The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold Page 23
Slovakia had a full five hours to make a good impression, and failed miserably. A lone raindrop plopped into the River March as my border ferry bumped to a halt, and an eager throng of its friends were soon rushing down to greet me. With EV13’s riverside route an unnavigable mud-bath, I reeled Bratislava miserably in along a thin and cratered road filled with thunderous, sluicing traffic. Armies of pylons marched across saturated, rain-smudged flatlands; the rotting Khrushchyovka tenements were back, and the ear-scratching bus-shelter idlers. It was all very Russian, inestimably more Soviet than the Czech Republic had been. Bratislava passed by in a dreary smear of stack-a-prole blocks and trams, then it was over the mighty, swollen Danube and back into Austria. Then Hungary. Then Austria again. Central Europe’s shattered-mirror geography had my phone bleating out welcome texts like a cornered lamb. A cornered lamb with a phone.
I was almost out of small-town Austria and it remained a conundrum. In theory, it was awful: expensive, dull and politically horrid. There was an election coming up, and the verges were clustered with stake-mounted placards depicting blotchy, snaggle-toothed right-wing populists, each one screaming out for a marker-pen toothbrush moustache, above some shouty slogan about border controls or Austrian jobs for Austrians. It could have been worse: the late Jörg Haider, former head of the Freedom Party, which provided the creepiest roadside faces and currently holds a quarter of the seats in the national parliament, once described SS veterans as ‘decent people who stuck to their beliefs’. I’ve often wondered if they’ll ever get bored with this stuff here, and concluded they probably won’t after reading an interview with Felix Baumgartner, the mild-mannered Austrian skydiver who memorably fell to earth from a platform at the edge of space. ‘You can’t do anything in a democracy,’ young Felix later told an interviewer, who’d only asked if he’d ever been scared of heights. ‘What we need is a dictator.’
Austrians, considered as a collective whole, were an unappealing people. Yet one-to-one, they had proved almost unfailingly wonderful – the most consistently helpful nationals I had encountered. During a break in the weather I stopped to clean and oil the MIFA’s chain, suddenly aware that 2,000 filthy, wet kilometres had elapsed since I had last done so, and concluding that this oversight might at least partly explain those awful grating shrieks (I was wrong: it completely explained them). I carried out this service on a back road so quiet that in twenty minutes, only five motorists passed; but of these, three pulled up and volunteered assistance. An hour later, poking cheese slices into tiny Czech rolls at a war memorial in Deutsch Jahrndorf (Austria’s easternmost town, it says here), I glanced up and saw a bespectacled old lady trotting up the road with a wodge of bulky textile clutched to her chest. For a moment I feared I was about to be stuffed into a sack and punished for my disrespectful picnic. But her burden was a pair of fleece tracksuit bottoms, which she proffered with a volley of concerned-sounding words and a beseeching look at my drizzle-tipped, goose-pimpled leg hairs. In every sense, I didn’t know what to say.
‘Danke … but, um, nein danke.’ I left her with her arms full of thermal polyester and a forlorn face that said the next time she saw me would be in the Deutsch Jahrndorf Zeitung, below a tragic headline.
The rain came and went, and the gently billowing landscape was stealthily annexed by smart vineyards. Stoats and weasels scampered across the road and an eagle flew right over my head, so close I felt the beat of its mighty wings. An auspicious encounter, for soon after I was riding through ancient gates topped majestically with sandstone representations of this regal bird. The night before, I had shared a concrete shoebox of a motel with a billion ants, whose doughtier patrols were still crawling from my washbag four countries down the line. Now I was booked into the Habsburg dynasty’s imperial summer residence. The instigator of this miraculous promotion was not far behind: her hire car swept to a halt on the gravel half an hour later, with my son at the wheel.
13. HUNGARY, SLOVENIA AND CROATIA
An awfully long time had elapsed since I had waved my wife and son off in Finland, enough from my perspective to have encompassed the rise and fall of a civilisation or two, and from theirs to have drained the dishwasher of rinse-aid. (I always like to imagine my household regressing into loveless, grunting squalor during my protracted absences, but this is generally as good as it gets.) They were, though, gratifyingly disturbed by my weather-beaten, hollow-cheeked degeneration: the scales in our magnificent bathroom would show that I now weighed a kilogram less than my slimline, twenty-one-year-old son. As instructed, my wife had brought out the old 1970s Peugeot jersey I wore while riding around France fifteen years previously – the fun had gone out of distressing survivors of Soviet-era oppression, and my GDR top would be returning home with her. The Peugeot jersey was tight even in 2000, and I hadn’t dared put it on since; I did so now, and it slid loosely over my concave torso with alarming ease.
My support team stayed for three more nights and three more countries. They brought the sun and a tailwind so fierce I could hardly keep up with it, pedals a blur through the Austro-Hungarian vineyards and elder trees. We would arrange to meet twice a day, at lunchtime and our end-point hotel, and I always set – and met – preposterously ambitious targets for both, out of nothing more than dumb macho pride. Fifty-one years old, and still showing off to women and children.
On their first day I covered 159km across Hungary, speeding past poppy-speckled cornfields as the wind swept pretty patterns through their deep, silvery pile. The road surface steadily deteriorated, the start of my long goodbye to smooth and diligently maintained tarmac: there were no Austrias or Germanys left from here to the Black Sea. Some of the villages were arrestingly medieval, scraggy ribbons of hovels and thatch-roofed bus shelters, laid out along the road for half a mile or more. Men were out in the fields with scythes and sickles, and the bicycle was a beast of burden, pushed along the verge with buckets slung from its rusty handlebars or rakes laid across them. Hungarians have a reputation as a bit of a rum bunch, and my presence was acknowledged with a stony-faced hauteur that offered a distinctive departure from months of total indifference, snide hostility and the odd waving infant. Though in fact, now that I cast my mind back to the dawn of time, it was strongly reminiscent of my standard reception in Finland, with whom the Magyars share a distant ethnic identity and a weakness for mad vowels.
The history round here was big and often brutal. I flew through Ferto˝d, catching no more than a regal glimpse of the rococo super-palace that has been called the Hungarian Versailles; my wife stopped for a tour, and told me that the nearby quarry which provided most of its limestone was requisitioned by the Nazis as an execution site, its rocky walls still riddled with bullet holes as testimony to the thousands of Hungarian Jews who died there. At Andau, hard up by the Austrian border, I poked fruitlessly about in the hedgerows trying to find the little wooden bridge that 70,000 Hungarians had desperately stampeded across during the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising – amongst them my late, lamented next-door neighbour Stephan, just seventeen at the time, who wound up splashing through the swampy water beneath.
Tim Moore
@mrtimmoore
Austro-Hungarian border. Thought better of getting in there for a jaunty selfie.
And then there was the borderland hilltop north of Sopron, where a picnic proved the unlikely beginning of the end for the Soviet empire. I met the support crew up there and we wandered together through a clearing studded with artworks and information boards, a commemorative site opened with a fanfare by child-of-the-GDR Angela Merkel on the Pan-European Picnic’s twentieth anniversary. Six years on everything stood forlornly knee-deep in weeds, a sad fate for a site of such import.
Hungary was always a black sheep in the Soviet flock, even before the revolt that left 700 Russian soldiers dead on the streets of Budapest. You get the impression that the Russians were always a bit freaked out by their barking-mad language and hardwired moodiness, and after a post-1956 crackdown they steadily allow
ed the recalcitrant Magyars a longer, looser leash. By the Seventies, Hungarians were allowed to run their own small businesses and buy Western goods; by the mid-Eighties, they could travel freely across the Curtain. The reciprocal freedom for Westerners to enter the other way soon attracted hordes of East German holidaymakers to Hungary, the one place where they could meet up with West German relatives.
So thousands of suntanned Ossis were already in Hungary in the summer of 1989, when the native authorities rather boldly announced that they would henceforth be de-fortifying their border with Austria, on the pretext that they couldn’t afford the upkeep. When the Hungarians upped the ante, and told the world that as a ‘symbolic gesture’ the border crossing at Sopron would be opened for two hours on 19 August, a great crocodile of chugging Trabants converged there for a self-styled ‘Pan-European Picnic’. As the information boards confirmed, no one quite knew what to expect, least of all the Hungarian border guards who later revealed that they’d been given no orders to countermand the default shoot-to-kill mandate. When an official unlatched a tiny wooden gate, the crowd hesitated, a fearful, Stasi-reared generation who figured there had to be a catch. But when the border guards merely shrugged, tentative sidling erupted into a gleeful stampede, and 700-odd East Germans dashed across no man’s land and off into Austria.
The hectic scene was memorably captured in the commemorative site’s photographic panels: what with the hair and the clothes, it looks like the opening of an unusually good-natured Black Friday sale, circa 1974. ‘We’re making history!’ one of the 700 remembered shouting as he squeezed through the gate. He wasn’t wrong. Before the Pan-European Picnic, the Iron Curtain’s fate still hung in the balance; afterwards, its days were numbered.
The Hungarian border bosses were initially appalled by this anarchic moment of madness, and in the days ahead over 5,000 East Germans were arrested trying to cross the border around Sopron. The father of one family group was tragically shot dead. But encouraged by the West German authorities, who reputedly offered to write off a few hundred million in debts as a quid pro quo, the Magyars soon began dismantling fences and control posts; within a couple of months, over 60,000 East Germans had fled to the West through Hungary, and the Soviet empire’s end was nigh. At Sopron and elsewhere the borderlands were left strewn with hastily abandoned Trabants and Wartburgs, all later acquisitioned by locals and to this day a conspicuous feature on Hungarian roads – I saw more Communist cars here than anywhere else.
My family’s visit presented a strange, dreamy interlude. We lunched together beneath strip-lights in a Tesco cafeteria, and under parasols on a rose-bushed Habsburg terrace; we slept in dusty old hotels and ritzy designer apartments. In between I rode with a manic intensity, flicking through kilometres like calendar pages in a time-flies movie montage, as if the faster and further I went, the longer they would stay. With my panniers in the support vehicle and a kind wind the MIFA fairly flew along, though shorn of expeditionary luggage and pedalling like a dervish I cut an even madder figure than usual, a man taking a ride down the shops way too seriously.
After festering in my own filthy, mad juices for so long it was difficult to process my wife’s helpful reminders of what constituted acceptable human conduct, and more particularly what didn’t, such as the retention of fortnight-old leftovers, keeping foreign currencies in separate sanitary-product disposal bags and humming 10cc all through dinner. Through her eyes I belatedly grasped the inherently weird ickiness of the CamelBak hydration system, how all the bladders and tubing I sluiced out and slung up to dry every night suggested paraphernalia concerned with the draining of human fluids, rather than their replenishment. ‘Don’t you feel odd suckling away from that thing?’ she asked as I strapped it on one morning. ‘I bet people think you’re drinking your own wee.’
Slovenia spent the Cold War as part of Marshal Tito’s Yugoslavia, the renegade, semi-Westernised Communist state that wasn’t so much behind an iron curtain as a plastic trellis. The little nation managed to extricate itself from the post-Tito Balkan mess without bloodshed, and around me the Slovenian landscape exuded the appealing essence of peaceable good-living: a rolling vision of mellow fruitfulness under a cirrus-flecked blue sky, the hillsides trimly planted with orchards and ripening cereal crops, interrupted here and there by a neat collation of terracotta roofs. The roads were broad and the drivers sympathetic, and the sunset so flattering that I mistook a cement factory for a castle. We stayed at Moravske Toplice, a restful spa town that offered us the condensed cream of Slovenia’s surrounding influences: Italian food, Austrian cleanliness, Hungarian roses and Croatian lymphatic-drainage massage. But Slovenia was as tiny as it was lovely, and by mid-morning I was out the other side.
I hate having my hair cut and in nine weeks hadn’t bothered, oblivious to the bouffant grizzle wafting stupidly out from under my helmet on all sides until my wife repeatedly pointed it out. On our last evening, at a hotel overlooking the crevassed sludge plain that had been Croatia’s largest lake before it sprang a catastrophic leak, she ordered remedial action. Off I went, with my son for company, into the gently flyblown centre of Prelog, where we presently found ourselves sharing a hair-floored front room with a bespectacled, white-bearded barber, three artillery shell-cases and a very happy man with five teeth.
The barber was less a stylist than an engineer, who went to work with the military precision befitting his souvenirs. One of the dozen-odd implements he would wield was a metal ruler, employed to assess the geometry of his cut along my collar line. That diligent focus was soon challenged, however, by the antics of his dentally imbalanced next customer. This fellow had bounded in through the door with a joyous blare of salutation, and at once settled down on the waiting bench extremely close to my son, who had just selected a periodical from the barber’s coffee-table stack. In the mirror before me I watched our new friend relieve my progeny of his newspaper with a matey wink, before riffling clumsily through it until he reached a large photograph of a young woman who had forgotten to put her top on. A lascivious cackle filled the room; leering horribly he introduced this image to my son’s face at a range of about four inches and lofted a grubby thumb.
Tim Moore
@mrtimmoore
Finally had a trim, in style with this madcap Col Sanders. ‘First cut, then drink!’ Out came his homebrew slivovice.
‘Sorry,’ murmured the barber, slicing the tip off a single hair above my left ear, ‘maybe he a little bit drinking.’
It’s a fair bet that any Croat with a collection of spent ordnance knows how to work amid noisy distraction, and the barber stoically snipped away through a barrage of brays, belches and bared bosoms that sent my eldest child wanly recoiling ever further down the bench. His tonsorial work was almost done when Freddy Five Teeth launched into a spirited anthem of nationalistic aspect, keeping time with hearty slaps on my son’s shoulder. Enough was enough: the barber sighed heavily, downed tools and filled a plastic beaker from a bottle of water nestled amongst his blades and brushes. This was sternly presented to Freddy, who accepted it without protest as his final raucous stanza died away. After sweeping a last cull of grey hair from my caped shoulders, the barber allowed me to admire my severe and precise parade-ground coiffure in a handheld mirror, and then filled three further beakers from the bottle.
‘Fuck da Coke,’ he told my son, handing him the first.
‘Fuck da pizza,’ he told me, proffering the second.
The third he held aloft, gazing at it reverentially before concluding his rhyming ditty with a gusto that brought Freddy to his unsteady feet, beaker raised. ‘All we need is Šljivovica!’
The ensuing communal toast informed my oesophagus that this fluid was very much not water; when my son, who had chauffeured me there, declined to participate with his hands on an imaginary steering wheel, Freddy responded with a loud scoff and a clearly well-informed mime of the delights of drunken driving. We left very shortly after, but not before the barber had progressed with
impressive haste through several stages of inebriation. One minute he was chuntering on about the EU; the next he was chasing us around with a pantomime-prop cut-throat razor, three feet of cardboard and silver foil.
My wife had recoiled slightly when I came back reeking of moonshine with a conscript’s crewcut, and did so more extravagantly the next morning, when my CamelBak leaked all over her during our farewell hug in the car park. ‘You’re so thin I thought I’d burst you,’ she said, blotting her blouse with a sleeve. Then doors were slammed, tears blinked back and my support crew were off, on a drive to Vienna airport during which they would impressively accrue 510 euros in motoring fines.
It was a broiled and airless morning, the tipping point of full-on summer. By 10.30 a.m. the digital mercury hit 27 degrees, and after all those months of steering into patches of sunlight for warmth, I now weaved ponderously about in search of shade. For a long while I tracked the Drava, a yawning aquatic corridor that was nonetheless a mere tributary of the Danube, its dappled banks dotted with brown-bellied old anglers in Speedos, fag in one hand, rod in the other. Either side of this immense river stretched a rich alluvial plain, its cornfields crowned here and there with a grain silo or the silvered sphere of a water tower, wobbling up out of the heat haze.