The Humorless Ladies of Border Control (24 page)

“There is a real imbalance in this country between Belgrade and the rest,” Ozren from Novi Sad told me. “All the money goes to Belgrade.”

“Do you know Rebecca West?” I asked. He didn't. “It's funny, people were making the same complaint in 1933, and probably 1333.”

West sat with a table of Dalmatian Croatians who exclaimed, “Belgrade! The Government does nothing for us, but they take our taxes and spend them in Belgrade. . . . Is that fair, when down
here we lack bread? It was a wretched little village before the [First World] war . . . a pig-town. . . . But now they are turning it into a place like Geneva, with public buildings six and seven stories high, all at our expense. I know there is corruption and graft in American politics, but you have no idea what it is like here. The trouble is not only that . . . the money goes to Belgrade, it's what happens to it when it gets there. It sticks to people's palms in the most disgusting way.”

Belgrade happens abruptly: one minute I was driving through miles more of table-flat farmland and huddled village houses, then around the corner was a dystopian, double-barreled skyscraper and some irredentist socialist housing projects. The air conditioners and laundry hanging from half-open windows made the buildings look flaking and scaly.

I was almost immediately exhausted. There was a hectic, dangerous energy to the traffic, and the city was dirty, loud, frantic, and disreputable. Belgrade has been completely destroyed and rebuilt innumerable times, and perhaps it has acquired the habit of building quickly, without the expectation that the buildings will enjoy a long lifespan. Eventually I found the venue, down by the rubble-strewn bank of the Danube on the way out of town. It was another cold, graffiti-plastered squat of what looked like an old public school. The doors were open, but no one was around. I headed back toward the town center.

What Belgrade doesn't have is the acres-wide plaza that I expect from a postsocialist capital, the kind usually named “Revolution Square” or “Plaza of the Heroes” and ringed with columns and concrete. Belgrade's “Park of the Pioneers” is cramped and grassy, flanked by two unprepossessing palaces and a rather attractive (if judged on a sliding scale) parliament building. It does
have a truly monumental post office (which also houses the Ministry of the Economy, and probably more) that would be right at home in Moscow and a lovely legal-pad-yellow train station.

It was when I stepped inside the rebuilt, beehive-like St. Mark's Church, though, that I felt true relief. The stench of diesel was replaced by incense; the frantic activity of the city center gave way to a pair of old ladies in headscarves praying and lighting candles. The stone floor was covered in a thick carpet. The tiny tomb of the fourteenth-century tsar Stefan Dušan, whose reign marked the high-water mark of the medieval Serbian empire, had a single candle burning before it. I just wanted to sit there for a while and give myself over to the velvet comforts of an Orthodox church.

Tonight's squat had an unusual pedigree. It had housed some sort of film production company, then was bought as an investment property by a “tycoon”—that's what the promoter, Nikolai, called him—who used the property as bank collateral for another loan and so wouldn't be developing it while it was thus engaged. The squatter collective went to the “tycoon” and asked if they could use it in the meantime, and he said, “Why not?”

Fresh and legitimized, these were the happiest squatters in Europe, thrilled to be alive. They were serving a godless concoction of vodka, soy milk, and peach juice, shaken in a plastic sandwich bag tied around a straw. Just a bunch of cool kids who wanted to get drunk in a freezing hovel. Nothing wrong with that.

“The country is all fucked up,” said one. “But so you can do whatever you want.”

“You playing Budapest?” said another. “A lot of Americans are living in Budapest.”

“And Belgrade,” a friend added.

“Well, in Belgrade it's cheap to live.”

“And cheap to die.”

Drunk nihilists make a good audience, and this was my biggest of the tour. Exhausted and cold, I let one of the organizers know that I was ready to leave whenever she was, but my show, it was clear, was just the beginning of the party. This was a Belgrade squat on a Friday night, and no one had any plans to wrap it up. I found a back room and fell asleep by the woodstove. At some point, a kind woman with bleached hair covered me with quilts. Around four in the morning, Nikolai and his girlfriend roused me and filled me in on what I'd missed.

“While you were asleep at the show, somebody broke a window from outside. And we thought it might be Nazis, so we got in two cars and chased them, and we caught them! They were so scared, they didn't think anyone would chase them. So we didn't beat them.”

I got in my car and followed them for twenty minutes to the city's outskirts and to their surprisingly nice apartment.

“Hey, Nicolay,” said Nikolai, “I'm going to the store in the morning, you need anything?”

“Oh no, I'm OK.”

“He is shoplifting,” added his girlfriend. “So it's no problem to tell him what you want. That's why the vodka was so cheap tonight.”

The Kalemegdan, the fortress of Belgrade, sits atop the overlook above the river Sava and the bend in the Danube, facing an island that's been given over to nature in memory of the Great
War. This prow of land has been fought over by every tribe, petty king, and emperor since before the dawn of European history. It is the place where the two great marauding tribes of the region, the Turks and the Magyars, faced off. The first shots of World War I were fired from the north shore floodplain up into the fortifications. Its very name is drawn from the Turkish words for “battlefield” and “fortress.” “The old fortress of Belgrade,” wrote West, “till the end of the Great War knew peace only as a dream. . . . Ever since there were men in this region this promontory must have meant life to those that held it, death to those that lost it.”

First among the shadowy, purgatorial ranks of great forgotten battles, World War I itself has more memorials here in this city of its nascency than perhaps any other place in old Europe. Atop a tall pillar, facing the former Hungarian lands, stands a slim nude man molded in tarnished copper, erected in 1928 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of something called the Breach of Thessaloníki. West records that since the statue was “recognizably male,” the townspeople refused to erect it (so to speak) in the city proper and placed it atop the pillar, nearly hidden by the height, his offending parts facing the enemy.

The Kalemegdan is a castle of labyrinthine fortifications, brick walls, and ditches, and a rare haven of quiet in all of Belgrade. I found four busts and tombstones of antifascist partisan heroes, a socialist realist statue in honor of a fourteenth-century despot, and a bench painted to look like a watermelon slice. Medieval tombstones with Old Slavonic inscriptions lay in the grass. The capstone of the park is, fittingly, a military museum, surrounded by tanks, howitzers, and heavy artillery going back hundreds of years. One may be forgiven a twinge of Ozymandian despair
that the centerpiece of this harried, desperate city is the remains of the armies that made it that way.

After last night's rain, though, summer had finally arrived. It was sweaty and hazy and I was northbound to Budapest.

II.

A Fur Coat with Morsels
(Hungary, Poland)

T
he Pannonian plain, with its poplar farms and stacked rolls of hay, is about as interesting to drive across as Kansas. The old imperial capital was more prosaic, more bourgeois, and altogether less interesting than the provincial cities that made up the rest of my week. It might as well be Berlin or Paris—though it is calmer and more monumental than either, a Berlin or Paris of the romantic imagination rather than the hectic, expat-and-immigrant hives of the two western capitals. Both Eva Hoffman and Rebecca West, visiting Budapest fifty years and a world apart, describe a city of commerce and extravagance that is somewhat devoid of the exotic Eastern
je ne sais quoi
they are looking for, a city of what West calls “dazzling,” “staring” lights (“In no Balkan town are there such lights,” she wrote, keen to underscore the imperial imbalance). Hungary in 1989, said
Hoffman, was “at a very different point of evolution” in private enterprise than its neighbors, “and the distance [it] has to travel to become a ‘normal' country is visibly shorter.”

In contrast to the Serbian entrance, the Hungarian border guards were nonchalant, even negligent, waving me through with barely a glance at my passport. The Serb province north of the Danube known as Vojvodina (including both Novi Sad and Bačka Topola), long the subject of dispute between Serbia and Hungary, also constituted an anxious border between the Hapsburgs and the Ottomans. Until the establishment of Serbian autonomy in the early nineteenth century, Vojvodina held the only population of Serbs outside Ottoman territory.
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So in the course of a barely six-hundred-kilometer journey, one crosses not only the historical north–south fault line between Catholic Croatia and Orthodox Serbia but also the east–west line between the Islamic Ottomans and the Christian Hapsburgs (which itself succeeded the Danube frontier between Rome and barbarism). In that crossroads is the heart of the conflicts of a thousand years.

Szentes is a sleepy country town with a wide central square punctuated by statues of Kossuth and more obscure heroes with pigeons for headdresses. I spent the afternoon at the old municipal “medicinal” baths, a shabby thermal affair of piss-yellow bricks and a Turkish-style (after all, Hungary was Ottoman territory for a century and a half, and the bathing habit stuck) central bath decorated in a mosaic style I would call mod-Etruscan. There was a closet-sized sauna in the basement, off of a 1970s rec room complete with wood paneling.

Hungary is a place of singular language difficulties. In general, most of the kids in the worldwide DIY scene speak decent English, and Maria's Ukrainian spills over into Russian and Polish. But Hungarian is an impenetrable language: Paul Theroux, in
Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
, quipped, “When you don't understand a single word, it's usually Hungarian,” though Eva Hoffman found it “enchanting and utterly perplexing, [with] Bartokian syncopations and sensuousness.” (If you can reliably pronounce Hódmezővásárhely, the name of a town between Szentes and Szeged meaning “beaver field marketplace,” you may have powers of enunciation strong enough to overcome a mouthful of marbles.) In this smallish town, though, no one seemed interested in offering a helping linguistic hand. We couldn't find the club, and Maggie—the GPS (or, if you prefer, satnav), whose authoritative voice I'd anthropomorphized with a conflation of the brand name Magellan and Mrs. Thatcher—directed us to a residential neighborhood that hardly seemed likely to contain a venue for a punk show. The old men in the square refused even to look us in the eye as we asked for directions to what turned out to be “Tisza Beach,” the waterfront of a wide, slow river, sluggish and shaggy, that outlined the town. We pulled the car up over a high levee, down a cobbled and then unpaved road, into a collection of battered trailers and houses on twenty-foot stilts, rattletrap and insectoid, something like the Mississippi Gulf Coast but with shacks instead of McMansions. If it weren't for the odd expensive-looking car, I'd have taken it for a Roma camp.

In fact it was a fishing village, located next to a river that has long flooded the Hungarian plains. The Tisza River (there is some confusion whether the “Tibiscus” that features in classical Greek and Latin literature refers to the Tisza or to the Timiș, which
runs more or less parallel and to the west; Gibbon conflates the two) springs from the Carpathian Mountains near Rakhiv, in Ukraine. Attila the Hun is said to have been buried under a section that was thereafter rerouted so his tomb would never be disturbed. In antiquity the region's inhabitants were the Dacians, “who subsisted,” according to Gibbon, “by fishing on the banks of the river Teyss”—from the German
Theiss
—“or Tibiscus.” An invasion by the Sarmatians, steppe nomads from what is now Ukraine and southwestern Russia, drove the Dacians into the Carpathian Mountains. The Sarmatians were themselves later victims of a servile revolt, Gibbon wrote, and forced to cede the “marshy banks which lay between [the Teyss and the Danube, which] were often covered by their inundations, [and] formed an intricate wilderness, pervious only to their inhabitants, who were acquainted with its secret paths and inaccessible fortresses,” to their former slaves, who called themselves the Limigantes. The latter were later defeated by Constantine's son Constantius, who exposed the Limigantes' camps by setting fire to the forest. The emperor was on the verge of generously allowing them to resettle as a Roman colony near modern Budapest, when, as he addressed them, they treacherously attacked his person. The result was “the extinction of the name and nation of the Limigantes” in reprisal, and the Sarmatians returned to the region.

The empty concrete foundations in some of the plots where houses had once stood attested to the functionality of the stilts that gave the whole place the quality of a Baba Yaga fairy tale. The venue itself, called Tiszavirág Büfé, was a fishing bar that looked as if it had been airlifted from a Key West backwater: the name was spray-painted on an old surfboard, and a rope fishing net, a life preserver, and an anchor hung from the balcony. It
was run by an amiable snaggletooth who had been a water polo player in Serbia for eight years. Now he refereed polo matches at the local water park in his spare time. “Serbia is the most beautiful country,” he said. “So stupid. Ten years of war, and they have nothing.” He boiled a stew of rice, tomato sauce, and soy protein on a welded, wood-burning stove standing in the dirt in front of the bar, which did nothing to detract from the sense that we were camping on a beach. We would be playing next to the stove, on the concrete patio outside the front door.

The opening act was a hapless group of teenage folk-punks. We were remanded into the care of one of them, a passive bonbon named Martin, who lived with his willowy sister in a small student apartment in Szeged, the nearest city. Szeged is ancient, near the former seat of Attila's empire, and yet almost nothing there is more than 140 or so years old: a massive flood swept away virtually every building in 1879, and it was rebuilt in a classic pastel Hapsburg style. We had all day to sightsee and were hoping Martin, who had contacted me on Facebook months before offering to host, could show us the sights.

“So what do you want to do?” he asked softly. Hoffman wrote, “Even when they speak English, Hungarians manage to transport some of the off-rhythms and softness of their language [and] give it strange, lunar resonances.” I'd describe Martin, less generously, as a mumbler, and we quickly got the impression that he didn't understand quite as much English as we'd originally thought.

“Um . . . I'm not sure. What's interesting to see?”

Martin shrugged.

“I guess we're hungry—shall we go get some food?” we offered.

“OK . . . what do you want to eat?”

“What's good?”

He shrugged.

“Something vegetarian?” I suggested.

“OK . . .”

He led us to a cafeteria-style lunch counter and gestured at the menu, written on a whiteboard above the counter, entirely in Hungarian. “So what do you want?”

I don't mean to sound ungrateful. It is a thankless task, escorting foreigners around your city, and the onus is on me as the one who doesn't speak the language. But I was frustrated nonetheless. There is a passivity to traveling, especially touring—not the heroic romantic engagement with the foreign but a radical withdrawal in which you engage only on specific and circumscribed terms: food, timetables, logistics. For anything beyond that, the impulse is to let the person operating on their home turf dictate your fate.

“Can you tell me, maybe,” I asked, “if there are any vegetarian options?”

“Hm,” he said doubtfully. “Mostly it is chicken.”

“Just point at something,” said Maria. “I think there's pasta.”

“In my view,” wrote Hoffman, Czech and Hungarian food “are close competitors for awfulness, but . . . Hungarian cooking could well take the prize. What's happened to the famed Hungarian cuisine of yesteryear?” Peter, the promoter in Szeged, simply said, “Hungarians put sour cream on everything. And a lot of it.” Lunch in Szentes two days earlier had been cold peach soup topped with whipped cream, accompanied by fried croquettes of breaded mushroom wrapped around soft cheese with dill. In Budapest, a dish advertised as “Mexican chicken” bore the description “Paprikash chicken meat was frying in a
fur coat with morsels.” Szeged is the home of spicy Hungarian paprika, yet I ended up with a plate of cold white pasta, topped first with a giant tablespoon of sour cream, and then shredded white cheese on top of that. I was hungry, but I made it through only a few bites.

The opening act that night was an enthusiastic duo, both named Peter, who had organized the show. After soundcheck, said the Peters, talk to the bartender; he'll hook you up with dinner.

“You are vegetarian, I heard,” said the bartender. “I think we can prepare for you . . . pasta with cheese and sour cream.”

There are physical markers I've come to associate with particular countries: the Serbian horse carts and trilingual signs (Latin, Cyrillic, and Hungarian), the light-pastel housing projects (a color scheme borrowed from the pastel wash of the Hapsburg buildings?) silhouetted against the outer hills of the minor Eastern European cities. In Hungary, it's giant concrete cones bristling with the entire telecommunications infrastructure of each small town, looming on the outskirts like the water towers of middle America. We were on our way to an “acoustic punk picnic” in Veszprém, ninety kilometers outside Budapest, where we'd play an afternoon set before heading to the capital for the evening show. Veszprém is a small town, and the picnic was near a zoo clogged by Sunday parkgoers, up a gravel road, on a grassy hill overlooking a bright valley. It may have been lovely, but a certain kind of situation can make “anarcho-punk” a synonym for “lazy and disorganized,” and a free-beer picnic with an iron cauldron of stew on a fire is one of them: no one in charge, no master plan. At least we hadn't taken a bus overnight from Vienna just
to play, like Jack, the friendly Brit in whose filthy student apartment we'd stayed a few weeks before.

Budapest is the second city of an old world. The Compromise of 1867 made the Hungarian capital the nominal equal of Vienna as an imperial city, and “much of Budapest's design and architecture dates from this period of national ascendancy,” Hoffman writes. “The central avenues are as wide as the Haussmann boulevards in Paris.” We arrived at dusk. These days, the other invariable sign of past Austro-Hungarian glories are backpacker hostels housing drunk twenty-two-year-olds, and we played a show in a bunker below one. After the show we stayed with Eliot and Laci, who run a hardcore label; Maya, a social worker; and their grouchy Boston Terrier. Maya helped Afghan refugees who had been told by their traffickers, “This is Norway,” and dumped in Hungary to fend for themselves.

Returning to Budapest the next year on my own, a perfect storm of small things added up to a bad show. I was worn out by Belgrade and the boredom of the drive, and the café, though staffed by stunning, feline Hungarian women with Central Asian eyes, had no place for me to curl up and nap. I had outrun the summer again, and the city was cold and wet. The stage was by the door. When that happens, the people who are there to see the show are already seated and settled, so what one notices from the stage are either those leaving or those entering—and their attempt to suppress a look of dismay when they see that there's live music. It was a pass-the-hat deal, which I know from experience averages about two euros a head regardless of the general enthusiasm level. And Hungary is a place where my conversational stage shtick just doesn't work. The language barrier, even for people with decent conversational English, is just too great.