One of the writers, a short, gingery man in a leather jacket, gets up and walks past their table. He gives a toothy smile, pausing to greet Lenka in the way that you do when you’re not certain whether you recognise someone or not. There’s a brief exchange in Czech, a blizzard of consonants. Lenka agrees with something said, laughs and offers a comment that clearly refers to English students rescued from the streets.
‘Ahoj,’ he says to them, sounding bizarrely nautical in this landlocked country. ‘Here is good,’ he tells them and they agree, it is good. ‘Very interesting.’
But he has to go. Clearly something calls him. ‘Čau,’ he says, the Italian ciao borrowed just to show how bright and carefree Czechoslovakia has become. They watch him leave, going out through the door into the street and glancing back at the last minute to give a jaunty little wave. ‘He is a writer of plays,’ Lenka explains. ‘Very important.’
Ghosts
That writer of plays is a ghost now, just another of the city’s many ghosts, for Prague is a truly haunted place. You can feel them around you. Some of them are just that, mundane ghosts that the tourist trade loves – golems, headless knights, wronged women, all that kind of thing – but there are others, there are others. The ghosts of the tens of thousands of Prague Jews killed by the Nazis, for example. Or the ghost of Franz Kafka, that anxiety-ridden man with the beady eyes and the sharp, inquisitive features (a rodent? a bird?) who pinned humanity to the pages of his fiction like so many insect specimens.
Although he was a Jew, Kafka escaped being murdered by the Nazis by dying of TB in 1924 (his three sisters were not so lucky) but his ghost still haunts the city, along with the spirit of his greatest novel, the one he never finished and never wanted published, the one he called Das Schloss, The Castle. But when people here refer to the Castle, they are not talking of Kafka’s masterpiece, which in Czech goes by the title Zámek, ‘Château’, but rather the seat of the president, as one might talk of the White House in the USA. And there it is, on the far side of the river as seen beyond the arguing writers through the windows of the Café Slavia: Hrad, Das Schloss, The Castle, dominating the town beneath, whose resigned inhabitants accept every complex, tortuous, irrational, absurd edict generated by the various organs of bureaucratic power – Federal Assembly, Party apparatus, Ministry – but signed off by the principal inhabitant of the Castle. Indeed, in his novel Kafka might almost have been prophesying the state that has come to pass in his home city less than three decades after his death, where fear is integral and endemic, where bureaucracy shuffles the cards and then loses them, where you are what the files say you are, where all is happy because it is decreed to be happy, and all is successful because that is what success is.
Other ghosts in the shadow of The Castle? Jaroslav Hašek for one, father of the Good Soldier Švejk. Hašek’s lifespan coincided almost exactly with Kafka’s (both were born in 1883; Hašek died one year before Kafka), but in every other way, both literary and personal, they occupy the opposite ends of any spectrum you care to invent. Drunk against teetotal, riotous extrovert against diffident introvert, bigamist against celibate, hilarious against sombre. Czech against German. Gentile against Jew.
But now all has changed. It is the summer of 1968 and the man in the high castle is a genial and white-haired war hero who goes by the name of Svoboda, which, in one of those coincidences of meaning that make one sure there is an ironist in heaven, means ‘Freedom’. And the man more or less in charge of the Party and therefore holding the reins of power in the country as a whole is some kind of interloper, a tall and gangling Slovak with a long nose and a warm smile and a tendency, dangerous amongst rulers, to consider the true feelings of the man and woman in the street. So now the writers and philosophers are talking at the café tables, writing freely at their desks, publishing in Literární listy and Reportér. A mere Two Thousand Words – the journalist Ludvík Vaculík’s famous June manifesto – has shaken the foundations of the socialist state. People can say what the hell they please and there is tacit concordance between the Party and the Castle because the Švejks are, for the moment, no longer in the ascendancy. Instead it’s socialismus s lidskou tváří, socialism with a human face, while the Soviet Union gathers the fraternal parties together on the banks of the Danube, in Bratislava, for a conference where they all swear that, while claiming ‘unwavering loyalty to Marxism-Leninism, each fraternal party may decide questions of further socialist development in a creative way, taking into account specific national features and conditions’.
It was during this Bratislava conference that a letter from five anti-reformist members of the Presidium of the Czechoslovak Communist Party was passed to a member of the Soviet Politburo to be handed directly to Leonid Brezhnev. This letter, the so-called ‘letter of invitation’, implored Brezhnev to intervene in Czechoslovakia ‘with all means at your disposal’ in order to save the country from the ‘imminent danger of counter-revolution’. So that there would be no misunderstanding, this invitation was written in Russian, with a plea to treat it with the utmost secrecy (prior to 1992, when it was released from the Russian State Archives, its existence was no more than a rumour). This treacherous missive, the excuse that the Soviets needed to give an aura of legality to their invasion, was passed to the intermediary in exactly the place where shit and piss is always passed, in the gents’ lavatory of the conference building.
What, I wonder, do the ghosts of Kafka and Hasěk say to each other about all this as they meet on the ghostly Prague streets? Or do they merely nod and pass by on the other side, the one off to haunt his favourite brothel, the other to the pub?
26
Things to see, places that live on in postcards sent to parents and friends – Tyn Square with the stiletto spires of the church of Our Lady standing over it, the Charles Bridge where musicians busk until moved on by the police, the Art Nouveau marvels of the Municipal House just near the medieval Powder Tower which has Gothic needles at the brim of its tall, pointed hat. Even the building and the room where Vladimir Ilyich Lenin founded the Bolshevik Party of Russia. Lenka will write about their visit, a piece for Student on how the Prague Spring is perceived by two students from the famous University of Oxford.
‘You will be famous in Czechoslovakia,’ Lenka tells them. It’s unclear whether her tone is ironic or not.
Another place that she wants to show them is something unique to her city. ‘You must take the memory of this back with you to England,’ she says. ‘This is very special.’
The building is a squat, secretive place hunched below the level of the pavement as though endeavouring to sit out the harsh storm of the twentieth century. A synagogue. They follow her inside only to discover that the storm is within, a blizzard that stings the eyes and batters on the mind. Not snow or sleet but names. Names everywhere, names on the walls, names on the arches and the alcoves, ranks of names like figures drawn up on some featureless Appellplatz. Names and dates: given names and dates in black, surnames in blood. Dates of birth and dates of death. Seventy-seven thousand seven hundred and ninety-seven of them, names so crowded that they appear to merge one into the other and become just one name, which is the name of an entire people – all the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia who died in the camps.