The Habsburg Cafe (37 page)

My mother spent the next six years in an ecstasy of anticipation. They had to wait until my father had enough capital to establish his own business before they could marry. He took a well-paid job in Budapest. Every weekend he would zoom down to Sopron on his infamous bike to see his fiancée. Now and then she would go up to town to stay with his mother, who was at first suspicious of this provincial orphan but grew at length to like her. Occasionally during my father's visits to Sopron, the young couple would take the early train for Vienna—suitably chaperoned by my grandmother or some other responsible person—to spend the day strolling along the Graben or the Kärtnerstrasse, to marvel at the great cathedral, or eat delicious cakes in one of the elegant cafés, or (if the weather was particularly fine) to ride on the great wheel in
the Prater, or to take the tram to Grinzing and stroll through the Vienna Woods.

My mother's happiness knew no bounds. The delicious thrill of anticipation with which she prepared her trousseau over those five or six years spread out to embrace her family, her friends and the little town itself, with its cobbled streets, beautiful buildings and the great watchtower looming over the rooftops. Her life was rich, and it was to become even richer on that day in 1935 when she left Sopron to travel to Budapest. It was to be her triumphant entry into a life of metropolitan sophistication, which was to last until it crumbled in the storm of hate unleashed in the beer halls of Munich by the little painter of Linz. I was born, exactly nine months and a week after her entry into the married state, on the bitterly cold leap-year day of 1936.

Retrospect and nostalgia cast a golden glow over her memories. They were transmitted to me, at various points of my life, and in various circumstances—when we sheltered in a damp cellar during the siege of Budapest and in the harsh light of an Australian suburb in the late forties—as a cycle of legends and myths of a lost world, a time of innocence and well-being before the corruption of experience set in. The more those days receded into the past, the more sentimental and embellished its images became. She forgot the pettiness, the provincial boredom, the poverty her family had endured. They were replaced by the glowing memories of Sopron's winding cobbled streets, the great watchtower standing as a comforting guardian or sentinel over its rooftops, the predictable rhythms of provincial life—the café, the little municipal theatre, outings to the wide shallow lake or the wooded hills where she first ran into my father. They set the standards of security, well-being and contentment which none of her later life—not even the five or six years of metropolitan affluence in Budapest—could equal.

For me, who possessed only fragmented memories of this place, that legacy is more emblematic than epic. Though I knew the sagas of the Ursuline convent and the wooded slopes, I have
acquired and retained a predisposition towards the more abstract elements of this world. My own longings for Europe, which are most pronounced in Australia, where I try to compensate for them by private and professional activities and aspirations which would nowadays be sneeringly labelled by many as ‘Eurocentric', find their fullest expression in social, aesthetic and emotional priorities which are probably embodied most clearly in places such as this town, or at least as it used to be.

I have learnt over many years of travel that the magic realm of Europe, which governs so much of my imagination, cannot be found in the present—or at least in those parts of modern Europe I have got to know on my professional and private travels. The excitement of Paris, the patina of Rome are both thrilling and enthralling. Yet experiencing them is somehow different from the promptings of that sentimental image that I carry around with me, which is labelled with the specific but highly abstract term ‘Europe'. The longing for a world I barely knew, indeed one which I may not have experienced at all, but only received as carefully nurtured myth, appeals to aspirations essentially different from the life of contemporary Europe.

From time to time, nevertheless, unexpectedly and therefore with curious potency, I have caught a fleeting glimpse or impression of that private fantasy in various places, almost always in that geographic and spiritual realm identified as Central Europe. It came to me one summer day in the cobbled streets of Salzburg—except that the crowds of sightseers jamming those narrow thoroughfares, the advertisements for
Mozartkugeln
and the great fortress scowling over the town provided jarring, incompatible overtones. It also came to me several times in Vienna, not in its great monumental spaces, but in a sidestreet, an alley or a passage lined with old-fashioned gaslights, where the scale was smaller and more intimate. It is also evident sometimes in the social rituals of small, out-of-the-way cafés, in a particular type of gentility—urban but not necessarily urbane—as with the two elderly
ladies with whom I fell into conversation on my last visit to the opera in Budapest. And it came most surprisingly and disconcertingly—surrounded, it is true, with sardonic ironies—in Szeged with its memories of imperial Vienna reduced and tamed to provincial cosiness.

I have come to understand in the course of these weeks, as I have been dipping into this world, that my private images of a time of innocence, perhaps of a paradise from which I had been expelled even before I was born, are concentrated in a distillation of that family myth world—as so often, preserved and transmitted through the maternal line—which took its inspiration from the rituals and aspirations of old Kakania's provincial bourgeois life. Despite my irony, close (it seems to me at times) to a deracinated cynicism, I am still devoted to that world, longing for the impossible, a quality of life and experience which had probably all but ceased to exist by the time of my true origins—that snowy day when my mother and her friend dragged a rickety sled up a winding path to the hills surrounding the little town of Sopron. The vision lodged in my imagination—the cobbled streets meeting at a sharp angle, the barred windows, the faintly glowing streetlight, the warm light of a shop or a café illuminating a square of cobblestones, the smell of vanilla and coffee I have encountered often enough in the cafés of this world—had their origins, I am convinced, not merely in this part of the world, but here, in this town.

Is that image a scrap, a remnant of an early experience, an all but forgotten memory of one of our visits to our Sopron relatives? Or is it, in a way even more contingent and remote, an assembly of bits of that mythology which have coalesced for me, its recipient, into this arbitrary, perhaps totally insignificant impression? I have no means of resolving that puzzle—my cousin knows even less about our family's life in this town than I do; her mother was clearly not a myth maker. Yet the source of the image, impression or sensation is less important than its effect or consequences. It provides a focus for the almost infinite, confusing and contradictory pressures and experiences of life. It becomes a still centre, something to
which the emotions and the sensibility—though rarely the intellect—may return to find a point of reference or of departure.

Most people, it seems to me, have such a centre, focus or still point to which they instinctively return. For many it is, no doubt, more substantial, intellectually and even spiritually more respectable than this essentially gimcrack illusion. For some a religious sense or conviction might provide such a focus; for others patriotism or deeply-etched ethnic allegiances. It may be my personal misfortune that the centre of my imagination—something that persists like a steady beat or the unvaried pattern of a figured bass—should be located in something as insubstantial and trivial as these scraps of mythology. Yet as I have been approaching the site of that myth world—even without realising that it was to be reached—I have been anticipating (I realise now as my acquaintance's car is making for the centre of the town) the moment of integration. The discrete, fragmentary impressions, experiences, observations and emotions which began when SQ24 was screaming towards Vienna airport always carried that shadow or afterimage: the cobbled street leading to a modest café of the old Habsburg world.

I am all too aware of the risks inherent in coming face to face with a myth cherished for many years under different skies. A year ago, after that hectic winter visit to Budapest, I had tried to break my return journey to Vienna for a night's stay here in Sopron. It could not be done: the inns were full, there was no room for the sentimental pilgrim. I left Hungary with the knowledge that I had not penetrated to the deepest level of nostalgia—and also of hostility—that governed my rediscovery, after almost half a century, of the world that had bred me. Sopron was to remain a romantic memory, a hazy image of a fabled place guarded by its massive watchtower; it was not to be tarnished by the rust of experience.

The failure to achieve that goal left, nevertheless, a sense of dissatisfaction and even frustration. One part of my personality urged me to lay those ghosts—no matter how kindly
or seductive they might be. The other part, though, insisted that illusions should not be shattered: and for that reason I made no attempt, in the course of these last weeks, which had been taken up with all sorts of trivial or mundane pursuits, to do what it would have been entirely possible to do—to catch a train and spend a day in Sopron. And now, with the intervention of fate or chance, it is absolutely clear that my steps were guided, that everything seems to have conspired to bring me back, in this year of the palindrome, to this centre, focus or perhaps shrine of an eccentric mythology.

The centre of the town is obviously close. The buildings are more substantial, there are many more shops, and they are no longer anonymous. There is, besides, quite heavy traffic jamming the streets. Everything looks drab and commonplace. The buildings are mostly three storeys high, uniformly covered in grey stucco and dotted with small square windows. The people shuffling along the footpath are squat, dumpy and elderly. They are muffled in shapeless coats to keep out the biting wind. The women's heads are wrapped in scarves; the men wear little peaked caps, some with flaps turned down over the ears. One or two people are fidgeting with small collapsible umbrellas, for a light drizzle has begun to fall.

My companion seems to know his way around the town. We make a right-hand turn into a narrow passage, broad enough for his elderly Saab to pass through without scraping the walls rising on either side. The alley ends in a large irregularly shaped open space. Its centre is filled with angle-parked cars, nose to nose like snarling dogs. We find an empty space and, locking the car securely for it contains my luggage, we make for the footpath on the long side of this space. The pavement is crowded. Groups of people stand outside the line of shops inspecting the merchandise displayed on racks and in containers placed untidily on the footpath. Some of the shopkeepers are busily removing racks and containers to protect their goods from the steady, sleety drizzle. Most of the signs, I notice, are in German.

We stand on the footpath discussing what to do. It is too early for lunch, my companion says, though we shouldn't delay too long because eating places get very crowded in Sopron—it's all those Austrians coming over the border, he sneers, looking for what they reckon are bargains. I have reached the stage of mild disillusionment where I do not much care what we do. Sopron, as I had expected, is just another small Central European town looking drab under a steely sky. Then, turning towards the other side of this open space—probably an occasional market, it occurs to me—I catch sight of, peeping over the roof tiles of the buildings opposite, the top of a characteristically Austrian steeple: not a church, it comes to me with a rush, but the watchtower, my one clear memory of this otherwise unfamiliar place.

That over there is the old town, my companion remarks as we begin to cross this large space, dodging puddles and the occasional manic car bearing down on us. We walk through a narrow alley and, suddenly, we are confronted by another world. Admittedly it looks just as drab and decrepit as the rest of this town, indeed as most of this sad country that has suffered so much neglect and destruction. Stucco peels from the walls of many buildings. The cobbled streets are a series of potholes. Some of the sturdy bars protecting ground-floor windows are bent, many have rusted away. Several of the wooden slats in the massive gate of one building are missing; they have been replaced by chicken wire. Nevertheless, I am able to impose on this image of decrepitude something of the memory pattern I have been nurturing (often without being aware of it) throughout much of my life.

As we wander through a network of cobbled streets and lanes, always skirting yet not coming upon the tower that dominates this part of the town, I begin to recognise, on crumbling facades, symbols and images of that dream world. A nearly illegible Latin inscription commemorates an eighteenth-century benefactor. A dirty marble plaque, yellow where water from a leaking gutter splashes on it, marks the house where a famous son of Sopron used to dwell. One house
displays, more or less intact, a row of plaster medallions beneath its eaves, each depicting a smiling cherub. The sharp angle where two streets meet is occupied by the apse of an ancient church. No doubt it once stood detached in its own grounds; now, however, and probably since the seventeenth century, it is inextricably joined to the dwelling houses of those two streets.

Coming round a corner not far from that truncated church, we find a small square dominated by a tall, somewhat off-centre monument, a miniature version of the huge plague columns that rise in the ceremonial spaces of Austrian towns. One side of the square is occupied by a four-storey building painted in an unpleasant shade of blue-green. A sickly potted rubber-plant is visible on the sill of a first-floor window. A very clean, very white enamel plate beside the entrance announces, in bold black lettering, that this is the convent and school of the Ursuline order.