afternoonâs displays threatened to turn hallucinogenic. Everything we were looking at seemed oddly, fatally confectionary, the face of a nation montaged onto one fantasia after another: The anointed Saint Stephen was the âpatriarchâ whose patrimony had no heirs; Prince Eugene was the (French-born) Austrian Imperial Army general who freed Hungary from the Ottoman Empire only to hand it over to the Habsburgs; Lajos Kossuth was the Father of Hungarian Democracy whose 1848 bid for Hungarian independence (celebrated every March 15 on National Day) was stillborn; the Turul was mythical herald to a thousand-year Magyar reign that never hatched.
I considered the illusions hanging from these walls. As we worked our way back through the echoing galleries, I looked at my father in her polka dots and the image that flashed momentarily through my brain was of a tour guide in theme-park costume, leading me through a tarted-up history that concealed a darker past, a Tinker Bell guide to a storybook culture, neither person nor place what they really were. What the Magyars were was humiliated. Just about every power that had ever dealt with Hungaryâwhether the Mongols in 1241 or the Turks in 1526 or the Austrians in 1711 and 1848 or the Soviets in 1956âhad seen fit to kick it in the teeth.
In the next station of our Castle Hill cultural tour (the Budapest History Museum), my father lingered admiringly before another hagiographic painting of another lionized Hungarian. This one was at least more modern than Vajk. He was dressed in a naval uniform, pinned with rows of medals: the Hungarian Regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy, whose governance of the country from 1920 to 1944 encompassed the arc of my fatherâs youth. Her reverence for the man who presided over the deportation of nearly a half-million Jews galled me.
A make-believe royal, I pointed out. (Horthy was elected Regent by the Hungarian National Assembly in 1920, intended as a placeholder for the exiled Habsburg king, who never reclaimed the throne.) And whatâs with the âAdmiralâ? A navy in a landlocked state?
âYou donât know anything,â my father said. âTrianon took away the Hungarian coast. A tragedy. A
catastrophe
.â
She was right about the coast. The treaty at the end of World War I, which dealt Hungary the harshest penalties of any warring state (including Germany), had stripped the nation of its seaports, along with 65 percent of its waterways, 88 percent of its forests, and all of its coal, salt, and silver mines. In the Second World War, Horthyâs Hungary would ally itself with the Axis in hopes of resurrecting âthe lost territoriesâ (and Hitler, indeed, returned two land parcels that Trianon had lopped off). When my father and I would finally make it down into the city, Iâd notice the ubiquitous imageâplastered on walls, affixed to bumpers, appliquéd onto backpacksâof the map of pre-Trianon âGreater Hungary,â also known as âthe mutilated motherland.â The map featured the nation as a butchered torso, surrounded by its four severed appendages. The defenders of Hungarian honor call Trianon âthe amputation.â
âIt destroyed the motherland!â my father said now, her voice rising. âIt cut his body into pieces.â
âHers,â I corrected.
My father hiked up her purse on a camera-burdened shoulder and headed for the exit.
We left the museum and, instead of descending to the streets of the city I so wished to visit, we climbed even higher to Fishermanâs Bastion. My father wanted to take some âpanoramicâ pictures.
A turnstile blocked the entrance. You had to buy a token if you wanted to see the view. My father forked over some forints, and we were admitted to the Neo-Romanesque stone arcade punctuated by viewing turrets, viewing balconies, and seven viewing lookout towers (in honor of the seven Magyar
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