Vienn-again

Viencore?

At some point on your road, you have to turn and start walking back towards yourself.

Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black

Clutching at straws, and reality.

The world is a fractal of nightlit streets packed with tables and happy drinkers.

Or at least, Vienna is.

The Viennese appear to have quietly unlocked the secret of the good life. I defy anyone to walk up Spittelberggasse on a soft summer evening, through gentle crowds smiling and conversing, without concluding the world is fundamentally a good and kind place, and the Viennese good and kind people.

The bats come out of the belfry and swoop around the square. It’s not really a square, more a pocket of cobbles wedged between busier streets. At dusk on a summer’s evening, the night is full of clinking platters and the murmur of conversation.

It’s warm enough to sit out without any kind of wrapping. A cool drink tastes even better than it usually does.

Somebody on a top floor is playing Ode to Joy. They are muddling through but the puddled sounds that leak to the street are pleasing.

—

Who can eat a whole pork schnitzel, I wondered to myself. The thing was as big as the plate, even bigger than that: it dangled over the sides.

The phone rang. It was my son, doing his duty. Yes, they had fun at the beach. No, he doesn’t know which one. Margate, I heard my ex-husband say in the background. Margate, my son informed me.

“Oh Margate! Lovely.” I pretended not to have heard the first response. “What are you doing for dinner?”

“Dad’s making me salmon and curry and rice and an egg.”

“Any vegetables?”

I looked down at my pork schnitzel and potato salad. It’s marked by a lack of green.

What hypocrites we are with our children.

—

Arriving earlier this morning to Vienna, I couldn’t check in to my hotel yet and took refuge in the Kunsthistorisches museum. Locked in the sinus-misery of a horrific headcold, I dozed on the cracked leather sofas in the soaring hallways and ogled the Bruegel room, again.

Bruegel and his cosmic, universal landscapes—the world in a painting. He painted the hardships of individuals, real people, living in quiet anonymity. He did it matter-of-factly, without pathos, condescension or ridicule; without politics, without ideology, without any message beyond this:

The dignity of existence needs no justification.

His great achievement was to be a realist and a humanist, not an idealist.

But humans get ideas and will always try to own the story. Babel is a cautionary tale, the museum’s footnotes tell me, not just of hubris but of the failures of reason, technology and engineering.

It’s Musk on a dwindling-value mountain of Ai-generated content! It’s unwearable Ai wearables!

It’s people who become obsessed with an idea and embroil themselves in pointless undertakings.

Like writers, I think.

I fancy myself a humanist but as with everything in life how far is this imagined self from reality? Actually, I loathe people all the time. I so often sit in judgement of ordinary grotesque humans, harmlessly staring at phones, eating piles of ice cream. I am a hypocrite.

Having eaten, the restaurant suddenly becomes so much less adorable, less appealing. Before the meal, I’m enchanted by the candle, the encroaching greenery and the subdued murmur from the next table. With waistband stretched, I notice the cigarette smoke.

I look down and realise I’ve finished the schnitzel, my capacity to consume grossly underestimated. My real and imagined selves not keeping pace.

I’m here to research real people, to write a novel about them. How much of them is me? How much of the story I’m chasing is self-projection, like a dream in which you inhabit all characters simultaneously? Does it matter? If the truth is not recorded, nor remembered by a living soul, who can say my version is wrong? Who owns the past?

—

As I crossed heroes square in front of the Hitler balcony, it happened.

Hurrying to keep an appointment at the archives, I glanced up briefly. The Viennese city council (or whatever it’s called) doesn’t know what to do with the balcony these days, the one that straddles the entrance to the National Library. Afraid to open it to the public, lest it become an unwelcome shrine: hallowed ground for Hitler enthusiasts.

Everyone tries to claim the past as their own, put their own words into the dead’s mouths and own the story.

The words Justitia regnorum fundamentum are inscribed above the gate at the entrance to the Hofburg.

Justice is the foundation of kingdoms, it says.

Generations of leaders and emperors in this city sought to claim their right to rule on the basis of justice. Hitler marched under these words.

Own the story of the past and you own justice.

What is it Rachel Cusk says about justice? It’s about “petty individualism”.

Yes.

But what could be less petty than righting an identifiable wrong against an actual person? Would you rather give justice to an idea? Ideas don’t bleed or cry; they don’t require justice to be meted out in their name.

My pack shifted on shoulders, feet thudded the grass in front of the Hofburg. I cut a shortcut diagonally across towards the Burgtor, the heroes gate.

Then, I heard it.

My footsteps pounded on, echoing after I stopped.

Thud, thud, thud: the quick march of thousands of stamping feet, right here.

I looked up at the Hitler balcony and felt afraid of it, of its power. Like the roving searchlight of the eye of Mordor.

The past lives in all of us, if we care to let it in.

_

In the archives, the document I am looking at is smeared with greasy, greedy fingers from eighty years ago.

A perfect fingerprint reminds me: I was here, I did this. A human did this.

I suppose I must be a humanist but humans are so insufferable.

It’s so hot in this attic room of the museum archives. My iPhone blinks, warning me it is dangerously overheated and needs to cool down. I know how you feel, mate.

The kind woman in charge of the archives turns on a fan for me and I spend the rest of my time there trying to carefully position litmus paper, airplane sheafs of the lightest tissue weight, so they don’t snow globe through the room.

—

Sometimes a stroke of luck hits in an unexpected way.

I couldn’t get a hotel room in Vienna on the last night of my trip. It’s the Taylor Swift concert, they shake their heads at me, didn’t you know? It will be over £500 to keep my room an extra night. That is double what I paid for the previous two nights together.

I declined and tried to figure out how I can make it home without having to do the dreaded all-night-on-a-train-floor again in reverse. I tried to imagine what it might feel like to have to sleep on the floor of the train—again—in undimmed lights, with this headcold and my period to boot.

You brought this on yourself, babe. That’s Joel’s voice, in my ear, reminding me that I did in fact bring this all on myself by refusing to fly like a normal person.

The new plan is this: train to Munich from Vienna, plus a night in Munich (significantly cheaper than Vienna), then onwards to Paris.

So, I booked the hotel in Munich and the onward connection from Munich to Paris and then… I dithered. Do I really need to do the Vienna-Munich booking now? I don’t know how long the archives will take. Maybe I’ll be ready to leave earlier. It seems silly to book it now when there’s probably no risk of it selling out, right? Trains to Munich run regularly and surely I can just buy that train ticket tomorrow to suit my schedule?

Reader, you will be delighted to hear that I ignored this moronic, inner voice.

I booked myself on the 5pm out of Vienna.

A good thing too because less than an hour after that, Taylor Swift got cancelled (her concerts in Vienna, I mean, not herself) and everyone and their mother (literally: many mothers and many daughters) wanted to leave Vienna.

The hordes wishing to exit Vienna were biblical.

Luckily, I had a seat booked.

—

The next day, hot winds whipped through the city.

After the archives, I thought a lot about my story. I stood in front of particular buildings and wondered. One woman pointed out the right rooms to me. Yes, it was the whole floor, but now there’s nothing there.

A story told in scraps and threads. It emerges only where the stitching’s come loose: there’s nothing there.

I think the fabric of the world becomes less certain, the sureness of reality less sure, when we perceive ourselves to be morally culpable, to have failed in some significant and unrecoverable way.

It is strange then that the most evil among us seem to be the most certain, the least troubled by this shimmering quality to reality. Either they do not consider themselves culpable or, noting the uncertainty, are untroubled by it. Which fuels the evil because: if nothing is real, what does it matter if you commit atrocities?

On the way to the station, I walked past the solemn facade of the Kunsthistorisches. In the closed museum, I thought of all those people carousing, playing, dancing, dying. Do paintings get lonely? All of them doomed to do whatever they are doing forever, to a darkened empty room, when all the unseeing crowds have gone.

It’s been punishingly hot but this afternoon feels like the heat will break in rain. Black clouds mass over the Parliament and the strange man poised at the top of City Hall looks as if he’s about to jump.¹ There’s a breeze that hits my clammy skin, raising goosebumps. That’s possibly the residual effects of the headcold rather than any comment on the chilliness of the breeze.

I’m so tired. Return journey, here we go again. Performing a circle, going back this time through Paris via Salzburg and Munich.

—

At the station, the rain started and spattered me under the platform awning.

A woman turned and addressed me in German.

“Entschuldigung bitte…”

I cut her off apologising that I don’t speak German.

She persisted—and actually, I could help, turns out.

“Salzburg?”

“Yes! Yes. This is for the train to Salzburg. I’m waiting for it too.”

Feeling disproportionately pleased with myself—maybe I am getting better at this!—I boarded the train that appeared at the allotted time.

“No,” the stewardess on board informed me. “This is not the section of the train for Salzburg. They will attach more carriages.” She looked more closely at me and sensed my weariness. “In the next seconds, the train will come,” she said with a pitying look.

I got off and walked back to where I was.

5:01 ticked past. It became clear to me that Austrians, unlike their mountainous Swiss neighbours, do not have the same slavish attachment to the clock.

Finally, the train pulled up. We lurked at the doors waiting for them to open—but what’s this? A newcomer—a tall, strapping white man—seems to think he may be entitled to board first.

Not so fast, Hans, I thought and positioned my backpack in his way.

Me first, mate. I need a wee.

That yellow stucco so particular to Vienna apartment buildings flashed past and was gone. We were back in deep countryside.

The conductor came by to check my ticket. We were late.

“Will we be late to Salzburg?”

“Yes, definitely.”

“What happens if I miss my train?”

“You will get the next train.”

Occasionally, and particularly in places I’ve never heard of, like St Polten in central Austria, I’m struck by the weight of humanity. I look at the houses, their windows, and am reminded of all the various lives being lived, all the other eyeballs behind which minds hide, each with their own churning memories and thoughts and concerns.

Sometimes, it weakens me, makes me wonder why do I bother, why are my thoughts any more worth recording?

They’re not.

It’s just that I bother to record them and most people don’t. That’s the trick.

Other times, I insert myself in the landscape, imagine myself living there. Hi, I live here in Amstetten. This is my enormous local garden centre on the edge of town.

The food situation started to interest me. The announcement said the restaurant was in coach 30 so I trundled that way but the train ended at the bottom of coach 31.

I stood there for a moment. An elderly woman with a sour face was watching so I performed cartoon befuddlement for her—where, oh, where is the restaurant, woe is me—and turned to her with a half smile, preparatory to asking for help.

She looked away quickly.

Bitch, I thought.

I’ll get her. I waited until she sneaked a look back to see what I was up to now. I immediately locked eyes and smiled sweetly.

“Essen?”

Gotcha.

She gave me a cold look and jerked a thumb over the shoulder back the way I’ve come. Right.

Rural Austria has the same mechanised agricultural feel of an upstate New York. Cornfields, silos, diesel pumps and wind socks. Tractor yards and marching pylons. It almost made me feel at home until I spied a bright yellow four-storey traditional farmhouse and remembered I have never been at home here.

The girl in front of me was watching a video on her phone. It was a TikTok woman applying make-up in a process involving at least seventeen steps. I’m not sure when it got so complex. Cleanse, tone, moisturise: what else can there be?

But then I remembered there’s money to be made at every step so of course there are more steps now. There are probably whole rooms full of people out there dreaming up new stages: Exfoli-magnify. Depillopop. Thirst trap incubation. Etc. Someone pay me, this shit is gold.

In Linz, I became viscerally jealous of all the lucky bastards waiting on the opposite platform for the train back to Vienna.

Especially this colour-coordinated, super stylish dude:

Even his bike was orange.

Imagine getting back to the streets of Vienna, with your bike, in time to sit out at a bar in an ancient churchyard. I reminded myself it was raining in Vienna and that I will go back, soon.

Vienna gets in.

I thought again of that box in the archives and how important it feels to me: how it contains multitudes and layers and humans captured forever in a few lines of impenetrable handwriting. How even people I love dearly can summon only minimal enthusiasm for a dusty box of documents.

I wondered again why this story has me so tight in its grips.

I have a quiet horror of turning into one of those earnest middle-aged female researchers with thermos flask and busy notebook.

That’s not me, I want to squeal. I’m on a sexy quest for my novel. This isn’t boring, it’s HOT.

—

The conductor on the train from Salzburg to Munich rebuked a foreign passenger.

“This is an Austrian train. You have a Bavaria regional ticket. It is not valid. You must get off at the next stop—Traunstein in five minutes—and you get the next train, the blue one. Your ticket works for that train.”

I looked to each side, at mist-shrouded fields under a setting sun. I am so certain I too will be ordered off in Traunstein, sent off into those dark fields.

I zoomed in on my barcode and prayed. By the time he reached me, I was certain my minutes on board were numbered.

But my ticket was good. He passed with a smile.

I closed my eyes and, against the green fields in Bavaria, outlined I see fallen bodies when they said run for it, run for target practice for the boys. Won’t run? A shot point blank, close range, and then to the others, quietly, now RUN.

Picked off one by one, as they run.

I squeezed my eyes to clear my head. Why do empty fields and boxes of documents and patches of city grass under a balcony speak to me like this? Why does historical fiction feel so much like communing with the very-present dead?

—

Midnight in Munich, at a hotel next to the station, I passed quickly into unknowing and just as quickly out of it. My alarm went at 6am, an uncomfortable hour, and I packed up the three items of personal effects I unpacked last night. Put back on the same clothes from yesterday.

No shower. I’m a treat.

It’s a six minute waltz to the station. My train was there already.

I had a seat in first class because that is all Trainline would allow me to book. Probably some private-equity-backed expenditure-optimising algorithmic tweak, effectively committing fraud by telling me that no second class seats were available and I must book first class. Right.

Anyway, first class means big seats and quiet. I got to my seat and it was a table, spot of luck with my laptop. I put my bag on the rack and took my allotted seat.

Some parts of land have, throughout history, served as focal points of conflict. I’m thinking of the Rhineland, because that’s where I’m chundering through as I write, but consider many other conflicts in the world right now: Israel-Palestine, Russia in Ukraine, even the Myanmar army in ethnic border areas. If it is a gross simplification to characterise these as contests for space (for control, for more, to pacify), it is also not entirely wrong. Boundaries are contested where various “nations” (and I use this only in the loosest sense of the term to mean a self-identifying unit) seek to chip away at the space of those outside the unit.

We covet what is not ours. We always want more. Humans encroaching or seeking to encroach on the space of others is often a matter of survival.

Space is finite. Turf wars are as old as humanity.

The reason I mention this is that I was subject to some very minor turf wars of my own in this train. The only turf I have to defend on a train is my own personal space. I will defend it to the death.

A woman came along with two small children.

Now, I know this woman. I dare say I have been this woman, so absorbed in the insane task of parenting small humans that you lose the ability to recognise that not everyone gives two shits about how hard things are for you. You display an entitled need to avoid even minor inconveniences which, in a child-encumbered state, feel like pure insult on top of injury.

Along she came, down to her seats, which did not have a table. She decided she wanted my table, and approached.

Now, let’s be clear: this is a hostile act of overt aggression. It’s Hitler marching into the Sudetenland. I see what you are doing: you are strong-arming me for Lebensraum.

We know what’s about to happen. You’re going to force me to share this long journey with you and your kids. This is a power move and, I’ll be honest, I know it well, having employed it myself in turn. Sure, you’re technically entitled to come along and surround me at the table—but it’s a dick move, designed to sweep me away, shift me off to my rightful place in a piddly two-seater without a table.

Like I said, I’m a parent myself and I get it. This isn’t my first rodeo. I’ve pulled this move.

But it’s a dick move and we all know it is.

I stood to get my AirPods from my bag—I’m going to need them!—and along came another woman at the luggage rack as I was fiddling with some small personal items.

“Can I put my luggage here?” She pointed at my bag.

“Sorry, what?” I visibly scrambled for words and comprehension. “But … my bag is there.”

Seriously, what is happening? Have I wandered into a Reddit thread of “Am I the Asshole?” (Let’s be clear: we are all the Asshole.) Have I transgressed a rule about where bags must go? Or is she, like the woman with kids, just… intent on occupying my space here in the Rhineland with perfect entitlement?

I can’t work it out. This never happens to me. I’m a solid five foot ten and have been told I have an intimidating don’t-fuck-with-me resting bitch face. Why are all these women suddenly trying to dominate me? Is it the mom shorts? Is it the obviously unshowered state I’m in? Is it the rest of this train journey, which has so comprehensively wiped me out that I give the impression I have no fight left?

Who can say.

I declined to move my bag. There were other places she could put hers and I’m not Chamberlain, fuck appeasement.

Inspired by my own boldness, I returned to my seat and coughed violently, before disclosing that I have a terrible cold.

The woman with children decided not to sit with me after all.

An elderly woman opposite gave me a quiet, conspiratorial smile, like: I get it, honey. I realised it was because she didn’t want the kids near her either and was delighted I had driven them away.

Look. Don’t judge me. The thing is, when you make it out the other side of toddlerhood with your own kids, the prospect of putting up with someone else’s for any length of time becomes insupportable.

Especially on a long train journey. Sometimes a gal just needs to sit at a table on her own in first class. I defy you not to want the same on five hours sleep and a sinus headache.

In bright sunshine as we streamed towards Karlsruhe, hunting stands studded the fields.

The woman who asked me to move my bag started doing squats in the aisle.

I turned attention to more pressing matters. Where’s the fucking coffee on this fucking train.

The kids I didn’t sit with shouted and cried in neat repeating patterns all the way to Paris.

Thank God for noise cancelling.

In Paris, the promise of my sister’s empty apartment, quiet and comfortable and familiar, beckons. They are away in the States and left the key. I will pootle around. I will go to the Louvre. I will buy cheese.

I will water their plants and imagine that every pocket of greenery I see on terraces and balcons is the effort of visiting houseguests. I will raid my sister’s closet for something to wear. (Just kidding, Jax!)

Or perhaps I will just sleep. I am very, very tired.

All the way to Vienna and all the way back again.

I’m not sure yet what I got out of it.

But wait and see.

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—

End notes: This was a good trip for reading. Long train rides will do that.

This summer—more than usual—every book I read, I said to myself: how have I never read this before?! This, this is the book from which all subsequent books shall be measured.

Oh no, wait. This one.

No, actually, this one.

Doris Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark. Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea. Most recently, because I just finished it today, Hilary Mantel’s early novel about a psychic, Beyond Black.

I don’t have any easy conclusions to draw from Beyond Black. It (like my last book review) felt autobiographical. Is it a lack of imagination in myself, I wonder, that sees the authors so clearly in their subjects? That sees Mantel as her main character Al, this slightly self-loathing woman with a sensitivity to the dead, an ear to the past and a tormented childhood?

All fiction springs from the well of the self, if it’s worth a damn. So-called “auto-fiction” is a tautological nonsense.

In her famous Reith lectures, Mantel drew parallels between the work of psychics and writers of historical fiction; refused to be drawn on whether she could have succeeded as a psychic. In Beyond Black, the term she uses often is ‘sensitives’.

In The Day is for the Living, the first of her Reith lectures², she talked about historical novelists needing a sensitivity to what’s missing—the crack in the land of the living—to work out what it is that the dead have left to tell us.

This, I know well: the crack around the edges of the historical record, where words fade out to exhaled air.

If you close your eyes, you can see it, see the whole scene writ large in your head, clear as day. You can see the signposts, the silences given new meaning. It is as if someone whispered it to you from the cupboard, or the wallpaper, or the depths of a potted plant.

In another lecture, she pointed out the conflict inherent in this work: it is two-faced, she said, as we yearn to experience a lost life we will never know, while at the same time thanking our lucky stars that we didn’t have to live it.

Tension between what’s left and what’s been left; between the dead and the living; the past and the present: it is an illusion, this tension.

The past wasn’t some primitive rehearsal for today.

It was all just as flawed, and just as perfect, as this day.

—

As long promised (threatened?), paying subscribers now have access to my bookshelves—for the next two weeks only, after which I will close it down. The link below will take you to a searchable, digital representation of about 550 actual books³ on my actual shelves, thanks to a cool app I found called BookBuddy that lets you create a virtual replica of your own library by scanning barcodes. (No, they’re not sponsoring me but if anyone reading this works there, very welcome to…)

So, for the next two weeks only, if you’ve ever wondered what’s on my shelves, now’s your chance. Link below, for paying subs only.