Tag: Budapest

From Asters to Astoria

Asters are star shaped flowers with tube like petals that come in a variety of dazzling colours. I was given a bright pink bunch a couple of weeks ago and I delighted in their cheery presence, especially in this bleak and wintery weather. Sadly, their stems soon began to droop, but the flowers retained their sunny disposition. That’s when I decided to cut off their stems and float the flowers in a bowl of water. They have continued to bring joy for two weeks and still look fresh.

Their flower heads remind me of daisies, so I wondered whether they were related. It turns out they are. Like a daisy, the disk florets in the centre of the flower are bright yellow, which is why we think of them as being sunny. Asters bloom late autumn and provide an important food source for bees and when there is little nectar to be found. My pink asters are native to Australia but as a species, there are more than 250 varieties in the world.

While researching the humble aster, I learnt that the Hungarian revolution of October 1918 was also called the ‘Aster Revolution’. The name was derived from soldiers removing the Austro-Hungarian symbols from their caps and replacing these with asters.

The ‘headquarters’ for the revolutionaries was at the Astoria Hotel in Pest, on the eastern side of the Danube of the dual city of Budapest. This stunning seven storey hotel, featuring fin-de-siècle architecture is still one of the best loved hotels in the heart of the city. However, at the time of the revolution, it was only four years old and without a doubt one of the most elegant places in Budapest. It was from one of its balconies that the leader of the First Hungarian People’s Republic, Mihály Károlyi, announced the end of the Hapsburg empire and the foundation of the republic to jubilant supporters below. This was the only revolution that Hungarians have ever won.

Reading about the significance of the Astoria took me back to the 1980s, when during a particularly cold winter, I arrived in Budapest to find the transport in the city had ground to a halt. Metre high snow lay frozen on the side of roads; there were abandoned cars and trams everywhere, and the occasional taxi or bus that was still operational wouldn’t stop.

I stood at a bus stop with dozens of commuters needing to get out of the cold. They were locals, while I was a tourist with a 30kg backpack that I could barely carry. When a bus finally stopped, they roughly pushed past me to get on board. I slipped on the ice, fell on my back and was transformed into a giant beetle, like Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s Metamorphosis. By now the bus had left, and I lay on the ground, legs in the air, crying, asking for my father’s intercession to get me out of this mess. After all, I was in his hometown, chasing ghosts.

Getting up seemed to take an eternity. I was cold, miserable and lonely. My only contact was my aunt who lived in a Soviet style high-rise in Buda. It was miles away. That’s when I spotted the Hotel Astoria on the other side of the road. Surely, someone could help me there.

I trudged across the road, entered the building and was greeted by a friendly face. I wiped away my tears. The woman behind the counter took pity on me and called my aunt who immediately took charge of the situation. All I had to do was to wait outside until she bribed a taxi driver to drive back into the city to collect me. Within half an hour the taxi arrived, and I arrived safely at my aunt’s place fifteen minutes later.

The weather improved the next day. I took the bus into town, found a florist and bought a pot of chrysanthemums. These I delivered to my saviour at the Astoria. At the time I had no idea of the hotel’s history. Nor would I have known that chrysanthemums are closely related to asters.  

Memories of love

My father in the early 1940’s – he would have been 99 on Feb 4, 2022

My father was a good-looking, debonair man. He flirted with ease and knew how to flatter women. He liked telling stories of his youth’s exploits. For him, women represented a source of fascination, conquest, and pleasure. The exception was Agnes, his first wife.

Throughout my childhood, a slightly tattered, black and white photograph of Agnes leant on a mirror in my father’s heavily draped room. She was a slender woman with shoulder length wavy hair who was destined to have her smile set for posterity. The photo was taken in Budapest, sometime in the late 1940’s.

I would look at this picture for hours and wished she had been my mother. Instead, Agnes died of TB. Penicillin could have saved her, if only the drug had been available in post-war Hungary. In the picture she is in her early twenties, full of life and pregnant with her first child.

Agnes was the only woman who had rejected my father’s advances. I don’t think she was playing hard to get, she just wasn’t interested in his games. They fell in love, married, and started their life together in a city that lay in ruins. In their short life together, she doted on him. Whatever wish passed his lips, she would try to fulfil. My father recounted a story of craving doughnuts in the middle of the night. Agnes got out of bed to make yeast dough so he could have his favourite jam-filled, fried doughnuts for breakfast. I wished I could have had a mother like her. And he did too.

She fell pregnant and they were looking forward to starting a family. Agnes loved the feel of the child growing within her but developed a persistent, blood speckled cough. Doctors confirmed the worst but only to my father. He set about trying to get penicillin from the West. Relatives who had emigrated were begged to help. None did. The cough persisted and she grew weaker. It became clear that she would not see out the pregnancy. The doctors enlisted my father to persuade Agnes to abort the child they both longed for. I don’t think my father ever forgave himself for that treachery. Agnes couldn’t understand why he was so adamant but yielded to his wish. This may have extended her life by a few short weeks.

My father described his anguish when she died. He walked out of the hospital and straight into oncoming traffic. He didn’t notice the screeching cars or people yelling at him. It is hard to know how he went on with his life. He had lost his son and his wife within a few short weeks of each other. No-one would ever be able to fill that emptiness. Only drinking somewhat numbed his pain.

My father died a long time ago and Agnes is suspended in an eternal autumn day. She is a hand-me-down memory, a two-dimensional figure etched on brittle, glossy paper. Yet I think of her more than I do of my father. Or maybe I think of my father as I struggle to be the woman he wanted me to become. Agnes is the looking glass, the flawless woman, the perfect mother, the ideal lover, the unattainable Madonna. The mother I never had. The mother I still strive to be.