The day of the bananas: Budapest

September 28, 2012

"Look, I don't know who you are but would you mind not shouting quite so much?"

THE FIRST TIME Maria saw bananas other than new year was a weekend in Vienna. Until then Hungarians hadn't been allowed outside the communist bloc without good reason. Without that, you got a red passport and not the blue one of true international travel.

"We could go to Romania or Bulgaria and the Black Sea and fly there and have a hotel for next to nothing," she said, bright with enthusiasm and the taste for a good tale. "And why? Because it kept people happy. They knew we didn't like communism so we had cheap drink and we were encouraged to be tipsy all the time and we were given ridiculously cheap trips to anywhere in the communist bloc."

It's the escape area of a nuclear bunker beneath much of central Budapest. It was where politicians and top brass would have gone had war begun. It remained a secret for decades and even now hardly anyone has been down there

The immediate post-war era was Bad Communism, she said, under Stalin, with secret police and informers everywhere. The Hungarian Uprising was crushed in a fortnight - the West encouraged the rebels but then declined to intervene - but it brought a more enlightened period known still as Happy Communism.

Travel restrictions were relaxed progressively - until then the Stalinists feared people wouldn't come back - and Maria's family first saw the outside world when they went the short distance to Vienna.

"I was just a child but I remember we were so astonished, that the streets were bright and the shops were full and the people well dressed. And the women were beautiful and the men so handsome. Remember, we had lived through decades of suppression and shortages.

"And then we saw bananas in the shops. In summer. I couldn't understand. I had only seen bananas at Christmas time, when they were a treat. And yet here they were, heaps of them, as many as you wanted, in summer.

"So we bought 20kg of them! We couldn't believe we could do it. But when we got back to Hungary, the border people said we couldn't bring them into the country. And so we sat there, there on the border, eating 20kg of bananas.

"Not a happy experience!"

All trolley-bus routes in Budapest are numbered in the 70s. Why? Because Stalin was born in the 1870s and sycophancy ran riot. They still have the original numbers. "We don't learn very fast," Maria observed

Look around Budapest, and Hungary generally, Maria said, and at street level everything seems fine. Those days look a long way away. But look one storey up and there is the decay, the neglect of the communist period, when the state didn't have the money to support its ideals of a job for everyone, compounded by lack of prosperity ever since. And indeed, across the centre the upper levels of houses still have pock marks and bullet holes of

Bullet holes left unrepaired since the uprising more than half a century ago

the uprising, not through a sense of preserving the past - it would hardly be in the communists' interests to remind people of the weeks they fought for their freedom, after all - but because there never was and still isn't money to patch them up.

"We are still not out of the communist period, that way of thinking," Maria said. "You spend a day, a few days here, and everything will seem fine. But spend longer and you'll see the problems. You'll see what I mean. We still think and act as though the communists were here.

"It will take another couple of generations, I think."

Budapest was one of Europe's black and uncleaned capitals until recently. Much has been done to make it brighter...

...but there's more to be done when money allows

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