Passage #36
This room is no dream–
Three locked doors with no
panic bars.
Escape
down Damianich
to the vast spaces
of Heroes Square.
Broad
Andrassy Street leads
us to the Chain Bridge.
Stiff breezes push us
along the gliding
crowds.
Danube ferries
wait for the tourists.
<video of walk over the bridge>
Illimitable
space, political
freedom, but not for
immigrants, barred from
Budapest.
We climb
slowly Castle Hill
the goose-stepping Guard
ritualistically
changes rigidly.
Changing of the Guard
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FrHaSBIWK_c
Masons down below
restore the old walls.
2.
Vegetarian
rigors abandoned,
we devour beef
Hungarian style.
Art is unconfined
away from diets
of museums, halls,
and chic galleries.
The walls leave plenty
of negative space.
Colors and forms drift
free and whimsical.
3.
“I would like
to hear some organ music.”
The street vendor sells
us a concert–
Teleki Miklós.
Stefansdom. Its glow
envelops the crowd.
Inside, we draw near
the organ. Its notes
trip free, J. S. Bach
Albinoni cries
his Adagio, Ave Maria
adulates the bass.
No horror movie,
Toccata and Fugue
in D-minor leaps,
shudders and shuttles
Bach’s counterpoint. Sound
vibrates in my chest.
The rock-star enters:
Liszt. His Fantasia
is all about him.
This is why I came to Budapest: Art,
music, genius,
contemporary
passionate, and fun.
4.
Five thousand figures
populate this world.
Dozens of models
whirl around the towns.
Tunnels, of course, bridges,
wheelhouses, side yards.
WE make the windmills turn.
Tiny cameras in locomotives
make us engineers.
A monitor shows our path of travel.
All-enveloping,
each stop accurate
historically.
Serendipity.
Enter Miniversum, Budapest’s model train experience.
With 100 trains under one roof, this is truly a little universe
right off Andrassy Street!
Click and de-stress.
videos coming soon!
5.
Synagogue
I can’t relate to this.
A simple tourist stands
before twin Moorish spires.
Wasn’t the Star of David
supposed to be six-sided?
Why are these stars eight?
One way to make even us
Gentiles look up is to
include alternating clocks.
They don’t work.
The Jews have always felt
embattled.
The crenelated
roof is a nice touch.
Geometric tiles replace
statuary of saints and Jesus.
The stereotype is that Jews
are rich, but no bankers
underwrote the reconstruction
after World War II.
5.
Twin Moorish spires
octagonal stars
alternating clocks
crenelated roofs
geometric tiles,
brown, yellow, red bricks
topped by onion domes.
We pay, and enter
the Great Synagogue
of Budapest.
No
statuary, but
abstract stained glass.
No
screens separate men
from women in prayer.
Yet we separate
according to French,
German, Italian,
Spanish, English and
Hungarian tongues.
Guilt money from the
Hungarian government–
post Communist.
Our guide, a Neolog,
lets us Americans know
of Estée Lauder and Tony Curtis.
Their Jewish ancestors
were calling to them.
$5,000,000. $2,000,000–
whatever it took.
In the land of Liszt,
an organ rises up
in the balcony.
Franz Liszt himself played
at the opening.
I hold my paper kippa
in place as the breeze
floats it up outside
in the cemetery.
Right next to to the synagogue,
Theodor Herzl was born.
Dóhany Avenue marks
the border of the Budapest Ghetto.
Seventy thousand Jews
relocated by force
to the Ghetto of Pest.
Some died of starvation,
and hypothermia
during the winter of 1944.
They are here
in the courtyard.
Raoul Wallenberg
Swedish diplomat,
saved tens of thousands
in Nazi-occupied
Hungary.
His Memorial
resembles a weeping willow
whose leaves have the names
of the Jews of the Holocaust.
Someone, therefore,
has found the words.
No one speaks.
Our tour ends.
Little stones
placed on the tombs,
link the living
to the dead.
6.
It’s time for a good soak.
I’m not one for hot baths,
but this one feels good
104 degrees good.
Through the maze
of hot pools
my path leads me to
the huge outdoor pools.
In a vast circle
50 meters in diameter
I tread toward the
other side. Only 100 degrees!
Bathers are chatting,
playing chess on floating boards,
soaking in chest-high water.
Wading back,
I practice tai chi walking,
brush-knee steps.
I induce Charlotte
to join this therapy.
7 a.
I look to
recapture
Porto’s art
its recrudescence
of street art.
Budapest
pixilates.
Rotating,
inviting
my hands
to twist.
7b.
Triangles
structure us.
Whence comes life?
My three-fold
face, her three-
fold breasts.
Birds look up
behind my
darkened head.
Featherless,
stars, circles
Florian
crosses, dots,
these two birds
stare at you.
Trees reach up,
leaf-less buds.
I hover
above my
wife, her mom.
We are three.
Our panels
of salmon
blue, purple,
green, orange,
painters’ strips
matte swatches
of fabrics
full of life.
They rest arms
on swelling
abdomens.
Behind me
the birds look
right at you.
7c.
A whirling
single-leaf conifer seed
falls
round and round
with a man
clinging
to the blade.
His companion-seed
swivels too
the broad blade
carving the air.
These poets are flung
into our mass culture
to take root
among the advertisements
for toothpaste, TVs, designer sneakers.
Will their words
grow enough
to be seen
or heard?
Millions will choke
shrivel
and rot.
Poets
are the unacknowledged
seed-pods
of the world.
7d.
Carl Lutz, Righteous among the Nations
“Im going crazy,
when out of the blue,
I have to decide
whom to save.
Where is God?”
The Danube engulfs
a bleeding Jewish
woman.
With water
up to his chest, Lutz
swims back to the bank.
His suit wet, he asks
to speak with the guard
presiding over
the firing squad.
“Give her to me.”
“Who?”
“Foreign citizen”
he splutters and chokes.
He carries her back
to his waiting car.
The fascists are stunned.
Sixty-two thousand
Jews saved by his staff.
Fake papers, unsigned,
stamped with the seal
of his Switzerland.
Negotiating
with Eichmann, he filled
eight thousand passes,
numbered and counted,
with the same number
of families.
Saved.
Somehow authorized.
Lutz survived the war,
unlike Wallenberg.
7e.
Hungarian seed-pod writers
George Konrád escapes
deportation to
Auschwitz-Birkenau.
He whirls through the shock
of the perfidy
of his countrymen.
A Guest in My Own Country:
A Hungarian Life
A boy of fourteen
endures the horrors
of a camp for Jews.
The novel Fateless
by Imre Kerlész
paints the author’s life.
Plotting her escape
from obscurity
and dry demureness,
a woman writer
ages as she lives
with her caretaker
and walks through The Door,
opened so slightly
by Magda Szabó.
Whirling
single-leaf
conifer seeds.
