Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
Gemini City
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
Dear Travel Journal:
Budapest is a city of dyads. A city proud of its past. A city uncertain about its future. A Gemini city.
On the bluffs of Buda Hill, from the ramparts of Fisherman’s Bastion, I see the Buda and Pest sides of the city conjoined by the Danube River. Along the river banks the leaves on the trees are starting to yellow.
It’s 2016, and the country’s democracy is yellowing as well. Fascist strongman Victor Orban—Hungary’s longest-serving prime minister—is putting freedom in a coffin, cashing out its treasury, shoving liberalism into prison cells. The country is zigzagging back towards dictatorship. Democracy is withering on life support, dying a slow death.
Budapest’s multi-faceted history is revealed inside the neogothic Mathias church. First used to coronate kings, then as a mosque by the Ottoman Turks, now a Catholic church. Also atop Buda Hill, the House of Houdini performs magic shows. Even seated in the front row, I cannot guess the magician’s sleight of hand any more that I can guess an authoritarian’s next outrage.
Across the river in Pest, there are swanky shops, a gilded opera house, public artworks, chic restaurants, a wedding cake parliament building. There’s the city’s elegant metro system, a UNESCO-designated World Heritage Site. Ornate tram cars still have leather passenger straps. Station signage is ceramic tile. Ticket booths are wood-paneled.
The House of Terror is on Pest’s most fashionable boulevard. The Nazis and Communists placed their police prison there because regimes terrorize more effectively when brutality is out in the open. Torture cells—submerging an inmate for endless days in knee-deep ice water or confining a prisoner in total darkness in a three-foot diameter hole—were a threatening fact of everyday Hungarian life.
But the human history of Budapest—its miseries and injustices—is not my concern. I am here to relax and revel in its celebrations, customs, cuisine, charms. I wander aimlessly, without purpose—like a political prisoner suffering a life sentence.
Like stray dogs, tourists want food, shelter, safeguarding. After that, I want to sniff around, sightseeing the new and the different. I don’t want civic ugliness interfering with my pretty holiday.
Such is the luxury of the traveler. Getting to know a place without getting to know it well enough to bear its burdens, own its dualities, cope with its trends and tensions or consider its consequential choices. Gleefully, like attending a magic show, I succumb to the pretty and picturesque illusions.
Budapest is alive, fast-paced, busy. Outwardly, Hungarians look happy. Their concerns appear limited to making the next Metro train.
Like a Trump grift, Orban’s democratic popularity is a magician’s political trick. Like a college campus safe space, he offers Hungarians safety from change.
Orban and Trump are selling nationalist stability. No to ethnic immigrants. No to gays. No to cultural change. No to abandoning the mythical dreams of a Greater Hungary or a once-great America. Orban’s witchcraft is convincing people that they can be tourists in their own country.
The obligations of citizenship exist only in one place on earth. Only at home does my wandering life give way to the singular responsibility to select my government’s leaders, to decide between competing political parties, to choose the lesser of two evils. To govern my government.
Only at home can I vote against an American Orban.
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