Farewell to Prague Read online

  In California when we stayed with the Czech refugee we drank mulled wine too. The house was red-wine coloured and had a veranda with grey floorboards. Yellow meadows merged into forests of pine and mountains of blue. The ocean had secretive foam distantly. The old man spoke of the cities of Eastern Europe long ago: cobbled streets; colours – verdigris, pistachio, sap-green, buff, hazel, sienna, umber, olive-grey, rose, peach, Naples yellow; a stork on a roof-top; an accordionist with his bear; a clown with alizarin hair and polka-dotted bow; a gipsy woman in a yellow dress with blue polka dots; a peach sunset over a street of yellow, scrunched-up houses; a head on a tram illuminated at evening; lights, yellow and white, at night, throwing pools on the cobbles.

  The first time I went looking for you from Dublin, I’ll never forget it. The walk to the airport bus. A man raised his hat as he passed Johnson Court Church. Already some Mormons in near-fifties clothes were motioning to passers-by on Grafton Street. An old man sitting on a stool in the Star of the Sea pub looked out at me.

  The plane ride from the melancholic autumn city full of damp and ill-lit basements. Up to a few days before leaving I’d been playing in a theatre company, dressed all in black, black jersey, black trousers, wheeling a doll in a black Victorian pram around a bandstand in St Stephen’s Green which had pale blue pillars.

  Arriving in New York, in a café at Kennedy airport, a boy in watery blue denim had looked at me in a way no one had looked at me for years.

  The plane ride West into the last of a ruddy sky.

  Walking on beaches, the sky blinding blue, nasturtiums running by the sides of the beaches, vines of orange and cyclamen, castellations of them by the embankments, the nasturtiums commingling in the embankments with geraniums.

  ‘I went for a walk on such a winter’s day.’

  I returned to Prague midsummer 1989.

  A woman wheeled a spaniel in a pram; an old lady in a yellow pinafore with blue cornflowers on it swept the street, beside an orange chariot.

  I brought biscuits and salami from Paxton and Whitfield’s as a gift from someone in London to a jazz musician who’d just got out of jail, after spending six years there. He lived in Hanspaulka. He brought me into a small living-room. There were posters for jazz jamborees in Warsaw in the early eighties on the wall – ‘It may look like America but it isn’t’ over the bony houses of Warsaw, on another an umbrella metamorphosed into a saxophone – photographs of open-air jazz concerts in the rain in Warsaw, a lithograph of David standing over Goliath, on the floor beside the wall stacks of Mothers of Invention records. On a small table in the middle of the room there were cherries in a white bowl with patterns of blue circles on it.

  The man and I were the same age, but he had a teenage son. The son was away in the Carpathian mountains but there was a photograph of him on a small dresser, in swimming trunks beside a swimming pool, blond, porcupine hair.

  We went to a nearby hostinec. There were soldiers drinking beer under the lime trees outside, their flies half-open. Inside, a calendar with one of Benozzo Gozzoli’s depictions of war. A mirror bordered with patterns of split pomegranates reflected more soldiers, who had surrounded a girl wearing a blouse with a hankie in the breast pocket.

  Afterwards, still light, I went to the Park of Culture. In one part of the park there was a funfair. Boys with Mongolian eyes, with shaven heads, a few in flash-scarlet jackets, all with chiffon around their necks, shook hands. A middle-aged man with a monocle wandered about. The ground was covered in fuchsine tickets, like cherry blossom. Men shot at storks, daisies, buttercups. A pineapple flashed in the centre of a carousel.

  There was a gallery of Minnie Mouses in pink dresses with white polka dots, purple rhinos with pink stars on them, dog-rose-coloured elephants, an illustration of infantry men in red jackets, with gold-knobbed swagger canes above them.

  Around the bumpers was a panorama of women in Victorian bathing suits feeding gulls, and a caravan was illustrated with street-walkers in forties clothes.

  In another part of the park travelling players had convened. They were crossing Europe, East to West, groups of players from many countries.

  Washing hung between a caravan and a tree. A Lada had graffiti painted in white on it saying, ‘Goodbye forever and if forever then goodbye forever’ and ‘God is my co-pilot’. There were posters with black and white photographs on them, one showing a clown up a bare tree, the land flooded, the other a naked and muscular clown, his face painted white, dancing in the square of an East European town.

  Boys in caps, shorts, sandals, white socks played mandolins, fiddles and accordions under a tree.

  A girl moved a mask on a stick from in front of her face and I saw a girl, very tall, broad-shouldered, whose hair had gone grey in her early twenties. I’d worked with her in a street theatre company once. We’d played Greek idiots on a beach in Ballybunion where my parents had honeymooned. Old fisher people had come to look at us. The last time I’d met her, in Dublin, she told me she could no longer sleep.

  Other people who’d worked in that theatre company had gone on to make films, a boy with the black hair of the Canaries and eyes that sometimes seemed decimated by the world.

  ‘Des.’

  Suddenly I heard my name called outside a marquee. It was a black, curly-haired English boy who’d run away with an English theatre company when they visited Galway once, where he lived. I looked at the beech trees behind him and the flowering St John’s wort and the knapweed in the grass. But I wasn’t that Des anymore. I had broken down.

  The old lady was in the café, white ballet dress on her, tutu bottom, paths of daisies running through the top, a butterfly on each of her high heels and a pearl-seed bee in each of her earrings.

  ‘Würdest Du am Samstag Nachmittag zum Tee kommen?’

  She gave me her address, inviting me for tea on Saturday afternoon.

  There was thistledown blowing as I got out of the train, houses on the hills around blue blurs. A woman stood on the platform, china-doll face, paths of green wreaths and peach-coloured roses in her scarf, a boy beside her, a basket, strawberries on one side, peas on the other, in her hand, the strawberry colour having seeped through. There was a shop beside the house, rows, one over the other, of cans of cherries in the window, a picture of the Crimean coast, a trunk of a mountain falling into the sea.

  The house was immense, grey, with a hood-like roof.

  I rang her bell. Markytov. There was no reply. She was not at the café that night.

  I visited the Old Jewish Cemetery the following morning. A woman in a dress patterned with gentian-blue squares, scarlet flowers in the squares with yellow centres, black dots in the centres, carried a huge white poodle through the cemetery, white sandals on her with pink and white bands in front. Two American women sat on a scarlet bench. One wore a dress of peach and blue dapples, the other a white one with horizontal stripes of wrinkled green on it. They were talking of a bus journey from Milwaukee to Atlanta. They referred to a man encountered along the way, called Zachary, and one of them mumbled the name of Danny Kaye and the other the words ‘country club’.

  Nearby was a little museum of drawings done by Jewish children in a concentration camp:

  A funeral procession, a coffin being carried, led by a banner of the Star of David, all the mourners in the pyjamas of the concentration camps.

  A man in these pyjamas hanging from a bare tree, a bulldog approaching him.

  A steamboat running on flurried water alongside a row of leaning synagogues.

  A terrier licking a squirrel’s tail.

  A beetroot devil giving a little girl a bath.

  A rabbi sitting by a table, a woman in a hat which looked like black mousse approaching, an umbrella over her head.

  A panorama of hay-gathering, with abundant butterflies in the air.

  Old women in the black dresses of mourning looked out of windows into the cemetery. One of them had a gold cage hanging from her window with a white bird in it.

&
nbsp; You could smell slightly wet oil-cloth and wild mint.

  A poppy in the grass, a ladybird on ground elder were good omens.

  There was somewhere else now other than England and Ireland.

  Before travelling to that country I was bidding farewell to Prague. But I’d come back.

  Three boys in white polo necks, the Beatles, sang ‘Yesterday’ on Charles Bridge against the setting sun.

  I remembered the sun going down behind urinals along the Tiber.

  A little boy crossing the bridge carried a toy dog which had skin of red tulips on white.

  On Monday morning a block of flats, mainly in shadow, was patterned with shafts of sunlight, like light on alder buds.

  A gold bead of water stood at the tip of a man’s penis against the light of Podolí sauna. Two naked old men played chess in the sauna.

  An old man in Wenceslas Square had a walking-stick with a gold head of a swan.

  And on Monday afternoon, my last afternoon, I met Honza in the square, sheafed blond hair, gleaming eyes, slightly crouched, in a white Russian shirt with a poppy-red stripe at the round collar, an azure and poppy-red stripe at the cuffs.

  He’d just been to Bulgaria where the police had raided the house in which he was sleeping with his girlfriend on a mattress. They had tried to approximate, from a fleeting glimpse of them on the mattress, the distance between them when they’d been sleeping: you could sleep with your girlfriend in Bulgaria, but only at a certain distance on the mattress.

  Czechoslovakia was full of crazy things too, he said. The previous winter the president’s wife had been the sole passenger in a plane looking for strawberries.

  ‘It’s a tin box that’s going to explode.’

  In a bank at the end of the square I signed for a money exchange for him, so he could go to a Stray Cats concert in West Berlin.

  The rain in Wenceslas Square had the smell of sulphur the following morning and a bare-legged boy in a white work coat was on his knees in a shop, sweeping dust and putting it into a pale brown urn.

  A girl I’d known at university who had been a nun for a while drowned herself, pregnant, in the Shannon near Kildicert, County Clare, that summer. The last I’d heard from her had been a postcard of a Gauguin boy nude about six years before: ‘I am coming to be my old self again. I am sorry for not being well. I missed you a lot.’

  A boy I’d known at university, with whom I shared a room when I first moved to London, turned up. He lived in New York now, working as a barman. Once, he looked as if a bucketful of coppery-blond hair had fallen on his head. Now, his hair was cut relatively short and groomed, the scent of lavender water from it.

  He wore a rose-red shirt and we journeyed on top of a double-decker, heading to Kilburn where he was staying, up Charing Cross Road, past the Venetian reds, the faded oranges, the hazels, the floriations of ironwork around upper windows, the occasional signs of domesticity behind those windows, past the lime trees.

  He’d had something of a breakdown after having been rejected in love by a priest in Florida – they’d taken a holiday together.

  He’d gone into a Greek Orthodox Church in Florida, where an old woman with big, black-framed glasses and a black scarf on her head was lighting candles, and decided to take a short trip home.

  He came from just outside a seaside town in Kerry, a town-land of crofters. There were three scarlet pumps alongside one another on the main street of this town and in the small square a statue of Our Lady of Fatima, gold leaves on her veil, two rosaries in her hands, one signal red, one silver, doves at her feet.

  His parents in their pebble-dash house had mutually become addicted to marmalade: marmalade for breakfast, for lunch, for supper. The house still smelt of ginger ale. He’d made peace with his parents.

  He had some photographs with him, a long black and white ensemble photograph taken at National School, a coloured one taken in his teens in the drawing-room, he in a sleeveless jersey the green of Irish pound notes, a pioneer pin on it, a cranberry deer on the windowsill behind him. He was glad he’d gone home and also glad he was lingering only briefly in England where he’d once lived.

  ‘So little is expected of the Irish here.’

  ‘Near where we come from there is a beach from where a noble family once left. On currachs to a bigger boat which would take them to Europe. “Deus Meus”, the monks’ chant, still echoed from the hills. The noble family had imported red wine from Spain and the Spanish ships had come to this beach. Now only curlews slope there and herons. It’s a barren place, my home.

  ‘You come from a country and you try to shed it, but something clings: an old sleeveless pullover, a pair of socks, a waistcoat, a habit. You dance one night in an Irish Country and Western ballroom in Kilburn and you’re dancing in history. You’re making your First Holy Communion again. You’re making your confirmation. You’re leaving Ireland in a currach that will bring you to a bigger boat, that will go to a country where there is red wine and no barren land.’

  ‘Micko’ Delaney had told his son about the ruins of Berlin, how he saw a man carrying a dead child as if it were a bit of peel, the smell of smouldering fires in the wet, black American soldiers sitting round these fires singing songs from their home country.

  If you don’t believe I have been redeemed

  Just follow me down to the Jordan stream

  My soul got wet in the midnight dew,

  And the morning star was a witness too.

  Guy ‘Micko’ Delaney had worn a short-sleeved wine shirt against the mountains known as the Twelve Apostles in the early sixties and sung an Elvis Presley song which was partly in the German language.

  Before I left for America the first time I worked in the mountains with the theatre group, bringing children from the slums there. It was the very hot summer of 1976. The mountains were amber-yellow and phlox-red. The body of a young drug dealer, murdered by the IRA, was found nearby that summer. I used to see him in Captain America’s dressed up as a tinker queen. I dished out fruit cocktail in rose ponds of syrup to the children. We’d stay up there until the late evenings, when the lights of Dublin were twinkling below.

  On one of my first days in the Southern States Kathleen drove me to see a wooden trestle bridge. There was a golden-russet ruin of a slaughterhouse nearby, cabbage roses – pink, mauve – sweet-williams, wallflowers, dahlias, goldenrod, asters outside it. A poster on it, ‘See America First’. Kathleen was half-Cuban. Her brother had been murdered in a field of yellow sage by the Ku-Klux-Klan.

  She sang a song as we paused on her Pontiac:

  When they ring those golden bells for you and me

  They’ll tell the story of how we overcame.

  An ensemble of boys in wine jackets and claret ties being photographed against the verdure of a lawn; a little smoke-blue boot belonging to a young Confederate soldier killed by Wilson’s Raiders; a squirrel in a tree with a hickory nut; a father kissing a son on the lips on the main street; a stack of old Elvis LPs, the beloved possession of the murdered boy. And the landscape, the clay ochre-red, a vermilion dust in the air from it. I purchased a blue bicycle and cycled the town and got to know people, the old black men beside the signs for Raisin Jacks in Woolworths window, the women with coral pink and squash-coloured hair.

  ‘Inspired in 1857 by Dorothea Dix’, a sign outside the mental hospital said. Not so long ago black patients would pull collards and mustard greens for the lunches of white patients. Nearby was the old graveyard for the mentally ill, shamrock iron crosses on the graves of white patients, stones on the graves of the black. ‘The dead who died in the Lord.’ A lady-slipper grew on the grave of Annie Ropp. ‘Her children rise up and call her blessed.’ People still came at night to leave flowers, often plastic flowers, on the graves of those who died in the 1900s and stood in the shadow of the grove of cypress trees on the hillside.

  Irene had lost her two daughters when a truck went into a charity walk in Mississippi. Kathleen had lost her brother. They were m
y friends.

  A few miles outside the town there was the ruin of a cotton mill. Right up to the fifties people, black and white, used to scavenge for wild plants here and shoot squirrels for survival. Nearby was a little shack-café with the word ‘coffee’ in large letters above a Coca-Cola sign.

  I visited the site of the accident with Irene. There was a bed of flowers now, the yellow stars of Dahlberg daisies, purple and rose bolls of globe amaranths, the silver trumpets of nicotianas. The body of a murdered black boy had been dumped in the little lake nearby in the sixties.

  Kathleen brought me to the grave of her brother. A little white timber church on a hill overlooking it, the earth liquorice-coloured, thrashers in the air and the leaves of the beauty berry turned yellow. He was buried beside a soldier, ‘killed in the operation of the First United States Army in Europe June 6 1944’. They refused a service in the church because a black girl was asked to sing, so the service was held in a funeral parlour instead, and the black girl sang ‘I’m Going to the Father and Will Sit’. Kathleen’s Cuban mother had held a wreath of poinsettias. On the white timber cross over the grave were the words ‘Forgotten you will never be.’

  Once we went into a church in Italy which had amber walls and held hands in front of a huge cross on which the Christ was an unbearded and almost totally naked young man.

  We went on travelling in Italy for a while, hoping for a cathartic act of sex, Eleanor, a boy, myself, but it didn’t happen. Eleanor went back to Dublin and later that autumn I returned to Italy from London, hoping to accomplish this catharsis myself.

  I walked through olive-coloured streets in Florence, under walled hillside gardens with cypress groves and fig trees in fruit.

  I passed ceramic bas-reliefs on walls of Virgins in maroon and blue with the Child, under arches, lilies on either side of the arch.

  I went to Siena on a day when Siena was flaxen yellows and Havana browns, and in the evening, when I got back to Florence, I took a bottle of white wine into a graveyard under a block of flats and got drunk.