A Time of Gifts (37 page)

It took me a little time to realize that the Vltava and the Moldau were the Czech and the German names for the same river. It flows through the capital as majestically as the Tiber and the Seine through their offspring cities; like them, it is adorned with midstream islands and crossed by noble bridges. Among crowding
churches and a mist of trees, two armoured barbicans prick their steeples like gauntlets grasping either end of a blade and between them flies one of the great mediaeval bridges of Europe. Built by Charles IV, it is a rival to Avignon and Regensburg and Cahors and a stone epitome of the city's past. Sixteen tunneling spans carry it over the flood. Each arc springs from a massive pier and the supporting cutwaters advance into the rush of the current like a line of forts. High overhead and every few yards along either balustrade stand saints or groups of saints and as one gazes along the curve of the bridge, the teams unite in a flying population; a backward glance through one of the barbicans reveals the façade of a church where yet another holy flock starts up from a score of ledges. At the middle of one side and higher than the rest, stands St. Johannes Nepomuk. He was martyred a few yards away in 1393—he is said to have refused, under torture, to betray a confessional secret of Queen Sophia. When the henchmen of Wenceslas IV carried him here and hurled him into the Vltava, his drowned body, which was later retrieved and entombed in the Cathedral, floated downstream under a ring of stars.
[3]

It was getting dark when we crossed the bridge. Leaning on the balustrade, we gazed upstream and past an eyot towards the river's source; it rises in the Bohemian forest somewhere north of Linz. Then, looking over the other side, we pieced together the river's itinerary downstream. If we had launched a paper boat at the quay she would have joined the Elbe in twenty miles and entered Saxony. Then, floating under the bridges of Dresden and Magdeburg, she would have crossed the plains of Old Prussia with Brandenburg to starboard and Anhalt to port and finally, battling on between Hanover and Holstein, she would have picked her way between the ocean liners in the Hamburg estuary and struck the North Sea in the Bight of Heligoland.

* * *

We shall never get to Constantinople like this. I know I ought to be moving on; so does the reader. But I can't—not for a page or two.

Prague seemed—it still seems, after many rival cities—not only one of the most beautiful places in the world, but one of the strangest. Fear, piety, zeal, strife and pride, tempered in the end by the milder impulses of munificence and learning and
douceur de vivre
, had flung up an unusual array of grand and unenigmatic monuments. The city, however, was scattered with darker, more reticent, less easily decipherable clues. There were moments when every detail seemed the tip of a phalanx of inexplicable phantoms. This recurring and slightly sinister feeling was fortified by the conviction that Prague, of all my halts including Vienna itself, was the place which the word
Mitteleuropa
, and all that it implies, fitted most aptly. History pressed heavily upon it. Built a hundred miles north of the Danube and three hundred east of the Rhine, it seemed, somehow, out of reach; far withdrawn into the conjectural hinterland of a world the Romans never knew. (Is there a difference between regions separated by this ancient test? I think there is.) Ever since their names were first recorded, Prague and Bohemia had been the westernmost point of interlock and conflict for the two greatest masses of population in Europe: the dim and mutually ill-disposed volumes of Slavs and Teutons; nations of which I knew nothing. Haunted by these enormous shadows, the very familiarity of much of the architecture made Prague seem more remote. Yet the town was as indisputably a part of the western world, and of the traditions of which the West is most justly vain, as Cologne, or Urbino, or Toulouse or Salamanca—or, indeed, Durham, which—on a giant scale, mutatis mutandis, and with a hundred additions—it fleetingly resembled. (I thought about Prague often later on and when evil times came, sympathy, anger and the guilt which the fate of Eastern Europe has justly implanted in the West, coloured my cogitations. Brief acquaintance
in happier times had left me with the vision of an actual city to set against the conjectured metamorphosis and this made later events seem both more immediate and more difficult to grasp. Nothing can surprise one in the reported vicissitudes of a total stranger. It is the distant dramas of friends that are the hardest to conjure up.)

* * *

I was glad Hans had given me the
Good Soldier Svvejk
to read, but I only realized its importance later on. After
Don Quixote
, Svvejk is the other fictitious figure who has succeeded in representing—under one aspect and in special circumstances—a whole nation. His station in life and his character have more in common with Sancho Panza than with his master, but the author's ironic skill leaves it doubtful whether ruse or innocence or merely a natural resilience under persecution, are the saving talisman of his hero. Jaroslav Hasvek was a poet, an anti-clerical eccentric and a vagabond full of random learning and his adventures paralleled the picaresque wanderings of his creation. In and out of jail, once locked up as insane and once for bigamy, he was an incessant drinker and his excesses killed him in the end. He had a passion for hoaxes and learned journals. Until he was found out, his description of imaginary fauna in the
Animal World
attained wild heights of extravagance; and his fake suicide, when he jumped off the Charles Bridge, at the point where St. John Nepomuk was thrown in, set all Prague by the ears.

Some of Hasvek's compatriots disliked his fictional hero and disapproved of the author. In the rather conventional climate of the new Republic, Svvejk seemed an unpresentable travesty of the national character. They needn't have worried. The forces that Svvejk had to contend with were tame compared to the mortal dangers of today. But it is the inspiration of his raffish and irrefragable shade that has come to the rescue.

* * *

In this late attempt to recapture the town, I seem to have cleared the streets. They are as empty as the thoroughfares in an architectural print. Nothing but a few historical phantoms survive; a muffled drum, a figure from a book and an echo of Utraquists rioting a few squares away—the milling citizens, the rushing traffic vanish and the voices of the bilingual city sink to a whisper. I can just remember a chestnut-woman in a kerchief stamping beside a brazier to keep warm and a hurrying Franciscan with a dozen loaves under his arm. Three cab-drivers nursing their tall whips and drinking schnapps in the outside-bar of a wine cellar materialize for a moment above the sawdust, their noses scarlet from the cold or drink or both, and evaporate again, red noses last, like rear lamps fading through a fog.

What did Hans and I talk about in the cask-lined cave beyond? The vanished Habsburgs for sure, whose monuments and dwelling-places we had been exploring all day. My Austrian itinerary had infected me long ago with the sad charm of the dynasty. I felt that this comforting grotto, with its beams and shields and leaded windows and the lamplight our glasses refracted on the oak in bright and flickering discs, might be the last of a long string of such refuges. We were drinking Franconian wine from the other side of the Bohemian-Bavarian border.
In what glasses?
The bowls, correctly, were colourless. But by the Rhine or the Mosel, as we know, the stems would have ascended in bubbles of amber or green, and tapered like pagodas. Perhaps these stalks were ruby alternating with fluted crystal, for these, with gentian blue and underwater green and the yellow of celandines, are the colours for which the Prague glass-makers have always been famous... We had gazed with wonder at the astronomical instruments of Emperor Rudolf II. A celestial globe of mythological figures in metal fretwork turned in a giant foliated egg-cup of brass. Chased astrolabes gleamed among telescopes and quadrants and compasses. Armillary spheres flashed concentrically, hoops within hoops... More of a Spanish Habsburg than an Austrian, Rudolf made Prague his capital and filled it with treasures; and, until the
horrors of the Thirty Years' War began, Prague was a Renaissance city. Deeply versed in astronomical studies, he invited Tycho Brahe to his Court and the great astronomer arrived, noseless from a duel in Denmark, and lived there until he died of the plague in 1601. Kepler, promptly summoned to continue Brahe's work on the planets, remained there till the Emperor's death. He collected wild animals and assembled a court of mannerist painters. The fantasies of Arcimboldi, which sank into oblivion until they were unearthed again three centuries later, were his discovery. Moody and unbalanced, he lived in an atmosphere of neo-platonic magic, astrology and alchemy. His addiction to arcane practices certainly darkened his scientific bent. But Wallenstein, who was one of the ablest men in Europe, was similarly flawed. In fact, an obsession with the supernatural seems to have pervaded the city. A whole wing of the Italianate palace which Wallenstein inhabited with such mysterious splendour was given over to the secret arts; and when Wallenstein inherited Kepler from Rudolf, the astronomer took part in these sessions with an ironic shrug.
[4]

As well as astrology, an addiction to alchemy had sprung up, and an interest in the Kabala. The town became a magnet for charlatans. The flowing robes and the long white beard of John Dee, the English mathematician and wizard, created a great impression in Central Europe. He made the rounds of credulous
Bohemian and Polish noblemen and raised spirits by incantation in castle after castle. He arrived in Central Europe after being stripped of his fellowship at Cambridge.
[5]
(One wonders how the Winter Queen, arriving a few decades later, reacted to this odd atmosphere; we have mentioned, earlier on, her contacts in Heidelberg with the early Rosicrucians.) The Jews, who had been settled in Prague since the tenth century, fell victims in the eighteenth to a similar figure called Hayan. He was a Sephardic Jew from Sarajevo, a Kabalist and a votary of the false Messiah Sabbatai Zevi; he convinced the trusting Ashkenazim. With Elijah's guidance, he proclaimed in private séances that he could summon God, raise the dead, and create new worlds.

Our wanderings had ended under a clock tower in the old Ghetto, where the hands moved anti-clockwise and indicated the time in Hebrew alphabetic numbers. The russet-coloured synagogue, with its steep and curiously dentated gables, was one of the oldest in Europe; yet it was built on the site of a still older fane which was burnt down in a riot, in which three thousand Jews were massacred, on Easter Sunday, 1389. (The proximity of the Christian festival to the Feast of the Passover, coupled with the myth of ritual murder, made Easter week a dangerous time.) The cemetery hard by was one of the most remarkable places in the city. Thousands of tombstones in tiers, dating from the fifteenth to the end of the eighteenth century, were huddled under the elder branches. The moss had been scoured from the Hebrew letters and the tops of many slabs bore the carved emblems of the tribes whose members they commemorated: grapes for Israel, a pitcher for Levi, hands raised in a gesture of benediction for Aaron. The emblems on the other stones resembled the arms parlant which symbolize some family names in heraldry: a stag for Hirsch, a carp for
Karpeles, a cock for Hahn, a lion for Löw; and so on. A sarcophagus marked the resting place of the most famous bearer of the name of Löw. He was Rabbi Jehuda ben Bezabel, the famous scholar and miracle-worker who died in 1609. His tomb is the most important memento of Prague's involvement with the supernatural, for it was the Rabbi Löw who constructed the many-legended robot-figure of the Golem, which he could secretly endow with life by opening its mouth and inserting slips of paper on which magic formulae were inscribed.

* * *

My last afternoon was spent high above the river in the library of Heinz Ziegler's flat. I had had my eye on those book-covered walls for a couple of days and this was my chance. I was in pursuit of links between Bohemia and England, and for a specific reason: I had taken my disappointment over the topography of
The Winter's Tale
very hard, and it still rankled: Shakespeare
must
surely have known more about Bohemia than to give it a coast... So I stubbornly muttered as I whirled through the pages. He needn't have known much about Peter Payne, the Yorkshire Lollard from Houghton-on-the-Hill who became one of the great Hussite leaders. But he was full of knowledge about my second Anglo-Bohemian figure, Cardinal Beaufort. He was not only John of Gaunt's son and Bolingbroke's brother and Bishop of Winchester, but one of the chief characters in the first and second parts of
Henry VI
. Before completing his cathedral and being buried there, Beaufort took part in a crusade against the Hussites and slashed his way across Bohemia at the head of a thousand English archers. A third connection, John of Bohemia, must have been equally well known, for he was the blind king who fell in the charge against the Black Prince's ‘battle' at Crécy. (His putative crest and motto—the three silver feathers and
Ich dien
—were once thought—wrongly, it appears—to be the origin of the Prince of Wales's badge.) This remarkable man, famous for his Italian wars and his campaigns
against the Lithuanian heathen, was married to the last of the Prvemysl princesses and one of his children was the great Charles IV, the builder of bridges and universities and, almost incidentally, Holy Roman Emperor as well; and here the connecting thread with England suddenly thickens; for another child was Princess Anne of Bohemia, who became Queen of England by marrying the Black Prince's son, Richard of Bordeaux.
[6]
But my last discovery clinched all. Sir Philip Sidney's brief passage across the sixteenth century glowed like the track of a comet: he seemed unable to travel in a foreign country without being offered the crown or the hand of the sovereign's daughter, and his two sojourns in Bohemia—once after his Viennese winter with Wotton and a second time at the head of Elizabeth's embassy to congratulate Rudolf II on his accession—must have lit up the Bohemian Kingdom, for even the most parochial of his distant fellow countrymen, with a flare of reality.
[7]
Ten years younger than Sidney, Shakespeare was only twenty-three and quite unknown when his fellow poet was fatally wounded at Zutphen. But Sidney's sister was married to Lord Pembroke and Pembroke's Players were the most famous acting company in London: they must have been friends of the playwright. Their son William Herbert could not—as some critics used rashly to maintain—have been Mr. W.H., but when the posthumous First Folio was published, he and his brother were the dedicatees; their cordial links with the poet are carefully stressed
by the publishers. Shakespeare must have known everything about Sir Philip Sidney. It became plainer every minute that Bohemia can have held no secrets for him.