The guy behind the card table is turning a watch over in his hands. “It’s broken,” he says, to the guy that insists that it’s not, that it’s a good watch, that it’s just the watch band that needs replacement. “No,” says the guy behind the card table, this pin on the side needs fixing, see, it’s hardly worth my time to take it apart, so, three Euros, I am not going to give you more than three Euros for it.”
The woman in the headscarf is shouting at the guy pointing at the flat screen monitor. “Look, you think I’m some kind of an idiot? I know it’s not junk, it works, we tested it at home before bringing it out here. It’s a perfectly good flat screen monitor, good luck to you if you can get one this good for 20 Euros somewhere else, but don’t be talking to me like I’m some kind of an idiot.”
The guy in the expensive sweater gestures at the pile of green rusted objects, little iron age and Celtic style shapes, a crescent, a horse, and asks where they’re from. “From here,” insists the seller, “they’re from here.” “No, where did you find them?” asks the potential buyer. “They’re from Austria, of course they’re from HERE.” This pile of oxidized metal is as likely to come from an unknown Celtic burial site as they are to come from a shed in the backyard of a house near the Hungarian border, recreated to look like Celt artifacts but in fact, no more than a few months old.
The flea market in Vienna is a confusing mess of multiple economies all happening at once. On the surface, it’s just a big messy garage sale, but if you listen to the conversations, there are other things going on. Sketchy looking guys are hard at work trying to sell things to vendors who are barricaded in behind great piles of their belongings. Sophisticated, well dressed curatorial types are hunting treasures, turning over the paintings to examine the construction of their elaborate gilded frames, perhaps they’ll score something that they’ll resell tomorrow in their antique gallery in the First District. Rough looking, gold toothed women in head scarves smoke with great intensity while refusing to lower their prices on anything, whether they stand guard over a pile of second (third?) hand clothes or a display of sculpted porcelain figurines. Tourists flip through shoe-boxes of postcards, gently turn pocket watches over in their hands before returning them to the seller, or shudder at the Judaica and swastika emblazoned ephemera.
There is a place in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The currents of the ocean act in such a way that it draws plastic objects — some as large as fishing nets, some tiny plastic particles — and there they remain indefinitely. The flea market in Vienna feels this way, though the driving force behind it isn’t current, it’s human culture. War and trade and the redrawing of borders and the tides of consumerism, of what’s in fashion and what’s out, what’s valuable today and yesterday and one hundred years ago, all swept into this crowded plaza near Vienna’s biggest outdoor food market.
I come here whenever I’m in Vienna on a Saturday. I imagine buying a chandelier, an accordion, an entire set of fine china from Prague, a coat made of lambswool and perhaps the hat that goes with it, but lambswool only, I couldn’t wear fur. I never buy any of those things, though, and in nearly 20 years of coming to Vienna, I have spent money only twice. Once to buy three little porcelain harlequin dolls with articulated arms and legs and heads that turn, they are pretty and delicate and surely replicas of a more expensive Victorian era toy. And once to buy a handful of photographs of some boys on a ski vacation in 1936. The remainder of the time I’ve just wandered with the crowds, stopping to flip through a German movie magazine from the 60s, to run my hand down the length of a black three quarter length mink coat, and to listen to the weird surf of commerce.
“All the pieces are here,” says the younger man, handing the board game box to the man behind the card table. “It’s worth more than I’m asking,” he says, but the older man behind the table declines. “I don’t think so,” he says, and the younger man puts the box under his arm and moves through the current to the next stall, where he will try again.
I love flea markets, you can find anything of any “era”. I remember when I was a kid I had an old game console, so old that I could only find games once a year during the annual flea market in my hometown. One game per year… I used to look forward to the market like anything else! haha! Thanks for reminding it to me!