by Bill Bryson
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.
20. Yugoslavia
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.
In fact, they turned out to be nice fellows. Isn’t the world a terrific place? They were her sons and knew a little English because they worked as waiters in town. One of them, in fact, was just off for work and would give me a lift if I wanted. I gratefully accepted on account of the distance and my considerable uncertainty as to where I was. He donned a red waiter’s jacket and walked me to a dusty blue Skoda parked on a nearby street, where he fired up the engine and took off at a speed that had the back of the car fish-tailing and me holding the armrest with both hands. It was like being in one of those movie chase scenes where the cars scatter dustbins and demolish vegetable carts. ‘I’m a little bit late,’ he explained as he chased a flock of elderly pedestrians off a zebra crossing and turned on two wheels into a busy avenue without pausing to see if any cars were coming. There were, but they generously made way for him by veering sideways into buildings. He dropped me by the marketplace and was gone before I could barely get out a ‘Thank you’.
Split is a wonderful place, with a pretty harbour overlooking the Adriatic and a cluster of green islands lurking attractively a mile or two offshore. Somewhere out there was Vis, where Katz and I had spent an almost wonderful week. We were sitting at an outdoor café one morning, trying to anaesthetize hangovers with coffee, when two Swedish girls came up to us and said brightly, ‘Good-morning! How are you today? Come with us. We’re going on the bus to a beach on the other side of the island.’
Unquestioningly we got up and followed. If you had seen these girls, you would have, too. They were gorgeous: healthy, tanned, deliciously fresh-smelling, soft all over, with good teeth and bodies shaped by a loving god. I whispered to Katz as we walked along behind, massaging our eyeballs on the perfect hemispheres of their backsides, ‘Do we know them?’
‘I dunno. I think maybe we talked to them last night at that bar by the casino.’
‘We didn’t go to the bar by the casino.’
‘Yes we did.’
‘We did?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Really?’ I could remember nothing of the night before other than a series of Bip Pivo beers passing before me, as if on a bottling line. I shrugged it off, youthfully unaware that I was in a single summer disabling clusters of brain cells at a pace that would leave me seventeen years later routinely standing in places like a pantry or toolshed, gazing at the contents and trying to remember what the hell it was that had brought me there.
We went on a bouncing bus to the far side of the island, to a fishing village called Komiža, had a long swim in a warm sea, a couple of beers at a beachside taverna, caught a bouncing bus back to Vis town, had some more beers, ordered dinner, had some more beers, told stories, compared lives, fell in love.
Well, I did anyway. Her name was Marta. She was eighteen, dark and from Uppsala and she seemed to me the fairest creature I had ever run eyes over – though it must be said that by this stage of the trip even Katz, in certain lights, was beginning to look not half bad. In any case, I thought she was lovely and the miracle was that she appeared to find a certain charm in me. She and the other girl, Trudi, grew swiftly drunk and loquacious and spent half the time talking in Swedish, but it didn’t matter. I sat with my chin in my hands, just gazing at this Swedish fantasy, hopelessly besotted, stirring to my senses from time to time just long enough to suck back drool and take a sip of beer. Occasionally she would lay a hand on my bare forearm, sending my hormones into delirious turmoil, and once she glanced over and absently stroked my cheek with the back of her hand. I would have sold my mother as a galley slave and plunged a dagger into my thigh for her.
Late in the evening, when Katz and Trudi had gone off for pees, Marta turned to me, abruptly pulled my head to hers and swabbed my throat with her tongue. It felt as if a fish we
re flopping around in my mouth. She released me, wearing a strange, dreamy expression and breathed, ‘I’m fool of lust.’
I couldn’t find words to communicate my appreciation. Then the most awful thing happened. An abrupt startled look seized her, as if she had been struck by a sniper’s bullet. Her eyes snapped shut and she slid bonelessly from her chair.
I gaped for a long moment and cried, ‘Don’t do this to me, God, you prick!’ But she was gone, as dead to the world as if she had been hit broadside by a Mack truck. I looked at the sky. ‘How could you do this to me? I’m a Catholic.’
Trudi reappeared, tutting in a sudden maternal fashion and saying, ‘Well, well, well, we’d better get this one to bed.’ I offered to carry Marta to their hotel for her, thinking that at the very least I might manage to lay my tingling mitts on her splendid buttocks – only for a moment, you understand, just a little something to sustain me till the end of the century – but Trudi, doubtless sensing my intent, wouldn’t hear of it. She was as strong as a steam train and before I could blink she had hoisted Marta over her shoulder and was disappearing down the street, leaving behind a fading ‘Good-night’.
I watched them go, then stared moodily into my beer. Katz arrived and saw from my face that there would be no naked twining in the moonlit surf this night. ‘What am I supposed to do now?’ he said, sinking into his chair. ‘She was coming on to me outside the men’s room. I’ve got a boner like Babe Ruth’s bat. What am I supposed to do?’
‘You’ll just have to take matters into your own hands,’ I said, but he failed to see any humour in the situation, as indeed, on reflection, did I, and we spent the rest of the evening drinking in silence.
We never saw the Swedish girls again. We had no idea which was their hotel, but Vis town was not a big place and we were certain that we would run into them. For three days we went everywhere, peered in restaurant windows, walked up and down the beaches, but we never saw them. After a time I half began to wonder if it wasn’t all a product of an overheated imagination. Maybe Marta had never even said, ‘I’m fool of lust.’ Maybe she had said, ‘I’m fit to bust.’ I didn’t know. And as it became clearer and clearer that she was gone for ever, it didn’t really seem to matter.
I wandered along the quayside looking at the sailing boats, then ventured into the sun-warmed lanes and courtyards that form the heart of Split. Once this area, roughly a quarter of a mile square, was the Palace of Diocletian. But after the fall of the Roman Empire, squatters moved in and started building houses inside the crumbling palace walls. Over the centuries a little community grew up. What were once corridors became streets. Courtyards and atriums evolved into public squares. Now the lanes – some so narrow you have to turn sideways to pass through them – are mostly lined with houses and shops, and yet there is this constant, disarming sense of being inside a palace. Incorporated into many of the façades are parts of the original structure – stairways that go nowhere, columns supporting nothing, niches that once clearly held Roman busts. The effect is that the houses look as if they grew magically out of the ruins. It is entrancing and there is no other place in Europe like it.
I walked around for a couple of hours, then had an early dinner on a square bounded on three sides by old buildings with outdoor restaurants and on the fourth by the quay. It was a fine summery evening, with the kind of still air on which aromas hang – in this case a curious but not displeasing mixture of vanilla, grilled meat and fish. Swifts circled and darted overhead and the masts of yachts rocked lazily on the water. It was such a pleasant spot and dusk was settling in so nicely that I sat for some time drinking Bips and watching the nightly promenade, the korzo.
Every person in town dresses up in his best clothes and goes for an evening stroll along the main street – families, hunched groups of furtive-looking teenage boys, giggling clumps of dolled-up, over-fragranced teenage girls, young couples with heavy-footed toddlers, old men and their wives. It had the same chatty, congenial air of the gatherings around the square in Capri, except that here they kept moving, marching up and down the long quayside in their hundreds. It seemed to go on for much of the night.
As I drank my fourth or possibly fifth beer, I suddenly felt drowsy – drowsy enough to lay my head on my arms and just sleep. I looked at the label on my beer bottle and discovered with alarm that the alcohol content was twelve per cent. It was as strong as wine and I had drunk a bucket of it. No wonder I felt tired. I called the waiter and paid the bill.
Solitary drinking is a strange and dangerous thing. You can drink all night and not feel the remotest sense of intoxication, but when you rise you discover that while your head feels clear enough, your legs have suddenly decided to go in for a little moonwalking or some other involuntary embarrassment. I moved across the square, dragging one reluctant leg behind me, as if under the strain of a gunshot wound, and realized I was too far gone to walk anywhere.
I found a cab at the quayside, climbed in the front passenger seat, waking the driver, and realized I had no idea where I was going. I didn’t know the name of the street, the name of the woman to whom I had entrusted my personal effects, the part of town in which she lived. I just knew it was up a hill. Suddenly Split seemed to be full of hills.
‘Do you speak English?’ I asked the driver.
‘Nay,’ he said.
‘OK, let’s not panic. I want to go sort of that direction. Do you follow me?’
‘Nay.’
‘Over there – just drive that way.’ We went all over the place. His meter spun like the altimeter on a crashing plane. Occasionally I would spot a corner that looked familiar, grab his arm and cry, ‘Left here! Left here!’ A minute later we would find ourselves coming up against the gates of a prison or something. ‘No, I think we may have gone wrong here,’ I would say, not wanting to let his spirits down. ‘It was a good try though.’ Eventually, when it became apparent that he was convinced I was insane as well as drunk and was considering pushing me out, we blundered onto the correct street. At least I thought it was correct. I gave him a pile of dinars and stumbled out. It was correct – I recognized a corner shop – but I still had to find my way along the steps and alleys. Everything looked different at night and I was drunk and weary. I wandered blindly, occasionally frightening the crap out of myself by stepping on a cat, and peered through the darkness for a four-storey building with a plank of wood outside.
Finally I found it. The plank was thinner and wobblier than I remembered. I shuffled along it and was about half-way across when it turned sideways and my footing went. I fell through black space for an instant – it seemed longer and was really rather pleasant – unaware that my feet were either side of the plank and that I was about to break my fall with my reproductive organs.
Well, it was a surprise, let me say that much. I teetered for a moment, gasping, then fell heavily sidelong into the ditch. I lay on my back for a long minute waiting for my lungs to reflate, wondering in an oddly detached way if the dull, unspeakable ache in my midsection indicated permanent damage and the embarrassing burden of a catheter bag, until it occurred to me that there might be rats in the ditch and that they might find me of interest. Abruptly I rose, scrabbled my way to the top against the loose dirt, slipped back, scrabbled again and tumbled out. I hobbled into the building and up to the fourth floor, where I tapped on the door to the lady’s flat. A minute later a woman in hair curlers opened the door to find an American man, dishevelled, covered in dirt, swaying slightly and clutching his scrotum with both hands, standing on her threshold. We had never seen each other before. It was the wrong flat.
I tried to think of words to explain the situation, but could not, and wandered wordlessly off down the hall, with an ambiguous wave as I went. I found the right flat and knocked, and after a minute knocked again. Eventually I heard shuffling inside and the door was opened by my lady acquaintance. She was wearing a nightdress and a frightening array of hair curlers, and she said something cross to me about, I guess, the lateness o
f the hour. I tried to explain things but she was looking at me as if I had brought shame into her home, and I gave up. She showed me to my room, her slippers flopping ahead of me down the hall. Her sons were also in there, fast asleep. My bed was an upper bunk. Suddenly $5 seemed like a lot of money. She shut the door and plodded off.
Still dressed, I crossed the room in the dark, and hoisted myself onto the upper bunk, stepping inadvertently on the stomach of one of the sleeping brothers. ‘Oomph,’ he went, like a deflated punchbag, but he seemed not to wake. I lay on the bed and took ten minutes to push my nuts back into place, locating them somewhere up around my shoulders and cautiously working them back down my body, as with a coin trapped in the lining of a jacket. That done, I tried to sleep, but without much success.
In the morning I sat up to find the brothers gone. I went into the kitchen with my rucksack. The flat was silent but for an insistently ticking clock and a periodic bloop bloop of a dripping tap, which somehow made the silence more intense. I didn’t know if the patroness was out or still in bed. I brushed my teeth quietly in the sink and made myself fractionally more presentable with the application of a little cold water and a tea towel. Then I took out a five-dollar bill and put it on the table, then took out another and put it on the table, too. And then I left.
I walked into the city centre and went to the bus station. I had intended taking the bus to Belgrade, as Katz and I had done, but discovered that there was no longer a direct daytime bus. I would have to travel to Sarajevo, half-way along, and hope that I could make a connection there. I bought a ticket for the ten o’clock bus and, with two hours to kill, went off to find some coffee. Midway along the quay, directly across the street from two of the city’s grandest hotels, I noticed a gloopy sound and a smell as of a slurry wagon. I peered over the quay edge. A small outfall pipe was disgorging raw sewage straight into the harbour. You could see everything – turds, wriggling condoms, pieces of toilet paper. It was awful, and it was only feet from the main street, mere yards from the cafés and hotels. I decided not to have coffee at my usual spot, and instead found a café well inside the old town where the view wasn’t so good but the chances of cholera were presumably slighter.