Walking Backwards. Mark FrutkinЧитать онлайн книгу.
tumbling down the train car’s three metal steps into the almost empty station. Heading out into the Austrian night, I circled the small station several times and realized the city was nowhere nearby. Every other station I had visited in Europe had been at the centre of a city. This one was out in the suburbs. I could see no city lights in the distance, no tall buildings, and had no idea in which direction to walk to find the city centre. There were no taxis about (which I could not have afforded, anyway).
A few minutes later, my bumbling request in English at the wicket inside the station for directions to the heart of the city was answered in German, leaving me as lost as ever, since the only German I knew was, “Wo ist der hauptbahnhof?” (Where is the main train station?), a phrase that was distinctly useless to me in Salzburg since I was already apparently standing in the main train station and the main train station in this town was obviously nowhere. Eventually the ticket-seller convinced a helpful and kindly old man sitting in the station (his evening’s entertainment, I supposed) to walk me the considerable distance to an economy hotel in the heart of the city.
Being a poor student, I couldn’t even tip him when we arrived at the hotel, but he didn’t seem to expect anything and, in any case, one look at the old hotel told both of us that I had other problems awaiting me. My generous Virgil left and I entered the tall, narrow house where I would spend my one night in Salzburg.
When the stout landlady showed me to my room, she didn’t step into it. She couldn’t. There was a good reason why this was the cheapest room in Salzburg, the cheapest in Austria, perhaps the cheapest in Western Europe. She moved aside so I could see where I would sleep. I would have to roll into the bed and pull the door shut while ensconced. The bed was barely wide enough for one very small, skinny man (luckily, I was both small and skinny at the time). I would have to be careful lifting my head from the pillow. Too quickly and I would bang it on the porcelain sink, which was roughly the size of a man’s hat. The room must have been used for storing linen at one time, or perhaps brooms. What the room lacked in breadth, however, it made up for in height, the small space of the room stretching a good twenty-five feet up to a skylight that consisted of numerous panes of glass. Lots of vertical space. Useless vertical space.
Luckily, the bed came with a thick eiderdown blanket, since I was surprised to find, upon awaking in the middle of the night, that snow was falling on me. Apparently several of those panes of glass high above were missing. I tucked my head under the eiderdown and went back to sleep.
The next day — my twentieth birthday — I inspected the castle, thought darkly and momentarily of Kafka, and left Salzburg, walking out to the highway that led to Vienna, wearing my dark blue navy pea jacket and carrying my backpack. The air was thick and sticky with snow as I stood by the side of the highway, my thumb out for hours, looking like a travelling snowman or a ghost out of the Arctic. Finally, at last, a long, sleek, black car slid to a stop and I jumped into the empty back seat.
A Canadian! A low-level diplomat. And his blonde Austrian wife. He was friendly. She was icy. It was apparent she had had no interest in picking me up. All the way to Vienna, the Canadian and I talked with abandon (“My mother’s from Toronto,” I said. “No shit,” he commented.), ignoring the simmering Valkyrie in front.
“Where are you staying?” he asked.
“I have no idea. I have to find someplace cheap.”
When we rolled into Vienna, he told me he knew of a good, economical place to eat — a student restaurant. He took me there, where he and I kept gabbing, drinking, and feasting. His wife ate in silence, refusing to look at either of us. After dinner, which he paid for, he offered to help me find a place to stay. Her jaw dropped.
He drove me from hotel to hotel and negotiated in German with the hotel-keepers on my behalf. All of the hotels were full. Something about the Christmas holidays. He insisted on continuing to help me find a cheap place. His wife was seething. More hotels and more hotels. He drove from one end of the city to the other. Finally, hours later, I found a room at a huge old establishment in the heart of the city. We parted and I thanked the good Canadian. As he and I exchanged farewells on the sidewalk, his wife didn’t even get out of the car.
That night I looked out from my room over a city of roofs softened with snow. Storybook Vienna. The radiator boomed and raised the temperature to a sauna-like level. I went to bed, slept, and awoke in the morning with a fever and spent the next day under the covers, only going out to grab a bowl of soup and a cup of tea at a local café.
Still feverish, I had walked down the street and entered the first place I could find — a gorgeous, turn-of-the-century Viennese café, its decor featuring high vertical panels of dark wood and mirror. I stood in the doorway and noted that each of the patrons in the room — they looked like students — was reading a newspaper. As I entered, they all turned to look at me, every single one wearing the circular granny glasses popular at the time. It was like staring at the faces of forty John Lennons.
On the third morning, January 5, I dragged myself out and went to meet the two Michaels, as we had planned, on the steps of the cathedral, Saint Stephanskirche, at 11:00 a.m.
The next day, in the early evening, we boarded a train bound for Istanbul. Near midnight it stopped at the border between Austria and what was then Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav border guards entered the cramped compartment, checked passports, and shrugged out, leaving behind a memory of grim faces, peaked caps, and ugly uniforms. We sat on our hard wooden seats, smoothed over the years by thousands of travellers like ourselves, and waited. We noticed it was growing colder inside the compartment. We speculated that they must have turned off the heat when we crossed the border, since there had been heat when the train was in Austria and now there was none.
After about an hour’s delay at the border, the train started moving. Five seconds later it stopped with a distant squeal and crash. After pausing for several minutes, it started up again, but going the other way. Again, after five seconds, it stopped with a similar squeal and crash. Several more minutes and it started up again, only to halt after the requisite five seconds. Back and forth the train went for most of the night. Each time it started up, our hopes leapt — Now we are going! We’re on our way to Istanbul! — only to come crashing down in disappointment mere seconds later.
Meanwhile, the cold was penetrating our compartment. We dug into our packs and put on extra shirts. We donned sweaters. We put our coats on. We could see our breath. Peering out into the darkness at the invisible borderlands, we glimpsed nothing but our own worried reflections gazing back.
“They must be changing cars,” said Lebanese Michael, his bulging black eyes looking blurred and tired behind his thick glasses.
Irish Michael ran his hands through his prematurely thinning hair. “We should have brought something to drink. Some whisky or something. Even wine.”
We nodded and waited, slept fitfully sitting up, and eventually the train started moving for good in the right direction. This time it didn’t stop until it reached Belgrade in the morning.
We had decided to stay over in Belgrade and catch the next train coming through to Istanbul twenty-four hours later. Belgrade in January was a revelation, a revelation of a dark, bleary, smudged sort. We exited the train into a decrepit downtown train station where a platoon of ancient women in babushkas swished brown sludge around the floor in a vain attempt to sweep clean the mud, snow, and sleet that was coming in on the badly made, worn-out boots of the workers.
Through a travel office in the station, we found a place to stay. Like something out of an animated cartoon or a modern version of an Eastern European folk tale, the old lady’s little house in which we were sequestered was the only residential structure in the sector and was surrounded by faceless grey towers where happiness could only be a faint memory and the future was already perfectly planned at least five years ahead. The old lady herself proved to be a spark of warmth in a cold land. She introduced us to her son, a medical doctor visiting for the holidays from Switzerland. Wanting nothing to do with us wild-looking and possibly dangerous students from America, he kept his distance. Our landlady pointed us in the direction of a café district to take our evening meal where we dined on ground horsemeat. If it wasn’t horsemeat (and I am no expert),