It was clear to one and all that this was not on. The car was absurdly small, the frontier obstacles serious. Next day, we trundled round the countryside, and it is an interesting area, as I later learned. The Csállókőz (Vel’ky Žitný ostrov in Slovak), an island in the Danube, had once had German villages, filled with harmless people (whom I later encountered, speaking a mixture of Hungarian and German, in Nassau). A scene of desolation in the snow (‘Dieses Dorf hiess seinerzeit Modern,’ said Tibor). None of us had quite the courage to say that this was preposterous. Tibor lay down on the back and Andrea put a coat over him; she then sat upon him, and rehearsed a line to the effect that she was suffering from an inflamation of the ovaries — Eierstockentzündung — which she thought would defeat the Slovak frontier guards. We then approached the frontier. It was the ides of March, 1964. So many people had that same experience — deep snow, barbed wire, guards in long coats with long rifles and red stars in uniform caps, barking Alsatians. The first barrier opened up, and we were in a column of cars going back to Vienna, which Andrea had banked on. Second barrier. Andrea had expected that there would be one guard, who would probably just have waved us through — the Slovaks’ instincts are decent — but, the authorities knowing what they were doing, there were several. One looked into the back of the car, and wondered. Andrea said, ‘Eierstockentzündung’. A hand went to the coat underneath, and hair was obvious. ‘Sie chaben eine vierte Perzzoon in diesem Wagen.’ I said to Andrea that there was no point in contesting it, and we were all led towards the customs building. Tibor stood shoeless in the snow, and bit his fingernails to the quick: he knew what would have happened otherwise, as sticks went under them. There was an interrogation that night, all of us in separate rooms. Morning came, and the customs people — decent Slovaks: I heard them say about me, ‘Simpatický’ — rang up the Czech Ministry of Justice people in Prague. The Czech Ministry of Justice people in Prague were pigs, insisted on rules, and so we were stuck. A police car took Jan and me to the prison, the Prokurátorská väznica v Bratislave. We stopped on the way, at a café, and they gave us an enormous slivovica. Then the prison gates opened, and the formalities started: belongings handed over, medical inspection, prison clothes put on — a brown number, smelling (I can recall it now) of washing, with flat shoes that you cannot run in. You go along the corridors, and if there is another prisoner coming, you are turned, face to the wall, until he has passed. Warders click keys to warn each other that they are coming. Then a cell — it was 283, and I later went back, post-Communism, Monte Cristo fashion, to see it, to wonder if the inmates needed some cigarettes. The cell then contained four young men, and I complained to the governor that the cell was too small for that number. He agreed, but said, what could he do? They were gypsies. In the old days, the gypsies used to get themselves put into prison in November, because they were fed and heated. Now there was a free market, and it was September. There was therefore overcrowding in the Prokurátorská väznica v Bratislave. I could not criticize, and wandered down that well-known staircase reciting the St Matthew Passion, which, somehow, I knew by heart: Wenn ich einmal soll scheiden, so scheid’ Du nicht von mir, in the old Klemperer version. I thought of my poor old mother, a war widow, with me as the only child — my father had been killed in the RAF in ’42 — and what she must be feeling. Your first week in prison is awful, and the chap they had moved in with me was very sympathetic as I wiped away the tears that were not entirely to be stifled. He was quite an interesting lad, Kornel Karpacky by name. Our common language was Hungarian. The authorities let me have the grammar book I had arrived with, Banhidi-Jókai-Szabó, Tanuljuk nyelveket, and I had reached lesson ten, where they explain that the verb changes according to whether it is transitive or intransitive followed by an indirect article or a dative. The translation passages were about a Palestinian going round a textile factory. At that time, the second language in Bratislava was Hungarian. It had been the second capital, until 1918, and the Jews, a quarter of the population, had spoken Hungarian; there were also Germans who had taken to it easily enough. Kornel spoke it, with a thick Slovak accent which I myself have never, to this day, entirely lost, because his mother had come from Transylvania and his father was Slovak. He explained that life had been very difficult, that he had made three of the local girls pregnant, had had three mothers chasing after him, had made for the frontier with wire-cutters. I should not have believed this, because Kornel — who was not I think entirely balanced in mind — must have been that phenomenon of Communist prisons that everyone knows, a Spitzel — someone planted to find out what you are about. He did not get anything much out of me, and must have got quite sick of the St Matthew (I also knew the Verdi Requiem). At some stage, he must have been told to try a homosexual approach. The prison pants came down, and a foot-long Pan-Slav number stretched before my eyes. On it had been tattooed the badge of Fascist Slovakia, some sort of double-headed lobster. I expressed no interest, and there we were. The weeks went by. I got to know the guards. The librarian, who had good German, trundled round his books, and I said, ‘Seitdem ich hier sitze, kann ich nicht umhin, Das Kapital zu lesen’, which I then did. H. G. Wells was not really any better, though, in later life, I would gladly read both of these men, especially Wells. Forty years later, Penguin asked me to do an introduction to his Short History of the World, a superb performance, and he is the writer whom I should want to recall from the dead. He competes with Orwell, but Orwell never dies.
The warders became friendly. ‘Mész haza,’ they said — you’ll go home. One had served in a Slovak outfit in Italy at the end of the war, and spoke at bit of Italian, which I vaguely could manage: ‘piove’, in the exercise yard, where we went every day for half an hour, balancing on an isosceles triangle of half-thawed ice, and if you stood on one end, the other, thirty yards up, rose. Then it was back to the cell, warders clicking their keys, to warn each other that a prisoner was coming. The food was some sort of stew, pushed through a flap. Later on, one of the judges asked me, why did you never complain about the food, and I said, not to his enlightenment, have you ever lived in a Cambridge college? I was not wasting my time, and the British went into action. The Consul-General in Prague, Ramsay Melhuish, turned up with several hundred untipped State Express, which I shared with Kornel, who, Slovak nationalist that he was, said that they were inferior to his own Lipa brand, the tobacco of which was so carelessly packed that the whole thing caught fire and was therefore easier to smoke. Melhuish also gave me all the works of Bertrand Russell when, in alimony mode, he wrote books called ‘Power’, ‘Being’, etc. We used to talk about the lectures of A. J. P. Taylor in the governor’s office, and he was very kind to my mother, whom he put up in the Thun Palace in Prague. She was, I am afraid, difficult, and he was wonderful. She came: there was nothing to be said but the prison governor took the point. At a certain point, in my cell, I heard the clumping of boots. It was the governor. He said something like: