The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold Page 22

  These were days of damp feet and cuckoo-clock chalets, of early nights spent festering dankly in bed with a belly full of stodge and ale, rain clattering the black windows. I squelched uphill through the buttercupped mountain meadows with such painful lethargy that more than once I’d stop at the top and find a spider assembling a dewy web across the front carrier bracket. Then a lunatic plunge between dark walls of spruce and pine beside a frothy Alpine torrent, shotblasted by stinging pellets of rain before rolling to a halt at the valley bottom, and draining a Magic Man in a bus shelter. A night on the Czech side brought me a pound-a-pint dinner of goulash and dumplings, and the sort of hotel where they hand you a TV remote sheathed in sticky cling film along with your room key. After turning in I’d watch Commie-era native films, heavy on slapstick and sideburns, and fiddle with the radiators. Uselessly: my clothes and possessions stayed wet for a week. In Germany everything was thrice the price but twice as nice, and generally twelve times weirder. I spent my last night there in the honeymoon suite of a ‘wellness und bier’ hotel, sleeping in the left ventricle of a heart-shaped barrel.

  Tim Moore

  @mrtimmoore

  I’m now in the honeymoon suite at a beer hotel.

  Brinelling – now there’s a verb to conjure with. It has a faintly shameful ring to it, perhaps an activity you might see trouserless figurines practising in the corner of a German garden (no matter how dearly we all wish I’d been joking about the self-pleasuring gnomes, I’m afraid I wasn’t). In fact, Brinelling refers to the permanent indentation of a hard surface, named after the Swedish engineer who devised the relevant assessment test, by riding a sub-standard bicycle for several thousand kilometres without adequate maintenance.

  I had been inadvertently dabbling with this phenomenon for some days, mystified by the MIFA’s slight but ever more obvious reluctance to turn corners. On my approach to the wellness and beer hotel, navigation became aptly if alarmingly wayward: the handlebars developed a powerful urge to centre themselves on some invisible tramline, and I was soon fighting my auto-piloting bike round the bends, tackling each in a series of very short straight lines, like the perimeter of a dodecagon.

  Curled up in my love-barrel, I Googled away into the small hours for a diagnosis. A consensus emerged just after I tore open the pillow chocolate for a midnight snack, to find a honeymoon condom sliding horridly into my hands. The ball bearings in that ever bothersome headset, it appeared, had ejected all their grease; heated by friction to the point of malleable incandescence in the rattling descents, they had eroded each other into dimpled, interlocking semi-spheres.

  ‘We have a very great bicycle man in Neureichenau,’ said the desk manager when I checked out and explained my predicament as best I could. He was a slightly over-familiar chap with the booming, wide-eyed manner of a children’s TV presenter and a predilection, which I now endured once more, for snatching guests’ reading glasses off their heads and giving them a wipe down with a cloth drawn from his top pocket. ‘He works at the garage for Honda cars, but he will have the instrument to correct your little balls.’

  If he did he was playing with it at home; it was Saturday and I found the garage dark and shuttered. Instead, trying to bully the bearings free by weaving about the road like an F1 driver warming his tyres on a parade lap, I pressed on up the moist green hills and almost at once found myself in Austria. Ten countries down, nine to go.

  I’d imagined rural Austria would be trim and prosperous Germany turned up to eleven, but in fact it was a cheerfully unapologetic shambles. The farms smelled of crap rather than sweet, fresh hay and many of the cars were in a state of red-neck dilapidation. It’s fair to say that the people of Austria haven’t had a great press in recent years, what with that ex-Wehrmacht president of theirs and the whole Josef Fritzl incest-cellar business, but they did me proud from the off. Just outside the first town I passed through, I spotted two young men fixing a moped in a driveway; I pulled over, jiggled my self-centring handlebars at them and within moments one was going at the MIFA with a vast adjustable wrench.

  ‘You drive this to Turkey?’ chortled his friend when I detailed my mission, the italics stridently audible. ‘How many years you are taking?!’ Admittedly their remedial efforts did no more than tone down the symptoms: we agreed that my little balls needed replacement, but even then I sensed this would never happen, and that Brinelling would hereon join taurine abuse and public urination as one of the immovable cornerstones of my life on the road. Nonetheless, on another damp day in the big hills these jolly fellows were a cheering ray of sunshine, seeing me off with a tribute that put the wind in my wheels:

  ‘Good travel for a great guy!’

  More glad tidings were dispensed a few hours later in improbable circumstances. In the late morning I re-entered the Czech Republic in daft and dangerous fashion, lugging the MIFA across some forsaken mountaintop log flume deeply flanked by sodden, waist-high vegetation. (That night I learned that this historic eighteenth-century waterway, the Schwarzenberg Schwemmkanal, linked the Black Sea and North Sea watersheds and their mightiest navigable rivers: my giant leap for bike-kind might instead have been a disastrous slither, sweeping me halfway home like a very unfortunate turn of snakes and ladders.) Now, after a full ten rounds with the rain-flicking, flesh-pricking brambles, I had at last stumbled out onto asphalt, and was celebrating with a ragged, lunatic yodel when a red Audi with German plates overtook and pulled up.

  ‘It is you, yes?’

  ‘Um, is it?’

  ‘Of course!’

  The two middle-aged men who had leapt from the car and splashed eagerly up to me seemed almost dangerously excited; I set my expression to Constrained Delight, a face that has done good service over the years when tasting cakes baked by my children.

  ‘I tell my friend it is you, he don’t believe me!’

  The one with the Begbie tache turned to his associate, who responded with a happily sheepish shrug. ‘Please – a photo, it’s OK for you?’

  Without waiting for an answer, Begbie smoothed his mullet into order, wiped rain off a cheek and put his arm round my shoulder.

  ‘I can’t believe it is you,’ he said, shaking his head as his friend began snapping away with a phone camera. ‘Incredible.’

  I smiled uneasily into the tiny lens, then cracked, and asked a question I hadn’t asked aloud since the loneliest, mind-messing depths of Finland.

  ‘I’m sorry, but who am I?’

  Begbie’s answer thoughtfully overlooked any existential predicaments. ‘Come on, it is you, the Englischer with the little MIFA,’ he said, waving a hand first at me and then at my bike. ‘We are from Sangerhausen; we read your story and see your photo in our newspaper!’

  Enlightenment drained all discomfort from my features. How remarkable, and how very splendid, that we three should congregate on this silent, soaking hillside so very far from all our homes. (‘Small bicycle,’ chirped Begbie, ‘small world!’) We took more photos and chatted a while; I learned they were ex-miners, enjoying an early-redundancy road trip to Budapest. Then the rain abruptly intensified, and after some hurried handshakes, they scuttled back to their Audi.

  As you may have gathered, I’ve got history with the Eurovision Song Contest; as you may not have, I am an impervious, goal-driven machine of a man. At any rate, it was finals night, Austria were the hosts, and I had that morning made a rash vow to re-consummate my love-hate Eurovision relationship with a nation-appropriate telly vigil. The conditions I conquered in fulfilling this ridiculous oath were unstintingly terrible. After the miners went I was 88km shy of Gmund, the next Austrian town on my route, and every last one of these metric bastards did its best to sadden and hurt me.

  The rain fell in sheets, smearing out a world of hills and lubricating the MIFA’s steel rims so profusely that my front brakes gave up, which along with the resurgent steering issues made an adventure of every downhill corner. The niggle in my right ankle blossomed into a searing, export-strength tor
ment; on the steeper inclines, it seemed as if my Achilles tendon was about to snap like a dry twig with every revolution. (‘If you experience ankle soreness,’ the internet later helpfully advised me, ‘try using a lower gear cycling uphill.’) How useful, on days like this, to have a bulging repository of even more awful recent tribulations to dredge up, putting my current misery into flattering perspective. With those memories finally exhausted, all I could do was double-up on the Magic Man, and ride things out on that brittle, tinny high, shivering and wax-faced. I soon felt strange and desperate and must have looked it too, because for the first time in my entire life, a motorist pulled over and offered me a lift.

  ‘How many you go?’

  Not too many by then; I turned him down. Though I might not have done had his car been less completely crammed with garden furniture.

  The border approach was marked by a ramshackle commercial parade of outlets offering Austrians stuff they can’t get at home, such as life-sized garden wolves and topless barmaids. Then I sloshed heavy-lidded through the unmanned customs sheds and into Gmund, in no fit state to appreciate or even notice the immaculate loveliness of its principal square: when I saddled up and went out in the morning, the fanned cobbles, tightly stacked, colourful old townhouses and embarrassment of mahogany and brass cafés all came as a wonderful surprise. Instead, I dully noted the word HOTEL above a door, battered it open with the MIFA’s front wheel, and presently found myself dribbling brown water and death-sweat all over a lobby crammed with elegant wedding guests holding champagne flutes and bouquets. Everyone looked round and two uniformed receptionists weaved speedily towards me through the throng. It suddenly felt like the end scene of some turdy rom-com, my cue to deliver a bumbling declaration of love and rescue the bride from a faithless cad, before riding away together on our bicycle made for none.

  The Hotel Goldener Stern, one of the finest buildings on that delightful old square, would have been out of my league on the best of days, and as this absolutely wasn’t amongst them I must credit its staff for their courteous, helpful hospitality, and all-round failure to grab me by the wet shoulders and throw me back out from whence I came. What had happened to Austria? One waist-coated functionary wheeled my filthy MIFA away through the reception party (I found it in the morning propped against a speaker in the function room), and another ushered me gently to a seat near the bar, where I blotted expensive upholstery and shuddered unappealingly for a while, before a waiter laid an unbidden but tearfully welcome pot of tea before me with a gracious flourish. Presently I heard that my room had now been readied, and was accompanied to it by a young woman whose expression welled with such profound concern that I genuinely feared she might ask if I needed a wheelchair. It was like being in a five-star hospice. Admittedly they stuck me in the attic and charged me ruinously for that tea, and later politely declined to turn the heating on. In consequence I was obliged to gaffer-tape the hairdryer button down on turbo mode and convert my en suite into a cacophonous kit-drying chamber, in full compliance with environmental best practice and fire regulations. It worked a treat, but also completely drowned out the Eurovision final. What a truly terrible shame.

  The Soviets never trusted Czechoslovakia. Before the war, it had ranked amongst the world’s most technically advanced countries; afterwards, still better off and better educated than any other on its side of the curtain, the nation was picked on as a hotbed of bourgeois intellectualism. More than 400 Czechoslovak dissidents and undesirables were executed after the Soviet empire’s most brutal post-war show trials, the bloody sharp end of a uniquely intensive crackdown: at the age of twelve, future post-revolutionary president Václav Havel was identified as a class traitor and thereafter struggled to find any educational establishment willing to accept him. It didn’t work, of course, and the Czechoslovakian Communist Party’s famously ill-fated dalliance with economic and political liberalisation in 1968 attracted the tanks. A hard-line regime was installed, and obediently persecuted its own people with scatter-gun mindlessness. For years after, appearing in public with long hair was enough to earn young men a police beating. Yet the stoic, thoughtful Czechoslovaks never succumbed to the temptations of violence and revenge: when the time came, their 1989 ‘Velvet Revolution’ overturned forty-one years of Soviet rule in ten bloodless days.

  I offer this condensed tribute to a now-divided land’s relevant history as a pointlessly overdue personal wake-up call: the Czech Republic was passing me by. In truth, as countries came and went with what passes for dizzying speed on a MIFA 900, such wholesale, nation-grade oversights would from now on become a recurring issue. But the Czechs deserved better, and I felt a little guilty for having cold-shouldered their land on the back of one bad night with two rude men at the Hotel Goethe in Aš. That and 12,000 years of biblical rain. Happily, the country had the decency and good sense to see me off with clear skies and the city of Znojmo.

  I arrived at its outskirts damp and done in, wearied after a long day slooshing between castle-topped Austro-Moravian hill towns, my progress either ponderous or breakneck. Of late the larger Czech settlements had been dispiritingly girdled with a scattering of bedraggled roadside prostitutes, and my heart sank when a huddle of figures appeared around Znojmo’s city-limits sign. But happily, all were local farmers hawking bottled Moravian produce: pickles, jams and – joy of joys – wine. Wine! Sun-ripened nectar of southern Europe, the essence of long, hot summers and not being anywhere near Finland. More so than that log-flume mountain border, this felt like a defining watershed. When I looked up the clouds had fractured, and before me Znojmo’s squat and slender spires glowed in a sheaf of golden rays.

  I bagged a cosy little room under an ancient roof, overlooking one of the many undulating cobbled alleys that graced Znojmo, then showered and laundered, and with an expectant whistle fluttering from my unaccustomed lips, struck out into the warm night to reacquaint myself with the half-remembered pleasure of alfresco evenings. What a civilised thrill to walk into a city you have never previously heard of, confident that it is poised to delight you. Znojmo duly offered up half a millennium’s worth of appealing architecture, much of it laid out around two tilting squares of extravagant proportion. I paced around the larger for almost half an hour, watching the last slabs of sunlight retreat across the meaty old cobbles. Its sides were lined with baroque porticos and pastel-stuccoed Habsburg mansions; one end was guarded by a four-square, pointy-roofed medieval turret, and the other – woah! – by a low-slung, open-mouthed Communist town hall, like some enormous concrete video-cassette recorder. This brazen excrescence was inflicted on Znojmo’s most graceful space in 1969, effectively as a punishment for the nation’s indiscretions the year before. I stared at it for a full five minutes, more stunned than appalled, looking around for someone to share this outrageous spectacle. Only then did I realise that I had the square almost entirely to myself. Here was a scene crying out for an Italian-pattern mass nocturnal walkabout, but it was Sunday and everyone but a distant pair of teenage couples had gone home. It took me half an hour to track down the vegan café that was Znojmo’s only open restaurant, and half that to put away four plates of spartan nourishment.

  For a welcome while the landscape lay flat on its back and sunbathed. Farmers were out pruning and tethering vine tendrils in poppy-speckled fields, brought to attention by the MIFA’s whirring clunks and hoisting secateurs in greeting. At my last Czech town, I successfully spent all my remaining korunas on a dozen cigar-shaped rolls and three cans of an energy drink compellingly named in honour of a notorious native invention. Red Bull gives you wings; Semtex blows them off. Then it was back into Austria, heading south along the Slovakian border down a flood plain scattered with village-idiot hamlets: Dorfles, Dürnkrut, Grub.

  These places were uniformly charmless, full of grey-rendered bungalows and heavy with the stench of boiled food and boredom. Every mantelpiece supported a carriage clock and a pair of ceramic spaniels, and when I nipped into a bar for a splash-and-dash coff
ee/pee, I found its rosewood jukebox topped and tailed by Rick Astley and Roger Whittaker. The town of Laa an der Thaya was lethargically gearing up for an onion festival; an air of drab, Mittel European stolidity pervaded throughout.

  I began to wonder if these borderlands had been made so unappealing by design, to discourage invasion by the Communists who once surrounded Austria on three sides: seriously, comrades, are we worth it? I was almost right. In fact, the towns had all been laid out to Soviet blueprints in the early 1950s, and afterwards left studiously unembellished to avoid antagonising the neighbours.

  Poking so deeply into the Soviet empire – Vienna lies way east of Prague – Austria, much like Finland, had to play a very careful hand in the Cold War. Having culled most (OK, all) of my relevant historical knowledge from The Third Man, I knew that Vienna had been split into Allied sectors in 1945, on the Berlin model, but hadn’t previously realised that the whole nation was divided for ten long years. The Soviets governed and reconstructed the entire eastern half, my bit, and at the time it was generally assumed that this chunk at least was fated to wind up behind the Iron Curtain for good, forming a neat continuum between the Czech and Hungarian borders. But Stalin’s death induced a certain giddiness amongst the Soviet top brass, and in 1955 they abruptly offered Austria full independence on the condition of neutrality. Hands were proverbially bitten off and Austria settled into five decades of low-profile mollification, painting their bungalows grey and waiting for the Cold War to blow over. At the same time, that precarious front-line geography ingrained a quiet sense of paranoia. Over 30 per cent of Austrians had access to a nuclear fallout shelter, and no one batted an eyelid when in 1978 Josef Fritzl applied for permission to build one under his garden. In fact, the local council even gave him a two-grand grant.