Last Days in Old Europe

by Richard Bassett

  Richard Bassett

  * * *

  LAST DAYS IN OLD EUROPE

  Trieste ’79, Vienna ’85, Prague ’89

  Contents

  Map

  The View from the Molo Audace

  The Charm of Old Austria

  The End of the Ancien Régime

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  In memory of Cornelia Kirpicsenko-Meran

  (geb. Gräfin Meran)

  1963–2013

  and

  Reinhold Gayer-Ehrenberg

  1950–2018

  nunc Scio quid sit amor: nudis in cotibus illum

  aut Rhodope aut Tmaros …

  Donau in Oesterreich

  Mich umwohnet mit glänzendem Aug’

  Das Volk der Fajaken;

  Immer ist’s Sonntag, es dreht immer

  Am Herd sich der Spiess

  (Danube in Austria

  With their gleaming eyes I am surrounded by

  The people of the Phaeacians

  For whom the roast-spit ever turns

  And for whom it is always Sunday)

  Friedrich Schiller, Xenien (1797)

  The View from the Molo Audace

  Trieste–Zagreb–Ljubljana–Graz

  There are many shades of sky-blue. In my experience, the most intoxicating is the one which fills the Adriatic sky around Trieste each January after a few days of the Bora wind. The air has a clarity which I have seen equalled only in the highlands of Tibet. From the Molo Audace, simple slabs of Istrian stone stretching out to sea like a pier from the Triestine Riva, the peaks of the Alps, faintly pink, can be glimpsed nearly 70 miles away to the west beyond the lagoons. To the east, the Istrian peninsula, lazy and shimmering in the sunlight, stretches like some reclining voluptuary towards the hazy and distant lands of the Quarnero. It is cold in this bright sunlight but the colours are so vivid one scarcely feels it. ‘Come to Trieste,’ James Joyce once wrote to a friend, ‘and you will see sun.’

  It was on such a day in January 1979 that the ‘Simplon-Orient Express’ dropped me at the foot of the old Südbahn Terminus after rattling down the cliffs beyond Duino. I was young, tall and thin, conforming to the continental European view of the English stereotype at the time. A heavy midnight-blue barathea coat with wide double-breasted lapels, and an impatient air with the bureaucracy of the luggage carriage, no doubt confirmed the image. Although I had been travelling for more than thirty hours, luggage (sent in advance in those convenient days) was one simple large suitcase. Opening the case the officials found that it contained little to arouse their interest. A pair of pyjamas, some second-hand shirts and collars, a pair of corduroy trousers and a duck-egg green paperback copy of Stephen Spender’s memoirs all failed to attract their attention.

  In some places, it seems that the circumstances of travel never change. The train will always more or less be a quarter of an hour late, the officials will always be indifferent. Indeed, I might have chosen any time in the previous twenty-five years to effect this arrival in Trieste and I would have been greeted by the same picture of perennial stillness. Trieste had been quiet since the early 1960s. Its status as a minor port of Italy, much disputed by Marshal Tito’s Communist Yugoslavia in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, had finally been stabilized by an international treaty four years earlier. The Cold War had sealed it from its hinterland and this once great metropolitan port had become, in practice, an enormous museum – a museum with very few visitors.

  I had studied the map of Trieste from an old Baedeker of the Eastern Alps bought for a pound from John Ruston’s wonderful antiquarian bookshop, Commin’s, a few minutes’ walk from our house in Bournemouth. Although none of the names seemed to be correct I had managed to find my destination within half an hour of walking from the station. The British School, Via Torrebianca, had placed a small advertisement in The Times asking for an ‘English teacher’. Glimpsed from a dark cold windswept avenue on the south coast a few weeks before Christmas, the very name ‘Trieste’ appeared to conjure up romance and a chance to escape from a peculiarly English parochialism. An exchange of telegrams a month later and the post was secured. It was, friends assured me, entirely the consequence of a good degree from Cambridge.

  But it appealed because it was not my first visit to the city. Six months earlier, the train had taken me from Ljubljana to Trieste and then, as now, the Bora had just died down to reveal a horizon of breathtaking clarity. Filled with enthusiasm and energy I asked a heavily made-up lady in the tourist office where I might stay and she told me of a small hotel near the Amphitheatre. Mietta Shamblin was elegant and middle-aged, keen to practise her rather archaic English and correct my halting Italian. She offered to ring them to ask if they had a room, noting en passant that Trieste was a very welcoming place for strangers. Thanks to Signora Shamblin, for whom nothing was too much trouble, this proved to be the case. With its soft imperial Viennese architecture, the bright light, the superb coffee, the abundant evidence of different peoples and creeds and a wealth of old Imperial and Royal civilization,fn1 it was almost as if the essence of the Habsburg Empire had been bottled into this one place for preservation for future generations so that the stranger might pass along its streets thinking, ‘Ah yes. This must be what an Imperial Austrian city was really like.’ So the advertisement in The Times that wintry afternoon on the Hampshire coast had fallen on fertile ground. It offered me a chance to renew an exciting new acquaintance, learn another language and deepen my knowledge of a fascinating city. To a twenty-two-year-old, these seemed to be happy prospects.

  The next day, as I entered a tobacconist’s shop just off the main square to buy some postage stamps, a lady with spectacles attached by wires around her neck took one look at me and hailed me with a familiar greeting. There had been no exchange of addresses six months earlier but Mietta had not forgotten the young Englishman and I could never have forgotten her enthusiastic warmth.

  ‘What are you doing now? Come with me.’ Mietta grabbed my arm. Chattering merrily about the power of coincidence, she briskly escorted me to the small canal which stretched from the solemn neo-classical Church of San Antonio near by towards the sea. It was another dazzlingly sunny day. As we marched along the Ponte Rosso, I remembered the difference between the ‘tourist’ and the ‘traveller’ which the amiable and owlish Senior Tutor at Christ’s, Gorley Putt, had been fond of pointing out. The former was a prisoner of superficialities, forever condemned to be ripped off and abused; the latter penetrated below the surface and could be relied upon to ‘understand’ the places he visited (in those days at Cambridge it was, sadly, usually ‘he’). The key to this was of course rapport with ‘the locals’. If you knew the inhabitants in a foreign city you were halfway to understanding how it worked.

  ‘I want you to meet some friends’, Mietta said. Halfway along the canal, a small unpretentious door led to the Bar Danubio. It was a modest place, very unlike the grander cafés glimpsed in Vienna or Graz or even elsewhere in Trieste. Later I would discover the opulent Caffè Specchi, on the Piazza Unità, and the Stella Polaris with its ornate columns, all of them distinct in atmosphere and style from the Bar Danubio. Mietta ushered me into a space whose walls were a fading cream unadorned save, very high up, for a small black and white photograph of Trieste taken from the nearby clifftop at some indeterminate date between 1860 and 1960.

  There could not have been more than half a dozen tables in the quiet, austere room. Three were occupied. Behind a large coffee-machine, the waiter was intently studying the newspaper’s cryptic daily ‘Rebus’. Conversation, if there had once been any, had stopped. As though we had entered a library, everyone seemed to
be in a state of mild concentration, examining the printed word.

  ‘This is the poetess Lina Galli,’ intoned Mietta with a flourish. I saw a grey-haired old lady with a large silver medallion round her neck. The poetess looked up from her newspaper and smiled ‘Piacere.’ Before I could engage her, Mietta pulled me to one side towards a second table, where an old man with heavily lidded eyes gazed up unshaven from another newspaper. ‘And this is the writer Giorgio Voghera … and his friend Piero Kern.’ Voghera smiled benignly. Kern, who seemed in his mid-fifties, streaks of red in his hair, responded in short, deceptively languid phrases: ‘So you are English? Have you read King Solomon’s Mines?’ Without waiting for a response Kern replied enigmatically: ‘So … the palaver is over.’ He pronounced the word in the Hungarian manner with an accent on the first syllable and returned to his paper.

  At the third table an old woman with a handsome profile sat gazing at the ‘Rebus’ quiz. ‘And this’, said Mietta with faintly recalibrated enthusiasm, ‘is my aunt, Myrta Fulignot, the widow of the famous painter Guido Fulignot.’ Myrta smiled with dark inscrutable eyes. I had not, alas, heard of this great painter, but I nonetheless found Mrs Fulignot easier to converse with than the other denizens of the Danubio. She spoke German with an Austrian accent and asked if I enjoyed playing Pritsch (bridge). Though I did not know it, that bright morning in this sparsely furnished space, and notwithstanding an average age difference of more than half a century, I had made friends for life.

  My duties at the school were light. Every day after the morning’s teaching, on Myrta’s advice I would go to a little restaurant, the Casa Maria near the Greek Orthodox Church, where a kind, portly woman offered a simple pasta and salad washed down with a quarter bottle of Merlot from the Gorizia hills a few miles away. Despite its plainness, this humble trattoria was far from cramped and we ate in comfort under vaulted ceilings. On the walls, a portrait of Emperor Franz Josef gazed down. The old Emperor had visited Trieste in 1882 to be greeted in the Habsburg tradition with demonstrations and bombs. In death, and more than a half-century after the end of Habsburg rule in Trieste, Cecco Beppe (a contraction of ‘Francesco Giuseppe’ but also meaning Blind Josef), as the Italians had called him, was venerated in cafés and trattorias across the city.

  There were about a dozen guests each day at Maria’s. One table attracted attention immediately because it was laid out every weekday for four respectable-looking men in their late fifties, each dressed in a dark tweed jacket, tie and flannel trousers. Each place was set with its individual miniature bottle of wine. These men were such regular lunchers they merited their own personal napkins, rolled into pewter rings. I would learn later that these anonymous bureaucrats were modest ‘men of the Generali’, the great insurance company headquartered in Trieste, whose careful underwriting in Habsburg days had stretched to every corner of the Austrian Empire. The firm had been so prevalent in writing policies for the bourgeoisie of the empire that one could generally discover whether someone had been an Austro-Hungarian citizen by asking whether they or their family had ever been insured by the Generali.

  The four men were convivial but they never raised their voices nor stooped to conspiratorial whispers. Each consumed his individual quarter-litre of Tocai Friulano or Refosco without fuss or criticism. Until this time in my life, I had placed a high value on energy and dynamism, but I could now see that here was something faintly enviable: a simple bureaucratic life, undisturbed by problems or challenges that might interfere with the routine of lunch with a few colleagues. These were not men who would ever confuse movement with progress. As I watched them leave promptly each day at ten to two, to head back to their offices or perhaps to a siesta, seemingly untroubled by worries, I was unaware that I was witnessing a middle-class douceur de vivre on the brink of extinction in Europe.

  Voghera had worked most of his life at the Generali. I had not then read his autobiographical masterpiece Il direttore generale, about the personalities of the Generali insurance company in the 1920s (let alone his celebrated Anonimo triestino: Il segreto), but it was clear that, within the confines of the city, his reputation was high. Despite his overall air of untidiness, it was equally obvious that long years of service in the Generali had afforded Voghera the luxury of early retirement. He had enough material comfort to write. Had he opted for the more intellectual life his brilliance merited and become a university professor, like his protégé Claudio Magris, author of the acclaimed Danubio, he could not have enjoyed such freedom. Magris’s spare frame and intense expression could occasionally be glimpsed across the marble tables of the nearby Caffè Tommaseo.

  At first, Voghera was inscrutable. Though he never offered the slightest protest, I often felt I was disturbing his peace and calm with my foolish questions about Trieste. Gradually, as my Italian improved, we moved away from conversing in German and he became far more garrulous. On the topic of Trieste’s railways (an object of unceasing fascination) he explained in painstaking detail how there had been three routes to Trieste under the Austrians and that one, running past the lake of Bohinj, had been especially beautiful dal punto di vista panoramico. The Pontebba Bahn, the Staatsbahn, the glorious Südbahn and the engineering feats associated with them were all described with the exactitude of a learned specialist, though railways never featured in his books: those dealt with altogether more profound psychological themes.

  Voghera seemed to be knowledgeable about everything. There was no escaping the fact that he had been an exceptionally gifted child. The opening lines of Il segreto summed up perfectly his intellect and dry wit: ‘Non c’è alcun dubbio: io fui un bambino precoce. Se mi dovessi basare su quel poco che ho letto di psicologia infantile, dovrei concludere che fui proprio un fenomeno’ (There was not the slightest doubt: I was a precocious child. On the basis of what little I have read of child psychology, I am forced to conclude that I was really a phenomenon’).

  To encourage my Italian, he urged me to use the most complicated words I could find ‘as these are more or less the same usually in every language’. When I announced one day that I was going to visit Cividale, he gave me a short lecture on the civilization of the Lombards. When I was off to Milan for the weekend, he cautioned me against the impenetrability of the local dialect and urged me to visit the courtyards of the town palaces in the centre of the city, to enjoy their secret treasures of vegetation and architecture. Occasionally Kern would add to Voghera’s advice, though on the whole he seemed indifferent to the thrills of travel, exuding an air of a weary uomo degli affari, always keen to get to the bank before it closed, or complaining of the cost and the delay in transferring money from Brazil where he had spent the war and where it seemed (though he never alluded to this directly) he still had business interests. Kern’s grandmother had married the father of Gustav Mahler. They had been ‘teachers in a school in Bohemia’.

  When, with the fussiness of youth, I had corrected him by pointing out it was Moravia not Bohemia, Kern observed in a deadpan voice, ‘Ma Lei è pedante nel corrigermi su queste piccole cose’ (But he is a pedant to correct me on these little details). Yet if he asked you some question about an obscure book and you failed to answer correctly, his refrain, delivered equally unemotionally, was ‘Ma la sua ignoranza è spaventosa’ (Your ignorance is terrifying).

  Very occasionally, we were joined in the Bar Danubio by a striking figure, complete with Homburg and red curls, who would introduce a histrionic energy into the café previously absent. Salmona was a Hebrew scholar and clearly a man of great learning. For my benefit he spoke in a loud fractured German, rich in grammatical errors and an exaggerated use of the plural pronoun which one morning finally provoked Voghera to exasperation. Turning his penetrating gaze on this highly accomplished intellectual he gave him a petulant look and said, ‘Schauen Sie Salmona, mit diesem “Euch” kommt man nirgends hin!’ (Look, Salmona, with this use of ‘Euch’ you cannot get anywhere).

  Other guests at the Bar Danubio were less cerebral. In particular
Myrta knew some beautiful women who struck me as the apogee of Adriatic beauty and utterly unlike the female company I had known at school or university. First there was Signora Corbidge, a Greek woman in her early thirties, with classically shaped eyes and hair. Then there was Mrs Jacobs, a blonde and elegant half-English woman with sparkling countenance and a wonderful smile. It seemed perfectly normal in Trieste that these sophisticated women should patronize a run-down bar in an unfashionable quarter of the city.

  Myrta lived in some style in a set of rooms above the canal in the old Palazzo Scaramanga opposite the Serbian Church whose great blue dome was visible from the windows of her salon. On the walls hung paintings by her former husband, a mixture of fashionable portraits of society women and nudes of intense sensuality, whose haunting eyes gazed down on me. A white and black top hat, made of Venetian glass, stood upside down on the table. It served as a vase, and was filled with orchids. Gradually, I grew to know each of these paintings, but it would be many months before Myrta confided that they were all studies of her, nearly half a century earlier. Myrta, as she had made clear at our first meeting, was a keen Pritsch player. The game, then as now, was a passport into civilized company and it was not long before I was introduced into the Circolo del Bridge which met each week in fine high-ceilinged rooms in the Palace of the Old Stock Exchange. Consuls (mostly honorary) gathered there each week to exchange the odd piece of political or commercial gossip between rubbers. The Circolo was open to all, but its membership was mostly made up of mentally agile octogenarians.

  Through an old friend in Graz, I had an introduction to one of these – Geoffrey Banfield, a highly decorated Imperial Austrian air ace and the Honorary French Consul. It was a sign of the rich multinational fabric of the old Austrian Empire that his name was quintessentially English. His friends called him Gottfried, Goffredo or Geoffrey, depending on their mother tongue. Banfield appeared impervious to these distinctions, clearly revelling in the linguistic riches of the empire whose devoted and most highly decorated officer he had once been and half a dozen of whose languages and dialects he spoke fluently.