Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City Read Free Page A

twenty pictures, the Professor said, that he wished us to take to his
     son - not paintings, as I had thought, but photographs, highly valuable original contact prints by a Czech master whose name
     was unknown to me. The Professor was anxious to assure us that if we had any doubts about taking them out of the country we
     should say so and he would find another means of getting them to New York. It was perfectly apparent, however, that we were
     his only hope. No no, we protested stoutly, we were determined to help him. Again that pained, melancholy smile, and he cleared
     his throat and carefully pressed the tip of a middle finger to the frail gold bridge of his spectacles. In that case, would
     we do him the honour of coming to dinner that evening at his apartment, where we could not only view the photographs but meet
     his wife? At that moment the double doors to the dining room behind us swung open from within, pressed by the backs of a pair
     of waiters, each bearing a tray piled high with used plates, who spun on their heels in co-ordinated pirouettes like the sleek
     male dancers in an old-fashioned movie musical, and pranced away in the direction of the kitchens, their trays held effortlessly
     aloft. In the moment that the doors were open we were afforded a glimpse, peculiarly comprehensive and detailed, of the room's
     main dining table. It was large and circular, and there were six or eight men seated around it. No doubt my jaundiced memory
     has exaggerated the look they had of so many pigs busy at a trough. 'Russians,' the Professor said, and sighed. They were
     raucously drunk, and contemptuously oblivious of the rest of the crowded dining room. I was to see their like again, dozens
     of them, a couple of years later in Budapest, where I foolishly allowed myself to be persuaded to attend a meeting of the
     Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe, a Cold War talking shop now surely defunct. The meeting was supposedly
     devoted to the encouragement of friendly exchanges between writers from East and West; in fact, most of the time during the
     sessions was taken up by the Americans and the Russians lobbing insults at each other over the heads of the rest of us irrelevant
     small-fry. The Soviet delegation were Writers' Union types to a man, grey-faced hacks in sagging suits, smelling of stale
     cigarette smoke and bad teeth, who during lunch breaks would commandeer the biggest table in the cafeteria and eat and shout
     and laugh and slap each other on the back in a show of calculatedly ugly triumphal-ism. Looking back now, of course, I wonder
     if they, and their counterparts in that Prague dining room, were merely trying to drown out with so much noise the increasingly
     insistent whisper telling them what they already knew in their heart of unthawable hearts, that it was all coming to an end,
     the jaunts to pretty satellite capitals, the dachas in the country, the sprees in Moscow's foreign-currency shops, all that
     passed for privilege in a totalitarian state, all soon to be grabbed by a new elite of mafia chiefs and criminal industrialists
     and members of this or that President's prodigiously extensive family. 1 But for now the trough was still full, and the Moscow politicos were still snout-deep in it, although the white double doors,
     swinging in ever more shallow arcs, were shutting them out of our view by two, by two, by two, and the last we saw of them
     was the fat fellow at the head of the table, his back to us, who in turn was reduced to a large pair of trotters in broad
     black shoes splayed under a chair, two hitched-up trouser legs, two crumpled grey socks, and the bared lower reaches of two
     fat, bristled calves, until at last even that much was gone.
    The Professor was offering to show us something of Prague. We were grateful, but worried that we might be keeping him from
     his work, on this weekday morning. He laughed very softly and said that he had all the time in the world. He