by Helen Moat
After Aggstein, we emerged from the shadowy riverside into the bright light of the apricot orchard plains. The sun broke through the clouds and the sweet scent of the ripening fruit hung in the air, the dew of the trees dripping on my knees – until I realised it was my leaky water bottle. Our wheels nosed forward effortlessly and I felt joy at being in this fruit-scented landscape of orchards.
There was a sense of contentment at being in the outdoors. It was something I shared with my father from the days when he’d been well. The oft-repeated two-word entry in his diary – In country – held so much meaning and contained so much of what my father was. Once, he wrote more eloquently, Lovely day in country with my Lord. I felt my father’s deep sense of peace and serenity as I cycled along, if not his religious devotion. But perhaps it was the one and the same: I just didn’t give it a name.
When we’d reached the campsite at Tulln the sky had darkened again and I was reluctant to camp. ‘Okay,’ said Jamie, our business-headed budget manager. ‘But if there’s nothing under fifty euros, we camp.’
Even the youth hostel cost more than that, and I reluctantly followed Jamie to the campsite, where we found Iris and Brian again. On erecting the tents, Jamie found one of his pole attachments had splintered at the end. Iris dipped into one of her ‘Mary Poppins’ Ortlieb panniers and triumphantly pulled out some duct tape and toothpicks to help Jamie with his DIY job.
After a campsite dinner, she was determined I should go swimming with her.
‘I need to clear up,’ I protested, not wanting to swim.
Iris took the dirty saucepan from me: ‘I’ll do the job for you while you get ready.’
There was no arguing.
But Iris was right: the water in the lake beside the Danube was warm and soothing, a balm on my cycle-tired muscles. We swam in the soupy weed, then floated on our backs, our voices drifting in the gathering darkness.
*
On Friday 13 June, we cycled into Vienna, white blossom drifting across our path like snow. We had reached the outer edges of Western Europe. Here the Ottomans had been driven back. It was another landmark on our journey.
8. Sabine and Sisi in Vienna
Sabine met us at the Messe exhibition centre. Dressed in black, she crushed us in a tall, strong-boned embrace before stepping back to peer owl-like at me through thick black-rimmed glasses. Sabine was a Tigger, bouncing everyone along in her passion for music, photography, art, architecture and theatre, all punctuated with exuberant cartoon sound effects. She was the perfect guide for Vienna. More than that, she’d set aside the whole weekend to show Jamie and I around her adopted city.
It was our love of music that had brought us together from our respective homes in Vienna and the English Midlands to Northern Ireland. Our paths had crossed in Belfast, where we’d travelled to see Duke Special, a quirky indie musician who combined soulful songwriting with old gramophones, theatrical props and song-sheets for sing-alongs. The musician personified all that Sabine and I loved: theatrical music, storytelling, vaudeville, cabaret, the absurd, the darkly humorous and emotional songwriting.
Not surprisingly, Sabine had turned her back on her rural birthplace, a deeply conservative hinterland of Austria close to the Slovakian border, to come and live in the theatricality of the fin-de-siècle Habsburg city. Now in Vienna, I saw that all the Austrian towns of onion domes, twinned-towered churches, ornate statues, carved masonry and colourful frescos Jamie and I had cycled through were just the overture to Vienna. Everything in the historical quarter declared unchecked grandeur: a penchant for pomp and circumstance, unfettered wealth and a self-indulgent formality of architecture spread out across this part of the city.
From the newer, shinier, stripped-back Messe – a trade fair centre of concrete and high-rise glass that doubled the cityscape in shimmering reflections – Sabine led us into Prater amusement park. We dodged children with candyfloss and parents with prams. We carried on past stalls reeking of Bratwurst fat and fried onions and through garish amusement arcades to the Riesenrad – the Viennese big wheel built for Emperor Franz Josef’s Golden Jubilee in 1897. The surviving gondolas looked strangely like Victorian garden sheds. We entered one, and slowly the wheel swung us to the sky. High above the city, black clouds parted and shafts of sunlight bathed the city’s rooftops in pools of golden light. It seemed a fitting baptism for this city of decadent opulence.
We finished the evening in the Café Central, sitting below chandeliers and decorative arched domes. Penguin waiters in black waistcoats and white knee-length aprons delicately danced around marble columns and customers while holding silver platters of pastries high above their heads. Adolf Hitler, Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, all familiar names from my university degree, had come here to philosophise, politicise and to write essays and poetry. Had they sat in this very corner where Sabine, Jamie and I now sipped on our drinks? In all probability. I felt the hand of history in this café. But it was the portrait of Empress Elisabeth of Austria on the wall beside her husband Franz Joseph I that caught my attention: ‘Sisi’, as she was often called, in her porcelain-white silk dress to match her porcelain-white face; Sisi with her delicate beauty and needle-thin waist; Sisi with her clear gaze and determined chin. It would be Sisi’s story that stayed with me as Sabine showed us round the inner city the next day.
‘And this is where Sisi had her apartments,’ Sabine said, pointing up to the building that curved with the circular Michaelerplatz. ‘She was only fifteen when she married Franz Joseph I and came to Vienna.’ Sabine took us to the rose garden in the Volksgarten behind Hofburg, the empress’s summer palace. I sat by the shade of the fountain, listening to the tinkle of water and the hum of traffic in the background. In front of me, Sisi stood frozen in Laaser marble, chalk-white hands folded demurely in her lap in front of her snap-thin waist.
‘Sisi was derided and dismissed by Viennese society,’ Sabine explained. ‘At best, she was admired for her beauty, only becoming a much-loved figure in Vienna after her death.’ The empress was deeply unhappy in Vienna, I learned. Her all-consuming vanity was at odds with her desire to be taken seriously. In all likelihood, Sisi suffered from an eating disorder: she was known for her binge-eating and punishing exercise regime, and rumoured to have a secret stairway accessing the kitchen. She was obsessed with her health, her ankle-long hair and her weight – sewing her tiny waist into the tightest of corsets. At the same time, she seemed to loathe the excesses of Viennese society, preferring to escape to a simpler life in Hungary, where she felt more of an affinity with the Magyars – causing deep resentment in Austria. She became more and more of a free spirit, turning her back on Viennese society and spending time in Madeira or Malta, or alone on board her steamer on the Mediterranean, writing poetry in the style of the poet Heinrich Heine. Each time she returned to Vienna she became ill. It was clear she had a psychosomatic aversion to the city.
‘Her life was tragic,’ Sabine told us by the statue. ‘She’d married into the Habsburg dynasty at a very young age. Then her son committed suicide – and she was murdered by Lake Geneva. An Italian anarchist rammed a file into her heart. She still managed to walk the distance to the steamship. It was only when they removed her corset – that had been stopping the flow of blood – she died. After her death, Sisi’s rejection of Viennese life was quickly forgotten by the Austrians. Instead, they remembered how she connected with ordinary people, her philanthropy and beauty. Now she’s a sort of saint.’
I could understand Sisi’s dislike of Viennese extravagance. I also felt an aversion to the overwrought baroque buildings with their shop windows piled high with designer goods and luxury chocolates. I preferred the shabbier, narrow side streets beyond the inner ring road: the quirkiness and fun of the multi-coloured Hundertwasserhaus, the graffitied walls by the River Danube and the bohemian boathouses with their deckchairs and bars and artificial beaches.
On our last day in Vienna, Sabine took us on the bu
s to Kahlenberg above the vineyards with their courtyard wineries. Below us, the Danube sliced southward through the city before disappearing into the green of the Danube National Park, where it would emerge at the border. Tomorrow, we would be heading that way. I felt a thrill as I saw our route stretched out in front of us, yearning to be on the open road again, and at the same time feeling a nervousness at cycling into the unknown – over the other side of the hill – into Slovakia and Eastern Europe.
PART TWO
EASTERN EUROPE
SLOVAKIA, HUNGARY AND THE WESTERN BALKANS
1. Slovakia
Jamie and I cycled out of the city, leaving the early morning stirrings of Viennese streets to plunge into the empty tree-lined avenues of the Prater parkland. I breathed in morning dew and damp earth, enjoying the splinter-sharpness of chilled air after the stuffiness of the hotel room. We overtook a road-cleaning lorry and splashed through soaked tarmac before climbing the spiral cycle path onto the bridge that led to the Donauinsel, or the Danube Island, which is a dagger of green stretching between the old and new Danube. The artificial island was created from the spoils of the channel that had been dug out to create a flood defence. I wanted to stay and explore the leisure island with its beaches and cafés, but we had forty miles to cycle between Vienna and Bratislava, the Slovakian capital. We crossed another bridge and continued along the left bank.
‘I love Bratislava,’ Sabine had told me. ‘It’s a beautiful city. Sometimes, I take the boat there and the train back, but do be careful – especially around the ATMs. Best to change your money inside the bank, and keep your belongings close to you. It’s not like here.’
Again, those words: it’s not like here – whispering all the way along the Rhine and now here on the Danube.
‘Your adventure will begin in Eastern Europe,’ Klaus had commented back in Ingolstadt. And now I felt a tightness in my stomach at the idea of adventure. Everything about the Germanic countries we’d passed through had an easy familiarity of language and culture, whereas the Slavic countries were still, primarily, a half-formed place in my mind – created by words on a page or images on my computer screen.
Or founded on rumour.
But that fear of the new and unknown, as always, was pushed aside by my curiosity, driving me on. I fought against any preconceptions, deciding instead to cycle into Eastern Europe with openness. But it was difficult to bat off all the warnings we’d received. I felt a tugging at the bike’s spokes, a dragging of the wheel – at least in my head.
In reality, we were covering ground quickly. The cycle path shot straight as an arrow through the Donau-Auen National Park between poplars, elms and willow, the river lost in marsh and bog. There was little to distract me and I thought of Sabine and Sisi again. I too had felt out of sync with the world I grew up in. At first, you just are; at first, it just is. You stand in the centre of your world and it reflects back at you in harmony. Everything radiated out from my town: the surrounding villages and the seaside settlements beyond, always returning me to the place that rooted me. Somewhere beyond that, there was an English world of strange accents, too far away to contemplate, and beyond that again, the unknown – a world of incomprehensible languages, customs and belief systems.
But when I was about twelve, I learned in geography that my small town in provincial Northern Ireland was just a village in comparison to mainland cities such as Birmingham and Glasgow, and it was even far down the list of Northern Irish towns by population. I was shocked and I had to rethink the significance of my epicentre. Up until that point my world comprised of my home, my school and my meeting hall. The Brethren were at the centre of it and the unbelievers they spoke of were a tiny, stubborn, led-astray-by-Satan smattering of individuals who would, hopefully, one day see their wrong. Everyone eventually got saved. Didn’t they? And if they didn’t, they were too entwined in their own selfish waywardness. They were beyond redemption.
Our path continued through the trees of the Donau-Auen. There was a heavy stillness in the forest, apart from the sleepy hum of insect and the rustle of small mammals in the undergrowth – a wood mouse or weasel, perhaps. And once, from somewhere deep within the trees, I heard something thrashing through the vegetation, the snapping of branches echoing through poplars. I wondered if it was a wild boar or a red deer, but we saw nothing bar the funnel of green that stretched out endlessly in front of us, and the dance of midges in front of the bikes.
I returned to my inner world. The first person to challenge my childhood reality was a supply teacher in my final year at primary school. She was an exotic creature smelling of perfume and always carrying an outsized bag over her arm as she swaggered along the school corridor in tight trousers smoothing out her closely cropped hair. She was the vicar’s wife from an outlying village, who was now teaching me hell was a metaphor, not a real place.
Hell was central to our gospel meetings, a place that preachers spoke about with low, hushed voice or with raging thunder. It was the weapon the Brethren used to persuade sinners to seek salvation. In our next art lesson, the supply teacher asked us to draw our own idea of purgatory. I defiantly painted flames in blood-red and left comic-strip religious tracts on her desk, warning of the perils of rejecting salvation and portraying hell as a fiery reality. She held up the miniature booklets, flashing scarlet-painted fingernails while raising a finely plucked eyebrow, quiet bemusement curling her lips. When my father came to pick me up from school at lunchtime, as he often did when it rained, I expressed my outrage about the supply teacher. But my father sat there quietly, head slightly bowed over the wheel, and I felt confused and abandoned by his silence.
For a few more years, I pushed away the possibility of other realities, but a larger, alternative world was revealing itself to me through books. With no TV in my home, I read ferociously, hungry for knowledge of the world that lay beyond my provincial home: Hardy and Lawrence, Atwood and Drabble, and a host of other novelists. I read the philosophers, Sartre, Camus and Russell. I read The White Hotel, by D.M. Thomas, and mourned the loss of my innocence.
But it was too late. I didn’t have the arrogance to simply reject other opinions, another Weltanschauung. Wasn’t our perception of the world deeply rooted in our culture and in our experiences? If salvation was only to be found in Christ, then it was heavily tilted in favour of the Christian-centric West – and specifically to the tiny number of evangelicals that mushroomed in small pockets of the world. If you were born into a Northern Irish Protestant household, you had hit the jackpot, but if you grew up in Communist Cuba or Islamic Iran, the odds were stacked against you. The Brethren argued over predestination, and whether a person could be sent to hell if they had not been exposed to the Gospel, but it was a simplistic argument that didn’t consider culture and upbringing, and the thoughts and beliefs that live inside our heads. This narrow view of ‘truth’ over perception didn’t sit comfortably with me.
The problem was, I could see the world from other perspectives. Slowly, I was shifting away psychologically from the narrow boundaries of my home, my town – its religion and politics. My father shook his head. My mother tutted at my rebelliousness as I entered adulthood. Like Sisi, I felt hemmed in. I didn’t quite belong.
Here, in the darkness of the Danube-Auen forest, I also felt hemmed in. There was an eerie quiet but for the rumble of our bike wheels. Once, somewhere above an oak, the silence was broken by the sweet machine-gun rattle of a blue tit.
Just before Hainburg, we emerged from the forest, blinking in the light after the gloom. Across the other side of the Danube, black clouds leaned into the river and the sky grew shadowy. We contemplated waiting out the coming rain in a riverside restaurant but Bratislava was calling on the other side of the hill. We cycled past low-slung terraced cottages, the kind depicted in Russian folk tales or in a Chagall painting, more typical of Slovakia than Austria, although we’d not yet crossed the border. On the top of the hill, the clouds sagged, then burst like an overfilled paper bag, t
ipping cold, hard water on Jamie and me. I tried to shelter under a tree but was soon soaked through, regardless. Then the rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun and we freewheeled past fields, shivering in damp clothes, down towards the city.
*
Heading into Slovakia, the changes were immediate. At the border, the customs buildings lay empty, weeds squeezing through broken concrete, render cracked and windows smeared with grime. Communist-era high-rises filled the skyline and the cycle path was cracked and uneven.
We left the main road and followed the cycle path as it swept north again to the Danube, then east along its banks. Still following the line of the border, we passed a pair of bunkers, one converted to a museum. Now, the concrete, humpbacked bunkers lay like beached whales in fields of weeds and yellowed grasses. The Czechoslovakians had built these fortifications in the 1930s as a defence against the Germans. Later, a border was created to keep its citizens in – the Iron Curtain. During the Cold War, this area had been heavily manned, barbed wire strung along the border in hostility. How quickly the barbed wire had unravelled in the dying days of Communist rule, when Eastern Europeans had flooded into Austria from Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Now the border soldiers were gone, the lookout posts and the barbed wire too. I marvelled at the open land between the two countries. I could have dismounted from my bike and wandered between Austria and Slovakia at will.