Farewell to Prague Read online

  It was as if in Ireland I’d seen the face of evil and travelling in Eastern Europe in those years, in the cities of mustard yellow, amber yellow, persimmon trams, of welcoming verdure, the vision was corrected; I saw the face of God.

  ‘He was from Ireland. Used to box there. Then came over here. Lived in Clapham, Battersea, Peckham, places like that. Then he disappeared.’

  Denk ich an Deutschland in der Nacht

  Dann bin den Schlaf gebracht,

  Ich kann nicht mehr die Augen subliessen

  Und meine heissen Tränen fliessen.

  People hold hands in London, put their arms around shoulders. Miranda writes to me about starvation in Zagreb, about the concentration camps in Serbia. The letter is posted from Warsaw, which she’s visiting for a few days, and the stamp shows a crane flying low over a cornfield speckled with corncockle.

  In my dreams swans take off from lakesides in Ireland and helicopters come from the skies, landing in cities of corrugated red roofs and cypress trees, to take the dead and wounded aboard.

  ‘The second question cannot unfortunately avoid a time of force, suffering, asking … why? Which flies in our heart since ever. So many deaths …’

  Once hit by it you are haunted forever, I write back. Your life will be full of dashes around, subterfuges, other people piling spite on you to try to quell your disturbance, your chaos, even; people, cities becoming part of your flight. Occasionally you look back, to see the others there in their safe lives, smoking their pipes. But you keep going, cities, streets, avenues. Occasionally when there’s a candle lit for you in some church someone touches your hand, your face. You might even make love for the night. But there’s a knowledge that won’t go away no matter how much they pretend it’s you. You see beautiful places. You’re assuaged by beauty, but always in you there’s a crying. What comes if you keep going is faith. A faith that’s wholly different from theirs. That finally divorces you from them. But which links you to people who have suffered like you, remember like you, seen what you’ve seen. There are far cities for you and maybe even peace sometime, peace that comes from the fact that you accepted and didn’t pretend. And if your faith is great enough there’s love. Love comes and puts its arms around you and love, against these wars, against the hatred, is the only answer. But the price we pay for love is high. We pay it with every fibre of our being. At the cost of alienating almost everyone. Must keep going. Must keep going. I reach for you and you don’t answer. I try to tell you about my loss but you don’t understand. I seek to communicate it and you repudiate me, try to eliminate my statement. Yes, we’re part now, Miranda, we’re part of the hordes, the refugees, the ones who have seen and lost and yet gained everything.

  First time I saw Chartres, the molten aftermath of childhood scapulars still on my breast, coming back in the car, it began to rain as we entered the suburbs of Paris at August dusk, lights over motorway bridges, funnels spangled with lights. It was over, the excitement of a vision, but something of that day, of Chartres, its portal statues, its roundels, would last forever, a gift from my parents.

  ‘Where Do You Go to My Lovely’ ricocheted from the café on the main street early that autumn. I hung around outside it, hoping to see the woman who gave French lessons. I willed myself to be as beautiful as some of the boys of Paris and I was beautiful, masculine, smartly dressed for a while but there was no one around to see.

  First sight of Big Sur on a journey from Dublin; then back for attack, denunciation. That was the way, progression, regression. Big Sur like Chartres would stay with me. Another link in the loveliness of things, another link with the river of my childhood, with the photographs of vulnerable women in cloche hats, something they ultimately couldn’t destroy.

  The child I saw in Lerici, near a dog-rose village, it’s hall-door steps which came to the sea, me in Salthill, alternated with another child, a boy in very short shorts, blue and white striped T-shirt. It could have been you, Marek. You would have been about eight then. Boats swayed on the very blue sea, women sold postcards right by the sea edge, and a lateen took off to sea.

  An aunt of mine visited Berlin in the nineteen-thirties, just after Hitler took power, the aunt who died two weeks after I was born. When she’d been training at the Immaculate Training College in Limerick, Maud Gonne had come and lectured about her time in Holloway Prison and how she managed to speak nothing but Irish there. Not the Maud Gonne I saw in the portrait on an educational tour to Dublin in 1959, a muss of hair over her elegiac features, but a Maud Gonne with blanched face, still in the coal-scuttle hat of the twenties. My aunt stayed with an Irish woman who was a governess, in a nougat-coloured street. There had been witchhazel under portraits of Hitler, and she’d seen Ashkenazhi Jews leading their children along, something frightened about them. They’d have afternoon tea in Kranzlers, they walked by the traffic of coal barges with their heavily smoking chimneys on canals, listened to a group of boys in tam-o’-shanters, most of them with blond hair and pinched faces, sing ‘Deutschland über Alles’ at the tables outside the Maison de France on Kurfürstendamm, the orchestra resuming when they’d finished with ‘I’ll Send You Some Violets’. She’d met her husband while she was teaching at the Mercy Convent in Navan and gone to live in the white house in the country. A sister-in-law walked through France during the war. Her hair had turned white when she returned to Ireland, and she was very silent, sitting around a lot by herself, always in a blue dress, taking the red bus to Dublin occasionally to meet old friends at Mitchels Tea Rooms or go to the pictures at the Rotunda Cinema. Then she’d returned to France and my aunt never saw her again. ‘I never go out now. Miss Holly does the shopping for me. I feel just middling. Have just heard from Saorse George in Berlin. Their biggest fear is the Soviet Union’s atom bomb now. Had a letter from Father Louis on the Divine Word Mission. They hear nothing but martial music in Seoul now.’

  When I lived in the squat in Battersea in 1977 there was a boy from Belfast there. He’d been summoned to the house of a prominent Irish citizen in South Dublin in the early seventies, given a gun and some money. He discarded the gun and went to England where he got a job in a vegetarian café run by gay Divine Light people from Ireland and had a few children with a West of Ireland girl. Last time I saw him he was with the winos in the bar at Galway station. ‘Thank God for the nuns this side of the Shannon,’ he said. ‘If it wasn’t for them I’d be dead.’

  A nun, a distant cousin, passed away in Brooklyn last year and in the way of these things, the stories staggered now, I’ve just heard. She’d been suffering from a brain tumour for years. As a child she’d cycle into town and addictively purchase bags of liquorice allsorts. Her mother had opened a sweet shop in the house after she’d become a nun, sold bottles of mineral water and lemonade, sweets in jars and, on the counter, in open boxes, tins of fruit. Last visits back to Ballyhistle, to the house with the clock which did a gavotte, people had come to regard her as a saint. Boys would come on their bicycles to see her, and a country and western band had welcomed her on one occasion with ‘One Day at a Time’. A local man had sent a bunch of yellow bog-asphodels to Brooklyn for her funeral. For years she’d cared for the terminally ill in Brooklyn, and of late worked with AIDS patients. Hart Crane befriended a young mystic tubercular case called John Squazialupi, who had visions of the twentieth century’s wars in a sanatorium in Brooklyn in the nineteen-twenties. After his death Hart Crane’s mother worked as baby-sitter, cook, scrub-woman, invalid’s companion, in a world whose light was caught by Edward Hopper, using her earnings to collate his poems and his writings, the way Nadia Mandelstam gallivanted around Russia, on the run, using her earnings from her work as a teacher of grammar to hold intact her husband’s life’s work. Grace Crane died in the Holy Name Hospital in Teaneck, New Jersey. My distant cousin lies in a hillside cemetery in Brooklyn now, not far from the house where Hart Crane had pictures of sailors on the wall, a house with a view of Brooklyn Bridge, a house which echoed a house with a tower roo
m in Cleveland where the first sentience had come as he listened to victrola music. In the spring I light a candle not for, but in celebration of my distant cousin, at Bonefatius in Kreuzberg, the way the lady doctor on a ramble through Germany last summer lit a candle for Marek in the Church of Our Lady, Nuremberg.

  In the Chapel of St Teresa in Avila I’d lit a candle for all of them, the women in cloche hats, the soldiers, the tuberculosis cases, the pub-owners, the grocery-store-cum-pub-owners in their ginger-sandy coats the herdsmen, the vendors of silk ties, the nuns, the priests, the missionaries, the navvies, the runaways, the lost forever.

  ‘Patrick went to America, died young.’

  13 February 1992. Back in Berlin. Afraid to look. The lights all around, yellow, green, red, white, poppy orange, electric blue, Aegean blue, sky blue, grey-blue, aquamarine, magenta, lavender, mulberry, blood.

  It is quiet like an East European city.

  As I walk to another temporary address the lime trees are so bare and wet you want to put a coat on them. There are birch trees against tall apartment buildings.

  ‘Sarah (Bobby) went to America. Never heard of again. Esther went to America. Disappeared.

  ‘Austin went to America. Came home on holidays twice.

  ‘Alfred and Elizabeth burned alive at the home place in Carrarea.’

  In a family bible in Swabia, next to a name, are the words ‘Ausgewandert nach Amerika. Verschwunden.’

  Krzysztof, a young doctor friend, who is handing over the keys of the apartment, has made a meal, and we eat it by the light of a menorah.

  ‘What are you running from?’

  On a dresser is a photograph of the owner of the flat, who has gone away to Africa for two months, in a kippa hat, in the Jewish Cemetery of Senefelder in East Berlin.

  On the wall is an oval photograph, edged in platinum, which is going to be my companion here; picked up in one of the junk stores of Berlin, it shows a little tow-headed boy, in the wide trousers of the nineteen-thirties.

  The lemon trains go by on elevated tracks against the red lights on the edges of high-rises, bare willow trees brushed against the wet sky, in the city my aunt visited sixty years ago. ‘Old friend, what are you looking for? What do you keep looking for?’ A black hare runs through Marx-Engels Platz. On a Saturday afternoon an old lady on Oranienburgerstrasse brings home a life-size ceramic Dobermann, with his tongue hanging out.

  25 February 1992. It is Marek’s birthday. ‘New World Symphony’ plays from a street of tall houses, with a scattering of lights. An old lady suddenly stops on the street, remembers something, then walks on.

  God protect me, I think. Before I left London a shadow of a man came to my door, to the French windows on which the panes are circular, some of the wooden circular frames crossing one-another. I was sitting in the dark so he must have thought there was no one there. He went away again.

  In a junk store on Fasanenstrasse, where a synagogue was burned down on Kristallnacht, 9 November 1938, there is a black baby box from an Irish school. The head of the baby, kneeling in a gown on the box, is blue and black like the scrotum of an old man.

  Maud Gonne said of the Nazis: ‘I am not sure had I been a German after the Treaty of Versailles that I would not have become a Nazi; except for the Nazi exclusion of women from a share in the direction of affairs.’ Krzysztof, my doctor friend, says that for his patients, memories of the war are returning. The syphilis of a woman who was raped by the Russians resurrecting itself. A man with cancer of the liver talking about Matthausen. A man with a tube in his throat recalling the two young French Resistance workers whose throats were cut on a truck in Alsace, minutes after he’d conversed with them in French about a favourite church in Paris, Notre Dame des Victoires. Snow and frost have briefly returned and at Grünewald a boy skates on the ice, making a long resounding sound underneath it, the sun going down in old gold scraggles like in a Flemish painting, and Krzysztof suddenly puts his arms about me and hugs me.

  Yes, the memories of the camps are returning.

  When Marek’s mother had reached out to him after he’d been diagnosed as having an infection – B-plus contagious – he’d just kicked her away and gone off to the house in Portugal for a few months. When he returned, she was in a hospital and he didn’t go to see her; he got work on a building site in Munich, then made money as a male prostitute. She killed herself, he said, ‘in her madness, and in her fear of having to grow old’.

  She killed herself with the knowledge that her son had AIDS, that he’d rejected her, and with the memories of a walk across Germany at the end of the war.

  The memories of a family I didn’t belong to were returning, maybe even of a country I never belonged to, the violence that was brought out in me when too much closeness was forced upon me, the madness that came out in me – the cruelty most of all to myself.

  ‘Keep on running,’ a Welsh boy said to me in London, and here I’d run into the camps. I could see what they were like. I saw the fires burning. I saw the piled-up corpses. I saw the bits of beloved garments among the corpses – blue and white check, red anemones. I saw the dead children. I saw people hanging from trees.

  What do you do about all this? And then I remembered Marek’s love of cafés, talking to people in cafés, how he’d once spoken to Andrei Tarkovsky in a café in Berlin and I thought, yes, that’s it. Keep fighting for love. Even when they’ve all but destroyed language in you, pick up the pieces and make collages, continue making collages – some meaning will come out of it. Even when they’re pushing you into the grave scream, scream a statement.

  In the little bar Krzysztof and I went to after walking in Grünewald there was a jingly song on the jukebox: ‘Für Mich Wirst Du Ein Neuer Anfang Sein’, ‘You’ll Be a New Start for Me’. We sat by a little table with a red tablecloth, a yellow lampshade on it, paper flowers, ferns in a yellow band, and a waitress with scalloped curls brought us guava juice.

  A friend of Krzysztof’s, an architectural student, had hung himself in Münster that week. He’d just wanted to paint. Do nothing else. But it wasn’t possible.

  And I remembered Marek telling me about the number of heroin addict friends of his, HIV positive, who’d killed themselves in Germany. He’d shown me photographs: beautiful-looking young people in beautiful shirts.

  Must go on. Must go on. Running creates its own momentum. If you keep doing it a bravery comes which is a meaning, a cohesiveness in itself, a mirror for others to look into, however briefly, a magnet for someone to reach to against figures in the snow.

  At night, they’re in my dreams, a film with sprocket holes on the edges, a film with no sound. Marek and his mother at a table by the turquoise sea in Sicily, he in a black summer shirt patterned with white skulls, the two of them laughing over a pitcher of wine which has little squiggles on it.

  Also in my dreams, I’m driving through Swabia, the countryside where Marek is buried, a man looking back at his life, stopping at the little cafés in the villages with louvred houses and towers. It’s as if this landscape will not only bring the bits and pieces together, but also give you a new, secret life.

  Whereas once I told Marek about adventures in my life – an educational tour to Dublin 1959, Oklahoma 1966 – he now tells me about adventures in his: a wedding in Rome 1978, Marek in a sea-blue zoot suit doing a mazurka with his mother to the music of a Hebrew band, a Venus de Milo in the hall with a black broad-brimmed hat on her and circles and circles of pearls about her neck, vases of purple Michaelmas daisies mixed with purple, pink, lemon feathers, a girl outside, scarf around her neck, selling purple Michaelmas daisies; travelling with a Finnish girlfriend in a bus through the DDR in 1980, passing pairs of strange old lovers – in berets, woollen hats, hair askew, with side whiskers; stopping and having a drink in a pub where all the waiters wore black and white and where the men were drinking green crème de menthe, fluorescent in the walnut-brown darkness; standing with his mother, arm around her, by a lighthouse in Sicily at sunset in 19
78, looking to the sea.

  Miranda and I sit on a bench by Grünewald Lake.

  She is currently making a stained-glass window for the dead of Croatia, dozens of tombstones in the shape of sand-dunes with crosses above them, against a sea of kingfisher blue colour.

  Near us are some Polish women in wheelchairs, one of them with an umbrella patterned with elephants above her head, though there’s only the odd drop of rain in the air.

  We don’t speak of her war – it’s too terrible – but a remark of hers – ‘You’re a nineteen-fifties person. Everything about you is nineteen-fifties’ – prompts me to tell her about the young American with Venetian blond hair, who looked like Tab Hunter, who came to our town in the nineteen-fifties. He’d fought in the Korean War. In his brown suits or letterman jackets or button-down sailor’s jerseys he’d smelt like Gold Flake cigarettes. On a frayed armchair at the guesthouse down the road he told us about the dark green trams of Seoul and about the many lepers.

  ‘I’ve been to war and I never want to see violence again.’

  The fishermen at the pub loved him, mixing their smells of river crowfoot with his tobacco ones, and they exchanged stories but those stories I never got, just echoes of songs from the pub at night, which hinted at what they might be talking about.