Life under the boot

There is a photo from my wife's family that haunts me in an unusual way. It shows my mother-in-law when she was still a small girl, standing on the balcony of the family apartment, being hugged by her father, my wife's grandfather. It is taken sometime in the late 1940s, and they are all smiling and laughing.

As a Western who has read and studied those years, something startled me. That during Stalin's reign -- when millions of people had already starved, perished in unimaginably horrible wars (which her father had just endured), vanished into gulags, and generally lived beneath a permanent dark cloud of arbitrary arrest -- people could laugh and hug one another seemed very strange. It had not crossed my mind in such horrible times, people would still behave like people.

I thought of that picture again this month when I on something of a whim read Martin Amis' 2002 book Koba the Dread, a sort of literary memoir to remind everyone that Stalin was awful. I was curious to read it to see what sort of animal this book was. I remember when it came out, how left field and strange it seemed that the guy who wrote London Fields and a treatise about arcade games felt obliged to abruptly join a sprawling, quintessential 20th century argument. I wanted to read it now just to see if there was any news on that conversation.

It didn't take long to realize there wasn't. Amis spends most of the time relitigating familiar arguments, and the text is mostly a synopsis of Robert Conquest's work, with memories of his father's journey from card-carrying Red to loudmouth Tory, and some gruesome, heartbreaking details from firsthand accounts by Nadezhda Mandelstam and other survivors.

He sifts through a lot of material gracefully, which might make it a useful first read for a "lay reader" who doesn't think regularly about Nikolai Yezhov's gruesome end, or the psychogeography of Kolyma. As Michiko Kakutani wrote at the time in the New York Times, "as flawed as Mr. Amis's book is, it does a credible job of conveying just how Stalin went about 'breaking the truth,' and it should send readers running to better, more scholarly books on this tragic period in history."

But ultimately, the first questions that arise when you hear of the book continue. Why did Amis, who by his own admission never really engaged very deeply in the politics of his times, suddenly feel he had to weigh in on all this?

I'm sensitive to this because of my current work. When I step away from my manuscript, I see that I'm basically trying to "explain" a group of people who for specific reasons bought into the Soviet scheme, and may or may not have had doubts about it along the way. I've been struggling to find the line between justifying what no sane person -- aware of all the facts -- could possibly endorse, and trying to explain how intelligent, well-meaning, and daresay decent people could have dedicated their lives, their work, and sacrificed their freedom for it. Seems to me someone has to think about these things on their own terms without rushing to judgment.

It is about seeing complexity, a skill not just useful when looking into the past. It is self-evidently ghastly to prosecute twelve-year olds for political crimes, but you'll never know why if you can't appreciate how at the same time loyal Party members in the state bureaucracy also loved their children.

Imagine you live in Germany in the 1930s, or in North Korea today. No matter how much you wish it to be true, the statistical reality is that you would not be a member of the underground helping save your Jewish neighbors, or standing at the side of a weep-athon for Kim Jong Il shaking your head. You would be trying to keep yourself and your family alive. You'd be hoping the Gestapo walks past your door and leaves you alone, you'd be on your knees making sure everyone could see you wailing for the departed Dear Leader.

Mob dynamics are terrifying, and easy to underestimate from a distance. And the best inoculation against their danger is an awareness of what human nature really is like. Our Founders understood this, and did everything they could to protect us from it while preserving democratic order.

And still... too many give in to the worst parts of our collective consciousness. There are too many today who howl with rage and delight when some hateful fool tells them we need to round up "illegal aliens," or deny rights to adults based on who they have consensual sex with, or rail about how elite liberal snobs use higher education to indoctrinate young adults (who, presumably, could think for themselves). The past isn't dead, as Faulkner warned, and it isn't even past.

Simply hard to beat

On Saturday we made a trip to Kádár Étkezde on Klauzal Ter, a simple lunchroom where the beef broth with matzo was beyond words. 

Class consciousness and Whit Stillman movies

Whenever my sense of 99 percenter outrage gets the better of me, I try to remind myself of two things. The first is my college roommate Adam, a Wharton wunderkind who now surely makes more at his private equity firm in a month than I will in my entire life, and who I know to be a decent person. And I think about how much I love Whit Stillman movies.

If one of the reasons we make art is to get a window into the lives of others, and to understand and appreciate our common humanity, then the so-called "Yuppie trilogy" -- Metropolitan, Barcelona, and The Last Days of Disco -- must be considered an amazing achievement. And so I'm very excited that after all these years, Stillman finally has another movie on the way, and strenuously disagree with the way that the times have moved on, and he's been pegged in the wrong place.

What's always surprised me about Stillman's movies is that they are about everything I should hate -- characters from affluent family backgrounds who never worry about student loan payments, people with the space to fret about nonsense and never worry about their lives sliding out of view. But by laying out the story on their own terms, Stillman invites you to sympathize with them. Or not, no big deal -- but you'd have to have a hard heart to still want to see their heads lopped off.

Around last Christmas I saw Metropolitan again for the first time in ages. I like it more each time I revisit it. The story is slight, about a week or so in the lives of a circle of affluent New York college-age kids, but it clicks as a sound comedy of manners. It's larded with class assumptions which it doesn't hide or apologize for. At its heart, it is an almost sentimental tale of passing youth -- a graceful story about passing through the best moments of your life, with all the foreboding notes in the right place (there's a remarkable scene at the very end when two of the characters meet their future selves).

You could just leave it at that. But for me, when put in context, Stillman pulls off something only F. Scott Fitzgerald could do -- to surgically puncture the nonsense that America is a noble meritocracy, and suggest the mix of hate and envy that we look upon whose who live unearned, better lives. This is why Fitzgerald is one of our best novelists -- he has the guts to point out that Americans are just like anyone else. That we are not, as contemporary Republicans odiously suggest, a cheerfully deluded nation of haves and soon-will-haves.

So I couldn't disagree more that his movies are light and simple. They are the opposite of adorable, cuddly, or quirky. Which is why the idea that somehow he is some godfather of twee, is offensive. I've seen the trailer for Damsels in Distress, and yes, it does seem rather "quirky." Yet the capsule review of Metropolitan would also make me wince. And I might say he has let his approach be influenced, rather than the other way around.

Of ice and the river

The Danube, looking north from the Lanchid. Feb. 13, 2012, 3 p.m. 

I've become unusually fascinated by the flow of ice down the Danube, which appeared one morning earlier this month. Multiple times a day I'll spend several minutes staring out the window at the ever-shifting mosaic outside, which accomplishes the nifty zen trick of helping you focus and relax at the same time. 

When we first moved over to Pest in January, the whole winter had been mild enough that it felt like a familiar New England early November. But in a few weeks, and rather suddenly, a remarkably stable weather pattern appeared that has only just now started to break. A huge pocket of high pressure lurking over the Baltic Sea, rotating Siberian air into central and Eastern Europe, coupled with a low pressure system over the Mediterranean that pushed up moisture every now and then. 

We've had a few snowfalls, and the temperature hasn't budged higher than the mid-20s in weeks. I haven't noticed a real pattern to the ice -- at first it came in slushy flecks, at its height it including enormous sheets of white floating by.

I don't know much about the seasons here, so I don't understand what the reality of a Hungarian winter is and what is just the usual seasonal whining. At the height of the cold snap, I saw one news outlet run a story comparing the situation -- favorably, I think -- to the winter of 1987. That was when a sharp cold in mid-January cost hundreds of lives across Europe, severely taxed energy resources (I read that the price of a barrel of oil reached a jaw-dropping $19!), and caused Danube water levels to drop to dangerous levels.

To give you a sense of what it was like here in Hungary, I found a BBC Monitoring Service report from Jan. 17, 1987, which perhaps captures the real spirit of life under late state socialism:

The Central Committee and the government greatly appreciate the work which leaders and workers, the collectives and individuals have performed in the struggle against the current extraordinary winter. This was stressed by Janos Kadar, Party General Secretary, on his visit to the headquarters of the National Technical Development Commission. He stated that the country had moved as a single unit in overcoming the difficulties. One could mention numerous examples of how transport workers had stood their ground, and could only express one's appreciation to all those who had gone to work on foot. There is more than one collective such as the Szekesfehervar plant at Ikarus where workers wish to make up for the four days of lost production on their first four free days, said Janos Kadar.

But anyway... this afternoon I took a walk over the Lanchid and nearly froze my fingers off taking pictures of the ice. When you are standing on the pylons looking down, there is a remarkable sound when the ice crashes into the pillars, then slosh and bump around before being carried away.

Here are a few more pics. There'll probably be more before winter is done... 

The view from our apartment window on Feb. 4, the first day we noticed ice.

The same view at noon on Feb. 6, probably the most dramatic day.

Ice crashing into the pillars of the Lanchid, Feb. 13. 

Looking west toward Margaret Island and Buda, from Drava Utca, Feb. 7, 4:20 p.m.

Different cities

Bauhaus is our house: our block.  

At the start of the new year, we moved to a new neighborhood. And Budapest being what it is, that means we basically moved to a new city. Famously, Budapest is the late 19th century merger of west-of-the-Danube Buda -- medieval, conservative, Hungarian -- and east-of-the-Danube Pest -- modern, progressive, international (always overlooked is Obuda, which is ancient and out of the way). The differences between each part survive in very real ways, and the experience of living in each has been like living in different cities.

We went from the I to the XIII district, or kerulet. Straight away, I have to say that the Budapest kerulets -- unlike the famous and more or less sensible arrondisement system of Paris -- is too arbitrary and weird for me to figure out. I'm a person who is pathologically unable to remember street addresses or telephone numbers because they are just random numbers, so the oddity of the Budapest system is hopeless. Consider the IV kerulet, which covers the extreme northern district of the city, and was given the number after the original IV kerulate in the center was merged out. It's kind of nonsense.

Anyway, while I've learned to say that we live in the XIII kerulet, in my heart, we actually live in Ujlipotvaros, which translates as "New Leopold Town." This makes sense to me. It is right across the korut -- the main ring road of Pest -- from Lipotvaros.

The neighborhood is relatively new, but has packed in quite a lot in its dense history. The area was a pretty drab industrial district until after the First World War, when it was built up very quickly. At the time, Bauhaus was the fashion, so it is like a giant museum of interwar, central European style. You see it in the stylized balconies and doorways, the sterile but stylish geometry of the buildings. This was, by necessity, Bauhaus as style, not as philosophy of living -- the area is far more dense than strict Bauhaus would demand.

Lines: Szent Istvan Park.

It fast became a region for the urban intellectual class. It was Jewish, and it was socialist. The street we live on, Pozsonyi ut, was the center of the region, and it still shows with the greatest mix of shops and restaurants. It was a who's who of places. A building on our block was the home of Anna Kéthly, the interwar socialist leader. Tom Lantos, the late Hungarian-American congressman, spent his childhood nearby. According to rumor, many of György Lukács' students lived in the neighborhood.

The statue of Marxist philosopher Gyorgy Lukacs at Szent Istvan Park.

Today, it reminds me the most of the Upper West Side, as it was in some idealized 20th century version before middle class knowledge workers were shoved out to god knows where. It is a long, narrow strip of a neighborhood, bordering a great river on one side, but instead of a park on the other, we have a railroad that separates the area from the more dense Terezvaros neighborhood.

After more than a month, I remain fascinated by how different it feels from our first place. When we arrived, we stayed in the I ker., in a place near Castle Hill. It felt like we were staying in a hotel in a historic district. Aside from the fact that it wasn't very fun to hike uphill with groceries, it was a quiet place, disturbed only by the regular rumble of tour buses. I can't deny that it was beautiful, and it felt in many ways more like "Europe." There were cobblestones and picturesque staircases, and sudden unfolding views of old churches and great bridges. I am still amazed at the way that Buda seems to have complete additional dimension that Pest lacks. 

It isn't surprising that Pest lacks a certain old world feel to it. The rapid growth on this side of the river after the Great Compromise called to mind nothing short of the rapid urbanization in the United States. There is to this day a neighborhood in Pest called "Little Chicago," because it appeared so fast that way they imagined American cities did.

Caring is bad for you

On a molecular level, that sucked. Over here, the Super Bowl began after midnight. And perhaps out of habit, but to be honest, out of superstition, I went to the same Scottish pub near Jokai ter where I'd survived watching the AFC Championship game. When I left the apartment, it was -8 degrees F.  The bar was more crowded, I spent a good two quarters listening to an outrageously, obnoxiously drunk guy babble to anyone who looked at him, and to make the wretched first quarter even worse, the bar managed to run out of chicken wings.

Unless your team truly and visibly sucks from an early point in the schedule, the end of the football season is the most vicious kind of gut punch. It is spread over hours, not days, and there are always it seems a handful of moments on which everything hinged which you can spend your leisure hours mulling over. Pats fans have had a good run of years of putting up with this.

The worst part about the 2011 season is that we got drawn in. No one began this season expecting much, when the big offseason acquisitions were Albert Haynesworth and Chad Ochocinco. No one could have foreseen that Hernandez and Gronkowski would emerge as superstars, or that this random grabbag of a secondary would bend and not break for an entire season. It was only towards the end, when the wins started piling up, when the other big dogs in the AFC started to stumble, and when we began to see weird bounces, shanked opponent field goals, and other explosions of luck to  offset the team's screw-ups that we began to think something was up. It felt, in a bizarre way, like 2001 again. Things were lining up.

And then, you know, nevermind.

I love sports, but do I like being a fan? One thing I enjoy about being over here is getting to watch lots of super high-quality football (that's soccer, in American English) at a reasonable hour. And not having a sincere rooting interest is a kind of bliss. Of course, you pick a favorite on a case by case basis, but you can enjoy what's happening, and leave it when it's over. I can do this with football, with ice hockey here, with cricket. I even did it with water polo for crying out loud last weekend.

There is great joy in detachment. So I pray that I can avoid thinking for a moment about this disaster when I'm finished writing this post. Right.

A la recherche du Pats perdu

Over at the Times Union blog, I try to explain why this trip by the New England Patriots to the Super Bowl isn't just about football.