by Joanna Walsh
It’s getting on for lunchtime, and I could eat lunch for once, so I have all the bother of finding somewhere. I head for what, from a distance, looked like a Hungarian café with outdoor seating. Closer, it’s an ‘Irish pub’, the prices (in Euros) high, and the menus in English.
I wander through the iron-ribbed market hall where displays of plaster mushrooms show species and variety, and there’s something northern European, something I don’t quite like about this casual intent to inform, to catch you, fill your head while you wait in line to fill your belly. The market is closing when I see what I want. I queue to eat lángos for the first time in – how many? – years and the long queue moves so slowly through the piles of shining fruit and veg that I am about to cry with impatience. I’m almost out of time.
Time flies like an arrow.
But then:
Fruit flies like bananas.
Bananas are curvy so maybe time flies less like an arrow, more like a boomerang, or maybe time flies are the flies that zizgag below the square old-fashioned-modern lamp in my apartment, turning back on themselves as they bounce off invisible borders.
The last time I ate lángos it was because it was cheap and I was hungry, and I had no expectations, never before having eaten anything like the deep-fried salty dough pillow glitched with oil and garlic. And now I’m repeating that stop in time to grasp at who I was that time in Budapest before – so many years ago I might have been a different person in a different city – but it’s something like trying to hold onto a smell, or a colour, or the feel of a string of beads passing through my hand. There are no adjectives to describe time’s passage. It can pass slower or faster, like a volume dial can turn louder or quieter, but no more than that: it has no texture, no timbre. Sound can be loud and cheerful, or loud and sad, or loud and aggressive, but time can’t be aggressive, or cheerful, or sad, not really, only the things that happen in time, which means these events must be made from different material to time, though they are woven with it. It’s the quality of these events that turns time’s dial, speeds it up, or makes it hang heavy.
This is the reason there is a world. The world consists of repetition.
Kierkegaard, ibid
Time is not just what I pay attention to, but how I pay attention to it. Looking back I notice there must have been gaps in my attention. This grey water to be bridged between the banks of now, and then, shows that memory too has edges. But it’s these blind spots, and the sensation of grasping, that make it memory. The unmeasurable widths of these grey areas are time’s increment. It would not be the past without this gap.
I’ve moved up the line by the lángos stall, almost without noticing. Well, time flies when you’re having fun. If that’s so, when time stops you must be having the least fun. I’d say it’s more fun – the most – when something’s memorable enough to halt time, but I suspect it’s more likely I’ve got it wrong about fun: time can be so painful that the definition of fun might be anything that makes it pass quicker.
I get to the head of the queue a minute before the mechanical bell sounds to signal the punters to leave the market, and I eat the lángos impatiently, searching to repeat the first surprise.
Is this repetition? I became immediately out of sorts, or if one wishes, in precisely the sort of mood the day demanded.
Kierkegaard, ibid
•••
Crossing behind the market’s car parks, I step from Buda (or is it Pest? I can never remember) onto a bridge over the Danube. It looks like it’s supported by white classical columns, but up close, the columns are cables and they shake slightly as I walk. Many of the people already on the bridge are taking photos of one another. A man photographs his girlfriend repeatedly at ten-metre intervals. Any bridge is a photo-op: it’s something to do with scale, and it’s something to do with the joke of being on neither one side, nor the other. A good-looking girl is photographed by her less good-looking friend, who makes up for this difference by being in charge of any amount of complicated camera equipment. An older man photographs an older woman. She holds a cable, poses as though poised to swing like the Blumenfeld fashion shot of a model half-way up the Eiffel Tower, but she stays still. She is performing, for the camera, an imitation of a photograph of someone moving, and she’s still posing the way they did in the nineteenth century, as though exposure took minutes. If she goes on like that, she’ll never get anywhere.
From the centre of the bridge I can see both ways: Buda (or is it Pest?) behind me, and Pest (or is it Buda?) ahead. We understand things by their edges: that’s where the eye grabs them, sorts one body from another. We know cities by their borders: the unmarked (you can tell as soon as you’re in a suburb) or the inalienable, the steep drop off a cliff, or into water. A city is where it crosses. Budapest’s first bridge was built in 1849. What did the Budas and Pestians do before that? I don’t know. Was it that technology couldn’t span so broad a gap, or was it that nobody from one side of the city wanted to get to the other?
In the eighteenth-century German city of Königsberg there were seven bridges and the citizens, wanting to free their lives from the tedium of repeat experience, searched for a route that would let them traverse the city crossing no bridge more than once. In Budapest there are eight bridges, running from bank to bank, or to and from four islands – and these two even numbers up your odds of being able to cross without coming across a passed version of yourself.
Each bridge in Budapest is built in a different style, visual proof of the passage of time. From north to south they’re the Megyeri (2008); the Árpád, once the Stalin, built for the workers (1950); the Margit (1876); the oldest – the Chain – (1849); the Erzsébet (1903) rebuilt in 1964; the Liberty (1896, reconstructed 2009); the Petőfi, once the Horthy (1937 – a website tells me it is, possibly the least inspiring of all the Budapest bridges); and finally the Rákóczi (1995), once the Lágymányosi, that is lit by lamps reflected in downward-facing mirrors. There is also a northern rail bridge (1913, rebuilt 2008) and a southern rail bridge (1877, rebuilt 1953) which, if included, would bring the bridges again to an even number, and which, because they cannot be crossed on foot, we shall not count.
(We shall not count? How easy it is to do the maths, so easy to slip into the impersonal, the first non-person plural: multiplied, diffused, expanded into authority. And when demonstrating, how painful to cross from the first person to the second: ‘His times were so different from hers. Sometimes he demanded an answer right away, at other times he did not answer for weeks.’)
But, back to crossing the bridges in the order described above: yes, it is easy to cross all the bridges in Budapest without recrossing once. Even easier as, in Budapest, the bridges from and to the two islands count as one. But what if I’ve come to see the bridges, not the city? What if the city is incidental? What if the bridges are the ghost nodes in this algorithm, and the tourist streets with their castles parks monuments shops cafés, are the arcs, mere vehicles to the next crossing point? What if I’ve come to visit not a place, but a time?
If I want to make sense of time passing chronologically, as historical time continues to pass me by at its own monumental pace, however time loops my own life, then, by the date of original construction the order of bridges would run: Chain (1849), Margit (1876), Liberty (1896), Erzsébet (1903), Horthy (1937), Stalin (1950), Rákóczi (1995), Megyeri (2008) – that is, if a bridge is still the same bridge when it’s rebuilt or renamed, even when it crosses from and to the exact same spots on the bank.
In cities space doesn’t run parallel with time. A city can overwrite me while I stay still. All I have to do is wait. If I don’t think the Árpád is the same as the Stalin, because it no longer has the same name, or if I don’t think the Erzsébet of 1903 is the same as the entirely different bridge of 1964, joining the same points, also called Erzsébet, I might prefer to rank each bridge by its latest incarnation, and the order would be: Chain (1849: though the bridge gained extra lions in 1852, it is still the ol
dest), Petőfi (1937), Árpád (1950), Erzsébet (1964), Rákóczi (1995), Megyeri (2008), Liberty (2009), Margit (2011). Then, instead of going from Erzsébet to Liberty my path would lead first past Petófi to Rókóczi, though Petófi would have moved north to sit under Chain. Either way, making my way from north to south, it would be no more than a matter of time before I recrossed at least one.
Time can be reckoned by the distance between the beginnings and ends of events, and the grey water that flows between them. Like cities, events are defined by their edges, and it’s easiest to square events by their borders in space: that Summer in Paris, or that Winter in Bratislava. I can measure time as the difference between these edges, but I’m never sure if I’m measuring the difference in the place, or the difference in me. There is no unit for personal small change (should it be counted in tens, like Euros, or thousands, like Forints?), and there is no standard exchange rate for personal with historical time.
Well, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. For now I am very comfortable on a bridge, balancing over the gap between one sure thing and the next.
In 1735 mathematician Euler found that, in Königsberg, where every bank was linked by an odd number of bridges, there was no solution to the Königsberg problem. Because the number of banks with an odd number of bridges was not two (or zero), it was impossible to make your way to all points in the city without crossing at least one of them twice. Nowadays Königsberg has only five bridges. Time has passed, and it is possible to cross them all without recrossing, but only if you don’t mind ending up on an island. Besides, the city is no longer called Königsberg but Kaliningrad. It is now in Russia, and Prussia – where it once was – is no longer even a country, which means more time has passed, and that it has passed through different units of the currencies of politics, and nationality. In 1945 the Soviets cleared the Germans out, both military and civilians. Only Russians live there now, and Poles resettled after the Second World War, so that the city, also almost entirely physically destroyed, is near unrecognisable. Although you’ll still find German on the tombs in the graveyards, one of them belonging to Immanuel Kant, in Königsberg you can no longer cross the same bridge twice. It has become a city with no memory.
•••
Once over the river, in Pest (or is it Buda?) I’m back in city break territory. Silver wedding couples walk by hand in hand. I regret nothing. They don’t look happy.
The districts of Budapest spiral clockwise in ever increasing circles. Buda is 1 and Pest is 5, or perhaps it’s the other way around. Whatever their numbers, the two halves of the city centre are binary: one high, the other flat, one stary, one mlady – but that’s Slovak, not Hungarian. I lived in Slovakia for a short while, in Bratislava, a slim border’s width from Budapest. That’s how I first came here. It’s a couple of hours away by the train, following the river that severs both cities.
I’m following the map to the Rudas Baths but, as in Nice, I find I’m helplessly ascending, this time through a scrubby park to Budapest castle. I don’t mean to climb but the roads curve upwards and clockwise, like Budapest’s districts, like water going down a sink – or not, as I’ve read that water goes down either way wherever you are in the world, according to factors as local as the slope of the plughole.
It is no longer so hot and I realise how much effort, in the south, I’d put into comfort. In Sofia any touch was unwelcome. Here I’m relieved to put on a sweater, a jacket, to put layers between myself and other people. The corkscrew streets are scattered with massage parlours, places where you pay for touch, but the pavements are almost empty, although the statues of undressed women on the art nouveau buildings detach themselves from their iron-framed facades. No longer supportive caryatids, they cross from the fascias into the streets. They are almost amongst us.
Then, just like in Nice, there’s no more up, not unless I want to pay for the castle, and the only way to visit and not to pay is to pay, instead, to eat at the restaurant on the ramparts, newly terraced with tables and moated by modern defences where perspex, not water, preserves the signposted ‘view’ but allows no entry, not unless you’re both hungry and rich enough. Standing at the summit is a pair of sixtysomething female twins with matching haircuts. They are dressed in identical pink leisure outfits, just as they might have been aged five.
At the bottom of the hill are the Rudas Turkish baths, which I have chosen because they are the oldest in Budapest and were really Turkish when the city was not-EU-not-Soviet-not-Austro-but-Ottoman-Hungarian. The bathhouse is under renovation, hidden beneath plastic sheeting, and the flyover leading to the rebuilt Erzsébet bridge. Entry is not expensive but, last time I was in the city, I had neither the time nor the money nor even the sense of direction to visit, though I did have an inkling that soaking myself in thermal and, as its website tells me, slightly radioactive water was something I would like, though I had not done it before, and though I have done it many times since in various cities across the world.
The stone interior of the baths is flaky as ancient skin, and the main pool’s ceiling is vaulted like a church with, instead of a font, a tap set over a stone basin at one end with a sign promising something to do with health, or youth. Though I can’t read what it says, I fill my plastic bottle up to the top because whatever it is, I want it.
Health? Youth? Age is the elephant in the room: wrinkly and Dorian-grey, it’s spent too much time in the baths, which are graded by middle-aged temperatures: 38, 40, 42, ages most of the bath’s patrons have long passed. Cold-blooded and slow-moving, with wrinkled rubber-capped heads – clown’s wigs covering already-bald spots – their increments are showing. But, as I creep nearer to them, the distance between me and them has telescoped so much I can see the connections, can imagine how time will bridge the gap between us. I’ll be there one day. But not yet.
An old man with long grey hair, bent double, his swimming trunks almost transparent with wear, sits under a pipe, the thermal water cascading onto his back. He directs the hose around his shoulders, letting the water caress him. He’s taking care of himself. No one else will.
The last time I saw you I remember holding your arm because you slipped as we walked up some steps – a legitimate touch – and, just after that, a girl with tight cut-off shorts passed, going up the steps in front of us, her buttocks a slim continuation of her legs. You made lewd fingers. You always let me know that youth belonged to you, even if you were no longer young.
You took off your glasses, said, ‘Of course I look twenty-eight.’
Though you might have been, you didn’t say, ‘I’m only playing.’
To stop time dead with love is for teenagers. It’s not meant to happen at my age, or at yours, or if it does it’s comic. How could we ever have bridged the lifetime we have between us of believing love is any particular thing?
But wait, what’s this? A chronicle of the Middle Ages?
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide?
Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself?
Chronic! (That’s what they used to say at school for rubbish, or the boys said it, while the girls minded their language). Chronic! Don’t make me laugh.
I’ll laugh like a Medusa, though they don’t have them in these waters.
The ‘waters of youth’ are warm in my bottle. I take a gulp, determined to stomach them, but they’re too sulphurous to drink. I’d rather get old than swallow that, hook line and sinker. Is that the catch – you can never drink enough for it to work?
•••
Along the river from the baths I find an outdoor café by the Danube. I eat (again!). I order fried carp because I ate it once in Slovakia, years ago, fished straight from the same river when the water was still brown, and probably slightly radioactive. I am disappointed. Whatever I’ve ordered, it’s not the same. I am leaving tomorrow: I had only one chance to get it right. To make things worse, at the table behind me a grating Hungarian voice speaking in English makes a hateful comment about gypsie
s and I turn, ready for scorn and am amazed to see that she is young and, what’s more, beautiful, with the kind of beauty particular to youth: a tall, slim, dirty-blonde with straight white teeth, cut-off shorts skimming the tops of her honey legs and T-shirt that says MIAMI (will she ever go?). And she is the girl on the bridge, still facing her less beautiful friend whose complicated camera equipment is heaped up beside her plate. The beautiful girl has the face of a fashion model: like a girl’s but at the same time like a woman’s because she has no young-girl fat on her cheeks. And, because she is so beautiful, and so young, I am shocked and condemn her more harshly than I would have done had she been older or less beautiful.
The last time I was here, I was her age, and in another how-many-years I may come back to Budapest, and I will know more but I will look less: that’s the tradeoff. I’m only material and that’s how time works on it, in both directions. The only way round is fiction: those too-wise girls in books – or is it just we expect so very little from girls? The last time I was here I must have known things. I had a degree, my head stuffed up with things that must sometimes have leaked from my mouth, and a few of them at least must have made sense, but I can’t remember. So much time was passed in speaking, and I can remember the feeling of it, but nothing that I said. It’s the gap, again, that makes it a memory.
Now I talk less and the fewer words tumble out, the more each means. It is terrible to age until each phrase is more than the sentence that contains it, and finally every word – so loaded with meaning by memory, reading, experience – conjures so many others, like nodes with a hundred arcs. Now each word has more edges, and they are sharp: your words are more defined now because, though you still write to me, there are fewer of them, and they come less often. All those words we used to have, and now we’re monosyllabic! Each stands out, sparser therefore more distinct, changing the focus, making it difficult to judge how far away you are from me. No more words, please, as I get older. Words are for the young.