I. The River That Ignores Us

Some journeys are measured in miles. This one was measured in sentences — my father’s, which I had been carrying, unread, for sixty years.

The Austrian Airlines flight came down over the Marchfeld in the late afternoon and I understood, with the embarrassment of a man who has prepared too long for something, that I had no idea what I had come to do.

The other passengers had itineraries. Schönbrunn, the Kunsthistorisches, an evening of Mozart performed by musicians in period wigs for people who would applaud in the wrong places. There is nothing contemptible in this. Vienna sells itself honestly enough, and what it sells is real: the city did produce that music, those paintings, that arrangement of stone and proportion which announces to anyone arriving from the east that they have entered the presence of an idea about civilisation.

My own list was shorter and would have looked, to any of them, deranged. An apartment building. A street sign. A courtyard where a synagogue used to be. A section of a municipal cemetery. A wall in a small park behind the Ringstrasse. Six or seven addresses, most of which do not appear in any guidebook and one of which no longer exists in any sense a surveyor would recognise.

I had come, I told myself on the flight, to see where my father came from. This is the sentence one uses. It has the advantage of being unfalsifiable and the disadvantage of being false.

What I had come to do — I did not know this until the fourth day, standing in a courtyard in the sixth district, and I will come to it — was to find out whether the stories were true. Not factually true. I had the documents; the facts were not in question. I mean something else, something harder to admit: whether the world my father described had ever possessed the density he gave it. Whether Vienna had been the place he made it in the telling, or whether a boy driven out at seventeen had spent the following eighty-five years elaborating a city that never existed at that resolution.

He died three years ago, at a 102. It is a strange arithmetic. He outlived the Reich by 78 years, outlived nearly everyone who could have contradicted him, and in the end was the sole surviving witness to his own childhood. A man in that position is not lying when his descriptions grow more vivid with the decades. He is doing what memory does when it is the only remaining copy.

I came, then, as one comes to a text of uncertain transmission. Not to venerate it. To collate it.

That first evening I walked down to the Danube, which took longer than I expected and required crossing several roads designed by people who did not anticipate pedestrians with this particular purpose. The July light held past nine. The river went brown and then gold and then a colour I will not attempt.

It is not a beautiful river. Everyone who writes about the Danube feels obliged to mention that it is not blue, and then to make something........

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