A Writer's World (57 page)

At the end of the street looms my hotel. No cappuccino there, no country and western music. It is, as
Siauliai
at
Your
Fingertips
says, ‘where most people stay if the other hotels are full’. At breakfast a long, long table covered with a brown velveteen cloth is occupied by twenty young Russian males, like visiting technicians from the old days, while at the end of the dim-lit room there sits alone in silence at her victuals a woman who might be typecast as a lady commissar: severe, spectacled, muscular, her hair in a bun and her skirts long and heavy. A solitary waiter in shirt-sleeves serves us – thick black coffee (they’re out of milk), fried eggs with peas, black bread and very good cheese.

Half-way through the meal we are each given a bottle of Coca-Cola. Most of the men drink theirs there and then, in tandem with the coffee: but I notice, as the lady commissar leaves the room, wiping her mouth carefully with her paper napkin and studiously not looking anyone in the eye, she takes hers with her.

‘How was Budapest? Political situation tricky, isn’t it?’ So said a card from a friend when I came home from Hungary, and it did not make me feel guilty. Political situation tricky? I had no idea. I had never asked. I gave not a single thought to the political situation during a few days in Budapest that were devoted entirely to the most escapist kind of pleasure.

It was a very different matter when I was last in Budapest, back in the
seventies. Then one could hardly help taking an interest in the political situation as a communist Hungary took its first tentative steps into the market economy. Private shops were beginning to open then. Foreign firms were appearing – foreign tourists, too. Merciful Heavens, there was even talk of a Hilton Hotel on Castle Hill, very near the spot where, on summer Sundays, a Red Army band sometimes played for the sceptical indigenes!

Today you must be a resolute visitor indeed to involve yourself in the political situation, for there are few places in Europe that are more fun to do nothing in particular in than Budapest. By the nature of things it was always a fine city to see: situated nobly on both banks of the mighty Danube, Pest so flat, Buda so hilly, with the astonishing parliament (‘frantic’, Patrick Leigh Fermor called it) dominating one bank, the castle and the spirited Matyas church looking down upon the other, and a series of bridges majestically connecting the two.

Somehow it all used to be muffled, though, by the very presence of communism, and the history of the city itself was blurred and obfuscated. Even the supreme symbol of Hungarian nationhood, the Crown of St Stephen, was notable only by its absence: it had been taken to the United States at the end of the Second World War and was being kept at Fort Knox in Kentucky, along with the gold reserves.

But now come with me. The door in the National Museum opens heavily when we push it, with a theatrical creak, and there in a dim-lit chamber, guarded by a solitary janitor apparently dozing on a chair in the corner – there dazzlingly in a glass cabinet stands the Crown of St Stephen, back where it belongs. It is a Byzantine marvel of gold, gems and enamelled saintly portraits, inscribed with antique letters, like no other crown on earth, and truly proper to the Hungarian spirit is the gold cross jauntily skew-whiff at the top of it.

Nobody knows why it is askew, but not even the dullest civil servant, the most pedantic scholar, would dare suggest that it should be straightened. The joy of Hungary is its heroic convention, the combination of formality and high jinks. Budapest always suggests to me a Vienna with fizz, its heritage of Habsburg hierarchy spiked with sudden flashes of wit or defiance, touches of exaggeration, suggestions of excess.

Hungarians themselves, of course, like to say that this is the Magyar element – the wild originality that the first Kings of Hungary brought galloping out of the Great Plains – and I am myself a sucker for the epic explanation. In the Heroes’ Square in Budapest (built for the Hungarian
millennial exhibition of 1896) there is a group of equestrian statuary that represents the arrival of King Arpad, the first of all the kings, in the year 896. Arpad himself rides in front, his head high, his eyes firmly fixed down Andrássy Avenue towards the city centre. Around him his fierce bodyguard of chieftains, mounted on splendidly caparisoned horses, look this way and that beneath their feathered helmets with expressions marvellously haughty and sneering – terrifically alarming men, predatory as all hell, the sort you would very much rather have on your side than on the other.

Full of such images, I went one evening to a concert performance of operetta extracts at the Vigadó concert hall. Liszt, Wagner and Mahler all performed there, but our evening was one of sugary pop melodies, all of them as familiar to the Budapest audience as Gilbert and Sullivan used to be to Britons. At first, my mind on St Stephen’s Crown and Arpad’s bravos, I thought this selection rather unworthy of the city. There was plenty of froth to the old tunes, plenty of gypsy charm, but the young gentlemen of the dancing chorus seemed to me a little weedy as they waltzed around the stage in white ties and tails.

Presently, though, having slipped into something looser, they broke into the violent stamp and strut of the
csárdás
, that old display of everything most dramatically Hungarian; and then as they threw their heads back, drummed the floor, slapped their thighs, flung their arms into the air and sometimes wildly shouted, while the jolly audience clapped to the accelerating rhythm of the piece – then I saw in them, benignly mutated, the cold sneer of the horsemen in Heroes’ Square, or for that matter the reckless style of the boys who, swarming over the Red Army’s tanks back in 1956, made the first crack in the awful Iron Curtain.

After a few days of Magyar heroizing, anyway, I was content enough to fall back into Habsburgization. There was snow on the ground when I was in Budapest, and this made the snug, fusty, fattening side of the city’s life all the more attractive. One cannot sneer and dance the
csárdás
all the time. It was restful to wander the squares and boulevards of Pest, now mostly restored to full capitalist amplitude, thinking about Franz Josef and whistling a tune that you and I know well, I’m sure, but can’t quite place – could it be something of Fritz Kreisler’s? ‘Schön Rosmarin’, isn’t that it?

There is nowhere better for one of those half-hours in a coffee shop when the coffee goes in the first five minutes, with the sticky cakes, and the rest is a happy aftertaste of observation, jejune philosophizing and making conversation with the people at the next spindly table. No ride could be
more
gemütlich
than ten minutes in the funicular up to the Habsburg’s royal castle, sitting in a quaint little wooden cabin cosy above the retreating river. There are no better streets for looking at the buildings of the last
fin
de
siècle
, an eclectic melange apotheosized by that splendid Gothic-Renaissance mongrel, the frantic parliament by the river. And you can hardly feel more comfortably Habsburgian than you can now feel at Gundel’s, the famous old restaurant by the zoo. When I was last in Budapest it functioned listlessly under municipal control, but now it has been brought to plush life again by enterprising American-Hungarians. I did not eat the soup described as Franz Josef’s Favourite, but I did indulge myself in a sufficiently courtly dish called Count Széchenyi’s Roast Breast of Pheasant, which is stuffed with goose liver and has baked apple on the side.

I have never enjoyed a city more. When I got home I telephoned some Hungarian friends in Australia to tell them I had been in Budapest. ‘Ah,’ said they, ‘but didn’t you detect
disconcerting
undercurrents
?’ I did not blush, even to myself: just tilted my crown a little more rakishly and took another bite of
Sachertorte
.

Quite suddenly, when you drive into the mountains south of the capital, Sofia, high in a narrow wooded pass you find the monastery of St John at Rila, a multi-domed church in a wide slabbed courtyard, surrounded by tall galleried blocks like a medieval inn. It is one of the most satisfying architectural ensembles I know, and is far more than just a monastery: for besides being a patently holy place, and a sort of fortress, and a familiar picture-postcard spectacle, it is the prime national talisman of Bulgaria. It is Bulgaria emblemised. It is the Eiffel Tower, the Sydney Opera House, the Nelson’s Column, the Washington Monument, the Brandenburg Gate or the Red Square of the contemporary Bulgars.

God knows they need a national talisman or two, because their more recent history has been, by and large, one long record of difficulty and frustration. Geography placed this unlucky people between two of the
most uncomfortable neighbours on earth. Russia has traditionally been Bulgaria’s protector, finally bestowing upon it a particularly distasteful Stalinist regime; Turkey has traditionally been its oppressor, occupying the country for several centuries and intermittently indulging in massacres. It is only during the past decade that the Bulgarians, charming people that nearly everyone likes, have really been free to be themselves.

Only natural, then, that a journey around Bulgaria seems to become a journey from one national shrine to another, through rings of pride radiating out from Rila. Such monuments of fortitude and National Revival! Such museums of sacrifice and revolution! Such cenotaphs, mausolea and tombs of poets and soldiers! Such statues of heroes and churches of thanksgiving and sites of constituent assemblies! No patriot on earth is more patriotic than a patriotic Bulgar, and nothing is more symbolical than a Bulgarian symbol.

The central triumph of Bulgarian history was the 1876 rising against the Turks, which eventually won the nation its independence, and its memory has risen above many a subsequent discomfort – the slaughter that followed it, despotisms of one kind and another, defeat in the Balkan War of 1913, humiliation in the First World War, the unfortunate alliance with the Nazis in the Second, the Russian ‘liberation’ of 1945, the long years of communist autocracy. More than a century on, you cannot escape the trophies of 1876.

On the Danube riverfront at Ruse is the house of the formidable grandmother Baba Tonka, who led the patriotic women of Ruse in an armed attack on the Turkish town prison, and whose five sons all fought in the cause. At Kozloduy upstream a monument honours the impetuous poet Hristo Botev, who led 200 Bulgarian émigrés from Romania in the hijacking of an Austrian river steamer, and stormed ashore here to join the rising beneath the banner Liberty or Death. In Sofia a memorial marks the execution site of poor Vasil Levsky, ‘the Apostle of Freedom’, who had roamed the country in disguise recruiting revolutionaries. And crowning all is the Freedom Memorial at Shipka, where the Bulgarians won the most famous of their victories (‘supported’, so my Bulgarian history bravely says, ‘by not very many Russians’). An almost constant stream of schoolchildren climbs the 894 steps to this enormous hill-top cenotaph, which is guarded by the mightiest and best-fed of all commemorative lions.

Having developed a most decided weakness for the Bulgarians, I heartily sympathize with these emotions, and am as stirred as any schoolchild by
the Freedom Memorial, the tales of Levsky and Baba Tonka, the seizure of the steamer
Retsb
by the wild lyricist and his comrades. Every people needs its moments of success to make up for its miseries, and Bulgaria’s troubles do not seem to be over yet. The countryside looks lovely, the wine is delicious, flowers are everywhere, waiters smile, geese, goats and donkeys roam the purlieus of picturesque villages, truckers’ halts serve nourishing soups, the package-tour resorts on the Black Sea thrive; but most people are extremely poor still, politics sound murky, and when I pick up a copy of the
Bulgarian
Economic
News
I find it full of anxieties. Base interest rate stands at 108 per cent. Volume of business is down 33 per cent. Fruit production has plummeted. The Minister of Internal Affairs has resigned, having been filmed celebrating with models at a beauty contest the day after three of his policemen were murdered by gunmen.

Poor Bulgaria! Will life never be easy here? Will the world never leave it alone? The Turks are quite friendly these days, but up at Ruse, the chief point of entry from the north, I still feel a nagging sense of alien interference. A mile or two downstream from the city a great iron bridge crosses the river, and here it is easy to fancy all the new skulduggery of eastern Europe flooding down from the north, to fan out across the little country in stolen Mercedes cars – Romanian rogues, opportunists from Moldavia, gypsy thieves, Hungarian conmen, Russian crooks (as a Bulgarian lady said to me the other day, ‘Russians are not ordinary people; they are merchants and robbers.’) Bulgaria stands on its own facing these new hazards: not yet a member of Europe, no longer a member of an Eastern bloc, only a small, delightful republic of 9 million souls, trying to sort itself out.

Of course the Bulgarians want symbols! Who wouldn’t? Often enough they go far back into their history to find them – beyond Rila itself, into the rich hazy world of proto-Bulgars, Thracians and Bogomils. The most apposite of all their patriotic icons, to my mind, is one of these. Above the village of Madara, with a railway station that suggests to me something to be blown up by Lawrence of Arabia on the Hejaz Railway, in the cliffs above the dusty hamlet there is carved an antique figure. So old is it, and so eroded, that you can discern it only when the setting sun catches its outline, and no more than vaguely even then. But in photographs you can see more clearly the Horseman of Madara, and realize how relevant he is to the condition of his country.