What the Traveller Saw. Eric Newby
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from them.
It was only for an instant; then they were out of sight and the forest closed in again, with occasionally a ride or firebreak running through it to interrupt its endless monotony. Thirty minutes later we crossed the Volga and I asked the least taciturn of the two standing stones which acted as stewardesses to ask the pilot, who up to now had not exactly been a mine of information so far as his passengers were concerned, at what speed we were travelling, information which he rather surprisingly provided. It was now possible to work out, longitudinally, the approximate position of my missile site/sewage farm, whatever it was. The military attaché at Kabul should be proud of his pupil, I thought. After all, it was he who when I was about to depart had gruffly told me to ‘keep my eyes skinned’ in case I saw anything interesting, and had provided me with a telephone number in London to ring if I did.
At Moscow I was put up at the Embassy and was invited by the Ambassador (Sir William Hayter) to travel with him the following day to the monastery at Zagorsk to which he was taking Isaiah Berlin who was also staying on the premises. Foolishly, perhaps, I turned down this invitation. I wanted to see Moscow and the Muscovites. An Orthodox monastery, however splendid, I felt, could wait. In the event it awaited me for more than twenty years, until 1977.
The Embassy at this time had a particularly beleaguered air about it and the Ambassador said that until recently the only place where he could be reasonably sure of having a conversation without being overheard by the Russians was in the Embassy garden; but even this was now no good with the recent improvement in listening devices. Now the only really satisfactory thing to do was to wait until winter if one had something confidential to communicate when it could be done while skating with one’s confidant on some frozen lake – summer was no good, boats could too easily be bugged. What about bugged skates? I wondered.
At Sacher’s Hotel in Vienna, where I had booked a room while still in Kabul, in spite of my outlandish appearance I was given a splendid double room with a sunken bath, approached by steps, that looked as if it might have been used by Rudolph when it was too damp to make love at Mayerling, and from it I sent Wanda a telegram. ‘Hotel Wonderful, come at once,’ I said, not realizing that she had not received my first cable from Moscow telling her which wonderful hotel she was to come to. After telephoning the tourist office in Vienna (whose staff might have displayed a little more initiative than they did by telephoning round one or two of the more wonderful Viennese hotels on her behalf) to ask the whereabouts of the Hotel Wonderful, she gave up and waited for me to appear at Trieste.
At this time (the autumn of 1956) Vienna had only recently ceased to be an occupied city, the Treaty restoring Austrian independence having only been signed in May the previous year, and its walls were still covered with allied military graffiti. Otherwise there was little outward sign, except for a certain threadbareness, that it had been occupied for ten years.
The Habsburgs still dominated the city. What they had made and what they stood for was everywhere, above and below ground, embalmed and in the spirit. In the Imperial Vaults, the Kaisergruft, there were 138 of them sealed up in giant catafalques and sarcophagi, one of which weighed eight tons, row upon row of them, as if in some funereal bedding department; dead from suicide, murder, assassination, the firing squad and natural causes, presided over by Franz Josef II, the penultimate Habsburg, who died in bed. The hearts of forty-nine of them were in the Augustiner-kirche. Their intestines, which in life they cosseted at the sulphur springs at Baden, were in St Stephen’s. Their dull, nineteenth-century furniture was in enfilades of rooms in the Hofburg. Their jewels and regalia and those of the Holy Roman Empire in its Secular Treasury: the Imperial Crown made for the coronation of Otto the Great in 962, the Orb, the Holy Lance and the Inalienable Heirlooms, the Agate Bowl and the Unicorn, representing the mystical element in medieval kingship which the splendid objects in the Ecclesiastical Treasury next door were somehow less successful in doing. And their uniforms could be picked up for a song, ankle-length coats and sledges to go with them, in the Dorotheum, a huge, rambling pawnbroker’s and auction rooms in the Dorotheergasse while sour-faced descendants of their female domestic servants, all dressed in black, dispensed delicious pastries at Demel, an extraordinary Kaffee-Konditorei near the Hofburg in the Kohlmarkt.
Everywhere I went I was confronted by noble, baroque Habsburg façades behind which the present inhabitants, many of them professional people, lived in conditions of gross overcrowding, lacking almost every amenity, although those Viennese in what had been the Russian sector were far worse off. Without industry, without an empire, out on a limb on the furthest frontiers of the West, the city gave the impression that it was dying. Even the young, who spoke of London as if it were Sodom, rather enviously I thought, seemed strangely old when I met them in the wine cellars, which were fun but rather conventional.
After a couple of days of this, replete with Habsburgs and Sachertorte, fed up with the bossy waitresses at Demel and with the very gemütlich chambermaid who every morning used to ask me why I was still ‘allein’ in such a large, fine, double-bedded room, and awash with coffee over which I sat interminably in a café – the Hawelka, in Dorotheergasse, hung with paintings by Cocteau, Chirico, Dali and Rops – I gave up what was to have been the holiday of a lifetime and took the train to Trieste.
Back in London I was invited to present myself at an office of the Secret Service off Whitehall, staffed by men some of whom I had regarded as being distinctly unstable when I had known them during the war. They were quite thrilled with my sewage farm and I spent a couple of days ‘helping them with their enquiries’. On both days I was taken to a dreary pub on the corner of Trafalgar Square, where I was forced to pay for my own sandwiches as apparently they had no appropriation for expenses of this kind. In future, I decided, they could jolly well find their own Russian sewage farms, and I have never again engaged in any remotely clandestine activity for Britain, or for any other country.
The Edge of the Western World IRELAND, 1960
‘YOU MUST ASK the Captain but he’s not here,’ the old man said when we asked him if we could visit the house, but not brusquely as he would have done in England, and with no suggestion that he ought to be given something for being rooted out of his habitation late on a winter’s afternoon. He had emerged from a Gothick lodge so narrow that one wondered if he had to go to sleep standing up in it.
He unpadlocked and opened an iron gate, which sounded as if it had not been moved on its hinges since the discovery of oil, and admitted us to the ‘demesne’. Dusk was coming on. A long, seemingly endless ride between huge, shattered trees eventually led to a rather severe, late-eighteenth-century mansion with its façade intact, but which proved when we reached it to be nothing more than a shell. It had either been burnt, if so probably during the Troubles in the 1920s, or someone had taken the roof off to avoid paying taxes. It was at the time of the Troubles, we found out from the old man later, but alone with it in the gloaming there was no way of knowing. The Captain was away, somewhere across the water. And when in residence he lived in a bungalow.
Over the house rooks circled ceaselessly, below there was a lake full of reeds. To one side there was an artificial mound overgrown with impenetrable thorn, and an obelisk choked with ivy rose from it, like a huge tree trunk.
The whole place had an air of indescribable melancholy about it, but exercised an irresistible fascination for people such as myself, lovers of the abandoned and the decayed. In Ireland local authorities and developers have a habit of dynamiting these kinds of remains. But there still are hundreds, and perhaps, in spite of such uncontrolled demolitions, thousands of similar places; many of them with lodges from which old men emerge to unlock gates; and sometimes with invisible captains, Foulenoughs and Grimeses some of them, in the offing, for this was a country, as Waugh’s Captain Grimes said, where you couldn’t get into the soup however hard you tried.
It was the thought of all the people, many of them still alive, who had lived in Ireland but no longer did so, that gave the country its unique feeling of loneliness. Roads led from no place that was or could be signposted, to another, equally nameless, because there was nothing there to signpost. Here, out in the boondocks, women, many