Cafe Europa

by Ed Ifkovic

  Winifred was talking rapidly in German, which I grew up speaking. She was looking at Tihanyi but speaking to Pór, curious about their work, asking about modern art in Budapest. I sat back, fascinated by her grasp of Parisian art movements. Both men had been part of a Hungarian group called The Eight, executing modern Expressionist works, Cubist art, heavily influenced by German and French avant-garde artists. A smattering of pioneer art had come to Budapest—Cézanne at the National Salon, Kandinsky and four Picassos shown at the Artists’ Gallery. Kokoschko, Klimt. The names swept past me, a blur, meaningless. So somber had been my few days traveling with Winifred—the awful aftertaste of her agony in a London jail—that I marveled at her now—her vitality, her animation.

  “Matisse,” Bertalan Pór enunciated, reverently.

  “Ah,” said Winifred, as though saying amen at the end of a prayer.

  Tihanyi’s lips embraced the august name, though what I heard was a garbled blunt of language.

  In 1907 Bertalan Pór had spent time at Gertrude Stein’s apartment at Rue de Fleures 27, hobnobbing with Juan Gris, Picasso, and their followers. He’d learned English, he said, from Americans drinking in the cafés. And for a few months a nomadic Lajos Tihanyi had lived in the shadow of Matisse’s home, though his being deaf and dumb limited his exchanges with the hardscrabble artists working and living at La Ruche. They’d returned to Budapest invigorated, banding with six other artists to exhibit at the Nemzeti Szalon. When Pór exhibited his paintings at the Könyves Kálmán Szalon, on the Váci, the Prime Minister Tisza publicly attacked his art, calling it degenerate, foul, unworthy.

  Now he smiled at us. “The way to become famous is to have a politician condemn you.”

  Winifred was impatient. “You two are doing a book of sketches?”

  Pór nodded.

  “Why Café Europa?” I asked.

  He smiled and glanced at his friend. “We are fascinated by the Americans. The busy reporters running around like wild birds.”

  “Like Harold?”

  Again the hasty glance at Tihanyi who shrugged his shoulders, comprehending. “Americans have…let me say…Americans in Budapest…they swagger and they burst out and they…they are”—his accent got thicker, deeper—“the wonder of the New World.”

  I repeated, “Like Harold?”

  “Harold the journalist is…is peculiar.”

  “Perceptive,” Winifred noted wryly.

  But Tihanyi nudged his friend and jotted something down on a strip of paper. Bertalan Pór grinned. “Like you, Miss Ferber.” Leek you Mees Fibber. Swallowed, wonderful words. “Different, the look.”

  “Me?” I stammered.

  “Lajos wants to paint you. In red.”

  “What?”

  “He wants your face on canvas. You, in a red dress.”

  I smiled at Tihanyi. “Yes, the scarlet woman afoot in the Old World. Hawthorne would be pleased.”

  My remarks made no sense to the pair.

  Winifred spoke up. “Your depiction of the Blaines was on target, Mr. Pór. You captured that rather stupid woman and that pompous man.”

  Pór rattled off a translation for his friend.

  Tihanyi chuckled and pointed at his friend.

  “Not all Americans are so…dreadful,” I announced.

  Tihanyi had been carrying an old leather satchel slung over his shoulder, cradling it in his lap when he sat down, and now clumsily extracted his sketchbook and flipped it open. The first drawing was startling—an unrecognizable figure, a slapdash jumble of blunt lines and chaotic swirls. I groaned—was this Nude Descending a Staircase all over again? But Tihanyi watched me closely, let out a gruff laugh and flipped the page. Staring intently into my face, he tapped a drawing. I was staring at Cassandra, her girlish beauty captured along with a hint of pouting in the puckered lips, meanness in her narrowed eyes. Hastily, eyes still on me, Tihanyi flipped the sheets, pointing, tapping another page showing a softer girl, one ready to cry. Another sketch—the secretive poet in the corner of the café, a man swathed in pastel scarves and arctic stares.

  Bertalan Pór saw the question in my eyes. “István Nagy,” he said. “Who hates us…and Americans.”

  “Why?”

  “He is the darling of the art nouveau Austrian poetry of the last century. He writes pretty poetry about fragile girls with huge eyes lost in veils and garlands of flowers. We…how you say?…scare him…our new art…and Americans scare him. “He says the Americans will flood the Old World with their money disease. Franz Ferdinand, who has toured America, talked of the craziness of the Americans for the dollar bill.”

  “So this István sits in the Café Europa for this reason?”

  “So he can write bad poetry about the loud Americans there.” He laughed. “You can watch him…his lips…they curl…when an American yells at a waiter.”

  “Good Lord,” Winifred said. She took the pad from the table and flipped back to the first drawing. “I like this.”

  “It’s Lajos’ self-portrait,” he said.

  Sharp, geometric lines, bug eyes, a crooked shoulder.

  I kept my mouth shut.

  Excited, Bertalan Pór suggested we accompany them to a gallery on nearby Váci Utca, where both had works on exhibit. Winifred was nodding up and down. Giving us no time to refuse, both men stood, and Winifred and I followed them out of the restaurant onto the quay.

  ***

  On busy Váci Utca the aroma of coffee wafted from a café. A baker enticed us with warm Kaiser rolls displayed in wide wicker baskets. A grocer was hanging glossy strings of dried red paprikas and garlic from a clothesline. Nestled between a used book store with stalls spilling onto the street and a haberdashery advertising goods from Paris, the storefront art gallery was empty, dimly lit and musty. But as we walked in, someone snapped on an overhead light, and the narrow room was suddenly bright. I blinked wildly because the walls were covered with canvases that startled. At least they startled me, a woman who favored the serene elegance of, say, John Singer Sargent. Elongated figures, garish misshapen heads, bulging eyes, splashes of vibrant color so bold they seemed blood-letting and barbaric, geometric angles passing for nudes, landscapes filtered through a drunken eye or a hashish-smoker’s delirium.

  Dazzled, Winifred and I hesitated in the doorway. This was a brave new world. Bertalan Pór, amused, nudged us in.

  Winifred sucked in her breath, a smile on her face.

  But our stillness was shattered by a lusty yell—Harold, out of breath, pushing behind us. “I saw you headed here and rushed…”

  Winifred grumbled. “No one invited you, Mr. Gibbon.”

  He grinned. “But I’m expected everywhere.”

  Harold galloped past us, taking charge, and stood in the middle of the gallery, face to face with the young woman who’d switched on the lights. “What the hell is this? Someone’s idea of a nightmare?” But he was laughing out loud. He swirled around, taking in the unorthodox paintings.

  Lajos Tihanyi, puzzled by Harold’s gesturing and strutting and the outburst in loud English, turned to Bertalan Pór for an explanation, but his friend looked to me.

  Harold stamped his foot. “What in tarnation?”

  Tihanyi’s face tightened, a flash of anger in his eyes, a vein on his neck throbbing.

  I smiled bravely. “Keep in mind that Mr. Gibbon is not an art critic. He knows little of culture. After all, he does work for William Randolph Hearst.”

  Bertalan Pór laughed and nodded at Tihanyi—a look that begged him to relax. Tihanyi breathed in. In careful, spaced-out English, Bertalan Pór said, “Then he is like most of Budapest—frightened of the new art, condemning this…new vision.” He lingered on the last word, as if uncertain he used it correctly.

  Stepping close to a huge canvas, Harold peered at a painting, which, I noted nervously, was signed by Tihanyi, and
blurted out, “You know, before the coming of war there are always fireworks—flashes of anger and decay and smoke signals in the sky. The workers’ protests. Breaking down the old guard. A slap in the face of tradition.”

  Harold, fingers tapping his chin, suddenly faced us. He pointed to Tihanyi’s brilliant purples and reds. A portrait of a man whose wide-open eyes suggested astonishment at the world he found himself a part of. An emaciated man in what looked like a bolero hat, but the cubist angles reinforced the subject’s smugness, his venality. “The end of the Habsburgs is here.” He bowed to Tihanyi and Pór. “You, sirs, are the true revolution.”

  Bertalan Pór bit his tongue. “Yes, we are.” Deadly serious.

  Pór then enthusiastically showed us his work, an elaborate narration in a chaotic blend of Hungarian, German, English and, I swear, a trace of bungled French. He pointed to one painting—The Sermon on the Mount—that he said had been the subject of an attack on him a few years back. “A man cursed me in the street.”

  “A badge of honor, sir.”

  Pór bowed to Harold. Thank you. “Köszönöm.”

  Harold’s eyes popped. “Maybe this is what I should be writing about. The Hungarian artists who strike out at moribund Habsburg inertia with a paintbrush.”

  At that moment Winifred, gazing out the front window, started, and we followed her gaze. For a brief moment I caught the eye of the mysterious American from the Café Europa, that bearded man in the shadows, who sat with Zsuzsa Kos and János Szabó. The rich American from Boston—or so Harold suggested.

  “Jonathan Wolf,” Harold announced.

  The man, peering in through the dusty windows, jerked back quickly, and disappeared.

  “I’m being followed,” Harold said, his voice unusually quiet. His head flicked back and forth nervously, and he bit a fingernail. “Yeah. There’s a story there.”

  “But what?” I asked.

  “I don’t feel good about this. Not one bit.” His eyes flashed with anger.

  Chapter Five

  The next morning, later than I’d planned, I entered the Café Europa to find Winifred already at a table, her hands circling a cup of black coffee. Markov, hovering nearby, signaled to one of the waiters who placed a cup in front of me, bowed, and asked in stilted English what else I wanted. I waved him off. Dark, bone-tingling coffee with frothy whipped cream, a concoction I’d become fond of and knew I’d demand in every American restaurant till the end of my days. I sipped the tangy brew, smacked my lips.

  Winifred smiled. “The Hungarians call black coffee ‘black soup.’”

  “More like black mud.”

  Harold, sitting nearby at a table, had glanced up as I entered, nodding through narrowed eyes. He was scribbling on a pad, biting the end of a pencil with the dedication of a beaver on a log.

  “So you’ve exiled dear Harold?” I smiled at Winifred.

  She didn’t smile back. “I didn’t say a word, but my steely eye sent a message to the man.”

  “Sooner or later he’ll be sitting with us.”

  “That’s because he knows you favor him.” She twisted her mouth. “Something I’ll never understand.”

  “A character, I admit, but amusing in the way the family pet satisfies its owner.”

  She shook her head. “And I thought I’d mastered the cruel jibe.”

  I shrugged. “I meant my words to be kind.”

  “Edna, I travel with you because you don’t suffer fools. You’re a young woman, but somehow you’ve learned that lesson early on. It took me a lot of years to learn that—and time spent on a cold jail floor, held down by rapacious men.”

  “I’m so sorry.” I shivered. “I can’t imagine that.”

  She reached over to pat my wrist. “Don’t feel sorry for me, Edna. Friendships fail when pity enters the picture.”

  Harold was sitting back now, arms folded against his chest, glaring at us, perhaps catching some of the conversation about him. Then, inspired, he scribbled furiously on his pad, then looked up to survey the quiet room. A few tables were occupied, one unfortunately burdened by the sour-looking poet, István Nagy. A snake-like man, dandyish in his fuchsia scarves and undulating belle-époque softness. Only his piercing eyes betrayed a petty character: hard, unforgiving. He caught me watching him and his face stiffened. Idly, I compared him with the two artists, Bertalan Pór and Lajos Tihanyi, who, despite their quirkiness and bizarre canvases, were welcome breaths of fresh air, vital young men in a hurry, racing to the horizon, spirited, robust.

  Out of the blue, Harold announced to the room, “The topic of the day: the Serbian Question. My day, of course.”

  Winifred grumbled, “Madness in a young man is particularly alarming.”

  I addressed Harold. “What are you talking about?”

  “The Austrian-Hungarian Empire doesn’t know how to deal with little crazy Serbia, spreading venom, throwing stink bombs, assassinating aristocrats—as if that’ll take care of things. Bosnia and Herzegovina be damned. Serbia, that Balkan powder keg, the streets filled with anarchists sailing merrily through the cobbled streets, looking for someone—sometimes I think anyone—to kill.

  “I’ve been there—in Belgrade. Unlike the emperor who has no clue what is happening in his empire’s far corners. Mud and pigs in the streets, ladies lifting their skirts to avoid the muck. King Peter Karageorgevich, a corrupt man, happy only in the brothels of Paris. Afraid of the Black Hand that put him in power. Young Bosnia—hungry for vengeance against the tyrant Austria. What to do if you’re Austrian? Alle Serben müssen sterben! All Serbs must die.”

  Pleased with this insane oration, Harold stood and bowed, and somehow didn’t look foolish doing so.

  “Good Lord, Mr. Gibbon. Stop! So early in the day.” I chuckled. “Politics is a bore this time of day.”

  “Politics pay my bills.”

  “But you talk of assassination and mayhem.”

  “A day of reckoning that’s coming round the bend. Welcome to the Old World.”

  Too bombastic, his words sailing across the quiet café, doubtless his day’s copy to be wired to Hearst. From his table István Nagy looked up from his desultory versifying, and grunted too loudly. An unhappy man.

  Now, deliberately, Harold pointed at him. “The spy in the house of Magyar. The apologist for the cruel double-eagled monarchy.”

  Vladimir Markov, signaled by Harold, rushed to the table and placed a bottle of spring water on the table.

  “Mr. Markov,” Harold began, “a moment of your time.”

  Markov didn’t look happy but moved closer and leaned in. “Of course.” A thick English accent. Ov corz.

  “You hear everything here, my good man. Perhaps you can shed some light on the question of the day. Franz Josef, when he’s not dying and shunning Franz Ferdinand’s unroyal wife Sophie, spends his days hating Serbia. What do you think?”

  Flushed, Markov looked back to the kitchen door, as though seeking escape. He fumbled with a button on his black vest, and then checked to see whether his cravat was still knotted. For a moment he was silent. Then, stuttering, he answered, “I no discuss the empire.”

  Harold guffawed. “I love it. ‘The empire.’ That rumbling over-bloated entity, bursting with bile and pus and sewage, unhappy with the heir to the crown—aloof Franz Ferdinand, hidden away in his castle in Bohemia with that hausfrau no one likes. He hates Hungary, doesn’t he? Good old Franz, tooling through Budapest in his Lohner-Porsche, scattering the chickens and calling the city a hotbed of dangerous men. And so the old Magyars despise him.”

  Markov flinched. “Sir, I am a foreigner living in this glorious city. A guest worker, I think you say.” He slipped into German. “Un arbeider. A worker. Budapest is my home. Me and my wife who comes—flees—the mountains of Russia. The village there. A wonderful life here.” He smiled uncomfortably. “Here—electric lights,
the underground train. I love Budapest.”

  Harold flipped his hand. “Yeah, yeah, I get the message. We all love Budapest. That is, everyone but good old Franz Ferdinand. What happens to the Croats, Serbs, Bulgarians, Gypsies, Jews when he takes over for his uncle, who at this moment, I understand, is gasping for a final undeserved breath?”

  Markov looked around him, locking eyes with István Nagy, who was listening closely. “Such talk is…dangerous, sir. I have a simple job…”

  Harold looked at Winifred and me. “See? Everyone is afraid here. Everyone kisses your hand, bows like you’re the king and queen, but first looks to see if you’ve got a bomb in the other hand.” He roared at his own remarks.

  Markov backed off, but not before catching István Nagy’s eye. A low hiss escaped from the poet’s throat. Finally, swiveling around so quickly he bumped a chair, Markov fled into the kitchen. Voices from inside: a woman’s frantic voice, maybe his wife, quivering, questioning. Markov’s own voice, laced with fear. The crash of glass dropped onto the tiled floor. A curse in Russian.

  “You like to endanger that poor man’s job?” I said to Harold.

  He waved his hand in the air. “Really, Miss Ferber. I’m just doing my job.”

  “He has nothing to offer you.”

  “The man in the street—my take on things. The fact that he’s scared to talk of how much everyone hates Franz Joseph is a topic unto itself. And so I report it.” He stopped to jot something down, his face contorted with concentration. “The old pensioner sitting in City Park is a gold mine of juicy tidbits.”

  “A weasel,” Winifred said too loudly.

  “Someday you’ll like me, Miss Moss.”

  “Not in the usual lifespan of any intelligent woman living in 1914.”