DIARY
FERDINAND MOUNT The Round Table talks which are dis- cussing the future of East Germany are held in a nondescript, school-like building set in a park of spindly birches somewhere in the grimy suburbs of East Berlin. In the anteroom, little cakes are laid out on paper doilies like a Women's Institute market day. Nobody stops you wandering into the hall where a Catholic priest and a Protes- tant pastor are presiding over an oblong, hollow table. The government spokesmen are solemn-faced, dark-suited, not easy to distinguish from the clerics except that they are fatter. The Opposition leaders incline to wear sweaters and beards like escaped horsehair stuffing, although the most im- pressive of them, Wolf Henrich of New Forum and Wolfgang Schnur of Democra- tic Awakening, are dark and handsome with a hint of suppressed panache. The talks are low-key, tentative. Nobody inter- rupts or seems to react. Voices are hushed, sometimes drowned by the chatter of the people munching cakes outside. They might be some ecumenical group discus- sing Inter-Faith Fellowship. In fact, they are discussing why the government has not yet disbanded the secret police. But then I suppose there is no need to raise your voice when you can call 150,000 people out on to the streets of Leipzig each week.
As you approach the Berlin Wall, you hear, from 200 yards away or more, the sound of hammers tapping. They say Erich Honecker can hear it from his hospital bed In La Charite, overlooking Checkpoint Charlie. The sound is both eerie and cheerful, a mixture of Wagner's dwarfs and Walt Disney's. The souvenir-hunters leave holes in the shape of swelling clefts which expose the bars reinforcing the concrete. The effect is not unlike those anti- totalitarian sculptures of the Reg Butler Period — Life limping after Art again, not even very good Art either.
The Lenin Museum in Prague is closed for technical reasons'. But the Gottwald Museum, just behind Wenceslaus Square, Is still open, with its life-size illuminated bronzes of communist heroes glowing at each other at the fop of the grand staircase: Lenin gripping his lapel in familiar pose opposite Klement Gottwald, wise and be- nign, on a pedestal which looks suspicious- ly like a filing cabinet. Among the dozens of photographs of the repulsive Gottwald In the exhibition, oddly enough, not one slows him in the company of Stalin. The nicest exhibits are the uniforms worn by the Young Spartacists in pre-war displays ---- blue shirts and tops for the girls, with sailor collars and cuffs, and Chilprufe
singlets for the boys. 'Is that place still open? I thought we'd closed it months ago,' exclaimed Rita Klimova in her feisty New York English — she interpreted for Havel throughout the revolution and is now off to be Czech ambassador in Washington. 'Well, it was a bank before it was a museum, and now it can be a goddam bank again.'
The.Central European temples of patis- serie are not what they were. The choco- lates we bought at Demers in Vienna have turned out to be dried up and uneatable. The Sachertorte I ordered at Gerbeaud's in Budapest, where the waitresses wear little white boots like skating-boots, might have come from Mr Kipling. On the other hand, I had a really delicious gooey slice at my - anonymous carbuncular hotel on the Pra- gue ring road. Pastrycooks too have their price.
AFord Motor Company executive I met on the plane to Budapest told me that somewhere in southern Moravia there is a man with the finest private collection of vintage motor-cars left in the world. Not only does he have an unrivalled number of Hispano-Suizas and Bugattis, he is also politically unfussy and has acquired limousines both from the estates of defunct gauleiters and from the fleets of departing Soviet proconsuls. Which will be the first to beat a path to his now open door Lord Gowrie, Lord Carrington, or Lord Montagu?
Crossing back into the West at Trieste, I felt none of the old sense of liberation. These days, that sort of relief would probably be experienced only on coming out of Albania. Or perhaps not even there, if one is to judge by a recent article in the Garden, the journal of the Royal Horti- cultural Society, by Primrose Peacock. entitled 'Exemplary Albania'. She records that: the Albanians' fondness for flowers was immediately apparent. . . . I saw individuals carefully cutting a buttonhole, but there was no pillaging, vandalism or litter. I was told that the garden belonged to the people to enjoy the beauty and scent of the flow- ers. . . . No serious visitor to Albania can leave without admiring the national spirit of independent self-sufficiency.
Her only problem was that 'I found that most people dislike cameras, so I had to be careful and not get too close to them.' Even in Albania, it seems, there is but- tonholing and buttonholing.
In a crowded Trieste fish restaurant (they are all crowded and the gentle, elderly waiters have scarcely room to push their steel trolleys of skate, squid and mullet between the Triestines who eat in a serious fashion, their droopy moustaches sweeping the plate), I found myself next to a hunched old man, in his late seventies at least but dressed in a careful, old- fashioned, bohemian style — soft leather jacket, floppy collar and cravat, spectacles propped high on his ancient brow. Surely this must be some lingering remnant of the Trieste intelligentsia, one of those 80-year- old baroni described in Richard Bassett's Guide to Central Europe who spend their time at the Café Tommaseo disputing points of Virgil with the waiter. With his air of exasperated gloom, he seemed to have tottered straight out of the pages of a novel by Italo Svevo, perhaps Trieste's most famous son (there is not much com- petition). What, I enquired, was his profes- sion? 'I am electronics engineer but I not decide yet how to live life.' A real Svevo character in fact, and pretty drunk too. `Did you happen to know Italo Svevo?' Of course, my uncle was his brother-in-law.' Excited by what must be nearly the last surviving link with that charming and melancholy writer, I asked if he had any recollection of him. `Svevo was nothing. Trieste is nothing. But Svevo nothing, nothing. Shakespeare is good. I see Sir Laurence Olivier Amleto 15 times.' I had one more go. 'Why you want to know about Svevo? Svevo nothing.' Which is what Svevo himself was told nearly all his life and why he spent most of it running his wife's paint business, but it is just what a Svevo character ought to think about his creator.
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