Auf Wiedersehen Wien

On April 1, we drove in a rented Skoda stationwagon (they call them "kombis" over here), packed to its rafters with all our suitcases, the fold-up stroller positioned between Rebecca's legs, the only free space left, from Vienna to Budapest. Any move makes me anxious; traversing an international border in such a move into a place whose language is utterly, sublimely baffling — to put it most mildly — is another order of anxiety. You know, the usual stuff: restless sleep for a night or two before leaving, plus that prolongated valedictory sense you have before making a big move, a kind of aimless, busy, empty feeling that prevails.

But before we left Vienna, there was some serious eating to do, as well as some opera-going & some touring about. Michael Heller & Jane Augustine, fresh off their UK Tour, ventured into the heart of Central Europe for some "relaxation," feeling like they hadn't put on enough weight in the time they'd spent in Paris & England. Vienna is the city with no anxiety about whipped cream, on sweets or savories. I think Mike & Jane were treated with ample portions during their week in Vienna. On a particularly nice morning, when the bonechill of late March had been tempered a little, I took them blindly into the Vienna Woods, walking past the villas & mansions of the 19th District to a park overlooking the city. Little did they suspect my guidance was a secret but necessary pilgrimage. I took them to the former site of the Bellevue Palace, which is where, in 1895, the Freuds stayed for the summer.

Here, an aside. If you look at a map of Vienna, you'll notice that the city, while large, has no overwhelming grand scale. I'd guess you could walk from one furthest end to the other in five hours or so (It would take you a whole day to walk the length of Western Ave. in Chicago — it's as long as a marathon). Back in Freud's day, Vienna was a smaller city. Its districts, conceived & oriented by Otto Wagner, were laid out so that the city could expand endlessly, like a nautilus accumulating chambers (an image to which I've already alluded). The Innere Stadt — inner city — is the 1st District. From it, the 2nd, then the 3rd coil counterclockwise around the core. Freud's Berggasse 19 anchors the 9th District, which, a century ago, was an already established upper middle-class neighborhood. The Freud family apartments, as well as the fabled consultation chamber, were a handsomely appointed & spacious set of rooms in the building, whose façade hides a lovely garden in the center. Even so, it was customary for the well-to-do to take to the hills for the summer months. But this isn't the Pope heading off to Castle Gandolfo. In fact, in today's Vienna, these country estates are all incorporated into the expanded city. The 19th District (which is where Rebecca & I lived six years ago) includes several villages in the Vienna Woods, including Nußdorf & Grinzing, which is the point from which Mike, Jane & I embarked up the hills into the woods. Is it odd that the climate changes so near to the city? I guess not. In the summer, especially, it is noticeably cooler in the hills, even as you look only slightly down into the center of the city. So, to this green belt the Freuds in 1895 retreated, staying in the Bellevue — which no longer stands — trying to keep cool.

It is at this spot, commemorated in a letter to his confidante, mentor, & cocaine-prescribing compadre, Wilhelm Fliess (who claimed the cocaine helped him locate the "male period," which ran on a 23-day cycle), that Freud had the dream that would change his life, enshrined in the Traumdeutung as the "Dream of Irma's Injection." It's your duty now to go fetch your copy of The Interpretation of Dreams (You do have a copy, right? If not, let me simply cry "Abandon Ship!" to Western civilization: it's been a pretty nice ride.) & reread this most astonishing & perverse dream. And then watch Freud unravel it. It's the Ariadne-thread that leads you through the Forest of Darkness that is your unconscious into the organizing labyrinth at its center. Anyways, in the letter Freud wrote to Fliess, he morbidly mused, 'Do you suppose that someday a marble tablet will be placed on the house inscribed with these words: In this house on July 24, 1895, the secret of dreams was revealed to Dr. Sigm. Freud. At this moment, I see little prospect of it." O, the narcissism of the Scorpio!



MH & PO'L at the Freud Denkmal


Here, then, are Mike (Taurus) & I (Aquarius) flanking the memorial tablet, placed here by the Friends of Freud a decade ago, in a photo snapped by Jane. Vienna lurks beneath & behind us, appropriately murky.

Nem beszélek magyarul

Budapest. I think it's becoming my favorite city after Chicago. It's huge — well, twice the size of Vienna. The city joins three historical enclaves: Buda, which rises into the eastern hills of the city; Obuda, or "Old Buda," where you find Roman ruins; & Pest, which is uniformly flat, & spreads out a great distance. We live in Pest.

So many things to say about this place. But I'll limit myself right now to two: the language; & our street & our apartment. We're living in the VIth District, which is just to the north of the inner core of the Pest, the Vth District, which is where you find quite a lot of the important historical & municipal features of Budapest. The Pest, especially outside of the 5th District, was built up in the late 1800s & early 1900s. It's very urban, until you get to the outer districts, with narrow streets & very few trees. It's also crumbling. The whole city is falling into tiny little pieces, onto the sidewalks glazed with canine urine, dotted with piles of excrement. To walk down any of these older streets is to breathe in a miasma of micturated nitrogen, carbon monoxide, feces, & a vague beery smell emanating from the countless bars & taverns (many of which, appropriately?, are subterranean). In my experience, only Palermo has a smell more pungent than the Pest.

But even as it crumbles, the Pest is being restored. Everywhere you go, there are construction sites, renovations, beautiful looking buildings, with requisite upscaling of the shops on the streets. When we were here last summer, we stayed on a street, the Sip utca (pronounced "ship utsa"), which seemed the absolute nadir of an urban street: cheerless, urinous, too narrow for sunlight. When we pulled onto our new street — in our rented Skoda, packed, as you'll recall to the rafters — my heart sank. Oh, it dropped into my abdomen! Could it be possible? Could the absolute nadir of the Sip utca give way to a cellar called the Weiner Leó utca? Looking for our new address, gravity pulled me toward the craterine construction site on the street. Yes, of course, we will be living near the sound of bulldozers all day long. (This is the risk of renting a place in a foreign city sight-unseen). We waited for our landlady to arrive with the keys to our new place & commiserated. We could always look for another place, right?



VI Budapest, Weiner Leo u. 9



When she arrived, our landlady took us into our building, the one with the most decayed façade on the street. You enter into the distant past once inside: the foyer hasn't been touched in one hundred years. Imagine the luxury of this place at that time! Now — it looks like the entrance to a prison. Or does it? Note the burnished marble balustrades; note the ceramic tiles; note the grille-work on the rusted iron banisters.



The entryway


We entered into our apartment through a cushion of shock. Brand new. New walls, all new furniture (tastefully neutral IKEA-ware throughout). Huge. I mean, in five rooms we've got nearly as much space as our house in Chicago (minus the basement). Everything suddenly, shockingly seemed doable. Livable. When the landlady left, I said, not able to help myself, "Now wasn't that a most surprising turn of events." This, I think, is the new Budapest. Being rebuilt from the inside out. In ten years, I suspect the city will be unrecognizable to us.



Can you tell me what this says?


Which won't make much of a difference, because the language will still be impenetrable — er, foreign. I don't want to exacerbate here a point every Hungarian guidebook groaningly elaborates, that Hungarian is a mysteriously, anomalously difficult language for nearly everybody except the natives. What I want to describe, however, is what it's like to be in a world with an unrecognizable language. Here, for instance, are some words, some everyday words. Can you guess — using any skills you have, whether sound or cognate or linguistic skills — what any of these words & phrases mean? Try to match them.

igen                           ham
pékség                      library
Szia!                          yes
egy                             cathedral
sonka                        bakery
szemle                      closed
könyvtár                  sour cream (my favorite Hungarian word to say)
zárva                          See you!
székesegyház         roll/semmel
paradiscom            tomato
tejföl                          one

I've been trying to articulate an analogy to being immersed in this language. I've never been to an Asian country, where I imagine seeing characters everywhere would be similarly baffling to me. But here, you're confronted with a familiar-seeming alphabet (though vastly expanded: Hungarian makes use of forty-four letters, such that every vowel has four possibilities: so o, ó, ö & a last o this typeface won’t represent, an o with a slanted umlaut above it, pronounced as follows: o as in oven, ó as in horse but longer, ö as the 'i' in shirt, & o-with-tilted-umlaut as the "i" in shirt but held longer. There's a town called Gödöllö (whose last o has the tilted umlaut), pronounced "girdirleuewrr." Come on, say it with me, "girdirleuewrr"), & a vague sense of its structure (Hungarian is agglutinative, which means adjectives are piled on to nouns as modifiers; it's also case sensitive, which means that sense is determined by the endings on words, determined by their cases, & not necessarily their word order; & then word endings can change based on the "strength" of certain vowel sounds. Pretty sweet, huh?).

Here's what it's like. Your unconscious creates a language for you. It is made up of the alphabet you use but altered psychically, disruptively, with the perfect logic & gravity of a dream. It is intrinsically familiar as a language, in its intonations & executions. It speaks to you musically in the concert chamber of your imagination. You recognize it as completely familiar in the way only the word "uncanny" captures: it's like staring at your face in the mirror for just a little too long, & then getting wigged out. And then all day long, you listen to people speaking this language around you. You look at it on signs, you see it on the milk you buy in the "szupermarket" (that one I figured out already). You know it is a language, but you have no idea what that language is, not even an inkling, even as it communicates to you relentlessly. That is what Hungarian is like. It is the language your unconscious would make if you dreamt a language into life one night. It is exactly that interesting.


Fantasztikus!