Farewell to Prague

by Desmond Hogan

  Back in Dublin there was a multitude of boyfriends, and even though they only lived up the road from her she’d get Rembrandt postcards in Mulvanys on Wellington Quay to write to them – seated rabbis, prodigal sons, Slav princes, portraits of elderly ladies, girls at half-doors, tortured Christs, shy scholars, young women at mirrors, Sibyls of Cumae, Joseph telling his dreams, Jacob blessing his grandchildren, Christ with the woman of Samaria, Titus with lipstick lips, King David with his harp, lavishly embracing David and Absoloms.

  She turned up in University College, Dublin, in a cherry-coloured anorak and jeans, and it was during her first year there she had an affair with a folk singer who lived in London. She met him in Galway city. They’d known one another from a dance hall in Dublin. He was the son of a Dublin builder and he’d moved between so many schools – Marion College, Sandymount, Sandymount High, Presentation Glasthule, Willy Martin’s school in Mount Street – that he contributed to his father bringing the entire family to live in London.

  He was with a girl from the North who had bonfire-orange hair, a reputed bomber, in a pub in Galway. He sang ‘Athá mé in mo codhladh agus ná dúisigh me’ and ‘The Waters of Tyne’, abandoned his revolutionary girlfriend and went off and made love to her.

  In the fall was the abortion in Brighton, and her first night ever in Amsterdam, on Gerard Doustraat, she woke up screaming, remembering it.

  So the secession truly commences from bourgeois Ireland into which she was born, from the congealed consciousness.

  Driving to Mississippi once from California with her second husband, Jesse, in a café under the mountains of New Mexico which had glitters of snow in them, illumined like a studded ikon, Willie Nelson singing ‘Always on My Mind’ on the juke-box, she thought of him.

  After they’d left Amsterdam that first time they’d hitch-hiked to the South and were picked up by a Moroccan truck-driver with a moustache who brought them to his flat in Monte Carlo, in a cluster of Moroccan-looking houses. He gave her a white T-shirt with a Moroccan soccer player kicking a ball on it which she was wearing in Dublin, he in Italy alone, when she betrayed him and started making love to another boy from the West of Ireland, banshee-pale in nakedness.

  So the break-up of an affair begins which lasts a lifetime, through two marriages.

  ‘You are to me the little sister, the friend, the child, the future and the fulfilment of the past,’ she tells her daughter in the old Jewish Cemetery in Amsterdam. And perhaps this child started being born one autumn in San Francisco when she left her old life, her old way, her old self, to join a religious group.

  Coming to live in Amsterdam recalled those autumn weeks, the way there were pictures over houses like in the Tarot – a coppiced tree, a berried rowan tree, an old-clothes man with tiers of top hats, the blessing of the new moon, the gibbous moon over the sea, a swan on lapis lazuli waters, a leopard, a green bird with red beak among shoots of grass, a pelican feeding her young with its own blood.

  She was told in San Francisco that Jesus had studied the cabbala with the Essenes and for a girl who’d had an abortion, for a girl who’d walked into a bombing in Dublin in which thirty people were killed, such random information, thrown out in the San Francisco air, opened an opportunity to expiate, forget, become new. The hold they had on you was terrible, but you had to fight your way out of it, become yourself, but in doing this you had to know that there was no way back, that you’d be an exile going between the cities of the world, half the time unwanted, but you had to try to hold on, keep your own mind, and a new religion, a religion which quoted the time there was a gymnasium in Jerusalem where boys performed naked, seemed to be a way of enabling this to happen, to let her have a new identity, a new soul which was safe from them.

  She met a man in a café who picked up a first knowledge of the cabbala in Buchenwald – crown, understanding, severity, imagination, harmony, wisdom, clemency, justice, prudence.

  And still, in spite of all this, there was a longing for a city where a catharsis could happen, but it couldn’t be an American city.

  She stayed on Lombard Street when she first joined the group and worked with delinquents in St Gabriel’s Youth Club on Lupus Street. She had a letter from him, from Calle dei Specchiere in Venice, above the mirror makers, in which he described Venice in flood and a young man crossing St Mark’s Square with a monkey on a leash, and then she moved north to Sacramento for a few weeks, and then back down to San Francisco before the new year, staying on South Linn Street, going to North California in early summer, staying in a caravan beside a lake. The Essenes had lived on the west side of the Dead Sea, away from the shores. He’d written to her about the fulguration of candlelight in Santa Maria della Salute in Venice, about bombings in England, how terrible it was for Irish people, about runaway English girls in black Juliet hats and black maxi-coats hurrying along streets of peeling Edwardian houses to meet boyfriends who were wearing school straws and spectator pumps, about women leading poodles in tartan outfits on other streets in this area, of the sudden eruption of song from an Irish drunk with cream sherry in his hand, how an entire street of squats was converted to Islam, how, at the door of the squat he was vacating, an English boy with pansy fine hair, in a mouldy Afghan coat, had put his arms around him before he’d returned to Ireland – the Irish stamp on the letter, Christmas 1974, had shown a Gaelic Madonna and Child, the madonna in infant’s blue – of British army trucks speeding down the Falls Road and murder off the Springfield Road.

  ‘I was fond of the times with you.’ She put up a distance with him and yet his travels, the travels of the previous summer immediately after she’d left Ireland, insisted on coming in on her; Stockholm, Geneva, the statues of Mary, Mother of James the Less, Mary Salomé, Mother of James and John, and Sarah, their gipsy servant in a church on the beach in Saint Maries de la Mer.

  Her first husband, whom she’d married a year and some months after her first return visit to Ireland and who was also in the religious group, had visited the basilica of St Anne de Beaupré in Canada when there had been a pilgrimage of North American Irish tinkers to it. He saw an Irish tinker playing the mouth-organ on the steps of St Anne de Beaupré, emphatically stamping his left foot as a woman sang ‘Spancil Hill’ beside the Canadian goldenrods in the autumn.

  Last night as I lay dreamin’ of pleasant things gone by Me mind bent on ramblin’ to Ireland I did fly.

  After her divorce, she went to Europe with her second husband, living in Berlin where she spent most of the nineteen-eighties.

  It was in the fall of 1988 they moved to Amsterdam. They drove there in a Pontiac with the American flag on front. Approaching it they passed a row of illuminated windmills by a canal, which, in the rain, made colours on the road like American football pompoms. She’d been in this city before and it was from here she prepared to go back to the United States, to Northern California, with her husband and child.

  Yes, her first night ever in Amsterdam she’d screamed, just as in Belfast the young wife of an IRA man about to be murdered had screamed. She screamed for her lost child, for her fading bourgeois identity, for her presentiment of journeys, journeys always to be made and her own country always to be circumvented, for her search for solid identity beyond them, for her lifetime of exile.

  ‘Glór mo chroi,’ he said to her in Amsterdam and her fingers which touched his face were already touching other lovers, men she’d meet her first summer in San Francisco, men in shorts striding the hilly streets, whom she felt obliged to sleep with until she went to a lecture on The Book of Splendour given by a young man who held up a copy published in Lublin in 1872.

  The Book of Splendour says that God is on earth and my first summer in Prague I contemplated this summons to carnality in the mildew of Podolí sauna, among the nude bodies seated in lemon light.

  ‘Tréigí amanánacht, agus maírigí: agus imigí ar slí na tuigsiona.’

  It was among the dead and mutilated bodies on Talbot Street, May 1974, that she knew
she had to leave Ireland, find another city, find an identity more solid than the one that came from the presumptions and intimacies, however seductive and literary they were on one side, which bred unyielding versions of nationalism.

  ‘Ireland, maker of wounds, tormentor of youth, ultimately breaker of all that was sensitive and enriched by sun, rain, wind.’

  June 1977 in Dublin, among those houses of persimmon and crumbled acorn, which had garden houses of liquid gold glass where flowers were tended with Huguenot zeal for possible exhibition at the Royal Dublin Society, a girl attacked his sexuality. He never really recovered from her; she returned to the United States and married and he left Ireland and maybe their paths would cross again for a moment and come morning that girl talks poetically, as you’re urged to in this city, but behind that poetry is a savagery which attacks anything not vetted by the tribe.

  She returned to the house where the attack had taken place in November 1990 for her father’s funeral – he’d had a heart attack while inspecting their turf patch on Djuce Mountain. Mary Robinson had just been elected president of Ireland. A tinker woman came to the door while she was staying in the house, in a polka-dotted white blouse, copper cocktail jacket, skirt of rhododendrons, black booties with pompoms at the back, a silver bullion on the front.

  The black-haired boy who’d committed suicide told me the day I visited him, in the spring of 1968, that when a tinker woman comes to the house she brings luck, when she comes down the road there’s change in the air.

  Perhaps she’d had a premonition of her father’s death at Zandvoort aan Zee, men running into the winter sea at dusk.

  A tinker encampment near my home, by high-rise buildings.

  A tinker girl under a photograph of the boxer Dave Proud in poppy shorts.

  Tinker boys in a fish and chip shop at dusk, beside the bowl of Japanese koi fish.

  A petrol can burns after a tinker wedding. A boy with a porcupine haircut, in a bristled cream jacket and scarlet dicky bow, and a youth with long locks and cigarette trousers look on, lit up.

  At a funeral party in Dublin, cloth over the sandwiches and plates of biscuits with pink icing on the table, Eleanor thought, there’ll always be a quotation of him in my body, that everyone is a mystery and that that mystery has to be accounted for, and she walked out of the house to the nearby tinker encampment where they were loudly playing Jim Reeves’s ‘I Love You Because You Understand’, where there were chalk greyhounds and empty swan-shape flower bowls outside caravans with Valentine festoons in the windows, and where a terrier was darting among little girls in crab-coloured blouses. One road takes shape out of another, but sometimes, because it is a side-road, we don’t see the direction.

  While I was staying in the high-rise apartment block in the Midwest a boy called Vance, half-German, half-Choctaw, invited me to go for a ride with him into the countryside. He had guinea-gold hair and scars on his face like smallpox scars. Earlier in the autumn we’d all partied on the loggia of our host’s house, which was on a hill alongside the apartment block, Chinese people singing Chinese opera into the gold and scarlet maple trees, Eastern European people reciting poems, copies of which would mysteriously appear in the police station in Cracow within ten days, Uraguayan men who’d been tortured smilingly drinking but never getting drunk. Recently, the parties had been indoors.

  A few nights previously I’d slept in the room of a Venezuelan boy who’d been visited by demons at night. The demons left that night.

  The countryside was under snow. There were gold ribbons around tree trunks for Thanksgiving. An Amish man with a lambchop beard passed us in a buggy, his wife in a poke bonnet beside him. Although it was winter little stores prominently advertised Midwest ice-cream.

  We stopped in a little pub where the graffiti in the lavatory said: ‘The anus is not a proper receptacle for the penis,’ ‘The pope said no to faggots,’ ‘Fags die,’ ‘Troops out of Northern Iowa,’ and we played two songs as two men with backwoods beards looked on in the darkness: Connie Francis, ‘Where the Boys Are’, and Bobby Darin, ‘You’re the Reason I’m Living’.

  ‘You know the poems of Louis l’Amour,?’ he asked me as we drove on. ‘Poems that tell stories. Well, that’s what you remind me of. Everything connects up, becomes part of a story.’

  We got out and walked. Vance was wearing a short wool coat of green and amber. There were lemon lights in isolated Norwegian houses. Lone figures were collecting firewood and someone had lit a fire in the snow. Cars were going by, to a local football match and to a Rolling Stones concert in Cedar Rapids, faces in the cars lit up, cherry-coloured football caps.

  In the winter of 1830 14,000 Choctaw Indians died trekking over 1,200 miles of swamps from Mississippi to Oklahoma after being cheated out of their lands by President Andrew Jackson at the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit.

  On 13 March 1847 Pushmakaha, chief of the Choctaws in Oklahoma, sent $710 to help the victims of famine in Ireland.

  Six years later, a lonelier person, under snow again, I would return to Iowa on a Greyhound bus, crossing the Iowa river from Illinois as Dolly Parton sang ‘My Tennessee Mountain Home’. And as I’d continue that journey the bus would be stranded at the Greyhound station in Cheyenne.

  Some weeks later, back in London, by chance I’d meet an Indian couple who lived near Cheyenne. The girl quiet like Vance, with thrusting china eyes, wax hair, near-celluloid features.

  But now I thought, to recover your dreams you’ve got to go through the snowy wastes. Nearly always alone. But sometimes there’s someone who volunteers to walk alongside you for a while. This time an Indian boy. He touches my shoulder and uses the Amish ‘thee’. His dark eyes are sad because soon people will be leaving, most of them back to their countries.

  But I won’t be going back to my country. I eschew the tribalism of my country in shame.

  ‘Ruby Tuesday’ was her favourite song.

  It was of Galway city she spoke in the weeks before she died, before she killed herself. The city she arrived in with her son.

  They’d both peeped through a window into a hotel where a room was arranged for a wedding reception, sherries in little glasses lining the table, a cake with a coach and cantering horses on top of it on a little table of its own.

  A tinker lady, scarf and coat on her, one of her front teeth missing, was sidled up against a wall with a sign in her hand: ‘Have your fortune read by Mada Brigid.’ There were pictures of Padre Pio all over Galway, inviting you on pilgrimage.

  An American band, in grey-green uniforms, with peach drums, had marched through the narrow streets, playing ‘Oh Suzanna’.

  In a church was a statue of Our Lady of Galway, with her symbols by her feet – a ship and a star.

  Further out the hills of Clare were blurred beyond Mutton Island, a football match in progress in a field by the bay.

  It was in this field, a football match in progress, that Eleanor and I had first kissed. After spending the night with her son in a red bus they hitchhiked to Connemara and stayed in a guesthouse in North Connemara which had a picture of Vincent de Paul in a kippa in three-dimensional lamination on the hallway wall. A window in the hallway looking to mountains of the palest blue she’d ever seen which brushed with scraggly marshland which was allowed a brief lemon colour before it was usurped by water the pale blue, the human blue, of Renaissance madonnas.

  She fell in love with this countryside and chose that her son go to school there. In the school he was taught that Tir-na-n-Óg, the Land of Youth, lay near Greenland. But the loveliness of the place could not save her nor him. He ran away to Scotland, then returned to Munich from where he started making forays to Verona where he injected himself with heroin and became HIV positive.

  In her last weeks there was her and him a lot, the couple, sometimes just herself as she looked in Berlin at the beginning of the fifties, flossed hair, skeletal thin legs. Interspersed with the images of Galway were tiny DDR postcards of Buchenwald in Weimar – the watchtower,
the crematorium – which had circulated at the beginning of the fifties. In between had been the glamorous years – clothes, films, travel – but HIV and Buchenwald seemed connected somehow, the same bleak toll of existence when the glamour was done with, when the colour photographs had been dispersed, the same account if some great effort were not made to redeem it.

  A mental hospital in Munich, a suicide in the first month of 1984, a song, ‘Ruby Tuesday’ – the keen along a corridor.

  Miranda returned to Zagreb for two weeks in the spring of 1992 before flying on to the United States. She took a plane from Berlin to Vienna. There was time to look around and she visited St Stephen’s Cathedral where she’d never been. A black woman with a hat on her head in the shape of an ibis was praying in front of her under a painting of Christ, in something which looked like a gold strapless evening dress. Then there was a plane from Vienna to Ljubljana. From Ljubljana she travelled by a red and white bus to Zagreb.

  Chess games, candle-holders, crucifixes, garlic, apples, oranges, bananas were sold by candlelight in the bus station. Most of the women wore purple-blue angora hats as if these were a product of the war. Soldiers had cotton underwrapping coming out from under their boots.

  Outside the station was a cluster of gipsy women, in spring-green smocks despite the war, in matador trousers, white socks with Slavic writing on them.

  Just a little on the way they passed a long mule-drawn gipsy cart with gipsy women walking alongside it. The almond blossom was coming out and you relaxed. You took deep breaths. Then suddenly there was the meander of war through the landscape. Eaves of roofs exposed and mashed like birds’ nests, with scavenged pines alongside.

  Immediately afterwards, going through a mountainside of pines, deer and boar peeped from the trees as if the times were serene.

  In an arcaded town a soldier with a rifle on his back sauntered along and entered a café.