Prague Spring by Simon Mawer

Author:Simon Mawer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2018-11-12T16:00:00+00:00

Border guards observe their approach to the barrier with indifference. There’s a queue of cars warming up the summer air. Rows of parked cars to one side. Coaches drawn up like ships at a quayside. People line up at a concrete building with small windows whose blurred glass panes have never been cleaned. From the open door of an office music emerges as though from the throat of a tin man, something vaguely Beatles, vaguely Beach Boys.

One of the guards snaps his fingers. “Pas,” he demands.

They hand over their passports. Ellie smiles. Smiles appear to be a newcomer to the border guard’s repertoire of expressions. He attempts one with scant success. He is no older than they, a pale youth with a prominent Adam’s apple and a scattering of acne pustules across his cheeks. He examines the documents with curiosity. “English,” he says.

“English,” Ellie agrees. “Anglický.”

“Beatles,” he says. “Liverpool.”

But there’s a change in the music emerging from the transistor radio inside the office. No longer approximately Beatles, it is now plainly and excruciatingly “Puppet on a String.” In Czech. Ellie begins to sing along with the music, in English.

The guard smiles. This is a real smile, displaying a graveyard of teeth. “Přenosilová,” he says. “Loutka.”

“Sandie Shaw,” Ellie responds, guessing.

A second guard joins in. “Foots. Naked foots.” And then adds something in Czech—a tripping, splintered sound like the snapping of bones—which makes his colleague laugh out loud. “No vísum,” the first guard points out, handing the passports back with something like a hint of regret. He gestures towards the customs house where already people are crowding.

They join a queue. German is spoken all around. Someone tries to explain in English and they hear a story of displacement and desolation that they only half-understand. “Once we live here,” the man tells them. “Now we are as tourists coming.”

They edge forward along the pathways of bureaucracy. Inside the building is the smell of old concrete and stale sweat, and perhaps, lurking in the background, a hint of urine. Glum men sit at desks and administer the stamps of acceptance and authenticity with a device like a miniature guillotine. The mechanism descends, and there, on the page marked “visas,” is a new imprimatur: ČESKOSLOVENSKÉ VÍSUM. A few endorsements, a flash of a pen, a date stamp against VSTUPNÍ and all is done. Money changes hands through a metal grille. For their traveler’s checks they receive bundles of used notes denominated in Czechoslovak koruny. Questions are waved away. They move on, through further passageways and out into the afternoon sunshine on the inside of the Iron Curtain.

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