Prague Pictures

by John Banville

  35 It is probably a good thing that they were not going to London, and that Gyldenstierne was not with them.

  36 The Capuchins' pique is understandable, if only for the fact that Rudolf had taken a shine to their miraculous statue of the Madonna and Child and borrowed it to put in his private chapel at the palace. However, the statue promptly made its own way back to the monastery - one pictures the indignant Mother, golden babe in arms, striding indignantly home across the at dead of night. Three times the statue was moved, and three times it returned. Impressed, the Emperor left the Lady and her Little One to the monks, and even presented the Virgin Mother with a gold crown and robe, which is perhaps what Mary had been angling for all along

  37 There is some confusion among the biographies as to whether at this time Tycho moved into another house, perhaps on Tychonova, or back into the late Baron Kurtz's Italian-style palace on the west side of the Hradcany, where Tycho had lived when hefirst came to Prague. I am particularly struck by the mention of the on the plaque outside The Golden Griffin house on Novy Svet (see footnote 23 on page 143). This enormous pile was built in 1668 on the site where once stood the Kurtz house; if the plaque is right, and Tycho did die there, it must be that this is where he lived for those last months in Prague, and not on Tychonova.

  38 The Belvedere still stands, lovely and delicate among the massy edifices crowding the he Blue Guide describes it as 'one of the purest examples in central Europe of the Italian Renaissance style'. Chateaubriand admired it, on a visit to Prague in 1833, although he did worry about how cold the place would be in Prague's unitalianate winters.

  39 What a baleful portent that name must have sounded to the Dane!

  40 Medical opinion at the time was that Tycho had died as the result of a kidney stone, but when his body was exhumed in 1901 no stones were found. It is probable that the true cause of death was uraemia.

  41 F. Marion Crawford's Gothic novel, The Witch of Prague, opens with an impressive portrayal of a funeral service in the Tyn Church. My copy of the book is a paperback in the 'Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult' series. Yes, Prague puts one into strange company sometimes.

  42 Now the Czech Academy of Sciences.

  43 Rudolf, of course, did not make good his promise of the 20,000 florins for Tycho's data and instruments, and the Brahe family were reluctant to hand them over to the new Imperial Mathematician. Tycho's assistant, Tengnagel, who had succeeded in having the job of compiling of the Tabulae Rudolphi-nae transferred to him, at twice Kepler's promised salary, demanded the return of Tycho's manuscripts and star charts. Kepler complied, but secretly held back the Mars observations. Give a dog a bone . . .

  44 This fine phrase is from Ferguson's The Nobleman and His Housedog.

  45 Praguers have a distressing fondness for throwing people from high places. In 1393 the fourth King Wenceslas, obviously not half so good as his dynastic ancestor and namesake, had the VicarGeneral of the Archdiocese of Prague, Jan Nepomucky - later canonised as St John of Nepomuk - thrown from the Charles Bridge and drowned in the Vltava. Later, in 1419, after the death of Wenceslas, followers of the religious radical Jan Hus flung the Mayor of Prague and his councillors to their deaths from the windows of the New Town Hall, with no piles of dung to break their fall. Leaping forward - if that is not too tasteless a formulation, given the topic - to the twentieth century, on the morning of March 10th, 1948, the Czech Foreign Minister, Jan Masaryk, a liberal who had tried to limit communist power in the new coalition government, was found dead in the courtyard beneath the open window of the Foreign Ministry; it was assumed he had committed suicide in face of the prospect of the Stalinisation of his country, but suspicions persist that he did not jump but was pushed. It is understandable therefore, that in the fateful month of August 1968, there were many who feared that the Russians would do in Prague as the Praguers do and thrust the reformist First Secretary, Alexander Dubcek, from some conveniently high elevation.

  46 Frances Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. The Lady Elizabeth was a keen theatregoer, and at Christmastide in 1612, the King's Men, Shakespeare's company, presented The Tempest for the couple's delight on their betrothal night. Yates notes that some scholars have suggested that the nuptial masque in the play had been added to the original version especially for the occasion. And on the wedding night, February 14th, 1613, a masque, with words by Thomas Campion and produced by Inigo Jones, was presented at the banqueting house at Whitehall before the newlyweds and the court. Yates quotes a charming chorus:

  Advance your chorall motions now,

  You musick-loving lights,

  This night concludes the Nuptiall vow,

  Make this the best of nights;

  So bravely crowne it with your beames,

  That it may live in fame,

  So long as Rhenus or the Thames

  Are knowne by either name.

  Alas, the magical union of Rhine and Thames was not to endure. 47 Ibid., p 41.

  48 Her daughter, another Elizabeth, was to be the dedicatee of Descartes' Principia.

  5

  SNAPSHOTS

  Summer, sometime in the middle of the 1990s. The city is hot and smoky, and seems to gasp, as if in distressed relief at having survived the terrible decades, so I fancifully think. It is my first visit since the Velvet Revolution - that journalist's formulation, which I have never heard a Praguer employ, has definitely begun to irritate - and I cannot help but search for signs of change everywhere. I am staying at U Pava ('At the Peacock'), a pleasant little hotel close by the Charles Bridge in Mala Strana. At night from the wide-open window of my room I have an uninterrupted view over the treetops of Vojan Park to the Castle on its hill, glaringly floodlit. I switch off the bedside lamp to get the full effect. The floodlighting is a post-1989 innovation, surely? The communists would have regarded such a show of unashamed consumption of the city's electricity supply as a typical piece of Westernised decadence, and probably they would have been right. Standing at the window in the moth-dusted darkness I am struck by how little like a castle the Castle is, with its long, blank, fortress wall studded with row upon row of tiny square windows and not a turret in sight and the spires of St Vitus's thrusting their witch's fingernails into the sky in what seems a gesture of frozen hysteria. Vaclav Havel is the President now. The fact is hard to credit, even yet. It is as if Kafka's K. had suddenly been welcomed into the Castle by a smiling Kramm and told that with immediate effect he will cease to be a lowly land surveyor and instead assume the leadership of the realm. I try to picture this playwright, admirer of Beckett and lonesco, sitting in his neat blue suit at a desk in Rudolf's palace, poring over documents of state. Havel himself is fully alive to the absurd dimension of his rise to power. In a speech in Jerusalem shortly after his inauguration he expressed, with an almost jaunty frankness, his feelings of incongruousness - of being, even, an imposter.

  I am the kind of person who would not be in the least surprised if, in the very middle of my Pre sidency, I were to be summoned and led off to stand trial before some shadowy tribunal, or taken straight to some quarry to break rocks. Nor would I be surprised if I were to suddenly hear the reveille and wake up in my prison cell, and then, with great bemusement, proceed to tell my fellow-prisoners everything that had happened to me in the past six months. The lower I am, the more proper my place seems; and the higher I am the stronger my suspicion is that there has been some mistake.

  If he were indeed to be apprehended, no doubt the nameless authorities would in their mordantly witty way send a pair of clapped-out actors to make the arrest, perhaps even dressing them up in frock coats and non-collapsible top hats.

  At midnight suddenly the floodlights are switched off. It is a shock, especially as it happens without a sound; somehow, so vast a disillumi-nation should be accompanied by a peal of bells, or a thunder-crack, or at least the amplified sizzle of a gigantic flashbulb. Unnerved, I fumble my way into bed and feel like pulling the blankets over my head. When my eyes have a
ccustomed themselves to the dark I see that one of the Castle windows, just one, is still lit. Someone must be working late. I suppose by association with my thoughts of Havel I recall a fragment from Beck­ett, 'the little lights of man . . .' Comforted, I close my eyes. There is a part of the self that is always a child.

  I was in Prague to attend a literary festival, with a side trip to Bratislava where I would address a gathering of academics. My friend the writer, had collected me from the airport in his brand-new green car which his daughter Jindra, with whom he lodges, insists is blue. In his late seventies, who loves to drive, loves his car; the silliness of this attachment amuses him. In the driving seat, though, he is very serious, the wheel held firmly with both hands at the top and his head thrust so far forward his forehead almost touches the windscreen. On that sunny afternoon we drove through pleasant suburbs that could have been the outskirts to any European city. I ask about property prices. He shrugs. They are going up, like everything else. He and Jindra have to share a tiny apartment, even though Jindra has an important job in Havel's office. I tell him about my unsettling experience with the Castle floodlights, and the solitary window that remained lit. He laughs, and says that of course that will have been Jindra's office: she always works late. The coin cidence strikes me as a little bit of Prague's old magic, and I am charmed. Jindra's window is suddenly an Archimedean lever powerful enough to lift the night itself a momentous inch or two.

  U Pava, my recently renovated hotel, is on a narrow hillside street, seminafe.49 The reception desk just inside the front door was a little booth with a high counter from behind which I was greeted by the manageress, a handsome blonde woman who took me for a German. who had insisted on carrying my suitcase from the car, spoke to her in Czech and she immediately switched to English. Yet again I was plunged in shame for my lack of languages. departed, saying he would pick me up that evening and he and Jindra would take me to dinner. The manageress, whose behind I could not help admiring, led me up the narrow stairs. There were hunting prints on the wall . . . Suddenly, now, this second, remembering those prints, I realise that it was U Pava which I used as the model for a hotel in a novel I wrote in the late 1990s, a hotel not in Prague but in Porto Venere, a seaside village in Liguria, where one of my characters had gone to commit suicide. Fiction is a strange, voracious business, and no respecter of the uniqueness of places or persons.

  The opening session of the Writers' Festival takes place in a small, extremely hot room, filled with cigarette smoke, over a restaurant on the Old Town Square directly opposite the Town Hall with its astronomical clock.50 The clock tower is remarkable not only for its brightly painted dials but for the life-sized figures that adorn it, among them Death, Vanity, Greed, Archangel, and head-shaking Turk. Praguers have an enduring predilection for statues, figurines and automata of all kinds, from the Jezuldtko, the famous Infant of Prague - of which I had a treasured miniature, gilt version when I was a child through various miraculous Madonnas, at least one of them black, to Karel robots 51 and the monstrous Golem, the alarming morphs that people the animated films of the great Jan Svank-majer, the numerous puppet theatres still flourishing in the city - most of them, alas, mere tourist traps now - and, of course, uncanniest of all, Kafka's odradek, a star-shaped creature resembling a spool of thread which propels itself - himself? - about the house of the nameless narrator of the fragment 'A Problem for the Father of the Family', emitting a laugh that sounds 'like the rustling of fallen leaves'. Ripelli­no, of course, that connoisseur of the uncanny, is fascinated by Prague's fascination with the unhu-man. He is particularly taken with the Jezulatko, that eerie godling with its globe and jewelled crown, 'a wax doll dressed in silk, gold brocade or other costly materials depending on the season and displayed in the Baroque Carmelite Church of Our Lady Victorious', which was brought from Spain by Polyxena of Lobkowicz in 1628, during Rudolf's reign. 'If the massive Golem . . . was a harbinger of disorders and disasters,' Ripellino writes, 'the Jezulatko - an exquisite rag doll and model of delicate fabrics was a salubrious balm cheering the spirits of the disheartened, a physician for both body and soul.' There follows a splendid example of the Ripellinonian non sequitur: 'And the fact that the principal patron of the dark church where it lies and where the mummies of the Carmelite Order's protectors lie in sumptuous open coffins was the cruel Spanish general Baltazar de Marradas (who commissions the Jezulatko in his death throes from the sculptress Flavia Santini in Julius Zeyer's legend 'Inultus' [1895]) is of scant significance.'

  But I must return, however unwilling, from these statuesque frolics to the sober business of the Prague Writers' Festival.

  Despite the organisers' best efforts, the opening session is happily chaotic. People wander in and out of the smoke-filled stifling room, not only audience members but the participating writers, too. The atmosphere is at once manic and vague. I discover to my consternation that I am due to chair one of the discussions. The topic has something - I never quite succeeded in discovering exactly what - to do with East-West literary influences. I have no notes, have made no preparations, and since the majority of the panel of speakers are Czech, I spend most of the hour, the very long hour, floundering in linguistic confusion, which the simultaneous translation in my headphones only serves to intensify. One of the writers, a grumpy chain-smoker with a brigand's heavy black moustache, objects at length to the fatuousness of the topic under discussion, and indeed, if I understand him, to the very idea of the festival itself. He speaks of the great, gone days of samizdat - much of which, I am fascinated to learn, was financed by George Soros - then lapses into a grumpy silence. I call, in some desperation, on a Hungarian member of the panel to comment. He and I have a previous, brief acquaintance, but he seems to have forgotten that he ever met me, or perhaps it is that when we met - in Budapest, was it, or Vienna? - I somehow managed to offend him. He talks about a novel I have not read by a writer I do not know, then looks to me in polite expectation of an informed reply. At this point the chain-smoker gets to his feet with a sigh and ambles out, to the lavatory, I assume, but in fact he was never to return. Close to panic now, I attempt to 'throw the discussion open to the floor', and endure a couple of minutes of shuffling silence as the audience sits and gazes at me in what seems barely suppressed resentment. At last someone asks a question about censorship in the bad old days, which only serves to provoke more shifting of feet and clearing of throats. Into the restive silence I remark gingerly that the present strength of Czech literature - 1 mentioned Klima, Hrabal, Michal Ajvaz - would seem to indicate that writers had not only survived the years of communist rule, but had triumphed. And then, with the horrified fascination of a fat man feeling himself begin to fall slowly, helplessly and catastrophically down a steep flight of stairs, I hear my voice, seemingly of its own volition, asking if perhaps Gore Vidal's assertion that Hollywood never destroyed anyone who was worth saving might be adapted to Soviet communism and Czech writers . . . ? The rest of the session passes for me in a hot haze of cringing embarrassment. At last, the hour up and my penance served, I throw off my headphones and with ringing ears make a shamed escape into the square, where, sure enough, the Turk is shaking his head at me in mournful reproval, Death turns up his hourglass and pulls on his rope, and the chimes of the clock toll the death knell of my brief, but not brief enough, career as an arbiter of Czech literature.

  In the afternoon, seeking balm for my still burning blushes, I pay a visit to the Old Jewish Cemetery, a pilgrimage every traveller to Prague must make. I last saw it under snow, one deserted winter twilight in the 1980s. On this sweltering afternoon it is a Dantesque scene, thronged with tourists shuffling along specified walkways between the jumbled, moss-grown tombstones, the estimated number of which varies between 12,000 and 20,000, depending on which guidebook you choose to trust. The oldest stone, from 1439, is that of Rabbi Avigdor Kar, or Kara, or Karo; the latest, marking the grave of Moses Beck, is dated May 17th, 1787. Buried here also are two of the leading Jews of the Empero
r Rudolf's time, the financier Mordechai Meisl, richest Praguer of his day,52 and Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel (P1520-1609), one of the greatest Jewish scholars of the Renaissance, and Prague's Chief Rabbi from 1597 until his death. Rabbi Loew is the subject of many legends, especially those featuring Yossel the Golem, the giant clay man whom Loew is said to have fashioned from a lump of earth, as God created Adam from the dust of Elohim. The story goes that in the year 1580 a certain friar by the name of Thaddeus, a fanatical anti-Semite, raised accusations of superstitious rituals and blood sacrifices against the Prague Jews. Rabbi Loew appealed to Yahweh for help, and in a dream was instructed to create the Golem as a protector of the faithful against the Christian mob. He summoned his son-in-law, Isaac ben Simon, and a disciple, the Levite Yakob ben Chaim Sasson, to represent respectively the elements of fire and water, while the Rabbi himself was the element of air; the Golem, of course, would be the final element, earth. After the three had performed the intricate ceremony of religious purification they went to the banks of the Vltava at midnight and kneaded a human figure from river clay. First Rabbi Loew instructed Isaac the priest to walk seven times around the Golem, starting from the right, chanting Psalms and reciting magical formulas and letter combinations as he went, then Yakob the Levite was ordered to circle the figure another seven times, starting from the left. After this, Rabbi Loew himself circled the Golem, which, feeling the effects of the three elements, began to glow with the heat of life. Finally, the Rabbi inserted a shem hameforash, a slip of paper on which was written the unutterable name of God, under the Golem's tongue, and the creature rose to his feet, a living homunculus ready to do his master's bidding.