Tonight's dish, Broccoli Pasta Surprise, is not really worthy of in-depth analysis or photography. (The surprise is that there's actually nothing except broccoli and pasta.) There has, however, been a development of significance for the word-kitchen: today, on the raid in a charity shop to celebrate being under-budget, I was looking for a new cookbook and came across the personal recipe-collection of Gerard Depardieu and his chef, looking not shabby at four quid. And really, you could give somebody a concussion with that thing. A concussion for under a fiver is value, that's the rule on which all my book-purchases are based.
So from here on you may notice that our menu becomes more... what is it the French say?... poche-laicques.
Anyway, more from the seven-day plan.
I woke early from my restless sleep, long before the sun had clambered up the dark midwinter morning's sky to creep in through my room's lone and dusty window; so early, in fact, that I made some attempt to fall asleep again. But I merely tossed on the mattress, shivering and itchy, looking for a comfortable spot which didn't exist. At length I rose, beat as much dust as I could from my clothes, threw on my coat, and slipped out.
The city was just waking: here and there in the windows I passed beneath, lights were being lit. Here and there I heard the crunch of somebody else on their own journey through the thick snow and thinning dark. All seemed sure of their course and destination, and I saw one man as he reached it and was warmly embraced on the steps of a house; but Vienna had no welcoming doors for me. I floated through it, exploring it as it emerged from the gloom, making half-recognisable shapes, like ruins.
With the corner of an eye I watched the steeple-clocks, and eventually I started to float back the way I had come, a little worried that my uncle should catch Jan and Christian loitering for our appointment. I arrived early, as anxious people do, and paced as eleven inched nearer. The snow whitened to the sun's cautious light.
My appointees rounded the corner just as the bells peeled the hour.
"Perfect timing, you chaps!," I called, waving.
"I am always early, Jan is always late. We average out."
"I am never late. Sometimes the world is early."
I noticed that they were wearing coats of the best fabric and the latest cut, just as they had been last night; but these were hidden now under frayed neckcloths, fuzzy scarfs, low and tattered caps, bags of books and papers, and other totems of the student tribe.
"Listen, we should clear out. My uncle's not taken too kindly to you two."
"Well, that's fair. We haven't taken too kindly to him," said Jan.
Christian nodded sagely. "Anyone who invites us to their dinners should learn to accept the consequences."
"Christian, he didn't invite us."
"Still."
Despite their bravado, we didn't waste any time in moving along a couple of streets and changing the subject.
"So, Ottokar, you're to do Philosophy?," Jan asked.
"Philosophy means just anything nowadays," interjected Christian. "Which faculty are you in?"
"Slavic philology."
"I like it!," said Jan. "I have no idea what 'philology' is supposed to be, but it sounds very academic, the way it swells in the middle, goes up and down. "Philology, dear boy, Slavic philology." 'Slavic' is another good word. Thick."
I looked on him with a newfound admiration: I can't help liking people with an intrinsic sense for words.
"It's the study of languages. Learning them, picking them apart, seeing how they work, and about the literature... I've always been fixated with that sort of thing," I confessed.
"That actually does sound rather fascinating," said Christian.
"Oh, it is! I love words. I like to find out where they come from, and the little differences between them. And you can trace so many ordinary phrases back into history and myth... it is fascinating stuff. Do you chaps have any foreign languages?"
"Oh, the usual." Jan waved a hand. "French, English. Christian, being a barbarian, has none."
"Excuse me, I prefer the term 'German true'."
Along we went down streets I didn’t know. We talked about studies and city life. At first, they asked the questions, but my tongue loosened and soon I was bombarding them with queries about Vienna, its people and their customs. They assured me that our destination, somewhere called 'Kaltenbrunner's', would be an object lesson.
The place didn't catch the eye from outside: an unremarkable facade was pierced by two thoroughly steamed-up windows and crowned by a sign, its paint kept dutifully fresh, bearing a name which, then, meant nothing to me. It was the sort of place one might walk past many times without ever noticing until it was pointed out to you.
Jan and Christian entered reverentially, scuffing the snow from their boots and returning the door to its frame tenderly behind me. Our arrival was announced by the tinkle of a little bell, which cut straight through the piano-accompanied chatter inside. A few patrons glanced up; but, having silently acknowledges our right to be there, they all returned to coffee, cake, and conspiracy.
The place stretched back much further than its facade suggested: it was a cave or perhaps a tunnel, and thick with smoke, steam, and the scent of coffee. I half-expected Osmin the Turk to rise from his houkah and escort the Honoured Effendis to the seraglio. What I got in his stead was a flustered-looking gentleman behind a counter entirely devoid of opiates. He was small and bald and did not appear to mind the steam that permanently covered his round steel spectacles.
"Ah, our young scholar-prince, and his shadow," said the man. "Oh, and you've brought a friend, I see."
"And may he oft return," said Christian. "Ottokar, Hans Wilhelm Kaltenbrunner, proprietor. Hawi, Ottokar Jánkovač, who will very soon be a Philosophy student."
"Delighted, young sir. I look with a kindly eye on all new students, since they keep me in the money. Your usual table's free, will you keep it? You can drag another chair over."
"But of course, old fellow. Three coffees and three Tafelspitzen, that all right, chaps?" We gave Christian our rapid assent. "Thanks, Hawi."
My companions led me to a table at which two of the chairs seemed to have been carefully sculpted to fit their backs; so they had been, over many long evenings.
"You like what you see?," asked Christian.
"I can't see a thing in this smoke and steam, but what I hear and smell is delightful."
"Wait until you get a taste!", said Jan. "Finest Colombian. We think he gets it discount because Simon Bolivar owed him a favour."
"To elaborate, our Hawi has contacts with every cafe in every nation in the world, and thus with all credible revolutionary organisations. He was a professor, until they found out about his 'night-shift work' and blacklisted him, so he vanished for a bit, got another name, and opened this place. It's the old job, he says: keep students under control, teach them something occasionally, and keep a hand in on the illegal book industry."
I gave a suitably respectful murmur. "I've heard a bit about underground publishing. Vienna was a sort of Mecca to one of my old schoolmasters. He circulated journals in Czech."
"It's a damn shame, banning a language. Damn stain on this country," said Christian with sudden conviction.
"Tilts the playing field something terrible." Jan nodded, but spoke in his usual mellow drawl. "It isn't sporting, and we are sportsmen."
"You...?"
"Oh, yes. We smuggle books," said Christian, as if it were nothing much.
"Herr Oberkirch and Graf von Hoyerswerda, Society for the Propagation of Forbidden Knowledge and Dinner Club, at your service."
This was quite a revelation for my second day, but the silence was broken by the arrival of coffee.
"Hmm... that is good," I said, searching for something uncontroversial. "How did you learn about this place? It's the sort of shop that's invisible unless you know about it. I swear, some of them actually appear and disappear..."
"An old magic, that is," Said Christian. "But Jan was raised here. In Vienna, and mostly in cafes. Some Viennese have veins half-filled with coffee-"
"Yes, the coffee-deprived ones."
"-and they can always sniff out dens like these."
"Indeed we can! This is our base. We go the university for the lectures, the library for study, the theater for plays, the cellars for drinks, and the house for sleep. If we're not at any of those places, we're here. Oh, and speaking of the theater, there's money in the ticket-box-"
"There is no 'ticket-box', Ottokar, Jan just goes to the theatre when he feels like it and then tries to dine off the back of Society for a week after that. Heaven knows where he'd be if I didn't keep an eye on him."
"Nevertheless, I can take you chaps to a concert this evening. Interested, Ottokar?"
I nodded keenly; there was coffee in my mouth.
"Damn short notice, isn't it?," said Christian.
"Oh, it's not exactly the Burg we're going to, not going to sell out. But it's Max and that lot, you know? I'm only too happy to patronise their orchestra."
Christian rolled his eyes. "Ottokar, it's going to be a hole in Margereten, I'm warning you."
"That's hardly fair! In Margereten, yes, but a charming venue."
"I'll brave it!," I said through a throat scalded from swallowing the coffee.
"Good on you, Ottokar!," said Jan.
"Fine, then I'll come along to keep the boy safe from your wicked influence."
The atmosphere of the cafe was infectiously chattery and it took us far longer to finish our Tafelspitzen that it should have; but finish we did, eventually, and call for the bill. I fished out my purse, but Jan was having none of it.
"I don't in the least mind people living off my back, Ottokar, God didn't make us all bankers' sons, but they have to be sports and acknowledge it. Christian has a roof over his head thanks to me, but he insists on buying his own books. Some people!," he said, paying. "So, where now?"
"Well, I must go and enroll this afternoon."
"Say, Jan, anything on?," asked Christian.
"Nothing essential."
"Then why don't we go with him?"
"Why not? Ottokar, we shall look after you. You can't trust the Philosophy lot."
"Can I trust the Law lot?"
"That's a very interesting question. You can certainly trust Christian."
We drifted out and along the streets, myself sandwiched between the two of them as we talked away. I started to feel a bit like a student and a native just from a short while of their company. As we drew near the Philosophy building, they decided on the need for a disguise lest a pair of interloping Law students be messily torn apart, and paused to ruffle up their hair and look tortured. I fought a guilty urge to tidy my own hair up a little.
But we passed through the quiet and venerable corridors without anyone being messily torn apart. Students merely spared us a glance as they trotted busily to and fro, and now I once again felt rather an intruder.
Slavic Philology was a humble corner of the place, installed in what seemed once to have been an ordinary town-house, and in it I found the office of my lecturer-to-be: Professor Andrej Macebulski, as his door solemnly proclaimed in brass. My nervous knock met a resounding 'Come in!', and inside I found every surface overflowing with books: German books, Czech books, Polish books, Russian books, Croat books, Slovene and Slovak and Serb and Bulgar books. On the wall were a map of eastern Europe heavy with pins, and spreads of a variety of alphabets living and dead. Completing the effect was the professor, hidden behind a neat but crowded desk and an enormous beard.
For a moment he seemed to look straight through me, silent and surprised. Then:
"Stańczyk!," exclaimed the voice of Christian from behind me in the corridor.
"Keep it down, will you? And shut the damn door!"
Christian obeyed, chastised. Jan was unflustered as ever.
"Apologies, Stańczyk, we didn't expect to see you here. We've brought you a student, that good for a peace offering?"
"Somebody has to rescue him from you two." The professor turned to me. "I take it Il Capitano and Goethe have told you about me? If not, they're even more careless than I had them down for, which would be a historic achievement."
I blinked. "Sorry, who?"
Behind his grandfather-like beard, the professor's face assumed a chiselled-steel appearance. Seeing it, Jan responded rather hurriedly:
"Ottokar, I mentioned we were smugglers?" Professor 'Stańczyk' softened a little. "Well, 'Il Capitano' and 'Goethe' are the, ah, pseudonyms, that we use. This is our leader, Stańczyk. We'd thought he was a professor of something..."
"Just don't go blabbing about it high and low, you cigar-sucking rogue," said the professor, sounding suddenly friendly in spite of his words. "And while you're here, what about the latest haul? That Croat stuff?"
"Safely stowed," said Christian.
"With Waechner?"
"Yes."
"Good! Now, I am sorry, young man, these buffoons distracted me." He extended a hand. "Andrzej Macebulski is the name I teach under." I shook readily: his face had relaxed and become defined again by that great amiable beard; his voice was warm now. I felt bold enough to ask a question.
"So that's not your real name either? Sir," I remembered to add.
"I wasn't born with it, if that's how you define 'real'. And you are?"
"Sorry, sir, Ottokar Jánkovač."
"Oh, a son of Czech?," he said in that language.
"Yes, I'm from Brno, sir."
"Ah, yes. Visited a couple of times, when I've been in that region. I haven't seen as much of Moravia as I'd like to. A pleasant town, if you don't mind the smell. No good in my line of work, though, everybody speaks German. No, a student of the Slavic languages like myself must always go nosing around in the villages."
"A student? I'd have thought I was the student, sir!," I said, with a silly grin.
"We are all students, Ottokar, and language and history are the teachers, but perhaps I have received consistently high marks."
At this point Jan broke in. Entering rooms or conversations, he always seemed to sidle.
"Lovely language you've got there, chaps, but if you're going to keep using it, we should be off."
"Then off with you!"
"Seven at Kaltenbrunner's, Ottokar!," said Jan, as Christian opened the door.
"I'll be there."
"Goodbye, Stańczyk!"
"For God's sake, don't keep calling me that."
'Il Capitano' was dragged away by the exasperated 'Goethe'.
"Ah. You pick your friends well, Ottokar," said the professor when they were gone. "I'm sharp with those two because I know they're made of sound stuff. Being sharp will only sharpen them and me, but they're good boys. They've got everything I need in young smugglers: young enthusiasm, young eyes, young fingers - even a young brain between them."
"Thank you, sir."
"And you've made a good choice of university, too," he went on reflectively. "There's nowhere quite like Vienna in the world," - I had to smile, remembering the same phrase on Jan's lips the night before, but he didn't notice; and anyway, I felt able to say he was right - "And no better city in the empire for a smuggler, ironically enough. If I was in Krakow or even Prague, they'd have caught me years ago, but who'd look go looking for us under the walls of the palaces?"
"Some, perhaps, but clearly not the secret police, sir."
"No indeed! Yes I run the whole show in the university, now, not just Polish stuff. I've been chief for a few years years, since they caught... 'Hans Wilhelm Kaltenbrunner', as he's taken to calling himself. You've met him? Poor man... but very lucky. He'd be rotting in the Spielberg fortress if it wasn't for me! Illegal books and pamphlets is one thing, treason is another. We all helped each-other out after the revolutions, of course."
I was silent for some time, feeling awed by the presence of history. The professor looked pensive.
"So... what's the procedure now, sir?," I said at last.
"Not much. Here's your required reading." He fished the list from one of his desk's many drawers. "Your father paid up front, I'm sure you know, and now that I know you're here you can run along until your lecture tomorrow." He glanced up, seemed to catch something in the expression of my face. "However, since you seem a good lad to me and there's only so much Old Church Slavonic a man of my age can take in a day, let me show you around." I tried not to beam too obviously.
He guided me around all the many corners of his office; he pointed out his maps of the Great Migration, the piles of essays he was marking, his half-finished grammar of Banat Bulgarian, his illuminated collections of folk songs, and some of the earliest Russian letters, inscribed on birch-bark. He showed me all these fascinating contents of his cupboards; and after a moment of contemplation and a look at my eager expression, he revealed the yet more fascinating, illegal contents of the cupboards hidden within cupboards. It was as I was inspecting a volume of first-edition Shevchenko, strictly banned, that he said:
"Now that you've seen the smuggler's gold, Ottokar, you have two options: you can be sworn to secrecy or we slit your throat." I think he was being sarcastic. "Are you with us?"
"Oh, I'll join alright!" Throat-slitting or no throat-slitting, what else could I possibly have said?
"Il Capitano and Goethe can be considered to have sponsored you in," he said with a roll of his eyes. "Our next meeting's tomorrow. They'll show you they way. You'll have to think of a name."
"I've thought of one already, sir. 'Sts. Cyril and Methodius'."
"It's a good one! I shall see you tomorrow, then."
I skipped out of the building and on to the well-trampled snow feeling as if I owned it. I was a student of Slavic philology! I was (almost) a book-smuggler! It was thrilling to think of myself as 'Ottokar Jánkovač, student of philosophy, Vienna', something that stirred my own romantic imagination, rather than the 'Ottokar Jánkovač, schoolboy, St. Maurice' Academy' I had always known. I felt as though I had escaped from something, abandoned some unwanted past like an emigrant.
The tour had taken longer than I'd thought. Seven was drawing on, and I felt that if I were a student now, I ought to go and await it at Kaltenbrunner's and stew in the scholarly atmosphere.
The place was as warm, welcoming, and crowded as before. Less coffee was in evidence in favour of the rightly-praised Tafelspitzen and other heartier fare, and the babble was quieter as mouths worked at overcoming boiled beef rather than the question of German unification. The piano was still playing, and the pianist, on further inspection, turned out to be Christian. He was blind to everything around him, rocking back and forth on the stool in time to his music. I found Jan at their table behind a stack of books.
"Rather good, is he not?" He looked up with a nod at Christian.
"Superb."
"I tinkle the keys myself, occasionally, but not nearly so well. I'm quite out of practice, of course. Looking forward to the concert?"
"Of course!"
"Tell you what, I'll introduce you to one of the violinists, who I've just spied over there. Maxi Eberstark, he's..." He leaned forward and whispered: purely for the effect, I surmised, "A book-smuggler. We call him Münchhausen for such purposes, but he and I knew each-other in another context, so to me he is Maxi. We go back a bit, shall we say."
"The professor..."
"Stańczyk!"
"...Stańczyk recruited me to you lot. He said I knew too much already. I'm to be taken along to the meeting tomorrow, apparently."
"Splendid!"
Jan led me to a very intense-looking fellow. He had a pair of those little spectacles that balance precariously on the nose, and a head of maroon hair that was escaping the confines of its combing at the edges. He was reading a very intense-looking book by Karl Marx.
"Ho, Max!"
"Hey, Jan," said Max the violinist resignedly, not looking up.
"Ottokar's coming to your concert tonight!"
"Wonderful." He did look up at the mention of my name. "Maximillian Eberstark, pleased to meet you."
"Ottokar Jánkovač. I'm from Brno, I've just enrolled with the department of Philosophy to study Slavic philology."
With those words, I seemed to have caught his elusive interest.
"He's also our newest recruit," Jan put in. Max placed his bookmark with care and closed the tome of Marx, then shook my hand.
"You've found us fast, Ottokar. I was in my second year when I discovered the Society. Have you heard that story?"
"Jan mentioned that you went back a way."
Max chuckled without a smile. "I was doing the entertainment at somebody's binge. One has to stay alive. Jan was steaming, and barged onto the band-platform shouting that there was an Italian plot afoot in the ballroom to kill us all. I was obliged to restrain him and help return him to his dwelling. He vomited several times. I only found out about the smuggling the morning after that."
"Max and his lot do a lot of charitable stuff," said Jan hurriedly. "Enormously admirable people. They play at balls to pay their costs and then do concerts all over, you know, Margereten, places like that. A spot of culture for the masses, what, Max?"
"Such is the principal," said Maxi, who didn't, I think, much like the sound of 'the masses'. "But now that you mention it I have a rehearsals to be attending."
"Of course."
He hurried out.
"Don't mind him. He actually does have last-minute rehearsals, and he's never late for them. Damn good chap, just awfully in a knot over, you know, mines and factories and that."
'Mines and factories and that' were a distant and ominous shadow for me then - as indeed for all Europe, I suppose. From my later childhood I'd been vaguely aware that my father's money, in short supply though it always seemed to be, must come from somewhere: it soon began to dawn on me that this 'somewhere' was the part of Brno I didn't frequent, the sprawling and stinking part, it's equivalent to 'Margereten, places like that'. Tomaš Jánkovač worked as a clerk for one of the pencil manufactories - above the toil and sweat, but their unmistakable odours drifted up to find him, and followed him home: whenever he fell through the door and into his chair, the colour drained out of him by exhaustion, I could smell them on him. But then he would always ask me how my day at school had been, and nothing was said of the factory; I knew that he didn't want to speak of it, when he'd left it behind him for a few hours.
I had steered well clear of Marx and his type. I read books to go on journeys across the distant imagination, but theirs only rubbed my nose in the worst parts of reality - to say nothing of being frightfully long. Jan and I silently agreed to avoid the subject – as indeed did all Europe, I suppose.
"Hoy! Christian, come over here!" Christian, who had been playing away, oblivious to all developments, blinked. "Over here!"
Irritably, he conceded the piano mid-tune and returned with us to our table. I had just started to think of it as 'our'. There we dined: humbly, but I much preferred it to the extravagance of my uncle's service.
It occurred to me suddenly that I had left his household in the early morning, without explanation, and never called back. I tried to feel irresponsible, but all I actually felt was 'good riddance!'. After dinner, Jan produced another of his customary cigars and we talked away the time until seven, when we payed and fell out onto to the dark streets.
It was snowing again, piling up on our backs and on our caps and in our hair as we tramped our way into Margereten. The new snow was a mercy: it hid the ugly sights and smells we passed, burying everything in perfect white. This lent some natural grandeur to the rude little concert hall where we joined a throng of patrons: huge, tough men in their thirties, women hardly less sturdy, all visibly just scrubbed for the occassion. Their clothing was not ragged, they were far too scrupulous for that, but certainly gave the impression of having been worn all week. In their presence, I felt an inexplicable urge to hide my nimble pink hands, so unlike their callused red titans; but they greeted us with a certain eye-rolling acceptance.
We shuffled into our places: The fit was tight, the chairs could do with repair, but what struck me was the almost-total silence of the place. Conversation was limited to a subdued, respectful murmur; all eyes were fixed to the frayed curtain that was the only thing marking the edge of the stage. I had never seen such reverence at any concert or play, and it dawned on me that this was the only music many of them would hear for days.
Then the curtain rose - that is, somebody tugged it aside by hand and bound it up - and everything around me vanished.
It wasn't really a very good orchestra; it was a collection of good instrumentalists, which isn't the same thing. But they played furiously: passion juddered audibly in their notes. For the next couple of hours, there was nothing in the world for me except the sound of the music: all that I saw was the conductor's baton weaving, soaring, plunging, as if it was making every sound in the hall by its frenzied effort. Effort, effort was the word: every piece they played (I was far too busy listening to wonder what it was) was a challenge to be overcome.
Jan turned to me at one point while they were tuning up for something new, and I was shocked to see that he had removed the cigar from his mouth and was holding it aloft in a languorous salute.
"I've never seen an actor displaying half the depth and range of emotion in several hours of theater as a conductor in one piece," he said, hushed but enthused. "Look at him dance! Is he directing the music? Is it directing him?"
I saw something in him then that I hadn't before. His drawling was as smooth as ever, his stance as slouchy: he was still every bit the scoundrel, and I heard that keen, bemused appreciation of the absurd he had displayed at my uncle's dinner. But there was the absurd right in front of him, dueling frantically with empty air, or perhaps his own music - and he was accepting it, applauding it. Jan Oberkirch was a scoundrel, in a cheerful way, and a hedonist, but he had as much of a weakness for the best in life as unique drinks and interchangeable girls.
And as for Christian, he didn't speak at all. He was somewhere else altogether, I think.
The steps of the concert-hall, cold and crowded, seemed a very riot of sensation after four senses had spent so long with nothing to do. The workmen were hurrying home: I didn't feel so out of place among them now. My friends and I lingered on the steps.
"It's been an excellent night, you chaps! Vienna does know how to make people welcome. I should hope I'll see more of you, but I must be off. Studying starts tomorrow!"
"Come now, Ottokar, it's only eleven!"
"Jan doesn't sleep, I should warn you."
"At the very least, I must insist on getting you drunk. I shall finance the undertaking. How a man behaves when he is drunk reveals a great deal about him. A man who commits outrages against his wife...," I winced silently, "...is at bottom a thug, for example, and would solve every problem with his fist if he could. Christian, on the other hand, tearfully recites poems by Müller and then looses the ability to walk unaided."
"And Jan, who God made backwards, becomes polite to men and chivalrous to women. Then he sings sentimental songs-"
"You sing along!"
"-And finally starts dancing with other chaps."
"You dance!"
Their banter washed over me as we stepped down to the street. A solitary snowflake alighted on Christian's nose. He melted it with a contemptuous glare.
Vienna was stirring restlessly in its sleep, dreaming dreams of parties, crimes, lovers, and plotters. Some of the dreams were drifting along the streets. I wondered where they had come from and where they were going, as Jan led us gently but surely to an establishment that kept its doors open all night.
After this point, my memory begins to dissolve. So do those of my companions, perhaps fortunately for us all. A few pearls emerge from the murky depths, however: welcoming windows... hearty fires... Jan singing the Andreas-Hofer-Lied (rather beautifully)... Christian's eyes, like a pair of steamed-up windows into his soul... someone challenging me to a duel with an umbrella... spotting various animals and saints in the smoky patterns of the ceiling... someone asking for an address in a surly voice, and Jan giving it as the Imperial Palace of Hofburg... lying on my back in a police cart, contemplating the infinite heavens...
All are the lovely golden-brown colour of finest Bavarian.
Author’s notes:
Somewhere in there I even advanced the plot! It’s all lies, of course: this story is not really about smuggling books at all, and I don’t even tell you what it is about until like chapter 11. Much of this is just me continuing to go around pointing at things and saying ‘Look! It’s the 1850s!,’ but then you need a bit of that at the start.
Is this stuff historically accurate? –ish. I’ve stuck fictional people in important places, made up some locations, and probably portrayed Hapsburg censorship as somewhat less clueless than it was. But I hope my people think and interact in a passably 1850s way, which is much more important than rigour about facts and dates. If I may say so, I know far too many facts and dates about the 1850s; but I think there’s a line somewhere between believable and pernickety.
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