Farewell to Prague Read online

  There was a sofa reserved for teddy bears – teddy bears with glasses, a teddy bear in black leather shorts, a teddy bear with earphones, a teddy bear in a jogging outfit with a red kerchief around his forehead, two elderly teddy bears – the woman in polka-dot scarf, the man in trilby and dicky bow – ancient, orange-ginger teddy bears, a grinning sailor thrown among the teddy bears, a bald doll with a suggestion of saffron hair, a mulatto doll, a pink devil with silver lamé horns and a brown loop on his head kissing one of the teddy bears.

  On the wall was Elvis against a vermilion background, a Hieronymus Bosch picture of a writer getting inspiration from the Virgin Mary in Heaven and a man with the legs of an ant, coat of armour on his middle, spectacles on his nose, jealously looking on, a photograph of Wilhelm Busch of the German Confessing Church, a lithograph of Jesus with Mary and Martha, a placid dog looking on and large earrings on one of the women’s ears.

  Bettina and Shannon were born-again Christians and there was a stack of Der Wach Turm on the floor.

  On the demi-partition separating the room from the kitchen were mainly American photographs: a youth on a beach against boulders in the sea, three boys with surfing boards, a boy with strawberry-blond hair in a panama hat, a herd of deer on a cliff.

  Shannon’s younger brother, featured in those photographs and who’d worked as an architect in San Francisco, had recently had a devastating breakdown, his mind, the flow of it, having stopped. From doing intellectual work he now had to do something physical, at the same time moving from an apartment on Anza with sliding doors to a small room on Vallejo. Working as a labourer, he usually dressed in a geranium-coloured jersey or in white singlets. Sometimes, during his work he lay spread-eagled on the ground, face to the earth. Such it was with the human mind, one day intact, the next day a wreckage. Such it was with life, one day peaceful, the next day in chaos.

  ‘To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.’

  The postcard he’d chosen to convey the most recent news about him was a Rembrandt, a woman with a gold ring on a leather string about her neck, a band of pearls on her wrist.

  When first I went to California, when first I went to this country, on a lonely beach near Big Sur, the breakers coming in, cormorants and petrels above them, I suddenly fell on my knees in wonder.

  Shannon had come to Germany in the late sixties and lived in Quakenbrück where he’d met Krzysztof’s mother, getting a train to Bramsche in the mornings where he worked as a mechanic.

  ‘We had no time for friendship in Vietnam,’ Shannon said.

  Then, drinking tea, we silently listened to records. I’ll Leave This World Loving You.’ Ricky Van Shelton. ‘Remember Me When the Candlelights Are Glowing.’ ‘Always on My Mind.’ Willie Nelson.

  That night I dreamt of a part of the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague where the tombstones were particularly golden. There was a woman with large earrings weeping among the tombstones and then a boy stood over her, naked above the waist. It was Marek.

  ‘You were wounded in flight.’

  Next day as we drove through Hamburg there were women in black coats, black hats, men in antique-looking coats, who could have been people of the nineteen-thirties. Cat Stevens sang ‘How Can I Tell You That I Love You? on the car radio when we reached the motorway and buses and trucks from Amsterdam and Rotterdam went by.

  Spring came again to Berlin, its light hitting the big grey buildings, the left-over Stalinist apartment blocks, coming through the lime trees, franking snogging lovers by Metros. In the evenings the sky was lavender mussed into peach at the end of the Kurfürstendamm.

  In November 1974, around the time of the Guildford and Birmingham bombings, I headed off to Venice. There I picked up a letter from Eleanor in poste restante and read it in St Mark’s Square, which was partly flooded, a youth with a monkey on a leash walking through it.

  625 Lombard Street,

  San Francisco

  3 November 1974

  Dear Des,

  Must we always be up and on the move? Am staying temporarily here but will shortly go to Sacramento for a few weeks. A Russian girl lives in this apartment. The walls of the sitting room are gold leaf. She made tea tonight in a golden samovar. She told me the Russian word for crane: ‘guraul’. On Hallowe’en I went to a performance of Giovanni Gabrieli’s ‘Jubilate Deo Omnis Terra’ in St Francis’ Cathedral and I felt an ineffable sadness. I thought of a chapel on an island in Mayo and of the Earl William crossing the Irish Sea. As I walked home the paint of a mime artist conducting an orchestra against the sea was running in the rain. I bought a bunch of roses for you tonight, pink and red, and put them against the ocean. You are stronger than you know.

  After reading the letter I went to the flat of the Italian boy I was staying with, in one of the tiny streets just behind the cathedral, a lithograph of a male nude with heavy buttocks on the wall.

  I’d had a call from her, by arrangement, about ten days before in a ramshackle telephone booth beside a box of a pub on the street of my dungeon of a squat. She’d told me that she wasn’t coming home and that she’d joined the religious group. I was wearing an electric-blue jersey which had become loose and which had slashes in it.

  For Eleanor, joining the religious group in the fall, golden sunlight in a city where young men strode the hilly streets in shorts, was like going from one city to another, a Western one transient as the gourd of medieval paintings to an Eastern one, one of labyrinthine streets, hammams, cafés filled with the smoke of incense, old people with many rings on their wrinkled fingers.

  In one of the cafés of this city she met an old man who’d been in Buchenwald. He showed her the tattoo. Each day in San Francisco was a thanksgiving for survival. She put up the barrier of deafness to my letters, to my pleas.

  Years later, in Amsterdam, beside a house with a sickle of a moon with a human face over the door, she would cross another border, go back to the girl she’d been before she entered that Eastern city.

  By then, on a train going through Poland, her image had faded for me.

  We’d once slept together in an apartment in Amsterdam and she’d woken in the night crying, the same way I was to hear a new young wife of a man shortly to be murdered in Belfast crying in the middle of the night. It was the apartment of a young couple, a boy and an older woman, who’d picked us up when we were hitchhiking in Connemara. ‘The trouble with Irishmen,’ the Dutch boy had said in a pub, ‘is that they put their penises in their pints.’ Children, dressed up like German children for Fasching, had passed us on the street as we reached the apartment in Amsterdam. An old man, smoking a pipe, sat on a bench under an autumn tree.

  When Dylan put his arms about me at the end of my sojourn in the squat my body had felt as if a pit had been dug in it for a grave, but something of the warmth of his body, of his condolence, would take me through the next few years in Ireland: chips wrapped in the Republican News in Belfast, British Army tanks rolling along the Springfield Road, the scream of a girl whose husband was about to be murdered. And it would take me through more.

  ‘Must we always be up and on the move?’ Eleanor became Heidi, and Heidi, Marek, and then touching became ever more chancy and dangerous.

  And always the resort to journeys to solve the crater left by Eleanor.

  A journey through Europe the summer Eleanor went, culminating in the Camargue, storks rising from the marshes, horses galloping against the varicose blue of the sea, bathing huts on the beach at Saint Maries de la Mer, blue bushes on the sand dunes and a boat with mouse-grey sails taking off to sea.

  A journey to Italy the year I returned to London, to a squat in Battersea – the words of a girl at a party still screaming in my mind – climbing to a chapel on a hill above Assisi, wending past the fields of winter barley and, having reached the top, beside the chapel, raising flowers to the sun – violets, poppies, white carnations, purple Michaelmas daisies – and then descending to a village where flotillas of child
ren walked by with white bread and where, at a funfair, boys stood around the bumpers in beautifully coloured jackets – peach, burgundy, strawberry – and ties of jade-green and cedar-green.

  When you were under attack by family, under threat of molestation, the journey to Palestine – Jerusalem to Haifa to Tyre to Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee to Tiberias to Nazareth, to Nablus, to Jericho – tanks passing camels in the pitted whiteness of the desert near Jericho – and then back to Jerusalem, men in streimel hats going by in the blue voltage of the fall sunlight in the Mea Shearim quarter. And then when you’d nearly gone dead inside from loneliness and the insistence of kin, something brought you to Prague, to a bare plywood room on an eighth floor where you began looking back, the smell of balm-mint in the room from somebody’s balcony herb pots, and the remembrance, by lulling association, of a song, ‘There is a balm in Gilead’, sung by a black girl in Chartres Cathedral on an evening when, long unkempt locks on you, your back crouched, you walked back to your room, past the boys, in narrow sloe-blue jeans, on mopeds speeding by kiosks squashed into fire-gold, to your room and, a plant on the windowsill, turned and saw the twin spires of Chartres against the summer night sky.

  If you’re going to the North Country Fair

  Remember me to one who lives there

  For he once was a true love of mine.

  In the spring of 1992 she would frequently wheel her child, Aoibhinn, down Javastraat, over Flevoweg bridge, into Flevopark, and stand with her, under a background of high-rise apartment blocks, by the old Jewish graves.

  When she first came to this city in the fall of 1988 and lived on Muidergracht she met an old lady, with hair dyed blonde and looking like an elderly Kim Novack, in the café near her home. She had been in Belsen.

  A boy in an amber leather outfit had bent over the jukebox as they’d spoken. There was a pattern of Mickey Mouse heads on the oil tablecloths in that café.

  ‘You come back, you go to the old cafés, you hear new songs: “Symphony of Love”, “Bessa Me Mucho”, “Don’t Fence Me In”. But the only one that matters is “Saturday Night Is the Loneliest Night of the Week”. New music, a new world, a new kind of human being. Those who came back from the camps.’

  First time in this city she’d come with him. They’d approached the flat on Gerard Doustraat of friends they’d met in Ireland and children had passed, dressed up, and looked at them. Maybe an omen that she’d have a child in this city one day. A little boy had worn pink lamé horns, a pink lamé jabot. Another had on a black half-mask with a greatly beaked nose.

  Her child always carried a tin ladybird with a key coming out of his behind, given to her by one of the former neighbours in Muidergracht.

  Eleanor would stand there, by the tombstones – the matseiwa – near a canal and, now that she was returning to the United States, remember him, the gristle of his face.

  When I first went to Prague and used to sit in the Old Jewish Cemetery, I’d think of how the old Jewish town reflected my life, sometimes the double-tailed Bohemian lion flying proudly here, sometimes the inhabitants having to wear the yellow star.

  And in the spring in Amsterdam, sea-light in the cemetery, the first swallows flying around, she would be back in the Dublin of her childhood, Rathmines, near the old Jewish quarter of Dublin and, beside her child, the sequence of her life would commence for her and its unfolding would try to tell her things and her life try to make sense of itself.

  It would be like the windowsill of a neighbour when she first came to Amsterdam – Goofy in an A-line skirt and ankle socks, Mickey Mouse in cornflower-blue trousers, holding out a bunch of red carnations, monkeys in Honolulu skirts and Chinese hats, a China man on a donkey, a strawberry-nosed hedgehog with prickles of mohair, a white goose with green polka dots on a white ribbon, a clog decorated with a line of blue windmills by a sherry-gold sea.

  A large room in Prague with a bunch of golden knapweed on the table in a green vase, a band around the vase with a pattern of red and yellow roses on a check tablecloth, a print on the wall of Hendrikje Stoffels, Rembrandt’s lover, looking out a window into Jodenbreestraat. A walnut tree in the garden outside. Near the window a picture of Mary, Queen of the Angels. The room is like the ashram in North Dublin of our friend who joined the Divine Light. There is the invocation of feminine peace here, of autumn, and the listless smell from the garden that there is from many gardens in this city where nude old ladies with many rings on their crinkled fingers sit under pillars of glazed majolica in saunas, an autumn smell that snuggles itself out from the back gardens of old houses in Dublin.

  She’d often pass the Seder on St Kevin’s Parade as the children were engaged in their Seder sing-song, a lemonade pitcher on the teacher’s desk; on Lennox Street was the Jewish bakery where her aunts would purchase gingerbread men, honey and curd cakes, sugar pretzels.

  Her mother’s people were traditionally from Rathmines; her father’s people were poor, and they came from the North of Ireland.

  In their home in Rathmines as much as possible was green; there was a painting of a maroon-garbed Arab with his arms around his dying steed, a photograph portrait of her mother in a black dress with a choker at her neck and, in her hand, a cigarette in a shining cigarette holder, a photograph of her parents in mackintoshes beside St Germain’s Abbey on the Isle of Man during their honeymoon, a photograph of herself in a swimsuit being led by her father on Curracloe Beach, he in an old-fashioned black swimming costume.

  Her mother’s aunts smelt of Ashes of Roses, Chanel No 5, Evening in Paris, and for a simple visit they would have sandwiches covered by a cloth and biscuits with pink icing on them. After her father’s funeral in November 1990 one of his aunts, who was aged eighty and had swollen legs, had spoken to her.

  ‘We came from a very poor background. The land was poor. You couldn’t raise crops but you could sheep. Black-faced mountain sheep. All the girls went to America one by one. They borrowed the fare and sent it back, bit by bit. They were only working as servant girls so it would take eight years or so.’

  At family gatherings it was the Dublin relatives who had the stories; how her mother saw an IRA man escape from Mountjoy Jail, dressed as Rita Hayworth, in 1942; a love-affair which commenced in Irish House on the South Quays where people were retreating from a vitriolic sermon given at Francis Xaviour’s on Gardiner Street. A little girl in a dress with a honeycombed front, she’d be led by her father so far down the South Bull Wall and then she’d have to stand there when he went for a swim in the nude in the Half Moon Swimming Club. Maybe that was why at a certain stage of her life, in London, sexuality was a pogrom for her. She was picking people up almost daily. But they had to be English boys, Pre-Raphaelite English boys, from Birmingham or Swiss Cottage, with names like Darren or Encombe, who wore cord trousers and made love to her over launderettes.

  Going West to a convent on an island in Mayo was emancipation for her; it was also connivance with another Ireland. It was leaving her father behind, the lecturer in the College of Art, who’d stand outside Marsh’s Library, in an old suit like a young man, a Franz Liszt haircut on him.

  A convent with a monkey-puzzle tree outside it and elms by the side of it; nuns singing ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ on a drugget at a Christmas concert; cakes every weekend – Bakewell tart, French sponge, cheesecakes with strings of coconut on top, Battenburg cakes – and during the week the trip to a little store for tipsy cake which came in plastic wrapping, and had soaked mottled sponge – dark and pale brown – almond paste on top and pink icing over that.

  Sister Camisias spoke of marvels and it was from her that she heard the story of the Children of Lir.

  Fianoula, Oodh of the Golden hair, the twins Fiachra and the blue-eyed Conn were bathing naked in Lough Derravarragh when they were turned into swans by their jealous step-mother. They retained the ability to converse in Gaelic however and at another convent when she heard the story of Oscar Wilde she thought it was similar – after being humiliated he lost
the power to write but he retained the power to make dazzling conversation.

  The children of Lir spent three hundred years on Lough Derravarragh, three hundred years on the Mull of Kintyre and three hundred years in Mayo on the Erris Peninsula and on Inis Glóra.

  Then they were blessed by the Christian missionary Kemoc, turned back into human beings, but human beings aged over nine hundred years, and died almost immediately, Oodh buried in front of Fianoula, Conn at the right, Fiachra on the left, their names in ogham.

  In North Mayo also lived a bird frequently referred to by Sister Camisias, the Crane of Iniskea, which had been on that island since the beginning of the world.

  Perhaps her parents felt she was getting over-enthused with her location as they brought her back to a convent in Dublin.

  The intervening summer, however, she spent in Paris and lost her virginity there to the father of the children she was minding. If anything, nuns in the West of Ireland, with their insistence on the Gaelic body in their stories, the hurling-playing, Atlantic-healthy body, had inspired her to sex.

  But it was not her first experience of sex she remembered most from Paris but the city at the beginning of the autumn, old people sitting in fold-up slatted chairs in the Luxembourg Gardens, the café au lait in the sidewalk cafés, the first sense of the aura of exile.

  He said that they’d met on a train going west that spring, but he was in Paris at the same time, he too was walking in the Luxembourg Gardens at the end of that summer, he too was entranced by the first lights in the Seine come evening.