Farewell to Prague Read online

  He was very tall, had hair of Indian ink, cobalt eyes, wore black polo neck jerseys.

  He went to secondary school in the East of Ireland, but in the spring of 1968 I visited him in his home in the country about six miles from our town.

  It was a very fine day. There were furze cutters with hooks in the fields. A boy in a maroon jersey was standing among the sheep. Outside was a tree, still bare, with a magpie’s nest in it.

  There was a horn rosary hanging on the sitting-room wall and a low prayer seat in the middle of the room. On the wall, in isolation, was a plate with five scenes of San Francisco, Golden Gate Bridge in the middle, around it China Town, a cable car, Fisherman’s Wharf, Embarcadero terminal.

  His mother, who had hair as black as he, brought a plate of pastry horns with vanilla cream. A tinker lady with a bag of goose feathers came to the hall door while I was there.

  As I was taking off on my bicycle his mother shouted after me, ‘If you return we’ll spread the green rushes for you.’

  I didn’t know him very well, he was a year above me; it was a one-off day.

  ‘I have a feeling that the people who remember the Famine are androgenous Irish boys.’

  Before I leave for Berlin there is a poster all around London for Stray Cats. There is a fish pendant hanging from the neck of one of them and patterns of anchors on the shirt of another.

  I have been in the end in Berlin West and I have seen Stray Cats face to face. To see such a city as Berlin West was great experience for me. It was very interesting and I found a lot of things normal which seem strange here in communist reality. Have you been in Berlin West? Truly, Honza.

  A man with a crimson face and a brown hat, the fly of his trousers open and a fan of flesh revealed, plays on a green and tallow accordion near a break in the Wall.

  ‘Underneath the lamplight, by the barracks gate …’

  Numerals decorated like snakeskin on the Wall. A boy with amber and green hair stands on the street, a little girl doll tied to his scarf. Behind him ‘Nazis is raus’ and ‘Elvis ist doof. There’s a giant surfer painted on the side of a red house.

  I stay with Heidi and visit Marek, who is in hospital with tuberculosis. He’s had HIV for seven years, and a bad bout of flu at Christmas a year ago, but was generally well until last spring when a doctor in Munich told him she didn’t understand how he was alive.

  Eleanor lives in a purple house behind a lime tree in Keizersgracht in Amsterdam.

  Carl, who lived in Berlin once, is in London now, making a short film about the Salvation Army.

  A woman in a burgundy coat, hat, talks to me in a Sunday café near Alexanderplatz.

  She crossed Heinrich Heine Bridge the night the Wall came down. People smiled at her as though at a poor person.

  She went to Sophie Charlottenburg her first morning, the buff and gold palace, and walked for hours with the boys in American shoes among the pollarded trees.

  She was trained in Marxist economics. What would she do now?

  ‘Before the Wall is falling a boy went into a shop in East Berlin and asked for a kilo of bananas. “Now it’s my turn for a joke,” said the shopkeeper.’

  You go into a Croatian Catholic church. There is forsythia under the statues of St Rudgerus and St Josef, both with constellations of stars above their heads. A group of women pray out loud near the front of the church, under a banner which says Servus Maria Nunquam. They pray in German.

  ‘Heilige Maria, Mutter Gottes, bitte für uns Sünder jetzt und in der Stunde Unseres Todes.’

  In the porch there’s a long table with a white oil-cloth on it; Croatian men with white beards, navy suits and white socks stand around it.

  Marek’s mother committed suicide about six months after Marek was diagnosed as probably having AIDS.

  ‘Can I say something? Have you ever prayed? Sometimes a prayer from the repository of things can change things. Beyond medical reports there is something. That’s all I can think now. And also that you’ll be all right.’

  As he wandered around Germany and Europe I followed him with postcards, Van Goghs, Gauguins, Leonardo da Vincis.

  Turkish music comes from a shop, a golden camel with a head on either side in the window, green stars in the flat pastries.

  ‘Tonight I think of you for some reason, or you come to my thoughts and conjectures. I sense something. I don’t know what. How did the court case go? How is your life? Will this card get to you? Maybe you want to come to London for a short while? Maybe you’re working. May here is lovely and I thought I’d write before it left. But as I write I can’t really. Thoughts are annotated in silence and in waves that reach. But coming from you I don’t know what they say. Just that I feel a little turbulence. The trees are lovely.’

  There’s a lotto game going on in the street, and a little old lady with sags at her neck the colour of her brown stockings looks on, and a boy in a floral shirt whose Latin-auburn hair merges into the light of the cumulus clouds behind him.

  A transvestite on the Metro wears a carmine coat and high carmine boots. A terrier peeps out through a boy’s luminous orange jacket. Some Polish boys in denim stand, kiss-curls on their foreheads, crucifixes hanging from their necks.

  It’s the blue of childhood Sunday in spring, a day you’d remember friends who’d left town.

  There are rooks’ nests in the maple trees beside houses with dunce’s cap effects in front of them, and the cobbles of side-streets are pastel blue. A boy with hair the black of crows drags a stick on the ground with chalk in the end of it as he passes a twin-spired church.

  When I was about six I used to go to the church every day about five in a blue coolie-type coat to get instalments from Heaven, voices telling me I had a mission. I often wore a wine dicky bow then, that became easily sullied.

  Marek’s mother, Brigita, was born in Czestochowska on the German-Polish border. In the Middle Ages the Swedes had burned a church on a hill there, but the ikon had refused to burn. The Virgin had turned black, however. Her mother, virtually in chador, big black scarf, would attend about four masses a day in this church. They crossed East Germany at the end of the war. Piles of rubble by the roadside, trees, bits of roofs, motor bikes, armoured cars, bicycles, trucks, Homburg hats. Women carrying their children wore necklaces of bread. Many women were violated by the Russians.

  In Berlin they lived in a condominium shed that smelt of carbolic, a cherry tree in the garden. She walked around in clogs while she was living there.

  Her mother worked in a factory that made Easter eggs with Indians and cowboys in them. There’s a photograph of her in this factory, looking like a German woman now, seated behind her Indians and cowboys, smiling. She put bits of the Indians on to the cowboys once, and was fired.

  Brigita was discovered on the street by a photographer, wearing red flannel trousers, and sent to film school.

  She met her husband while he was studying in Berlin and they married in Palestine. She wears a fountain of a veil. He’s a Teddy boy, white dicky bow on, a spray of ceramic white daisies on his lapel. There’s a Bavarian house made of dates and red roses lined in front of a white Buick.

  In the photographs that follow she carries flowers a lot, her dress is often a short, rich crimson one, a bumpkin woman always in the background. Marek in check American shirts looks at laden tables.

  Then his parents are divorced.

  They sit on the steps of a pale yellow building in Munich. Her hair smelt of spikenard then, he says. His hair is brilliantined. He wears a deep peach shirt and scarlet braces. For some reason there are sprocket holes around the photographs.

  When he was ten and eleven, at the height of his mother’s career, he lived in a pale yellow house with a blue roof, by himself, outside Rome, the woman a cypress tree-path away looking after him. There were belled goats around the house and a boy would come in the mornings with white bread.

  He wore broad, cedar-green braces then, with a motif of English huntsmen on horses, hounds
at the horses’ feet. His favourite books had illustrations of a girl on a bed in pale blue with patterns of gold roses being woken by a prince, a woman in a snood sleeping in a rocking chair nearby, and of St Nicholas in a shako hat in a snow-covered forest, squirrels, stoats, mice on their hindlegs, looking up at him, a mouse on a red apple in his pocket, a blue kerchief about the saint’s neck. He had a train that travelled through a landscape of German louvred houses, windmills, tiny sheep, stationary Buicks in this landscape.

  His mother often visited from Munich, coming up the path from the railway station, bringing a sailor’s bag full of gifts, always woollen stockings in the bag.

  He had a German shepherd dog with long hanging ears which was killed by a train near this station.

  One of his mother’s lovers, an Italian policeman, gave him a pair of soccer shorts and he went to Rome in them, to see the Pope.

  They’d spend part of those summers by Lago di Como. In those photographs she wears outfits like short crimson trousers with crimson braces, a gold heart on the belt. He wears panama hats, white singlets, black tights.

  The trams are canary yellow and cornflower blue by Lago di Como, the houses are peach-roofed, there are cable cars over meadows of yellow sunflowers. The hotel is pale yellow with a pale blue awning over their balcony. The boats, usually with three arches on them, ferry artichokes and white asparagus across the lakes.

  A man who looks like Samuel Beckett sits alone at a table in a lot of their photographs of Lago di Como.

  He went to a boarding-school in Bavaria then, mountains, partly snowed over, looking like a two-coloured marble cake, nearby. The maids wore white aprons, white socks, jabots, puffed sleeves and the school was full of rustic Bavarian furniture. Coming towards Christmas there were Prussian soldiers on the Christmas tree and dragoon men in beige with long beards, carrying doves or paper trumpets. He had his first affair there, with a boy from Berlin who started early, going to Brandenburg and Potsdam to be fucked by and to suck Russian soldiers.

  When Marek was fourteen he and his mother hitchhiked around Ireland together, spending a night sleeping in a red bus in the bus station in Galway. Next day they got to North Connemara. It was then Marek was sent to school there.

  I met her once, in a wooden house with a loggia looking out on to the mountains. She had Venetian blonde hair – gold with darker streaks – and wore a plain beige suit.

  Marek and I were lovers of sorts. The Christmas after I’d been to Palestine he turned up in my flat and we slept together.

  His mother committed suicide by putting a plastic bag over her head, dark spots on her face and hands in death.

  After that he went to Portugal, took heroin, sold it from Turkish-blue, Jugendstil, vine-trussed cafés in Alge or from his mother’s house in the Algarve. I went to see him in that house in the Algarve.

  There were some gipsy women in orange at the station when I arrived, white bags with peaches and bits of meadow-sweet beside them, a gipsy woman beside a motor bike, a crib with a baby in it attached to the bike, an older gipsy woman in black to the side with a baby in her arms.

  It was early 1986. The last time I’d been away had been a brief trip to Italy in 1984.

  I thought of gipsy girls in saffron dresses, azure belts, suddenly spectacularly appearing on a bridge in Tuscany in the autumn of 1973, under a hill of narrow three-storey houses with doors and shutters of brown and sky-blue, and crossing it in a rhythmic, a ceremonial way.

  He wasn’t at the station, nor was he at the pasteleria he’d designated as an alternative, full of little cakes on its shelves with mops of egg-yolk string. His mother’s house was miles out and it was twilight. I started walking, but a woman in black cotton stockings told me it was the wrong way, so I crossed a little olive-yellow mountain, belled goats running about, the maize-streaks of midsummer in the sky, and I got to the road on the other side just as he was passing in a car with a drug-dealer friend.

  There was a sky-blue Leeds wagon-type vardo – straight sides, curved roof – on the beach near his home, a steel hound on a lintel on either side of it.

  He was withdrawing from heroin, resolved never to take it or deal in it again.

  There was a lighthouse near his house and it threw light into the house at night as he lay in bed, his head in my arms, and talked about his mother.

  She was always picking up bargains and bringing them home, never having gotten over the time she’d been poor. When she died her basement was full of unused bargains, dozens of pairs of woollen socks.

  She also preferred staying in youth hostels to hotels. They hitchhiked together in Tuscany once in the spring, staying mainly in youth hostels, the yellow and green shoots of lentils and the thin green shoots of asparagus coming up outside, and in Sicily later that spring, staying mainly in wisteria-overgrown convents, usually a white chair beside the bed.

  They spent a week together in a peasants’ hut in Switzerland, pumpkins on the porch, ate pumpkin soup each evening, and heard the nightingale sing.

  Once when they were going into Paris at night the man who’d picked them up thought they were lovers and gave them a tour of squares of cinnamon brown, terracotta pink, ochre yellow, copper vermilion, with hundreds of lampposts of coral-white in them.

  My first time to Europe had been France, 1968. There had been a Dublin boy in a tweed sports coat sitting beside me on the plane. He’d been met in Orly by a Frenchman in a trilby. You could see mammal-like gasworks from the high-rise in the suburbs of Paris where I was staying; after the revolution the ice-cream on sale all over Paris was green crème de menthe; a boy and a girl virtually made love on a wall in Place de la Concorde. Then I’d gone to the Auvergne, belled goats in the valleys, the mountains conical, grape-blue.

  For a couple of days Heidi’s mother is also staying with Heidi. At night she makes meals – vegetable soup, red cabbage, carrots, grilled fish, baked apples filled with marzipan and raisins – and afterwards she tells stories of the war, how her brother was killed in Kiev in 1943, and how he appeared to her just before their village was bombed in 1945, wearing their mother’s Holy Communion wreath which was stowed away in a drawer and never previously seen by her. In her trek through a forest to the next village she felt his presence by her side. They lived in the next village for about six months, the American soldiers giving them the fat from pommes frites and apples and corned beef, and in the evenings they listened to Hans Albers on the gramophone in the large room in which they were staying, as they drank tea with the GIs.

  A rag-and-bone man goes by outside the hospital, the spokes of the wheels of the horse wagon very ruddied.

  The hospital is a two-storey building, in two parts, one part jutting at an angle to the other. The part to the right of you as you go in has a plum-coloured Nuremberg roof. The other a medieval peak to its left side. It is encircled by pine trees. An old man in a wheelchair parked outside looks at me as I enter.

  In the hall a Coptic bishop sits in a wheelchair. There are many Turkish people, women with much silver and gold jewellery on their breasts, a Turkish man with a goatee, part black, part white. Some Turkish men who look like Irish tinkers play chess under a framed jigsaw of Hohenzollern Castle in Swabia.

  As I walk down the corridor I pass a dog-rose-pink Chagall synagogue, a palm tree on a tiny island with a fusillade of cirrus clouds over it, Queen Fabiola of the Belgians, a Lucas Cranach Virgin and Child, little apricots in the child’s hands.

  ‘The lion said to the mouse “Why aren’t you big and strong like me?” “Because I’m sick.”’

  A boy who looks like a young soldier from the Korean War. Crew cut. His hair gone sand-coloured. Lurid Eastman colour spots on his face, crimson and bronze. He sits by the side of the bed in white barred sandals, clutching one white crutch, his top part naked. There is rose ageratum and yellow tansy on the windowsill. By the side there is a picture of John Lurie in a zoot suit blowing into a saxophone, a lop of dark hair over his forehead.

  ‘Once
I went to a John Lurie concert in Stuttgart. It was great. He told jokes about oil fields, masturbation, cottaging, and talked about the Isle of Antigua as he played jazz.’

  Two of the postcards I sent him over the years have survived in this room: Simeon Solomon, Carrying the Scrolls of the Law; Antonio Mancini, Standard Bearer of the Harvest Festival.

  ’It’s the winter nights; the dark winter nights bring back so many memories, anniversaries. Please be with me.’

  Late in the evening we sit in the room, the candlelight reflected in the mirror as in a Georges de la Tour painting, me telling stories of times before he was born or just after he was born.

  An educational tour to Dublin, March 1959. Guinness wagons, urchins, crazy people holding newspapers on their heads, white peep-toes, signal-red lamp-posts, a portrait of Maud Gonne McBride with her cheeks of Prussian-blue shadow. Getting a lift in from the train in the Beetle car of the mother of the boy who lived up the road. He’d brought a stack of comics from Dublin – Topper, Victor, Beano, Hotspur – and we went into the long garden at the back of his house with them, passing the pantry, the shamble of sheds, the oak tree over the pea garden, and over an ivy-covered wall at the bottom of the garden a little boy orphan, alone, looked at us from the convent fields by the river.

  A production of Oklahoma!, Christmas 1966. You played Ali Hakim. Talks after rehearsals in a darkened room, the window stained-glass. Cigarettes dashing in the dark. The main subjects of conversation being the illegitimate children of Irish showband singers or the lesbianism of English pop singers. My costume arrived, a tartan suit. Without their clothes some of the boys had silk balls. The Bishop of Clonfert had just denounced Gay Byrne and a woman who’d discussed nighties on The Late Late Show and the old nun doing up my face said, ‘There’ll be a run on nighties this Christmas.’ I played Ali Hakim with a French accent and I carried a carpetbag. The audience was a sea of nuns in black who shrieked and whinnied with laughter. Walking home, my part done, I heard those same boys singing ‘The Green, Green Grass of Home’ in the room in the night behind me. Later that Christmas I went to Dublin and saw a boy, half-naked, behind a window in a block of flats near Tara Street Station.