Letters From Prague (32 page)

‘I know what I want for my birthday. A watch.'

Of course. Just the right age. They went off to look for one. It was too hot to think about taking the U-Bahn: they walked through to Prenzlauer Allee, and down towards Alexanderplatz. Prenzlauer Allee was tree-lined and full of shops, less daunting than the Ku'damm. They found a jeweller's, they found a watch. It was small, with a gold face and a white strap, and it suited Marsha perfectly. She wore it out of the shop and couldn't stop looking at it.

‘Now it's an hour and a quarter till I was born.'

‘So it is.'

They came into Alexanderplatz, with its crowds and its stalls in the shadow of the television tower.

‘I know what I'd like to do,' said Marsha.

‘What?'

‘Go up that thing. Go to the top.'

Harriet gazed upwards. Two hundred metres of concrete column rose towards the summer sky. A globe turned slowly, transmitters clung to it, an aerial pierced the blue. ‘Are you sure?'

‘Yes. Don't you think it would be fun?'

They took the lift up, up. There were other tourists: Marsha told two Australians she was ten, and showed them her watch. They said that was brilliant, they thought it was neat. At the top was a viewing platform. They all got out. There was quite a wind up here.

Harriet and Marsha stood side by side and looked far out over the city. They looked towards the East, its tower blocks and tenements stretching far into the distance. Somewehere over there was Marzahn, and Dieter's factory. Tomorrow they would be travelling much further east, to a new city. They went round the viewing platform and looked west, along the straight, beautiful boulevard of the Unter den Linden, with the ordered, pleasing lines of old Berlin on either side.

Marsha looked at her watch. ‘And now I was born,' she said.

‘So you were.' Harriet kissed her. ‘Happy birthday. You do know I love you, don't you?'

‘Yes.' Marsha leaned against her, the wind blew her hair across her face. She said: ‘I just wish – you know.'

‘About Daddy?'

‘Yes.'

‘I'm sorry,' said Harriet. ‘It's just how it is.'

‘I know.'

Summer clouds drifted over the sun.

‘Anyway,' said Marsha. ‘Tomorrow we're going to Prague.'

‘Yes. Are you excited?'

‘Yes. How long do you think it'll take us to find Karel?'

‘I don't know. We might not find him.'

‘I bet we do.'

‘Dear Marsha.'

‘And if we do –'

‘Then we'll see,' said Harriet.

‘That's what grown-ups always say.'

The wind blew, the clouds moved on, the sun shone over Berlin. Harriet could just see the Brandenburg Gate, where Rosa Luxemburg had made speeches, where there had been a wall. She thought: as the West to the East, all those Cold War years, so Karel to me, perhaps, all this time. Beyond the wall there is something to dream of, offering hope.

A bell was ringing, a single mellow note sounding across the terracotta rooftops of the Little Quarter, bathed in evening sunlight. Marsha was leaning out of their gabled window. Harriet put her box of letters on top of the edge of the chest of drawers. Sun caught the edge of the wood.

‘Come and look,' said Marsha, at the window.

Harriet joined her. The buildings were crammed together; tiny dark courtyards huddled beneath; electricity cables were strung from housetop to housetop. They looked down on pitched pantiled roofs, the fantails of gables, on skylights, tall chimneys, clay gutters, peeling stucco. The sun was low, the bell rang steadily, a haze hung over the city.

‘It's lovely,' said Marsha.

‘Isn't it? Aren't we lucky to have a room here?'

Their train from Berlin had pulled in after five hours to the station in Holesovice, an industrial suburb in the questioning curve of the river Vltava; they had taken a taxi, a first-day luxury, following the road winding along the embankment, gazing out over the broad river, the bridges, the domes and spires of the Old Town churches across the water. The hotels there were for rich Americans; those on the city's perimeter were modern and ugly, a ring of cheap skyscrapers beneath the forested hills beyond. Their taxi had brought them to the pension room Harriet had booked through Cedok in London last spring: impossible, had she not done so, to have found space here, in the shadow of the castle, in a quarter where everyone wanted to stay. She gave a passing thought to their arrival in Berlin, and the disappointment of the Hotel Kloster, and patted herself on the back: this time she'd got it right.

‘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.