27
Down and Out in Buda and Kispest
With cracked fingers he combed the lice out of his beard. On the ground beside him a couple spooned in a nest of sleeping bags. Next to them a young woman slept uncovered, her tattooed stomach bloated and blue in the cold, undimmed neon. Above her swayed a man clutching a violin case to his chest, his eyes fixed on nothing.
At Kálvin tér station commuters glanced away and held their breath. But the sight of the poor held me, as it had done at another dozen metro stops across the city; bodies broken and collapsed against tiled walls, contorted figures crumpled onto concrete floors, filthy hands cracked with chilblains and gripping begging cups.
I’d heard the facts at A Város Mindenkié – the privately funded ‘City is for All’ homeless shelter: 7,500 people living rough in the capital, at least two deaths every winter night, vagrancy now criminalised in a draconian amendment to the Hungarian Constitution.
‘People don’t sleep on the street out of choice,’ a volunteer activist told me. She had a pale, patient face but her voice was edged with anger. ‘They sleep on the street because there is nowhere else to go.’
Nearby at the cramped and grimy Danko Utca shelter, over 200 lost souls squeezed onto barracks-like metal bunks. Men played cards or whispered to each other, guarding secrets. One wheeling drunk yelled coarse slurs across the room. His tone wasn’t measured, his thoughts were unreasoned. A woman – with barely an ounce of flesh on her bag of bones – had the air of someone long accustomed to the ruin of dreams.
Gábor Iványi, the Methodist preacher who ran the shelter, claimed that the ruling conservatives – specifically Viktor Orbán – wanted to rid Hungary of the poor, along with everybody who cared for them.
‘The government has realised they can’t play the migrant card endlessly because there are obviously no migrants in the country,’ he said. ‘Migration issues can still be useful for national campaigns but for local issues they need a new scapegoat.’
Iványi had fought for the dispossessed during the communist years. With their end he’d expected an easing of his workload. Instead it had doubled when the new government had ostracised the homeless, making them scapegoats along with the Romani and refugees.
Humanitarian groups struggled to take up the slack. Iványi’s Evangelical Brotherhood provided shelter for hundreds every night, cooking as many as 800 meals every day, until it was stripped of its official status along with some 300 other religious organisations.
‘I mourn for Viktor Orbán,’ lamented Iványi. Hungary’s prime minister was ‘on the road to damnation’.
‘Sandor? Is it you?’
I’d not have recognised him were it not for the Hungarian lapel ribbon. He wore it in the identical manner to his father, with tell-tale twist, giving him away. Otherwise I’d have walked right by him, his face and stature so changed by time. He was slumped on a bench outside the shelter’s office, trying to focus his watery eyes, teeth crooked or broken, all but lost in an enormous, cast-off Bundeswehr anorak.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ he snapped in response.
Thirty years earlier Sandor had opened his small grocery shop but had then been squeezed out of business, Alajos had told me. He’d left Tokaj and, with no word from him in so long, Alajos had come to believe that he’d died. But in secret, his sister Lili had stayed in touch with him, hiding the truth from their father, knowing that it would have broken his heart. When I left for Budapest, Lili had told me that once a week Sandor collected her letters at Danko Utca.
‘I can no face my father,’ Sandor said to me an hour later at the Sza-Sa burger bar. ‘I leave Tokaj for ever.’
He hadn’t remembered me but he was willing to talk, and to be fed.
‘Alajos thinks you are dead,’ I said.
‘Is better. No matter.’
‘He’s ninety-three and heartbroken.’
Sandor shrugged and said, ‘Like Hungary.’
In the communist years everyone had a job. Everyone had a roof over their head. ‘Workers pretended to work and the authorities pretended to pay them’ was a well-worn cliché, meant as a joke, yet it contained a grain of truth. But the joke vanished with the Wall. In the early 1990s workers’ hostels were closed, along with redundant factories, throwing tens of thousands onto the street. Many tried their luck at small start-ups, opening video-rental shops, nail parlours or a corner grocery, losing everything when their enterprises failed. They left their villages and towns in shame, escaping bad debts, joining the exodus to the capital.
Sandor had fallen into such a spiral. In Budapest he’d set himself up as a roast-chestnut vendor. But when he couldn’t pay the weekly bribe, the police trashed his wheeled stove. He’d found casual work for a time with the city, weeding the central reservation of divided roadways in summer, scraping flyers off lamp posts in winter. After he lost that job, he turned to collecting discarded bottles and tin cans, loading them into a shopping trolley and living off the deposit refunds.
‘Muslim steal jobs,’ he told me, teeth bared in his ruined face. ‘Muslim steal hostel beds.’
As a result of the war in Syria, some 400,000 refugees had fled through Hungary to reach Germany. Not one of them had taken someone else’s job. In fact, almost none remained in the country. Yet the government had built a ten-foot-high razor-wire fence along its southern border. It had spun yarns about a ‘Muslim invasion’. As in other parts of Europe, including the UK, the plight of refugees had been used to polarise opinion and hijack political power. As ever, an enemy was needed, and any enemy would do.
‘Is like a thousand years ago,’ insisted Sandor as he finished the burger, grease oozing onto the pumice-like skin of his hands. ‘Hungarians again are border guards of Christian Europe.’
That wasn’t true, I pointed out. About a thousand years ago it was the Hungarians who were the incomers. As for taking jobs or places in the hostels, I’d heard only Hungarian spoken at Danko Utca and the other shelters. Homelessness was a domestic problem.
I asked how Sandor was getting by – in the absence of government handouts – and he told me, ‘I make business again. I show you.’
On the metro I tried to understand the change in Sandor. A loss of certainties played its part, of course, as did disappointment. Many Hungarians had expected their country to become as rich as neighbouring Austria within a year or two of the fall of the Wall. When it didn’t happen, they lost faith in the future.
Hungary – again not unlike the UK – didn’t know how to deal with its past. It harboured outdated notions of greatness, of superiority. As nostalgia replaced optimism as a ruling emotion, its people swallowed astonishing untruths about scheming enemies. They fretted that their identity was being undermined by immigration. On the seat beside me Sandor spoke of ‘predators’ and the ‘Trojan horse for terrorism’. I couldn’t blame it all on drink.
‘Now Hungary is no longer sheep, is become lion,’ he told me, clenching his fist.
Of course modern Hungarians – both drunk and sober – were not alone in imagining a lost Utopia, ruined by Jews, refugees, bankers or Brussels bureaucrats. To succeed, a political movement needed to find an ‘existentially different and alien’ opponent, according to the Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt. Eliminate that enemy, wind back the clock and restore lost glory, or so promised the fairy tale. Viktor Orbán is not the only contemporary politician who may have studied Schmitt’s theories.
‘Hungary must be great again,’ he insisted.