Homecoming

Austria smells like cold, compacted old snow and cigarette smoke and freshly baked Kaisersemmel. This is what I noticed when I disembarked at Schwechat airport in early September last year. It’s the smell of annual childhood holidays; it’s a smell that makes me smile. Now, living in Vienna, I notice it less—because it has become part of my everyday, normalised to the point of being almost unobservable. But when I remember to sniff deeply, or it catches me out unexpectedly, I am reminded that all is fine. A happy smell from the past has become the smell of home.

For many years now, when I have been on an aeroplane hovering above the UK’s patchwork of green and yellow fields or the thick, brown, snaking Thames that darts through London’s crowded metropolis, my stomach sinks. I hate that first breath of soggy British air. And I’m not exactly sure why; all I know is that it’s a place I find innately uncomfortable, one that has always felt a little alien.

The German word ‘heimlich’ commonly speaks to secret and concealed things. But if you happen to have been an English Literature student in the UK who laboured over Freud’s essay on ‘The Uncanny’ in high school, then university, you would be forgiven for knowing it better as ‘homely’, ‘familiar’, ‘intimate’— its outdated meaning.

Although heimelig conjures up the cosiness of homeliness in contemporary German, instinctively, I would be more likely to use the word ‘heimlich’ to describe what Vienna has become to me. It is home and familiar in unexpected, entrenched, secret ways. As if it has been patiently waiting to be discovered by me. I cannot say if this is because it came into my life at the right time or if it really is because it contains the whispered siren song of my ancestors—none of whom, apart from Granny, were born in Vienna but who were all drawn to it, thought of it as home, before it rejected them.

My grandfather is perhaps the only one who made an honest attempt of returning. He was adamant about regaining his Austrian citizenship, and although he had a life and home and work in London, I wonder if he thought he would retire in Vienna. Spend his last days sipping verlängerter and nibbling on topfenstrudel in the cafes he frequented as a student. And although his life ended on the streets of Vienna, a freshly re-minted Austrian, it was not in a way anyone imagined.

But, my last question—must we know where we have come from to decide where we are going? Perhaps not. But Vienna is my city of ghosts. It is my uncanny city—and not everything uncanny has to be maleficent. I am walking streets and treading paths that I am sure I have never been down, and yet—they are familiar. This is home.