Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City (16 page)

I was aware of a growing, mild distress, which presently I identified as hunger: I had not eaten since breakfast time. Still there was no sign of the party getting under way. We had finished the wine, and after a long and sneeze-interrupted search
turned up a half bottle of slivovitz which she had brought back from a trip years before to Dubrovnik. Plum brandy has not been nor will ever be my tipple, but I drank it gratefully that night. Hunger and cold and the humming of the heater had combined to set up a throbbing ache in my temples. I thought of my hotel with its murky little bar, and the cavernous dining room that could be filled to bursting with roistering Muscovites for all I cared, if only I could be there, at a corner table, with my book and a bottle; I even found myself thinking wistfully of a nice plate of smoked pork with sauerkraut and a steaming triorch of potato dumplings on the side. The doorbell sounded, interrupting my reverie.
went out, and Jan and Philip looked at each other expressionlessly for a moment and then suddenly both gave a spluttering laugh. Was
the object of their amusement, or was there something else entirely going on of which I was ignorant? There is a facial expression which I have developed over the years to put on in U.S.A. - Unmanageable Situations Abroad - a sort of misty, ultra-bland half smile meant to indicate that although I do not understand what is going on, usually because of language difficulties, I am perfectly willing, if everyone is laughing, to have the joke explained, even if it is on me, or, if everyone is scowling, to apologise if I have inadvertently caused offence by word or deed; or simply to suggest in a quiet way that I am not as idiotic as I might seem. Many years ago, when I was a young man and on one of my first ventures into foreign parts, I was at a party in Rotterdam, sitting on the floor trying to impress a Dutch beauty - trying, indeed, to see if before the night was out I might be invited to venture further into foreign parts - who asked me, in a particularly long lull in an already halting conversation, if I liked Geneva, or at least that is what I understood her to be asking. I gave the world-weary shrug of a jaded traveller and said that I had never been to that city. Blonde Beauty gave a hearty laugh, and called to her friends to come and share the joke. She had been asking me not for my opinion of Rousseau's birthplace, but if I would care to have a drink from the bottle of gin standing on the floor beside her. I do not think my measure of myself as a sophisticate every quite recovered from that incident.

So when
came back into the room leading a middle-aged couple whom she introduced only as Rosa and Alex, I adopted my U.S.A. expression as I waited warily to find out who they might be. From their general and not unappealing shabbiness and vague air of distraction I took them for intellectuals of a minor sort, university lecturers, perhaps, or schoolteachers, or even writers. Rosa was one of those women who at fifty retain a vivid image of what they looked like at twenty, the visible ghost of their younger selves still haunting them in the slenderness of a neck, the delicacy of an ankle, the erotic tenderness of a smile. She was tall and attractively gaunt, with the head of one of Modigliani's less dim-seeming models. She wore an enormous fur coat with bald patches, which at first she refused to take off, complaining of the cold, and indeed the pale hand she laid briefly in mine had the chill, slack feel of a small, exquisite, fine-boned creature that had recently frozen to death. Her greying hair was tied behind in a bun from which fine wisps kept floating free and straying about her face in an underwater way, making me think, disconcertingly, of poor Ophelia submerged in her brook under that willow. Alex, on the other hand, was pure Chekhov. Tall like Rosa, and extraordinarily thin, he had the long, greyish face of a suffering ascetic; in my memory he wears pince-nez, but no doubt memory is being fanciful. He had very large, splayed feet, and was in need of a shave; the sprinkle of silver glitter in the stubble on his chin and in the hollows of his cheeks was peculiarly affecting, a token of the dishevelled old age that was awaiting him. Rosa sat beside me on the sofa, perched on the front edge of the cushion and turned a little sideways with her lovely hands folded in her lap. She had changed from Ophelia now into Edith Sitwell, only less pursed and pinched. She kept heaving fluttery, troubled little sighs, and seemed at every moment about to burst into a litany of complaint, or to cry out in tragic supplication. I would have thought she was on the brink of some terrible collapse of the spirit or the mind had not the others in the room seemed quite accustomed to what I took to be the signs of her distress. Alex was standing at the bookcase with his hands clasped behind his back, frowning at the titles through those pebble lenses I have imagined for him. He had not spoken a word since entering the room, not even when I, the stranger - J an and Philip he seemed to know was introduced to him, yet his silence seemed not rudeness so much as a kind of consideration, as if everything that he had to say had been said already, to everyone, and he was too kindly to think of burdening us with repetition.

meanwhile had rinsed two cups at the sink and was pouring out the last of the slivovitz for the newcomers. Alex at first tried to refuse, screwing his lips into a smile and shaking his head, his courtly hands lifted and spread palm outward at his chest, but
insisted, and in the end he took the cup and gave a little bow and - or do I imagine it again? - clicked his heels. Rosa knocked back her dram in one go, expertly, with no more it seemed than a light intake of breath, and gazed before her with a frown of concentration, like that of a communicant on the way back from the altar rails. While she had greeted Philip warmly enough, I had the impression, from the way she angled her shoulder in his direction, that she disapproved of Jan. For his part he was taking no notice of her, in a determinedly pointed way. All this, of course, I found baffling, and assumed I was missing some explanatory link between the people in the room. I had still been given no indication of who precisely Alex and Rosa were. Party guests? - but could this be called a party? Relations of Katefina's, an uncle and aunt, perhaps, or parents, even? Talk was desultory, and, when it was directed at Alex and Rosa, all in Czech. Alex had still said nothing. I drained the last, burning drop of slivovitz in my tumbler. Now all the drink was gone. I sneaked a look at my watch.It was half past eight.

I wish I could say that at that moment suddenly the door burst open and a crowd of half-drunk Praguers came in singing, waving bottles and with sausages sticking out of their pockets, and that I was swept up from the lumpy sofa and made to dance until dawn. And that at dawn, Alex and Rosa having left long ago,
,laughing, pushed Jan and Big Phil out the door, and turned and took my hand and led me to her bed, where we lay down together, and I was Peter Finch and she was Eva Bartok, and . . . and . . . and . . . But nothing like that happened. Katefina made coffee, and Rosa was at last persuaded to take off her coat, and Jan told another incoherent story from his time in America, laughing at his own jokes; I had not noticed before how crazy Jan's laugh could sound. Then there was a long period of silence as we drank our coffee. Katefina, her cold worsening by the minute, sat hunched before the hot-air heater, gasping softly and juicily blowing her poor, raw nose and squishing the tissues in her fist and lobbing them into the by now overflowing grate. Rosa said something to her in Czech, a rebuke, it sounded like, and she scowled and flung herself from her chair and stalked across the room to the galley kitchen and rattled the coffee pot angrily on the stove, and sneezed. Rosa threw her eyes to heaven and stood up and went to her, and they began to argue in tones of hushed fury. Jan looked at Philip, who shrugged. Alex now provided the first, the only, faint interest of the evening when, in a polite attempt to distract attention from the squabbling women, he came and took Rosa'splace beside me on the sofa and with a sort of wistful leer asked in a perfect imitation of a Dublin accent if I would 'fancy coming out for a pint'. It turned out that he was, or had been most academics that I met in the city in those days seemed to be unemployed - a professor of AngloIrish literature. He had been to Ireland. Dreamily he named the shrines he had visited: 'Eccles Street . . . Thoor Ballylee . . . the Aran Islands . . .' He had met Brendan Behan. Certainly, I said, you must have gone out for a pint with
him?
But Brendan, it seemed, had already drunk many pints, and fallen asleep at the bar. Irish people were very nice, Alex said, very friendly. The librarian at the National Library had told him a joke about James Joyce which he had not quite understood - 'Can you tell me, please, what is a piss artist?' - and in Sligo an ancient boatman had assured him that no one in the area had ever heard of the Lake Isle of Innisfree, and that when tourists asked him to take them there he would row them out to Rat Island instead. I said it was true, that when Yeats himself in old age went to look for Innisfree he could not find it. Professor Alex laughed softly, shaking his head. I asked if he had meant it, about going with him for a pint; I tried not to sound desperate. He laughed again, regretfully this time, a very Uncle Vanya sprung to melancholy life. There was no Guinness to be had in Prague. I said I did not mind, that I would drink anything. This for some reason he found very funny, and winked at me, and punched me softly on the upper arm, wag that I was.