The Habsburg Cafe (32 page)

All those advantages, they go on to say, have been compromised because Hungary has been betrayed. The husband, after speaking those portentous words, pauses significantly, drawing on his cigarette, to emphasise the gravity (and in a way the finality) of his pronouncement. It's up to me to make the next move, to ask how Hungary has been betrayed, even though I know more or less what the answer will be. It is always the same. This gallant, long-suffering, hardworking and ingenious nation has once more fallen victim to foreign guile and chicanery. Hungarians are too trusting, too ready to believe that the promises of support and encouragement when they were fighting to throw off the Soviet yoke would be honoured by the powerful nations of the west. Well, they risked all and won. And what has happened? Betrayal. The Americans promised the earth, and what did they do? Nothing! Absolutely nothing except to offer loans at impossible rates of interest. The Germans are just as bad—they were driven out in '45, but they're back again plundering the country, buying up everything with their marks.

The complaints grow even more strident and animated. If all this weren't bad enough, there are traitors at home, too. Look around you, the husband gestures around the empty
restaurant, and you'll find the same time-servers and opportunists in government, in the press and the media as before. They're very good at looking after themselves, of course, but the country—well, the poor country suffers while they grow rich. It's Hungary's fate to be the underdog, to be betrayed by the unscrupulous: it will never change.

He is about to begin, it seems to me, to reel off the customary roll call of traitors: former communists, gypsies, Romanians and—as always, inevitably and sickeningly—the Jews, that cancer in this world which nothing is able to eradicate. I have heard this from excited taxi drivers prophesying civil war tomorrow or at the latest the day after. I have overheard it in crowded buses, in cafés, and among the expensively dressed patrons of the State Opera. It is, moreover, a complaint that has always been heard in this world—except that my host, who is of course conscious that he must provide hospitality to all and sundry, wisely refrains from specifying the identity of these villains and exploiters, preferring to leave it all to innuendo and implication.

No doubt much of what they say has some justification—no one would deny the difficulties experienced by a society attempting to change economic, political and social direction in a troubled world of uncertainty and severe economic problems. There is, nevertheless, more than a suspicion of immaturity, of a failure to recognise the sad fact of the real world in these complaints. The fundamental problem has always been a reluctance to realise that in the cold hard world of political brutality, nations must stand on their own, must try to work out their destinies without sentimental expectations of justice, fairness and benevolence. Australia, it occurs to me, has not yet learnt that lesson fully, though it has gone farther towards that goal than Hungary, which is still trapped within its romantic belief that a gallant people should be treated with gallantry. For this reason, political debate in Hungary, both formal and spontaneous, almost always devolves into a hunt for the scapegoat, someone to blame for all the ills, difficulties and misfortunes of a small country trying to survive in the ‘real' world.

Such an attitude is, of course, yet another manifestation of a basically colonial mentality, of a people and a nation who have for hundreds of years been the subjects or clients of foreign powers. Ever since the victory of the Turks at the battle of Mohács in 1526, Hungary has been a subject nation—first the Turks, followed by the Habsburgs, then, after the brief flurry of independence in 1919, the growing reliance on Germany, to be replaced, at the end of the Second World War, by the long years of Soviet rule. Whatever has happened in this country, whatever it has suffered or whatever glories its people have achieved have always flowed out of policies formulated elsewhere, decisions made by powerful men in a distant city or fortress. Naturally enough, therefore, reality is always imposed, never endemic, always a consequence of what they—whoever they may be—have decreed.

That sad realisation is confirmed by my host's peroration. Lighting another excessively long (‘luxury length') American cigarette—for no-one of his standing would smoke the terrible locally manufactured muck—he leans forward and says, in gravely confidential tones, that he is about to tell me what the solution should be. I have heard a number of these solutions in the past weeks: they are usually violent, ranging from public hangings to the dropping of a few nuclear devices on selected targets. I am, however, entirely unprepared for what I am about to hear: the solution to Hungary's problems, he says, is union with Austria.

I am unable to disguise my astonishment. I could have expected such sentiments, perhaps, from my grandmother, the owner of the silver Ferris wheel, or even from my mother, who never lost her sentimental attachment to the dream of Kakania. But I had never imagined that a true son of Hungary, a gallant Magyar whose national mythology had long rested on the terrible exploitation of his people by the hated Habsburgs, should, on this cool morning in a little hotel on one of the hills of Buda, seriously advocate a turning back of the clock, a return to Hungary's shameful state of subjection. Yet even as I am seized by astonishment and disbelief, I realise that I
have been noticing all over the city in the course of these weeks signs and emblems of a nostalgia for that Kakanian past. Several bookshops, for instance, display Hungarian versions of those little books recounting the sad tales of Sissy, of Rudolf and his Marie, of Maximilian and Franz Ferdinand that grace the shelves of similar brightly lit establishments in Vienna.

My host has all the answers; he says that he's thought a great deal about this, and he is convinced that his is the only viable solution. Hungarian energy, capacity for hard work and ingenuity need bolstering. The country would benefit from Austria's wealth and present influence. Of course at first Austria would be dominant—that's only to be expected given that Hungary has been retarded by all those years of socialism. But Austria's day is past; it is decadent, and of course they all realise this in Austria, even though no-one will own up to it. That's why they need Hungarian energy and ingenuity. In a few years, he'll wager, the tables will be turned. Then Hungary will be on top, the most vital political and economic force in Central Europe. And now he says what he had been reluctant, it would seem, to say earlier. ‘That will confirm our destiny, put us on the map once and for all.'

Half a century of war, occupation and communism have not diminished the exuberance of Budapest's pastrycooks. At Gerbeaud's, once the city's most fashionable café, they still serve the baroque extravaganzas I remember from my childhood—towering cream slices, rich slabs of chocolate cake, sculptured petits fours and huge mounds of worm-like chestnut puree layered with sweetened cream. Even the room is much as I remember it. Perhaps the brocaded wallpaper has faded, the large mirrors are now spotted with flaws, and the chandeliers do not sparkle as they used to. Only the clientele has changed. Most of the customers are corpulent Germans spilling over their small gilt chairs or else members of the jeans-clad
international back-packing society anxiously counting their money. The few natives of Budapest who feel that it is safe once more to appear in a place like this in furs, jewels and expensive clothes are lost in that polyglot crowd.

To see a more vital remnant of the café life of old Central Europe, it is necessary to visit a smaller though equally richly decorated establishment a kilometre or so away. This is the Artists' Café, much patronised by singers, musicians, designers and directors from the Opera House across the road, on the other side of a broad avenue. Only one or two of the seething throng of tourists crowding into the square kilometre of the inner city penetrate this far. Here echoes of a former world may still be heard.

The best time to go is, once again, mid afternoon, before the fashionable early evening rush. The atmosphere is relaxed, even slightly somnolent. There are not many customers at this time, the waitresses are able to relax, leaning on the brightly polished counters, thinking no doubt about their aching feet. The room is almost empty; it is possible on most afternoons to find a table at the back, in front of the large mirror that covers almost the entire wall. In these cafés you should avoid, if at all possible, sitting at one of the tables in the middle of the room because from those tables you cannot survey the other customers with the required aplomb.

Most of the people are elderly or middle-aged; several are obviously regulars. The buzz of talk is subdued, discreet, not the babel of the other café—and the language is Hungarian. These people are the remnants of that fabled café-society which flourished in Central Europe during the early years of the century, and managed to hang on, in a significantly diminished form, until coming of Nazism. In those establishments many of the epoch-making ideas of that world were born. At a lesser level of cultural intensity, these cafés became the literary and artistic salons of the bourgeoisie, places where people could absorb the outlines or the surface of the world of ideas, of the intellect and of the arts. Here you could at least learn the names of up-and-coming painters, writers and composers, and get to
know something about the works they were creating, even though you yourself might have found their books, paintings and string quartets entirely strange and daunting.

One couple, seated at the only table with a
RESERVED
sign on it, and placed in the most advantageous position to survey the room, has fascinated me each time I have come here. They are both elderly; they may or may not be married; they may, it strikes me, be brother and sister. She is intense, angular and chain-smoking. He seems more relaxed but also a trifle melancholy. She fidgets most of the time with the glass of water that is always served with coffee in these establishments. He spends time fussily adjusting his black beret. As with most members of this world, his attaché case, that great distinguisher of the professional classes, is placed on the floor beside him. From time to time, without any signal or bidding, a waitress brings them fresh coffee. They never seem to order any food.

From where I am sitting I cannot catch any of their conversation, for their talk, as of the other customers, is subdued—unlike the mega-decibel uproar at Gerbeaud's. I begin, therefore, to spin fantasies about this elderly pair, whose appearance, demeanour, clothes and gestures evoke long-buried memories. How old are they? They seem to be in their late seventies; that would make them the same age as my mother if she were still alive. Had they known my parents? That question is not as absurd as it sounds; Budapest café-society was a small, self-contained community in which most people within an age group knew or at least knew about each other. It was always, and seems to remain, set apart. For much of the population of Hungary, such as the two pot-bellied entrepreneurs whose lamenting conversation I overheard in that café in Szeged, metropolitan and cosmopolitan people have always seemed somewhat alien, and often undesirable. They do not stand for that myth world of courage, manliness and intense national pride that the true Hungarian clings to. The broader horizons of the people who used to haunt such cafés, and still do so judging by the appearance of the pair at the reserved table, have
always been seen as a threat by those suspicious of anything smacking of ‘internationalism'. You often hear people saying (with pride or with scathing anger, depending on their point of view) that cultural, artistic and political life in Budapest is still in the hands of the Jews.

It is not impossible that my parents would have known these people. Looking at the lady I begin to fancy that I recognise something familiar in her, something fleeting, hidden and overlaid by the years. This is all absurd, I remind myself, yet somehow the conviction grows on me that there is something ineffably familiar about her appearance, or more precisely about her gestures. It strikes me that her hands, nervously fiddling with her glass of water or with the chain of cigarettes she lights one from the other, are those of an artist, a sculptor perhaps. I am seized by the conviction—absurd and fantastic though it probably is—that this is the sculptor, whose name I have long forgotten, who played an extraordinarily intense part in my mother's life for a few months in 1944.

By that time my father had been taken off to a labour camp and my mother and I were living—hiding would be a more appropriate term—in one of those gloomy blocks of flats that were constructed everywhere in this city in the last years of the nineteenth century. Almost every night we hurried down to the cellar, carrying rugs, pillows, water and bandages, as the air-raid sirens screamed their warning. In between raids we stayed indoors, making hurried forays into the street to pick up what little food remained in a world about to collapse into ruin.

One of the people living in that block of flats was a sculptor, a widow, an intense, chain-smoking woman whose hands, my mother said, were those of a true artist. I was told that she was very famous. Had it not been for this terrible war, her works would have been exhibited in New York—the ultimate accolade according to my mother's cultural horizons. She possessed, besides, other gifts. She was psychic. She could summon spirits from the dead who would, at her command, answer the hushed questions on everyone's lips: ‘When will it
end? Will we survive?' As the days of that terrible year grew shorter and shorter, as there were more and more hours of darkness before the inevitable 10.00 p.m. air raid, several women gathered around a spindly-legged table, hands spread out and touching each other, as the sculptor entered into her trance.

After a while the muscles of her face would stiffen. Soon her body seemed wholly rigid. She would begin to sway slightly, back and forth, back and forth, and in a voice that seemed to echo with the chill of the grave (or so my mother insisted), she would summon spirits to come to her. And mostly they came. Very soon the table would begin to move and shake, and then to obey her command to tap once if any spirit were present, twice if there were none. Crouched on the floor in a corner of the darkened room, both enthralled and terrified, it did not occur to me to question how absence could tap at all, let alone twice.