My apartment is in a slightly seedy central part of Budapest, and I am a little afraid of being murdered by a guy in a sweat suit who looks like a hockey player. Coming home one night after a late supper, I had trouble opening the heavy wooden door that leads into the courtyard from the street. I was trying hard to be patient with my iron key when up he came. He towered next to me and reached past the key through a fist-sized square hole in the door that I hadn’t noticed. He flicked the latch and then, looming there above me, started to scream.
The street around us was deserted. Of course. Anyone with sense would be inside behind a wall, away from this black yelling that streamed out of him like lava. I couldn’t catch a word, I was petrified. I rushed out to the reassuring boulevard and from a public phone called my American friend Sweetheart (she calls me Sweetheart, Honey, Darling, in a café society way). At that time the telephones were working for me: I didn’t understand why people went on and on about how problematic, money-grabbing, and nightmarish they were.
Sweetheart told me to hop into a cab and gave me her version of the name of her street, which was so far-fetched that even in my panic I had to take the time to ask her to spell it out as it would be written on a street sign. A cab flew me over the Danube, and my night became peaceful and safe.
Back to my building the next morning, knowing that the big door would
be open for the day, I vowed never again to come back alone after eleven or whenever it is that they choose to lock the place.
I live on the ground floor. My only acquaintance here is a man with platform shoes and a thick cane and thicker spectacles. One Saturday afternoon he knocked on my door. He excused himself, seemed to say a teacher used to live here (could Erzsébet, silent and brittle, be a teacher?) and kissed my hand. Then he passed me two large bags filled with groceries.
He told me his name and pointed diagonally up across the bleak cement courtyard, saying “second floor.” Hugging his provisions, I padded in my slippers (everyone in Hungary wears slippers at home) up a floor and onto the balcony that surveys the courtyard as in a prison movie. None of the little metal tags on the doors matched what I had thought was his name, so back down the marble stairs I went.
“Second, second,” he said, and “Oh yes, second,” I echoed in Hungarian, grasping my confusion at their second floor being our third.
Back upstairs I saw windows with white curtains—on the ground floor we have old blankets and cardboard over our windows. A different social class on high, with different customs? Longer-term residents who bought curtains in better days, as opposed to desperate newcomers devastated by unemployment and inflation?
I hung the bags on his door handle. He thanked me by telling me his life story, or something that brought in the Hungarian word for “waiter”. But maybe he was asking me to be his waitress.
I had a sneaking hope that this would become a ritual, his knocking at my door with his groceries, but it hasn’t happened again. I feel quite isolated in this courtyard, isolated but not left out, because everybody seems to keep to themselves, and life goes on without a city’s usual rhythms. I never hear a rush of people leaving for work in the morning, or a cluster returning in the evening. I don’t hear TVs or alarm clocks, music, or meals. At times I find myself wondering whether a lot of the apartments are deserted, or inhabited by invalids.
Actually, maybe it’s that the people here, with the exception of the hockey player, are quiet, which is my way of saying depressed. Even drunk, faces flat and bruised, they stumble upstairs in silence, like stunned animals. The most expansive person in my building is a woman who likes to stand out on the street in her bathrobe and slippers to smoke.

Why here?, foreigners living in Budapest tend to ask one another. Nobody knows. People shrug, mutter a phrase or two about the city, and then, as though it were an in-joke, roll their eyes and smile with the camaraderie of victims. Hungarians too ask “Why here?”, teetering between the gloaming of their ethnic spirit and their longing to be in Vienna with its cleanliness, its goods, and those hard smug faces that make one wonder if consumerism means the end of gentleness and grace.
Budapest is like Paris, like London, like New York. Budapest is beautiful. When I leave my apartment and step out into the city I feel elated. Buses scud one after another like dolphins, the light falls soft and yellow on the dirty streets and the gray faces, and the eye never stops being drawn up and around, over somber people with fillips of colour at their necks, over buildings whose proportions seem to soothe, over ochres and greens, statues and gratings: there is no end to the eclectic prettiness of Budapest. And as soon as you start to walk around in the balmy polluted air, the story of the country starts gently to unfold. Bartók Béla út, Liszt Ferenc tér.
If you climb Castle Hill to visit the National Gallery, you’ll be struck by the weird agony of the statue of a man named Dózsa. In 1514 he led a peasant uprising that failed. Victorious nobles seated him on a red-hot iron throne and crammed a red-hot iron crown onto his head; his followers were forced to eat chunks of his scorched flesh. Therefore, forever vivid, Dózsa György tér. At every corner the history of Hungary is a constant presence.
My guidebook says that there’s a Hungarian word, honfibú, that means
“patriotic sorrow”, and behind that word is the grief of generations, a grief common to all for their ill-fated country. “We are sad people,” my students tell me. They don’t want to talk about politics, at least not to me. I must have had fifty students by now, and I’ve never seen any of them with a newspaper, even though there are seven or eight dailies in Budapest. All I get from my students are generalities, asides really, like “Antall and Csurka aren’t real politicians, they’re clowns.”

The school I teach at is pleasant enough. As one prospective teacher put it, “Unbelievable. You come and you go, you can expect the school to arrange substitutes for you whenever. You wear what you want. What a great place.”
I got the job simply by walking in, with my Cambridge Certificate of Teaching in my hand—the result of a brutal one-month course in Barcelona a couple of years ago. The school needed teachers at that time, and I’ve noticed that every three or four months the need comes again; English teachers in Budapest turn over rapidly, because so many of them are not particularly dedicated to teaching. Sweetheart, for example, left New York because she wanted to live in Europe. Visiting a friend in Budapest, she found that there was plenty of work and not much red tape. Then she fell in love with the guy she was visiting. So she taught English in the fall, and when she needed more money, found a job as a secretary for an American company.
Most of the teachers are, like her, in their twenties. I feel removed from them, part of a different generation. The students, though, are all ages—this being a language school, not a high school—and I feel especially appreciated by the older ones. Several women have invited me to their homes for a meal, an event which goes on for hours in enthusiastic English. They all had to learn Russian for years, but they insist they never spoke it. I drink the delicious wine and babble on as though I were at home, happy to have company and forgetting that they pick up about a fourth of what I say, though they politely pretend to understand everything.
Now and then someone says something that reveals how much thought, as well as time, has gone into the festivities.
“Here. Margarine. Americans need margarine if I remember it well.”
I’ve visited families with microwaves, VCRs, and framed photographs, who take holiday trips “abroad”—meaning out of Hungary. Most people, though, can’t afford the four-hour train trip to Vienna, have no credit cards, (no one uses cheques, it’s all cash), and have to save for decades to buy a car.
Many students are sent to the school by their places of employment. On Mondays and Wednesdays, for example, a group of scientists leaves its institute together after lunch to come to my three-hour class. Many unemployed students are paid for by the government, but I haven’t found out what the deal is, daunted by the reproach of the British teacher I asked: “That doesn’t concern you.”
Budapest has been besieged thirteen times: surely the current influx of foreigners, especially businesspeople, is a reminder of patriotic sorrow as well as a sign of much-anticipated progress. Substituting for a friend, I gave a private English lesson to an executive at a company taken over by G.E. To get him talking, I told him to interview me, which made it perfectly reasonable for me to then interview him.
I asked what the main changes in the company were.
“Now, everyone has to smile,” he said.
“Because they tell you to?”
He shrugged. “Because it’s the American way.”
Now, he has to work twice as hard; efficiency, he said, wasn’t valued under communism. G.E. thinks G.E. knows everything, and “maybe they do in America, but Europe is different.” In America, it’s all done by computers and the customer is always right. In Europe, people go out to dinner, talk about the family, and then buy.
“It’s a culture problem,” he concluded.
It must be very hard to be working for Americans if to an executive the customer-is-always-right concept seems stupid or demeaning. I wonder how it feels to learn English in order to be able to talk to the boss—as opposed to learning English as a desirable asset in international life. He told me there are twenty-five Americans in his company in Budapest, and only one who speaks Hungarian.
American teachers tend to be supersensitive to the concept of English as a form of imperialism. One of Budapest’s two English weekly papers published the story of an American who stopped teaching English because as a teacher of English she felt part of a force destined to destroy Hungarian culture. I assigned the article to one of my classes. Their reaction was that Hungarian culture can cope.
British teachers of English, meanwhile, have different concerns:
“Are the Brits going to lose out yet again to a load of colonial upstarts?” asks an impassioned English teacher from England. “It used to be so nice in Hungary’s English classrooms—so, well, English. Until American English arrived with the Americans. Now Budapest is swarming with ex-colonials in horn-rimmed glasses being overly intense all over the place.”
The British, ready to charge into a lift-vs.-elevator riff immediately upon introduction to an American, don’t seem to register the fact that we’re not antagonistic about these language differences.
My school sporadically offers its teachers free Hungarian lessons. This gives the British a chance to make fun of, say, Thanksgiving. Otherwise the classes don’t make much of a dent, the Hungarian language is just so different. Sweetheart isn’t interested in learning her boyfriend’s native language; she gets by just fine, as do, I’m sure, most foreigners. Sweetheart did, though, have a problem with a dentist who filed three of her teeth down to tiny stumps when she went in for a cleaning.
“I thought they understood English,” she told me, livid.

Every morning I prepare my classes for the next day. What are we doing? How and when will I get them away from the book and into conversation? Each class has a different character, as well as a different level. My evening class, for example, is filled with shy young adults who know English but refuse to speak it. If I can’t get them to talk, who can, I wonder. So I try to figure out how to keep them talking almost the whole time. I can do this, but it takes planning and inspi-
ration. After which I usually drink a dark beer and ricochet around my apartment.
Sheepskins litter the sofa, the skins of some other animal are splayed over the floor and the walls, and the radio sounds as if it’s being broadcast from the bottom of the Caspian Sea. I usually eat a couple of hot dogs and maybe some boiled potatoes or spaghetti. Jarred peppers, for color and taste. Tiny containers of natural yogurt for health. Sometimes, as a treat, expensive Austrian bread, shot through with fruits and nuts. Usually Hungarian loaves, which I finish within two days, I get so ravenous. Food costs about the same in Hungarian supermarkets as it does in American supermarkets. Not the same proportionally, but the same in exact currency exchange. I can’t tell with food in regular markets—merchants have a habit of raising their prices as soon as they realize they’re dealing with a foreigner.
It’s hard to stay alert to what the currency means. First you have the literal dollar-into-forint exchange, which prices a monthly bus pass at around ten dollars, an espresso at 25 or 30 cents, a movie at less than a dollar. But an average monthly wage for someone who needs a bus pass is about $120. An apartment costs maybe $110. So how much is a bus pass, really? Sixty cents for a ticket to the wonderful Katona József Theatre, how fantastic. Three dollars and fifty cents for a good seat at the ballet sounds equally cheap. But if you have the equivalent of two dollars set aside for entertainment for the month… And although it could be argued that it’s great, foreigners are supporting the ballet and the opera through a difficult time of transition, still we’re squeezing the natives out. In the intermission at the ballet I heard so much English spoken it was as if I were at a spectacle put on for tourists.
On the streets all over the city I see KENYERET scrawled. “Bread.” Prices have doubled in the last year and sky-rocketed the year before. The teachers at my school just got a raise of twenty-five forints an hour. Jasmin, whose mother is Hungarian, father Yugoslav, and who speaks English like a native of Australia, was disgusted.
“Twenty-five forints. Nothing,” she said.
Twenty-five forints is about twenty-eight cents.
“I have no time. And no money to set aside. Two years ago, on this wage, you could have the house and the cat.”
“You could have what?”
“An idiom. Now prices have gone up.”
“But don’t we get an awful lot compared to regular Hungarians?”, I asked.
“Why should we compare ourselves to regular Hungarians?”, she said.

Beggars are everywhere. Gypsies camp on the subway steps, displaying their greatest tragedy, whether it’s a scabby child or the stub of an amputated limb. People with pleading eyes, in tidy frayed tweed coats, walk around collaring strangers. And maybe because poverty seems less threatening in Hungary than in America, I find myself wondering why I so carefully give so little. Am I afraid they’ll be able to stop begging before they’ve put in their full begging hours? Am I afraid of acknowledging that I have more money than they?
I visited a mountain area in the northeast where there were 180 men, 170 of whom are now unemployed. They must have worked for some hopelessly inefficient business which cannot stand up to free trade. Could anyone have warned them that the switch from communism to capitalism would be so devastating? They waited so long for freedom, and here it comes, flattening them into poverty. Privatization aims to streamline, to get rid of unnecessary workers, not to support them. Unemployment is a new phenomenon, and the people, who are used to being taken care of by the government—full employment was a policy of the centralized communist government—either lack the skills or are psychologically unprepared to dash out and join the rat race. The government unemployment allowance lasts for a year and a half.
When I was first here, I just couldn’t understand why the economy doesn’t work. The people seemed so contained and intelligent. But now, now that the telephone has turned against me and I’m getting used to it here, my fixit attitude is fading. The situation seems to be getting worse all the time. Sweetheart told me she stands rather than sits on the subway so that she won’t have to be on eye level with the people. I understand. For us, it’s a short-term adventure.
The whole system is being changed. The national debt is enormous. And meanwhile, the nations all around Hungary rustle with nationalistic feelings. Since the dismemberment of Hungary at Trianon in 1920, 3.5 million people of Hungarian origin find themselves living in neighbouring countries, about half of them in solid ethnic blocs just across one new border or other. The rights of Hungarian minorities is a constant issue, like—surely—the land they live on.
But, “No, we don’t want our land back,” my students assure me casually.
“You don’t?” I say incredulously. “I do.”
Then I remind myself that I’m not Hungarian, I don’t understand the nuances. For all I know this is sarcasm, privacy, or despair.

All these American women in Hungary,” said János, interviewing me for a
teaching position.
“It’s not so easy to live in America right now,” I said. But he didn’t want to chat about our inflation any more than he wanted to talk about Hungary’s.
“America is my dream,” said János. “Jack Kerouac.”
“Jack Kerouac,” I echoed, smoking because he was smoking. “Was that thirty years ago? How old were you? That was fine then, but now you’d have to get a job.”
Was it the driving around that had appealed to János? I took the little old metro line to the American library. I found Kerouac’s definition of “beat”.
“…furtiveness. Like we were a generation of furtives… with an inner knowledge there’s no use flaunting on that level, and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world.”
It sounds Hungarian.
I took out a book about American Indians because I’m envious of the Hungarians having their peasants. Selling flowers, tablecloths, garlic in their costumes. I feel superficial, alien to the land, I have no garden or superstitions. On Saturday nights I go to a folk dance place where people are taught the steps and peasants sit along the edge, nodding, with skirts and blouses draped over their knees, for sale. At first I thought I’d eventually get up my courage and try dancing, but the husband of one of my students said, “That’s for young people.” So I just sit with the bright-eyed hard-skinned old peasant women who are delighted to have me with them because they know I’ll be tempted by some beautiful handmade thing which I’ll buy as soon as I translate the price into dollars.
The small band wails scratchy, lurchy music. The dancers take a break and are taught a folk song. They care so much. I was so desperate to leave America.

I’ve seen the hockey player walking across my courtyard. So he lives here. Everyone in my building knows about him, I think, but they’re quiet, they assume I can take care of myself, with my four pieces of luggage and my airmail letters from home.
Last night there was shuffling outside my window. I lay frozen with fear. Shuffle shuffle shuffle, things being moved, the hockey player approaching, everyone else dead to my world. Why was he taking so long? Didn’t he know I had only the lightest lock on my door, the thinnest bars over my window, and no telephone? On and on he went with his preparations, his approach, whatever it was. My poor mother, I thought, “MURDERED IN BUDAPEST.” How will she ever be able to come to grips with that?
Hours passed. I lit a candle (a bright light might make me visible). I tremblingly scratched a description of the guy in my journal. Then I willed myself to sleep. I refused to ruin my last hours with thoughts of him.
I woke to silence outside. Morning, like a dying fire, brightened the orange blanket over my window. When I set off for school I saw an old pushcart standing on the other side of the courtyard, in front of a door that was ajar. The pushcart was piled high with cardboard. Someone had worked through the night, folding and stacking. He was going to pull that cart through the streets to someplace where he’d get something, anything, for his long hours. I vaguely remembered seeing a child go into that apartment, or that room—I had no idea who the parents were.
I glanced in as I walked by. More cardboard strewn around, a haggard disorder.
In the late afternoon when I came back, the cart was standing there empty. Tired and homesick, I hopped into the tub and drank some cherry brandy. Then I sat at my fold-out kitchen table with my calendar, crossing out the weeks already spent in Hungary, counting up the ones remaining. After dark I stealthily scuttled across the courtyard and put a box of Austrian cookies in the old cart, weighting down a hundred forint note. Nothing.