The Habsburg Cafe

by Andrew Riemer

  I have been given the use of a desk in the middle of the room—its owner is spending a few weeks in Graz attending a course on the teaching of English as a second language. It is piled high with brightly coloured manuals, cheerful pictures intended to convey images of the privileged life of those who are lucky enough to live in a world where English is spoken, as much as instruction in the intricacies of the language itself. The permanent occupants of the room are rather puzzled and, I suspect, not a little suspicious of me. I probably represent a vague threat, one they can’t articulate, yet one that makes them apprehensive and edgy. The difference in age doesn’t help either—these people are, I realise, not much older than my sons.

  The two Americans are friendly enough, but the three or four young Hungarians who are lucky enough to have found jobs in this institution are sneeringly unfriendly. I sense that as far as they are concerned Australia is beyond the pale, the very sticks—their beady and hungry eyes are obviously firmly set on America, their land of heart’s desire, the Ultima Thule of immense salaries and prestige. I avoid the room as much as possible, spending my free time in the ample and sunny visitors’ flat across the courtyard—probably another bone of contention and envy. The only occasion on which the Hungarians drop their undisguised hostility is when I come in search of a printer to hook up to the small word processor on which I had written my lectures for my course on Australian literature. They stand around, admiring this most desirable of icons—they only have the departmental desktop, for which there seems to be much ill-tempered rivalry. They ask all sorts of technical questions which I cannot, I have to admit with shame, answer. One of them asks whether he could have a go, and as he slips a disk into the drive and begins to type onto the small LCD screen, he turns to me, saying with an obvious mixture of delight and contempt that this is stone-age technology, surely I could afford something better. Now when he was in America last year …

  The Big Teachers’ Room also serves as a meeting place. In one corner a coffee machine is permanently on the boil—by this time of the day the contents of the glass bowl have assumed an unpleasantly glutinous appearance. An Englishwoman and I are the only occupants at the moment: we are wondering whether the coffee’s worth drinking. She has been in Szeged for almost six months now, as an English-language instructor. She says that it’s not ideal—especially since she cannot understand Hungarian and has to rely therefore entirely on SKY television for news and entertainment—but she thinks that she’s lucky to have a job at all. Things are very difficult in Britain, she says with resignation.

  Her one great worry, she goes on to say (as we decide that perhaps it’s not wise to drink the dregs in the glass container), is what she will do when her contract runs out. There are no jobs in Hungary as far as she can tell, because as a consequence of the change in the political system most of the formerly state-supported teaching positions are being discontinued. What she would really like to do is to go back to Australia. What are things like there; is it difficult to get a teaching-post in a college or a university? I am unable to give her much comfort. Things are just as difficult there as in England, perhaps worse, I tell her, and she replies by saying that it’s a pity, that she’d like to go back there very much.

  When was she in Australia? I ask. She gets a dreamy look in her eyes. Oh four years ago, visiting some friends near Armidale. She’d also been to Sydney and Melbourne, loved every moment of it. She thought Sydney was stunning; she’d had a couple of ferry trips on the Harbour—it must be wonderful living near the water. She says that she would, nevertheless, prefer to live in the country. She is not a city person even though she’d lived in Manchester most of her life. What she would love to do would be to settle in one of those towns like Armidale or Tamworth, that would be wonderful. And she would also love to got to the outback, to look at Ayers Rock and those rainforests. Yes, that would be marvellous: to see those great empty spaces—they are so strange, so forbidding, yet somehow much more exciting than Europe. Europe’s too crowded, too neatly arranged. Out there, she’d imagine, you would be thrown on your own resources, you’d be tested—and yes, she’d read Voss, thought it was terrific. She is sure that it would be quite creepy out there in that great emptiness, but she would love to experience that thrill. Anything to get away from Europe or England. They’re dead, trapped under the weight of all that history, hate, cruelty.

  I confess to her that I’ve never been to the outback, that I fear empty spaces, and I begin to tell her about the panic that seizes me every time I fly out of Australia. I tell her how, from that great height, you realise how fragile and provisional our ‘civilising’ of the continent has been, how the patchwork of fields and farms soon gives way to a lunar landscape beneath you, stretching to eternity it seems. I tell her how that sense increases as you fly, hour upon hour, over that nothingness until, finally, even that void peters out and tumbles into that other nothingness, the sea.

  A few days later I am chatting with one of the senior people of this institution during the afternoon lull. The glass urn is filled with freshly brewed coffee—the last of a batch, she tells me, that someone brought back from Vienna a couple of weeks ago. Next week, she says with a grimace, it’ll be the revolting local stuff again, until someone goes out and remembers to bring some back.

  That phrase—going out—has a curious and disturbing resonance in this world. For forty years or more it meant crossing the Iron Curtain, entering Austria and therefore the fabulous world beyond its border, or else boarding a great gleaming plane and heading for the cities of Western Europe or America. You did not ‘go out’ when you went to Prague, Moscow or Bucharest. To go out was to leave behind the repression, privations, the drabness of these peoples’ republics to experience at first hand (though always under the strictest surveillance) the decadent delights of the west.

  By now, the autumn of 1991, those restrictions no longer apply. Hungarians are free to travel anywhere—indeed, I point out to my temporary colleague, she may enter France without a visa which I, with my Australian passport, am no longer able to do. Yet the old habits and casts of mind linger. People still speak of going out, and going out provides considerable problems for people living in a soft-currency economy where all except the very rich find it almost impossible to afford a night’s accommodation in a down-at-heel Viennese pension. And there is, besides, for people like this middle-aged woman, the effects of nearly a lifetime of conditioning.

  She begins to tell me of a time in the seventies when she was allowed to go to West Berlin to attend an intensive language-training course. She was frightened, she says, by the possibility of freedom, of slipping off the leash. The person in charge of the group could be easily evaded. One night she went to a party given by some expatriate Hungarians, people who had escaped in ’56. They talked politics all night, but not in the carefully guarded terms they used at home, when they always made sure that there were no strangers, potential informers, around. The talk was open, dangerous—thrilling of course, but terrifying. Afterwards they went off to a nightclub.

  During those weeks someone she had met offered to take her to Paris for the weekend, reminding her that all she needed was her passport—neither the West Berlin nor the French officials would stamp it, he assured her, so no-one would find out that she had broken the rules. Looking through the open window, into the late afternoon sunshine, she describes for me the terror that filled her when she tried to contemplate the limitless freedom of a world where it was possible to hop on a plane at a whim and travel as far as you wished—provided that you had enough money. It was a relief to her when the course came to an end and she could return to the drab world of restrictions and surveillance, where she had little control over her life, where someone else always made decisions for her. She couldn’t, she realised, deal with unlimited freedom—the great expanses of the world still fill her with fear and alarm. And no, she didn’t go to Paris—it wouldn’t have been proper, anyway.

  GUIDED TOUR

  Vis
itors arrive, an historian from Melbourne who is spending a year establishing courses in Australian Studies in Budapest, and her friend, a Greek-born linguist. They have come to look over Szeged. As a result of Byzantine rivalries in Hungarian academic circles and also (I suspect) because of similar rivalries and enmities in Australian academic and bureaucratic quarters, Szeged, an important university town, has missed out on the programme to establish Australian Studies in Hungary which has been funded by the Commonwealth government. Bad blood everywhere. The university people of Szeged, it seems to me, have no particular desire for Australian Studies in their institutions, but once they discovered that they had been snubbed they immediately felt aggrieved and suspicious. The historian’s visit has been arranged to build bridges, or to smooth ruffled feathers.

  A meeting has been set up for the afternoon, just before one of the series of two-hour classes I am giving here as some sort of rival Australian Studies course. The historian and her friend will stay for the first hour of the class, and in the break when the students and I stop for a few minutes, someone will drive them to the station for the 6.15 express to Budapest. Meanwhile they have the morning to look around. One of the students, who earns her living as a tourist guide, is detailed to show them around. Out of courtesy and curiosity, I join the tour. In her flat, American-inspired English, betraying the characteristic difficulties Hungarian-speakers experience with the diphthongs and stresses of English, our guide treats us to a sing-song account of the history of Szeged.

  She tells us about the flood and points out an impressive monument—waves of stainless steel fastened with sturdy bolts to a stone plinth—symbolising the might of the river and the ingenuity of Hungarian engineers in taming it. I wonder, as she reels off a string of technical details, whether five years earlier her counterpart would have been required to say ‘socialist’ instead of ‘Hungarian’. Next we admire the river and the nearby bridge, its arch not unlike a bonsai version of Sydney’s. We are led to inspect the Bishops’ Palace near the Votive Church, built of the same liver-brick and in the same ghastly ‘simplified Romanesque’ style as the church. The guide delivers an account of Szeged’s history, and mentions that after the partition of Hungary the great university of what is now the Romanian city of Cluj established itself in Szeged. It is a consequence of that, she tells us, that Szeged is one of the leading academic centres in the country.

  At this point a minor dispute breaks out. Our guide, descanting on the scientific achievements of that uprooted seat of learning, mentions that it was here that a famous scientist—indeed, Hungary’s first Nobel laureate in science—discovered the wonders of vitamin C. The historian’s friend is sceptical. Surely, he insists, vitamin C was discovered in Britain or America; he can’t remember at the moment where but he’s sure it wasn’t in Hungary. The guide is equally insistent. No, no, it was Albert Szent-Gyorgyi who won the Nobel prize in 1937 for biochemistry for the discovery of vitamin C.

  A long-buried memory from my childhood suddenly rises to my consciousness. I am three or four years old. There is a terrible fuss because I am refusing to eat the red capsicum my mother (or more likely my nanny) has cut into long strips. My parents are very enlightened people. You don’t coerce children; you reason with them. My mother tells me therefore that capsicums are full of a wonderful substance called vitamin C which helps to make me strong and healthy, especially in wintertime. She goes on to say that it was a clever Hungarian scientist who discovered that these capsicums, which grow so abundantly near a place called Szeged, are packed with vitamin C. And that was such a wonderful discovery, it helped so many little boys and girls to stay healthy and well throughout winter that some people in Sweden gave him a big prize for it. And that is something we Hungarians can be very proud of. The ruse did not work. My mother’s attempt to make me see reason ended in anger, threats and tears.

  The guide and the historian’s friend are disputing the point with some heat, though without any rancour. I, nevertheless, see the danger that the situation might get out of hand. I offer therefore the peacemaking formula: perhaps Szent-Gyorgyi discovered that capsicums and peppers were a rich source of vitamin C, thereby making the substance available to the inhabitants of Continental Europe much more conveniently than from its other rich source, citrus fruit. My companions accept the compromise, the emotional atmosphere cools, and we continue on our tour of the wonders of Szeged.

  We enter the Votive Church. The interior is, if anything, even more depressing. It is filled with devotional images and nationalistic emblems of a particularly offensive stridency. Our guide embarks on a long and rambling account of the construction of the church, how the people of Szeged made a solemn vow to Our Lady that if she would help the city recover from the terrible effects of the flood they would build a splendid church in her honour. She tells us that the money needed for the construction was raised by public subscription and that construction commenced soon after, though the building was not completed until 1930. She reminds us that some of the great cathedrals of medieval Europe took centuries, not decades, to complete, so that it should not be surprising that the pride of Szeged took so long to finish, given that the First World War set back the plans of the city’s devout citizens for many years. And then she returns to the topic of the bishopric and recounts how, after the consecration of the building, the bishop returned with the treasures and relics. We could now see these beautiful devotional objects around us in this church, faithfully restored a few months ago, following years of neglect, after Hungary had regained her freedom.

  The historian’s friend is champing at the bit. He doesn’t like being inside a church; he thinks that people should be discouraged from all that superstition, which is, after all, only a way of keeping them in control, under subjection. The guide is beginning to show signs of distress: she has probably never encountered a western left-wing intellectual who seems to espouse the doctrines that had been, during her adolescence, the unquestionably correct point of view, but are now, as the cross around her neck declares, as much in disfavour as religion had been not too many years ago. I cannot but feel some sympathy for her, understanding, as I think I do, the complex inhibitions and insecurities she must be experiencing. For our guide, the young historian and her friend, who live on what I would regard as a fairly small income and face the prospect of unemployment once the historian’s one-year appointment comes to an end, represent the glittering world of the west, a world of unbounded opportunities, of salaries undreamt of in Hungary, of travel and experiences which she, in this impoverished little country, will never achieve. Despite my ambivalent attitude towards the growing nationalism in the ‘new’ Hungary, accompanied by many obvious signs of xenophobia—‘Watch out for the gypsies!’—and supported, just as it happened half a century ago, by a narrow-minded, retrograde church (which seems to have been almost wholly untouched by Vatican II), my sympathy goes out for this young woman, who is now showing signs of a troubling confusion and perplexity. I should, it seems to me, do something to get her out of her embarrassment.

  As she guides us to a carved crucifix in a side-chapel, and launches into an account of its sculptor, and how he had given the crucified Christ his own face, I draw the historian aside and ask her to tell her friend to stop needling our guide. The historian turns on me quite sharply: ‘Oh, he’s not doing any harm, she can look after herself!’—and in a way she is quite right, yet I am conscious that somehow, in an uncomfortable way, I am caught between two currents, two loyalties. As always I feel much greater affinity with my Australian colleague, and decide that she’s probably correct—or is it, I ask myself straight away, cowardice?—and therefore let the matter drop, for I too am troubled by this young woman’s unquestioning acceptance of ambiguous national and cultural myths.

  And so we continue our way around the huge interior, admiring a painting here, a reliquary there, a gilded inscription inside the dome, and mosaic in the floor. At length the glories of the Votive Church are exhausted. Over lunch in a
cellar restaurant the atmosphere relaxes a little, my young companions find common concerns—the difficulties of student life in particular—despite the whiff of brimstone that still hangs in the air.

  The guide asks what else would we like to do, assuming her professional manner once more. The historian’s friend jumps in—he has obviously done his homework. He would like to see what he believes is a splendid art-deco building with an equally renowned café on the ground floor. He produces a piece of paper with the address on it, but we can’t find it on the map—it is a socialist street name and our guide doesn’t know which holy or imperial name has replaced it. The young man tries to explain what he is talking about, perhaps she knows the building, but the term ‘art-deco’ means nothing to our guide. So I break the inflexible convention I had imposed on myself throughout this tour—which has been conducted entirely in English—and try to explain to the puzzled guide in Hungarian, with the awkwardness of someone who has not spoken the language for many years, about ‘art-deco’. The attempt proves futile; she doesn’t know the place—there are so many cafés in town, she says. The historian’s friend has two other items on his list: the synagogue and, he believes, a Serbian Orthodox church with a celebrated iconostasis. He would like to see both, in spite of, it would seem, his ideological qualms about superstition.

  Our guide seems reluctant, she wonders whether there’s enough time, whether either place will be open. But we prevail on her and finally she resigns herself to the inevitable and leads us into a sidestreet where we come upon a substantial iron railing behind which stands a nondescript building obviously much in need of repair. Here is a remnant of an aspect of the city’s history that no-one seems keen to remember.