Tailor of Inverness, The (11 page)

By 1989, I had been living with my partner, Virginia Radcliffe, for four years, sharing a flat in Dalston, East London. We decided to go on a tour of Eastern Europe that summer. My long absence from Poland – fifteen years – had been eating away at me for some time. During this period I exchanged annual Christmas cards with Adam, Aniela and Ula, but that was all. I was keen to see them again and regretted the fact that I had been too busy with my life in England to engage more fully in what had been happening in Poland. Martial Law had been lifted in July 1983. During Martial Law, thousands of Solidarity activists and other oppositionists had been interned. Some had been killed by Polish security forces. Thousands more, such as journalists and teachers, were banned from their professions. Public institutions and much of the country’s industry and transport infrastructure were placed under military management. An economic crisis ensued which resulted in widespread rationing.

Around 700,000 people left Poland between 1981 and 1989. There are those who argue that General Jaruzelski’s imposition of Martial Law prevented an invasion by the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies, as had happened during the Prague
Spring and the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. Jaruzelski himself has argued this. Whatever the case, this was the darkest period in post-war Poland.

Nationwide strikes in 1988 and continuing popular unrest forced the government to hold talks with Solidarity. These led to semi-free elections on June 4th 1989, the first democratic elections in the Warsaw Pact countries, less than three weeks before our departure. Solidarity candidates won all of the 33% of parliamentary seats they were allowed to contest, 99 of the 100 seats available in the second chamber, the Senate. The Communists were plunged into crisis. On September 12
^th
, Tadeusz Mazowiecki became the first non-Communist Prime Minister in more than 40 years and the first anywhere in the Eastern Bloc.

Virginia and I drove away from Dalston in our red VW Golf on June 22
^nd
1989. Our planned route would take us to Misha’s flat in Vienna, Budapest, Prague and finally Lesna before returning to the UK via Berlin. It would take 18 days. We had our visas for Hungary and Poland and the ferry was booked.

We caught the 2.00pm sailing from Dover to Ostend. It was quiet on the boat, which was furbished in ugly utilitarian browns and oranges, rigid laminated tables and moulded plastic chairs. There was an atmosphere of desertion and dinginess reminiscent of English seaside resorts in winter. The tannoy barked out the announcement of a film screening, a Belgian man gave us a half-used disposable lighter so we could light our fags and we tried to doze, mindful of the long drive ahead.

The sky was overcast as the Belgian coast came into view, great black-backed seagulls wheeling about the boat and soaring towards the grey housing blocks of Ostend. We climbed down to the car deck, thick with the noise and exhaust fumes of vehicles eager to disembark. 6.30pm became 7.30 on the continent and our long night’s driving began. Through Ostend
in 5 minutes, following signs for Brussels, we were soon on the long, straight Belgian motorway, passing through the typically flat terrain, with lines of poplar trees and narrow little houses. Friesian cows ruminated. We passed Brussels and then Luik/Liege, jumping from Flemish to Walloon to Flemish counties. In two hours, we reached the German border near Aachen and stopped for petrol and a coffee.

We travelled through Germany in the dark. Traffic was light. We took turns to drive in 3-hour stints, dozing in the passenger seat, smoking, listening to tapes, drinking coffee, enjoying the rhythm of the road. Koln, Frankfurt, Nurnberg, Regensburg and, as dawn broke, we reached Passau on the Austrian border by the Danube. We stopped by the river at 5.00am. Morning mist lay on the water which was oozing its great way into Austria, wide and thick. The sky was grey, the mist was grey, the road was grey and the water was a darker grey. Everywhere else: green. We were tired and alert, feeling a sense of magic at this spot which was so new and distant but which we’d arrived at so effortlessly. After the last of our coffee we resumed our journey.

After entering Austria, there was 40 kilometres of two-way road through picturesque countryside with rolling green fields, hilly little pine forests and grand square farmhouses with mighty roofs with wide overhangs to cope with heavy snow. These scenes continued most of the way to Vienna. We entered Vienna’s suburbs at 7.00am, rush hour. Our efforts to find Misha’s flat succeeded after an hour’s experiment, thanks to a bank clerk giving us a map of the city and spending some time pointing the way. Thinking he’d be up by then we rang Misha, who was amused and surprised that we’d arrived so early. We were exhausted and exhilarated, but sleep wasn’t on the immediate agenda.

Misha had a lonely life in Vienna at that time, with only one close friend living in the city, another journalist. Visitors
didn’t come often, so he wanted to make the most of our stay. Despite our need for sleep, we were whisked back into town, Misha promising a good breakfast and a brief visit to his office: he was taking the day off. Breakfast turned out to be brotschinken, ham rolls bought in a bakery, which were delicious, but disappointing as we’d expected to sit in a
restaurant
. We walked to the office, chewing our rolls and exchanging news. Misha didn’t like Vienna and he emphasised the fact by referring to the ‘anally retentive’ Viennese bourgeoisie and the city’s ‘anally retentive’ imperialist architecture.

His office was small, containing a little recording studio, two desks, a typewriter, tape recorders, books, a coffee machine and a constantly clicking telex machine. Misha’s first task was to go through its overnight outpourings, selecting news items which were relevant. The machine received information from around the world, sent by various Eastern European news agencies, 95% of which was of no use to Misha. He whizzed through the yards of telex at an impressive rate, passing it to us to bin. Much of the information consisted of crop yields in Colombia, the arrival of a new consignment of tractor parts in a Bulgarian province, production targets being met ahead of schedule in a Yugoslavian shoe factory, and so on. Then it was time to make phone calls. When it became obvious that Misha would take some time we decided to go for a walk. It was a sunny morning and the Burgtheater was just round the corner. We passed it and strolled into a little park. In a few minutes, we were asleep on park benches.

A couple of hours later Misha took us for coffee and cake in an expensive café. We returned to his flat for a wash and then ate in town, a traditional dish of boiled beef, cabbage and dumplings. Afterwards, we visited a pub full of Vienna’s affluent younger types, all looking quite conventional. The pub served draught Budweiser/Budvar, now common in the UK, but virtually unheard of then. The 100-year-old trademark
dispute between this Czech beer’s makers and the makers of American Budweiser, which had originally been settled by a gentleman’s agreement not to market their product on the other’s continental territory, was about to flare into a much more serious argument with the collapse of Communism, as Czech Budweiser expanded into new western markets and US Budweiser travelled in the opposite direction. On tasting the Czech beer in Vienna for the first time, it struck me that the Americans were about to have a real fight on their hands. Tired and merry after a couple of litres of the stuff, we returned to Misha’s flat, drank whisky and vodka and sang songs until 2am before collapsing into bed.

We stayed with Misha for two days soaking in Vienna’s history and culture, so informed by its unique geographical position, thrust into the midriff of the Eastern Bloc states, close to so many different countries: Italy and the states which then comprised Yugoslavia to the south, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine and the Black Sea to the East, Czechoslovakia and Poland to the north, Germany to the West. Once, before the First World War, it was the imperial capital of most of these countries and the flea market reflected this heritage to a degree, with Yugoslavian, Hungarian and Turkish stalls. The city housed small communities from a variety of nations but, of course, the overriding culture was Austrian.

The city centre is dominated by a series of opulent, ornate buildings, most of which are dedicated to church and state and designed to reflect the glory of the old Austro-Hungarian empire. Most were built during the 19
^th
century in a variety of archaic styles: neo-classical, neo-gothic, neo-renaissance and neo-baroque. We walked through the manicured parkland of the Schonbrunn Palace, patrolled by an attendant on a bicycle who zealously admonished anyone who dared to walk on the grass, up to a folly of arches and columns, topped by a great stone eagle, which Empress Maria Theresa had built to add interest to her strolls.

As an antidote to all this overpowering grandiosity, we visited the beautiful art nouveau gallery which houses Klimt’s friezes, erotic, luxurious, dream-like explorations of his own psyche which expose his obsession with women. Then we went to see the Hundertwasserhaus. An apartment block completed in 1986 by the Viennese artist and architect Friedrich Hundertwasser, its governing concept is irregularity. Verandahs poke out at different angles, windows are on different levels, straight lines are kept to a minimum. Trees grow through apartments and emerge through the roofs. Little statues and mosaics appear in surprising places, many of which have been used elsewhere before finding their way here. Pillars, many quite definitely not vertical, vary in thickness along their length, with brightly-coloured ceramic sections wrapping them.

We left Misha at the airport where he was to catch a flight to Belgrade and drove on to Budapest. The Hungarian border surprised me. It had a relaxed atmosphere unlike any of the crossings I remembered from my childhood. In May of the previous year, Janos Kadar, the ‘benevolent’ dictator who had been installed by hardliners with the blessing of Moscow after the 1956 Uprising and had been in office ever since, was deposed by a coalition of radical reformers and conservative technocrats. Kadar’s Hungary mixed populism and nationalism with repression and has been described as ‘the happiest barracks in the camp,’ an eloquently ironic comparison with the other Eastern Bloc states. His deposition ushered in the end of one-party rule and the preparation of multi-party elections, which took place in spring 1990. On May 2 1989, Hungary’s communist regime had begun removing its
fortifications
along the border with Austria. The new reformist
government
in Budapest undertook this move as a goodwill gesture towards the West and as a message to the world that it was unilaterally ending the Cold War and damn the consequences. At a ceremony held on June 27, two days after we arrived in
Budapest, the Austrian foreign minister Alois Mock and his Hungarian counterpart Gyula Horn formally cut the barbed wire in the presence of the international press.

We drove in the summer heat by vineyards and wheatfields, past the towns of Gyor and Tatabanya and into Budapest, Vienna’s old imperial twin capital. Despite suffering much more wartime damage than Vienna, Budapest has preserved numerous historic buildings akin to those in its old sister city, but it had quite a different atmosphere. It was certainly poorer, grimy and surrounded by the gigantic housing blocks which are so prevalent in the ex-Communist cities, but it was also bustling and vibrant. One felt a sense of purpose there, an anticipation of things to come.

We were very fortunate in Budapest to have Endre and Veronica Kelemen as our hosts. Endre worked in educational broadcasting and was a friend and colleague of Virginia’s father John, who ran the BBC’s Open University Production Centre. They had become acquainted at a series of European
educational
broadcasting conferences. We found their flat and were given a warm welcome, and steaming plates of Veronica’s goulash before Endre escorted us to our accommodation, a small flat in a block for visiting journalists. We felt a little fraudulent at being given this privilege, but blessed our good fortune and took it anyway.

The following day, we registered with the local police, which was a requirement for tourists at the time, and visited the Czech Embassy to obtain visas for our journey to Prague. We stayed in Budapest for four days, taking the funicular railway up Castle Hill to see the Royal Palace and climbing Gellert Hill for a great view of the city. The Citadel on this hill still bore the damage inflicted in January 1945, when the Germans dug in here and held on for a month before their surrender. We travelled on the elegant Line 1 of the Budapest Metro. Now a World Heritage Site, it was opened in 1896 by Emperor
Franz Josef, the year of the 1000
^th
anniversary of the arrival of the Magyars. We visited the Opera House, the Museum of Labour History and the National Gallery.

We watched the extraordinary massed ranks of synchronised gymnasts at the Czech Spartakiada on TV and ate again at Endre and Veronica’s house. We also visited the beautiful Great Synagogue, the largest functioning synagogue in Europe. It is situated on Dohany Street, which marked a boundary of the Nazis’ Jewish Ghetto, established in 1944. Thousands of Jews took refuge in and around the synagogue. Around 7,000 died there during the winter of 1944-45. These victims are buried in the synagogue’s courtyard. Adolf Eichmann, one of the principle architects of the
Shoah
, arrived in the city in March 1944. For a time, he used part of the synagogue as an office as he oversaw the deportation and murder of Hungary’s Jewish population. In the space of not much more than six weeks, between mid-May and June 1944, 381,661 people, half of all the Jews in Hungary, had arrived at Auschwitz. Hardly any survived.

Endre introduced us to a young colleague, Gyorg, a good English speaker who spent a day with us as our guide. He was from Transylvania, a member of Romania’s large Hungarian minority. He was glad to be in Budapest, free from the discrimination Hungarians suffered in education and employment in Romania. Gyorg took us to Szentendre
Skanzen
to the north of the city.
Skanzens
are open-air museums of rural life. The one at Szentendre is effectively a museum village. Thatched cottages and barns, in styles from the last 300 years have either been reproduced here or originals have been dismantled and transported in pieces from their original locations to Szentendre to be rebuilt there. They house farm implements and machinery, furniture, household goods and folk art. Szentendre gave me an idea of what my father’s village might have looked like when he was a boy.