The Beautiful Gray-Green Danube

On Sunday we took a river cruise from Vienna to Bratislava, Slovakia. The 75-minute trip down the Danube began at Schwedenplatz, where Vienna's city center touches the river. The boat, a sleek, white vessel, held perhaps 150 passengers, in a cabin that was windows all around. Although there may have been commuters in the crowd, most passengers appeared to be tourists, and among them were several families with small children, many of whom rolled aboard in strollers. The boat seemed an ideal way for families with little ones to travel because of the freedom to move around. The kids could get up and stretch their legs, and many took advantage of it. As the river slid past, some set aside their fruit juice, rice cakes, and apples to add graffiti to the fogged lower sections of the windows, from stick figures to tic-tac-toe grids, readily erased with a coat sleeve once filled in. The ride was smooth, like a water slide, and relaxing. It made me want to have a rice cake and some juice and take a nap, but I chose to stay awake so that I would not miss anything.

Although I have long understood that the surface of water changes color according to the sky, the Danube has always looked army green to me on even the brightest day. At Schwedenplatz, the river is in one of four channels that divide it as it flows past Vienna, and so it is much narrower at that point than it is outside the city. Although we have seldom noticed graffiti in Vienna, the narrow channel that we were in for several hundred yards was lined with concrete walls that made quite a fine easel, even better than the fogged boat windows. Far from being a tangle of black swirls, scratches, and scrawls, this graffiti is brightly colored witches, ghosts, and cartoon figures like the Incredible Hulk mixed with an occasional political slogan; they followed along beside us until the levee walls gave way to stone embankments and trees. Despite the moisture on some of the windows in the cabin, we could see quite well through most of the glass panels: low banks lined with trees and, occasionally, insubstantial wooden fishing lodges with decks leaning out toward the gray-green water roiling dizzily on its way to the Black Sea. No pleasure craft were in evidence on the way down, though we passed a few barges. The river, like the shore, appeared deserted for long stretches.

As we moved along the river, recordings in German, Slovak, and English barked a smattering of facts about the size of the boat and its engines, as well as about the river itself. We were informed, for example, that the river near Vienna is approximately 640 bratwurst wide and some 30 cucumbers deep. The mountains and castles, it seems, lie in the opposite direction of the one we were going in. The Danube Valley is wide east of Vienna; gentle, tree-covered slopes gave way only once to a small town on the south bank; finally we passed the one-time border of Austria and Slovakia, where a fortress with walls extended along a small hill sits crumbling. After a few more miles, we slipped under a bizarre Communist-era bridge--a big metal flying saucer, or perhaps a jellyfish, was suspended above one end of the bridge, holding up the rest of the span with its cable tendrils. And then we tied up at the quay in Bratislava.

Initially I thought the boat ride might be the high point of the trip. Although we had left the European Union, there was no customs control to pass through at Bratislava. The exit path from the boat led us along the pier and then up a concrete ramp and then a wooden one, which took us into an old wooden structure that served as the Welcoming Portal to Slovakia. In the tobacco-smoky haze were tourist gewgaws, a bar, and a "WC," which was guarded by a tiny, snarling, dried leaf of a woman, whose wild, frizzy red-gray hair was arranged to cover both her heads. In scratchy Slovakian, I think, she croaked a demand for 40 cents--as I judged from a sign--for the privilege of urinating in her kabinka. It flashed through my mind that I had just paid a fee to Cerberus to enter Hades. At last we emerged into a cold, gray breeze and onto a riverside walk adjacent to a busy street. Jacket collars turned up and zipped tight against the prying fingers of the wind, we crossed the street with uncertain steps, hoping we were heading toward the old city and making visual mental notes of landmarks to help us find our way back to the boat in the afternoon. At that moment, I was wishing it were already afternoon.

The experience got better quickly. Soon, strolling along, we found ourselves in a charming, flower-filled square before the national theater, and after a few cobblestone blocks more we were in the old center, with its leafy squares and curiously ornate structures and bright shops and businesses in a variety of pastel blues, yellows, oranges, and creams. It is like an architect's playground: even some of the humblest buildings have gargoyles, embedded turret towers, caryatids, Italian balconies, crenelated stone entablature above windows and roof lines, palladian windows, and mixed elements of Gothic, Roman, and Greek revival. Napoleon provided an additional historical touch to one building: embedded perhaps 20 feet up in the bright yellow wall of the city hall is a cannon ball fired by his army. As we ambled along, peeking in shops and churches, we saw also that scattered around the city are two kinds of bronze statues: secular saints--whose names to me are as unpronounceable as they are historically opaque--to remind local citizens of national ideals, and then fun, whimsical, life-sized figures, including a bronze man popping out of a manhole and a smiling Napoleon leaning over a park bench. They were brass mimes--and much preferable to real ones. We saw, too, a great amount of decay. Fenced, weedy lots bordered on the backs of crumbling medieval buildings. The old churches were sometimes in a sad state of repair, though others had been recently restored. Plain like the castle on the town hilltop, which was burned out and then rebuilt in 1953, there was little to recommend the churches except perhaps for worshipers, who appeared to pack the services. Under a stone arch we saw a seated beggar in bright pink pants. As we passed, he pulled back a sleeve to display and wiggle an arm stump (well healed)...himself a colorful, restored ruin.

Our thoughts began drifting to the return trip and being indoors. We stopped in for lunch at the Senate Cafe, which, like so many places in Vienna, offered a menu with lots of pork and goulash choices, but also a number of faux Italian dishes. Tempted though we were by "beef soupe with noddles," we opted for sandwiches. After lunch and another hour or so of strolling and browsing shops, we decided to take off the chill by stopping in a chocolate shop. I had a warm bowl of white chocolate, thick like cream, topped with ground hazelnut, and delicious. When Linda's chocolate fondue was set before her, she asked me if I would like to try one of the wafers and dip it in the sauce. Absorbed with my own selection, I first had a couple of spoonfuls of my own dish and then looked up, starting to reach over to get a wafer to dip to try hers. Too late. She had the bowl upended, with the bottom against her nose, licking out the last drop; the wafers were gone.

It was time, then, to make our way back to the boat. Like my white chocolate, our glide back up the river was sweet and gentle.

Filler

Austria's funniest home videos. Occasionally on a downtown street we see that half the sidewalk disappears: it becomes a stone staircase that drops one or two floors to a sidewalk below. There is no gate, no sign, no warning. It is a black hole, waiting to suck in pedestrians texting, talking on cell phones, or reading maps, and it surely provides hilarious instances of cracked heads and broken appendages.

German class. Teacher trying to get an American student to say her street address number correctly in German:

(All pronounced in German)
Teacher: 44
Student: 54
Teacher: 44
Student: 54
Teacher: 44
Student: 54
Teacher: 44
Student: 54
Teacher: 44
Student: 54
Teacher: Perfect...let us move on....

Things medical and post-nasal. We have both noticed an abundance of brass plaques at building entrances advertising psychiatrists' offices. It still momentarily distracts me whenever I pass one that reads [type of practice] followed by Gesundheit [which means 'health'].

Each academic title is mentioned here when a doctor is addressed, as in "Dr. Dr." for a psychiatrist, who normally has a doctoral degree in medicine as well as in psychology.

More black socks. The Austrian national soccer team players wear black socks.

Television advertisement. Two young women sit under a tree, having a picnic in a green field on a sunny day; each forks up slices of potato from a bowl, chatting about the goodness of that homely tuber; the scene is followed by an endorsement for a brand of potatoes. I continue to wait for some tourist to stop me on the street and ask me where a person should go for a good potato.

Grinzing scene. A young man, perhaps Turkish, stands in front of the grocery where Linda and I shop a few times each week. He arrives on the tram and is at his post when the store opens at 7 a.m., and he leaves at 7 p.m. when the store closes. He has three or four German magazines about sports and other topics that he sells for 3 euros each, and sometimes he asks for an additional coin. He is there in the rain, in the wind, in the gray mist that is so common here, and by the end of the day he still has most of his magazines. In the mornings, when he sees a grocery clerk carrying empty boxes to a trash bin across the street, the young man runs to see whether any food is being discarded. Linda and I are starting to accumulate a pile of magazines that we cannot read.