Free Inside Outside by Andrew Riemer Page B

flourished among the bourgeoisie of Hungary, and may still be heard in public places like the foyer of the Sydney Opera House, though it is notably absent in the Budapest of the 1990s, was probably the remnant of a former way of life where the rural gentry lived in close contact with the peasantry. But that is sheer conjecture on my part.
    My grandmother’s flat formed the centre of her life—at least in the years that I knew her—in a way completely opposite to my parents’ gadding about from restaurants to nightclubs during their golden years. She rarely went farther than visiting friends and relatives who lived in the same building or in nearby streets, except for those frequent and highly ritualised trips to the cemetery that played an essential role in her life. Domestic duties occupied a great deal of her attention—she had after all three adults living with her—but these were of an exclusively supervisory nature. There was a live-in servant who, in the manner of these bourgeois households, was combined cook and chambermaid. The laundress came each Monday. A dressmaker would call from time to time and sew on my grandmother’s treadle machine (which she herself never used) that succession of black dresses with white spots, in cotton, silk and wool, which my grandmother wore each day. A lesser creature would attend to such mending as was not trusted to the maidservant. The corn-cutter (no fancy terms like chiropodist or podiatrist were then known) would come whenever necessary, as would someone with leeches or cups for those minor medical matters that did not require the services of a doctor. If a doctor were needed he (for no woman doctor could be trusted) would also call—a visit to the consulting-rooms was reserved for the gravest of maladies, when the opinion of a specialist, inevitably a Professor, was called for. My father used to say that when he was a child, a person (some sort of minor, possibly untrained dentist) would be summoned if a tooth needed extracting.
    I do not remember a piano or a radio or a gramophone or any books at all. Yet my father was relatively well read, and he was very musical indeed, though entirely as a listener, despite several agonising childhood years at the violin. I suspect that he acquired these tastes when he left home after finishing his schooling. He spent some years studying to become a textile engineer, first in the Czech city of Brno, later in Aachen in Germany. It was during his years in Aachen that he used to travel all night in a third-class compartment to cities like Dresden and Leipzig to queue for most of the day for an opera ticket, only to return to Aachen by the late train, sleepless and exhausted. His musical interests were restricted to opera; he spoke of some legendary singers he had heard. He would occasionally mention the odd conductor, principally Strauss, whom he had heard conducting a performance of
Der Rosenkavalier
in Dresden or Leipzig. He never spoke about orchestral concerts or chamber music recitals. Nevertheless, his cultural horizons were wider than my mother’s. He had seen something of Europe. After he had finished school his mother stood him a trip to Venice, where he stayed with a reliable and respectable Hungarian family who fed him proper and decent food. A few months later, before beginning his studies, he used his meagre savings for a visit to Paris—a three-night journey in third class—where unfortunately a reliable Hungarian family could not be found. To my grandmother’s dismay he slept in an hotel and ate goodness knows what muck in cafés and restaurants.

    In this account of the two sides of my family I may have stressed the differences in the way each looked at the world. But such differences are probably more striking in retrospect than they were in fact. They each remained fixed within fairly clearly defined boundaries, the boundaries of a bourgeois world where certain proprieties were