“He is shoplifting,” added his girlfriend. “So it’s no problem to tell him what you want. That’s why the vodka was so cheap tonight.”
The Kalemegdan, the fortress of Belgrade, sits atop the overlook above the river Sava and the bend in the Danube, facing an island that’s been given over to nature in memory of the Great War. This prow of land has been fought over by every tribe, petty king, and emperor since before the dawn of European history. It is the place where the two great marauding tribes of the region, the Turks and the Magyars, faced off. The first shots of World War I were fired from the north shore floodplain up into the fortifications. Its very name is drawn from the Turkish words for “battlefield” and “fortress.” “The old fortress of Belgrade,” wrote West, “till the end of the Great War knew peace only as a dream. . . . Ever since there were men in this region this promontory must have meant life to those that held it, death to those that lost it.”
First among the shadowy, purgatorial ranks of great forgotten battles, World War I itself has more memorials here in this city of its nascency than perhaps any other place in old Europe. Atop a tall pillar, facing the former Hungarian lands, stands a slim nude man molded in tarnished copper, erected in 1928 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of something called the Breach of Thessaloníki. West records that since the statue was “recognizably male,” the townspeople refused to erect it (so to speak) in the city proper and placed it atop the pillar, nearly hidden by the height, his offending parts facing the enemy.
The Kalemegdan is a castle of labyrinthine fortifications, brick walls, and ditches, and a rare haven of quiet in all of Belgrade. I found four busts and tombstones of antifascist partisan heroes, a socialist realist statue in honor of a fourteenth-century despot, and a bench painted to look like a watermelon slice. Medieval tombstones with Old Slavonic inscriptions lay in the grass. The capstone of the park is, fittingly, a military museum, surrounded by tanks, howitzers, and heavy artillery going back hundreds of years. One may be forgiven a twinge of Ozymandian despair that the centerpiece of this harried, desperate city is the remains of the armies that made it that way.
After last night’s rain, though, summer had finally arrived. It was sweaty and hazy and I was northbound to Budapest.
II.
A Fur Coat with Morsels (Hungary, Poland)
The Pannonian plain, with its poplar farms and stacked rolls of hay, is about as interesting to drive across as Kansas. The old imperial capital was more prosaic, more bourgeois, and altogether less interesting than the provincial cities that made up the rest of my week. It might as well be Berlin or Paris—though it is calmer and more monumental than either, a Berlin or Paris of the romantic imagination rather than the hectic, expat-and-immigrant hives of the two western capitals. Both Eva Hoffman and Rebecca West, visiting Budapest fifty years and a world apart, describe a city of commerce and extravagance that is somewhat devoid of the exotic Eastern je ne sais quoi they are looking for, a city of what West calls “dazzling,” “staring” lights (“In no Balkan town are there such lights,” she wrote, keen to underscore the imperial imbalance). Hungary in 1989, said Hoffman, was “at a very different point of evolution” in private enterprise than its neighbors, “and the distance [it] has to travel to become a ‘normal’ country is visibly shorter.”
In contrast to the Serbian entrance, the Hungarian border guards were nonchalant, even negligent, waving me through with barely a glance at my passport. The Serb province north of the Danube known as Vojvodina (including both Novi Sad and Bačka Topola), long the subject of dispute between Serbia and Hungary, also constituted an anxious border between the Hapsburgs and the Ottomans. Until the establishment of Serbian autonomy in the early nineteenth century, Vojvodina held the only population of Serbs outside Ottoman territory.1 So in the course of a barely six-hundred-kilometer journey, one crosses not only the historical north–south fault line between Catholic Croatia and Orthodox Serbia but also the east–west line between the Islamic Ottomans and the Christian Hapsburgs (which itself succeeded the Danube frontier between Rome and barbarism). In that crossroads is the heart of the conflicts of a thousand years.
As an example of the complicated nature of borderland identity, Serbians in Vojvodina made a good living selling pork to the Islamic Ottomans.
Szentes is a sleepy country town with a wide central square punctuated by statues of Kossuth and more obscure heroes with pigeons for headdresses. I spent the afternoon at the old municipal “medicinal” baths, a shabby thermal affair of piss-yellow bricks and a Turkish-style (after all, Hungary was Ottoman territory for a century and a half, and the bathing habit stuck) central bath decorated in a mosaic style I would call mod-Etruscan. There was a closet-sized sauna in the basement, off of a 1970s rec room complete with wood paneling.
Hungary is a place of singular language difficulties. In general, most of the kids in the worldwide DIY scene speak decent English, and Maria’s Ukrainian spills over into Russian and Polish. But Hungarian is an impenetrable language: Paul Theroux, in Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, quipped, “When you don’t understand a single word, it’s usually Hungarian,” though Eva Hoffman found it “enchanting and utterly perplexing, [with] Bartokian syncopations and sensuousness.” (If you can reliably pronounce Hódmezővásárhely, the name of a town between Szentes and Szeged meaning “beaver field marketplace,” you may have powers of enunciation strong enough to overcome a mouthful of marbles.) In this smallish town, though, no one seemed interested in offering a helping linguistic hand. We couldn’t find the club, and Maggie—the GPS (or, if you prefer, satnav), whose authoritative voice I’d anthropomorphized with a conflation of the brand name Magellan and Mrs. Thatcher—directed us to a residential neighborhood that hardly seemed likely to contain a venue for a punk show. The old men in the square refused even to look us in the eye as we asked for directions to what turned out to be “Tisza Beach,” the waterfront of a wide, slow river, sluggish and shaggy, that outlined the town. We pulled the car up over a high levee, down a cobbled and then unpaved road, into a collection of battered trailers and houses on twenty-foot stilts, rattletrap and insectoid, something like the Mississippi Gulf Coast but with shacks instead of McMansions. If it weren’t for the odd expensive-looking car, I’d have taken it for a Roma camp.
In fact it was a fishing village, located next to a river that has long flooded the Hungarian plains. The Tisza River (there is some confusion whether the “Tibiscus” that features in classical Greek and Latin literature refers to the Tisza or to the Timiș, which runs more or less parallel and to the west; Gibbon conflates the two) springs from the Carpathian Mountains near Rakhiv, in Ukraine. Attila the Hun is said to have been buried under a section that was thereafter rerouted so his tomb would never be disturbed. In antiquity the region’s inhabitants were the Dacians, “who subsisted,” according to Gibbon, “by fishing on the banks of the river Teyss”—from the German Theiss—“or Tibiscus.” An invasion by the Sarmatians, steppe nomads from what is now Ukraine and southwestern Russia, drove the Dacians into the Carpathian Mountains. The Sarmatians were themselves later victims of a servile revolt, Gibbon wrote, and forced to cede the “marshy banks which lay between [the Teyss and the Danube, which] were often covered by their inundations, [and] formed an intricate wilderness, pervious only to their inhabitants, who were acquainted with its secret paths and inaccessible fortresses,” to their former slaves, who called themselves the Limigantes. The latter were later defeated by Constantine’s son Constantius, who exposed the Limigantes’ camps by setting fire to the forest. The emperor was on the verge of generously allowing them to resettle as a Roman colony near modern Budapest, when, as he addressed them, they treacherously attacked his person. The result was “the extinction of the name and nation of the Limigantes” in reprisal, and the Sarmatians returned to the region.
The empty concrete foundations in some of the plots where houses had once stood attested to the functionality of the stilts that gave the whole place t
he quality of a Baba Yaga fairy tale. The venue itself, called Tiszavirág Büfé, was a fishing bar that looked as if it had been airlifted from a Key West backwater: the name was spray-painted on an old surfboard, and a rope fishing net, a life preserver, and an anchor hung from the balcony. It was run by an amiable snaggletooth who had been a water polo player in Serbia for eight years. Now he refereed polo matches at the local water park in his spare time. “Serbia is the most beautiful country,” he said. “So stupid. Ten years of war, and they have nothing.” He boiled a stew of rice, tomato sauce, and soy protein on a welded, wood-burning stove standing in the dirt in front of the bar, which did nothing to detract from the sense that we were camping on a beach. We would be playing next to the stove, on the concrete patio outside the front door.
The opening act was a hapless group of teenage folk-punks. We were remanded into the care of one of them, a passive bonbon named Martin, who lived with his willowy sister in a small student apartment in Szeged, the nearest city. Szeged is ancient, near the former seat of Attila’s empire, and yet almost nothing there is more than 140 or so years old: a massive flood swept away virtually every building in 1879, and it was rebuilt in a classic pastel Hapsburg style. We had all day to sightsee and were hoping Martin, who had contacted me on Facebook months before offering to host, could show us the sights.
“So what do you want to do?” he asked softly. Hoffman wrote, “Even when they speak English, Hungarians manage to transport some of the off-rhythms and softness of their language [and] give it strange, lunar resonances.” I’d describe Martin, less generously, as a mumbler, and we quickly got the impression that he didn’t understand quite as much English as we’d originally thought.
“Um . . . I’m not sure. What’s interesting to see?”
Martin shrugged.
“I guess we’re hungry—shall we go get some food?” we offered.
“OK . . . what do you want to eat?”
“What’s good?”
He shrugged.
“Something vegetarian?” I suggested.
“OK . . .”
He led us to a cafeteria-style lunch counter and gestured at the menu, written on a whiteboard above the counter, entirely in Hungarian. “So what do you want?”
I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. It is a thankless task, escorting foreigners around your city, and the onus is on me as the one who doesn’t speak the language. But I was frustrated nonetheless. There is a passivity to traveling, especially touring—not the heroic romantic engagement with the foreign but a radical withdrawal in which you engage only on specific and circumscribed terms: food, timetables, logistics. For anything beyond that, the impulse is to let the person operating on their home turf dictate your fate.
“Can you tell me, maybe,” I asked, “if there are any vegetarian options?”
“Hm,” he said doubtfully. “Mostly it is chicken.”
“Just point at something,” said Maria. “I think there’s pasta.”
“In my view,” wrote Hoffman, Czech and Hungarian food “are close competitors for awfulness, but . . . Hungarian cooking could well take the prize. What’s happened to the famed Hungarian cuisine of yesteryear?” Peter, the promoter in Szeged, simply said, “Hungarians put sour cream on everything. And a lot of it.” Lunch in Szentes two days earlier had been cold peach soup topped with whipped cream, accompanied by fried croquettes of breaded mushroom wrapped around soft cheese with dill. In Budapest, a dish advertised as “Mexican chicken” bore the description “Paprikash chicken meat was frying in a fur coat with morsels.” Szeged is the home of spicy Hungarian paprika, yet I ended up with a plate of cold white pasta, topped first with a giant tablespoon of sour cream, and then shredded white cheese on top of that. I was hungry, but I made it through only a few bites.
The opening act that night was an enthusiastic duo, both named Peter, who had organized the show. After soundcheck, said the Peters, talk to the bartender; he’ll hook you up with dinner.
“You are vegetarian, I heard,” said the bartender. “I think we can prepare for you . . . pasta with cheese and sour cream.”
There are physical markers I’ve come to associate with particular countries: the Serbian horse carts and trilingual signs (Latin, Cyrillic, and Hungarian), the light-pastel housing projects (a color scheme borrowed from the pastel wash of the Hapsburg buildings?) silhouetted against the outer hills of the minor Eastern European cities. In Hungary, it’s giant concrete cones bristling with the entire telecommunications infrastructure of each small town, looming on the outskirts like the water towers of middle America. We were on our way to an “acoustic punk picnic” in Veszprém, ninety kilometers outside Budapest, where we’d play an afternoon set before heading to the capital for the evening show. Veszprém is a small town, and the picnic was near a zoo clogged by Sunday parkgoers, up a gravel road, on a grassy hill overlooking a bright valley. It may have been lovely, but a certain kind of situation can make “anarcho-punk” a synonym for “lazy and disorganized,” and a free-beer picnic with an iron cauldron of stew on a fire is one of them: no one in charge, no master plan. At least we hadn’t taken a bus overnight from Vienna just to play, like Jack, the friendly Brit in whose filthy student apartment we’d stayed a few weeks before.
Budapest is the second city of an old world. The Compromise of 1867 made the Hungarian capital the nominal equal of Vienna as an imperial city, and “much of Budapest’s design and architecture dates from this period of national ascendancy,” Hoffman writes. “The central avenues are as wide as the Haussmann boulevards in Paris.” We arrived at dusk. These days, the other invariable sign of past Austro-Hungarian glories are backpacker hostels housing drunk twenty-two-year-olds, and we played a show in a bunker below one. After the show we stayed with Eliot and Laci, who run a hardcore label; Maya, a social worker; and their grouchy Boston Terrier. Maya helped Afghan refugees who had been told by their traffickers, “This is Norway,” and dumped in Hungary to fend for themselves.
Returning to Budapest the next year on my own, a perfect storm of small things added up to a bad show. I was worn out by Belgrade and the boredom of the drive, and the café, though staffed by stunning, feline Hungarian women with Central Asian eyes, had no place for me to curl up and nap. I had outrun the summer again, and the city was cold and wet. The stage was by the door. When that happens, the people who are there to see the show are already seated and settled, so what one notices from the stage are either those leaving or those entering—and their attempt to suppress a look of dismay when they see that there’s live music. It was a pass-the-hat deal, which I know from experience averages about two euros a head regardless of the general enthusiasm level. And Hungary is a place where my conversational stage shtick just doesn’t work. The language barrier, even for people with decent conversational English, is just too great.
That said, I ended up pocketing more on this disappointing show than at Belgrade’s fantastic one, so there was no actionable lesson besides a macroeconomic one about comparative currency valuation and free trade zones.
“I just want to let you know,” said the man who was putting me up, “I had a band staying over last night, and I haven’t had a chance to clean up.”
“It’s OK—I want to go straight to bed.”
“I understand. The guys last night were in a drinking mood. We stayed at the club for a long time, then when we came home we played Passion of the Christ with these.” He held up a pair of pink furry handcuffs. “So I am still hungover.”
The previous year, Maria and I had a two-day drive through the Czech Republic to Poland. We stopped in Brno for lunch (after the bland Central European cuisine, we sought out what we figured must be the only vindaloo for miles around) and spent the night in Olomouc, a half-deserted college town with dark, baroque sculptures, a spectacular astronomical clock, and automatons in the town square. Something of a Peter Lorre horror movie atmosphere prevailed in this cobblestoned Moravian backwater. Passing us as we strolled were identical
twins with waist-length straight blonde hair, walking arm in arm and wearing identical outfits: denim shirts tied up to bare their midriffs, white belts, black skirts, dark eyeshadow. As they glided by, a capella choir music spilled like a sudden rain shower from an alley window.
When I first started coming to Germany to tour around the turn of the century, people told horror stories about terrifying, drunken Polish punks. But a decade later little seemed to differ entiate Polish touring from German. In Poland the young, hip crowds were even more stylish, more self-consciously curated, less bar and more coffee shop, less infoshop and more gallery. One of the great ironies of international prejudice is the stubborn survival of the “Polish joke” in America, premised on the Pole as the incorrigible dullard. I haven’t read any study of the chronologies of immigration and assimilation that explains its tenacity. Maybe German Americans were well enough ingrained in American society that when working-class Poles began to emigrate, the old European stereotypes already had a foothold. But the Poles see themselves, not without reason, as the cosmopolitan, artistic elite of Eastern Europe and their country as the home of serious film and literature, with a long, aristocratic history. And the anti-Communist resistance was more sustained and more class-integrated than in much of the rest of Eastern Europe, priming it for the easy emergence of the kind of civil society often declared a necessity for countries emerging from totalitarian government.
There was one major difference when I first visited in 2012, however: in Germany, with its wide autobahn and lenient speed limits, there are virtually no two cities between which the drive takes more than seven hours. In Poland, a country nearly the same size, there were only divided highways with limited passing opportunities. This is a country with a huge business in trucking (and a correspondingly huge business in incongruously glamorous roadside prostitutes, standing alone, checking their cell phones, in the pull-off rest areas every few miles). So any Polish drive, as we crisscrossed the country from Kraków to Szczecin and Gdańsk, south to Wrocław, back north to Poznań and Łódź, south again to Kraków, became an exercise in tense frustration. For thirty miles, we would crawl behind a couple of tractor-trailers, before exploding into a five-hundred-foot drag race past six cars into a half-mile of glorious open-road speed, only to stop dead against the next convoy. Poland and Ukraine were then in a mad race to build infrastructure for the Euro 2012 soccer tournament starting in a matter of weeks, so what few highways there were tended to be under construction or closed for expansion, sending a flummoxed Maggie into a frenzy of back-roads recalculation. We almost missed the show in Poznań, racing on foot across the central square, loaded down with instruments, arriving directly onto the stage at set time, in front of an already seated crowd of two hundred.
The Humorless Ladies of Border Control Page 20