The Usual Suspects

For the last couple of weeks my wife and I have been in Vienna. Every day we take the 57A bus from our AirB&B at one end of the line (Amschutzgasse) to our daughter’s apartment 3/4ths of the way to the city center. (Burgring) 

As we travel in we pass a lot of what makes Vienna a European city. Both sides of the street are a solid wall of 4 and 5 story apartment buildings with shops on the ground floor. The majority were built 100 years ago when the city entered a phase of rapid expansion. But closer in you see the odd two story building from the early 19th or late 18th century. Sometimes a new building jumps out, almost always the replacement of one hit by a bomb in WWII. 

Where we are staying could be called an immigrant district, with close to a majority being Turkish, followed by Serbs, Koreans, Arabs, and Chinese. When we lived here (a few blocks from where we stay now) I used to joke that German was our common language and none of us spoke it well. That’s less true now, as the second generation has come up through German language schools. But you still hear a variety of languages on the bus. 

As you move toward the city buildings are better kept and rents higher, but most of the line runs through working class neighborhoods, some of which are slowly changing through yuppification. Not that it matters. Because everyone here takes the bus, and so three or four times a day we jostle alongside a pretty fair cross-section of Vienna’s population. The more so because one stop links to an U-Bahn line (subway) and thus two major train stations, the airport, and basically the rest of Europe. Its common to see people with suitcases. 

Along the route we see lots of small shops, old restaurants, cafes, and bars. Prostitution is legal in Vienna and the bus line runs past or near about a dozen brothels. And both sides of that business make up some of our fellow riders. Who also include the refugees and asylum seekers from their centers just around from my old church. 

It also passes five (that I’ve counted) psychiatrist offices and seven dance schools. This is Vienna after all. I’m not sure I can readily identify a dance student, but I’ve seen some prospects for the shrinks. 

There are five churches (three Catholic, one Methodist, one Lutheran.) This being Christmas they have been doing more business than usual. 

We pass a hospital (which looks like every other building) and three city- run senior day care centers, as well as probably a dozen pre-schools and schools. So lots of older folks, many with canes or walkers, get off and on along with children from ages 6 to 16 with backpacks.

The inner leg passes two centers for drug addicts and one homeless shelter, so those folks ride alongside us (and our granddaughters). Sometimes a bit unsteady on their feet. Sometimes rather obviously unwashed. There they are, next to the baby strollers, women in headscarves, workers in overalls, and polished men in neat, dark suites heading to a downtown office. 

There is also the AIDS help center whose clientele are less obvious. With the final stops being walking distance from Schoennbrunne Palace on our end and the Opera on the other tourists and folks in formal wear join everyone else.  

I took this bus for 7 years many times a day. And now again I’m on and off daily. Along  I’ve never seen violence, and rarely bad behavior except by thoughtless adolescents who are soon put straight by an elderly woman equipped with a sharp rebuke and a cane. 

Sometime the bus turns magical, as it did on the 23rd evening as we returned home. A group of a dozen young adults were headed somewhere together and suddenly began singing Christmas music in perfect 6 part harmony (4 women’s parts and 2 mens). They sang old Austrian folksongs about winter nights and coming home. They sang White Christmas. And then suddenly they spilled out into the night equal distance from a Catholic Church, a modern dance club, two brothels, and an old classic Viennese restaurant. Who is to say the destination of a band of angels?

But there is magic too in the drug addicts helping their fellows down steps that have become cruelly hard, or a teenage boy reaching down to help a woman lift in her stroller, or a working man at the end of a long day standing so a child can sit next to his mother, or the kind woman helping a palsied old man stop his shaking hand long enough to punch his ticket. 

A city is a place where people live with each other rather than within their fences. That is why it is cities with all their variety that generate culture, and art, and ultimately civilization. There is magic in the city because there is no escape from the usual suspects, and that makes us all unusually rich.