Dragan Velikic' Budapest, Strictly Personal

1

This story begins in the blacksmith shop of Anton Csonka.
From Rakovceva Street the eye can see only two wide windows and the front door of the single story house on Kastanjer, one of the seven hills on which the town of Pula lies. Stepping inside, the visitor is surprised by the length of the hallway which runs straight through the house and out to the inner courtyard where the shop is located. Metal stairs lead up to a flat roof, where the view is like from atop an observation post. It is the harmony of the asymmetrical: from the roof of the lowest house the observer can see the whole town, because the house stands at the very top of Kastanjer. So the observer gets a sense of the importance of position.

In the early sixties of the twentieth century I was eight years old, I read Paul Street Boys and after school often dropped by Anton Csonka's shop. Mr. Anton was making huge forged iron lanterns at the time and they were eventually to become his shop's recognizable signature in the streets of the old city. And while Anton Csonka was forging lanterns, I would steal into the corners of the shop, rummage through the battered cupboards and gaze at the objects on the shelves as if I were in a museum. My explorations always wound up at the shelves where, standing on the middle board, was the coffee mill that Anton Csonka's father had made in Budapest after World War I. Old man Csonka (whose first name will be omitted here because I have forgotten it) had for a while a coffee-mill-making shop in Budapest, the city where Anton was born in the late nineteen twenties.

Mr Anton was, in fact, my friend. We would sit in his shop for hours, hunched over a sheet of paper where Mr. Anton would pencil in Pest's toponyms, pronouncing aloud the names of the streets and squares. Mr Anton would try to explain to me where Paul Street was. That was the first time that I heard the words út, utca, tér, körút. Mr. Anton would remove from the top of one of the shelves prints of Buda and Pest. I remember a fountain, the banks of the Danube and engraved above it the ramparts of a fortress, a bridge and a ship passing underneath. I also remember the scenes from the black-and-white postcards he gave me, which, in the course of the past thirty-five years, have gone astray amidst my book covers or the bottoms of my drawers, travelling the invisible paths that objects do. I can no longer remember details from these postcards, however hard I try. But I always know, without the slightest effort, that one of them depicted a woman with a parasol, standing in front of a delicatessen. I remembered the name of the shop-owner because of my own fascination with Attila the Hun. His name survived the centuries only to find itself printed on the store front of a delicatessen in Pest.

2

In June of 1967, the principal of my music school announced that on our way to Trencsin, a town in what was then Czechoslovakia, we would be stopping off over in Budapest.

I thought to myself: finally I will see the East.

Mr. Anton Csonka explained that we who travel to Budapest from Yugoslavia always arrive at Keleti railway station. In Hungarian, the word keleti means -- Eastern. In the language in which Anton had revealed Budapest to me, in my language, which no longer exists and which, when it did exist, was called Serbo-Croatian, the word keleti concealed the verb letiti -- to fly. So for me, from the very first, the name of Budapest's railway station was a Babylonian word, a word which mixed languages, a word which in one language meant to fly, and in another meant East. And I was muddled by it: the East is what flies, or what one flies to, and what one flies to is in Budapest. Budapest is where the lucky arrive, only they fly Eastwards, only they catch what flies.

And so I thought to myself: finally I will see the East.

The buses transporting our school orchestra and choir stopped at Keleti. The drivers told us that we would take a half-hour break, the teachers told us not to stray from the bus, the principal told us he was ready to explain whatever was unclear to us, and one of the drivers told us that they would not wait for anybody. Scared, excited, I stepped off the bus, stopped, opened my backpack to check whether the forints Anton Csonka had given me were still in the inside pocket, and then slowly made my way toward the exit of East. I walked out, but did not get far, I stopped right outside the station, in front of a kiosk selling postcards. I wanted to buy some postcards, not to mail them, but rather to keep them for myself. Then, as now, collecting postcards was for me an act of continually forgetting and remembering. Now, as then, I do not keep the postcards in any special place, rather they are scattered among my books, so that every book in my library conceals a postcard, although with time, I forget which card is in which book, I confuse or forget places and scenes, the postcards vanish in the books. I can no longer find them when I want. I can only hope that one day I will open the book with the postcard I am looking for.

I can give a detailed account of this encounter with Budapest. There is only one thing I have forgotten, everything else I remember with crystal clearness.

I have forgotten how long I spent choosing the postcards, looking, probably, for a scene from one of Csonka's black-and-white prints, a scene which, in its intimacy, was not to be found on the retouched colours of Budapest that were displayed at Keleti station's news stand in June 1967. I remember everything else quite clearly: when I returned to the parking lot, the buses were gone. I ran around at a loss, a frightened boy, lost in the East. Russian soldiers were passing by, I stopped them, frantically trying to explain that I was lost, they laughed, one of them patted me on the shoulder, and then, yes, miracles do happen, an icecream vendor who spoke my language came over to me. He took me to the Lost and Found, where they phoned the Yugoslav embassy, a man from the embassy came to fetch me, he said he would issue me a special paper for me to return to Yugoslavia if the bus did not come back for me. Thus began the longest day of my life.

The man from the Yugoslav embassy dropped me off at a home for juvenile delinquents. I sat in a huge room with chess boards on several of the tables. There were a number of boys and girls in the room. Two were playing chess. I heard the song Marina, Marina in Hungarian, I did not move, waiting, still frightened that something would go wrong. Eventually I relaxed and played chess with another boy. A few hours later, a young woman walked into the room, as pretty as a fairytale princess, and what she told me was like a fairytale: your friends know you are lost and they miss you, that's what she said, as if embarking on a story. We will find a car and it will take you to Czechoslovakia tonight. And the fairytale came true, the only thing I do not remember is what language she told it to me in. Late that evening, sitting in the back of a car, I left Budapest, without postcards but no longer lost. Before drifting off to sleep, I gazed out at the dimly lit streets of Pest through which we wandered for ages before coming out of the labyrinth.

And that was it. Budapest was not on my itinerary again until the early nineties. It was then that the map of my country changed and towns and languages in my country began to disappear. Churches and train stations flew off, into the air. These changes turned me into a traveller, into someone who lives in-between, who is nowhere. I lived between Belgrade and Vienna, I lived travelling by train, a train which had a stop in Budapest. I would stand for about ten minutes at the coupé window, looking out at Keleti, at the place where I had got lost twenty-five years earlier. The ritual of standing at the coupé window at Keleti station repeated itself, always at the same time, depending on the direction I was coming from: Belgrade or Vienna. This ritual presumed thoughts about "being lost". But I did not think about whether, after being lost in Budapest, I had ever managed to find myself or was, perhaps, still flying around the East like a ghost. I thought about something else, about how millions of people in the country I came from, a country that was disintegrating, wanted only one thing – to be lost, but to stay alive.

3

Early in the morning of March 24, 1999, I left Belgrade and took the Avala train to Budapest. For the first time, Keleti station was not "somewhere in-between", a stop-over, a waiting point for the journey to resume. For the first time, Keleti station was my destination. I headed for an apartment in Kecskeméti Street, where I was going to stay for an unspecified period of time, to start living there, to sit down at a table I had not chosen but which waited for me almost obdurately, to start to write. Half-an-hour later I was standing at number four, I opened the front door and walked into a story, into a different space. The story is Grimm-like. Standing right next to the front door was a tall, fat cook, dressed in white, holding a big knife in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Next to him was a huge, fat cat. The cook and the cat watched me, carefully following my every move, not budging, and I walked past them, noticed stains on the cook's apron, noticed in the hall behind them a wooden table with raw meat on it, and realized I was looking at the kitchen of a restaurant.

The space was panoptic. I entered the inner courtyard which led to all the apartments in the building. The windows looked out on each other. You could see into the apartments, people were exposed in their privacy to outside eyes. They had no place to hide. I thought of the paradox of it: the city where I had once been lost was a city where you could not hide anything from view. The apartment windows were screens televising the little secrets of everyday life. On the way to my apartment I saw: a boy eating at a table in number seven, an old lady sitting on her bed and smoking in number nine, a blond woman in a dentist's chair in number eleven. I unlocked the door of number thirteen, the curtains were drawn, it was dark and stuffy in the apartment, I went over to the window, the only one in the apartment, pulled back the curtain, opened the window and again saw the cook and the cat watching me. I sat down in the armchair, turned on the television and learned that half an hour earlier, just as I had stepped down off the train at Keleti, war had broken out in Yugoslavia.

4

Two days later, my son arrived in Budapest by the same train. The fact that he was thirteen at the time, exactly the same age I was in June 1967 when I strayed from Keleti station, the fact that my son found safety in the very city where I had been lost, evoked in me a mixture of feelings, fear and gratitude of almost mythical proportions, which I felt at every moment, lived with, became used to as a new way of seeing the world.

And so, with my son, I began to discover the city. He had a system: first he would study old maps of Budapest which he would buy in second-hand book shops, maps which depicted the pre-war city, the post-war city, maps which depicted the transport grid, the grid of streets and squares. Next he would carefully study modern maps of the city, clearly memorizing every detail. Then we would set off, by tram, which in Budapest are yellow. My son would explain everything to me: where the trams used to run before the war, why they no longer go there today, why today's routes are better or worse. He would explain how some of the squares used to look before the war, he would describe the façades of buildings that are no more, he would compare them with their modern counterparts, and it was then that I realized: in his mind he was constantly building Budapest and tearing it down, he was seeing several Budapests at once, to his eye every square was a multitude of squares, and the past surfaced as a picturesque image in the middle of a scene which just happened to catch us. And the scene multiplied, the city became layered, stories were awakened and were experienced by someone who had only just arrived in the city, someone who did not know the language spoken by the people of the city, someone who at the age of thirteen had situated himself in a past and a present, thus inventing for himself a space which he could inhabit as if he had always lived there. That was when I also realized the following: that my son refused to be in exile, that he refused to be lost, that he had discovered a whole enormous city called Budapest so that he could find himself in it, with all its memories and, thus, with an entire future.

We established our everyday life in Budapest, meaning we established our daily routine: we would set off in the morning, taking tram number 4 or 6 down the Körút, getting off at Margit Bridge and crossing the island of the same name on foot. At Árpád Bridge, we would wait for tram number l, going in the direction of Népstadion. Soon we began to recognize the kiosk vendors, the women selling dried flowers, the vagrants assembled around the bridges and entrances to the subway, the tall, blond woman selling silver jewellery who would smile at us, the girl playing the violin at various sites in the city. The city began to assume a face of its own.

We also had another version: we would set off on tram number 47 or 49 to the Gellért Hotel and climb up to the Citadel. The view from there spanned Pest's unending streets, reminding me of the view from the roof of Anton Csonka's single-story house in Pula. At that moment I could see any city I cared to imagine.

5

I have a large collection of Hungarian words in my head, a collection that is both full and empty at the same time.

Full, because I remember the words, I can repeat them, they exist, they exist even for me, as mine -- a kind of souvenir of the past from a life I am only now starting anew.

Empty, because I do not know what all these words mean. I remember the words the way one remembers one's own name, I remember them as a random connection of symbols naming something unique, inimitable, the only person who roams the world with that first name and last, with that personal word that will outlive him, the way names outlive us, naming us even after death, forever, on a tombstone or in someone's memory.

For instance: Pillangó utca. I translated that name to myself as Pillangó Street, in other words, I did not translate it at all, convinced that it was a name, a street bearing somebody's name. I walked through Budapest as if I had just arrived in Babylon where, by the grace of a god who had yet to become angry or disappointed, everything had a personal name, untranslatable, and thus immediately understandable. I had the feeling that I understood every word, that words were inhabiting me, immediately entering a personal, friendly relationship with me. I did not feel rejected by the language.

Nothing about that feeling changed even when my friend explained to me smilingly that Pillangó means -- butterfly. You are talking about the Street of Butterflies, she said, about Butterfly Street. But the word "pillangó" was ever after engraved in my mind as the name of a butterfly. There was a "Pillangó butterfly" and it lived in Budapest. And what does Budapest mean? Is it a personal name, the name of a unique and inimitable person? Personal names can only be stated and remembered. You cannot tell a story about them. Which is why I am unable to tell a story about Budapest.

[...]

Bremen, October 1999
Translated by Marco Ivic'

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Dragan Velikic'
was born in 1953 in Belgrade. He is the author of five novels, two books of short stories and three books of essays. His novels, stories and essays have been widely translated.