PAUL NEUBURG
I
I swing round in amazement ; I see a man unfolding the local paper-
I'm on the point of walking over to him before realizing where I am.
This persists for the next six weeks. I can always believe that those I'm
with are Hungarians, but the rest, the waiter, the bus conductor,
people in the street or the cinema, remain natives, foreigners, as they've
been for a decade. My brain simply can't adjust itself.
I drive on. The road is good, much better than I'd expected. And
rain has begun to fall which also makes me happy. For some reason,
the landscape has lived in me as lifeless and arid. A political image,
I suppose. Now rain
is
falling, the road glistens, the grass and trees
are drenched, a rich green. There's a smell of acacias. On the radio,
one of the stations has excerpts from an opera, the other a series, "The
Szab6 Family" which has been going for years. I watch the rhythms,
savor the accents of their speech. Their preoccupations are decidedly
bourgeois.
"Narrator:
Bracsek decides to come back a day early from
his stay at the company rest home on Lake Balaton. He goes to the
hardware shop where his wife is working. But she's not there! Nor is
Forg6. Another salesgirl tells him that (insinuating) they've taken
time off together. . . . (Creaking of door is heard.)
Bracsek:
I kiss
your hand, Miss." In the old days, he'd either have breezed' in with
"Liberty, Comradine!" or be s,oon revealed as a bourgeois degenerate
and probably a stooge of the enemy. Would be fascinating
to
read
a batch of scripts for social analysis.
Budapest. As I read the sign, reading it aloud, enunciating each
vowel as best I can, a strange heat dashes down my back and I
shiver and have to swallow.
Immediately I lose my way and just press on, hoping to end up
somewhere familiar. Night has fallen. The streets are dark, worse lit
even than New York. Neon signs have letters missing. State firms,
formed in the fifties, had a passion for calling themselves by crazily
contorted abbreviations. Half blacked out, they look even crazier.
Then suddenly the Danube, just across from the Parliament
building, a red star glowing ,on its spire. (A girl, a Communist, asks
me a week later, looking across from the same spot, "Now isn't that
ugly? Out of style, spoils the whole building.") I look for the new
Elizabeth Bridge, pride of the town. Justly. Blown up during the war,
it remained a wreck for some twenty years, then they rebuilt it a
beauty. I'm told that for weeks after the opening ceremony people
went there to see it,
to
touch it, to hang flowers on it when the of·
ficial ones had dropped off.
I t gives on to one of the main thoroughfares. I know it by heart.
