by Tom Fort
At the time Hungary was struggling to emerge from its centuries of subordination within the Habsburg Empire, and its poets, story-tellers and painters were searching for a source of images of the nation’s newly rediscovered soul and identity. Many of them found it in the fabulously unforgiving landscape of the Alföld, and in the elemental lives of its people. Here, beneath a flawless sky confined only by the shimmering horizon, the noble and tragic destiny of the Magyar had been played out.
My home and my world are there
In the Alföld, flat as the sea,
From its prison my soul soars like an eagle
When the infinity of the plains I see.
These lines were written by Hungary’s most famous poet, Sándor Petöfi, whose death in 1849, fighting in Hungary’s doomed attempt to achieve independence, contributed appreciably to the mythologising process. They conjured the magnetic pull on the Magyar’s soul of the puszta, where, across the endless expanse of grass, dust, salt and sand, moustachioed teak-brown shepherds in wide hats and rank sheepskin cloaks, and brown-eyed, booted horsemen, followed their flocks and herds, fought, drank, loved and perished to the strains of the gypsy’s lament and the stamping csárdás.
As one would expect, Anglo-Saxon observers were sceptical of the myth-making and suspicious of the Magyar’s estimation of himself. Andrew Augustus Paton, an indefatigable traveller through eastern Europe in the 1840s, found him ‘generous, courageous, sincere’, but devoid of any urge ‘to labour, to improve, to take pains and persevere’. Most damningly, Paton concluded that ‘as to the value of manure they have not the least idea’. John Paget was chiefly struck by the characteristic pride of the Hungarian:
Which leads him to look down on every other nation by which he is surrounded with sovereign contempt. A Magyar never moves when he can sit still and never walks when he can ride. His step is slow and measured, his countenance pensive, his address imposing and dignified. His character is a singular mixture of habitual passiveness and melancholy mixed up with a great susceptibility to excitement.
Whatever he is, Paget seems to be saying, it is far removed from the English model. (Nevertheless the Englishman fell wholly under the sway of the land and its people, marrying a Hungarian countess and spending the rest of his days managing her estates in Transylvania. He is buried in Koloszvár – Cluj in present-day Romania.)
Inevitably the taming of the Tisza was followed by the taming of the Great Plain. In the course of the twentieth century it was transformed from a wilderness into an agricultural powerhouse. Irrigated from the Tisza, the arid grasslands became orchards, vineyards, vast fields of sunflowers and maize. The low whitewashed tanyas where the cowboys used to rest in the shade of the spreading acacias were sold off as weekend houses for the well-to-do of Budapest or turned into guest-houses and riding centres. With large-scale sheep and cattle herding eliminated, the cowboys themselves – the csikósok – were recycled as a visitor attraction, employed by the state to pull on their waistcoats and tight breeches, adjust their wide-brimmed hats and perform horseback tricks.
The demystifying of the Alföld is summed up by the fate of the famous nine-arch bridge over the River Hortobágy, and of the equally famous inn beside it. This was once the great meeting-place of the eastern puszta. At the cattle markets, the grasslands beside the river’s lazy green water were shrouded in dust raised by the herds, watched over by the csikósok and their Puli dogs. Buyers, sellers and travellers found sanctuary at the inn, the Nagy Csárda. Outside, every inch of space was taken by conveyances: wagons with teams of oxen, horses, buggies, chaises, drags, coaches, diligences, all gathered into a great camp. Inside, the air was thick with pipe and cigar smoke and alive with the music of tambur, seven-holed pipes, goatskin bagpipes, cymbolons and fiddles.
Petöfi came here and sang of the beauty of the innkeeper’s wife. An English woman, Mrs Birkbeck, claimed to have witnessed the single most celebrated incident in the history of the Nagy Csárda: the night the notorious bandit, Rósza Sándor, arrived with the police hot on his heels, staying long enough to perform a wild dance with his axe before fleeing under a hail of gunfire. (‘The man was young, of middle stature and muscular frame … his grave pale face had a striking expression of sadness, yet his eyes were like burning coals,’ wrote Mrs Birkbeck, possibly betraying a weakness for romantic fiction.)
These days the Nagy Csárda plays host to tourists, who queue for their bowls of gulyás while a tape of canned pseudo-gypsy music plays. Air-conditioned coaches, BMWs, Mercedes and Opels have replaced the tethered horses. Touts advertise tickets for the riding shows. Where the cattle once stamped and snorted is a sprawl of souvenir shops. A concrete stand has been built to provide a view of the nine-arch bridge.
Since 1990 the economy of the whole region has faltered badly. The collapse of the Communist system led to financial support for factories and farms being cut or withdrawn altogether. Many were forced to close, causing both serious unemployment and an exodus to Budapest or abroad. Tourism, always seen as the benign saviour, took up some of the slack, but was halted in its tracks by the cyanide poisoning. Since then there has been a slow retrenchment, but unemployment in the east of the country remains significantly higher than the national average.
As for the Tisza itself, it came through the pollution calamity but remains in deep trouble. A recent study identified a host of factors ranged against it: heavy metal contamination from the mines of north-west Romania, pollution from paper and cellulose plants in Romania and Ukraine and from chemical factories at Miskolc and Szolnok, long-term nitrate loading from agricultural run-off, grossly inadequate water treatment resulting in sewage dumping on a huge scale. The marvel is that the river still functions at all, and that there are any fish left.
It was hardly surprising therefore that Gábor and Márta should have taken a sombre view of life. They had staked everything on the marina and it had been a struggle all the way. The rent charged by the state for the site kept rising, and Gábor was still embroiled in a long-running legal dispute with the Anglers’ Federation over the issuing of permits to anglers. The fishing side of the business had fallen away anyway, although the holiday lets were doing well. At odd moments he would put aside his worries and dwell on his dreams of expansion. He wanted to build a bridge across to a reedy island and develop it with more cabins, extend the moorings for boats. Márta would shake her head. They could not afford to borrow any more, she said.
Márta was keenly curious about my life, which made her quite unusual among the people I met. She wanted to hear what had happened to the children I had told her about in 1990. She frowned when I said I had been divorced, smiled when I said I was married again with two small daughters, and demanded to see their photographs. She was preoccupied equally by the business and by family matters, particularly the impending wedding of her daughter. There was much talk of dresses and guest lists, and several times a day she would engage in long telephone conversations with the bride-to-be about the preparations, after which she would look serious and thoughtful. When I reminded her that a wedding was supposed to be a joyous occasion, Márta shook her head and said she would be glad when it was over.
There were other worries. Márta and her sister were estranged as a result of something that had been said between them. Her son was working for a computer company in Budapest, living on his own and spending all his spare time surfing the internet. This was the modern world and Márta gave me the strong impression that she did not care much for it. She was a regular worshipper at the Calvinist church in Tiszafüred and maintained a gently, humanely Calvinist outlook on life. When she was a student in Budapest, she said, she had smoked and drunk and partied, but it was not easy to imagine.
In general she was less inclined than before to discuss Hungary and its problems, preferring to stick to safer subjects such as family affairs and literature. In part this probably reflected a general tendency as we grow older to steer away from politics and big social issues, as we underst
and more how little we truly understand. Also 1990 had clearly been a watershed for the countries of eastern Europe, and the future had been the preoccupation of the moment. Now that future had become the recent past. For Márta and Gábor it had brought a measure of fulfilment and independence, but also pain and anxiety. Life had proved to be the usual mixture of confusion, disappointment and pleasure. Clearly no golden age had dawned: unemployment in Tiszafüred was running at 30 per cent, most of the factories had shut, much of the good agricultural land had been annexed by the lake, the river had been poisoned.
Márta felt out of sympathy with the new order that had arisen from the ruins of the old. I did wonder too – it wasn’t the kind of question you could ask – if her reticence about the present might have reflected a fear of being suspected of nostalgia for the past. I remembered a conversation with her in 1990 in which she had expressed irritation with the righteous damnation of every aspect of the old days. ‘The young people criticise us for allowing Communism,’ she had said, chopping onions and tomatoes for a salad. ‘They seem to hate us because we did not have the revolution. But it wasn’t so bad for ordinary people. It wasn’t like Russia. There was work, enough food, there were books and plays and music, and good schools and hospitals, and it was peaceful. Now I am expected to feel guilty because I didn’t do anything about the Communists.’
Their daughter, known as Panka, was a lovely, delightful girl, blonde and slender, full of plans for her new life. She said she remembered me from that evening when we had all sat around the fire eating bread and pork fat. On my last evening this time we ate al fresco by the river with various of her and her fiancé’s friends. There was a thick venison stew, followed by spicy soup with chunks of sausage, red from the paprika, tomatoes and peppers. No catfish, though. We sat at trestle tables as darkness fell and the mosquitoes marshalled their forces. Bottles of Hungarian Merlot circulated and Gábor became vivacious. I noticed that Márta drank almost no wine.
I told her a ludicrous, hoary fisherman’s tale about a man who walks along a river bank and comes upon an angler patiently watching his float. He asks the angler what he is after. ‘Bream,’ the angler replies. ‘Bream, eh? What are they like?’ ‘Dunno. Never caught one.’ She listened intently, with her chin in her hand, as if I was revealing some extraordinary truth. At the punchline she tilted back her head and laughed delightedly; as much, I suspected, from the pleasure of having been able to follow my nonsense as with its humour.
I asked her about Hungarian writers and she wrote me a little list of novelists she liked – Péter Esterházy, Kálmán Mikszáth, Zsigmond Moritz, Frigyes Karinthy. I promised to search for English translations when I got back.
By now the mosquitoes were feasting hard and the conversation was punctuated by the slapping of hands against arms and necks. The river – black against the trees, silvered where it reflected the sky – slid noiselessly by. Márta, I felt, was pretty much indifferent to it. But at the same time I had an image of her chained to it, her fate intertwined with its fate, watching it for years to come.
In the end I did manage to get out on the water. Gábor couldn’t take me; he never dared leave the marina for long in case some crisis galloped up in his absence. But he arranged for me to have an outing with one of his regulars, a small, elderly dentist called Attila, who kept a houseboat and a fishing skiff at the marina and came from Budapest most weekends, leaving his wife behind with their cats in their flat on Gellért Hill. He had some words of English, which he extracted from the recesses of his memory with difficulty, rather like teeth, and displayed with pride. He had an impish air, and his movements were quick and precise. Everything in the boat – rods, seats, net, tackle, bait – was arranged with great care to be within reach when the moment came.
It never did. We tried upstream and then downstream. We asked several anglers, some of whom had been at it all night, if they had had any luck. None of them had. I sat in the bow of Attila’s boat, listening to the soughing of the wind in the trees, the rustling of the reeds, the occasional swirl and splash along the margins, and retreated into a familiar meditative daze. It was as if I had merely resumed the vigil begun with Zsolt 18 years before.
‘Catfish not feed,’ Attila said superfluously. The sun came up over the willows, sucking the last trails of vapour from the surface. He wound in the baits, stowed the rods away, and steered back to the marina. I thanked him and wished him well for his forthcoming trip. I had diagnosed Attila as being in the grip of a severe and probably incurable attack of catfish fever. It had driven him to the Po in Italy and the Ebro in Spain, but the hot catfish destination of the moment was the Ural River in Kazakhstan. Attila shook his head in remembered wonder at the size and abundance of those Kazakh cats. He had already been to the Ural three times and was about to go again.
What about the Danube Delta, I asked? Plenty of catfish there. Attila shook his head vigorously. ‘I not like Romanian people,’ he said, the words coming at intervals.
The world may be changing, I reflected as I retreated to the Hotel Hableana for some much-needed breakfast, but not everything in it. And one of the things that would never change would be the antipathy between Hungarians and Romanians. Ideologies wax and wane, systems come and go, tyrants fall, democracies totter, but the age-old hostility between these neighbours is as constant as the current of the Tisza itself.
Chapter 10
Balaton
Lake Balaton from the castle at Szigliget
THE EVENING LIGHT restores some of the lost magic to Balaton.
I was looking down on the lake from the ruins of the medieval castle at Szigliget, a few miles along the northern shore from the western end. The sun was dying to my right, flooding golden light across the water to hide the ugliness of the holiday resorts. The hills and bluffs above Balatongyörök and the slopes of the table-topped Badacsony dropped darkly into the opalescent water. The bay west of Szigliget sparkled like the Field of the Cloth of Gold. The vast lake seemed at peace with itself; the land behind it beautiful and full of pleasing possibilities.
In the 1830s or 40s John Paget made an excursion from Budapest to Balatonfüred, also on the northern shore but well to the east of Szigliget. He bathed in the lake, danced with the local ladies of quality, disparaged the primitive facilities, condescended to one and all, and commented that: ‘It is difficult for an Englishman to imagine a fine inland lake of this kind totally useless for the purpose of commerce or pleasure … I believe there is not a single trading barge and certainly not one sailing-boat on the whole lake.’
Were he still with us, Paget could hardly complain that the lake was under-exploited now. The beaches seethe with sunbathers. The shallow waters buzz with speedboats and pleasure craft. The southern shore is one unbroken trail of hotels, apartments, marinas, chalets, camps, bars, restaurants and amusement parks; and while the resorts of the northern shore pride themselves on serving a classier clientele, the business they conduct is just the same.
I was in two minds about returning to Balaton. The memories from 1990 were not good. But I did wonder if it could possibly be as grim as I remembered. Re-reading my bleats of dismay at the despoiling of the lake, I was struck by how quick my younger self had been to leap upon the high horse of moral indignation. I was curious, too, about the fate of Hungary’s only trout stream, and about Balaton’s past, before the concrete mixers moved in.
In the end curiosity won. I hired a car and, on a day of blazing summer heat, went back to the Hungarian Sea.
It took me a while to relocate the Anglers’ Federation’s camp on the Tihany peninsular where I had stayed before. A navigational error sucked me into the village of Tihany itself, where the abbey rose above a sea of coaches, cars and trippers. Eventually I got on to the lower road, which followed the shore. The beaches were packed, the water churned with bodies. Flesh was everywhere, glistening with sun oil. Uncovered bellies and half-covered breasts and fat arses swung and swayed in all directions.
I pa
ssed the Yacht Club and came to the entrance to Club Tihany, a sprawling complex that had managed to grab most of the prime beachfront. I asked a young man on the gate if there was a fishing camp anywhere. He directed me along a track that curved away under a steep ridge studded with the cones of defunct volcanic geysers. It led to the camp, a jumble of modest wooden chalets and a rundown restaurant/bar. There were no German number plates and no sign of any Germans.
A pontoon led from the car park through the reeds out to the lake, where there was a long wooden platform arranged for easy fishing. Three men in swimming trunks were sitting beside their rods towards one end, shaded by umbrellas from the scorching sun. They were part of a group of eight friends, all originally from Budapest but now making money in different parts of the world. They got together for a week each year, to fish for carp, eat carp soup, drink beer and catch up. One of them said it was important to get away together, to unwind, to talk again properly. I asked about wives. They all laughed. No wives.
They had two carp in a net, which they were keeping for supper. The fishing was good, they said, better than a few years back when there were all kinds of problems with pollution and water levels. They all liked it here. The camp was not so smart but it was peaceful, and in the evening deer would come out on to the slopes above to feed. I asked who used the camp these days. Mainly Hungarians, they said. Some Dutch, some Danes. No English, and not so many Germans now. They went to Croatia or Turkey instead.
A motor launch passed by some distance out. One of the men watched it through binoculars, then whistled and burst into a voluble commentary in Hungarian. The glasses were passed to me. A blonde woman, completely naked apart from a pair of sunglasses, was standing in the bow, her body arched against the rail. I gawped for a time before handing back the glasses. A bell tinkled at the end of one of the rods and a carp of about two pounds was hauled in, admired, and released.