Chapter 5. Alice was enthralled
The news from the streets hasn’t changed. The last bulletin Alice heard confirmed that the drivers are settling in for yet another night. She wishes she could understand the news in Hungarian. The young Americans — they have Hungarian names like Steve Kovacs and Johnny Faludy — who staff Radio Bridge may be getting things wrong, and they certainly don’t seem to know very much about the state of negotiations. They are reduced to filing amateurish reports from border crossings, bridges, airports.
One of the American vice-presidents of Tungsram, the big Hungarian company that General Electric bought last year, is being interviewed at the moment on his arrival on the Malév flight from Amsterdam.
“If I’d had any idea of the chaos here in Hungary,” he is saying, “I’d have stayed on for a few more days in New York.”
Daniel had to change at Amsterdam too, Alice realizes. He must have been on the same flight.
On the outskirts of Budapest, the passengers off the Malév flight are looking at one another in dismay by the doors of the new Ferihegy airport building.
Most of them shrug helplessly or in disgust and retreat back inside the overcrowded building to wait for eventual rescue. A few, singly or in twos and threes, begin to walk in the direction of the city.
It is a familiar enough sight, in 1990, to see weary men, women, and children carrying bags and infants over long distances on quiet roads. But it is a familiar sight elsewhere, not here in Budapest, especially not here on the normally busy airport road.
And these are like no other refugees. These are more or less prosperous world travellers: that fit Tungsram executive in the Burberry struggling with his laptop computer and his garment bag; a Hungarian chemical engineer with his three-year-old son on his shoulders, his wife teetering behind him in high heels; and a Canadian journalist pulling a moulded plastic suitcase behind him like a recalcitrant puppy.
Among them, walking alone, is a dark-skinned man of medium height who might be taken for a Roma. In Hungary, a man with Daniel’s umber skin and his black eyes and his fine hook of a nose is called a cigány. And a cigány is viewed as one of the wretched of this part of the earth, despised, feared, and alien.
Only this dark-skinned man cannot be a cigány, can he? — walking with these glossy western travellers, dressed casually in beige cotton pants and a bottle-green sweater, his straight black hair escaping from its elastic band at the nape of his neck. This is someone who is not a cigány in among the refugees who are not destitute. This is Daniel.
Does Alice still love Daniel? At a certain stage in a long marriage, the question becomes meaningless. Daniel is part of Alice, and she of him. Loving him is an expression of her love of the part of herself that fell in love with him the day she met him. She has made Daniel her home. But Daniel is changing in ways that are leaving Alice behind. Though she hasn’t realized it yet, she hardly knows him anymore.
Daniel is at that crucial point in his career where it may or may not take off. He’s into his forties already, and a man gets only so many chances. Against all the evidence Alice believes she and Daniel will somehow pull through. Either that or she cannot face the possibility that they won’t.
“What a nuisance,” is what Daniel says when he phones Alice. He’s made it to the far end of the Metro line in Pest, and should be at Moscow Square in half an hour.
“Do you have much luggage? Shall I ask downstairs if Zoltán can go down to meet you?”
Slow down, she tells herself, take it easy, don’t be so eager.
“No need. I have only the one bag, thank God, or I wouldn’t have made it this far.”
“Life is never dull here in the wild east,” she says, and then regrets it. It irritates Daniel when she acts the smart aleck. “Cancel that last statement. What I really want to say is that I missed you and I’m glad to hear you. I thought you’d never make it back here. Are you all right?”
“Pretty fed up, actually. Listen, we’ll be cut off in a second. I don’t have any more change for the phone.”
“I love you madly.”
The line goes dead.
As Alice replaces the receiver, Peter looks up from the table.
Pretending not to notice, she turns back into the kitchen, where she stares out of the open window onto the steep little street.
Gólya Steps may really have been steps, once upon a time, but is now a paved street flanked with ancient poplars, willows, and pines, wild roses, brambles, and nettles. At the top, on the corner, stands Peter’s school and the low apartment building where Gábor and Veronika live on the top floor.
Another apartment building crouches at the bottom of the little hill, with a sunny wall favoured by lizards all summer long, a garden full of geese, and a balcony on which a newborn baby wails at times and is picked up and sung to. Across from this an unfinished house gapes like a skull over the lower slope of the Hill of Roses.
In between are only two houses. The one is flashy and new, four marble floors of the Spanish-style splendour that appeals to Hungary’s most prosperous new entrepreneurs.
The other, Ester’s villa, was once the only building on Gólya Steps. The whole side of the street was once its garden. At that time, the entire hillside was as wild as the field beside the dirt road, and there really was a stork’s nest here. For “Gólya” means “stork,” though Alice has resisted translating Hungarian street names into English since the day she discovered a magical path along the Danube named after Liszt that lost some of its lustre when she learned that “Liszt” means “flour.” Frank Flour Walk just doesn’t have the evocative sibilance of Ferenc Liszt sétány.
And gólya, which is pronounced as “goya,” is a far more beautiful word than stork. Stork had meant nothing to Alice. The word itself sounds ugly in English, if not faintly comical. Certainly she had never seen a real stork, there being none in Canada, none in Ireland.
The closest she had ever come to a stork before now was the inane cartoon figure on wrapping paper and cards when Peter was born. And that cartoon bird, now that she comes to think of it, isn’t always a stork at all, but a pelican, as often as not, with an infant in its pouch. The idea that the stork brings babies has been so debased and commercialized in North America that it’s lost its power to amaze.
But what an idea it is, really, what an image for life going on, year in, year out, generation after generation, from the dawn of time, for ever and ever.
The stork is so much a part of Hungarian folklore that it crops up in everyday conversation without ever really becoming a subject for discussion. It is no more and no less remarkable to Hungarians than the air they breathe, the water they drink; it is taken for granted.
Alice has never seen a photograph or a postcard of a stork or its nest. Not one of her guidebooks bothers mentioning what may be the most astonishing sight on the Hungarian landscape. So Alice was entirely unprepared when she first saw the great white magyar stork perched in its enormous nest on top of a telephone pole.
Elegant on its thin legs, regal, and utterly alien, the bird curved its neck gracefully and peered down at Alice with an expression saved from disdain by large dark eyes. When it spread its black-tipped wings and swept unhurriedly over the village towards the river, Alice was enthralled.
It was in describing her attachment to this villa on Gólya Steps that Eszter, who has never lived anywhere else in all her forty-six years, once in all seriousness explained that the stork brought her here. And though she looked distractingly like an outsized child of the 1940s as she spoke, there was something about the mixture of fantasy and starkness in her — her hair like Medusa’s, her face like a death mask — that she didn’t sound crazy, especially not to Alice. It has surprised Alice here to find herself inclined once again to believe anything possible. Poised on the side of the hill, the villa itself seems to Alice straight out of a fairy tale, a house sure to be familiar with astonishment.
Alice said as much to Daniel once, but he did not respond, and she’s kept her thoughts on the matter to herself since then. Daniel hasn’t taken to Hungary much at all. The beer is sour, the wines are suspicious, and the pálinka tastes like radiator fluid.
Vicious dogs stalk the streets, and their shit decorates every other doorstep and every children’s playground. Flies hang around every butcher’s shop, and no wonder, with the meat hanging on hooks in the summer heat. And for all their vaunted swimming pools, the Hungarians seem not to have heard of lifeguards. Cheap shoddy goods are all you can buy, and such western goods as you can find cost more here than at home.
More Hungarians smoke than any other people on earth except for the Yugoslavians; they smoke when they drive, when they walk, when they eat, when they change their babies diapers. The stench of diesel fumes and two-piston engines is in the air wherever you go, and the men drive so dangerously that you take your life in your hands each time you go out on the street. And what, exactly, is so romantic about that?
Even the plays Daniel has seen have too often been disappointing and derivative: a Richard IIl memorable chiefly for inadvertently comic executions, and a tired musical production of Orwell’s 1984 that might have had some point — and some clout — three or four years earlier. The people Daniel hangs out with, theatre people mostly, are all city types.
And not all city types, Alice has discovered, are as tolerant as they pretend to be. Some are anxious to demonstrate their openness to other cultures, but they all but despise their own.
An art critic once explained to Alice that most Hungarians tend to belong to one tribe or the other. It has very little to do with where you actually live, he had explained patiently to her at a party one evening, but you’re either urban, liberal, and more or less elitist, or you’re folksy, populist, conservative, and more or less nationalistic. What side you’re on determines everything from the music you love to the clothes you wear.
And if you’re a city type, you have a scathing disregard for the countryside and everything and everyone it it. Much later in the evening, thinking perhaps that he had moved on to some other subject, she overheard that same critic expressing contempt for anyone who has ever painted a field, a creature, a plant, or, worst of all, a child.
If that was liberalism, God help us all.
Admittedly, she finds that the populists who protest too loudly and too long about the virtues of the simple folk, the Magyar People with a capital P, are worrying in other ways. More worrying, especially when they slide from awareness of cigányok, Arabs, Jews, blacks, Orientals and anyone and anything they consider “cosmopolitan” into distrust and, in some cases, hatred. Is this nationalism? That’s what it’s called, all over Central and Eastern Europe, but it’s more like tribalism — its boundaries are local and ethnic rather than national.
Whatever it is, it’s pernicious. Daniel has been on the alert for it since he left Goa. He has suffered from the popularity of Asians at school in Nairobi, and then in Enoch Powell’s London. He has been made aware of the undisguised scepticism of white theatre artists on two continents, of the supressed surprise of English Canadians, and of the anxieties of ultra-nationalists in Quebec — and even he has been taken aback by the unabashed interest that Hungarians take in the colour of his skin.
Who can measure such things? You don’t have to look too far beneath the surface to find racism in any society. Maybe this part of world is just less hypocritical about it.
Growing up in the North of Ireland, Alice developed an allergy to tribalism as others develop an allergy to wasps. She spent the first years of her life near Cushendall in County Antrim, on a coast road lined with whin and fuchsia and wheeled around with kestrels.
Just across the water was the fist of Scotland — the Mull of Kintyre, looking, on a clear day, like just another headland on the Irish coast. A few miles further north was the Giant’s Causeway, and inland were the nine Glens, the cairns and the fairy hills.
The eldest of four, and the only girl, Alice spent her childhood here looking out to sea and up to the skies, believing that anything was possible.
That ended when her father died. She was the age that Peter is now. Her mother took a job in Antrim, and they all moved into a small row house with the windows painted shut. Alice would get her brothers off to school in the morning and make their tea in the afternoon, tidy the house and iron the clothes. She didn’t complain, and she didn’t dream. She just took to staying out of the house for as long as she dared, sharpening her tongue, biding her time.
She was sixteen when she ground her way through her “O” level exams. So much for school, and not a minute too soon. But how to get away from home? The girls who were leaving home were bookish girls who wanted to study. Alice had a better idea. The photography course at the technical college would be her ticket.
She took the only job she was offered when she finished the course. It was a job with the police, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, in Belfast. Her brothers’ insults had a harder edge than usual when she came home with the news, and her mother was appalled. It hadn’t occurred to Alice that anything she did would matter to anyone.
It was the autumn of 1968 when she began working, and the troubles were starting. What Alice calls the crack — the talk — in the department was quick and clever, but the work itself was at its best when dull. She learned how to make it all dull, how to turn it all into routine documentary work, providing a photographic record of damage to people and property.
Years later, she once caught herself wondering how she stuck it. But in those days she could sit through a film like Ken Russell’s The Devils eating Mars bars and Fry’s Chocolate Cream. She had become the most matter-of-fact of young women, and even her jokes were mistaken for seriousness. She had a job, and she had her own life. She bought herself sensible shoes and three shirt-dresses at Marks and Spencer’s. It was a far sight better than being at home.
She came out of it all with a bend in her nose — broken by a lout in the Shankill who rammed her camera into her face — and a smart answer for everyone.
What got her to move on? Was there a child, maybe, some bloodied, broken little body. was there anyone, anything, that impinged? She doesn’t remember. All she knows is that one day she’d had enough — of the job, the place, and every last Tom, Dick and Harry in it.
The Tate Gallery in London was advertising for a staff photographer. Alice wrote a letter and sent in some of her work. Were they horrified by the photos she sent them? Were they just convinced that anyone who’d lived all her life in Northern Ireland needed a break? She never asked.
They offered her a job photographing Elizabeth Siddal as a wan Beatrice and a drowning Ophelia. Maybe, someone suggested soon after she arrived in London, they liked her pre-Raphaelite hair and her long bent nose.
Ophelia photographs Ophelia? It’s as plausible as any other reason, and it’s just the kind of inanity that might have appealed to the poseurs at the Tate. Redheads are a dime a dozen in Ireland. She’d never given her hair a moment’s thought before, just washed it once a week and cut it once a year. But suddenly it had become part of some idea about Ireland that turned her stomach. She went out then and there and cut it short.
