The Habsburg Cafe (18 page)

The theatre is nevertheless crowded this evening. This is a celebrated production, first staged during those turbulent months when the movement for reform was coming to a head, when it was not clear whether Gorbachev would honour his implied promise not to interfere in any bid for self-determination by this country, or whether the tanks would roll again, as they did in 1956. In those days, several people have told me, the murderous political rivalries of Plantagenet England provided a brilliant mirror for the time. By now the production is said to have gone soft, lost much of its punch, being merely a competent performance of a classic. It is, however, still capable of attracting large crowds; the auditorium is almost full ten minutes before starting time, and it is then that I discover that I'm sitting in the wrong seat. With murmured apologies I squeeze my way into the single empty seat directly in front of the one I had been occupying.

An elderly gentleman on my left says something sardonic about people getting confused about where they're meant to sit. Though he probably means only to be jocular, I find myself bristling, and once more embark on the carefully rehearsed spiel about having spent most of my life in Australia, about the confusing way theatre seats are numbered etcetera. He seems quite interested. Where do I live? he asks. I tell him I live in
Sydney. Does he know it? Well, he's heard of it. Then he begins to quiz me about my profession—a common Hungarian trait this—about where I live, about my family and so on, to such an extent that I'm beginning to think that he has overstepped even this society's generous tolerance of inquisitiveness. I answer him as briefly and as noncommittally as I am able, for the thought has crossed my mind that he may be a police informer, even though the current official doctrine insists that there are no longer such informers in this free society. That is a proposition, it occurs to me, with which my cousin would no doubt disagree violently.

At this stage our conversation takes a bizarre turn. My neighbour mentions the name of a former colleague of mine, nowadays a reasonably well-known public personality—though hardly, one would have thought, of international renown. Then, taking out his wallet, he shows me a passport-size photograph of a man of Chinese appearance. Do I know who this is? I shake my head. Well, I should know, he tells me, mentioning the name of a famous heart surgeon recently gunned down in a street in Sydney, not far from where I live. He says that he owes everything to that man—he saved his life, and now he doesn't know what will become of him and of all those people whom that wonderful man restored to life. And then, switching into English, he confesses that he has been teasing me, and introduces himself. He owns, he tells me, a pharmacy in the Sydney suburb of Glebe.

During the two intervals of the play we chat in the foyer, smoking our cigarettes. Should he be smoking? I ask. No, he says shrugging his shoulders. But why not? You shouldn't believe everything doctors tell you. Our conversation is pleasantly desultory. My companion's accent is marked by those open vowels and trouble with elisions that make it difficult for Hungarians to learn idiomatic English. Frequently, he slips into Hungarian, appropriately enough, it occurs to me, in our no-man's-land between two cultures and societies.

I ask him what he thinks of the play. It's impressive, he says, these people certainly know how to act. I cannot but agree
with him, for this long, well-paced performance is acted with wonderful professionalism. Yet it is not the quality of the acting but the curious excitement in the auditorium that impresses me. In this production, Shakespeare's murderous tale of ambition, cunning and political chicanery is anything but a piece of quaint historicising. Rather, it is raw, immediate and—despite the new order that is allegedly flourishing here—still capable of being deeply disturbing.

One side of the stage (which is clad in rough wooden boards) contains a large metal door. It is the sort of door you see protecting dangerous places. Its heavy metal bolts speak of secrets. It is to this door that a succession of fallen figures are led in the course of Shakespeare's tale of murder, revenge and counter-revenge. Behind the door is the execution chamber. As the mighty are led into that unseen, secret place, there is a sickening sense of anticipation as we wait for the thud of the headsman's axe. They went in proudly or defiantly; they emerge as parcels wrapped in blood-stained hessian. As the complicated and incestuous rivalries of York and Lancaster run their course in this sardonic vision of political brutality, where the victims are almost as corrupt as their predators, the opening and shutting of that door and the thuds echoing behind it act as eloquent commentaries on the terrible lessons of political life. How many in this audience, I wonder, have seen such a door opening and shutting, receiving the latest victim of a brutally pragmatic régime?

We, in the happy west, in that world of wealth and plenty most people here dream of with longing and envy, do not admit to such realities. Perhaps our world also has its heavily bolted doors, its secret chambers. They have not, however, become parts of a mysterious public mythology, as they have here, where everyone in this theatre knows what that door signifies. And the reason for that must be that our world—which we so often censure for its brutality and exploitation of the weak and the defenceless—is less brutal, less cruelly indifferent to injustice, suffering and barbarism than this world had been until a short time ago.

Performances of
Richard III
in the English-speaking world often toy with similar icons of tyranny and brutality. There is nevertheless something contingent and even faintly obscene about such posturings. Here in Budapest it is otherwise. When, at the culmination of a sequence of sickening murders, assassinations and executions, the body of the vanquished Richard is hurled into the pit that had received those hessian-bound bundles, I sense something that I have never experienced previously with this play. It is just and entirely proper that the deformed usurper should have come to such an end, despite his attractive roguery, despite the keen edge of sarcasm with which he played his deadly games. In a more stable and possibly more effete society we may entertain notions of Shakespeare's celebrating this lord of misrule. Here there is no room for that luxury—as there probably wasn't in Shakespeare's world either. Here people know that such figures must be cast into the pit that had also received his victims. What is not clear, though, is whether they realise that the very fact of vengeance, the entirely proper extinguishing of a force as obscene as Richard, inevitably means that that nauseating cycle, the opening and shutting of the metal door, must continue through the as yet unwritten pages of their history.

At the end of the performance, as we walk into the still-balmy evening air, I exchange a few words of farewell with the pharmacist. He tells me that he must hurry to his sister-in-law's, where he is staying. He has to get up early in the morning to go riding. He knows someone who can pull a few strings to get him a fine horse most mornings. They usually telephone in the afternoon to make the arrangements. He had heard from them today. So he'll be up at the crack of dawn for a good canter—a fellow has got to get his exercise, after all.

The Australian Embassy in Budapest is housed in a handsome turn-of-the-century mansion overlooking a large park in Pest.
It was built by one of those bankers and industrialists whose energy and ambition transformed this city, a sleepy and prim amalgam of a small town and several villages, into a bustling, thriving, cosmopolitan and, as always with the nouveaux riches, slightly vulgar metropolis. That ambition and thirst for wealth came to seem threatening to the often impoverished members of the Hungarian nobility who had established their townhouses on this side of the river, and also to the German-speaking society huddling around the Castle above the opposite bank—people whose families had settled there after the expulsion of the Turks, more or less as colonial administrators, the upholders of the political arm of the great dream of Kakania.

For me, this part of the city is familiar territory, at least in mythological terms. I spent the first few months of my life in a flat in an avenue near the park, and the worst years of the war in a building just around the corner from here, but in a much more plebeian quarter. Two streets away is the institution where I received the only formal education—two or three days—before I started school in Australia in my twelfth year.

Twice a week long queues form outside the Embassy. These resigned and yet cross-looking people are seeking visas to enter Australia, to spend a few weeks with relatives they say, but most (according to gossip) hope to merge into the landscape and settle permanently in expectation of a miracle or an amnesty. You are advised to avoid calling at the Embassy on visa days unless you are prepared to wait for your turn in this queue of patient but anxious people.

Even on non-visa days getting into the Embassy is a harrowing business. Its doors are not open in welcome. If you want to be let in, you must press a button on the intercom fixed to the gate, and state your business—provided that someone answers, or that you can hear or make yourself heard above the din of the traffic rushing along this broad, straight roadway, which offers an irresistible invitation for Budapest's manic drivers to indulge their self-destructive urges.

I have an appointment this morning, fortunately not a visa day. As I walk along the street towards the Embassy, I catch sight of a Hungarian gentleman (the briefcase gives him away immediately) angrily pumping the button. I wait patiently for him to do whatever it is he has to do. To my irritation, his business is taking an inordinately long time. He is arguing—as far as it is possible to argue through an intercom in a deafeningly noisy street—with a Hungarian-speaking person who seems to have some official function inside. It concerns some complicated business about importing a motor car—I am not sure into which country—which the person on the other side of the intercom declares to be impossible, absolutely impossible.

After an unconscionable time the gentleman admits defeat, or at least an impasse, and takes his hand off the button, thereby breaking communications with the inside. As I stand there pressing that unresponsive black button, which remains resolutely unacknowledged, probably because the official on the other side of the intercom thinks it is still that tiresome person going on about his motor car, the gentleman launches into a passionate diatribe about these impossible, uncivilised Australians, and advises me to have nothing to do with them. The Canadians, now they are an entirely different story.

The Ambassador's residence is on the other side of the river, high in the green hills of Buda. Meetings of an Australian-Hungarian friendship society are held from time to time in a basement rumpus room decorated with posters of Bondi Beach and the outback. These functions are attended by a curious assortment of people. Among them are several more-or-less permanent residents of Hungary. Some are spending a year or two in what is for them a linguistically impenetrable society on various business or technical missions. This evening I chat briefly with the head of the Hungarian branch of an international
soft-drink company who—as it turns out—is friendly with some of my Sydney acquaintances. I also meet a computer expert, sent over to set up the Hungarian version of the TAB in this new world of freedom and opportunity. His parodies of the Hungarian language, based on the few words he knows or at least knows how to approximate, provide much hilarity.

Such occasions also serve to mop up those itinerant nationals who do not rate an invitation to an Embassy dinner or reception, but should be shown some hospitality by their country's representative. Among the crowd of people jamming into this smallish room and spilling on to the lawn in the chill autumn night—mostly to have a cigarette since, this being Commonwealth property, the evil weed is of course proscribed—are several Hungarian-speaking people, former residents of Australia who have returned for some reason or another to the country of their birth. One of them, whom I had met once or twice in Sydney, tells me that there are great opportunities for business now, and hands me a bilingual business card, assuring me that he can put me in touch with well-placed people anxious to do business with Australia.

The atmosphere is convivial, reminding me slightly of a meeting of Rotarians I once attended in a large country town. Everyone knows everyone else, and if there should be new faces around, they are welcomed into the group with genuine warmth. There is a strong impression of people clinging together in what must be for many an alien and perplexing culture. Desultory gossip passes around the room about the comings and goings of various Australians; latecomers, some recently returned from a trip to Warsaw, Prague or Vienna, are greeted with enthusiasm. Expatriate life obviously irons out social and political differences. We are all brothers under the skin—for there are, as yet, no women present—no matter what differences might divide us on our native (or adopted) soil.

Someone says that curried prawns and rice are on tonight. Another looks rather concerned: prawns in Hungary, hundreds of kilometres from the sea? Perhaps he remembers that popular myth of the Australia of my childhood—if you are served
something curried when you are ‘out', it's bound to mean that the stuff's off. No, no, someone else reassures him, it's OK, Joe's had a look at the prawns and they are fine. Joe, I learn later in the evening, is a jovial Hungarian who grew up in Wollongong. He is now employed as some sort of factotum at the Embassy to tide him over the time of the complicated legal proceedings connected with his attempt to gain reparations for his parents' small farm, which had been seized during the 1948 collectivisation of farming land. He is a tower of strength, those in the know acknowledge. He has a wonderful ability, the computer expert tells me, to weave his way through the monstrous and often obstructionist Hungarian bureaucracy—a remnant of the bad old days of only a year ago. And obviously he knows all about frozen prawns.