Pécs

“Max, you are a bridge,” said Tibor, as we stood in a small country road, Mike taking pictures of the fields that sprawled out towards the lowering sun.  “I am very glad to know you.”  He meant that I was a connection— a bridge between families, across borders, and even generations.  I had never met him before yesterday–indeed, had barely heard of him.  Now, Mike and I were staying with my uncle and his family in their house on the hill above the town where my grandfather was born.

That afternoon, Tibor had taken us out to the countryside to see the farmhouse he and his family had been building for over ten years.  It was quite incredible— to see the wooden bones of the house, hewn from trees Tibor himself had found and chopped down and sanded, and the walls made of mud bricks that the entire family had made by hand, and laid themselves.  Tibor had pointed out where everything would be— where the kitchen and the washrooms stood yet as ghosts amidst the raw timber and emptiness, where the bedrooms would be, and who would sleep where; there was even going to be a loft for baling hay, for there would be horses, too.

As we had stood there, in the half-finished home that had taken ten years to build, and would, he told us, take at least another ten years to complete, Tibor motioned to everything around us and said, “This is my dream.”  It was hard not to get a little swept up by it; a rustic retreat built together by a family— something they could say was truly theirs, down to the very bricks.  I imagined the summer months they had sweated away here, saw the homemade crucifix of twigs latched together over a humble makeshift table where they must have taken their supper.

I looked out the back, where the open-air portico surveyed a wide hill of endless golden grass.  Tibor had explained that he could have taken what money they have and divided it seven ways (!) amongst all the kids, but that it would not have been enough to even buy a flat.  Putting that money into building the farmhouse, however— this was a team-building exercise.  A family-building exercise.  Something that all the children could enjoy long after it was completed.  Something solid, to be held with the hands.

As we drove back to Pécs, I couldn’t help but reflect on what this man had accomplished, and my own childish obsession with immortality.  What did any of that really mean, next to building something with your hands, and having a great, adoring family, and being a good man?

Tibor told us he thought the “modern world” was unstable, and that in a couple generations it will be gone, and that is why we must learn practical things, such as how to work with our hands.  While I’m not sure I agree with his socio-cultural forecast, I was still greatly awed by what he and his family had built, and I think there is an undeniable immortal value to being able to work with your hands.  And, after all, wasn’t the pride he had from building that house and seeing his family bond while doing it just as great, if not greater, than the pride one would get from releasing a best-selling album or novel?  And wasn’t the product more tangible and long-lasting?  More meaningful?

It made me a little sad, though, to realize that, whatever the merits of this epiphany, it would not change my mind.  That I would never build a house.

Urban Crime Fighting in Budapest

Branches whipped past my face as I ran, the utter darkness of the thick underbrush illuminated only by my cell phone's flashlight, which caught Barnus' legs running ahead of me as we chased the thief.  For a moment, I thought, "Is this dangerous?"  Then, "Nah, what am I saying? There are three of us.  We could beat the shit out of him!"

We had walked up Hero’s hill to see the Liberty Monument, andtake in the views of the city at night. The walk had been very pleasant, getting to know my second cousinsAnna, Orsi, and Kristof, and their friends Peter and Barnus, who, as the bestEnglish speaker, was our de facto tour guide for the evening.

Kristof and Peter

Barnus historizes

Budapest was spectacular by night, allilluminated building fronts of ornate stonework and lights and bridges over thewater.  The view fromthe hill was beautiful, the lights glimmering and wavering in the distance,playing on the waters of the Danube. Black and gold.  We sat on a benchthat overlooked the city and drank Soproni, which Barnus proudly informed us was brewed in his hometown of Sopron.

We had begun towalk down the hill back home, Barnus revelling in regaling us with the history of the city, when suddenly, Mike pointed outthat Kristof no longer had his camera.  His super expensive camera.  Kristof turned white and stopped dead, then turned and bolted at asprint back up the hill.

We sat in tensesilence for several minutes.  “Well,” Ithought, “this will be a superawkward way to start our stay in Budapest...”

I hardly noticedthe man walk past us on the path.  Barnus, however, noticed he was carryinga camera bag, and called out to him.  “Excuse me, is that your camera?  Our friend just lost his and it was in a bagjust like that.”  But the man paid him nomind and continued walking, looking straight ahead.  Barnus called out again.  “Hey!” At this point, I looked over and it was clear something was wrong.  Barnus tried again, but the man remainedsilent, and continued briskly along.

“Hey!” Barnus called to us in English, “call the police!”  By now, Barnus was trying to keep up withthe man, and Mike and I had begun to walk after them.  The girls scrabbled for their phones, and suddenly, the man broke off into a run,darting off the walking path and into the brush.

Instinctively,we sprinted after him.  We could barely see where we were going in the blackness as we chased him through the trees.  It felt like The Blair Witch Project, but with less snot.  We choused himout of the bush and back onto the trail, where we were lucky to happen uponsome guys drinking beneath the path light.  We had him cornered.

He was pissed.

At length, he begrudgingly handed us the camera to inspect, at which point he quite casually strolledoff into the darkness of a wind in the trail.  Kristofarrived, and saw that everything was intact, and we all heaved a collectivesigh of relief.  “It’s at times like thisthat I cannot accept that God doesn’t exist!” Barnus exclaimed.

I certainlycould not deny the providence of our nimble thief’s timing in coming down thehill with the camera, or Barnus’ incredibly sharp eye in noticing the bag.  “There are over twenty ways down the hill,”Barnus explained.  “And for him to havechosen this path?  No comment!” he smiled.  At this point, the girls cancelled their police call, only to realize they had accidentally requested the fire department instead.

Budapest is a city with a fractious relationship to the past.  On the one hand, there are the elegant Old World stone buildings; on the other, there are many numerous bullet-riddled and decrepit buildings from WorldWar II, and the communist-era subways, which looking like ye olde steel lunch pails and which skitter loudly and unconvincingly to a stop in the fallout-bunker subway stations; it's a city full of university students, yet many of them are dressed as if they’ve just awoken from a coma that began in the1940’s.

Appropriate, then, that this was the place where I came to face my own somewhat fractious relationship with my own past.  Getting to know relatives I had never met, or even heard about before.  They were possibly the nicest people I've ever met, and it was a humbling experience to receive such kind-hearted generosity.  It was another experience that reinforced the idea of the inherent good of people.  You know, besides the camera thief.

One night, as we walked through the park, a homeless man grumbled something to us.  "What did he say?" I asked Orsi.
"Oh, he said, 'Welcome,'" she explained.  "Which makes sense," she said, motioning to the park, "since we are in his home."  Yeah.  We're definitely related.

And I was about to get more family education, since my cousins' father Tibor was insistent that Mike and I visit the family home in the small town of Pécs, a couple hours south of Budapest...

Lostria

The food just kept coming. No matter how much we ate, it seemed, the sound of Krysta preparing something else could be heard in the kitchen. First, there was the sliced pancake soup, of which Edi had insisted we eat second and third portions; then came a large salad each; then a plate full of delicious pork roast and potatoes; then a bowl of fruit salad; and finally, a plate full of coffee cakes, all of which we had washed down with a liter of beer each.

Now, Irwin was insisting we have a third glass of the homemade schnapps that was supposedly blueberry flavored, but tasted more like heavily chlorinated pool water. We politely declined, trying to explain that we wanted to regain consciousness for at least part of tomorrow. "Morgen?" he shrugged– that was tomorrow; a world away.  He refilled our glasses. By the time he lead us through the dark down to the guest cabin, we were both properly drunk. And of course, none of them spoke a breath of English.

Irwin, Reinhardt, and Krysta

Edi and "Speedy"

The journey from Vienna to the Saringer family farm, remotely situated on the mountainside above the tiny town of Murau had been quite eventful. While the journey was supposed to take under three hours, Google decided to take us on a preposterous route on a single-lane road that dizzyingly wound its way 1800 meters up and down a mountain, and it took almost five hours. It didn't help that we had to contend with some bad traffic–

Despite the inconvenience, though, we couldn't deny that our detour was undoubtedly the more scenic route–

–and we couldn't help but be a little thankful for the detour.  An unexpected gift.

Escaping to a secluded, rustic farmhouse seemed like a great idea after the exhausting tourist route from big city to big city.  We would be staying in the guest cabin, hand-built by Saringer’s great-uncle Reinhart, which was right beside the sheep pen. It seemed like a very writerly thing to do. Based on the prodigious amount of alcohol Saringer's relatives served us, I would say more Hemingway or Joyce than Thoreau.

"If I die, use this photo for the cover of my collected works."

After being so roughly stuffed with food our first night, we didn’t get up to the house until 11:30 the next morning.  When breakfast arrived, we dutifully ate everything they placed before us.  Except then they brought out a second plate.  Saringer and I plodded through the rest of the food.  We were both quite full, but we felt proud.  Like we had accomplished something.

Clearly these krauts believed they could kill us with hospitality.  Well! we were about to serve them– serve them a little cultural lesson that North American gluttony is not so easily defeated.  When we were finished, Irmi informed us we would be eating lunch in an hour.

Wait, what?

Lunch was a struggle.  I do not have a big appetite regularly, much less when it is a mere hour after I have eaten an epicurean breakfast.  “This is my Vietnam!” I thought to myself, though I probably could have just as well said it out loud, considering none of them would have understood anyways.  But we didn't want to be rude– didn't want to admit defeat.

We gorged ourselves to discomfort.  "This must be how dogs feel as they eat themselves to death in dumpsters," I thought.  "Or how Monsieur Creosote felt in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life."

So, after the gustatory savaging of our first few meals, I made sure to learn a little German, most importantly "Mein Magen ist voll"—my stomach is full.  “Don’t worry,” Saringer said as we walked up to the farmhouse that evening, feeling vaguely like condemned men slouching to the gallows.  “If I remember correctly, dinner tends to be pretty small here.  I think we’ll be alright.”

Dinner was simple, consisting of h’ors-d'oeuvres-like bread slices covered in ham and cheese, and, like everything we had eaten thus far at the farm, they were incredibly delicious.  We had already worn the phrase “das is zere güt!” pretty thin by this point, but I couldn't bring myself to remember anything from Jordan's German phrasebook back in Berlin other than "Vie weel kostet das?"  What will this cost?

The table was loaded with food, but no one else was eating.  They told us they had already eaten, and that everything was for us.  We thought that maybe if we took long enough to eat the food, we could out-wait them.  But no, another round of food came, inevitably, ominously.  It was time to test my new linguistic abilities. 

"Nein, danke," I said to Edi. "Mein Magen ist voll." He laughed in my face. "Ha!" he said, and rubbed his own great belly, speaking cheery German to my German-deaf ears.  No, he seemed to be saying, this is a truly full stomach.  Silence.  I ate some more.

All the while, the mischievous Irwin had been continuously refilling our beers. When we tried to decline, he began bringing the beers into the room pre-opened.  Once we finished eating, we began to reckon that we had each had three liters of beer since lunch.  Then we were served a few rounds of obligatory schnapps.

At this point, Edi felt the need to educate us a little about Austrian culture, so he turned on the TV, and we watched what appeared to be some sort of musical telethon where all of Austria's biggest musical acts lip-synced for charity in a big beer hall full of middle-aged people eagerly clapping along.

It was hilarious. No matter what "genre" the artist supposedly belonged to— the Michael Bolton-esque crooner, the Madonna-esque diva, the "punk" band, the teen idols—they all basically just played oompa-pah music.  It was awful.  Hilariously awful.  While I set out on this European odyssey with an aim of experiential open-mindedness and cultural sensitivity, at this point we were both wasted, and I began laughing out loud at the television.  I was laughing in their faces.  Laughing in the face of Austria.

"Murau's a really obscure town.  You've probably never heard of it"
-Hipster Max

The language barrier was a bit of a difficulty, so we mainly resigned ourselves to awkward silences, and smiling and nodding in agreement with basically everything anyone said.  But I'd like to think we made some progress.  At lunch, I would whip out my pocketbook, filled with German phrases I had crudely assembled using Saringer's German dictionary.  “Das ist köstlich.”  This is delicious.  “Interessant.”  Interesting.  “Das habe ich nicht verstanden.”  I do not understand.

Staying with Saringer's distant relatives was the sort of thing that restores your faith in humanity.  To be taken in to house and home so completely as more-or-less a stranger.  As we drove through Murau on our way back to Vienna, we stopped for a local police officer leading some small children across the street.  It seemed an appropriate symbolic bookend– after touring concentration camps and museums filled with relics and bloody histories of the wars and atrocities of antiquity, it had been easy to lose sight of the basic good in people, and our week of country living was a welcome reminder of the fact that we humans are all family.

And with that in mind, we hopped on the train from Vienna to Budapest, where we would stay with my own distant relatives...