[In The Wall in My Head, we feature an excerpt from David Zabransky’s brilliant book Any Beach But This. The story opens with a scene in Madrid, at the Museo Nacional del Prado, with a meeting between a young Ukrainian woman who has fled to the West with her British boyfriend, and a new acquaintance; another young man from the West. The meeting unfolds according to our expectations: the man meeting the Ukrainian Polina, reacts with surprisingly convincing disdain for her odd mannerisms, her studied air, her general lack of “ease” in the free and democratic air of the liberated West. His characterizations of the fiery and carefree Spanish women, in contrast to the “watercolor” specimen before him, intrigue, even as they offend, and this is where Zabransky’s true story begins to unfold, just as we think we have gained proper footing. The chapter we’ve included is a lovely contemplation of what freedom means, and what it truly means to “deserve it”; is the speaker of the beginning of the story right? Does it go only to those on whom it fits most becomingly? Or do those who enjoy it cautiously have equal claim to it? With a deft sleight of hand, Zabransky changes protagonists, and soon it is Polina who takes on the role of narrator, and the reader finds himself in the middle of a thoughtful and beautifully considered story on all of these issues, and on the complications of life after the fall of the Iron Curtain. We’ve provided a small advance look at the piece over here, do take a look, and I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we have.—Rohan Kamicheril, editor]

ANY BEACH BUT THIS
David Zábranský
(Translation by Robert Russell)

Democracy on the loose!—Here I am in the café of the Museo Nacional del Prado, thinking of Vienna.

Bartlett (the guy I flew to Madrid to see) warned me about Vienna. He said that’s where Hitler learned to hate the Jews. “He was born in Austria, but to get his show on the road he had to move to Munich. Vienna couldn’t stomach his paintings—those amateur daubs of his—or his Nazism. Vienna’s way is different: in-depth destruction. Instead of attacking from the outside, it destroys from within.”

Why go to a town where waltzes sound like marches and marches sound like waltzes? Why go to Vienna at all?

*

The moment I landed at Schwechat I realized Bartlett had got it wrong. I was surprised at how fresh the Viennese air was. If Vienna were Lagos or Delhi there would be two Viennas—the tourist one and the real one—and being a tourist I would naturally have seen only the former. But Vienna is not Lagos or Delhi. What I saw was Vienna.

Italians strolled around in shorts, with bits of clothing round their waists and cameras round their necks. Austrians stepped out of cars and walked past palaces, past the unchanging backdrop of the democratic West that is everywhere the same.

Of course you are surrounded by history (this is Vienna, after all!)—so much history it can be quite daunting. All those pictures in the galleries, all those plays in the Burgtheater, all that music in the concert halls—it can get quite scary. But here in Vienna they lay that vast weight of history and culture on you so gently you hardly feel a thing.

Waiting, credit card in hand, in the queue at the Albertina ticket desk (my pockets full of fliers of every description, behind me a group of Italians in shorts and sandals arguing about their flight home, all around me modern art and architecture, the laid-back lightness of the West), I recalled Bartlett’s words and had to laugh out loud—then apologize to the Italians. Neither in Vienna, nor in Italy, could anyone learn to hate the Jews: Freud’s house is now a museum, and so is Mussolini’s birthplace in Predappio.

(As we stroll through Vienna or Madrid or an Italian village, do we ever pass houses and apartments that will one day be museums? Sure we do. But won’t they be the houses and apartments of movie stars destined to play Mussolini or Freud in some yet-to-be-made film?) I ordered a fresh orange juice.

Madrid is awash with oranges—picked in Andalusia by Moroccans, Poles, Rumanians, Ukrainians, etc. The Moroccans stay on after the harvest, but the Poles, Rumanians, Ukrainians, etc. return home. So Madrid is more and more awash with oranges picked by Poles, Rumanians and Ukrainians, etc. and less and less with oranges picked by Moroccans. The Ukrainians pick oranges and go. The Moroccans pick oranges and want to stay. But what Spain wants is picked oranges, not Ukrainians, Moroccans, etc. Spain doesn’t want any of them; it just wants the oranges they pick.

Da-da-da!
Dum-da-da-daa!

*

A couple of tables away I spot a young couple—honeymooners, lovers? I’m not sure about him, but she is certainly not Spanish. Her hair is too fair, her skin is too fair, her features too Slavic. Her manner lacks a certain type of femininity natural to women born under a scorching sun. Her body is incapable of that rapidity, that severity and simplicity that seems to relax every muscle under their skins. Unlike Spanish women she has no vestige of the animal about her, of the beast that seeks out the shade. Her cheekbones are not prominent, her lips are not half-parted in a constant sucking-in of air, nor does her body remind you of a sculpted wooden torso. Unlike Spanish women she does not look like an animal tormented by sun and thirst. Nothing about her suggests primal suffering or physical thirst or physical fatigue. Or, for that matter, physical passion.

Unlike Spanish women she seems fluid, washed-out—in fact she reminds me of a watercolor, an artist’s attempt to express disillusionment with the present, nostalgia, or at any rate some feeling that feeds on the past, not like the feeling I get when I look at those boldly striding Spanish women, confident in their bodies and clothes and gestures.

She gets up and goes to look at a poster for an exhibition in the Prado. Then, left foot turned out, hips relaxed, she starts fiddling with the end of the scarf draped casually round her neck, first winding it onto her finger, then unwinding it until the scarf hangs once more against her blouse.

She does this several times, until the scarf slips off her shoulder and drops to the floor. Quickly, glancing around in furtive embarrassment, she stoops to pick it up.
She’s out of place here—she’d be out of place even in Vienna. Here years of democracy have eliminated embarrassment from public life without a trace. Maybe it survives as an endangered species in private life, in intimate situations. Maybe there is still a place for embarrassment and coyness in the bedroom (possibly as the most effective form of titillation, since it’s the only place you’ll find it). But on the street, in cafés and museums, in planes, trains and offices, it has become extinct.

Just as History in the West entered its last lap after the Second World War (since History now only affected those on the other side of the Wall) and came to a final halt (waving cheerfully as it crossed the finishing line on the last stroke of historical time) when the Wall collapsed and the East ceased to exist—so, too, embarrassment has become a thing of the past. Instead we have absolute naturalness. Man is the measure of all things. In the post-war era Western man blossomed at an unthinkable pace. No democratic or humanist system in history has ever borne such luscious human fruits, so unselfconscious, so self-possessed, so natural. It was the naturalness of the Viennese, and of the tourists in Vienna, that transmuted the vast weight of culture and history into—dadada!—a bland amusement for tourists.

Watching her—she’s still looking at the poster for a Tiepolo exhibition—I feel increasingly sure she’s not from Madrid, she’s not from the West, and she definitely doesn’t belong in the West.

Where does she belong? In the Eastern reservation. On the other side of the fence that still separates the West from the East (although historically speaking the East has collapsed and the West is helping itself to more and more of it). She belongs on the other side of the fence, in that place where occasionally they bark, but otherwise just gaze in envy, at the West.

“Hey, there’s Polina!” says Bartlett, reaching over the table with one hand to shake mine while waving to her with the other.

“Sam’s a teacher. Where was he born? Bradford. And Polina’s from Ukraine. She was born in Ukraine and most likely she’ll die in Sam’s arms in Madrid. What a wonderful fate, eh Polina?”

Again she’s embarrassed. She says “they” don’t want to disturb us.

“They met in Ukraine. She talked him into leaving Ukraine and taking her with him. Good-bye and good riddance! Said she couldn’t lead a decent life in her native land, same as me in fact. Good-bye to all that. Grappa?”

*

“She’s not very natural,” I say, as he returns with two glasses. “I was watching her. She kept twiddling her scarf round her finger. Then she dropped it and looked awfully embarrassed. She’s out of place here. She doesn’t belong in the West.”
“She doesn’t belong in the West because she’s not natural? Nonsense! She doesn’t belong in the West because she’s not original. Her main aim in life is to look the same as everyone else, but in her attempts to be the same she’s never had to deal with the terrifying need to be different—which has now become absolutely suffocating, even here.”

“But fancy making such a fuss about a scarf! I wonder what she’d do if she were naked? Imagine: her blouse falls apart at the seams, her skirt drops round her ankles, she steps out of it; maybe she’s still holding her glass; maybe it slips out of her hand and shatters on the floor, but she pretends not to notice and carries on walking round the room. She’s just the same as before, except now she’s naked. Then and only then will nobody doubt she belongs here.”

[. . .]