Budapest & back again

From a day of trains and trains we came to a hostel in Budapest. An older American man greeted us – the manager, he said, thin-haired, slight, his teeth when he laughed gray. Generally I’m suspicious of older male American ex-pats in Europe. This is not without good reason.

As he checked us into the hostel, the man took on a tone of idle chit-chat inconsistent with his words, which grew over-share-y and disturbing: “I came to Budapest after my divorce… I was a whistle-blower, that’s why I had to leave, that company is after me… The owner here, he can tell you about a lot of clubs, but he doesn’t go to them. I do. I’ve been to all the gentlemen’s clubs. Sometimes, you know, young women go to them and you’d be surprised at what they do there!”

He grinned at one point and declared, “I’m the real Forrest Gump!” The gray-toothed laugh barked out again. “I don’t know where I’m running to, but I keep on running!”

Later the owner approached us about Forrest. He had come to Budapest with a lot of money several years ago, we were told, but spent it all on strippers and was now penniless. Recently the owner had discovered him stealing money (for more strippers) and fired him. Seeing as he had nowhere to go, the owner allowed him to sleep on the couch. He added, needlessly, that Forrest probably suffered from mental health issues.

(Why a hostel owner would want his guests to know that a slightly deranged gentleman’s club enthusiast slept just outside their door, I don’t know. But I might add that after our return home, the owner emailed my friends to request a good review on Hostelworld.com. The email included pictures of him pointing a gun at the camera, and then at his head, as if to say, “Give me a good rating or I’ll kill you / myself, HA HA!”)

In comparison, the other hostel guests seemed bland, or maybe just too German. We spent an afternoon with a few students: very cute and all about the same size and multi-ethnic, like dolls dipped in different colored paint. By “too German” I suppose I mean they were very civilized and easily shocked by tales of bucket baths, aggressive dogs/men, the usual grisly shtick. My friends and I exchanged looks of judgment and horror when one tossed a half-full water bottle into the trash, or when another, suffering from a cold, declined our scratchy brown Ukrainian toilet paper to blow his nose on. He wouldn’t go out with us that night, pleading sickness. “You just need to drink vodka,” I told him. “That’ll knock the cold right out of you.”

Maybe I spoke out of Stockholm Syndrome; more likely, self-satisfaction. The Peace Corps tendency to identify with Ukrainians is less a complex than a fallacy: We work and live together, share similar daily inconveniences, but our lives are not their lives. On the train home, Megan and I talked about Taras and Nadja. “They know that there’s a better life out there and that they’ll never have it,” she said. “They can’t just go off to Hungary for a week and spend 30 Euro on pants.”

But the urge rears itself: To take on authority, take on a tone of voice, in conversations with people who have never, will never see Ukraine, that implies, “You don’t know what it’s like.”

This tone, like most attitudes of authority, results from embarrassment. In this case, we affect being one who has struggled because we sense our privilege, an uncomfortable burden. No, not burden – maybe, lightness. Too little has been asked of us; on us, too little depends.

By us I mean not only PCVs, but those of us navigating our post-college years with varying levels of adequacy. There’s already a lot of internet handwringing about our individualism, our irresponsibility, our irony.* Some of this is unfair. Exploration and experimentation are no more selfish than the average office job. Still, I wonder: What is the difference between exploration and just dicking around?

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Budapest presents its pleasures in many forms. One, at the Szechenyi baths, was that of Leda in an open courtyard. Her stone neck craned back, the swan curled around her thighs. Italian teenagers scuffled around the pools, grappled and cuffed each other’s long brown bodies. They couldn’t be quiet or stop touching each other. Inside, in steam rooms, large men sat in the sweat traversing folds of their bellies and triangular flaps of breasts.

Some people swam around a circular pool until it became a whirlpool. A plump older woman in a bathing cap swam into the current and let out a high-pitched whoop: “Ooooo-hooo-hooo-hooo!” She collided into everyone, grabbed hold of their arms, apologizing in very loud Russian.

At night we went to ruin bars. I mean ruin as in a noun, not a verb; in the decaying shells of bombed-out buildings, people in Budapest have assembled jumbles of chairs and tables and colored lights and screens projected with 1920s fashion show reels, and called them bars. We drank red wine mixed with Coca Cola (“borash cola”– classy, no?) under the no-roof of cold starry air.

The last day I walked a long time alone and ended on a bridge. I wanting to fling my voice out over it, like a woman throwing dirty bathwater out a window, like a Rilke poem about angels. My hair and skirt whipped in the wind and I felt immensely sad. Europe doesn’t need me. Its streets would receive my interpretation politely, but its stone eyes over church doors remain impassive. Travel begins to lose its sense of possibility or purpose. Still, there’s no choice but movement. Run Forrest, run.

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To know the difference between exploration and dicking around, maybe we need to know the difference between production and creation. The former is geared toward function, efficiency, usefulness, and/or speed; the latter (at least ideally, or romantically) adheres to no such criteria.

It would take the length of like, five more blog entries to attempt an analysis of what it means to “be productive,” or the nature of “Work,” so I won’t strain your eyes or patience. However, I will say that the most all-consuming moments of creation, for me, are not romantic. I’ll be wearing jammies under my dress which smells like eggs or something weird, and Valentina will come in from working in the fields and ask me, “Are you sick?” I’ll say, “No, I’m working.” I say this and believe it, but in my ears it sounds defensive; my idea of work is not hers.

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My walks to and from school cross wide swaths of black fields where I’ll see whole families working. As they bend, their distant bodies are outlined in light, under low clouds.

The old women sit on their benches and watch me pass. But I no longer see the elderly couple across the street. Last spring, they often beckoned me over and wordlessly made room between them on the bench. It wasn’t really big enough for three, but I squeezed in and listened to their running commentary on passersby: “There goes Olga Petrovnya…” “There’s Sergei, where is he going? What is he doing?”

A few days ago, Valentina told me the woman had died. She had been working in the kitchen garden when it happened. God, I thought, these people. The older generations especially – they work their whole lives, they work until they die.

That is their reality, their necessity, and so I try to make sense of it as it is, without imbuing it with romance or tragedy. That’s the hardest, not to make it something else.

Once, I remember, last year I came home and the old man was standing motionless by the road, squinting. “Where is my wife?” he asked. “She went to the store. Did you see her?” I hadn’t, I said, then awkwardly moved toward my gate. “Where is my wife?” he repeated, blinking at the road that was empty.

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*You may have read enough of such non-news to reach saturation, but Jake sent me this New Yorker piece that made me think a lot, and also made me angry. It’s framed as an article on declining marriage rates and then transitions into a piece on declining civic participation. Disinclination toward marriage and communal interaction might seem, reading this, two parallel outcomes of young America’s hyper-individualism. Such an argument is hetero-normative and gross and I don’t buy it.

As a refreshing alternative, I’ll recommend this piece Helenmary sent me, “On Learning a Trade.” It’s both complex and clearly written, and its thoughtful comments on work and privilege have been in my brain while writing this entry.

I don’t pretend to speak for our generation, seeing as a) I don’t actually contain multitudes, on a literal level, and b) I barely ever see any of y’all. Save me from solipsism: If you have ideas or opinions about these issues, you should definitely talk to me.