Farewell to Prague
Page 24
The stories come like the sound of a bayan, they come in bits and pieces, you make your own sense out of them.
When I went with my storyteller friend from North Conne-mara on a pilgrimage to Fatima we were on a wild beach north of Caiscais one day when I said I wanted to go for a swim. I did not have my togs so she removed her prune-purple panties and I went swimming in them, they falling around my loins.
In Berlin I read how during the Second World War Russian soldiers on the front had carried poems by Akhmatova and Pasternak on scraps of paper.
‘For now we see through a glass darkly …’ When I go to Ireland now, on sea-fronts I go into arcades with games machines and snooker tables, where people drink from styro-foam cups, and sometimes there is a room with distorting mirrors. It’s as though I’m going through one of those mirrors now and meeting the victims and asking: What happened? Why?
In Leningrad there are games rooms with chandeliers made up of little banana shapes, swans and horses on which children can ride, murals on the walls of pig majorettes.
When you were being washed out to sea in Cornwall it was that landscape which redeemed the sea, East Galway, its Irish dancing green. The boys from that landscape who’d died, been murdered in a way, made me live.
‘Child of the fifties, I was very much in love with life. But I failed psychiatry at UCD, and despite the fact that I was very beautiful I didn’t have a girlfriend, there was no prospect of a girlfriend, and they made me feel a failure, a eunuch. I did not fit into chauvinism, into categories. It was the pressure on me, like a bombardment.’
For three years Leningrad was bombarded, people queued for twelve hours for food, they ate bread which tasted of kerosene, they burned books for fuel, in summer they ate wild herbs and grass.
I walk along sea-fronts in Ireland on sunny days, promenades on which my parents and I were photographed against Bradmola and Dundyl and Go-Ray advertisements. I always feel on the other side of a glass here.
Two photographs of Mr Haythornthwaite and his beloved on sea-fronts. One on the promenade at Cliftonville, she in a dress with horses and striped riding jackets framed in straps on it. Another on the promenade at Burnham-on-Sea, she in a dress with men in tricorn hats on it and Venetian palaces. Two photographs. Only two or three mentions of her.
A local girl aged forty, walking along Salthill promenade in 1959, with a young actor from the travelling players with whom she was having an affair. She’s in black and white penguin shoes and a dress with wine leaves on yellow and he, holding her hand, is in a khaki shirt, chinos, loafers.
In Leningrad pink candyfloss is dispensed in a games arcade. There are holes in the faces of a man gobbling spaghetti and a frumpish waitress in a mini outfit bringing him a fresh supply where you can have your photograph taken. A woman is reading a UFO magazine over a counter display of prizes – a pink pig with white hair playing a bayan, a pig lewdly offering its udders to piglets, bears running a coal train, an ape eating a banana, Michelangelo’s David, but he’s grinning, a coach drawn by prancing meringue horses, David’s Napoleon, a plain-looking fifties type bus, a clock with ears of doves, a whale with big round eyes and its tail in the air.
On a newspaper stall on the street is a jar of anemones and pink roses and gilia with a ruff of cake paper. Above the flowers is a picture of a woman, black-haired with a fringe, lonely-faced, in a floral dress.
A guesthouse with bay windows near the sea in Ireland is called Yorkland House and has gleaming purple rock flowers on the walls.
‘Gudgie. Gudgie. Gudgie,’ a woman in a dress of red pomegranate flowers bends over the go-cart and starts tickling you.
A woman sits on a bench by the sea now in a dress with gift boxes on it, the lids orbiting around the boxes, telling her rosary on green perspex beads.
The stucco streamers over the houses are painted red now.
Where did the unhappiness begin, mental illness set in?
But Salthill, August 1954, my parents’ faces have a loveliness. Those faces don’t seem made to be hurt by life. My mother smiles, the camera catches her smiling right on against advertisements for Max Factor of Hollywood and Trebor sweets. Latin, almost out of place hair, cherry bow-lipped smile.
Truth to tell, she is an exile here in the West of Ireland, among a husband and children she mostly does not understand.
Leningrad tugs you back, it is seeing through the glass.
The yellow trams go by under the lime trees and sailors with blue and white striped Vs at their necks dawdle in little parks under the trees. Women in terracotta dresses with chamomiles on them sell kvass from barrels on the street.
In the churches, fluted vases of flowers on the ground, women stand beside ikons of the Mother and Child like Jewish people stand before the Wailing Wall.
Hotel Sancta Maria. Hotel Rio. Hotel Monterey. Beronda House.
In our house when our grandfather came to live a calendar arrived each year, always with the same picture, the basilica of St Anne de Beaupré by the St Lawrence River in Canada.
Down the river on the paddle steamer, a Breton accordion playing, flag with the maple on it flying, confessions on board, hay being turned and Canadian goldenrod growing by the sides of the river, to the cathedral in Montmorency County where we paint our votive pictures – paintings of thanksgiving – on the walls.
The whales going down the coast of Northern California, fall 1976.
On a road in Northern Alabama, faces of home-going football fans being lit by other cars, a woman hums ‘May the circle be unbroken by and by Lord, by and by.’
In a room in Louisiana at Thanksgiving a boy in a tartan dicky bow, who’d been in a penitentiary, says grace, and then the Acadian accordion plays, a statue of Our Lady of Montser-rat in the room with tiny cactus plants in front of her which have flowers on their heads, the sun going down over the bayous in divers colours.
At the burial of a boy in Swabia a youth plays an accordion, a Southern States song, ‘Lord, Didn’t He Ramble?’; brief life, AIDS death, but a life of divers colours.
The woman with the sherry-gold wig plays the accordion on Nevsky Prospekt, the V of a dress with sunflowers with red and blue centres through her coat, American flag on her lapel; people in brown alpaca converge on me; there is the smell in the air of the wild grasses people ate during the bombardment.
I see the boys of the West of Ireland, heavy-browed, black-haired. ‘Many were good heroes, flame-like.’
In the Jazz Club there’s a boy in a shirt and polo neck with black hair.
The gilt-edged mirror on the stairway catches the mosaic of a blond boy’s face.
The woman sings, ‘God, if you can’t send me no woman, then send me a sissy man.’
The sun flashes on the mirror and you are walking along a beach in Southern California with Beck on a very blue day, knowing you had to create a new mosaic in yourself, a new country, a new language even.
A gilded and encaustic mirror in an Irish pub, a stag’s head over the till, catches your parents August 1954. She’s in a yellow blouse with white borders with roses on them, he with orange hair, not the mahogany-orange hair of his brothers. They leave the pub and go on their way in a nunc dimittis from the reflection of the sea in the mirror.
There is a bit of stained glass in the pub, and sunlight which has been withholding itself breaks through the opaqueness and the years are thrown into a radiance like a meadow of poppies in Prague after a thunderstorm, and there are cohesions between the bereftitudes and a sediment of totality like a row of orphaned, mainly coffee-coloured, Japanese plates on a wall, or like postcards on the wall which are poultices on a wound on the brain, or like the picture of the Cathedral of St Anne de Beaupré, or like stories which are grafts, lesions – or calls to new countries – on the brain, and the years converge on now.
The gilded and encaustic mirror catches you as you are now, you seem to be in one part of the pub and everybody else in another part.
When you played in Oklaho
ma! at school, Christmas 1966, and the show was over the last night and you were walking home, down the mud laneway, the rest of the actors were singing in the distance ‘The Green, Green Grass of Home’ and you felt like Berlin feels on 6 January when the Christmas trees are ritualistically dragged out and dumped.
That Christmas, the year your friendship with Bridget was broken up, Dublin became Leningrad, rescuing you, your dreams.
A boy with arctic flaxen hair and cobalt eyes in a rose-scarlet shirt snuggles against the pipes in the urinal under the Irish Life building on Burgh Quay.
On Burgh Quay is a café, with pink walls and a glass pillar of rippling water, which sells cakes with pink icing and fruit cocktail and ice-cream of lavender, and a woman with bobbed henna hair sits alone on one of the vermilion seats, gold knobs in front of her high heels.
In the window of a small maroon-buff-fronted socialist shop on Tara Street is a picture of the youthful Maud Gonne with jackdaw eyes.
‘Keep on the right side of the shadows,’ her look seems to say.
Beside a hall door is a palmist’s sign with the diagram of a palm and there is a diagram of stars in the sky.
The accordion plays ‘The Last Rose of Summer’.
I walk through the glass, but first encountering other phantoms by the Liffey – mirrors to your own desolation – and scribble on ghostly foolscap.
‘October 1977. These days are recognition that you are gone. National Library, cycling, dinners. Mr Tambourine in the Coffee Inn. Goodbye.’
And there is in passage the screen, the shield, the translucence of another city, Prague – an interim, a meditation, a summons.
Gulls skim the jetties of light of the Liffey in sleek strides and they remember the tang, the narratives, the accordion music of the Liffey in the tremulous and mosaic-making midsummer light over the Fontanka Canal. Gounod’s ‘Ave Maria’ sounds from one of the canal-side houses. The fanlights are those of Cork, of Dublin.
So Dublin would always stay Leningrad a bit, the Liffey, Tara Street flats, the little shop at the corner of Burgh Quay and Tara Street which is there to this day, the detritus of the colour lavender.
Leave something in Leningrad and you’ll come back, throw a coin in the Neva or the Fontanka or the Obvodnogo or the Moyka.
In the upper window of a house an ebony-haired woman is looking out, the tattoo of a ladybird on the cup in her hand. She still has an Edwardian poise. She has been spat at. She has been abused like the women in my town were abused long ago. Her bags packed beside her, she is ready to move to another abode, another country even. But like a Georges de la Tour Madeleine at the flame she stares out now at the city whose rags and orphan walls have adhered to her.
DESMOND HOGAN was born in Ballinasloe, Ireland. He has published five novels as well as several books of stories and a collection of selected travel and review pieces. In 1971 he won the Hennessy Award, and in 1977 the Rooney Prize for Literature. He won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1980 and was awarded a DAAD Fellowship in Berlin in 1991.
MICHAL AJVAZ, The Golden Age.
The Other City.
PIERRE ALBERT-BIROT, Grabinoulor.
YUZ ALESHKOVSKY, Kangaroo.
FELIPE ALFAU, Chromos.
Locos.
IVAN NGELO, The Celebration.
The Tower of Glass.
ANTÓNIO LOBO ANTUNES, Knowledge of Hell.
The Splendor of Portugal.
ALAIN ARIAS-MISSON, Theatre of Incest.
JOHN ASHBERY AND JAMES SCHUYLER,
A Nest of Ninnies.
ROBERT ASHLEY, Perfect Lives.
GABRIELA AVIGUR-ROTEM, Heatwave and Crazy Birds.
DJUNA BARNES, Ladies Almanack.
Ryder.
JOHN BARTH, LETTERS.
Sabbatical.
DONALD BARTHELME, The King.
Paradise.
SVETISLAV BASARA, Chinese Letter.
MIQUEL BAUÇÀ, The Siege in the Room.
RENÉ BELLETTO, Dying.
MAREK BIEŃCZYK, Transparency.
ANDREJ BITOV, Pushkin House.
ANDREJ BLATNIK, You Do Understand.
LOUIS PAUL BOON, Chapel Road.
My Little War.
Summer in Termuren.
ROGEÁR BOYLÁN, Killoyle.
IGNÁCIO DE LOYOLA BRANDÃO,
Anonymous Celebrity.
Zero.
BONNIE BREMSER, Troia: Mexican Memoirs.
CHRISTINE BROOKE-ROSE, Amalgamemnon.
BRIGID BROPHY, In Transit.
GERALD L. BRUNS, Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language.
GABRIELLE BURTON, Heartbreak Hotel.
MICHEL BUTOR, Degrees.
Mobile.
G. CABRERA INFANTE, Infante’s Inferno.
Three Trapped Tigers.
JULIETA CAMPOS,
The Fear of Losing Eurydice.
ANNE CARSON, Eros the Bittersweet.
ORLY CASTEL-BLOOM, Dolly City.
LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE, Castle to Castle.
Conversations with Professor Y.
London Bridge.
Normance.
North.
Rigadoon.
MARIE CHAIX, The Laurels of Lake Constance.
HUGO CHARTERIS, The Tide Is Right.
ERIC CHEVILLARD, Demolishing Nisard.
MARC CHOLODENKO, Mordechai Schamz.
JOSHUA COHEN, Witz.
EMILY HOLMES COLEMAN, The Shutter of Snow.
ROBERT COOVER, A Night at the Movies.
STANLEY CRAWFORD, Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine.
Some Instructions to My Wife.
RENÉ CREVEL, Putting My Foot in It.
RALPH CUSACK, Cadenza.
NICHOLAS DELBANCO, The Count of Concord.
Sherbrookes.
NIGEL DENNIS, Cards of Identity.
PETER DIMOCK, A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family.
ARIEL DORFMAN, Konfidenz.
COLEMAN DOWELL,
Island People.
Too Much Flesh and Jabez.
ARKADII DRAGOMOSHCHENKO, Dust.
RIKKI DUCORNET, The Complete Butcher’s Tales.
The Fountains of Neptune.
The Jade Cabinet.
Phosphor in Dreamland.
WILLIAM EASTLAKE, The Bamboo Bed.
Castle Keep.
Lyric of the Circle Heart.
JEAN ECHENOZ, Chopin’s Move.
STANLEY ELKIN, A Bad Man.
Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers.
The Dick Gibson Show.
The Franchiser.
The Living End.
Mrs. Ted Bliss.
FRANCOIS EMMANUEL, Invitation to a Voyage.
SALVADOR ESPRIU, Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth.
LESLIE A. FIEDLER, Love and Death in the American Novel.
JUAN FILLOY, Op Oloop.
ANDY FITCH, Pop Poetics.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, Bouvard and Pécuchet.
KASS FLEISHER, Talking out of School.
FORD MADOX FORD,
The March of Literature.
JON FOSSE, Aliss at the Fire.
Melancholy.
MAX FRISCH, I’m Not Stiller.
Man in the Holocene.
CARLOS FUENTES, Christopher Unborn.
Distant Relations.
Terra Nostra.
Where the Air Is Clear.
TAKEHIKO FUKUNAGA, Flowers of Grass.
WILLIAM GADDIS, J R.
The Recognitions.
JANICE GALLOWAY, Foreign Parts.
The Trick Is to Keep Breathing.
WILLIAM H. GASS, Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas.
Finding a Form.
A Temple of Texts.
The Tunnel.
Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife.
GÉRARD GAVARRY, Hoppla! 1 2 3.
ETIENNE GILSON,
The Arts of the Beautiful.
Forms and Substances in the Arts.
C. S. GISCOMBE, Giscom
e Road.
Here.
DOUGLAS GLOVER, Bad News of the Heart.
WITOLD GOMBROWICZ,
A Kind of Testament.
PAULO EMÍLIO SALES GOMES, P’s Three Women.
GEORGI GOSPODINOV, Natural Novel.
JUAN GOYTISOLO, Count Julian.
Juan the Landless.
Makbara.
Marks of Identity.
MICHAL AJVAZ, The Golden Age.
The Other City.
PIERRE ALBERT-BIROT, Grabinoulor.
YUZ ALESHKOVSKY, Kangaroo.
FELIPE ALFAU, Chromos.
Locos.
IVAN NGELO, The Celebration.
The Tower of Glass.
ANTÓNIO LOBO ANTUNES, Knowledge of Hell.
The Splendor of Portugal.
ALAIN ARIAS-MISSON, Theatre of Incest.
JOHN ASHBERY AND JAMES SCHUYLER,
A Nest of Ninnies.
ROBERT ASHLEY, Perfect Lives.
GABRIELA AVIGUR-ROTEM, Heatwave and Crazy Birds.
DJUNA BARNES, Ladies Almanack.
Ryder.
JOHN BARTH, LETTERS.
Sabbatical.
DONALD BARTHELME, The King.
Paradise.
SVETISLAV BASARA, Chinese Letter.
MIQUEL BAUÇÀ, The Siege in the Room.
RENÉ BELLETTO, Dying.
MAREK BIEŃCZYK, Transparency.
ANDREI BITOV, Pushkin House.
ANDREJ BLATNIK, You Do Understand.
LOUIS PAUL BOON, Chapel Road.
My Little War.
Summer in Termuren.
ROGER BOYLAN, Killoyle.
IGNÁCIO DE LOYOLA BRANDÃO,
Anonymous Celebrity.
Zero.
BONNIE BREMSER, Troia: Mexican Memoirs.
CHRISTINE BROOKE-ROSE, Amalgamemnon.
BRIGID BROPHY, In Transit.
GERALD L. BRUNS, Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language.
GABRIELLE BURTON, Heartbreak Hotel.
MICHEL BUTOR, Degrees.
Mobile.
G. CABRERA INFANTE, Infante’s Inferno.
Three Trapped Tigers.
JULIETA CAMPOS,
The Fear of Losing Eurydice.
ANNE CARSON, Eros the Bittersweet.
ORLY CASTEL-BLOOM, Dolly City.
LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE, Castle to Castle.
Conversations with Professor Y.
London Bridge.
Normance.
North.
Rigadoon.
MARIE CHAIX, The Laurels of Lake Constance.