Farewell to Prague Page 13

  On one of my first nights in Dublin when I came to go to university I went to the Bailey where a row of people sneered: ‘Up from the bogs in a nipple-pink shirt.’ In a far corner was a poet, fat as a rooster.

  Marek went to visit a teacher he liked, who lived in a yellow wooden bungalow with a brown door, mauve rails on the porch, and a loggia at the back, to read a passage of Herman Hesse:

  … he nailed his senses to a cross, bowed his head to the stern rule of obedience, resolute to serve only in spirit, offering his body as its sacrifice; had become, through and through, minister verbi divini. There like a corpse he had lain, half-dead from weariness, with white face and pale thin hands …

  The teacher had just stared at him.

  Shortly afterwards Marek had run away from school, gone first to Scotland, then back to Munich, from where he started visiting Verona and where he became HIV positive through injecting heroin.

  Because they had rejected the gift I offered I went on, past that town, to the West, to a landscape I could identify with, the savage little shores with beaches of beaded splinter, where long ago raddled black tinkers’ kettles would be left.

  So it begins, a country you love, a country to live and die for …

  On my way to the Leningrad train a woman in a trouser suit and high heels plays with a hula-hoop; a woman in silver lamé high heels, white hair outspread, stands in the middle of the road; Kurds in saffron costume do a dance in flank-formation on the pavement, arms on one another’s shoulders; an American boy stands talking to a German girl, the sun hitting off him; a begging Romanian woman rubs her nose with that of her child; ‘Sadeness Part 1’ by Enigma is blasted on to the pavement.

  There is something to be listened to there, as one listens to the sound of the sea in a sea-shell.

  Fields of white rye; a blond-haired Virgin Mary leaning forward, lilies on her white veil and dress, a gold orb in her hand, cochineal-coloured streamers from her head to the ground; women in fiery angora jerseys staring at the train; girls in drummer-boy hats with green lollipop indicators at stations; bushes of red dawn by the railway tracks.

  My mother brought me up to Dublin to see a pantomime at the Olympia and Jack Cruise at the Royal. Ireland was an aviary of priests and nuns and snogging couples at the time. On the streets huddles of women would suddenly burst into ‘We Will Be True to Thee til Death’.

  Her hair was mussed raven, her lipstick geranium, she wore a black serge dress and in the lounge of Wynne’s Hotel she chatted to frumpish spinsters from Kimmage and Templeogue and Phibsborough. We stayed in the Castle Hotel, a bony building like the house of Warsaw. She took off her clothes and I saw her naked. She put on a pink nightdress and slept in the bed, with her arms about me.

  There are rotted lilies of the valley in the attendant’s cubicle; two little red flags crossed under Mikhail Gorbachev; a birch-twig broom outside it. She had a plate of little pink cakes with dabs of cream on top for tea with the attendant of the next carriage.

  A country just coming out of civil war; a group of young hockey players, brave faces against an ancient building.

  Someone gave me a little photograph of a woman who ran away from the town in the nineteen-twenties, leaving two children. She sits in a deck chair, in a cloche hat, her friend, in a narrow suit, immaculate shirt with narrow collar, paper flower on his lapel, to the side behind her, she leaning towards him, a man in shorts and kerchief is on his side, further back.

  A young Irishman and his English girlfriend in the mid-forties on Brighton Beach against a merry-go-round. They liked to see Max Miller at the Lewisham Hippodrome and come to the open-air music-hall on Brighton Beach on summer evenings, girls singing ‘Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me a Bow-wow’, men shifting around tailors’ models in red polka-dot dresses, and coloured lights strung up.

  Asleep, I see girls in summer dresses of the nineteen-forties – dresses with patterns of twin bars on them, slabs of different coloured polka-dot patterns – girls with the tubercular beauty of Gerard Majella, against a white country house, crying like a Greek chorus. There’s a sudden strophe-like wail.

  A sister of the man of this house whom my mother’s sister had married lived in France during the war and walked around it for a year with the family for whom she was governess, eating turnips. The house has a river near it bordered by oaks, sycamores, copper beeches, and there are frequently swans on the river.

  Young men with beautifully coloured ties – Moroccan red, laquer red, cyclamen, garnet – a misty maroon tie with white polka dots.

  A wedding scene – priests, bridal couple, sisters so close they look like a locomotive.

  With a husband who went to the asylum grounds on winter days to watch rugby, chatted in a room thronged by naked men afterwards, she thought to get a divorce, go back across the Shannon, go to her people, but she stayed in the West of Ireland town.

  Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, in the little British Legion hut, oak trees outside, tables and chairs arranged as if in a restaurant.

  ‘Of your charity pray for …’

  In Lerici once on a blue day I saw the child I’d been in a crinkled swimsuit with straps in the water at Salthill, against the promenade buildings which looked like an airport in wartime.

  In the country, a group of young men in suits back from England on holiday in a sitting-room, a storyteller, gangly as a spare-bodied cow, who’d been coming for centuries.

  A country lane at Christmas, a lone magpie’s nest, mummers coming along the lane.

  The wren, the wren the king of all birds.

  St Stephen’s Day was caught in the furze.

  Up with the kettle and down with the pan.

  Give us a copper to bury the wren.

  The Artane Boys’ Band coming out to play in Croke Park before a football match involving Galway – all orphans.

  A boy in trousers like rainfall, sandals on him with cross bar, bar down the middle. They tried to make me a Boy Scout but the day before I was to be inaugurated I became too frightened by the nationalism they were purveying, and opted out.

  There were the women who died or tried suicide. If one of them protested about the erosion of their dreams their husbands would say, ‘Ah sure, I adore the ground you walk on.’

  A woman who used to make sweets of green and pink coloured marzipan in a flat at the top of a large house had a picture of Romy Schneider in Sissi, Mother and Empress on her wall and died during a heart operation.

  A woman who had studied singing in Heidelberg, and would sing ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ at parties, threw herself out of the top window of the house she was living in, a red brick house in an alcove.

  A raven-haired woman lived in a courtyard beside the mortuary and a little shoemaker’s shop that smelt of black polish. She wore black bejewelled suits even for sweeping up. One day when she was sweeping up and I was passing she took a fit, and started wielding her brush at me as if I had the look of someone who’d do something unforgiveable some day.

  My aunt, who lived in a vestal orange house out of town, had a big picture of a geisha girl, entertained priests a lot, gave words and admonitions in fruity Gaelic. One day she showed me an illustration in a book of cranes flying over vermilion turreted palaces, and that was the first stage of my journey to Russia.

  A woman in a broad-brimmed hat, emerald coins on white, ribbon around it with a bow, her eye-shadow Nile-green, looks into the train.

  The fashionable avenue of a town in Ireland where the Polish woman lived and the children you always wanted to be. The attempt to coerce love from a wheaten-haired Polish boy who looked like a white poodle. He shook you off. You weren’t satisfied with being a good Catholic Irish boy like you should have been. A woman who made firescreens with embroidered flowers on them also lived on this avenue and died young.

  A girl who’d just lost her virginity crying, bent over, hands on her face, in Butlins, Mosney, County Meath. The Dutch College Swing Band had been playing in Butlins that night. A few girls
in red jackets looked on.

  A school which had once been the manor house, a pyramid in the garden like the pyramid of Caius Cestius in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, an avenue of poplar trees cutting through the garden. We were asked in this school one day what two people in the world we most wanted to meet. I said Carol Baker and Jackie Kennedy. Daniel said Harold Robbins and Tennessee Williams. Next day he vanished to England.

  Your mother tried to destroy all your friendships. She didn’t like the look of the boy up the road. She wouldn’t let Daniel into the house. She beat you up and locked you in a room for seeing Bridget – ‘a tinker’.

  You were the leper boy with the leper’s rattle then.

  You meet a friend who’d gone away in Cork in 1968, went to Blarney with him. The daffodils and the narcissi had withered. At Cork Airport, where you also went with him, a young couple held hands.

  Your passport photograph before you went to France, freckles like bullets, a prisoner’s haircut.

  The first view of the pale blue twin spires of Chartres Cathedral across the wheat fields. That summer, you met your art teacher and her husband, by arrangement, in a Paris hotel with a faded carpet. Later, you took a train through France, from the Auvergne to Paris.

  (In Berlin, years later, you saw this Europe again. An old lady, maybe ninety, in a brown coat and scarf, fluffy like a beard, skin already dead, tripping along outside Gedahtniskirche, glove falling off her fingers, joyously looking up at the plane trees about to break into blossom.)

  ‘You must forgive. It was history,’ an obsidian-haired woman from Washington, with a great bun at the back, said to me in the Russell Hotel, which had a cerulean door.

  ‘You’ve got to go through Poland to realize what we did,’ a German boy told me. ‘How business-like it was.’

  Your first time in England; a pound for accommodation in the house of a black woman in Notting Hill; an Irish girl going up to you next morning on the street and saying, ‘It’s different for you coming over like this. For us it was awful’; an address your mother gave you of one of her loves, a man who lived in West London, hair askew, face inflamed, holy water from the Jordan on the cupboard, a picture of the miraculous draught of fishes on the wall.

  In Dublin, a city where as much as possible was painted green at the zoo, where girls in moss-green convent uniforms would sit endlessly in Bewleys, you came up against something.

  Plötzensee, two windows, a cross beam, five hooks. An American woman hanged there translated Goethe before she died.

  Noble be man

  Helpful and good

  For that alone

  Distinguishes

  Him from all beings

  On earth known.

  Waiting at Dublin airport for the coffin of a girl, a truant of Ireland, killed while hitchhiking from Geneva to Paris.

  The intellectuals who lived in houses with sitting-rooms with lachrymose forties lampshades, who tuned into a hatred of England brewed over the centuries. These masters of war with their many books.

  A boy on a platform in Ireland, petunias on the platform, a plane going by in the sky.

  To take the life of teenage British soldiers, of a young couple who’d informed, is evil, is a contumely.

  There were British soldiers garrisoned in the manor house in the town after the 1916 rebellion, many of them from a countryside with wild service trees still in it, and girls fell in love with their firm pectorals as they bathed in the swamps surrounded by loosestrife, burdock, yellow irises.

  The last lord of the manor had married a London music-hall artiste and, to celebrate the wedding, there had been fireworks over the town of immense sheaves of wheat falling downwards.

  As a teenager, I’d meet a little old lady in a black coat, black beret, on a red bench on a hill overlooking the town. Although she never married, she remembered what were, for her, the dulcet days of 1916 and 1917.

  Before the train goes into Russia the wheels have to be changed and people get out and sit on the grass. A female attendant walks along a corridor with a great plunger. A male attendant holds up a bunch of wild strawberries he’s picked from the railway tracks. He introduces himself and shakes my hand, strawberries in the other hand. His name is Darya. Lemon pepper also grows on the tracks. Women in felt boots grease the tracks. A woman in gold lamé high heels with a stippled effect, plain gold strap, plays a lemon-gold accordion and young people dance. They dance in circles around individuals and couples parade in succession under sporadic bridges made by the dancers, the bridge all the time lapsing as couples break from it to advance under it. A man with a white beard to his chest and a gold and cobalt moustache, broad braces of gentian blue, flamingo and white with bunches of flowers embroidered on the white, looks at the dancers from a bank. A woman in a red cloth hat, red dress with white polka dots, stands and looks towards Russia. The sky, with its high clouds in the heat, is chromium blue.

  A meadow of black cherry trees in fruit; a flock of cranes by a river; a woman in strawberry scarf fetching water from a pump; a woman in a big white scarf and tattersall pattern coat of black and white looking at the train, a girl beside her in a summer dress with patterns of little ducks, mauve with blobs of brown on them; an old lady with patterns of nosegays on each side of her shawl also looking at the train; a graveyard with three pairs of arms on the crosses; houses secretive, diminutive, often with families of geese pleading outside them.

  A railway station, a booth on it, with cobalt weighing scales, which sells sugar-freckled buns in boxes with patterns of spider chrysanthemums and dandelion heads, lemonade, jars of pickled kohlrabi and beetroot. A Red Army man carries Vecchia Romagna in a box. There’s a gipsy woman in a red flounced dress, with gold bracelets on her wrists, a girl in coat, trousers and Wellingtons as if dressed for winter. A boy in an anorak who looks like Marek.

  That evening, Marek passed into a coma. He looked very beautiful, strong before this, a young soldier, sitting up in a wine jersey. But the thalamus of his brain had irreparably degenerated, and although he was in great pain that evening he spoke in English about forgiveness and gratitude; he said it didn’t matter how long, that it was like passing from one room to another; he spoke of Liebes-schmerz, the grief of love, die dunkeln Machte, the forces of darkness; he spoke of Italy, an open-air dance on a wooden platform outside Rome, tangos, polkas; the pastelerias of Lisbon; cormorants crying on a rock in Connemara for a labourer buried in the Midlands of England; a memorial stone in the middle of an Irish square for the Connaught Rangers.

  Irland war ein schönes Land aber ich bin dort gegen etwas gestossen. Manchmal habe ich so eine Friede gefühlt. Jetzt fühle ich diese Friede noch einmal. Es ist genau so wie eine Insel zu finden, wo das Wasser hinuberschwemmte. Diese Insel ist deine Kindheit.

  He said goodbye to life, to his short life, and thanked everyone who had held his hand in life.

  Late evening, azure of lupins at the edge of the forest, yellow of rape, juniper bushes and the smell of caraway and hemlock in the air. In a dark compartment, a boy with his shirt off plays a red bayan over a glass urn of apricot juice, rye bread, toffee sweets, and a vaudeville lady in a bewhiskered mini-coat with muff wrists and a carpet-like mini-dress stands at the door and does a little dance, lifting her legs. The bayan is still on the table next morning when we begin to see the high-rise buildings of Leningrad.

  A ladybird on a stalk of ground elder in waste land in Prague; high-rise buildings; a plywood room, gauze curtains blowing; memories that had nearly been killed coming back. An aunt long ago who wore sandy suits whose worship had not been mass or prayer but sex. Sex was her path to God, sex with young men who listened to Mick Delahunty, with young men who were box players, members of brass bands, with young male nurses in mental hospitals. She liked men with small penises best because they were usually the most beautiful. She liked boys in ‘their birthday suits’.

  Down Burgh Quay and George’s Quay to City Quay and Sir John Rogerson’s Quay, over the River Dodder to
Pigeon House. Boys in anoraks waiting against the Irish Sea. I always wanted to take one of these boys to safety, not England where they’d be maligned, but Europe – maybe Amsterdam, put them on Rembrandtsplein or by the Schinkel Canal. But the hair of an almost albino-looking boy, boy blue in denim, blows this morning in Leningrad against the lavender blue over the Irish Sea, a ghost. Then suddenly, on Nevsky Prospekt, at the corner of Sadovaya Boulevard, there’s a boy in powder blue with cobalt eyes selling American T-shirts, and the sound of an accordion.

  A woman with a yellow wig falling down her forehead, little American flag on her lapel, playing a black and white accordion with black on white by the sides; a soldier on his knees dancing with a little girl; a man turning towards me and showing off all his war medals; an old lady in Hare Krishna costume selling Hare Krishna books on a little table, the books surrounded by dill, wallflowers, sweet william and parsley; the rays of the rising sun on a shop sign; women staring at a pineapple in a kiosk; a woman selling canaries in cages; a man in a wheelchair with blackberry-coloured streamers attached to the wheelchair; two dwarfs walking along together; a little girl dressed like a Valasquez Infanta; a woman, mussed raven hair, glimpse of an earring, cherry lipstick; a little boy in a short-sleeved blue shirt; a little boy in a white cambric shirt with a blue dicky bow, patterns of birds on it.