And, in ways I did not understand, he had survived, become a hero of ideas. He had managed, in ways that I did not begin to understand, to be on both sides of the wall, find the key to the back door, build the bridges of thinking, backwards and forwards, sideways and upwards, that were needed through a chaotic and tragic human age. He did not come from my age, and that meant I did not understand his. In fact, as Codicil said, I was an investigative simpleton, and he was born in dramas and tragedies I could hardly begin to share. From what Gerstenbacker had said with the wine in him last night, it seemed clear he had his share of secrets that he’d made his tricky way through a time of chaos, terror, deception and disguise. He was probably flawed, tainted in some fashion; he was certainly interesting. And now that I too lived in a time of transition, and saw in my own small way that no age lasts, that no framework is secure, that even the contemporary is not forever, I began to see a good deal more point to my search.
I stared out of the window of the Salieri Express. Contrary to myth, European trains are usually lumbering, contemplative, slow. They move reflectively through complicated landscapes, shuddering over bridges and going through strange valleys or impossible passes. The crews change suddenly, the temperaments of the passengers shift. Now there was plainly an Eastern European world to be seen outside. I saw high-rise concrete suburbs, workers’ apartments and grim-fronted stores, gridded streets and crowded yellow trams. There was a glimpse of water, a spire or two, a sudden sight of a long stone aqueduct. I checked the railway timetable and saw the train must now be coming into Budapest, at just the time the management said it would. I picked up The Magic Mountain, put it in the pocket of my anorak, there on the hook, took down the luggage from the rack, slipped the Kurier in my bag. I went down the corridor as the train doors jerked open, and stepped onto the platform.
People in grey clothes and plastic leather caps pushed and bustled; overalled porters shoved along great barrows. The posters on the station walls were in a language of very great obscurity, but they spoke of the things I immediately recognized – colas and jeans, television sets and pantihose. The architecture was grimly tiled, savagely functional. I looked round everywhere for a glimpse of Eiffel’s ironwork and Eiffel’s glass, but there was nothing there to suggest the work of the old bridgebuilder. No, as seems to happen so often in the kind of life I lead, I had plainly ended up in some completely different station. I went through a plastic-walled passage and out to the forecourt, found a small, air-polluting taxi, and gave the address of my hotel, where I would call Sandor Hollo, the only real line I now had to Doctor Bazlo Criminale.
6
Budapest is not one city but two . . .
Budapest is, of course, really not one city at all, but two. Unlike Vienna, which has hidden the Danube away in a culvert on its fringes, Budapest allows the great river – brown, wide, and fast-flowing by now, as it floods on southward and eastward – to surge through its middle, dividing it into two refracting capitals, looped together by great bridges, which stare across its waters at each other. High old Buda looks down from its hilltops onto flat nineteenth-century Pest; lowdown Pest stares up at the castle, the battlements, the double hills and deep valleys of ancient Buda. But when my taxi reached the hotel that Lavinia had booked for me that morning back in Vienna, I discovered that I was staying in neither of these places. My hotel lay in the very centre of the river, on Margaret Island, reached by a zigzag bridge, a quiet green corner that made an excellent resort for lovers and joggers, summer walkers and playing children, and no doubt, in the older, darker times just behind us, colluding spies and conspirators.
Back in the days of the Dual Monarchy and the belle époque, the tired and sated aristocrats of middle Europe had, I gathered, come here to its great Grand Hotel for the famous hot sulphur baths, hoping to purge away their old amorous and gastronomic excesses and at the same rime start on new ones. Rumour has it that Franz Schubert was made better here, though we can take it that Franz Kafka was made a good deal worse. Then, in the new postwar order of things, it was Party bosses and members of the nomenklatura, small government officials and workers for the post office, Russian tourists and East German attaches, who came to put on the grotesque rubber bathing-caps, splash in its fountains, take in its sulphurous steam, roll in its mud. Now the Grand Hotel was not so grand, though it retained its shape and dignity. With the twists and turns of recent history, it has taken on another incarnation, and been quite heavily restored. Today it is the Ramada Inn, and stressed German executives and excited American tourists now enjoy the pleasures of its stinking sulphur and eternal mud.
I checked in and got my key in the hotel’s now smart lobby, and changed Austrian schillings for Hungarian forints. Then a slow sad elevator took me upstairs to the long, many-bedroomed corridor, smelling of sulphur and chlorine, on which I hunted for my room. I found it at the very end, one of the smaller suites; even at the former Grand Hotel of Budapest, Lavinia had done all she could to make sure I had not ended up in total luxury. Nonetheless it had a tiny balcony, a view over the fast-flowing Danube, and an enchanting misty glimpse of fairytale battlements on the hillside above. I could not complain. I unpacked a little, sat down at the desk, picked up the telephone, and called the number of Sandor Hollo, which Gerstenbacker had given me. There was a dull dragging sound, then a crackling answer-phone message in Hungarian, one of the world’s most obscure languages, with the exception of African Click, then a quick flourish of Bartok, then the dragging sound resumed.
I tried for most of the afternoon. From what Gerstenbacker had told me, I had assumed that Sandor Hollo was a teacher of philosophy at the university, and so I imagined that he was even now closeted with his students, lecturing to his classes, sitting over books in the university library, or doing whatever university teachers do if they are not Professor Otto Codicil. Still, I kept on trying, on the half-hour, until I saw that November darkness had begun to fall over the river, and bright floodlights were now picking out the battlements and buildings on the high Buda bank. So now I gave up, made my way downstairs, and went over to the hotel bar for a drink. Here, on the barstools, I found myself surrounded by a group of Hungarian beauties, all of them wearing mini-dresses and leather boots that came up over their knees. They sat with their drinks and eyed me with the greatest curiosity. I quickly finished my beer, and went over to the maître d’ at the entrance to the dining-room, to ask for a table for dinner.
The maître checked a plan that lay in front of him on his lectern-like desk. ‘I suppose you are with a film, sir, yes?’ he asked me. ‘Well, I am, that’s right,’ I said. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘Well, sir, tonight we have BBC making Ashenden, Granada TV making Maigret, Channel 4 making a series on the European Community I think is very good. Which one, sir?’ ‘Oh, none of those,’ I said, ‘I’m here on my own.’ ‘Really it is too bad,’ said one of the Hungarian beauties, who had wandered across from the bar with her Campari soda and was now standing by my side, ‘It is not good to be all alone. If you like it and have twenty dollar I will have dinner with you.’ ‘A table for two, sir?’ asked the maître d’, looking at me with an air of deep human understanding. ‘No, thank you,’ I said, ‘Actually I quite like being on my own.’ ‘You don’t?’ cried the Hungarian beauty, ‘It is too bad to be all alone. Everyone has twenty dollar.’ ‘Well, not tonight,’ I said, ‘Tonight I have some work to do.’ ‘Oh, work to do,’ said the girl, ‘What a pity, well, tomorrow, when you have plenty dollar. You should not be alone, it is not nice. Remember, you can find me here any time.’
That night I slept very peacefully (and also entirely singly) in my bed somewhere in the middle of the great River Danube. In the morning I woke early, and looked out of my window. There were sweatsuited joggers already jogging on the tracks outside, towelled bathers already on their way to their sulphurous pleasures. Fishermen fished, birds dipped and darted, long low Russian cruiseboats slid by on the river, to-ing and fro-ing between here and the Black Sea. I picked up
the telephone and dialled my number again, and this time someone answered: ‘Hollo Sandor.’ ‘I believe you can help me,’ I said. ‘Yes, I think so,’ he said. ‘I haven’t explained what it is yet,’ I said. ‘No, but I can help you,’ said Hollo Sandor. A little mystified, I explained that I was a British television film-maker working on the subject of Bazlo Criminale, and that I should like to consult him. ‘A film?’ he said, ‘Everyone makes a film in Budapest now. We are so cheap, of course. Now we are Paris, now we are Moscow, now we are Nice, now we are London, now we are Sydney, Australia. Never of course Budapest, I think they make films about Budapest in Prague. Very well, you like us to meet about your film?’ ‘If you can give me the time,’ I said, ‘I imagine you’re very busy.’
‘For you I find the time,’ Hollo said, ‘Let us meet at noon at the Petofi statue on the Danube prospect. He is our great poet, you know, so everyone will tell you where it is. By the way, you are on expenses?’ ‘Yes, I am,’ I said. ‘Good,’ he said, ‘Then I think we will go somewhere very nice. I know all the places. I will see you at Petofi.’ I went down to the lobby for breakfast, and found there young men from several different and competing film teams, who were packing into vans and trailers the actors and extras, the clapperboards and cameras, the blondes and redheads, that even I knew were the stuff of a television shoot. I imagined our own team coming out to do the same in a few weeks or months. Our Criminale project was not at all unusual. As Hollo had said, these days everyone was shooting films in Budapest.
When I had taken breakfast, I caught the tram into Pest, and found myself walking round a city where, it was very clear, history had been changing very fast. Almost all the street names seemed to have been struck out with red lines, and new names set up either above or below. Karl Marx Square, where I got off the tram, was evidently no longer Karl Marx Square. 1 did, though, discover one more enduring monument. Here in the square was Gustave Eiffel’s splendid little West railway station, as fine as I had hoped. I had not come into it because its trains went east, into the Puszta and to Transylvanian mystery. It was probably from here that Bram Stoker’s innocent Jonathan Harker started, when he chose to take his unfortunate summer holiday in the land of Vlad the Impaler, in the book whose hundredth anniversary was due, like so much else, very shortly. What he would not have seen in those days was the new addition that had been made to the building. Tucked onto Eiffel’s station was the emporium of McDonald’s Hamburgers, a handy meat dish that might have saved Count Dracula a lot of trouble.
I turned and walked along the fine boulevard of the Lenin Ring, now no longer called the Lenin Ring, but Terez Korut. Here the stucco and balconies were pitted with bullet holes, perhaps from the war, perhaps from the Hungarian uprising; the shops below sold Sony Walkmen and Mannesmann computers, as well as stamps, marzipan, and flaky pastry. In a mahogany and marble café of perfect style, where nothing – not even the contents of the sugar bowl – seemed to have changed since the turn of the century, I sat down among lovers and old ladies in big fur hats and had good coffee and ice-cream, in a world where it seemed Marx, Lenin and their friends had never been. Then it was time to make my way down to the Petofi statue on the Danube prospect, evidently one of the few surviving statues in Eastern Europe, and wait for Sandor Hollo.
When I found him at last, he was not at all what I expected. I had imagined a small, intense philosopher, probably carrying a worn leather briefcase and engaged in abstruse thought. Instead a young man in a dashing white raincoat, blonde highlights tinted into his dark hair, passed me by three times, glancing over significantly in what I assumed was erotic invitation. Finally he walked directly over to me and held out his hand. ‘You are Franz Kay?’ he asked. ‘No, it’s Francis Jay, actually,’ I said. ‘Jay or Kay, it makes no different,’ he said, ‘Unless you are Kafka. I am to me Hollo Sandor, to you Sandor Hollo. It makes no different either. What is a name? And so you like to talk to me about your film.’ ‘I was told you could help me,’ I said. ‘I think not here,’ he said, glancing at the crowd, ‘Excuse me, but old habits die hard. In any case I know a very nice place over in Buda for your expenses. Don’t worry, I have a good car, by the way.’ ‘Fine, then, let’s go,’ I said.
‘One moment,’ he said, ‘Before we leave our excellent Petofi, one small lesson in Hungarian. Look across the river. Do you see those two hills?’ Yes, I did indeed. ‘On Gellert Hill, on the left, do you see the monument with the winged victory on the top? That is our monument of grateful thanks to the Russian soldiers who liberated us so kindly. Put up, of course, by those Russian soldiers. And now, on Castle Hill, to the right, do you also see a great white building?’ I did. ‘That is our monument of grateful thanks to the American people who sent us so much of their precious Coca-Cola,’ said Hollo, ‘Put up, of course, by those same American people. It is the Budapest Hilton. In Hungary we have learned one thing very well History is either one of these, or the other. This year we are all for the Hilton. Why not? Isn’t a bed and a minibar better than a tank? You agree?’
Hollo nodded gravely to me and led me over to his car, a shiny red BMW with racing stripes and rear spoiler, which he had parked flamboyantly right across the pavement. ‘Ultimate Driving Machine,’ he said, ‘Please get in. By the way, you can smoke in here. This is not the West, it is a free country.’ I sat in the low front seat, and Hollo scorched off, round the square and up over the Elizabeth Bridge, dodging between clanging yellow trams and slow chugging Trabants. Over on the further bank of the river, he pointed to a large decorated piece of concrete that stood among the trees. ‘Piece of the Berlin Wall,’ he said, ‘They sent it to us because we opened our borders and let out the Germans. You know here was where the great change started. The Wende, they call it, the turn. Oh, do you like to buy some, by the way? I can get you very good pieces, the real thing, there is a lot of fake wall around now. Also Russian tank-driver hats.’ We began zigzagging up the great Buda hill, around the vast restored castle. I looked at Hollo, who was changing gear joyously on every bend. ‘Are you really a teacher at the university?’ I asked.
He looked at me and laughed. ‘Believe me, if I drive this, I don’t do that,’ he said, ‘Do you know how much a university teacher gets in my country, maybe one-sixth of what you would make in the West. No, I am a juppie.’ ‘What is a juppie?’ I asked. ‘You don’t know?’ he said, ‘Very mobile young businessman.’ ‘Oh, a yuppie,’ I said. ‘You didn’t notice my red braces?’ he asked, and began patting items in the car, ‘CD player, equalizer, central lockings, even Filofax. We have seen on television here your “Capital City” and know how it is done.’ ‘Well, very nice,’ I said. ‘And how is your Iron Lady?’ he asked, ‘Very well, I hope. Still for the free market?’ ‘She resigned from office a couple of days ago,’ I said, ‘I just read about it on the train.’ ‘You get rid of her?’ he asked, ‘No, I don’t believe it.’ ‘It’s been eleven years,’ I said. ‘Nothing,’ said Hollo, ‘Okay, please, send her here quick. We love her, we need her. Better than these ones we have here, with twenty heads and only half a brain.’ ‘Unfortunately I don’t think it’s allowed,’ I said. ‘Of course not, national treasure, not for export,’ said Hollo, ‘Now here we get out.’
We had driven up to the top of the hill, through tree-lined streets past fine merchants’ houses, and now we stopped somewhere between the Saint Matthias church and the Budapest Hilton, which between them dominated the heights. ‘Over here, Fisherman’s Bastion, you have heard of it?’ asked Hollo, ‘It is what everyone remembers of Budapest.’ Fisherman’s Bastion was the delightful concoction of battlemented walls and fairytale turrets I had been looking up at from my hotel window below. From it you had, in turn, a fine view over Margaret Island, the traffic of the flowing Danube, the spread of Pest, the Parliament Building, the power station, the high ugly workers’ highrise blocks in the distance, and then the plain stretching out beyond. Near us, artists and potters, embroiderers and woodcarvers, sold their wares, and a moustached Magyar mus
ician in baggy white trousers played his pipes. ‘Ah, yes,’ I said, ‘It’s called one of the great views of Europe, and it is.’
‘Charming, yes,’ said Hollo, lighting a cigarette, ‘And now you see our trick. Here we have built a great European city, two in fact, one old and one new. Our only problem is our European cities are not in Europe at all. Budapest is Buenos Aires on the Danube, all a pretend.’ ‘How is it a pretend?’ I asked. ‘First, nearly all these buildings were not designed for here at all,’ said Hollo, ‘See there our lovely Parliament, down by the river, which hardly meets, by the way. The architect loved your House of Commons, so he made us one. The Chain Bridge, built by a Scotsman in a kilt. Eiffel from France made the railway station. Our boulevards are from Paris, our coffee houses from Vienna, our banks are English, the Hilton American. You see why they make films here, ewe are everything. And this old castle, Fisherman’s Bastion, from which nobody has ever fished, by the way, was built as a fantasy at the turn of the century. So you see it is Disneyland, and we are Mickey Mouse.’
‘I think it’s a magnificent city,’ I said. ‘I too,’ said Hollo, ‘A great unreal city. You know two million people live in Budapest, and every one is a European, when they are not being Magyar nationalists. All are artists, intellectuals, actors, dancers, filmmakers, great athletes, fine musicians. Unfortunately just for the moment, they drive a taxi, but one day . . . Then go out into the Puszta, and you will see Europe has stopped. The peasants have carts with horses, there are men in sheepskins herding flocks of ducks. Or look down the Danube a little, you will find great marshes and old women squatting by the river, washing clothes in the mud. That is Hungary. Two million intellectuals, eight million peasants, and only one thing in common. Barak palinka, peach brandy. So let us go and have some palinka, and you can explain me your film.’ Hollo led me down from our viewpoint and back between the Cathedral and the Hilton, into a smart square beyond. Fine merchants’ houses with great rounded coachdoors surrounded the square, and Hollo went into the courtyard of one of these. Then he opened a door, drew aside a curtain, and ushered me inside.
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