The Habsburg Cafe (27 page)

What follows next is almost impossible to comprehend—a torrent of animated French, a click-clacking out of which I am able to glean only the barest essentials. Madame's eyes sparkle, she smiles, wags an admonitory finger, refills my glass and expresses her delight at understanding everything. Of course, it's all clear now. I am a European, that's why I speak French, that's why I seem a very cultivated person who has been asked to teach English literature here—she seems not to have taken in my laborious attempts to tell her about one or two Australian writers and Patrick White's Nobel prize. Of course, of course. How interesting it must be to live in that primitive world, to attempt to civilise the
autochtones
. It must be a real mission; I must tell her what it's like to introduce a complex culture to people who must have little conception of it. The challenge must be wonderful, but oh, she understands what a relief it must be to come home—twenty-four hours, is that how long it takes?

No matter how much I protest, I cannot impress on her that she has got it all wrong, that it's not like that at all. I try to tell her as patiently as possible, and with as much linguistic complexity as I am able to muster, that Australians are among the most urbanised people in the world, that until recently at any rate Australia was a carbon-copy of European societies, that we are not any longer colonists in the true sense of the word, for we have shamefully but effectively all but got rid of the
autochtones
, or at least robbed them of their way of life. I try to say something about the nature of cultural and academic life in a country which she might, if she ever visited it, find unusual but not all that strange. I tell her that Sydney is not of course as grand or as sophisticated as Paris, yet that it has its opera house, its theatres, restaurants, public buildings and art galleries. We may not have many old masters in our galleries, I tell her, but there are some very interesting Australian painters. None of this makes any impression on her; she is firmly fixed in the conviction that
Australie
must be like those African countries that were once under French domination, an exotic, picturesque place of curious customs and
traditions on which people like myself have attempted to impose a simplified version of European high culture.

It strikes me, as I come to realise from my very imperfect understanding of her monologue, and as I am grateful to discover that she disappears momentarily into the kitchen to produce a trayful of little quiches, that this curious and offbeat image of Australia—a faraway place, a cultural desert—is not at all unlike the attitude of those people who had fled to Australia to escape the upheavals of Europe, people who lamented that they were forced to live in a crass, primitive and unsophisticated world. They saw themselves as a cultural and social elite exiled in a curious land—and some indeed aspired to a type of missionary zeal in their attempt to bring European high-culture (music and Kakanian cream-cakes) to that benighted land.

Madame has obviously set me aside as unrepresentative of that world because of my European sophistication, as she sees that quality from the perspective of a small corner of an insignificant European country. This is not substantially different from the setting-aside that people of my parents' generation practised in Australia in the years immediately after the end of the Second World War, or, for that matter, the sense of isolation I still experience in a place where I have spent by far the greater part of my life. I am intent on not falling into that trap or being guilty of that abuse, that is of consenting to such a blanket denigration of the world in which I live. I discover once again something that is no part of my conscious life ‘at home', a fairly simple patriotism that inevitably forces me to exaggerate my country's achievements. And I can see, as Madame places a quiche on my plate with a delicate silver implement, that she doesn't believe a word I've said.

Here, in this pleasant sitting room, the confusions and ambivalences of the past weeks come to a particular head. I know that Australia is not at all like the place she imagines it to be, but I also begin to wonder whether it would not perhaps be a more interesting and satisfying place if it were. I also know that I am drawn, as I have always been, to her
world, whether it be this obscure corner of a little country, or that glittering world of Paris she left, she tells me, many years ago because she found it impossible to make a living there, and also because it was so noisy, messy and violent. I realise that we are fellow exiles, and I realise too that she is probably exaggerating the extent of her attachment to Szeged. She tells me what a pleasant place it is, how nice the people are, how high the academic standards. And culture? Oh, she says, there's the opera. But when I ask what it's like, all she says is ‘What can you expect?' At that moment I catch a glimpse of those people who used to sit around the tables of cafés and espresso-bars in the Sydney of the fifties loudly lamenting the ‘natives' 'laughable attempts to mount opera performances that they were obliged to endure.

I am also conscious of the confusions of identity our little chat has provoked. Anyone who has crossed nations, languages and cultures must suffer, to a greater or lesser extent, from ambivalence and perplexity. I suffered it on the first occasion I stood before my class of Hungarian undergraduates, introduced myself, spoke a few words in Hungarian, and then slipped into English, the only language I am able to command with any measure of competence. Yet as I began to speak about life in Australia, devoting the first session to the physical characteristics of the continent, its early history before the coming of the British—topics that I had also attempted to convey in a shower of adjectives and adverbs in this living room—I found myself slipping into Hungarian whenever it became obvious that my students' excellent English did not extend as far as some of the facts and ideas to which I wanted to introduce them. There I straddled cultures and languages, finding miraculously that all sorts of long-forgotten Hungarian words rose to the surface of my consciousness when I was attempting to explain to these people concepts, objects and experiences which they could not understand in English.

Here, as the evening at last seems to be coming to an end, I am perhaps in an even more confusing environment. The
polarity of Hungary-Australia, evident in so much that I do or that happens to me here, has an additional and quite piquant element: the French lady herself, her almost wistful words about France and especially Paris, the city where she cannot any longer afford to live. With her my confusions of identity are even more pronounced, for she cannot ‘place' me in the way that Australians, British people and Hungarians are capable of placing me—even if I should disagree violently with the way in which they have done it. With her the confusions exist on many levels and in several dimensions, not the least of which is my constant sense of the terrible barriers of language.

We shake hands again as I am about to leave. Madame tells me how enchanted she has been to have made my acquaintance. She wishes me every success in my endeavours, and expresses the hope that we shall meet again. She says that she would like to thank me most cordially for having found time to visit her, and she would also like to assure me how instructive the evening has been for her. And also very diverting.

Back in the front flat, as I am waiting for the kettle on the stove to boil, I muse on the confusions and difficulties of the evening. I am so tired that I haven't even the energy to get undressed and go to bed, but I know that I must teach again in the morning and that I must contrive to arouse some interest in Australia among those young people, whose understanding of it is as limited as Madame's—though I do not, it is true, have to restrict myself to the utter simplicities that my poor command of French made necessary. In bed, having shuttered the windows tightly to keep out the noise of the traffic, I find that I am unable to sleep. Floating images of the past few hours swim around in the darkness. My mind is playing over those linguistic tricks I tried so unsuccessfully to play. An odd assortment of French phrases—prohibiting smoking, leaning out of windows or affixing bills to walls—insists on going round and round in my head, waking me every time I am about to fall asleep. In this half-waking nightmare, even more alarming than a full-blown
cauchemar
(a word that
suddenly comes to me apparently out of nowhere), I realise that I do not even know the Hungarian word for nightmare. I am still awake when the first light of dawn creeps through the shutters.

The earliest of my consecutive memories are centred on a house—or villa as we called it—on the outskirts of Budapest. I think I can remember one or two scraps of my life from the time before my parents moved to that house late in 1938, when I was almost three years old. I suspect that those very vivid memories belong to that strange no-man's-land between the remembered and tales transmitted by a cherished family mythology.

One occasion is, nevertheless, firmly etched in my memory: my mother is holding me, swaddled in blankets, in front of the glass door that leads from the living room of our Budapest flat to the entrance hall. On the other side of the door, crowded in the narrow hall, are my Budapest grandmother (as I distinguished in later years, the owner of the Ferris wheel), my uncle and aunt, and possibly the spats-wearing Excellency who was resurrected for me a few weeks ago on the night of curried prawns and rice. I can still see, though I am unable to distinguish the features of those onlookers, my family staring at me through the panel of glass that occupies most of the door. I can also see quite clearly the door's narrow wooden frame, painted a glossy, brilliant white.

It seems unlikely that this could be a precise memory. The occasion is my second birthday. The family had been invited to my parents' flat to celebrate the great event. They had travelled across the city to pay homage to the infant prince. When the maid opened the front door to let them in, the myth insisted, she noticed that my aunt had a heavy cold. Hearing this, my mother refused to allow the deputation to pass beyond the entrance hall—they had to be content with a ceremonial viewing through the glass panel. The family rift took months to heal.

Is that my earliest memory? It seems to me improbable that I should have retained such a precise, clearly etched vision of a very early time of my life. When I found the street where that block of flats used to stand—a couple of days ago, after my return to Budapest from the stint at Szeged—it evoked nothing familiar, nothing that stirred any memory, no matter how faint. But then, it occurred to me, perhaps the street had lost all resemblance to the way it had looked fifty-three years ago. It had certainly lost its name for many years. I could not find it on any map of the city until, rounding a corner on the way to the university to deliver yet again my party-piece on Miss Slattery and Tibby Szabo, I noticed a fresh, brightly painted street sign above a battered plate bearing a now discredited socialist name, and realised that I had stumbled onto a mythological site.

I hurried back to that street as soon as the business of Tibby and Pete Slattery was finished. It was a long, drab thoroughfare, but it revealed here and there echoes of former glories. Everything was wholly unfamiliar, I could remember nothing about it until one more scrap of memory (or myth) rose to my consciousness. At one end, near the park, not far from the block of flats where we had lived, there used to be a water tower, a large cylinder on massive brick pillars. The tower had clearly been pulled down years ago—if indeed it ever existed. At the top of the street I did find, though, a large semicircular space, the terminus of several trolley-bus routes, which could have formerly contained such a structure.

That night in my hotel room I watched an ancient Hungarian film on television. It was a romantic comedy made in 1936, very much in imitation of those sparkling Hollywood films which my mother, suitably hatted and furred, used to enjoy in some of the city's fashionable cinemas. The plot revolved around a bored, spoilt young woman—her father, a monocled and bespatted aristocrat, tried unsuccessfully to keep her in proper maidenly subjection. Her amorous escapades led to many witty and diverting situations.

The actress playing the part of this unconventional young
woman was dressed and made up to resemble Katharine Hepburn. The romantic lead—a sophisticated, perhaps slightly dissolute portrait-painter who lived in a modern, airy apartment with glass-panelled doors—could never persuade the young woman to allow him to come to her house; indeed she refused to reveal her name or give him her address. She insisted that all their meetings should take place in front of the water tower at the top of the street where he lived—a large cylindrical container on four massive, arched brick pillars, surrounded by what looked like the trees of a municipal park on the scratched, flickering and slightly out-of-focus images of that ancient black-and-white film.

My memories of the villa to which we moved a few months after that disastrous second-birthday party are much more precise and continuous. Yet no photograph had survived from those years, or so I had thought, until I found, on first meeting my cousin, the single image which had been preserved, showing a summer idyll, the two of us splashing in a wooden tub filled with water. Nothing of the villa is visible in the photograph apart from a small portion of the back porch. Our sandals are neatly lined up on its edge; folded deckchairs lean against the wall. I asked my cousin whether she'd been back to that place, whether she knew if the house still existed. No, she didn't know, she's never been that way, why should she? And it struck me, indeed, that there was no reason why she should have gone to that outer suburb to find a house where she had spent some happy times as a young girl. It was possible, after all, almost at any time in the last fifty years for her to catch a suburban train and travel to that outlying district of the city. I, on the other hand, who have been cut off from that past for so many years, and who will, moreover, leave this world again in a few weeks' time, found myself consumed by curiosity to know what had become of that house where I had known the only relatively peaceful and secure days I ever enjoyed in this country.