Prague Pictures

by John Banville

  Legend, as the Blue Guide knows, has a deplorably lurid imagination, and in the matter of Prague's origins will have none of that boring stuff about Migrations of the Peoples and dy- nast's first seats. No no, listen, it says excitedly in its rough demotic, this is how it was: once upon a time in the east there were these three brothers, Czech, Lech and Rus. Seeking new homelands, they set out westward at the head of their respective tribes. Rus halted at the Dnieper and became Father Russia, while the other two continued on, Lech veering northwards to found Poland, and Czech climbing Rip hill in Bohemia and deciding that he liked all that he saw. Czech's tribe settled down happily here, and after a couple of hundred years produced a new leader rejoicing in the name of Krok12 who lived at legendary Krok had three beautiful daughters, Kazi the healer, Teta the priestess, and Lady the prophetess. Presently Libuse inherited her father's throne and became ruler of the Czech Lands. However, since Czech's male descendants, like most men, then as now, did not relish the idea of living in a matriarchy - or, as my Internet history Runyonesquely puts it, 'a guy who did not like one of decisions as judge started a stink about the fact that the Czechs were ruled by a woman' - followed the dictates of a vision and sent a company of her subjects, accompanied by her white horse, into the forest in search of an a ploughman, building a a threshold of a house, and there to found a a 'new town'. People and horse carried Orac - Orac the Ploughmanin triumph back to Castle on its stony eminence above the Vltava, where he and were married, thus founding the Pfemy-slid dynasty . . .

  How curious it is, the way in which one's fancy lingers on the least of history's props, and how, lingered on, the props spring suddenly to life. Beyond all this welter of names and dates and places, my attention keeps wandering back to that wooden bridge over the Vltava that linked the New Town on the right bank to the old Slav quarter on the left. What did it look like, how was it built? No sooner have the questions formed than the mind begins to drive the piles into the mud and link the arches one by one. Romantically, legendarily, I see it in storm, straining against the surge of waters, or hovering on the mist of mornings, or glimmering in the darkness of the vast medieval night . . . In the eleventh century the wooden structure was replaced by a stone one, 'the so-called Judith's Bridge' of the Blue Guide - but why 'so-called'? - and in time that too was replaced, when the great architect Peter summoned to Prague in the city's Golden Age by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, in 1357 built the bridge named after the Emperor that stands to this day, despite fire and flood and the generations of war.

  At least, I think it was Peter Parlef who built it . . .

  In the essay Building Dwelling Thinking, the philosopher Martin Heidegger meditates movingly on the essential nature of the bridge, the bridge's bridgeness, as der Meister aus Deutschland himself might put it. The bridge defines, brings into existence. 'It does not just connect banks that are already there. The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream . . . It brings stream and bank and land into each other's neighbourhood. The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream.' The bridge is a 'location,' he writes, 'it allows a space into which earth and heaven, divinities and mortals are admitted.' Heidegger designates the bridge as a 'thing', in the ancient sense of gathering or assembly. 'The bridge is a thing and only that. Only? As this thing it gathers the fourfold.'

  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.

  What do I recall most clearly from my last visit to I draw up an inventory. Dead, damp leaves beside a gravel pathway. A mother and her toddler wandering through the cemetery in a vaguely questing way, as if these were not graves on either side but supermarket shelves. A nun in the Rotunda of St Martin, lighting a candle and smiling blissfully, angelically, to herself. Black spires seen through the bare black limbs of a winter tree. That soft-spoken man in a blue jersey sitting at a small square table selling entrance tickets to SS Peter and Paul's - of the church itself I retain practically nothing . . . Thinking historically, like giving a story a happy ending, is a matter of deciding where to stop. Hegel at Jena, writing on the Absolute, hears under his window Napoleon and his forces riding to battle and conceives of the little Corsican as the embodiment of the World Spirit. Napoleon, meanwhile, is pondering his haemorrhoids, those same haemorrhoids that may well have been one of the chief causes of his defeat at Waterloo. Everything ramifies. Facts are susceptible to an infinite process of dismantlement. Benoit Man­delbrot, the originator of fractal geometry, considered the question of how long, exactly, is a coastline? That is, at what level may we stop measuring the coast of Europe, say, and proclaim definiti
vely that it is so many hundreds of thousands of miles long? If we employ a yardstick, the figure will be very much smaller than if we measure by the inch. Think of all those bays, those coves, those inlets; those dunes, those rocks, those grains of clay; those atoms, those electrons, those nuclei; those quarks, those super-strings . . . think, and immediately you plunge headlong into the dizzying possibility of there being no level at which to stop. So it is with the past. Is history the big picture, or the minute details, the grand sweep or the dusty annals? Irish historians are engaged in a passionate debate between revisionists and traditionalists. Revisionists want a new interpretation of ancient pieties - perhaps, they suggest, the famines of the 1840s were not entirely the fault of Perfidious Albion, perhaps the 1916 Rising was not the glorious blood sacrifice we have always been told that it was - while the traditionalists, many of whom see historiography as a tool for nation building, insist on a kind of poeticised, nationalist version of our shared past. In the Cemetery there is a special section, the Slavin, or Pantheon, built by the architect Wiehl in the early 1890s, overlooked by stylised statues of the 'Rejoicing Homeland' and the 'Mourning Homeland', and containing the remains of some fifty of the homeland's heroes, including the Art Nouveau painter Alfons Mucha and the musician Jan Kubelik. In monuments such as the Slavin we encounter a notion of the past far removed from that of the young Anthony Burgess's schoolboy friend who encouraged him to read the history plays of Shakespeare since they were all to do with 'fighting and fucking tarts'.

  The question I am addressing is the one that historian, tourist and essayist alike must grapple with: how and where to locate the 'real' Prague, if, indeed, such a singular thing may be said to exist. Those dead leaves that I remember beside the path on the heights of what is there about them that makes them particular to the place? When I think of Golden Lane I see far more vividly the snow under my feet, compacted to clouded grey glass, the first time I walked there with the Professor, than I do the house where in the late autumn and winter of 1916 Kafka wrote the stories that would make up the collection A Country Doctor. The gloomy glories of St Vitus's Cathedral are no more than a shimmer at the edge of my memory compared to the uncanny clarity with which I recall one afternoon leaving the crowded building, with its gaggles of tourists following the upheld umbrellas and rolled newspapers of their tour guides, and walking down the unexpectedly deserted Street and hearing my own footsteps ring on the cobbles with what seemed definite but inexplicable intent. I met no one in particular, saw nothing out of the ordinary, so why has the image of myself walking there lodged so stubbornly in my recollection? Was it that the fresh-cut white stone paving flags and bags of mortar stacked against the east wall of the cathedral reminded me of Sudek's great series of photographs of St Vitus's under reconstruction in the 1920s? I do not know, just as I cannot say for certain what is the true length of the coastline of Europe. All I know is that I can see myself there, can see the silver-and-pearl light of afternoon, the gleam on the cobbles, that Japanese man frowning at his map, a grubby dog trotting past on its way to something important. These are the things we remember. It is as if we were to focus our cameras on the great sights and the snaps when developed all came out with nothing in them save undistinguished but maniacally detailed foregrounds.

  If Prague is not place, is it people, then? Not the great sights but the great figures? The Emperor Charles IV (1316-78) in 1355 made Prague the capital of the Holy Roman Empire, the 'Rome of the North', thus initiating the city's Golden Age, attracting artists and scholars from all over Europe, including the poet Petrarch. Charles, son of John of Luxembourg, the blind soldier who died at the Battle of Crecy - a blind soldier? - was elected King of Germany in 1347 and crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 1355. He proceeded to shift power away from Italy and the papacy, and built his empire on the core of Bohemia and Moravia. His 'Golden Bull' of 1356 formed a new constitution for the empire, set out the procedures for imperial elections and the rights of the seven electors, declaring their domains indivisible. Prague expanded under Charles's rule; the horse and cattle markets, today's Wen­ceslas and Charles Squares, were incorporated into the New Town, work began on St Vitus's Cathedral, and the first university in central Europe was instituted. Charles was an extraordinarily liberal and enlightened ruler, highly intelligent and richly cultured, a vivid historical mover and achiever. Yet I cannot see him. The image I have of him is of one of those statues that are carried aloft in religious processions, gilded and impassive and mechanically nodding. Far more real to me is his blind old dad, lover of jousts and military adventuring, last seen hacking sightlessly all round him with his great-sword on the field at Crecy.

  The single historical figure who most epitomises old Prague is the Emperor Rudolf II. This melancholy madman, gull of all manner of mountebanks and charlatans but also a patient patron of the astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, was born in 1552 into one of the more complicated Habsburg lines. His father, the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II, son of the Emperor Ferdinand I and Emperor Charles V's brother, married Charles's daughter Maria. All right, all right, let us put it another way. Rudolf's father was Emperor Maximilian II. Maximilian was the son of Emperor Ferdinand I, who was brother to Emperor Charles V, founder of the Habsburg dynasty - the daddy of them all, as one might say. Maximilian married his cousin Maria, daughter of Charles V. As the attentive reader will already have spotted, this of course meant that Rudolf was by double lineage the great-grandson of Joanna the Mad!13 No wonder there were blemishes in Rudolf's psychological profile. Still, what family does not have its own version of Mad Joanna, squawking and jumping up and down on her perch somewhere amid the denser foliage of the family tree?

  At the age of eleven, on the insistence of his mother, the mournful Maria, Rudolf was packed off from the relative liberality of his father Max­imilian's court at Vienna to live in the household of the Spanish King Philip II, his mother's brother, there to be taught some of the harsher realities of life as a Catholic monarch in a Europe facing into the horrors of the Counter-Reformation. During the seven years he spent in Madrid, Rudolf became, in Ripellino's words, 'a perfect "Spaniard", acquiring the customs and masks of that dissembling monarchy. Bigotry, intrigues, religious pomp, suspicion, persecution of heretics, the Inquisition's funeral pyres, the illusion of boundless majesty, vainglory on land and at sea such was his school.' This was a disastrous experience for the dreamy and otherworldly Rudolf, who was more interested in alchemy, literature, and the wilder shores of art - it was Rudolf who brought Arcimboldo, that master of the grotesque, to Prague and made him one of his chief court painters - than in power and the machinations of European politics. Ripellino is firm in his conviction that the Spanish experience was a 'fatal influence' on the young man's char­acter: 'it heightened his morbid shyness, his yearning for solitude, and planted the seeds for the megalomania and persecution complex that later so obsessed him.' Spanish influence became very powerful at Rudolf's court, as the Jesuit-educated younger generation displaced the older, liberal Catholic faction. The new men, supported by Rome and Madrid, were the ones who prosecuted fiercely the Counter-Reformation measures that would lead, after Rudolf's time, to the Thirty Years War. So strong was the Spanish presence that in Bohemia the more fervent Catholics were known as , 'Spaniards'.

  Jealous, paranoid, hypochondriacal, incurably melancholy, obsessed with the passage of time and terrified at the prospect of death, Rudolf was a compulsive collector, filling room after room of Prague Castle with talismanic objects meant to stave off mortality and be a barrier against the world, all sorts of rubbish and kitsch tumbling together with exquisite objets d'art. As is so often the case with weak men who inherit vast power, he was obsessed with things in miniature, hiring entire schools of craftsmen to carve and emboss and inlay the tiniest surfaces, of pearls, nut shells, cherry pits, flakes of amber, birds' eggs, sharks' teeth, gallstones. No expense was spared, no effort was thought too great. He purchased a painting in Venice, Das Rosenkranzfest, b
y one of his favourite artists, Albrecht Durer, and had it carried on foot across the Alps by four stout men, one at each corner.

  Ripellino fairly revels in Rudolf's collecto-mania: 'Among the many peculiar objects he collected I might mention . . . an iron chair (Fangstuhl) that held whoever sat in it a prisoner; a musical clock with a gilt lid decorated by a hunting scene of leaping stags; an Orgelwerk that performed "ricercars, madrigals, and canzoni" by itself; stuffed ostriches; rhinoceros chalices for boiling poisonous potions; a votive medallion of Jerusalem clay; the lump of soil from the Hebron Valley out of which Yahweh Elohim formed Adam; the large mandrake roots (alrauns) in the shape of little men reclining on soft velvet cushions in small cases resembling doll beds . . . [which] belong to the same family of man-like figures as the Golem, robots and Kafka's odra-dek.' But that is only the merest sample. Ripellino goes on to compile an 'unsystematic inventory' to represent the crowding and chaos in Rudolf's wonder-rooms: