Last Days in Old Europe

by Richard Bassett

  Christa proceeded to interrogate me in a mixture of French, German and English. What did I want to do with my life? Why was I in Zagreb? What was my religion? Who were my people? When Blanka attempted to support my halting replies by saying, ‘Perhaps he will become a diplomat,’ Christa icily dismissed this idea with a withering glance: ‘In England? Impossible; everyone knows there is no future in government circles in England for anyone who is Catholic. I thought you had studied history! These jobs are not available. Ausgeschlossen!’ (Out of the question!)

  Christa’s only experience of diplomacy had been playing bridge with the consuls of Zagreb in the 1950s, although an uncle, Antun Mihalović, had been the last Ban (viceroy) of Croatia during Habsburg times and a photograph of him wearing the fur-lined coat and hat of office adorned a nearby table. Her opinions on this as on all matters brooked no opposition, and we settled back to listen to a prolonged exposition on the realities of European geopolitics. Blanka unconvincingly adopted an expression of submissive compliance.

  As Christa lit her fourth cigarette, she continued to survey me with a cold analytical stare. The brief compliment for not reading magazines had not been followed by any more enduring evidence of goodwill. Yet, when all was said, these two sisters, so different in character and temperament, clearly both loved each other. When, a few years later, Christa fell asleep in bed while smoking her fortieth of the day and reading Agatha Christie, the ensuing conflagration proved fatal. Blanka was deeply affected by her passing.

  Blanka had arranged for me to stay in Zagreb for a week in a small pension a few streets away. As usual in those days, I had brought my horn with me so as not to get out of practice. Each day I was able to use a room in the nearby music academy for a few hours. One morning, there was a knock at the door and an elderly professor asked if I could hear his star pupil, a fifteen-year-old whom he believed had a rare talent for the French horn. I happily agreed and was introduced to the young man, who did indeed display great skill on a dilapidated pre-war instrument far too primitive for his abilities but from which he nonetheless managed to coax a beautiful sound. Would I be able to give him some lessons on playing? I was happy to comply, little knowing then that within ten years this ‘pupil’, Radovan Vlatković, would become the principal horn of the Berlin Orchestra and a highly sought-after soloist. I would then be listening to his exquisite playing for guidance, rather than the other way round.

  A few days later, I decided to make an excursion to visit distant relations of friends I had made a few months earlier in Trieste. One of these, Haleban, a man of advanced years, lived in a small town called Koprivnica (Koprinica) of which he was an historian. I did not know Haleban’s telephone number or indeed his address. I had been told simply to take the train to Koprivnica and ask for him when I got there. A small train with old green carriages which allowed one to sit outside, dangling one’s legs down to the tracks, moved off from Zagreb’s main station at a steady 20 miles an hour in the direction of Hungary. A glorious winter sun offered surprising warmth. No cars appeared on the roads we passed and the fields were dotted with triangular hand-gathered haystacks.

  Koprivnica had been established as one of a chain of fortified camps guarding the south-eastern flank of the Habsburg Empire against the Turks in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Over many years, this ‘Military Frontier’ had absorbed peoples of different faiths and nationalities, welding them into ‘a huge armed camp’ in the phrase of the Napoleonic Marshal Marmont. Ante Murale Europae, contra immanissimum nominis christiani hostem ran the motto of Croatia after 1389 (The first defence of Christendom against her innumerable enemies). The beating back of the Muslim armies had been Koprivnica’s incessant work for centuries. Here Ottomans who had converted to Christianity, Orthodox Serbs, Protestant Hungarians and gypsies as well as devout Croat Catholics had all organized themselves into a system of defence which was communal as well as military. In these settlements no individual held land; families alone were proprietors and the chief of each administered any revenue. When a family of the Frontier died out for any reason, the property returned to the Emperor, because it was only held in return for military service rendered. Sixty years after the end of the Habsburg Empire the legacy of these arrangements appeared to have survived the upheavals of the twentieth century. The paternal home was still the epicentre of all social activity and the head of the household was waited upon virtually hand and foot by the women of the family.

  An hour after leaving Zagreb, the train pulled into Koprivnica and as instructed I asked the stationmaster for Haleban. He knew immediately who I meant and directed me towards a crumbling, red single-storey villa with a vine-clad terrace behind the station. The untarmacked streets were mostly composed of similar one-storey houses and at the end of each street fields stretched as far as the eye could see. Haleban came to the door and welcomed the stranger with unquestioning hospitality and the firm handshake of the Military Frontier. He spoke little modern German and at that stage I spoke little Croat, but I soon realized that my host understood and could speak the old German of the Frontier, Militärgrenze-Deutsch, an extraordinary amalgam of Slav and German phrases, the most repeated of which, uttered every two minutes, was Ist gefällig, a linguistic corruption of Izvolite, a Serbian phrase which could be translated as ‘Please, after you’, and the Austrian gefällt’s dir, meaning ‘Are you happy?’ or ‘Do you like it?’

  Haleban’s frame and hands were large and he moved slowly. He might have been any age between sixty and eighty, even older perhaps. His head was huge and bald, his face round and generous, Ottoman rather than Croatian. A headscarved woman, a relative rather than a servant I thought, appeared from a side room with Turkish coffee and a plate of bread, tomatoes and cheese, and our halting conversation began. She curtseyed for an instant before retreating to the kitchen. Judging by the Jugendstil detailing of the woodwork and the classical stucco detailing of the façade, the house dated from Austrian times, but there were no doors between the interior spaces, only large rugs hanging from the lintels. An old-fashioned bookcase held mostly Austrian novels, one of which was romantically entitled Ulanenliebe (Lancer Love). Its cover portrayed a thin, impossibly high-collared officer in boots and czapka (lancer helmet) fixing a monocle into his eye while a wasp-waisted Viennese lady in an equally high-collared, pneumatic blouse looked on admiringly.

  Before our lunch was over, Haleban’s face puckered into a smile and we were joined by three of his female relations who, taking chairs around our little table, sat watching the patriarch as he slowly drained his coffee cup. Suddenly, with a splendid coup de théâtre, he upended the cup over the saucer and gazed silently at the pattern made by the remains of the black liquid. The women bent forward to look. Haleban watched intently as the coffee formed its strange patterns on the saucer. I had never witnessed this particular example of fortune-telling and could not imagine how the abstract remains of our coffee might afford any indication of the future. But Haleban, drawing on the symmetry of certain shapes, soon proceeded to give a spirited prediction of his own good health and happiness, although many of his words were lost on me. Our female companions took it in turns to tip their own cups over and visit the mysteries of their own futures.

  Before 1900, many of the inhabitants of the old Military Frontier had been illiterate, yet the Habsburg officers recruited there rose to high rank on account of their courage and quick thinking. Although often they could neither read nor write, they developed other skills. Instinct and intuition gave them much of the mental equipment required. Psychic prediction was another talent. In 1900, the ill-fated Archduke Franz Ferdinand had visited these parts and had been presented to an old soldier widely rumoured to have such powers. When the Archduke had shown the man his hand, the soldier had examined it and recoiled in horror, saying that it was a hand which would ‘one day unloose a terrible war’.

  This was the tradition of which Haleban was part, and he performed the rituals of this fading world of his predecesso
rs with solemnity. He offered to accompany me back to the station and show me a nearby battlefield where ‘thousands of Turks’ had been killed during the long Turkish wars of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The ramparts he took me to were long overgrown and barely recognizable, but his face took on a grim expression as he described, as if it were yesterday, the fighting that had taken place here.

  A few hours later, with a setting sun of spectacular richness accompanying the train, I was brought back to Zagreb. As I walked from the railway station back to Christa’s apartment, the sophistication of an altogether more metropolitan world quickly reasserted itself. The following day Blanka, still in uneasy residence with her elder sister, took me to lunch with her friend Countess Kukuljevič who lived in the Upper Town near St Mark’s Church. At that time, the Kukuljevičs were a shadow of their former glory as one of the families par excellence which had contributed to Croatia’s intellectual and literary life in the nineteenth century. The Tito regime had however spared them much of the cruelty which had been visited on other aristocratic families in Central Europe after the Second World War. Like Christa, the Kukuljevičs lived in some comfort, although no doubt in the twenty-first century their surroundings would be considered austere. Large rooms with interlinking doors in the best Vienna style led to a salon with a fine cabinet of porcelain, the usual portraits of Habsburg military figures and Biedermeier furniture. We lunched well, and I barely noticed that the servants had withdrawn silently to another part of the palais. ‘You see,’ said Blanka, revisiting an old theme, ‘you cannot get such Personal in Trieste these days.’ As the light faded on the leafless trees of the Upper Town, we lay on various chaises longues and took a siesta for the customary forty-five minutes. By the time we awoke the room was dark and it was time to prepare for our return to Trieste.

  A jovial lawyer, Gianpaolo Tamaro, often drove Blanka between Zagreb and Trieste in his Alfa Romeo. This time, he had agreed to take us both back to Italy that evening. A member of a famous Triestine legal and scholarly family, he was certainly un uomo d’affari, but he was also wise and kind, a great romantic who loved the unsophisticated simplicity of the Croatian countryside and its inhabitants.

  As I came to know Blanka better, I discovered that Tamaro had played a significant role in persuading the Albanian authorities to allow her to leave that benighted country in the early 1950s. What possessed him to take up her case I never knew – he had come across it while researching his doctorate – but since Blanka’s return to Trieste the two had remained firm friends, always joking and laughing when they were together. Not that Blanka by herself was ever gloomy or melancholy. She exuded a contagious sense of well-being and calm. Her detachment from worldly things was matched by an acute power of observation and humane curiosity which enabled her to converse with anyone of any rank with ease. On one of our trips to Zagreb I accompanied her first to the candle-strewn open chapel of the old town, the Kamenita Vrata, where she engaged cheerfully on a Marian theological point with some smiling old Croatian women before entering an ice-cream parlour run by Albanians, chiding the owner for his, in her view, eye-watering prices with a torrent of fluent Shqiptar (Albanian patois) to the astonishment of the teenage boys behind the counter.

  That evening, the journey back to Trieste took us rather longer than expected. Near Samobor, a pretty village to the west of Zagreb to which Blanka’s grandfather had retired, the car broke down with an engine problem. Having rectified that, a few miles further along Tamaro had to change a wheel next to the streams of lorries pounding along one of the principal arteries of east–west traffic in Southern Europe. Once the car was running properly again, Tamaro’s style at the wheel was that of an Alfa Romeo test driver of the 1960s. No vehicle ahead of us was ever ignored but had to be overtaken at high speed. Politesse dictated that one should feign total sangfroid in the face of this display of high-speed machismo. Tamaro was without doubt a skilled driver but several near-misses with oncoming traffic made the journey a terrifying experience.

  One morning in October, Blanka almost absent-mindedly announced over breakfast that we had been invited for drinks at the Castle of Duino that evening by Raimondo Torre e Tasso, a prince of the Thurn and Taxis family, and we would be heading off there by bus later that afternoon. Threading our way a few hours later up the long path from the village of Duino to the castello, we followed a red-liveried servant who led us into the castle’s magnificent rooms, all decorated in a wonderful mixture of Italian and old Austrian styles. A group of septuagenarian men in double-breasted blue and grey suits looked up and the Prince bounded over to greet us with magnificent joviality.

  ‘How is Prince Charles?’ He looked at me seriously while I took in his splendid blue-and-white-striped shirt complete with princely coronet under which the initials TNT were (rather alarmingly) set out. Blanka whispered, ‘Don’t forget to call him Your Grace: Durchlaucht!’ The Prince of Wales had certainly looked well in a photograph in the week-old copy of The Times I had just seen lying in Tommaseo’s so I assured one prince of the well-being of another. As so often in Trieste, the conversation moved seamlessly on to ‘England’, a concept which for my host included Scotland and at times even Canada and South Africa. As always during the late 1970s, despite the difficulties of the moment, there was a mixture of admiration and envy of the way England functioned, the strength of its institutions, the continuity of its traditions and the confidence of its ruling class.

  The salon we were in was painted yellow, making a pretty backdrop to the blue-upholstered Biedermeier furniture. Its windows overlooked some jagged rocks and, as a white-jacketed waiter served us canapés and prosecco, Blanka urged our host in almost theatrical excitement to ‘Zeig uns die Felsen!’ (Show us the rocks!). We moved to a balcony and surveyed the dramatic scene below us. The Felsen were the same magnificent limestone which had inspired Rilke to write his Duino Elegies. On a windswept morning in January 1912, the greatest expressionist poet of the German language had clambered on to the ramparts above the room in which we were standing and had contemplated the rocks 200 feet below in the brilliant sunshine and Bora wind. Rilke had been much exercised by a disappointing letter he had received from his publisher that morning. While he thought about a reply, with the wind howling around him and the sea reflecting the dazzling sunlight, a verse came to him as he watched the blue sea streaked with silver in the wind:

  Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel

  Ordnungen? und gesetzt selbst, es nähme

  einer mich plötzlich ans Herz: ich verginge von seinem

  stärkeren Dasein. Denn das Schöne ist nichts

  als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen,

  und wir bewundern es so, weil es gelassen verschmäht,

  uns zu zerstören. Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich!

  (Who, when I cry out, hears me from the ranks of the angels?

  And even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart

  I should be consumed in that overwhelming existence.

  For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror

  which we are still able to endure,

  and we are so awed because it serenely disdains

  to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying!)

  By the evening he had the first elegy on paper.

  Stepping back from the sublime vista below I noticed how gentle and feminine the decoration of the room was; the pictures with views of Venice and portraits of the Habsburgs offset the cragginess outside the window. Everything seemed to confirm the supranational identity of an older order. Italian, Austrian, Bohemian and Hungarian art were all linked by the common thread of this venerable family. Our glasses chinked. There was the usual gossip about some errant mutual acquaintance. An hour later, with the sun setting over the autumnal horse chestnuts, Blanka and I took the bus back from Duino to the Via XXX Ottobre.

  This cosmopolitan Trieste was a world away from its immediate neighbours. A few miles to t
he west begins the Venetian plain, which opens up beyond Monfalcone. There even in the 1970s the village parish priest still held in the palm of his hand the power of material advancement and spiritual oblivion. A few miles to the east, there was another completely different culture. In the beautiful foothills of the Julian Alps begins the unique world of the Slovenes and the charms of ‘Inner Austria’.

  The great Südbahn, the oldest of the Alpine railways, then still linked these worlds and its principal termini now punctuated marks in my approach to the Habsburg capital. Before finally reaching Vienna I was to work and live in Graz and Ljubljana, two cities of beauty, blessed with all the advantages of provincial Central European life: each had an opera house and theatre, fine-art galleries, good restaurants and superb local wine, and the opportunity to be in the deepest countryside in less than half an hour’s walk from the city centre. Barely four hours of rail travel separates Trieste in the south, Ljubljana and Graz in the north. Yet in those few hours the traveller encounters three different languages, half a dozen different dialects and all the nuances of national and confessional diversity which the old Habsburg lands offer.

  In Ljubljana I was startled and amazed by the buildings of Josef Plečnik, an early twentieth-century architect who had studied in Vienna under Otto Wagner but had quickly developed his own personal style very different from the Viennese Jugendstil of his contemporaries. After a year in Trieste, I returned to London to study at the Courtauld Institute of Art where Anthony Blunt and Howard Burns encouraged my interest in Plečnik. The architect, then virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, would provide an admirable subject for a Master’s thesis and a chance to build on the Triestine foundations of my time in Central Europe. There remained only the challenge of financing myself through the research in Slovenia. There were no language schools in Titoist Slovenia and a job in the university would have been impossible for a non-Slovene speaker, which at that stage I still was.