Prague Pictures

by John Banville

  Lunch. Ah. Perhaps this is the place to say a word about Czech cuisine; a word, and then on to more appetising topics. My Czech friends, whom I value dearly and would not wish to offend, should skip smartly the next two paragraphs - you have been warned. I have eaten badly in many parts of the world. There is a certain plate of macaroni studded with gobbets of cow's kidney that was served to me by a resentful cook - her name was Miss Grub; honestly, it was - at a friend's house in London many years ago which I shall never forget. At a hostelry in a pleasant little town not far from Budapest I have been confronted by a steaming platter of sliced goose, mashed potato, and sauerkraut, three shades of glistening grey. And what about that inoffensive-looking green salad which I ate without a second thought in a little lunch place off the tourist trail one glorious autumn afternoon in Oaxaca, which infiltrated into my digestive system a bacillus, busy as a Mexican jumping bean, which was to cling to the inner lining of my intestines for three long, queasy and intermittently galvanised months? I do not say that my culinary adventures in Prague were as awful as these. Indeed, I have had some fine meals there over the years. In general, however, it must be said, and I must say it, that the Czech cuisine is, well, no better than that of Bavaria, which statement is, as anyone who knows Bavaria will confirm, a ringing denunciation. I recall an evening at a Bierkeller in Regensburg where . . . but no, that is another story, and another town.4

  Both the Czechs and the Bavarians, close neighbours that they are, have in common an inexplicable but almost universal enthusiasm for . . . dumplings. These delicacies can be anything from the size of a stout marble - what in my childhood we called a knuckler - to that of a worn-out, soggy tennis ball, with which they share something of their texture, and possibly of their taste. The Czech species comes in a broad variety of strains, from the very common hous-kove knedliky, or bread dumplings, through the bramborove knedliky, potato dumplings, often temptingly served alongside a smoking midden of white sauerkraut, to the relatively rare - rare in my experience, anyway - ovocne knedliky, or fruit dumplings. Perhaps the dumpling's most striking characteristic is its extreme viscosity. It sits there on the plate, pale, tumorous and hot, daring you to take your knife to it, and, when you do, clinging to the steel with a kind of gummy amorousness, the wound making a sucking, smacking sound and closing on itself as soon as the blade has passed through. Dumplings can be served as an accompaniment to anything, whether the lowly parky, or hot dogs, or the mighty slab of boiled fillet of beef. They can have their own accompaniments, too, for instance the creamy, sour-sweet sauce called 5 That day at The Golden Tiger, if that is where it was, we stuck to simple fare: plates of only slightly worrying klobasy - grilled sausages - and dark bread, heavy but good, washed down with bubbling beakers of glorious Czech beer, which tastes of hayfields baking in summer heat. But there would be other mealtimes, oh, there would, from which memory averts its gaze . . .

  After lunch we thought we might visit a gallery or two; G. worked at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and was eager to see the local treasures. Again a faint cough from the Professor, again the fingertip to the spectacles. The main museums - including, if I remember rightly, the National Gallery - were shut, he told us, and had been since sometime back in the Seventies. No reason had been given for their closure, and enquiries to the 'faceless authorities' - in Prague, the cliche took on a fresh, or rancid, rather, new life - elicited either a contemptuous silence, or pompously worded, but carefully vague, assurances that elaborate programmes of repair and refurbishment were about to get under way. As yet, however, there had been no sign of these promised initiatives, and the Professor and his fellow scholars were becomingly increasingly alarmed as to the condition of the sequestered art works, which had not been tended to for nearly a decade.

  In place of a museum, the Professor offered to show us St Vitus's Cathedral. We climbed to the hill of once more, labouring up the shallow granite steps, 'each one the width of four bodies laid head to foot,' the novelist Gustav Meyrink notes in his accustomed cheery fashion. The sun was gone now, and a sky bearing a bellyful of snow loured over the afternoon. The great church reared above us, 'ornate and mad', in Philip Larkin's fine description of churches in general, like a vast, spired ship run aground and sunk here in the midst of the castle complex, clamoured about on all sides by the reefs of Baroque palaces, coral-coloured. The cathedral is yet another of the gifts lavished on Prague by the munificent Charles IV. Work began on it in 1344, and was not completed until 1929, if such a building can ever be said to be finished. The first architect was Matthew of Arras. Here is the Golden Portal, held aloft on the delicate webbing of Peter three Gothic arches. When one looks up, the entire building seems to be speeding massively through the brumous air, going nowhere. See the gargoyles, 'these caricatures, these apings-at', as Rilke, another of Prague's unwilling sons, has it; I always feel a pang of pity for gargoyles. In 'View from the Charles Bridge', Seifert writes:

  There are days when the Castle

  and its Cathedral

  are gloomily magnificent,

  when it seems

  they were built of dismal rock

  brought back from the Moon.

  We enter into a huge, reverberant silence, shadowed, ancient air. The rose window above us dimly glows, feeding upon the wan winter light; the stained glass, I silently observe, is distinctly gaudy. In 'Zone’, the poet ApoUinaire, 'montant au Hradchin’,experienced here a moment of Modernist dread:

  Epouvante tu te vois dessine dans les agates

  de Saint-Vit

  Tu etais triste a mourir le jou ou tu t'y vis

  Tu ressembles au Lazare affole par le jour

  Which Samuel Beckett renders as:

  Appalled you see your image in the agates of

  Saint Vitus

  That day you were fit to die with sadness

  You look like Lazarus frantic in the daylight

  My footsteps ring on the floor of the nave and fetch back reproachful echoes. I enter St Wence-slas's Chapel, into which one could wander freely then but which nowadays is barred to the public by a velvet rope, international tourism's ubiquitous, polite but unvaultable hurdle. Buried in this chapel is Wenceslas I, that hymned good king, fourth ruler to hold the throne, supposedly assassinated on this holy ground at the behest of his bad brother Boleslav in or about 935. The interior walls, so my guidebook tells me, are studded on their lower levels with 'c.1372' precious stones; I am impressed by that laconic V. On the north door of the Wenceslas Chapel there is a bronze ring, gripped firmly in the mouth of what I am told is a lion,6 to which the dying king is said to have clung as the assassins struck.

  I am always surprised to think that churches should be considered places of comfort and sanctuary. On the contrary, they seem to me, especially the big, Catholic ones, soulless memorials of anguished atonement and blood rites, gaunt, unwarmed and unwelcoming, heavy with Wallace Stevens's 'holy hush of ancient sacrifice'. Years ago, in Salisbury Cathedral, eavesdropping one twilit eve on the cathedral choir at rehearsal, I was appalled to notice that beside me my seven-year-old son was weeping silently in terror. As I tried to comfort him I looked about - 1 , who was compelled by a devout mother to spend extended stretches of my childhood in places such as this and saw it all suddenly from the perspective of a little boy born to godless parents: the grimacing statues, the cross-eyed martyrs in stained glass, the shot-torn regimental banners, the maniacally carved pulpit, all quite mad - Larkin was right and hideously menacing. What frightened my son most, he later confessed, were the sotto voce comments and encouragements that the choir master breathed into his microphone in the pauses between verses; they must have sounded like the celestial chidings of weary, terrible old Yahweh himself.

  Yet it occurs to me that a few centuries ago my son in that place would not have been frightened at all, only awed, and dazzled, too. We easily forget that ours is a world permanently lit, that we live in a garish, practically nightless present in which our senses are assaile
d from all sides, by small flickering screens and huge advertisement hoardings, by public music, by a myriad perfumes, by the textures under our hands of rich stuffs and polished hides. The world out of which this cathedral grew was another place entirely. In the opening pages of The Autumn of the Middle Ages, Johan Huizinga writes:

  When the world was half a thousand years younger all events had much sharper outlines than now. The distance between sadness and joy, between good and bad fortune, seemed to be much greater than for us; every experience had that degree of directness and absoluteness that joy and sadness still have in the mind of a child . . . Just as the contrast between summer and winter was stronger then than in our present lives, so was the difference between the light and dark, quiet and noise. The modern city hardly knows pure darkness or true silence any more, nor does it know the effect of a single small light or that of a lonely distant shout.

  What an aspirant marvel St Vitus's must have been long ago, with its Golden Portal glowing, its great doors flung open and its rose window angling down God's celestial light. The colour, the sonorities, the incense, the thousand candles burning. And the bells. Huizinga again: 'The bells acted in daily life like concerned good spirits who, with their familiar voices, proclaimed sadness or joy, calm or unrest, assembly or exhortation.'

  'Churches,' Ripellino remarks, smacking his lips almost audibly, 'exert a fatal attraction on Prague fiction's morbid characters.' A key scene in Meyrink's ghastly and sometimes risible novel The Golem takes place in St Vitus's Cathedral, amid the 'enervating smell of tapers and incense'.7 Even the commonsensical Jan Neruda, chronicler of the doings of the simple folk of Mala Strana, feels drawn to that grey stone eminence on the hill, where within its fastness he in his turn detects that not so enervating but no less 'distinctive combination of incense and mould found in every house of worship'. In Neruda's story 'The St Wenceslas Mass', the narrator recalls how when he was an altar boy, he and his friends knew for a fact that St Wenceslas returned every night at the stroke of midnight - when else? - to celebrate Mass at the cathedral's high altar. One night he hid himself in the locked cathedral, determined to witness the saint return to enact the ghostly ceremony. As the last faint glimmer of evening fades and night comes on, and 'a silvery, gossamerlike radiance floated over the nave,' the boy is seized with a numinous terror: T felt the entire burden of the hour and of the cold, and suddenly I was overcome by a vague - yet for its vagueness all the more shattering - terror. I did not know what I feared, yet fear I did, and my weak, childlike mind was powerless to resist.'

  Prague writers love to frighten themselves, especially the decadents of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They revel in the uncanny. Their fiction, according to Ripellino, 'is characterised by an oppressive recurrence of the Spanish-derived image of the crucifix [Habsburg emperors of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, including Rudolf, were schooled by Spanish Jesuits], a gloomy tangle of wounds and rent limbs, a fountain of gushing blood, a spiritualist vision and source of terror'. He gives a skin-crawlingly vivid example from the unlikely-sounding Roman Manfreda Macmillena (The Novel of Manfred Macmillen, 1907) by Kar-asek ze Lvovic:

  No sooner did my eyes fix on the cross hanging on the wall than I felt behind me the presence of a living being. I was seized by terror, for now even the cross at which I had been gazing assumed a ghostly appearance: it was no longer hanging on the wall but suspended in the darkness.

  In another tale, Gotickd duse (A Gothic Soul, 1905), the 'large Christ covered with bleeding wounds that glowed in the darkness like mystical signs descended from the arms of the cross and slowly approached the altar'.

  Of course, the most famous literary visit to St Vitus's takes place in The Trial, when Josef K. is charged, by his employer at the bank where he works, with showing a visiting Italian businessman the artistic sights of the city. The Italian, with his nervous laugh and steel-grey bushy moustache - one would surely describe him as sinister except that there is nothing in this novel that is not sinister - is pressed for time and opts to restrict his viewing to the cathedral. It is all a cruel ruse, anyway; the Italian does not turn up, and Josef K. is left to loiter uneasily in the echoing nave as the morning steadily, eerily, darkens, encountering 'the silver sheen of a saint's figure', no doubt the same 'silver St John' of Nepomuk identified by the boy in Jan Ner-uda's story. Josef K. cannot account for the strange atmospherics that are affecting the daylight. 'What sort of weather could there be outside? It was not just a dreary day any more, it was the depth of night.'

  In the distance a large triangle of candle flames flickered on the high altar. K. could not have said with certainty whether he had seen them earlier on. Perhaps they had just been lit. Vergers are stealthy by profession and are scarcely noticed. When K. happened to turn round he saw not far behind him a tall thick candle also alight, this time fixed to a pillar. However beautiful it looked, it was quite inadequate to illuminate the altarpieces which mostly hung in the gloom of the side-chapels; it only made the darkness more intense.

  The scene is set for K.'s encounter with the priest, who claims to be a prison chaplain - the prison chaplain, in fact - who knows Josef K.'s name, and who tells him the terrifying parable of 'the man from the country' who comes seeking 'entry into the law' but is prevented by the implacable door-keeper, who makes him sit by the door for years, until the man grows old, and reaches the threshold of death. 'You are insatiable,' the doorkeeper tells him.

  'But everybody strives for the law,' says the man. 'How is it that in all these years nobody except myself has asked for admittance?' The door-keeper realises the man has reached the end of his life and, to penetrate his imperfect hearing, he roars at him: 'Nobody else could gain admittance here, this entrance was meant only for you. I shall now go and close it.'

  In his lengthy exegesis on the implications and possible meaning of the parable, the priest observes that 'right at the beginning [the door­keeper] plays a joke on the man by inviting him to enter in spite of the express and strictly enforced prohibition . . .' We know that Kafka had a sly and mordant sense of humour. Of his job as an insurance assessor giving judgement on workers' claims he exclaimed in a letter to his friend Max Brod how extraordinarily accident-prone the world seemed to be, and how 'one gets a headache from all these young girls in the porcelain factories who are forever throwing themselves downstairs with mountains of dishes'. There is also the anecdote which tells of him beginning to read from The Trial to a gathering of friends, but collapsing into such laughter on the first page that he had to abandon the reading. The 'joke' in the parable of the law, however, is, as Mark Twain said of German humour, no laughing matter. A few years ago, not long before his death, the great Germanist and Kafka scholar, Eduard Goldstiicker, described to me how he and other loyal communists in Prague were rounded up in December 1951 at the beginning of a new wave of Stalinist show trials. When he asked to know why he had been arrested, the answer came with an ironic smile: 'That is what you must tell us.' I immediately thought of the prison chaplain speaking to Josef K. of the door-keeper's friendliness and humour, and even compassion. I thought as well of the two gentlemen in frock coats, with the air of broken-down actors, pale and fat and wearing top hats, 'apparently the non-collapsible kind', who come to K.'s apartment on the eve of his thirty-first birthday to fetch him away to his execution in the little quarry in what is most likely the Strahov district of the city. 'There was nothing heroic in resisting, in making difficulties for the gentlemen now, in putting up a defence at this point in an effort to enjoy a final glimmer of life.' . . .

  All at once I was cold; an empty cathedral is a chilly place. The Professor was standing a little way off with J. and G., pointing upward to one of the stained-glass windows and explaining some fine detail of the depicted scene. Now, suddenly, and at no particular prompting, it was my turn to feel embarrassed. As I looked at him there, in his shabby raincoat, with his pale, thin hair, the high, Slavic cheekbones, those touchingly inoffensive spec
tacles, I asked myself what did I know of the difficulties of this man's life, of the stratagems he had been compelled to engage in over the years in order to preserve dignity and self-respect, or in order simply to feed and clothe himself and his wife and son. My friend had made a Czech version of Hamlet before the war which was very popular and continued to be put on even after 1968. Although his name as the translator was suppressed, he did receive a small royalty from these productions. T would walk past the theatre in the first snow of the season,' he said, 'shivering in my thin jacket, and see Hamlet announced as a coming attraction, and I would think, good, Vll have an overcoat by Christmas!' That was how they lived, in those days, he said, 'hand to mouth' whatever you say, say nothing - and then covered his lips with his fingers and laughed, enjoying his own wordplay. for all his regrets - 'It was too late for me,' he would cry, 'the Havel revolution, too late!' - is a great laugher. One day, when we were in his car and I had been pressing him for details of his life in 'those days', he began to chuckle, and waved a hand at me, saying, 'Stop, stop! You are like the ones who used to interrogate me then, the nameless ones!' But then his smile faded and he turned a grim face to the windscreen again. What do I know?

  The day was dying when we got back to the hotel. The Professor left us, promising to pick us up later and take us to his home. In the lobby the two black-eyed beauties were at their post again under the potted palm, fingering their coffee cups and appraising the passing men, potential trade. Such beautiful creatures, I wondered aloud as we entered the lift, why did they take up such a profession? T suppose,' J. said, 'they do it for kecks' We were too tired to laugh.