two years. On the day he was arrested her mother had told her it was all a mistake, a story which she accepted with relief, but as the weeks and then months wore on she knew that he wasn’t coming back. He had been imprisoned, her mother said, not because he was a bad man, but because of something he had written, and for a time Radka’s dearest wish was to read his book in order to see, with her own eyes, the appalling thing that had ruined her life. At school no one mentioned her father, but she understood that everyone knew about him by her classmates’ ripple of response to certain names, or by the way that some of them turned to look when teachers mentioned saboteurs or threats to the state. That summer was to be her first visit to a pioneer camp, but a week before the event she told her teacher that she would have to stay and spend the vacation with her mother. Afterwards she avoided taking part in most of her classmates’ activities, inventing one plausible excuse after another. She knew that her anger was connected with her father and his absence, but after a while she stopped thinking about it, and, when her mother said that he would be coming back soon she chose not to believe it, putting that prospect out of her mind in case it turned out to be yet another deceitful hope. His return was a surprise, but it was his appearance and his manner which shocked her.
Before he had left, he was a broad, powerful man. She seemed to remember his voice booming, and he could still pick her up and hold her high above his head before hugging her against his chest. The man who came back was thin and slouching, with downcast eyes and an apologetic smile. He never recovered his old self. Instead he would shuffle out every morning, clad in neatly pressed blue overalls.
‘This is paradise,’ she heard her mother say in the kitchen one day as she got up to get ready for school. Her voice had a deep, angry pitch, and Radka could tell she was close to tears. ‘A professor sweeping floors.’
Her father didn’t answer. When he came out of the door and saw her standing there, he gave her his thin smile and walked past without touching her. He died soon after this, and in later years when the carp began to appear on the street corners Radka would often think of the bloody footprints and of her father’s strange smile.
George was the only person she had ever told about the carp. This was when he proposed returning to Prague, and she had held out against it stubbornly while he ran through all the obvious and good reasons why they should. Setting up the business would be easier there, he said. The materials and skills they needed would be more readily available. There would be better chance of success for a business run by a Russian and a black man. In Berlin who knew what would happen? Maybe one night they would wake to find the place burning.
At that point she told him about the carp, and the irrational fear she had always nursed, that the blood she tracked through the snow had somehow been linked to her father’s fate. George listened without comment, simply holding her hand and stroking it. Then he told her that their lives might be in danger. After that she surrendered to his will, but some part of her had never forgiven him.
George should have realised, even though she never managed to explain it properly to him, that both she and her mother had somehow been imprisoned along with her father. Before that time she had experienced no problems in seeing herself as a part of every activity at the school and among her friends. At the age of ten she had competed for the Youth Union banner. Her entry was a dramatic recital from Jirásek’s rendering of ‘The War of the Maidens’, and the judges had been taken with the sweetness of her voice and the innocent intensity of her pose as she recounted the massacre of Sharkah’s Valley. At the end she threw up her arms, shrilling Jirásek’s words: ‘Pay attention, men, to this sign from the gods! Hear me, and do not take the warring women lightly.’ The hall exploded with applause, and, as her mother always said, she would have won by a kilometre had she not been immediately followed by a nine-year-old who recited, from memory, a long section of the speech Lenin made in Petrograd during 1917. She had left with an honourable mention and the acclaim of her schoolmates, confirming her position as one of the leading spirits in her year. But her father’s incarceration changed everything, and when he returned she lost even the secret hope that his presence would restore her life to normal. At first she imagined that her anger was directed at this tattered relic of her dad, who had taken from her what she had without putting anything in its place. Later on, after he died, she understood that the hot rage hidden in her chest was really about the sense that she, too, had been locked into an airless room. This was a perception which had merely grown deeper as she grew older. Berlin had been the key to her escape, the place where, in her mind, she had broken with her own past and begun remaking her future. In Prague she hardly knew anyone now. The friends with whom she had been through school and university were scattered, and her closest relatives, people she had not seen since childhood, were in Pilsen, a few hundred kilometres away. Sometimes she encountered a man or a woman whom she had known well more than a decade in the past; it made her feel more than ever like a stranger in a place which echoed with hidden loyalties and hatreds. Even stronger was the sense that during her childhood she had learnt to prepare a face to meet the faces that she met, a surface which covered in deceit all that she felt. This wasn’t merely a question of politics. Her politics before Berlin had been unformed, a matter of resentment and irritation at the restrictions and stupidities about which everyone grumbled. It was more the feeling that she could not be herself, and that she didn’t know what it might mean to be exactly the kind of individual she wanted to be. When she left the city she had rejected the numb emptiness she had filled with the diligence of study, sitting night after night with her books while her mother slept. In Berlin, she had thought she would become the person she was meant to be. She always knew that the city was in many ways drabber and life more controlled than the one she was leaving, but she also knew that no one would recognise her there, that the future would be a blank, like a sheet of fresh snow on which her footprints would trace a new, untrodden path.
In this sense she felt her return to Prague as a kind of defeat, a step backwards, and walking in the park with Serge, she felt the memories clouding round her, coupling her again with the self she’d left behind.
Ironically, her work there gave her more time and freedom. In Berlin she’d worked for a magazine, translating documents and articles from Czech and Russian, and assembling diaries about events and attitudes in Eastern Europe from information that she picked up on the Internet. When she left Germany she continued writing, filing her copy by e-mail, but now she made her own schedules and wrote about a broader range of subjects, whatever caught her fancy. Most of it, George told her once, was a kind of therapy in which she explored her own identity, using as raw material the passions and frustrations of people, like herself, who had grown up in the shadow of the Party and its methods. For instance, when a young man in his twenties was appointed as head of Czech broadcasting, the profile she wrote started with a fairly curt biography, then went on to argue that men and women between the ages of thirty and fifty had disappeared from public life because they were all compromised by their past complicity with the system, or incapable of coping with the challenges of a new society. George read it without comment, then he smiled at her.
‘I’d agree with this,’ he said, ‘except that you’re defining public life in the same way as the old comrades. Head of this and secretary of that. Everything’s changing so quickly that in a couple of years all the people you thought had disappeared might be back.’
She shrugged. When they first met it was the kind of exchange which would have been the signal for a pleasurably heated argument. Now the prospect offered no excitement to either of them.
From time to time he asked her why she felt the urge to be so busy. She was no longer tied to a routine, and now that Katya no longer lived nearby, caring for Serge took up more of her time. Even so, she worked occasionally for a language school where she taught English to businessmen. They had enough money, George would say, and it wasn’t necessary. When she didn’t answer it was partly because she was convinced that he already understood, and that the question was a provocation whose purpose was to expose the distance between them. In the years since they had come together everything had changed, and now it was as if she hardly knew him.
It
