Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City (11 page)

Always and ever differently the bridge escorts the lingering and hastening ways of men to and fro, so that they may get to other banks and in the end, as mortals, to the other side. Now in a high arch, now in a low, the bridge vaults over glen and stream whether mortals keep in mind this vaulting of the bridge's course or forget that they, always themselves on their way to the last bridge, are actually striving to surmount all that is common and unsound in them in order to bring themselves before the haleness of the divinities. The bridge
gathers,
as a passage that crosses, before the divinities whether we explicitly think of, and visibly
give thanks for,
their presence, as in the figure of the saint of the bridge, or whether that divine presence is obstructed or even pushed wholly aside.

The bridge
gathers
to itself in
its own
way earth and sky, divinities and mortals.

To stand on the Charles Bridge today, among the press of tourists and moody sightseers - the sights are always so much less than it seemed they would be - is to feel the essential truth of Heidegger's numinous definitions, however unnumi-nous may be the present-day reality of Prague, heritage city of heritage cities.

River, bridge, the human community . . .

Castle on its crag was the seat of the
rulers for a half century from 1085, when King Vratislav I settled his court there. After 1140, when the
moved back to Prague Castle on the left bank of the river, John Banville
ceased to be a centre of royal power until Charles IV turned his omnivorous attention to the area and rebuilt the castle and erected fortifications, the mighty remains of which are still to be seen. During the Hussite wars of the fifteenth century most of Charles's handiwork was destroyed. Subsequently,
became a small independent town of traders and craftsmen, which in turn was flattened by the steamroller of history to make way for yet another fortress. The effects of these successive declines and falls are palpable still in the sombre, silvery air that seems so much thinner on those heights than down in the Old Town or even in melancholy Mala Strana.
lures few tourists, a fact that adds immeasurably to its charm. It is best approached from the metro station, despite the looming Palace of Culture, a typical example of brutalist gigantism from the communist era, and the equally awful Corinthia Towers Hotel which, by a piece of glum serendipity, finds itself overlooking a prison - the exercise yard had to be roofed over to spare the hotel's guests the sight of the prisoners at break time plodding their doleful circles. Leaving these horrors behind, one enters Na
another of Prague's inexplicably deserted and faintly sinister streets. Here is the Tabor Gate, there the Church of SS Peter and Paul. The Rotunda of St Martin is a Romanesque jewel, still functioning as a church, one of the tiniest I have ever entered. The cemetery boasts the graves of, among many others, the composers
and Smetana - the latter wrote an opera based on the legend of
and her lusty ploughman - and the writers Karel
and JanNeruda. Walk on and you enter a lonely little park - the Czech word for garden,
sad,
seems, for the English-speaker, peculiarly appropriate here - incongruously peopled by four sets of enormous stone figures by Josef Myslbek, another occupant of the nearby cemetery, representing not only, and inevitably,
and Pfemysl, but also Zaboj and Slavoj, the latter described by my
Eyewitness Travel Guide
as 'mythical figures invented by a forger of old legends'. The statues were moved here in 1945 from their original site, the Palacky Bridge, damaged by American bombs in February that year. That is another characteristic of bridges, unremarked in Heidegger's dithyramb: they tend, unhappily, to attract bombardment.