tribes). Despite the name, the bastion wasnât built for fishermen; it was designed in the 1890s
as
a viewing terrace. âIt was meant to be like a fairy tale,â as one chronicler put it, to â
feel like history
rather than
be history
.â
Follow the Yellow Brick Road
, I thought, as I morosely trailed my fatherâs footsteps.
She stopped at one of the designated lookout towers to take some shots of the city across the river. âA good thing I brought the telephoto,â she said, wrestling the lens out of her purse. While she clicked away, I leaned through a vaulted arch to bask in the fading autumn sun and, despite my cynicism, admire the view. The Danube was a broad dusky ribbon under the cityâs seven bridges. To my left, I could see the enchanted greensward of Margaret Island and, beyond it, the approaching riverâs long bend to the south.
On the far shore, Pest was a hazy blur. The Hungarian Parliament, a Neo-Gothic wedding cake encrusted with half a million precious stones and nearly a hundred pounds of gold, took up nine hundred feet of prime waterfront real estate. This temple to democracy, the largest parliament building in Europe and the third largest in the world, was built in the late nineteenth century, when Franz Josef reigned and less than 10Â percent of the Hungarian population could vote.
On this side of the river, the red incline train, the Sikló (âthe Little Snakeâ), was inching down the cliff. Directly below, the Chain Bridge arced across the water toward the Neo-Renaissance splendor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The learned society was inaugurated by the same man who spearheaded the construction of the Chain Bridge, Count István Széchenyi, a preeminent Hungarian statesman of the nineteenth century. Széchenyiâs quest for an authentic national culture would end in personal despair. âWe have no national habits,â Széchenyi lamented once. âOur existence and knowledge depend on imitation.â Subsequent seekers of Hungarianism have been equally riddled with doubt. They have generated two centuries of literature, journalism, and oratory devoted to the question that doubles as the title for many of their angst-ridden jeremiads: âWho Is a Hungarian?â Long before Erik Erikson coined the phrase, Hungarians were having an identity crisis.
My father traced the descent of the shiny red funicular with her camera lens. âI was so happy when they reopened the Sikló,â she said. âThe first time I saw it, I cried.â
I asked why and she said, âBecause the Russians had destroyed it.â The Sikló was bombed, along with pretty much everything else along this stretch of the Danube, during the Siege of Budapest, the fifty-day Soviet campaign in the winter of 1944â45 to evict the die-hard Waffen-SS and Hungarian troops bunkered along Castle Hill.
âWould you have preferred the other side won?â I asked.
âYou have a very stupid American concept of this.â
âEnlighten me.â
âThe Russians destroyed everything that was Hungarian.â
Later I would pick up a brochure on the history of the Sikló and take a perverse pleasure in finding that it was put back in service in 1986, under Soviet rule. I didnât bring it up with my father. By then I knew better than to stick a pin in Hungarian âgrand illusion.â
8
On the Altar of the Homeland
I learned to time my more probing questions to my fatherâs golden hour. She was at her most expansive over late-afternoon coffee, which she took with a slice of Linzer torte or Sacher torte or Dobos torte or some other confection evoking the Austro-Hungarian era. Cake was always served with a hefty dollop of freshly whipped cream, because thatâs âthe correct
Viennese
way to do it.â The Habsburg Empire lived on in my fatherâs prandial habits.
The ritual was lifelong, though in Yorktown
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