Farewell to Prague

by Desmond Hogan

  In the next town they stopped. A barge of refugees arrived by a pier and she was reminded of the way barges were so popular during the Third Reich, and how you see photographs in junk shops all over Berlin of SS men on barges with women in fox furs or cheetah coats or in pork-pie hats.

  It was raining a little on the damson roofs. They had Pepsis and Fantas and coffees in a café where there was a black and white poster of a young Croatian punk, killed in the war, his face a web of blood – he used to mutilate himself during his performances. They entered Zagreb along an avenue double-lined with lime trees. A scarlet Coca-Cola sign was lit up on a high-rise.

  She wasn’t going to linger long in Zagreb, not because of the war, but because this independent Croatia was too small for her. She wanted to hold on to distance and she’d go on to the United States, teach, become a professor, use all the right, utterly debased and debasing jargon. After Berlin she’d never be satisfied again with soirées over an oil-cloth of rose-hips and blue roses.

  But no jargon could tell of the raping and murder of children, the torture of youths, the bombing of old people. Maybe a stained-glass window, made among the cornfields and the Quaker graveyards and the dirgeful autumn landscapes of the Midwest could get it across to someone, somewhere, that these things were part of her now, waking and sleeping, and always would be.

  The women pushing prams in the suburbs of Zagreb looked greatly more stooped now, and a small group of refugees, old people, the women in black, slowly moved along, their ikonostases in their bags now.

  Krzysztof went to Amsterdam, spring 1992, with Jo, a mulatto girlfriend who worked as a nurse in a hospital in Düsseldorf now. A boy had spat at her on the street the day after her arrival in the city of Berlin. ‘You’re not of the pure German race,’ a honey-haired receptionist at the hospital had told her a few days after she’d started working there.

  On the bus to Amsterdam there was a group of German men in Tyrolean hats. On a bridge across the Rhine in Düsseldorf three women stood in fedora hats, short fur coats, pressed slacks, just like women in the nineteen-thirties, while the bus radio played Leonard Cohen, Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye’

  In Amsterdam the lime trees were coming into blossom. The gable fronts of houses by the canals were like screens when the light was translucent. At other times there were different strands of colour webbed in the air over the canals. The first swallows had come. He imagined that this was how St Petersburg felt in the spring.

  Women held their vaginas in windows by the canals.

  The spring sun skipped along the bridges.

  Coming in on the train from Zandvoort aan Zee they passed a field of swans.

  They frequently called in on a café run by two black American twins in kilts who had lines of brightly patterned knitwear hanging up in the café.

  In the Russian Orthodox Church on Utrechtsedwarstraat they stood beside a Russian Orthodox nun for devotions. A little boy in a gold lamé dalmatic held a candle in front of an ikon which showed two figures kneeling before a tree which enclosed the Madonna and Child.

  There was a great peace in this city as if it was the most peaceful place in the world.

  They stayed in a house with a hedgehog over the door, the medieval sign of the gipsies – Wij Zigeuners – and there was a jar of dandelions on the doorstep.

  Etty Hillesum had once looked out of the window of one of these houses and seen a squad of green-uniformed young Nazi soldiers, and never been so frightened of anything in her life.

  ‘Your body feels very familiar to me. he whispers in his sleep to her at night in the House of the Hedgehog, and it is as if her mulatto body is the body of many people whose lives he has briefly crossed or almost crossed.

  One night all the neighbours came into the kitchen with banjos and guitars and there was singing and recitation. On the table were plates of Passover bread – bread with marzipan and currants – and bowls of beet salad. Jurgen had come, a friend of Krzysztof‘s who’d been HIV positive for eight years and who’d just cycled from Berlin to Amsterdam in two days. ‘The marigolds of the New Testament,’ Jo said. The phrase had come out of nowhere and she did not know what she meant by it.

  Carl Witherspoon visited his mother in Berlin, spring 1992. She lived in a street of stucco houses and chestnut trees in Friedenau. She sat, this grey-haired woman, in her customary solitude, in a black dress, in shadow, under Qian Long plates on the mantelpiece showing a crowned, black-faced boy, with a halo, surrounded by angels, the figures enclosed in silver fretwork. The ikon had been a gift from her Jewish father who escaped the Germans in the South of France by crossing the Pyrenees on foot. She was shortly going to leave Berlin and go to live in Zurich.

  He could see why.

  In Babelsberg in Potsdam, where he’d gone to meet a filmmaker, two Hell’s Angels were striding along, chanting ‘Sieg Heil. Sieg Heil.’

  The Wall was gone now, the years of safety. She would live beside some bougainvillaea in Switzerland. He looked at two cows on a cabinet with bells on their necks and scarlet ribbons, their cheeks plum-coloured, and at a Victorian scene of caramel cows, by a pine-lined brook, not far from raised wooden houses, under gusty Alpine-looking mountains.

  ‘They have never been resolved, those camps,’ she said. ‘In the East the memory of them was suppressed by the drab routine of socialism. In the West they threw a little glitter and American slang on them. But very few German people resolved them in their minds. And they passed this lack of resolution on to their children. These children who go around the streets with headphones and have no culture. You must have culture. I don’t want to know these children, to look in their faces any more.’

  Her husband, from whom she was divorced and who taught in Columbia, South Carolina, now, once called her accent, when she spoke English, Weimar, picked up from listening to Joseph Schmidt arias in English.

  They discuss his current girlfriend then.

  ‘She’s a Catholic and she’s got bad teeth.’

  And they have schnapps and, as the light fades through a stained glass showing the crucified Christ, very like the one they had in the chapel of Eton College where Carl went to school, they play Lale Anderson singing ‘Fernweh’.

  The time Eleanor and her husband had set for return to the United States was May 1992. In March they visited Berlin together, where they used to live, and from there went on to St Petersburg for a week.

  They left their child in Amsterdam with a rabbit who had a lachrymose stitch for a nose and a yellow key in its backside, a black walrus with a long rubber tooth, a head-scratching rhinoceros, an elderly teddy bear with long Arctic hair and spectacles, in blue dungarees, who looked like a Big Sur hippie.

  They stayed in Reinickendorf where they used to live.

  What would it be like to be back by a lake in Northern California with their daughter? The mystery and inner glow of religion had diminished in her – her husband’s fervour was undiminished. But she had a daughter and a comfortable life. Her husband was rich.

  Her mother, whose hair was champagne-coloured now, had written how the spring days in Dublin were fine and how she travelled to Dunlaoghaire each day to catch the sun, where she encountered her aunts, who wore spring dresses of hydrangeas, red daisies, blue braids and peach roses, who were militantly doing the same thing. She had to be careful not to become just another one of them.

  Would you and Jesse and Aoibhinn not come to live in Dublin? We have Mary Robinson now. I feel sorry I never travelled like you. The Isle of Man was our honeymoon. Lawlors in Naas was a great night out. Jimmy O’Dea and Harry O’Donovan kept us happy and many is the seditious pre-kiss we saw in the Regal Rooms. People rode bicycles as if they were on liners and Eszteryom, Cardinal Mindszenty’s archbishopric, was a place we could all see, alike, in ghouls and in palaces on steep hills, to Dracula’s Transylvania.

  But I have a longing for travel now and I’ve no one to go with – just the shadow I often look around and see now that your father
is passed away, a young man in a beret by St Stephen’s Green.

  I need the child I gave birth to in you.

  Why does that city haunt me day and night, Eleanor thought in Grünewald forest which was full of Russians and Poles, a Polish lady being pushed in a wheelchair. Wherever I go. Wherever I’ll go. The bombs of May 1974. The little back-street boys with Mediterranean faces and eyes that adhere to you. A young Carmelite in a cassock with the desire of a Caravaggio boulevard boy. A tin whistler’s medieval army march by the Liffey. The way the aquamarine skies attack you at the arched ends of alleys. The pejorative smell of a seaside urinal in the reverential rain. Something unresolved there. Something undone. It will always be the only city, wherever I go. The city I’m trying to come to peace with. The city I’m trying to forgive, but no forgiveness will come, will ever come.

  Remember the blond male prostitute Des and I saw being dragged out of the Liffey? He’ll always be Dublin for me.

  But there was the shape of a boy almost born there. A cherub like Nathaniel Hone’s Piping Boy.

  As fate had it, it was a little girl I was to have, in another land far from Ireland and I’ll soon be taking her even further away.

  But I give this to Ireland, the land of Mary Robinson, a kiss for my unborn son, the idea of him.

  When she’d first gone to the United States and passed over Yosemite National Park she’d thought: all the possibilities there are in life now, all I can do. Now she’d passed those possibilities on to a child.

  The cabbala said:

  He who dies without leaving children will not enter within the curtain of heaven and will have no share in the other world and his soul will not be admitted to the place where all souls are gathered, and his image will be cut off from there.

  She’d assured her place in Heaven. A child born out of travels, a report back to the day she saw dead and mutilated bodies in Dublin.

  A letter from Venice long ago; boys in amber jackets and rolled-up blue trousers in paddle boats on the floods of St Mark’s Square.

  Then a person forgotten forever.

  A little boy with black crimped hair, in a shell-suit, looked at her on Nevsky Prospekt. There were booths along the pavement.

  ‘Before, it was easy to survive,’ the hotel receptionist told her. ‘Now everything must go through corruption. And before, it was easy, corruption. Now the corruption is dangerous, violent and still there is the KGB, the army, the navy. They have the money.’

  Nevsky Prospekt was still covered with slush and some Irish tourists demonstrated the currency of their country to street vendors.

  In his last few days Marek had a persistent trance of a trail of mules crossing a hill of pollarded trees in medieval Swabia.

  ‘It takes all my strength to live, all my strength to die. If this is death my life was beautiful. I give to my friends das Zimmer, das ich immer gesucht habe, das ich niemals gefunden habe, wo sie ihren ganzen Kram hinlegen können, ihr Madonnas-Heer, ihren Schmerz.’

  Christmas 1984, the second Christmas Marek spent with me, we went with an Irish girl who was also staying with me to see the house of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who had lived near me.

  The girl was a social worker in a small Irish town and her current project was trying to get a tinker woman from stripping all the clothes-lines in the town.

  23 Manor Mount, Forest Hill. It was on a hill looking down on my home. Brown door, peeling bay windows, a line of gnomes’ heads across it, dormer windows on top. He used to go back and forth from there to Berlin in the nineteen-thirties.

  In Berlin, January 1991, when Marek was in hospital in Swabia, I visited Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s house in Berlin, 14 Wangenheimstrasse. A slabbed front yard, a circle of pine trees, snow-berries.

  And when I got to the hospital the first time, Marek half-asleep, I told him the story of how Dietrich Bonhoefer as a child during the First World War spent all his pocket money on a hen so he’d have eggs.

  ‘Tell me another story,’ Marek would often say when he was in hospital, so I told him about the Jewish lady I knew in Bethnal Green whose son, as a teenager, injured someone in a fight and was sent to Durham jail. When he got out he went to the United States where he worked as a stripper in a bar halfway between Salt Lake City and Las Vegas; he then came back to England, worked in a restaurant, and every Saturday night had Sabbath meal by the light of a menorah with his mother in Bethnal Green; of the Irish boy in Austro-Hungarian-looking squats in New Cross, who lived there with Dublin tinker men. He went off one day and got his hair cut, purchased an old suit and a tie with a yellow mandala in the centre of it and a pattern of two ties coming out of the mandala, one red, one maelstrom white, returned to the squat and was told that he was now sullied – he’d become a Brit.

  Stories don’t have to be long, they can be very, very short.

  And in exchange Marek told me stories about himself and his mother until their lives became part of my mind, of the labyrinth of stories of people whose lives you touch, which are continually flexing and growing so that your mind, when you think of them, becomes like a polychromatic Irish pub, with verre églomisé – back-painted mirrors, gilded and flashed glass, and encaustic glass – glass with patterns burned in, or like an Evie Hone stained-glass window in an Irish country church – sloe-blues, dove-greys.

  22 March 1992. On Kurfürstendamm an Irish boy with Cherokee black hair walks alongside me. He comes from a part of East Galway where they used to celebrate King James II’s birthday, 12 October, until recent times. His house when I visited it was like, for its items, a country auction. A muscular boy in a black polo neck reflected in a curvilinear mirror. What happened to that potential?

  But tonight he walks alongside me in the spring evening.

  A one-legged man plays with a rubber spider, bouncing him up and down on a string. A boy with a doll sticking out of his rucksack pushes a pram full of electric sockets. A woman with a crocheted cap strides with a staff. A man in cobalt sweeps the street. A woman in a short honey-coloured coat, in black tights, high boots, with a pony tail, walks a muzzled Airedale she calls Nadezhda. A boy wheels two tiers of flowers along, taking puffs from a cigarette. A man at a bus-stop plays Franz Lehar’s ‘Minne Lippen, Sie Küssen So Heiss’ on a green and mulberry accordion.

  On such a spring evening, full of white hawthorn, I first met Eleanor on a train going West in Ireland. On such a spring evening I returned by train, through the former DDR, from seeing Marek in hospital, past argent villages, deer forests, fields of rabbits, station houses with daphne and rows of red tulips outside and men in knee-length trousers and long stockings and two Homburg hats looking at the train.

  ‘Can’t go back home again, to the first country, or the second country. Got to move on.’

  Brigita’s ashes were brought from Munich and placed alongside Marek in the graveyard in Swabia that spring. The black chiffon scarves waved on the headstones in the graveyard, dots on them, hems of black cloth.

  In the doctor’s house afterwards I sat in a room where there was a photograph of a boy in Third Reich uniform beside a photographic shop, a paper ladybird on the photograph, miniature rondavel houses, a plant surrounded by ceramic geese, the clay stabbed with red polka-dotted mushrooms. These bits and pieces which are a legacy from one of life’s rare friendships. Like the aftertouch of someone’s hands. When you lose the intimacy, the closeness, the bits and pieces become diffuse, anarchistic, anonymous, a no man’s land, a greyness, and you’ve got to rally them again towards the shape of another friendship, an invitation into a room in a block of flats with its own kitchen witch and peach walls.

  Swabia: in such a country is the soul reborn; a village in the mountains, purple rain clouds behind it; a precipitous path through the mountains, over a valley; a wooden cross with a roof on it beside a clump of pignut; a lone ash tree which is tabbed with carved wooden goats on St Vitus’ Day, June 15; a soldier’s grave: ‘George Egger 4.6.1924 – 12.9.1941 Ist gefallen im Russland.’

 
In the Turkish Market in Berlin you see albums and albums of discarded family photographs. People who thought of themselves as families once and then scattered.

  My mother in a swimsuit of rhombuses and sea urchins and complicated shells on an island in Mayo on an ethereal blue day in 1968. Deutsche Schlager music coming from the hotel behind her.

  So the pattern builds up, a stained-glass window or a polychromatic pub, the bits and pieces, the shards of family history, of quest – your own or someone else’s. Not just the pictures behind the surface of things, but people who are obsessed with image, images they created, images of themselves, religious images.

  When you’ve kept a distance from Ireland for a while you realize how scarred people are by the history. Maybe not so much Dublin. But you still see it, for all the tinsel of modern Ireland. Like you see victims of the Holocaust in Europe, second- or third-generation victims.

  The journeys overlap and you’re not sure whether you’re seeking forgiveness for yourself, or whether you’re seeking forgiveness for someone else. The journeys make a collage. They become like the bits and pieces on an East European wall.

  In May 1991, on a day of purple lilac behind rusty railings in East Berlin, I visited a flat near Friedrichstrasse. There was washing hanging up in the sitting-room, tapestries on the wall, paintings, bits of embroidery, many photographs, photographs in oval frames on a dresser, cloth flowers on a biscuit tin which had a goldfish bowl on it.

  ‘It feels like an East European flat,’ I told the German man.

  ‘Yes, my wife is Hungarian,’ he said and a woman with raven hair in a bun, in a coral-pink blouse, peeped through the washing.

  One particular photograph I remember from that day – a woman in a smock-dress, V-opening on a white blouse and ankle socks in a cornfield, speckled by corn poppies, surrounded by beech trees, against a country mansion.

  A visit to an uncle who’d run away from his wife, in Shepherds Bush 1970. A black woman whose grey hair was speckled by constellations of white on the street outside the house. Beds in the kitchen and a young bricklayer sitting on one of them, smiling, the afternoon light catching his musculature which was pale despite his profession. A picture of Our Lady with a burning heart behind the boy, a garland of white roses around the heart. A smaller picture of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. There are other pictures trailed in, hugging in, the room – St Bonaventure, St Bernard of Clairvaux, St Joseph of Cupertino, Blessed Bernard Minni – which smelt of bed sheets and old antimacassars and Holland blinds and oatmeal and Spam and Marmite and patent shoes and old British rail tickets and the buddleia and burdock outside. It was like a scene from the Bible.