Prague Pictures Read online

  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.

  'There it is,' he said, 'the axis: Washington, Tel Aviv, Bucharest.' Then he sat back and folded his arms.

  Jan, I could see, shared my doubts about all this, frowning into the middle distance and running his fingers through his scant beard. Neither of us, however, was willing to speak up. It is the nature of secret knowledge such as Phil claimed to possess that it is unverifiable, and therefore unchallengeable. Why had we heard nothing of Reagan supporting of the CIA training Romanian security police, of Israel supplying weapons to Bucharest? Because it's all a secret, of course, stupid! And it might all be true, too. The CIA had tried to kill Castro with an exploding cigar. One of Jimmy Carter's people had gone to Teheran bearing a cake and a copy of the Koran as gifts for the mad mullahs with whom he was to negotiate. Anything is possible.

  The snow outside was turning to sleet, falling slantwise sluggishly in the light of the street lamps and extinguishing itself in the dark surface of the river. Although night had fallen it was still early, and Phil had the ominous look of a reality instructor warming to his task. Then Jan asked him if he had spoken to since his arrival in Prague. He shrugged. Now it was Jan's turn to smile and shake his head. He fished in the pockets of his jeans and came up with a coin and went to the telephone beside the gasping espresso machine. Who is I asked? Philip shrugged again. 'A girl,' he said. He looked vexed; he had hardly begun to tap into his store of secret knowledge, the great world's arcana. After a brief and what seemed furtive conversation on the telephone Jan came back to the table. Katefina was at home, and was having a party, and we were invited. A girl. We paid and left.

  Praguers are the most circumspect of city dwellers. Travellers on trams and in the metro carefully remove the dust jackets of books, no matter how innocuous, that they have brought to read on the journey; some will even make brown-paper covers to hide the titles of paperbacks. Understandable, of course in a city for so long full of informers, and old habits die hard. Likewise, our brief journey to apartment had the air of the credits sequence of a 1960s espionage movie. First there was Jan on the telephone in the cafe cupping his hand over the receiver and raising a protective shoulder to the room as if he thought there might be a lip reader on the premises, then we were outside, three hunched figures on an empty avenue, walking cliches, shouldering against the wind and the darkness and the gusts of flabby sleet, spies who went out into the cold for a rendezvous with the woman called After we had waited for a numbing ten minutes at a corner rank an ancient taxi wheezed up and, eager as eskimos, we piled into its leather-and-cigarette-smoke-smelling back seat, huddling together for warmth.

  Taxis are another of Prague's mysteries. They seem to congregate and swim in protective shoals, like a species of large, unlovely, shy sea creature. Until 1989 they were run by the Prague Transport Corporation, which meant they were dependable to some degree, but now they are all privately owned, with the results that one might expect. It is impossible to flag down a taxi, if you are a foreigner, or at least I have never succeeded in doing so. There must be a set of coded signals known only to native Praguers. Often I have stood on the pavement wanly waving as cab after cab plunged past, every one of them empty, only to have some leather-jacketed fellow with the regulation drooping moustache step nimbly past me and, like an expert bidder at an auction, lift one finger, or flex an eyebrow, at which a taxi I had not even seen approach would slew across three lanes of blaring traffic and pull to a smoking halt at the kerb with its back door already swinging open. Nowadays one is warned off taxis altogether. On my most recent visit to the city the first thing I saw when I entered my hotel room was a notice from the manager cheerily assuring me - 'Dear Honoured Guest!' - that if I were to hail a cab in the street I would almost certainly be charged an exorbitant rate, with the additional hint that this would like be the least of the evils that would befall me; instead, I should ask reception to call a car from their own private service. I assumed this was a piece of strategic exaggeration on the part of the hotel, but when I checked with a diplomat from the Irish embassy he told me how a few nights before he had taken a taxi from the railway station to his home and even though the meter registered 600 crowns the driver insisted on charging 6,000. Did you pay, I asked him? 'Oh, I paid,' he said grimly, breathing heavily down his nostrils. It seemed best to drop the subject.

  I heard sneeze before I saw her. She lived on Slezska Avenue, on the eastern side of the city, in a big, blank apartment block behind one of those grey, many-windowed cliff-faces so characteristic of Eastern Europe.17 There was an open entranceway of grey concrete where a naked bulb was burning, and a clanging grey metal door which had to use both hands to haul open. She was, indeed, a very Eva, and was even wearing a tight black sweater with a polo neck, and black leather boots. She was very beautiful, with a sharp, heart-shaped face and thin, long, pale hands and long, slender legs. Particularly appealing were those deep shadows, of a pale plum shade, under her eyes, so characteristic of Eastern European women. She gave a loud, liquid snuffle, and smiled. The wings of her nose were red and raw, and she was clutching a sodden tissue. Jan and Philip kissed her on the cheek. With me she shook hands. 'Oh,' she said, 'forgib me, I hab such a code.'

  Her apartment consisted of a single, enormous room furnished sparsely with a lopsided sofa, some straight-backed chairs, a mahogany table with carved legs - lugubrious survivor of a bygone bourgeois age - an overflowing bookcase, and an elaborate stereo system housed in an upright black perspex cabinet. There was a tiny fireplace with a tiled surround, the fireless grate already half filled with wadded paper hankies. The only source of heating that I could see in the room was a small hot-air blower, an oddly animate-seeming appliance that squatted froglike in the middle of the floor, its mouth wide open and its engine whirring at full though inadequate blast. Obviously Jan and Phil and I were much too early, for not only were there no other guests present, but there were no visible signs of any preparations for the party. turned the sofa sideways-on to the fireplace while Jan and Philip brought forward the straight-backed chairs. As this was my first visit, the rules of hospitality insisted, it seemed, that I must sit on the sofa, with the result that I spent the entire evening in a vaguely helpless, semi-recumbent sprawl, peering up waiflike at the others perched on their grown-up chairs. Every so often I would drag myself upright, wriggling and grunting, only to subside again inexorably into the bumpy upholstery wallowing around me like quicksand. In a far corner of the room there was a tall refrigerator, big as a packing crate, from which fetched a bottle of freezing wine, Moravian, slightly fizzy, and sickly sweet, which we drank from tumblers. At regular intervals Katefina would be overcome by a sneezing fit - really, for such a slight and delicately made girl she sneezed with remarkable force - at the end of which she would blow her nose violently, as if to punish it for its betrayals, crush the tissue in her fist and with rueful aplomb toss it into the grate to join the steadily growing slushy white mountain of its fellows. What did we talk about? Philip rehearsed his Romanian adventures, and Jan gave us a long, rambling account of a fist fight he had got himself into late one drunken night outside a bar in a small town somewhere in windy Wisconsin. The point of the story was that his opponent turned out to be a second-generation
Pole whose parents, old-style Marxists, had been imprisoned in the McCarthy era. When this bond was discovered, Jan and his new friend went back into the bar and spent the rest of the night drinking vodka and discussing Polish politics. 'Of course,' Philip said when Jan had finished his tale, 'Lech Walesa is in the pay of the KGB, as everybody knows.'

  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.