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We drop from the sky like
ravens, hover above the clouds for a moment, sun glinting on steel, then
plow through vapor and rainbow into a grayness whose only illumination
is the Danube. The river is the brightest and the widest thing I see;
there are farms and green on either side of it, then houses, then Soviet
slabs of concrete, then spired cathedrals, cobblestone streets, then people!
they are skating on a lake beside a castle! the ice is white and clear!
then the Danube again, and then the vastest graveyard I have ever seen.
It vastens as we descend; the graves accelerate and fill the eye, and
then a bank of trees, the remains of a forest that edge the city, both
containing and accommodating the graves; a tremor rushes through the plane,
and we land in Budapest.
There are
certain names in certain languages it feels good to pronounce. Budapest
is one such name. Budapest. I have met but few Hungarians in my life.
Any opinion I had made of the people prior to a visit—and there were several–was
therefore bound to be useless. I expected from them a facility with English
and good bone structure. My preconceptions deceived me.
The people
in Budapest do not speak English. Nor do they speak French, Italian (except
for the Roumanian gypsies), Spanish or Greek. Perhaps they speak Russian.
I tried some Russian on them and they were not amused. I do not blame
them for that. The most common second language I encounter is German.
Why? That is a question I would have loved to ask them. Why do you speak
German? What is the point? All Germans speak English already. Never having
needed to learn German I was unable, alas, to ask the denizens of Budapest
any direct questions. My preconceptions deceived me, in regard to the
appearance of the people and their language, and not being able to communicate
verbally with them I was left to wonder, in the shadow of the passing
looks we exchanged, are you clever? are you frightened–still? are there
politicians, even nations, you deplore? do you believe in God? in history?
what do you expect from science? what informs your self-understanding?
do you use the internet? to what end? Your opera house is one of the most
gorgeous buildings I have ever seen. Do you ever attend? How do you pronounce “Iraq”? Are you part
of Rumsfeld’s New Europe?
What I
am trying to say is that there is a closedness to Budapest, and I longed
for a Magyar friend throughout my visit, and failing either to find or
to make one, I blessed time that it had given me a measure of non-linguistic
communicative ability.
I am pleased
to report that people in Budapest look you in the eye and are willing
to hold your seeing. The time of the stasi glance is over. But a suffering
I can only imagine seems to have left its wound on these people, and it
still hurts them. Something has seeped into their circulation (perhaps
it was always present and has risen to the surface), and they present
a gray visage. Zoe thinks this has to do with the smoking people do in
Budapest. Everyone smokes. Everywhere. All the time. “It grays them out.
It wrinkles everything,” she says, and she is right. They smoke too much
in Budapest. There are even small placards in certain restaurants, written
in Magyar and—English!—explaining that one is sitting in a smoking or
non-smoking section, and that this division (whose symbol is the ying-yang
with a lit cigarette pluming away on the ying side) is based on principles
of diversity, acceptance, and cooperation. Buda—Pest indeed. Every city
has its private squabbles, I suppose, which gesture to some larger urban
misery. I take the smokiness to be a manifestation rather than a cause,
but the grayness is there, the city is saturated with it, in the clouds
of smoke and the sky and the clothing; in the graffiti and the crumbling
facades upon which it is scrawled, in the bark of the trees and the hair
of dogs. My coffee goes gray when I add cream to it.
Personally,
I am very fond of gray. Gray lends one a certain anonymity; it is a spy’s
cover; it is degages, disengaged, neutral and cool. Gray is an ideal background:
other hues leap and splash against it. Gray heightens red and textures
white. It isolates green, so that a child’s sweater in a dun plaza recapitulates
perfectly the copper-moss green of a rain-burnished rooftop. Color against
gray takes on a velvety consistency. All the Budapest gray made me want
to lick the drapes and the tablecloths in the city’s cafes and restaurants.
Architecturally
speaking, Budapest has an elegance and a refinement that one does not
find in any American city, with the possible exception of New Orleans.
The devastation that one might expect to have been visited upon the city
has not harmed its older structures. Everywhere there are enormous palazzi
with deep courtyards, offering a combination of the neo-classical and
the gothic. If the weather were different I might feel as though I am
in Paris. The Soviets transformed some of the grander buildings into houses
of interrogation and torture—one such is now the grisly Museum of Terror—but
they elected not to rip them down. One must be thankful for the small
things, I suppose. The avenues are wide, with room for two lanes of traffic
going in either direction, separated by electric tram lines sparking along
down the middle. The tram cars are wooden and rickety orange boxes, linked
three or four in a row, warm and crowded and brightly lit. Very quaint
indeed.
The first
night there we go out in search of people. The streets were full of rushing
bodies at 6pm but by 10 o’clock they are empty, and the windows that were
dark in the gorgeous gray buildings at 4pm are still dark now. There is
a profound emptiness to the place, deepened by the suspicion that something
creepy must be going on somewhere (Budapest is the capitol of the porn
industry in eastern Europe) and a feeling that this place is as foreign
as Serbia would be, or Sumatra. The people are as ugly as I am, with misshapen
noses and rotting teeth, and we look as local as anyone else. The proof
of this lies in the fact that locals approach us and ask for the time,
and waiters arrive at our table speaking Hungarian. They do not expect
visitors here. How refreshing.
Hoping
to get into some sort of trouble, we go to a pub to get drunk. This place,
at least, is crowded, with the requisite clouds of smoke hanging over
every table. People are already passing out. A young woman spits at me
when I complement her shoes and demonstrate that I aim to take the extra
chair at her table, if she and her lovely friends aren’t using it, that
is. I go to the bar for the first round but the owner brings us our drinks
on the next eight.
The local
consolation is a curiosity. It is treacle colored with the consistency
of thin coffee and goes by the name of Comintern. Or Unicorn. Or Comminyou.
Minicon? Nimancoo. No. “Unicom.” That’s it. Unicom. The first one tastes
like it has been pulled from the roots of very old trees. It is dry and
fiery, bitter and oddly alive. After the second one, K stops for a moment
in the middle of an increasingly animated conversation.
“Does anyone
else feel...” He is gesturing with small flapping motions to his head
and to other parts of his body. This is a good drink. We all feel the
strangest buzz in our brains. None of us has ever tasted anything like
this before. It is like something out of Willy Wonka’s factory. We have
four more each and twelve beers then ask for the cheque. “Kose ehashishim
szia,” I say. The owner returns with another round and the cheque. “Thankyou
ehashishim hello,” he says, and smiles. This is the first of about two
smiles I will see in Budapest. It is not a smiling city, except for the
Roumanian gypsies when you buy their goods and they flash you their gold-rimmed
whites. The cheque comes to 6,000 florints. $25 never got five Americans
quite so drunk.
Outside
it has been raining and the streets glisten and sweat. It is much warmer
here at this time of year than it would be in a place like…New York City.
It is also eerily dark. “Cantabit vacuus coram latrone viator.” The traveller with an empty purse sings when he meets a thief.
But there is nothing to fear; Budapest is very safe. There are people
making out in doorways here and there. Women walk alone late at night.
Budapest is wealthy and clean and feels prosperous.
It shares
with Paris and Geneva the happy smell of dogshit. There are great piles
of the stuff glimmering in the rain and affluent, long smears of it on
the sidewalks. Good for them! I say. Bravo! Whenever you are in a city
with lots of dogshit around you, rejoice! because it means that either
the city is wealthy enough to hire people in little trucks to come and
slurp it up or the inhabitants have foyers outside their their spacious
apartments where they can deposit their shit-besotted shoes. Ample dogshit
suggests leisure and money.
Every
happy European city is the same: you see the same dogshit on the same
avenues with the same fancy people wearing the same boring clothes in
the same dehumanized cafes. Urban European happiness is a ubiquity, familiar
as a species of bird, whether one is in Rome or Paris or Athens. But the
unhappy cities are each miserable in their own peculiar manner. Budapest
boasts of having the second largest synagogue in the world, but it is
mostly empty now, and it will never be full again. The Nazis killed around
600,000 Jews in Hungary, with another 100 to 200k killed by the Hungarian
fascist Arrow Cross party, who murdered at least 70,000 in the Budapest
ghetto right after the war was over. I could not imagine living with this
memory. Then there were the Soviets with their tanks and their grim totalitarian
empire. It is the Soviet presence that lingers most persistently and about
which I am most curious. I remember the cold war. The terror of it gave
me chills on even the warmest nights in bed as a child.
Thus I
find myself drawn to the Soviet memorabilia in the markets and the junk
shops. There are hats, flasks, medals, paintings and figurines of Lenin,
KGB commando watches and tank clocks. The clocks are genuine but many
of the watches and the flasks are—incredibly, already!— reproductions.
Good for them, I say. Good for them, to have figured that out so quickly.
Capitalism still turns history on its head. Trying to penetrate the Soviet
aura becomes an obsession. We go to an old KGB cafe, are greeted at the
door with a big sigh and a shrug of the shoulders and then are treated
to some of the worst service I have ever come across. The place itself,
however, has retained some of that 1960’s Soviet aesthetic, which is compelling
to one who comes from decadence: sturdy formica tables and chairs, uniform,
government-issue lace tablecloths, yellow lights overhead and of course
the red drapes. The drapes are saturated with memory and desire; I touch
one and hear muffled voices thick with longing and deferment.
It is in
the taxi back to the airport that my first Hungarian tries to speak to
me. The driver is a young man with a lean look in his eyes. I like him
instinctively. “You like Budapest?” he asks me.
“Yes. Very much. Do you?” I reply.
“Eh. You speak German?”
Always the German, dammit. “Nein.” I say. “Italiano? Francais?
Espanol? Hellenico?”
“Nein.”
We have
escaped Budapest proper and are driving past some soviet-block housing.
I decide to press on. “What was it like here with the Soviets?” He looks
at me blankly. I point to the housing blocks. “Soviet?” I ask.
“Yes.” He smiles.
“What was it like here with the Soviets?” A long pause as he searches
for a word.
“Different.” He smiles again.
Now we
are passing the graveyard. We catch one another’s eye in the rearview
mirror then both look to the graves. “Different,” he says again and smiles.
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OTR Dispatches - February, 2004