Part 9 (1/2)

On the whole, the cafes were the biggest disappointment of Vienna to me. I've reached the time of life where my idea of a fabulous time is to sit around for half a day with a cup of coffee and a newspaper, so a city teeming with coffee houses seemed made for me. I had expected them to be more special, full of smoky charm and eccentric characters, but they were just restaurants really. The coffee was OK, but not sensational, and the service was generally slow and always unfriendly. They provide you with newspapers, but so what? I can provide newspapers.

Even the Cafe Central, where Trotsky used to hang out, sitting for long hours every day doing b.u.g.g.e.r-all, was a disappointment. It had some atmosphere vaulted ceilings, marble tables, a pianist but coffee was thirty-four schillings a throw and the service was indifferent. Still, I do like the story about the two Viennese who were sitting in the Central with coffees, discussing politics. One of them, just back from Moscow, predicted a revolution in Russia before long. 'Oh, yeah?' said the other doubtfully, and flicked his head in the direction of the ever-idle Trotsky. 'And who's going to lead it him?'

The one friendly cafe I found was the Hawalka, around the corner from my hotel. It was an extraordinary place, musty, dishevelled and so dark that I had to feel my way to a table. Lying everywhere were newspapers on racks like carpet beaters. An old boy who was dressed more like a house painter than a waiter brought me a cup of coffee without asking if I wanted one and, upon realizing that I was an American, began gathering up copies of USA Today. USA Today.

'Oh no, please,' I said as he presented me with half a dozen, 'put these on the fire and bring me some newspapers.' But I don't think his hearing was good, and he scuttled around the room collecting even more and piling them on the table. 'No, no,' I protested, 'these are for lining drawers.' But he kept bringing them until I had a stack two feet high. He even opened one up and fixed it in front of me, so I drank my coffee and spent half an hour reading features about Vanna White, Sylvester Stallone and other great thinkers of our age.

Vienna is certainly the grandest city I have ever seen. All along the Ringstra.s.se colossal buildings proclaim an imperial past the parliament, the Palace of Justice, the Natural History Museum, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the opera house, the Burgtheater and above all the Hofburg, with its 2,600 rooms. They all look much the same mighty piles of granite and sandstone with warlike statuary crowded along the roofs and pediments. A Martian coming to earth would unhesitatingly land at Vienna, thinking it the capital of the planet.

The one thing you soon learn to adjust to in Vienna is that the Danube is entirely incidental to the city. It is so far from the centre that it doesn't even appear on most tourist maps. I tried walking to it one afternoon and never made it. I got as far as the Prater, the vast and famous park, which is bordered by the Danube on its far side, but the Prater is so immense that after a half-hour it seemed pointless to continue walking on aching feet just to confirm with my own eyes what I have read a hundred times: that the Danube isn't blue at all. Instead, I plodded lengthwise through the park along the long straight avenue called Hauptallee, pa.s.sing busy playing-fields, swings, a sports stadium, cafes and restaurants and eventually the amus.e.m.e.nt park with its ferris wheel the one made famous by Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton in The Third Man. The Third Man.

A sign by the ferris wheel, the famous Riesenrad, gave a history of it in German. It was built in 189697 by an Englishman named Walter Ba.s.set, I noted with a touch of pride on behalf of my friends and neighbours. I a.s.sume old Walter had some help because it's a pretty good size. It cost twenty-five schillings to go up, but it wasn't operating. The rest of the park, however, was doing brisk business, though I am hard pressed to explain why, since it seemed to be rather a dump.

Late one afternoon I went to the Sigmund Freud museum, in his old apartment on Bergga.s.se, a mile or so to the north of the city centre. Bergga.s.se is now a plain and rather dreary street, though the Freuds lived in some style. Their apartment had sixteen rooms, but of these only four are open to the public and they contain almost no furniture, original or otherwise, and only a few trifling personal effects of Freud's: a hat and walking stick, his medical bag and a steamer trunk. Still, this doesn't stop the trust that runs the museum from charging you thirty schillings to come in and look around.

The four rooms are almost entirely bare but for the walls, which are lined with 400 photographs and photocopies of letters and other doc.u.ments relating to Freud's life though some of these, it must be said, are almost ludicrously peripheral: a picture of Michelangelo's Moses, which Freud had admired on a trip to Italy, and a photograph of Sarah Bernhardt, included not because Freud treated her or slept with her or even met her, but because he once saw her perform. Almost all of the personal effects Freud collected during half a century of living in this apartment his library, his 2,500 pieces of cla.s.sical statuary, his furniture, his famous consulting couch are now in a far superior museum in Hampstead because, of course, Freud was driven from Vienna by the n.a.z.is two years before he died.

The wonder to me is that it took him so long to go. By well before the turn of the century Freud was one of the most celebrated figures in world medicine, and yet he wasn't made a professor at the University of Vienna until 1902, when he was nearly fifty, simply because he was a Jew.

Before the war there were 200,000 Jews in Vienna. Now there are hardly any. As Jane Kramer notes in her book Europeans, Europeans, most Austrians now have never met an Austrian Jew and yet Austria remains the most ferociously anti-Semitic country in Europe. According to Kramer, polls repeatedly show that about seventy per cent of Austrians do not like Jews, a little over twenty per cent actively loathe them and not quite a tenth find Jews so repulsive that they are 'physically revolted in a Jew's presence'. I'd have thought this scarcely credible except that I saw another poll in the most Austrians now have never met an Austrian Jew and yet Austria remains the most ferociously anti-Semitic country in Europe. According to Kramer, polls repeatedly show that about seventy per cent of Austrians do not like Jews, a little over twenty per cent actively loathe them and not quite a tenth find Jews so repulsive that they are 'physically revolted in a Jew's presence'. I'd have thought this scarcely credible except that I saw another poll in the Observer Observer revealing that almost forty per cent of Austrians thought the Jews were at least partly responsible for what happened to them during the war and forty-eight per cent believed that the country's 8,000 remaining Jews who, I should point out, account for just a little over 0.001 per cent of the Austrian population still enjoy too much economic power and political influence. revealing that almost forty per cent of Austrians thought the Jews were at least partly responsible for what happened to them during the war and forty-eight per cent believed that the country's 8,000 remaining Jews who, I should point out, account for just a little over 0.001 per cent of the Austrian population still enjoy too much economic power and political influence.

The Germans, however unseemly their past, have made some moving attempts at atonement viz., w.i.l.l.y Brandt weeping on his knees in the Warsaw ghetto and Richard von Weizsacker apologizing to the world for the sins of his country on the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the war. What do the Austrians do? They elect a former Wehrmacht officer as President.

I thought about this as I was walking from the Freud museum to my hotel along the Karl-Lueger-Stra.s.se. At a set of traffic lights, a black limousine led by a single motorcycle policeman pulled up. In the back seat, reading some papers, was I swear to G.o.d the famous Dr Kurt Waldheim, the aforementioned Wehrmacht officer and now President of Austria.

A lot of people aren't sure of the difference between the Chancellor and the President in Austria, but it's quite simple. The Chancellor decides national policy and runs the country, while the President rounds up the Jews. I'm only joking, of course! I wouldn't suggest for a moment that President Waldheim would have anything to do with the brutal treatment of innocent people not these days, certainly. Moreover, I fully accept Dr Waldheim's explanation that when he saw 40,000 Jews being loaded onto cattle trucks at Salonica, he genuinely believed they were being sent to the seaside for a holiday.

For the sake of fairness, I should point out that Waldheim insists he never even knew that the Jews of Salonica were being s.h.i.+pped off to Auschwitz. And let's be fair they accounted for no more than one-third of the city's entire population one-third of the city's entire population (italics theirs), and it is of course entirely plausible that a high-ranking n.a.z.i officer in the district could have been quite unaware of what was happening within his area of command. (italics theirs), and it is of course entirely plausible that a high-ranking n.a.z.i officer in the district could have been quite unaware of what was happening within his area of command.

Let's give the man a break. I mean to say, when the Storm Troopers burned down forty-two of Vienna's forty-three synagogues during Kristallnacht, Waldheim did wait a whole week before joining the unit. And after the Anschluss, he waited two whole weeks two whole weeks before joining the n.a.z.i Student Union. Christ, the man was practically a resistance hero. I don't know what all the fuss is about. before joining the n.a.z.i Student Union. Christ, the man was practically a resistance hero. I don't know what all the fuss is about.

Austria should be proud of him and proud of itself for having the courage to stand up to world opinion and elect a man of his calibre, pugnaciously overlooking the fact that he is a pathological liar, that he has been officially accused of war crimes, that he has a past so murky and mired in mistruths that no one but he knows what he has done. It takes a special kind of people to stand behind a man like that.

What a wonderful country.

20. Yugoslavia

I flew to Split, half-way down the Adriatic coast in Yugoslavia. Katz and I had hitch-hiked there from Austria. It took four days of standing on baking roadsides on the edge of a series of nowheres watching carloads of German tourists sweep past, so there was a certain pleasure even now in covering the same ground in hours. I had no choice: I was running out of time. I had to be in Bulgaria in six days or my visa would lapse.

I caught a bus into town from the airport and was standing at the harbourside in that state of mild indecisiveness that comes with the sudden arrival in a strange country, when a woman of late middle years approached and said quietly, as if offering something illicit, 'Zimmer? Room? You want?'

'Yes, please,' I said, suddenly remembering that this was how Katz and I had found a room in Split. 'How much?'

'Ten t'ousan' dinar,' she said.

Five dollars. This sounded like my kind of a deal. I considered the possibility that she might have four grown sons at home waiting to throttle me and take my money I hve long a.s.sumed that this is how I will die: trussed up and dumped into the sea after following a stranger offering an unbeatable bargain but she looked honest enough. Besides, she had to trust that I wasn't an axe murderer. 'Sure,' I said. 'Let's go.'

We took a bus to her neighbourhood, twenty minutes away up a long hill, and stepped off on a nondescript residential street somewhere at the back of the town. The lady led me down a complicated series of steps and sunny alleyways full of scrawny cats. It was the sort of route you would follow if you were trying to give someone the slip. It wouldn't have altogether surprised me if she had asked me to put on a blindfold. Eventually we crossed a plank over a narrow ditch, made our way across a gra.s.sless yard and entered a four-storey building that looked only half-finished. A cement mixer was standing by the stairwell. I was beginning to have my doubts. This was just the place for an ambush.

'Come,' she said, and I followed her up the stairs to the top floor and into her apartment. It was small and plainly furnished, but spotless and airy. Two men in their twenties, both vaguely thuggish-looking, were sitting in T-s.h.i.+rts at the table in the kitchen/living-room. Uh-oh, I thought, casually sliding my hand into my pocket and fingering my Swiss Army knife, but knowing that even in ideal circ.u.mstances it takes me twenty minutes to identify a blade and prise it out. If these guys came at me I would end up defending myself with a toothpick and tweezers.

In fact, they turned out to be nice fellows. Isn't the world a terrific place? They were her sons and knew a little English because they worked as waiters in town. One of them, in fact, was just off for work and would give me a lift if I wanted. I gratefully accepted on account of the distance and my considerable uncertainty as to where I was. He donned a red waiter's jacket and walked me to a dusty blue Skoda parked on a nearby street, where he fired up the engine and took off at a speed that had the back of the car fish-tailing and me holding the armrest with both hands. It was like being in one of those movie chase scenes where the cars scatter dustbins and demolish vegetable carts. 'I'm a little bit late,' he explained as he chased a flock of elderly pedestrians off a zebra crossing and turned on two wheels into a busy avenue without pausing to see if any cars were coming. There were, but they generously made way for him by veering sideways into buildings. He dropped me by the marketplace and was gone before I could barely get out a 'Thank you'.

Split is a wonderful place, with a pretty harbour overlooking the Adriatic and a cl.u.s.ter of green islands lurking attractively a mile or two offsh.o.r.e. Somewhere out there was Vis, where Katz and I had spent an almost wonderful week. We were sitting at an outdoor cafe one morning, trying to anaesthetize hangovers with coffee, when two Swedish girls came up to us and said brightly, 'Good-morning! How are you today? Come with us. We're going on the bus to a beach on the other side of the island.'

Unquestioningly we got up and followed. If you had seen these girls, you would have, too. They were gorgeous: healthy, tanned, deliciously fresh-smelling, soft all over, with good teeth and bodies shaped by a loving G.o.d. I whispered to Katz as we walked along behind, ma.s.saging our eyeb.a.l.l.s on the perfect hemispheres of their backsides, 'Do we know them?'

'I dunno. I think maybe we talked to them last night at that bar by the casino.'

'We didn't go to the bar by the casino.'

'Yes we did.'

'We did did?'

'Yeah.'

'Really?' I could remember nothing of the night before other than a series of Bip Pivo beers pa.s.sing before me, as if on a bottling line. I shrugged it off, youthfully unaware that I was in a single summer disabling cl.u.s.ters of brain cells at a pace that would leave me seventeen years later routinely standing in places like a pantry or toolshed, gazing at the contents and trying to remember what the h.e.l.l it was that had brought me there.

We went on a bouncing bus to the far side of the island, to a fis.h.i.+ng village called Komia, had a long swim in a warm sea, a couple of beers at a beachside taverna, caught a bouncing bus back to Vis town, had some more beers, ordered dinner, had some more beers, told stories, compared lives, fell in love.

Well, I did anyway. Her name was Marta. She was eighteen, dark and from Uppsala and she seemed to me the fairest creature I had ever run eyes over though it must be said that by this stage of the trip even Katz, in certain lights, was beginning to look not half bad. In any case, I thought she was lovely and the miracle was that she appeared to find a certain charm in me. She and the other girl, Trudi, grew swiftly drunk and loquacious and spent half the time talking in Swedish, but it didn't matter. I sat with my chin in my hands, just gazing at this Swedish fantasy, hopelessly besotted, stirring to my senses from time to time just long enough to suck back drool and take a sip of beer. Occasionally she would lay a hand on my bare forearm, sending my hormones into delirious turmoil, and once she glanced over and absently stroked my cheek with the back of her hand. I would have sold my mother as a galley slave and plunged a dagger into my thigh for her.

Late in the evening, when Katz and Trudi had gone off for pees, Marta turned to me, abruptly pulled my head to hers and swabbed my throat with her tongue. It felt as if a fish were flopping around in my mouth. She released me, wearing a strange, dreamy expression and breathed, 'I'm fool of l.u.s.t.'

I couldn't find words to communicate my appreciation. Then the most awful thing happened. An abrupt startled look seized her, as if she had been struck by a sniper's bullet. Her eyes snapped shut and she slid bonelessly from her chair.

I gaped for a long moment and cried, 'Don't do this to me, G.o.d, you p.r.i.c.k!' But she was gone, as dead to the world as if she had been hit broadside by a Mack truck. I looked at the sky. 'How could you do this to me? I'm a Catholic Catholic.'

Trudi reappeared, tutting in a sudden maternal fas.h.i.+on and saying, 'Well, well, well, we'd better get this one to bed.' I offered to carry Marta to their hotel for her, thinking that at the very least I might manage to lay my tingling mitts on her splendid b.u.t.tocks only for a moment, you understand, just a little something to sustain me till the end of the century but Trudi, doubtless sensing my intent, wouldn't hear of it. She was as strong as a steam train and before I could blink she had hoisted Marta over her shoulder and was disappearing down the street, leaving behind a fading 'Good-night'.

I watched them go, then stared moodily into my beer. Katz arrived and saw from my face that there would be no naked twining in the moonlit surf this night. 'What am I supposed to do now?' he said, sinking into his chair. 'She was coming on to me outside the men's room. I've got a b.o.n.e.r like Babe Ruth's bat. What am I supposed to do?'

'You'll just have to take matters into your own hands,' I said, but he failed to see any humour in the situation, as indeed, on reflection, did I, and we spent the rest of the evening drinking in silence.

We never saw the Swedish girls again. We had no idea which was their hotel, but Vis town was not a big place and we were certain that we would run into them. For three days we went everywhere, peered in restaurant windows, walked up and down the beaches, but we never saw them. After a time I half began to wonder if it wasn't all a product of an overheated imagination. Maybe Marta had never even said, 'I'm fool of l.u.s.t.' Maybe she had said, 'I'm fit to bust.' I didn't know. And as it became clearer and clearer that she was gone for ever, it didn't really seem to matter.

I wandered along the quayside looking at the sailing boats, then ventured into the sun-warmed lanes and courtyards that form the heart of Split. Once this area, roughly a quarter of a mile square, was the Palace of Diocletian. But after the fall of the Roman Empire, squatters moved in and started building houses inside the crumbling palace walls. Over the centuries a little community grew up. What were once corridors became streets. Courtyards and atriums evolved into public squares. Now the lanes some so narrow you have to turn sideways to pa.s.s through them are mostly lined with houses and shops, and yet there is this constant, disarming sense of being inside inside a palace. Incorporated into many of the facades are parts of the original structure stairways that go nowhere, columns supporting nothing, niches that once clearly held Roman busts. The effect is that the houses look as if they grew magically out of the ruins. It is entrancing and there is no other place in Europe like it. a palace. Incorporated into many of the facades are parts of the original structure stairways that go nowhere, columns supporting nothing, niches that once clearly held Roman busts. The effect is that the houses look as if they grew magically out of the ruins. It is entrancing and there is no other place in Europe like it.

I walked around for a couple of hours, then had an early dinner on a square bounded on three sides by old buildings with outdoor restaurants and on the fourth by the quay. It was a fine summery evening, with the kind of still air on which aromas hang in this case a curious but not displeasing mixture of vanilla, grilled meat and fish. Swifts circled and darted overhead and the masts of yachts rocked lazily on the water. It was such a pleasant spot and dusk was settling in so nicely that I sat for some time drinking Bips and watching the nightly promenade, the korzo.

Every person in town dresses up in his best clothes and goes for an evening stroll along the main street families, hunched groups of furtive-looking teenage boys, giggling clumps of dolled-up, over-fragranced teenage girls, young couples with heavy-footed toddlers, old men and their wives. It had the same chatty, congenial air of the gatherings around the square in Capri, except that here they kept moving, marching up and down the long quayside in their hundreds. It seemed to go on for much of the night.