by Scott Larson

If cities have souls, Budapest’s is tortured. I’m on my fifth or sixth glass of barack, Hungary’s uniquely alluring apricot brandy, so perhaps I shouldn’t be contemplating such things. But as my dinner companion, a Hungarian journalist named Agnes, fills my head with sad stories, a driving melancholy seeps under my skin.

Agnes has taken me to a small hole-in-the-wall restaurant in what once was in Budapest’s Jewish quarter. No Jews live there now. First, Hitler’s Holocaust nearly wiped them from the city’s face. Those that remained disappeared or fled when the Soviets liberated the city in a particularly vicious, destructive campaign. It wasn’t the first such fight Budapest had seen. The city’s history, and much of its aura, emanate from the centuries of blood – Mongol, Muslim and Habsburg – spilled in its streets.

We eat goulash soup, and Agnes, whose mother is half Jewish, tells me tales of what it means to be Hungarian. Hungarians in foreign cities, she says, those in London, New York, Stockholm, huddle in groups, holding on to what remains of their homeland, and remembering, "with guilt, the good life."

Home is like that, I say. Once you’ve left, it haunts your dreams with unfair clarity.

Agnes shrugs and sighs and reminds me that Hungary has the highest suicide rate in the world.

I’d arrived in Budapest in a van packed with Germans after flying seven hours with a Ukrainian named Viktor who smelled like far too many weeks between visits to the shower. The van’s windows fogged over with the close, smoky breath of my companions, but with constant wiping I was able to catch glimpses of gray sky and rain as we wheeled past "Diszkont" stores and Shell Oil stations nestled up close to wooden houses with postage-stamp lawns. At one point, all the buildings became the same height, interlocking pieces in a grimy urban puzzle that gave way to casinos. And lots of strip bars, too.

I remember trying to reconcile these cheap, monotonous images with my own idealized expectations, some vague pre-conceptions of what should have been, when a sudden turn took us down a narrow, non-descript street. In the distance, the Danube spilled into view. On the far side medieval Buda rose majestically from the river’s edge, a steep climb crowned by castle towers cast in black shadow against a sliver of setting sun. Farther on, rolling hills covered with houses gave way to a forested horizon. Buda was a vision, my postcard fantasy, tethered to the slate sameness of Pest by great iron bridges strung with lights and guarded by angels and lions chiseled from stone ramparts.

The first thing I did when I got out of the van was to walk along the Danube from the Chain Bridge to Margaret’s Island, if only to breathe in the air and try to find my footing. But the sun’s weak light, on the rare moments when it found a path through the clouds, always seemed to come at me from unexpected angles making it hard to get my bearings.

I remember the parliament building, a crescendo of spires and statues, like some oversized pipe organ, dominating the Pest-side bank. A pallid man rolled by in a rusty Fiat with a Denver Broncos sticker on its rear left window; a stunningly beautiful woman with raven hair followed, flashing the headlights of her Audi to let me cross traffic to the river’s edge. Every few hundred feet stone steps ran from the road into the water, disappearing in yet another shade of gray, as if the occasional city resident simply peeled off pants and shirt and went for an impromptu swim.

Riding in a taxi one morning I passed Pearl Jam graffiti and a black anarchist’s "A" spray-painted on the city’s walls. As they do everywhere, the residents of this place seemed to have reached an arrangement with their own peculiar situation, a sort of truce with the daily forces that snipe at their lives. Pedestrians waited patiently for green lights before crossing empty streets. On narrow roads, drivers pulled halfway onto sidewalks so as to park without blocking either those on foot or other cars.

Every night it rained, and the slick streets emptied early. One night while walking alone I passed two girls, arm-in-arm with bare midriffs and jeans and wild smiles. They instantly recognized me for what I am – just another American there on some self-important business.

"Hello," they said in English, in perfect unison, and walked on, not waiting for my reply.

My first night in Budapest I chose to eat dinner at what my guidebook said should have been the Dona-Curso. It had become Schuh-Schuh, I was told, not such a subtle reference to its new owner, Mr. Schuh. Throughout dinner I sat facing a bleary-eyed old man whose features refused to betray his age. His ruddy cheeks were set off by tufts of snowy gray hair and they hid brilliant blue eyes when he smiled. He could have been anywhere from 50 to 80, I finally decided, depending on how hard his life had been.

In between futile attempts at begging another drink from the waiters, he accompanied the house violin and accordion with croaking, drunken lyrics.

"Tommy!" he cried to the youngest of the staff. "Micky!" he tried when Tommy refused to hear. The waiters, perhaps tired of his games, ignored him with a willfully sharp silence, so he took to addressing them as "professor" since they seemed to know so much.

As the night progressed, he grew redder, louder and more urgent in his efforts. And his singing got better. When the musicians played a song that struck a particular chord, he grew enthusiastic and animated, at moments freezing in sincerity, a rigid arm extended toward the kitchen as he gazed proudly, defiantly, far past the restaurant’s wall to some remembered place. For an instant, it seemed, all the abuse he’d taken no longer mattered.

Finally, Tommy brought him an espresso, and on my way out I bought him a glass of wine.

Do cities have souls?

As Agnes and I walk back towards the Danube through a misty rain, she tells me another story, the quintessential Hungarian story, she insists. It’s about her father, a clerk for the state symphony who dreamed of being a writer. He’d had an idea for a novel, Agnes says, one that some publishers liked enough to buy before it was even written. But like too many artists doomed by doubt, once he’d signed the contract he couldn’t finish the piece. For years, the book sat, half a life’s work, in a desk drawer in a house outside Budapest where an old clerk grows older, wrestling with the memory, the resignation, of what might have been.

"He’s a sad man, really," she says softly, bitterly.

Scott Larson is a freelance (read: unemployed) writer who lives in Brooklyn.  In past lives he's lived and worked as newspaper and magazine editor in NYC, Mexico City, Alaska and Saudi Arabia.