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 was tempting to imagine that this was something to do with the move, but the truth was that after Serge’s birth their relationship had been different. When they’d met she was just twenty-one, and George had been beautiful and exotic, curly and dark like a Roma, with a tint of gold under his skin. The odd thing was that seeing Joseph had immediately reminded her of how George seemed at that first moment when she saw him threading his way through the crowd in the Freundschaft Hall at the university. It wasn’t so much that they looked alike, although they did. It was something about the way he moved, a slight hesitation in his step, and a kind of wide-eyed boyishness which had long ago disappeared from George’s features. Watching him as he walked through the door behind George she had felt for a second or two as if time had spun backwards and she was once again the young innocent making eyes at a golden stranger across the room.
Remembering, she smiled, searching the shadowy image in the glass of the window for traces of the child she had been. She had imagined that George was a foreigner, a student or teacher from somewhere like Cuba or Mozambique. She soon found out who he really was, but the thrill she’d felt in that first instant hadn’t gone away. It was true enough that George was different. He was an experienced man, more than ten years older, who had lived through a stint in the army and suffered disappointments at which she could only guess. He also had a contempt for the bureaucracy of politics and administration which Radka shared, and the confidence of his sarcasms and jokes about the system made her feel lighter, almost joyful, as if her isolation was at an end. Like herself, he was an outsider who played by the rules, and kept his feelings to himself, expressing them only within the confines of their mutual privacy. For Radka, being with George was like a final release from the mould in which the first crack had appeared at the time of her father’s imprisonment. In their first couple of years they seemed to have been always together, but later on, when she found out more about what George had been doing at the time, she knew that the memory was an illusion, like a magic trick in which he’d caused the truth to disappear.
Her first clue had come on the night they started demolishing the Wall, tearing with their bare hands at the chips and lumps of concrete. It was a moment she remembered like a piece of music, starting slowly then building rapidly to a crescendo. The first notes, distant and piercing, came as they paced along Stargarder Strasse, following the streams of people, sometimes a couple like themselves, sometimes a chattering group of students, or a dozen young men chanting slogans in unison. Up ahead the columns of pedestrians thickened around the bulk of the Gethsemanekirche. Clinging to George she pushed her way behind him into the entrance in the Greifenhager Strasse, and caught up in the eddying movement of the mob, they drifted further and further in, moving, without volition, among the press of bodies as the crowd broke away and headed for the Bornholmer Gate. Around her was the smell of garlic, tobacco and sweat, then strange vagrant streaks, the sweet taste of roses and wine. Walking up Bornholmer Strasse, she linked arms with Peter, whose father had become a drunken closet fascist, and then Wolfgang, who reached under her coat to hug her, his fingers digging into her breast, indifferent in his exaltation to George marching on the other side, and Renate, who clasped her hand tightly, swinging it up and down in the rhythm of their steps. The noise was unbelievable but she didn’t hear it. ‘The Wall must fall,’ they chanted, and all up and down the line people, their spirits fired by the magnitude of the event, were spouting off impromptu bursts of rhetoric. ‘Let us go see the Ku’damm,’ Peter shouted over at her, ‘and then we’ll come right back.’ Sometimes George looked round at her, laughing, and from time to time they kissed openly, squeezing each other’s bodies, more united than they had ever been. She remembered all this as if it had been a drunken roaring dream, oases of clarity alternating with moments of crazed frenzy. At the Wall they shouted, kicked and tore at the crumbling fabric with their hands, tossing the fragments around them like so much rubbish. In one of the moments she remembered, Peter leapt on to a pile of bricks, a few metres from where she stood, and holding up a piece of the concrete, began making a speech, shouting at the top of his voice. ‘Tonight!’ he yelled. ‘Tonight we sweep away all lies, all illusion.’
Turning round she saw George grinning. ‘Without a few lies and illusions,’ he muttered, ‘none of us will survive.’
She’d laughed then, but later on it struck her that this was exactly how it had turned out.
They were drinking more vodka. When Radka tilted the bottle the long strand of grass in it wavered like weed in a pond. Joseph tried to count the number of glasses filled with the spirit