Budapest [antikvár]

Introduction to the Second Edition Budapest, my native city has not changed much for the tourist during the last three years, since I finished the manuscript for this edition. More luxury restaurants, more and nicer shops, worse and worse black markét rates for the forint, together with Vienna prices in somé places. It has changed for me - beyond recognition. That meek and mellow dicta-torship has given in: melted away in front of our very eyes. You should know that this regime was different from all the others in East-ern Europe. We did not cry out against it every day after getting up; on the contrary, we had to remind ourselves of what kind of a regime we are living in, at the weekend. We laughed at the ignorant "politicians", and detested money. We wore ragged blue jeans from twenty to thirty and our hair was reluctant to follow the Zeitgeist into a shorter and shorter style. We read a lot of books, but very few papers, always trying to read between the lines. We didn't expect this world to disappear in our lifetime. We were condi-tioned to irreverence and to having absolutely no responsibility outside the family. Having been born in 1954 I didn't have any memories of the revolution in 1956. My best friend, a poet and scholar did. He kept on teliing me the story about the Cow. He explained that in the dark 50s his family didn't think the régime would last. They felt that a big dark cow that was grazing over a beautiful meadow (i.e. Hungary), suddenly sat down. But that darkness, they thought, cannot last forever: it is the very nature of cows that one day they get up. And the Cow did get up. For only twelve days - glorious but short time. After that nobody thought that she would ever leave. Some'people - including me -thought it was not a cow just a cow-shaped piece of solid rock. And it is possible to live under a rock - if you are somé species of fungus. Around 1982 the government decided to introduce somé "reforms": after in-venting lukewarm water they opted for inventing hot water. Letting small businesses start and flourish was going to erode the remaining ideological features of the system. Earlier, a district hall official could turn down a per-mission for a shoemaker's shop, saying that there are enough shoemakers in a given neighbourhood. That made a slow but dramatic impact on Budapest. There were better and better shops. The gentrification of the Inner City started again, first making the tourist reservation just a bit bigger, later spreading throughout within the Grand Boulevard. That slowly changed my generation as well. Somé of us felt that it was worth earning money so as to spend it in an intelligent way. You could be, if not happy, free. Somé of us were not interested in money at all - they published the half a dozen underground papers, for a couple of thousand people. Somé were interested in both. Somé in nothing. But every-one thought that the regime cannot become more liberal than it had become. Common sense was infiltrating everyday life more and more, though. Not so much, though, that one of the stupidest laws — my favourite — was abolished. Until the autumn 1989(!) if you had a car younger than 3 years old, you could only sell it to the state, at a depressed price. Thus, a three-year-and-one-day-old car was much more expensive than a three-year-old car