today as I was painting walls and it was a miracle. Afterwards I went to the Pacific at Cissy Field. It was very, very deep blue. There was an old Chinese woman there in red socks and I threw a pebble in for you.
Two years later I found her. She had joined a religious group. We stayed in Carmel, with an old Czech man who wore a black beret with a tongue on it. He gave us pancakes with strawberries. He’d left Prague when he was twenty-six.
Then we stayed with an Indian family near Arcadia, and used to watch the elk come down to the ocean, in the fog.
But when she came back to Dublin the following summer a girl, a supposed comrade, attacked me at a party. ‘You’re incapable of having full physical relations with women except with Eleanor.’ She raised a closed fist to indicate an erect penis.
I couldn’t make love to Eleanor any more. She went back to California and I left Ireland, carrying impotence, making stories, doing odd jobs.
Sometimes our cities connected up, and we were in the same place, or near one another. But she was always just that girl in the café now, behind a window.
9 August 1987. I sit in a café near the Vltava. Sunset on the edges of women’s hair as if on waves of the sea. Boys in asterisk-splattered bermudas skating across Maje Bridge.
‘Do you know Seamus Heaney?’ a worried-looking boy from a nearby table, who’s heard that I’m Irish, comes up and asks me. There are four boys with shaven heads at the next table. A man with a little bullion of a goatee looks as I answer the boy. A man in a beret with a tongue has his head bowed over an empty plate as if in prayer.
There is a boll of light to the left side of Prague Castle.
The orchestra plays ‘La Paloma’, ‘Melancholy Baby’, ‘As Time Goes By’.
Pictures of robins, clumps of pansies at their feet, ripple, in my mind, into advertisements for Kincora Plug.
There were dead aunts outside the windows of cafés at sunset, and against the Vltava visions of drownings in my town when I was a child, a chain of swimmers across the river searching for a body.
A woman opened a wallet beside me, and instead of the young Slavonic face inside I saw the face of a drowned Teddy boy.
‘I’ll be watching to see if you go to the altar tomorrow,’ his mother admonished him on the Saturday he was drowned, urging him to go to confession. He was laid out in a brown habit. At his funeral a phalanx of liquorice-haired girl-cousins had carried wreaths of purple-carmine roses.
Years later, his father, a widower, put a memorial in the Connaught Tribune, where the photograph looked tragically fashionable and the handsomeness savagely unrequited. ‘That we might meet merrily in Heaven.’
At night there were the cafés, the one with the lady in the ginger wig, the one by the river, the same repertoire of songs over and over again.
I was troubled by these songs. I could hear my mother’s voice through these songs. ‘At Night When I Listen to Late Date I’m in Dreamland.’
She and her boyfriends would go to Dublin and dance to Billy Cotton, Ambrose, Jack Hylton, Oscar Rabin.
Then she got tuberculosis, had her lung punctured, refilled. She broke off an engagement because of it but didn’t tell her boyfriend, and so left him broken-hearted and bewildered.
Her doctor was in Mullingar: Dr Keenan, Church View. It was while she was attending him that she met my father. He recoiled when he heard about the tuberculosis, but after a few months proposed to her and they became engaged. He told her about the funeral of his mother in 1926, how it was one of the biggest for many years in East Galway, the blinds drawn on every private house in town as well as on businesses.
Her friends in 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
