Inside Outside (31 page)

I may have no more than a legal right to call myself Australian, and as I look at daily life around me, I am not at all sure that I would want to identify myself entirely with the Australia in which I live. As the years go on, I find myself increasingly intolerant of the crassness and vulgarity of the urban hothouse I see each day. The packs of oversexed teenagers milling around the cinemas in George Street, the empty-headed young women in tennis dresses congregating for hours around their four-wheel drives in the carparks of suburban shopping centres as they gossip in their rising intonations, the dreadful jargon that passes for literary criticism these days, the unwillingness of contemporary undergraduates to read anything written before about 1975, the pot-bellied executive types nattering into their portable phones in restaurants and at street corners, the abysmal lack of integrity in political life, the intellectual poverty of much Australian writing—these and much, much else make me ask at times what I am doing here, whether I am living in a backward, second-class world rapidly sinking into material as well as spiritual mediocrity. But I remind myself that people like me are often prone to confuse cause and effect, shadow and substance. In the streets of London and Paris, of Munich and Vienna, I see much the same crassness, much the same vulgarity that irritates me in Sydney, though it is often in a different key in those cities, and possibly less offensive because less familiar. I wonder whether I am blaming Australia for the discontents of middle age.

I am nevertheless more Australian than anything else. This is the only society with which I am at all familiar, where I feel least alien. This is the world where I have put down roots, and a world where I have, I allow myself sometimes to think, made a small contribution. There is no other home for me. I have to come to terms with being the type of Australian I am, and I have learnt that I must no longer entertain fantasies of what I am or what I might become. I realise that the programme of assimilation I had set myself in those grim days in the Idiots' Class or among the paspalum of Epping represented an aim which could never be fully achieved. I could not remake myself, just as I could never throw off entirely my physical, emotional and spiritual affinities with the gesticulating world of the espresso-bars. And yet I have become Australianised, if it is possible to invent a word as ugly as that. The remnants of my heritage exist within a consciousness and a sensibility that were largely formed by the experience of growing up in Australia. Nothing that I could have attempted to do would have been able to achieve whatever balance there happens to be between my various cultural and spiritual selves. That balance had to emerge in the way it has, and, of course, it could just as easily have developed in an entirely different way, given other circumstances and a different temperament. My assimilation, or the extent to which I may claim to represent multiculturalism—it comes to the same thing eventually—has come about as an inevitable consequence of my personality and of the environment in which I live, but it has nevertheless emerged in a wholly haphazard manner. It could not have been otherwise.

For that reason, I view with alarm and misgivings those programmes of multiculturalism that provide a powerful preoccupation for the political and cultural life of the nation. Occasionally, I still see remnants of the few cultivated members of espresso-bar society when they meet in a suburban town hall where recitals of chamber music are given. Bent and frail, many showing recognisable signs of major surgery and courses of chemotherapy, they gossip in reedy voices with liberal use of the scatological vocabulary of their culture. There are many younger people in the audience too, some young enough to be my children. Looking at them you would think that they are ordinary middle-class citizens of Sydney, which they are in most ways. But their speech betrays something quite individual. They speak Hungarian, employing those indecent expressions that even now must not be spoken aloud in English, and using the same gestures as those elderly people, despite the fact that their years of exposure—since birth in most cases—to Australian ways should have imposed on them an entirely different pattern of behaviour. When they turn to address a remark in English, you can hear faintly but distinctly the unmistakable awkwardness with diphthongs and accentuation that distinguishes their parents' or grandparents' attempts at Australian-English.

Were these people consciously encouraged to retain what they thought was their heritage? I do not know, for since my parents' death I have drifted away entirely from that world. Whether they should be encouraged to continue in their ways is a much more pressing and difficult question. There is no reason, as far as I can see, why a genuinely free and tolerant society should not accommodate people who are different—as it must tolerate and regard as full members of the community those people who are immediately identified by their appearance as belonging to a particular ethnic type. Problems arise where these people are urged to think of themselves as different, as set apart. This seems to be the danger among those groups who are intent, on religious or social grounds, to retain certain customs that are clearly out of step with the way of life of most people in contemporary Australia.

A growing problem in universities, for instance, is the reluctance of certain Mediterranean people to allow their daughters to attend classes unchaperoned. Their solution to this problem—since most realise that institutions would not tolerate the presence of large numbers of chaperones in already overcrowded lecture rooms—is to insist that their daughters must always remain in the company of young women of their own nationality, or in many cases members of their family and immediate social circle. Their fears about their daughters' virtue are probably ill-founded. Nevertheless one would not wish to encourage them, despite the protestations of ideology, to abandon entirely social standards which have sustained their way of life for centuries. Yet to continue the practice inevitably isolates these young women from the world in which, for better or worse, they must live. The dilemma has no easy solutions; no amount of bureaucratic or ideological management or interference will make it any easier for these people to achieve a balance between their two worlds.

It is essential, nevertheless, that we should not encourage people to live in ghettoes that threaten to shut them out of those structures of society where they might flourish and prosper in a material as well as a cultural sense. Australian Catholicism has learnt the painful lesson that you must not enclose yourself behind walls of doctrine and tribal loyalties. Yet several other groups seem to be intent on committing the same errors—one might even include among these the more extreme separatist elements of the gay culture or the feminist movement. I would not want to advocate a return to those days of the late forties and the fifties when a naive notion of the possibilities of assimilation, which was merely an aspect of the larger demand for social conformity, drove people like me to attempt to jettison vital parts of our heritage. We have to be given the liberty to realise that we must, for better or worse, dwell between two worlds; and we must be allowed to work out our cultural salvation in terms of our individual, often confused, personalities, predicaments, fears and aspirations. Above all, we must realise that such a process may well take a long time, perhaps the whole of a life, to achieve.

As I am writing these words in the late autumn of 1991, I fancy that it is only very recently that I have come to anything like a clear understanding of these puzzles and predicaments. The reason for that is, of course, that after almost half a century of evasion, reluctance and perhaps even cowardice, I finally succeeded in laying to rest some noisy ghosts when I went back, briefly and provisionally, to visit the city where I was born.

My return was a reverse-image of the way I left Budapest in 1946. On a gloomy November afternoon in that year, my parents and I boarded a decrepit train, pompously entitled the Orient Express, in a soot-blackened and bomb-blasted railway station. We sat apprehensively on the worn velour seats of our compartment. The panelling above our heads still bore signs of a former world in the shape of several faded photographs, behind almost opaque panes of glass—images of the marvels of prewar Europe. As the train groaned through a desolate countryside, our anxiety increased to near-intolerable levels when we realised that we were approaching the border. Would our exit permits be honoured by the Russians? Would we be searched? Would they find the last of our gold coins in the hollowed-out heels of my mother's winter boots? After an interminable delay, the grim-faced border guards left the train. With a clang and a grating of metal we lurched forward, towards Vienna and freedom. Several hours later we were travelling in an open horse-drawn carriage down a broad street lined with the empty shells of apartment blocks and grandiose imperial palaces to our hotel in the Graben, where a small pane of glass set in the boarded-up window of our room afforded a glimpse of that once elegant thoroughfare.

A few days before Christmas in 1990, I set out from another—perhaps the same—small hotel in that street, now a pedestrian mall glittering with affluent brilliance. My elder son sat beside me in a purring Mercedes taxi as we were driven to the station along that avenue down which I had been driven, in the opposite direction, almost half a century before in a state of over-excitement because we were embarking on the great adventure that was to carry us to the other end of the world. At the well-kept, efficient station, my son and I boarded a sleek modern train, also called the Orient Express, though not that essay in nostalgic kitsch which carries the super-rich between Paris and Venice. Whereas the train my parents and I travelled on in 1946 was half-empty, the Orient Express of 1990 was filled to the brim with a noisy and excited crowd. We found our reserved seats already occupied. A few stern words in English swiftly displaced the usurpers. Meanwhile more and more people piled into the carriage. Soon the corridors were jam-packed with passengers perching on suitcases and large cardboard boxes fastened with sturdy rope.

Eventually the train moved off, half an hour late, to the relief of the generally animated and in some instances inebriated travellers. A neat, tidy Austria slid past in the gathering dusk. Darkness had fallen by the time we reached the border. Out of the window of our compartment I could see a corner of a squat utilitarian building. Through the glass panel of a doorway you could glimpse a customs official busily at work at a desk under a naked, low-wattage light bulb. Outside, a railway worker in a shabby coat was stamping his feet in a puddle of melting snow.

The crowd fell silent. Something was in the air. It soon became obvious that the border-guards were making their way down the carriage. People began to betray the unmistakably apprehensive look of those who had lived under (or had escaped from) oppressive regimes. I noticed that they were impressed and not a little envious as we got out our Australian passports. We were the fortunate ones; we belonged to that privileged world towards which my parents and I had set out all those years ago, tense with anxiety as we sat in our compartment listening for the approach of the guards. And I, protected though I was by my magic passport, shared the tension and anxiety of my fellow-passengers, while my son sat beside me absorbed in the book he had been reading ever since darkness fell. For him this was just another frontier.

The past should not, perhaps, be revisited. Those days I spent in Budapest were among the most painful experiences of my life, for they forced me not only to remember things long forgotten, but also to recall those other days—in Hurlstone Park, in Epping and in other parts of Sydney—that were the occasion of much humiliation and shame. Walking around the decaying streets of a once graceful city, I continually thought of the dead—of all those people, my father's large family, the much smaller circle of my mother's relations, who had disappeared, vanished from the face of the earth. I recalled the days my father spent wandering those streets in 1945, when he had barely recovered from his injuries, because someone had told him that he thought he had seen my uncle, ghastly and emaciated, groping his way along one of those thoroughfares. I also remembered the terrible day when my father accepted the inevitable, that it was useless spending another day searching for a brother he would never find. I also remembered in those streets, in gloomy cafés and restaurants, and in the faded splendour of my hotel room where the television churned out alarming news about the war which was to break out in three weeks' time, that it was here that the seeds were sown of those black years of my parents' life in Australia, when they could not bring themselves to speak to each other, when they used me as an intermediary, and also as an emotional buffer and punching-bag.

My memories jumped years and continents. Catching sight of a group of intense and overpainted elderly ladies in a cafe one afternoon reminded me of a similar group in another café—in Double Bay, many years ago—who were discussing with loud exclamations of anguish and dismay the brutality of the world (this world) which they had to flee. I remembered my own sense of guilt that day, as I began to persuade myself that perhaps the vulgarity of those people was excusable in the light of their sufferings, until I realised that they were recounting the plot of
The Sound of Music
. I wondered what these ladies of 1990 were talking about. A little later that day, I recognised the baths where my mother and I had to cart bagloads of money, and still did not have enough for the price of admission. That made me recall the embarrassment of a picnic at Palm Beach on which some well-meaning acquaintances had taken us in the early years of our life in Epping. My mother was an undisguised picture of misery as she sat under the tarpaulin stretched between two cars, swatting at mosquitoes with a rolled-up newspaper in the manner we were taught to disperse the red-backs that infested our dunny. I found the pond where I used to go skating, during trips to the city made precisely for that purpose, under the eagle-eyed supervision of one or another German nanny, and the nearby restaurant where I used to be taken for a special treat. I could not, however, find many places I tried to revisit, having only confused and muddled memories of things that had been suppressed for many years.