The Habsburg Cafe (8 page)

Despite their looking towards Vienna as the centre of their civilisation, as the measure of elegance, culture and learning, my family did not have anything more than a mild sense of exile in the cities and towns of Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia or Slovakia where most of them had lived for generations. They had a complex, layered sense of patriotism. They felt more or less at ease among those ‘nations'; they identified with many of their aims and aspirations; they observed their customs and rituals—my mother loved to dance the
csardas
—and they felt that they had put down roots in that world, despite ominous rumblings from ultranationalist groups which consistently questioned that right. Above, but also including, that sense of local patriotism was another level of allegiances and sentiment—symbolised by my grandmother's purchase of the silver
wheel—which made them see themselves as the inheritors of Habsburg civilisation, a way of life that transcended the national and racial diversity of this world and embraced peoples and nationalities within the ample bosom of the Empire.

In this dual citizenship, which allowed my family to look to Vienna as their cultural and social home, but also allowed them to regard themselves as fully-fledged citizens of Hungary, the question of race played an essential and yet in one way entirely insignificant part. The urban bourgeoisie of Vienna, Budapest, Prague, as well as of course of the great German cities, contained sizable Jewish elements. Many practised the ceremonies of Judaism—as the great synagogues erected in those cities witness—but just as many had lapsed, or at least continued to observe its stern dictates only in a superficial and half-hearted manner. Though there were exceptions to be found everywhere, in general for these people Judaism had decayed from an all-embracing social, cultural and personal structure into a mere religion, something to be tucked into a corner of your daily life, or even to be abandoned entirely. Many intermarried with people of other faiths.

One of my father's cousins, a Roman Catholic, succumbed to religious mania in a way that proved embarrassing for her acquaintances and disastrous for her children. She was one of the family eccentrics. When she visited my parents in Budapest, she usually caused a sensation by falling on her knees outside every church she passed in the inner city (and there were many) whenever she accompanied my mother on her ritual shopping expeditions. So thoroughly had she been absorbed by Gentile society that she forced her children into the two great institutions of the Habsburg world. She connived and cajoled until her son was accepted by one of those brutal military academies Musil evoked in the terrible pages of
The Young Törless
. He committed suicide in his second year. The daughter was packed off to an upper-class convent where she was raped by the invading Soviet forces in 1945.

Many of these people suffered the inconveniences of being
Jewish or, perhaps more precisely, of being deemed Jewish. But they were all adept at clever footwork, at those arts of survival which all—Jew as well as Gentile—had to practise in that world of hurdles and barriers, a world where a ‘Keep Out' sign always implied that there was a way round. Many, Mahler is the most celebrated example, formally embraced Catholicism in order to gain entry to restricted professions, others merely avoided pursuits not open to them. Before the long disaster that began in 1914 and came to a fiery climax in 1945, this world offered plenty of opportunities for intelligent, resourceful and cultured people. They shut their eyes to the dust rising from the advance of those ultranationalist movements, in Austria as much as in other parts of the Habsburg world, which were to bring about their destruction. But at the time when my grandmother purchased her silver Ferris wheel, she and her family felt comfortably at one with the world in which they lived. They were protected by their Hungarian nationality and by their membership of that great society which found its centre in the imperial city that boasted, apart from other marvels, an amusement park erected on the site of a former royal hunting ground.

In the Australia of the 1950s, as I was beginning to learn something about the way of life of the country in which I had settled, I came to recognise curious analogies between the attitudes and standards of my grandparents' world (by then almost entirely obliterated) and the nostalgia of many Australians of the time towards a distant land. The people of the dusty outer suburb of Sydney where we spent our first years were fierce in their Australian patriotism. For them that land, or rather the corner of it they knew, represented an earthly paradise, the nonpareil of existence. Though they treated us with suspicion and at times open hostility, they were, nevertheless, anxious to demonstrate to us the physical, social and material wonders of a land of unbounded promise. They seemed incapable of imagining any other existence, any social or cultural system which could be superior to theirs.

And yet, anomalously, they often spoke of their desire to
go ‘home' to England. Now that the war was over and the sea lanes were open once more, it may be possible, they said, to save enough money to go home for a few months, before it was too late, before they grew too old or infirm. We assumed that these people who spoke longingly of England and filled their houses with its nostalgic emblems—Toby jugs, plates decorated with views of Westminster Abbey, Canterbury Cathedral or Windsor Castle—were exiles aching for a lost world, just as we had begun to yearn for Europe, despite the horrors and brutalities that drove us to seek shelter in the most distant part of the globe. Yet those people were mostly, with very few exceptions, second, third or even fourth generation Australians. The ‘home' they spoke of and dreamt about was a mental construct, even a lovingly cherished fantasy. They celebrated Australia with fierce and at times narrow-minded enthusiasm, but they called their streets Pembroke, Oxford and Norfolk, and their houses Sandringham, Windermere and Arden. They lived in two worlds, loyal to each, unaware, it seemed, of the gulf that separated them.

The social and cultural complexion of the Australia of the immediate postwar years mirrored the dual allegiance of my grandmother's world. In each case people felt part of a large cosmopolitan world which was fully their birthright. Beneath such pride, maintained despite occasional instances of prejudice and intolerance—against Jews and other undesirables in the Habsburg world; against their colonial cousins by the British—lay a more immediate, though somewhat ambivalent attachment. My family felt at home, comfortable and safe in Hungary, but they must have known that a fierce and increasingly strident ethnic nationalism, the claim of the Magyars that they and they alone were the only true Hungarians, posed a challenge to that safety. Australians of the years after the war did not feel, or at least would not admit, that their occupation of the land was in any way contingent or even perhaps provisional. Nevertheless they were, despite their noisy protests, uneasy inhabitants of a frequently hostile land, visitors often unwilling to commit their lives unconditionally to the world they
celebrated, the world they claimed to be the best of all possible worlds. They looked to a distant fantasy-land as the source of cultural and spiritual values; their desire to ‘go home' answered the deepest mythic needs. That world, they were convinced, would rejuvenate them, bring them into contact with their origins and the life-sustaining forces of their heritage.

In Vienna, in this autumn which is still indistinguishable from high summer, when the golden light illuminates the handsome baroque palaces as much as the kitsch, the vulgar and the crass, I am more aware than ever of the similarities between my two worlds. Australians who were adults at the time when my parents and I arrived in that sleepy suburb of Sydney thought of themselves as much heirs of a proud tradition as did my grandparents and their parents before them who regarded themselves as the beneficiaries of a great social and cultural empire. For my grandmother Vienna was not as distant and out of reach as London was for the citizens of Sydney in the late forties. And yet she entertained just as many fantasies about the true source of the culture and the society which sustained her, and she too indulged in her own version of nostalgic kitsch when she placed that model of the
Riesenrad
among the tasteful objects in her china cabinet.

It is curious and ironic, I realise, as I am standing, here in the Prater, in front of that wheel, watching it turn slowly against the soft blue sky, that I should have left one nostalgic world for another; that the culture of the Australia in which I grew up had icons and totems which answered the same dreams as those silver objects in my grandmother's glass case, especially the clumsy representation of the great wheel of Vienna. And for me the wheel has, in a way, turned, for looking at this slowly revolving contraption that nothing could persuade me to board, I am conscious again that I am about to return to Hungary, not for a few days and in the isolation of my emotions and memories as nine months ago, but as a minor public personality, invited to teach young Hungarians about the literature and culture of the place I now call home. I also realise that I have no memory of Vienna in summer time
or in autumn. I have stood in front of this great wheel several times in the past, and thought, on each occasion, of what it represented in my grandmother's private and perhaps faintly eccentric mythology—but it was always immobile in hibernation. Now it is moving, and from somewhere in the amusement park the breeze wafts in my direction a strain or two of ‘The Blue Danube Waltz'.

Walking along a narrow cobbled street—more alley than street—behind the cathedral, I am pulled up short by that most evocative aroma: sweet vanilla and pungent coffee. It is a commonplace scent, perhaps the characteristic smell of Kakania; it floods over you every time you walk through the glass doors of one of the great cafés of Vienna or Budapest. Rarely, however, is it as enticing as it is now, flowing through the open door of a small café on this autumn afternoon. My dream-sensation of melancholic wellbeing returns with almost urgent immediacy. I cannot resist walking into the café, even though I've only just had a sandwich at the buffet of the art gallery, having been wearied by endless rows of bulbous women, eviscerated martyrs and dead pheasants.

This is a very modest café. Half-a-dozen small marble-topped tables are ranged along one wall of the narrow room. The wall opposite is occupied almost entirely by a glass-fronted counter, displaying on mirror-backed shelves a variety of cakes, gâteaux and pastries. These have an invitingly homely look, very different from the sculpted extravaganzas offered for the delectation of their patrons by the great cafés of this city. If those establishments emulate the salons of aristocratic mansions—marble halls, Chinese rooms, wintergardens—this small café resembles the drawing rooms of bourgeois apartments seventy or a hundred years ago. The fierce though faded flocked wallpaper certainly looks old enough to be considered antique, while the lace curtain draped over the window at the
front has lost most of its pattern through repeated darning. The crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling has been rendered opaque by decades of steam, coffee fumes and tobacco smoke.

At this early hour of the afternoon, the place is practically deserted, though in an hour or two it will no doubt be jam-packed, as all Viennese cafés, large and small, are crowded at the appropriate and traditional time of five o'clock. Now there are only two customers,
habituées
, it would seem. They are elderly ladies of indeterminate age, for both of them are heavily made up, with obviously dyed hair or perhaps wigs. Their gnarled and knobby fingers suggest that they are very old indeed. The waitress, who is probably the proprietor, stands beside their table, one hand resting on the back of one of those spindly chairs which provide the usual furnishing for such establishments. As a concession to the season, no doubt—though the day is warm, even oppressive—she wears fur-lined felt boots over black stockings.

The three women are deep in conversation. I sit down at one of the tables at a discreet distance from them. The waitress acknowledges my presence and resumes the briefly interrupted discussion. There is, of course, no hurry—everyone in this part of the world seems to have ample time. The rhythms of café-life admit no haste. I have learnt to accept this convention, even though I live in a country where people are usually impatient and often in a hurry. I have not yet learnt, however, the art of staring vacantly into the middle distance, at which Europeans seem so adept as they sit in cafés, hanging on every word spoken at the next table. I know that it is quite proper to listen to these conversations as long as you maintain the fiction that eavesdropping would never enter your mind. Lacking that skill, I now do what I always do in such circumstances: I become wholly absorbed by the pages of my address book.

The ladies' conversation is hard to follow. They speak in the slurred and mellifluous Viennese dialect which almost constitutes a distinct language. All I am able to catch is a few
words. They are sufficient, nevertheless, to give some indication of what they are talking about. It seems that they have been occupied by this topic for some time; it may indeed be that I have strayed into an instalment of a long-running, real-life serial. Certainly, what I glean from their rapid and largely incomprehensible conversation seems to have the ingredients of a conventional soap opera. The centre of attention is a young woman, the daughter of one of the customers. Her husband seems to be an out-and-out rotter. I understanding nothing of the long litany of his crimes and outrages, but the exclamations of the lamenting mother's companions clearly indicate their gravity. I begin to wonder whether this is a tale of marital infidelity—but it could just as easily be a matter of money, for I am able to catch the words ‘twenty thousand schillings' which form a sort of leitmotif throughout these lamentations. Perhaps it's both, for now I begin to hear sneering references to ‘that kind of woman'. Even if feminist theory has penetrated this most conservative society, it has obviously made no impact whatever on these elderly members of the Viennese middle class.