Inside Outside

by Andrew Riemer

  As the years passed, my mother came increasingly to think about Sopron, its cosy compactness, and that curious vision of a cultivated life passed on to her by the Ursuline ladies. My father, in his turn, remembered more and more details of his life in my grandmother’s stuffy, overfurnished flat. He recalled the family gatherings on cold winter days around the great tile stove. Quite insignificant memories of family life—like the provincial cousin who arrived one day large with child claiming a safe haven, only to withdraw, a day or two later, the cushion she had hidden under her dress—began to assume great importance for him. This was partly a result of the process of ageing. But it was more than that. For both of my parents, in their different ways, these memories represented, despite my mother’s recollections of the terror of 1919, a time of peace and stability and of an ordered society—the old world before the flood swept it away. By contrast, their golden years, that hectic time of metropolitan smartness and fast living—though sorely missed—was, they realised, the first warning of that inundation. In one of the last conversations I had with my father, a day or two before his sudden death, he acknowledged that all that nightclubbing, the high life of the late thirties, was nothing other than an attempt to keep fear down, or at least to drown it in some good wine.

  AFTER THE FALL

  Persecution, war and famine are classic themes in the literature of migration. My parents and I experienced all three, but we were fortunate: we survived. The hardships and brutalities we suffered—in common with millions of others from one end of Europe to the other—provided the impetus for our leaving the old world to seek safety in the new. Yet in our case at least, these experiences played a smaller part in the evolution of our ambivalent relationship with our new home than memories of the past or fantasies about the future. It would serve little purpose to recount the tale of our survival, or to tell how we were reunited in a devastated Budapest in the spring of 1945. Though that time left scars on each of us, they soon disappeared from our conscious minds, leaving behind merely traces of fear and anxiety. To this day I feel uneasy when I hear a distant siren in the still of the night or see a searchlight in a festive sky. I do not, however, recall ever having been tortured in my dreams by recognisable icons of persecution and brutality. In all probability, the effect of those years on people like me is deeply ingrained within our personalities; but they are of much less significance to the web of social and cultural interactions I am uncovering in these pages.

  In Australia my parents were always reluctant to speak about the worst of their wartime experiences. This may have been due to a natural reticence on their part, or perhaps it was because, compared with the atrocities so many people had suffered, we had got off relatively lightly. I know that they found distasteful—as I still find distasteful—the way some people exploited the events of that time for purposes which were not far removed from emotional blackmail. Making those more fortunate than you uncomfortably aware of their advantages may become a powerful means of imposing your will on them, even of exercising power over them. Such a desire for domination may take the shape of a licensed and at times outrageous eccentricity, as Patrick White showed with his extraordinary recreation of the archetypal survivor, Lotte Lippmann, in The Eye of the Storm. It may also manifest itself through a constant insistence that, because of such apocalyptic experiences, the survivor’s sensibility and sensitivity are somehow sharper, more perceptive, and therefore worthy of special attention and respect. In the mid-sixties, a middle-aged Viennese lady effectively disrupted a course on twentieth-century literature I was teaching by leaping to her feet at every opportunity to roll back her sleeve and display the number tattooed on her arm. ‘What do you know about The Waste Land?’ she would screech at a roomful of embarrassed young people. ‘You know nothink until you know zis!’

  For us, and I suspect that this holds true for most other migrants, the months (for some people years) we spent in 1946 in a state of anticipation, waiting to begin our journey to Australia, a land that would ensure safety and happiness, provided by far the most important influences in our efforts to understand and to come to terms with our new home. In my own case, that period, extending from the last months of 1945 until the late November of 1946, determined much more of my life than I could have realised at the time. It provided our last experiences of the old world, even though that world had been almost obliterated or altered beyond recognition. It formed the perspective from which we viewed both the past and, after our arrival in Sydney, what the future might be. That time was a node, an intersection, a crossing of the ways which influenced different people in different ways. For me, at the impressionable age often its effect was to be like those drugs that are designed to dissolve slowly in order to suppress the symptoms of flu or hay fever over a lengthy period. It is only now, after having retraced my steps to the past, that I am able to see with any clarity how much of my personality, longings, desires, and how many of my prejudices and idées fixes stem from those strange months of hectic activity and aimless anticipation.

  The setting for those feverish months was not the villa of my earliest memories but a three-room flat in the centre of Budapest. We had moved there in 1942, or perhaps early in 1943, because the location of that house in the ‘country’, formerly the source of great pride for my parents, turned out to be one of the first districts in and around Budapest to attract the attention of Allied bombers. It was not far from a small airfield which, as Hungary came to be more and more involved in a war that until then had been relatively far away and therefore unmenacing, provided a base for the Stukas, Heinkels and Messerschmitts of the Luftwaffe. Consequently, we were obliged to spend more and more time in our neighbours’ cellar—our ‘ultra-modern’ villa had no such amenity—listening for an unmistakable whine indicating that a bomb was about to hit the ground. After several weeks of ever-increasing air-raids my parents decided to seek a safer place to live.

  It took time, of course, to find something suitable. Meanwhile we were obliged to accept subterranean hospitality from our neighbours, who had been good friends and participants in my parents’ nightclubbing in happier times. Now, however, unspoken but very real tensions began to appear. My parents came to experience a disturbing and paradoxical state of mind that was to come to a climax in the last months of 1944, when Budapest was subjected to almost incessant carpet-bombing. The terrors of civilians subjected to such airraids requires no comment; the psychological condition of those victims who see these instruments of destruction as their means of liberation should provide, I think, vitally interesting data for the annals of psychopathology. Such was not the case with our neighbours, Croatians (though the wife, who was born in Trieste, claimed to be Italian) and fervent supporters of the Axis powers—though after the war they insisted, of course, that they had never agreed with the racial policies of those régimes.

  At length a flat was found in a newly constructed block—probably the last to be built in Budapest for many years—in a quiet residential street near a large park, well away from any military installation, or so my parents imagined. They turned out to have been as mistaken in this belief as in so much else; they had not reckoned with the innocent-looking church on the edge of the park at the top of the street, the crypt of which had been turned into a massive arsenal. That part of the city sustained some of the most concentrated bombing-raids of the last months of the war, when waves of American bombers literally blacked out large areas of the sky above. Miraculously, though, the building itself escaped all but minor damage.

  The smell of damp cement, of drying plaster, and of green timber hastily painted or polished are my most haunting memories of the flurry of activity that accompanied our preparations to occupy the apartment. There was need for haste; every day’s delay meant more raids against the airfield, more nights spent in our neighbours’ cellar crouching on straw mattresses. But certain proprieties had to be observed before the flat was deemed ready for occupation. For one thing, new furniture had to be obtained, for th
e large art-deco pieces in fiercely patterned walnut which had been especially made for the villa would clearly not do. It was unthinkable for people like my parents to buy ready-made furniture in a shop. New pieces had to be ordered from trusted craftsmen, care had to be exercised over the choice of fabrics to match the texture of the walls, which were not painted but sprayed with a gun to produce a stippled effect—the ultimate in chic. All this took considerable time. We were waiting for furniture that would last a lifetime. Meanwhile the bombing raids against the airfield increased in ferocity. My parents did not ask themselves, it seems to me, how long a lifetime might be.

  Finally everything was ready. We moved in. Preparations were made for a housewarming party held behind blackout screens and accompanied by the distant thudding of an airraid, perhaps on that hapless airfield. The record player and the green-eyed radio, which had come with us, blared out whatever tunes were the hits of the day. Putting the radio in the living room represented a considerable risk. It should have had a device fitted to it to make it incapable of receiving the world services of the BBC. It lived for most of the time in a broom cupboard under piles of blankets. My parents would shut themselves in that cupboard to listen to ‘real’ news, even though they risked terrible penalties if they were caught. The extension cord trailing from the cupboard to a power point in the entrance hall of the flat was a dead giveaway; but at least the piles of blankets muffled the sound of the radio from the ears of the ever-vigilant caretaker.

  He was a revered figure of tyrannical power and authority. He supervised not merely the orderly conduct of the building—making sure that rubbish was disposed of in the required manner, that children did not make too much noise in the stairwell, that the glass panels in the front door of each apartment were cleaned properly—but also the political inclinations of his tenants. Like all such functionaries he was believed to be a police-informer—which he no doubt was. He was not, however, entirely incorruptible. A sufficiently large ‘tip’ ensured that he allowed the noise level of my parents’ housewarming party to exceed what may be termed, I suppose, the level for which no charge was levied. But he could not be trusted, no matter how large the bribe, with the secret of the undoctored radio. On the night of the party it was not produced until all the guests had arrived, and a cloth to be thrown over it was ready to meet the eventuality of an unexpected caller.

  I searched for that block of flats on Christmas Eve in 1990. I knew the name of the street but I had forgotten or was confused about the number. As I walked down that drab thoroughfare lined by blackened, crumbling buildings on each side, stucco peeling from their pompous neo-baroque facades to reveal layers of crudely made bricks, nothing spoke to me of familiarity, nothing gave me the sense that I had been there before, or that this was somehow a part of my life. I could have been strolling through a giant postmodernist stage set. Gradually and disturbingly, though, I became aware of a trickle of recognition. The past was returning. The clatter of a distant tram; a grandiose, now disintegrating mythological personage, arms crossed above his head to support the balcony over the gateway of a building; the shallow steps leading to a group of shops in a half-basement; the vista of the grimy street itself; and above all, something in the air, in the atmosphere (a sort of genius of the place) all gave this particular street a unique and individual presence, despite the fact that this street scene was mirrored by many other streets of the city, indeed by countless streets the world over—without, it is true, the quantity of dirt and pollution I found around me.

  Suddenly, I saw the building. There was no need to look at the street-number, 31B, to discover whether that stirred any memories. Nor was there any need to search the facade to find our balcony or the window of my room. It gave me a momentary shock to realise that the glass in that window was unmarked. Memory prompted me to expect to see the neat round hole, surrounded by a symmetrical web of craze-lines, the result of a shot fired one night by a revelling Russian soldier. I had forgotten the incident, just as I had forgotten how my horrified parents extracted the bullet from the wall beside my bed, and made me sleep thereafter in the unused maid’s room that gave onto a gloomy light-well. It was an odd, unsettling moment. The past and present were beginning to merge. Their images were in the process of being superimposed to form a satisfying whole, in the way that several coloured plates are printed over a sheet of paper to produce a glowing, richly-hued image.

  That moment of recovery and reintegration, when I was coming into contact with a past that had been largely forgotten, or had lain dormant in my memory, was destroyed as I began to look at the building itself. In place of that shipshape construction smelling of newly-laid cement, kept in order by a feared caretaker, there stood a mean, decaying pile, its blackened walls streaked with evil-looking vertical stripes the colour of rust, or perhaps of dried blood. Its balconies, especially our balcony, were sagging perilously, their iron balustrades twisted and, here and there, displaying dangerous gaps. The glass panels in the wings of the entrance door were opaque with dirt. Through the gap I could see—and smell—a Dalek-like garbage container which should have been emptied, judging by the stink, weeks ago. A dog-eared piece of paper fastened to the wall beside the entrance gave the list of tenants and adumbrated the rules governing the conduct of the building. It was signed with the name of the ‘Leader of the Tenants’ Co-operative’. I stood in front of the doorway. My son took a photograph. When the film was developed I saw myself grimacing at the camera.

  Later that day, back at the hotel, surrounded by acres of plywood and plastic, I tried to come to terms with the sense of disappointment and anticlimax this encounter had produced, a feeling not unlike the flatness that overcame my parents and me, all those years before, when the Marine Phoenix sailed past the row of streetlights near South Head. I reminded myself that forty-four years had passed since I last stood in that doorway, that those years were bound to have taken their toll on even the most lovingly cherished of buildings, let alone one that had seen war, revolution, and neglect bred out of apathy and indigence. And besides, I also had to remind myself, those forty-four years had not left me entirely untouched.

  Such calming thoughts—telling you to be grown-up and sensible, and not to allow your emotions to run away with you—were followed by the recognition of another, perhaps even more disturbing possibility. Could it be that the building, indeed the whole city, had always been like this? After all, I had spent almost half a century amidst Australian standards of hygiene, in a world where even the dunny-men of Epping displayed a certain fastidiousness as they ran along a moonlit driveway. Perhaps this world, the memory of which had been preserved for me by a lovingly nurtured mythology, had always been as grimy, decrepit, ill-organised and foul-smelling as that building, that street, indeed as all of Budapest in those dank, pollution-choked days before Christmas during which I had tried to recapture the past. Was the golden world lamented in countless espresso-bars in Sydney and London, and no doubt in Melbourne, Toronto and Buenos Aires, in reality no more than a shabby aggregation of ill-kept buildings? Had Budapest always been essentially of the Third World? Had those of us who had retained a glowing memory of this world been perpetuating a lie for so many years? I could not find then, as I cannot find now, an answer to these riddles. Perhaps no-one can.

  That block of flats, where I spent only a few months of my life, provided the setting from which I observed, with the growing perceptiveness of a ten-year-old old before his time, the febrile world of postwar Budapest, a world which was to persist until the time of our departure for Australia, and indeed for some months beyond that. The memory of that time, which has faded in one sense but has gained in intensity in another, was to colour our attitudes to life in Australia for many years. Many of the problems and perplexities we experienced during our first years in this country grew out of the atmosphere of those hectic months in Budapest, as much as out of the real or imagined hostility and strangeness of our new environment.

  We lived in that flat in
Budapest until the end of 1944. We returned to it after the city had been liberated, regaining, from families that had camped there during the height of the siege, occupation of at first one, then two and at length every room. It was there that my mother nursed my seriously wounded father, with whom we had been reunited early in 1945 in circumstances so extraordinary that recounting them would offend against credibility. She saved his life, but she could not have accomplished that feat without the kindness of one of the tenants in the building, a recently widowed woman who had turned her flat into a brothel for officers of the occupying forces. This supplied her with food and fuel, which she generously shared with us, and also put her in touch with a source of otherwise unobtainable drugs that were needed to prevent my father’s infected wounds from festering. It was in that flat, in a remarkably short time (after, incidentally, the widow had closed the doors of her brothel and returned to her former respectability), that the old patterns of life reasserted themselves, though in a significantly feverish and hectic manner.

  The flavour of that time is best described as an uneasy mixture of frantic activity and aimlessness. Though the city had not been as seriously damaged as Dresden or even Vienna, when the Germans and their Hungarian henchmen were finally defeated in the early spring of 1945, much of it lay in ruins. Life contracted into small spaces: people huddling around a feeble brazier (if they were lucky), or merely huddling together. The long nights were illuminated by a shoelace or a piece of string burning in a jar lid filled with rancid oil. There was little food, mostly tins of bully beef of dubious quality and even more uncertain state of preservation. You could, at first, obtain meat of sorts from the bloated carcasses of horses which lay scattered all over the city, but my mother could not bring herself to join the queues of people waiting with hastily sharpened knives to take their cut.