The Habsburg Cafe

by Andrew Riemer

  Another time I wake up in the morning. I ask for my mother. She had to go into town early, before I was awake, my grandmother tells me. Will she be back by evening? Of course, my grandmother says without much conviction. Next morning, and for many mornings after that, I am told the same tale. Mummy has a lot of things to do in town, she goes in early and gets back after I’ve gone to bed, but she comes and looks at me every night and hopes that I’ve been a good boy. I know of course that my grandmother is lying. My mother is dead. My father is with the army, somewhere far away. I weep uncontrollably, for days on end it seems. But I will not speak those terrible words ‘Mummy is dead’; there are certain things you mustn’t ever say. Then, one morning, she is back, smiling at me over the side of my bed.

  Explanations of a sort were probably given; no doubt there were presents and treats, at least as far as it was possible to indulge in treats in a world rapidly heading towards destruction. It was, however, only much later that I came to understand the combination of courage and folly—so characteristic of much of my mother’s behaviour in those years—that generated that inexplicable absence. My father had been called up for one of his periodic stints of army service—though in truth it was more forced labour than military duty. It was autumn, still warm, like high summer, just as this autumn almost fifty years later is still indistinguishable from summer. My parents assumed that my father would spend four or five weeks in a camp in a little town not far from Budapest, as he had done on every other occasion. He left in his summer uniform, though I have no memory whatever of saying goodbye to him.

  On this occasion, though, he found himself going much farther afield, into Transylvania, where the Hungarian army, supported of course by our gallant German allies, was engaged in the heroic struggle to recapture our homeland. The deeper they penetrated that land of mountains the colder it became. Frostbite, chilblains and even worse afflictions threatened. Somehow my father was able to get word to my mother asking for his winter clothes to be sent to him—though for security reasons he was not allowed to reveal the locality.

  The message arrived late in the evening. My mother hurriedly packed my father’s winter uniform, reeking of mothballs, as much warm underwear as she could find in haste, and set off, carrying her own heavy topcoat (from which she had prudently removed the fur collar), for Transylvania and the unknown. She had no idea where she might find my father. She had not imagined what risks she took in travelling through that turbulent world, on her way towards a raging and particularly bloody conflict—as all conflicts in that unhappy land always are. She was almost arrested as a spy, a haggard and chain-smoking Mata Hari. She had to contend with the sullen and murderous hostility of the many warring races that inhabit Transylvania. Even the Hungarians, whom this military action was supposed to bring back into the bosom of the homeland, looked on her with suspicion—who was this Hungarian-speaking woman who was clearly not one of us?

  She travelled from village to village, sometimes on foot, sometimes in a farmer’s cart and even in an army truck. She went from place to place where people, sometimes with gleefully malicious intent to mislead her, told her that units of the Hungarian army might be found. At last, after two or three days of wandering around that mountainous, bitterly cold terrain, she came upon yet another large camp surrounded by barbed wire. As she had done time and time again she called out to the groups of hunched, shivering men standing behind the wire. On that occasion one of them went away and returned, a moment or two later, with my father. All my mother could do was to hurl the suitcase of clothes over the wire before my father hurried off. There was no time for talk, no time for love. She returned to Budapest by the same difficult and hazardous route.

  That was the first time in my life that I had been betrayed—that is to say, the first occasion on which I was forced to realise that I was not the sole centre of my parents’ world, that my mother had to exercise a choice when she was called upon to rescue my father from the bone-freezing cold of Transylvania. For that reason, too, that house occupies a position of absolute centrality within my memories. It was there that my life was somehow formed by influences that I could understand, where I was able to say, time and time again with the insistence of a five-year-old: ‘You could have told me, you could have told me; I thought you were dead.’ It was in that place, in other words, that I began to enter into the world of experience, where I came to the recognition that people—even those close to you, those that formed the centre of your life—were, in the final analysis, untrustworthy and fickle.

  The last time I saw that house was three or four years later, in 1944. By then the war was raging around the city. Our situation was desperate. We needed false identity papers, for which the price was high and rising each day. The house had been abandoned a year or so earlier, but a small metal box remained buried beside the sour-cherry tree in the garden. My mother and I left the city at dusk—the trains were, miraculously, still running. As we approached the village the boom of not-too-distant guns grew louder, bright flashes illuminated larger and larger patches of the night sky. We picked our way through darkened streets, past many abandoned houses. Our house stood in darkness. With the light of a small torch, around which she had wrapped a handkerchief to soften its glow, my mother found a spade in the toolshed. She dug beside the cherry tree, where an innocuous looking stone marker had been carefully placed. She took out the small metal box, containing the last bits and pieces of gold. She didn’t even bother to fill in the hole.

  The railway station was deserted by the time we had made our way back there. No more trains would run that night, perhaps no more trains would run at all. We started walking the nine or ten kilometres to town along the road that ran beside the track. Occasionally an army vehicle roared past, its shielded headlights casting small pools of light on the surface of the road. One of them stopped. The door was thrown open by a Hungarian-speaking person in German uniform. We were ordered to get in. The officer—whose Hungarian was now revealed to be heavily accented—began quizzing my mother. Who were we, what were we up to so close to the war zone? My mother embarked on her well-prepared story. She gave her name, a suitably Magyar surname. Her husband had been killed fighting for the fatherland in Transylvania. Her mother—and here she named our former caretaker’s elderly mother, who had always lived in that village—was mortally ill. She had to visit her, and allow the old lady to say goodbye to her only grandson.

  The soldier then turned to me. I was sitting in the back of the armoured car, staring at my mother’s back. What was my name? Where did I live? Who was my father? I answered as I had been drilled. The inquisition continued throughout the half-hour trip to town. He seemed satisfied with our performance, for he dropped us off at the carefully selected false address my mother had given him—a district of the city where wives of soldiers fighting on the eastern front had been settled—and, reaching into a compartment of his vehicle, he handed me a bar of army-issue chocolate. I have often wondered whether our transparent performance had taken him in, or whether we had been on that night recipients of a small spark of compassion and humanity in an infernal world.

  An idle Saturday morning seems a good opportunity to embark on a sentimental journey in search of that house, to finish that piece of unfinished business. I am aware, as I squeeze into an overcrowded carriage on the Metro, that the search will probably prove futile. No amount of poring over maps of the city has revealed a street of the right name anywhere near that suburb. We arrive at the terminus. I follow the signs leading to the suburban trains. Coming out of the subway, I find myself in front of a huge concrete barn, some sort of a marketplace. Short, mostly elderly people are hurrying around with shopping bags filled with limp cabbages, pale carrots, black potatoes. Elderly women, black scarves around their heads, sit beside plastic buckets of autumn flowers—there must be a cemetery nearby.

  I find the train I must take without any trouble, but another problem immediately presents itself. There are three stops bearing the name
of the village or suburb where we used to live. Where to get off? An answer of sorts presents itself: the middle one of the three stations is also identified as an airport stop. There had indeed been a small airfield near that villa; we left the place largely because of the increasing severity of the air-raids against that military installation. That, logic suggests, is where the search should begin.

  The train pulls into the station and I recognise immediately a familiar world—unless each of those stations presents the same aspect. A row of shops lines the roadway running along the left side of the track. On the right, luxuriant trees shield ornate nineteenth-century villas, each of them a miniature Versailles, a tiny Belvedere. I remember how we used to cross the line to reach the shops where ice cream could be bought, or where the primitive flea-pit cinema was situated. But I also remember that there was a place where you could purchase fruit and vegetables on ‘our’ side of the line—and there indeed I see a small weatherboard shop with a prominent Marlboro sign in its window.

  Beyond that, memory fails. I zigzag through the leafy streets, still green in the late autumn sunshine, though piles of brown leaves lie in the gutters everywhere. I wander past rows of ornate villas, stucco garlands and medallions over deep bay windows or beneath cantilevered balconies. Here and there a more modest timber house interrupts the uniformity, and even one or two small, obviously recently constructed blocks of apartments. In one street I find a man burning leaves in the gutter—something I have not seen in pollution-conscious Sydney for many years. I ask him whether he could direct me to the street, but he assures me that there is no such street around here. I walk a little farther and come upon a young woman pushing a child in a stroller. No, she’s only lived here a couple of months; doesn’t know the place at all—and hurries on nervously.

  There seems little point in persisting. I turn back towards the station. At the next corner I see an elderly lady shutting the gate of a small garden. Why yes, of course she knows the street. It’s back there, where I’ve come from: first left after the church. She tells me what it is now called. Memory comes flooding back. The steeple of the church had been visible all along; why had I forgotten that you could see it from our back garden? Why had I not made for that beacon? I now know exactly what to do. Walking briskly along the wide avenue, I turn left into a short, much narrower street, and there, in a garden surrounded by a high wire fence, stands—familiar and yet totally strange—my parents’ pride and joy, an art-deco villa constructed in 1937 which had been extensively featured in the architectural journals of the time.

  I stand on the opposite side of the street, lost in the past. The house looks as though it had fallen on hard times. The handsome walnut trees that used to screen it from the street are gone; the green wire fence seems a recent installation. The cement-rendered façade, sparkling white in my memory, is browny-grey. An external staircase runs up one side, ending in a small porch covered in coloured fibreglass, which is obviously a recent addition. On the other side, where the garden furniture used to be placed under another handsome walnut tree on sunny summer days, there now stands a ill-constructed garden shed. I take my camera out of its case to record these images of a lost world.

  I have not noticed that I have aroused the suspicion of a middle-aged man who is raking the grass behind the wire fence. I am embarrassed: I would feel similar alarm and hostility if I found someone photographing our house in Sydney on a quiet Saturday morning. I cross the road and call out to him. He comes over to the fence, even more suspiciously. I apologise, telling him that I don’t want to make a nuisance of myself—I’ve only come to look at the place where I spent some of my childhood. His reaction to that is even more hostile: that’s impossible, he says. His family has lived here since 1945, and the people who were here before emigrated to Australia. They were called Riemer. But they’re all dead now, he adds, obviously bringing the interview to an end.

  What follows is, in a curious way, touching. Hostility and suspicion are converted into amity. The alarm experienced by this middle-aged man in a sweatshirt and baggy tracksuit pants visibly increases when I tell him of the miracle of my survival. It is, however, tempered by his curiosity. He comes closer to the wire, asking all the inevitable questions. He shakes his head in disbelief as I give a brief account of how I happen to have fetched up, out of the past, seemingly out of death, on this sunny autumn day. How did I find the street? I tell him about the old lady. Ah, yes—and he mentions a name.

  Then his mood changes, becoming almost violent. What am I after? Nothing, I assure him, I’ve only come to look at the place, to fill in one of the blanks. He looks half convinced, but launches into something that sounds like self-justification. His parents, he tells me, bought the house from mine, he can’t remember when, ’42 or ’43, when he was a baby, and before his brother was born. They didn’t come here until ’45, after the siege ended, because (he says) there was an airfield here—it’s still there, he adds—and the district was always being bombed. Pointing to one corner of the house, he shows me where it was hit, not by a bomb but by a large piece of shrapnel: there was quite a bit of damage. At any rate, he goes on to say with some vehemence, they were here before ’48.

  I now realise the reason for his hostility. In the weeks that I have spent in this country one topic has dominated the many contentious issues examined by a society trying to sort out the social and political priorities of a brand-new order. The government is to make restitution for property seized by the state in 1948. Daily on the radio, on television or in the press some official or other stresses that this restitution is to be in terms of cash payments, not in terms of real estate. No-one living in houses or flats, on farms or small holdings purchased from the state in the course of the more liberal 1970s and 1980s need fear dispossession. Yet few believe those soothing assurances. The crowds gathering for curried prawns and rice at meetings of the Australian Hungarian Friendship Association include several expatriates who have returned in an attempt to repossess ancestral estates. Even my cousin and her husband, who purchased their flat in a block built in the 1950s on the site of a bombed-out pre-war building, are worried about the security of their title.

  I try to reassure the man behind the fence that I have no ambition whatever to repossess this fragment of the past. He seems somewhat mollified, or at least his curiosity gets the better of him. Would I like to have a look around? I make the usual apologies about not wanting to be a nuisance and so on, but he opens a gate in the wire fence, and I cross over a curious threshold into a segment of my past. We walk around the garden. The back is covered in long grass. One or two low and gnarled trees seem desperately in need of pruning. I remember where the sour-cherry tree used to stand. The borers finally got to it, I am told. And the walnuts trees? He doesn’t know what became of them, probably chopped up for firewood in ’45.

  As we walk slowly around this unkempt garden, his hostility is converted into an almost benign friendliness. I must come inside, he says, to meet his wife, and his brother who lives in the downstairs flat. Indeed, he becomes importunate: it would be unthinkable for me to go away without having a look inside, there must be so many memories. It would be churlish to refuse. His wife and brother are summoned, and, after general amazement, we climb the external staircase leading to the upper floor, and enter by a door which has been cut, I realise, through what had been the outside wall of my bedroom. The place is unrecognisable; yet as I am ushered into a hideously over-decorated living room—crimson cushions everywhere—I see that this is what used to be my parents’ white bedroom, which had been sparsely furnished with angular salmon-pink and grey pieces, the ultimate in sophistication in 1938.

  We chat over a cup of strong coffee. The brothers tell me that they lived in this house with their mother and father. When property was to be nationalised in 1948, their father subdivided the house and installed his widowed sister-in-law and her two sons in the downstairs flat. That way, I am told, the family could retain the property, which otherwise woul
d have been seized by the state. Now their parents are dead; the brothers find it convenient living here, a bit cramped, a bit too far from town, but very pleasant and quiet—and suddenly, from my childhood, I can see my mother, gesturing with her crimsonpainted nails, assuring a visitor that there were so many advantages to living in the country, despite the distance from town.

  The conversation passes to the present. As always, the account I give of the reasons that have brought me back to Hungary produce mild disbelief. The younger brother is, however, anxious to know more about Australia—what are things like there? As I give an inevitably foreshortened account of the benefits and inconveniences of living in that strange place, he interrupts me to say that he has been thinking of emigrating there. He used to be a systems manager in a state-run institution. Now he has set up in business as a management consultant. It’s very difficult, however, given the circumstances—he has thought once or twice that he ought to take his family to somewhere like Australia, where there must be a great shortage of skilled managers. I try to tell him as gently as I can about the queue of unemployed management consultants that seems to stretch from one end of the country to the other. He looks downcast and I, in turn, experience a sense of mild guilt for having shattered yet another illusion.

  It is time to leave. We say goodbye without any sense of that awkwardness and hostility with which the encounter had begun. Yet as I am about to leave, having taken a couple of photographs of the interior, the elder brother asks me whether I could wait for one moment. He dives into another room and returns a few minutes later with a sheet of yellowing paper. It is some sort of document covered with elaborate official stamps. The faded typescript declares that in 1943 the brothers’ parents purchased from mine this property for an undisclosed sum. Beneath are the four signatures of the vendors and the purchasers.