A Fekete Duna

A week ago I was still in Hungary, enjoying the weather in my favourite city, Budapest, and feeling the high of a week spent serving God with the teenagers of the Tivadar English Bible Camp.  My mind was full of contrasts, however.

Hungary is a land with a rich and complex history and one which, even now, seems to struggle with the weight of it all.  There is a lot of prejudice and resentment from the events of the last century, mirrored, I'm sure, in many of the neighbouring countries, where borders were drawn up on a map in Versaille and people's lives were changed, ostensibly for their better.  Now, in the second decade of the 21st Century, it is clear that much of that has failed and only worsened tensions between ethnic groups, but I doubt that things would be any better at all if the borders had not been moved.  It seems to me that the problem with Eastern and Central Europe, and indeed the rest of the world, is not this group, or that group, to whom blame can be apportioned, but, in fact, the problem is everyone, ourselves included.  We're the sinners who want things all our own way and who distrust those with different lifestyles, cultures and agendas.  As long as we remain in our sin that will never change, however you draw the separation lines.

Last Sunday evening I had a unique opportunity to take a walk through the centre of Budapest on my own and got to do some writing on the steps of the Fisherman's Bastion on Várhegy, looking down on the Danube and the Parliament building over in Pest.  With this view and these thoughts (and others) in mind, and with a week's worth of editing and honing of both the words and the ideas behind them, this is what I came up with.

Do remember, as you read it, that I love Hungary, and Budapest especially, but just because I love something does not mean I cannot see its flaws.  Any errors in historical, or geographical accuracy are entirely my own.

A Fekete Duna (The Black Danube)

The river is black now.  By day she flows a murky, greenish brown, and Strauss is proven false.  Swimmers brave the beaches of Margit Sziget and there are parties by the banks, but though the breeze is fresh and the view a pearl of Europe, you cannot escape that filmy surface, that unclean sheen, that tepid, ancient lie.

But the river is black now; lacquered gold where street lamps cast their gaze.  Her bridges arc in filigree chords and all the monuments of greatness - squandered and taken - stand out like rich topaz on a field of starry black.  Tourists smile and point, immortalise themselves on her banks and spans.  They are backlit by splendour, eyes starry in the flash. Beneath, pleasure boats cruise past like they're sliding on glass, through the shade of their Grand Prince, beneath the chains and the roaring lions, towards freedom (hid) and the distant, stolen sea.  They slice through their own reflections and are gone.

But the river is black now - she frames her city like a mirror in a darkened room, defining light and shade and nothing more.  She cuts between classes, the high and low, between those elevated and those levelled; West and East.  Spots of colour on her banks tell of burger chains and clubs, vending machines and hotel bars.  Trams weave by like the ghosts of regimes past.

But the river is black now, so the old man on the hill does not watch her, nor remember how they threw him to her grasp; the red wake he left behind him in his spiked and sudden coffin.  The river stained, the bishop sainted, yet above a verdant lady stands, her gaze upon that long, dark ribbon: not just Gellért's blood at all.  How could she glance away from one she claims, twice now, to have freed?

But the river is black now - on her banks lie many shoes, cast-off and cast iron: forgotten reminders of a forgettable night, or a frozen memory of an unmentionable one.  Who wishes to recall such cold amidst the summer heat, or the black-clad ice that flowed through the city and turned the river white, then red.

But the river is black now - no one sees those shapes lurking in its shadows, picking scraps and making do midst the waste and grime, lost and forgotten in its flow like the souls in back alleys begging for change, or the woman selling flowers to tourists, back bent and humbled even as the roses stand tall and proud.

Because the river is black now, and every step forward seems a step further back.  All this progress, like the Danube, merely lies.