The Habsburg Cafe (28 page)

My cousin tried to dissuade me from finding the place. It's bound to have been pulled down ages ago, she said, all I was
likely to find was row upon row of apartment blocks. Besides, it's a business getting there: the trains no longer run into town: you have to go to the end of a Metro line and change, I was sure to get lost, she added. Her husband produced a large fold-out map of the city. We found the suburb easily enough—it is no longer on the edge of the city of course—but we could not recognise any of the street names. My cousin said that she didn't remember the name of the street, but the odd thing is that the name had come back to me a few days earlier, and also the number: 3 Tátra Street. They looked at me with astonishment: how could I have remembered that?

I could not, of course, offer any cogent explanation. I have come to realise in the course of these weeks, that I have retained all sorts of odd facts and details about my early life—about places and about people—probably because those fragmented memories are parts of a myth world, not of everyday reality, as they are for my cousin who has spent her life surrounded by these places and images. Precisely because these mundane things—addresses, dates, the relationship among long-dead people—have been fixed in the fluid but always consistent world of my mythology, they have stayed with me in a way that many details of my ‘real' life in Australia, that distant place, have been consigned to oblivion. Nevertheless, a careful scrutiny of the street names printed in minuscule type on that large map failed to reveal any street approximating that memory.

So it came about that I heeded my cousin's advice, and didn't try to find that house in a suburb of Budapest, but went off to Szeged to further the cause of Australian Studies in Central Europe. Yet in the course of those weeks, perhaps because the unaccomplished sentimental journey became a nagging piece of unfinished business, I thought from time to time about the house and the part it had played in my earliest consecutive or at least sharply etched memories.

Those memories have the particular clarity of early childhood; many are shining, brightly coloured images, all the more vivid because they are surrounded by blankness. Our maid
Rosie is sitting astride a squawking, flapping goose, forcing corn down its protesting gullet. The dull swoosh as the caretaker-handyman shovels away the snow piled high on the flat roof. A row of tiny cactus plants, each in its small terracotta pot with matching saucer, on the low windowsill under the picture window of the living room. Rosie and the caretaker hanging a Persian rug at the foot of the stairs to prevent the heat of the tiled stove from escaping. Standing in front of my mother as she peels off me layer after layer of cardigans after our afternoon walk in winter. The dark-hued painting, a nude with her arm twined around her neck, hanging by the stairs. Picking redcurrants in summer. Being told to stay indoors while several men thwack at the walnut trees to dislodge the hard, white-shelled nuts still nestling in their dark green husks. The red stripe that runs around the perimeter of the black rubber floor-covering in the hall. The hiss of the bottled gas burner, on which all the cooking was done in summer, after the solid-fuel kitchen stove had been shut down at the end of spring.

Some of these memories are connected with events, with the structures of cause and effect, with stories rather than with static, shining images. They are, moreover, much more darkly coloured. The house is filled with long-faced people. A hearse drawn by two jet-black cockaded horses stops in front of the house. Then the house is empty. ‘Don't worry,' the maid who is looking after me (we are probably between nannies) says. ‘They'll be back soon, they've only gone out for a little while.' But I know what is going on: great-grandmother has died. They're going to put her in a hole in the ground and she'll never be able to get out again. Then everybody comes back and I am carted off for supper and bath.

Another time I wake up in the morning. I ask for my mother. She had to go into town early, before I was awake, my grandmother tells me. Will she be back by evening? Of course, my grandmother says without much conviction. Next morning, and for many mornings after that, I am told the same tale. Mummy has a lot of things to do in town, she goes in early
and gets back after I've gone to bed, but she comes and looks at me every night and hopes that I've been a good boy. I know of course that my grandmother is lying. My mother is dead. My father is with the army, somewhere far away. I weep uncontrollably, for days on end it seems. But I will not speak those terrible words ‘Mummy is dead'; there are certain things you mustn't ever say. Then, one morning, she is back, smiling at me over the side of my bed.

Explanations of a sort were probably given; no doubt there were presents and treats, at least as far as it was possible to indulge in treats in a world rapidly heading towards destruction. It was, however, only much later that I came to understand the combination of courage and folly—so characteristic of much of my mother's behaviour in those years—that generated that inexplicable absence. My father had been called up for one of his periodic stints of army service—though in truth it was more forced labour than military duty. It was autumn, still warm, like high summer, just as this autumn almost fifty years later is still indistinguishable from summer. My parents assumed that my father would spend four or five weeks in a camp in a little town not far from Budapest, as he had done on every other occasion. He left in his summer uniform, though I have no memory whatever of saying goodbye to him.

On this occasion, though, he found himself going much farther afield, into Transylvania, where the Hungarian army, supported of course by our gallant German allies, was engaged in the heroic struggle to recapture our homeland. The deeper they penetrated that land of mountains the colder it became. Frostbite, chilblains and even worse afflictions threatened. Somehow my father was able to get word to my mother asking for his winter clothes to be sent to him—though for security reasons he was not allowed to reveal the locality.

The message arrived late in the evening. My mother hurriedly packed my father's winter uniform, reeking of mothballs, as much warm underwear as she could find in haste, and set off, carrying her own heavy topcoat (from which she had prudently removed the fur collar), for Transylvania and the unknown.
She had no idea where she might find my father. She had not imagined what risks she took in travelling through that turbulent world, on her way towards a raging and particularly bloody conflict—as all conflicts in that unhappy land always are. She was almost arrested as a spy, a haggard and chain-smoking Mata Hari. She had to contend with the sullen and murderous hostility of the many warring races that inhabit Transylvania. Even the Hungarians, whom this military action was supposed to bring back into the bosom of the homeland, looked on her with suspicion—who was this Hungarian-speaking woman who was clearly not one of us?

She travelled from village to village, sometimes on foot, sometimes in a farmer's cart and even in an army truck. She went from place to place where people, sometimes with gleefully malicious intent to mislead her, told her that units of the Hungarian army might be found. At last, after two or three days of wandering around that mountainous, bitterly cold terrain, she came upon yet another large camp surrounded by barbed wire. As she had done time and time again she called out to the groups of hunched, shivering men standing behind the wire. On that occasion one of them went away and returned, a moment or two later, with my father. All my mother could do was to hurl the suitcase of clothes over the wire before my father hurried off. There was no time for talk, no time for love. She returned to Budapest by the same difficult and hazardous route.

That was the first time in my life that I had been betrayed—that is to say, the first occasion on which I was forced to realise that I was not the sole centre of my parents' world, that my mother had to exercise a choice when she was called upon to rescue my father from the bone-freezing cold of Transylvania. For that reason, too, that house occupies a position of absolute centrality within my memories. It was there that my life was somehow formed by influences that I could understand, where I was able to say, time and time again with the insistence of a five-year-old: ‘You could have told me, you could have told me; I thought you were dead.' It was in that place, in other
words, that I began to enter into the world of experience, where I came to the recognition that people—even those close to you, those that formed the centre of your life—were, in the final analysis, untrustworthy and fickle.

The last time I saw that house was three or four years later, in 1944. By then the war was raging around the city. Our situation was desperate. We needed false identity papers, for which the price was high and rising each day. The house had been abandoned a year or so earlier, but a small metal box remained buried beside the sour-cherry tree in the garden. My mother and I left the city at dusk—the trains were, miraculously, still running. As we approached the village the boom of not-too-distant guns grew louder, bright flashes illuminated larger and larger patches of the night sky. We picked our way through darkened streets, past many abandoned houses. Our house stood in darkness. With the light of a small torch, around which she had wrapped a handkerchief to soften its glow, my mother found a spade in the toolshed. She dug beside the cherry tree, where an innocuous looking stone marker had been carefully placed. She took out the small metal box, containing the last bits and pieces of gold. She didn't even bother to fill in the hole.

The railway station was deserted by the time we had made our way back there. No more trains would run that night, perhaps no more trains would run at all. We started walking the nine or ten kilometres to town along the road that ran beside the track. Occasionally an army vehicle roared past, its shielded headlights casting small pools of light on the surface of the road. One of them stopped. The door was thrown open by a Hungarian-speaking person in German uniform. We were ordered to get in. The officer—whose Hungarian was now revealed to be heavily accented—began quizzing my mother. Who were we, what were we up to so close to the war zone? My mother embarked on her well-prepared story. She gave her name, a suitably Magyar surname. Her husband had been killed fighting for the fatherland in Transylvania. Her mother—and
here she named our former caretaker's elderly mother, who had always lived in that village—was mortally ill. She had to visit her, and allow the old lady to say goodbye to her only grandson.

The soldier then turned to me. I was sitting in the back of the armoured car, staring at my mother's back. What was my name? Where did I live? Who was my father? I answered as I had been drilled. The inquisition continued throughout the half-hour trip to town. He seemed satisfied with our performance, for he dropped us off at the carefully selected false address my mother had given him—a district of the city where wives of soldiers fighting on the eastern front had been settled—and, reaching into a compartment of his vehicle, he handed me a bar of army-issue chocolate. I have often wondered whether our transparent performance had taken him in, or whether we had been on that night recipients of a small spark of compassion and humanity in an infernal world.

An idle Saturday morning seems a good opportunity to embark on a sentimental journey in search of that house, to finish that piece of unfinished business. I am aware, as I squeeze into an overcrowded carriage on the Metro, that the search will probably prove futile. No amount of poring over maps of the city has revealed a street of the right name anywhere near that suburb. We arrive at the terminus. I follow the signs leading to the suburban trains. Coming out of the subway, I find myself in front of a huge concrete barn, some sort of a marketplace. Short, mostly elderly people are hurrying around with shopping bags filled with limp cabbages, pale carrots, black potatoes. Elderly women, black scarves around their heads, sit beside plastic buckets of autumn flowers—there must be a cemetery nearby.

I find the train I must take without any trouble, but another problem immediately presents itself. There are three stops bearing the name of the village or suburb where we used to live. Where to get off? An answer of sorts presents itself: the middle one of the three stations is also identified as an airport stop. There had indeed been a small airfield near that villa;
we left the place largely because of the increasing severity of the air-raids against that military installation. That, logic suggests, is where the search should begin.

The train pulls into the station and I recognise immediately a familiar world—unless each of those stations presents the same aspect. A row of shops lines the roadway running along the left side of the track. On the right, luxuriant trees shield ornate nineteenth-century villas, each of them a miniature Versailles, a tiny Belvedere. I remember how we used to cross the line to reach the shops where ice cream could be bought, or where the primitive flea-pit cinema was situated. But I also remember that there was a place where you could purchase fruit and vegetables on ‘our' side of the line—and there indeed I see a small weatherboard shop with a prominent Marlboro sign in its window.

Beyond that, memory fails. I zigzag through the leafy streets, still green in the late autumn sunshine, though piles of brown leaves lie in the gutters everywhere. I wander past rows of ornate villas, stucco garlands and medallions over deep bay windows or beneath cantilevered balconies. Here and there a more modest timber house interrupts the uniformity, and even one or two small, obviously recently constructed blocks of apartments. In one street I find a man burning leaves in the gutter—something I have not seen in pollution-conscious Sydney for many years. I ask him whether he could direct me to the street, but he assures me that there is no such street around here. I walk a little farther and come upon a young woman pushing a child in a stroller. No, she's only lived here a couple of months; doesn't know the place at all—and hurries on nervously.