The Habsburg Cafe (35 page)

The large, crowded campuses of Budapest's universities and places of higher learning are concentrated in the flatlands of Pest. They grew as that city grew, and they mirrored its citizens' energetic determination to succeed, to exploit the new world of opportunity that came into being in the hectic birth of that crowded, often vulgar town from the sleepy villages and trading posts which had occupied that bank of the Danube for centuries. In those institutions people could learn to become engineers, or acquire the commercial skills which would enable them to better their lot and rise through the economic—if not
the social—scale, and also to absorb a culture of sorts to complement their new-found wealth.

The Eötövs Academy stands, aloof from such vulgarity and ambition, at the foot of the Buda hills, in the heartland of the old Kakanian gentry, far away from the bustling world on the other side of the river. It is housed in one of those palatial public buildings that have a subtle but unmistakably Viennese air—pilasters and niches, statues and medallions, crests and devices speaking of tradition, authority and stability. It is a palace rather than a temple of learning. Solidly cast and intricately decorated iron railings protect it from intruders. My cousin gave me a characteristically sour account of this academy when I told her that I would be staying on for a few days to attend the reception. Oh yes, she said, it was the breeding ground for Nazi intellectuals—or at least they called themselves intellectuals. Then it was reserved for the sons and daughters of Party bosses. Now, of course, the Nazis are back again. Whatever possessed me to agree to speak at a function in such a place?

I do not see swastikas or even the Hungarian variant of that infernal symbol displayed in the entrance foyer as I am asking the elderly gatekeeper to direct me to the reception room. Yet his surly unfriendliness, denying that any function is scheduled for this afternoon, insisting indeed that the place is about to close, does suggest something of the brutal secretiveness you associate with the headquarters of such organisations. But it is probably no more than the ingrained bloody-mindedness of totalitarian officialdom evident all over Budapest—in banks and railway stations, pharmacies and supermarkets, post offices and tourist bureaux. My task is made not a jot easier as I keep insisting that he must let me in, that I am one of the speakers without whom the function could not possibly proceed, while he continues doggedly to repeat that the building is about to be locked. I am saved by a middle-aged woman dressed in a severe blue suit, suggesting simultaneously a business executive and a prison warder, who has been attracted by the hubbub in the entrance hall. Oh yes, she says
sneeringly, the salon has been booked for some sort of reception, and she will show me up.

She throws open a door on the ample first floor landing and stalks away. The panelled room is empty, though rows of chairs are set in a semicircle around a lectern placed on a small podium. There is no sign of life anywhere, except that I can hear laughter and clanking somewhere down the corridor beyond the open door. Making cautiously towards the source of that noise, I discover to my relief a small kitchen where Joe, the dispenser of curried prawns and rice, is supervising, with much hilarity, the preparation of supper by a group of enthusiastic helpers.

I offer to help, hoping to find something to occupy me to quell the anxiety and apprehensiveness I am experiencing at the prospect of having to say my piece as an Australian Hungarian. Joe has other ideas. He presses a glass of wine into my hand and tells me to go and sit near the heater. He says that I must look after myself because, mate, you don't want to get crook in this town—the doctors are the pits. And he goes on to tell me something that I've heard several times already, a part of a mythology of a kind that always springs up among exiles and expatriates. When the Embassy people need a doctor, he says, they choof off to Vienna; you can't trust the local buggers.

Seated in a comfortable armchair next to the central heating outlet, I find myself obliged, after all, to muse on my anxieties about engaging in the mixing or crossing of cultures on which I am about to embark. It's no use my telling myself that it is all my fault, that I should have declined the invitation and travelled to Vienna as planned. I am trapped now, called upon to do shortly what I least want to do. Even with my cousin, the only person who is at all important and valuable for me in this world, I have been reticent, unwilling to speak openly about the confusions, perplexities and ambivalences anyone like me who has been wrenched from one world to be planted in another must experience. I do not want to admit to the crossing patterns and mixed allegiances I have been aware of
throughout these weeks. How Australian am I? someone asked me in Szeged. Ninety-nine percent, I replied with only slight exaggeration—I did not add, however, that the remaining one part in a hundred made all the difference.

Besides those constant preoccupations another much more immediate worry nags at me. This function is obviously intended to be diplomatic, ceremonial and anodyne. I know that I am expected to say something cheerful, optimistic and reassuring—to speak about co-operation, about the exchange of ideas, and how our two nations and cultures can learn from each other to the benefit of both. I have to admit that in an abstract, hypothetical sense I too believe in these aspirations, and (in my more optimistic moods) I convince myself that in the course of these weeks, as I have been talking about Australia to—admittedly mostly bored—students, I may have contributed a little to those aims. There are, however, private demons, personal nightmares that make it very difficult for me to approach this world with equanimity and without prejudice. I am ready to admit that many of the people alive in this city today, certainly those who will be coming to this reception, are far too young to bear any direct responsibility for what happened here almost half a century ago. I cannot escape, however, the sense, indeed the conviction, that a terrible and shameful past must not be swept under the carpet, that it is only too easy to say that it all happened a long time ago, that a line has been drawn under a shameful page of national history. There are too many spectral signs in this world—ones to which I may perhaps be more sensitive than others—to make it possible for me to forget or to ignore their threat.

That is the particular dilemma facing me today, one I shall have to resolve shortly, for at last people are beginning to arrive, peeling off their gloves, scarves and topcoats, smiling, shaking hands, effecting introductions. I recognise several familiar faces: people from the university and the Embassy, as well as the Transylvanian in the bow tie. The Ambassador arrives and walks around the room welcoming people, diplomatically expressing his pleasure at seeing them. We begin to say a few
words to each other as the young Third Secretary mounts the podium, announces that the proceedings are about to start, and invites the Ambassador to speak. People crowd to find a place in the semicircle of chairs, though there are far more seats than people. The noises from the kitchen cease. Joe places himself just inside the open door—half-voyeur, half-bouncer—as the Ambassador takes a few sheets of paper from his pocket and begins his address.

His speech is matter-of-fact, efficient and diplomatic. He gives a brief outline of the scheme to send Hungarians to train in Australia. One of these people, who has recently returned to Budapest, will be speaking to us later on, he says, He stresses the importance his government places on this type of aid, and goes on to deliver a thumbnail sketch of Australia: size, population, climate, economy, political structure. He wishes the people about to depart every success; he is convinced that Australia—herself experiencing certain economic difficulties in these hard times—will be of some help to the Hungarian people's attempts to solve the many difficulties they are experiencing at this time of transition.

He is followed by a speaker representing a government agency, and then a youngish man in a well-cut dark suit with carefully groomed hair gets up to speak. In the curious monotone of the Americanised Hungarian-English spoken here nowadays, he identifies himself as an economist who recently spent three months in Melbourne acquiring financial and commercial skills. He speaks a few words describing how stimulating it was to learn from people who clearly possessed those skills that Hungarians must acquire if the nation is to survive in a competitive world. The bulk of his address is concerned, however, with the beauty of Melbourne. He didn't know what to expect: Hungarians know so little about Australia. Nothing had prepared him for his first sight of that stunning city: the wide, clean-swept boulevards, the shiny automobiles, the wonderful skyline of tall buildings glinting in the clear sunlight, and above all the sky, the quality of the light, penetrating, revealing but also exhilarating. He continues
in this vein for a minute or two and then comes to an end by expressing his gratitude to all concerned for giving him the privilege of those wonderful months in Australia. The Third Secretary rises to his feet again, and introduces me as the next speaker.

My head is throbbing; my mouth is dry; no sound, I am convinced, will issue from my burning throat. I fiddle with the sheet of folded paper on which I've jotted the odd phrase, cough, and begin to speak. At first things go well enough. Though my voice is like sandpaper, I am at least audible. I say how much I've enjoyed my weeks in Hungary, how much I appreciate the kindness and hospitality I've received, and how valuable it was to get to know again the country of my birth. So far, I think to myself, so good—I may have been gilding the lily a bit, but I'd stand by most of what I've said. The next part is also easy enough. I give a brief biographical sketch. I mention how I was born in a clinic just around the corner from the Australian Embassy; how I spent the first two years of my life in an apartment also very near the Embassy, and I give a brief description of my parents—entirely ordinary and reasonably affluent middle-class inhabitants of Budapest. I say something about their way of life, stressing all the time that it was typical of the Budapest bourgeoisie between the two wars. I recount a few anecdotes from my childhood—skating on the frozen pond in the municipal park, waiting for the wave-machine in the baths on St Margaret's Island to be switched on, visits to Gerbeaud's and other scrumptious cafés. I reveal that my mother, although technically an Austrian at the time of her birth, loved to dance the
csardas
, the fiery Hungarian national dance.

Listening to myself, all this sounds innocuous enough—anecdotal, even perhaps inconsequential but (or so I hope) diverting. I wonder though how many of my audience realise the extent of my deviousness, that this meandering assemblage of family history leaves out as much as it includes. That exclusion is quite deliberate. I find, as I am building up this
picture of ordinariness, that the demons are returning, demons that I intend to let loose in a moment or two on my relaxed and comfortable audience. I am conscious of the dangers and even of the potential impropriety of what I am about to do. Yet these are compulsions I cannot resist, unwise and undiplomatic though it might be to give in to them.

I have deliberately omitted from my account of my parents' very commonplace life any mention of race or religion, and in truth those concepts played only a very small part in their early married life. Yet that is precisely what I have to speak about now—how that ordinary family came to be hounded and persecuted just because some blood coursed through its veins that offended the sensibilities of many true-blooded Magyars. As I begin my account of the familiar story of the persecution of Central European Jewry, which started as a series of annoying prohibitions and ended in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, the demons of my past—indeed of my early childhood—flood back with noisy insistence. I remember not merely the pleasant, public images of family life about which I have spoken, but also those intangible, intimate relationships that existed in a large and on the whole loving family. And it comes home to me with a particularly searing pain once again that most of these people were killed in 1944, amid God-knows-what brutality and suffering, that they were not allowed to live their allotted span, to be born and to die within the orderly rhythms of life.

As I speak about these things in an attempt to explain as candidly as I can why I am no longer able to think of myself as a Hungarian, why I can never think of this country as home, something unexpected and shaming occurs. I have thought and spoken often enough in the past about my family's fate, indistinguishable from the fate of millions of others, I have even on occasions written about it. However, I have never stood before a group of people—especially a group including many Hungarians—and remembered, publicly and ceremonially, the dead, my own dead and by implication all those who were tortured, humiliated and killed. This ceremony of remembrance
proves more distressing than I could have imagined. Recalling the sufferings of people who would all be dead by now, even if they had been allowed to live their three score and ten, literally and embarrassingly brings tears to my eyes. It is no use pretending that I must stop to blow my nose or clear my burning throat. For the first and I hope the only time as a public speaker I dry up, unable to continue, only too conscious of what a ridiculous sight it must be to behold a squat, bald, middle-aged man with a streaming nose turning away from his audience as he is overcome by emotions.

The moment passes. I recover as much equilibrium as I can muster and continue on the next part of what I intend to say: my praise of Australia, a society which despite its occasional crassness, intolerance and narrow-mindedness is, nevertheless, basically healthy and just, a world where you could grow and develop with fewer restraints placed on you, and a world, above all, that gave you opportunity not only to grow but also—and this is something I want particularly to stress—to fail. And that, I go on to say with a little more self-control, is why I think of myself as ninety-nine percent Australian, why I appreciate the opportunity I have been given to return to Hungary, why I hope that the country of my birth and I may have achieved a reconciliation, but why I must speak tonight as the Australian I think I have become.