Free Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City by John Banville Page A

way, as if these were not graves on either side but supermarket shelves. A nun in the Rotunda of St
     Martin, lighting a candle and smiling blissfully, angelically, to herself. Black spires seen through the bare black limbs
     of a winter tree. That soft-spoken man in a blue jersey sitting at a small square table selling entrance tickets to SS Peter
     and Paul's - of the church itself I retain practically nothing . . . Thinking historically, like giving a story a happy ending,
     is a matter of deciding where to stop. Hegel at Jena, writing on the Absolute, hears under his window Napoleon and his forces
     riding to battle and conceives of the little Corsican as the embodiment of the World Spirit. Napoleon, meanwhile, is pondering
     his haemorrhoids, those same haemorrhoids that may well have been one of the chief causes of his defeat at Waterloo. Everything
     ramifies. Facts are susceptible to an infinite process of dismantlement. Benoit Man­delbrot, the originator of fractal geometry,
     considered the question of how long, exactly, is a coastline? That is, at what level may we stop measuring the coast of Europe,
     say, and proclaim definitively that it is so many hundreds of thousands of miles long? If we employ a yardstick, the figure
     will be very much smaller than if we measure by the inch. Think of all those bays, those coves, those inlets; those dunes,
     those rocks, those grains of clay; those atoms, those electrons, those nuclei; those quarks, those super-strings . . . think,
     and immediately you plunge headlong into the dizzying possibility of there being no level at which to stop. So it is with
     the past. Is history the big picture, or the minute details, the grand sweep or the dusty annals? Irish historians are engaged
     in a passionate debate between revisionists and traditionalists. Revisionists want a new interpretation of ancient pieties
     - perhaps, they suggest, the famines of the 1840s were not entirely the fault of Perfidious Albion, perhaps the 1916 Rising
     was not the glorious blood sacrifice we have always been told that it was - while the traditionalists, many of whom see historiography
     as a tool for nation building, insist on a kind of poeticised, nationalist version of our shared past. In theCemetery there is a special section, the Slavin, or Pantheon, built by the architect Wiehl in the early 1890s, overlooked
     by stylised statues of the 'Rejoicing Homeland' and the 'Mourning Homeland', and containing the remains of some fifty of the
     homeland's heroes, including the Art Nouveau painter Alfons Mucha and the musician Jan Kubelik. In monuments such as the Slavin
     we encounter a notion of the past far removed from that of the young Anthony Burgess's schoolboy friend who encouraged him
     to read the history plays of Shakespeare since they were all to do with 'fighting and fucking tarts'.
    The question I am addressing is the one that historian, tourist and essayist alike must grapple with: how and where to locate
     the 'real' Prague, if, indeed, such a singular thing may be said to exist. Those dead leaves that I remember beside the path
     on the heights ofwhat is there about them that makes them particular to the place? When I think of Golden Lane I see far more vividly the
     snow under my feet, compacted to clouded grey glass, the first time I walked there with the Professor, than I do the house
     where in the late autumn and winter of 1916 Kafka wrote the stories that would make up the collection A Country Doctor. The gloomy glories of St Vitus's Cathedral are no more than a shimmer at the edge of my memory compared to the uncanny clarity
     with which I recall one afternoon leaving the crowded building, with its gaggles of tourists following the upheld umbrellas
     and rolled newspapers of their tour guides, and walking down the unexpectedly desertedStreet and hearing my own footsteps ring on the cobbles with what seemed definite but inexplicable intent. I met no one in
     particular, saw nothing