Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City (27 page)

U Pava, my recently renovated hotel, is on a narrow hillside street,
seminafe.
⁴⁹
The reception desk just inside the front door was a little booth with a high counter from behind which I was greeted by the manageress, a handsome blonde woman who took me for a German.
who had insisted on carrying my suitcase from the car, spoke to her in Czech and she immediately switched to English. Yet again I was plunged in shame for my lack of languages.
departed, saying he would pick me up that evening and he and Jindra would take me to dinner. The manageress, whose behind I could not help admiring, led me up the narrow stairs. There were hunting prints on the wall . . . Suddenly, now, this second, remembering those prints, I realise that it was U Pava which I used as the model for a hotel in a novel I wrote in the late 1990s, a hotel not in Prague but in Porto Venere, a seaside village in Liguria, where one of my characters had gone to commit suicide. Fiction is a strange, voracious business, and no respecter of the uniqueness of places or persons.

The opening session of the Writers' Festival takes place in a small, extremely hot room, filled with cigarette smoke, over a restaurant on the Old Town Square directly opposite the Town Hall with its astronomical clock.
⁵⁰
The clock tower is remarkable not only for its brightly painted dials but for the life-sized figures that adorn it, among them Death, Vanity, Greed, Archangel, and head-shaking Turk. Praguers have an enduring predilection for statues, figurines and automata of all kinds, from the
Jezuldtko,
the famous Infant of Prague - of which I had a treasured miniature, gilt version when I was a child through various miraculous Madonnas, at least one of them black, to Karel
robots
⁵¹
and the monstrous Golem, the alarming morphs that people the animated films of the great Jan Svank-majer, the numerous puppet theatres still flourishing in the city - most of them, alas, mere tourist traps now - and, of course, uncanniest of all, Kafka's
odradek,
a star-shaped creature resembling a spool of thread which propels itself - himself? - about the house of the nameless narrator of the fragment 'A Problem for the Father of the Family', emitting a laugh that sounds 'like the rustling of fallen leaves'. Ripellino, of course, that connoisseur of the uncanny, is fascinated by Prague's fascination with the unhu-man. He is particularly taken with the Jezulatko, that eerie godling with its globe and jewelled crown, 'a wax doll dressed in silk, gold brocade or other costly materials depending on the season and displayed in the Baroque Carmelite Church of Our Lady Victorious', which was brought from Spain by Polyxena of Lobkowicz in 1628, during Rudolf's reign. 'If the massive Golem . . . was a harbinger of disorders and disasters,' Ripellino writes, 'the Jezulatko - an exquisite rag doll and model of delicate fabrics was a salubrious balm cheering the spirits of the disheartened, a physician for both body and soul.' There follows a splendid example of the Ripellinonian
non sequitur:
'And the fact that the principal patron of the dark church where it lies and where the mummies of the Carmelite Order's protectors lie in sumptuous open coffins was the cruel Spanish general Baltazar de Marradas (who commissions the Jezulatko in his death throes from the sculptress Flavia Santini in Julius Zeyer's legend 'Inultus' [1895]) is of scant significance.'

But I must return, however unwilling, from these statuesque frolics to the sober business of the Prague Writers' Festival.

Despite the organisers' best efforts, the opening session is happily chaotic. People wander in and out of the smoke-filled stifling room, not only audience members but the participating writers, too. The atmosphere is at once manic and vague. I discover to my consternation that I am due to chair one of the discussions. The topic has something - I never quite succeeded in discovering exactly what - to do with East-West literary influences. I have no notes, have made no preparations, and since the majority of the panel of speakers are Czech, I spend most of the hour, the very long hour, floundering in linguistic confusion, which the simultaneous translation in my headphones only serves to intensify. One of the writers, a grumpy chain-smoker with a brigand's heavy black moustache, objects at length to the fatuousness of the topic under discussion, and indeed, if I understand him, to the very idea of the festival itself. He speaks of the great, gone days of
samizdat
- much of which, I am fascinated to learn, was financed by George Soros - then lapses into a grumpy silence. I call, in some desperation, on a Hungarian member of the panel to comment. He and I have a previous, brief acquaintance, but he seems to have forgotten that he ever met me, or perhaps it is that when we met - in Budapest, was it, or Vienna? - I somehow managed to offend him. He talks about a novel I have not read by a writer I do not know, then looks to me in polite expectation of an informed reply. At this point the chain-smoker gets to his feet with a sigh and ambles out, to the lavatory, I assume, but in fact he was never to return. Close to panic now, I attempt to 'throw the discussion open to the floor', and endure a couple of minutes of shuffling silence as the audience sits and gazes at me in what seems barely suppressed resentment. At last someone asks a question about censorship in the bad old days, which only serves to provoke more shifting of feet and clearing of throats. Into the restive silence I remark gingerly that the present strength of Czech literature - 1 mentioned Klima, Hrabal, Michal Ajvaz - would seem to indicate that writers had not only survived the years of communist rule, but had triumphed. And then, with the horrified fascination of a fat man feeling himself begin to fall slowly, helplessly and catastrophically down a steep flight of stairs, I hear my voice, seemingly of its own volition, asking if perhaps Gore Vidal's assertion that Hollywood never destroyed anyone who was worth saving might be adapted to Soviet communism and Czech writers . . . ? The rest of the session passes for me in a hot haze of cringing embarrassment. At last, the hour up and my penance served, I throw off my headphones and with ringing ears make a shamed escape into the square, where, sure enough, the Turk is shaking his head at me in mournful reproval, Death turns up his hourglass and pulls on his rope, and the chimes of the clock toll the death knell of my brief, but not brief enough, career as an arbiter of Czech literature.

In the afternoon, seeking balm for my still burning blushes, I pay a visit to the Old Jewish Cemetery, a pilgrimage every traveller to Prague must make. I last saw it under snow, one deserted winter twilight in the 1980s. On this sweltering afternoon it is a Dantesque scene, thronged with tourists shuffling along specified walkways between the jumbled, moss-grown tombstones, the estimated number of which varies between 12,000 and 20,000, depending on which guidebook you choose to trust. The oldest stone, from 1439, is that of Rabbi Avigdor Kar, or Kara, or Karo; the latest, marking the grave of Moses Beck, is dated May 17th, 1787. Buried here also are two of the leading Jews of the Emperor Rudolf's time, the financier Mordechai Meisl, richest Praguer of his day,
⁵²
and Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel (P1520-1609), one of the greatest Jewish scholars of the Renaissance, and Prague's Chief Rabbi from 1597 until his death. Rabbi Loew is the subject of many legends, especially those featuring Yossel the Golem, the giant clay man whom Loew is said to have fashioned from a lump of earth, as God created Adam from the dust of Elohim. The story goes that in the year 1580 a certain friar by the name of Thaddeus, a fanatical anti-Semite, raised accusations of superstitious rituals and blood sacrifices against the Prague Jews. Rabbi Loew appealed to Yahweh for help, and in a dream was instructed to create the Golem as a protector of the faithful against the Christian mob. He summoned his son-in-law, Isaac ben Simon, and a disciple, the Levite Yakob ben Chaim Sasson, to represent respectively the elements of fire and water, while the Rabbi himself was the element of air; the Golem, of course, would be the final element, earth. After the three had performed the intricate ceremony of religious purification they went to the banks of the Vltava at midnight and kneaded a human figure from river clay. First Rabbi Loew instructed Isaac the priest to walk seven times around the Golem, starting from the right, chanting Psalms and reciting magical formulas and letter combinations as he went, then Yakob the Levite was ordered to circle the figure another seven times, starting from the left. After this, Rabbi Loew himself circled the Golem, which, feeling the effects of the three elements, began to glow with the heat of life. Finally, the Rabbi inserted a
shem hameforash,
a slip of paper on which was written the unutterable name of God, under the Golem's tongue, and the creature rose to his feet, a living homunculus ready to do his master's bidding.

The Hebrew word
golem,
⁵³
meaning rudiment, embryo, or merely earthly 'substance',appears in Psalm 139:

My substance was not hid from thee, when I was
made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.

Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being un-perfect; and in thy book all my members were
written, which in continuance were fashioned,
when as yet there was none of them.

Rabbi Loew was a great scriptural scholar, and also an adept of the Cabala, a mystical philosophy based on visionary writings which originated among the Jews in thirteenth-century Spain, and which had a widespread vogue during the Emperor Rudolf's reign. Cabalistic teachings reached well beyond the Ghetto, and were a strong influence in Neoplatonism, for instance, and even on the magical thinking of John Dee. Rudolf, needless to say, was deeply interested, and in 1592 summoned Rabbi Loew to the Hradcany and had a lengthy, secret meeting alone with him.
⁵⁴
How one longs to have a record of that conversation.

The Cabala might be said to be the underground religion of the Jews. It is a creation myth and a Jewish form of Messianism, and incorporates numerology and a complex science of alphabetical combinations known as
gematria.
The legend of the Golem's creation speaks of complex rituals in which permutations of the Tetragram-maton, the four-letter symbol of God's name, was of paramount importance. From this and other hints it seems clear that the Golem story is a debased, popular version of a Cabalistic creation myth. How peculiar, then, that the never less than dogmatic Ripellino should insist that the legend of Prague's Golem 'goes back no further than Romanticism', making its appearance first in a five-volume collection of tall tales and anecdotes, in German, not Yiddish, entitled
Sippurim,
published by Wolf Pascheles in the middle of the nineteenth century. There is no mention of the Golem, Ripellino points out, in David Gans's 1592 chronicle of the Jews of Prague,
Zamach David
('Descendants of David'), nor in a biography of Rabbi Loew published in 1718.