Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City (4 page)

Speaking of Kafka - as how, in Prague, would one not? - we wondered if it might be possible to visit his birthplace. Well, yes, the Professor said, frowning, we could go and look at the house, but the building, U
(At the Tower), originally owned by the Benedictine order, was burned down in 1887, some years after the Kafka family had moved to a new apartment on Wenceslas Square, and all that remains of the earlier building is the stone portal of the front doorway. A small carved plaque, by the sculptor Karel Hla-dik, is attached high up on the wall beside the door; the memorial was erected in 1965, after the famous conference on Kafka at Liblice Castle in 1963 had made Prague's greatest artist acceptable to the authorities as a critic of decadence and capitalist alienation. Before that time, the Professor explained, Kafka officially was a non-person in the Czechoslovak state. The communists did not stop at suppressing his works, but held that they and their author had never existed. One almost has to admire the simplicity of it, the horrible, blank thoroughness of this erasure of a life and its darkly luminous products.
³

We walked on, up the steeply ascending street, the patches of packed snow squeaking under our boots. The sounds of the city came to us on this high hill as a kind of troubled murmur. We had fallen silent. The thought of Kafka having been for so long a non-existent presence in his native city seemed so . . . well, so Kafkaesque, that we felt abashed. But not as abashed as the Professor looked. There was in those days among the decent folk of Prague a particular form of embarrassment in regard to the city's, and the country's, plight, held bound and mute under Soviet domination and what Ripellino in a finely contemptuous phrase calls 'the fell tyranny of its Calibans'. It is an affliction that is common, one suspects, to all subjugated people, this tongue-tied, apologetic shame before the eyes of strangers. In Ireland during the catastrophic famines of the 1840s, when the country's condition was desperate - successive rebellions against English rule had failed, the economy was in collapse, the language was as good as dead whole families of starving countrypeople would turn in upon themselves, shutting and barring the doors of their cabins and blocking out the windows against the world's gaze, and wait for death. It was as if they could not believe that such misfortune were not somehow, at some level, their own fault. I never had the nerve, the effrontery, that first time or on subsequent visits to the city, to ask the Praguers of my acquaintance, or even those who over the years became my friends, whether the Czech people felt deep down that they had somehow failed themselves in 1968, and had not done enough to halt the Soviet tanks in their tracks. But what, really, could they have done? What could they have been expected to do, those petalled children of the Age of Aquarius?
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea I Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
Shakespeare beautifully, tragi- cally, asks. At the time we all recalled the Hungarian uprising of no more than a dozen years previously, the bodies in the streets, the rubble, the ruined city. Who could have wished a like fate for Prague?

In what was no doubt an attempt to dissipate the gloom that had settled on us, and to demonstrate that the city had its living writers, whose flesh-and-blood reality the authorities could not deny, the Professor took us to lunch at a literary pub. At least, that is how he described it. Hidden in a narrow, twisting street somewhere between the Old Town Square and the river, it was a long, low, brownish place with benches and three-legged stools and a kippered ceiling - was it the fabled
U Zlateho Tygra,
The Golden Tiger- a Bohemian version, I immediately thought, of Mulligan's pub in Poolbeg Street in Dublin.
U Zlateho Tygra,
if such it was, that day was riotously busy. Shirt-sleeved barmen were slinging litre-sized steins of Pilsner, while simultaneously dealing out piled mounds of sausage and potatoes to clamouring customers on all sides. Watching these professionally dour masters ply their trade was like witnessing a troupe of acrobatic conjurors at work with sticks and spinning plates. The air was dense with steam and cigarette smoke, and in the stippled, misted mirrors the waiters' ghostly doubles darted. We asked the Professor to point out the best, or at least the best-known, writers; we were hoping for a Hrabal or a Skrovecky. The Professor looked about carefully, then coughed, and once again touched a fingertip to the bridge of his spectacles, that gesture which I knew by now was the prelude to an apology. The literati, it seemed, were not much in evidence today. That fellow by the window, the one in the scarf, styled himself a novelist, but he had never published anything, and no one had yet been permitted to read his work. The woman in the corner, a handsome blonde
d'un certain age,
was rumoured to have had an affair with Seifert. That haughty-looking chap with the cockerel's crest of silver hair had been engaged for twenty years on a Czech translation of
Finnegans Wake,
and was known to be a police informer. And there, glaring at him across the room, was sad old Svoboda, the critic and feuilletonist, whose name had not been allowed to appear in print since '68. I told the Professor there was no need for him to apologise; in Dublin in the early Sixties, when giants still walked the earth, I would often venture into McDaid's or the Palace Bar or Mulligan's, hoping for a glimpse of Brendan Behan or Patrick Kavanagh, but there never seemed to be anyone there except other haunted-eyed neophytes such as I was, and the odd penniless poetaster hoping to cadge a drink. The Professor wanly smiled. I could see he did not believe me, thought I was merely being kind. Life, as Kundera's title has it, is elsewhere.

Lunch. Ah. Perhaps this is the place to say a word about Czech cuisine; a word, and then on to more appetising topics. My Czech friends, whom I value dearly and would not wish to offend, should skip smartly the next two paragraphs - you have been warned. I have eaten badly in many parts of the world. There is a certain plate of macaroni studded with gobbets of cow's kidney that was served to me by a resentful cook - her name was Miss Grub; honestly, it was - at a friend's house in London many years ago which I shall never forget. At a hostelry in a pleasant little town not far from Budapest I have been confronted by a steaming platter of sliced goose, mashed potato, and sauerkraut, three shades of glistening grey. And what about that inoffensive-looking green salad which I ate without a second thought in a little lunch place off the tourist trail one glorious autumn afternoon in Oaxaca, which infiltrated into my digestive system a bacillus, busy as a Mexican jumping bean, which was to cling to the inner lining of my intestines for three long, queasy and intermittently galvanised months? I do not say that my culinary adventures in Prague were as awful as these. Indeed, I have had some fine meals there over the years. In general, however, it must be said, and I must say it, that the Czech cuisine is, well, no better than that of Bavaria, which statement is, as anyone who knows Bavaria will confirm, a ringing denunciation. I recall an evening at a
Bierkeller
in Regensburg where . . . but no, that is another story, and another town.
⁴

Both the Czechs and the Bavarians, close neighbours that they are, have in common an inexplicable but almost universal enthusiasm for . . . dumplings. These delicacies can be anything from the size of a stout marble - what in my childhood we called a knuckler - to that of a worn-out, soggy tennis ball, with which they share something of their texture, and possibly of their taste. The Czech species comes in a broad variety of strains, from the very common
hous-kove knedliky,
or bread dumplings, through the
bramborove knedliky,
potato dumplings, often temptingly served alongside a smoking midden of white sauerkraut, to the relatively rare - rare in my experience, anyway -
ovocne knedliky,
or fruit dumplings. Perhaps the dumpling's most striking characteristic is its extreme viscosity. It sits there on the plate, pale, tumorous and hot, daring you to take your knife to it, and, when you do, clinging to the steel with a kind of gummy amorousness, the wound making a sucking, smacking sound and closing on itself as soon as the blade has passed through. Dumplings can be served as an accompaniment to anything, whether the lowly
parky,
or hot dogs, or the mighty slab of
boiled fillet of beef. They can have their own accompaniments, too, for instance the creamy, sour-sweet sauce called
⁵
That day at The Golden Tiger, if that is where it was, we stuck to simple fare: plates of only slightly worrying
klobasy
- grilled sausages - and dark bread, heavy but good, washed down with bubbling beakers of glorious Czech beer, which tastes of hayfields baking in summer heat. But there would be other mealtimes, oh, there would, from which memory averts its gaze . . .

After lunch we thought we might visit a gallery or two; G. worked at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and was eager to see the local treasures. Again a faint cough from the Professor, again the fingertip to the spectacles. The main museums - including, if I remember rightly, the National Gallery - were shut, he told us, and had been since sometime back in the Seventies. No reason had been given for their closure, and enquiries to the 'faceless authorities' - in Prague, the cliche took on a fresh, or rancid, rather, new life - elicited either a contemptuous silence, or pompously worded, but carefully vague, assurances that elaborate programmes of repair and refurbishment were about to get under way. As yet, however, there had been no sign of these promised initiatives, and the Professor and his fellow scholars were becomingly increasingly alarmed as to the condition of the sequestered art works, which had not been tended to for nearly a decade.

In place of a museum, the Professor offered to show us St Vitus's Cathedral. We climbed to the hill of
once more, labouring up the shallow granite steps, 'each one the width of four bodies laid head to foot,' the novelist Gustav Meyrink notes in his accustomed cheery fashion. The sun was gone now, and a sky bearing a bellyful of snow loured over the afternoon. The great church reared above us, 'ornate and mad', in Philip Larkin's fine description of churches in general, like a vast, spired ship run aground and sunk here in the midst of the castle complex, clamoured about on all sides by the reefs of Baroque palaces, coral-coloured. The cathedral is yet another of the gifts lavished on Prague by the munificent Charles IV. Work began on it in 1344, and was not completed until 1929, if such a building can ever be said to be finished. The first architect was Matthew of Arras. Here is the Golden Portal, held aloft on the delicate webbing of Peter
three Gothic arches. When one looks up, the entire building seems to be speeding massively through the brumous air, going nowhere. See the gargoyles, 'these caricatures, these apings-at', as Rilke, another of Prague's unwilling sons, has it; I always feel a pang of pity for gargoyles. In 'View from the Charles Bridge', Seifert writes: