Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City (29 page)

Bratislava is not Prague. The Old Town, in the centre, is handsome and charming, but all around, the city, at least in the time that I was there, resembled a sprawling construction site. After lunch I was driven into the countryside, to a nineteenth-century mock-Gothic castle, the entrance to which was guarded by a pair of mighty steel gates that opened before me in slow, menacing silence. In communist times the place had been a retreat for authors favoured by the State, that is, apparatchiks and hacks. My third-floor bedroom was enormous, dotted here and there with looming items of black-lacquered furniture. A tall window looked down with what seemed a melancholy gaze upon a scene of heat-hazed woodland and a pond with ducks. I spent a restless night, lying stiff as a board in my shiny black bed. In the morning my friend Igor, one of the organisers of the conference, cheerfully enquired if I had slept peacefully, and when I said no he chuckled and said he was not surprised: previous guests in the Black Room had included Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and a crazed writer, one of the last of the privileged pre-eighty-niners, who had leapt from the window to a messy death beside the duck pond. Shakily I descended to the conference room and delivered my paper on Synge and the Aran Islands; when I was finished, a Canadian academic with a mien of steely ambition attacked me for what he claimed to believe was my rabid Irish nationalist views. Not a pleasant experience, at ten in the morning after a night spent in a bed once occupied by Leonid Brezhnev.

That evening, back in Bratislava, I was invited to a party, where I spent an agreeable half hour chatting to a writer and translator, I shall call him Mr H., who had just published his translation of a Modernist Irish classic into Czech, a task that had taken twenty years of loving labour. He complained that before 'the changes', that is, before 1989, when the State controlled publishing, only the finest, most edifying works of Western literature were translated, but nowadays every kind of American trash was being allowed into the country. Afterwards I mentioned this conversation to Igor, who chuckled again - I was learning to interpret Igor's many modulations of chuckle - and said that certainly Mr H. would know all about State publishing policies under the communists, since he had been the official Censor.

When the conference ended
came down again from Prague to collect me. I told him how another man I had met at that party - oiled black hair
en brosse,
thick spectacles, a peculiar, silvery suit that seemed made of tinfoil, and a manner that inevitably made me think of Big Phil, the Man Who Knows the Inside Story - had informed me, with the air of one who is merely repeating a matter of common knowledge, that in the final months before the 1989 revolution, Havel in prison had been conniving with the Czech intelligence service to take over the Presidency when Husak's regime fell, as everyone had known it very soon would.
however, was adamant: such a thing was not possible. I did not persist, but privately I thought that even if it had been true, I would not have thought any less of the President. Politics is politics, even if you are a playwright of the Theatre of the Absurd. By now we were on the outskirts of Prague. As we drove down through a smoky industrial suburb,
pointed out the spot at a bend in a road where the Gestapo chief Reinhard Heydrich had been assassinated by Czech partisans in 1942; in reprisal for his killing the Nazis razed the coal-mining village of Lidice, twenty kilometres northwest of Prague, and shot 184 men, the entire male population of the village, the oldest a man of eighty-four, the youngest a boy of fourteen. In the following days German troops buried the charred remains of the village under soil, and the name Lidice was expunged from the map. Today, the memorial erected on the site in 1947 is one of the most frequently visited war memorials in the Czech Republic.

The Writers' Festival is closing, and I am invited to a British Council party. It is held in a handsome house - not the Embassy, but someone's home - on one of those leafy streets off behind the Castle, that part of Prague where the tourists do not go, and which many Praguers consider to be the true heart of their city. I had tried to avoid the party - the novels of Malcolm Bradbury have jaundiced me for ever against such occasion - but my friend Claudio Magris, writer, Germanist and Triestino, who also has been taking part in the Festival, says I must be there, 'to meet
'. I do not know who this
is, and am not eager to be introduced to yet another new person at the end of a week of mostly baffling encounters with voluble strangers. However, my host and hostess - the SmithJones, let us call them - turn out to be remarkably unlike the usual run of British Councillors, being funny, irreverent, and discerning in their choice of wines.
⁵⁸
The party is small, a couple of dozen guests sitting about on chairs and sofas in what appears to be the Smith-Jones's living room - I find a child's sock under my chair - so that it is possible to engage in something like real conversation. I am recounting my Slovakian adventure, Black Room and all, to an attractive young woman whose name I did not manage to catch but who laughs rather prettily at my shameless exaggerations, showing an interesting fleck of lipstick on her upper incisors, when Claudio grasps me by the arm and drags me away. 'Come come come, you must meet him, come!'

Professor Doctor Eduard Goldstiicker is a handsome man with a large, squarish face, eyes of a clear, marine blue, and hands that are also squarish and large; he is in his early eighties, and looks twenty years younger. He sits on a sofa in the middle of the room, those big hands resting on his knees, looking before him with such a tranquil gaze, his head tilted slightly upward, that for a moment I wonder if he might be blind. Quite the contrary is the case, as I discover: I think I have never met anyone more sharp-eyed. There is another quality he possesses that is harder to describe. He somehow contrives to fill with extraordinary exactitude the space that he inhabits; compared to him, I realise, most people seem to be rattling around in the ill-fitting envelope of themselves, like astronauts in their space suits. I am introduced, and Goldstiicker invites me to sit beside him; he is, he says, a great admirer of Irish literature. He points to a painting on the wall opposite where we sit - he has been studying this picture, which explains the upward tilt of his gaze as I approached - an unremarkable landscape, with polders, and a rainbow arched over a misty, dull green distance. He had been wondering, he said, if it might be an English scene, for it reminded him of the Sussex Downs. I stared, I suppose, and he produced what I can only describe as a basilisk smile: eyes electric with amusement, nostrils flared, the lips compressed and turned not upward but down. He had taught at Sussex University throughout most of the 1970s, having fled Czechoslovakia the day before the Russian invasion in August, 1968, and later settled in Britain. 'Hence,' he said with arch self-mockery, 'my impeccable English.'

Over the following hour or so, Goldstiicker told me his story, and since then I have filled in some of the details from other sources. It strikes me as being, in certain significant and appalling ways, the story of Prague itself in the second half of the twentieth century. He was born in the village of Podbiel, in Slovakia, in 1913, the son of a Jewish timber merchant. In 1931 he moved to Prague, to study German and French literature. At university he became the leader of a communist student group, and in 1933 joined the Czech Communist Party. He taught in a secondary school until 1939, when he and his wife escaped the German occupation and fled to England via Poland and Sweden; the members of his family who remained behind were to die in Auschwitz. In London Goldstiicker edited the journal
Mlade Ceskoslo-vensko (Young Czechoslovakia).
Later, in 1943, he worked in the Foreign Ministry of the Czechoslovak government in exile in London, and in 1944 became cultural attache at the Czech embassy in Paris. After the war he returned to Prague and became a civil servant at the Foreign Ministry, returning to London as attache at the embassy there from 1947 to 1949. Following the communist takeover in 1948 his career as a diplomat flourished briefly. He was appointed Ambassador to Israel in 1950, and to Sweden in 1951. It was in 1951, however, that Stalin ordered a purge of Jews from the Communist Party. Along with a number of others,
was rounded up in December 1951 and taken to the headquarters of the secret police, where he was kept in almost total isolation and subjected to constant interrogation.