‘Our history is complicated,’ Alajos had once said to me, no more prone to exaggeration than any of his countrymen. The Magyars, a Mongol tribe, had first stormed across the steppes and into the embrace of the Carpathians around ad 895. Their fierce horsemen then raided deep into the west, ravaging Germany and Italy, playing their part in burying classical civilisation in the Dark Ages. Their enemies prayed, ‘A sagittis Hungarorum libera nos domine’ – deliver us from the arrows of the Hungarians – and God answered by defeating them at the Battle of Lechfeld.
The vanquished tribe settled on the Central Plain, abandoned their nomadic habits and organised themselves into a state. In time that state fell under Habsburg rule, and later moulded itself into Austro-Hungary. At the start of the twentieth century Budapest was home to a dozen future Nobel Prize winners, the film-maker who would create Casablanca and the physicists who would help to spark the Manhattan Project and nuclear age.
But the Great War ended its heyday, reducing the kingdom to a quarter of its original size. In the hope of regaining its land, its embittered leaders forged an alliance with Nazi Germany, contributing 250,000 soldiers to its assault on Russia. When the tide turned against Hitler, Budapest tried to make peace with the Allies. In response, German troops occupied the country, installed a puppet government under the fascist Arrow Cross Party and set about executing or deporting more than half a million Jews. Another 280,000 Hungarians were raped, murdered or deported when the country fell to the Red Army. Next, a quarter of a million ethnic Germans were expelled and ten Soviet-style labour camps built within its borders, to save the trouble of transporting political prisoners to the USSR. Some 200,000 more Hungarians fled the country during and after the 1956 revolution. When the Wall fell and Hungary then joined the EU, Alajos (and I) had thought that the nightmare was over at last.
Late into the night I read aloud parts of my first book, recounting the stories that he had once told me, closing a circle. His eyesight had deteriorated over the years and in any case he didn’t speak English so I translated his words back into German, leaning close to the lamp, watching expressions pass across his dear face.
‘After the war I went back to school as a mature student,’ I read out, quoting Alajos back to himself. ‘One day – during Latin class – a man appeared at the classroom door and asked for me by name. I stood up. He showed me his identification card – he was ÁVH, state security – and he ordered, “Follow me.” What could I do? I followed. We walked to the police station. He showed me to an empty room. “Wait here,” he said and left me for two hours. Then a man I’d never seen before came into the room.’
‘Stand up!’ barked Alajos, taking up his story again, recalling the new policeman’s order. He lifted himself to his feet and said, ‘The man asked me if I’d ever been to the West and I told him I’d been a prisoner in Belgium in the war and for that he slapped me hard across the face.’
Alajos snapped back his head as if he’d been hit again, as if the pain still stung across the years.
‘Then he told me that I could go and from that moment I was a collaborator, as most of us were. I was frightened and fear made me cooperate. I had a wife and children. I didn’t want to die. I wanted them to live. They gave half of my house to the policeman. I was permitted to occupy the remaining part, for which I was obliged to pay rent. My tormentor slept in my old bedroom.’ Alajos paused and asked me, as he had done thirty years before, ‘What would you have done?’
Thirty years on I still ponder that question, repeating it to myself again and again. Thirty years ago, in that same bedroom, I’d slept between cotton wedding sheets long stored in scented drawers, dreaming of lying in a bowl of potpourri, and waking into a time of hope after so much tragedy.
Now I woke to whispers, to the rustle of clothing and the muffled clink of crockery. Around Alajos in the next room whirled his three daughters and an indeterminate number of grandchildren, slipping in and out of the kitchen, balancing plates of smoked salami and buttered breakfast kifli bread rolls. I sat up in bed and watched the careful preparations by the half-light of the closed shutters, moved beyond words. My sudden laughter startled the family, sparking their own in turn. Alajos fixed his almond eyes on me and declared with mock severity: ‘You can live a quiet life – drink my wine, go to bed and die early. Or you can get up and learn something.’
Suddenly everyone was talking, tempo and volume turned up as if by a switch. Bacon, eggs and potato pancakes sizzled in a pan. A kettle whistled on the cooker. Four children pulled me from bed to table, giggling, trying out their German.
‘Hallo hallo.’
‘How are you?’
‘Mein Name ist Maria.’
Coffee was poured and a dressing gown draped around my shoulders.
‘Thank you,’ I said as a fifth child placed a cinnamon pastry in my hand.
‘Nichts zu danken,’ said Alajos, welcoming me back into the heart of the family: modest, loving, without condition or expectation. He put his hand on mine and added, ‘I’m glad you survived the night.’
As we resumed our conversation, I dropped a handful of coins on the table, mementoes from my last visit to Hungary. Alajos picked them up, saw the communist stars and threw them across the room.
‘Worthless,’ he said with a flash of sudden anger. ‘Throw them away.’
He pulled a modern forint banknote from his wallet and warned, ‘This also may be worthless. Our new government ordered special security paper from Germany and the border guards made sure that the freight cars were left on a railway siding overnight. I’m not saying that they had anything to do with its theft but they all drive Mercedes now.’
Alajos rubbed the note between his fingers.
‘Good quality,’ he said with a wink. ‘The forgeries look better than the real ones.’
Thirty years ago – at the same table – Alajos had asked me about democracy and the rule of law, and now he recalled my definition. He said, ‘If democracy is tradition then the sum of our experience is thirty-three months: in 1918 for two and a half years and in 1956 for ten days. We have no tradition of democracy here.’
‘And today?’ I asked him.
‘You are wondering what has changed?’ he replied and, when I nodded, his laugh was bitter. ‘Everything and nothing.’
I told him of the changes that I had seen on my journey, of hopes betrayed, fears manipulated and people choosing to believe lies rather than face difficult questions. ‘I also see that nobody in Hungary is in danger of losing weight,’ I added.
Since the fall of the Wall, Hungarians had become the fourth most obese nation in the world.
‘People eat well in our banana republic,’ said Alajos. ‘It helps them to overlook the ruin around us. Have some more coffee.’
‘The ruin?’ I said as my cup was refilled.
‘Our judges have been tamed and journalists restrained, once again. Enemies are invented and loyal politicians given our property, once again. Now we are just their marketplace.’
‘Including Sandor’s shop?’
‘Including Sandor. Aldi – with its Hungarian partner – bought the old co-op, undercut his prices, drove him out, drove my son out of his own home like the ÁVH had driven me out. Und so weiter. Und so weiter.’
And so it goes on and on, as ever.
‘The only difference now is that ideology has been replaced by money,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you after you’ve eaten another croissant.’