Inside Outside by Andrew Riemer

front. The city picked itself up and dusted its clothes with aplomb. Though there were bomb-sites and craters everywhere, though the supply of gas, electricity and water was erratic and unreliable, though the sweet smell of decomposing flesh hung over the piles of rubble and the mass graves dug in the municipal gardens (strenuously denied by the authorities, but known to everyone), Budapest enjoyed—if that is the word—the benefits of a free-enterprise society with verve and gusto. The communist takeover a few months after we left put a clamp on this activity for many years to come—until indeed a few months before my return at Christmastime in 1990, when once more the city was witnessing scenes not unlike those that characterised the heady days of 1945 and 1946. Then, everyone had something to sell. Everyone found some way of participating in the complicated economic networks that had sprung up everywhere like toadstools.
    The result was chaos; but it was chaos of a wonderfully exhilarating sort. The whole city was on the move. People hurried about with whatever commodity they possessed to strike deals with owners of other commodities. They rushed along the crowded pavements, neatly sidestepping piles of rubble or gaping holes, or else were carried about in an astonishing variety of horse-drawn vehicles—clapped-out fiacres, hansom-cabs, aristocratic landaus, barouches and cabriolets, their pompous crests still faintly visible on their faded and crazed coachwork. No-one was empty-handed. You carried whatever you intended to sell, or whatever you had just purchased—bolts of cloth, ancient eiderdowns, the horn of an old-fashioned gramophone, pots of glue and paint, shoe-trees, stethoscopes. Anything and everything had value. Someone somewhere would find a use for any object, no matter how bizarre or broken-down. People were thirsty for success, for the accumulation of wealth out of whatever they had rescued from the ruin of their lives, and they lusted after the outward and visible emblems of wealth. In the crowded cafés everyone boasted of his good fortune while keeping a weather-eye open for the main chance.
    All this was, it goes without saying, a perilous and unhealthy world which would have collapsed of its own energy, greed and lawlessness even if the grim-faced comrades hadn’t quashed it with a ham-fisted blow. Money had become worthless. One stifling day my mother and I set out for the nearby baths. One bag contained our swimming gear, the other was stuffed full of banknotes. We stood in the queue at the ticket booth amid the throng of people seeking relief from the heatwave. We had almost reached the top of the line when an official emerged and rubbed out the admission price chalked on a blackboard beside the booth, substituting a figure a few millions greater. We didn’t have enough. When we got back to the flat, we dragged a suitcase from the broom cupboard which had formerly housed the clandestine radio, and stuffed several million more into our moneybag. But it was to no avail—by the time we reached the ticket booth once more, the price had gone up again.
    You only used money for things like tram tickets. After a while the conductors refused to collect fares, overburdened as they were by satchels containing sums of money which could only be represented by figures, not by words. Currency could not buy real goods or services. The economy subsisted on barter (which was tolerated) or on American dollars or, better still, gold coins, chiefly louis d’or and the occasional English sovereign (both dollars and coins wholly illegal, with frightful penalties for those caught in possession). Where formerly we lived in dread of inspectors seeking to sniff out the least trace of political unreliability or a radio capable of receiving the BBC, our hearts now missed a beat every time the doorbell rang, wondering whether it was the inspector (often the same person as before) in search of