affair,” Egerton said, “than a business transaction; but I won't ask for any more details about that girl in Ostrava -.”

Harbinger was nodding towards the bar. "We can discuss this over there," he said. "You will excuse us, Ms. Blighen?"

"Of course," she said, still looking shocked and curious.

"My meeting that girl in Ostrava was a mistake," the banker said at the bar, "and I don't really want to be reminded of it. Certainly, not here! What I have learned of this racket, I am willing to share with you, Mr. Krac, but you must understand, I came into this by accident! If what that girl told me has any truth in it, it will all come out: it can’t lie hidden, even in such a backward country as Slovakia.”

"Slovakia?" the painter said.

"That's where they are based," Harbinger said.

Egerton refused the drink, though it was difficult to persuade the barman to pick up the brimming glass, once he had set it down. The Czech banker also refused, more easily, as he still had half a glass.

“Publicity will kill it,” Harbinger said. “This business cannot survive. It is inherently unstable, ultimately too risky! They must expect to operate a year or two. That’s all.”

“But who? Who am I looking for?”

“I can give you a name,” Harbinger said. “It is not a registered company; but it is the name used for their organisation. I’m sure it’s a front.” He had taken a small card from his side pocket and he passed it across the oak bar.

“The ClimAxis,” Egerton read aloud.

“Their calling card,” Harbinger said. “The address on the back is the place I visited. The then home of that girl from Ostrava. She was held there against her will; and you might say, I rescued her! That’s all: I can give you no more... I have put this behind me. I can have nothing more to do with it!”

“Well, goodbye, then, Mr. Harbinger.”

The painter looked over at Sarah Blighen, and nodded.

It was cold outside, and he walked the crooked length of Van Gogh without sighting a taxi. He walked on the villa side, his collar turned up. The better class of homes were like paper shreds now that the Party was over, a house of cards. How many old Communists were still in there planning their next moves? How many still held on to hope?

Tomáš was still out with his friend, and back in his hotel room, Egerton began to paint. The canvas was primed, and he had already applied darkened red, a sky. Like everyone else, they would be discussing the future in freedom: the shape of it, the mess of it, emerging, like a decayed crown, and this vision of a culture so suddenly overturned in a land of failed egalitarians, with their hatred of the past and all that was new, these people, competing to embrace the future, so much shallow, misbegotten value, so many unpleasant truths.

Olga had told him she would be partying with her friend, Jana, from the bank; maybe she would be wearing that golden dress and cloak. They would be out there together, tonight, perhaps at an underground event in some dank and resonant cellar. Again, he thought of bone against a dampening wall. The dull thud of it. Unconsciousness. The blind, raging dancing of friends... Everything dark, this ugly red cut through with depressing purple. Too dark - the eye too dark, pan Krac! He built up an orb of shape, the bulbous, pointed onion of a church roof, he imagined in time, weeping from copper to verdigris; then, daubed a silver cross, scored through the red night as if to tear it. Could Kate's body be lying in some shallow grave? Or was it worse, far worse than that? In the flat lines of the paint he saw no answers.

8. The Trojská Wall

The Millennium approached and would pass like snow. A new one hung behind, ahead, all time like velvet. Pat Macdonald saw only a charitable fraud in liberation. The unexpected victory of husbandry and housewifery. Domestic revolutionaries! Their household alchemy, an iron to a velvet curtain.

It was all in the mind.

One curtain lifted. Consumerism triumphant! Dread of the western bomb was only splintered into many smaller fears: smaller bomb fears... Everywhere. One world matured. Its problems solved. The solution: lesser problems.

Smaller. More of them.

More widespread, and less contained.

As they opened up the box.

Everything had changed in Nineteen-eighty-nine, and from their tight focus on a dissident art in hiding, GorPress had panned out to cover the synthesis of extremes, the coming together of former 'criminals' of the state and their reformed dictators. Since moving to Prague from Toronto, the company’s founder, Milan Gor was still building his name on the back of the cold war. Pat Macdonald, who with Sarah Blighen edited the G.P. magazine 'Cerebralign', liked the man’s glacial, no-nonsense approach to the spoiling thaw. Gor wanted to see the spilled guts of a new world; to "bring down their balls, after the fall of the wall."

Milan Gor’s Trojská apartment overlooked the scattered lights of the city from the hillside reputed to enjoy the cleanest air in Prague. Pat stood at a window on to the balcony breathing deeply, though the window wasn’t open. Behind him Professor Pazd blended effortlessly with a Pro-Logic arrangement with the present, softly Grieg, his voice a monotone drumming.

Pat was alone, listening to the melody in the dark key of F minor as he faced the wheeling constellations in his solitary perception: in this darkest city, the lights were poor guides, the haziest sciosophy, their shadow-wisdom baffling; in one of those clustered star groups north of the Vltava lay his own apartment, but high on the wall of Trojská, the Scot felt almost lost in a patternless universe.

“... a neat corner-display...”

“... blending of talents, the Paris of the Thirties...”

“... the great thaw or the fall of Troy...”

A touch of pianississimo.

“Another soft drink, Pat?”

Jarmila had joined him out on his Trojská wall.

“Sorry, I was miles away,” he told her. “I wouldn’t say no to a coffee.”

“Lovely, isn’t it?” she said.

Prague castle, like some defunct midi-system bathed in too many lights, darkened as a timer cut its power; the green light faded, so the white halo in the sky above the Strahov stadium behind appeared to leap up higher.

"I feel guilty being in there," she said, "when my boss is out here!"

Beneath those keys in the dark, he could hear Hans Pazd over the rising Norwegian piano: “... the particular rearrangement that’s important!”

“But the rift is so absorbing!” Jarmila said, turning to rejoin them.

Pat faded them out. Diminuendo.

Up in Perthshire, Pat had grown to love the lines of his native Highlands and while his mother had been attempting to gather the clans, busily canvassing for the 'Nats', he had escaped the family and its politics, and gone up into the hills, where he had first found peace in solitary reflection. Rock climbing had seemed above Scotland, and nature was cold, sear instructress in the applied ‘poetry’ of the climb. He had known each quiet nook and cranny, and when the time had come to complete his education, Pat had gone south to St. Andrews. By contrast to the landlocked wilds of Perthshire, ‘the East Neuk’ was almost an island, shored and defined by broad estuaries to north and south, and a wide expanse of grey northern sea to the east. The ‘island’ nestling between the arms of the Forth and the Tay had been patterned long before great estuary-bridges connected that ‘corner' to the world; the roads of the 'Nook' still roamed and explored itself. That place of reformation, too, had functioned, historically faulted and devastated like a secret broken world it seemed wistfully to remember. The grey cathedral had been such faulted ambition, when the walls had been built and the roof finally put into place, it had collapsed, unable to close the heavens or lift such space. A cocktail of religious potency and ruin, the fantastic wreckage was nowadays like any great ideology at the peak of lost certainty, those heights still convincing as they failed to close the open sky. Pointing fingers pinnacled a wrecked ideal, broken crowns and spiring gesturing up and out of a misery of axed and levered reform in sheer awesome defiance.

Tady je domů, this is home... That is what the posters said: the buzz-word here was 'restitution', though it was now competing with 'partition'. Place names were being recalled from the past, historical cul-de-sacs, resurgent pedestrian streams of returning location; and the demand for newness, and divisions in language and property, meant that national politics were closely following this great renaming, a river of fluid causation; but hadn't the Czechs and Slovaks only moved on from the totalitarianism of a strict red grammar to the resurrection of lingual imperfection? A friend of his, Clara Skálová, lived on a street, Na louži, that translated as ‘on the Puddle’. Names can be liquid things, the editor thought, inadequate to the description of cold hard fact. No lane of words can ever be squared true in a stonemason’s sense, though words can be levered and even toppled, as in this Czechish katabasis that was working towards another kind of reformation.

Pat returned inside to join them.

“It must have been difficult to remain,” Gor was saying, “and face the impossibility of resurfacing! Friends tell me that the end is like waking up to a flash of light from the troubled darkness of a dream, because mass oneirodynia had set in, and most of the visionaries were escaping. The start of the art-drain, the first funeral of free expression! And can such a great sleep be escaped? Or is the act of waking now destined to be part of a continuing dream? When you’ve had to pinch yourself for a lifetime, just to make sure you weren’t dreaming, waking up to the pain of that lifetime can take you the rest of your days!"

“Capitalism certainly woke us up!” Kolínková said.

“It won't repair roads.” Tamak said, "in the gaping gulf of Iraq!"

He was the chief of Prague's Department of Roads, though having served his apprenticeship as punishment for promoting punk in the Seventies he was welcome high in Trojská.

“It suggests roads,” Prezn was saying, “capitalism will provide the map.”

“And communism lived the map,” Professor Pazd interjected. “We looked up from our Marxian sketchbook to see a whole world in contours and labels! How could anybody question that?”

“It is still more difficult for us!” Jarmila said. “Československu! You know, I always say now, ‘Těžká-Slovensku!’. ‘Těžká, ‘difficult', Pat! Our republic is a grumbling patient, behind its thin partition, and we can only really joke about her condition at 'Cerebralign'! Nothing much has changed!”

Pat said nothing.

“We mock and rename this crazy country of ours,” Pazd said, “and we don’t even know what to call it ourselves.”

“Since the communists gave up the ghost,” Jarmila said, “the new politicians have been like young doctors arguing about a name for an unheard-of condition! Everywhere, you see the posters for our new democracy, that ladder climbing the wall towards a higher Europe to the west; yet suddenly Prague is descending into further chaos!”

“You aren’t a Czech-hyphenist?” Gor asked playfully.

“And why now partition?” she said. “Why, just as the world is coming together? They know they are wrong to divide the spoils... spoil the neatly divided integrity of an inherited collection! Such a great dismantling only looks like freedom on paper. Make it real and this excitement will turn to dread; it will be taken beyond our control!”

“It is the great reawakening," Gor said, "but you know, we hear that phrase on the news, now, so often: fears are growing... Fears are growing for a Czech tractor-works; fears are growing for the safety of a missing English girl... Fears are growing! And it was the gathering of dread that hit these sleeping people between the eyes, as soon as they reopened!"

"And capitalism will carry us the whole way!" Kolínková said. "After the velvet revolution, the product of freedom may be separation! Our future may lie in chosen strains, their lonely advancement... But tonight, we can talk about merger, even as Slovakia talks of a split! The colours in that business logo of his aren't the healing of blood and bandages, Milan, but our federal flag, and missing Slovakian blue: Ivan Krac is a sizeable target even for you, and P.S. will be just the right acquisition for GorPress -."

Pat was listening now, and sat forward; but their boss was frowning.

"I don't think this is the right time," Gor said. "More wine, anybody?"

Pat did not wait for the coffee. He hadn’t drunk much wine, a glass or two of Rüdesheimer. Afterwards, he had drunk something labelled ‘tonic water’ which had supposedly come from India. It had tasted foul, a tonic impostor. Water of the Ganges, after the clarity of the Rhine. Their tonic was like their tea, which wasn’t quite tea, but purported to come from China. The shops were stocked with cheap approximations of the products back home. Only the 'countries of origin' gave a faint taste of authenticity, when he could decipher them.

Crossing the centre of town, he took a detour by the main department-store, Bílá Labuť, 'the White Swan': it would be long closed, swooning in darkness, but he wondered if he might see the newly-weds in the flesh; some time before that final hint Kolínková had given of a merger, she had been talking about the White Swan's bizarre promotion: for what was in Prague terms an extravagant prize, a young couple had agreed to spend their honeymoon in the store window. Pat slowed, but the newlyweds were asleep on a bed in the their dimly lit display-case; in the next window was a blown-up photograph, something of which there seemed to be no current shortage, at least: a rather poor reproduction of a nearly red tomato.

So Milan Gor was thinking of taking on Ivan Krac! GorPress against P.S. That would be some battle, and Pat wasn't sure who he favoured to win it. Kolínková had spoken of the flag and blood and bandages, and he had thought of the company secretary who always wore pink: his good friend Clara Skálová worked for Ivan Krac, and his loyalties, anyway, were divided. He had heard somewhere that her boss had taken the name P.S. from the title ‘Concluding Unscientific Postscript’, the final bark of the great Dane, Sören Kierkegaard; but the old Slovak had also taken great photographs. Krac's book ‘Dividing Lines' had not been published under the old regime, his point of view bordering on dissidence; but Pat had bought it, now that it had appeared in print; though he was still trying to get to grips with Czech, which he would grade as a climber 'very severe'. The photographer had once been imprisoned, and then regularly castigated by the authorities for the crime of bourgeois nationalism; he had only partly accepted the values of the state, and even then, with bitterness, to judge from those ideas of solitude and fragmentation, which had been published since the revolution.

He overtook another queue for a garage, still at this late hour a mile long. Prague had panicked. Some of the drivers were even pushing their cars, as the queue inched slowly forward, towards a distant pump. Pat checked his own dial: a quarter full. Russian demands for hard currency had caused a fuel crisis in Prague; Czech demands for hard currency had only caused a beer crisis in Moscow. The Russians could survive without pilsner - they had their vodka; but petrol was irreplaceable; it had no substitute.

“I want to share a secret,” Ivan Krac told Clara Skálová the next morning. “Milan Gor has been quietly buying up shares in P.S. He’s attempting a take-over - and if he succeeds, he’ll remove me from the board! I’d be shut out of the company, Clara, and back to the darkroom! I’m telling you this because I’d like your help. I want you to follow me through some confidential business meetings."

"Of course, I will, Ivan," she said, uncertainly, thinking of her friend, Pat Macdonald at GorPress, and the possibility of a conflict of interest.

"Our first meeting is with Vašek Zupa," he said, "a potential intermediary and an expert on the re-emerging capital markets in the east, who I hope will become a business partner! He runs the Slovak business-magazine, ‘Slo-Invest’. We will be discussing a reverse take-over by P.S. -."

“A reverse take-over?” Clara said.

“Yes, a backwards merger,” Ivan said. "I have identified a larger company, SlovaKable, which I may have the necessary capital to tempt into such a merger. S.K. is a newly privatised company with interests ranging from print to telecommunications. An exchange of shares would form a far greater company, capable of seeing off GorPress; and taking-over 'Slo-Invest', which is stuck in the doldrums! So, Vašek is already on side..."

Until she had moved to P.S. two months before, Clara Skálová had worked at the Institute of Chemistry’s Peptides Department, or the I.C.Pept.Dept. She had loved the work. She had been employed by the Czechoslovakian state, one of the world’s largest corporations. In every stomach in the land peptides had formed from amino acids to produce proteins and enzymes which were essential if any of them were to survive. In the body’s governance enzymes played chancellor, home secretary and minister of trade. Enzymes were the body’s foreign-exchange dealers, facilitating global trade and converting hard foreign payments into those useful domestic notes that kept soft cells afloat. Having broken-down food, they converted its valuable energy into loose stores of cash at the best possible rates. In the dark backrooms of the body they were skilled forgers, copying out D.N.A.; and as cells divided, enzymes went to work. They were middlemen and property developers, traders and facilitators; and as if that weren’t enough, they were willing to do extra hours, working in chains of overtime as immigration officers, scrutinising new arrivals.

Peptides had been a microscopic part of the Communist business of state and the I.C.Pept.Dept. was a research department with a global reputation. But suddenly, the organism of state had been busily turning itself into a free market outfit and the peptides had been the first to leave. She had been told that the he team would be catching the next plane west, no doubt carrying the odd microscope and alembic with them. Clara had understood the attractions of wealth and sunshine in Arizona, but after fourteen years at the I.C.Pept.Dept. she had expected some consideration; the team could hardly have forgotten that she had put a lot of work into peptides herself.

“We’ll be sure and send you a postcard,” Dr. Potz had told her.

A postcard! As if that would make up for all the research papers she had poured over with absorption and weak correcting-fluid or the clinical, celebratory clink from the champagne-filled test-tubes that always followed a break-through, before the tubes were hurled against the wall Soviet-fashion to be trampled in silica splinters underfoot?

Potz had seen through Clara’s fragile attempt to smile and cracked it.

“I’m just sorry we can’t take you with us!” he had said. "They only want the brains over there - and the amino acids!"

She had asked him why they had accepted the invitation from PeptiSaurus Inc. and as a chemist Potz had not had to ponder long the causes of their imminent secretion. “Three hundred times the salary in hard green,” he had told her, “and a new Lincoln - in whatever colour I choose!”

Despite her disappointment, Clara had helped them pack as Professor Pecka had joined them in the lab with a trusted, white-coated technician. Together, Pecka and the lab. tech. had hovered protectively around the I.C.Pept.Dept.’s expensive equipment as files of indigenous peptic research were piled into Pekinese tea-chests labelled for Tucson.

“Nobody to use all this,” Professor Pecka had lamented, “nobody to teach the young ones, nobody to carry on... It is a catastrophic disruption! An entire department - wiped-out, as if it never existed! Everything’s falling apart!”

“Come on, Professor,” Clara had said, “you know that here we can’t even get the heating to work."

Everything in Czechoslovakia had indeed seemed to have broken down like the internal heating-system at the I.C.Pept.Dept., from which the chemists had witnessed the latest external reaction, a revolution, in their overcoats. It was part of what her new British friend Pat Macdonald had called the 'Bohemian katabasis' or 'Czechish katabatic'.

“It’s true, it’s true,” the Professor had said, “at least in the desert, they will be warm!” He had sighed. “The human memory needs no centre in the brain: a centre would render it less efficient and vulnerable to blows; research, like memory will be spread out across the green matter of the globe... My little peptides, broken up and scattered! Arizona,” he had hissed, “a year ago I would have given them more chance of getting to Mars!”

With the mass defection of the I.C. Pept.Dept. to PeptiSaurus Inc. the Institute’s director had offered Clara Skálová the opportunity of redeployment to the Department of Gases, which was economically inert, and therefore immobile, and reputed to be a bit warmer.

But she had refused.

“Not Gases,” she had told him. “They make me light-headed.”

When she had told her husband Miloš a few days later that she was going to work for Ivan Krac, he had not said a word, though her affair with the young photographer had lasted only a few months, over twenty years ago. Her dyspeptic husband had always believed that his wife’s work had been somehow connected with his own gastral acid and searing pain - that the I.C. Pept.Dept. had been busily working on a final cure. This had helped him through many an attack. His favourite expression was: “If we can’t beat indigestion, Clara, what hope do we have?”

He had simply rubbed his stomach.

“Don't worry, Miloš," she had reassured him. "I will only be working for the man at P.S. You know I have absolutely no feelings for him. There was always something so final about Ivan; he loved his sunsets for all the wrong reasons. I'll get you a glass of milk.”

But she had not told Miloš that she had looked up his number and called Ivan to ask for a job.

The meeting with Vašek took place in the art nouveau splendour of the Hotel Europa, where he and Ivan concentrated on the complex business in hand, as the faces around them were turned to an antiquated trio of musicians, piano and two strings, performing under gilt distanced heights, all embraced in the great fin de siècle bowers of empty balconies. They were speaking quietly in Slovak, which as a Czech, Clara could easily follow, but she twirled her glass, and glanced up at the crystal chandeliers, remembering a time, long before, when she had been in love with the cameraman’s shining quartz, Ivan's magical gifts and glittering suspensions. Where was all that now? she wondered. This flecked marble floor had once been limestone, the grained wood of the tabletop a tree; metamorphosis and the axeman had done the rest.

“Maybe it is time to cross that forming border!” Ivan was saying to Vašek. “Fight or flight? I know which I should choose!"

Now their business was threatened, it was as if Clara's memories of Ivan as a lover were being fully reawakened in the Europa: she remembered their stay in that landlocked lighthouse, which had just been restituted to him by the state, the folly at Sandovisko, and their passionate nights in a red sandstone thalamus in the White Carpathians. They had been lovers only for a few months in Sixty-eight. Their holiday at the ‘light’ had ended before the Russians came, and they had been discharged like twin resurgent streams to an already darkening surface. The folly was a red sandstone graft on limestone skein, a bloodied intrusion on a virgin scene, a monumental misconception on an immaculate sea of broken pavement and windswept tors; a landlocked lighthouse, a thousand miles from the nearest shore! She recalled that landscape, dampening in the thaw, the gaps in those rocks taking down the last moisture, like a photographer's sponge, opening to absorb all wet and energy, and promising to store and transform their lives into invisible soaks and buried flows of hidden meaning... Almost against her will, now that she worked for Ivan, she often found herself thinking of that red sandstone interior, and their brief nights together in that little room, lined with its hopeful rock, where they had lain in the last of their freedom, between unpainted, rough-grained, curving walls.

That landscape of tranquility with its empty, desiccant plunge-pools, the dry-cliffed abandonments of waterfalls and hidden underground streams, still placed Krac, the diminutive Slovak, for Clara Skálová. His very name seemed to crack against the pitted and furrowed rock, the white fractured pavements and swallow-holes that had lined their brief escape.

Three months afterwards, the tanks had poured in through their borders and taken up positions in and around the city of Prague. The curfews had begun, enforced by nightly tracer-fire from Petrin Hill. Her city, plunged into darkness, had been illuminated by the target practice of so-called allies. Reform had channelled underground; Ivan had taken to the streets with his camera; and Clara had already met Miloš, the simple mechanic she had married.

The Prague Spring had been over.

But she had been haunted ever since by that beautiful, clumsy dream of his red sandstone folly set atop fractured limestone karst, that dark light in the White Carpathians her last memory of freedom.

When Vašek Zupa left them alone together in the Hotel Europa, the second violin was dying to the lazy percussion of polite applause. The meeting hadn’t gone very well, as far as she could tell. Ivan's friend Vašek had returned to Bratislava, leaving them with nothing firmer than an invitation to follow him east for a formal introduction to the head of SlovaKable. Now, looking into Ivan's dark, lined face, Clara felt that even her work with him might be coming to an end. In light of all that had happened, the lighthouse in Slovakia had come to seem another form of torture, that mockery of a guiding beam with its lack of any real function in the dark, like the positive line slain in translation; and as Ivan talked of 'Slo-Invest', Clara looked down at her glass, rather than up at the huge space around them, the vast lingering indictment of past imperial might and faded ornament at what might become the end of another cycle - of their workmanship, their hopes; their union, itself - a republic now dying.

The Inversion Trial, a novel by Frank Foran

Friday, May 23, 2008

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