Farewell to Prague Page 14

  Dublin, as a child with my mother; a man playing an accordion and singing ‘Kevin Barry – Just a Lad of Eighteen Summers’; a queue to see Esther and the King; meeting, at the Royal Marine Hotel in Dun Laoghaire, an orphan from home who’d married a Dublin doctor and become respectable, in a blue beret with a white jewel in it.

  Long escalators, globular lights in the hands of tribute bearers; a coronet of illuminated eggs on a little stand with a bulb in it at a market-place; the eternal flames by the Neva.

  I never thought I’d know happiness. I never thought I’d look at happiness in the face again.

  Graffiti on the wall – ‘I knew it would be bad but I didn’t know it would be so soon’; a poster for a film, a knight in a landscape of skeletons; a ragged old lady suddenly talking to herself.

  Everyone is a mystery; that’s why those women didn’t fare well in the fifties, because Ireland makes everything part of community. But that’s a lie. Community leads to fascism, the swastikas in the churches, the lilies of the valley under Hitler.

  ‘St Sava, the founder of the Russian Orthodox Church, was promiscuous,’ a Puerto Rican woman who is studying translation at Leningrad University says to me at the Saigon Café, ‘That’s why the Russian people have a different attitude to their bodies.’

  Boys wait outside the Kirov Ballet towards evening; a woman in black crouched on the pavement sells pornography on Nevsky Prospekt – ‘Your boobs against mine’; a street is incandesced in light, with the grass coming through the pavement.

  The Jazz Club of Leningrad; outside, with its steps, it looks like a cinema in Cork; in the porch there are celestial flushes in the ceiling. A group of boys not so much welcome you as determine who you are, all in mod shirts that were popular in the mid-sixties.

  Photographs of Bert Hardy and Dinah Washington on the wall. Men in carob-brown suits and women in gleaming satin décolleté sitting around tables on which there are burgundy lamps with burgundy tassels. The smoke ascending against lamps on the wall seems to be a secondary code, a secondary meaning to the conversations below.

  In the lounge a boy from Bettyfield, Alabama, wearing a shirt with the words ‘Hector Pierce Academy 1954 Jackson Florida’ at the back says to me ‘Well, son, how does it feel to be in the Soviet Union?’

  In the upstairs bar, against the midsummer light, a sailor in white, with a V of blue and white stripes at his neck, is drinking lemonade.

  The singer, who wears a black chiffon dog-collar, sings ‘Ochi-Chyorniye’, ‘Sinner Man Where Are You Running To?’ and Elvis Presley’s ‘Love Me Tender’.

  Love me tender

  Love me sweet

  Never let me go.

  O darling I love you and I always will.

  A young man gets up to waltz with an older woman and they are the only dancers on the floor.

  He wears a summer shirt with mauve peonies and red sorrel on it, and she wears a summer dress, gold roses which have black centres on it, long green beetles with black feet.

  My mother’s and my father’s favourites come back: Woody Herman, Guy Lombardo, Glenn Miller, Maurice Mulcahy, Billy Cotton, Oscar Rabin, Victor Sylvester. ‘La Paloma’, ‘Melancholy Baby’, ‘La Mer’, ‘Wish Me Luck As You Wave Me Good-bye’ played at the County Hall in Mullingar.

  ‘Desmond.’

  A boy with a GI haircut, meadow-amber hair, in a summer shirt with cerulean daisies, poppies, sheaves of wheat on it, a gold ring of four-leaved clover on his hands. He greets me on the upper balcony as I watch the dancers. Gavriil.

  He is a student of architecture in Leningrad, from Syktytyvkar. His grandfather was a one-armed communist from Kleistpark in Berlin who escaped from Anhalter in 1936, ended up in Moscow where he joined the Red Army, got to the Polish concentration camps. His father works on the black market, brings goods between Leningrad and Skytytyvkar, and is something of a playboy, dressing in blue serge suits, red serge shirts, black suits, black silk shirts, and brings young women to Simferopol on the Black Sea.

  We leave the Jazz Club and walk in the midsummer night.

  First we call on Laveus on Vereyskaya Street. He is a small, chubby sailor and his wife has just left him, taking their son, so, sitting in a sleeveless vest, he laughs that this is a novoseley – a housewarming – for his being alone.

  There are big crimson cushions, a screen with men with shako hats on them, washing hanging up, and the small room, its shelves, is packed with toys. A squirrel with a mushroom. An orange Donald Duck with real bird feathers sellotaped on to him. A dog with an aeriel coming out of his head. A rabbit with a carrot. A bulldog in black panties with a necklace on. A bulldog with a bib of green and white. An Alsatian in an apron. A mouse on the telephone. A mouse in a little bed. A teddy bear with Mickey Mouse pattern skin. Five teddy bears in mulberry dicky bows, with red sashes on them, on rectangular blue tasselled cushions. A blackberry-coloured rhino. A donkey in a cardigan. A row of little Cossack puppets. A belly dancer puppet with a girdle of coins, black horsehair on her head. There’s an inchoate animal with hair like Dolly Parton. A pair of clogs with windmills on them. A quarter moon hanging above with a doll on it.

  In this small room there are two clocks, one with a man’s face, henna rolls on either side, little legs with pepper and salt trousers. The other in a bell-jar, held up by slim pillars with pink roses on them. On the dresser is a photograph, in an oval frame, of his son.

  In the wedding photograph on the wall, everyone looks sixties, bouffant hair-styles on the girls, shingles under their ears, the suits striped, trousers flared, moustaches walrus, red sashes on everyone.

  Also on the wall is a picture of the King and Queen of Sweden, a picture of the Château de Chillon, a painting of a mansion, wheat fields in front of it, an ikon fretted in silver – a saint giving his blessing with three fingers, a picture of Elvis Presley and Cliff Richard.

  Laveus presents tea in a white teapot with red polka dots and a red line on the rim, pickled mushrooms with chopped chives on them, a bowl of brandied cherries and a plate of profiteroles. The tablecloth is white with blue stripes through it.

  To go walking with us in the midsummer Laveus goes to change and comes back in a white shirt and a brown jacket peppered with orange. It’s raining outside now and with the rain the colour of the air is blue. A boy with a cleft palate noiselessly passes.

  We call on Valeri on Izmaylovsky Street by the Fontanka Canal.

  She’s a Jewish girl, a pianist, and she’s just about to emigrate to Israel. She has long mousy hair and wears a shamrock-green dress with long, white peaked collars. We sit in her kitchen. ‘If it’s a stranger knocking at the door always make him more welcome,’ she quotes a Jewish proverb.

  There’s a poster ‘100 Fires’ on the wall – one hundred dalmatians looking at a fire, foreign toothpaste boxes pinned up – Nautica, Panda, Pepsident, Colgate, a photograph of a palm tree with white flowers among them.

  An den Wassern zu Babel sassen wir und weinten.

  The lids of biscuit tins are displayed on a shelf. Queen Victoria sipping tea. Two polar bears on an iceberg. A boat entering the Panama Canal. A bear on a drum, being tamed by a Cossack. Prancing majorettes with plumes.

  She serves tea in a teapot with yellow stars and green lines on it and semolina on a tray with has tansy and eighteenth-century figures on it. She puts the tray on an oil-cloth with patterns of blackberry blossom and blackberries and yellow flowers like rancid buttercups.

  To go walking in the midsummer night she goes and changes and returns in a dress of lapis lazuli with uneven black lines running across it, and in peg-top shoes. The rain is falling, the light is cornflower blue. Women pass us noiselessly with huge poodles, imbecilic-looking Alsatians, muzzled Airedales. ‘Salve’ is written at the entrance to a tall eighteenth-century house with ironwork railings outside it, and Gounod’s ‘Ave Maria’ comes from an upper window of one of the houses further on. Lights of windows are reflected in the canal, like the streamers of candle-flame in Georg
es de la Tour’s paintings. A coral red truck goes by, one of the few vehicles that have passed. We go, all four of us, into a courtyard with a floor of black and white tiles, pillars, the top half blue, the bottom half orange. ‘We had grown sick and sinful, had to recover ritual, closeness to God at any price.’

  Tonight is a night in Ireland, in Dublin, in Cork; it is the night I went to a convent reunion dance with the girl with whom I used to play a Greek idiot in a chiton and we danced to ‘Meet Me on the Road to Nenagh’ and afterwards walked home with a girl who threw a smile after us as we said good-bye and who was drowned a few days later. It is a night of beautiful ghosts.

  The woman who cut her throat, the swan-necked woman who died young, the woman who studied in Heidelberg and threw herself out of a window, the woman who made marzipan sweets and died during a heart operation, the aunt who came with flowers once and was rejected, Irene’s daughters, Marek’s mother, are all out in their most beautiful clothes, georgette, satin, party dresses. The doll-faced Madeleine puts her arm through a candle-flame.

  By a bridge a boy is playing a guitar and singing ‘Universal Soldier’, surrounded by a small hushed group.

  We wait in a small bakery in a peach-brown courtyard for the first bread rolls of the day, an old woman with a cloth bag patterned with shell-pink roses heading the queue, Gavriil and I then say goodbye to Valeri and Laveus and get a taxi to his place near Park Pobedy, his head on my shoulder. We go into his flat, a painting of a liner with war-planes above it on the wall, his landlady’s high heel on the carpet – blue with white hatch effect and a pair of gold beads – and he takes off his clothes, lots of cotton underclothes, and he stands naked for a moment, genitals red like the red blemishes on Irish pears in the autumn, and then we sleep in separate, narrow beds across the room from one another in a light that hasn’t failed, dreaming dreams that seem to come from a mutual remembrance.

  A ship, still lit up, reflections in the water, goes up a river into an Irish town at dawn. It passes a row of tall creamy white or light green houses as if the citizens had demurred against any strong colours. All the houses have transoms on the doorways. There’s a convent near the water’s edge with a statue of a nun in black over the entrance as if she’d flown up there. It is the ship of death.

  26 June 1991. Marek died. In Kreuzberg a group of nuns in white, who looked Jewish, passed me. A blond-haired boy, with plum cheeks, fell off his red bicycle and I picked him up. A boy in bafflingly large trousers, with brilliantined hair, looked on. The cobbles were violet and pale blue, overlaid by rain which had begun to fall about twelve o’clock when he died. There were many lime trees in blossom up those side-streets, Trabants parked. They could have been side-streets in many East European cities. There was kohlrabi outside the shops and old women in pinafores of rosebuds and hydrangeas looking out the windows, and the rain smelt of sulphur as in Prague. In a corner café, with a conical tower above it, by the window, two women chatted, cloth hats pulled down over their heads. They had strings of beads about their necks. Further in was a soldier with blond hair. An old lady, in a white blouse, with heavy breasts, a pheasant feather in her hat, carried a suitcase. ‘You are the red thread in my life.’

  10 August 1987. In Ruzyně in Prague a man and a boy walk along a row of low, red-roofed houses, with dormer windows which with evening have shaded into blue. They both wear donkey jackets. The man’s hair is long and unkempt. The boy is tow-headed. The man wears pink sneakers, the boy green. The man carries a corrugated aluminium suitcase. Suddenly the boy looks around as if saying goodbye to something both father and son are leaving.

  Norway, November 1986. Oslo covered in snow and soldiers in red outside the Royal Palace, a little café near the palace which has marzipan cakes in banana shapes in the window; apartment blocks often with a pub at the entrance to the courtyard, a red plush curtain at the doorway as if for a performance, a stove and old prints inside, the solicitation then.

  ‘Once hit by it you are haunted forever.’ A dream after I’d left Ireland in 1977; St Bonefatius Church in Kreuzberg now, its twin spires. A walk across Eastern Europe.

  ‘You know the story of the Archpriest Avvakum and Dame Avvakum and their walk across Russia and she says “How long, Archpriest, are these sufferings to last?” And he says “Till our death.”’

  A black dress on a Turkish woman with fierce white polka dots on it, a geranium coat on another Turkish woman and white scarf; both seem to be looking at me in the evening as I walk in Kreuzberg, having heard; the marigolds – Studentenblume – aflame in the middle of the road near St Bonefatius.

  Yellow agrimony and purple speedwell by the tracks; a change of trains and you are in Swabia, the country of the soul. A river dividing in a valley, heather by brooks, buff cows, half-timbered houses and timber houses.

  First Zdena and I went with the doctor to the house of the doctor’s sister. A daguerreotype on the wall of a man beside a drayhorse and wagon, and one of a man holding a twig against the Swabian Alps. Then, with the sister who had the key, we walked up the street, mountains all around the village, to the little hut where Marek lay alongside an old lady. Both their faces had jaundiced somewhat in death and a stubble had come above Marek’s lips which appears when the facial tissue has peeled away. I left a card in his hands, posted in Leningrad during the siege, the Egyptian Sphinx at the Quay of the Academy of Arts.

  There were striations in the rolling meadows around the cemetery, the rowan tree and pine and beech grew about it. Yellow lion’s teeth, yellow key flowers, white goose flowers, white bell flowers by my feet. The church at the top of the hillside cemetery looked like a biretta and, as was the custom in this part of Germany, black chiffon scarves were attached to the headstones – dots on them, hems of black cloth – and they waved in the breeze.

  The distant meadows were mussed with summer flowers and the sky was clouded with pearly and blue clouds. Zdena’s hair, alongside me, scuffled against the sky. The doctor stood with her sister at the bottom of the cemetery.

  Titus van Rijn, Rembrandt’s son, died at twenty-seven. Georg Trakl died, at twenty-seven, from cocaine poisoning in a garrison hospital in Cracow which smelt of carbolic acid and where victims of war were ending their misery by blowing their brains out. Marek died at twenty-six.

  Wild geese flew over, against the Alps, as I stood there, as I had once seen them fly over Vltava in Prague, or the Moldau as it is called in German, and they seemed to be saying good-bye to Marek but also perhaps welcoming me to Europe. The Wild Geese were the Noble Irish who went to Savoy, France, Piedmont, Austria, Lombardy, Flanders, Alsace, Bohemia, Russia in the eighteenth-century – Count Browne was the commander-in-chief of the armies of Maria Theresa, Peter Lacy, governor of Livonia, Count O’Rourke commanded the Russian Army. They were also, by reason of their great journey, the tinkers who were deported to Barbados and Virginia.

  A street in Ireland in my childhood, bathed in gold, beech and elder on the fringes of the village, the May devotions going on and young men in black patent shoes outside the court-house. I felt that peace again in the paths of the Wild Geese; a town in Galicia at evening, children carrying bread along by canals; Kreuzberg on Sunday afternoons with the Turkish men standing around in suits.

  They’d tried to maim, they’d tried to destroy, but people, strangers, brush against one another as true families, attracted to one another perhaps by the chimera of a piece of clothing or a glance, and create, away from totalitarianisms, true posterities, based on love and kindness.

  A friend of Marek’s from the school in Bavaria, Erhard, who’d since lost a finger, came by plane from Berlin for the funeral in a new shirt. The villagers gathered as if burying nobility and in the showers sang Byzantine hymns. There was the smell of wild thyme in the air. The doctor wore a crenellated, ebony fur coat which made her look like someone from the Berlin of her childhood. A boy played an accordion which when it opened looked like a festive lantern, with patterns on it.

  The pri
est prayed: ‘Das Korn wird in die Erde gepflanzt, damit der Weizen emporspriessen kann.’

  Afterwards, there was a gathering in a house full of faience – polka dot cups, square petals and petals set on squares in the cups – and in the evening there was a service in the hospital chapel attended mostly by nuns from Africa with a few Missionaries of Charity sitting on the carpet in front, in dark blue cardigans.

  Zdena read from the Koran in English:

  Men ought to have a part of what their parents and kindred leave, and women a part of what their kindred leave: whether it be little or much, let them have a stated portion: and when they who are of kin are present at the division, and the orphans and the poor, bestow somewhat upon them therefrom; and speak to them with kindly speech. And let those be afraid to wrong orphans.

  I saw the orphans on the other side of the convent wall and heard the whine of the Dublin train.

  The Swabian mountains at the top are like Pacific waves rolling in – the blue of blue lines in exercise books when you were a child – greater, more grandiose waves beyond. My first time in Europe I saw the French Alps from the Auvergne, with white peaks which were rose with evening light. I also saw those Alps from Savoy in 1974 when I feasted out of doors with a young French family, a plate of almond cakes in the middle of the long table and the snow at the top of the Alps, which I could see more clearly with evening.