Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City (14 page)

Years later, when I began to travel beyond what was then the Iron Curtain and into Eastern Europe, I discovered that Eva was not unique. In fact, there were Eva Bartoks all over Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and probably all over the other Eastern Bloc countries I had not yet visited. Everywhere one looked, on the streets, in the trams, behind the counters of dowdy shops, there they were, Eva's sisters or cousins, just as dark and soulful and nearly as lovely as she, with that same faraway look in their sloe-black eyes, dreaming, as surely she must for long have dreamed, of the West and all its wonderful decadence. In my first days in Prague I moved through the streets in a state of low-grade anguish at the spectacle of so many beautiful women, not the glossy, soot-and-silver wraiths of the cinema screens of my youth, but palpably real persons, walking about unconcernedly, or hurrying to an assignation, or standing at a bus stop hunched over a cigarette, or, indeed, sitting together in a pair at a table under a plastic palm tree in a hotel lobby on the look-out for custom.

The first one of these fascinating creatures I got to speak to in circumstances that could be called in any way intimate was
I have forgotten her surname, if I ever knew it - a freelance editor working at the time for a small Prague publishing house. I met her on my second visit to the city, again in winter. I had been to Kutna Hora to view, among other interesting sites, the famous Bone Chapel,
¹⁶
and when I came back in the afternoon there was a note waiting for me at my hotel from an old acquaintance, a Czech journalist named Jan. He wrote that he had heard I was in town - how, I wondered? - and that by coincidence another friend was also here, Philip, an American poet who ran a little magazine in a city in upper New York state, Syracuse, I think, or perhaps it was Albany. The three of us had first encountered each other some years before in wintry Madison, where we were attending a literary gathering at the University of Wisconsin. I liked Jan, a tall, thin, bearded, nervous young man with a tremor in his hands and a permanently worried expression - 'haunted' is the epithet that springs to mind. He was funny, in his sombre Czech way. I wondered then, as I do still, how he had managed to get a visa to travel to America, seemingly without difficulty, in those Cold War days of the Andropov interregnum. Was he an apparatchik, or its Czech equivalent? - not that I would have disapproved, particularly, for who can say what accommodations one might come to, given the circumstances and the necessity? He was witheringly critical of Gustav Husak's horrible regime, yet, as I discovered one drunken night at a party in someone's house overlooking one of Madison's many lakes, he was nevertheless a doctrinaire Marxist. In the freezer in the kitchen we had found a bottle of Stolichnaya, Jan and Philip and I, which we had liberated from its Siberian cell - Jan declared it the People's Vodka; we were already fatuously tipsy - and as we sat in the gloaming at a picture window, looking out at the frozen lake glimmering in ghostly moonlight and passing the bottle of gelid, steely liquor from hand to hand and mouth to mouth, Jan made a passionate speech in praise of dialectical materialism, delivered, however, in a low, urgent murmur, as if he were worried that he might be overheard and arrested by the campus police, a not irrational fear, come to think of it. The moment recalled for me other, similar moments which I could not immediately place. Next morning, though, feeling my way cautiously through the fog of a vodka hangover, I realised that what Jan reminded me of most was those Irish Catholic priests of the post-Conciliar 1960s who had been to John XXIII's Rome and come back to Dublin burning with reformist zeal. One encountered them, these liberal zealots, at parties much like this one, thrilled with them selves in the new dispensation; they too would drink too much, and late at night back one into a corner and, in tones similar to Jan's, breathe into one's ear the hot good news from the Vatican Council that Christ the Aquarian was in the ascendant. Of course, press them on dogma contraception, sex before marriage, that kind of thing - and one struck against the old, iron rules. As many have remarked, Catholicism and Communism have much in common.

So now here we were again, the three of us, meeting up in another snowbound city. I had telephoned Jan and asked him to come to my hotel. He and Philip arrived together, but when I suggested a drink in the hotel bar Jan glanced about the lobby and shook his head and walked back into the street and hailed a taxi. It was twilight, and snow flurries were swirling in the pallid light of the street lamps. What was wrong with the hotel bar, I asked? Jan shrugged. 'Russians,' he said, reminding me of my first meeting with the Professor, and then made that odd, snuffly sound that I remembered from our previous acquaintanceship, half joyless laugh, half snort of pure disgust, which in turn, eerily, reminded me of Marta. According to Jan, I had managed to choose the hotel in Prague most favoured by Russian businessmen, Russian army officers, and Russian spies. In the taxi Jan sat in the front seat, talking to the driver - they seemed to know each other - while in the back Philip and I warily reminisced about that week we had spent in each other's company in the Midwest. Philip, Big Phil, was a large, unsteady man, hard-breathing, bespectacled, with a footballer's shoulders and thick, touchingly unhandy hands. He had been more Jan's friend than mine - I think they had known each other before Madison, for Philip in his role as magazine editor had been a frequent traveller to Prague and points east - and I always felt he held me suspect in some never defined way. Curious, these intermittent and far-flung encounters into which life insists on leading us. I have never been an adept of international relations. I envy those travellers who can drop in on friends in all corners of the world at a moment's notice and be at ease in their company as if they had parted from them only yesterday. It was said of Sir Alfred Beit, the diamond magnate and art collector, that he kept his houses in England, America and Ireland fully staffed and functioning all year round, with food in the kitchens and freshly laundered clothes in the wardrobes, so that he and Lady Beit could travel luggageless and walk in their front doors and take up their Irish, English or American lives without breaking stride. In a similar way, but without needing all that money, how nice it would be to meet up with old pals in New York, or London, or Prague, and not have to unpack the years that have passed since we last met. I always feel a constricting shyness when I encounter someone after a long absence, as if all that had happened to both of us in the intervening years had somehow to be accounted for, like a clandestine love affair discovered by one's spouse. So as Philip in his stertorous mumble interrogated me about my doings over the previous three years I felt myself as usual squirming evasively, with the result that we quickly fell into a silence that was aggrieved on his side and shamefaced on mine.

We were on our way to a cafe, the Slavia, it must have been, on the river down at the end of Narodni Avenue, in the New Town. The snow was falling faster now, and as it came to a stop at traffic lights or negotiated tricky bends, the ancient taxi wallowed and yawed on the slippery, fresh surface, creaking, like a boat caught sideways in a rip tide, to the quiet amusement of our driver. In the East, in those days, snow did not carry the Dickensian, bells-and-holly promise that it does for us in the West, it was too chillingly suggestive of windswept, floodlit wastes and huddled huts and freezing figures lying swaddled in their rags on rows of bunks in the deep Arctic night. In Prague, snow was serious.

We were wafted into the cafe on a blast of icy air. The place was crowded but quiet. Heads were lifted and glances swept us swiftly, hopefully, thorough as a policeman's hands checking us for what we might be carrying, then the eyes dropped back to books, or chessboards, or just the shadows under tables. We sat by a steamed window and drank bitter coffee and a peculiarly slimy liquor that the label on the bottle said was cognac. Talk among the three of us was desultory. Jan was distracted, and my reticence in the taxi obviously still rankled with Philip. I looked about. Since the 1920s the Slavia has been one of Prague's leading literary cafes. Kafka mentions it in his diaries, and Rilke used to take his evening coffee here, got up in spats and starched collar and white cotton gloves; it is the setting for some of his short stories,
Tales of Prague.
Seifert was an habitue, and even wrote a series of 'Slavia Poems'. The Slavia is not arranged after the Austro-Hungarian model, all dark old wood and cosy inwardness; it is more like the Caffe San Marco in Trieste, one of the world's great coffee houses, noisy, even a little rowdy, and somewhat higgledy-piggledy, with tables set too close to each other so that when you stand up, your chair back makes the customer behind you knock his front teeth against the rim of his espresso cup. Also, the Slavia looks not in but out, on to the quayside and the Vltava. In 1991 the cafe was closed for renovation, and stayed closed for seven years due to a leasing dispute between a consortium of Boston investors and the Film School next door. The President, Vaclav Havel, was among the many Praguers who loudly protested the closure; when eventually the Slavia reopened in 1998, Havel spoke of the saving of a national institution.

That night in the 1980s it seemed more like a national memorial. Who are the most numerous frequenters of public literary establishments, so-called? In the 1960s in Dublin I found no Behan or Kavanagh in McDaid's or Mulligan's, and when I was in Paris and walked past the Cafe Flore or the Deux Magots - what penniless young Irishman on his first Paris visit would dare venture inside such frighteningly suave and expensive places? - 1 saw a lot of American tourists, but no sign of Sartre or de Beauvoir hard at work over their
cahiers
and
cafes.
The customers in the Slavia that night did not look likely
litterateurs
to me. They were young, poorly dressed and bored, or middle-aged and dowdy; only in the elderly among them, I thought, was there discernible the still-surviving glow of an intellectual spark. I remember one night in Dublin in 1987 arguing with Joseph Brodsky and Susan Sontag about yet another letter they and other East Coast luminaries had written to the
New York Review of Books
protesting the imprisonment of intellectuals in the Soviet Union. Did they ever, I demanded - the wine was flowing, and I could hardly see Brodsky behind the clouds of cigarette smoke in which he was forever enveloped - did they, he and his American friends, ever think to protest about the imprisonment of a Russian street sweeper, or charlady, some poor nobody who had not even written a subversive poem but still had ended up in prison? Sontag was adamant on the need to keep pecking away at the vast repressive machine that was the Soviet Union, and no doubt she was right. Brodsky, however, a fine, just and courageous man, conceded that, yes, 'we do tend to look after our own.' Recently I read a memorial tribute to Brodsky, who died of a heart attack in 1996 at the age of only fifty-six, by the Russian essayist and fiction writer, Tatyana Tolstaya. She wrote of how she had urged him after 1989 to return to Russia - a thing he was superstitiously unwilling to do: she quoted a poem written in his youth in which he prophesied
Neither country nor churchyard will I choose/Til come to Vasilevsky Island to die -
so that all those who had revered him as their spokesman when he was in exile might have the comfort of seeing him back amongst them in St Petersburg, even if it meant risking a visit to Vasilevsky Island. 'What about all those little old ladies of the intelligentsia,' Tolstaya had reminded him, 'your readers, all the librarians, museum staff, pensioners, communal apartment dwellers who are afraid to go out into the communal kitchen with their chipped teakettle? The ones who stand in the back rows at philharmonic concerts, next to the columns, where the tickets are cheaper?' Tolstaya was right. We know about the great ones, the Solzhenitsyns, the Brodskys, the Sa-kharovs, but when, even in those dark days before the Fall of the Wall, did we think about the 'little old ladies of the intelligentsia', those sustainers of the spark, those no less heroic guardians of the light?

Philip had arrived that day from Bucharest, where he had been seeing one of his dissident poets - although the adjective is superfluous, since to write poetry in Romania then was automatically to dissent. I was interested to hear a first-hand account of life there, suspecting, as so many of us in the West suspected, that reports of the gaudy excesses of the Ceau§escu regime must be in part at least inspired by the American Central Intelligence Agency. Philip was there to enlighten me, however. He is one of those wised-up people, is Phil, who see themselves both as social outsiders - dissidents, if you like - and as players strenuously engaged in the great game of world politics. Whatever you vaguely believe, whatever fuzzy opinion you may hold, whatever way you choose to account for world-historical events, Philip can be depended upon to show you how fatuous and shallow you are in your grasp of reality, how hopelessly limited in your thinking. In Phil's version, everything that happens is either the innocent-seeming tip, glistening there in the sun, of an immense, malignant iceberg, or a deliberately manufactured smokescreen behind which a secret inferno is raging. Nothing, for Phil, is as it seems, and he has the inside information. Yes, all that I have heard about Ceau§escu and his doings is correct, Phil can tell me. In fact, I do not know the half of it. When Phil was in Bucharest, Ceau§escu was returning from one of his many triumphal progresses through the world's capitals. To mark his homecoming, or so Philip swore, a full-sized replica of the Arc de Triomphe, made from plywood, or maybe even cardboard, had been erected on the road along which the President would travel on his way in from the airport. In the city centre the boulevards along which the President's motorcade would pass were emptied of onlookers - that is, possible troublemakers - by squads of security police in ankle-length leather overcoats and slouch hats, just like the Gestapo, on whom, or on movie versions of whom, they had probably modelled themselves. Yes, typewriters were licensed, and could be confiscated without warning. The Ceau§escu family ran the country like a mafia, for their own aggrandisement and to fill their secret Swiss bank accounts. All this was true, all this and more. Jan, making abstract designs with his fingertip in , nodded gloomily: yes, yes, all true. 'Ceau§escu is a vampire,' he said with a sigh, 'his wife too, that bitch. Between them they have brought Romania back to the Middle Ages.' The Russians knew it, of course, knew how bad things were, but what could they do? 'If they invade, take over the government, the Americans will howl; let matters go on as they are, the country will explode. Either way, is a disaster.' Big Phil, however, was shaking his big head slowly and smiling his pitying smile. How could we be so dumb? Could we not see the true situation? The fact was, Reagan and his people were Ceau§escu's real sponsors and protectors. This made even Jan sit up. Phil looked from one of us to the other, still smiling, still shaking his head, like a teacher regarding two of his most favoured pupils on one of their less brilliant days. 'Listen,' he said, and when Phil said 'listen' in that soft, patient tone you knew you were about to get the real stuff, the lowdown, the insider's inside information. 'It's simple. What is the worst advertisement for MarxistLeninism, atheistic communism and the Soviet so-called Union?' He opened his hands and showed us two broad, soft, pink palms. 'Romania!' Ceau§escu was a precious asset for Reagan and the CIA. The Agency, as Phil familiarly, almost fondly, called it, regularly ferried Ceau§escu's top security people to a base in Turkey for training in state-of-the-art - it was the first time I had heard the phrase - anti-insurrectionist techniques, developed in the jungles of South America. The Israelis too were involved. 'The Israelis!' Phil cried, with a harsh laugh. 'The frigging Israelis!' He knew for a fact that Ceau§escu had commissioned an Israeli arms firm to provide him with a fleet of attack helicopters specifically designed to tackle urban guerrilla warfare. He reached out and traced a triangle in the spilled salt on the table, cutting through Jan's designs.