PART I
Fear and Loathing in Prague
Memories of Smuggling Subversive Literature Behind the Iron Curtain
1 (i) — The revolutionary scene in late 70s London; a beautiful woman at the bar; an invitation to undertake a perilous journey
Today, the area behind King’s Cross station in London is a frenzy of new construction. Office towers and luxury apartment blocks vie to fill the remaining vacant lots around the Eurostar high-speed train terminal, where passengers depart with silky velocity to Paris and beyond. But in the mid-70s this was a desolate hinterland, with narrow rubbish-strewn streets that served as a work place for local prostitutes and home for impoverished itinerants.
It was here that the International Marxist Group (IMG), an organization dedicated to the worldwide overthrow of capitalism, had set up its headquarters, attracted by the neighborhood’s low rents and convenient transportation. In a three-story building that housed a dingy bookstore stacked with volumes on the deepening crisis of imperialism, the organization’s leadership developed its strategy for the seizure of state power. This was communicated via smudgily mimeographed bulletins mailed to a membership of a few hundred.
Public meetings were held in a pub across the road, the General Picton, named for an infamously brutal military governor of Trinidad. Upstairs, beneath the low hanging lights of an old pool table that cast the proceedings in a conspiratorial chiaroscuro, comrades debated the theory of permanent revolution, as formulated by Leon Trotsky.
It was in the General Picton that I went to my first IMG gatherings, so called “Red Circles,” open only to those interested in becoming a member of the group. The speakers were intense and cosmopolitan, their words entirely captivating to a 19-year old just arrived in the capital from the anodyne suburbs of Liverpool.
After one such meeting, I found myself continuing the discussion over a beer in the downstairs bar with a friendly local union official and his spectacularly beautiful girlfriend. (I only later discovered that they had been assigned by the organization to undertake “contact work” with me—to ease my entry into the group through regular get-togethers.) We were in the middle of excoriating the lamentable sectarianism of the International Socialists, our primary rivals on the revolutionary left, when I was approached by a tall, lightly bearded man with soft eyes and a flat nasal voice that suggested an enduring heavy cold. He was holding a hand-rolled cigarette between finger and thumb, in the manner of the working class.
The man asked if I would care to accompany him outside for a chat. My heart raced at the invitation. I was aware that he was in the leadership of the group, having heard him speak at a previous educational on why the Soviet Union should be regarded as “degenerate” under its Stalinist rulers. I had taken copious notes. What could such an elevated comrade want from someone like me, not even an official member?
I duly followed him through the pub door into a chill wind that blew old newspapers around our feet. Bracing against the blast he leaned in and, with sparks flying this way and that from the tip of his roll-up, inquired whether I would be interested in taking a trip abroad. What he was about to tell me, he said, needed to be kept strictly between ourselves. Did I understand? I could barely speak, such was my excitement. I nodded emphatically.
He went on to explain that the IMG was cooperating with a group of dissidents in Czechoslovakia in their struggle to overturn the regime there, a repressive Moscow-backed government that was anathema to democratic revolutionaries such as ourselves. To assist this work, couriers were being dispatched behind the Iron Curtain to deliver packages, primarily banned books and newspapers, but also secret communiqués. Would I would be interested in joining these efforts? He need not have asked.
1 (ii)—Preparation for the trip; misgivings about my accomplice; introduction to the van
On a wet evening a couple of weeks later, I descended the steps to a basement flat of a large Victorian house bordering Highbury Fields in north London. I was there to meet with Jan, the London representative of the organization running the courier system to Czechoslovakia. Between puffs on a small black pipe that filled the room with clouds of sweet smoke, he informed me that before embarking on the trip I would be required to attend evening training sessions twice a week for the next month. I would be one of a team of two people, the other of whom, also a comrade, I would be introduced to at the next meeting.
Jan went on to explain that, posing as tourists, we would be driving a van fitted with secret compartments containing our illicit cargo. We would travel through Belgium, Germany and Austria, and across the border into Czechoslovakia. Once inside Eastern Europe, we would spend a week in Prague with a side trip out of town. We would rendezvous with contacts and use secret codes to identify ourselves before handing over the materials, the exact nature of which would not be revealed. We would also be required to bring back some small packages to London. We were not to open these. The consequences of being caught would be serious for us; a spell in a Czech prison was likely. But for those with whom we were meeting they would be much worse. Considerable caution and secrecy was essential.
At the next meeting I was introduced to Adam, who was to accompany me on the trip. My heart sank a little when he entered the basement. I knew him from a number of the Red Circles I had attended and my initial impressions had not been favorable. A compact man with a prematurely receding hairline and waxy complexion, he sported small glasses with dark round rims in the style of those worn by the young Trotsky. I’d noticed that there was rarely a topic on which he didn’t have an opinion, expressed with a self-confidence that soon became irritating. Still, I comforted myself, he did seem clever and well-informed, and we didn’t need to be friends, merely accomplices.
Our training consisted of repeatedly rehearsing the trip’s itinerary, which specified in considerable detail who we were to meet and where. Our first rendezvous, for instance, was to be in Prague’s Wenceslas Square, outside the Cathedral at 9.30 at night. There we would meet a tall man in a leather jacket who would be accompanied by a smaller companion sporting a beard and wearing a plaid cap. We were to approach them and say that the weather in the English Channel had been rough on our journey over. If the tall man replied that it often was at this time of year, we were to hand over two holdalls marked with a large letter “W.”
It occurred to me that these passwords were corny enough to have appeared in the script of Night Train to Munich, and that if this was any measure of the sophistication of those organizing the trip, it wasn’t only the Channel that promised a rocky ride. Perhaps, I comforted myself, they sounded more original to a Czech.
Adam’s behavior in these sessions was already beginning to exasperate. As Jan explained the logistics of delivering the packages, Adam would regularly interject inquiries about the people we were due to meet. These questions seemed designed less to elicit information and more to show off his knowledge of the arcane political divisions in the Czech opposition. Though he responded to Adam’s pestering with resigned geniality, I could tell this was information Jan had no desire to share.
Adam’s faux Czech circumlocution when enunciating proper names was especially grating. After one particularly elaborate run of “w”s pronounced as “v”s I asked if he actually spoke Czech. “Not fluently” he replied, casting an awkward glance at Jan, “at least… not yet.”
A few days before departure Jan took us to inspect our vehicle, a mid-sized camper van with shiny blue paintwork that belied its beaten-up hubcaps and rusting bumpers. Since the group had to use the same vans repeatedly, they re-sprayed them in a different color after each trip in order to avoid arousing suspicion at the border. For the same reason, once in Austria, we would need to swap out the license plates with a fake set that would be provided to us. We were to change them back on leaving Czechoslovakia.
Jan opened the doors at the back of the van and used a flashlight to show us around. On either side of a folding table, wide cushioned seats served as single beds. Beneath the cushions were wooden drawers which, Jan instructed, we should fill with dirty laundry. The reason for this was soon apparent: The drawers did not extend to the sides of the van and the gaps which they left, perhaps 18 inches wide and accessible from the top by removing lids held in place with spring clips, formed secret compartments. This was where our packages would be hidden.
My concern about the incongruous paint job outside was largely dispelled by the ingenuity of these internal arrangements. When going through the border, Jan instructed, one of us should feign being asleep in the back in order to diminish the likelihood of a search. The compartments would be ready-loaded when we picked up the van the following Tuesday.
1 (iii)—A premonition during the Channel crossing; a surreal encounter with the Austrian police; arrival in Prague
The weather in the Channel was indeed rough and I spent most of the voyage to Zeebrugge out on deck, keeping an eye on the horizon in order to fend off sea sickness. Adam seemed entirely unaffected by the ship’s pitching and remained in the cafeteria drinking tea while engrossed in a battered paperback of the Case of Comrade Tulayev, a novel by the dissident Soviet writer Victor Serge. I pointed out that we had been advised against bringing personal items that might reveal us as anything other than apolitical tourists; he assured me he would finish and discard the book long before we arrived. “I’m a very fast reader,” he said without looking up from the page. I headed back outdoors.
The journey through Belgium and southern Germany was largely uneventful though my first night’s sleep in the van, which we had parked in a motorway service station south of Frankfurt, was interrupted by a bout of fervent grunting from the adjacent couchette. I pulled the sleeping bag over my head and made a mental note to be sure I always slept on the side of the van I was currently occupying.
We arrived in Vienna the following evening to be put up overnight by a welcoming couple, comrades in the Austrian sister organization of the IMG, whose elegant rooftop apartment overlooking the Hapsburg Place was used regularly as a staging post. The following lunchtime, we left for the border. The plan was to arrive at one of the quieter, less heavily manned crossings, just as the light was fading. At that time the guards on the day shift would be looking forward to getting home and their fresh-eyed replacements on the night watch would not yet have arrived. We made rapid progress on the excellent road heading north before, as instructed, turning off into a small wood about fifteen miles from the border to change the license plates.
It was snowing lightly as I crouched at the front of the van, fumbling with a screwdriver and frozen fingers to attach the fake plates I had retrieved from one of the secret compartments. I had nearly finished tightening the final screw when I heard a shout from Adam. “Hurry up,” he cried. “Someone’s coming!” Cursing under my breath, I stood up to witness the incongruous entrance of an Austrian policeman on a bicycle into the small copse where we had parked. Feigning as much nonchalance as I could, I nudged the plate I had just removed under the van with my foot, slipping the screwdriver into my back pocket.
The cop was now talking to Adam, in a German neither of us could understand. Adam, entirely unconvincingly to my ears, explained at inordinate length that we had parked merely for the purpose of a picnic. As evidence, he held up a flask of coffee that had been filled for us that morning by the comrades in Vienna. “We’re interested in the wildlife here—you know, birds and rabbits, that sort of thing” he gabbled on “and, er, badgers, though of course they’re nocturnal.”
Whether the policeman understood any of this was impossible to tell; I was certainly hoping he didn’t. In any case he heard Adam out before walking slowly around the back of the van. It occurred to me that the rear plate no longer matched the one I had just fastened to the front. By the time the officer reached me—leaning on the hood with one elbow and desperately affecting the relaxed stance of a tourist taking in the sylvan beauty of the Alps—a heart attack seemed my most likely means of escape.
With my voice emerging in a falsetto of which Frankie Valli would have been proud, I bid the cop good afternoon. To my considerable relief he merely touched his cap, stared around the clearing and got back on his bike before riding off through the trees. “Good thing I was able to put him off the scent” Adam hissed in an extravagant stage whisper as I climbed back inside.
Two hours later, with me pretending to be asleep in the back of the van, we were at the border. As we approached the crossing, Adam delivered a running commentary: “There are fences everywhere, with coils of barbed wire along the top… Maybe six guards, all with semi automatics, one with a dog, an Alsatian, ugly looking beast… Another couple of soldiers in the border post, one’s on the phone… No-one else seems to be here.” I pulled the sleeping bag over my head, both to escape the intense glare from the searchlights and to muffle his ceaseless, suspicion-arousing chatter.
The van rolled to a halt and Adam turned off the engine. I heard him talking through the window, explaining that we were tourists on our way to Prague, that we’d driven from London, that his friend was asleep in the back. The sound of boots scrunching in the snow echoed from around the rear of the van, accompanied by a brief discussion in Czech. There followed a period of silence, lasting perhaps five minutes, though it seemed much longer. More footfalls, then a shout. Adam started the engine and we were off. As we gathered speed I risked a peek through the flimsy curtains covering the rear window and caught a glimpse of a heavily reinforced barrier swinging back into place.
I clambered into the front seat. “That was pretty straightforward,” Adam said, with a confidence I now recognized as both characteristic and entirely unreliable; “though they did have a good look underneath.” We drove on, bouncing around on a surface markedly less well paved than the one we had just left in Austria. A succession of drab villages strung narrowly along the roadside were bare of commercial signs or even much domestic lighting.
It took about three hours to reach Prague. We checked into our hotel and I left Adam alone in the room, surfing the channels on a large wood-framed TV. (The surf was running pretty low, there being only three stations, all broadcasting in black and white.)
Outside, it took some time to adjust to the gloom of the city’s night time streets, tenebrous under the feeble light of infrequent lampposts. As I walked — aimlessly, but mindful of the turns I was taking through winding medieval streets in order to be able to find my way back — I tried to prepare myself for the rendezvous later that evening in Wenceslas Square. My heart was already surging with excitement.
1 (iv)—A bungled exchange in Wenceslas Square; an ill-advised conversation in a bar; the universal appeal of the Steve Miller Band
We parked the van in a nearby side street and, after furtively retrieving two large holdalls from the secret compartments, headed for the cathedral. The square which it dominated was more or less empty. There were few commercial premises in the vicinity, and these—like, it seemed, pretty much everything else in Prague after 5.30pm—were shuttered and closed. It was also icily cold, with soft flurries of snow spiraling across the still night air.
We stamped our feet and waited, the desolation of the surroundings only intensifying a mounting sense of unease. Surely, as two foreign men, clutching large bags on the otherwise deserted steps of the church, we were dangerously conspicuous? I made a considerable effort to keep such uncomfortable conjecture to myself, which made it all the more irritating that Adam evidently could not. “Where are they?” he kept demanding, staring around from beneath the furred peak of an oversize aviator hat that, he’d told me on the drive over, had been purchased specifically for the trip.
With ponderous, plangent clangs, the bells of the cathedral struck eight, our appointed hour. I noticed my breathing becoming shorter, the clouds of steam drifting in thin wraiths across my face. “Where are they” Adam asked, yet again.
Just at that moment, two figures emerged from the side of the cathedral. It was immediately evident that they were both elderly ladies, replete with headscarves, handbags and dark stockings. But not evident enough, apparently, to Adam, who hurried over and confronted the pair with a loud declamation that the weather in the channel had been rough. The women looked anxiously at each other and began talking in rapid Czech. By this time Adam was trying to get them to accept the bag he was carrying, proffering it to them with arm outstretched as they backed away anxiously across the steps. I rushed up behind him, beside myself with anxiety and anger. “No, no” I hissed, in a voice that emerged in the register of a castrati from a Baroque opera, “Tall man, leather jacket, short man, plaid cap.”
Adam swung around so abruptly that the dangling ear flaps of his aviator hat lifted horizontally into the air, like the carousels on a fairground ride. An expression of blank, witless confusion confronted me; he looked like a spaniel that had momentarily lost its master. “You idiot” I squawked, pulling him away while the women, still talking urgently to each other, hurried out of sight around the corner of the cathedral.
As they did so, two men precisely matching the description in our briefings appeared from the other side of the steps. I grabbed the bag from Adam and, after quickly exchanging passwords with them, handed over both holdalls. The taller of the two, in a timbre of preternatural calm, wished us a pleasant stay in Prague and a good evening. He and his companion, a bag apiece, sauntered off into the night.
I returned to Adam, who was now squinting up at the statuary on the front of the cathedral in what seemed a grotesquely affected pretense at appearing casual. “Jesus,” I began contemptuously. But before I could proceed with the full-fledged excoriation he so richly deserved, he turned and started to head back to the van. As he walked across the square, he called back to me over his shoulder, “That went pretty well. How about a celebratory beer? ”
After a five minute walk through gloomy streets we spotted the entrance to a basement bar and descended to the interior, which was bathhouse-hot and even more poorly lit than the street outside. We groped our way to a cubicle under a low-ceilinged stone arch and ordered drinks—deep tankards of black beer, a brew that infused flavors of molasses and hops in a taste that became progressively sickly. Barely had we taken our first sips when we were joined on the opposite side of the booth by a young couple.
They smiled and nodded as they slid into their seats. I was anxious that Adam might start talking in front of them about the encounter in the square, something we had been warned against. But instead he embarked on a protracted exposition about how his girlfriend wanted him to move in with her; an arrangement which, unsure if she was the right woman for him, he was resisting. This was by no means a new topic—indeed, I’d endured it to the point of paralysis through much of Belgium and southern Germany. But it was certainly better than betraying our mission to strangers and so I simulated interest, nodding stoically between drafts of beer.
I went to the bar to replenish our tankards and returned to find Adam accepting a cigarette from the man, whose shoulder-length hair was longer than that of his female companion. She took off her thickly knitted sweater, revealing a T-shirt with a picture of Daffy Duck on the front. She was undeniably pretty.
“Do you need a light?” I heard the man ask Adam in comprehensible but heavily-accented English. He took a box of matches from the pocket of his denim jacket.
“Thanks, man.” Adam struck a light, cupping the burning match, unnecessarily, in his hand. I suppose he thought it looked cool.
“Is this a regular place for you guys?” he asked. The man confirmed that it was.
“Do you work around here then?”
“No, we’re students.”
“Really? What’re you studying?”
“I’m taking architecture” the man said, “and Marta’s training to be a radiologist. My name’s Jiri. Pleased to be meeting you.” We gave our names in return. Jiri raised his glass in a toast of welcome, and asked a question I knew was coming:
“What are you guys doing here?”
Adam replied rapidly — too rapidly, it seemed to me. “Oh, you know, taking in the sights. Prague’s such an amazing city.” He blew out a stream of smoke. It curled into the darkness.
“Are you students also?” the woman asked. Her eyes were softened by delicate folds above the eyelids.
“Yes” Adam confirmed. “He’s studying in London and I’m taking politics at Essex.”
I ran my fingers through my hair, trying to quell an uncomfortable sensation that the conversation was about to stray into territory we had been explicitly instructed to avoid.
“We just organized a big occupation there, you know, to protest at government cuts.” Adam’s flow was now gathering momentum. “There were barricades on all the roads leading into the campus. We even turned over a mini bus to stop the cops getting in. It was an amazing sight.”
At that point, someone put money in the jukebox in the far corner of the room. It began to play a song I knew well: “The Joker.”
“Wow, this is on all the time in the LSE bar,” I said, hoping to steer the conversation to safer ground. “I didn’t expect to hear it here.”
“Oh yeah, we love Steve Miller, don’t we Marta? But can I ask a question?” Jiri’s eyes narrowed with intensity. “What does ‘pompatus’ mean?”
“Sorry?” I said, confused.
“In the first verse: ‘Some people call me Maurice, because I speak of the pompatus of love.’ What’s ‘pompatus’?”
“You know, I have absolutely no idea” I said, smiling at the realization that I’d heard the song at least a hundred times, and never wondered at the meaning of a plainly nonsensical word. It was surprising that someone for whom English was a second language should have noticed.
“I think it’s just playing with words” Adam volunteered brightly. “Like Ob-la-di, ob-la-da.”
“Ah yes, the Beatles. They’re great too. Lots of people in Czechoslovakia like them. So cool,” Jiri said.
“Yes,” replied Adam: “Isn’t there a band here that put out a song that was a play on Sergeant Pepper? What were they called?”
Marta leaned forward across the table and lowered her voice. “You mean Plastic People of the Universe?” she said quietly “They made a song called ‘Egon Bondy’s Happy Hearts Club Banned’?”
“Yes! That’s it! ‘Banned’ as in, you know, ‘Banned’. Really clever. It was banned, wasn’t it?”
At this point, I knew that we, or rather one of us—the one who was pathologically incapable of resisting any opportunity to show off, especially in front of an attractive woman—had most definitely blundered into a no-go area. Czech philosopher Egon Bondy, the eponymous hero of the proscribed hit song, was a leading light in the Prague underground and a frequent target of the government. The banning of the song had prompted the setting up of Charter 77, the organization to which many of the recipients of our packages belonged.
My heart was thumping and I felt a thickening stiffness in my neck. I kicked Adam hard under the table.
“Ouch!” he winced loudly, “why did you do that?’
I very much wanted to tell him that it was because he was a fucking idiot. “Time to drink up” I said tensely, “we need to be getting off.”
♛ END of PART ONE. READ PART TWO.
Illustrations by Mattis Dovier
The Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott International portfolio.
