The Woman from Bratislava Read Online Free PDF Page A

run into one another, pass the time of day, without feeling any emotion, great or small. I think we both wonder what we saw in the other. The children had been a bond of sorts between us. Now they were grown up, married themselves, had provided us with grandchildren whom we saw separately. We very rarely met. Majken and I were married for almost twelve years, but the divorce was a nasty business. She had had one child from her first marriage and together we had three in rapid succession before it all fell apart. I cheated on herand she eventually found out. Both she and the children went ballistic and I don’t think any of them has ever really forgiven me. We imagine that we live in an age when our hearts cannot be broken, but betrayal and broken promises hurt as much as they ever did. Our youngest was eighteen now, we could have a polite conversation , but I was still not very popular. What annoyed me most was that it bothered me and affected me more than I was prepared to admit. Majken had remarried. She had had another child, late on. Her new husband already had two of his own. Just as well Majken was a mathematician. Because it took a mathematician’s brain and methodical mindset as well as a hefty diary to keep track of all the birthdays, the Christmas and New Year holidays, when you had to allow not only for your own offspring but also for all the various step-children. We belonged to a generation which had not gone through life quietly and unremarked. To be honest I don’t think we had ever thought about anybody but ourselves.
    ‘Do you even want it to last?’ Lasse asked.
    ‘Of course I do,’ I said. ‘But let’s talk about something sensible, like Poland or NATO…’
    He laughed.
    ‘You started it. Lunch is on me, seeing as you’re paying all that child maintenance.’
    ‘Thank heavens my own two are over eighteen now,’ I mumbled morosely and we both laughed again, possibly as a way of covering up a growing awkwardness, and I felt better.
    We strolled along the narrow streets like two gentlemen, coats open and arms swinging. All we needed was a couple of top hats and somebody to tip them at and we could have been in a Hollywood musical. Horses’ hooves clip-clopped over the cobbles, but as yet there were few passengers behind the drivers in the carriages they drew. Down by the old Town Hall, where a hot-dog stall emblazoned with the evocative name ‘Dania’ struck a strangely tasteless note, Lasse suddenly stopped short and put a hand on my arm.
    ‘Don’t look now. Remember the old days in Moscow …’
    I knew what he was getting at. I bent down, pretended to be tying my shoelaces. I glanced back. There were about a dozen people behind me.
    ‘There’s a woman, d’you see her?’ Lasse said. ‘Blue coat, chest-nut-brown hair, sensible shoes. Good-looking woman in her early sixties. Maybe a bit younger. Well-preserved, but still …’
    I scanned the street, then I spotted her. She stopped short, made a big show of looking in the window of a sports shop, then she glanced towards us, turned on her heel and strode off briskly down a side street.
    I straightened up.
    ‘What about her?’
    ‘Old habits die hard when I’m in this part of the world, even if the country is a member of NATO and about to join the EU. I can’t help looking over my shoulder. You remember how sometimes in Moscow you could simply sense that you were being followed?’
    I nodded. I remembered. We had not spent all our time with our noses buried in dusty books in the endless reading rooms in the yellow palace of the Lenin Library. We had also met people. We had visited the homes of the hospitable Russians and we knew that they knew that an eye was kept on dangerous foreigners who were liable to spread noxious ideas about democracy and freedom.
    ‘What about her?’ I said again.
    Lasse looked after her, but she was long gone. Then, as he took my arm and led me away, he said:
    ‘She was in the back row at the Institute of