Antal Szerb

A Martian's Guide to Budapest

 

HE CHAIN BRIDGE. Perhaps we might begin here? Budapest is the city of great bridges. The Chain Bridge was begun in the early years of the last century, taking several decades to complete. It was the subject of genuine popular enthusiasm and was celebrated by the otherwise unknown poet Emil Vidor, writing in The Athenaeum in 1842:

Out there, beneath the flood, they have buried a seed
From which—to the headstrong current's blushing shame!—
An arch, Intelligence's brandished blade,
Will soar in triumph to everlasting fame!
The ancient river, so mighty and so proud,
Shall bend its neck in stooping subjugation
As patriot-poets hymn their praises loud,
And all men bow before the Mind's creation.

The construction work apparently went on through all four seasons of the year, which makes it the bridge of winter in particular—of winter and the night, with its characteristic colouring of black, or the dark chocolate-brown of asphalt in the rain. It is also the winter bridge in the sense that its predecessor was not.

Before it, Buda and Pest were connected by a pontoon crossing, along which the saintly old Benedek Virág would stroll with his devotees. But in those days the Danube regularly froze over, and you could skate across to the other side. If the ice failed to freeze, but simply broke up and drifted, they say that you had to go all the way round via Vienna to dine in Krisztina Square. Well, possibly.
The Chain Bridge as we see it now is in the Empire style, as are the entrance to the Buda tunnel on the right bank and the Police Headquarters on the left. Essentially there are two historical layers in Pest: the Baroque—in the spirit of the old German (and Catholic) Burghers, and the Empire, preserving the memory of a great Magyar impulse that has since dwindled to nothing. But here, between the Tunnel and the Police Headquarters, something of it lingers. If, a hundred years ago, the Palatine were to gaze down from his apartments, this is the scene that would have met his eye. And he would have thought, with a sigh, of Széchenyi (whom he only ever addressed as "Count Stefi") and turned back to his desk, stubbornly devoted, like all his Habsburg forebears, to his work. The Chain Bridge is infernally long. But you must try it once, Sir, and you won't regret it. Stroll, with a woman on your arm, across to Buda, and then stroll back again—possibly with the same woman. You will find it conducive to romance simply because it is so long. Budapest is truly, and profoundly, the City of Love. Believe me, Sir, those who really know this town can only speak of it with tears in their eyes.
But as you cross you must look neither right nor left. Keep your eyes focused on the Police Headquarters, that noble, finely-proportioned, silent presence. Don't even glance at the Academy, with its fiercely independent dignity so suited to a Hall of Learning. It is best addressed as "Your Excellency". "Your Honour" might be more appropriate, but when it comes to titles one should always err on the side of caution. And don't stare at the Gresham Palace either. The poor thing was new and daring, once. This is how we live, poor souls of Budapest, caught, like the Police Headquarters, between stern formality on the one hand and the flashily ornamental world of commerce on the other. So, don't look to either right or left. 

HE RIVER BANKS. Like a great many rivers, the Danube has two banks. Here, as in Paris—and many other cities, I believe—each bank is an entirely different world. As the chestnut trees close down for the night on the Buda side, the coffee-houses open up in Pest, alive with music.
I suggest you avoid the Pest bank in daylight. I'm not sure what your standards of taste are, but I'm fairly confident you would not like what is generally to be seen at that time. This bank is at its loveliest on winter evenings, when the only people strolling about (in pairs) are teachers from the Piarist Gymnasium. Dressed in their flowing cassocks, they set out from the priory in the direction of Parliament. The point of these mysterious missions is the dinner they will enjoy on their return. On name days, the porter trundles a barrel of beer into the refectory. It is drunk amidst a steady flow of gentle monastic jokes and the discussion of scholarly and pedagogic questions. I'm sorry I can't show you the old Friary, the Grassalkovich Palace with its gracious balconies, or the drab (but truly ancient) tenement blocks attached to it. Since they went, the city is now a little gap-toothed between the Greek Orthodox and the Inner City Parish churches. This was once the most distinctively eighteenth-century quarter of Budapest. In those days you could still half-expect the Serbian tugboats to smash up against the tramway railings as they came in to moor, just as they did decades earlier, when Councillor József Ürményi bathed his aching old feet in the water and chatted away with the smooth-tongued Ferenc Kazinczy.

N INNER CITY STREET (part thereof). But Galamb Street (Dove Street) is still there, and beside it, the Kriszt House and the Greek Courtyard. The former is several feet below street level: in this town, the lower the level the older the building. It seems Madách was right: the dust flies up, a few centuries level the pyramids, jackals howl on the esplanade and cars roar past where the present third floor stands.
Lying in the very heart of the city, between two major thoroughfares, Galamb Street has been unaccountably forgotten. It remains just as it was in the days of Maria Theresa. No sunlight has entered these rooms for two hundred years. Little old people totter down the street—I can't tell whether they actually inhabit those shuttered apartments or simply remember them. I do know that some of them live in the Greek Courtyard. There you see bearded priests and small children everywhere, and these Greeks, they say, are the real thing. Even today they hurl abuse at one another in parish meetings in the old Hellenic tongue.

ELLÉRT HILL. Recommended for a Sunday afternoon in spring. The hill is topped by a ruined building, the Citadella. Along the wall you can make out narrow slits, like military embrasures, out of which horses occasionally poke their heads. Behind the Citadella lies a plain. Every Sunday there would be a pilgrimage up here by the local people and soldiers—all of them quite indistinguishable from the people and soldiers you see at St Cloud, and no doubt on the outskirts of every other large and not-so-large city at the same time of the week and the year. In fact these people are the same everywhere. Only at the highest levels can one make distinctions. A soldier is a soldier wherever you look: Hölderlin and Vörösmarty are very different.
But this isn't what I want to talk about. Rather, Sir, consider the scene. At the top of the Hill the people, and the soldiers, take part in a rather unusual game whose origins go back into the densest mists of folklore, when witches still posed in groups for their copper engravings. No one knows who introduced this game and who keeps it going: it simply happens every Sunday in spring. People stand in a circle, in pairs—a man and a woman, as I understand. One of the couples inside the ring walks around, stopping from time to time before another couple standing on the perimeter. The man inside the circle asks the man on the perimeter, "Are you fond of your partner?" If he says yes, he is, they move on. If the answer is no, the women are exchanged. This goes on all day. When darkness falls—to put it rather grandly—every Tristan has found his Isolde. What happens next, I never managed to find out.

Translated by Len Rix