Capa’s photograph was taken at a famous spot on Váci Street. This was where, at one time, the inn called The Seven Prince Electors had stood. Visitors to the inn included royalty and its ballroom, opened in 1772, had been the great grandmother of all dance halls in Budapest. The new building, erected on the site in 1840, and which is still there to this day, was designed by the great architect of the period, János Hild. It was a dwelling house for some time, and then in 1862 it was once again turned into a hotel, the Nemzeti Szálló. The front that looks onto Aranykéz Street is what is left of the hotel’s coffee salon; there lurks a bar that at one time was called the Florián and later the Colonial before it became widely known as a nighthawks’ haunt under the name of the Pipacs (Poppy). Even the moral crusaders of the workers’ state failed to have it closed down. Anyone over sixty who ever went carousing in the city centre has a story to tell about the Pipacs. For a long time cinema tickets were sold at the Váci Street entrance to the building, where the box office is located today of the Pesti Színház theatre. In 1911 the glass-covered courtyard restaurant was replaced by the Corso Film Theatre. From 1945 to 1948, when the political parties and the organizations affiliated to them divided up the better cinemas amongst themselves, the Corsó was managed by the National Peasant Party or, to be more precise, the Sarló (Sickle) Book and Film Production and Sales Cooperative. They were in the process of nationalizing it just about the time Capa was there. The photograph even shows what films were on at the time. Since you are hardly likely ever to get to see the Soviet technicolour film, Express Love, I shall divulge what it is about, for those who are interested. While the great festivities to celebrate victory are underway in Moscow on 9th May, 1945, an express train rumbles on its way to Vladivostok. On the train, one Captain Lavrentiev meets Zina, an actress who behaves in a very hostile and provocative manner. At some point on their journey, the two somehow manage to get left behind. They have many highly entertaining adventures until finally the misunderstandings are cleared up and it turns out that Zina is in fact a nice girl who is not an actress at all but a botanist and is travelling east to help the fruit farmers. Lavrentiev in turn reveals that he is not in fact married...

[...]

It is to Count István Széchenyi that we owe horseracing in Budapest, although what he envisaged was rather different to the form it takes today. From the 1820s, for many years he went to great lengths to publicize his views on the value of breeding and racing horses at national level in word, deed and in print. He submitted an application to the Court in Vienna for a licence to hold races, and after riding around the territory of Pest-Buda for three days in the company of a number of friends, looking for suitable terrain, he finally stumbled on a parcel of land in the "flatlands of Üllő" which from then on would no longer be used as a pasture, but would become the Pest racecourse. It was announced that the first race meeting would take place on June 6, 1827, and from that date forward for more than half a century the horse racing public would drive out to this area, also known as the Gubacsi Estate. From 1880 they no longer had to travel as far. The authorities decided they needed the land and instead offered the Pest Jockey Club a lease on the land where the People’s Stadium and the adjacent sports pavilions now stand. Although space was somewhat restricted both on the course and in the stands, the several decades when races were held here count as the classic era of horse-racing in Budapest. At the same time, flat races on the training track at Alag, north-east of Budapest, also became fashionable. When there was talk of shutting the city racetrack, influential gentlemen of the Jockey Club suddenly began to enquire among the upper echelons of society whether it might not be possible to extend Andrássy Avenue as far as Alag. They entered into negotiations with the tramway company and the hotel owners. Whether this was a serious enterprise or simply psychological warfare is not known, but anyway, it had the effect of forcing the city fathers to back down and postpone their plans to shut the racecourse. At the same time, they offered the possibility of setting up another racecourse somewhere else in the city. Their choice fell on the cavalry training grounds at the point where the Albertirsai Road and Fehér Road converge. The fact that it was some distance away filled the cab drivers in particular with great hopes. Work on the site, however, ground to a halt with the outbreak of the First World War.

The fate of horse racing at City Park, too, was sealed under the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, which lasted only three months, when the race-track was turned over to commercial crop cultivation. The novelist Gyula Krúdy mourned the passing of the old race-course, and the world that disappeared with it, as follows: "all the pretty women decked out in their finery who once got soaked here on Royal Cup day, all the fine cavaliers who would swoop so majestically in at the main gate in their two-horse carriages (one-horse cabs were not permitted even to stop at the gate), and who, at the end of the race, would stroll sadly on foot along the paths that meandered amongst the bushes; and the gentlemen of the Jockey Club who grew old on their podium with its red rope fence and who, at the close of the racing season in the autumn of 1918, never imagined they had seen the lovely race-course for the last time; they still remember it, they remember how sophisticated and impressive She was, how springy the grass around the totalisators’ booths, how shady the park where the racehorses were led out to parade in a circle in their colourful blankets, how refined and gay the company that used to meet there from the early, fragrant days of May until late in October, when the tote clerks would have to pay out the last tickets by candlelight in the dusk of evening."

Fewer (and in any case much less nostalgic) descriptions remain of the racegoers in third class with the thirty-farthing tickets. And yet the ordinary people were increasingly keen to share in the passion of the upper crust and in the winnings to be made from gambling. In a world already turned upside down by revolutions, the higher classes of society were forced to rub shoulders with "people who frequented street markets". It must have come as a great relief to them when, in 1925, the sports complex that is still standing to this day on the Albertirsai Road was finally completed, with tiered grandstands, and restaurants and cafés for first and second class customers. Those with third-class tickets once again had only standing room around the central perimeter of the racecourse, with no cover above their heads.

They did have separate betting booths, however. Gambling, after all, was increasingly becoming the principal driving force behind the races. Initially it had only been the owners of the horses who made wagers with each other. Later came the bookmakers, these larger-than-life characters who were a strange combination of the romantic adventurer and the obscure accounts clerk. The names of some of the most famous of them became legends, preserved for generations in the annals of the turf. A talented bookmaker had to be an expert in horses, a psychologist and a stockbroker all rolled into one, looking at the horses’ form, the punters’ state of mind and the rates offered by the other "bookies’", the competition, to gauge what odds he would offer to anyone with whom he entered into the risk of the deal. At first the bookmakers were merely "bagmen", offering their services they strolled around, but later they became tradespeople organized into guilds and operating according to strict regulations. And yet they were an elite organization: even when gambling became a thriving business, there were still no more than a dozen and a half registered bookmakers operating in Pest at any one time. The first swallows came from England in the eighteen-sixties. The first to make a fortune here in Hungary was a bookmaker named Lehmann who used to be a member of the English colony in Hamburg. He was followed by many others from the island kingdom, who included the Pest racecourse in an itinerary which also took them to Hamburg, Prague, Baden-Baden and Freudenau. At the close of the season they went home for the winter hurdles season, and some went travelling round India. Their successors had offices in both Vienna and Pest. They had their own "ring" at the racecourse. We have to imagine them at their clap-board stands with a sign bearing their name, standing on a small raised platform, leaning on book-stands that looked rather like music stands, waiting for clients to challenge them to a wager. In the city, the first market for betting and small-scale gambling was in Ferenciek (Franciscans’) Square, so it was no coincidence that the first off-track, licenced public betting office was on the ground floor of the Ferenciek Bazaar. On racing days a tremendous throng would gather in the courtyard, with sellers of salted pretzels and fruit pressing their way through the milling crowds of horse-experts and small punters. Occasionally some people would find out the results of the first race in Vienna before all the bets had been taken, but when they tried to prevent the word passing round by shutting the doors, the news would still reach the ears of the initiated from the street outside, disguised in the form of an organ-grinder’s tune.

[...]

There is so much to look in this picture, it is hard to know where to rest one’s gaze. On the figure of the woman, bathed in bright afternoon sunlight? Or the outline of the water speeding out from under her back like a pool of blood? On the old-fashioned briefcase that she is using as a cushion, or the piece of clothing crumpled up underneath it—the objects that give the image a more pervasive sense of intimacy as we explore the physical beauty of the woman? Let us direct our gaze a little further to the left, however, as befits the theme of this book, and look at the fragment of stone slab that can just be glimpsed through the waves. It is part of the Chain Bridge that had been blown up by the Germans in 1945; we can see some of the letters of the name of István Széchenyi whose brainchild it had been. A strange juxtaposition of incongruous images, a memento radiating with blasphemous joy.

The first attempt to blow up the Chain Bridge had taken place on May 21, 1849, in the final minutes of the siege of Buda by the Hungarian army. Seeing the cloud of smoke and dust that flew up following the terrifying blast, the advancing soldiers supected that the cannon emplacement was in fact between the two lions on the Buda bridgehead, but all they found amidst the ruins was a corpse that had been blown to pieces. These were the mortal remains of Colonel Alois Allnoch; the fuse, ten paces long, had proved too short to ensure his survival. The Chain Bridge, however, remained standing unti 7 a.m. on the morning of January 18th, 1945. On the previous evening General Pfeffer-Wildenbruch, the commander of the retreating Germans, had obtained permission to evacuate Pest. The flight of the Germans lasted throughout the night amidst apocalyptic scenes. With the buildings on the Danube embankment burning like torches, casting a light almost as bright as day, civilians and soldiers driven frantic by the Soviet artillery bombardment scrambled across the bridge, which had been breached in many places and was covered in dead bodies. At the time of the explosion there were still people on it. The explosives had been placed with German precision, in the chain chambers on the Pest bank. Following the detonation, the unleased chains flew up and smashed the stone corbels at the top of the pillars, whereupon the suspension rods snapped one by one, and first the section of the bridge on the Pest side, then the middle section crashed into the water. Once again, by sheer good fortune, the anchor chamber on the Buda side was spared; in 1948, when the trench was drained, the workers came across the explosive device that had been intended to destroy it, soaked through and useless.