Scenes from Budapest, Cogwheel Train

«A budapesti fogaskerekű — Budapest cogwheel train», mixed media 2012

The cogwheel train, with its toy-box red body, its bells and melodies, chugging up the hill on a winter’s night— one of my first impressions of Budapest.

In the years since, I have ridden the cogwheel through the seasons, spring, summer, fall, and winter, paced up and down its platforms, learnt each of its station names, saluted its conductors, walked alongside its cog tracks.

Even at home, unseen, the rumble of its passage is our grandfather’s clock, marking the passage of time. Its toy-like compartments mark the beginning and end of my trips to and from the city.

So bear me while I write a bit about this quaint hillside transport, its past and its role on New Years Day.

The snows had melted away a few days after Christmas, leaving the hills somewhat naked and forlorn. Along the cog tracks running behind the house, the ground had reverted back to the mottled brown of decomposing leaves, mute and humid underfoot. Evenings, only a few Christmas lights and the windows of the passing cogwheel would periodically illuminate the darkness— a series of rounded square windows framing muffled faces that ascended and descended with regularity behind a screen of stark trees.

But on the first morning of the New Year, I came to the window to find a fine filigree of frost lacing every twig, every branch, every leaf, every gate, every roof tile, every stone. And the air, it seemed a diaphanous white veil, through which one moved like a trembling young bride. From this hazy picture, the red and cream cogwheel emerged like a carriage from a fairytale. Its sliding doors opened with a whoosh just before our feet on the icy platform, and in we stepped.

It is a family tradition to take the cogwheel train up to the top of Széchenyi Hill for a little stroll in the forest on the first day of the year.

I imagine that at no other time, at no other moment, does the cogwheel ride resemble more its first journeys of the late 19th century than on a white winter’s day— snow and frost render almost invisible the houses that have multiplied in the past four decades on the hillsides, the canvas is once again blank. One is transported to those times when vineyards still covered the slopes, with only a scattering of villas, visited during the weekends by those living in the seething cauldron of Pest.

When Niklaus Riggenbach, a Swiss locomotive designer, built continental Europe’s second cog railway here in 1874, he replaced an hours-long horse-and-buggy service that had effectively limited expansion on the Buda hills with an open-window steam-powered train decked in green livery.

Even in the few decades following 1929, when the steam engines were replaced with electric trains and yellow passenger cars, there was nothing but a lone school among fruit orchards and grassy slopes near our station.

The present cogwheel trains are rarely ever filled to capacity. One begins to recognize faces, of passengers and conductors, one runs into neighbors. Once, on our way back home after midnight, well past the hour of the last train going up hill, we spied a darkened cogwheel heading towards a station we happened to be passing. Rushing to the platform, we waved to the conductor, who halted the train, and begged him to take us up. He opened the doors with a whoosh, and we took up seats in the dark. Up went the phantom train, with lights switching on midway, not stopping until it had reached our station, whereupon we thanked the conductor, bid him a good night and happy holidays, letting the cogwheel continue on its way.

Scenes from Budapest, Evening dances underground

«Danseurs en rond», aquarelle

As November draws to a close, wooden huts of motley wares mushroom across the squares of the city, giving shape to Christmas markets that will soon illuminate the darkness of Central European winters.

The wailing arabesques of fiddles cut through the late autumn air, surprise you at corners, mingle with the sweet aroma of roasted chestnuts. Night falls shortly after 4 o’clock, and all anyone would like to do after work is squirrel himself away in some cozy niche with warm company and mulled wine.

One such frosty evening, V took me down to the Gödör Klub on Erzsébet tér (management has since changed hands, and it is now called Akvárium), an underground pit in the middle of the city that hosts various nocturnal and cosmopolitan parties of music and dance. But that evening, Gödör had donned on the aura of one of Gogol’s country tales, becoming the “light burning somewhere at the end of the village as soon as evening comes on,” where “laughter and singing is heard in the distance, there is the twang of the balalaika and, at times, of the fiddle, talk and noise […] lads burst into the cottage with the fiddler, there is an uproar at once, fun begins, they set off dancing, and I could not tell you all the pranks that are played.”¹

In the dimness of candlelight and Christmas garlands, a music ensemble composed of contrabass, violins, the hurdy-gurdy, the zither, and the cimbalom, performed for a dance floor filled with men and women of all ages holding one other by the waist and shoulders, twirling madly about, now clockwise, now counter-clockwise. On the men were sleek polished leather boots that glinted softly and reached just below their knees and slim trousers topped with a billowing white shirt. On the women were flowing skirts that flared as they spun around, their heads tilted back, their eyes fixed on their partners.

The entire scene did not give one the impression of being too folkloric, but rather of something pulsing and vibrant, of a past woven seamlessly into the present.

When the couples’ dance had ended, the women parted to the edge of the floor and the men formed a circle to perform for the women a dance, the legényes from the Kalotaszeg region of Transylvania. The musicians took to their instruments and one by one, each of the men puffed into the circle, executing a series of improvised leg flourishes with his black leather boots, now tapping the ground with his heel and boot tip, now kicking the air and bending his knees to the melody of the fiddle. Like a marionette, he seemed to leap into the air in starts and spurts, his torso straight, his head level, with his limbs in autonomous animation. All the while, the women looked on sternly, amusingly, their hands on their hips, swaying also to the music, admiring, evaluating, reveling. How like life!

We took part in the next couple’s dance, but this part of the night with men in a circle, dancing, vying for the feminine gaze, was most memorable. I shall be sorry when I leave this city of underground dances whose folk roots flourish on modern dance floors.

¹ Nikolai Gogol, (Evenings in a Village near Dikanka, preface to Volume I, 1831)

A performance clip of a Kalotaszegi legényes

Spaces, places

Is it possible to imagine that this batik had its origins in a sleigh racing over snow through a frost-laced forest, tinkling bells to the music of Tchaikovsky? Bearing a happy couple bundled in furs, each peering from under their snug chapkas at the wondrous wintry kingdom fleeting by? Somewhere along the way, an elephant from Mughal India crept underneath my hand, and the snows melted away to reveal flowers of a tropical jungle.

But perhaps I have confused the beginnings of this balmy promenade with another dream, now that autumn is here once more, and winter is not far away.

The room is veiled in silence, folds of saris the colors of pandan leaves and conch shell lips. Tendrils of interwoven golden threads climb a trellis of emerald silk, glimmering dimly in crystal drops scattered about like morning dew. A young Tahitian woman’s gaze captured by Gauguin’s brush is reflected in the mirror. Her fragrance has wafted across oceans. Noa noa, a lovely word.

The door opens out into the morning air. A heavy fog the color of bones has enveloped the entire city. From the balcony, one can barely make out the jeweled dome of the Parliament on the other side of the river. A few minutes pass and Parliament disappears. And then go the two spirals of St Anne. And the cylinder that is Hotel Budapest. And the brick chimney of a hospital. The city is a paper screen, darkened now and again by the stroke of a wet brush, before reassuming its unblemished opacity. The city is a paper screen for my shadow theatre.

I’m floating in the Jugendstilbad, eyes lifted toward the vaulted ceiling and painted walls. As steadily as the fountain trickles, they expand and fall away, revealing the misty hills of Lake Garda. Waves lap gently against the wooden pier, where two young girls await the return of a pleasure boat. The boat is rocking like a cradle in the middle of Lake Balaton. A child bravely jumps into the water, buoyed by a bright orange life vest. Orange, the color of hope, like the coat of the royal Bengal tiger hiding under the boat’s tarpaulin, stranded at sea with a boy from Pondicherry. A bigger cousin of the feline now stretched up against the heater, its ginger coat rising and falling ever so softly.

Spaces, places confound, conspire, in the unfathomable depths of an autumn canvas.

Scenes from Budapest, Bomo Art

«Hőlégballonok Budapest felett» Hot-air balloons over Budapest (via Bomo Art)

C'était l'époque où les crinolines, les cages d'acier avaient pris leurs proportions les plus extravagantes, et il me semble qu'elle émergeait d'une véritable montgolfière de soie blanche.

It was the age when crinolines, those cages of steel, had taken on the most extravagant proportions, and it seemed to me that she was emerging from a hot-air balloon of white silk.

— Pierre Loti, Prime jeunesse (1919, p 34)

Touching that Pierre Loti, indefatigable voyager and Orientalist, lover of Istanbul, would in his old age depict the outmoded women’s skirts of his youth as hot-air balloons, so that even in a drawing-room, one was still elsewhere, circumnavigating the world and time in 80 days.

Something in that picture reverberates in the little shop on Régiposta utca 14 (14 Old Post Office Street), home of Bomo Art stationery, in its leather-bound journals and exquisitely printed original paper sheets. Surannée, like the pomaded locks of Valentino, or the waltz in a tango; dépassé, like an English rose at the piano, or a gentleman’s monocle; surannée, like the perfume of parchment maps, the gentle folds of a silken bow; dépassé, like skating on a frozen lake in the snow.

Praxinoscope (via Bomo Art)

Spinning the praxinoscope in the shop round, a child hovers over its rotating mirrors to glimpse a neatly trimmed corseted lady walk up and down a flight of stairs. Kaleidoscopes wrapped in embossed prints of painted birds and animals, compasses and astrolabes, lilacs and lavender, line the shelves above her, by drawers full of watercolor postcards with calligraphic greetings.

But by far the most charming print adorning journals, boxes and gift card sets is of a painting of hot-air balloons hovering over Budapest, like women’s crinoline skirts spread full in a magnificent ballroom.

And the presider of the ball, a benevolent Baba Yaga with a bird’s nest of hair, will have her house on chicken legs carry you more swiftly than a wink to those long bygone days.

Scenes from Budapest, Párizsi Nagy Áruház

«Protests before Párizsi Nagy Áruház, Andrássy út 39», 2012
Signs: “There will be a Hungarian Republic”, “Enough!”, “Solidarity”, “Democracy”, “Orbán, get out!”

Nothing betrayed the commotion outside the Alexandra bookstore of the Párizsi Nagy Áruház to its visitors but the assistants who had halted their rounds and stood motionless by the upper-floor windows. Arms crossed, their faces illuminated by the dancing lights on the trees of Andrássy Avenue, they reflected the shadows of thousands passing beneath their gaze. And as the music and chants grew more distinct, one could not, even in the opulent interiors of Budapest's own “Parisian Department Store”, one simply could not escape the sense that something was in the air.

Monday evening of January 2, wave upon wave of protesters rolled down the elegant thoroughfare towards the State Opera, where the prime minister and his coterie were holding a gala in honor of the country's new constitution, passed by his party’s two-thirds majority in Parliament. The numbers of the opposition did not cease to grow into the night, and already by half past seven had congested quite a number of side streets, including the “Broadway” of Pest, Nagymező utca, as well as Liszt Ferenc tér.

The state television channel would later air footage of nearly-empty streets along with isolated skirmishes between young ruffians and the largely peaceful congregation, the former clad in black leather, and who had pushed themselves into the crowds to stir trouble and make Nazi salutes. But as I had seen it from above and later down in the streets, the procession was by and large solemn and grave, distancing themselves from the troublemakers with “Nazis haza!” (Nazis go home!).

What is a constitution that restrains the powers of the constitutional court, the speakers asked, that muzzles the free press, the judicial branch, the independence of the central bank? What is to be done with a prime minister who strips the country of the word “Republic” from its official name, invokes St Stephen and God to bless the Hungarians? Do “Heroes, Kings and Saints,” the exhibit Viktor Orbán opened at the Hungarian National gallery on the same day, impassion him more than the economic fears of Hungarian citizens today?

«Lotz-terem», 2012

In the Lotz-terem, the neo-Renaissance jewel of the Párizsi Nagy Áruház, where I was sitting at the start of the mobilization, a piano tinkled As Time Goes By. The artist of the hall’s vaulted ceiling, Károly Lotz, must have been dreaming of the Sistine Chapel when he painted the gilded frescoes in 1884. Between the arcades, in place of Michelangelo’s prophets and sibyls, he had depicted men and women hammering, measuring, drawing, cutting, building— in a fit of national glorification in crimson lake and cobalt blue. Sipping hot chocolate in such a place, one could feel the effervescence of those years of monarchy and empire.

The neo-Renaissance palace on Andrássy út 39 that was refashioned into a department store of Secessionist expression owed its conception to the wealth gleaned from such an empire, the very same that had erected the State Opera, its ceiling also signed by Lotz. On that evening, the audience of the prime minister’s gala and the visitors of the Lotz-terem Bookcafé were gazing up at the same inherent tension— burgeoning nationalism rendered in the cosmopolitan aesthetic of an imperial multiethnic constellation.

The Párizsi Nagy Áruház and its Lotz-terem did not offer the circumstances to contemplate such paintings after the Second World War, when it was converted for some years to a book storage warehouse, no doubt at the time the finest of its kind in the world.

Scenes from Budapest, Moszkva tér

“In the old days, this square used to be called Moszkva tér”

The voice of the metro had announced the stop, “Széll Kálman tér,” just as the train pulled into the station. Nothing had changed, apart from its new and freshly pasted name. The people still arrived on Soviet trains, steel blue compartments with leather cushions from 1970, the year of Line 2's inauguration. They mounted the tunnel escalators, still interminably long and windy, at the end of which the ticket inspectors guarding the entrance still nodded a deferential “jó egeszséget” (good health) to the elderly.

From the metro doors streamed forth the passengers, among whom emerged a little boy, polar bear clutched in one hand, his grandmother's mitten in the other.

“In the old days, this square used to be called Moszkva tér.”

The boy made this remark with extreme gravity, although he was no older than three, and his grandmother, like the grannies who had overheard him, was moved to a soft chuckle.

His words hung in the air like an air of Khachaturian...

The old name plates were crossed out in red before vanishing from one day to the next. But they cannot erase the past so easily. At the bar just above the metro entrance, there was still “Moszkva tér bisztro” printed on a London underground bull's eye; across the tram lines to the market, a “Moszkva tér ticket booth.”

Or can they?

Morning breaks over the bridges, streets and squares of Budapest as Ivan Sings. Köztársaság tér (Republic Square) has become II. János Pál Pápa tér (John Paul II Square); Lágymányosi híd (bridge) has been renamed Rákóczi híd. What was known as Roosevelt tér on the Danube is now Széchenyi István tér. The nameless square by Margit bridge is baptized Elvis Presley tér. And soon Szabadság tér (Freedom Square) will cease to be, as will the poetic Pablo Neruda utca and Lukács György utca in Óbuda.

And it was so that the reigning party committed what those they condemned had done before: uproot by force, remold the memory of the people.

Vörösmarty Christmas Fair

«Vörösmarty tér», 2009

Les nuages oranges du couchant éclairent toute chose du charme de la nostalgie; même la guillotine.

In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.

— Milan Kundera, L’insoutenable légèreté de l’être

The annual artisanal Christmas Fair on Vörösmarty square dismantled its chalets two days before the New Year. Passing by the stalls with merchants selling their last wares or folding them away, I felt with sudden intensity the year drawing to a close.

On days I cross the river to the Pest side, a tour of the fair is always obligatory, perhaps because time itself slows there, and because the handmade traditions delight me in a way no sleek Kindle or iPad ever could. At the risk of sounding kitsch, the souls of these handmade entities seem to mingle with the wide-eyed children and adults of the square, inhaling the smoke of grilled sausages and the cinnamon-coated kürtőskalács pastries of Transylvania. Just like the child who abandons the screen when he spies a black teddy bear laying in wait of his arms under the Christmas tree, we still long for these warm things we can touch and smell, things we can really care about.

Exquisite crimson embroideries from Kalotaszeg, sheepskin capes, felt vests adorned with cord and polished buttons, black and white postcards of ancestors carving musical instruments from wood or standing in front of a cauldron of goulash somewhere on the great Hungarian plains, wrapping paper with ink motifs of hot-air balloons hovering over Budapest, kaleidoscopes, hobby horses, leather purses stamped and gilded, like the ones carried by the horsemen of Hortobágy or some Byzantine lord, shadow theatre, fairytale marionettes, gothic mirrors framed in wood and painted birds and flowers in enamel, ceramic teacups graced with tiny foxes and hedgehogs, Halás lace….

The best of the chalets clustered around the statue of romantic poet Mihaly Vörösmarty betrayed nostalgia for an era before the dawn of mass production, while fighting vigorously for a place in the present world.

city of a dream

«Budapest», 2009

I first entered Budapest in winter, as the first snow fell upon the city. The night was silent and the lights glimmered as we took the cable car up the Buda hill, gazing through the gauzy snowflakes to the barges on the Danube and the illuminated spires of Parliament below.

In other countries, I had dreamt of the city, conjured its bridges and hills, its poets and failed revolutions, its language vibrating in the streets, an indecipherable stream that flowed invariably to you. So much that even the sight of the forlorn Keleti train station moved me, like the trace of your fingers.

Sometimes, Budapest does not live up to its surnom, Paris of the East. Oftentimes.
One passes the soot-blackened plaster peeling off its abandoned palaces. One walks under its tawdry neon signs, pieces of a dream post-1989. One boards its metro escalators crowded with commuters heading somewhere, plastic bag in hand. One visits its flats for rent and for sale— the sights are too sad to describe.

But during that slow ascent up the hill, the city was a sleeping beauty on the Danube. And the snow that fell softened her imperfections, quilted her in the aura of a dream.

Cat philo

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