Inside Outside (32 page)

In the life of the city I began to discern certain alarming signs that I was to see again a couple of months later in the courtyard of the Hungarian Embassy in Canberra. Magyar nationalism was visible everywhere, mixed with a totally incompatible and entirely irrelevant nostalgia for a Habsburg past. Antisemitic slogans, in a world where, surely, there were few Jews left, were daubed on walls and embankments. A statue of the Empress Elisabeth, after whom generations of Austro-Hungarian girls (including my mother) had been named, was in the process of being elaborately restored. The monument to St Stephen, king and missionary who gave my father his name, displayed once more the royal emblems of the former kingdom. It was as though the previous forty-odd years had never occurred. The wave of nostalgia and sentimentality, in a world of grim economic hardship where a couple of Australian dollars would take you in a taxi from one end of town to the other, seemed at times a distraction, at others almost an indecency. And as I walked among these people I realised that they assumed, as the people on the train assumed and as my companions at the Embassy in Canberra were to assume, that I was a foreigner. They would come up to me in the streets with offers to exchange money delivered in various languages, but never in Hungarian. In restaurants waiters would hand me, before a word had been spoken, the English or German versions of the menu. For them I obviously represented that golden world beyond the Austrian border, where elegant people strolled along well-swept boulevards, where sleek limousines deposited glamorous patrons at the vast portals of a huge opera house, where everyone could afford to buy genuine Levis and wear Reeboks to their hearts' content.

I had nothing in common with this world, I came to realise as the initial impact of return began to wear off. This was not my life; it had almost no bearing on what I was or felt myself to be. I began to be acutely aware of the advantages of my real life. Sydney, with its sprawling suburbs, its harsh, all-revealing light, seemed a blessed place compared with the murk and grime of this depressing city. I glanced up at a first-floor window; someone was leaning out, staring at the tramlines on the street below. I thought of Sydney—how if I lean out of our bedroom window I can just catch sight of a square of blue water with a headland above it that reveals at night those twinkling streetlights my parents and I saw as the
Marine Phoenix
sailed towards the Heads. In this, my home town, I did not dare to board the clattering trams for fear they would bear me off to places unknown, from which I would have trouble getting back to my hotel. The language that people spoke all around me, though comprehensible, seemed strange and foreign. Their ways were alien and a trifle menacing. I did not know how to deal with the many people importuning me to buy this or that. I got confused about the elaborate rituals governing cafe-life: who served, whom to pay, how to tip, and when to leave. I realised that I desperately wanted to go home.

In the train to Vienna, after it had pulled out of the seething railway station, where you felt you had to hang on to your wallet for dear life, I fell into conversation with an elderly couple, vaguely reminiscent of the patrons of Sydney's espresso-bars of former years. They had just been to Budapest for the umpteenth time to visit relatives for Christmas. They'd had an absolutely wonderful time. I mentioned something about the grime and the filth, the air of depression that hung over the city. They hadn't noticed. Mind you they didn't go out much, there were so many relatives to see. And the food! They wouldn't want to eat another thing until they got back to Toronto for New Year. People back home sure knew how to be hospitable, especially now that life was so much easier. I smiled and changed the subject; quite obviously, we had been visiting different worlds.

For a few days after I got back to Sydney I looked around me with changed eyes. This was home; this was where I belonged. The old life was no longer meaningful to me except as a source of anecdotes, to which middle-aged people are frequently and at times tediously addicted. But those few days in Budapest had, it seems to me, loosened a spring, or perhaps lifted a lid, allowing long-suppressed memories to escape. They were, in a way, my own madeleine, dipped in this instance into a polluted and noisome river. And as I slipped back into the familiar routines of Sydney life, taking up the threads that I had dropped a couple of months before when I flew out of Mascot in a screaming Jumbo, convinced, as I usually am, that we would crash at any moment, I found that in an intangible and not entirely clear way the present and the past, those seemingly absolutely contradictory experiences and ways of life, were parts of a larger whole. I cannot explain what that whole might be—it is probably indistinguishable from the process of living. But I came to learn something that ‘normal' people, those whose lives have not suffered the sharp cleavage mine seems to have suffered, have always known: that the past may yield sense only in terms of the present, and that the present is inevitably conditioned by the past. To remove either of these—as I tried to suppress my past during the years of my adolescence, and as the more extreme theories of multiculturalism urge people to ignore the realities of the present—is capable of leading to a serious and damaging spiritual imbalance.

I cannot pretend that that realisation has made me any happier, any more content with my lot, or given me a clearer idea of what I am. As the days and weeks wore on after my return, I felt again the old doubts and uncertainties returning. Had it all been a mistake? What would life have been like if my parents hadn't bundled me out of Budapest on that foggy November day in 1946, with a scarf wrapped around my head because I was still sick with mumps? Should I have waited for that position at University College London, after all? My moods changed as rapidly as they always have. Among my family and friends, people who have given shape, meaning and purpose to my life—which seems otherwise something of a bad joke—I feel contentment and peace. At other times, as I watch the increasingly mindless rituals of many aspects of academic life, or as I listen to the strident, often ill-informed and alarmingly unintelligent punditry that pours out of the radio and television hour after hour, I think that back there, in that possibly imaginary Europe of my fantasies, things might be better ordained—that in an older and more mellow society life might be less fraught with the irritations and vulgarities of life in the raw. Then I hear a snippet of news about the ugly racial tensions that are once more surfacing in those nations which have recently won their independence from Soviet control, and I begin to wonder whether that unhappy continent isn't about to start again down the road towards the hatred and enmity that tore it apart half a century ago, provoking people like my parents, and millions of others, to flee to the farthest corner of the globe.

And, as always, I experience the old fears and alarms. A screaming siren in a distant street, heard on a still summer night, leaves me edgy and apprehensive. I begin to wonder, with that clarity of vision which is ours in the dead of night, whether, as the economic difficulties of contemporary Australia bring out of the cupboard ugly hatreds that had been hidden for a long time, I will also have to experience what members of my family, and millions like them, had to endure. I think back on the world into which I was born—my great-grandfather the supervisor of milk in his proud uniform, the elderly ladies chattering in my grandmother's living-room as the great tile stove sent out waves of comforting heat on a dark winter afternoon, my mother peering with short-sighted eyes through a pair of gilt opera-glasses. They too felt safe. They too imagined that being citizens of a country where their families had lived for generations would protect them against atrocities like those their ancestors had to suffer. They were, after all, respectable Hungarians and Austrians of the twentieth century, paying their taxes, observing the customs of a country in which they felt entirely at home. That reassuring stove, which the maid dutifully stoked up each morning and evening, was as close as all of them thought they would get to a fiery furnace.

Will I also find, I ask myself as the siren recedes into the night, and as I think of those slogans I see daubed on walls and fences (‘Australia for Australians', ‘Stop Migration Now') all over the city, that my father's naturalisation certificate, on which I am included almost as an afterthought, will prove to be as worthless as the documents which promised my parents, and their parents before them, safety and security in their homeland? Will my sons have to appeal one day to the fact that their mother was a fourth-generation Australian in order to obtain permission to remain here? These are probably the fantasies of an overwrought imagination; but on those still nights they are, nevertheless, menacing realities which I cannot entirely banish.

I shall probably experience for the rest of my life these doubts and alarms. This is, in all likelihood, the yoke of exile. There is nothing, in the final count, to be done about it except to understand the predicament and to come to terms with it to the best of one's ability. There are no solutions, no reassuring slogans to assuage doubts, alarms and perplexities. People like me will probably search and seek, wonder and question, and suffer from irrational fears to the ends of our lives. We must acknowledge that we belong nowhere, that our sense of dislocation is more radical and more disturbing than the characteristic alienation most people experience from time to time in their familiar world. We have no place we may call home truly and unconditionally, for we are always aware that we were born elsewhere, and that our lives are governed by the consequences of a choice we exercised, or of a decision that had been exercised on our behalf.

We are essentially rootless. Try as hard as we might, we cannot feel at one with the world in which we live—the only world we know, the only world, indeed, prepared to accept us, even if only provisionally, and on rare occasions with bad grace. For many of us the place where we were born has become more alien and much more perplexing than anything we encounter in our daily existence in the world we must think of as home. We come to understand, therefore, that we belong nowhere—yet sometimes we still dream of an existence where we may avoid the confusions of lives like ours, which seem more and more to resemble the nightmare of that ingenious puzzle, a loop without an inside or an outside.