The Snug: A Blog

Shoplifting at Dracula’s, cont’d.

Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen. 

Benjamin Disraeli

    Now I am ten. It is a summer dawn, forty-five years ago.  I lie half-awake in my small bed at the Hotel Regina, Trieste, listening to the early-morning sounds of an Italian city: Vespas; Fiats; electric trolleycars; buses; shouts of “Ao” and “ciao”; a radio playing (what else?) an aria (Puccini?). Light dribbles through the shuttered windows. The aroma of roasting coffee and diesel exhaust faintly commingle in the cool dawn air. My parents are still asleep in their separate beds on the other side of the room, one of them snoring lustily.[1]  

    So here I lie in my Trieste hotel bed at the age of ten, unaware (thank God) of the lifetime of striving and confusion and false hope that lies before me, and I stare at the mock-chandelier hanging from the high cobwebby ceiling and I reflect on…the melancholy Adriatic outside? Or the ambient old Italo-Habsburg city and its associations with Maximilian and Carlotta, Franz von Suppé, Franz Ferdinand, James Joyce, Italo Svevo, and Jan Morris…? No, that is what I would reflect on today; that, or my health. But in the pearly-gray light of that Triestine summer morning forty-five years ago I’m thinking about cars. Or rather: a car. Nothing glamorous or exotic. No: a Ford Anglia, to be precise. For the ten-year-old me is obsessed with the latest model (’61) Ford Anglia. The multiple simultaneous discoveries I have made—that Italian versions come in a special pale-green tint, instantly evocative of pistachio gelato, unavailable on the British model; that on their fenders they have orange turn indicators that look like candies or cough drops; that their tail lights are a tasty-looking red and orange instead of solid red; that they boast chrome strips where the banal British version has none—have served only to titillate me further. I long for a scale model of this car. I salivate for the car itself. It has a jazzy profile. I love it.

     But the Boylan family conveyance du jour is not a Ford, or no longer a Ford. The successor to Dad’s old Ford Squire, SYU 729, is a brand-new off-white Renault Dauphine, GE 71495, whose new-car smell, a composite aroma of vinyl, plastic, and paint, I can summon up at will from my olfactory memory files. Just as I can relive that shadowy moment between sleeping and waking, nearly a half-century distant, in triste Trieste. Then it’s over: With a splutter and a hearty smoker’s cough, Dad rises from his bed and, ever the irascible riser, roars at me for something or other (picking my nose; lying in bed with my legs crossed; farting) before retiring into the bathroom and smoking his first couple of cigs of the day, coughing mucally while enthroned. Soon awake, Mum orders breakfast from room service in slow, deliberately-enunciated English, as to an idiot. And so another day begins, and soon we’re on the road again.

    The foregoing is a memory-scrap of a trip we all took to Yugoslavia in 1961. Trieste was our last stop on the civilized side of the Iron Curtain. I still have no idea why we went: It was always a backward place, Yugoslavia, with dusty unpaved roads on which donkeys dutifully pulled carts and lorries lumbered past and police-driven Fiats (renamed Zastava, or “flag,” as in “red”) buzzed by at reckless speeds. My parents and I (well, Dad,  sole designated driver) drove down the Slovenian and Croatian coast to Split, ex-Spalatum, ex-seaside residence of the Emperor Dalmatian–I mean Diocletian–and we spent a night there and another in a place up the coast called Zadar, where I saw a brand-new green Ford Anglia, with Italian license plates. I also recall even lesser details: really excellent ice cream; Arab-type dhows on a blue, blue sea; some grilled something-or-other fish, with delicious rice; surly natives on terra firma; whitewashed walls; the smell of dogshit.

     I remember also us having, a day or two later, a flat tire outside a military base somewhere in the midlands of Serbia and within minutes, with the efficiency characteristic of the militia in even the most inefficient dictatorships, being promptly surrounded by well-armed guards, upon which Dad resorted to handing out cigarettes and matchbooks and beers from his stash and amid much grinning he succeeded in persuading the militia that we were not Amerikanski spies but innocent Swiss-Irish tourists; and he blarneyed on until one of the guys volunteered to change our tire, which he did while Dad and the tire-changer’s colleagues, who were leaning casually on their Kalshnikovs, smoked and chatted in mutually incomprehensible lingos and tilted beers down their throats, a more universal dialect. Mum sat in the car and stared ahead; I sweltered in the back, enjoying the drama, dreaming of cars and other trivia, doltishly unaware that the incident could have turned very nasty, and utterly oblivious to the pluck and bravery shown by my father in the face of Tito’s soldiery.

     In that same year of 1961—year of Algeria and Evian and the Bay of Pigs—we drove in our Renault northwest across France to Mont Saint-Michel. When we stopped in Paris I revisited my old passion for the metro and found it wanting. I decided I was more interested in cars; at that moment in time (this was just pre-Anglia) I was obsessed with the Citroen 2CV, and craved a gray scale model of same. And I could think of little else, even in Citroen-gray Rouen, city of Flaubert and the immolated Maid of Orleans, where I was impressed by the great gilded clock and depressed by the grimy buildings still sooted from war and age and possibly from the ashes of Joan of Arc’s auto-da-fe…and I was most enchanted by a shiny gray 2CV outside our hotel. (I actually did get the scale model I yearned for, later, but the headlights were fragile and soon fell off, as they might have also done had it been a full-size version.) At Mont-Saint-Michel, the fresh wind off the Channel blew through the swaying reeds and the fleecy clouds scudded across the blue sky and the tide rose fast over the causeway and we ate omelets aux fines herbes at the famous and overpriced restaurant of the legendary Mère Poularde, who was then in her late eighties but alive enough to hobble about her restaurant, yelling “Tout est bon? Hein?” Afterward, with cursory attention paid to the residence of St. Michael’s monks, we drove along the coast to the military cemetery at Omaha Beach in Normandy, and the real objective of our trip came into focus—slightly blurry focus for Dad, as I remember him tearfully pacing along the rows of crosses and Stars of David that marked the remains of old comrades fallen on D-Day and, smoking, pointing out to us name after name from his unit: “Benny? Johnny? Jeez, I had no idea. Good God, there’s Leo. Wait a sec. That can’t be Mike the Okie, can it?” Then he closeted himself with the cemetery overseer, a retired U.S. Army colonel, and they rehashed things together over whiskey, Dad no doubt claiming to have spearheaded the invasion with his chums Monty and Ike (thereby guaranteeing he wouldn’t be invited back, a special talent of his he would hone to perfection in years to come). Meanwhile, my mother and I wandered off into the town...what town? Ste. Mère Eglise? Arromanches? I have no idea, but it was a Norman town with half-timbered seaside hotels and cafes with striped awnings, like the one in Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday. The experience gave birth to my mother’s only-ever fiction, a short story about memories of war that I (much later) thought very good, if inconclusive in a quite New Yorkerish way.  But she never published it, and didn’t care to try her hand again. It was up to me to shoulder the burden of the family fictioneer. (Hooray!)

       We traveled much, in those days: to the States in ’63 for my only visit “home” in twenty years (my grandmother’s musty apartment in Wilmington, a living enclave of the 1920s; a motel in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, run by an old friend of Mum’s; New York); to various neighboring parts of France and Switzerland in late ’63; to Rome, via Volkswagen Microvan, and back, via Rimini, Cattolica and the Marches (where my car-obsession was briefly displaced by a preoccupation with miniature scale models of the catamarans that rocked and rolled on the Adriatic waves); and transiently to Wales, the only time I’ve ever set foot in the Principality. There was rain in Bettws-y-Coed and a high wind in Aberystwyth, and for Ireland fair set the wind at Holyhead. Dad and I went over; Mum stayed in London, overdosing on Wodehouse and Dorothy Sayers. It was a very good year for Dad and me, probably our best. We lived together in the endearing squalor of a flat he’d taken on Morehampton Road (of which more anon); we traveled in Ireland hither and yon; once to Waterford, where Dad met the Lord Mayor for tea, and discussed installing electronic bells in the town hall. Another time to Drogheda, and Dundalk, and the border country, then only timidly beginning to smolder again; and once to black-Protestant Belfast, where to this very day the bells my errant-Papist Pa hooked up chime proudly in the City Hall on Donegall Place.

    In that year too, or the next, Reg came to visit. Reg was a Bermudan-but-very-English friend of my parents—but especially of Mum, as I now realize. He was a chap who’d been in the British Army as part of the Juno Beach invasion force, an old-fashioned florid smoking drinker and/or drinking smoker with a short temper and small tolerance for small boys, more specifically the thirteen-year-old sons of women he was keen on (true, I must have been an annoying impediment, if his goal was making or remaking acquaintance with Mum)….Anyway, he’d been the reason for a visit my mother and I paid to Bermuda when I was two, and I swallowed whole the myth that the Pitmans–Reg and his lot–were good family friends. It’s obvious to me now that Dad never liked him at all; how could he, echt-Irisch that he was, and Reg such a Colonel Blimp? It seems odd, though, that Dad so willingly absented himself when Reg was around, unless there were co-respondences of his own underway during his campanological excursions to Germany and Denmark and Italy. (More than likely there were.) In ’64, then, Mum and Reg and I traveled in the little Renault all the way to the Rhine, so Reg could have a dekko at Jerry at last, after hearing so much about the ghastly blighter over the years, don’t you know (yes, he spoke just such a Wodehousian patois). On the day we approached the Siegfried Line at Neuf-Brisach on the French side, he had a drink or two, or probably more, for he was of the heroic generation that thought nothing of abusing its liver and lungs; then we persuaded him to cross the Rhine and spend ten minutes of his life in Alt-Breisach on the soil of the Bundesrepublik, or ex-Reich. He ordered a beer in a kneipe, but the experience proved too much for him; the shades of Colditz and Juno Beach pressed in too close. At the sight of a sleepy and beer-bellied German customs guard in a dark uniform he blurted, “Christ, it’s the bloody SS,” and headed out the door and back, trans-Rhine, to France; and from there, via London, to Bermuda. There some eight or ten years later, mourned or unmourned by all, Reg died a manly death (and probably quite a painful one, poor bugger) of cirrhosis, that manly curse.    

     There was a boozy footnote to Reg’s visit thirteen years later when I ran into his son Ted, even larger and more florid than his da but with a the neo-North American accent of the native Bermudan. This occurred on a bridge in the Loire Valley city of Blois in the summer of 1977. (“Boylan, eh?” “Ted Pitman, as I live and breathe.”) Upon ascertaining identities, we went from café to café along the still and silvery river and became very drunk, and to this day I know not what became of Ted, or why he was in Blois, or how he found me—or indeed whether the thing happened at all…Anyhow, I later heard via unimpeachable sources that Ted’s a rich and influential hotel proprietor in Hamilton, the bustling offshore-finance capital of Bermuda, and something of a local kingpin. If his liver’s still holding out I may try to arrange a tax- and palm-sheltered retirement with him one of these days…. “Oy, Ted! It’s me! Remember Blois?” “Blah? Blah yourself.”   

    My family travels continued. Later I traveled with Mum alone, first in the little Renault, increasingly less new-car-odorous, then in its successor, an equally small but somewhat sprightlier Simca Mille, the car in which I learned to drive. It took me to Spain in the early years of that country’s tentative openness to the world, just before the tide of concrete overwhelmed the Cosat Brava. I saw bicorne-wearing Guardia Civil in their capes, long dusty roads leading into hills, the great cornice above Figueras, then-charming Barcelona, and an industrial suburb called Badalona populated by old men in berets. None of it made much of an impression, except the cable car up Mount Tibidabo. 

But most memorably, this small Simca took us from Geneva to Budapest and back at a time when Budapest was one of the gray commie capitals beyond the Pale, set well back behind a barricade of minefields and barbed wire and the sinister lies of communism. To go there at all then (1966) was a daring escapade, since I was paralyzed with self-consciousness, juggling organs and fantasies—girls, cars--through the long and lonely silences of the night. Still, there must have been something about this pallid, awkward youth, for once we got there the comely Hungarian wenches came on strong. Well, at least one did, over gulas at a tavern in the industrial dump of Tatabanya. (What was I doing with my mother in a tavern in Tatabanya?) And there she was, vast-bosomed, rosy-cheeked, floral-aproned Zsa Zsa or Ilonka, exclaiming such endearments as (per rapid consultation of handy Hungarian dictionary) szeretett! kedves! gyönyörűség! szépség! And pinching my cheeks with strong flour-scented fingers all the while. With au fond, of course, the thundering czardas. Ember! shrieked Ilonka or Zsa Zsa, displaying me to the assembled clientele as if I were a rare display, say a no-longer extinct dodo. Applause all round, from ruddy, lean, chain-smoking Magyar peasantry.

      Of course, the whole country came on strong, in stark contrast to grim Yugo-Titoland; but not until we’d waited three hours at the Hegyeshalom frontier post, surveyed and coldly interrogated by robotic apparatchiks, most of them from other commie countries (Russia, Ukraine, Poland, the GDR), delegates of faceless internationalism. As darkness fell, the strobe lights on the watchtowers went into action, rotating slowly from left to right, right to left, left to right, inspecting the lower depths for telltale signs of escape. Uniformed guards paced, expressionless. Occasionally a Hungarian would bustle over and yell something at us in his native tongue or in one of the many other languages we couldn’t understand. Even my doughty mother was beginning to wilt when finally we were released from bondage at eleven at night, and drove off into the Magyar plain and found shelter in a town called Györ that was dark, and silent, and smelled of cheap kerosene.

    Of the Hungarian countryside, however, I recall an excess of fertility, and color, and jolliness, and harvest festivals; but I may be thinking of the photos in an old Communist Youth magazine. Certainly Budapest itself was fine, although ringed with cheap apartment blocks, a noble sepulcher athwart the bluish Danube under the gray skies of Communism. Still: The view from the hills of Buda was magnificent. And I remember yet my mother's angry hisses in the faded-baronial quarters we managed to find at the Grand Hotel Gellert, when I cranked out some lame witticism in my loud, cracking pseudo-man’s baritone. “SHhhhh! Bugs!” She pointed at the overhead light and made telephone-listening gestures. “They record everything foreigners say!”