Farewell to Prague

by Desmond Hogan

  I could see my own cruelty, hypocrisy. It wasn’t a matter of making amends, but of channelling these things, turning them to good.

  I saw another country besides London, the Irish in England, a place where souls were redeemable.

  There had been trees once beside the British Legion hut and they’d been cut down. I could shield myself here in Prague. I could be alone here for a while. They wouldn’t be able to get me here.

  What are you running from? Don’t know. But I just run and run, looking for a place of safety.

  I keep thinking of my aunt who died, out of place in the family, of a broken heart.

  Berlin, 27 March 1992. Sitting in Krzysztof’s flat in Kreuzberg in the evening. He wears a blue denim shirt. Turkish boys, in Spanish high heels, with their shirts hanging out, do up their quiffs outside. Turkish men, in brown suits and pebbled ties, stand in clusters. A woman in chador goes by in a temper, holding a bottle of champagne. A boy rides a green stick, red diamonds along it, with a buffalo’s head at the top. The lady in Edwardian costume goes by with her hurdy-gurdy drawn by a donkey in socks, daffodils in his ears, the hurdy-gurdy playing Franz Lehar’s ‘O Signorina. O Signorina’.

  Kyzysztof tells me how his father, a teenage Nazi soldier, was captured by a Jewish resistance worker in the forest in Eastern Holland at the very end of the war and let free, allowed to run back into the woods.

  Tonight is a night of tranquility, yellow mimosa on the table.

  Maybe Krzysztof’s face, slightly simpleton and dimpled, is the face of the young American soldier.

  You see them all over the world, children of fifties Ireland. People with memories of Ireland’s Own, who had their knuckles rapped with rulers by Polish-looking piano teachers as trains went through marshy fields outside, who were canvassed for the Boy Scouts. Nervous squirrels. Not really welcome where they go. Pulling back a curtain of rich crimson and entering a pub at the base of a tall building. Eating marzipan cake shaped as a banana on a podium in a frugal Northern café with grill windows on a snowy day. Stealing down cramped medieval streets of steely houses with front gables, each house with a copy of the September bible. These flights into Egypt come from a reason. They saw something which unfits them to live in the society they come from. Sometimes at night, by a canal in a Northern city, a Lutheran clocktower over a lock, they hear it again, Lives of the Caesars on the radio and their own screams at night when at the age of twelve they’d go to a window to throw themselves out. On these flights you sometimes meet a kind person, as Nadezhda Mandelstam says. The silhouette of Prague Castle against embers in the sky maybe. As often as not you don’t recognize them, because you’ve become so distrustful of people and of yourself. But you learn that you’ve got to allow yourself to be humiliated again and again until you discover the kind person, until you make contact with them. In Dublin once a boy gave me a Mexican shirt, oyster white, indigo-blue patterns, oval bone buttons and it became a symbol of the city’s possibilities. Each new city was a prospective new shirt, a transcendence, a conquering of the pain, but in each transcendence – a red-haired woman looking at you in London, a candle burning on two embracing Cupids in Paris, a restaurant in Rome with fishnets on the wall which gave bills of yellow with burgundy lines – what was most beautiful about the place you came from: the gabled country houses with their hoards of faience, the eskars crossing the country, the boys with faces subverted by Spanish looks.

  France 1968, a Sunday afternoon car journey with a French family in the lashing rain. Suddenly I notice the place name. Avon.

  ‘A le cimitière! A le cimètiere!’

  There in the Protestant cemetery, in the rain, a small flowerpot on the grave, was Katherine Mansfield’s grave. I dislodged the mud on the inscription. A woman in a jaundiced coat looked on.

  ‘But I tell you my lord fool, out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.’

  On trips to Dublin with my mother in the sixties we’d always stop at Westland Row Church before getting the train back West from the nearby station, and once for some reason, on the church steps, she looked down the street, in the opposite direction to the station, to 21 Westland Row, the birthplace of Oscar Wilde. She may have been in a crenellated sultan’s hat, a sponge hat with tinsel-thin jetties, an ombré fungus hat, a fur hat – cream and grey in turn, a striped woollen hat with a beard around it, a mosaic hat of chocolate-coloured coins – two wings at the back, a coffee trellis hat with rhinestones in it, she may have been in pumps or she may have been in many strapped white sandals, she was carrying two handbags.

  For one moment these two Irish lives joined up.

  She who’d lost sisters as a child, later on a stepsister and brother, later on again another sister, who’d married and gone West.

  He who was jailed, reviled on Clapham Junction for half an hour, who was banished from home and children.

  There he is beside Lord Alfred Douglas, he standing, Lord Alfred seated, slightly bowed head, sculpted face – a West of Ireland face – in a school straw, a flash on his delicate high heel, grass at the bottom of the bench like wolf’s fur.

  With the veterinary student from Dublin I went to Oscar Wilde’s grave in Père Lachaise. I revisited it later, the autumn you left me, young people with algal hair strumming guitars among grave lighters by Jim Morrison’s grave which was a cloud of graffiti.

  And afterwards I walked the city, which smelt of pissoirs and wine, and remembered the Jugendstil decor of certain Dublin houses – damascened orchids on sofa covers – and ended up somehow in Gare St Lazare where some Irish nuns in madonna blue and stork white had got caught up among the prostitutes who smelt of violets.

  What Oscar Wilde did not know when he died was that his Salome would be produced with tumultuous success by Max Reinhardt in Berlin in September 1903, in the Neues Theater, with Gertrud Eysoldt.

  It is raining in Paris. Today I saw the Ingres in the Louvre, encrusted flowers on the tarboosh of a naked Turkish woman, braids of colour on the snood of a naked woman, a naked woman holding a curtain with fleur-de-lys-on it, jet dashes on ermine, geometric designs on a carpet. I also saw, elsewhere, Rodin’s La Pensée, a woman’s bonneted, fine-featured head in white marble.

  There is a sense of lives and lives of exile about this, the first city I have visited after Dublin, the paces of other people’s exile, cities, streets of exile.

  In Berlin tonight a young boy stood in the rain dressed as a ghost against a mauve light, all white, Ku-Klux-Klan type hood on him, white face, a red rose in his hand.

  So it ends, this concordance of Ireland and Eastern Europe. It is my piece of paper under a cairn of stones in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague, among the messages on salmon-coloured Munich bus tickets.

  The Polish lady stands outside the cinema, primrose hair, in a black suit and a scarf with cornflowers and wild strawberries on it, in solidarity with her people. The black and white stills in the case show beautiful young Polish people among war ruins. In the fair green beside the cinema a girl with a bouffant hair-do, home on holiday from England, sits in the grass with her English husband, who has a crescent of hair over his forehead, and their baby. The girl makes a daisy chain. Two old people are crossing the meandering path through the green. They become a Polish couple before the war – a man with firewood tied to a board on his back, a woman in a scarf with a pitcher in one arm and a basket of fruit in the other hand. The Polish woman has the solemnity about her of Polish women saying the rosary in unison in a church, in Berlin, standing for parts of it, kneeling for parts of it.

  Anyone who came to know Berlin in these years will feel what she is remembering – Auschwitz, Birkenau, Treblinka – wounds that opened again when the Schlager music had died down and when the holidays to islands in Yugoslavia had receded, calamities imparted but never really acknowledged, things that old ladies over poffertjis in cafés in Amsterdam will tell you about late in the evening, when the street outside is in copper flame, and Leonard Cohen is singing ‘H
ey That’s No Way to Say Goodbye’ on the juke-box which is crimson and yellow and sky-blue and mauve.

  ‘Once hit by it you are haunted forever.’

  There are other things you are haunted by now, that have slipped between you and the horrible memories, that is a force, a mystery more fixating, the beautiful legacy, the creative travail of lives which are over.

  One of the Christmases when Marek was going to school in Bavaria he spent with his mother in Lisbon.

  She’d just purchased the house in the Algarve and she met up with him there.

  It is the morning of the day after Christmas and they walk the streets of Bairro Alto. Nothing really stops in Lisbon at Christmas. The boys in singlets had sat early morning on the steps of the cinemas on Avenida da Liberdade, shoes alongside them, their heads on their laps.

  She wears black Cossack trousers, he’s in a black bomber jacket.

  ‘After the war I had a little bald Dixie doll with a bowed head given to me by a soldier called Buck from Opelika, Alabama, and I always dressed up to hold him, put on long white stockings, a dress with a lace ruff, because he looked so höflich.’

  ‘My mother used to put on a snood every morning for her Easter egg factory and people mistook her for a nun and often told her on the street how proud they’d been during Nazi times of Cardinal von Galen – Löwe von Munster.’

  A priest in a black cardinal hat, cassock, black coat, patina-thin shoes, carrying an umbrella, passes and bows to them.

  Shoe-shining shops are open with men in ripple-flap-fronted shoes on a dais.

  A little girl holds a lemon umbrella.

  A gipsy girl with gold hoops in her ears, in a flounced red dress and incongruous black canvas shoes with sequinned garlands on them, stands against a wall.

  A man in black on a stool holds a baby.

  The bakeries on Rua San Pedro de Alcantara are selling bolo rei – a barmbrack with crystallized cherries and pineapple and a surprise. The manager in a café with a sign in the window – ’Seja feliz enquanto esta vivo, porque voce vai passar muito tempo morto.’ (‘Stay happy while you’re alive because you’ll be dead long enough.’) – tells them that the surprise will be a good hiding. They also have, in this café, to celebrate Christmas, cocktails of fruit slices on custard and chocolate Swiss roll, sequinned on top.

  On Rua da Escol Politecnica they can see the whole city, with its yellow trams, and the Sandeman and Brandy Constantino advertisements alight on Praca de Pedro IV although it’s daytime.

  On the opposite side of the street to the panorama opening, on a street corner, is a mural of Francesco, Jacintha, Lucia having their vision.

  The Mother of God intercepting the world.

  When Brigita had been to Fatima she knew it could not have been in the basilica – it was too dull and ugly – but then she found the small church and thought here, it was surely here, it has the feeling.

  Perhaps that’s what life is all about, we should hold out for the visions. When we have a breakdown just wait, nothing more visionary than another person’s compassion.

  ‘He called God compassion,’ she says about Buck, who returned to visit them in the nineteen-fifties when he had a wife and children.

  The sound of a fado comes from the bar, one male voice singing part of it, another male voice answering, accordion music.

  In Marek’s mind a train of people on a beach north of Lisbon pulling fishing nets from the sea at evening.

  The bayan plays on the Leningrad train as Marek goes to sleep forever. A boy-musician, shirt off, beside an urn-like jar of apricot juice. Streams and streams of azure lupins go by the edges of forests. Juniper bushes. Meadows of rape which push back the forest. A little boy, ship with sanguine sails and underneath it a sea-dragon on his dungarees, sleeps on his father’s lap while a little girl with black-cherry curls smooths the little boy’s hair, chinks in her sandals.

  You in trousers like rainfall, sandals with a cross bar, a bar down the middle, chinks on front.

  Many of the ladies who peep in while passing the door have tabs of faux leopardskin somewhere on their garments.

  A boy on a railway platform in Ireland, petunias on the platform. Maybe it’s you. In a white shirt. Maybe it’s the boy who killed himself. In a black T-shirt and trousers of dog’s-tooth check. The boy becomes a woman and it’s your aunt. She had a Sephardic expression and wears a coffee-coloured summer dress. A chorus of girls stand on the railway bridge. Your aunt smells of old photographs taken in studios in Mul-lingar and from the canal there’s a smell of waterlilies, which look like blowsy madonnas.

  Times and people merge now, and fact and fiction cross in the Russian midsummer, become indistinguishable from one another, in one sentinel moment.

  It’s things, people, coming into a consciousness of themselves, and it’s East European and Irish worlds bordering on one another and it’s people normally denigrated given a chance, and there’s a touching, an abrasion with a consciousness which has just passed out of life.

  He knew your country, the West of your country, but now the train goes through the mirror and it passes through the East of your country. Sycamores, horse-chestnuts, copper beeches. Rock in the fields like pearl seed. Walls which are testaments to landlords. Eskars which beckon you on a journey. Gabled houses. Crofters’ cottages. A distant friary. Forever lolling piebald horses.

  The train stops at a small station and there’s a woman in a black silk blouse with lapis lazuli hanging from her neck.

  Her son gets off the train. They embrace. It’s the boy who committed suicide. He stares at me now from a curvilinear mirror in which the meadow behind him changes into Russian grass with scarlet bellflowers.

  The evil is always inside you. What you’re running from. You’ve got to deal with that.

  The husbands of those women who were abused in the town I came from; they had their own vulnerability. It was a clash of opposites, those marriages, marriages which destroyed the women.

  You brought venom in Dublin on yourself by carelessness with other people’s emotions, a clash with sedentary people, people who were content and happy to stay there.

  Marek and Brigita, they killed one another.

  ‘Yet each man kills the thing he loves.’

  But I know, despite all my contumelies, there’s still the child, although the child has become a counter-sign in new cities with new shades of tram.

  You used to take the train to Dublin as an adolescent, and when it touched the outskirts of Dublin, Ballyfermot, the council houses, everything, became Russian.

  You’d dawdle on winter nights over the Liffey, wanting to be approved by the lights on the water, poppy, lemon, blue-mauve, magenta.

  One winter night outside a shop on Eden Quay you saw daffodils, hothouse daffodils, blanched scrolls around their necks, lime in their youthful heads, and you became excited. They made you think of Russia. The Russian spring after the Russian winter. A tram going through Moscow, a man about to die, a woman in a cornflower dress walking alongside the tram. ‘He thought of several people whose lives run parallel and close together but at different speeds …’ That was the half sentence which had stayed in your head.

  You felt at one with people in Eastern Europe whose lives were running parallel to one another like different coloured trams and that killed the loneliness.

  The boy in the polka-dot carrot shirt who’d been playing an accordion on O’Connell Bridge became an ikon.

  The woman in the shop in the Legion of Mary blue coat, with red cheeks and ebony perm, looked at you as if you were daft.

  Bridget was your friend then, though you were forbidden to see her, but you telegrammed emotions telepathically to her and she to you. You told her in this way about what you were looking at.

  She’d pushed a note through your door to say goodbye, a print of lilacs on the top of it and the paper slightly perfumed.

  That perfume became the whiff of daffodils now.

  Daniel was also your friend, but
he’d withdrawn from school and was about to go to England in a kerchief.

  One Christmas as a child he stood in a blue denim suit on four tables thrown together as a stage in the National School and sang ‘Mary’s Boy Child.’

  Something about these boys of the West of Ireland was altogether different. It was another country, the West of Ireland. The generosity was so tantamount and the capacity for pain sometimes unendurable – there were many victims. Maybe their romanticism was not compatible with the world.

  Each lap of the journey has been like something passed on from one person to another, a message, a secret, an ultimatum – a boy in smoke-blue and a cinnabar-red kerchief going down a road by a melted blue bog in 1967.

  It’s as though I had to go on this journey to see my own sins. It’s as though I had to go on this journey in order to know that the romanticism we grew up with was truthful, that there is a home for it.

  In a tailor’s shop on Hauptstrasse in Berlin I once saw a poem on the wall by Nelly Sachs about moving. The Berliner who moved to another country and never came back.

  ‘It’s not where I thought I’d end up,’ Mr Haythornthwaite said. ‘On a street of council houses.’

  ‘Yes, but we make lands out of these places.’