Neither Here Nor There (28 page)

More ridiculousness: it is the world’s largest producer of sausage skins and false teeth. It is a notorious tax haven, the only country in the world with more registered companies than people (though most of these companies exist only as pieces of paper in someone’s desk). It was the last country in Europe to give women suffrage (in 1984). Its single prison is so small that prisoners’ meals are sent over from a nearby restaurant. To acquire citizenship, a referendum must be held in the applicant’s village and, if that passes, the Prime Minister and his cabinet must then vote on it. But this never happens, and hundreds of families who have lived in Liechtenstein for generations are still treated as foreigners.

Vaduz is not terribly picturesque, but the setting is arresting. The town nestles at the very foot of Mount Alpspitz, 6,700 feet high. On an outcrop directly above the town is the gloomy and fortress-like royal Schloss, looking uncannily like the Wicked Witch’s castle in
The Wizard of Oz.
Every time I looked up at it I expected to see those winged monkeys flying in and out. Curiously, despite centuries as a backwater, Vaduz retains almost no sense of antiquity. The whole town looks as if it were built twenty years ago in a hurry – not exactly ugly, but certainly undistinguished.

It was a Saturday and the main road through the town was backed up with big Mercedes from Switzerland and Germany. The rich must come at the weekends to visit their money. There were only four hotels in the central area. Two were full and one was closed, but I managed to get a room at the fourth, the Engel. It was friendly but outrageously expensive for what it offered, which wasn’t much – a lumpy bed, a reading light with a twenty-watt bulb, no TV, and a radio so old that I half expected to hear Edward R. Murrow broadcasting details of the Battle of Monte Cassino. Instead, all I could get was polka music, mercifully interrupted at frequent intervals by a German-speaking disc jockey who had evidently overdosed on sleeping pills (or possibly on polka music), judging by the snappiness of his delivery. He ... talked ... like ... this, like someone trapped in a terrible dream, which I suppose in a sense he was.

The sole virtue of the room was that it had a balcony with a view over the main church and town square (really just a strip of lawn with a car park) and beyond that a handsome prospect of mountains. By leaning perilously out over the street and craning my neck at a peculiar angle, I could just see the Schloss high above me. It is still the home of the Crown Prince, one of the richest men in Europe and possessor of the second-finest private collection of paintings in the world, outdone only by the Queen of England. He has the only Leonardo in private hands and the largest collection of Rubenses, but a fat lot of good that does the eager visitor, because the castle is completely off limits, and plans to build a modest national gallery to house a few of the paintings have yet to get off the ground. Parliament has been debating the matter for almost twenty years, but the thought of parting with the necessary funds has proved too painful so far and evidently no one would dare to ask the royal family (worth an estimated $1.3 billion) to dip into their treasure chest and pass down some bauble to get the ball rolling.

I went out for a walk and to check out the possibilities for dinner, which were not abundant. The business district was only a couple of blocks square and the shops were so pedestrian and small-town – a newsagent’s, a chemist’s, a gift shop selling the sort of gifts that you dread receiving at Christmas from your in-laws – that it was impossible to linger. Restaurants were thin on the ground and either very expensive or discouragingly empty. Vaduz is so small that if you walk for fifteen minutes in any direction you are deep in the country. It occurred to me that there is no reason to go to Liechtenstein except to say that you have been there. If it were simply part of Switzerland (which in fact it is in all but name and postage stamps – and even then it uses the Swiss postal service) nobody would ever dream of visiting it.

I wandered down a pleasant but anonymous residential street where the picture windows of every living-room offered a ghostly glow of television, and then found myself on a straight, unpaved and unlit road through flat, still-fallow fields. The view back to Vaduz was unexpectedly lovely. Darkness had fallen with that suddenness you find in the mountains and a pale moon with a chunk bitten out of it hung in the sky. The Schloss, bathed in yellow floodlights, stood commandingly above the town looking impregnable and draughty.

The road ended in a T-junction to nowhere and I turned back for another look around the town. I settled for dinner in the dining-room of the Vaduzerhof Hotel. Two hours earlier I had been solemnly assured that the hotel was closed, but the dining-room was certainly open, if not exactly overwhelmed with customers, and people also seemed to be coming in through the front door, taking keys off hooks in the hallway and going upstairs to bedrooms. Perhaps the people at the hotel just didn’t like the look of me, or maybe they correctly suspected that I was a travel writer and would reveal to the world the secret that the food at the Vaduzerhof Hotel at No. 3 Städtlestrasse in Vaduz is Not Very Good. Who can say?

In the morning I presented myself in the dining-room of the Engel for breakfast. It was the usual continental breakfast of bread and butter and cold cuts and cheese, which I didn’t really want, but it was included in the room charge and with what they were charging me I felt bound to empty a couple of little tubs of butter and waste some cheese, if nothing else. The waiter brought me coffee and asked if I wanted orange juice.

‘Yes, please,’ I said.

It was the strangest orange juice I’ve ever seen. It was a peachy colour and had red stringy bits suspended in it like ganglia. They looked unnervingly like those deeply off-putting red squiggles you sometimes find in the yolks of eggs. It didn’t even taste like orange juice and after two polite sips I pushed it to one side and concentrated on my coffee and cutting slices of ham into small, unreusable pieces.

Twenty minutes later I presented myself at the checkout desk and the pleasant lady there handed me my bill to review while she did brusque things with my credit card in a flattening machine. I was surprised to see that there was a charge of four francs for orange juice. Four francs is a lot of money.

‘Excuse me, but I’ve been charged four francs for orange juice.’

‘Did you not have orange juice?’

‘Yes, but the waiter never said I’d be charged for it. I thought it was part of the breakfast.’

‘Oh no, our orange juice is very special. Fresh-squeezed. It is—’ she said some German word which I assume translates as ‘full of stringy red bits’ then added – ‘and as it is
razzer
special we charge four francs for it.’

‘Fine, splendid, but I really feel you should have told me.’

‘But, sir, you ordered it and you drank it.’

‘I didn’t drink it – it tasted like duck’s urine – and besides I thought it was free.’

We were at an impasse. I don’t usually make a scene in these circumstances – I just come back at night and throw a brick through the window – but this time I was determined to take a stand and refused to sign the bill until the four-franc charge was removed. I was even prepared to be arrested over it, though for one unsettling moment I confess I had a picture of me being brought my dinner in jail and taking a linen cloth off the tray to find a glass of peach-coloured orange juice and a single slice of ham cut into tiny pieces.

Eventually she relented, with more grace than I probably deserved, but it was clear from the rigid all-is-forgiven smile she gave me as she handed me back my card that there will never be a room for me at the Hotel Engel in Vaduz, and with the Vaduzerhof also evidently barred to me for life, it was obvious that I had spent my last night in Liechtenstein.

As it was a Sunday, there was no sign of any buses running, so I had no choice but to walk to Buchs, half a dozen miles to the north, but I didn’t mind. It was a flawless spring morning. Church bells rang out all over the valley, as if a war had just ended. I followed the road to the nearby village of Schaan, successfully gambled that a side lane would lead me to the Rhine, and there found a gravel footpath waiting to conduct me the last half-mile to the bridge to Switzerland. I had never crossed a border by foot before and felt rather pleased with myself. There was no border post of any kind, just a plaque in the centre of the bridge showing the formal dividing line between Liechtenstein and Switzerland. No one was around, so I stepped back and forth over the line three or four times just for the novelty of it.

Buchs, on the opposite bank of the river, wasn’t so much sleepy as comatose. I had two hours to kill before my train, so I had a good look around the town. This took four minutes, including rest stops. Everything was geschlossen.

I went to the station and bought a ticket to Innsbruck, then went and looked for the station buffet. It was shut, but a news-stand was open and I had a look at it. I was ready for something to read – Ziegler’s relentless body-count of fourteenth-century European peasants was beginning to lose its sparkle – but the only thing they had in English was the weekend edition of
USA Today,
a publication that always puts me in mind of a newspaper we used to get in primary school called
My Weekly Reader.
I am amazed enough that they can find buyers for
USA Today
in the USA, but the possibility that anyone would ever present himself at the station kiosk in Buchs, Switzerland, and ask for it seemed to me to set a serious challenge to the laws of probability. I thought about stealing a look at the paper, just to check the Major League baseball standings, but the kiosk lady was watching me with a look that suggested this could be a punishable offence in Switzerland.

Instead I found the way to my platform, unburdened myself of my rucksack and took a seat on a bench. I allowed my eyelids to droop and passed the time by composing Swiss riddles.

Tiring of this, I switched, for no explainable reason, to multiple-choice Adolf Hitler-Eva Braun jokes, but I had only completed one—

—when the train pulled in. With more than a little relief, I boarded it, pleased to be heading for yet another new country.

I walked through the station at Innsbruck with an almost eerie sense of familiarity, a sensation half-way between déjà vu and actual memory. I hadn’t been to Innsbruck for eighteen years and hadn’t thought about it more than once or twice in that time, but finding myself there now it was as if it had been no more than a day or two and the years in between had never happened. The station appeared not to have changed at all. The buffet was where I remembered it and still serving goulash with dumplings, a meal that I ate four times in three days because it was the cheapest and most substantial food in town. The dumplings were the size of cannonballs and just as filling. About as tasty as well.

I took a room in a small hotel in the centre, the Goldene Krone, and spent the dying hours of the afternoon walking through slanting sunshine that bathed the town in golden light. Innsbruck really is an ideal little city, with solid baroque buildings and a roofscape of bulbous towers. It is carefully preserved without having the managed feel of an open-air museum, and its setting is as near to perfection as could be imagined. At the end of every street you are confronted by a towering backdrop of mountains, muscular and snow-peaked beneath intensely clear skies.

I walked the paved footpath along the River Inn, swift and shallow and clear as polished glass, passed through a small park called the Hofgarten and drifted out into the residential avenues beyond: long, straight, shaded streets lined with stolid three-storey houses that disappeared in the treetops. Many of them – too many surely for such a small city – contained doctors’ surgeries and had shiny brass plates on the walls or gates announcing
DR G. MUNSTER/ZAHNARZT OR DR ROBERT SCHLUGEL/PLASTISCHE CHIRURGIE –
the sort of offices where you know that you would be ordered, whatever the complaint, to undress, climb onto the table and put your feet in the stirrups. Bright trams, empty but for the driver, trundled heavily past from time to time, but all the rest was silence.

It occurred to me that one of my first vivid impressions of Europe was a Walt Disney movie I saw as a boy. I believe it was called
The Trouble With Angels.
It was a hopelessly sentimental and naff fictionalized account of how a group of cherry-cheeked boys with impish instincts and voices like angels made their way into the Vienna Boys’ Choir. I enjoyed the film hugely, being hopelessly sentimental and naff myself, but what made a lasting indent on me was the Europeanness of the background – the cobbled streets, the toytown cars, the corner shops with a tinkling bell above the door, the modest, lived-in homyness of each boy’s familial flat. It all seemed so engaging and agreeably old-fashioned compared with the sleek and modern world I knew, and it left me with the unshakeable impression that Austria was somehow more European than the rest of Europe. And so again it seemed to me here in Innsbruck. For the first time in a long while, certainly for the first time on this trip, I felt a palpable sense of wonder to find myself here, on these streets, in this body, at this time. I was in Europe now. It seemed an oddly profound notion.