The Habsburg Cafe

by Andrew Riemer

  And then follows my own tiny discovery which, for me, could not have occurred elsewhere. Tibby Szabo, who grows more than a little interested in the self-confident market-researcher who has fetched up on his doorstep, has short, pointed teeth. White draws our attention to Tibby’s vampire-fangs very early in the story, and returns to them towards the end when Miss Slattery, disenchanted (‘pissed off’ would probably be a more accurate though less acceptable way of saying it) with her ‘demon lover’, notices that those short teeth are markedly discoloured and blunted. I had not noticed that detail before, or if I had, I had paid no attention to it. Now, with that alertness most of us experience when teaching—a slight nervousness that we might dry up or even (worst of all fates) be found out—I become very conscious of it. Once again I am filled with admiration for the cleverness and wit of a writer like White, who puts us teachers and critics, barnacles on the great craft of literature, very properly in our place.

  Until the wise statesmen meeting at Versailles in the aftermath of the Great War redrew the boundaries of Central and Eastern Europe, Szeged sat in the middle of the great granary of Hungary that stretched a long way to the south and, of more particular interest in the case of Miss Slattery and Mr Szabo, to the east. There beyond what is now the Romanian border lies a land rich in Hungarian folklore and traditions. It is where, according to some present-day ultra-nationalists who are beginning to mutter in an alarming way about regaining the ‘homeland’, the true Hungary is to be found—more so than in the pathetic rump that remains, and certainly much more so than in a cosmopolitan, polyglot Budapest—a place, according to some citizens of Szeged, such as the pot-bellied patrons of The Flower, still unaccountably full of Jews. In that world of a lost heritage, where Bartók collected the true Hungarian folk music (not that dreadful gypsy stuff that passes for Hungarian music everywhere else, including of course Budapest), the spiritual and national characteristics of the Magyars (the only true Hungarians) are preserved, even though the towns and villages, streams and forests now bear Romanian names.

  In the south-east of that countryside rich in Magyar nostalgia and national pride rise the Transylvanian Alps, homeland of my companion on the night of curried prawns and rice. There arose the dark legends of the blood-sucking vampire, of the living dead, the terrible and insatiable lord of a remote castle, protected by mighty chasms and cataracts, whose razor-sharp fangs constantly searched for the blood of nubile maidens. Ethnologists have, of course, offered rational explications for these wild stories: local history tells of a haemophiliac nobleman and of clumsy attempts at blood-transfusion. But the legend of the vampire—Dracula or Nosferatu—is of far greater imaginative strength. It speaks of fears and longing, of desires that are best not acknowledged yet are shared by most nations and cultures. The story of Dracula is one of the few great European myths to have emerged since classical times, yet Dracula speaks with a pronounced Hungarian accent—as did the actor Bela Lugosi, with his irresistible mixture of monster and courtly aristocrat.

  I point to the open classroom window on my right into the gathering dusk, in what I hope is the direction of Transylvania, and remind the young people of Szeged about Count Dracula—as much a part of their cultural heritage as those patriotic heroes who are this year gradually thawing out of the deep-freeze into which socialist ideology had placed them many years before these people were born. Their reaction, though, is curious: they seem not to know much about Dracula. I try Nosferatu and one of them, no doubt a film buff, says he remembers the silent film … was that set in Hungary? I cannot remember whether the setting in those flickering images I have only seen on SBS was at all specified, but I say yes, probably it was meant to be Hungary, or nearby, anyway. Nevertheless, they seem not very interested in Dracula, and I realise that perhaps the Count had been banished by the healthy ideology of the previous half-century or so, together with all those nationalist agitators who, despite all their bluster, failed to represent the noble ideals of the dictatorship of the proletariat. And the thought also strikes me that, while the memory of those nineteenth-century swashbucklers was kept alive in the imagination of most Hungarians through the long years of what everybody still refers to as socialism, poor Dracula had a stake driven through his heart, at least as far as this part of the country is concerned.

  That moment, I realise later in the evening, as I am heating some rather suspicious-looking packet soup on the stove in the spacious kitchen of the visitors’ flat, meant more to me than to my students. They, as things turned out, were much more interested in other elements in the Patrick White story, those which I take to be fairly predictable and unremarkable. They were fascinated by my description of a baked dinner with three veg which Miss Slattery cooks for her demon lover (and he ungallantly chucks out of the window). The manufacture of gravy seemed to them a magical process. Shelling prawns on the Esplanade in Manly led to a lively discussion of the nomenclature of crustaceans—of which there are several interesting varieties to be found in the Tisza, the river that flows through the city. The young grazier with the stockwhip and the suspiciously new elastic-sided boots who turns up at the ‘bohemian’ party which forms one of the climaxes of the tale proved to be someone they could understand: the Hungarian plains around Szeged have their own stockwhip-cracking cattlemen. But when Miss Slattery appropriates the stockwhip and begins plying the delighted Tibby’s naked thighs with it, their attitude changed. They became almost prim, embarrassed—they are, after all, still products (probably the last) of socialist educational attitudes of the sort that seem remarkably similar to the prudishness of the Australian moral right. Sexual perversions, bread-and-butter stuff to most Australian undergraduates, are still somewhat tricky topics in contemporary Hungary. That will probably change soon: the Hungarian edition of Playboy, concocted in Budapest and printed in Austria on high quality art-paper, is likely to see to that. At present, though, Pete and Tibby are still able to bring a blush to the cheeks of young Hungarians.

  And yet for me the centre of that late afternoon seminar remains Tibby and his vampire teeth. It seems to me entirely fitting and perhaps altogether inevitable that I should have learnt something about Patrick White in Hungary, a country almost wholly unfamiliar to me, yet one not without some influence on my life. The extent of what I learnt that afternoon was not very large. Tibby’s teeth will not add greatly to the sum of human knowledge about White’s art, even if they had remained undiscovered until my sojourn in Draculaland. Yet it was, personally, a discovery of considerable importance. It brought together, momentarily and provisionally, the two societies and countries that have formed me, and provided a brief integration of their opposed and contrary claims.

  A LITTLE TEA, A LITTLE CHAT

  The French lady, as everyone calls her, lives in the flat behind mine. She, too, is one of the lucky ones, enjoying visitor status, even though she has been in Szeged for years. I met her shortly after my arrival, as she was attempting to manoeuvre her Hungarian-registered Peugeot through the building’s vaulted gateway. We introduced ourselves and shook hands. Later in the day, I asked one of the academics about her. I learnt that she has been living in Hungary for many years and has worked as a French instructrice here for at least a decade. She teaches at the university, at one of the colleges and also takes classes in one of the city’s excellent secondary schools. A few days later, in the same gateway, we fell into conversation once more, and she invited me to visit her the following evening for a little tea and a little chat (as the English translation of her staccato French phrase would run).

  The day turns out to be hectic. There are calls to be made on vice-chancellors, on heads of departments. I am taken on an inspection tour of a multilingual secondary school. I also give a particularly gruelling class on Australian literary culture—the students (I begin to suspect) have had just about as much as they can take of photocopied examples of the literature of a distant and peculiar place. By six-thirty any notion of squeezing in an evening meal has long been aban
doned, and in any event last night’s fat-rich dinner is still a particularly vivid memory. I wonder though what ‘a little tea’ implies and, more worryingly, how we will manage to conduct a little chat. Madame claims neither to speak nor to understand Hungarian or English. My French is, to say the least, rusty. It is one thing to be able to read a newspaper or even a novel, quite another to follow the machine-gun speech of most French people, let alone trying to frame some appropriate form of reply.

  I am not therefore in the best of spirits as I ring the bell on her door. Perhaps she has forgotten the invitation and has gone out for the evening, I tell myself. That, however, does not seem very likely, for I can hear the sound of a television set. Madame opens the door, we shake hands once more, and I am immediately conscious of my first faux pas: I have come empty-handed. She is, however, all graciousness. She ushers me into a large, spotlessly clean though rather spartan living room, turning down the sound of the French satellite television channel which will continue to emit its soundless spectral dance of images throughout the evening—voluptuously enticing visions of a consumers’ paradise alternating with icons of brutality and terror. She invites me to sit in one of the sand-coloured armchairs placed around a low table, and thus we embark on several hours of halting, and for me exhausting, conversation.

  Very soon I begin to suspect that Madame is putting one over me, that she has me firmly trapped in a linguistic vice. She assumes that French is the only language we have in common. No, she never learnt English, and as far as Hungarian is concerned, well, it’s impossible—though I have been told that she understands and speaks more of the language than she is willing to let on. It is, therefore, up to me. I must, for the next two hours or so, attempt to make civilised conversation in a language I am able to read with some confidence but I am unable to speak with any ease or assurance. Madame offers me a drink, a glass of the glutinous Tokay everyone around here consumes with relish, and I am relieved to see that there is some food on an elegant glass platter—a few savoury bouchées purchased, no doubt, at the ‘Little Flower’, the café’s take-away annexe where, at most times of the day, long queues wait patiently to buy cakes, savouries and aspic-covered sandwiches.

  Then our little chat begins. It soon transpires that Madame had heard some gossip around the place that there would be someone staying for a few weeks in the front flat, someone to teach in the English Department. Am I from England or America? she asks. So far, at least linguistically, so good. I understand perfectly what she has said, and I am able to answer (with colloquial aplomb, I hope) ‘Non, non, l’Australie’. This provokes a torrent of sounds in which I am able, I think, to distinguish the words ‘surprise’ and ‘Australian’. I assume therefore that I need a) to reassure her that I have indeed come from Australia, b) to make it clear that I am here to teach Australian literature, and c) to explain why I have come to Szeged to do so. The demands of this exceed my command of French: from now until the end of the evening I shall be obliged to fall back on the cowardly phrase ‘Je ne sais pas comment dire’, which is probably incorrect yet comprehensible, as well as on extraordinarily complicated periphrases to get around the terrible gaps in my vocabulary and grammar.

  Madame’s interest is aroused by this intelligence. She is a woman of indeterminate age with sparkling eyes, an inquisitive aquiline nose, and possessing a style and elegance (despite the unfashionable clothes she is wearing) that contrast wonderfully with the utilitarian drabness of the people of Szeged. As she offers me one of the bouchées, it becomes clear that I am now required to deliver a disquisition on Australia. If I have understood her correctly, she has just told me that I am the first Australian she has ever met, that she knows nothing about the place, but has always been fascinated by exotic countries. After a brief excursus on—I think—her impressions of Marrakesh, she sits back in her comfortable armchair, takes a sip of sickly-sweet Tokay and indicates with unmistakable body-language that it is up to me now—I must sing for my supper, or at least tell her about Australie.

  The problem exercising me over the last few weeks, how to describe Australia for people who aren’t wildly anxious to find out about the place, now takes on a particularly pressing urgency. I must achieve that feat in the simplest terms possible, not because my hostess is incapable of dealing with sophisticated concepts, but because of my own linguistic shortcomings. I must offer her an account of Australia (whatever ‘Australia’ might be) in a primitive vocabulary, without nuances, with the constant possibility of being misunderstood, and without the command of grammar and idiom seemingly necessary for such a task. Remembering a phrase of one of Madame’s compatriots, I embark on a ‘degree zero account’ of Australia—simplicities, the bare bones of something complex and contradictory and something moreover about which I have my own complicating ambivalences. Added to those difficulties is the difficulty of perspective. In Australia, when generalising or pontificating about the world in which I have spent the greater part of my life, I am always conscious that no matter what authority (spurious or otherwise) I might have, I must always acknowledge that my roots or origins are not of that place, that my views and judgments are likely to be coloured by those early and formative years of my life which I spent here, in Hungary. Similarly, in Szeged, as I was standing earlier today in front of a class of undergraduates and tried to tell them something about Australian life and literature, I was very conscious of a possible confusion of perspective: that I, the ‘Australian’, belonged in some indefinable sense to this world, even though I had left it many years ago, and even though I was almost entirely ignorant about it, having only superficial impressions, forty-five-year-old memories and the remnants of a family mythology to represent it.

  In Madame’s living room I find yet another perspective, one that has its own ironies and possibilities of confusion. Knowing nothing about Australia except that it is very far away, somewhere down there at the bottom of the globe, she has no preconceptions about it or about the people inhabiting it. She knows, I think, that English is the common language, but that to her is no more surprising than the fact that French is spoken in Algeria. She obviously has no preconceptions of the sort that British people have whenever I am incautious enough to say to them that I am an Australian.

  As I begin my discourse on Australia in a language of adverbs and adjectives—it is arid, very large, very empty, very warm, an ancient continent—I become aware that she takes me for a ‘native’ inhabitant of the land. She probably thinks, I tell myself, that I come from a family that has lived there for centuries, perhaps millennia, for it is quite obvious that she knows nothing about the history of the South Pacific—even though I try to remind her about Tahiti and Nouméa, and the nuclear testing her government carries out (but I decide to say nothing about the Rainbow Warrior). La Pérouse, she remarks, is the name of a street and a famous restaurant in Paris—she didn’t realise they were named after an explorer. Should I tell her, I ask myself, that I am not what she calls an autochtone in any sense of the word? The opportunity passes because I have to spend some time figuring out the meaning of that word.

  The conversation becomes even more difficult as I have to pass from the physical world, where my repertoire of adverbs and adjectives with an occasional noun proves reasonably adequate, to an attempt to describe the social and political complexion of Australia. As I begin to tell her about Cook’s voyages, a glimmer of recognition plays across her eyes. Mais oui, she remembers now, she has read something about that—wasn’t he eaten by cannibals? As for the rest, surprise follows on surprise. Settled by the British in 1788? A penal colony? (Initially there was much difficulty with that—Devil’s Island became the way of overcoming that hurdle.) Was there really a gold rush? There are cities? How many, how large? As large as that? How interesting! At about that point my ability to communicate these bare facts, this skeleton of a description of Australia, breaks down. We are now talking about universities. She is mildly surprised that there should be so many, and that people from t
hose institutions should travel to other parts of the world to teach courses in literature—though I do sense in her voice some contempt for the academic standards of the country in which we are conducting this curious conversation.

  And then we reach an insurmountable obstacle. I am unable to say in my pidgin-French that our universities have lost in recent decades much of the autonomy they once possessed, and that they have passed into the control of a rigid central bureaucracy. That is too much for me: I try the shameful expedient of saying it loudly in English, but my hostess still fails to comprehend. Then I use the Hungarian equivalent of the phrase ‘centralised bureaucracy’ (very much in the air these days as the political and administrative structures of the country are in the process of being redrawn) and my hostess understands immediately and indeed speaks a few appropriate words in a broken, heavily-accented but nonetheless comprehensible Hungarian. Fatigue, frustration and hunger (for there is plenty of Tokay but precious few of the bouchées) have made me desperate. I pounce on this to express my surprise and delight that she speaks Hungarian, and begin elaborately to compliment her on her command of the language, hoping thereby to switch the conversation to a tongue much easier for me to manage than French, even though it too presents many hurdles and pitfalls.