Prague Pictures

by John Banville

  He was a tall, spare man with pale, short hair brushed neatly across a narrow forehead, a Nordic type unexpected this far to the south and east. Impossible to tell his age; at first sight he might have been anywhere between thirty and sixty. He was handsome, with that unblemished surface and Scandinavian features, yet curiously self-effacing, somehow. Even as he stood before me I found it hard to get him properly into focus, as if a flaw had suddenly developed in the part of my consciousness that has the task of imprinting images upon the memory. I think it was that he had spent so many years trying not to be noticed - by the authorities, by the police, by spies and informers - that a layer of his surface reality had worn away. He had something of the blurred aspect of an actor who has just scrubbed off his make-up. He shook hands with each of us in turn in that grave, elaborate, central European way that makes it seem one is being not greeted for the first time but already being bade farewell. Such a melancholy smile. His English was precise, with only the faintest accent. He welcomed us to Prague in a mild but calmly seigneurial tone, as if it were not Prague we had arrived in but his own private domain. We were to catch this proprietorial note repeatedly here, especially in intellectual circles; so many things that were precious had been taken from the lives of these artists, critics, scholars that they clung to the idea of their city, its history, its shabby magnificence, its unyielding mysteriousness, with the passion of exiles. I had brought a litre of duty-free Irish whiskey as a gift. 'Ah, Jameson!' the Professor said, in the tone of one acknowledging a precious gift from what had seemed a mythic place, silk from Cathay, spices from Samarkand. He took the bottle from my hands delicately, almost tactfully, with a finely judged degree of gratitude. Courtly: that was the word. It struck me I had never met anyone to whom the term could be so aptly applied.

  He had advanced no more than a pace or two into the room, and when I moved to shut the door I seemed to detect behind the rimless spectacles that he wore a flicker of unease, of alarm, even. Still holding the whiskey bottle, he stood with his elbows pressed into his sides, his grey raincoat buttoned to the throat. When G. began to speak of the mission that had brought the three of us to Prague he silenced her at once by putting a finger to his lips and pointing to the dusty light fixture in the middle of the ceiling. It was another Prague gesture, always accompanied by a hapless apologetic smile, with which we were to become depressedly familiar. There were, there really were, hidden microphones everywhere.

  We went down to the lobby, where the Professor judged that it was safe for us to talk, albeit in guarded murmurs. The two beautiful, black-eyed girls had gone, though their empty coffee cups, the rims printed with smeary lipstick kisses, remained on the table under the plastic palm. There were some twenty pictures, the Professor said, that he wished us to take to his son - not paintings, as I had thought, but photographs, highly valuable original contact prints by a Czech master whose name was unknown to me. The Professor was anxious to assure us that if we had any doubts about taking them out of the country we should say so and he would find another means of getting them to New York. It was perfectly apparent, however, that we were his only hope. No no, we protested stoutly, we were determined to help him. Again that pained, melancholy smile, and he cleared his throat and carefully pressed the tip of a middle finger to the frail gold bridge of his spectacles. In that case, would we do him the honour of coming to dinner that evening at his apartment, where we could not only view the photographs but meet his wife? At that moment the double doors to the dining room behind us swung open from within, pressed by the backs of a pair of waiters, each bearing a tray piled high with used plates, who spun on their heels in co-ordinated pirouettes like the sleek male dancers in an old-fashioned movie musical, and pranced away in the direction of the kitchens, their trays held effortlessly aloft. In the moment that the doors were open we were afforded a glimpse, peculiarly comprehensive and detailed, of the room's main dining table. It was large and circular, and there were six or eight men seated around it. No doubt my jaundiced memory has exaggerated the look they had of so many pigs busy at a trough. 'Russians,' the Professor said, and sighed. They were raucously drunk, and contemptuously oblivious of the rest of the crowded dining room. I was to see their like again, dozens of them, a couple of years later in Budapest, where I foolishly allowed myself to be persuaded to attend a meeting of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe, a Cold War talking shop now surely defunct. The meeting was supposedly devoted to the encouragement of friendly exchanges between writers from East and West; in fact, most of the time during the sessions was taken up by the Americans and the Russians lobbing insults at each other over the heads of the rest of us irrelevant small-fry. The Soviet delegation were Writers' Union types to a man, grey-faced hacks in sagging suits, smelling of stale cigarette smoke and bad teeth, who during lunch breaks would commandeer the biggest table in the cafeteria and eat and shout and laugh and slap each other on the back in a show of calculatedly ugly triumphal-ism. Looking back now, of course, I wonder if they, and their counterparts in that Prague dining room, were merely trying to drown out with so much noise the increasingly insistent whisper telling them what they already knew in their heart of unthawable hearts, that it was all coming to an end, the jaunts to pretty satellite capitals, the dachas in the country, the sprees in Moscow's foreign-currency shops, all that passed for privilege in a totalitarian state, all soon to be grabbed by a new elite of mafia chiefs and criminal industrialists and members of this or that President's prodigiously extensive family.1 But for now the trough was still full, and the Moscow politicos were still snout-deep in it, although the white double doors, swinging in ever more shallow arcs, were shutting them out of our view by two, by two, by two, and the last we saw of them was the fat fellow at the head of the table, his back to us, who in turn was reduced to a large pair of trotters in broad black shoes splayed under a chair, two hitched-up trouser legs, two crumpled grey socks, and the bared lower reaches of two fat, bristled calves, until at last even that much was gone.

  The Professor was offering to show us something of Prague. We were grateful, but worried that we might be keeping him from his work, on this weekday morning. He laughed very softly and said that he had all the time in the world. He explained that due to his involvement in Charter 77, the human rights manifesto drawn up at the end of 1976 by dissident intellectuals after the authorities had ordered the arrest of the rock and roll band, Plastic People, he was dismissed from the university, where he had been Professor of Fine Art. Since then, he and his wife had been subsisting on a meagre pension which the State repeatedly threatened to stop if he were to insist on maintaining links with degenerate and anti-revolutionary factions. He knew Vaclav Havel, of course, still in prison at the time, and often met his friends from the old days, before 1976 before, indeed, 1968 - in cafes and pubs, where their conversations were monitored by police informers. He was frequently summoned for interrogation at police headquarters, even still, although the authorities must have known that he was politically powerless. He explained to us, in tones of weary amusement flecked with bitterness, how the procedure worked. There would be a phone call early in the morning, often before dawn, when he was still in bed, and a friendly voice would ask if he would care to come to such-and-such a building, always a different one, and have a chat. Just a chat, the voice would say, nothing serious, nothing for him to worry about, he could take his time, there was no hurry, a car would be outside, waiting for him, when he was ready. He would get up straight away and pack a small bag - pyjamas, a clean shirt, change of underwear, socks, shaving things, the all-important toothbrush - while his wife made coffee and heated rolls. This was their unvarying ritual. It was strange, he said, but they spoke little on these occasions, and only of practical things, despite the fact that they both knew they might never see each other again. There were friends and acquaintances who had been summoned like this, 'for a chat', and who had not come back. Arrived at the specified anonymous building in one of the city's m
ore unbeautiful quarters, the Professor told us, he would be placed in a small, windowless room, bare save for a steel table and straight chair, and instructed to fill out a sheaf of official forms, listing the minutiae of his life and the lives of his parents, wife, children, while unseen eyes, as he well knew, watched him through the two-way mirror set before him in the wall. Then the interrogator would stroll in, relaxed, smiling, and infinitely menacing.

  These periods of detention, the Professor mildly observed, could be over in half an hour, or might go on for three days and nights, or even longer, with half a dozen interrogators working in shifts. He had never yet suffered physical violence. Like secret police forces everywhere, the Statni or StB, had a very great deal of information - when the files were opened after the Velvet Revolution, the names were discovered of tens of thousands of informers on the StB payroll - but found the greatest difficulty in piecing it all together. Frequently, the Professor said, the line of questioning would meander so far from anything or anyone that he might be able to tell them about, even if he were willing to, that he would have no alternative but to fall silent. The interrogators were always nameless. Many years later, another Czech friend, Zdenek, a writer and translator, and a leading Charter 77 activist, told me how one day after the fall of the communist regime he was walking in the city centre and spotted on the other side of the street one of his interrogators from the bad old days, and how, before he knew what he was doing, he found himself shouting across the traffic furiously at the fellow, 'What is your name? What is your name?' as if it were the one most important thing in the world, the one thing that he must know above all. And what did the former interrogator do? I asked, expecting to hear that he had pulled up his coat collar and slunk away in shame. 'Oh,' said with a shrug, 'he smiled, and waved, and called out, Hello there! How are you? and went on his way.'

  By now we were in Zlata Ulicka - the famous Golden Lane - hard by the walls of the fortress of Hradcany. I do not know how we got there. Indeed, much as I try I cannot remember what means of transport we used in any of our time during that first visit. We must have travelled by bus, or tram, or even, despite J.'s claustrophobia, the metro - still unnervingly spotless, by the way - but I cannot see us on any of those conveyances. We are simply here, and then there, and then somewhere else, with only blank spaces in between. How smoothly does Mnemosyne's magic chariot glide!

  Golden Lane is very old, an enclosed, cobbled way blind at both ends. Its tiny houses, clustered against the wall of the Stag Moat, were built at the end of the sixteenth century by the Emperor Rudolf II for his twenty-four castle guards. Why, one wonders, only twenty-four? History's simplest statements have a way of provoking puzzles. In the seventeenth century the houses in Golden Lane were taken over mostly by the city's goldsmiths, hence the name. The curious little street has generated legends, for instance that Rudolf's numerous band of alchemists had their laboratories here - alchemists are a type of goldsmith, after all, which might explain the confusion. It is attractive to think of those magi huddled over their alembics in these cramped little rooms, but my guidebook insists, in a distinctly reproving tone, that despite popular lore, Rudolf's alchemical horde did not work in Zlata Ulicka at all, but were confined to nearby Lane, that runs along the north side of St Vitus's Cathedral - yes, yes, we shall visit the cathedral presently. I was more impressed to hear, from the Professor, that Kafka lodged for a time in Zlata Ulicka, at number 22, as did his latter-day fellow-countryman, the great Czech poet, Jaroslav Seifert.2 So also, mind you, did the great Czech fortune teller, Madame de Thebes, who lived at number 4 in the years before the Second World War. More magic . . .

  Speaking of Kafka - as how, in Prague, would one not? - we wondered if it might be possible to visit his birthplace. Well, yes, the Professor said, frowning, we could go and look at the house, but the building, U (At the Tower), originally owned by the Benedictine order, was burned down in 1887, some years after the Kafka family had moved to a new apartment on Wenceslas Square, and all that remains of the earlier building is the stone portal of the front doorway. A small carved plaque, by the sculptor Karel Hla-dik, is attached high up on the wall beside the door; the memorial was erected in 1965, after the famous conference on Kafka at Liblice Castle in 1963 had made Prague's greatest artist acceptable to the authorities as a critic of decadence and capitalist alienation. Before that time, the Professor explained, Kafka officially was a non-person in the Czechoslovak state. The communists did not stop at suppressing his works, but held that they and their author had never existed. One almost has to admire the simplicity of it, the horrible, blank thoroughness of this erasure of a life and its darkly luminous products.3

  We walked on, up the steeply ascending street, the patches of packed snow squeaking under our boots. The sounds of the city came to us on this high hill as a kind of troubled murmur. We had fallen silent. The thought of Kafka having been for so long a non-existent presence in his native city seemed so . . . well, so Kafkaesque, that we felt abashed. But not as abashed as the Professor looked. There was in those days among the decent folk of Prague a particular form of embarrassment in regard to the city's, and the country's, plight, held bound and mute under Soviet domination and what Ripellino in a finely contemptuous phrase calls 'the fell tyranny of its Calibans'. It is an affliction that is common, one suspects, to all subjugated people, this tongue-tied, apologetic shame before the eyes of strangers. In Ireland during the catastrophic famines of the 1840s, when the country's condition was desperate - successive rebellions against English rule had failed, the economy was in collapse, the language was as good as dead whole families of starving countrypeople would turn in upon themselves, shutting and barring the doors of their cabins and blocking out the windows against the world's gaze, and wait for death. It was as if they could not believe that such misfortune were not somehow, at some level, their own fault. I never had the nerve, the effrontery, that first time or on subsequent visits to the city, to ask the Praguers of my acquaintance, or even those who over the years became my friends, whether the Czech people felt deep down that they had somehow failed themselves in 1968, and had not done enough to halt the Soviet tanks in their tracks. But what, really, could they have done? What could they have been expected to do, those petalled children of the Age of Aquarius? How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea I Whose action is no stronger than a flower? Shakespeare beautifully, tragi- cally, asks. At the time we all recalled the Hungarian uprising of no more than a dozen years previously, the bodies in the streets, the rubble, the ruined city. Who could have wished a like fate for Prague?

  In what was no doubt an attempt to dissipate the gloom that had settled on us, and to demonstrate that the city had its living writers, whose flesh-and-blood reality the authorities could not deny, the Professor took us to lunch at a literary pub. At least, that is how he described it. Hidden in a narrow, twisting street somewhere between the Old Town Square and the river, it was a long, low, brownish place with benches and three-legged stools and a kippered ceiling - was it the fabled U Zlateho Tygra, The Golden Tiger- a Bohemian version, I immediately thought, of Mulligan's pub in Poolbeg Street in Dublin. U Zlateho Tygra, if such it was, that day was riotously busy. Shirt-sleeved barmen were slinging litre-sized steins of Pilsner, while simultaneously dealing out piled mounds of sausage and potatoes to clamouring customers on all sides. Watching these professionally dour masters ply their trade was like witnessing a troupe of acrobatic conjurors at work with sticks and spinning plates. The air was dense with steam and cigarette smoke, and in the stippled, misted mirrors the waiters' ghostly doubles darted. We asked the Professor to point out the best, or at least the best-known, writers; we were hoping for a Hrabal or a Skrovecky. The Professor looked about carefully, then coughed, and once again touched a fingertip to the bridge of his spectacles, that gesture which I knew by now was the prelude to an apology. The literati, it seemed, were not much in evidence today. That fellow by the window, the one in the scarf, styled himself a novelist,
but he had never published anything, and no one had yet been permitted to read his work. The woman in the corner, a handsome blonde d'un certain age, was rumoured to have had an affair with Seifert. That haughty-looking chap with the cockerel's crest of silver hair had been engaged for twenty years on a Czech translation of Finnegans Wake, and was known to be a police informer. And there, glaring at him across the room, was sad old Svoboda, the critic and feuilletonist, whose name had not been allowed to appear in print since '68. I told the Professor there was no need for him to apologise; in Dublin in the early Sixties, when giants still walked the earth, I would often venture into McDaid's or the Palace Bar or Mulligan's, hoping for a glimpse of Brendan Behan or Patrick Kavanagh, but there never seemed to be anyone there except other haunted-eyed neophytes such as I was, and the odd penniless poetaster hoping to cadge a drink. The Professor wanly smiled. I could see he did not believe me, thought I was merely being kind. Life, as Kundera's title has it, is elsewhere.