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.
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