He had disappeared earlier that afternoon to his friend Fallon Luke, known to everyone as Fluke, where they had engaged in illicit activities that Eva contrived to know as little about as possible, such as downloading films from the internet to sell on the black market at school to help pay for a Playstation that she was supposed to know nothing about. Fluke was also reputed to have found a way of using his cell phone without having to pay for calls. He had built his first cell phone out of spare parts at the age of twelve and never looked back. Rusty's conversations with Fluke revolved around technology, music and a smattering of Czech swear words that Rusty had learned from Eva's mother through some obscure process of osmosis. Svetlana denied all knowledge of how he could have come by them.
He was currently doing a homework project for Economics about Thatcherism. "What was typical for Thatcher's economic policy?" Rusty asked Eva, reading from his dog eared, ketchup stained worksheet and gallantly unplugging one earful of Green Day from his mp3 player to await her reply.
"Monetarism," replied Eva.
"What's money tourism?" asked Rusty, perplexed.
"Good question!" answered Eva, who did not manage an answer, as she was seized by a laughter attack that bent her double. This unfortunately brought her closer to Rusty's feet.
"What's that awful smell?" Eva asked, giggling.
"Sorry Mum!" said Rusty, triumphantly wiggling his teenage sweaty socked toes to waft the smell more effectively through her tiny study.
"Look, do you want me to help you with this or not?" laughed Eva, in mock offence.
"Sorreeee!!" came Rusty's sing song reply, followed immediately by a teenage neck grabbing manoeuvre from behind that temporarily cut off Eva's air supply but which he clearly intended to be an affectionate hug. As she gasped for air, she was aware of a tinny refrain from a Green Day song making its way from a stray earphone into her ear. Suddenly he loosened his grasp.
"Love ya Mum!" he said, planting a cheese and onion flavoured kiss on her left cheek, and disappearing towards the kitchen in a gust of displaced unwashed teenage air to find another snack.
They worked for a while together on the Economics assignment, referring to his textbook, which by some miracle he had not forgotten at school today, and doing some research on the Internet, printing out pictures and pieces of text as necessary. Eva managed to steer him in the direction of some reliable sites, such as the Economist, as part of a campaign to wean him off the gospel according to Wikipedia. Thirty minutes of concentration for a fourteen year old demanded yet another refueling break. Rusty bent low and made an oblique sideways movement, like a human Frisbee, propelling himself out of his chair.
"Don't forget you're going round to your Granny's for tea tonight!" Eva shrieked back at him over her shoulder. Rusty adored his Czech Granny Svetlana, and was fully able to do justice to her cooking and baking, no matter what he had eaten at home before. Whistling on his way out of the front door (always the most reliable sign that he was in a good mood), Rusty went out. As the door slammed shut it was as if the whole house stood still in space time for sheer relief as a shocked, teenage-free silence alighted on it.
Eva smiled to herself and returned to her laptop, where she was doing some background research on the Elizabethan alchemist, John Dee. She was looking up information about when he had spent time in Prague at the court of Rudolf II. "This is the life!" Eva thought, as she settled down to an evening of blissful research into her favourite city.
Eva's mother Svetlana was dozing in her armchair near the open coal fire. This was one of the things about the British lifestyle she had most enthusiastically adopted when she had come to live here in the late 1940s. It was an aspect of the culture she had remained faithful to even when it had gone out of fashion among the British themselves. Eventually she found she had waited long enough to see the open fire come back into fashion. Svetlana's attachment to quaint, homely habits only made her all the more fascinating and adorable to Rusty. One of his favourite treats on arriving at her house on a cool, dark autumn or winter evening, for example, was to take a toasting fork from the brass stand by the fireplace, and make himself toast over the open flames. He was never able to convince his friends that toast tasted better that way.
Perhaps because Svetlana's relationship with her daughter Eva had been a little aloof until recent years, Rusty's grandmother relished the emotional straightforwardness she could enjoy with her grandson. Svetlana had discovered an impish sense of fun rather late in life and then, to her delight, found that she could not only enjoy it, but even hone and perfect it with Rusty. Whenever Svetlana inadvertently broke old age wind, for example, she knew she could rely on Rusty, who broke teenage wind, either to affect not to hear her, or to start some sort of ongoing competition.
"Heff enudder slayees of tooost, deeeerrr," Svetlana was saying, in her mock Czech accent. Actually, she normally had hardly any accent in English, but this was part of the fun she enjoyed with Rusty. Rusty was already on his second slice of thick toast. He relished, among other things, that his Granny never scolded him for dropping crumbs, or even for occasionally dripping jam on the carpet. She also made all her own jams and pickles and grew potatoes in her back garden that actually tasted of potatoes. In a while, they would go into her kitchen and press fresh garlic and grate raw potatoes to make potato pancakes with marjoram, the ultimate Czech evening meal for Rusty.
The main topic of conversation in this benignly conspiratorial relationship was the ongoing question of How to Ransom Mamma from Ransom's. It had already been established between Rusty and his Granny that Ransom's was about as near as you could get to the Antichrist, and that all who tarried there were infected with such fatal plagues as self-importance, workaholism and, most damningly of all, humour deficit. Since Svetlana's visit to Prague with Eva in 1990, some sort of perspective and inner meaning had returned to her life, but Svetlana and Rusty agreed that their first priority must be to wean Eva off the dreaded Ransom's.
In truth, this project served more as a welding exercise for Rusty and his grandmother than actually to convert Eva from workaholic drone to autonomous being. For one thing Eva was clearly beginning to see the light of her own accord. One afternoon, for example, she had arrived for a visit at Svetlana's with an application form for a job at a supermarket. She had worked out that she could keep herself and Rusty afloat on a thirty five hour job as a supermarket cashier, or stacking shelves, especially if she was willing to work unsocial hours, such as weekend and night shifts. This liberating thought, like similar liberating thoughts, was perhaps more liberating in the thinking than in the doing, but it did feel good to Eva to know that she had an alternative like that waiting in the wings. Even a theoretical alternative gave her a feeling of freedom.
When she went shopping in the store, she would walk up and down the aisles comforting herself with the thought: "I could be working here, and I would have no more meetings to go to, no more fretting over exam results, no more snotty parents, no more snotty colleagues, no more seventy hour weeks."
She would walk past the household cleaning materials or the packets of tea bags and the jars of coffee and imagine herself helping a customer to find a product, or stacking shelves with teabags, and still having enough of a mind left with which to think her own thoughts. Or she would picture herself at the end of a shift, perhaps at ten o'clock on a rather frosty night, putting her warm jacket on to go home and walking away from the store, back home up the winding hill to her house, with her head empty of all thoughts except for her night time routine. She would picture closing her front door behind her and taking her coat off, putting the kettle on to make a hot water bottle or a last cup of tea. She could imagine herself feeling that pleasant kind of tiredness that came from having a shift behind her, but with her personhood still intact and a mind that still felt like her own. On a night such as this, she thought, she would get into bed and read perhaps for an hour before turning off her bedside lamp, because her mind would be hungry for some content, and just as importantly still be in a fit state to accept that content. And then, refreshed from the brisk evening walk in the fresh winter night, she would switch off her bedside lamp, plump up her pillow and settle down to sleep, feeling like a person. No more sensible career suits, no more tight-lipped professionalism, no more high blood pressure, no more rushing around the school precincts perpetually late for appointments she had no interest in keeping.
Even more blissful for Eva in these moments of reverie was the thought of being able to get up the next morning at whatever time she woke, rather than having to snap into fifth gear at seven in the morning or even earlier. For, or at least so she imagined it, in her job at the supermarket she would not have to work an early morning shift immediately after a late night shift. This meant that she would now have time, even on a working day, to call her own. Bliss. In Eva's imagination this fantasy played itself out most satisfactorily in winter. She would picture herself on a winter morning waking some time between seven thirty and eight and getting up slowly. First she would make herself a pot of tea, and have the time to drink it. Then she would make herself some toast and put it on a tray with some butter and some ginger preserve. Rusty would still have to be dragged out of bed, clearly, but this would not worry her, because she would be in no hurry, so it would not matter. She would then eat her toast and ginger preserve and drink her pot of tea before deciding to take a leisurely hot bath. Then she would put the vacuum cleaner round the flat, perhaps mop the kitchen floor as well and, luxury of time luxuries, manage a whole basketful of ironing with time to spare. By contrast, her current record for putting off ironing she felt too exhausted to do was ten weeks.
…Svetlana dozed on in front of the fire waiting for Rusty to arrive for tea, her own memories mingling with those about people who had been close to her before she had moved to England. As a piece of coal suddenly spat and cracked, rousing her from her dream for a second, she half opened her eyes and registered the warm flames and that it was already dark outside, before floating back to the threshold of sleep. Almost in anticipation of another of her regular chats with Rusty about the Awfulness of Ransom's and the annihilating effects of career mythology, another picture was evoked in her mind's eye. She was in an old basement in Prague, on a similar cold, dark autumn night many years ago, talking to Stanislav, known to his friends as Stanley. Stanley was a lawyer and bricklayer. It was in the late 1950s. He was making some adjustments to an old brick wall in the chimney of an old building on Lilliova Street in the Prague Old Town. He had a slow, methodical, contented way of moving and his eyes were lit with a gleam of discreet satisfaction, as if it would be unseemly to look happy around other people who might not be.
"How is your wife keeping, Stan?" Svetlana was asking.
"She's well, thank you," Stan replied, loading another spatula with mortar and placing another brick carefully into the gap in the chimney wall that he was filling. The brick was being recycled from another site and was slightly chipped on one edge, so he turned it round and eased it into the layer of fresh mortar.
And the children?" Svetlana went on.
"Oh, they are fine too," Stan went on, a little more hesitantly this time.
Svetlana waited.
"You know they are still only nine and eleven, but we do rather wonder what will become of them, you know, their education and so on."
"You mean because of your being out of favour with the Communist Party? They will be barred from going to university then?" Svetlana asked.
"Well that, and the fact that I am no longer allowed to practise law. I only practised for about two years after 1948 and discovered that I just did not have the stomach for all the lies," Stan went on, as if he were informing her that he had just planted some runner beans.
"So you earn your living as a bricklayer," Svetlana confirmed.
Stan chuckled. "Yes," he answered. "When I think of all the anguish I used to go through in those early years in the law practice when I discovered that the Party actually had monthly quotas for how many people had to be convicted, so if someone's trial was due to come up at the end of the month and the quota had not been fulfilled, then you could be the best lawyer in the world and it would not help the poor plaintiff. You knew they would go to jail whatever you did. Then there were the dirty deals over Party members. It is, of course, ideologically unthinkable that a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia should be convicted of a criminal offence, so mostly the charges are just dropped."
"So it's either lie and cheat and play the game, or become a bricklayer?" Svetlana went on with a wry smile.
Stan smiled. "That's basically what happens," he said, scraping a drip of spilt mortar off the floor.
"The irony, of course," he went on, musing as he waved another chipped brick gently around in his hand, "is that my 'punishment' has in some ways turned out to be a liberation. Not that I would wish it on anyone else, you understand. Don't get me wrong!"
"How do you mean?" Svetlana asked, feeling a little wrong-footed by a man she was determined to view as a victim turning round and saying that he had gained some advantage.
"Well, lest we forget," Stan ventured with a touch of good humoured irony in his voice, "We are the fortunate citizens of a workers' paradise these days, which means among other things that I earn far better money as a bricklayer than I ever did as a lawyer!"
"So your wife is certainly not complaining then, with two children to feed?" Svetlana laughed.
"Indeed not," Stan went on. "What with the extra jobs I do on the side for friends and acquaintances, I make quite good money. And then, to be frank, I am treated like royalty wherever I go! I am fed with beer and Schnitzel, potato salad and roast chickens! Nothing is too much trouble for bricklayers: we are worth our weight in gold. A lawyer, on the other hand, as a sort of intellectual, is inherently suspect, and likely to be a rootless cosmopolitan, leeching a living from the downtrodden working classes.
"I have a great deal to be thankful for, you know," Stan added a few moments later, standing back and scanning his work. "When I think of the people I know who never came back from the war, or who were sent off to labour camps for having served in the RAF! No, I can consider myself very fortunate indeed.
"And if I am being completely honest," he added, almost furtively, as he gathered up his tools and put them away, "I am lucky that I don't have to fret and worry in my job. I just go and build a wall, or whatever they want me to do, eat a good lunch, washed down by good beer, and go home. My thoughts are my own. My mind is free. You might even say that my misfortune has given me my freedom!"
"Or your character has," said Svetlana.
"Don't flatter me too much!" chuckled Stanley, twinkling in her direction with a flash of intelligent humour in the twilit room.
"Oh, by the way," said Stan, pulling something out of his blue overall pocket and handing it to Svetlana. "I almost forgot!"
"What's this?" said Svetlana, looking down at an odd shaped piece of greenish stone in her hand.
"It's Vltavin," answered Stanley. "Known in most other places as Moldavite."
"Moldavite?" repeated Svetlana, still not understanding.
"Yes," said Stanley. "It's a strange thing. I was just repairing this old chimney when I noticed that one of the bricks was loose, so I pulled it out, and found that inside. Minerals used to be quite a hobby of my father's. He worked at the National Museum, you know, which has a fine collection of minerals. Moldavite is unique."
"How so?" asked Svetlana, very curious by now.
"Well firstly it is found almost exclusively in Bohemia and some parts of Moravia, but mainly near the river Vltava, hence its name."
"And?" asked Svetlana, sensing there was more to come.
"And it's also unique because it is the only gemstone on earth that is extraterrestrial in origin," said Stanley.
"Extraterrestrial?"
"Yes," Stanley went on. "It came about from the impact of a meteor landing in the Bohemian basin many millions of years ago. In fact it created the Bohemian basin when it hit the earth. I can lend you some books on it, if you like. It has a fascinating history and is surrounded with all sorts of legends."
"I would like that very much," said Svetlana thoughtfully. "But you shouldn't be giving this to me, it must be very valuable. I can't accept it!"
"Ah," Stanley had then said, "but some things are more valuable when they are given away!"
There had been a moment's silence between them and then Stanley had added, in a way that brooked no further debate:
"Think of it as a keepsake from your homeland of Bohemia that you can have with you when you are in England. Have some jewellery made from it for your daughter!"
"Thank you Stan," she said. "I will."
The chimes of the front door bell jolted Svetlana awake and out of her chair. She switched on the standard lamp and looked out of her bay window to see Rusty standing there, shivering a little in his thin jacket. She walked slowly to the front door and opened it.
"Ah, there you are dear," she said, give him a peremptory hug. "I've made us some goulash tonight. Thought it would warm us up."
"What kind of goulash?" Rusty asked, by now something of an expert on the nuances of Central European cooking.
"Szegedin," answered Svetlana, referring to a Hungarian goulash recipe involving Sauerkraut and sour cream.
Rusty grinned.
"Great!" he said, rubbing his hands together. "Makes you fart though!" he added with a gleam.
Svetlana waved an unconcerned hand behind her as she led the way into the kitchen. "Who cares? It tastes good!"
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