Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City (3 page)

We went down to the lobby, where the Professor judged that it was safe for us to talk, albeit in guarded murmurs. The two beautiful, black-eyed girls had gone, though their empty coffee cups, the rims printed with smeary lipstick kisses, remained on the table under the plastic palm. There were some twenty pictures, the Professor said, that he wished us to take to his son - not paintings, as I had thought, but photographs, highly valuable original contact prints by a Czech master whose name was unknown to me. The Professor was anxious to assure us that if we had any doubts about taking them out of the country we should say so and he would find another means of getting them to New York. It was perfectly apparent, however, that we were his only hope. No no, we protested stoutly, we were determined to help him. Again that pained, melancholy smile, and he cleared his throat and carefully pressed the tip of a middle finger to the frail gold bridge of his spectacles. In that case, would we do him the honour of coming to dinner that evening at his apartment, where we could not only view the photographs but meet his wife? At that moment the double doors to the dining room behind us swung open from within, pressed by the backs of a pair of waiters, each bearing a tray piled high with used plates, who spun on their heels in co-ordinated pirouettes like the sleek male dancers in an old-fashioned movie musical, and pranced away in the direction of the kitchens, their trays held effortlessly aloft. In the moment that the doors were open we were afforded a glimpse, peculiarly comprehensive and detailed, of the room's main dining table. It was large and circular, and there were six or eight men seated around it. No doubt my jaundiced memory has exaggerated the look they had of so many pigs busy at a trough. 'Russians,' the Professor said, and sighed. They were raucously drunk, and contemptuously oblivious of the rest of the crowded dining room. I was to see their like again, dozens of them, a couple of years later in Budapest, where I foolishly allowed myself to be persuaded to attend a meeting of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe, a Cold War talking shop now surely defunct. The meeting was supposedly devoted to the encouragement of friendly exchanges between writers from East and West; in fact, most of the time during the sessions was taken up by the Americans and the Russians lobbing insults at each other over the heads of the rest of us irrelevant small-fry. The Soviet delegation were Writers' Union types to a man, grey-faced hacks in sagging suits, smelling of stale cigarette smoke and bad teeth, who during lunch breaks would commandeer the biggest table in the cafeteria and eat and shout and laugh and slap each other on the back in a show of calculatedly ugly triumphal-ism. Looking back now, of course, I wonder if they, and their counterparts in that Prague dining room, were merely trying to drown out with so much noise the increasingly insistent whisper telling them what they already knew in their heart of unthawable hearts, that it was all coming to an end, the jaunts to pretty satellite capitals, the dachas in the country, the sprees in Moscow's foreign-currency shops, all that passed for privilege in a totalitarian state, all soon to be grabbed by a new elite of mafia chiefs and criminal industrialists and members of this or that President's prodigiously extensive family.
¹
But for now the trough was still full, and the Moscow politicos were still snout-deep in it, although the white double doors, swinging in ever more shallow arcs, were shutting them out of our view by two, by two, by two, and the last we saw of them was the fat fellow at the head of the table, his back to us, who in turn was reduced to a large pair of trotters in broad black shoes splayed under a chair, two hitched-up trouser legs, two crumpled grey socks, and the bared lower reaches of two fat, bristled calves, until at last even that much was gone.

The Professor was offering to show us something of Prague. We were grateful, but worried that we might be keeping him from his work, on this weekday morning. He laughed very softly and said that he had all the time in the world. He explained that due to his involvement in Charter 77, the human rights manifesto drawn up at the end of 1976 by dissident intellectuals after the authorities had ordered the arrest of the rock and roll band, Plastic People, he was dismissed from the university, where he had been Professor of Fine Art. Since then, he and his wife had been subsisting on a meagre pension which the State repeatedly threatened to stop if he were to insist on maintaining links with degenerate and anti-revolutionary factions. He knew Vaclav Havel, of course, still in prison at the time, and often met his friends from the old days, before 1976 before, indeed, 1968 - in cafes and pubs, where their conversations were monitored by police informers. He was frequently summoned for interrogation at police headquarters, even still, although the authorities must have known that he was politically powerless. He explained to us, in tones of weary amusement flecked with bitterness, how the procedure worked. There would be a phone call early in the morning, often before dawn, when he was still in bed, and a friendly voice would ask if he would care to come to such-and-such a building, always a different one, and have a chat. Just a chat, the voice would say, nothing serious, nothing for him to worry about, he could take his time, there was no hurry, a car would be outside, waiting for him, when he was ready. He would get up straight away and pack a small bag - pyjamas, a clean shirt, change of underwear, socks, shaving things, the all-important toothbrush - while his wife made coffee and heated rolls. This was their unvarying ritual. It was strange, he said, but they spoke little on these occasions, and only of practical things, despite the fact that they both knew they might never see each other again. There were friends and acquaintances who had been summoned like this, 'for a chat', and who had not come back. Arrived at the specified anonymous building in one of the city's more unbeautiful quarters, the Professor told us, he would be placed in a small, windowless room, bare save for a steel table and straight chair, and instructed to fill out a sheaf of official forms, listing the minutiae of his life and the lives of his parents, wife, children, while unseen eyes, as he well knew, watched him through the two-way mirror set before him in the wall. Then the interrogator would stroll in, relaxed, smiling, and infinitely menacing.

These periods of detention, the Professor mildly observed, could be over in half an hour, or might go on for three days and nights, or even longer, with half a dozen interrogators working in shifts. He had never yet suffered physical violence. Like secret police forces everywhere, the Statni
or StB, had a very great deal of information - when the files were opened after the Velvet Revolution, the names were discovered of tens of thousands of informers on the StB payroll - but found the greatest difficulty in piecing it all together. Frequently, the Professor said, the line of questioning would meander so far from anything or anyone that he might be able to tell them about, even if he were willing to, that he would have no alternative but to fall silent. The interrogators were always nameless. Many years later, another Czech friend, Zdenek,
a writer and translator, and a leading Charter 77 activist, told me how one day after the fall of the communist regime he was walking in the city centre and spotted on the other side of the street one of his interrogators from the bad old days, and how, before he knew what he was doing, he found himself shouting across the traffic furiously at the fellow, 'What is your
name?
What is your
name?'
as if it were the one most important thing in the world, the one thing that he must know above all. And what did the former interrogator do? I asked, expecting to hear that he had pulled up his coat collar and slunk away in shame. 'Oh,'
said with a shrug, 'he smiled, and waved, and called out,
Hello there!
How are you?
and went on his way.'

By now we were in Zlata Ulicka - the famous
Golden Lane - hard by the walls of the fortress of Hradcany. I do not know how we got there. Indeed, much as I try I cannot remember what means of transport we used in any of our time during that first visit. We must have travelled by bus, or tram, or even, despite J.'s claustrophobia, the metro - still unnervingly spotless, by the way - but I cannot see us on any of those conveyances. We are simply here, and then there, and then somewhere else, with only blank spaces in between. How smoothly does Mnemosyne's magic chariot glide!

Golden Lane is very old, an enclosed, cobbled way blind at both ends. Its tiny houses, clustered against the wall of the Stag Moat, were built at the end of the sixteenth century by the Emperor Rudolf II for his twenty-four castle guards. Why, one wonders, only twenty-four? History's simplest statements have a way of provoking puzzles. In the seventeenth century the houses in Golden Lane were taken over mostly by the city's goldsmiths, hence the name. The curious little street has generated legends, for instance that Rudolf's numerous band of alchemists had their laboratories here - alchemists are a type of goldsmith, after all, which might explain the confusion. It is attractive to think of those magi huddled over their alembics in these cramped little rooms, but my guidebook insists, in a distinctly reproving tone, that despite popular lore, Rudolf's alchemical horde did not work in Zlata Ulicka at all, but were confined to nearby
Lane, that runs along the north side of St Vitus's Cathedral - yes, yes, we shall visit the cathedral presently. I was more impressed to hear, from the Professor, that Kafka lodged for a time in Zlata Ulicka, at number 22, as did his
latter-day fellow-countryman, the great Czech poet, Jaroslav Seifert.
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So also, mind you, did the great Czech fortune teller, Madame de Thebes, who lived at number 4 in the years before the Second World War. More magic . . .