THE LOT: The Budapest of My Imagination
It was my husband’s 45th birthday in November 1989, and we went out to lunch.
I never went out to lunch. András and I never went out to lunch. There simply was no time in his life or in mine for such luxuries, but we did have reasons to celebrate — and plans to make.
The Berlin Wall had been crumbling for months before it came down that November. András had been watching the news with uncommon interest, both professionally, as a political scientist, and personally, as a boy who became a refugee when he and his family fled Soviet tanks during the 1956 Uprising.
His life was now full of teaching at Concordia University and consulting work; mine was filled with teaching at John Abbott College, publishing Matrix magazine, and editing fiction mss. for Véhicule Press. Both our lives were brimming over with our marriage, our three sons, our big house, a yellow Labrador named Hector, and our writing and research; I’d just finished writing my book on Hugh MacLennan’s Two Solitudes.
András was going to be on sabbatical from May 1990, and I’d had good news about a research grant that would release me from teaching for the next three years. We were going to leave this busy life behind, pack up our children and Hector, a few books and other belongings, and spend the year in Budapest.
That was the plan. And that was the start of the Budapest of my imagination.
It did work out, in most ways, but there were unpleasant surprises, along the way. The nastiest was learning that the man who rented our house was a crook. The loveliest was the fairytale hillside villa we moved into in Budapest in June, 1990. The fact that we ended up living there for two years rather than one was hardly any surprise at all.
The most miraculous surprise, for me, was that I was able to write a novel in Hungary.
We returned to Montreal in the summer of 1992, and Birds of Passage was published by Signature Editions in 1993. It’s been out of print for years and now, in a process of rediscovery, I’ve begun to serialize it here and here.
My own rediscovery of that early book, certainly, as I hadn’t reread it for decades.
A rediscovery of the Budapest of that pivotal time, when the first post-communist government elected in Hungary in June 1990 stumbled into something close to anarchy.
And a rediscovery of the hope that fledgling government represented — a hope already being dashed in our first months in Hungary, and a hope that looks poignantly, tragically over-optimistic when viewed in the dark light of today’s Hungary and today’s world.
I’ve never been an expert on Hungary.
I was a foreigner there with a limited understanding of the language. I had been there several times before, though, starting in 1972, and had always been one of only a few foreigners there. I was in the privileged position of having close contact with András, who is an expert, and with many other Hungarians through his extended family and close friends who had been dissidents under the old regime. And I had daily contact, in my halting Hungarian and my almost-forgotten German, seldom in French and English, with neighbours, my sons’ friends, shopkeepers, my language teachers, and a widening circle of Hungarian writers and artists.
At that November lunch in Montreal, I dreamed I might have time to write while we were in Budapest. And I did start writing almost immediately after we settled in, keeping a journal, taking notes, working on what I thought might be an essay or perhaps a memoir.
Only then, sometime in October 1990, history caught my imagination, and I found myself writing dialogue, that fall, structuring a story, and creating characters. I kept going all the next year, telling no one what I was doing, hardly daring to hope this would become a novel.
I was doing my research work, too, and I was editing fiction mss. for Véhicule Press and working remotely with Matrix co-editor Kenneth Radu, designer Susan Valyi, and business manager Diane Hibbard on upcoming issues of the magazine — and, as the months went on, putting together a special issue of stories, poems and images by the writers, translators and artists I was meeting in Hungary. The title of that issue is “The Budapest of the Imagination.”
The rediscovery of Birds of Passage is the rediscovery, for me, of a city I loved and once knew quite well, for a foreigner.
It’s the rediscovery, too, of the person I was then — I was 40 years old in 1990–and the warily hopeful and bedazzled eyes through which I saw that city at a time when it was impossible to guess what the future had in store for its world-weary denizens, its avian populations, myself, or my family.
Like this new Hungary, my literary career was just a fledgling in 1990. Blue Metropolis was nowhere on the horizon. I had no way of knowing I would one day be a publisher of other writers’ books. And the reason I never told anyone I was writing a novel is that I was afraid it would never get published.
I present it now for readers interested in a great city living through a period of turmoil; for anyone curious about the process of becoming a writer; for those few who will notice how literary mores have evolved in the intervening decades; for everyone mesmerized, as I am, by the power of the imagination; and for amateur ornithologists everywhere.
