Saly Noémi: Café?! Változatok és változások Időszaki kiállítás 2007. február–május (Budapest, 2007)

Bui all this could not change the essential point: in the eyes of the Bolshevik leadership, alter the horrors of the period of terror of the despised and derided German Nazis and the Hungarian Arrow-Cross, the calé became the symbol of the bourgeoisie - persecuted as a class - and the main object of an aggressive desire to wipe out the past. (Hardly half a year separates the two short propaganda films - Arrow Cross then communist - which first, in the country's life and death battle, mocks the Jews still promenading and frequenting cafés, and then in the life and death battle of the reconstruction, mocks the bourgeoisie, once again promenading and frequenting the cafés. Otherwise, everything in them is exactly identical: the images, the music, the judgmental lone ol the commentary, the dramaturgy. 1 could not believe my eyes and ears when I came upon them.) One must admit their work was effective. The traditional clientele - if it was lucky enough to survive the Holocaust or simply the war - withdrew from the café to the similarly assaulted dominions of private file and the characters and trades developed over centuries - the café proprietors themselves, the legendary waiters, the coffee makers who knew the coffee's place of origin as soon as they took a whiff from the sack, the eternally smiling ffower-sellmg and bread girls, the cigarette vendors strolling between the tables with their cigarette trays hanging from their necks, the post boys flitting about like pixies with letters for the regulars, the sleepy-eyed cloakroom ladies, their voices rasping from cigarettes and all the skilled coffee-roasting workers.

.. - quickly vanished or were forcibly assimilated into the industrialised, uniform society of socialist subjects. Exactly the opposite was the case with the espresso bars, which proved to be more suitable in the view of the Rákosi leadership, for two reasons. Firstly, they did not have adhering lo them the ethos of the centuries old bourgeoisie; secondly, due to their small size, they seemed to be easier to survey and control than the cafés. And they turned out to be right. It cannot be by chance that such a large proportion of informers' reports are based on ihe 'experience" of meetings and conversations in ihe various espresso bars, nor should we be surprised by the fact that there was even one - the Maiomló - that was opened by János Kádár in 1962. Thus, in atlributing merit to the socialist decades because, through the espresso bars - as opposed to many of the capitals and towns of the other Socialist Bloc countries, where the leadership did not tolerate any such places - m Budapest the cullure of drinking coffee in public was nevertheless maintained, we cannot allow our faces to be clouded over with nostalgia, even if we - ihe forty and fifty somethings of today - lived half of our lives in them. Thus these lines by Miklós Gáspár Tamás at the turn of the new millennium seem lo be correct m saying: 'Our generation got the espresso bars. They were dark. Low iron chairs covered in red vinyl. The coat rack always falling over. Puddles on the artificial marble floor. The winter coats flung onto the low chairs always dangling in the brownish puddles of slush. Do you remember what the birds looked like then? They always splashed in the mud and their sodden nylon siockings sluck to their legs... If the time machine were to bring someone back from those one-time espresso bars (»1 was the key figure of the new economy«), he would look like a homeless person with an accumulation of disadvantages. ...They would never believe me today in thai combination ol Russian fur hat and raincoat, nails stained yellow from »Feesfee« cigarettes... Cheap »Portonko« rum, pear and »Mecseki« digestif liqueur. A bread roll, a small black coffee, and stuffed