My grandfather died just before my parents’ wedding. He had been separated from my grandmother for many years, living with ‘a woman in Prague’ (the phrase assumed mythic proportions in the family) whom he left once a year in order to accompany his wife and children on their annual holiday at a lakeside resort. These apparently were the conditions set by my grandmother before she agreed to a separation. Keeping up appearances was a quality about which my father cared little, but my mother instinctively understood its importance. For that reason perhaps, my grandmother and to a lesser extent my aunt came eventually to drop their early hostility towards her. Just before my parents were married, my grandfather returned to the bosom of his family to die.
My father had not made a ‘good’ marriage. Not that his family had any moral misgivings about my mother (at least as far as I know) but she suffered from serious disadvantages: she came from outside their circle, and she was practically a pauper. This sounds a harsh and calculating attitude, and no doubt it was so to some extent. But behind its precepts lay decades of bourgeois prudence: keep within the known and trusted circle, do not neglect the necessities of life—if the man is capable of earning good money, his wife must bring some property to the marriage in order, as it were, to balance the books. Since the women in these families were relieved almost entirely of all responsibilities other than the supervision of housework, the concept of unpaid work as a contribution to a marriage, so often invoked by modern feminist theory, had little relevance for them. Such prudence is probably to be encountered in any propertied society, but in prewar Europe its practice had been refined into an art-form of elaborate conventions and rules of decorum. The first volume of Proust contains an account—at a much higher social and cultural level than my parents’ world—of this ritual, which was conducted from one end of Europe to the other, and had spread throughout the spectrum of castes that constituted the bourgeoisie.
From the perspective of her in-laws, my mother was deficient in at least three important respects: she was provincial, she was an orphan (her father had died when she was very young) and she was very poor. Whereas my father’s family had been city people for several generations, my mother was born in a village on the shores of a large, shallow lake that now forms part of the border between Austria and Hungary. The nearby town, where my mother grew up, was generally known as Oedenburg until 1921. After the Treaty of Versailles, a rather suspect plebiscite (in which the dead were said to have voted enthusiastically) decided that the town should be absorbed into the newly independent state of Hungary, and that it should be known exclusively by its Hungarian name, Sopron. As a means of rewarding the gallant (and largely German-speaking) citizens of Sopron for their courageously patriotic act, the Hungarian government decided to endow it with the title Urbs Fidelissima.
My mother was the daughter of a village schoolmaster who died from meningitis when she was a toddler. My grandmother—a widow of twenty-two—left the schoolhouse and went back to live with her parents. My great-grandfather, whom I remember distinctly, was a little, compactly-built man with pronounced Slavic cheekbones, despite the fact that his name was David Weiss. He was something of a grandee in the village. The caste-obsessed Habsburg world extended its influence to the most obscure recesses of its domains. He was involved in the dispatch by train of milk from the estates of the great Eszterházy family to the two capital cities—Vienna and Budapest. I do not know what my great-grandfather’s function was—I think it may have been entrepreneurial. I do not think he was an employee of the railways. I say this because this side of my family, though conscious of its humble origins, habitually thought of itself as a cut above the local peasantry and rural canaille. In earlier times they may well have been servants of the Eszterházys or of their retainers, for the one shred of mythology in that part of the family concerned my great-grandfather’s grandfather, who was supposed to have ‘known’ Haydn during his years as Kapellmeister at Eszterháza.
My great-grandfather saw himself as a person of some importance; he took pride in the orderly flow of milk to the great capitals. He considered himself, albeit in a small way, an important part of the machinery that ensured the smooth operation of that vast, benevolent Empire which was joined by an unbroken chain extending all the way from the Kaiser und König in Vienna to the humblest peasant on its eastern extremity. He had a uniform and a braided cap to denote his station along that chain. He has been given an immortality he hardly warranted in an anecdote in David Malouf’s Harland’s Half Acre. How mistaken he was in his faith in the stability of the Habsburg world was proved to him a few years after the birth of his first grandchild, my mother, who was born in 1912.
Around the time of my mother’s birth, when her mother, the widow Neubauer, moved back to her parents’ house after her pitifully short marriage to the village schoolmaster, this world seemed stable, comforting, eternal. Franz-Josef, the benevolent, avuncular monarch, still mourning (according to popular mythology) his assassinated Empress (even though they had, in fact, loathed each other), ruled over his people from the big city, Vienna, seventy or so kilometres to the west. For my mother’s family Vienna was ‘their’ city. What you could not get done in nearby Oedenburg you could accomplish in Vienna, a short train journey away. When my grandfather began developing the symptoms of the meningitis which was to take his life, the doctors of Oedenburg decided that he must be taken to Vienna, where he died. My grandmother often spoke about his funeral in a cemetery on the outskirts of the city. She remembered her father in his splendid uniform and black armband, and how my great-grandmother had discarded for the occasion the black kerchief she wore every day of her life, replacing it with an ancient, heavily-veiled black hat. But this orderly life, with its dependence on the kindly monarch and the great city, commemorated in Robert Musil’s wry masterpiece The Man Without Qualities, was not to last. It was shattered not so much by the Great War as by its aftermath.
After the disintegration of the Habsburg Empire, various provinces in Austria and Hungary were shaken by socialist, anarchist or bolshevist uprisings (the epithet varied from place to place). One of these forced my great-grandfather and his family (every one of them exploiters and toadies, of course) to take refuge in their cellar. My mother, who must have been six or seven at the time, recalled those days of terror more vividly and referred to them more frequently during her years in Australia than she was to speak about those later times, in the forties, when she was forced once again to seek shelter underground. They lost everything. According to my mother and grandmother, who saw all their woes as stemming from that time, the revolutionaries made off with considerable wealth: all their worldly possessions, furniture, clothes, sacks of produce, and most damagingly several bags of gold coins which had been carefully hidden in cunning places all around the house. Only one small satchel survived the attention of the raiders. A hitherto prosperous family was ruined. They were taken in by my grandmother’s cousins who lived in Oedenburg (soon to become Hungarian and Sopron). Throughout my mother’s childhood and adolescence these cousins took exquisite delight in reminding their impoverished relatives of their extraordinary kindness.
I remember some of these cousins, their children and their grandchildren, who were my contemporaries. These are among my earliest memories, and I believe that they have stayed with me all this time—when so much else has vanished—because it was my first experience of the subtle patterns of beastliness that govern family relationships. Each year until 1943, when Hungary became involved in the war in an immediate and disastrous way, we would visit our Sopron relatives at Easter-time. By this stage my mother had become the metropolitan grande dame, wife of the successful manufacturer (whom these people had remembered as the young manager of the local weaving-mill). We would descend in our smart city clothes, my mother swathed in furs, exuding cosmopolitan sophistication. The cousins were dowdy and provincial, and were made to feel so by my mother’s account of life in the city—the theatres, the restaurants, her dressmaker, milline
r, hairdresser, our neighbours who drove a large black convertible (it was rare in those days for people to own motor-cars), and above all how one night the Prince and Mrs Simpson had sat at the table next to theirs in a fashionable Budapest nightclub (even though by the forties this anecdote had become rather stale).
A precise memory concerns a young cousin—I have long forgotten her name. She was sitting on one of those revolving piano-stools which was, that week, the envy of my life. Round and round she went, the gold ringlets of her hair flying past at ever greater speed. I felt anguish and despair—we did not have a piano, let alone a piano-stool. My spinning cousin was conscious of her power; waves of contempt flowed out of her twirling body. I could bear it no longer: I grabbed hold of one of the flying ringlets, and off she came, tumbling onto the Persian rug, howling in delight because she knew she had scored a considerable advantage over me. At that moment the polite beastliness conducted by the grown-ups over afternoon tea (a meal which always included all sorts of food and beverages except tea) erupted into open warfare. The cousins turned on my mother, accusing her of ingratitude, calling her an upstart, prophesying a horrible criminal future for me. Had not, after all, my mother as a girl scandalised everyone when she was seen by the whole town riding pillion on my father’s motorbike? They had said it at the time, and they would say it again: she was shameless, and shameless people have shameless children. I have no recollection of what happened after that. Did the storm pass? I do not know and it does not matter very much, for all these people are dead and, if the dead live on, I hope against hope that they are not spending eternity reliving old squabbles and rivalries.
Oedenburg, Sopron, called Scarbantia by the Romans, represented one of the principal vantage points from which my mother judged the sprawling suburbs of Sydney. It was—I write in the past tense for I have not seen it for half a century, even though I tried in vain to find a night’s accommodation there during the hectic Christmas season of 1990, when every expatriate seemed to be looking for hotel rooms all over Hungary—a town of about fifty thousand inhabitants nestled below some pleasant hills that briefly break the monotony of the great plain that begins to the east of Vienna.
As you leave Vienna, passing cemeteries, and a huge petrochemical plant, the Austria of popular imagination, that is the Austria of The White Horse Inn and of The Sound of Music, is swiftly left behind. ‘Asia begins at the back door of my palace in Vienna,’ Prince Metternich is supposed to have said, and it is immediately obvious what he meant. For very soon signs of the Turkish invasion and occupation begin to appear. The farther you travel, especially after you cross that curious little puddle of a river called the Leitha, which served, incredibly, as the border of the Holy Roman Empire, you notice more and more remnants of Islam: bathhouses and the suspicion that some churches have done service as mosques. There are other signs of the past as well: Caruntum, a great Roman outpost, built, with the obsessive practicality of the Romans, in the middle of nowhere just because two great highways crossed at that point. There is also increasing evidence of that most Hungarian of emblems: tall farmhouse chimneys, each with its obligatory stork’s nest.
Until very recently, as you continued along this highway, you came upon a wire fence, a watchtower, and an old woman scratching away at a cabbage patch. Not far from that fence, otherwise known as the Iron Curtain, you would soon come upon Sopron, itself an amalgam of Austrian, Turkish, Roman and Hungarian influences. Now the fence is gone. Sopron may, in years to come, begin to find again something of its identity as Oedenburg, a town sharing as much with Austria as with Hungary, a town that always looked towards Vienna, rather than in the direction of a distant and somewhat provincial Budapest. The mood in contemporary Hungary looks back with some nostalgia on its Habsburg past. But the people of Sopron are unlikely in the near future to run up to Vienna to do this or that, as my mother’s family used to do—the problems of a soft-currency economy will prevent that.
My memories of Sopron are vague and discontinuous. Most vividly remembered is a curious, rough-hewn stone tower, built, I was told, on a Roman base, which had formerly served as a lookout to warn of the coming of fire or of invading hordes. This was, I think, the oldest part of the town, where there were other Roman remains, as well as bits and pieces revealing the influence of the Turkish domination of that part of the world, and beautiful timbered houses, modest on the street-side but displaying, through their arched gateways, glimpses of spacious courtyards surrounded by overhanging balconies with intricately carved decorations. Elsewhere, one could see that Vienna was not far away. I recall a large square with the municipal theatre at one end (where I was taken to see The Gypsy Baron on one of our visits) and nearby the vast Ursuline convent where my mother was educated. I have no recollection of any sort of cathedral, church, or synagogue though there must have been such establishments somewhere. But I do remember with some clarity the hotel where we used to stay, also situated on this square, which (memory tells me) was constructed according to the provincial’s understanding of Viennese luxe, with elaborately moulded ceilings and crystal chandeliers.
The compact design of this little town suggested solidity and reliability. You knew where you were. Each part had a function, or at least a significance. Whether you regarded the square or the watchtower as your focus, the town made sense. Its variety testified to continuity—outliving the Romans, the Turks and, at least for Hungarian patriots, the wretched Austrians; its compactness spoke of a sense of community. I suspect that life in Sopron must have been deadly dull; but for my mother even that dullness came to seem rich and comforting when compared with the very different dullness of Sydney in the fifties.
Where Sydney differed so much was in its monotony. No Roman ruins, no Turkish remnants, no reminders of a Habsburg past, though one or two of the buildings in Macquarie Street were strangely reminiscent, in size and relative crudeness, of Sopron’s attempts at Viennese grandeur. There was the unsettling sense that in Sydney people lived not in but around the ‘city’, which, we came to realise in the weeks after our arrival, was almost exclusively dedicated to the demands of commerce. We knew nothing about the social topography of Sydney suburbia; nor did we appreciate, as I do now, that those relatively few Sydneysiders who live around the shores of the Harbour lead a life no less attractively urban than the smart apartment-dwellers of European capital cities. What we were conscious of were the miles and miles of undifferentiated suburbs, rows upon rows of mean bungalows, stretching to the end of the world—or at least to the foot of the mountains—a depressing world of dormitories, where there was no reason to walk along the street unless you had to go ‘out’ to get something done. I do not think that this sentiment was misplaced: compared to the awfulness of Epping—especially when tinged by nostalgia for the irrecoverable—even the provincial boredom of Sopron was vastly preferable.
The Ursuline convent furnished my mother with another myth-world which was to colour many of her attitudes later in life, whether as the grande dame of Budapest or as the seamstress of Epping that she became for several years. Because of some obscure dispute with an Archbishop or even perhaps with the Holy See (my mother was always vague about the precise circumstances) the Ursulines of Sopron became an enclosed order. They retreated behind the walls of their handsome convent and continued the task of educating the young ladies of the district from a position of apparently total isolation. Though they were a Catholic order, they seemed remarkably generous in their acceptance of pupils of various faiths—Protestants as well as Jews—reflecting in many ways the attempts of the old monarchy to bring harmony to the many creeds amongst its subjects, even in the face of the antisemitism and other forms of bigotry that had always marred Austro-Hungarian social and political life.
They may have been an enclosed order, but they were by no means denied the amenities of life. I do not know how accurate my mother’s accounts of the splendours of convent life were—quite possibly they were tinged with a certain romantic aura—but clearly
the Ursuline ladies did everything to overcome the disadvantages of isolation. They were anything but self-lacerating anchorites. Indeed, the word ‘ladies’ was crucially important. They were ladies, many of them titled (though that did not signify much in a world which was very liberal with dispensing honours), who were required to bring a handsome dowry to the order. It was generally expected that they would also bring the benefits of a good education. Several were university graduates. They seemed to have retained considerable contact with the outside world. Visitors were received in what my mother described as an elegant salon. Parcels of the latest books from Vienna were constantly delivered to their front door. And they had one of the first wireless receivers in the town.
I do not know what passions and anguish marked the lives of these women, how many had immured themselves because of some grave disappointment in life, or if any had been incarcerated by their families for some terrible indiscretion. My mother never spoke of such things. But she did recall with great pleasure the few glimpses she was vouchsafed of their calm, orderly, and civilised way of life. No doubt that life seemed particularly glamorous to the impoverished orphan living in a poky flat, sustained by the charity of contemptuous relatives. She remembered the handsome, beautifully furnished apartments each of these ladies occupied, having brought with them not merely exquisite pieces of furniture, heirlooms of great value, but personal servants who became members of a lower—in truth menial—branch of the order. The emphasis was always on ease, on luxury, on elegance and even on sophistication, especially that typically European sophistication which sees the consumption of high culture (in carefully measured doses) as a necessary adjunct of the chic. Of their spirituality or devotion there never seems to have been a word. Their allure was purely secular and material.
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