Foreign Faces

by V. S. Pritchett

  Before American and Canadian wheat came on the market in the nineteenth century, this plain supplied large areas of Europe. It is not a land of poor, ignorant peasants; every traveller is struck by the high material and cultural level of the countryman’s life in the little market towns. The Danube comes through it lazily on its way south to Yugoslavia and it is surprising to hear that in this mild climate the river freezes up in the short winter when the East wind blows. Hungary is a small country—it dwindled seriously after the First World War and is only 122 miles long and 280 miles wide, with a population of just under ten millions. The Hungarians often speak of “going to the mountains” for their holidays, and certainly there are mountains to the north-east and south-west of Budapest, but they are not mountains as their neighbours in Austria, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia know them.

  The Slovak lady was right. Except about the forgetting. The sun dazzled, the autumn air was warm and sleepy at the handsome airport of Budapest. The officials had the negligence and excitability of lazy men in uniform. One saw a few gypsyish faces outside and when the dusty old taxi broke down, as it took me by the autobahn into the city, I laughed with pleasure. We were certainly outside efficient, Germanic Europe. We broke down again in a mile-long traffic jam of lorries and horses and carts. Everyone was grinning, shrugging or shouting. One might have been in Italy or Spain. It was one of the most cheerful traffic jams I have ever been in. They often occur in Hungary because, during the Rising, the Russian tanks made a mess of the roads.

  Happiness continued. I stayed on the Margaret Island, that long island of beautiful trees, winding paths and formal gardens, tennis clubs, boating clubs and hot springs where the happy rheumatics sit in the volcanic water in the open-air baths, simmering quietly like pork in the sun. There are one hundred and twenty-three thermal springs in Budapest and thousands of people take the waters every day. In the hotel gardens one dined or drank at the basket tables under the trees and at night there was dancing under the stars to old-fashioned tunes. The people appeared to be comfortable middle-aged persons living on their means: not entirely a delusion. There were no Americans, which was startling. The American government does not allow its citizens to visit Hungary.

  In the open-air cafés the orchestras played. The flowers—especially the red canna—were sumptuously spread. Pretty girls brought the beer, the wine or the Hungarian salami. Wandering about the shady paths in the heat of the morning, one saw chattering troops of children from the crèches or kindergartens following their nurses. Hoses twirled their spray over the lawns. The gardeners were flirting with the stout young peasant girls whose dark hair was done in bright handkerchiefs and who were pretending to sweep the paths. Everyone is under the obligation to work and one of the lasting impressions of the Peoples’ Democracies is that they are places where women of all ages have the agreeable job of gossiping with friends as they lean on their brooms, before sweeping an almost invisible heap of dust a few feet from one part of the paths to another, and then leaning contentedly on the broom again.

  Up and down the river went the white paddle steamers and pleasure launches. Late in the afternoon the rowing eights and diamonds were sparkling like water-flies, the women’s crews as strenuous as the men’s; and all the seats under the trees by the river were occupied by pairs of lovers. There seemed to be a special technique for courtship on the Margaret Island which I have never seen elsewhere: the girl sits on the seat, the man sitting beside her puts his legs through the back of the seat, so that he can face her. So, with his back to the passers-by, the uninhibited Hungarian shuts out the world and concentrates on the beautiful thing and avoids the spine and waist twisting of the ordinary sideways embrace.

  In the meantime, the crews cried from the river, the tennis balls slapped on to the courts, the footballers and basketball players shouted in the distance; then the lights came on among the trees, the Hungarian owls began making their curious yelping noise in the branches as if they were flying dogs; the Red Star shone on the tower of the enormous Gothic Parliament House and the lights prickled over the steep hills of Buda and in the flat city of Pest. The buses arrived, bringing the crowds to the open-air theatre.

  I went there that night with a clever young man who was an authority on William Blake and who had just edited a selection of his works. The translation and interpretation of the Daughters of Albion had caused him a lot of worry, but Hungarians have considerable reason for thinking themselves the best translators in the world. They produce Shakespeare scholars by the dozen and think that Hungarian translations of the poet surpass the German. We sat in the warm September air under the stars in this pleasant modern theatre. We were seeing a traditional operetta of the old-fashioned kind: Janos Vitez by Kacsch. It has pretty tunes and all the things that Hungarians love—the scenes of peasant life, the shepherd with his flock that wanders in from the real trees, a gallop of splendid Hussars, a victory over the Turks and a splendid court scene on the Versailles model where the decadent Prince confronts the stalwart hero and the court ladies perform a ballet. “Simple people” my friend said, nodding to the audience. It was a popular show.

  The wide coppery-green Danube sweeps in a long curve under the eight bridges which have been rebuilt since the war and divides the Buda from Pest. It is a city of some 1,700,000 people. Thousands crowd the trolley-buses and suburban trains. On the Pest side, the Hungarian plain begins at once. Pest is flat and here are the fashionable streets, the once-famous restaurants and cafés. They survive. Budapest thought of itself as another Paris—so did Bucharest in Romania—and still tries to think so. The shops in the fashionable streets do their best to keep up an air of the ancien régime. People dress well. The dress shops, the hat shops, the tailors and shirt-makers put up a show. Hungarians dress for the street. Now and then one sees an elderly couple go by who might even be called fashionable. How they contrived to be so was mysterious to me; but I was told that they might be people with top jobs in State Industry, or that they might have had a big house in the past or valuable pictures and so on, which they could sell. Or they might be living on some pension, although the pensions of the middle classes were slashed to very little. Old age generally means work in Hungary, not retirement.

  But if private savings were confiscated, chattels were not. I did not see any severe poverty in Hungary ; it was a well-found little nation and was already getting on its feet industrially before the Second World War. One of the complaints against the Russians at the time of the rising in 1956 was that they had forced deliveries of Hungarian goods into Russia at very unfavourable rates of exchange. Any Hungarian will tell you with pride that the écrevisses you ate in Paris probably came from Lake Balaton and that you certainly ate Hungarian chicken in Vienna; and that if Hungary has lost some of its Western markets it has found new ones—Nasser’s Egypt buys Hungarian trolley-buses and motor lorries.

  The walls of the shops and offices in Pest were still pocked with the bullets and shells of the Russian tanks in 1956, but new buildings are going up quickly where the bombardment had been most destructive. The damage of the Rising was tackled quickly, in order to wipe out the signs of that disastrous comment on the true relations of the People’s Democracies with their ruling minority and with Soviet Russia. Up in Buda at the high point of the Horthy Palace, the citadel, the cathedral and castle, the destruction caused by the battle of Budapest in World War II, was being repaired much more slowly. I went up many times to look for little garden cafés where gypsies turn up to play, and to stand in the lovers’ gazebo, a superb look-out point for a general view of the city. The lovers go up there to scratch their initials inside the little temple-like structure and look down on the river, the ochre-coloured buildings, the Baroque towers, and the mixed but on the whole handsome parade of buildings on the river front. The city is one that interests the eye.

  In Budapest one falls immediately among friends. Everybody knows everybody else—in the most casual crowds at a bus stop or in an office people always
add some personal detail that is handed on; everyone loves talking; and the smallest bit of news travels in no time across the city. I hailed a taxi in the street after I had been there only a week and the taxi-driver knew all about me: he had heard from another taxi-driver who had heard it from a fare. It is true that taxi-drivers were used as police informers before ’56 and perhaps still are; but as this one tried, in a mixture of night-school English and fragmentary German, to tell me why he considered Othello the greatest of Shakespeare’s plays, I was not worried. In two or three days I had more acquaintance than I knew what to do with: all clever, all fizzing with argument and almost caressing in kindness, subtle, serious, passionate and cynical, masters of irony. Notoriously this is a nation with more writers and intellectuals to the square mile than any other on earth.

  Like the Viennese they spend a lot of time in cafés in long discussions, which emerge in articles, in reviews, in the theatre and in novels. They have one exceptional quality: they are pretty well the only intellectuals in the world who often turn out to be first-rate bankers and financiers, and who have a sound capacity for large practical enterprises. They are masterly impresarios in their own country, in London, Paris, Hollywood and New York, many of them Jews, who always held high positions under the old aristocracy though rarely penetrating that caste. I was cornered one evening by a young university lecturer who had amused himself by putting on a play or two in Budapest; he complained to me that he had not been able, so far, to obtain the Hungarian rights of My Fair Lady, which he wanted to put on! He wanted to take a big jump up the ladder. I tactfully pointed out the enormous personal and financial difficulty, and the complication of the enterprise. But the lecturer on French poetry, I realised, was not a naïve dreamer in the eyes of his friends.

  “We cannot understand why there should be any difficulty,” they said.

  “It is very important to make a great deal of money,” he said. Clearly they had no doubt about the soundness of his proposal or his capacities. Hungarian ability is a serious thing.

  But there was a shadow on our friendships. All the Hungarians I met, except three or four who were staunch Party members and had important jobs under the Kadar régime, made me swear not to write any of their political views or to identify them. If I had lunch with one of them he would certainly send messages to me by a friend the following day, reminding me of my promise. But they all said with some pride—the Communist, the ex-Communist and the anti-Communist:

  “We have got over the Rising. Life is back to normal and we are even much better off than we were before it all happened, except for the human tragedy.”

  I said: “What about the six people who were executed a few weeks back for their part in the Rising?”

  The reply to this was that what they meant by normality was “back to normal” on the surface and was put by a diplomat in these words:

  “The police surveillance is relaxed as far as the majority of people are concerned. It now operates in a more concentrated, efficient and specialised way in the circles it is watching. The terror is far more severe.” He was right at the time but, latterly, friends tell me that the régime has become milder. The fact is that the political temperature goes up and down; one lives in an imposed climate, sometimes benign and sometimes chilly. The severity is felt chiefly by Party members—for the Rising began as a quarrel among the Communists themselves and all are haunted by some degree of guilt. What really shocked the Hungarians was the Russian soldier’s ignorance of the common amenities of civilisation.

  I went with a middle-aged Party member to a football match on my first Saturday afternoon. He was a reliable Party man, proud of his “little family”—his wife and two children who were doing well at High School, mad about football. There must have been 80,000 people at the match but the teams were poor. He was frank about it: “The Rising has cost us the loss of a great deal of talent of all kinds,” he said. “We lost our best football players. Two of them are now playing for Real Madrid” —of all Fascist teams!

  “Politics are a curse,” I said carelessly. “They are the cause of the whole of modern misery.”

  “Everything,” he said severely, correcting me in the firmest Marxist manner, “is political.”

  I think I can quote him without getting him into trouble. I imagine his position was strong, since he was still a Party man.

  The dilemma of the Party as a whole is that it is in conflict with its own nationalist feelings, for, like the Poles, the Hungarians are nationalists before everything else; their mistrust of Russia is traditional and their cultural traditions are overwhelmingly Western. The wretched Party members are always warning each other:

  “Be careful. That is how it begins.”

  What is “it”? Sin, of course. It is all right for an organisation to have contact with the West, but for the individual it is perilous to say to the Westerner: “Send me that engineering textbook. Tell me how I can find out about the music or painting of So-and-so, about the health service in Great Britain or municipal government in Birmingham.” There was some talk, when I was in Budapest, of arranging an exchange visit between the mayor of a Hungarian town and the mayor of an English industrial city.

  “We are waiting for approval,” said the busy official in the Foreign Ministry who has about three telephone calls a minute. And he nodded from his window across the Danube to that modern “box on stilts”, which is beginning to look a bit grubby, as functional architecture so quickly does, the Ministry of the Interior, the headquarters of the Police. Months later I was asked to a party in London to meet the chief of Hungarian municipalities, so I gather the permit came through for someone. In Budapest, where large numbers of people have read George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm (although they are banned), the Ministry of the Interior is known as the Ministry of Love. I had no difficulty in seeing and talking to innumerable Hungarians and they were interesting and outspoken, as I have said, but they were all aware of the dangers of “it”, whether they were in favour of the government or against it.

  I have only one more thing to say about Hungarian politics. It is important and difficult to express. It is this. The revolt was a spontaneous mass rising of the people— so spontaneous that it was almost incompetent and surprised the people themselves—its suppression was tragic. It is the feeling of tragedy that remains and, with it, among ordinary people outside politics, the desire for healing of wounds. For this reason, many Hungarians who had been on the side of the Rising said to me that they were out of sympathy with the attitudes of the Hungarian refugees abroad.

  There is some envy in this: claustrophobia is the chief illness in the satellite countries. Some thought they should have stayed and lived through the aftermath, as my friends had had to do. Others said they should return and “be Hungarians”. Others said that, with the passing of time, the refugees had lost their relevance and knowledge and that their minds were dangerously fixed traumatically in the rebellion; whereas the situation in Hungary had moved on. Others resented the hostile propaganda of the refugees as “unpatriotic”. Still others, the loss of active and virile population. As the months and years go by, the refugees lose their value as witnesses.

  Now it is natural that obedient Communists should say this; but many of the people who said this were anti-Communist. They feel deeply the loss to the country and this is a measure of the strength of Hungarian nationalism. In a practical way, the existence of large colonies of refugees in Vienna and elsewhere in the West has made it much more difficult to get what all satellite peoples long for—visas for travel. To meet a refugee abroad is a considerable sin, to stay in his house almost a crime. The government’s foreign espionage service reports back to Budapest every movement of the sinner, even the shops that are visited, the trains taken, the car rides. This insecurity preys on the minds of the non-political; but it haunts the Communist Party leaders. The Rising for them was a Party quarrel ; they are all guilty. This was in 1960. In 1963 an anti-Stalinist purge has, theoretically, sof
tened the régime.

  To go back to the football match. So that the crowd could get its money’s worth, there were two games. We were there from two till six. The crowd had bursts of temperament. A woman sitting behind me grabbed my hat and screamed when a player missed a shot; and then collapsed with blushes when everyone laughed at her. One player, in a fury with the referee’s whistle, kicked the ball far out into the crowd and got a formal dressing down on the field.

  We had all bought lottery tickets and between the games the winners came out. One man won a woman’s bicycle, another a radio and another a television set. It is very difficult to walk round an arena carrying a television set: he had to get the police to help. Showers of lottery tickets went up in the air like confetti. There are not very many private cars in Budapest and 80,000 people had to fight their way on to the trains and buses afterwards. I was lucky to have a lift in an old car borrowed from a doctor—after successful writers, doctors are the highest paid people in Hungary and are among the first to get cars and telephones. After the match I went off alone to the flat of an elderly and lively Swedish lady, the widow of a Hungarian, who rejects all attempts by her American and Swedish relations to get her out. “I should be bored in New York or Stockholm,” she said. “And the music is better here.”

  There were a lot of people in her three-roomed flat in a new modern block in Pest. She had been able to buy it under a new mortgage scheme and had raised the money by selling one or two family pictures. She had been obliged by the housing law to let one room and the use of the kitchen to a young married couple. This started her off on the doctor-problem, on marriage, women, divorce; and everyone joined in. The young couple had been married before. The girl had divorced her husband because he had been thrown out of the Party and had lost his job. The new husband had also had a disaster. He had married a woman doctor who made a larger income— a much larger income—than his as a teacher and she had left him, taking with her the car and the telephone!