The Habsburg Cafe (31 page)

I do not know what to think, but I am spared the embarrassment. My informant's monologue now takes a fresh and unexpected turn. She can't imagine why anyone would want to live here. That is a sentiment I happen to share, but probably for entirely different reasons. It soon becomes clear why she thinks anyone would be crazy to want to live in Hungary—this is a story I have heard many times and in many places: in the streets of Budapest, from my cousin, from wildly gesticulating taxi-drivers as they negotiated Budapest's chaotic traffic. Things are infinitely worse than they were under socialism, the lady tells me. She has to live on a pension—oh yes, she ekes it out with a job like this, but it's only commission work, and nobody has money to spend on books. It was bad enough trying to make ends meet before; now it's impossible. Her rent has tripled; food costs an arm and a leg and God only knows what the heating charges are likely to be this winter. Yes, certainly, there's freedom, but does that, she would ask, fill your stomach, or pay the rent, or heat your room? Under socialism everyone had enough, not too much—and of course people grumbled, but then that's what people are like. But there was enough; nobody was rich, nobody was
poor. Then, looking at the illustration on the dustjacket of my book, she sighs. Perhaps those were the best days; perhaps people didn't know when they were well off. And it was a graceful time. People speak a lot of rubbish about exploitation, but surely these people—pointing vaguely towards the bull-necked Habsburgs—knew what their responsibilities were. Nowadays all you get is thugs and confidence men.

Nostalgia is a powerful drug. As the old lady drones on and on in the autumn sunshine about the hardships she is forced to endure, she is conjuring for herself a powerful fantasy of a happy world, sometime in the past, sometime before she was born perhaps. I begin to wonder about the world that had bred her—which also bred me—about the injustices and even perhaps atrocities she has had to endure, and it occurs to me that perhaps the present always seems worse than the past, that we tend to romanticise an unsatisfactory former world because it seems more glamorous than our drab present. I think of my cousin's daughter aching for old things, and I think of all those elderly people who used to sit in cafés and espresso-bars in Sydney, lamenting this world, a world they had not only lost but had been driven from by hate, brutality and persecution.

The lady's monologue drones on and on. We are now in the thick of family history, of her difficulties with her daughter and son-in-law, of some obscure dispute about the ownership of the small house she rents in a village a couple of minutes' by bus from this tourist site. I begin to grow weary of her, indeed of Hungary and its obsession with its glorious and infamous past, of the political and social immaturity of its complaining citizens. Beneath us, on the river sparkling in the late afternoon sunlight, I catch sight of the white tourist boat making for the jetty. I murmur hasty apologies and hurry down the steps towards the wharf, while behind me I can hear the lady's voice wishing me all the best, a safe journey back to town—and also, of course, to Australia.

The proprietors of the small hotel high in the Buda hills are hard-working people, anxious to please. Nothing seems too much trouble; at the height of the tourist season, when all rooms are occupied and booked months ahead, when guests spill over into rooms rented from the occupants of nearby houses and apartments, they deal with a constant stream of questions and requests in a remarkable variety of languages. They arrange excursions and opera tickets, procure taxis and hire cars, advise on shopping and sightseeing while attending to the chores required to keep the establishment in tip-top shape. They are shining examples—as several American guests remark—of the virtues of a free-enterprise economy. Their energy and professionalism certainly provide a marked contrast to the lassitude of functionaries in those enterprises which are still controlled by the state—the bored woman issuing tickets at snail's pace from the single booth at a busy railway station, the spivvy youth in charge of the advance booking office for Budapest's major theatres. If Hungary is to make a successful transition from the somnolence of a command economy to the brave new world of capitalism, it will be people like the owners of this hotel who will deserve the credit.

There seems to me, nevertheless, something alarming and at the same time sad about their energy and assiduousness. By breakfast time—7.00 a.m.—the wife already looks tired. For the next three hours she will supervise the two waitresses and the distribution of an ample (in truth too ample) meal. Her husband is installed in one of the booths of this dining room decorated with nostalgic emblems of Hungarian folklore—wooden platters ranged around the walls, embroidered hangings, garish paintings and watercolours depicting scenes of rural and village life. That booth serves both as an office and an observation post; there accounts are made up, books kept, reservations made, and the staff supervised with eagle-eyed concentration. Both husband and wife are vigilant, indeed tense; each seems to think that the least delay in serving food,
or the least sign of dissatisfaction in a guest implies instant ruin.

They are probably in their mid-thirties—perhaps even older. It seems as though they are obsessed with the need to make up for lost opportunities, for all those years when their energy, business acumen and desire to succeed were thwarted by an oppressive economic system. They seem very conscious of those wasted years and are also obviously aware that their new-found prosperity may be shortlived. It is imperative to succeed now, to seize every opportunity that presents itself, before age or one of those violent changes in the political climate which this world knows only too well renders them powerless.

From his office-booth, in between making up bills, changing money and taking bookings, the husband conducts complicated deals on the telephone—the purchase of a vacant lot here, an apartment there, an Austrian-registered Mercedes someone wants to sell or a consignment of prime-grade salami from Szeged. He bargains, flatters, cajoles, telephone tucked between between neck and shoulder, while he punches figures into a pocket calculator and transfers the calculation to a well-covered sheet of paper. Meanwhile his small green eyes, set in a chubby, pig-like face, dart around the restaurant, trying to read his guests' assessment of the morning meal. His wife, a short blonde who is sure to become, in a few years, yet another overweight Budapest matron, stands in front of the small bar, her eyes fixed intently on the swing-door that leads to the kitchen, indicating to the waitresses what their next move in this well-orchestrated dispensing of food should be. They are models, as I have been forced to acknowledge throughout these weeks of commuting between this hotel and my flat in Szeged, of energy and dedication, despite the faintly ridiculous zeal with which they pursue their commendable ambitions.

The small entrance hall of their hotel is decorated with an elaborately framed and much embellished map. This cartographic fantasy is also to be seen in many places in every part of the city. It is another emblem of deep desires, of a belief
that icons and rituals are capable of giving life and substance to longings bred out of nostalgia and the fulfilment of wishes. Many guests, certainly those from America, Britain or Australia, would not recognise the significance of the map, even if they happened to notice it in the ill-lit foyer. For anyone at all familiar with the intense mythologies that have emerged from this world, it speaks eloquently, however, of deeply ingrained dreams and aspirations.

It represents Hungary as it used to be—or better to say, perhaps, as it should have been—before it was slashed to pieces by the victors of Versailles. It is an accurate enough representation of what used to be the Kingdom of Hungary. A bulbous piece in the south-western corner ends in a strip of the Adriatic coast around the city of Fiume (now called Rijeka). That is the reason why, in my childhood, this landlocked country was ruled by a dictator—masquerading as the regent of the kingdom—who gloried in the rank of admiral. To the north and the east the country represented on the map bulges out to embrace not only modern Hungary but those lost lands which provide such a potent mythology of regret for latter-day patriots—in the east the land of vampires, in the north and to the south the rich farmlands of what is now Slovakia and the Serbian Banat. The cities, towns and streams marked on that map cannot be found in any modern atlas, for they are the names these places bore when they were possessions of the proud and unconquerable Magyar race.

At some time during the history of this unstable part of the world, when national and regional boundaries changed in accordance with the varying fortunes of great powers and ambitious princes, the rulers of Hungary may have indeed commanded the extensive tract of land depicted on this map embellished with the emblems and devices of proud cities and fertile plains. In the fifteenth century, before the coming of the Turks, the kings of Hungary may have enjoyed empery over precisely such a substantial portion of Central Europe. Nevertheless, this map depicting a Hungary stretching from the Adriatic to Transylvania is in essence a construction of
Kakania, representing the lands and territories over which the Habsburgs gave a limited autonomy to the unruly Hungarians after the political accommodation of 1867. Habsburg power and Habsburg political cunning decreed those boundaries within which Hungarians believed that they were masters, as animals in a zoo might imagine that they rule the cages in which they are confined.

I do not know what prompted the owners to decorate their entrance hall with that fantasy map. It is most unlikely that they are fiery nationalists urging—as some people are—the exploitation of political instability in Romania and Serbia for Hungary to regain its lost homeland. Political instability is the last thing these people would want: it would be bad for business. That does not mean, however, that they would not welcome the return of lost territory, for they are well informed people, and they know that Hungary in its present geographic state is much less viable economically than that extensive kingdom of former times. It may be that they had been driven by an essentially irrational though by no means insignificant compulsion. Perhaps they told themselves that if a representation of a Hungary great in territories and resources is displayed in sufficient hotels, restaurants, shops and private homes it will, in some mysterious way, attract reality to itself, become actual, not merely an idealised fantasy.

A conversation in the breakfast room a few days before my departure provides a glimpse into the complex network of fantasy and hard-headed realism that characterises these people. The hotel has emptied; the season is over. The weather has changed: a cooler wind from the north-east has blown away the lingering Indian summer and has brought with it the acrid fumes of heavy industry. The proprietors say that now they will be able to relax a little—the hotel will close for two weeks in mid-November for a thorough cleaning, for painting some of the rooms, and repairing the central heating that's been giving trouble on the top floor. They'll probably go to Vienna for a few days' holiday while the work is carried out. They
have some very reliable workmen who can be left to themselves for a couple of days.

As I am dutifully consuming the ham and eggs they insist on pressing on me each morning, and as I comfort myself with the thought that I have a little anti-cholesterol pill to take each night, they stand beside my table chatting desultorily. I have just finished telephoning Sydney, timed with a stopwatch by the husband so that the appropriate amount may be added to my bill. They ask about my family, how many children we have, whether my wife has to work, what life is like in Australia. They are surprised to learn that summer is about to begin and that my wife has just told me that there has been an early burst of heat which caused several serious fires on the outskirts of Sydney. But this is the end of October, they say in disbelief, autumn, almost winter—until I remind them, as I had to remind the students I have been teaching during these weeks, about the reversal of seasons in the two hemispheres.

Our talk soon switches to their hopes and aspirations—Australia is obviously too far away, much too hypothetical in a way, to engage their interests for long. They both express their fear that the present economic liberalism won't last—already they're being taxed out of existence. It's most unfair, they complain with passion, that those who are prepared to work and help the country find its feet are made to carry the burden of all those layabouts, good-for-nothings who aren't interested in doing an honest day's work but prefer to live on generous handouts. I haven't the heart to tell them that this is an all too familiar tale, that they do not have a purchase on the miseries of the
rentier
class, for they have launched into a loud and heartfelt litany of complaints, an eloquent lament for the way Hungary has again been betrayed and exploited.

What emerges in the next quarter of an hour or so, after they have accepted my invitation to join me at table and to share the generous pot of coffee they've provided, is a tale of woe I have heard many times, with minor variations, throughout these weeks in Budapest and Szeged. It amounts to a national paranoia, an essentially immature—and therefore
alarming—view of economic and political structures and processes. The basis of these tales is always the same. They reside in the undoubted genius, inventiveness and skill of the Hungarian people, the true representatives of Central European civilisation. My hosts are too sophisticated to speak of Hungary's great destiny as a leader of nations, in the way that some political hotheads have been doing, but such sentiments are clearly implicit in their complaints. They do speak, however, of the great potential Hungary enjoys: plentiful food, considerable technological and commercial skill and, mercifully, freedom from the ethnic and racial tensions of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. It would be unwise, I think, to point out to them that the last of those blessings is almost entirely due to the efficient ethnic cleansing of the country during the forties.