As I say, in Trieste, or Trst as the Slovenes prefer, or Triest as the Austrians have it, you are not quite sure what nation you are among. If a nation can be defined as an amalgam of ethnicity, language, history and landscape, or as James Joyce’’s Mr Bloom more succinctly thought ‘the same people living in the same place’, then the nationality of Trieste is far from absolute, and when the city soccer team plays elsewhere in Italy its players are sometimes sneered at as Slavs or Germans. As the Mayor exclaimed to me, one day in the 1970s, ‘We are the furthest limit of Latinity, the southern extremity of Germanness’ – he could have said a western protrusion of Slavness too, but that might have been politically incorrect. When I first came here Trieste’s Statehood was just as debatable. The Yugoslavs had some claim to it by force majeure (they had played a powerful part in forcing the Germans and Italian Fascists out), by history (they had been fellow citizens, with the Triestini, of the lost Habsburg Empire) and by blood (outside the city centre most of Trieste’s people were Slovene). The Italians could claim it because it had been in more ancient times an Italian seaport, and because they had been awarded it as spoils of victory after the First World War. History had thrown it about between sovereignties, and was still tossing it then–in 1947 it was declared a free territory under United Nations protection, almost a State itself, and only in 1954 did the city become once more part of Italy.
Who can really take Statehood seriously, in such a place? It is fashionable in late-twentieth-century Europe, as it struggles towards (or against) unity, to talk about Nation-States, as though nations and States were synonymous. They seldom are really. One of the very States which was squabbling about Trieste fifty years ago is a State no longer, and turns out to have been no more than a jumble of nations forcibly fused – Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croatians, Muslim Bosnians, Kosovo Albanians, Slovenes, Montenegrins, Macedonians, all given the same passport and called Yugoslavs. Trieste attracts mavericks and outsiders because here they can feel (speciously, I fear) beyond the constraints of the Nation-State. Karl Marx once reported that the place had been built up by ‘a motley crew of … Italians, Germans, English, French, Greeks, Armenians and Jews’. ‘In Trieste, ah Trieste, ate I my liver,’ wrote Joyce of his residence in the city; the phrase is really a translation of a local idiom – eating one’s liver means eating one’s heart out – but somehow it does seem to express the seaport’s sense of esoteric enclave.
There are not many places in Europe that give me this feeling. The continent has generally been dominated by a few self-important States that diplomacy and history call Powers, and over the years, as I have become more and more loyal to Wales, which is not even a State, let alone a Power, I have found myself increasingly exasperated by their childish arrogances. Powers come and go, rise and fall, but in their fortunately transient climactic days they lord it over nations and States alike, and the war memorials of Trieste tragically and nonsensically illustrate the effects. The memorials mostly date from the First World War, when the Italian Kingdom was fighting the Austro-Hungarian Empire (both undeniable Powers in those days), and their names are nationally meaningless – Borgello side by side with Brunner, Silvestro with Liebmann, Zanetti with Zottig and Blotz, so that it is hard to know which side any of them died for. As for the figure of the naval officer outside the Marine Terminal, it represents an Italian Triestino who fought for Italy, was captured by the Austrians who then ruled the place, and was accordingly shot for treason (a class of crime I myself decline to recognize).
‘And so it goes on for ages and aeons,’ wrote Ogden Nash, ‘between these neighboring Europeans …’ What a farce it has all been! The prejudices of nations have been bad enough, and the ambitions of States, but the bloody Powers have been the curse of Europe.
I was on a troop train on my way from the English Channel to Italy. The Second World War having been won, the Swiss Government now allowed the victorious Western Powers to pass their armies through its neutral territory, and a marvel of the journey was to emerge briefly from the blighted and dingy landscapes of the warring States into a Switzerland that still looked creamy. Nothing could be more glamorous than the neon advertising signs, in reds and blues and yellows, that I was seeing almost for the first time in my life, and I remember how shamelessly, when the train passed through the lakeside suburbs of Lausanne, I peered through the windows of apartments to catch glimpses of the well-lit padded comforts within. When we drew into Lausanne station smiling Swiss ladies were waiting for us with cisterns of hot coffee, buns and sandwiches – miraculous sandwiches of white Swiss bread, light and crusty, like manna after several years of our brownish wartime kind.
Just as the train began to move on, while I hung out of the window absorbing these novel scenes, I caught the eye of a small well-dressed man standing indecisively on the platform. Shyly smiling, he hastened towards me. The train gathered speed. The man burst into a trot. The train went faster. The man lost his smile and ran. He held out his hand to me. I held mine out in return. The train got into its swing. The man panted anxiously. I stretched as far as I could out of my window. Our hands touched, just in time, and there passed from one to the other a small Swiss silver coin. It was not a valuable coin, but as a token it was priceless. Surely he meant it as a token? I clasped it sentimentally anyway, and waved my thanks as long as the man was still in sight – standing there motionless now, unsmiling, indistinctly raising his small white hand in response.
He might have spoken French, German, Italian or Romansh, but he certainly thought of himself as Swiss – as Swiss as the coin itself, which appeared to be new-minted. The Swiss are the one people who have given dignity to the idea of the Nation-State by turning it into a State of Nations, to my mind a model for us all. They have not compromised either their Statehood or their nationhoods. Their four languages remain more or less inviolate, but in all their autonomous cantons the Swiss are the Swiss are the Swiss.
Yet they are not universally admired in the rest of Europe. In the nineteenth century the world seems to have regarded the Helvetic Confederation with almost fulsome respect. Its citizens were sturdy mountaineers and farmers, nature’s gentlemen. They could teach even Victorian Britain something when it came to mighty works of engineering, and they were a nation of soldiers too, every man with his own gun above the mantelpiece. However, they preferred not to fight in either of the two world wars, and this rather altered their reputation. Neutrality enabled the Swiss not only to evade the tragedies which had befallen the rest of Europe, but even to profit from them, and by the time I came to Europe the notion of Swissness had come to seem a less noble abstraction. The English in particular now scornfully resented it. Few phrases have more exactly expressed a historical resentment than the famous remark in Carol Reed’s film The Third Man (1949), about the creativity of the Swiss: ‘They had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.’
The Victorians would have been astonished by this calumny, but Britons have been quoting it ever since. Nobody had yet heard it when our troop train passed through, but many of the officers on board would certainly have relished it, even as they accepted their coffee from those courteous volunteers: it perfectly expressed the sour judgement of a battle-scarred, impoverished imperial kingdom of epic suffering and performance upon a comfortable, well-heeled, chocolatey republic which hadn’t done a damned thing to help save civilization as we knew it.
The more elegant would doubtless have sneered at the Swiss as unstylish, too, and it is true that for years after the war the Swiss bourgeoisie seemed resolutely determined never to break out of the ordinary. (Mussolini, who despised the ordinary, had called theirs ‘a sausage-making democracy’.) But actually Swissness can be truly splendid. Swiss bridges are wonderful, especially the lovely spans with which the engineer Robert Maillart gave an unprecedented beauty to concrete. Swiss chalets, though relentlessly trivialized by developers and speculative builders, and made the architectural equivalent of the cuckoo clock, can be magnificent objects – stately homes par excellence, built for men of stature by master craftsmen, heroic homes, as strong as they are hospitable, and sometimes inhabited by the same family for centuries. The high mountain passes of Switzerland, with their superb roads and brilliantly lit tunnels, their railway lines circling and recircling in the hearts of mountains, their crowning forts, their tremendous sense of scale, purpose and infallible calculation, are like the constructions of a super-Power, not of a petty land-locked republic. A tall-funnelled steamer of the Swiss lakes may look quaint at a distance, but when it comes into port it is an ensemble of grandeur, swanky as can be, and the very image of competence. I find something grand in the Swiss Army too, with all its half-hidden bunkers and hangars: especially at weekends when the citizen soldiery turns out in the mountains, polishing its saddles at cavalry depots among the trees, clambering up hill-tracks in pairs with radio aerials flopping, or reverberating the thunder of its artillery in impossibly inaccessible valleys. It has scarcely fired a shot in anger for 150 years, but then that is what is grand about it.
By the 1990s the Swiss were much more stylish, anyway. In some Swiss ski-resorts there is a Kinderland, and on the slopes around it New Model Children, raised to modern perfection from the start, are daily on display. Dressed as they are in apparently brand-new baby ski-suits, generally with brightly coloured helmets on their heads like infinitesimal astronauts, they seem incapable of getting wet, muddy or even untidy, and are congenitally immune to hazard. Sometimes with ski-sticks, sometimes without, often hardly big enough to be out of their carry-cots, they hurtle with terrific insouciance down the slopes and out of sight, to reappear a few moments later returning imperturbably up ski-lifts. They hardly ever fall over, and if they do they pick themselves up in a trice with a magical disentanglement of their skis. They never cry or grumble. They never hurt themselves. When the time comes for them to go home, and they are led away to their always spotless family cars, their rosy little faces express no resentment at all, but only a healthy satisfaction with their day’s sport, and a proper gratitude to their parents.
Who themselves look, when they are in the mountains, preternaturally young and vigorous. High up the mountainside, when I have been taking my leisurely morning exercise, I have come across stalwart groups of great-grandparents, I swear it, sticks in their hands, smiles on their faces, striding sun-flushed and companionable towards their hearty luncheons: and once I observed far above my head, riding all alone on a chair-lift on his way to the highest ski-runs, a white-bearded ancient of such majestic splendour and vivid gear that he was like a Zeus of the snows. It is as though in some clinic of unimaginable hygiene, reachable only by funicular, these people have on the one hand had all their confusions smoothed by fatherly Jungians, while on the other hand they have been administered tremendously effective virility pills.
I made a pilgrimage once to the field of Rütli, the lakeside meadow where, at least according to pious legend, in 1291 the Swiss highland rebels met to defy the authority of the Holy Roman Empire and bring into being a Swiss Republic. On the Sunday I walked down the track from the heights above, thousands of Swiss country patriots were making their way to and from the hallowed site, swarming through the woods and arranging picnics on the sward. I offered a cheerful good morning to everyone I met, and could not help admiring the utter lack of ingratiation, the courtesy tinged with decidedly suspended and unsmiling judgement, with which most of them responded.
This seems to me a peasant-like characteristic, and in many ways Switzerland is still a nation of bucolics. There may be New Model Swiss in the ski-resorts, but they are mostly Old Model in the rural lowlands. I am often struck by the number of twisted, stooped or withered old people I see there – people of a kind that have almost vanished from the rest of western Europe. They are one generation removed from the goitre, that talismanic ailment of mountain folk: and though the Swiss have a longer life expectancy than any other Europeans, and the remotest Alpine farm is likely to possess every last gadget of domestic convenience, still the faces of those crooked ancients, hard-hewn, bashed-about, gaunt, seem to speak of centuries of earthy hardship, isolation and suspicion. It was in Switzerland, in 1782, that the last European witch was publicly burnt.
In the mountain resort of Flims, one afternoon in the early 1990s, I saw three small Swiss girls on their way home from school. They were standard graduates of Kinderland, not in the slightest goitrous or bucolic. They looked like modernistic elves, with bright-coloured rucksacks on their backs, and they were burbling brightly to each other as they climbed the hill to their homes above the town. They paused for a bit of a gossip and leg-swinging at a bench beside the road, and when they got up to go one of them, meandering off by herself, chanced to leave her sun-glasses on the bench. In a trice the other two, laughing and giggling, threw them on the ground and stamped them into pieces before my eyes, alternating kicks in the prettiest way.
I sometimes stay at a place called Weggis on Lake Lucerne, as Swiss a place as one can imagine, where ladies in hats stroll talkatively along promenades, where bands play in bandstands and swans and ducks are fed by plump infants in pushchairs. It is a place of sexless charm, kind but condescending, hanging on the air like lavender. It is a hive, nest or cliché of Swissness. Sometimes as I potter around the lake, however, I come across small and unobtrusive boundary markers. Four cantons surround Lake Lucerne – Lac des Quatres Cantons – and each to a large degree governs its own affairs: yet only those modest stones, sometimes far from roads, mark the frontiers between them. I find them very moving. Not for centuries has one of those cantons gone to war with another, or tried to impose itself upon a neighbour. The stones represent a gentle apotheosis of the nationalist idea. I would not at all mind a Europe similarly demarcated, so that only a block marked ‘France’, say, with a concrete cock on top, will tell travellers that they have left Germany or Italy, and must swop dictionaries for another language. Marx wrongly thought that Communism offered the complete solution to the insanities of the Nation-State: when I am in Weggis I half-cherish the hope that the end of history will be Swissness.
It is sad to think that I once thought it might be Yugoslavity. Absolutely my favourite road in all Europe used to be the coastal highway which ran down the coast of Dalmatia from Trieste to Montenegro, because I saw it as a proclamation of unity, and hoped that, when cohesion was finally achieved, Yugoslavia’s brutal postwar Communism would mature into libertarian socialism. The road was fast and usually empty, and passing motorists would cheerfully warn you, with flashing lamps and hooting horns, if there was a speed trap around the corner. The glorious Dalmatian shoreline swept by panoramically, all creeks and inlets and islands and ships. Every now and then one came across a marvellous old Venetian town, with a gnarled cathedral in the centre, winged lions of St Mark all over it and snub-nosed Adriatic fishing-boats nestling each other in the harbour. Sometimes I made a detour up the road to Mostar, where a lovely old Turkish bridge spanned the Neretva river in a high and graceful span. Sometimes I stopped off for a night or two under the golden walls of Dubrovnik, or in Split, whose inhabitants seemed to me to be the handsomest people in all Europe. The light, in my memory at least, was always brilliant. My BMW of the time always went beautifully. I played Bach, Mozart and Sinatra on my cassette-player. Once I saw Marshal Tito, the dictatorial President of the Yugoslav federation, in a white uniform, speeding by in his limousine towards his retreat in the Brioni islands.
The road started in the Istrian peninsula, which had once been Austrian, and then Italian, and was now part of the Slovene People’s Republic. A little lower down it entered the Croatian Republic. For a few miles it passed through the Bosnian Republic. It skirted Dubrovnik, which had been for several centuries the independent Republic of Ragusa, then ran through a coastal strip of the Montenegrin People’s Republic, until at last it stopped short at the frontier of Albania, in those days as frowardly unwelcoming as Tibet (the few travellers permitted to cross the border had to walk through a tank of disinfectant). Most of these territories had once been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Some had been Roman. Some had been ruled by the Turks. Bits of them had been, until the Second World War, Italian. Some were chiefly Catholic, some Orthodox, some Muslim. Now, thanks very largely to that portly white-jacketed grandee I saw in the back of his Mercedes (who had himself started life as a corporal in the Austro-Hungarian Army), they were all within the bounds of a single Federal State, and long before the emergence of the European Union one could drive from one end of Yugoslavia to the other without producing a passport or changing currency.
I used to be happy and hopeful driving down the Dalmatia highway, supposing that all the tumultuous history of the country was reaching some well-surfaced serenity. More recently a magazine commissioned me to drive a new Alfa Romeo down it, picking up the car in Venice and returning it there at the end of the journey; but it could find nobody to insure such a venture, in the Yugoslavia of 1994.
Next time I did make a journey through what we had by then learnt to call The Former Yugoslavia there was no such abstraction as Yugoslavity. Perhaps there never had been. It seems extraordinary, in retrospect, that when we foreigners used to travel so blithely through the Yugoslav federation we were seldom aware which constituent republic we were in. I generally did not think of the Yugoslavs who lived in the very outskirts of Trieste as anything but Yugoslavs, or just Slavs – it seldom occurred to me to call them Slovenes. It is true that now and then my reporter’s instinct warned me that something dangerous was brewing over there, but I never dreamt that in the 1990s the country would collapse in a struggle horribly reminiscent not so much of the Second World War but of those indiscriminate, almost indefinable ethnic-religious-hereditary conflicts of the Middle Ages. Next time I went to Dubrovnik it was scarred with shell-fire, and in the balconies of hotels there forlornly fluttered the washing of refugees. Next time I went to Split convoys of armoured trucks were lumbering out of the docks. The bridge at Mostar had been blown up. The frontier with Montenegro was closed. My next Yugoslav motor-journey was not down that happy coastline but across the cruel mountains of Bosnia in the aftermath of the fighting, and it aroused in me sensations not of hope but of despair or even self-reproach.
I had been in Sarajevo, and finding the airport snowed-in I took a night ride in a mini-bus down to the sea. The snow in Bosnia-Hercegovina was deep, the road was unpredictable, every now and then we were stopped at roadblocks in the middle of nowhere, and the awful gorges through the mountains loomed around us dark and dangerous. Sometimes we clattered across a temporary iron bridge, beside a blown-up original. Sometimes, shadowy in the night, an armoured vehicle stood guard beside a road junction. The only other traffic on the road consisted of huge tanker trucks labouring up to Sarajevo from the coast, their headlights showing far, far away on mountain curves. And, most disturbingly suggestive of all, ever and again I looked through my window to see scattered ruins passing dismally by outside – house after house gaping in the darkness, with no sign of life but for a single dim light, perhaps, on a ground floor, or a melancholy fire burning in a brazier. I dozed uncomfortably off somewhere around Konjic, and when I woke up I looked out of the window again, into the grey dawn, to see the ruins passing still.
They were not the usual ruins of war – not compact villages knocked into general shambles by blanket bombing, street fighting or concentrated artillery bombardment, like villages of France, Germany or Italy in the Second World War. They were generally strings of detached houses, well separated, each one of which had been individually and deliberately destroyed. In the same way, Sarajevo did not look in the least like those cities of Europe which were bombed into desolation in the Second World War. It was not a wasteland of burnt-out shells and skeletonic blocks. But there was hardly a building in the city centre which had not been specifically targeted, sometimes half-collapsed in a mess of beams and boulders, sometimes just pitted all over with shell fragments or snipers’ bullets. All this gave me an impression of particular and personal hatred. It looked such a spiteful sort of destruction. Bosnia had been ravaged, it appeared, not by ignorant conscript armies clashing, but by groups of citizens expressing their true emotions. A. J. P. Taylor once wrote that the Great War had begun as the most popular of wars, but I had a feeling that the War of the Yugoslav Succession was undertaken even more genuinely from the human heart. And what did that say, I could not help wondering as those shattered houses passed me in the dark, about the human heart?
There were four other passengers in the mini-bus that night – a Swede, a Finn, a Croat and an Englishman. We were all there to make money in one way or another. Behind us a second bus-load was following through the darkness. At about two in the morning we stopped, and our driver got out and peered rather helplessly into the black emptiness behind him, up the highway banked with snowdrifts. ‘What’s happening?’ said the Englishman in front of me. ‘What have we stopped for?’ The driver explained that the other bus seemed to be lost: there was no sign of its lights, and he was worried that it might have got into trouble back there. The Englishman stretched, pulled his coat more tightly around his shoulders, and settled down to sleep again. ‘Who cares?’ he said. But he may have been joking.
How strange to be a Yugoslav, of whatever nation, who was born when I was born! When I was first in Sarajevo, before the Yugoslav wars, the very name of the place had a different meaning for the world. By the 1990s it stood for cruel sieges, snipers, hopeless negotiations, ethnic cleansing, poverty and public hardship. In the 1970s it had recalled only, for me as for most of the world’s inhabitants, the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austro-Hungary, which led immediately to the First World War. I went at once then, as every visitor did, to the place where Gavrilo Princip fired the fateful shot, on 28 June 1914. He had been among the crowd at the end of a bridge, later renamed in his honour, over the Miljačka river; and there was a small museum in memory of the occasion, and some footprints incised in the pavement to show just where Princip had stood, and a plaque on a wall which every tourist liked to photograph. It was all pointed out to me with some pride: Princip was a Yugoslav patriotic hero, and there were ceremonies at his grave on the anniversary of the murder. Twenty years later, when I returned to Sarajevo, a city all bashed about and wasted, I went back to Princip’s Bridge out of curiosity, to see how history had treated the site. It was a rainy dusk. The bridge was there still, over the rushing narrow river. So was the museum, though it was closed. But the paving-blocks were knocked about, cracked and puddled, and I could find no sign of the footprints. I stumbled about trying to locate the famous plaque upon the wall, but passers-by told me not to bother. It had been removed, they said. We were not in Yugoslavia any more. We were in Bosnia-Hercegovina now, and Gavrilo Princip had been a Serb.
In Zagreb I was introduced, as it happened, to a woman born there in the year before me, 1925. We inspected each other with interest, and after discussing our respective personal lives spent half an hour exchanging our experiences of history. Mine were soon told. Hers were more complicated. She had been born into a Yugoslav monarchy, in a city that was (and still is) in many ways a characteristic provincial capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She was old enough to remember the assassination of King Alexander of the Yugoslavs in 1934 ( her mother cried, she said). She remembered the arrival of the German Army in 1941, and the odious Croatian Fascist State of the Second World War, with its brutal Ustashi guards, its concentration camps and its ethnic massacres. Two of her brothers, she told me, had run away to fight with the Communist partisans. She had been in the crowd in the central square that welcomed the proclamation of the Yugoslav federation in 1945. She had been present when Croatian soldiers attacked the Zagreb barracks of the Yugoslav National Army in 1991, heralding the end of it. She had lived through the miseries of the Yugoslav civil wars. Now she was looking forward eagerly to the putsch which must before long, she felt sure, rid Croatia of its present dictatorial president and make a real democracy of it.
And yet, she said, she felt no older than she had felt thirty or forty years before. ‘Well,’ said I conventionally, ‘it’s all in the mind anyway.’ She eyed me thoughtfully then.
In the Republic of Ireland there exists a genuine and peaceable Nation-State – perhaps it is all to the good that the Protestants of the North, mostly of Scottish descent, have not been reunited with the South since the British sliced them off in the 1920s. Nowhere in western Europe has history moved faster than in Ireland – which in this century has matured from a hangdog, rebellious and poverty-stricken British possession to a confident and progressive sovereign member of the European Community. Even in my time there were wrecks of Anglo-Irish houses all over the country, never rebuilt after the old troubles, or allowed to fall into dilapidation with independence. There were innumerable semi-wrecks of Anglo-Irish people, too, surrounded by grand memories in unheated mansions, recalling the wars and high jinks of their youths in the drawing-room of the Kildare Street Club. When I first went to Ireland it was easy to meet people who remembered the Protestant Ascendancy – which meant, in effect, the British Empire – if not in full swing, at least in vibrant style. I envied them. It all sounded shamefully delightful. Who would not like to have been The Most Honourable the Marquess of Waterford, living with his exuberant children, his devoted family servants and his hundred horses among his wide woods at Curraghmore?
In those days, when foreigners spoke of the Irish style, as often as not it was the Anglo-Irish style they really meant. The Irish Joke, of course, never referred to the Marquess of Waterford, but Irish Dash, Irish Pluck, the Luck of the Irish, a Touch of the Irish – all these abstractions were fostered, in outsiders’ minds, less by the native Celts than by the occupying Britons. It is true that the line between the two was blurred, people of impeccable Norman origins swearing to their own undying Irishness, unmistakable members of the Ascendancy turning out to be descended from native chieftains, but still Anglo-Ireland was essential to the Irish mystique.
Where is it now? Even its ruins are disappearing, one by one, and the governing class of Ireland is now the courteous, cultivated, worldly, clever and sometimes corrupt progeny of its tenants. Back in the 1960s, contemplating one of the more spectacular of those Ascendancy ruins, sentimentally I remarked to a passing Irishman that it seemed a shame all the festive and colourful life of the house should have come to an end. ‘Oh,’ he replied, ‘wouldn’t you say it was too late for that kind of fandango?’ I remembered his words when, decades later, I sat down to a contemporary equivalent of those old hedonisms – a first-class Irish country lunch at a famous pub near Galway City. I had never been there before, and found it gloriously high-spirited. The place was full of well-heeled and entertaining Galwegians, as Irish as could be, eating crab claws, scampi and fresh fish in the dining-room, or at wooden benches outside. Ever and again another car turned up full of eloquent anticipation. ‘On a day like this,’ my companion said to me, ‘honest to God there’s nowhere on earth I’d rather be than Moran’s.’ We were sitting in the open air, overlooking the water and the Volvos, and I had washed down half a dozen Galway oysters with a glass of Guinness. Finding this insufficient for my needs, I ordered the same again, and while waiting for it to arrive I took a stroll up the road to look at the view. Honest to God, there on the skyline I saw in unmistakable silhouette the very same ruin whose outdated merriments that passer-by had long before dismissed. It still looked grand up there – a big square block with the sun shining through its gutted windows – but the oysters, the Guinness and the Galway company had done their trick, and I no longer wished I could hear the music of the hunt ball, or see the young Etonians and their girls larking about in the rose-garden.
As the century closes, Ireland, which is the youngest country in Europe, and one of the best-educated, is still on the move. Do you recall the seditious radio programme that so astonished me in that Dublin bookshop, making fun of the Catholic Church? By the 1990s scandals among the Church hierarchy had become so common, and so highly publicized, that it was hard to remember which divine had been involved in which (there were four Catholic archbishops in Ireland, and thirty-one bishops). ‘Let me see now,’ I heard myself saying warily one morning, ‘is the Bishop of Ferns the one who – well, er, you know–that woman?’ ‘No,’ came the matter-of-fact response, ‘you’re thinking of the Bishop of Galway. The Bishop of Ferns is the one who’s away in America for detoxification.’ Of course there was a sadness to such developments, the discrediting of old certainties, the abandonment of old ways, but the Irish seemed to be taking it in their stride. Theirs was a laughing country still, and rich in quirk and variety to a degree that most countries of the West had almost forgotten. When I ventured to complain one lunch-time about a mildewed baked potato, ‘Oh what a shocking misunderstanding,’ cried the café proprietress in a truly fastidious choice of euphemism, and gave me a free pudding. Deep in the country one day I came as in a daze to a village where every house had recently been repainted in colours of blinding variety – pinks, blues, reds, dazzling yellows – while the single street was astonishingly festooned with drooping electric wires, and paved mostly with mud. It was a Civic Trust nightmare! When I went into a shop to ask the meaning of it all (there was none), merciful Heaven, disoriented as I was it seemed to me like stepping into the attic storeroom of some crazed recluse – broken boxes, splintered crates, piles of newspapers, paint-pots, random vegetables everywhere, stacks of cans tumbled in corners, shadowy high shelves jammed with packages, a potato or two rolling across the floor, and somewhere amidst the chaos a composed urbane shopkeeper, awaiting my order for all the world as though she were standing behind the confectionery counter at Fortnum & Mason’s.
No doubt there were all sorts of things wrong with that republic – drugs, organized crime, violence – but still the Irish seemed to be running better than most in the general pursuit of happiness. Modernizing things without ruining them is a problem every society faces – how to make things more efficient without making them less entertaining. If any State can get away with it, Ireland’s the one.
The Portuguese were a Power in their time. They were neutral in the Second World War, but they were still imperialists long after it – their African empire collapsed only in the 1970s, and they stayed even longer in Macao, their colony on the coast of China. The spoils of empire are apparent in Portugal to this day, in the grand palaces of Lisbon and Oporto, and the vulgar country homes of recently returned colonialists. I can well remember the Portuguese in their imperial mode, when they fought with all the paraphernalia of troop carrier and camouflage suit to keep the blacks of their African possessions in subjection. I remember the tough Portuguese mercenaries who, deprived of a war by the independence of Mozambique, came over the border to fight the blacks of the old Rhodesia – sunning themselves, between skirmishes, with cigars and whisky beside the swimming-pools of Salisbury. Even in the 1990s, in Portugal itself, one sometimes came across reunions of those old veterans, jovial with regimental banners and vinho verde, celebrating the last of their imperial wars.
I am imaginatively seized myself by relics of the Age of Navigators, the golden age of Portugal’s power, when Portuguese seamen ranged the seas in trade and conquest under the auspices of the fifteenth-century Prince Henry. The best of these souvenirs is the great wind-rose set up by Henry for the instruction of his captains at Cape St Vincent, the south-western extremity of Europe. It is a huge compass chart laid out on the ground to record the strengths and directions of prevailing winds, and it was built within the purlieus of a dramatic headland fortress. When I was there it was sadly neglected, and looked rather like a run-down rock garden, but it stirred me all the same. As I stood beside it in the evening I could see those caravel captains clustered there so long before, worrying their way through the new devices of seamanship; and, if I turned my head a little, there was the very ocean they had made their own, taking the lessons of the wind-rose with them to Brazil, to Angola, to the Cape of Good Hope, to Mozambique, to Goa, to Macao, to all those places that the Portuguese discovered for Christian Europe, and mastered for themselves.
But a Portuguese family arrived while I was meditating by the wind-rose, and stood staring silently at this emblem of old adventures without a sign of emotion. The Portuguese in general seem to have put Powerhood behind them, and adjusted their temperament to the times. Their frontiers have remained virtually unchanged since 1139. They got rid of their last dictator in 1970, they had their last revolution in 1974, and they are now the most tranquil of the Europeans. Peace and quiet is the thing in modern Portugal, which is why the Algarve, south of Lisbon, long ago became the favourite resort of elderly northerners of gentle tastes (though mass tourism has since whittled down the old discretion). The Portuguese can drive as maniacally as anyone else, but in most circumstances they are remarkably restrained. They are conquerors no more. Their smiles are kind but vestigial. Their waves of the hand are solemn. Their courtesy is reserved, and especially in the countryside it takes application to amuse them into riposte or badinage. From the heroic cliff-tops of Cape St Vincent, near the wind-rose, people fish with rod and line, dropping their mussel bait through the gusty winds all down the face of the precipice to the ocean far below. This eccentric technique naturally attracts foreign sightseers, but the anglers appear to think it a perfectly conventional way of fishing, as they allow their reels to release a few hundred feet more line to the tossing waves below. ‘Any luck?’ they say to each other, just as though they are sitting on a canal bank drinking tea from Thermos flasks and waiting for their floats to bob.
Parts of Portugal are among the poorest regions in western Europe – women still wash their clothes in rivers, mules and donkeys pull ploughs – but there is no sense of primitivism to this country. Even the animals and children are gentlemanly. In the village of Vila do Bispo once I discovered all the village dogs crowded in the market square waiting to have their compulsory inoculations, and there was not a single snarl among them. I was taken aback to find my hotel in Lisbon disturbed one day by a truly demoniac pack of infants. They screamed along hotel corridors into the small hours. They banged on strangers’ doors. They were extremely ugly and seemed to have no discipline whatever. I was quite relieved to learn, when I inquired at the front desk about them, that they were not Portuguese at all, but child-members of a Russian ballet company performing in the city. ‘Bring back Stalin,’ said I to the concierge: but he only smiled, very Portuguesely.
I was driving along a country road in Portugal when I spied a tray of oranges for sale outside a cottage. It was blazing hot, and I stopped to buy some. Nobody attended the fruit, so I selected three oranges for myself and knocked upon the cottage door. Nobody came. There was no sign of life. I peered through the windows, I walked around the back, and in the end I opened the front door. It was very dark inside, but when my eyes accustomed themselves I saw that fast asleep on a bed in a corner of the room was a small old lady. I coughed and shuffled my feet, and without a start she awoke. Her very first reaction was to smile. Her second was to reach for her straw hat from a nearby chair and put it carefully on her head. She seemed entirely composed, entirely balanced. She accepted my few coins for the oranges, but then, hustling me kindly outside, picked me two apricots from another box and gave me those as a present. All the time she smiled, and laughed at my phrase-book Portuguese, and bustled around looking for other kindnesses to perform. She was one of the blithest people I have ever met, closely related I would guess to the old Breton lady that my daughter coveted on page 103. When we had said goodbye, and I had returned to the car, she came running out of the garden gate again, smiling still, clutching her hat on her head, to give me a sprig of rosemary.
On my very first evening in Sweden, in the 1950s, I impertinently adopted as my paradigm of the country an antiseptic woman I saw having dinner in my hotel restaurant. She was very handsome, and very cool. She looked as though she had been to her hairdresser’s half an hour before. She was eating alone, with a bottle of German white wine, but seemed not in the least lonely or bored. It took her only a moment to decide what she wanted from the menu, and her orders to the waiter were polite but brisk. Her mastication was regular, as if she were timing herself for statistical purposes. Sometimes I thought she was breathing to a conscious rhythm, too. When I engaged her in conversation she was courteous but unforthcoming, her pale blue eyes engaging mine with absolute confidence and no perceptible interest. She was all I expected of Sweden, I thought, and she could never have guessed how delighted I was when she told me her profession. ‘Juvenile social worker,’ she said in her impeccable English, taking an extraordinarily deliberate sip of her hock.
She was how we all thought of Sweden in those days. Like the Swiss and the Irish and the Portuguese, the Swedes had been neutral in the Second World War, leaning slightly towards the Nazi cause – in which they were only human, as German power surrounded them on three sides, while Russian power seemed to threaten them on the fourth. We thought of them as smug, fortunate, rich, efficient, socially trendy, spared the anxieties of greater States, with complacent ideological preferences and a high suicide rate, which served them right. No wonder, I thought that evening, the juvenile social worker drank her wine with such prissy calculation – I can see her now, removing a minute segment of cork from her tongue with the tip of a well-manicured little finger.
After that initial visit, however, I soon came to realize that Sweden had once been a Nation-State of a very different kind: presumptuous, swanky and aggressive, the Terror of the North – another of those damned Powers, in fact, which have so often snarled up Europe’s progress. I think my perceptions were changed by a statue of King Karl XII (1682–1718) which stands in the Kungsträdgården in Stockholm. The gardens themselves are almost exaggeratedly Swedish. All around them is a bustle of restaurants and cafés, and the bulk of the Opera House stands above. In summer, when the sun shines and the sky is a theatrically northern blue, the air is filled with the slapping of ropes from the harbour and the snapping of flags in the wind (Sweden is a terrific place for flags, most of them in the national blue and yellow, and all of them apparently brand-new). At the foot of this agreeable place stands old King Karl. He does not look in the least like a Swede in the contemporary kind. He looks demonstratively imperial, and he is holding out his right hand in a peremptory fashion in the direction of St Petersburg, as if to say, ‘On, on, you noble Swedes,’ adding something about gentlemen in Sweden now abed. This is not just sculpted histrionics, either. The Swedes really have invaded Russia more than once, have sent their armies storming across half Europe and their colonists to the Indies East and West – where on the French island of Saint-Barthélemy, years after my conversion, I came across the extremely Swedish mansion of the island’s quondam Swedish governors, clean and trim as could be beside the tropic sea.
Forty years ago one occasionally saw in Stockholm representatives of the old imperial class. The King of Sweden was still a proper king in those days, living in his vast palace beside the harbour, and sometimes there stalked the streets late representatives of the Swedish aristocracy. They looked slightly oriental – Finnish blood, no doubt. Their greatcoats were Junker-like, almost down to their heels as they strode through the snow, and their boots were patently made of supple deerskin by family cobblers on ancestral estates. Were they corseted, or was that just their masterful bearing? Did they wear monocles, or am I making that up?
I never see them now, and I look in vain for their images in the Stockholm gossip pages. The King and Queen no longer usually live in that great palace beside the harbour, but at the sweeter, softer palace of Drottningholm, leaving behind the helmeted dragoons of the royal guard to blow their trumpets and wheel here and there in the courtyard. The longer I have known the Swedes, though, the more jejune I realize my original paradigm to have been. No longer one of the Powers, there is still something rather heroic about them. They are certainly not the most beloved people in Europe, but that is perhaps because they have so successfully looked after their own interests throughout a century of general uncertainty. For years after the Second World War they kept their warships in huge excavated sea-caverns, from which they emerged into the daylight with vastly echoing rumbles of their engines: there is no denying heroism to that!
Besides, if their country is hardly an earth, a realm set in a silver sea, it really is epically situated. Its northern territories protrude into the frozen North; its southern peninsula commands the entrance to the Baltic, to my mind the most ominous and eerie of Europe’s waters. Fearful things happen in the Baltic. Wars embroil it. Ice freezes it. Unidentified submarines prowl it. Empires storm this way and that across its shallows. Predatory Powers one after the other covet its control – now the Germans, now the Russians, now the Swedes themselves. An archipelago of small islands protects Sweden from this sea, and although nowadays it is largely the province of affluent second-homers with yachts and saunas, it always seems to me to be protecting, too, against all the threats and mysteries of the wider world. Behind the archipelago Sweden stands plump, confident and well-armed beneath its bright new flags, a Power no longer, a threat to nobody: beyond the archipelago anything may happen.
Norway next door has never been a Power at all, and has been a State only since 1905, when it broke away from Sweden’s rule. Back in the 1950s it seemed to me magically northern, provincial and introspective, like a mise en scène from Ibsen. I was invited to lunches of perfect bourgeois decorum, to eat gravlax and boiled potato in decors of heavy velvet, white-painted panelling, polished wooden floors, paintings of stern ancestors and stormy seascapes. Writers still looked wonderfully writerly in the Norway of the 1950s, painters were like painters then, middle-aged ladies properly middle-aged and cardiganed. I happened in Oslo one night to see some members of a theatre cast assembling for a post-performance supper in a restaurant, and watching their meticulously staged arrivals, their accomplished greetings and their mastery of incidental business was almost as stimulating as seeing the play itself. Nothing then seemed to me more absolutely of the country than Edvard Grieg’s suburban house in Bergen – not a showy house at all, but homely and full of bric-à-brac, secluded in a garden, with a wooden pavilion among the trees in which the composer, warmed by a big iron stove in the corner, had settled at his worn old table to write his melodies. And what grand Norwegian themes had come to him through the trees, from the still water of the fjord in front of his windows, from the wooded hills behind! Norway was just the place, I concluded, for writing A-minor piano concertos.
Forty years later, primed by North Sea oil, richer than most countries, Norway showed every sign of cosmopolitan modernity. One day, as I sat on a bench in Oslo, I jotted down in my notebook all that I saw about me, and here is the register. A man with a pigtail pushed a baby-carriage along a pavement. A young executive talked into a car-phone. A Eurobus set off on a holiday trip to Andalusia. An interracial procession of raggle-taggle students marched by holding ecologically protesting banners. There were shops with names like Ambiente and Marc O’Polo, a Pakistani corner store and a Bulgarian tourist centre, a sushi bar, a pizza counter and a graffito on a wall claiming Norway for the Norwegians. There were statues of playwrights, animals, nude and preternaturally athletic children. The yellow-brick Stortinget, the national parliament, looked more interesting than lovely, I thought – like an aardvark perhaps. The National Theatre looked unmistakably national and theatrical. The university looked, with its classical columns and sandwich-eating students, indisputably academic. All in all, Oslo had become a little epitome of modern Europe.
Even in more utter parts of the country there seemed to be nothing very insular or introspective to Norway any more, even in reaches of the bleakest North, where all is desolate sea and tundra, the wind howling off the Arctic and the little fishing-towns, hundreds of miles from one another, huddled beneath their rocky bluffs in the half-light. By the 1990s hardly a one of those towns was without its modern chain hotel, with Country and Western Music on Saturday Nite. At Bergen by then there was a Gay Disco at weekends. At Skjervöy, far above the Arctic Circle, they were advertising package tours to the Canary Islands. At Trondheim I came across two whole-hog Rastafarians drinking hot chocolate in a café, together with a genuine punk couple, complete with Mohican haircut and ethnic jewellery. Mexican restaurants were all over the place, video shops, soft-porn magazines, and wherever you looked there was likely to be an infant drinking Fanta through a bent straw. I did once see a scrawl on a wall, in Ålesund, which seemed to speak of that older Norway. ‘TELL ME ONE REASON FOR LIVING,’ it said, and I was tempted to add another: ‘IBSEN RULES‚ O.K.?’
DR STOCKMANN: I feel so indescribably happy at being part of all this teeming, flourishing life. It’s a wonderful age we’re living in – it’s as though a whole world were springing up around us!
THE MAYOR: Do you really think so?
Yearsago at the airport in Leningrad, as they then called St Petersburg, I chanced to see an acquaintance of mine from the British Embassy in Moscow, waiting for a flight to Finland. It was winter, and he was dressed in full paraphernalia of fur hat, fur coat and heavy boots. I thought he looked like an English Muscovy merchant in an old painting: lean, clever, ready to drive the hardest of sealskin bargains, or arrange a cruelly advantageous shipment of amber. What was he really going to Finland for? He was going to the dentist.
It used to be thought that there was something magical about the Finns – lightfooted, high-cheeked, speaking a strange language, addicted to mystic folklore: it was claimed that the very word ‘Finn’ meant ‘magician’, and even at the end of the nineteenth century British sailors were reluctant to sail with Finns because they thought they had unearthly powers. Magic or not, certainly throughout my fifty years Finland has been the Lucky Country of Europe, maintaining a brilliant equilibrium through all history’s convulsions. The Russian invasion of 1939 was Stalin’s one example of restraint in military expansionism. The German alliance which followed it was soon forgotten. Nobody holds grudges against the Finns, unless there are inherited Scandinavian grievances that I know nothing of; the Finns are respected by one and all, if only for the slippery skill of their diplomacy. In the days of the Communist Empire, whose dominion it so narrowly escaped, Finland was like a safety-valve on the edge of Russia. Not only young men from the British Embassy went there for their comforts: Communist apparatchiks, you may be sure, knew their way across the frontier, or over the narrow waters of the Gulf of Finland, to the dentists, the restaurants, the dressmakers, the fleshpots and the bankers of Helsinki. ‘o to be in finland,’ wrote e. e. cummings in 1950, ‘now that russia’s here.’
Going there from Leningrad then was a tonic. The wind out of a Russian sea was like a death in the family, but the same wind in Finland was just a tingle in the cheek. An hour in a Finnish sauna, after even a week or two in the Soviet Union, seemed to scour some miasma from your person, to leave you clean, brisk and ten years younger. Nobody could possibly feel pity for the Finns, as I often felt pity for the Russians. Besides, you could do anything you liked in Finland! You could take a ride in a pony-sleigh across a frozen harbour without being watched through binoculars by suspicious policemen. You could drive a car at a proper pace – in Russia in those days they never seemed to go more than thirty. You could go to a French film or an American play, and read the English newspapers. You could march around with a placard demanding currency reform or forecasting the imminent end of everything. You could satisfy your every craving. My own particular desire, when I first flew into Finland out of the Soviet Union, was for raw carrots, and when I arrived in Helsinki I went straight to a grocer, bought half a pound, washed them in my hotel bathroom, and ate them luxuriously with a glass of schnapps. Gogol once wrote that in the land of the Finns ‘everything was lost, flat, pale, grey, foggy …’. He should have tried carrots with schnapps.
Thirty years or so after those long-ago visits, when the Soviet Union had disintegrated, I went back again to Helsinki. I arrived by sea this time. Hoisting my bag on my back, I walked around the south harbour towards the centre of the city, and found the whole place en fête. It was Helsinki Day, and I was greeted at the Kauppatori market-place, where the daily mart of the waterfront was already in full swing, by a uniformed band playing from the first floor of the City Hall. Flags were everywhere, the café tables were hedonistically crowded, and Senate Square, the handsome focus of all Finland, was taken over by an extremely merry marching ensemble – a military band which undertook such hilarious convolutions of march and countermarch, the drum-major sometimes leaping in the air with his baton, the bandsmen often breaking into a puffing trot to maintain the pattern of movement, that I found myself laughing out loud in appreciation. Helsinki seemed flushed with success and self-esteem – well-dressed citizens promenading, tourists from all over, androgynous youths distributing brochures, trams trundling, bands playing, yachts scudding, musical marchers strutting, shops opulent, hotels fully booked, and nearly everyone smiling.
The Lucky Country! Actually it was not quite as lucky as it looked, there being an economic slump at the time, and 20 per cent unemployed. It seemed lucky to me, though, and I felt almost as fortunate to be there as I had all those years before when it had given me most of the relief of an escape from jail. I tried hard to re-enjoy my happy sensations of the 1950s, and succeeded with most of them – the freshness, the newness, the liberty, the variety, the colour. When it came to satisfying that old craving of mine, though, for the life of me I could not remember what the craving had been.
Only fifty miles from Finland, across a narrow gulf, is Estonia: an independent State before the Second World War, a Soviet republic for fifty years, since 1991 an independent State again. Tallinn, its capital, has been the very opposite of Helsinki. It has been the Unlucky City, repeatedly fouled by the historical detritus of our times. Grabbed by the Russians in 1940, by the Germans in 1941, by the Russians again in 1944, it entered Estonia’s post- Communist independence burdened with an incubus of unwanted Russian settlers that formed a third of the entire population. Luck could not come much worse. Yet by 1995, when I got there, you would scarcely have known it. Tallinn’s Old City, scarcely damaged by these events, had evidently determined to make itself one of the great destinations of mass tourism. All was ready for the rush. The cobbled streets were in good order. Piano music sounded romantically from upstairs windows. Baubles gleamed fresh-gilded on church steeples, and the grand central square, Town Hall Square, was done up like something from a medieval picture-book, with ice-cream stalls and cafés added. The Festival Grounds on the edge of town were ready for the next All-Estonian Song Festival – 200,000 people usually came: the biggest concert audience in Europe, so I was told a hundred times if I was told once. In multitudinous cellars and crannied storage-places the antique salesmen, bistro chefs and boutique proprietors were eagerly at work, and tandoori kebabs were sizzling at Sanjay’s. I had heard that the Estonians were famously taciturn – asked why he had spoken for the very first time only at the age of twenty, a deaf-mute of Estonian legend replied that he’d had nothing to say until then – but in 1995 Tallinn seemed to me downright talkative. I had lunch at one of those cellar restaurants with an Estonian academic, and she was almost as amazed as I was by this capitalist transformation of the capital – only four years before mired apparently interminably in the Communist bog. We ate crayfish, and they reminded her loquaciously of her childhood in the Estonia of long before, before the Communists had come at all, when she had fished for them with her parents in limpid streams among the birch trees, and boiled them in cauldrons on the river-bank.
Unfortunately it turned out upon inquiry that the crayfish came from Louisiana, but that did not spoil the spirit of the occasion. Nor did all the standard post-Communist complaints I later heard about lost jobs, low wages, rising prices, crime, sleaze, housing shortages and all those wretched Russians – some of whom were pointed out to me skulking about in a Marxist manner in one of their insalubriously Stalinist suburbs. No unpalatable truths could alter the fact that in 1995 Tallinn, the Unlucky City, had struck a lucky streak at last.
When I was a child, and spent much of my time tracking the ships that came up the Bristol Channel, the most esoteric of the vessels I saw through my telescope were the small freighters, with high deck-cargoes of timber, that flew the flags of Latvia and Lithuania. I was vague about the localities of those countries, and entirely ignorant about their histories; and when long afterwards I set foot in them I was not much the wiser. Together with Estonia they were the only States of my Europe that were actually absorbed into the Soviet Union as constituent republics, after having been occupied by the Nazis in the Second World War; and although I reached them only after the collapse of Communism, when they had regained their interwar independence (more or less, because as in Tallinn Russians of one sort or another were still influential in their affairs), they remained for me the least familiar of all the countries of the continent. The process of de-Sovietization was more difficult there than anywhere. By 1996 the two capitals of Riga and Vilnius had gone a long way down the free-market road, and were becoming recognizably normal European cities; but looking for somewhere that would more truly illustrate the halfway condition of the republics, still emerging from Stalinism, I came to the Lithuanian industrial town of Šiauliai (Schaulen to the Germans) – particularly suitable to my purposes because in Soviet times it had been forbidden to all foreigners as the site of a strategically important base of the Red Air Force. I had never heard of it before.
I checked in at the main hotel, a dowdy high-rise that was built in Soviet times, might well be still Soviet-owned (nobody seemed to know), and had doggedly stuck to those old ways that I had begun to find nostalgic back on page 78: which is to say, streaked concrete, no heat, derelict telephone booths, dismal food, receptionists muffled in greatcoats, a Moscow chat show on the television, and a notice on the wall quoting different rates for Lithuanian citizens, citizens of the former USSR, and the rest of us. ‘Just what I wanted,’ said I to myself as the terrifyingly jerky lift carried me in spasms to my room. It was almost as though Lithuania had never achieved its independence at all, and when I went out for a morning walk I thought I might well be in some relatively prosperous township of the USSR ten years before, except that there were no statues of Stalin or Lenin.
Everything else was there. There were the monumental square office blocks of State, overlooking spacious squares with parks in them. There was the statutorily ornamental pedestrian highway, Vilniaus Street, running through the city centre, with various cultural institutions on it, and many benches for the well-earned refreshment of happy workers, and babushkas selling bananas. The crowning church of St Peter and St Paul, with its tall polygonal steeple, had been handsomely rebuilt – as a museum of atheism, perhaps? – and there were many manifestations of the whimsical humour that was meant to give a human face to Soviet Communism, like funny statues of rabbits, a stone shoe on a pillar, and a cat museum. Most of the factories, on the outskirts of town, were disused, deprived of their Soviet markets and left to languish. The former airbase was being turned into a free economic zone, but it gave me a shudder nevertheless, as I wandered among its shabby half-dereliction, its hangars and abandoned guardhouses, to imagine what kind of reception I would have had if I had strayed through its barricades in Stalin’s time.
But gradually, very gradually, the little Baltic States were finding an identity again, and so was Šiauliai. Here and there along Vilniaus Street very different institutions were arising. Cappuccino was available. Rock music blared from boutiques. Foreign businessmen ate expense-account lunches at smart new restaurants. Credit cards were accepted. Ravishing girls in miniskirts would never grow up to be babushkas. There was a bowling alley in the basement of Vilniaus 88, and you could eat quite a decent hamburger at 146. The Universaline department store still looked a bit Stalinist, but as the Business Advisory Centre’s Šiauliai At Your Fingertips indulgently suggested, it was ‘a good place to visit for nostalgic reasons’. Up at St Peter and St Paul five masses were celebrated every day.
At the end of the street, nevertheless, irreconcilably loomed my hotel. No cappuccino there, no country-and-western music. It was, in Šiauliai At Your Fingertips’s snide classification, ‘where most people stay if the other hotels are full’. At breakfast a long table covered with a brown velveteen cloth was occupied by twenty young Russian males, like visiting technicians from the old days, while at the end of the dim-lit room there sat alone in silence at her victuals a woman who might be typecast as a lady commissar: severe, spectacled, muscular, her hair in a bun, and her skirts long and heavy. A solitary waiter in shirtsleeves served us – thick black coffee (they were out of milk), fried eggs with peas, black bread and very good cheese. Halfway through the meal we were each given a bottle of Coca-Cola. Most of the men drank theirs there and then, in tandem with the coffee: but I noticed that when the lady commissar left the room, wiping her mouth fastidiously with her paper napkin, and studiously not looking anyone in the eye, she took hers with her.
My acquaintance with Denmark has been slight, and unsatisfactory. It is another of the small States that were once great Powers, and long ago I walked the streets of Danish imperialism in Tranquebar, on the Coromandel coast of India. There in the seventeenth century the Danes had founded a fort and trading colony, and although the plaster was peeled and the pilasters were crumbling, I could still discern the remains of Danesborg and Prins Christian Gade dreaming the centuries away. My introduction to the Danish motherland was scarcely less curious. In 1952 I attended a North Atlantic Treaty exercise designed to demonstrate how instantly the West could come to the support of the Scandinavian countries if ever the Soviet Union attacked them. Its climax was a landing by marines on a beach at Skagen, at the very tip of Jutland between the Kattegat and the Skagerrak, between the North Sea and the Baltic. This was my entry to Denmark, and I remember it largely because the battalion of the Danish Home Guard assigned to receive the landing went to the wrong place and appeared far too late, merrily huffing and puffing in its long greatcoats along the strand.
It is unfair, I know, but I suspect that this ridiculous episode was always subconsciously to colour my view of Denmark. It was a pleasant country, that was undeniable. Its landscape was genial, its architecture handsome, its people were generally honest and friendly. The things it made were beautiful. Its butters and bacons were tasty. Its National Museum was one of the best in Europe. Lego was a blessing to harassed parents around the world, and so were the tales of Hans Christian Andersen. Denmark’s behaviour during the Second World War had been exemplary (though there was no truth to the well-known legend that good King Christian X had appeared in public, during the Nazi occupation, wearing a Star of David on his sleeve – Danish Jews were not obliged to wear them anyway). Yet somehow it always seemed to me a. foolish place, and if this feeling was first inspired in me (I was young and somewhat militant in those days) by the spectacle of those part-time soldiers jokingly shambling along the beach, too late for the action, it was particularly reinforced over the years by the central position that the Tivoli Pleasure Gardens in Copenhagen appeared to occupy in the national psyche. Mention Copenhagen to almost anyone, Danish or foreign, and they would mention the Tivoli Pleasure Gardens in return. The gardens themselves were certainly agreeable, with their Chinese lanterns and flowered terraces, their swings and slot-machines and rifle-ranges and jolly orchestras playing far into the night. I have paid happy enough visits to the Tivoli Pleasure Gardens. But I have always found it childishly demeaning that they should stand at the very centre of Denmark’s life and reputation – Denmark, home of the Vikings, the country of Gorm the Old and Harald Bluetooth, which once sent its colonists to India and Africa, and its conquerors all across the icy northlands! That it should all come down to this, I used to think: tinkly music, clowns and fairy lights in the Tivoli Pleasure Gardens!
Besides, the public style of Denmark has never allured me. Nothing could be much more footling, in my view, than the daily changing of the royal guard at the Amalienborg in Copenhagen, after the Tivoli the central Danish tourist spectacle. Most military displays appear pretty childish to me nowadays, but the Amalienborg ceremony seems deliberately designed to be absurd. The unfortunate men of the guard look as though they are officially trained to impersonate toy soldiers, with their white cross-belting, striped blue trousers, heaps of buttons and preposterously exaggerated bearskin hats. The bandmasters stamp about like parodies of sergeant-majors. When some of the more diminutive officers, dwarfed by their bearskins, march in an embarrassed way around the ranks, or fiercely draw their swords in salute, I find it hard not to think of them as comics in a farce.
Something sugary, something whimsical about this culture turns me off. Jazz, which seems silly in the hands of most Europeans, seems silliest of all in the hands of middle-ageing Danes. The chain of Copenhagen pedestrian streets called Strøget, the most famous shopping precinct in Denmark, is dominated by a tawdry-glitz sort of capitalism and frequented by the trendiest kind of street performer – the sort that plays Peruvian pipes or performs incomprehensible mimes. The very titles of Denmark’s favourite fairy tales say it all for me – ‘The Little Matchgirl’ – ‘Little Claus and Big Claus’ – ‘The Steadfast Tin Soldier’ – ‘The Rose-Elf’. I sympathize with the vandal who climbed out one day to the statue of The Little Mermaid, sitting prettily on a rock in the harbour, and sawed her head off. But there we are: perhaps I am not made for Hans Christian Andersen. Perhaps I am the Brothers Grimm type! Danish humour has never much amused me. I do not respond to the national taste for japes and winsomeness, or its reliance on charm and pixie-lore. I have repeatedly tried to make myself enjoy Denmark, but have failed so far: such is the power of unfair prejudice – and the unfairer, perhaps, the more powerful.
I feel very differently about another of Denmark’s former possessions, Iceland. I have felt happily at home in Iceland. I certainly do not mean at home in its landscapes, which are almost hallucinatorily alien, scarred with terrible glaciers, spouting all over the place into hot springs and volcanoes – an eighth of Iceland is one immense snowfield, and down the years I have myself watched the island of Surtsey, off the south-east coast, maturing from a plume of fiery smoke in the sea to a sizeable piece of new Icelandic territory. I mean I have felt at ease with the national outlook. Iceland is not in the least insular, in any pejorative sense. Nor does it seem, when you get there, particularly remote. Reykjavik feels just up the road from Edinburgh, where many citizens go for their Christmas shopping. I arrived once on the same aircraft as a well-known Swedish tenor, who had come to perform in an oratorio and would be popping back to Stockholm again next morning. The harpist of the Iceland Philharmonic is traditionally recruited in Wales, and on my very first visit to the republic, when I dined with the British Ambassador, he told me that the night before he had thrown a whisky bottle at the Icelandic Foreign Minister – as though they had been enjoying a rather too rowdy evening at the Students’ Union.
The Icelanders are something like the rest of us, but not much. Descended about equally from Celts and Vikings, sometimes they look gently poetical, sometimes so loutish that they ought to be wearing horned helmets. Beauty and the Beast is a true Icelandic allegory. I have repeatedly been stopped short in Iceland by some totally unexpected dead end of behaviour or comment. Years ago I bought in Reykjavik a copy of Horrebow’s Natural History of Iceland, published in an English translation in 1758. For the most part it is an archetypal work of the Age of Reason, arranged in chapters uniformly named and rationally argued –‘Concerning Earthworks in Iceland’, ‘Concerning Forests in Iceland’, ‘Concerning Horses’, ‘Concerning Butter and Cheese’ – but Chapter 17 is a more characteristically Icelandic entry. ‘Concerning Owls in Iceland’ is its heading, and it consists in its entirety of the following minimalist analysis: ‘There are no owls of any kind in the whole island.’
I loved this odd streak in the Icelanders from the start. Many peoples suppose themselves extraordinary, and boast of being ‘quite, quite mad’, but the only ones who really seemed to me nationally, generically eccentric were the people of Iceland. Perhaps the long northern winters were the cause, or the cage of the winds above. Gargantuan toasts, awful hangovers, free love, sexy high spirits, gallons of coffee, throwing bottles at one another, sleeping round the clock – all these things I came to associate with the Icelanders. Their ancient language, the core of their nationality, was surrounded by a mystic exaltation, not without comedy. Bards abounded, people launched themselves without warning into poetic declamation, and strangers spoke of characters in the sagas, Grimur Goatbeard or Leif the Lucky, as though they were neighbours up the road.
One evening in Akureyri, on the northern coast, I heard the sound of solemn singing emerging from a restaurant, and peering through the door I saw that a large party was in progress. There the Icelanders sat in ordered ranks, their arms linked around the long tables, and as they sang what sounded like some sort of sacramental anthem they swayed heavily from side to side in a rhythmic motion. It gave me a queer impression of private solidarity – Iceland all over. Everybody knew the words of the song, and the whole assembly seemed to be in arcane collusion. I noticed that if ever I caught an eye, as the celebrants sang and swayed there at the tables, after a moment’s puzzled focusing it abruptly switched away from me, as if to dismiss an illusion.
I suppose the Romanians are almost as odd as the Icelanders. I did not get to Romania until 1994, but I felt I knew them well already. They were Frenchified Latins, peculiarly implanted among the Slavs of the East, and they were famously raffish, intriguing, high-flown, unpredictable and unreliable. At first it seemed to me that most of their conversations concerned tunnels. Tunnels apparently played a large part in Romanian history, as they figured largely still in their affairs – tunnels of love, tunnels of escape, rumoured conspiratorial tunnels. Tunnel-talk was everywhere. The whole Romanian mind-cast, it seemed to me, was tunnelly. The appalling dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu and his no less frightful wife had been dead for five years, but many of their associates were still in the Government, and every manner of twist and mayhem still complicated the corridors of power, making them feel subterranean too.
Ignorant as I was, I was dazed by the complexity of Romanian allusions. Which was Moldova and which Moldavia? What was the difference between Iron Guardists and Legionnaires? Was the Trans-Dniester issue the same as the Trans-Istria question? What was the Romanian Orthodox attitude to the matter of Bessarabia, and how did Catholics feel about the return of King Mihal? Was King Mihal the same as King Michael? Who were the Szekels? Louche but devout, often elegant in a feline way – with women tram-drivers smoking on the job, and headscarved babushkas sweeping leaves – with vulpine sellers of medicinal roots and peasants in high fur hats – with cinematic rogues, coats over their shoulders, trying to cheat you with financial transactions – with slyly evasive bureaucrats and delightfully cynical historians – with conversations bafflingly opaque, and memories almost fictionally improbable – the Romanians struck me as a cavalcade of everything I thought of as most unchangeably Balkan. While I was in the country the head of the national intelligence bureau declared Romania to be under threat from Legionnaires, Iron Guardists, international terrorism, organized crime, extreme leftists, Hungarian autonomists and the secret services of Russia, Ukraine, Hungary and Moldova. The fate of all Europe, he said, depended upon the solution of the Trans-Dniester issue.
One day I was given six different reasons why I might not enter Peleş Castle, the former palace of the Romanian kings and queens at Sinaia:
(1) It was being rebuilt.
(2) There had been a robbery in it.
(3) An inventory was being conducted.
(4) It was about to be visited by President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt.
(5) It had lately been visited by President Saparmurad Niyazov of Turkmenistan.
(6) It was closed.
Nevertheless the Romanians, who are lived among by large communities of Hungarians, and are all wound about by Gypsies like a plant enmeshed in the tendrils of a parasite, despite their neuroses are charmingly welcoming to the stranger. Walking one day past the gloriously baroque Central House of the Army in Bucharest, a marvel of elaboration in the very heart of the Paris of the Balkans, I noticed that its ground floor appeared to be a restaurant. I breezed in through the revolving doors and asked if I could bring some guests to dinner. ‘Nico o problema,’ they said at once with the well-matured smile Romanians specialize in, and sure enough that night, with a jolly crew of acquaintances, I found myself sitting there, to the deafeningly amplified thump of a band, eating pike-perch from the Danube and drinking a happy Riesling from Moldavia (as against Moldova, I think). And when I once blundered into the headquarters of the Romanian Writers’ Union, for decades a tribunal of Communist orthodoxy, I was allowed to wander as I wished, bemused and unhindered, through the accumulated cigar-smoke of a thousand ideological debates, amiably nodded at now and then by marvellously literary-looking confrères.
Romania’s Communist despotism had been different in kind from those in Warsaw, Budapest, Sofia, Prague or East Berlin. It was a Latin autocracy, it was often at odds with the Soviet Union, and it was presided over by a pair of psychotics, Ceauşescu and his all-but-illiterate wife being more like crazed tyrants of the old Orient than normal Stalinists. They had destroyed whole villages by the hundred. They had planned to drain the marvellous Danube delta, one of Europe’s great havens of wildlife, uproot all its vegetation, and turn it into paddy-fields. Even more than the recidivism of Hungarians, even more than historical grievances or Ottoman legacies, even more than the Trans-Dniester issue, even more than the Gypsies! the ghosts of this appalling couple still muddled and muffled the affairs of the country. An entire generation had grown up under their twenty-two-year aegis, and it showed.
I had assumed the fall of the Ceauşescus to be something definitive in Romanian history, like the collapse of the Berlin Wall – the end of dreams and nightmares, the opening of the road to the prosaic. Once in the country, I was not so sure. Ceauşescu’s follies seemed to have become organic to the place: perhaps it was the nature of Romania to absorb everything, spewing out nothing, simply adding even the wildest excess or improbability to its historical repertoire, or storing it away in a tunnel. For example, an immense boulevard, two or three miles long, had been intended to form the central axis of Ceauşescu’s infamous new Bucharest, one of the supreme megalomaniac monuments of history. It was still unfinished in 1994 (all its myriad fountains were dry), but already parts of it were being humanized by trees, shops and the general flotsam and commotion of city life, so that I could imagine it in another twenty years being as essential to the flavour of Bucharest as the boulevards of the city’s Francophile past. Even the vast palace which crowned Ceauşescu’s capital was becoming familiar, if hardly homely. Its scale and ugliness was inexpungible, of course. If the Vittorio Emanuele monument in Rome were to be magnified twenty or thirty times, it would have no more civic clout than Bucharest’s Parliament Palace (née Palace of the People, a.k.a. Palace of the Ceauşescus). In living and working space the building was surpassed only by the Pentagon: in sheer volume only by a rocket-assembly hangar at Cape Canaveral and the Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl in Mexico. It wasn’t finished, either, yet it seemed to me that people were already accepting it as part of the municipal furniture. Tourists were taken there, conferences were held in its immense salons, and both houses of Parliament were expected to move in one day. When I left the building one afternoon I noticed curled up beside the ceremonial doors, which were guarded by milling soldiers and security people, an elderly dog snoozing in the chill sunshine. It looked perfectly at home.
Over the Danube is Bulgaria, whose recent history has been, by and large, one long record of difficulty and frustration, geography having placed it between two of the most uncomfortable neighbours on earth. Russia was traditionally Bulgaria’s protector – ‘Grandfather Ivan’ – finally bestowing upon it a particularly distasteful Stalinist regime; Turkey was traditionally its oppressor, occupying the country for several centuries and intermittently indulging in massacres. In the twentieth century Bulgaria has experienced nothing but trouble – despotisms of one kind and another, defeat in the Balkan War of 1913, humiliation in the First World War, unfortunate alliance with the Nazis in the Second, the Russian ‘liberation’ of 1944, the long years of Communist autocracy, remembered by the world at large in eerie images of poisoned umbrellas, hired assassins and the brutally forced Bulgarization of minorities.
It was only during the 1990s that the Bulgarians, a charming people that nearly everyone likes, achieved the freedom to be themselves. When I travelled around the country during the hiatus between Communism and whole-hog capitalism – when the collective farms lay in ruins but the battery hens had not yet arrived, when the party headquarters had been turned into a cinema but the mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov, the father of Bulgarian Communism, had not yet become an art gallery – when I made my journey then it became a journey from one national shrine to another, through rings of pride and defiance. Such monuments of fortitude and National Revival! Such images of brave Bulgarian lions! Such museums of sacrifice and revolution! Such cenotaphs, mausoleums and tombs of poets and soldiers! Such monasteries of patriotic faith! Such statues of heroes, churches of thanksgiving, sites of brief-lived constituent assemblies! No patriot on earth is more patriotic than a patriotic Bulgar, and nothing is more symbolic than a Bulgarian symbol.
An enormous hilltop cenotaph, the Freedom Monument, commemorates the most fateful event in modern Bulgarian history, the battle of the Shipka Pass. It stands high in the Balkan Mountains in the very heart of the country, embellished with the mightiest and best-fed of all the Bulgar lions. The battle was actually an episode in the Russo-Turkish war of 1877, but it resulted directly from the great Bulgarian rising against the Turks in the previous year, which was put down with such savagery that all Europe was horrified. The Russians went so far as to intervene on behalf of the Bulgarians, and the victory won among the snows of Shipka led eventually to the independence of Bulgaria. There are plenty of memorials to the Russian sacrifices of the battle, but the Freedom Monument easily caps them all. Was it not the Bulgarian contingent, after all, which really won the day, ‘supported’, as my Bulgarian history bravely says, ‘by not very many Russians’? An almost constant stream of schoolchildren climbs the 894 steps to the cenotaph of Shipka, a little vague I dare say about the strategy and even the participants in the battle, but left in no doubt that it was a famous victory of their own.
One day I was caught in a torrential rainstorm in the very heart of Bulgaria, Aleksandâr Nevski Square in the capital, Sofia. How the rain pelted down, making the green gardens soggy, making the paving-stones shine, dripping off the leaves of the trees all around, streaming down the gaudy ceramic tiles of the Holy Synod building and the golden domes of the cathedral! In a flash the pedestrians vanished into shelter, and only a few cars cautiously navigated their way through the downpour in the streets around the square. I fled myself, this way and that in search of somewhere dry, until I reached the doors of the church of Sveta Sofia. This is a very holy little place. It was built in the sixth century, and gave its name to the city itself. Inside I found two nuns and a young priest, chatting there in the shadows, and they dragged out a kitchen chair for me, and invited me to join them. Icons shone around us. The old brick church was dark and echoing. The rain drummed on the roof and splashed against the doors. I spoke no Bulgarian. The nuns and the priest spoke nothing else. We sat there benevolently smiling at one another, now and then nodding or shyly laughing, until the rain seemed to be dying away at last. I said my thanks and goodbyes, and walked back into the square. The storm was passing away towards the mountains, rumbling. Around the corner, soaked to the skin, his clothes hanging dank around him, his hat all floppy with water, an elderly man was standing still and silent before the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
Cherishing a decided weakness for the Bulgarians myself, I heartily sympathize with all these emotions, and am as stirred as anyone by the Freedom Memorial, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and all the tales of patriotic derring-do. Every people needs its moments of romantic ecstasy, to make up for its miseries, and even in the late 1990s Bulgaria’s troubles did not seem to be over yet. The countryside looked lovely, the wine was delicious, flowers were everywhere, waiters shyly smiled, geese, goats and donkeys roamed the purlieus of picturesque villages, truckers’ halts served nourishing soups, the package-tour resorts on the Black Sea thrived; but most people were extremely poor still, politics sounded murky and economics unreliable. Of course the Bulgarians wanted shrines and symbols! Who wouldn’t? Often enough they went far back into their history to find them, into the rich hazy world of proto-Bulgars, Thracians and Bogomils, and the most apposite of all their patriotic icons, to my mind, was one of these. Above the village of Madara, with a railway station that suggested to me something to be blown up by Lawrence of Arabia on the Hejaz Railway, in the cliffs above the dusty hamlet there was carved an antique figure. So old was it, and so eroded, that you could discern it only when the setting sun caught its outline, and no more than vaguely even then. But in photographs you could see more clearly the Horseman of Madara, and realize how relevant he was to the condition of his country. There he rode, indomitable if only just recognizable. He had a jolly greyhound at his heels, and appeared to have lately slaughtered some wild beast. With his right hand he grasped the reins of his prancing horse, but his left hand was raised exuberantly high above his head, and in it he was holding a wine-cup. ‘Nazdrave!’ the Madara Horseman cried to history – ‘Cheers!’ And ‘Nazdrave!’, down the centuries, Bulgaria had loyally cried back.
Just as I drove away, on page 68, to my war in the Middle East, the people of Budapest rose in arms against their awful Communist Government. As we said heartlessly at the time, two great stories broke simultaneously, and I went to the wrong one. The Suez adventure turned out to be hardly more than a squalid and ignominious expression of pique: the Hungarian Rising was the most tragically heroic event of the entire Cold War between capitalism and Communism.
Budapest was just the place for it. It does not seem to me a very lovely city, as the tourist brochures claim, but it is made for glory. On the right bank of the Danube is piled the old capital of Buda, with its royal castle and cathedral resplendent at the top; on the left bank extends the mass of Pest, all grand boulevards, parks and church steeples, running away to the horizon in a flatland of suburbs, and fronted on the river bank by the grotesque and mighty Parliament. Six bridges connect the two halves of Budapest, and the whole city suggests to me a figure of lapidary pride, commemorating always the sieges, battles, rebellions and miscellaneous splendours of its history. By and large modern Hungarians may look about as ordinary as the rest of us, but in my romantic way I like to fancy in them the spirit of the Magyar horsemen who ride in sculpted bronze about the national memorial in Heroes’ Square: haughty magnificent noblemen, ineffably proud on their caparisoned horses as they ride at a leisurely pace into the city, their kingly leader looking majestically in front of him, his companions glaring this way and that from beneath their feathered helmets like presidential security men. And in 1956, as it happened, my fancy proved to be true: the people of Budapest, ancients to schoolchildren, rose in fury against their oppressors as to the Magyar manner born.
How I would love to have been there! Within a month a thousand Soviet tanks had viciously suppressed the Hungarian Revolution, and a whole-hog Communist Government was reinstalled. But, though the battle was tragically lost, it was the start of the winning of the war. By the time I did get to Hungary, in the 1970s, it was the first of the Communist countries of eastern Europe to be flirting with the idea of a market economy. There was talk already of a Hilton Hotel! Russian soldiers were still all over the place, still pouring off the Moscow train, still strutting about in their preposterous officers’ hats, but by the standards of Poland, Czechoslovakia or East Germany the regime was enlightened. I was astonished by the conversations of the citizenry, so risky it seemed to me then, blatantly subversive, apparently confident that life was going to get better. The diktats of Communism were brazenly disregarded. I was taken to a privately owned holiday home on Lake Balaton which might almost have been in Switzerland, and for the first time I experienced the bitter pleasure of choosing between State-owned shops and private enterprises – the first so abjectly disagreeable, the second already full of smiles and salesmanship.
Twenty-five years on again, and I was back in Budapest for Christmas. Now the war was won. Apart from a memorial or two, there was almost nothing to remind me of the Communist years. The Hilton, so wild a promise in the old days, had been joined by four or five other international hotels, all equally luxurious. The shops were vivid, and, hard though I tried (for I missed them rather), I could find none of those grumpy white-aproned women, congenitally unable to smile, who had represented the triumph of Marxist-Leninism behind the counters of Communist Budapest. And that old air of heroism? Had it evaporated? I went to a performance of operetta pieces at the Vigadó concert hall, and for a time I thought it had. There was plenty of froth, of course, to the old melodies, plenty of Gypsy charm, but the young gentlemen of the dancing chorus seemed to me a little effete as they waltzed around the stage in white ties and tails. Presently, though, having slipped into something looser, they broke into the violent stamp and strut of the csárdás, that old display of everything most theatrically Hungarian; and then as they threw their heads back, drummed the floor, slapped their thighs, flung their arms into the air and sometimes wildly shouted, while the audience clapped to the accelerating rhythm – then I saw in them, benignly mutated, the cold sneer of the horsemen in Heroes’ Square, and the reckless style of the boys who had swarmed over the Red Army’s tanks in 1956.
One symptom of Communist relaxation, in the Budapest of the 1970s, was an emphasis on historical continuity. It is true that an official history of the capital I was given then casually dismissed the 1956 rising as counterrevolutionary, and claimed that almost at once ‘a resolution of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party analysed its causes and laid the foundation of new political measures and economic decisions’. True too that part of the Great Boulevard, Budapest’s monumental ring road, was still named for Lenin. But I was struck by the surprising attention being paid to the memory of the Habsburgs, whose kings and queens had ruled Hungary until the collapse of their empire after the First World War. Part of the Boulevard was named for Vladimir Ilyich indeed, but part was named for the Emperor Franz Josef; the yellow paintwork so characteristic of the Habsburg domains was assiduously renewed; my party cicerones made a point of directing me to cafés and restaurants which preserved some of the old imperial atmosphere – the New York Café, ineffectually renamed the Hungaria, Gerbeaud’s patisserie, the old resort of the sweet-toothed aristocracy, or Gundel’s restaurant, which had started life as the zoo restaurant but had become the very epitome of Habsburg Budapest around the turn of the century.
In 1996 the Habsburgs and their era were even more fulsomely remembered. The New York Café and Gerbeaud’s had become among the city’s best-known tourist sites. Most of the Great Boulevard once more honoured the old monarchy. Gundel’s, for so long a fief of the Communist State, had been taken over by rich and imaginative Hungarian Americans, and was frank in its gastronomic loyalties; I did not in fact try the soup identified simply as Franz Josef’s Favourite, but I did indulge myself in a marvellously courtier-like meal consisting of Wild Suckling-Pig Soup Flavoured with Tarragon, and Count Széchenyi’s Roast Breast of Pheasant Stuffed with Hungarian Goose Liver. I felt the presence of archdukes around me as I ate, and was not surprised to read a testimonial from Otto von Habsburg himself, the dispossessed heir to the imperial monarchy, declaring that Gundel’s revival showed Hungary was ‘on the way to recovery from years of oppression, and moving towards a glorious future’. Precisely, said I to myself, indelicately burping.
To help promote the country’s bid to join the European Union, Hungary appointed royal heir György Habsburg Ambassador for European Integration.
The Habsburg family, heirs to the Hungarian throne since the fifteenth century, have used their dynastic and diplomatic network to lobby for Hungary in European organizations since the political transformation of 1989.
Habsburg is the director of MTM Communications, the largest movie production and distribution company in Central Europe.
On a lovely spring day I climbed the Mouseion hill in Athens, all among the olive trees, to see the celestial view of the Parthenon from its summit. The morning smelt delectably of pines and flowers and dust, and my mind was full of Hellenic glories: halfway up, a Greek sprang from the bushes, opened his mackintosh wide, and revealed to me his manly equipment.
Well, I suppose, why not? Greek art has been displaying masculine glories to us for a few thousand years. Nevertheless, on the Hill of the Muses, within sight of the Acropolis itself … I felt betrayed. My generation was brought up to think of things Greek as particularly pure and radiant, down to the Greek soldiery which had, apparently in pompoms and ballet skirts, so courageously defied both the Italians and the Germans during the war. Were the Greeks not the inventors of democracy? Were they not the fathers of poetry? To find a representative of this noble race flashing his cock to innocent tourists on the Mouseion was a sad disillusionment.
But actually Athens had long been a come-down itself. I fear in retrospect that those Hellenic fragrances I relished on the hill were fragrances purely of the mind, because already the capital was habitually veiled in a greenish smog, swirling up from the industrial quarters of Piraeus and so thickly masking the city that sometimes the Acropolis, protruding above its vapours, looked as though it was levitating. The sentries outside the royal palace, too, were something of a disappointment to anyone of romantic fancy. Goose-stepping up and down in their full and famous finery, they looked less like soldiers of Greek myth than farm boys in drag – bulging, rather sweaty young men who might easily, I could not help thinking, in their off hours mount a performance on the hill of Mouseion.
Do the Greeks, I once asked a Greek acquaintance of mine, consider themselves a Western or an Eastern people? ‘That,’ he replied, ‘is our Quandary.’ He said it with a palpable capital Q, and with reason. By the 1990s Greece had become a full member of the European Union, but for myself I still doubt whether Greeks are temperamentally, instinctively, even stylistically Europeans. In the days of classical education John Murray’s Handbook to Greece, 1884, could observe comfortably that any visitor ‘with the usual knowledge of ancient Greek’ might read the Athenian papers with ease. The knowledge is not so usual now, and the universal links with Greece, fostered by generations of teachers, theologians and art historians, have long since weakened. For every Winckelmann or Byron, devoted to the ideas of Hellenism, there are a dozen scholars and artists dedicated to the culture of Africa, the Incas or the Australian aborigines. As for me, there are few places in Europe where I feel abroad these days, so intimately related are this continent’s languages, histories, approaches to life and love, but in Greece almost everything is foreign to me, from the script to the cuisine to the manner of thought. In Greece I feel hardly more among ethnic relatives than I do in Bangkok or Zagazig.
‘Is the hotel open?’ I innocently asked in the deserted off-season lobby of the posh Xenia Palace in Nauplia. ‘It seems to be,’ said the receptionist unpleasantly, ‘since you’re inside it.’ Greek functionaries can be very disagreeable, and even in the 1990s I take this to be an echo of the long centuries of Turkish occupation – we were within sight of the castle of Bourdzi, where the executioners whiled away their old age back on page 64. The Xenia receptionist was like one of the obstructionist pashas one reads about in old travel books, perpetually making things as difficult as possible, and there is a good deal in Greece which smacks to this day of Ottoman orneriness, together with those suggestions of slyness and conspiracy that now seem as native to the country as ouzo.
Let us visit any run-of-the-mill provincial town in the last years of the twentieth century in Greece. The sea is in front of it, the hills are behind. Architecturally it is mostly pure Balkans: flat roofs, flowered concrete, busts of national heroes, and rival cafés across a cement-flagged square. Technically it seems to be in a condition of semi-suspense, so that we can never be sure whether any given traffic-light is working or not, and half the buildings appear to have been abandoned before completion. Our brand-new hotel smells of cement, and we are woken in the morning by a rhythmic banging from the quayside outside its windows, where a fisherman is slapping a large octopus on the ground to soften it for the pot. The town’s manners vary unpredictably from the sweet to the curmudgeonly. In the least forbidding of the restaurants we are given the choice of mutton, fish stew and thick pasta, all bubbling in their cauldrons in the kitchen. The beach, pictured in brochures pristine as anything, is in fact scummed with rubbish, pecked over by carrion crows and scavenged about by cats. In the evenings the cafés are taken over by the Greek Army, hundreds of uniformed conscripts sitting about doing nothing in particular, while up at the market quarter all is a souk-like vividness of commerce and vegetables, lightly touched with tourism. The voices of this town are very loud. The air is exhilarating. The temper is generally cordial. Are we in Europe or not? It is a Quandary.
But it can be a Liberation, too. The easy individualism of the Greeks is fine – if there is anything the contemporary Greek is not, it is downtrodden or standardized. For one of my tastes the general sense of incipient anarchy is a stimulant, and the effervescent variety of life, the feeling that you never know what is going to show up round the corner, is a welcome antidote to the growing homogenization of everything elsewhere. One minute there is the spectacle of a scudding hydrofoil out at sea, thundering in a blur of spray towards some Homeric isle, the next a dissonant clanging of bells fixed to the axle of a horse-drawn cart. A hurrying truck blows a horn like a fairground carousel. From the little glass-fronted shrines that line the highways there is an atavistic glint of trinkets, coins and bottles. There must be more beehives in Greece than in the rest of the world put together, and at Delphi they sell the honey in tins, with peel-off tops like beer cans or cat food. On the Byzantine slopes of Mistra I once encountered a nun picking olives halfway up a tree, attended by her goat at the bottom.
Sometimes it seems to me astonishing that anything works at all in Greece, so slap-happy does its populace seem, but this is perhaps as much a matter of personality as of capacity. More often I feel that if it comes to an emergency a kind of makeshift efficiency will prevail – Levantine guile combined with the chewing-gum-on-the-carburettor improvisation that used to characterize the resource of rural America. One night at a hotel in Euboea I found myself without my passport, carelessly left behind several hundred miles away in the Peloponnese. A few extremely loud telephone calls, a complex mobilization of taxis, buses and family contacts, and somehow or other by the next morning it had found its way to Khalkis. ‘I am going to make you very happy,’ said the hotelier as he produced it like a conjuror from beneath his desk, and he knew of course that I was about to contribute to his happiness, too.
I have only twice been properly drunk in Europe – tipsy ten thousand times, really sozzled only twice. The first time was at Catterick Camp in the north of England, when I was just eighteen. The second time was at Monemvasía, in the Peloponnese, when I was fifty-two, was working on a book and should have known better. I had taken a room in a private house on the outskirts of the village, and in the evening I walked a mile or so to a tavern for my supper. It was very full, and very lively – local people mostly, with some merry Americans. We drank large amounts of furiously resinated draught retsina out of metal mugs, and I seldom had a happier evening. In the small hours I staggered up the road again to my lodgings, and I can still see the face of my landlady, in a flowered housecoat over her nightdress, as she pulled back the bars and undid the chains of her front door to let me in. I expected her to be tight-lipped and disapproving: instead she greeted me with a sly and knowing smile of collusion, very nearly a wink, as if she had been enjoyably up to no good herself. I went to bed incoherently whistling, and awoke in the morning fresh as a daisy.
Europe? Would my landlady have been so conspiratorially forgiving if we had been in Germany? Do Greek truck-drivers really keep to the European tachometer rules? Are the scrawny Greek sheep of the mountains really dipped and vaccinated to Brussels standards? Do any Greek fishermen, thumping their octopuses on the quay, take any notice of European laws about keeping their hair covered while processing seafood? But there we are, the Greeks are officially Westerners now, and their admission into the comity of Europe suggests to me something raw and vital put into a vat to help the fermentation: a rough organic agent, with plenty of bacteria in it. This is a different metaphor indeed from the classical visions of my youth – gone from the Greek image is the bounding grace and elegance, the gravitas of the philosophers, the style of the clean-limbed athletes with their curls and chiselled noses. But who knows? Perhaps the people of ancient Greece were really Levantine all the time – dark-skinned, stocky and evasive like second-hand car dealers in Piraeus.
In 1993 I spent a day at Epidauros, where the temple of Asklepios once offered its cultists the hope of eternal life. The marvellous theatre, cradle of stage drama, was swarmed all over by visitors of a dozen nationalities. Sometimes people standing in the orchestra whispered, or rustled pieces of paper, to demonstrate the famous acoustics of the place. A tour guide mounted a block and quoted some verse, instantly recognizable to anyone with the usual command of ancient Greek. An Italian performed ‘O Sole Mio’. A tall young man and an elderly lady half his height sang with much feeling and to great effect some kind of romantic ballad – a touching performance, in a tongue which none of us recognized, but which moved us all to applause.
What language were they singing, I hastened to ask the performers, there in the theatre of Sophocles, Aristophanes and Euripides? It was Finnish, they said, and the song was a folk-melody from Europe’s remotest north. I was exuberant. ‘Viva Europa!’ I cried in my adolescent way: but nobody responded much, beyond a sheepish laugh or two.
‘Mirësevni në Shqipëri’ is what it said on the immigration forms when I arrived in Albania – ‘Welcome to Albania.’ They must have been printed after 1992, because until then Shqipëri was the most inflexibly, disagreeably, alarmingly and indeed insanely unwelcoming country in Europe. For most of my fifty European years I had contemplated it in bewilderment from outside. Its blue-grey coast looked back at me tantalizingly across the Strait of Corfu, inaccessible as a bank vault. I gazed upon its silent mass, as upon a morgue, from the mountains of Montenegro. As I pursued the tracks of the British Empire in the Ionian Islands, I remembered with a shudder the hired executioner who used to come over from Albania (no Greek would do the job) wearing a face-mask and a particoloured costume like a jester. The case of the Corfu Strait, when Albanian mines sank two British destroyers with terrible loss of life, rumbled through my early years in journalism, and for decades I could hardly turn on my short-wave radio, wherever I was, without hearing the monotonous dogmatic voice of Radio Albania, telling us of Comrade Hoxha’s latest achievements in revolutionizing chemical production, or eliminating religion. Comrade Hoxha – Friend Hoxha, as his subjects were supposed to call him! Of all the unhinged despots in the Europe of my time, Enver Hoxha was undoubtedly the most deranged. He was madder than Ceauşescu. His people were cut off from all outside sources of information whatever, and for years they were conditioned to think of him as all-but-magical. He could cause the rain to come! Flowers blossomed in his footsteps! Many of his subjects really did believe that he had made Albania uniquely successful and enviable among all the nations of the world, whereas in fact it was uniquely unsuccessful and unenviable. Hoxha quarrelled successively with the Western democracies, with Yugoslavia, with the Soviet Union, with Communist China, with God himself (‘the only religion in Albania is being Albanian’), until in the end his country was all alone, friendless, destitute and paranoically nasty to everyone.
Hoxha had been dead for six years when at last I reached Albania, and his irrational brand of Communism had been rejected for four. Almost at once I made a pilgrimage to honour a far older champion, the warrior-chief Skanderbeg – Alexander Bey – who had famously held the predatory Turks at bay in the fifteenth century. For Albanians Skanderbeg was undoubtedly the No. 1 Albanian of history, and he was the one Albanian who, with his heroic beard and his goat-horned helmet, had been known to me all my life as a face on a postage stamp. The scene of Skanderbeg’s most celebrated exploit was the ruined fortress of Krujë, in central Albania, epically sited on a mountainside looking across a plain to the distant Adriatic. The place was fine, I thought. The view was tremendous, shimmering with heat-haze down to the sea. The citadel was properly defiant in its wreckage. The bazaar down the hill sold fox-skins. But even then, even in 1996, even in the presence of Skanderbeg himself, Enver Hoxha lived! For all across that wide landscape, much the most compelling feature of it, were the thousands and thousands of concrete pillboxes, egg-shaped, like so many grey-white igloos, which the dictator had caused to be constructed throughout the length and breadth of his country. I was told there were 800,000 altogether, big and small, and there seemed to be no strategic or even tactical pattern to them – they just popped up wherever you looked, sometimes in twos and threes, sometimes in dozens, and only now that Hoxha was dead were they beginning to crumble. Some had been broken, or upturned, or were used as houses or hay-stores, and down on the holiday coast one or two had recently been turned into cafés.
When I asked whom these defences had been to defend Albania against, they said ‘Everyone.’ Having spent much of his young manhood as a guerrilla partisan, Hoxha apparently feared invasion by the Americans, the Russians, the Yugoslavs, the Greeks, the Italians, and for all I know the Libyans too. One man I asked about the pillboxes in Krujë merely put his finger to the side of his head and twisted it. I don’t know how persuaded most ordinary Albanians had been by Hoxha’s persecution complex, but now that he had gone it was as though they were awakening from some awful nightmare, shaking their heads to be rid of the memory. His was a fearful tyranny. Scores of thousands of Albanians had been murdered or worked to death in his prison camps – forty-eight of them, in a country the size of Wales or Maryland. Every kind of freedom had been abolished. Censorship had been absolute. Secret police and Government informers were everywhere. Beards, blue jeans and rock music were forbidden. Just as nobody could enter the country, so nobody could leave either. Babies’ names had to be chosen from an officially approved list, changed each year.
Six years after Hoxha’s death, when his body had long been exhumed from its tomb of honour, the sense of release was still palpable, and infectious. Poverty was still cruel in Albania, industry was ramshackle, politics were corrupt. The usual post-Communist mafia was rampant – Albanian gangs were a byword as far away as Germany. Nevertheless it seemed to me, in 1996, a remarkably exuberant country. All the symptoms of capitalism were sprouting then – Western-financed hotels, Arab-financed tourist developments, Italian restaurants, backstreet boutiques, service stations, car-washes, glossy propaganda magazines for visiting foreign executives. I went down to the coast one weekend, and the beaches around Durrës were jammed with cars and coaches, festive, noisy and sticky. All among the seaside pine-woods, full of picnickers, those pillboxes abjectly lurked.
In 1992, when the Albanian Communist regime came to an end, there were only fifty cars in the capital, Tirana, and pictures I had seen of Skanderbeg Square, the heart of the city, showed it all but empty, with only a few disciplined pedestrians crossing its enormous ceremonial space. By the time I got there 40,000 cars swarmed the Tirana streets (a third of them Mercedes, almost all of them second-hand, most of them stolen in Germany) and Skanderbeg Square was a sort of maelstrom. It contained a mosque, a clock-tower, a museum, a cultural centre, a functional-modernist hotel, a national bank, a fountain or two, sundry Italianate government offices, dozens of street stalls, an equestrian statue of Skanderbeg, and two extremely noisy funfairs. Countless men of all ages wandered around offering black-market exchange rates. Innumerable children rode the funfair rides. Around the edges of the place scores of cafés were in a perpetual kind of frenzy, and round the back an immense street market pullulated in a welter of fish-stalls, butcheries, vegetable-carts and stacks of old bicycles. It was rather as though the great square of Marrakesh had been worked over successively by Atatürk, Mussolini and Stalin, and then handed over to the management of the Tivoli gardens in Copenhagen.
In the evening the entire population of Tirana seemed to emerge for the twilight passeggiata, strolling up and down the main avenue, sitting on the edges of fountains, milling around the funfairs, wandering haphazardly across highways apparently under the impression that there were still only fifty cars in the city. The noise seemed to me then a supremely Albanian noise – the hooting horns of a thousand newly acquired and uncertainly driven automobiles, the whistles of distraught traffic cops, and the deafening beat of mingled rock, rap and Balkan folk-music. I loved the louche insouciance of it all, ever-ready smiles from the citizenry, inescapable suggestions of roguery, the immense hum over everything, the quirks and surprises. Sometimes I felt a small dry kiss on my arm, and turned to find a Gypsy child irresistibly importuning me for cash. When I testily shooed off a young man in a T-shirt and jeans, supposing him to be yet another currency tout, he shyly introduced himself as one of the President’s bodyguards, trying to warn me away from the presidential front gate.
I walked one night into the huge pyramidical structure which had been designed to be a museum of Enver Hoxha – in his own lifetime! – and was now converted to more secular uses. It was strikingly lit up after dark, and swarmed all around by numberless crowds of idlers, up and down its ceremonial steps, in and out of its basement café, eating ice-creams and loudly talking. Irrepressible urchins climbed its smooth concrete buttresses in order to slide down again. What should I find in the main hall of this tumultuous building, this hilariously discredited monument of egotism, but four young people exquisitely performing Ravel’s string quartet?
Poor old Hoxha! What would he think? Ogre though he was, I rather regretted his posthumous elimination from Tirana. For most foreigners, after all, Hoxha rather than Skanderbeg was Albanian No. 1. I did visit his house, in the formerly sealed-off official quarter known as The Block – a respectable suburban-style part of town from which, in Hoxha’s day, ordinary citizens were entirely banned. Even in 1996, as I wandered the tyrant’s garden paths I was followed always by an armed guard, and when I stooped to pick a flower from a bed of Michaelmas daisies I thought I heard behind me (though perhaps I was fantasizing here) the click of a safety-catch. Was it OK to take a flower? I asked the young man over my shoulder, just in case; but instead of shooting me he made an expansive gesture of permission. Take the lot, he seemed to be saying. They were only Friend Enver’s.
I wished Hoxha’s museum were still his museum, and in particular I wished that his immense bronze statue still stood in the main square (where its plinth did remain, beside one of those funfairs, and was tottered over by enterprising infants in need of parental guidance). So I was excited when somebody told me that the statue still existed in Tirana, preserved in the Monuments Factory where it had originally been cast. In a flash I was there, accompanied by a young Albanian engineer of my acquaintance. Like most Albanian factories the Monuments Factory had gone out of business, and at first the watchman took us to the wrong statue – that last public statue of Stalin, as it happened, which I noticed on page 79. ‘Oh, you want Enver,’ the watchman then said (everyone in Albania still called him Enver): ‘Enver’s in there’ – and he directed us to a windowless warehouse apparently sealed off for ever. We circled this gloomy mausoleum searching for keyholes to look through or doors to peer under, and in the end I found a spyhole between the bricks.
There Enver Hoxha was, recumbent in the shadows, just his bronze thigh to be glimpsed like something not very interesting in Tutankhamun’s tomb. It was enough. My engineer positively identified the old monster, and he should know. As a student he had been in the forefront of the rejoicing crowd when the statue was pulled down in Skanderbeg Square. ‘I pissed on it,’ he complacently recalled, and you can’t get more positive than that.
So normality of a kind returned to Albania, if only for a year or two, but it had already long returned to the Czech Republic, which I first knew as part of Czechoslovakia, and which had imprinted its name and character upon the consciousness of all Europe since the day in 1938 when Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister of Great Britain, fatefully described it as a faraway country of whose people ‘we know nothing’. When I first went there, in the 1950s, it was a country of degraded servility, where everything seemed to smell of sausages. The slogans of Communist piety nagged from every hoarding, the drab emblems of State management were on every corner shop. The only foreigners around were approved comrades – Afghans and Syrians, come to buy arms or cars, ideologically correct delegations of Poles, Romanians, Hungarians and East Germans, or groups of square-shouldered Russians in baggy trousers and drab hats.
At that time I took note, for literary purposes, of an apartment block at the corner of Kaprova and Valentinská streets in Prague. A cross between baroque and art nouveau, it had a small onion dome on one corner, and was embellished all over with symbolic images. There were balconies, and window-boxes, and lace curtains in the windows. A tobacco shop stood on the ground floor, and at the end of the street, over the river, you could see the spires and battlements of Hradčany, the old stronghold of the Czech kings. I chose to describe this building as an allegorical hostel of Communism, and fancied it full of drabness, fear, longing, austerity, compulsory pictures of Lenin and nosy-parker informants. I saw it too swirled about, there at the road junction, by the whole parade of European history. I saw the armies of Franz Josef, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin all marching past its doors. I saw ecstatically courageous students shouting slogans and waving banners. Commissioners, gauleiters and commissars drove officiously by. Franz Kafka’s faceless functionaries trudged past on their way to the interrogation rooms, Jaroslav Hašek’s Good Soldier Švejk, bless his heart, smiled ironically down on the lot of them.
But years later I went back to the corner of Kaprova and Valentinská streets to reimagine these matters, and this time I saw something quite new on an upper balcony of the apartment block, above the potted geraniums. It was a TV satellite dish, the universal emblem of market-force society. It suggested to me the olive leaf that the dove brought back to Noah, when the flood began to recede.
Had history ended in the Czech Republic? Going back to the country a few years after the Velvet Revolution which finally got rid of the Communists, sometimes I felt it had: the one great thing that had happened since was the voluntary separation of Slovakia from Czechoslovakia, and that had been scarcely noticed by the world at large (although, by an irony worthy of Švejk himself, it was the very separation which, when Hitler implicitly decreed it, gave rise to the Second World War). In the 1950s Prague had seemed to me the most oppressive of the Communist capitals of eastern Europe, but its fate was tragic and tremendous. Forty years on, the collapse of the Soviet Empire had left its own smouldering layers of sleaze and squalor, but the public miseries of the place were miseries familiar to us all. Stalinist Prague was sufficiently corrupt, God knows, but in institutional ways: at least in the 1950s one was not cheated by taxi-drivers or robbed by jostling pickpockets. The secret policemen were everywhere in those awful old times, every official was waiting to be bribed, but there were none of the beggars sitting with bowed heads, sometimes with their eyes hopelessly closed, who represented contemporary sadness in the 1990s.
In 1993 I went to a political meeting in Old Town Square, scene of heroic demonstrations in the days of the oppression, to hear a speaker inveighing against Germans, Gypsies, prostitutes and illegal immigrants; he was supported by skinheads and miscellaneous layabouts, protected by mounted police, assaulted by flying bottles and the odd rotten vegetable. Prague had joined the ordinary world, and history was at least on the blink. In 1957 I had been warned, by somebody who knew, that not only my room in the morose Palace Hotel but actually my table in its restaurant was likely to be bugged. Now the same hotel offered American cable television in its bedrooms, a lavish variety of soaps, lotions, bath salts and shower-caps, and such excellent little notepads beside its telephones that I helped myself to a few from the maid’s trolley in the corridor. When the Czech journalist Karel Kyncl returned to Prague in 1989, after seven years of exile, he said it was like sleep-walking.
In the last decade of the century Prague became one of the great tourist destinations of Europe. It had tried to be one under the Communists, but in those days its drably printed brochures and smudgy programmes did little to counteract the dark reputation of the place, and not many foreigners responded. Now thousands came, and loved it – its buildings, its atmosphere, its beer, and perhaps most of all its music. When I was last in Prague I went to three musical performances which profoundly affected me in different ways.
The first was an impromptu jazz concert in Old Town Square, where that right-wing demagogue had said his piece. Throughout eastern Europe jazz had played an important part, almost a symbolic part, in the various risings which had put an end to Communism, and I thought it stirring to hear the blast of the saxophone, the wail of the blues, there in the heart of Prague. I sat drinking borivicka then, as the Good Soldier would have done before me, and Prague’s glorious baroque skyline was silhouetted around me against a velvet sky. The horses of the pleasure-barouches stood chomping at their bits, attended by grooms in long cloaks and brown bowler hats; the performers played with immense ebullience; every now and then excited small children, encouraged by their fond parents, ran out to deposit coins in the band-leader’s open trumpet-case.
My second performance gave me less benign sensations. One windy morning I chanced to arrive at the gates of Hradčany Castle, beneath the proud standard of the President of the Republic, just in time for the changing of the guard. This struck me as an ambivalent display. The soldiers, in their long grey greatcoats, wore white scarves like Americans but marched like Russians. The bandsmen appeared at open first-floor windows, rather like the holy figures appearing at that very moment in the little windows of medieval clocks all over Europe, and they played a series of lush fanfares that sounded bathetically like film music. The flag flapped heavily in the wind above us. The troops marched and countermarched. The filmic fanfares sounded. I could imagine it all turning rather nasty if ever history started up again in Prague.
And my third concert was a recital, in the battered gilded church of Our Lady of Týn, of six different settings of Ave Maria (Schubert, César Franck, Cherubini, Saint-Saëns, Verdi, Gounod). It was extremely cold in the church, and we were all bundled in our pews. The soloist, Zdena Kloubová of the National Opera, sang from the organ loft behind us, and now and then I turned to see her. She looked very small and brave up there – almost defiant. She was wearing a black leather jerkin against the cold, and as her lovely voice rang out among the altars I thought her a haunting reminder of more heroic days among the Czechs: bad times, cruel times, but times when history happened.
My first Poles were Poles of the diaspora. For years after the Second World War I came across them everywhere. Near my own home in Wales hundreds of officers and their wives, exiled in 1939, lived out their lives in a bleak camp of Nissen huts and institutional buildings: many had fought with distinction in the war, many had been landowners and professional people in pre-war Poland, but over the decades I watched them age in dignified impotence among the sandy scrubland, until only a few ancients were left to mull over their memories and tell tales of old glories for junior reporters preparing feature articles for the local press. A Pole rented the room upstairs from mine when I first went to live in the dismal, battered and frequently power-cut London of 1948: he had been a cavalry officer at the start of the war, and he still went off most elegantly, in a bowler hat and a well-worn dark suit, to his work as a hotel doorman. Years later, visiting a Royal Air Force fighter squadron in Egypt, I found that the oldest and most dashing of the pilots was a Polish veteran of the Battle of Britain. The young men called him ‘Uncle’. All these people seemed to me, whatever their circumstances, to be stylish and vivid in their exile: some had perhaps been Fascists of a kind, many were undoubtedly anti-Semitic, but war had scoured them, and made their minds as lean as their bodies – for none of them seemed to be fat.
These were my original Poles. How different they seemed when, in the 1950s, I met them on their native soil. Poland then was sunk in Stalinist subjection, governed by a regime of puppet ideologues. At first I thought the country infinitely dispiriting, because nobody seemed to have much hope of ever changing things. Poland had so often been occupied by those damned Powers down the centuries that the people seemed punch-drunk. Some colleagues took me to stay at a writers’ retreat near Zakopane in the southern mountains, and on the way we were stopped by the police, on some pretext or other. Our driver, a journalist of great charm and intelligence, about my own age, did not even speak when the cop tapped on his window. He merely took his driving-licence from his inside pocket, tucked a banknote in it, and handed it out. The policeman did not speak, either. He had no need to. He just took the note, handed the licence back, and walked away. My friend drove off without a word to me. He knew what I was thinking, and there was nothing to say.
If such a lively, clever and delightful man, I thought, was so numbed by history and the system, what could I expect of the populace at large? They seemed to me utterly disillusioned. On my first day in Warsaw a waiter offered to change money for me at generous black-market rates, and I accepted. When I happened to mention the fact to Polish acquaintances they said I had made a foolish mistake. The waiter might well have been an agent provocateur – I would find out when I came to leave the country and had to produce my receipts. It might have been a trap. The penalties were extreme, especially for foreigners – especially for foreign journalists. On the other hand perhaps it was just another poor sod trying to make a bit on the side, like that policeman in the South. Who could know? What could I do about it, anyway? Who cared? Forget it, and hope for the best. They took me up to Krasiński Square to show me the manhole into which the heroic fighters of the 1944 rising, driven out of the Old Town at last by the Nazis, had escaped with their wounded into the sewers below: but it was just another manhole, just another reminder of national impotence, and we looked at it in silence.
Then on a very cold and slushy day I stood on the great square of Kraków to hear the hejnał Mariacki, the trumpeter’s call of St Mary’s. Every hour, night and day, a trumpeter appeared in a high window of the church of St Mary to blow a slow sad call north, east, south and west, the most plaintive of tocsins, breaking off always in the middle of a phrase as tradition demanded (a thirteenth-century predecessor having been shot dead by a Mongol arrow before he could finish his warning). This was an unforgettably haunting polonaise, a true catch in the throat, and it was a terrible thing, I thought, to hear it then in the vast, beautiful and desperately shabby square. Kraków had been the capital of the wartime German colony of Poland. The Generalgouvernement Polen, the administration was called, and everything in Kraków had been forcibly Germanized – Adolf-Hitler Platz had of course been the new name of the square, and so established did the Germans feel their presence to be that Baedeker even produced a guidebook (Das Generalgouvernement, 1943). Just along the road was Auschwitz. Now the Germans had gone but the Russians were there instead, just as domineering, just as arrogant, apparently irremovable. Kraków had not been badly damaged during the war, but there hung over it that day, I thought, a miasmic sense of helplessness. There were very few people about: the trumpet sounded over a muffled city, muffled alike by snow and by history, and when it broke off so abruptly the silence that followed seemed to me absolute.
Surely, I thought, this enervated fatalism had once and for all blunted the vigour and optimism which made the Poles of the diaspora so irrepressible. But I was wrong, and especially in the capital I did sometimes sense it. Warsaw was indeed the saddest place imaginable in those days. Looming over it was the enormous Palace of Culture donated by the Soviet people to their unfortunate neighbours, and this stood there as an inescapable emblem of recurrent subjection to the Powers. Piłsudski Square was now Stalin Square. Most of the city was inexpressibly run down, much of it still in ruins. Yet there were flashes of the old spirit. They were rebuilding Old Town Square, a baroque ensemble utterly destroyed by the Germans, just as it was, house by house with meticulous accuracy, and this seemed to me a saving grace of the regime – to be honouring the past with such diligence. I remember a covey of merry schoolchildren sloshing through the snow one morning, their high-boned faces peering through fur hoods like fox cubs through bushes. A few beautiful women somehow managed, for all the shortages and hardships and puritan interferences, to dress themselves stylishly and walk with panache. Though the Poles might be hangdog in the general, in the particular they were still amused and inquisitive. Polish drunks were still cheerfully bawdy. Polish humour was disrespectful. The style of the Poles, which I found so poignantly urbane in their exile, flickered too among the miseries of home. The writer Neal Ascherson says (in his Black Sea, 1995) that for 150 years ‘the essential experience of every generation of young Poles’ had been drinking hot drinks in cold rooms, arguing about what kind of Poland they wanted, singing and listening to poetry. They were acclimatized, I suppose.
In the 1970s I took home from Poland a record by a popular young Polish tenor of the day, singing (in English) Songs That Swept The World. How it touched me then, and touches me still! Out of that snowbound, unhappy country, a programme of wishful schmaltz, a reaching-out as it were to all the more fortunate rest of us. The singer’s English was peculiarly imperfect as he carefully enunciated the words of those now half-forgotten lyrics; the slightly jazzed-up strict-tempo orchestra was like something from a radio broadcast of the 1930s; and as the young man rode his sentimental melodies – ‘Be my larv, fur nowan ulse can ind this yarning!’ – as his voice rose heroically and invariably to the tonic in the final cadences, he brought into my distant sitting-room all the grand pathos and passion of the Poles.
I went back to Poland again in the winter of 1996, when the Soviet Empire had long collapsed, and was surprised to find my emotions much the same. Of all the ex-Communist countries, it seemed to me to have changed least. There were bright new shops enough, posh hotels, plenty of cars, a lively jeunesse dorée, all the usual paraphernalia of capitalism: but still the place breathed a spirit of heroic poignancy, the spirit of Chopin in fact, once characterized by Schumann as guns in flower-beds. The patina of Communism still lay heavily upon Warsaw. The Mongolesque Palace of Culture, though surrounded now by the stalls and parked vans of a fairly dubious free market, was still the dominant building; the tenement oblongs of the old ideology still marched gloomily away into the suburbs; even the famously restored Old Town Square looked to me unmistakably a pastiche now, and a little shoddy at that, whose doors did not fit as the originals would have fitted and might have been better made (it occurred to me with a pang) by the carpenters of Disneyland.
On the other hand when I returned to that manhole near Krasiński Square I found a plaque on the wall above it, and over the street was a huge monument to the heroes of the 1944 rising, emerging furious from their hiding-places with guns at the ready, finally disappearing in ever-glorious defeat into the labyrinth. The Communists remembered that insurrection equivocally, because the tanks of the Red Army, already in the suburb of Praga just across the river, had declined to come to the help of the Poles, whose fighting leaders were anti-Communist to a man. Now the terrific tale has come into its own again, and is recognized as one of the supreme episodes of Polish history. It was a heroic failure, of course, but then most of Poland’s battles are heroic failures, and the glories of Poland are always tinged with sadness.
The trumpeter was still faithfully blowing the hejnał Mariacki down in Kraków, and although the great square was far from empty now, and the lovely city had come wonderfully to life again – full of students and tourists and foreign entrepreneurs – even so I found the long slow call as sad as ever. The Communists had built a huge steel plant on the outskirts of the city, and sometimes during my stay Kraków was so plunged in smog, like an old London pea-souper, that the top of the church tower was lost in murky vapours, and we could not see the trumpeter at his high window. But one morning it cleared, the sun came out, and up there the brass of the trumpet flashed against the shadows. A party of schoolchildren waved enthusiastically, and when the call broke off I could just make out the hand of the trumpeter waving back – like the hand I saw in the blockhouse in Ireland, back on page 70.
So Poland moved me still, and Warsaw especially. It remained the least superficial of Europe’s capitals, the least suited to all our glitz and trendiness, still sullenly ablaze, guns among the flower-beds, with its memories of cruelty, love, courage, hope, despair and sacrifice. ‘Nice car,’ I remarked to the man who drove me to the airport in his big new Volvo. He shrugged his shoulders and looked at me with a dry smile. I knew what he meant. ‘Well no,’ I added in afterthought, ‘I suppose it’s not Chopin’: and he knew what I meant, too.
How anomalous that Belgium should have become the administrative centre of the European Union, my generation’s attempt to make a unity of the continent! Belgium is certainly not a Power. It is decidedly not a nation, split as it is between two peoples, the Flemings and the Walloons, each with their own language, loyalty, history and territory. It has been a State only since the 1830s, and even when there was a Belgian Empire in Africa the Congo was no more than a personal fief of the King. It still seems to me a kind of ad-hoc entity. One day I walked up to the royal palace in Brussels, which is a sort of distillation of all the royal palaces that ever were, and just as I arrived a plenipotentiary emerged through its gates in a big black car after a diplomatic presentation to the King of the Belgians (the sixth to hold that title since its invention). A footling squadron of cavalry awaited him in the ceremonial square outside. Its officers wore romantic white cloaks. Its troopers, in slightly cock-eyed bearskins, as in musical comedies or fancy dress, included some sceptical-looking horsemen of the old-sweat school, and at least one rosy-cheeked woman. When they clattered and bounced away with the ambassadorial Cadillac, a municipal road-sweeping truck came trundling around the place where they had mustered, cleaning up the horse-shit. Its driver told me he spent his days doing it. There were so many embassies, missions and international institutions in Brussels, he said, that the palace cavalry was always at it–and, sure enough, as he spoke the horsepersons, having disappeared around the corner with their fluttering lances, came ridiculously back again with another couple of limousines.