Farewell to Prague Page 3

  I couldn’t make love to Eleanor any more. She went back to California and I left Ireland, carrying impotence, making stories, doing odd jobs.

  Sometimes our cities connected up, and we were in the same place, or near one another. But she was always just that girl in the café now, behind a window.

  9 August 1987. I sit in a café near the Vltava. Sunset on the edges of women’s hair as if on waves of the sea. Boys in asterisk-splattered bermudas skating across Maje Bridge.

  ‘Do you know Seamus Heaney?’ a worried-looking boy from a nearby table, who’s heard that I’m Irish, comes up and asks me. There are four boys with shaven heads at the next table. A man with a little bullion of a goatee looks as I answer the boy. A man in a beret with a tongue has his head bowed over an empty plate as if in prayer.

  There is a boll of light to the left side of Prague Castle.

  The orchestra plays ‘La Paloma’, ‘Melancholy Baby’, ‘As Time Goes By’.

  Pictures of robins, clumps of pansies at their feet, ripple, in my mind, into advertisements for Kincora Plug.

  There were dead aunts outside the windows of cafés at sunset, and against the Vltava visions of drownings in my town when I was a child, a chain of swimmers across the river searching for a body.

  A woman opened a wallet beside me, and instead of the young Slavonic face inside I saw the face of a drowned Teddy boy.

  ‘I’ll be watching to see if you go to the altar tomorrow,’ his mother admonished him on the Saturday he was drowned, urging him to go to confession. He was laid out in a brown habit. At his funeral a phalanx of liquorice-haired girl-cousins had carried wreaths of purple-carmine roses.

  Years later, his father, a widower, put a memorial in the Connaught Tribune, where the photograph looked tragically fashionable and the handsomeness savagely unrequited. ‘That we might meet merrily in Heaven.’

  At night there were the cafés, the one with the lady in the ginger wig, the one by the river, the same repertoire of songs over and over again.

  I was troubled by these songs. I could hear my mother’s voice through these songs. ‘At Night When I Listen to Late Date I’m in Dreamland.’

  She and her boyfriends would go to Dublin and dance to Billy Cotton, Ambrose, Jack Hylton, Oscar Rabin.

  Then she got tuberculosis, had her lung punctured, refilled. She broke off an engagement because of it but didn’t tell her boyfriend, and so left him broken-hearted and bewildered.

  Her doctor was in Mullingar: Dr Keenan, Church View. It was while she was attending him that she met my father. He recoiled when he heard about the tuberculosis, but after a few months proposed to her and they became engaged. He told her about the funeral of his mother in 1926, how it was one of the biggest for many years in East Galway, the blinds drawn on every private house in town as well as on businesses.

  Her friends in his town were three Czech sisters and their brother who ran the jeweller’s. They liked sweets a lot and in their honour I gazed at chocolate ducks with marzipan legs in windows. They used to leave gifts of boxes of chocolates in my pram.

  They had arrived in Ireland after the First World War, orphans, and after spending a few years in an orphanage in Dublin moved around Ireland, looking after jewellery businesses. The brother was epileptic and had visions by the oak trees just outside town.

  I shared his visions this summer: a fresco depicting orange trees on the wall; clouds of gnats under lime trees; a cobbled street, violet and pale blue cobbles, a water-pump with a high tiara of black iron-work around it in the middle of the street; a lock on the Vltava, a huge fan of surf in front of it, hundreds of swans just before the lock; a girl in a flowered bonnet and crimson dress in a painting; grapes by a goblet in an illuminated book; a vase with pink nude swimmers on it.

  ‘I see Czechoslovakia as a free spirit over which the body has no power.’

  They thought they’d never grow old, but the epileptic died in County Galway. One of the sisters, in old age, married the driver she’d met on a pilgrim bus to Knock, the other two sisters moving to Dublin. The sister who married the bus driver joined them when her husband died. She died, and the eldest sister died, and a sister who permanently hobbled was left. She crossed Ireland to live in an old people’s home, a bungalow on top of a hill in Galway, called Ave Maria. She was visited often by my mother. Then she moved to another old people’s home on the sea coast outside Galway. When she died she left £17,000 for masses. The eldest one had left me a tablecloth which had yellow flowers on it and green leaves.

  The epileptic with his charcoaled face always veered towards the leaves outside town, to pause and see something. Maybe he was looking back at Czechoslovakia, some memory of childhood, the olive-yellows, the sap-greens, the pistachios, the rose dorés of Prague, the acacia trees in blossom, the molten rose of summer roofs above houses of tallow and primrose-yellow.

  13 August 1987. The Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague. The graffiti outside said ‘Who is my love?’ ‘John Lennon.’ ‘AIDS.’ The headstones are a monsoon. Some are pink-coloured like the undersides of mushrooms. Some are white and with shapes like clefts of snow. Groups of them hug one another. Pairs of them in intimate proximity are like two men talking. There is a shape on one of the headstones like the palace in Snow Whiteand the Seven Dwarfs.

  Women look down from the windows of the houses around, leaning on the windowsills. Gargoyles rise out of sun-illuminated webs. Alders protect the borders of these seas of headstones and in some places intrude among the headstones, the sun pocketing its way among the leaves above a density of headstones, turning the leaves to gold. Under a cairn on a headstone is a Munich bus ticket with the words ‘May the Jewish people find peace. No more oppression.’ Under another cairn is a note: ‘Life is short. Do what you can to enlighten the world so your epitaph won’t be written: Life lived in vain.’

  An Ashkenazi Jew sits on a scarlet bench.

  The eldest of the Czech sisters had marigold hair, sashes of it: She fell in love with an Englishman who managed the local pencil factory. He’d played the Baron Minho Zeti in the light opera the year the Pontevedrian Embassy in Paris fell down.

  She wore brown alpaca suits. It was a brief romance, a winter one.

  In Dublin, when the sisters lived there, up the road from Red Spot Laundry, Grace’s Pub, Costello’s Garage, I dined on that tablecloth, drinking tea from white cups with gold handles, and tried to recall how the romance ended but couldn’t. It was just an image, the elderly lovers walking out by the oak trees in the direction of the Railway Hotel, long converted into the local army headquarters.

  14 August 1987. When I stayed in Paris in 1968, it was in a high-rise like this one. The Marriage of Giovanni Arnolfini by Van Eyck on the wall. Stashes of Wagner and Beethoven records and glossy magazines in their assigned corner of the room. I had held a woman who gave French lessons that spring. A woman who used to go to mass in a harlequin hat. Why did she talk about abortion so much?

  She’d been having an affair with another teacher in town. A man who played rugby every Sunday afternoon in the asylum grounds. One Sunday, when she felt he had kept her waiting too long, she went looking for him and saw them showering in their brute, grey place, the rugby players of town. Why hadn’t she fled there and then, she asked? Why hadn’t she gone to the Prague spring or the Paris revolution? Why hadn’t she re-immersed herself in the pastels of Europe, Europe where she’d studied for a while? Why hadn’t she admitted to herself there and then that sex is sacred and of God, and that to find salvation we must not fool ourselves, just be adventurous and seek holy union with other people, not the animalistic sex of this small town.

  The only thing that stood out for me about that summer in France was my first trip to Chartres, the twin spires rising above the cornfields on a grey afternoon. My first summer at University College, Dublin, I returned to Chartres, boys speeding on mopeds on the summer evenings. On one of those evenings I heard a black American girl sing ‘There Is a Balm in Gilead’ in t
he cathedral.

  Towards the end of my time at university I visited Chartres again, with Eleanor.

  ‘How long have you been together?’ an English girl asked us on the bus from Calais to Paris.

  ‘Let’s All Go Search for America’ was playing.

  Eleanor’s hair stood out, very blonde, against the windows of the cathedral. We held hands in front of the black pearwood Virgin who was dressed in gold. Afterwards, in Paris, we had chips in Montmartre, a prostitute with ghosted henna hair seated at the open-air table opposite us. We started kissing on the boat back to England and made love in a house in Barnes, dove-coloured squirrels in the garden outside.

  I remembered what the teacher of French had said about sex and it seemed prophetic. In Liverpool three black children, Peter, Peter and Paul, sensed the thrall between us and offered to carry our bags to the boat. For some reason I felt a fear, thinking of what should have been exotic, chocolate over the froth of cream of a cappuccino in our favourite late-night café in Dublin.

  I hear that the French teacher married a doctor in Galway, lives in a house in a miasma of white houses by the bay, has four children with deeply nationalistic names. I hear that her hair is still red, that she wears beautiful clothes to art openings, that there’s something beautiful and grieving about her face, and that she does charitable work with the tinkers, walking in a red coat down lanes where the tinkers are encamped, red being the tinker colour of mourning.

  ‘I was beautiful in the early days.’ From Florence I went on to Rome, a stubble of marigolds and leaf parsley on the black wetness of Campo de’ Fiori when I arrived at evening. In Mario’s I had a modest meal and got a yellow bill with burgundy stripes on it. Just as I was getting up to leave the table a boy from Dublin with a toothbrush moustache and wearing a Fair Isle jersey sat beside me. He was organizing the first Hare Krishna march in Rome the following day and he invited me to join them, which I did, chanting ‘Hare Krishna’ with some Italians, a Scots boy with chestnut hair in a ponytail and radically illumined cheeks, American girls with pigtails, all in salmon-coloured robes.

  A middle-aged man in a silver suit came up to me in the crowd to say, ‘You are beautiful.’

  We passed a bridge over the Tiber which the sun had turned into a carmine fog.

  Someone told me in Dublin early the following year that the boy from Dublin had died in London from a drug overdose.

  Later that year, Eleanor gone, I returned to London. Lived in a squat in West London. The trade of stolen colour televisions was negotiated at the Windsor Castle and Lord Palmerston. A girl who used to walk around barefoot was picked up and jailed for doing a bombing. In the kiosk at the end of the street I would wait for Eleanor’s calls. Early in the month of the Birmingham pub bombing she told me that she would not be coming back, that she’d joined a religious group.

  25 January 1975. I saw a person in Berkeley recently who walked and looked like you – so much so that I stood in fascination with many emotions turning, thinking it was you.

  26 November 1975. I have had many abodes since coming here. And now I am living away from San Francisco. There is a thrift store in the nearby town which is fun. I purchased a little mink for $1.50 and a crocodile handbag for $1. Last week down in San Francisco I accidentally met with some boys from Dublin – they’d met on an Alaskan pipeline. They were joking and laughing. It could have been in a pub in Dublin. One of them had a pet goat when he was growing up in Ballyfermot.

  Auntie Dymphna had a goat which had been deported from the garden next door. She used to keep her in the back. Once she nearly sent her to the butcher.

  It’s autumn now and there’s a crispness in the evenings and the swallows are gathered by day and all the sounds are set apart from one another by night. It would be great if you came to America. The places you mention are each wonderful and there are also other things that are wonderful too. I work in a drug rehabilitation centre. It’s very nice here, quiet. Northern California greatly resembles Ireland – the land is green and there are many trees and rivers. There are no lambs. This is not sheep country.

  I’ll light a little candle for you – it is shaped like a mushroom. Blues and yellows and whites.

  I think of candles around a golden Virgin in Chartres and a sanctuary lamp suspended in a convent chapel in Mayo.

  You talk of Ireland and of England, of endearing landscapes as ‘a common country’. But something about being surrounded by my past – by mistakes – weighed me down in Ireland and in England. Each way I turned they would confront me, sometimes mockingly. Though I did not realize it for many years I had to be away from them.

  It is an odd place, California.

  I’ll fly now.

  14 August 1987. An old Italian stands to attention in front of the Child Jesus of Prague. There are sea shells and jewels at the feet of the child and yellow irises mixed with gypsophila in front of him; what could be riverine flowers, yellow flag, hornwort, the bogbean flower, which were always a relief for a lone and stellar cormorant.

  Messages are sculpted on the wall. Thanks from Michele, Toronto, Canada. Dékuji Adrienne 1944. Graci a Familia Cacho Sousa. In a frame a picture of the Church of Minino Jesus de Praga, Rio de Janeiro, palmettos outside it.

  Further down the church there are angels with gold brassieres and batons under the blue and pink smoke of an Assumption scene. The Czech women had a reproduction of Poussin’s Death of the Virgin in their home in County Galway. A boy from the North of Ireland I knew in London, a carpenter, had the same reproduction on his wall. He had a row over some repair with his oily Greek-Cypriot landlord who reported him to the Anti-Terrorist Squad. They burst down his door and when they found nothing never bothered to apologize or fix the place.

  A sunset over the high-rise. The sun is an isolated boll and a pale blue mist rises to meet it.

  ‘Where I live there’s a couple who have just come from Mexico. He’s French. She’s American. You would like them. The opportunities for going so many places offer themselves here – South America, the Orient, Russia, India.’

  There’s a song coming from a ghetto blaster: ‘Running Away Forever with the Shepherd Boy Angelo.’

  A tapestry has been hung from the balcony of one of the flats, showing night in El Salvador: bodies rising from graves, men in cowboy hats being tortured in police stations, devils pulling naked women out of houses, nuns in outlandish wimples kneeling outside confessionals, Indians praying by open coffins in their sitting-rooms, houses, under huge coconut trees, going up in fire.

  In one flat I pass a group of young people, some in baseball caps, are huddled on the floor. A boy is playing an accordion. Its borders are tallow and green-coloured and its body is gold. There are bottles of red wine on the floor around. Cervano Vino.

  In Paris in 1968 I went to a concert given by a guitar-playing priest in the basement hall of the high-rise in which I was staying and drank wine for the first time, red wine, coughing it up.

  Eleanor was in Paris the same summer. She lost her virginity to the father of the children she was minding. She liked sitting in the cigarette smoke of tables on the Boulevard St Michel. When the first chestnuts came to the Luxembourg Gardens we were both preparing to leave. But she was returning to the three-tier trays of cakes in Bewleys and the prospective boy-lovers from Rathmines and Rathgar and Monkstown.

  ‘Remember you told me how that blond solicitor leaned towards you in the toilet in Toners. That French boy looks like him.’

  She wore a white blouse the night before I left Prague, silver caterpillar brooch on it, a little black hat, spears of black lace standing up on it, black leaves imprinted on the lace. Her face was nearly that of a skeleton, powdered and pearled. She sat beside me, singing along with ‘La Paloma’ as usual, head bowed.

  There were two lovers seated on a bench on Wenceslas Square, the girl wearing white bobby socks and a skirt of cedar-green with pink roses and ruby crab-apples and pale green leaves on it, her head inclined towards the
boy’s thighs. Around them the humble blue and red and yellow of Traktoro Export, Machino Export Bulharska Telecom Sofia Bulgaria, Lucerna Bar, Licensintory Moscow USSR, Vinimpex Sofia, Licence Know How Engineering, Hotel Druzhba.

  Next morning there were marigolds being sold all over Wenceslas Square before I got the Metro to Leninova.

  Tinker boys in white shirts and kipper ties outside St Saviour’s Church of John the Evangelist and St John the Baptist in Lewisham as Sunday mass proceeds inside, looking like boys outside churches on Sunday in Ireland.

  A plea for the Peru missions near the railings and a sign saying ‘Do you want to know more about the Catholic faith?’

  One of the women has taken home a collection of pamphlets with saints’ faces on them – Blessed Margaret Clitheroe, Blessed Cuthbert, St John Fisher, St Thomas More – I notice on my next visit to them and when I feel uneasy and an intruder, as I often do on these visits, I browse through them.

  On the windowsill is a girl dancing with sunflowers at her feet, a scarlet bow on each of her feet; two matchstick caravans; two toby jugs; a lampshade held up by an elephant who has foxgloves at his feet. To the right of the window a photograph of Vincent, the dead boy, beside a picture of Marie Goretti.

  ‘It’s all going back to the 1300’s,’ the youthful and even-voiced father says, and we discuss a recent court case in London where a girl was prosecuted for killing a rat. Now that winter is moving in there’ll be no more journeys this year for them. But I’ll be leaving Lewisham for a while before the end of the year. I am planning to go to the United States.

  All this was a year ago. Now it’s summer. I am separated from every country in the world. I hold Robin’s card and grasp for seconds the last night on Wenceslas Square, the powdered salvia, the lights. But after having been nearly swept out to sea, and having toyed with the idea of suicide, there’s a decision, despite the emptiness I had to fight, to keep trying for a path.