Break.up

by Joanna Walsh

  I wander into the park’s gated summerhouse, iron curlicued, with stained glass stained over with urine-coloured drips of graffiti, and I find it – blink and you’d miss it – that moment I can keep boredom ajar, pry it open with jaws of life, and rescue myself through its iron teeth.

  The moment of vision is nothing other than the look of resolute disclosedness [Blick der Entschlossenheit] in which the full situation of an action opens itself and keeps itself open. Heidegger, ibid

  4th May

  Next morning I’m waiting again, this time for the coach which will take me on to Budapest. My fellow travellers – a scowling fat girl in an off-the-shoulder sequinned T-shirt and gleaming leggings; two thin women eating cold McDonald’s from brown paper bags, a number of blocky, shaven-headed men smoking and drinking Coca-Cola – are hulks of solitude. We are all heaving around what’s inside us with no common language, no hope of an exchange. The coach is late and we are all bored and the waiting is not at all like waiting at the Larissa station, although I was waiting there too, and for longer, and with less certainty of arrival.

  The station cannot properly be what it is supposed to be for us as long as the moment of the train’s arrival is not there. The dragging of time as it were refuses the station the possibility of offering us anything. It forces it to leave us empty. The station refuses itself, because time refuses it something… How much time is capable of here! It has power over railway stations and can bring it about that stations bore us.

  Heidegger, ibid

  Then three Hungarians arrive, who look out of place. The two girls are round, but on the hips not the belly, and they are not dressed in anything tight, or black, or shiny. The boy is wearing hiking shorts, and the shoes of all three are lumpy brown pastries. Their drinks are unflavoured, unsweetened. One of them has a bag with the three-arrowed symbol for RECYCLE, and the word, NATURA. That’s it! They’re North-western Europeans. I haven’t seen anything like them for a while.

  The coach arrives and we drive over cobbles then concrete, through the rings of stained grey apartment blocks that circle Sofia’s perfecting centre. We cross the point at which the monumental pulls away from the everyday. The roads are broken up, something’s pushing through, the outer city invades the inner. We stick in traffic by a ragged street market: each stall selling one kind of veg, and not much of that, its shopkeepers balancing goods on hand scales, stalls set out on scarves, on bits of carpet, on the bare pavement, stalls selling odd objects someone gathered together with I don’t know how much hope of a sale. Old women leak in amongst the posters of business girls and casino girls – SEX! FUN! LUCK! MONEY! – trickles of black coming up through cracks in the pavement.

  Small puffs of clouds: the first I have seen since Paris.

  I take some of my sky photos but I’m getting sick of my point of view. Telegraph poles, new-builds, dereliction, train lines, tramlines: avoiding one cliché, I’m stuck in another, if it’s possible to be stuck in an aesthetic of change, of movement.

  The photos have become a task, and the task has given me something to do – like buying the notebook, which I never managed to track down – but it has also numbed me. Putting something down can do that. I could take more video clips, like the ones I took rattling over the cobbles, like the one I took from the Italian train or, in Athens, through the window of a taxi at night, streetlamp after streetlamp rising up to meet me, but I’ve forgotten where it’s all going… I check myself in case I’ve become too happy with my unhappiness, which has, after all, proved to me that I can still feel, breathe, think, that has proved to me that I am still here.

  Budapest is thirteen hours away. I doze, a defence against simultaneous Hollywood blockbusters and anglo-pop broadcast through two screens, one at the front of the bus and one halfway down, both soundtracked by the louder radio. I am the only English-speaker. Because I can’t hear anything distinctly, I watch for patterns. In the movies women appear only at moments of high emotion – to cry at the hero’s funeral, or marriage, or graduation – the rest of the time they go unnoticed. We appear to be either boring or hysterical: no wonder men despise us.

  How do people who don’t look like film stars have love affairs? It never happens in the movies. The film is trying to make its stars look boring as everyone else by dressing them in shades of brown, mussing up their hair. The stars used to be silver, platinum. Now they are sepia. Everyone on the coach wants to look like a movie star, but as they look at the awards ceremony, not on the screen – the men in black leatherette the women in rhinestones and lycra, the special flipped with the everyday – except for the Hungarians who are matte, absorbing instead of reflecting light. There’s so much of them, and everything about them is quality! Their fabrics are thick; their watches are chunky, their mobile phones and music devices are slim. They take possession of their seats, expanding, until they overflow the inadequate fold-out table with gourmet crisps, bottled water and glossy magazines. At a pitstop they get out for more. They are so prolific. They amaze the whole coach with their ability to order coffees and cakes and juice and sandwiches. Don’t they know that they could have waited and saved twenty, thirty Euros (goodness knows how many Lev)? Don’t they know they could have bought better, tastier bread from the bakers’ at the corner of any street in Sofia for less than half a Euro? But they order in at the pitstop bar and everything comes to them immediately, and ready-made. They expect no less. They expect no more.

  Back on the coach, we cross the border into Serbia where there are so many new cemeteries, so much dumped trash. The white and black of the rubbish sacks gleams in the sun with the same shine as the new gravestones, marble, granite, obsidian. From a distance it is difficult to tell one from the other. The screens blink, and the movies switch and I try to catch a new thread but there are too many words, too many stories. I can’t hear, can’t think. I fall into utter passivity.

  What do the bored do? They section out time, like Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, who, postwar, walked all the way to America, never once leaving his prison cell, multiplying the space of his enclosure by long division, writing his diary on a thousand sheets of toilet paper, each day a weightless perforated square. The bored divide and sub-divide until each moment becomes a grid within another, each pavement split into cobbles, but however much they break down time, they never cover any more ground. Boredom is freefall: even if you break into a run between any two fixed points, you never really get any further.

  This project is… a battle against the endless boredom; but it is also an expression of the last remnants of my urge toward status and activity.

  Albert Speer, Spandau: The Secret Diaries

  The enduring of the ‘during’ swallows up, as it were, the flowing sequence of nows and becomes a single stretched ‘now’ which itself does not flow, but stands.

  Heidegger, ibid

  If boredom fragments, it also builds, as anything fragmented gains borders, more of them, and longer. Whether you were bored by me or by your own capacity to be bored, whether boredom is visited on the bored by external power – of a state, or a person – whether it’s a failing of the boring, or a sin unaddressed, it insists on a border, an outside and an inside, a bored to be bored by, a you that is not part of me. To be bored is to lay claim to some personal territory, at least.

  Tiny unavowable interdictions to infinity.

  Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse

  At the Hungarian border the coach stops. An exercise of official power: we are asked to descend, and to wait for a long time, a long enough time to be broken down into many units of canned drinks, candy bars, cigarettes. The people I have travelled with are beginning to look familiar, friendly, almost family. The trashily dressed fat girl, too tired to scowl, turns and softens, tendrils of hair escaping from her scrape-back. The harsh, skinny women who smoked continuously at every stop, josh each other. A shaven-headed man with DIY tattoos grabs my bag from me, unasked, and carries it down the coach’s steps.

  Outside t
he customs point we wait again on the motorway’s verge. Dusty grass: a used condom. I am constantly on the verge of… something. We’re called into the checkpoint and lined up by the wall. How do the border-guards verify me? At the Bulgarian/Serb border they searched my bag. At the Serb/Hungarian border a guard takes my passport, looks deep into my eyes and says my christian name.

  9 Budapest/Timing

  4th May

  Travel happens either too quickly or too slowly to describe. Time passes and – travelling again by rail-replacing bus – I am in Budapest for the first time in years, perhaps to the day from the last weekend I was here. How do I know time has passed?

  Well, here and now, as opposed to then, there are doormen, and entry halls, and multiple locks, and buzzer-intercom systems, and notices promising security and dogs. City of Janus, double-headed Budapest looks both ways: Buda, to the west, and Pest, to the east. Leaning to the west, even the public toilets have door codes.

  Awareness of change is the condition on which our perception of time’s flow depends.

  William James, Principles of Psychology

  A friend of a friend has left the key to her apartment in a tourist shop with a bell and a double entry.

  ‘Are you here for a holiday?’ The owner asks. She doesn’t wait for an answer. She goes on. ‘I cannot understand people who photograph Budapest when they could go to Switzerland. The Alps are beautiful!’

  ‘Have you been?’

  ‘No, but I will go one day. I would take photographs there.’

  In a building next to the shop, through curlicued metal grilles, then a porch and an entrance hall, I climb a flight of wide marble steps that curls around the iron cage of a lift. Behind three backwards-turning locks the apartment – amazingly – overlooks the Danube, has white walls, a parquet floor, avant-garde mid-twentieth-century paintings, and avant-garde mid-twentieth-century furniture. Now it’s behind the times, but once it must have been ahead of them. Untouched by anything contemporary, it’s out of time, seems to never quite have been of it: something about it never happened.

  It’s late. It’s getting dark. I have no idea what time it is. I sit in my dazzling apartment, dazzled by Budapest, by the white walls, and the moon and the moon-globes strung along the city’s banks and bridges reflected upward in the river.

  5th May

  The next day, I walk the streets. Budapest is a relief. I can read the signs again, even if I can’t translate. It’s Saturday and every man here is let loose from a stag party. An agitated group tries to find a brunch place, already booked. Along the riverfront the men pass Italian, Greek, Japanese restaurants, but not Hungarian: those are hidden down back-alleys.

  Brunch? I haven’t had breakfast, can’t get my head around the money. The currency runs into thousands: just under three thousand Forint to the Euro. I can’t bring myself to spend notes with so many zeroes. I withdraw too little cash but, with the tiny thousands I have, I find I can still buy thousands of calories. So much on sale is fried or smothered in cream, or icing. Maybe that’s where the thousands come in.

  But Budapest means café culture, no? So that’s where I should go. On the main square (of Buda or Pest? I’m not sure?), is Café Gerbeaud, its facade layered in chocolate and cream. Everything on the menu’s so expensive – those rows of zeroes after each digit: surely there’s nothing I can afford. In the currency of coffee, an espresso is the smallest unit. I look down into my tiny cup, shrinking into it as an old Englishman and an old Englishwoman dressed in icing-sugar pastels sit down at the next table. The man looks up brightly from the menu:

  ‘Oh, nice coffee!’

  ‘Iced coffee?’

  ‘Nice coffee!’

  ‘Iced..?’

  It goes on. And on. They might have played this many times before. It is a game – but only just.

  I’m not very hungry anyway. Let the tourists eat cake: Sachertorte or whatever… No! In Budapest, in the Café Gerbeaud in Vörösmarty Square not Sachertorte, which is Austro-not-Hungarian, but Dobos cake, or Esterházy.

  I leave and queue for a cake at a cheap stand-up café round the corner.

  What do they eat here?

  Don’t be such a tourist.

  But I am a tourist. What else should I be?

  OK, I’ll show you! So that’s cheesecake, right, and those are strudels? And that thing there is Esterházy cake, which is layered with, on top, a design of cobwebs in icing. And the Dobos, which is the same tight drum but the layers are slimmer and, like the zeroes on a Forint, there are more of them, the top layer a hard lid of caramel. And, oh, they are people’s cakes! The first jogs the memory of its sponsor, Prince Paul the Third of something, the second, its creator who popularised the cake by travelling across Europe distributing samples. There are seven layers in an Esterházy cake – like the Dobos, an odd number – if you don’t count the icing on top which, being so slim, and of a different material, I don’t. In the Dobos there are five layers, clasping four of buttercream, though at the Café Gerbeaud, there are an extravagant eleven: five of cream and half a dozen of the other (in each cake, the extra slab, always, of sandwiching sponge at the base). These stacked cakes stand out from the others, slow the gaze, bring it to a halt, break it down into layers where it would glaze over smooth cream. They give the eye a handle so it can afford some grip: the more edges, the more grip, that’s how gestalt works, and that’s why these show-stopper layer cakes draw Oooh!s and Ahhh!s each time they’re put on a table. There’s some competition: all the cakes in the shop are layered, rolled or stacked and all of them contain a hidden surprise of something inside something else. The unexpectedness of the inner thing makes these cakes memorable, gives the memory extra purchase – unless you’ve had one of them before, in which case the delight must be in discovering the expected surprise as though, for the first time, again.

  When a scene has little or no apparent structure, we are likely to be confused and frustrated: the eye will roam fruitlessly seeking interest & points of connection, from one fixation to the next, without much success. Simon Bell, Landscape: Pattern, Perception and Process

  ‘That!’ I point to a thick slab of white cream, or to its neighbour, black with poppyseeds – I don’t mind which. The till works Eastern European old-style, in three layers. You ask for your cake then, sandwiched in a middle queue, wait for it to be wrapped, then finally you queue again to pay.

  As I leave I’m surprised by a poster in English: YOU CAN’T SAY YOU’VE BEEN TO BUDAPEST UNLESS YOU’VE TRIED KUSTOKOLAKS HUNGARIAN SPECIALITY! I don’t think what I’ve got is a Kustokolak, and it’s not something I remember from the first time I was here. Am I going about Budapest the wrong way?

  Repetition and recollection are the same movement, just in opposite directions, because what is recollected has already been and is thus repeated backwards, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forwards. Repetition, if it is possible, thus makes a person happy, while recollection makes him unhappy. Kierkegaard, Repetition

  I sit in the central square to eat my cake, and do the maths: I work out that all those thousands spent in the shop and the café were equal to less than one Euro. In Budapest many prices are displayed in Euros, and these prices are written larger and more clearly than anywhere else I have been. Only the beggars’ notes are still hand-written in Magyar. While the rest of the city clears its memory banks for a reboot, they’re living the past, their data already out of date. Good luck to them, waiting for a repeat of the expected surprise though, now with these anglophone tourists, panhadling’s hardly a piece of cake.

  The beggars and junkies congregate in a panic corner at a particular entrance to Ferenciek tere metro, which is my stop. At different times of day I see: a man bellowing in the voice of a town crier, another shaking and singing, a woman offering tiny bouquets. Then something unseen scatters them like a gust of air. In other parts of the city the beggars sit placidly and wait for loose change. Here something animates them, keeps them moving but doesn’t m
ove them on. It’s… disturbing.

  I get up and walk down the main shopping street, which I was told to visit by the woman who wanted to go to Switzerland. It’s a disappointment of tourist tat. There is active selling going on here, though. It’s not like Sofia, or even Athens: people have money, and street vendors approach hopefully. I pass a sign: BUDDHA BAR HOTEL OPENING SOON (hotel, like taxi, like WiFi, the same word in every language). Another: MAXMARA OPENING SOON, then NOBU OPENING SOON – more machines for holiday making, all located somewhere in the future. In the fashion streets, the local boutiques are all 30 per cent, 50 per cent, 70 per cent SALE. There is something unfamiliar, still particularly Hungarian, about the way goods are displayed. In the flat, narrow vitrines women’s clothes are stretched across boards, or on dressmakers’ dummies, pinned between the panes like butterflies, refracted as though through deep water that only appears shallow, making long distances seem shorter. If the past is everything known and the future’s everything unknown, the present, trapped mid-way, hardly knows where to look. Even in Janus Budapest it’s difficult to turn both ways at the same time. There’s one remaining local supermarket, NON-STOP DELICATES, but I have returned too late: the city has already been sold.