The city I am talking about is old Prague. Fate, the Pilot, brought me to this strange city from foggy Hamburg forty-five years ago. On the very first day, when I took a long walk through the unknown streets, I was dazzled by the bright, scorching sun brooding over the ancient buildings with its sweltering heat, a sun which seemed quite different from the cheerfully shining skies I remembered from my childhood in bright, carefree Bavaria. …
Even then, as I walked over the ancient Stone Bridge which crosses the calm waters of the Moldau to the hill with its dark castle exuding the arrogance of ancient generations of Habsburgs, I was overcome with a profound sense of horror, for which I could find no explanation. Since that day this feeling of apprehension never left me for a moment during all the time — the length of a whole generation — I lived in Prague, the city with the secret heartbeat. It has never entirely left me, even today it comes over me when I think back to Prague or dream of it at night. Everything I ever experienced I can call up in my mind’s eye as if it were there before me, bursting with life. If, however, I summon up Prague, it appears more clearly than anything else, so clearly, in fact, that it no longer seems real, but ghostly. Every person I knew there turns into a ghost, an inhabitant of a realm that does not know death.
Puppets do not die when they leave the stage; and all the beings the city with the secret heartbeat holds together are puppets. Other cities, however old they may be, seem to me to be in the power of their people. Prague, as if disinfected by germicidal acids, shapes and manipulates its inhabitants like a puppeteer from their first to their last breath. Just as volcanoes spew forth fire out of the earth, so this eerie city spews war and revolution out into the world and it may well not be a delusion when the few people who keep their eyes open say that it secretly set off the first sparks of the last war!
On the Town Hall in the Old Town Square there is a huge astronomical clock with the signs of the zodiac, wreathed in legend. On the stroke of midday a little door opens and the twelve Apostles come out one after the other, only to silently disappear again, as if satisfied that the time for which they have been waiting patiently has not yet come, pursued by a thirteenth figure, Death with hourglass and scythe. He goes as well, with the cock of the far-off resurrection crowing above, like a prophecy of the apocalypse. It gives the sign and the hundred towers of the city join in, howling to drown out the mocking cockcrow that claims to know of the future collapse of all human time. I wonder if the long dead constructor of the clock had such an announcement in mind when he made it? He is supposed to have been mad. Perhaps madmen are closer to the last things than ‘normal’ people with their common sense. And one way or the other most of the puppets in Prague are mad, with a secret and concealed madness. Or obsessed with some bizarre idea.
Every year on 16 May, thousands — mostly peasant women with colourful headscarves and girls with hot, dark eyes — come in pilgrimage from the villages of Bohemia to the statue of St Nepomuk on the edge of the Stone Bridge. On such spring nights, surrounded by the glow of the five ruby-red lamps, it seems to hang in the air, shimmering in the silvery mist and looking to the south with the face of Jan Hus. In fact it never was St. John Nepomuk, it is the bronze statue of Jan Hus, only the people have forgotten, have swapped the names — the secret heartbeat of the city washes away all names, creating legend upon legend.
Often, on brightly moonlit nights, I wandered round the Lesser Town — the quarter on the other side of the Moldau, the very heart of Prague — and every time I got lost: an ancient town house where you feel it is impossible anyone can have lived there for decades, so thick are the layers of dust and verdigris on the doorknob; beside it a baroque building with opalescent windows which gleam like the glass of antique Roman tear-bottles; then a fifteen-foot-high wall, stretching out into infinity, with crumbling stucco on which the city’s ghostly hand has drawn fantastic animal heads and staring faces that seem unmoving and yet have changed their expression every time you look at them. An overpowering fragrance of jasmine or elderflowers comes drifting down through the air and you sense: somewhere there are gardens, huge parks where perhaps no one has set foot since time immemorial. A vision steals over you: across the wall is a house where, in a mouldering room, is a dead woman, her worm-eaten body lying in a bed that has long since crumbled to dust. Or is it a monastery, a convent, the wall surrounds? With monks or nuns who prayed and chastised themselves until they were dead to the outside world. But if you look for it in broad daylight, you look in vain. Instead of the wall, there’s a street with a house, three stories high, at the end; you look up at the roof — and there’s another house on top of the first! A hallucination? No, the street takes a sharp turn, like a bent elbow, rising steeply, and high up there’s another house. A queer man lives there, short, beardless, he looks like Napoleon and tells people’s fortunes from a huge tome written in Hebrew letters. I once went to visit him and as I crossed the threshold into his room I heard him saying to a stranger in broken German, ‘The drumming you heard during the night by the wall at the last street-lamp doesn’t come from the soldiers, it comes from Žižka’s drum. Before he died, he gave orders for his skin to be removed after his death and made into a drumskin so that his voice could be heard even though he was dead.’
‘What did you mean by that?’ I asked when we were alone. He looked astonished. He genuinely was astonished and denied ever having said anything like that. Some time afterwards I was told that he forgot everything he had said almost immediately after saying it. He was moonstruck, even by daylight.
Later, when the great war broke out, I was reminded of the drum of Jan Žižka, the one-eyed Hussite leader. I somehow felt there was some kind of shadowy connection. Or was it just coincidence? I don’t think so — the city with the secret heartbeat has a strange way of speaking through the lips of its puppets.