Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City (6 page)

All at once I was cold; an empty cathedral is a chilly place. The Professor was standing a little way off with J. and G., pointing upward to one of the stained-glass windows and explaining some fine detail of the depicted scene. Now, suddenly, and at no particular prompting, it was my turn to feel embarrassed. As I looked at him there, in his shabby raincoat, with his pale, thin hair, the high, Slavic cheekbones, those touchingly inoffensive spectacles, I asked myself what did I know of the difficulties of this man's life, of the stratagems he had been compelled to engage in over the years in order to preserve dignity and self-respect, or in order simply to feed and clothe himself and his wife and son. My friend
had made a Czech version of
Hamlet
before the war which was very popular and continued to be put on even after 1968. Although his name as the translator was suppressed, he did receive a small royalty from these productions. T would walk past the theatre in the first snow of the season,' he said, 'shivering in my thin jacket, and see
Hamlet
announced as a coming attraction, and I would think,
good, Vll have an overcoat by Christmas!'
That was how they lived, in those days, he said, 'hand to mouth' whatever you say, say nothing - and then covered his lips with his fingers and laughed, enjoying his own wordplay.
for all his regrets - 'It was too late for me,' he would cry, 'the Havel revolution, too late!' - is a great laugher. One day, when we were in his car and I had been pressing him for details of his life in 'those days', he began to chuckle, and waved a hand at me, saying, 'Stop, stop! You are like the ones who used to interrogate me then, the nameless ones!' But then his smile faded and he turned a grim face to the windscreen again. What do I know?

The day was dying when we got back to the hotel. The Professor left us, promising to pick us up later and take us to his home. In the lobby the two black-eyed beauties were at their post again under the potted palm, fingering their coffee cups and appraising the passing men, potential trade. Such beautiful creatures, I wondered aloud as we entered the lift, why did they take up such a profession? T suppose,' J. said, 'they do it for
kecks'
We were too tired to laugh.

It is a peculiarly affecting, regressive sensation to wake up from an involuntary sleep at evening in a strange hotel room, the daylight all gone from the window, and a lamp, an impassive sentinel, burning on the bedside table. The unfamiliar furniture crouches in the shadows, looking as if it had been engaged in a furtive passacaglia and had stopped in its paces an instant before one opened one's eyes. The noises from outside are different now, more indistinct, it would seem, as if muffled by the falling darkness. There is the hum of the great concourse of office workers going home; voices sound, and a radio buzzes somewhere, and car tyres make a watery hissing in the dry streets. One's day-clothes restrict, there is a hot dampness in the crevices of elbows, behind the knees. Sluggishly one's mind casts about, fumbling like a hand on the bed covers, trying to grasp something, a fragment of thought, a dream, a memory, and failing. What is it the moment is reminiscent of? The silence, the hum in the air, the woolly warmth . . . all this is out of the far, the immemorial, past. Is it childhood that is nudging at the blunted edges of consciousness, a jumbled recollection of the fevered bedtimes of one's lost childhood? Somewhere adults are awake, going about their unsleeping, mysterious tasks.

How much of this first visit to Prague, twenty years ago, am I remembering, and how much is being invented for me? Memory is a vast, animated, time-ravaged mural. There is a fore ground, hazier in places than the extremest background, while in the middle distance the real business is going on, but so busily it is hard to make out. We fix on a face, a familiar room, a little scene; startlingly, off at the side, from nowhere, it might be, a pair of eyes look out at us directly from the crowd, fixing us with their candid glance, cool, amused, and quizzical, like the eyes of that mild maenad in Poussin's
Dance to the Music of Time.
There are, too, the big, continent-shaped patches of bare stucco, the damaged places that no restorer will mend, now. Some things of that first visit - and of other, more recent ones - I recall as vividly as if they were before me now, but they are almost all inconsequential. The hopeful money-changer in his leather jacket. The two prostitutes in the lobby, their lipstick, their hairstyles that long ago have gone out of fashion, even the imitation palm tree under which they sat. I see the Professor standing in the cathedral, pointing up earnestly at the stained-glass window. I see myself waking, fully dressed, on that big, high bed, not knowing where I was. Why these fragments and not others, far more significant? Why these?

The Professor's wife was short, dark, handsome and intense. Her name was, let us say, Marta. The clothes she wore were too young for her, a tight black jumper and a black leather skirt, far too short, and black stockings. The outfit, at once severe - all that black - and slightly tartish, was I think a form of protest, a gesture of defiance against what she saw as the meanness and enforced conformity of her life. Of all the people I met in Prague that first time, no matter how oppressed or angry or despairing, she was the one who seemed to me truly a prisoner. There was a manic quality to her desperation, a sense of pent-up hysteria, as if she had passed the day, and so many other days, pacing the floor, from door to window, window to door, one hand plunged in her hair and the other clutching a shaking cigarette. She would have been frightening, in her violent discontent, had it not been for her humour. In the midst of a tirade against the State, against her family - she seemed to have a great many relatives, all of whom she professed to despise - she would suddenly stop and turn her face aside and give a snuffly cackle of laughter, and shake her head, and click her tongue, as if she had caught sight of a younger, happier, more cheerfully sceptical version of herself smiling at her and wagging a finger in rueful admonishment. I think that in her heart she simply could not credit her predicament, and lived in the angry conviction that a life so absurd and grotesque must be at any moment about to change. I liked her at once, the menacing black outfit, the scarlet fingernails, the frankly dyed hair, the flashing look that she gave me as, with a flamenco dancer's flourish of the shoulders, she handed me a bilious-green glass tumbler three-quarters full of vodka

We were in a small, neat, bright room with a lot of blond, fake-Scandinavian furniture. Everywhere, on every available flat surface, Marta's collection of Bohemian glass vied for space with the Professor's books. Through an archway there was a galley kitchen where saucepans were seething and steaming. J. and G. and I sat crowded hip to hip on a narrow sofa, our knees pressed against the edge of a low coffee table. The Professor sat opposite us in what was obviously 'his' chair, an old wooden rocker draped with a faded, tasselled rug; when he grew animated, or when Marta was provoking him with one of her tirades, he would propel himself back and forth with steadily increasing speed until, just when it seemed the madly rearing chair would tip him forward on to the floor, he would grasp the armrests and pitch himself stiffly back against the headrest and go suddenly still, queasily smiling, like Dr Strangelove in his wheelchair, pi nioned by a gravitational force all of his own. I made the first gaffe of the evening by asking how many rooms there were in the apartment. The Professor winced, and Marta in the galley turned from her steaming pots and gave a bitter snort of laughter; this room, it seemed, along with a tiny bathroom down the hall, was the extent of their living quarters. 'Our bed!' Marta said, pointing with a wooden spoon at the sofa where we were sitting. 'It unfolds,' the Professor corroborated helpfully, showing how with a graceful gesture of his hands. I am sure I was blushing.

While Marta was noisily busy at the stove, the Professor conducted us on an imaginary tour through the city's museums we had been unable to visit in reality. His modestly delivered disquisition on Czech art in the twentieth century was a revelation, to me, anyway. Most of the artists he mentioned were ones, I am ashamed to say, that I had never heard of. The extraordinary flowering of Modernism in Prague in the years just before and after the First World War was put into the shade by brasher capitals such as Paris and Vienna. The long-lived exile
Kupka, who settled permanently in Paris in 1895, was one of the great figures of European abstraction. He derived many of his ideas from music - he liked to describe himself as a 'colour symphonist' - and photography, which he valued for its abstract possibilities. While Kupka was settling in Paris, the younger Prague painters were founding the Osma ('The Eight') group of avant-gar-dists, which in 1911 evolved into the Association of Plastic Arts, the cradle of Czech cubism. The greatest of the cubist artists was the sculptor Otto Gutfreund, although at the end of his career he abandoned the cube in favour of a kind of naive realism. The most tangible mark that cubism left on the city was in architecture.
⁸
As early as 1911 the architect Josef Chochol was putting up some remarkable buildings below the hill of
After the establishment of the Republic of Czechoslovakia at the end of hostilities in 1918 Prague became a sort of collection point for European avant-garde movements, particularly Surrealism, to which Praguers took with unsurprising enthusiasm. The city already had its own quasi-Dadaist movement, called
of which Charlie Chaplin was granted honorary membership
in absentia.
eventually imploded, but left a strong legacy in the Surrealist works of such artists as Josef
and Jindf ich
. . . Names, names. Listening to the Professor, I experienced a sense of shame such as a professional explorer would feel on being gently told that an entire civilisation had flourished briefly in the valley next to where he was born, the existence of which had been entirely unknown to him.