Prague 1938 E-Book

Dara Kavanagh

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 354

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Prague 1938 is a coming-of-age novel, or a novel of lost illusions, set in a Czechoslovakia threatened with incorporation into the Third Reich. Centred on the 15 year old Guido Hayek, it traces his infatuation with Leah Meisel, an orphaned Jewish girl several years older than him who, he discovers, is part of a street-gang of con-artists and petty thieves. His initiation into their world occurs when Leah challenges him to steal a ring from a jewellers. Soon he is enmeshed.Guido is aware that Leah's grandfather Ezra Meisel, an antiques dealer, has plans to emigrate to Odessa with her, particularly as the Sudeten Crisis comes to a head. Guido's own crisis comes to a head when he discovers that his father Emil, an art-dealer whom he adores, is bent on cheating old Meisel, and he must choose between aiding the Meisels or helping his own half-sister, the 'degenerate' artist Katya, who also has the 'taint' of Jewish blood, emigrate to the New World."The streets of Prague take centre stage in this smorgasbord of a novel: coming-of-age, familial upheaval, political unrest, artistic intrigue, rag order existence, the folly of youthful infatuation, the warp and woof of flight to a new world; and all of it played out under the looming shadow of war, of a world approaching the precipice. This is elegant, vibrant and read-on storytelling at its very best." – Alan McMonagle"[Dara Kavanagh] has written a vivid coming-of-age morality tale set in pre-WWII Prague that holds a magic mirror up to our own strange and disrupted times" – Paul Lynch

Leseprobe

Dedalus Original Fiction in Paperback

Prague 1938

Dara Kavanagh is a writer, academic, translator and poet. A native of Dublin, he spent more than a decade working in Africa, Australia and Latin America before returning to settle in Ireland. He is the author of several books and poetry collections.

Kolik řečí umíš, tolikrát jsi člověkem– Czech Proverb

Contents

Dedication

IThe House on Nerudova Street

IIU Černého Slunce

IIIOld Meisel

IVThe Thief

VMeisel’s Granddaughter

VIKatya

VII‘Pequod Mutiny’

VIIINárodní Obec Fašistická

IXHeinrich Heine

XPickaxe Handles

XIOrlando Furioso

XIIThree Card Trick

XIIIChess Pieces

XIVApprenticeship

XVExodus

XVIScenarios

XVIIReckonings

XVIIIThe Letter

XIXOn the Bridge

XXSeptember 1938

XXIWitness

XXIIThe Carve-up

XXIIIBloodlines

XXIVSusannah and the Elders

XXVSuspicions

XXVIEndgame

XXVIIThrough the Looking Glass

XXVIIIComplicity

XXIXShowdown

XXXChristmas Eve

XXXIChristmas Truce

XXXIINew Year’s Eve

XXXIIIFlight

XXXIVDegenerate

XXXVCigno Nero

XXXVINew World

Recommended Reading

Copyright

I

The House on Nerudova Street

Maman came from Turin, necropolis of statues and long colonnades where Nietzsche finally went mad. Perhaps, as a girl, the chill of Alpine melt-water entered her veins. She had little of the hot-headedness one associates with her compatriots. Her anger, such as it was, took the form of headaches and withdrawals.

In fact she was Papa’s second wife. His first, the soprano Elsa Mörschel, had run off with her voice coach and, as was said in those days, had come to a bad end somewhere in Moravia. A laudanum overdose. Along with a stack of recordings on the Ultraphon label and a baby-grand that dominated the music-room, she left two young children in my father’s charge: my half-brother Klaus, twelve years my senior, and Katya, closer in age if not in appearance. It may have been that responsibility that led him to act so precipitously. Within months, rather than installing a regular governess in the house on Nerudova Street, he’d brought Maria Teresa Tedesco from Turin to Prague, where she knew not a soul and spoke not a word of Czech. I can only assume she’d been his mistress, one of several perhaps.

Papa travelled a lot in those days. He was an art dealer, and it was not unusual for him to be gone for weeks at a time, to Nuremberg or Dresden, to Vienna or Venice, to Basel or Turin. As the years went by he visited Italy less and less. He declared he could no longer abide the preposterous posturing of the ‘Hairless Ape’, as he called him. What Maman thought of Il Duce I’ve never fathomed. Papa’s antipathy meant that I’d only been to Turin once, on the occasion of my grandfather’s funeral. I was five. I recall a gloomy interior inhabited by whispers and ladies’ fans and great quantities of lacework, and the powder on my grandmother’s cheek that came away when you brushed it, like dust from a moth’s wing. I’ve no doubt that dusky interior has coloured my memory of the city.

Because of the places business took him, Papa was something of a polyglot. We all were. It wasn’t unusual, in Prague, in those days, to speak several languages. Maman always addressed me, and I her, in Italian, though why I’d always called her Maman and Papa, Papa, I’ve never understood, unless it derived from her penchant for reading French novels in yellow covers. Even after sixteen years, her Czech was error prone and heavily accented. Father Kaufmann, a Sudeten Jesuit who was my Latin, German, History and Mathematics tutor and also Maman’s confessor, was a frequent visitor, and in his presence hochdeutsche became the lingua-franca in the living room. At other times we’d entertain one or another of Papa’s business associates, a far-flung bunch, so that occasional smatterings of Polish, Ruthenian, even Yiddish would pepper the talk. It was like an illustration of the old Czech proverb he’d had Maman embroider for over the lintel: Kolik řečí umíš, tolikrát jsi člověkem – ‘Your humanity is as plural as the number of tongues you speak’. At one such evening, Father Kaufmann shook a celery stick and baptised our house in Mala Strana the ‘Little League of Nations.’ The maid and cook, though, spoke only Czech, as, by choice, did Klaus.

Klaus, you see, was a nationalist. He was just old enough to remember the Old Habsburg Empire, whose collapse gave birth to a clutch of new nations, each eyeing their neighbour with deadly jealousy. So it was a surprise to hear the ardour that animated his voice when he spoke of the Berlin Olympics – he’d been the star member of the Czechoslovakian sculling team. At the closing ceremony – this he told us on his return – once the flame was extinguished and the stadium plunged into darkness, there was a moment’s awed silence and then one hundred thousand voices called out in unison, Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil. ‘It was no use to resist, you were swept along by the power of it.’ Eyes ablaze he stood and mimicked the Roman salute, but that was for the benefit of Katya, who stared daggers. Had Father Kaufmann been there, I imagine his performance would have been more muted.

As for Katya, she was far happier working on her charcoals, montages and engravings in her attic studio. Whatever her opinions, and whatever language she thought them up in, she kept them largely to herself. Or she let her art speak for her. The prints and collages she produced, several of which had featured in avant-garde journals like Exploze, Pásmo and even once in Revue Devětsilu, were dark, angular, monochrome, jagged – curious distortions of the human form that Klaus castigated as perverse. ‘Why give your time to producing such ugly images?’ he’d ask, genuinely baffled. ‘You used to draw so beautifully.’ She might have pointed to the war-cripples who, all through our childhood, begged on every bridge and under every archway. Or to the wine-stain birthmark that discoloured one side of her brow. But she chose not to.

Papa indulged her, to an extent championed her work, which is all the more surprising given the persistent rumour that she was not, in fact, his child. Maman could never understand her husband’s somewhat decadent taste in art – for her, art started and ended with the Renaissance masters. And so she rarely visited the U Černého Slunce Gallery on Karluva Street which, to me, was an Aladdin’s cave. ‘Contemporary Czech and International Art’, read the business card with the black sun logo. By ‘International’, Papa meant German, Swiss, Italian and, occasionally, Hungarian art. I don’t recall ever having seen anything from further afield.

At the time of the events I’m to relate, I’d just turned fifteen. Father Kaufmann SJ had been my mother’s confessor, and now that I was entering adolescence, he was to be my spiritual advisor. I didn’t mind. I quite liked him. He had a long, desiccated face with large eyes that made me think of Don Quixote. Besides, he’d taught me the rudiments of chess when we should have been studying algebra. The one black mark against him was nineteenth-century history. Where I wanted to learn about the Risorgimento and the Franco-Prussian War, all he seemed to be interested in was surplus value and the emancipation of the serfs. I also had him to thank for the family name. I was Guido Salvatore Hayek. It was his steadfast banter that finally led Papa to raise his hands in mock surrender and agree to ‘allow Maria Teresa make an honest man of me’.

You might have thought Prague would have been scandalised by so prominent a figure as Emil Hayek living openly with his mistress and having a child by her. But Papa was genial, forceful, well-liked, and moved largely in artistic circles where such arrangements were common enough. Besides, it had been his young wife who had abandoned him. True, as Catholics, he and Maman had had to await news of the demise of Elsa Mörschel before remarrying. But that news had come two years earlier. The wedding, a private affair, took place the very year of Maman’s return to Turin to bury her father. That trip would be all the honeymoon she ever got.

In any case, Father Kaufmann had always intrigued because he was such a mix of contradictions. A chain smoker in a soutane, one with a taste for the finer things, though he never hid his communist leanings, an outspokenness which raised eyebrows and occasional rebukes within the military hierarchy of the Society of Jesus. A bon viveur, though he’d taken a vow of poverty and ran a soup kitchen out of the great Church of St Niklaus. A Sudeten German who had no time for the Sudeten Germans then agitating to be incorporated into Grossdeutschland. A Jesuit who could fire off a ribald joke or colourful anecdote any time Maman was out of earshot. He must have been in his late sixties, though he behaved like a man of forty. Papa called him Hans or Hansi, to the rest of us he was Father Kaufmann. Only to Maman was he Johannes.

I wasn’t devout in the way Maman was. I was a believer, though. Moreover, I had that hunger for devotion to a cause peculiar to adolescence. But there was one other reason I was looking forward to having Father Kaufmann as my spiritual advisor. In all things, Klaus excelled. He was the complete athlete, and the trophy cabinet teemed with cups and medals for soccer, shooting and chess as well as rowing. His results at the Gymnasium had been first class, whereas I’d been tutored at home, since I’d inherited from my mother’s side a congenital irregularity of the heart, an arrhythmia that had cost her only brother his life while he was still a seminarian. It was Uncle Guido I’d been named for.

In all things, Klaus not only excelled. He’d also preceded me. It had been Father Kaufmann who’d taught him, too, the rudiments of chess until the day his student out-played him. When Alekhine beat the great Capablanca for the world crown, they’d play through the moves together, inventing endings for the games that had been drawn, which Klaus would invariably win regardless of which side he took. It had been Father Kaufmann who’d introduced Klaus to canoeing – the Jesuits ran a youth club on the Moldau, or the Vltava as Klaus insisted. But Klaus didn’t have a religious bone in his body. Nor the sort of philosophical curiosity that I’d always had. The spiritual would be an area of Father Kaufmann’s attention that would belong to me, and to me alone.

Don’t imagine it was sibling rivalry that was driving me. I’d never seen Klaus as a sibling. He was fully twelve years older, so to me he’d always been an adult. As for what he made of me, I’ve never really known. Did the teenager resent the arrival of this intruder, the illegitimate child of his father’s mistress? If he did, it wasn’t apparent. True, he rarely called me by my Christian name, always Kašpárek, after the diminutive puppet. But I think that was because I was so much younger than he, and wasn’t much given to sports. He didn’t appear to begrudge the presence of his father’s mistress in the house, either, but that may be because all his scorn was directed toward the mother who’d abandoned him.

On one occasion, while Papa was away on a trip to Basel, Klaus brought me up to Krčský woods together with Papa’s hunting rifle. There, we shot at a line of bottles. It was exhilarating. All the same, I came away with a feeling of total inadequacy, of how cosseted my upbringing was. Papa had regularly taken Klaus on hunting trips when he’d been that age. Incidentally, Papa once asked Klaus to teach me how to make a rudimentary crystal radio set out of copper wire, aluminium foil, a safety pin, and lead taken out of a pencil. I marvelled to hear the thin strains of the Prague Philharmonic condense out of the ether. But Klaus’ heart hadn’t been in it. At twelve you pick up such things.

For a while we did share one passion. That was for stamp-collecting. It was through these miniature stained-glass windows that I first got a sense of the wider world around us: Sverige, Helvetia, CCCP, Polska, Magyar Posta. It was no harm at all that Papa had so many foreign correspondents. My favourites were those that had been overprinted – the British Monarch overwritten by Saorstát Éireann 1922, and Deutsches Reich stamps overwritten with Danzig or bearing fantastic sums, 75 Tausend, 2 Millionen. When I turned eleven he gifted me the entire collection. Klaus had moved on.

The mystery was that my father always spoke with a kind of amused irony about Elsa Mörschel. ‘I came home one day,’ he’d say, ‘to find the pair of them practising the duet out of Don Giovanni.’ He’d even play, on occasion, one of the several recordings she’d left behind of Heyduk’s Songs My Mother Taught Me, which invariably prompted Klaus to leave the room. Through the static of the old gramophone I found her voice thin, almost ghostly. Most visitors, though, agreed with Papa that she could have been a very fine soprano indeed, had she but kept it up.

II

U Černého Slunce

I may have given the idea that I was something of an invalid. Not so. The arrhythmia meant that I had to take a few basic precautions, that was all. Not to get overtired, not to get dehydrated. No sudden or prolonged exertions. When an attack came on, and the frantic double-pulse fisted at my throat, I had to lie down and raise up my legs until it passed, even if it meant lying in a doorway on the street. That had only happened twice, though. Another time I’d fainted. But that was as likely down to anaemia, brought on by my recent growth. Maman was overprotective, but given the untimely death of her beloved Guido, it was difficult for Papa to gainsay her. He did his best, and I loved him for it.

He didn’t have it all his own way, either. Sometimes I heard raised voices. As I had grown gangly over the last few months and my voice had broken to something of a croak, as my skin was bad and my imagination worse, I sensed instinctively I was the root cause. Sometimes I heard Papa shout words like ‘mollycoddle’ and ‘mama’s boy’. For her part, Maman’s headaches and silences became daily features of Nerudova Street. But Papa persevered, and anytime he persevered, Papa prevailed.

So it came about that every Tuesday and Thursday he’d take me to the U Černého Slunce Gallery, ‘The Black Sun’, on Karluva Street. ‘It’ll be a good apprenticeship for the boy,’ he announced at the dinner table. And so it was. There was so much to learn. Not merely developing an eye for art trends and an idea of the prices a particular artist might fetch, but framing, restoring, touching up. Talking to customers and gauging what it was that they most wanted to hear was a skill in itself, one at which Papa excelled. Only rarely did a customer meet the asking price. The asking price was no more than an opening gambit in a game of bargaining and haggling that might take an hour or more, during which biscuits and a samovar of tea or even a bottle of absinthe were produced. ‘Guido, go and see if the little green fairy is home,’ he’d say at such times. And then there were the ledgers, with their double-entry accounts and balance-sheets that had to come out identically when you totted up income against expenditure. Mostly, I was an errand boy. This delighted me. I loved Prague, that fairy tale city. Papa placed an injunction on informing Maman of this aspect of my apprenticeship. Maman would not have approved.

He gave me an allowance to cover these days, not quite a wage, but given how little I spent beyond old stamps or an odd second-hand book, it was sufficient for me to begin to amass a nest-egg in an old biscuit-tin I kept hidden at the back of my wardrobe. ‘You should never be without a little something put aside,’ he’d say, unpeeling a few twenty koruna notes. ‘Fate has this nasty habit of springing surprises on us out of the bluest of skies.’

Because he had the only set of keys and had to let in the cleaning woman, Darja, who came three mornings a week, and Jan, who’d lost part of his arm in the war and worked half-days, we’d rise before dawn. We’d set off having had nothing but a glass of water and maybe an old crust – later, I’d be sent out to the corner café for hot bread-rolls and coffee, which I’d carry back in a pewter flask, but never before ten o’clock, when the gallery opened its doors to the public. I loved the walk down Mostecka and over the Karluv Bridge before the city had woken up, with the mist low over the river and the roofs and cobbles glinting as though they were newly washed. The gallery was always cold to begin with, though by the time we opened up to the public at ten, it had warmed through our activity. I loved the very smells of the place, which the cold air and our hunger pangs made more distinct – the heady volatility of turpentine and white spirits; the rich savour of linseed oil; the burnt tang of sandalwood and beech shavings from Jan’s lathe.

It was as well we set off so early. Papa could never pass an acquaintance without exchanging pleasantries, gossip, or the latest off-colour anecdote. Always remember, Guy, our business is people. I think his philosophy went beyond the gallery. Papa was a social animal to the roots of his being. He had a sonorous voice that came from the diaphragm, and he loved nothing better than to exercise it. He was the king of banter, of flirtation. At any other time but seven in the morning it might have taken him thirty minutes to cross that bridge. As it was, we were often fifteen, even thirty minutes late to open the shop for Jan, who scowled and muttered, and Darja, who couldn’t have cared less.

In the workshop I’d watch Jan out of the corner of my eye. He was missing his left hand, and in place of a hook or a regular prosthesis, a sort of metal loop protruded from the sleeve. This he managed with considerable dexterity, as well as the crook of his left arm, so that he was able to manoeuvre and hold an awl, say, or a chisel just ahead of the mallet. It was Jan who had crafted the black sun pendant, finely gilt, that hung out over our doorway. He invariably wore a forage cap from his army days, which he’d whip off with his good hand to dry the sweat with his sleeve in the same movement as though every second counted. He worked fast, as if to demonstrate that the amputation had done nothing to diminish his usefulness. In all the time I’d known him, I’d never seen him smile.

By the back wall was a work-bench with a vice and wooden-jawed clamp. Above it, their outlines traced in inks, hung an entire taxonomy of tools – chisels and mallets and saws of every variety. These were Jan’s tools. Beneath the work desk was a bucket which contained such tools as Papa had accumulated before he’d taken him on. On the facing wall hung a great selection of frame corners, in every design, wood and tint. Several of these, Papa would place in turn for a customer on the corner of a canvas. His skill was to find the precise form and thickness and shade that would bring to life the painting, picking out a highlight hitherto subdued.

Jan must have been a master-joiner before the war, but he was so parsimonious of speech, begrudging words as a miser would coins, that I never verified this idea. Where one of Papa’s maxims ran ‘Measure twice, cut once’, Jan had an eye that gauged, by a single glance, lengths and cuts and fits to an uncanny snugness, so that glue was scarcely required. It was fascinating to watch, fascinating to see the finely bevelled lengths of frame emerge on a bench so rough-hewn. At the pedal-driven lathe he was also a master wood-turner. Besides framing, the gallery ran a sideline in plinths and custom-made display tables which helped when business was slack. Papa’s philosophy was that every mouse should have two boltholes. That philosophy had seen the gallery through the lean years at the start of the decade.

Within the workshop, the contrast between Jan’s rapid handiwork and Papa’s painstaking, meticulous methodology was something to behold. Though the U Černého Slunce Gallery was known for its line in contemporary Czech art, Papa took in old paintings that required cleaning or restoration. He’d set them, unframed and naked, on an easel, then examine the brighter border that had been concealed for maybe centuries beneath the frame. As he worked, I marvelled to watch the tiny coins of pure colour emerge from under the yellowed varnish, coaxed out by a cotton ball dampened in a Petri dish. ‘When the solution might be too strong, you know what you must use?’ he asked me, a jeweller’s eye-piece squeezed like a monocle in his left eye. I shrugged, and was startled to hear him gargle up a froth of saliva and tap his lips. ‘Go on, try it!’ With a glance toward Jan, to make sure I wasn’t being made a fool of, I spat, tentatively. ‘Don’t pussyfoot, boy!’ He spat. I spat. It became a race. Within minutes the entire canvas was marbled in our saliva. I glanced again to Jan. He’d remained impervious to the whole game.

On a couple of occasions my father had taken me on overnight trips – to Hradec Kralove or Český Krumlov. It was far more difficult to bring Maman round on such occasions, and taking ‘the child’ beyond Czechoslovakia’s frontiers was absolutely out of the question. Out of the question, Emil, I won’t have it! And yet, secretly, Papa had secured a passport for me, a treasure I kept hidden in the biscuit-tin to the back of the wardrobe. One of these days, Guy! And the first Maman will know of it is when she receives a picture postcard from lake Geneva. How would that appeal to you?

It was on our trip to Český Krumlov, or more correctly on our return journey from Český Krumlov, that my father confided that he was training me to one day take over the business. ‘Keep it under your hat for the time being, Guy,’ he said. ‘You see it’s no use leaving it to Klaus. I hate to say it about my own son, but he’s a Philistine. Klaus’ idea of beauty might do for the National Socialists, but it will never do for Bohemia.’

I was confused. I blushed, with embarrassment, but also with pleasure. After all, Klaus was making decent money as a sports instructor and had done a course in radio engineering. He’d never shown any real interest in the gallery. ‘Don’t say anything to your mother,’ he tapped his nose, ‘not a word.’ Then he added, ‘Not as yet.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because my dear boy, Maman may have other plans for her little Guido.’ Though nothing had been said in the house, I had an inkling of what he meant. Papa had nothing against the church, not as such. But neither had he any great devotion to it. Once, I’d overheard him say to her ‘you won’t be happy until you have your Guido Salvatore dressed in a priest’s frock.’ All the same, when she’d insisted on my having a spiritual adviser, it was he who’d insisted it be Father Kaufmann. ‘Tell me,’ he squinted one eye, always a sign that a bon mot was on its way, ‘How are you getting along with our irreverent Reverend? By the by, did you ever wonder why his hair isn’t white, or silver?’

I pictured momentarily the priest’s mane of hair and pencil moustache, which were the tawny colour of old ivory. I shook my head.

‘Too much of this!’ He made a gesture of smoking. ‘So how are you two coming along?’

I smiled, weakly. Because what he was probing was none of his business. I suddenly became interested in the evening countryside sweeping past our carriage window.

‘Do you know, I think that old rogue is an atheist!’ Papa began to drum his fingers and hum a merry tune, barump-be-dum, barump-be-dum, and I could see his reflection still eyeing up mine.

‘But what about Katya?’ I asked, in part to move the subject away from something so private as my confessor, something which should be untouched by the mild raillery I could expect from Papa. But partly, too, because when we are met with sudden good fortune, we try to forestall any possible obstacle by naming it at once. ‘Surely Katya is the artist of the family.’

‘Poor Katyenka,’ he sighed, which surprised me. ‘Her art is all very well, but she has no head for business. No feel for it. And where talking to people is concerned, well! She’s a disaster, isn’t she?’ He leaned forwards and fixed me with his gaze in a manner I’d only rarely seen. ‘Promise me, Guido, that you’ll always look out for her.’

I promised. Of course I did. It made me feel like a man to make such a promise. But at fourteen going on fifteen, I had no idea what it was I was promising.

III

Old Meisel

1938 is a catastrophic date in the history of the Czech people, a people who have never lacked for catastrophic dates. It was a pivotal moment for all of Europe, a year during which the course of history might have gone any number of directions. For the house on Nerudova Street, too, it was a time of unlooked-for change. As the bells of Our Lady of Týn rang in the New Year, and the crowds in the Old Town Square embraced one another with apprehensive smiles, we had little real idea of just how bad things would get before the year was out.

All through spring, the Marconi wireless was turned far less to music, as it always had been. In previous years, the main battleground had been whether to tune into Munich or Prague or Vienna, to classical or jazz, to Italian opera or Django Reinhart or Smetana’s Ma Vlast. Now, bulletins and political broadcasts were the order of the day. ‘That machine,’ declared Father Kaufmann, rather more sententiously than was his wont, ‘is the tabernacle in everyone’s home. And we must be careful, or demagogues of the stamp of Dr Goebbels are like to become the new household gods.’ If Maman had had her way, the wireless would have remained unplugged, displaced by the old phonograph it had usurped. ‘At least such a rasping voice would never make it onto a record label.’

Political discussion, which often grew heated, was unavoidable, particularly when we had guests. Maman would have been far happier if these soirees had, as in former times, remained musical affairs, with card games and talk of artistic fashions and the latest town gossip. Katya had learned the clarinet to grade six, and though I loved the Hebraic airs she’d coax from it, it was a shame she could never be induced to sing outside her attic studio – she had inherited a sweet voice from her soprano mother. There was usually some guest who could bring to life the baby-grand to accompany Maman or Klaus, who had a fine baritone voice. But that year, there was an element of the ostrich burying its head in the sand about such frivolous entertainment.

One evening in late spring, around the time of the partial mobilisation in the wake of the Austrian Anschluss, the talk turned again to the problem of minorities. The question hinged on this. With the map of Middle Europe such a hotchpotch of ethnic groups sitting inside the towns and borders of larger polities, should the borders be moved to accommodate the minorities, or the minorities moved to consolidate the borders. Klaus took the latter view. Curiously, given Konrad Henlein’s increasingly vocal demands for full autonomy for the Sudeten Germans, his antipathy was aimed chiefly at the Poles. After all, the Germans you could understand. They’d been badly done by with the Treaty of Versailles. Some of their territorial claims were justifiable, particularly around Danzig. Henlein and his SdP would have to be accommodated in some way, but they’d have to be reasonable in their demands. No castle under siege could reasonably be asked to surrender its castle walls. But as for the Poles, they were damned opportunists who’d carve up Bohemia at the drop of a hat. When Marshal Piłsudski had died, he for one had shed not a tear. Not one.

‘And what,’ asked Father Kaufmann, ‘if mein lieber Konrad won’t come round to your way of seeing things?’

Klaus was leaning against the piano, punctuating his thought by depressing a B# key again and again. It was an annoying tick. Plink! ‘He’ll have to.’

‘But if he won’t?’ Father Kaufmann, lighting one cigarette from the butt of the previous, was squinting against the smoke. It was a sacred mystery where he got his cigarettes, since Jesuits are not permitted to have their own money. ‘What if Herr Konrad and his SdP cronies simply refuse to be accommodated, as you put it?’

‘Then they’ll have to leave.’ Plink! ‘If they want so much to be a part of a Grossdeutschland,’ Plink! ‘then let them go and live there. And I say to them, auf Wiedersehen und viel Glück.’ Plink!

‘Leave at gunpoint?’

‘If necessary.’ Plink! A vision came to me of Klaus as he had appeared at the time of his national service. He’d remained in uniform all the while he was on home leave, even when attending mass. It had seemed to my seven-year-old mind admirable, romantic. This time round, though he’d long been a reservist and had recently enlisted in the Signal Corps, Maman had prevailed on him to dress in evening clothes.

Father Kaufmann nodded slowly. ‘All three million of them.’ This was more dismayed statement than question.

‘If it comes to that, all three million.’ Plink! Plink! Plink! QED. One, two, three.

‘Stop drumming on that one key, Klaus, it’s infantile.’ The interjection was from Maman, who was at the card-table. Her back was to the piano, so that she didn’t see the glower that darkened his features at being admonished in front of his fiancée. Through the partition, she and Katya made up with Maman the party of skat players. Maman’s upbringing in funereal Turin must have been a nineteenth-century one, and she still subscribed to the tradition that women should withdraw after dinner to allow the men to discuss politics over port or whisky. It was a concession to modernity that the partition to the drawing-room remained open.

Rather than answer Maman, Klaus turned his chagrin on me. ‘Guido wants to abolish borders. Make Europe into one big Switzerland, as advocated by his beloved guru Stefan Zweig. Isn’t that right, Kašpárek?’

I flushed. ‘If it means an end to minorities…’

‘A brotherhood of nations!’

‘Why not a brotherhood?’

‘All marching happily to the Radetzky March, I suppose. And ruled over by a family of inbred degenerates. We tried that before, Kašpárek. And look where it brought us.’ Klaus had meandered through the partition and over to the card-table, and now placed his hand on the shoulder of his fiancée, who was looking up at him admiringly. ‘I tell you, if I had been there in Sarajevo that day, I’d have put a bullet in Franz Ferdinand myself.’

‘There’s something in it all the same,’ said Father Kaufmann. ‘Love thine enemy. And couldn’t they just as well march to the Internationale.’

‘Congratulations, Guido Salvatore mundi, you have the support of our Marxist priest! You know what they call him down in the rowing club? Red Johann.’

‘Il prete rosso,’ put in Papa, winking at me.

‘Klaus!’ said Maman, smiling. ‘Johannes is no Marxist.’

‘Marxist, no,’ declared the Jesuit, raising an exclamatory finger. ‘Communist.’

‘There’s a difference?’

‘Certainly, there’s a difference. From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs. Doesn’t it have the very cadence of the apostle? The early Christian communities were communist, thousands of years before Comrade Marx ever dreamed up his manifesto.’

‘I daresay the first Christian communities had no need of Comrade Beria and the NKVD. But just try telling the farmer and factory worker to share what they have with the poor and the idle, see how far you get.’

‘You prefer the world to dress up as boy scouts? Die Fahne hoch, die Reihen fest geschlossen…’

It seemed that Maman was to get her musical evening after all.

‘I prefer Czech lands for the Czech people,’ declared Klaus. ‘If you can’t sign up to that, you have no place in our country.’

His eyebrows raised conspiratorially, Papa, who had remained aloof from the exchange, pushed the brandy decanter across the table to our guest, a diminutive art dealer from Bratislava whose name escapes me, though I can still see the hooded eyes, the sensual lips and the thick beaver collar on the overcoat that enfolded the back of his chair as though some species of bear were about to overwhelm him. Nodding slyly, the man took Papa’s gesture as an invitation. ‘And what would you say about the Jewish question?’

It’s difficult to quantify the effect the interjection had about the room. There was an all but imperceptible gasp at the card-table, and Father Kaufmann and Papa exchanged hurried glances. Even Klaus winced. An unspoken taboo, one of the very few to be observed at the house on Nerudova Street, had just been breached. If, as was widely assumed, Katya was not Papa’s child, and after all she alone of all the household had eyes so brown they were almost black, then she was the daughter of Mordecai Gans, the voice coach with whom Papa’s first wife had absconded a few short weeks after giving birth. From what Papa had said to Katya, I understood that he’d died a few years after Maman. I’d never seen him, but I’d seen his photo in the atrium of the Rudolfinum Concert Hall. The eyes were carved of the same mahogany.

‘What do you say, Hans?’ said my father, to break the silence.

‘I didn’t know there was a Jewish question, Emil,’ sighed Father Kaufmann. ‘I live such a cloistered life, you see. Would our friend mind spelling it out for an ignorant Jesuit?’

The art dealer, oblivious to the sardonic, heard nothing disingenuous in this. ‘By all means. The Jew has no country. The Jew has no nation, not for two thousand years. It follows that the Jew has no loyalty. None beyond his own people…’

‘The chosen people.’

‘As you wish. I’m not a believer.’ He raised his brandy glass with his stubby fingers, smelt, sipped, savoured. Papa’s brandy was always of the finest. All this time I was aware that Father Kaufmann was watching me out of the corner of his eye, and I blushed. ‘You see, Father, it’s this way. You may have Polish Jews, and Russian Jews, and Hungarian Jews, who knows, you may even have Bohemian Jews. But these are labels, nothing more. First and foremost they are always Jews. That is what sets them apart.’

‘Where would you have them go?’ The question came from Katya. We all turned to look at her. For Katerina was morbidly shy.

‘Let them have their New Jerusalem! Isn’t their promised land supposed to be somewhere in British Palestine? Let them go there.’

Now the silence was more pronounced, so much so that even our obtuse Bratislavan merchant must have noticed it. This time it was Klaus who broke it. ‘That reminds me. I ran into my friend Novák, who works down in the Town Hall. You’ll never guess who’s putting in for the necessary documentation for travel. I suppose he must be getting ready to up sticks.’

‘Who’s that, Klaus?’ asked Maman, since Papa seemed lost in reflection.

‘Old Meisel.’

Once again Father Kaufmann’s eyes were on me. Once again I blushed, more deeply yet. I had no real fear that he might break confidence, joker that he was. But I was mortified that Papa might notice. He was always alert. Or Klaus, because he had such a mocking tongue, and would enjoy nothing more than having a dig at ‘little Kašpárek’. The irony was, with last year’s spurt of growth, I was now taller than Klaus. Not so robust, but taller. He had no right to call me little Kašpárek any more.

‘Meisel, the merchant?’ enquired our guest.

‘You know him?’

‘Everyone knows old Meisel. Has that shop on Bilkova Street, isn’t that it?’

‘That’s him.’

‘And so he’s selling up shop!’

‘I imagine he realises what way the wind is blowing.’

‘Where will he go, did your friend say?’

‘He didn’t say. Perhaps… Odessa? That’s right Papa, isn’t it? Didn’t he originally arrive here from Odessa, all those years ago?’

At last Papa was motivated to speak. It was as though he’d been pulled from a trance. ‘You say the Jew has no loyalty. Well, there’s one Jew who gave up his only son in the last war.’ That was the second taboo broken. The Great War was never mentioned in our house. Papa had lost both of his brothers to the catastrophe. He’d quite literally lost them. They were part of the Czech Legion that had wandered for so long in the wilderness of Siberia, caught up in another conflict. For years, Papa would ask the stragglers and survivors if there was any news of his two brothers. But there never was.

‘Izsak,’ he went on. ‘Ezra Meisel’s only child. A fine lad, too. When news came of his death, the old man almost went out of his mind with grief.’

‘The more fool him,’ said our guest. ‘To lose a son. And for what, eh?’

IV

The Thief

Old Meisel wasn’t an art dealer. His business was antiques and fine arts. Furniture, silverware, old books and maps, even clothes. During the long endgame of the Habsburg Empire in the run up to the disastrous conflagration that swept it away, he’d made his fortune visiting the estates of the distressed nobility and buying up family heirlooms for perhaps a third of the price they’d later fetch. Any time a work of art came into his possession, he’d send his card around to my father – to father and a half-dozen others in the business, who would be invited to the backroom of the shop on Bilkova Street to view the exhibits and make their offers.

I’d accompany Papa on these visits. Bilkova Street is in Josefov, the Jewish Quarter that sits under the elbow of the Moldau. But the ghetto had been pulled down and the area greatly improved since the time that Ezra Meisel first stepped off the train and settled there, in a tenement basement near where the Old Shul used to stand.

The bidding process was never straightforward, and since the backroom was always crowded and stifling, I took to wandering about Josefov while I waited for my father to conclude his affairs there. Although the streets were nowadays as wide as anywhere in Prague, it felt like a different world. The shops, whose air held the tang of different foodstuffs, and which had a tiny box screwed into the doorjamb that customers touched as they entered, had signs and posters in a language I took to be Yiddish. But more exotic yet was the script that adorned the synagogues, like an unknown musical notation. The quarter teemed with people, some in tight black suits or in skullcaps and woollen shawls, the men bearded and with long locks of hair, and on every stoop sat urchins who stared up from undernourished faces. That was my impression, at least.

Returning to Meisel’s premises from one such excursion the previous October, I’d been surprised by a girl sitting behind the counter, eating soup. She was perhaps a year or two older than I. Her mass of dark hair was long and unkempt, her pale face streaked with dirt. She watched me from sullen, sloe-black eyes, as though she resented my daring to look at her. At that time I was acutely self-conscious. I was gawky, having shot up the year before, my voice had broken, I had large hands and it seemed to me that my Adam’s apple was colossal, as though a billiard ball had lodged in my throat.

‘I’m here for my father?’ I tried. ‘Emil Hayek?’

She shrugged. Then abruptly she dropped the spoon into the soup bowl, rose, and disappeared through a doorway immediately behind the counter.

After we left, I asked Papa who she was. He at once gripped me in a headlock and rough-polished my scalp with the knuckles of his free hand. ‘So, you scamp! You’ve met the old Jew’s granddaughter, have you? And I suppose she already has you under her spell.’ Annoyed, I pushed and pulled till my head was at last free and made a show of straightening my hair. ‘You’d want to be careful, Guy. She’s an alley-cat. You don’t want to let her get her claws anywhere near a mouse like you.’ Normally I enjoyed his horseplay, but hearing my loud breathing and seeing my face flushed with anger, he decided to hold fire on whatever quip he’d readied. Instead, he suppressed the mirth that characteristically lit his features. ‘You did notice she’s lame?’

‘Lame?’