A TALE FROM THE VIENNA WOODS

In Germany, and Central Europe as a whole, you always know exactly and precisely where the countryside stops and the town begins.

Civilisation starts where the trams turn round.

Sometimes (north of Heidelberg, for instance, or south of Vienna) there are places where a special kind of tram carries on, to link the big town with the smaller one - a perilous undertaking, through dangerous country, past unknown villages and strange farms - but such exceptions only confirm the rule.

These metal circles are important and decisive places. They are so clearly the end of the line, whether they are outside the third and last gate into Vienna’s Central Cemetery, or on a windswept heath near Prague, at the site of the Battle of the White Mountain, where, in 1620, the Czech nation was crushed and almost three hundred years of Austrian oppression and dominance began. Bila Hora – that’s the name on the enamelled plate on the tram-stop, and when I went there once, I fantasised that the two armies might have made their way there like me by tram, one red and cream monster after another arriving, stopping, disgorging its passengers, and trundling off back down the hill, while the soldiers got themselves sorted out and lined up as two opposing sides.

If you go for a walk in the Vienna Woods, then you are always walking through them from one tram-end to another. Everybody does it, on Saturdays and Sundays, because you need to get out of Vienna – but not too far.

The Vienna Woods are ideal – they curl round the city’s western end like a luxuriant growth of hair – a bit like Struwwelpeter, in fact. And indeed, Vienna, when you look at it on a map, does seem rather like a brain. It appears relatively complicated at first glance, folded in on itself, with alleys and courtyards and dead-ends and unexpected diagonal links and curving streets that come out where you didn’t think they should – but then you begin to see how it’s structured, around old pathways and river-channels and traffic routes that have been adapted to new functions, and areas that formally looked identical can now be clearly seen as having different natures and purposes.

It’s like the brain, too, in that nothing ever lies dormant. In London, great sprawling areas are “earmarked for development” and lie empty and dead and decaying for years. Not so in Vienna. Every spot is used and re-used, even if it was the house that Beethoven died in, or the theatre where the The Magic Flute was first performed. There are none of those gaps that make a street look like a mouth full of rotting teeth. The only place I know where a building plot has been deliberately left vacant is down by the Danube Canal. There’s a rather small area of green, which is somehow clearly not intended to be a park, surrounded by tall buildings that look as though they’re trying to ignore this interruption in the city’s pattern and just get on with their lives, and an unobtrusive plaque tells you that the house which stood on this site, Morzin Square, was the headquarters of the Gestapo in Vienna, and that many more people entered it than ever left alive.

The people in Vienna are like neurons. Packed closely together, but not actually touching, they each live in their little securely locked apartment (my front door had five locks of widely differing ages, to two of which I was given keys) in a building which is usually also locked – and yet they form a kind of community, linked by intangible communication (electrical? chemical?) routed through those numerous nodes of intersection, the theatres, the opera houses, the café, the Gasthaus, the Weinhaus, the Heuriger, all those places where the Viennese go to be together and yet apart, alone and yet not lonely.

You can probably tell why I love the city: because it suits my character so well. And when in Vienna...

You can leave it to chance. Whichever tram comes first. They all link up with each other somehow. What you want to do is go as far as you can to the west. Right to the end of the line. There, you will get out and walk up the hill into the woods. And at some point you will decide between left and right (always an important decision). And when you become weary, or the weather grows inclement, or the light starts to fail, you will repeat your choice and go back downhill. It doesn’t really matter where. In the woods, as in the city, there are so many different paths that it’s hard to call one right and another wrong.

Excitingly uncertain of your whereabouts, you emerge from the mysterious forest (predominantly a beech wood) and try to get your bearings. Then, at the bottom of the hill, still half-hidden by occasional trees, you sense movement, and hear the protest of metal wheels that are being asked to go round in slightly too tight a circle, so that their flanges squeal at an angle to the rails. It's a penetrating sound - it certainly always penetrated the double or triple glazing of the Austrian National Library reading room in the days when I studied there. It was the oldest kind of tram that was particularly affected and they only ran on one of the four routes round the Ringstrasse, so I could get a bit of sleep and was only roused every fifteen minutes or so.

Not, you must understand, that what I studied was boring. On the contrary. Sleep was induced by the cosiness and comfort and above all warmth of the library, which saved me a fortune in heating bills. I was looking at left-wing political groups in the 1930s, and, strange to say, there were a lot of photographs. Photographs of them having fun. Not waving banners. Not marching. Not making speeches or giving clenched fist salutes. None of that nonsense, which is almost interchangeable between the parties and therefore deeply disturbing. No – they were sitting around among clumps of trees, chatting and having a picnic. It was quite disarming – as though you’d asked someone why he’d become a Marxist and the answer was because the Marxists had better fillings in their sandwiches. Of course, their naiveté proved to be their undoing, in some very terrible ways, but they looked such nice people that you’d almost have trusted them as politicians. Though perhaps they hadn’t been entirely naive: in some respects, the woods were a good place to meet, to avoid suspicion, since everybody went there...

Clearly, just looking at fading photographs of trees in the Vienna Woods was no substitute for the real thing, so one fine day in late March 1988 I went for a walk in the way I’ve described.

What I haven’t yet described, however, is one of those triumphs of Austrian culture before which Mozart, Schubert, Bruckner and Mahler pale into insignificance. After all, not everybody likes their music. But I’ve never found anyone averse to coffee and cake. And it is Austrian genius which unerringly plants a more than acceptable source of comestibles in close proximity to any natural feature worth visiting. The Americans might manage a van serving burgers and coke, the Brits could conceivably run to a vendomat that was permanently out of order and filled with foreign coins – but the Austrians consistently provide the kind of place that would be an attraction all on its own without the scenery.

In the present instance, it appeared all of a sudden out of the trackless forest right at the beginning of my walk – a gingerbread house a bit too early on its cue. But you don’t look a gift-horse in the mouth, so I went in.

Vienna lulls my hyper-critical faculties – but it seemed very old-fashioned and a bit dowdy. As though nothing much had changed in the previous fifty years. But perhaps the old posters were simply reproductions... I huddled in a corner and had an achtel. Outside in the sun, on a kind of meadow, a group of young people were laughing, playing some sort of impromptu ball-game. There was something terribly familiar about some of them, I thought – maybe I’d seen them in the University Library, where I went occasionally to consult theses – or in the restaurant at the National Library, which did the best baked carp in the world on Fridays - The man in the corner opposite kept a constant eye on me, I noticed. Short hair, sharp face, trench-coat – no concession to the unexpected warmth and sunshine – and under the coat, occasionally visible, some sombre black clothing. Been to a funeral, perhaps, I thought, as I had the second achtel. One-third of a normal bottle in all. White. Pleasant, if undistinguished. Probably around eleven percent by volume. You’ll want to know. I called twice for my bill, but no one came, so I left the money on the table without a tip.

As I walked on through the woods, where a gentle breeze was rustling the burnished copper of the fallen leaves that lay in great drifts, I was aware of people moving through the trees around me. Sometimes I thought I heard them laughing. Sometimes I glimpsed the flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye. Then, sooner than I had intended, the path began to take me downhill, and I caught sight of an old-fashioned tram stop, Jugendstil curlicues in faded green paint, and a tram arriving at it, quite silently.

It was the oldest kind I had ever seen. They had still used them at peak periods in 1970, when I first came to Vienna, and you could hire them for special trips, too – open platforms back and front, with sliding doors to the central enclosed section. I couldn’t quite see where they came from, but a crowd of young people, perhaps the ones I had seen before on the meadow, emerged from the woods and boarded the tram. It sat in the shade, and they had dressed to enjoy the sun, so they all went inside. Then, a man in a trench coat – I couldn’t see his face – appeared from the bushes, climbed aboard and signalled to the conductor. Simultaneously, the pair of them locked the doors at both ends of the central section with those keys you use on electric meter cupboards and without a sound the tram moved off.

I scampered down the hill and stared after it. It hadn’t, I now realised, shown a number. There was no timetable to be seen on the dilapidated tram-stop, and I somehow had no confidence in its being as frequent a service as was normal for Viennese Transport Undertakings, so I began to walk rapidly down the hill, following the tram-lines, thinking, in the first instance, to get to the next stop, and there maybe to find a telephone, because I wasn’t at all happy about what I’d seen, even if I didn’t quite understand it. The next tram-stop wouldn’t be far away, I knew that – after all, the Karl-Marx-Hof, that classic example of 1930s Viennese social housing, boasts four of them along the length of its façade.

But when I got to the next bend, I gave up the pursuit as pointless. The shiny square cobbles I had been walking on up till now disappeared under a smooth coat of featureless asphalt, and the tram-lines simply came to a stop.

I looked up at the sky. It was still blue. I could see the sunlight from the west touching the topmost branches of the silver-grey beeches at the top of the slope. Inside, I suddenly felt very cold, not just because I was in the shade. The street had acquired grey, anonymous buildings, with groups of people standing outside them, laughing and talking together in a language that I didn’t recognise. Even less point, then, I thought, in trying to ask them questions that they certainly wouldn’t be able to answer.

I walked back up the hill and into the woods as fast as I could, puffing and panting. The exertion took my mind off things. Coming from this direction, I had no trouble in finding direction markers that I had failed to notice earlier. That’s usually the way it is – you have to be going the right way first, before you see the signs that tell you so.

I hurried along, because I didn’t want the darkness to overtake me. I didn’t think I would be out of the wood until I was out of the wood. At last, though, I caught a glimpse through the trees of a distant red and white tram turning, and heard the squeal of its wheels on the track. The sight and sound gave me the reassurance to look around at last. I was on the edge of a small meadow – but where, I wondered, was the little Gasthaus? Maybe all the meadows looked the same, I thought – and as I started walking again, I tripped over something in the drifts of leaves.

It was a post with an unobtrusive plaque on it, which I had to kneel down to read properly. “On this spot,” it said, “stood the restaurant where young socialists used to meet to organise social and political resistance to the activities of Fascism in Austria. To them and their sacrifice, the Socialist Party of Austria places this small memorial.”

As I stood up and dusted myself down, a gust of wind caught the leaves and covered the memorial again. I didn’t try to brush them away. Instead, I carried on down the hill, to where the trams turn round, and civilisation starts.

Started 21.ii.2002, finished 16.30, 22.ii.2002