Letters From Prague

by Sue Gee

  ‘Where does Karel live?’

  ‘If he’s still at his old address, it’s across the river.’ Harriet leaned on the narrow windowsill. The unpainted wood was rotting: you could pick little bits of it away. ‘We’ll go and knock on his door tomorrow.’

  ‘I can’t wait to meet him.’ Marsha had discovered the rotting wood also, and was flicking small, picked-out pieces down into the gutter. Harriet stopped her.

  ‘And please don’t be too disappointed if we can’t find him.’

  Marsha stopped picking, and looked at her. ‘Won’t you be disappointed?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Well, then.’ She yawned.

  ‘Shall we have a rest?’ Harriet felt suddenly that she could do no more. ‘And then we’ll go and look at the river and have something to eat.’

  ‘Okay.’

  They lay on high iron beds with creaking springs. The ceiling sloped steeply, and the room, even with the window open, was close and warm. They talked sleepily, with long pauses.

  ‘Everywhere we stay is nicer than the last place.’ Marsha was yawning again. ‘Except for the Hotel Kloster. But the Hotel Scheiber was better than Brussels, and this is the best of all.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I like being up in an attic. I like the rooftops.’ The bedsprings creaked as she changed position. ‘I’m thirsty, though.’

  ‘We have to be a bit careful here,’ said Harriet. ‘Everyone drinks mineral water.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There’s a lot of pollution. In the air, in the water.’

  ‘That’s why Hugh’s giving money for that thing. That pollution thing, that sulphur thing.’

  ‘Yes. How clever of you to remember. In the Krus˘ne Hory mountains. We might go and look at it.’

  ‘Why did I speak?’

  ‘I’ll try not to drag you about too much.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘But I do want us to see –’

  ‘Everything. I know.’

  After that, there was silence. Harriet lay watching Marsha fall asleep. She watched a fly sail into the room and sail out again. She looked at the sloping whitewashed ceiling, at their open cases on the dusty bare floor, the crucifix above the chest or drawers, the box of letters. They were here, she had done it. She closed her eyes, summoning images of the city – from her reading, from photographs, from her lined black notebook, tipped in Chinese red.

  Prague was chalk and pastel colours, gleams of gold, rippling terracotta. It was washed-out blue and faded rose; copper-green domes and dark slate towers. It was the façades of medieval houses painted in shades of parchment and linen, coffee and cream and ochre. It was five medieval towns, one a ghetto, on the east and west banks of the river; the centre of a holy empire under a visionary king who gave his name to the Charles Bridge. It had not become one city until the end of the eighteenth century.

  Prague was a castle and cathedral on a forested hill; it was Romanesque and Gothic, Renaissance and baroque, onion domes and soaring spires, intricate turrets and gabled roofs; art nouveau avenues modelled on Parisian boulevards, cobbled alleys and quiet squares. It was bells, ringing across the city, it was string quartets in churches, it was Mozart, Mozart, Mozart. He had visited Prague four times in the last four years of his life, overjoyed by his reception. Figaro had flopped in Vienna, but the Czechs loved it, whistling arias in the streets.

  Fairytale, musical, picture-book Prague.

  The capital city of Bohemia, one of the most polluted quarters of Europe. Behind the parchment and ochre façades was rot and decay, and the water was unfit for drinking. Along the border with East Germany clouds of sulphur rose into the sky from factory chimneys, and the trees were stripped bare by acid rain.

  ‘The countryside in northern Bohemia is choking to death … the children have to stay indoors in winter … we’re financing a loan for a plant in the Krus˘ne Hory mountains …’

  Harriet heard Marsha’s breathing, steady and light. She turned over, thinking of their twin-bedded room in Brussels, the acres of pale carpet, the padded headboards and gilt mirrors, the sound, late at night, of Susanna, weeping. She thought of the conversation with Hugh, his laid-back enthusiasm for this project, his casual mention of a casual encounter with an old school contemporary, coming to dinner. She saw the hotel in Berlin, and Christopher hurrying out into the street, with a curt goodbye, and she felt a wave of sadness and confusion, blotting it out at once by returning to Prague, its history and her expectations.

  The past has become more to me than my own life –

  Well. Perhaps there were very good reasons for that.

  Prague was a Protestant martyr, burned at the stake. Jan Hus, the university rector, preaching against a corrupt papacy. In 1415 his death ignited two hundred years of war.

  Prague, centuries later, was tormented, emaciated Kafka, who once described himself as a memory come alive. He was born and died in the Old Town – ‘the most beautiful setting that has ever been seen on this earth’ – but for a while, in the winter of 1916, he rented a house in Golden Lane, here in the Little Quarter, writing all night and walking back across the Charles Bridge to go home and sleep.

  Prague was Alexander Dubcek, whose sweet, charismatic smile showed liberalism to the world for a few brief months in 1968, when Harriet and Karel had met. By the last week of August he was lying drugged and incoherent in a back room in the Kremlin.

  Prague was a bitter January day in 1969, a human torch in Wenceslas Square, where a young philosophy student stood next to a fountain and poured a can of petrol over himself. When he died, three days later, Dubcek – back from Moscow, humiliated, clinging to the last shreds of authority – ordered black flags to be hung throughout the city.

  Prague was Charter 77. It was Vaclav Havel, one of its signatories, in and out of prison. It was thousands of East Germans in the autumn of 1989, besieging the German Embassy here in the Little Quarter, camping out in the gardens, demanding the right to travel freely. It was the heady days after the fall of the Berlin Wall a few weeks later, a student demonstration brutally suppressed, a Velvet Revolution.

  In the cold days of that November, Dubcek returned from banishment. He smiled from the balcony of the national Museum overlooking Wenceslas Square, on the thousands ringing handbells in the snow, and Harriet, in London, watched it all on television and reread her bundle of letters by the fire.

  Prague was a playwright president installed in grand offices in the Castle. For 900 korunas you could now have bed and breakfast in Havel’s old prison cell. Prague was liberated, Prague was westernised, the ring of cheap hotels was built round the perimeter, and everyone’s aunt let rooms.

  And here they were, in one of them. All this way, after all this time.

  Prague was Karel, returning, leaving Harriet to walk with awful slowness home from school, all through the autumn of 1968, changing her briefcase from hand to hand, watching damp leaves pile up in the garden square and smoke rise thinly towards the trees. Her footsteps dragged as she came to the house …

  – dreading the rack of expectation, and the sick collapse of disappointment … I suppose animals kept in cages, and so scantily fed as to be always on the verge of famine, await their food as I awaited a letter …

  She climbed the steps, she rang the bell, she gave the merest glance towards the hall table as her mother let her in.

  ‘Had a good day?’

  ‘Fine, thanks.’

  ‘Much homework?’

  ‘Quite a bit.’

  It wasn’t there, it wasn’t there. He had forgotten her. Well. She had tea, she went upstairs to her room, she worked. On a wet night in April, the following year, she sat in the striped armchair by her bedroom window reading black pen on thin paper.

  London seems a very long way from me now. Since my return life has been –

  I hope to study law again one day, but at present I am working as a porter –

  I think of you …

  The
fly who had sailed out through the open window had returned, and was buzzing. Harriet sleepily opened her eyes. The beam of light which had touched the edge of the box of letters had moved, holding the whole box now. Seeing this, hearing the summer sound of the fly, and the bell beyond the rooftops, she was put in mind all at once of another film seen on a long-ago evening in London, down at the NFT: an Italian film, following the life of a village through the seasons. An old man in a clean white shirt put his dead wife’s wedding ring into a box on a chest of drawers, and put his own beside it, preparing for death. He left the house and walked along a flowery path in high summer. The rings lay next to each other, gleaming in the sun at the bedroom window. A whole life together.

  The room was warm, the bell rang steadily, the fly had gone. Harriet closed her eyes and slept.

  The air was balmy and still when they left the pension. They bought two bottles of mineral water from a dark little shop on the comer, and wandered through the streets in the general direction of Malostranské Square. The Little Quarter was full of charm: hilly cobbled streets, with here an arch, there a sudden, surprising descent of steps, an elaborate gateway or shady courtyard. The streets were narrow, but the houses fine – pleasing, regular, eighteenth-century facades bathed in the deepening evening light. Every now and then they came to a little square, or broader thoroughfare, from where they were able to look up the hill towards the castle, and the soaring Gothic pinnacles of St Vitus Cathedral. Strains of Mozart floated now and then from open café doorways. Don Giovanni was completed and premiered here, and here, while Mozart lay in a pauper’s grave in Vienna, four thousand people stood in the aisles of the great baroque St Nicholas Church, listening to his Requiem Mass.

  St Nicholas towered over and divided Malostranské Square: Harriet and Marsha, drinking their mineral water, taking their time, could see ahead of them its mighty copper dome and tower, overshadowing a cobbled hill lined with tramways. Awnings still shaded the café tables spilling on to the pavements, shops were still open, the last of the day’s tourists were coming down the hill from the castle, stopping for a drink or making their way through the square towards Mostecka, the long sloping street which led to the Charles Bridge. Marsha and Harriet followed them, seeing the gleam of the sunset on water, passing through an arch between two massive Gothic gateways.

  Black-headed gulls wheeled above the cobbled bridge, and over the broad Vltava. Barges rocked on their moorings, swans drifted beneath the buttressed arches, and a procession of stone saints all along the parapets stood in silhouete against the sinking sun. On the far side were the clustered buildings, the towers and spires and domes of the Old Town. For four hundred years this medieval bridge had been the only link between the two settlements. It had been a trade route, a battle ground in the Thirty Years War, a place of execution for Protestant martyrs. Now, as the sun fell on the water, a path of gold, it was crowded with students, with tourists, with hawkers and buskers.

  A young man with a violin was playing Eine kleine Nachtmusik, very fast and not very well, but the effect even so was tuneful and light. People were wandering amongst stalls of painted eggs, postcards, secondhand books, a hot-dog stand. Everyone, it seemed, had a bottle of mineral water, and no one was in a hurry. The gulls wheeled, the sun sank lower, the violinist changed his tune to a slow and gentle air which floated out over the water.

  ‘I feel happy,’ said Marsha.

  ‘Yes,’ said Harriet, ‘so do I.’

  They found a space betwen two statues on the parapet, next to one of the tall, copper-topped street lamps; they leaned on the stone, looking out over the river, spanned by bridge after bridge. To the south the right bank was lined with the buildings of the Old Town, the New Town, the suburb of Vysehrad; to the north it made a great, questioning meander, in whose curve lay Josefov, the old Jewish quarter, a once-walled ghetto whose slums had been razed to the ground at the end of the nineteenth century. A synagogue remained; so did the old cemetery, an overcrowded plot of broken headstones which Harriet intended to visit, Marsha permitting. She also intended to visit Kafka’s grave, in the New Jewish Cemetery in Žižkov, near to where Karel’s family had their apartment. Palach, also, was buried near there. Tomorrow, she thought, watching the lazy progress of swans, tomorrow I shall be walking along the street from where Karel used to write to me. I shall find his apartment building, I shall ring the bell …

  Someone had lit a cigarette, and the smoke drifted past her. She turned, and saw a little stall selling packets of Marlboro – ‘Cheap Americans’ – and for a moment her heart turned over.

  Karel, lighting up in a long-ago summer, held the precious western cigarette between long thin fingers, inhaling, looking at her across a cheap brown table. He held her in his arms as they lay on an Indian cotton bedspread.

  ‘There must be many beautiful girls in Czechoslovakia.’

  ‘That is true. But none of them called Harriet’

  She felt herself on the threshold of a journey, which began with the expression in his eyes and ended – where would it end?

  There it was: the reason for her journey now, the moment which had brought her and Marsha halfway across Europe, to lean on the parapet of the Charles Bridge on a heavenly summer evening, filled with expectation.

  And then there was someone else who smoked – far too heavily, embracing its danger – and Harriet, looking out over the water, recalled moments in the dining room of the Hotel Scheiber, the smoke wreathing in and out of a shaft of sunlight, a candle flame, a heavy, serious face across the table.

  ‘I suppose I did hit rock bottom … There’s still a side of me which is – well, I suppose you could call it dangerous … Getting high on a risk – it’s in my blood … But never again.’ He smiled at her, a smile full of warmth and liking. ‘And now I have told you the worst, and now you know.’

  Smoke drifted through the candlelight She thought: I am on the brink. We are on the brink –

  Chapter Two

  Žižkov was set on a hill, a mixed district of nineteenth-century working-class tenement housing and postwar rebuilding, where new streets of skyscrapers and lingering cobbled alleys climbed to a strip of green. To the north, the strip overlooked the district of Karlin and the bend in the river; to the south was a windswept expanse of cemeteries. On this hill the Hussites had won their first battle; from this hill you could see much of the city spread out before you. Or you could do that by taking the lift to the top of a smooth grey television tower, in the south-west corner of the district, as Marsha and Harriet had done in Berlin; feeling the summer wind on their faces as they slowly revolved above Alexanderplatz.

  They did not do that here. They came out of the metro station next along the line from the tower – Flora, on the comer of the cemetery – and began to climb the hill, walking up Jirinska, broad and straight and tree-lined. The cemetery was endless: row upon row of graves and tombstones crisscrossed by cobbled paths: how to begin to find Kafka’s? Well, that was for later. Harriet looked at her Cedok map, searching for Baranova Street. It wasn’t hard to find on the grid: they turned left, walking a couple of blocks, turning into a featureless thoroughfare where a local tram was humming to a halt. She checked the map once more. The centre was richly decorated with little symbols for churches and restaurants and museums, but here, apart from the cemeteries, was mostly as ordinary as the district itself – much as the winding streets of the Little Quarter had early this morning already been crowded with tourists, while here they were mostly among families doing the weekend shopping. She stepped aside for a young mother with a pushchair, and said to Marsha, ‘Karel’s street is just off the next block. We turn right.’

  ‘He’d better be there, he’d better be there, if he isn’t there I’ll die.’ Marsha skipped along the pavement.

  ‘It’s Saturday morning,’ said Harriet calmly. ‘It’s a good time to find people in.’ And a bad time to disturb them, after a hard week. She followed Marsha round the corner, keeping a measured pace, feeli
ng her heart racing.

  ‘What number, what number, what number did you say?’

  ‘Slow down, calm down, you’re making me terribly nervous.’

  ‘You’re terribly nervous already.’

  ‘Nonsense.’ Harriet looked about her. This street was narrower than Baranova, impassable for a tram or indeed anything but a small car or motorbike. It was quiet, with few people about, the morning sun slanting thinly from the far end on to windows where the curtains were still drawn, and narrow brick balconies where one or two women were taking down washing, or watering plants. A child ran out of a doorway and ran back in again; a man came out of a shop, opening his paper as he walked along the street, stopping to light a cigarette. Everyone smoked in Prague. Harriet glanced at his paper as he lit up and walked on. Céský Expres, a cheerful-looking tabloid. Žižkov had been a communist heartland even before the war: until a few years ago everyone would have been reading Rude Prâvo, the Party paper. Now, the fashionable broadsheet was Lidové Noviny, a samizdat publication all through the 1970s and 1980s, when many of its contributors, like Havel, had been signatories to Charter 77. These days it was revamped, readily available – she’d seen it at the metro kiosk this morning, amongst English-language papers like the Prague Post, and the dozens of western magazines.

  What did Karel read? What had he been doing, all these years? He had grown up in this quiet, ordinary back street, a child of the working class for whose Party-member parents communism had turned sour, who had through his studies climbed into the intelligentsia, and made the classic trip to the West. And there he had met a nice young English girl …

  A dog ran out of an alleyway; someone went past on a bike. Marsha reached for the map in Harriet’s hand and turned it so she could read the address written upon the corner.