Lost in Our Space

Wednesday evening Linda and I went for a stroll well beyond our village boundaries, ending up in nearby Heiligenstadt--a smaller village--and taking a wrong turn in an effort to make a loop hike out of it. We'd been walking close to an hour, and the last 15 minutes, it became clear, in the wrong direction. At two points we stopped people--both with fairly good English--to ask directions. The first sent us back up the hill we had just come down; when we realized we were still lost after following her directions--at least thinking we had done so--we stopped a second person, and she graciously pointed us the way we had just come.

As we heading back up the hill again, realizing the fecklessness of our effort, I suggested we ask yet a third person. Dark was coming on, and I wanted to be home before the streets got inky black and we were beset by garden gnomes. A very kindly looking man about 200 years old was making his way along, shopping bag in hand, and Linda and I approached him. His English, unfortunately, was not so good as the others', and I found myself falling back on my limited German, trying to get him to understand that we needed to get to our village of Grinzing:

I: Grinzing?

Old Man: Wo? (where?)

I: (trying to improve my accent) Grrreenzing

Old Man: Wo?

I: Grrreeeeeeenzing

Old Man: (squinting, hand to ear) Wo?

I: Grrrrrrrreeeeeenzink!

Old Man: Aah, Grinzing!

The three of us smiled, said "Ja, Ja" repeatedly, and nodded vigorously to each other. Drawing on my store of languages, I conveyed our need to him: "Wir haben ge-walked mucho far. Want go home...hausfrau anfang pooped out eingang. Grinzing ja ja." Or somesuch phrasing, mostly picked up from traffic signs and elsewhere in the local environment.....

He asked in German whether we were on foot. I thought, yes, you dolt. And then I realized that he thought we must have gotten out of a car to approach him. He pointed up the hill and said, "I you go." Ah, we realized he was going to walk with us and show us. And so we three proceeded up the hill, in matched, shuffling baby-steps. Interminable matched, shuffling baby-steps. When we got to the top of the hill, he pointed to the right, and we three turned into a narrow lane. He pointed to an apartment and said "I go here," and then added, "But I walk with you." This wonderfully kind man stayed with us another block or two to be certain we followed the appropriate road, and then he left us for his own home. We were quite sorry our disorientation had taken him so far out of his way, particularly given the effort it was for him to walk. But we were home before the gnomes and werewolves came out.

Day 10

In contrast to the chaos and cacophony of Rome, the city center here is quiet and casual. Few panhandlers appear, and only rarely do we hear a street musician. Things are not quite uniformly white or perfectly, Teutonically orderly, but it is close: there are few blacks, few street vendors aside from those hawking theater tickets, no gypsies, a sprinkling of women in Islamic dress, and lots of Turks--which explains the abundance of kebab stands. The curse of European cities, however, is present: mimes. Although I was hoping to see one of Hitler, no such luck--Mozart and other music figures abound. (World War II does not exist here. I thought of Faulkner's comment that "The Past is not dead. Hell, it's not even in the past.") Women in dresses and heels are in evidence, but a man in a suit and tie is a rare sight. And, although women young and old are usually dressed pleasingly, many people tend to wear sloppy-casual, and some young men fit the stereotype: hiking shoes and black socks against white legs, blue shorts, stretched-out gray-white T-shirts featuring band names, and sunglasses with red plastic frames.

Vignettes

1. On a sunny sidewalk, near the city center, I walked behind two scruffy young men with backpacks, both staggering along; twice, one stepped out in front of traffic and the other pulled him by the sleeve back onto the sidewalk. They were taking turns drinking a foul-smelling liquid, smelling vaguely like ether, from what looked like a cough-syrup bottle. They giggled and sometimes burst out in loud laughs...then stood attentively at crossings, carefully observing the walk/don't walk signs.

2. A young woman--locally typical dark brown hair, fair complexion, and royal blue eyes--in a cool summer frock boarded the tram with a happy, plump baby in a large stroller, and sat across the aisle from me. The baby and I exchanged several smiles and raised eyebrows over the next three or four stops, and then the young woman addressed me in German as the tram stopped again. I indicated I could not understand and said, "English?" She replied in perfect, unaccented American English: "Can you help me? I need to get off." I stepped off the tram and took hold of the bottom of the stroller while she lifted from the top, and, as we set the stroller on the sidewalk, "Thank you very much." And a sweet, warm smile.

3. At the news kiosk by the Grinzing tram station:

I: "Herald Tribune"?
Vendor: "Zirty min."
I: (checking my watch) "Danke."
Vendor: "Sank you."
30 minutes later:
I: "Guten morgen. Herald Tribune?"
Vendor: "Goot morneeng."
I: (taking paper, handing him 3 euros): "Danke."
Vendor: "Sank you."
I: "Auf wiedersehen."
Vendor: "Gootbye."

4. In the deep of Sunday dusk, Linda and I were out strolling, exploring our neighborhood. Descending a deserted sidewalk on a rather steep hill on the outskirts of the village, we noticed another couple, middle-aged, in the shadows ahead of us. Apparently they had just parked their car and were heading arm in arm down the hill to the restaurant district, he in a dark suit and she in a silky, close-fitting, full-length dress of gold and floral pattern. As they walked on in the dark, his arm let go of hers, and his hand slipped behind her and squeezed her butt. They paused in the dark and kissed. Walking a few steps further, they turned into the open doors of a theater entrance. We passed them, we in the dark, smiling, they in the brightly lighted foyer, smiling, reaching for flutes of sparkling wine.

Our Grinzing Neighborhood

The last two evenings we have been strolling our neighborhood. It is no exaggeration to say there must be 100 restaurants, often adjacent to each other in rows, within a half mile of our apartment. Most of them are heurigers, with wooden tables on stone patios inside courtyards and sometimes up long, leaf-dark corridors lined with pots of bright red geraniums, white-light wisps on candles, and orange-red lanterns. Potatoes, cabbage, and pork feature prominently in the posted menus we consulted, and always wiener schnitzel, which seems to be the only way that they prepare veal here. Some of the restaurants are quite informal and some quite elegant, and all with live music--which is perhaps in the definition of heuriger--some with piano and strings, and some with accordions and strings. The evenings have been cool and pleasant, sometimes with spritzes of rain; we wonder how long it will be before indoor dining becomes the rule.

Down one street from us, less than a mile, is a modest house occupied by Beethoven in 1808, and a place once the residence of Strauss is also nearby. Large, very old trees abound; the public green areas and yards, including that of our apartment building, tend to be overgrown, shrubs rarely if ever pruned, with grassy areas of clumpy green. Our sidewalk in the morning has an abundance of 2-3" brown slugs inching their way to work, and we wonder where the birds are that should be breakfasting on them. We see birds only rarely, a surprise given all the natural housing that the many trees provide for them. The untended look to many of the yards and the slightly rundown little park near the village center is in marked contrast to the city parks and green spaces downtown, which are meticulously trimmed. Many a large, luxurious home sits on our side streets, though the main street, on which our modern if bourgeois apartment building sits, also has small and medium individual homes dating perhaps to the 18th century, as well as what look like Soviet-era design apartment buildings: large, sturdy, boxy structures with square-cut windows in blank plain flat facades--reminding me of what D.H. Lawrence, writing of his travels in Switzerland, called "a vigorous ordinariness." Near the main street and the Grinzing tram end-of-the-line are small shops and groceries, including two bakeries, a news kiosk (yes, it sells the International Herald-Tribune), a bank, a sundries store, and a few shops purveying glassware and women's clothes. The two churches we have been in look to be Baroque, but modestly so, as if the funds for the usual excess were not available, and so the ceilings are left bare and side chapels are furnished sparsely compared with those in Rome.

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.

Arrival in Wiener World

Here at last in Weiner World. Our flight got in Friday morning on schedule; like most transatlantic flights. it was no more than a minor ordeal of being cramped and sleepless. Because Austrian Air appeared to have grouped children and cats into a 6-row section just behind the business class section, we had several pleasant little children nearby, along with one screamer, and two little boys who amused themselves through much of the flight by pushing the doorbell-sounding button to summon the flight attendant, who began ignoring the calls after the first few. The screamer from time to time brought back memories of the Flight of the Angry Babies, which I took from Rome to Washington in 2004, when the Italian Government expelled these shrill and hostile little beings all on one flight, all within five rows of my seat. Our Vienna flight left us little room for legs and feet, with Walter and Earl in their sherpa bags squeezed under the seats in front of us. For the most part, the two of them remained quiet, although 2 hours from Vienna we heard a good deal of meowing and frantic clawing from Earl's bag, and then Linda noticed a large white furry paw extended from a point at which Earl had managed to push back one of the zippers on his bag. I imagined he had sequestered in his bag a volume of Poe and had just finished reading the cat version of "The Cask of Amantillado," in which the central figure while being walled up screams at his host to let him out for God's sake. Linda shoved his paw back in and secured the fabric portal once more, and Earl went back into his semi-comatose state for the rest of the trip.

Another surprise awaited us upon landing and exiting the airport: just as at the Lufthansa desk at Dulles, no one checked the cats' health certificates, not even the ones specially embossed by the USDA office in Richmond. I wanted to kick myself for not bringing a slew of rabid animals into Austria. The airport was hot and stuffy, but perhaps that is the last time for many months that I shall experience such an atmosphere. Since the warm, sunny day of our arrival, the sky has usually been cloudy and the air cool and damp with fine, blowing spray, Middle English "small rain."

Of course, I imagined that upon the ride to our apartment from the airport we would see scores of men in lederhosen playing accordions, and rosy-cheeked Alpine milkmaids bedecked in edelweiss, skipping about beer gardens. The first-impression images, however, are rather more to do with what is not here than with what is here: no graffiti anywhere, no jaywalkers, no cars crowding a single lane to make it two, no trash in the street, and generally little that could be called disorder, though police are little in presence. There are often wide bike lanes, wide sidewalks for pedestrians, and greenery; there are cars that always stop to let pedestrians cross; few business suits are in evidence, as life here seems rather casual; life here is not loud. So far, so good.

last stage

State finally coughed up my passport without my having to go to Washington to administer a bureaucratic Heimlich maneuver. It is in my open briefcase, and Earl at the moment is trying to perforate it with his remaining fang. He seems to like the way it smells--maybe made from recycled tuna. All the paperwork for the move is done now except for the USDA health forms for the cats, which must wait until late next week.

Monday the packout starts, and we have nearly completed sorting and shuffling and some preliminary packing of things that are more fragile or beloved than other possessions. There is something quiet, soft, and gentle about this stage of a big move--a putting away of the past to make room for the new. Cleaning out boxes in the attic storage has meant rediscovering fragments of my past, particularly recalling other times I have had major moves. The Roman Capitoline museums have been frequent visitors to my sleep lately, and half-formed fragments of images from those displays have been strolling through the hallways of my mind just the way I strolled through those museum hallways in years past. Instead of time-travel through bits of inscriptions on tombstones, busts, and Roman mile-marker fragments, I found my mind drifting into the past via a frying-pan shaped ashtray from Harlingen, Texas, an item that was in the welcome kit when my family moved there when I was 11; a baseball bat nicked from the bluestone bits I swatted from our driveway in Vienna, Va; framed photos of the kids and grandkids that no longer look like them; a picture collage Bruce made in high school; a Japanese robot toy of Ben's from Okinawa; a caricature of Karen on skates, drawn at a fair in Quebec on a 1984 vacation....

Endings.... As Thackeray sort of put it, it is time to put away the puppets and close up the box, for the play is played out. Well, this act, at least, is about over. The future beyond Dulles on the 22d has scenes but, as yet, no dialogue for me to rehearse before we leave. My mind at this stage refuses to travel beyond July 22.

dates...at last

With a surgical adventure this week, I had a psychological dry-run of sorts for the flight. The schedule for inguinal hernia surgery--third time, same spot--required me to be in the surgery waiting room at 11:30 a.m. on Monday, a kind of pre-departure lounge very like one in an airport. One television monitor showed the status of patients--by numbered, pale-colored blobs that oozed slowly, horizontally, across a grid from "scheduled" to "pre-op" to "OR" to "recovery." All other monitors for those awaiting flights--and their accompanying families, there to see them off--were fixed on a single channel that silently showed scenes reminiscent of those viewed by the people in the movie Soylant Green undergoing the early stages of euthanasia: mountain sunsets, mushrooms by mossy stones, white water birds taking flight, the tide going out. Across these scenes, like a slow IV drip, rolled bromides in white letters in a funerary font, paradoxically interesting only because of their shallowness, messages like "Life is good when there is hope," and "With a goal, life has meaning." These drips of mental anesthesia were given attribution as well, from The Wife of Bath to Sylvia Plath; these trivial snippets may have been cut from Bartlett's, though I can't imagine that any of the authors or speakers would have wished to see these thoughts a second time. We endured this for almost 5 hours before being summoned to pre-op. I slept through the flight. Around 9 p.m. an attendant rolled me out to B level in the parking garage of the medical center.

After taking great care of me for two days, Linda went back to work, and, even though I'm getting around fairly well, if sorely, I wrote her today to tell her I had been crawling on the floor since she left and surviving on toilet water and raw potatoes, the only food I could reach, on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator. Bruce kindly stopped by early this afternoon with a sundae for me from McDonald's. He also very graciously moved some boxes around for me, getting them out of the living room so the house seems a little less cluttered.

Our pack-out dates have finally been determined: we will be out of the house by the 14th and out of the country on the 22d. It feels a little bit frantic now. I met with our property manager this morning and passed over the keys, and I called State Farm to change the house insurance to that of a rental; afterwards I picked up our car titles at the bank, scheduled the cats' last visit to the vet to get health certificates, and tried in vain to get a cleaning company scheduled to come out on the 16th. This holiday weekend, while others are having grand times with their families, I shall stew and go over my lists and move some of my 50 sticky notes around.