Farewell to Prague Read online

  A postcard came from Prague. Wenceslas Square, a haze of salvia on the front of the museum, trails of cloud having made it half-way across the sky.

  I could hear Robin’s affected worry.

  Went to this café where a really old woman in a long red wig and crazy clothes came up and sat beside me, batted her huge eyelids, and whispered ‘Lasst Blumen sprechen.’

  She was wearing a ra-ra dress the first evening she came up to me, blue with white polka dots, a little black cloak with a gold clasp – the lining rose-madder. A little bunch of paper violets on the cloak. Her wig was ginger, reaching down to her waist, tressed in many parts, confluences of tresses in it. Block high heels were sawdust-coloured and harlequin stockings cream. She batted her false, mahogany-coloured eyelashes, some of the pearl around her eyes lit up, bowed, sat down.

  As she waited for her drink, her head coyly turned to one side, she hummed ‘Ich Kann es nicht Verstehen dass die Rosen Blühen.’ ‘I Know Not Why the Roses Bloom.’

  Some soldiers in sandy uniforms came through the café, inspecting identity cards, and took off a young bespectacled man, somewhat unshaven, in a vermilion T-shirt.

  The band resumed then with ‘You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby.’ Behind them was a painting of the Three Graces – one of them elderly, her white hair in a bun – being attended by monkeys, a parrot hovering overhead.

  You could still see the red of salvia through the lime trees outside. The neon signs on the opposite side of the street were quiet ones – Diskotek and Machino Export Bulharska.

  The old woman’s eyelids accelerated every few minutes.

  There were huddles of young men at a few tables, many rings on their fingers, striped trousers popular with them, tongues on their shoes. One young man with hair like Goldilocks kept looking over at the old woman.

  When the band played ‘La Paloma’ she said, ‘My song,’ and sang with it.

  Later that evening an accordionist played the same song at the top of Wenceslas Square, under the lime trees, and a couple danced and a man in a white workcoat let himself free from a sausage kiosk and put a lighted cigarette in the accordionist’s mouth.

  The woman dancing was wearing a daisied navy dress and white bobby socks and I thought of Mrs Delaney who dressed this way when she was working for us. After her husband died she started getting electric shock treatment. She was very proud of it. Being strapped in, electrodes clamped on to her forehead. She used to walk in from the mental hospital, past the two-storey Victorian house beside an Elizabethan ruined castle.

  Then one day her bones broke under the electric shock treatment and she died. That was the day her son played billiards.

  The ninety-year-old lady who lived a few houses away from me was out sweeping the leaves the morning I left for Prague. ‘I was down in Margate yesterday, loafing around.’ She was eager to tell me. She wore a long adamantine necklace. Her husband was killed in the war and she still spoke about him as if he were alive. She frequently hummed ‘We’ll Be Lit Up When the Lights Go Out in London.’

  Hedgehogs, owls, starlings lived in this grove.

  She reached out her hand and touched my wrist. ‘Have a wonderful time wherever you go.’

  On the train into London, in the middle of a conversation about work, a woman suddenly leaned towards a man and whispered, ‘You’ve got to suit the horse and the horse suit you.’ It was just as we were passing the tinker encampment, roses in pots that were swan-shaped outside modern caravans, and geraniums on ironwork above the doors of little huts.

  In the latter part of 1968 there were two photographs in my room. One of Nguyen Thanh Nam, a prophet who lived up a coconut tree in Vietnam, and one of a woman, lamé stole around her neck, kneeling on the front of a tank in Prague, arms outstretched.

  There were tanks at Prague airport the first time I arrived. Inside, people from sundry nations were having cocktails and beers. By the exit there were a row of stalls, one of which had matchstick angels with fluted dresses under glass. In a cavernous underground toilet there was a picture pinned to the wall showing a funfair by the azure waters of a Russian port.

  I got the bus into the city. A broom stood at the back of the bus. An old couple walked by outside, holding hands, the woman holding a scarlet handbag in her other hand. Viburnum cut the avenue. A little man in a black beret and persimmon shirt kept consulting a little fat brown-covered dictionary he had with him. The high-rises on the way in were like the high-rises of the suburbs of Paris where I’d stayed in 1968.

  Wenceslas Square on that first day: lime trees in bloom on a downsloping pavement; flanks of ice-cream awash with viridian syrup in plastic tubs in a window; fat creamy cakes called Budapest with wide-brimmed chocolate papal hats on them; a young man in shorts and white workcoat darting between buffets in a sudden downpour; amber make nude statues over a magazine shop; a man in a buffet cleaning up, a disabled hand outheld, like an unpeeled prawn; a dreamy-eyed woman in the same buffet, her white workcoat stained lemon, like butcher’s blobs. There was a young tinker in Lewisham called Foncie who had a pen-pal in Prague and one recent summer, according to legend, he journeyed to Berlin to meet her in Friedrichstrasse.

  High-rise buildings, bluish, like another city, on the horizon, the yellow and green fields slightly carmined with poppies. I got off another red bus. There was a gypsy family at the bus stop, a gradation of them, father, mother, two sisters, a brother, tattoos on some of their wrists. It had rained torrentially and suddenly the sun came out, the grey sky with a rust tint like an orange galvanized roof on a shed which was part of the panorama behind our house in County Galway. A boy sat on a stool in the meadow, a plastic bag of orange in his arms. A woman with fungus-like veins on her legs stood by the bus stop, a little away from the gypsy family. And for some reason there were flowers in a glass jar, isolated, in the meadow.

  I had to get away from London. I had a brother who’d been a monk in County Waterford. He left and came to London, followed me, surveyed me. You were compounded in clan. When he entered the café I frequented one day, looking around, an old lady tramp seated near him over tea, I dashed into the lavatory and locked myself in.

  Some people said living in London was an escape from Ireland, but there were more people from County Galway in London than there were in County Galway. While I lived in Dublin I met middle-class people. In London I had to deal with family again.

  Every day I saw the images: Irishmen with red faces, chipped noses, tottering along Camberwell Road; a tramp wearing a silver Bridget’s cross on a pendant playing at a UN squadron pinball machine in a café in Kilburn, a girl companion alongside her with a blue ribbon in her hair, her cheeks the red of the Virgin Mary’s cheeks on roadsides in Ireland.

  Afterwards, when I had the breakdown, I dreamt of it over and over again, this place where I came alive after the not so much death-existence but fretful, shadowy one in London; sweet-peas, sunflowers, geraniums, hollyhocks in the gardens at the foot of high-rises; rabbits in pens; old people talking to one another from deck chairs; tarmacadam tarnished with spillages of coal; groundsel, elder, warts of poppies in the grass; young Africans wandering around in happy huddles; a woman in a T-shirt showing a fighter-jet wheeling a child; a song blasting out from a high-rise, ‘I Love Your Daughter, I Love Your Son’; washing decorating every balcony, pink the favourite colour; dead lakes in the distance. I lived on the eighth floor, in a bare room which had plywood walls. One day I looked out and saw what I had not noticed before – a field spanned by blue chicory.

  I made love in this room to a long-haired boy called Radvj whom I met on a path in the fields. He was from Bratislava. He was wearing gooseberry-green bermudas and told me he was looking for somewhere to stay. He stood proudly in front of the bed before getting in, showing off his genitals. There was a tattoo on his left shoulder which depicted a cairn.

  ‘The quiet sculpture of your body,’ I thought.

  ‘You’ve got a beautiful body.’

  ‘No
t as beautiful as yours.’

  He told me of his favourite sexual memory, being fucked by an older boy in a field at night, season of the gathering of the hay, while he looked into the boy’s eyes.

  I wanted to smell his buttocks. I wanted to smell the pink T-shirt thrown in a heap on the floor. I wanted to return to life.

  I thought of Foncie, the tinker boy, my nearest connection to life in London. His twin brother, Vincent, had been killed by a car near the encampment when they were six. An uncle was supposed to be minding him. Later, that uncle went to Brighton and drowned himself.

  Porridge every morning of his life; at seventeen a job with a cousin’s painting business; first sex with a Chinese prostitute on Lee Road; the pubs of the West End marauded in large, flashy groups.

  With every wedding there was an essential video. Though born in England they often journeyed to Ireland – the occasion of the erection of a grandmother’s headstone, of a wedding. London tinker young mixed with the young of Ireland on hills in Cork city on Sunday nights.

  There was a car dump near the encampment. A famous actress had gone there on a supposed errand to buy ginger ale, taken alcohol and pills and been found dead by a tinker dog.

  Foncie too had felt the life being dragged out of him by London and, with a crest ‘Wild Ireland’ on the elbow of his jacket, he’d gone to Berlin and met a Czech girl on Friedrich-strasse. They never corresponded again. She’d been carrying white chrysanthemums. They’d strolled to the temple-like building nearby where two helmeted soldiers stood guard by the flame to the unknown soldier, the lime trees lit up, in the late afternoon August sunshine, in biblical incandescence.

  With Radvj I dreamt of tinkers on a cart passing a shield of oak trees just outside our town in County Galway and shouting after them a customary tinker farewell, ‘See you in Clare-morris.’ My eyes consumed then in a colour like the pink T-shirt of my guest, who left abruptly early in the morning.

  The Prodigal leaving his father’s house, corn being loaded distantly, a glimpse, just as it was in a photograph, of an ancestor in a cloche hat bending over the grave of my mother’s youngest sister.

  Rest in peace, O dearest Una

  Thou art happy

  Thou art blest

  Earthly cares and sorrows ended.

  The headstones are splattered with lichen and meadow barley grows in profusion in the graveyard.

  Women bearing baskets of redcurrants across fields that were lime-coloured, poppies on stalks that had seized up in the field, men raking lime hay, an azure tooth of a small mountain above them.

  A pudgy, slightly obese Christ child in a see-through gauze dress, the edges of the dress gilded.

  Lambeth Palace, the foreign painter having endowed a pearly light to Westminster Bridge, a tiny figure in a red swallow coat supporting himself against a privet hedge, back turned. The main character in the little film I made was dressed like that. An Irish poet in London at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth. His favourite song had been ‘Lillibullero’ and he’d drunk himself to death in Catford. On his tombstone in Lewisham you can read ‘Let fall a holy tear.’

  An uncle of mine, my mother’s half-brother, had worked in a jeweller’s shop near Lambeth Palace in the mid-nineteen-forties. When he was a teenager he’d joined the army in Mullingar; the Twenty-seventh Infantry Battalion. Then he’d moved to England. Wrote a card home, ‘Rotten lonely here.’ A grey embankment scene with painted wallflowers on it. Fought in Egypt, wore a hat like a funny-shaped brioche and desert shorts. Returning to England he worked in the jeweller’s shop in Lambeth and became engaged to an English girl with lavish ginger-blonde hair. One night, when they were dancing in Forest Hill, just after the compère announced, ‘Please take your partners for the last waltz’, and the band started up with, ‘Who’s the lucky man who’s going home your way?’, the hall was hit by a doodlebug and the place confounded. He’d wandered through all the nearby hospitals looking for her, and eventually heard her screaming in one of them. But it was because she had toothache. He died a few years after the war. No one really knew why.

  His sister, my mother’s half-sister, the woman who wrote to my mother on my birth, also died young. She died of tuberculosis two weeks after my birth.

  An open-air dance in Prague. Two old ladies dancing together, one with white hair, the other black. The black-haired one is the taller, she wears dark glasses and her mouth grins like that of an American tough guy. There are men in suits, and men in white shirts and casual trousers. A gipsy woman, in white bobby socks, black high heels, black dress with a white belt on it, is the proudest dancer. She wears a white braid through her long, flattened black hair. The white-haired woman, who is quite frail, is almost throttled in an embrace by the black-haired woman. There is a wood of lime trees around the dance area. I had a black-haired aunt who wouldn’t behave herself when I was a child, dancing at the crossroads, especially with young men. Dances which were periodically interrupted by a ferocious display of Irish dancing by girls in dark emerald dresses and cloaks, in black tights. A few funfair swings near the crossroads.

  She married a radio expert from Sligo. They opened a pub, but she drove him off. When my grandmother died my aunt wanted to look after my grandfather, in his little town house with the gipsy vardo in the front window, but my mother took him. My aunt became unruly and she died, in one of her reprieves from mental hospital, in her pub.

  My first summer in London I stayed a few days with her husband. Walked down the Uxbridge Road on a Saturday afternoon, past a black people’s wedding, hair in cornrows, white roses in lapels, to a flat where there were beds in the kitchen. There was a mass card for my aunt, a camellia in her hair, beside a picture of St Bonaventure.

  ‘We put towels over the mirrors the day she died,’ a young man who had his shirt off told me.

  The old lady in the ginger wig sat at the table across from me tonight, in sailor trousers, sailor top, sailor cap with gold braid around the peak, platform high heels, and kept nodding to me. The orchestra played ‘Hong Kong Blues’, ‘Jeepers Creepers’, ‘Two Sleepy People’, ‘You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby’, ‘La Mer’, ‘We’ll Meet Again’. Someone had told me that the old lady had owned a hotel on Wenceslas Square which was confiscated in the early fifties, when high-ranking officials were being thrown downstairs to their deaths in Czechoslovakia, when there had been mass rallies in Wenceslas Square, with people like tornado clouds, when trams ran up and down the square, when there was a rendezvous with Stalin’s profile around every corner, alongside posters of faded, aquatic-coloured cherries, for even then the Czechs had a fondness for communicating in pictures on the walls.

  There was puce-violet kohlrabi in the little shop windows in Prague that summer, and peppers that looked like snoods. Some of the shop windows were mainly yellow, like a Dutch painting, with a few items in them. There were window displays of red hats with ladybird spots on them, and mauve trilbies. Men with satchels full of vodka beside them throwing bread at swans; old men huddling past alabaster-faced Marys with alabaster-coloured lilies, sequined in gold, in front of them. There was a poster for ‘The Mikado’ everywhere, a poster for Dvorak’s ‘Requiem’, a girl with one eye on it. There was a poster for a Goya exhibition with a man with a letter in one hand which he seemed to be giving you, the word ‘Expulsis’ on it, his other hand missing. Tram number seventeen brought you to Podolí, where naked men waited in the lemon light of a sauna as if for a ceremony, and where a jubilant body-building life-guard congratulated me on being Irish against the dazzle of a pool.

  It was part of a journey East, a journey which had begun in Berlin the previous summer.

  From the eighth floor of a high-rise, gauze curtains ruffling, it was a look back. It was a city which grew out of little tales I’d written, not knowing where they’d come from, whence a hotel, a crossroads.

  It was a city which grew out of the punitive damp of a little flat in Catford. But in coming out of thos
e things it also showed an alternative truth – that life is humbler than art and more loving.

  Sometimes, early in the mornings especially, I spoke to her: Amsterdam, you woke crying. I did not know why you were crying.

  She was looking at a painting of a huddle of women with hats like geese on them in the Van Gogh Museum and suddenly she turned to me and smiled.

  Later that autumn I journeyed to Italy alone, to Florence. Walked along a street where there were salmon-coloured hearts with lace borders under a statue of Mary. I got accommodation in a dormitory in a monastery. There was a broom hanging on the wall at the end of the row of beds on the opposite side to the door.

  She started having an affair in Dublin with a boy who came from the countryside near our town, a house with lily of the valley wallpaper in the sitting-room, a house always visited by the tinkers at the same time in spring. He had rooster-orange hair and the same colour was rumoured to be elsewhere on his body.

  The following summer she left for the United States.

  I heard Rodrigo’s ‘Concerto d’Arjuanez’ today as I was painting walls and it was a miracle. Afterwards I went to the Pacific at Cissy Field. It was very, very deep blue. There was an old Chinese woman there in red socks and I threw a pebble in for you.

  Two years later I found her. She had joined a religious group. We stayed in Carmel, with an old Czech man who wore a black beret with a tongue on it. He gave us pancakes with strawberries. He’d left Prague when he was twenty-six.

  Then we stayed with an Indian family near Arcadia, and used to watch the elk come down to the ocean, in the fog.

  But when she came back to Dublin the following summer a girl, a supposed comrade, attacked me at a party. ‘You’re incapable of having full physical relations with women except with Eleanor.’ She raised a closed fist to indicate an erect penis.