Prague Pictures

by John Banville

  It is a peculiarly affecting, regressive sensation to wake up from an involuntary sleep at evening in a strange hotel room, the daylight all gone from the window, and a lamp, an impassive sentinel, burning on the bedside table. The unfamiliar furniture crouches in the shadows, looking as if it had been engaged in a furtive passacaglia and had stopped in its paces an instant before one opened one's eyes. The noises from outside are different now, more indistinct, it would seem, as if muffled by the falling darkness. There is the hum of the great concourse of office workers going home; voices sound, and a radio buzzes somewhere, and car tyres make a watery hissing in the dry streets. One's day-clothes restrict, there is a hot dampness in the crevices of elbows, behind the knees. Sluggishly one's mind casts about, fumbling like a hand on the bed covers, trying to grasp something, a fragment of thought, a dream, a memory, and failing. What is it the moment is reminiscent of? The silence, the hum in the air, the woolly warmth . . . all this is out of the far, the immemorial, past. Is it childhood that is nudging at the blunted edges of consciousness, a jumbled recollection of the fevered bedtimes of one's lost childhood? Somewhere adults are awake, going about their unsleeping, mysterious tasks.

  How much of this first visit to Prague, twenty years ago, am I remembering, and how much is being invented for me? Memory is a vast, animated, time-ravaged mural. There is a fore ground, hazier in places than the extremest background, while in the middle distance the real business is going on, but so busily it is hard to make out. We fix on a face, a familiar room, a little scene; startlingly, off at the side, from nowhere, it might be, a pair of eyes look out at us directly from the crowd, fixing us with their candid glance, cool, amused, and quizzical, like the eyes of that mild maenad in Poussin's Dance to the Music of Time. There are, too, the big, continent-shaped patches of bare stucco, the damaged places that no restorer will mend, now. Some things of that first visit - and of other, more recent ones - I recall as vividly as if they were before me now, but they are almost all inconsequential. The hopeful money-changer in his leather jacket. The two prostitutes in the lobby, their lipstick, their hairstyles that long ago have gone out of fashion, even the imitation palm tree under which they sat. I see the Professor standing in the cathedral, pointing up earnestly at the stained-glass window. I see myself waking, fully dressed, on that big, high bed, not knowing where I was. Why these fragments and not others, far more significant? Why these?

  The Professor's wife was short, dark, handsome and intense. Her name was, let us say, Marta. The clothes she wore were too young for her, a tight black jumper and a black leather skirt, far too short, and black stockings. The outfit, at once severe - all that black - and slightly tartish, was I think a form of protest, a gesture of defiance against what she saw as the meanness and enforced conformity of her life. Of all the people I met in Prague that first time, no matter how oppressed or angry or despairing, she was the one who seemed to me truly a prisoner. There was a manic quality to her desperation, a sense of pent-up hysteria, as if she had passed the day, and so many other days, pacing the floor, from door to window, window to door, one hand plunged in her hair and the other clutching a shaking cigarette. She would have been frightening, in her violent discontent, had it not been for her humour. In the midst of a tirade against the State, against her family - she seemed to have a great many relatives, all of whom she professed to despise - she would suddenly stop and turn her face aside and give a snuffly cackle of laughter, and shake her head, and click her tongue, as if she had caught sight of a younger, happier, more cheerfully sceptical version of herself smiling at her and wagging a finger in rueful admonishment. I think that in her heart she simply could not credit her predicament, and lived in the angry conviction that a life so absurd and grotesque must be at any moment about to change. I liked her at once, the menacing black outfit, the scarlet fingernails, the frankly dyed hair, the flashing look that she gave me as, with a flamenco dancer's flourish of the shoulders, she handed me a bilious-green glass tumbler three-quarters full of vodka

  We were in a small, neat, bright room with a lot of blond, fake-Scandinavian furniture. Everywhere, on every available flat surface, Marta's collection of Bohemian glass vied for space with the Professor's books. Through an archway there was a galley kitchen where saucepans were seething and steaming. J. and G. and I sat crowded hip to hip on a narrow sofa, our knees pressed against the edge of a low coffee table. The Professor sat opposite us in what was obviously 'his' chair, an old wooden rocker draped with a faded, tasselled rug; when he grew animated, or when Marta was provoking him with one of her tirades, he would propel himself back and forth with steadily increasing speed until, just when it seemed the madly rearing chair would tip him forward on to the floor, he would grasp the armrests and pitch himself stiffly back against the headrest and go suddenly still, queasily smiling, like Dr Strangelove in his wheelchair, pi nioned by a gravitational force all of his own. I made the first gaffe of the evening by asking how many rooms there were in the apartment. The Professor winced, and Marta in the galley turned from her steaming pots and gave a bitter snort of laughter; this room, it seemed, along with a tiny bathroom down the hall, was the extent of their living quarters. 'Our bed!' Marta said, pointing with a wooden spoon at the sofa where we were sitting. 'It unfolds,' the Professor corroborated helpfully, showing how with a graceful gesture of his hands. I am sure I was blushing.

  While Marta was noisily busy at the stove, the Professor conducted us on an imaginary tour through the city's museums we had been unable to visit in reality. His modestly delivered disquisition on Czech art in the twentieth century was a revelation, to me, anyway. Most of the artists he mentioned were ones, I am ashamed to say, that I had never heard of. The extraordinary flowering of Modernism in Prague in the years just before and after the First World War was put into the shade by brasher capitals such as Paris and Vienna. The long-lived exile Kupka, who settled permanently in Paris in 1895, was one of the great figures of European abstraction. He derived many of his ideas from music - he liked to describe himself as a 'colour symphonist' - and photography, which he valued for its abstract possibilities. While Kupka was settling in Paris, the younger Prague painters were founding the Osma ('The Eight') group of avant-gar-dists, which in 1911 evolved into the Association of Plastic Arts, the cradle of Czech cubism. The greatest of the cubist artists was the sculptor Otto Gutfreund, although at the end of his career he abandoned the cube in favour of a kind of naive realism. The most tangible mark that cubism left on the city was in architecture.8 As early as 1911 the architect Josef Chochol was putting up some remarkable buildings below the hill of After the establishment of the Republic of Czechoslovakia at the end of hostilities in 1918 Prague became a sort of collection point for European avant-garde movements, particularly Surrealism, to which Praguers took with unsurprising enthusiasm. The city already had its own quasi-Dadaist movement, called of which Charlie Chaplin was granted honorary membership in absentia. eventually imploded, but left a strong legacy in the Surrealist works of such artists as Josef and Jindf ich . . . Names, names. Listening to the Professor, I experienced a sense of shame such as a professional explorer would feel on being gently told that an entire civilisation had flourished briefly in the valley next to where he was born, the existence of which had been entirely unknown to him.

  Over dinner, crowded together at a small square table wedged into a corner of the apartment, we attempted to move from art to a discussion of the frosty state of East-West relations. Marta, however, would have none of it. She wanted only to hear about America, land of freedom and limitless wealth. She complained that her son, although a diligent letter writer, never gave her the kind of details she desired. Were the department stores as magnificent as she had heard? Macy's, Bloomingdale's, I. Magnum, Nie-man Marcus . . . each legendary name as she breathed it glowed like a coal. J. and G., disenchanted survivors of Berkeley 1968, tried to explain to her some of the realities of life in the Great Republic - there was much emphasis, I reca
ll, on the plight of poor whites in the mining towns of Virginia - but she would have none of that, either, it was heresy to her ears. She was an educated woman, a chemist by training; she was not naive, and certainly not uninformed; she listened to the Voice of America and the BBC World Service, when the signals were not jammed; she was well aware that the West had its pains and protests; but the fact was, she insisted, we could have no true idea of what it was like to live in one of the satellite countries of the Soviet empire. We continually spoke, she said, J. and G. and I, of Eastern Europe, she had listened to us doing so all evening - but could we not see that even by using that designation we were, however unwittingly, conniving with the Soviets and accepting the status quo? Eastern Europe? she said, glaring at each of us in turn - where was that? Where does Eastern Europe begin? At Moscow? Budapest? Prague? Vienna? The croissant, that quintessential staple of Parisian mornings, did we know the origin of it, that it took its shape from the crescent displayed on the flags of the Ottoman Empire that were carried to the very walls of Vienna before a terrified Europe at last mobilised itself sufficiently to push the forces of the infidel back to the East? No no, if there was an Eastern Europe, it began no further west than Istanbul!

  Flushed by now, as were all of us, on bad Moravian wine, the Professor's wife had taken on a sort of furious magnificence, seemed a very we shall meet Libuse presently - the raging mother of a country that at depressingly regular intervals throughout the twentieth cen- tury had been dishonoured, betrayed, invaded.9 As she railed at us, the Professor watched her with brimming uxorious admiration, wordlessly urging her on. I have always been fascinated by the deals that married couples tacitly make with each other, the silent arrangements of interdependence by which they apportion power between them. Who could know how many times over the years the Professor himself had been dishonoured by the authorities, betrayed by friends and colleagues, had his privacy of heart and mind invaded, and how many times he had returned here, to this cramped sanctuary, exhausted in spirit, to feed and renew himself upon his wife's unrelenting fury, outrage and contempt in the face of State oppression? And now, having said her say, his wife retreated into silence, although her rage continued to make a palpable mutter and grumble, like the reverberations of a thunder storm that has departed to batten on some cowering elsewhere.

  The Professor was considering his wine glass. Yes, he admitted mildly, all that Marta had said was true. There were intervals when life in Prague was almost unbearable, to him as much as to her.Curiously, perhaps, it was not the times of active oppression that were hardest - the aftermath of the communist takeover in May 1948, or of the Soviet invasion and annexation of the country twenty years later - for then at least there was a sense of dreadful excitement at the spectacle of something happening, even if what was happening was terrible. Afterwards, however, when authority was consolidated and the tanks were gone from the streets, an awful lethargy had quickly descended, and the country had slumped once more into a troubled but unshakeable somnolence. The Professor, still gazing at his glass, smiled ironically. He wished, he said, that he could blame this state of torpor on the Soviets, or even on home-grown petty tyrants, but the fact was, the Czechs had been sleepwalking for three and a half centuries, ever since, that is, the defeat at the Battle of White Mountain in 1620, when the Protestant forces of the young Frederick, Elector Palatine, appointed King of Bohemia by the Prague Diet, and known ever afterwards as the Winter King, were crushed by the Habs-burg Emperor Frederick II, Jesuit-trained hammer of the Lutherans. Even the infatuated Ripellino agrees with the Professor's gloomy diagnosis, seeing the country as 'a land prostrate and somnolent' since the disaster of White Mountain. 'Prague,' he writes, 'has the rhythm of slow, endless mastication (like that of Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis for hours on end), a catatonia from which it at times awakes with a burst of energy that immediately dies down,' and speaks of visitors being 'struck by the frailty of the joyless, eternally pouting city, its suffocating, defenceless lethargy, its deposed-sovereign majesty, the pallor, the morose resignation of those who walk its constricted streets, a dungheap of ancient glories.' The Professor, unlike Ripellino a native son, after all, could not be as harsh in his judgement as the jilted Italian, but even he, it was obvious, had his days when he wished he could take the city by the shoulders and shake it until its stone monuments rattled in their sockets . . . And yet, he said, he would not leave, could not leave, not for all the gold paving of America's streets.

  In the confused interregnum after August 1968, before the Soviets had fully taken over and it was still comparatively easy to get out - in the period more than a hundred thousand Czechs fled the country - Marta had begged him repeatedly that they should flee together to New York, to their son, who had a job there, and contacts at the university, and might even be able to find employment for the Professor. But the Professor would not budge - no, he would not budge. Marta was speaking again, as her husband continued to gaze dreamily into the dregs in his glass. 'You would quote those lines at me,' she accused him, 'those lousy lines in that lousy poem by that lousy poet Viktor Dyk, saying those who should dare to leave would die.10 But you would not have died!' Yes, the Professor mildly agreed - it was apparent they had been through this conversation before, many times - he would have survived, but something in him would have died, for he would have lost an essential part of himself had he left Prague. He turned to us, his visitors. 'This,' he said, tapping a finger on the pale-pine table and making it for a moment Europe, 'this is civilisation, the only one I know.'

  After dinner Marta plied us with a sweet liqueur, a local speciality, the name of which I have forgotten - was it green, or was it just the glasses that were green? - and the Professor took from a drawer in his desk a music-case, exactly like, I saw with a start, the satchel that my sister had when we were children and she took piano lessons, an old leather one with a silver metal clasp like an attenuated dumbbell. He put the case on the coffee table and opened it flat. Inside was a sheaf of some thirty photographs, carefully wrapped in tissue paper. Perhaps it was the effect of the wine at dinner, and now the liqueur, but there seemed to me a vaguely religious, vaguely sacramental, tenor to the moment. And why not? True works of art are a real presence, after all.

  The photographs were by Josef Sudek. They were in black-and-white, mostly views of Prague streetscapes, with a few interior studies, including 'Labyrinth in My Studio', two oneiric still-lifes from the 'Remembrances' series of the late 1960s, and the ravishing 'Nude', the one seated sideways with her hair partly hiding her face, from the early 1950s. I had not seen Sudek's work before; in fact, I had not heard of him before coming on this mission to Prague. He is, I believe, a great artist, in a league, or almost, with that other visual celebrant of a great city, the Parisian Eu- gene Atget, with whom he shares significant artistic traits. But these sober evaluations came later.

  It is strange, that sense of familiarity one has on even a first encounter with an artist's work. As I looked at those photographs one by one I was convinced that I had seen them before, many times, and knew them well - that, indeed, there had never been a time when I did not already know them. Plato's by now trite notion must be true, that somewhere in the unconscious there is a myriad of ideal forms, the transcendent templates, as it were, against which is fitted and measured each new object that one encounters in the world. But there was a more immediate, less lofty, cause of the soft shock of recognition, a sort of shivery drizzle down the back of the mind, that I experienced as I took in these reticent yet ravishing, dreamy yet precise and always particular images. It was, simply, that in them I discovered Prague. Art, Henry James insisted in a famous letter of rebuke to the philistine H.G. Wells, art 'makes life, makes interest, makes importance', by which he may be understood to mean that the work of art singles out, 'beautifully', as H.J. himself would have it, the essential matters, the essential moments, in the disordered flux that is actual, lived life, while ever acknowl- edging the unconsidered but sustaining dros
s left behind, the Derridan rien that is supposedly de hors-texte. All day I had been walking about the city without seeing it, and suddenly now Sudek's photographs, even the private, interior studies, showed it to me, in all its stony, luminous solidity and peculiar, wan, absent-minded beauty. Here, with this sheaf of pictures on my knees, I had finally arrived.

  Josef Sudek was born in the Bohemian town of Kolin in 1896 where in later years he would take some of his most evocative, Proustian pictures. His father died when he was three, and his mother moved the family to Prague. At fifteen he was apprenticed to a bookbinder in Nymburk, and later to one in Prague. At the outbreak of the First World War he was drafted into the army and sent to the Italian front, where a shell detonated by gunners from his own side damaged his right arm so badly that it had to be amputated. So ended his bookbinding career, before it had properly begun. When he was capable of being moved he was sent back to Prague and was lodged in the Veterans' Hospital to undergo a lengthy convalescence. He had already developed an interest in photography, and had taken his camera with him to the front and made numerous studies of his fellow soldiers and of the Italian countryside. In his lifetime he ventured abroad only once more, and that was to revisit Italy, and the scene of his wounding: 'Far outside the city toward dawn, in the fields bathed by the morning dew, I finally found the place. But my arm wasn't there...'

  Faced now with the problem of finding work, Sudek spurned the government's offer that he should become a street vendor selling cigarettes and tobacco for the State monopoly. Instead, he tried to eke out his army pension by hawking photographs on the Prague boulevards. His time as a street seller did not last long, for he had no professional training as a photographer and could not secure the necessary tradesman's certificate. However, one of the staff at the Veterans' Hospital, Dr Nedoma - spiritual cousin, surely, to Van Gogh's Dr Gachet - had spotted Sudek's potential, and determination, and succeeded in having him enrolled in the photography class of the Prague School of Graphic Arts. Despite the disapproval of his conservative professor, Karel Novak - 'a noble gentleman,' as Sudek would later wryly describe him - he got through the course, and received a certificate establishing him as a professional photographer in 1924. Thereafter, his work came to the attention of a publish ing house, Prace (Co-operative Work), which began to give him freelance commissions, enabling him to move into a little studio - hardly more than a garden shed, really - on Ujezd, between Mala Strana and the river, which was to be both his workplace and his home for the next thirty years of his life.