Farewell to Prague Read online

Page 7


  Sometimes when I walked down a back-street in Florence, past the chestnut braziers, the purple Michaelmas daisies, a poster of Botticelli’s Young Man Holding a Medallion of Cosimo de Medici, I was straight-backed, sometimes humped, depending on what phase of life it was, but always, even with Eleanor gone, searching for that catharsis not done, the quest sometimes becoming panoramic, as if a whole ancestry needed catharsis.

  A boy from Berwick-on-Tweed who has his head shaved comes home with me one night. I’ve met him in the West End.

  ‘For freedom Christ has set us free,’ is illumined against the night as we take the train south-east, both of us silent.

  He’s wearing Union Jack boxer shorts.

  We make love.

  ‘What part of America are you from?’

  ‘I’m from Ireland.’

  ‘Well I’ll be off then.’

  Someone sends me a postcard of Sonia Delaunay’s Tango in Paris, the women in blues, yellows, green-blues, purples, browns, siennas, the men in sombreros. The postcard turns into a tango in Prague before it reaches the mantelpiece. Chrysalises on dresses, suits, dark glasses, lime trees, a white-haired woman in white dancing with a black-haired younger woman, the younger woman looking as if she’s been snowed on. The man dancing with the gipsy woman has the sun tattooed on his wrist. There’s a tall white tin coffee jug on a round side-table and egg halves decorated with onion rings and anchovies.

  Joe comes home with me one night. He’s got an Irish accent though he’s never been to Ireland – second-generation Irish. He’s black-haired. Has a girlfriend. He likes to see men naked, though he’s never had sex with men. ‘Some day maybe I’ll have sex with you.’

  ‘In jagged coats smelling of past winters, facing a dying nation, going on because maybe in front of us there’s a ray of greatness in a poem, in a film, in a bit of song.’ Someone’s been scrawling poetry on the walls.

  But in these alleys I was in the city of incunabula, where serving ladies suddenly despoiled your spinach with a swoop of meat sauce, where dog roses blazed on metal counters, where frankfurters cooked under the lime trees, where women secretively made daisy chains in the grass for their children, where old people sat in gardens of crimson roses watching young Czechs parade by with the insignia of journeys – rucksacks, kerchiefs – where bursting sunsets drew amalgams of young people to the river, where boys skated through the light of sunsets over the middle of bridges, where war veterans wore Los Angeles Lakers caps at beer counters, where a wounded boy suddenly looked at you, his arm in a scarlet sling striped with cobalt, where there were framed collages on the walls of little buffets – a young man from the nineteen-twenties, a poem in Czech, cut-out paper wallflowers, a city which gave me a different kind of memory of my race.

  My grandfather went to America on the Queen Mary, saved £900 in Cleveland, returned and bought a shop on the main street of an Irish town – a bar and grocery business – and managed it in a burnt-umber workcoat.

  My father, with his legacy, bought a shop up the street, after doing his apprenticeship in the tailoring business in Cheapstead. A poster survived there from the previous owners, advertising an olive-yellow, short coolie-type coat. ‘Two coats in one, can be worn either side out.’

  He wore his hat to one side on the street, like a lid that’s half open.

  He’d always write over his own writing, many times, in the ledger in the shop. The pages of the ledgers created a russet effect when closed, with dapples of peacock-blue. The covers were sepia and dappled in white. His best man committed suicide in Athlone shortly after his marriage: hanged himself from a bacon hook.

  He always went to see the rugby in the grounds of the asylum on a Sunday afternoon.

  When I was a child he liked taking me to films in which cats spoke to mice, downstairs in the Grafton Cinema in Dublin.

  He knew the people who ran Tofts the amusements, the man with the china-blue eyes who looked like an undertaker, and who would run on to the arena to collect the money as the bumpers swung round, journeying a little on the back of bumpers. He also knew many of the travelling players. Some of the players would come on the train with bits of scenery rolled up. They had exaggeratedly posh accents. They’d stay in damp rooms, eat bad food and play to small audiences in the Parochial Hall.

  There were others who came in caravans and pitched a marquee in the fair green. They were more popular. A man in a tuxedo would play the violin, the strings ludicrously breaking, one by one. A woman in a man’s hat with a flood of plumes coming out the front would recite Constance’s speeches from King John. There would be a raffle at the interval and orange juice, always lukewarm, would be sold. The women of town would have their hair done for these shows.

  The last time the marquee players came to town the Polish lady had a party for them. It was the early sixties, and in your imagination the Galway-Dublin train at night, whining into the distance, was a train in Eastern Europe. When you started going to Dublin by yourself the blocks of flats near Tara Street Station on winter evenings were flats in Leningrad, and always, in your imagination, there were sexual scenes behind windows.

  The week before your father died you took a boat from Alge ciras to Tangier. As you waited in the night for the boat men in burnouses, standing, played with sebhas – prayer beads – against the Mediterranean. You took a train by the coast. Men with ards ploughed the fields where Mediterranean light clashed with Atlantic light in a brilliancy which matched the south coast of Connemara in winter with its symphonies of rock which looked as if they had just been apocalyptically thrown up by the sea.

  The Polish lady would drive around in a black Ford Consul with beetroot-coloured seats, always a few green Brogeen books by Patricia Lynch for her son on the back seat.

  Always going back to childhood, a furniture removal lorry open at the back, goods in it, chairs with cabrioles, wide tables, green carpets, orange lino, a town house being vacated. The family were moving to a city in the south. Another friend went away when I was ten. His family had a meadow at the back, surrounded by ivy-coloured walls. We could see the train speeding to Dublin over the walls. There were birch trees over the other side of the rear wall, in the convent grounds. Once an orphan in a sky-blue shirt and navy-blue short trousers stared at me over the wall, an open fan in his hand with fat-face fairies on it.

  17 June 1991. Going through Mazowsze in Poland on the Berlin-Leningrad train. The curtains by my head have patterns of pale-blue yachts on them. This morning in Warsaw as men fished in the Vistula it had been grey. But now, late afternoon, half-naked men lie by bundles of hay, women in bikinis sit by rivers, some of them wearing necklaces of dandelions, women driving goats by the same rivers. The shadows in the fields are lime and cobalt and harrows lie around. Storks fly over the fields and sometimes stand in them.

  There is a spot by the side of a wide river which is crowded with swimmers, mainly young boys and girls, the boys mainly in scarlet but one or two in black and white striped swimming togs, the girls in black. Black Ladas pull up, bushes with red fruit beside them.

  There was a little man in the town with a cleft palate who knew everything about West Ham and the South African rugby team and Dixie Dean of the Everton soccer team. In urinals at the back of pubs he’d light matches, not only lighting up the lower regions but also the faces of beautiful local boys, making them look like the Georges de la Tour boys who used to grind colours and pose. His excuse was: ‘I’m afraid my feet will get wet.’ Because he worked on the railways he got pornographic magazines easily from England. The only illustration I remember is one of a nun in white leaning over a naked apache. He’d cycle through town, often with two children on the bar of the bicycle. Parents didn’t mind until AIDS came. The last saga was an odyssey he made to the boys’ school late one night when he’d done with lighting matches in pub urinals, hollering at the boarders and throwing pebbles at the windows. He was taken to the mental hospital and peremptorily dismissed. He died shortly afterwards, of flui
d on the lung and cancer of the spinal cord, finally breathing only with terrible pain.

  It was summer when he died, a time when in previous summers he’d ferret in his railway gear among the yellow irises, purple loosestrife and burdock by the river bank, in the precinct of the railway bridge, for an elegiac vision of a bathing boy in sanguine bathing trunks on a sandy spot.

  About the same time he died a life-long spinster, sweet-shop owner and pinafore-wearer, in whose house a woman had lived who’d run away with a man in the nineteen-thirties, ran away to Donegal, and went to live in a caravan with a vegetarian member of the Irish Army who lived on brown bread and fried bananas.

  We were both English and Irish in this town, with its garrison history, its cricket grounds and its cricket pavilion, where sometimes people wound up a victrola and danced.

  Something was expected of one in this town: you were implicitly expected to honour a tradition. This town, its people, were different, a people who prided themselves on a certain Anglicism. Yet when a local IRA man got out of Portlaoise jail, about twenty pints were passed down a long table in a local pub to him.

  The factory was started up in 1928. There was a welfare fund, and so the houses of those who worked in the factory were much neater in the poor part of town than those of other people. Guy ‘Micko’ Delaney worked in the factory for a while, and he represented it by enacting the song ‘In the Valley the Bells Are Ringing’ one St Patrick’s night concert, playing Jimmy Brown in a poppy shirt and with funnels of locks, the chorus of girls in white frou-frou dresses.

  Because his mother had worked in our house he’d befriended me a little and I kept track of his life after he left Ireland. In London he had a girlfriend with a blonde beehive hair-do.

  This was the time I had orgies in my head each night before going to sleep, with Vikings on board ships in the seas around Scandinavia.

  From South Africa he sent me a photograph of himself against a rondavel, and a postcard in which two elephants were approaching one another, heads meekly bowed.

  Cape Town was a new shirt, a short-sleeved one, saffron with big black rectangles on it. Cape Town for a young Irishman was doll’s houses of churches, Seafarers’ clubs, benches for whites only, Judas trees in blossom, a young Irish sailor’s grave, Islamic prayer hats, the luminous temples of black children, houses of white and azure, the ghost of a mother with hair still shining brown as it was up to her death, in a dress which suited the Cape Town climate, bolero on the shoulders, patterns of blue lilies and white carnations, a peach cloth belt with a bow on front.

  He worked on the docks and was thrown out of South Africa for rowdy drunkenness.

  Later on, in Camden Town and Kentish Town, it was the memory of a certain beach under mountains called the Twelve Apostles, and the memory of a young body under short-sleeved shirts that would bring him through nights of drunkenness and degradation.

  There was a picture of The Meeting of the Waters, there was tinsel over the mirror, looped-back velvet curtains, many doilies and antimacassars in Guy ‘Micko’s’ home, a modest but insistently furnished home like that of Bridget.

  I went to see Bridget at the end of May. She is married to a policeman of Lithuanian extraction in Bromley, and has a son. On the bus to Bromley I passed the beginnings of a funeral, outside what seemed like a shell of an apartment block, so desolate was it.

  Houses the colour of exotic fifties nail varnish, shops war-time colours – teal-blue, old-emerald. The News of the World, in smaller letters, ‘All human life is there’, against a smoke-blue background above a newsagent’s, instead of a name.

  Red skins of chestnut blossoms were stamped into the wet. A woman in a honey-coloured coat with a beehive hair-do, chiffon with the colours of streamers on top on the hair-do, passed me. The graffiti outside a hall whose purpose was indeterminate said, ‘Sam is a sad lyric.’ Shelley’s Café was closed.

  Bridget sat in a purple dress with a purple whipped-cream effect of a rose on it, under plants in bird-cages. Her husband was at work. Her son was with his grandmother. There was a photograph of him on the mantelpiece in a pale-blue romper suit with rose-madder hearts on it.

  We’d lead a gang of children on a hunt for ghosts to the woods and the big ascendancy house, now a boys’ school the summer Marilyn Monroe died, the summer the devil danced regularly at the local ballroom, girls suddenly looking down as the Clipper Carlton or Mick Delahunty played and seeing his feet. He wore a white shirt, braces, a black tie, had a fifties American haircut with kiss-curls.

  Her father was a cobbler, had been illegitimate and raised in an orphanage. Her mother had landed with the Allies in Dunkirk, as a nurse, and had travelled as far as Berlin with them.

  Her father was a story-teller, would sit cross-legged on his counter as he worked, telling stories: how a plane once landed in the fairgreen; how a tinker once stole a pair of shoes from his shop and was led back by the ear by his mother. ‘Never dishonour a trader,’ she was shouting at him.

  On the wall of Bridget’s sitting-room was a photograph of a soldier playing a guitar. I must go on and make these journeys for her, for the good people, the beautiful people.

  ‘I know, I just know we’ll have a child before the winter comes,’ you said, before you took the plane to California the first time. You were wearing a cherry-coloured anorak in which you watched a mongrel who’d bitten an elderly female neighbour being shot in the Dublin mountains by your father.

  When you were working at menial secretarial jobs in California, staying in hostels with Hawaiian girls and Philippino girls, singing in Bach choirs at the same time, reading Rilke, Lou Andreas Salomé and Whitman, walking in woods, collecting blue liverwort and anemones, I was playing a self-flagellating saint in a ragamuffin theatre group which eventually made a foray to the North of Ireland.

  One night I stayed in a house, just off the Springfield Road, where the young and recent wife of an older man screamed in the next room in the middle of the night.

  Next morning I ran along a street with side-streets that dipped with background views of cowslip-coloured hills, young soldiers in burgundy berets watching from side-streets.

  I passed an orange band.

  ‘Stamp your feet. Stamp your feet to the Sash,’ someone whispered. ‘Pretend.’

  A few days later my host was killed, shot at close range in the lemon Ford Orion in which he’d driven me around.

  First time I caught up with you you would not make love to me, had not made love to anyone for two years.

  On Hallowe’en I hitchhiked up from Santa Cruz. There were pumpkins and Stars and Stripes in the fields to the left. The sunset over the Pacific was magenta. I passed a blue and white lighthouse and thought of the lady I often stayed with in Connemara, how she’d run away from Ireland and come to Chicago, not quite as a girl, in her thirties, met a man from the old IRA who wore ties with salamanders on them and drove with him to California. ‘I buried myself in him in California.’

  There is a photograph of you with her beside hollyhocks outside her house, your shirt out.

  In a field by the Pacific there had been a crowd of children with winter mints in their mouths, mints that created phosphorescence on the lips.

  We met in a café on Geary and would have slept separately at your aunt’s had not a youth approached us as we were walking down Sutter Street and offered us a key for an empty flat for the night. The flat was over a laundry called De Paul Cleaners.

  There had been impotence with a girl in Dublin, but our bodies found one another immediately. Dublin and the pain were cancelled out. Afterwards, you looked at me strangely. You gauged the alarm, the pain in my body, a body which had been half-exposed to the public when I played the part of the self-flagellating saint, shrouded in chains.

  Some weeks later we both hitchhiked up the coast. It was America’s tri-centenary. The poppies by the coast road were peach-coloured. We passed a town called Westport which the Indian summer had turned to an azure evaporation and w
here a couple of dogs watched us as we walked through.

  Making love to Eleanor I saw a battle, a World War Two battle in the snow. It was the early forties, Russia. There was a young German soldier, slightly bumpkin face, his hair straw blond, just looking at the battle, not fighting.

  The girl who attacked me at the party had had an affair with a young member of the Provisional IRA who killed a young couple who’d been informers, in a back-alley of Belfast.

  ‘Sure it was nothing,’ she said next morning. ‘Nothing. I don’t remember what I said. It was absolutely nothing. Absolutely nothing.’ And she swigged tea as if it was Guinness, and looked as if she was listening to a song in a Dublin pub.

  An ex-monk playing a tin-whistle in an indigo archway by the Liffey; Brendan Behan’s song coming from somewhere else; boys in watery blue denim in Bewleys; suddenly bombs going off around Dublin; later that night a young German in a white shirt with large black stripes on it sitting on the steps of a café run by Hungarian socialists in which the ex-monk had approached him and asked him to go home with him, strumming a guitar and singing ‘Sag mir wo die Blumen sind’.

  The little boy had been following me those weeks in Dublin; already there was the colour of the Pacific in you; you wanted to find a new God to the God of Ireland, a new and a more pristine spray in the air to the mouldy-coat-smelling spray of Dublin.

  ‘You must not fall in with the manners of this world; there must be an inward change, a remaking of your minds.’

  For a while when we were having an affair I lived in a small cottage in Rathmines and we would sometimes go together and collect firewood on an estate nearby. We’d light fires then, and drink mulled wine, and crawl on a gnawed carpet looking for a lost nugget of marijuana.