The Habsburg Cafe (16 page)

The women stand immobile, hour after hour, in the two long rows stretching the length of the street. With extended arms they display their wares as though they were precious relics or trophies. The eyes of some are glazed with fatigue, others are nervously agitated as they seek their prey, while their chant ripples along the street like the lamentations of the damned. ‘Buy, noble lord, buy, for the pity of God' mingles with ‘Buy, gracious lady, buy, for my blind mother's sake' in a strange cacophony of counterpoint. Its echoes and murmurs bounce off granite and plaster walls, cobblestones and plate glass. These immobile figures are terrible presences, the living dead, past whom the waves of sightseers slowly flow like the damned streaming into hell.

In this underworld, this world without hope, a few shining emblems, accessible to all, serve as reminders of another world where life is rich and filled with boundless promise. In a side lane behind one of the rows of lamenting women a large, rounded yellow M beckons crowds into a brightly lit interior where Big Macs and Cheeseburgers are dispensed by gaily dressed boys and girls, as wholesome and smiling as the confident teenagers in the many American sitcoms Hungarian television churns out with blissfully unsynchronised dubbing. While Vienna looks towards its sentimentalised past for spiritual nourishment and the indulgence of fantasies, this second city of the former realm of Kakania has its eyes firmly set on the wonders of the west—that indeterminate but magical world that begins at the Austrian border. McDonald's stands as an icon of the distant, intangible good life—the world where there is no sorrow or poverty, no brutality or suffering, a world where Reeboks and Levis are plentiful and cheap. As yet there are merely glimmers of that world to be seen in the streets of Budapest—a McDonald's here, a news-stand selling
Playboy
there, a branch of an Austrian chain of supermarkets groaning with imported foodstuffs next to a booth dispensing Coke. These images of hope illuminate the lives of those condemned
to dwell among the crumbling decay of a city which, from some vantage points, sparkles with breathtaking beauty.

A family reunion, after a long separation, should be an occasion for rejoicing, for the deepest emotional satisfaction. That, at least, is the lesson of literature. Experience, as is often the case, gives the lie to such dreams. Finding my one remaining Hungarian relative, a person to whom I was very close in the early years of my life, produces awkwardness, even embarrassment. And we come to realise, after the first few minutes in which we catch up on forty-five years of family history—births, marriages and deaths—that there is little left to say. We have grown apart, separated by time, distance and language: my Hungarian is a blunt, outmoded instrument; my cousin's command of English is, to say the least, limited. Across that gulf we must try to establish again a relationship that in the normal course of events would require decades to reach maturity.

The bonds that existed between this woman and me when we were young were much stronger than an account of our consanguinity would suggest. Though only a few years older than I am, she is my mother's first cousin—the product of a late marriage and of seventeen childless years—which makes her into some sort of surrogate aunt. We were, however, treated almost like brother and sister by a family in which there were no other young children. Years before her birth, my cousin's parents helped to bring up my mother, whose father had died when she was a toddler. My mother, in turn, regarded her first cousin—who was born a few years before her own son—almost as a daughter, to be indulged, protected and cherished. My cousin spent many months at a time living with us. A bond developed between the two of us of which only a few scattered images remain. One, perhaps the most eloquent, resides in that penumbra of the memory where fantasy and experience
intersect. And yet, within the first hour of our reunion, she provides me with proof that this haunting memory isn't merely a product of fantasy or nostalgia. Scrabbling around in an untidy drawer, she produces a photograph taken when I was about three years old showing the two of us, on a day of blinding summer light, splashing about in a wooden laundry tub filled with water. The memory of that scene swells in my imagination: I can smell the heat of that long distant day, and the odour of freshly mown grass.

That provides a deeply satisfying moment. Otherwise we are both somewhat stiff, even perhaps formal, a barrier separates us as much as it separates me from her husband, whom I had not met until now. Three middle-aged people sitting in a pleasant, sparsely furnished living room on the top floor of a dreary, barracks-like block of flats built during the socialist fifties, play out the elaborate pretence that they are not strangers, that their lives are still somehow connected by intimate ties. Such a pretence cannot be sustained for long. Soon awkward silences and gaps in the the conversation begin to appear. My cousin, sensing that something is required of her, but not knowing what to do, sighs and says, crossing her arms behind her head, ‘Well, well, life's strange, isn't it?'—and then goes into her tiny kitchen to do something about dinner.

Over that evening meal—cold meat and salad, as is the custom in this part of the world—the fiction that we are somehow close, intimately connected is gradually abandoned. We realise that we are strangers, acquaintances at best. Yet on this evening, I come to discover in this middle-aged woman and her wheezing asthmatic husband something of the history of this sad country in the last half-century.

Eighteen months or so after our arrival in Australia in 1947, my parents contrived to obtain an entry permit for my mother's elderly mother. At the same time they tried to persuade this cousin, who was then sixeen or seventeen, to join us in Australia. I do not know how seriously she considered their
offer, but ultimately, after the exchange of several slow-moving letters, she refused: her mother (my grandmother's younger sister) was already showing the symptoms of the breast cancer that was to take her life a year or two later. For some years we kept in touch with my cousin: the occasional letter would arrive telling us of her studies at school and university, and eventually of her early marriage and of the birth of her daughter in 1953 or 1954.

Then came the terrible days of October 1956. The newspapers carried ominous banner headlines and, after those inevitable days of delay in a world without the electronic transmission of images of horror and brutality around the globe in seconds or minutes, pictures of the fighting in Budapest. Seeing those images and reading the reports carried by eyewitnesses and by those who had managed to escape to the west in all that confusion, my mother became increasingly alarmed about the fate of her young cousin. With frenzied determination she sought out every agency that could possibly provide her with information about her relative. News organisations, the embassies and consulates of European nations, the various churches were all sympathetic but proved incapable of helping her. Finally, in about 1958, word came by way of the International Red Cross: my cousin and her family were well but wished to have nothing to do with capitalist lackeys.

Many years of silence followed. Letters were returned marked ‘unknown at this address'. Then, in the late 1960s, a postcard arrived, showing the socialist paradise of a Black Sea resort. The brief message announced that my cousin and her family were enjoying a well-earned vacation. In the next few years more postcards, even the odd letter (from the address where she had not been known some years earlier) arrived. They were always vague, noncommittal, usually concerned with news of her daughter's progress through the various grades of school. My father visited them briefly when he returned to Budapest for a few days a year or so after my mother's death. He reported that they seemed reasonably comfortable and
happy: the daughter had married and had just given birth to a daughter of her own.

A desultory correspondence followed. I wrote to my cousin when my father died. I sent her the occasional photograph of my wife and children. When I spent a few days in Budapest in 1990 I tried to telephone her a couple of times but received no answer—I assumed that she had gone away somewhere for Christmas. As it turned out her telephone number had changed but no-one at the large hotel where I was staying bothered to tell me, after I had asked the concierge to check the number, how to find out about new and altered telephone numbers. That is how it came about that this family reunion did not take place until today, and only after I had spent several frustrating hours trying to raise the altered numbers service of Budapest's antiquated telephone system. Now, sitting around the dining table in my cousin's small flat, I realise that I know almost nothing about this woman and her family, who are my closest surviving relatives. And, growing conscious of the reserve that greets any mention of those forty years of Hungary's communist past, I begin to suspect that I will be vouchsafed very small glimpses only of my cousin's life during those years of silence.

As the Soviet empire in Europe crumbled away and countries formerly under its sway asserted their independence, the news was greeted with jubilation in many parts of the ‘free' world. These oppressed people, who had shown their unquenchable desire for liberty in 1956 and 1968, and later with the rise of Solidarity in Poland, would at long last know freedom. The yoke of tyranny had been thrown off; a bright new day was dawning for those tragic and long-suffering nations as the map of Europe was being rapidly redrawn. In Australia, in this extraordinary year of 1991, the doors of the Hungarian Embassy in Canberra were thrown open to receive, in an act of reconciliation, compatriots who had fled the oppression and brutality of that régime. That gesture, charged with symbolic import, was no doubt repeated in embassies and consulates the
world over. Optimism and goodwill were in the air. A line had been drawn through a brutal history; henceforth amity and brotherhood would rule all Hungarians.

Such myths are as simple as the rhetoric in which they are couched. Reality is more complex, and one probably significant part of it is to be encountered here, in this small flat in a grubby and pollution-choked thoroughfare, where this grim and decrepit building, with huge cracks running up its façade, proves to be the best maintained structure in the street.

My cousin begins to talk about their hard life. She is a retired history teacher. Until a year or two ago the pension she and her husband received was sufficient to allow them to make ends meet. They had to be careful, of course, but then who doesn't? There was enough for their daily needs. Not any more. She has had to go back to work part time—thank goodness they had friends in the ministry who could pull some strings. At this point her husband says that he should go back to work too, electrical engineers can always find something to do. That provokes an outburst from my cousin: he certainly can't go back to work, being as ill as he is with asthma, and last winter he had pneumonia twice! He shrugs, and says something entirely characteristic, it seems to me, of the spirit of Kakania, which must still be lingering in these decaying streets and avenues. ‘Oh well', he says, ‘it's probably better to get pneumonia at home: the flat will certainly be cold enough when the heating's cut off'.

Their story is a familiar tale. You cannot spend even a few days in this city without becoming aware, from snatches of conversation overheard in the streets and in buses, from the monologues of taxi drivers or from the dismay and disbelief of people in supermarkets when the cost of their meagre purchases is totalled, that the new forces operating in this country are imposing hardships on many citizens. Abroad, in places like Britain, America and Australia, the change in political régime was seen in idealistic and largely sentimental terms. Everyone would now have freedom, everyone would enjoy the benefits and blessings of a democratic and open
society. Few of these people, the odd idealistic intellectual apart, see those changes in such terms. For most Hungarians the change was neither political nor ideological but predominantly economic: the substitution of the market-driven policies of the capitalist world for the old, discredited command economy of the communist era.

Some, my cousin tells me, are doing very nicely, thank you very much. I know immediately what she has in mind. A monied class is beginning to emerge in this city in a way that was not apparent nine months ago, at the very beginning of this new world for what is still at times referred to as gallant little Hungary. Then there were no young men in screeching Porsches to be seen. None of the women in the two or three elegant cafés that remain were seen wearing the outrageous quantities of jewellery now to be seen as these members of the new upper crust sit, hour after hour, consuming delicacies, emblems of social superiority in this world. None talked loudly then, as many do now in cafés and on the streets about their acumen and cunning in outwitting their business rivals, about the huge profit they made from bringing a second-hand Mercedes, purchased in Austria for next to nothing, across the border, and selling it to some sucker here who just had to own one.

And, as was inevitable, there are many more poor people now—pensioners, those on fixed incomes and, of course, the unemployed and the homeless, a situation, my cousin says, they had never known. Have I seen those young people roaming the streets of the inner city? she asks. Did I know that they are homeless children who sleep in culverts and viaducts, some of whom deal in drugs or sell themselves for sex? I tell her that it's nothing new to me—that's what it's like at home. That word gives her a momentary pause, but then she shakes her head and smiles—oh no, that can't be true, my home is, after all, in the west, things like that don't happen there no matter what they were told in the past.

Both of my relatives grow more animated as they continue telling me about the problems and confusions of this society,
those problems and confusions that are visible even to the casual visitor in the streets of the city. I do not hear anything about freedom, liberty or democracy; all I hear from them are the all-too-familiar preoccupations of my own world: the appalling amount it costs nowadays just to keep yourself fed and clothed. Do I know how much it costs now to have a pair of shoes heeled? (The figure mentioned seems—from the perspective of exchange rates—risible, a mere nothing, the cost of a ferry ride.) Did I know that education, even at primary school, is no longer free? And you have to pay for medical services! The litany continues, mixed with stories of the way people are making vast amounts of money from the newly deregulated financial structures. Where will it end? they ask, shaking their heads.