Neither Here Nor There - Travels In Europe Part 9

On the whole, the cafes were the biggest disappointment of Vienna to me. I've reached the time of life where my idea of a fabulous time is to sit around for half a day with a cup of coffee and a newspaper, so a city teeming with coffee houses seemed made for me. I had expected them to be more special, full of smoky charm and eccentric characters, but they were just restaurants really. The coffee was OK, but not sensational, and the service was generally slow and always unfriendly. They provide you with newspapers, but so what? I can provide newspapers.

Even the Cafe Central, where Trotsky used to hang out, sitting for long hours every day doing b.u.g.g.e.r-all, was a disappointment. It had some atmosphere vaulted ceilings, marble tables, a pianist but coffee was thirty-four schillings a throw and the service was indifferent. Still, I do like the story about the two Viennese who were sitting in the Central with coffees, discussing politics. One of them, just back from Moscow, predicted a revolution in Russia before long. 'Oh, yeah?' said the other doubtfully, and flicked his head in the direction of the ever-idle Trotsky. 'And who's going to lead it him?'

The one friendly cafe I found was the Hawalka, around the corner from my hotel. It was an extraordinary place, musty, dishevelled and so dark that I had to feel my way to a table. Lying everywhere were newspapers on racks like carpet beaters. An old boy who was dressed more like a house painter than a waiter brought me a cup of coffee without asking if I wanted one and, upon realizing that I was an American, began gathering up copies of USA Today. USA Today.

'Oh no, please,' I said as he presented me with half a dozen, 'put these on the fire and bring me some newspapers.' But I don't think his hearing was good, and he scuttled around the room collecting even more and piling them on the table. 'No, no,' I protested, 'these are for lining drawers.' But he kept bringing them until I had a stack two feet high. He even opened one up and fixed it in front of me, so I drank my coffee and spent half an hour reading features about Vanna White, Sylvester Stallone and other great thinkers of our age.

Vienna is certainly the grandest city I have ever seen. All along the Ringstra.s.se colossal buildings proclaim an imperial past the parliament, the Palace of Justice, the Natural History Museum, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the opera house, the Burgtheater and above all the Hofburg, with its 2,600 rooms. They all look much the same mighty piles of granite and sandstone with warlike statuary crowded along the roofs and pediments. A Martian coming to earth would unhesitatingly land at Vienna, thinking it the capital of the planet.

The one thing you soon learn to adjust to in Vienna is that the Danube is entirely incidental to the city. It is so far from the centre that it doesn't even appear on most tourist maps. I tried walking to it one afternoon and never made it. I got as far as the Prater, the vast and famous park, which is bordered by the Danube on its far side, but the Prater is so immense that after a half-hour it seemed pointless to continue walking on aching feet just to confirm with my own eyes what I have read a hundred times: that the Danube isn't blue at all. Instead, I plodded lengthwise through the park along the long straight avenue called Hauptallee, pa.s.sing busy playing-fields, swings, a sports stadium, cafes and restaurants and eventually the amus.e.m.e.nt park with its ferris wheel the one made famous by Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton in The Third Man. The Third Man.

A sign by the ferris wheel, the famous Riesenrad, gave a history of it in German. It was built in 189697 by an Englishman named Walter Ba.s.set, I noted with a touch of pride on behalf of my friends and neighbours. I a.s.sume old Walter had some help because it's a pretty good size. It cost twenty-five schillings to go up, but it wasn't operating. The rest of the park, however, was doing brisk business, though I am hard pressed to explain why, since it seemed to be rather a dump.

Late one afternoon I went to the Sigmund Freud museum, in his old apartment on Bergga.s.se, a mile or so to the north of the city centre. Bergga.s.se is now a plain and rather dreary street, though the Freuds lived in some style. Their apartment had sixteen rooms, but of these only four are open to the public and they contain almost no furniture, original or otherwise, and only a few trifling personal effects of Freud's: a hat and walking stick, his medical bag and a steamer trunk. Still, this doesn't stop the trust that runs the museum from charging you thirty schillings to come in and look around.

The four rooms are almost entirely bare but for the walls, which are lined with 400 photographs and photocopies of letters and other doc.u.ments relating to Freud's life though some of these, it must be said, are almost ludicrously peripheral: a picture of Michelangelo's Moses, which Freud had admired on a trip to Italy, and a photograph of Sarah Bernhardt, included not because Freud treated her or slept with her or even met her, but because he once saw her perform. Almost all of the personal effects Freud collected during half a century of living in this apartment his library, his 2,500 pieces of cla.s.sical statuary, his furniture, his famous consulting couch are now in a far superior museum in Hampstead because, of course, Freud was driven from Vienna by the n.a.z.is two years before he died.

The wonder to me is that it took him so long to go. By well before the turn of the century Freud was one of the most celebrated figures in world medicine, and yet he wasn't made a professor at the University of Vienna until 1902, when he was nearly fifty, simply because he was a Jew.

Before the war there were 200,000 Jews in Vienna. Now there are hardly any. As Jane Kramer notes in her book Europeans, Europeans, most Austrians now have never met an Austrian Jew and yet Austria remains the most ferociously anti-Semitic country in Europe. According to Kramer, polls repeatedly show that about seventy per cent of Austrians do not like Jews, a little over twenty per cent actively loathe them and not quite a tenth find Jews so repulsive that they are 'physically revolted in a Jew's presence'. I'd have thought this scarcely credible except that I saw another poll in the most Austrians now have never met an Austrian Jew and yet Austria remains the most ferociously anti-Semitic country in Europe. According to Kramer, polls repeatedly show that about seventy per cent of Austrians do not like Jews, a little over twenty per cent actively loathe them and not quite a tenth find Jews so repulsive that they are 'physically revolted in a Jew's presence'. I'd have thought this scarcely credible except that I saw another poll in the Observer Observer revealing that almost forty per cent of Austrians thought the Jews were at least partly responsible for what happened to them during the war and forty-eight per cent believed that the country's 8,000 remaining Jews who, I should point out, account for just a little over 0.001 per cent of the Austrian population still enjoy too much economic power and political influence. revealing that almost forty per cent of Austrians thought the Jews were at least partly responsible for what happened to them during the war and forty-eight per cent believed that the country's 8,000 remaining Jews who, I should point out, account for just a little over 0.001 per cent of the Austrian population still enjoy too much economic power and political influence.

The Germans, however unseemly their past, have made some moving attempts at atonement viz., w.i.l.l.y Brandt weeping on his knees in the Warsaw ghetto and Richard von Weizsacker apologizing to the world for the sins of his country on the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the war. What do the Austrians do? They elect a former Wehrmacht officer as President.

I thought about this as I was walking from the Freud museum to my hotel along the Karl-Lueger-Stra.s.se. At a set of traffic lights, a black limousine led by a single motorcycle policeman pulled up. In the back seat, reading some papers, was I swear to G.o.d the famous Dr Kurt Waldheim, the aforementioned Wehrmacht officer and now President of Austria.

A lot of people aren't sure of the difference between the Chancellor and the President in Austria, but it's quite simple. The Chancellor decides national policy and runs the country, while the President rounds up the Jews. I'm only joking, of course! I wouldn't suggest for a moment that President Waldheim would have anything to do with the brutal treatment of innocent people not these days, certainly. Moreover, I fully accept Dr Waldheim's explanation that when he saw 40,000 Jews being loaded onto cattle trucks at Salonica, he genuinely believed they were being sent to the seaside for a holiday.

For the sake of fairness, I should point out that Waldheim insists he never even knew that the Jews of Salonica were being s.h.i.+pped off to Auschwitz. And let's be fair they accounted for no more than one-third of the city's entire population one-third of the city's entire population (italics theirs), and it is of course entirely plausible that a high-ranking n.a.z.i officer in the district could have been quite unaware of what was happening within his area of command. (italics theirs), and it is of course entirely plausible that a high-ranking n.a.z.i officer in the district could have been quite unaware of what was happening within his area of command.

Let's give the man a break. I mean to say, when the Storm Troopers burned down forty-two of Vienna's forty-three synagogues during Kristallnacht, Waldheim did wait a whole week before joining the unit. And after the Anschluss, he waited two whole weeks two whole weeks before joining the n.a.z.i Student Union. Christ, the man was practically a resistance hero. I don't know what all the fuss is about. before joining the n.a.z.i Student Union. Christ, the man was practically a resistance hero. I don't know what all the fuss is about.

Austria should be proud of him and proud of itself for having the courage to stand up to world opinion and elect a man of his calibre, pugnaciously overlooking the fact that he is a pathological liar, that he has been officially accused of war crimes, that he has a past so murky and mired in mistruths that no one but he knows what he has done. It takes a special kind of people to stand behind a man like that.

What a wonderful country.

20. Yugoslavia

I flew to Split, half-way down the Adriatic coast in Yugoslavia. Katz and I had hitch-hiked there from Austria. It took four days of standing on baking roadsides on the edge of a series of nowheres watching carloads of German tourists sweep past, so there was a certain pleasure even now in covering the same ground in hours. I had no choice: I was running out of time. I had to be in Bulgaria in six days or my visa would lapse.

I caught a bus into town from the airport and was standing at the harbourside in that state of mild indecisiveness that comes with the sudden arrival in a strange country, when a woman of late middle years approached and said quietly, as if offering something illicit, 'Zimmer? Room? You want?'

'Yes, please,' I said, suddenly remembering that this was how Katz and I had found a room in Split. 'How much?'

'Ten t'ousan' dinar,' she said.

Five dollars. This sounded like my kind of a deal. I considered the possibility that she might have four grown sons at home waiting to throttle me and take my money I hve long a.s.sumed that this is how I will die: trussed up and dumped into the sea after following a stranger offering an unbeatable bargain but she looked honest enough. Besides, she had to trust that I wasn't an axe murderer. 'Sure,' I said. 'Let's go.'

We took a bus to her neighbourhood, twenty minutes away up a long hill, and stepped off on a nondescript residential street somewhere at the back of the town. The lady led me down a complicated series of steps and sunny alleyways full of scrawny cats. It was the sort of route you would follow if you were trying to give someone the slip. It wouldn't have altogether surprised me if she had asked me to put on a blindfold. Eventually we crossed a plank over a narrow ditch, made our way across a gra.s.sless yard and entered a four-storey building that looked only half-finished. A cement mixer was standing by the stairwell. I was beginning to have my doubts. This was just the place for an ambush.

'Come,' she said, and I followed her up the stairs to the top floor and into her apartment. It was small and plainly furnished, but spotless and airy. Two men in their twenties, both vaguely thuggish-looking, were sitting in T-s.h.i.+rts at the table in the kitchen/living-room. Uh-oh, I thought, casually sliding my hand into my pocket and fingering my Swiss Army knife, but knowing that even in ideal circ.u.mstances it takes me twenty minutes to identify a blade and prise it out. If these guys came at me I would end up defending myself with a toothpick and tweezers.

In fact, they turned out to be nice fellows. Isn't the world a terrific place? They were her sons and knew a little English because they worked as waiters in town. One of them, in fact, was just off for work and would give me a lift if I wanted. I gratefully accepted on account of the distance and my considerable uncertainty as to where I was. He donned a red waiter's jacket and walked me to a dusty blue Skoda parked on a nearby street, where he fired up the engine and took off at a speed that had the back of the car fish-tailing and me holding the armrest with both hands. It was like being in one of those movie chase scenes where the cars scatter dustbins and demolish vegetable carts. 'I'm a little bit late,' he explained as he chased a flock of elderly pedestrians off a zebra crossing and turned on two wheels into a busy avenue without pausing to see if any cars were coming. There were, but they generously made way for him by veering sideways into buildings. He dropped me by the marketplace and was gone before I could barely get out a 'Thank you'.

Split is a wonderful place, with a pretty harbour overlooking the Adriatic and a cl.u.s.ter of green islands lurking attractively a mile or two offsh.o.r.e. Somewhere out there was Vis, where Katz and I had spent an almost wonderful week. We were sitting at an outdoor cafe one morning, trying to anaesthetize hangovers with coffee, when two Swedish girls came up to us and said brightly, 'Good-morning! How are you today? Come with us. We're going on the bus to a beach on the other side of the island.'

Unquestioningly we got up and followed. If you had seen these girls, you would have, too. They were gorgeous: healthy, tanned, deliciously fresh-smelling, soft all over, with good teeth and bodies shaped by a loving G.o.d. I whispered to Katz as we walked along behind, ma.s.saging our eyeb.a.l.l.s on the perfect hemispheres of their backsides, 'Do we know them?'

'I dunno. I think maybe we talked to them last night at that bar by the casino.'

'We didn't go to the bar by the casino.'

'Yes we did.'

'We did did?'

'Yeah.'

'Really?' I could remember nothing of the night before other than a series of Bip Pivo beers pa.s.sing before me, as if on a bottling line. I shrugged it off, youthfully unaware that I was in a single summer disabling cl.u.s.ters of brain cells at a pace that would leave me seventeen years later routinely standing in places like a pantry or toolshed, gazing at the contents and trying to remember what the h.e.l.l it was that had brought me there.

We went on a bouncing bus to the far side of the island, to a fis.h.i.+ng village called Komia, had a long swim in a warm sea, a couple of beers at a beachside taverna, caught a bouncing bus back to Vis town, had some more beers, ordered dinner, had some more beers, told stories, compared lives, fell in love.

Well, I did anyway. Her name was Marta. She was eighteen, dark and from Uppsala and she seemed to me the fairest creature I had ever run eyes over though it must be said that by this stage of the trip even Katz, in certain lights, was beginning to look not half bad. In any case, I thought she was lovely and the miracle was that she appeared to find a certain charm in me. She and the other girl, Trudi, grew swiftly drunk and loquacious and spent half the time talking in Swedish, but it didn't matter. I sat with my chin in my hands, just gazing at this Swedish fantasy, hopelessly besotted, stirring to my senses from time to time just long enough to suck back drool and take a sip of beer. Occasionally she would lay a hand on my bare forearm, sending my hormones into delirious turmoil, and once she glanced over and absently stroked my cheek with the back of her hand. I would have sold my mother as a galley slave and plunged a dagger into my thigh for her.

Late in the evening, when Katz and Trudi had gone off for pees, Marta turned to me, abruptly pulled my head to hers and swabbed my throat with her tongue. It felt as if a fish were flopping around in my mouth. She released me, wearing a strange, dreamy expression and breathed, 'I'm fool of l.u.s.t.'

I couldn't find words to communicate my appreciation. Then the most awful thing happened. An abrupt startled look seized her, as if she had been struck by a sniper's bullet. Her eyes snapped shut and she slid bonelessly from her chair.

I gaped for a long moment and cried, 'Don't do this to me, G.o.d, you p.r.i.c.k!' But she was gone, as dead to the world as if she had been hit broadside by a Mack truck. I looked at the sky. 'How could you do this to me? I'm a Catholic Catholic.'

Trudi reappeared, tutting in a sudden maternal fas.h.i.+on and saying, 'Well, well, well, we'd better get this one to bed.' I offered to carry Marta to their hotel for her, thinking that at the very least I might manage to lay my tingling mitts on her splendid b.u.t.tocks only for a moment, you understand, just a little something to sustain me till the end of the century but Trudi, doubtless sensing my intent, wouldn't hear of it. She was as strong as a steam train and before I could blink she had hoisted Marta over her shoulder and was disappearing down the street, leaving behind a fading 'Good-night'.

I watched them go, then stared moodily into my beer. Katz arrived and saw from my face that there would be no naked twining in the moonlit surf this night. 'What am I supposed to do now?' he said, sinking into his chair. 'She was coming on to me outside the men's room. I've got a b.o.n.e.r like Babe Ruth's bat. What am I supposed to do?'

'You'll just have to take matters into your own hands,' I said, but he failed to see any humour in the situation, as indeed, on reflection, did I, and we spent the rest of the evening drinking in silence.

We never saw the Swedish girls again. We had no idea which was their hotel, but Vis town was not a big place and we were certain that we would run into them. For three days we went everywhere, peered in restaurant windows, walked up and down the beaches, but we never saw them. After a time I half began to wonder if it wasn't all a product of an overheated imagination. Maybe Marta had never even said, 'I'm fool of l.u.s.t.' Maybe she had said, 'I'm fit to bust.' I didn't know. And as it became clearer and clearer that she was gone for ever, it didn't really seem to matter.

I wandered along the quayside looking at the sailing boats, then ventured into the sun-warmed lanes and courtyards that form the heart of Split. Once this area, roughly a quarter of a mile square, was the Palace of Diocletian. But after the fall of the Roman Empire, squatters moved in and started building houses inside the crumbling palace walls. Over the centuries a little community grew up. What were once corridors became streets. Courtyards and atriums evolved into public squares. Now the lanes some so narrow you have to turn sideways to pa.s.s through them are mostly lined with houses and shops, and yet there is this constant, disarming sense of being inside inside a palace. Incorporated into many of the facades are parts of the original structure stairways that go nowhere, columns supporting nothing, niches that once clearly held Roman busts. The effect is that the houses look as if they grew magically out of the ruins. It is entrancing and there is no other place in Europe like it. a palace. Incorporated into many of the facades are parts of the original structure stairways that go nowhere, columns supporting nothing, niches that once clearly held Roman busts. The effect is that the houses look as if they grew magically out of the ruins. It is entrancing and there is no other place in Europe like it.

I walked around for a couple of hours, then had an early dinner on a square bounded on three sides by old buildings with outdoor restaurants and on the fourth by the quay. It was a fine summery evening, with the kind of still air on which aromas hang in this case a curious but not displeasing mixture of vanilla, grilled meat and fish. Swifts circled and darted overhead and the masts of yachts rocked lazily on the water. It was such a pleasant spot and dusk was settling in so nicely that I sat for some time drinking Bips and watching the nightly promenade, the korzo.

Every person in town dresses up in his best clothes and goes for an evening stroll along the main street families, hunched groups of furtive-looking teenage boys, giggling clumps of dolled-up, over-fragranced teenage girls, young couples with heavy-footed toddlers, old men and their wives. It had the same chatty, congenial air of the gatherings around the square in Capri, except that here they kept moving, marching up and down the long quayside in their hundreds. It seemed to go on for much of the night.

As I drank my fourth or possibly fifth beer, I suddenly felt drowsy drowsy enough to lay my head on my arms and just sleep. I looked at the label on my beer bottle and discovered with alarm that the alcohol content was twelve per cent. It was as strong as wine and I had drunk a bucket of it. No wonder I felt tired. I called the waiter and paid the bill.

Solitary drinking is a strange and dangerous thing. You can drink all night and not feel the remotest sense of intoxication, but when you rise you discover that while your head feels clear enough, your legs have suddenly decided to go in for a little moonwalking or some other involuntary embarra.s.sment. I moved across the square, dragging one reluctant leg behind me, as if under the strain of a gunshot wound, and realized I was too far gone to walk anywhere.

I found a cab at the quayside, climbed in the front pa.s.senger seat, waking the driver, and realized I had no idea where I was going. I didn't know the name of the street, the name of the woman to whom I had entrusted my personal effects, the part of town in which she lived. I just knew it was up a hill. Suddenly Split seemed to be full of hills.

'Do you speak English?' I asked the driver.

'Nay,' he said.

'OK, let's not panic. I want to go sort of that direction. Do you follow me?'

'Nay.'

'Over there just drive that way.' We went all over the place. His meter spun like the altimeter on a cras.h.i.+ng plane. Occasionally I would spot a corner that looked familiar, grab his arm and cry, 'Left here! Left here!' A minute later we would find ourselves coming up against the gates of a prison or something. 'No, I think we may have gone wrong here,' I would say, not wanting to let his spirits down. 'It was a good try though.' Eventually, when it became apparent that he was convinced I was insane as well as drunk and was considering pus.h.i.+ng me out, we blundered onto the correct street. At least I thought it was correct. I gave him a pile of dinars and stumbled out. It was correct I recognized a corner shop but I still had to find my way along the steps and alleys. Everything looked different at night and I was drunk and weary. I wandered blindly, occasionally frightening the c.r.a.p out of myself by stepping on a cat, and peered through the darkness for a four-storey building with a plank of wood outside.

Finally I found it. The plank was thinner and wobblier than I remembered. I shuffled along it and was about half-way across when it turned sideways and my footing went. I fell through black s.p.a.ce for an instant it seemed longer and was really rather pleasant unaware that my feet were either side of the plank and that I was about to break my fall with my reproductive organs.

Well, it was a surprise, let me say that much. I teetered for a moment, gasping, then fell heavily sidelong into the ditch. I lay on my back for a long minute waiting for my lungs to reflate, wondering in an oddly detached way if the dull, unspeakable ache in my midsection indicated permanent damage and the embarra.s.sing burden of a catheter bag, until it occurred to me that there might be rats in the ditch and that they might find me of interest. Abruptly I rose, scrabbled my way to the top against the loose dirt, slipped back, scrabbled again and tumbled out. I hobbled into the building and up to the fourth floor, where I tapped on the door to the lady's flat. A minute later a woman in hair curlers opened the door to find an American man, dishevelled, covered in dirt, swaying slightly and clutching his s.c.r.o.t.u.m with both hands, standing on her threshold. We had never seen each other before. It was the wrong flat.

I tried to think of words to explain the situation, but could not, and wandered wordlessly off down the hall, with an ambiguous wave as I went. I found the right flat and knocked, and after a minute knocked again. Eventually I heard shuffling inside and the door was opened by my lady acquaintance. She was wearing a nightdress and a frightening array of hair curlers, and she said something cross to me about, I guess, the lateness of the hour. I tried to explain things but she was looking at me as if I had brought shame into her home, and I gave up. She showed me to my room, her slippers flopping ahead of me down the hall. Her sons were also in there, fast asleep. My bed was an upper bunk. Suddenly $5 seemed like a lot of money. She shut the door and plodded off.

Still dressed, I crossed the room in the dark, and hoisted myself onto the upper bunk, stepping inadvertently on the stomach of one of the sleeping brothers. 'Oomph,' he went, like a deflated punchbag, but he seemed not to wake. I lay on the bed and took ten minutes to push my nuts back into place, locating them somewhere up around my shoulders and cautiously working them back down my body, as with a coin trapped in the lining of a jacket. That done, I tried to sleep, but without much success.

In the morning I sat up to find the brothers gone. I went into the kitchen with my rucksack. The flat was silent but for an insistently ticking clock and a periodic bloop bloop bloop bloop of a dripping tap, which somehow made the silence more intense. I didn't know if the patroness was out or still in bed. I brushed my teeth quietly in the sink and made myself fractionally more presentable with the application of a little cold water and a tea towel. Then I took out a five-dollar bill and put it on the table, then took out another and put it on the table, too. And then I left. of a dripping tap, which somehow made the silence more intense. I didn't know if the patroness was out or still in bed. I brushed my teeth quietly in the sink and made myself fractionally more presentable with the application of a little cold water and a tea towel. Then I took out a five-dollar bill and put it on the table, then took out another and put it on the table, too. And then I left.

I walked into the city centre and went to the bus station. I had intended taking the bus to Belgrade, as Katz and I had done, but discovered that there was no longer a direct daytime bus. I would have to travel to Sarajevo, half-way along, and hope that I could make a connection there. I bought a ticket for the ten o'clock bus and, with two hours to kill, went off to find some coffee. Midway along the quay, directly across the street from two of the city's grandest hotels, I noticed a gloopy sound and a smell as of a slurry wagon. I peered over the quay edge. A small outfall pipe was disgorging raw sewage straight into the harbour. You could see everything t.u.r.ds, wriggling condoms, pieces of toilet paper. It was awful, and it was only feet from the main street, mere yards from the cafes and hotels. I decided not to have coffee at my usual spot, and instead found a cafe well inside the old town where the view wasn't so good but the chances of cholera were presumably slighter.

The bus was crowded buses in Yugoslavia always are but I found a seat three-quarters of the way back and gripped the seat bar ahead of me with both hands. When Katz and I had crossed Yugoslavia, it had been nothing if not exciting. The roads through the mountains were perilous beyond words, much too narrow for a bus, full of impossible bends and sheer falls from unimaginable heights. Our driver was an escaped lunatic who had somehow talked his way into a job with the bus company. Young and handsome, wearing his cap at a rakish angle, he drove as if cheerfully possessed, pa.s.sing on blind bends, driving at break-neck speed, honking at everything, slowing for nothing. He sang hearty tunes and carried on lively conversations with the pa.s.sengers often turning around in his seat to address them directly while simultaneously sweeping us along the edge of ragged roads on the brink of sheer-sided cliffs. I remember pressing my face to the window many times and being able to see no road beneath us just a straight drop and the sort of views you get from an aeroplane. There was never more than an inch of shoulder standing between us and wingless flight.

Katz and I were sitting at the front, and the driver, taking a sudden liking to us, decided to amuse us with some visual jokes pretending to nod off for a few moments, then jerking back to consciousness just in time to avoid an oncoming truck or acting as if the brakes had failed as we hurtled down a more or less perpendicular incline at the sort of speed usually experienced only by astronauts, causing Katz and me to try to sit on each other's laps.

In the afternoon, after many hours of such bouncing excitation, the bus crested the mountains and began a steep descent into a broad valley of the most inexpressible lushness and beauty. I had never seen such a charmed and dreamy landscape. At every town and village people would emerge from houses as if our arrival were a kind of miracle and trot along with the bus, sometimes pa.s.sing little bags of cherries through the windows to their friends and the driver and even to Katz and me.

We arrived in Belgrade in the early evening, found by some miracle a cheap and lovely hotel high on a hill, and dined on a rooftop terrace as we watched the sun sink over the Danube and the lights of the city twinkle on. We drank many beers and ate the last of our cherries.

It had been a nearly perfect day and I itched to repeat it now. In a strange way, I was looking forward to the dangers of the mountain road it was such an exhilarating combination of terror and excitement, like having a heart attack and enjoying it. The bus laboured through the streets of Split and up into the steep, cement-coloured mountains at its back. I was disappointed to discover that the roads had been improved in my long absence in many places they had been widened and crash barriers had been installed on the more dangerous bends and that the driver was not obviously psychotic. He drove with both hands and kept his eyes on the road.

Clearly any drama I was to find would come from the landscape, though of this there was plenty. Most people are unaware of the richness and beauty of Yugoslavia's interior. It is as green as England and as stunningly scenic as Austria, but almost wholly untouristed. Within an hour or two of leaving the baking coastline, with its teeming resorts and cereal-box hotels, you find yourself descending from the empty mountains into this lush, lost world of orchards and fields, lakes and woodlands, tidy farmhouses and snug villages a corner of Europe lost to time. In the fields people cut and gathered hay by hand, with scythes and wooden pitchforks, and crossed their fields behind horse-drawn ploughs. In the villages the elderly women were almost all dressed in black, with scarves around their heads. It was like a picture out of the distant past.

Seven slow, hot hours after leaving Split we rolled into Sarajevo, capital of the republic of Bosnia-Hercegovina. I truly was in another world now. There were minarets everywhere and the writing on shops and street signs was in Cyrillic. Sarajevo is surrounded by steep hills the 1984 Winter Olympics were held there and bisected by a narrow, swift, very straight river, the Miljacka. The street along one side of it, connecting the new part of town near the bus station with the old town a mile or so away, was the scene of Sarajevo's most famous incident, the a.s.sa.s.sination in June 1914 of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

I got a room in the Hotel Europa, a dark and faded establishment still clinging to a hint of former grand-ness. There was no television in the room and only about fourteen watts of illumination with all the lights on, but the bed looked comfortable enough and the bath, I noted with a sigh of grat.i.tude, issued steaming water. I had a long soak and, much refreshed, went out to see the town.

Sarajevo was a wonderful surprise, with lots of small parks and leafy squares. In the centre of town is one of Europe's largest bazaars, a series of alleyways lined with tiny shops selling hand-worked bra.s.s and copperware. But because there are no tourists, there are none of those irksome little gits tugging at your sleeve and thrusting goods in your face as you find in the more famous bazaars of Istanbul and Tangier. Here no one paid any attention to me at all.

I took a steep walk up into the hills, where old, sometimes tumbledown houses were packed together in a dense and picturesque jumble along roughly cobbled streets that were sometimes all but vertical. It was a strenuous climb even locals could be seen pausing for breath, a hand against a wall but the views from the higher points were memorable and exotic, with the setting sun crowning a skyline of minarets, and the muezzins' tortured calls to prayer echoing over the rooftops.

I returned to town in time to join the nightly promenade along the main street the only time, it appeared, the Yugoslavs get cheerful. I examined restaurant menus along the way and settled on the dining-room of the Hotel Central, which had much the same faded grandeur of the Europa, like a stately home inhabited by an impoverished aristocrat. I was the only customer. Yugoslavia was going through a period of economic upheaval. Inflation was in the hundreds of per cent and the dinar was being devalued daily, sometimes two or three times daily, to the almost embarra.s.sing benefit of the tourist and the detriment of the locals. A generous dinner of soup, steak, vegetables, salad, bread, beer and a coffee cost just $8, and yet I was evidently the only person in town who could afford it.

The service, as everywhere in Yugoslavia, was indifferent not so much hostile as just past caring. The waiter dribbled my soup across the carpet and tablecloth and disappeared for long periods between courses, leaving me to stare at empty bowls and plates, but I couldn't entirely blame him. The difficulty with being a visitor in a place where you can live like a prince is that your wealth makes a menial of everyone you deal with. In Split, I had noticed some Germans tipping a waiter as if it were play money, almost teasing him with it, and I trusted he had had the sense to add some spittle to their meal. I just hoped that this wasn't what was keeping my waiter now.

In the morning I returned to the station and tried to find out about a bus to Belgrade, but the girl behind the information window was having such a delightful conversation with someone on the telephone that she was clearly not going to answer any enquiries. I waited for many minutes, and even said a few words to her through the mouth-hole in the gla.s.s, but she just looked at me blankly and carried on talking, curling the flex around her finger. Eventually I trudged off and found a bus by asking around among the drivers.

The trip to Belgrade took eight hours, and it was even hotter, slower, duller and more crowded than the bus the day before. I sat beside a man whose concern for personal hygiene was rather less than obsessive and spent much of the day wis.h.i.+ng I knew the Serbo-Croat for 'Pardon me, but your feet are a trifle malodorous. I wonder if you would be good enough to stick them out of the window.' Gradually, to escape the smell, I fell into the mindless oblivion that seemed more and more to sustain me on these periods of getting from place to place, and patiently awaited the appearance of Belgrade through the front window.

I stepped off the bus in Belgrade feeling cheated. The trip had taken two days and had offered none of the reckless speed and adventure I had been hankering after. I found a room in an old-fas.h.i.+oned hotel called the Excelsior, rather expensive but comfortable, and immediately embarked on the usual business of acquainting myself with the city. I spent two days wandering around and found I remembered almost nothing about Belgrade. For old times' sake, I tried to locate the hotel where Katz and I had stayed, thinking I might dine on the rooftop terrace if it was still there, but I soon realized the quest was hopeless. I didn't remember enough to know where to begin to look in such a sprawling city.

Still, I was rather taken with Belgrade. It is the quintessential Mittel European city long avenues of stolid, gloomy, five- and six-storey buildings, interspersed with parks and monumental buildings with copper domes. There was a certain indefinable sense of the dead hand of central planning everywhere, but alongside it a refres.h.i.+ng shortage of Western enterprises McDonald's, Benetton and the like.

There was not a great deal to do in Belgrade. I strolled through the main shopping streets to an inner-city park called Kalemegdan, built around an old fortress and neatly arrayed with trees and benches and statues of Yugoslavian, and more particularly Serbian, heroes. Most of the benches were taken up with men hunched intently over chessboards, each of them with a congregation of onlookers freely offering advice to both players. At the park's edge was a high terrace with an un.o.bstructed view of the city and of the spot where the Sava and Danube rivers flow together to make one truly monumental river.

One afternoon, I walked some distance out to Hajd Park, a wooded and rolling estate where t.i.to had his executive compound and where he is buried now. A long paved path led up to his mausoleum. I was the only visitor and there wasn't much to see. t.i.to was not, as I had hoped, preserved in a gla.s.s case. He was safely hidden beneath a marble slab covered with scores of fresh wreaths and flowers. A lone soldier, looking desperately young and bored and uncomfortable, stood at attention beside the tomb. He was clearly supposed to stare straight ahead, but I could see his eyes following me around the room, and I had the terrible feeling that my visit was the high point of his day. 'Mine too,' I mumbled.

I went outside and felt the sudden weight of not knowing what to do with myself. Before me lay a panoramic view of a city I had no keen urge to explore. I spent most of the afternoon sitting in a park by a playground watching young parents pus.h.i.+ng children on swings. I kept telling myself to get up and go do something, but my legs wouldn't respond and anyway all I wanted to do was sit and watch children play. I was, I realized at length, homesick. Oh dear.

I woke the next day in a better frame of mind. Today I would fulfil a little dream. I was going to take a first-cla.s.s sleeper from one European capital to another. This had long seemed to me the very pinnacle of luxury, and I breakfasted in the dining-room of the Excelsior with the serene composure of a man who knows his time has come. My plan was to buy the ticket directly after breakfast and spend the day going around the museums before heading to the station in the evening to take my place among the dispossessed d.u.c.h.esses, Hercule Poirot look-alikes and other exotic characters I presumed still travelled by first-cla.s.s sleeping carriage in this part of the world.

The concierge told me not to buy my ticket at the station 'It is hysterical there,' he said, shaking his head sadly but to go to the main office of Sputnik, the state-run travel agency, where I could make a reservation in an atmosphere of relative tranquillity.

The Sputnik office was orderly but unfriendly and full of sluggish queues. First I had to stand in a line to find out which line to stand in. Then I had to stand in a line to reserve a sleeping compartment, but these, I was told with withering disdain by a nasty-looking piece of work masquerading as a middle-aged woman, were booked solid for weeks and no amount of money could secure one for me now. Well, there goes another dream whoos.h.i.+ng down the sluicepan of life, I thought bleakly. The woman directed me to a third line where I might might get a seat ticket if I were lucky, but she gave a wave of her hand that told me this was unlikely. She was right. get a seat ticket if I were lucky, but she gave a wave of her hand that told me this was unlikely. She was right.

Without even a seat on the train, I returned to the first line to see if there were any other lines I could usefully stand in. The girl in the first line, who happened to be the only nice person in the place, told me that I should stand in the airline line because flights across Yugoslavia were nearly as cheap as the train. I went and stood in the airline line, which was exceptionally long and slow-moving, and discovered when my turn came that it wasn't the airline line at all ha, ha, ha that the airline line was one more line to the left. So I went and stood in the airline line and eventually discovered that there were no airline seats available either, not that day or the next.

A sense of helpless frustration was overcoming me, with weepy panic nipping at its heels. I had been here for nearly two hours. I explained to the girl as patiently as I could that I had had to be in Sofia the next day on account of my visa. She gave me a look that said, Well, why on earth do you expect me to give a f.u.c.k?, but she said she would put my name on the standby list for the evening flight and told me to come back at four. to be in Sofia the next day on account of my visa. She gave me a look that said, Well, why on earth do you expect me to give a f.u.c.k?, but she said she would put my name on the standby list for the evening flight and told me to come back at four.

I went to the bus station, hoping by some miracle that there would be a bus to Sofia. The station was absolute chaos throngs of people bunched around every ticket window or sitting on piles of suitcases, waiting listlessly or erupting into little localized riots whenever a bus arrived. The babble of a dozen tongues filled the air. All the signs were in Cyrillic. I examined the timetables on the wall, but had no real idea what Sofia would look like in Cyrillic. Suddenly the idea of being innocent and free in a foreign land didn't seem so exotic and appealing. I couldn't even tell which was the information window. I was as helpless as an infant.

It took me most of the afternoon to discover that there were no buses to Sofia. My best hope was to take a bus to Ni and another onward to Dimitrovgrad on the Bulgarian border, and hope that I could find some kind of transport the last forty miles to Sofia. It would take three days at least, but I was so eager by now to get out of Yugoslavia and into any other country that I bought a ticket to Ni for $12, pocketed it and trudged back up the long hill to the Sputnik office.

I arrived two seconds after the stroke of four. A new girl was seated at the airline reservations computer. I told her the situation and she looked through the standby list for my name. After a moment she informed me that my name was not on the list. I looked at her with the expression of a man who has lost his job and had his car stolen and now has learned that his wife has run off with his best pal. I said, 'What?'

She said it didn't matter because there were still plenty of seats left on the evening flight.

I said, 'What?'

She looked at me with manifest indifference. A ticket to Sofia would cost $112. Did I want one?

Did I want a ticket? Is the Pope Catholic? Is Betty Ford a clinic? 'Yes,' I said. She did some tinkering with the computer and at length issued me with a ticket. A wave of relief washed over me. I would be in Sofia for dinner or at least for a late snack. I was getting out of Belgrade. Hooray!

I went outside and hailed a taxi. 'Take me to the airport!' I said to the driver, falling into the back as he shot away from the kerb. Pulling myself upright, I discovered he was young and cheerful and wore his cap at a rakish angle. He drove like a lunatic. It was great.