The Habsburg Cafe (34 page)

And now I am greeted by a pleasant surprise: the prospect of attending a performance of
The Clemency of Titus
, an opera I have never seen, one that is said to be among the least satisfactory of Mozart's mature works, yet one surely worth ‘collecting' in this bicentenary year. The performance is about to start by the time I find my seat—except that here everything seems to start about ten minutes after the advertised time. For that reason the theatre is still half-empty, though it is filling
rapidly as people at last begin to heed the hortatory bells that have been shrilling in the foyers for the last minute or two. There is the usual flurry as the confusing method of numbering rows and seats in Hungarian theatres defeats the endeavours of a large number of foreign visitors to find their places.

My seat, at least, is secure—I have made sure that I am in the right place, remembering the embarrassment that led to my introduction to the pharmacist of Glebe. I suspect that the well dressed Americans who have just sat down beside me are in the wrong place, judging by the tentative and puzzled way they matched the directions on their limp pink tickets with the seats they are now occupying. That suspicion is confirmed as soon as the houselights begin to go down. Two dumpy ladies, their white hair neatly arranged in buns, wearing dark dresses and silk stoles, arrive and begin, with great politeness, to claim their seats. For an instant I entertain the fear that I shall have to act again as an impromptu interpreter. I am, however, saved when it turns out that one of the ladies is able to resolve the confusion in surprisingly confident English. The Americans scurry off in search of their seats on the other side of the auditorium. With some shuffling and arranging of handbags and stoles, the two ladies settle into their rightful seats just as the orchestra strikes up the first notes of Mozart's overture. My neighbour, seemingly the elder of the two, gives a little start and, after a hurried consultation with her companion, leans over to me and asks whether I know what opera is being performed this evening.

She turns to me again as soon as the curtain falls on the first act. Would I be kind enough to tell her how I knew about the change of programme? I mention the sheet of cardboard in the foyer. Ah, they didn't notice it—they were running terribly late, the buses are so unrealiable these days. So I didn't receive notification either? I look blankly at her. Well, she reminds me, they usually notify subscribers if the programme has to be changed. I explain that I am not a subscriber, at which she seems greatly surprised. Surely I was sitting here last time, and the time before that—she and her cousin have changed
subscriptions this year, and she would swear that they had sat beside me on the other occasions. This is the moment for me to produce the line I have been obliged to produce time after time during the previous few weeks: I am a visitor; I've lived most of my life in Australia; I am indeed about to return home.

Thus we fall into conversation during the long interval separating the two acts of Mozart's homage to imperial (Roman and Austrian) clemency. There is something very pleasant about the behaviour of these elderly ladies sitting beside me in the plush-padded stalls of the Budapest Opera House. Their appearance is neat, with a modest and understated style quite unlike the highly-coloured glitz of Budapest's very nouveaux riches in this, the second year of freedom and liberty. My neighbour is wearing a black dress covered in white dots. Her feet are shod in sensible lace-up shoes. A small silver ornament is pinned to her breast. It strikes me that, but for the shoes, this lady resembles my grandmother, the owner of the Ferris wheel. She wore every day of her life—at least in the years I knew her—such a dress, in warm wool during the long winter months, cotton in the summer and silk for the few occasions that she left her small, overfurnished apartment in an unfashionable part of town to spend an evening with relatives or close friends. As for shoes—though she must have owned some during the course of her life, had worn them no doubt when dancing with my grandfather during the years of their engagement and married life (before he defected to enter a scandalous liaison with a woman in Prague)—when I knew her (before she vanished from the face of the earth, together with most of my father's family, in 1944) she always wore calf-length boots which were ceremoniously laced up with a silver-handled hook.

I continue chatting with these ladies in the empty auditorium where only a few people remain through this long interval. In the orchestra pit a lone oboist is practising an elaborate semiquaver run. The odd thump behind the curtain indicates that some adjustment is being made to the minimal scenery in front of which Mozart's opera is being performed. I tell my
companions about the purpose of my visit; I mention the weeks I have spent in Szeged, the lectures I have given here in Budapest. They are fascinated, delighted. The lady sitting next to me says that she used to teach French, while her cousin is a teacher of English—well, she has actually retired, but still works part time to make ends meet in these difficult times.

Perhaps it is the gilt-and-plush surroundings of this elaborately decorated theatre—tiers of boxes rising to the domed, frescoed ceiling, couchant sphinxes everywhere—that make these ladies, who are intoning the by now familiar litany of hardships, seem less crass or less obsessed than those people who had spoken similar words to me in the past few weeks: my cousin, eyes ablaze as she worked herself into a lather of distress; the custodian of the keep at Visegrád; the green-eyed proprietor of the little hotel in the Buda hills. Whatever the reason, these women seem less intense, much more civilised. They show a nicely ironic detachment from the ills and confusions of this society. They had seen it all before, their demeanour seems to suggest, and, given that both must be well into their seventies, it is obvious that they have experienced several changes of régime, several brave new worlds come into being in this unstable country.

I find to my surprise that this polite, desultory conversation in a near-empty theatre is a very pleasant experience. Trying to understand why that should be so, the thought occurs to me that (through some sort of regression into childhood) the fleeting resemblance of these ladies to my long-dead grandmother, whom I can only remember as a featureless image in a polka-dot dress, has brought me to a partial and probably temporary reconciliation with this world. Other forces must also be operating here; the civilising influence of art—even if it should be something as fundamentally trivial as opera is in the opinion of many people—may have converted something that would seem, outside the privileged confines of the golden enclosure of this theatre, crass and even neurotic. Or is it, I ask myself, that in these weeks of moving around the country, listening, observing, heeding chance encounters, I have been
isolated from the better, more refined, at any event less hectic, elements of this society, ones which one may encounter only on an occasion like this?

This sense of ease, of not being on one's guard, helps me to face with reasonable equanimity the question I knew was coming, a question that cannot be avoided in such conversations. What is it like being back in Hungary? my neighbour asks—and I realise, as I am about to launch into my well-prepared standard reply, that she has not used the word ‘home'. Both nod knowingly when I say that it's nice to be back, even though it is strange to visit a place you hadn't lived in for almost fifty years. I am about to proceed to the platitudes I consider fitting in such circumstances—how hospitable everyone seems to be, how this may be a better world than the one I left etcetera—when my neighbour's cousin leans across her companion and touches my sleeve. It must be very painful, she says, to have to come face to face with memories, to remember all sorts of things that I had forgotten or hadn't wanted to remember. There must be great distress in such recognitions. And then she says something that has occurred to me several times during these weeks and, of course, even more poignantly, a year ago, when I returned to this world for the first time after all those years of absence. The past, she says, with a faint smile of self-consciousness, is another country—she knows it's a banal thing to say, yet it's true.

The moment marks something strange, inexplicable but—or so I am convinced—very significant. The barriers of suspicion and reticence are lifting. Why is it, I ask myself with some bitterness, that I am able to experience some sense of community, of a shared understanding, with total strangers, to whom I would probably not have spoken had there not been a last-minute change of programme at the opera, when with others, even with my cousin, I keep myself aloof, reluctant to allow them to come too close? I cannot, I realise (as I notice that the audience is beginning to trickle back into the auditorium) account for this curious change of attitude, and perhaps I should not seek explanations—perhaps these
moments of insight and even reconciliation must come like this, unexpected, mysterious and fleeting.

I think that my companions have also recognised that something significant has occurred—something which they are probably as incapable of putting a name to as I am, yet something which (judging by our silence) has touched them too. Then, since such moments cannot and perhaps should not last, my neighbour begins to chat about tonight's performance. What do I think of it? Of course the standard is not very high, she knows that. What can you expect, though? The singers are paid next to nothing, so it stands to reason that if they get the offer of an engagement abroad they're off like a shot. Didn't I know, she asks with a smile, that that is why so many performances are cancelled because of indisposition? Some years ago the authorities relaxed the rule that all operas must be performed in Hungarian. Singers are now able to learn the more popular works in their original languages—German, Italian, French. So that if a singer suddenly cancels a performance in Graz or Linz, or even in Vienna, someone gets on the telephone and—pouff! the opera in Budapest is off. You can't blame them, she remarks; poor things, they work so hard, yet they scarcely know where the next meal will come from. And, of course, some never come back.

I tell them, again with greater candour than usual, that my visits to the opera throughout these months have been more sentimental and mythological than musical. Pointing to one of the boxes on our left, now occupied by a pair of extremely bored-looking people, I begin to speak about those months in 1946 when, as a gesture of farewell to the world we were about to leave, my parents brought me to this theatre most Wednesday nights, to sit in that box and witness spectacles which have come to stand, throughout the many intervening years, as shining images of the old life, the life that had been poisoned for us by hatred and barbarity, yet a life we yearned after in our exile. I describe for them some of my memories of those nights long ago; I speak about the way those probably pedestrian performances enchanted an impressionable and
undiscriminating child. But the lady in the spotted dress interrupts me: no, she remembers that year, some of the performances were surprisingly accomplished, given the appalling circumstances. Had I, she asks, ever heard of Otto Klemperer?—and I tell her that I do indeed remember him conducting performances in this theatre, and that furthermore, many years later, when I was living in London, I used to attend concerts given by the then famous and practically crippled musician, and that I used always to remember how my parents would mention his name whenever he took his post at the podium here in 1946.

Reminiscence, sentiment and nostalgia are interrupted by the polite applause greeting the conductor of tonight's performance. The houselights dim. The second act, in which Titus' magnanimity will be confirmed, begins. The performance is, to say the least, mediocre. The person sitting directly behind me, who resolutely refuses to cover her sneezes, proves to be a distracting nuisance. Yet I experience a sense of strange contentment as I watch this tedious opera weave its way through a confusing and silly plot to its triumphant conclusion.

Buttoned, muffled and gloved, I am panting up a steep street at the foot of the Buda hills towards the Eötvös Academy, the venue for the reception where I am to deliver a short address as a token Australian Hungarian. The weather has turned wintry. A blast of cold air from the steppes has blown away the last remnants of the Indian summer that lingered for many weeks over the Danube basin. The sky is leaden, sheets of sleety rain are driven by swirling gusts. People are huddled at bus shelters, in the doorways of shops and blocks of flats, waiting for a momentary break in the downfall before dashing across the rainsoaked street, dodging between screeching and sliding cars rushing about at their customary breakneck speed. The academy turns out to be a handsome building halfway
up a street that snakes its way to one of the lesser peaks of this steep terrain. The wind is screaming in my face. I am able to see next to nothing because my glasses have fogged up. Wheezing and spluttering, I struggle to shut my umbrella on the portico, exasperated, miserable and feeling very sorry for myself.

Almost as soon as Mozart's celebration of imperial clemency came to an end and I had said goodbye to the two ladies sitting beside me, I felt the telltale tickle at the back of the throat, the legacy of the person behind me who had sneezed her way through the performance, a sure harbinger of a streaming cold. My throat is on fire; my eyes are watering; I am probably running a temperature; and I have certainly all but lost my voice. It is in these circumstances that I must speak those few words to the gathering at the academy.

This institution occupies a curious place in the complicated and confusing network of Budapest's universities. It is one of those unexpected remnants of Kakania you come upon in odd corners of this large, noisy and decrepit city. The academy was established, I have been told, to produce a professional and bureaucratic elite, imbued with the supranational aspirations of the old Empire, to contain and to check excessively nationalistic sentiments, not at gunpoint but by the seduction of favour and privilege. Both the appearance and the location of the institution declare, with obvious symbolism, its otherness and privilege—a privilege that seems to have survived two wars, revolutions and dizzying changes of régime.