The Habsburg Cafe by Andrew Riemer

Author:Andrew Riemer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography/Autobiography
ISBN: 9781742699141
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd
Published: 2012-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

CULTURAL DELEGATION

Australia is very chic in the Central Europe of 1991. Tourist agencies in affluent Vienna carry seductive posters of ‘Ayers Rock’, koalas and dreamy images of the Sydney Opera House in a misty half-light. While Hungarian universities are gearing up for their first-ever courses in Australian Studies, a prestigious mega-conference on Australian culture is being held in the Swiss city of Bern. Anyone who is anyone seems to be there. One well-placed bomb would probably wipe out of the cream of Australia’s cultural gurus. After the conclusion of the conference the delegates disperse. Some head for London, some for New York, at least one hurries to what is still called Leningrad, and a few drift into Hungary—though one visaless unfortunate, gossip insists, got no farther than the border. On a gloriously sunny weekend, when the soft sunlight already betrays hints of the winter to come, I meet some of these people and become, temporarily, an amateur and somewhat bemused tourist guide.

The weather remains enchanting throughout our rambles around the city. A gentle breeze has blown away the brown murk of the past few days. In the mellow autumn sunshine Budapest looks beguilingly beautiful. The river dances with light as it curves under the graceful bridges linking the hills of Buda and the flat land of Pest. The green dome of the Castle and the stone spire of St Matthew’s church are etched against a clear blue sky. Upstream, on the opposite bank, the extravagant fantasy of the Parliament glitters with flashes of gold as the sun touches its walls and turrets. The river is busy with steamers conveying Saturday morning pleasure-seekers to the islands and resorts of the Danube. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century houses of the Castle district are festive with window boxes and baskets of geraniums. Horse-drawn carriages clatter along the narrow cobbled streets.

My companions are surprised and enchanted. We are standing on a terrace in front of the Castle, the panorama of city and river spread out below us. They had not realised that Budapest is such a beautiful place, nor that it was so ‘European’. I ask them what they had expected. They can’t put it into words exactly, but it was something much more grim, much more drab and somehow ‘eastern’. But this city, they insist, is like Paris—much more interesting than Vienna, for instance, where they had stayed for a few days on their way here from Bern. Vienna was, they confess, a disappointment—dull, dowdy and rather boring. But this, this is entirely different.

Yet while their excitement and delight grow as we walk along the cobbled streets of the oldest part of the city down to the river bank, and then make our way across the handsome suspension bridge towards the flat, late nineteenth-century city of the opposite side, I am seized by a desire to show them the other city, my city, or at least the city that has become the focus of my private mythology about this nation and its people. I

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