Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City (5 page)

There are days when the Castle
and its Cathedral
are gloomily magnificent,
when it seems
they were built of dismal rock
brought back from the Moon.

We enter into a huge, reverberant silence, shadowed, ancient air. The rose window above us dimly glows, feeding upon the wan winter light; the stained glass, I silently observe, is distinctly gaudy. In
'Zone’,
the poet ApoUinaire,
'montant au Hradchin’,
experienced here a moment of Modernist dread:

Epouvante tu te vois dessine dans les agates
      de Saint-Vit
Tu etais triste a mourir le jou ou tu t'y vis
Tu ressembles au Lazare affole par le jour

Which Samuel Beckett renders as:

Appalled you see your image in the agates of
      Saint Vitus
That day you were fit to die with sadness
You look like Lazarus frantic in the daylight

My footsteps ring on the floor of the nave and fetch back reproachful echoes. I enter St Wence-slas's Chapel, into which one could wander freely then but which nowadays is barred to the public by a velvet rope, international tourism's ubiquitous, polite but unvaultable hurdle. Buried in this chapel is Wenceslas I, that hymned good king, fourth
ruler to hold the throne, supposedly assassinated on this holy ground at the behest of his bad brother Boleslav in or about 935. The interior walls, so my guidebook tells me, are studded on their lower levels with 'c.1372' precious stones; I am impressed by that laconic V. On the north door of the Wenceslas Chapel there is a bronze ring, gripped firmly in the mouth of what I am told is a lion,
⁶
to which the dying king is said to have clung as the assassins struck.

I am always surprised to think that churches should be considered places of comfort and sanctuary. On the contrary, they seem to me, especially the big, Catholic ones, soulless memorials of anguished atonement and blood rites, gaunt, unwarmed and unwelcoming, heavy with Wallace Stevens's 'holy hush of ancient sacrifice'. Years ago, in Salisbury Cathedral, eavesdropping one twilit eve on the cathedral choir at rehearsal, I was appalled to notice that beside me my seven-year-old son was weeping silently in terror. As I tried to comfort him I looked about - 1 , who was compelled by a devout mother to spend extended stretches of my childhood in places such as this and saw it all suddenly from the perspective of a little boy born to godless parents: the grimacing statues, the cross-eyed martyrs in stained glass, the shot-torn regimental banners, the maniacally carved pulpit, all quite mad - Larkin was right and hideously menacing. What frightened my son most, he later confessed, were the
sotto voce
comments and encouragements that the choir master breathed into his microphone in the pauses between verses; they must have sounded like the celestial chidings of weary, terrible old Yahweh himself.

Yet it occurs to me that a few centuries ago my son in that place would not have been frightened at all, only awed, and dazzled, too. We easily forget that ours is a world permanently lit, that we live in a garish, practically nightless present in which our senses are assailed from all sides, by small flickering screens and huge advertisement hoardings, by public music, by a myriad perfumes, by the textures under our hands of rich stuffs and polished hides. The world out of which this cathedral grew was another place entirely. In the opening pages of
The Autumn of the Middle Ages,
Johan Huizinga writes:

When the world was half a thousand years younger all events had much sharper outlines than now. The distance between sadness and joy, between good and bad fortune, seemed to be much greater than for us; every experience had that degree of directness and absoluteness that joy and sadness still have in the mind of a child . . . Just as the contrast between summer and winter was stronger then than in our present lives, so was the difference between the light and dark, quiet and noise. The modern city hardly knows pure darkness or true silence any more, nor does it know the effect of a single small light or that of a lonely distant shout.

What an aspirant marvel St Vitus's must have been long ago, with its Golden Portal glowing, its great doors flung open and its rose window angling down God's celestial light. The colour, the sonorities, the incense, the thousand candles burning. And the bells. Huizinga again: 'The bells acted in daily life like concerned good spirits who, with their familiar voices, proclaimed sadness or joy, calm or unrest, assembly or exhortation.'

'Churches,' Ripellino remarks, smacking his lips almost audibly, 'exert a fatal attraction on Prague fiction's morbid characters.' A key scene in Meyrink's ghastly and sometimes risible novel
The Golem
takes place in St Vitus's Cathedral, amid the 'enervating smell of tapers and incense'.
⁷
Even the commonsensical Jan Neruda, chronicler of the doings of the simple folk of Mala Strana, feels drawn to that grey stone eminence on the hill, where within its fastness he in his turn detects that not so enervating but no less 'distinctive combination of incense and mould found in every house of worship'. In Neruda's story 'The St Wenceslas Mass', the narrator recalls how when he was an altar boy, he and his friends knew for a fact that St Wenceslas returned every night at the stroke of midnight - when else? - to celebrate Mass at the cathedral's high altar. One night he hid himself in the locked cathedral, determined to witness the saint return to enact the ghostly ceremony. As the last faint glimmer of evening fades and night comes on, and 'a silvery, gossamerlike radiance floated over the nave,' the boy is seized with a numinous terror: T felt the entire burden of the hour and of the cold, and suddenly I was overcome by a vague - yet for its vagueness all the more shattering - terror. I did not know what I feared, yet fear I did, and my weak, childlike mind was powerless to resist.'

Prague writers love to frighten themselves, especially the decadents of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They revel in the uncanny. Their fiction, according to Ripellino, 'is characterised by an oppressive recurrence of the Spanish-derived image of the crucifix [Habsburg emperors of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, including Rudolf, were schooled by Spanish Jesuits], a gloomy tangle of wounds and rent limbs, a fountain of gushing blood, a spiritualist vision and source of terror'. He gives a skin-crawlingly vivid example from the unlikely-sounding
Roman Manfreda Macmillena (The Novel of Manfred Macmillen,
1907) by
Kar-asek ze Lvovic:

No sooner did my eyes fix on the cross hanging on the wall than I felt behind me the presence of a living being. I was seized by terror, for now even the cross at which I had been gazing assumed a ghostly appearance: it was no longer hanging on the wall but suspended in the darkness.

In another tale, Gotickd duse (A Gothic Soul,
1905), the 'large Christ covered with bleeding wounds that glowed in the darkness like mystical signs descended from the arms of the cross and slowly approached the altar'.

Of course, the most famous literary visit to St Vitus's takes place in
The Trial,
when Josef K. is charged, by his employer at the bank where he works, with showing a visiting Italian businessman the artistic sights of the city. The Italian, with his nervous laugh and steel-grey bushy moustache - one would surely describe him as sinister except that there is nothing in this novel that is not sinister - is pressed for time and opts to restrict his viewing to the cathedral. It is all a cruel ruse, anyway; the Italian does not turn up, and Josef K. is left to loiter uneasily in the echoing nave as the morning steadily, eerily, darkens, encountering 'the silver sheen of a saint's figure', no doubt the same 'silver St John' of Nepomuk identified by the boy in Jan Ner-uda's story. Josef K. cannot account for the strange atmospherics that are affecting the daylight. 'What sort of weather could there be outside? It was not just a dreary day any more, it was the depth of night.'

In the distance a large triangle of candle flames flickered on the high altar. K. could not have said with certainty whether he had seen them earlier on. Perhaps they had just been lit. Vergers are stealthy by profession and are scarcely noticed. When K. happened to turn round he saw not far behind him a tall thick candle also alight, this time fixed to a pillar. However beautiful it looked, it was quite inadequate to illuminate the altarpieces which mostly hung in the gloom of the side-chapels; it only made the darkness more intense.

The scene is set for K.'s encounter with the priest, who claims to be a prison chaplain -
the
prison chaplain, in fact - who knows Josef K.'s name, and who tells him the terrifying parable of 'the man from the country' who comes seeking 'entry into the law' but is prevented by the implacable door-keeper, who makes him sit by the door for years, until the man grows old, and reaches the threshold of death. 'You are insatiable,' the doorkeeper tells him.

'But everybody strives for the law,' says the man. 'How is it that in all these years nobody except myself has asked for admittance?' The door-keeper realises the man has reached the end of his life and, to penetrate his imperfect hearing, he roars at him: 'Nobody else could gain admittance here, this entrance was meant only for you. I shall now go and close it.'

In his lengthy exegesis on the implications and possible meaning of the parable, the priest observes that 'right at the beginning [the doorkeeper] plays a joke on the man by inviting him to enter in spite of the express and strictly enforced prohibition . . .' We know that Kafka had a sly and mordant sense of humour. Of his job as an insurance assessor giving judgement on workers' claims he exclaimed in a letter to his friend Max Brod how extraordinarily accident-prone the world seemed to be, and how 'one gets a headache from all these young girls in the porcelain factories who are forever throwing themselves downstairs with mountains of dishes'. There is also the anecdote which tells of him beginning to read from
The Trial
to a gathering of friends, but collapsing into such laughter on the first page that he had to abandon the reading. The 'joke' in the parable of the law, however, is, as Mark Twain said of German humour, no laughing matter. A few years ago, not long before his death, the great Germanist and Kafka scholar, Eduard Goldstiicker, described to me how he and other loyal communists in Prague were rounded up in December 1951 at the beginning of a new wave of Stalinist show trials. When he asked to know why he had been arrested, the answer came with an ironic smile: 'That is what
you
must tell
us.'
I immediately thought of the prison chaplain speaking to Josef K. of the door-keeper's friendliness and humour, and even compassion. I thought as well of the two gentlemen in frock coats, with the air of broken-down actors, pale and fat and wearing top hats, 'apparently the non-collapsible kind', who come to K.'s apartment on the eve of his thirty-first birthday to fetch him away to his execution in the little quarry in what is most likely the Strahov district of the city. 'There was nothing heroic in resisting, in making difficulties for the gentlemen now, in putting up a defence at this point in an effort to enjoy a final glimmer of life.' . . .