Inside Outside (10 page)

He was a revered figure of tyrannical power and authority. He supervised not merely the orderly conduct of the building—making sure that rubbish was disposed of in the required manner, that children did not make too much noise in the stairwell, that the glass panels in the front door of each apartment were cleaned properly—but also the political inclinations of his tenants. Like all such functionaries he was believed to be a police-informer—which he no doubt was. He was not, however, entirely incorruptible. A sufficiently large ‘tip' ensured that he allowed the noise level of my parents' housewarming party to exceed what may be termed, I suppose, the level for which no charge was levied. But he could not be trusted, no matter how large the bribe, with the secret of the undoctored radio. On the night of the party it was not produced until all the guests had arrived, and a cloth to be thrown over it was ready to meet the eventuality of an unexpected caller.

I searched for that block of flats on Christmas Eve in 1990. I knew the name of the street but I had forgotten or was confused about the number. As I walked down that drab thoroughfare lined by blackened, crumbling buildings on each side, stucco peeling from their pompous neo-baroque facades to reveal layers of crudely made bricks, nothing spoke to me of familiarity, nothing gave me the sense that I had been there before, or that this was somehow a part of my life. I could have been strolling through a giant postmodernist stage set. Gradually and disturbingly, though, I became aware of a trickle of recognition. The past was returning. The clatter of a distant tram; a grandiose, now disintegrating mythological personage, arms crossed above his head to support the balcony over the gateway of a building; the shallow steps leading to a group of shops in a half-basement; the vista of the grimy street itself; and above all, something in the air, in the atmosphere (a sort of genius of the place) all gave this particular street a unique and individual presence, despite the fact that this street scene was mirrored by many other streets of the city, indeed by countless streets the world over—without, it is true, the quantity of dirt and pollution I found around me.

Suddenly, I saw the building. There was no need to look at the street-number, 31B, to discover whether that stirred any memories. Nor was there any need to search the facade to find our balcony or the window of my room. It gave me a momentary shock to realise that the glass in that window was unmarked. Memory prompted me to expect to see the neat round hole, surrounded by a symmetrical web of craze-lines, the result of a shot fired one night by a revelling Russian soldier. I had forgotten the incident, just as I had forgotten how my horrified parents extracted the bullet from the wall beside my bed, and made me sleep thereafter in the unused maid's room that gave onto a gloomy light-well. It was an odd, unsettling moment. The past and present were beginning to merge. Their images were in the process of being superimposed to form a satisfying whole, in the way that several coloured plates are printed over a sheet of paper to produce a glowing, richly-hued image.

That moment of recovery and reintegration, when I was coming into contact with a past that had been largely forgotten, or had lain dormant in my memory, was destroyed as I began to look at the building itself. In place of that shipshape construction smelling of newly-laid cement, kept in order by a feared caretaker, there stood a mean, decaying pile, its blackened walls streaked with evil-looking vertical stripes the colour of rust, or perhaps of dried blood. Its balconies, especially our balcony, were sagging perilously, their iron balustrades twisted and, here and there, displaying dangerous gaps. The glass panels in the wings of the entrance door were opaque with dirt. Through the gap I could see—and smell—a Dalek-like garbage container which should have been emptied, judging by the stink, weeks ago. A dog-eared piece of paper fastened to the wall beside the entrance gave the list of tenants and adumbrated the rules governing the conduct of the building. It was signed with the name of the ‘Leader of the Tenants' Co-operative'. I stood in front of the doorway. My son took a photograph. When the film was developed I saw myself grimacing at the camera.

Later that day, back at the hotel, surrounded by acres of plywood and plastic, I tried to come to terms with the sense of disappointment and anticlimax this encounter had produced, a feeling not unlike the flatness that overcame my parents and me, all those years before, when the
Marine Phoenix
sailed past the row of streetlights near South Head. I reminded myself that forty-four years had passed since I last stood in that doorway, that those years were bound to have taken their toll on even the most lovingly cherished of buildings, let alone one that had seen war, revolution, and neglect bred out of apathy and indigence. And besides, I also had to remind myself, those forty-four years had not left me entirely untouched.

Such calming thoughts—telling you to be grown-up and sensible, and not to allow your emotions to run away with you—were followed by the recognition of another, perhaps even more disturbing possibility. Could it be that the building, indeed the whole city, had always been like this? After all, I had spent almost half a century amidst Australian standards of hygiene, in a world where even the dunny-men of Epping displayed a certain fastidiousness as they ran along a moonlit driveway. Perhaps this world, the memory of which had been preserved for me by a lovingly nurtured mythology, had always been as grimy, decrepit, ill-organised and foul-smelling as that building, that street, indeed as all of Budapest in those dank, pollution-choked days before Christmas during which I had tried to recapture the past. Was the golden world lamented in countless espresso-bars in Sydney and London, and no doubt in Melbourne, Toronto and Buenos Aires, in reality no more than a shabby aggregation of ill-kept buildings? Had Budapest always been essentially of the Third World? Had those of us who had retained a glowing memory of this world been perpetuating a lie for so many years? I could not find then, as I cannot find now, an answer to these riddles. Perhaps no-one can.

That block of flats, where I spent only a few months of my life, provided the setting from which I observed, with the growing perceptiveness of a ten-year-old old before his time, the febrile world of postwar Budapest, a world which was to persist until the time of our departure for Australia, and indeed for some months beyond that. The memory of that time, which has faded in one sense but has gained in intensity in another, was to colour our attitudes to life in Australia for many years. Many of the problems and perplexities we experienced during our first years in this country grew out of the atmosphere of those hectic months in Budapest, as much as out of the real or imagined hostility and strangeness of our new environment.

We lived in that flat in Budapest until the end of 1944. We returned to it after the city had been liberated, regaining, from families that had camped there during the height of the siege, occupation of at first one, then two and at length every room. It was there that my mother nursed my seriously wounded father, with whom we had been reunited early in 1945 in circumstances so extraordinary that recounting them would offend against credibility. She saved his life, but she could not have accomplished that feat without the kindness of one of the tenants in the building, a recently widowed woman who had turned her flat into a brothel for officers of the occupying forces. This supplied her with food and fuel, which she generously shared with us, and also put her in touch with a source of otherwise unobtainable drugs that were needed to prevent my father's infected wounds from festering. It was in that flat, in a remarkably short time (after, incidentally, the widow had closed the doors of her brothel and returned to her former respectability), that the old patterns of life reasserted themselves, though in a significantly feverish and hectic manner.

The flavour of that time is best described as an uneasy mixture of frantic activity and aimlessness. Though the city had not been as seriously damaged as Dresden or even Vienna, when the Germans and their Hungarian henchmen were finally defeated in the early spring of 1945, much of it lay in ruins. Life contracted into small spaces: people huddling around a feeble brazier (if they were lucky), or merely huddling together. The long nights were illuminated by a shoelace or a piece of string burning in a jar lid filled with rancid oil. There was little food, mostly tins of bully beef of dubious quality and even more uncertain state of preservation. You could, at first, obtain meat of sorts from the bloated carcasses of horses which lay scattered all over the city, but my mother could not bring herself to join the queues of people waiting with hastily sharpened knives to take their cut.

Recovery was, nevertheless, swift. This probably came about through that resilience and inventiveness of the Hungarian character which has spawned several wry jokes, like the one about a Hungarian entering a revolving door behind you and coming out in front. The city picked itself up and dusted its clothes with aplomb. Though there were bomb-sites and craters everywhere, though the supply of gas, electricity and water was erratic and unreliable, though the sweet smell of decomposing flesh hung over the piles of rubble and the mass graves dug in the municipal gardens (strenuously denied by the authorities, but known to everyone), Budapest enjoyed—if that is the word—the benefits of a free-enterprise society with verve and gusto. The communist takeover a few months after we left put a clamp on this activity for many years to come—until indeed a few months before my return at Christmastime in 1990, when once more the city was witnessing scenes not unlike those that characterised the heady days of 1945 and 1946. Then, everyone had something to sell. Everyone found some way of participating in the complicated economic networks that had sprung up everywhere like toadstools.

The result was chaos; but it was chaos of a wonderfully exhilarating sort. The whole city was on the move. People hurried about with whatever commodity they possessed to strike deals with owners of other commodities. They rushed along the crowded pavements, neatly sidestepping piles of rubble or gaping holes, or else were carried about in an astonishing variety of horse-drawn vehicles—clapped-out fiacres, hansom-cabs, aristocratic landaus, barouches and cabriolets, their pompous crests still faintly visible on their faded and crazed coachwork. No-one was empty-handed. You carried whatever you intended to sell, or whatever you had just purchased—bolts of cloth, ancient eiderdowns, the horn of an old-fashioned gramophone, pots of glue and paint, shoe-trees, stethoscopes. Anything and everything had value. Someone somewhere would find a use for any object, no matter how bizarre or broken-down. People were thirsty for success, for the accumulation of wealth out of whatever they had rescued from the ruin of their lives, and they lusted after the outward and visible emblems of wealth. In the crowded cafés everyone boasted of his good fortune while keeping a weather-eye open for the main chance.

All this was, it goes without saying, a perilous and unhealthy world which would have collapsed of its own energy, greed and lawlessness even if the grim-faced comrades hadn't quashed it with a ham-fisted blow. Money had become worthless. One stifling day my mother and I set out for the nearby baths. One bag contained our swimming gear, the other was stuffed full of banknotes. We stood in the queue at the ticket booth amid the throng of people seeking relief from the heatwave. We had almost reached the top of the line when an official emerged and rubbed out the admission price chalked on a blackboard beside the booth, substituting a figure a few millions greater. We didn't have enough. When we got back to the flat, we dragged a suitcase from the broom cupboard which had formerly housed the clandestine radio, and stuffed several million more into our moneybag. But it was to no avail—by the time we reached the ticket booth once more, the price had gone up again.

You only used money for things like tram tickets. After a while the conductors refused to collect fares, overburdened as they were by satchels containing sums of money which could only be represented by figures, not by words. Currency could not buy real goods or services. The economy subsisted on barter (which was tolerated) or on American dollars or, better still, gold coins, chiefly louis d'or and the occasional English sovereign (both dollars and coins wholly illegal, with frightful penalties for those caught in possession). Where formerly we lived in dread of inspectors seeking to sniff out the least trace of political unreliability or a radio capable of receiving the BBC, our hearts now missed a beat every time the doorbell rang, wondering whether it was the inspector (often the same person as before) in search of illicit currency.

People expended extraordinary ingenuity in contriving safe hiding places for their hoards. Rumour spread its net around neighbourhoods and communities. Never in the spines of books! They arrested someone at Number 47 last week. My parents thought they had been very clever when they worked out how to loosen the lead seal on the electricity meter, thus enabling the cover to be lifted and the cavity behind it to be stuffed with banknotes and coins. Then we heard that Mrs Somebody had been dragged off by the police when they discovered a roll of American dollars in her meter. We tried the lining of topcoats; we tried the back of the green-eyed radio; my mother had the wedge heels of her summer sandals hollowed. Our precious dollars and gold coins led a restless life, constantly moving about the flat, our clothes and our possessions in search of safety. We were always on the lookout, always alert and watchful, apprehensive, forever trying to anticipate whatever ‘their' next move might be.