Inside Outside

by Andrew Riemer

  A growing problem in universities, for instance, is the reluctance of certain Mediterranean people to allow their daughters to attend classes unchaperoned. Their solution to this problem—since most realise that institutions would not tolerate the presence of large numbers of chaperones in already overcrowded lecture rooms—is to insist that their daughters must always remain in the company of young women of their own nationality, or in many cases members of their family and immediate social circle. Their fears about their daughters’ virtue are probably ill-founded. Nevertheless one would not wish to encourage them, despite the protestations of ideology, to abandon entirely social standards which have sustained their way of life for centuries. Yet to continue the practice inevitably isolates these young women from the world in which, for better or worse, they must live. The dilemma has no easy solutions; no amount of bureaucratic or ideological management or interference will make it any easier for these people to achieve a balance between their two worlds.

  It is essential, nevertheless, that we should not encourage people to live in ghettoes that threaten to shut them out of those structures of society where they might flourish and prosper in a material as well as a cultural sense. Australian Catholicism has learnt the painful lesson that you must not enclose yourself behind walls of doctrine and tribal loyalties. Yet several other groups seem to be intent on committing the same errors—one might even include among these the more extreme separatist elements of the gay culture or the feminist movement. I would not want to advocate a return to those days of the late forties and the fifties when a naive notion of the possibilities of assimilation, which was merely an aspect of the larger demand for social conformity, drove people like me to attempt to jettison vital parts of our heritage. We have to be given the liberty to realise that we must, for better or worse, dwell between two worlds; and we must be allowed to work out our cultural salvation in terms of our individual, often confused, personalities, predicaments, fears and aspirations. Above all, we must realise that such a process may well take a long time, perhaps the whole of a life, to achieve.

  As I am writing these words in the late autumn of 1991, I fancy that it is only very recently that I have come to anything like a clear understanding of these puzzles and predicaments. The reason for that is, of course, that after almost half a century of evasion, reluctance and perhaps even cowardice, I finally succeeded in laying to rest some noisy ghosts when I went back, briefly and provisionally, to visit the city where I was born.

  My return was a reverse-image of the way I left Budapest in 1946. On a gloomy November afternoon in that year, my parents and I boarded a decrepit train, pompously entitled the Orient Express, in a soot-blackened and bomb-blasted railway station. We sat apprehensively on the worn velour seats of our compartment. The panelling above our heads still bore signs of a former world in the shape of several faded photographs, behind almost opaque panes of glass—images of the marvels of prewar Europe. As the train groaned through a desolate countryside, our anxiety increased to near-intolerable levels when we realised that we were approaching the border. Would our exit permits be honoured by the Russians? Would we be searched? Would they find the last of our gold coins in the hollowed-out heels of my mother’s winter boots? After an interminable delay, the grim-faced border guards left the train. With a clang and a grating of metal we lurched forward, towards Vienna and freedom. Several hours later we were travelling in an open horse-drawn carriage down a broad street lined with the empty shells of apartment blocks and grandiose imperial palaces to our hotel in the Graben, where a small pane of glass set in the boarded-up window of our room afforded a glimpse of that once elegant thoroughfare.

  A few days before Christmas in 1990, I set out from another—perhaps the same—small hotel in that street, now a pedestrian mall glittering with affluent brilliance. My elder son sat beside me in a purring Mercedes taxi as we were driven to the station along that avenue down which I had been driven, in the opposite direction, almost half a century before in a state of over-excitement because we were embarking on the great adventure that was to carry us to the other end of the world. At the well-kept, efficient station, my son and I boarded a sleek modern train, also called the Orient Express, though not that essay in nostalgic kitsch which carries the super-rich between Paris and Venice. Whereas the train my parents and I travelled on in 1946 was half-empty, the Orient Express of 1990 was filled to the brim with a noisy and excited crowd. We found our reserved seats already occupied. A few stern words in English swiftly displaced the usurpers. Meanwhile more and more people piled into the carriage. Soon the corridors were jam-packed with passengers perching on suitcases and large cardboard boxes fastened with sturdy rope.

  Eventually the train moved off, half an hour late, to the relief of the generally animated and in some instances inebriated travellers. A neat, tidy Austria slid past in the gathering dusk. Darkness had fallen by the time we reached the border. Out of the window of our compartment I could see a corner of a squat utilitarian building. Through the glass panel of a doorway you could glimpse a customs official busily at work at a desk under a naked, low-wattage light bulb. Outside, a railway worker in a shabby coat was stamping his feet in a puddle of melting snow.

  The crowd fell silent. Something was in the air. It soon became obvious that the border-guards were making their way down the carriage. People began to betray the unmistakably apprehensive look of those who had lived under (or had escaped from) oppressive regimes. I noticed that they were impressed and not a little envious as we got out our Australian passports. We were the fortunate ones; we belonged to that privileged world towards which my parents and I had set out all those years ago, tense with anxiety as we sat in our compartment listening for the approach of the guards. And I, protected though I was by my magic passport, shared the tension and anxiety of my fellow-passengers, while my son sat beside me absorbed in the book he had been reading ever since darkness fell. For him this was just another frontier.

  The past should not, perhaps, be revisited. Those days I spent in Budapest were among the most painful experiences of my life, for they forced me not only to remember things long forgotten, but also to recall those other days—in Hurlstone Park, in Epping and in other parts of Sydney—that were the occasion of much humiliation and shame. Walking around the decaying streets of a once graceful city, I continually thought of the dead—of all those people, my father’s large family, the much smaller circle of my mother’s relations, who had disappeared, vanished from the face of the earth. I recalled the days my father spent wandering those streets in 1945, when he had barely recovered from his injuries, because someone had told him that he thought he had seen my uncle, ghastly and emaciated, groping his way along one of those thoroughfares. I also remembered the terrible day when my father accepted the inevitable, that it was useless spending another day searching for a brother he would never find. I also remembered in those streets, in gloomy cafés and restaurants, and in the faded splendour of my hotel room where the television churned out alarming news about the war which was to break out in three weeks’ time, that it was here that the seeds were sown of those black years of my parents’ life in Australia, when they could not bring themselves to speak to each other, when they used me as an intermediary, and also as an emotional buffer and punching-bag.

  My memories jumped years and continents. Catching sight of a group of intense and overpainted elderly ladies in a cafe one afternoon reminded me of a similar group in another café—in Double Bay, many years ago—who were discussing with loud exclamations of anguish and dismay the brutality of the world (this world) which they had to flee. I remembered my own sense of guilt that day, as I began to persuade myself that perhaps the vulgarity of those people was excusable in the light of their sufferings, until I realised that they were recounting the plot of The Sound of Music. I wondered what these ladies of 1990 were talking about. A little later that day, I recognised the baths where my mother and I had to cart bagloads of money, and still did n
ot have enough for the price of admission. That made me recall the embarrassment of a picnic at Palm Beach on which some well-meaning acquaintances had taken us in the early years of our life in Epping. My mother was an undisguised picture of misery as she sat under the tarpaulin stretched between two cars, swatting at mosquitoes with a rolled-up newspaper in the manner we were taught to disperse the red-backs that infested our dunny. I found the pond where I used to go skating, during trips to the city made precisely for that purpose, under the eagle-eyed supervision of one or another German nanny, and the nearby restaurant where I used to be taken for a special treat. I could not, however, find many places I tried to revisit, having only confused and muddled memories of things that had been suppressed for many years.

  In the life of the city I began to discern certain alarming signs that I was to see again a couple of months later in the courtyard of the Hungarian Embassy in Canberra. Magyar nationalism was visible everywhere, mixed with a totally incompatible and entirely irrelevant nostalgia for a Habsburg past. Antisemitic slogans, in a world where, surely, there were few Jews left, were daubed on walls and embankments. A statue of the Empress Elisabeth, after whom generations of Austro-Hungarian girls (including my mother) had been named, was in the process of being elaborately restored. The monument to St Stephen, king and missionary who gave my father his name, displayed once more the royal emblems of the former kingdom. It was as though the previous forty-odd years had never occurred. The wave of nostalgia and sentimentality, in a world of grim economic hardship where a couple of Australian dollars would take you in a taxi from one end of town to the other, seemed at times a distraction, at others almost an indecency. And as I walked among these people I realised that they assumed, as the people on the train assumed and as my companions at the Embassy in Canberra were to assume, that I was a foreigner. They would come up to me in the streets with offers to exchange money delivered in various languages, but never in Hungarian. In restaurants waiters would hand me, before a word had been spoken, the English or German versions of the menu. For them I obviously represented that golden world beyond the Austrian border, where elegant people strolled along well-swept boulevards, where sleek limousines deposited glamorous patrons at the vast portals of a huge opera house, where everyone could afford to buy genuine Levis and wear Reeboks to their hearts’ content.

  I had nothing in common with this world, I came to realise as the initial impact of return began to wear off. This was not my life; it had almost no bearing on what I was or felt myself to be. I began to be acutely aware of the advantages of my real life. Sydney, with its sprawling suburbs, its harsh, all-revealing light, seemed a blessed place compared with the murk and grime of this depressing city. I glanced up at a first-floor window; someone was leaning out, staring at the tramlines on the street below. I thought of Sydney—how if I lean out of our bedroom window I can just catch sight of a square of blue water with a headland above it that reveals at night those twinkling streetlights my parents and I saw as the Marine Phoenix sailed towards the Heads. In this, my home town, I did not dare to board the clattering trams for fear they would bear me off to places unknown, from which I would have trouble getting back to my hotel. The language that people spoke all around me, though comprehensible, seemed strange and foreign. Their ways were alien and a trifle menacing. I did not know how to deal with the many people importuning me to buy this or that. I got confused about the elaborate rituals governing cafe-life: who served, whom to pay, how to tip, and when to leave. I realised that I desperately wanted to go home.

  In the train to Vienna, after it had pulled out of the seething railway station, where you felt you had to hang on to your wallet for dear life, I fell into conversation with an elderly couple, vaguely reminiscent of the patrons of Sydney’s espresso-bars of former years. They had just been to Budapest for the umpteenth time to visit relatives for Christmas. They’d had an absolutely wonderful time. I mentioned something about the grime and the filth, the air of depression that hung over the city. They hadn’t noticed. Mind you they didn’t go out much, there were so many relatives to see. And the food! They wouldn’t want to eat another thing until they got back to Toronto for New Year. People back home sure knew how to be hospitable, especially now that life was so much easier. I smiled and changed the subject; quite obviously, we had been visiting different worlds.

  For a few days after I got back to Sydney I looked around me with changed eyes. This was home; this was where I belonged. The old life was no longer meaningful to me except as a source of anecdotes, to which middle-aged people are frequently and at times tediously addicted. But those few days in Budapest had, it seems to me, loosened a spring, or perhaps lifted a lid, allowing long-suppressed memories to escape. They were, in a way, my own madeleine, dipped in this instance into a polluted and noisome river. And as I slipped back into the familiar routines of Sydney life, taking up the threads that I had dropped a couple of months before when I flew out of Mascot in a screaming Jumbo, convinced, as I usually am, that we would crash at any moment, I found that in an intangible and not entirely clear way the present and the past, those seemingly absolutely contradictory experiences and ways of life, were parts of a larger whole. I cannot explain what that whole might be—it is probably indistinguishable from the process of living. But I came to learn something that ‘normal’ people, those whose lives have not suffered the sharp cleavage mine seems to have suffered, have always known: that the past may yield sense only in terms of the present, and that the present is inevitably conditioned by the past. To remove either of these—as I tried to suppress my past during the years of my adolescence, and as the more extreme theories of multiculturalism urge people to ignore the realities of the present—is capable of leading to a serious and damaging spiritual imbalance.

  I cannot pretend that that realisation has made me any happier, any more content with my lot, or given me a clearer idea of what I am. As the days and weeks wore on after my return, I felt again the old doubts and uncertainties returning. Had it all been a mistake? What would life have been like if my parents hadn’t bundled me out of Budapest on that foggy November day in 1946, with a scarf wrapped around my head because I was still sick with mumps? Should I have waited for that position at University College London, after all? My moods changed as rapidly as they always have. Among my family and friends, people who have given shape, meaning and purpose to my life—which seems otherwise something of a bad joke—I feel contentment and peace. At other times, as I watch the increasingly mindless rituals of many aspects of academic life, or as I listen to the strident, often ill-informed and alarmingly unintelligent punditry that pours out of the radio and television hour after hour, I think that back there, in that possibly imaginary Europe of my fantasies, things might be better ordained—that in an older and more mellow society life might be less fraught with the irritations and vulgarities of life in the raw. Then I hear a snippet of news about the ugly racial tensions that are once more surfacing in those nations which have recently won their independence from Soviet control, and I begin to wonder whether that unhappy continent isn’t about to start again down the road towards the hatred and enmity that tore it apart half a century ago, provoking people like my parents, and millions of others, to flee to the farthest corner of the globe.

  And, as always, I experience the old fears and alarms. A screaming siren in a distant street, heard on a still summer night, leaves me edgy and apprehensive. I begin to wonder, with that clarity of vision which is ours in the dead of night, whether, as the economic difficulties of contemporary Australia bring out of the cupboard ugly hatreds that had been hidden for a long time, I will also have to experience what members of my family, and millions like them, had to endure. I think back on the world into which I was born—my great-grandfather the supervisor of milk in his proud uniform, the elderly ladies chattering in my grandmother’s living-room as the great tile stove sent out waves of comforting heat on a dark winter afternoon, my mother peering with short-sighte
d eyes through a pair of gilt opera-glasses. They too felt safe. They too imagined that being citizens of a country where their families had lived for generations would protect them against atrocities like those their ancestors had to suffer. They were, after all, respectable Hungarians and Austrians of the twentieth century, paying their taxes, observing the customs of a country in which they felt entirely at home. That reassuring stove, which the maid dutifully stoked up each morning and evening, was as close as all of them thought they would get to a fiery furnace.

  Will I also find, I ask myself as the siren recedes into the night, and as I think of those slogans I see daubed on walls and fences (‘Australia for Australians’, ‘Stop Migration Now’) all over the city, that my father’s naturalisation certificate, on which I am included almost as an afterthought, will prove to be as worthless as the documents which promised my parents, and their parents before them, safety and security in their homeland? Will my sons have to appeal one day to the fact that their mother was a fourth-generation Australian in order to obtain permission to remain here? These are probably the fantasies of an overwrought imagination; but on those still nights they are, nevertheless, menacing realities which I cannot entirely banish.

  I shall probably experience for the rest of my life these doubts and alarms. This is, in all likelihood, the yoke of exile. There is nothing, in the final count, to be done about it except to understand the predicament and to come to terms with it to the best of one’s ability. There are no solutions, no reassuring slogans to assuage doubts, alarms and perplexities. People like me will probably search and seek, wonder and question, and suffer from irrational fears to the ends of our lives. We must acknowledge that we belong nowhere, that our sense of dislocation is more radical and more disturbing than the characteristic alienation most people experience from time to time in their familiar world. We have no place we may call home truly and unconditionally, for we are always aware that we were born elsewhere, and that our lives are governed by the consequences of a choice we exercised, or of a decision that had been exercised on our behalf.