Farewell to Prague

by Desmond Hogan

  In the mid-nineteen-forties my grandfather came over from Ireland to London, called because his son was dying of a mysterious illness. He had only been to England once before: he’d gone to a fair in Wakefield where he’d bought his wife a pianola. He came with a little suitcase, in a brown hat and brown suit, the carob colour Turkish men wear in Berlin.

  On the bus to South London the bus conductor had told a story in a singsong music-hall voice.

  ‘An Irishman knocked on a door in Scarborough and asked for a glass of water. “There’s no water,” the lady said, “The government have turned off the waterworks.”

  ‘“Never mind,” said the Irishman. “Give me a cup of tea.”’

  A giant woman in a scarlet scarf vociferously shook hands with a tiny woman in a pillbox hat at the top of the street, like two characters on a cartoon postcard.

  In the room was a picture of teddy bears in dinner jackets serving glasses of champagne.

  The ginger-blonde English girl stood by the dying boy in mulberry Cuban-heel sandals with bow straps on the front. She’d been the soldier queen in a village in the Home Counties, stood on a wagon drawn by a dray horse, in an oyster satin dress the colour of yellow ivory.

  A brother of his had gone on a paddle steamer down the St Lawrence River, many invalids with crutches on board, a priest hearing confessions on the boat, to the basilica of St Anne de Beaupré where people, if their intercessions were heard, had paintings of thanksgiving done on the walls of the cathedral.

  The man said he’d have a painting of thanksgiving done in a church somewhere if his son was saved.

  His son died.

  ‘Early to go. Ain’t it?’ said the landlady, who was in the room.

  His girlfriend said afterwards, ‘Don’t know whether he had a premonition or not. Four months ago he said, “I don’t want to be buried in England. I want to be buried in Ireland: the Rick, County Westmeath.” I don’t know why he said that.’

  The comment of a woman in County Westmeath became widely known: ‘I give credence to reports that he died as a result of sexual indulgence while serving in the British Army.’

  Went with my mother to Rick, County Westmeath, once. Two cemeteries, one facing the other. Over my aunt’s grave I was reflected in a glass dome which had the Sacred Heart in cellophane inside it. A little boy in a blue coolie-type coat. There was the smell of bog myrtle and nearby was a rusted railway bridge by a clump of lilac bushes, a girl hesitating on the bridge in a dress with a scalloped print and in white barred rubber sandals.

  We then went on to Bray, County Wicklow.

  My mother with mussed black hair, the glimpse of an earring, a blouse with picot edges, cerise smile against the bay windows of sea houses.

  Me in the sea, endomorph father above me.

  Then a photograph of my father in a pearl-grey suit, three peaks of a hankie in his breast pocket, sitting on rails, against the sea in Bray, staggeringly handsome, all the beauty of the Wicklow Mountains dipping to one side.

  My mother, my father and me, advertisements for Bradmola and Dundyl and Go-Ray behind us.

  By the billiard-table-green sea edge my father and I met a priest in a black plastic hat, his gown pulled up in an oyster shape and still a cassock underneath.

  Girls who were born around 1918 made their Holy Communion in Moslem-shape white veils, perhaps gathered into white roses at the side or maybe a loop on top, got partial indulgences at the Eucharist Congress summer 1932, were teenagers in the De Valera years, courted during the war, married just after the war – picotees and fern in the buttonholes of their suits – some were not satisfied to leave it just there, marriage, children.

  A photograph of my wild aunt beside fool’s parsley where the canal ended at Mullingar.

  I saw her ghost there as the trains went West from Dublin, lilies on the canal, and she was a Russian woman that evening for me.

  When she died six Japanese plates, depicting slender geisha girls and pagodas by autumn streams, came down from her house to us, and a golden gondola with a little cabin on it which had broadcloth curtains on the windows.

  Eleanor returned to the United States June 1977. I went to live in Battersea October 1977. The following May I followed her. I got a plane to New York and a Greyhound bus across the United States.

  In the Greyhound bus station in Saint Louis a boy with Maureen O’Sullivan and Tarzan on a tree on his T-shirt and an embossment of a clump of bananas on his jeans, came up to me and said, ‘I know you.’

  He didn’t.

  There was a dog-rose and tangerine sunset over the arched, lighted Pioneer Bridge.

  On the bus was a German boy, a Greyhound bus brooch on his jacket, running away from Germany to San Francisco, who until recently had been sleeping in the porches of the old houses of Kreuzberg.

  The America we went through seemed to be one of back-ways. Small villages: scroll-work houses, white-spired, redbrick churches, general merchandise stores, advertisements for old products – Conté’s ice-cream, Nestle’s.

  In Salt Lake City a group of men got on, all in the same grey suit and schiller tie.

  I stayed with acquaintances from Dublin, people who were testing San Francisco, near Russian Hill. Eleanor was living in Northern California.

  One evening a boy from Dublin, who was a member of Eleanor’s religious group, brought me for a drive in his Barracuda.

  On a hill under Gold Gate Bridge, looking to Sausalito, he said, ‘By the way, Eleanor Munelly is getting married.’

  On our travels in the fall of 1977, when we’d seen Orion over the Pacific and whales going South, we’d met a boy called Beck who looked like a candle which had become molten. He lived in a room which was crimson and damask but for collages of David Bowie photographs.

  He and I drove south in his Cadillac. He wore a shirt with swallows on it. I wore a shirt with autumn leaves on it. We were like people who followed a doctrine of shirts. They were talismans, the tales these shirts told.

  We walked through towns with Spanish-American alleys over the ultramarine, the comic-book colour of the Pacific. We walked along beaches full of boys with heraldic musculature and faces, with the pores dilated, which looked as if they were suffering from a disease of the epidermis. Boys were surfing on the sea. We walked and walked along beaches which had wild geraniums growing alongside them until the sun was going down behind a little lighthouse, a little yellow sentinel in a golden sky, and the boys were still coming in and there was the smell of barbecue fires and calypso oleander.

  Against the blue of the Pacific that day, beside the mosaic of Beck’s face, I felt my loss, my hurt, the destruction, but also life as a new collage, a collage reassembled from this destruction. There were lives I could understand now that I’d never been able to understand before and there, against the ocean, in Southern California I saw the workhouse in our town before it was burned down, and a blind man from our town traversing the orange peel at Ballybrit races, led by a little boy with a smock of hair on his forehead.

  The light of the Pacific was a nuclear light, the light of an explosion inside me. Everything I’d been had been changed and I’d have to start anew, a new shirt, a grief, a throbbing of pain always there. Part of me gone.

  ‘Once hit by it you are haunted forever.’ I felt that from that day on I’d be homosexual rather than heterosexual, Dublin had twisted a part of me and I’d never recover. Near the workhouse once had been green trees and behind those trees the Royal British Legion Club and inside photographs of young men who’d fought in the Somme or Givenchy or Ypres or Passchendaele.

  The survivors sang songs of the war just as a little boy at a country fair would sing of ‘Spancil Hill’ and by song, by story, not just stories of the war but stories of the lady of the manor who had been a London music-hall artiste and who used to go around the streets in a red coat, with grey horses once, we were transported and shared their experiences. By song, we seemed to go back and back until we encountered the first wanderers,
those who were first traumatized, in our ancestry.

  Beck wore a trinity ring. For friendship. For me from that day on it would be for wandering.

  Before the Celts came there was a race in Ireland and the Celts, in turn, treated them as slaves, treated them animalistically, so they wandered the roads of Ireland, tin-smiths, ironmongers.

  On the Mexican border, where you could get the smell of sewage pipes and blanched sand of Mexico, Mexican boys in baseball caps wandered through the streets with macaws in cages, stores sold pictures of the Virgen de San Juan and the Virgen de Guadalupe and Thérèse of Lisieux beside conch shells by candlelight, a mariachi band on a bandstand played ‘South of the Border’ and ‘Show Me a Home Where the Buffalo Roam’. I didn’t have my passport but I knew I’d come back some day, cross into Central America.

  Inside myself, in a room in Shepherds Bush with a collage of Botticellis and Filippo Lippis, I sang ‘My Love Is Like a Red Red Rose’ before I left for the United States that year; on my return I sang ‘The Last Rose of Summer.’

  She came Christmas 1976 and stayed until Easter, apart from a few brief journeys, mainly back to Germany.

  She arrived on a grey-green train in an anorak with fur edges. The station-master, with his waxed moustache, watched them embrace.

  That first time she came she brought in a sailor’s bag old magazines in which her photograph appeared – alongside that of Kurt Jurgens and Jacques Sernas and Gina Lollobrigida. A photograph of her in a white dress with black chiffon coming below it and a pair of pink Joyce’s shoes she’d gotten from the United States, on top of a Chevy convertible, taken in 1960. She also brought in the sailor’s bag a button-down sailor’s jersey for him.

  There was an effigy of St Nicholas in the local church in a peach burnous, cross around his neck, a basket of gourds and apples and purple grapes on his back and a little white teddy bear peeping out of the top.

  Pierina, the woman who looked after him, would come in the mornings with fresh herbs to put in the room where they slept in twin beds. There was a crucifix with dried flowers under it in the room. Pierina would often fry potatoes, mixed with juniper berries, in the mornings.

  At midnight mass on Christmas Eve in the church of gold stucco which had a picture of Maria-Einsiedeln in it, she sat in a black dress with a choker of ostrich-egg pearls at her neck.

  For Christmas lunch they had rape-seed soup in bowls of Dresden china, tunny fish with leaf parsley and babas au rhum.

  On the night after Christmas they saw The Song of Bernadette in the local cinema. The Movietone News had shown an American nuclear carrier ship. When there was an interval for the reels to be changed the children and the clociaro youths stamped their feet on the ground. At the end of the film was a swaying procession, a torchlight procession. The earth around the cinema was dark from the shadow of trees covered in leaves and in summer and autumn you came here to gather truffles, avoiding the little vipers who’d make their home among the leaves.

  After the film they had balls of cheese melted on skewers over the fire and Frascati for supper.

  In January when the local people got colds they put wax paper with mustard on it on their bellies.

  Their first unhurried trip to Rome was to see the Caravaggios in the Galleria Borghese – John the Baptist in a vermilion cloak, David holding the head of Goliath, the Madonna, naked child beside her, stamping on a serpent. Afterwards, they saw a crowd of boys over a brazier as in a Caravaggio or a Georges de la Tour.

  It was that day they found a café on Via Merulana which they visited, from them on, every time they went to Rome. They sat over an oil-cloth with patterns of menorahs on it. The proprietress had powder on the front of her hair. There were fly-catchers hanging from the ceiling. On a nickelodeon you could play Puccini. His photograph was on the wall, seated beside Elsa Szamosi who was dressed as Madame Butterfly for the Budapest production and on a little shelf a statue of Madame Butterfly in a pink sarafan, her hair jutting up in two loops.

  There Brigita played the humming chorus a lot and ‘Ch’ ella mi Creda’ from ‘Girl of the Golden West’ and ‘Mimi e tanto Malata’.

  A red-cheeked Punchinello on the street, in the hand of a little man with a pince-nez, said to her one day, ‘Che bel figlio tu ai!’

  In February the Judas trees and the wisteria and the lemon trees and the mulberry and the almond started coming into bloom, and the daisies.

  Brigita, in a garnet-red coat, went to the Café Leroy on the Cola di Rienzo to have peach ice-cream with film veterans from Germany, people she used to frequent the café-chantants of Hamburg with in the late fifties and early sixties, listening to accordions and pianos and cellos and violins – songs about the sea sung by men in peaked caps.

  Marek and she saw pictures on the walls of the catacombs of San Callisto by torchlight, the stricken, beautiful, doomed madonnas, child Jesuses of the first Christians. A mother shielding a child. A lot of red in it, cinnabar red of Eastern Europe. For fear it was like a photograph of a Jewish family, the man with a goatee, the wife and two daughters in pixie hats, being hounded on a cobbled street in Memel by the Nazis.

  They went to the Church of San Agostino where there was a diamond in the Virgin’s crown in honour of the conversion of the Irish poet Oscar Wilde to Catholicism on his deathbed. A man had given it to a girl but said that she must give it to this madonna when Oscar Wilde was converted.

  They walked Rome at night with the Coliseum lighted up, reflections of trattorias in Marek’s Arabic eyes.

  Old men drank grappa outside the cafés on the Piazza Navona in the afternoons, they and the olive vendors sometimes looking to the water-spouting, naked river gods in the fountain.

  Muzio, the tow-headed flower-seller at the foot of the Spanish Steps, sold geraniums, alyssum, violets, marigolds, phlox, white carnations, myrtle wreaths, mimosa.

  On February 25, Marek’s birthday, they went to Mario’s in Trastevere, someone playing ‘Addio a Napoli’ on an accordian outside.

  Come March, azaleas in bloom, they took trains from the San Paolo station to Ostia where boys rode the beach, past the rows of bathing huts, in pale sunshine, on motor-bikes. Boys in vests and cut-downs looked at Brigita and Marek.

  As they sat on the beach one fine afternoon they heard a worrisome noise, like the sound of a foghorn, from way out at sea.

  Sometimes now there was a Saturday night dance, on a wooden platform under poplar trees, near their house, boys standing around in peach jackets and ties of peacock-green and malachite.

  Marek now wore ties for their visits to Rome – a tie with ladybirds on it, a tie with pink elephants in blue dungarees, an orange tie with mushrooms which had sequinned tops.

  Both of them holding on to the handrail of a bus which was going along by the Tiber, she in a tangerine velour turban hat, he kissed her, the water low and showing the white river walls.

  She left him for a few days to go to Taormina with a German lover and a photograph of her appeared in a movie magazine, buried up to her breasts in sand.

  One weekend, excerpts from Puccini were shown on a screen in the open air on the Piazza Farnese – Madame Butterfly, her hair like the inside of a kiwi fruit, giving her son the USA flag and a doll as she blindfolds him; the end of Tosca’ – the shooting by firing squad of Mario Cavarodossi, and Tosca jumping off the ramparts of the Castle Sant’ Angelo with a view of the Vatican in the distance.

  Marek wore ribbed vests now and had a GI haircut.

  They’d take a passeggiata in the evenings under the apricot trees on the Via Calatafimi, she wearing a muslin dress and he always changing for this to an American summer shirt with copper or gold or Rembrandt brown in it.

  Come April, there was an ensemble of little boys, who’d just made their Holy Communion, in the woods, in cocoa-coloured suits, turned-up collars, scarlet dicky bows, rosaries on their sleeves.

  Then she left, back to Munich for an assignment.

  He didn’t want to be without her,
he was raggedly tall for his age and he followed her, never to return here.

  In Munich, twelve years old, he accompanied her to film parties in ties with ringed planets on them and coral-red ties with yellow prisms.

  ‘Wessen Sohn? Wessen Tochter bist du?’ Dancing under strobe lights, the first marijuana.

  His mother saw that he was growing up too early and in the autumn he was sent to a boarding-school in Bavaria where he spent two years before being sent to school in the West of Ireland.

  4 October, Feast of St Francis, he started.

  In the West of Ireland school, in a composition book, he wrote an essay about a Christmas fair in Bavaria, a carousel of real ponies with faux-ermine-looking fur, a roundabout of ladybirds, Bavarian men in romper suits and fedora hats dancing in a tent robbed by the Nazis from a Dutch seaside resort – a pink baldaquin, Jugendstil mirrors at the side – and a flamethrower throwing up a torch which was reflected in all the mirrors.

  Mimi e tanto malata.

  Before she died she saw water rising on Atlantis.

  She remembered the scene of a terrorist bomb during a Puccini opera.

  Her face looked like a Georges de la Tour face, a beautiful face cracking into pieces.

  ‘The glamorous years, the movies, the talk, the drink, the forgetting. A horrible marriage but a beautiful child. Mother and son. Like in a Renaissance painting. But this ikon could not save us, could not protect us. But there was a legend and our love and images will go on, through transference to the people whose elbows we touch, we alarm.’