The Habsburg Cafe (25 page)

There would have been members of the city's bourgeois upper-crust—magistrates and lawyers, highly placed medical specialists, perhaps even a respected writer or two. Their manners would have been more refined than those of the landowners and their wives, yet lacking that aristocratic panache and nonchalance the rural gentry sought so hard to emulate with their precisely calculated coarseness of manner. There would have been children of course, demure schoolgirls and well-behaved boys (their hair neatly brushed, parted and glued) dressed in their sailor suits. There might also have been one or two raffish characters, the local merry widow and the odd rake, whom the well-bred and caste-conscious patrons would have assiduously ignored in the rituals of greeting and acknowledgment that characterised the mysteries of social life.

Would the Jews of Szeged have set foot inside this place, or was Szeged one of those places where the sporadic antisemitism of Kakania—at times fierce, as in Vienna, but mostly benign, as in Budapest at the height of its prosperity—established impenetrable barriers? That question is unanswerable, for an answer would depend on an intimate knowledge of the social networks of the city's past. It would be nice to imagine that this large provincial café at what was then the geographic and perhaps spiritual heart of Kakania, the meeting place of many of the peoples, races, faiths and languages that populated that complicated realm, would have been a focus where rivalries and enmities came together to be neutralised and reconciled, even if only within its elaborately papered walls. I would like to believe that here, in my grandparents' time, Hungarians and Austrians, Jews, Catholics and Protestants, even perhaps the bourgeoisie and the gentry might have discovered something of that social harmony that the rulers of Kakania sought to inculcate among their often unruly subjects.

That harmony was more a matter of dreams and aspirations than of substantial reality. Kakania may never have been anything other than a pious dream, as its nickname, a scurrilous comment, clearly suggests. Its ideals were supported by
hypocrisy, pretence and snobbery, a self-satisfied smugness that contaminated most elements of social life. Nevertheless, the image I have conjured (or manufactured) of this café of the Habsburg world at the turn of the century—the discreet clinking of good china and heavy silver, the buzz of conversation, the greetings, smiles and nods—is alluring, even irresistible. I want to believe that such a golden world did exist, that it did contain a possibility of achieving at least a partial reconciliation of its tensions and rivalries. I would like to imagine that its destruction came from forces outside its cosy and comfortable ordinariness, that the beguiling aroma of coffee and vanilla carried no trace of the noxious fumes that spread over this continent. Yet I know that the symbol or exemplar of that evil grew up in the pleasant city of Linz, another site, some five hundred kilometers to the west, of the Kakanian dream which also had, no doubt, its own characteristic Habsburg café. And I also know that these places in Linz and Szeged, and in the other towns and cities of the realm, overheard terrible sentiments and hatreds expressed over cups of thick rich coffee, or the weaker brew of the days of hardship.

My neighbours, the gold-embellished citizens of Szeged, are loud in their complaint about the revolting quality of the coffee these days. What is happening to the world? they ask. OK, so socialism's dead, but are things any better? Both are convinced that life is harder than it used to be. Under the old régime you could make a bit of money out of all sorts of things—but now, well now prices are going up and up, it's almost impossible to do business and show a profit. Look at the price of petrol, it's disgraceful! And besides, there are all those Romanian refugees to house and feed. Neither knows where it will all end.

The younger of the two, resplendent in a cerise shirt, lifts a nicotine-stained finger and tells his companion that he knows why Hungary is in such a sorry state. It's simple, he says, Hungary's been betrayed once again, just as she has been in the past. It was all very well for the Americans to promise the
earth once it seemed likely that the Russians would leave. But did they do anything? Of course they didn't. And why? Well, he tells the other, it's simple—it's all those crooks in Budapest, especially the Jews: they're creaming off all the benefits for themselves. Of course there's money there. Why only last week he had to go up for the day—he couldn't believe his eyes: the wealth, the ostentation. Here in Szeged, he continues, Hungarians, the truest of true Hungarians, are deprived, struggling to make ends meet, exploited and, yes, betrayed again. And then he begins to tell his friend about a café in Budapest—full of Jews of course—where you can get coffee the likes of which he hadn't seen for years and years. Rich, thick, smelling like real coffee, not the muck that the gallant and plucky Hungarians of Szeged are forced to endure.

A few kilometres to the south of Szeged lies Yugoslavia, or more accurately perhaps Serbia, the most aggressive or the most exploited (depending on your point of view and allegiances) member of what is still in 1991, a federation. The Romanian border is a short distance to the east—the citizens of that other troubled country often spill across the Hungarian frontier looking for shelter, food and employment. This is an unlikely place for a discovery about Australian literature, yet it happens precisely here, where three countries meet, where (people will tell you) Europe comes to an end, merging with the lands of the Slavs and other denizens of the east.

This is not a major discovery; it is more like a footnote or a gloss on a minor text. It may indeed be the case that it had already been noticed, that the critic who had picked up the allusion had not thought it worthwhile to record such a trivial observation—or else had buried it somewhere in an essay or a critical book I have not read. The discovery provides, nevertheless, a moment of curious poignancy, tinged with irony. It would seem that the fates had decreed that I must
come back to the country of my birth, though to a city I had never visited before, to understand a conceit in a minor
jeu d'esprit
of a great writer.

We are in a seminar room on a late afternoon in October. Though it is supposed to be autumn, the weather is still warm, the students are still clad in their international summer uniform—jeans, tee-shirts, sneakers. Sunlight slants through the open windows; a butterfly, surely the last of the season, flutters past, lifted by a surge of warm air. Even the grey institutional buildings across the courtyard manage to look pleasant in the golden light of evening. There is an atmosphere of somnolence—not at all unusual in such circumstances—a furtive watching of the clock by teacher and taught alike. And I, half choking from the dust of eastern-bloc chalk that crumbles between your fingers and sends clouds of white powder everywhere, grow increasingly conscious of the neat symmetry and irony of things.

It is a curious, somewhat unsettling feeling to be negotiating two cultures, two languages, two very different countries: a landlocked bit of Central or Eastern Europe (again it depends on which point of view you opt for) and that vast arid continent in the southern hemisphere where you are obliged to fly for hours on end over desert and ocean whenever you set out for a place like Szeged. I am a juggler, an illusionist. Most of the proceedings have to be conducted in English, for my rudimentary command of Hungarian does not extend to conceptual or literary terminology. Yet occasionally, with the showmanship that's an essential though often unacknowledged part of the art of teaching, it proves very effective to introduce the odd word in Hungarian, ostensibly to elucidate the meaning of an expression, or to offer an analogy, but fundamentally to provide a moment of surprise, a little nudge to make people pay attention, to stop them sinking into late-afternoon lassitude.

On this sunny afternoon, about half-way through a three-week course on Australian literature for students whose knowledge of Australia does not extend beyond Kylie Minogue, AC/DC, koalas and kangaroos (and one of them had seen
Crocodile Dundee
), we are reading Patrick White's ‘Miss Slattery and her Demon Lover'—hardly an adequate introduction to White, but a nice way of bringing Australia and Hungary together, even if only contingently, through White's venomous settling of scores with a couple of expatriate Hungarians he had known in Sydney. Miss Slattery, (‘Pete', which is short, according to her, for Dimity) a full-blooded no-nonsense Australian girl falls into the clutches of Tibby Szabo, a squat, hirsute Hungarian inhabitant of a good Sydney address with a stunning view of the Harbour, the proud owner of deeply piled wall-to-wall, and (most importantly perhaps) of an obscene mirror fastened to the ceiling above his ample double bed.

One of White's jokes raises more of a laugh from these students than it would from readers of almost any other nationality. Why, Miss Slattery asks, is the gentleman (who will presently become her lover) called Mr Szabo and not Mr Tibor since the name above the bell says clearly ‘Szabo Tibor'. These students know why—because, as Tibby tells the long-limbed market-researcher, ‘In Hoongary ze nimes are beck to front'. That moment of mediation, when my audience and I have privileged access to two modes of nomenclature, achieves little epiphanies, explanations, clarifications. It is a way of bringing them to a very small understanding of an alien society through this comedy of the meeting of ‘old' and ‘new' Australia at the front door of an expensive home unit. I tell them about the social topography of Sydney in the sixties, about the conspicuous way of life led by many wealthy Hungarians in the Eastern Suburbs, about the espresso-bars of Double Bay and Bondi Junction (‘Please, what does junction mean?'), and of the way these people often spoke broken English with an overlay of broad Australian—unlike the students in Szeged (I am careful not to add) whose excellent English is delivered in an American monotone only slightly tarnished by the characteristic open vowels and the absence of accentuation of Hungarian-speaking people. I also tell them about the social and financial
éclat
of a splendid water view.

And then follows my own tiny discovery which, for me, could not have occurred elsewhere. Tibby Szabo, who grows more than a little interested in the self-confident market-researcher who has fetched up on his doorstep, has short, pointed teeth. White draws our attention to Tibby's vampire-fangs very early in the story, and returns to them towards the end when Miss Slattery, disenchanted (‘pissed off' would probably be a more accurate though less acceptable way of saying it) with her ‘demon lover', notices that those short teeth are markedly discoloured and blunted. I had not noticed that detail before, or if I had, I had paid no attention to it. Now, with that alertness most of us experience when teaching—a slight nervousness that we might dry up or even (worst of all fates) be found out—I become very conscious of it. Once again I am filled with admiration for the cleverness and wit of a writer like White, who puts us teachers and critics, barnacles on the great craft of literature, very properly in our place.

Until the wise statesmen meeting at Versailles in the aftermath of the Great War redrew the boundaries of Central and Eastern Europe, Szeged sat in the middle of the great granary of Hungary that stretched a long way to the south and, of more particular interest in the case of Miss Slattery and Mr Szabo, to the east. There beyond what is now the Romanian border lies a land rich in Hungarian folklore and traditions. It is where, according to some present-day ultra-nationalists who are beginning to mutter in an alarming way about regaining the ‘homeland', the true Hungary is to be found—more so than in the pathetic rump that remains, and certainly much more so than in a cosmopolitan, polyglot Budapest—a place, according to some citizens of Szeged, such as the pot-bellied patrons of The Flower, still unaccountably full of Jews. In that world of a lost heritage, where Bartók collected the true Hungarian folk music (not that dreadful gypsy stuff that passes for Hungarian music everywhere else, including of course Budapest), the spiritual and national characteristics of the Magyars (the only true Hungarians) are preserved, even though
the towns and villages, streams and forests now bear Romanian names.

In the south-east of that countryside rich in Magyar nostalgia and national pride rise the Transylvanian Alps, homeland of my companion on the night of curried prawns and rice. There arose the dark legends of the blood-sucking vampire, of the living dead, the terrible and insatiable lord of a remote castle, protected by mighty chasms and cataracts, whose razor-sharp fangs constantly searched for the blood of nubile maidens. Ethnologists have, of course, offered rational explications for these wild stories: local history tells of a haemophiliac nobleman and of clumsy attempts at blood-transfusion. But the legend of the vampire—Dracula or Nosferatu—is of far greater imaginative strength. It speaks of fears and longing, of desires that are best not acknowledged yet are shared by most nations and cultures. The story of Dracula is one of the few great European myths to have emerged since classical times, yet Dracula speaks with a pronounced Hungarian accent—as did the actor Bela Lugosi, with his irresistible mixture of monster and courtly aristocrat.

I point to the open classroom window on my right into the gathering dusk, in what I hope is the direction of Transylvania, and remind the young people of Szeged about Count Dracula—as much a part of their cultural heritage as those patriotic heroes who are this year gradually thawing out of the deep-freeze into which socialist ideology had placed them many years before these people were born. Their reaction, though, is curious: they seem not to know much about Dracula. I try Nosferatu and one of them, no doubt a film buff, says he remembers the silent film … was that set in Hungary? I cannot remember whether the setting in those flickering images I have only seen on SBS was at all specified, but I say yes, probably it was meant to be Hungary, or nearby, anyway. Nevertheless, they seem not very interested in Dracula, and I realise that perhaps the Count had been banished by the healthy ideology of the previous half-century or so, together with all those nationalist agitators who, despite all their
bluster, failed to represent the noble ideals of the dictatorship of the proletariat. And the thought also strikes me that, while the memory of those nineteenth-century swashbucklers was kept alive in the imagination of most Hungarians through the long years of what everybody still refers to as socialism, poor Dracula had a stake driven through his heart, at least as far as this part of the country is concerned.