The Habsburg Cafe

by Andrew Riemer

  Such myths are as simple as the rhetoric in which they are couched. Reality is more complex, and one probably significant part of it is to be encountered here, in this small flat in a grubby and pollution-choked thoroughfare, where this grim and decrepit building, with huge cracks running up its façade, proves to be the best maintained structure in the street.

  My cousin begins to talk about their hard life. She is a retired history teacher. Until a year or two ago the pension she and her husband received was sufficient to allow them to make ends meet. They had to be careful, of course, but then who doesn’t? There was enough for their daily needs. Not any more. She has had to go back to work part time—thank goodness they had friends in the ministry who could pull some strings. At this point her husband says that he should go back to work too, electrical engineers can always find something to do. That provokes an outburst from my cousin: he certainly can’t go back to work, being as ill as he is with asthma, and last winter he had pneumonia twice! He shrugs, and says something entirely characteristic, it seems to me, of the spirit of Kakania, which must still be lingering in these decaying streets and avenues. ‘Oh well’, he says, ‘it’s probably better to get pneumonia at home: the flat will certainly be cold enough when the heating’s cut off’.

  Their story is a familiar tale. You cannot spend even a few days in this city without becoming aware, from snatches of conversation overheard in the streets and in buses, from the monologues of taxi drivers or from the dismay and disbelief of people in supermarkets when the cost of their meagre purchases is totalled, that the new forces operating in this country are imposing hardships on many citizens. Abroad, in places like Britain, America and Australia, the change in political régime was seen in idealistic and largely sentimental terms. Everyone would now have freedom, everyone would enjoy the benefits and blessings of a democratic and open society. Few of these people, the odd idealistic intellectual apart, see those changes in such terms. For most Hungarians the change was neither political nor ideological but predominantly economic: the substitution of the market-driven policies of the capitalist world for the old, discredited command economy of the communist era.

  Some, my cousin tells me, are doing very nicely, thank you very much. I know immediately what she has in mind. A monied class is beginning to emerge in this city in a way that was not apparent nine months ago, at the very beginning of this new world for what is still at times referred to as gallant little Hungary. Then there were no young men in screeching Porsches to be seen. None of the women in the two or three elegant cafés that remain were seen wearing the outrageous quantities of jewellery now to be seen as these members of the new upper crust sit, hour after hour, consuming delicacies, emblems of social superiority in this world. None talked loudly then, as many do now in cafés and on the streets about their acumen and cunning in outwitting their business rivals, about the huge profit they made from bringing a second-hand Mercedes, purchased in Austria for next to nothing, across the border, and selling it to some sucker here who just had to own one.

  And, as was inevitable, there are many more poor people now—pensioners, those on fixed incomes and, of course, the unemployed and the homeless, a situation, my cousin says, they had never known. Have I seen those young people roaming the streets of the inner city? she asks. Did I know that they are homeless children who sleep in culverts and viaducts, some of whom deal in drugs or sell themselves for sex? I tell her that it’s nothing new to me—that’s what it’s like at home. That word gives her a momentary pause, but then she shakes her head and smiles—oh no, that can’t be true, my home is, after all, in the west, things like that don’t happen there no matter what they were told in the past.

  Both of my relatives grow more animated as they continue telling me about the problems and confusions of this society, those problems and confusions that are visible even to the casual visitor in the streets of the city. I do not hear anything about freedom, liberty or democracy; all I hear from them are the all-too-familiar preoccupations of my own world: the appalling amount it costs nowadays just to keep yourself fed and clothed. Do I know how much it costs now to have a pair of shoes heeled? (The figure mentioned seems—from the perspective of exchange rates—risible, a mere nothing, the cost of a ferry ride.) Did I know that education, even at primary school, is no longer free? And you have to pay for medical services! The litany continues, mixed with stories of the way people are making vast amounts of money from the newly deregulated financial structures. Where will it end? they ask, shaking their heads.

  My cousin suddenly becomes very agitated, her eyes are flashing with fire—I recognise in her those mysterious characteristics that are carried through a family’s genes, changing and altering with circumstances, yet surviving and persisting despite all sorts of vicissitudes. Why did they stay in this godforsaken place? she asks the walls, the abstract watercolour above the settee, those emblems of western affluence, the colour television set and the video recorder, and even the large pot plant in front of the window—probably placed there to block out the view of a crumbling building on the opposite side of the street. Why, oh why didn’t they get out in ’56, when there was a chance? Indeed, they were about to go, they’d all but arranged it, but lost their nerve at the last minute. If only they’d had the courage! But no, they stayed, stayed here in this terrible corrupt world, a world going from bad to worse, a world with a curse on it.

  Her husband, the more ironic and phlegmatic of the two, tries to dampen her frenzy. For people like them, he says, it’s rotten everywhere. They’re the sort that always gets it in the neck—the clever and the unscrupulous survive anywhere. Might as well make the best of things; after all they’re a damn sight better off than many others—and he begins to reel off a list of names, a disaster attached to each, in order to calm my cousin whose emotions seem to be in danger of getting out of hand.

  There is, however, no stopping her. This is a family characteristic I recognise only too well. It does nothing, though, to diminish my embarrassment. These people, despite the ties of blood and sentiment, are strangers to me; I do not know how to respond to this dangerous heightening of the emotional temperature. I look away as she continues her tirade of lamentation—now concerned with her fears for her daughter and granddaughters—and my eyes light on the shelves of books that cover most of the walls in this small flat. And there, straight in front of my gaze, I notice the dull red lettering on a row of books bound in the coarse linen cloth used in these countries. They announce: Marx, Engels and Lenin. The realisation strikes me that I am in the company of people who had been attracted to the now discredited ideals of communism, who may even have been members of the Party. Their bitterness is perhaps a result of seeing the disintegration of the Party and the enthusiastic way their compatriots have embraced the infernal doctrines of capitalism.

  Several Australians of my acquaintance would recoil with horror from that realisation or possibility, as though these people were afflicted with the plague. Yet it is difficult to see in these ordinary, fundamentally middle-class people the brutal steely-eyed ideologues of western mythology. It would be far easier to regard them as pathetic victims of that heartless system—except that if they give any appearance of being victims, the fault seems to lie with the present régime as much as (if indeed not more than) with the past.

  It is certainly the present with which my cousin is preoccupied in her agitation. I cannot follow the fine details of her tirade for I know almost nothing of the political intricacies of the previous forty years. The theme of her nervous, edgy monologue is, however, clear enough: the country is screaming to the right. All sorts of nasties are crawling out of the woodwork, war criminals, former Nazis (the word she uses actually refers to the Hungarian variant of National Socialism that flourished in the forties), rabid nationalists and religious bigots. The Catholic church is all-powerful, and she repeats something that also played a part in my parents’ mythology, concerning the wartime activities of a celebrated Hungarian pre
late, beatified in the anti-communist hagiography of the Cold War years. Being a highly emotional person, she is almost shaking with distress; tears well up in her eyes as she tells me that her one hope is that her daughter’s family, who are about to spend nine months in London where her son-in-law is to take an advanced degree in Economics, will stay in the west, will try their luck in England or in America. This world, she says, sweeping her arms around the small living room, will always be a world of hatred and brutality—and now someplace or other the gas chambers and ovens are probably ready, waiting for the first cattle-trucks …

  The scene—for this family reunion has assumed the proportions of a scene—is embarrassing and painful. It would be only too easy to accuse my cousin of neurosis, of that emotional imbalance characteristic of our kind of people and also (at least according to popular belief) of women of her age. She has gone, as they say, completely over the top, totally out of control. Her husband looks at her with a mixture of pity and irritation; he has probably witnessed many such outbursts in the past. Yet underneath the excess, the self-dramatising, I recognise many years of bitter experience. Her outburst is not merely the displaced fear of a neurotic; she is haunted by phantoms that may have assumed, in the course of the years, shapes even more grotesque than they had possessed in the past. They are, nevertheless, phantoms of a particularly insistent kind. She may, for all I know, be entirely mistaken about the turn Hungarian politics is taking in this new order. But that seems not to be the point. Rather, an understanding of a sort comes to me about the likely nature of her life during those years when she resisted my mother’s sad, and equally alarmed and distressed, attempts to establish contact with her young cousin, whom she loved with an almost maternal intensity. I imagine I can reconstruct some of her life in the last three or four decades—years about which she seems so reluctant to speak, evading all attempts on my part to discover why her husband has not been able to work for many years, or what type of work she did in the gymnasium, a secondary school for gifted young people, where she was the head of the history department, or why she retired at (for this world) an early age: in short all those mundane details of our life about which we normally display no reluctance to speak.

  On the way back to the hotel, sitting in a half-empty tram—for it is late at night now—I try to picture my cousin when young in those years just after the end of the war, as she was trying to pick up, or indeed start, her life from the ruins of the old. Alone with her ill mother—her father was one of those who had disappeared—she somehow managed to finish school and gain a place in a university. That much I know; the rest must remain conjecture, though a conjecture (I am convinced) with a good degree of probability. Perhaps she felt that a new order was about to begin. The rhetoric of the time promised that the old world of privilege and brutality would be swept away, to be replaced by those shining ideals: equality and justice. She may have seen in that promise a possibility of hope, that she would no longer be persecuted, exploited and reviled as her family had been throughout the years of her childhood. The death of the old world would have been welcome to her, for she was too young to retain any of those sentimental dreams that people like her parents and grandparents, and to an extent those like my mother, entertained about the spurious benevolence of Kakania—a benevolence that somehow compensated for cruelty, injustice and the wanton use (or abuse) of privilege.

  A photograph taken at that time shows her as a confident young woman, eyes shining, the skin on her broad Slavic cheeks (another rogue gene that has woven its way through my mother’s family) is smooth, youthful, indeed almost childlike. Her smile seems entirely spontaneous—no photographer’s coaxing could have produced such openness. She is leaning towards the camera, her shoulder ready to advance into a new world. Perhaps she believed that she could help forge that world, and in so doing put behind her the horrors and the unhappiness which had been her lot—as of millions of others—in the past. Optimism seems to shine out of that photograph: the great communal good which she was ready to help build would compensate (she may have thought) for a dead father, a dying mother and a ruined world.

  How long did that illusion last? I imagine her eagerly engaged not merely in the labour of building a new society but in those earnest and dedicated discussions—at school, at university, later at her place of work and at meetings of the local cadre—where the mysteries of the new religion would have been celebrated with absolute faith and dedication. But it could not have lasted. Soon she must have started to notice, no matter how devout she may have been, the sad but inevitable gulf between brave ideals and the realities of life in the new paradise. When did she first suspect that those urging her to greater and greater exertions on behalf of humanity—rather than those outmoded concepts of the state and the nation—were often lining their own pockets at the expense of those whom they attempted to fire with internationalist zeal? When did she realise, at last, that all that had really happened was that the old order had reshuffled itself, adopted new slogans, made a few minor changes in the cast, and continued untroubled on its way?

  Disillusion and disenchantment must have come to her. Perhaps it came in 1956, perhaps earlier. By middle age—as was inevitable—she would have looked on the world with much more cynical eyes. Yet, I begin to think in these midnight meditations as the tram is approaching its terminus, even though she came to recognise the sham, the venality, and the corruption in those pious and rousing slogans and exhortations, the ideal itself may have remained fresh and seductive. For the alternative, which (she imagines) she sees blossoming everywhere in the birth of yet another new world, is a return to the nationalist bigotry, to the terrible millennium-old enmities that have always torn this world apart. I do not think that she has become disenchanted with the holy texts that line the bookshelves of her flat, only with the way they have been compromised in a world that always compromises the noblest of ideals. I ask myself whether she is subtle enough to realise the inevitability of this outcome—one which will occur with any religion that is prepared to make no allowance for human imperfection. I suspect that she cannot reach that level of abstraction because she sees only the imperfections of this particular world, where she has lived out her life of many disappointments.

  I cannot entirely disagree with her. It is appropriate perhaps, though hardly wise, for those of us living in the fabulous world beyond the Austrian border to see the great ideological battles of the century in terms of those simplicities which our politicians and demagogues are intent on offering us. Inside one of the former satellites of the Evil Empire, it does not seem entirely axiomatic that the alternative to that earlier belief or conviction is to be preferred. Under ‘socialism’, after all, no-one starved or went unhoused. The sad fact may well be not that people like my cousin were wrong, mistaken or even evil, but that their ideals were, as always, exploited and abused by the brutal and the unscrupulous, who are now busily reconstituting themselves in this new dispensation.

  As I was saying goodnight to my cousin, before walking down innumerable flights of stairs with her husband so that he could unlock the heavily secured gate, she turned to me and said ‘You know, I was terribly lonely. You had left; your grandmother went to join you; my mother died … There was no-one, no-one at all.’ She sighed as she pecked me on the cheek. And I realised that for this middle-aged woman whom I had last seen as a radiant girl, the great political conundrums of our century were inseparable from the sorrows and the few triumphs of her life. I came to understand that she had been living in history much more intensely than we in the lotus-land of the antipodes could imagine—and I, for my part, could feel no regret that I had missed out on that slice of the troubled history of this sad little country.

  THE CLANGING DOOR

  Budapest’s theatres are numerous, excellent and inexpensive. The rate of exchange admittedly distorts the cost of a ticket—I paid a little over three dollars for an excellent seat in the stalls for tonight’s performance of Richard III. For Hungarians that is
a more substantial sum, the equivalent of the cost of a day ticket on the city’s splendid public transport system. During the long years of grim socialist conformism the theatre provided performances of high quality at minimal cost. Theatre tickets and tram and bus fares are, indeed, just about the only prices not to have skyrocketed in the twelve months of freedom this society has enjoyed.

  Shakespeare’s play is being performed in a vast theatre built in the last years of the nineteenth century. Formerly it was a home for musical plays, popular dramas and comedies. It was one of the theatres people like my mother considered fashionable; a certain social cachet adhered to attending a performance here. Nowadays, together with four or five other theatres, it presents repertory seasons of classical drama from Aeschylus to Beckett. The richness of the theatrical offerings in this city is astonishing. In the space of one week, or ten days at most, you may attend performances of five of Shakespeare’s plays, three or four by Molière, the works of Ibsen, Chekhov, Pirandello and Osborne as well as plays by Czech, Hungarian and Russian dramatists whose names are unfamiliar to me. You may, in addition to all this, see Cats and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, not to mention the ubiquitous Les Misérables. The two opera theatres—one a jewelled, diminutive version of the great theatres in Milan, Vienna and Paris, the other a frightful barn constructed in the 1930s along the best Fascist architectural lines—give performances for most of the year. An operetta theatre is reserved exclusively for those Kakanian fantasias which seem to have withstood, here as elsewhere in Central Europe, the passage of time and changes of régime. Two marionette theatres stage puppet versions of remarkably sophisticated works—at one they are currently giving performances of Goethe’s Faust, which is itself indebted to a series of popular puppet plays.