Laure wormed her way to the side of the stage where she could better analyse what was going on. Tomas’s music had undergone a subtle change. Into the out-and-out Western Europe rock-andpop influence, into the defiant blare and gangbuster kidnap of the senses, had crept the rhythms of the Slavonic dance, a tiny hint of the Bohemian bagpipe and a glorious riff on Smetana’s Vltava.

The evening deepened. The audience grew bolder and yelled, stamped, waved their hands. The lights bathed Anatomie in the chiaroscuro she had seen in paintings and lit the passage of thousands of insects winging in to feast.

She yelled and waved with the best of them.

It wasn’t just the powerful music to which those massed bodies were responding. In the dusk, they were giving in to forbidden yearnings and loyalties. Tasting resistance like wine on the tongue.

Laure feasted on the figure of her lover, waistcoat hanging loose, a suggestion of sweat-streaked torso under it, dominating his guitar and the microphone. ‘Czechoslovakia resistance is cultural,’ he said, ‘very special.’ Watching it, hearing it, feeling it, was to draw its subversions into her veins.

Why hadn’t she paid more attention to history at school? Then she might have had a better idea of how regimes eventually die. If they died. There were so many layers to unpeel. So many crosscurrents to master.

But what she could see, and experience, was the wasteland of lives and dreams it generated. A catalogue of unnecessary deaths and the destruction of talent and opportunity. An ingrained habit of being fearful. A population who had the morality beaten out of them by repression that the authorities pretended was love.

Tomas shifted. His gaze caught hers and they exchanged a look, complicit, lustful, tender, and Laure forgot about anything else except her own desires.

Too soon, far too soon, Leo struck up the penultimate number. ‘Tunnelling’ was a story of mice working their way through harvested grain in a silo, thereby creating underground highways and hidden passages.

‘Make of it what you will,’ said Tomas when Laure had been puzzling over its lyrics. ‘Remember, mice are good at infiltration. Nobody notices them.’

There was a pause. Tomas held up his hand and, as the crowd roared, he swung into the final number, ‘Kočka.’

‘If a cat wants

To kill the mouse

He must first catch it’

Halfway through, with an ecstatic audience shifting and swaying, the lights on the stage were cut with a crack of electricity and plunged into darkness. More than one person screamed. Looking towards the sound, Laure saw the outer edge of the crowd shift and crack. Immediately, in a Pavlovian response, a percentage peeled away and hastened into the dusk. They know the form, she thought. Some, trapped at the centre, tried to fight their way out. Others held their ground. An impasse threatened.