They caught squirrels together and walked down Cathedral Trail towards the sea. The squirrels bounced in a plastic bag against Jeremy’s leg. “Returning to the Babes in the Wood,” he said.
“A tragedy,” the Professor said.
“I’m trying to understand,” Jeremy admitted.
“Me too,” the Professor said, and some light re-entered his voice. “There are pieces remaining.”
They returned to camp by a different route, climbing out along the seawall, then sharply up, climbing cliffs to find an abandoned path. From there, they backtracked into the forest, looping through the falling darkness, finally tumbling between two leaning trees and into the Professor’s space.
Caruzo was there. The fire was lit and a grill lay over it, ready for the squirrels. Jeremy guessed the grill had once been the side of a shopping cart.
“You remember the place?” the Professor asked. Gesturing around them.
“Of course, of course,” Jeremy said, looking now and enjoying the familiarity of it. “And the tent?”
The Professor gestured silently, and following his finger Jeremy could make out a shape. A leaf-covered shape nestled in at the base of one of the trees.
Facilitating run-off and minimizing flooding
, Jeremy recalled.
“There’s been some rain lately,” the Professor said, but was interrupted by the sound of leaves crushing. Branches being pushed aside.
Jeremy started, got to his feet, but the Professor motioned him to sit again. “Pieces remaining,” he said.
“What about them?” Jeremy asked, as the crashing came nearer.
“I wonder whether you will agree that Chladek is one of them,” the Professor said.
And into the orange glimmer, which just managed to push off the darkness of the clearing, stepped the man himself.
Chladek’s voice had the clip and precision of an educated Czech, although his face had blunted features, a kinked and flattened nose like a boxer’s. He wore a heavy, black woollen
overcoat, which he kept wrapped around him. Found footwear.
During dinner there had been only a little conversation. Afterwards, the Professor and Caruzo abandoned them, over Jeremy’s objections, crashing off into the bush on some unspoken errand. Jeremy sipped his wine, a sugar-sweet ruby plonk not half-badly suited to the squirrels. He turned to Chladek, determined to draw him out.
Not an unmitigated success. Caruzo was the Patron Saint of Stanley Park, the only statement Chladek was prepared to make on the matter.
“Siwash?” Jeremy tried.
Really, really crazy, Chladek said. He held out his hands about a foot apart to describe the blackened knife that Siwash apparently carried.
Hmmmm. Jeremy thought. What were the chances? His Sabatier now riding around in Siwash’s waistband, waiting for the trigger count, the obscure day of reckoning. “And you?” he asked, pressing on. “What brings you here?”
Chladek produced a bottle of Stolichnaya from the folds of his coat. He looked at the bottle, then at Jeremy.
“Let’s walk,” he said, gesturing with his head into the blackness.
They pushed themselves up out of the cool ferns and off into the darkness, making their way through the brambles and salal bushes, tracing the edge of the cliff. Chladek talked as they picked their way. He was thirty-five. He’d been a journalist at the
Prague Evening
newspaper until the Velvet Revolution in 1989, when he left the country, disillusioned, to ramble the world.
They started up a rock incline that stretched towards the purple night sky.
“I leave Czechoslovakia in 1989,” Chladek said over his shoulder. “Sometime after Students’ Day. November seventeenth. This is the beginning of our Velvet Revolution. Václav Havel and the students, you know this story maybe?”
Jeremy didn’t very well, but Chladek was skipping across the details, homing in on his point. In communist Czechoslovakia, there had been demonstrations and counter-demonstrations on Students’ Day for decades. Sometimes violent. But November 17, 1989—with the gale of new ideas blowing through Eastern Europe at that time—was expected to be an especially troubled day.
At the top of the rock face, they climbed over a chainlink fence. “November fifteenth,” Chladek was saying, “two days before the official rallies, there is a counter-demonstration in a place called Stromovka.”
Chladek looked over at Jeremy, who shook his head.
“Stromovka: the place of trees.”
Chladek described a park at the centre of Prague. Very old, very beautiful, loved by many people. And he described how earlier in 1989, the Communists had announced their intention to put a highway through the middle of it.
Jeremy made a sympathetic face.
“Exactly,” Chladek said. “But a good excuse for a demonstration.”
Things went poorly. The police beat up the demonstrators, along with any journalist impudent enough to cover such an event. Some were jailed, but far more were given the common punishment of being driven five miles out of the city and dropped there. Chladek was swept up among them and found himself on a frozen roadside at midnight, without money and with a very long walk home.
Students’ Day, 1989, dawned with portent. The official Communist rally at Vysehard Castle in the middle of Prague drew twelve thousand people, including many of the Stromovka demonstrators and students who had heard about those events. Chladek joined the crowds in his new joint-capacity as victim and journalist. The young people lit candles and sang sad Czech songs. It was beautiful.
“Well,” Chladek said, after a fortifying slug of vodka, “you cannot tell twelve thousand Czech people to go home once they have lighted candles and begun to sing sad songs. Everyone now wants to hear Václav Havel speak. ‘Havel Havel Havel,’ we call out.…”
Havel, perhaps wisely, wasn’t there. And although a rousing speech from the poet and activist might have satisfied the gathered throng, without him, without his words, the demonstration became restless. It became mobile.
“Now people in the crowd are calling out: ‘Václavské námesti! Wenceslas Square!’ ” Chladek said, pushing the vodka into Jeremy’s hands, his eyes glistening with remembrance.
It was forbidden to demonstrate in Wenceslas Square, but even Chladek wanted to see twelve thousand candles lit next to the river. To see the older people leaning out their windows in wonder, up and down the streets connecting to the square.
The crowd entered Národni Avenue, proud but frightened. There were riot police at the top of the avenue, “white-heads” as they were known for their helmets. They stood in rows, three deep, armed with wooden clubs, blocking the way into the square. Fearing the worst, the students sat in the street, and there followed picturesque moments of uncertainty. Groups of students holding lit candles in their hands. Sitting in front of the ranks of police. Chladek took photos, moving through the crowd.
And then the police fell on them. Through his lens, Chladek saw the clubs rising and falling in the candlelight. He saw students rolled into balls as they were kicked. As they were beaten bloody, as their arms and legs and noses were broken.
“And all the time the students are crying,
‘Máme holé ruce!’ ”
Chladek said, breathing hard. “It means: ‘We are bare-handed. We have nothing in our hands.’ Do not beat us.
Máme holé ruce.”
Chladek was pulled from the crowd himself. Pushed against a wall. Three young policemen beat his ribs and his legs, practised and methodical. Broke his nose.
His camera was last. As Chladek described the end of his beating, his hands gripping the railing in front of them, eyes out across the view he was not seeing. His beautiful Leica. The police told him to run and, as he did so, the camera arced over his head and smashed into the street in front of him. It crunched underfoot but he did not stop.
The remembrance of this last detail exhausted Chladek. He took a break during which Jeremy lit them both cigarettes.
“The Velvet Revolution,” Jeremy said.
Chladek shook his head. Drank some, smoked some, grimaced. “Very velvet, isn’t it?” he said eventually.
They walked up past the flower bed with the marigolds spelling
Prospect Point
. Past the concession, where Chladek stopped at the garbage cans and rifled through the uppermost layer of refuse. They walked in silence down the Park Drive and to the middle of a mossy stone bridge that crossed the causeway, then cut down the embankment and strolled out onto the Lions Gate Bridge itself. The black water of the inlet unfolded beneath them as Chladek picked up the story again.
In the days following the beatings, a rumour swirled through Prague that there had been a martyr. A mathematics student, Martin Smid, beaten to death. Killed for the cause, like students before him. The symmetry of history was tragic and compelling. The country felt changed. Chladek, too, noticed things about himself.
“I felt good,” Chladek said, walking slowly towards the crest of the bridge. “I have a big white bandage across my face, and I am limping everywhere, but I feel very, very good. What I think at any time seems right, yes? I understand everything. You know this feeling?”
Jeremy didn’t think he did.
Not a bad feeling overall, Chladek said, knowing everything. He woke up that morning, heard about Smid, and half an hour later he understood all that had happened in Czechoslovakia in the past two days, all that had ever happened in Czech history, all that had ever happened, period. World history. The history of humanity.
“So clear to me,” Chladek said, remembering.
He wrote an increasing number of articles from this point onward. Three in the single day following the emergence of Smid’s story. Seven the following day. Seven again the next day. Ten a day at his manic peak.
“About Smid?” Jeremy asked.
“About the Devil. How he has come again to Czechoslovakia.”
He met with his editor on a Monday. The time off that his editor gave him (a reward for excellent work, he was told) allowed him to participate more fully in the events that then followed. Demonstrations daily that grew out of control. Ten days later there were a million people in downtown Prague. The city, the country, stood still.
They had reached the apex of the bridge. Here there was a steel maintenance ladder that lead from the railing down a dozen feet to a catwalk hanging beneath the bridge. Use of the ladder was forbidden in French and English on a small wooden sign affixed to the railing, but also prevented more strenuously with a grating that was secured over the ladder with various locks and shields. Chladek surprised Jeremy by producing a screwdriver from his jacket pocket, and further by how easily he used it to unlock the grate, which swung aside and offered them access to the platform below.
“Chladek. I don’t think so.”
Chladek disappeared over the railing into the howling blackness.
Jeremy stuck his head over the rail. His stomach dropped even at that, the distance to the water telescoping into countless miles. He’d heard about jumpers. Nobody lived. At this
height the Burrard Inlet was like a sheet of concrete. You broke into pieces on impact.
“Come down,” Chladek yelled up from the catwalk, his words faint.
“Not a chance in hell,” Jeremy yelled back, feeling the vodka swirling in his veins.
Chladek turned and looked out over the water. Then back up at Jeremy. “The park,” he said, waving out into the blackness behind him, “as you will never see it.”
When he got down, Jeremy’s gut was in turmoil, but he turned, hands gripping the railing, and the park did spread out away from him in a way he didn’t expect to see soon again. Above them, the underbelly of the Lions Gate Bridge, a sounding board that boomed with traffic. Directly below, the foaming sea, cut just now by a freighter that surged in towards a berth at the terminal. Across the water, the park. The face of the park, Jeremy thought. He had always thought that the park turned away from the city. Presented the tumult of downtown with a turned shoulder. From here, hanging in this sympathetic darkness, displaced entirely from any roadway or city vantage point, transgressing to see this sight. Here the park faced you, its expression one of knowing and familiarity.
Chladek spread his arms in the wind that swept around them, enveloping them in its briny fragrance.
“At one demonstration, Jeremy,” he called out, voice raised against the wind, “I remember the people in Václavské náměsti, and a little boy in front of this crowd. He is six, seven, ten, I don’t know. A little boy in a white shirt and black hair, and he plays the violin so beautifully that people are crying. A million people weep in Wenceslas Square. And I knew then that an angel has joined the fight. An angel for our Devil, I think. I wrote some more articles.”
“And the Communists fell,” Jeremy shouted. “Your angel won.”
“The Devil won,” Chladek shouted back, opening his eyes and grinning. “Smid was a lie.”
A real person, just not dead. His death was a rumour spread by the Secret Police, spread to generate dissent and unrest among the students. The rumour was designed to motivate further demonstrations, to provoke riots that would justify martial law.
Chladek pressed the bottle into Jeremy’s hands. “We’re almost done,” he said. “Drink.”
Jeremy was now drunk enough that the alcohol was vibrating within him. His eyes felt bright and alert. His thoughts supple, strong, sharp-edged.
And so, Chladek continued, what had begun in Stromovka had now ended like this. He learned the truth about Smid on the seventh day of a week-long period during which he slept not a single hour. He had written over 70,000 words, he guessed, none of them published by the
Prague Evening
. He had phoned every person he had ever known, telling them what he knew.
Then Smid turned out to be a lie.
“Smid the martyr is shit,” Chladek said, his eyes filling with dark rage. Then he wound up and threw the bottle out over the blackness. It hung suspended, released a tendril of remaining vodka, then glinted off downward to its faintly audible impact against a bridge stanchion and a glittering distribution of shards over the black water.
“Night cap,” Chladek said when they reached his camp—a filthy foam mattress and a tangled pile of clothes spilling out of a yellow plastic milk crate. “You know Becherovka?”