The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow

by A. J. Mackinnon

  In this black mood I was rummaging in my rucksack, when by the feeble light of my torch I noticed something. Before I left Ellesmere, the school matron, a very beautiful and gentle woman called Mair, had asked to borrow my old rucksack. When she returned it, I saw that as a present she had sewn onto one end the Ellesmere College crest, an appropriate design as it depicts a crow with a ring in its bill – my own ship’s flag, in fact. This I had known about and thanked Mair for, but what I had never noticed until this dreary, dreary night was that on the inside of the rucksack, on the reverse side of the school badge, she had embroidered in golden thread a message. By the light of my torch I examined it curiously. It read: Sandy, may all that is good watch over you and keep you safe. God bless.

  With those simple words, my mood lifted. I had carried that secret blessing with me for a year, and as I thought back over the last twelve months, I realised how much I had indeed been blessed by all that is good – by friends and strangers, by birds and stars and clouds, by fine winds and the world’s poetry, and by adventure and song. With that sudden lifting, I remembered that deep in the bows there was a bottle of red wine to finish off, and some Austrian salt-bread to be eaten, and even a little cheese. I slept that night in my iron labyrinth more soundly, more sweetly, than at any other time of the journey, and sent a silent blessing back to Mair in Shropshire, over all the sleeping leagues of Europe that lay between.

  The wind was a contrary gale as I set off the next morning down river. The skies were grey and Wagnerian with bluster and flung rain. I was in fact in the Wachau region, the land of the Nibelung, and the Valkyries on their storm-steeds rode me down like a fleeing warrior. I came in the early afternoon to the town of Melk on the right-hand bank, and having had more than enough, pulled into a side arm of the Donau and trudged damply off to find a dry bed for the night.

  Melk is famous for its great abbey, Stift Melk. It occupies the whole flat top of a loaf-shaped hill overlooking the river, and is possibly the finest example of Baroque architecture in the world. A tour leaves one feeling as though one has just devoured several crates full of caramel meringues. Each individual room, sure enough, each chamber, each ceiling, each nave, taken one by one with good doses of plain fare in between, is splendid. But taken all together, piled one upon the other like some toppling confectionery extravaganza, it left me wanting to lie down in a darkened room for several weeks.

  It was in the baroque chapel that the ornamentation reached an opulence and tastelessness sufficient to dissolve any last lingering opposition to the Puritan aesthetic. Here the two most striking features are a pair of skeletons preserved in glass cases on either side of the main aisle. Instead of reclining decently in the usual manner of the dead, these two have been dressed and posed in a ghastly imitation of Life. One is reclining coyly propped on one elbow, his skeletal hand tucked under his chin, and one leg crooked as though he is posing for a fashion shot for Cleo magazine, pouting invisible lips at the camera. The other is clad in beetle-green silk pantaloons and is sitting clasping in his bony hand a quill pen and a little diary, recording the day’s excitements:

  Friday, September 4th (Quarter Moon) Weather: Cloudy, intermittent showers.

  Appointments: None.

  To do: Moulder a little.

  Comments: Still dead … Several days later I reached the Wienerwald, the famous Vienna Woods, and on an afternoon of sunshine and rain in equal measure, slid over green-silver rapids like a yellow willow leaf and came to the marble splendour of Vienna itself, greatest of all the Danu-bian cities.

  Vienna was an important stop. Beyond it I would be travelling into lands relatively unknown, leaving behind Western Europe and sailing into the former Eastern Bloc countries: Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania. Unknown indeed! As I stamped around the hot summer streets of Vienna to the different consulates, it soon became clear that my waterways map was as outof-date as a map of the Prussian Empire. What had once been Yugoslavia, for instance, was now several different countries.

  All consulates are pretty grim places at the best of times but the Yugoslavian Embassy (more accurately the Serbian Embassy) was a nightmare especially. There were queues of angry young women with squalling children, and older head-scarfed women standing despondently munching garlic sausages out of greaseproof wrappers, and as far as I could tell they were one and all being refused their requests to travel by the officials behind the grille. I gathered from the young woman behind me in the queue that the country was in such a state of flux that even long-term resident citizens were being refused re-entry. She herself had her Yugoslavian passport, she had lived all but the last year of her life there, and now was unable to go to Dubrovnik to visit her sick father. The mood in the waiting-hall was one of resentment and despair, and I am almost embarrassed to admit that in order to distract the woman’s little girl I started doing some magic tricks. Soon the whole queue was watching in grave silence, some were beginning to smile – at the little girl’s wide-eyed reaction, not the tricks, I must add – and the mood lightened a little as we made our way up the line. Ahead of me, one by one, people were being turned away with a curt refusal. By the time I got to the window, I was convinced that if all these people were being refused visas into their own country, then as an idle adventurer I would not stand a chance. And indeed, when I put my request to the hard-faced man behind the grille, his first reaction was a contemptuous snort. The borders were closed. The Kos-ovo situation had made things impossible. I was better to travel elsewhere.

  ‘Ah,’ said I, taking a deep breath, ‘the thing is, you see …’ and I launched into an explanation about Jack de Crow and the Black Sea and the concept of rowing and how very tricky it would be to row elsewhere across the Carpathian Mountains. Under his stony stare I grabbed a couple of visa application forms and drew a little map on the back of them, and a rather natty picture of Jack de Crow, my fellow applicants leaning over my shoulder in a cloud of garlic fumes and murmuring their astonishment and approval. I came to a halt eventually and looked at the official, and fifty pairs of eyes looked at him too, all alike asking a silent, ‘Well …?’ The garlic-sausage munching stopped and the hallway was quiet. From the look in the man’s eye and the bead of sweat on his brow, it was clear that this application was not on his clear-cut list of reasonable requests to be unblinkingly refused. In fact, it probably didn’t appear on any list near at hand, so with a roll of his eyes off he went, vanishing through a doorway to consult with a superior office about how the iron rules applied to dinghy-sailors. The minutes passed and I was given a large hunk of sausage to pass the time. This was likely to take hours and meanwhile, there were fifty more deserving former Yugoslavians being held waiting. I should just leave … To my astonishment the official returned only minutes later with a visa application form, a tight smile and look in his eyes that spoke volumes about the stupidity of the regulations. There was a soft but heart-warming cheer from the crowd as I turned to go, and I could see a dozen hopeful faces wondering where they could get a dinghy from at short notice. A precedent had been set and a wave of optimism rippled through the room. The man behind the grille saw this too and it was good to see an expression of exasperation cross his flinty features as he turned back to the no-longer-straightforward task of keeping apart a sick man in Dubrovnik and his daughter.

  In Vienna I stayed with Alfons and Uli, two of the most civilised people one is ever likely to meet. I had met this couple on a walking holiday in the Alps some years before and we had kept in touch. We met for dinner, but then I was taken to their elegant flat, pushed into a hot shower and gently but firmly told that I was staying with them until further notice.

  It was rather like being entertained by two slim, immaculate, well-bred Siamese cats. Alfons made it clear that anything of his was at my disposal: the new racing bike for getting around Vienna, the fridge stacked with the entire contents of a gourmet delicatessen, the slim-line phone for making international calls (‘That is what it is for,’ h
e explained when I started to wave aside the offer) – in fact, everything. In return I would have to help him sample the latest acquisitions in his collection of fine malt whiskies.

  I responded to this extraordinary kindness by clod-hopping my way through the three-day stay, demonstrating in person the utter boorishness of all non-Austrians. When I loudly applauded the fact that Vienna had seen fit to provide free travel on the trams I had been riding over the last few days and what a jolly good thing that was, Alfons and Uli pointed out quietly that no, this was not the case, that it worked on an honesty system which no right-minded citizen would dream of abusing; tickets were available at the booths I had failed to notice on every street corner. When somebody mentioned Kristallnacht, I exclaimed merrily how I would love to have seen that and what a jolly sight it would have made. Somewhat surprised, Alfons gravely explained that Kristallnacht was Vienna’s greatest night of shame when the citizens of Austria turned upon their Jewish neighbours, breaking their windows and humiliating them in the streets, and so therefore, no, not such a jolly sight after all. In vain did I try to explain that I had always assumed Kristall-nacht to be some Christmassy festival involving lots of tinsel and icing sugar and sparkly crystal decorations and … oh, never mind. When we went off to a nearby pub in a rainstorm and Alfons lent me an old plastic mac, the only item of clothing in their possession that didn’t look as though it had been tailor-made, I slung it onto a coat-hook in the vestibule of the pub before charging ahead into the bar to buy a round of beers, later to find that Alfons had discreetly snuck back to re-hang it properly on a proper coat-hanger provided by the establishment for the proper care of one’s vestments.

  Lastly, I had been warned about the lift in the apartment block, an alarming contraption of brass and mahogany and wire cables with iron grille doors that scissored back to open and shut. Alfons had given me a careful demonstration that the lift was fine, just fine, as long as you didn’t open the grille doors too soon, in which case the lift would jam irrevocably. Clear? Ja … Not long afterwards I found myself waiting on the ground floor for the lift with a breathless and slightly worried young lady who had rushed in from outside. As we entered the lift, she explained in good English that she had just left her two-year-old in the car in the street with the engine running while she ran upstairs to grab her forgotten purse. But all was well, she would only take thirty seconds, and what could happen in that interval, ja? We laughed merrily at her groundless worry, and as we approached her floor, I, ever the gallant gentleman, stepped forward to pull back the doors to speed her on her way.

  Too soon.

  The lift jerked to a halt, just six inches short of the fifth floor, and the grille doors stuck fast. I tugged at them. Apart from an alarming creak from the cables, there was no movement. We were stuck, stuck in a metal cage halfway up a deserted midday apartment block, and it was remarkable how quickly our recent international bonhomie and bridge-building evaporated. In a very short time, the emotional temperature in the lift became arctic, the woman’s contempt for the stupid foreigner alternating with vivid images of how young Hans in the car had probably by now found the handbrake-release and was even now taking his first, and possibly last, joy-ride along the Frederikstrasse. I, in the meantime, was jabbing at buttons, rattling the grille, jumping up and down to try and dislodge something, anything, but to no avail.

  Eventually, after several ice-ages, we were rescued by an elderly cleaning lady, and my now near-hysterical companion raced out to hurtle down the stairs to check on the infant. She quite forgot to say goodbye, but perhaps she had other things on her mind.

  When not insulting Alfons and Uli and their fellow citizens, I spun around Vienna on the bike seeing the treasures of their marvellous city. There was the Belvedere, where most of the paintings by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele are displayed. There was the Orangery, with its Gallery of Grotesques and Messerschmidt bronzes. And there was the Hundertwasser House, one of the most bizarre and beautiful works of architecture anywhere in the world. Hundertwasser believed that as nature abhors a straight line or a plane surface, so too should the designer. He created buildings where there is scarcely a right-angle or a flat surface to be seen. The Hundertwasser House is actually a block of residences, built almost like a steep craggy hill in the midst of the city. Not one window is the same as any other; some are round portholes, others old-fashioned shuttered oblongs of flashing glass. Wide ledges and crannies all the way up hold saplings and trees in groves, so that in autumn the building is hidden beneath a shower of gold and scarlet and the spindly skeletons of birches. What surfaces can be seen ripple with mosaics of broken tiles in sea-blues and china-whites, cut here and there by ceramic oranges and greens. The courtyard on the ground floor holds a tinkling fountain of similar shattered tiles, but that is its least unusual feature, for the cobbles that pave the yard swell gently in rolling dips and curves, making a walk across them a ‘symphony for the feet,’ as Hundertwasser put it.

  There was the great holy gloom of St Stephensdom with its crimson and azure Western Window blazing like a chrysanthemum of fire on high, and the sheer marmoreal splendour of the city buildings themselves. I had never seen such a wealth of marble, of gilding, of civic statuary: fountains swimming with Tritons, monuments scrambling with horse-hooves and manes, squares, columns and palisades, architraves and porticoes, each doorway upheld by a pair of giant, muscular caryatids, and in every little town square or park or courtyard a statue of yet another famous person: Liszt, Mozart, Freud, Klimt, Bruckner, Strauss. There seems to be a statue of everyone that ever existed. There is probably one of me somewhere, though I never found it.

  The last thing to love in Vienna were the cafés. I spent blissful hours in a gloomy coffee-house all in dark brown with an immense gilt mirror soaring up into the darkness of the ceiling; the largest mirror in Europe, I was told. Another favourite was Santo Spirito: this was tucked down a side-alley and was furnished with polished bentwood chairs, lit only by candles and playing nothing but classical choral works: Pergolesi, Vittoria, Tallis, Byrd, Scarlatti, pure as candleflames themselves.

  And what of poor Jack de Crow all this time, you may ask. How was she included in all this? Well, to tell the truth, she wasn’t. I had abandoned her in a modern marina on the shores of the Danube. In my week in Vienna I went out to visit her only once, trusting that she was being well looked after by the gods and the Hafenmeister.

  A week of blustery weather and squalls began to clear, all my jobs were done, my visas in order, my letters written, and the whisky collection of Alfons was looking distinctly thinnish. Ahead of me, and only half a day’s sail, was the border of Slovakia and the end of Western Europe. I knew nothing about the lands ahead, apart from hazy apprehension engendered by the fact that every evil mastermind in any thriller always talked to his pet cacti or piranha with an Eastern European accent. I also had vague doubts about the trouble brewing in Serbia, wherever that was. I consulted my map but couldn’t find it. Ah well. No doubt I would bump into it somewhere along the way.

  Alfons and Uli came down to the marina to see me off . When they saw just how small Jack de Crow was, they blanched. Being accustomed to my stories, they had assumed that I exaggerated her size and were expecting a middling-sized yacht. Nevertheless, they soon rallied and produced a large bottle of wine, some stores of salami, bread, fruit and cheese, and a mysterious little package that clinked. This last item Alfons told me to keep closed until I was in need of some serious cheering up. Before a gentle breeze I hoisted sail, moved out onto the broad grey river and set off into the East and the Unknown.

  Wilderland and War

  Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,

  Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgement Seat …

  —KIPLING, The Ballad of East and West

  Jack did not lightly forgive me for my callous abandonment in Vienna. The next day she abandoned me and, like naughty Albert at the zoo, was nearly eaten by
lions. It happened like this.

  My first night out of Vienna was spent in a grim shipyard outside Bratislava, a cheerless place full of rusting tankers and oily water. Without any desire to footslog through industrial wasteland into town, I stayed on my dinghy that night, not even getting off to stretch my legs. After an early night I woke at dawn and set off down the river. As the morning progressed, the day became wilder in all respects. The breeze stiffened to a following wind that sent me churning down the river at a cracking speed. The river, too, was fierce here; even in the early morning stillness, the placid-seeming mirror of the surface would sometimes boil up in a great lazy swell, suck at my oars and send me insolently spinning in a couple of circles before sending me on my way with a little pat on the behind like some corporate manager goosing a very junior typist. Such moments served to remind me of the power of this cold-handed god with whom I was consorting.