Farewell to Prague Read online

  My wild Irish rose.

  The sweetest flower that grows.

  He caused my first wet dreams, dreams nearly as intense as those caused by a half-naked boy in flats near Tara Street, Dublin 1966.

  I wrote to him, in a letter that would never reach him.

  ‘I miss you very much. I wonder often about you.’

  When A Hill in Korea came with George Baker we all thought about him, but then he was gone far away.

  Things would suddenly remind me of him over the years: a photograph of Mamie Eisenhower; the rifle drill by Irish soldiers at the funeral of President Kennedy; a song, “The Yellow Rose of Texas’; Coretta King playing the piano; a boy at Kennedy Airport, New York, October 1976 – ‘No one looked at me like that for years’; a blond-haired boy in a café by Bay Bridge 1976; a Quaker graveyard in the Midwest, 1981; a soda fountain in a café in Columbus, Georgia, December 1987; the red earth of Tennessee 1987; a group of bare-chested young soldiers jogging on a coppery fall morning in Alabama, singing ‘Look at 101 rolling down the strip. Heave up. Heave up. Big Daddy’s going to take a little trip’; yellow grapes on a table in the fall in Alabama; a boy riding a motor cycle on to a truck in Yazoo City, Mississippi.

  He is my war story for you today, Miranda, my stained-glass window.

  Afterwards, Miranda and I walk to the Russian Church in Wilmersdorf where, a service going on with a small congregation, a little old lady insists we join our hands and then goes to fuster with candles, pulling them out of where they are for no apparent reason, putting them elsewhere, ferrying them between candle stalls, plucking out bits of wax in an increasingly agitated manner.

  A monk in a silver stole, facing the congregation, recites a prayer with a candle in his hand, and the choir sings, magnifying glasses to the texts.

  Miranda kneels on the tiles to pray for her country, and I remember the boy from Korea, here in Berlin in a Russian church with a Croatian woman, just as I used to periodically recall him as a child.

  He was my first and most enduring lesson in courage, courage to face memory, hypocrisy.

  He was the mirror to all that was good in life.

  He is conjured up in a Russian church in Berlin, but only by mutual volition, by the friction, the reaching to one another of two minds, Miranda’s and mine, clear as the memory of the poster for Walt Disney’s Bambi, the stubble over his mouth not unlike that of Marek in death, a power against evil, a renewed talisman, and he turns and looks at me and I am again the child I was then, the child is recaptured with all his dreams and all his openness and all his fearlessness and a path that was concealed is open and a strength is passed on, like an irrevocable candle.

  In Berlin, on the Metro, Turkish men incessantly tell their beads – their sebhas – and a mantra is created, a mantra of consciousness, and things are brought to mind here which would not be possible anywhere else, and things are remembered, a young ex-soldier, pinks pinned to his lapel, holding a boy’s hand in a small town in the West of Ireland in the nineteen-fifties in the season of cranesbill, in the season of croaky versions of ‘The Maid of Mooncoin’ for gatherings of tinkers in the local pub.

  After he left I went to the films as often as I could, to the two cinemas in town and, on Sunday afternoons, to the hall in the orphanage where we sat on wooden benches. Once, shortly after he left, a teenage orphan, in grey rather than the blue younger orphans wore, got very excited at a film which ended in marriage.

  ‘Oh I love the films,’ she said, clapping her hands.

  ‘But he’s a divorcee,’ the girl sitting with her posed an objection.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. They’re not Catholics.’

  Outside the church in Wrangelstrasse, beside a big basket, slanted on both sides at the top like a roof, a little Asian missionary of charity is wiping the face of a shaven-headed, heavily tattooed young man, which is covered in blood. He’s been wounded with a broken bottle by a gang of skinheads from the Marzahn or Hillesdorf districts of East Berlin.

  I go into the church and there’s a crucifix with a young Christ on it, a pot of poinsettias underneath him, and I remember the crucifix I saw with Eleanor in Italy and know that this was to be our lives.

  Outside, there’s a liquescence about the scene with the nun and the young man, as if it had taken place in early Christian times.

  She rubs his face almost rhythmically, then lithely stands back from him to see the effect. Everything is calm for her, everything is as it should be.

  His shirt is open now and you can see his marble-white pectorals.

  To the edge of this city are the high-rise apartment blocks of Marzahn and Hillesdorf and beyond them high-rise blocks all over Europe, slits of sunset above them come evening.

  This was to be our lives, to become part of one of them, a number, a window, a room with its own brand of exile, with its own individual bricolage.

  The car keeps driving through Swabia in my dreams, stopping at the little towns, the driver still trying to collect, to make sense of what has happened. Sometimes the landscape, the beauty of it, is an end, a cohesion in itself. Other times nothing coheres, there is no coming together and he still tries, knowing that this life has been beautiful, like the landscape, and must make sense.

  My first summer in England I kept hearing a song:

  I haven’t got the love of the sweetest boy in town.

  But I’ve got the silver of the stars

  Gold of the morning sun.

  And I remembered a girl who’d been in love with that young American soldier who had since died.

  Something that was smashed, something that was destroyed is coming together again, a town, a connection.

  A group of labourers run naked into the river. There is a black Victorian coach in a shed in a blacksmith’s yard. Mrs Delaney sits under her picture of The Meeting of the Waters in a pale blue dress strewn with coral-white daisies.

  A connection is being made again, is being resolved with country of birth, but not with their country but a country beyond it, a countryside of Country and Western parlour masses; of trees on which beautiful crofters’ sons hung themselves, for unfathomable reasons, with extra-long laces, standing on their bicycles, and were given funerals with arches of hurleys over their coffins; where little girls, destined to be nuns, open lucky bags with thick tablets of sweets in them and a message; a countryside of churches with saints with broken lilies in their chipped hands; of people who continue to go into exile for reasons unknown and spend lives drifting through rooms with other people’s settees in them, the spoor of other people’s exile on them, on the diamond-patterned cushions; of people, all of whom have a relative who went away on the Queen Mary and was never heard of again.

  Two people dancing under lime trees in Prague with lights coming through the trees, two people on a cement carpet at a crossroads in Ireland.

  ‘I have looked into your eyes and seen the horror in them and understood.’

  Years ago in Ireland, often at the end of a journey – a boat journey, a train journey – somebody would be waiting on the other side. For years, going between England and Ireland, there was never anybody. When I travelled in Germany suddenly people started waiting on the other side again – having mathematically deduced the arrival time of a train.

  After we’d gone to see Marek’s body in the mountain cemetery, in the evening, Zdena and I went to visit a blind girl in a little apartment block a few miles outside the town of louvred houses. In the surrounding meadows was the pink of weigela and the white of the beauty bush. She was sitting over a tomato salad she’d prepared, all in black, her hair newly curled, radiant, waiting for her lover.

  We drove then through Swabia, Zdena and I, as the sun was going down, through the little exact villages, past one which had a red English telephone box in it, and she said, ‘Nobody will be as glittering as him.’ She was soon to be off to the United States with a boyfriend; they’d hitchhike around. She showed me a photograph of the boy, already prepared, in a pal
e yellow summer shirt with palms and poinsettias on it. I told her to be sure to go to New Orleans and the states of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia. And she said, although she’d never been there, ‘Yes, return to Georgia.’

  She’d stopped the car and gone and collected a bunch of wild flowers in the meadows and when she returned, scraggles of her hair over her blue denim jacket against the green fields, she took my hand and pressed it.

  It was like when the Liverpool boat would come into the Mersey Canal, the sudden jolt when you’d be sleeping on the floor; touching something, making a contact now with another being, with other beings that wouldn’t go away.

  From those women, the swan-necked woman who died young, the woman who cut her throat, the woman who threw herself out the window, the insistence of them in Berlin, came a lady, an answer, Our Lady of Berlin.

  She appeared above a side-street of tall houses one evening in the spring, some of the houses dark, some light, matchstick corridor effects of lighted windows, the sky murky.

  Something that came from the purity of those women’s lives remembered in Berlin, from all the journeys, from the bits and pieces of this city – a gold Immaculate Conception in a frame with some red plastic flowers in a Turkish hairdresser’s shop, two old lovers by an oil-cloth-covered table, a Kurdish lament, Elvis Presley singing ‘Wooden Heart’ on the nickelodeon.

  A figment of the imagination, yes, but no less real for that, a notion, a counterpoint, a return to a childhood when we were geared for the continual possibility of such apparitions, a drawing together of my times here and a knowledge that my sojourn here was a right one, that there was a token of safety, of protection over my presence here, and that Marek’s death was leading me from one path of search to another. The paths were cross-reaching, but where the new path was going I didn’t know yet. All I knew was that I’d have to take the courage of a tinker woman, who refused to die at ninety, with me.

  When I was travelling through the Southern States in a Greyhound bus December 1987, a woman was loaded on the bus by her husband and son at a small depot in Tennessee. She was a very big woman, huge bun at the back, on two crutches, dressed in what could have been mail-order clothes. They were sending her, alone, to a hospital in Iowa City, where she was from. She kept telling me she was thirty-six, though she must have been much older. At another stop in Tennessee we got out – I was helping her. It was sunset. There was an advertisement showing a cowboy riding a pig outside the timber café. She said, ‘You speak American real good,’ and then for some reason, by instinct, she raised her right hand in what seemed to be a blessing against the rose doré sunset, and I knew that, because of this, I would come back, again and again, to the Southern States. I would return to Georgia.

  At the bus station in Chicago, where we were stuck for thirty-six hours because of a snowstorm, she collapsed and was taken away by ambulance. I panicked. My things were in her locker. She had the key. But she managed to throw it to me as she was being taken away. Sitting there, alone, I watched a little black boy play with a miniature Greyhound bus. One morning in Alabama a girl who dealt in what-nots – voodoo bits and pieces – came and left a miniature Greyhound bus on my doorstep.

  Slowly and slowly I’m changing my life.

  Sweet Jesus, slowly I’m changing my life.

  On Oranienburgerstrasse an old lady in an apron-coat speckled with little flowers, bent over, coming out of a tiny store, says to me, ‘Nehmen Sie mich bei der Hand,’ and I take her hand. It is a spring twilight. Golden trams are swimming, are wraithing out of one another. Little boys surf along on skates, one of them with a Davy Crockett hat on. We pass a synagogue with a gold and almond-green dome. Someone at the end of the street is playing a barrel organ. There are corner parks with benches as in any Eastern European city and already, though cold, some people sit on them, conversing. Above those parks you can see the lighted rooms of people’s homes, the kinds of lampshades, the shadows of creatures at the windowsills – a furry bird, a raving crocodile.

  And in this city you meet them now, the people like Grace Crane, from middle-class houses in other countries, far countries, once with good jobs, living in tiny rooms now, cleaning toilets, scrubbing stairs, washing glasses. In Havana there’s no food, someone who’s just come from there tells me. There’s a boy from China. Can’t go home. Will wander the world. Miranda will go on to the United States. It rains heavily and the lights mix on the pavement by Gedächtniskirche. In the window of a shop is a poster showing a café in Havana, with a lemon awning outside it, a woman with a microscopic dog on a long leash.

  Lou Andreas Salomé said something like the cloaca and the genitals must be reconciled before we find a path to God.

  In the spring Krzysztof and I went to Worpswede where Rilke lived after his trips to Russia with Lou Andreas Salomé. At the old border to the DDR the police were holding up a Russian family, grandmother in huge scarf, husband in sneakers, young mother with red velvet bow at the back of her hair, children with the pale blue of hunger about their eyes. The women wore watches embroidered with flowers.

  Gavriil’s father, though only fifty-two, had died of a heart attack, just after the New Year, in Russia, and his relatives – fifteen people – had come, according to custom, and stayed for forty days in the three-roomed family flat.

  Gavriil had sent me a photograph of himself at these unwanted festivities – a tie with ice-skating seals on him.

  His friend, Iveta, whom I’d met just after Christmas, had written from St Petersburg: ‘I waz very glad to meat with you. I want to visit you. It will be very nice.’

  She had come and stayed for a few days, on her way to Munich and, in high heels with gold knobs in front of them, the girl who frequently worked as a prostitute in Leningrad, her father having been exiled to the other side of the city when she was a child because he’d made love to her, joined the queue for confession in the Russian Church in Wilmersdorf, the choir singing as the people queued.

  ‘What Are We Living For?’ played on the car radio. Starlings swooped over the fields.

  ‘After its success in Vienna, Bonn, Munich, Antwerp the circus comes.’

  Once, when Chipperfields’ circus came, a woman who knew she was going to die, who’d been in love with that American soldier, stood in the middle of the green in a long, old-rose coat, the elephants and crocodiles around her, her head bowed.

  Berlin had taught me that the way to destroy evil is to forgive, but one must never go back.

  In my childhood there was a gang who lived down a cellar in a yard, a steel plate on top of it, and frequently came up, by way of a wooden ladder, to attack; my friend and I arranged a funeral procession for a cat, my friend dressed like someone from the Ku-Klux-Klan for the occasion, a girl, who’d gone bald, heading it, sprinkling flowers on the grass; my friend performed a play outside the British Legion hut, playing the fairy queen, ‘Dismiss. Dismiss’; when he’d gone I wrote down what I remembered of the play in a fat, green-covered copy book with pale blue lines, imagining the fairy queen to look like Romy Schneider in Sissi; the oak trees which flanked the British Legion hut were cut down before I’d finished putting the play down, so it was as if their green went into the words and green would always be part of the words, the green of a row of oak trees cut down in May.

  Kites sat on heaps of earth near the motorway as we got to the North and the meadows were trickled with black earth – signs of the burrowing of moles.

  In small towns crowds of boys, many of them with baseball caps turned back to front, returned from school.

  Ugly duckling boys, crouched, returning from school in the West of Ireland, destined to become beautiful for spells.

  A little boy with green-framed spectacles looked at our car passing.

  Marek had a photograph of himself, a little boy in sunglasses, jiving with his mother on a balcony with urns on the wall, against the sea, in Taormina.

  A boy, porcelain-skinned, curly, beige-haired, in a thick argent T-shir
t, against a house, purple crocuses in front of it, a message over the door: ‘O God above protect this graciously given house from fire, gale, burning, and shelter us, and one day guide us into Your Heavenly Home.’

  ‘We are always looking for someone stronger, braver, more compassionate than us,’ I thought, as I looked at Krzysztof in Worpswede.

  After the visit we stayed the night with his mother, who lived near Bremen with an American – a deserter from the Vietnam War – she married after divorcing Krzysztof’s father.

  It was dark as we took the ferry across the Weser and Krzysztof’s face was lit up by the red lights of the harbour on the other side.

  Berlin was the city of Georges de la Tour’s most beautiful painting, St Sebastian, the irrevocable arrow in him, four figures above him – three, one above the other, one to the side – the red of the robes of the woman nearest him passed on to the dead body, an act of love, the flame in her hand doing an orchestration, the figure to the side like the figure of death, a deeply bowed head, a sickle of a moon in a black hood, and the colour of night in the clothes, all around them, just as the colour of night had enveloped the desolate grandeur of this bog countryside, crossed by narrow roads flanked with giant birch trees.

  Krzysztof’s mother, Bettina, crouched on the ground in a flash-crimson blouse decorated with Chinese mountains, and skirmishing clouds and tall pagodas with spiralling rods on top of them. His step-father, Shannon, was in the same position; he wore scenes of Honolulu on his white shirt: Kawaiahao Church, Ioliani Tower, the Royal Mausoleum.

  The room, which was papered with a pattern of a goose chasing a dog, had little shelves on the wall which were built at all kinds of angles to one another and all kinds of little objects on the shelves – box gipsy wagons, a little louvred wooden school, a little louvred wooden bakery, a louvred stable with tiny horses in it, a dwarf – palette in his hand – painting, a little dresser with patterns of flowers on it, a honey-coloured witch on a broom, a family of elephants, a glass ball with a richly brown view of Prague sunk in it – Prague Castle above a myriad of gabled houses.