Europe

by Jan Morris

  There Enver Hoxha was, recumbent in the shadows, just his bronze thigh to be glimpsed like something not very interesting in Tutankhamun’s tomb. It was enough. My engineer positively identified the old monster, and he should know. As a student he had been in the forefront of the rejoicing crowd when the statue was pulled down in Skanderbeg Square. ‘I pissed on it,’ he complacently recalled, and you can’t get more positive than that.

  52 Normality returns

  So normality of a kind returned to Albania, if only for a year or two, but it had already long returned to the Czech Republic, which I first knew as part of Czechoslovakia, and which had imprinted its name and character upon the consciousness of all Europe since the day in 1938 when Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister of Great Britain, fatefully described it as a faraway country of whose people ‘we know nothing’. When I first went there, in the 1950s, it was a country of degraded servility, where everything seemed to smell of sausages. The slogans of Communist piety nagged from every hoarding, the drab emblems of State management were on every corner shop. The only foreigners around were approved comrades – Afghans and Syrians, come to buy arms or cars, ideologically correct delegations of Poles, Romanians, Hungarians and East Germans, or groups of square-shouldered Russians in baggy trousers and drab hats.

  At that time I took note, for literary purposes, of an apartment block at the corner of Kaprova and Valentinská streets in Prague. A cross between baroque and art nouveau, it had a small onion dome on one corner, and was embellished all over with symbolic images. There were balconies, and window-boxes, and lace curtains in the windows. A tobacco shop stood on the ground floor, and at the end of the street, over the river, you could see the spires and battlements of Hradčany, the old stronghold of the Czech kings. I chose to describe this building as an allegorical hostel of Communism, and fancied it full of drabness, fear, longing, austerity, compulsory pictures of Lenin and nosy-parker informants. I saw it too swirled about, there at the road junction, by the whole parade of European history. I saw the armies of Franz Josef, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin all marching past its doors. I saw ecstatically courageous students shouting slogans and waving banners. Commissioners, gauleiters and commissars drove officiously by. Franz Kafka’s faceless functionaries trudged past on their way to the interrogation rooms, Jaroslav Hašek’s Good Soldier Švejk, bless his heart, smiled ironically down on the lot of them.

  But years later I went back to the corner of Kaprova and Valentinská streets to reimagine these matters, and this time I saw something quite new on an upper balcony of the apartment block, above the potted geraniums. It was a TV satellite dish, the universal emblem of market-force society. It suggested to me the olive leaf that the dove brought back to Noah, when the flood began to recede.

  53 History on the blink?

  Had history ended in the Czech Republic? Going back to the country a few years after the Velvet Revolution which finally got rid of the Communists, sometimes I felt it had: the one great thing that had happened since was the voluntary separation of Slovakia from Czechoslovakia, and that had been scarcely noticed by the world at large (although, by an irony worthy of Švejk himself, it was the very separation which, when Hitler implicitly decreed it, gave rise to the Second World War). In the 1950s Prague had seemed to me the most oppressive of the Communist capitals of eastern Europe, but its fate was tragic and tremendous. Forty years on, the collapse of the Soviet Empire had left its own smouldering layers of sleaze and squalor, but the public miseries of the place were miseries familiar to us all. Stalinist Prague was sufficiently corrupt, God knows, but in institutional ways: at least in the 1950s one was not cheated by taxi-drivers or robbed by jostling pickpockets. The secret policemen were everywhere in those awful old times, every official was waiting to be bribed, but there were none of the beggars sitting with bowed heads, sometimes with their eyes hopelessly closed, who represented contemporary sadness in the 1990s.

  In 1993 I went to a political meeting in Old Town Square, scene of heroic demonstrations in the days of the oppression, to hear a speaker inveighing against Germans, Gypsies, prostitutes and illegal immigrants; he was supported by skinheads and miscellaneous layabouts, protected by mounted police, assaulted by flying bottles and the odd rotten vegetable. Prague had joined the ordinary world, and history was at least on the blink. In 1957 I had been warned, by somebody who knew, that not only my room in the morose Palace Hotel but actually my table in its restaurant was likely to be bugged. Now the same hotel offered American cable television in its bedrooms, a lavish variety of soaps, lotions, bath salts and shower-caps, and such excellent little notepads beside its telephones that I helped myself to a few from the maid’s trolley in the corridor. When the Czech journalist Karel Kyncl returned to Prague in 1989, after seven years of exile, he said it was like sleep-walking.

  54 Three recitals

  In the last decade of the century Prague became one of the great tourist destinations of Europe. It had tried to be one under the Communists, but in those days its drably printed brochures and smudgy programmes did little to counteract the dark reputation of the place, and not many foreigners responded. Now thousands came, and loved it – its buildings, its atmosphere, its beer, and perhaps most of all its music. When I was last in Prague I went to three musical performances which profoundly affected me in different ways.

  The first was an impromptu jazz concert in Old Town Square, where that right-wing demagogue had said his piece. Throughout eastern Europe jazz had played an important part, almost a symbolic part, in the various risings which had put an end to Communism, and I thought it stirring to hear the blast of the saxophone, the wail of the blues, there in the heart of Prague. I sat drinking borivicka then, as the Good Soldier would have done before me, and Prague’s glorious baroque skyline was silhouetted around me against a velvet sky. The horses of the pleasure-barouches stood chomping at their bits, attended by grooms in long cloaks and brown bowler hats; the performers played with immense ebullience; every now and then excited small children, encouraged by their fond parents, ran out to deposit coins in the band-leader’s open trumpet-case.

  My second performance gave me less benign sensations. One windy morning I chanced to arrive at the gates of Hradčany Castle, beneath the proud standard of the President of the Republic, just in time for the changing of the guard. This struck me as an ambivalent display. The soldiers, in their long grey greatcoats, wore white scarves like Americans but marched like Russians. The bandsmen appeared at open first-floor windows, rather like the holy figures appearing at that very moment in the little windows of medieval clocks all over Europe, and they played a series of lush fanfares that sounded bathetically like film music. The flag flapped heavily in the wind above us. The troops marched and countermarched. The filmic fanfares sounded. I could imagine it all turning rather nasty if ever history started up again in Prague.

  And my third concert was a recital, in the battered gilded church of Our Lady of Týn, of six different settings of Ave Maria (Schubert, César Franck, Cherubini, Saint-Saëns, Verdi, Gounod). It was extremely cold in the church, and we were all bundled in our pews. The soloist, Zdena Kloubová of the National Opera, sang from the organ loft behind us, and now and then I turned to see her. She looked very small and brave up there – almost defiant. She was wearing a black leather jerkin against the cold, and as her lovely voice rang out among the altars I thought her a haunting reminder of more heroic days among the Czechs: bad times, cruel times, but times when history happened.

  55 My first Poles

  My first Poles were Poles of the diaspora. For years after the Second World War I came across them everywhere. Near my own home in Wales hundreds of officers and their wives, exiled in 1939, lived out their lives in a bleak camp of Nissen huts and institutional buildings: many had fought with distinction in the war, many had been landowners and professional people in pre-war Poland, but over the decades I watched them age in dignified impotence among the sandy scrubland, until only a few
ancients were left to mull over their memories and tell tales of old glories for junior reporters preparing feature articles for the local press. A Pole rented the room upstairs from mine when I first went to live in the dismal, battered and frequently power-cut London of 1948: he had been a cavalry officer at the start of the war, and he still went off most elegantly, in a bowler hat and a well-worn dark suit, to his work as a hotel doorman. Years later, visiting a Royal Air Force fighter squadron in Egypt, I found that the oldest and most dashing of the pilots was a Polish veteran of the Battle of Britain. The young men called him ‘Uncle’. All these people seemed to me, whatever their circumstances, to be stylish and vivid in their exile: some had perhaps been Fascists of a kind, many were undoubtedly anti-Semitic, but war had scoured them, and made their minds as lean as their bodies – for none of them seemed to be fat.

  56 Poles at home

  These were my original Poles. How different they seemed when, in the 1950s, I met them on their native soil. Poland then was sunk in Stalinist subjection, governed by a regime of puppet ideologues. At first I thought the country infinitely dispiriting, because nobody seemed to have much hope of ever changing things. Poland had so often been occupied by those damned Powers down the centuries that the people seemed punch-drunk. Some colleagues took me to stay at a writers’ retreat near Zakopane in the southern mountains, and on the way we were stopped by the police, on some pretext or other. Our driver, a journalist of great charm and intelligence, about my own age, did not even speak when the cop tapped on his window. He merely took his driving-licence from his inside pocket, tucked a banknote in it, and handed it out. The policeman did not speak, either. He had no need to. He just took the note, handed the licence back, and walked away. My friend drove off without a word to me. He knew what I was thinking, and there was nothing to say.

  If such a lively, clever and delightful man, I thought, was so numbed by history and the system, what could I expect of the populace at large? They seemed to me utterly disillusioned. On my first day in Warsaw a waiter offered to change money for me at generous black-market rates, and I accepted. When I happened to mention the fact to Polish acquaintances they said I had made a foolish mistake. The waiter might well have been an agent provocateur – I would find out when I came to leave the country and had to produce my receipts. It might have been a trap. The penalties were extreme, especially for foreigners – especially for foreign journalists. On the other hand perhaps it was just another poor sod trying to make a bit on the side, like that policeman in the South. Who could know? What could I do about it, anyway? Who cared? Forget it, and hope for the best. They took me up to Krasiński Square to show me the manhole into which the heroic fighters of the 1944 rising, driven out of the Old Town at last by the Nazis, had escaped with their wounded into the sewers below: but it was just another manhole, just another reminder of national impotence, and we looked at it in silence.

  Then on a very cold and slushy day I stood on the great square of Kraków to hear the hejnał Mariacki, the trumpeter’s call of St Mary’s. Every hour, night and day, a trumpeter appeared in a high window of the church of St Mary to blow a slow sad call north, east, south and west, the most plaintive of tocsins, breaking off always in the middle of a phrase as tradition demanded (a thirteenth-century predecessor having been shot dead by a Mongol arrow before he could finish his warning). This was an unforgettably haunting polonaise, a true catch in the throat, and it was a terrible thing, I thought, to hear it then in the vast, beautiful and desperately shabby square. Kraków had been the capital of the wartime German colony of Poland. The Generalgouvernement Polen, the administration was called, and everything in Kraków had been forcibly Germanized – Adolf-Hitler Platz had of course been the new name of the square, and so established did the Germans feel their presence to be that Baedeker even produced a guidebook (Das Generalgouvernement, 1943). Just along the road was Auschwitz. Now the Germans had gone but the Russians were there instead, just as domineering, just as arrogant, apparently irremovable. Kraków had not been badly damaged during the war, but there hung over it that day, I thought, a miasmic sense of helplessness. There were very few people about: the trumpet sounded over a muffled city, muffled alike by snow and by history, and when it broke off so abruptly the silence that followed seemed to me absolute.

  57 The style flickers

  Surely, I thought, this enervated fatalism had once and for all blunted the vigour and optimism which made the Poles of the diaspora so irrepressible. But I was wrong, and especially in the capital I did sometimes sense it. Warsaw was indeed the saddest place imaginable in those days. Looming over it was the enormous Palace of Culture donated by the Soviet people to their unfortunate neighbours, and this stood there as an inescapable emblem of recurrent subjection to the Powers. Piłsudski Square was now Stalin Square. Most of the city was inexpressibly run down, much of it still in ruins. Yet there were flashes of the old spirit. They were rebuilding Old Town Square, a baroque ensemble utterly destroyed by the Germans, just as it was, house by house with meticulous accuracy, and this seemed to me a saving grace of the regime – to be honouring the past with such diligence. I remember a covey of merry schoolchildren sloshing through the snow one morning, their high-boned faces peering through fur hoods like fox cubs through bushes. A few beautiful women somehow managed, for all the shortages and hardships and puritan interferences, to dress themselves stylishly and walk with panache. Though the Poles might be hangdog in the general, in the particular they were still amused and inquisitive. Polish drunks were still cheerfully bawdy. Polish humour was disrespectful. The style of the Poles, which I found so poignantly urbane in their exile, flickered too among the miseries of home. The writer Neal Ascherson says (in his Black Sea, 1995) that for 150 years ‘the essential experience of every generation of young Poles’ had been drinking hot drinks in cold rooms, arguing about what kind of Poland they wanted, singing and listening to poetry. They were acclimatized, I suppose.

  58 Yarning

  In the 1970s I took home from Poland a record by a popular young Polish tenor of the day, singing (in English) Songs That Swept The World. How it touched me then, and touches me still! Out of that snowbound, unhappy country, a programme of wishful schmaltz, a reaching-out as it were to all the more fortunate rest of us. The singer’s English was peculiarly imperfect as he carefully enunciated the words of those now half-forgotten lyrics; the slightly jazzed-up strict-tempo orchestra was like something from a radio broadcast of the 1930s; and as the young man rode his sentimental melodies – ‘Be my larv, fur nowan ulse can ind this yarning!’ – as his voice rose heroically and invariably to the tonic in the final cadences, he brought into my distant sitting-room all the grand pathos and passion of the Poles.

  59 Not Chopin

  I went back to Poland again in the winter of 1996, when the Soviet Empire had long collapsed, and was surprised to find my emotions much the same. Of all the ex-Communist countries, it seemed to me to have changed least. There were bright new shops enough, posh hotels, plenty of cars, a lively jeunesse dorée, all the usual paraphernalia of capitalism: but still the place breathed a spirit of heroic poignancy, the spirit of Chopin in fact, once characterized by Schumann as guns in flower-beds. The patina of Communism still lay heavily upon Warsaw. The Mongolesque Palace of Culture, though surrounded now by the stalls and parked vans of a fairly dubious free market, was still the dominant building; the tenement oblongs of the old ideology still marched gloomily away into the suburbs; even the famously restored Old Town Square looked to me unmistakably a pastiche now, and a little shoddy at that, whose doors did not fit as the originals would have fitted and might have been better made (it occurred to me with a pang) by the carpenters of Disneyland.

  On the other hand when I returned to that manhole near Krasiński Square I found a plaque on the wall above it, and over the street was a huge monument to the heroes of the 1944 rising, emerging furious from their hiding-places with guns at the ready, finally disappearing in ever
-glorious defeat into the labyrinth. The Communists remembered that insurrection equivocally, because the tanks of the Red Army, already in the suburb of Praga just across the river, had declined to come to the help of the Poles, whose fighting leaders were anti-Communist to a man. Now the terrific tale has come into its own again, and is recognized as one of the supreme episodes of Polish history. It was a heroic failure, of course, but then most of Poland’s battles are heroic failures, and the glories of Poland are always tinged with sadness.

  The trumpeter was still faithfully blowing the hejnał Mariacki down in Kraków, and although the great square was far from empty now, and the lovely city had come wonderfully to life again – full of students and tourists and foreign entrepreneurs – even so I found the long slow call as sad as ever. The Communists had built a huge steel plant on the outskirts of the city, and sometimes during my stay Kraków was so plunged in smog, like an old London pea-souper, that the top of the church tower was lost in murky vapours, and we could not see the trumpeter at his high window. But one morning it cleared, the sun came out, and up there the brass of the trumpet flashed against the shadows. A party of schoolchildren waved enthusiastically, and when the call broke off I could just make out the hand of the trumpeter waving back – like the hand I saw in the blockhouse in Ireland, back on page 70.