The Habsburg Cafe (29 page)

There seems little point in persisting. I turn back towards the station. At the next corner I see an elderly lady shutting the gate of a small garden. Why yes, of course she knows the street. It's back there, where I've come from: first left after the church. She tells me what it is now called. Memory comes flooding back. The steeple of the church had been visible all along; why had I forgotten that you could see it from our back garden? Why had I not made for that beacon? I now know exactly what to do. Walking briskly along the wide avenue, I turn left into a short, much narrower street, and there, in a garden surrounded by a high wire fence, stands—familiar and yet totally strange—my parents' pride and joy, an art-deco villa constructed in 1937 which had been extensively featured in the architectural journals of the time.

I stand on the opposite side of the street, lost in the past. The house looks as though it had fallen on hard times. The handsome walnut trees that used to screen it from the street are gone; the green wire fence seems a recent installation. The cement-rendered façade, sparkling white in my memory, is browny-grey. An external staircase runs up one side, ending in a small porch covered in coloured fibreglass, which is obviously a recent addition. On the other side, where the garden furniture used to be placed under another handsome walnut tree on sunny summer days, there now stands a ill-constructed garden shed. I take my camera out of its case to record these images of a lost world.

I have not noticed that I have aroused the suspicion of a middle-aged man who is raking the grass behind the wire fence. I am embarrassed: I would feel similar alarm and hostility if I found someone photographing our house in Sydney on a quiet Saturday morning. I cross the road and call out to him. He comes over to the fence, even more suspiciously. I apologise, telling him that I don't want to make a nuisance of myself—I've only come to look at the place where I spent some of my childhood. His reaction to that is even more hostile: that's impossible, he says. His family has lived here since 1945, and the people who were here before emigrated to Australia. They were called Riemer. But they're all dead now, he adds, obviously bringing the interview to an end.

What follows is, in a curious way, touching. Hostility and suspicion are converted into amity. The alarm experienced by this middle-aged man in a sweatshirt and baggy tracksuit pants visibly increases when I tell him of the miracle of my survival. It is, however, tempered by his curiosity. He comes closer to
the wire, asking all the inevitable questions. He shakes his head in disbelief as I give a brief account of how I happen to have fetched up, out of the past, seemingly out of death, on this sunny autumn day. How did I find the street? I tell him about the old lady. Ah, yes—and he mentions a name.

Then his mood changes, becoming almost violent. What am I after? Nothing, I assure him, I've only come to look at the place, to fill in one of the blanks. He looks half convinced, but launches into something that sounds like self-justification. His parents, he tells me, bought the house from mine, he can't remember when, '42 or '43, when he was a baby, and before his brother was born. They didn't come here until '45, after the siege ended, because (he says) there was an airfield here—it's still there, he adds—and the district was always being bombed. Pointing to one corner of the house, he shows me where it was hit, not by a bomb but by a large piece of shrapnel: there was quite a bit of damage. At any rate, he goes on to say with some vehemence, they were here before '48.

I now realise the reason for his hostility. In the weeks that I have spent in this country one topic has dominated the many contentious issues examined by a society trying to sort out the social and political priorities of a brand-new order. The government is to make restitution for property seized by the state in 1948. Daily on the radio, on television or in the press some official or other stresses that this restitution is to be in terms of cash payments, not in terms of real estate. No-one living in houses or flats, on farms or small holdings purchased from the state in the course of the more liberal 1970s and 1980s need fear dispossession. Yet few believe those soothing assurances. The crowds gathering for curried prawns and rice at meetings of the Australian Hungarian Friendship Association include several expatriates who have returned in an attempt to repossess ancestral estates. Even my cousin and her husband, who purchased their flat in a block built in the 1950s on the site of a bombed-out pre-war building, are worried about the security of their title.

I try to reassure the man behind the fence that I have no
ambition whatever to repossess this fragment of the past. He seems somewhat mollified, or at least his curiosity gets the better of him. Would I like to have a look around? I make the usual apologies about not wanting to be a nuisance and so on, but he opens a gate in the wire fence, and I cross over a curious threshold into a segment of my past. We walk around the garden. The back is covered in long grass. One or two low and gnarled trees seem desperately in need of pruning. I remember where the sour-cherry tree used to stand. The borers finally got to it, I am told. And the walnuts trees? He doesn't know what became of them, probably chopped up for firewood in '45.

As we walk slowly around this unkempt garden, his hostility is converted into an almost benign friendliness. I must come inside, he says, to meet his wife, and his brother who lives in the downstairs flat. Indeed, he becomes importunate: it would be unthinkable for me to go away without having a look inside, there must be so many memories. It would be churlish to refuse. His wife and brother are summoned, and, after general amazement, we climb the external staircase leading to the upper floor, and enter by a door which has been cut, I realise, through what had been the outside wall of my bedroom. The place is unrecognisable; yet as I am ushered into a hideously over-decorated living room—crimson cushions everywhere—I see that this is what used to be my parents' white bedroom, which had been sparsely furnished with angular salmon-pink and grey pieces, the ultimate in sophistication in 1938.

We chat over a cup of strong coffee. The brothers tell me that they lived in this house with their mother and father. When property was to be nationalised in 1948, their father subdivided the house and installed his widowed sister-in-law and her two sons in the downstairs flat. That way, I am told, the family could retain the property, which otherwise would have been seized by the state. Now their parents are dead; the brothers find it convenient living here, a bit cramped, a bit too far from town, but very pleasant and quiet—and suddenly, from my childhood, I can see my mother, gesturing with her crimsonpainted
nails, assuring a visitor that there were so many advantages to living in the country, despite the distance from town.

The conversation passes to the present. As always, the account I give of the reasons that have brought me back to Hungary produce mild disbelief. The younger brother is, however, anxious to know more about Australia—what are things like there? As I give an inevitably foreshortened account of the benefits and inconveniences of living in that strange place, he interrupts me to say that he has been thinking of emigrating there. He used to be a systems manager in a state-run institution. Now he has set up in business as a management consultant. It's very difficult, however, given the circumstances—he has thought once or twice that he ought to take his family to somewhere like Australia, where there must be a great shortage of skilled managers. I try to tell him as gently as I can about the queue of unemployed management consultants that seems to stretch from one end of the country to the other. He looks downcast and I, in turn, experience a sense of mild guilt for having shattered yet another illusion.

It is time to leave. We say goodbye without any sense of that awkwardness and hostility with which the encounter had begun. Yet as I am about to leave, having taken a couple of photographs of the interior, the elder brother asks me whether I could wait for one moment. He dives into another room and returns a few minutes later with a sheet of yellowing paper. It is some sort of document covered with elaborate official stamps. The faded typescript declares that in 1943 the brothers' parents purchased from mine this property for an undisclosed sum. Beneath are the four signatures of the vendors and the purchasers.

I cannot understand why it should have been important for me to inspect this document. I try to make a suitable comment, agreeing that their title to the property seems beyond question, when once again I am interrupted. No, I do not understand, I am told. Not a penny had changed hands; the undisclosed sum was a legal fiction—the property had been ‘sold' because
my parents were (and he finds it almost impossible to pronounce the word) Jews. Do I not see, he continues with a curious mixture of embarrassment and bitterness, that anything might happen; at present there is no talk of restitution for property seized before 1948, but who knows what retrospective legislation will be passed in the future. And then, to my considerable distress, both brothers begin to plead with me: they have lived here all their lives; their father had rebuilt the house after half of it had caved in; it's the only security either of them has.

I interrupt them with more vehemence than politeness tolerates. I tell them that I have not the slightest wish to reclaim this house, or indeed to have anything to do with Hungary after I leave for home in a couple of weeks' time. I grow agitated too. I stress and stress again that this world means nothing to me, that when my parents and I left it forty-five years ago, we severed whatever connection there had been between us and this place where so many of my relatives had met a terrible death. I tell them that my home, the world where I belong, is there, in Australia, a place where we had discovered safe harbour after leaving this contaminated world. I assure them that I came here merely out of perhaps misplaced sentimentality, to finish a piece of emotional business, but certainly not one connected with real estate. I hear myself thanking them for their hospitality, assuring them once more of my good intentions. Yet, as I set out for the station and as they are standing in the garden, safe behind their fence, waving, I begin to wonder guiltily what future fears and alarms I have sown in the minds of these people who have lived for a very long time in a house where I spent no more than three or four years of childhood.

We are standing before a screen of icons in a small Serbian Orthodox church; in front of us prophets and saints are frozen in eternal mystery. My cousin's daughter, a currently unemployed
teacher of English, looks around at the decrepit late eighteenth-century building, a typical example of Austrian baroque, which had been constructed, in all probability, on a shoestring budget. She fixes her gaze on the cracks in the elaborately plastered dome. She wonders, she says, whether the authorities will manage to get around to fixing the building before it collapses. The saints and prophets look on unconcerned, their minds set on more important matters. Outside in the bright autumn sunshine, after exchanging a few words with the elderly woman seated by the church door who is selling postcards and devotional objects, my young cousin remarks on how few antiquities there are in Hungary.

On our way to this small town called Szentendre, an artists' village and tourist trap on the outskirts of Budapest, we drove past a few Roman columns and brick foundations beside the busy road, remnants of the Roman settlement of Aquincum. Behind us rose a vista of identical-looking multi-storey blocks of flats—‘socialist flats' as they are called by the inhabitants of the city. Those depressing buildings, a source of anger and contempt for the citizens of a newly ‘liberated' Hungary, are nevertheless not much different from the architectural standards achieved here in former times. You would not come to Hungary to admire the architectural excellence of its antiquities. There are, admittedly, a few medieval castles (or in most cases their ruins) scattered around the country. There is also a handful of old churches, most of them ‘modernised' during the eighteenth century. Here and there you may come upon remnants of the Turkish occupation five hundred years ago. But mostly this is a country with only paltry monuments of the past.

In Budapest, where my young cousin lives in what is the only old part of the town—a series of medieval streets around the fortifications of the long-since demolished fortress, composed mostly of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century houses—most of the buildings date from the turn of the century, a period when many large cities, Sydney and Melbourne for instance, received their present-day aspect. The two
cathedrals in Sydney are older than the pompous neo-baroque basilica in Budapest. Most people in this city live in houses or apartment blocks built since the 1880s. Budapest is, in other words, a relatively new place.

My cousin is fully aware of this. When she remarked that even the iconostasis in the church we had visited wasn't particularly old, she began to speak about the sense of deprivation she felt in Hungary. There is, she said not for the first time, so little that is old, so few things to put you in touch with real civilisation, to give you a sense of being in contact with the past, with continuity and with things that really mattered. She spoke wistfully of the fortnight in the early 1980s, it was still ‘socialism' then, of course, when she and her husband, an economist, managed to obtain permission to ‘go out'. They went to Italy; they didn't get as far as Rome, but were able at least to drive around Tuscany and Lombardy. Her eyes began to sparkle as she recalled that wonderful time. Now, of course, they were free to go anywhere, but they didn't have enough money—and besides the girls were growing up, costing a great deal to keep. The most they can manage to do is to go to Vienna for the weekend to stay with friends and stand through a performance at the opera on the Saturday night. Vienna is much better than Budapest, she remarked, it has, after all, something of a past, but really she felt that she would have to get to Italy or Greece or the south of France soon, otherwise she would dry up.