If These Walls Could Talk: Budapest's Café Gerbeaud

"Perhaps the most beautiful and exciting gift in life is to guard a precious treasure and to further enoble it." - Cafe Gerbeaud (Budapest, Hungary)

Months spent isolating at home has me hungry for the whimsy and adventure of travel. For my husband and I, though we travel together, a trip is vastly different. He is non-fiction through and through, primarily concerned with the here-and-now and appreciating what the architecture and sights before us mean in the moment. 

I, on the other hand, am a fiction and history buff. I will often spend hundreds of hours researching our trips to understand the historical context, what happened there, and why each building or monument is significant. That's the history part.

Then I imagine being there. This is the fiction part. I make up characters, people living their daily lives in those places. I wonder what their names are, how they make a living, what their day-to-day concerns are. 

Today's post is about Café Gerbeaud, a historic café and pastry house in Budapest, Hungary.

The moment you enter, you know this place was not built for you. It was not designed with the modern consumer in mind. It is older than you, older than your grandparents, older than their parents. There were no students and writers sitting with open laptops, no tourist checking maps on their cell phones. It was the height of café culture in Pest* and this was the place.

*Reminder that Buda and Pest were, for a long time, two separate cities, divided by the mighty Danube river. The cities were joined by bridges to become Budapest in 1873. 

It looks like a classy, mid-1800s establishment. It is upscale, with religious-esque portraits hung from the walls, themselves ornately adorned in rich tapestries and gold filigree. The ceiling is adorned in crystal chandeliers. The Habsburgs themselves visited. 

But, there is a seedier story beneath the gilding.

The legend goes like this. A woman orders a cappuccino and a few sugars, arranging the sugars just so. It's a signal. 

Some legends say it's a gigolo pickup point. The woman's signal says that a watching male escort should approach her.

But, to a history buff with a never ending brainstorm list of new story ideas in a note on her phone, is it really a gigolo pickup point? Or is that the cover story for something considerably more nefarious? 

Read more about Cafe Gerbeaud's less seedy history on their website here.

Writing Playlist

I've put historical romance on the shelf for a minute to turn back to a contemporary spy novel I started a few years back and am re-working. As I've now flashed forward by four centuries, the backdrop to my writing has picked up tempo (and lost the strings).

Here's what I'm writing to now. If it gives you any clue as to the pace of my writing at the moment, it could also double as your new workout playlist...

On Good Neighborhoods

I recently found this post from Chicago Unheard back from mid-January. Its title is "White People: Here’s Why Moving to a “Good School” in a “Good Neighborhood” Is Racist."

It's going to make some people uncomfortable. If that's you, can I just tell you something? ...that's okay.

We don't have to be comfortable. In fact, getting UNcomfortable might be a prerequisite for change here.

Some takeaways:

• Being born in a "bad neighborhood" and going to a "bad school" can completely rob a child of upward mobility.
• Living your life in a neighborhood like that, which is devoid of investment and presents no options for growth, limits a Black child's opportunity just as much as "Colored Sections" did in the Jim Crow South.
• As white people self-segregate, the opportunity and good schools become even more concentrated, and Black people often do not have access to those benefits. 
• There doesn't need to be a "No Blacks Allowed" sign on your town for that to be the practical result.
• Your decision to concentrate your life, the education of your children, and your property taxes in an area that is already full of white people and opportunity only serves to further segregate people with less privilege.

A Prayer To Unlearn

I wrote this prayer in response to seeing a lot of Bible verses used on the internet to indicate that all we need to do is pray and our hearts should not be troubled. I disagree with this. I want my heart to be troubled because I desire to understand what has been, and is being, endured by other people. I do not want to sit in an ivory tower, clutching a Bible and feeling comfortable. May we all pitch in and do the real work. For those who pray, this is a prayer that asks God to help us unlearn what the world has taught us and lean into the pain.

----

Lord, thank you for lighting a fire within me to understand the racial inequities in our world. Please continue to open my heart and mind to others' pain. I pray you would never let me stop learning about what has been endured by those whose shoes I have not walked in.

I ask you for the courage to speak out against those who propagate racism, even when those people are close to me. That can feel so hard to do, Lord, but do not let me place my own comfort above the change that is so desperately needed. I pray that you would speak through me when those conversations arise so that my words may be thoughtful and free of distraction.

Father, I know that I can only become part of the solution if I remove the beam from my own eye. I pray that you could expose my heart to me and help me root out the prejudices that this world has ingrained within it. Lord, please lead me to the parts of me that must be examined in order to grow in the direction of change.

In Jesus' name I pray, Lord. Amen.

Adventure

A few weeks before coronavirus took over the media cycle, I found myself a little bored with the simplicity and ease of life. I was deep in the editing phase on a historical fiction novel set 400 years in the past where my characters faced very different problems than I did.

They faced problems of survival. Mending injuries on the fly. Finding food where none was provided. Searching for safety, sprinting for sanctuary, afraid for their lives.

And I have to admit that I found myself a little jealous. From my desk chair, with my romanticized perspective on the past, I was a little pissed off to be sitting at a computer, paid to write and read and edit, easily ordering food the moment I wanted it, spending my time not cutting logs or gathering food but typing words on a page. I guess I wanted some of the adventure in the life I had written for my characters...

So, I complained to my husband. Life is so easy now, I said, that things have lost their meaning. Significance is reduced when you don't work for something, when all you have to do to get what you want is decide you want it. "Steak for dinner? Order it." vs "Steak for dinner? Go shoot something, skin it, chop it up, and let's find a viable storage solution so we can preserve it for the next few weeks too" (and what if you're on the run -- then it must be easy to pack and transport, too!).

Then I got a taste of what I complained about lacking. Coronavirus blew up and borders started to shut down just as we returned to the country. We scrambled to find a place to ride out the storm, hurried to secure a rental car, and drove 20 hours to get to safety. We slept in our car! It was terrible, gross, sweaty, and took forever -- and also it was a little bit awesome.

Once we got to safety, I spent about fifteen hours figuring out how to get groceries delivered to the somewhat remote (what is not remote when you live in Manhattan, though?) location. Multiple deliveries failed, we were briefly without food, and I had to cook some interesting things I've never tried before simply because we didn't have the comforts of our "usuals." I commented to my husband that I felt like a modern "pioneer woman," having spent 15-20 hours in one week to ensure food.

So, yeah, this sucks. I would trade the frustration and adventure to go back to the "Before Times" and reclaim all of the lives and jobs lost. But, that's not something I get to decide, and so I am trying to remind myself that this is an adventure. None of the historical figures I write about got to choose which tragedy, which war, which plague they lived through. Neither do I. 

Childhood Antics

This blurry image was taken in mid-2015 on my iPhone-whatever-model-was-out-then. I'm surprised by how blurry it looks, which makes me realize 2015 was longer ago in the world of technology than I had previously realized. Sometimes I wish my selfies still had this level of blur...

In 2015, my husband and I were about 1 year into owning our house in the Eastown neighborhood of Grand Rapids, Michigan... and we had just decided to move to New York. That meant downsizing from a 4 bedroom house to a 1 bedroom apartment. So, I had to go through my things.

I took this picture of a pile of just a few of the many books I wrote as a kid. A few observations:

• Slight obsession with mountain climbing (fun fact: I watched the movie Vertical Limit every day for over a month and, when I was told we had to go on a road trip for a wedding and I wouldn't have access to the DVD player or TV, I used a self-tape recorder to record the audio to the movie Vertical Limit and narrated the visuals myself so I could continue to relive the torture)
• Did I think I had to sign the front of everything I wrote to legitimize it, like a painting?
• These are pretty short -- maybe more like a short story or novella -- though that WWIII book was probably around a hundred pages
• I spent hours drawing the "mountain" on the cover of the book in the middle in Microsoft Paint

When shaking hands became an anachronism

"Dr. Fauci says Americans should never shake hands again due to coronavirus"

- New York Post

Future period-piece creators - writers, directors, actors, and so on - will have to diligently identify and represent whether they are pre- or post- COVID-19 for a number of reasons. Seems like shaking hands will be one of them, right?

A few months ago, shaking hands was commonplace. Meeting a new colleague, someone's parents, anyone at a work or recruiting event, you shook hands.

It's about to be an anachronism. It will say something about you that you shake hands. 

What else needs to go on this list?

A Sacrifice for Your Own Greater Good

We put our 14+ year old black lab down last week and, if I am being honest with myself, I was unprepared for the grief rollercoaster that ensued. I had never fully grieved before, not as an adult with a fully-formed brain.

I knew the first day would be hard, but thought my life would keep moving; I didn't realize that grief stops everything. It's not an emotion you experience side-by-side with your normal life. Your normal life stops.

I thought I could attend a zoom workout the next day. I thought I could be the strong one, knowing my husband would be in shambles. I thought I would be up for a virtual happy hour with friends or family. And I was wrong.

On day three, I took a shower; I considered that a "win." Other than some viscious hangovers during my early 20s, I'm not sure I've ever considered a shower a "win" before, but now I get it.

There is something freeing about considering the small things wins. Cancelling your to-do list for several days at a time. Not picking up phone calls you can't handle. Giving yourself a pass. Not pressuring yourself to work out.

It's amazing what takes its place. Long conversations with no agenda. Authentic emotional adventure with no time limit. Depths of thought often left untouched between the day's appointments and tasks. It took grief for that to materialize in my life in such a real and valuable way -- but it didn't have to.

We are all making sacrifices right now for the greater good of our local, national, and global societies. We are staying home when we'd prefer to go out and avoiding each other when we would rather be face to face. I wonder if some of us could 'sacrifice' productivity for our own greater good, kick the to-do list goodbye and get some true mental rejuvenation -- without waiting for life to force it upon us.

**Also of note: 

• This interview with David Kessler on the collective grief we are experiencing during the COVID-19 crisis
• This podcast with Brené Brown and David Kessler on finding meaning in grief