Budapest to Amsterdam River Cruise I

How does one encapsulate a 16 day river cruise from Budapest to Amsterdam, a 1,134-mile voyage along the Danube River, the Main-Danube canal, and the Main and Rhine Rivers -- through 68 locks and past an untold number of churches, castles, medieval towns, and a few major cities into one coherent blog article?  As information on the sites we saw is readily available on the web, I decided to truncate my write up, using some (and I do mean some) of the nearly 1,000 photographs I took on the trip to tell the tale with more of a personal, impressionistic view.  I've also borrowed a little from AmaWaterways for some of the summary information.

On Aug 31 we flew from JFK to Frankfurt, connecting to Budapest, on two very nice flights on Lufthansa which served up some edible airline food and provided a decent entertainment selection.  I found John Wilson's Orchestra's Rodgers & Hammerstein at the Movies there, and played it over and over again as it includes Richard Rodger's original orchestration and my favorite waltz, the Carousel Waltz.  I had never heard Wilson's album before and it was a surprise to find an English orchestra playing R&H so faithfully.  Time passed quickly with the jet stream at our backs and we landed in Frankfurt before we knew it, and smoothly made our connection to Budapest, made it to our hotel in the late morning, so we had the rest of the day to explore the city (more on that later).

The next day we boarded the beautiful AmaCerto, a relatively new and luxurious ship built specifically for river cruising.  As such, it is long -- some 440 feet --  with a beam of just 36 feet, just narrow enough to allow about three inches between the walls of some of the locks we passed through. It is unlike any ship we've been on.  Everything collapses on the deck including the bridge when we are on waterways with low bridge clearance (five days in a row at one point). Our captain, Tom Buining, or the second captain, his 23 year old son (who is about 6'5" and bears some resemblance to Tab Hunter), sticks his head out of a little hatch when passing under low bridges.

The ship is powered by twin 1350hp Cats with plenty of stern and bow thruster power to deal with the swift currents of the rivers when docking or turning. The ship even has to plan where to take on their 320 tons of fuel taking water depths and bridge heights into account. We were running out of water after the last lock on the Danube, with only 6 inches under the ship and the draft of the ship is just 4 feet -- the same as my 40' boat in Connecticut!  My conclusion is that a river ship is a much tougher ship to handle than an ocean vessel.  Imagine having to run most nights and parts of days with the challenges of river traffic (very heavy in parts -- industrial barges galore), the strong current, depth issues, navigating the multitude of locks and trying to clear bridges.  And the Captain and his son do it themselves -- 6 hours on and 6 hours off for 14 plus days!  I have a profound respect for their abilities.

Naturally, the first day on board we met our fellow passengers, one of the more interesting challenges on a river cruise vs. ocean-going vessels.  On the latter, there is always a place to go if you want to be alone, or if a couple wants to eat by themselves.  Not so on a river cruise.  I called it forced socialization, just one sitting for meals, one dining room (except for a very small specialty restaurant, dinner only).  There are pluses and minuses to this, nice to meet some interesting couples but also dreadful to sit with people who are traveling together in groups and you are the third wheel.

There were only about 155 people onboard, nearly half from Canada which I found surprising, nice people of course but many traveling in groups.  However, we found a few couples with whom we were extremely compatible politically & socially so we tended to dine with them. Amazing how fast a group of disparate strangers form into cliques with one another and proceed to ignore everyone else.  It's high school on an upper class, adult scale. 

One couple seemed to have such disdain for the rest of us that they deliberately choose to eat alone at every meal, taking a table clearly set up for four and commandeering it for themselves!  We probably sat, though, with 1/4th of the people, and have found most of the conversations begin with geography.....where are you from?  And then it either continues with some mutual interest or just peters out in a natural course. Both lunch and dinners were lubricated by wine every day, the wine following the particular country we were in.  I defiantly enjoyed my diet Coke or just water, one person asking me why I bothered to book a cruise where the wine flowed freely.  Judging by how inebriated a few became (one person actually fell down a flight of stairs on our first night on board in a drunken stupor and had to be hospitalized in Budapest), I was fine with my choice.  I usually asked for a special vintage of diet Coke which usually confused the waiter.

But AMA generally did it up first class in their culinary choices and execution.  All the bread is baked on board and that is my weakness.  Oh, for another piece of dark multi-grained Pumpernickel!

Getting back to couples, we generally sat with Mark and Edna -- some 10 years younger than we, or Ronnie and Mary -- some 10 years older.  And then, another couple, Susan and Dominick, about our age and with whom we had much in common. 

Mark is a purser for a major airline, a dedicated tennis player (I was too at one time).  Edna was with the airlines, but now is a librarian and so we had much in common with her as well.  They were very upbeat and fun to be with.

Ronnie and Mary, on the other hand, were the mystery couple, Ron never disclosing his last name, joking that he was with the witness protection program.  But we were simpatico politically, enjoying discussions of music, particularly Sondheim, and feelings about Germany and WW II.  Ron was a young boy in London during WW II and remembers his mother throwing herself protectively on him while bombs were dropping and also watched British soldiers getting strafed by German fighter pilots on a beach.  As he said, "I have smelled death."  Therefore, while we toured some of the German cities, he would bristle at any attempt by the guide to whitewash national culpability.  He also took one of our fellow passengers to task for declaring that it was a "shame" that one of the quaint towns we visited was destroyed by allied bombing during the last month of the war.  It was a war!

I gave Ron a reading list as he would like to write his memoirs.  I gather he was a luminary in the fashion industry, not only by the way he dressed (obviously NOT in my Lands End ensemble) and given some of the people he knew well, such as Audrey Hepburn.  He too was fun to be with given his droll sense of humor.  

Actually, if there is one major take away for me with this particular trip it was the elephant in the room of WW II.  Everything has been rebuilt.  Germany is thriving.  And yet, there is that ugly history of not only extreme German nationalism, but genocide (never heard that word mentioned in the tours). As we transited the Rhine, I felt the presence of the War and my father's involvement in it as a Signal Corps photographer. I've included this photo of him in another part of my blog before, but it bears repeating.  It was a photo taken of him -- and published in Stars and Stripes at the time --  as he filmed movements over the banks of the Rhine, with the following caption: Even if he doesn't savvy German, Sgt. Bob Hagelstein, Signal Corps camera-man from Richmond Hill, Queens, for this Nazi sign on the banks of the Rhine at Neuss, forbidding photography in the area.

Neuss is only about 25 miles north of Cologne, from which my great grandparents immigrated in the 19th century.  So, all along the Rhine I wondered where he was active, but when we visited Cologne and went to the massive Cologne Cathedral, I stood on the lower steps and said to Ann that I've seen this before.  When I returned, I looked at my father's scrap book and sure enough there are photos of him at the bombed out Cathedral.  I include the before and after photos here.

Regarding photos, I've attempted to include some of the representative ones, day by day.  They are sometimes labeled only with the place. To identify each and every site, particularly the names of the churches and castles would be an incredible chore.  I found that two weeks is a long time for a river cruise and if we do one again it would be for a shorter period, with perhaps a longer land based stop at either end.  Some of the medieval towns have already merged in my mind.  Luckily I have the photos to tell them apart but if we played a game of pick-up sticks with those pix, I'd be hard pressed to get them in sequence!  So here is some brief information, day by day, with photos below

---------------------------

Day 1 ARRIVE BUDAPEST, HUNGARY

Mid morning we checked into a hotel overlooking the Danube and the beautiful Parliament House, so we had good part of the day to walk around town, and most sites were reachable by foot.  Perhaps we walked about 4 or 5 miles total, across the magnificent Chain Bridge into the main shopping and pedestrian walking area, stopping for an espresso.  Ann even found a Marks & Spencer where she has bought her nighties for almost 50 years, so the shopping began already. 

As it was Sunday we were able to observe the local Budapestians at leisure.  We strolled around like locals.  At night we ate at a neighborhood restaurant where Ann enjoyed a Hungarian beer served in its traditional wooden holder.  In some respects, Budapest reminded us of St. Petersburg because the buildings on the river and their architectural shroud of Socialist realism.  It seems that Hungry has never fully recovered from the Soviet occupation.

Day 2      EMBARKATION Most of this day was spent exploring the ship, unpacking in our stateroom, and then in the evening meeting our fellow travelers at a welcome dinner.

Day 3     BUDAPEST, HUNGARY

In the morning, we slept in, missing the ship's very early sightseeing tour -- most of which we had seen the day before.  I wanted to go to the market, see the people, which I find more interesting than endless churches and some historical sites.  The highlight of the day was actually in the evening when the ship departed for Bratislava -- a special “Illuminations Cruise” past the city’s stunning river front.

Day 4     BRATISLAVA, SLOVAKIA

We enjoyed a scenic cruise to Bratislava, arriving early afternoon and there we took a walking tour with a very funny, engaging Bratislavian of the Old Town Hall, Mirbach Palace and St. Martin's Cathedral. Later in the day we had some free time for espresso at one of the pretty cafes.

Day 5     VIENNA, AUSTRIA

Here we had a guided bus tour in the morning, including the Vienna Opera House, the Ringstrasse, and St. Stephen’s Cathedral. With some free time on our own, we went to a well-known Viennese cafe for espresso on one of the city's squares, watching, what else, the people strolling by.  A high point of the visit was an evening Strauss and Mozart concert at the breathtaking Imperial Schönbrunn Palace. I include just a brief video "sample" of the concert.  Sorry about the fellow in front scratching his ear.

Day 6     DÜRNSTEIN - MELK

We reached the Wachau Valley early in the morning, stopping in Durnstein, a charming town, taking a walking tour down medieval cobblestone streets past 16th-century town houses and wine taverns. High above the town, were the ruins of a castle where Richard the Lionhearted was once imprisoned. After lunch, the ship cruised to Melk for a guided tour of the town’s Benedictine Abbey, one of Europe's largest baroque monasteries and the inspiration for the Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the Rose. Photography was strictly forbidden in the library, even without a flash, but our tour guide whispered in my ear, seeing my particular interest in the library, "take a few pictures without the flash quickly as the guard just left the room." I did.  One photograph shows the flood levels over the centuries in Melk, on the Danube.  Note the level on left from last April

Day 7     PASSAU, GERMANY

The ship continued its cruise through scenic Upper Austria to Passau, a 2,000-year-old city noted for its Gothic and Italian Baroque architecture. Passau is known as the "City of Three Rivers," because the Danube is joined at Passau by the Inn from the south and the Ilz from the north. A late afternoon walking tour of Passau took us along the cobblestone streets of the Old Town, where the old city fortifications could be seen and St. Stephan’s Cathedral, home to the largest pipe organ in the world.  This is yet another town my father was in during the war, going there at the end of the war and then to Berchtesgaden where he toured Hitler's "Eagle's Nest." (I'll have to write a separate entry for that one of these days.)

Day 8     REGENSBURG

Early in the afternoon we arrived in Regensburg, one of Germany's best-preserved medieval cities. The guided tour revealed the city's architectural highlights, including the Old Town Hall and the Porta Praetoria - gates to a Roman fort built in 179 AD. Next to the old stone bridge there is the Wurstkuchl -- a sausage kitchen -- dating back to 1135.  Here is an endless battle as to which town has the best and oldest sausage restaurant, Regensberg or Nuremberg.  As can be easily seen, the women working here practically kill themselves in the heat to cook these special wursts and so I waited patiently in a very long line to purchase this local specialty.  By the way, the sandwich Ann and I shared was delicious, especially slathered with their secret recipe mustard! Back to more serious matters, the Regensburg David and Goliath Mural, which has been lightly re-touched, dates back to the 16th century. Remarkable.

Day 9     NUREMBERG

In the morning we entered the Main-Danube Canal and had a leisurely cruise through the beautiful Altmühl Valley. The Main-Danube Canal traverses the Franconian Alps via 16 locks, a marvel of modern engineering as at one point the locks lifted us to 1,332 feet above sea level and the following lock is the largest in terms of depth, dropping us 81 feet. We also went past the Continental Divide after the 11th lock in this particular system  In Nuremberg we opted to take the “Medieval Nuremberg” tour and later regretted not joining the “WWII” tour that visited the Zeppelin field where Hitler held his Nazi rallies and the Justice Palace where the War Crimes Tribunal sat in 1946. My former psychology professor, Gustav Gilbert was the leading psychiatrist there, writing the Nuremberg Diary. We felt that we'd never get back to this town, so thought the city tour would be best, but that was a mistake.

Suddenly, while we were in the middle of the Main-Danube canal, the German lockmasters announced a strike and all river boats had to tie off at a dock. But our Captain was clever, hearing a rumor that the strike would be lifted at midnight, so he decided to get in queue at the next lock before then, and there we sat until sometime in the middle of the night when we finally made it through. We were on the move again, although a little behind schedule, but not seriously at least. He made up time each day.

Day 10     BAMBERG

Here we had a morning walking tour of Bamberg, which was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993, seeing the Cathedral, the Old Town Hall that straddles the river, and the serpentine streets lined with charming houses. Somehow Bamberg was mostly untouched by WW II bombing raids so most of the city's buildings are originals.   

Day 11     KITZINGEN - WÜRZBURG  Shame on us.  We arrived in Kitzingen for an early morning tour, one that involved busing, the ship meeting the bus at Wurzburg for more bus tours, so we decided to enjoy the leisurely cruise on board and take a break.  It seemed that we never had a moment for ourselves until then, so finally we got some reading done as the scenery passed by, including a nudist colony, not a pretty sight.

Day 12     WERTHEIM - MILTENBERG  Early in the morning I heard jets, as we passed the Frankfurt Airport, into which I had flown dozens of times to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair.  Never in my dreams did I think I'd be cruising by the airport on the Main river in the distant future. In the morning we enjoyed a walking tour of Wertheim, a town that has retained much of its medieval charm and character at the confluence of the Main and Tauber Rivers.

I'm certain my father was there during WW II during the closing weeks of the war and this warrants a brief aside, a few selected passages from his letter of April 11, 1945 to his brother, my Uncle Phil:

The future looks very bright in this theater of operations, the final collapse of Germany can very well be by the end of this month -- definitely I think, by the end of May.  When that joyful day comes, all our hopes and desires about coming home will be greater.  I only hope that if I must go to the Pacific Theatre of Operations I will at least get a furlough to home....Now that spring is here this little town we are quartered in has an atmosphere of peace and quiet -- like some little village out in Long Island if it wasn't for firing of weapons less than eight miles to the front, I'd feel all's well again.  This town is one of the few that has been spared of destruction,   The civilians that are here aren't hostile and they move freely about during the day.  Next door to our house is a blacksmith -- who seems to be busy shoeing horses and oxen.  The farmers are back on their land tilling and plowing, growing the needs of their conquered people.  The little children roam about some staring at GI's and have already learned to ask for candy and gum.  I'm a sentimental guy when it comes to the children and I hate to pass them up....With the on rush of the Allies into Germany, hordes of people are without homes.  The Germans can shift for themselves in this respect but the forces -- laborers of Russia, Poland, Belgium and other lands are a different problem for us -- they are so overjoyed at being freed, but it's our problem to house and clothe and feed them...Due to the particular sector of operations, I can't disclose to anyone, as yet, just exactly what I'm doing or what is going on.  Between the limited amount of time for letter writing and censorship my letters are vague and few.  The picture of me in the Stars and Stripes I see was received home with joy.  I didn't even know it was published.  It would have been a much better photograph if the Rhine River, which was less than twenty five yards in front of me, could have been included -- but at that particular time the surroundings were very hot with fire of all sorts....So, Phil, until my next letter, so long for awhile.  My love to Mom and Pop and of course my darling wife and son.  Love, Robert

BLOGSPOT cut off my entry at this point and I had to post the rest as Part II which can be viewed here.

It’s a Wrap

Hard to believe our summer on the boat is drawing to a close.  Next week we’ll be on our way to Budapest to begin a river cruise that will take us on the Danube, the Main, and the Rhine, through five countries and many medieval towns and villages.  I’m particularly looking forward to Cologne, the city from which my great grandparents emigrated.  As a boater, a highlight will be the leisurely navigation of the three rivers, through a total of 47 locks.

Our clearing off and packing up signals the end of our boating season here, leaving old friends, the Boat Club we’re active in, and neighborhoods that are ingrained in our sub-consciousness.  Compounding a sense of sadness was our attendance at two funerals this summer to say farewell to old boating friends, both our age.  We also had a rather sad dinner with a boating friend who had a severe stroke over the winter, a once vigorous man who is now disabled.

I’ve mentioned Shorefront Park before, where I usually do my morning power walk.  I love that little neighborhood here in S. Norwalk, so evocative of the neighborhood I grew up in Queens, but with the added luxury dimension of being on the water.  However, this lovely neighborhood suffered the wrath of Super Storm Sandy, and the devastation can still be seen, homes totally ruined, others in stages of reconstruction, even raising one house a full story to elude possible future flooding.  The storm left its mark on this area.  I usually walk early in the morning and already there is a certain late summer stillness the last few mornings foreshadowing the oncoming fall.  Indeed, time to leave once again.

I did not read as much as I would have liked during our relatively brief stay here.   But in addition to The Orphan Master which I described in the previous entry, I recently read and thoroughly enjoyed Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff.  It reads like a suspense novel and Wolfe makes you feel as if you are right there.  It mostly covers the original Mercury 7 Astronauts’ training and launches, but against the background of the Cold War of the late 50s and 1960s, a period I remember so well, but never fully realizing the extent to which it drove the space program.  The book begins though with Chuck Yeager’s breaking the sound barrier and fittingly ends with Chuck Yeager’s last test flight, the point being that unlike the Mercury 7, Yeager flew a rocket as a pilot. Wolfe’s description of Yeager’s last test flight is unforgettable, and provides a strong incentive for reading the book.

 

Nonetheless, there are several other selections which resonate with me and therefore I include them below.  The first is his description of where the astronauts stayed while at the Cape: Cocoa Beach.  I’ve been there and I can attest that while it has obviously been more developed, Wolfe still captures its essence and the meaning of the place to the Mercury 7:

….Cape Canaveral was not Miami Beach or Palm Beach or even Key West.  Cape Canaveral was Cocoa Beach.  That was the resort town at the Cape.  Cocoa Beach was the resort town for all the Low Rent folk who couldn’t afford the beach towns father south….Even the beach at Cocoa Beach was Low Rent.  It was about three hundred feet wide at high tide and hard as a brick.  It was so hard that the youth of postwar Florida used to go to the stock car races at Daytona Beach, and then, their brains inflamed with dreams of racing glory, they would head for Cocoa Beach and drive their cars right out on that hardtack strand and race their gourds off, while the poor sods who were vacationing there gathered up their children and their Scotch-plaid picnic coolers, and ran for cover.  At night some sort of prehistoric chiggers or fire ants – it was hard to say, since you could never see them – rose up from out of the sand and the palmetto grass and went for the ankles with a bite more vicious than a mink’s  There was no such thing as “first class accommodations” or “red-carpet treatment” in Cocoa Beach.  The red carpet, had anyone ever tried to lay one down, would have been devoured in midair by the No See’um bugs, as they were called, before it ever touched the implacable hardcraker ground.  And that was one reason the boys loved it!

And then onto Wolfe’s definition of the intangible, “the right stuff” as he so poignantly describes it: ….Next to Gagarin’s orbital flight, Shepard’s little mortar lob to Bermuda, with its mere five minutes of weightlessness, was no great accomplishment.  But that didn’t matter.  The flight had unfolded like a drama, the first drama of single combat in American History.  Shepard had been the tiny underdog, sitting on top of an American rocket – and our rockets always blow up – challenging the omnipotent Soviet Integral.  The fact that the entire thing had been televised, starting a good two hours before the lift-off, had generated the most feverish suspense.  And then he had gone through with it.  He let them light the fuse.  He hadn’t resigned.  He hadn’t even panicked.  He handled himself perfectly.  He was as great a daredevil as Lindbergh, and he was purer: he did it all for his country.  Here was a man..…with the right stuff.  No one spoke the phrase – but every man could feel the rays from that righteous aura and that primal force, the power of physical courage and manly honor.

And how did the geopolitical events influence the space program?  Probably there would have been no program, at least not in the 1960s, without those events:  ….Kennedy was convinced that the entire world was judging the United States and his leadership in terms of the space race with the Soviets.  He was muttering, “If somebody can just tell me how to catch up.  Let’s find somebody – anybody…There’s nothing more important”…Catching up became an obsession.  … Finally Dryden told him that it looked hopeless to try to catch up with the mighty Integral in anything that involved flights in earth orbit.  The one possibility was to start a program to put a man on the moon within the next ten years.  It would require a crash effort on the scale of the Manhattan Project of the Second Work War…..Less than a week later…the Bay of Pigs debacle had occurred, and now his “new frontier” looked more like a retreat on all fronts….And the tremendous public response to Shepard as the patriotic daredevil, challenging the Soviets in the heavens, gave Kennedy an inspiration…They were all absolutely startled when Kennedy said: “I want you to start on the moon program. I’m going to ask Congress for the money.  I’m going to tell them you’re going to put a man on the moon by 1970.”

The program and the book culminate with John Glenn’s first orbital flight.  The adoration of the man knew no bounds and his parade with the other Mercury 7 down Broadway brought even the city of steel and concrete to its knees: ….And what was it that had moved them all so deeply?  It was not a subject you could discuss, but the seven of them knew what it was, and so did most of their wives.  Or they knew about part of it.  They knew it had to do with presence, the aura, the radiation of the right stuff, the same vital force of manhood that had made millions vibrate and resonate thirty five years before to Lindbergh – except that in this case it was heightened by Cold War patriotism, the greatest surge of patriotism since the Second World War….But what the multitudes showed John Glenn and the rest of them on that day was something else.  They anointed them with the primordial tears that the right stuff commanded….Somehow, extraordinary as it was, it was…right! The way it should be!  The unutterable aura of the right stuff had been brought onto the terrain where things were happening! Perhaps that was what New York existed for, to celebrate those who had it, whatever it was, and there was nothing like the right stuff, for all responded to it, and all wanted to be near it and to feel the sizzle and to blink in the light…Oh, it was a primitive and profound thing!  Only pilots truly had it, but the entire world responded, and no one knew its name!

 

I also reread Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus (merely 50 years since the last time).  It was a very different experience reading the book as a septuagenarian.  I see Roth as a young colt writing this novella, exploring themes that would develop over the next fifty plus years, with clear signs of the literary thoroughbred he would become.  Certainly the work foreshadows my favorite Roth work, American Pastoral.  Nonetheless, it was somewhat painful reading his youthful work, bringing up issues of my own formative years that were submerged long ago, ones I was hardly conscious of when I first read the book, crazy families’ impact on their children, the first real romantic love, and youth’s obliviousness that old age would one day arrive.  And true to Roth, is a very funny work as well.

The title symbolizes the soon-to-be-lost youth of Brenda's brother, as he is about to be married (like me, at an early age), but still a boy, dreaming of his basketball days at Ohio State, listening to an old radio broadcast of the big game which begins: "The place, the banks of the Oentangy."  My friend Bruce and I spent part of the summer at Ohio State University in Columbus as representatives to the National Student Association from our university.  It was a different world from New York, indeed, but we, like the youth of Roth’s first major work, were ready to be swept along into the stream of life as if it were endless.

The 1984 Paris Review carried a remarkable interview with Roth (hat tip, my son, Jonathan). The interview is a treatise on his process of writing, and I was fascinated by how “fake biography” enters his art, using the analogy of the art of the ventriloquist.  As such, Roth himself is omnipresent in his works: ….Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life. There has to be some pleasure in this job, and that’s it. To go around in disguise. To act a character. To pass oneself off as what one is not. To pretend. The sly and cunning masquerade. Think of the ventriloquist. He speaks so that his voice appears to proceed from someone at a distance from himself. But if he weren’t in your line of vision you’d get no pleasure from his art at all. His art consists of being present and absent; he’s most himself by simultaneously being someone else, neither of whom he “is” once the curtain is down. You don’t necessarily, as a writer, have to abandon your biography completely to engage in an act of impersonation. It may be more intriguing when you don’t. You distort it, caricature it, parody it, you torture and subvert it, you exploit it—all to give the biography that dimension that will excite your verbal life. Millions of people do this all the time, of course, and not with the justification of making literature. They mean it. It’s amazing what lies people can sustain behind the mask of their real faces. Think of the art of the adulterer: under tremendous pressure and against enormous odds, ordinary husbands and wives, who would freeze with self-consciousness up on a stage, yet in the theater of the home, alone before the audience of the betrayed spouse, they act out roles of innocence and fidelity with flawless dramatic skill. Great, great performances, conceived with genius down to the smallest particulars, impeccably meticulous naturalistic acting, and all done by rank amateurs. People beautifully pretending to be “themselves.” Make-believe can take the subtlest forms, you know. Why should a novelist, a pretender by profession, be any less deft or more reliable than a stolid, unimaginative suburban accountant cheating on his wife?

Luckily, before leaving , just this past weekend, all the stars fell into place for us, schedules, weather, etc. and we enjoyed a weekend visit with Jonathan and Chris, yes, both sons!, and Jonathan’s lovely girlfriend, Anna, a really special person, wise beyond her years and with a patient disposition.  We took the boat out to our mooring of some thirty years, between Chimmons and Copps Islands, early in the morning, and had a leisurely breakfast there, Ann, Jonathan, and Anna later playing Scrabble, while Chris and I read.  The day was a “10,” the islands sparkling in the sun and the boat in peak form.  We wish we had had more time with them and better weather in July, but it was not to be.  Nonetheless, we saved the best for last.  And on that note, farewell once again Norwalk, until – hopefully -- next year!

The Orphan Master’s Son

North Korea is an enigma (to me at least).  Only a few months ago the young North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was saber rattling nuclear missiles, threatening not only South Korea, but American bases in the Pacific as well.  Bizarrely, at about the same time, basketball celebrity Dennis Rodman visited the country and the new leader (apparently Kim Jong-un likes basketball).  Rodman thinks he played peacemaker.   How weird to see the heavily tattooed Rodman sitting side by side with the young chubby cheeked dictator. 

Did I really want to know more about the circus-like-train-wreck of North Korea?  However, the accolades for Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son were overwhelming, calling to me. So, I’ve read it and can understand why it deservedly won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature last year.

This is a compelling novel, such a good story, and so well written.  But can life in North Korea really be as Johnson writes?  While no one can say whether his depiction is accurate, it is fiction, and it succeeds as an allegory of universal themes. 

At times episodic, with shifts in time and voice, mixing the 3rd person narrative of Jun Du AKA Commander Ga, and the 1st person narrative of an interrogator who is dedicated to extracting the “truth” from his interrogees by writing their biographies (vs. the brute torture inflicted by the “Pubyok”). Interspersed are propaganda broadcasts which surreally move the story further along.  The entire narrative ultimately revolves around the caprice of “The Dear Leader,” Kim Jong II, (Kim Jong-il, the father of the present leader) who is the ultimate Orphan Master of an entire nation. 

One can only describe the action as an extended nightmare, following the narrative down a rabbit hole into a totalitarian state whose underpinning is brainwashing; its people expecting no more than a life that would seem like Dante’s Inferno to any westerner. The book makes normalcy of brutality and propaganda, portraying a society where insanity is sanity.  In fact, I was constantly thinking of my college psychology professor, Gustave Gilbert, who wrote The Nuremberg Diary, had interviewed all the major Nazi figures who were put on trial there, and came to the conclusion that as they were raised in a culture where deference to authority took precedence over all, their actions would not be considered “insane” in such a society.  I also couldn’t help but think of another WWII allusion, a work of fiction though, Jerzy Kosiński’s The Painted Bird, chronicling the horror witnessed by a young boy, who was considered a Jewish stray, during the War.

And similarly, this is a coming-of-age story of Jun Du (or, as some have aptly noted, a “John Doe”) who, although the son of a man who ran the “Long Tomorrows” orphanage, is raised as an orphan himself, as his beautiful mother, an opera singer, had been shipped off to Pyongyang for the amusement of the New Class, as is so often the fate of beautiful women in that State.  From helping to run the orphanage (his father was frequently drunk), he “graduates” to “tunneler” – working in the dark in tunnels under the DMZ to kidnap South Koreans and then Japanese by boat.  He further graduates to study English and becomes a radio surveillance 3^rd mate on a North Korean fishing ship, reporting English conversations for reasons unknown.  One of those conversations is of two American women rowing across the ocean, one of which figures later in the novel.

When Jun Do had filled out his daily requisition of military sounds, he roamed the spectrum.  The lepers sent out broadcasts, as did the blind, and the families of inmates imprisoned in Manila who broadcast news into prisons – all day the families would line up to speak of report cards, baby teeth, and new job prospects.  There was Dr. Rendezvous, a Brit who broadcast his erotic “dreams” every day, along with the coordinates of where his sailboat would be anchored next.  There was a station in Okinawa that broadcast portraits of families that US servicemen refused to claim.  Once a day, the Chinese broadcast prisoner confessions, and it didn’t matter that the confessions were forced, false, and in a language he didn’t understand – Jun Do could barely make it through them.  And then came that girl who rowed in the dark.  Each night she paused to relay her coordinates, how her body was performing and the atmospheric conditions.  Often she noted things – the outlines of birds migrating at night, a whale shark seining for krill off her bow.  She had, she said, a growing ability to dream while she rowed.

What was it about English speakers that allowed them to talk into transmitters as if the sky were a diary?  If Koreans spoke this way, maybe they’d make more sense to Jun Do.  Maybe he’d understand why some people accepted their fates while others didn’t  He might know why people sometimes scoured all the orphanages looking for one particular child when any child would do, when there were perfectly good children everywhere.  He’d know why all the fisherman on the Junma had their wives’ portraits tattooed on their chests, while he was a man who wore headphones in the dark of a fish hold on a boat that was twenty-seven days at sea a month.

Not that he envied those who rowed in the daylight.  The light, the sky, the water, they were all things you looked through during the day.  At night, they were things you looked into.  You looked into stars, you looked into dark rollers, and the surprising platinum flash of their caps.  No one ever started at the tip of a cigarette in the daylight hours, and with the sun in the sky, who would ever post a “watch”?  At night on the Junma, there was acuity, quietude, pause.  There was a look in the crew members’ eyes that was both faraway and inward.  Presumably there was another English linguist out there on a similar fishing boat, pointlessly listening to broadcasts from sunrise to sunset.  It was certainly another lowly transcriber such as himself.

Our hero finally metamorphosizes into Commander Ga, a hero of the State (and the reader is more than eager to suspend disbelief of this change) as this page turning novel becomes a thriller of the first order.  He is united with Commander Ga’s wife, Sun Moon who is the State’s movie actress, a favorite of “The Dear Leader.”  From there, all of the main characters in the novel converge, even Sun Moon and the American rower, the propaganda speakers announcing:  Citizens!  Observe the hospitality our Dear Leader shows for all peoples of the world, even a subject of the despotic United States.  Does the Dear Leader not dispatch our nations’ best woman to give solace and support to the wayward American?  And does Sun Moon not find the Girl Rower housed in a beautiful room, fresh and white and brightly lit, with a pretty little window affording a view of a lovely North Korean meadow and the dappled horses that frolic there?  This is not dingy China or soiled little South Korea, so do not picture some sort of a prison cell with lamp-blacked walls and rust-colored puddles on the floor.  Instead, notice the large white tub fitted with golden lion’s feet and filled with the steaming restorative water of the Taedong.

Contrast that Halcyon scene with the reality of our hero’s imprisonment: In Prison 33, little by little, you relinquished everything, starting with your tomorrows and all that might be.  Next went your past, and suddenly it was inconceivable that your head had ever touched a pillow, that you’d once used a spoon or a toilet, that your mouth had once known flavors and your eyes had beheld colors beyond gray and brown and the shade of black that blood took on.  Before you relinquished yourself – Ga had felt it starting, like the numb of cold limbs – you let go of all the others, each person you’d once known.  They became ideas and then notions and then impressions, and then they were as ghostly as projections against a prison infirmary.

It is a love story as well, and it is the cry for individualism in a totalitarian state.  The nameless interrogator’s final dreamlike thoughts express it best:  I was on my own voyage.  Soon I would be in a rural village, green and peaceful, where people swung their scythes in silence.  There would be a widow there, and we would waste no time on courtship.  I would approach her and tell her I was her new husband.  We would enter the bed from opposite sides at first.  For a while, she would have rules. But eventually, our genitals would intercourse in a way that was correct and satisfying.  At night, after I had made my emission, we would lie there, listening to the sounds of our children running in the dark, catching summer frogs.  My wife would have the use of both her eyes, so she would know when I blew out the candle.  In this village, I would have a name, and people would call me by it.  When the candle went out, she would speak to me, telling me to sleep very, very deeply…I listened for her voice, calling a name that would soon be mine.

Adam Johnson has written an epic novel, one that required research and a colossal imagination.  Sign me up for his next work!