Farewell to Prague Page 15

  Prague, 11 August 1987. A little boy in a go-cart holds a yellow dog with a tail so long it drags on the ground and he laughs up at me, sharing the joke. On the riverside tram no. 17 there’s a little lady in a cream beret, with cream bobbed hair which has fuschine shadows in it. A family picnics on the path of sand by the river. The tablecloth on a little table is black with gold squares. Two policemen check the identity papers of some travellers on Maje Bridge; early evening jazz, ‘Hong Kong Blues’, comes from a corner café; wild geese fly over the Vltava; hundreds of swans sail by the fan of a lock.

  When I get back there’s a note under the door: ‘We already had to leave because of the train. Have a nice time and see you. Your Canadian friends.’

  Prague, 8 August 1987. A couple waltz at the top of Wenceslas Square, under the lime trees, she in a daisied navy dress and white bobby socks. A man in a white work coat rushes to put a lighted cigarette in the male dancer’s mouth. The accordionist plays ‘La Paloma’ and a small group gathers and begins, against the lights of Traktoro Export, Balkancar Bulharsko, Machino Export Bulharska, Telecom Sofia Bulgaria, Lucerna Bar, Licensintory Moscow USSR, Licence Know How Engineering, Fiat Olivetti, to sing Carmen Miranda’s ‘La Paloma’ as if it is the national anthem. Some of the women in little boots, in berets, hats with feathers in them. Some of the men in baseball caps, some with tattoos at their necks. They come like the cast from the raddled black cheap benches at the cinema, on which we children were seated to watch ‘Mise Eire’ – the heroes of Ireland, Michael Collins, De Valera, strutting around in quick motion on silent newsreel – all in magic lantern now, the man who sang Puccini at GAA matches, the Rue di Doo Boys.

  At Easter 1979 I went to Portugal with the old lady I used to stay with in North Connemara. She drank aniseed liqueur and told filthy jokes on the plane over. We took an old train up the mountains to Fatima and stayed in white-washed rooms divided by plywood. One morning I looked in on her and there was a young American in the double bed with her. He’d come in the middle of the night, and the only space in the house was in that double bed.

  My first summer in Prague I noticed images of Mary all over the place, the annunciation above a doorway, the Virgin appearing over a cornfield, and the colour of corn was my first impression of Czechoslovakia, the fields by the airport, the yellow of corn also woven into the green colour of the Czech summer, the urgency, the innocence of a beautiful girl’s blonde hair in this hue.

  ‘Wash yourselves clean, spare me the sight of your busy wickedness, of your wrongdoing take farewell.’

  At university there was a Siamese-looking girl from Cornels-court who had dates every lunchtime with a blind man called Mr Clarke and she used to steer him round to a little café run by the Irish Country Women’s Association. ‘I’m tryin’ to convert him,’ she’d always say in an exasperated Dublin accent to the sedate customers.

  And in the little family house in Churchtown where my mother insisted I spend my three years at university, Francesco, Jacintha, Lucia were depicted in the hallway, having their vision of Our Lady of Fatima. Women divided little pictures of Our Lady of Fatima in the rain of Grafton Street as the colours ran amok – olive yellows, roses, verdegrises – and the indigents stood haplessly over their money boxes. So even on the worst of days in this wet city, with its often cornflower-blue mountains, with its harbinger boats forever bringing its runaways home, with its Murillo back-street children, with its mallards, with its lament of a Phil Lynott song forever in readiness on the juke-box, a miracle was proposed.

  So afterwards all cities became places where miracles were expected. I entered every city, sized up the first feeling of it, hoping, like the little boy on Dollymount Strand, hoping for the real boy’s voice, and every embrace with every stranger became an act of expiation, and every act of kindness became an act of atonement, and the city’s orphans became the only possible friends, the only possible mirror, a candle always reflected in that mirror if the liaison, if the friction, if the exchange of depth of hurt was a true one, like the candles in the mirrors in Georges de la Tour paintings.

  But it was in Eastern Europe that the mirror was most exact, that the Madeleine I brought from Ireland saw herself most clearly and most remorselessly, for here prostitutes were the town’s holy women.

  When I was seven I was cycling along at dusk with no lights on my bicycle and was arrested by a young, virginal guard, and brought to court where I stood with the town’s criminals, young men with holes in the backsides of their trousers. Whereas they were sent to prison, I got a fine. But in my dreams I was circumscribed by the town and the country from that day on.

  In my dreams, back in London, I am walking across a flat landscape. At first the houses I go into have cuckoo clocks, one or two pictures on the walls – a grandfather, a grandmother – altars with Mary and Jesus on them in a corner, tables spread with salads, pickled vegetables, vodka, decorated with sprigs of plastic flowers. But the further East I go the walls of houses become more crowded, all kinds of pictures on them, big and small, collages, and the collages become something to make sense of, the puzzles people create in order to try to divine the mystery of their lives, in order to try to hear the tempo of their feet.

  My friend Miranda writes from Berlin. She is a Croatian stained-glass maker. There is a stained-glass window of hers showing whales in a church in Berlin. ‘Berlin makes us foreigners somehow more present in ourselves than our own countries. This is a paradox of being an unhappy, dispossessed being.’ Berlin, she says, is now like the Raft of Medusa, the raft with the alabaster bodies on it. In her own sad and ruined country she says buses arrive in villages at night to find they have suddenly become empty. Men play football with children’s heads. In Zagreb people are thrown from high-rises in the middle of the night by terrorists. There are bombs in bins. Apartment blocks are riddled with bullets. Her parents have lost their life savings, which were in a Serbian bank. Women in black march in Zagreb with the blue and white of peace, the green moon of Croatia, the blue, white, red with the red crest in the white. It is a time of pain and suffering and yet strength. She nearly died last year, having an open heart operation. (‘Why do doctors conduct operations in Latin in Zagreb?’ ‘Because soon they’ll be speaking a dead language.’) Having survived she can’t go back to Croatia, not because of the war, but because, having been touched by Berlin at this time, Croatia is too small. Like Hart Crane’s mother after his death she feels ‘like a wanderer on the earth’. Further East in Russia the yellow moroshka berry (the berry Pushkin ate before he died) is to be found now under small bushes in damp places. Cranes are gathering in Eastern Europe. The swans are gathering by lakes in Ireland.

  Miss Hanratty who studied singing in Heidelberg had a picture of the Little Flower in the alcove of her room in the London brick-orange house. Her memento of her stay in Europe was the romantic postcards from the time of the Anschluss in her album, an SS man, hands behind his back, on many of the romantic, lime-tree-crowded streets.

  Once I went into a church, surrounded by a white fence, in Norway in November. It was filled by old ladies in black like the bits of black chiffon blowing on the headstones in the cemetery in which Marek is buried. They all turned around and looked at me.

  30 December 1991. Jazz Club of St Petersburg. A girl, Kzenia, at my table, with sanguine curls, in tall boots, mini-skirt, a huge, festive chrome-yellow ribbon at her breasts, takes my hand and asks me to dance to ‘Moonlight Serenade’. Around us are photographs of musicians who look like the young Tennessee Williams. ‘You are very gentlemanly. You dance – pravda.’

  Afterwards we watch a couple who dance solo to ‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy’, the girl in a tawny woollen trouser suit, the tall boy in black jacket, white shirt, cedar-green trousers. He tosses his quiff, his kiss-curls back, then continues to shake his arms, clench his fists. He has those fragile St Petersburg cheekbones, the mime-artist-pale skin, the small, almost obfuscated mouth, those telegrammatic liquid-black eyes like the ey
es of a madonna in an ikon. He smiles at me, sharing a joke, like the little boy in Prague with the yellow dog which had a long tail.

  Gavriil comes in then with some friends, a girl in a red dress and black stockings, and two boys, one of them with a silver chain with a medal of Mary around his neck.

  The afterglow of a summer’s day in Leningrad is still in Gavriil’s smile, a day in last June, as if a summer’s day had merged into a winter night and all between it – Marek’s death, return to London, hundreds of Irish tramps, some of them in cowboy hats, by fires alongside the Thames – not so much cancelled out as postponed.

  On a day in June I’d taken a train with Gavriil to Komorova. The ticket office at Komorova had walls of shining grey and Havana-brown, cracking as a medieval painting, a tiny hole for tickets, a little old lady in a scarf behind it. ‘Fuck off’ in English was scrawled on the wall opposite the old lady. We stopped at the ticket office to make an enquiry about return trains and on the other side of the railway tracks, beside a powder-blue store, Gavriil waited outside a skeletal telephone box to make a telephone call to his gym. There was another little old lady in a scarf in it and she stuck her head out and said, ‘Poshel na hui.’ ‘Fuck off.’

  An old man who heard us speaking English stopped and told us he’d sailed to England once with the navy.

  We walked through a forest of conifers, past the pale Madonna-blue cottage of Anna Akhmatova, to the Lake of Pikes where we swam in the coppery water.

  Although he himself was child-faced, child-limbed, Gavriil, like many Russian boys, already had a child, a girl, Bashkirs, who lived with the mother in the Urals. On the way back two little boys with shaven heads, buckets in their hands with windmills on them, asked us ‘Horoshay voda, ili plohay?’ ‘How’s the water, hot or cold?’

  In the evening I had dinner with a young couple. Looking through their many books I found an inscription by Anna Akhmatova in one of them. We were having tea from a samovar shaped like a Matreshka doll, patterned with white daisies, black-eyed Susans, green tambourines. I remarked on the inscription and they immediately began denigrating. ‘Anna Akhmatova was vain. A lesbian.’ Finished with her they started on Pasternak. ‘He wouldn’t look at Olga Ivinskaya when she got out of the camp.’ It’s just like Dublin, I thought.

  Georges de la Tour was forgotten for centuries, his paintings ascribed to other people. The first book about him was written in Paris during the Occupation. When the biographer looked through the records of Luneville he found that the citizens hadn’t a good word to say about this creator of beautiful Mayan-looking Madeleines; he’d refused to pay taxes for the poor, he’d set his spaniels and greyhounds among other people’s crops.

  Done with Anna Akhmatova and Pasternak, my hosts not only flailed Andrei Tarkovsky but his father. ‘He wasn’t a good film-maker. He wasn’t a good poet.’

  I thought of Andrei Tarkovsky, modern ikon maker, not tempera on wood, but still the art of the catacombs, film-maker, who’d given meaning to our arid age, to the vistas of thousands and thousands of high-rise apartment blocks surrounded by cypress trees.

  Beyond this room, beyond this city, was Komorova and its lake with little bands of swimmers alongside it on summer days; beyond Dublin on summer days were the mottled beaches.

  I left and walked through the midsummer streets, many old women on their passeggiata, to the Jazz Club which was not far away.

  The female singer was singing ‘Shenandoah’.

  O Shenandoah I long to see you

  O away you rolling river

  O Shenandoah I long to see you

  Away I’m bound to go across the wide Missouri.

  In the upstairs bar, against the midsummer light, was not a sailor, but Andrei Tarkovsky, dark hair on his forehead like a wing, Mongolian eyes, Tartar moustache, mod shirt, and another Russian who lived in a high-rise, Nadia Mandelstam, her large gipsy’s mouth, her gipsy’s eyes, and I thanked them and the medieval ikon-makers, the men from Novgorod and Constantinople, the makers of madonnas with beautiful eyes in amber oranges and sulphur yellows, who despite the denigration and the spite of the crowds, of their own countries, went on to create a beauty that linked up through the ages, like a pattern of fleur-de-lys on Russian wallpaper, and redeemed, put a charcoal brazier in a world where Irish tramps died of cold through the winter in the streets of London.

  On the afternoon before I got the night train to Berlin in the summer, a couple of days before Marek’s death, I’d sat in a café with Gavriil, near the Moyka Canal, the wall papered with dolphins. Nearby was a park in which little girls sat on ponies or carried shoals of balloons, most of the balloons round, the top ones sausage-shaped. We talked about London, why I had to leave it. Couldn’t live in Ireland, couldn’t live in London; flee the small-mindedness of Ireland, find yourself surrounded by an abyss of racism in London.

  ‘I blew out the candle on London. London extinguished for me.’

  On my way to the station, walking by the Fontanka, I saw a woman in a sarafan against a bridge. It could have been a de la Tour Madeleine, with long, black hair, a straight fringe, and sad, lighter eyes. It was Anna Akhmatova.

  ‘Goodbye. A strong, strong kiss. Gavriil.’

  Dear Volody,

  Since leaving you and Iveta and Pyoir and Gavriil my heart has been sad. I felt on Monday night never in my life was I in the company of such lovely people, filled by God.

  Since I met you, I have thought about you, and I feel, I hope, I trust my thoughts and prayers will go with you. Gavriil is a very good friend for you. Before the Feast of the Epiphany love to you.

  The road outside the tinker encampment is a one-way system now and the trucks shake the aluminium caravans. People peg stones from the railday station above and even a ladder is thrown down one night. The fumes have become unbearable and children can’t sleep at night and are prescribed sleeping pills. Sometimes when you pass there is a bunch of flowers high on the lamppost, with his photo, that of a little boy with a fitful head of hair; near where the little boy was killed, in spring a bunch of daffodils, in summer a bunch of marigolds or stock or wallflowers, in autumn Michaelmas daisies, in winter carnations or chrysanthemums.

  More difficult for the travellers to move in summer, parking places were always privately owned but now people are more possessive about green places.

  A blue umbrella lights up on the railway tracks as I pass the tinker encampment; there’s a teddy bear on the tracks with a blue dress pulled up over her head; below, many-ribboned traveller girls play school, most of them sitting on a bench, the teacher confronting them.

  A traveller woman comes out of one of those caravans in the afternoons now as the children are playing and puts up a picture outside her caravan, a concave picture behind glass of an angel guardian standing behind a little boy and girl going for a stroll.

  People’s lives touch less often than we think, like lighted ships passing one another at night on the Irish Sea. I feel like someone, socks going around without legs, shoes without ankles, arms, head separate, bits all over the place. At night, often the lights of Catford Greyhound Course still blinking, there’s a child in the sea. Is it Marek in somewhere like Porto Nuovo or me in Salthill? The rhizomes of grief go deep into the earth but there is also a contradictory joy. Missing someone, someone’s face, is like missing a country, the sky of another country. You think in January that the only real way to fight evil is not prayer but to hold someone’s hand. Touching can so often be rape, molestation. Real touching comes from love and love happens so rarely. You have to fight for love, the way Ursula Goetze, Libertas and Harro Schulze Boysen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Etty Hillesum fought fascism. In London I see Rembrandts everywhere; he brings tenderness to old people, mostly black, queuing to take part in an old people’s talent competition; to a maroon and blue bomb-disposal van stopping and a man getting out to look at a parcel; to people entering a hotel for a pawnbrokers’ conference; to a funeral gathering outside shelled-looking flats; to a group o
f black women singing ‘Abide with me … Fast falls the eventide’ in a shopping arcade; to two young Irish lovers, holding hands, looking at pictures of Padre Pio in a window; to an old Irish tramp praying before a picture of Bernadette Soubiroux as a nun; to a Killarney brick-layer in a hospital, about to have a hernia operation, the lights of South-East London high-rises outside – ‘I feel like an old woman’s blouse.’ You pick up a second-hand blue jersey, from a pointillistic chair, like the one you wore in the first squat you lived in in London. There’s the continuity, the faithfulness of paupers about this city. The city itself is a second-hand jersey. Always, at the worst of times, an echo, a pastiche of the Second World War. A woman puts a scarf, turban-style, on her head, puts epaulettes on. A boy says of his father who has cancer: ‘It’s the most exciting thing that happened to him since the Second World War.’ The city itself seems to have cancer now, ragpickers in the West End, wartime colours in West London – Santa Claus red, teal blue. Loved it once, too close to kin now, must take off. In you there is a longing for life, a longing for Europe, the invocation of the Flight into Egypt – the knowledge that there’s never any going back to Ireland. The violation has been too horrible, too spiteful, the connivance too wicked.

  There was your own wickedness too, the inability to fit in, to obey the rules, say the right things, the tendency always to flit, not to concentrate, to aggravate people.

  When a friend dies they leave you their life’s images like the bits and pieces of Kreuzberg. To put them together is not just to relive their life but also to enter a stronger, braver life. There’s a bequeathed shirt to fit into, a flamboyant purchase in Amsterdam. I feel in January that there were people who tried to murder me, to murder the children I’d have. But my children are you Marek now, you and your mother, and the bits and pieces, the mosaic like an East European high-rise apartment block, the precious array in any of them – a Red Army man with a clock on his breast, a disgruntled doll in Victorian cap, dress, knickerbockers, a puppet of a girl cobbler.