Farewell to Prague. Desmond Hogan

where the Athina B had been and instead of throwing myself in to drown I went for a swim. The water was already warm.

      The tinkers could tell you that Judas hung himself from an elder tree. They could tell you that a tinker called James McPherson was hanged in Banff on the Scottish border in 1700. They could tell you about beet-gathering in Scotland not too long ago. They’d pick up the thread of a family tale out of the beet fields of Scotland. How a man raised himself up in society with a successful plumbing business, then, on a whim, stole a Ford Orion, and ended up in a jail by the sea on the south-west coast.

      A girl, his sweetheart, described visits to him. The walk from the bus stop down a road by the sea. The lemon waiting-room inside. The warden with as many keys as beads on a rosary on a chain by his side. Red-brick buildings with turrets outside and cherry trees, like dirty Guinness when in blossom. Armies of prisoners coming out all of a sudden from the buildings opposite, in pale blue shirts and dark blue trousers, a kind of exhilaration about them, as if they were going on a pilgrimage.

      A woman once a beauty queen in Kerry, ‘the year Canvey Island flooded’, killed herself in that encampment in May and was buried with a wreath of shiny red roses in the shape of a vardo and horses. When she’d been laid out, near a rhino in a sailor suit, there was a candle at her head.

      I didn’t go back to the encampment after that.

      Modern caravans, men hanging around as they hang around streets in Nationalist Belfast, one supreme vardo soon to be gone on the roads.

      I blamed many things for this breakdown, but I could more or less directly trace it back to a night in Dublin, in the middle of an affair, a very vulnerable affair, a girl, erstwhile friend, screaming at me: ‘You’re incapable. Incapable of full physical relations with women.’ She’d heard on the Dublin grapevine of some sexual failure. If I’d have stayed in Dublin I’d have committed suicide.

      After loss, when the crying stops inside, something else starts, an alternative world. It is peopled by a tinker woman, a mad aunt, an English poet. There are squats in Battersea, squats in Maida Vale where you live. You find a body upstairs in one, and ceilings fall in on bathrooms and bedrooms. But you keep going. For a while, in a very peaceful time, there’s a flat beside the heath in Hampstead. You spend a while in the United States, autumn 1981.

      A Chinese lady who’d been locked for eight years in a chicken hut, where she could only write on toilet paper, was also there. Her hair was swabbed over her head and she wore jerkins and pants. She’d straddle with her fifty-five-year-old Chinese boyfriend past young Americans in shorts and T-shirts. Once she gave a reading. There was a Norwegian writer with a gipsy scarf on her head and in a décolleté dress on one side of her and a Philippine writer in an even more décolleté dress on the other side of her. The large hall was scattered by American feminists, some in crocheted hats, who ran vegetarian cafés and macrobiotic cafés which also sold turkey sandwiches. The little old Chinese lady raised her arms in the air and asked why the American army wasn’t there.

      There was a Polish woman with steely hair in a ponytail. When she had travelled around the United States on Greyhound buses she’d keep loading tins of food on to the buses. She had studied medicine in Leningrad during the last years of Stalin. When he died they were asked to cry and they cried. A few days later they were asked to laugh and they laughed.

      Your hostess was a Chinese lady who liked wearing shawls of lacquer red and pink. She’d hidden among the skeleton firs in the mountains near Peking during the Chinese revolution and then escaped to Taiwan.

      We had parties on lawns at night. There was usually a fat lady in black – black dress, black shoes, black stockings – sitting on those lawns, holding a flotilla of black balloons. She was in love with a middle-aged Egyptian doctor, with black and ash hair which fell on to his shoulders, who later married a young Polish waitress. Later, she went to New York, where she’d stand around Rubens exhibits in galleries, because she reckoned that men who liked the flushed, flaccid bodies of Rubens would like her.

      You had an affair there, with a boy you met at a discotheque mainly frequented by South American girls who’d been tortured, and by gays. It was on the edge of cornfields which Amish people rode through on buggies, the women in poke bonnets.

      One morning, after having made love to him in the bath the previous night, you walked past a Catholic church with him in which a wedding was taking place. It was just about the third anniversary of Eleanor’s wedding.

      Although it was only November, an imbecilic Santa was swinging himself on a swing in a shop window and a Virgin Mary with outspread auburn hair, who looked like an Italian starlet of the fifties, looked aghast at the Christ child in another shop window.

      You made friends there with the Norwegian writer and the Israeli writer, an Arab Catholic. Afterwards, you visited the Norwegian writer in Norway. When you arrived at Oslo Central Station youths and girls in pale blue jeans and high boots were sweeping up the garbage with brooms. Two days later, Sunday, women in fur coats had come out of Karl Johans Cathedral which had chandeliers in it. The same day you took a train to the town in the country where your friend lived. Norwegian trains are very slow. Taciturn boys with tight pouches of pubic hair on pale skin sat endlessly in saunas. You went with the writer’s son to her summer house by a fjord and sailed in a boat with him out on to the lake, under the mountains. Snow came to the hilly town when you were there, falling on the houses which were set apart from one another.

      You visited the Israeli writer in Jerusalem, just after the Sabra and Chatila massacres. He had a menorah in his room, five brown candles in it and two white ones with gold sequins on them.

      Rabbis prayed, heads close to the temple wall.

      ‘We sit in solitude and mourn for the temple that is destroyed. We sit in solitude and mourn.’

      I travelled around Israel. There had been soldiers on foot milling on the roads near the Lebanese border, an unceasing, onward march. In olive-yellow hills black goats had bits of white like wigs on their heads. Tanks had overtaken camels in the desert behind a deserted white-brick refugee town near Jericho. An old man had played an accordion by a field of melons.

      Back in Jerusalem, in the Mea Shearim district, men with peoths, in fur-edged streimel hats, had walked by in the September light.

      I took a bus from the Jaffa Gate to Bethlehem. The protruding-nosed bus was old and dusty and had no colour. Geese and goats had fled from its path and some of the passengers were geese.

      There was a little blue and white flag on a mast in the middle of Manger Square in Bethlehem. Sweets had been laid out on tables on the little alleys that led away from the square: pistachios, hazelnuts, almonds in the yoghurt whites, saffron reds, pistachio greens. There was a framed photograph of Tracey Ullman on a wall above a bench on which men smoked honey-soaked tobacco.

      I thought of Eleanor.

      I thought of my new friend, Marek, whom I’d met in a school in the West of Ireland. His mother was a German actress and his father, from whom she’d long been separated, was a Palestinian surgeon.

      I walked to the Mount of Olives one night, through the West Bank, and looked down on the Garden of Gethsemane, the Kidron river.

      In Acca, by the Mediterranean, I had wanted to masturbate but didn’t.

      After walking to the Mount of Olives I met my Arab friend in La Belle Bar. There was a picture of a grey-haired Paul Kent on the wall and the jukebox played ‘We had joy. We had fun. We had seasons in the sun.’ That was the song that was playing in my mind June 1974 when I walked into Easons in Dublin, picked up the Irish Press, a little news item at the bottom left-hand side of the front page about the death of a sister of a friend of mine. She’d been killed near Lyon, hitch-hiking from Geneva to Paris. Shortly after that Eleanor went to see her brother, who was stranded in San Francisco without a valid visa.

      One evening in Norway we had earthberries and cream just as Mr Haythornthwaite, the Englishman who visited our town when I was a child, would have had in Norway in the nine-teen-twenties.

      As I walked up the hill after