Blue River, Black Sea

by Andrew Eames

  I hadn’t, however, chosen the right coffee-house to blend in, at least not according to Count Peter Bolza when I met him in the Muvesz – the Artist – later in the week. The New York, he said, was a fantasy, designed for tourists. The Muvesz, on Andrássy Út, was a much more likely place to find a true writer. Certainly it was surging with customers, gossip and cake.

  The corduroyed, cufflinked count was another friend of Count Kalnoky, the Hungarian-Romanian aristocrat who’d helped me out with the contents of his address book during the planning of my journey. Count Peter was in his mid-forties, and he told me how he had been one of a select band of younger-generation aristocrats (along with Kalnoky) who’d returned to Budapest shortly after the end of communist rule. Up till then his family had been living in an apartment in Austria, and he remembered the day when a little fat man with a goose under his arm appeared framed in the glass of the apartment’s outside door. ‘We all called him uncle, although I’m not sure he was a relative at all. Anyway, he’d come to tell us that the long wait had come to an end. That it was OK to go back home.’

  For a few heady years in the 1990s Budapest became the party city of Central Europe, and young Westerners – particularly Americans – gathered here to enjoy the celebratory after-shocks of liberty. Amongst them were around thirty aristocratic returnees like Peter Bolza with family names which would have meant instant dispossession under communism, and for a while they’d had a whirlwind social life, a magical time with dinner, discussion and dancing virtually every day. Eventually many of them paired up, got married, had children and in some cases relocated to a country life – I was to meet more of them later – but Count Bolza had remained in town, where he had forged himself a career as the interface between overseas companies and the local business community. That was where returnees like him had something to offer, he said; he had the necessary language skills and the cross-cultural understanding to make a bridge between the investor and the invested.

  The count was a natural coffee-house demagogue. He was one of those people for whom conversation involved setting in motion long and ponderous trains of thought, and his interlocutor had to wait until the last carriage had cleared the platform before attempting a response. For him the return to Hungary had been, he said, like coming back into a family, restoring a sense of belonging, slotting all the pieces of a globally scattered jigsaw puzzle of uncles and cousins back into a defined shape that finally made sense. He acknowledged that it wasn’t to everyone’s taste, coming back, and probably 90 per cent of the escapees and their descendants had chosen not to. His own brother was amongst the dissenters, and had only set foot in Hungary once, and even then only because his father had specifically asked him to.

  The story of his parents’ original flight sounded like a chapter from The Sound of Music. They’d climbed a fence into Austria in the dead of night, with their only asset a gold watch which they’d sewed into the stomach of his sister’s doll. And once in Austria his father, who’d been a high-ranking cavalry officer in the Hussars, had had to swallow his pride and make a living as a bicycle salesman. Of course those who hadn’t left had fared far worse. Count Bolza told me of a fellow count who’d married a gypsy and was living in a run-down communist apartment block, and I’d heard talk of another who was squatting in a disused shipping container on Csepel, Budapest’s industrial island. These were the ones who didn’t get away.

  But there were also returnees who were back ensconced within the family’s four walls, as was Count László Károlyi, whom I’d arranged to go out to see at the Károlyi Palace at Fót, a short suburban train ride to the northeast of the city.

  The Károlyis, along with the Andrássys, Széchényis and the Telekis, had been one of Hungary’s most famous and powerful families, and their ranks included several prime ministers. They had been so rich, goes the story, that they didn’t know the full extent of their own holdings. For example, in the mid-nineteenth century a head of the family had been making for Vienna to negotiate with the Habsburgs when his train had been stopped by a snowdrift. His staff informed him that he had a house nearby, so the whole contingent decamped from the train into a manor house that was heated, lit, staffed and with food ready-prepared every evening just in case the family should ever turn up. A house which the head of the family didn’t even know existed.

  It would have been hard to forget the palace at Fót, a classically colonnaded nineteenth-century chateau with over a hundred rooms, where the whiskery Emperor Franz Joseph had been a regular guest. It was set in parkland planted with rare trees, and every room had its own unique parquet flooring. This had been the family seat to some of the most prominent Károlyis, and Count László was proud of being the only Hungarian aristocrat to have been invited to return to his family property by the government. Mind you, that sounds grander than it was; the count and countess turned out to be lodged in a flat in a small corner of the building, while the remainder was being wound down as a government-run children’s home. The home had been established as a direct consequence of the catastrophic 1956 Revolution, to mop up the offspring of fractured families whose parents had been killed, who had fled, committed murder or been declared insane. It had been a brutal time to be in Budapest, and those same palace rooms where lace-covered ladies had once flirted and danced had filled with 1,800 children who’d witnessed things that no child should ever see.

  The Károlyis’ apartment had its own entrance with a staircase that led up to a high-ceilinged set of rooms cluttered with family antiquities. Chief amongst them was the count himself, the apogee of an English pipe-smoking gentleman. Tall, distinguished, animated, interested and very generous with the gin, he was a good three decades older than the Bolza generation of new returnees. His wife, the countess, had flashing eyes, dangly jewellery, a tight skirt and had been a debutante in Vienna, although she was from a Transylvanian family. Plainly younger, it was not easy to tell by how much.

  ‘I’m really terribly sorry we can’t show you the rest of the palace,’ said the count. ‘It isn’t ours to show. A blessing, really. As much as one would awfully, awfully like to have one’s property back, the cost of restoration would amount to seven or eight million dollars.’

  Count László’s apparent Englishness was far more than just skin deep. He’d left Hungary right at the end of the Second World War, fleeing the Russian advance.

  ‘The morning we left I’d been out beagling somewhere in the palace grounds. When I came back I was told we were leaving immediately, and I was to pack a rucksack. I was thirteen.’ He paused to work at his pipe. ‘We left in the family car, and we only just managed to cross the Danube in time. The bridge went up, boom, lit up the sky, minutes after we’d reached the other side. The roads were chaos, of course. The car was confiscated at the border, so we had to continue in a military truck.’

  The family had had some money squirreled away in Switzerland, where he’d eventually completed his schooling, but at the age of seventeen he’d emigrated to Argentina with just $50 in his pocket, courtesy of the International Refugee Organization.

  The count’s pipe was proving obstinate so he gave it his full attention for a moment or two. ‘I started as a construction worker, handing bricks to the bricklayer,’ he continued, labouring away at the bowl. ‘Then I moved to Peru and worked on a coffee plantation for twelve years, until coffee crashed. So then it was London. In 1965.’ Puff puff. But while he’d been happy enough in every adopted country he’d lived in, he’d always felt Hungarian ‘in spirit’.

  In England he’d set up his own export consultancy, helping businesses to break into difficult markets, and that in turn had developed into an enterprise exporting medical equipment to further-flung corners of the world, particularly Iraq. Eventually it was the war in the latter, coupled with seismic shifts in Hungarian politics, that had finally persuaded him to return to Fót. The children’s home had a new manager and wanted to rebrand itself as the Károlyi Children’s Centre with the count as its patron, so
they’d asked him whether he’d like to come back.

  ‘It was very touching to see how we were welcomed by everyone. You see, the Károlyis had always been on the liberal side of the political spectrum. We looked after people, we provided social security for the elderly because there were no state pensions back then. Personally I don’t much like the term “aristocrat”; we were not educated to make money, but to serve God and country.’

  I mentioned that I’d read about his relative Mihály Károlyi, the last Hungarian prime minister before the First World War, who’d been so liberal that he’d turned socialist, giving land and privileges away, much to the disgust of his fellow aristocrats.

  ‘That was your uncle?’

  ‘The red Károlyis. We don’t talk about him. He did a lot of damage.’ The count nodded, keeping the rest of that thought to himself.

  His own father hadn’t concerned himself with politics. He’d had more than enough to do with the palace and its 45,000 hectare estate – although that in itself had been massively reduced from the 200,000 hectares they’d had back in the nineteenth century.

  ‘In fact the life I remember at Fót was rather austere, Calvinistic if you like. We weren’t having a good time at the expense of serfs, as some of the history books like to suggest. There was the occasional ball, certainly, but we only lived in the smaller-roomed parts of the palace and the family maintained twenty-five social institutions for the poor and underprivileged. Personally, I don’t like to cry after past fortunes, so I’m not in favour of recreating the aristocracy. I try to tell the young people it wasn’t like it is portrayed in books, but then we have the occasional busload of old ladies from the countryside who come through – the municipality asks us to host them – and you overhear them saying to each other “You see, they got everything back.”’

  A knock on the door, and the count went to deal with something to do with parking; a film crew was using parts of the building to create a docu-drama about the Revolution that had created all those tormented children. When he returned, he told how he’d been involved in the previous year’s marches in central Budapest – a commemoration of that same 1956 Revolution which had itself turned violent.

  ‘The policemen hit me with their shields. It was just aggression, pure aggression.’ He puffed on his pipe, which was co-operating at last. ‘Then somebody I’d never seen before jumped out from the crowd and pulled me out from the middle of it all. “Mr Count, Mr Count, come quickly, come quickly.” I think he thought there were people who would have loved the chance to take a pop at the aristocracy. And there may well have been. So it was probably wise.’

  The count had got to the age where he didn’t really care what people thought of him, so as we drank more gin, conversation became more scurrilous. We moved away from politics to the wider reaches of family connections in Hungary and abroad. ‘Not every aristocrat is our friend just because he’s an aristocrat. Aristocracy is a state of mind, nothing to do with money. Mind you, some of these locals, they can be so boring, sitting here talking about healthcare and haircuts.’ His pronouncements began to swirl around in the ether, becoming more and more English as the gin tightened its grip, and the truly English combination of irony, humour and sangfroid meant it was hard to pinpoint his own personal opinion in the haze. But on Archduke Georg Habsburg, the son that Archduke Otto had posted to Hungary, he was unequivocal. ‘When I meet him I’ll tell him what I think of him, in the politest possible way.’

  And on the subject of Hungary’s relationship with its neighbour to the east he had strong words, too. ‘Frankly, Romania is not a nationality, it’s an occupation.’

  Not every aristocrat had escaped, or had wanted to escape, the closing of the Iron Curtain. A few of them, including Count László’s wayward uncle, prime minister Mihály Károlyi, had seen the communist point of view. Mihály’s circle had included a certain Count George Paloczi-Horvath, a name that Count László didn’t appear to recognize when I brought it up, but by that point in the evening we were flying along on a magic carpet of gin. In his book The Undefeated, Paloczi-Horvath described his Hungarian family as being top-heavy with representatives of the old feudal times, painting a picture of red-faced gentlemen with Gargantuan appetites and of thin-lipped matrons who peered out into the confusing world beyond the estate boundaries with expressions of total bewilderment. In his childhood, Paloczi-Horvath’s elderly uncles had talked more Latin (a mark of class) than German or Hungarian and regarded non-nobles as a kind of subspecies of humanity, and yet families like his had relied on free peasant labour to keep them afloat. It was considered undignified for a noble actually to work, so their lives were essentially idle, apart from parties, banquets and horses. As for Paloczi-Horvath himself, ‘my heart ached for Hungarian peasants’. Mind you, it couldn’t have ached too much, because during the war years and after he had seized the opportunity to retreat to London and move in society circles with other political exiles, including ex-Prime Minister Károlyi.

  He did, however, make his sympathy for the peasantry widely known, and eventually he was invited back to Budapest by the Soviet-appointed government to edit a new weekly magazine. Describing himself as ‘in love with communism’ and therefore blind to all its faults, he’d accepted the Party as one would accept a wise and severe father. It seemed to him to be the best insurance against the return of fascism, and a high-minded way in which to build a world without wars and poverty. By now thoroughly indoctrinated and promoted to control the media output, he ‘thought, talked and felt in clichés’. But the Party was never comfortable with his aristocratic origins and his overseas contacts with that émigré society back in London, so eventually the AVO – the secret police – came for him during one of its systematic purges.

  That evening in September 1949 he’d been listening to music with his girlfriend when they knocked at his door. They’d taken him to AVO headquarters at 60 Andrássy Avenue, which today lives on as the House of Terror museum. Its liftshaft is papered with pictures of executed kulaks (upper- and middle-class landowners) like him, some of whom had probably been in the building at the same time as he was. The cells are still in the basement, and it is easy to visualize how he had had to lie so that his wrists could be seen from the spyhole, because ‘in this building we do the killing, nobody else’. He’d been made to type his life story repeatedly, and not allowed to sleep, for three weeks, while around him the basement filled with groans, whimpers, shrill shouts, screaming and sobbing, sounds you can still hear (simulated) in the House of Terror today. At one point his interrogators had made him stand facing the wall for days on end watching ‘prisoner cinema’, a state of starved hallucination where the grain of the wall started to move of its own accord, acting out scenes from his past. Then came the proper torture, with piercing pain for week after week, punctuated briefly by a visit to the sanatorium to prevent actual death. The biggest danger was insanity, so he occupied himself by re-living his life, backwards, forwards and any which way he could. The only indication of the passing of the seasons was when his guards grew either more suntanned, or less.

  Eventually he was moved out of Andrássy Avenue into the brutal Gyujtofoghaz jail. Here the punishment of choice was the short iron, where the prisoner’s body was contorted as far as possible and then manacled to an iron bar. The first scream was one of surprise that something so simple could hurt so unbearably. Then came the groaning and sobbing, then the piercing cries expressing utter terror and agony, shriller and thinner as the guard shortened the manacle and jumped on the prisoner’s back. Eventually those listening for the first time wouldn’t have identified the final cries as coming from a human being at all.

  Many didn’t survive the short iron. The elderly would suffer incurable injuries at once, and others had heart attacks. And yet it was a punishment meted out for the simplest of offences: taking your cap off too slowly when passing a guard or dropping your bowl while waiting in line for food. The worst of it was that these people suffering like this h
ad never done anything wrong in the first place.

  Along with his cellmates, Paloczi-Horvath tried to work out where communism had left the rails. Many of his fellow prisoners had been great leaders from the early days, idealists and supreme thinkers. Now they were having to deal with the fact that the whole edifice of their ideology, the grand cathedral of their faith, had collapsed on their heads. The system that they’d created had destroyed the individual, his internal integrity, his self-respect, honesty and correctness.

  In prison, they tried to hang on to what they had been passionate about, debating how to fix it and how to make it work again. They realized that leaders cared only for power, that ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ had become just a smokescreen to hide dictatorship of the Party bosses, that communism had been pure only when it had been in opposition. The Communist Party in power was neither communist nor a party; instead it was an apparatus in the hands of dictators whose power was based on the secret police, and if those dictators wanted to retain their power they needed to strike first, to terrorize any potential rivals.

  Eventually, in the early 1950s, the system had begun to liberalize as the Soviets became distracted by America. The prisoners were allowed to write to their families and to have two visits a year, their first contact with the outside world. Mostly both parties had aged so fast and become so emaciated as to be physically unrecognizable, and the guards had to introduce spouses to each other – ‘This is your husband.’ ‘This is your wife.’ Both would then spend the rest of the visit clutching the wire netting that separated them and weeping, silently, having failed to find any suitable words.

  Paloczi-Horvath was finally released in September 1954. For the next two years the system continued to liberalize, with writers beginning to be bold and getting away with it. It seemed that anything could be written, everything discussed, and those who had once been hanged as arch-criminals were being disinterred and reburied as heroes. Then came the mass marches of the 1956 Revolution, the fighting, the brief ecstatic victory, and the brutal Soviet return, ushering in a new, stricter inquisitional regime in a violated city where there was no food, no money and no hope.