A Time of Birds by Helen Moat

Author:Helen Moat
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Saraband
Published: 2020-05-17T16:00:00+00:00

Heading into Slovakia, the changes were immediate. At the border, the customs buildings lay empty, weeds squeezing through broken concrete, render cracked and windows smeared with grime. Communist-era high-rises filled the skyline and the cycle path was cracked and uneven.

We left the main road and followed the cycle path as it swept north again to the Danube, then east along its banks. Still following the line of the border, we passed a pair of bunkers, one converted to a museum. Now, the concrete, humpbacked bunkers lay like beached whales in fields of weeds and yellowed grasses. The Czechoslovakians had built these fortifications in the 1930s as a defence against the Germans. Later, a border was created to keep its citizens in – the Iron Curtain. During the Cold War, this area had been heavily manned, barbed wire strung along the border in hostility. How quickly the barbed wire had unravelled in the dying days of Communist rule, when Eastern Europeans had flooded into Austria from Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Now the border soldiers were gone, the lookout posts and the barbed wire too. I marvelled at the open land between the two countries. I could have dismounted from my bike and wandered between Austria and Slovakia at will.

At New Bridge, leading into the heart of the city, we passed a curious observation tower, part retro with its brutalist Communist architecture, part futuristic with its UFO-shaped viewing platform. Across the river, Bratislava’s castle gleamed white on the hillside in the watery sunshine. We cycled into the old town, the cobbled bricks in the pedestrianised streets shifting below the wheels of my bike with the rainwater that had oozed through the cracks, and on past a bronze figure pulling himself from a manhole. It felt like Bratislava was at sea.

In keeping with the watery Bratislava, we booked ourselves into the Botel – an old cruising ship anchored on the Danube that looked like it hadn’t been renovated since the seventies. It was filled with swirly carpets and moth-eaten curtains, and stank of stale cigarettes and cheap coffee, but we liked the feel of the water beneath our cabin beds and the open decks overlooking the river. More than that, it was cheap – a fraction of the price of our modern hotel in Vienna.

*

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.