Now You See It, Now You Don’t and House of Cards have been included as part of the Open Society Archive dedicated to this period in the CEU. You can read a serialisation of them here on Xpatloop. You can also buy the dual-volume book on Kindle as well as in Stanfords London.

Photo: Catholic church of Dunafalva

Book Two, Chapter 7, Part 2

The following morning we set off in convoy for Dunafalva. A narrow, unsigned road led off Baja’s main square from which we turned down a narrower and similarly unsigned lane. This eventually led through a village of storks’ nests and peasant houses, where elderly headscarved women were cycling along the wet roads of this blustery October morning.

At the end of the village was an unmade track that led up on to a narrow strip of tarmac on top of a grassy dyke. This separated the hamlet and fields on one side from the broad, fast-flowing Danube lined with bare poplar trees on the other. This was the only way to reach Dunafalva by motorised vehicle, several miles along the dyke with frogs hopping across in front of the car’s wheels.

The road came to an abrupt stop in the centre of the village – there was nothing beyond the few houses and the green except the river and a small ferry boat to the other side of the Danube. Two pubs and the church constituted the focal point of village life, with a small shop nearby.

‘Well, that’s the church,’ said Tom as we got out of the cars. ‘And Nick used to go into both these pubs on his visits here.’

We went in turn to both and had coffee, merely to acquaint ourselves with what Nick had known and loved. The church was locked, but the small gate leading to the graveyard behind it was open and we let ourselves in.

‘It’s lovely here,’ said Miklós, surveying the scene under the trees.

‘Yes, I think this would be fine if we can get permission,’ agreed Donát.
 

‘All right, I’ll do what I can,’ said Tom. ‘But let’s go and have a look at the house.’

A sandy, bumpy track led between houses to an area of higgledy-piggledy allotments and small wooden structures, probably summer houses used only in the hotter months. The twisted gnarled vines were now bare, the grape harvest over, windows shuttered and fruit already picked and bottled. We drew up outside a wattle and daub building too small really to be called a house. Donát beckoned to us as he got out of his car.

‘Well, this is it,’ he said, pushing open the gate.

It was little more than a hovel, though the plot of land it occupied was generous and the living area could easily have been enlarged without encroaching on the garden or the small vineyard at the far end of the house. We trooped in.

There were two dark rooms which as Tom had said, had earthen floors. There was also an area which served as a kitchen which still had a variety of baskets and ancient garden implements strewn over its cracked, stone floor. Tom sighed and smiled.

‘Yes, a lot of work would need to be done before anyone could use this place. But it’s really beautiful here in the summer and the river’s just at the end of the road.’

As we drove off again I stared back through the rain-spattered window. I could imagine how this would appeal to Nick, and he was just about eccentric enough to have enjoyed living here after the noise and bustle of London life.

He would undoubtedly have seen to two priorities immediately on moving in: he would have learnt all there was to know about the cultivation of his vineyard and about wine-making; and he would have set up a stereo system with speakers in each room so that he could listen to Wagner and Bartók from morning till night.

Baja

Miklós had already told Tom that he and I would like to look around Baja, an unashamedly nostalgic re-acquaintance with my favourite town, where both of us had spent more than one happy summer teaching. The vast, cobbled main square was little changed, though the cukrászda – one of the town’s main meeting places – was now closed.

The few smaller cafés that had sprung up to replace it were now patronised by Yugoslavs in sunglasses and with mobile phones, generally suspected of involvement in arms dealing, an inevitable assumption in a town a mere twenty kilometres from the border beyond which a war had only just been concluded.

The small wooded island where we stayed, Petőfi sziget, had been a haven of tranquillity in a quiet tributary off the Danube, a sanctuary of holiday homes and the buildings of the Communist Youth Movement with its hostel and sports facilities.

There was a large old fish restaurant at one end of the island overlooking the water, and the only means of taking a car over was the small hand-operated ferry that could, in fact, carry just one vehicle at a time, and was intended only for emergency use.

Thus a car was an unusual sight, the island being populated by only by pedestrians, cyclists and fishermen. But now the stone footbridge leading across to the island had been superseded by a bridge for cars.

Lingua had had two language courses in this peaceful town – the first for a furniture factory in whose holiday house we had been accommodated here on the island. The second, where we had taught Tom, was for the water authority.

Their own holiday home was on the Danube banks, and to our amazement we heard it had been changed, in the spirit of free enterprise that followed its sale in 1990, into a brothel. We eventually found the building where we had stayed and taught, though in the interim new houses had been built, which upset our bearings.

The gate was locked, the building deserted; the garden area where we had eaten fish soup from a huge black cauldron was overgrown with weeds. However, through the rusty railings we could make out the bay-fronted window of what had been the classroom, the bedrooms above, and the terrace where I had sat in the mellow afternoon sunshine of my first weeks in Hungary and watched the ferryman in his rowing boat, sitting under the willows at the water’s edge, and in the evenings, the fishing boats silhouetted against the rippling reflection of the setting sun.

Three weeks later, Attila returned from London with Nick’s ashes. He dropped in to see us one afternoon soon afterwards.

‘Well, he’s in Zsámbék now,’ announced Attila, stirring his tea. ‘It was a great journey – the first time I’ve done it accompanied. You know, when I used to do the smuggling in the old days the car was broken into once or twice – I couldn’t put everything in the boot and I couldn’t empty the car whenever I had to leave it for half an hour.

Well, I was so worried that someone would break in and steal Nick, that I decided to take him with me wherever I went. Basically, it’s a wooden box in a carrier bag,’ he explained. ‘So whether I went into a café to get something to drink, or I went for a pee in the bushes, I took Nick with me!’

The situation, though perfectly logical in the circumstances, was nevertheless bizarrely macabre.

‘Before we got to the Austrian-Hungarian border I told Nick to get his passport ready. And when the customs official asked if I had anything to declare I really wanted to say ‘Yes, my friend here in this bag!’ – just to see what their reaction would be. It’s the most unlikely bit of smuggling I’ve ever done.’

Nick’s grave today

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