PETER NEWALL

Impermanence

The midday express from Salzburg to Zernice was scheduled to take five hours, but took more than seven, so we drew in to the station just as the pale green platform lights came on against the lavender evening sky. Knots of passengers descended from the train, the women with baskets, the men in shirtsleeves and carrying their jackets over their arms, all heading towards the exit. I pulled my suitcase down from the overhead rack and wearily followed them. 

I was very grateful to step down onto the platform. All afternoon, the late summer sun had glared through the carriage windows, glinting off the brass fittings and baking the worn leather seats. Even at the end of the day, it had lingered above the horizon, glowing red, obstinately refusing to set. Hot, dry and rattling, the train had been a small hell. Even standing on the steps outside the station, looking over a triangular, grassy park bounded with linden trees, breathing the evening air, it was hard to believe I had finally escaped. 

I took a taxi to my hotel. That was probably a mistake, as a walk might have helped me recover myself. On the other hand, it was already nearly eight o’clock when, my head aching, I filled out the registration form at the front desk. Feeling tired, crumpled and grimy, I took a shower and lay down to rest for a moment before going out to eat. 

I woke to find the luminous hands of my watch showing half past one. At first, I had no idea where I was. I felt dehydrated and vaguely ill. The room, which had seemed pleasantly solid and old-fashioned when I checked in, was now close and oppressive, smelling of cigar smoke and stale perfume. The single window was closed fast. I drank a glass of tepid water and lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling. Scrambled by the train trip, the heat, and my untimely sleep, my thoughts went round and round, leading nowhere. 

Zernice, once the old German city of Lindenburg, was now the capital of our new neighbouring state. I had been sent here by my newspaper to report on the ‘national mood’ following the elections held in the spring. I had to think of some angle to make my piece interesting, because on the face of things, there was nothing to report. The government shared the politics of most governments in Europe, and had just been returned with a thumping majority. There was not much doubt about the national mood; after the decade of chaos that had followed the war, people wanted above all stability, to make a decent living, and to bring up their families in peace. Strong government was accepted as the best guarantee of that. 

Lying in the darkness, I tried to come up with an original approach to my story. All the major issues of the day – the rearmament question, the border question, the monarchy question – had been exhaustively canvassed. Not so many readers were interested in emerging national consciousness in music or theatre. Perhaps something about football rivalries, or even the recent ban on absinthe? I didn’t know. My thinking became more and more circular, and the room stuffier and stuffier. Eventually I got up and doused my face at the washbasin. I tried again to open the window, first by subtlety and then by force, but it still defeated me. To stay inside any longer was insufferable; I had to get some fresh air. 

My clothes were folded over the chair. They smelled of the train, but I wasn’t going to start unpacking my suitcase now. Buttoning my wallet into my coat pocket, I went out, careful to close the door quietly behind me. A narrow red-brown carpet ran the length of the dimly-lit corridor. I found the stairs before I found the lift, so I took them down to the lobby. 

At the front desk a dark-haired man in hotel uniform, the collar undone at the neck, sat reading a newspaper. A cigarette in a cut glass ashtray at his elbow sent up a long straight thread of smoke. I nodded to him. He looked at me without expression and went back to his reading. It was not an expensive hotel.

The front doors opened directly onto the pavement outside. I stood under the canvas canopy, wondering where I could go at this time of night.

A plum-coloured sky hung over the city like a heavy baize cloth. I could see no stars, whether because of smoke or cloud I couldn’t tell. I had hoped for a night breeze, but there was none. The stale air bore traces of diesel and a damp, greenish scent rising from the Danube, flowing past below the embankment opposite. Across the river, the lights of occasional cars showed, but this street was empty and silent. For no particular reason I set off to my left. I passed a tram stop, deserted; the trams would long ago have stopped for the night. I kept to the river bank for a couple of blocks, then turned into a broad side street. 

Dark trees in full leaf stood along this avenue, which was lined with solid three-storey apartment buildings in stone, marking the city’s prosperity of a hundred years ago. I could have been in Vienna’s eighth district, or in Agram, or Czernowitz; the architecture had a marked Habsburg uniformity. 

The buildings were almost all in darkness, but at occasional upper windows, light showed; contained, interior light, barely touching the nearest leaves of the dense trees. From the pavement I saw, in a top floor flat, a chandelier bearing five softly glowing lamps. One or two windows were open, to allow a breath of air into the rooms.

I stopped, and stood looking upwards. The rectangles of warm, yellowish light cheered me; they advertised life, the ongoing, irrepressible life of the city. Because of them, I felt less alone, awake at this ungodly hour. But I had no wish to see the people inside; it was the life of the apartments themselves, rather than their inhabitants, which interested me. They had a certainty which their occupants did not.

These buildings looked just as they had when they were erected, and would no doubt look the same in another hundred years. The flats I knew they would contain – high-ceilinged, with worn parquet floors, deep-set windows, patterned wallpaper and, no doubt, cracked marble stairs running between the floors – would be much alike along the whole avenue. The people occupying these flats, though, were merely tenants, or at best custodians, incidental to the life of the buildings, there only to open and close the doors, and turn the lights on and off. Only people, they were necessarily transient.

How easily residents could be removed from their homes, from a district, from a whole city, and replaced with others, I had seen for myself, in Austria, in Germany, and in the lands that used to be Hungary. A line is drawn on a map by four old men around a table somewhere, there is a new border, and, it follows immediately, a new name, a new language, old antagonisms, new laws, and lo! one family disappears, a hundred families disappear, overnight, leaving a void, creating a vacuum. And that vacuum draws other families to enter and take up residence, often without even changing the beds, the chairs, the mirrors hanging on the walls, or anything else too large to be carried away by those who departed. But the apartment, almost oblivious, continues to live, to breathe life in and out of its windows. It adjusts to the smells of different cooking, the sound of different steps moving through its rooms, the replacement of one kind of icon with another, impermanent trifles.

And these buildings, regardless of who inhabited them now or last year, were part of the fabric of the city, they were its furniture, they made up people’s experience of the city, locals and visitors alike. People strolled past them, along Franz-Josef-Strasse, or Andrassy utca, or strada Eminescu, whatever it was called at the time, and these stolid stone exteriors were the backdrop to their lives. In cities all across Europe, postcards captured a view of similar streets; this, they said, in small, slanting letters across the top of a hand-coloured picture, is Pressburg, or Pozsony, or Bratislava. But all the time the buildings, and the apartments inside them, remained the same. 

I wondered what these particular inhabitants were doing awake at two in the morning. Sitting up late over a drink, or a game of chess? Arguing about politics, or their parents-in-law? Maybe they’d been in bed, and, sated, got up for a cigarette and a cup of tea. And not everyone obeys the common clock; some prefer to be up late at night, some – like me, tonight – find their routine disrupted, and lose the regular rhythm of sleep and wakefulness that is as much a habit as smoking, or a stable marriage. 

Absorbed in looking up at these windows overhanging the silent, empty avenue, I had not considered that anyone else might be afoot at this hour. As always when one thinks oneself unobserved, I was startled to notice someone standing near me, an indistinct figure in the grainy darkness under a tree, just at the barely-lit midpoint between two streetlamps. A householder who, sleepless, had stepped outside for fresh air, or to take the dog out? Or someone else taking an interest in the lighted windows above? And if so, a merely personal interest, or an official one? The shape didn’t move, and the longer I stared, the less I was sure it was a man at all. Perhaps it was a cut-down tree. Or a fixture, an electrical junction box, something of that kind. No, it must be a man; and he could surely see me, standing in the middle of the footpath, while I couldn’t make him out at all.

Uncomfortable to remain there with someone watching me, I resumed my walk. But only a few paces along, I heard voices behind and above me, seeming to come from one of the open upstairs windows. Then there was a crash, startlingly loud, on the pavement, something metallic landing and breaking, a small piece rolling away. A shrill woman’s voice, speaking in German: ‘Damn your typewriter! Damn your pamphlets! You’ll get us arrested!’ A male voice remonstrated, but I couldn’t make out his words. A moment later the window was slammed shut. 

I would have turned back, out of curiosity, but for the man under the tree. It now seemed quite likely he was watching that particular apartment, and I had no wish to get involved with a jealous husband, or worse, the secret police. But what if it’s one end of the thread of a story for my paper? After all, they had spoken in German. I hesitated, standing in a pool of lamplight, looking back over my shoulder. Some dark shape now lay on the footpath. I couldn’t tell whether the watcher still stood there in the darkness.

The fellow upstairs would have to come down to retrieve his typewriter, if that’s what it was. Such an object was incriminating, it wasn’t like a plate, or a pair of shoes, or something else that might be thrown out of a window in the course of an ordinary domestic row. A typewriter spoke of an intention to write, and if there had been an argument about that, and talk of being arrested, quite possibly to write something it was unwise to write, at least here and now. 

The purple night sky was still dense, and the air still unmoving. I took off my hat and mopped my forehead. At that point I realised I would have to go back along this boulevard, past the window, and past, if he were still there, the observer under the tree. I wasn’t confident I could find my way back to my hotel by another route; I didn’t know the city, had no map, and wouldn’t find anyone to ask directions at this time of night. 

I took a deep breath, turned and walked back, trying to appear blameless, an ordinary man going for a stroll. I couldn’t see anyone. My footsteps rang loudly on the paving stones. The dark object on the ground was indeed a typewriter, a portable Olivetti, like mine. I paused to look at it. There was nothing suspicious in doing that, surely? Any normal person would at least glance at something lying in their path. But as I did, I heard someone clearing his throat, the man under the tree. He’d done it deliberately, to let me know he was there, and that it would be better not to linger. I didn’t; I walked on briskly, without looking around me.

Soon enough I was back at the river. I leaned on the embankment, looking down at the dark width of the Danube. I berated myself. You should have hung around, discreetly, out of sight, watched for what turned up, maybe a black car, maybe nothing, but whatever, you shouldn’t have left. You’re a journalist looking for a story, for God’s sake. But after watching the Danube rolling past calmly for a while longer, I decided that as a foreigner in this city, and a kind of foreigner tolerated but not necessarily welcome here these days, I was better off out of it.

I looked out over the ancient, regal river. What had she not seen! Whole cities built, laid waste, and built again, all along her course. Single apartments, and their inhabitants, were of little concern to her. 

I wondered what was happening back in the avenue. A small matter, surely, not warranting a great display of official strength. A knock on the door, a quiet but firm word, a hand on the elbow, downstairs to the car parked around the corner. A young man, in glasses and with his tie loosened. Not a strong face, but lips pressed together determinedly. Perhaps just to be arrested was actually his triumph. The woman, left behind, immediately thankful not to have been taken, but frightened for the young man; wanting to go with him, but in the end telling herself, ‘Perhaps I can do more to help if I’m not arrested too,’ that thought coming partly from reason, partly from fear. 

The wiser course is not to become involved, I’d said to myself, even though I knew that was precisely how these things are allowed to happen, whether it is one man or a whole line of people being led away. People don’t look, they wish they hadn’t seen it. ‘These things occur, I can’t change them. I have a wife and daughter to keep, I finally have a steady job, I don’t want to be seen to sympathise with anyone on the wrong side of power, whatever they have or haven’t done.’  Perfectly valid, entirely understandable; human nature, even if not at its most courageous. As for me, I was only a foreign journalist, not a crusader. Beyond finding a story, I had no concern with the details of life here. How they ran the country was their own business. 

It was after three when I got back to the hotel. The night porter still sat at the front desk, apparently smoking the same cigarette. I found the lift this time; the brass grille closed with a crash so loud that I winced.

Upstairs, I undressed and lay down again on the narrow bed. My mind was still turning over what I’d seen, and the room was still unpleasantly stuffy, but I went to sleep anyway, out of sheer tiredness. 

I woke later than I’d intended, but still in time for breakfast. Under the shower, I ridiculed my alarm of the night before. It was all perfectly innocent, at worst a jealous husband, but probably not even that, just a man standing there for his own reasons, and it so happened that two people were arguing upstairs on a hot night, and you embellished the whole thing, imagined a drama, I told myself, with yourself as an actor in it. You’ve been reading too many spy novels, that’s the truth. 

I went down to breakfast in the ground floor restaurant. The usual arrangement: neat rows of tables with starched tablecloths, mostly occupied by men sitting alone, a modest buffet set along one wall, a couple of bored, pale-faced waiters guarding the coffee pots. With eggs, rolls and coffee in front of me, I leafed through the local daily newspaper, Noviny, so fresh that the ink smudged slightly in my hands. 

The front page dealt with politics, and I skimmed over it. But on an inside page a short paragraph: Saboteurs arrested. In bland official prose, it reported that last night, due to the vigilance of the local authorities, a gang of saboteurs, thought to be in the pay of a large neighbouring state, had been broken up, and the ringleader arrested. I found it hard to imagine the quarrelling German-speaking couple last night as saboteurs, even though that word is given a very broad meaning nowadays, but no doubt the press was better informed than I. My initial instinct was right after all; I had missed a story. But perhaps in the circumstances it was better so.

That morning I interviewed various officials and ministers’ assistants, looking for ideas for my article. I learned about plans to expand the railway network eastwards into Silesia, about the standardisation of the brewing industry, about the new National Picture Gallery, which would emphasise local artists unjustly neglected under the Imperial government, but none of these struck me as interesting enough for a newspaper piece which was meant to be lively and engaging.

After lunch I walked back across the main square, paved with rounded cobblestones, the discernibly German town hall and the late Gothic St Barnabas’ Church facing each other across it. In the centre of the square, workmen had erected a new bronze statue on an old, weathered sandstone base. They were just dismantling the wooden scaffolding. I asked one, a red-faced man in a flat cap, the identity of the new inhabitant of the pedestal. He looked puzzled, then embarrassed. ‘Actually, I don’t know’, he confessed. ‘A king, maybe. But a famous man, a very famous man.’ I looked at the new marble tablet on the plinth, with its sharply-cut gold inscription: ‘Constantinus Slovacek, the father of independence,’ it read, with his dates.

My battered pre-war Baedeker told me that when this city was called Lindenburg, there stood in the main square a ‘very fine’ statue of Friedrich Wilhelm IV, sculpted by Rauch. So, yet again, seemingly permanent residents are dislodged and replaced. What they had done with Friedrich Wilhelm’s effigy I didn’t know, but I suspected they had not treated him too gently.

That, I decided, standing in the shade of an overhanging balcony, looking over the sunlit mediaeval square, would be the subject for my feuilleton; how new powers construct new histories to replace the old, taking statues as an example. That was the best summary I could give of the national mood here. If I were feeling provocative, I might point out that we had done the same, across half of Europe, in former times. 

And I might go on to write that, while these new histories might appear relatively harmless, no more than the assertion of a nascent nation’s pride and self-awareness, it is a pity that this replacement of history always has to be based upon the dislocation, and too often destruction, of human beings. I thought of Constantinople and Smyrna, of Nagyvárad and Klausenburg.  New history is erected over a substratum of the crushed gravestones of those who were part of the old, and if not always on their actual graves, on the graves of their societies, the fabric of their lives. Statues and street-names, superficial things, certainly, but also the extinguishment of their newspapers, schools, football clubs, cafes, the language they could speak freely in the street. A whole community suddenly unwelcome in their own home town, the place of their birth and their fathers’ birth. 

I went back to my hotel room and began work. The afternoon sun fell in thick bars across the wooden tabletop. It was still very hot, the window still wouldn’t open, and my shirt stuck to my back as I typed. At least they had put a fresh jug of cold water in the room, its glass sides already beaded with dew. 

Tomorrow I could take the morning train back to Salzburg, and deliver my piece to my editors. Just possibly, the weather might relent, and turn cooler overnight. 

Peter Newall has worked variously in a naval dockyard, as a lawyer and as a musician. He has lived in Australia, Japan, Germany, and now in Odesa, Ukraine, where he leads a local blues band. His work has been published in the UK, Europe, the Americas, India and Australia.