The Habsburg Cafe (33 page)

She had a varied menagerie of shades, who obligingly tapped once, spelt out their names, and conversed with her (in Hungarian) by means of the tapping alphabet—one tap was A, two taps B, three C … Marie Antoinette was the most troublesome, refusing after a while to tap nicely, often flying into tantrums, hurling the table about and, on one spectacular occasion, shattering several of the legs. Fra Angelico was much more serene and gave the dates of his birth and death correctly—someone had an encyclopaedia that confirmed this. The most helpful of the spirits was someone called Claudius, not the Emperor, but an official, according to his account, of the Roman colony of Aquincum on the outskirts of modern Budapest. He proved a useful source of information, though his answers were in almost every instance riddling, like those of the Sphinx.

In later years, during our life in Australia, my mother spoke scathingly about those wartime seances. The sculptor was probably a fraud, she would say—well, if not a fraud she was probably pushing the table subconsciously, and you'd expect her to know Fra Angelico's dates, wouldn't you? But that was
in Australia, a dry and matter-of-fact world. In Hungary during those terrible and hectic days of death and fear she was eager for those nightly seances, for gleaning whatever illumination she might gain from Claudius' cryptic taps, or for that matter from Marie Antoinette's tantrums. Ghosts and reven-ants are somehow appropriate to Europe; they seem faintly absurd in the harsh glare of the southern sun. I cannot imagine middle-class Australian women sitting intently around a slender table asking agonised question—if seances are held in Australia, the questions are most likely to be concerned with the domestic arrangements of the other place. Perhaps you need to have experienced terrible atrocities and outrages before ghosts will come. The Aborigines, who have had their own share of atrocities to endure, are perhaps the only Australians to live in the world of the spirits.

As I look at the elderly couple at the table reserved for them in a strategic corner of this quiet café, I am both amused and slightly embarrassed. Yet I cannot put out of my mind that sculptor of a half a century ago, or those seances, or yet the differences between the two worlds in which I have lived. It is absurd to imagine that this elderly lady, lighting another cigarette from a dying butt—an unladylike but appropriately bohemian habit, surely—might be that psychic sculptor, yet there are many absurdities in our everyday lives. Reason and the intellect are the enemies, at times, of truth, no matter how much we might wish to put our trust in them. And then I am amazed to see the lady place her hands on the marble top of the table and spread out her fingers, with thumbs touching each other, as she is explaining something to her companion. Both laugh and she lifts her right hand to retrieve the cigarette hanging from her lips. I remember, simultaneously, that the sculptor was much older than my mother, and that if this lady were indeed she, she would probably be very close to her hundredth birthday.

The Museum of Jewish History is housed in an annexe of the main synagogue in Budapest. While the synagogue itself is largely empty, the museum is filled with people. The exhibits are commonplace enough, reminding me, disconcertingly, of those museums of colonial life you come across in places like Berrima and Beechworth. The reason for that seems to be the faint air of incongruity hovering over the objects exhibited in the glass cases scattered around several rooms of the museum. They reveal a crossing of two traditions and societies. Here is a Meissen plate, all gilt and decorative curlicues, redolent of the prim proprieties of the Central-European bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century. Yet the figures depicted on it, crinolined ladies and frock-coated gentlemen, are seated around the Friday night
Seder
table. It is an odd
objet d'art
, as odd as those pieces of English china manufactured for rich ladies and gentlemen in the colony of New South Wales with representations of emus and kangaroos, and of idealised scenes of life in Australia Felix. Many of the other exhibits are equally curious objects. Groups of visitors, mostly elderly, inspect them with a mixture of reverence and boredom. At one end of the large central room a noisy guide hectors his charges in a guttural language which is probably Hebrew.

Tucked away almost apologetically at one end of the museum is a small room illuminated by several spotlights trained on a series of large, unframed photographs fixed to austere black walls. They present, as a demonic iconostasis, the story of the persecution of the Jews of Budapest. You notice odd things: that the official decree of 1944 establishing, for the first time in the history of the city, a ghetto—a quadrangle of streets within which all Jews had to live—was poorly, almost amateurishly typed on a machine very much in need of a fresh ribbon. It looks quaint, an almost harmless document, despite its sinister message. The grainy photographs also reveal curious paradoxes: a jaunty, dandified man, hat worn at a rakish angle, stands beside an advertisement for
salami; the yellow star is prominent on the lapel of his well-cut topcoat. A group of men, some little more than children, others elderly, almost decrepit, pose for a photograph at a forced labour camp. Who took the photograph? you begin to wonder as you notice that on the whole the group looks cheerful enough. Was it one of their number who had somehow contrived to bring a camera with him, or was it (as is much more likely) one of their captors, recording for eternity this example of the racial cleansing of gallant Hungary?

Other photographs present more terrible images. One depicts a large group of women, suitcases and bundles beside them, massed in a railway yard, on their way to Auschwitz no doubt. Did they know what was in store for them? Scanning the picture for any sign of alarm or fear on these faces proves futile; their features are hardly to be distinguished, let alone any sign of emotion. Were they told that they were on their way to some pleasant, healthy place where they might make a new life for themselves? In one image, an elderly lady, a country-woman judging by the kerchief tied round her head—a poignant contrast to the befurred matriarch in a nearby photograph—stares at the camera in apparent panic. Was that expression habitual? Was that the way she always looked at a perplexing world? Or did she know that she was looking at death?

The last image, as you leave this little room saturated with the atmosphere of cruelty and death, is the most terrible. It shows a mass of people pressing against a lone, impassive figure. His hands are tied in front of him as he is being fastened to a stake. The photograph was taken during the last moments in the life of a man called Szálasi, the leader of the puppet régime established by the Germans in 1944, who was largely responsible for the mass extermination of Hungarian Jews in the last months of that terrible year. I do not know why this image of a brutal and degenerate man about to face the firing squad should be even more disturbing than the other images of death placed around the walls of this blackened room. If anyone deserved to die, it was surely this man, not the yellow-starred
boulevardier with his rakish hat, nor the kerchiefed countrywoman with her expression of fear and puzzlement. But that, of course, is the point. The cancer of this world is the seemingly inescapable and endemic cycle of outrage and revenge, which has continued unabated since the day that that bully and henchman, whom the rest of the world and perhaps even Hungarians themselves have long ago forgotten, was tied to a stake and shot to death.

I, however, cannot forget him, for his name entered into a diabolic mythology that was carried over the seas, to the other side of the world, by people like my parents, who had been brushed by his brutal insanity. Here in Hungary I cannot forget his days of power and greatness, even though I was only a child at the time, and only partially aware of the peril in which we stood—and from which we mercifully escaped. For me the history of that time is written into every stone, every paving block of this city. It may be unreasonable to be so conscious of events I had rarely thought about during half a century of life in another part of the world. Yet they colour my every perception, perhaps because, unlike those who stayed here—my cousin for instance—I am encountering them afresh, and with particular force this afternoon in this little black museum.

The city to which I have returned is for me still the city of 1945, the city in which people spoke proudly that they had been present when Szálasi faced the firing squad. And for that reason the final image in this museum proves to be the most deeply distressing. I cannot say to the people standing around me with that reverential mien one might encounter in front of holy objects or a screen of icons, that it would have been better to have spared this man's life—not because he didn't deserve to die, but because it is always better not to kill. To say so would no doubt offend these people and even perhaps cause them to misinterpret my sentiments and aspirations. They might even mistake me for one of those people who daub antisemitic slogans on statues and monuments in squares, avenues and parks all over the city. Nevertheless, this place which records images of a twentieth-century martyrdom should
not display images of vengeance as well—even if, possibly, such vengeance should be sanctioned by divine will.

It also occurs to me that in this room, an infernal camera obscura, images and experiences that have followed my movements around this small country (nominally my homeland, yet one towards which I am able to feel little warmth or love) coalesce in strange and disturbing ways. We tend always to to be moved deeply by memories of the suffering or the persecuted. The puzzled, insouciant or terrified faces displayed around these walls are united by one common and entirely inescapable bond. They were all about to die, and, more importantly, they were all aware—the boulevardier as much as the henchman—that death was near, just behind the camera or just around the corner. Martyrs and monsters, saints and vampires, become indistinguishable in the presence of that obscenity.

For me, though possibly not for others, Australia is innocent of such obscenity. And that is the answer that I should have given my young cousin when she asked me how I could continue living there. The very absence of the patina that age imposes on the great cultures of Europe is also the absence of those nightmarish images that are represented on the walls of this blackened room. Living in such a vacuum, in a land of innocence for people of my kind, might imply life at lower intensity, an existence cut off from the life-sustaining forces of the culture and art celebrated in Europe's nostalgic pantheon. It may even reduce potentially dangerous creatures, the fabled vampire of Transylvania, into the risible figure of Tibby Szabo, the podgy sensualist with sharp teeth and a vulgar taste in interior decoration. It may mean, therefore, that the culture in which I live is, and must continue to be, second rate, one incapable of producing resplendent images of saints because it lacks monsters. So it may indeed be cowardice of a kind not to take the risk and plunge myself once more into the world of vampires. Yet all I seem able to do during these seemingly endless weeks in my ‘homeland' is to count the days until I can board the train for Vienna, on the first leg of my journey home.

A hastily scrawled notice on a large sheet of cardboard propped up against a gilt chair in the foyer of the Budapest Opera House announces a last-minute change of programme. The performance of
La Fiamma
scheduled for this evening has been cancelled because of illness; it is to be replaced by the Hungarian State Opera's contribution to the Mozart bicentenary year,
The Clemency of Titus
. For me at least that piece of news is by no means unwelcome. I had been warned by an acquaintance that
La Fiamma
is, to put it kindly, undistinguished. If opera tickets in this city were not ridiculously cheap, and if I had not been at a loose end for the last three or four days, I would no doubt have heeded that advice. As things turned out, I am to be spared Respighi's no doubt dismally unsatisfactory opera. It seems entirely fitting that my last visit to the opera in Budapest should be to attend a performance of one of Mozart's last major works, written, a few months before his death, for the coronation of Leopold II in the imperial city of Prague.

My own change of programme came about as a result of a telephone call from the Australian Embassy three days before I was due to leave Budapest for Vienna, intending to spend a few days there before embarking on the long flight to Singapore and Sydney. I was asked whether I would consider saying a few words at a reception for a group of people—engineers, economists, computer experts, teachers—who were about to leave for three months' study in Australia. The Embassy would appreciate it if I could see my way to staying on for the function: after all, I had a foot in both camps, so to speak, being both Hungarian and Australian. Vanity and curiosity made me accept the invitation, as long as I succeeded (I told them) in altering my travel arrangements—a complicated
business in a country which, until recently, did its best to discourage people from making last minute changes of this sort. A telephone call to the airline's offices in Vienna obtained a changed reservation easily enough. Another informed the proprietor of the small hotel in the building where Mozart composed
The Abduction from the Seraglio
that, unfortunately, I would be prevented from returning for the few nights they had reserved for me. Only one hurdle, and that the most terrible, remained: to change the booking for the two-and-a-half-hour train journey to Vienna. Securing the existing booking took almost as long as the journey itself: I dreaded having to endure that ordeal again.

It seemed, however, that I was meant to stay on for that function. Just as I was about to devote the best part of the day to queuing at the reservations desk of the principal railway station, waiting once more while the official behind the counter dealt with her customers in a maddeningly lackadaisical, enervated manner, in between prolonged telephone conversations discussing the state of her nerves, health and finances, a message from one of my acquaintances in Szeged arrived, saying that her husband would be driving to Vienna, and would be happy to give me a lift. I rang the Embassy to confirm my acceptance, and bought a ticket for
La Fiamma
. ‘You'll hate it,' my knowledgeable acquaintance said, ‘it's frightful.' I didn't have the courage to tell him that having paid the equivalent of five dollars for a good seat in the stalls, leaving at interval would not be an irresponsible act. And anyway it was better than spending the evening watching satellite television in my hotel room.