Europe
Page 16
I had been in Sarajevo, and finding the airport snowed-in I took a night ride in a mini-bus down to the sea. The snow in Bosnia-Hercegovina was deep, the road was unpredictable, every now and then we were stopped at roadblocks in the middle of nowhere, and the awful gorges through the mountains loomed around us dark and dangerous. Sometimes we clattered across a temporary iron bridge, beside a blown-up original. Sometimes, shadowy in the night, an armoured vehicle stood guard beside a road junction. The only other traffic on the road consisted of huge tanker trucks labouring up to Sarajevo from the coast, their headlights showing far, far away on mountain curves. And, most disturbingly suggestive of all, ever and again I looked through my window to see scattered ruins passing dismally by outside – house after house gaping in the darkness, with no sign of life but for a single dim light, perhaps, on a ground floor, or a melancholy fire burning in a brazier. I dozed uncomfortably off somewhere around Konjic, and when I woke up I looked out of the window again, into the grey dawn, to see the ruins passing still.
They were not the usual ruins of war – not compact villages knocked into general shambles by blanket bombing, street fighting or concentrated artillery bombardment, like villages of France, Germany or Italy in the Second World War. They were generally strings of detached houses, well separated, each one of which had been individually and deliberately destroyed. In the same way, Sarajevo did not look in the least like those cities of Europe which were bombed into desolation in the Second World War. It was not a wasteland of burnt-out shells and skeletonic blocks. But there was hardly a building in the city centre which had not been specifically targeted, sometimes half-collapsed in a mess of beams and boulders, sometimes just pitted all over with shell fragments or snipers’ bullets. All this gave me an impression of particular and personal hatred. It looked such a spiteful sort of destruction. Bosnia had been ravaged, it appeared, not by ignorant conscript armies clashing, but by groups of citizens expressing their true emotions. A. J. P. Taylor once wrote that the Great War had begun as the most popular of wars, but I had a feeling that the War of the Yugoslav Succession was undertaken even more genuinely from the human heart. And what did that say, I could not help wondering as those shattered houses passed me in the dark, about the human heart?
There were four other passengers in the mini-bus that night – a Swede, a Finn, a Croat and an Englishman. We were all there to make money in one way or another. Behind us a second bus-load was following through the darkness. At about two in the morning we stopped, and our driver got out and peered rather helplessly into the black emptiness behind him, up the highway banked with snowdrifts. ‘What’s happening?’ said the Englishman in front of me. ‘What have we stopped for?’ The driver explained that the other bus seemed to be lost: there was no sign of its lights, and he was worried that it might have got into trouble back there. The Englishman stretched, pulled his coat more tightly around his shoulders, and settled down to sleep again. ‘Who cares?’ he said. But he may have been joking.
10 Growing old
How strange to be a Yugoslav, of whatever nation, who was born when I was born! When I was first in Sarajevo, before the Yugoslav wars, the very name of the place had a different meaning for the world. By the 1990s it stood for cruel sieges, snipers, hopeless negotiations, ethnic cleansing, poverty and public hardship. In the 1970s it had recalled only, for me as for most of the world’s inhabitants, the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austro-Hungary, which led immediately to the First World War. I went at once then, as every visitor did, to the place where Gavrilo Princip fired the fateful shot, on 28 June 1914. He had been among the crowd at the end of a bridge, later renamed in his honour, over the Miljačka river; and there was a small museum in memory of the occasion, and some footprints incised in the pavement to show just where Princip had stood, and a plaque on a wall which every tourist liked to photograph. It was all pointed out to me with some pride: Princip was a Yugoslav patriotic hero, and there were ceremonies at his grave on the anniversary of the murder. Twenty years later, when I returned to Sarajevo, a city all bashed about and wasted, I went back to Princip’s Bridge out of curiosity, to see how history had treated the site. It was a rainy dusk. The bridge was there still, over the rushing narrow river. So was the museum, though it was closed. But the paving-blocks were knocked about, cracked and puddled, and I could find no sign of the footprints. I stumbled about trying to locate the famous plaque upon the wall, but passers-by told me not to bother. It had been removed, they said. We were not in Yugoslavia any more. We were in Bosnia-Hercegovina now, and Gavrilo Princip had been a Serb.
In Zagreb I was introduced, as it happened, to a woman born there in the year before me, 1925. We inspected each other with interest, and after discussing our respective personal lives spent half an hour exchanging our experiences of history. Mine were soon told. Hers were more complicated. She had been born into a Yugoslav monarchy, in a city that was (and still is) in many ways a characteristic provincial capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She was old enough to remember the assassination of King Alexander of the Yugoslavs in 1934 ( her mother cried, she said). She remembered the arrival of the German Army in 1941, and the odious Croatian Fascist State of the Second World War, with its brutal Ustashi guards, its concentration camps and its ethnic massacres. Two of her brothers, she told me, had run away to fight with the Communist partisans. She had been in the crowd in the central square that welcomed the proclamation of the Yugoslav federation in 1945. She had been present when Croatian soldiers attacked the Zagreb barracks of the Yugoslav National Army in 1991, heralding the end of it. She had lived through the miseries of the Yugoslav civil wars. Now she was looking forward eagerly to the putsch which must before long, she felt sure, rid Croatia of its present dictatorial president and make a real democracy of it.
And yet, she said, she felt no older than she had felt thirty or forty years before. ‘Well,’ said I conventionally, ‘it’s all in the mind anyway.’ She eyed me thoughtfully then.
11 Or Irishness?
In the Republic of Ireland there exists a genuine and peaceable Nation-State – perhaps it is all to the good that the Protestants of the North, mostly of Scottish descent, have not been reunited with the South since the British sliced them off in the 1920s. Nowhere in western Europe has history moved faster than in Ireland – which in this century has matured from a hangdog, rebellious and poverty-stricken British possession to a confident and progressive sovereign member of the European Community. Even in my time there were wrecks of Anglo-Irish houses all over the country, never rebuilt after the old troubles, or allowed to fall into dilapidation with independence. There were innumerable semi-wrecks of Anglo-Irish people, too, surrounded by grand memories in unheated mansions, recalling the wars and high jinks of their youths in the drawing-room of the Kildare Street Club. When I first went to Ireland it was easy to meet people who remembered the Protestant Ascendancy – which meant, in effect, the British Empire – if not in full swing, at least in vibrant style. I envied them. It all sounded shamefully delightful. Who would not like to have been The Most Honourable the Marquess of Waterford, living with his exuberant children, his devoted family servants and his hundred horses among his wide woods at Curraghmore?
In those days, when foreigners spoke of the Irish style, as often as not it was the Anglo-Irish style they really meant. The Irish Joke, of course, never referred to the Marquess of Waterford, but Irish Dash, Irish Pluck, the Luck of the Irish, a Touch of the Irish – all these abstractions were fostered, in outsiders’ minds, less by the native Celts than by the occupying Britons. It is true that the line between the two was blurred, people of impeccable Norman origins swearing to their own undying Irishness, unmistakable members of the Ascendancy turning out to be descended from native chieftains, but still Anglo-Ireland was essential to the Irish mystique.
12 Too late!
Where is it now? Even its ruins are disappearing, one by one, and the governing class
of Ireland is now the courteous, cultivated, worldly, clever and sometimes corrupt progeny of its tenants. Back in the 1960s, contemplating one of the more spectacular of those Ascendancy ruins, sentimentally I remarked to a passing Irishman that it seemed a shame all the festive and colourful life of the house should have come to an end. ‘Oh,’ he replied, ‘wouldn’t you say it was too late for that kind of fandango?’ I remembered his words when, decades later, I sat down to a contemporary equivalent of those old hedonisms – a first-class Irish country lunch at a famous pub near Galway City. I had never been there before, and found it gloriously high-spirited. The place was full of well-heeled and entertaining Galwegians, as Irish as could be, eating crab claws, scampi and fresh fish in the dining-room, or at wooden benches outside. Ever and again another car turned up full of eloquent anticipation. ‘On a day like this,’ my companion said to me, ‘honest to God there’s nowhere on earth I’d rather be than Moran’s.’ We were sitting in the open air, overlooking the water and the Volvos, and I had washed down half a dozen Galway oysters with a glass of Guinness. Finding this insufficient for my needs, I ordered the same again, and while waiting for it to arrive I took a stroll up the road to look at the view. Honest to God, there on the skyline I saw in unmistakable silhouette the very same ruin whose outdated merriments that passer-by had long before dismissed. It still looked grand up there – a big square block with the sun shining through its gutted windows – but the oysters, the Guinness and the Galway company had done their trick, and I no longer wished I could hear the music of the hunt ball, or see the young Etonians and their girls larking about in the rose-garden.
13 On the move
As the century closes, Ireland, which is the youngest country in Europe, and one of the best-educated, is still on the move. Do you recall the seditious radio programme that so astonished me in that Dublin bookshop, making fun of the Catholic Church? By the 1990s scandals among the Church hierarchy had become so common, and so highly publicized, that it was hard to remember which divine had been involved in which (there were four Catholic archbishops in Ireland, and thirty-one bishops). ‘Let me see now,’ I heard myself saying warily one morning, ‘is the Bishop of Ferns the one who – well, er, you know–that woman?’ ‘No,’ came the matter-of-fact response, ‘you’re thinking of the Bishop of Galway. The Bishop of Ferns is the one who’s away in America for detoxification.’ Of course there was a sadness to such developments, the discrediting of old certainties, the abandonment of old ways, but the Irish seemed to be taking it in their stride. Theirs was a laughing country still, and rich in quirk and variety to a degree that most countries of the West had almost forgotten. When I ventured to complain one lunch-time about a mildewed baked potato, ‘Oh what a shocking misunderstanding,’ cried the café proprietress in a truly fastidious choice of euphemism, and gave me a free pudding. Deep in the country one day I came as in a daze to a village where every house had recently been repainted in colours of blinding variety – pinks, blues, reds, dazzling yellows – while the single street was astonishingly festooned with drooping electric wires, and paved mostly with mud. It was a Civic Trust nightmare! When I went into a shop to ask the meaning of it all (there was none), merciful Heaven, disoriented as I was it seemed to me like stepping into the attic storeroom of some crazed recluse – broken boxes, splintered crates, piles of newspapers, paint-pots, random vegetables everywhere, stacks of cans tumbled in corners, shadowy high shelves jammed with packages, a potato or two rolling across the floor, and somewhere amidst the chaos a composed urbane shopkeeper, awaiting my order for all the world as though she were standing behind the confectionery counter at Fortnum & Mason’s.
No doubt there were all sorts of things wrong with that republic – drugs, organized crime, violence – but still the Irish seemed to be running better than most in the general pursuit of happiness. Modernizing things without ruining them is a problem every society faces – how to make things more efficient without making them less entertaining. If any State can get away with it, Ireland’s the one.
14 The wind-rose
The Portuguese were a Power in their time. They were neutral in the Second World War, but they were still imperialists long after it – their African empire collapsed only in the 1970s, and they stayed even longer in Macao, their colony on the coast of China. The spoils of empire are apparent in Portugal to this day, in the grand palaces of Lisbon and Oporto, and the vulgar country homes of recently returned colonialists. I can well remember the Portuguese in their imperial mode, when they fought with all the paraphernalia of troop carrier and camouflage suit to keep the blacks of their African possessions in subjection. I remember the tough Portuguese mercenaries who, deprived of a war by the independence of Mozambique, came over the border to fight the blacks of the old Rhodesia – sunning themselves, between skirmishes, with cigars and whisky beside the swimming-pools of Salisbury. Even in the 1990s, in Portugal itself, one sometimes came across reunions of those old veterans, jovial with regimental banners and vinho verde, celebrating the last of their imperial wars.
I am imaginatively seized myself by relics of the Age of Navigators, the golden age of Portugal’s power, when Portuguese seamen ranged the seas in trade and conquest under the auspices of the fifteenth-century Prince Henry. The best of these souvenirs is the great wind-rose set up by Henry for the instruction of his captains at Cape St Vincent, the south-western extremity of Europe. It is a huge compass chart laid out on the ground to record the strengths and directions of prevailing winds, and it was built within the purlieus of a dramatic headland fortress. When I was there it was sadly neglected, and looked rather like a run-down rock garden, but it stirred me all the same. As I stood beside it in the evening I could see those caravel captains clustered there so long before, worrying their way through the new devices of seamanship; and, if I turned my head a little, there was the very ocean they had made their own, taking the lessons of the wind-rose with them to Brazil, to Angola, to the Cape of Good Hope, to Mozambique, to Goa, to Macao, to all those places that the Portuguese discovered for Christian Europe, and mastered for themselves.
15 Peace and quiet
But a Portuguese family arrived while I was meditating by the wind-rose, and stood staring silently at this emblem of old adventures without a sign of emotion. The Portuguese in general seem to have put Powerhood behind them, and adjusted their temperament to the times. Their frontiers have remained virtually unchanged since 1139. They got rid of their last dictator in 1970, they had their last revolution in 1974, and they are now the most tranquil of the Europeans. Peace and quiet is the thing in modern Portugal, which is why the Algarve, south of Lisbon, long ago became the favourite resort of elderly northerners of gentle tastes (though mass tourism has since whittled down the old discretion). The Portuguese can drive as maniacally as anyone else, but in most circumstances they are remarkably restrained. They are conquerors no more. Their smiles are kind but vestigial. Their waves of the hand are solemn. Their courtesy is reserved, and especially in the countryside it takes application to amuse them into riposte or badinage. From the heroic cliff-tops of Cape St Vincent, near the wind-rose, people fish with rod and line, dropping their mussel bait through the gusty winds all down the face of the precipice to the ocean far below. This eccentric technique naturally attracts foreign sightseers, but the anglers appear to think it a perfectly conventional way of fishing, as they allow their reels to release a few hundred feet more line to the tossing waves below. ‘Any luck?’ they say to each other, just as though they are sitting on a canal bank drinking tea from Thermos flasks and waiting for their floats to bob.
Parts of Portugal are among the poorest regions in western Europe – women still wash their clothes in rivers, mules and donkeys pull ploughs – but there is no sense of primitivism to this country. Even the animals and children are gentlemanly. In the village of Vila do Bispo once I discovered all the village dogs crowded in the market square waiting to have their compulsory inoculations, and there was
not a single snarl among them. I was taken aback to find my hotel in Lisbon disturbed one day by a truly demoniac pack of infants. They screamed along hotel corridors into the small hours. They banged on strangers’ doors. They were extremely ugly and seemed to have no discipline whatever. I was quite relieved to learn, when I inquired at the front desk about them, that they were not Portuguese at all, but child-members of a Russian ballet company performing in the city. ‘Bring back Stalin,’ said I to the concierge: but he only smiled, very Portuguesely.
16 The sprig of rosemary
I was driving along a country road in Portugal when I spied a tray of oranges for sale outside a cottage. It was blazing hot, and I stopped to buy some. Nobody attended the fruit, so I selected three oranges for myself and knocked upon the cottage door. Nobody came. There was no sign of life. I peered through the windows, I walked around the back, and in the end I opened the front door. It was very dark inside, but when my eyes accustomed themselves I saw that fast asleep on a bed in a corner of the room was a small old lady. I coughed and shuffled my feet, and without a start she awoke. Her very first reaction was to smile. Her second was to reach for her straw hat from a nearby chair and put it carefully on her head. She seemed entirely composed, entirely balanced. She accepted my few coins for the oranges, but then, hustling me kindly outside, picked me two apricots from another box and gave me those as a present. All the time she smiled, and laughed at my phrase-book Portuguese, and bustled around looking for other kindnesses to perform. She was one of the blithest people I have ever met, closely related I would guess to the old Breton lady that my daughter coveted on page 103. When we had said goodbye, and I had returned to the car, she came running out of the garden gate again, smiling still, clutching her hat on her head, to give me a sprig of rosemary.