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

Ifjúsági (youths’) - remiz

In the old days this was the Nagy pastry shop, which we learned of in history class. When the dramatic moments were over, it became a simple little café festooned with New Year’s Eve and Carnival garlands tucked in behind the dead-end barricades of the BKV (Budapest Transportation Company). The slotmachines rattle like machine-guns and in the corners teenagers play truant from school. A long time ago, in Mrs Sóvári’s time, pastries were carried around on aluminium baking-trays held high, one in each hand, and if a waitress went off balance and the baking-tray toppled, the cream-filled pastries would wobble gently.

Then the ticket-collectors, fingertips shiny from all the coins they handled, disappeared too. The garden stayed eternal, luxuriant, only the flowers placed before the monument wither and die. At the back behind the terrace, beside the huge, mysterious water-plant, a cat crouches, caressing all there is to be seen beneath the loosely draped silk skirt with burning eyes. The fountain is overgrown with grass, no rainbows arch soaring from its fine mizzle. Visitors sometimes roam through the shrubbery, looking for the lavatories, their noisy rustling like the passing of a lost wild boar.

5 BUDAKESZI ÚT, II.

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