Through a house darkly

BUDAPEST – It was a muggy 30 degrees in Budapest and it was snowing. Little white tufts of springtime pollen drizzled across the gently foliated Andrássy Boulevard, triggering allergies in countless numbers of tourists and providing a fuzzy, scratched-film like ambience for my visit to the House of Terror.

This was no Disneyland ride, but a modern museum documenting the atrocities of both the Nazi and Communist regimes in Hungary. The word museum doesn’t adequately describe the place, however; most museums are little more than mausoleums, and while the history of the Terror Háza is one certainly embalmed in death, the space was brought to life with the creepy electricity of a million souls conjured back from the clutches of Abaddon.

On the outside, the museum looked like any of the other 19th century European apartment buildings that lined the boulevard, the so-called Champs-Elysée of the East. No. 60 was a respectably grand, gray old lady, but one with a crown of thorns shoved on her head. A turret-like structure carved out in reverse the words "terror" in the star-and-crossed sky, leaving long shadows over the side of the buildings, a reminder of a reality that would otherwise be erased in the unrelenting forgetfulness of time.

But traces definitely remain. My personal Let’s Go guide to Budapest was actually Prague, the zeitgeist-friendly novel by Arthur Philips, who chronicles the exploits of several expats living in the newly opened Hungarian capital. The confusing title is a riff on Milan Kundera’s Life is Elsewhere, which itself is a reference to the grass-is-always-greener maxim. In the book, the American characters’ first flippant impressions of Hungarians were that they are a brusque and sullen lot, and this was confirmed by my own trip to the local pubs, souvenir markets, sausage stands, and this museum. Unhappy, almost mean workers everywhere, attributed easily to the fact that the last commie soldier only decamped some 14 years ago, and thus a bitter hangover remains. Before the Russians, they were occupied by the equally charming Nazis, and even before that, a generally embattled and bloody path can be traced all the way back to their Hun beginnings (Hungarians actually call themselves Magyars, but it doesn’t seem to matter to the rest of the world).

Honestly, I’d be bummed too if the store windows displayed wares like relic toasters and vinyl shoes that probably haven’t moved since The Scorpions’ Wind of Change became a Bloc-rocking anthem. The women wore white spandex pants and denim bustiers unironically, but that’s a side note, or maybe those were just hookers.

The Terror Háza, which opened in 2002, didn’t exist in the pre-millennium landscape of my fictional Prague, and so the new destination provided me a different reading of the country, one written by the country’s own emerging modern consciousness. The Andrássy building’s troubles began in 1937, when a branch of the Hungarian National Socialists – a Nazi-affiliated movement – rented it out as its headquarters. Ferenc Szálasi, head of the nefarious Arrow Cross Party, dubbed his new crib the "House of Loyalty." During WW2, Hungary was literally torn apart from both sides of the warring Nazi and Communist empires, and down in the cellars of the House of Loyalty, members of the Arrow Cross interrogated, tortured and killed hundreds of people with truncheons, cigarette butts, pliers and bad breath.

The prison cellars have since been built over and excavated again for museum purposes. Visitors are taken down via an interminably slow elevator, stoking the embers of claustrophobia while a large flat-screen looped gravelly footage of former survivors. The temperature in the basement drops a few degrees, prickling the hairs on your arms as you walk through the windowless maze of prisoner abuse memorabilia. On the walls of each cramped cell hang pinups, not of screen sirens whose trim bellies belie an escape route to freedom, but of the collaborators, the abusers and informers. Smiling yearbook-like pictures of the often young and fresh-faced party members, now forever brandished with the label "victimizer."

But antique torture chambers are standard tour fare in Europe; what make the Terror Háza an alluring exhibition are its three upper floors. A sinister bass line – quite a dread beat – follows you through every dimly lit room, ghostly multimedia projections stutter in and out of time, and CNN-style graphics show a map of the world consumed. A large black Soviet car stands as a centerpiece, shrouded behind a black curtain, intermittently lit with a blood-tinged glow. Rotary telephones line the walls, and dialing a number transports you back to the milieu when this particular Hungarian ditty was popular on the radio, or when this propaganda speech was being read, or when the national anthem started to sound ominous. The experience is as much sensory as it is informational. How could a museum depicting such depressing themes be this exciting?

In 1945, Hungary was wrested into the hands of the Soviets, and the black arrow cross was replaced with a red star as official fear-mongering icon. The building on 60 Andrássy Boulevard became the headquarters of the State Security Authority, which affectionately rechristened the place as the "House of Horrors." The AVO, as the party was called, was a similarly heinous, paranoiac outfit that unfurled a blanket of terror over the nation, turning son against father and brother against brother, and placing around forty thousand Hungarians in the internment camps and forced labor campaigns known as the Gulag.

Two rooms in contrast: One, the Everyday Life room, is a riot collage of posters of patriotic comrades, fat happy children, muscular men and complacent wives enjoying their toothpaste and coffee – the smiling face of the lie. The other, the Gulag room, is a long dark cabin, the carpet a map of Eastern Europe red-dotting the network of camps that formed the system of Soviet concentration. A display case telescopes up from a point in the map, zooming in to the most personal and intimate artifacts of a prisoner’s doomed life – a rusted spoon, a book of novenas scraped together in the tiniest of handwriting, a grayed photograph – still lifes, ordinary in any other context.

Exiting the museum, an almost palpable and culpable weight is lifted. The heaviness of history and overload of information mingles with the slight disbelief that something like this ever happened, or could ever happen again. The purpose of creating memorials to tragedies like this one is to prevent us from forgetting, lest we let it happen again. The museum’s voice, in its force to make us burn with memory, is almost extreme, and indeed critics have called it right-wing and politically motivated in defending a particular and possibly false idea of Hungary. Here are the victims, and here are the bad guys – forever divided, forever preserved. The unanswered question remains, how much were they – are we – part of the problem?

The dust bowl they call Ground Zero in New York is another passionately contested space. Rebuilders have all kinds of grand and glassy towering plans. Memorialists, usually relatives of the deceased victims, are scandalized at the suggestion of putting up an art gallery (blasphemy!) or even an International Freedom Center that documents the struggle for civil rights, anything less than a hallowed space for mourning and breast-beating. Politics aside, the thing about trauma and memory is finding that imperfect balance between how much you should be reminded of in order to remember, without getting stuck in an ambiguous past, and how much you need to pave over in order to move on, still without forgetting all that unsettled ground below.

Perhaps the Philippines needs to build its own museum, one dedicated to its legacy of corruption and legendary idiots in government. Then maybe we’d stop taking to the streets as if enraged for the very first time; instead we’d be inside, humming along to the hook, now familiar, just watching the video on endless repeat.

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E-mail audreycarpio@yahoo.com.