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river.
    It was still terribly hot. He had removed his dinner jacket and his tie and rolled up his sleeves, but his shirt was dripping. Galena lived in a rough area. No-one was enjoying noisy after-dinner drinks in their back gardens. He located her room before the number of the house by the sound of Don Giovanni pouring out of an open second-floor window.
    Raymond ran upstairs, hardly needing to hammer on the door, his heart was banging so loudly. Galena welcomed him, a glass in one hand, paintbrush in the other, her fringe drenched with sweat, paint all over her matelot jersey. She had kicked off her new boots and put them beside Casey’s sketchbook and the remains of Raymond’s bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the only chair.
    ‘Casey, vile peeg, vas swigging it from the bottle, then he give me great cheesy kiss, I slap his face and run away.’ She filled a tooth mug with whiskey for Raymond.
    ‘Perhaps you should give back his sketchbook? Those drawings are probably worth something.’
    ‘Good, I need money for paints.’
    Galena’s room was dreadful, only large enough to contain a single bed, stacked up canvasses, an easel, a small rickety table for her tubes of paint, brushes and palettes, and an ancient gramophone. The LPs, apart from Don Giovanni , were by Slav composers: Suk, Bartók, Dvořák and Smetana. On top of the books piled up by the bed was a collapsing copy of Kafka’s Castle . In between big damp patches on the wall were rough sketches and far too many scribbled telephone numbers. Did they all belong to men? Donna Giovanna? Raymond was appalled by his jealousy.
    Galena had gone back to her easel, thickly applying paint. Raymond edged towards the canvasses.
    ‘May I?’
    ‘Of course, that is vy you are here.’
    And Raymond was overwhelmed by the same churning excitement he had felt when he first saw the Raphael Pandora in the flaming château. Galena’s subject matter was hideous. Farms and entire villages being sliced in half by the Iron Curtain. Humans and animals being blown to pieces or burnt to death on high-voltage electric fences.
    ‘As children,’ Galena said flatly, ‘we were tormented by the screams and bangs as foxes, hares, dogs and cats tread on mines.’
    The pictures were made more sinister by homely touches: storks nesting in watchtower chimneys, window boxes filled with orange nasturtiums. As if in defiance against the horrors and the greyness of Communist life, Galena revelled like Matisse in the brightest, most exuberant of palettes.
    One large canvas took Raymond’s breath away. On the Slovak side, from a watchtower above the electric fence, border guards were mowing down defectors in case the mines didn’t get them. Everywhere were screaming mouths, waving hands, terrified eyes, severed limbs. On the Austrian side, a bunch of grandees were blasting away at partridge against brilliant autumn colours. A horse and cart followed, weighed down by picnic hampers and crates of wine. The contrast made the behaviour of both sides more reprehensible. It had the power of a Guernica . Galena could capture sadistic arrogance in a brush stroke.
    ‘These are amazing, has anyone seen them?’
    ‘No. In Prague, I vas banned from college for protesting against Communists. The Volpos, secret police, vatch me and my friends. They close down my first two exhibitions.’ Galena had put on The Bartered Bride , side one, which was even more scratchy.
    ‘Things get too hot, my father vas arrested for political activity, he didn’t come home much, my mother die earlier.’
    ‘How did you escape?’
    ‘I get to know Volpos, who arrange for me and my sister to escape over border. She vas four years younger.’
    Tears were trickling down Galena’s face as she went to the window.
    ‘As we get to other side, my sister tread on mine, it blow off her leg, and knock me unconscious. I came round to hear her last screams, border guards leave her to die.
    ‘I crawl to safety. A shooting party nearly