The Habsburg Cafe

by Andrew Riemer

  Is that image a scrap, a remnant of an early experience, an all but forgotten memory of one of our visits to our Sopron relatives? Or is it, in a way even more contingent and remote, an assembly of bits of that mythology which have coalesced for me, its recipient, into this arbitrary, perhaps totally insignificant impression? I have no means of resolving that puzzle—my cousin knows even less about our family’s life in this town than I do; her mother was clearly not a myth maker. Yet the source of the image, impression or sensation is less important than its effect or consequences. It provides a focus for the almost infinite, confusing and contradictory pressures and experiences of life. It becomes a still centre, something to which the emotions and the sensibility—though rarely the intellect—may return to find a point of reference or of departure.

  Most people, it seems to me, have such a centre, focus or still point to which they instinctively return. For many it is, no doubt, more substantial, intellectually and even spiritually more respectable than this essentially gimcrack illusion. For some a religious sense or conviction might provide such a focus; for others patriotism or deeply-etched ethnic allegiances. It may be my personal misfortune that the centre of my imagination—something that persists like a steady beat or the unvaried pattern of a figured bass—should be located in something as insubstantial and trivial as these scraps of mythology. Yet as I have been approaching the site of that myth world—even without realising that it was to be reached—I have been anticipating (I realise now as my acquaintance’s car is making for the centre of the town) the moment of integration. The discrete, fragmentary impressions, experiences, observations and emotions which began when SQ24 was screaming towards Vienna airport always carried that shadow or afterimage: the cobbled street leading to a modest café of the old Habsburg world.

  I am all too aware of the risks inherent in coming face to face with a myth cherished for many years under different skies. A year ago, after that hectic winter visit to Budapest, I had tried to break my return journey to Vienna for a night’s stay here in Sopron. It could not be done: the inns were full, there was no room for the sentimental pilgrim. I left Hungary with the knowledge that I had not penetrated to the deepest level of nostalgia—and also of hostility—that governed my rediscovery, after almost half a century, of the world that had bred me. Sopron was to remain a romantic memory, a hazy image of a fabled place guarded by its massive watchtower; it was not to be tarnished by the rust of experience.

  The failure to achieve that goal left, nevertheless, a sense of dissatisfaction and even frustration. One part of my personality urged me to lay those ghosts—no matter how kindly or seductive they might be. The other part, though, insisted that illusions should not be shattered: and for that reason I made no attempt, in the course of these last weeks, which had been taken up with all sorts of trivial or mundane pursuits, to do what it would have been entirely possible to do—to catch a train and spend a day in Sopron. And now, with the intervention of fate or chance, it is absolutely clear that my steps were guided, that everything seems to have conspired to bring me back, in this year of the palindrome, to this centre, focus or perhaps shrine of an eccentric mythology.

  The centre of the town is obviously close. The buildings are more substantial, there are many more shops, and they are no longer anonymous. There is, besides, quite heavy traffic jamming the streets. Everything looks drab and commonplace. The buildings are mostly three storeys high, uniformly covered in grey stucco and dotted with small square windows. The people shuffling along the footpath are squat, dumpy and elderly. They are muffled in shapeless coats to keep out the biting wind. The women’s heads are wrapped in scarves; the men wear little peaked caps, some with flaps turned down over the ears. One or two people are fidgeting with small collapsible umbrellas, for a light drizzle has begun to fall.

  My companion seems to know his way around the town. We make a right-hand turn into a narrow passage, broad enough for his elderly Saab to pass through without scraping the walls rising on either side. The alley ends in a large irregularly shaped open space. Its centre is filled with angle-parked cars, nose to nose like snarling dogs. We find an empty space and, locking the car securely for it contains my luggage, we make for the footpath on the long side of this space. The pavement is crowded. Groups of people stand outside the line of shops inspecting the merchandise displayed on racks and in containers placed untidily on the footpath. Some of the shopkeepers are busily removing racks and containers to protect their goods from the steady, sleety drizzle. Most of the signs, I notice, are in German.

  We stand on the footpath discussing what to do. It is too early for lunch, my companion says, though we shouldn’t delay too long because eating places get very crowded in Sopron—it’s all those Austrians coming over the border, he sneers, looking for what they reckon are bargains. I have reached the stage of mild disillusionment where I do not much care what we do. Sopron, as I had expected, is just another small Central European town looking drab under a steely sky. Then, turning towards the other side of this open space—probably an occasional market, it occurs to me—I catch sight of, peeping over the roof tiles of the buildings opposite, the top of a characteristically Austrian steeple: not a church, it comes to me with a rush, but the watchtower, my one clear memory of this otherwise unfamiliar place.

  That over there is the old town, my companion remarks as we begin to cross this large space, dodging puddles and the occasional manic car bearing down on us. We walk through a narrow alley and, suddenly, we are confronted by another world. Admittedly it looks just as drab and decrepit as the rest of this town, indeed as most of this sad country that has suffered so much neglect and destruction. Stucco peels from the walls of many buildings. The cobbled streets are a series of potholes. Some of the sturdy bars protecting ground-floor windows are bent, many have rusted away. Several of the wooden slats in the massive gate of one building are missing; they have been replaced by chicken wire. Nevertheless, I am able to impose on this image of decrepitude something of the memory pattern I have been nurturing (often without being aware of it) throughout much of my life.

  As we wander through a network of cobbled streets and lanes, always skirting yet not coming upon the tower that dominates this part of the town, I begin to recognise, on crumbling facades, symbols and images of that dream world. A nearly illegible Latin inscription commemorates an eighteenth-century benefactor. A dirty marble plaque, yellow where water from a leaking gutter splashes on it, marks the house where a famous son of Sopron used to dwell. One house displays, more or less intact, a row of plaster medallions beneath its eaves, each depicting a smiling cherub. The sharp angle where two streets meet is occupied by the apse of an ancient church. No doubt it once stood detached in its own grounds; now, however, and probably since the seventeenth century, it is inextricably joined to the dwelling houses of those two streets.

  Coming round a corner not far from that truncated church, we find a small square dominated by a tall, somewhat off-centre monument, a miniature version of the huge plague columns that rise in the ceremonial spaces of Austrian towns. One side of the square is occupied by a four-storey building painted in an unpleasant shade of blue-green. A sickly potted rubber-plant is visible on the sill of a first-floor window. A very clean, very white enamel plate beside the entrance announces, in bold black lettering, that this is the convent and school of the Ursuline order.

  Walking past the convent, we turn another corner, and find ourselves in St George Street. Here, at Number 11 according to my cousin, was the poky flat where my mother and her family led a miserable life of destitution. The building is surprisingly large: its windows rise in four levels in strict classical order of size and decoration. The façade is freshly plastered and partly painted. A handsome arched gateway is secured by a well-polished slatted door. A notice fixed to one of its wings, and protected by a sheet of plastic, advises that the restoration of 11 St George Street will be completed by early 1992, when these self-contained luxury flats, each
with its lock-up garage at the rear, will be offered for sale.

  Two or three cobbled lanes cast into dark shadows, but illuminated by handsome converted gaslights which have been turned on in the early afternoon gloom, take us to another, quite large space lined with public buildings. And there in front of us is the tower, just as I remember it, at its base a squat, rough-hewn construction but rising to a graceful baroque steeple. A tunnel-like passage runs through its cumbersome base—the tower’s Roman foundations, I remember being told by my mother half a century ago on the occasion of one of our visits to Sopron.

  Here, therefore, is the moment of integration, the re-entry into mythology. This is the watchtower and this space, where groups of people are craning their necks to inspect the steeple, is no doubt where the town was scandalised by my mother’s disgraceful antics on a motorbike. Beneath the present-day appearance of this drab and neglected town, more dreary-looking, in all probability, because of the lowering winter sky, I can feel—in a mild though by no means unpleasant way—a tenuous connection with the past. I experience an entirely irrational sense that somehow or other I belong here, in a way that I do not quite belong in Budapest, that city of terrible memories, or Vienna, despite its allure, or even Sydney, the familiar place I now fondly call my home. Looking around this open space in front of the massive tower, where the cobblestones once clattered under the wheels of my father’s motorbike, I am able to understand how this little Habsburg town, which has managed to retain much of its essence despite the vicissitudes of time and history, somehow concentrates the symbols of a way of life that I can only identify by the mock-serious name of Kakania—symbols I have encountered, though dispersed and at times almost obliterated, in the cities and towns of this world.

  There is no illumination, no sense of a peace passing all understanding as this goal is achieved. There is, however, a mildly pleasant sense of satisfaction—despite aching eyes, running nose and fiery throat—that the myth world which has coloured so much of my imagination in the course of my life does have at least some foundation, that it is not entirely the product of misplaced longings and dissatisfaction. I have not come upon those streets meeting under a burning gaslight, nor seen the rectangle of light illuminating a patch of cobblestones. I have not found the Habsburg café depicted on my private iconostasis. But I have found the elements of that vision scattered throughout the square kilometre of this little town that nestles so comfortably around its watchtower.

  It is well after two, time to look for a meal, my acquaintance says—the restaurants should be emptying by now. Then, looking up at the tower, he suggest that perhaps we should climb to the top, there’s bound to be a reasonable view, despite the cloud and drizzle. But we find the entrance heavily barred: a notice advises that the tower is closed for winter; it is open for inspection from April to October.

  CROWN AND EAGLE

  We leave the overheated cellar restaurant after an indigestible paprika-laden meal—my last exposure for a long time, I think with considerable satisfaction, to Hungarian cooking. As we climb the short flight of steps leading to the street I can still hear some elderly Austrians protesting loudly about the outrageous cost of their meal—which was probably as low as ours had been. My companion thanks me for my hospitality, and I, in turn, thank him for the lift, for his kindness in showing me around the town. It is time to get under way again. In a few minutes, he says, we’ll be at the border. He hopes that there won’t be a long delay, but you can’t tell. This border crossing is quite good, he adds, because it has a separate lane for road transports. Elsewhere, especially on the road into Czechoslovakia, you can be kept waiting for ten or twelve hours if you are unlucky.

  On our way back to the large parking lot, it strikes me that I should offer my companion some coffee before we start on our journey—for it is not good form in this world to take coffee in the restaurant where you’ve had your meal. Glancing at his watch, he says that that would be very nice, as long as we don’t take too long, because he’d like to get me to the airport hotel before it gets dark: the roads around there are very busy and he finds them very confusing.

  Around the next corner we come upon a sign placed in the gateway of one of the few freshly painted houses. We step inside a surprisingly spacious courtyard where, at its far end, another sign over a doorway identifies the location of a café. The place resembles—and once it probably was—a ground-floor apartment. The first room we come upon contains the obligatory glass-fronted and mirror-backed counter displaying a selection of homely cakes and pastries. One of the two doors in this hallway leads to the café itself—a series of interconnected small rooms, each with two or three marble-topped tables and plush chairs. The second door obviously leads to the kitchen.

  All the tables in the first room are occupied. At one, a pair of elderly ladies are scraping the last bits of a creamy confection from shallow glass dishes. We find a table in the second room. The only other occupant is a middle-aged gentleman in a baggy suit. His briefcase has been placed on the chair opposite him. He is reading a newspaper while finishing a cup of coffee. An untouched glass of water stands on a small saucer on top of a paper doily.

  The suspicion that this café had once been a dwelling is even stronger in this room. Two sash windows with lace curtains look onto the courtyard—an undesirable aspect according to the domestic hierarchies of this world. A large winged door on the opposite wall leads to another room, perhaps the owner’s apartment. The walls are papered with a pattern known in English as Regency. A chandelier of Bohemian glass hangs from the moulded ceiling.

  It would be easy to imagine this place as it would have looked when it housed some worthy citizen of Sopron. As we wait for our order to be taken, I begin to spin fantasies about this place. Who lived here in the 1920s, the years in which my mother was growing up in this tight little town? Since this was a courtyard flat on the edge of the old town, it is unlikely that its occupants were grandees. It is much more likely that they were relatively hard-up, like my mother’s people, though no doubt able to aspire to some measure of bourgeois propriety and comfort. Did they know my mother? Were they parts of the rumour mill that spread the news of her scandalous conduct around the town? Did my mother visit friends or acquaintances here? Perhaps this was where the not-very-accomplished portrait painter executed a likeness of her on a large oval board—commissioned to commemorate her first ball—which she always detested and took some pleasure in chopping up to provide firewood in the bitter winter of 1945, as Budapest lay in ruins around us.

  The atmosphere of the café is comfortably somnolent. The tiled stove in the corner sends out a mellow heat. We are silent, each lost in his thoughts. Perhaps my acquaintance is thinking about what he must do in his three or four days in Austria. I, for my part, looking around at the comfortable furnishings of this little café on the border of what used to be the two great nations of the Habsburg realm, am struck by a sense of curious appropriateness. It seems to me entirely fitting, indeed inevitable, that these months of wandering around the territories of what used to be Kakania, that world which gave the various members of my family many of their dreams and preoccupations, their fantasies and also their fears, should come to an end here, in a café, perhaps the most characteristic and poignant image of that world’s communal dreams.

  It also strikes me with particular force that the anomalies and paradoxes of this world are beyond resolution, just as my own confused and ambiguous responses to the tinsel pomp of Austria and the turmoil of contemporary Hungary must always remain balanced on a knife-edge between scorn and attachment, fear and indifference. Yet in this little town, rich with images of a mythic world, and in this unassuming café, there may remain a few echoes of a former life, of a lost world, capable of being cherished and recaptured, briefly and provisionally, in this fossil of the Dual Monarchy, the bitter-sweet, serio-comic dream of Kakania, which once, in the distant past, beguiled so many members of my family, seducing them with its siren-song of the good life
.

  As my eyes travel around this warm, comfortable, slightly dowdy place, I notice the faded etchings and lithographs decorating its walls. They show perspectives of this city, always dominated by its watchtower, some executed with great skill, others with a charmingly naïve ineptitude. In each of them, whether accomplished or amateurish, the engravers and draughtsmen have managed to include, somewhere in the elaborate designs framing these views of the town, a curiously-shaped crown, the emblem of the Kings of Hungary, and the proud double-headed eagle of the Habsburgs.

  The waitress arrives to take our order. Only coffee? Nothing to eat? Could she perhaps recommend her Sachertorte, homemade, according to the original recipe, far superior to anything we’d find in Vienna?

  SQ23

  We rise into a leaden sky. Soon trees and fields, roads and houses are blotted out as we climb, shuddering and jolting, through a thick blanket of cloud. Later the turbulence ceases, the pilot extinguishes the seat-belt sign. Weak winter sunlight flows into the cabin. Nothing is visible through the porthole beside my seat except the thick cloud-cover from horizon to distant horizon. Below, the countries, provinces and districts that had once formed the world of Kakania—their towns and cities, their hopes and terrible hatreds, and those cafés that seem to stretch from one end of this realm to another—slip by unseen. Towards dusk the clouds begin to disperse. Just before sunset I catch sight of a snow-covered crag burning with the last glimmer of evening as we hurtle eastwards, into the night.