The Habsburg Cafe

by Andrew Riemer

  There was an air of anticipation and fear as we approached the Hungarian border. Communism had been dead for only a few months; no-one believed that the political system had really changed, that border guards would have given up their jackbooted ways. When they came clumping through the train, they did, indeed, look like incarnations of totalitarian brutality. Grim-faced, they inspected our passports with slow deliberation. I experienced again a long-forgotten panic when I saw them looking at the page on mine that said ‘Place of Birth: Budapest, Hungary’. They bore off several of the swarthy people crowding the corridor—their cardboard boxes travelled on unaccompanied.

  Today the sun is shining. The people on the platform are relaxed, even smiling; most of them look, and probably are, ‘western’. The train pulls in more or less on time. Though the compartment fills up a few minutes before the punctual departure, there are no usurpers, no cardboard boxes. The fat American lady in pink jeans and her lanky husband, whom I had seen smiling at each other on the platform, settle into the window seats. Each burrows into what looks like a blockbuster novel, though the front and back covers are missing from both. The businessman sitting opposite me begins to fuss with a sheaf of computer print-out; I retrieve for him a stack of glued-together British passports which has fallen out of his briefcase and landed under my seat. An Italian couple are poring over a green-covered book entitled Ungheria, Oggi ed leri. Outside, the grey buildings of an unfashionable district of Vienna look almost cheerful in the autumn sunshine.

  We roll towards the border through a pleasant landscape: neat fields, neat houses, neat church spires. The border station no longer looks grim and threatening, as it did in the winter darkness nine months ago, like a spectral sequence in a black-and-white spy thriller. Now, in the afternoon light, it is merely shabby and ill-kept. The border guards are cheerful and relaxed, unlike their surly comrades on my earlier visit—though in all probability they were merely tired and cold. These guards don’t pay much attention to my passport once they see that my visa is in order, nor to the businessman’s sheaf or those of the Italians. Yet there is a minor fuss when the American man hands them two passports. Where is the other person? they ask in Hungarian. Incomprehension. For what will prove to be the first of many occasions in the coming weeks, I am obliged to step in as a reluctant and unhappy interpreter. The British businessman (who, I suspect, is of Hungarian origin) looks at me suspiciously, but, being British, he keeps himself to himself. It is up to me therefore to convey the information that the lady has gone to the lavatory. For a moment a hard-set look passes across the guards’ faces, as they issue the stern instruction that she is to come out.

  Having had their ultimatum translated for him, the American goes off to fetch his wife; the guards take possession of their passports. He is away for what seems a very long time. The guards are getting restive, and I am beginning to wonder whether they are about to assume their former nasty habits. They hold a brief conference, and one of them walks down the corridor towards the lavatory. No sooner has he gone than the pink lady and her husband return from the opposite end of the carriage. Now the guard who had stayed behind in the compartment goes off in search of his colleague, carrying with him the protesting Americans’ passports. The Americans, confident members of a society who think you may cock a snook at borders and wander off to the loo passportless, betray some signs of alarm. Perhaps they are momentarily touched by fear and suspicion of those dark countries behind the Iron Curtain, fears and suspicions which had kept me for so many years from venturing behind it. Perhaps they too feel that just because someone has said that the Iron Curtain no longer exists does not necessarily imply that the cruelties and the exercise of arbitrary power which had been conducted behind it for decades will have ceased altogether.

  Nevertheless, as in all good farces, confusions and perplexities are resolved once all the actors are gathered on stage. The border guards, the Americans and their passports are all reunited, mild reprobation is conveyed through the medium of the interpreter, the solitary figure—Jaques, Malvolio—who always stands to one side when everyone else is celebrating that all’s well that ends well.

  We are on our way once more. The countryside, now that we are inside Hungary, doesn’t look much more forbidding than it did in Austria. The houses may be a little less well kept, the cars tootling along the road beside the track are not as glossy as those on the other side. Everything here seems very ordinary and speaks of the commonplace. There appear to be no ghouls or monsters. For all that, I feel myself growing increasingly apprehensive the closer we come to Budapest. Soon, within the hour no doubt, I shall have to get out of this well-upholstered compartment; the evasions of my days in Vienna will have to come to an end, and I shall have to face once more the difficult and distressing task of entering a society where my identity is not what I would like it to be. Once again those fears that beset me as SQ24 was heading towards Vienna are very real and pressing: will people in Hungary assume that I am one of their own, that I have come home? Will my belief that I am Australian be challenged and perhaps denied here, the place where I was born? Will I fall into some sort of existential void out of which I shall not be easily (if at all) able to extricate myself?

  The moment of severance (or of commitment) is obviously near. There, on the horizon, the hills behind the city are clearly visible. There is the communications mast and there the ugly monument to the Soviet troops of 1945. The train sweeps in a large curve around the city. It crosses the Danube. The river sparkles in the sunlight; the domes and spires of the city glow in the afternoon sun. It is, I tell myself, a beautiful sight, just as the Americans are saying loudly to each other, ‘Well, look at that, isn’t that something?’

  There is no time for reflection. We arrive at the station; this time I know exactly what to do. I know that you cannot change money (at least legally) there, but that a few Austrian banknotes will work wonders. I know that you mustn’t look curious or expectant as you walk along the platform if you wish to avoid the attention of touts and shysters. I know where the taxi rank is and walk confidently towards it, as if this were the place where I have always lived, the place where I belong. I brush aside brusquely, and in Hungarian, the one miserable creature importuning me in broken English to exchange currency. I have reserved a room in a small hotel at the top of a steep hill; I therefore select a taxi which looks as if it will be able to make it up there. I ignore the loud protests of other drivers, those who claim to have had precedence in a nonexistent queue. I don’t even bother to ask the driver whether he’ll accept Austrian currency. Having done a quick mental conversion at the unofficial rate of exchange, I merely hand him the appropriate amount at the end of the trip, with, of course, what is for me a modest but for the driver an impressive gratuity. The people in the hotel welcome me in minimal English and, to my horror, I hear myself conversing with them in Hungarian, exchanging greetings and pleasantries, and complimenting them on the nice room they have reserved for me.

  A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE

  When people speak of the beauty of Budapest they almost always have the Danube in mind. Standing on one of the bridges spanning that broad stream, looking at the panorama glowing in the late afternoon sunshine, I too am impressed by what is one of the world’s great vistas. To the left the hills of Buda rise in tiers, like the galleries of a great theatre. On my right, upstream from the most imposing of these bridges, (a graceful structure suspended on intricately ornamented chains that give it the name ‘Chain Bridge’), beyond the row of solidly handsome buildings lining the embankment, the great, vaguely oriental dome of the Parliament seems one mass of burnished gold. In the distance the green shadow of St Margaret’s Island, a woody park with hotels, restaurants and swimming baths, floats on the slowly flowing water.

  In Budapest the Danube is the focus of the city; Vienna, by contrast, has turned its back on the river—it flows forgotten, out of sight, leaving behind merely a dreary canal clipping the edge of the old city. The scale of Londo
n is far too great for the Thames to be an essential presence in the way that the Danube is in this city, even in those parts where it is out of sight. Only the Seine, snaking its way through Paris, binding together the elements of a complex urban world, has something of the impact that the Danube makes on Budapest. The Danube is, however, a much broader stream than the Seine, more imposing—and Budapest does not have the kind of glories which vie in Paris with its more modest river. Here the river is all.

  The Danube is the reason for the existence of this city. Thirty or forty kilometres upstream, at the border of what is still known in 1991 as Czechoslovakia, the eastward flow of the river takes an abrupt ninety-degree turn to the south. As it changes direction, it flows through a series of high hills which once provided an excellent strategic position from which to guard or control its placid lower reaches. The hills continue on what becomes the western bank after the river performs its change of direction. On the opposite, that is the eastern, side the flatlands stretch seemingly to the end of the world.

  Various people settled among those hills overlooking the great plain on the eastern shore. The Romans came and left behind a modest amphitheatre and a few broken columns—they even established a settlement farther downstream on the other side. Towards the end of the first millennium King Stephen established Christianity; a royal court of sorts came into being among those hills in a place that was eventually called Buda. Four and a half centuries later a brilliant culture flourished under Matthew Corvinus, whose name shares, with the evangelist, that of the gothic church (much restored, and another latter-day fantasy), the stone spire of which dominates the skyline above the river. That short-lived period of learning, civilisation and peace was brought to an abrupt end by the coming of the Turks. They turned churches into mosques and built their shallow-domed bath-houses over the thermal springs which, since at least the time of the Romans, have been much exploited features of this locality.

  Two centuries later the Turks were driven out by the Austrians. The Habsburgs eventually built their large royal palace on one of the promontories above the river more as a symbol of power and perhaps of arrogance than for any strategic purpose. By the time the slow construction of that ungainly pile commenced, the flat reaches of the opposite bank, hitherto trading posts, fishing settlements, even resting places for the odd nomadic group, had begun to assume the characteristics of a town—Pest—to become by the end of the nineteenth century a burgeoning, cosmopolitan centre of trade, commerce and intellectual ferment.

  Looking towards Pest on this golden afternoon, when the pall of noxious fumes hanging over the city turns the sun’s slanting rays into great gilded beams, what I see is the result of an extraordinary growth in the last years of the nineteenth century and the first few of the twentieth. There, opposite the Habsburg fortress town of Buda, which even in my father’s youth in the twenties remained to a great extent a conservatively Austrian town, emerged the chaotic, noisy, competitive and ambitious society of Pest, made up of the many racial and national strands of Kakania, that blossomed with extraordinary energy at the turn of the century. By then the two towns had been formally joined together, and their names had changed from Buda and Pest to the composite Budapest. But that ferment, the heady energy that made people speak of this city as another Chicago or New York, was much more characteristic of the flat expanses of the eastern bank. Streets, avenues, massive apartment blocks mushroomed there as more and more people flooded in from all over the Empire to exploit the golden opportunities offered by that brave new world. The patricians of Buda looked down on the anthill of Pest with bemusement and growing distrust.

  Pest was my family’s world. They lived among those bustling streets in a polyglot society that was a microcosm of the variety of Kakania. My grandmother, at the time of her wedding trip to Vienna, when she purchased her furniture and some of her household gods (including that Ferris wheel), must have seen avenues and boulevards being laid out, massive buildings rise out of the ground almost overnight, bridges constructed across the broad expanse of the Danube. Her parents, and also my grandfather’s no doubt, attended performances at the Opera House, smaller than Vienna’s, though much more elaborately decorated, as soon as it opened its doors. She may also have attended the celebrations in 1896 to mark the millennium of the foundation of the Kingdom of Hungary and probably admired the great new public space, with its ornate sculptures and monuments, built to commemorate that great event. For her, as for her younger son, my father, living in Budapest meant inhabiting that raw, complicated but exhilarating world that sprang up on the flat lands opposite the staid Habsburg town where the remnants of Roman, Magyar, Turkish and Austrian history seemed increasingly anachronistic, irrelevant to the real source of Budapest’s energy and potential.

  The pomp and arrogance of Habsburg hegemony among the hills of Buda riled Magyar nationalists of the nineteenth century. The abortive revolution of 1848 was directed against the usurpers and invaders in their fortress that dominated, symbolically and physically, the great river. Even after the reconciliation of 1867, when the country’s Habsburg masters gave Hungary a measure of autonomy, and began thereby to elaborate that pious myth of a supranational state which soon devolved into the fantasies and absurdities of Kakania, nationalist sentiment smouldered beneath the surface of an apparent calm. By contrast, the inhabitants of the other bank embraced the social and cultural implications of the Kakanian myth. The construction of the huge bulk of the Parliament on their side of the river may have been dictated by no more than contingency—Buda was much too hilly to provide a site for so large a building. Yet, everyone recognised the implied symbolism. Here was a splendid structure, the world’s first building to be centrally heated. It was obviously the outward and visible sign of the emergence of Budapest as one of the great cities of the world. It graced moreover the energetic and dynamic skyline of Pest, the metropolis of the future, the epitome of the newfound peace and prosperity—which was to come to an abrupt and bloody end as a consequence of the gunshot in distant Sarajevo.

  As the sun disappears behind the steep hills of Buda, enveloping in long shadows the buildings clinging to their sides, I am reminded that even for my parents that part of city remained somewhat alien, as it had been for my grandparents and, no doubt, for their parents before them. Buda was site of the conflict between Magyar and Austrian. My family, inhabitants of the multilayered world of Pest, stood aloof from those disputes: they could not identify wholly with either side, were suspicious of each. If their sentiment inclined towards either it would probably have been towards the Austrians—despite their arrogance, and indeed bigotry—because my family and people like them looked beyond the confines of those ‘nations’ that made up the Habsburg realm towards that cultural cynosure some two hundred kilometres away, Vienna, the city of their dreams. They were in essence internationalists, not by virtue of an ideological conviction, but because they thought they were citizens of a vibrant and energetic world where the opportunities for the good life were unbounded.

  In Pest, over which the shadows of the Buda hills are now advancing, just as the terrible tide of German bigotry and Magyar nationalism crept over it during my childhood, their lives revolved around the institutions of their world—especially those sites of public ceremony, the cafés, the opera and the theatres, which gave that world shape and substance. Memory tells me that my parents rarely crossed the river. They lived in Pest, or for some years in a suburb on the Pest side. Scraps of family mythology I remember suggest that on summer nights they would sometimes visit riverside restaurants in Buda, to eat the fiery fish stew, the local version of bouillabaisse, and to dance to the music of the gypsy bands. I can recall one or two occasions on which I crossed the river in one of the white paddle-steamers that used to ply between the two banks, to be taken to visit the Castle, to be shown the ‘ancient’ church of St Matthew and the few streets of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings nestled around it. I remember that on one occasion there was a great
fuss because my parents refused to take me on the funicular that runs from the embankment to the Castle—they considered it unsafe, citing an accident that was supposed to have occurred a quarter of a century earlier. On the whole, though, we kept to our side—the Pest side of the river—at first because the patterns of our life as they had evolved through the years made Pest their focus, later because of war, persecution and peril, and finally, in the days after the siege of the city, because these bridges, now enveloped in the autumn dusk, lay as tangled masses of metal and stone in the waters of the Danube.

  THE UNDERWORLD

  At the foot of one of the bridges across the Danube, a pedestrian underpass leads to the streets and boulevards of Pest. In an attempt to enhance the appearance of this short tunnel—usually the haunt of gypsies begging for alms and delivering blood-curdling curses on those that refuse—its walls are lined with enlarged photographs of nearby streets and squares taken at the turn of the century. They show the bustle of a newly-emerging metropolis; in an entirely intangible way they remind me of photographs taken in Sydney at about the same time. There is the same sense of rawness—in the eyes of the hurrying pedestrians as much as in the appearance of shopfronts and the sides of buildings as they were caught by the camera. For all their period charm, intended no doubt to evoke an older, more leisurely world, these images speak of the new, the emerging and also of the unformed.