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

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 flourish of the shoulders, she handed me a bilious-green glass tumbler three-quarters full of vodka
    We were in a small, neat, bright room with a lot of blond, fake-Scandinavian furniture. Everywhere, on every available flat surface, Marta's collection of Bohemian glass vied for space with the Professor's books. Through an archway there was a galley kitchen where saucepans were seething and steaming. J. and G. and I sat crowded hip to hip on a narrow sofa, our knees pressed against the edge of a low coffee table. The Professor sat opposite us in what was obviously 'his' chair, an old wooden rocker draped with a faded, tasselled rug; when he grew animated, or when Marta was provoking him with one of her tirades, he would propel himself back and forth with steadily increasing speed until,