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:: articles Go Back to Journalism and Essays TLS 8 February 2008 James Morrison Roman Polanski Contemporary Film Directors series 191pp. University of Illinois Press. £10.99 For the incentive to revisit the exciting universe of one of cinema’s giants, one ought to be grateful to Morrison. But here is a sample of his prose: “The director’s attentions to the oppressions of social utility could be called Foucauldian, if the filmmaker’s art were theoretical and polemical instead of visual and dramatic, or if the tendency of these ubiquitous structures to elude perceptibility even while demanding total visibility of all they elect to acknowledge were not a basic condition of his interest in them.” Roman Polanski probably didn’t know this. And judging from the sparse interview excerpts at the end of the book, he wouldn’t care. “I like all cinema,” he says, “What I like least is blabla and pseudo-intellectual gimmickry.” Morrison is not guilty of intellectual gimmickry, but the inert prose of his book is in direct contrast with Polanski’s playfully disquieting style. This, inevitably, is the responsibility of the editor as much as the author, both of whom seem to think that writing for an academic audience is a license to obscure meaning. But once you hack your way through the frozen prose, you find that this is a valuable addition to the already substantial field of Polanski studies. It is insightful and richly informative not only about Polanski’s trail-blazing, difficult-to-classify films, but also about the cultural context of the past few decades. It steers clear of biographical intrusions and brilliantly ‘organises’ the director’s work into several cultural periods, arguing that genre means little in Polanski’s daringly eclectic artistic sensibility. Morisson’s theory-informed interpretation of Polanski’s universe is incisive, from the early classics of 60s art cinema such as Cul-de-Sac, Repulsion and Knife in the Water, to ‘New Hollywood’ films like Chinatown, and historical dramas Tess and Macbeth. His analysis of the moral and thematic threads running through Polanski’s work will enrich your viewing: the sado-masochism explicitly stamped on Death and the Maiden and Bitter Moon is already present in Cul-de-Sac. For its unsettling blend of comedy, horror and melodrama, Rosemary’s Baby is also given much space here, and Morrison interprets The Tenant as Polanski’s self-parodying answer to critics’ attempts at biographical readings. The closing chapter, Discovering the Figural, is a heavily theoretical take on the Polanskian aesthetic, and reinforces the author’s argument that Polanski deals primarily with the visible world, and that ultimately, his is ‘a cinema of surfaces’. With Borges Alberto Manguel Times Literary Supplement, 30 June 2006 Alberto Manuel WITH BORGES 77pp, Telegram In a Buenos Aires bookshop called Pygmalion, a blind old man approached a teenaged shop assistant and asked him to be his reader. The year was 1964, and you’ve guessed the names of the two protagonists. In this slender but perfectly formed memoir of his four years spent in the giant shadow of Borges, Alberto Manguel paints a vivid, humane portrait of the multiple enigma that is Borges the writer, the reader, and the man. And since we have one of the world’s greatest bibliophiles writing about another, the first thing that strikes us about Manguel’s recollections is the literary bustle in the world of Borges and his bookish young apprentice. Borges thought of the Universe as a giant library, and sure enough here are entire constellations of writers Borges admired - Stevenson, Henry James, Kipling, Dante, quoted multilingually (including his own books of which he demonstratively kept no copies), or dismissed outright - Goethe, Neruda, Thomas Mann, García Márquez, Lorca, Austen, Flaubert; indeed, as Manguel says, an entire history of literature could be constructed with the authors he rejected. This brings us to the second thing that stands out: the man himself, in all his prodigious prejudices, fantasies, and subversions. The narrative unfolds in two alternating time-plains: the past, where Manguel is an innocent witness of Borges’s eccentricities, and the present, where he analyses what took place in the library of Borges’ universe. For it is fair to say that Borges lived inside books, and that for him books were reflected in reality, not vice-versa. Just as he turned Buenos Aires into one of the great character cities of the world, Borges himself has become a near-fictional character. But while the popular Borgesian prototype is a blind librarian, Borges himself was a very human puzzle, and Manguel provides us with some of the pieces, both good and bad. We briefly meet Borges the bigot and racist; conservative Borges who detested the genius tango innovator Astor Piazolla; Borges the Europhile snob who couldn’t stand ordinary minds and for whom being Argentine was ‘an act of faith’; Borges shaking hands with the Argentine generals while they were murdering the best minds of the younger generation, but the great fantasist was too blinded by his hatred for Peronism to take note of politics, ‘the most miserable of human activities’. We also meet Borges the ironic wit, the cosmopolitan humanist, the lyrical philosopher, the creator of the Aleph where the entire universe converged in Buenos Aires, not in Paris. A Paradise that looked like the Vatican (his critique of El Greco) was the perfect Hell, and he positioned himself in direct opposition to all manner of dogma: ‘I’m the contrary of the Argentine Catholic. They believe but are not interested; I’m interested, but I don’t believe.’ But he did believe in books, more than he believed in himself. He genuinely considered himself primarily a reader, and even gifted the postman with the Italian edition of his work rather than keep it. Manguel remains in the shadow, but we know that the voiceless teenager would turn this experience into literary gems like ‘Borges in Love’ (Into The Looking-Glass Wood). We know that he in his turn would create labyrinths and mirrors of the mind. Borges the anglophile would have nodded in approval. By KAPKA KASSABOVA
For Bread Alone Mohamed Choukri Translated and introduced by Paul Bowles 213pp. Telegram. £9.99/ $14.95 Mohamed Choukri is one of Arab literature’s most unliterary figures, and this memoir, like his life, has followed a torturous course. First published in English in 1974 thanks to Paul Bowles’ translation and patronage, For Bread Alone appeared in French in 1980 and caused a splash. The Moroccan ban against it was only lifted in 2000, as if the degrading lives that homeless kids still lead in the Arabic world had been the book’s obscene fault. Prostitution, smuggling and drug-dealing thrived in Tangier of the ‘50s and ‘60s, and while American writers like Bowles and Burroughs went to the ‘Interzone’ in pursuit of imaginative thrills and handsome boys, the handsome boys themselves - Choukri included – had no time for imaginative lives as they were too busy selling themselves for bread. What is remarkable about Choukri’s life is not the extreme wretchedness of his early years, but the transition from an animal fight for survival to a decision to become literate in classical Arabic at the age of 20, resulting in his first published short story, Violence on the Beach, eleven years later. The post-illiteracy phase of his life is the subject of the sequel Streetwise (published by Saqi in 1996), but it is this first memoir which is the most ‘shattering in its impact’, in the words of another Tangier friend of Choukri’s, Tennessee Williams. Choukri remained a down-to-earth man even when he was awarded a chair in Arabic Literature at the Ibn Batouta College in Tangier, but he was naturally drawn to the transgressive American and European writers who haunted the cafés and brothels of Tangier. He even went on to write about their time in Tangier. Moreover, Choukri’s desperate, amoral narratives influenced Paul Bowles’ fiction, especially the novel The Spider’s Web, told from a poor Moroccan boy’s point of view. What is remarkable about this raw, vital story, galaxies away from the ‘misery memoir’ genre, is the absence of literary misery. There is no authorial rumination or adult angst here. We are instead in the engaging presence of a child born into famine (the first words he utters in the story are ‘Bread. Bread. Bread.’), family dysfunction, and social dysfunction. He grows up with the constant threat of violence, not least on the eve of Morocco’s independence. After marching across the Rif mountains with his family to a hopeful life in the town of Tetouan, he only finds himself helping his mother scavenge for crusts of bread and boiling them ‘sometimes with a little oil and pepper, sometimes without.’ In one of the book’s most harrowing scenes, young Mohamed witnesses the murder of his sickly brother by their rabid father. The family are too poor to pay for a grave, and each time Mohamed finds himself in the cemetery, he wonders just where his little brother lies. But it is his rough time in the back lanes and brothels of Tangier that makes this a unique Bildungsroman of the streets. It is superficially reminiscent of Jean Genet’s writing, but the similarity begins and ends with transgression. Unlike Genet’s deliberate narratives of crime, Mohamed’s story is that of an innocent forced into advanced knowledge of the jungle. There is no symbol, metaphor, or reminiscence here, only a harsh, unrelenting present of discovery at 11, 15, 20 years of age: women cry a lot, bleed, and are often treated badly, so he feels sorry for them but is delighted to find that their vaginas don’t bite; nobody in their right mind ‘marries a whore’; the world is even crueller than he thought because ‘not only those of my own family, but other people as well had power over me’; but good news - there are ways to fight back – ‘I can steal from anybody who uses me’. It is the vitality of the voice and the frank enjoyment the young narrator takes in discovering life’s pleasures that bring light into the story. And it is the moments of tenderness and unarticulated sorrow – for his mother, for the neighbours’ daughter, for the prostitutes he frequents, for his dead brother – that catch us unawares. This is where the seeds of the future writer germinate. When at 20 he finds himself in jail, a cell-mate scribbles on the wall two lines by a Tunisian poet which he then commits to memory, and he learns his most startling lesson yet: he is ‘illiterate and ignorant’. This is where the next journey begins. I wonder when Telegram will re-issue Streetwise. Perhaps when the 2005 Italian film of For Bread Alone, Il pane nudo, starring Said Taghmaoui (La Haine) gets into British cinemas? When he died of cancer in 2003, Choukri was buried in a Tangier cemetery close to the one where he slept on cardboard in the early homeless days. A deliberately circular ending, telling us that the road he travelled between that first cry for bread and the last books he wrote in the late 90s matters just as much today when desperate youths haunt the back-lanes of Tangier or risk their lives across the Gibraltar. By KAPKA KASSABOVA
METRO MAGAZINE, January 2006Someone Else’s War Kapka Kassabova A year ago, I found myself living in a British Army barracks. The reason, of course, was love. It all started in Berlin when an old friend from my university days visited me. We snatched a few weekend rendezvous before I had to return to New Zealand where he couldn’t join me because, as it happened, he was an officer in the British Army. His term didn’t finish for two years. A drama of separation began which lasted ten long, confusing months. Michael thought about leaving the army. The solution, or what looked like one, presented itself at an interview with his commanding officer before his unit left for Iraq. Asked for his view on the Iraq war, Michael gave it. His commander instantly barred him from going, to prevent demoralising the troops. With his ultimate reason for being in the army removed, Michael wrote a ‘statement of views’ to army HQs in Glasgow, outlining his offensive Iraq views, and asking to resign. Up in the distant, Orwellian HQs in Glasgow, irrevocable decisions were made about lives and careers. In the weeks of awaiting the verdict from Big Brother, we agonized about what kind of life to improvise for ourselves. When the answer arrived, I had already packed my bags, confident that the answer would be yes and we could live happily ever after, somewhere, somehow. We didn’t have the luxury of planning details - the only plan was to see each other without having to say goodbye next week. Surely the crusty generals up in Glasgow could see the truth in Michael’s letter and let him go. Surely we deserved a gust of favourable wind after the dead calm. The answer, of course, was “No.” No explanation, no comment. Michael was informally told that he was lucky not to get court-marshalled. ‘I’ll go AWOL’, he said on the phone in desperation. ‘I’ll just disappear.’ But this meant a Bonny and Clyde existence for a few years. He chose another year with the army. I arrived at the Royal Engineers Brompton Barracks in the grim maritime town of Chatham, ready to endure the army. We weren’t allowed to live in the married quarters outside the base, but Michael’s new commanding officer took pity on him and gave him special permission to receive a ‘guest’ in the Officers’ Mess. As the barrier lifted, flanked by armed guards, we stepped into our new life, starry-eyed as if we were walking along a tropical beach. I expected grisly communal showers and drunk soldiers prowling the corridors, but we moved into a top-floor en-suite room overlooking the barracks’ main square. Two quiet majors lived in the flats underneath. Before we entered our first shared dwelling, Michael warned me not to be shocked if his room was plastered with porn. ‘It’s a common prank: when a guy brings his girlfriend, his mates wallpaper his room with porn. They find it hilarious - public boys’ school humour, very British. Last time it was an Australian Captain and his fiancée from Brazil. She burst into tears when she saw his room. She didn’t take to the army.’ ‘Funny that.’ I said. Fortunately, the only decoration I found was a black silver fern flag draped outside the door. Michael took pride in being a Kiwi among the Brits. Sitting on the iron bed in our room, I decided that no matter the privations, this was my chance to glimpse a sub-culture I’d always held in contempt without knowing anything about it. It was Easter break when we arrived, and everyone was away. We ate supper in the Central Mess, at 4.30pm. Shorn sappers in tracksuits munched in silence. The rare officer was served by waiters and called ‘Sir’ in a separate room. Officers and other ranks (meaning lower) don’t mix outside social events. When we sat to eat with the ‘squaddies’, they didn’t speak or look at me – I was ‘Sir’s’ girlfriend. The British Army mirrors the social pathologies of Britain, but with a time-lag of about fifteen years in relation to modern life. Over Easter, the barracks were like a sanatorium. The few remaining patients had succumbed to lethargy: Gurkhas (Nepalese recruits) and Trinidadians shuffled among the stone buildings in rubber slippers, waiting for something to happen. These foreign recruits, like Michael and other ‘colonials’, had job-descriptions that included risking their lives for Britain. But they weren’t given British passports, nor the right to vote. The only thing that distinguished them from foreign legionnaires was that there were no ex-IRA terrorists among them. One day, the rest of the inmates returned, and a cheerful swagger filled the air. We now dined in the Officers’ Mess, a massive hall with tables that stretched into the distance like the British Empire. They were overseen by gigantic portraits of florid-faced generals. The pièce de résistance was a towering, expressionless Queen Elizabeth II with a corgi. At formal functions, Mr or Ms Vice, the appointed master of ceremonies, rose with a port-glass, bowed to the Queen, and declared: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, The Queen.’ ‘The Queen,’ everybody agreed. At such occasions, the grotesque wealth of the army was dusted off and displayed on tables. Mounted silver objects the size of small tanks represented various parts of “the Empire where the sun never set”: Nepal, Kenya, India. They were in fact loot from a previous era. But for some reason, such trophies are still purchased by the Messes at the officers’ expense who find that sums are missing from their wages “towards” the latest silver piece. At daily dinners, the cutlery was silver, the Royal Doulton china gilded, the dress conservative, and the food meat and three veges boiled to death. The new graduates from the military academy Sandhurst were pressed from a mould – clipped, humourless, earnest, with that public school air of superiority, especially over civilians and ‘other’ ranks. Somewhere along the training, they had lost their personalities in order to fit the officerly mould. It was only later in their careers that they became individuals. Everybody spoke in army-code. Michael’s OC, Officer Commanding, was an exceptionally unpleasant Scot I dubbed Codlips, who somehow managed to change girlfriends every few months. ‘I don’t do girlfriends,’ he said at dinner, ‘I call them my wing-commander.’ ‘Civvies’, army-code for civilians, were alien creatures, and on the whole losers and slobs lived in ‘civvie street’. Helen*, a fresh graduate with muscular calves, explained: ‘When I came out of Sandhurst and went into town, I couldn’t believe the people, so overweight. And what on earth were they wearing? I felt like a Martian.’ Duncan was a gawky captain with spiky hair and eczema. He made attempts at humour for my benefit: ‘These civvies, they’re everywhere, invading our ranks.’ Another officer quipped: ‘The only good civvie is a dead civvie.’ But that was just small talk. Small talk tyrannised dinner conversations. Some of these men would risk their lives, but the banter was always safe. In the space of two months, I had one interesting conversation - with visiting engineers from Norway’s army. They took a dim view of the Iraq war in crystal-clear English, much to their hosts’ embarrassment. When the scandal of British abuse of prisoners in Iraq hit the papers, a New Zealand friend emailed me: ‘I don’t know how you can resist dropping hints about hooding.’ It was hard. I studied the faces round the dinner table, trying to spot the potential torturers. But evil is banal. The shaved, jolly faces discussed nothing, and expressed nothing – not even disapproval. You’d think the war in Iraq was someone else’s war. And in a way, it was. It was the British government’s war. I ran into Duncan in the regimental gym where I worked out like a prisoner intent on staying in shape. ‘I gather your view of the army is somewhat tainted,’ Duncan grinned from his treadmill. ‘I take an open view. I probably wouldn’t join though.’ ‘I wouldn’t either. As an officer, I get bored. But at the end of the day, it’s a job. Besides, the army looks after me. I’ve been downgraded.’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘I don’t go on operations because I’m ill.’ ‘What have you got?’ Just then I sneezed. ‘Sneeze away from me, I’m on immuno-suppressants. I got some tropical disease in Kenya last year, and my immune system crashed.’ Duncan left and although I didn’t particularly like him, I missed him. I feared I wouldn’t meet anybody else at the barracks. My reclusiveness and the officers’ aloofness meant that I mostly talked to Alistair, the Mess manager, an ex-merchant seaman who had been to New Zealand twice but kept referring to Michael as ‘the Australian’. He warned me in advance what was for dinner, and did I like it? Did I have a choice? ‘I know,’ he sighed, ‘We’re on a budget.’ At one point, a shy Finnish chef appeared at the Mess, and the food suddenly improved – there was salmon! Life in the barracks was a mix of boarding school, prison, and summer camp. A former sapper of Michael’s was in jail for getting into a brawl. He wrote to Michael from the prison: ‘Its quiet (sic) good here, very similar to the army.’ The barracks were often silent, and pigeons cooed on the roof outside our room. Occasionally, a military helicopter roared overhead. From the haze of summer, a formation of uniformed men emerged, toy soldiers marching towards some destination around the corner. In the morning, a circle of crew-cut boys ran around a man with a megaphone through which he bellowed orders. PT, physical training. I sat at my laptop, trying to hold on to my world of words which suddenly seemed depressingly irrelevant. I shuffled between internet room, gym, and patrolled gates like a visiting alien, trying not to draw too much attention. To make a mobile phone-call, I had to leave the base because inside there was no signal. I lived in a state of jet-lag between my previous life and this ghostly residence. When a military band with gleaming trumpets and red trousers marched up and down the main square rehearsing ‘We are the champions’, the jet-lag was particularly severe. But the ‘champions’ were mostly conformists. One day we went to see a town flat where an acquaintance of Michael’s was renting with his girlfriend. Hamish was a Scot who’d been in the army ten years. His girlfriend had recently arrived from Australia, only to find that he was on call for Iraq. ‘I already did an Iraq tour. I totally disagree with our being there,’ Hamish said to Michael, ‘I resent risking my life for something I disagree with. This isn’t the way I want to live my life anymore. I want to move to Australia in 2 years’ time. Surf, chill out. But I can’t do what you did. You stood up for your beliefs. I admire that.’ Later, we found out that after Iraq, Hamish had quit prematurely and moved to Australia. He now owed the army £30,000 as penalty for resigning early. Clearly, he was prepared to pay the price. Most soldiers either had no opinions or only voiced their opinions privately, like Hamish. Officers are trained in leadership, but military leadership is in the service of ideological leadership, also known as ‘serving the Queen’. In the internet room which served as my life-line to the external world, a bespectacled guy just back from Iraq told Michael: ‘To be honest, we all feel betrayed and let down. We wanted to do something good, help the Iraqis, but our hands were tied. We didn’t have the kit, we spent our time protecting our security. But that’s all behind now, I want to move on.’ Onto what, I wondered. Isn’t war the ultimate raison d’être of a soldier? What greater job disappointment than fighting a war you don’t believe in, or feeling helpless in the field? That’s what surprised me most about the army: soldiers are there not because they like violence, or even exercise. It’s because they want the lifestyle and the cocoon of a large mother organization that gives them a generous pension and protects them from the larger world. Engineers in particular join because they become tradesmen: carpenters, builders, electricians, plumbers. Wars and military operations come as the cherry on the cake, if at all. ‘I’d have liked to do a tour,’ Sanjay said. Sanjay was a soft-handed Indian educated in Britain. He’d joined ‘for the experience’ and was resigning the same time as Michael. ‘I know the Iraq war wasn’t right, but I’d have liked to go out there. Just for the experience. Tat’s what they train us for.’ Sanjay went on to join a petroleum company in London, and to look for an Indian bride whose star-charts matched his. He just wasn’t too fussed about politics. He cried at Bollywood films and was the least violent person you’ll meet. So was Colonel James, a jovial Jamaican Brit, one of the few black high-ranking officers. He had a contagious, high-pitched laughter. He sat next to me at a ‘ladies’ dinner during which the ladies remained seated while the gentlemen rotated after each course. Over roast beef, Colonel James told me about visiting Jamaica and feeling like a foreigner. He told me about his wife’s ordeal with breast cancer, and we both wiped a tear. He kissed me every time he saw me after that, like a long-lost daughter. That dinner was a farewell for Lt Colonel Hansley or Richie, Michael’s universally adored CO, commanding officer, who was leaving after a brilliant career of twenty years. Richie had run all the marathons north of the Equator. He gave a gripping speech about all the times he’d been hospitalised for accidents - thirteen. His long-suffering wife, a Princess Di look-alike he’d met in Kenya, received a bouquet from the regiment and thanks for putting up with army life. But putting up with civvie life wasn’t easier. Later in the ‘ladies’ powder room’ I overheard her talking to another wife: ‘Actually, I’m scared. In the army, we support each other when the men are away. We’re in the same boat. In Civvie street, it’s different.’ ‘You’re right,’ said the other wife, ‘when we moved into our first house outside the army, I felt really isolated.’ Outside the glittery dinners, being an army wife is rotten. You move every few years, which makes jobs difficult - hence the popular profession of house-wife - or you stay put while your husband moves. You don’t see your man for months, and worry about him getting killed. You are forced into a community of army families, and the ‘civvie’ world becomes foreign. You are provided for by the army, but only through your husband who belongs to the army. For soldiers it’s even worse: they often commute on weekends to see their families at the other end of the country or even Germany. I was intrigued by the women soldiers. In Britain, they make up 7% of soldiers. What’s it like to be female and an officer, like beautiful June? Drunk at a function in her strapless frock, June confided that her superiors called her ‘darling’ and ‘sweetheart’ at board meetings. ‘I hate it. I hate my job. I’ll never have any authority!’ she drawled. June was fairly useless at her job, but she could do no wrong. She was protected and pampered by her male colleagues – and this is precisely what she resented. Another officer, an Australian, had joined for the adventure. Anna quit after five years, in the wake of a scandal that hit the tabloids. She’d had a relationship with her Sergeant, and breach of hierarchy is a serious offence in the army. Now she teaches English, her Sergeant is her husband, and they have a baby. ‘I prefer being an army wife,’ she emailed me, ‘It’s less stressful.’ Another woman, Heidi, was Britain’s woman sledge champion, courtesy of the army. ‘The guys are great. When you’re on operations, and you have to use the latrines or shower, they give you privacy. You just have to forget you’re a woman. Even if they can’t.’ But she was wearing high heels and a sexy dress. I had trouble imagining her in army boots. There was a switch somewhere in these women’s minds between female mode and soldier mode, a switch that men didn’t need. I’d always thought of women in the military as lost souls. Now I admired their versatility. Michael resigned this year. When I asked him whether he’ll miss anything, he said: ‘The loyalty. In the army, when you have to be somewhere at zero five hundred, you are. You can rely on people. And the humour. The dry British army humour. Like in that case in the Falklands war when a corporal hit a mine. Fuck, he screamed, I’ve lost my hand! No, you haven’t, his mate said. It’s over here.’ And the handless corporal probably laughed too. I met people like that, some of them ordinary soldiers with missing teeth, parochial views, and no love of ideas – but they were the corporal from the anecdote. One guy from Michael’s troop had risked his life twice in the Gulf War to prevent explosions near his unit. He was large, jolly, and probably plastered his mates’ rooms with porn, for all I know. Despite the philistinism and the conformity, I gained a sympathy for the military ethos I didn’t think I had in me. It’s pointless to reject armies. Better to look at who is in them and what they do. In the Engineers’ case, they go in after the destruction to rebuild again, or help de-mine the country. The army, it turned out, wasn’t a faceless killing machine. It was a bunch of mostly decent individuals with feelings, relationships, sometimes courage and integrity. Now, when I hear on the news about the death of a British soldier in Iraq, I don’t shrug with ‘c’est la vie, they shouldn’t have been there.’ I think, this could have been Michael if he hadn’t spoken up. Or Hamish who didn’t speak up. Or Duncan whose immune system had crashed. Or Anna who was after adventure. Or Richie who’d rather be running marathons. There at the wrong time, in what always turns out to have been someone else’s war.
METRO 2005 Middle-Europe Kapka Kassabova spends time in Budapest, examining what makes Hungarians the most eccentric Europeans. Kapka Kassabova is a New Zealand novelist, poet and travel writer. Her last travel story for Metro was about Berlin. The first thing you smell as you enter Budapest from the Pest-side and take in the Buda hilltop Palace behind the monumental Danubian bridges, is the dust of empire. The scale of its buildings and bridges recalls decades of wealth; the beauty and elegance of their design recalls the spirit of the Austro-Hungarian epoch. The extravagant Parliament building, a dead ringer for Westminster, is larger than its London model; the boulevards, chandelier-adorned cafes and sumptuous Art Nouveau facades were once matched only by Vienna; the baths were left by the Turks. Except that Budapest has a special charm, something you simply don’t find anywhere else. This is the Hungarian ingredient, the sting of paprika in the goulash. Non-Slavic, away from the troubled Balkans though bordering on them, and clearly destined for Europe, Hungary was always seen as an eccentric Eastern cousin to the Western patriarchs. The region was settled in turns by Romans, Huns (whose rule ended with Attila), Avars and, finally, the seven Magyar chieftains who came from the Urals and sowed the seeds of the future Hungary. Christianity was forced on the pagans in 1000 by a determined King Istvan, and as with most peoples of Eastern Europe, it became a defining feature of national identity against the onslaught of the Ottoman Empire. So far, so unremarkably European. But Hungary’s central location on Europe’s biggest river destined it to be continually up for grabs, and in the coming centuries Mongols, Turks, Austrians, Germans and Russians helped themselves to chunks, and at times all of it, leaving destruction and ugliness in their wake. Only the Hapsburg Empire was good news for Hungary: it built the Budapest that stands majestically today and gave semi-autonomous Hungary a solid base for the social reforms and architectural effervescence of the 19th Century on which the wretched Ottoman-ruled Balkans missed out. The architectural wonders of Budapest date from this period. As you wander around the streets and oak-lined avenues that have seen better times, you are startled by gargoyles, bas-reliefs, gilded frescoes and statues of buildings that haven’t been touched since the ravages of 1945. The good news ended with World War One. Hungary’s combination of ambition and misguided war-alliances translated into harsh facts: the punitive post-WWI Trianon Treaty stripped it of 75 per cent of its land, which was fed to neighbours Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia and Romania, dismembering the Hapsburg Empire in which Hungary had been a powerful player. In true Hungarian spirit, this down-sizing didn’t stop Hungarians from inflicting terrible damage on themselves, if not to their neighbours, in the next war when once again they took the wrong side. Hitler promised Hungary its former glory, and the results were a full-blown Holocaust for the Hungarian Jews, many Hungarian lives, destruction of 40 per cent of national wealth and Soviet domination for the next half century. Hungarians are conscious that every armed conflict Hungary has staged has been crowned with failure, and a tragic, defeatist thread runs through the national psyche. While most anthems sing the glory of the land and its people, the Hungarian anthem pleads for divine support in its continuing struggle with its foes, and bemoans a country “torn by misfortune”. Hungarian is the most outlandish of European languages, in fact it’s not even in the European family. With that other European exile, Finnish, it sits on a lonely Asiatic branch of the world language tree, known as Finno-Ugric. There, they don’t even understand each other. A German poet once remarked that Hungarian is the only language with Latin script in which not even the word for pharmacy rings a bell: it is “gyógyszertár”; restaurant is “étterem”; university is “egyetem”. Hungary itself is “Magyarország”. I walked around Budapest looking for a street-name with five consecutive consonants, having established that clusters of three or four are the norm, as in Bajcsy-Zsilinszky Utca, one of the main boulevards. (But, to be fair, “zsex” and “zsinagóga” are okay.) Another surprise is the reversal of first and last names, without which Hungarians don’t recognise their own names. When I got lost looking for the statue of the leader of the 1956 uprising against the Soviet regime, I turned to passers-by for help. “Imre Nagy?” I asked, having given up trying to elicit foreign languages from the bemused locals. (Hungarian, being such a hard language to get into, also seems impossible to get out of, which explains the generally non-existent foreign-language proficiency of Hungarians.) The famous name produced blank faces, and I was beginning to think that the Hungarians have very short memories, when I came across a woman who spoke rudimentary English. “Nadj Imra”, she smiled and guided me to the statue. On the way past the stunning gothic parliament, she pointed out the small brass balls marking bullet-holes in the Ministry of Agriculture building, and a plaque commemorating the Bloody Thursday in October 1956 when the uprising led by progressive premier Nagy ended in bloodshed. It was a protracted revolution which started off promisingly velvet. But when, encouraged by Western noises of support, Nagy announced that Hungary was quitting the Warsaw Pact, the Soviets sent in the tanks. The UN was busy with the Suez crisis. Nobody came to save the Hungarians and over 2000 were killed in this square, several thousand wounded and many more jailed. In the House of Terror museum, which documents the different shades of terror visited on the Hungarian people in the 20th Century, a recorded female voice lists unrelentingly, chillingly, the names of those who died in the uprising. Among the executed was Nagy himself. His statue stands over a small bridge, poignantly turned towards the river and the Parliament, anticipating better times for Hungary. Those times have finally come. On May 1 this year, Hungary joined the European Union amidst official celebrations. Budapesters were encouraged to dump unwanted possessions in a central square, as a symbol of the final break with an unwanted past, and the bridges were closed off for parties. But talking to educated Budapesters, you feel that this isn’t a life-changing event. Márta*, a 22 year-old medical student, tells me that for her generation it was already easy to travel around Europe, and this won’t make a huge difference, unless you want to emigrate. Which Márta doesn’t, and nor do her friends: “It’s nice to travel, maybe study somewhere in Europe, but only for two years. Then come home,” she says. “Nobody wants to be a foreigner forever.” A good thing too, because as EU legislation stands, the West hasn’t fully opened its doors to migrant workers from the East. Being in the same club doesn’t make everyone equal. The greatest perk of EU membership is access to European money for businesses and national projects. Already, there is considerable foreign investment in Hungary. There is also a healthy five billion euro fund in Brussels available to small and medium enterprises in the new nation-members. Small Hungarian businesses, however, have a poor record of scoring EU money, due to crippling local bureaucracy, a rigid approach to technology, a reluctance to show their book-keeping records and corruption. As a result only 10 per cent of Hungarian applications for such funds succeed. In the prediction of Budapest Sun columnist Johh Hayes, it may be some time before Hungarian private enterprise plugs firmly into the lucrative EU subsidies. As to making a living, a computer specialist at the University of Budapest told me that to have a life of moderate comfort, he needs to run his own consultancy business on top of the academic job. The process of economic surgery is long and still painful. The Hungarian state airline Malev is up for sale, and a Chinese airline is deemed its likely buyer. Funnily enough, Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros has 15 per cent stakes in the airline but Soros also has stakes in many East European ventures and charities. The biggest of those is his Central European University, whose aim is to cultivate the new elite of the former communist block. And as that elite expands, so does the university — run from an imposing neo-Classical building, it has taken over an entire block of a central city street. There are, as usual, Euro-sceptic nationalistic grumbles from the right. Although foreign investment in Hungary and expanded foreign markets for Hungarian industries assured a rapid economic growth in the 1990s, right-wing parties warn about selling out to the EU and losing Hungary’s national character to a globalised Europe. There are also lone but loud voices coming from the ultra-right, which bemoan the “Zionist conspiracy” against Hungary and “Israeli interests behind the Socialists”. The current Socialist government is seen by many as a disappointment but it was elected in the wake of a previous disappointment with the Conservative Fidesz government (Federation of Young Democrats). The latter has disgraced itself over the years, along with other conservative parties, by failing to criticise anti-Semitic and anti-Roma statements from the frankly neo-Nazi party MIEP (Hungarian Justice and Life Party), and even striking political deals with it. But if there are shades of darkness in current political life, it’s because some skeletons of recent history are still locked in the national cupboard even as a fresh layer of paint is being applied to the gorgeous fin de siècle buildings along the waterfront for tourists on boat-cruises to admire. Along the Pest riverbank, a gilded ghetto of luxury hotels and kitsch tourist restaurants has crept into the central city. As the Gipsy accordionist plays his tunes for dining tourists, the Danube flows quietly under its glittering bridges and the Buda Palace across the river is lit up like a Viennese cake, you’d be forgiven for thinking that all is well here: the buildings are beautifully restored, the food is sturdy and filling, the delicious wine lives up to its reputation, the Gypsy music is thrillingly sad, the urban infrastructure is surprisingly good, the trams tinkle along the river picturesquely. But soon the accordionist smiles with his wrecked teeth, and you might care to ask how much he is paid, or in which Nazi camp his parents perished. Then your journey into the heart of Budapest begins. A good observation point for surveying downtown Pest is the famous cafe Gerbaud, in the central Pest square of Vörösmarty. Stone buildings line the square, stolid and immovable as the Hapsburg empire once was. The discordant note in the composition is a brown Communist-era building, wrapped in plastic. Its future is a mystery, like that of many buildings in the throes of reconstruction, including the elegant neo-classical New York Palace in another part of Pest. Once home to a famous writers’ cafe, it was so loved by its impecunious patrons that they threw the keys in the Danube so it would stay open all night. A few weeks before my visit, it had been closed and wrapped up in plastic sheets by its new owner, and not even the builders knew its new purpose. In Vörösmarty Square, night-buskers play for a few hundred forints (1NZD=130Ft). Further down the main commercial street of Vací, with its luxury-brand stores, you will find the shopping arcade Parisi Udvar, where neo-Gothic meets the Orient, originally planned as a savings bank. In the Italianate baroque Franciscan church across the road where I strayed in one evening, a communion was taking place and many in the audience were on their knees, praying to various painted saints. The church commemorates the flood of 1838 during which the whole inner city of Pest was submerged and most buildings collapsed. At Gerbaud, the steep bill comes as a nasty surprise, a hint that Budapest now takes its cue from exploitative Prague: if you overcharge, you will become Paris overnight and more tourists will come. And they do: the cafe is packed with sandaled tourists, a far cry from its former elegant clientele of ladies in furs. What remains are the heavy chandeliers, the layered cakes, and the pervasive air of nostalgia. Budapest’s last golden age was the belle époque preceding the Great War, when Hungary was the beneficiary of the prosperous Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy. The eventual price of this alliance was high but in the meantime, Budapest had a ball. Its favourite venue was the famous Gellért Hotel and Baths in Buda, which hosted balls on a glass floor over the pool. The Gresham Palace in Pest is another nostalgic monument to pre-war times: its white façade with gilded art nouveau motifs is the stuff of fairy-tales. It has seen a good deal: the Nazis blowing up the nearby bridge, the Red Army warming itself by burning the mahogany furniture, the theft of its marble stairs. In the 1980s, it housed a Chinese restaurant, and in the 1990s a casino. Restored from these serial ravages by a Canadian-Hungarian developer, it is now the five-star Four Seasons Hotel. By contrast, a building that has hardly changed since its inception is the frivolous Post Office Savings Bank, where Art Nouveau meets faux Russian Orthodox in a fabulous green and yellow spiked roof which the architect designed, allegedly, “for the birds to enjoy”. The columns of bees creeping up the façade symbolise accumulating money. Budapest used to be two cities — the symbolic Buda and pragmatic Pest — until well after the failed Hungarian revolution for independence in the mid 19th Century. The first permanent bridge between the cities was the majestic Széchenyi Lanchíd (as with most Hungarian words, attempts to pronounce it are futile) or Chain Bridge, named after its instigator, the remarkable reformist, city benefactor and writer Count Szechenyi. The engineer was so proud of his achievement that, in Hungarian style, he challenged anyone to fault him under threat of drowning himself in the Danube. At the other end of the stretch of the Danube that defines the city is Margit Híd, a bridge connected to the river-island of Margit, a favourite retreat for Budapesters. The bridge was blown up by the Nazis, pedestrians, trams and all, killing hundreds. Now, from the 150° angle in the middle, Buda and Pest merge across the Danube into an enchanting vista of colours and curves. From any lookout point in Budapest, you will see bursts of mosaic-like colours amid the stone and brick: Budapest’s brightly tiled roofs and domes, reminiscent of Russian Orthodox and Byzantine architecture. There is a story about an old Hungarian peasant interviewed by a foreigner. “I was born Austrian,” the man says. “Then I became Hungarian. Then German, Russian, and now I’m Hungarian again.” “How interesting,” the foreigner says. “You’ve travelled so much.” “I never left my village,” replies the old man. Nothing exemplifies the national story of metamorphosis better than the hilltop castle district of Buda and the neighbouring 140 metre-high dolomite cliff, Gellért, crowned by a citadella. The cliff is named after an 11th Century bishop who converted the Hungarians to Christianity under the rule of the venerated King István. When the king died, Gellért was placed in a wheelbarrow by the enemies of Christianity and sent down the hill. His statue now stands above a waterfall in the cliff-side, overlooking the city — one of many male saints in this city of myriad churches. King István himself has the city’s most glorious basilica named after him; it displays his mummified hand in a glass casket. His is also the city’s most celebrated statue: he sits astride a horse, a saint’s halo around his helmeted head. More symbolic is the Gellért citadel, built by the Austrians in the wake of the Hungarian revolution in order to control the rebellious city. Only decades later, when Hungary had become semi-autonomous, parts were symbolically destroyed, hence the impression it gives of ancient ruins. The Nazis holed up here until the Red Army took the city. In the citadel stands the ironic Statue of Liberty: a 14 metre woman holding a palm leaf. Commissioned by the fascist inter-war regent Admiral Horthy in the wake of a short but nasty Communist reign for his son who fought against the ‘Red Terror’, it was later recycled as a monument to the Red Army ‘liberators’. A bronze Soviet soldier was added to the statue by the same architect, who had to move with the times. The soldier has been long purged, but the statue remains – the real patron-saint of Budapest. Not far from here, in a touristy restaurant with a Gypsy band, I met András, an elderly Hungarian émigré who lives between Arkansas and Budapest with his younger Hungarian wife Éva. András is Jewish, although he only became aware of this when his parents were deported in 1944. At the end of the war, his mother returned but his father was killed. András spent the dismal year of Hungarian Nazi rule in the Budapest ghetto, with his grandfather who was later killed along with the entire extended family. But those in the ghetto were the lucky ones because the killings there were only sporadic: members of the Arrowcross, the Hungarian Nazi party, would come and round up people at random and shoot them into the Danube. Éva’s family’s story is slightly less grim: her mother’s first husband was Jewish and therefore deported to his death. Their daughter was also put on a train but the mother managed to save her at the last moment thanks to the momentary mercy of a Hungarian Nazi to whom she had given an aspirin for a headache. These are the stories Hungarians have forgotten while telling their official stories of suffering. The Holocaust machine managed, in the space of less than a year, to exterminate a staggering 600,000 out of the 800,000 Jews, many of whom lived in Budapest as fully integrated and often high-profile Hungarians. Among them was Antal Szerb, distinguished novelist, critic and worldly Middle-European, who perished in a labour-camp at 43. Another was Imre Kertész, who spent his adolescence in Auschwitz but lived to tell the tale to a largely indifferent Hungarian audience, until in 2000 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. The betrayal of the Hungarian Jews by fellow Hungarians, headed by the not very numerous but deadly Arrowcross Nazis, was complete. And yet the otherwise comprehensive monuments, museums and historical narratives of Budapest consistently downplay the Holocaust, home-grown Nazism and the terrible impoverishment to Hungarian society and culture that the loss of the Jews spelt. Even survivors keep a low profile about it, as if what happened was too unspeakable to mention. “It’s not very nice dinner conversation,” András said, apologetically. When I asked a Synagogue guide whether there is much anti-Semitism today, he looked away: “Well, it’s a mixed picture. There was a liberal period in the 19th Century when Jews prospered…” But there was also the year 1921, when Hungary introduced Europe’s first anti-Jewish law of the 20th Century; the killings of Jews and “Reds” in the fascist inter-war regime of Admiral Horthy; and the deportation to German camps in 1941 of Jews who couldn’t prove Hungarian descendance two generations back. The majestic synagogue in the former Jewish suburb Erzebetvarós, where the ghetto was, is the biggest in Europe. Beautifully restored with government money and Jewish donations, it once housed the Gestapo HQ. It contains a museum of Jewish culture and a small, matter-of-fact Holocaust room but there is no mention of prominent Jews in pre-war Budapest. In the courtyard of the synagogue, a pile of grave stones commemorates those of the 10,000 people executed and buried in a mass grave on this site who could be identified. It’s numbingly impersonal. The metal weeping willow in the courtyard, each leaf bearing a name for which the surviving family have to pay, is Budapest’s only memorial to the Holocaust. In the new, award-winning House of Terror museum, room after room stages powerful displays of the different terrors that tormented Hungary. The museum was used both by the Arrowcross and by the sinister Communist secret police AVÓ — different shades of the same terror, the museum tries to say. Except that the Hall of 1956 Revolution is much larger and sadder than the Nazi exhibits; the “room of tears” is for the victims of Communism who, you get the impression, are simply countless. There are entire halls dedicated to Catholicism (persecuted by the Communists), secret files of the AVÓ, forced labour under the Communists, Gulag. There are scores of leaflets on related topics but nothing about the deportation and murder of 600,000 Jews apart from a quick chapter on “Hungarian Nazis”, which avoids big words or statistics. You can walk out of this haunting labyrinth thinking that WWII was a breeze compared with what was to come. The truth is, what was to come was bad news but not as bad as the Hungarians make out, and certainly not as bad as many others had it in Eastern Europe. In 1956, Hungarians rose in arms against a Stalinist post-war regime as repugnant as any in the Soviet block and, as in Prague, the price was terrible. But what followed was a conciliatory socialism “with a human face”, as the saying went, and Hungary had several decades of something resembling a market economy, known as goulash socialism. Hungary was the success story of the Eastern block, there was modest prosperity in the 1970s and in the 1980s perestroika was imminent. But as young Márta, who is a devout Catholic from a prominent religious family, told me, “The victims of communism cannot be counted, the suffering cannot be measured.” Whereas the statistics and stories of the Holocaust speak for themselves — if only you let them. In the Budapest History Museum, housed in the Buda Castle, a small cove lists dates from the Arrowcross period. A brief paragraph in the English translation is titled “The Tragedy of the Hungarian Jews”. In the Hungarian version, there are only dates, no tragedy. That’s possibly why Márta told me one evening, as we sailed on the Danube, “But there weren’t many killed Jews. Most of them were saved.” She also said, on the topic of the neo-Nazi party MIEP, “They don’t do anything, they just talk. OK, there have been some atrocities against Gypsies…” But the Gypsies, as usual, don’t count. It’s true that the neo-Nazis are a small bunch of skinheads. “So were the Arrowcross at first,” Ándras pointed out. “I can’t believe my eyes when I see the skinheads marching under the Arrowcross flag. And you know, one day it’s only words, the next day they’ll be pushing people into the Danube. That’s how it happened then.” Éva, who is not Jewish, is ashamed of this legacy. To my question why, unlike in the rest of occupied Europe, there was no resistance here against the Nazis, she said, after a pause, “Because we are cowards.” Cowards or not, it’s easier to blame it on the Germans. But the Germans have done their homework; their Vergangenheitsbewältigung or coming to terms with the past, is part of the national narrative and the Holocaust is in the school curriculum. Not in Hungary. Here, they have only come to terms with the kind of past that suits them. But, to be fair, the Soviet block was a bad place to learn about the Holocaust. Hungarians have done more soul-searching than some other East European countries, and perhaps they will do more. Token reparations have been introduced in the last 10 years, though only directly to survivors. By contrast, this month there was a quickly hushed controversy about Simon Wiesenthal Centre’s Operation Last Chance aimed at hunting down Nazi war criminals. Hungary became the first European country to present a legal obstacle; an anonymous complaint about breach of privacy resulted in the resignation of the local coordinator, and the likely collapse of the project in Hungary. Even the director of the House of Terror has stated that her museum won’t support the project, saying that “after so many decades” this hunt is a waste of time and resources. Today, Erzsébetváros is a leafy but run-down neighbourhood. Two synagogues are boarded up in the side streets around the main synagogue, and when I asked a group of smoking youths when they were closed down, they laughed, “1945”. Most of today’s Jews, numbering about 60,000, are spread across Budapest, though the site of the ghetto is coming to life again with schools, Kosher restaurants and shops. Budapest Jews have a dynamic cultural life, and remain the third biggest Jewish community in Europe. They also remain among the most gifted Hungarians. Among them is internationally celebrated film-director István Zsabo, who made Mephisto and Sunshine, the story of Hungarian Jews, who rejected Judaism in favour of total integration, won medals at the Olympics and wrote patriotic poems, only to find themselves on the trains. Some of the survivors, like an elderly guide at the Synagogue, still remember the young Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who made it his life’s mission to save the Jews, abandoning the safety of neutral Sweden to come to Budapest. Here, through shrewd diplomacy, blackmail, personal courage, and an understanding of Nazi bureaucracy, he managed to save around 100,000 lives. Issuing them with false Swedish papers, putting them in Swedish safe houses, pulling them out of trains by throwing Swedish passports into the crowd, Wallenberg single-handedly did more for the Jews of Budapest than the entire Hungarian nation. He paid with his life: the Soviets immediately deported him as a suspected American spy. His death is still the stuff of speculation: he might have died in 1947 or later, but it is most likely that he was executed by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, soon after his arrest. His statue is of a lone man with a melancholy face walking between two broken pieces of granite. Although the Latin inscription says “You have many friends”, you wonder whether these friends are here in Budapest: instead of standing in the central city, he is exiled in a dull suburb across the river, by a tram-line going nowhere. It remains to be seen whether, in the words of Imre Kertész, the trauma of the past “lives on as culture or neurosis” in the Hungarian psyche. The Hungarian psyche seems prone to dark moods. Hungarian life-expectancy is among the lowest in Europe; suicide has long been a national obsession, and until recently, Hungary topped world suicide statistics. A startling number of Hungary’s most gifted men took their own lives (I say men, because women are traditionally invisible in the country’s political and artistic life: all saints, rulers, writers and musicians in the national pantheon, and even in the contemporary Writers’ Bookshop, are men). Famous suicides include 19th Century reformist politician and “Greatest Hungarian” Count Széchenyi; modern classic novelist Sándor Maraí, who was only published after his death in 1989; WW2 premier Pal Teleki, who killed himself as German troops entered Hungary; 20th Century poet Attila József, who died at 32; 1960s actor Zoltan Latinovits, who killed himself at the same train station as the poet. The author of the international suicides’ anthem “Gloomy Sunday”, pianist Rezsô Seress, was Hungarian. The story of the tune was fictionally recreated in the exquisite German film Gloomy Sunday. In reality, Rezsô wrote this simple but harrowing song the day after his fiancée dumped him for being a failure. He didn’t know that he would start a spree of suicides, nor could he know that the success of the song wouldn’t lure his fiancée back; she hanged herself and the lyrics were found at her feet. At 69, Rezsô jumped out of his window in Budapest. It is possible that the Hungarian spirit, so different to its Slavic and Germanic neighbours, swings between agony and ecstasy. The tendency for self-pity is not unique to the Hungarians but the existential despair is. This is reflected even in the name of the popular satirical publication Hócipo, which means literally snow boots, but is understood as “I’ve had enough”. Psychologists have commented on the strange restlessness of the Hungarian spirit, eternally skipping from East to West, like a lone boat on the Danube. Hungarians are also highly individualistic, a quality that made them singularly unsuited to Communism. There is a Romantic glamorisation of death as an ultimate act of rebellion or, later in life, an ideal solution to intractable problems. Perhaps, coupled with anti-Semitism, this self-destructive impulse was at the root of the Hungarian failure to stand up to the Nazis in any meaningful way. In his novel Journey by Moonlight, Antal Szerb’s hypersensitive hero ruminates on the suicide of his friend, and his own sense of impotence: ‘He felt… that the important things happened not here but elsewhere.’ The Hungarians you are likely to meet are on the whole relaxed, sophisticated, fond of ironic humour, good wine and music, and often full of joie de vivre. But then every interesting nation has its contradictions. What is certain is that the traditional Hungarian sense of being destined for the West but stuck with the East, being exiled from where important things happen, is becoming a thing of the past. Eventually, Hungary will become prosperous and find a place of honour in the European family. But it is necessary to remember that the European family has distinguished itself with great barbarity in the recent past by devouring its own children. To meet their destiny, Hungarians will need to confront their own barbarous contribution, and make amends.
The Passions of Madrid Kapka Kassabova © 2005 It is midnight in the downtown Madrid neighbourhood La Latina, and nobody is sleeping. The bars are overflowing with music and chatter, and people of all ages are standing around glasses and small plates of tapas. The neighbourhoods of Madrid are laid-back and almost sleepy by day, but Madrid by night is a different beast. In the daytime, bulky churches dominate the streets, but at night, a thousand lit-up bars come to life. This week is Easter, the semana santa, and the city is relatively quiet as madrileños head out of town. I hate to think what it is like when it isn’t quiet. It’s impossible to park your car in the crammed night-life streets, and my Spanish friends were ecstatic when they finally found a park in a jammed one-way street – which meant backing out all the way a few hours later, something normal by local driving standards. We were standing at the bar, squashed on all sides, cigarette smoke blown at us, drinking grape juice and munching tostadas with salsa and prosciutto, when the solemn sound of drums reached us. I had been waiting for this, the Processions of semana santa. You have to see the Processions to believe them, and even then you might have difficulty. Because there they were, advancing towards us under the hypnotic, medieval beat of drums: the hooded Catholic brotherhood of Spain. The dark violet hoods with high, stiff-tipped peaks had holes for the eyes, and only the girth and shape of the robed bodies suggested the age and sex of the person. They wore a belt of thick ropes around the waist. Some of them went bare-foot, and one especially penitent sinner had chains around his ankles. Others were carrying heavy wooden crosses on their backs. The only reassuring thing about these crosses was that they threatened crucifixion for the penitent, not for the faithless onlooker. Although the Procession’s dungeon imagery was a cross-over of the Spanish Inquisition’s auto-da-fés and the Ku Klux Klan’s lynching, its aggression was, at least theoretically, turned inwards. The ghoulish violet figures were interspersed with groups of matrons in black: the planideras, traditional criers at funerals. These middle-aged women with righteous faces surrounded by tufts of black lace pinned at the back with a silver clip were marching straight out of Marquez’s allegorical epic of Hispanic Catholic society One Hundred Years of Solitude. Some of them were shoeless in their black stockings, in the Catholic penitent tradition of descalzos (there is a 16th century convent in Madrid called Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales, Monastery of the Barefoot Royal Ladies, which still houses two dozen shoeless Fransiscan nuns). A few, however, were wearing improbably high heels, and looked like macabre dominatrixes of the Catholic fetishism for pomp and pain. I was reminded of Lorca’s play about repressed sexuality and madness in an all-female Spanish household The House of Bernarda Alba, especially when I saw a beautiful adolescent walking among the matrons of death decked out in the same funereal costume, her olive-skinned face lit up by some troubled dream of eternal virginity. And sure enough, along came the Virgin – a waxen apparition on a canopy of flowers carried by men. Behind her was Jesus, also waxen, with waist-long hair. This worship of suffering gave the hedonistic motto of Madrid a somewhat different slant: ‘After Madrid, there’s only Heaven.’ The crowd applauded the Virgin’s ‘apparition’, although many onlookers were sneering, like my two Spanish friends. ‘Fanatics,’ said Juan, a philosophy graduate and civil servant in his 30s. ‘They’re sick. Tomorrow I’ll be on the train and one of them will sit next to me. It gives me the creeps.’ Creepier yet was the Silent Procession the following day. The hoods wore black and moved in total silence, like an army of Grim Reapers sneaking up on the town. ‘Don’t make eye contact, they’ll give you the evil eye,’ Juan said. ‘They’ll crucify you at a moment’s notice.’ All around Spain, processions like this were taking place, and cosmopolitan Madrid has the most moderate scene of all. Still, this is a dark corner in Spain’s heart, seemingly at odds with Spanish extroversion. But in Spanish culture, perhaps even more than in other European Catholic cultures, passion is the main currency, and worshipping the ‘passion’ of the Christ is only one strand, along with the passions for flamenco, bull-fighting, good food, late nights, and loud conversation. ‘This is a country of martyrs and poets,’ Juan said. ‘Do you know any Spanish philosophers since Seneca, who was Roman anyway? That’s because there aren’t any. OK, there is one I can think of, a modern one called Aranguren. He said ‘Con España, no puedo.’* But look at all the churches and streets in Madrid – San Jeronimo, San Antonio, San Marco, a bonanza of saints and martyrs. It’s because we think with our guts.’ The hoods of the Processions are practically a freak show today, especially in a vibrant metropolis made up of 4 million assorted Spaniards and immigrants, but they ruled for centuries. Many of Madrid’s enchanting squares are former sites of auto-da-fés and gruesome executions arranged by the Inquisition. In the 20th century, following tradition, Franco’s dictatorship allied itself with the Catholic far-right. Juan, who is a Republican and allies himself with the ‘moderate left’, tells me they were the two heads of the same monster. ‘Why is France a modern, evolved society with none of these marching fanatics? Because they won the Revolution, and we lost the civil war. Fifty thousand were executed by Franco in the aftermath of the war – a whole generation of intellectuals, humanists, young people, atheists, homosexuals like Lorca - so that the army and the church could have absolute power.’ A month ago, the last statue of Franco in Madrid (but not in Spain) was quietly removed from a square. The left-wing government, elected in the messy aftermath of the Madrid railway bombing last year, decided to do it inconspicuously, at night. But the Falanguistas, the surviving fascists of Spain, protested conspicuously. Some even publicly tore their shirts, a gesture reminiscent of religious acts of penitence. One historian in the conservative daily ‘El Mundo’ claimed that ‘the socialists’, with their ‘obsession with Franco’, are erasing history instead of promoting continuity, and that 30 years after Franco, memories of his time should be ‘normalised’. This stance is reminiscent of old radical divisions in Spanish political life, and is difficult to justify, given that the ultimate monument to Franco’s rule and spirit still stands, some 50 km north of Madrid. The hypocritically named memorial Valley of the Fallen was built according to Franco’s aesthetic of brutalism, religiousness, and megalomania, ostensibly to commemorate the dead on both sides of the Civil War, but in reality to immortalise the Generalíssimo himself. The fact that it was built by political prisoners from the Republican Army in the Civil War says it all. So do the poignant buildings in Madrid damaged by clashes between Republicans and Nationalists, like the half-destroyed medieval church in the colourful immigrant neighbourhood Embajadores, whose clock is frozen in time. As a stronghold of Republicans, Madrid was regularly shelled by the Nationalists who camped west of the city, in the vast park Casa de Campo. ………… Asking for more ‘continuity’ than this amounts to propping up the patriarchal triumvirate of army, church and far-right reaction. Modern Spain, and especially modern Madrid, have moved on from such follies and are more interested in keeping their hard-won liberties. At the Atocha railway station, scene of the terrible terrorist bombing, no traces are left of the tragedy. The tropical garden inside the station, complete with a turtle pond, is an oasis of harmony – a deliberate civic statement that the forces of fanaticism will not quash the city’s fun-loving, progressive spirit. The monument to the dead is elsewhere: a park with a tree planted for every victim. Casa de Campo, on the other hand, is a living monument to Madrid’s considerable carnal appetites. Aside from the ubiquitous ham and chorizo, and the sado-masochistic perversity of the Processions, Madrid harbours a seedier, franker carnality. After 6pm, Casa de Campo becomes the domain of prostitutes. They stand along the winding roads of the park, wearing little more than dental floss, and tapping the bonnets of cars. Like meat at the market, they are bunched together by race and orientation: East Europeans, blacks, transvestites, Spanish, Latin-Americans. The transactions are made in the woods, or in the client’s car. Those familiar with the films of Pedro Almodóvar will recognise the scene of his tragic-comic, sexually ambiguous characters’ misadventures. Prostitution, like that other Catholic sin abortion, is illegal in Spain, but widespread and tacitly tolerated (the old saying goes that if a woman travels to London, it’s to get rid of a baby; if she travels to Paris, it’s to keep the baby. In the repressed climate of Franco’s days children were told that babies come from Paris). The council has supposedly banned prostitutes from the inner city, but there is a street running up from the epicentre of Madrid – Puerta del Sol – which is taken over by prostitutes and pimps. I saw a repulsive old man in an overcoat approach a pale girl with blue eye-shadow. ‘How old are you?’ he asked. ‘Twenty,’ she said. He moved on to her younger friend. Walking past the girls’ blank faces, I wondered how many of them are smuggled from Eastern Europe and South America as sexual slaves, without papers, practically non-entities. At the end of Montera Street I reached the huge, frantic Plaza of Puerta del Sol, Gateway of the Sun, the ground zero of Madrid. This is where countless transactions, rendezvous, pick-ups, and general purpose loitering take place. In front of the neo-classical building and once post-office Casa de Correos stood three guards wearing different uniforms and don’t-mess-with-me faces: national police, municipal police, and civil guard. Triple protection for the seat of regional government seems excessive, especially in the light of what this building used to be: the HQs of Franco’s secret police, and the scene of the murder by defenestration of communist Julián Grimau in the 1960s. But on top of the building, Madrid’s most famous clock ticks on brightly towards the future, and down on the pavement a little sign says ‘Kilometre zero’. All distances in Spain are counted out from here - including, of course, the distance to Heaven. Or Hell, depending on your perspective.
Polyglot Perigrenations Kapka Kassabova A second language is a double escape: it takes you out of yourself, but also back into yourself to places you didn’t know existed. To translate is to travel this unpredictable landscape every now and again. But I don’t translate, I live inside two different languages. This means being constantly on the move, skipping over invisible borders of identity and meaning. I was born an escapist and a traveller, which is why I was gripped from the moment my Russian teacher wrote on the blackboard a funny-looking sentence in Cyrillic, then turned her bespectacled face to the class and said: ‘Today, we are going to learn Russian.’ I was eight. The year was 1981, the place Sofia. Leonid Brezhnev, the last serious Soviet dictator, died soon after. My Russian teacher wept into her fringed shawl while we froze in neat rows in the school courtyard, listening to records of Soviet army songs for hours. By then, I understood the songs. I also understood that something was wrong with us, with these songs blaring out of megaphones, with the way we had to understand them. So, as an unconscious act of protest, I tried to be bad at Russian. I gave idiotic answers in class, infuriating the poor teacher who yelled that I was lazy and broke her ruler on my desk. Being a language idiot was unrewarding, and soon I discovered that it had no future anyway. One day I found myself entertaining my little sister with a slide-show of Russian fairy tales. I had to translate as well as I could for her benefit. My mother came in at one point, and praised me for my translation. I was secretly chuffed. I kept up my slide-shows, ostensibly for my sister. I started looking up words in the Russian dictionary, and this is how I stopped wanting to be bad at Russian – being good at it was much more fun. Around that time, I started writing poetry in Bulgarian – about railway stations and going away. I also read Evgeni Onegin in a bilingual edition, and was transfixed by the miracle of sustained rhyming translation. Gradually, books became the centre of my world. I stopped showing my sister slide-shows because I was too busy reading. It was a way of forgetting what was wrong with us, and travelling to other worlds in the only possible way. When it was time to choose a special secondary school, I applied for the English school. But my entrance exam results in maths weren’t good enough, and I only just made it into the French school. The first day at the Lycée Français, our sophisticated teacher Madame Lambreva warned us in Bulgarian that from now on, only French was to be spoken. When we feebly protested that we didn’t speak any yet, she said: ‘That’s exactly why’ and continued in French for the rest of the day. We were petrified. It was too much for the girl sitting next to me – first she started sobbing quietly, then crapped herself. Her mother had to come and take her away. We were given between eighty and one hundred and twenty new words per day. I went home and copied each word several dozen times, with the religious fervour of a convert. It didn’t really matter what language I was learning – it was foreign, it wasn’t Russian, and that was enough. French took me out of my familiar world, and that surely meant it would also take me out of all that was wrong with us. We sang songs like La Normandie and La Marseillaise. Their geography was a mystery – Normady, Marseille, those were mythical places, like the Underworld. We had marathon dictations in class packed with impossible-to-spell words like inouïes, ‘unheard of’: negative, feminine, plural, umlaut, and diphthong. It was very important to get the spelling right. Our French teachers were Mme Musaud and Monsieur Neuilly, and I stared at them amazed how human and ordinary they looked, despite being unattainably French. Once, I drew the Eiffel Tower in a drawing class. Mme Musaud said ‘That’s a nice drawing. Have you been there?’ I was mortified. Some of the kids’ parents were diplomats and they had lived in countries like Algeria, Libya, or even France. But not me. When Monsieur Neuilly left, he gave me his address in France and I wretchedly copied it in my address book. He was as good as dead to me now. France was an idea, not a real place. Only its language was real, and I clung to it as to a secret money-belt. By the end of the first year, I spoke fluent French and read Sartre and Camus. In my second year, I translated Baudelaire into Bulgarian while stuck in hospital with an autoimmune disease. There was no functioning toilet in my ward, and the incompetent nurses had burst every vein in my body, but I could discuss in French the phosphate resources of the Balkan region, molecules with triple valence, Hegel, and existentialism. Somehow, this was going to save me, get me out of there. I already knew, implicitly, that when you are a second-class nation, learning the language of first-class nations is the closest you can get to a ticket. The iron curtain was like the Styx. Poor as we were, perhaps we could pay our way with language units. Soon, my class-mates started talking about studying medicine or law in France after school. Medicine and law scared me witless, but maybe that’s what it took to get to France? Then, one day, the Berlin Wall fell. There was a coup in Bulgaria and the government was reshuffled. The world as we knew it collapsed magnificently, and anything was possible. I was sixteen. My father went to Essex as a research fellow for two years. The family followed. I found myself at Colchester Sixth Form College with a late 80s East European hair-style, the usual torments of adolescence, and rudimentary English. You see, I never thought I might need English. I had been preparing for France all along. My English teacher, the poet Joe Sheerin, talked in class about ‘Waiting for Godot’. I had seen it three times, in Bulgarian. I knew the carrot dialogue by heart. ‘It’s a funny play, isn’t it,’ he tried to involve the class. They chewed gum and couldn’t give a shit. ‘It’s not funny,’ I ventured, blushing deeply, ‘it’s sad, very sad.’ Some kids sniggered. Joe Sheerin turned to me with blue eyes full of wonder, and said: ‘Thank you. You see, in English, funny has two meanings. It also means strange. It’s a funny language, English.’ And he smiled with all the kindness I needed to rescue me from disappearing into the black hole of English. When I wrote my first essay, full of grammatical mistakes, inventive spelling and semantic horrors, Joe Sheerin asked me if I wrote poetry. He suggested I translate some poems and show them to him. I was speechless with gratitude, I still am. By the end of that year, I was almost ready to start writing in English. Then our UK visas expired and we had to go back to Sofia to wait for new ones. Four weeks, the Home Office said, six at the most. The early 90s were a dark time in Bulgaria: poverty, unemployment, power cuts, water cuts, shortages, mass immigration, and disillusion. Six months later, there was still no news about the visas. My mother was diagnosed with a tumour and had to have instant surgery. In the hospital, they had no sheets, only newspapers. I stopped eating, just in case. It was an act of protest – against what, I didn’t quite know. My father went grey overnight. He sat in the kitchen at night, unshaven and alone in the dark when impromptu powercuts struck, and ate cheese pastries for hours. My little sister was re-learning to be Bulgarian after two years in English schools, and sensibly trying not to make a nuisance of herself – the family couldn’t afford it. My boyfriend from England came to visit in the darkest winter of our family, and heroically fought through blizzards to buy Christmas cards for England. We waited ten interminable months for word from the Home Office. Bored and depressed, I enrolled in an intensive Spanish course. One more language couldn’t hurt, besides I wanted to read Don Quixote in the original. For a month, I sat in a classroom and conjugated Spanish verbs in a sort of incantatory trance. Yo me voy, tu te vas, el se va, nosotros nos vamos, nosotros nos vamos, nosotros nos vamos…The world was out there, and I wanted to go and practice my languages. All I needed was a stamp in my passport. The Home Office sent us three visas – minus mine. After all the waiting, I had turned 18, no longer a “dependent family member”. But my parents could harldy leave me behind. Fortunately, they had organized a back-up option in New Zealand. We became New Zealand residents before we even arrived in Dunedin some months later, thin and pallid from stress and passport complications. On our first supermarket trip, my father bought twenty five cartons of juice – every available variety in the supermarket - and arranged them in neat rows in the kitchen with a madman’s grin. No more shortages, no more dark kitchens. But supermarket thrills aside, Dunedin at the time struck me as Calvinist, provincial, and distinctly untropical. They worshipped someone called Robbie Burns who was apparently Scottish, and had a strange way of speaking: instead of saying pen, they said pin; they said bid for bed, and fush and chups for fish and chips. It was Colchester all over again, except this time my boyfriend was far away, and worst of all - my English had lapsed. I made no difference between long and short vowels, so that when I said ‘shits’, I really meant ‘sheets’. Fortunately, Dunedinites were much nicer than the kids in Joe Sheerin’s class. I wanted to study English literature but couldn’t muster the confidence, so I enrolled with French, Russian, and linguistics - my comfort zone. I was a published poet in Bulgaria by now, and still thought, dreamt and wrote in Bulgarian. But pretty soon it dawned on me that this move was permanent, that my life from now on was the life of a migrant in an English-speaking country at the end of the world. I had to stop writing in Bulgarian. France looked more out of reach than ever. I had to start writing in English, translating wasn’t good enough anymore, in fact it was suspiciously like second-hand writing, and I was acutely sensitive to notions of second hand and second class. If someone else (Joseph Conrad) had done it at the age of 19, so could I. But I wanted it to happen overnight, I wanted to start writing in a literary tradition that I didn’t know, with a fluency I didn’t even have in speech yet. In my unseemly haste, I became stuck between two languages. In my writing, I had let go of Bulgarian, but I couldn’t go anywhere in English. I became speechless. I entered the transitional muteness of the immigrant. If you can’t formulate complex thoughts and images in some language, you become emptied of complex thoughts and images. You stop being yourself and enter a state of non-being, of invisibility. I was used to writing in Bulgarian like living in a well-appointed family house: padding on soft carpets, muting the lights, glimpsing fantastical landscapes from the windows, conversing with the portraits of my ancestors on the walls, browsing the endless library. I was used to bringing the furniture of foreign languages into that house too – there was always room for more. But I had never tried writing in another language – a completely different business from speaking well or simply conveying meaning. Now that I tried, I found myself stranded in a mental no man’s land, with no shelter in sight and no familiar landmarks. Who were my ancestors? Who were my contemporaries? All I knew of English literature were the novels of Jack London, Ray Bradbury, and Hariett Beecher Stowe, and some ‘Hamlet’ – all in Bulgarian translation. Where did I begin? Whom did I ask? I was studying French literature, after all – Sartre and Camus, my old friends. But they couldn’t help me now that I was in the thick of Being and Nothingness. Instead of being yet another foreign language for me, English temporarily became my non-language. And because my sense of self had always come from my articulateness, I lost my very sense of selfhood. I underwent an identity meltdown. Of course at the time I blamed it on Dunedin. But while I was miserable in New Zealand, I also hated Bulgaria and resented Britain for what it had done to us. There was no place in the world where I wanted to be - because without language there is no perception, and without perception there is no self, and therefore no place for you in the world. In other words, I wanted to die. I became a professional anorexic, scratched my wrists, wrote preposterous, hysterical poems in English, and thought about quick ways to die, since self-starvation was clearly going to take time. But my parents had wrestled the monster of bureaucracy and the spectre of ill fortune to bring us here, and were now saving every penny to educate us and give us nice bedrooms and twenty five varieties of fruit juice. I couldn’t. I was shamed by my sister who, once again, was trying not to make a nuisance of herself because she knew the family couldn’t afford another troubled teenager. Then one day, in the swimming pool where I went to burn off the fat I didn’t have, I met a psychiatrist. He knew a troubled soul when he saw one and told me where to look for him. He became my Kiwi Joe Sheerin: for a year, he gave me books to read, including Sylvia Plath’s poetry and ‘The Bell Jar’. By the end of the year, I was recovering: not just because Sylvia Plath could write about the way I felt in my psycho-linguistic bell-jar, but because I had started actually reading English literature. I had been given entry into the literary culture into which I so desperately wanted to read and write myself, so that I could exist once again. I was also meeting local writers and like-minded students. New Zealand stopped being a wasteland for me around the time I found a tongue to be myself in. Or at least to be someone. In the meantime, I travelled to Tahiti on a scholarship. There, I discovered that I was in fact French. The Tahitians laughed when I said I had never been to France - I had the accent of ‘métropole’, I was obviously French. This threw me. Yes, I had wanted to go to France, but I didn’t want to be French. After all, I was writing in English now, and I had a Kiwi passport. What had France ever done for me except feed me with vain hopes. But language has its own agenda. It is a giver and taker of identity on its own terms. Even now, when I fully inhabit English, and couldn’t write in any other language, I cannot control my inflection which is a collection of accents. My previous book of poetry, Someone else’s life, was reviewed together with East European poets in translation. Yet when I met East European poets at the Dublin Writers’ Festival the year Europe swelled up to the East, and tried to find common ground, I couldn’t - we didn’t share a language or even a culture. To them I was an English language writer. In Britain, people think I am French. When I meet travelling Kiwis, they are perplexed when I insist I too am from New Zealand – I never learnt to say fush and chups. The only language in which I can pass off as a local is Bulgarian. But when I tried writing in Bulgarian once, I found myself regressing to the level of my sixteen year-old self, which is when I wrote my last poem in Bulgarian. When I finally went to France, I queued up with my two passports and accent-free French in the ‘other’ queue, still vaguely unclean. But it didn’t matter. I didn’t need France anymore, I didn’t need to carry my currency in a language belt. All this happened in another, distant life. But the truth is, even now, after several books in English (and the occasional translation into Bulgarian), my yearning for the original language house persists. Not for the Bulgarian language itself perhaps, but for the comfort of that home. I have to accept that no matter how much I read, how many rare English words I know, and how many books I write in English, I will never live in such comfort again. The loss of homely innocence is permanent. The leather-bound volumes of Wordsworth and Tennyson are borrowed, a kind of life-long lease. Walter Benjamin, on his travels to Marseille, said that childhood is the source of all sorrow. It is also the source of all other profound experience, which is why inhabiting the ancestral house of language begins with childhood, with first memories and first picture books, with learning nursery rhymes and songs, and absorbing the moods of language while you are still a semi-conscious sponge. You cannot learn nursery rhymes as an adult any more than you can learn memories, even though you can learn Shakespeare. But a writer’s adventure with words starts not with Shakespeare, but with doggerel and lullabies, with slide-shows of fairy tales, with the deepest, pre-language memory of a certain smell of damp leaves. I can elegantly render this memory into English, but it’s an emotional travesty because the smell of those damp autumn leaves is in Bulgarian. This is why I could only ever be a tenant in the English language house, albeit a happy tenant. This is also why my poetry bristles with metaphors of restlessness and the search for some kind of surrogate home to replace that lost original place of innocence. But above and beyond the question of language, the loss of the original ‘home’ is something we must all experience, in one way or another. Once, I found myself at a festival of Latin-American poetry in Vienna, I’m not too sure why. I read my poems in Spanish translation, with the Argentine accent I’d acquired on my travels to Buenos Aires. An Austrian poet read my poems in German translation. The original English poems didn’t get an airing. After the reading, an Austrian poet came up to chat in French. A Bulgarian expat introduced herself in Bulgarian. The Latin American community shouted in their various accents. An Argentine poet swore she had heard my poem at a festival in Colombia last year. I swore I’d never been to Colombia, but she didn’t believe me. An American expat spoke English with an English expat. Splinters of Austrian German flew around us. For a moment, caught up in this Babylonian cacophony, tuning in and out of meanings, I couldn’t remember which language was supposed to be mine. And yet, I wasn’t confused. It was a happy moment of escape from the tyranny of a master language. For once, I didn’t have to worry about being a local, a foreigner, or worse, a thing in between, about not remembering how to spell ‘inouïes’ and betraying myself as a tenant in a worn-out coat, rather than a stately home-owner in soft slippers. Perhaps this was my true place: on the noisy, multiple frontier of languages, a traveller passing through, free from the constraints of residence permits? In any case, it was a moment of polyphonic bliss, like listening to the chanting of Gregorian monks.
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