Meat and Potatoes

Our Grinzing neighborhood has a heuriger--beer garden--about every 50 feet, and our first evening here we ventured into one. We sat at a small table in the shade and checked the menu. Linda ordered wiener schnitzel, feeling that that was obligatory for initial familiarization with the area; after reviewing the other menu items, all of which featured boiled potatoes served in a variety of different cuts to please the eye and tempt the appetite, I went with "3 meat and potato." And we had lovely large steins of draft beer with it. When Linda's plate arrived, it looked as if the wings of gargantuan tropical moths had been hammered, breaded, deep-fried, and plopped on cut-up boiled potatoes; mine was two kinds of sausage bits and diced ham, with a smaller cut of potato mixed in. I sighed for pasta and sauces of Rome--then vowed to quit comparing.

And it was, nonetheless, a lovely evening, though not so much because of the cuisine. In the garden, edging from table to table, were a violinist and an accordion player. Accordions here are as common as potatoes, I am finding, and there is a fondness for them in the evening as there is for servings of cucumbers--much admired locally for their resemblance to sausages--on the lunch menus. The musicians played what I suppose were love songs, unintelligible to me, and they were okay, at least not so loud as to be annoying. We noticed seated at an adjacent table an elderly woman (by which I mean older even than I). The one dominant descriptor when I saw her was bagginess: baggy eyelids, baggy cheeks, baggy neck, baggy bosom, and baggy blouse and skirt. Her outfit hung softly on her, even as it seemed to cause her face below her milky blue eyes to sag even further. Between sets the musicians sat at her table, chatting and sharing drinks and cigarettes with her. As we were finishing our dinner, the three of them rose from the table and strolled to the center of the garden, where the musicians began to play cabaret songs, and the woman began to sing. Her eyes suddenly looked happy and alive. The bagginess vanished, and the rich, deep, cigarette voice, above all, let us know that, inside, she was in a place far away, perhaps the world of Edith Piaf. For me she was Lily Marlene, and she would, I thought, drift late in the evening to underneath the lamppost, time traveling back to the 1940s. What a privilege it was to hear her, to see her, and to let her songs transport me to my own imagined foggy pastiche of scenes of post-war Austria.