The Habsburg Cafe (20 page)

The weather remains enchanting throughout our rambles around the city. A gentle breeze has blown away the brown murk of the past few days. In the mellow autumn sunshine Budapest looks beguilingly beautiful. The river dances with light as it curves under the graceful bridges linking the hills of Buda and the flat land of Pest. The green dome of the Castle and the stone spire of St Matthew's church are etched against a clear blue sky. Upstream, on the opposite bank, the extravagant fantasy of the Parliament glitters with flashes of gold as the sun touches its walls and turrets. The river is busy with steamers conveying Saturday morning pleasure-seekers to the islands and resorts of the Danube. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century houses of the Castle district are festive with window boxes and baskets of geraniums. Horse-drawn carriages clatter along the narrow cobbled streets.

My companions are surprised and enchanted. We are standing on a terrace in front of the Castle, the panorama of city and river spread out below us. They had not realised that
Budapest is such a beautiful place, nor that it was so ‘European'. I ask them what they had expected. They can't put it into words exactly, but it was something much more grim, much more drab and somehow ‘eastern'. But this city, they insist, is like Paris—much more interesting than Vienna, for instance, where they had stayed for a few days on their way here from Bern. Vienna was, they confess, a disappointment—dull, dowdy and rather boring. But this, this is entirely different.

Yet while their excitement and delight grow as we walk along the cobbled streets of the oldest part of the city down to the river bank, and then make our way across the handsome suspension bridge towards the flat, late nineteenth-century city of the opposite side, I am seized by a desire to show them the other city,
my
city, or at least the city that has become the focus of my private mythology about this nation and its people. I want to show them the place on the embankment where hundreds, perhaps thousands of people were machine-gunned by the Germans and their Hungarian henchmen in the terrible winter of 1944. I want to take them to the narrow, overcrowded streets behind this magnificent façade, places where the grim life of the Hungarian
petite bourgeoisie
in poky flats and rented rooms fed the obsessions and neuroses of this world. I want them to realise the implications of those pompous and bombastic monuments and statues that litter the city in praise of brutality and intolerance, some of the ugliest characteristics of humanity masquerading as nobility and patriotism. I want to translate for them the inscriptions on public buildings that commemorate a national pride which borders on paranoia. I want, in short, to make them see what I think of as the cancer of Mitteleuropa, which nothing, not two devastating wars nor forty years of totalitarian repression, could obliterate.

The reasons for that compulsion are deeply buried within my own obsessions. This is the place of origin of the cultural luggage I carry around with me wherever I go, even though it is only here that I become conscious of its weight. I realise that a part of me wishes to respond to the undeniable
attractiveness of this place—especially when seen in this sparkling sunshine, as a soothing breeze wafts warm air from the south. If there is some sort of
genius loci
to which we become attached during the first years of our life, something that forms the centre and the navel of all our experiences of the many worlds some of us must inhabit, then this city must provide that location for me. And I have to admit to myself that there is something about my relationship with Budapest which is different from and in a way much more intimate than my attitude to Sydney, a city I know far better, a city where I feel much more safe, comfortable and at ease. Yet, despite the allure of this city of water, hills and monuments, I find myself constantly driven in the opposite direction. For this is the city where most of my family were killed, or else where they started their journey to death. This is the setting for some twelve or fourteen months of panic and fear, of weeks spent in a dark cellar, of many weeks of life masquerading under an assumed name—as an eight-year-old well-drilled in the deceptive tale of a false identity for which my mother had paid with her last piece of jewellery. It was here that I was made to feel that people like me were pariahs, vermin to be exterminated, just because we did not share the physical and cultural characteristics of the high-cheekboned people who are now, in 1991, strolling around in the bright sunshine, enjoying their city in the fond belief that they are now free and masters of their own destinies.

I come to realise more powerfully than ever how much this world has been poisoned for me, that for me the stench of death and hatred still hangs in the air, despite its having been cleansed by the processes of history, or at least that it has been filled with different hatreds and enmities. I also realise that throughout the days and weeks I have spent in this place, more or less on my own, observing yet detached, and even in the course of perfunctory conversations I have had with people (my cousin and her husband, the owners of the small hotel high up in the hills of Buda, the lady at the corner shop, a succession of manic taxi-drivers) I have kept this world suspiciously at
arms' length. Now, looking at these sights with people whose cultural preoccupations and obsessions are very different from mine, I find myself forced to admit the possibility that what I take to be an objective and verifiable truth—the indelible corruption and evil of societies such as this—may be no more than a projection of my own particular dilemma generated by history and personal experiences.

I am driven, all the same, to impose that vision on my companions. We visit duly the spot on the embankment—unmarked, forgotten, ignored—where my mother and I narrowly escaped death. The image of that bleak winter day comes back with remarkable vividness. My mother pulls me by the hand as we slip out of the snakelike file into a dark alley, pressing against a doorway as the cortege passes by. Next we look at drab rows of apartment houses, and I speak about the mythology of hierarchy that governed, and probably still governs, these dwellings, the pecking-order based on whether your flat looks onto the street or the courtyard, whether it's on one of the upper floors or closer to street-level, whether it may boast a balcony, and a thousand other snobbish gradations. I show my companions the streets and cafés where, in the days before the queues of people making their way to the river bank, it was fashionable to be seen, and those places which people like my parents would not frequent. I try to impress on them, in short, that the well-known political brutality of this world was merely an extreme manifestation of its stifling and iron-clad social stratification. I tell them about the way servants were treated, even by families who considered themselves humane and considerate, and I also tell them about the strutting arrogance of the gentry and aristocracy, and that if you wanted to attract the attention of the waiter in a restaurant you used to tap loudly on a glass with your knife.

I suspect that I am growing somewhat tedious, as anyone pursuing an obsession is likely to produce tedium. My companions are attentive and thoughtful, however, perhaps because what I am saying has made some impression on them,
or perhaps because I am revealing a facet of my personality that they have not met before. It is, nevertheless, when we return to the hills above the river, to the cobbled streets around the Castle that this sour litany seems to engage with something within their consciousness and their experience, something to which they are able to relate more directly than they were when listening to my catalogue of brutality, outrage and small-minded snobbery.

We are standing outside the gothic church of St Matthew, named not merely in honour of the evangelist but also of the fifteenth-century monarch who gave this country a brief ‘renaissance', before it was swept away by the marauding Turks. It is a pretty church, a miniature cathedral with a stone spire like that in Vienna. Here is one of the few antiquities in a city which, apart from a handful of modest domestic structures of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, is fundamentally a nineteenth-century city like Sydney, Melbourne or Adelaide. On this shining autumn day the church draws admiring crowds of tourists. My friends, like most cultivated Australians, are very respectful towards antiquity. They admire the skill that went into the construction of these ancient piles, and they are prone at times to discourse on their aesthetic merits, on the harmony of their design and the wonderful spaces they contain, even though these people are wholly secular in outlook, often contemptuous of what they regard as the mere superstition of religion. Coming from a society bereft of such monuments they are obviously impressed by this imposing church, and I can sense that somehow this increases their regard for this country, seemingly rich in antiquities that speak of a continuity of tradition.

Conscious as I am that they are impressed by this edifice and that they admire the elaborately carved and embellished exterior of the church, I cannot resist telling them that it is by and large a modern reconstruction, a fantasy of what the church, which has stood on this spot for centuries, should look like, rather than what it is or has been. I can sense myself becoming quite harsh and dogmatic as I insist that they
recognise the implications of such sentimental reconstructions. I draw analogies between this type of façadeism and the national and political cult of illusions and surfaces. I suggest that there is considerable immaturity about people who find the source of national pride and identity in something so blatantly manufactured, a recreation of their longings and fantasies. They are structures no less phoney than the neo-gothic brick and stone extravaganzas of Australia which my companions regard as the living insignia of our colonial status, of that cultural cringe that worshipped and attempted to emulate the institutions of a distant and arrogant world.

This they are able to appreciate. I am conscious that because this world is alien to them, because they have never felt obliged—understandably enough—to consider deeply its political and cultural confusions and complexity, they had imagined that its appurtenances, its gothic churches, baroque palaces, medieval bastions are natural and ‘native' aspects of this society's history. In their own world, our world, such people are very sensitive to the manner in which both the material and spiritual features of Australian society have encoded within them the particular perplexity and ambivalence of life in the antipodes. They are sensitive to the many layers of exploitation, dispossession and fulfillment of wishes in the cityscapes of urban Australia. That Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide are theme parks does not seem to them an insupportable or offensive notion. They understand the essentially imitative nature of our public architecture, those attempts to reproduce and emulate the social and political structures of a distant and allegedly superior society. The possibility that here in ‘Europe' similar emulation, similarly nostalgic instances of trompe l'oeil may be encountered comes to them as a surprise: they had not considered that these apparently self-confident societies, with their histories evident in the testimony of stone, timber and brick, may have sought a spurious respectability as much as the late nineteenth-century edifiers of Australian cities attempted to persuade themselves that they were producing replicas of European culture.

It is possible that their perception of this world may have been altered in the course of these few hours by my hectoring, yet, as we continue our ramble around the city, and as we take up the threads of this topic in the vaulted cellar of a restaurant which does, in all probability, date from the fifteenth century, I am growing aware of the gulf that separates us. In Australia with people like these—as close as our society has been able to get to the nurturing of an urban intelligentsia—I often sense considerable affinity. Though our attitudes and aspirations may differ radically in many respects, we often find a common ground. Our view of life, despite those differences, is far removed from the everyday lives of most of our compatriots—those people who turn their backs on the type of speculation (possibly futile and self-indulgent) which is our habitual pursuit. We experience a certain camaraderie because we stand aloof from what we regard as a hedonistic and material-obsessed society which we think dominates Australian life in the late twentieth century—the entrepreneurs, the grey bureaucrats, the violent crowds at sporting fixtures, and those who spend their lives mesmerised in front of the television.

Here, however, because of my own particular obsessions with this world and its many injustices and dishonesties, I am growing aware of the fundamental difference between myself and people like my companions of the day. They understand now, I suspect, the reasons why I had to delve beneath the surface of their essentially tourist-like enjoyment of this world, to make them see the brutality I see everywhere. A great gap exists between understanding and experience. They cannot, and cannot be expected to, share the distress and anguish that I find hard to disguise in this world; I cannot ask them to be as passionate about it as I find myself becoming, despite my inclinations, despite my better judgement, and my recognition that at any moment I shall become a tiresome bore.

Consequently I come to understand why in Australia I often feel distanced from and not a little scathing about the perplexities, preoccupations and obsessions that frequently torment such pleasant and entirely civilised people. Their responses to
my litanies of the terrible things that have happened here, in this world, and to this conducted tour around my private mythology are sympathetic and understanding. Their moral and political sensibilities are obviously stirred by these reminders of a dark and still-recent past. But for them these injustices and atrocities remain merely parts of a universal predicament. They know that societies in every part of the world and at every moment of history are more than liable to exploit and to persecute those who are weaker or defenceless. They know that such is the way of the world, and they might indeed be tempted to identify that condition as the operation of evil, were it not that they are more than aware of the theological implications of that word. So, as they listen to me on this golden sunny day, they are beginning to realise that this world also knew atrocities of the kind they are familiar with—South Africa, Nicaragua, Chile, East Timor. For them this lesson about the darker face of Central European history is, however, no more than another instance of the corrupting influence of power, ambition and hatred. Their passion is reserved for outrages much closer to home.