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OUR FAR-FLUNG
CORRESPONDENTS
 f you travel abroad, you will most likely come across something that you couldn't see back home. In Paris, the Eiffel Tower; in London, Westminster Abbey; in Berlin, the gutted ex-Wall; in Rome, marauding gypsies; in Moscow, tanks or bandits.
And it makes sense that those historic landmarks are there, as opposed to here; after all, if they were here, nobody would need to leave home. Travel agencies would flounder, Samsonite would suffer, and the postcard industry would receive its death blow. And yet, there is one monument that exists in pretty much the same form wherever travelers go, one temple before whom all bow down; one attraction as integral to Terre Haute as to the Louvre, even though it never seems to make it into any Blue Guide. It is the bathroom, that infinitely necessary place where W.C. Fields did his reading, Stephen Daedalus did his deepest ruminating, and Charlotte Corday did Marat; it is the one spot no tourist leaves off the itinerary, and the one architectural relic that, above all others, proves to Americans just how alien, and fundamentally unknowable, foreigners are.
The toilet we recognize in this country is friendly and serviceable. Its low, oval, porcelain seat comes with a thoughtfully-positioned, heat-storing seat, made of plastic, padded-vinyl or buffed wood, while its gentle chrome ear, modestly protruding from the side of the tank, demurely beckons. There are only two ways of flushing; the industrial rotating metal handle, popular in schools and offices, or the aforementioned ear model, which reposes in the centrally-heated, be-tubbed, floral wall-papered private American bathroom. We take this order of things for granted all of our lives, and only at the end of our first seven-hour flight across the Atlantic does the rude shock register; our kind of unaggressive, no-tricks toilet does not exist over there. Instead, they all do it their way, the EC way; in other words, in distinct, incompatible ways, molding their toilets out of their national neuroses and inhibitions, boobytrapping them for Americans by subtle European assumptions we cannot even guess. There is more to be learned about English decline from one toilet in a private home than from Fleet Street and Buckingham Palace combined; more menace in a German hotel bathroom than in all the stones of the Reichstag.
The first overall difference an American abroad notices is that what we genteelly nickname the "bathroom" is usually called the "toilet," there, and is generally set apart from bath and sink, stemming perhaps from a fundamental European suspicion that the invention might not work, and had better be kept well away from necessary rooms. If left to their own devices, the Europeans might never have accepted the toilet; after all, people whose sense of smell had been numbed by decades of munching marbled blue cheeses that a dog would run from wouldn't necessarily find chamberpots offensive. All the same, about a hundred and twenty years ago, an Englishman named Thomas Crapper invented the flush toilet that we use today, naming it "Crapper's Valveless Waste Preventer' with Syphonic Action," and tested it gleefully by flushing apple and apple down it at public exhibitions. The terminology daunted Crapper's suspicious countrymen, as did his enthusiasm, and its inventor's name did not exactly inspire confidence, either.
It was American soldiers who picked up his idea and ran with it when they were stationed in England during the First World War, and one admiring American journalist later wrote of Crapper, "If ever a man left the world a better place than he found it, it was he."
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Europeans, however, seem to have had their doubts. they accepted Crapper's gift grudgingly;they kept and still keep, the toilet in shameful isolation, and hold chamberpots in reserve, camouflaged as cachepots.
Americans were more reckless, more willing to mix foul and fair, base and pure, and our Whitmanesque commingling of toilet and tub has had a happy result: every time in the last century that an American went into the bathroom, he was confronted with the thought, "Maybe I should bathe." We are a suggestible nation, and this subliminal prodding led most of us over the years to begin bathing or showering once, twice, even three times a day (J.F.K. was a three-timer.). Europeans, on the other hand, could go weeks without tripping over a tub, which possibly led them to wash less frequently. (see: hairwashing, comparative rareness of in Europe, below.) This was not the only repercussion.
For Parisians, obsessed for centuries with presenting a belle figure, the toilet/bathroom separation led to the creation of the perfume industry, bidets, and haute couture.
The French may look fantastic, but walk into a public convenience and you will see how they act when they suspect they are not being observed. You will find low porcelain launching pads riveted to the ground, with indentations at one end whether for the heels or the palms it is difficult to guess. To suspend yourself above these without coming into contact with undesirable fixtures requires the balance, not to mention the calf muscles, of Nadia Comaneci. The toilet paper is little 2 X 3 sheets that look like ghosts of phyllo pastry; one senses that they are actually intended to blot lipstick; and their inadequacy necessitates further gyrations to be performed nonchalantly above the bidet. This explains both why Parisians have such good legs and why they are so cool and sophisticated (what could shock someone who grows up performing gymnastics half-naked in public spaces?).
The British are appalled at the boldness of French bathroom habits; in London, bathrooms are places of euphemism and nursery glow; no bidets allowed. Poised above every British toilet is a genial plastic creature called the bathroom "duck," a cleaning fluid dispenser with a head actually shaped like a duck's bill. Meanwhile, by sink and tub, every household stocks another cleaning liquid called "Fairy," and between the fairies and the ducks and the suds, and the Arctic air (nothing is as cold as a British bathroom), you would be convinced that nothing occurs in a bathroom except for intense, frigid hygiene which is what propriety-obsessed Brits like to believe. The process of flushing in Britain clearly has evolved out of the British concern for fair play and parliamentary procedure; the first flush has no effect except to issue a weak trickle of water that seems to plead "Let's not be too hasty; is flushing really a good idea?"
One good flush would be terrifyingly decisive; instead, the user must deliberate over whether or not to flush a second time, which, theoretically, would do the job, but in reality, does not. Uncertain of a good flush, and flush, and flush again, hoping not to be discovered until the damn thing works. With such nostalgia and indecision in the bathroom, its a wonder Labour ever got to the head.
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In Berlin, the traveler never encounters the same toilet twice. With brilliant technological wizardry, German engineers have devised high toilets, low toilets, square toilets, rounded toilets, silver toilets, white toilets, red and green toilets; many of them with no visible handles or flushing devices.
To flush one model, the user must find a neat silver button, hidden in the pattern of the sterile tile floor, and press it with the toe. For another, an indentation in the lid must be depressed, for yet another, an invisible panel on the wall does the trick. Officious signs demand that users only flush if truly necessary, to spare the environment, but those who flout the eco-rebuke or those who can't disappear with a silent, awing rush. Was it ever there? Doesn't this all sound somehow familiar? One study showed that German spending on personal hygiene is the highest per capita in Europe out damned spot! and German bathrooms are as blisteringly clean as their owners.
In search of less regimented surroundings, German tourists invade Italy in the summers in their shorts, hiking shoes and backpacks, and find bathrooms as varied as their own, albeit for the sake of beauty, rather than efficiency. The birthplace of Corregiio and Da Vinci once produced the David; today in Rome, artisans produce faucets that meet the Golden Rule, upholstery, chairs and clothing that revive Renaissance patterns, and toilets that do homage to their owners' powers of interior decoration. In a particularly touching effect, the bathroom floors ripple with low waves of water, resulting from an Italian confusion over yet another bathroom innovation, the shower. Standing showers were introduced in Italy barely five years ago, and it did not occur to architects that a ledge might be installed between the shower curtain and the floor to prevent overflow. As a result, whenever you wash your hair in the shower, you fill the bathroom with an ankle-high sea, affording you the chance to imitate either Christ, or Botticelli's Venus, depending on your sex and your preferred delusion. Italians, like all Europeans, have not quite come to terms with the standing shower, and most tubs abroad have the coiled, shaky, hand-held nozzle showers that are so hard to wield along with a bar of soap and a bottle of shampoo; but whether it is used or not, the standing shower is considered very stylish, and ultimately, very American, and is therefore a design imperative (see: Europeans, suspected frequency of bathing of, above).
Russia is not yet ripe for home design; it is not very EC, not very PC, and not very WC. Americans who want their toilet, their tub, their shower and their Charmin at the end of their flight should probably just skip Moscow. There is no toilet paper there, except, rarely, torn pieces of newsprint; the flushing system is pre-Crapper, containing the peculiar feature of a sort of mid-bowl diving board that presents curious Russians with proof of their scatological endeavor, and hot water is turned off for several weeks at a time in summer (to permit cleaning of the pipes, so someone lied long ago, and so the inconvenience is still explained). W.C. Fields might have liked it in Moscow, though, and Whitman, too, because, in Russia, it is very easy to remember we are all just a bunch of earthy mammals with passports whatever our monuments, our air travel, and our interior decoration might pretend.
-LIESL SCHILLINGER
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