A Writer's World (48 page)

Looked at from the east, Beijing is not remote at all – only 100 miles from the sea, only three hours or so by air from Tokyo. It is when you come to it out of the west, or more pertinently out of the Western sensibility, that it remains so romantically distant. On a Monday afternoon I went down to the gigantic railway station, twin-towered and green-roofed (escalator out of order) to see the arrival of the Trans-Siberian Express from Moscow. This was a dramatic occasion. Hundreds of us had come to meet the train. For hours beforehand we waited in the cavernous International Travellers’ Waiting Room, and when the bell rang, the great doors were opened and we burst on to the platform, an air of headiest expectancy prevailed. We stood on one leg, so to speak, we stood on the other – we looked at our watches again, we sat down, we got up – we gave the children another bottle of Kekou Kele to keep them quiet – and there, slowly round the curve into the station, very, very grandly appeared the Trans-Siberian.

With a triumphant blast of its whistle it came majestically to Beijing, the three engineers in their cab sitting there like a trio of admirals on a flagship bridge, and the waiting people clapped, and cheered, and waved newspapers, as the doors opened and from Mongolia or Siberia, Omsk or Moscow itself, their travel-worn loved ones fell home into China. One coach was full of a Western travel group; and these voyagers, as they emerged glazed and haggard on the platform, looking wonderingly around them, suggested to me astronauts returning to earth out of a long-lost space-ship.

There is not much left of Old Peking, except for Protected Treasures. The city walls have been torn down, most of the fortress gates have vanished, the clutter of medievalism which so entranced the old travellers has been swept away as though it never were. Across the face of the central city has been laid the cruel thoroughfare called Changan, down which the trolleybuses trundle and the bikes chaotically swarm. Here and there, though, all the same, I felt a powerful tug of organic continuity, in this city of 2,000 years.

I felt it for instance at the Summer Palace of the last of the Manchu empresses, which is now a public park, but is still everyone’s idea of a Chinese imperial retreat, with its pagodas and its towering temples, its ornamental bridges among the water-lilies, its myriad boats upon the limpid lake, its covered way, decorated with a thousand scenes of Chinese legend, from which it is said no pair of lovers can emerge unbetrothed, and its ridiculous Marble Paddle-Steamer for ever moored beside the quay (the Empress built the place with money intended for the reconstruction of the Chinese navy, and commissioned this nautical folly, they say, as a slap in the face of the outraged Fleet).

I sensed the constancy of things ominously when, lifting my head unawares as I walked up Qianmen Street, I saw the vast glowering shape of the Qianmen Gate blocking the thoroughfare in front, for all the world as though it were still the portentous gateway, as it used to be, into the Inner City beyond. I sensed it delectably beside the lonely neglected pagoda of Balizhuang, twittered about by martins out on the western outskirts, at whose feet the women of the local commune worked crouching in their straw hats among the beanpoles, chitter-chattering half-hidden like so many swallows themselves. I felt it pungently in the traditional pharmacy called The Shared Benevolence Hall, founded in 1669, which is a treasure-house of arcane specifics, stack upon stack of mysterious powders, brown bottles of roots and seeds, phials of restorative nuts, sea-horses, antlers, extract of deer-tail, heart of monkey …

In the early mornings I used to go wandering through the
hutongs
, the crooked quarters of small courtyard houses which survive here and there off the huge new highways. A curious hush pervades these parts. No motor-traffic goes along the alleyways, high walls conceal the jumbled yards. Only by peering through half-open gates can you glimpse the tangled, crowded life within, meshed in laundry and potted plants, here a man in no shirt eating porridge from a tin bowl, there an old woman smoking her first cigarette of the day, or a girl in a spotless white blouse extracting her
bicycle from the rubble. A faint haze of smoke hangs in the air, and from the public lavatory, smelling violently of mingled excrement and disinfectant, heavy breathing and a vigorous swishing of brooms show that some unprivileged comrade is fulfilling early-morning labour norms. Nobody ever took much notice of me, wandering these quiet lanes as the sun came up: only a fairly hooded eye focused on me now and then, when a woman emerged to empty her slops down a drain, or a bicycle bell chivvied me out of the way.

And once very early I strayed over a ridge to a leafy path beside a moat. I was led there by a curious cacophony of shouts, singing and twanged instruments, and it turned out to be the most hauntingly timeless place of all. It was a place of self-fulfilment. Resolutely facing a high stone rampart above the moat, like Jews at the Wailing Wall, all along the path men and women were rehearsing their own particular accomplishments privately in the dawn. As we sing in the evening tub, so the people of Beijing go to that wall. Here was a man, his face a few inches from the masonry, declaiming some heroic soliloquy. Here a woman was practising an astonishing range of arpeggios, soprano to resonant baritone. A splendid bass was singing a romantic ballad, a poet seemed to be trying out a lyric, an old man with a bicycle was plucking the strings of an antique lute. I thought of joining in, so universal did these impulses seem, sending To Be or Not To Be reverberating down that wall, or perhaps reciting some of my own purpler passages: but I restrained myself, as a Foreign Guest, and just whistled my way home to breakfast.

I must have walked a hundred miles! And gropingly I circled towards the centre of things – to what the old Chinese would have called the centre of
all
things. The measured and muffled restraint of this city was like a fog in the sunshine. Gentle, un-pushing, polite, its people kept me always wondering, and I missed the flash of underlife that gives most great cities their clarity. I missed scamps, drunks, whores, hagglers, ticket touts offering me seats (which Heaven forfend) for the Chinese opera. I saw no Dostoievsky brooding over his minced shrimps, no tragic rebel sticking up wall posters. All seemed in bland order. I had been told to look out, in the dizzily Westernized new Jianguo Hotel, for Party officials in expensive suits taking luncheon with their mistresses: but all I saw were security guards from the American embassy, eating Weight-Watchers’ Salad.

How bored this quarter of the earth must be! Even the procreation of the urban Chinese is limited, if not by law, at least by powerful persuasion.
They must not gamble, there is nowhere to dance, it is miles on a bike to a cinema, and if they turn the TV on, what do they get but improving documentaries, English lessons, historical dramas of suitable import or Chinese opera? Their one emotional release seems to be eating, which they do with a gusto in which all their passions are surely sublimated. The grander restaurants of Beijing generally have two sections, one for bigwigs and foreigners, the other for the masses: but though the downstairs rooms are usually rough and ready, with linoleum tablecloths and creaky old electric fans, an equal riotous festivity attends them all.

No wonder the Chinese are such hypochondriacs. They live so strangely, I was coming to feel, in a condition of such crossed uncertainty and brainwash, that psychotic illness must be rampant. I went to one restaurant devoted to the cult of Dinetotherapy, sponsored by another 300-year-old herb store, and was not surprised to find it prospering mightily. When I told the waiter I was suffering from headaches and general debility, he prescribed Sautéed Chicken with Fruit of Chinese Wolfberry, followed by Giant Prawns Steamed in Ginger. They worked a treat: I walked out feeling terrific.

But not all the prawns in China can cure the stresses of history, and the real malaise of Beijing, I came to think, was its domination by an ideology so all-pervading, so arbitrary, in many ways so honourable, but apparently so inconstant, which can change the very way the nation thinks from one year to another. Today it is liberal and welcoming, Chinese tradition is honoured, people are free to wear what they like, consort with foreigners if they will, sell their ducks in a free market and even build themselves houses with the profits. Yesterday it was puritanically narrow, the revolutionary condition was permanent, aliens were devils, Mao caps and floppy trousers were
de
rigueur
, angry activists with stepladders and paint-brushes went all down that covered way at the Summer Palace, expunging pictures of un-progressive myth. And tomorrow, when another generation succeeds to domination, everything may be different again, and all the values so painstakingly absorbed into the public consciousness may have to be ripped out of mind once more.

There is a blankness to this despotism. What is it? Who is it? Is it the people we see on the TV news, smiling benevolently at visiting delegates, or is it scoundrels out of sight? Is it noble at heart, or rotten? Is it genial Deng Xiaoping, or some up-and-coming tyrant we have never heard of? If you climb to the top of Jingshan, Coal Hill, the ornamental mount on which the last of the Ming emperors hanged himself from a locust tree, you
may look down upon a string of pleasure-lakes. Their northern waters, within the Behai Park, are alive with pleasure-craft, and their lakeside walks are always crowded. The southern lakes look dead and sterile. No rowing-boats skim their surfaces. No lovers take each other’s photographs. The buildings on their banks, contained within high walls, look rich but tightly shuttered, and only occasionally do you glimpse a big black car snaking its way down to Changan.

This is where that despotism resides. Behind those walls, beside those silent lakes, the condition of the Chinese is decided, whether by cynical opportunists shacked up with girls and Japanese electronics, or by sombre philosophers bent over their calligraphy. The compound is called Zhongnanhai, and if it all looks numb from Jingshan, it must really be full of gigantic thrust and calculation. Its main entrance is to the south, with tilted eaves and two great guardian lions. The red flag flies bravely on a mast outside, and within the gate an inner wall – the ‘spirit wall’ of old China – is inscribed with the cabalistic text ‘Serve The People’. You cannot see past it, though. Two armed sentries stand there, with two more watchful over their shoulders. They look distinctly unwelcoming, even to Foreign Guests, as they stare motionless and expressionless into the street: and sure enough, when I asked them if I could take a stroll inside Zhongnanhai, they seemed to think not.

Dazzled, bewildered, profoundly affected, all at once, I retreated from the Chinese presence. Some of those caterpillars on the Great Wall, I had noticed, never make it to the other side, but settle in crannies among the paving: and from there if all goes well, I suppose, they turn themselves into butterflies, and flutter away into the empyrean from the very substance of China. I felt rather like them when the time came for me to leave, for I took the advice the Bureaucrat had given me, and floated my way out through those humped green mountains of Guangxi, away in the humid south.

My cities of China had left me hazed with conflicting emotions and contradictory conclusions, and like a sleep-walker I wandered back towards the coast. I bicycled down dusty lanes through fecund communes, where labouring girls waved and laughed beneath their comical hats, as in propaganda posters. I clambered precipitous hillocks to take jasmine tea in faery huts. I joined the great daily migration of the tourists down the Li River, stretched out flat in the front of the boat, eating lychees all the way, drifting through a fantasy of bulbous mountains, and green, green paddy-fields, and dragon-flies, and ferry-men, and riverside villages clouded in
the song of crickets, and cormorant fishermen squatting on bamboo rafts, and junks punted upstream by women bent agonizingly double at their poles, and geese in the shallows, and peasants high on rock tracks, and water-buffaloes snuffling, and old river steamers panting and thumping, while the lychees got steadily squashier in the sun, and the sad man beside me, erect in the prow, bared his chest in the breeze and sailed through those legendary landscapes singing the proud songs of his revolutionary youth.

And so I came out of the heart of China back to the sea once more. I had found no absolutes after all. I had found nothing immutable. I had met a people as confused as any other. I had seen marvellous things and miserable, I had eaten pickled turnip with Mrs Wang and been sent packing by the sentries of Zhongnanhai. I had been cured of headache by Chinese Wolfberry. I had successfully evaded the Chinese opera. I had bought a bamboo goat, and beaten Mr Lu at checkers in the park. I had visited the grand simplicities of my imagination, and found them grand indeed, but muddled. I had reached that mighty presence at last, and it was smiling nervously.

Out on the Pearl River, surrounded by black sampans, the ship lay waiting.

Nothing so becomes a city as a street-car (or a tram, as we Europeans prefer it), especially if it has a single cyclopean headlamp on its front, and a couple of flags fluttering on its roof, and is connected by sundry pipes and couplings with a trailer-car behind. What weight! What responsibility! What reassurance!

And nowhere does the tram fulfil its municipal functions more staunchly than in the city of Vienna, for here it must trundle its way, day in day out, come war come peace, through a state of affairs utterly alien to the instincts of any self-respecting trolley: fantasy is piled upon fantasy in Wien, Österreich, pretence is compounded by delusion, introspection repeatedly degenerates into complex, and the whole adds up to a baleful parable of the urban condition. In some ways Vienna is the most intensely civic of great cities, the most complete and compact, the most preoccupied with its own civicness – a fifth of the entire Austrian population, after all, lives within this peculiar capital. In other ways it transcends mere city status altogether, and is more a temperament or a sensibility, embodying as it does an inexpungable repertoire of doubts, regrets and ambiguous prides – was it not within living memory the seat of the Habsburgs, the Imperial Capital of Austria-Hungary, the root of all that the word ‘Empire’ came to mean to the world before the wars?

Steadily notwithstanding, small flags flying, the trams clank their way around town: they are painted in strong and sensible colours, and look rather barge-like, as though they ought to be stirring up bow-waves along the track in front of them.

Down upon their diligent passings stare the structures of the Ringstrasse, the boulevard which, in the nineteenth century, replaced the ancient ramparts around the inner city of Vienna. Now as then, the Ringstrasse unforgettably dramatizes the false and footling values of this city, and it has given its name to a whole genre of Viennese art and thought – the Ringstrasse genre. Like some mad architect’s dream fulfilled, its buildings rise one after another preposterously into view, Gothic or Grecian or baroque, plastered in kitsch or writhing with classical allusion, capped by spires, monstrous domes and silhouetted effigies, clumped with goddesses, chariots, gross escutcheons, caryatids, piles of sculpted trophies – here a titanic opera house, here a refulgently Attic Parliament, a university more utterly academic than Princeton, Padua, Cambridge and the Sorbonne put together, museums as overwhelmingly museumy as museums possibly could be, and dominating the whole ensemble, half-way round the ring, the immense pillared sprawl of the Hofburg, the palace of the Habsburgs until their removal after the First World War, which seems to lie there all but exhausted, as well it might, by the weight of so much consequence.

Vienna is all consequence. It stands at the far end of the Alps like a grandiloquent watchman of history. Its streets lead not just to suburbs or provincial towns, but to ancient satrapies and fields of action: the Ostautobahn strikes grandly out for Budapest and Prague, Triesterstrasse will take you, if you persevere, direct to Dalmatia, and at the end of Landstrasse, as Metternich once observed, Asia itself begins. Everything around here is designed for consequence. The Danube passes a mile or two from the Ringstrasse, crossed by strategic bridges, commanded by castles. Flatlands just made for tanks or cavalry sweep away almost from the suburbs to the marshlands of the east. The spire of St Stephen’s Cathedral, plumb in the middle of the inner city, stands as a mighty marker to guide or warn the tribes, the caravans and the warring armies.

God-made then for consequence, long ago the city came to worship it. Under the aegis of the immemorially self-important Habsburgs, the Viennese became the archetypal sychophants of history, and made of their city one vast tribute to the vulgarity of class. How could they help it? For centuries they revered as their models of behaviour men who not only called themselves, in all seriousness, Their Imperial, Royal and Apostolic Majesties, but also claimed to be Kings of Jerusalem, Dalmatia, Bohemia, Transylvania, Croatia and Galicia, Grand Dukes of Tuscany, Princely Counts of Tyrol, dukes of a score of dukedoms and lords of lordships without number. These walking Social Registers, these Grand Panjandrums
of Central Europe, were the presiding spirits of this place almost into modern times, and their silly standards and superstitions linger inescapably still.

It reminds me of Beijing. Beijing too has torn down its medieval walls to make way for pompous squares and thoroughfares, it too apparently depends for its self-assurance upon childish charades of grandeur, and it also is haunted by the ghosts of dead autocrats. Franz Josef, the last of the great Habsburgs, was the Mao of nineteenth-century Austria, the Helmsman of Vienna, the Great Father, and like Mao he has left behind him a host of followers who may deny their loyalty to his ideology, but who are subject by hereditary brainwash to his values. Watch now – stand back – here come a couple of Ministers down the steps from the Council Chamber in Parliament, portly important men, deep in portly and important matters of state – and swoosh, like a rocket from his office leaps the porter, buttoning his jacket – out of his door, panting heavily, urgently smoothing his hair, down the steps two at a go,
bitte
,
bitte!
– just in time, my goodness only just in time to open the door for Their Excellencies, who acknowledge his grovel only with slight inclinations of their heads, so as not to interrupt the flow of the discourse, as they lumber out beneath the figures of Minerva and her attendant sages to their waiting limousine.

Where sundry passers-by look almost inclined to bow and curtsey themselves, to see those dignitaries so lordly! In manners as in symbolisms, Franz Josef’s convictions of hierarchy seem to colour everything in Vienna still. Though this is the capital of a republic, and a Second Republic at that, it abounds in princes and archdukes, not to mention mere counts or baronesses, glittering in restaurants with sleek golden hair and predatory half-Magyar faces, elegantly cordial at cocktail parties (‘If you’re ever in Carinthia, we happen to have a little place down there …’), or sometimes to be glimpsed, if young enough, driving around the Ringstrasse in racy Italian cars for all the world as though they should still be dressed in the shakos, plumes and dangling scabbards of White Hussars.

And below the aristocrats, the social order is marshalled still in self-perpetuating gradations of esteem and respectability. The style of the imperial bureaucracy, established to administer a dominion that extended from Switzerland to Albania, now orders the affairs of a powerless neutral republic of 7.5 million souls. People grumble constantly about the size, the slowness, the fussiness, the not unknown corruption, the ornate arcanum of it, but still one feels they are themselves oddly complicit to its survival. It is the last blur of their greatness. It is Franz Josef himself living fuzzily on, honoured still by all Vienna’s myriad ranks of social and official import, all
its Excellencies and Herr Professors and Frau Doktors and guilds and orders and infinitesimal nuances of protocol – the allegiance symbolized every morning, to this day, by the awe-struck deference that attends the morning exercises of the Imperial Lipizzaner horses, cantering round and round their palatial riding school, and followed obsequiously by a functionary with a shovel to remove their noble defecations.

Vienna feeds upon its past, a fond and sustaining diet, varied with chocolate cake or boiled beef with potatoes (Franz Josef’s favourite dish), washed down with the young white wine of the Vienna Woods, digested, and re-digested, and ordered once more, over, and over, and over again … If it reminds me sometimes of Beijing, sometimes it suggests to me the sensations of apartheid in South Africa. The city is obsessed, and obsessive. Every conversation returns to its lost greatness, every reference somehow finds its way to questions of rank, or status, or historical influence. Viennese romantics still love to wallow in the tragic story of Crown Prince Rudolf and his eighteen-year-old mistress Marie Vetsera, ‘the little Baroness’, who died apparently in a suicide pact in the country house of Mayerling in 1889. The tale precisely fits the popular predilections of this city, being snobbish, nostalgic, maudlin and rather cheap. I went out one Sunday to visit the grave of the little Baroness, who was buried obscurely in a village churchyard by command of Franz Josef, and was just in time to hear a Viennese lady of a certain age explaining the affair to her American guests. ‘But in any case,’ I heard her say without a trace of irony, ‘in any case she was only the daughter of a bourgeois …’

I often saw that same lady waiting for a tram, for she is a familiar of Vienna. She often wears a brown tweed suit, and is rather tightly clamped around the middle, and pearled very likely, and she never seems to be encumbranced, as most of us sometimes are, with shopping bags, umbrellas or toasters she has just picked up from the electrician’s. If you smile at her she responds with a frosty stare, as though she suspects you might put ketchup on your
Tafelspitz
, but if you speak to her she lights up with a flowery charm. Inextricably linked with the social absurdity of Vienna is its famous
Gemütlichkeit
, its ordered cosiness, which is enough to make a Welsh anarchist’s flesh creep: the one goes with the other, and just as it made the people of old Vienna one and all the children of their kind father His Imperial, Royal and Apostolic Majesty, still to this day it seems to fix the attitudes of this city as with a scented glue – sweetly if synthetically scented, like the flavours you sometimes taste upon licking the adhesives of American envelopes.

There is nothing
tangy
to this city, except perhaps the dry white wines. There is no leanness to it. Even the slinkiest of those patricians, one feels, is going to run to fat in the end, and the almost complete absence, in the city centre, of any modern architecture means that a swollen sense of inherited amplitude seems to supervise every attitude. Though Vienna is ornamented everywhere with eagles, the double-headed eagle of the Dual Monarchy, the single-headed eagle of the Austrian Republic, nowhere could be much less aquiline. Vienna an eyrie! It is more like a boudoir birdcage, and when one morning I saw a seagull circling over the pool at Schönbrunn Palace it was like seeing a wild free visitor from some other continent.

Wildness, freeness, recklessness – not in Vienna! I went to a minor police court one day, and noticing one of the accused studying a road map between hearings asked him if he was planning an escape. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I am deciding the best route to visit my aunt at Graz.’ The famous Big Wheel of the Prater funfair, that beloved image of the Viennese skyline, moves with such a genteel deliberation that I felt like kicking it, or scrawling scurrilous graffiti on its benches: the Vienna Woods which are said to have inspired so many artists in their passion for the Sublime represent Nature about as elementally thrilling as a rectory rock garden.

But who would want it otherwise, in this city of the coffee-house, the white-tie Wholesalers’ Ball and the merry tavern evening with accordion accompaniment? Vienna is an elderly, comfortable, old-fashioned city. If you want excitement, a student of my acquaintance told me, you must either go to Munich or work up a peace demonstration. More immediately to hand than in almost any other city, Vienna possesses all the sensations and appurtenances of metropolitan existence, the stream of the sidewalk traffic, the great green parks with ponds and cafés in them, the opulence of long-established stores, the plushy banks and crowded theatres, the consoling lights of restaurants gleaming on wet pavements, the glimpses of opera audiences spilling out for gossip and champagne in the intermission, the bookshop after bookshop down the boulevards, the hotels rich in lore and private recipes, the memorials to heroes and historical satisfactions, the newspaper kiosks selling
Le
Monde
or
Svenska
Dagbladet
, the grand steepled hulk of the cathedral above its square, the buskers in pedestrian precincts, the winking TV tower, the sleepless trams … Yet as no other city can, Vienna somehow mutates this glorious distillation of human energy and imagination into something irredeemably domestic and conventional.

I walked one day into the Karlskirche, the most spectacular of Vienna’s baroque churches, which has a dome like St Peter’s, a couple of triumphal columns dressed up as minarets, and two subsidiary towers roofed in the Chinese manner. Inside I found a wedding in progress. It was magnificent. The great church seemed all ablaze with light and gilding, rococo saints floated everywhere, the bride and groom knelt side by side before the high altar, and flooding through the building came the strains of a Haydn string quartet, marvellously played and amplified to a crisp and vibrant splendour. Yet all that glory was subtly plumpened or buttoned by Vienna, for when I looked at the faces of the congregation I saw no exaltation there, only a familial complacency, satisfaction with the decorum of the arrangements only slightly tinged by the thought that dear Father would have played that
adagio
with a little more finesse.

For yes, if there is one art that has the power to make
Gemütlichkinder
of them all, it is the inescapably Viennese art of music. To Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Liszt, Schubert, Brahms, Bruckner, Mahler and any number of Strausses the Viennese feel a cousinly and possessive relationship. ‘I hate going to concerts,’ I rashly announced to a Viennese companion over dinner one evening, and our rapport was never quite the same again: and ah! how I grew to dread the quivering pause in the garden of the Kursalon-conductor with bow and violin raised above his head, orchestra poised expectant over their strings, audience frozen with their spoons half in, half out of their ice-creams – that preceded, twenty or thirty times a day, the fruity melody and relentless beat of the Viennese waltz!