Farewell to Prague Page 6

  You feel like a trespasser, a bit of fuschia just visible in the gable window of a country house distantly, the kind of house which has a family of unmangled country boys.

  He had a wife once, the tinker. She left him, ‘shipped herself out of Ireland’. He died of abandonment and a harsh life-style in the Regional Hospital in Galway, still in unresolved youth. There is a wake, and tinkers come from all over Galway, women in expansive head scarves like East European women, and Pakistani traders. He was a rag-and-bone man, used to collect scrap on a cart and pile it up beside his caravan.

  During the war, when cars were disused and wrecks of cars accumulated in the fields about town, tinkers had a glut of scrap and made rings and brooches from those cars and initialled them. When I was a child he showed me one of those rings, which a sparkle of spring sunshine had just indicated to him in a meadow, initialled by an uncle.

  He lived in a white, modern caravan full of Staffordshire and Chelsea china with a prominent picture of Our Lady, Comforter of the Afflicted. He had a mongrel dog, referred to as ‘a fool of a dog’, as companion.

  A tinker girl in a maroon summer dress with large white spots in it sings ‘Four Country Roads Leading to a Town in County Galway’ and ‘The Fields of Athenry’ at his wake.

  He was a Teddy boy in my youth, a little older than me, long locks, sculpted mouth, a pale, almost a madonna face.

  ‘I have no mind for happiness. Just for peace of mind.’

  There was a Polish woman who lived in this town once, the mother of a friend who had blonde, wavy hair and liked wearing black glasses with white frames. He had corn hair, loops of glasses, and I snatched at his corn hair outside the Boys’ National School one afternoon after school and pleaded with him to be my special friend. He would concede nothing.

  I was invited to their house once, for a children’s party. She wore a necklace of sea-shells and a white dress with large black spots for the party. In their drawing-room was a picture of an Edwardian lady and gentleman in a chamber pot patterned with shamrocks.

  The father died, and they headed to Durham in the north of England.

  Years later I saw my friend on The Late Late Show, playing a cello.

  The Polish woman came from a town near the site of a concentration camp. Recently, in Berlin, I saw a photograph of an entrance to that town, cobbled road, black lampposts, houses with dormer windows, where Jewish pedlars would gather daily before the war.

  Her neighbours in the fashionable avenue in town, with its double-flowering prunus trees in the front gardens, testified that they would hear her screaming in the middle of the night.

  Once a Polish film came to the town hall and she stood outside the cinema, in a black suit, for the best part of an hour, as if advertising the film, or as if in solidarity with people she would never meet again.

  It’s just a memory of the dead now. But no … something asks me to return another time, tells me that there’s room for me in as yet dark, misunderstood places.

  Just before Christmas I visit an old lady in Denmark Hill whose husband was Polish. She lives on the fourth floor of a mansion of flats. Beside it is a new apartment block in the shape of a lighthouse. She met her husband early in the war and had a son by him. His brother had been one of the officers killed at Katyn. After the war he deserted her, returning to Poland.

  Her son manages a gay bookshop in the Midlands and rarely visits her.

  Her husband lectured at an agricultural training college when he returned to Poland and in later years also worked as a courier for Polish tourists.

  She met him again, by accident, summer of 1986, in Prague. She was with a lady companion and he was leading a band of Polish tourists in Wenceslas Square. They’d gone to that café, the three of them. The band had been playing ‘A Cup of Coffee, a Sandwich and You.’ Afterwards, they’d walked through back streets, women standing outside doors, lights above the doors. She’d seen an old Jewish man pass by a window with festoons in it, his back bent. Or was he a ghost?

  Her husband came to see her the following year in London and afterwards she sent him food packages and many gifts but then he ceased writing.

  Her legs are swollen and she goes to the window with difficulty, looks out on the winter sunset over a Georgian square in Denmark Hill and says, ‘£35 a week. We deserve better.’

  An old Russian emigré is dressed as Santa in Tesco’s in Cat-ford, enthroned on a platform. A little Malaysian man lies on the upstairs floor of the café in Soho. He holds up a crucifix with one hand, and with the other throws rose petals, which he fetches out of a small brown paper bag. Some of the rose petals hit a baby in a romper suit patterned with clowns, held by a young man whose head is barely sheathed with hair, whereupon a Greek jumps up and starts beating up the Malaysian. The Greek chases the Malaysian out on to the street.

  A little serving lady comes in with a bunch of Irish Catholics and for some reason starts spreading them on the spot where the Malaysian had lain.

  Many of the Christmases over the last years Marek, the boy from Munich, came to my flat. He’s not coming this year: he’s got AIDS. He’s been HIV positive since 1983, the virus identified in 1984, but now he’s in hospital in Berlin. Heidi, a girlfriend you had after Eleanor, also lives in Berlin. Carl’s moved back to London. Eleanor’s moved on to Amsterdam.

  You spend Christmas with the homeless, old men with their hair curling up like smoke from a country cottage.

  As you watch old men lining up for soup you think of a funeral of a ninety-year-old uncle under an East Galway sunset; second cousins, a man and a woman who lived together in the country in East Galway, whose house burned down, killing them; your step-aunt and step-uncle who died young, buried in cemeteries facing one another in County Westmeath, a road between the cemeteries.

  Not her own children, my grandmother used to throw saucers at them, and my mother would cry out, ‘They have a mother in Heaven too.’

  My step-aunt went to the Immaculate Training College in Limerick. She taught at the Mercy Convent in Navan before she married, and later taught at a rural school where she worked right up to her death.

  My mother got tuberculosis too, from germs under the bed of a woman with tuberculosis she visited regularly, but she recovered and married.

  When I was thirteen she came into the theatre I’d constructed in the back-shed. I was standing in a turban with a turkey feather in it, with a tan I’d acquired from mixing some of her cosmetics, and she started beating me in a wild, frightened way, pulling down the sack curtains at the same time, pulling out lavender from jam jars.

  ‘All this was redeemable,’ Heidi said. ‘It’s Dublin that nearly destroyed you.’

  Someone played ‘O Solo Mio’ on a mouth organ near Vauxhall Bridge. I remembered what the old lady had said about Christmas during her brief marriage, how the priest used to come to the house each Christmas Eve and break bread.

  It was that girl. She’d wander around Dublin saying things like, ‘Lizzie Rossiter is a virgin.’ She was about six feet tall, had blonde hair tossed like a capuchin’s, underneath an infernal, dissatisfied face. She liked wearing a flowing lavender cloak and white rubber, barred forties sandals when she walked her aunt’s Irish wolfhound on Grafton Street and the surrounding streets. This dog was treated as a special guest in the Golden Spoon on Grafton Street. In her aunt’s house where she lived there was a display of ancient Ireland’s Owns, Freeman’s Journals, Irish Schools’ Weeklies, Weldon’s Ladies’ Journals on a low table in the middle of the sitting-room, and above the mantelpiece tasselled dance cards behind a frame. Elsewhere on the walls there were scenes from Ireland’s past in black and white – fields being staked out during the war – and photographs with a sweetheart from the National Athletic and Cycling Association, one taken on a laneway, the other in the Royal Marine Hotel in Dun Laoghaire. Green plants grew under pictures of St Athnacht, St Eanna and Napoleon in a maroon cloak, jabot, wreath on his head, and shoes of white with gold designs like t
hose of Our Lady of Fatima.

  The aunt wore a black mantilla or black cloche hat if she wasn’t in the blue and white of the Little Company of Mary. The girl went to get her a bottle of whiskey one day and came home and found her dead, whereupon she had the house to herself.

  We were very happy, Eleanor and I, when Eleanor came back from California. But after wending our way to a party this girl let fly at me: ‘You’re incapable. Incapable of full,’ she raised her hand as it conducting an orchestra, ‘full physical relations with women. It’s your family. All because of your family. You hate women. With Eleanor, yeah.’

  I believe that woman has a child of her own now with whom she lives in that house in Windy Arbour with its Irish, Catholic memories.

  Berlin, 3 May 1991. I remember once taking the train west in Ireland on a summer’s evening. Past suburbs of Dublin. Lilies on the canal running alongside the railway tracks. I thought of Russia. I had suffered a great loss. A loss I could not comprehend or cope with. But I knew something connected me with Russia, something would bring me there. Someone was there.

  I have been terribly, terribly lonely but now I must call up the child. The child is me, the broken inner part of me. When you went, my love, the imprint, the ectoplasm of a little boy was left. I have almost lost touch with him at times, but now he is close.

  I left Ireland shortly after the outpouring, vowing never to go back. The wisteria blue of the mountains and the talmudic shapes by the docks are always part of me.

  ‘We teach all hearts to break,’ a sign had said on a wall under a flyover near Portobello Road on my arrival in London in the summer of 1977.

  ‘You smell of bitter almonds,’ a girl told me in a café in Dublin a few days before the attack. A beautiful, blonde girl from our town who liked wearing white dresses with black spots on them. She leaned forward as she spoke and had a dangerously vulnerable openness and an almost ringing enthusiasm.

  She’d had a nervous breakdown and was sojourning in St Pat’s.

  Now, I’m told, her mind has stopped completely, and she’s sealed off in some leafy hospital in a semi-Protestant town.

  At night as I sleep and dream of that girl in London there’s an awkward pietà which forces it’s way through, mother and prostrate Christ. It’s at the entrance to the bad part of our town near where Daniel lived.

  When we were fifteen, in 1966, a warren of lesbians was discovered in a factory by the Shannon in Athlone and Daniel went to England.

  Discotheque in London. I meet a boy from our town. He has long Titian-red hair and wears a green jacket. He lists the gay venues of Dublin, where he lived until recently: the George, Minskys, O’Henrys, Fitzpatricks on a Thursday night.

  In Czechoslovakia, because of 1968, the old mingle with the young, those among the old who did not conform and worked as stokers and road-sweepers. At discos in Prague you see older men sitting beside young people at long tables covered in white oil-cloth and laden with white wine as they watch videos shot in New Orleans on a small screen.

  ‘Many were good heroes – flame-like,’ a medieval chronicle said about the young men of our townland, and I see its sometimes undulating verdure caressed by pockets of rowan trees and bryony bushes aflame in autumn.

  His mother had had a daughter before she married who was adopted by ah American family. She turned up recently.

  ‘When I was a child,’ she said, ‘when the doorbell rang I always pretended you’d come for me. My toy suitcase was always packed, ready to return.’

  His family live in a cottage near an eskar, one of the strange hummocks created in the Western Midlands when the mountains were pressed down and the oak trees were razed into bog by ice. They now have an American flag flying outside their cottage.

  An Italian in a shiny blue suit sold red roses on Wardour Street, the roses in a bucket at his feet. A little girl wearing a pearl necklace to her knees walked down Old Corrrpton Street. There were violets on Ladywell Fields and two black girls in black leather skin-suits, wild hair flossed out, both of them wearing identical sapphire-blue scarves around their necks and carrying skimpy Tesco bags, crossed the Fields.

  I’d just received a letter. I was going to live in the Southern States in the autumn.

  Life changes: the Tarot cards on the mantelpiece are young men pulling a boat out of the sea in Portugal with ropes; a nobleman with his arm around his pageboy, a ball in the nobleman’s hand, his outfit olive-yellow with patterns of girdles in it, a black hat with a silver coin on the front of it on his head; two men in thoabs and turbans conversing by a field of green barley, poppies scattered among the barley.

  When you were at university your mother had you incarcerated in digs, so you celebrated your twenty-first birthday four months after the night in the flat of a friend. A woman who’d recently lost her husband and cried a lot came, a Mrs Lawlor. Two urchin boys with plum cheeks from Mountpleasant Buildings. The girl who later attacked you, in a fur coat, a blue and white striped gown like that of a concentration camp inmate, a slouch hat. You brought pictures of Bob Dylan, Carson McCullers, Katherine Mansfield, Anne Frank, the Isle of Capri and Chartres Cathedral, and pinned them on the wall.

  ‘It’s the happiest night since my husband died,’ Mrs Lawlor said. ‘I spend most nights crying and sobbing with tablets. Now I realize I’ve got to start living again.’

  Shortly after that I moved out of the digs into the flat of another friend. He gave me as a gift a white, blue-embroidered Mexican shirt and not satisfied with the gift I took to wearing his clothes, especially a black leather jacket. I would sit in these clothes in Dwyers on Lower Leeson Street. I used to fulminate there – a new identity, a new shirt.

  With change in Dublin you always recourse to the sea. I went every day to Sandycove, the sea at its most azure at Monkstown.

  One night I went to a party held in the open air by the Forty Foot. Eleanor was singing songs and crying ‘My baby. My baby’, referring to a baby aborted in England, child of a ruffian songster.

  In the yellow bracken he laid her down,

  While the wind blew shrill and the river ran;

  And never again she saw Shaftesbury town,

  Whom Long Thomas had taken for his leman.

  Eleanor did an inglorious wee in a corner under the Martello Tower and a girl from Irishtown swam around in the sea in a black maxi-coat, dispelling dabs of orange.

  On the corner of Westmoreland Street and D’Olier Street that spring there was a poster of Chartres Cathedral.

  From my friend’s flat I made a foray to France in June with a girl veterinary student and we went to the Georges de la Tour exhibition at Orangerie des Tuileries.

  Falling in love, coming out of the madness and cruelty of an Irish Catholic adolescence, will always be connected with those Mayan Madeleines, Madeleines gazing into sable mirrors, holding skeletons, skeletons talking back from mirrors, faces illumined by candlelight dissembled when you got up close into a myriad of cracks. A saint in geranium robes did a striptease, showing his alabaster body.

  I returned to France in the autumn with Eleanor, to visit Chartres Cathedral. On our way, in London, we met a red-haired woman who stared at us and we at her. Years later I was seated alongside her at a dinner-party in London. ‘Sleep with as many people as possible. James Joyce stopped having sex when he was thirty. It was no good.’ Her hand was aquiline and pearl, and her slight touch called up the landscape of her youth: curling Irish streets which have flurries of leaves gathered like cornflakes in parabola-like corners in autumn, and always, pairs of girls who squint at passing cars at these nethermost edge spots.

  Eleanor and I knocked around together for two years after visiting Chartres.

  In the spring of 1974 I was teaching in a school in the back-streets of Dublin and one of the pupils, a boy of thirteen or fourteen, would often follow me around Dublin. One afternoon I came across him in St Stephen’s Green, standing among a bed of yellow tulips, holding up a baby.

  The following day
bombs went off in Dublin, killing thirty people.

  Two weeks later our friend’s sister was killed.

  Eleanor went to California and I went hitchhiking in Europe.

  Passing through Aries in late July I met a girl with curly foxtail-red hair, in very faded jeans, big, broad-shouldered – like a Roman soldier.

  ‘Will you sleep with me?’ she asked. I’d only slept with one girl in my life. I only knew how to sleep with one girl.

  In the autumn of 1976 I purchased a ticket for San Francisco in an emerald-fronted shop in Ballsbridge.

  Following my visit Eleanor returned to Dublin for a while in the early summer of 1977. There was a poster for James Joyce’s Exiles all over Dublin: Joyce as he was on his silver wedding, white tuxedo, white carnation. Eleanor wore dresses with epaulettes, and I wore white shirts like the white shirts from Sulka an uncle used to wear, and broad braces, in pubs where the counters were butterscotch or tallow or chamois with a fine rain of rose.

  In these pubs a woman in a fawn coat and a black beret with a diamond wheatear in it gave us a pamphlet about St Cornelia Connolly, whose son was pushed into a cauldron of boiling sugar-cane by a Newfoundland dog; we met the Trinity Vincent de Paul; a youth in a dirty grey anorak tried to sell us a paper with the headlines ‘British soldier, do you want to be here?’

  Outside in the June sunlight of Dublin, beautiful blonde girls in white dresses walked by.

  A boy is pulled out of the Liffey in Dublin. His clothes are pastel-blue like the colour of one particular pub front in Dublin. It is a grey January morning. The image creates a tremor in my relationship with Eleanor, a need to saturate myself more in her. But already there are approaching bombs and the first light falling on new trails. ‘Always I sense the need of a catharsis, something not done, something not expunged.’

  Shortly before Eleanor left for America we burned most of our belongings in the back garden of the house of flats in which I lived, and a postcard of a Raphael madonna I’d gotten in Florence survived in this city of young prostitutes in pastel blue, with flaxen hair as smooth as Arctic wastes.