A view of Budapest. Photo / 123RF
Budapest. I last came here in the 1980s when Hungary was still ostensibly communist, part of the Warsaw Pact and under the grim governing eye of the Russians.
And I met an old man who had fought in World War II, and who conspiratorially showed me a black and white photograph of himself as a young soldier sitting astride a toppled statue of Stalin.
“Me,” he said, jabbing the picture with his finger, and he giggled like a naughty child, then glanced around in fear.
Forty years later, the country has the same landlocked climate – the afternoon heat is fierce and it is only early summer – and the same impenetrable language that owes no debt to any other. But politically it has flipped, has crossed the divide, is now a paid-up member of the European Union, a capitalist Western democracy, its people free and self-determining. And yet, and yet …
Our last night in the city. We have toured the sights, climbed to Buda Castle, lunched by the Danube, seen Parliament lit up at night, ridden the metro and the buses and the trams, eaten the goulash, drunk the beer and wallowed in the thermal pools as the Romans did 2000 years ago.
And now a taxi is booked to take us to the airport in the early morning and it would be sensible to go to bed. But the bar is still open in the hotel lobby, and what’s a holiday for?
In the quiet of midnight, the receptionist doubles as barman. He’s in his late twenties, heavily built, gentle-natured, kind-faced.
“You are leaving in the morning,” he says.
“Yes. We have had a good time.”
“That’s good.”
“Yes.”
A pause. There are just the two of us. “So,” I say, using a line I often use to set the conversational ball in motion, “where will you be in 10 years’ time?”
He is surprised. He looks me full in the face, wondering perhaps whether I am serious, whether he is really being invited to take the leap from commercial courtesy to personal honesty. He is.
“Will you still be here?”
“Oh sir, I have a little daughter 1 year old and I am worried.” And like the old man with the photograph of Stalin toppled, he lowers his voice and looks around to ensure we are alone. “Things is not good.”
I wish I could have taken notes. I would like to capture his words exactly, his halting, earnest English for which he apologises repeatedly, but which, as I point out, is a sight better than my Hungarian.
What he lays out, sentence by hard-won sentence, is a first-hand account of the old conundrum of political power: that those who want power shouldn’t have it; but those who don’t, are often happy to give it to them.
So it is that the Russians, having finally thrown off the totalitarian yoke in 1990, now three decades later find themselves in thrall to Putin..
And here in Hungary the people have willingly given power to Viktor Orban, and they seem unlikely to shake him off.
In my view, Orban has achieved his aims by the standard authoritarian recipe, the half-truths, the vilification of the outsider, the nationalist rara and all the rest, which is as old as the emperors, as old as power itself.
Auden captured any and every Orban in six lines:
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
What’s needed, says the barman, is for his compatriots to take responsibility for their own fate, but he fears that they won’t, that they lack the mindset.
He worries for his country, and he worries for his daughter. And as he tells me all this, the look on his face, of pained honesty, would tear any heart.
I listen and nod and tut through a pint of cold Hungarian beer and a couple of whiskies. And when I finally say that I need to go to bed, he clasps my hand in both his and thanks me as if I’ve just saved his daughter’s life. Though all I’ve done is ask a question. Which he both has and hasn’t answered.