Spring Bits

Spring so far has brought us more warm, sunny days than windy, rainy ones, and the buckeye trees that pervade Grinzing are showing new leaves. The wine and beer gardens, their umbrellas opening like flowers, are beginning to beckon.

Lost in the Funhouse

The warm weather a few days ago encouraged visiting friends and me to stroll around the outside of Stephansdom, the huge central church in Vienna. Heavily damaged by fire at the end of World War II, the church bears signs of earlier conflicts as well, particularly the Turkish siege of the city in 1683. Evidence of that two-month siege is in the broken Gothic stone decoration along many of the windows and portals, and a Turkish cannon ball is still lodged high in a wall near the south tower. St John Capistrano, who rallied Christians with his fiery sermons against the Turks the year after they successfully besieged Constantinople in 1453, is depicted in stone on one side of the exterior of Stephansdom with his foot atop a fallen Turk, who gnashing his teeth in frustration. And there is more stone violence on the exterior: a medieval figure that the Viennese refer to as Toothache Jesus moans in silence on a cross, looking very much as if he is waiting for a molar to be extracted. Although Mozart was not buried in the church, along the outer wall is a gated recess with a sign indicating that he lay there in state while Vienna paid its respects; subsequently he was moved to a cemetery away from the city. We noticed a small, dark, locked stairway leading down from the recess, and we strolled away, wondering aloud where it led.

With thoughts of springtime bulbs deep in the earth, we entered the church and sought out a tour of the crypt. Soon we were further along in the dark nave, in front of a gated stairway leading down. A guide in a heavy winter coat unlocked the gate and let us enter, accompanied by only one other tourist, a Japanese woman. Since the three of us spoke English, the guide said he would do the tour in English. He had just shut the heavy wooden door to the stairs when a frantic, incessant pounding began, making me think that someone had been buried alive. The guide opened the door to admit a couple from Spain, who immediately demanded that the tour be given in Spanish. We proceeded--with the guide narrating in English, and the Spanish couple muttering at him in Spanish--through a cold, breezy corridor and descended more stairs, down about 20 more feet and 20 more degrees. In addition to holding bones, the dimly lit crypt was a graveyard for statuary and other stone decoration that had come loose or fallen into disrepair. Until sanitation requirements ended the practice of urban burials in 1745, thousands of parishioners--one large section was devoted to plague victims--were buried under and adjacent to the church. The experience was much like traveling through a House of Horrors at an amusement park, and I found myself wishing I were riding on a little train as we walked gingerly through the dark corridors and peered through cobweb-laced iron grids in tiny windows revealing faintly illuminated rooms with bone piles. At the end of the tour, the guide unlocked another mysterious door and ushered us to a staircase leading up--and up we went. We tourists representing three continents rose from the dead and popped out into Mozart's memorial niche and out the gate at which we had stood staring curiously an hour before, leaving the bones to awaiting the springtime of Judgment Day, when they will, no doubt, rise up like so many tulips.

The Prater

-- "in Just-

spring when the world is mud-

luscious..."

Sunday afternoon we visited the Prater, a huge green area near the Danube and downtown, and the site of a large amusement park that has been in operation about a century. Cotton candy, balloons, roller coasters, bungee jump rides, bumper cars, ghost houses, "Alpine" water fall rides, and a million colorful and musical adventures for children and inebriated adults.... Bare legs and shoulders were the norm, the white Teutonic skin turning pink as cotton candy in the bright Sunday sun. It was an e.e. cummings' idyll: The goat-footed balloonman, the god Pan, had whistled, and the children--and we--were following him around in a magic world.

Castle Road

Last Sunday we headed south from Vienna toward Graz, the second largest city in Austria, leaving the A-2 autobahn for a route referred to by one guide book as the "Castle Road." After about an hour of rather flat terrain, the scenery on the A-2 turned into what I had always pictured to be the Austrian countryside: Tuscany plus snow-capped peaks. Melodies from The Sound of Music streamed through my head. We turned off the autobahn to the small town of Hartberg, aiming to find one of the castles we had identified in the guide book. As we entered the town, it struck us as odd that there were not the usual signs pointing the way to an historic site. We stopped first at a tourist information office to ask the location of the castle and then drove on another half mile, as directed. We still could not find it. We parked the car and wandered down a small lane, where we came across a small museum; a lady there graciously directed us to walk up a nearby hill to find the castle. We saw only a modern hotel. And then we realized, finally, that the hotel was built atop an old stone foundation of what must have been the castle. The castle was buried, and it would not, like a bulb, be coming up again any springtime soon. We were, at least, rewarded with a medieval guard tower and part of an old town wall, and forsythia and a cherry tree in bloom. Hartberg is a charming town in its own right, like Melk, with cobblestone lanes lined with 17th and 18th-century buildings--shops, restaurants, and homes--an amusement park for history lovers.

Filler

Other Times, Other Worlds

-- Vienna's Clock Museum displays chronometers and clocks dating back to the Middle Ages. Most interesting to me were certain of the early 19th-century clocks, which combined physical and temporal perspectives: these clocks appeared in the tops of town halls and churches that were represented in landscape paintings, as if the clocks themselves were part of the paintings. There, too, was a huge blue ceramic Empire style floor clock that had belonged to Mme. Schratt, an actress friend and probably mistress of Emperor Franz Josef 130 years ago, when Empress Sisi sat on her ceramic dolphin throne, singing of lost time.

-- The Globe Museum offers in its rooms arrayed with globes made in earlier years a political and geographic history of the world, as it was seen and understood over a period of some five centuries. Somehow the pictorial distortions of the continents probably mirror the distorted understanding of the world than most people still have regarding other's religions and cultures.

As the fruit trees begin to bloom...

-- "Austria is a major producer of fruit juices which constitute an important export item, especially to the Arab world. Unfortunately these are almost all from fruit concentrate and are moderately nasty." Austria Blue Guide




-

Home to Wiener World

Just having returned from a visit to the US, I was reminded of how much I like travel but hate the process of getting somewhere. I had a terrific visit with my loving and generous family, yet I was glad to return to Wiener World, and not just because the flights here can be as colorful as the pastel city squares of many an Eastern European capital, though far more annoying.

Vienna is a funnel for Central Europeans traveling to and from New York, Washington, and U.S. points beyond. About a third of the passengers on my flight coming and going was comprised of people from Bosnia, Slovakia, and other Central European points whose airlines feed into Vienna. The people, young families, the middle aged, and the elderly, come from long broken and slowly mending economies, and many on my recent flight appeared to have little familiarity with air travel. I had a longer wait at the gate at Dulles, coming home, than I did departing from Vienna, and thus more time to observe. Some of the Central and Eastern Europeans loitered in the departure gate area at Dulles, staring as if amazed at electric lights. These visitors' appearance is sometimes an odd mix of fashion. One middle-aged man, who strolled continuously in front of me as we waited for the flight, wore a cherry red sports coat over a silver and white paisley shirt, tail out; blue jeans with knee pockets big enough to hold a supply of rolls and sausages to sustain him through the flight; and athletic shoes, though the beer belly suggested the footwear served other than athletic purposes. Like most of the men, he combed his slightly wavy iron-gray hair straight back. His eyebrows, probably never trimmed, had multiple steely curled wisps licking at his forehead, their length exceeded only by the hair growing out of his nose and from a large mole on his right cheek.

When I reached my seat row during the boarding process at Dulles, a man of about my age from Sarajevo (as I later learned), dressed in a jogging suit, was in my window seat. I was certain that he had boarded ahead of schedule, out of the order of rows called. I showed him my boarding pass, and he moved to the aisle seat. Normally I would have been more than happy to have the legroom of the aisle seat, but on this flight--ever the optimist--I planned to rest my head against the bulkhead in the hope of catching a bit of sleep. As soon as we had switched seats, my Bosnian companion plopped his right arm on the center armrest, covering the controls to my video screen, light, and audio system. Repeatedly during the flight I asked him to move his arm so that I could change the volume or change channels. For most of the night, his right leg leaned over well into the minuscule, cramped space I called mine, so as to use my left knee for his support and provide me unwanted bodily warmth. When our first meal was served, he stared at the tiny plastic cup of dressing accompanying our tiny salads and then poured it into his water; then he did the same with his coffee creamer. He started to scrape his pat of butter into the mix, but stopped when he realized that it might make the glass overflow. He stirred the mix with his fork and then drank it down. Then he ate the butter.

And the children.... Lawrence Sterne wrote that on the night Tristram Shandy was conceived, Tristram's mother famously asked her husband, at the exact moment of conception, whether he had remembered to wind the clock. The homunculus's discombobulation caused by the timing of the question, according to Sterne, resulted in Tristam's being born with a variety of character disorders. I mention this because several years ago a lineal descendant of Tristram Shandy's mother made her way to Slovenia, where she worked in a sausage factory. About three years ago, as she was being seduced atop a machine that inflated sheep stomach linings to bind the ground pork, she asked her lover, "What time is it?" Nine months later she delivered a child with porcine features and ovine character traits. Two years after that, that mother and child were on my flight from Washington to Vienna. For 6 hours of the 8 and a half hour flight, the child bleated, squealed, and screamed, counterpointing the music of his voice with the "bong" from his smacking the "call attendant" button. Dozing was impossible; I wished that I had taken the aisle seat.

I returned, happily, having been awake only 36 hours, and with my interior clock 6 hours off from Wiener World time--nothing that could not be cured by a week of alternating wine and coffee, much tastier and more comforting than a vinaigrette and coffee creamer in a glass of cold water.