Prague Pictures

by John Banville

  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.

  By now the argument behind us had waned, and Rosa came back, looking offended and cross, and put on her fur coat. Alex said something to her concerning me, I suspect recounting my unintentional witticism about my drinking habits, and she gave me a wry and, I thought, faintly pitying smile. Alex gravely shook hands with me, and stood up and followed Rosa to the door. There they both paused, somewhat melodramatically, I thought - Rosa very Sitwellian now and looked back at who uttered a word angrily under her breath but nevertheless went and accompanied them out, leaving the door open behind her. We listened to their footsteps receding down the stairs. 'Jesus Christ,' Philip said, 'and I think my folks are bad.' Oh, I said, so Rosa and Alex were parents? Philip looked at me and then at Jan, and they did their spluttery laugh again. I heard the front door opening below, and and her putative parents saying their strained goodnights. A draught came in from the landing, bringing a strangely heart-piercing smell of snow. When came back she would not look at either of the men, but went to the sink and began bad-temperedly to wash the crockery. Philip said something to her and she shrugged and answered nothing, keeping her back turned. Jan stood up and flexed an eyebrow at me and at the door, putting on his leather jacket. The party, it seemed, was over. I took up my coat, expecting Philip to do the same, but Philip, Big Phil, was staying, it seemed. We shook hands, he and I, and said we must get together again, in Dublin, or New York, or Saratoga Springs. came to the door again
to say goodbye. I leaned forward to kiss her cheek but she sneezed, and stepped back, smiling an apology.

  In the street the snow lay thick; Alex's and Rosa's footprints were already almost filled. Jan stuck his hands into the pockets of his jacket and together we headed into the swirling night. I asked about Phil and Jan lifted a shoulder and turned down the corners of his mouth. 'She thinks he will bring her to New York, give her a job, make her a big-shot.' And will he? I asked. He glanced at me sideways, his eyes narrowed against the flying snow, and grinned . . .

  Why have I remembered that night, and with such clarity, such vividness? Nothing, like something, can happen anywhere, Philip Larkin bitterly observes. Yet those particular nothings that happened in big, dim, cold room are somehow the quintessence for me of Prague before the revolution of 1989. The occasion had that particular quality - at once ordinary and mysterious, mundane and enigmatic, dull and yet bizarre - which for the visiting Westerner characterised the lives of these captive people. For that is what they were, captives, held in the prison of a vast, irresistible, wholly philistine system. The driving force of dissidents, especially the from Solzhenitsyn on the far right to Joseph Brodsky on the cheerful left, was anger, pure fury, at the unrelenting and mindless effrontery of the Soviet However, in Praguers such as Jan, and and her parents, if they were her parents, what one sensed was not so much outrage as the aftermath of outrage, a kind of weariness, and boredom, and restless dissatisfaction. was tired of the pettiness of her life, the huge empty room and the ineffective heater, the tumblers in the sink, the ill-stocked fridge, the draught on the stairs. She wanted colour, excitement, risk; like Marta the Professor's wife before her, she wanted America and all that America represented. I wonder if Phil ever did bring her there. I would prefer to think of her escaping on her own terms. Nowadays, when I come across an Eva lookalike doing some menial job in New York, or London, or Dublin - one such, a very beautiful one, with those irresistible dark shadows under her eyes, serves behind the counter in the frozen goods section of my local Asian food store, her long, slender hands rubbed raw and her shapely legs already varicose-veined - and wonder how she can bear such thankless work, I think of in her weary desperation. I think of Rosa, too, and wordless Alex, and of Marta and the Professor, and of others whom I knew, and the many others I did not know, all those damaged lives. I hope they are happier now, the ones who lived long enough to see the fell Calibans undone, yet always I hear the echo of my friend sad complaint: 'Too late! Too late for me!'

  16 Kutna Hora lies some seventy kilometres east of Prague. The ossuary is situated a short way outside the town, in the Chapel of All Saints - it flies a flag sporting a skull and crossbones - dating from around 1400. The cemetery was a popular burial place, after a Cistercian abbot returning from the Crusades had spread a layer of soil from the Holy Land over it, and by the 1500s it had become so crowded that a Cistercian monk was given the task of disinterring the old residents to make way for new applicants. He gathered some 40,000 skeletons. Nearly four centuries later, in 1870, a local woodcarver, Rindt, was hired, on who knows what ecclesiastical whim, to employ the bones to decorate the inside of All Saints. The result is one of the Czech Republic's more grisly tourist attractions. The centrepiece of the ossuary is a full-sized, working chandelier made from bones. There are bone crucifixion scenes, bone portraits, and a bone coat of arms of the Schwartzenberg family, featuring, if I am not confusing my images, a bone raven plucking a bone eye - a ball joint - from the head of a bone Turk. Not surprisingly, the great Czech animator, Jan Svankmajer, made a short film on the subject, in black and white, featuring a lively jazz score. The Bone Chapel is a place of horrible fascination, and should be pulled down and given a decent burial.

  17 However, on that last visit to Prague I had a drink at the Slavia if it is changed after its famous interval of renovation I failed to detect the alterations, for good or ill - and afterwards, when I was leaving the cafe, my memory having been jogged, perhaps, by the cold and sleety night, I telephoned my hotel and they sent a car and I went to Slezska Avenue in search of the building where Katefina had lived, but could not find it. In fact, the avenue was nothing like the grim canyon I thought I remembered, but a rather pretty, not very wide thoroughfare with fine nineteenth-century architecture, and a park running parallel one street down. Yet in my memory I distinctly see that big grey pile, the bare bulb, the big metal door.Sometimes one is led to wonder if memory is a faculty of deception rather than recollection.

  4

  GREAT DANE, LITTLE DOG

  The once Danish, now Swedish, island of Hveen, or Hven, or simply Ven - let us choose a middle course and call it Hven - situated in the southeast of Hamlet's Elsinore, is 400 miles distant from Prague, as the seagull flies. The name is said to derive from that of Hvenild, maid-in-waiting to the Lady Grimmel, ruler of the island in the times before time, who is reputed to have murdered her two brothers, one of whom had got Hvenild with child. When Ranke, Hve-nild's boy, grew up, he cast his auntie into a dungeon, where she would starve to death, and set himself in her place as the true lord of the isle. Later, in the thirteenth century, a party of Vikings, led by the Monty Pythonesque Eric the Priest-Hater, stopped off at Hven to do some marauding, in the course of which they destroyed four castles, possibly those that Lady Grimmel had built, at Nordburg, Karlshog and Hammer. Through the following sleepy centuries the island lay at peace save for the violent winter storms that whistled down the Sound. And then, in 1576, there arrived on the rocky shore a large, imposing figure with flowing moustaches and a wedge of silver and gold alloy set into the bridge of his damaged nose, to whom King Frederick of Denmark had granted the island as a gift whereon to build what would become the great observatory of Uraniborg, one of the middling wonders of the Renaissance world.

  Tycho Brahe was born in 1546 into the highest reaches of the Danish nobility. The Brahes had been among the first of Denmark's noble families to reject Catholicism in favour of the reformed religion. Tycho's paternal grandfather, Tyge Brahe, died at the siege of Malmo in 1523 defending the Lutheran cause that would bring the Reformation to Denmark, while Tyge's brother Axel had the honour of carrying the sceptre at the coronation of the militant Lutheran King Christian III in 1537. When Tycho Brahe was two years old, he was abducted from his parents' castle at Knudstrup, in what is now southern Sweden, by his uncle Brahe and his wife Inger Oxe (wives in Denmark then kept their maiden names after marriage). Mysteriously, Ty-cho's parents made scant protest at this piece of inter-family high-handedness, despite the fact that Tycho's twin, a boy, had died at birth;18 it seems that put it to Tycho's father that since he already had another son, while he and his wife were childless, it was only right that he should share his bounty. Tycho himself in later life was sanguine in the matter, saying only that Jorgen and Inger had supported him generously on their estate at Tostrup and treated him as their own son.

  The Brahes were a warrior clan, but happily, through his kidnapping, Tycho came under the influence of a very different family. The Oxes, his Aunt Inger's people, put a high value on learning and culture. Inger Oxe's brother Peder was a man of great influence in Denmark, a kingmaker and member of the Council of the Realm. Inger shared many of her brother's intellectual interests, and was something of a thinker in her own right. For years she conducted a lively correspondence with the sister of the Danish King Frederick, Princess Anne of Denmark/Saxony, noted for her work in alchemy, even though alchemy was an almost exclusively male pursuit, not least because of the danger a woman ran of being accused of witchcraft for dabbling in the dark art.19 No doubt Inger was a strong force in her nephew's education. After grammar school he first of all attended the University of Copenhagen - motto: 'He looks up to the light of heaven' - and after three years there moved on to study at Leipzig. As Tycho's latest biographer Victor E. Thoren puts it, 'When the time came to take the Grand Tour that had become a standard feature of the education of Danish aristocrats, Tycho followed the path of the Billes and Oxe
s to foreign universities, rather than the path of the Brahes to foreign wars.'

  He was also a student for a time at Wittenberg, Luther's Alma Mater, but an outbreak of plague sent him scurrying north for safety to Rostock. It was at Rostock that he witnessed a lunar eclipse, on October 28th, 1566; Tycho, after careful study of the phenomenon, concluded that it presaged the death of the Turkish sultan, Suleiman the Great, and was unwise enough to publish a poem in Latin hexameters announcing the pend- ing event. Shortly afterwards, word came that Suleiman had indeed died - six months before the eclipse. What did follow the eclipse was not a death but a disfigurement. A couple of months later, at a Christmas party, Tycho got into a violent argument with another Danish student staying in Rostock, Manderup Parsberg, a distant cousin of the Brahes, who may well have been mocking Tycho over the embarrassing Suleiman prophecy. The pair went outside to settle the matter with their broadswords. In the duel, Ty­cho received a blow to the face that hacked a large notch out of the bridge of his nose. He was lucky not to have died, from infection if not the sword cut itself, and spent a painful convalescence. When he returned home to Denmark, he fashioned a prosthesis for himself of gold and silver blended to a flesh colour, kept in place by means of an adhesive salve a supply of which he carried with him always in a little silver box. This precious nosepiece was, it seems, reserved for 'dress' occasions, while a copper one was used for ordinary daywear.