[..]

Why here?, foreigners living in Budapest tend to ask one another. Nobody knows. People shrug, mutter a phrase or two about the city, and then, as though it were an in-joke, roll their eyes and smile with the camaraderie of victims. Hungarians too ask "Why here?", teetering between the gloaming of their ethnic spirit and their longing to be in Vienna with its cleanliness, its goods, and those hard smug faces that make one wonder if consumerism means the end of gentleness and grace.

Budapest is like Paris, like London, like New York. Budapest is beautiful. When I leave my apartment and step out into the city I feel elated. Buses scud one after another like dolphins, the light falls soft and yellow on the dirty streets and the gray faces, and the eye never stops being drawn up and around, over somber people with fillips of colour at their necks, over buildings whose proportions seem to soothe, over ochres and greens, statues and gratings: there is no end to the eclectic prettiness of Budapest. And as soon as you start to walk around in the balmy polluted air, the story of the country starts gently to unfold. Bartók Béla út, Liszt Ferenc tér.

If you climb Castle Hill to visit the National Gallery, you’ll be struck by the weird agony of the statue of a man named Dózsa. In 1514 he led a peasant uprising that failed. Victorious nobles seated him on a red-hot iron throne and crammed a red-hot iron crown onto his head; his followers were forced to eat chunks of his scorched flesh. Therefore, forever vivid, Dózsa György tér. At every corner the history of Hungary is a constant presence.

[..]

Budapest has been besieged thirteen times: surely the current influx of foreigners, especially businesspeople, is a reminder of patriotic sorrow as well as a sign of much-anticipated progress. Substituting for a friend, I gave a private English lesson to an executive at a company taken over by G.E. To get him talking, I told him to interview me, which made it perfectly reasonable for me to then interview him.

I asked what the main changes in the company were.

"Now, everyone has to smile," he said.

"Because they tell you to?"

He shrugged. "Because it’s the American way."

Now, he has to work twice as hard; efficiency, he said, wasn’t valued under communism. G.E. thinks G.E. knows everything, and "maybe they do in America, but Europe is different." In America, it’s all done by computers and the customer is always right. In Europe, people go out to dinner, talk about the family, and then buy.

"It’s a culture problem," he concluded.

It must be very hard to be working for Americans if to an executive the customer-is-always-right concept seems stupid or demeaning. I wonder how it feels to learn English in order to be able to talk to the boss—as opposed to learning English as a desirable asset in international life. He told me there are twenty-five Americans in his company in Budapest, and only one who speaks Hungarian.

American teachers tend to be supersensitive to the concept of English as a form of imperialism. One of Budapest’s two English weekly papers published the story of an American who stopped teaching English because as a teacher of English she felt part of a force destined to destroy Hungarian culture. I assigned the article to one of my classes. Their reaction was that Hungarian culture can cope.

[..]