‘I suppose the legitimate question is, what peace would they enforce?’ I said.
‘What peace would they enforce?’ Onomatopoeic Bob said, but mimicking me in a wheedling high voice. There is probably no feat of rhetorical brilliance in the history of human debate which can survive the funny-voice treatment.
‘Look, there are people dying, Andrew. We have an army. Send the army to stop the children dying. It’s not hard?’ said Shannon.
I didn’t like any of it. I didn’t like the lack of attention that almost everyone gave to the people dying. I didn’t like Shannon’s ease with putting young men’s bodies into the gunfire. I didn’t like the simple solutions of idealists and I didn’t like the obfuscating overcomplication of cynics. I was a connoisseur of the conflict and all gross solutions offended my refined understanding of the subtleties of the situation.
Scraping along the main roads at the bottom of Germany, the evening closed the day off and we simmered down from our alcohol boil, moaning for frequent piss stops. Onomatopoeic Bob had to hide his surprise when a number of attempted right turns into Austria found a river in the way. We finally discovered a route over at the border town of Braunau am Inn. There we parked up on the outskirts at eleven or so, many already asleep, the rest of us trying to curl comfy on the plastic-covered seats we were growing to hate.
The next morning, I walked into town to look for a croissant. The sun was bright and my hangover not terrible. I had a maths problem running in my head, along the lines of: if Shannon loves Sara and Sara loves Shannon, and Penny loves Shannon and Andrew loves Penny and Penny might like Simon, who thankfully has been subtracted, then what the fuck does that equal? It was a problem that needed simplification, but I didn’t know what to divide it by. One of the issues was that I didn’t really totally believe in lesbians. I mean I thought, like vampires, they were a fun idea, but they weren’t much in evidence on the Welsh borders. Sara and Shannon acted like a couple, but I knew they’d both had boyfriends and of course Shannon just seemed built for worship – like a great cathedral you had to admire. So Penny’s feelings for Shannon I hoped might just be admiration so overheated she’d mistaken it for the horn, and when it actually came to doing something, she might find that, like wanking over a picture of Mahatma Gandhi, it proved hard to translate one strong feeling into another.
The morning was clear and the hanging baskets along the main street were still dripping from an early watering. Having successfully bought a creased and sugary morning pastry with German marks and a smile of apology, I felt optimistic about the language issue. ‘Dobar dan. Oprostite, govorite li engleski?’ I said to myself, sitting in the first shy heat of a summer’s day, flicking through my guidebook on a bench, as the tape played.
I read my guidebook’s paragraph on the history and cultural highlights of Braunau am Inn as an old man walked past – and felt an embarrassed flush zoom through my whole body, popping up bright into my face. I shut the book sharply: We had, it seemed, entered Austria via the town of Hitler’s birth. I smiled at the old gentleman with his loaf of rye bread in hand and he smiled back.
The pastry was dry in my mouth. I sat a little longer and watched the townspeople as they climbed onto their morning mopeds, drove their VWs and BMWs and even their Peugeots through the streets. I was full of a boundless patronising pity, which, if I was honest, masked quite a bit of revulsion. How could they forget where they were? How could they possibly remember?
I supposed that there was, really, no reason not to live here. Except maybe, wouldn’t you rather live anywhere else? In the whole world? Then again – shouldn’t we all perhaps move here, squash out the stink with normality? Was it quiet heroism to buy your bread in the street where a tyrant was born? Could your walk to the bakery beat down, step by step, the shadow of history? Especially if you got a doner from the Turkish place on the corner?
Guidebook in lap, I felt hugely self-conscious. Who came to this town for its history? What monsters they must have hosted. And what did they say at tourist information? Market this, you poor fucker: ‘We do have one claim to fame, but it’s a rather unusual one . . .’ ‘No, we have no statue of our most famous son, actually . . .’ I walked back to the van concocting a cover story that it was impossible to imagine any local demanding.
‘Why are you here?’
‘I am merely visiting the towns possessing the churches with the highest spires in Austria! Yours is third tallest. Look, my guidebook says so! Congratulations. I had to come!’
At the van, I aimed to keep my discovery a secret and usher us out of town as quickly as possible. But I was so hungry for a connection that, as she spat toothpaste into the storm drain at the edge of our car park, I was tempted into sharing my piquant little nugget with Penny. It filtered out from there.
It was a nightmare for me, the reaction of the group. I would describe it as frank, uncomplicated curiosity. Most of the gang wanted, if you can believe it, to go and take a look at the Hitler house. Why? Well, because it was ‘interesting’. Of course it was interesting! It was too interesting. And the way they talked on the way down to Salzburger Vorstadt 15! Saying his name out loud! I followed at the back of the crowd looking only at the pavement and humming in an attempt to drown out the words of my companions. Von asked the way with the phrase ‘War ist Hitler’s haus please danke?’ A young woman in jeans and white trainers and a New Order (not here!) T-shirt pointed the way in a manner I found utterly unreadable.
Salzburger Vorstadt 15 looked long and non-domestic from outside. It had been a hotel or lodging house when he was born, apparently. In front of the house there was a stone with an inscription. As we looked dumbly down at it, a woman walked past and muttered something which sounded critical. I found that quite a relief. This was all horrible, the whole situation, so I was glad for the group to be able to see themselves through the townsfolk’s eyes: beery Britishers, paying homage, or worse, to Hitler’s birthplace.
Onomatopoeic Bob took the lead in making our sentiment clear. He moved forward and with a decent swing, kicked the Hitler stone, espadrille on granite, and looked back at us like he’d taken a bullet for the team.
‘Fuck him,’ he said. ‘This is where this whole mess started, right here.’
‘Fuck him,’ Von said and kicked the stone too.
Another man passed us by with a look of busy bourgeois indifference. Penny and Cally kicked the stone one after another. Then I kicked it, feeling it was now what we did, but a little harder, because the impacts had been growing softer as the original gesture got shrouded in the mists of time, becoming merely symbolic. I was something of a revivalist. My toe stung in my Doc Martens as Sara read out from my guidebook that ‘the material for the memorial stone against war and fascism came from Mauthausen concentration camp’. At that point I stopped still. I looked over at a passing hausfrau. She was shaking her head. I smiled, then, unsure of my next move, kissed my fingers and touched them to the stone, hoping that maybe the kick and the kiss, taken together, might express both my negative assessment of Hitler’s career and my approval for the sentiments of the stone.
Chapter 11
FROM BRAUNAU WE headed to Salzburg, narrowly avoiding an Onomatopoeic Bob-advised double-dip into Germany at Berchtesgaden. As we made it across the tail of tadpole Austria, the Catholic spires shot up from the heart of every town, most of them spindly and straight like dongs, others onion-domed at the summit, even more like dongs.
A couple of days into the drive, the boundaries of my person were dissolving. But I wasn’t shrinking, shrivelling into my seat – I was expanding ever so slightly. It felt to me by then that the borders of my being were coterminous with the edges of my ‘bit’ of the van, in such a way that a nudge of Christian’s Adidas shoulder bag a few centimetres into my footwell felt like a thumb pressed on my windpipe.
The natural border of our territories went down the middle of our two-man seat, where the plastic seat covering puckered into a cleft and shredded like elephan
t skin. That division was clear. But our conflict was kindled by the fact that down the middle of the seat back in front of us there was a moulded plastic imitation of a seam. Because of the arrangement of the seats, this seam didn’t align with the crease in our own seat, it was in fact a couple of inches to the left, in his favour.
The scene was therefore set for a bitter turf war – each of us seeing it as too trivial, too important, to raise verbally. In a series of tit-for-tat raids he shuffled his bag over into my area, theoretically unconsciously, and I nudged it back, as if without noticing. Then I sent my actual foot in – an inch or two over the legitimate boundary, just as an initial bid, so that later I could compromise at a fair point. I kept my foot there for several hundred kilometres of Austria, while my heart beat hard.
Christian kept his eyes down on the collection of short stories he was reading and periodically underlining with a knowing smile. The volume was A Suitcase Between Friends by Douglas Hurd, the Foreign Secretary. Penny’s father had given it to her and she had passed it on to Christian. It was signed in the front by Hurd: ‘With affection and admiration to “Good Old Ken”’, followed by an exclamation mark and question mark which hinted at some manner of interesting or boring relationship.
As we made our way towards Slovenia, Christian’s delight increased steadily. He started to laugh as he read. That is always irritating. ‘What’s so fucking funny, friend?’ you want to ask of this person off on their own, having a good time with an author right in front of your face while you’re trying to mind your own business among all the horror in the world. He banged a fist into the seat in front of him. ‘Oh man, this is it!’ he said and crossed his legs with merry abandon.
It wasn’t that he was actually enjoying the book. More that he felt he had found in the collection the ultimate testament to the utility of his chosen field of study – critical theory.
‘There is so much in here! He’s saying so much!’ he said to me, but aimed it over for Penny and Cally’s benefit, as he double-, triple-underlined and shook his head.
This deconstruction was what his course of study had been preparing him for. A man had written a story and he was going to take it apart sentence by sentence and dissolve it in his proving fluids, and, in a subsequent analysis of its constituent elements, utterly fuck the author.
‘Is that what it’s about – fucking the author?’
‘No – what? That’s incredibly reductive,’ Christian said and made his counter-attack by jutting his desert boot right up against my Doc Martens.
He told us that though he actually felt quite sorry for the Foreign Secretary, he was going to destroy him. The arsehole had broken cover – out from all the speeches and the declarations of what he thought he thought. Now he’d accidentally strayed into Christian’s field of fire and the poor Foreign Secretary had no fucking idea what weapons were going to be brought to bear.
He soon finished the second short story of the day and looked exhausted, as if he’d been making love for twelve hours straight. He moved his foot away from mine entirely, in what I took to be a tactical feint, and sighed.
‘So. My God. Amazing. “The Summer House”.’
‘OK? Interesting story?’
‘So. He’s written this sort of “tale” about a Serb living next door to a Croat – in Bosnia.’ He smiled to himself at the threadbare obviousness of the conceit and I smiled back, because I am something of a spineless shit. ‘And they build this summer house, together in their gardens, but of course they do! Then off somewhere, a Croat rapes a Serb soldier’s sister, and in retaliation the Serb mortar-bombs our Croat’s house and he dies – in the shared summer house!’
‘OK?’ I smiled.
‘It’s so obvious! It’s like – it’s like a fairy tale about a shopping trip, where a man just goes to the shop and buys some tuna and comes home. That’s it. The story is just what it is. It lies there like a piece of cheese in a fucking vacuum pack.’
‘Not good?’
‘Oh no, it’s brilliant. It’s written in this sort of “prose” that’s like, if he had a job doing the descriptions for the toys in the Littlewoods catalogue, he’d get fired, first day. But it’s when you dig down – I mean, he’s the Foreign Secretary, and he’s written a story which exposes his view precisely: he’s a sad wise observer watching an unavoidable pub fight with his gin and tonic from the window of his club. It’s moral equivalency writ large. Or writ shit.’ He laughed. ‘His other one is a sort of fantasy about a fictional Foreign Secretary. And guess what this hero does? He turns a party conference debate the way of intervention in a foreign war. Yeah?’
‘Yeah?’ I said.
‘It’s like the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan had written To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s an alternative reality where he’s a good man. It’s extraordinary. Did you read it, Penny?’
‘Yeah. I thought it was interesting,’ she said.
‘Yeah? Interesting how?’ he prickled.
‘Well, I’m not sure it’s totally fantasy fulfilment, is it?’
‘Well, it’s an alternative reality, where he’s good?’
‘Yes, but it ends, after the Foreign Secretary has ordered champagne in his suite, to toast his success in arguing for intervention, with the news that his wife’s brother has been shot?’
‘Exactly! In Madeupstania, where the conflict is meant to be happening!’
‘Yeah,’ Penny said. ‘But that’s saying: there are costs associated with the solution of military intervention. Yes?’
‘Correct. Illustrating that – to the folks with chopped cock for brains.’ Christian’s mind was working fast, wriggling away from his initial position.
‘So, it’s not a fantasy of his good self, it’s a warning about what would happen if we did go in? Right?’
‘Oh sure,’ said Christian, bristling. ‘It’s multiple, of course it is. You defer one vain justification for non-intervention and there’ll be another one along in a minute!’ He wrinkled his shoulders and shuffled and then added, ‘Andy, is it OK if you move your foot over so I can just put my bag like that? I think we both might be more comfortable, yeah, mate?’
I was speechless at his audacity.
‘Oh, of course, totally, I’m sorry,’ I said, eventually, my tone indicating to all, I think, that I was teetering on the edge of devastating sarcasm.
*
Outside the van, the pitch of the roofs was becoming decidedly Alpine. Widely obtuse, they overshot the walls by a metre or so front and back, ready for snow. It hurt me how well organised everything was. The roads, the system of payment at the motorway service station, the log piles. I felt we were being continually silently reproached for the relatively shitty disorder of the United Kingdom, our turbulent temporariness. That feeling about everywhere I’d ever worked and every institution I’d ever passed through – that the system had recently changed and no one quite knew how it worked yet and soon it would change again so why bother getting too involved?
We were into Slovenia by late afternoon. Slovenia. How very weird it felt to be looking for Slovenia on a map bought from a European service station. The world was being remade – we had grown up with East and West German football teams and the Iron Curtain that made everything to the east just counties of red Russia, where everywhere from Vladivostok to Prague had a Yuri Gagarin Street. To be looking now at Slovenian border guards, with their cutely differentiated uniforms, their flag – searching a bit unsuccessfully for some new spin on three stripes of white, red and blue – it all suggested a return to before the First World War, when the modern was newly modern.
The whole thing was exciting, to see these names bristling back onto the map: Croatia, Slovenia. What next? Would dragons return? Might Assyria or Rome spring back up like a trodden rake, alert and twangy, looking for fun? And of course, at the back of the palate, Bosnia, Serbia and so on also tasted of a return to catastrophe, to triggers and dominoes and Great Powers getting sucked down the vortex by small war on the heel of
small war.
As we approached the border I had an excuse ready. Nevertheless I built up a prickle of sweat on my palms and my head movements became stiff and self-conscious. But as we were processed through the border I was not called upon to explain that Slovenian is actually quite a separate language from Serbo-Croat. There was almost no verbal interaction required and I walked out of the little Portakabin smiling, feeling light and airy. It was stupid of course, I knew that, and my stomach still gnawed deep down, because soon we would be in Croatia, only one little country between us and that border – but when you’re looking at a death sentence, every hour’s reprieve feels sweet.
So – we were in. Looking at the dream face of the break-up of the oddball six-way boho Yugo marriage. Here in Slovenia the kids were doing fine and the Croats could come to Christmas lunch and there might be joshing about how rich the Slovenes were and how fierce the Croats came on, but no one would shout or break a plate. The whole place, with its name – the sort of thing an American arts student, or a weary foreign secretary, might make up for a central European state in a story – felt magical, an alternative reality.
Once through to the other side of the border, the very first woodpile announced a new world: all stacked and fallen, then jumbled back up in a muddled heap. The breeze blocks of a farmhouse unrendered. In a factoryish yard, propane gas canisters the length of torpedoes jostled in a crate at wild angles, and at the fringe certain ones lay on the ground, the fallen pickup sticks.
‘Look at that. As soon as we’re over the border,’ I said to Penny and nodded to the wonky logs. ‘Yeah? Did you see the ones in Austria?’
‘Huh?’ she said, mildly interested. ‘My dad would say that was because the Communist Party has robbed them all of the urge to keep neat log piles.’
‘Yeah. Right!’ I said and shook my head.
Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals Page 8
