Neither Here Nor There (30 page)

Instead, for a change of pace, I went to the Tobacco Museum, not far away behind the Messepalast. This was expensive too. Most things in Vienna are. The entrance charge was twenty schillings, two-thirds as much as the Kunstmuseum, but it was hardly two-thirds as good. In two not-very-large rooms I was treated to a couple of dozen display cases packed with old pipes (including a few grotesquely anti-Semitic ones), cigars, matches, cigarettes and cigarette boxes. Around the larger of the two rooms was an elevated gallery of paintings with little artistic merit and nothing in common except that one or more of the people portrayed was smoking. Not recommended.

Nor, I have to say, is the Albertina. This was even more expensive – forty-five schillings. For that kind of money, I would expect to be allowed to take one of the drawings away with me. But I paid without a whimper because I had read that the Albertina has one of the world’s great collections of graphic art, which I just happen to like a lot, but in fact there was hardly anything on show. It was a huge building, but the public gallery was confined to eight small rooms at the back, all with creaking floors and sketching students and unmemorable drawings by mostly obscure artists.

The postcard-stand outside was full of drawings ‘from the Albertina collection’ by artists like Rubens and Dürer, but I had seen none of these. The woman running the stall didn’t speak English and when I held up a Dürer postcard and asked her where the original was, she just kept saying, with that irritableness for which the Viennese are noted, ‘Ja, ja, das ist ein
postcard
,’ as if I had said, ‘Pardon me, is this a postcard or is it a snack food?’ and refused to try to grasp my question until finally I had no choice but to slap her to the ground and leave.

Apart from her, however, I didn’t find the Viennese especially rude and pushy, which rather disappointed me, because I had heard many times that they are the most disagreeable people in Europe. In
The Double Eagle,
Stephen Brook’s excellent account of Vienna, Budapest and Prague, he notes that he met many foreign residents of the city who reported being stopped on the streets by strangers and rebuked for crossing against the lights or letting their children walk with their coats unbuttoned.

Brook also promised that at the famous Café Landtmann, on the Ringstrasse next to the Burgtheater, ‘the waiters and cloak-room attendants treat you like shit’ and in this he was certainly closer to my experience. I didn’t feel
precisely
like excrement, but the waiters certainly did have that studied air of superiority that you find among a certain class of European waiter. When I was younger this always cowed me, but now I just think, Well, if you’re so hot how come I’m sitting down and you’re doing the fetching? Let’s be honest, if your career consists of nothing more demanding than conveying trays of food back and forth between a kitchen and a dining-room all day, there’s not really much of anyone you are superior to, is there? Except perhaps estate agents.

On the whole, the cafés 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 Café Central, where Trotsky used to hang out, sitting for long hours every day doing bugger-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 café 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.

‘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 Ringstrasse 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, passing busy playing-fields, swings, a sports stadium, cafés and restaurants and eventually the amusement park with its ferris wheel – the one made famous by Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton in
The Third Man.

A sign by the ferris wheel, the famous Riesenrad, gave a history of it in German. It was built in 1896–97 by an Englishman named Walter Basset, I noted with a touch of pride on behalf of my friends and neighbours. I assume 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 Berggasse, a mile or so to the north of the city centre. Berggasse 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 documents 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 classical 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 Nazis 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,
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
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., Willy Brandt weeping on his knees in the Warsaw ghetto and Richard von Weizsäcker 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-Strasse. 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 God – 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 shipped off to Auschwitz. And let’s be fair – they accounted for no more than
one-third of the city’s entire population
(italics theirs), and it is of course entirely plausible that a high-ranking Nazi 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
before joining the Nazi 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.

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 assumed 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 grassless 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-shirts 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 circumstances 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.