A Time of Birds

by Helen Moat

  We found a little guesthouse sandwiched between tall thin terraces in a side street on a narrow spit of land between the Danube and the Inn rivers. That evening, Jamie and I wandered along the banks of the Danube, which was lined with cruise ships, and on past towers and churches, castles and grandiose baroque residences. When we ran out of land at the Dreiflüsseck, or ‘Three rivers corner’, where the Inn, Danube and Ilz converge, we followed the promenade back along the banks of the Inn.

  Wandering through the narrow streets of Passau, I thought back on our journey along the German Danube – of the poppy-splashed pathways, the wildflower meadows and the pastel-coloured townhouses teetering on hilltops. The Danube had been glassy and still in the mild spring weather, wispy cloud and powder-blue caught in the mirror of water. On that last stretch of the river, we had been covering enough ground to allow us to make detours. Between Munderkingen and Ulm, we’d followed the Blau tributary to the Blautopf at Blaubeuren – a pond of such intense blue, it stung the eyes. In Ulm, Jamie and I had had a rest day, wandering the cobbles of the fisherman’s quarter, its ancient houses leaning drunkenly over canals, their midriffs bulging like beer bellies. At night, a light show played off the tower of the Gothic Munster, the tallest church in the world, and bright neon lights gleamed shocking-pink and electric-blue from modern blocks, spelling out Weltblick, meaning ‘vision’ (but literally ‘world view’), and Sehnsucht, meaning longing, a word that can’t be translated very precisely into English, but is roughly ‘a yearning to the point of obsession or addiction’.

  Those words could have been a personal message especially lit up for me. Like Kat, I had longed to escape the confines of my life. There had been no physical walls – just mental ones. The bike ride had originally been intended as my lifeline, something that would see me through the next years at my stifling school, until I could afford to leave. But my breakdown had brought it all to an abrupt end. Recovering at home, the Sehnsucht was an itch that wouldn’t go away. I had a Weltblick, a vision – a long-distance view of the world – that extended all the way to Istanbul. I believed it would save me.

  And, sure enough, the journey was healing me slowly and gently, more effectively than the pills my doctor had prescribed to me. Somehow, the waters of the Rhine and Danube were washing me clean; and the birdsong that I imagined had been sent by my father was a balm for my tortured soul. The meadows thick with wildflowers were a much better gift than any get-well bunch of flowers. And the human connection with old friends, and the simple trust of strangers along Europe’s rivers were more soul-restoring than the rounds of therapy that had been arranged for me.

  There were other experiences that were less positive. When we’d reached Regensburg, we found ourselves caught up in a student demonstration against racism. We felt the atmosphere thick with ugliness, emitting from the skin-headed neo-Nazis, who goaded the demonstrators from street-side cafés, arms folded across thick chests in alpha-male threat, beer and testosterone spilling from metal tables. I’d experienced the same ugliness in my own country: the mob mentality, the troublemakers hurling insults and bottles, even petrol bombs. The air curdled with hatred.

  But as we walked back to our Passau Gasthaus, it wasn’t the neo-Nazis I was thinking about, but rather Klaus and Kat, who had lived under the shadow of the Wall; who’d taken in Jamie and me – two foreigners of unknown character – and fed and sheltered us in the Middle-Eastern, Islamic tradition of hosting strangers. This cycle was more than a physical journey – it was also a spiritual journey that nourished and fed my soul. And I realised that when people live in hope, not fear, and when we see our place in the world as a force for good, not one of threat, then we are naturally inclined towards reaching out to our fellow human beings in kindness.

  *

  5. A Detour along the Inn and Salzach Rivers

  When you are cycling thousands of miles along Europe’s great rivers, what’s another hundred? And why not add another couple of rivers? So, we took a right turn at Passau, abandoning the Danube, and headed south towards the Austrian Alps along the Inn and Salzach rivers to visit friends who lived in Oberndorf, the town near Salzburg where the Christmas carol Silent Night was written.

  Mental preparation and practical planning are everything when cycling. If you know there are hills ahead and the paths are going to be rough in places, you brace yourself. If you realise the temperature is going to soar, you get up at first light. But we’d been lulled by easy cycling from Ulm, with tarmac paths and flat terrain. Cycling sixty miles in a day had been easy, even on the Tank.

  Just beyond the bridge that crossed the Inn at Passau, the climbs began. Jamie missed our turn-off and we found ourselves pushing the bikes up a near-vertical hill. We backtracked and discovered our path sandwiched between river and railway track, where we crossed into Austria. It was already hot, although it was early in the morning. The sudden heatwave was unexpected.

  At Wernstein am Inn we wheeled our bikes onto the pedestrian bridge to catch the breeze off the river. The waterway was Air Force blue, blotched green by the reflections of the dense woodland that flanked the river’s banks. Above the woodland, inky-green gave way to lime meadow, and on the skyline, the towers of Schloss Neuburg castle stabbed the unbroken blue with pointed roofs of red. Below us, Wernstein’s castle stood more modestly at the water’s edge, its little wooden balcony wrapping stone beneath its roof. I breathed in the ozone of water and felt the early morning sun like a lamp-glow on my skin.

  Every day brought new surprises on this journey – in the beauty of its natural landscapes and in man’s own poetic shaping of Europe’s rivers. We stopped just outside Wernstein to look at the monastery of Vornbach spread out along the shore on the German side. Two mute swans, book-ending a line of cygnets, glided towards us in search of food. I felt a sudden sadness that my father had turned his back on the outdoors, preferring to sit in his armchair with the TV on silent, flicking with disinterest from channel to channel. What if he had been prescribed country walks instead of electric shock treatment and pills? Would it have made a difference? While still at home, we’d tried to encourage him to take his evening walks to the fields again, but he’d barely made it to the end of our road before heading back again. Perhaps, my father had yearned for us to reach out to him, in the darkness of his mind, but I, for one, had never asked. We had merely followed the doctors’ orders.

  After passing through Schärding, with its colourful baroque architecture, we temporarily left the banks of the river and climbed up through woodland to hilltop villages. A freewheel flung us down to the water again, where a farmer, surreally, was ploughing his field under a large parasol attached to his tractor. Our bikes continued to shoot across the floodplains from the momentum of the downhill, a welcome cooling breeze in my face and a respite from the heat. As the afternoon drew to a close, we cycled into Braunau am Inn, a pretty riverside town – and the birthplace of Hitler.

  Braunau’s wide main street of narrow, terraced houses and pencil-sharp roofs, and café terraces sitting under shady trees, combines Gothic grandeur and Mediterranean cool. With its onion-domes, cupolas, turrets, arched doorways, frescos and brightly coloured buildings, the settlement exudes an odd mix of sugary sweetness and solid respectability, as well as centuries-old wealth.

  But for the local residents, a dark shadow smears a stain across their colourful town. If you google Braunau am Inn, it mainly references the town as Hitler’s birthplace, reflecting the outside world’s morbid fascination with the dictator. But the people of Braunau would prefer it if Hitler had never been born here. On one of the town’s websites, it’s only the obscure Hans Steiniger that’s listed as a notable resident, documenting his two-metre-long beard (the 450-year-old beard still on display at the local museum). The website even pays homage to a visit from Emperor Franz Joseph. Of Hitler there’s no mention. It’s as if he had been erased from the town’s history.

  The history books, however, record that Hitler’s father, Alois Hitler
, having progressed from humble cobbler to senior custom’s officer, was relocated to Braunau am Inn in 1875 – with Germany just across the bridge on the other side of the river. In 1889, Alois, now on his third marriage, held his newest child in the apartment block on Salzburger Vorstadt 15, a child he and his wife named Adolf. A sickly, weedy infant, the young Adolf only lived in the apartment block for three short years before he and his family moved on to Passau. This didn’t stop Braunau from basking in the reflected glory of the Führer in the years preceding the war, renaming Salzburger Vorstadt as Adolf-Hitler-Straße, and the town plaza as Adolf-Hitler-Platz.

  Hitler’s private secretary, Bormann bought the house on Salzburger Vorstadt and opened a Nazi-style art gallery and library (which was seized by US troops at the end of the war). After the war, the town’s association with Hitler soon turned from pride to shame as the extent of his crimes sank in. Now, the only indication that Hitler ever lived in the house is a piece of granite, from a quarry near Mauthausen Concentration Camp, inscribed with the words Für Frieden, Freiheit und Demokratie. Nie wieder Faschismus. Millionen Tote mahnen: ‘For peace, freedom and democracy. Never again fascism. Remember the millions dead.’

  Despite the plaque, the building has become a place of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis, a blot on the old town’s hosed-down, scrubbed-up and freshly painted streetscape. Never has a building caused so much fierce discussion: its defenders asserting that we should confront history, not bury it; its opponents arguing the house had become a shrine for white supremacists and should thus be dismantled. I, too, was torn between the rationale for confronting history and the feeling of distaste at the idea of seeking out Hitler’s birthplace. In the end, we turned our back on Hitler and went for a pizza.

  *

  It was another cloudless day as we left Braunau, although the air was still deliciously cool in the early morning. A few miles outside of town, we came to a junction on the river, with the Inn continuing towards Innsbruck and Switzerland in one direction, and the Salzach twisting west then south towards Salzburg and the Tirol in the other. We took our leave of the Inn to follow the Salzach to visit our friends, Chris and Maria, in Oberndorf.

  Maria had already sent a text, wanting to know our ETA and urging us to arrive by Thursday. Something stirred somewhere in my brain, but it didn’t quite reach my consciousness at the time: it was out of character for Maria to push – even gently. But as we headed along the forest road behind the Salzach, I felt a thrill of anticipation: Manuela, in Basel, seemed a long time ago and I longed for familiar faces.

  At Duttendorf we emerged from the forest and cycled on through field and suburb to Ach, where, at last, we caught a glimpse of the Salzach again. Ach – or ‘Oh!’ – is a wonderful name for any village, and is particularly appropriate for this one: views across the river reveal the German fortification of Burghausen spread out along the ridge above the town for more than half a mile (it’s the longest castle in the world). Like an illustration from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, towers, courtyards, chapels, residences, serving quarters, gates and drawbridges fill the skyline here, while below the battlements, the town’s terraced houses line the Salzach in a colourful concertina.

  From Ach, the river twisted this way and that before settling down to a long straight slash through woodland. Here the trees closed in on the river on either side as we cycled, and the sense of claustrophobia was palpable in the heat of the day. I drooped over the handlebars as the track stretched out interminably in front of us.

  Then familiarity: the curve of houses on the bank of the Salzach at the town’s edge; the promenade that loops with the bend of the river; the gravel beach where Tom and Chris had once tried to throw stones across to Germany on the other side of the river, and failed miserably; the pedestrian bridge that connects the two countries; the diminutive Silent Night Chapel; and, finally, the hub of roads that congregate at the corner of Chris and Maria’s apartment complex.

  The cycle along the town’s riverbank felt unreal. Were we really arriving at Maria’s doorstep on a bicycle? I remembered taking the train from Winterthur to Salzburg, decades earlier, to visit Chris and Maria in their old flat – a journey of several hours through Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Austria. It had seemed such an adventure at the time. Then, years later, driving from England to Oberndorf when the boys were small. I remember distinctly thinking with wonder that we’d driven all that way. And now we’d arrived by bicycle from Rotterdam – across half a continent.

  *

  Maria was a friendly, approachable language assistant at Southampton University, where I studied German. I liked her straight away. She was gentle and tough at the same time; she embraced her femininity but was an unashamed feminist. We met up once or twice but other than that my contact with her was limited to brief encounters around the small German department. Maria had already made good friends with her colleagues. Plus, she was increasingly spending her time with another student – a final year student called Chris. It was only after Maria had left Southampton that I really got to know her, through my visits to Austria over the years as a student, then with Tom and finally with our children.

  Maria and Chris were queen and king of Gastfreundlichkeit, translated literally as guest friendliness. While they worked hard during the week, the weekends and holidays were given up to pure indulgence. Breakfast would start late – an Austrian mountain of breads, cold meats, cheeses and eggs – and we’d spent hot afternoons dozing in the hammock, followed by long, balmy evenings on their terrace with good food and wine. When we came with our young children, the boys had drawn pictures of African animals, which Maria added to a collage of paintings from children in the commune.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ Maria called.

  The door flung open and we were caught up in Maria’s hugs. We went into the living room and spotted the boys’ pictures still hanging there. Jamie and I collapsed into chairs: we’d been cycling for seven consecutive days and felt hot and tired. Cups rattled from the kitchen area and the coffee machine began to gurgle.

  ‘I need to go to the doctor in the morning,’ Maria chattered as she prepared the coffee. ‘Then we’ll head to a local outdoors shop in town, where we can buy the camping mattresses and sleeping bags you need.’

  This was good news. As we’d headed down the Inn and Salzach, I realised we couldn’t hold off camping any longer: the temperature was soaring into the thirties, and we were discovering Austrian guesthouses were not cheap. Meanwhile, Tom had promised to post out some lightweight tents to Oberndorf.

  ‘Have the tents from Tom arrived?’ I asked.

  ‘Not yet, so maybe you’d better stay in the house in the morning in case the postman comes with them. You’ll need to sign for them.’

  ‘No problem. There’s nothing I’d rather do than sit on the terrace with a cold drink!’ I laughed.

  I was worried about the tents though. I sent a message to Tom: Are they going to get to us before we leave Oberndorf?

  I’ll track their progress, the reply came.

  Then a second ping the next morning: They’re in Austria. They should arrive any time.

  *

  ‘Helen, your tents have arrived,’ Maria called out. ‘The postman’s at the gate. Can you go and sign for them?’

  I wandered down the grassy path and opened the gate onto the street to see … not a postman, but Tom standing there with two suitcases.

  ‘Your tents,’ he said, holding up one of the cases. ‘Mattresses and sleeping bags too.’

  I stood with my hand over my mouth and laughed, unable to speak. Tom and Maria, as it turned out, had been scheming for weeks and I had suspected nothing: Maria had not gone to her local GP, as I’d assumed, but had picked up my very own Doctor of Philosophy.

  All along the Rhine and Danube, Tom had been my champion, but he missed Jamie and me terribly. The house felt incomplete. He also worried about the next stage of our journey – the unfamiliarity of Eastern Europe. Now the reality of what he’d agr
eed to was sinking in. He fretted over the stories of aggressive pack dogs out in the countryside, the opportunistic thieves, the thundering lorries on the narrow Eastern European roads, and the isolated villages miles apart, just as I did. But while I would be there to deal with it and take the decisions with Jamie, he’d be hundreds of miles away – and everything that would happen to us would be beyond his control.

  Our weekend together went by in a blur of activity and inactivity. We visited the local food market for our breakfast ingredients with Chris and Maria, and walked along the river and over the pedestrian bridge into Germany for ice cream, as we’d done in the past. We drove to a nearby lake and drank local beer on a hilltop above the Salzach. Chris and Maria treated us to a fine meal in a monastery garden, and Tom and I dozed together in the hammock after long brunches that stretched into the afternoon.

  At the end of the weekend, it was hard to say goodbye to Tom.

  ‘I’m going to come out again in three weeks, when you are in Budapest,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll bring Patrick with me next time. We’ll celebrate my birthday on the Danube. What do you think?’

  6. Cycling with Coffins

  It had taken us two days to cycle from Passau to Oberndorf, but just a morning to return to the city. We’d decided to put our bicycles on the train to save time. By the time we reached Passau, the heatwave had broken and dark clouds hung from the sky like funeral drapes. Still, we had our new tents and I was keen to try them out. We stopped in Lindau for our campsite ingredients and cycled on a handful of miles to Camping Kohlbachmühle. The glum manager, body bent like a broken spring, reassured us that no storm was forecast even though the sky was smeared an angry black.

  Jamie and I shook out our tents and quickly erected them. We had chosen lightweight ones, but now that they were up, I could see that each one was not much bigger than a coffin. Getting into the tent needed the skills of a contortionist. Jamie tried his out and found that he could not fully stretch out. There was definitely no room for his panniers, which he had to chain to his bicycle. I could fit mine in, as long as I lay straight and stiff as a corpse.