Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [67]
12 June
Harold went to see Urbánek to do an interview for a video. He loved his book-lined study, for he felt he was looking at a typical Central European intellectual’s room. I taxied to the Castle and walked all the way back on the cobbles (ouch, wrong shoes! In agony this morning). In a bookshop I saw the first signs of the Soviet Union: Russian newspapers, plenty of them, including Pravda, nothing else foreign even in German. In the bookshop, dusty Russian books and books in Czech about Russia: the only foreign author I can make out is Balzac. No catering for tourists in this most beautiful of cities, which makes it a heady relief from Venice. Big effort to find a postcard and only on the Karl Bridge a few leather knick-knacks.
While we were at Prague Airport on our way home, we wrapped up kroners and posted them, according to instructions by Diana, to a young fifth-year student about whom Harold was concerned. You wrap the money up in paper, put it in a hotel envelope, but take care to post it from the airport.
Our next visit to Czechoslovakia was in February 1990. By this time Václav Havel had become president of the country – a post he would occupy for fourteen years in the course of which Czechoslovakia was transformed into the Czech Republic. Harold had kept up contacts in the intervening months and was tremendously pleased when Havel gave an interview to the Observer in which he referred to the ‘brotherhood’ he immediately felt with Harold on their first meeting. We had both watched the events of the Velvet Revolution, transfixed, in late November 1989. I thought of Pepys writing about the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660: how it was not to be imagined, ‘the suddenness and the glory of it all’.
7 February
General jollity at the airport including from a large body of handsome youths whose luggage establishes them as having come from Cuba. ‘Football?’ I ask hopefully but get nowhere. The answer turns out to be ‘Wrestling’. I bring presents of bath oil, perfume and body lotion for my Czech women friends. (Rita Klimova told Diana she still had the bath oil I bought for her in June – which was not supposed to be the point, she was supposed to wallow.) Vlasta Gallerova, theatre manager, tells us that this is a bad time for the theatre, which used to be the centre of opposition: but nowadays ‘we sit at home watching television’ where such exciting things are happening. Frantisek Fröhlich (Harold’s translator) confirms this: ‘We never even had a television. Now we watch it all the time.’ ‘Dramas?’ ‘No, news programmes, documentaries.’ We realize that Mountain Language will no longer have the same resonance. Frantisek is a very sympathetic man. Tells me that when he hears certain loud noises, he thinks ‘Here they come again.’ For example a helicopter overhead – ironically it turns out to have contained Havel himself. ‘You see, as a little boy’ – he’s born in 1934 – ‘I remember the Germans coming in 1939, then the Russians in 1945 which seemed good, then the Russians in 1948, not good, then again in 1968. Always this noise haunts me: “Here they come again.” ’ He is Jewish and spent the war in Theresienstadt miraculously surviving, along with his mother, though his father and the rest of his family vanished.
8 February
Went to Wenceslas Square. People hurrying. Mild weather. Walked the whole way with anticipation, but all the same was taken by surprise by the simple, round memorial to Jan Palach, the student who burned himself to death as a political protest, inset on to the pavement. His face in a photograph, handsome, forever young, looking out of the mass of flowers, mostly made up of quite small bunches, carnations, freesias, daffodils. Then I read the New Year tribute of ‘Pan President Havel 1 January