Blue River, Black Sea

by Andrew Eames

  ‘He wouldn’t come,’ declared the archduke.

  The countess disagreed. ‘He would.’

  ‘He’s too old. He’s well over ninety.’

  ‘You’ve got to invite him.’

  I could see that she was the one who was going to make sure the family maintained its social connections.

  Breakfast was at eight the following morning in a family kitchen in a different part of the building, and I found myself ‘hullooing’ down corridors feeling a bit like Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood.

  In the kitchen the archduke was making the coffee and the countess preparing the toast, surrounded by photos of the family. She was in a tracksuit, shortly departing for the gym, and he had his BlackBerry out, plainly already in work mode. His staff began at 7.30, in offices across the courtyard, and he said they’d start even earlier if they could.

  ‘This is forestry. It’s an old-fashioned country business.’

  I found it hard to imagine him dealing in pulp and tonnages. He belonged on a bicycle on the wet cobbles of a university town on a darkening evening, where his mind would be on higher things.

  ‘Do they call you “Your Highness”?’

  The archduke admitted that they did. ‘They prefer it that way.’

  Twenty minutes later we’d all dispersed, he to his paper trees, she to her exercise machines, and me to my personal, mobile seat by the riverbank.

  I didn’t have far to go for my lunch appointment with Princess Anita von Hohenburg, so I took my time climbing up the 1,500 feet to Maria Taferl, one of Austria’s most important pilgrimage destinations. The pilgrimage church was full of candles, so I lit one for my family, and then another for my journey. Then I thought that was selfish, so I lit one more for the happiness of people in general. And another for the state of the world, all the while thinking what an empty gesture it really was, lighting candles in a chapel on top of a hill.

  Outside, I found a bench on the valley side of the village and settled to drink in the view, right across to a handful of low hills in the distance. If the Mostviertel had been the bow waves of ships, then these were the foreheads of swimmers making their way across the plain. In the middle distance regular scurrying red trains threaded their way, miraculously, through what looked like an unruly chaos of forest, field, tarmac and brick, but which must have had some kind of order to it after all. To the west was a small industrial town, but I found I could use a foreground tree as a big green eyepatch to block it out and the only sign it was there was the occasional shout, bark of a dog or rasp of a motorcycle that floated up the hill. Directly below me the 5-mile valley filled its arms with a bumper crop of Danubian water, on which barges moved like creeping arrowheads towards some as-yet hypothetical target.

  From Maria Taferl it was a short, high-speed freewheel across to Artstetten, a far more romantic and castley-looking castle than the baroque box of Persenbeug had been. Artstetten had seven banded towers topped with copper onions and completed with dewdrop spikes, and was set in sloping parkland with rose arbours, fountains and mature trees. Two-thirds of it was open to the public, but its visitors didn’t come here for the aesthetics; they came for the tomb of Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, whose assassination had sparked the First World War.

  Princess Anita was Franz Ferdinand’s great-granddaughter. A cheerful, energetic, bustling woman in middle age with a crop of straw-blonde hair, she had taken it upon herself to try to correct what she thought was a mistaken world view of her great-grandfather, who is portrayed in some history books as arrogant and reckless. The common view is that he provoked the assassination and thereby the war.

  ‘He was hot-tempered, yes,’ she said, as we walked through the castle to collect the keys. ‘But he would always apologize afterwards. Here, look at this,’ and she pointed out a cabinet of little china sheep. ‘He’d give his wife one of these every time he lost his temper with her, to ask forgiveness. Sweet, don’t you think? You see, unlike many of the other royal alliances at the time, he and Sophie were a real love match.’ A far cry from those dynastic couples who’d got married without even being present at their own wedding.

  As we descended into the crypt, she explained that Franz Ferdinand had never seen eye to eye with autocratic Emperor Franz Joseph. He had in fact only become heir by default when Franz Joseph’s only son Rudolph killed himself in a bizarre and inexplicable suicide pact with his mistress at his hunting lodge at Mayerling, near Vienna – a suicide that Franz Joseph never acknowledged; it was always referred to as a ‘hunting accident’. For a while afterwards Franz Ferdinand himself had been very ill with TB and had not been expected to survive; he felt betrayed by how much the rest of the court had ignored him during that illness, shifting their attention to the next in line. A particular defining moment came after his recovery when he married Sophie, a lady-in-waiting to the court, which greatly displeased the emperor and all around him. The marriage had had to be declared morganatic (of unequal status, and therefore their children would have no claim to the throne), given that the House of Habsburg’s strictures allowed marriage only to members of other reigning royal houses. Franz Ferdinand had gone ahead with it, nevertheless.

  And then there was the assassination itself, which stemmed from the unfortunate timing of his official visit to Sarajevo, on the anniversary of the Serbian defeat by the Turks at the battle of Kosovo Polje. Sarajevo had a large Serb minority, so the timing of a royal visit was insensitive, for sure, but Princess Anita was of the opinion that it wasn’t deliberately so – at least not on her great-grandfather’s part. The arrangement had been made by members of his household, and when told of the risk he ran by being there on that particular day, he had felt obliged to go ahead with it on the basis that he couldn’t, as a future emperor, show cowardice.

  As for the day itself, there’d been a first, unsuccessful assassination attack with a hand grenade that had bounced off the archduke’s car and exploded under the vehicle behind, injuring some of the officers inside but not the royal couple. It was only later, after the day’s formalities were done, that Franz Ferdinand and Sophie had taken to their car again, at the archduke’s instigation, to go and visit those same wounded officers in hospital. It was on this compassionate journey that a Bosnian Serb student called Gavrilo Princip had found himself presented with a point-blank opportunity, and had taken it.

  Franz Ferdinand and Sophie couldn’t be buried with the rest of the imperial Habsburgs because of their morganatic marriage, so they’d had a crypt built at Artstetten. It was a relatively simple construction, dominated by the two main tombs, with a smaller plaque on the wall behind them.

  ‘Yes, sad, that,’ said the princess, seeing me looking. ‘They had a stillborn child. They really loved their children, quite unlike other royal parents at the time.’

  ‘Will you be buried in here?’ I asked, looking at all the unallocated space.

  ‘Probably not,’ she said. ‘I’ll probably be buried with my second husband in Timioara.’

  We adjourned to the terrace to join Princess Anita’s daughter, the gamine, vivacious Countess Alix, and the two women shared a cigarette before lunch.

  ‘I know we shouldn’t, but my mother smoked and she lived to a grand old age,’ said the princess, but her next remark was cut short by a censorious gurgle from a gargoyle of a fountain-head set into the slope opposite. It started to vomit a mixture of brown water and leaves.

  ‘Ah, that’s Willibald.’

  ‘The fountain has a name?’

  ‘No no, Willibald is a wonderful old man who fixes everything and I asked him to investigate why it wasn’t working. The fountain.’

  So we sat down to pork and rice prepared by the countess, with Willibald putting his welly in somewhere up the hill.

  ‘Alix comes to help me with running the house every summer,’ said the princess, ‘and a great help you are too, dear.’

  ‘Nobody else wanted to do the job my mother is doing,’ said Alix, addressing me. She was in he
r early twenties and (unlike her mother) both looked and sounded very French, which must have been either her education or her father’s genetics, or both. ‘There was a lot of family discussion about what to do with Artstetten and no one wanted to sell it, but neither did anyone want to take responsibility for running it as Mama does. It’s hard for her. The house and the archive. A lot of work.’

  Princess Anita smiled. ‘My sister is jealous. I got the castle, she got the money, and she thinks I got the better deal.’ She threw back her head and laughed. ‘The very idea. She doesn’t come here in the winter.’

  ‘No central heating?’

  ‘We’ve got an oil system, but it’s very expensive. Besides, we’ve got a lot of wood to burn, and it’s free. Did you not smell the log fires as we came through the house?’

  I had.

  ‘That’s from last winter. At times of high pressure like today the air comes squeezing down the chimneys and we get to re-live last winter’s log fires. I like it. It brings back memories of cosy nights.’

  ‘Cosy?’ Alix raised an eyebrow, sarcastically.

  ‘The teachers at Alix’s school used to complain,’ explained her mother. ‘They said I sent the children to school without enough clothes, but they were used to the cold from the house, you see.’

  ‘What we didn’t like was the dressing up in sailor suits.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ the princess smiled guiltily. ‘I did make you do that occasionally when rich Americans came to lunch. In those days I’d do anything to put the house on the map.’

  ‘And we had to visit the Paris branch of the family and wear long dresses and sit in silence. Children did not speak.’

  ‘Very proper, that family,’ murmured the princess.

  I knew that her first husband and the father of her three children had been French, and by all accounts a rather bumptious character. It sounded as if she was better off without him. Meanwhile her second husband spent most of his time in Romania, where he’d invested in a lot of agricultural land, so Artstetten had become her project alone.

  We talked a bit about the aristocratic life, and I mentioned the archduke’s brother, who chose not to get involved with business but to travel and read and generally have a good time while his brother managed the family’s forestry business.

  ‘Of course I know people who don’t work,’ said Countess Alix. ‘I think a lot of them are very lonely, because who do they find like them? Not many people have so much time to sit around and discuss Proust. And if they do, they’re usually strange.’

  I asked what she herself was doing, and it turned out she was taking six months off from an unspecified job to go to New York and take in some sailing regattas, which sounded quite jet-setty to me.

  ‘Not jet-setty,’ corrected her mother. ‘You should see the sort of person she sails with. They’re all bears.’

  Alix frowned but said nothing. This was a discussion she and her mother had had before.

  ‘And do they call you “Countess”, those bears?’

  She wrinkled her nose and shook her head. ‘Course not. But if people of my level send me a letter which doesn’t have my proper title on it, then that irritates me. They should know better.’

  When lunch was finished I asked the princess whether she had any official role in the local community.

  ‘Certainly people come to me about local issues, which is no doubt why the mayor and I don’t get on. Not at all. I mean, he bought a cow and called it Princess! I ask you! How obvious is that!’ She laughed but I could see she was riled, and I could imagine that the mayor and she made a point of stepping on each other’s toes on a regular basis. Princess Anita was not one for holding back.

  ‘He has no liking for history, that one,’ she was saying.

  ‘And what about social life? Parties?’

  ‘Oh yes, we have those. Sometimes for writers and artists. For the children. And once a year we have a big party, usually with five hundred invitees. We need to stay in touch.’

  ‘So what will happen to Artstetten when you run out of energy?’ I asked, as we cleared the table. The countess had disappeared inside to make coffee.

  ‘Who knows,’ shrugged Princess Anita. ‘Après moi, le déluge.’

  11

  The Wachau and the Vienna Woods

  There’s a stretch of the Danube in Austria where picture postcards are made in heaven. It’s a stretch where the riverbanks rise up, studded with baroque churches and trellised with vineyards that were planted in the era of Charlemagne. A place where castles once sprouted from every riverside rock, showing their teeth and collecting their tolls. The Wachau.

  I entered this hallowed stretch of waterway full of great expectations of a Narnia-like land flowing with milk and honey, but initially there was little change to the forest-and-cornfield combination that had escorted the Danube for the last couple of days. The first hint of change was at the small town of Aggsbach Markt, where a fresh milk machine had been placed in the main square for the benefit of walkers and cyclists; the good burghers of Aggsbach had plainly decided we were going to need some extra nourishment for what lay ahead.

  The next village, Willendorf, was famous for its fertility symbol, a 30,000-year-old Venus in limestone, with heavy breasts and hips, who added serious weight to the theory that the Danube was the earliest corridor of civilization in Europe. The Willendorf Venus had been discovered back in 1908 during the laying of the local railway line. She’s thought to have belonged to a nomadic hunter who would have been chasing mountain deer, bison, Arctic fox and wolverine through what was then a sub-Arctic world. She had no face, just braided hair all over her head, and no feet either, perhaps because the artist wasn’t good at faces and feet, or because the lack of face made her more like a god than a person and her pointy legs made her more practical to stick into the ground.

  The hunter would have kept her by his bedside as an ancestor image to ensure his hunting success; for me, sitting on the bench by the large Venus facsimile at the spot where she was discovered, I found her presence comfortingly maternal. She had the sort of silhouette you might see running an Italian pizzeria anywhere along the Adriatic coast, where she’d be laughing and shouting in equal measure. I’d been travelling a few weeks now, and I felt the need for someone to talk to. Encouraged by her comforting shape (and the absence of anyone else in the vicinity), I found myself telling her about my journey so far and asking for her blessing for what was to come, just as the hunter who’d owned her must have done. And confiding in that luscious-breasted presence gave me more heart than lighting a candle in the austere pilgrimage chapel at Maria Taferl.

  After Willendorf the first vineyards began, but initially they had to compete for space with the more powerful fruit orchards, which batted the vines up on to ledges on the valley sides. There they rallied their troops and drew strength and vigour from the Loess soil under their feet, until from the town of Spitz onwards they had the confidence to mount a full-scale assault on the valley bottom, descending in tresses to smother the apricots and pears, and eventually to colonize every piece of available land with their massed battalions. Battle over, they were neatly drawn up for inspection by their vintners, in neat regimental order, turning landscape into maths.

  Up close, they had a charm of their own. These vineyards were mostly small and family owned, worked by hand or possibly with the aid of a single old vintage tractor which would be lovingly polished by the farmer every day after work. Each farmer had a shed and a different theory about the lie of his land, so each patch of vineyard was slightly differently orientated from its neighbour, with the shed as its axis. The result was that, from afar, it looked as if the grande dames of Grüner Veltliner and the gentlemen of Müller-Thurgau were performing a stately quadrille around reluctant wooden partners.

  The town of Spitz lay at the foot of the highly productive Tausendeimerberg, literally ‘thousand bucket mountain’, so-called because it could produce 55,000 litres, or one thousand ‘pails’ (an Austri
an Eimer contains 55 litres), in a good year. Wine by the bucket doesn’t sound like good marketing, but a lot of it never saw the end of the following year, because many of the Wachau’s small vintners had their own improvised wine gardens where they sold their heuriger, or young wine, direct from the barrel, hanging a bunch of straw on their garden gates to indicate that the vintage was ready. Selling direct like this, without having to deal with the likes of retailers and bottling plants, was the only effective way that wine-making on such a small scale could ever be profitable.

  I took a seat at a trestle table outside Konrad’s, a long, low cottage under a spreading chestnut tree, where Grüner Veltliner was the bucket of the day. Konrad’s menu was sparse, but the man himself was red-faced and cheery; would I like an Achtel or a Viertel? he asked. A Viertel, I said, without really thinking, and so a couple of minutes later found myself cradling a quarter-litre glass of wine, with some kilometres still to cycle.

  I’m no great wine expert, but sometimes the sense of place adds immeasurably to the enjoyment of a drink, so I took great pleasure in Konrad’s bucket, and great comfort from the fact that one of the other wine-makers turned up shortly after me and parked his tractor outside.

  ‘You taking a break?’ asked one of Konrad’s other guests.

  ‘Sure I am,’ came the reply. ‘I spent all morning making it, now I’m going to drink it,’ and he disappeared inside.

  The wine went quickly to my head so I ordered a ‘fitness brot’ from Konrad’s menu (radishes, tomatoes and gherkins on buttered black bread) and watched the river traffic go by. In the foreground a couple of attentive ducks were shepherding their only surviving offspring round and round in an eddy, like a child in a playground, while behind them a Ukrainian push-tug struggled with one of the fastest-flowing stretches of the Danube. He had four barges of gravel lashed to his bows, deep in the water, and crabbed sideways around the corner, barely moving against the stream. Paradoxically, the very rain which gave him the depth to travel also made his progress tortuously hard.