Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City (2 page)

The Charles Bridge was deserted that morning, a thing the latter-day visitor will find hard to credit, since that statued stone span must now be one of the world's most densely peopled spaces, all day long, and throughout most of the night. rost glittered in the air over the river, just as it had that morning in sixteen-hundred-and-something when my protagonist, the astronomer Johannes Kepler, arrived here from Ulm on a barge, to present the first printed copies of the
Tabulae Rudolphinae
to the Emperor after whom he had so hopefully named his almanac. here, looming above me now as it had loomed above my disembarking astronomer, was the great, blank fortress of
and over there as Mala Strana, the Little Quarter, where Kepler would live when he took up his appointment as Rudolf's imperial mathematician. Yes, I had got it right, to a startling degree. Why was I not pleased? In part because, standing there surveying my handiwork, I was struck yet again by the essential fraudulence of fiction. Conjure a winter morning, a river and a castle and a traveller disembarking with a book under his arm, and for the space of a page or two an implied world comes to creaky life. It is all a sleight of the imagination, a vast synecdoche. And yet one goes on doing it, spinning yarns, trying to emulate blind Fate herself.

Much has been written on the beauty of Prague, but I am not sure that beauty is the right word to apply to this mysterious, jumbled, fantastical, absurd city on the Vltava, one of Europe's three capitals of magic - the other two being Turin and Lyon. There is loveliness here, of course, but a loveliness that is excitingly tainted. In his book
Magica Praha,
that ecstatic paean of
amor urbi,
Angelo Maria Ripellino figures the city as a temptress, a wanton, a she-devil. 'The antiquary coquetry with which she pretends to be nothing more than a still life, a silent succession of glories long since past, a dead landscape in a glass ball, only increases her sorcery. She slyly works her way into the soul with spells and enigmas to which she alone holds the key.' Ripellino's Prague is not that miraculously preserved museum piece of noble prospects and Biedermeier frontages which in the Seventies and Eighties of the last century earned some desperately needed hard currency as a backdrop for Hollywood movies set in the never-never time of Mozart and Salieri; his is the city of 'surreptitious passages and infernal alleys . . . still smelling of the Middle Ages,' of cafes and
- 'in our time,' Kafka writes, 'the catacombs of the Jews' - low dives such as The Poison Inn, The Old Lady, The Three Little Stars, although he does sometimes escape the 'sinister narrowness of those lanes, the stranglehold of those baleful alleys' by fleeing to 'the green islands, the efflorescent districts, the parks, belvederes and gardens that surround Prague on all sides.' This is the old Prague, wistful, secretive, tormented, which survived the communist takeover of 1948, and even the Russian invasion twenty years later, but which, irony of ironies, finally succumbed to the blow delivered to it by a velvet fist in a velvet glove in the revolution of 1989. Now the dollar is everywhere, the young have all the blue jeans they could desire, and there is a McDonald's just off the Charles Bridge. Well, why not. Praguers have the same right to vulgar consumerism as the rest of us. Freedom is freedom to eat cheap hamburgers as much as it is to publish subversive poetry. Yet one cannot help but wonder what Ripellino, who lectured in Czech literature at the University of Rome and died in 1978, and who tells us how in the dark years he would often go to Germany and gaze longingly eastward, a heartsick lover pining for
die feme Geliebte,
toward the 'serrated mountain ranges of Bohemia', would have made of the tourist hive that his beloved temptress has turned into. Yet he was a great democrat, loving Prague for her promiscuity as well as for her secretiveness, delightedly citing the grotesque image in Vilem Mrstik's 1893 novel,
Santa Lucia,
of the city reminding the book's protagonist with 'shrill cries that trains were approaching her body and ever new crowds, ever new victims, were disappearing into her infinite womb.'

Ripellino's vast effort of recuperation is an attempt not so much to express the city as to ingest it, to make that metamorphosis of world into self that Rilke tells us is our task on earth. It is analogous to the effort every serious visitor must make. One will not know a city merely by promenading before its sites and sights,
Blue Guide
in hand. Yet how can one know an entity as amorphously elusive as Prague, or any other capital, for that matter? What
is
Prague? Does its essence inhere in the pretty Old Town Square, with its cafes and its famous clock, or, on the far contrary, in the smouldering concrete suburbs, where the majority of Praguers live their decidedly unbohemian lives? Time lays down its layers like strata of rock, the porous limestone of the present over the granite of the communists over the ashes-and-diamonds of the Habsburgs over the basalt of the
. . . Where, in what era, may one station oneself to find the best, the truest, view? When I was young I thought that to know a place authentically, to take it to one's heart, one must fall in love there. How many cities have seemed to spread themselves out before me in the very contours of the beloved's limbs. Solipsism. There are as many Pragues as there are eyes to look upon it - more: an infinity of Pragues. Confused and suddenly glum I make my way back toward the hotel. The frost has turned my face to glass.

While we wait, the three of us, in the women's bedroom for the Professor to arrive, we are aware of a faint but definite sense of nervousness, or perhaps it is only an intensity of anticipation. We have come to Prague with a mission. G. has an acquaintance, a young Czech
emigre
recently arrived in New York, I shall call him
.
hopes to study architecture at Columbia, but as yet he has not been able to find a job to support himself while going through college. His father believes he has found a way to help him, by sending him some art works which he will be able to sell for a lot of money. The difficulty is in getting these valuables out of Czechoslovakia. We have volunteered to do it - to smuggle them out. When J. and G. and I were discussing this plan over the international phone lines between Dublin and California it had seemed a bold adventure, but here in the winter light behind the Iron Curtain the inevitable misgivings had begun to assail us. In those days travellers' tales were rife of Western tourists being seized for the most trifling contraband offences and detained for months, for years, even, beyond the help of consular entreaty or ministerial bargaining. While I had often entertained the idle fancy that a jail cell might be the ideal place in which to write, I did not relish the prospect of mouldering for an indefinite period in an Eastern Bloc prison. There rose before me again the image of that Gellert sausage described by J. and G., or a distant relative of it, anyway, all mottled and shrunken with age, and floating not in a nickel dish but plonked down on a rusty tin plate beside a hunk of grey bread . . . Too late to back out now, however, for here was the Professor's hushed tapping at the door.

He was a tall, spare man with pale, short hair brushed neatly across a narrow forehead, a Nordic type unexpected this far to the south and east. Impossible to tell his age; at first sight he might have been anywhere between thirty and sixty. He was handsome, with that unblemished surface and Scandinavian features, yet curiously self-effacing, somehow. Even as he stood before me I found it hard to get him properly into focus, as if a flaw had suddenly developed in the part of my consciousness that has the task of imprinting images upon the memory. I think it was that he had spent so many years trying not to be noticed - by the authorities, by the police, by spies and informers - that a layer of his surface reality had worn away. He had something of the blurred aspect of an actor who has just scrubbed off his make-up. He shook hands with each of us in turn in that grave, elaborate, central European way that makes it seem one is being not greeted for the first time but already being bade farewell. Such a melancholy smile. His English was precise, with only the faintest accent. He welcomed us to Prague in a mild but calmly seigneurial tone, as if it were not Prague we had arrived in but his own private domain. We were to catch this proprietorial note repeatedly here, especially in intellectual circles; so many things that were precious had been taken from the lives of these artists, critics, scholars that they clung to the idea of their city, its history, its shabby magnificence, its unyielding mysteriousness, with the passion of exiles. I had brought a litre of duty-free Irish whiskey as a gift. 'Ah, Jameson!' the Professor said, in the tone of one acknowledging a precious gift from what had seemed a mythic place, silk from Cathay, spices from Samarkand. He took the bottle from my hands delicately, almost tactfully, with a finely judged degree of gratitude. Courtly: that was the word. It struck me I had never met anyone to whom the term could be so aptly applied.

He had advanced no more than a pace or two into the room, and when I moved to shut the door I seemed to detect behind the rimless spectacles that he wore a flicker of unease, of alarm, even. Still holding the whiskey bottle, he stood with his elbows pressed into his sides, his grey raincoat buttoned to the throat. When G. began to speak of the mission that had brought the three of us to Prague he silenced her at once by putting a finger to his lips and pointing to the dusty light fixture in the middle of the ceiling. It was another Prague gesture, always accompanied by a hapless apologetic smile, with which we were to become depressedly familiar. There were, there really were, hidden microphones everywhere.