Bodor Ferenc: Coffee-Houses - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1992)

Fény (light)

In prehistoric times, traffic passed and converged before the entrance of the Fény café. The bold yellow letters have glowed for a long time above the corner of the lopped-off building. The Fény café was at one time an illustrious place with a Negro waiter and even the “Nejlon" (Nylon) opposite the BSR (Budapest Suburban Railway) stop could not vie with it. The heavies of the Buda district used to flock like moths around its epoch-making new juke-box. Girls in yellow skirts and black stockings kept feeding in forints for the newest rock and roll numbers. In the evenings the police wagons came and took away the most dubious-looking characters. On these raids high-school students who had defied school rules simply by being present would try to disappear. In the mornings the Clj-Hold poets, fresh-skinned and inspired afresh by the waters of the Lukács baths, would sit sipping cofee and initiating pointy-breasted blue-stockings into the secrets of literature. The café later took on an erotic show. The girls danced on a shabby slip of a stage, multiplied by the mirrors. Nowadays, sober, nostalgic live music lulls the listener. A giant tropical poster and alpine rusticity stifles the spirit of the good old days. A composition of dried flowers on the wall, and skirting the terraced, semicircular sanctum, a quartered railing symbolizing the dawn partitions off the coffin-shaped disco counter and deep waters. A timeless diplay of Chinese lanterns and garlands.

There are old mosaic tiles on the floor, the old phonograph is probably gathering dust somewhere in Rákospalota, the poets have been driven back to their collected oeuvres, the blue-stockings have grown too old to serve as muses. The Fény café has reached adulthood.

4 MARGIT KÖRÚT, 11.

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