Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City (9 page)

¹
Since I was a delegate, however unwilling, to the CSCE, I feel obliged, in the spirit of fairness, to report that the Americans, while smoother, more soft-spoken, and certainly better dressed than their Eastern Bloc rivals, had been brazenly hypocritical enough to include ostentatiously in their delegation, as a token - apt word - of the racial tolerance and care for indigenous peoples enjoyed in America, a pair of novelists of American Indian heritage. The home of the brave, indeed.

²
Kafka and his favourite sister, Ottla, rented number 22 Zlata Ulicka in November 1916. Kafka had a room but not, it seems, a bed; on his days off from the insurance office he would work there all day, then have his supper, and walk down the Old Castle Steps at midnight and across the Manes Bridge to his flat in the Schonborn Palace in the Old Town. He was happy in Golden Lane: 'it is something special,' he wrote to his girlfriend Felice Bauer, 'to have one's own house, to lock the door to the world, not of the room, not of the flat, but of the house itself; to step out of the door of one's home straight into the snow of the quiet lane.' Conditions were primitive, but K. could always improvise. He arrived one day when the fire was out, he told Ottla, 'But then I took all the newspapers and manuscripts and, after a while, a very lovely fire was burning.' All the manuscripts . . .

³
Kafka's attitude to his native city was made up of equal measures of love and hate. 'Prague doesn't let go,' he wrote to his friend Oskar Pollak in 1902. 'Either of us. This old crone has claws. We would have to set it on fire in two places, at
and the Castle; only then might it be possible for us to get away. Perhaps you'll give it some consideration before carnival.'

⁴
But I cannot refrain from reproducing the description of a dish I found on a menu in the Kepler Beer Restaurant in the Czech town of Kutna Hora not long ago: 'Filled chicken brest (sic) with banana in almond sauce with cream and griotce.' Serve me right for asking for an English-language menu. Griotce, by the way, is a cherry liqueur; I have never, so far as I know, tasted it.

⁵
Another question not to be asked: does it strike the Czech ear oddly that one of their great national composers should be called Smetana, which means cream? But then, think of the Russians:
ipasternak\
I am told, in English is 'parsnip'.

⁶
But which looks to me more like a cheerful if not over-bright dog, like the dog of St Wenceslas which the short-story writer Jan Neruda says is depicted in a painting behind the cathedral's main altar, although I could not find it. And anyway, according to the history books, Wenceslas wasn't murdered in St Vitus's, or even in Prague, but in a town outside the city, Stara Boleslav.

⁷
This is the phrase as translated in Ripellino/Marinelli's
Magic Prague;
Gustav Meyrink's
The Golem
is available in a somewhat capricious English translation by Mike Mitchell (London, 1995).

⁸
Tangible indeed is the cubist lamppost in Jungmannovo
a fascinating but frankly hideous object designed by Vratislav Hofman in 1913.

⁹
Milan Kundera, in his novel
Ignorance,
is awed by these repeating loops:

'The history of the Czechs in the twentieth century is graced with a remarkable mathematical beauty due to the triple repetition of the number twenty. In 1918, after several centuries, they achieved their independence and in 1938 they lost it.

'In 1948 the Communist revolution, imported from Moscow, inaugurated the country's second twenty-year span; that one ended in 1968 when, enraged by the country's insolent self-emancipation, the Russians invaded with half a million soldiers.

'The occupier took over in full force in the autumn of 1969 and then, to everyone's surprise, took off in autumn 1989 - quietly, politely, as did all the Communist regimes in Europe at that time: And that was the third twenty-year span.'

¹⁰
The lines by Viktor Dyk are from the poem 'Zerae
mluvV
(The Land Speaks), translated by Justin Quinn:

- li mne, nezahynu.

-li mne, zahynes!

(If you leave me, I will not die.

If you leave me, you will die!)

¹¹
In a conversation in Paris recently with Henri Cartier-Bresson and his wife, the photographer Martine Franck, I was told they found Sudek's work 'not human enough'.

2
THRESHOLD

My brief history of the Czech Lands, downloaded from the Internet, opens by observing that the first inhabitants of the region were prehistoric fish. The anonymous author of this disconcertingly skittish document - why do I think it was written by a woman? - goes on to note that when the prehistoric oceans dried up, the fish were followed by dinosaurs, mammoths, and, in due course, Celts. The Celts, that mysterious but ubiquitous people, which some specialists claim never existed, arrived in the fourth century BC; the Roman name for the area, Boiohaemum, our Bohemia, is said to have derived from the Boii, one of the Celtic tribes. Presently this race of redheads was displaced by Germanic tribes from the west, and by Romans from the south, although the latter did not progress much beyond the Danube. Some centuries of apparent inactivity followed, for historians are largely silent on the period until the sixth century of our era, when the Slavs arrived, and occupied the left bank of the Vltava, above what is now
Here, by the end of the ninth century, a citadel was established by the first of the
, one
; this was the original seat of the Pfemysl dynasty and not, so the sometimes censorious
Blue Guide
scoffingly asserts, the fortress at Vysehrad, 'as legend would have us believe'. In the meantime, Italian, French, German and Jewish merchants had been setting themselves up on the opposite bank, in the area that is now Nove
or New Town; it was connected to the Slavic quarter by a wooden bridge, and must have been a lively spot. In the later 960s the city was visited by Ibrahim ibn Ya'qub, a Spanish Jew dispatched from Cordoba by Caliph al-Hakam II as part of a diplomatic mission to the Emperor Otto I in Merseburg. The bookish but well-travelled Ibrahim, who would have known a thing or two about the cities of the earth, was impressed by Prague's moneyed cosmopolitanism.