To use the title of one of those melancholic torch songs
in which Chet Baker specialised, ‘Whatever Possessed Me’?
Why should an otherwise sensible married couple choose to
drive from south-west France to Budapest and back? Yes, it was the last chance
to see an old friend before he moved back to Sheffield at the end of his tenure
with the United Nations, but that hardly excuses such a rash and deluded
undertaking. Public transport might have been expensive, but once you’ve paid
for diesel and the incessant motorway tolls, it looks a much more competitive
and certainly safer option.
I blame myself. The notion was mine, but as usual I
failed to think through the details. Whether it’s Britain or France, travelling
across a map always seems to be more difficult than travelling up or down it.
The distance in this case was unspeakable. Even now, I refuse to clock up the
kilometres. Add to the equation the motorways of Italy and Austria. We’re
spoilt in France. Traffic is generally light and people, although I never
thought I’d live to admit it, drive with a certain discipline and civility. The
motorway that crosses the north Italian plain is like a combination M1/M6
hell-hole conceived by a Minister of Transport given to suck the blood of his
victims. It’s wall-to-wall lorries, which render the inside lane – normally my
refuge of choice – impenetrable.
It was the lorries that prompted us to take a northern
spur to Austria by way of the Brenner Pass. The scenery was stunning, but no sooner
had we crossed the frontier than the rain that washed out Europe descended like
a curtain. The Austrians are a comparatively wealthy lot and there seems to be
a surfeit of black Audis and BMWs, whose drivers want to kill themselves and as
many others as they can take with them. During my white-knuckle stint, gripping
the steering wheel as I tried to ignore the tiny demons whispering in my ear
that we’d never make it to Vienna alive, cars flashed past at speeds that
suggested they could see beyond the spray they kicked up.
Somewhere around Salzburg we ran into a traffic jam.
After crawling nowhere for half an hour or so, we discovered that someone had
smashed through a safety barrier and disappeared into the ravine below. The
traffic police stood around figuratively scratching their heads. Electronic
signs thereafter urged people to cut their speed, but no one seemed willing.
Miraculously, the rain stopped and my co-pilot took us to Vienna, where –
despite the absence of signs and guided entirely by E.S.P. – she steered us
straight to our hotel opposite the West Banhof station. With five minutes to go
before the garage was due to lock its doors, I tried out my ‘O’ level German on
the woman behind the desk. Wir haben ein zimmer gereserviert… She smiled
sympathetically and replied in perfect English to the effect that she would
phone the garage and ask them to stay open for us. The line between triumph and
disaster was fine enough to suggest that a guardian angel had helped us
negotiate our road of trials.
Only a little more than 100 years ago, Vienna, I
discovered, was the 5th largest city in the world. That its
population at the time was around 2 million shows how far we’ve come in terms
of global over-population. My father was disappointed to discover that the
Danube only skirts rather than runs through the city. I know what he meant.
There is something ultimately unsatisfactory about the place. If the
architecture that marked the 19th century pomp of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire appears initially rather grand, it soon turns sterile
and pretentious. The boulevards are wide and graceful, but they weren’t
designed for tourists like us on foot. Although armed with copious leaflets and
maps, we both found it one of the most confusing cities to find your way around
– perhaps because of the lack of a river as a reference point.
Our trip coincided with a major exhibition in the
grandiose Belvedere Palace to mark 150 years since the birth of Gustav Klimt.
Seeing his work in the flesh – and that of Egon Schiele, his younger and more
radical contemporary –prompted the kind of emotions that pilgrims at Mecca or
Jerusalem must experience. You realise that even the best reproductions in a
book can never be more than a mere facsimile. Seeing them, too, in the context of
all the pompous imperial showpieces also helped to explain what the
Secessionist Movement at the turn of the 19th century was all about.
The glorious Art Nouveau apartment buildings and other architectural gems of
the era seem so much more modern and challenging when set beside the vestiges
of the self-satisfied and stultifying old order.
There wasn’t time to visit the eccentric creations of the
architect and painter, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, and I would have liked to
travel on the big wheel in which Orson Welles delivered his famous cuckoo-clock
speech to Joseph Cotton in The Third Man, but I couldn’t leave Vienna
without sampling some apple strudel. We treated ourselves to afternoon tea in
the elegant Central Café, where an ageing jazz pianist ran through his
repertoire as if practising scales. Verily I can now say unto thee that I
understand the Germanic obsession with strudel.
After a Duel-like incident with a menacing lorry
on the M1 from Vienna to Budapest and our first mystifying encounter with the
Hungarian language and currency when trying to buy the obligatory vignette that
entitles you to drive on Magyar motorways, we arrived in Budapest with just
enough daylight to appreciate why the city is spoken of in reverential tones.
Our friend Bryan found himself an apartment on the 5th floor of a
block that looks as if it was designed by a disciple of Charles Rennie
Mackintosh, with one of those wonderful cage-lifts that you tend to see these
days only in French films of the 1950s. Some might die for the view we had from
our bedroom window: over the wide Danube to the stately floodlit buildings of
Buda on the other side.
The block is in what was once the rich Jewish sector of
Pest. Not any more. I had forgotten that more Hungarian Jews died at Auschwitz
than any others and Bryan began our bicycle tour of the city the following
morning down by the Danube to see a chilling monument to an infamous massacre.
The sculpted boots and shoes on the quayside represent the victims of the
Hungarian Nazis who were bundled together with barbed wire and chucked into the
river.
It’s all the historical, political and social
contradictions that make the city such an alluring and fascinating place.
Wealth and fairly severe poverty sit side by side. Many of the elegant public
buildings, which sprung up after the Compromise of 1867 gave Hungary more of a
dual role in the management of the Hapsburg Empire, lie empty today. The
monumental Soviet statues – including Stalin’s boots, which steadfastly
remained once the body had been toppled – have been shifted to Memento Park on
the outskirts of Buda, but the hated Soviet war memorial still sits in the
centre of Liberation Square on a plot of Russian-owned land forever fenced off from
vandals by railings. Not far from this, there is a bronze statue to the man who
supposedly liberated the Hungarians from the yoke of communism. No, not Mikhail
Gorbachev, but er… Ronald Reagan. And not too far from the life-size replica of
Mr. Ray-Gun you can see the bullet holes, now plugged with black metal rivets,
that commemorate the 1956 October uprising.
There is a thriving counter-culture despite the current
right-wing regime and the Bohemian young have converted some of the more
dilapidated apartment buildings into ‘ruin bars’. They look like glorified
squats and the number of bicycles parked outside tends to denote the coolest
establishments. On the Saturday night, we went to one such bar to watch a Roma
band play a kind of thrash-gypsy version of their traditional music. We
travelled back home on a trolley bus, one facet of the plentiful and regular
public transport in Budapest. A favourite occupation is fare-avoidance: a
throwback to a practical form of civil disobedience during the Soviet
dictatorship.
Sunday morning we spent in the lap of luxury at the
famous Széchenyi spa baths. It would have been nice to capture such an
extraordinary place on film, but the last thing you want to take with you to
public baths is a digital camera. As I sat with Bryan outside in the crowded
circular pool, not far from a group of elderly men playing chess on a plastic
board up to their tattooed biceps in hot spring water, while my aquatic wife
did her lengths in an adjacent pool for serious swimmers, my friend told me how
in winter you can come here and not see beyond your nose for the steam rising
off the surface of the water. We decamped to the labyrinthine network of plunge
pools within the palatial buildings and sampled a range of temperatures and
degrees of sulphur. In the murkiest and most eggy one of all, we watched a
corpulent gentleman opposite us fall gradually asleep.
Because of the impending journey home, we sacrificed
another night in Budapest to the further joys of road travel. This time we went
via Slovenia, where they also demand a vignette for the car. As we crossed into
Italy not too far from Venice, we ran into an electrical storm of Wagnerian
proportions. Faced with the prospect of Monday-morning lorries, I preferred to
drive on while the roads were empty and, much to my poor wife’s chagrin and for
want of a convenient staging post, we ended up driving through the night.
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