Farewell to Prague. Desmond Hogan

his town were three Czech sisters and their brother who ran the jeweller’s. They liked sweets a lot and in their honour I gazed at chocolate ducks with marzipan legs in windows. They used to leave gifts of boxes of chocolates in my pram.

      They had arrived in Ireland after the First World War, orphans, and after spending a few years in an orphanage in Dublin moved around Ireland, looking after jewellery businesses. The brother was epileptic and had visions by the oak trees just outside town.

      I shared his visions this summer: a fresco depicting orange trees on the wall; clouds of gnats under lime trees; a cobbled street, violet and pale blue cobbles, a water-pump with a high tiara of black iron-work around it in the middle of the street; a lock on the Vltava, a huge fan of surf in front of it, hundreds of swans just before the lock; a girl in a flowered bonnet and crimson dress in a painting; grapes by a goblet in an illuminated book; a vase with pink nude swimmers on it.

      ‘I see Czechoslovakia as a free spirit over which the body has no power.’

      They thought they’d never grow old, but the epileptic died in County Galway. One of the sisters, in old age, married the driver she’d met on a pilgrim bus to Knock, the other two sisters moving to Dublin. The sister who married the bus driver joined them when her husband died. She died, and the eldest sister died, and a sister who permanently hobbled was left. She crossed Ireland to live in an old people’s home, a bungalow on top of a hill in Galway, called Ave Maria. She was visited often by my mother. Then she moved to another old people’s home on the sea coast outside Galway. When she died she left £17,000 for masses. The eldest one had left me a tablecloth which had yellow flowers on it and green leaves.

      The epileptic with his charcoaled face always veered towards the leaves outside town, to pause and see something. Maybe he was looking back at Czechoslovakia, some memory of childhood, the olive-yellows, the sap-greens, the pistachios, the rose dorés of Prague, the acacia trees in blossom, the molten rose of summer roofs above houses of tallow and primrose-yellow.

      13 August 1987. The Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague. The graffiti outside said ‘Who is my love?’ ‘John Lennon.’ ‘AIDS.’ The headstones are a monsoon. Some are pink-coloured like the undersides of mushrooms. Some are white and with shapes like clefts of snow. Groups of them hug one another. Pairs of them in intimate proximity are like two men talking. There is a shape on one of the headstones like the palace in Snow Whiteand the Seven Dwarfs.

      Women look down from the windows of the houses around, leaning on the windowsills. Gargoyles rise out of sun-illuminated webs. Alders protect the borders of these seas of headstones and in some places intrude among the headstones, the sun pocketing its way among the leaves above a density of headstones, turning the leaves to gold. Under a cairn on a headstone is a Munich bus ticket with the words ‘May the Jewish people find peace. No more oppression.’ Under another cairn is a note: ‘Life is short. Do what you can to enlighten the world so your epitaph won’t be written: Life lived in vain.’

      An Ashkenazi Jew sits on a scarlet bench.

      The eldest of the Czech sisters had marigold hair, sashes of it: She fell in love with an Englishman who managed the local pencil factory. He’d played the Baron Minho Zeti in the light opera the year the Pontevedrian Embassy in Paris fell down.

      She wore brown alpaca suits. It was a brief romance, a winter one.

      In Dublin, when the sisters lived there, up the road from Red Spot Laundry, Grace’s Pub, Costello’s Garage, I dined on that tablecloth, drinking tea from white cups with gold handles, and tried to recall how the romance ended but couldn’t. It was just an image, the elderly lovers walking out by the oak trees in the direction of the Railway Hotel, long converted into the local army headquarters.

      14 August 1987. When I stayed in Paris in 1968, it was in a high-rise like this one. The Marriage of Giovanni Arnolfini by Van Eyck on the wall. Stashes of Wagner and Beethoven records and glossy magazines in their assigned corner of the room. I had held a woman who gave French lessons that spring. A woman who used to go to mass in a harlequin hat. Why did she talk about abortion so much?

      She’d been having an affair with another teacher in town. A man who played rugby every Sunday afternoon in the asylum grounds. One Sunday, when she felt he had kept her waiting too long, she went looking for him and saw them showering in their brute, grey place, the rugby players of town. Why hadn’t she fled there and then, she asked? Why hadn’t she gone to the Prague spring or the Paris revolution? Why hadn’t she re-immersed herself in the pastels of Europe, Europe where she’d studied for a while? Why hadn’t she admitted to herself there and then that sex is sacred and of God, and that to find salvation we must not fool ourselves, just be adventurous and seek holy union with other people, not the animalistic sex of this small town.

      The only thing that stood out for me about that summer in France was my first trip to Chartres, the twin spires rising above the cornfields on a grey afternoon. My first summer at University College, Dublin, I returned to Chartres, boys speeding on mopeds on the summer evenings. On one of those evenings I heard a black American girl sing ‘There Is a Balm in Gilead’ in the cathedral.

      Towards the end of my time at university I visited Chartres again, with Eleanor.

      ‘How long have you been together?’ an English girl asked us on the bus from Calais to Paris.

      ‘Let’s All Go Search for America’ was playing.

      Eleanor’s hair stood out, very blonde, against the windows of the cathedral. We held hands in front of the black pearwood Virgin who was dressed in gold. Afterwards, in Paris, we had chips in Montmartre, a prostitute with ghosted henna hair seated at the open-air table opposite us. We started kissing on the boat back to England and made love in a house in Barnes, dove-coloured squirrels in the garden outside.

      I remembered what the teacher of French had said about sex and it seemed prophetic. In Liverpool three black children, Peter, Peter and Paul, sensed the thrall between us and offered to carry our bags to the boat. For some reason I felt a fear, thinking of what should have been exotic, chocolate over the froth of cream of a cappuccino in our favourite late-night café in Dublin.

      I hear that the French teacher married a doctor in Galway, lives in a house in a miasma of white houses by the bay, has four children with deeply nationalistic names. I hear that her hair is still red, that she wears beautiful clothes to art openings, that there’s something beautiful and grieving about her face, and that she does charitable work with the tinkers, walking in a red coat down lanes where the tinkers are encamped, red being the tinker colour of mourning.

      ‘I was beautiful in the early days.’ From Florence I went on to Rome, a stubble of marigolds and leaf parsley on the black wetness of Campo de’ Fiori when I arrived at evening. In Mario’s I had a modest meal and got a yellow bill with burgundy stripes on it. Just as I was getting up to leave the table a boy from Dublin with a toothbrush moustache and wearing a Fair Isle jersey sat beside me. He was organizing the first Hare Krishna march in Rome the following day and he invited me to join them, which I did, chanting ‘Hare Krishna’ with some Italians, a Scots boy with chestnut hair in a ponytail and radically illumined cheeks, American girls with pigtails, all in salmon-coloured robes.

      A middle-aged man in a silver suit came up to me in the crowd to say, ‘You are beautiful.’

      We passed a bridge over the Tiber which the sun had turned into a carmine fog.

      Someone told me in Dublin early the following year that the boy from Dublin had died in London from a drug overdose.

      Later that year, Eleanor gone, I returned to London. Lived in a squat in West London. The trade of stolen colour televisions was negotiated at the Windsor Castle and Lord Palmerston. A girl who used to walk around barefoot was picked up and jailed for doing a bombing. In the kiosk at the end of the street I would wait for Eleanor’s calls. Early in the month of the Birmingham pub bombing she told me that she would not be coming back, that she’d joined a religious group.

      25 January 1975. I saw a person in Berkeley recently who walked and looked like you – so much so that I stood in fascination with many emotions turning, thinking