Read Online Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City by John Banville - Free Book Online
Authors: John Banville
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apartment block on an unremarkable street to the west
of Wenceslas Square, yet what I see is a scene straight out of one of Sudek's nocturnes, something like the view ofBridge on a snowy evening, or that lamp-lit cobbled square on Kampa Island, with the winter tree, and the Charles Bridge
behind, and the city farther off, the light of the street lamp in the foreground all blurred and gauzy, as if seen through
tears. At the door, Marta clutched G.'s hand in hers and bade her 'Say hello for me to California,' a greeting that sounded
to our ears more like a farewell to an impossible dream. I do not think that Marta made it to America, in the end, although
it is not impossible that she did. A couple of years ago we heard that the Professor had died. How quickly the past becomes
the past! That night we walked in silence, the three of us, though the empty, frostbound streets back to our hotel. G. carried
the photographs, rolled up tightly and concealed in a cardboard tube supposedly containing nothing more than a reproduction
of a poster from the 1930s for an exhibition of formalist Czech art. Next morning, under a shower of sleet, we left the city
by train. At the Austrian border we were held up for an hour while crossing guards went through the carriages with implements
like giant versions of dentist's mirrors, searching under the seats and on the luggage racks for anyone who might have hidden
there in an attempt to flee the country. My palms were damp: what if G. were to be made to open the cardboard tube and show
its contents? But the guards were not interested in art. When we crossed to the Austrian side the first thing I saw was a
hoarding of a half-naked woman advertising some degenerate Western luxury - Dior fashions or Mercedes motor cars - and something
in me revelled instinctively, irresistibly, in the sight of what seemed such happy, hopeful, life-affirming colours, and I
thought of the Professor, and Marta, and felt ashamed.
1 Since I was a delegate, however unwilling, to the CSCE, I feel obliged, in the spirit of fairness, to report that the Americans,
while smoother, more soft-spoken, and certainly better dressed than their Eastern Bloc rivals, had been brazenly hypocritical
enough to include ostentatiously in their delegation, as a token - apt word - of the racial tolerance and care for indigenous
peoples enjoyed in America, a pair of novelists of American Indian heritage. The home of the brave, indeed.
2 Kafka and his favourite sister, Ottla, rented number 22 Zlata Ulicka in November 1916. Kafka had a room but not, it seems,
a bed; on his days off from the insurance office he would work there all day, then have his supper, and walk down the Old
Castle Steps at midnight and across the Manes Bridge to his flat in the Schonborn Palace in the Old Town. He was happy in
Golden Lane: 'it is something special,' he wrote to his girlfriend Felice Bauer, 'to have one's own house, to lock the door
to the world, not of the room, not of the flat, but of the house itself; to step out of the door of one's home straight into
the snow of the quiet lane.' Conditions were primitive, but K. could always improvise. He arrived one day when the fire was
out, he told Ottla, 'But then I took all the newspapers and manuscripts and, after a while, a very lovely fire was burning.'
All the manuscripts . . .
3 Kafka's attitude to his native city was made up of equal measures of love and hate. 'Prague doesn't let go,' he wrote to
his friend Oskar Pollak in 1902. 'Either of us. This old crone has claws. We would have to set it on fire in two places, atand the Castle; only then might it be possible for us to get away. Perhaps you'll give it some consideration before carnival.'
4 But I cannot refrain from reproducing the description of a dish I found on a menu in the Kepler Beer Restaurant in the Czech
town of Kutna Hora not long ago: 'Filled chicken brest (sic) with banana in almond sauce
of Wenceslas Square, yet what I see is a scene straight out of one of Sudek's nocturnes, something like the view ofBridge on a snowy evening, or that lamp-lit cobbled square on Kampa Island, with the winter tree, and the Charles Bridge
behind, and the city farther off, the light of the street lamp in the foreground all blurred and gauzy, as if seen through
tears. At the door, Marta clutched G.'s hand in hers and bade her 'Say hello for me to California,' a greeting that sounded
to our ears more like a farewell to an impossible dream. I do not think that Marta made it to America, in the end, although
it is not impossible that she did. A couple of years ago we heard that the Professor had died. How quickly the past becomes
the past! That night we walked in silence, the three of us, though the empty, frostbound streets back to our hotel. G. carried
the photographs, rolled up tightly and concealed in a cardboard tube supposedly containing nothing more than a reproduction
of a poster from the 1930s for an exhibition of formalist Czech art. Next morning, under a shower of sleet, we left the city
by train. At the Austrian border we were held up for an hour while crossing guards went through the carriages with implements
like giant versions of dentist's mirrors, searching under the seats and on the luggage racks for anyone who might have hidden
there in an attempt to flee the country. My palms were damp: what if G. were to be made to open the cardboard tube and show
its contents? But the guards were not interested in art. When we crossed to the Austrian side the first thing I saw was a
hoarding of a half-naked woman advertising some degenerate Western luxury - Dior fashions or Mercedes motor cars - and something
in me revelled instinctively, irresistibly, in the sight of what seemed such happy, hopeful, life-affirming colours, and I
thought of the Professor, and Marta, and felt ashamed.
1 Since I was a delegate, however unwilling, to the CSCE, I feel obliged, in the spirit of fairness, to report that the Americans,
while smoother, more soft-spoken, and certainly better dressed than their Eastern Bloc rivals, had been brazenly hypocritical
enough to include ostentatiously in their delegation, as a token - apt word - of the racial tolerance and care for indigenous
peoples enjoyed in America, a pair of novelists of American Indian heritage. The home of the brave, indeed.
2 Kafka and his favourite sister, Ottla, rented number 22 Zlata Ulicka in November 1916. Kafka had a room but not, it seems,
a bed; on his days off from the insurance office he would work there all day, then have his supper, and walk down the Old
Castle Steps at midnight and across the Manes Bridge to his flat in the Schonborn Palace in the Old Town. He was happy in
Golden Lane: 'it is something special,' he wrote to his girlfriend Felice Bauer, 'to have one's own house, to lock the door
to the world, not of the room, not of the flat, but of the house itself; to step out of the door of one's home straight into
the snow of the quiet lane.' Conditions were primitive, but K. could always improvise. He arrived one day when the fire was
out, he told Ottla, 'But then I took all the newspapers and manuscripts and, after a while, a very lovely fire was burning.'
All the manuscripts . . .
3 Kafka's attitude to his native city was made up of equal measures of love and hate. 'Prague doesn't let go,' he wrote to
his friend Oskar Pollak in 1902. 'Either of us. This old crone has claws. We would have to set it on fire in two places, atand the Castle; only then might it be possible for us to get away. Perhaps you'll give it some consideration before carnival.'
4 But I cannot refrain from reproducing the description of a dish I found on a menu in the Kepler Beer Restaurant in the Czech
town of Kutna Hora not long ago: 'Filled chicken brest (sic) with banana in almond sauce
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