Travel_Diary01

Sometimes beauty hurts and ugliness excites.

Dear reader, this is another piece from my unpublished archives – short travel sketches that I wrote in the summer and winter of 2021 while travelling by train around Europe. The style – compromising, cathartic, modulating light and dark – was inspired by the Swedish author Stig Larsson (not the deceased crime writer) whose book Autisterna I’ve been slowly translating into English (dm if you’re interested to read).

Alexander x

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Brussels

A woman was urinating outside Brussels-Midi station on an overcast day, slow and corpulent with plastic bags in both hands, another Manneken Pis, neither boyish nor virile, pissing to relieve herself. The station is in the south of Brussels, as indicated by its Dutch name, Brussel Zuid, but it used to serve the South of France, Le Midi, as the French speakers still call it. This divide is marked by a slash ‘/’ along which the pee of the city’s inhabitants can trickle down into the gutter. I made no remark about the woman to my travelling companion and it started to rain. We walked along uneven pavements, past construction sites with machines sitting idly, to the Mont des Arts, down to the Cathedral of St Michael and St Gudula, reaching at last the Grande Place, ‘the most beautiful square in Europe’, its gilded guilds idle, outpaced by trade and invention. The baroque balcony of the Haberdasher’s Building is supported by Telamons, bent to support a platform from which they cannot be seen, distinguishing the blind splendour within and the painful labour outside. The square offers this truth in its western corner. At the Musées des Beaux-Arts more suffering and leisurely turning away from disaster, the dirty Dutch winter, Mary and Joseph no bigger than the people gathered round the scribe giving their details for the census. ‘Isn’t the same soiled atmosphere present in the films of Chantal Akerman?’ I said to my companion. Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, the address sealed her fate: Brussels is no promised land but a town of sluggish trains, wet weather and bureaucracy.

Rhine-Ruhr

White grass, crusted stalks, chilled feelers of black earth that lay wounded in mounds at the outskirts of Dortmund. Dark trees sketch themselves black against a dirty night that brightens the hour. In their midst, a schloss, a willow. An agglomeration of devastation.

Changing trains in Cologne.

Hamburg

It was the day after the winter solstice, the moon hung waning gibbous, it seemed like night, my hands were stiff from the cold, my face numbed, snot flowed down my philtrum, and I walked down Spitalerstrasse, the same street, the same shops, H&M, Nike, Deichmann, a department store with a local name – Karstadt – and the same goods, Samsonite, L’Oreal Paris, Yankee Candle. The Elbphilharmonie’s Kulturkafé was a temple housing Starbucks, the American coffee chain. Minus five degrees, frost and homeless men on the pavement sleeping. The Rathaus provided a picturesque backdrop to an upmarket Weihnachtsmarkt with tastefully uniform dark green stalls and a luxuriously illuminated iron gazebo gracing the entrance. Lights left on inside revealed stuccoed ceilings with paintings in a rococo style. A civic building in the most frivolous style, betraying its spirit with a piano nobile. What do I know of the blighted history of this town? Fires, floods, firebombings have left precious little that is old enough to do justice to the official name: Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg. I continued by the Handelskammer, which is attached to the Rathaus, politics and commerce being very close here, down past the old town hall and the stock exchange, guided by a gothic looking steeple that towered darkly against the gloomy sky. To my dismay, it was nothing but a steeple, a ruin turned memorial for Germany’s crimes, those responsible for its destruction left curiously unnamed on the plaque attached to what remained of the transept. The medieval church had burnt down in the great Hamburg fire, and it’s imposing neo-Gothic replacement had been bombed by the Allies. The ruin now borders a busy thoroughfare. I crossed the wide street, following a nervous looking woman who entered one of the many UNESCO certified office buildings. A young black woman was wandering around above with a dust wand, dusting white tables with black computer screens. I continued down to the canal along Bei dem Neuen Krahn, a name that betrays what kind of tall structure is truly venerated in this town. I crossed one of the metal bridges to the Speicherstadt, whose warehouses, now prime office real estate or English language tourist attractions, lay in darkness. I passed two men, several minutes apart, on the wooden deck that ran elevated alongside the warehouses. I left footprints in the frost, I alone it seemed had passed on this side of the deck. I was seeking a view of the Elbe. The gigantic Elbephilharmonie emerged in view, a ‘culture wash’ of what is essentially a conference and hotel complex with a concert hall below it. Elevation used to have a meaning, being up high meant being the most important, and it still does in our allegedly secular and supposedly democratic societies. The hotel sits atop the concert hall, just like the London eye towers over the Palace of Westminster: Mammon trumps it all. I could now smell the scent of oil, walking down a quay, a magnificent view of the harbour, it’s great silver cisterns, the tall chimneys spewing huge towering clouds. On the other side of the Elbe rose a city of which the one I was in was merely a shadow, a back office. The real city stretched out in front of me, an immense machine, never sleeping, that roared and rumbled while the other side slept its stupid sleep.

Vienna

I crept up on Vienna under the cover of night. The NightJet train from Brussels takes one to the new glassy Hauptbahnhof by the Belvedere on the edge of town. Vienna has the largest collection of Bruegels in the world, yet its obsessive orderliness, which is not always coupled with a talent for ordering, bears little resemblance to the Flemish scenes of crowded folly and violence. A man cleans the joints between the flagstones outside a café using a high-pressure washer. It is suddenly twenty-seven degrees in March. The sun is warm but the wind is cold. The young people at the salad bar are like young people everywhere: pouting, excited by the same trivialities, wistful about the same clichés. Their worth is in their image, not their character. They do not attempt to impress anyone around them because they cannot fathom attention and eros, only ‘likes’ and porn. Do I sound disgruntled? I might as well be air to the waitress since I feature in no online fantasy. She needs someone less peculiar. Grüß Gott! What is incongruous here is not just the mix of the north and the south, the hard, nineteenth-century architecture, the predominance of machines over humans in public, a clockwork rhythm, and then vineyards on the northern hill, a warm Italian light that falls on cream-coloured facades, an Ottoman breeze, but also the Viennese, who look either like generic social democrats two generations removed from farming or like Austro-Hungarians, bearded coachmen drinking Kapuziner in the cold or latter-day Habsburgians on their way to the Staatsoper. The question ‘Könnte Sie bitte Englisch Sprechen?’ may still be met with a curt ‘Nein!’. There was once a civilisation here and it continues to exist in a chastised form, a picturesque ruin.

Warsaw

The drive to my great-aunt took more than an hour. The ground was brown dust. Disorienting swelter that made your flesh feel like it was outside and the cold world was within, pressing outward. Humble communist blocs outside the city-limits. The starter was a hot soup, the main was chicken cutlets, the pudding was a cheesecake served with hot black tea in glasses, which managed to cool me down by warming me up. My great-aunt had spent many years working for a wealthy woman in Vienna but on a recent visit complained of all the veiled muslim women in the parks. The tea glasses were Turkish. She brought out the halva. The conquest had already happened. How did this elderly woman get into Warsaw from this little satellite? There was a private bus, an old Hungarian Icarus that drove recklessly fast along the uneven roads. She must have travelled on that bus last year when we met her in the Royal Baths. On a sunny day, a middle-aged Thai man approached me with a request to take a picture of him on the steps near the Old Orangery. He draped himself over the balustrade while I shot with his iPad. A real ciota, the Polish equivalent of ‘faggot’, which is a back-formation from the word for aunt, ‘ciotka’. My mother had no sisters of her own, and I no aunts, whether maternal or paternal, yet aunts haunted me in this town, which laments not being Vienna or Paris, as if it could, being where it is, without a Panthéon, each street wide as the Ringstraße. I sit in a tram going into Śródmieście, passing by taller and taller towers. Nothing gives a city more confidence than skyscrapers. Hamburg did not, like Warsaw, rebuild its Altstadt when it was razed, and what is left of Alt-Berlin? The real question that should be asked is what was communism other than something the Poles didn’t want and repeatedly try to purge?

Stockholm

I checked out from my hotel at twelve and went to the library where I had planned to read until the evening. I was immediately turned off when inside the large rotunda, filled as it was by tourists and wastrels there to take pictures or to browse the web. No one seemed interested in the books. I got a little, how should I put it, excited by the disgusting man sitting across from me with a plastic bag and a carton of joghurt on the table, gulping the dairy and smacking his lips. I felt the same excitement a while later when, while outside to take a call, I sat on something resembling a recently chewed gum by accident. Aversion can pass over into pleasure if one doesn’t let oneself be repulsed by the foul. The call put me ill at ease and a return to the miserable Facksal 1 was out of the question. I went up to the Observatory Grove instead, passing the shrub where I had peed early the same morning on my way home from a dinner on Karlavägen, and laid down on the sun-drenched grass. It was relaxing to be déclassé, to be rid of the nagging duty toward literature, to not feel inferior to the tall, golden men of Stockholm, to attend to the infinity of the present, the blue dome above, the western wind besides. But grass affords only momentary hospitality, and I soon felt compelled to go. I walked across the Vasa Bridge, past the Knights’ House, over the Knight’s Bridge to the island, then further on the Central Bridge to Södermalm, where I climbed to Monteliusvägen. In Ivar Lo’s Park I looked over the city on the other side of Lake Mälaren. The sun gilded the city hall and the water fragmented the light into little sharp bits. It was so beautiful that it hurt; it was impossible to look and not feel pain. I thought it best to return to ugliness, so I went my way, seeking the underground station at Slussen, but finding myself in the yard of St Mary Magdalene church – white, with its steeple slightly askew. It appeared welcoming and I entered. There were people in the pews: an organ recital was underway. The whitewashed interior with its baroque altarpiece drove me with its radiating purity into soothing tears.