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  Andrew Riemer is a well-known critic, academic and bestselling author, and is the Sydney Morning Herald chief book reviewer. He is the winner of several literary awards and he taught at Sydney University for many years. The experiences of his early years outside Australia form the basis of his award-winning memoir Inside Outside: Life Between Two Worlds. His other books include Sandstone Gothic, Hughes and A Family History of Smoking.

  HOUSE of BOOKS

  ANDREW

  RIEMER

  The Habsburg Café

  This edition published by Allen & Unwin House of Books in 2012 First published by Collins/Angus & Robertson Publishers Pty Ltd in 1993

  Copyright © Andrew Riemer 1993

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

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  And in the good old days when there was still such a place as Imperial Austria, one could leave the train of events, get into an ordinary train on an ordinary railway-line, and travel back home.

  All in all, how many remarkable things might be said about that vanished Kakania!

  Robert Musil The Man Without Qualities

  HUNGARY AND ITS NEIGHBOURS IN 1991

  Contents

  SQ24

  CITY OF DREAMS

  RETURN OF THE NATIVE

  IN DRACULALAND

  REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST

  THE LAST CAFÉ

  SQ24

  RIVERRUN

  SQ24 is scheduled to land at Vienna International Airport at 06.55 Central European Summer Time. This morning it has been delayed because of a late departure from Singapore and by head winds over India. The pilot apologises for the delay and announces that we will be in the terminal by 07.23. Below us an unremarkable landscape glows in the September haze—neat rectangular fields, clusters of houses and, near the horizon, a sizable town with plumes of smoke snaking out of thin chimneystacks. A network of roads binds together fields, villages and town; they converge on a broader stripe, obviously an important motorway.

  This could be almost anywhere in the world, except that a shimmering band cutting across the toylike symmetry and neatness must be the Danube, my destination. Yet nothing other than an uneasy trust in the miracle of aeronautical navigation and in the relaxed, confident sound of the pilot’s voice as he assures us that we will reach our objective within the next three quarters of an hour makes me believe that that band of water is the Danube. From this height all great rivers look the same: the shimmering band below us could just as easily be the Moldau, the Rhine or even the Volga. I believe, nevertheless, in the way that a religious person believes in God or a crank in extraterrestrial beings, that we are floating above the Danube basin—above Austria and Hungary, a world filled for me with the emblems of a powerful mythology.

  THE PALINDROME

  I left the world unfolding below us in the morning sunshine almost forty-five years ago. It was a day of bone-numbing frost. The bright disc of the sun shining in a pale blue sky set sparks in snow-covered fields and hills. Thirty or forty of us were shivering in a wheezing bus, heavily guarded by two GIs with their fingers poised on the triggers of their submachine guns. The scratched and crazed windows of the old bus were opaque, fogged up by the heat of our shivering bodies—but if you rubbed your sleeve against the glass you could observe (until the film of mist obscured the view once more) a white world, spotted here and there by a ruined farmhouse or a gutted church. What we saw was the Central Europe of 1946, torn apart again during the previous six or seven years by war, hatred and brutality. We in that shuddering bus were the fortunate ones, those on whom the gods had smiled, for we were on our way to Vienna airport (in all probability the same airport to which this humming machine is now hurrying) where a gleaming Pan American plane was waiting to convey us to New York and freedom—provided, of course, that we reached the airfield and received permission from the Russians, who controlled that part of Austria, to take off into the icy sky.

  My father had been quite friendly with some of our fellow passengers for several weeks. They were remnants (like us) of a polyglot world—citizens of Hungary, Austria, Czechoslovakia and the despised Balkan States—countries which had, not so many years before, been the domain of the pompously styled ‘Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Empire’. He had got to know them during the weeks he had patiently waited in the queue that formed each morning outside the hastily established Pan American office in the bomb-pitted and soot-blackened heart of the old city. Each day, from a grey dusk to the early dark of a winter afternoon, forty or fifty cold, anxious and disconsolate people stood about, stamping their feet on the hard-packed yellowing snow on what remained of the footpath, pulling the collars of their topcoats about their ears, and discussed, endlessly and circuitously, their terrible plight.

  All these people had purchased, in Vienna, or in Budapest (as was the case with us), or in some other city or town, obscenely expensive tickets for the weekly flight to New York—for us the first stage of a long journey to a new life in Australia. Their hopes and expectations were quickly shattered, or at least severely discouraged, once they discovered that possessing those tickets counted almost for nothing. Before they could board the gleaming bird of their dreams, they had to obtain elusive and mysterious cards, precious reservations slips and boarding passes that alone could ensure flight and freedom. So they waited and stamped their feet, trying to keep out the biting winds and flurries of snow, and discussed from one day to the next how best to bribe the mean-faced and rapacious officials behind the makeshift counter. No doubt they kept their best ideas to themselves, for inevitably their plight produced rivalry as well as comradeship. My father returned each evening to our ill-lit hotel room, shaking his head to indicate his lack of success—until inspiration struck him one day when he discovered the magic key to unlock that intransigence in the shape of half-a-dozen bottles of Hungarian apricot brandy.

  The other occupants of the bus had obviously found their own means of securing those magical cards. The rivalries and suspici
ons of earlier weeks vanished in our anxious happiness. A murmur rose as we caught sight of the outskirts of the airfield and, a moment or two later, the squat, shiny machine standing on the tarmac. We were comforted by the sight of a group of American soldiers, each of them reassuringly armed to the teeth. Half an hour later we were strapped into our seats; the smiling airhostess distributed boiled sweets to protect our eardrums against the stresses of take-off. Then the engines started with a roar, the plane lumbered forward to the runway and began trundling along its length, apparently earthbound. After what seemed an eternity, it finally began to rise with much clattering and shuddering. We watched the fields and hills, the ruined buildings, the thin grey stripe of a road sink away below us, as we prepared for our long winter flight. Elated that we had at last managed to escape from this world, we were also terrified because none of us had ever flown before, and all entertained, therefore, dark suspicions concerning wings and God’s intentions.

  I have returned to this world several times since then: one furtive, distressing visit to Budapest, my birthplace, and several much more relaxed short trips to Vienna, the city of glitz and schmaltz. Each time, however, I have approached this world of memories and phantoms from the west, by the overnight train from Paris or along Western Europe’s great network of roads and motorways. It now seems appropriate that in this palindromic year of 1991, I should be describing a spiritual palindrome by coming back to this world by a reversal of the way I left it more than half a lifetime ago.

  The purpose of this visit itself has a poignant though potentially hilarious symmetry about it—another instance of life’s turning back on itself, retracing its apparently aimless path. I have been invited to spend some six or seven weeks in Hungary—that country of bad memories—to give a course of lectures on Australian literature and culture in various colleges and universities to young people who have, it seems likely, only the haziest notions of that distant, exotic and, for them, probably outlandish place. The enterprise itself is slightly odd, even eccentric; that I should be participating in the inception of a scheme supported by weighty governmental and academic instrumentalities is just as odd, though no doubt appropriate. For me the coming weeks are, nevertheless, filled with dangers with which I am becoming more and more preoccupied as this contraption glides lazily above the morning landscape, following the path of the winding river below us.

  My greatest fear is that down there, in Hungary, my identity will be tested in an unwelcome and possibly embarrassing way. That fear is greatly increased as I become aware that my last ties with Australia are about to be broken. Boarding the plane in Singapore, I noticed a couple of faces familiar from the flight from Sydney. They also had loitered for five hours in the brightly lit antiseptic wilderness of Terminal 2, inspecting the depressing abundance of watches, cameras and calculators displayed in the glass cases of duty-free shops, and commenting on these insignia of end-of-the-century consumerism in their flat, laconic voices. A tenuous link still exists, therefore, with the place where I know, more or less, who I am, for I have lived in Australia long enough to make it possible to call myself an Australian. It is true that this identity may have been assumed or invented, yet it is an identity of sorts.

  The closer Hungary approaches, the less secure am I in that identity. In Vienna, where I plan to spend some days before setting out for the disturbing country of my birth, I shall be safe enough. There a measure of ambiguity will preserve my otherness, largely because my command of German is so poor that no-one could possibly imagine that I was once intimately tied to that world too. In Hungary it will be otherwise. Even though I speak a version of Hungarian that was in currency half a century ago, and even though my command of its idioms and vocabulary is restricted to the horizons of a child, it is a language I speak with some fluency at a commonplace and everyday level. Will that competence be sufficient warrant for Hungarians to claim me as their own? In that resides perhaps the deepest of my fears and misgivings.

  I do not want to be claimed by Hungary. My antipathy towards it far outweighs any residual fondness for a half-forgotten country. It is true that I know next to nothing about the place, not having seen it for almost fifty years apart from a few feverish days nine months ago filled with the anguish of the past, a time of raw nerves and gloomy introspection. For people like me, though, places are capable of possessing implications of limitless evil. We often invest the ordinary and the commonplace with diabolic intent; we see in the most mundane activities the seeds of cruelty and barbarity. For us some places have been irreversibly poisoned, like those tracts of land where radioactive material was buried long ago. We suspect that dangerous influences may still lurk under a pleasant and welcoming surface. And because we have spent our lives far away from such places, we have elaborated a mythology about them—both nostalgic and infernal—that colours all our attitudes and prejudices.

  God knows what experiences will swallow me once I take that dangerous and perhaps irrevocable step across the frontier into that contaminated world. Will I fall into a void, becoming neither one thing nor another, but remain suspended between possibilities, as I am now in this marvel of modern technology, which is descending towards its destination?

  ABOVE KAKANIA

  My fears and alarms are balanced by other, much more pleasant and exhilarating expectations. These weeks of anxiety and apprehension are to be spent in what is for me the centre and the focus of that fabled realm—three parts fantasy, one of experience—which I call by the familiar name of Europe, the land of heart’s desire I often find myself longing for in Australia, that place at the other end of the world I now know as my home. I realise only too well that for many people that mythic word ‘Europe’ implies worlds and experiences very different from those that have sustained my memories and fantasies during the years of my life in Australia. My Europe is that part of the continent which stretches from the Alps to the Carpathian mountains. We, the children of those towns and cities, hills and mountains, plains and rivers, believe with a passionate intensity that this world represents the essence of all that is contained within that magic word ‘Europe’.

  There is at heart no inconsistency, I believe, between my addiction to this world and my fears and alarms about Hungary. Hungary is real and substantial, it was the site for hardships and experiences of the sort that have been chronicled countless times by the survivors of the great conflagration that swallowed this part of the earth in the 1940s. ‘Europe’, though its images are lodged in an experienced past and are inevitably connected to the lives of those whom I still remember, is largely a country of the mind, fashioned out of nostalgia and fantasy. It is, nonetheless, just as real and substantial as the towns, villages and fields below us which are now becoming visible in much more detail as we continue to lose altitude, approaching our destination.

  I have only confused and discontinuous memories of that world, for by the time of my earliest recollections it had all but vanished. I remember it perhaps more vividly than if I had lived in it, or enjoyed its blandishments and experienced its pressures and its texture, through the myth world my parents lovingly elaborated in the course of their life in Australia. Those beguiling myths found their characteristic emblems in a strangely muddled collection of images which have persisted in my imagination—the sights, sounds, smells, social rituals and music of the Austro-Hungarian world.

  That world was certainly not Hungary with its passionate introspection, its need constantly to reassure itself of its greatness and excellence, and its obsession with those lands to the east of the river Tisza, extending as far as Transylvania, the site of the true Hungary according to nationalist rhetoric, which was shamefully lost to Romania after the Great War. Nor was it the Austria my family knew, with its fierce Catholicism, its hidebound preoccupation with caste and rank, or an Austria of Tyrolean fantasies of lederhosen and schram-mel music. It was an entirely different existence, a fantasy realm, superimposed on the physical and political realities of those nations, which found
its true location in a kind of extraterritoriality reflected by the characteristic images of Vienna and of the many cities and towns built in imitation of its imperial pomp and grandeur.

  The inhabitants of those cities and towns—for that world which I know to be my true heritage was an essentially urban phenomenon—may have been Austrians or Hungarians, Bohemians or Slovakians through domicile and by virtue of various legal and legislative definitions. They may even have felt some pride in, or patriotism about those nations or regions. Yet they were essentially cosmopolitan people, discovering their identity in that supranational concept of the Austro-Hungarian spirit so assiduously promoted by their political masters, the ministers and advisors of the Emperor Franz Josef, the monarch whose long reign coincided almost exactly with the florescence of that strange world.

  This world was given the nickname ‘Kakania’ in the closing decades of the Empire, as its pomp and its fantasies crumbled away into the disaster of the Great War. The name blended scatology and nostalgia. Kakania sounds romantic, an ancient duchy or quaint principality, one of those long-vanished territories or fiefdoms that came at length to be absorbed into the Austro-Hungarian Empire, yet was still remembered fondly. It was, however, cobbled out of a familiar bureaucratic abbreviation, ‘k.k.’, standing for the phrase ‘kaiserlich und königlich’ (imperial and royal), which was used to denote the dual nature of this world—the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary, the fiction of the dual monarchy which, by virtue of those two ‘k’s, sounds like kaka, that is to say, ordure, faeces or manure.

  The inhabitants of this realm, those people who moved easily among its various linguistic and ethnic divisions—as did my family, who had roots in Austria and Bohemia as well as in Hungary—would have been shocked by such a scatologically insulting term. Indeed, until the shadows of the disaster that was eventually to engulf them began to darken their orderly and predictable lives, they did not feel threatened by its prejudices, exclusions and hatreds. In the time of my grandparents’ young adult life—in the years before the gunshot at Sarajevo that was to spread its poison through this world—these people felt safe and comfortable: safer and more comfortable than their families had felt throughout the turbulent events of the nineteenth century.