The Habsburg Cafe

by Andrew Riemer

  Szeged’s thriving Jewish population was almost entirely wiped out in the course of the war, all that remained was this vast and crumbling synagogue, a memorial to a lost time and tradition. Recently the interior of the building has been subjected to a vigorous programme of restoration. This ‘eclectic’ interior (the word comes from the official descriptions of the edifice) is once again resplendent with gilt and sky-blue, with inspirational texts painted on the walls in Hebrew and in Hungarian—in the latter case in elaborate gothic lettering. Chandeliers hang above the ample space of this imposing building, used nowadays mostly for concerts and cultural activities.

  A handful of practising Jews remains in the town, far too few to be anything other than lost souls in this huge building. They receive visitors with undisguised enthusiasm, immediately extracting an entrance-fee of ten Hungarian forints (the equivalent of twenty cents) for which they will give you a ticket with the quip that it’s the cheapest movie ticket in town. They usher you into the synagogue, and before you have had time to take in all the gilt and blue, all the brass and marble, they will begin to enumerate, in a singsong voice, the cost of restoring the building to its former magnificence. So many millions for the roof, so many for the floor; so much for the gold lettering and for the hangings, and we haven’t even started yet—we need many millions for the glass, and many more to make the structure sound. It is all very realistic and practical. But as the bent little man who has taken charge of us continues his fiscal litany, you cannot but begin to entertain disturbing suspicions about racial stereotypes—perhaps Jews are as obsessed with wealth and money as their detractors claim them to be.

  Whatever the reason, this litany of restoration produces embarrassment in all of us, except in our guide, on whose lips I see the faintest of smiles as she translates some of the old man’s monologue. Then something extraordinary occurs. The old man breaks off his account of the vast sums spent on the refurbishment of this place of worship and breaks into a long sinuous chant. His voice is unsteady and cracked, yet for all its imperfections, his chant pulses with echoes of a world none of us has experienced—a world of worship, belief, a sense of community with a people in its joys as well as in its sufferings, a world richer and perhaps more satisfying than our humdrum existence. And I begin to sense that despite the shabbiness of this old man, despite his unattractive singsong accounts of vast sums of money, his life may be fuller, more worthwhile and certainly closer to God than mine.

  We are mercifully saved from further exposure to the glories of the synagogue of Szeged by the clock. It is time to leave. There will be no opportunity to search for the Serbian Orthodox church. Our guide seems to realise this, and looks not a little pleased.

  FLOWERCOFFEE

  When he was a young man in the 1920s, my father lived for a time in Aachen, Charlemagne’s city. He boarded en pension with the family of a lawyer, an upright and inordinately proud gentleman who was mortified because the economic chaos Germany experienced in those postwar years obliged him to take in a lodger. The lawyer’s teenage daughter was turned out of her pink-and-white room—she was made to sleep on a trundle in her parents’ bedchamber—to accommodate the young student from Budapest.

  My father’s year or eighteen months in Aachen supplied him with a fund of anecdotes about life in those hectic times. He used to tell the tale of his career as a smuggler. He would slip over the Dutch border with a friend, to return with a couple of blocks of cheese for use as currency in the complicated barter economy that emerged in that world of galactic inflation. That was also the time when his fascination with opera led him to travel all night to a distant city—Dresden or Leipzig, even Munich on one or two occasions—to stand through a long performance, returning to Aachen by another endless night journey in third class. He also had a mild flirtation with the lawyer’s daughter, the refugee from the pink-and-white room, which her parents condoned because it was kept well within the rigid bounds of propriety.

  He often spoke about the shortages and privations—the lack of fuel and food but especially of coffee, Central Europe’s essential drug of addiction. All sorts of substitutes for those unobtainable beans were tried by the ingenious Germans, but they were, according to his account, uniformly vile. From time to time you could get hold of some real coffee, or something approximating to it at any rate. Those were red-letter days. So precious was the substance, however, that it was made into a very watery, weak brew, so weak indeed that you could clearly see the flower painted on the bottom of your cup. It was called Blümchenkaffee—flowercoffee—as a sardonic commemoration of its weakness.

  The history of Central Europe in the last two hundred years or more is marked by wild fluctuations in the consumption of coffee—vast quantities of thickly glutinous ‘espresso’ in good times, Blümchenkaffee in the bad. In 1942 and 1943, when the war was beginning to encroach on Hungary, my parents spent more and more time scouring Budapest in search of a few hundred grammes of the precious beans. The last batch they were able to purchase consisted of unroasted green beans—our flat was filled for days with the pungent aroma of coffee roasted in a pan on the kitchen stove.

  Now, almost fifty years later, the citizens of Hungary are still conscious of their deprivation. Coffee is plentiful, but it is mostly poor stuff. To have real coffee, people tell you, you must go to Austria. And, of course, every visitor brings some back, even though the cost is crippling. But then coffee is the spiritual staple of Central European life. Though café-life involves much more than eating or the consumption of coffee, coffee is nevertheless the vital ritual object in its ceremonies. It lubricates the conversation and the gears with which social relationships are made to work. You cannot sit in a café without a cup of coffee in front of you, for it establishes and validates your membership of a privileged society. A foreigner ordering tea in a Hungarian café commits a faux pas of considerable gravity.

  Szeged’s chief café is called Virág, The Flower. The coffee served under crystal lights in its ample, flock-papered rooms is probably a far cry from the watery flowercoffee of my father’s youth. It is, nevertheless, dreadful stuff—you suspect that finely ground, powdery coffee has had steam forced through it any number of times in the café’s porcelain-clad (and, of course, flower-embellished) espresso machine. Gossip insists that if you go to the café shortly after it opens in the morning you might, if lucky, get a cup out of the first or second infusion. As the day wears on, so the quality of the coffee served in the café’s faded rooms, or on the ample terrace in fine weather, deteriorates.

  Like so much else in this city, the place seems too large for the patrons it is able to attract, or indeed for a town of this size. Like the vast Votive Church, or the blue-and-gold synagogue, or indeed the National Theatre with its tiers of boxes rising to a domed ceiling, the scale of this café speaks of Szeged’s former pride as an important outpost of Kakanian pomp. When the city commanded the rich agricultural and pastoral lands that now lie in Serbia and Romania, the café, the cathedral, the theatre and perhaps even the synagogue must have played essential roles in the public rituals, embracings and exclusions that gave substance to that world. The complex reticulations of a heterogeneous society no doubt met and diverged, to refashion themselves into other meetings and divergences, in places such as this.

  Sitting in the nearly empty front ‘salon’ at that hour of the afternoon when the cafés of Budapest are buzzing and crowded, I cannot help trying to visualise the clientele for which this place had been designed. They must have been very different from the few people here this afternoon—jeans-clad students, a harassed mother with two tots whose faces are covered with custard, an elderly couple, ethnic Hungarians on a visit from Serbia, converting their worthless dinars into somewhat less worthless forints, and at the table next to mine two squat middle-aged men in loud shirts displaying quantities of gold in the shape of chains, bracelets and signet-rings.

  I try to imagine how this place would have looked around the turn of the century, at t
he time when this café together with the rest of the flood-devastated city was rebuilt, refurbished and converted into an embodiment of the Kakanian good life. No doubt its patrons would have been more elegantly and appropriately dressed, observing with provincial dedication the elaborate sartorial rules that governed so many aspects of life in this part of the world. Landowners and their wives, in town for business or pleasure, would have displayed the insignia of their caste—the women in clothes purchased perhaps in Budapest, but more likely in Vienna, the men decked out in the carefully chosen rusticity of tweed and loden-cloth.

  There would have been members of the city’s bourgeois upper-crust—magistrates and lawyers, highly placed medical specialists, perhaps even a respected writer or two. Their manners would have been more refined than those of the landowners and their wives, yet lacking that aristocratic panache and nonchalance the rural gentry sought so hard to emulate with their precisely calculated coarseness of manner. There would have been children of course, demure schoolgirls and well-behaved boys (their hair neatly brushed, parted and glued) dressed in their sailor suits. There might also have been one or two raffish characters, the local merry widow and the odd rake, whom the well-bred and caste-conscious patrons would have assiduously ignored in the rituals of greeting and acknowledgment that characterised the mysteries of social life.

  Would the Jews of Szeged have set foot inside this place, or was Szeged one of those places where the sporadic antisemitism of Kakania—at times fierce, as in Vienna, but mostly benign, as in Budapest at the height of its prosperity—established impenetrable barriers? That question is unanswerable, for an answer would depend on an intimate knowledge of the social networks of the city’s past. It would be nice to imagine that this large provincial café at what was then the geographic and perhaps spiritual heart of Kakania, the meeting place of many of the peoples, races, faiths and languages that populated that complicated realm, would have been a focus where rivalries and enmities came together to be neutralised and reconciled, even if only within its elaborately papered walls. I would like to believe that here, in my grandparents’ time, Hungarians and Austrians, Jews, Catholics and Protestants, even perhaps the bourgeoisie and the gentry might have discovered something of that social harmony that the rulers of Kakania sought to inculcate among their often unruly subjects.

  That harmony was more a matter of dreams and aspirations than of substantial reality. Kakania may never have been anything other than a pious dream, as its nickname, a scurrilous comment, clearly suggests. Its ideals were supported by hypocrisy, pretence and snobbery, a self-satisfied smugness that contaminated most elements of social life. Nevertheless, the image I have conjured (or manufactured) of this café of the Habsburg world at the turn of the century—the discreet clinking of good china and heavy silver, the buzz of conversation, the greetings, smiles and nods—is alluring, even irresistible. I want to believe that such a golden world did exist, that it did contain a possibility of achieving at least a partial reconciliation of its tensions and rivalries. I would like to imagine that its destruction came from forces outside its cosy and comfortable ordinariness, that the beguiling aroma of coffee and vanilla carried no trace of the noxious fumes that spread over this continent. Yet I know that the symbol or exemplar of that evil grew up in the pleasant city of Linz, another site, some five hundred kilometers to the west, of the Kakanian dream which also had, no doubt, its own characteristic Habsburg café. And I also know that these places in Linz and Szeged, and in the other towns and cities of the realm, overheard terrible sentiments and hatreds expressed over cups of thick rich coffee, or the weaker brew of the days of hardship.

  My neighbours, the gold-embellished citizens of Szeged, are loud in their complaint about the revolting quality of the coffee these days. What is happening to the world? they ask. OK, so socialism’s dead, but are things any better? Both are convinced that life is harder than it used to be. Under the old régime you could make a bit of money out of all sorts of things—but now, well now prices are going up and up, it’s almost impossible to do business and show a profit. Look at the price of petrol, it’s disgraceful! And besides, there are all those Romanian refugees to house and feed. Neither knows where it will all end.

  The younger of the two, resplendent in a cerise shirt, lifts a nicotine-stained finger and tells his companion that he knows why Hungary is in such a sorry state. It’s simple, he says, Hungary’s been betrayed once again, just as she has been in the past. It was all very well for the Americans to promise the earth once it seemed likely that the Russians would leave. But did they do anything? Of course they didn’t. And why? Well, he tells the other, it’s simple—it’s all those crooks in Budapest, especially the Jews: they’re creaming off all the benefits for themselves. Of course there’s money there. Why only last week he had to go up for the day—he couldn’t believe his eyes: the wealth, the ostentation. Here in Szeged, he continues, Hungarians, the truest of true Hungarians, are deprived, struggling to make ends meet, exploited and, yes, betrayed again. And then he begins to tell his friend about a café in Budapest—full of Jews of course—where you can get coffee the likes of which he hadn’t seen for years and years. Rich, thick, smelling like real coffee, not the muck that the gallant and plucky Hungarians of Szeged are forced to endure.

  THE VAMPIRE’S TEETH

  A few kilometres to the south of Szeged lies Yugoslavia, or more accurately perhaps Serbia, the most aggressive or the most exploited (depending on your point of view and allegiances) member of what is still in 1991, a federation. The Romanian border is a short distance to the east—the citizens of that other troubled country often spill across the Hungarian frontier looking for shelter, food and employment. This is an unlikely place for a discovery about Australian literature, yet it happens precisely here, where three countries meet, where (people will tell you) Europe comes to an end, merging with the lands of the Slavs and other denizens of the east.

  This is not a major discovery; it is more like a footnote or a gloss on a minor text. It may indeed be the case that it had already been noticed, that the critic who had picked up the allusion had not thought it worthwhile to record such a trivial observation—or else had buried it somewhere in an essay or a critical book I have not read. The discovery provides, nevertheless, a moment of curious poignancy, tinged with irony. It would seem that the fates had decreed that I must come back to the country of my birth, though to a city I had never visited before, to understand a conceit in a minor jeu d’esprit of a great writer.

  We are in a seminar room on a late afternoon in October. Though it is supposed to be autumn, the weather is still warm, the students are still clad in their international summer uniform—jeans, tee-shirts, sneakers. Sunlight slants through the open windows; a butterfly, surely the last of the season, flutters past, lifted by a surge of warm air. Even the grey institutional buildings across the courtyard manage to look pleasant in the golden light of evening. There is an atmosphere of somnolence—not at all unusual in such circumstances—a furtive watching of the clock by teacher and taught alike. And I, half choking from the dust of eastern-bloc chalk that crumbles between your fingers and sends clouds of white powder everywhere, grow increasingly conscious of the neat symmetry and irony of things.

  It is a curious, somewhat unsettling feeling to be negotiating two cultures, two languages, two very different countries: a landlocked bit of Central or Eastern Europe (again it depends on which point of view you opt for) and that vast arid continent in the southern hemisphere where you are obliged to fly for hours on end over desert and ocean whenever you set out for a place like Szeged. I am a juggler, an illusionist. Most of the proceedings have to be conducted in English, for my rudimentary command of Hungarian does not extend to conceptual or literary terminology. Yet occasionally, with the showmanship that’s an essential though often unacknowledged part of the art of teaching, it proves very effective to introduce the odd word in Hungarian, ostensibly to elucidate the meaning of an expression,
or to offer an analogy, but fundamentally to provide a moment of surprise, a little nudge to make people pay attention, to stop them sinking into late-afternoon lassitude.

  On this sunny afternoon, about half-way through a three-week course on Australian literature for students whose knowledge of Australia does not extend beyond Kylie Minogue, AC/DC, koalas and kangaroos (and one of them had seen Crocodile Dundee), we are reading Patrick White’s ‘Miss Slattery and her Demon Lover’—hardly an adequate introduction to White, but a nice way of bringing Australia and Hungary together, even if only contingently, through White’s venomous settling of scores with a couple of expatriate Hungarians he had known in Sydney. Miss Slattery, (‘Pete’, which is short, according to her, for Dimity) a full-blooded no-nonsense Australian girl falls into the clutches of Tibby Szabo, a squat, hirsute Hungarian inhabitant of a good Sydney address with a stunning view of the Harbour, the proud owner of deeply piled wall-to-wall, and (most importantly perhaps) of an obscene mirror fastened to the ceiling above his ample double bed.

  One of White’s jokes raises more of a laugh from these students than it would from readers of almost any other nationality. Why, Miss Slattery asks, is the gentleman (who will presently become her lover) called Mr Szabo and not Mr Tibor since the name above the bell says clearly ‘Szabo Tibor’. These students know why—because, as Tibby tells the long-limbed market-researcher, ‘In Hoongary ze nimes are beck to front’. That moment of mediation, when my audience and I have privileged access to two modes of nomenclature, achieves little epiphanies, explanations, clarifications. It is a way of bringing them to a very small understanding of an alien society through this comedy of the meeting of ‘old’ and ‘new’ Australia at the front door of an expensive home unit. I tell them about the social topography of Sydney in the sixties, about the conspicuous way of life led by many wealthy Hungarians in the Eastern Suburbs, about the espresso-bars of Double Bay and Bondi Junction (‘Please, what does junction mean?’), and of the way these people often spoke broken English with an overlay of broad Australian—unlike the students in Szeged (I am careful not to add) whose excellent English is delivered in an American monotone only slightly tarnished by the characteristic open vowels and the absence of accentuation of Hungarian-speaking people. I also tell them about the social and financial éclat of a splendid water view.