A Tale of Two Utcas (Ootsawsh): Part 1

St. Michael's Church, Váci utca, 47b

Budapest, like Prague, like many European cities, prides itself on its ability to make music, to make it beautifully and to offer it widely. Each year Budapest hosts a two-week (mostly) classical music festival with performances scattered about the city in basilicas, churches, and concert spaces large and small. It's kind of like Hungarian March Madness, minus the competition, frenzy, and basketball.

Before I came to Hungary I had known of and began anticipating The Budapest Tavaszi (Spring) Music Festival. Last month, I purchased pairs of tickets to five performances. Regrettably, I did not foresee the travel logistics to the Berlin Fulbright Conference last weekend, and so I had to forego the first two concerts (though I was happy to have made a gift of them to two of my very hospitable Hungarian colleagues). 

Last night, then, was the first concert I was able to attend, an all-Mozart program featuring several of his oratorical pieces. The concert was to be performed at Inner City St. Michael's Church, Váci utca (street), 47/b. Interior views of St. Michael's

I had invited Nora, a friend of friends, to join me for dinner and the show. Nora is Hungarian, a Budapester of 20 years, though she has spent some time in the U.S. as an au pair. Her English is, by her own measure, not good, though compared to my Hungarian, she could work at the U.N.

Through a series of comical emails, we arranged to meet outside St. Michael's at 5:30. Then, we would head off to the renowned and nearby Central Káváhaz -- now more an upscale restaurant than a traditional Hungarian coffee house --, have a meal, and return back to St. Michael's for the show.

The last time I was to have met Nora, when I first arrived in Hungary at the end of January and was in Budapest for the Fulbright orientation, was at Kálvin Tér, a metro stop not far from where I was staying near Blaha Lujza Tér. 

According to the map I was given gratis upon checking-in at my hotel, Kálvin Tér wasn't far. Definitely walking distance. Turn left on Rákóczi utca, keep going, take a left on Múzeum körút, and boom, I'm there. Can't miss it. So I decided to walk and not take the metro, which would have gotten me there in two stops.

I left the hotel and made the turn. 

I walked.

And walked.

And walked. 

According to the map, I had walked enough blocks to have long ago crossed the Danube, perhaps even the Austro-Hungarian border. I was in the dark in a dark neighborhood with few signs of help. I saw a Chinese restaurant. This should be interesting, I thought.

I entered and asked the eager to help waiter "Kálvin Tér?" He shook his head, and, either in Hungarian with a Chinese accent or in Chinese with a Hungarian accent, he directed me where I needed to go. Unfortunately, despite his best efforts, it was all Greek to me. Whatever he said, I was sure he was mistaken. Kálvin Tér was close. It had to be. If only he spoke better English.

I asked somebody else on the street, equally eager to help, but we were mutually incomprehensible. 

Finally, a young woman walking her dog was able to help as the dog did its business alongside a tree. 

The Chinese guy was right; I was way off. It turned out that the first turn I made coming out of the hotel was fatal. I turned left; I should have turned right. The destination originally so close was, thanks to my footwork, now far, far away. 


I located a phone booth and dialed Nora's cell. I got the Hungarian equivalent of the three-tone shrill when, in the U.S., you dial a number which is no longer in service or misdial and the phone company figures to damage your hearing for trying, along with a Hungarian operator-droid informing me of something about the undialability of the number. Screw her/it. I dialed again. Same result. I grew frantic. This was the only number I had for Nora. Plus, I was already late, and far away in Nora-time from where I needed to be. 


Picture Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate after his Alfa runs out of gas and he tears off to reach the church before Elaine (Katherine Ross) says "I do" to Biff. Ben on the run

By the time I got to Kálvin Tér, somewhere around 8:40, I was sweating. A mess. 


Nora, sensibly, was gone. 

There was a pay-phone in the station, and I tried -- desperately -- to call her. Again, three squeals and a strikeout.

Sure that I was continuing to grow as the biggest loser Nora had never met, I felt an acute need to get in touch with her. I found two women chatting by the entrance to the subway escalators and, showing them the written phone number, asked them what possibly could be the problem. They conferred for a second and pieced together the answer that because I was calling from within Hungary, the initial calling code was 06, not 36, as the number I had been trying (which would have worked outside Hungary, say, in Austria). 

I dashed back to the payphone and dialed 06 instead of 36. Nora picked up. She said, with audible edge, that she had waited half an hour for me. I apologized profusely, and sincerely. That night was shot; could we at least meet for a glass of wine the next? She agreed, we did, and with rose in hand, I had redeemed myself, somewhat.

So, I was determined not to have a replay of that inanity leaving Nora at the church door. I had the address. I had a map. I had google. Google.

***

Do you think you know where this is heading? Well, sorry to disappoint your CSIQ, but you don't. Come back for part two, to see what happens next. 

Not Yet A Berliner, But Not So Far Away, Either

There is a story that when John F. Kennedy pronounced ''Ich bin ein Berliner!" at the Berlin Wall in 1963, instead of expressing his (and America's) solidarity with West Germany, he inadvertently thundered "I am a jelly donut!", Berliner being a German, jelly-filled pastry. If true, then speaking on our behalf, Kennedy was assuring Germany that all America stood behind a jelly donut.

It turns out that the story is only partially true -- that, technically he could have been declaring his (and our) oneness with jelly donuts, but the only way a German could possibly have reached that interpretation, Kennedy would have had to make the claim standing in a bake shop, to which his German audience would have responded, "Nein, Sind sie verrückt" ("No, you are nuts.").

Given the actual context, addressing a huge Berlin crowd in the open, what he said was not that he was a jelly donut, but that he was a citizen of Berlin. Germans remember him fondly for it.

I don't know that I will ever say "Ich bin ein Berliner" in either sense, but I can say that my time here in the German capitol has greatly changed my perception of this city and what fills it. How representative it is of Germany as a whole I don't know, but my initial concerns about being Jewish and coming to the one-time epicenter of anti-Semitism have been greatly allayed. Berlin is contrite about its Final Solution past. Politicians talk openly about it; citizens talk knowledgeably about it; the city is flecked with museums and cemeteries and memorials recounting a significant German-Jewish heritage as well as an ignoble German-Jewish past.

Non-Jewish Germans seem to feel something more than simple penance. It is almost as though they have embraced a terrible past, and with it, a truer sense of themselves, not who they were -- though that is surely part of it -- but also, who they are, truly, and want to be: what Germans, and Germany believe and represent. By opening themselves to self-scrutiny, they also confront visitors with the admonition to do the same.

Last night, at the farewell party for the Berlin Fulbright Conference, a woman complemented me on my hat (it's a good hat) and we began talking. She, Irene, is no jelly donut, but a true Berliner. She holds several degrees and has spent years in the U.S., China, Russia, and her own Germany earning them. Her PhD is in Sino-Russia history.
 
Yet, it wasn't her knowledge of a once-upon-a-time communist relationship that impressed me as we spoke but rather her knowledge of German-Jewish relations, then and now. Irene is not a Jew, though if admission to Judaism were a matter of respect and appreciation for its religious culture, Irene could be bat mitzvahd

I had to check out of my hotel the next day (today) by noon, but Irene offered to take me on a Jewish tour beforehand. 

* * *

We met this morning at 9:00 on the Senefelder Platz subway platform, two stops from the hotel. Within a short walk of the station she brought me to the Jewish cemetery on Schöenhauser Allee, the only one of the two cemeteries she would show me not desecrated by the Gestapo. A little museum, called a lapidarium, held a display of tombstones, its walls bearing information about the traditional format for a Jewish tombstone, some of the symbols that adorn them (a butterfly, water pitcher, Star of David, for example), as well as other historical and religious explanations. Unfortunately for Irene, and surprising to her -- because so many who visit these Berlin sites are English-only Americans --, all the information was in German, and so she had to translate it all for this English-only American. (That earned her lunch later on, a cheeseburger, though she certainly could have demanded higher. Owing to the dollar's puniness against the Euro, I was relieved.)

She then walked me out to the actual cemetery, crowded with listing and fallen tombstones from 100, 200 years ago. Some black, some brown, some grey. Most with Hebrew chiseled into one side and German chiseled into the other. Trees shot past the tombstones. A bed of ivy kept them all warm. It was green and pretty, but a bit unruly, as old cemeteries, and the codgers who come to occupy them, sometimes get.

Irene then walked me to the Mitte, the "center," Berlin's prewar district of Jewish living and culture. She showed me the other cemetery at Grosse Hamburger Strasse, unrecognizable as such but for the single tombstone of Moses Mendelssohn, the 18th century philosopher. The cemetery had functioned as a burial ground from 1672 to 1827, but in 1943 the Nazis removed the tombstones so that they could have a lawn upon which to play ball. I didn't think to ask Irene if the Nazis spared Mendelssohn, or if his tombstone was only replaced after the war.

She then showed me the spot adjacent to that cemetery where once stood a building which served for many years as a Jewish hospital and nursing home, and not briefly enough as a Gestapo processing center for Jewish deportation. It was destroyed in a Berlin bombing raid; only its space remains. 

Several blocks away she showed me an orphanage, named Ahawah, Hebrew for "love," that was similarly converted to the orderly extermination of Berlin's Jews. A plaque tells its history as an orphanage, as well as an announcement of its renovation and reopening. The plaque dates from 1998. Nothing has been done to the building, and it is deteriorating badly.

 

Less imposing than the cemeteries and memorial sites, but more arresting, are the "stumbling blocks" that Irene had told me about the night before. More figurative that literal, the stumbling blocks are brass plates, about three inches square, set into the sidewalks generally in groups of three, four, five. Each grouping of plates generally bears a single family's names -- mother, father, children, grandparents -- who lived in the building outside of which the plates have been placed. They were the Jews swept away. In addition to an individual name, each plaque bears its namesake's year of birth, year of death, and place and manner of dying. A few were ambiguous: "Buchenwald, died." Most were not: "Auschwitz, murdered."

Had Irene not first pointed out to me these stumbling blocks, I might well have walked on and over them unnoticed. Once she pointed them out to me, however, I saw them all over. Every few buildings in the Mitte there would be another cluster of stumbling blocks. There was no escaping them. And there was no escaping how many of them recorded lifespans in the single digits. To be one, two, or three, and already so despised by a massive world power to be put to death.

Some of the stumbling blocks are not in clusters, and not victims of the camps, however. We came across two several blocks distant from each other that had not been murdered at Auschwitz nor died ambiguously in Buchenwald. Instead, one, a young 22-year old man, and the other, an older man, a lawyer, both died in a notorious Gestapo prison, executed, perhaps, for being Communists. Both were Jewish and likely to have been killed, anyway, but it was probably their politics which did them in first.

These stumbling blocks are neither a government program nor a uniquely Berlin phenomenon. Irene told me that the people who live in the homes formerly occupied by the Jewish families pay 90 euros to purchase and place the stumbling blocks. And she said people are putting down stumbling blocks all over Germany. The project is ongoing. Current residents are continuously making connections with their past.

According to Berlin's Jewish Museum (this one time a source other than Irene, though she corroborated it, so I trust it), in 1933 there were approximately 520,000 Jews living in Germany. By the end of the war, 215,000 of those Jews perished. The difference in the two figures represents those who fled before the camps became their fate. I wonder if Germans will ever get close to fixing a stumbling block for each deserving name, and if so, what the streets will look like, then.
 
Irene, a not-so-typical typical German woman, and a non-Jew, helped me see beyond my own fear and more importantly, my own bias. I can't account for why Germans of the '30s and '40s allowed the Holocaust to develop, and worse, helped develop it, but my sense from spending four days in Berlin plus one morning is that today's Germans are quite willing to shoulder a past not of their own making so that the past of their own making resembles nothing like the one they inherited.

Echoes From A Past Not Really My Own

I'm beginning to wonder if even the Hungarians themselves know Hungarian. This morning at 6:30 I arrived at the Eger Palyaudvar (pieawudvawrr/ Train Station) to purchase a round trip ticket to Budapest, 6:50 departure. On the walk over from my apartment, about twenty minutes, I practiced, out loud, "Kérjuk, Budapest, hat ut ven, körutazás" (kayrrook, budapesht, hot ut ven, koorrutawzosh." Over and over, I repeated "Kérjuk, Budapest, körutazás" like a mantra, fingering the scrap of paper I had scribbled it on like a rosary.

So when I say to the ticket agent -- in what I can only describe as impeccable, and, more importantly, unambiguous Hungarian -- "Kérjuk, Budapest, hat ut ven, körutazás," he looks at me, adrift within my syllables.

I concede: maybe the körutazás should have come after the Budapest, or the hat ut ven before, but, given the context, what possibly could I have been saying to so confound him? Even if I had shown up speaking Mandarin (and not perfect Hungarian), wouldn't the fact that we both were in a train station, that Budapest is a train stop, and that the next departure was scheduled for 6:50, minutes away, wouldn't that combination of clues, even under the most unintelligible of exchanges have prompted the ticket agent to hazard the Hungarian equivalent of "Budapest? One way or two way?" There appear to be few leaps of logic when it comes to Hungarian rail service. 

Baffling as Hungarian is, it doesn't scare me. German scares me. Irrational as I may be, German remains, to my ears, fixed in the larynx of Nazism. As a Jew I cringe at the sound of it. Everything I hear sounds like six degrees of separation from Adolph Hitler. Again, I fully admit the irrationality of it.


Still, it is with some apprehension and a bit of anxiety that I find myself now in seat 25A of Lufthansa flight #1337 en route to Berlin for five sprechen sie Deutsch-filled days.

My trip into the acme of the axis powers is not entirely involuntary. Berlin, nor anything within Germany's borders, was on my to-do list. But, each year the German Fulbright Commission hosts a pan-European conference, to which as a European Fulbrighter, I was invited.

I could have said no, turned down the invitation with no excuses, purely for fear of being immersed in German/y, but I decided that to do so would be childish, that what happened happened long ago, in a much different time, in a much different country.

I know this. And yet I am not convinced that, once there, I won't break out in hives or have some other kind of hysterical reaction.

To prepare myself for a soft landing, I had dinner last night in Eger's sole "German" restaurant, the HDH, or something-something Hofbräuhaus. It's a German restaurant, but everyone who works there is Hungarian and speaks Hungarian. Worst case scenario I figured is that I'd end up eating some kind of wurst when I thought I'd ordered wienerschnitzel. I read the laminated menu, each page of which featured a picture of the stereotypical blonde, buxom biergarten fräulein hugging a brood of brews close to her ample bosom, laughing heartily at something no doubt saucy shouted off camera.

Unfortunately, my server looked nothing like the fräuleins; he looked like James Carville. 

Through a series of pointings and "igens" I managed to get some kind of pork thing with roasted potatoes wrapped in bacon (as I've said before, Hungary is no place for pigs), which would have been good had the pork "loin" not been sauteed into a wafer. With it I had a nice mug of a special sour-cherry beer, which, fortunately, James Carville did not attempt to deliver nestled in his cleavage.

Had it been just this amount of Germanness in the restaurant, I would have been fine. But, in order to cultivate maximum Aryan authenticity the music was all oom-pah-pah and Bavarian drinking songs. All very cheery, and upbeat, the kinds of songs you and a fräulein can swing huge steins to in unison, and maybe even klink some.Trinken, trinken, trinken!

The problem was that I didn't picture myself swinging steins with either of the HDH fräuleins, nor did I see myself merrily drinking to these songs with anyone else. Instead, innocent as the music sounded, I pictured a couple of SS guys, caps tilted back, drinking and singing those songs, pinching the fräuleins and generally yukking it up after a long day of deporting Jews. 


I am certain that because they were authentic, the songs filling the room had also filled rooms during and through the second world war, and had, for at least a while, given comfort and pleasure to Nazis as they went about the day-to-day business of persecuting, and ultimately exterminating, Jews (and yes, others).

So, you can see how, if I can manifest that kind of darkness out of simple German drinking songs over a Hungarian restaurant's sound system, who knows what kind of paranoia I'll come up with once I have both feet on the ground in Germany.  


One thing I can assure you of: for better or worse, I will be all ears.

Growing Pains

March 15 is Hungarian Independence Day, when Hungarians celebrate the 1848 revolution against Austria and the Habsburg monarchy. It's kind of like our (U.S.) July 4th, except it's March 15th. And, from what I can tell, it differs from July 4th in that shops close for it, rather than pimp it as a reason to have a sale.


I decided to spend my Independence day at the voluptuous Book Cafe, located on the second floor of the Budapest's upscale Alexandra Bookstore. Twice before I felt like a rich man in its splendor; I was going for a hat trick.


I arrived at the bookstore and took the escalator up to the second floor restaurant, which was delightfully empty. The room sits beneath a huge, ornate, vaulted ceiling. Seats are a mix of small black tables and chairs, overstuffed leather loungers, and plush banquettes that line the walls. 

I spotted the banquette where I sat last time I visited, on which I spent several delightful hours drinking Cabernet Franc and listening to Norah Jones beneath a gilded firmament. 


As I shed my backpack I spotted and overheard the three customers at the corner of the same bankette, two tables  over from mine, drinking cappuccinos. They were all speaking English, one American, two Hungarian. I glimpsed a bit more. The American, sitting in a plush chair and most visible to me, was chubby, fifties, wore a greying goatee and grey wiry hair pulled into a pony tail. The two Hungarians, a woman and a man, both sat on the banquette. I could only catch their profiles. She, closest to me, was late forties, I guessed, chestnut shoulder length hair, no makeup and nothing remarkable about her dress. The man alongside her was, like me, shorn of hair. He looked to be in his sixties, maybe seventies, but hip. He wore two small hoop earrings in his left ear, and camo cargo pants. The American, leaning to the side away from them, arm draped over the back of the chair, was clearly the center of the Hungarians' -- and his own -- attention.


I unpacked Will Shortz's Crosswords for 365 Days, which, is in fact, a big fat lie, because I have had this compendium of New York Times crossword puzzles since I went to Reykjavik, Iceland in January 2007, well over a thousand days ago. And I am only only puzzle 251, "Growing Pains." 


I settled into my little corner there, soon to be greeted by the same young waiter I had during my last visit. He remembered me and the wine I ordered -- to excess, I now surmised. "Cabernet Franc," he declared standing by the table, as though prompted in his head by the Jeopardy! question, "What did this American drink last time?"

"Very good memory!" I said, envious of his recall. "I'll have another, köszönöm." He smiled, rightfully impressed with himself. He also pointed out a smoked trout paté plate on the menu he thought I would like. "Okay, sold," I said. But then he disallowed me from having the Cabernet Franc. "You must have white with the paté," he said, probably mistaking "must" for "should" or "ought to." Whatever. "Fine. Pick one for me."


The truth is, I don't really care for white wines, but he was trying so hard, I didn't have the heart to say no. "Chardonnay," he said conclusively to another Jeopardy! question. 


Off he went and on I went to "Growing Pains." 


The threesome next to me were speaking loudly enough so that in the otherwise quiet room, even with Norah Jones singing over my should, I could still pick up their conversation with crystal clarity. Clues abounded. He, the American lived in LA, and apparently traveled a lot, or at least widely, as he spoke about having been in Indonesia the week before. He also said that whenever he flies, he always takes an aisle seat. Always.


Talk turned to Charlie Sheen, his fiasco with CBS, and how the execs had no choice. "As far as I'm concerned, I couldn't care less what someone does, as long as they show up for work. He didn't. What choice did he leave them?"


Hmm. Sounds like an insider to me. I snuck a peek. Clearly not an actor; talking like a director. Maybe he's a Hollywood somebody.


I corrected my posture, in the event that, like Lana Turner, I might be discovered. 


More talk about unstable movie stars. "I mean, look at Nolte. The guy goes to the liquor store in his bathrobe, for chirssake. But he shows up for work. That's the difference."


Wine arrived. Who cares. I had a mystery to solve. 


So, he is some kind of Hollywood player. What was he doing in Budapest? And who were the Hungarians with him? What was their role? Local casting, perhaps?


I weighed introducing myself to him, real laid back like, one American to another, to see if he was somebody I knew ("Ah, so you're Ethan Coen. I admire your work, mostly, though I found True Grit disappointingly two-dimensional"), or should know, and to see if perhaps he wanted to cast a Fulbrighter in his next film. 


I decided instead to remain demure, appear to be quietly tending to to "Growing Pains," my wine, and soon to arrive trout paté, all the while gathering and piecing together more clues. 


I also concluded that if he was a somebody, it would begin to grate on him that I wasn't paying attention to him, wasn't, apparently, interested in discovering just what a somebody he was. The only thing that annoys somebodies more than being recognized is not being recognized.  


Eventually, unable to stand my disinterest, he'd get out of his chair and come over to my table demanding to introduce himself to me, when he would learn just how cool and collected I am -- "Hi Ethan," I'd say, extending my hand, but not getting up, "Name's Jerry." He then would ask if I've ever done any acting, and how I'd be a "natural" for his next lead role of a suave and sexy academic who spends a semester in Hungary teaching but also working undercover with the CIA to crack a global crime ring. I'd chuckle, a little embarrassed. And he'd call Harrison Ford right then and there to tell him he's been fired. 


So, I played hard to get, and just listened without appearing to.


"Depp and DeCaprio. They're the ones to watch. Neither of them has peaked yet. But they've got the look. They're the new look."


Depp, okay; but DeCaprio? He's a wimp.


The trout paté arrived in a clip-top jam jar, along with several slices of toast. I gave one a schmeer, and took a crunchy bite. It was good. I swigged -- no, sipped -- the wine, trying to appear nonchalant -- in case "anyone" should be watching --, as though I have trout paté with Chardonnay in elegant restaurants all the time. It's just one of the many sophisticated things I do.


"Bottom line, it's a business. And actors just don't get that." The Hungarians commiserated. "I mean, I'm paying for the shoot, and if one of them doesn't show because they got too drunk the night before, or they had a fight with their boyfriend, or whatever -- that's money out of my pocket. They just don't seem to understand. If they don't show up, or show up late, I've still got to pay for the location, for the cameras, the whole bit. That costs me. I mean, I'm sorry for all the troubles in their life, but I've got a movie to make. I've got a business to run."

The Hungarians understood, totally. And, in fact, so did I. Prima donna actors mucking up the works. Prissy little Leonardos screwing things up. And zonked out Charlie Sheens.
"And then if they don't get along. I've got to do all this hand holding, as if they aren't professionals being paid to do a job. I mean, they are professionals, right? So, why does it matter if they like each other? Just do your job and let's call it a day."


I was beginning to see how actors could really be a director's nightmare. But which actors? I wanted to know which actors, specifically, he was talking about? Someone famous, I hoped, I have to admit. But someone I disliked, too. (Leonardo for sure.) I didn't want to think that any of my favs -- Helena Bonham Carter, perhaps -- could be anything but the most professional and productive of actors. I was positive that, if given the chance, I would be a model actor, the polar opposite of nightmare. A director's dream.


I continued my feint with "Growing Pains" and chomped through another crunchy bite of the patéed toast, causing me to miss the question posed by the Hungarian woman.


"Oh sure," the American said. "That's something I always try to do. Add a story. I want it to be more than just the sex. I mean, there are those who want the sex and only the sex. But there are others, plenty of others, who want a story also. It's for them that I make my movies."


Wait. What did he say?


"I mean, how many times can we see the plumber come to fix the kitchen sink? It just gets boring after a while. So, I try to give my movies a story, some drama, something to watch besides the sex. And I try to cast my movies with actors who want to mix a little bit of acting -- real acting -- into their roles."


Hmm. So. He's not quite the director I thought he might be. Not likely to fire Harrison Ford, or even know his phone number. I started to rehearse in my mind how I would tell him, in the end, I just didn't feel right for the part. I just couldn't risk my acting future with a starring role in a porno movie.

I have to admit that, despite having to soon turn down the not-yet-offered-role, I remained interested in their conversation, not out of my own prurience (okay, well, maybe a little), but rather because the more they talked, the more I learned about the other side of porn, the business side, what happens behind the lens, so to speak -- and how unerotic it is. I am not a big devotee of porn -- I'll watch it if there is nothing else on -- but he was knocking the stuffing out of it, stripping it of all its allure. It got so I expected to hear him kvetch about how hard it was to make a living in porn these days, what with the Chinese producing it at a fraction of the cost.

So, porn ain't what it seems. 


But why stop there. Maybe the movies I thought he directed before I learned he directed porn, maybe those, too -- and the assumed charmed lives of actors in them -- are equally illusional and delusional. Maybe if we spent a day with Depp or DeCaprio we'd be bored to tears.
Even dining in that bookstore opulence, beneath the painted ceilings and chandeliers, the ooh-lah-lahness of it is kind of make believe. Certainly my waiter, by now, ceased to see the cafe's splendor, and instead saw it as a place to go to put in his hours, serve awestruck Americans trout paté and Chardonnay, make his money and go home.


Maybe everything is cool-lah-lah only from a distance. Maybe all the things people lust over -- be it pornographic fantasies, or fantasies of wealth and celebrity -- maybe those fantasies are propped up more by what we are kept from seeing than by what we are shown.  


I got through "Growing Pains." It took time, and the glass of Cabernet Franc that I had asked for way back when, and a bit of sneak-peaking at the completed puzzle in the back, and the departure of the director and his friends.

Just Say Nem

I never liked the Reagans (though they did provide great satirical fodder for Gore Vidal in the pages of The New York Review of Books). Since The Great Eviscerator -- the original Talking Hairdo -- took office, and gave us each not a chicken in every pot but rather a truncheon in every hand, to whack at and keep whacking at Washington like some giant, taxes-stuffed pinãta, the American heart has withered to a raisin.

Dutch had the twinkle, but Nancy -- the Smiling Hairdo -- had the vision. Coming from California, and the hippest of circles therein to be sure, the Reagans had learned, and Nancy gave utterance to, the magic bullet for helping teens steer clear of drugs: Just Say No. How simple? How easy? Who would have thought that those three words alone could have worked so wondrously? But wait: I will come back to them shortly.

First though, I would like to talk about some other words. When one is in the process of not learning a language as fluently as I have not been learning Hungarian for over a month now, whether in Hungary or anywhere (with the appropriate translation), there are key words that will get even the most unteachable tongue out of a pickle. Here are a few that I have learned:

Bocsánat (botchanought) = (I'm) Sorry. 
Here, as in the U.S., I think it best to lead with penance. Even if you have done nothing wrong, people will appreciate your apologizing for it nonetheless. However, fearing that even my Hungarian apology may not be discernible to Hungarian ears, I redouble my apology by crossing my hands over my chest and bowing deferentially as I do or do not botch bocsánat. There is no way that even a botched bocsánat would not be understood with such heartfelt chested contrition.

Köszönöm/Köszönöm szépen (Koosoonoom/Koosooom saypen) = Thank you/Thank you very much (an Elvis favorite when he bonded with Hungarians following the 1956 uprising (Köszönöm, köszönöm szépen). 
Saying thank you is also a good pre-emptive strategy, even if, as in bocsánat above, it confuses the recipient who did not register doing anything worthy of thanks. Again, just the fact that you are grateful for whatever they did or didn't do can go a long way in a foreign lang/land. So many Americans are ungrateful. Try to be unAmerican in this regard.

The exponential value of a combined "Köszönöm/Köszönöm szépen, bocsánat" or "Bocsánat, köszönöm/Köszönöm szépen" should be apparent, and so I will move on.

Viszlát (veezlot) = (Good) Bye
Usually said with brio, as Viszlát!/Bye! Now, viszlát serves several purposes, the most immediate of which is to let whoever may be attending to you know for certain that you are leaving. As a twenty-year bartender I can tell you that nothing -- apart from a fat tip -- brought on more joy to me than to see an un-time-tested customer leave (I have seen alcohol flip switches in even the nicest of strangers). Especially if the customer had been grating on me from the beginning, as would The Dour Donalds

Trumpy,

                  

                              Rummy,

                                                               

 








and Ducky,  

have grated on me had I to pour them drinks. So, the first good of goodbye is that it signals its sayer will soon be gone.

The second good of viszlát is that, because one usually says it with a dash of exuberance -- viszlát! -- that emotional uptick shows that you feel some bond with the person you are viszláting, as if, "I am not just any old apologetic yet thankful American, I am an apologetic yet thankful American who feels a loose kinship with you, even if it's only in, and by, leaving." Viszlát!

Igen (eegen) = yes.
Igen is another all purpose word. Most usefully, it helps hide the fact that you don't really know the language but can agree to certain things nonetheless, hence not exposing yourself (totally). So, for instance, if I go into the local hús bolt (hoosh bolt) and order a csirkemell filé (cheerkemell feelay), naturally, the butcher freezes in place as What did the hell did he just say? washes over her face. Then, when I point to the heap of boneless, skinless chicken breasts piled up in the meat case she understands, and leaning into the meat case she'll start sorting through the breasts asking me a number of questions, which, of course, I don't understand, but which I presume have something to do with the csirkemell filé I just requested. Uncertain but trusting in a small margin of error I say "Igen" to one of her questions. She holds up a chicken breast and double-checks with her own "Igen?" "Igen," I confirm as though there could be no better chicken breast for me than the one she plucked. I pay her and of course do the whole "Köszönöm szépen/viszlát!" thing.

The vocabulary I cited above, though helpful, can only be used in a limited way, in response to well-constrained situational exchanges. So, for instance, the seamless conviviality of a viszlát! only works upon leaving; likewise, one wouldn't offer a resolute "Igen" to a butcher who holds her arms wide to include the cornucopia of her entire meatcase. It is only because, like a skilled chess-player, I have been able to back the possible meanings into a corner, that I am able to deploy the terms and phrases above with a modicum of confidence.

Another advantage of those terms is that they thrust the confusion squarely in the lap of my conversation partner. In a sense, they've got to figure me out.

Not all situations, however, provide me such clear advantage. There are occasions where I am more confused than confusing. For instance, when I go to the supermarket to buy a bottle of scotch, and the cashier looks up from scanning the bar code and asks me a question, as they always do, I can't say "Igen" because I have no clear point of reference. I don't know what I'd be saying "Igen" to. Is she asking, "Do you have a shopper's card?" or "Would you like to step in the back and have your liver harvested?"; "Trouble finding anything?" or "We have lots of mangy stray cats locked up in the basement; would you like some?"; "Do you need a bag?" or "My ex-husband, the bum that left me for a woman less than half his age, used to drink this very brand of scotch; would it be okay if I smashed the bottle over your head?"

As you can see, there are simply too many variables to say "Igen" in such a situation, with or without bocsánats, köszönöms, etc. It is at times such as these that the simple wisdom of Nancy kicks in. When in doubt, just say nem. Nem, no, nips it. Clean. Simple. The End. 

Now, of course, just saying nem could cost me, too. It's possible that rather than wanting to harvest my liver the cashier only wants to fatten it, gladden it: "Oh, that brand of scotch has a two for one promotion this week; would you like the second bottle, free?" Or that rather than of an excess of cats, cash is her problem: "My register seems to be too full of money; would you take some off of my hands?" Or rather thank looking to smash a bottle she's looking to raise a toast: "I think you'd be a perfect match for my daughter, Miss Hungary; would it be okay with you if I gave her a call?" 

Igen, nem, both carry risks. But, at this stage of my Hungarian evolution, knowing what I know, and more importantly, what I don't, I'd rather hang on to my liver, stray the strays, and slip the split head and splitting headache, even if it means passing up a bottle of scotch, a wad of cash, and perhaps a mall makeout session with Miss Hungary. 


There is very little that Nancy and I agree upon, but in this instance, I'm with her that just saying nem is the way to go.

Where To Go And Make-Out In Eger, or, The Smears Of A Clown

Things have changed a lot since I last "made-out" (see above when me and one of my former sweethearts posed for Rodin. Dig the casual left hand; damn, I was smooth!). Or as least as I recall. In those deep catacombs of memory I remember making out as kind of a private, erotic, osmotic confluence of unstoppable romantic torrents. Occasionally, the girl I was making out with felt the same. I'm sure of it.


Back in the day, the rules were that you always made-out away from crowds, unless you made out in crowds, like when me and my 7th grade bros Henry and Paul would make out with our 7th grade girl pals, Kitty, Kathleen, and Tricia,  everyone kind of keeping an eye (and ear) on each other. Making out in one of our parents' basements, two-by-three on a busted, ratty couch as some off-kilter drier invariably rattled nearby, its clothes checked on invariably every few minutes by a not-so-tender-footed mom creaking down the stairs. Still, despite all that, our make-out sessions had the pretensions of privacy. And, of course, the aura of amour (however musty smelling).


But if Hungary is typical, the rules have changed. 

Since arriving here a little over a month ago, I have taken to going into Agria Park (trans: Agria Park), Eger's "Prize Winning Mall" (The plaque outside the mall states that the prize, given by some kind of real estate organization, was awarded by a "panel of independent judges." No mention is given whether that panel was made up of architects or mall rats.)


I'm not a habitue of malls, so, from what I have seen elsewhere, Eger's looks to me to be pretty generic. Lots of clothing chains selling back to their young patrons unique, hip, poutty, Made-in-China mass-produced identities; puppy-mill jewelry stores wedged in between the clothes stores; and of course, the cellular phone shops serving up the latest must-have generation of cellular wizardry -- the only retailers actually doing any business, from what I can tell.

As I am neither hip, young, nor unique, and as I don't wear (or give jewelry), or use a cell phone, what gets me here? Two things: first, the little coffee houses in Eger play the local Eger radio station, whose musical programming is a mix of bad disco and remixes of bad disco. Second, often when I go to a little coffee shop in Eger, I find that I am the only patron, and so I get wrapped up in a bit of self-consciousness, what with the shopowner having nothing better to do but listen to the radio and stare at me. 


So I escape those two things in Eger's award-winning mall by patronizing two coffee shops, side by side (one smoking, the other non), where I can (and do) have a one-two of hossou kaves (large coffees, as in, Turkish coffee, black as tar and just about as thick, with a dollop of steaming water), where I sit and sip unnoticed, and where, owing to the award-winning acoustics, I can't actually make out what music is being piped over the sound system, disco or disco re-mixed. 


At tables that would be considered al fresco if they weren't actually in a two story box, I sit as if on Main Street, watching the mall pedestrians go by. Occasionally I'll look at the book I brought as camouflage, but mostly I gape at the passersby.


And that is how I have become aware how much things have changed, make-out wise. For, while having a kave or two at my outdoor/indoor table, I have observed couples swoop in to take up positions on wood park benches between the opposing rows, there to engage in full-tilt, full-contact, tongue-tacking make-out sessions. I'm not talking a little puckering-plus, here. I mean serious sessions. Like, half an hour, during which, saliva ends up smeared over both smoochers' faces, resulting in a stinging, red rash on lips, cheeks, etc.

Before

 After

And totally unperturbed. They'll sit there and smooch as if they were outside the mall in a secluded parked car rather than inside the mall sitting on a wholly exposed park bench; as if there wasn't rotten mall music playing from speakers that wouldn't know a tweeter from a woofer if they got bit by one; as if there weren't Buckingham Palace mall guards stoically patrolling back and forth, back and forth, right in front of them; as if there wasn't a steady stream of other pedestrians passing by; as if there wasn't some American guy drinking caustic coffee studying them and wondering how can they do that?


I could understand if, after several hours of shopping and lugging around bags from store to store, a couple might say, "Enough! Enough shopping! Let's sit down here on this bench and smooch to our success!" You might even say that the mall would encourage such necking, maybe even advertise it -- just desserts for good consumer behavior.


But the I couples I have noticed have not come from shopping, nor do they head toward shopping once their romantic thirsts have been quenched. From all appearances, the only thing they planned on consuming in the mall was each other's face. 


This is the m.o. They come in from outside (the real outside, winter), plop themselves on a bench, shimmy out of their parkas, turn to position themselves just so (a la me, my girl, and Rodin), and then lock lips as though the whole mall had been designed and now exists for just their purpose. And then, once their lips have swollen to twice their normal size and have begun to occlude the oxygen flow into their nostrils, they separate, shimmy back into their coats and coast back outside, holding hands, giddy, lighter than air.

I admire their passion but their oblivion seems a little weird, a bit hard to fathom. Why come to a place and make-out where you will be under constant scrutiny -- real or imagined -- each and every salivating second? Wouldn't you want just a smidgen of privacy? 


Maybe they're exhibitionists, whose lipsmacking is made more erotic with an audience? 


Maybe they're sadists, cruelly taunting the lovelorn or simply the lived-long, those who lead kissless lives.


Perhaps, and this is a very long perhaps, these bench sessions are products of Eger's stout Catholicism -- it's an Archbishopric, after all -- such that these mall maulings are actually a socially approved, even applauded, form of safe sex, i.e., total abstinence south of the mouth. Maybe it's kind of like those parents who, realizing that their teenage kids are going to drink Friday or Saturday no matter what they say, host parties where at least they can keep their children safely at home and under their own sober scrutiny. Yes, Mom and Dad may have to later hold back Johnny's hair while he gets sick in the toilet, but at least he won't drive into a telephone pole or get in the car with someone who might.


Perhaps, in Eger, the mall is a romantic go-to for those wanting to make-out but also wanting to guarantee -- to themselves, to the community -- that all they want to do is make out. In other words, regardless of how chap-faced they may get in front of The Gap, chap-faced is all they will get-- literally and figuratively. 


Maybe that's why the mall is prize-winning.


I know that former President George Walker Bush and his sympathizers believe that preaching abstinence is the most effective form of promoting safe-sex, but I think studies have shown that simply preaching it isn't all that effective. Perhaps rather than sending missionaries to Africa we should have been building malls instead. If Eger is any indications, malls work.

E6: Jeter (A Rant)

I have always liked and admired New York Yankee shortstop, Derek Jeter. Every one does. He plays hard, delivers consistently, and comports himself as a gentleman, on and off the field. The complete package.


I never really thought about how much I like and admire him, never thought about liking and admiration as quantifiable entities. Rather I just appreciated the guy, kind of open endedly. 

That was until yesterday, when I read a piece in The New York Times about his new "house" near Tampa, Florida. You flew over it on the way to this paragraph.

Here are some stats on it:


"The 30,875-square-foot mansion, which overlooks Hillsborough Bay, features seven bedrooms, nine bathrooms, a pool, two boat lifts, a drive-through portico and a pair of three-car garages flanking the north and south ends of the property."


By comparison, my mansion is 900 square feet. I can fit 34 of my mansions in Derek's. With room to spare, actually.


(As an aside, I think he made a mistake with only seven bedrooms. He should have made it an even ten, so that he can have the whole starting line-up, including the DH, over for smores and slumber parties. But then, that would actually not likely happen, as Jeter is known for his sense of privacy.)


So why do I now realize admiration is quantifiable and that I admire Derek less today than yesterday? Because Jeter, with this house, shows that he is just as clueless what to do with his wealth as almost every other gazillionaire in the world. I mean, here is a truly humble guy, from solid middle-class stock, who because of his prodigious athleticism makes extreme money -- more than 99.9% of Americans, way more -- and yet this house of his indicates that he really has no good idea what to do with that money. Here, he had a real opportunity to make an outstanding play on the world's diamond. 


Meaning, that in a global culture that believes unquestionably that money is its own good and the more the better, Jeter could have proved he's not just another rich guy following the rich guys flock, sheepishly amassing wealth beyond anybody's ability, including his own, to make sense of it, and to rationalize it.  


But he didn't break away from the flock. Instead he built an edifice to pointless wealth, the biggest, most pointless edifice in all the land. And in so doing he dropped the ball.

The Times article didn't mention the price tag of Jeter's cottage, but it did cite the homes of two teammates. Relief phenomenon Mariano Rivera's 9,250 sq. ft listed at $8.99 million (his other, smaller house, was given no price); catcher Jorge Posada's 9,788 sq. feet are are going at the fire sale price of $6.495 million.


So let's do some math. Rivera's house averages out to $972 per square foot; Posada's, $664. Assuming that Jeter decided to spend a dime and do it right, as apparently Rivera did, Derek's house at $972 per sq. ft carries a $30 million plus price tag. If he decided to pinch pennies, as apparently Posada did, the house will have only cost him $20.5 million. 


Twenty mil, thirty mil -- what the dif? Last year, as he had in the previous nine years, Jeter made $18.9 million -- that's just for playing shortstop. It doesn't include endorsements, estimated at another $9 mil annually. So, Derek had to play somewhere between 175 and 245 games to pay off his house (not including playoff games, of course -- he is a Yankee, after all), between a little more than a season and a season and a half. It's pretty safe to say that he's not going to be sweating the mortgage payments. He's already swatted through them.

But again, for what? Seven toilets that for the most part will go unflushed? Think of the number of toilets $20 or $30 million could provide where they're actually needed. Or the thousands of classrooms that could have been built instead of that single house. How much does a hospital go for these days? Think of the living, breathing good those millions could be doing, instead of the inert, extravagant meaninglessness in which they now lay frozen under the Florida sun.


Sure, Jeter gives to charity, even has a foundation all his own. And so, he is a good guy. But in opting for that house, when one so much simpler would have done equally well,  and then to have publicly turned the difference into projects, domestic, international (Hungary has a shortage of textbooks), he could have catapulted his own legend to a whole new level, perhaps setting a path for others to follow. Forsaking a palace, he would have built a kingdom.


Maybe next year he'll play to his potential.