Inside Outside (9 page)

In this account of the two sides of my family I may have stressed the differences in the way each looked at the world. But such differences are probably more striking in retrospect than they were in fact. They each remained fixed within fairly clearly defined boundaries, the boundaries of a bourgeois world where certain proprieties were carefully observed, even though people of my parents' generation often exercised greater licence than their elders thought proper. Though my parents enjoyed in their few years of relative peace and prosperity the amenities of a ‘fast' way of life, there was little if any sexual indiscretion among their friends. Indeed, men of my grandfather's generation were much more likely to succumb to a ‘woman in Prague' than those of my parents' nightclub-going, relatively hard-drinking circle. Divorce was almost unheard of. Children were generally cherished. Their welfare was a constant preoccupation, so much so that many were smothered by a possessive and over-protective love.

My mother's leaving me largely to the mercies of nannies and governesses was quite normal according to the custom of the time. It did not necesarily imply lack of care, though it may be deemed irresponsible. I did not feel unloved or unwanted; I accepted my life as perfectly predictable and ordinary. There was a genuine bond of affection with almost every one of the women who had been hired to look after me, yet it was not a surrogate, as far as I can tell, for parental love. Though in early childhood I saw my parents much less frequently than Australian children see (or used to see) at least their mothers, my memories of my early years are on the whole pleasant—family picnics, summer holidays at a mountain resort (accompanied, it is true, by a retinue consisting of maid and nanny) and various outings to the city which always came to an end in a gilded café filled with mouth-watering delicacies.

I recall only one episode of brutality, and that had a swift and significantly predictable consequence. I was scared of moths and beetles (and still detest them when they fly into our bedroom on summer nights). One of my German nannies decided that this childish fear had to be cured. I remember being carried into my room after my bath; I remember the white sheet on the bed; I remember black beetles crawling over the snowy sheet; I remember the crunch of those carapaces as I was lowered into bed; I remember screaming in terror; and I remember that this particular nanny had disappeared by morning. My parents were outraged by her gratuitous cruelty. They were also dismayed, I think, at what they saw as their own irresponsibility. Though the allure of the good life was strong—perhaps too strong—they saw clearly what their responsibilites were, and those responsibilities were fundamentally indistinguishable from the standards of my paternal grandmother's bourgeois dedication to the family and the clan.

The war and, later, life in Australia were to confirm the strength of those responsibilities, decencies and obligations. My parents, but especially my mother, the flightier and the more romantic of the two, rose splendidly to the demands of a harsh life. Those charmed years when money was plentiful, when the menace of the great world seemed very far away from the comfortable safety of Budapest, were in truth no more than a sport, a vacation from their essentially conventional and family-oriented view of the world. Their difficult and in many ways dreary life in Australia was in essence no different from the difficult and dreary life their parents often had to endure. The dismalness of Hurlstone Park or Epping was no worse than the dullness of that plebeian quarter of Budapest which my father's family considered home. Life in Sydney was harder but in essence no different from the life into which they were born. It was only that its details—I am tempted to call them accidentals—the stage-setting for their difficulties were very different. And there had been those golden years, which a brutal and horrible war swept away relentlessly. Those could not be easily forgotten.

As the years passed, my mother came increasingly to think about Sopron, its cosy compactness, and that curious vision of a cultivated life passed on to her by the Ursuline ladies. My father, in his turn, remembered more and more details of his life in my grandmother's stuffy, overfurnished flat. He recalled the family gatherings on cold winter days around the great tile stove. Quite insignificant memories of family life—like the provincial cousin who arrived one day large with child claiming a safe haven, only to withdraw, a day or two later, the cushion she had hidden under her dress—began to assume great importance for him. This was partly a result of the process of ageing. But it was more than that. For both of my parents, in their different ways, these memories represented, despite my mother's recollections of the terror of 1919, a time of peace and stability and of an ordered society—the old world before the flood swept it away. By contrast, their golden years, that hectic time of metropolitan smartness and fast living—though sorely missed—was, they realised, the first warning of that inundation. In one of the last conversations I had with my father, a day or two before his sudden death, he acknowledged that all that nightclubbing, the high life of the late thirties, was nothing other than an attempt to keep fear down, or at least to drown it in some good wine.

Persecution, war and famine are classic themes in the literature of migration. My parents and I experienced all three, but we were fortunate: we survived. The hardships and brutalities we suffered—in common with millions of others from one end of Europe to the other—provided the impetus for our leaving the old world to seek safety in the new. Yet in our case at least, these experiences played a smaller part in the evolution of our ambivalent relationship with our new home than memories of the past or fantasies about the future. It would serve little purpose to recount the tale of our survival, or to tell how we were reunited in a devastated Budapest in the spring of 1945. Though that time left scars on each of us, they soon disappeared from our conscious minds, leaving behind merely traces of fear and anxiety. To this day I feel uneasy when I hear a distant siren in the still of the night or see a searchlight in a festive sky. I do not, however, recall ever having been tortured in my dreams by recognisable icons of persecution and brutality. In all probability, the effect of those years on people like me is deeply ingrained within our personalities; but they are of much less significance to the web of social and cultural interactions I am uncovering in these pages.

In Australia my parents were always reluctant to speak about the worst of their wartime experiences. This may have been due to a natural reticence on their part, or perhaps it was because, compared with the atrocities so many people had suffered, we had got off relatively lightly. I know that they found distasteful—as I still find distasteful—the way some people exploited the events of that time for purposes which were not far removed from emotional blackmail. Making those more fortunate than you uncomfortably aware of their advantages may become a powerful means of imposing your will on them, even of exercising power over them. Such a desire for domination may take the shape of a licensed and at times outrageous eccentricity, as Patrick White showed with his extraordinary recreation of the archetypal survivor, Lotte Lippmann, in
The Eye of the Storm
. It may also manifest itself through a constant insistence that, because of such apocalyptic experiences, the survivor's sensibility and sensitivity are somehow sharper, more perceptive, and therefore worthy of special attention and respect. In the mid-sixties, a middle-aged Viennese lady effectively disrupted a course on twentieth-century literature I was teaching by leaping to her feet at every opportunity to roll back her sleeve and display the number tattooed on her arm. ‘What do you know about
The Waste Land?'
she would screech at a roomful of embarrassed young people. ‘You know nothink until you know zis!'

For us, and I suspect that this holds true for most other migrants, the months (for some people years) we spent in 1946 in a state of anticipation, waiting to begin our journey to Australia, a land that would ensure safety and happiness, provided by far the most important influences in our efforts to understand and to come to terms with our new home. In my own case, that period, extending from the last months of 1945 until the late November of 1946, determined much more of my life than I could have realised at the time. It provided our last experiences of the old world, even though that world had been almost obliterated or altered beyond recognition. It formed the perspective from which we viewed both the past and, after our arrival in Sydney, what the future might be. That time was a node, an intersection, a crossing of the ways which influenced different people in different ways. For me, at the impressionable age often its effect was to be like those drugs that are designed to dissolve slowly in order to suppress the symptoms of flu or hay fever over a lengthy period. It is only now, after having retraced my steps to the past, that I am able to see with any clarity how much of my personality, longings, desires, and how many of my prejudices and
idées fixes
stem from those strange months of hectic activity and aimless anticipation.

The setting for those feverish months was not the villa of my earliest memories but a three-room flat in the centre of Budapest. We had moved there in 1942, or perhaps early in 1943, because the location of that house in the ‘country', formerly the source of great pride for my parents, turned out to be one of the first districts in and around Budapest to attract the attention of Allied bombers. It was not far from a small airfield which, as Hungary came to be more and more involved in a war that until then had been relatively far away and therefore unmenacing, provided a base for the Stukas, Heinkels and Messerschmitts of the Luftwaffe. Consequently, we were obliged to spend more and more time in our neighbours' cellar—our ‘ultra-modern' villa had no such amenity—listening for an unmistakable whine indicating that a bomb was about to hit the ground. After several weeks of ever-increasing air-raids my parents decided to seek a safer place to live.

It took time, of course, to find something suitable. Meanwhile we were obliged to accept subterranean hospitality from our neighbours, who had been good friends and participants in my parents' nightclubbing in happier times. Now, however, unspoken but very real tensions began to appear. My parents came to experience a disturbing and paradoxical state of mind that was to come to a climax in the last months of 1944, when Budapest was subjected to almost incessant carpet-bombing. The terrors of civilians subjected to such airraids requires no comment; the psychological condition of those victims who see these instruments of destruction as their means of liberation should provide, I think, vitally interesting data for the annals of psychopathology. Such was not the case with our neighbours, Croatians (though the wife, who was born in Trieste, claimed to be Italian) and fervent supporters of the Axis powers—though after the war they insisted, of course, that they had never agreed with the racial policies of those régimes.

At length a flat was found in a newly constructed block—probably the last to be built in Budapest for many years—in a quiet residential street near a large park, well away from any military installation, or so my parents imagined. They turned out to have been as mistaken in this belief as in so much else; they had not reckoned with the innocent-looking church on the edge of the park at the top of the street, the crypt of which had been turned into a massive arsenal. That part of the city sustained some of the most concentrated bombing-raids of the last months of the war, when waves of American bombers literally blacked out large areas of the sky above. Miraculously, though, the building itself escaped all but minor damage.

The smell of damp cement, of drying plaster, and of green timber hastily painted or polished are my most haunting memories of the flurry of activity that accompanied our preparations to occupy the apartment. There was need for haste; every day's delay meant more raids against the airfield, more nights spent in our neighbours' cellar crouching on straw mattresses. But certain proprieties had to be observed before the flat was deemed ready for occupation. For one thing, new furniture had to be obtained, for the large art-deco pieces in fiercely patterned walnut which had been especially made for the villa would clearly not do. It was unthinkable for people like my parents to buy ready-made furniture in a shop. New pieces had to be ordered from trusted craftsmen, care had to be exercised over the choice of fabrics to match the texture of the walls, which were not painted but sprayed with a gun to produce a stippled effect—the ultimate in chic. All this took considerable time. We were waiting for furniture that would last a lifetime. Meanwhile the bombing raids against the airfield increased in ferocity. My parents did not ask themselves, it seems to me, how long a lifetime might be.

Finally everything was ready. We moved in. Preparations were made for a housewarming party held behind blackout screens and accompanied by the distant thudding of an airraid, perhaps on that hapless airfield. The record player and the green-eyed radio, which had come with us, blared out whatever tunes were the hits of the day. Putting the radio in the living room represented a considerable risk. It should have had a device fitted to it to make it incapable of receiving the world services of the BBC. It lived for most of the time in a broom cupboard under piles of blankets. My parents would shut themselves in that cupboard to listen to ‘real' news, even though they risked terrible penalties if they were caught. The extension cord trailing from the cupboard to a power point in the entrance hall of the flat was a dead giveaway; but at least the piles of blankets muffled the sound of the radio from the ears of the ever-vigilant caretaker.