Prague
September 1998
The two Africans in the forecourt of the Hauptbahnhof were playing an old Motown hit. One of them was standing up, strumming a battered old guitar, the other was seated cross-legged on the ground behind him, beating on a drum balanced between his knees. You could hear them all over the railway station, but it took George a long while before he could make out the tune or the words. He had heard the song a few times on the radio, but the Africans gave the melody a mournful, wailing twist which made it almost unrecognisable. George also spoke English well enough to realise that their intonation was so peculiar and their pronunciation so incorrect that they were mangling the words, running them together into lines which made no sense. Another three Africans sat alongside in a short line, open suitcases spread out in front of them stacked full of curios, carved wooden figures, necklaces and bracelets made from beads and shiny stones. All of them wore loose shirts made from printed material, cheap imitations of African cloth.
It was about lunchtime, and the station had begun to fill up with office workers making short trips. It wasn’t as crowded as it had been earlier in the morning, or as it would be later during the rush of the evening, but there was a constant flurry of people coming and going. Around the margins prowled a scattering of hucksters, buskers, hawkers and hustlers; a flock of gypsy women, brown faces and heavy eyebrows shrouded in rainbow shawls, a couple of Turks selling lottery tickets, three lurking Uzbekis, swarthy and battered, red eyes darting furtively, a red-haired German youth in a tight black suit and dark glasses playing riffs on an alto sax, a middle-aged drunk with a ravaged face above his outstretched hand.
Beggars, drunks and pickpockets from all over the city gathered here, mostly because of the international traffic which flowed through its doors. To make matters worse the city’s Hauptbahnhof stood a stone’s throw away from the dramatic bulk of the Kunsthalle Museum, along Glockenweisserwall. In comparison the station was a drab and unattractive building, a big square rectangle of glass and ugly grey brick, having been rebuilt in the forties after Hamburg was blasted into twisted rubble by Gomorrah, the firestorm of British bombs in 1943.
It had the appearance, George thought, of a hundred other such places in the centre of Europe, like a beach where the ebb and flow of passage washed up and deposited human flotsam.
Behind him the station exploded with the noise of a new arrival, and he guessed that the train from Copenhagen had just pulled in. A minute later the buzz of voices and a flood of young tourists streamed through the forecourt, the rucksacks on their backs proclaiming their mission. A group of blonde teenage girls filed past George, pushing mountain bikes, their faces red and pink with the sun, spun-sugar hair bleached to a uniform pale yellow. As they reached the Africans, playing now with renewed vigour, they paused and stared, giggling in unison. Then one of them reached out and dropped a couple of coins on the blanket in front of the musicians before the little group moved on, wheeling their bikes down the slight incline towards the Adenauerallee.
Watching them, George felt a slight prickle of irritation. The girls had looked at the Africans with the patronising curiosity they would probably apply to all the other exotic sights they were about to see during their vacation. Part of what he felt was embarrassment for them; the other part was mainly anger. For most of his childhood, conditioned by his mother’s tales, whenever he heard the word Africa or the name of particular African countries, he had experienced a thrill of curiosity and a peculiar spike of nostalgia, as if he had been there and was now living in exile. In his heart he dreamt of sitting in the shade of a giant tree, singing strange songs, surrounded by a pure aura of effortless joy. In time the dream vanished, but somewhere inside he still had the hope that Africans would be tall and heroic presences, men whose eyes looked into far and beautiful distances. He knew now that this was also a fantasy he had manufactured out of his own longing, but, in spite of his adult understanding, he still couldn’t help a swell of resentment towards Africans like the ones in front of the Hauptbahnhof. In the last few years he had seen too many of them, their breaths furred and stinking, their bodies racked with the pain and exhaustion of how far they had come, their skins and hair grey with the dread of long nights locked in the hold of a ship or a container, listening for the footsteps which might mean death. Even so they stayed alive, red eyes glistening with the lust to survive, movements swift and stealthy as rats, scuttling steadily through alien cities, from disaster to oblivion.
‘Vlasti chornim. Zamyechatyelni.’
