TRUNCATED CITY

...When somebody says, "I wonder if you will be passing by this morning," I do not ask him why—for he would not only decline to tell me, but would also be annoyed by my naive and embarrassing gaucherie...

...In hopeful anticipation of the still-hesitant warmth of spring, the royal Reberniggs, the family which for several generations has provided G.E.R...

...It is quite instinctive, when my telephone rings, to be spoken to and to reply in veiled language, conscious that a third party is dutifully registering the conversation on a dictaphone record, to be run off if at all interesting for the benefit of the M.V.D...

...Before the war the circus in Vienna had a well-heated, permanent home way out in the Prater, near the Danube...

...So tickets for two children and two adults to see that circus cost about as much as three adult tickets for the Opera...

...Standing in the queue recently, waiting to contribute to their support during the lean months of winter by booking seats for a Saturday children's matinee, my eye was struck by a gigantic icon of the late Red Czar of all the Russians, superscribed in Cyrillic lettering, "Slava Velikomu Stalin"—"Glory to Stalin the Great...

...This is the end of Europe...

...In truncated Vienna since the war, you get so used to strange spectacles, which must arouse the curiosity of any visitor from the West, that their incongruity no longer impresses...

...The rest of the debris of the East Station has been removed...

...In some cases they do—Americans especially claim that officialdom recognizes the need to stretch points to the limit of elasticity...

...But you can generally recognize the transition as you pass from the reconstructed houses in the West to the largely neglected ruins in the East...

...I may not stop once on that 120 kilometer stretch, no matter how hot the day, how inviting the wine gardens, or how bitter the blizzard...

...How use doth breed a habit in a man...

...Even in the West, house-owners are apt to leave the stucco facades shockingly shell-pitted and crumbling, out of short-sighted greed, allowing their property to deteriorate rather than carry through maintenance repairs so long as socialist-inspired rent-restrictions limit their profits...

...It does not seem strange to me that while a glittering new Westbahnhof—a blaze of shining steel, glass, and neon-lighting— in Western-occupied Vienna has arisen from the ashes of the shabby pre-war structure, the Stations within the Russian Zone should still stand much as the bombing and shelling left them eight years ago...

...No more for me the familiar pre-war delights at Vienna's doorstep—the Vienna Forest, its babbling trout streams, its warm spring plages, its vineyards, its once-elegant weekend hotels...

...Before the war, the Eastern Station— the Ostbahnhof—stood just opposite the South Station...

...It would never dawn on me now to telephone anyone outside Austria without giving his name, street, and house number in addition to the same details about myself, specifying the language in which I intend to talk—so that a snooper with the right language qualifications can be notified to listen in—although the Allied Commission has, purely nominally, registered my number as "censor-free...

...Of course I realize —as automatically as you realize that you must pay the cost of a telegram—that a copy will still reach the Russian censor...

...I was puzzled as to what a fragment of the Acropolis, obviously built no later than the worst neo-classicist period of the late Francis Joseph, could be doing just opposite the Sudbahnhof...

...For here, close to the Landstrasse where Metternich once said metaphorically that Asia began, today it really does begin...

...Aus-trians can go where they will in Austria...

...hereditary monarchs of the circus world—producers, acrobats, domp-tems, clowns, and tinseled queens of the tight rope—have set up their tents close to the much-bombed Sudbahnhof...

...The building stood in what is now the Russian sector and has consequently never been rebuilt...

...Then the thought of that building gave me the clue...

...Little wonder that we penalized citizens of the Occupying Powers who submit perforce—and, by use, tamely—to these extraordinary conditions, should sometimes expect our own authorities to do a little here and there to alleviate them...

...Since the circus-folk—and their expensive livestock, too—have to live in unproductive idleness for half the year, they make up on the summer swings what they have lost on the idle merry-go-rounds in winter...

...III Holding a British passport, I cannot even visit the American or French zones (by the other corridor road) without a special Russian permit...

...Not I. I dare not leave the narrow confines of the city boundaries, save by one road or railway going straight to the Semmer-ing—to the British Zone...

...I am neither surprised nor annoyed that letters from outside Austria whose senders disregard that warning all arrive stamped "Opened by Allied Censorship"— eight years after "liberation" and the end of hostilities—even though my name and address are nominally classified as "Exempt from Censorship...

...It means the consumption of a lot of time and gasoline that, in nine cases out of ten, your telephone cannot be used to convey information, but only to summon you here, there, and everywhere...

...How the censor reacted when, after he had been notified that the "language of communication" would be English, my small son grabbed the phone to remark to his Grannie in the west of England, "Googie-googie-gah!," I have no means of ascertaining...

...Use has bred in me the habit of living cheerfully as an inhabitant of a beleaguered city in which all its native born citizens are free...

...I realized that my Greek ruin was it—or part of it...

...It was burned out and blown to fragments when the retreating Nazis made their last stand against the advancing Red Army in 1945...

...In other cases, the Western Apparatchiki—alas, the Russians monopolize only the name, but not the breed—are expert both in digging up red-tape regulations, devised for normal conditions, and in applying them to the very abnormal conditions under which the "Westerner" in Vienna lives, too accustomed by long usage to realize just how fantastic they really are...

...Formerly on the foreign staff of The New York Times and the London Herald, Gedye is now free-lancing from Vienna for the London Observer and The Progressive...

...II Here are some of the other unusual features of life in Vienna which use has so far bred a habit in me that they seem perfectly normal: There seems nothing strange to me, after eight years of it, in my letterheads bearing two addresses— one, my physical address in Vienna, superscribed, "For ALL Letters From Abroad...

...Since no travelers can entrain here for Asiatic Europe, nor any escape from there to Vienna, the Austrians have abandoned the portico of the Ostbahnhof to the only traffic it can still deal with—Russian troop and supply trains...

...His books on European politics include 'The Revolver Republic," "Heirs to the Haps-burgs," and "Betrayal in Central Europe...

...Few people are prepared to sink money on buildings in that sector today...

...GEDYE, one of the best-informed European correspondents, has covered major developments in Central Europe for more than three decades...

...It covered, apparently meaninglessly, most of a strange structure—a portico of ionic columns standing naked in a patch of wasteland which should obviously have been flanked by long extensions on either side...

...Once I was forced to stop on this corridor road in winter to remove snow chains...

...There are no street barriers in Vienna between Eastern and Western sectors, as in Berlin...

...No editor will give his real views on election prospects, no Party leader discuss the plans of his Party, no government, official give me the low-down on any question of the day, no diplomat furnish any information whatever in response to my queries on the telephone beyond the fact that he is quite well, thank you—because to do so would be simultaneously to give the same information to the Russian M.V.D...

...They are all "Russian Zone"—where all but we nationals of the Western Occupying Powers can move freely...

...in consequence I spent 26 hours in Red Army custody and was dragged to Vienna, under heavily-armed escort by the apparently drunken Red Army captain responsible, and labeled "spy" until I was released by the Red Army Kommandature...

...Even to do this I have to carry a special "Grey Permit" in three languages, issued by my own authorities for a month at a time, which, together with my passport, is severely scrutinized by the Red Army control post en route...

...As a national of one of the Occupying Powers, my press telegrams are privileged—they bear a "censor free" stamp...

...a little later...

...The portico stands—to the Glory of Stalin, late dictator of all Europe beyond the Curtain...

...The stamp only prevents him from mutilating it, and avoids from one to three hours delay until he finds time to read it...

...It shows only in a vast, drafty tent which would be a death-trap for children when the icy winds of winter sweep down from the snow-covered Alps across the plain...