On and Off the Mainland

On and Off the Mainland 

John Flynn 

(c) 2024 

Contents 

1. High Country … Amsterdam 

2. Low Country … Brussels 

3. The House of Terror 

4. Inside Rome 

5. Western Hungary 

6. From Cannes to Antibes 

7. Paris 2012 

8. A Thunderstorm in Florence 

9. Last Exit to Salzburg 

10. Stories of Linz 

11. The Quarry at Mauthausen 

12. Innsbruck Trains 

13. Bordeaux and Biarritz 

14. Western Slovakia 

15. Night in Vienna 

16. Lothar of Lanzarote 

17. The Brno Train 

18. Alghero 

19. Prague Scams 

20. Zagreb 

Preface 

If the Biblical explanation of the variety of languages at the Tower of Babel has always carried the association of a great morning commotion, the hotel breakfast rooms in Europe suggest a different reaction – the cautious, discreet murmuring and whispering of many tongues as people woke up, had some food and drink and made no more noise than the odd bang of utensil against utensil, as they got their heads together in unfamiliar circumstances. 

Budapest, 9 April 2009 

High Country … Amsterdam 

January 1996 

The Fall is the most famous book set in Amsterdam, “a capital of waters and fogs, girdled by canals, particularly crowded, and visited by men from all corners of the earth”. Camus also wrote of it “asleep in the white night, the dark jade canals under the little snow-covered bridges”, and when we landed, there were snow flurries rippling across the runways at Schipol. 

What really made the Saturday night there, in the Grasshopper hash bar on Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal, was the episode with the guy who came up the stone steps inside the front door and then collapsed across the table beside us, smashing cups and saucers before hitting the floor like a dead man. At least, I thought he might be dead. The most famous song about Amsterdam is also in French and Jacques Brel had put it well.  

Tout à coup l’accordéon expire.  

The bunch of teenage American girls at the table of smashed crockery went, “Omigaad, is he like, OK?” “I hope so,” replied the cute little Dutch one who reluctantly came out from behind the counter. Sitting nearest the body, I helped her pick him up as a girl asked one of my companions (P.) a question. 

“Is your friend a doctor?” 

“No. But it’s OK, he’s got a Master’s in Sociology.” 

The guy we hauled up and plonked on a seat rested for a minute or two before making his way unaided to the toilet. Later that same night, the Bamboo bar was where we met another young American, a chancer who came in with a Dutch mother and daughter. This chap discreetly explained the presence of his two companions. 

“I picked up these two babes in a McDonalds.” 

The daughter was in her early forties, a good-looking Germanic blonde, among many, among the menacing trams and bicycles. Her mother was maybe seventy. She looked like a grandmother. The American had gone up to them in the burger debris and given them a little-boy-lost story. The charm worked and later he bought them a drink or two before they all arrived at the Bamboo and squeezed in around the big, round table. 

At this stage the daughter was clearly on a high, which was only added to by the fact of getting into the bar, away from the cold and the snow and the slush and the frozen canals. I imagined a suburban home and a divorce. She was waving money and insisting on getting the drinks and laughing and seemingly telling her mother that she didn’t have to stay if she was fed up. 

I didn’t think the mother looked too bothered, actually. She looked calm with the bar lights reflecting on her glasses. There was a crowd and a blues band down the back. The young American looked to be on a definite promise that night. The daughter just seemed thrilled to be having a bit of fun.  

Low Country … Brussels  

Yesterday we went out to Tervuren. In the park the heat was scorching and fish were jumping in dirty green ponds linked like a canal. Under the trees was cool but the Africa Museum in the old palace was distinguished by the combination of hot weather and myriad stuffed animals. It smelled rather like a crusty old cowshed, with a soupçon of the wild smell of fear and danger. The dubious merits of such a memorial to Belgium’s colonial past have to be balanced against the fact that they clearly had an awful lot of stuff and needed somewhere to put it. 

6 July 2006 

Ten years before the hot afternoon in Tervuren, a first visit to Brussels had involved a different woman and a somewhat frostier atmosphere. TV shots of European Union landmarks had given no true advance impression of the Belgian capital. It was more like Auden’s poem, Brussels in Winter. Wandering through cold streets, I knew the formula had escaped me alright. 

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked, in well-practised exasperation. 
“I’m freezing.” 

“Well, you should be wearing layers. That’s how to dress, over here, in winter. Don’t you know that?” 

In the church of Saint Nicolas, near the Grand’ Place, I lit a candle as an offering to Job. She saw what I was doing and for a moment her old warmth and amusement seemed to return. Back in her place in the gentrifying eastern Schaerbeek, I fell asleep in my overcoat on her couch as she sat at a computer across the room. It was a strange kind of sickness, like a flu which never took hold but enveloped the gloom and left me in a daze. When I awoke, she was smiling. 

“What’s so funny?” 
“You’re such a waster,” she kindly explained. 

Brussels has a split personality, the French light and the Flemish shadow. By that I chiefly mean the cold reaction of the Flemish minority in the city if addressed in French. Then there are the many thousands of Eurocrats. An ambassador no less (2006) confided to me that, out of their ranks, having to ship people home after psychotic episodes was by no means uncommon.    

In 2006, I found Booze ’n’ Blues, near the Bourse. It was my kind of bar, narrow with high stools and old sounds that filled the silences of the other female companion, hopelessly marooned in her own thoughts. I focused more on the lethal, narrow, spiral staircase to the basement. The next day, the launderette was another quietly shared activity. I carried the black sack along Rue Dupont. “Welcome to Turkey town,” the sack’s owner said of western Schaerbeek. “And hookers,” I added, because she’d already shown me the contents of some of the nearby windows. 

The House of Terror 

The Irish comedian Tommy Tiernan had a routine that discussed the standard 1-2-3 division of Irish school classes in any given year.  

For Tiernan, the groups broke down as follows: 

(1) those who did arts degrees;  

(2) those who went on make money; 

(3) eh, as for this group 

Well, that was just where the bus brought them. 

A Hungarian friend once explained the very different streaming trinity that operated in schools in the Eastern Bloc: 

(1) the children of Party officials; 

(2) the children of actual workers; 

(3) the kids of parents that the parents of (1) employed to keep the parents of (2) in line. 

On 13 February 2008, in the House of Terror in Budapest, the tour started on the second floor with an animated map graphic showing the ebbs and flows of Hungary’s borders in the twentieth century. Those lines moved to and fro to a rhythmic, ominous soundtrack that was soon echoed elsewhere in the building by the “Hungaria” onscreen ranting of the widely supported fascist leader Szálasi, in a room lined by Arrow Cross uniforms.

(pic Nov 2018)

Much of the Arrow Cross muscle found new gigs in Rákosi’s post-war secret police. The even more enthusiastic (Stalinist, as opposed to Nazi) puppet Rákosi appeared sinister in a more low-key way than Szálasi. He was like a bank manager, with a shaved head, but it was interesting to note that Kádár himself had received a dose of the medicine in the basement, before he got the top job in late 1956 and calmed them all down over there.  

A krumplileves legyen krumplileves, elvtársak (‘Let the potato soup be potato soup, comrades’). Life is a compromise, János Kádár also wisely observed. His favourite book was said to be The Good Soldier Švejk.  

The House of Terror dungeons were smelly and the experience wasn’t like a wine cellar. My companion, a dental patient, thought they might have added some audio (“screams”) down there but then added that it would surely have freaked out the many young girls we saw touring the place. 

Inside Rome 

March 2008 

On the airport concourse a man in his sixties was gathering passengers to fill his people-carrier and in the throng, we shrugged and ran with that. The driver occasionally named something important we passed in the dark, such as “Terme di Caracalla”, but his speed didn’t slacken when he took to narrower streets. When he barely missed a second car I looked around to gauge if this really was normal Roman driving. Over my shoulder a dark young Italian man silently buried his shaved head in his hands. 

The two American girls had a few drinks while waiting for us and the blonde looked tipsy but with her rangy, athletic frame she wasn’t under any pressure. We had a meal first. I ate very little, needing to unwind after the delayed flight, in the presence of a girl just as attractive as she had seemed in Budapest.  

That’s how we ended up in a restaurant in Rome. Then there was a long taxi spin to somewhere with a bunch of clubs. In a place called Coyote, the redhead was true to form, messing with Italian gropers, while K. stuck very close to me. The dental patient disappeared on more of his own adventures and, in the end, the blonde and I had to wait while R. was neither fish nor flesh to a couple of Italians outside. Finally, I got both girls to agree to come back to the hotel, which had for some reason upgraded us to a suite with a terrace. 

The taxi driver’s Italian I could grasp. He looked like a decrepit version of Benny in Crossroads. In the back seat, the redhead started on about her car, which she’d parked near Piazza Venezia and which she didn’t want towed away. Then, at the hotel, the night porter wouldn’t let the girls upstairs without passports. Even the theoretical mention of money wouldn’t make the issue go away. I should have simply put down Miss Smith and Miss Jones as an addition, when checking in.  

As this was going nowhere, K. sighed and said she’d do the driving and rescue the car. She kissed me goodnight in a way that doubled the issue. She asked me to call her the next day. I was still only on the first few steps of the stairs when the dental patient got back. When he heard what had just happened, he gave Carlo the porter a long and very large piece of his mind. Carlo was taken aback. 

“I have never been so insulted in my life!” 

“But, Jesus Christ, I keep telling you, it was obvious they weren’t prostitutes. Couldn’t you see that?” 

“Why you keep talking about prostitutes?” 

It was then that the dental patient picked up a pen from the counter and threw it at him. I told my barrister to take it easy and apologised for the flying biro (“Sorry about that”) but then added that I had informed the porter’s colleague when checking in that we would have company later but all he had done was nod and smile without mentioning any Italian law or cops or passports. Then we went out again and found a couple of bars on a street within sight of the nearby Santa Maria Maggiore, which was lit-up, all alone across the square. 

The next Roman afternoon we went to Piazza Navona and the dental patient found a place called the Abbey Theatre bar, where he’d been at the time of his sister’s second wedding. In the evening the two Americans came, stayed a while, and went. In the morning the dental patient introduced a new comrade with whom he’d stayed up all night, doing speed.  

This was Jim, a wired American tour guide, and a passport carrier. We went to a place called Finnegan’s after checking out of the hotel. There was no mention of any nocturnal pen-throwing and I even got my phone handed back. I’d left it in the taxi that had brought me home but I remembered tipping the driver well, from sheer relief at getting out of a long night, and praising his good work, his buon lavoro. 

There were always tour guides in and out of Finnegan’s. Shooting the breeze of trivia for the afternoon, I showed off by naming every emperor up until 235 AD. There followed thirty-five years of absolute havoc until Aurelian knocked some sense into that world again from 270. Jim said I could be a guide too, no problem. He added the codicil that he tended to tone down the anecdotal content of his tours if there were children present. 

Though I’ve technically been to Rome, the great mosque (Mezquita) in Córdoba remains the most impressive building I’ve ever actually been inside (2016). After the Carthaginians and the Romans had had their day down by the Guadalquivír, the Moors took Córdoba from the Goths in 711 and held it until 1236.

Western Hungary 

I’m deep in action on a secret mission, 

Contact’s broken down, 

Time drags by, I’m above suspicion, 

There’s a voice on the telephone… 

Rory Gallagher’s guitar classic Philby (1979) was partly inspired by touring Europe and having to deal with all sorts of shady characters at all hours of the day or night. When I think of the seven or eight times in Budapest, doing this and that, including a spell in dental-patient trafficking, I think of the above verse, but there is more to Hungary than ducking and diving. 

May 2019 

In the Rockline bar in Sopron, I made some new friends when invited by the owner to come down the back and join the one remaining table. The other stragglers along the counter had gone on or gone home. Its online presence said, “Gastro pub” but the only edible items I saw in there were peanuts.  

Like in a playground, one of the first things they asked was my age. Of the women, T. said she only knew L. because L. had once interviewed her for a survey. The waiter Z. told stories of tourist antics from his night at the Corvinus restaurant on Fő tér, the main square.  

I think the group expected to have to speak German to the stranger. It’s a border town, a beautiful Baroque border town, with some more ancient back streets, but the fact that I don’t make a dog’s dinner of Hungarian was a source of wonder. Languages are hobbies in which I don’t lose interest. 

The bar owner claimed Sopron hadn’t suffered too much in the war because it wasn’t on the railway line between Budapest and Vienna. He claimed it was in worse shape now, economically, on its last legs, but he was a glass-half-empty kind of chap, though kindly and honest. He added that the 1921 plebiscite, which saw Sopron joining Hungary instead of Austria, had been nobbled.

At Sunday lunch, Leonard Cohen was coming calmly over the speakers at the Generális restaurant on the main square as a man with no arms steadily and assiduously ate spaghetti at the next table. Cohen sang The Partisan with the angelic French chorus and the rhythm of a fluttering heartbeat.  

Then the man with no arms had gone, with his wife. A Thalidomide survivor, with small hands. Very small hands. Still, he managed to smoke and drink as well, while his wife was in the Goat Church across the square. 

By his accent the man at the nearest table on the other side was from Dublin. He had gone pensive after settling up with a Danke blurted to the Köszönöm szépen from the waitress. On his phone again, he seemed to want to know badly if two Irishmen had died on Mount Everest in the past week.  

They did. Will I bother telling him? He’s about to leave.  

I told him. A talkative chap in need of a shave, he was in Hungary to walk from Sopron to Lenti. As well as something of his life on the buses, he told me he’d got up as far as the third level on Everest but then remembered his age (62) and had the sense to turn back and get down off it.  

June 2012 

In Budapest for a long weekend, the first sniffle arrived on Saturday morning, on the raw heels of a sore throat. Before a bath later, I felt a bit stoned. It felt like I’d been there a long time.  

There’s a tickly cough now. Sleep more if you can.  

Passing the afternoon with a river cruise turned out to be a good idea, nevertheless. I met a middle-aged American couple (Sam and Diana) while boarding the boat. Originally from the Bahamas, Sam had enjoyed his time in the US National Guard, back in the days that were out of harm’s way, when, as he said, it only meant getting to play cards and drive cool vehicles. 

On Sunday morning, after a Hungarian friend picked me up, we headed north out of the city with a couple of his kids in the back. When we got to Szentendre, he unfortunately didn’t stop in the historic town, with its half dozen Serbian churches, but passed through it for the village museum or skanzen, 4 km beyond.  

That’s a big site with peasant reconstructions from the country’s five regions. There’s even a windmill for the kids but, once politely obliged to leave the shelter of the visitor centre, I really didn’t get a kick out of the heat, which was too high for the odd state of my head, which was also balding and unforgivably uncapped in the sun.

Over a half door, I took an envious photo of a chap asleep in a back room in one of the houses. That’s nice work if you can get it but most of the guides were old ladies, even at the house where this guy was unconscious, stretched on a bench by a long table that contained a couple of water bottles, a lunch bag and two black cases, one of which evidently stored a musical instrument. I was only thinking I should have stayed in bed for the day.

After that we continued to Visegrád, where I got a short, violent coughing fit before we bought ice cream cones. My nose was running up on the Vár, or castle, which offers a very impressive view of the river and the wooded hills that mark both banks, up around the Danube Bend. The evening sunshine lit up the panorama. It was after five when we got there and, though the man on the gate said it was zárva (‘closed’), a bribe of 500 forints was enough to get us in.

June 2009 

For a landlocked country, Hungary has more than one splendid watery vista. I made it to the Tihany peninsula, where the upmarket village of the same name stands by the narrowest point of the eighty-mile-long Lake Balaton. The little lake behind the village is a geological anomaly that sits 25 m higher than the real one. A stone jetty stretches out far below the Benedictine abbey, the grounds of which stand on the ridge that gives the great lake view to the east. The hazy Balaton was a light, smoothie green. 

From Cannes to Antibes 

2011 

14 May, Saturday 

The flight descended over pale red roofs looking more washed-out than baked. Palm trees were new to me the previous time, in May 1998. At night the monkey suits still mill around the Palais.  

When I got here, I couldn’t contact D. so I left my bag at reception before heading off to Morrison’s, the pub I hadn’t managed to find by the night The General won a big prize in the festival, in 1998.  

While I was there, a text from S. told me he’d probably passed out in the apartment because that was what he’d done to him, last year.  

When I gave the missing person’s name, back at reception, the black lad found it on a sheet and brought it and me (with my bag) upstairs. He unlocked the door and looked in and around, to the left. Then his head re-emerged.  

“Il dort.”  

D. is snoring in there now, on and off, fully dressed. I looked for any food, snacks, but there’s only a small bottle of Power’s whiskey. The Irish Film Board party was on earlier. This is bullshit. 

15 May, Sunday 

1 pm on the balcony. He burst into my room at 5.15 this morning. “I found you!” he exclaimed. It turned out he’d just walked away from wherever he was. White wine was involved. They had kept refilling his glass. Jim McDaid, our former Cabinet minister, gave that explanation for driving the wrong way down a motorway. Anyway, he [the man with the man bag], not Jim, had collapsed here at ten.

16 May, Monday 

This morning I climbed Le Suquet again for some daylight shots. Then I got the hill from La Croisette. Later we went to Antibes. From there the Alps were snowy, far to the east. After a ritual stop at the Felix Café in honour of Graham Greene we walked around the vieux port and did some shopping. He got some dried lavender, as ordered by N., plus a couple of sailor tops for the baby. We sat down again at the Hop Store for another beer.

At the nearest table, a beautiful girl was doing all the talking, holding court like an actress, but for a gorgeous chatterbox she looked humane. “J’étais folle, j’étais folle” (‘I was mad, I was mad’) was the end of one story. She wasn’t skinny like a model either. She was normal for one so lovely. She had dark skin, short dark hair, white teeth: she looked French but with no hauteur. She wouldn’t have passed for any other Mediterranean nationality. She was at a low table, we were at a high one, and several times she glanced up at me looking down at her.  

Then D. looked down to see what a pigeon was doing under my feet. It was sucking water from the grooves of a metal insert in the flagstone (a manhole). Then another pigeon opportunistically started to ride it. D. started to laugh. When the nearby beauty was leaving, her parting words to the young couple left at the table were, “Bonne soirée!” Her mannerisms reminded me of an Irish girl more than a French one. 

17 May, Tuesday 

We went swimming at the beach nearby but later I didn’t enjoy the swarm in the hot sun, down by the Palais, where the red carpet was being used and the CRS were blowing whistles, trying to manage both the pedestrian and the motor traffic. D. told me of the time he stood back in a crowd so Scorsese’s limo could noisily get through. A bearded American in shades, shorts and sandals ambled along and politely asked could he slip past, through a gap behind him. It was Coppola. 

Paris 2012 

1 September, Saturday 

Le Saint Jean, rue des Abbesses, 3pm. I’m in Montmartre. I just went up to the Sacré Coeur. Now I’ve eaten here and I’m working my way through a short selection of drinks. The sun is shining but this place is on the shady side of the street.  

When I went out yesterday, I first went to the Cork and Cavan pub on the Canal St. Martin, as planned. It had a young crowd but not of student age. 

Later I had some trouble finding The Quiet Man, which was tiny. In looking for it I went a bit too deeply into the Marais, as could be seen by the increasing number of gay couples that passed. Anyway, when I found it, about the only Irish thing in there was the green shirt on the barman.  

Beside me at the end of the short counter sat a young American couple. They were graduate students in California. She was into whales while he was studying the geochemistry of noble gases. She turned out to be related to Michael Fingleton, the notorious Irish banker. “We don’t like him,” she said. She added that “Fingers” had become his family nickname too. 

5.45pm, hotel room. The bells of the church of St. Laurent across the street are banging now. When descending from rue des Abbesses in Montmartre I came out at Pigalle and saw nothing scary on the quiet daytime way except a transvestite who reminded me a bit of Doctor Zaius in Planet of the Apes. 

Over here, some of the girls are too beautiful, for anyone with a taste for female beauty. The first time I came here on my own (1996) I was actually a bit lonely. One afternoon, in Le Piano Vache in the Latin Quarter, an outrageous little flirt named Estelle bent over further than a gymnast when poking in her school bag, across the bar.  

Elle portait la culotte bleu pâle.  

Late on Saturday: I got back to the hotel by midnight. The long walk to Kitty O’Shea’s near Place Vendôme was basically in vain. It was practically empty, there was a hole in the door window, like it had been shot at, and – another bad sign – it didn’t have any beer mats.  

2 September, Sunday 

Place St. André des Arts, 3pm, at a café of the same saint’s name, on a cool, breezy side street: I saw a sign earlier that said 28° but I’m erring on the side of chilly here. A girl is upset at a nearby table but the guy keeps talking like his voice is the most important thing to hear. My back seems quite cold. I try to watch my back. I think the guy is dumping her. He’s getting more agitated. He’s dumping her (“Je dépars”). A bunch of teenage girls with female intuition (“Une bagarre,” said one) are now sitting and watching from the other side of the narrow street. But here’s my food.  

3 September, Monday 

I went back to The Cork and Cavan last night and sat by the canal until I saw a few older people going in and out. I got a seat at the bar and the young Kerry barman started talking and eventually he confirmed that the most tanked-up person in the pub was the owner. I ended up sitting beside him. His Japanese wife joined in and told me they had rows over disciplining their young son. It turned out to be a place that welded a smile to my face. 

The owner said his son was actually doing more than OK in his class. His wife also gave him credit for doing sports and activities with the boy, too, but his comically confidential punchline concerned a key piece of info in the boy’s possession.  

“He knows I’m a millionaire.” 

The top man* insisted on getting me a last drink and before that the Kerryman had given me one on the house, saying it was a French tradition, like a buy-back, I suppose. I enjoyed the pantomime. 

*The last time I saw him on the premises (December 2013) he was standing on the counter at one stage and speaking Irish at another. 

A Thunderstorm in Florence 

Florence is an anthill. Swarming with tourists, it can be difficult to get out of but the last time I was there (July 2014), I wasn’t the only person showing some exasperation. A tall American father was pulling his little son along past the Duomo and the kid was singing or chanting something – something very repetitive, I guess – and the American dad looked down at him and pleaded, “For Christ’s sake, will you knock it off!” 

That last time, on a waiting train at Santa Maria Novella, with my head and torso melting after a hot Florentine afternoon, I was giving out about a young prick from Portugal or Brazil taking up three seats with three cases. His two nearby buddies removed theirs but, just then, we got seats behind him, as directed by a cooling suggestion from three Italian women seated together in the carriage. Later I enjoyed seeing him bang his head off the overhead rack, blinded by his baseball cap and shades. 

On 24 June 2013, the bus tour in contrast hadn’t even taken an hour in the fresh air. It sped around a shorter, darkening route, minus Santa Croce, but at least it was over before the deluge. The omission of Santa Croce was due to the annual Calcio storico ‘sporting’ free-for-all, which the impending thunderstorm also rained off that afternoon.

The banks of the Arno are the part of the city I like to look at most. The river holds the story I remember most. In 1304, the arts of Florence included a forerunner of reality TV. A staged performance of Hell had been advertised to take place by the Carraia bridge in a theatre that was set up on boats in the river. There were fires, naked souls screaming for mercy, master demons and henchmen devils wielding pitchforks. Overloaded with spectators who had crowded onto it, the bridge collapsed. It was said afterwards that those who’d gone to see Hell had got exactly what they sought. 

As we got off the open-top bus, my father asked for chips, having developed a taste for the McDonalds variety in his eighties. The rain started during a shared quarter-pounder meal beside Santa Maria Novella, where I took the burger. At the table my mother rustled in her bag and produced a baby Bacardi and put it into the Coke. Then she revealed he had expressed to her a wish to see the Duomo. 

Outside, the rain was getting heavier by the minute. She rustled in her bag again. They donned plastic macs and I got the umbrella, which was broken. A few hundred yards away, the piazza was by then a pond, ankle-deep under thunder and lightning. The authorities had shut the door of the Duomo.  

I told my father to go back to the Baptistery, where she had ducked into the doorway. A young man there with a clipboard told her she couldn’t stay because there was a christening on but then he let her be after she used the one phrase of the English-speaking nations that is understood by all others. 

By then my father was holding another broken umbrella, after a failed investment by my mother. An African hawker tried to sell him a third one but even he had to laugh when my father asked him a question.  

“Is it as good as this one?”  

By the time we made it back to the station the elements had eased off. At first, I couldn’t find a ticket validating machine on our platform. I asked two inspectors who were talking at the far end. One of them just waved me away with words that included “schermo” and “binario” but where was the schermo on the binario? That was what I wanted to know. It turned out to be half-concealed at the entrance to the platform but then another train delay invalidated all the urgency. All we had to do then was dry out. 

On the train I asked a glamorous, dark young woman across the aisle, in order to make doubly sure it really was the one for Viareggio. When she learned we were Irish and I was the minder, she looked at my father and said something that made him say, “Eh, she doesn’t like me,” but she’d only offered her impression that he looked a bit Italian. 

The inspector with the wave showed up with his Germanic eyes and his short beard, a dodgy Franco Nero or Gian Maria Volonte. His first move in the carriage was to eject an African hawker (“Scende da quà”). After punching our tickets, he gave a sinister spaghetti-western smile and politely said, Grazie. 

Last Exit to Salzburg 

February 2015 

At the Staatsbrücke bridge over the Salzach two cops were checking their sub-machine guns and one popped a bullet from a clip out onto the ground as I passed. Having checked into the Hotel Mozart, I made my way back along Linzergasse to the river. I slipped curiously up the old and narrow Steingasse to verify an address from the imagination of the Grimms. The house, in business since Mozart’s time, belonged deep in a wood. There was even a red button beside the heavy door.  

Turning back, I crossed the Salzach and went into the Zipfer Bierhaus for a grill and a drink. After dark I went down some stairs into the imaginatively named Shamrock pub to watch a match. The barman was from Cork and before he finished his shift at eight, D. B. asked would I still be there if he came back later. I assured him I would be. I was. 

An afternoon customer who returned was a man from Yorkshire but anyway his night ended badly after he got into an argument with a little Arab at the counter. Over a stool, I think. One of the other barmen told him he’d had enough and, outside, he took a swing at a bouncer with a shaved head. That only earned him a bloody nose, which then necessitated an ambulance, which could be observed, up on the quay, through the high windows. 

The fact that a strawberry blonde in her early thirties later came over when I was full of drink in the by-then crowded bar (live band, Valentine’s night) must have meant that she liked the cut of my jib or else thought I was kind for having helped a disabled girl get through the crowd as far as the toilets and back. My arm was soon around her and her hair was in my face. She asked why I didn’t just speak English to her, when German aphasia was setting in. I can’t have been that bad, though, because when it was all over, I stopped at the Würstelstand across Staatsbrücke for a bottle of water. It was very late.  

The next day I tried the email address she’d provided along with a phone number. She had a six-syllable name, like that of a ski jumper or an opera singer. Katharina S. In the mail I explained my German was a bit better today and asked her to meet for dinner or a coffee, oder etwas zivilisiert. I’d made a mess of her number the night before by putting the code for Ireland in front of it. She replied to the mail sometime in the afternoon. Das ist wirklich sehr charmant von dir … but she was already on her way back to Vienna. It turned out she was a shrink. Up to their necks in bulimics and anorexics, who knows? 

A couple of days later I ended up back in the Zipfer B., for the same grill. A young shoe salesman, Christian S., sat down at the big wooden table. By the time he decided to stay and find a hotel, I’d noticed he was very keen on the beer. He said he’d driven over from Bavaria that day to get away from Fasching (carnival). He also explained that one piece of their folk wisdom was enough if one wanted to understand Bavarians – the view that if something wasn’t a complete disaster then it should be looked on as a success. 

I left him there after three hours but said I’d be in the Shamrock later. After another shower, back at the hotel, I fell asleep for an hour. On getting to the pub, I didn’t notice him at first but then overheard the Bavarian Al Bundy nearby, putting his oar into a couple who seemed to be English. He was locked by then and I wanted Christian to drink some water but I ended up with it instead.  

Leaning over the counter to tell the manager there had been a misunderstanding – that the water was my recommendation for my man – helped to clarify the situation.  

Es gab ein Missverständis. Das Wasser war meine Empfehlung für ihn.  

The manager then leaned forward too.  

“He’s an annoying prick who won’t get served anymore.” 

After poor Christian left, quietly at least, I got talking to that couple. The guy was English. He asked if I wanted to have a drink with them somewhere else and she nodded and smiled, so we went to O’Malley’s, which was right next door. These were the only places with any life, at least midweek.  

Though from Swindon, he looked Middle Eastern, but the top-heavy and good-looking blonde was from the Dutch-German border. He got harmlessly drunk while moving his arms to the likes of Oasis and Stereophonics on the speakers and she told me she’d had a stroke eighteen months earlier, as a result of which she’d put on “twenty kilos” and lost her job in event management. I told her she was lovely and added she was lucky she wasn’t dead. Or worse.  

He was with BMW and had a “problem” learning German, although, he claimed, knowing Turkish would have been more useful at work. Together eight years, she had two kids and they lived in Munich. This night was their anniversary. They were nice people. I drank very little.  

In the morning nonetheless, Kapuzinerberg was still a tough climb, even forty-eight hours after waking up wrecked after Valentine’s night, and even after the scrambled egg and scrambled rasher breakfast at the hotel, over which I could hear an Irish table, older than me, talking about hangovers. Kapuzinerberg was still well worth it for the view of the river, the snow-covered city and the high castle. Then I crossed the river and took the funicular up to Hohensalzburg. The castle heights were even brighter and we seemed to be above the zero-degree haze.

Salzburg had a lot of well-wrapped beggars hunkered down. Most but not all were Roma but all seemed to call out cheerfully (“Hallo!” or “Grüss Gott!”) to passers-by. By the sound of them at least, they were the chirpiest homeless I’d ever come across. 

Overcast Munich was very cold the next day. One guy on the street asked for €2 for a coffee and then asked had I a heart but, well dressed as he was, he wasn’t even parked in a begging spot. I did give a euro to one with one leg, on Bayerstrasse. Another time I saw two beggars there without feet. One at least had knees, which kept him upright, like Toulouse-Lautrec. 

August 2015 

On entering Salzburg’s Mirabell gardens, where there had been chunks of ice in the fountains in February, my mother and I passed two very dark chaps with a clarinet and accordion, playing Stranger on the Shore. “Now they are gypsies,” I said. They looked very different from the conservatory student string quartet we had watched play a tango on Kärntner Strasse in Vienna the day before.  

A reminder that US citizens usually like to catch a show came from a woman who keenly spotted a marionette theatre poster as we left the gardens. We walked to the Dom and then dined outside at the Zipfer. My mother became convinced that Salzburg was the classiest place, with the most stylish clothes.  

“Have you noticed how soft-spoken the people are here?” I asked.  

Even without much of an ear for German accents and dialects, one can almost always identify Germans in a predictable Austrian dining scenario, where everyone is speaking German, because it will be the only loud table, busy comparing Austria with Germany. 

After there it was a matter of a trail of churches plus the sight and sounds of a jazzy procession of bishops, skeletons and devils on their way to put on an Everyman (“Jedermann”) show for the crowd on the stand that had been erected on the enclosed Domplatz by the cathedral. 

I had just a few in the Shamrock that night. D. B. told me about his most recent abstract paintings that might soon get some café exhibition space but, on a less abstract note, it seemed they had to put up with a lot of tourists messing, in and around the pub. He’d recently opened the door onto the quay well after closing time only to be greeted by the sight of an American girl rolling around on the ground, fighting another girl of unknown nationality, in front of cops and onlookers.  

After there I crossed the river and again walked up Steingasse, which was spooky in the dark. A warm red light was on over the magic door as I passed but there was a restaurant, clinking and nattering, right across the alley, though the few diners al fresco were shielded from the sinners by some plants. 

Stories of Linz 

I had passed through Hitler’s hometown before I ever got out there. In a heat wave in August 2015, a Hamburg gentleman of about sixty spotted me at breakfast in Vienna, applying a serviette to my face. He came over, hoarsely repeating the German word for Hell.  

“Hölle! Hölle!” 

On the train to Salzburg that day my mother and I got talking to a retired American couple who’d sold their house in upstate New York to move to Florida. I think Bob sold his mass of Waterford glass in the house on eBay. His wife had fallen off the train that had brought them as far as Linz. I didn’t ask why they had chosen to change trains in Linz. They were thinking of squeezing in the Sound of Music tour, despite the lack of enthusiasm of the holiday planner, their daughter. 

We left our Salzburg hotel two mornings later. In the station a black vintage train pulled up at our platform. Uniformed serving staff jumped out to unravel short rolls of red carpet below each carriage door. Who could these passengers be? They were Australian casualties from Linz. They had to be practically carried off. One old lady was handed down a set of wheels like those that belong in a nursing home. The next woman out that door was a bit younger, and had better pins, but she sported a broken arm. 

I got off in Linz that December. Down past Hauptplatz, the bridge over the Danube crosses to the Urfahr end of the city. The car lights on the bridge shone through the murk as an icy mist blew up from the water. Heading back to the main square I found a suitably small and dark pub down a long tunnel that is typical of Upper Austria. 

The pretty young blonde behind the counter didn’t know what a hot whiskey was so I had a few bottles of Weizenbier instead. My eyes at times were stinging with the smoke, long banned in Ireland, as the place filled up. As stated, it was small and dark, but there was a lot of people then and it was quite amazing how the girl, Laura, handled it all alone. Some people were coming to the counter, some were ordering from tables, some were paying up front, some were running a tab. When the Turkish boss turned up and held a full ashtray under her nose, as an admonition, she understandably rolled her eyes and shook her head (“Ah, du spasst mich”). Anyway, she soon moved on to better things. 

The guy next to me at the counter wouldn’t have looked out of place among the crew of U-96 (Das Boot), down with all the scraggy beards and hunted eyes. He said the informal people of Upper Austria hadn’t much use for Sie, except with Polizei und Richter (police and judges).  

He ordered something that looked like a grilled slice of a large brown loaf, with some pizza toppings. He told me what it was called (Holzknecht) and then I had it too. It was a traditional meal for poor people working in the woods. 

The next night saw a different barmaid there, a dark-haired girl with what I thought were some Italian features but also with rather exotic eyes. I got talking to a bespectacled young darts fan who was only into the darts on TV because some Austrian had qualified for the last whatever of the world championship. He wasn’t the only person during this trip to ask,  Warum Österreich? As for why Austria, I summarised a quote from the actor Christoph Waltz.  

Austrians tend to make their lives easier, so, first of all, they are very polite and second, they don’t mean it… The difference between Austrians and Germans is very much like Irish and English.  

Aristocratic titles have been banned since 1918 but Austrians compensate for this deprivation with comically excessive use of academic ones. Some people even use a different calling card (e.g. one that uses “von” in the name) when dealing with Germany, where such elaboration remains legal. 

The down-to-earth impression made by Linz that first time brought me back for a couple of days in October 2017. While we were enjoying coffee and dessert in the elegant Café Traxlmayr at lunchtime, a pair of retired ladies chatting intently over a couple of tall beers attracted the attention of my wingman (JP).  

“Fair play to the two old dears, tanning the pints in the middle of the day.”  

Linz is also a handy base for visiting truly scenic places like Steyr or, in Bavaria, the town of Passau. Passau is very like Steyr but it’s a college town, whereas Steyr is known for making tractors and guns. The train from Linz in 2015 had reached Steyr before dusk, having followed a bend on the Enns that there meets the river that gives the town its name. This place was like a fairy tale town. Schubert loved it and wrote the Trout Quintet there in 1819. Empty dark alleys were less spooky than dreamlike. The wind off the rivers was icy.  

At a pub by the name of Sir Patrick, one had to press a buzzer to be let in. There, an inquisitive but very inebriated Opel agent of about sixty was unimpressed by any mention of Ireland. Sepp later gave up insisting I was an Englishman, also in the motor trade (“Du bist Agent?”) for the suggestion I was from Norway. A taxi finally took him away but not before he also enquired if I was looking for a fight (“Willst du kämpfen?”), though not necessarily with him. 

Back in Linz, in 2017, JP and I ended up in the small, dark place once more. The girl with the exotic eyes was still behind the counter. They were green; interesting; hard to read. A local Celtic fan with communist leanings told me her name. She wasn’t Italian. I took a photo of a young chap buckled at a table where she kindly left a pint of water. JP had earlier observed him sucking on a thick cigar, though the electric fan in the pub did make the smoke a lot more tolerable than it used to be.

On the train to Vienna in the morning, a row developed between the couple sitting at the table across from ours. She was on the phone for a long time first, a good-looking girl with faintly Asiatic features. Russian, I guessed, from a few words I could make out, such as mozhnó, droog and rabot. When he wasn’t eating (an apple, a banana, other stuff) or sleeping behind a hanging jacket, he spoke to her in English and his accent was Germanic (i.e. Austrian). 

They had a weekend engagement in Vienna, so flowers and a present had to be bought for their hosts, but first he wanted to deposit her at the Albertina while he walked around for a while. Unfortunately for her, it seemed he intended for her to carry three bags around while at the museum.  

“I’m shocked,” she said, several times. She also observed that he was “the man in this couple”, which had Mister Sensitive asking how she managed whenever she was on her own. She countered with, “But I’m not on my own now”, so he offered to carry one bag. 

When the train stopped at Wien Hbf, he told her there was no need to get off immediately, as it wouldn’t move on towards the airport for a few minutes, but she really had heard enough by then and left the scene. He reluctantly followed. There would be nothing happily ever after in that relationship. She’d also got in a dig about him always finding the time and opportunity to eat, so it sounded like she was quite familiar with the various ways he would suit himself, if given half a chance.  

Three times in 2018 I went back to Linz to see the soft-spoken girl with the green eyes. The young man from Vienna who sat beside me on the next plane referred to it as an untypical destination. At the Hotel Wolfinger my fourth-floor room overlooked the Hauptplatz. I could hear a clarinet by one of the cafés below my window. The trams rolled up and down through the long square with a steady rumble.  

From the steps around the Trinity column down there, she pointed to a special little train idling nearby. Nächstes mal. Next time, we’d be running up that hill, and we duly took that little train up to the wooded Pöstlingberg and wandered around for an afternoon.  

It was a bit windy up there but we got something to eat and saw some deer up close. They were in a kind of dry moat. The little stag was munching leaves unperturbed, up by the fence, while the others came and went via a nearby slope. The eyes were wild. One of the lads from a nearby tree surgeon gang then threw the stag another branch of leaves. 

She laughed when told of the whispering Americans on the train, the time I came via Regensburg in Bavaria.  

“Ja is the German for yes, right, so what’s Jawohl?”  

One of the two women across the table said she’d get a translation on her phone. A mechanical voice then broadcast, Jawohl! Jawohl! to the entire carriage before the phone screen coughed up the meaning. The two women went on to talk about restraining kids but that seemed to be part of their day jobs. 

It was a quiet Sunday night in the pub the night an old nutter with a cravat and smelly feet marched in with his sunglasses on and started causing hassle about the service, the drink and the music.  

“Diese Musik ist Gift für mich!”  

Poison it may have been to him but it wasn’t even loud. Feeling a mixture of irritation and gallantry, I used du when telling him in exasperation to leave the girl alone and wait for his Guinness to settle. In a how-dare-you tone of voice he announced he had a doctorate (“Summa cum laude” blahdy blah). When I said that so did I (“Ich auch”), he then said he had two of them.  

Then he called the cops to report the impudent Gast at the counter but he quickly paid up and fled when she told him she’d had enough of him and called the owner. Then two cops walked in, so we had to do a bit of explaining. Anyway, the Polizei seemed to be familiar with this character and they soon left us in peace. We did a gentle high five before she observed the nut-job wasn’t as bad as the Nazi who had thrown a pint over her, some other night. 

It wasn’t the only place in Linz where I saw someone get barred. In Thüsen Tak the metal from the speakers was generally boring but it wasn’t too loud. One entrant to the pub was refused service. The rather pissed but well-dressed, middle-class gentleman was in a better state than many drunks at home. All he did to cause offence was bow extravagantly to the rockers at the low tables but, anyway, a good suit must be the new long hair, to be met with a frown and expulsion. 

From midnight the small place often got busier as the smoke got worse. A Bono-loving lush wanted me to go on to a club. She insisted Austria was full of Nazis but I said so was Ireland and maintained Bono was a tax-dodging hypocrite, whereas at least Falco had never droned on about Africa.  

In January 2019 the landscape in Austria was snowy and icy. On the train an Elvis impersonator – der König – sat down with his kit bag nearby before I moved to the dining car, where the low drone of a deep American voice was a constant. It went on and on about a cookery class. The man’s hair, like the King’s, was a mite darker than it should have been at his age. 

Having checked into the hotel, I had to get something quick to eat. The cold froze my arse in a heavy snowfall on the way down Landstrasse to the famous Bosner Eck hotdog stand. The lights of that long street looked wonderful through the brief blizzard but I was almost sick with the cold. Back at the hotel I donned a pair of pyjama-style long-johns before heading to the pub. 

She had put a “Reserviert” card at my favourite end of the counter. It was there that weekend that I enjoyed a long conversation with a Stammgast, a regular named S., who remarked on the way she smiled at my presence.  

As the crow flies, Linz is a thousand miles from home. She had already cooked for me, and she had served up Holzknecht in the bar, and she had given free shots of tequila, but it’s still best to remember some words of Pozzo in Waiting for Godot. 

I have given them bones, I have talked to them about this and that, I have explained the twilight… 

At any rate, S. told a story about getting his own back on some Russians, who had spiked him with gherkins injected with vodka, by spiking them with an Austrian elixir called Sturm, which also acts as a laxative. This was in the context of a major deal to build some heavy industrial plant in Ukraine.  

In his workplace he was “Herr Doktor”, of course, though he did amusingly describe the German managerial habit of shouting as useless for Austrian productivity. His face dropped a little only when I included Mauthausen in the list of all the Austrian places I’d been. Normally I omit that but this time I threw it in, for the hell of it.  

On one of the trains that I’ve taken out of Linz sat a retired nurse. After I put her heavy bag up on the rack, we chatted all the way to Vienna. Her husband, a railwayman, had died in 2010. Her parents came from Steyr. She said they had never bought into the Nazi thing and added that her father had taken consistent pleasure after the war in reminding those who did that they had done so.  

In Austrian culture it seems no one admitting to cheering Hitler on Heldenplatz in Vienna in 1938 is the other side of the comic coin of the Irish ‘all’ claiming to have been in the GPO for Easter 1916. 

The Quarry at Mauthausen 

28 December 2015 

The train from Linz to Mauthausen took only about twenty minutes. There were no taxis at the station and I did the 5 km winding hike uphill to the camp.  When I got high enough away from the wet Danube fog, the sun lightened the soup, but I still could see f*ck all except some of the road in front. I was even wondering was it just the murk or was it the effort of the climb too. I started wiping (steam?) off my glasses. 

Higher again, the sun was just beginning to burn off some of the fog in the afternoon. The Lager loomed, finally, as a long stone fort of no great height on top of the hill. A woman at the visitors’ centre – a concrete maze – told me it was closed and she unlocked a door to get me a brochure – so I wasn’t going to see the gas chamber – but she added I could walk around the exterior.

Past the monuments, past the wall with a moving verse from Brecht’s poem Deutschland (see below) the highest fog had cleared. There was a piece or two of metal-mesh building site fencing across the top of the rough stone path down to the Todesstiege (death stairs) and the quarry but it was possible to get around that with no trouble. This was the place I most wanted to see. 

I was the only one down there, where the fog was brightly waxing and waning. At the time it didn’t feel eerie but oddly peaceful and even beautiful, by the black pond below the cliff.

Forty nationalities were consigned to hell in that place. It was like the UN of concentration camps. There is even a monument to the Albanians. Of the thousands of Spaniards who had fled to France in 1939 to escape from Franco only to end up at Mauthausen or one of its satellite camps, the lowest estimate states that 4,427 were killed.   

All the first consignment of Dutch Jews sent here in 1942 were thrown off the quarry cliff that the SS nicknamed die Fallschirmspringer Wand, the Parachutists’ Wall. Many other prisoners saved the SS the trouble and just jumped. 

On the way back up the leafy Todesstiege I counted the 186 steps, stopping to straighten my legs on nos. 75, 100 & 130, though I wasn’t carrying any granite block and the steps are a lot neater now than they were back in the day.  

I took a look then around the back of the camp. Though the entrance is on the left-hand side, where I got a photo of the gravelly yard via the gap under the wooden gates of the entrance arch, the front is really the long side wall facing the road. Anyway, around the back there was no wall but a fence topped with barbed wire. The remaining huts could be seen across a wide open space drenched in sunshine. From there a short-cut made for a steeper descent into the fog that gloomily took me back to Mauthausen village.  

O Deutschland, bleiche Mutter! 

Wie haben deine Söhne dich zugerichtet 

Daß du unter den Völkern sitzest 

Ein Gespött oder eine Furcht! 

(Oh Germany, pale mother / How your sons have abused you / That you sit among the peoples / A mockery or a dread). 

Innsbruck Trains 

August 2016 

On the three-and-a-half-hour train journey to Innsbruck from Verona, through the Brenner Pass, a north German family of three shared our compartment most of the way. They had just spent ten days hiking south over the Alps. The only scary incident involved having to run from lightning to reach the next rest hut.  

The wife was a pigtail blonde, predictably a bit literal, but kind, and young in spirit. Early forties, I imagined. The husband mentioned seeing the Cliffs of Moher on the Irish west coast and then the only other occupant – an Italian woman – suddenly produced a picture of the cliffs on her phone. I hadn’t the heart to mention that they had become a notorious suicide spot.  

My card worked without the pin at the hotel in Innsbruck. Nonetheless I needed to compile a few choice phrases for a review inspired by the Verona incident and the charmless reaction at that desk that morning. My mother and I had an OK meal in the Altstadt that evening but by the time we emerged the odd drop from the grey sky and the foggy Nordkette peaks had turned to rain.  

In the morning at a post office over the bridge I picked up €500 sent by my brother, via Western Union.  The curious, uniformed lady of a very uncertain age wanted to know what the Irish language stuff meant on the passport. She pointed to it like it was hieroglyphics but nodded her acceptance when I assured her it meant the same as the English. 

We had trouble finding seats on the train to Munich but eventually got in among two young blondes unfamiliar to each other. When a middle-aged English couple with too much luggage later boarded our carriage and couldn’t find seats, it led to talk in our compartment.  

These two Brits were in shorts and sun hats, yet each had a big rucksack and a wheelie bag, each. They caused the good-looking girl at the window to roll her eyes at me as she retook her seat after a quick smoke on the platform.  

It was time to put some distance between us and the latest arrivals.  

“Ja, ich habe gehört,” I said. 

That was in reference to having heard the woman laughing hysterically and then swearing, at the end of the carriage (“Farking hell… This is farking ridiculous” etc). 

“Die sind Englander. Wir kommen aus Irland.” 

The girl was interested and happy to hear that, as was the gorgeous student with the pigtail and the anatomy book near the door on my mother’s side. She beamed as she closed the book of skeletons, took off her black-framed reading glasses and asked in German if I’d liked Innsbruck.  

I explained that I’d been there before too, on my own. I recalled the first time heading up Maria-Theresien Strasse at nightfall, with a royal blue sky reflecting off the white Nordkette. No camera can convey how the mountain chain towers over the city, where the shop fronts glowed though all were closed.

I went on to outline the Verona hassle to both. Was it Juliet’s revenge or Juliet’s curse? We didn’t go to see her bloody balcony but everything was going OK until I paid the hotel bill. We’d seen a lot that morning. There were lots of tourists there speaking German and French but not many Americans or Asians. Or Brits. We crossed Ponte Pietra below the huge cypresses on the Roman theatre hill.

Then a young Gianna Ten-Thumbs at reception pressed something she shouldn’t have and somehow locked my pin. She looked like she didn’t know what she was doing and a sweet one (a bit older) had to give some guidance before she was, eh, finished with me. My worries started when I went out then to get some cash. It was all hassle after that. I should have brought more cash. At least my mother still had €327 in her bag.  

I’d thought I wouldn’t complain online but the dismissive attitude of the charmless young manageress with the glasses changed my mind. “Hotel Siena” would get a roasting. The defensive aggression kicked off with her saying  

(a) it wasn’t nice;  

(b) it was a serious matter to make such an accusation.  

I wasn’t accusing anyone of a crime or deliberate wrongdoing. I said it was clearly a mistake but, given she wanted to talk about seriousness, my “Siamo nei guai a causa di questo” (‘We’re in trouble because of this’) was only met with another contemptuous, f*ck-you shrug.  

I told them to be careful in case it happened again but didn’t rear up entirely because we still wanted to get the other (i.e. the sweet, competent) girl to call us a taxi. It was pissing rain outside. There had been lightning in the night, in the distance. Early that morning, heavy rain had thumped some nearby roof or awning and that woke me at half past six. Once I got back home and simply changed the pin code at the bank, the card worked as normal. There was nothing wrong with it that hadn’t happened in Verona. 

In Alghero, in September 2022, in the sunlit doorway to the marble stairs of the old seafront block, our cool landlord Felice (in his voice of gravel) referred to our arrival the day before, saying it hadn’t been necessary to dump all the cash out of our pockets and bags after their card reader hadn’t worked. (The card was fine when I found a bank ATM.)  

Then I told him the Verona story, with an in-out hand gesture indicating the teen messing with the card… buffa con la mia carta … ma la oltra ragazza, la figlia del capo …  molto scortese … (he repeated the last phrase about the boss’s daughter (‘very rude’) with a dawning, understanding nod) … adesso sempre abbiamo i contanti, per evitare… (‘now we always have the cash, to avoid…’).  

The two girls on the Munich train in contrast were very sweet and curious. The one beside me had lovely varnish on her toenails (somewhere between pink and orange) and expensive sandals. The ladies were open-mouthed again when I explained that we lived on the south coast and so I’d have to drive 200 km after Dublin. The girl with the anatomy book got off at Kufstein and sweetly said, Auf Wiedersehen, not just to us but also to the one beside me, who softly replied with, Tschüss.  

There was a fella in mountain boots on my left who never said anything, except one whispered “F*ck” at his phone, but he was all ears. At least he didn’t look like another Englander. He even smiled once or twice, for example when I had to stick my head through the compartment doorway to retrieve my mother who had walked past after a toilet break. We got off at Munich Ost and the girl at the window bade me farewell twice, to be sure, as I stood in the corridor with our bags, without swearing, while waiting for the train to stop. 

Bordeaux and Biarritz 

2017 

17 June, Saturday 

The Café Brun deejay is behind my end of the counter. He had a problem with his Mac charger. Wires exposed on the lead meant it was fumé – i.e. ‘smoked’ – and he had to shoot home on his scooter for another. “Lor” (i.e. Lorenzo) also told me he had been ordered by le patron to play Eighties stuff tonight but I got him to put on some French hits from that decade, starting with France Gall and Ella Elle L’a. The crowd liked that. Anyway, there was a bit too much English junk otherwise (e.g. Pass the Dutchie) but Hoegaarden’s on tap & I even got a buy-back. I’ll be back. 

After leaving there I wandered around some more, lingering in Place St. Pierre and thinking this city is lovely, not least at night with the calm, warm ambiance. It’s a mini-Paris, without the hassle.

I went back to the Black Velvet Bar and had a few more. I was joined by two young lads, one of whom banned the other from practising his English. The former later threw up in the toilets, in a brief time-out. Another character to appear was a flower seller in a fetching lady’s wig (of a blonde). Except he wasn’t selling flowers. They were plastic sticks with lights in them. He had a quick drink and kept going. The other time-passer was the silent TV screen showing a documentary on Lemmy. The subtitles were English. It never ended. Almost like Lemmy. 

18 June, Sunday 

La Terrasse St. Pierre: an elderly American woman nearby seems to have married more people than Elizabeth Taylor but in a professional capacity. She was on about doing it in Nepal and then performing on the side of some hill somewhere else. That was before she got on to her “Anne Frank experience” but sadly I didn’t catch those details. I’m waiting for a duck burger. I only ordered it because burger du canard is chalked on the board. I’m curious. 

19 June, Monday 

This morning I got a taxi to the station with an hour and a half to spare. If you tell a Frenchman that you’re from Ireland it seems fifty-fifty that he’ll mention rugby. At the station I just sat there, conserving energy. Nearby a little blonde of five or six watched a lame pigeon. She spoke to her father. Il a mal.  

On the train, a quite elegant lady sat across the table but spent much of her time nose-picking, while reading documents. I nodded off a few times but in Biarritz there were no taxis at the station. Got a bus for a euro to the Mairie and then set off on foot in the general direction of the hotel. A green neon pharmacy sign said thirty-six degrees.  

Bag or no bag, I took a break in the church of Ste. Eugénie before getting the camera out along the rocky seafront. This is a tasty resort. Surf crashes on the rocks both onshore and offshore and falls back into the varying twinkling shades of blue. The swimmers down below look and sound happy.

Though I found the street name at a T-junction, I took the wrong turn that wound around to a very hot hill but, up that slope, a retired gent put me right. Je vous accompagne. The road signs are bilingual. At the hotel, Le Gamaritz, I was let in and processed by a lovely (both senses) girl in her twenties who reminded me that this wasn’t so much France as le Pays basque. Her father was recently in Ireland. He liked la bière. 

While I was out at the tip of Rocher de la Vierge there was a few swimmers and surfers hundreds of yards offshore but still inside the outer rocks. There must be strong currents, though, as they changed position very fast. From there I wandered around the cliffs to the rocky harbour that now only contains pleasure craft. I dined well under the blue awnings at Casa Juan Pedro, which overlooks the little Port des Pêcheurs. A fillet of hake and a half-litre carafe of white wine were followed by some ice cream with fruit.  

The unshaven waiter in his thirties looked like a man to go through the motions but he was cool. At first, he answered my opening French in English but, when I calmly persisted with my Bordeaux habit, he gave me a chance as maybe not being a complete spud-mouth and didn’t bother with English anymore. Given the name of the joint, French may well not have been his first language either. Someone else took the modest payment and I had to go find him to give him a fiver as I left. He smiled warmly in the early evening sunshine and wished me well, as one human being to another. 

Western Slovakia 

September 2019 

Bratislava 

The first meal is often the simplest and most functional. Burgers and chips (hranolky, a useful word in Czech and Slovak). The first pub was Čierny Pes (the Black Dog), a proper Slovak bar back then. From there we went down the narrow, cobbled Na Vŕšku to the half-Irish Uisce Beatha, which had a “No Stags” sign on the door. The barmaid, Lucia, was a pretty and polite Slovak brunette with an Irish surname (that of her ex).  

Pretty, polite and honest, she proved to be the high point of that joint. In the low light, I mistook the denomination of euro note I gave her, for herself, before we left, and I wouldn’t have known the difference had she not looked at it. She put the twenty back on the counter, saying, “No, that’s too much,” after which I made her keep it, as a reward. The lady let me kiss her (hand) goodnight. 

After breakfast at the far end of the street below Michael’s Gate, the bright morning after the night before meant a sweaty climb to the Castle. At least the castle shop had a couch, to cool off on. I bought some postcards to justify the seat. Hotovost means cash in both Czech and Slovak, and s kartou with a card.

I usually feel tired in galleries and museums. Like Alan Bennett, I’m always looking for a seat or glad to find one. Why is that? Is it a mixture of slow walking and poor ventilation?  

August 1998 involved a morning visit to the Edvard Munch Museum in Oslo. There I was sorely tempted to lie down on Munch’s bed in the basement. In the gloom it proved impossible not to laugh at the morbid captions e.g. Dead Mother with Child. I bought a poster and two cards. The poster was of a cheerful painting called Weeping Nude. 

One more note on Oslo: my Cork mate K. lives there and in March 1999 he and I were wandering around looking for a pub showing an Irish rugby match. We ended up in a place that only had rugby on the radio. BBC commentary on England v. Wales. There was no one else there only an Irish barmaid, two French guys and a little Welshman with a sidekick who stood back and said absolutely nothing. These four lads had been on the same quest and just bumped into each other on the street.

Wales won with a last-minute try and the Welshman was hopping around and wanting to buy everyone a drink. K. then insisted he’d do it, in honour of Wales. Then one of the French fellas asked the Welshman if he lived there.

“No, just passing through.”

I leaned back at the counter and caught his eye.

“Anonymity is a great thing, isn’t it?”

His eyes betrayed alarm but he relaxed when he copped I’d say nothing. When he and his minder left, I revealed he was James Dean Bradfield. The French fellas confessed they’d been wondering why he’d got stopped on the street outside for an autograph. K. shook his head.

“I knew I knew him from somewhere but assumed he was someone I’d run into on the building sites in London. And there’s me buying him drink, and him a millionaire!”

Upon descending from Bratislava Castle, we stopped at a cafe beside St. Martin’s cathedral. One of the lads (P.) wanted some white bread slices on top of the toast on the platter my two companions shared. He asked me to sort it out, so I had a go.  

Môj priateľ hľadá… eh… normálny chléb. Prosím (‘please’ in Czech and Slovak). 

Having got the gist from that effort and from the slicing motion of my hand, the amused lady of the caff leaned forward with careful articulation and corrected the “chléb” (Czech) to “chlieb”  (Slovak). I was gently put back in my box before she went inside for the sliced pan. 

The old town calm of Bratislava lacks the attitude of most capital cities I’ve seen, probably because it’s a relatively new one, in our time. Meandering, photo-taking, was an essay in afternoon relaxation that September. This was exemplified by shots of a boy and girl in a courtyard, playing chess with pieces almost as big as traffic cones.  

June 2016 

Three years earlier I was in a café off Hlavné námestie, the main square in the old town, with a pot of tea. The Earl Grey (“Early Grey” on the menu) was nice but the kitchen had closed and there was a terrific downpour outside. When Smooth Criminal came on the Michael Jackson CD, I could move on, through the rain which had eased a bit, at best. That song always puts pep in the step.  

I got some novädzi gúlaš nearby, at a place where a young-ish American with long hair slicked back behind his ears was wearing sunglasses. On a rainy night. At an unlit table. He ignored both Asian waiters who thanked him as he departed.  

On the walk back to the hotel I passed an English stag party near Michael’s Gate. Two of the lads were the regulation shirtless, on a rainy night, outside a pub. The trams made an eerie, whistling sound in the wet. The wheels were whining. 

I got truly soaked in the morning, trying to get some more Staré mesto (‘old town’) photos before flying home. It had started so well, when I was idly peering through tall railings at the presidents of (checks notes) Switzerland and Slovakia inspecting a guard of honour at the palace. I’d headed off with a short blue plastic mac but it was of little use in the next deluge. I had no time to take proper shelter.  

Some French cyclists asked me if I knew the location of a public toilet – un chalet de nécessité, as Félicien Marceau had put it with great finesse – but my only suggestion was that they find a café and buy something in return for the convenience.  

By the time I got on the plane my trousers had dried, at least. The row in front was all fat Roma but the row in front of them was a young family of Dubs who quizzed an unenthusiastic steward about chicken nuggets (“No”) and food allergies (“Just cheese then?”). 

September 2023 

Trnava  

It was the ecclesiastical capital for the Hungarians in the Turkish time (roughly 1541-1686) and now it’s like a beautiful old mouth that, here and there, has lost a tooth to a cheap replacement. The communist house of culture on the south side of the main square is the worst example but, across from that, there’s also a post office block, of which I heard a Dutchman online observe it had at least got a lick of paint (unlike, he said, in Bulgaria). 

With a mixed heritage of Baroque and earlier medieval German settlement, from the Ostsiedlung, it’s otherwise just more texturally impressive onsite than online, even underfoot, with the rectangular paving stones, known now to me as setts, and the neat, smooth cobbles. I knew I’d be back. 

All the notable buildings seemed a bit bigger too, as did the price (€4) per modest if tasty slice of cake in some cafe near the bottom of the main street. This was despite a beer and a coffee being reasonable, as is normal in Slovakia. No Slovak is going to pay that for a couple of mouthfuls of cake. When my companion looked at the price on the receipt, he went back in and politely asked was it really €4, before giving them an ‘Are you for real?’ look and coming back out. I picked up a couple of euro coins from the table. We hadn’t needed to stop there for refreshments, no one had us over a barrel. Certainly not at an otherwise empty cafe.

On the train back to Bratislava, the only people making noise in the carriage (with their waa-waa-ing about past jobs abroad) were four young Englishmen dressed like well-fed Americans, in shorts and baseball caps.  

September 2019 

Trenčín 

It was only a tenner for the hour or so on the train northeast to Trenčín, via Trnava of all the churches. On the way out of the Hotel Elizabeth, to do the Castle, I saw the Roman inscription on the rock face of the castle hill outside the windows. There’s a back landing used as a viewing gallery. Carved in a square of concrete by men of the 2nd Auxiliary legion in 179 AD, it was rediscovered in 1852 after a storm knocked a tree concealing the key part of the rock. 

The Castle was a steeper hike than the one in Bratislava and this was also after two nights on the beer. When paying in, I found the pretty woman of the pair in the ticket office seemed to take a shine to me, complimenting the effort in Slovak and then emerging quickly to help scan the ticket at the barriers outside, which had me completely baffled. I was already melting without this embarrassment but then saw the climb went on. And on.

Still, after a cooling-off period, while sitting on a bench watching a wedding party get their photos, I did the top tower and all. The top of the castle. The narrow stairways and doorways up there proved no obstacle to the young and ignorant. Twice, when I stepped back to let someone in or out a gap, the twenty- and thirty-somethings of various nationalities breezed past my shoulder and drove on regardless. 

A lone black goat was grazing on a grassy enclosure between ramparts. A Japanese couple got snapped (by me) while filming it. I’d got it too, just below where I was standing, while doing a three-sixty of the scene, but moved the camera away to give it some privacy during a call of nature. 

December 2019 

Bratislava 

It’s usually hard to spend a lot of money in Slovakia, even at Petržalka, the other main station in in the capital. From there a taxi took me to the airport. No complaints. Petržalka station is south of the Danube and the trip took more than the unrealistic twelve minutes indicated online, and he did go over the right bridge for the airport. All the drivers at the rank looked like gypsies, I was in a hurry, and my guy did say, tridsat’ (‘thirty’) when I asked him, before getting in.  

When I sat in, he mentioned something about a meter, which turned out to be cleverly hidden between the front seats. At the airport, he uncovered the ‘meter’ like a magician (“€34”) and praised the effort in Slovak before adding he had a brother in Kilkenny. I added a fiver, for Ireland, and he looked at it (“OK, bye bye”) and got back to ushering me out of his car so he could get away.  

Afterwards, I thought he probably just knew of the ale called Kilkenny, but I was just glad to get where I had to be, in time. So, a poor man made a little extra? More power to him. Why tolerate a little chiselling, if you’re cornered? It often means an easier life, plus any Slovak who’s at it will, on average, do you for half the amount a Czech will chance.  

The Czechs tend to look down on the Slovaks and Poles as bogmen. A sense of superiority must have rubbed off on them from being surrounded by the German language on three sides. 

An Irish priest my father knew used to say that the Italians were “great Catholics but they would feck the eye out of your head” but an Italian will normally look after you if you show him respect by giving him his cut.  

There’s another thing to remember about a little chiselling and it doesn’t just apply to Italians, though such an example will suffice. In Siena, the Campo sits where the three ridges of the medieval city meet to make an inverted y on the map.

On the northern ridge at nine, on an August evening in 2014, we chanced Ristorante Vitti and its tables in a street nook with dark statuary on the back wall. The food was fine, no problem, but the best thing was the house wine. The waiter went over to a modest cooler bin familiar from shops in any Seventies childhood. He slid aside one of the two silver metallic shutters on top and pulled up a bare bottle of white, i.e. one with no label. 

It’s the kind of place that gets very mixed reviews and, the second night, we got there a bit later, and the bill was handwritten (a scribble) and, though still modest for its location, a little bit dearer than expected from the menu choice. Nevertheless, if ever you lose a fiver or so like that, you might remember that it’s late and these people want to get home after another day sprinkled with fussy demands from bores not making eye contact but assiduously photographing their plates. 

September 2023 

Bratislava 

The Black Dog (Čierny Pes) and Uisce Beatha were write-offs this time. The former was being ‘run’ by a couple of female student dopes, one of whom kept showing up at a nearby table to get her arse slapped, but we couldn’t even get served in the latter. The Irishman said he was full but arguably there was standing room, and the door was wide open. He even smugly threw in a smart remark (“You’re too late, lads”) for free, as we quietly left, for good. 

Wandering around, then, we took refuge in Jazztikot, which M. spotted and insisted on trying. That pleasantly saw out the night. No more shit. They liked us and we certainly appreciated them. M. had figured out the best Slovak draught beer number in degrees (11°) for Irish tastes. After I was handed a 12° by mistake, I gave it a go but didn’t like it. I told the girl I’d still pay for it, as I’d accepted it in the first place, but she assured us it was no problem and took it away.  

She had already served us an opening pair of elevens, in response to M. pointing at that tap, but I drink faster than M. and, as she was finishing her shift, her colleague had just presumed to draw a twelve. 

This man behind the bar ended up giving us blood-brother handshakes before we departed that night. That is, after shooing us in behind the counter for snaps, but, at this juncture, he came over to find out wtf it was that we actually wanted. The girl had left by then. At first, he seemed to wonder if we were there for a fortnight, before I managed to translate M., who was pinching his own upper arm, as if it were Popeye’s, and loudly proclaiming, 

“We’re too weak for the 12°. Too weak, I tell you! No twelve. I need eleven!” 

“No twelve, yes, I understand. Two… weeks?” 

“Povedal, že je príliš slabý.” (‘He said that he’s too weak.’) 

Then our man lifted his head with an “Ah” and, tickled by this explanation, went chuckling back behind the counter, while repeating their word for weak (“slabý”). Then he put a hand on the tap for eleven, before looking over for a final check, re launching the next round.  

“Jedenásť ,” I went, with a nod.  

It was all coming back to me now, even the numbers. He hauled back the tap and the good stuff flowed again. M. went up the back for a quick gawk at the musicians. The place wasn’t empty but it wasn’t very busy either. I wondered if there would be enough takings that night to pay them but M. said there was some kind of bottle on a table, in front of the low stage. 

Before I put a tenner in it for the veteran pair, I held it up to the bar and asked our host, “Tam, stôl?” (‘There, table?’). He nodded with enthusiasm and raised a thumb in their general direction. It already contained a few notes when I added mine. The lady and gent were quite elderly but they were competent and courteous as they went about their mellow business, which inevitably included Stranger on the Shore.  

Night in Vienna 

On the Ring, the sight of the Burgtheater recalls Thomas Bernhard’s at times grotesquely funny 1984 novel Holzfällen, which for a time turns into a rather good play, once the Actor appears, to ramble on and on about Ekdal in The Wild Duck, even while slogging through his dinner party soup.  

Suicide is a theme – the funeral earlier in the day has been for a woman who hangs herself, in some detail – but by then its treatment has turned blackly comic, as in when the host asks the Actor if working at Vienna’s Burgtheater wouldn’t give someone every reason to do that. Before the end, as if to stress the point, the host also waves his false teeth in the Actor’s face.

Behind the theatre can be found Harry Lime’s doorway in The Third Man (1949), where Orson Welles first appears by the smooth, sloping cobbles of Schreyvogelgasse. The first time I stood in the doorway (2013), there was still daylight, but lights shone from scattered windows. They reflected in others. Evening traffic hummed and rumbled on the nearby Ring, beyond which the university rose in the dusk. 

After the nearby Freyung square, on Herrengasse a drunk American woman (“I’m a human rights defender” blah blah) wanted “twenty or thirty euros for a hotel” (i.e. for more drink). ‘You must be f*cking joking,’ I thought, before I walked on (“Eh, no”). Looking back, I saw her simply waiting for the next man to pass. 

Farther down Herrengasse, the Café Central was in darkness for the night. One evening in that café, a young French girl came back to my table, blushing, looking for her annotated city map. I offered her mine but hers had “mes notes”, while another French girl, alone at the next table, read Freud. Trois essais sur la théorie sexuelle.

I’d already read somewhere that France had 600,000 psychology students. The Saxon Brits have 312,000 accountants and when the finance minister of Hesse killed himself over the economic impact of the virus, it was the German equivalent of a famous French incident from 1671 (i.e. the suicide of the chef, Vatel). A German checks out over an accounting issue, a Frenchman over a ruined meal. 

The French are always value for money in Vienna. On an underground platform, I’d only arrived in the city in late 2019 when I overheard a phone conversation that began with, Je sors du concert. C’était supérieur. Is this the only foreign place that cuts their mustard? 

It was a New Year’s Eve (2015) when I set off to find Berggasse and Freud’s apartment, even though I presumed it would be closed. It wasn’t. It was packed. A mixed French group pushed the street door ahead of me. Upstairs a stubbly Frenchman with a woolly cap didn’t bother going in. His wife turned to him, to ask was he going to wait across the street.  

“Tu restes au café en face?” 

He chuckled and nodded.  

“Il y a un sex shop en face.” 

The people jumping the ‘queue’ to swarm around the entrance desk had been more of an illustration of Alinsky’s key social-psychology principle – that people only push to get on a bus they think has limited seating – than anything Freudian. Schlange means both queue and snake in German but in there, one couldn’t dream of either.

At the hotel that same night I ended up talking to the man from Kiev behind the desk, comparing the death tolls of the Irish and Ukrainian famines. He must have asked me something about Ireland for us to jump on to that topic but in fairness he was curious about Irish dancing as well. He imitated the arms held down by the dancers’ sides, a style I explained had been ordained by the puritanical priesthood.  

“Das war ein Befehl von den Priestern. Sonst, zu sexy.” 

He didn’t want to pin Holodomor on Stalin, just “die Moskau Regierung” (‘the Moscow government’), and I wasn’t going to argue with him about the 1930s. Not on New Year’s Eve. My impression was that he missed the USSR. He was proud of Nikita Khruschev and Ukrainian generals and a nearby monument to the soldiers of the First Ukrainian Front.  

I’d have guessed he didn’t care much for Jews either, though all he did was express sympathy for the Palestinians. Woher kamen diese Juden? (‘Where did those Jews come from?’) 

He’d claimed Rokossovsky was Ukrainian but that invited a later check. The Marshal was of Polish origin and spent almost three years as a prisoner of the State from 1937 until his release without explanation in 1940, during which time he somehow never signed any false statement. He later told his daughter that he always carried a revolver so they would not take him alive if they ever came for him again. 

From Herrengasse one can get to Graben via Am Hof or via Hofburg and Kohlmarkt. Down the wide Graben towards the cathedral, turn left for Peterskirche, a green church dome over a high lit window. Behind the church one finds the vintage Gutruf, which is best known as the haunt of Helmut Qualtinger (1928-86). It’s cosy, a gemütlich place for drink and food but knowing at least some German is advisable. 

In April 2023, A. and I spent some time there talking to a retired couple from Berlin. Back in the day, some people in Clonakilty had given them a roof for the night at a late, inclement hour, and when the Germans rose in the morning, a note on the kitchen table told them to help themselves to breakfast and to pull the door out after them when they were leaving. 

I told them the joke about the Englishman becoming your very best friend if you can ever eventually get to know him, whereas the Irishman is automatically your best friend, that is, until you get to know him. You’re in a lot more danger then than if you were a stranger. 

The waitress asked why I’d left my side salad untouched but I confessed I’d had a kebab earlier in the day. Then my lady artist companion gladly ate it. Later that evening, A. brought me to the Bonbonniere wine bar on Spiegelgasse. Though he gave it to her, I ended up with the CD from the pianist (“Frankie D”) who was tucked inside the red walls (once a knocking shop) along with the doddery female owner, Gabrielle. 

Both places were mercifully quieter than the Schilling on Burggasse (April 2022) where we had to move tables to get away from a bunch of London girls. The boss told A. that another group like that arriving would mean his windows would shatter. 

Lothar of Lanzarote 

2022 

Puerto del Carmen 

11 May, Wednesday   

The typical British foreign-language phrase book is historically revealing. From another century, the twentieth, when travel, for most of it, required more money, and the contraption once known as the telephone required its own chapter, it’s nevertheless still well geared towards what we now call Karen and her eternal desire to see the manager.

The Spanish one I have here at least does not bark at the Italian station porter or ask to see the insect collection but it does have gems like, My son is missing, He’s drowning, and, You’ve forgotten to bring my dessert.   

13 May, Friday   

At half past two I awoke to some tired and emotional Brit effing and blinding somewhere in the complex. At times like that, everyone either prays, or gives praise that it’s not one’s neighbour.  

15 May, Sunday   

There are too many Brits out here for my liking. I don’t like to be surrounded by them. A sung verse of God Save the Queen blessing the air this evening reminded me of that.  

16 May, Monday   

Each morning a German ‘hobo’ (there isn’t enough beach about him for a beach bum) sits in a shadowy spot across from the Spar. Mirror shades, slick grey hair to his shoulders, a bit of a Hulk Hogan beard, he wears a hoodie jacket because, he claims, even thirty degrees aren’t enough now, when a cool breeze blows down from Tías.  

Yesterday I handed him a cold can of San Miguel as I passed from the shop. Today I stopped to see what he might say. He said he was waiting to get off the island he had first seen forty-five years ago but I gathered that both money and a passport were issues. He told me I was my mother’s butler and asked for any change (“for the lunch”). I gave him maybe a fiver in coins.  

17 May, Tuesday  

His name is Lothar. He said his first wife died of cancer. He also told me he, as head of security, once discreetly took down a flag at the entrance to a NATO base in Cologne, to save people stopping and saluting it. It was a quiet weekend and you could “have a joke” at NATO back then but not now.  

18 May, Wednesday   

On the topic of nationalities, Lothar quoted some guy who’d seen it all in “the red-light business” and concluded the Serbs were the worst people to have to deal with (“They always carry ze knife” – L., while indicating with a hand jabbing his back).  

19 May, Thursday   

He asked me to check the label on the t-shirt someone else had given him. Hugo Boss.  

“Ja, he designed the uniforms for the SS.”  

In Lothar’s experience, the unquestioning obedience of German tourist groups (re “Come with me” commands) shows why they followed Adolf too.   

20 May, Friday   

Now it seems Lothar’s wife and daughter are in Uruguay and he will be ‘killed’ for not being present for the daughter’s birthday (today). He dreams of opening the first Irish pub in Montevideo but I asked him when he was last over there. Four years ago. But who knows what to believe?  

If he does get off the island in another week, he says it’s bye bye to Europe then. He has a bad feeling about it, like there’s going to be a war. Given the sun, the breeze and the shades in the shade, I thought of the last scene of The Terminator (1984).  

Last I saw of him, I was waving him off on the 4pm bus to Tías.  

“Yih had bater have a loang harrd think aboot what yih sayd ta mih. Yih can f*ck oafff, so yih can.”  

That was the consistent Scottish refrain from the balcony above our door tonight but at least all was quiet by midnight. 

2023 

10 May, Wednesday  

We’re in the same apartment as last year and Lothar is still up by the Spar, as I’d suspected he would be. He was crossing the dusky road to the shop this evening, just after we arrived. I kept an eye on him but only addressed him when I left, when he was back at his usual spot, examining whatever he’d just picked up inside. Perhaps he vaguely recognised his old mate, although he did mention being available any day for stimulating conversation. He had a new (leather) jacket, I noticed.  

“Yes, Italian, the best, but it weighs four kilos.”  

I imagine that if the wife and daughter in Montevideo even exist, they’re just getting on with life.  

11 May, Thursday  

I was watching the Chinese clothes shop across the road (next to the Spar) and hanging on to my cap. L. met my mother after she emerged from there. I left a bag with him before leading her back across the way. I couldn’t take a photo of them because she was hanging on to me in the strong wind that’s out there this evening.  

12 May, Friday  

This evening, “dinner” was some kind of shitty-looking hotdog in a Styrofoam case. He said he’d had a bad day. I gave him something over a fiver in small change, plus a (black) can of Dorada Especial when I re-emerged from the Spar, where I’d been bookended by various annoying Brits.  

A tool in front kept darting away from the till to get yet more shit. I examined the sunburnt tattoo on the back of his female compatriot standing between us. One of her forearms was more completely defaced. Meanwhile, three classic Coronation Street voices were drilling into the back of my head.  

I was in a pharmacy too today, for my mother. Down the winding hill towards the Strip. I’d been there before but what struck me most again was the number of retired tourists who had no business being out in that sun. There’s nothing to see here to warrant the urban marching.  

16 May, Tuesday  

This evening I gave L. a bottle of Jameson on instruction from my mother, as a reward for keeping me amused. His favourite term of opprobrium on matters in general is a neologism, to me at least (“Zat is hell bullshit”). A fiver gets him a proper lunch, up in Tías. He has a bus pass.  

19 May, Friday  

I’ve watched a couple of Dubs handing Lothar beers he doesn’t want. This morning, while I was present, one of these donors came over a second time in the space of a few minutes, with a large plastic drum of water (“Yeh can’t be drinkin’ beer all the time”). When he left, L. turned to me, not for the first time, and asked,  

“Why ze Irish always zoo zis? Ze most I want only small beer, max. Una lata. Zey are nice guys but what I do wiz all zis bullshit water?”  

“They think you’re a wino.”  

“Eh, wino? Vot is das?”  

“It’s just the Irish way of thinking. If they see someone hanging around a shop, they think he only wants beer.”  

“Ah.”  

He ended up pouring the water on some street plants.  

20 May, Saturday  

This evening Lothar was telling me in somewhat outraged terms about an Englishman of his un-fond acquaintance who recently drove a mobility scooter into the Spar and around the aisles.  

“He didn’t need it?”  

“No, zis is just a lazy bastard man.”  

“Does he live here?”  

“Yes, a long time. He was a singer or sumsing.”  

“Did he hit anyone in there?”  

“Vot? No, zey all stand back and say, pasa, pasa. Ja, if it’s my shop I say get out, you bastard. I see him driving up to ze English pub and parking it and walking inside to a table, no problema.”  

21 May, Sunday  

Lothar was on about international petroleum deals again today, and of having to phone some far-flung countries. His phone goes off more than I remember but I just nod along to that stuff.  

Up around the corner, the edge of Tías can be seen on a ridge or plateau’s edge between two brown peaks. The pharmacy on the road up to Tías was where on Wednesday a member of the Guardia Civil emerged through the dark sliding doors (“No mask, sir, no entry!”). As he left, one of the women inside called me in and gave me a mask. She was rolling her eyes at the teatro from the little beard in uniform.  

22 May, Monday  

Between nine and ten this morning, when it was most pleasant, I was down in the old town for this and that. Fuerteventura is visible to the south, as one heads down the hill. There’s even the white line of a town (Corralejo) on the coast facing Lanzarote.   

My mother calls Lothar a tourist attraction.

23 May, Tuesday 

Passing the time telling stories. He told me about a resort island off the German North Sea coast where there was construction money to be made from building sandcastles for rich nudists. The walls were up to one and a half metres high and there was a ‘courtyard’ inside for doing private nudist things. I asked him why the sandcastles and he just said,   

“Zat is German. Even naked, everyone wants his own space, cut off from ze others.”  

It sounds like an advance on the poolside towels but I suppose it’s not as dramatic as the night their official boss woke the lads from a well-oiled sleep to tell them that a stormy high tide from the North Sea was taking the Strandkörbe. It took two or three hours to rescue all but a few from the water. This furniture Baywatch was rewarded with an excellent morning meal, extra money and no hangover.  

24 May, Wednesday  

Lothar got a call from what seemed to be a strange, toneless, English voice, almost AI-like. When I heard, “There’s a large delegation coming from the Congo…” I stopped trying to listen in any way. My mother and I said goodbye to him later before he got on the noon bus to Tías. We gave him a twenty note each to speed his journey to the next Spanish dole on Monday. 

The Brno Train 

2022 

24 April, Sunday 

There was hassle on the mid-morning train from Vienna to Brno when an Italian near me lost his ticket. Maybe he was a Slovene, as I’d thought there was a woman speaking a Slavic tongue to him on the platform when I boarded. Maybe he was a junkie, he was looking rough and bewildered, and smelling of smoke. He had no English or Czech and, on getting no satisfaction out of a stereotypically indifferent Spanish couple across the aisle (he had earlier offered them sweets), he turned back to me for help. He’d already required considerable reassurance about where he was going, which meant I’d actually seen his ticket, whatever he did with it. I looked over him to the window side of his seat but only saw two or three crushed beer cans. 

The mature lady conductor quickly invoked the police. A bit too quickly, to be fair. He hadn’t even emptied all his pockets but, given he kept looking back at me, as if for a miracle, I remembered enough survival Czech to assure her that he and I were strangers.  

Pointing at him and going, “Neznám” (‘I don’t know [him]’) aimed to allay any suspicion that we were working a scam. Nevertheless, I added that he did have a ticket, at the outset, and did have cash (“Má hotovost”) for another, and that he was only going to Brno. In the end she took very little money off him and gave him another ticket. 

When we disembarked, he stuck to me and asked for help to find cambio in the station. By then my rusty Italian was showing signs of life but he stopped two sceptical yet business-like security guards for information. That’s how I had to think of some more Czech to explain he only wanted to exchange his euros, while making a rollover motion with my hands.  

“Má euro. Chce vyměnit. Eh, cambio.” 

Once we were shown to a willing hatch, the two beefy guards in black rolled their eyes and walked away, and I too said a quick ciao to my new friend (“Max, Massimo”) as my work there was done. I wasn’t going to let him buy me a drink at any rate, and I too vanished when the lady behind the glass distracted him. 

This incident and the one in The Good Soldier Švejk, where the fictional Czech hero pulls a train handbrake, both recall a story told to me by a Jewish Englishman in a Belfast pub on a snowy day in 1987. In 1969, G. was on a train somewhere in Czechoslovakia, enjoying the luxury of a Cuban cigar, when a representative of state security slid back the door to tell him to put it out. The railways minister was in the next compartment and didn’t like the smell. After attempting to engage the minister in a fraternal socialist debate about the cigar, G. got thrown off the train at the next station. As the translator Cecil Parrott described Švejk’s creator Jaroslav Hašek, he (H.) was a very untypical Czech. 

Even the paving stones of Brno are bigger than I’d imagined and I hadn’t expected the sloping, undulating aspect of the main square, Svobody. The city centre does have vulgar touches, like the two monument cocks (clock and horse), and the KB and Omega blocks on Svobody are more bad teeth, but there’s quite a number of strikingly good-looking buildings, in colour and texture. The dark cathedral stands on Petrov, an enticing little hill above a corner of the cabbage market square (Zelný trh).

From Vienna one can, by train, in less than an hour and a half, reach Brno to the north, Bratislava to the east, Sopron to the south and Linz to the west. Brno, the capital of Moravia, is the second city of the Czechs and home to 380,000 people. I just went to have a look, just because it was there. The striking theme from Czech YouTube videos about Ireland is that our mentality is alien to them. The same theme hardly features at all among similar videos made by Croats. 

Alghero 

September 2022 

In the evenings, beneath our apartment windows, a crowd gathered to watch the Sardinian sun go down over Capo Caccia. The nicest cafe I saw, and sat at more than once, beginning with Felice’s invitation, was the nearby Girasol at the southwestern corner of the old town. The compact ‘cobbles’ could be more comfortable underfoot, instead of being just pebbles on edge, set in concrete. Wear appropriate footwear. You will see also one or two lines of flagstones on many of the narrow streets but the people and bikes (and motorbikes) coming against you will prefer to use them too. 

Here’s a short Italian lesson from the rush of our last morning, when we had to be out at ten. A busy tout of a husband (delatore = informer) hailed a cop car to tell the lads I was putting a supermarket sacchetto (plastic bag) of rubbish in a street bin, all of which usually had glass bottles and pizza wreckage filling them by nightfall anyway.  

I talked my way out of it by explaining the nationality (always advisable) and the circumstance (see above). The police just told me to bring the few plastic bottles I had left back to the apartment. That retired couple of ficcanesi (busybodies) had to be out on patrol early for the likes of me. 

Prague Scams 

Three times in recent years I’d already tried to get to Prague but got stopped by a funeral, a snowstorm and the virus. At the time of the snowstorm (2018), the Hotel Čertovka was sound enough to take the price of the entire weekend and not just the first night, like would happen in any normal place. This was despite being notified on the morning of the day of departure that the weather wasn’t permitting. It was a portent. Nature didn’t want me to go. 

2022 

25 October, Tuesday 

The taxi driver was waiting in the airport as arranged. No hassle. A presentable lad in a good car, he smiled and shook my hand in response to a decent tip. Once checked in, I had two pints downstairs in U Medvídků. No more orders taken after half past ten put a stop to unwinding. I walked then to the Old Town Square and back. An awful lot of foreign youngsters roamed the cobbled streets. This truly is the smallest hotel room I’ve ever had (€104 per night, out of season). I’ve walked into bigger wardrobes. 

26 October, Wednesday 

In Prague, the chiselling is official. The country’s largest bank (Česká spořitelna) forces conversion charges on cash withdrawals by foreign cards at its ATMs. It’s a completely legal scam. The dreary rain came as I crossed the Charles Bridge and headed uphill. I stopped off in the Church of St. Nicholas to film the ceiling. 

The minor tourist mob at the metal detectors kept me out of the Castle. Up there I instead went to find the Black Ox (U Černého vola). The lovely waitress looked very like someone I used to know in Ireland but this one was a little bit shorter, a little bit curvier and a little bit prettier.  

It was a long afternoon but I got out of it by six, having paid no more than €25 (equivalent) for a simple lunch plate and a load of pints to pass the time. The Czechs are an unsmiling bunch, in the main, but this was the only place I heard anyone laugh. The waitress, the man at the taps, a couple of regulars, it was a pleasant sound, in the otherwise general absence of charm.  

27 October, Thursday  

I got scammed by the driver of a taxi the hotel called at my request this morning. The swarthy greaseball didn’t even step out of the car to check for any baggage but I was tired and my antennae weren’t up. Lesson to self: don’t be too tired to deal with the unexpected. This wasn’t going to be as smooth as my arrival but I’d naturally presumed the hotel would still use a reputable taxi firm, with or without prior arrangement. “The cab company with the best reputation is AAA Taxi,” says the Pocket Rough Guide to Prague. Evidently the very rough guide.    

For example, the thousand-crown note that I had for the fare (an ample amount) disappeared after I handed it over and turned to reach for my bag on the back seat. He insisted I’d handed him a hundred. For another example, he then loudly and falsely insisted 900 crowns were worth €70. 

By then I was too tired and confused to go, “What?? No, it’s f*cking not!” Given I had no more Czech currency, I paid him off (and overpaid him again) in euros to be rid of him. That’s somewhere crossed off. I did Prague and Prague did me. The poster in the hotel breakfast room had already explained what was expected of tourists.

Zagreb 

2022

4 March, Friday 

A burger and chips are the regulation first rations wherever one storms ashore. I found a small table and a blanket at The Submarine on Bogovićeva in the lower town. Two bottles of Grička vještica (‘Witch of Grič’) later, I headed for the hill of her name. Radićeva is really steep in part and I missed the Kamenita vrata (‘Stone gate’) on the way up in the dark. It’s the site of some works.  

Anyway, I made it via some stairs to Pod Starim Krovovima, the oldest pub in Zagreb. I even got the small table near the green entrance door. The place was buzzing, in a nice way, in which none of the hammered patrons got messy, but in Croatia the smoking ban is just for lolz. Pizza deliveries peppered the night. I like to prepare for events, dear boy, abroad, and so proved able to read a message in biro taped to the door of the gents in the alley, out the side door. The guys had to share the one for the dolls.  

5 March, Saturday 

I got lunch at a place called Leonardo’s on the steeply sloping Skalinska. It was a good, crisp, hot Zagrebački odrezak when I needed it (in this case, breaded chicken schnitzel, stuffed with ham & cheese). While there I watched a grizzled hawker push trolley after market-trolley up that street. For a while he had an assistant with one hand on a front corner, like a navigator, but soon even he vanished. Each time, the Sisyphus of Zagreb used to pause for a rest (i.e. a holding position) on the path, across from where I sat.

I wasn’t having any drink today. My last task was to find a supermarket. I tracked down a Spar with my phone. Being able to ask for a plastic bag in a local language is a mark of integration. Such also allows a tourist to approach the tills with un-weighed bananas and calmly explain to the lady, Stvar kaže, kraju papira (‘The thing says, the end of the paper’), without earning a ‘ffs’ eyeroll in response. She took the bananas with a let-me-handle-it calm. Zagreb is cheap, safe and easy on the eye.  

2023 

Zagreb 

28 March, Tuesday  

AM  

The eight o’clock flight didn’t take off until half past nine so flying faster and shaving half an hour in the air didn’t achieve a whole lot. The taxi man was older and bigger than me and when I stuck out my hand, he squeezed it like a Balkan bear. A man of few words, he drove up to the hotel door, ignoring the pedestrian zone at the late hour. He only smiled when I gave him a tenner. Having given the docket to the night porter, he did it again when saying good night.  

I wonder how many inhuman fares give these guys nothing, given the pre-booked damage goes on the hotel bill. In the airport car park, I’d asked him could I sit in front, and he said, “No, no,” but it was only on the empty road that I copped that the front passenger seat was where he stored all his shit, his office. Between the seats I could see a cable and what not, in a pile. 

4 PM  

Got lunch (goulash) at Mali Medo on the Tkalčićeva strip in the upper town. That was after walking the parks horseshoe in the lower. The waiter smiled at the nationality (“iz Irske”) of the tipper. I was gladly paying extra for any practice. I’d made it to the hotel breakfast before ten. A waitress told me at the coffee machine that I was a good boy to have learnt some of her language, unlike nearly all foreigners, who don’t bother.  

I think I’ll go up the hill to Grič now for a while, though I’m not thirsty. There is pleasant sunshine, though the morning was a little cold. The Croats are not loud. They look human as they pass. They don’t have alien expressions on their faces.  

11 PM 

The lad behind the counter in Pod Starim Krovovima had a beard and a shaved head. He said he thought my accent or way of speaking was Slovenian or maybe Czech. Did he give me the one on the house just because I was the first in? I didn’t quite catch that bit. The bogof happened when I ordered a second drink. He put up two pints for the price of one.  

The toilet situation had evolved. There was a key behind the bar this time, though it was still for the women’s unit. They no longer sold bottled beer, to my surprise, so I had four jugs of a Czech nectar, the only thing on tap, and under three euro a pop. I’d have had at most three, only for the free one, which I had to drink faster, as I was faced with two going flat at the same time. 

I left before dark and down the hill, on Radićeva, ducked into MK Krolo, where I got a counter stool and soaked up the scene.  

Krolo was dark and busy. A half-litre bottle of beer was only €2.30, a stone’s throw from the main square in a European capital. Two young beardy ex-pat Brits just in the door took a high stool belonging to an ageing rocker of a regular, in denims, when he went for a leak. When he came back, he looked around and threw his hands up but then I gave him mine, with an explanation about my neighbours, the missing stool, and me.  

“Su Englezi, ja sam Irac.”  

A warm clap on the shoulder ensued when all had been revealed but he added he was about to leave anyway. When he did, the old man with glasses perched beside him beckoned to me to take the stool back, i.e. before any other beardy f*cker with a strong sense of self walked in. 

2024

16 February, Friday

My taxi driver from the airport was a bit like an older Peter Sellers. We got on well and soon he showed me a selfie video in which he introduced a passenger he didn’t meet every day. The camera turned to an amused Luka Modrić. 

From Hotel Dubrovnik I went and got something quick to eat, before moving on to Krolo until half past ten. At the counter I was next to three good-looking ladies who got quite a lot of drinks bought for them for being nice scenery. Eventually the dark one (very pretty) started glancing over, as if shots goggles were sharpening her vision. I too bought them a round, before I left, but I’d also given them a couple of bar stools earlier. They had to be persuaded to take them. The dark girl was willing to stand. She had an exquisite smile and a tasteful grey-green jacket. Nail extensions suggested hairdresser from among the caring professions. 

Of the familiar faces among the male patrons, the man with the rug adjusted it at one point. He was only on water. The old lad with glasses who gave me back my bar stool (2023) turned up on my left and I had a chat with him and got him a drink, as I did for the distinguished man with the shaved head at the end of the counter, beyond the girls. The gent of the joint. He was on white wine and looked important, as he had free access to the back of the bar. Some of these characters are visible in a photo I took on my first visit. 

The man of distinction bought the birds two rounds and laughed when, on my way to the gents, I said to him, U Irskoj, daju nešto malo natrag. Despite the little joke about reciprocity, the girls weren’t bothering anyone. They were just out to enjoy the night. Krolo isn’t a place for noses in the air. Their chief benefactor and I later exchanged a round. It’s a great pub.

17 February, Saturday

It turned out I was very tired, and I slept long, even though, after half seven, a wan burst in on me when I was spread-eagled under nothing but a t-shirt. Unfortunately, she wasn’t the entertainment. It must have been a cleaning lady making a mistake.

In the middle of the day, I went up to Grič. The sun was shining. I went up via Mesnička and soon got away from the crowds of the lower town. In Pod Starim Krovovima I had three ‘small’ ones. A grey-beard poetry session ended while I was there, and then, near the bar, a young man in glasses in his thirties started tipping away on guitar and vocals. I gave him a tenner as I left. He seemed genuinely surprised that I funded his jam.

I could have stayed up there longer but hadn’t eaten since breakfast, so it seemed wise to do that. Around four I headed down Radićeva and crossed Krvavi Most on my way to Leonardo’s at the top of Skalinska. The odrezak wasn’t crisp like the first time there but it was quick, and I got it into me without side effects.

Tonight, by accident, I came across the sheltered Pingvin kiosk on Teslina and a non-greasy kebab meal there (with a drink and a small bag of chips) did the trick once more. The big Croat inside with the two little Chinese women for the cooking asked me for a euro to make the change easier (i.e. for a tenner back out of twenty) but I didn’t have any sitan novac, so I went, OK, pet natrag, je dosta, and I got a fiver back with a beam of success. But it was worth it. When I told him that before I left, he gave me the same knowing smile. I’d say he’d seen it all from in there.

18 February, Sunday 

At eight this morning, a man opened my door, again without even a knock. I guessed technician. I’m back from breakfast now at ten and, as I left the lift, a young Indian fella seemed to have just emerged from my room, again. Wtf is going on with them? Multiple intruders.

On a bench in Zrinjevac, killing time before heading to the airport, I overheard nearby three young people with a camera conducting an interview in Irish. The interviewee was a girl with her arm in a sling, an injury she got from Brazilian jujitsu. She had an American accent. When I spoke to them (“Maith sibh, agallamh thar barr…”), they were even more amazed at an Irish speaker turning up than I was. 

Kinski reading Herzog’s version

‘Never believe anyone from the Balkans.’

– Robert Perišić, Naš čovjek na terenu

Born Werner Stipetić to a Croatian mother in 1942, Werner Herzog with his hypnotic voice remains a peculiar mixture of the German lack of knowing when to stop and the Balkan love of westerns (i.e. tall tales). When he remade F. W. Murnau’s silent Nosferatu (1922) with Klaus Kinski in 1979, he could not shoot in Wismar, which was in East Germany, so he moved the production to Delft. The authorities there refused to let him release 11,000 rats in the city but in nearby Schiedam they weren’t so fussy. Biologist Maarten ’t Hart was hired by Herzog as rat adviser but, as the Dutchman told the story in Granta magazine in July 2004, he got a bad feeling about it on the way to the engagement.

Starving white rats were imported from Hungary and they started to cannibalize each other on the way. Herzog then insisted that the vermin had to be dyed grey for cinematic effect. This meant dunking them in cages into hot, coloured water, which killed half the creatures. The survivors then licked off the dye, as the biologist had predicted, so, in the (apart from Kinski) soporific finished product, the rats look kind of beige, at most. By the mass makeover, Maarten ’t Hart no longer wished to be involved. He later implied in Granta that the other, more cuddly animals used in the production were also treated cruelly.

Herzog made five (mostly jungle) films with Kinski, who was undoubtedly a headcase. After the latter died in 1991, it didn’t take Herzog even a decade to spin his revenge, which is of the shoulda, woulda, coulda killed Kinski variety. Nevertheless his documentary Mein liebster Feind (1999), which translates as ‘My Best Enemy’, didn’t convince every critic. It has been the subject of at least two screen parodies, the more astute of those being a fly-on-the-wall-style episode of the US comedy series Childrens Hospital in which the director explores his troubled relationship with one of the cast. Thereby it gradually becomes obvious that the insane director is responsible for many of the actor’s troubles.

The South American jungle masochism of Herzog is immortal thanks to Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982) but it also recalls a very different German who appeared in a 1993 documentary by Britain’s Channel 4. Therein, Charles Nicholl follows the path of Walter Raleigh’s search for El Dorado, along the Orinoco. Upriver he encounters this man with a German accent, who, when asked what he is doing there, explains what Venezuela means for him.

I can realize myself. I could shoot somebody in the street and I would get out of jail because this is a country you can really do anything you want. You just have to have the right connections, maybe a little bit of money and you can do what you want.

Stressing that he was not an explorer or a survival nut, though, he answered another question, about the space and the “mind or… the mood of the place” [sic].

The land is immense but maybe the people don’t want to live in the jungle. I think the Venezuelans, they don’t, they prefer to live in the city, they prefer the comfort we always had in Europe, eh, the electricity, the television… I don’t go into jungle to get bitten by a snake. I have enough bugs at home.

This German (“Lobo”) appears after 16:39

Wallraff

Günter Wallraff (1942- ) is a German undercover journalist most famous for exposing the harsh reality of work in heavy industry, the treatment of Turkish Gastarbeiter, and the malevolent carry-on of German tabloids. He was tortured and imprisoned by the Greek military dictatorship in 1974 but, when he tried to go to Chechnya in 2003, the Russians just wouldn’t let him in. His style of work has led to the coining of a verb in Swedish (“wallraffa”). Having read one of his books in 2012, I’ve just come across it again on a shelf.

2012

25 February

I’m still plodding on, on and off, with Wallraff. The language of the industrial shop floor isn’t the easiest. He meets a strange guy* on the roof of another plant – an ex-miner and Stalingrad survivor. The man says those were the days [in Russia], always on the move, and rhetorically asks what chance did he get to go abroad after that. When asked by the amazed W. if the other stuff (death, cold, filth) wasn’t terrible, he maintains it wasn’t as bad as the pit. 

* This man’s damaged lungs would have normally have failed him in a health examination, only the doctor, a former Wehrmacht lieutenant, was also a survivor. He falsified the disability test result, passing the chap as fit, and then they spent a long time talking about their Stalingrad adventures.

2012

18 April

In bed I finally finished the Wallraff book. Reading a couple of pages late at night most nights took me months but I wouldn’t be at my freshest then and often had to look up the same word several times. The material was of uneven interest but I did unearth some gems.*

*Some of these date from his national service in the Bundeswehr, when he refused to carry any weapon but still had to run around taking part in all the other army nonsense. 

p. 123

Workers who got caught stealing from the company store at the steel firm August-Thiele-Werke went unpunished if they promised to shop at that store only, in the future. The company also had divided its four shop-floor toilets (for three hundred staff) into three grades. Eight foremen shared the first, fifteen assistant foremen the second, and the other 277 men shared three and four, in long queues. The toilets were beside each other and the first two were lockable from the outside, for which the foremen and their assistants had special keys.

pp. 26-28

The ‘Gas Chamber’ is a military training site that from the outside looks like a chapel but inside is full of teargas. The men must move in a circle, marching, running, jumping. God help anyone with a leaky gas mask but anyway, all taste the gas when ordered to change the mask filters. When marching back to the barracks, the men must put their masks on again. They are ordered to sing. Their voices sound like death rattles. They pass some civilians out walking and nod politely with their heads looking like insects. The civilians gape at them. When finally allowed to take the masks off again, their mouths and noses are full of coal dust from the filters.

p. 17

During password practice, someone whispers to Wallraff a message about seven enemy tanks 3 km away blah blah but Wallraff tells the next man about an atom bomb exploding 100 m to the east, so everyone must put his head in the sand and cover it with a newspaper. The last man writes down the message and hurries to give it to the sergeant, who hands it to the captain in charge, who goes pale and says no more.

pp. 98 – 102

der Feuerfesteste (‘The Most Fireproof’)

Dantean, one may easily call it, a descent by ladder into a furnace cooler in order to free a blocked chute. A satanic engineer jokingly refers to his squad as our Sonderkommando as he browbeats a couple of men, including Wallraff, into ‘volunteering’ to enter Hell for ‘at least’ ten minutes. It would cost the company too much to shut down for a few hours, and refusing a task assigned by a superior means the sack for any man not on the job more than three months. The first man cannot stick it and forces his way up and out again. Inside, Wallraff cannot whack the blocking material as hard as he wants, due to the ominous wobble of the ladder. The engineer’s torch is a small point of light above, in the thick dust. Despite the protective gear, the hairs in his nose smoulder. His glowing crowbar burns a finger through his asbestos gloves. The damp cloths he wrapped around the gloves have burnt off completely. He cannot breathe deeply because it makes him feel like he is on fire inside. Then, as if his brain is cooking, he goes into a kind of trance to finish the job.

Passau in October

Dr. John Flynn

2017

The Inn is very scenic near Passau. High wooded riverbanks continue for several miles of train track. The warm sunshine in Bavaria contrasted with the fog in Linz. Having gone down the left bank of the Inn to the peninsula tip where it meets the Danube (blink and you’ll miss the Ilz, around the tip), we walked back through the Altstadt and had a nice meal at a place called Bi Plano. It got cold outside at sundown but there were orange blankets on the backs of the chairs. Passau in Bavaria is very like Steyr in Upper Austria but it’s also clearly a college town.

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Brecht : Kafka in Reverse

Bertolt Brecht appeared in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) on 30 October 1947. Facing him that morning was the Chairman, J. Parnell Thomas, born John Parnell Feeney, who had not only changed his name but also his denomination, to Episcopalian. Feeney’s political career ended soon afterwards. In 1948 he was indicted and subsequently jailed for defrauding the Federal government.

Other members present were Reps. John McDowell (died by suicide in 1957) and Richard Vail (d. 1955). Most of the questions were asked by HUAC Chief Investigator Robert E. Stripling, a Texan who, a year later, assisted Richard Nixon in his pursuit of Alger Hiss. Nixon, though also a Committee member, was not present on the day.

Brecht was flanked by two lawyers, Bartley Crum (died by suicide in 1959) and Robert Kenny, and an interpreter, David Baumgardt, about whom a committee member can be overheard at one point interjecting, I can’t understand the interpreter any more than I can the witness.

The only foreigner called up on a Hollywood list of “unfriendly” witnesses, Brecht left the country the very next day, never to return. He was too clever for them and they ended up thanking him for it.

It was like Kafka’s Trial but in reverse.

The links below are to parts one and two of the full show, with later commentary by Eric Bentley.

The reader is now directed to the audio link part one above, from 18:22, as follows

STRIPLING: Now, I will repeat the original question. Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of any country?

BRECHT: Mr. Chairman, I have heard my colleagues, eh, and they considered this question not as proper but I am a guest in this country and do not want to enter in any legal arguments, so I will answer your question fully as well I can. I was not a member or am not a member of any Communist Party.

CHAIRMAN: Your answer is, then, that you have never been a member of the Communist Party?

BRECHT: That is correct.

STRIPLING: You were not a member of the Communist Party for Germany?

BRECHT: No, I was not.

STRIPLING: Eh, Mr. Brecht, is it true that you have written a number of very revolutionary poems, plays and other writings?

BRECHT: I have written a number of poems and songs and plays in the fight against Hitler and, of course, they can be considered, therefore, as revolutionary because I, of course, was for the overthrow of that government.

CHAIRMAN: Mr. Stripling, we are not interested in any works that he might have written calling for the overthrow of Germany or the government there.

From the start of part two, above, Stripling asks about a play called Massnahme, which was one of two Brecht adaptations of a particular Noh play from Japan, but Bentley tells us that Brecht’s explanation relates to the second adaptation, not that Stripling or the Committee spotted the difference.

STRIPLING: Now, Mr. Brecht, will you tell the Committee whether or not one of the characters in this play was murdered by his comrades because it was in the best interests of the Party, is that true? Of the Communist Party.

BRECHT: No, it is not, eh, not quite so in the story.

STRIPLING: Because he would not bow to discipline he was murdered by his comrades, isn’t that true?

BRECHT: No, it is not really so in the play. You will find, when you read it, carefully, that like in the old Japanese play where other ideas were at stake, the young man who died, uh, was convinced that he had done damage to the mission he believed in and he agreed to that and he was ready to die, in order not to make greater such damage. So he asks his comrades to help him and all of them together help him to die. He jumps into a… abyss and they lead him, eh, tenderly to that abyss. And that is the story.

CHAIRMAN: Well I gather from your remarks, from your answer, that he was just killed. He wasn’t murdered. (laughter)

BRECHT: He wanted to die.

CHAIRMAN: So they killed him?

BRECHT: No, they did not kill him, not in this story. They, he killed himself. They supported him. But, of course, they had told him it were better when he disappeared (laughter) … for him and them and the cause he also believed in, up ’til the end.

From 09:32 in part two, above, Stripling leaves the issue of party membership aside to press Brecht on whether he ever attended any dubious assemblies. More laughter ensues.

STRIPLING: Eh, Mr. Brecht, since you have been in, eh, the United States, have you attended any Communist Party meetings?

BRECHT: No, I do not think so.

STRIPLING: You don’t think so.

BRECHT: No.

CHAIRMAN: Well, aren’t you certain?

BRECHT: (chuckles) I am, I am certain, I think, yes.

CHAIRMAN: You are certain that you have never attended?

BRECHT: Yeah, quite. I think so (laughter). You see I am here six years, I am here six years, I do not think so. I do not think I attended, that I attended, eh, political meetings.

CHAIRMAN: No, no, never mind the political meetings, but have you attended any Communist meetings in the United States?

BRECHT: I do not think so. No.

CHAIRMAN: You’re certain?

BRECHT: I think I am certain.

CHAIRMAN: You think you’re certain. (laughter)

STRIPLING: You don’t know what a, what it, what a –

BRECHT: No, I have not attended such meetings, eh, in my opinion.

From 27:23 in part two, the final joust plays out, leading to the longest laugh of all.

CHAIRMAN: Some people did ask you to join the Communist Party, didn’t they?

BRECHT: Uh…

KENNY (lawyer): In Germany or…?

BRECHT: In Germany, you mean in Germany?

CHAIRMAN: No, I mean in the United States.

BRECHT: No, no, no.

CHAIRMAN (to Kenny): Now you let, you let him, he’s doing all right, he’s doing much better than the other witnesses that you’ve brought here (laughter) … (to Brecht) You don’t ever recall anyone in the United States ever asked you to join the Communist Party?

BRECHT: No, I do not recall anybody having asked me.

The Chairman then asks each of his colleagues in turn if they have any more questions.

STRIPLING: I would like to ask Mr. Brecht whether or not he wrote a poem – a song, rather – entitled, Forward, We’ve Not Forgotten.

McDOWELL: Forward we’ve what?

STRIPLING: (louder, irritated) Forward, We’ve Not Forgotten.

Stripling then recites an entire lyric lost in translation.

STRIPLING: Did you write that, Mr. Brecht?

BRECHT: No, I wrote a German poem but that is very different… (extended laughter) … from this thing.

STRIPLING: Eh, that is all the questions I have, Mr. Chairman.

CHAIRMAN: Thank you very much, Mr. Brecht. And you are a good example to the witnesses of Mr. Kenny and Mr. Crum.

A gavel then bangs for a recess until that afternoon.

On the tape Bentley then recalls meeting Brecht a year later near Zürich, when Brecht laughed at a recording of the show. He added that he had chosen to risk disregarding Bartley Crum’s advice to tell them he was a communist party member (though it was not true) in case a membership card was later forged to ensure a perjury conviction.

They weren’t as bad as the Nazis. The Nazis would never have let me smoke. In Washington they let me have a cigar and I used it to manufacture pauses… between their questions and my answers.

The Case of Leni Riefenstahl

Die Macht der Bilder (1993) is known in English as The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl. When watching this film, it is hard to ignore even the sparkling eyes of a razor-sharp old lady often condemned as a witch of Nazi propaganda, especially for what she filmed at Nuremberg.

In this documentary, she insisted that Triumph of the Will had to be seen in the context of the time, which was 1934, not 1945. At that time in the Thirties, Robert Musil was living in Berlin. His diaries show that not quite everybody was blind to what was happening. It is seen as a spell of bad weather… a police car with swastika flags and singing officers, speeding down the Kurfürstendamm. It is alarming that Germans today possess so little sense of reality… the streets are full of people – “Life goes on” – even though, each day, hundreds are killed, imprisoned, beaten up…

Riefenstahl nonetheless pointed out too that her film contained nothing about anti-Semitism or racial theory. Instead, she argued that in it she conveyed (through Hitler, you may splutter) the themes of work and peace. Her avowed goal had been artistic, once she had accepted the task on the condition that she would never have to make another film for the Nazi Party.

Riefenstahl was more than able for the unseen interviewer who asked her about the responsibility of the artist concerning those who will be affected by the work. On the issue of filming for Hitler, she pointed out that Sergei Eisenstein had worked for Stalin but her more general point was that artists cannot tell the future and that the likes of Michelangelo and Rodin had shown no grasp of politics.

The more she spoke, the harder it was not to feel a certain amount of sympathy for her position. She ridiculed Susan Sontag’s assertion that she had been attracted to photograph the Nuba people in Africa because their black skin reminded her of the SS. She pointed out that a Nazi wouldn’t think black people were even worth photographing.

In a fit of enthusiasm they later regretted, the French had given Triumph of the Will the gold medal at the Paris World’s Fair of 1937 – a decision they vindictively balanced out after the war when they imprisoned its maker. This was after the Americans had decided that she had no case to answer, beyond being a fellow traveller (Mitläufer). This imprisonment also happened despite the fact that neither she nor any close family member had been a member of the Nazi Party.

Her true crime? Perhaps it was to be perceived to have done the impossible and actually produced a ‘fascist’ work of art. The Wagnerian comparisons commonly made in this case tie in with Louis Halle’s observation on Germany and Italy in The Ideological Imagination.

“What the fascist movements lacked in philosophy they made up for in theatre. It is surely no accident that the extreme of fascism was realized in the two countries most notable for their contributions to grand opera.”

– The Ideological Imagination, 1972, p.99

Though she denied she was proud of Triumph of the Will, given the trouble it had caused her, and she did not think fondly of the extended hard work, editing it and so on, there was evident glee on her part as she showed off certain camera effects she had achieved. She could even remember the geographical origins of specific contingents where they took part in particular shots.

Riefenstahl’s outlook was apolitical at the very least and the future was all there to see in Mein Kampf and so on, but the vast majority of Germans – of human beings – are not lights in the darkness like Sophie Scholl or Willy Brandt. As a boy, Leon Trotsky was suspended from school for a year for inciting his classmates to howl at a teacher who was tormenting a fellow pupil simply because he was of German descent. Trotsky saw that once the protest began the class was henceforth divided into three groups – the frank and courageous boys on the one side, the envious and the talebearers on the other and the neutral, vacillating mass in the middle. Writing about the incident from the perspective of suitably chastened adulthood, he added that these three groups never quite disappeared, even in later years.

In The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi expresses anger and revulsion when evaluating a statement made by Liliana Cavani, director of The Night Porter, who said that we are all victims of murderers and that we accept these roles voluntarily. Levi says that to confuse murderers with their victims is a sign of moral disease or artistic affectation, or a sinister sign of complicity rendering a precious service to the negators of truth.

Today the cinematic glorification of serial killers earns vast amounts of money but, in that context, an important distinction can be made between The Silence of the Lambs and Seven, to take two key examples of the genre. In the former, Hannibal Lecter is a satanic figure in the artistic sense of the term, as a snaky embodiment of temptation. He gets all the best lines, his feats are superhuman and, at the end of his satirical quest, he ends up like a guardian angel.

In Seven, the Kevin Spacey character is a grudge-filled little vigilante who trots out his banal motives behind gruesome tortures and murders which have been carefully and cleverly rendered by those behind the camera. Which of these films is a sign of moral disease, a form of sinister complicity?

In the same real world where a gangster like John Gotti gets life without parole, despite never having ordered the carpet-bombing of a Third World country, which of the following pair of even more famous cinema examples answers the same question? Is it Apocalypse Now with its ending that echoes the way Thucydides in The Peloponnesian War makes Pericles sound like Hitler (“It is because your resolution is weak that my policy appears to be mistaken”)?

Contrast that now with a scene from one of the Rambo films, of all things, where Richard Crenna tells it like it is to a Russian in Afghanistan. You can’t defeat a people like that. We tried. We already had our Vietnam. Now you’re gonna have yours. In other words, get out. Does the latter example not express the true moral of colonial war?

The application of Leni Riefenstahl’s technical brilliance was ill-advised but one could say too that she was unlucky. Too many artists to mention have buried their heads in the sand or even joined in the madness prevalent at any given time and there was no honest reason for preventing her from ever making a film again. Few others whom we think should have known better actually grasped the destination. They were often simply content to admire the parade.

PS an insider’s account of a 1939 encounter between Riefenstahl and Hitler is hysterical in more ways than one.

Regensburg

August 2018

There’s a lot to see in Regensburg but not much to do at night. I know it was only a Tuesday but, given the amount of tourists, I’m surprised the town wants to shut down by eleven, like a curfew. I was having an acceptable homemade dunkel at the Weissbräuhaus when the waitress told me, Ich muss kassieren. No problem but I added I wanted to try the helles (lighter-coloured) version before I left.

Whatever it was that I got, it wasn’t even cold. The receipt suggested a different drink altogether (“Alt. Bayr.”) but given the suspicious delay in bringing the drink, I don’t believe it was a mistake. Just throw something out to him, we’re closing early. The last bottle on the shelf.

Anyway, I left it there. I wasn’t going to be bothered giving grief to the waitress and I’d heard enough of the Himmler inside, pontificating behind the counter whenever she went near him. Pity I tipped her before I tasted it, though. In contrast, the sweet girl with the very pretty dark eyes at the Ratskeller (where I’d had a meal, earlier) well deserved hers.

I told her it was her luck too that the ticket machine at the train station in Freising was very temperamental about the banknotes it would accept. A girl beside me there had offered twice to swap notes but I already had a fistful of them. Ended up with too many coins in the change, having had to fire in a twenty to cover the last two euro of the fare. Getting to Freising from Munich airport was easy, quick and cheap on the 635 bus. The train onward then cut the Munich to Regensburg journey in half.

As well as the many cobbled alleys here, there are numerous pedestrianised streets but for some reason cars are still allowed to drive down them, albeit relatively slowly. Another thing to look over your shoulder for is the cyclists, especially at night when it becomes evident that having a light on one’s bike is, for many here, not an example of Germanic order.

The Ratskeller has a lovely bottle of beer on the menu. It’s called Regensburger Bruckmandl. Blue label. 33 cl. Quite strong too. Three of them combined with evening heat to make crossing the Steinernebrücke (over and back) not something I’d have liked to do in a hurry.

At Regensburg the Danube has divided in three. The setting sun and the greenery made up for the never-ending works on the old bridge.

 

Aspirin & Heroin

A drug story…

Passau in October

2017

The Inn is very scenic near Passau. High wooded riverbanks continue for several miles of train track. The warm sunshine in Bavaria contrasted with the fog in Linz. Having gone down the left bank of the Inn to the peninsula tip where it meets the Danube (blink and you’ll miss the Ilz, around the tip), we walked back through the Altstadt and had a nice meal at a place called Bi Plano. It got cold outside at sundown but there were orange blankets on the backs of the chairs. Passau is very like Steyr but it’s a college town, whereas Steyr is nowadays known for making tractors and guns.

Vienna & Salzburg between Budapest & Munich

August 2015

At Keleti station in Budapest, in an August heatwave in 2015, the machines wouldn’t give international tickets and the office was slow chaos, with backpackers getting the most awkward tickets possible and people farther back in the queue having to hold open the heavy door that led into the tight space with the hatches. With the low chairs at those hatches, it was like a small dole office. A fair-haired North American chap with dreadlocks eventually came away from one of them to relay the news to his two female dreadlocked companions – also white – that they would have to make five changes, wherever the f*ck they were going. The set-up might have done with a few of the Hungarian soldiers we’d seen up on the Vár the day before.

A guy in front of me watching them wore a t-shirt advertising Iron Maiden and The Trooper. He must have given up his dreams of martial glory for the sake of heavy metal.

I should have asked, “Viccelsz velünk?” when the waiter asked me and my mother to make way for six French f*ckers, plus dogs, up there, at the Miró cafe. Anyway, we got on the train with just a few minutes to spare and the three-hour trip to Vienna was comfortable. Within two weeks Keleti made international news, thronged with refugees. Across the aisle on the train, some Brits and a spherical though pretty Indian girl with an American accent had some ‘psychedelic’ colouring books that didn’t keep them entertained for very long. Two of the chaps vanished to the bar carriage.

If anything Vienna was even hotter than Budapest. Every twenty minutes, late that night, I went to the bathroom to wash my face and neck. At the Westbahnhof we had gone down to the packed U-Bahn but on the Volkstheater station platform I simply couldn’t see the correct exit, it was so far away, so we emerged on the Burg Ring and passed the correct exit on our last daylight slog, up to the Hotel Admiral. That night we made it back over the Ring, down through the dark Burggarten and up the steps to the Paumen Haus with its red neon sign. There we sat outside and got things we needed such as chairs, drinks and food.

After each of two brief stretches of sleep I had a shower in which I turned the tap from lukewarm to cold. Then I went back to bed again, my ears full of water from that and from sweat rolling into them. Even my shoulders were sweating. I’d been turning the old air conditioning unit on the wall on and off and sometime after dawn I just left it on and finally managed to sleep properly until nine.

We spent the whole day walking around the Ring and the Innere Stadt. There was no way we were going to any outlying palaces with vast gardens of low hedges and shrubbery that offered no protection from that sun. My companion really liked the Café Central and we got to hear a young string quartet on Kärtnerstrasse (“They’re not gypsies, they’re conservatory students”). I’d still like to know the name of this tango.

We did the walk I’d mapped out:

(1) up the Ringstrasse to Schreyvogelgasse (Harry Lime’s doorway);
(2) down to Freyung to the Ferstel Passage;
(3) a pit stop in the Cafe Central;
(4) along Herrengasse to the Hofburg and a detour through the arches to Heldenplatz;

(5) back through the arches to Kohlmarkt and Graben (we lunched in the vicinity);
(6) down to Stephansdom (in and around the cathedral);

(7) Kärtnerstrasse (incl. a detour to the Loos bar where I tried a mojito, because I recognised the name, but it was like mint soup);
(8) back to the hotel via the Opernring.

At eight in the evening we went to the Witwe Bolte, which was practically around the corner from the hotel. After a garden supper, during which the skin of my head still felt a bit prickly, we were back in the hotel by ten.

My head continued to melt. The dissolution restarted as soon as I lay on the bed. Cold water from the tap gave brief relief but then a rivulet rolled down somewhere. I filled the sink so I could have a dunk now and then.

There was a slim, dark girl doing long hours down at reception. She was wearing a white garment with buttons, that evening. It made her look like a nurse. She had matching dark frames for her glasses and she kind of embodied the female cool around there, even though most were typically, for Austria, solid and well built. She’d checked us in the day before. By then my head was already melting, unconnected to this hotel, given the time it took to sort out the three-stop journey on a packed U3 line from the Westbahnhof and then make our way on foot. I explained we had just come from Budapest and she looked at me quite sympathetically before remarking on the weather (“Das ist heiss”).

A Hamburg gentleman of about sixty spotted me at breakfast, applying a serviette to my face, and he came over, hoarsely repeating the German word for hell (“Hölle! Hölle!”). His wife was Danish, a quite tasty blonde, twenty years younger. She appeared at reception as we were checking out and asked about the fire alarm that was going off, only to be told it was nichts, nur das verflixte Telefon. The woman at the desk was waving the receiver as she spoke.

On the way to Salzburg we got talking to a retired American couple who’d sold their house in upstate New York to move to Florida. I think Bob sold his mass of Waterford glass in the house on ebay. His wife had fallen off the train that had brought them to Linz. I didn’t ask why they had come by Linz. They were thinking of squeezing in the Sound of Music tour, despite the lack of enthusiasm of the holiday planner, their daughter.

We were in Salzburg by 2pm and though it was a hot if reasonably short walk to the hotel, my companion wanted to make the most of the afternoon, in case it pissed rain the following day. We got the no. 3 trolley bus as far as Mirabell. On entering the gardens we passed two very dark chaps with a clarinet and accordion, playing Stranger on the Shore. “Now they are gypsies,” I said.

Another reminder that US citizens always like to catch a show came from a woman who keenly spotted a marionette theatre poster as we left the gardens. We walked to the Dom and then dined outside at the Zipfer Bierhaus, where two wasps had to be killed, one by me, one by the waiter (“Raus!”). My companion became convinced that Salzburg was the best, with the most stylish clobber. “Have you noticed how soft-spoken the people are?” I asked. We retreated to the hotel early. The rooms had electric fans.

Though I didn’t hear anything, it rained for much of the night. The breakfast at the Guter Hirte was the best, with scrambled egg, scrambled rashers, little sausages, and then we did the Festung. These mist-covered mountains were all now to see. Anyway, across the river we climbed the Kapuzinerberg steps, though the greenery that hadn’t been there that snowy February curtailed the view.

Down from the hill, I had a look in the Shamrock and my February wingman, Daniel, was there on his own. He told me about his most recent abstract paintings that might soon get some café exhibition space. After there it was a trail of churches plus the sight and sounds of a jazzy procession of bishops, skeletons and devils on their way to put on an Everyman (“Jedermann”) show for the crowd gathered on the stand that had been erected on the enclosed Domplatz.

I had a few more in the Shamrock that night. At half past eight my pal had to leave. It seemed they had to put up with a lot of tourists messing, in and around the pub. Only recently, he said, he’d opened the door onto Rudolfskai well after closing time only to be greeted by the sight of an American girl rolling around on the ground, fighting another girl of indeterminate nationality in front of cops and onlookers.

After a hot dog at the Heisse Kiste Würstelstand across Staatsbrücke, I walked up Steingasse, which was spooky in the dark. The warm red light was on but there was a restaurant, clinking and nattering, right across the alley, though the few diners al fresco were shielded from the sinners by some plants. I didn’t have a theoretical hour to spare.

We left the hotel at ten the next morning. This time I had heard heavy rain but it was only gloomy out by then. In the station a black vintage train pulled up at our platform. Uniformed serving staff jumped out to unravel short rolls of red carpet below each carriage door. Who could these passengers be? They were Australian casualties from Linz. These war wounded had to be practically carried off. One old lady was handed down a set of wheels like those that belong in a nursing home. The next woman out that door was a bit younger and had better pins but she sported a broken arm.

I managed to sleep a few minutes on the train to Munich. We dined across the street from the Hofbräuhaus, which was very hot and mental, on the evidence of a few seconds inside. What is it, though, about Bayerstrasse? This day I saw two beggars there without feet. One at least had knees, which kept him upright, like Toulouse-Lautrec.