A Time of Gifts (27 page)

This was all very well. But, from the friendly but puzzled faces of my hosts, I understood that, apart from my all-but-inaudible telephone conversation, they had no notion of any impending visit. No letter had reached them from Munich. My telephone call had conveyed an impression, I think, of some Englishman motoring to Vienna proposing himself for tea or a drink. Instead of this urbane imaginary absentee, they were confronted by an affable tramp with a knapsack and hobnailed boots. When we had been talking about our Munich friends for half an hour, a moment of silence prolonged itself for a few seconds; and, during the gap made by this angel's overflight, a swarm of anxieties and doubts and uncharacteristic scruples rushed into my mind. I felt suddenly convinced that they longed to be alone. Perhaps they had just
heard bad news; other visitors might be expected at any moment; or they might simply be bored stiff: why not? Anyway, I was convinced that a stranger's presence might be a curse past bearing, and this loss of nerve gave way to a touch of insanity:
perhaps they thought I was a burglar
? I heard myself clumping to my feet and inventing, in a strangled voice, an excuse for departure. I had to catch a train that night, I said, in order to meet a friend arriving in Vienna by train next day. The unconvincing lameness and confusion of this invention called up looks of surprise, then bewilderment and finally concern as though they had a mild lunatic on their hands. At which station was I meeting my friend? Desperately, and at a venture, I said, the Western one...luckily, a Westbahnhof
did
exist. When was I meeting this friend? “Oh—at noon.” “Then
that's
all right,” they said. “You can't possibly go on tonight in weather like this! We'll get you to the station in plenty of time for your rendezvous in Vienna.” I think it must have been obvious that the entire rigmarole was nonsense, but none of us could say so. They may have guessed that it had been prompted by diffidence. My fears had been chimerical; but I was committed to my mythical programme. In spite of all this, dinner and the evening were easy and delightful. When I outlined my future journey, they were full of suggestions, my hostess made me take down the names and addresses of kinsmen and friends on the way who might help, especially in Hungary, and she promised to write to them. (She did. It made a great difference later on.) I didn't let on about my birthday; what
could
I have been expecting?

The Gräfin, opening her letters over breakfast, gave a joyful cry and waved one over her head. It was the Baron's, re-forwarded several times! She read it out, and, on the strength of its splendid tenor, I thought of telling the truth about my Vienna improvisation but I didn't quite dare.

The day was dark and threatening. Why didn't I stay on a bit? How I would have liked to! But I was entangled in a fiction that no one believed and there was no way out. We were talking in the library, snugly surrounded by books, when the man in green announced
that the car was waiting. No good saying, now, that I would rather walk to the station: I would have missed my unwanted train and been late for my phantom rendezvous... But when we said goodbye, they looked truly worried, as though I were not quite safe on my own.

I sailed away, half-cocooned in a fur rug, in the back of an enormous car that swished its way, under an ever-darkening sky, to a little country station on the St. Pölten-Vienna line. A few warning flakes were falling when we arrived and the chauffeur jumped out, carrying my rucksack and stick. He wanted to help at the ticket office, put me into a corner seat and see me off.

Here was a new panic. Even had I wanted to go by train, I hadn't enough money for the ticket. All this brought on a recrudescence of last night's folly: someone had told me—
who, and where
?—that one tipped chauffeurs in Central Europe. Taking my stick and shouldering the rucksack, I found four coins in my pocket, and pressed them on the chauffeur with mumbled thanks. He was a white-haired, friendly and cheerful old man, a former coachman, I think. He had been telling me, over his shoulder on the way, how he too had loved wandering about as a young man. He looked surprised and distressed at this sudden unwanted largesse—he didn't in the least expect me to try to keep up with the Liechtensteins—and he said, with real feeling, “O nein, junger Herr!” and almost made as though to give the wretched coins back. Leaving him with his coronetted cap in his hand, scratching his head with a puzzled and unhappy look, I dashed in confusion into the station for cover and oblivion and watched him get slowly back in the car and drive off. The station master, who had exchanged friendly greetings too, headed for the office to sell me a ticket. Instead, I gave him an ambiguous wave, slunk out again and strode fast along the Vienna road. Looking back in a minute or two, I saw him standing on the platform, staring bemusedly at my dwindling figure. I wished I were dead.

* * *

There was another serious cause for anxiety. The coins that had made up that ridiculous tip had been the last. Not a
groschen
remained. With luck, four pounds would be waiting in Vienna, but till then I would have to trust to farms and cowsheds.

The day matched the general distress. Low mountains rose on either side of a gloomy road. The snowflakes became scarce and sticky and finally stopped altogether. A fierce gust ran along the valley and clashed the laden branches, shaking down cascades of snow. All at once the clouds, which had been growing steadily darker, burst open. The snow, pitted like smallpox for a second, turned to slush and the whole sky was dissolving in water and sound.

I got into a barn just in time and despondently surveyed the grim scene from a heap of straw. After an hour of wild thunder and lightning the storm dwindled to a stubborn downpour and a few intermittent rumbles. The sky was dark as twilight. I pressed on when the rain slackened, and sat through the next deluge in an almost pitchdark church. On a lonely stretch of road the driver of a lorry, creeping along slowly for fear of skidding, pulled up and shouted to me to climb in behind.

Snug under lashed tarpaulin in a nest among piled planks, a scarlet-cheeked girl with a kerchief tied under her chin was sitting with a basket of eggs by her side and her arms clasped round her knees. I huddled beside her, and the drops hammered down on the re-fastened waterproof. She shook hands politely, asked me my name and told me hers was Trudi. Then she said, grinning with enjoyment: “Hübsches Wetter, nicht?,” and laughed: “Nice weather, eh?” She gave me a slice of cake sprinkled with caraway seeds out of her basket and I was halfway through it when a loud quack came from the other side. A huge bird was sitting in a second basket held there by a zigzag of strings: “Er ist schön, nicht wahr?” She was taking this handsome drake to her grandmother who lived with five unhusbanded ducks in Vienna. Her parents had a farm the other side of St. Pölten, she told me; she was fifteen, the eldest of six: how old was I? Nineteen yesterday. She shook my hand again solemnly and wished me “herzliche
Glückwünsche zum Geburtstag.” Where did I come from, with that funny accent? When I told her, she clicked her tongue. What a long way from home.

The rain had sunk to a steady drizzle and the truck crawled on through the slush while we huddled together and sang. It was impossible to make out much in the dark, but Trudi said we must be in the Wienerwald by now; Strauss's Vienna Woods. But there were no lights on the horizon where Vienna should have begun to show. When the lorry pulled up, we could hear voices, and then a torch was flashed on us by a helmeted soldier with a slung rifle and fixed bayonet and we saw that we were in a built-up street, and already inside Vienna. But torches were the only lights on the pavements and the gleam of candles behind window-panes. A breakdown, apparently.

When the truck put us down, the people in front said they didn't know what was going on. There had been some disorders in Linz. I took the egg basket, and Trudi the drake, and she put her free arm companionably through mine. The drake, which had been asleep most of the journey, was wide awake now and quacking frequently. The atmosphere in the street was inexpressibly dismal. There was a sound of more thunder, or something like it. After a mile or so, barbed wire barriers closed the way and a couple of helmeted soldiers, again with their bayoneted rifles slung, peered into the baskets. One of them started handling the eggs rather clumsily and Trudi told him, with considerable firmness, to mind what he was doing. He let us through, and when we asked him what was up, he answered: the hell of a mess.

What
was
going on? A general strike, as well as a breakdown? The noise we had taken for thunder boomed again, followed by a scattering of sharper reports. Trudi, with a wide, hopeful grin and sparkling eyes, said “Perhaps it's War!”—not out of bloodthirstiness, but anything for a change. “It must be the Nazis again! They're always shooting at people, throwing bombs, starting fires!
Pfui Teufel!
” She had to go to the north of the city, and I was heading for the centre. At the point where our ways parted, she
asked for my handkerchief and handed it back with a dozen eggs knotted inside: “There!” she said. “A birthday present for you! Don't bump them about.” She hitched the basket in the crook of one arm and the drake, with a quack or two, over the other. She turned round after a few steps to shout cheerful post-valedictory wishes for good luck.

* * *

The sooty and rain-pocked snow, banked along the pavements, showed in pale lines. Once or twice the beam of a searchlight moved beyond the roofs. The distant rumbling, interspersed with the crackle of small arms and a few continuous bursts, was unmistakably gunfire now. At another road block, I asked a policeman if there were a Jugendherberge in Vienna where I might sleep for the night. He conferred with a colleague: the Heilsarmee, they said, was the only place. I didn't understand the word—something Army?—and I got in a muddle about their directions. One of them came along with me for a furlong or two. He knew Vienna as little as I did; he had only arrived from the country that afternoon; but he knocked at lighted windows and asked the way. When I asked him whether it were a Nazi putsch, he said no, not this time: in fact, just the opposite. It was trouble between the Army and the Heimwehr on one side and demonstrating Social-Democrats on the other. He didn't know any details. No papers had appeared. Trouble had started early that morning in Linz and then spread. There was martial law, and an outbreak of strikes, hence the darkness and general chaos. I said it didn't seem fair to use weapons against unarmed political demonstrators. At the word ‘unarmed' he stopped and looked at me in surprise, and repeated the word: “unbewaffnet?” He gave a grim laugh and said “You don't seem to know much about things here, young man. They've got thousands of weapons that they've been keeping hidden for years. Rifles, machine guns, bombs, everything! All over the country. It's an armed battle over there in the Nineteenth District!”

That was all he knew about it. It was not till later that it was possible to get a very slightly clearer idea of events. Afterwards, the dead on both sides were reckoned in hundreds by the government; by their opponents, in thousands. After retreating from street-barriers, the Social Democrats, some of whom were in uniform, had taken up defensive positions in a block of workers' flats in Heiligenstadt, the Neunzehnte Bezirk. Their chief defensive position was the Karl-Marx-Hof, a massive building over half a mile long; and the noise I had mistaken for thunder was the sound, muted by distance, of a battle settling down into a siege. The besiegers, unable to make a frontal attack across an open space under machine gun fire from the besieged building, had brought up mortars, howitzers and field guns; but they were firing solid shot, as opposed to the normal and much more destructive high-explosive shells. The command of the besieging troops and the Heimwehr were much blamed afterwards for using artillery. By cutting off water and supplies, it was held, the besieged could finally have been induced to surrender with many less casualties. Before the surrender, the Social Democrat leaders fled to Czechoslovakia; and Vienna, except for bitterness and recrimination, returned, more or less, to normal. Or rather, to a resumption of the briefly interrupted Nazi subversion.

Robbed of their historical context, these were the purely physical circumstances. At the time, one had only a confused inkling of events. Immediately afterwards, these were blurred, in conversations and newspapers, by conflict of versions and rumour and recrimination. And then, most surprisingly—at least, so it seemed to a stranger in the city—the whole topic vanished from the air as though it had never happened and, with amazing speed, ordinary life resumed its course.

It was a desperate time for Austria. All through 1933, the country had been shaken by disturbances organized by the Nazis and their Austrian sympathizers. During one outbreak, they had attempted to assassinate Dr. Dollfuss. Soon after these February troubles, similar activities started again. They culminated five
months later in a Nazi
coup d'état
. It failed, but not without bloodshed and heavy fighting and the murder of Dr. Dollfuss. Afterwards there was ostensible quiet until the final disaster of the Anschluss in 1938, when Austria disappeared as an independent nation until the destruction of the Third Reich.

* * *

We seemed to have been walking for miles in this dim wilderness. At last, not far, I think, from the Danube Canal, we reached a quarter full of sidings and warehouses, and tramlines running over cobblestones glimmered amid dirty snow, and broken crates were scattered about. Under the lee of a steep ramp, a lighted doorway opened at the foot of a large building whose windows were bright in the murk. The policeman left me and I went in.

A large antechamber was filled with a moving swarm of tramps. Each one had a bundle; their overcoats flapped like those of scarecrows and their rags and sometimes their footgear were held together by rusty safety-pins and string. There were Guy Fawkes beards and wild or wandering eyes under torn hat brims. Many of them seemed to have known each other for years. Social greetings and gossip combined in an affable manner and a vague impulse kept them on the move in a shuffling ebb and flow.