Month: October 2016

A River Runs Through It: Budapest

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The river, of course, is the Danube, which in my mind is always associated with dance. “Take this waltz,” sings Leonard Cohen in three-quarter time, and I’m back in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, when every school dance (not that I went to that many of them) included a prize waltz as the highlight of the evening. I learned to dance by counting: “one, two, one, two” or “one, two, one.” I remember a particular prize waltz competition when the eliminations were faster and more furious than usual; instead of spotlighting a small group of the best dancers among us, the teachers who were running the shebang eliminated everyone. The dance floor was bare. We thought we were waltzing, but we were all doing the fox trot, the popular dance of the day.

We could have learned to dance by watching the Arthur Murray Party on TV, hosted by Arthur’s wife Kathryn. Those people knew what they were doing and never would have confused a waltz for a fox trot or a lindy hop or anything else. And If we had been serious about it, we could have ordered paper footprints for the various dances. I think there must have been different footprint combinations for men and for women, but I don’t really remember. I do remember that there was a class of waltz—a very classy waltz—called the Viennese waltz, but I’ll save that for another city.

Right now I am on a train leaving Budapest, where Joe and I have spent the past four days. We walked along the Danube, crossed the Chain Bridge, admired the views, both upriver and downriver. We photographed Buda from Pest, where our hotel was, and Pest from Buda, where the castle was. We saw small tour boats, those that took tourists on ninety-minute cruises, and large Viking River Cruise ships looking not quite as spiffy as the ones we used to see in donor videos (i.e., commercials) before every episode of Downton Abbey. Budapest is a beautiful city, and the Danube runs through it.

On both sides of the river the city contains memorials to Hungary’s heroes from various historical periods. Some of these examples of public art employ traditional sculptures of men on horseback, while others vary from the expected by being whimsical in design and execution. The most unexpected, most simple, and, in my opinion, most moving memorial is called Shoes on the Danube. It is on the Pest side, down from street level, close to the water, and it looks at first like a scattering of old shoes perched on the edge of the walkway. The shoes look old, musty, worn out, as if they had been in some old grandmother’s closet since the 1940s. When I searched for further information, I learned that the eighty pairs are not the real shoes but rather replicas cast in iron by the Hungarian sculptor Goulart Pauer. Pauer and his friend Can Togay created the memorial in 2005. A website about the display tells me the following: “The Shoes on the Danube is a memorial to the Budapest Jews who were shot by Arrow Cross militiamen between 1944 and 1945. The victims were lined up and shot into the Danube River. They had to take their shoes off, since shoes were valuable belongings at the time.”

According to Wikipedia, Arthur Murray was born in Galicia, Austria-Hungary, in 1895. His parents, Sarah and Abraham Teichman, named him Moses. They brought him to America in 1897 and raised him on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Because of anti-German sentiment after the start of World War I, Moses changed his name to Arthur Murray. He was an immigrant kid who loved to dance and made a career out of teaching others to dance. How would he feel to see the sad shoes of people who never danced again? 

Time for a Little Leitmotif

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I began to notice a pattern. First there was an organ grinder in Berlin, right near the Brandenburg Gate—a real, live organ grinder, but without a real, live monkey. Instead, so that we’d get the idea, he had hung from his organ a toy monkey, useless as a collector of coins but cute and still a monkey. Then we went to Dresden and visited the Zwinger, an elegantly groomed estate with a couple of museums, one of which was devoted entirely to porcelain from the collection of Augustus the Strong. In addition to his other interests, which mostly had to do with ruling countries, Augustus was a champion of porcelain arts. His collection includes impressive pieces from Japan and China: large vases, cachepots, pieces that look like gigantic ginger jars, teapots, and figurines. Augustus was also instrumental in establishing a home-grown porcelain industry. The galleries devoted to Meissen pieces were my favorites, especially those showcasing Augustus’s porcelain menagerie. I saw lions and lambs and rhinoceroses, but what I liked best was the grouping that included a set of monkeys engaged in everyday activities like taking snuff or eating grapes.

When I was a child and lived in New Bedford, my mother would often take me to Buttonwood Park. I would play on the swings and slides, and then my mother would buy me a box of Cracker Jacks. I didn’t like the popcorn part of the Cracker Jacks, but I liked the peanuts, which were not plentiful, and the toy hidden somewhere in the box. I would find the toy, eat a few peanuts, and hand the box to my mother, who liked Cracker Jacks quite a lot. Then we would head over to the park’s zoo. There were bears inside a double-fenced enclosure that included a pool to splash around in and a cave to hide in when they got tired of being gawked at. There was a buffalo that was very careful not to step on the chickens walking around him. There were goats and geese, as well. Two or three years after my brother was born, one of the geese bit him on the finger; I guess my brother shouldn’t have been poking his finger through the wire fence and calling “Mother Goose, Mother Goose!”

There was also a monkey house. I thought the monkeys were cute, and I liked visiting them, but I never got to spend much time there because my mother was always yanking me out the door. She didn’t approve of the monkeys’ behavior, but I was a little girl and didn’t notice that they were doing anything wrong. Maybe one of them was taking snuff and setting a bad example.

Brandenburg Gate

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Brandenburg Gate is imposing, even in the rain, even with a whole lot of other people milling about.

I was actually in Germany when reunification happened, twenty-six years ago this month. I was there to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair, staying in a hotel in Bad Homberg and commuting by train to Frankfurt. Berlin was many miles away. Since I had a full schedule of appointments the next morning at the Buchmesse, I had decided to ignore the reunification events in favor of getting a full night’s sleep. I went to bed early, but something, maybe the excitement in the air, forced me to wake up before midnight. I watched the televised ceremony, and I’m glad I did.

The next morning, my commuter train didn’t show up, and I had to wait for the next one. When I got to the Buchmesse, one of the escalators was broken, and I had to climb a lot of stairs.

Anticipation

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Carly Simon’s hit song “Anticipation” was, according to the singer’s website, composed quickly while she was waiting for Cat Stevens, her date for the evening. I don’t know what sort of date she was anticipating, but the song, released in 1971, was a hit on the singles charts and appeared on several compilations. The melody is spirited, and the uncomplicated lyrics obviously resonated with listeners. Later “Anticipation” was featured in commercials for Heinz Ketchup. I guess you could say that the drawn-out, five-syllable first word of the chorus is almost onomatopoeic; the visual in the commercial was of ketchup slowly deciding to come out of its bottle.

Our multitasking minds probably spend more time looking forward to events than experiencing them, almost as though the foretaste of the ketchup is better than the eating of it. In fact, one of the big questions of travel has always been whether the anticipation of a trip is more rewarding than the trip itself. In his book The Art of Travel Alain de Botton writes, “It seems that unlike the continuous, enduring contentment that we anticipate, our actual happiness with, and in, a place must be a brief and, at least to the conscious mind, apparently haphazard phenomenon . . . . The condition rarely endures for longer than ten minutes.” Is he right?

Soon I will take off on a trip, a real journey this time rather than a virtual one (although the virtual trek will be operating in the background, as always) and I am trying to anticipate the historic landmarks I will see, the exquisitely prepared regional specialties I will sample, the colors of the façades of the buildings, the sounds of the streets at night, the expressions on the faces of people I will see. I am trying, but I seem instead to be preoccupied with packing a capsule wardrobe suitable for the weather swirling through the places I intend to visit. Will I need a raincoat? Will I have room in my suitcase for a Tilley hat? Will I need more than two sweaters? I am preparing to explore the unknown, although you could say that Central Europe isn’t exactly the unknown. When I worked in publishing I went to Germany every year at about this time to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair. In preparation I taught myself two German sentences; Sprechen Sie English? was essential, and Wo ist die Damentoilette? also proved useful. This time we are headed for Berlin, where my two German sentences will still be useful, but afterwards we will explore countries in which I will have no idea how to ask for directions to the ladies’ room.

I guess I’m obsessing rather than anticipating. But maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe the most memorable moments of a trip are those that are impossible to anticipate, like buying a tube of red lipstick in the Marais, or eating crêpes from a food truck, or getting front-row seats to see Juliet Binoche in Anne Carson’s translation of Antigone at the Théâtre de la Ville.

The song “Anticipation” ends with a twist, a call to stop anticipating because “these are the good old days.” Of course this flash-forward to reminiscense is only another form of anticipation. There’s no getting away from it.