3. Exhibition in the Dark

Part Three
Borderland

16. Troubled Awakening

"She’s alive..."

Poláček was coming back from the cockpit to join them.

"Thank God for that!" Olga said.

"Where?" Egerton managed to ask; his throat still felt dry and cracked, like a tight passage, lined with pitted rock. "When can we see her?"

"She’s at the hospital," Poláček said, "the central hospital. We're coming over Bratislava now."

Like Poláček, Otto Harbinger was looking down on their second city, a dark sea of fragmented lights, already cut in two by the upper Danube. Their light aircraft passed over the Bridge of the Slovak National Uprising, bathed in floodlights, its single leg lurching out at a crazy angle, and swept them down towards the Slovakian airport.



Because she had suffered quite a nasty head wound, which had required six or seven stitches, and been unconscious for a while, they had not wanted Kate to take a shower, but she had refused point-blank to put on a hospital nightdress until she was allowed to clean up. Following a good wash in a powerful shower, Kate Ashe had lain on the clean, white linen of a real bed in Bratislava. The nurse had explained where she was, and that the window looked down on the Fourth of April Square. That had a ring to it, the fourth of April Square. What had Ivan called this? April, the month of Oak... There was something solid here at last! The nurse had told her that she had been imprisoned in a lighthouse, which she had not seen, as she had been carried out on the stretcher. A lighthouse in the most painful inwardness that had become of Slovakia? Could that cold place have been any darker?

"Please, you mustn’t remove from your bed!" the nurse said.

"How is the man with the broken leg?" Kate asked her.

"He is on the ground floor," she said, "in the fracture clinic. Some more of your people are flying over from Prague. They will be here soon."

"And Natsa?"

The nurse looked at her blankly.

"The gypsy girl who is having her baby."

"Ah! she would be in maternity on the floor above."

"I must go up and see her," Kate said, ignoring her protests.

In the lift, Kate let her tears come for a couple of seconds, when she pictured the dark room, without partition, and then she choked them back again, wiping her eyes as the doors opened into the maternity ward. 'Natsa' was in the second bed, and as Kate approached the gypsy girl smiled, as Kate had never seen her smile, the brightness almost blinding, as she turned up the clouded form of a baby to greet her. Through her tears, Kate could see a brown smudge in a white bundle, a stain of life, as she sat down on the bed and put her hand on her friend’s hand. Then, she wiped her eyes again. He was beautiful, and Kate stroked his little cheek, placing a finger in the tiny hand that escaped the shawl.

"To je krasny!" the girl murmured.

"You’re the English patient?" Kate looked round, and the nurse frowned as she struggled to think of the words. "Eva come..."

"Just in time!" Kate told her. "She came here just in time! What did she say?"

"Eva say: it is beautiful!" She smiled again. "Yes?"

"I didn't even learn her name..."

Eva took Kate’s hand and for the last time they looked at one another, so far away from that hard stone of Sandovisko; Natsa's tender eyes fell away from Kate, back to the baby in her arms; and Kate said, "Goodbye".



Pat Macdonald was limping in great strides around the fracture-clinic. His leg had been set in plaster. Then he saw Clara Skálová in the doorway, and he hurried over, wincing in pain. "Thank God!" he said. "I thought I’d been abandoned! How are you feeling?"

"How’s your leg?" Clara asked.

"How’s that English girl's head?" he said.

"They say she had six or seven stitches," Clara said. "She'll be fine!"

"I take it you are the party I'm seeking!" a voice said loudly. "Poláček, Czech Interior Ministry Special Investigations, and Mr. Otto Harbinger, banker; Miss Slídlová; Mr. Lovas... Mr. Krac. They tell me your name is Macdonald. You have done very well here tonight, Mr. Macdonald!"

Clara began to speak to Poláček in Czech, and Pat looked at the banker, trying to think where he had seen or heard of him before. The man beside him was English, and looked liked he needed to be seen by a triage nurse, and he was sure that the Czech investigator had said the name Krac.

Otto Harbinger may have inhabited a borderland, but the Czech banker did not feel at all at home in the wilds of Slovakia. To the unreformed communist and lover of discordant jazz, Bratislava's gamble with democracy risked everything he loved; but he could see that for the Englishwoman, it would be very different: for Kate Ashe, far from being the cause of impending partition, Bratislava must seem very much like heaven!

Egerton was clearly very impatient for his own reunion, but Kate's rescuer, Pat Macdonald, was approaching the old communist banker and the English painter on crutches, and he wheeled around to sit beside them.

"My friend Clara Skálová is being debriefed by your friend over there," Pat said. "She knows all about that bloody lighthouse!"

"Knows what about what?" the banker asked.

"It belongs to Clara's boss, Ivan Krac," Pat said. "It has some symbolism, that photographer's 'light', Krac's flash! But it was his grandfather who built the place, and it has been restituted to Krac. Look what he has done with it!"

"It was the photographer's place?" Harbinger exclaimed. "That, we didn't know! Egerton, your own cousin!"

Pat looked with puzzlement into the protective screens of the banker’s sunglasses, and suddenly remembered Gor's description of his own banker in Prague; he was sure this must be the man; the Englishman, who had obviously been through some kind of ordeal himself, seemed too shocked to speak.

"She was kept in Sandovisko!" he finally gasped.

"This is Egerton Krac, Kate's boyfriend," Harbinger explained, "and he's Ivan's cousin! That was the last place we would have thought of looking! It would have been - it is unthinkable!"

"It's unbelievable!" Pat said. "I'm a only a friend of Clara's, but she works for your cousin, Egerton, and was once closer to him than that... I work for GorPress, which is trying to take over P.S. Past and present have suddenly intertwined, and Clara led us into the black heart of it!"

"I'm going to find Kate myself," Egerton said.

He had been sure that he had recognised Clara Skálová from that morning at P.S., above Leninova, and that had brought to mind Ivan; but to discover that Kate had been kept in Sandovisko, their own property, was almost too much for the painter to take in; so, Shams must have been right about him! He and Kate had been betrayed by his own cousin! Had he twice robbed him? Then, he remembered how Ivan had told him that he trusted Milan so much, he had given him a key to Sandovisko? But could that explain this?

"I can hardly believe Krac is involved in this!" Harbinger said as Egerton left them. "You work for Milan Gor, Mr. Macdonald? He has said nothing to me about a take-over; I'm Gor's banker back in Prague! But Ivan Krac, he is rich enough through the success of P.S. Why kidnap? Why hurt his own cousin? Why snatch his cousin’s love?"

"To say that Krac didn't need money," Pat said, "might be stretching the truth."

"Krac is certainly in trouble," Clara said, as she and Miloš joined them with Tomáš and Olga. "They’re going to arrest him in Prague. I really can’t believe it!" Her husband Miloš took her hand, but he was white, and visibly shaken. "I feel nothing for him!" Clara said to her husband quietly in Czech. "But he must be innocent -."

Harbinger was listening and reconstructed a vague background to these events, a past liaison between Clara Skálová and the photographer, if not the precise dates or a visit to Sandovisko.

"What’s the charge?" he asked her, gently.

"Kidnap!" she said, "but from what I gather, this may be bigger than Krac. I'm sure he will be in the clear!"

The banker wasn’t smiling as he thought of the old Slovak photographer and his light. Krac was one dissident he had admired! Their ‘Dividing Lines’ and 'Accented Edges' were endless... and their country was in danger of falling apart. He disagreed with some of the old Slovak's views; but, surely, Krac would not have thought of kidnap!

"Where's Egerton?" Olga whispered to Tomáš.

"He was looking for the lift," he told her. "He has gone to find Kate. I think we should try to find them."



Egerton Krac felt trapped in partition, as he held on to the steel rail in the hospital lift, returned once more to his 'homeland', but feeling only that he was falling through his own inwardness, rather than rising towards Kate. The bright light, the clean lines; but a tight space - and inside, nothing - inside an emptiness, a dark and empty room... She had been standing, looking out of the window, then turned to see him, the arms of his climbing-shirt rolled up, his forearms badly cut, his eyes dull and expressionless. What was wrong?

His clothes were filthy and his face too dirty; swarthy; almost foreign; she saw beneath a strip of plaster the graze down one cheek, down under the colouring of dirt and those mild eyes, so gypsy at times, and filled with something, filled with her; but lost as well, Egerton lost as well... But it was like waking up from a dream! She ran to embrace him.

"It was that young man, Milan," Kate said, sobbing. "He was with them! I thought it would never end!"

'"I know," he said, "I had some words with Milan myself; that explains the state I'm in!"

"Thank God it's over," she said, "for the both of us!"

"Do you know who owns the lighthouse?" he said. "My cousin, Ivan!"

"Oh, Egerton!" she said.

"But Milan had the key," he said. "Ivan gave Milan the key to Sandovisko, so my cousin may have had nothing to do with this..."

"I don't want to think about that dark room now," she said. "I'm just so happy to see you again!"

She was aware of her hospital gown, the ties unloosened, the rents open, for all the world like those tears in his shirt and trousers. Where had they been? She went to him, and they did not speak; but he held her tightly, and as he turned Kate, so they faced the window, the first fine light had touched the edge of what seemed to them a stranger world, as it revealed the shapes in the returning morning across the high Danube.



"Why so solemn?" the painter asked, as he sat down in the window seat beside Kate Ashe. "At last, we can share a beautiful view!" Beside them, Tomáš Lovas looked out over Bratislava. This was beautiful! Having seen Egerton’s portrait of her, he had felt as if he had already met Kate when they had been introduced by the painter. The contours of the paint were more substantial, more personal than any photographic image, or even this odd reflection, which seemed to have nothing to do with her but hung in the glass partition, like the smeared features of somebody else.

The others had joined them, and Poláček was talking about Ivan Krac.

"From what I remember," Egerton told the investigator, "my cousin had leant Milan Procházka the keys to Sandovisko. That was last Christmas. Milan may have copied them! He may have been using the place in Ivan's absence... Or what if the young photographer hatched this whole plot, passed the key to Sandovisko to his gypsy friends and deliberately framed Ivan? He may have had a grudge against his boss, even before he fired him!"

Tomáš thought his voice sounded a little doubtful, and he could see why; even before they had learned of Sandovisko, the painter had told him how his cousin had defended Milan; and how he even suspected that Ivan Krac had at least stood idly by, and allowed all this to happen.

"Your cousin will go down!" Poláček said. "Kroupa may get off scot-free for letting Milan have the key to his place; but Milan is small fry! And Hell was just something in passing! Ivan Krac is bang in the frame with Sandovisko; Milan may have been the muscle, but we’re looking for the lens!"

"But it was all so... clumsy," Kate said. "There was nothing planned... It was Shams who told me about Narsis. The gypsies in there took me away... They couldn’t have known who I was! Then Milan happened to be taking photographs in that place we went in Smichov -."

"Happened?" Poláček interrupted. "Milan is now into pornography; he is earning money for the first time in his life from photography! We have established that much! You should never have gone near Narsis, Kate! Even if the gypsies acted alone, they knew of Milan - and his 'interest'. They took you to him! Why? But it was an arrangement I am sure was made by Ivan Krac! It’s such a pity that their ringleader escaped, before the police got to Sandovisko - and the man we do have claims he knows nothing..."

"Only Shams truly suspected Ivan," Egerton said. "He had even heard rumours that my cousin spied for the state, after his time in prison! Could there be any truth in that, Mr. Poláček?"

"That is only a rumour!" Poláček said. "I would know if it was otherwise."

"Then, if my cousin is guilty of anything -," Egerton began.

"Oh, he’s definitely guilty!" Poláček interrupted him.

"But how can you be so sure?" Kate said. "Egerton tells you Milan had the key to Sandovisko."

"How can you doubt it?" Poláček said. "He owns Sandovisko! That will be enough to partition that smug face of his behind prison bars! The landlocked lighthouse might have remained an innocent symbol for the uselessness of his art under repression, but instead the old Slovak has turned his folly into a dark place of captivity for two innocent women!"

Egerton knew that because his cousin had been a dissident, the old communist Poláček might be biassed. "But when was Ivan last there?" he said. "He can't be in the frame! The evidence against him may seem horrendous, but surely it's circumstantial!"

"We’ll get Milan to talk!" Poláček said. "That was a pretty bad beating you gave him, by the way! They want to keep him in hospital; he has three fractured ribs and his cheekbone is broken. He deserved as much! But his evidence will confirm what I already know."

"And it will cover up the ClimAxis?" Harbinger said.

"The ClimAxis?" Poláček said. "That is not a legitimate organisation. It is only another rumour, Mr. Harbinger! Krac is our man! I remember how he always tried to terminate any better vision of our progress in the past; some of his work has the clinical, unfeeling precision of the abortionist: the view is held for only the moment he slaughters it, sucking it into that lens with all the life it possesses. Like me, you are one of the old guard, Otto; and surely you must have seen the same!"

Hell's banker said nothing, looking out of the window through those shades.


17. The Keeper Kept

Every year, Prague is gripped by a summer inversion, in which the heavy air becomes trapped along the valley of the River Vltava through August, the unruly heat unbearably flattened out fast across the city by high temperatures and strange atmospherics. The storm-threat never abates and brief thunderstorms come thick and sudden, driving anybody outside beneath the nearest lintel, till the storm clouds have passed; the sun beats down; the faces tan; yet all eyes watch the sky for the sign of the next wild downpour. Olga Slídlová had arrived in court with Pat Macdonald for the arraignment in what the press were beginning to dub the Inversion Trial. The courtroom was filled to capacity and extremely warm under the humid weight of high summer, and the clerk had to speak loudly in order to be heard above the hubbub of protest and excited conversation.

"It will be like this every day of the trial," Pat Macdonald said. "Those who miss a day will lose their places..."

"I can see Mr. Harbinger!" she said.

The banker in his sunglasses was on the second row from the back, but then, Olga frowned slightly, as she saw her father sitting behind him. What could have dragged old Slídl away from his summer season in the Giant Mountains? There was a disreputable looking character with a huge red moustache sitting beside him, and Olga wondered if this could be Egerton’s ‘carp’, the 'secret' agent. Her father caught her eye and waved.

"I think the whole of Prague is here!" she said to Pat.

He laughed. "They would be," he said, "if there was a little more room!"

"This will become a show-trial!" she said. "Especially when his cousin Krac and victim Kate Ashe turn up for his defence!"

As Ivan Krac was brought up from the cells to the defendant’s box there was a momentary hush, followed by a crescendo of more excited murmuring. The clerk’s voice shouted for silence, as the judge made his entrance. In spite of the threat now hanging over him, Krac had managed a merger with SlovaKable, which had taken place with him inside; he was now managing his business affairs from prison. After all that time he had already spent on remand in Pankrác, the photographer's face seemed a pale mask.

Three gypsies had already been sentenced for the crime of kidnap. The man they called Sly, the gypsy ringleader, had unfortunately escaped, possibly into Hungary. The younger photographer, Milan, was to be sentenced for his part in the abduction, or at least, the secretion of Kate Ashe, though as he had agreed to make a damning statement against his former employer, his sentence had been reduced. According to Milan, he had only acted as Krac’s intermediary in passing on a key to Sandovisko to Sly; he claimed that Sly had demanded a huge ransom for Kate’s release, but that he had not wished to betray his mentor Krac.

The most surprising fact to emerge from the investigation of the photographer’s affairs - and an ironic twist in the public discussion of the tale of the cousins Krac - had been what the defence called Ivan’s ‘only crime’, that of silence in relation to Egerton and his Czech inheritance. It had become clear that Egerton's father should have inherited the property restituted by the Czecho-Slovakian state to his cousin; and Ivan had certainly parted Egerton from that 'light'; but the Krac family folly, Sandovisko, the place of Kate's secretion, was belated in recovery, and seemed an empty gift.

At the close of the arraignment, the judge set the date of trial for the start of January. Outside, the bright sky was touched with foreboding, the storm-threat near, beneath that layer of weighty air in the final summer of a republic that was about to experience its own share of fragmentation and despair.



Squinting through his screwed up eyes at the Romanesque arch above him, Ivan Krac could not have imagined a better prison window had he tried: it hung upside down as he lay on the cot beneath it, that arch forming a cold smile raised not in surprise at the photographer’s predicament, but stretched instead as he was in barred mockery at this sham arraignment! He would smile back grimly, sharing the irony in that cruel mouth of wrongful partition, which at other times, when upright, he would think of as the wrong end of a tunnel or a lens. The governor of Pankrác had refused to allow him a single photograph for his wall, but had given him a camera, an old Praktica, an empty machine; his piece of mockery sat beside a solitary bonsai Ivan had named Yggdrasil.

At least the light in this cell was soft and yellow, dripping from the plain white plastered walls, so you hardly noticed the cracks. But Krac had closed his eyes again, lying on his back on the cot with a black prison blanket half across his face, when Dušan checked his cell, and was unaware of that extra eye up against the lens in the door. Bathed in sunlight, from that part visible, the prisoner's face appeared quite serene. Not for the first time, Dušan felt gratified that he had arranged for his ward’s transfer to this cell on the south-side of C Wing! If their famed photographer had needed anything, he had sorely wanted an end to his own partition from the light! His face, before grown haggard and drawn, had softened with its touch; and over the last few weeks in a new cell, he had become more forthcoming - the move had surely changed him! Dušan allowed himself a smile of professional satisfaction. Quietly, he slid back the lens cap and continued along the gangway of Deck Two. As he walked, rubber-soled on iron, the warder began a low tuneless whistling through his teeth: Pankrác wasn’t such a terrible place!



Later that morning, Dušan unlocked the door and stepped into the cell. Ivan was seated on the bed. Somewhere, one of the prison’s many gypsies had begun to strum a guitar, and Krac, forbidden a single photograph, laughed, as he cocked his head, listening to the sad refrain from the Gican.

"You cater so well for Romi," he said laconically, "and that 'commie' bastard with the harmonica! Still, I don’t know what I’d do in this place, if I did have some things of my own, or even a film for that camera!"

"If it was up to me..." Dušan began, shrugging his shoulders.

"You’d silence the lot of ‘em?" Krac said.

The warder frowned, a little hurt. "Your old cell would make a good darkroom!" he said.

"That’s the thing about darkrooms," the photographer said, "you wouldn’t want to live in one! I am grateful, you know, Dušan..."

Dušan smiled, appreciatively; there had to be such brief moments of empathy in a prison. "I have some good news," he said. "I shouldn't be telling you this! You’re to have a visitor tomorrow: a different visitor; not Clara Skálová; and not that old man who brings you books; a visitor from England. It’s that cousin of yours, who you are to call in your defence."

The photographer said nothing, but, his face, blank, turned to the window. Dušan recognised that aspect: the prisoner was a man of even temperament, but occasionally he would be visited by gloom. He secured the door, turning the key slowly and as discretely as possible in that cumbersome lock.



The pensive, grey-haired Slovak did not walk in the courtyard in the wind with the other prisoners, but sat alone on a rough stone block in a painted porch with his back against the prison wall; Ivan had never cadged, nor taken, nor traded; he had also stopped watching these men, who, thankfully, had adopted a respectful attitude towards him in his separation from them. Krac was a bit of a star in here; it was just like the old days, he thought, though this time some of them did think he was guilty! The partition between them was that much narrower! Ivan Krac sat impassively through his exercise period in the prison that had been the scene, in his own time, of the hangings of the Czech, Slánský, and the Slovak, Clementis, after a Fifties show-trial for their 'crime' of 'Titoism', speaking to nobody, as was his norm.

"Time!" somebody shouted and as the men began to file back into the building, Ivan stood for a moment in the middle of the courtyard staring up into the sky. The wind caught at his starched prison trousers, which flapped about his legs. The heart can surge most gladfully at the slimmest chance, the narrowest slit of sky; but as he followed the others into the gloomy hallway, a rattling of locks welcomed him back; and the slit of the sky was gone! The sound of the wind that tore against the walls outside, and the hollow roar of the doors, as they were being slammed shut along Deck Two, further disheartened him in this, his greatest solitude; and when he reached his cell, he closed his eyes against the near sadistic sight of the governor's Praktica.



At the appointed hour the next day, Ivan Krac was led down to the Visiting Hall, where his cousin was waiting. When he entered, carrying his single book, Egerton Krac was released by a warder at the other end of the long visiting hall and they met in the middle. Ivan recalled the place of their very first meeting on Leninova, and compared it to their reunion here, which seemed by contrast at once less fraught with actual dread, but more like the scene for some paltry melodrama, or perhaps a saga, the lost cousins Krac, restored to one another, in this fearful hall! As they shook hands, the painter wasn’t smiling, but there was fair beauty in Egerton that transcended an absence of any joy, and the photographer thought that even as an enemy the aspect of his long lost cousin would have been uplifting.

The light through the glass of the roof had flooded the hall, as Ivan gripped Egerton's hand; but against the tattered red wallpaper of this visiting hall in Prague, Ivan, the remand-prisoner looked withered and sear.

"I got your last letter," the painter said. "You do look the worst for wear! I have worked in a prison, myself; but I don't think that I'd want to work here!"

"Thank you for coming, Egerton," he said. "I hope you have forgiven me! That claim on Sandovisko was an error; but that single error was my only 'crime', I swear to you! Whatever the courts decide, and however you feel, I am still your flesh and blood! You must know that I wouldn't harm a hair on Kate's head; not for all the world! Thank you for defending my innocence! Congratulations on your wedding, by the way..."

"I wish you could have been there," Egerton said.

"You are the new and I am the old Krac," Ivan said. "I should have been there; I'm sure Miroslav, who I loved very much, would have wanted that. To the press here, I am ‘the dark flash’! The 'the kidnapper with the camera'! The 'old Slovak pagan'! But your doubting me in this case would have been a lot more hurtful than all that, Egerton, and I am so grateful for your support!"

"I don't feel that I have anything to forgive," Egerton said. "And Sandovisko means nothing to me! Nothing at all! You could have it back!"

"Of course, you didn't grow up here," Ivan said. "It was Sandovisko that trapped me between two worlds, between two countries... I was taken there as a child, and from an early age, I think, she became the mistress of my fate! Your father would have remembered the place; I'm surprised that he never described it to you; perhaps he wanted to forget... But it was just too tempting for me in the end; how I wanted that old ruin! How I felt that place denied! But an arraignment for kidnap, Egerton, this is just too fantastical... a towering injustice!"

"Damn the light!" Egerton said quietly. "That makes no difference to me! It is what was done there to my wife, Kate! And sometimes, I find myself in two minds about how I feel about you! I believe what you have told me about Milan; Kate and I are both convinced of your innocence, Ivan; but how can I know with certainty that they aren't right? How can I ever really be sure that you weren't involved?"

"I was never there, Egerton," the photographer said. "That is why I had leant the place to Milan Procházka last Christmas... I had no use for it, though I had wanted it so much! I was far too busy here in Prague to do anything about my returning lighthouse in the east! I have made some great mistakes, Egerton, but my biggest mistake was giving Milan the key to Sandovisko! That bastard has hurt all of us; he betrayed me, and is only lying to save his own skin!"

"That will have to come out at the trial," Egerton said. "I want to believe you; and you mustn't lose faith!"

"What hope will I have in January?" Ivan said. "The dark was once held to be so blind and malignant that trials were never held in winter! The Danelaw was clear: January would have been Forseti's blind time; justice was impossible in partition from the light! Here, we call January Led, ‘Ice’ - and ice was the mythical repository for wickedness! My only solace is the sure knowledge that the future is meant for you! We were taught under communism that capitalism was doomed; in a sense, we embraced Ragnarok, and it gave us the cold war, and partition from the west; in Ragnarok, the gods slain by giants, the earth sinks beneath the sea, but Yggdrasil survives, the great triple-trunked ash, sheltering a couple destined to repopulate the cleansed earth, under a bright new sun... At times, as I watch the wider destruction of that communist world I fought so hard against, and the lead-up to the partition of Czechoslovakia, herself, I almost think of myself as the necessary victim, while you and Kate are left to carry on! We may have accepted a poisoned cup of weather from the north; we have rejected Lenin’s forecast for what is perhaps equally a folly - of far less predictable, libertarian chaos! Here, I can see only Ragnarok: these are the final days... Like that which I fought, I may be doomed to vast injustice. The governor here in Pankrác at least has a sense of humour: he has given me an old Praktica camera on which to focus as history flies by me! The empty machine is a constant reminder, whispering ‘Wait and see!’ Because in here, Egerton, there is no more of photography..."


18. Brief Exposure

It was a freezing day in January and Olga Slídlová watched Kate and Egerton Krac as they arrived in the Prague courtroom in the third week of the trial. She caught Egerton's eye and winked at him. She had put on so much weight in the past few months that she had barely squeezed into her row! Egerton pointed her out to Kate, and as she waved at her, more than one person in the gallery looked around to see who the Englishwoman could be signalling. They were followed in by Milan Gor and a retinue Olga assumed to be from ‘Cerebralign'; and the winter-coated party, entering the warmth of the public gallery, seemed to sum up for her the absurdity of the proceedings so far: the English couple had initially relied on official court transcripts that transformed all that had passed into a kind of Czenglish-legalese; what would have been obscure enough in the Czech legal record, must have been damn near incomprehensible in further translation! Then, Milan Gor had become a minor celebrity, when he had bypassed the court and arranged for his own stenographer to be present in the courtroom, and for an English version to be translated by his staff at GorPress. It was strange that as Ivan Krac defended himself against the charge of kidnap, having recently fought off a hostile take-over bid for his company P.S., his cousin and his alleged victim were depending on the help of his business rival, Milan Gor.

Olga had attended every day, and like Egerton she still wasn't sure. The painter had told her that sometimes he thought his cousin had somehow allowed all this to happen, and that Ivan's image had become tarnished by his wrongful possession of Sandovisko, as well as the unfounded or misplaced trust he had expressed for Milan; but the painter was also sure that his cousin the photographer was not completely duplicitous, or in any way directly involved in Kate's kidnap from Narcis, her partition from him, or her secretion at Sandovisko. "Why would he want to hurt me?" Egerton had asked her. "Why would he hurt himself?"

She knew nothing about him as a businessman, but Olga felt a great deal of sympathy for Ivan Krac, the photographer, the artist and the dissident, once before imprisoned, and only with their freedom, for a brief while feted before his downfall. Despite the lack of firmer corroborative evidence, the public prosecutor Mendel had been robust in his attacks and highly critical of the person, the work and the character of the accused. Though the only evidence against the businessman-photographer was the word of Milan Procházka, who could be discredited, as he was in prison, and Krac's ownership of Sandovisko, which, at least at the time of those events, had not been in any doubt, Mendel had attempted to blacken the man as deeply as he could manage through the harshest criticism of court exhibited examples of his work. It was if the prosecutor thought that he could damn the photographer through that rather partial portfolio of pictures, carefully selected to suggest something sordid, twisted and even slightly sadistic in the past capture of Ivan Krac: scenes of an underlife, cataloguing extremes, one picture of a working prostitute, her face all beaten up, desaturated of every colour, other than red.

Mendel had asked in court why he could have chosen to highlight the hurt, and questioned whether photography should be considered an art, when so much of it was dark, and doctored, and false; without any real context or hint of inspiration! Krac had been portrayed as the product of unfettered capitalism and a representative of 'the dark arts', and the past, a simple con-man who had become a more nefarious conjourer under freedom, and through a faith in fragmentation, and partition, had even been tearing his homeland apart! Press coverage of the trial had already turned half of Prague against the man Mendel called the 'old Slovak pagan'.

Before the defendant took the stand for the last time, Mendel would again address the jury, but first he looked into the press gallery and smiled in greeting. "Over the past few weeks," he told them, "we have heard a lot about Krac, the innocent artist; but don’t let that blind you as he has been blinded; don’t fall for that deception he dealt in by trade! There is no reason to believe that an artist in his singular partition from normal society is above crime, that he can never descend to its level! On the contrary, art and crime aren't mutually exclusive; and a decent camera is no defence; not even a decent camera with a telephoto lens!" Mendel put his hands on the jurors’ rail and leant towards them. "Art requires the same ruthless dedication, the same daring, the same skills..."

Olga looked at Ivan Krac seated in the defendant’s box. His face was impassive, though very pale from those months spent in prison, and he was listening intently.

"I ask you to put aside thoughts of artistic innocence," the prosecutor said, "and picture instead the adjusted images Krac has worked with all his life; think about the secretive nature of photography, which is to snatch at what it wants, to steal images and burgle scenes; to lay fraudulent claim to entire passages of life; to do away with privacy; in other words, to murder, callously... private lives! I have talked about the life and character of the accused in his curious partition, and I have introduced witnesses and published and photographic evidence to demonstrate that the defendant is more than a little flawed! He may not be forthcoming about his work or the crimes of which he stands accused, but you have heard the evidence and seen the images for yourselves! I call Ivan Krac!"

Mendel had shouted before he turned and some in the jury were startled. The photographer was making his way across to the stand; his drained face was at that moment more than ever like a desaturated mask, Olga thought, as he took a tight hold of the rail.

Throughout the trial, Kate had struggled most with the foreign language, the immediate indecipherable argument that seemed never to end and wouid never be explained until the court was in recess. She had had to judge each picture herself as though in deafness to those who sought to explain them, and they had not been pretty images. As she looked at Ivan today, she recalled blocking out the sound of his speech in the cavern under Strahov Monastery, and she focused again on his face, as she had then, remembering the picture she had tried to take in the place they called Hell, the difference in his features down there, so filled with life and animated, whereas up here in the brightness of the courtroom, he seemed frozen and lifeless. Her camera had been lost, but the image still in her mind was as detailed as what it had contained. The speech went on, and this time she did not feel faint.

"Would you agree that you have an image-problem?" Mendel asked him.

Olga expelled air from her nose, as Krac stood speechless, as well as absolutely colourless, in the witness box.

"Please answer the question!" the judge said. "And answer all of the questions, with honesty, and as fully as you can."

"What question?" Ivan asked. "For days, I have listened to this nonsense being turned over, again and again, in what the press are calling the Inversion Trial! Nonsense about photography! Nonsense about me! Nonsense about capitalism! Nonsense about the key to Sandovisko! Nonsense about my 'uncanny' interest in partition! Nonsense about the acronym, P.S.! Injudicial nonsense! Eschatalogical nonsense! Apocryphal nonsense! In the absence of real evidence, am I here only to listen to more of the same?"

"You are on trial, sir!" the judge told him. "The jury will decide what is and isn't 'nonsense'!"

"Am I to be tried for working?" Ivan said. "Am I to be tried for capitalism or for art?"

"I take it," the judge said, "that you agree you have an image-problem."

"After what has been said in this trial in Ice," Ivan said, "I'm not surprised! I demand the right, at least, to defend my work!"

"That won’t be necessary!" Mendel said.

"Allow me to finish!" Ivan said. "You have submitted my own photographs as 'character' evidence against me! With the weakness in your other evidence, you widened your attack!" He looked at the judge. "Am I to be tried for my work?"

"You may defend it, if you wish, Mr. Krac," the judge said.

Mendel sat down heavily.

"You have called into question the fact of photography as art," Ivan said. "Photographers aren’t artists, though they must certainly have a feeling for light. Photography is a more like a mirror; it is interpretation and reflection, rather than creation; but that is not to say that we picture makers are clumsy technicians who are incapable of making the leap and advancing art! And here in Prague, focus for so much wonderful work, I should hardly be forced to mount a defence for what the painter Ingres famously dismissed as 'faultographs'! Photography could be called the art of contrasts; I am talking about the bare feminine shell against the well-buffed automotive steel, the pink carnation in the butt of the Kalashnikov. Anything possessing contrasts must aspire to some form of art; and only the darkest partitions of space are a hundred per cent artless! So, maybe I am an artist, Mr, Mendel! The inclusion of photography as an art has some legal basis: for as early as 1862, the French government declared the work of the camera to be an art form in response to a campaign to the contrary led by the painter Ingres and his League of Artists Against Photography; though I would be the first to admit that the photographer, in his partition from art, depends upon an unreasoning machine! From its introduction, photography usurped the work artists had managed; though, today, in this courtroom we can see that the camera has been excluded, forcing you to rely once again, instead, on outmoded pen-portraits, in the absence of the machine. But that form of portraiture is a passive, if rather painstaking kind of reflection; while behind the more active partition of photography, my assertion would be, the solitary battle is for constant vigilance, and victory is luck. In reply to Mr. Mendel, I can answer yes, I do love my work! The prosecution has introduced only fragments of it in an attempt to suggest that I am capable of this terrible crime; so I ask that I be allowed to use my own work in my defence."

"What? All of it?" the judge said. "We are all here very familiar with your work, and your request to introduce further pictures as evidence for the defence is denied, though you are, of course, free to describe your court exhibited work, Mr. Krac - the nature of which the prosecution has certainly called into question."

"I ask only one further image in defence," Ivan said.

"Very well, Mr. Krac," the judge said, "a single image."

The defence counsel, Hrasky, wheeled forward a huge monochrome photograph mounted on card, which had been reproduced at P.S. for the courtroom. It was a grainy image: still blurred in motion, a tank's gun in the foreground was softly extruded from the surrounding crowd, who were by contrast sharp, and very still, as though unmoved. A murmur ran around the public gallery, as a clerk helped Hrasky to mount the picture on the board that stood beneath the bench; he handed the judge a smaller copy, which he unrolled.

"You may proceed," the judge said.

"I took that picture of a drunken-tank on Wine-castle Street," Ivan recalled, "back in 1968. It was a scene of contrasts, both astounding and ludicrous. It was and is a matter of perception. Theirs and ours. Prior to the invasion of Czechoslovakia in Sixty-eight, the allied troops had been assured by their officers that they had been issued with a cordial invitation. Primed in this misperception, they were even surprised that the pubs were shut!"

Somebody laughed loudly in the gallery, and the judge looked at the man and coughed meaningfully.

"Aristotle saw that a tiny hole in the shutter of his window," Ivan said, "cast across a darkened room an inverted-image of a scene outside: the basic principle of the camera obscura. This inverted image, confronting ‘Socialism with a Human Face’, was the Soviet-led invasion of Nineteen-sixty-eight. I was at the Radio Palace on Wine-castle Street the day the tanks reeled up from Wenceslas Square and parted us from our freedom. They didn’t speak our language. With their wine-dark skins and long faces, these rather more sober Mongolian soldiers tried to locate the main radio transmitter there -."

"This is too much!" the prosecutor said. "Our history has no place in this courtroom! I have deliberately avoided very much emphasis on the defendant's dissident past, and I ask now that he do the same, and make no further attempt to play to the gallery!"

"Yes, I agree," the judge said. "Mr. Krac, please try to confine yourself to this picture, in partition from the past; and answer any questions directly, honestly, and to the best of your ability!"

"Very well," Ivan said, "but I have to say that the prosecution has not confined itself to pictures in partition! Nor is Mr. Mendel, himself, shy of playing to the gallery! Before this scene would be photographed, Warsaw Pact tanks had rolled across the countryside, having fallen easily through open borders from several directions at once. ‘Your borders are our borders,’ Brezhnev had warned Dubček - which had been rather like telling him: ‘your face is our face, so you don’t mind if we pull it!’"

The same man laughed in the gallery, and he was now joined by a few other people. "I must warn the court," the judge said, "that further disturbance will result in my clearing the gallery! Please go on, Mr. Krac!"

"This oddest Stalinist viticulture," Ivan said, "was falsely labelled, ‘appelation contrôlé Marx’. Laying claim to internationalism, it masqueraded under the socialist brand! Power-drunk strangers had entered the frame, tumbling from East Germany and Poland, pouring in from the Ukraine, and rolling up from the Republic of the Magyars - flooding Czechoslovakia from north, south, east and west: Germans through Děčín, Poles round Ostrava and Žilina, the Soviets over Čierna and Košice, and the Magyars upon Bratislava."

The judge was nodding and the prosecutor was looking down at the floor. Olga felt that at last Krac was fighting back and regaining some lost ground.

"Transports landed every two minutes," Ivan reminded them, "bringing in more! It was the largest, most ruthless act of international terrorism we ever saw. The philosopher Kierkegaard wrote about dread being the only possible response to freedom, but nothing of the dreadful anger I captured here - in the face of its suppression! The Radio Palace on Wine-castle Street was broadcasting live on equipment that could be moved from studio to studio; through those partitions, to another small partition; then from closet to closet; and finally, as retreat was the only answer, to any last wired location we could find... In a way, speech was far more important than photography, those secret broadcast far superior to the images denied... For months, the radio was to be the only source of subjective, non-Soviet information, but for a while the Radio Palace was the solitary chamber of free transmission, behind those slim partitions, as the Russians fought to take control... I think that it was only when we lost the airwaves and the sound died that we knew we had failed."


19. The Camera's Shame

The court was very quiet, and Clara Skálová, sitting with the English couple, sensed that Ivan had won back some of the support he had lost over the last few months. Like Kate and Egerton, and many other honest citizens, Clara Skálová had a great deal of sympathy for the accused. Now that he was giving evidence, Clara could recall why she had loved Ivan all those years ago. He might be no saint, but his arguments clearly refuted the earlier accusation of darkness and perversion! The photographer was defending more than a kidnap charge. But there was Sandovisko; there was always Sandovisko; and there was also the fact that Ivan had said nothing about his cousin’s inheritance, but had claimed it for himself! A single absent image, the almost unimaginable folly of the dark house in which Kate had been secreted, stood as it had been described before the court, like a tower of gore; Sandovisko was casting its long shadow, during their own partition, and Clara wondered whether that would be enough to darken the minds of the jury against him; the prosecutor Mendel had called it "the towering optic of Krac's greed" and called into question "the photographer's bloody nerve".

"I think I can safely say," the judge told the court, "that this image is even more indelibly stained on our memories than before! Thank you, Mr. Krac. Unless there is anything else you wish to say about the photograph, I will ask that it be also labelled as evidence and removed from the court."

The clerk moved to take down the drunken-tank picture, and the judge turned towards Mendel.

"The prosecution may resume," he said.

Mendel rose.

"The image we have seen is a famous one, Mr. Krac," he said. "You will recall that you included it in your book, ‘Dividing Lines: our Accented Edges’, where you accompanied the photograph with the following text." He looked down at a piece of paper which had been passed to him by one of his team when the picture was introduced. "And I quote: ‘When I returned to the studio, I examined the film in partition, before inverting the image for some selective sharpening. That negative was truly the reflection of our own reversal and containment. There could be no excuse for what it captured, and what now contained us...’ bah-hah-bah, bah-bah-bah." He skipped through some text and came to the end: "There can be no just reason for such cruel containment by governments, ‘even if the gods and the gifted may stand above moral laws.’ Can you remember what you meant by that statement?"

"Certainly," Ivan said. "I was quoting the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard in relation to the uniqueness of individual experience..." He looked at the jury. "He differed from Hegel," he said, "- and by extension, Marx. Soren Kierkegaard rejected reliance on a group, or institution, 'the system' of Hegel; but argued instead for solitary perception and 'passionate inwardness' in partition from the structures of the world; and he counters the idea of dialectical materialism, that man is a product of an ordered historical process -."

Ivan paused, as the prosecutor banged his hand sharply on a table.

"Kierkegaard isn’t on trial here!" Mendel said.

"Kindly answer the question," the judge said, "what did you mean about standing above moral laws?"

"The artist is no god," Ivan said. "With his own passionate inwardness, the artist doesn’t really attain the god-like power of creation; instead, he controls the emergence of his subjective vision through free will; in his solitary perception, he is appreciative of its evolution, in an artistic partition from truth. He can see and he can shape and he knows the difference. If any two books can be said to frame the photographer’s world, they are the ‘Concluding Unscientific Postscript' of Kierkegaard, and 'The Pencil of Nature', by the English chemist, Henry Fox Talbot, both published in the same year, 1846. 'The Pencil' was the world’s first book of photographs."

"Why the pencil?" the judge asked him, politely.

Mendel leapt forward. "Where is the point in this pencil?" he demanded.

The judge frowned at the prosecutor, and he sat down.

"The philosopher’s last work," Ivan said, "gave Europe his thoughts on the importance of individual experience, subjective truth; and in the same year, the chemist, Fox Talbot, handed nature a pencil! With the advent of photography, for the first time nature was allowed to draw herself: she replaced the artist with the scene in her own partition. Mechanics had conquered art and democratised the picture... It was the technology of Fox Talbot’s negative-positive image that handed nature her pencil. Chemistry had caught up with mechanics to fix our new type of map. These to me are the god-like creations! On one hand, we have individualism and the singular conclusions of existentialism; on the other, the first bloom of mass photography; both were great works of liberation, and not only for me... Where a principle proceeds, and something finer is made possible, imagination will always follow; and with birth of photographic capture came the delivery of individual freedom and the fullest realisation of man's possibilities in his own partition from nature: two years after the introduction of photography, various revolutions swept across Europe; and the new forces of photography were driving artists forward: just look at the meticulous detail in Inez's paintings, which, ironically, look as though they were based on the capture from an optical device! Four years after the birth of photographic capture, his radical ideas centred on music-drama, Wagner began work on Götterdämmerung -."

"What I am trying to get at," the prosecutor said, again rising to his feet, "is what you mean, and what you believe by ‘god-like’! These are mere footnotes in history, Mr. Krac. But let me refer back to the photograph we have just seen. Would you say that such an image can guarantee the artist - I’m sorry: its photographer - immortality?"

"It is the triumph of mechanics," Ivan said, "that a camera exists inside a scene the hand of man can only later record or seek to replicate. It is the camera with its superior inwardness, through any situation, that's immortal! Cameras are like ‘continuing presences’ secreted through our history, their technology frozen in time, part of the frame forever. The camera doesn’t move. It is also history's pencil, existing in an image even after the eye moves on."

"I think that is enough!" Mendel said. "I would now like to move on."

"I think Mr. Krac is still making his point," the judge said. "I am willing to let him go on."

Ivan looked back towards the jury. "Anybody can break a lens," he said, "but not its capture: its record in partition can't be broken. As soon as it became possible, through chemistry, in the Eighteen-forties, to fix the image, the world fell into Daguerrotypomania! We couldn't get enough! A photographer will move on, but the image he has captured is the thing itself, and timeless; the eye can briefly be a witness, but the lens is the event! No person is immortal, but incidents have become eternal events because they were caught on film, rather than on paper or canvas. Think of the procession of the Archduke Ferdinand through Sarajevo in Nineteen-fourteen. The assassination of President Kennedy in Sixty-three: the motorcade is still in motion; the motorcade moves on; the horror never falters; and the lens is tracking an open limousine, forever. This is the secret of eternal events: that they defy the fact of historical and locational difference, or any such partition; they are fixed, and living on with us for as long as they are observed! Through the medium of film, the processions in Dallas and Sarajevo are actually taking place! All the participants are cheated of mercy! The photographer may not be a killer by nature, but he can so very easily become the accessory to interminable murder."

There was silence, and though Mendel opened his mouth, he chose not to speak, but simply tossed his pencil across the table. To his mind the silence could almost have been damning; and he let it go on for a while. "So now it’s murder!" he said at last. "But let us stick with the lesser crimes for which are you being tried, Mr. Krac. You have yourself described photography as fraud. Would you like to elaborate for this court?"

"It must be rare," Ivan told them, "for a photographer to destroy a picture on the grounds that is a positive topical image which could reassure millions. Yet this I have done - not once, but many times: I have destroyed negatives to prevent their publication and to ensure that no softer image take away from the hardness in the partition I desired... Admittedly, my decision was also political. In a democracy, an image isn’t just caught or reflected: it is carefully selected. At that time, I had chosen to represent only the harshness, and in sharing the contemporary prejudices of my fellow countrymen, I undoubtedly did a great disservice to one amiable Russian soldier and his Czech girlfriend who once posed for me."

There was a sympathetic murmur from the gallery, and Mendel looked up, again wondering how this would impact on the jurors. The judge had already indicated his own interest, and a wish for Krac to go on; Mendel now thought that the introduction of photography into the trial may not have been a wise idea, though it was too late at this stage in the trial for him to change his mind; but he would have felt a lot easier, if some of the rather more negative imagery had remained on exhibition in the courtroom!

"Photography is nothing if not unfair," Ivan went on. "Though banned from court, the irony is that the camera can in other circumstances provide minute and impartial evidence of facts. That is not to claim that mechanical accuracy, in its partition from the truth, is at all times ‘fair’. The coexistence of technology and the favourable opportunity are insufficient, in themselves, to guarantee truth! The pose that offends is plucked; the lens that offends is capped... Behind the cruelest partition of photography, selection and rejection are all! The camera cannot lie, but it can be the accomplice in deliberate blinding, and to that extent, certainly be charged with fraud."

The court was silent.

"Live in Truth!" Mendel said, "that is our motto, Mr. Krac, the motto of our revolution, the rallying cry of the former dissidents, and the expressed aim of our new democracy. ‘Truth Must Prevail!’ Yet you have admitted that far from living in truth, you have worked all your life in lies!"

"Not all my life," Ivan said, "but certainly, for many years..." There was some further laughter, and the judge chose merely to look up at the gallery, while it died away. "The fact is, a decent photographer finds it impossible to live in the truth!" Ivan said. "He can pan its periphery for the perfect opportunity; but he need never take it, even if it arrives; and indeed, he may be diverted away from it by inclination... The visible truth tends to be well observed, whereas the capture of its exceptions are very rare. Where the mechanics of photography is striking, and most aspires to art, it least resembles truth! Where it best succeeds, it is, therefore, in its partition from the truth, the most subjective, and unrepresentative form of art! And at its heights, as this court knows, it may well be faked! After they die, most honest photographers choose Hell, where they can continue to work, exactly as before! Photographers, such as myself, are tempted to ask the Devil himself to say 'cheese', to raise the level of the flames, and repeat his atrocity!"

There was no laughter this time, and Ivan’s smile was one of sadness, as though, as well as his own history, and fondness for his work, he, too, recalled a meeting with Kate and Milan in a Prague club called Hell.

"So you would agree with me that it a shameful profession!" Mendel said.

"I have published my opinion," Ivan said, "that the camera cannot blush, but it is in part the accessory to our shame. The most moving image would be an empty monument in the absence of any subjective memories, including those of shame; a photograph springs to life only for those who will remember. There lies the true impotence of any record against the potential forgetfulness of posterity, and the real transience in any photographable truth... That the sum of my work lies in the darkest partition of history, I can only lament; but I do hope that my images will outlast me! However formed and derived, or even misconstrued and baseless, our words must be held responsible, if they are to matter; as with my pictures, each word is very dear to me, and the true cost of this defence has been immeasurable! The photographer's ambition is to avoid being recognised, or shown up like this, for lying and faking, twisting and turning, touching up and pasting out a world’s mistakes; but I would be the first to agree with you, Mr. Mendel, that may be an Olympian ambition!"

Mendel sighed wearily at him. "Indeed, it may, sir!" he said. Then, the prosecutor sat down heavily, almost as though he had been struck by Ivan. Conversation had broken out in the courtroom. Two policemen were rising to return the photographer from this open light to a darker cell. His ideas were on record, Olga thought, and here, in answering Mendel's charges, Ivan Krac had restated them without fear or reservation; she wondered whether his cousin Egerton would be as sure as she, later that night, of his innocence.



"It’s photography on trial," Clara told Kate Ashe in the Hotel Europa. "This has really become a winter pantomime, but Ivan isn't a pantomime villain! From the start, Mendel has been hoping for a conviction on the basis of character; and the camera, not the act! Today, I really believe he has lost the jury; they can just see through him."

"This is sounding like some fundamentalist Sharia court," Pat said, "though I don't think Mendel is yet calling for a fatwa against the photographer."

"The dark flash of Sandovisko," Kate said, "that’s what the prosecutor calls him. Yet is that really something he need live down?" She noticed Milan Gor frowning, though she felt that even he must have his doubts; but Gor was no friend of Ivan Krac; still, he was helping them with those translations, and they hadn't been able to invite Pat Macdonald along, without also inviting his boss. "How can you describe dark with light?" she said. "Wasn’t Ivan Krac as blinded as everyone else by the situation around him? But his photography is incidental, like his ownership of Sandovisko; they don't add to up to innocence or guilt! He only owned a dark room! And he only saw what he saw! The court watches us both, willing us to win; but do they know who's side we're really on?"

"For all his cod philosophy," Gor said, "that old Slovak dissident has never captured my sympathy from his own sense of partition, or once turned my eye; so I had no hesitation in turning on him! And the evidence would seem to be sufficient! I really think your own view a family one: you should at least admit the possibility of your cousin's guilt."

"Kate shook her head. "We're grateful for the translation," she said, "but you can't change our minds, Mr. Gor!"

"Until this reversal of fortune, he was a man of vision," Harbinger said. "Before his cruel partition from the light, Ivan Krac was an artist I admired, both for his photography, and 'Accented Edges'! The negative imagery Mendel has been using in his charade of a prosecution of our great photographer through the courts! But while Krac is under attack, his lens is still wide open, yet unashamedly dark! In our sudden dread on this, the edge of freedom, we can talk about a flag of fears, that colourful symbol of a threatened tripartite federation: the Czech red, the Moravian white, the Slovakian blue; and weren’t Ivan’s images equally true of that earlier time here, capturing all the terror in the colours he did still see around us? Didn’t those dread things of his shake us because we needed shaking?"

"Was it too much for you today?" Egerton said quietly to Kate. "You know, you needn't have sat through it! You could even go home."

"We might as well be deaf in court," Kate told him, "and with only a single photograph to go on, for a while today it was like helplessly watching a single horrific event repeating tragically through a closed window; but I could hardly blink, Egerton, let alone feel bored in there! The jury seemed to be following him intently. To have lost your defining tool, to be denied your film, to be left with only an empty machine! I feel so sorry for Ivan, in his partition from the light! But in that dark room of his in Sandovisko, I was really blind! So this is nothing! I am just so glad at least that I can see in there!"

Even here, in the Europa, Egerton had sharp memories of that burning chemical spray, his own partition from the day, and his equally blinding welcome in the lights of Disney; and he frowned, thinking of his cousin the photographer in Pankrác prison, Sandovisko's former keeper kept.

"I suppose," he said to her, "I take on that mantle: the dark flash, I mean; now that his blind lighthouse has been properly restituted! This, too, may turn out to be a curse! And there's nothing we can do about it."

They might sponge Sandovisko with whitewash, but the red ‘light’ would always stand in dark against those fractured limestone pavements, their old tower a landlocked indictment in its own partition from the world, standing, adamant, against new hands, forbidding revision from above, and showing history as flawed; forgotten and now returned, the Krac family folly would remain bisbegotten; the 'light' was only miscast, and misconstrued. What newer construction could they place upon such dark inheritance? The fact that they had been awarded possession of the red sandstone 'light' that was the scene of her secretion had given neither he, nor Kate, a glimmer of satisfaction.

He wondered again whether Ivan might have stood by and let this happen and could even have been, as Mendel claimed in court, absent warder during her brief confinement in that dark room, and author of the entire affair, the ordeal of their partition; but hadn't he claimed to have abandoned or at least neglected the light from the moment he had got his hands on it? The photographer's duplicity in falsely claiming Sandovisko was clear; but his being party to Kate's capture in Narsis, and her confinement, and secretion there, was just unthinkable!

The painter could understand why Ivan had been drawn to an unfinished light, a landlocked beacon; the useless lens blind in its partition. He could easily forgive him for that wrongful restitution; he could see why his cousin had wanted it so much, then neglected it, yet would love it to the end; but he still found himself doubting Ivan; there would always be that stain; and he was now the keeper of that small round ‘treasure’, like a red ring, without revolution, in this land facing crueller partition; he was realising that Sandovisko was like his 'homeland', breaking-up around him, like the Carpathian limestone, fragmenting in their absence. Until he and Kate returned there, Sandovisko would be a dark focus for dread, the old Slovak keeper kept, the warders perhaps witnessing the final eclipse of a light the former dissident had once brought to an underground fight against repression.


20. The Conditioned

Everybody knew that Hrasky, the council for the defence, was a much less effective speaker than his client, the old Slovak photographer; Hrasky was young and overweight. He peered at them, through thick round glasses, mounted on a bloated face. Outside it was freezing, but in the heat of the courtroom his fat face ran with sweat. He had prepared for the final hearing with great care. The city was simmering in the argument over a ‘velvet’ separation, the details of a divorce-settlement in the break-up of Czechoslovakia; the imminent collapse of their federation and the claims and counterclaims of the Czechs and Slovaks could not fail to influence the atmosphere inside the court, or the outlook of the jury, who were denied outside news, but no doubt, somehow, informed in that imposed separation of the state of their nation.

"Let not this surrounding drama," Hrasky said, "darken the heart or tempt any of you to blame the witness for an act of prophecy in ‘Dividing Lines: our Accented Edges’. As partition and fragmentation hang over Czechoslovakia, as the dark days of argument between two sides finally give way to the judgment of history, and a handful of political representatives on both sides of a single border, and as dark is being replaced, only by the cataclysm of separation, and the destruction of the republic we hold so dear, do not forget that a word is immaterial! Whether it is to be Czecho-Slovakia or a Czech Republic, we must differentiate between cause and effect! Whether it is to be ‘C.S.’ or ‘C.R.’ we have never been a people trapped in a physiological interpretation of the senses!"

A juror who had coughed looked up at him blankly.

"We aren’t witnessing a conditioned stimulus," Hrasky went on, "and the conditioned response in break-up; we Czechs and Slovaks are not a couple of laboratory dogs fighting over the sound of freedom’s bell! In the political relationship between the ‘C.S.’ of the past and a new ‘C.R.’ we will be witnessing the reaction of reason, not secretions! Some of you will have come here today from the metro station ‘I.P. Pavlov’. Unlike our 'Moscow' station, that is one name that will not be changed! The Russian physiologist remains welcome here... But do not let the truth of our separation blind you to his light of rational dissent; I ask you not to let my client’s own prophecy of partition become confused with the reality of Kate Ashe's separation from Egerton Krac; or his years as a dissident confused with criminality! We have listened to a lot of words here! Language has been on trial in this court! Photography has been on trial! Capitalism has been on trial!"

He walked towards the jury, his hands behind his back. "There are four Slovaks on the jury, residents of Prague," he said, "a ‘representative’ jury in accordance with federal law. You were selected before the break-up was made official. You have witnessed not only the most chimeric evidence against a noble Slovak, Ivan Krac, who argued so strongly for partition, but the death-sentence handed down on Czechoslovakia herself! And, here, you have my sympathy!"

He looked up at the gallery. "You have all of our sympathies..."

Hrasky placed his hands on the rail as the courtroom almost imperceptibly darkened. There was a clap of thunder like a gun firing at the windows, and some of the jurors turned their faces towards the sound. "I would ask Czechs and Slovaks alike," he said, "to see the evidence before you; and especially, see the man! Having worked with negatives, we are told by Mr. Mendel that with 'Dividing Lines', Ivan Krac negated a whole federation; having steeped his work in fixers, we are told, this noble Slovak, behind his own partition, painted out our bond. Our darkroom ‘visionary’ turned prophet of doom... But is it clear, even from this barrage of lies, that he is capable of such a crime, that a dark world parted from light, and redolent with menace, reflects so singularly on him? In your verdict of 'not guilty', justice will have been seen in the dying days of our federation; you will have served a clear message, this January, that disunity does not mark the winter eclipse of reason!"

Hrasky looked up at the press gallery, clenching his teeth so hard that it was visible through his fleshy jowls. "With all the publicity this case has received in the media," he said, "I imagine that it may be difficult for those who are not locked in a jury to remember what is actually being decided here! This trial has had no centre, for from its inception, the prosecution has depended upon blackening the periphery of a reputation which was once so bright, it dazzled Prague."

He turned back to Ivan in the prisoner’s enclosure. "The trial has come to focus on a man’s work, a man’s vision, and a man’s name; it has tied the camera to a persona; it is being influenced by shattering events outside the courtroom, and even by recent events inside ourselves! Much has been made by the prosecution of the dark, and it seems that the dark is all it had to go on! But in Mr. Mendel's prosecution of Ivan Krac, the dark has been unrelieved! Sagas were tales, in partition from any truth, acting as pressure-valves that sought to release darkness and dread, playing them through in the night, allowing society to emerge from its fable and lore, healed, and healing, released, and somehow much more certain..."

He looked back at Ivan Krac. Compared with the healthy faces around them, his white face still appeared a detached and doubtful mask. "The negative image in its partition from modern life performs just the same function," he said. "The powerful immediacy, even of negative imagery, can overcome fear, replacing dread with sudden realisation, as swiftly, the art of photography can exorcise the dark!"

The defence council looked up at Kate in the gallery. "This case has aroused strong emotions," he said. "The presence of Kate Krac and the details of her ordeal have gained all our sympathy, and tapped into deeper roots, giving rise to complex feelings it has been impossible to ignore. In a sense, we have raised from a tribal memory our own version of her partition from Egerton Krac... But we must seek the truth! Kate and Egerton Krac have sat patiently, through the trial of a cousin; and their position here has been a strange one! Studying transcripts of the trial provided by ‘Cerebralign’, they have examined the facts, only after everybody else here had the chance to do so: so, these strangers at a foreign court cannot have failed to have been influenced by the judgments of the other observers!" He glanced across at Milan Gor. "As well as the transcripts, their primary source material, if you like, the analysis has been provided by those who followed the argument in the first place; and I can imagine that sorting out the evidence has been made more, not less problematic as a result! In a sense, this trial, too, can be likened to the an historical analysis, the judgment of those also in partition, who toppled the giant, and now carve-up a corpse! But in reality, the testimony of Milan Procházka can only be dismissed by the jurours as an attempt to cover up his own part in the abduction and secretion of Kate Ashe; and shift blame on to another, my friend here, Ivan Krac! Admittedly, Ivan was the owner of that, till then uninhabited ruin; but it is also clear that our great photographer was completely in the dark about the use to which it was being put - and that in a moment of weakness he had given another man the key!"

Hrasky checked his voice, feeling the collar of his extra-large shirt and looking up towards the English couple in the gallery. "With the detatched impotence of revenge this trial began," he said gravely. "With a natural tide of sympathy for the frustration of its victims, the process of justice was commenced. I ask that you to bear in mind my comments in relation to the foreign witnesses of this trial, and the rather partial prosecution of the trial itself. It is very easy to be led; it can be easy to listen to the critics; it would be easy to accept a revisionist history, and believe that the impossible really happened!"

He looked slowly from Ivan to the jury. "You have listened," he said, "and you have understood, yet you must go even further and decide what is true. Is there sufficient evidence? Is there any evidence at all? This is not some inevitable saga, but a man’s life we have been unravelling; and we are deciding not an individual’s beliefs; nor his right to express them; but the fate of one man, possibly our greatest photographer, after his long exposure before the court! I ask you, finally, not only to live in the truth; but to think carefully of Ivan Krac's reinforced sense of partition, the truth in his own abandonment of Sandovisko: and return a verdict of light!"


21. A Light Returning

Tomáš Lovas had taken the train into Prague from his isolated lodge in the High Tatras of Slovakia, and found himself in relative luxury in modern office, high above Evropská in Prague. Tomáš had been Egerton's best man at their wedding in England, and had naturally wanted to be with he and Kate at the time of the verdict, hopefully the day the couple could put all that had happened in his country once and for all behind them. Egerton had already told him the good news that Kate was pregnant - they had wasted no time! - so the final developments in the Inversion Trial were to be welcomed, by all of them, whatever the outcome!

Tonight, as events had unfolded, he had joined the others in the offices of P.S., above what he had only ever known as Leninova, and they were facing a whole new world.

"We should drink to the birth of our new state," Ivan Krac said cheerfully, "and Slovakia’s first taste of independence!"

"You’ve been doubly blessed!" Egerton said, smiling.

As one of a minority, a Hungarian-Slovak, Tomáš wasn't so sure - at least about a new 'Slovakia'; but he managed to smile back at Ivan and Honza.

After his partition from them, and those long months in Pankrác prison, the Slovak photographer was finally free; he had been acquitted and released into a new world where his homeland had become another country! Or had he really emerged from a trial a rootless light in the dark eclipse of reason? Opinion, here at P.S., even amongst his friends, was divided; Egerton's cousin had almost been broken in a break-up he had predicted.

"As a Slovak, you’re biassed!" the Czech banker was saying. "You, too, Honza! Partition was the last thing we wanted, but you’ve waited a thousand years for this coming; and I think I can drink to that!"

Harbinger raised his glass and so did Honza.

"But so few wanted a break!" Clara said, putting down her own glass. "I liked what Hrasky had to say today on this final day, about the reaction of reason, not 'secretions', in terms of our federation, and this trial; history will have to judge this cruellest partition; but I think the knee-jerk response from our politicians on both sides has been shameful and -."

"Regressive!" the banker cut in. "Yes, it’s going to be tough for a while, Ivan, far tougher than that reverse-takeover of yours! After saving P.S., we could say you have been triply blessed! You can't have had the chance to celebrate that success in Pankrác; so we should really be doing so here! But we all know what separation will mean in the short-term! The end of reform in Slovakia; those inward-looking 'nats' going back to some kind of consumer-led communism; and that Slovak ex-boxer, Meciar, sparring as your new leader for the heavy-weight champion's belt in xenophobia!"

Tomáš frowned at his friend Olga; he agreed with the banker.

"We are celebrating tonight!" Honza Sismis said. "Let's not argue."

"As a Slovak," Ivan said, "I can only see opportunities for progress. That is why I wanted to get back over there! We couldn’t go along with Prague’s plans, designed only for the Czech lands. Slovakia has completely different needs! We needed this partition! She has to move on more slowly... And no new nation can be forged without pushing back the boundaries of others - or allowing a hot-head free rein!"

"Everything now will be second-hand," Olga said, raising her glass and looking through the dark filter of Moravian red. "It will be easy enough to carve up the land, but everything else, the assets, the industry, the state... it would be like toasting the house-contents-sale, before a divorce!"

"It has been a long time coming!" Ivan said. "Of course, in the past no Slovak would have called himself a 'Czecho-Slovakian’! Why define yourself on the back of another? We needed no hyphen! Or should I say, no hyp-hen: 'under one'? Thank goodness for separation! That politics of hyphenation only underlined Slovakian dependence, a negative underdog state! And what a hybrid nightmare we have escaped!"

"But who was the underdog, really?" Harbinger said.

"Sometimes, I wish Scotland could be brave enough to do what you are doing!" Pat Macdonald said. "But for us there can be no such easy escape! And when you think about it, no escape is easy! Maybe, that's why I ended up out here, and editing 'Cerebralign'. The Latin root hibrida means the litter of a domestic sow made big with the seed of a wild boar. My little country, too, has been hybridised, almost beyond recognition; so I have no problem drinking to a new Slovakia, whatever the problems ahead!"

"I would say that the wild east was our master," Harbinger said, "and we were the underdog! We always had to think first in Prague of that wild pig in the east; and perhaps things will be a little simpler here across the new borderland, without her!"

Tomáš grimaced again at Olga, but Ivan Krac and Honza Sismis chose to ignore the Czech banker's remark about Slovakia.

"We look forward to a velvet divorce!" Honza said.

"Divorce is on the cards," Olga said, "but there is everything to argue over with our partition! Take Supraphon, who owns the record label? Which tracks belong where? Is that Picasso art-collection yours or mine? Wasn't that European Investment Bank loan a present to both of us? How will we work out the Slovak share of every single thing begged, built or borrowed since Nineteen-eighteen?"

"I will have my work cut out!" Harbinger said.

"So will we!" Honza said. "Prague can be very greedy!"

Looking at the banker, Tomáš thought of Velcro, unfastening.

"Czechoslovakia was born from a philosophy," Clara said, "and it has meant as much to many of us as the Trinity itself! I am thinking of Tomáš Masaryk, Edvard Beneš and the rest! Your capital has three roots, three names, Ivan! Pozsony, Pressburg, Bratislava. Our luckless federation had three roots, three lands... three colours. Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia..."

"Leninova boulevard; Benešová; Evropská," Egerton said. "Even the route from the airport has three roots! Talk about things in triplication!"

"It was a Calixtine thing," Harbinger said, "Czechoslovakia in two kinds! Czech beer and the Slovak wine! Our federal substance... For a time, we raised one cup - and now it’s broken! You do realise, Ivan, that change could be a drag! All you will have is a border! Your email address over there will end in ‘co.slo’; from socialism to ‘co.slo.ism’ in one fell swoop! And you'll lose the flag!"

"I'll even drink to that!" Ivan said.

"A flag isn't worth fighting over," Honza said. "We have our people to think about."

"You know, we want to hold on to the flag?" Clara said to Kate. "We Czechs, I mean; we’ll be keeping our beautiful flag, through a cruel separation! Well, Bratislava is asking sixteen-million Deutchmarks for their blue triangle!"

"Really?" Tomáš said. "I thought it was worth rather more!"

"They want it in hard currency!" Clara said. "And up front in Deutchmarks!"

"When you think about it," Ivan said, "Czechoslovakia is a big country and if you sewed all the blue triangles together you could probably wrap Bratislava! Winters out there are cold! You know, my friends, I'm looking forward to going home! We've come through the ordeal of our partition at last, and I'm just so glad we have done so together, and you weren't turned against me by that Czech bastard, Gor, and the rest of press! Let’s drink to justice, the future success of the new P.S., and 'Slo-Invest', and at the same time toast the best little federation ever to come out of the Habsburg empire! And here's to that glorious flag we so long shared! Let’s remember Czechoslovakia, my friends! One word now gone! To freedom, for all us! Without regrets!"

Ivan Krac raised his glass, and this time Clara obliged, commencing a round of toasting. "Na zdraví!" she said.

"Good luck!" Kate said.

"Gesundheit!" Harbinger said loudly, raising his glass with a grimace.

"Slàinte mhòr!" Pat said. "Though independence may hurt!"

"Cheers!" Egerton said, smiling. "Here’s to an unhappy couple!"

"I can hear bierkellers ringing!" Olga said quietly to the Czech banker. "They will be toasting the misfortune of our partition, all across Bavaria! I think you are right, Otto; Gesundheit!"

"Na zdravíe!" Honza said.

"Stolicka!" Tomáš said, rather more soberly.



After lunch the next day, Kate and Egerton caught a train with Tomáš Lovas, eastward from Prague, across their new border, and then, after many hours, they changed train, and were up into the bright sweep of the river Váh, and the late afternoon. It was a slow train - as all trains in Slovakia are slow; and as they were carried gradually north into the wilder lands of the White Carpathians, Kate felt that they had been freed from Prague, now a city of crisis and shortage, but approached a far great emptiness in its partition from the Czech lands. They were returning to visit Sandovisko; Egerton had never been there, and he even thought of the Krac cousins' legacy as somehow Kate's own possession. She was returning there to lay the ghost of that dark room, where in the dark of Sandovisko, Ivan Krac would perhaps seem complete, and completely innocent; and he to look for truth, and try to clear his mind of its associations with the possibility of his cousin's duplicity, the undeniable truth of Kate's captivity, and that strangeness Egerton still felt towards his homeland.

Among those foothills, stepping up from the sinuous sweep of the Váh, Kate could almost picture its dark internal walls like dried blood through thin whitewash; but then the gentle, undulating landscape unfolded around them, and they crested an embankment, their carriage moving forward against the river’s current and the clear water flowing along one side; patches of vineyard pooled alongside them on the hillsides in the shade, and higher up shipwrecked cottages masted woodland, stark, rude suggestions of völkish, half abandoned life.

"Our homeland in the east," Tomáš said, "has voted for the old ways or been cast off, and allowed to sink back into them! In the end, as always, it was Prague that decided this question of partition; but I think that on our part, it was less a desire for our own destiny and independence, than near regret over the passing of communism; we want to take things more slowly over here; wild Slovakia couldn't keep up with that tame business in Prague!"

Egerton laughed. "So what am I going to do with the Krac legacy then?" he said. "If I don't turn Sandovisko into some kind of tourist business - perhaps with your help, Tomáš - it will just be a liability, and eventually it will fall down!"

Kate said nothing, but for the moment at least she could think of no better fate for that dreadful, abandoned place of inwardness, darkness and secretion. In her partition from the world outside, she had only ever seen that dark room, never the 'lighthouse' from outside; she had been taken there in darkness, wrapped in a shawl, and had been unconscious when she left; but in spite of her unpleasant memories, until now, she had been wondering as much as Egerton what it would look like.

The placid thoughtless channel of the Váh stretched beyond the window, containing a simpler, senseless reason. Did she really want to know?

Their train slowed even more, turning away from the lassitude of the Váh, and up into a tighter, lesser valley, and Kate could sense more deeply their distance from any ocean; she felt immersed, and almost muffled by the still and landlocked sense of inwardness and vastness in Slovakia! She had never seen the place as an outsider, and now thought that she never wanted to get nearer to Sandovisko than she had found herself in that dark room; but she imagined that against the skyline the tower might look like a single red tooth in partition, a bloodied canine extruded from the pale ancient gum of the Carpathians; Sandovisko would stand out against the sky in bold and ugly outline, the only jagged monument on a green and white horizon.

Clouds clung to the wilderness, mustering, ready to advance against the sunshine, and lightly it had begun to rain, when they finally got off the train at Čachtice station. Kate pulled up her collar. There had been no sight of a tower, the scene of her own partition. She still dreaded what she would find; though this time it would be different, she thought: she had their own baby inside her; she had to put this whole experience behind her; and this time, she would be freed.

As they sat, awaiting a taxi on the platform, the rain came down much harder, beyond the portico overhead, thundering down on top of it, so that they were deafened, and Kate was slightly in awe; the mountains had pulled down the sky and the view was obliterated.

"Fantastic welcome!" the painter shouted.

"Even the rain is free of Prague!" Tomáš shouted back.

When the taxi arrived, and its driver had collected them from a flooded platform, Kate climbed with Egerton into the rear of the car, for a moment relishing its smell of slightly rubberised warmth; she wrinkled up her nose against the acrid fumes of the heating, glad to be parted from the rain.

"You don't have to tell them here," Tomáš said from the front, "they always switch on the meter!"

At first, he drove very carefully, but as the taxi-driver grew more confident with the strangers from Prague, he took chances on the winding road in the rain, hammering up and down the gears as he sped them through the gradients and the bends, and on and on through the downpour. They fell silent, as nothing much was visible beyond the slow, sure sweep of the wipers. Kate was forced to hang on to the sash-handle above her window as the vehicle swung wildly, seeming to keep the road only by chance. She remembered her last journey along this road had been very different.

Then they veered around before Sandovisko, the car churning up loose stones as it turned in a wide arc to point back the way they had come, the taxi-driver seeming impatient to get away as quickly as he could - in spite of the foul weather and all that empty countryside around them; only the solid door and the sandstone wall around the ground-floor were caught for a second in the sweep of the beam of his headlights.

"It looks like this is it!" Tomáš said, getting out of the car.

"Tell him to wait," Egerton said, "until we have seen whether those locked rooms inside are as 'decent' as Ivan claims!"

"I want to see my room!" Kate said as he paid the driver.

"Your room, Kate?" he said with a hint of criticism, and immediately felt sorry. "Of course you do, my darling! Hang on a minute!"

After he had fumbled with the keys and was ready to tackle the door, they each looked upwards, but all they could see through a blur of weather that had sponged all sharpness away were a few metres of saturated dark sandstone, a small partition of the wall in the night, very dim, and then completely vanishing off into rain.

"We'll have to wait till tomorrow to see Sandovisko," Egerton said. "This night is blinding!"

Once inside, they climbed the spiral stair and when she came to what she thought might be the right door Kate tried the handle.

Egerton struggled to find the right key but eventually he opened it.

Only lit by a tiny grill high in the wall, it had never quite been visible to Kate before, but the room seemed just as she remembered it, only even smaller and redder in its partition from the world. As a new fluorescent light flooded the gentle curve of the patched red sandstone emerging from a badly whitewashed and yellowing wall, she could see the place properly for the first time. During their captivity, and before that gypsy had struck her, the pitch dark had only ever given way to their own smudged shapes in the faint glimmer she had known as ‘day’. But her isolated cell had been transformed by that light with its wires hanging. She stepped into the room and it seemed to her in the light even smaller, more confined and constricting than before. She swayed a little, thinking of Natsa, and the shared dark room, and almost losing her balance, and feeling the world slightly slipping, she retreated towards the door, hardly seeing Egerton, and half dreading that it would be banged shut against her, as it had always been before.

Saying nothing, Egerton took her by the hand and as they stepped out on to the stair, closed and locked the door, pocketing the key. "The old storeroom," he said nervously to Tomáš. "One partition I don't think we'll be using! I don't think I'll even unlock it again."

Though they had planned to go on to a guesthouse or hotel in the case that it might be too unpleasant for Kate at Sandovisko, they had brought sleeping-bags with them, and Ivan had told them that there would be plenty of clean, if rather musty, bed linen; there had been a different set of keys for the best rooms, and there were beds in the upper part untouched by the gypsies. Egerton asked her again how she felt. The taxi-driver was waiting.

"Well, what do you think, Kate?" he said.

"I know you want to stay," she told him. "I can manage."

The empty lighthouse seemed full to Kate in the night, filled in the darkness with her secret memories, full of those shadowy figures, its unwanted guests... She had asked Egerton to keep on the little light, and unable to close her eyes, as the painter slept she looked around their room, which though it was furnished and had its own narrow window, still felt to her malign, part of the Krac red sandstone folly that would always seem threatening with its forlorn and empty foreignness and those dark partitions in secretion in a limestone forest. Kate was almost filled with dread. She looked at Egerton sleeping, and told herself that she mustn't be scared; this was now his place! The dark room had gone! But in the embrace of those curved walls, she felt the rock a living thing that seemed at once a frustrated guest and unfriendly host, as he was unable to escape her wakeful eyes; and the stone through the peeling paint seemed to weep sheer malice like bloodied tears; and turn to angry resentment, perhaps even jealousy at their lamp; not gratitude, nor least of all pity for its keepers.

Egerton had placed a gold-coloured pillowcase over the little light, so that its glow had been cut back and trellised, narrowly creeping up the walls, leafing its way towards the dense canopied shadow in the dark belly of the ceiling. She could only imagine the surrounding forest and feel lost inside a partition of silence. Kate closed her eyes, her memories of Narsis and the dark room in Sandovisko reeling; she peeked back at Egerton to stop herself from slipping. But it was no use.

Getting out of bed, she sat for a while in a small armchair, huddled up in the first stage of her maternity, her heavy eyelids closed against those soft, loose tendrils of light, and inwardly forgetful of the fecund dark outside, nature here a partition, a foreign state of being, teeming with strangers. She was holding tightly the arms of the chair; Sandovisko felt bleak and oppressive and immediate all around her; and nearby, beyond the touch of wood beneath her fingers, against her bare feet, she felt the frozen hardness of cold stone flags, and sensed an even greater chill that plunged straight down the bloody tower, through the thin Carpathian soil that covered the forested limestone hill, and on into the depths of the earth; she was left with the impression of the light inverted, that tower of her separation upturned, an absent light of partition buried deep in the dark, the trunk shooting into lime, its branches channelling through cracks in stone, a thousand miles from any ocean. Rather heavily now, Kate made her way through shoots of diffused golden light and shadows, and out across the narrow chamber to the rain-spattered window, where looking out from a treelike tower between redwood slats, she gripped the rough wood, as in the grain, and up through their thin partition it seemed to shudder. She had once dreaded the dark room, and fancied it rooted in hell, and looking down now into the impenetrable wet and dark, she sensed only the void.