Farewell to Prague Read online

  I went south.

  It was raining on the beach in Viareggio where Shelley was washed up.

  The fields were hazed with sun in Etruria.

  I got into Rome on a late afternoon when wallflowers, ginger, pears of old gold were laid out on Campo de’ Fiori, with strings of garlic above them with slightly erect tips, the flesh of the garlic white and purple and Jesuitical black.

  There were violets and daisies around the pyramid of Cestius in the Protestant cemetery where Keats is buried.

  In Northern California, on our journey, we were taken in by an Indian family. The night before we met them we’d stayed with a lame boy who had brought us to a beach which was all colours, comprised of flattened glass. We slept on the floor in his wooden room, which had two pictures on the wall, both of sky-blue-eyed babies looking at dummies, but from different sides.

  In the morning we stood hitchhiking by a bridge, bits of pine sticking up from rafts on the river, a little hut of a café on our side of the bridge, a big corrugated shed with an arched roof behind it.

  John was the name of the Indian youth who picked us up. He wore a dusky cerise lumber jacket. The following day he brought us to Luftenholz Beach, a beach of black sand, boulders sticking up from the water, cormorants, petrels and black albatrosses flying over the breakers.

  There were a couple of Vietnam veterans living in caravans under the redwoods. Under one of those redwoods I felt a strand of this experience, of this closeness, would protect me for life.

  One gesture leads to another. Before I’d left the squat in London a few years before, about to return to Ireland, a boy called Dylan, who usually wore an Afghan coat that smelt as if it had been buried in the earth, came to the door suddenly and embraced me. In the next couple of years in Ireland, before going to California, I would often suddenly remember the grey colour of his jersey at that moment, a North Seaman’s jersey.

  Spirit of ‘76 will be with me always.

  It wasn’t until I went to the Southern States that I found in myself the strength to understand their hatred of me.

  A boy came home with me one night and asked me to fuck him. His father, who was from Yazoo City, Mississippi, had killed himself, a salesman in Chicago in the nineteen-sixties. I saw his father, hands in his pockets, in a pair of chinos and a white summer shirt with patterns of Laurel and Hardy on it.

  Irene knelt on the grass beside her daughters’ graves in Georgia. There was a ceramic donkey with vermilion cheeks and a creel on his back on the grave of a Victorian child nearby. ‘Mama don’t leave me. I won’t be here in the morning.’ Irene’s hair was blowing over her argent anorak. I’d just been to her family home with Kathleen and another woman, a professor’s wife called Marylin, and Marylin’s son, Andrew.

  We’d set off for Columbus, Georgia, in the early morning. It was nearing Hallowe’en and there were ghost effigies with Spanish hats hanging from trees and cut-out witches and tombstones in windows.

  Andrew wore a Hawaiian shirt with penguins on it and he carried a duck with a lilac beak, a silver lamé stole on the duck.

  In a small town a lemon gingko tree flashed by.

  ‘There was a duck who went looking for lipstick in Wool-worths. He said “Put it on my bill.”’

  As Alabama reached into Georgia there were the reds and the golds of oaks and sycamores and beeches and dogwoods and maples and sweetgum, and of oak-brush and sage-brush.

  ‘There were two men in the town. One man with his arm inside his shirt. I asked him “Why are you standing like that?” And he said “Because I’m Napoleon …”’

  A man was slowly driving a protruding-nosed bus with about twelve goats trailing behind it.

  In a Chevrolet parked beside a railway track two little black boys were waiting for their father who was shopping in a store which was part of a coral-pink, ginger-bread-style house. Cornflake and Muleek. They both said they wanted to be footballers.

  The colours of the fall in Georgia brought back the Trieste Café on North Beach, San Francisco, sitting there with Eleanor in a white short dotted with chrysalises, listening to ‘You Who Opened Your Wings to God’ from Lucia di Lammermoor; they brought back Israel in autumn, a tree of bitter apples, a lighthouse with blue flowers around it by the Mediterranean; they brought back the Madeleines of Georges de la Tour, the patterns in his clothes, rabbits, eagles and a headdress, pink sun-shaped flowers on a sleeve.

  Both Irene’s daughters had been mulatto: her lover had been half-caste. In the sixties they’d marched together past her plantation home in Georgia singing ‘Keep Your Hands on the Plough We’re Not Turning Back’, ‘We’re Marching on to Freedom Land’.

  She and her lover had marched on Washington, 28 August 1963.

  All five of us walked past a parade of wig shops in Columbus. Woman Tree. Sun Wigs. Jackie La Fouche. Columbus Sister.

  Over a café counter was a bas-relief of two Mickey Mouses kissing, one male, one female, tails erect, fluttering mauve and scarlet hearts above them.

  And old man was talking to the waitress.

  ‘Halfway between the houses and the runway they struck. Just beside Shercock Barracks.’

  ‘So you don’t drive a Japanese car?’

  ‘I have a Japanese nurse. I saw that look on her face and first thing I said was “I don’t have anything against the people, just the government.” We traded iron and ships to Japan and they made bombs from them and bombed us.’

  ‘Sneaky.’

  ‘All sneak. My wife said “I want to go to Pearl Harbor” and I said “I’d never go to Pearl Harbor again.”’

  By the river there were cotton mills with water-towers and block glass in the windows. In Irene’s childhood machine guns would sometimes be pointed out these windows.

  The drive up the avenue to the plantation house brought a tangle of stories: the little black boys, presented with new tennis shoes, who were caught in a storm walking down the avenue and their shoes dyed red from the wet earth forever; Aunt Francesca who fell in love with the soldier with the trooping chicken on his shoulder during the war; the black family who cooked the foliage of the elderberry like greens.

  The sky was coral white over the building which had a pedimented porch and shiplap siding.

  We were served coffee from a coffee set which had patterns of acorns and green quilling on it.

  Irene’s father, seated at the table, wore a flash shirt, her mother, seated there too, a yellow serge dress with peach haemorrhages on it.

  Irene’s father had sailed with the 8th Airforce past County Antrim during the Second World War.

  Irene’s mother had worked with US military personnel in London during the war.

  In a house in Georgia I saw a street in London during the war from the eyes of an ancestor, people standing around talking, a woman in a voluminous matt green scarf, a hesitant sailor seen through the crowd reminding him in blueness of wayside madonnas in Ireland, some American soldiers in the crowd. The houses on the street were serried, burlap covering an empty window, a dog with eel-like skin poking among the crowd.

  We drove to the cemetery and afterwards visited the house outside Columbus where Kathleen’s mother was minding the old bedridden lady.

  Kathleen’s mother had recently run away and hitchhiked around America, but now she was back.

  There was a photograph of the old lady on a dresser in her bedroom, with a beehive hair-do which resembled in contortion the palace in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, beside a man in a string tie.

  Glenn Miller and his AAF band were being emulated on television and we danced in the room to ‘Jeepers Creepers’, for the delight of the syrupy-faced old woman, who could only gurgle.

  Northern Alabama was where Kathleen once taught; it was where, living with her grandparents, she’d had her first affair, with a young man, killed in Vietnam, who had a marble-white body; it was a countryside whose soughing trees she heard in her dreams.

  On the way home through the night she drove down a
side road to a ghost village – houses with vinyl chairs on their porches and advertisements outside little stores for Golden Cola, Royal Crown Cola, McCormacks Iced Tea, Nedicks Orange Juice – beside the Hanging Woods. It was there black people were hanged, right up to the fifties.

  I got out and listened to the sighing of the oak trees. When I got back into the Oldsmobile Kathleen put on Gladys Knight, ‘He’s Leaving on that Midnight Train to Georgia’.

  Kathleen, Irene and I, our faces lit up by cars coming home from a football game from which men frequently hollered, were people looking for a self-forgiveness, for appeasement for mutilated memories.

  ‘If two lie together they have heat but how can one be warm alone?’

  Early January I took the plane back to London, but something had changed for me. I didn’t want to stay long in London. I’d go on to Berlin and Prague.

  Shortly after we’d gone to Georgia I had a letter from Carl Witherspoon. He’d rushed to Berlin from London with the first news of the Wall coming down.

  On the night of 13 November a youth stripped to blue underpants had gone up a lamp-post with elaborate curlicues, from which the SS had hanged people in the last days of the war, and waved the blue and yellow stars of the EEC from the top of it; two women kissed, the one from the West in a honey-coloured fur coat, fur hat, the one from the East with cinnamon hair, a bald patch at the back, a squirrel fur around her shoulders; a kindergarten of Vietnamese children burst into song near Glienicke Bridge; an African woman with turquoise about her mouth stared at the Trabants streaming over; girls in faux leopardskin excitedly made telephone calls in kiosks; bicycles were garlanded in chrysanthemums; people filed around with bunches of flowers held towards the ground; a Turkish girl in high heels, matador trousers, black cape fetched cigarettes from a machine as if nothing was happening; an Irish tramp sang ‘Alleluia’; a man played an accordion; in a strip club near the Exile Café a Chinese boy put a reptile up his backside.

  I’d also heard from Honza in Prague, where the candles were burning on the pavements. Heidi, my lover after Eleanor, was living in Berlin. Marek was dying of AIDS in the suburbs of Berlin.

  It began in the summer of 1986, my journey East.

  Before I got the boat to Holland a British detective with a Robertson’s golliwog on his lapel had harassed me. What was I going to Berlin for? What would I be doing there? Who would I be seeing?

  First morning in Berlin the coffee, strawberry jam and croissants at a pavement café seemed miraculous; there was a poster of a school of fullsome naked women on white horses on a shore outside a sex shop; lime trees touched stucco houses with balconies; there had been a blond Dutch boy on the bus, and I kept seeing him around Berlin; girls in scrawny clothes held bunches of marguerites on the East side of Friedrich-strasse; a gipsy woman with a cable of hair down her back studied the clock in Alexanderplatz; there were men and boys on Alexanderplatz in the check shirts that pullulate all over Eastern Europe.

  I’d made love to Carl, duckish white of his body. Orange poppies grew outside the window of his flat, in the mulch towards the border.

  I did not look up Eleanor. Marek, who was HIV positive, was throwing off the habit of heroin in Portugal. Heidi was enwrapt in her past lives, studying her time as a Russian soldier during the Napoleonic wars.

  It was only a short trip, a few days. I’d wanted to go on to Prague but I didn’t have the money. It would be years before I’d see the high-rises, the willow trees, the swimmers in scarlet bathing trunks in Prague.

  I’d sit with Heidi in her room in the summer evenings.

  ‘As the Wall comes down, people paint the faces of loved ones or half-remembered lovers on it.’

  We’d made love in North Connemara, Heidi and I. She came to me after the wreckage of Dublin.

  ‘So much is there inside me, longing, love, a little pain, and before I go I want you to know that I will be there when you should need me, and my love is with you, wherever you go. I shall send my love with the wind. I’ll give my soul to the rain, my eyes to the night, my hands to the earth. You will find me, meet me on your ways.’

  She came to one of those rooms where I lived, the walls painted combed brown, about a year after we’d met in North Connemara, and there we made love again.

  ‘They tried to take your light from you.’

  I saw candlelight at the feet of a Madeleine.

  It was in North Connemara too I’d first met Marek. He was going to school there.

  North Connemara, domes of bleeding azure and cobalt in turn on mountains, the lower slabs viridian, sap-green, aquamarine. Often cloud fragments are stabbed into the mountain tops. Golden saxifrage grows on these mountains, in the autumn grass of Parnassus. Also in the autumn, in the meadows below, there are red berries on the lilies of the valley. Mary’s tears, they are called.

  Where these mountains begin is Derryclare Lake, with its island lined with Scotch pines. Richard Martin, the last great lord of this area, died hiding from his debtors in Boulogne in 1834. His son Richard emigrated to Canada and was so haunted by North Connemara that he named his territory by the Grand River, Derryclare.

  The eye is addled by lakes and rivers – Doo Lough, Lough Nagilkey, the rivers Derryhorraun, Ballinaboy – and they seem to reach not to the mountains to the south-east but to the charcoal of Erris Hill and Cashel Hill by the sea to the south-west. The red-haired lady lived in this direction. The ruins of her house are still there, with a few what local people call ‘freckener’ bushes outside it. She was rapacious, luring passing horsemen into her bed, murdering them, and stealing their horses.

  A lady of ninety who was half-blind commandeered the roads around that ruin, pearl droplet earrings always on her: ‘the Duchess’. She married a man with the papal title of Count and when her son was killed in the war she vowed never to cross the Shannon again, a promise she kept.

  The last train left in 1935. Shortly after the closure of the railway there was a funeral, and a few days after the funeral the man whom everyone believed they’d buried arrived on the green bus from Galway – the hospital in Galway had sent the wrong man. He lived to a great age, finding a companion in a man who’d escaped from the Titanic dressed as a woman.

  ‘The people were always shoneens.’ A town of phlox pinks, bold lavenders, more modest turquoises. Beyond the town, on the dip to the sea, each house has fuchsia in the garden which on fine days autographs the almost palpable ultramarine of the sea. This ultramarine is a miasma on the mind when you’re away from it and lures you back, again and again, as though to a destiny.

  In bed with Heidi in North Connemara, just before I left Ireland, I had a dream in which I saw a prison cell with two small windows and five hooks on a cross beam. I did not know at the time that this was Plötzensee Prison in Berlin. A child appeared in the middle of the cell.

  ‘Because you have seen these things I will take your hand and you will be my father and I will be your son.’

  From a squat in Battersea, London, I wrote a letter to the girl who’d attacked me at the party in Dublin.

  ‘My children will be born in spite of you.’

  13 February 1990. On my way through London to Berlin I cycle to a squat where I lived in 1974. The girl who used to walk about barefoot had been released from jail.

  Now most of the Edwardian houses have been knocked down and there are shining new flats in cubicle-effect array, with a network of undulating paths between the different blocks. A little old lady in a saffron, daisy-patterned pinafore and white bobby socks reaches up to put some rubbish in a big bin. There are towels hanging out – a train with a human face, a skiing dalmatian, a poodle gazing at his bowl, a spaniel kicking a ball, a belligerent jet – and some flesh-coloured lingerie. Someone shrieks a name … ‘Wend.’ Flowers in a Trebors sweet tin have not come out yet outside a window. A borscht-coloured Hillman is parked. A man in the blue and white of Tottenham, a boy on his shoulders, momentarily looks into your eyes. There is an advertisement for Buddh
ist meditation services for women on the gate of one of the few remaining Edwardian houses on the border of the domain of flats, and a biblical quote: ‘And even to your old age I am he, and even to hoar hairs will I carry you.’

  ‘Will never go back to Ireland,’ a boy in this squat told me. ‘It’s in the blood now.’

  A black man in an ancient overcoat, a black trilby, carrying a briefcase, comes towards me.

  There was a woman who used to live in this squat who sang opera in Berlin in the thirties, and would pick up black men and bring them home.

  Not far away in the windows of Kilburn the advertisements begin: ‘Irish guy wanted for room in Irish house in Neasden. Double room near Dollis Hill. Irish guitarist wanted for Irish band.’ ‘Owensy from Belfast.’

  22 February 1991. Going to a squat like a monastery in Battersea in 1977 was picking up the threads of a squat in West London in 1974, the inmates dressed in fiery red and fiery pink. Went to Italy from that squat. Purple Michaelmas daisies everywhere. Didn’t find that feeling of refuge until I came to Germany this year.

  Going by train through snow from Berlin to visit Marek. Passing churches with onion domes, colours of burgundy and yellow. Black hares fleeing across the fields. Dark coming and the train throwing lights like a menorah on the landscape. Miles of cars held up on the roads.

  Changing to a slow train that goes through the snow-covered vineyards, a boy in a green jacket and, despite the snow, short green trousers, starts talking to me. He’s looking for work as a maker of wind instruments. He’s been a carpenter in Cologne.

  A boy I knew in Ireland in the late sixties used to visit Germany in the summers. A town of half-timbered houses, louvred houses, houses with wooden cross beams, rivulets running by the houses. After failing psychiatry at university a few years later, he took rat poison and died.