Farewell to Prague Read online

  A Farewell to Prague

  SELECTED OTHER WORKS BY DESMOND HOGAN

  The Ikon Maker

  The Leaves on Grey

  A Curious Street

  A New Shirt

  The Edge of the City: A Scrapbook 1976–91

  The House of Mourning, and Other Stories

  In memory of Jonathan Warner, with gratitude.

  CONTENTS

  Copyright

  wie heisst es, dein Land

  hinterm Berg, hinterm Jahr?

  Ich weiss, wie es heisst.

  Wie das Wintermärchen, so heisst es,

  es heisst wie das Sommermärchen,

  das Dreijahreland deiner Mutter, das war es,

  das ists,

  es wandert überallhin, wie die Sprache,

  wirf sie weg, wirf sie weg,

  dann hast du sie wieder, wie ihn,

  den Kieselstein aus

  der Mährischen Senke,

  den dein Gedanke nach Prag trug …

  Paul Celan, ‘Es ist alles anders’

  what is it called, your country

  behind the mountain, behind the year?

  I know what it’s called.

  Like the winter’s tale, it is called,

  it’s called like the summer’s tale,

  your mother’s threeyearland, that’s what it was,

  what it is,

  it wanders off everywhere, like language,

  throw it away, throw it away,

  then you’ll have it again, like that other thing,

  the pebble from

  the Moravian hollow

  which your thought carried to Prague …

  Translated by Michael Hamburger

  ‘What are you going to do now?’

  ‘Don’t know. Go to Africa.’

  Robin had his arms about me and behind him I could see the mecca of dirty-black and nebulous South-East London high-rises.

  We were on the eleventh floor of a high-rise.

  As he held me, I was touching in my mind the great naked statue of David in Florence I’d travelled to once from University College, Dublin, having climbed steps to it, finding it wet from November rain.

  I was in the same gesture with Robin as I’d been with a girl two weeks before, in a high-rise in Catford, who’d had the sudden inspiration to try to change my sexuality. A teacher from the polytechnic I had worked in part-time, she had stood, naked from the waist up, for this embrace. I was wearing a white sleeveless vest which had a theatrical ancientness. The woman who held me was from Antrim.

  She’d told me that night about a young boy with a tattoo showing a gentian-violet swallow bearing a bunch of pink roses on his right arm. She used to sleep with him on the beaches of North Antrim the previous summer. He’d run around at night in the full regalia of the IRA, come home in the small hours when his mother would be waiting to give him a box on the ears. One night he went out in his regalia to inspect a place where he knew Semtex to be buried and was shot dead by the British Army.

  Robin had a semi-troglodyte face that always looked as if it was going to apologize for something, sable curls barely held back from it. His cheeks had a high violet colouring and he had large lips, the lower lip always pulsating a little, which had been sealed by many people, men and women.

  His mother had called him Robin because he was born in the year Robin Lee Graham had sailed from South Africa to California and to remind them all there was a photograph over the piano in Pulvensey showing Robin Lee Graham with sun-kissed hair holding up a dorado fish.

  The cassette player was playing a Marvin Gaye song:

  Has anyone seen my old friend Martin?

  Can you tell me where he’s gone?

  He freed a lot of people but it seems the good die young.

  I just looked around and he’s gone.

  From the corner of my eye, reflected in a mirror, I could see a buff-coloured dole card beside a few tubes of oil paint. The flat belonged to a friend of Robin’s. We had spent the night here, sleeping on mattresses a few feet away from one another because Robin was covered in spots he’d gotten from sleeping with a girl on the heath in Pulvensey. She had tried to kill herself when he wouldn’t intensify the relationship, slashing her wrists, was put in the mental hospital in Norwich, dyed her hair cowslip-pale and alizarin and haze-blue and escaped in a diseased bituminous fur coat, taking the boat to France.

  Robin was teaching English at the moment in Hastings. He’d come to London for Friday night.

  ‘Well, I’m off to Prague in a few weeks,’ Robin said.

  ‘I’ve been to Prague.’

  ‘I know.’

  Suddenly I started crying. I broke down crying a lot now. My mind seemed to stop and the world blurred. There were a few weeks when even walking was difficult, walking was walking through torpor and if not it was an intoxicating experience. A pendulum inside propelled me back and forth. There was no way forward, no further lap I could make, and the only thing that seemed possible was to exit, to finalize myself to save others trouble and to preserve intact achievement, totality.

  Words had stopped for me, the ability to speak, the ability to express. And instead of words came images from childhood.

  A drummer in the brass band who’d emigrated to Glasgow, a collector of cigarette cards showing athletes, always wore nice suits, sometimes floral waistcoats, became engaged to a member of the Legion of Mary in Glasgow, and then one day, inexplicably, in a suit, hankie in his breast pocket, jumped off a bridge into the Clyde.

  A boy with a Teddy-boy quiff who’d chalked a billiard cue in the men’s club and played billiards the night his mother died.

  Later he went to South Africa for a few years, then became a singer in England, turned alcoholic, lived as a tramp. Recently I had seen a scrawled sign for his singing outside an Irish pub in London. ‘It’s the crack here every Saturday night.’

  His name had been Guy ‘Micko’ Delaney. ‘Micko’ for a father who had left his mother, gone to fight in the war, lived with a Russian woman in Crouch End and died – they said of drugs – in the late nineteen-forties.

  Cocaine Bill and Morphine Sue

  Were walking down the avenue.

  He was in Berlin in 1945 and had brought home a girl’s Holy Communion wreath, lilies appliquéd on lace, that he had found in a wrecked house. Mrs Delaney had buried it with him when he died.

  Micko was the bad element of our town. I was Micko now, or had become so these past months.

  Robin and I said goodbye at Kennington tube station. An Alsatian, not too big, leapt into a youth’s arms in the waste ground nearby.

  ‘I’ll write.’

  Flashy-coloured or old technicoloured postcards in my mind: a boy in mod clothes stealing the scene from a pair of nuns on Salthill prom; a guard directing traffic under Nelson’s Pillar.

  I walked home. A baby was crawling around the window of a pawnbroker’s in Camberwell. Lampposts were swathed with posters for wrestling, a Mardi Gras incoherence about the way they were pasted over one another, a bricolage of names like Kendo Nagazaki and Ravishing Robbie Hagan, of mammal-like breasts and Titan heads in balaclavas.

  ‘I’ve got more scars on my back than I can count,’ a stooped old man was telling another old man outside a bookie’s in Peckham.

  The Appleby Fair would be beginning just about now, black boxing gloves embossed with red satin roses hanging in the windows of vardos. I’d once known a boy from Derry who lived with an adoptive mother in Appleby for a while.

  In Catford, outside a shop which had fluorescent green pens in the window, pictures of reclining nymphs in Scandinavian forests, cups with ferny patterns, Limerick Benny was singing.

  He was wearing a black hat and, although it wa
s summer, a black overcoat.

  ‘Tis not for Limerick that I sigh though I love her in my soul.’

  Perhaps it was because I’d just left Robin, but I heard the words of an English folk song and the English folk song in turn conjured a landscape in Ireland with an insistent narrative.

  Hurrah for the Scarlet and the Blue

  Bayonets flashing like lightening to the beat of the military drum

  No more will we go harvesting

  Together in the golden corn.

  I took the good king’s shilling

  And am off tomorrow morn.

  The landscape, like the words, was heraldic; the eighty English acres my father’s people had come from Tipperary to tend the time the railway station was being built, the coral-red station building against the bog.

  In my flat I picked up a tiny photograph of a woman in a crisply fluted black coat and white saucer hat by a porch adorned with traveller’s joy, her legs like the legs of malnutrition. On the mantelpiece beside her was a framed photograph of two Teddy boys in the middle of a street, a row of council houses running behind them, a man bending his head into the distance and a row of trees in a conflagration of bloom. Close by was a snapshot of me and my parents in Bray in the early fifties. Behind us, advertisements for Bradmola and Dundyl.

  I picked up a letter that was on the mantelpiece, partly for decoration, partly because it had never been resolved.

  Hearty congratulations to you both on the arrival of your little son. I was delighted to get the good news, and aren’t you the lucky one not to have been kept waiting too long. I just got the news before the pater arrived on the 3 p.m. bus from Trim.

  I am sending a wee frock for the baby. You know all the shopping one can do from a bed. I feel middling. The same routine still, from bed to school and back to bed.

  A red bus to a house which has a white sifted feel where traveller’s joy comes in summer, a runaway bit of white fence in a field behind. There was also another bus in my mind. Eleanor travelling south in California, through a landscape of mustard fields, green mountains, blue skies, red earth, a landscape which had crowd scenes of people from India who had come here because rice and soya beans were grown in the area. It was some months after she had arrived in the States. She’d been living in Sacramento in a hostel mainly for Hawaiian girls and some days she did not have the fare for work. In her mind she was writing to me, telling me of her new life, her new religion.

  Birds had gathered on the wires along the road.

  I’d passed through Sacramento in the small hours this last Christmas, a woman with pigtails, leading her six little boys, all of them with chinquapin eyes and chipmunk mouths, off the bus.

  I knew her to be in Berlin just now, with her second husband, out of reach. But at Summerleaze in Cornwall a few weeks before, where I’d gone with a group of Bangladeshi children, when I’d been pulled out to sea in an undertow, it was her image and the voice of a Bangladeshi child which brought me in.

  ‘Come on, Des. Come on.’

  A girl with sculpted face, sculpted olive-yellow hair. I saw her in a café when I was in the sea, a German café whereas once it had been an American café, a red bulb over the upholstery of rich crimson at the door, a little picture of a village with rose roofs by a lake in a mountain valley by her shoulder, a solvent handbag beside her.

  I was given a coffee after coming in from the sea, in a miserly-looking sand-dune café of white and teal-blue which had a big sign saying ‘Special offer on Tuesdays. Fish and chips £1.55.’

  And then we drove away from the sea and visited a church in which there was a picture of a worried king, a gold and black check jerkin on him. Outside, a man in wine socks, fawn trousers sat on a bench, and harkened when he heard my Irish accent. I sat on a bench near him. The names on the graves were Trythall, Stoat, Willis.

  After nearly drowning there were flowers I was grateful to see, tucked into the crevices of this town of big masculine buildings, like Clonmel in Ireland, where my father had once worked in the hosiery and shirt department of a shop.

  ‘We will give you a position at a salary of £3.10 per week. (Three pounds, ten shillings.) Please come soon as possible.’

  I’d lost my part-time job after my breakdown, and now had to start anew.

  By now, Robin would be arriving at the house he was staying in in Hastings, boats piled up under the castle nearby, gulls dropping mussels.

  On her wedding day my mother had worn a froth of white lace on her head, her eyes frightened.

  There was mental illness on both sides of our family. I had often imagined what it was like, but now that I was on the other side, that I’d lost what was most precious to me – flow – I was faced with what seemed an undifferentiated future.

  I looked around me, wanting to be held by someone, wanting to be in someone’s arms, but there was nobody there, only the ghost of a girl’s arms, hopeless conjugality, of Robin’s arms, of a young Englishman with a face full of indigo grooves, and I thought of my first embrace, with a teacher of French on a sofa in 1968. In her flat.

  There had been oak trees in bloom outside, and she had remarked on the abortion law which had just been passed in England.

  Last night, as we walked the streets of Soho, we met a tramp who said he’d been a music teacher until recently in a South London public school. A horde of destitute people passed us, heads bent, most of their rucksacks sooty but one of them bright orange. And before we got a tube from Charing Cross Station we passed a tramp who was sleeping just outside South Australia House, a picture of vineyards in the window above him and two white seals snogging.

  I met Carl Witherspoon in a café in Soho.

  He lived both in Berlin and London, his mother a rich German woman, his father English.

  He’d recently spent a few days in a town on the border of Portugal and Spain. Sunday morning in a café, a boy in holy communion costume, red rosette on his white shirt, water-colour blue eyes, a few men in dove-grey suits, an old man with a bottle of red wine in his satchel staring at him. A mosaic of the Immaculate Conception on the wall, a swish of royal blue sash over her white robe. St Martin de Porres among the vodka and port.

  Outside was flat land where white ignited cauliflower shapes bloomed.

  Carl had wondered what had brought him here, what he was doing here. He went all over the place, a tickertape of journeys, sometimes losing tickets, sometimes foregoing a journey to one place at the last moment in order to go somewhere else. His life felt wasted, hopeless. He wanted to die.

  A woman came into the café and asked in a religious tone, almost bowing her head, for a religieuse.

  I’d been to Carl’s flat in Berlin two years before. In the bathroom, on a cabinet, had been numerous bottles of milk of magnesia tablets from England.

  Carl had tributaries of black hair which vaporized over his forehead and he had asparagus-green eyes which could assume a popping effect at will. He got up, took a few steps away from the table, then came back.

  I thought of the mental hospital at home, three particular sister buildings, bony windows, high chimneys, a batch of dead elms brushing against the windows, some of the windows savagely latticed, the lattices painted gleaming white.

  The young man at the next table was talking more intently, as if to drown us, about the best poem in Bengali about premature ejaculation.

  Carl looked at me, and it was as if he realized that I wasn’t of his class, that his madness, unlike mine, was immured, and as if to dissolve the sympathy he suddenly said, ‘I’ve been offered a job at £750 a week.’

  I walked to the South Bank after we parted and met a beggar boy, one of his shoes pink, the other blue, who told me how he’d run away from home in the Midlands when he was twelve. Recently he had gone back for his sister’s wedding in the village he was from, Ashby de la Zouch, disguised in the uniform of the Queen’s Own Regiment, posing as boyfriend to a cousin; no one had recognized him.

  I recognized the village as
being that of a fisherman who used to come to our town each spring when I was a child and teenager, a place off the route north to Holyhead and Ireland.

  Further along the South Bank some men were doing Morris dances against the orange sunset. They were adorned in beads, sashes, and were waving batons. ‘The size doesn’t matter. It’s how you use it,’ one little man cried as he threw his baton into the air, a middle-aged woman tramp with silver spikey hair looking on from her array of rags which were dolled up by the sunset.

  Limerick Benny sat on a bench in Catford Arcade shouting: ‘I believe in the controls of 747s.’ He looked up, spreading his arms out. ‘All the cunts singing and dancing up there and me on the ground.’ An old man limped by, a green plastic flower in his lapel, a green handkerchief in his breast pocket, a pheasant feather in his hat and an earring which looked like a Russian cross hanging from his right ear. Further along the arcade, under the huge papier mâché cat splayed above it, there were four evangelists who looked like the Beatles, crew cuts, polo necks, little bibles unerringly in their hands.

  ‘Latecomers. End of the day people. They hear the call too late. Try to enter by the back door but often find it’s jammed.’

  I rang up J. M. Tiernan looking for a job on a building site. They had no need of anyone.

  I went to Catford Job Centre looking for a job. A honey-haired girl looked at me as if I was crazy.

  An evicted family huddled beside a cluster of Tesco bags.

  A man worked a glove puppet towards the traffic.

  A youth cycled by with a mongrel on the trailer behind his bicycle.

  ‘My life means something since I met Jesus’ and ‘Love is something you do’. billboards said outside a hut of a church on Stanstead Road, which was surrounded by lavender bushes.

  Outside the ancient tram man’s toilet at the top of Stanstead Road a dispatch rider paused. He wore a red bandana around his right wrist.

  ‘The worst danger is scatty-brained women. They’re suicidal. Rob, he worked as a courier in London, in New York; was killed when he went back to work on the buildings in Rye, walking down the street. It’s time to go. The English girls are only alive from the shoulders up. I’ll pick up a girl in France and work on the vineyards. It’s time to go.’