The Habsburg Cafe (21 page)

Inevitably, as we discuss the ubiquity of cruelty and barbarism, the sad plight of the Australian Aborigines creeps into our talk. This is something about which they have very strong opinions, tinged with a considerable emotional charge. They are descended, at least in part, from people who had been directly or indirectly implicated in the dispossession, persecution and slaughter of the original inhabitants of the continent. They feel contaminated by the guilt of their ancestors, even though they know that it is merely a retrospective guilt, or guilt by association. They are also sane and intelligent enough to know that very little may be done to atone for that guilt—short of evacuating the land, leaving it once more to its rightful owners, though inevitably in a depleted and degraded condition. They are, therefore, caught in an emotional dilemma. They know that the cultural and emotional reparations society at large or individuals might make to the Aborigines could easily devolve into tokenism. Yet they also realise that it is
impossible to go beyond that probably insufficient attempt at reconciliation. In consequence, this question or problem tends to occupy the centre of their cultural and political consciousness, it forms a preoccupation colouring much of their intellectual life, even though they are aware that they are powerless individually or even communally to act upon that preoccupation. And they become conscious of an impasse, even of frustration as they acknowledge that the guilt must perforce remain merely that—purgation through action cannot become a practical possibility. From such perplexity is obsession born.

I understand and sympathise with their dilemma, but I cannot share it in any immediate or personal way. I cannot participate in these people's sense of personal or national guilt because, for me, the terrible persecution and exploitation of the Aboriginal people of Australia occurred, at least in large part, at a time when Australia had not existed for my family as anything other than an exotic land on the other side of the world. That, I realise, sounds casuistic, and it may well be so: by living in Australia, and by adopting its mores I may well have become just as guilty, or even perhaps more so, than the direct descendants of those squatters, settlers and explorers who slaughtered or enslaved the Aborigines. Yet, much as I understand the terrible perplexity and torment that this consciousness does and should impose on those people, for me it is not something that has entered into the fibres of my being, has not become intrinsic to my emotional life, to the way I look at the society in which I live. It is not a part of my history, it is merely a part of my recognition of the terrible cruelty of humankind. The maltreatment of the Aborigines is, for me, a dark spot in the history of the world, equal to but no more horrible than all the other dark spots in the history of man's inhumanity.

That is precisely how my companions on this day's outing respond to my tale of the terrible events of 1944. For me, though, those events have become a deeply personal and perhaps obsessive mythology. This is something I cannot forget or escape from whenever I am in this world, even though I
realise that it happened almost half a century ago, and that many of the people walking the streets of Budapest on this beautiful afternoon were not even alive at the time. All that is beside the point. For me that time has soured this world, making it incapable of redemption, despite my knowing that it is contrary to good sense and to humane principles to think of a world, a nation or a society as being beyond redemption. This is my own particular preoccupation, obsession or secular cross, like the guilt many (though by no means all) Australians experience when they think of the fate of the original inhabitants of their world, or, for that matter, the deep psychic scars that still mark many Australians of Irish ancestry.

For that reason there will always be something of a gulf separating us. Though I have much greater affinity with people like my companions of this sunny autumn day than with the inhabitants of this world of Hungary, I am always conscious of being outside the emotional currents of Australian society. I do not feel the same alarms, or if it comes to that, the same joys that these people experience. For me the Australian landscape, a source of deep consolation for many, is always hostile and threatening. The unremarkable plains of Hungary, which to most Australians seem merely what they are, a pleasant featureless landscape, stir deep sentiments whenever I catch sight of them through the windows of a train or a car. My participation in Australian life, in the fullest sense of the term, must remain provisional, cerebral and necessarily detached, just as my companions are detached emotionally, though not intellectually or politically, from the atrocities that this world has witnessed. It cannot be otherwise. The gulf must be acknowledged despite the inclination to pretend that it is no more than a shallow ditch.

Nevertheless, these people and I have shared a world and a pattern of experiences that make us understand each other with respect and sympathy. And we discover a moment of considerable empathy as, almost at the end of our ramble around the streets of a city that still looks seductively picturesque in the late afternoon sunshine, we return to that
gothic church of illusions. The interior is bathed in rich light. My companions almost gasp, as I suspected they would, when they catch sight of its extraordinary embellishments. Every surface of every wall, pillar and arch is covered with gorgeous arabesques of flowers and vines painted in the richest and most glowing hues. This medieval fantasia, the ultimate in kitschy reconstruction perhaps, certainly achieves what its inventors intended: to deliver one of those theatrical surprises that so many of the public monuments of this city strive to achieve. The effect is stunning even though you realise almost immediately that it is contingent and perhaps a little shoddy. If this gothic church had indeed been decorated with rich colours during the middle ages, as all great churches of the time were supposed to have been, it would not have looked like this. This is a modern fantasy, another instance of Central Europe's sad tendency to turn itself into a theme park.

You cannot but be indulgent towards this mixture of naïveté and sophistication; there is something endearing if a little childish about it. I can see my companions smiling with pleasure as they take in the extravagance of the décor. But then they notice something that I too noticed on earlier visits. The pleasant entwining of flowers and vines is interrupted here and there by large frescoes, depicting great moments in the Christian history of the Hungarian people. They realise what I have also realised—several of these paintings depict the subjugation of pagan tribes by a sword-bearing royal saint, his halo clearly visible behind a proud crowned head as he lifts his great weapon to show the might and power of the God of Love.

The Café Ruszwurm, nestled between seventeenth-century townhouses in the Castle district, is probably the city's most eloquent emblem of Kakania to have survived the political storms of the century. This is not one of the pompous, gilded
establishments, football-field sized expanses of marble and mirrored glass which provided the stage-setting for the social rituals of pre-war Budapest. You enter from the street through a modest glass door. The outer room is almost entirely occupied by a large counter and a glass case. As in the smaller cafés of Vienna and Budapest, the cakes displayed in front of mirrored backings have a pleasantly irregular look, as if to suggest that quality rather than appearance were the pastrycook's main concern.

That Kakanian smell is evident the moment you set foot inside. It wafts into the inner room—the café proper—which contains only a handful of tables in front of banquettes ranged along two longish walls. The decoration is simple, homely though stylish. The tiled stove in one corner—a guarantee of comfort and well-being in this world of arctic winters—has been lovingly maintained, its curves and curlicues as fresh as the day it was installed. Everything is, indeed, light and cheery. The cups and saucers, plates and cutlery are made of the finest materials. The carpet, the wallpaper and the chandeliers attest to regular and devoted cleaning. This is one of the few places in the city where the universal grime and decrepitude of present-day Budapest seem somehow to have been avoided. It is as though fifty years of war and misery have bypassed this blessed place. You cannot help wondering how that miracle might have been achieved, what privilege this place enjoyed to allow it to continue so sparkling, so spick and span in a down-at-heel world.

Most days it is impossible to get anywhere near the Ruszwurm. Americans from the nearby Hilton, guidebooks open at the map directing them to this fabled place, loiter outside the entrance hoping to find an unoccupied table. Now and then, a couple of well-dressed Hungarians, members of the new elite in a world where an élite always rises from the ashes of the old, muscle past them, clearing a space with their expensive skin handbags, to assume a position at the head of the expectant queue. The only sensible time to find a table is in that midday lull when no-one in his right mind would
abandon the joys of the day's main meal to sit in a café, even the Ruszwurm.

On this early afternoon the café is quiet. Every table is occupied, though there is no queue, no sign of a face peering through the window in hope of encountering the impossible. Most of the customers are in the process of leaving, hurrying no doubt to a hearty luncheon somewhere or other. The neat waitresses in their stiffly starched lacy aprons stand decorously at the back of the room. They have obviously been carefully chosen and well trained; they do not lounge about or gossip like their slatternly ‘colleagues' with oversized earrings in the large cafés on the other side of the river. Unfashionable though it probably is to be frequenting the Ruszwurm at this hour, it is one of the most pleasant experiences to be sitting here, surrounded by the wonderful aroma of coffee and vanilla, idly watching the play of light on walls, trees and cobblestones through the large plate glass window. The ticking of an old-fashioned clock marks out the peace and contentment of this quiet haven in a noisy and often neurotic city.

In an imperfect world such peace cannot last. Almost as soon as the young woman at the table adjacent to mine leaves, a group of five noisy Germans occupies the café. They—three men and two women—are very large people. The women wear tight-fitting jeans which do nothing to flatter their flabby middle-aged thighs. Two of the men are sporting loudly checked jackets which used to be fashionable in the seventies—though they were never intended to be worn over knitted summer shirts with broad horizontal stripes describing a series of sine curves over the wearers' bloated bellies. The group looks around the small room for somewhere to sit, discussing the situation in the loud guttural tones of a dialect or provincial accent.

They decide that the table next to mine is the only one able to accommodate their generous bulk. Even so, two spindly chairs and a narrow curved banquette are insufficient space for five large persons. Three try to perch on the banquette, which means that one of the men—the fattest, it seems to me—must
squeeze himself beside me with much grunting and sighing. He is almost sitting on my lap. They consult the Hungarian menu with noisy and inaccurate guesses about its contents. My neighbour, I discover, reeks of garlic, the result no doubt of gorging himself on too much spicy Hungarian salami. The discomfort, the noise, the smell of breathy garlic mixed with the subtler aromas of vanilla and coffee prove too much for me. I signal the young waitress who had served me, with the universal sign-language indicating that I wish to pay.

She walks over to my table. She is very young, in her early twenties probably, with wonderfully delicate skin and eyes of the palest blue. There is nothing of the hardness of most of the women of this city about her. She, like the café itself, seems to be a remnant of an older world—she has the appearance of one of those modest young ladies so often depicted by Central European genre painters of the turn of the century. Before she is able to reach my table, however, one of the Germans grabs her by the arm and begins reeling off, in German, a complicated order for coffee and cakes.

I see red. Mustering as much courage and German as I am able, I say (indeed bark) at him: ‘
Ein Moment, bitte; warten Sie
', wondering what effect this boldness will have. He in turn is flabbergasted long enough for the young woman to escape and to make her way to the other side of my table. As she recites the items I have consumed—two black coffees, a mineral water, a ham and egg sandwich—she looks at me with the wisdom of her twenty years. The Germans are terrible, she says. Rude and pushy. They took over the country in her grandparents' time. Now they are back again, probably for good. And as she gives me my change, I can see her take a deep breath before facing the onslaught of the victorious Teutons.

Szeged goulash is a dish composed of meat, vegetables, onions, spices and the inescapable paprika, all floating in a soup-like sauce. It is like any other goulash except that the diced vegetables are cooked separately and thrown into the pot just before serving. Like Irish stew, Lancashire hot-pot and spaghetti bolognese, Szeged goulash is unknown in the place that gave it its name, though the dish often appears on restaurant menus in other places, notably in cheaper Austrian inns. Yet the town itself is not unlike a stew—a lot of miscellaneous elements thrown into a pot and boiled.

If you travel to Szeged by train, across the great Hungarian plain that used to extend (in happier times) far into what is now Romania and Serbia, the landmark warning you of imminent arrival is a tall white building of recent construction, the salami factory, a source of pride and employment for many of the town's citizens. Salami is, indeed, ubiquitous in a place that knows nothing of Szeged goulash: in the salami factory's immense retail outlet in the centre of the town you may buy all sorts of salamis, some in elaborate gift-packaging contained in satin-lined wooden boxes. Yet as soon as the factory is left behind, the train pulls into the railway station of a very different world. The station itself is surprisingly spacious, though badly in need of repair and painting. It seems somehow much too large and ornate for the drab buildings surrounding it.