Neither Here Nor There (29 page)

* * *

I found my way back to my hotel along the city’s main street, Maria-Theresien-Strasse. It is a handsome thoroughfare and well worth an amble, so long as you don’t let your gaze pause for one second on any of the scores of shop windows displaying dirndls and lederhosen, beer mugs with pewter lids, peaked caps with a feather in the brim, long-stemmed pipes and hand-carved religious curios. I don’t suppose any small area of the world has as much to answer for in the way of crappy keepsakes as the Tyrol, and the sight of so much of it brings a depressing reminder that you are among a nation of people who like this sort of thing.

This is the down-side of Austria. The same impulse that leads people to preserve the past in their cities leads them also to preserve it in their hearts. No one clings to former glories as the Austrians do, and since these former glories include one of the most distasteful interludes in history, this is not their most attractive feature.

They are notoriously red-necked. I remember that Katz and I, while hitch-hiking through Austria, made friends with two Germans of a similar age, Thomas and Gerhard, who were making their way by thumb from Berlin to India with a view to finding spiritual enlightenment and good drugs. We camped together in a high Alpine pass, somewhere along the road between Salzburg and Klagenfurt, and in the evening walked into the nearest village, where we found awaiting us a perfect inn, full of black panelled wood and a log fire with a sleeping dog before it and ruddy-faced yeoman customers swinging steins of beer. We ate sausages with dabs of mustard and drank many beers. It was all most convivial.

I remember sitting there late in the evening, glowing with drink and thinking what a fine place this was and what good, welcoming people the Austrians were – they were smiling warmly at us and occasionally raising glasses to us in a toast – when the Germans leaned forward and told us in low voices that we were in danger. The Austrians, it seemed, were mocking us. Unaware that two of our party could understand every word they said, they were talking freely – every one of them: the men, the women, the landlord, the landlord’s wife, the whole fucking village – about taking us out back and, as Gerhard translated, ‘of giving us a hair-cut and running us through with zer pitchforks’.

A roar of laughter passed across the room. Gerhard showed a flicker of a smile. ‘Zey say zat perhaps zey should also make us to eat of zer horse dung.’

‘Oh, swell,’ said Katz. ‘As if I haven’t eaten enough shit on this trip already.’

My head swivelled like a periscope. Those cheery smiles had become demonic leers. A man opposite toasted me again and gave me a wink that said, Hope you like horse shit, kid.

I turned to Gerhard. ‘Should we call the police?’

‘I sink zat man over zere
is
zer police.’

‘Oh, swell,’ said Katz again.

‘I sink maybe we should just go to zer door as
quietly
as we can and zen run like, how you say, zer clappers.’

We rose, leaving behind unfinished beers, strolled casually to the door, nodding to our would-be assailants as we passed, and ran like hell. We could hear a fresh roar of laughter lift the inn roof off its moorings, but no one followed us and the soft squish of horse shit between the teeth remains for me – thank you, God, thank you, thank you, thank you – for ever in the realms of the imagined.

As we lay in our sleeping bags in a dewy meadow beneath a thousand stars, with the jagged mountains outlined against a fractionally less black sky and the smell of mown hay hanging on the still night air, I remarked to no one in particular that I had never seen such a beautiful place as this.

‘Zat’s zer whole trouble wiz Austria,’ said Thomas with sudden passion, in one of the few times I actually heard him speak. ‘It’s such a lovely country, but it’s full of fucking Austrians.’

I travelled the next day to Salzburg. I found it hard to warm to, which surprised me because I had fond, if somewhat hazy, memories of the place. It was full of tourists and, worse still, full of shops selling things that only a tourist could want: Tyrolean crap and Alpine crap and crap crap and, above all, Mozart crap – Mozart chocolates, Mozart marzipan, Mozart busts, Mozart playing-cards, Mozart ashtrays, Mozart liqueurs. Building and roadworks seemed to be in progress everywhere, filling the town with dust and noise. I seemed to be forever walking on planks over temporary ditches.

The streets of the old town, crammed into a compact space between the River Salzach and the perpendicular walls of the Mönchsberg mountain, are undeniably quaint and attractive, but so overbearingly twee as to bring on frequent bouts of dry heaving. Along Getreidegasse, the site of Mozart’s birthplace, every shop had one of those hanging pretzel signs above the door, including, God help us, the local McDonald’s (the sign had a golden-arches M worked into its filigree), as if we were supposed to think that they have been dispensing hamburgers there since the Middle Ages. I sank to my knees and beat my poor head on the cobbled pavement.

I’m all for McDonald’s in European cities, I truly am, but we should never forget that any company that chooses a half-witted clown named Ronald McDonald as its official public face cannot be relied on to exercise the best judgement in matters of corporate presentation.

The people of McDonald’s need guidance. They need to be told that Europe is not Disneyland. They need to be instructed to take suitable premises on a side street and given, without option, a shop design that is recognizable, appropriate to its function and yet reasonably subdued. It should look like a normal European bistro, with perhaps little red curtains and a decorative aquarium and nothing to tell you from the outside that this is a McDonald’s except for a discreet golden-arches transfer on each window and a steady stream of people with enormous asses going in and out of the door. While we’re at it, they should be told that they will no longer be allowed to provide each customer with his own weight in styrofoam boxes and waste paper. And finally they have to promise to shoot Ronald. When these conditions are met, McDonald’s should be allowed to operate in Europe, but not until.

The main square in Salzburg, the Mozartplatz, was quite astonishingly ugly for a city that prides itself on its beauty – a big expanse of asphalt, as charming as a Tesco car park, one extraordinarily begrimed statue of the great man, and a few half-broken benches, around every one of which was crowded a noisy cluster of thirteen-year-old Italians in whom the hormonal imbalances of adolescence were clearly having a deleterious effect. It was awful.

What surprised me was that I remembered Salzburg as being a beautiful place. It was in Salzburg that Katz and I met Gerhard and Thomas, in a bar around the corner from the Mozartplatz, and it was such a thrill to have someone to dilute Katz’s company that I think my enthusiasm may have coloured my memory of the city. In any case, I could find nothing now in the old town but these wretched souvenir shops and restaurants and bars whose trade was overwhelmingly non-local and thus offered about as much charm and local colour as a Pizza Hut on Carnaby Street.

When I crossed the river to the more modern right bank, I found I liked Salzburg much better. A long, quiet street of big houses stood overlooking the Salzach and the views across to the old town were splendid: the ancient roofs, the three domed spires of the cathedral and the vast, immensely heavy-looking Hohensalzburg fortress sinking into the low mountain-top at its back. The shopping streets of the modern town were to my mind much more interesting and appealing and certainly more real than their historic counterparts across the river. I had a coffee in a Konditorei on Linzer Gasse, where every entering customer got a hearty ‘Grüss Gott!’ from every member of the staff. It was like on
Cheers
when Norm comes in, only they did it for everybody, including me, which I thought was wonderful. Afterwards I had a good dinner, a couple of beers and a long evening walk along the river and felt that Salzburg wasn’t such a bad place at all. But it wasn’t the Salzburg that most people come to see.

Vienna is a little under 200 miles east of Salzburg and it took all morning and half the afternoon to get there. There is this curiously durable myth that European trains are wonderfully swift and smooth and a dream to travel on. The trains in Europe are in fact often tediously slow and for the most part the railways persist in the antiquated system of dividing the carriages into compartments. I used to think this was rather jolly and friendly, but you soon discover that it is like spending seven hours in a waiting-room waiting for a doctor who never arrives. You are forced into an awkward intimacy with strangers, which I always find unsettling. If you do anything at all – take something from your pocket, stifle a yawn, rummage in your rucksack – everyone looks over to see what you’re up to. There is no scope for privacy and of course there is nothing like being trapped in a train compartment on a long journey to bring all those unassuageable little frailties of the human body crowding to the front of your mind – the withheld fart, the three and a half square yards of boxer short that have somehow become concertinaed between your buttocks, the Kellogg’s cornflake that is teasingly and unaccountably lodged deep in your left nostril. It was the cornflake that I ached to get at. The itch was all-consuming. I longed to thrust a finger so far up my nose that it would look as if I were scratching the top of my head from the inside, but of course I was as powerless to deal with it as a man with no arms.

You even have to watch your thoughts. For no reason I can explain, except perhaps that I was inordinately preoccupied with bodily matters, I began to think of a sub-editor I used to work with on the business section of
The Times.
I shall call him Edward, since that was his name. Edward was crazy as fuck, which in those palmy pre-Murdoch days was no impediment to employment, or even promotion to high office, on the paper, and he had a number of striking peculiarities, but the one I particularly remember was that late at night, after the New York markets had shut and there was nothing much to do, he would straighten out half a dozen paper clips and probe his ears with them. And I don’t mean delicate little scratchings. He would really jam those paper clips home and then twirl them between two fingers, as if tuning in a radio station. It looked excruciating, but Edward seemed to derive immense satisfaction from it. Sometimes his eyes would roll up into his head and he would make ecstatic little gurgling noises. I suppose he thought no one was watching, but we all sat there fascinated. Once, during a particularly intensive session, when the paper clip went deeper and deeper and looked as if it might be stuck, John Price, the chief sub-editor, called out, ‘Would it help, Edward, if one of us pulled from the other side?’

I thought of this as we went
tracketa-tracketa
across the endless Austrian countryside and I laughed out loud – a sudden lunatic guffaw that startled me as much as my three companions. I covered my mouth with my hand, but more laughter – embarrassed, helpless – came leaking out. The other passengers looked at me as if I had just been sick down my shirt. It was only by staring out of the window and concentrating very hard for twenty minutes that I was able to compose myself and return once again to the more serious torments of the cornflake in my nostril.

At Vienna’s huge Westbahnhof I paid to have a room found for me, then walked to the city centre along the long and ugly Mariahilfer Strasse, wondering if I had been misled about the glories of Vienna. For a mile and a half, from the station to the Ringstrasse, the street was lined with seedy-looking discount stores – the sort of places that sell goods straight out of their cardboard boxes – and customers to match. It was awful, but then near the Hofburg palace I passed into the charmed circle of the Ringstrasse and it was like the sun breaking out from behind clouds. Everything was lovely and golden.

My hotel, the Wandl, was not particularly charming or friendly, but it was reasonably cheap and quiet and it had the estimable bonus of being in almost the precise geographical centre of the city, just behind the baroque Schottenkirche and only half a block from Graben, one of the two spacious pedestrian shopping streets that dominate the heart of Vienna. The other is Kärntnerstrasse, which joins Graben at a right angle by the cathedral square. Between them, they provide Vienna with the finest pedestrian thoroughfare in Europe. Strøget may be a hair longer, others may have slightly more interesting buildings, and a few may be fractionally more elegant, but none is all of these things. I knew within minutes that I was going to like Vienna.

I went first to the cathedral. It is very grand and Gothic outside, but inside I found it oddly lifeless – the sort of place that gives you a cold shiver – and rather neglected as well. The brass was dull and unpolished, the pews were worn, the marble seemed heavy and dead, as if all the natural luminescence had been drained from it. It was a relief to step back outside.

I went to a nearby Konditorei for coffee and a 15,000-calorie slice of cake and planned my assault on the city. I had with me the
Observer Guide to Vienna,
which included this piece of advice: ‘In Vienna, it is best to tackle the museums one at a time.’ Well,
thank
you, I thought. All these years I’ve been going to museums two at a time and I couldn’t figure out why I kept getting depressed.

I decided to start at the top with the Kunsthistorisches Museum. It was fabulous – vast, grand, full of great paintings. They employ a commendable system there. In every room is a rack of cards giving histories of the paintings in that room in a choice of four languages. You wander around with a card looking at the paintings and reading the notes and then replace it in the rack before passing on to the next room where you collect another. I thought it was a great idea.

The only problem with the Kunstmuseum is that it is so enormous. Its lofty halls just run on and on, and before I was a third of the way through it I was suffering museum fatigue. In these circumstances, especially when I have paid a fortune to get in and feel that there are still a couple of hours standing between me and my money’s worth, I find myself involuntarily supplying captions to the pictures: Salome, on being presented the head of John the Baptist on a salver, saying, ‘No, I ordered a double cheeseburger,’ and an exasperated St Sebastian whining, ‘I’m warning you guys, the next person who shoots an arrow is going to get reported.’ But this time I did something that astonished even me. I left, deciding that I would come back for a second sweep later in the week, in spite of the cost.