Read Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City for Free Online Page A

different now, more indistinct, it would seem, as if muffled by
     the falling darkness. There is the hum of the great concourse of office workers going home; voices sound, and a radio buzzes
     somewhere, and car tyres make a watery hissing in the dry streets. One's day-clothes restrict, there is a hot dampness in
     the crevices of elbows, behind the knees. Sluggishly one's mind casts about, fumbling like a hand on the bed covers, trying
     to grasp something, a fragment of thought, a dream, a memory, and failing. What is it the moment is reminiscent of? The silence,
     the hum in the air, the woolly warmth . . . all this is out of the far, the immemorial, past. Is it childhood that is nudging
     at the blunted edges of consciousness, a jumbled recollection of the fevered bedtimes of one's lost childhood? Somewhere adults
     are awake, going about their unsleeping, mysterious tasks.
    How much of this first visit to Prague, twenty years ago, am I remembering, and how much is being invented for me? Memory
     is a vast, animated, time-ravaged mural. There is a fore ground, hazier in places than the extremest background, while in
     the middle distance the real business is going on, but so busily it is hard to make out. We fix on a face, a familiar room,
     a little scene; startlingly, off at the side, from nowhere, it might be, a pair of eyes look out at us directly from the crowd,
     fixing us with their candid glance, cool, amused, and quizzical, like the eyes of that mild maenad in Poussin's Dance to the Music of Time. There are, too, the big, continent-shaped patches of bare stucco, the damaged places that no restorer will mend, now. Some
     things of that first visit - and of other, more recent ones - I recall as vividly as if they were before me now, but they
     are almost all inconsequential. The hopeful money-changer in his leather jacket. The two prostitutes in the lobby, their lipstick,
     their hairstyles that long ago have gone out of fashion, even the imitation palm tree under which they sat. I see the Professor
     standing in the cathedral, pointing up earnestly at the stained-glass window. I see myself waking, fully dressed, on that
     big, high bed, not knowing where I was. Why these fragments and not others, far more significant? Why these?
    The Professor's wife was short, dark, handsome and intense. Her name was, let us say, Marta. The clothes she wore were too
     young for her, a tight black jumper and a black leather skirt, far too short, and black stockings. The outfit, at once severe
     - all that black - and slightly tartish, was I think a form of protest, a gesture of defiance against what she saw as the
     meanness and enforced conformity of her life. Of all the people I met in Prague that first time, no matter how oppressed or
     angry or despairing, she was the one who seemed to me truly a prisoner. There was a manic quality to her desperation, a sense
     of pent-up hysteria, as if she had passed the day, and so many other days, pacing the floor, from door to window, window to
     door, one hand plunged in her hair and the other clutching a shaking cigarette. She would have been frightening, in her violent
     discontent, had it not been for her humour. In the midst of a tirade against the State, against her family - she seemed to
     have a great many relatives, all of whom she professed to despise - she would suddenly stop and turn her face aside and give
     a snuffly cackle of laughter, and shake her head, and click her tongue, as if she had caught sight of a younger, happier,
     more cheerfully sceptical version of herself smiling at her and wagging a finger in rueful admonishment. I think that in her
     heart she simply could not credit her predicament, and lived in the angry conviction that a life so absurd and grotesque must
     be at any moment about to change. I liked her at once, the menacing black outfit, the scarlet fingernails, the frankly dyed
     hair, the flashing look that she gave me as, with a flamenco dancer's