Vienna’s Apology to the Pigs
Fiction by Mark Anthony Jarman
I kind of hate Vienna. Architectural marvels lift like iced wedding cakes on every boulevard and we linger in gorgeous galleries devoted to Raphael, Rubens, Tintoretto. I give hours to staring at the giant canvases by Bruegel the Elder and Bruegel the Younger; I want to live forever in the Bruegel family room; clearly the far-flung Habsburg Empire meant fine paydays for a slew of talented artists and architects.
In high boughs above a minor river we spy orbs of foliage. Are they stork nests?
Kissing trees, says the cab driver, a very friendly woman who fled Serbia during their war.
Ah, mistletoe, for kissing. To our mouths we bend. This is early March, mere days ahead of the virus. Soon the kissing will stop. But for now, a nice moment.
Our Serbian driver loves her adopted city; she says this city and Budapest and no other cities compare; she loves the operatic buildings, loves Vienna’s palaces and pastries, loves walking an earlier century.
But I am not connecting with any of the centuries as we wander miles, no phone or GPS, wander by error into the Turkish Siege of Vienna, the Third Man Museum, into funky Café Drechsler, wander into the force field of Sigmund Freud Park where men in horse masks perch on low stools and play accordion, hoping for our coins.
I approve of toothy horse masks, but masks and accordions are not enough; somehow Imperial Vienna seems a city lacking rude salt and flavour, fussy and embellished, its coffee and strudel not seducing us into that pre-nostalgia tremor of We must live here! Every place we visit I declare stupidly, We’re moving here next! But not Wien.
We walk under history’s monuments, but the present era’s milquetoast simulacra makes me grumpy: Vienna’s young citizens are clones of every other young citizen in the world, a vista of sidewall haircuts and oiled beards and hipster toques, NY ballcaps under Abercrombie & Fitch hoodies, clean Kodiak boots and expensive Rockports. North Face winter jackets drift in the thousands, thousands of white AirPods jammed in the side of heads like tiny ivory tusks. Vienna checks with Brooklyn and Berlin and Apple and Portlandia before adjusting a forelock or playlist. Felons broke into my loft and rolled up all my pant cuffs one perfect inch. How impulsive I am to wear them! My jeans cut themselves open over my thigh all on their own; how crazy! The same infected tattoos and the same eyeglasses staring at the same devices.
We are ridiculous, yet we keep breathing and breeding. From a trendy café I look on lanes and cars and capitals full of depressing people like me, our puny hopes and love-songs and malaises multiplied a million times. As Donald would say, Sad!
To save the earth, Donald’s friend Greta Thunberg rode a slow boat across the sea, but no ship seems ready to sail us from Fredericton to Venice. Instead of saving the planet, we settle for a bargain flight to Vienna via Austrian Airlines; from Vienna easy trains to Ljubljana and Trieste and Venice, our true jet-lagged destination.
Venice, there I’d move, love its campos and canals and malarial islands, but it saved us $1000 to fly in and out of Vienna, off season, fly there in January, fly out with the viral ides of March. We were pampered, we were not sardines, and I fell in love with the Austrian crew’s scarlet uniforms and an extra grand in my pocket to join the café idlers of wintry Europe. We wander Vienna’s Orson Wells rain, Vienna’s Innere Stadt, the Josefstadt, the Krazenberserkerstadt. No snow this year, but the air is chilly; by the Rathaus we duck into an old-fashioned restaurant’s back entrance to warm up.
“Follow me!” commands a tall brusque waiter, a storm trooper in a previous life, leading us into starched tablecloths and businessmen whispering as if in a Gothic cathedral. We sit warily. Clarissa orders spaetzle, a word she might be making up.
I’m drawn to rindsgulyas, goulash, a house special. A half order: is that possible?
“Goulash,” Karl asserts decisively, understanding one key word and smacking menus shut, no more discussion. Goulash for me is like fish soup or chowder; I enjoy sampling local variants. Of course, goulash is pure meat. Europe is meat without apology, windows hung with sausages, horsemeat for sale in loaves, a carved leg of Black Iberian pig lounging tartily on the bar.
In Trieste we were served a pink pig-shaped platter with different offerings from a pig’s inside also arranged in the shape of a pig’s body. That origin of that meal was made very clear. In Canada I rarely seek meat, never order a monstrous bacon burger or marbled sirloin, but my parents lived through the Great Depression and the war and I eat what is put in front of me, as long as it doesn’t bite me.
My storm trooper delivers, delivers goulash to die for — flavours that are stunning and soothing at the same moment, and it is generous: Karl did not bring a half order. Dark goulash and three naked potatoes, potatoes pale as eggs, minimalist art, tastier than art. Here there is no need for teeth, the goulash meat soft as yogurt, meat crossing the Polish border into gravy.
I feel guilt over meat as pleasure, but one taste of this ambrosia and guilt flies away via Austrian Air, via Zeppelin. This is travel, this is life.
Clarissa stares at her vast spaetzle, a farmer’s dish of cheese, egg noodles, and caramelized onions that could feed three. I must help out, a voracious pig, I must open my mouth. Karl tells us it is the traditional dish of Allgau, Swabia, and Voralberg (or is it Viralberg); the name comes from spatz, a tiny sparrow, the bird suggested by the curve of the noodle.
Our curves stuffed with goulash and tiny sparrows we wander this mysterious capital, our heads stuffed with art and sorrows at the Kunsthistoriches Museum, stuffed with porcelain and palaces, lions and horses and Kaisers frozen in white stone.
I have a vision of dead Viennese waltzers twirling in the sky far above an armoured king, bewigged madhouse pinwheels in the winter clouds, all the dancers wearing head-sets and mics. One stone lane makes us stumble into the Middle Ages, into Judenplatz, a square with a statue of writer Gotthold Lessing gazing at the site of a synagogue destroyed in the pogrom of 1420. The year 1938 brings noisy Kristallnacht, jackboots on your stairs and shop windows smashed, the simple joys of destruction and dogma.
The first statue of Lessing stood for a brief time in the 1930s, but the statue was melted to feed the Nazi war machine. Once this square was a Roman fort fighting Vandal tribes. Herr Freud fled Vienna for London in 1938, avoiding Herr Schicklgruber’s vandal tribes smashing city banks and prayer halls. The night train to Prague packed with people escaping, though running east toward Uncle Joe may not have been the best direction.
Today police vans move hither and thither as protesters beat drums at Rathaus City Hall. On another block a woman’s bullhorn leads a call and response chant from demonstrators; a crowd shouts on one side of a disputed intersection, a row of police stare blandly from the opposite side. By simply turning corners I conjure palsied placards dancing toward police shields and helmets. I feel sorry for the feverish mob, so excited now. This time it’s different. Later the letdown, later the fervour fading and tweets tapering off.
A bearded man on a bike crosses the contested intersection to say something to an individual policeman, head leaning in a heartfelt point. Do they march for Greta and the environment? For Black Lives Matter? Against cars and gentrification and Air-bnb? I feel a bit blind, witless, feel a need to signal my virtue. Herr Karl, does anyone call police “pigs” anymore?
These crowds march on March 7, 2020: deaths from the new virus fill the head-lines, we joke about the virus, but the killing seems distant: death stalks Huanan’s seafood market, death visits old Italian hill towns, death fills Iran’s dusty graves. Italy is ravaged, but Italy’s latest plague is not visible in the tidy Habsburg capital, Viralberg is the other side of a mountain range.
To paraphrase Trotsky, you may not be interested in the virus, but the virus is interested in you. A few days ago we slipped from Italy into Slovenia before the borders shut, our bus eerily empty. But Vienna’s gasthauses and cafes overflow with customers and protesters march en masse. A few masks bob like soft blue lamps in the crowded art galleries, but Vienna, cross-roads of old empires, is not isolating. Zero cases, they boasted proudly in Slovenia, zero in Austria. Zappa sings, No, no, It can’t happen here.
None of us know that in a few days western Europe will be the white-hot centre of contagion. A virus travels with us, moves at the speed of flight, a fellow traveler on our bus and train through France, Spain, Italy, Ireland, the UK, and soon Germany; people will start dying right here and not just Persia or the Far East.
A woman in a trench coat walks by the protest, looks me in the eye and mutters something, assuming I will agree. I understand the word scheisse: the protesters are full of crap. Or could it be a friendly invitation to watch her defecate? My friend Richard visited a Berlin club where there was scheisse-nacht, very literal, shit night; roll out the heavy-duty plastic to guard the club floor and let go, preferably with someone under you. Richard says the fetish is popular in Germany and Austria. There is a lovely word, scheissenfreude, the change on your face when hit by a heavy turd. I concede that the scheisse-nacht fetish is better than the Kristallnacht fetish. Would Dr. Freud understand making these transactions public? Do participants get stage fright? Didn’t Freud associate scheisse with death? I posit that excreting a log on someone’s face in a club means you are very much alive. The club has air scrubbers; the smell is sheissegeist, a ghost lingering in the room. Richard says sheisse porn is a thing.
These images start depressing me. Not the porn or the club or the plastic, but all the shit, our over-population and the vast hillocks of crap created by us in one city in one year. Where does it all go? “Wir danken fur Ihren Besuch.” Just think of India and China’s masses, Himalayas of excrement for Mother Nature to eat. Danke!
I walk, try to shake off the images. Which way is the Danube? I’m lost. One block over an earnest Sozialistische Jugend on a bullhorn takes neo-Nazis to task under a cavernous subway portal; no one pays attention.
Our Serbian driver loves Vienna, but in 1914 a Serbian student shot Franz Ferdinand, Vienna’s archduke and heir to the Hapsburg throne, shot him in an open car by the Latin Bridge. This pistol in Sarajevo starts the Great War; the anarchist found his anarchy, millions slaughtered and then the Hapsburg Empire simply vanishes, poof! An empire disappears like that old diner in Welsford. I feel strange nostalgia for an empire I never knew.
My grandfather was injured in ww1 and was never the same. My parents lived through the Great Depression and World War Two. The Nazis bombed my parents in the war and the Nazis in turn were bombed; these places are proud of how they rose from postwar rubble and shook off history; they don’t want the Nazis back.
I wonder if I could play my sad minor key harmonica on the lonely socialist’s bull-horn. Back in Canada I’ll give this musical idea a shot. Eight p.m. and stupid rush hour still throbs as misty rain comes and goes like Michelangelo; night falls nightly in noirish Vienna and Clarissa and I spy a sign outside a bar window.
If you are reading this you are likely a tourist. Do not come here if you want Wiener Schnitzel.
Just days ago we visited Vanja, a dear friend in Zagreb. When visiting Canada Vanja loves Tim Horton’s donuts and when in Austria Vanja claims she orders nothing but wiener schnitzel over and over. We do the opposite of our dear Vanja.
The Do Not Come Here place is casual, a row of micro taps and a pleasant young waitress in a T-shirt, hair held in a careless bun. She brings brusque unfiltered beer in tall vessels; I am thirsty from my scheisse thoughts and I seek more drink. The waitress is a stark contrast to the Old World waiter’s brusque persona and starched tables, different worlds two blocks apart.
The menu says their specialty is speck, Karntner kulinarik, Carinthian cuisine. The lovely old Duchy of Carinthia, on our route to Venice, has alpine lakes and flowery meadows under Austria’s highest mountains. Speck, she says, is bacon rubbed with spices, smoked, and air-dried (ideally dried outside beside a glacier).
Speck is a very specific cut of meat, months of preparation, with local variations in Italy, Friuli, Bohemia, Slovenia, Styria, Istria, Transylvania, Hungary, Albania, even Turkey, Vienna’s old infidel foe. Young Asian women in powder-blue surgical masks giggle at another table.
To our simple table our waitress brings cheese dumplings and mounds of spiced and diced bacon cubes that hit like some happy version of heroin; one morsel of the spiced dried bacon, a shudder, and I’m an addict, an acolyte of this specific church of flesh. The conflict over diet and the globe and carbon and meat and planes makes my head hurt.
Our motorcycle climbing bright Austrian valleys under icy Alps and couloir fissures; was that sin? My Irish grandfather crafted oak barrels by hand and died in the Irish Civil War; my grandfather never saw a plane’s contrail or a shrinking glacier.
Born, I was thrown into the wrong century, the wrong continents, the wrong noble causes. The bar’s slim menu features a frank and touching apology to their animals.
We use our own free-range pigs’ organic meat. These animals are very special and every year between five and six of them lose their life for this endeavor. The meat is treated with pure handicraft and undergoes a lengthy ripening period, becoming a product that is unparalleled in quality. We’re very proud of that. At the same time we feel humbled by the process as we feed and kill wonderful living beings for consumption and income. Although we are very conscious of the process and we do the best we possibly can, a pig dies at the end of the day and there is no excuse for that. We would like to point to our vegetarian and vegan Kasnudl (dumpling) as an alternative. If you happen to choose something on this page, we ask you to consume consciously and respectfully.
Travel is a very old word connected to travail and error, from Latin and Old French errer, linked to Knights Errant and adventures, to wander and err.
We search for the Loos Bar, an art deco landmark named for the writer Anita Loos. I am sorry no, the bartender informs us, this bar is named for the rebel architect Adolf Loos.
We sip a drink in error and travel is a greasy series of guesses with credit cards. Meander is a Turkish word for a river that meandered and Balkan is a Turkish word for mountains. Once the Turks held the Balkans, but Prinz Eugen threw back the Turkish Siege, he saved Vienna and Belgrade from the feared Ottoman infidels. Prinz Eugen was a patron of the arts and a military genius; now his name graces a budget hotel by the train station.
Consume consciously and respectfully. We open a menu and a mouth and they open a pig. We are conscious, humbled, we open our teeth to learn this stunning taste, we know the body intimately, like the pig learns, learns the honed metal slicing its neck that special day. Don’t go there, don’t touch your face for this virus moves with the speed of venom. Our waitress plays an album by the Contortions; planes eat jet fuel and we are held in the roaring. Greta stands at a ship’s windy rail and bacon cures beside melting glaciers. Airbnb in Venice pushes out another local family and Luciano the guitarist greets us with keys to our apartment by the oil-black canal. A teak speedboat cuts the dark water, its white wake spreading, washing into other people’s doorways. »