For S., my prince
I have never been to Graz. This little city with a so-called ‘mountain’ in the middle, and a clock tower clock tower on top: I don’t know it.
That would be a good start.
In reality, or perhaps unfortunately, I have lived here for twenty years. This city has become so familiar to me that I do not know what I have left to tell about it. I don’t want to moan, but put simply: Graz is a medium-sized city with medium-sized provincialisms. Graz has never been my home and the older I get, the pokier it feels. Every day the city and I are locked in a bout of petty arm-wrestling. Graz tries to push me down, and I push back. I often talk about leaving soon. In my mind I forge farewell plans and parties. For the moment, though, I am still here. If ever I am not, I might well regret that there is, after all, a lot I don’t know about Graz.
So I go to places, spaces and spots that I have never seen before. Perhaps I might fall in love with Graz if I learn to see it with the curiosity of a newcomer. That would be nice. Then, wherever I do end up going, I could take with me a little bit of nostalgia for the city.
The newsagent’s on Dietrichsteinplatz, right next to the Pamukkale kebab shop. The South Section fire station. Uhlgasse. A bench between the tram stops at Teichhof and Tannhof beckons, I park my bike. Behind me is a stream. I smoke a cigarette; a match explodes between my fingers. Unfortunately all this leads nowhere.
Big dogs do not frighten me as much as the threat of particulate matter. ‘Look, I used to live just over there,’ says S., ‘and there was where the P. family lived.’ The P. family is the family of a mutual friend. I say ’How nice,’ and look round furtively. We are standing by a church where I once engaged in a lewd act, up against the wall. It was dark, and I was drunk; it was only later that I saw the sign saying ‘Please treat this site with respect’. This site is a burial mound from the year dot. A beautiful place. That’s life: we have to forgive ourselves regularly. I take S’s hand and we carry on, stopping for a glass of sauvignon blanc whose smell and taste is as intense as the cellar of my childhood. Afterwards we talk over red wine poured for us at the Parkhouse. And, let me tell you, it is not often that S. and I leave anything in a glass.
Three or four hundred steps up into a beautiful wood. It is a place that S. and I have been looking for. The first time we got lost I found myself in the middle of a herd of cows: Graz sets itself up as a city, and that’s what it reeks of, but otherwise it’s just a suburb of a bigger whole. With cows. At the top we stand on rotting tables and feel like kings of the world. I pick up snail shells to add to the collection I’ve arranged at my workplace. Then I drop them again, so that I won’t crush them in my coat pocket on the long walk back. It would make me sad to find just a handful of snail shell shards when I get home. I pick one up again and notice that it is still occupied. Don’t panic, I’ll set you back down in the soft moss and hope that you’ll carry on for a long time yet. On the way back we see a deer and it sees us. A brief hesitation, laden with mutual respect. There we all stand, hesitating for a moment in mutual respect.
S. says: If I were a rich prince I would buy this wood, and lots of the woodland all around it, so I can have a bit of peace and quiet. He is not rich, S., but he is prince of my racing heart and I would like to show him my love right here and now on a bed of moss, though not before I’ve evacuated all of the sweet snails we might endanger in the process.
Graz, oh Graz, how I would like to swiftly bid you farewell. I practically count the days until I can say adieu. Perhaps I will be sad afterwards, since I am no good at goodbyes. But I would really like to take my chances. Me still being here is just the open end of a provisional arrangement.
In the garden of my inner courtyard, once, a long time ago, a pheasant came and strutted up and down. No one could say where it came from. (Had it floated down from the Schloßberg? Or even heaven perhaps?) He calmly took his time finding out how to get out of the courtyard again. Pheasants need rather a long run-up to launching. Aerodynamically awkward birds, are pheasants. At last he discovered the correct diagonal in the much too small garden of my courtyard and launched himself and was up and away and never seen again. I am likewise an aerodynamically awkward bird in a courtyard that is much too small.
On the same evening I go running and I run badly and without any motivation. Even though it’s a balmy spring evening, I just can’t get into it. I see a podgy little hedgehog ahead of me on the pavement, so I stop and shoo him back over to the side. Although, of course, I have no idea which side is his side. I just don’t want him to stay on the road and get run over and squashed and then if I go running tomorrow evening all I would see would be hedgehog puree. I would never be able to forgive myself and the whole film has run through my head before I have even slowed down and stopped. Sweet hedgehog. The sweet hedgehog has to go back to the left side and I make noises (shoo) and I clap and wave my hands because I’m not sure how to make my sweet hedgehog react. In the end he does react, and runs back to the left. Then, as I’m running on with a goofy smile all over my face, I can’t help but think of the two kings’ children who cannot reach one another. Perhaps the sweet hedgehog has a beloved lady hedgehog waiting for him on the other side of the road, but there’s always some animal lover like me who comes along and insists on getting their daily girl-guide kicks out of relocating supposedly needy animals—see ‘snail’ above. And then I think: Perhaps I too am like this hedgehog, who would so like to get to the other side, away from Graz, to S., my king’s child. And then the pieces of the puzzle slot together: the prince, the motivated pheasant, the hedgehog looking for his mate: me and the wild animals of Graz. How I just couldn’t get away from Graz. It will make a nice text. Bursting with motivation and ignoring the stitch in my side, I run home.
The next day, I see a dead mouse on the tram tracks on Sackstrasse and think: Oh no. It’s the mouse that didn’t manage to get across the tracks and out of Graz in time. I am the mouse and the mouse is dead and perhaps my idea wasn’t such a good one after all.
The Strassgang cemetery, the Strassgang swimming pool. The lock and key museum in Wienerstrasse. The Wiki-Akademie, which also runs courses in first aid. Places I have never been to. The men’s loo at the Literaturhaus. No, that’s not true, I have been there once and whom did I meet there? My uncle! (Not as long and confusing a story as it might sound).
As for the men’s loo in the Running Horse pub, I really haven’t ever been in there and didn’t dare go in even though S. urged me to several times. I was supposed to look at the board in there. Just one look. I wasn’t brave enough. I don’t like going into men’s loos, because you never know what’s on offer there, where the urinals are and so on. Magda, who wasn’t at all fazed, went and had a look and reported back that someone had written on the board: ‘A quarter-bright moon runs far too fast through the window. And quarter-bright streaks tear through my dream.’ It’s the beginning of a poem. What’s more, it’s one that I wrote, and S., the romantic, has scribbled it on the board in the men’s loo. I feel both very touched and terribly wimpy.
A few days later I grab my oldest child’s small dog and take her for a walk. The dog is called Amy and is really very small. She also really does not want to go for a walk, it’s too hot. On Schröttergasse we meet an even smaller dog: it’s a baby Chihuahua called Lea. She’s white, the size of a tennis ball and closely resembles a rat. Today I wanted to let the dog lead the way. With Amy on the lead, I thought, it should be easy to find new, unfamiliarplaces. If need be, from a dog’s perspective.
All Amy finds, however, is a chewed bit of schnitzel; she is torn between wanting to eat but not wanting to face the armies of ants descending on it: her appetite wins but only briefly, and she jumps back and pulls me onwards, her muzzle ringed with ants.
On Grabenstrasse, it seems like the same piece of graffiti has been there for the past twenty years: ‘I LOVE MY NA.’ I love the ‘I LOVE MY NA’ graffiti. It’s been puzzling me for a long time now. Since it’s not far from the Grabenkirche church, was it perhaps a burst of Christian feeling from a slightly incompetent speller (‘I LOVE MY NAYBOR’)? No, the most likely theory is that it’s a girl’s name. But which name? The only ones I can think of are Natasha and Nathalie; in twenty years that’s all I’ve come up with, and Natasha and Nathalie are not at all typical Graz names.
(S. comes up with a rapid and effortless solution. Obviously it must be ‘I LOVE MY NASAL INFLAMMATION’, since my GP has his practice in the same building. Freedom for nasal inflammations!)
I remember timidly that there once was a time I didn’t know the places I now do, or which of these places made the greatest first impression on me. The armoury. The inner courtyard of the Franciscan monastery. The Institute of Archaeology in the main building of the university. The Art Garden. Starhemberggasse. Exactly. It does work.
I first saw the inner courtyard of the Franciscan monastery in 2003. I don’t usually remember dates. I remember the year in this case because in 2003 culture was enjoying a surge in Graz. One of the most accessible places was the place of silence, and this was situated in the Franciscan monastery. I went there because you were supposed to go there to write a poem or paint a picture (you could take paper and pens from a wooden crate in the corridor). It is a beautiful courtyard right in the middle of the city and hardly anyone knows about it. You can sit on a bench and listen to the garden, you can pray if you like. But you don’t have to, and that is nice. I wrote a poem there and posted it into the box set out for collecting them. This was my contribution to the Year of Culture 2003. Conversely, the contribution made by the Year of Culture to my biography was the chance to discover this oasis of contemplation.
In the evening, I am very happy to discover a new street called Kettengasse. I found it while cycling aimlessly and unhurriedly around my neighbourhood. I cycle along it, it is short and small. I come out onto Schwimmschulkai and immediately increase my speed. On Schwimmschulkai there is nothing aimless going on; everyone, whether pedestrian, cyclist or rollerblader, has a destination: to get to the other end as fast as possible. Since Schwimmschulkai is one of the few quiet, car-free stretches of straight road in Graz, it is used more or less round the clock by fitness freaks as a haven for stressful leisure activities. My children and the children of at least half of Graz learned how to ride a bike here and were at the same time initiated in the rough manners of the local traffic. More than once they were abused by muscle-bound runners, who had not reckoned on encountering children on their way to a better self. I am myself a runner, but since all the runners who I see here or in the Stadtpark or on Keplerstrasse (it will always remain a mystery to me as to why there are always runners on the most congested roads in Graz) seem to carry with them a whiff of tormented ill health, I try not to run too often, at most three times a week. At the slightest signs of indisposition I postpone my fitness session without the slightest twinge of conscience. A big dog watches me from a balcony; he has put his front paws up on the railing and is looking down at me. A grey-white cat crosses my path and I am glad. Dogs leave me indifferent, while I am instantly delighted by every cat’s air of distinction.
Unfortunately we have a dog. There’s nothing I can do about it. I gave in once, on the grounds that it is educationally advantageous for children, and now we have a typical apartment dog, like so many in Graz and other cities. As I have previously mentioned, he is not very big. Whenever he doesn’t want to do what I want to do, I grab him by the harness and carry him like a handbag. And now rewind, because anyway it’s not a he, it’s actually a she.
If I had never been to Graz, I wouldn’t know Eisengasse, the Langedelwehr or Starhemberggasse. Here, and in other places, live people who either want nothing more to do with me or who I’m not talking to. We have each deleted the other from our lives, mostly without any great dramatics. Starhemberggasse is, like a few other addresses in Eggenberg, a bit of a sink district. The city authorities have tried to change this: brightly coloured balconies have been put up with EU funding and so on, but the people who live there can’t be changed and they don’t want to change anyhow and I don’t know whether I should find this a good or a bad thing. I think it’s probably good, but I certainly don’t want to move to Starhemberggasse. I once had a friend on Starhemberggasse. She went the way of many of my friends: at some point she stopped being of interest to me. I never tell people when this happens, instead I look for and find an excuse and then I ruminate on it for so long that it eventually becomes a reason. The reason is then so strong and so convincing that I don’t even need to communicate it; I break off all contact and give it no more thought for a long time. An ex-boyfriend lives on Eisengasse and barely have I started to write this passage when I bump into him on Humboldtstrasse: I’m waiting for the number 63 bus and he cycles past and we look each other in the eye. It is a moment of ungodly intimacy and we are both glad when it’s past and we can forget it again.
The number 63 bus takes me in the direction of Raaba, which is definitely beyond the limits of Graz, so I’m afraid I can’t tell you about the bizarre events that befall me there (it’s Easter).
Perhaps this is how it is: I want to get away from this city so that I’m not constantly reminded of the fact that I’m unwilling to get along with people for longer. They get boring, I could claim, or annoying in some way or other. Very few people manage to keep up the excitement. I don’t like it when something is predictable. Yes, this is true not just of people but also of my whole life. I don’t even have a bad conscience about it. Perhaps, you could say, partly in my defence, that the boredom that Graz induces in me is transferred to my friends and ex-friends. Perhaps it’s not completely my fault.
And Graz is so small. I’m forever meeting people who I would rather avoid: ex-boyfriends, and the said friends from whom I have suddenly and inexplicably broken off contact. Dentists and account managers. It’s enough to make you weep. I don’t know how other people stand it. And I only very rarely hear of people who have actually properly left, gone far, far away. To Vienna, Berlin or Sardinia. That is the furthest anyone I know has gone. Some—young, unattached or artists—manage by having homes in a number of sophisticated cities.
In my bed there is a dip and this dip is quite new. I have never been here before, in this dip, and it reminds me of something wonderful. And then it occurs to me, the way Graz really is.
The municipal sports ground in Andritz. Giovanni’s Garden. The Waldorf school on the Ries. The little chapel, if it is a chapel, which you see when you’re waiting at the Weinzödlbrücke bus stop. Just opposite, on the slope that’s been cleared of trees.
S. says he would prefer not to think about whether I will at some point move nearer him or not and I slap myself on the forehead and think: This was once my motto too. That was how I was once. I must remember what this city means to me, what it is now. When I go for a walk with S. or even when S. isn’t here. It is after all where I live.
The best times in Graz are when I go to Lendplatz in the morning to buy steak or a few radishes. Then a glass of wine, all in work time. I go to get birthday presents at department stores that act as though they were in a far bigger city, as if they were Harrods in London, for instance. There, opera singers sing around the Egyptian Escalator, so Kastner is bound to start doing it too. Kastner is a spectacle completely lacking in understatement. I don’t like it, but it is the only place that stocks the casino-style poker cards my son needs, at the age of seventeen. Soon he will be eighteen and does not want to leave this city. Then he should stay here, I think, while picking his cake up from the cafe opposite. On the cake is written: Long live David.
The very best times in this city are when my flat is filled with people, friends, eating and drinking. Reading and making music, we’re all happy. The downstairs neighbours with the newborn baby already think badly of me, although they only moved in a few weeks ago. The balcony has a crack in it. It is made of natural stone, someone explains, and it’s almost impossible – though not totally impossible – that it would fall down from the terrible strain exerted on it by drinkers, smokers and eaters. I do not want to die here in this city by falling from my balcony. I want to leave Graz before my balcony disintegrates; I vow to myself that I will. Standing on my balcony you can see the Schlossberg in all its glory; this is something I will miss. I will miss being able to experience at close range the New Year’s fireworks, up close and yet at a safe distance from the drunkenly perched beer bottles. Sometimes you hear an ambulance racing along Grabenstrasse, its siren blaring, it doesn’t stop, which means that some stupid driver hasn’t got out of the way in time, and now the ambulance is standing there and wants to drive on, but can’t. The whole courtyard becomes a siren.
My best times in this city are when S. is at my side. This would also be true elsewhere, but S. is from here. Now he lives somewhere else, but it is a good thing about Graz nonetheless, I think to myself, that it was involved in producing something as lovely as S.
It’s as if I am welded to this city. I like to escape into my daydreams. Then I dream myself to where I am from (which is not Graz) or wherever I want to go (which is everywhere). Many of my loved ones do not understand what I have against Graz. Then I try to explain, but somehow can’t, so I usually stand up and finish with: It’s just that I’ve been here too long.
Friedrich-von-Gagern-Allee. The Büchersegler, a new bookshop. The Metahofpark, where I’ve only been once and that was a long time ago. There’s a lot that isn’t true here, it’s mostly a pack of lies, it occurs to me. I’m going to take the arm-wrestling motif off the first page and insert it here and make it into a closing poem. This is how it goes.
We are locked in an arm-wrestle, my city and I
She pulls me down, I push back
I’m not very good at it
She has more persistence, and pigeons
The pigeons don’t bother me so much, what annoys me
Are the people, and that I know everyone, everything
And that every person greets me on every corner
No one kisses me
This city is little, my spirit is big
Or at least I like to think so. The birds twitter
Down from the mountain into my garden
The mountain is everywhere, wherever you are is mountain
Which doesn’t have to mean you are trapped. Now that’s something I like:
You can really breathe here.
I like passing so many lovely places
I’ve had many adventures here, first kisses,
Sex, and so on. You know
Three thousand ways through strange streets.
I actually don’t really know what bothers me,
about this, my little city.
And yet again she’s won outright.
Translated from German by Kate Howlett-Jones
Kate Howlett-Jones was born in the UK in 1971. She graduated from Oxford University in 1993 with a Masters in French and Russian. She lives in Graz, Austria and works as a translator, cultural journalist and writer.
