The Habsburg Cafe

by Andrew Riemer

  The devious conversation on which we now embark, filled with ambiguity, unspoken implications, innuendo and evasions, confirms that suspicion. He says he is delighted to be talking to someone who has just arrived from Australia. What a marvellous place! He must tell me in all sincerity, and he doesn’t mind if I should think he’s having me on, that the years he spent there were the happiest of his life. He sketches in a few vague details, leaving as much unsaid as stated. He went out in ’38, young foolish fellow that he was, searching for adventure. Of course he got there just before the war, had to spend a bit of time interned, but then they let him out when they discovered how useful he could be. Ah, wonderful years, wonderful country. All that sunshine, those great open spaces, the friendly people … He looks around for a moment, obviously searching for another image to complete his litany, and then turns to me and says: ‘And all that seafood—prawns, scallops, lobsters; my dear fellow, you don’t know how lucky you are!’

  While I am reassuring him that I am entirely aware of my good fortune, I realise that this iconography of the wonders of Australia is as limited and consists as much of well-tried cliches as the litanies of the marvels of Budapest and Hungary among my parent’s contemporaries as they sat in cafés and espresso bars in Sydney lamenting the awfulness of life in the world of sunshine, empty spaces and plentiful seafood. Their repertoire was just as paltry: the opera, the cafés along the Corso beside the Danube, the bridges spanning the river, the view of the city from the Castle. It seems to me curious that this gentleman who apparently left Australia voluntarily, and who is obviously still in good standing with the Embassy, should be loud in his nostalgia for a world in which he could have stayed. He had not been driven out as those denizens of the Sydney espresso bars felt that they had been driven out by the hate and brutality that tore this world apart half a century ago. And indeed he now launches on a theme which is all too familiar to me in its mirror image. How can anyone live here, he says, in this filth and pollution, among all the corruption and chicanery, all these ruthless and ambitious people? Oh yes, he knows very well that life in Europe offers some delights not available back there. But that’s a small price to pay. How I must be looking forward to going back again!

  It seems inevitable therefore that I should ask him why he came back to Hungary. Hearing this he suddenly looks very stern, like an old-fashioned schoolmaster. What makes me think he is Hungarian? No, no, he came here to do a most interesting job—now that he’s retired he has decided to stay; it’s a fascinating time, after all. I ask him where he came from, reminding him that he said he went out in ’38. Ah, Transylvania; he’s Transylvanian through and through, not Hungarian.

  I am about to ask whether being Transylvanian isn’t the same as being Hungarian, indeed perhaps the only genuine way of being Hungarian, but something cautions me to hold my peace. There is, as they say nowadays, a subtext here that I don’t entirely understand. Transylvania lies in the western part of modern Romania. Much of its population is Hungarian speaking. Many Hungarian patriots insists that a genuine folk culture, unsullied by Slav, Austrian or Jewish influences, is to be found only there, in that world of farmers and shepherds where the authentic Hungarian folk music (not the phoney gypsy stuff) and traditions survive. In the growing nationalism of the new Hungary, it is not unusual to encounter the sentiment that until Transylvania is restored to the Kingdom, Hungary will be neither secure nor stable.

  Why then does this dapper gentleman, with his immaculately clipped moustache, insist so strenuously that he is not Hungarian? No amount of devious insinuation on my part provokes him into offering any clarification—he is obviously much more expert at such games of evasion. I begin, nevertheless, to suspect something that, for lack of a more compelling explanation, must lie close to the truth. This gentleman must be in his seventies; he was probably born just after the Great War, or perhaps even during its closing stages. It is possible, of course, that he is even older—it all depends on what he meant by having been young in 1938. In any event he would have been born at a time when a dedication to Kakania, though that realm was no longer a political reality, still ran strong through the veins of its former subjects. Transylvania was, moreover, not far from the slightly more easterly district known as the Bukovina where Gregor von Rezzori, chronicler and memorialist of the last years of the Empire, began his life as a scion of the Kakanian ruling class among the Ruthenians, Serbs, Jews and Magyars of that ethnographic melting pot. Perhaps this gentleman, in asserting sternly that he is a proud son of Transylvania, is distancing himself from what he, like von Rezzori, would have been trained to regard as vulgar and provincial nationalism. Perhaps his family’s gaze also skipped over that parvenu city of Budapest in their attempt to catch sight of the fount and origin of their culture, Vienna, the city of their dreams.

  I have noticed that he has held himself aloof throughout this evening from the conviviality, the merry quaffing of cans of Fosters and consumption of curried prawns and rice. Perhaps he regards with absolute contempt the other wearers of gilt kangaroos, in their shiny suits of exaggerated cut which only confirm the sad fact that the creators of contemporary haute couture never had short Hungarians in mind when drawing up their sophisticated designs. I can understand such disdain. In this world, especially, the elaborate sign language of clothes still retains some of its former force. The tweed suit, the bow tie, the plain gold links worn with a double-cuffed shirt all signal that this gentleman belongs almost to another order of creation, that he is a product of a network of social standards and preoccupations which those stocky possessors of Armani suits would not understand.

  And they do make a ridiculous spectacle. There is something essentially oily in the way they seem to be whispering confidences into the ears of soft-drink tsars and computer wizards decked out in their much less fashionable Australian clothes. They seem to be living parodies of the way Hungarians are supposed to behave according to the popular mythology of the English-speaking nations. Yet one of them, despite his fashionable and expensive suit, gives a very different impression. Taller than his compatriots, thickset in a muscular rather than flabby way, he is sending out complicated signals in which self-confidence and arrogance are equally present. He does not mix with the other occupants of the rumpus room; rather he seems to be holding impromptu audiences with what I can only think of as a peasant-like hauteur—reminding me a little of the image Boris Yeltsin’s minders cultivated for him during his rise to prominence. There is certainly nothing patrician about this person. He gives, on the contrary, a sense of reined-in aggression, as though he would be more comfortable in battle-fatigues than in the uniform of the successful Budapest man of affairs in 1991. He waves away with an imperious sweep of the hand the paper-plateful of prawns someone offers him. The gesture suggests that he demands more substantial food than an effeminate stew of curly prawns.

  Some days later I find out a little about him and his kind, and also about my dapper companion on the night of prawns and rice. The latter, I am told, has been hanging around Embassy functions for years. The consensus seems to be that he would like to go back to Australia but realises that his money will go much farther here. A nice old stick, my informant says.

  The other is a very different proposition. He is one of the heroes of ’56, people who took advantage of the turmoil and disarray of those terrible days to slip over the border—something my cousin and her husband failed to do. They have been living in Western Europe, in the Americas, in Australia and New Zealand, often prospering in various business ventures where their ingenuity and acumen have reaped considerable benefits. Now that the political system has changed, many of them have come back, claiming that their efforts and their financial contributions have sustained dissident movements through the long years of political repression. Some of them claim to be the true saviours of the country, defenders of the realm who have kept the spirit of Hungarian nationalism alive in exile. They have returned for their reward.

  My informant, a
wry, sceptical Hungarian who, according to his own confession, is never able to decide whether the political system that happens to be dominant at any particular time is heaven-sent or the work of the devil, is generally scathing about these strutting patriots. They are in the forefront, he says, of a movement to purge the nation of collaborators. An entire university department, he tells me, has been disbanded while its former members are being investigated by the new censors—in the meantime, though, they continue to teach and to draw their salaries because no-one else can be found to do the work. Where will it all stop? he asks. Will bus drivers and street cleaners be condemned as collaborators because they drove the buses and cleaned the streets of a discredited régime? Hungarians will never learn, he sighs, and then grows animated: something must be done to put an end to this culture of blame, to the national obsession with finding scapegoats, on whom all the ills of the world may be blamed before they are driven out or killed.

  The clanging door of that Plantagenet prison of the other night at the theatre comes to mind, as I listen to his mild-mannered though deeply pessimistic account. There are aspects of this world which seem never to change. The old cycle of blame and revenge appears destined to continue for ever. Though the streets of the inner city have been renamed in these first years of a new world, they remain the same grimy and chaotic streets they were during the dark years of what everyone in this country now refers to as socialism. This is still the depressing, deeply flawed and probably treacherous world of fierce hatred that I left in my childhood for that land of sunshine and abundant shellfish.

  CULTURAL DELEGATION

  Australia is very chic in the Central Europe of 1991. Tourist agencies in affluent Vienna carry seductive posters of ‘Ayers Rock’, koalas and dreamy images of the Sydney Opera House in a misty half-light. While Hungarian universities are gearing up for their first-ever courses in Australian Studies, a prestigious mega-conference on Australian culture is being held in the Swiss city of Bern. Anyone who is anyone seems to be there. One well-placed bomb would probably wipe out of the cream of Australia’s cultural gurus. After the conclusion of the conference the delegates disperse. Some head for London, some for New York, at least one hurries to what is still called Leningrad, and a few drift into Hungary—though one visaless unfortunate, gossip insists, got no farther than the border. On a gloriously sunny weekend, when the soft sunlight already betrays hints of the winter to come, I meet some of these people and become, temporarily, an amateur and somewhat bemused tourist guide.

  The weather remains enchanting throughout our rambles around the city. A gentle breeze has blown away the brown murk of the past few days. In the mellow autumn sunshine Budapest looks beguilingly beautiful. The river dances with light as it curves under the graceful bridges linking the hills of Buda and the flat land of Pest. The green dome of the Castle and the stone spire of St Matthew’s church are etched against a clear blue sky. Upstream, on the opposite bank, the extravagant fantasy of the Parliament glitters with flashes of gold as the sun touches its walls and turrets. The river is busy with steamers conveying Saturday morning pleasure-seekers to the islands and resorts of the Danube. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century houses of the Castle district are festive with window boxes and baskets of geraniums. Horse-drawn carriages clatter along the narrow cobbled streets.

  My companions are surprised and enchanted. We are standing on a terrace in front of the Castle, the panorama of city and river spread out below us. They had not realised that Budapest is such a beautiful place, nor that it was so ‘European’. I ask them what they had expected. They can’t put it into words exactly, but it was something much more grim, much more drab and somehow ‘eastern’. But this city, they insist, is like Paris—much more interesting than Vienna, for instance, where they had stayed for a few days on their way here from Bern. Vienna was, they confess, a disappointment—dull, dowdy and rather boring. But this, this is entirely different.

  Yet while their excitement and delight grow as we walk along the cobbled streets of the oldest part of the city down to the river bank, and then make our way across the handsome suspension bridge towards the flat, late nineteenth-century city of the opposite side, I am seized by a desire to show them the other city, my city, or at least the city that has become the focus of my private mythology about this nation and its people. I want to show them the place on the embankment where hundreds, perhaps thousands of people were machine-gunned by the Germans and their Hungarian henchmen in the terrible winter of 1944. I want to take them to the narrow, overcrowded streets behind this magnificent façade, places where the grim life of the Hungarian petite bourgeoisie in poky flats and rented rooms fed the obsessions and neuroses of this world. I want them to realise the implications of those pompous and bombastic monuments and statues that litter the city in praise of brutality and intolerance, some of the ugliest characteristics of humanity masquerading as nobility and patriotism. I want to translate for them the inscriptions on public buildings that commemorate a national pride which borders on paranoia. I want, in short, to make them see what I think of as the cancer of Mitteleuropa, which nothing, not two devastating wars nor forty years of totalitarian repression, could obliterate.

  The reasons for that compulsion are deeply buried within my own obsessions. This is the place of origin of the cultural luggage I carry around with me wherever I go, even though it is only here that I become conscious of its weight. I realise that a part of me wishes to respond to the undeniable attractiveness of this place—especially when seen in this sparkling sunshine, as a soothing breeze wafts warm air from the south. If there is some sort of genius loci to which we become attached during the first years of our life, something that forms the centre and the navel of all our experiences of the many worlds some of us must inhabit, then this city must provide that location for me. And I have to admit to myself that there is something about my relationship with Budapest which is different from and in a way much more intimate than my attitude to Sydney, a city I know far better, a city where I feel much more safe, comfortable and at ease. Yet, despite the allure of this city of water, hills and monuments, I find myself constantly driven in the opposite direction. For this is the city where most of my family were killed, or else where they started their journey to death. This is the setting for some twelve or fourteen months of panic and fear, of weeks spent in a dark cellar, of many weeks of life masquerading under an assumed name—as an eight-year-old well-drilled in the deceptive tale of a false identity for which my mother had paid with her last piece of jewellery. It was here that I was made to feel that people like me were pariahs, vermin to be exterminated, just because we did not share the physical and cultural characteristics of the high-cheekboned people who are now, in 1991, strolling around in the bright sunshine, enjoying their city in the fond belief that they are now free and masters of their own destinies.

  I come to realise more powerfully than ever how much this world has been poisoned for me, that for me the stench of death and hatred still hangs in the air, despite its having been cleansed by the processes of history, or at least that it has been filled with different hatreds and enmities. I also realise that throughout the days and weeks I have spent in this place, more or less on my own, observing yet detached, and even in the course of perfunctory conversations I have had with people (my cousin and her husband, the owners of the small hotel high up in the hills of Buda, the lady at the corner shop, a succession of manic taxi-drivers) I have kept this world suspiciously at arms’ length. Now, looking at these sights with people whose cultural preoccupations and obsessions are very different from mine, I find myself forced to admit the possibility that what I take to be an objective and verifiable truth—the indelible corruption and evil of societies such as this—may be no more than a projection of my own particular dilemma generated by history and personal experiences.

  I am driven, all the same, to impose that vision on my companions. We visit duly the spot on the embankment—unmarked, forgotten, ignored—wh
ere my mother and I narrowly escaped death. The image of that bleak winter day comes back with remarkable vividness. My mother pulls me by the hand as we slip out of the snakelike file into a dark alley, pressing against a doorway as the cortege passes by. Next we look at drab rows of apartment houses, and I speak about the mythology of hierarchy that governed, and probably still governs, these dwellings, the pecking-order based on whether your flat looks onto the street or the courtyard, whether it’s on one of the upper floors or closer to street-level, whether it may boast a balcony, and a thousand other snobbish gradations. I show my companions the streets and cafés where, in the days before the queues of people making their way to the river bank, it was fashionable to be seen, and those places which people like my parents would not frequent. I try to impress on them, in short, that the well-known political brutality of this world was merely an extreme manifestation of its stifling and iron-clad social stratification. I tell them about the way servants were treated, even by families who considered themselves humane and considerate, and I also tell them about the strutting arrogance of the gentry and aristocracy, and that if you wanted to attract the attention of the waiter in a restaurant you used to tap loudly on a glass with your knife.

  I suspect that I am growing somewhat tedious, as anyone pursuing an obsession is likely to produce tedium. My companions are attentive and thoughtful, however, perhaps because what I am saying has made some impression on them, or perhaps because I am revealing a facet of my personality that they have not met before. It is, nevertheless, when we return to the hills above the river, to the cobbled streets around the Castle that this sour litany seems to engage with something within their consciousness and their experience, something to which they are able to relate more directly than they were when listening to my catalogue of brutality, outrage and small-minded snobbery.