Farewell to Prague Page 12

  The train is packed. There is a young black American soldier with bow knees. A woman in a floral dress, cyclamen and red hankie on her breast, sings an aria from Franz Lehar’s Giuditta; two women are making shirts from twenty-mark notes – ‘our last’; a man with a bottle of schnapps in his fist stares into his son’s eyes, his son with a big white collar and a moustache like his, except that the boy’s moustache is sapling; a woman with a black mantilla on her head carries a doll with shining chestnut hair and polka-dot dress in plastic covering.

  Outside men with lanterns and burning braziers illumine lambs eating grass, making the lambs look like those in Georges de la Tour’s painting of the Nativity.

  Candles burn in a grotto on Narodni and there are little photographs of Jan Palach and Jan Zagik stuck on telephone kiosks. ‘Let us never forget boys,’ a poster says outside the Hussite Church on Staromēstaké Nám.

  Women on Wenceslas Square are selling lilies of the valley, threading them together for customers. The girls on the Metro wearing frou-frou dresses and bobby socks and the boys black socks with explosions of thread, lemon and pink.

  ‘Tomorrow is coming the Holy Father.’

  The old lady is not at the café. There is a table of British tourists in shell-suits near the door.

  ‘Last of the big spenders, Harry.’

  A girl with manifold, outspread hair gets up and plays Für Elise on the grand piano.

  ‘Nice one, Pamela.’

  I leave.

  Outside, under the Air France sign, a male prostitute waits. He has one gold tooth.

  Dvorak’s Te Deum is broadcast all over Wenceslas Square.

  In the Metro station near the Pope’s venue, vendors tinkle little bells in your face and wave mostly French and Papal flags. A woman in a white polo neck stares at John Paul, hands clasped on her breast, as a Jack Russell barks near her.

  Honza’s been selling glass popes for the past few days and this evening, Saturday evening, he has a party. On the wall of a large room prepared by cranes, lions, grapes and red berries is a picture of Pat Boone in shorts, and a wooden bas-relief of a courting couple in elephant flares. His mother remarried – a communist official – and lives in the country. In the garden outside is a walnut tree she planted when he was born. They play mainly fifties American music. ‘Did We Have a Party?’ Billy Brown; ‘Wild Wild Party’, Darryl Vincent; ‘Bald Headed Baby’, Buddy Sharpe and the Shakers; ‘Rose of San Antonie’, Pat Boone.

  Honza recently married and he stands in the middle of the room, arm around his pregnant wife, earrings with lemon tassels on her.

  Next morning I visit the Old Jewish Cemetery.

  Some children are playing with acorns on a street nearby, one of them wearing glasses with raspberry-syrup-coloured frames.

  Suddenly, a wedding party comes round a corner – men with ties like bits of carpet, a bride with carmine cheeks and shocking blonde hair – and, just as quickly, they disappear round another corner.

  White dead-nettle grows in the cemetery.

  What brought me through? The sexuality of boys. The Southern States of America. A feeling of colour and scintillation like a beach of flattened glass. The poetry of Hart Crane. But leaving the intimacy, the sunlight of this medieval city is like a death.

  ‘I give part of my heart to friends, to enemies.’

  A woman is bidding farewell to a friend on a street of amber, buff, pistachio. In her window is a cat with lime eyes, a chimpanzee in a concentration camp suit.

  She waves. I am bidding farewell to Prague.

  It is a year later and I live in Berlin. Zdena comes to visit me. Marek is in a hospital in a town about sixty kilometres from her in Swabia, a town of peach roofs and marzipan buildings, houses of buff and old rose, sepia mermaids and knights and antelopes on buildings, signs of golden ships over shops, downy swans on the water, pines and firs on the surrounding hills.

  We light a menorah as we have a meal. Outside, the sun is amber and grape purple on the ancient buildings of Kreuzberg.

  A girl called Ursula Goetze lived in this house. She was a member of the Rote Kapelle, an anti-fascist group, and secret meetings were held here. Also members of the group were Harro and Libertas Schulze Boysen. Harro Schulze Boysen worked for the Ministry of Aviation which enabled him to get hold of vital information. Ursula Goetze was murdered in Plötzensee, August 1943. Harro and Libertas Schulze Boysen were murdered there December 1942. There’s a photograph of the Schulze Boysens in the little museum nearby. She’s a beautiful blonde woman playing an accordion. He wears a dapper suit. They were, paradoxically, friends of a golden-haired Irish writer who lived in Berlin during the war, teaching Modern English and Anglo-Irish literature at Berlin University. He was somehow drawn into Plan Kathleen for a German landing in Derry, helped by the IRA in Leitrim. To activate this plan a man called Herman Goertz landed by parachute in Ireland in May 1940 and made his way by foot to the writer’s wife in County Wicklow. In Dublin, later that month, a party which he was attending in the house of Stephen Held, who had an Irish mother and an adoptive German father, was raided by the gardai. Herman Goertz got out the back door but the gardai got hold of a new suit. A court case was held in Dublin early in July to ascertain whether the writer’s wife had purchased that suit for him in Switzers, but the woman’s mother, Maud Gonne, who wore towel-like scarves on her head at that time and had a cratered facial appearance, got her off. The writer remarried a German woman and she lived in Dublin and could sing ‘Lili Marlene’ beautifully and sadly at parties. She was a woman of kindness and hospitality, who wore warm red dresses, and owned many white rabbits. Sometimes, in Berlin late at night, on the Metro, I imagine her breaking into song as a stranger talks, maybe a woman with a muslin frill on her shoes. ‘With no border I don’t know how long I’ve come here for. Two months. Two years. I’ll go on to Frankfurt, Paris, Toronto.’

  On Easter Sunday Marek got baptized. He feared it would not be possible without fierce elaboration but there was no problem.

  He got baptized in a country church, with a dark gold interior, among vineyards and wine-coloured buds breaking into blossom, after a sermon about the Jews crossing the Red Sea.

  In the porch was an advertisement for the pilgrimage to Santiago, beginning 23 June. On the altar were huge catkin branches, and red gerbera and broom decorated with eggs painted with flowers and butterflies, and a little flag of the Vatican colours. A little girl in a white crinoline party dress with scarlet rims was running riot around the church, cross with everybody. Eventually a boy, in a grey satin suit and black dicky bow, pursued her. The sacristan was a boy in a flash-scarlet letterman jacket. His face was full of adolescent pores. The altar boys, who were slightly crouched, wore scarlet and white. One of them had mud-marigold hair. Two little girls in sailor hats and sailor duck suits, blue and white, carried candles wrapped in silk. What looked like a gipsy boy, in a coral-pink suit, videoed the event. The lady doctor who looks after Marek carried a candle. She was the godmother. I was the godfather. Marek stood under a statue of King David playing a harp. There was a bunch of wild pansies in front of the statue. In the front row was a boy in a pearly-white letterman jacket with the words ‘American League’ on the back, and a crippled woman with crutches, her legs askew. Near the front there was a gipsy family, a bas-relief of black bolls on the women’s black stockings. Girls in the congregation, Mediterranean girls, had lace on their heads.

  When you are in love a bunch of daffodils in a glass jar outside a vegetable shop in Potsdam, beside a crate of black roots and the cats who keep passing on the umber stones, takes on a new meaning.

  The days are miraculous.

  I feel as if I’ve been dead all my life. Now I’m only awakening.

  Kreuzberg, 10 April 1991. Turkish boys on bicycles lean against a Litfass-säule. Turkish men in suits stand around. An old woman throws crusts of bread from an upper-storey window. A man in a long skirt limps on alternate legs. A woman in chador goes by in a temper. A
Dobermann has his front legs on a bench. The species barrier is broken down in murals on the wall: a duck and a teddy bear kiss in a balloon the shape of a heart; a turtle and a frog kiss; a girl cat presents a bouquet to a mouse. Outside a church the Missionaries of Charity, in white with blue-rimmed veils, give soused herrings to shaven-headed youths. Inside, a woman who looks like the Duchess of Windsor, in black velvet coat and black velvet tarboosh, prays in front of Our Lady of Czestochowska; a woman in a silver lamé turban hat chats to a friend on a bench.

  11 April 1991. The meadows of Potsdam.

  The tulips are red and yellow, the red sprinkled with white, the yellow with blood-red. A mental hospital patient with a big head, in elephant flares, sits beside a Harley Davidson, eating from a bag of chocolates. Two other retarded male patients walk, holding hands. A nun with a Dutch-style wimple stands in the meadows, among the cowslips and wood anemones and lambs. A little boy with defective eyesight looks into my face, his eyes all the time going from side to side.

  An old lady holds Marek, like a mother, like a lover. Her black hair is rolled up. She wears a brown suit like one of the Trapp family. Beside the bed is the ladybird – Marienkäfer – I brought from Kreuzberg, being sold on a cloth by children, alongside a yellow duck and a red gorilla.

  The lady doctor worked in Uganda for twenty years, in the latter ten years mainly with women who had AIDS. When she returned to Germany she found that no one would give her a job as a doctor so she does an administrative job, in a nearby town, getting a train through the vineyards most mornings around five o’clock. She lives near the hospital and is here as Marek’s friend, having met him in a community in the mountains he’d reached from Berlin – some people mentally or physically handicapped, some with drug or alcohol problems.

  ‘Now you see what it’s like.’

  Sometimes, the pain is so terrible he just cries.

  He takes temgesech for the pain, with a thimble of water.

  He gets infusions from three bottles attached to a contraption by his bed – glucose, minerals, antibiotics. Pink rosettes are appliquéd to him.

  When he walks, with the contraption strung to his body, his face has the charcoal of death. When he’s in bed again it’s a young boy’s face.

  Zdena came yesterday. She brought a pool of tobacco which lies by the ladybird. She’ll return in a few days.

  ‘It’s a strange life, hospitals.’

  Old people sit in wheelchairs in the lounge. There are pebbles and artificial plants around the side and a Nigerian mural of the Flight into Egypt on the wall. Through a wide glass window you can see the town below. Snow has come again and it falls on the peach blossom, the cherry blossom, the redcurrant, the hedge flowers, the buttercup hills, the peach roofs, the swans. Blossom is messages of white through a mist of alders. The town, with its towers and parapets, becomes a lavender-blue blur with late afternoon.

  Now I lay me down to sleep,

  I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

  If I shall die before I wake,

  I pray the Lord my soul to take.

  I hold his hand.

  He cries from pain and I cry from loneliness. His hair has turned colour again. It is the black of Palestine. In Palestine, shortly after her wedding, his mother had seen the moon and the stars being blessed by rabbis, in slouch hats, with snowy beards. In the light of Galilee in the fall Marek was conceived.

  Against the glamorously lit-up medieval town I see a boy from Ireland, dressed in black, black polo neck, who used to come to Germany. ‘How lovely are thy tents, O Jacob.’

  A child of the West of Ireland who died in the early seventies.

  Last thing Marek talks about, before falling asleep, is Ireland, the winter roses in January by the sea, the sunsets, the sudden view of an entire meadow of snowdrops across a stone wall, a cake with royal icing of blue and white made by an old lady and he quotes her, ‘God be with the lovely days and nights.’

  19 April 1991. I was in that room when the white-winged reapers were there. There were a few of them. I was not afraid of death. I’d been near death many times but they were asking of me, asking of me. I sat calmly with death and I put the blessing of love and peace on Marek, my deepest blessing, and I went on.

  The lady doctor unweaves her hair. She stands very straight.

  In the little room in which I’m going to sleep on a couch there’s an ikon of Our Lady of Vladimir, a squirrel-like child held by the black hands of a mother against a gold and copper patchwork like fallen autumn leaves, pendants of stars on the rose-bud-lipped mother’s wrists. On a dresser there’s a photograph of children in coats around a kitchen-stove – kitchen witch – in Berlin in the thirties, a photograph of a Third Reich ballerina on stage, a colour photograph of a little boy in a top hat, yellow shirt, short blue trousers with straps.

  A candle lights. It throws grape-red light on the boy’s ankles.

  There’s a white towel for me on the radiator.

  She asks about his burial. What potter’s field among the cherry blossoms, the peach blossoms, should he be buried in? Her family live in a village high in the Swabian mountains, with a view of the Alps, and I suggest that he, a child who knew Europe, would be happy there.

  Last time I was in Alges a woman, in a white coif and a scarf of fuschia and violet with a border of black berries, was selling gold rings with the Portuguese Queen Victoria on them in a square splintered with orange peel. A man was striking a canary in a cage over a spread of ceramic bullterriers and cats. Above the square a banner announced for a few years hence ‘Europa 1992’. Young heroin dealers with flap-fronted shoes went by.

  20 April 1991. Early morning I break down on a bridge. Shane McGowan’s and Bob Geldof’s photographs are nearby, advertising a concert, alongside a poster for an Indian experience multi-vision show. There’s a male nude in a kiosk with the words ‘Budapest mit Paprika’. Girls with hair polished on their heads, a boy in boots and camouflage trousers, a woman with a poodle whose coat is trimmed around the neck like a lavish fur stole, a man with piping hot cheeks who looks like Curly Wee, all stare. None of them approaches. There are swans on the water in the rain. My friend is dying. In Leningrad I have met someone and, despite the fact that my closest friend is maybe near death or perhaps because of it, I am going there.

  The moment’s serenity asks:

  Was it worth it?

  And it’s up to you to answer:

  Yes, it was the right path.

  Death at your throat.

  You have loved life.

  Yet your soul is weary

  Of what finally pushes you now.

  Even though we will die

  We know the seed will blossom,

  That people will see,

  The spirit will force the State.

  The last arguments are neither rope

  Or guillotine knife,

  And our judges today

  Will not be our final judges.

  This poem by Harro Schulze Boysen was found under the floor of his cell after his hanging in December 1942. Plötzensee haunts my sleep at night – its maroon and oak colour, the river around it, the turbines on islands in the river; so does the figure of a boy in a black capote, purple diamanté on him, a cross, his hair blue, his lips blackberry-coloured, who begs in Kreuzberg; so does a witch on a cloth on the pavement, a skull in her hand; so does a hurdy-gurdy woman in Kreuzberg, in a maroon capote, wide-brimmed black hat with bedraggled black feather on it, black paper roses on her breast, black teddy bear hanging from the hurdy-gurdy; so do the punk boys going to work early in the morning – ‘Hast du etwas Kleingeld für mich? – some of them letting out a strange cry as they walk, as if they are selling wares at a marketplace.

  27 May 1991. A grey day in Berlin, Germany. A lorry from Warsaw, Poland, goes by.

  Marek suddenly improved and the doctor started taking him out in a wheelchair. Then one of his friends came from the community in the mountains, put him on the back of a motor-bicycle and took
him for a ride in the mountains, on the roads lined by rowan trees. After the trip the strength went from his body.

  In the courtyard of the house where Ursula Goetze lived there are red geraniums, lace curtains in the windows. The chips on the walls make a ruddy and silver tracery. During the day there are always children playing, and frequently the sound of jazz comes from the lime-shrouded street outside.

  We leave our friends and keep going. Once you’ve found a country you love you want to go back there no matter what.

  Before I leave Berlin I get frantic letters from my mother, injections of melancholy, and then, on an evening when the cobbles are blazing with vermilion, Turkish couples out walking, a crazed telephone call. I understand now why for some members of Irish families there’s no choice but to go to the Antipodes or die.

  When I was a child I purchased my mother a necklace for Christmas, big gaudy beads. I saw beauty in it. When I presented it to her she started hitting me.

  In a photograph she’s a raffish, voluptuous little girl in booties, white socks, knickerbockers showing under a white dress, holding a chair against a South Sea Islands scene. Once she came on her way from the South, where she was having an affair, in a black Morris Oxford and presented a gift – a handsel – of a bunch of golden tickseed to my mother. The gift was rejected.

  ‘Bog Irish,’ someone once turned and said towards me in a café in Soho. But the bog-myrtle grows in the bogs, and in the spring it is very beautiful with orange and red catkins.

  At a wedding party in Ireland on a cement carpet at a cross-roads this woman of the Midland bogs, in a suit of the near-biscuit brown which covered armchairs all over Ireland at the time, in block high heels, got up to dance with a young man who’d been an orphan in an orphanage where most of the orphans had been mulattos. A year or so later she was dead – had died of a broken heart.