Blue River, Black Sea

by Andrew Eames

  As I cycled on I thought of two other artists who might have painted the motorway arches in their day.

  The seventeen-year-old Adolf Hitler had come to Vienna from Linz as a would-be art student, but had failed to get a place in the Arts Academy when his drawings of Linz – yes Linz – were rejected as an inadequate portfolio. Not wishing to return home a failure, he’d stayed on for five years, lodging in hostels and earning money from drawing postcards and from set-painting in the theatre. Interestingly, for someone who made a career out of war, he’d also been avoiding conscription, and indeed he eventually left for Germany because of the prison sentence that awaited him if he was caught, which is not something he mentions in Mein Kampf. At the time he wrote to a friend that ‘I still believe that the world has lost a great deal by my not being able to go to the Academy and learn the craft of painting. Or did fate reserve me to some other purpose?’ It’s fair to say it did.

  Twenty years later Patrick Leigh Fermor arrived in Vienna and ended up doing much the same thing, staying in hostels and earning money from his art, unaware that he was following in the footsteps of a draft-dodger who was about to start a war that would change the world. It was in a Viennese hostel that Leigh Fermor met a German called Konrad, one of the most striking characters in A Time of Gifts. Konrad had learned his English entirely from his reading of Shakespeare, and his talk was peopled with wanton wenches, lackeys and fardels. He called Leigh Fermor ‘my dear young’, and it was his idea that the author should go door to door in the prosperous Mariahilferstrasse district doing sketches of residents. That was how the young Leigh Fermor spent his next weeks.

  I too headed for Mariahilferstrasse, but there were no Konrads in its Pension Esterhazy, which smelled like a sanatorium and looked like one too. In fact I barely saw another resident. Thus far I’d stayed in some pretty basic places, but this one had been stripped down to the absolute minimum and slathered all over with some plague-resistant, anti-fouling paint, the colour of dirty battleships. It had no pictures on the walls, no curtains on the showers and no seats on the toilets. And yet I still had to hand over my passport as a ‘caution’, so distrustful was the owner of his clientele. But at least it was outside the touristed city centre, beyond all those massively decorative palaces, galleries and museums that anchor the city so firmly in its imperialist past, stalked through by the whiskery ghost of Emperor Franz Joseph, his joints cracking, his ceremonial sword clanking by his side. These buildings turn Vienna into a weighty piece of scenery, an arcane, dusty place full of reminders of lost glories, where tourists go off in search of the Dorotheum, the Hof or the Belvedere, and are never entirely sure which one it is they’ve found. It is a city which forever missed out on a good sacking, burning or bombing, those invasive purgations which cleared the systems of many other European capitals and allowed them to leave one foot in the past while stepping forward to the present and into the future. As a result it wears its history on its sleeve, but little else.

  On previous visits Vienna had struck me as a place of thickset middle-aged women with big hair and little dogs who murmured to each other in coffee shops. Of late middle-aged princesses who wore furs without a second thought, and of baggy-stockinged spinsters who were occasionally seen in public smoking a pipe. Even before Botox, decades of coiffure, skincare and avoiding too much emotion had set the expressions of the moneyed Viennese into masks, usually faintly disapproving, and their hairstyles were carved, not styled. From their mid-forties onwards they began to turn to stone.

  In The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn (down the Danube) Peter Esterhazy says of Vienna that ‘in a friendly little town, men’s and women’s gazes go scampering all over the place, but not here’. What constitutes normal behaviour elsewhere – simply forgetting to remove one’s glance from another’s face – is not the custom in the imperial city. As a result, he felt unnoticed and ‘as grey as a concrete bunker … It is easier to join the dead in Vienna than talk to the living’.

  But things had changed since I was last here and parts of the city had moved on, thanks to the newly enlarging Europe. For decades Vienna had played the role of the last outpost of capitalist civilization, almost completely surrounded by the Eastern Bloc, like a grand and glittering luxury cruise liner berthed in a port which the communist world could see, tantalizingly close, through the barbed-wire fence. The Viennese turned their backs on the grubby faces surrounding them, ate more Sachertorte and pretended they didn’t exist, but in the years since 1989 the old customs and immigration restrictions had been steadily removed, boarding passes had been issued and now the luxury liner’s decks rang with the footsteps of hundreds of thousands of incomers, whom the original passengers were still doing their best to ignore. This new subculture emerged particularly in the Internet cafés, where I spent a couple of days making my travel arrangements amongst fractured families Skypeing each other in a babel of voices and languages. Many of these places were run by Africans speaking a mixture of Arabic, French and English, with a clientele of Romanians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks and Turks.

  So where the inner Gürtel or ring road was lined with the monuments of old empire, filled with holidaying Western Europeans holding maps, the outer Gürtel had the newcomer encampment, the Internet cafés and girly bars, filled with the rest of the world making a new home. Occasionally the two worlds would overlap: in the inner Gürtel, a group of Turkish-origin breakdancers earned money from virtuoso displays outside St Stephen’s Cathedral, its roof scaled like a reptile’s skin, while in the outer Gürtel a tall man in a long coat and felt hat came striding through, looking neither to the left nor right of his long, cold nose, clicking the metal tip of his cane on the stone.

  For a couple of days I hunkered down, sending filled notebooks home and receiving parcels of fresh socks in return. I had a meeting with the benevolent Danube Tourist Commission, who took one look at me and decided I needed a hot meal and a bath. I cycled out to look at the United Nations City, a clutch of bureaucratic office blocks that looked like a set of microchips printed on the sky, surrounded by a squatter town of doughnut shops, Irish pubs and cocktail bars. I tried, and failed, to attend a concert that included the Blue Danube waltz – although I did finally find a part of the Danube that was truly blue: a floating swimming pool.

  I eventually tracked Strauss himself down to his eponymous museum behind a flaking façade above a McDonald’s in an unappealing part of town. The museum was full of romantic portraits of the composer, forever in a tuxedo, with a fine bushy showman’s moustache of which he was plainly very proud. Paintings depicted him at the piano, from where he dazzled a series of swooning, fanning ladies in ruffed dresses. But there was no recording of the tune he wrote in 1867 for a male choir, and to which an amateur lyricist supplied those clumsy words which have since become a national anthem for Austria:

  Danube so blue

  You flow straight through

  The meadows and dales …

  On my last afternoon in the city I pedalled down non-blue, non-meadowed, non-daled banks to the Cemetery of the Nameless, an obscure plot east of Vienna containing the graves of those who had chosen to end their lives in the river, and who as a result couldn’t be buried in Catholic ground. No romantic end for them. No matter how heavily they’d weighed themselves down, the river currents used to bring their drowned corpses to the surface at this point, amongst old Hansa warehouses and barges with dangerous chemicals, a place where nobody would go of their own free will. Peter Esterhazy describes the Danube as a ‘heavy eater’, swallowing up Jews, Serbs, babies and Hungarian prisoners of war, but it seems that it wasn’t so keen on swallowing up suicides. There must have been a couple of hundred buried here, all under the same metal cross with a silver Christ on a black crucifix, arms outstretched beseechingly, hungry for love. Most had the simple inscription ‘Unbekannt’, unknown. People who, said a sign by the graveyard entrance, had ‘fled from the world to where nobody could find them, and where there is no more pain’. Some had plast
ic lilies, but even more had old cuddly toys left on the graves, the Snoopies and teddies of compassionate children who sensed that some people had a greater need. And one, in a far corner right at the back, had a lit candle, suggesting a body that was by no means as ‘unbekannt’ as the inscription suggested, but someone who had been, and still was, deeply loved, by one person at least, and whose story had never been told.

  * * *

  In the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire Vienna had a diminutive neighbour called Pressburg, 60 kilometres away, to which it was connected by one of the longest tram rides in the world. That tram crossed what was later to become a buffer zone between East and West, between capitalism and communism, so the tracks were ripped up and watchtowers were posted there instead; they were the hooks on which the Iron Curtain was hung. The resulting no-man’s-land helped to preserve the last vestiges of a true Danubian alluvial marsh, while everywhere else the river was being imprisoned in its progressive straitjacket of embankments and hydropower dams.

  Wetlands like these are capable of absorbing and slow-releasing large quantities of water, thus removing the extreme highs and extreme lows of the river flow, and they are far better for the biodiversity of the EU’s longest river. The canalization of the Danube, of which only around 30 per cent is truly free-flowing, has caused the loss of 80 per cent of the original floodplain, along with species like the moor frog and the black poplar. It has also had an impact on water quality, because those wetlands used to act as natural filters, cleaning the river water before sending it on its way. So now that the Danube is frogmarched through Europe, without looking to left or right, it carries its slop bucket with it from one country to the next and ultimately upsets the ecology of the Black Sea. From having been a reedy, marshy, wandering, wonderful, amorphous living thing, it has been rendered into straight lines, made far less interesting, and more dangerous, by the hand of man.

  Certainly the communists weren’t much bothered by environmental issues. On the far side of the Iron Curtain, the former marshlands on the southern shore of the city the Viennese still call Pressburg (but the rest of the world knows better as Bratislava) had been drained and recarpeted in marching rows of brutalist apartments. Man’s triumph over nature, never mind that they looked like school lavatory blocks from the 1960s.

  Bratislava is the capital of one of the world’s youngest countries, Slovakia, which was an integral part of Czechoslovakia until independence in 1993. In reality the city had never really been Slovak at all, but a largely German-speaking part of the Habsburg Empire, although technically it belonged to Hungary. In the rearrangements that followed the First World War it was handed over to the newly created nation of Czechoslovakia so that the latter could have a port on the Danube, and becoming the Slovak capital was the city’s third rebranding in seventy years.

  Border changes like this were settled by post-war treaties, which between them carved the rough outlines of Eastern Europe as we know it today. Besides the new nation of Czechoslovakia, these treaties created Yugoslavia, Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania out of what had been largely feudal territories with mixed populations ruled over by powerful landowners who took no account of people’s needs, and who had been giving their allegiance to some empire or other in return for relative autonomy. In Western Europe we’ve had settled borders and a strong sense of nationality for hundreds of years, but most of Central and Eastern Europe didn’t have single nationalities until the idea of the nation-state was thrust upon it by the treaty-makers.

  Besides, apart from the Danube, there were no handy physical barriers that kept peoples boxed in, so all the ethnicities had freely intermingled. There were Magyars, Serbs, Saxons and Swabians all swilling around the same general area. Hungarians were widely spread in what is now Romania; Turks dominated whole swathes of what is now Bulgaria, former Yugoslavia and southern Hungary; Germans had big concentrations in what is now Poland and the Czech Republic, plus large regions of Hungary, Serbia and Romania, and they had settled in all the trading cities. And Slovaks were widely spread, the wild and woolly woodsmen of the East; but apart from the mountains, the Tatras and the Carpathians, they never really had a place they could call home.

  The treaty-makers at Versailles and Trianon changed all this, drawing lines on the map and creating new names and nationalities just as they had done in the Middle East, with Syria, Iran, Iraq, Israel and Palestine. The driving idea was for self-determination – majority rule – but the new borders often trapped hundreds of thousands of one ethnicity in another ethnicity’s country. Previously this had always been a region of comparatively free movement, so over the succeeding post-treaty decades millions of people took the remedy into their own hands, either crossing the new borders into lands where they were in the majority, or deciding to cut their losses and start again with a completely new life in the Americas. Thus Bratislava went from 60 per cent German in 1880 to 80 per cent Slovak in 1921, and thus, today, there are supposedly more Slovaks in Cleveland, Ohio than there are in Bratislava.

  Thereafter communism clamped down on everything, preventing any further movement, incarcerating those who were thinking of moving in countries to which they’d never really belonged, and virtually halting all communication between families and ethnicities spread across borders.

  Over the last two decades those restraints have been steadily removed, and now Central and Eastern Europeans are crossing borders again. They’re swilling around the whole continent, spilling over into the wider world, looking for a better place to settle, just as they did between the wars. Many – particularly those who belonged to a minority trapped in someone else’s country – find it easy to leave. They’ve never really felt hefted to their own piece of soil, as a deer is to the scrap of mountain or moorland where it was born. So the Swabians in Hungary and Romania, the Saxons in Transylvania, the Hungarians in Slovakia and Croatia, and the Slovaks in Romania, they’re all on the move. And leaving their homeland means that, wherever they end up, they never quite fit in. Not, at least, for this generation.

  I found myself discussing these after-effects of war treaties with two kindly old gentlemen at the Association of European Journalists in central Bratislava, where I was welcomed with more deference than I deserved. Juraj and Peter were both good case histories in Trianon-created nationalities and in generational change. Peter was from the east of the country, and had grown up speaking Hungarian; Juraj, from the north, had a German grandfather and a Hungarian grandmother, and had grown up speaking German. Both had experienced multiple nationalities in their lifetimes – Hungarian, Austrian, Czechoslovakian – and both were now good Slovaks, proud of their country, and yet both had children who’d left Slovakia to pursue their careers overseas, though they hadn’t gone as far as Cleveland.

  In fact the Association was feeling pretty anti-American when I was there, with the membership still smarting from the release of the horror movie Hostel, produced by Quentin Tarantino, which told the story of two American college buddies who were lured to ‘a Slovakian town’ stocked with Eastern European women as desperate as they were gorgeous. Bewitched by the women, the Americans found themselves dragged into an increasingly sinister, graphic and gory underworld of organized crime, torture, human trafficking and sex tourism, against a backdrop that was recognizably Bratislavan. ‘Why did they pick on us?’ I was asked. ‘Why choose our city?’ I hadn’t seen the film or even read about it, so I didn’t feel qualified to answer, but I had to admit that there was probably some truth to the popular hypothesis that nobody cared about Slovakia, which was too far away from the United States and too small for anyone in the film’s audience to know better. In response, I muttered something about Hollywood always needing to depict the world in black and white, in good and bad, and how the baddies had to come from somewhere, preferably somewhere that wouldn’t object too vociferously. Slovakia had no political or economic muscle on the world stage, so it had been a soft target.

  Certainly there was little sign on t
he streets of any kind of underworld. The capital city was no grander than many a Habsburg town I’d cycled through further upriver, but it had been ringed with suburbs and seriously smartened up in line with its new capital-city status. Its city centre had a feeling of wide-eyed innocence, of still being a new boy at the capital-city game, and its citizens were on their best behaviour in their new national front room, which was freshly decorated and awaiting visitors. ‘How should I look in my capital? Am I wearing the right clothes for my capital? What should I do in my capital?’

  And where in most capital cities there’s a clear distinction between the local and the tourist – the former in a hurry and viewing the latter as a nuisance – here everyone was a tourist, even the locals. They seemed rather surprised, and elated, that their historic city centre was actually rather a nice place, certainly when compared to the buckled tarmac, cracked concrete and discoloured steel that had colonized the southern shore, where many of them lived. They were also very good speakers of English, which made me realize how Germanic my journey had been up to then. Here, English was deemed necessary either for a life overseas or for finding a job at home, and the former townhouses of aristocratic families like Palffy and Esterhazy were now occupied by international anglo-centric consultancies, come to teach these people how to become proper capitalists, for which they’d be charging a very fat fee.

  There was, though, another kind of English on the streets that wasn’t quite so welcome: stag parties. Party organizers had started to promote Bratislava as an alternative to Prague or Riga, and now there were a couple of herds of them moving from bar to bar, joshing each other loudly. I don’t know whether or not Tarantino’s Hostel had helped sell the city to these groups, but I saw nothing that would suggest to me they’d come to any harm here, unless they tripped and fell into the Danube after one Slivovica (cough medicine meets vodka up a dark alley) too many.