Such an attitude is, of course, yet another manifestation of a basically colonial mentality, of a people and a nation who have for hundreds of years been the subjects or clients of foreign powers. Ever since the victory of the Turks at the battle of Mohács in 1526, Hungary has been a subject nation—first the Turks, followed by the Habsburgs, then, after the brief flurry of independence in 1919, the growing reliance on Germany, to be replaced, at the end of the Second World War, by the long years of Soviet rule. Whatever has happened in this country, whatever it has suffered or whatever glories its people have achieved have always flowed out of policies formulated elsewhere, decisions made by powerful men in a distant city or fortress. Naturally enough, therefore, reality is always imposed, never endemic, always a consequence of what they—whoever they may be—have decreed.
That sad realisation is confirmed by my host’s peroration. Lighting another excessively long (‘luxury length’) American cigarette—for no-one of his standing would smoke the terrible locally manufactured muck—he leans forward and says, in gravely confidential tones, that he is about to tell me what the solution should be. I have heard a number of these solutions in the past weeks: they are usually violent, ranging from public hangings to the dropping of a few nuclear devices on selected targets. I am, however, entirely unprepared for what I am about to hear: the solution to Hungary’s problems, he says, is union with Austria.
I am unable to disguise my astonishment. I could have expected such sentiments, perhaps, from my grandmother, the owner of the silver Ferris wheel, or even from my mother, who never lost her sentimental attachment to the dream of Kakania. But I had never imagined that a true son of Hungary, a gallant Magyar whose national mythology had long rested on the terrible exploitation of his people by the hated Habsburgs, should, on this cool morning in a little hotel on one of the hills of Buda, seriously advocate a turning back of the clock, a return to Hungary’s shameful state of subjection. Yet even as I am seized by astonishment and disbelief, I realise that I have been noticing all over the city in the course of these weeks signs and emblems of a nostalgia for that Kakanian past. Several bookshops, for instance, display Hungarian versions of those little books recounting the sad tales of Sissy, of Rudolf and his Marie, of Maximilian and Franz Ferdinand that grace the shelves of similar brightly lit establishments in Vienna.
My host has all the answers; he says that he’s thought a great deal about this, and he is convinced that his is the only viable solution. Hungarian energy, capacity for hard work and ingenuity need bolstering. The country would benefit from Austria’s wealth and present influence. Of course at first Austria would be dominant—that’s only to be expected given that Hungary has been retarded by all those years of socialism. But Austria’s day is past; it is decadent, and of course they all realise this in Austria, even though no-one will own up to it. That’s why they need Hungarian energy and ingenuity. In a few years, he’ll wager, the tables will be turned. Then Hungary will be on top, the most vital political and economic force in Central Europe. And now he says what he had been reluctant, it would seem, to say earlier. ‘That will confirm our destiny, put us on the map once and for all.’
SÉANCE
Half a century of war, occupation and communism have not diminished the exuberance of Budapest’s pastrycooks. At Gerbeaud’s, once the city’s most fashionable café, they still serve the baroque extravaganzas I remember from my childhood—towering cream slices, rich slabs of chocolate cake, sculptured petits fours and huge mounds of worm-like chestnut puree layered with sweetened cream. Even the room is much as I remember it. Perhaps the brocaded wallpaper has faded, the large mirrors are now spotted with flaws, and the chandeliers do not sparkle as they used to. Only the clientele has changed. Most of the customers are corpulent Germans spilling over their small gilt chairs or else members of the jeans-clad international back-packing society anxiously counting their money. The few natives of Budapest who feel that it is safe once more to appear in a place like this in furs, jewels and expensive clothes are lost in that polyglot crowd.
To see a more vital remnant of the café life of old Central Europe, it is necessary to visit a smaller though equally richly decorated establishment a kilometre or so away. This is the Artists’ Café, much patronised by singers, musicians, designers and directors from the Opera House across the road, on the other side of a broad avenue. Only one or two of the seething throng of tourists crowding into the square kilometre of the inner city penetrate this far. Here echoes of a former world may still be heard.
The best time to go is, once again, mid afternoon, before the fashionable early evening rush. The atmosphere is relaxed, even slightly somnolent. There are not many customers at this time, the waitresses are able to relax, leaning on the brightly polished counters, thinking no doubt about their aching feet. The room is almost empty; it is possible on most afternoons to find a table at the back, in front of the large mirror that covers almost the entire wall. In these cafés you should avoid, if at all possible, sitting at one of the tables in the middle of the room because from those tables you cannot survey the other customers with the required aplomb.
Most of the people are elderly or middle-aged; several are obviously regulars. The buzz of talk is subdued, discreet, not the babel of the other café—and the language is Hungarian. These people are the remnants of that fabled café-society which flourished in Central Europe during the early years of the century, and managed to hang on, in a significantly diminished form, until coming of Nazism. In those establishments many of the epoch-making ideas of that world were born. At a lesser level of cultural intensity, these cafés became the literary and artistic salons of the bourgeoisie, places where people could absorb the outlines or the surface of the world of ideas, of the intellect and of the arts. Here you could at least learn the names of up-and-coming painters, writers and composers, and get to know something about the works they were creating, even though you yourself might have found their books, paintings and string quartets entirely strange and daunting.
One couple, seated at the only table with a RESERVED sign on it, and placed in the most advantageous position to survey the room, has fascinated me each time I have come here. They are both elderly; they may or may not be married; they may, it strikes me, be brother and sister. She is intense, angular and chain-smoking. He seems more relaxed but also a trifle melancholy. She fidgets most of the time with the glass of water that is always served with coffee in these establishments. He spends time fussily adjusting his black beret. As with most members of this world, his attaché case, that great distinguisher of the professional classes, is placed on the floor beside him. From time to time, without any signal or bidding, a waitress brings them fresh coffee. They never seem to order any food.
From where I am sitting I cannot catch any of their conversation, for their talk, as of the other customers, is subdued—unlike the mega-decibel uproar at Gerbeaud’s. I begin, therefore, to spin fantasies about this elderly pair, whose appearance, demeanour, clothes and gestures evoke long-buried memories. How old are they? They seem to be in their late seventies; that would make them the same age as my mother if she were still alive. Had they known my parents? That question is not as absurd as it sounds; Budapest café-society was a small, self-contained community in which most people within an age group knew or at least knew about each other. It was always, and seems to remain, set apart. For much of the population of Hungary, such as the two pot-bellied entrepreneurs whose lamenting conversation I overheard in that café in Szeged, metropolitan and cosmopolitan people have always seemed somewhat alien, and often undesirable. They do not stand for that myth world of courage, manliness and intense national pride that the true Hungarian clings to. The broader horizons of the people who used to haunt such cafés, and still do so judging by the appearance of the pair at the reserved table, have always been seen as a threat by those suspicious of anything smacking of ‘internationalism’. You often hear people saying (with pride or with scathing anger,
depending on their point of view) that cultural, artistic and political life in Budapest is still in the hands of the Jews.
It is not impossible that my parents would have known these people. Looking at the lady I begin to fancy that I recognise something familiar in her, something fleeting, hidden and overlaid by the years. This is all absurd, I remind myself, yet somehow the conviction grows on me that there is something ineffably familiar about her appearance, or more precisely about her gestures. It strikes me that her hands, nervously fiddling with her glass of water or with the chain of cigarettes she lights one from the other, are those of an artist, a sculptor perhaps. I am seized by the conviction—absurd and fantastic though it probably is—that this is the sculptor, whose name I have long forgotten, who played an extraordinarily intense part in my mother’s life for a few months in 1944.
By that time my father had been taken off to a labour camp and my mother and I were living—hiding would be a more appropriate term—in one of those gloomy blocks of flats that were constructed everywhere in this city in the last years of the nineteenth century. Almost every night we hurried down to the cellar, carrying rugs, pillows, water and bandages, as the air-raid sirens screamed their warning. In between raids we stayed indoors, making hurried forays into the street to pick up what little food remained in a world about to collapse into ruin.
One of the people living in that block of flats was a sculptor, a widow, an intense, chain-smoking woman whose hands, my mother said, were those of a true artist. I was told that she was very famous. Had it not been for this terrible war, her works would have been exhibited in New York—the ultimate accolade according to my mother’s cultural horizons. She possessed, besides, other gifts. She was psychic. She could summon spirits from the dead who would, at her command, answer the hushed questions on everyone’s lips: ‘When will it end? Will we survive?’ As the days of that terrible year grew shorter and shorter, as there were more and more hours of darkness before the inevitable 10.00 p.m. air raid, several women gathered around a spindly-legged table, hands spread out and touching each other, as the sculptor entered into her trance.
After a while the muscles of her face would stiffen. Soon her body seemed wholly rigid. She would begin to sway slightly, back and forth, back and forth, and in a voice that seemed to echo with the chill of the grave (or so my mother insisted), she would summon spirits to come to her. And mostly they came. Very soon the table would begin to move and shake, and then to obey her command to tap once if any spirit were present, twice if there were none. Crouched on the floor in a corner of the darkened room, both enthralled and terrified, it did not occur to me to question how absence could tap at all, let alone twice.
She had a varied menagerie of shades, who obligingly tapped once, spelt out their names, and conversed with her (in Hungarian) by means of the tapping alphabet—one tap was A, two taps B, three C … Marie Antoinette was the most troublesome, refusing after a while to tap nicely, often flying into tantrums, hurling the table about and, on one spectacular occasion, shattering several of the legs. Fra Angelico was much more serene and gave the dates of his birth and death correctly—someone had an encyclopaedia that confirmed this. The most helpful of the spirits was someone called Claudius, not the Emperor, but an official, according to his account, of the Roman colony of Aquincum on the outskirts of modern Budapest. He proved a useful source of information, though his answers were in almost every instance riddling, like those of the Sphinx.
In later years, during our life in Australia, my mother spoke scathingly about those wartime seances. The sculptor was probably a fraud, she would say—well, if not a fraud she was probably pushing the table subconsciously, and you’d expect her to know Fra Angelico’s dates, wouldn’t you? But that was in Australia, a dry and matter-of-fact world. In Hungary during those terrible and hectic days of death and fear she was eager for those nightly seances, for gleaning whatever illumination she might gain from Claudius’ cryptic taps, or for that matter from Marie Antoinette’s tantrums. Ghosts and reven-ants are somehow appropriate to Europe; they seem faintly absurd in the harsh glare of the southern sun. I cannot imagine middle-class Australian women sitting intently around a slender table asking agonised question—if seances are held in Australia, the questions are most likely to be concerned with the domestic arrangements of the other place. Perhaps you need to have experienced terrible atrocities and outrages before ghosts will come. The Aborigines, who have had their own share of atrocities to endure, are perhaps the only Australians to live in the world of the spirits.
As I look at the elderly couple at the table reserved for them in a strategic corner of this quiet café, I am both amused and slightly embarrassed. Yet I cannot put out of my mind that sculptor of a half a century ago, or those seances, or yet the differences between the two worlds in which I have lived. It is absurd to imagine that this elderly lady, lighting another cigarette from a dying butt—an unladylike but appropriately bohemian habit, surely—might be that psychic sculptor, yet there are many absurdities in our everyday lives. Reason and the intellect are the enemies, at times, of truth, no matter how much we might wish to put our trust in them. And then I am amazed to see the lady place her hands on the marble top of the table and spread out her fingers, with thumbs touching each other, as she is explaining something to her companion. Both laugh and she lifts her right hand to retrieve the cigarette hanging from her lips. I remember, simultaneously, that the sculptor was much older than my mother, and that if this lady were indeed she, she would probably be very close to her hundredth birthday.
MUSEUM
The Museum of Jewish History is housed in an annexe of the main synagogue in Budapest. While the synagogue itself is largely empty, the museum is filled with people. The exhibits are commonplace enough, reminding me, disconcertingly, of those museums of colonial life you come across in places like Berrima and Beechworth. The reason for that seems to be the faint air of incongruity hovering over the objects exhibited in the glass cases scattered around several rooms of the museum. They reveal a crossing of two traditions and societies. Here is a Meissen plate, all gilt and decorative curlicues, redolent of the prim proprieties of the Central-European bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century. Yet the figures depicted on it, crinolined ladies and frock-coated gentlemen, are seated around the Friday night Seder table. It is an odd objet d’art, as odd as those pieces of English china manufactured for rich ladies and gentlemen in the colony of New South Wales with representations of emus and kangaroos, and of idealised scenes of life in Australia Felix. Many of the other exhibits are equally curious objects. Groups of visitors, mostly elderly, inspect them with a mixture of reverence and boredom. At one end of the large central room a noisy guide hectors his charges in a guttural language which is probably Hebrew.
Tucked away almost apologetically at one end of the museum is a small room illuminated by several spotlights trained on a series of large, unframed photographs fixed to austere black walls. They present, as a demonic iconostasis, the story of the persecution of the Jews of Budapest. You notice odd things: that the official decree of 1944 establishing, for the first time in the history of the city, a ghetto—a quadrangle of streets within which all Jews had to live—was poorly, almost amateurishly typed on a machine very much in need of a fresh ribbon. It looks quaint, an almost harmless document, despite its sinister message. The grainy photographs also reveal curious paradoxes: a jaunty, dandified man, hat worn at a rakish angle, stands beside an advertisement for salami; the yellow star is prominent on the lapel of his well-cut topcoat. A group of men, some little more than children, others elderly, almost decrepit, pose for a photograph at a forced labour camp. Who took the photograph? you begin to wonder as you notice that on the whole the group looks cheerful enough. Was it one of their number who had somehow contrived to bring a camera with him, or was it (as is much more likely) one of their captors, recording for eternity this example of the racial cleansing of gallant Hungary?
Other photograp
hs present more terrible images. One depicts a large group of women, suitcases and bundles beside them, massed in a railway yard, on their way to Auschwitz no doubt. Did they know what was in store for them? Scanning the picture for any sign of alarm or fear on these faces proves futile; their features are hardly to be distinguished, let alone any sign of emotion. Were they told that they were on their way to some pleasant, healthy place where they might make a new life for themselves? In one image, an elderly lady, a country-woman judging by the kerchief tied round her head—a poignant contrast to the befurred matriarch in a nearby photograph—stares at the camera in apparent panic. Was that expression habitual? Was that the way she always looked at a perplexing world? Or did she know that she was looking at death?
The last image, as you leave this little room saturated with the atmosphere of cruelty and death, is the most terrible. It shows a mass of people pressing against a lone, impassive figure. His hands are tied in front of him as he is being fastened to a stake. The photograph was taken during the last moments in the life of a man called Szálasi, the leader of the puppet régime established by the Germans in 1944, who was largely responsible for the mass extermination of Hungarian Jews in the last months of that terrible year. I do not know why this image of a brutal and degenerate man about to face the firing squad should be even more disturbing than the other images of death placed around the walls of this blackened room. If anyone deserved to die, it was surely this man, not the yellow-starred boulevardier with his rakish hat, nor the kerchiefed countrywoman with her expression of fear and puzzlement. But that, of course, is the point. The cancer of this world is the seemingly inescapable and endemic cycle of outrage and revenge, which has continued unabated since the day that that bully and henchman, whom the rest of the world and perhaps even Hungarians themselves have long ago forgotten, was tied to a stake and shot to death.
The Habsburg Cafe Page 25
