584
PARTISAN REVIEW
An enclave of what? Belonging to what?
It
was primarily, and cer–
tainly more conspicuously than anywhere else around Salzburg, a
colony of war refugees, expellees, emigrants. In any case, the pharma–
cist was such a person, a member of a family that had run a pharma–
ceuticals factory in the east, first under the Hapsburg monarchy, then in
the Czechoslovak Republic, then under German occupation. More
details, I said, I didn't want to know for this story of his, to which he
responded, "That's fine! Leave it vague!"
And after the war, new arrivals like this hadn't merely settled in the
spandrel between the long-distance train tracks, the highway, and the
airfield, on what was left of farmland there, specifically the farm known
as "Taxham"-long since gone-but had screened themselves off even
more, barricaded themselves in.
TAXHAM WAS A forerunner by half a century, though on a much smaller
scale, of many of the new housing developments known today as "new
towns": hard to find your way in, and even harder, whether on foot or
by car, to get out again. Almost all the routes that promise to lead you
out then turn off and take you around the block or wend their way back
past cottage gardens to your starting point. Or they simply dead-end at
yet another impenetrable hedge, through which open land and whatever
leads elsewhere can just barely be glimpsed, even if the street is named
after Magellan or Porsche.
In fact, because of the adjacent airport, most of the streets (or rather
access roads) of this bushy-hedged village of Taxham bear the names of
pioneers of flight, like "Count Zeppelin," "Otto von Lilienthal," "Mar–
cel Rebard"-presumably foisted on the immigrants after the war, with–
out consultation; they themselves would probably have preferred
"Gottscheer Strasse" or "Siebenbiirger Strasse," but who knows? The
only aeronautical street name that would have been really suitable,
according to my friend Andreas Loser, was "Nungesser and Coli," after
the two pilots who attempted the first trans-Atlantic flight and vanished
soon after leaving the continent behind.
FROM ITS BEGINNING Taxham anticipated a contemporary phenomenon,
so to speak: Just as today it's more and more common for people not to
live where they work, it was already the rule fifty years ago for those with
jobs in the spandrel- and hedge-colony to have their house or apartment
somewhere else-not far from Taxham, but at least not in the village. The
