Farewell to Prague. Desmond Hogan

1983, the virus identified in 1984, but now he’s in hospital in Berlin. Heidi, a girlfriend you had after Eleanor, also lives in Berlin. Carl’s moved back to London. Eleanor’s moved on to Amsterdam.

      You spend Christmas with the homeless, old men with their hair curling up like smoke from a country cottage.

      As you watch old men lining up for soup you think of a funeral of a ninety-year-old uncle under an East Galway sunset; second cousins, a man and a woman who lived together in the country in East Galway, whose house burned down, killing them; your step-aunt and step-uncle who died young, buried in cemeteries facing one another in County Westmeath, a road between the cemeteries.

      Not her own children, my grandmother used to throw saucers at them, and my mother would cry out, ‘They have a mother in Heaven too.’

      My step-aunt went to the Immaculate Training College in Limerick. She taught at the Mercy Convent in Navan before she married, and later taught at a rural school where she worked right up to her death.

      My mother got tuberculosis too, from germs under the bed of a woman with tuberculosis she visited regularly, but she recovered and married.

      When I was thirteen she came into the theatre I’d constructed in the back-shed. I was standing in a turban with a turkey feather in it, with a tan I’d acquired from mixing some of her cosmetics, and she started beating me in a wild, frightened way, pulling down the sack curtains at the same time, pulling out lavender from jam jars.

      ‘All this was redeemable,’ Heidi said. ‘It’s Dublin that nearly destroyed you.’

      Someone played ‘O Solo Mio’ on a mouth organ near Vauxhall Bridge. I remembered what the old lady had said about Christmas during her brief marriage, how the priest used to come to the house each Christmas Eve and break bread.

      It was that girl. She’d wander around Dublin saying things like, ‘Lizzie Rossiter is a virgin.’ She was about six feet tall, had blonde hair tossed like a capuchin’s, underneath an infernal, dissatisfied face. She liked wearing a flowing lavender cloak and white rubber, barred forties sandals when she walked her aunt’s Irish wolfhound on Grafton Street and the surrounding streets. This dog was treated as a special guest in the Golden Spoon on Grafton Street. In her aunt’s house where she lived there was a display of ancient Ireland’s Owns, Freeman’s Journals, Irish Schools’ Weeklies, Weldon’s Ladies’ Journals on a low table in the middle of the sitting-room, and above the mantelpiece tasselled dance cards behind a frame. Elsewhere on the walls there were scenes from Ireland’s past in black and white – fields being staked out during the war – and photographs with a sweetheart from the National Athletic and Cycling Association, one taken on a laneway, the other in the Royal Marine Hotel in Dun Laoghaire. Green plants grew under pictures of St Athnacht, St Eanna and Napoleon in a maroon cloak, jabot, wreath on his head, and shoes of white with gold designs like those of Our Lady of Fatima.

      The aunt wore a black mantilla or black cloche hat if she wasn’t in the blue and white of the Little Company of Mary. The girl went to get her a bottle of whiskey one day and came home and found her dead, whereupon she had the house to herself.

      We were very happy, Eleanor and I, when Eleanor came back from California. But after wending our way to a party this girl let fly at me: ‘You’re incapable. Incapable of full,’ she raised her hand as it conducting an orchestra, ‘full physical relations with women. It’s your family. All because of your family. You hate women. With Eleanor, yeah.’

      I believe that woman has a child of her own now with whom she lives in that house in Windy Arbour with its Irish, Catholic memories.

      Berlin, 3 May 1991. I remember once taking the train west in Ireland on a summer’s evening. Past suburbs of Dublin. Lilies on the canal running alongside the railway tracks. I thought of Russia. I had suffered a great loss. A loss I could not comprehend or cope with. But I knew something connected me with Russia, something would bring me there. Someone was there.

      I have been terribly, terribly lonely but now I must call up the child. The child is me, the broken inner part of me. When you went, my love, the imprint, the ectoplasm of a little boy was left. I have almost lost touch with him at times, but now he is close.

      I left Ireland shortly after the outpouring, vowing never to go back. The wisteria blue of the mountains and the talmudic shapes by the docks are always part of me.

      ‘We teach all hearts to break,’ a sign had said on a wall under a flyover near Portobello Road on my arrival in London in the summer of 1977.

      ‘You smell of bitter almonds,’ a girl told me in a café in Dublin a few days before the attack. A beautiful, blonde girl from our town who liked wearing white dresses with black spots on them. She leaned forward as she spoke and had a dangerously vulnerable openness and an almost ringing enthusiasm.

      She’d had a nervous breakdown and was sojourning in St Pat’s.

      Now, I’m told, her mind has stopped completely, and she’s sealed off in some leafy hospital in a semi-Protestant town.

      At night as I sleep and dream of that girl in London there’s an awkward pietà which forces it’s way through, mother and prostrate Christ. It’s at the entrance to the bad part of our town near where Daniel lived.

      When we were fifteen, in 1966, a warren of lesbians was discovered in a factory by the Shannon in Athlone and Daniel went to England.

      Discotheque in London. I meet a boy from our town. He has long Titian-red hair and wears a green jacket. He lists the gay venues of Dublin, where he lived until recently: the George, Minskys, O’Henrys, Fitzpatricks on a Thursday night.

      In Czechoslovakia, because of 1968, the old mingle with the young, those among the old who did not conform and worked as stokers and road-sweepers. At discos in Prague you see older men sitting beside young people at long tables covered in white oil-cloth and laden with white wine as they watch videos shot in New Orleans on a small screen.

      ‘Many were good heroes – flame-like,’ a medieval chronicle said about the young men of our townland, and I see its sometimes undulating verdure caressed by pockets of rowan trees and bryony bushes aflame in autumn.

      His mother had had a daughter before she married who was adopted by ah American family. She turned up recently.

      ‘When I was a child,’ she said, ‘when the doorbell rang I always pretended you’d come for me. My toy suitcase was always packed, ready to return.’

      His family live in a cottage near an eskar, one of the strange hummocks created in the Western Midlands when the mountains were pressed down and the oak trees were razed into bog by ice. They now have an American flag flying outside their cottage.

      An Italian in a shiny blue suit sold red roses on Wardour Street, the roses in a bucket at his feet. A little girl wearing a pearl necklace to her knees walked down Old Corrrpton Street. There were violets on Ladywell Fields and two black girls in black leather skin-suits, wild hair flossed out, both of them wearing identical sapphire-blue scarves around their necks and carrying skimpy Tesco bags, crossed the Fields.

      I’d just received a letter. I was going to live in the Southern States in the autumn.

      Life changes: the Tarot cards on the mantelpiece are young men pulling a boat out of the sea in Portugal with ropes; a nobleman with his arm around his pageboy, a ball in the nobleman’s hand, his outfit olive-yellow with patterns of girdles in it, a black hat with a silver coin on the front of it on his head; two men in thoabs and turbans conversing by a field of green barley, poppies scattered among the barley.

      When you were at university your mother had you incarcerated in digs, so you celebrated your twenty-first birthday four months after the night in the flat of a friend. A woman who’d recently lost her husband and cried a lot came, a Mrs Lawlor. Two urchin boys with plum cheeks from Mountpleasant Buildings. The girl who later attacked you, in a fur coat, a blue and white striped gown like that of a concentration camp inmate, a slouch hat. You brought pictures of Bob Dylan, Carson McCullers, Katherine Mansfield, Anne Frank, the Isle of Capri and Chartres Cathedral,