Several of these photographs show quite clearly the names of various merchants and tradesmen—butchers and cobblers, upholsterers and grocers—painted on large boards above the windows or doors of their establishments. Most of them are German names, and many, at least of the superior variety of merchant or artisan, bear the discreet emblem of the official favour bestowed on them by His Majesty, the k.k. monarch, Franz Josef. Here were His Imperial and Royal Majesty’s Hungarian bootmakers, grocers, wine-merchants and stationers, all catering for His Majesty’s needs whenever, as King of Hungary, he resided in this part of his dual realm—which, in reality, did not happen very often. These nostalgic images serve as reminders, in this grim underworld of begging gypsies, of that Kakanian past which now, in the second year of the new dispensation, is becoming a matter of sentimental preoccupation for the citizens of Budapest.
Beyond the subway other emblems of the Kakanian past are visible. The semicircle of boulevards, modelled on Vienna’s Ring, once more bear their former imperial names: Elisabeth and Theresia; Franz and Josef—though in another subway under one of these boulevards, at one of the large Metro stations, the exit signs still direct the unwary towards thoroughfares named after Lenin and his ilk. The broad avenues which fan out from these boulevards—inspired by Baron Haussmann’s Paris—once again commemorate Hungarian statesmen and patriots approved (or at least tolerated by) the Habsburgs. This part of the city is a cartographic fantasy of Kakania, with former street names boldly cancelled in red (like ‘no smoking’ signs) acting as reminders of the forty-year-long usurpation by heroes of socialism.
There is nothing beautiful about the present-day aspect of these streets and avenues. Budapest bears all the depressing signs of a half-century of neglect—which followed the severe destruction of war—bred out of the grim assurance of Hungary’s political masters during those decades, unscrupulous men who knew that they were not answerable to the people under their subjection, and felt no obligation therefore to repair the city’s crumbling fabric. They also knew that they had the guns—readily used in 1956—to discourage any grumbling or potential revolt. In this Indian summer of 1991 the handsome chestnut trees lining the broad avenues of the inner city may momentarily disguise the crumbling façades of monumental buildings poorly restored in the years after the war. The illusion is, however, shortlived. As your eye travels from the luxuriant foliage to the blackened, grimy walls lining these streets, you seem to be looking at obscure but menacing hieroglyphs of destruction and neglect. A poorly patched window embrasure here, there the telltale scar of a collapsed balcony, and everywhere the pockmarks of bulletholes chronicle the outrages and indignities suffered by this city during a tragic century.
The roadways are choked by a neverending stream of noisome traffic; ancient cars, that obviously have rarely been washed or properly serviced, dodge in and out of each other’s way, seemingly heading for the inevitable collision and avoiding it, in most instances, only by a hair’s breadth. The occasional crunch of metal, the frequent screech of tyres and the many dented mudguards testify to the risk of travelling by car along the streets of Budapest. Meanwhile these antiquated Trabants and Ladas, interspersed here and there with gleaming Porsches and other four-wheeled icons of Budapest’s new life, send out plumes of noxious smoke. Mixed with the foul odours rising from vents and apertures, this provides the characteristic aroma of modern Budapest.
The streets are almost always crowded with shuffling, ill-clad people. They mill around bus stops or congregate in the large underground halls leading to the Metro lines, which are filled, in this era of the new dispensation, with hawkers and stallholders spruiking their wares at the tops of their voices. The footpaths are littered with discarded newspapers, empty cigarette packets. Eyes must be kept on the ground—not only to avoid excrement left behind by the city’s countless dogs, but also pools of vomit and urine. There are many misshapen people and also even more drunkards than you are likely to see in most cities of the ‘western’ world.
After darkness falls, prostitutes start their beat along certain well-known stretches of the great line of boulevards. The homeless begin to bed down on park benches and in the doorways of public buildings. Waves of yelling youths and drunken conscripts, roaring sentimental ballads which pass for folksongs, roll along the footpaths, sometimes spilling over into the roadways, into the path of the screeching, rattling traffic. You grow uncomfortably conscious of a young man following you a few paces behind; your grip tightens on your wallet in the pocket of your trousers. If your path takes you into one of the ill-lit and largely deserted sidestreets or alleys, the still emptiness is even more alarming than the bustle of the great avenues and boulevards—you hope fervently that the youth who has been shadowing you in the crowded street has gone on his way.
Budapest at the end of the twentieth century is not a theme park. It is driven by the terrible realities of a world that has been at the centre of the great upheavals of a brutal epoch. Amidst such realities there seems little room for fantasy. Accordingly, Budapest, in its grime and anarchy, is much more like the cities of the familiar world than the elaborately staged spectacle of Vienna. It is dirtier and much more decrepit than London, for instance, yet in both places urban decay is ever-present and palpable. Like London, like Munich, like much of Sydney and Melbourne and even prim Adelaide, Budapest is one of the infernal cities of the modern world. Here the canvas of filth and corruption may have been painted in more lurid colours and with bolder strokes. There are, nevertheless, the same icons of decay visible as in those cities of the ‘developed’ world.
Fantasies, however, are beginning to emerge. Coming out of the pedestrian underpass with its sepia images of Kakanian Budapest, you find yourself at one end of a short, narrow street, nowadays mercifully free of the wheezing cars that choke the rest of the city. This is, and had been in the years of my childhood, the most elegant shopping street in town. Its glories always paled beside those of the Graben and Kärtnerstrasse, points of comparison for a world that rarely looked beyond Vienna to the great cities of Western Europe for its inspiration. Yet there were glories sufficient to satisfy people like my mother, much of whose life during her five or six years of metropolitan affluence before the coming of war revolved around this street and the lanes leading off it. Her days were marked by pilgrimages from one to another shrine dedicated to beauty and elegance. The route may have varied from day to day and from season to season, but her devotions conducted her in an ever-changing pattern to the dressmaker and the milliner, the shoemaker and the furrier, the cosmetician and the coiffeur. Whatever path her peregrinations described, the final goal, and resting place after such exertions, was invariably the large café, the most elegant in Budapest according to the social code that governed her life, at the top of the ample square at the far end of this street.
Some echoes of that long-vanished world remain. A few of the boutiques display goods of a kind not seen in the dusty and flyblown shops and department stores in other parts of the city, though the windows of some of these boutiques carry discreet signs announcing that their merchandise is available only to holders of hard currency. For that reason, perhaps, the street is filled with jeans-clad youths whispering to anyone who looks like a tourist, offers to exchange currency at rates almost double the official.
The crowds of tourists—mostly Germans, but even here the occasional Australian intonation can be heard—pass in great waves up and down the street. They seem to pay little attention to the dozens of young men importuning them to exchange money, or indeed to the shopwindows filled with goods of unimaginable luxury to the eyes of the citizens of Budapest. To them it’s all familiar; the magic brand names—Gucci, Christian Dior and Armani—are household words, commonplace domestic objects. Yet even if they were attracted by these glittering emblems of affluence, they would find it difficult on most afternoons or evenings to inspect at leisure the shop windows where these rare objects are displayed. Both sides of the street are lined with people
(mostly peasant women, kerchiefs tied round their heads) holding out for inspection embroidered tablecloths, bedspreads and sheepskin jackets from Transylvania. With ululating voices they praise the exquisite workmanship of these unique objects and implore the kind lords and ladies strolling along the street to buy from them, so that they may feed their starving infants or care for their aged mothers. The lords and ladies understand none of this, apart from guessing that they are being invited to purchase goods identical to those displayed in the windows of the large folk art emporium prominently situated in the middle of this street.
The women stand immobile, hour after hour, in the two long rows stretching the length of the street. With extended arms they display their wares as though they were precious relics or trophies. The eyes of some are glazed with fatigue, others are nervously agitated as they seek their prey, while their chant ripples along the street like the lamentations of the damned. ‘Buy, noble lord, buy, for the pity of God’ mingles with ‘Buy, gracious lady, buy, for my blind mother’s sake’ in a strange cacophony of counterpoint. Its echoes and murmurs bounce off granite and plaster walls, cobblestones and plate glass. These immobile figures are terrible presences, the living dead, past whom the waves of sightseers slowly flow like the damned streaming into hell.
In this underworld, this world without hope, a few shining emblems, accessible to all, serve as reminders of another world where life is rich and filled with boundless promise. In a side lane behind one of the rows of lamenting women a large, rounded yellow M beckons crowds into a brightly lit interior where Big Macs and Cheeseburgers are dispensed by gaily dressed boys and girls, as wholesome and smiling as the confident teenagers in the many American sitcoms Hungarian television churns out with blissfully unsynchronised dubbing. While Vienna looks towards its sentimentalised past for spiritual nourishment and the indulgence of fantasies, this second city of the former realm of Kakania has its eyes firmly set on the wonders of the west—that indeterminate but magical world that begins at the Austrian border. McDonald’s stands as an icon of the distant, intangible good life—the world where there is no sorrow or poverty, no brutality or suffering, a world where Reeboks and Levis are plentiful and cheap. As yet there are merely glimmers of that world to be seen in the streets of Budapest—a McDonald’s here, a news-stand selling Playboy there, a branch of an Austrian chain of supermarkets groaning with imported foodstuffs next to a booth dispensing Coke. These images of hope illuminate the lives of those condemned to dwell among the crumbling decay of a city which, from some vantage points, sparkles with breathtaking beauty.
FAMILY REUNION
A family reunion, after a long separation, should be an occasion for rejoicing, for the deepest emotional satisfaction. That, at least, is the lesson of literature. Experience, as is often the case, gives the lie to such dreams. Finding my one remaining Hungarian relative, a person to whom I was very close in the early years of my life, produces awkwardness, even embarrassment. And we come to realise, after the first few minutes in which we catch up on forty-five years of family history—births, marriages and deaths—that there is little left to say. We have grown apart, separated by time, distance and language: my Hungarian is a blunt, outmoded instrument; my cousin’s command of English is, to say the least, limited. Across that gulf we must try to establish again a relationship that in the normal course of events would require decades to reach maturity.
The bonds that existed between this woman and me when we were young were much stronger than an account of our consanguinity would suggest. Though only a few years older than I am, she is my mother’s first cousin—the product of a late marriage and of seventeen childless years—which makes her into some sort of surrogate aunt. We were, however, treated almost like brother and sister by a family in which there were no other young children. Years before her birth, my cousin’s parents helped to bring up my mother, whose father had died when she was a toddler. My mother, in turn, regarded her first cousin—who was born a few years before her own son—almost as a daughter, to be indulged, protected and cherished. My cousin spent many months at a time living with us. A bond developed between the two of us of which only a few scattered images remain. One, perhaps the most eloquent, resides in that penumbra of the memory where fantasy and experience intersect. And yet, within the first hour of our reunion, she provides me with proof that this haunting memory isn’t merely a product of fantasy or nostalgia. Scrabbling around in an untidy drawer, she produces a photograph taken when I was about three years old showing the two of us, on a day of blinding summer light, splashing about in a wooden laundry tub filled with water. The memory of that scene swells in my imagination: I can smell the heat of that long distant day, and the odour of freshly mown grass.
That provides a deeply satisfying moment. Otherwise we are both somewhat stiff, even perhaps formal, a barrier separates us as much as it separates me from her husband, whom I had not met until now. Three middle-aged people sitting in a pleasant, sparsely furnished living room on the top floor of a dreary, barracks-like block of flats built during the socialist fifties, play out the elaborate pretence that they are not strangers, that their lives are still somehow connected by intimate ties. Such a pretence cannot be sustained for long. Soon awkward silences and gaps in the the conversation begin to appear. My cousin, sensing that something is required of her, but not knowing what to do, sighs and says, crossing her arms behind her head, ‘Well, well, life’s strange, isn’t it?’—and then goes into her tiny kitchen to do something about dinner.
Over that evening meal—cold meat and salad, as is the custom in this part of the world—the fiction that we are somehow close, intimately connected is gradually abandoned. We realise that we are strangers, acquaintances at best. Yet on this evening, I come to discover in this middle-aged woman and her wheezing asthmatic husband something of the history of this sad country in the last half-century.
Eighteen months or so after our arrival in Australia in 1947, my parents contrived to obtain an entry permit for my mother’s elderly mother. At the same time they tried to persuade this cousin, who was then sixeen or seventeen, to join us in Australia. I do not know how seriously she considered their offer, but ultimately, after the exchange of several slow-moving letters, she refused: her mother (my grandmother’s younger sister) was already showing the symptoms of the breast cancer that was to take her life a year or two later. For some years we kept in touch with my cousin: the occasional letter would arrive telling us of her studies at school and university, and eventually of her early marriage and of the birth of her daughter in 1953 or 1954.
Then came the terrible days of October 1956. The newspapers carried ominous banner headlines and, after those inevitable days of delay in a world without the electronic transmission of images of horror and brutality around the globe in seconds or minutes, pictures of the fighting in Budapest. Seeing those images and reading the reports carried by eyewitnesses and by those who had managed to escape to the west in all that confusion, my mother became increasingly alarmed about the fate of her young cousin. With frenzied determination she sought out every agency that could possibly provide her with information about her relative. News organisations, the embassies and consulates of European nations, the various churches were all sympathetic but proved incapable of helping her. Finally, in about 1958, word came by way of the International Red Cross: my cousin and her family were well but wished to have nothing to do with capitalist lackeys.
Many years of silence followed. Letters were returned marked ‘unknown at this address’. Then, in the late 1960s, a postcard arrived, showing the socialist paradise of a Black Sea resort. The brief message announced that my cousin and her family were enjoying a well-earned vacation. In the next few years more postcards, even the odd letter (from the address where she had not been known some years earlier) arrived. They were always vague, noncommittal, usually concerned with news of her daughter’s progress through the various grades of school. My father visited them briefly when he ret
urned to Budapest for a few days a year or so after my mother’s death. He reported that they seemed reasonably comfortable and happy: the daughter had married and had just given birth to a daughter of her own.
A desultory correspondence followed. I wrote to my cousin when my father died. I sent her the occasional photograph of my wife and children. When I spent a few days in Budapest in 1990 I tried to telephone her a couple of times but received no answer—I assumed that she had gone away somewhere for Christmas. As it turned out her telephone number had changed but no-one at the large hotel where I was staying bothered to tell me, after I had asked the concierge to check the number, how to find out about new and altered telephone numbers. That is how it came about that this family reunion did not take place until today, and only after I had spent several frustrating hours trying to raise the altered numbers service of Budapest’s antiquated telephone system. Now, sitting around the dining table in my cousin’s small flat, I realise that I know almost nothing about this woman and her family, who are my closest surviving relatives. And, growing conscious of the reserve that greets any mention of those forty years of Hungary’s communist past, I begin to suspect that I will be vouchsafed very small glimpses only of my cousin’s life during those years of silence.
As the Soviet empire in Europe crumbled away and countries formerly under its sway asserted their independence, the news was greeted with jubilation in many parts of the ‘free’ world. These oppressed people, who had shown their unquenchable desire for liberty in 1956 and 1968, and later with the rise of Solidarity in Poland, would at long last know freedom. The yoke of tyranny had been thrown off; a bright new day was dawning for those tragic and long-suffering nations as the map of Europe was being rapidly redrawn. In Australia, in this extraordinary year of 1991, the doors of the Hungarian Embassy in Canberra were thrown open to receive, in an act of reconciliation, compatriots who had fled the oppression and brutality of that régime. That gesture, charged with symbolic import, was no doubt repeated in embassies and consulates the world over. Optimism and goodwill were in the air. A line had been drawn through a brutal history; henceforth amity and brotherhood would rule all Hungarians.
The Habsburg Cafe Page 12