The Habsburg Cafe (15 page)

Pest was my family's world. They lived among those bustling streets in a polyglot society that was a microcosm of the variety of Kakania. My grandmother, at the time of her wedding trip to Vienna, when she purchased her furniture and some of her household gods (including that Ferris wheel), must have seen avenues and boulevards being laid out, massive buildings rise out of the ground almost overnight, bridges constructed across the broad expanse of the Danube. Her parents, and also my grandfather's no doubt, attended performances at the Opera House, smaller than Vienna's, though
much more elaborately decorated, as soon as it opened its doors. She may also have attended the celebrations in 1896 to mark the millennium of the foundation of the Kingdom of Hungary and probably admired the great new public space, with its ornate sculptures and monuments, built to commemorate that great event. For her, as for her younger son, my father, living in Budapest meant inhabiting that raw, complicated but exhilarating world that sprang up on the flat lands opposite the staid Habsburg town where the remnants of Roman, Magyar, Turkish and Austrian history seemed increasingly anachronistic, irrelevant to the real source of Budapest's energy and potential.

The pomp and arrogance of Habsburg hegemony among the hills of Buda riled Magyar nationalists of the nineteenth century. The abortive revolution of 1848 was directed against the usurpers and invaders in their fortress that dominated, symbolically and physically, the great river. Even after the reconciliation of 1867, when the country's Habsburg masters gave Hungary a measure of autonomy, and began thereby to elaborate that pious myth of a supranational state which soon devolved into the fantasies and absurdities of Kakania, nationalist sentiment smouldered beneath the surface of an apparent calm. By contrast, the inhabitants of the other bank embraced the social and cultural implications of the Kakanian myth. The construction of the huge bulk of the Parliament on their side of the river may have been dictated by no more than contingency—Buda was much too hilly to provide a site for so large a building. Yet, everyone recognised the implied symbolism. Here was a splendid structure, the world's first building to be centrally heated. It was obviously the outward and visible sign of the emergence of Budapest as one of the great cities of the world. It graced moreover the energetic and dynamic skyline of Pest, the metropolis of the future, the epitome of the newfound peace and prosperity—which was to come to an abrupt and bloody end as a consequence of the gunshot in distant Sarajevo.

As the sun disappears behind the steep hills of Buda,
enveloping in long shadows the buildings clinging to their sides, I am reminded that even for my parents that part of city remained somewhat alien, as it had been for my grandparents and, no doubt, for their parents before them. Buda was site of the conflict between Magyar and Austrian. My family, inhabitants of the multilayered world of Pest, stood aloof from those disputes: they could not identify wholly with either side, were suspicious of each. If their sentiment inclined towards either it would probably have been towards the Austrians—despite their arrogance, and indeed bigotry—because my family and people like them looked beyond the confines of those ‘nations' that made up the Habsburg realm towards that cultural cynosure some two hundred kilometres away, Vienna, the city of their dreams. They were in essence internationalists, not by virtue of an ideological conviction, but because they thought they were citizens of a vibrant and energetic world where the opportunities for the good life were unbounded.

In Pest, over which the shadows of the Buda hills are now advancing, just as the terrible tide of German bigotry and Magyar nationalism crept over it during my childhood, their lives revolved around the institutions of their world—especially those sites of public ceremony, the cafés, the opera and the theatres, which gave that world shape and substance. Memory tells me that my parents rarely crossed the river. They lived in Pest, or for some years in a suburb on the Pest side. Scraps of family mythology I remember suggest that on summer nights they would sometimes visit riverside restaurants in Buda, to eat the fiery fish stew, the local version of bouillabaisse, and to dance to the music of the gypsy bands. I can recall one or two occasions on which I crossed the river in one of the white paddle-steamers that used to ply between the two banks, to be taken to visit the Castle, to be shown the ‘ancient' church of St Matthew and the few streets of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings nestled around it. I remember that on one occasion there was a great fuss because my parents refused to take me on the funicular that runs from the embankment to the Castle—they considered it unsafe, citing
an accident that was supposed to have occurred a quarter of a century earlier. On the whole, though, we kept to our side—the Pest side of the river—at first because the patterns of our life as they had evolved through the years made Pest their focus, later because of war, persecution and peril, and finally, in the days after the siege of the city, because these bridges, now enveloped in the autumn dusk, lay as tangled masses of metal and stone in the waters of the Danube.

At the foot of one of the bridges across the Danube, a pedestrian underpass leads to the streets and boulevards of Pest. In an attempt to enhance the appearance of this short tunnel—usually the haunt of gypsies begging for alms and delivering blood-curdling curses on those that refuse—its walls are lined with enlarged photographs of nearby streets and squares taken at the turn of the century. They show the bustle of a newly-emerging metropolis; in an entirely intangible way they remind me of photographs taken in Sydney at about the same time. There is the same sense of rawness—in the eyes of the hurrying pedestrians as much as in the appearance of shopfronts and the sides of buildings as they were caught by the camera. For all their period charm, intended no doubt to evoke an older, more leisurely world, these images speak of the new, the emerging and also of the unformed.

Several of these photographs show quite clearly the names of various merchants and tradesmen—butchers and cobblers, upholsterers and grocers—painted on large boards above the windows or doors of their establishments. Most of them are German names, and many, at least of the superior variety of merchant or artisan, bear the discreet emblem of the official favour bestowed on them by His Majesty, the k.k. monarch, Franz Josef. Here were His Imperial and Royal Majesty's Hungarian bootmakers, grocers, wine-merchants and stationers, all catering for His Majesty's needs whenever, as King of
Hungary, he resided in this part of his dual realm—which, in reality, did not happen very often. These nostalgic images serve as reminders, in this grim underworld of begging gypsies, of that Kakanian past which now, in the second year of the new dispensation, is becoming a matter of sentimental preoccupation for the citizens of Budapest.

Beyond the subway other emblems of the Kakanian past are visible. The semicircle of boulevards, modelled on Vienna's Ring, once more bear their former imperial names: Elisabeth and Theresia; Franz and Josef—though in another subway under one of these boulevards, at one of the large Metro stations, the exit signs still direct the unwary towards thoroughfares named after Lenin and his ilk. The broad avenues which fan out from these boulevards—inspired by Baron Haussmann's Paris—once again commemorate Hungarian statesmen and patriots approved (or at least tolerated by) the Habsburgs. This part of the city is a cartographic fantasy of Kakania, with former street names boldly cancelled in red (like ‘no smoking' signs) acting as reminders of the forty-year-long usurpation by heroes of socialism.

There is nothing beautiful about the present-day aspect of these streets and avenues. Budapest bears all the depressing signs of a half-century of neglect—which followed the severe destruction of war—bred out of the grim assurance of Hungary's political masters during those decades, unscrupulous men who knew that they were not answerable to the people under their subjection, and felt no obligation therefore to repair the city's crumbling fabric. They also knew that they had the guns—readily used in 1956—to discourage any grumbling or potential revolt. In this Indian summer of 1991 the handsome chestnut trees lining the broad avenues of the inner city may momentarily disguise the crumbling façades of monumental buildings poorly restored in the years after the war. The illusion is, however, shortlived. As your eye travels from the luxuriant foliage to the blackened, grimy walls lining these streets, you seem to be looking at obscure but menacing hieroglyphs of destruction and neglect. A poorly patched window embrasure
here, there the telltale scar of a collapsed balcony, and everywhere the pockmarks of bulletholes chronicle the outrages and indignities suffered by this city during a tragic century.

The roadways are choked by a neverending stream of noisome traffic; ancient cars, that obviously have rarely been washed or properly serviced, dodge in and out of each other's way, seemingly heading for the inevitable collision and avoiding it, in most instances, only by a hair's breadth. The occasional crunch of metal, the frequent screech of tyres and the many dented mudguards testify to the risk of travelling by car along the streets of Budapest. Meanwhile these antiquated Trabants and Ladas, interspersed here and there with gleaming Porsches and other four-wheeled icons of Budapest's new life, send out plumes of noxious smoke. Mixed with the foul odours rising from vents and apertures, this provides the characteristic aroma of modern Budapest.

The streets are almost always crowded with shuffling, ill-clad people. They mill around bus stops or congregate in the large underground halls leading to the Metro lines, which are filled, in this era of the new dispensation, with hawkers and stallholders spruiking their wares at the tops of their voices. The footpaths are littered with discarded newspapers, empty cigarette packets. Eyes must be kept on the ground—not only to avoid excrement left behind by the city's countless dogs, but also pools of vomit and urine. There are many misshapen people and also even more drunkards than you are likely to see in most cities of the ‘western' world.

After darkness falls, prostitutes start their beat along certain well-known stretches of the great line of boulevards. The homeless begin to bed down on park benches and in the doorways of public buildings. Waves of yelling youths and drunken conscripts, roaring sentimental ballads which pass for folksongs, roll along the footpaths, sometimes spilling over into the roadways, into the path of the screeching, rattling traffic. You grow uncomfortably conscious of a young man following you a few paces behind; your grip tightens on your wallet in the pocket of your trousers. If your path takes you into one
of the ill-lit and largely deserted sidestreets or alleys, the still emptiness is even more alarming than the bustle of the great avenues and boulevards—you hope fervently that the youth who has been shadowing you in the crowded street has gone on his way.

Budapest at the end of the twentieth century is not a theme park. It is driven by the terrible realities of a world that has been at the centre of the great upheavals of a brutal epoch. Amidst such realities there seems little room for fantasy. Accordingly, Budapest, in its grime and anarchy, is much more like the cities of the familiar world than the elaborately staged spectacle of Vienna. It is dirtier and much more decrepit than London, for instance, yet in both places urban decay is ever-present and palpable. Like London, like Munich, like much of Sydney and Melbourne and even prim Adelaide, Budapest is one of the infernal cities of the modern world. Here the canvas of filth and corruption may have been painted in more lurid colours and with bolder strokes. There are, nevertheless, the same icons of decay visible as in those cities of the ‘developed' world.

Fantasies, however, are beginning to emerge. Coming out of the pedestrian underpass with its sepia images of Kakanian Budapest, you find yourself at one end of a short, narrow street, nowadays mercifully free of the wheezing cars that choke the rest of the city. This is, and had been in the years of my childhood, the most elegant shopping street in town. Its glories always paled beside those of the Graben and Kärtnerstrasse, points of comparison for a world that rarely looked beyond Vienna to the great cities of Western Europe for its inspiration. Yet there were glories sufficient to satisfy people like my mother, much of whose life during her five or six years of metropolitan affluence before the coming of war revolved around this street and the lanes leading off it. Her days were marked by pilgrimages from one to another shrine dedicated to beauty and elegance. The route may have varied from day to day and from season to season, but her devotions conducted her in an ever-changing pattern to the dressmaker and the
milliner, the shoemaker and the furrier, the cosmetician and the coiffeur. Whatever path her peregrinations described, the final goal, and resting place after such exertions, was invariably the large café, the most elegant in Budapest according to the social code that governed her life, at the top of the ample square at the far end of this street.

Some echoes of that long-vanished world remain. A few of the boutiques display goods of a kind not seen in the dusty and flyblown shops and department stores in other parts of the city, though the windows of some of these boutiques carry discreet signs announcing that their merchandise is available only to holders of hard currency. For that reason, perhaps, the street is filled with jeans-clad youths whispering to anyone who looks like a tourist, offers to exchange currency at rates almost double the official.

The crowds of tourists—mostly Germans, but even here the occasional Australian intonation can be heard—pass in great waves up and down the street. They seem to pay little attention to the dozens of young men importuning them to exchange money, or indeed to the shopwindows filled with goods of unimaginable luxury to the eyes of the citizens of Budapest. To them it's all familiar; the magic brand names—Gucci, Christian Dior and Armani—are household words, commonplace domestic objects. Yet even if they were attracted by these glittering emblems of affluence, they would find it difficult on most afternoons or evenings to inspect at leisure the shop windows where these rare objects are displayed. Both sides of the street are lined with people (mostly peasant women, kerchiefs tied round their heads) holding out for inspection embroidered tablecloths, bedspreads and sheepskin jackets from Transylvania. With ululating voices they praise the exquisite workmanship of these unique objects and implore the kind lords and ladies strolling along the street to buy from them, so that they may feed their starving infants or care for their aged mothers. The lords and ladies understand none of this, apart from guessing that they are being invited to purchase goods identical to those displayed in the windows of the large
folk art emporium prominently situated in the middle of this street.