The Habsburg Cafe (36 page)

The Ambassador is looking at his boots. Is he annoyed, I ask myself, because I've broken the bland conventions of such gatherings? The Third Secretary seems somewhat rattled too as he rises to his feet to announce the next speaker. My own feelings are a curious mixture of fatigue, embarrassment and satisfaction at having spoken out. I am most conscious though of my fiery throat and congested chest.

The evening draws to a close. I say my farewells. The Ambassador and I exchange a few polite words. Joe tells me again to look after that cold. I tell the historian from Melbourne that she mustn't come near me because you don't want to get crook in this country. The Third Secretary says we ought to find something to eat somewhere, perhaps that
recently opened Thai restaurant which, he's heard, is quite decent.

The rain has stopped. A cold sun shines in a wintry sky. It has got even colder with the clearing weather. Snow is forecast for the weekend, heavy in places—but by then I should be far away from here, floating in the dark sky above Asia.

We are driving along a busy motorway, Budapest's western artery. My Szeged colleague's husband is a steady, sensible driver, refusing to join in the daredevil games of the other motorists—drivers of clapped-out Ladas and Trabants, the occasional golden youth of the new Hungary in a Porsche, helmetless motorcyclists. Grim towers of socialist flats line both sides of the road. I catch sight of a woman shaking out an eiderdown from a high window. Another young woman holding a small child by the hand waits patiently at a pedestrian crossing. A large advertising hoarding entices you to smoke a well-known brand of cigarettes.

As the city is left behind I notice that we are approaching a small town—by now no more than an outer suburb—where in 1944 my father was interned in a forced labour camp. Travelling past that dreary little town's mean houses, small factories, decrepit shops, I begin to wonder where the barracks might have been in which my father was confined. I realise that he must have walked along this road the night he escaped, picking his way in the darkness to the place in Budapest where my mother and I were hiding. And it must have been along this road, too, that he returned after four or five days to give himself up, when he could no longer bear being confined behind the wooden slats of the coal cellar where my mother had hidden him from the gaze of the curious.

On the other side of that perfectly ordinary little town, which may no longer remember that it had once been the site of a minor infamy, the countryside begins. We now have the
road pretty much to ourselves. The golden youths have sped on into the distance, the spluttering Ladas and Trabants have been left far behind. We chat desultorily in the way that near-strangers who have been thrust into each other's company for a few hours seek some topic of conversation to fill in the silences. Over a cup of coffee in a small roadhouse beside a chicken-run my companion says that we should think of where to stop for lunch, and I suggest Sopron, the town where my mother grew up, a place I'd wanted to have a look at very much but could not find an opportunity to visit. He looks hesitant. I recall something my cousin had said—that when she last visited the place four years ago she was appalled by the high prices: the same as they charge in Austria, just down the road. I say to my companion that he must, of course, be my guest and he, smiling and obviously relieved, accepts the offer.

Half an hour later another roadsign. This leads us into a largish town, an important railway-junction called Györ, its grey ill-kept buildings hinting at former Kakanian splendours. The sun has disappeared behind slate-coloured clouds. Swirls of wind lift the autumn leaves lying in the gutters. Here is another site of my personal mythology, the town where my father's eccentric cousin, the religious maniac who forced her daughter to join a convent and whose son committed suicide in one of those brutal Kakanian military academies, ruled with an iron hand her mild-mannered, ineffectual husband, the Major. I recall the last time I saw that lady—just before she too, despite her fervent Catholicism, was swallowed by the madness and hatred of the time.

We visited my mother's Sopron relatives for Easter in 1943: we all knew that it would be our last visit. The war was closing in, menacing and terrible. My father's cousin came to the station to see us during the train's hour-long halt. As she was leaving, when shrill whistles warned of the train's departure, she pressed a brown paper parcel into my mother's hands—eggs, she said, she was sure we hadn't had any in Budapest for a long time. Ten minutes or so after the train drew out
of the station into the dusk of early spring a huge explosion not very far away shook and jolted the carriage, hurling the eggs from my mother's lap. As we sat for many hours in that freezing carriage, waiting for the line ahead, which had received a direct hit, to be repaired, we watched the sticky mess of eggs on the patterned carpet first coagulate and then freeze over.

Soon we are clear of that town too. Indeed we shall soon be clear of Hungary, so short are the distances in this tiny country. The landscape becomes more undulating; there are now the odd vistas and prospects visible through the misty rain. We pass through several small towns or large villages. I have all but stopped looking at the scenery, or paying attention to the roadsigns, concentrating instead on my running nose and aching throat. I catch sight of the name of a dreary dun-coloured village etched on the façade of a crumbling town (or village) hall. The seemingly endless row of letters that makes up the name of the place attracts my attention. It is, I realise, Fertöszentmiklós, yet another stage on this unintended pilgrimage to my past.

This is the place where my mother was born, where her father taught in the village school until his untimely death in the third year of my mother's life. It was here that my great-grandfather supervised the transportation of milk from the estates of the Eszterházy family to the great capitals, nearby Vienna and much more distant Budapest. And it was here in 1919 that the Bolsheviks ransacked my great-grandfather's house, causing his family—my great-grandmother, my grandmother and my mother as well as my cousin's as yet unmarried mother—to seek shelter in a heavily barred cellar. It was from this place that they moved with their few remaining possessions to the nearby town, Sopron, which they knew by its Austrian name of Oedenburg, to be succoured by the contemptuous charity of relatives. Such a place should be charged with resonances. Yet it is no more than a dull, down-at-heel little town in the last stages of decay, except that a garish video shop beside a small unkempt park suggests that some life may, after all, remain here.

A few stretches of farmland and a couple of straggling hamlets bring us to a corrugated iron shed, beside which a faded and pockmarked metal sign announces that we have entered the town of Sopron.

The outskirts of Sopron, as of most towns, are anything but inspiring. The rust-encrusted shed gives way to a series of mean single-storey dwellings, interspersed from time to time with red brick workshops and the mess and confusion of a car yard or scrap metal dump. A little farther along, the size and ambition of the buildings increase; there are occasional ornate decorations and pompous inscriptions to be seen. Soon, as always happens, the first institution slips past, turrets and porticoes behind a rusting iron railing—school, hospital or madhouse. There are groups of shops visible now, few distinguished by any sign—you get the feeling that in this part of the town people know where to go for goods without needing to be told. A small park, a church and then, with a slight rattle of wheels, we're off the bitumen, driving along a narrowing cobbled street.

We all carry in the secret recesses of our imagination a myth world—a place, a house, a landscape, a time—which often speaks to us most eloquently precisely because it is remote, perhaps forgotten, a very particular symbol of our longings and dreams. For me the name of this town, much more so than a handful of hazy, fifty-year-old memories, fleeting and unrelated images, stands at the centre of that network of nostalgia and yearning—and also of fears and demons—which have been following me in my rambles around the two countries that meet here, Austria and Hungary, the remnants of the fabled realm of Kakania. This little German-speaking town that became Hungarian as a consequence of a somewhat suspect referendum held after the Great War provided the focal
point from which my mother surveyed the bitter early years of her life in Australia, and it was here that the many strands of her mythology—elaborated and embellished with the passage of time—converged. Now, as the cobblestones set up a curious shuddering, I am about to enter that world as a middle-aged Australian with a cold in the head.

That mythology had many centres, many points of departure from which the filaments of anecdote and story snaked out, tangling with other strands leading to other centres. One centre was formed by my mother's bitter memories of her cousins' icy charity, the cruelty that hid behind a loving smile, when they persisted in reminding their unfortunate relatives of their nobility and altruism when they helped them out in their great need after the disaster of 1919. That cycle of tales told of insults and humiliations, and also of my mother's revenge, years later, after her transformation into the metropolitan
grande dame
, when she was able at last, she said, to teach these provincial cousins a thing or two.

The other tales were much brighter than that saga of petty revenge. The most elaborate constellation circled around the Ursuline convent where she was educated. It presented her with images of the gracious and cultivated way of life led by those noble women who had retreated behind the walls of a luxuriously appointed institution, there to pursue a life of study, reading, polite conversation and other civilised amenities of the good life. She spoke of the handsome apartments the good nuns occupied, the delicacy of the dishes prepared for them by their servant sisters, the distinguished visitors they received in their handsome salon. She spoke of these with great fervency in our poky flat in an outer suburb of Sydney where the rising damp left intricate yellow patterns on the whitewashed walls.

For me, as a young child in Hungary, and later as a pimply adolescent in Sydney, the most fascinating and momentous of these tales found its location in the hills that rise on the perimeter of the town. It was there in 1928 that my sixteen-year-old mother met my father, a mature adult of twenty-four.
That story, vaguely reminiscent of one of the episodes in those Kakanian romances that fill the bookshops of the Mariahilferstrasse, seems as if it occurred in a distant century, in a fabled time of myth and legend, rather than a mere, prosaic sixty-odd years ago—yesterday, or at most the day before.

It was wintertime. The Ursuline ladies had given their pupils a half holiday to celebrate some great event—a saint's feast-day, an important anniversary in the annals of the order, my mother couldn't remember which. With a friend she tramped through the drifting snow to the top of the hills ringing the town where, for a few pennies, you could hire rickety wooden sleds. They spent a delirious afternoon screaming down a winding track to the foot of the hill, laboriously dragging the sled uphill only to scream down once more, most of the time entirely out of control and ecstatically happy. Occasionally a wonderfully sleek two-seater toboggan slid past them, with two young men frantically waving them out of the way.

Towards the end of the day, in the failing light, my mother and her friend decided to go for one last slide. The runners of their usually slow and cumbersome sled had iced over by this time: it slithered down the hill with the speed of light. Now they found themselves wholly unable to control its career. As they approached the bottom, lurching out of the last curve, they saw themselves heading straight for the sleek toboggan. Its drivers, who were adjusting something on its complicated frame, had just enough time to jump out of the way before their contraption was smashed to smithereens by two silly schoolgirls, who were now tumbling head over heels in the soft snow.

A dreadful scene followed: recriminations, threats, insults—a slanging match that echoed through the hills and certainly reached the ears of the town's gossips and meddlers. The story spread around the town. The Neubauer girl (‘You know the one, David Weiss's granddaughter, she lost her father in '14.') has to pay for a new toboggan, or one of those young men (‘His name's Riemer, he comes from Budapest—yes you do know him, he is the manager of the weaving mill.') is going
to go straight to the nuns to ask them to intervene. People took sides, as always happens, in this provincial tempest. One party—led by my mother's charitable cousins—insisted that this was merely proof of what they'd been saying all along: my mother would come to a bad end, and serves her right. The other side asserted that it was surely a little childish of a grown man to be so vindictive towards two foolish girls. Accidents do, after all, happen, and surely he must be earning enough money to be able to afford a new toboggan.

The controversy raged for some time. Then people noticed that my father kept on calling at my great-grandfather's flat almost every day—to discuss the terms of settlement, he insisted, but there were those who thought they knew better. Then one summer day a fresh scandal broke. The cousins hurried in deputation to my great-grandfather: they'd seen Elisabeth riding pillion on young Riemer's motorbike. Imagine, they went round and round the square in front of the watchtower for all to see, laughing, waving to friends! My mother was locked in her room for a week, allowed out only to use the bathroom. Because of the severity of the punishment she had already endured, the Ursuline ladies decided not to expel her. A year later, when she had finished school, she became engaged to my father.