Pregnancy, and what we ate in Austria

I learned I was pregnant in a hotel room outside of Paris, France. On a business trip with my husband.

While he was out businessing, I practiced my high school French on the maid, who turned out to be Spanish, and busied myself feeling nauseous. When this feeling lasted more than two days with no other symptoms, I got suspicious. Can’t put much over on me.

Even in those days, you could get a pregnancy test to do in the privacy of your own hotel room. My husband got me one. Instructions in French of course. I waited for the little circle to appear at the bottom of the dish. When it did, I was happy. My husband was happy. But I was still nauseated.

Then the business part of the trip was over so we packed up and headed out to visit hubby’s feudal clan in Austria where everybody eats meat — lots of meat. And these large semiporous ball things called leberknoedel (I think literally meaning “large soft ball things,” and pronounced lay-brrrr-kah-nerh-dle) that are made from bread crumbs or maybe potatoes — and liver, thus the word leber (lay-brrr). These liver balls are rolled by hand after the cook adds whatever is left over from the week before, then dumped into a pot of boiling broth. The cook can tell when they’re done by the odor of ripe old shoe insole that rises from the cauldron. When they’re not eating these things that could sub for bocci balls, they’re eating plain meat or downing just about anything covered in whipped cream.

Whipped cream is known as schlaggobers (pronounced schlagg-obers). Nearly everything in Austria is spelled with sch in it somewhere. This is only one of many mysteries in Austria, a very old land the Romans invaded and left their mark on after subduing the indigenous tribes that had been perfectly content to hunt wild boar in the forests and pick lingonberries in the mountains. They didn’t have any need of viaducts or aqueducts but I guess the Romans knew better because they arrived with all sorts of improvements.

Maybe whipped cream was one of them. Austria is the whipped cream capital of the world. South Africa is known for its diamond mines. The U.S. is known for McDonalds, France has perfume and England, well, they have dysfunctional Royals. But Austria has its schlagg.

The Austrian flag should have a mound of whipped cream up in the left hand corner. They could put a mound of manure in the opposite corner. Every town you go to in Austria has a huge mound of manure — called a misthaufen — right by the Welcome To Our Village sign. Welcome and here’s a manure pile just to let you know we really mean it. When you arrive at my husband’s ancestral village the pile is particularly large, maybe two stories high. I wouldn’t venture a guess at its base in round numbers. But by careful calculations I think it would come off pretty favorably compared with the Great Pyramid at Giza. The Great Manure Pile At Gschwalingendorfersburgergehapft. This shows it’s one of the more prosperous villages in the region. That would be the Salzkammergut. I’ve heard many an American wax poetically nostalgic about the beauties of the Salzkammergut but no one ever mentions the manure. Leaving it to me.

By the way, these are relatively short words in Austria, where instead of adding more vowels to their words, they have devised a symbol denoting where a vowel used to be or could be or should be but really isn’t. Namely the umlaut.

At the restaurant where we met the Teutonic tribal council, everyone was very jovial. And noisy. Austrians are a noisy people. And tall. A tall, noisy people. Who like to drink beer. A tall, noisy, tipsy people. Who eat meat. A tall, noisy, meat-eating, tipsy people. The smell of meat cooking inside the beirschtubbe (another of those sch words) made me run out into the street after only being introduced to one of my husband’s old friends — Agilodangle. Yes, that is correct. His name is Agilodangle. Which is pronounced AH-gee-(hard G)-lo-don-gull. I swear.

I tried to go back inside but every time I smelled that searing beef I got nauseous again and raced out the door where I had staked out a bench. My husband tried to take me back to the hotel but I insisted he stay by telling him I would be equally sick anywhere else so why not just let me sit on this bench and puke into the gutter. I told him everyone would just think I was practicing for Oktoberfest. For readers who are not acquainted with Oktoberfest, it is simply the Bavarian version of Saturday night on frat row, on a much larger scale and with really odd music that sounds as if an oompah band just got let out of an asylum for the very, very unrhythmic.