Blue River, Black Sea

by Andrew Eames

  As a solo traveller, you have to be prepared for downbeat days, and I usually tell myself that there’s a creative edge to misery. It is only through such moments of loneliness that you touch base with the essence of your personality – who you really are – and hopefully you’ll also discover a resilience that helps you to bounce back. Just look at the world’s artistic geniuses, I reassure myself, they are almost invariably miserable much of the time. Misery comes with the territory of creativity, and it applies to travel, too. If I was a person who took everything in my stride with perfect ease, then this book would read as blandly as a tourist brochure. Its light would have no shade. It is the emotional highs and lows, the physical discomforts and disasters, that make an experience worth reading about.

  But that difficult day in Esztergom, infected by Hungarian gloom, was particularly personal because of the inevitable comparison I could draw with Leigh Fermor’s experience of the same place. Esztergom represented a chance for me to measure myself up against him, and I came out of it pretty badly. I tried to be philosophical: he had his style, I had mine. Journeys are bound to have miserable days, and I knew I had good stuff to come. I remember thinking, before I fell asleep, that I’d had enough of the bicycle. I needed a change of scene, a change of cinema reel, a change of pace. I needed.

  13

  Communists and Aristocrats in Budapest

  Budapest is the only capital city which truly straddles the Danube. Vienna shoves the river into the suburbs, Bratislava regards it with suspicion from a safe distance from behind a parapet and Belgrade takes a squinting, sidelong view from the top of a hill, but Budapest, according to Peter Esterhazy, ‘allows the Danube to slide between its breasts’. Mind you, it is quite flat-chested on the Pest side.

  I slid unpornographically between these unequal bosoms on a tourist boat I’d picked up in Szentendre. It was nearly 40 degrees in the shade, and I didn’t fancy trying to pedal-penetrate my way into a major city in that heat, so I’d joined the tourists who’d come upstream to buy lace parasols and wooden puzzles in Szentendre’s pretty streets and then to sit in its riverside cafés until it was time to go home.

  The boat passengers were very cosmopolitan and it was a pleasure to be able to eavesdrop on understandable conversations again. At least it was until I overheard a posh Englishman getting into an argument with one of the crew over a lost ticket. The Englishman was pedantic in the extreme, indignant at any suggestion of dishonesty, and equally determined not to pay again. For his part the crewman was large, fat and shiny-headed and had a packet of sunflower seeds in his pocket which he dipped into at regular intervals. His end of the conversation, therefore, was punctuated by spitting small blizzards of seed fragments over the rail, which only served to aggravate the Englishman even further. At the expression ‘downright ill-mannered’ (it had to come sometime) I moved a few rows away so I didn’t have to hear more. To block out the argument I peered fixedly at the musculature of the tree roots where they were exposed by low water.

  Initially, as the boat moved downstream, the thickly wooded banks were giving nothing away, a model of impassivity. And then we started to meet sculling boats and canoeists coming upriver, the city’s single spies. They were followed by an island colonized by ramshackle glass-fronted villas on piles, like captains’ bridges that had been severed from their motherships by a passing storm and spirited away to an isolated lump of land. It was the handiwork of an invisible, all-powerful captain’s-bridge collector in the sky who wanted them, as a magpie does, for their glittery glass windows.

  Then came a half-finished motorway arch and then another older bridge, this time with a rumbling yellow tram that temporarily drowned out all attempt at conversation on board. At this point the banks became follically challenged and concrete embankments stepped forward, followed reluctantly by shy apartment blocks.

  Suddenly self-conscious, aware that he was entering the grandstand at the end of a long race, the blotchy-complexioned old gentleman sitting in front of me folded away his German-language Viennese newspaper and started to talk to his neighbour in Hungarian, while the rest of the architecture of Budapest started to assemble on the riverbanks like a reluctant army of mismatched soldiery dribbling out on to the parade ground.

  There was Margaret Island, busy with joggers and spa-visitors; and there were the Houses of Parliament, a 691-roomed giant crab with a spiky haircut that had taken a thousand labourers seventeen years to build. Next door to it on the embankment sat a statue of Jozsef Attila, another prolifically suicidal poet with eight attempts on his own life after the age of nine, gazing at the Danube’s bulging and contracting waters, whose

  Each single movement, each and every wave.

  It rocked me like my mother for a time

  And washed and washed the city’s filth and grime.

  Atilla’s vision of filth and grime is contiguous with the present day, but amongst those things it had washed away, from just where Attila sat, were throngs of Jewish children aged between four and twelve, machine-gunned into the river in the latter days of the Second World War. A row of metal shoes lined the embankment edge where they disappeared.

  The boat slowed and turned back into the current in the lee of Buda’s biggest hill, Gellert, topped by the city’s most adaptable monument, Lady Liberty, holding a palm frond aloft for all to see. Lady Liberty is a true survivor amongst Eastern European statuary. She’s overcome the vicissitudes of Hungary’s very difficult century, starting her career during the fascist period as a personal tribute to a dictator’s son, riding out the communist period as a Liberation Monument thanking the Russians for their advance, and now she stood as a generic memorial for all those who had died for Hungarian independence. Adaptable and ambiguous, she’d managed to epitomize heroism for each new regime, although she’d required discreet remodelling at every regime change in order to escape being melted down into ship’s propellers.

  Below her, we nosed ashore just upstream of the Chain Bridge, where art nouveau merchants’ houses spread in staccato clumps along both shores, demi-semiquavers on a stave. The bridge is Budapest’s most photogenic and elderly crossing, a string-of-pearls suspension, a suspender belt across a svelte river which was briefly stockinged by a rifling breeze. It was constructed in 1849 at the instigation of Count Széchényi, after he had been forced to delay his father’s funeral for eight days because the river was too high for him to cross. This was an inconvenience that he found intolerable, and he decided it was time the city had a more permanent crossing, so he contacted a British engineer who’d just created a Thames river-crossing at Marlow: ‘I want one of those.’ Back then in Hungary the aristocracy made everything happen, even big things like the building of bridges.

  For the moment I didn’t need to cross it, but my destination was close to its western end, and within twenty minutes of disembarking I’d wheeled my bicycle into the kitchen of a fourth-floor apartment block in Buda’s riverside Taban district. There my well-travelled 20-euro set of wheels came to rest, five weeks after leaving Donaueschingen. I never rode it again.

  The apartment belonged to an old friend, a lifelong socialist and a teacher at one of Budapest’s universities. Despite thirty years of living in communist and post-communist countries there was something very British about Mark, with his passionate support of Wolverhampton Wanderers, his umbilical cord (via the Internet) to BBC Radio, his fascination with cricket and his enthusiasm for James Joyce. Stocky, energetic and crackling with enthusiasm, he had a craggy face which habitually crinkled at the corners when he smiled. He was fluent in German, Czech and Hungarian and could cope in Serbian, Croatian, French and Irish, but in his spoken English he clung tenaciously to his flat-vowelled Black Country accent. Although he was massively interested in everything, his teaching was always top of his list, and he was forever gathering material and exchanging emails with his students, for whom he was plainly a caring, inspirational figure.

  Socialism ran in the family. His grandfather had bee
n a post-war Labour MP at a time when the Labour Party was keen to forge links with the wider socialist world, and had travelled out to Budapest back in 1946 to meet the government. Mark, therefore, was to some extent following in his grandfather’s bond-forming footsteps, although his own political activity quickly got him into trouble when he first moved out to live and work in East Germany in the early 1980s. Completely unintimidated by the system, he’d started to criticize the GDR’s heavy-handed brand of socialism and to bring copies of seditious magazines like New Musical Express, Woman’s Own and Cosmopolitan into his English Studies classes, which resulted in a reprimand from the head of faculty.

  ‘I was told I didn’t understand Marxism–Leninism properly, and that I was an anarchistic euro-communist. And I suppose I was a bit of an anarchist, that much was true. I used to run English evenings, staging a male beauty contest in one of them, and then I did a cabaret on a summer course which had the corpse of socialism in the GDR in it. They didn’t like that, they didn’t.’

  There were other acts of provocation, too, including trying to take a dartboard through Checkpoint Charlie, which aroused a lot of interest amongst the border guards, as did the Solidarity leaflet the guards found in his back pocket. The Stasi pulled him in for interrogation, and when he continued to insist he was committed to the GDR, albeit to a more liberal version than what they’d so far achieved, they changed tack and tried to recruit him as a spy instead.

  ‘It was a real cliché. A guy in a leather jacket came out to visit. You could tell straight away who he was because he had a Lada, while everyone else had a Trabant. He was a nice enough guy. Brought me cakes and newspaper articles from the British press with bits underlined for us to talk about. But there was no way I was going to start working for the secret police.’ After three visits the agent gave up.

  Nevertheless there was no denying the strength of Mark’s convictions and those of the friends around him. He was such a strong socialist that when his grandmother left him a legacy of £20,000 he dared not mention it to any of his circle. ‘I felt ashamed of it. I was even tempted to give it away, but at that stage I was living in East Berlin and the money was in a bank account in the UK, so it was easy enough to pretend it didn’t exist.’

  Two decades later that legacy came home to roost when it helped him to buy his own parquet-floored, high-ceilinged apartment in Budapest, filled with sunshine, books, good conversation and the sound of rumbling trams. After twenty-eight different addresses in thirty years it wasn’t an ideological cop-out, buying the flat, he maintained; he didn’t consider property ownership to be theft. ‘But I suppose I’ve mellowed in my old age,’ he conceded. ‘I’m not as active politically as I was, which might well be something to do with enjoying being within my own four walls. I still believe in equality of opportunity, grants for education, free healthcare, etc. The difference is that now I suppose I try to find things I have in common with people rather than trying to change their views.’

  He continued to travel widely in Eastern Europe, heading off for rock festivals, starting conversations with strangers on trains, and cutting a popular figure in English-teaching seminars all the way across former communist states. I’d get emails from unheard-of places, at unlikely times of the night, sleepless in Gdan´sk.

  But Hungary was where he’d settled, and he was suitably dismayed at the haste with which Budapest had abandoned its former socialist ideals and swung to the right, which we discussed over a bottle of Hungarian wine and a cold cherry soup prepared by his Hungarian girlfriend, Magdi. ‘At the moment we’ve got Victorian capitalism here in its worst manifestation. Everyone’s afraid of losing their jobs, corporate greed is good, and tax fraud is acceptable at the highest level because it encourages outside investors. Meanwhile lots of people are effectively destitute and the health service is in chaos. What a mess.’

  I stayed with Mark for several days, sallying out solo while he was working, and then, when he’d finished, going together to the open-air spa on Margaret Island or to the sulphurous Turkish baths at Rudas Fürdö, where naked men gossiped in the gloom about football, mistresses and the poetry of Petöfi. In these places we discussed why communism hadn’t worked, with me pointing to the animal kingdom’s hierarchies. ‘Do you know why bees have a queen? Because if they had a central committee, there would be no honey.’

  ‘Ah, but we’re rational beings, not animals,’ countered Mark. ‘No, the idea was fundamentally good, but the problem was Soviet control.’

  From there we moved on to the challenges of democracy, Britain’s cricketing failures, the parenting skills of mutual friends and how to tell your Zwack from your Tokaji.

  Mark took my book-research seriously, and one day he came home excited at having made contact with Vajda Miklós, the literary editor of the Hungarian Quarterly who’d translated Leigh Fermor into Hungarian, so we climbed aboard a tram and went out to pay him a visit. Miklós turned out to be an elderly, heavily built, hesitant, softly spoken intellectual who lived in a small new apartment crammed with books, including several copies of his own translation of Between the Woods and the Water. It turned out he had a closer relationship to the book than we realized, because his aunt, Xenia, appeared in it under the pseudonym ‘Angela’, the married woman whom Leigh Fermor had met in Hungary and with whom he’d subsequently had a passionate affair while dashing around Transylvania. According to Miklós, his aunt had been a raven-haired beauty with an appetite for men, and Leigh Fermor had not been the first. Unfortunately, some time after her cameo appearance in his story, her life had gone badly wrong. She’d always had a difficult temper, and her divorce and the subsequent poverty had made it worse. Eventually she’d moved to Budapest and had ended up strangling her neighbour in a fit of rage. She’d spent many years in prison.

  Miklós hadn’t had an easy time of it, either. His family came from Arad, long since swallowed up into Romania thanks to Trianon. His father had been a well-known lawyer who’d died young, and his mother had ended up in prison on trumped-up political charges, so Miklós was brought up by his godmother, a famous actress, but he’d always struggled to find work.

  ‘My parents were classified as “class aliens”, so I had a document that followed me everywhere, although I never saw it, that made me practically unemployable.’ He found bits and pieces of work as a freelance translator, and then, during the liberalizing 1960s, the Hungarian Quarterly finally gave him a job. It was to become his niche for the next forty years, and even though he had since retired, it was still effectively the family he’d never had.

  His mother’s supposed crime had centred on her free-enterprise espresso kiosk, where she’d worked long hours to try to support her son, and hers had been a show trial intended to frighten the middle classes during the early years of communism. According to the prosecution, the kiosk had become the venue for dissident talk and the focal point for an attempt to devalue the forint, and although Miklós said neither charge was true it certainly wouldn’t have been the first time revolutionary talk had fomented in Budapest’s coffee-houses. Which is why the communists effectively closed them all down.

  Back at the start of the twentieth century there were six hundred of these places in Budapest, and although they’d be described these days as ‘Viennese-style’, many of them harked back (as do the spas) to the days of Ottoman occupation. (It was the Turks who’d introduced coffee to Vienna, too, although you’d be hard-pressed to find much acknowledgement for it in that city’s archives.) Budapest’s coffee-houses varied from smoky back-street hideaways to elaborate, ornamental palaces and many became second homes to writers, poets and politicians. In those days you could tell which political party and which social class a Budapester belonged to by which coffee-house his post was forwarded to. The coffee-house culture became a symbol of independence of mind and the setting for scintillating conversation, and we may yet look back on our own Starbucked era as enlightened, too, now that we’re once again picking up our mail in coffeeshops, albeit
digitally. Anyway, the communists certainly didn’t approve. They had no time for the idle recreation, not to mention the idle speculation, that these places represented, so they swept them away.

  Recent years have seen many of them restored to something approaching their former glory, and one of the most supremely serene is the New York Café, ridiculously over the top, extravagantly neo-baroque, with curving marble pillars rising to gilded niches and ceilings covered in frescos and statuettes. Pulling up a red velvet chair to a chrome-edged glass table in here, behind windows as tall as double-deckers, I read that Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár was so impressed when the café opened, back in 1894, that he threw its front-door keys into the Danube in order that it should never close. In the modern high street that sort of behaviour would get you banned from all Starbucks for life, but back then it turned the New York Café into a legend, and for a while it became the leading literary café of its day. Its writerly clientele would be provided with free paper and a basic, inexpensive writer’s lunch of bread and cheese.

  Alas, neither tradition has been maintained in the recently re-opened café. I couldn’t see anyone who looked like a writer until I caught sight of myself in a mirror, and that was a shock. What with my notebook, my slightly dishevelled appearance and my half-moon reading glasses (a sad concession to age), I realized that I had reached the stage of life where people either look like their dogs or their jobs, and I don’t have a dog. For much of my writing career I’d dismissed my appearance as distinctly unwriterly; I’d habitually describe myself as a pig farmer in chinos, waiting for the moment when I’d be weeded out of the literary world and sent back to shovel muck and mend fences. Now, seeing myself in the mirrors of the New York Café, I reckoned I finally looked the part. Besides, I was stuck with it, having passed the point where anyone would employ me in anything that had a pension attached.