was too chillingly suggestive of windswept, floodlit wastes and huddled huts and freezing figures lying swaddled
in their rags on rows of bunks in the deep Arctic night. In Prague, snow was serious.
We were wafted into the cafe on a blast of icy air. The place was crowded but quiet. Heads were lifted and glances swept us
swiftly, hopefully, thorough as a policeman's hands checking us for what we might be carrying, then the eyes dropped back
to books, or chessboards, or just the shadows under tables. We sat by a steamed window and drank bitter coffee and a peculiarly
slimy liquor that the label on the bottle said was cognac. Talk among the three of us was desultory. Jan was distracted, and
my reticence in the taxi obviously still rankled with Philip. I looked about. Since the 1920s the Slavia has been one of Prague's
leading literary cafes. Kafka mentions it in his diaries, and Rilke used to take his evening coffee here, got up in spats
and starched collar and white cotton gloves; it is the setting for some of his short stories, Tales of Prague. Seifert was an habitue, and even wrote a series of 'Slavia Poems'. The Slavia is not arranged after the Austro-Hungarian model,
all dark old wood and cosy inwardness; it is more like the Caffe San Marco in Trieste, one of the world's great coffee houses,
noisy, even a little rowdy, and somewhat higgledy-piggledy, with tables set too close to each other so that when you stand
up, your chair back makes the customer behind you knock his front teeth against the rim of his espresso cup. Also, the Slavia
looks not in but out, on to the quayside and the Vltava. In 1991 the cafe was closed for renovation, and stayed closed for
seven years due to a leasing dispute between a consortium of Boston investors and the Film School next door. The President,
Vaclav Havel, was among the many Praguers who loudly protested the closure; when eventually the Slavia reopened in 1998, Havel
spoke of the saving of a national institution.
That night in the 1980s it seemed more like a national memorial. Who are the most numerous frequenters of public literary
establishments, so-called? In the 1960s in Dublin I found no Behan or Kavanagh in McDaid's or Mulligan's, and when I was in
Paris and walked past the Cafe Flore or the Deux Magots - what penniless young Irishman on his first Paris visit would dare
venture inside such frighteningly suave and expensive places? - 1 saw a lot of American tourists, but no sign of Sartre or
de Beauvoir hard at work over their cahiers and cafes. The customers in the Slavia that night did not look likely litterateurs to me. They were young, poorly dressed and bored, or middle-aged and dowdy; only in the elderly among them, I thought, was
there discernible the still-surviving glow of an intellectual spark. I remember one night in Dublin in 1987 arguing with Joseph
Brodsky and Susan Sontag about yet another letter they and other East Coast luminaries had written to the New York Review of Books protesting the imprisonment of intellectuals in the Soviet Union. Did they ever, I demanded - the wine was flowing, and I
could hardly see Brodsky behind the clouds of cigarette smoke in which he was forever enveloped - did they, he and his American
friends, ever think to protest about the imprisonment of a Russian street sweeper, or charlady, some poor nobody who had not
even written a subversive poem but still had ended up in prison? Sontag was adamant on the need to keep pecking away at the
vast repressive machine that was the Soviet Union, and no doubt she was right. Brodsky, however, a fine, just and courageous
man, conceded that, yes, 'we do tend to look after our own.' Recently I read a memorial tribute to Brodsky, who died of a
heart attack in 1996 at the age of only fifty-six, by the Russian essayist and fiction writer, Tatyana Tolstaya. She wrote
of how she had urged him after 1989 to return to Russia - a thing he was
in their rags on rows of bunks in the deep Arctic night. In Prague, snow was serious.
We were wafted into the cafe on a blast of icy air. The place was crowded but quiet. Heads were lifted and glances swept us
swiftly, hopefully, thorough as a policeman's hands checking us for what we might be carrying, then the eyes dropped back
to books, or chessboards, or just the shadows under tables. We sat by a steamed window and drank bitter coffee and a peculiarly
slimy liquor that the label on the bottle said was cognac. Talk among the three of us was desultory. Jan was distracted, and
my reticence in the taxi obviously still rankled with Philip. I looked about. Since the 1920s the Slavia has been one of Prague's
leading literary cafes. Kafka mentions it in his diaries, and Rilke used to take his evening coffee here, got up in spats
and starched collar and white cotton gloves; it is the setting for some of his short stories, Tales of Prague. Seifert was an habitue, and even wrote a series of 'Slavia Poems'. The Slavia is not arranged after the Austro-Hungarian model,
all dark old wood and cosy inwardness; it is more like the Caffe San Marco in Trieste, one of the world's great coffee houses,
noisy, even a little rowdy, and somewhat higgledy-piggledy, with tables set too close to each other so that when you stand
up, your chair back makes the customer behind you knock his front teeth against the rim of his espresso cup. Also, the Slavia
looks not in but out, on to the quayside and the Vltava. In 1991 the cafe was closed for renovation, and stayed closed for
seven years due to a leasing dispute between a consortium of Boston investors and the Film School next door. The President,
Vaclav Havel, was among the many Praguers who loudly protested the closure; when eventually the Slavia reopened in 1998, Havel
spoke of the saving of a national institution.
That night in the 1980s it seemed more like a national memorial. Who are the most numerous frequenters of public literary
establishments, so-called? In the 1960s in Dublin I found no Behan or Kavanagh in McDaid's or Mulligan's, and when I was in
Paris and walked past the Cafe Flore or the Deux Magots - what penniless young Irishman on his first Paris visit would dare
venture inside such frighteningly suave and expensive places? - 1 saw a lot of American tourists, but no sign of Sartre or
de Beauvoir hard at work over their cahiers and cafes. The customers in the Slavia that night did not look likely litterateurs to me. They were young, poorly dressed and bored, or middle-aged and dowdy; only in the elderly among them, I thought, was
there discernible the still-surviving glow of an intellectual spark. I remember one night in Dublin in 1987 arguing with Joseph
Brodsky and Susan Sontag about yet another letter they and other East Coast luminaries had written to the New York Review of Books protesting the imprisonment of intellectuals in the Soviet Union. Did they ever, I demanded - the wine was flowing, and I
could hardly see Brodsky behind the clouds of cigarette smoke in which he was forever enveloped - did they, he and his American
friends, ever think to protest about the imprisonment of a Russian street sweeper, or charlady, some poor nobody who had not
even written a subversive poem but still had ended up in prison? Sontag was adamant on the need to keep pecking away at the
vast repressive machine that was the Soviet Union, and no doubt she was right. Brodsky, however, a fine, just and courageous
man, conceded that, yes, 'we do tend to look after our own.' Recently I read a memorial tribute to Brodsky, who died of a
heart attack in 1996 at the age of only fifty-six, by the Russian essayist and fiction writer, Tatyana Tolstaya. She wrote
of how she had urged him after 1989 to return to Russia - a thing he was
Similar Books
