Islands of this kind have roots that grow deep inside us and the only thing that matters is how we turn them into a home and what it will feel like to live there in the midst of an infinite sea of other castaways.
We turn the most intimate maps of the world within ourselves into a home, each of us living on an island of our own. And we are surprised to find that no fish or boat sails past us, and that we are abruptly yanked out of the sojourn on our island by the island of a city tram stop that we leave on autopilot.
We leave the tram stop and start crossing the road, passing other islanders, similar to us—figures in a sea of moving cars. And at moments like these, the thought crosses our minds yet again: what is it that brings us closer to the other castaways? What brings us together? Is it our island experience?
The macrocosm is like a denial of the tiny, invisible island inside us. What can we do to avoid denying ourselves and the existence of other islanders?
Many years ago, I had a recurrent dream. It came in endless variations. I dreamt of the breakup of the monarchy. This was at the time when I was a devotee of Joseph Roth’s novels. In my dream, I would fly away aboard a zeppelin with a paper model of Emperor Franz Joseph and land on the island discovered by a Norwegian sea captain on a polar expedition. The island is called Franz Joseph Land. And there is actually nothing nice there.
The dream used to recur with cast-iron regularity, and eventually even when I was half-awake. I came across some photos of the island and would gaze at them lovingly before going to sleep. Apparently, the island is home to the northernmost post office in the world, which also holds another record. It is open for only an hour a week.
Otherwise, there is really nothing in this island country. And there wasn’t in my dreams either. A deserted northern land, devoid of trees, with just a post office, a NASA military outpost, and soldiers standing stiffly, waiting for a life . . . And yet, I would voyage there again and again aboard a zeppelin. And it was comically wonderful: I was turning that barrenness into a home in the hope that in this place that is home to the northernmost post office in the world, a new, meaningful world was bound to come into being.
For we islanders keep having these fantasies . . . We dream of rivers and seas, and of crossing rivers and seas, and we drown in the impossibility of accomplishing this task.
But—what I would like to write about now is something else: real islands.
One such island is the Island of Szentendre, Saint Andrew, in the Danube. It is situated some twenty kilometres north of Budapest. The sentimentally capricious and smoothly swift-flowing Danube on its left and on its right. There are four villages on the island and one totally unique cabin colony, Menedék.
Menedék is an island on an island. A fenced land. With over a hundred and fifty log cabins hidden among the trees. Everything here runs on a communal basis: rubbish, water, electricity; even cooking was once done communally. Over the summer, a council of elders meets every Sunday to discuss the colony’s affairs.
The cabin owners even have their own museum dedicated to the colony’s history. They organize debates and literature readings in their common room, there is a film club and an open-air cinema in the summer, a computer room with internet, ping-pong tables, a football pitch, and boats. There is a separate cabin with a playroom just for children, and—of course—children’s hiding places all over the shrub-covered land . . . The islanders have their own traditions—canoe paddling down the Danube, carnival. In a word: their olde-worlde order. The only way you can enter the colony is with a guide and a key, as the gate to Menedék is kept locked even during the day.
Cars are not allowed in: the cabin owners leave theirs parked outside by the fence and cart their supplies on squeaking wheels down a bumpy forest road. It is a sound that signals the arrival and departure of the Menedékians.
In the summer, nearly four hundred people live in the colony’s cabins. Many are distant relations. So if, on a hot August morning, little Julcsi should run barefoot out of her cabin, whichever way she goes, she will soon bump into her aunt, uncle, grandmother or great-grandmother. As the oldsters criss-cross Menedék’s sandy paths, they encounter parents with pushchairs, while older children chase one another in the playground, their shouting partly muffled by the rustling of plane trees and willows. Further along, you see people playing cards, barbecuing, and drinking wine in the shade of a hot, stifling summer's day, while the sound of a steamship honking on the Danube can be heard in the distance.
A touch of claustrophobia and a mesmeric sense of safety. The children run along the sandy paths among the cabins barefoot as a matter of principle. They live here as in paradise. A circumscribed paradise.
The first ten cabins were built before the Holocaust. Hungarian Jews still form the majority of summer residents. Some arrive for their holidays from France and no longer speak Hungarian. All are descended from a group of Hungarian communists, members of a rowing club. They founded the colony in 1928. After the breakup of the monarchy, Hungary lost two-thirds of its territory, and this was where the rowers found their circumscribed home—on an island in the Danube. Later, the Jewish Bolsheviks and anarchists were joined by hikers, Esperantists, freethinkers, and socialists.
And then came the war. Many of those who didn’t manage to row their way to safety were done with rowing for good . . .
You will find no mention of the war in the museum because the Menedék museum is a museum of life. Forty years ago, it hewed closely to the ideological line, but since 1989, the Menedékians have tried to be objective. The left-wing worldview continues, however, to be apparent in the museum, and the labels “communist” and “anti-communist” have little traction here.
A popular story has it that Tamás, a filmmaker who grew up in the colony in the 1980s, decided to get even with the generation of his fathers, the communists. But he met his match. Not even those who used to give communists a wide berth and who hunkered down during the last twenty years of socialism in Menedék, listening to ‘subversive’ radio stations, were willing to badmouth their neighbours now that the regime had fallen. Not out of fear but because it seemed pointless. They just shrugged it off. Life goes on; surely what matters now is surviving in a country that has lately been faltering under Orbán’s demagogy. Tamás has yet to finish his film. He hasn’t figured out how to approach the chaos of human stories once his original plan failed.
But back to the colony. When you pass through the gate and leave the Menedék microworld, you cross the island’s tarmac road and immediately find yourself on a sandy beach on the banks of the Danube. The river licks the banks on both sides, it keeps returning and claiming them, depending on the season. The banks are in constant motion, obscured by shifting shadows, telling their tales. This is most apparent here, by the sandy beach, where the twisting willows and hazel trees reach down to the Danube as if waving to the boats that pass. They also reach down to the opposite bank of the Danube, a collection point for Jews taken on the transports during the war.
After the war, some of Menedék’s residents returned to the island and began building an ideal socialist world here. A kind of kibbutz. Only with a different ideology, an ideology of recreation. And one that was fenced in, just to be on the safe side. Some made a career under Kádár, but most—those who weren’t sufficiently adaptable—didn’t stand a chance, something that was quite common throughout this Central European region. In addition, nearly a quarter of the cabin owners fled after the crushing of the 1956 uprising: to Israel, France, America, Canada . . . that is why these days you hear other languages mingling with Hungarian.
In the 1970s, someone on the island tried to set fire to the Menedék colony. He was caught and the incident hasn’t been talked about much since.
The past thirty years have passed quite peacefully, with the local islanders playing football with the island's islanders, the inhabitants of Menedék.
We are sitting on the porch of cabin number seven. Elsa, the Hungarian translator Eva, and I. Elsa turned ninety-seven this year. Her family owns five more cabins in the woods. She has lived in her little cabin since 1945. An enormous set of wireless headphones sits on the table. Elsa listens to opera from morning till night. She has loved opera all her life. After the war, she worked for a printing company. Until a few years ago, she used to hitchhike here from Budapest. She would hitch a ride down Highway 11, the tenacious hitchhiker from Menedék.
Elsa’s husband died thirty years ago. He was an astrologer who spoke thirteen languages. A survivor of Dachau. The cabin is piled to the rafters with old books, yellowing envelopes, a 1974 wall calendar with a Japanese print.
I had been looking forward to this meeting. This was because I knew that in Budapest in 1944, Elsa had saved ten boys who were about to be drafted into the army. Although she herself had a fake ID, she accompanied each of them to government offices pretending to be their fiancée. When she left the house for the eleventh time—on her way to yet another office—the concierge reported her for not wearing the Star of David. But how could she, with her fake ID?
She was arrested, dragged along the ground by her hair, but by then such was the chaos reigning in Budapest that Elsa and a group of Jews managed to escape to a Catholic parish office. They were offered refuge if they converted. “It wasn’t really about converting, the problem was that we were communists,” says Elsa. And so they were kicked out and had to hide elsewhere.
Eva is such a brilliant interpreter that she creates the illusion that I’m talking to Elsa without an intermediary. The chorus of the Hebrew slaves from Nabucco can be heard crackling in the headphones on the table.
“What does Menedék mean to you?” I ask.
“My life. This is the only place I have lived in peace.”
We fall silent.
With an expansive gesture she shows me the place in front of the cabin where peonies used to grow. Twenty years ago. “A real peony paradise,” she says. The path leading to the peonies outside the cabin is overgrown. So are the paths of Elsa’s life. Her eldest sister, aged one hundred and four, lives in Canada, her brother is in America, her three other sisters and her parents perished in Auschwitz.
Verdi’s opera comes to a crescendo; the air is motionless the way it tends to be in August. Elsa lunges at a mosquito. She hits it and that makes her laugh. There’s blood on the wrinkled, now-almost-hundred-year-old forearm. The headphones lie on the table, the first notes of Madame Butterfly begin emanating from them.
Next summer in Menedék, on the porch of her cabin, she will show me again where her peony paradise used to be. She will be ninety-eight.
And, just like this year, I will smell the peonies. Because the memory of the scent of peonies is often one of the few certainties in life.
That is just as true here, in Menedék, in the island on an island.
Especially here, on the island of circumscribed hope.
