The admirable avenue, where I most like to walk, ends, or is it begins in a grand square, which like so many structures in this amazing city is under construction. It is to be a monument to the Magyar conquest of the Carpathian basin, built to honour its millenary year, already past, although the monument is not completed. It seems to me that the Magyars are a proud people much interested in their history and their heroes. They will tell you that Budapest is one of the oldest settlements in Europe. The Magyars themselves were a fierce nomadic race who came into this area from the east under the leadership of one Arpdd, conquering the area in 896, hence their millennium celebrations four years ago. While the monument to Arpdd is not finished, there are buildings to either side, one of which, a palace for the arts, is constructed to resemble a Greek temple with six Corinthian columns.
Beyond that, there is a city park which is endowed with a castle, quite an extraordinary one. On Sundays, many families gather in the park at an outdoor restaurant called Wampetics, and I am quite determined to take a meal there at some time during my visit. Should one become weary on the walk along the avenue, which must extend, by my reckoning, for two miles, there is an electric subway, the Franz Josef Underground line, which is a marvel. I find the trip in the yellow cars beneath the street exhilarating, but mindful of mounting expenses, I walk almost everywhere.
My lodgings are also most conveniently situated near the Danube. There is a splendid walk along its banks. The bridges across the Danube—bridges are hid in the local language which I am making every effort to learn—are a marvel of both engineering and aesthetics. I find the Lanchid, the chain bridge, which is very near my apartment, particularly attractive, but the Erzsebet Bridge, now under construction, will be equally impressive, I'm sure. It may well be that it is named for their Emperor Franz Josef's late wife, the Empress Erzsebet, Elizabeth we would call her, whom Fekete Neni tells me was adored here. They called her Sisi, but she died about two years ago, assassinated by a madman. They mourn her still.
The coffee houses seem to me to be a very important part of the life of the city, where like-minded men gather to discuss issues of importance, like politics, or great literature and the arts. Perhaps when T arrives we will visit one of these together so that he may translate for me the discussions. As it is, I rather enjoy the smell of coffee, slightly burnt, that permeates the air almost everywhere I walk, competing with the scent of violets this spring. The weather has been very fine since my arrival. It is such a relief from the rains that so depressed me in February when it seemed to me to be the worst such winter as I could recall.
I have left a letter and packet for T as we arranged before he left England for the continent. I have not received a letter back, but am not concerned. Nor am I idle. I am continuing my studies on ancient man, and indeed find myself quite taken with the idea that it should be possible to find evidence of his existence nearby. It now seems quite laughable to me that our immediate forebears believed as they did, that the world was created in 4004 B.C. I am much taken with the reports of the skeletons found in the Neander Tal, and also of reports of caves north of the city.
I have already made enquiries and find that a journey of reasonable duration will take me to the region in which limestone caves are to be found. When T arrives, I will question him closely on this subject, and it may be that he will accompany me there.
I am quite convinced that my decision to journey here was the right one.
September 13
Many questions had surfaced in my reading through the excerpts from Piper's diaries, the identity of T and the need for his anonymity being only one of them. The decision to choose Budapest was another. In 1900, most of the discoveries of evidence of early man had been in France or in Germany. If I were looking for an old skeleton in 1900 or so, the Dordogne in France was the place I'd go. Altamira in Spain was another possibility. The famous cave drawings there had already been found, and while many disputed their authenticity, someone like Piper would not. That was with the benefit of a century of hindsight, of course. Still, it was a question. Did T have something to do with it? Did Piper strike up a friendship, or perhaps even a business relationship, with a Hungarian so persuasive that Piper chose Hungary for his scientific explorations, other evidence to the contrary? The fact that the choice was such a happy one would surely be merely serendipitous.
On one point Piper and I were in total agreement. Budapest, to my surprise, is lovely, with broad tree-lined avenues reminiscent of Paris, the gleaming Danube its Seine. On one bank, Buda Castle reigns over its surroundings; on the other, the Pest side, cafes along the river's edge were filled with people enjoying the last of the sun before the cold weather took over, laughing and talking and sipping their drinks. I expected a city of Soviet-style gray concrete bunkers and prominent statues of heroes of the Revolution. I was wrong.
Only thirty hours after I'd been visited by Anna's specter in my dreams, I was sitting in the Cafe Gerbeaud, a very old coffee house not far from the Danube on Vorosmarty ter, a place that my guidebook told me everybody visited.
I was not, however, there because the guidebook said I should be. I was there because my hotel room on a back street off Andrassy ut near the Opera House was not yet ready for me, and because Karoly Molnar had, according to his expense claims, been there four times on the trip that netted him the Venus, in the company of someone by the name of Mihaly Kovacs.
It's amazing what you can find out about a person from their expense claims. I knew that Karoly usually stayed at the Hilton in Buda, came to the Gerbeaud almost every day, and, if I'd been able to read Hungarian, which I couldn't, I would have known what he ate. What I didn't know was anything about the city in which I found myself. It had been a very long time since I'd been somewhere I'd never been before, and where I spoke not so much as a word of the language. While I do get to travel all over the world, I have a regular route for my buying trips, agents and pickers at every stop, and at a very minimum, I know how to say hello, thank you, and goodbye. Not here.
Right at that moment I couldn't think what had possessed me to come. I was jet-lagged, fatigued beyond endurance, to say nothing of rumpled and scruffy. All I'd brought with me, other than clothes and toiletries hastily assembled, were Karoly's file and the book on the discovery of the Magyar Venus. The guidebook, I'd acquired at Heathrow.
I could see it was a business kind of place, as well as a tourist haunt. The tourists were there, certainly, in their jean suits and trainers, money belts strapped around their middles, but there were locals too, people with papers spread out on the marble-topped tables, talking very seriously to a companion or their cellphone.