“‘I am very glad to meet you,’ I said to her. ‘Thank you for arranging the honor of my attending the conference.’
“Aunt Éva laughed and pressed my hand. If I had thought her calm and reserved the moment before, I had been fooled; she broke out now in a voluble stream of Hungarian, and I wondered if I was supposed to understand any of it. Helen came to my rescue at once. ‘My aunt does not speak English,’ she explained, ‘although she understands more than she likes to admit. The older people here studied German and Russian and sometimes French, but English was much rarer. I will translate for you. Shh -’ She put a fond hand on her aunt’s arm, adding some injunction in Hungarian. ‘She says you are very welcome here and hopes you won’t get into any trouble, as she put the whole office of the undersecretary of visa affairs into an uproar to get you in. She expects an invitation from you to your lecture-which she will not understand that well, but it is the principle of the thing-and you must also satisfy her curiosity about your university at home, how you met me, whether I behave properly in America, and what kind of food your mother cooks. She will have other questions later.’
“I looked at the pair of them in astonishment. They were both smiling at me, these two magnificent women, and I saw a remarkable likeness of Helen’s irony in her aunt’s face, although Helen could have benefited from a study of her aunt Éva’s frequent smile. There was certainly no fooling someone as clever as Éva Orbán; after all, I reminded myself, she had risen from a village in Romania to a position of power in the Hungarian government. ‘I will certainly try to satisfy your aunt’s interest,’ I told Helen. ‘Please explain to her that my mother’s specialties are meat loaf and macaroni-and-cheese.’
“‘Ah, meat loaf,’ Helen said. Her explanation to her aunt brought an approving smile. ‘She asks you to convey her greetings and congratulations to your mother in America on her fine son.’ I felt myself turning red, to my annoyance, but promised to deliver the message. ‘Now she would like to take us to a restaurant you will enjoy very much, a taste of old Budapest.’
“Minutes later, the three of us were seated in the back of what I took to be Aunt Éva’s private car-not a very proletarian vehicle, by the way-and Helen was pointing out the sights, prompted by her aunt. I should say that Aunt Éva never uttered a word of English to me throughout our two meetings, but I had the impression this was as much a matter of principle-an anti-Western protocol, perhaps?-as anything else; when Helen and I had any exchange, Aunt Éva often seemed to understand it at least partially even before Helen translated. It was as if Aunt Éva was making a linguistic declaration that things Western were to be treated with some distance, even a little revulsion, but an individual Westerner was quite possibly a nice person and should be shown full Hungarian hospitality. Eventually I got used to speaking with her through Helen, so much so that I sometimes had the impression of being on the brink of understanding those waves of dactyls.
“Some communications between us needed no interpreter, anyway. After another glorious ride along the river, we crossed what I later learned was Széchenyi Lánchid, the Széchenyi Chain Bridge, a miracle of nineteenth-century engineering named for one of Budapest ’s great beautifiers, Count István Széchenyi. As we turned onto the bridge, the full evening light, reflected off the Danube, flooded the whole scene, so that the exquisite mass of the castle and churches in Buda, where we were headed, was thrown into gold-and-brown relief. The bridge itself was an elegant monolith, guarded at each end by lions couchants and supporting two huge triumphant arches. My spontaneous gasp of admiration prompted Aunt Éva’s smile, and Helen, sitting between us, smiled proudly, too. ‘It is a wonderful city,’ I said, and Aunt Éva squeezed my arm as if I had been one of her own grown children.
“Helen explained to me that her aunt wanted me to know about the reconstruction of the bridge. ‘ Budapest was very badly damaged in the war,’ she said. ‘One of our bridges has not even yet been fully repaired, and many buildings suffered. You can see that we are still rebuilding in every part of the city. But this bridge was repaired for its-how do you say it?-the centennial of its construction, in 1949, and we are very proud of that. And I am particularly proud because my aunt helped to organize the reconstruction.’ Aunt Éva smiled and nodded, then seemed to remember that she wasn’t supposed to understand any of this.
“A moment later we plunged into a tunnel that appeared to run almost under the castle itself, and Aunt Éva told us she had selected one of her favorite restaurants, a ‘truly Hungarian’ place on József Attila Street. I was still amazed by the names of Budapest ’s streets, some of them simply strange or exotic to me and some, like this one, redolent of a past I had thought lived only in books. József Attila Street turned out to be as politely grand as most of the rest of the city, not at all a muddy track lined with barbaric encampments where Hun warriors ate in their saddles. The restaurant was quiet and elegant inside, and the maître d‘ came hurrying forward to greet Aunt Éva by name. She seemed used to this sort of attention. In a few minutes we were settled at the best table in the room, where we could enjoy views of old trees and old buildings, strolling pedestrians in their summer finery, and glimpses of noisy little cars zooming through the city. I sat back with a sigh of pleasure.
“Aunt Éva ordered for all of us, as a matter of course, and when the first dishes came, they were accompanied by a strong liquor calledpaálinka that Helen said was distilled from apricots. ‘Now we will have something very good with this,’ Aunt Éva explained to me through Helen. ‘We call thesehortobàgyi palacsinta. They are a kind of pancake filled with veal, a tradition with the shepherds in the lowlands of Hungary. You will like them.’ I did, and I liked all the dishes that followed-the stewed meats and vegetables, the layers of potatoes and salami and hard-boiled eggs, the heavy salads, the green beans and mutton, the wonderful golden-brown bread. I hadn’t realized until then how hungry I’d been during our long day of travel. I noticed, too, that Helen and her aunt ate unabashedly, with a relish no polite American woman would have dared to show in public.
“It would be a mistake to convey the impression that we simply ate, however. As all of this tradition went down the hatch, Aunt Éva talked and Helen translated. I asked the occasional question, but for the most part, I remember, I was very busy absorbing both the food and the information. Aunt Éva seemed to have firmly in mind the fact that I was a historian; perhaps she even suspected my ignorance on the subject of Hungary ’s own history and wanted to be sure I didn’t embarrass her at the conference, or perhaps she was prompted by the patriotism of the long-established immigrant. Whatever her motive, she talked brilliantly, and I could almost read her next sentence on her mobile, vivid face before Helen interpreted it for me.
“For example, when we’d finished toasting friendship between our countries with thepaálinka, Aunt Éva seasoned our shepherd’s pancakes with a description of Budapest’s origins-it had once been a Roman garrison called Aquincum, and you could still find the odd Roman ruin lying around-and she painted a vivid picture of Attila and his Huns stealing it from the Romans in the fifth century. The Ottomans were actually mild-mannered latecomers, I thought. The stewed meats and vegetables-one dish of which Helen calledgulyás, assuring me with a stern look that it was not goulash, which was called something else by Hungarians-gave rise to a long description of the invasion of the region by the Magyars in the ninth century. Over the layered potato-and-salami dish, which was certainly much better than meat loaf or macaroni-and-cheese, Aunt Éva described the coronation of King Stephen I-Saint István, ultimately-by the pope in 1000 AD. ‘He was a heathen in animal skins,’ she told me through Helen, ‘but he became the first king of Hungary and converted Hungary to Christianity. You will see his name everywhere in Budapest.’