Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City (31 page)
54
Rudolf was remarkably tolerant of the Jews; a number of his closest advisers were Jewish, and he is known to have consulted the wealthy Mordechai Meisl for advice on the imperial finances, and most probably touched him for the odd substantial loan, too.
55
It was futile to press
for details of what he did for the Jews; he would merely smile and shake his head and wave a dismissive hand. To be brave and not to boast of it is bravery squared.
56
Ripellino, p. 109.
57
'After 1989 all properties nationalized by the revolution (factories, hotels, rental apartments, land, forests) were returned to their former owners (or more precisely, to their children or grandchildren); the procedure was called
restitution:
it required only that a person declare himself owner to the legal authorities, and after a year during which his claim might be contested, the restitution became irrevocable. That judicial simplification allowed for a good deal of fraud, but it did avoid inheritance disputes, lawsuits, appeals, and thus brought about, in an astonishingly short time, the rebirth of a class society with a bourgeoisie that was rich, entrepreneurial, and positioned to set the national economy going' (Milan Kundera,
Ignorance).
58
The matter of the well-chosen wine will be appreciated by those readers who have attended a British Council party anywhere in the world.
It is said that the name of the Vltava river is made up of two words from the lost language of the Celts,
vlt,
meaning wild, and
va,
meaning water. In normal times the visitor to Prague would think this an unlikely derivation. The great, broad river in places it is a third of a kilometre wide - meanders its way through the city, skirting an island here, there spilling gently over a weir, placid, it would appear, as a village stream. More than one of Prague's disenchanted writers have seen in it a symbol of what they consider the shallowness of the people who live along its banks; Gustav Meyr-ink, for instance, sourly observed that a foreign fool might think the Vltava as mighty as the Mississippi, but in fact is it 'only four millimetres deep and full of leeches'. But T.S. Eliot got it right when, in the
Tour Quartets,
he declared:
. . . I
think that the river
Is a strong brown god - sullen, untamed and
intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a
frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of
bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost
forgotten
By the dwellers in cities - ever, however, implacable,
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget.
Certainly, a large number of Praguers had forgotten just what the river could do when its back was up. There have been many floods in the city over the past hundred years - in 1890 two arches of the Charles Bridge were washed away - but none so terrible as the cataclysm of the summer of 2002. On the night of August 8th-9th, after a week of torrential rains, a vast surge of waters gathered in southern Bohemia and began to race toward the capital, swamping and in some cases destroying villages and towns along the way:
Krumlov,Budejovice, Pisek, Strakonice,
. . . Prague was unprepared for what was coming. By the time the waters began to subside on August 14th, an entire district of the city, the former industrial centre and lately somewhat yuppified Karlin, had been virtually destroyed, half the metro stations were closed - and will remain so indefinitely precious old buildings had been damaged, some beyond repair, and tourist figures had fallen by fifty per cent. The cost of repairing the waterlogged fabric of the city would run into billions of Czech crowns, and no one could say who would end up footing the bill. It was a European disaster.
I visited Prague a month after the floods had subsided. As a rule I avoid places where natural disasters have occurred; even when I walk through the ruins of Pompeii or Herculaneum, beautiful, fascinating and moving though these ruined cities are, I feel uncomfortably as if I have gatecrashed a wake. In such places Mme de StaePs identification of the predicament of the tourist - 'What I see bores me, what I don't see worries me' - becomes intensified to the level of a moral reprehension. Over the years I have spent many happy days in this city, so accommodating of the
chodec
- stroller,
flaneur -
but after such damage, what is to be my attitude now, and how should I comport myself?
I arrive at the evening rush hour, but there is little traffic. The city's almost Venetian silence, which I register at the start of every visit as if I were hearing it, not-hearing it, for the first time this, more than the Mitteleuropan ambience or the ravishing architecture, is what, for me, gives the city its unique character and is part of the explanation for the enduring mysteriousness of the place. On a film set, the sound recordist at the end of a scene will record what is called a wild track, a minute or so of silence to keep as background should part of the scene need to be re-dubbed; in Prague, it always seems to me that someone has forgotten to do the wild track, and that behind even the loudest scenes of festival or protest or just everyday business, there is a depthless emptiness. But the silence is different now, in this amber-coloured, waterlogged September. The Venice it suggests is not a Venice on water, but under it.
One needs to know something of the successive defeats and invasions the city has suffered through the centuries to appreciate the full extent of the shock that Praguers felt as they cowered before the raging waters of the Vltava that August. It was the White Mountain all over again. Here was another assault to be resisted, not from without, this time, but from within. Suddenly, the thing in their midst that they had 'almost forgotten' literally rose up against them. After the first torrents had raged through the city - one eyewitness I spoke to described seeing a forty-foot container, torn from the back of a juggernaut, hurtling down the river on a sixty-kilometre-an-hour surge of waters - people in the city told of their incredulity and growing horror as day after day they watched the river's levels continue to rise; an Irish diplomat described to me how each morning as she walked to her embassy office in Mala Strana she would look down successive side streets and see the fringe of dirty water inching its way inexorably upwards. At its highest, the flood reached a height of some four metres; one could still see the high-water mark on the houses, shops and restaurants of Mala Strana.
Most of the bridges were still closed to all modes of conveyance save trams and taxis, the ban enforced by soldiers and armed police manning roadblocks. Traffic on the main thoroughfares near the river was even more chaotic than usual; one commuter said that travelling by tram in the city now reminded her of the public transport system in Calcutta: 'The trams are so crowded, people are practically sitting on the roofs!' Yet the sense I had was not of panic or desperation or a jostling for safety, but of a great sadness, rather. At the turning of every street corner something seemed to breathe in my face, an exhausted, soundless sigh out of a shadowed past. It was as if the flood waters, coursing through the catacomb of cellars and underground passageways beneath the city, had stirred something ancient and elemental in Prague's very foundations. I felt as if I had come to visit a sometime lover and found her beautiful as ever, but aged, and melancholy, and fearful of the future.
For Praguers, there was no romance in any of this. The city might sound, and smell, like Venice, but this cistern silence and rank odour would attract no visitors. Businesses had been ruined; some of the biggest and most expensive hotels were closed, and would stay closed, possibly for years; precious murals were washed off the inner walls of Renaissance buildings in Mala Strana; for children going to school, for workers going to factory or office, finding means of transport was a nightmare. Yet as everyone in the city, native or foreign, will attest, Praguers showed magnificent spirit and capability in dealing with the crisis. All the same, the question remained: Who would pay? A flood tax proposed by the government was voted down by parliamentarians who sus- pected a ploy to raise taxes in general. On Wenceslas Square students were selling bricks from buildings demolished by the floods in an effort to raise funds for flood repair. The gesture seemed heartbreaking, but heartening, too. Prague would survive. Prague always survives.
There is so much I have not said, so much I have not told about my love affair, its intensities and lamentable intermittences, with the city on the Vltava. I am thinking of the stifling evening at the Charles Bridge when I was pickpocketed by a tiny, thin, quite beautiful child-woman, whom I chased - to my surprise and obscure shame and who, when cornered, pulled open her summer dress, under which she wore only a skimpy set of flowered underwear, and grinned fiercely, showing white teeth and a wad of well-chewed gum, and invited me in guttural Czech to search her, while a fellow who was most likely her pimp stood a little way off, looking at his nails, no doubt with my wallet already stowed in his back pocket. I am thinking of a diplomatic occasion organised for me in a residence on one of those bosky streets behind
, to which I turned up hopelessly overdressed in sober suit and tie and starched shirt, while the Ambassador and his people were in shirt sleeves, cheerfully unbuttoned, and ready to talk all night about the fascinations of Prague and Praguer affairs. I am thinking about a dinner in an upstairs restaurant in Mala Strana below the Castle steps with
and his daughter Jindra, and how
told such wonderful stories against himself, and how much we laughed. I am thinking of myself standing on a street corner in the Josefov one deserted summer afternoon, with not a soul in sight in any of the four directions in which I could look, and how happy I felt suddenly, for no earthly reason, except that I was alive, and in Prague, and for a little while free of myself, and that the moment was precious precisely because it would not come again.
How easily the blown banners change to wings,
Wallace Stevens writes of another city, in another time. Yes, how easily . . . Prague, as Kafka said, has claws, and does not let go. I shall leave the last word to Ripellino, my inspiration and tirelessly enthusiastic cicerone. 'When I seek another word for mystery,' he writes, 'the only word I can find is Prague. She is dark and melancholy as a comet; her beauty is like the sensation of fire, winding and slanted as in the anamorphoses of the Mannerists, with a lugubrious aura of decay, a smirk of eternal disillusionment.'