Budapest Postcard 4/Berwyn Postscript
Pathopatridalgia
Homesickness hit me on April 26 around 8.30 in the morning. It emerged from my sinus cavity & my salivary glands, tasting like a blend of minerals & Novocain. Thoughts that moments ago coursed on what felt like normal trajectories suddenly felt tethered, held to some invisible center in my feeling. They raced around a pole in my imagination like dogs on leashes, barking at the shadowy circumference. When I would see a taxicab parked on the corner, I would think, "In a little more than a month, I will be taking a taxi to the airport, which will take me
home." My legs began to feel like they were being periodically filled with molten lead, which would slowly drain through the pores in my feet. The light of the springtime became sometimes difficult to bear. I began to notice how much dogshit lurked on the street, when it was removed, when it was replaced. I started talking about going home with G., regularly. We talked about his room, our yard, our cats — the one living & the one who had passed away.
I’ve had experience with nostalgia before & fully expected it to hit  in fact, was surprised it didn’t come until the end of April. I think homesickness is one of the most potent emotional forces that can overwhelm us. Rebecca took a Hungarian class for the last month we were in Budapest. It met every afternoon for three hours. In her class were a ragtag crew: a number of Portuguese students, a Korean (who described the similarities between Korean & Hungarian — which are part of the same language family — as remotely distant at best, "in some of the grammar"), a conspiracy-theorizing American who called himself at times Rick, at times Nick (he claimed something like, "If I were doing what I’m doing here in America" — it was "medical research" of some sort — "I would be in prison"), & a young Iraqi woman, named Hibay. Hibay, it seems, had been married to an elderly family friend soon after the beginning of W.’s "war," one who is Iraqi but a Hungarian citizen, in hopes of protecting her. She had been in Budapest for eight months. The only thoughts she could bear were to imagine returning to Baghdad. Her husband wouldn’t let her; or, he was considering its possibility, of letting her return to her family, while he remained in Budapest. Rebecca asked her why she would want to move back into such a treacherous place on earth. She could only sigh in response. It was home & she missed it terribly. Toward the end of class, Hibay asked R. when she was returning home. When R. replied,five days after class ends, Hibay burst into tears.
My own homesickness was mitigated by two helpful events: the always-approaching meridian of our actual departure — each day, bringing us a day closer. (Though I allowed a morbid fantasy to bloom into life in which I concocted various scenarios that would prevent us from going home.) And salmonella poisoning, which hit me mid-May, a body-crusher. On a Sunday, I noticed an unusual twinge in my ear canal — I felt like I was getting an earache, something I hadn’t had since childhood. I began to track the invisible pain, which felt like it was moving through my most interior corridors. The next day, I felt the advent of aches & pains in my joints. Just a cold, I reasoned. By evening, I was reduced to a gruesome fetal curl, shivering under the covers of the bed. I spent the night in a mazy delirium — thoughts of utter familiarity but ones, for purposes of survival perhaps, discarded & left unremembered. By Tuesday, the fever — still high — had persisted for more than twenty-four hours. Rebecca thought a doctor’s visit was merited. Calling around, she determined my best bet was to go to the Emergency Room at the International Hospital — Kórhaz — where we would be likely to find someone who spoke English. All of which proved to be true. The hospital — well, I really don’t need to describe it to you. Let’s just say it wasn’t quite a gulag, but it didn’t make me feel any better to be there. After a brief examination, the doctor — a doppelganger for our Polish next-door neighbor in Chicago — explained in elaborate Hungarian to the nurse that I had salmonella poisoning, likely because I wasn’t used to the "fatty & meaty Hungarian diet." If only! I was given prescriptions — packets of powder, suspensions to mix with water in the tiny glasses in our apartment — & told to get some rest. A week later, I was feeling closer to normal. And at this point, we had only a week in Budapest left. The weather had turned to full-blown spring. Life. Again.
Balaton
So, our last weekend in Hungary, we decided to rent a car, again, & visit Lake Balaton, the largest freshwater lake in Europe. We had wanted to go to Transylvania, in order to visit the locus originalis of the culture of the Hungarian folk revival, but realized — with some dim-witted consternation — that it would take us six to seven hours to drive where we wanted to go, too long for a simple weekend trip. Next time — oh, there will be a next time! — we will visit Transylvania, & if I have any say, Moldavia as well, so I can see the painted Orthodox churches.
The Balaton region is west of Budapest, southeast of Austria. It’s a lush, green region of the country, whose north side is hilly & forested, & whose southern shore is flatter, leading into the broad Transdanubian plain. Márton has said to us that the Tihany peninsula, which dips down from the north shore into the lake, is probably his favorite place on earth, where he would ideally retire. I poked around on the internet — what did we do before we could poke around? — & found an old Hapsburg mansion just under the hamlet of Tihany on the peninsula where we could stay. Not expensive & perfectly located for exploring the rest of the lake. This is, after all, the land of old Hapsburgs & their many mansions.
Tihany peninsula, with bull
Tihany is special, no doubt. Everything — you know, "nature" — is on such a smaller scale in most of Europe I’ve visited. Even mountains have well-trodden paths to their summits, where you’ll typically find a cozy lodge where you can get some delicious hot chocolate. So Tihany can be walked across in a few hours. There are lovely hills, two small lakes, incredible views of Balaton, & some gorgeous Hungarian cows. Lake Balaton is all set up for tourists, Tihany as well. Mostly Germans, it seems. All the tourist signs are auf Deutsch. We walked by one place that offered an "American-style buffet of unlimited consumption." Unfortunately, what was lost in this translation from the Hungarian was reborn in oracular clarity. It was funny for a minute, then, simply tragic.
Hungarian fact: it costs $50 to put a 1/2-tank of gasoline into a VW Golf. Which means, you know, a full tank would cost $100. Just think how much better our public transportation — busses, trains, light rail — would be if gas cost that much over here.
From Tihany, we drove further west to the tip of Balaton to go to the spa-town of Héviz, known for its curative, mildly radioactive lake, the second-largest thermal lake in the world. (Evidently, the largest is in New Zealand.) The town is all built up with hotels & German-style pizza places (which, believe it or not, is a good thing: Hungarian pizza is not all that good, I’m sorry to say. German-style pizza — which is what you get in Austria, almost always made by Turks — is excellent: thin, a little doughy, with sparse ingredients, some cheese, a little sauce, some oregano, a few slices of ham). Germans with colorful flotation donuts ambled, strolled, waddled down to the spa — a huge complex of changing rooms surrounding the thermal lake, a virid-black opacity that reflected the sky almost luminously (might’ve been the radioactivity). We rented an innertube & plunged into the waters that hovered that day around 34 degrees Celsius: quite lovely. It turned the silver on my Zuni ring a burnished copper color. After an hour — G. liked it a lot, but the lake was very deep, so he always needed to be held — we took cleansing showers in water that smelled distinctly of farts & then went to get some pizzas. Which were delicious. I even drank a Coke along with, a rare afternoon caffeine treat, feeling loosely-jointed & relaxed, anticipating the drive back to Budapest.
Which we made on backroads through a glorious thunderstorm. Fields Oz’d with poppies alongside, nodding under the waterdrops.
One last praise of Budapest: Margitsziget
More than a few times I’ve mentioned this park, which sits on an island in the middle of the Danube, stretching north from the center of the city. It’s a glorious place, one of the splendid gems of Budapest, along with, perhaps, the tomb of
Gyul Baba, the Sufi dervish & saint who is buried in the Buda hills, looking beneficently down across to the Margitsziget.
Gyul Baba’s tomb
While we lived on the filthy Weiner Leo utca, I went to the Margitsziget several times a week, at least. It was maybe 1/2-a-mile away from our apartment, so I would sometimes go to run there, feeling like some kind of Roman marathoner as I lunged around the island, thinking to myself, That’s the Danube flowing beside me; people have been walking along this island looking at it since the time Legionnaires sped Ovid on to his Scythian exile. I can get the same thrill running alongside Lake Michigan, but not the same sense of the culture into which my imagination is largely immersed.
The Ruined Church, Margitsziget
The island is dotted with the ruins of various churches, including theskeleton of the Dominican abbey where St. Margaret, the island’s namesake, in the thirteenth century dwelled. There’s a memorial tomb for her in one of its empty chambers — I don’t know if she’s interred there, but people regularly leave flowers on the site. The ribs of the abbey’s cathedral rise up brokenly around her. So does a tree, in which a pair of European goldfinches were nesting. G. & I come here to play: he brings several cars, which he races along the smooth path laid down near a garden; I bring my binoculars to look for birds: mostly European robins, sparrows, & wood pigeons. Only occasionally have I seen something interesting: a wagtail, a blue tit. Afterwards, we usually walk over to the small zoo, where there are some deer, a number of fancy chickens with pantaloons of feathers on their legs, some peacocks, some wounded raptors — hawks & eagles, a one-winged European crane, some storks, & three gentle horses who press their soft lips against our palms as we feed them carrots.
Trees of Life, Margitsziget
Margitsziget is an almond of land in the Danube stream, one existing for me now as a simultaneous mental place.
There I see it almost entirely as superabundant, vernal greens: a textured, leafy light.
Berwyn Postscript: July 23, 2004
Spiderwort, Berwyn, Illinois
Nearly two months after returning home, I review this final postcard. It comes this time from a now-remote place back to me here in a very familiar one. It’s cool outside, evening. The profligate sparrows chirp into the sunset — they haven’t ceased hatching broods since our return. There are bluejays jeering into the trees, some cardinals issuing their what-cheers, & a family of yellow-shafted flickers in the tree a few yards over. What was that place called Central Europe? And did we really live there? Humans began as migrators: our unique bipedal motion, our rapid conversion of proteins to energy, our stamina — these allowed us to drift across continents only the birds surpass. For over 10,000 years we’ve been stationary, sedentary. How much ingrained motion has been lost to us as these centuries passed? Can it be recovered in an instant, on a massive jet? We’re only at the beginning of our transcontinental movements — we’re still psychic toddlers in our travels. And our jetlag is epochal.