Inside Outside

by Andrew Riemer

  Recovery was, nevertheless, swift. This probably came about through that resilience and inventiveness of the Hungarian character which has spawned several wry jokes, like the one about a Hungarian entering a revolving door behind you and coming out in front. The city picked itself up and dusted its clothes with aplomb. Though there were bomb-sites and craters everywhere, though the supply of gas, electricity and water was erratic and unreliable, though the sweet smell of decomposing flesh hung over the piles of rubble and the mass graves dug in the municipal gardens (strenuously denied by the authorities, but known to everyone), Budapest enjoyed—if that is the word—the benefits of a free-enterprise society with verve and gusto. The communist takeover a few months after we left put a clamp on this activity for many years to come—until indeed a few months before my return at Christmastime in 1990, when once more the city was witnessing scenes not unlike those that characterised the heady days of 1945 and 1946. Then, everyone had something to sell. Everyone found some way of participating in the complicated economic networks that had sprung up everywhere like toadstools.

  The result was chaos; but it was chaos of a wonderfully exhilarating sort. The whole city was on the move. People hurried about with whatever commodity they possessed to strike deals with owners of other commodities. They rushed along the crowded pavements, neatly sidestepping piles of rubble or gaping holes, or else were carried about in an astonishing variety of horse-drawn vehicles—clapped-out fiacres, hansom-cabs, aristocratic landaus, barouches and cabriolets, their pompous crests still faintly visible on their faded and crazed coachwork. No-one was empty-handed. You carried whatever you intended to sell, or whatever you had just purchased—bolts of cloth, ancient eiderdowns, the horn of an old-fashioned gramophone, pots of glue and paint, shoe-trees, stethoscopes. Anything and everything had value. Someone somewhere would find a use for any object, no matter how bizarre or broken-down. People were thirsty for success, for the accumulation of wealth out of whatever they had rescued from the ruin of their lives, and they lusted after the outward and visible emblems of wealth. In the crowded cafés everyone boasted of his good fortune while keeping a weather-eye open for the main chance.

  All this was, it goes without saying, a perilous and unhealthy world which would have collapsed of its own energy, greed and lawlessness even if the grim-faced comrades hadn’t quashed it with a ham-fisted blow. Money had become worthless. One stifling day my mother and I set out for the nearby baths. One bag contained our swimming gear, the other was stuffed full of banknotes. We stood in the queue at the ticket booth amid the throng of people seeking relief from the heatwave. We had almost reached the top of the line when an official emerged and rubbed out the admission price chalked on a blackboard beside the booth, substituting a figure a few millions greater. We didn’t have enough. When we got back to the flat, we dragged a suitcase from the broom cupboard which had formerly housed the clandestine radio, and stuffed several million more into our moneybag. But it was to no avail—by the time we reached the ticket booth once more, the price had gone up again.

  You only used money for things like tram tickets. After a while the conductors refused to collect fares, overburdened as they were by satchels containing sums of money which could only be represented by figures, not by words. Currency could not buy real goods or services. The economy subsisted on barter (which was tolerated) or on American dollars or, better still, gold coins, chiefly louis d’or and the occasional English sovereign (both dollars and coins wholly illegal, with frightful penalties for those caught in possession). Where formerly we lived in dread of inspectors seeking to sniff out the least trace of political unreliability or a radio capable of receiving the BBC, our hearts now missed a beat every time the doorbell rang, wondering whether it was the inspector (often the same person as before) in search of illicit currency.

  People expended extraordinary ingenuity in contriving safe hiding places for their hoards. Rumour spread its net around neighbourhoods and communities. Never in the spines of books! They arrested someone at Number 47 last week. My parents thought they had been very clever when they worked out how to loosen the lead seal on the electricity meter, thus enabling the cover to be lifted and the cavity behind it to be stuffed with banknotes and coins. Then we heard that Mrs Somebody had been dragged off by the police when they discovered a roll of American dollars in her meter. We tried the lining of topcoats; we tried the back of the green-eyed radio; my mother had the wedge heels of her summer sandals hollowed. Our precious dollars and gold coins led a restless life, constantly moving about the flat, our clothes and our possessions in search of safety. We were always on the lookout, always alert and watchful, apprehensive, forever trying to anticipate whatever ‘their’ next move might be.

  It was a neurotic world, bordering on hysteria. A curious excitement filled the air, a recklessness with a touch of hectic gallantry. People were living their lives to the full, as if there were no future. For some there was none. For some there was only ruin—financial, political and physical. For others, like my parents, the future was the peaceful dullness of places like Epping. But even for them that peace soon turned to ashes through economic hardship and the boredom of living in a world entirely lacking the excitement of their last months in the old world.

  Like most other children living through those strange days, I fell under the spell of that carnival of excess, anxiety and excitement. Like my parents, like everyone else, I was in a state of anticipation, of marking time, and while I was marking time, I engaged with the pleasures of life—at least as far as they were available to me. For the first time in my life, apart from a couple of weeks spent at a nursery school some years earlier, I was to attend school. My education was, however, shortlived. On my second day, a barber came into the classroom carrying the sinister appurtenances of his trade: razor, brush, bowl and strop. We—thirty or forty squirming boys—had to submit to the indignity of having our heads shaved as a precaution against lice. My parents were outraged. They took me out of school—we would after all be leaving for Australia soon. Officialdom ignored my truancy. My schooling was not to begin until I was past my eleventh birthday, when I was received into the perplexed bosom of Canterbury Public School in New South Wales.

  The months of aimless activity that followed my two days of schooling provide my most significant memories of that former life, a life that abruptly ceased to exist as soon as we caught sight of those streetlights near South Head the following year. Much of that time I spent in the company of my maternal grandmother, who had grown even more sour and mean-spirited in that hectic and self-indulgent world. No doubt we did all sorts of things which I have now forgotten; some of my most powerful and evocative memories of that time are concerned with our frequent visits to a funfair. That funfair, modelled (like so much else in Budapest) on the famous, and much larger, Prater in Vienna, stood—and still stands—in the public gardens which began at the top of our street. My grandmother and I would stroll in a leisurely fashion towards its gateway, and enter a magical world.

  It boasted the usual attractions of such places, but my grandmother and I spent an eternity—or so memory tells me—visiting two of them in particular. One was called Venice, a kitschy version of the Tunnel of Love. To the accompaniment of a cracked, hissing recording of the Barcarolle from The Tales of Hoffmann, your gondola glided down the dark waters of the Grand Canal, past imposing palaces, past the magical facade of a cardboard Ca’ d’Oro, under a rickety Rialto, until, as a pièce de résistance just before the conclusion of this dreamlike tour on the other side of a canvas flap, the Piazetta, with the noble domes of San Marco and an admittedly foreshortened Campanile, floated into view. The enchantment of gliding down those black waters, surrounded by the magic of the Venetian night, was almost unbearable. My grandmother always sat impassively beside me, wearing her heavy topcoat, into the lining of which our golden wealth had been carefully sewn.

  The other attraction, the Midget Theatre, could have stepped straight out of o
ne of Fellini’s improbable fantasies. We sat on folding chairs under a striped tent in front of a makeshift stage on which a company of midgets performed a repertoire of sketches and short plays. I can remember nothing about their plots or subject matter, or any of the dialogue which, I suspect, may have been quite obscene. All that remains with me is a handful of images. I remember one of the players in an elaborate wedding gown, so made as to exaggerate the shortness of her stature and the disproportionate size of her head. She clutched a wilted bouquet almost as large as herself. She was weeping disconsolately while recounting an endless tale of woe—no doubt about the lover who had jilted her at the altar. Another image has even less context: two personages in morning dress—grey toppers and silver-knobbed canes—probably drunk, arguing about something. I remember several musical numbers including two policemen singing ‘The Gendarmes’ Duet’. But best of all was the grand finale of many of these shows, a group of midgets in full habit marching onto the stage to the accompaniment of the angelus bell singing something vaguely religious, probably ‘The Nuns’ Chorus’.

  Those days spent at the funfair seem in retrospect emblematic of the folly and pathos of that strange time. Many of us lived in a world of illusions, a world where the shabby imitation—whether a cut-out Venice or those unfortunate stunted creatures aping the lives of ‘big’ people—was preferable and considered superior to the real and the substantial. Our sensibilities had, somehow, been thrown out of kilter. We turned our back on the world of everyday reality in favour of a carefully stage-managed dream in which the cheaply romantic rubbed shoulders with the grotesque. When, amidst the paspalum of Epping, I, like my parents, began to yearn for Europe, I did not dream of my father’s solidly bourgeois world, nor about the cosiness of my mother’s home town, nor even about my few memories of golden summers in our villa, but of the ecstasy and enchantment generated by paint, canvas and paste. The past had become indistinguishable from the wonders of another astonishing theatrical illusion, one for which Venice and the Midget Theatre were no more than a preparation. My memories of the romance of Europe, cherished and worshipped under the harsh Australian sunshine, amidst the anguish and discontents of adolescence in a strange land, came to focus on the most curious and memorable of my experiences of the last months of our life in the old world, something far excelling the many enchantments of the funfair.

  A NIGHT AT THE OPERA

  During that year in which I spent many of my daylight hours in Venice or at the Midget Theatre, when the smell of death still hung over the city, as bodies continued to be extracted from the rubble, and as the occasional blast of a buried bomb shook the few windowpanes that remained, the Budapest Opera House opened its doors. The building was a blaze of light in a darkened city. Whole districts had their uncertain supply of low-voltage electricity cut off to illuminate the marble foyers, gilt auditorium and spacious stage of an elaborately over-embellished theatre. The treacherous allure of Venice and of the Midget Theatre was enacted on a gigantic scale as the whole population, it seemed, flocked to marvel once more at painted vistas of grandeur and romance, and to fall under the spell of the arm-flailing passions of love, lust, revenge, hate, treachery, nobility and despair. The tragic fortunes of noble courtesans and jilted queens, of cruel tyrants and traduced princes, seemed more real, and were certainly charged with far deeper significance, than the reminders of the real-life apocalypse visible in the world outside the resplendent theatre.

  The Central European mania for opera—incomprehensible to the Anglo-Saxon sensibility—reached its apotheosis in that wanton squandering of scarce resources on a form of entertainment that many would regard as the most mindlessly self-indulgent and bombastic of the arts. It is difficult for those who were not brought up within this deeply ingrained habit or tradition to appreciate the profound social, cultural and perhaps even spiritual significance of opera for the people of Central Europe. For them opera is much more than, at best, a powerful form of musical theatre or, at worst, an inane farrago of tortured plots and turgid music. It is, on the contrary, a way of life, a symbol of aspirations tinged, at times, with near-religious import. It provides the basis for a social ritual in which music and performance are merely important parts of a much larger whole. Opera is one of the means—perhaps the crucial one—of such a society’s celebrating itself as a superior civilisation. For that reason, in Budapest, as in those cities where the opera houses escaped total destruction, performances began to be held while the city still bore fresh signs of war and carnage, when there were many shortages and privations, when there was considerable danger attached to the simple act of going to the opera and returning home after the performance.

  As you walked past mountains of rubble, you were confronted by all manner of perils. You had to be careful not to lose your footing, especially if you had forgotten to bring a torch. There was always the danger that a loose bit of masonry would come crashing down from a damaged building. Sinister shapes would sometimes leap out of the shadows. Local vagabonds, half-starved and often half-crazed, were not too difficult to discourage; not so drunk Russian soldiers, out for a bit of innocent fun. Nevertheless people flocked enthusiastically to the opera.

  Only a great deal of string-pulling and the distribution of substantial bribes permitted my parents not merely to obtain a subscription but to regain the box they had occupied on Wednesday nights until air-raids and the siege obliged the theatre to close. Throughout that year, as they were cutting one by one their ties with the old life, their attention turned very much to last things: we would all go to the opera for one last season. There was no doubt in their minds that their new home would offer a theatre and an ambience as splendid as this had been, but they were fond of the old place; they thought it well worth the bother of picking our way laboriously home after each performance. And, in any event, it would be nice for me to remember what our Opera House had been like. So, on almost every Wednesday night throughout that year, with only a brief remission during high summer, we went to the opera to witness tales of lust and passion. Those magical nights were my initiation into a world of fabulous wonder which dazzled my eyes more than it enchanted my ears. I entered a dream world which has never lost its allure for me.

  I must not give an impression of a phenomenally precocious child savouring the nuances of a complex and demanding art form. I was not entirely unfamiliar with opera, for there were recordings of operatic extracts among my parents’ collection of popular songs and dance music. Nevertheless, the enchantment of opera was only partly, perhaps not even predominantly, musical. A performance of Tristan and Isolde conducted by the great Klemperer left me unmoved and, by the end, bored beyond endurance. I would give anything now to hear that performance again. The allure of opera was for me visual and atmospheric; music was no more than an accompaniment to the romantic experience that engulfed me as the houselights dimmed and the first sounds emerged from the orchestra pit.

  Our box was in the lowest tier, just above the level of the stalls, a little too far to the side but still among the most desirable locations according to the strictly codified hierarchy that governed the construction of such theatres. Its four gilt-and-plush chairs were complemented by a high stool with a small back support and a raised footrest; it allowed a view of the stage over the heads of the other occupants. An anteroom contained a mirror, several coat-hooks (for the proud possession of a box relieved the necessity of having to mingle with the canaille at the cloakroom), and a chaise-longue, the function of which was not at all clear to me at the time. The anteroom could be separated from the box by a plush curtain, an offspring perhaps of the great braided curtain hanging over the stage.

  If you leaned on the padded balustrade at the front of the box, which was ample enough to allow opera glasses and ladies’ purses to rest on it without the danger of their tumbling over, the social world spread out in front of you could be surveyed with all the elaboration of an arcane ritual. Admittedly, what you saw in 1946 were row upon row of bemedalled R
ussian officers, stiffly signifying their respect for culture. Yet on those Wednesday nights my mother’s eyes, mouth and hands nevertheless performed a complicated dance of recognition, greeting, surprise, mild censure for some sartorial faux pas—in short that vocabulary of signs unique to the culture of Central European opera audiences, which were so ingrained in people like her that they would not yield even in the face of the harshest reality. Most of the people who had engaged in this strange ritual with her in earlier years were dead. But her eyes and hands continued to move in an instinctive, indeed involuntary manner.

  The rising of the curtain transported me into another world. Those were still the days of fussily realistic scenery—most of it predating the war—and visual tricks which, to my eyes, defied belief. Venusberg, with its twisted limestone pillars and massive outcrops, was transformed within an instant into a pleasant valley bathed in morning light. The great ramparts of the Wartburg were clearly visible in the distance; the shepherd-lad playing sweetly on his pipe was seated on a grassy knoll carpeted with flowers. The story of Tosca’s doomed love for the painter Cavaradossi reached its climax under the huge bulk of the Castel Sant’ Angelo; once again you could hear a shepherd greeting the dawn. The great dome of St Peter’s rose out of the mist, but a few stars still twinkled in the sky above to allow the painter to sing the song we all knew. There were terrors as well. Dr Miracle’s sinister shape, as he tempted the hapless Antonia to sing, and thus hasten her death, multiplied itself, scattering its reflection into every nook and cranny of the stage, from which he leered at the dying invalid. Mephistopheles hovered above the grieving Marguerite, mocking the chains that bound her to her dark prison. As the statue of the Commendatore strode into the vast hall where Don Giovanni supped alone, I experienced a shudder almost as violent as that which shook the manservant cowering near the footlights.