C Cities of Wonder Wind #3

Vienna: A World Apart #3
Wind from the South

Imagine a book, an encyclopaedia, that held the information you needed
to conduct all aspects of your life. A book that could instruct you on
your health, your business, the food you ate and even your future ...
History tends to repeat itself. Humans don't seem to learn.Through my
escape, I was running away from it all.

I spent fourteen hours on the polished wooden floors of the unfamiliar
Austrian police station. All those hours I felt cut off from the world,
lying in a darkened room in a cocoon of loneliness. I could hear the
border guards and policemen and knew that I faced more uncertainty
ahead.

At one stage I looked into the mirror and saw my eyes were bloodshot,
my head heavy, my face unshaven. My darkened eyes felt like tinted
windows - I could see out, but no one could see in. I turned quickly
from the pull of my tinted eyes in the mirror. I did not pause to look
inside them. Instead, I swallowed the strange sensation of seeing a man
in tinted glasses poking a wounded dog with a stick. Bessie was
engrossed in licking the salt of my right hand, the taste of my tears,
maybe in the hope that I was going to take her out for a walk. It was
summer and that was what we always did in summer. Bessie received no
solace. My brain was still fogged with chilling images of me wrestling
with masses of water.

'Oh, God did I do that?'My eyes seemed stone cold. They had aged beyond
their years.

When at last I brought myself to look out the window, I was at first
surprised. The village resembled an elegant album of nostalgic
snapshots, Austrian workers in comfortable shoes with bags in their
hands, a cluster of pastel stately homes on the hill. Beyond them lay
the motionless Czechoslovak border. In the distance was the mysterious
Devin Castle. It was there, at the confluence of the Danube and Morava
rivers, where Slovak and Austrian citizens in 1948, separated by the
infamous Iron Curtain, gathered to wave to family and friends on
opposite sides of the border.

The sun mirrored the freshly starched and pressed pastures in the
window panes. The grass fields rose behind the Morava River. I
whispered good-bye in my heart. Although there were some gaps in my
memory, I did not require a map to tell me where the splendid Austrian
countryside ended and the Slovakian concrete slum began. I focused my
gaze on the concrete barbed wire fences - a line that was drawn on our
map in Kezmarok several hours ago.

At the height of the Cold War, the world nervously watched as
superpowers tested their chemical weapons. This was a time when most of
my country men were being 'brainwashed,' many subject to torture, rape,
manipulation, suppression. The treatment of conscientious objectors,
democratic sympathisers, and other 'undesirables', was nothing less
than legalised genocide. Combined with the full force of controlled
print, radio and television, it produced a subservient nation, which
was the intention of the communists.

I wondered why I was in an Austrian police station: the horror seared
part of my memory. The full force of my fears came to fruition in that
police station, whirling inside the chaos of my head. I scanned the
faces of those Austrian police but was unable to tell whether they
sympathised with my plight or not. Even if I had understood German
perfectly and even if the translator had spoken Czech fluently, I could
not possibly have relayed what I had been through in the last
twenty-four hours, the culmination of many hours and years of my life
as a Slovak.

After I had signed 14 pages of documents, they led me out of the police
station through a curious crowd to an unmarked four-wheel vehicle. Its
driver gazed down at Bessie, and congratulated her for being the first
and only dog ever granted political asylum. Within seconds, the car was
speeding across the Austrian landscape, past ridges of black soil and
sea-like waves of trees as we made the journey to Vienna. The
inevitable suspicion of being rootless was in daylight made more
obvious. I was certainly not in Vrbov anymore.

I was passing through new towns, heading for a big new city. I felt
that Austria was much more like something from the next century than
the present day. Anything I used to seeing before was conspicuous by
its absence. I was seized by an urge to compare everything with my
familiar world: the seats in the car were as soft as Tato's leather
chair; the colour of the interior was the colour of Babka's cat, light
grey; the voice of the driver sounded like someone who needed to clear
the phlegm, a routine practice in Slovakia; the policemen 'Hans' looked
like my Vrbov neighbour, Ferko Hrebenar; the road was the width of
Vrbov's cinema screen.

I can remember being amazed by many things the first time I saw them:
the Russian tanks, a naturist beach in East Germany, a disco in Krakow.
But none made such an impact on me as Austrian highways. The first
thing I noticed was the make of the cars - Mercedes, WVs, BMWs, which
glided smoothly along well paved roads. Then the clean streets, neat
gardens as well as the store windows with assortments of coffees and
cakes. I saw mothers smiling at their toddlers.

And then we arrived in Vienna, a city that had long been held dear in
my heart for its supposed beauty, I imagined I would arrive in
different circumstances; but then youth tends to be romantic in so many
ways. Despite my fatigue, I could still sense the magic of Vienna,
brimming with promises. I stared at some of the writing on the huge
advertising boards. I hoped that they would resolve into something I
could understand. The capitalist guerrilla attacks of colour and
effusion of energy, that weird screech echoing from a passing Coca Cola
poster. As I promiscuously scan other posters of suggestive poses on
the groundfloors of buildings, I am excited by strangely shaped breasts
promoting handbags. Call me impressionable, but I thought nothing could
beat those the magnificent colours on the posters.

I saw one beautiful face on a poster, and then another and another, and
I tried to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not
find any words that seemed to me worthy or as lovely as that sudden
emotion. In 1980 some parts of the globe where meant to be
unmentionable. We lived in a flat world of Communism. Despite my
misery, I could hardly believe that I was here. Only I had no idea yet
whether Vienna promised acceptance or rejection.
Dreams of Vienna are an old Slovak tradition. Slovaks, locked up for
decades behind iron bars, in a country of suspicious glances, have
developed images of Vienna as the golden symbol of freedom, standing on
the border gates. I had read about Vienna since I was a young child,
and finally I was emerging from masses of incomprehensible stories and
the magic power of a Slovak imagination to the actuality. Only Slovaks
like Andy Warhol could make a can of soup or a toilet seat the subject
of high art.

The difference between Czechoslovakia's token economy and Austria's
market economy was startling. I was struck by the change. How was it
possible that Vienna, a city which at the beginning of this bloody
century had more Czechs and Slovaks than any city except Prague and
Bratislava, was surrounded by so much beauty? By such spine-warming
aura? The contrast with the Czechoslovakian landscape was too
stark.

I remember a strange tension as we headed for the city centre. I passed
the endless circles of friends, dressed in so many different styles and
colours, relaxing their souls and sunning their smiling faces outside
dozens of solid stone cafes. Every cafe made a particular artistic
statement. There were no grim-faced party apparatchiks, no soldiers on
point duty with rifles at the ready, no regulated state businesses. So
many newspapers. Banks so huge. The scenery along the avenues was
majestic, particularly the sections above the cafes, where the charm of
the past was projected by the massive balconies of the Ringstrasse.
Ever since I was a kid I had always wanted to have a coffee in Vienna
in this famous semicircle of avenues. In me Ringstrasse had a
fascinated audience. I kept thinking, Rambacher, my amusing neighbour,
was right Vienna was richer than any totalitarian God.Here I was, the
first Imrich since 1948 to set his eyes on the Ringstrasse, the largest
open air cafe in the world. I was getting used to something that my
generation had never experienced: freedom. The psychology of freedom
and its acquisition is a fascinating subject. No phrase can convey the
idea of freedom as vividly as the size of my eyes as I watched Vienna
walking past.

Men moving with Vienna speed; it was only a matter of time before their
shirts came out. A woman's skirt caught in the summer wind revealed
every paradox: the pleats stretched, flew, shrank and raced to
mysterious angle. At the traffic lights, her determined face pretended
that her cream knickers had never seen the light of the day. Never mind
that my poetic heart glued the connection between shirts and knickers
and the wind in the trees.

*The Literary Athorsden provides in few hours what it took years to
experience
Jozef Imrich: the Richest Author of All

Can you ever think too much about freedom?
Not in my book