Prague Pictures

by John Banville

  The show trial took place a year and a half after his arrest. Everything was rehearsed. 'It was theatre,' he said, 'a kind of grotesque and meticulously prepared performance. I was presented with a text, on which were listed the court's questions, and my answers. If I did not keep to the text, strayed from it in any way, the trial would have been called off, and I would have been sent back to the secret police for the process to begin all over again.' His lawyer had given him a single piece of advice - do not use swear words before the bench - and then went into court and opened the case for the defence by saying that the 'supreme punishment', that is, the death sentence, was being demanded for his client, and that 'no doubt he deserves it.' However, since he was not a leader of the 'conspiracy' the court might find it in its heart to be lenient. Big-hearted as the judges were, they retired for the night to consider their verdict. 'The trial had lasted,' Goldstiicker said, 'from nine in the morning until four in the afternoon. Then, from four until nine the following morning, I had to live with the distinct possibility of being sentenced to death and executed right away.' He smiled again. 'Doctor Johnson was right: the prospect of being hanged in the morning does concentrate the mind.'

  He was spared the death penalty, and sentenced to life imprisonment instead. He was sent to the uranium mines, where he spent two and a half years digging radioactive material with his bare hands. 'I cannot understand,' he said, 'why I have not died of cancer long ago.' There were periods when he could move about only on all fours, even when work had ended for the day. In all this time, he was not aware that Stalin had died at the beginning of 1953. Khrushchev, prior to the momentous 20th Congress of the Communist Party in Moscow in 1955, at which he secretly denounced Stalin, had begun to release prisoners from the Gulag. The Czech authorities saw which way the Siberian wind was blowing, and started their own discreet programme of releases. By Christmas 1955, the same court which had almost sentenced him to be hanged changed their verdict, decided the charges against Goldstiicker had been illegal, and ordered that he should be set free immediately. 'The governor of the prison where I was held called me to his office,' Goldstiicker said. 'He was obviously embarrassed - I remember how he kept nervously moving documents about on his desk - and warned that it might be some time before I could be released. Of course, all my hopes collapsed at once, for this was just the kind of cruel trick they liked to play, these people: tell you that you would be set free, then delay your release for years. Yes, the governor went on, it could take two or three hours before we can get you out of here.' Goldstiicker was studying the watercolour landscape again. 'In that moment I realised,' he said, almost dreamily, 'that I was dealing with a man who was - how shall I say? - who was not human. If he thought that, after the years of interrogation and imprisonment that I had endured, I would consider three hours to be some time, then no, he was not a human being, as I understand being human.'

  After his release he found a position in the philosophy faculty of the Charles University, later becoming Professor of German Literature there, and eventually was appointed Deputy Vice Chancellor. In May 1963 he organised the legendary Kafka Conference at Liblice Castle, which paved the way for Kafka's rehabilitation in Czechoslovakia. In the years that followed he busied himself with academic work, was a representative briefly on the National Assembly, and in January 1968 became President of the Czechoslovak Association of Writers and one of the promoters of the Prague Spring. That springtime proved a short season, as we know. 'The Russian invasion had just taken place, and my wife and I had fled to Vienna,' Goldstiicker said, 'when I received a telephone call from a journalist in England, telling me that the University of Sussex wished to offer me a teaching post. I accepted, of course. But do you know, I did not catch the journalist's name, and to this day I cannot say who my benefactor was.'

  It is an indication of the strangeness of those times in Prague that Goldstiicker returned the following year, for a few days only, during which he was sworn in as a member of the Czech National Council. He wanted to remain in Prague, but the Husak government claimed to have uncovered a planned coup against it by dissidents, of whom Goldstiicker was one. He returned to Sussex, and in 1974, in his absence, his membership of the Czech Communist Party was revoked. He was happy in England, he said, or at least not unhappy. Eventually, in 1989, Czech history took another of its recurring twenty-year turns when Husak and his Calibans fell and Vaclav Havel came to power. At once Goldstiicker contacted the new Czech government to say that he wished to come back to Prague. The answer he received was equivocal: it might be some time before he could be allowed to return . . . He had, after all, he was reminded, been an active communist during the Novotny regime. It was not until his daughter in Prague became friendly with the daughter of the Havel government's Foreign Minister that he was at last given permission to return - 'to come,' he said, 'home.'

  And what, I asked him, was his attitude to communism now? 'Oh, I am still a socialist,' he said, 'I never lost that faith. The people with the power were bad - more than bad - but the system was not.'

  I kept in touch with Goldstiicker, and some years later I arranged, with the sponsorship of the Goethe Institute, for him to come to Dublin. He wrote to say that he looked forward to the visit, set for the following spring, but warned that I should realise that for a man of his age the Prague winter would be a 'hazardous undertaking'. As it happened, he did not make it through the autumn. On October 24th, 2000, the Goethe Institute telephoned me to relay the news that Professor Goldstiicker had died the previous day. It is not too much to say that, for me, an essential part of Europe, and of Prague in particular, died with him.

  49 seminafe is named after a sixteenth-century seminary founded exclusively for the education of postulants from the region in the eastern part of the country, which had its own Slavic language, since lost. Now you know.

  50 The clock, completed in 1410 by , was rebuilt in 1490 by a master clocksmith named who did such a fine job that the town councillors, fearful that he would make a replica elsewhere, had the unfortunate craftsman blinded. The mechanism of the clock as it is today is the work of Jan Taborsky, who, from 1552, spent twenty years perfecting it. When the clock chimes the hour, the figure of Death pulls on a rope with his right hand, while lifting and inverting the hourglass he carries in his left. Two doors above the clock face then creak open and a number of figures including the twelve Apostles, led by St Peter, emerge and do their round. The doors close, a cock crows and the hour is chimed. The clock not only tells the time but also shows the position of the Sun and the Moon as they circle the Earth fixed at the centre of the world - Kepler must have snickered when he first passed under the tower. Beneath the clock is another, rather pretty dial, painted in 1846 by Josef Manes, showing the signs of the Zodiac and pictorial representations of the months of the year. The clock is a popular tourist attraction. That is an understatement.

  51 in his play R.U.R. coined the word 'robot' from the Czech term robota, the labour owed by a vassal to his feudal overlord, and the Old Slavonic rob, meaning slave.

  52 Meisl was a great philanthropist, and built three synagogues one of which bears his name - public baths, a hospital, and the Jewish Town Hall, overlooking the Cemetery, which has a Hebrew clock the hands of which turn backwards, a detail not missed by ApoUinaire in his hallucinatory poem 'Zone'.

  53 Wearing his Professor of Useless Information hat, Ripellino informs us that '[I]n the Talmud a woman who has not yet conceived and a jug requiring polishing are termed golem.''

  54 Rudolf was remarkably tolerant of the Jews; a number of his closest advisers were Jewish, and he is known to have consulted the wealthy Mordechai Meisl for advice on the imperial finances, and most probably touched him for the odd substantial loan, too.

  55 It was futile to press for details of what he did for the Jews; he would merely smile and shake his head and wave a dismissive hand. To be brave and not to boast of it is bravery squared.

  56 Ripellino, p. 109.

  57 'Af
ter 1989 all properties nationalized by the revolution (factories, hotels, rental apartments, land, forests) were returned to their former owners (or more precisely, to their children or grandchil­dren); the procedure was called restitution: it required only that a person declare himself owner to the legal authorities, and after a year during which his claim might be contested, the restitution became irrevocable. That judicial simplification allowed for a good deal of fraud, but it did avoid inheritance disputes, lawsuits, appeals, and thus brought about, in an astonishingly short time, the rebirth of a class society with a bourgeoisie that was rich, entrepreneurial, and positioned to set the national economy going' (Milan Kundera, Ignorance).

  58 The matter of the well-chosen wine will be appreciated by those readers who have attended a British Council party anywhere in the world.

  EPILOGUE - THE DELUGE

  It is said that the name of the Vltava river is made up of two words from the lost language of the Celts, vlt, meaning wild, and va, meaning water. In normal times the visitor to Prague would think this an unlikely derivation. The great, broad river in places it is a third of a kilometre wide - meanders its way through the city, skirting an island here, there spilling gently over a weir, placid, it would appear, as a village stream. More than one of Prague's disenchanted writers have seen in it a symbol of what they consider the shallowness of the people who live along its banks; Gustav Meyr-ink, for instance, sourly observed that a foreign fool might think the Vltava as mighty as the Mississippi, but in fact is it 'only four millimetres deep and full of leeches'. But T.S. Eliot got it right when, in the Tour Quartets, he declared:

  . . . I think that the river

  Is a strong brown god - sullen, untamed and

  intractable,

  Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a

  frontier;

  Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce; Then only a problem confronting the builder of

  bridges.

  The problem once solved, the brown god is almost

  forgotten

  By the dwellers in cities - ever, however, implacable,

  Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder

  Of what men choose to forget.

  Certainly, a large number of Praguers had forgotten just what the river could do when its back was up. There have been many floods in the city over the past hundred years - in 1890 two arches of the Charles Bridge were washed away - but none so terrible as the cataclysm of the summer of 2002. On the night of August 8th-9th, after a week of torrential rains, a vast surge of waters gathered in southern Bohemia and began to race toward the capital, swamping and in some cases destroying villages and towns along the way: Krumlov, Budejovice, Pisek, Strakonice, . . . Prague was unprepared for what was coming. By the time the waters began to subside on August 14th, an entire district of the city, the former industrial centre and lately somewhat yuppified Karlin, had been virtually destroyed, half the metro stations were closed - and will remain so indefinitely precious old buildings had been damaged, some beyond repair, and tourist figures had fallen by fifty per cent. The cost of repairing the waterlogged fabric of the city would run into billions of Czech crowns, and no one could say who would end up footing the bill. It was a European disaster.

  I visited Prague a month after the floods had subsided. As a rule I avoid places where natural disasters have occurred; even when I walk through the ruins of Pompeii or Herculaneum, beautiful, fascinating and moving though these ruined cities are, I feel uncomfortably as if I have gatecrashed a wake. In such places Mme de StaePs identification of the predicament of the tourist - 'What I see bores me, what I don't see worries me' - becomes intensified to the level of a moral reprehension. Over the years I have spent many happy days in this city, so accommodating of the chodec - stroller, flaneur - but after such damage, what is to be my attitude now, and how should I comport myself?

  I arrive at the evening rush hour, but there is little traffic. The city's almost Venetian silence, which I register at the start of every visit as if I were hearing it, not-hearing it, for the first time this, more than the Mitteleuropan ambience or the ravishing architecture, is what, for me, gives the city its unique character and is part of the explanation for the enduring mysteriousness of the place. On a film set, the sound recordist at the end of a scene will record what is called a wild track, a minute or so of silence to keep as background should part of the scene need to be re-dubbed; in Prague, it always seems to me that someone has forgotten to do the wild track, and that behind even the loudest scenes of festival or protest or just everyday business, there is a depthless emptiness. But the silence is different now, in this amber-coloured, waterlogged September. The Venice it suggests is not a Venice on water, but under it.

  One needs to know something of the successive defeats and invasions the city has suffered through the centuries to appreciate the full extent of the shock that Praguers felt as they cowered before the raging waters of the Vltava that August. It was the White Mountain all over again. Here was another assault to be resisted, not from without, this time, but from within. Suddenly, the thing in their midst that they had 'almost forgotten' literally rose up against them. After the first torrents had raged through the city - one eyewitness I spoke to described seeing a forty-foot container, torn from the back of a juggernaut, hurtling down the river on a sixty-kilometre-an-hour surge of waters - people in the city told of their incredulity and growing horror as day after day they watched the river's levels continue to rise; an Irish diplomat described to me how each morning as she walked to her embassy office in Mala Strana she would look down successive side streets and see the fringe of dirty water inching its way inexorably upwards. At its highest, the flood reached a height of some four metres; one could still see the high-water mark on the houses, shops and restaurants of Mala Strana.

  Most of the bridges were still closed to all modes of conveyance save trams and taxis, the ban enforced by soldiers and armed police manning roadblocks. Traffic on the main thoroughfares near the river was even more chaotic than usual; one commuter said that travelling by tram in the city now reminded her of the public transport system in Calcutta: 'The trams are so crowded, people are practically sitting on the roofs!' Yet the sense I had was not of panic or desperation or a jostling for safety, but of a great sadness, rather. At the turning of every street corner something seemed to breathe in my face, an exhausted, soundless sigh out of a shadowed past. It was as if the flood waters, coursing through the catacomb of cellars and underground passageways beneath the city, had stirred something ancient and elemental in Prague's very foundations. I felt as if I had come to visit a sometime lover and found her beautiful as ever, but aged, and melancholy, and fearful of the future.

  For Praguers, there was no romance in any of this. The city might sound, and smell, like Venice, but this cistern silence and rank odour would attract no visitors. Businesses had been ruined; some of the biggest and most expensive hotels were closed, and would stay closed, possibly for years; precious murals were washed off the inner walls of Renaissance buildings in Mala Strana; for children going to school, for workers going to factory or office, finding means of transport was a nightmare. Yet as everyone in the city, native or foreign, will attest, Praguers showed magnificent spirit and capability in dealing with the crisis. All the same, the question remained: Who would pay? A flood tax proposed by the government was voted down by parliamentarians who sus- pected a ploy to raise taxes in general. On Wen­ceslas Square students were selling bricks from buildings demolished by the floods in an effort to raise funds for flood repair. The gesture seemed heartbreaking, but heartening, too. Prague would survive. Prague always survives.

  AFTER-IMAGES

  There is so much I have not said, so much I have not told about my love affair, its intensities and lamentable intermittences, with the city on the Vltava. I am thinking of the stifling evening at the Charles Bridge when I was pickpocketed by a tiny, thin, quite beautiful child-woman, whom I chas
ed - to my surprise and obscure shame and who, when cornered, pulled open her summer dress, under which she wore only a skimpy set of flowered underwear, and grinned fiercely, showing white teeth and a wad of well-chewed gum, and invited me in guttural Czech to search her, while a fellow who was most likely her pimp stood a little way off, looking at his nails, no doubt with my wallet already stowed in his back pocket. I am thinking of a diplomatic occasion organised for me in a residence on one of those bosky streets behind , to which I turned up hopelessly overdressed in sober suit and tie and starched shirt, while the Ambassador and his people were in shirt sleeves, cheerfully unbuttoned, and ready to talk all night about the fascinations of Prague and Praguer affairs. I am thinking about a dinner in an upstairs restaurant in Mala Strana below the Castle steps with and his daughter Jindra, and how told such wonderful stories against himself, and how much we laughed. I am thinking of myself standing on a street corner in the Josefov one deserted summer afternoon, with not a soul in sight in any of the four directions in which I could look, and how happy I felt suddenly, for no earthly reason, except that I was alive, and in Prague, and for a little while free of myself, and that the moment was precious precisely because it would not come again. How easily the blown banners change to wings, Wallace Stevens writes of another city, in another time. Yes, how easily . . . Prague, as Kafka said, has claws, and does not let go. I shall leave the last word to Ripellino, my inspiration and tirelessly enthusiastic cicerone. 'When I seek another word for mystery,' he writes, 'the only word I can find is Prague. She is dark and melancholy as a comet; her beauty is like the sensation of fire, winding and slanted as in the anamorphoses of the Mannerists, with a lugubrious aura of decay, a smirk of eternal disillusionment.'