Blue River, Black Sea

by Andrew Eames

  I’d read that Audi had quite an ageing workforce, and here was the evidence. For one particular function, installing some interior components, the company had devised a chair on a swinging arm so that the worker didn’t have to stand and bend. It was, said the guide, so that productivity could be increased. Allowing workers to operate from a comfy chair meant they could contribute more with less effort, producing more cars per hour. And that was what the company needed to do: get more out of its people – a tricky task when they were all getting older. But if it didn’t, then it might as well shift the whole operation to somewhere where it could get more people, younger and cheaper, but that would no longer be in Germany, with all the marketing implications that that would have for a ‘German’ car.

  Half an hour later I was reunited with my low-Technik 20-euro set of wheels and making Vorsprung durch the Forum’s car-delivery area. At the junction where Audi’s private road met the public highway a woman had drawn up on the kerb, unable to wait any longer for her first oral fumigatory experience in her new cultural expression of movement. She was having a fag in her car.

  7

  Regensburg: the Pope and

  the Punk Princess

  For the next couple of days the weather deteriorated, having reminded itself it was still early in the year. The trees dripped down the back of my neck, the rain slid down my nose, and I found I could see my breath pasted on air that was thick with the smell of wet leaves. Even though it was May, I regretted not bringing gloves. For the first time in the journey I found myself cycling just to get to the other end.

  Bad weather is mood-affecting, but not everything was unhappy. Beneath my wheels the transformation of the cyclepath on these cold, damp days was dramatic. It was as if someone in the hedgerows had fired a starting gun and all the slugs and snails of the neighbourhood had surged forth at the signal. They’d been waiting for days, hidden away, miserable in the dry heat, thinking how lovely and damp it looked over on the other side, but barred from crossing by horribly hot and dusty conditions. But now they were off to play in the road.

  I whirred on, tyres slick with slime, lured onwards from one village to the next by the smell of local breweries, whose cloying, sweet steam lingered low in the damp conditions. Ingolstadt was the city that had witnessed the signing of Bavaria’s much prized beer-purity law, the Reinheitsgebot, back in 1516, stipulating that beer must not contain anything other than water, malted barley, hops and yeast. And one of Bavaria’s demands, on agreeing to join the new country called Germany in 1871, had been that the rest of the country should sign up to the beer law too, so the Reinheitsgebot has pretty much set the standard for this beer-drinking nation ever since, to the benefit of all mankind. You’d think that the result might be that every beer tastes the same, but I can assure you they don’t, and the breweries of the Altmühl region were a welcome diversion on those damp days.

  In particular I made a point of stopping and supping at the riverside monastery of Weltenburg, where the monks have run the oldest monastic brewery in the world since 1050 – nearly a thousand years. The brewery sat on one side of a giant interior courtyard filled with chestnut trees, just along from the church, providing a choice between praying and drinking. And to banish any uncertainty about the sanctity of the latter, hanging in the brewery window was a giant photograph of a Kloster Weltenburg beer-delivery lorry in front of the Vatican in Rome. If it was good enough for the Pope, then it was good enough for me, so I settled at one of the trestle tables under the chestnut trees, along with a boatload of daytrippers who’d come up the Danube from Kelheim.

  The river here was the colour of spring cow-pats, and just below the gentle shingle at Weltenburg it ran fast and hard through a gorge of limestone cliffs bearded with greenery. It was particularly deep in this stretch, up to 20 metres in places, and there was no room for a towpath, which meant that early navigators had had to unhook their horses and hand-haul themselves and their boats upstream with the help of iron rings sunk into the gorge walls, until the river broadened out again by the monastery, where the horses were waiting to hitch up again. But there was no hurry; after all that effort a little legitimate intoxication provided by monks was the nearest thing to heaven.

  In the broad Weltenburg courtyard the speciality dark beer was served by once-handsome middle-aged ladies in heavy boots, rough worsted waistcoats and green aprons, who looked as if they might well have been recruited a thousand years ago themselves. They were confident and earthy, not servile or spiritual, and I wondered what today’s monks made of these worldly women, with their air of having seen it all before, in their midst. It was not as if there weren’t monks around, because occasionally a black robe would emerge from one door, scurry along the side of the courtyard, and disappear into another. After a hard day at work in the heady air of the brewery they would surely represent a temptation, those waitresses. Some of the monks must have had cell windows looking down on their beer garden, and they’d be able to watch them as they waltzed between the tables, laughing and joking with the guests.

  But not, it seemed, with me.

  ‘Is the white sausage made by monks too?’ I asked the waitress who stood over me while I surveyed the menu.

  ‘Only the beer,’ she said.

  ‘And is the cappuccino made by a Capucin?’

  ‘It’s made by a Pole,’ she said, dismissively. When you’ve been around and seen the world you know a plonker when you see one.

  I turned this exchange over in my mind and by the time I’d guzzled most of my Dunkelbier I’d concluded my German must have been deficient in the white-sausage-monk association. Up above me in the chestnut tree a bird started singing an insistent note: ‘Pissed. Pissed. Pissed.’ I wasn’t, not quite, but another beer magicked up by monks and I would be, so I stumbled off to the monastery church to admire its very theatrical baroque interior. Besides the usual extravaganza of ogees, pinnacles and pediments, there was a George slaying the dragon above the altar, framed in marble pillars with a finish like polished birds’ eggs, while everything above and behind it was gilded and curlicued. The organ pipes were supported on two more pillars and looked ready to march down the nave and give good old roistering George a rousing chorus, while right above my head was a big oblong lantern whose ceiling was decorated with a frescoed sky and cherubs looking down at the congregation from the balcony edge. The lantern distributed daylight handsomely throughout the church, but at a price, because from the outside it was an ugly brute, and it gave the church the look of a baroque camper van with one of those cantilevered roofs that you raise when you want to go to bed.

  By now I’d moved from a land of -ingens into one of -ings, lots of them. There was Töging, Essing, Sittling, Pförring. Most of which I was doing, I think. And then there was Marching, which I wasn’t doing, Pissing, which I did sometimes, and Bad Gögging, which didn’t sound like a good idea. I did get some Startling, too, when quite without warning an ICE, Germany’s high-speed train, pierced the valley walls like a steel needle and thread and shuttled across in front of me in the blink of an eye. That train was the only straight line in a world full of curves, and it sliced across from one tunnel to the other so fast that I couldn’t be absolutely sure it had existed. Certainly most of the passengers on board would have been oblivious to the world outside their window, but a few might have looked up from their Essing and Sittling and caught a glimpse of a figure on a bike in the Pissing rain, and wondered idly what it was like out there. By the time they’d finished reading the newspaper they’d have been approaching Munich, but I was still bumping my way across the tracks in my bid for Budapest, contemplating the incongruity of high-speed trains making guest appearances in a world of slugs, monks and Romans.

  Eventually I came to Bad Gögging itself. It turned out to be a small spa town which had started life being called Limes Thermae by the Romans, whose ruined fort of Abusina was on the top of a nearby hill. In their day the Limes had been a line of Roman fortifications which had stret
ched all the way down the Danube to the Black Sea, marking the boundary of empire, and Abusina must have been one of the more comfortable postings. At the end of their guard duty the legionnaires could trundle downhill to flop into a choice of several thermal pools, all between 25 and 37 degrees, for post-guard-duty facials, armour-chafing body scrubs and waxing of centurion bikini lines.

  The pools had since been enclosed in a big modern spa centre, where you could get, amongst other things, a paraffin bath and a hot chocolate massage, neither of which I found particularly tempting. It was clear from the posters and brochures that modern Bad Gögging was marketing itself as a place to roll back the years, to halt the ageing process without going under the knife. But it was lunchtime when I cycled through and not many people were on the streets, so I couldn’t judge for myself whether its clientele were rejuvenated, happy, white-smiling sixty-somethings, or whether too much warm water only served to make them wrinklier than prunes. The only evident visitors were a couple of pre-teens kicking their heels in the infant playground of a local biergarten, looking as if they’d been deposited there by spa-obsessed grandparents who’d taken them away on a lovely bit of Bad Gögginging and couldn’t understand why they looked so glum.

  Beyond Gögging, past the Essings and the Sittlings, I found a room in the house of a dear old Bert in a village whose Gasthof advertised good ‘bürgerliche’ cooking, and which to emphasize the point had a wall-fresco of burgers in hats looking like they thought everything was burgerlicking good. This Bert and his wife were my most eccentric hosts on the cycling stretch of the journey. He was a great talker and a great laugher, and he had a thick country accent which was made even thicker by the amount of alcohol he consumed, on what must have been an hourly basis. I suspect he’d been a farmer once upon a time, because his powerful shoulders and the way he held his arms slightly away from his body suggested a lifetime of hard labour. But he didn’t seem unhappy with his new career as master of ceremonies, seeing it as his particular role to talk at his guests and, between sentences, to laugh his short bellowing laugh.

  ‘Here comes the brains of the operation, hurr hurr,’ he said, as I was clambering off my bike in his courtyard. From the street behind me emerged an elderly lady pushing a pram, and I naturally assumed he was introducing me to his wife.

  ‘Only one year old, hurr hurr, but already she’s got more brains than the rest of us put together, hurr hurr.’

  I struggled to keep up with anything he ever said to me, and he said a lot. I barely got more than every third word, but he didn’t notice. I don’t think he even realized I was a foreigner; probably just thought I was unusually quiet for a Frankfurter. That evening I could hear him downstairs, growling and bellowing for hour after hour, but I couldn’t hear anyone else. I assumed his wife probably left him to soliloquize at the TV, but in the morning they were both in the breakfast room, reading aloud to each other from the newspaper, looking up briefly to offer me tea or coffee. It was plainly their morning ritual, no matter whether anyone else was in the house. He’d read bits to her, she’d grunt, and she’d read bits to him and he’d laugh, hurr hurr. Then they’d swap sections and repeat the process, ending up reading the same stories to each other all over again, having plainly not listened at all the first time round. They’d found a way of co-existing, and they really didn’t give a hoot about what anyone else thought.

  Appropriately, I arrived in Regensburg with the Regen, rain. And despite the dour conditions it was clear that the former capital of Bavaria, once the hub of Charlemagne’s empire and the seat of the Imperial Diet of the Holy Roman Empire, was a lovely old city, still essentially medieval in its layout. It was the first city I’d encountered on the river which had not been re-arranged by the RAF, and the result was 1,400 buildings of serious historical significance still standing, many of them more than five hundred years old. It would have been lovely on a sunny day.

  Centuries as a trading crossroads, particularly for salt brought up the Danube, had imbued the city with a cosmopolitan spirit. In the narrow pedestrian lanes, lined with jewellers and antique traders, you could have been in the back streets of The Hague, where the main noise came from the pigeons settling around the gables overhead.

  It was a city whose nationality was determined by the weather forecast. When the days were warm, it’d be like Italy, with tourists sitting around the terraces and piazzas eating ice-cream and shopkeepers at the doorways of their boutiques congratulating each other on the artistry of their window displays. When the sun was high it could be Nice or Marseilles, where shade is provided by tall buildings by the waterside and the siesta rules at midday. But in the rain it reverted to being decidedly German, with everyone going about their business resolute and grim.

  Ecclesiastical buildings dominated the centre. Robed figures fluttered down pedestrian alleys, and I got a sense that Bible studies were breaking out all over, behind Dominican, Benedictine and Carmelite doors. It wasn’t so long since Pope Benedict XVI had been here, soon after his elevation from plain old Cardinal Ratzinger, and it was here that he made that now infamous speech in which he quoted a declaration that the Prophet Mohammed was ‘evil and inhuman’ because of his command that faith should be spread by the sword. The Islamic world had reacted angrily, and the Pope had been forced to apologize, pointing out (rather disingenuously) that he’d only been quoting the view of a fourteenth-century emperor, not his own. Benedict/Ratzinger had taught theology in Regensburg back in the 1970s and still had a house in the city, so I could see how, back amongst unchanging, medieval cobbled streets surrounded by friends and former colleagues, the views of fourteenth-century emperors might have seemed of suitable interest. And I could see that, to someone who had dwelled amongst medievalism and academia, the impact that repeating those views made on the wider modern world might have come as a surprise. Anyway, Benedict returned to Rome rather chastened by the experience and hopefully resolved to be less naïve in his choice of words thereafter. Possibly he had also renewed his supply of Regensburger Karmelitengeist, an alcohol-based cure for flatulence which is made and sold by Regensburg’s Carmelite monks from their monastery on the Alter Kornmarkt square. The formula contains twelve herbs, and only two monks know the magic mix that will prevent a Pope from losing his dignity during the quietly meditative passages of evening prayer.

  Regensburg’s biggest single attraction, and the reason for its historical importance in trade, religion and politics, was its bridge across the Danube. The Steinerne Brücke was built back in 1130 and for centuries was the only river-crossing between Ulm and Vienna. To my eye, it still looked in pretty good order, a hefty piece of stonework arching its back over giant slippered feet which thrust their toes into the fast-flowing river. As with practically every construction of such age, it had a legend attached, and one which was repeated by every tour leader whose group came to stand on the arch. They were told that story as they looked back at the medieval skyline studded with towers and the mullioned garret windows that dug their heels in to stop themselves sliding off steep roofs and spiking themselves on the eaves below. There were few straight lines in that cityscape, and with every building at a slightly different angle to its neighbour, it was hard to judge either distance or perspective. Sitting on the parapet, looking back at the soft yellows and ochres of old walls whose outlines were softened further by drizzle, turning it into a fading fresco on a riverbank, I listened to various accounts of the bridge legend. The basic story runs that the bridge-builder had made a bet with his rival the cathedral-builder that he could complete his project first, but in order to assure a win he had entered into a Faustian compact with the Devil. He’d enlisted Satan’s help with the bridge construction, agreeing to Satan’s terms that he could take possession of the first soul to cross to the other side. The bridge-builder duly triumphed over the cathedral-builder, and he tricked the Devil, too, because the first soul to cross the bridge had been a donkey. Or a dog, cat or chicken, depending on which group leader you believed
.

  Of the four or five accounts I overheard, only one narrator queried its authenticity. The problem with the story, she said, was that at the time of the bridge-building there was no cathedral in Regensburg, and nor would there be for another 150 years, which didn’t make it much of a race. So even back in the Middle Ages there was no letting the truth get in the way of a good story.

  As unmissable as the Steinerne Brücke, and built at much the same time, was Regensburg’s Historic Sausage Kitchen, supposedly Germany’s oldest restaurant, in a low stone cottage with a tall chimney on the city end of the bridge. Unmissable not because of its architecture – it looked like a Greek quayside taverna with trestle tables in front – but because of the all-pervasive smell of grilling Wurst, which wrapped itself alluringly around every street corner, triggering a Pavlovian response in every passerby. I felt some sympathy for the staff who stood around the grill inside, forever prodding, checking and turning. When you live with the smell of sausages, waking up with it, going to sleep with it, and existing with it every hour in between, you can have too much of a good thing. By the time they got home at night they must have been lacquered in sausage fat.

  I ordered my ‘six with sauerkraut’, sat down and watched the tour guides pause en route to the bridge to run through the list of the Kitchen’s celebrated customers. From my perspective, on a hard bench by a greasy quayside, it didn’t seem Goethe’s, Mozart’s and Haydn’s kind of place, but I daresay they were practically forced to try it, because in those days the best address in town had been the White Lamb Hotel directly behind the Sausage Kitchen, and its important guests must have been tormented by the smell drifting through their windows, morning, noon and night. ‘Mein Gott, I have to have a sausage,’ Mozart would say to Haydn, pushing aside his half-finished oratorio. The British Saxe-Coburg-Gothas had recently had the same problem with itinerant Wurst sellers outside Buckingham Palace. I wondered whether they too had been so pestered by the smell that they’d eventually sent out a valet to buy some surreptitiously. ‘Mein Gott, I have to have a hot dog with onions.’