Of Pumpkins, Potatoes, and Springtime

Some time ago my Italian teacher was helping me translate a text and I came across the word spunta, which was unfamiliar to me.  He explained it is a verb referring to something peeking out, like the tip of a handkerchief from a pocket, or the first hues of morning sunlight.  It felt this past weekend like the right word for change now slowly in motion in Wiener World--the tip of the sausage of springtime peeking out from the bun of winter.  We were noticing the first forsythia buds, the first pollen, the first sneeze, and then on the rims of my eyes the first red tinge, deep and delicate as the new purple-red growth on the tea rose canes in the Volksgarten.

At the Prom

Winter is ball season in Vienna, and on Friday night we closed out our winter, if not the calendar's, at the Hofburg Palace with the annual ball held by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.  Some months ago we reserved a room at a very nice hotel in the inner city for this occasion, and at the end of this warm, sunny Friday we took a taxi downtown to our luxury quarters, where we enjoyed a bottle of wine as Linda put on her glass slippers and I my princely regalia, and we prepared to hail a pumpkin for the short trip to the Hofburg.  When we arrived at the palace, our taxi joined a queue of other taxis at the grand doors.  As if moving to spring grazing lands, black-suited men and ladies in dark and pastel gowns streamed past; Austrian guards, like tin soldiers, stood at attention in ceremonial dress at the palace entrance.  With guests from more than 50 countries, we first made our way into an ornate ground-floor hall, accepting flutes of champagne catered by servers all in black, with gold ties.  As Linda's smiling eyes took in the whole scene, the introvert in me made my pulse quicken.  I concentrated on looking as if I had done this sort of thing so many times that I was close to experiencing ennui.  I looked around at the sea of people and thought nearly everyone was surging with social disorientation.  I edged closer to my companion.  Across the room I saw many sets of eyes watching the entering crowd, searching for someone they knew, trying to form connection, hoping to attain a sense of belonging that would end the need to mill about like wildebeests looking for their calves after crossing a river.  As the minutes passed, guests grouped in ragged circles and eventually began shuffling and baby-stepping, migrating up a huge marble staircase, past even more ceremonial guards, all of whom remained cool and dispassionate while happy, smiling couples posed next to them and camera flashes went off in their faces. 

After shuffling past two more vast marble halls with glittering crystal chandeliers, we found the dining hall designated for us and the table where we would join four other Embassy couples.  A long-ago memory of finding a seat in the high school cafeteria scuttled across my mind like a ghostcrab looking for a hole in the sand.  Were we going to be at the cool people's table, or seated with the losers?  It soon became clear that the former was the case.  My mind was at ease, my social status validated, and my sense of belonging reaffirmed; lively conversation began at our table, and the evening settled into comfortable elegance.  The dinner was a fine buffet; our wine glasses were kept filled with a quality red by an attentive wait staff.  The band kept the amplification reasonable, and we were able not just to have a great time dancing but even to have conversation at our table without having to shout.  The magic evening eased out like the tide; by 1 a.m. all but one other couple had slipped away from our table, and we made our way back to the palace portal.  The toy soldiers, we saw, had been put back in their boxes, and soon we were in a pumpkin heading back to the hotel--peaceful, sleepy, satisfied, feeling as if we had completed an important annual ritual.  We had wrapped up winter like a warm blanket we no longer needed and put it away with the toy soldiers, the glass slippers, and the princely regalia.  After one of the loveliest evenings we have had here, we were ready for sleep and waking to the new season. 

Primavera Passeggiata

Saturday was another warm, sunny day.  The ball felt like a distant memory, and in the early afternoon we set off on a walk along the Danube canal, so buoyed by the weather that we could dare the bicyclists whizzing by to crash into us.  Unlike so many large cities, Vienna has little graffiti.  The authorities, it seems, sanction it along the concrete levees of the canal and on bridge abutments, and the warm day had brought out the artists.  I imagined them having been asleep like tulip bulbs all winter, and now they were popping up to add color to the cityscape.  On one short stretch we passed five of them painting adjacent to each other.  The odor from cans of spray paint tinted the air as we walked by, and  anti-establishment pictorial messages were emerging like weird blossoms in a fantasy world:  cartoon monsters, red-eyed green and black skeletons reaching out bony fingers, brightly colored insulting messages to the police, and the zig-zagging thick black angular scrawls that seem universally characteristic of graffiti.  After four or five miles we reached Schwedenplatz, a busy downtown square.  Its benches were filled as they are on summer Sundays with singles, couples, and families.  Toddlers were licking ice-cream cones precariously tilted, bums were drowsing through hangovers, international tourists were studying city maps and resting tired feet, pigeons were dodging walkers while bobbing for crumbs from hotdog rolls, pickpockets were taking cigarette breaks, and, just as every spring, a goat-footed balloonman whistled far and wee.  We strolled back toward Schottentur station by way of St Stephen's Cathedral and shops filled with Easter candy and bright, fun decorations, and then made our way to the Volksgarten.  Many of its rose bushes, their burlap covers removed and put away, were already awake, welcoming the spring sunshine.

Wachau Easter

Sunday was again sunny and warm, and we headed up Route 3 into the Wachau Valley to stroll the medieval lanes of Weissenkirchen and Spitz.  Most of the shops and restaurants were closed and will remain so until April.  The church at Weissenkirchen is built on the ruins of an old fortress wall; inside we found Gothic architecture and stonework from later periods.  In the narthex, colorful rabbits, eggs, and chicks and other pagan fertility symbols were set next to a stack of Easter bulletin covers picturing the risen Jesus...layers of myth and religion mirroring the layers of stone and design from different ages.  Every house in Weissenkirchen that had a yard also had a few short rows of grapevines, and the steep hillsides surrounding this and the other towns in the Wachau are combed with gray lines of vineyards waiting for days of longer sunlight to turn green and later be used to make wine for subsequent ball seasons. 

In Spitz we noticed that bags of potatoes rested against several doors along some streets, as if the Potato Bunny had just made his rounds.  Although two of our favorite restaurants remained closed for the season, we found another along the river and sat at an outdoor table near the water, watching the early afternoon sunlight brighten the edges of the swirls and ripples on the Danube, as well as the pools of gravy covering our servings of roasted wild boar and the spatzel noodles that floated along the far banks of our plates.  Our transition weekend was ending, and we drove home to Vienna in time for the evening spunta, ready for the seasons to complete their changeover.

Filler

-- I gathered up Linda from the Vienna airport on a recent Wednesday morning and enjoyed a minor adventure when the parking lot pay-machine ate my credit card.  After I walked about 400 yards to locate an actual live attendant at an inside office and told him what had happened, he did find someone to assist me.  First, however, he loudly and repeatedly demanded to know why I did not use the call button at that lot to inform him.  I could only shrug and look chastened.  Behind the clerk, a cleaning woman stopped pushing her broom and looked up at me with an expression that said, "How you say in English, 'You Moron!'"  I turned my eyes to the floor and, shoulders slumped, pulled my cap bill low over my face.  I went slinking back to the car lot with a pretense of humiliation that should have satisfied any witnesses.  Someone soon arrived with a tool kit and--after pointedly ignoring my greeting--frowned at me as he popped my card loose from the pay machine and handed it to me.  When he left, I inspected the machine.  I could not find a call button.  This time I ignored the card slot and instead inserted a euro note into the cash slot, and off we went. 

-- On a recent windy, drizzly weekend, we took the tram into the city to scope out another Hapsburg museum, the Hofmobiliendepot, which served as the royal furniture warehouse for almost 300 years.  We expected a royal jumble--which we did find in one section with chairs, tables, and other items piled atop each other.  Much of the rest, however, was a well-lit collection of historical non-sequiturs attractively displayed.  Specially exhibited were original furnishings that had been lent for sets in movies that romanticized the story of Empress Sisi and Franz Josef.  The thousands of items from the royal families' daily lives included about 50 spittoons and some 30 chamber pots; thrones of a different sort, they were highly ornate and amply decorous for the effluents and deposits of kings and queens.  Two, 200-year-old stuffed Brazilian canaries that had belonged to Emperor Franz I still perched in their cage--their home from infancy to eternity--and the garden tools with which that same emperor had amused himself each spring hung from strings against a wall not far from the royal traveling chairs and traveling dinnerware.  Adjacent to the baby crib that Empress Sisi used for Crown Prince Rudolf stood--alpha and omega--the bed from the hunting lodge in Mayerling on which Rudolf shot himself and his mistress, probably in frustration at not being able to find a call button to get his carriage out of the lot.  On a catafalque not far from Empress Sisi's breakfast dishes sat the tin-lined box in which Emperor Maximilian's body was shipped home from Mexico in 1867 after his execution by the revolutionaries.  It was not always a bed of roses being an emperor.

Germany: A Round Trip

 

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."-- William Faulkner

While Linda was back in Pennsylvania and Virginia the first week in March visiting family, particularly intent on seeing her two angelic grandchildren, I planned a trip to points north and past.  I set out from Vienna by train for Dresden, where I rented a car for my onward journey to Goerlitz on the Polish border and other sites.  For the first part of the car trip, the strange roads and strange language proved at least as interesting the destination; for the second part, the travel was more through time than it was through Germany's often charming villages and countryside.

Bumping and Bumbling Along

The first day of my trip had a variety of bumps, but nothing too jarring.  The train north from Vienna passed through Prague and then, rattling, rocking, and squealing along. turned west to Germany.  I arrived in Dresden at the end of the day and the beginning of the rain, which was to continue for most of the next four days.  Because my plans involved additional stops in rural areas, I had arranged to pick up a rental car at the Dresden railway station.  Having in mind that I would be paying about $10/gallon for gasoline, I had requested an economy car.  The woman at the Europcar counter, however, informed me with great pleasure that I had been upgraded "at no extra cost" to a huge Opel wagon, the largest, heaviest automotive dumpling in their kitchen, a vehicle that would get an impressive 10-12 mpg.  The size of an ambulance (but without a light bar--which I could have used), it well deserved the German name Mietwagen (pronounced "meatwagon," literally, rental car).  I affixed the GPS system to the windshield and sped off the lot into Dresden's evening rush hour.  At the first major intersection, I had already nearly passed a line of cars sitting at the light in the left-turn lane when the GPS directed me to turn left.  Unfazed by the red light and the line of obedient drivers waiting their turn, I swung past them all into the middle of the intersection and executed a perfect left; soon I had found my way to the Autobahn, the A4.  I was heading east into heavy rain and fog, the very sort of weather, as I recall reading, that had confronted the Roman legions slaughtered by the Teutons when they entered Germania on the orders of Augustus. 

The last stretch of the drive was confusing and dangerous--but more for the Germans than for me.  After about an hour, I knew I was getting close to the exit for Goerlitz, and the GPS directed me to turn off the highway.  This, I thought, does not look like a decent road to exit on--the shortest route, perhaps, but not the fastest or safest.  Two turns later, still obedient to the electronic voice, I found myself on a narrow country lane with sharp bends and curves, progressing at about 20 mph.  At many a turn my headlights illuminated clutches of cows huddled against the weather.  I passed through several small villages, in each of which couples dressed in black were out in the rain walking their equally dark dachshunds in the middle of the road.  When at last I reached Goerlitz, the GPS directed me down a dead-end street and announced that I had reached my destination.  My hotel was nowhere in sight.  I decided to make a U-turn, park, and get out and look for it.  Because the street was narrow and my Panzerwagen had a large turning radius, I pulled to the curb and then tried to put the vehicle in reverse for the second stage of the U-turn.  It was not to be.  Several times I shoved the shift lever hard left and up; thinking I was in reverse, I would gradually let out the clutch.  Each time, however, the car surged forward a foot.  Soon I was up over the sidewalk, with the front wheels on the grass on the other side.  I could not find an interior light switch to examine the pattern on the shift knob, so I opened the car door; the interior light was too dim.  People were gathering in the mist, peering from under their umbrellas into the dark car that was preventing them from passing.  I heard voices and indistinct words, at first puzzled sounds like "Ha!" and then a loud, derisive laugh--which sounds much worse in German than in English.  Well experienced with public humiliation in foreign countries from a variety of misadventures at restaurants and other venues, I told myself not to get discouraged, that those were probably just the sadistic voices of some Austrian dentists on vacation.  I remembered that I had placed a small flashlight in the bag with my maps and soon located it.  I examined the gear shift and noticed a button on the back of the stick--a release.  I pressed it and then got the car into reverse, off the sidewalk and back into the street.  Soon I had parked, and after walking a bit I located my hotel for the next two nights, the Schwibbogen, a name that sounds most euphonious when pronounced with a mouth full of potatoes.  I was tired and hungry, eagerly anticipating a huge beer and a huge plate of Silesian cuisine.

English as She Is Spoke

I do not believe that many people travel to Germany to enjoy the food, but I do--in the same spirit that, in Italy, I had a quest for the worst-tasting digestivo liqueur.  And I often find the menus even more fun than the food.  Goerlitz is split into a German and a Polish section by the Neisse River, which serves much like the transition of the River Jordan.  Crumbling, drab, and uninviting shades of gray and brown--like so much of what I have dined on in this part of Europe--the Polish side is still recovering from decades of communism.  German Goerlitz, however, has quaint architecture and colorful houses and shops, and it draws from at least some guidebooks praise for its regional cuisine, Silesian.  Although I found it not much different from the pork, starch, and cabbage entrees I have consumed in Austria and elsewhere in Germany, I did see in German Goerlitz some of the most fun English-language menu items I have yet run across.  That evening and the next I ate in the Stadtwache (City Waking) Restaurant, a repository of linguistic and culinary treasures.  As soon as I saw the English menu, I got out my pen and a scrap of paper and began writing quickly and furtively, fearing the waiter would suspect I was trying to pirate their culinary creations for a rival restaurant.  Among its offerings:  "Herring salad lijing nit cerium after grandma's prescription," "Meat of the pig comb inserted in the darling drink," "Meat with homemade lumps," and "Blather in a homemade way."  At lunch the next day I found on a menu "Silesian white rat and sticky balls" (named, I hope, in a spirit of jocularity) and so had to order it; it turned out to be slices of pork roast, I think, but I like to believe it was a cut from a huge rodent.  The dumplings, the size and hue of golf balls, seemed to be lightly glued together.  They had the texture of nerf balls that had been soaked in oil; when I tried to cut into one with the edge of my fork, it gave slightly and then scooted across my plate.  Another Silesian menu item I saw, but did not try, was "sharp potty soup with many onions." 

Winsen

On Thursday morning I was back in my Panzermobile and the rain and fog, heading out from Goerlitz to the A4 and back toward Dresden, where I turned north for a half-day's drive to the Hannover region.  My paternal great-grandfather Wilhelm, a blacksmith, came from the village of Winsen an der Aller in Hannover, and it is he who emigrated to the U.S. soon after participating in a battle in 1866 against the Prussians in Langensalza, Thuringia, in central Germany.  I was curious to visit Winsen, and I cannot explain it as much more than that:  seeing the town was like visiting a grave of someone I did not know but knew of.  When I was studying English literature, I could never relate with much intensity to the themes of ubi sunt? and Ou sont les neiges d'antan?--profound longings for what no longer exists.  I did find, however, a vague sense of connection with the past, a sense of the naturalness of change--and a pleasing feeling of completing a circle.  Ur-grampy had never made it back from the American Midwest to see his home again, and perhaps I was returning there on his behalf. 

The fog on the ground was not the only fog in Winsen.  The town, which sits on a plain that looks a great deal like Illinois but with birch trees, is now little more than a busy crossroads lined with recently built houses and small strip malls--bakeries, florists, plumbing repair businesses, and perhaps thriving umbrella shops.  I could find little evidence of the past except for the Lutheran church, which dated from 1822, and the town hall, from the 18th century, heavily remodeled at times over the decades.  A stele next to the church was dedicated to the fallen in the unification wars of 1870-71, but that was it for memorials.  Surprisingly, I found no monument celebrating the enormous achievements of my family in the fields of Piety, Obedience, and Introversion.  For several minutes I strolled the town cemetery looking in the mists for family ghosts but could not turn up, so to speak, our surname; I was aware, however, that the custom of these pragmatic Teutons has long been to disinter bodies and reuse grave sites every 50 years.  Many of the grave markers wore green velvet shrouds of moss, and light blankets of crispy gray-brown autumn leaves lay on the ground above many of the sleepers.  Had I found a stone for Ur-Ur Grampy Ludwig, or any stone with our surname, I would have left a potato on it.

Closed Today, Come Back Yesterday

Friday morning I turned the Panzerwagen south for Bad Langensalza in Thuringia, site of a battle on June 27, 1866, and for which Ur-Grossvater Wilhelm received a service medal.  I presume his smithing skills made him useful in beating plowshares into swords, or perhaps he was of service to the horses of Hannover's cavalry.  The Hannover forces, allied with the Austrians, did battle against the Prussians just west of the Langensalza.  Although the Prussians lost the first engagement, they returned soon after with stronger forces and won the war.  Perhaps that conflict is what prompted Wilhelm to emigrate not long after, but his motives are lost in the fog.  The town itself is lovely--well restored and maintained shops and homes built centuries ago, often in bright pastels, and a thriving pedestrian area.  It is, however, one of the "baden" towns, and the two-lane highway that connects Langensalza to the rest of Germania is choked with traffic.  Very often it felt as if the military history of the past had lost the battle to spa tourism.  Aware that it was growing late in the day, I pressed on in my quest to reconnect with the ancients.  Although I suspect my spoken German in itself could qualify as a war crime, I employed it with the kind lady who tended the tourist information office and spoke not a syllable of English.  She directed me to the city museum, closed for the day, and gave me a map showing the location of the battlefield, blocked to traffic.  Soon I was on my way in my Panzerwagen to the battle site, now entirely farm fields, flat as a potato pancake, with new crop growth peeking up low and green as moss.  In the distance I could see three or four memorial stones--a good ways out on a narrow road that was open only to pedestrians and bicyclists--but, with no place to park my tank, inaccessible to me.

Exotic Thuringian Cuisine

I said my goodbyes to the ghosts of 1866 and headed on to Gotha, where I spent the night.  Gotha also has a charming old city, with includes a church boasting a statue of Luther built into the stone Gothic doorway, just as I have often seen St Peter on Catholic churches in Europe.  I love how, in Europe, history is present less often in stone monuments than in stone layers.  I was ready for a cultural diversion and thought I had found one:  a restaurant close to my hotel was Greek, and I looked forward to a change from the German diet.  When I received my entree, however, the purported lamb was in ground patties and highly salted.  It may well have been pork, or even white rat; next to it rested the rice, shaped in balls like dumplings. 

Elbe Was I

 
On Saturday morning, in the heaviest fog yet, I completed my auto loop-journey.  Shortly before noon I returned the Panzerwagen to Europcar, next to the train station in Dresden.  As I stepped out of the car, I felt like a soldier who had just taken off a heavy backpack after a long hike. 

Dresden sits on the Elbe River.  To cross it is to make the transition from the restored old city to the modern new town.  As soon as I saw a sign to the river, the Napoleonic palindrome, "Able was I ere I saw Elba," began looping through my head like a stuck song, and it remained there all day, annoying as tinnitus.  Hoping in vain to change the tune, I turned it into "Eble was I ere I saw Elbe."  I checked into the Kipping hotel, one of the few structures in the old city to have survived the Allied firebombing in 1945, and headed off on a walk to see old Dresden.  Many of the restored structures from the 18th-century palace complex are somewhat blackened by oxidation of the sandstone, something that gives them a kind of crispy look and makes them natural, durable reminders of the firebombing.  Beautiful though old Dresden is, I felt as if I had seen it all in about 15 minutes.  I had no desire to linger in it, and so I spent the next 3 hours in the city's wonderful gallery.  Raphael, the Venetian masters, the Dutch masters, Cranach, Canaletto--I loved it all.  There, too, I found a scene that has become a visual cliche in the U.S., one that is common on greeting cards and card-shop coffee mugs:  Raphael's "Sistine Madonna" portrays a large scene of Heaven; at the very bottom of the picture, two cherubs sit.  They look whimsical, resting their elbows on a "transition panel," a coffin lid, a demarcation of Heaven and Earth, the future and the past. 

Back to the Present

Sunday I completed the second, larger loop of my train trip, circling back to Wiener World.  It was the first morning that I had seen bright sunshine since I left home.  As I waited in the cold at the Dresden station for my train back to Vienna, my breath making the only fog that morning, I noticed another train stopped at an adjacent platform, about to depart.  A father was standing next to the car opposite me, and I could see the face of a little boy of about 4 peering out the train window.  The two of them waved to each other.  As the train began to pull out, the father jogged along beside the car, continuing to wave, and, as the train slowly picked up speed, he broke into a sprint, waving the whole time, running full out beside the car until he came to the end of the platform and the train drew into the distance.  He stopped, turned, and walked slowly past me toward the station exit, a soft smile on his face telling me he knew the little boy would be back.