Farewell to Prague. Desmond Hogan

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A Farewell to Prague

      SELECTED OTHER WORKS BY DESMOND HOGAN

       The Ikon Maker

       The Leaves on Grey

       A Curious Street

       A New Shirt

       The Edge of the City: A Scrapbook 1976–91

       The House of Mourning, and Other Stories

      In memory of Jonathan Warner, with gratitude.

      CONTENTS

       Copyright

      wie heisst es, dein Land

      hinterm Berg, hinterm Jahr?

      Ich weiss, wie es heisst.

      Wie das Wintermärchen, so heisst es,

      es heisst wie das Sommermärchen,

      das Dreijahreland deiner Mutter, das war es,

      das ists,

      es wandert überallhin, wie die Sprache,

      wirf sie weg, wirf sie weg,

      dann hast du sie wieder, wie ihn,

      den Kieselstein aus

      der Mährischen Senke,

      den dein Gedanke nach Prag trug …

       Paul Celan, ‘Es ist alles anders’

      what is it called, your country

      behind the mountain, behind the year?

      I know what it’s called.

      Like the winter’s tale, it is called,

      it’s called like the summer’s tale,

      your mother’s threeyearland, that’s what it was,

      what it is,

      it wanders off everywhere, like language,

      throw it away, throw it away,

      then you’ll have it again, like that other thing,

      the pebble from

      the Moravian hollow

      which your thought carried to Prague …

       Translated by Michael Hamburger

      ‘What are you going to do now?’

      ‘Don’t know. Go to Africa.’

      Robin had his arms about me and behind him I could see the mecca of dirty-black and nebulous South-East London high-rises.

      We were on the eleventh floor of a high-rise.

      As he held me, I was touching in my mind the great naked statue of David in Florence I’d travelled to once from University College, Dublin, having climbed steps to it, finding it wet from November rain.

      I was in the same gesture with Robin as I’d been with a girl two weeks before, in a high-rise in Catford, who’d had the sudden inspiration to try to change my sexuality. A teacher from the polytechnic I had worked in part-time, she had stood, naked from the waist up, for this embrace. I was wearing a white sleeveless vest which had a theatrical ancientness. The woman who held me was from Antrim.

      She’d told me that night about a young boy with a tattoo showing a gentian-violet swallow bearing a bunch of pink roses on his right arm. She used to sleep with him on the beaches of North Antrim the previous summer. He’d run around at night in the full regalia of the IRA, come home in the small hours when his mother would be waiting to give him a box on the ears. One night he went out in his regalia to inspect a place where he knew Semtex to be buried and was shot dead by the British Army.

      Robin had a semi-troglodyte face that always looked as if it was going to apologize for something, sable curls barely held back from it. His cheeks had a high violet colouring and he had large lips, the lower lip always pulsating a little, which had been sealed by many people, men and women.

      His mother had called him Robin because he was born in the year Robin Lee Graham had sailed from South Africa to California and to remind them all there was a photograph over the piano in Pulvensey showing Robin Lee Graham with sun-kissed hair holding up a dorado fish.

      The cassette player was playing a Marvin Gaye song:

       Has anyone seen my old friend Martin?

       Can you tell me where he’s gone?

       He freed a lot of people but it seems the good die young.

       I just looked around and he’s gone.

      From the corner of my eye, reflected in a mirror, I could see a buff-coloured dole card beside a few tubes of oil paint. The flat belonged to a friend of Robin’s. We had spent the night here, sleeping on mattresses a few feet away from one another because Robin was covered in spots he’d gotten from sleeping with a girl on the heath in Pulvensey. She had tried to kill herself when he wouldn’t intensify the relationship, slashing her wrists, was put in the mental hospital in Norwich, dyed her hair cowslip-pale and alizarin and haze-blue and escaped in a diseased bituminous fur coat, taking the boat to France.

      Robin was teaching English at the moment in Hastings. He’d come to London for Friday night.

      ‘Well, I’m off to Prague in a few weeks,’ Robin said.

      ‘I’ve been to Prague.’

      ‘I know.’

      Suddenly I started crying. I broke down crying a lot now. My mind seemed to stop and the world blurred. There were a few weeks when even walking was difficult, walking was walking through torpor and if not it was an intoxicating experience. A pendulum inside propelled me back and forth. There was no way forward, no further lap I could make, and the only thing that seemed possible was to exit, to finalize myself to save others trouble and to preserve intact achievement, totality.

      Words had stopped for me, the ability to speak, the ability to express. And instead of words came images from childhood.

      A drummer in the brass band who’d emigrated to Glasgow, a collector of cigarette cards showing athletes, always wore nice suits, sometimes floral waistcoats, became engaged to a member of the Legion of Mary in Glasgow, and then one day, inexplicably, in a suit, hankie in his breast pocket, jumped off a bridge into the Clyde.

      A boy with a Teddy-boy quiff who’d chalked a billiard cue in the men’s club and played billiards the night his mother died.

      Later he went to South Africa for a few years, then became a singer in England, turned alcoholic, lived as a tramp. Recently I had seen a scrawled sign for his singing outside an Irish pub in London. ‘It’s the crack here every Saturday night.’

      His name had been Guy ‘Micko’ Delaney. ‘Micko’ for a father who had left his mother, gone to fight in the war, lived with a Russian woman in Crouch End and died – they said of drugs – in the late nineteen-forties.

       Cocaine Bill and Morphine Sue

       Were walking down the avenue.

      He was in Berlin in 1945 and had brought home a girl’s Holy Communion wreath, lilies appliquéd on lace, that he had found in a wrecked house. Mrs Delaney had buried it with him when he died.

      Micko was the bad element of our town. I was Micko now, or had become so these past months.

      Robin and I said goodbye at Kennington tube station. An Alsatian, not too big, leapt into a youth’s arms in the waste ground nearby.

      ‘I’ll write.’

      Flashy-coloured or old technicoloured postcards in my