The Habsburg Cafe (19 page)

Joe leaves the small bar—like those you see in advertisements on late-night television—where he has been dispensing cans of Fosters for a modest donation to help with the forging of Australo-Hungarian friendship. He begins ladling portions of a bright pink stew of small curly prawns on to one side of paper plates while a helper plops dollops of steaming rice on the other. In a loud voice throbbing with the accents of Wollongong, bearing no trace of the Hungarian plains on which he was born, Joe summons everyone to come and get some great tucker, curried prawns and rice like your mum useta make, the best you can get this side of the Danube. One of the expatriates inspects, with obvious suspicion, the small curled crustaceans floating in their pink sauce. Where do they come from? Joe is buggered if he knows, but they're beaut, mate, straight from freezer to pot. The doubter dutifully tucks into his portion—it is impossible to question the word of anyone with such natural authority.

The party breaks into small groups. There is nowhere to sit in this sparsely furnished room except for the three or four stools placed around the angled bar. These places are already taken, probably by the canny, who know the routine and have secured them in good time. The rest of us stand around, balancing paper plates, plastic forks and glasses the best we
can. I find myself talking to an elderly gentleman of military bearing, one of a number of people here (almost every one of them, it seems, Hungarian) who are wearing small lapel badges in the shape of a gilt kangaroo. These emblems look vaguely familiar, until I realise that Qantas used to—and perhaps still does—hand them out to passengers on the Kangaroo Route.

The appearance of this gentleman evokes certain poignant memories. He stands stiff and erect. His tweed suit looks immaculately brushed and pressed. His shoes are polished to a mirror sheen. He wears a red bow tie with small black dots. His grey hair is closely cropped, almost shaved; his moustache is neatly trimmed. Something about him speaks of a vanished time, and, more particularly, of a person of whom I have only the haziest memories. A close friend, perhaps a distant relative, of my father's mother was a fastidious, almost dandified gentleman of similar bearing, similar hair, similar moustache. He was a retired town clerk who was inordinately proud of the ‘Excellency' he had been awarded at the time of his retirement. He struck terror into the family through his self-appointed role as the arbiter of taste, manners and morals. He was also the only person I have ever known who always wore spats.

My companion on this night in the vinyl-floored rumpus room of the Australian Ambassador's residence reminds me of that gentleman, though a quick calculation suggests that he must be a good forty years his junior. This, I realise, is the look of a Hungarian gentleman of former times, with an air of respectable propriety, of a certain pride of bearing, and a faint hint of the military or at least of the regimented. You can no longer see the likes of this formerly quite familiar figure on the streets of Budapest, for even the few well and carefully dressed people in that shuffling crowd have an entirely different appearance—the studied casualness of contemporary fashion with its litany of revered designer labels. Only in Vienna, that theme park dedicated to images of a former life, may you see people resembling this elderly gentleman with the gilt kangaroo pin in his lapel—and it occurs to me that he is, like those people
of similar bearing in the old imperial city, one of the last remnants of Kakania to have survived into the new world.

The devious conversation on which we now embark, filled with ambiguity, unspoken implications, innuendo and evasions, confirms that suspicion. He says he is delighted to be talking to someone who has just arrived from Australia. What a marvellous place! He must tell me in all sincerity, and he doesn't mind if I should think he's having me on, that the years he spent there were the happiest of his life. He sketches in a few vague details, leaving as much unsaid as stated. He went out in '38, young foolish fellow that he was, searching for adventure. Of course he got there just before the war, had to spend a bit of time interned, but then they let him out when they discovered how useful he could be. Ah, wonderful years, wonderful country. All that sunshine, those great open spaces, the friendly people … He looks around for a moment, obviously searching for another image to complete his litany, and then turns to me and says: ‘And all that seafood—prawns, scallops, lobsters; my dear fellow, you don't know how lucky you are!'

While I am reassuring him that I am entirely aware of my good fortune, I realise that this iconography of the wonders of Australia is as limited and consists as much of well-tried cliches as the litanies of the marvels of Budapest and Hungary among my parent's contemporaries as they sat in cafés and espresso bars in Sydney lamenting the awfulness of life in the world of sunshine, empty spaces and plentiful seafood. Their repertoire was just as paltry: the opera, the cafés along the Corso beside the Danube, the bridges spanning the river, the view of the city from the Castle. It seems to me curious that this gentleman who apparently left Australia voluntarily, and who is obviously still in good standing with the Embassy, should be loud in his nostalgia for a world in which he could have stayed. He had not been driven out as those denizens of the Sydney espresso bars felt that they had been driven out by the hate and brutality that tore this world apart half a century ago. And indeed he now launches on a theme which is all too
familiar to me in its mirror image. How can anyone live here, he says, in this filth and pollution, among all the corruption and chicanery, all these ruthless and ambitious people? Oh yes, he knows very well that life in Europe offers some delights not available back there. But that's a small price to pay. How I must be looking forward to going back again!

It seems inevitable therefore that I should ask him why he came back to Hungary. Hearing this he suddenly looks very stern, like an old-fashioned schoolmaster. What makes me think he is Hungarian? No, no, he came here to do a most interesting job—now that he's retired he has decided to stay; it's a fascinating time, after all. I ask him where he came from, reminding him that he said he went out in '38. Ah, Transylvania; he's Transylvanian through and through, not Hungarian.

I am about to ask whether being Transylvanian isn't the same as being Hungarian, indeed perhaps the only genuine way of being Hungarian, but something cautions me to hold my peace. There is, as they say nowadays, a subtext here that I don't entirely understand. Transylvania lies in the western part of modern Romania. Much of its population is Hungarian speaking. Many Hungarian patriots insists that a genuine folk culture, unsullied by Slav, Austrian or Jewish influences, is to be found only there, in that world of farmers and shepherds where the authentic Hungarian folk music (not the phoney gypsy stuff) and traditions survive. In the growing nationalism of the new Hungary, it is not unusual to encounter the sentiment that until Transylvania is restored to the Kingdom, Hungary will be neither secure nor stable.

Why then does this dapper gentleman, with his immaculately clipped moustache, insist so strenuously that he is not Hungarian? No amount of devious insinuation on my part provokes him into offering any clarification—he is obviously much more expert at such games of evasion. I begin, nevertheless, to suspect something that, for lack of a more compelling explanation, must lie close to the truth. This gentleman must be in his seventies; he was probably born just after the Great
War, or perhaps even during its closing stages. It is possible, of course, that he is even older—it all depends on what he meant by having been young in 1938. In any event he would have been born at a time when a dedication to Kakania, though that realm was no longer a political reality, still ran strong through the veins of its former subjects. Transylvania was, moreover, not far from the slightly more easterly district known as the Bukovina where Gregor von Rezzori, chronicler and memorialist of the last years of the Empire, began his life as a scion of the Kakanian ruling class among the Ruthenians, Serbs, Jews and Magyars of that ethnographic melting pot. Perhaps this gentleman, in asserting sternly that he is a proud son of Transylvania, is distancing himself from what he, like von Rezzori, would have been trained to regard as vulgar and provincial nationalism. Perhaps his family's gaze also skipped over that parvenu city of Budapest in their attempt to catch sight of the fount and origin of their culture, Vienna, the city of their dreams.

I have noticed that he has held himself aloof throughout this evening from the conviviality, the merry quaffing of cans of Fosters and consumption of curried prawns and rice. Perhaps he regards with absolute contempt the other wearers of gilt kangaroos, in their shiny suits of exaggerated cut which only confirm the sad fact that the creators of contemporary
haute couture
never had short Hungarians in mind when drawing up their sophisticated designs. I can understand such disdain. In this world, especially, the elaborate sign language of clothes still retains some of its former force. The tweed suit, the bow tie, the plain gold links worn with a double-cuffed shirt all signal that this gentleman belongs almost to another order of creation, that he is a product of a network of social standards and preoccupations which those stocky possessors of Armani suits would not understand.

And they do make a ridiculous spectacle. There is something essentially oily in the way they seem to be whispering confidences into the ears of soft-drink tsars and computer wizards decked out in their much less fashionable Australian clothes. They seem to be living parodies of the way Hungarians are
supposed to behave according to the popular mythology of the English-speaking nations. Yet one of them, despite his fashionable and expensive suit, gives a very different impression. Taller than his compatriots, thickset in a muscular rather than flabby way, he is sending out complicated signals in which self-confidence and arrogance are equally present. He does not mix with the other occupants of the rumpus room; rather he seems to be holding impromptu audiences with what I can only think of as a peasant-like
hauteur
—reminding me a little of the image Boris Yeltsin's minders cultivated for him during his rise to prominence. There is certainly nothing patrician about this person. He gives, on the contrary, a sense of reined-in aggression, as though he would be more comfortable in battle-fatigues than in the uniform of the successful Budapest man of affairs in 1991. He waves away with an imperious sweep of the hand the paper-plateful of prawns someone offers him. The gesture suggests that he demands more substantial food than an effeminate stew of curly prawns.

Some days later I find out a little about him and his kind, and also about my dapper companion on the night of prawns and rice. The latter, I am told, has been hanging around Embassy functions for years. The consensus seems to be that he would like to go back to Australia but realises that his money will go much farther here. A nice old stick, my informant says.

The other is a very different proposition. He is one of the heroes of '56, people who took advantage of the turmoil and disarray of those terrible days to slip over the border—something my cousin and her husband failed to do. They have been living in Western Europe, in the Americas, in Australia and New Zealand, often prospering in various business ventures where their ingenuity and acumen have reaped considerable benefits. Now that the political system has changed, many of them have come back, claiming that their efforts and their financial contributions have sustained dissident movements through the long years of political repression. Some of them claim to be the true saviours of the country, defenders of the
realm who have kept the spirit of Hungarian nationalism alive in exile. They have returned for their reward.

My informant, a wry, sceptical Hungarian who, according to his own confession, is never able to decide whether the political system that happens to be dominant at any particular time is heaven-sent or the work of the devil, is generally scathing about these strutting patriots. They are in the forefront, he says, of a movement to purge the nation of collaborators. An entire university department, he tells me, has been disbanded while its former members are being investigated by the new censors—in the meantime, though, they continue to teach and to draw their salaries because no-one else can be found to do the work. Where will it all stop? he asks. Will bus drivers and street cleaners be condemned as collaborators because they drove the buses and cleaned the streets of a discredited régime? Hungarians will never learn, he sighs, and then grows animated: something must be done to put an end to this culture of blame, to the national obsession with finding scapegoats, on whom all the ills of the world may be blamed before they are driven out or killed.

The clanging door of that Plantagenet prison of the other night at the theatre comes to mind, as I listen to his mild-mannered though deeply pessimistic account. There are aspects of this world which seem never to change. The old cycle of blame and revenge appears destined to continue for ever. Though the streets of the inner city have been renamed in these first years of a new world, they remain the same grimy and chaotic streets they were during the dark years of what everyone in this country now refers to as socialism. This is still the depressing, deeply flawed and probably treacherous world of fierce hatred that I left in my childhood for that land of sunshine and abundant shellfish.

Australia is very chic in the Central Europe of 1991. Tourist agencies in affluent Vienna carry seductive posters of ‘Ayers Rock', koalas and dreamy images of the Sydney Opera House in a misty half-light. While Hungarian universities are gearing up for their first-ever courses in Australian Studies, a prestigious mega-conference on Australian culture is being held in the Swiss city of Bern. Anyone who is anyone seems to be there. One well-placed bomb would probably wipe out of the cream of Australia's cultural gurus. After the conclusion of the conference the delegates disperse. Some head for London, some for New York, at least one hurries to what is still called Leningrad, and a few drift into Hungary—though one visaless unfortunate, gossip insists, got no farther than the border. On a gloriously sunny weekend, when the soft sunlight already betrays hints of the winter to come, I meet some of these people and become, temporarily, an amateur and somewhat bemused tourist guide.