For a moment I dozed off while my eyes focused on the finer details of the chair that rested in front of me. The background quickly blurred and the great mass of colourful scenery fused and mixed together to form something unappealing and formless. The fast pace of the train suddenly felt like time froze or at least slowed down as the blue, green, brown and dark mass was swirling in the periphery of my sight. It was, however, only an illusion, a deception of my senses.
Then I suddenly woke up, quickly as if strong arms had grabbed me and now held me to chase away every dream from my eyes. This was physically a rather staggering and mentally a rather shocking experience. My focus cannot vain, not like this and I cannot turn off my senses, I must be on the lookout. But I once again managed to lose track of space and time as the steaming black gold under my nose had awoken me from the embrace of the sweetening music that surrounded me. The air was filled with the mix of the sound of violin and piano. Reasonably, I must have dosed off for mere seconds, although, I could not manage to figure out whether I was dragged out of this world for seconds, minutes or hours even.
My colleague has just returned amidst these train of thoughts and sat down on the chair, in which my thoughts got lost a few seconds ago. And he did not just casually sit down, he sat down with a civilised manner, almost ritually. A westerner not just falls into the chair or onto the cushions like a man of my manners. No, here in Europe everything has culture. For instance, coffee has almost a religion set up around it, with the infrastructure and the rituals that are concentrated in the café houses. Or take eating a simple meal for example – people are not starving or fighting for the last bit of food in order to stay alive, eating in a fast and messy manner, using their hands and teeth… no no no! Here there are rules to eating! You have to do it accordingly with some grace, while showing your respect to the food. The seasoning is always measured, the topping or the garnish of the dish is decided by ancient and unbreakable traditions. Not to mention that you also have to keep in mind the exact time and the cutlery that you aim to use, for these may prevent you from eating altogether if you err.
Similarly, tradition and culture are there with train rides. Fine seats, gorgeous scenery, wagons with cabins where you can sleep if you wish so. Or there can be a nice wagon where they even have a bar! You can have good coffee and enjoy the scenery, combining two rituals at the same time. But if you fancy something stronger the spirits of the counter are always inviting with their steaming aroma that fills the whole enclosure. However, your taste in this does not matter, just choose something and enjoy the ride.
Although, from where I come, these are not the matter of mere enjoyment. All of these are ordinary actions that happen in the shadow of our mortality. In other words, all is gray. There is no attachment, so unnecessary that it takes away precious time or energy that you need elsewhere. No rituals or culture – and especially no values and noble feelings are attached to the mundane actions of ordinary folks. On the contrary, here everything is dressed up with some illusion or enchantment of a sacred ritual. But where I am from, it is paradoxically both machine like and human at the same time. And it is human – human in the sense of escaping death on this steel and fire powered cage in an unending cycle of flight.
And thus, this is the most important difference between the man of the West and the man of the East. A human being moulded by trauma. And I consider myself as an Eastern European, the same as I consider myself as European. Even if the eastern edge of Europe—so close to the Russian steppes—may look just as European from Paris or Munich. But it only looks that way, because this too is nothing more than a performance.
In the West, there is beauty in everything that counts as luxury, because people have been granted the privilege of not having to fear death at every single step they take in life. But in the East, where I come from, there are no eternal moments. There is only the daily, endlessly repeated struggle for survival. And when this becomes normalized, suffering and human misery sink into the emotionless grayness of everyday life. No one is moved when someone starves to death, falls out of line at the factory, or collapses somewhere on the street, be it during broad daylight or the cold darkness of the night. Tiny specks of dust in the machinery, which may sometimes even run better because a grain has finally been ground and no longer obstructs the operation—no longer a burden on the mechanism—or because the entrails spilling from it provide just enough lubricant for the tasks at hand.
That is the Eastern European perspective put against the Western. And that is why it is hard for me to get used to not flinching at every small noise behind my back, or to not be constantly aware that this is not eternal and that my miserable little life—one that has only ever meant anything just to me—could end at any moment. We were raised differently back home, and things here work very differently in contrast. Where I come from a strong hand shapes the human being, and where strength is sovereign rather than providence, anyone can be sacrificed from even the very top of the chain to the bottomless depths of societal wastes. This can be deceptive to Westerners, because they are unfamiliar with such ways of functioning, which I purposefully do not want to call “ways of life”—and some people that travel to the west know exactly how to exploit this unfamiliarity. The principle of authority has become meaningless in the West, and they are astonished that the democracy forced upon us… upon us, the barbarians… does not work in the same way, or with the same purity, as it does for them.
And no, my colleague—my friend—cannot understand this, because he does not live this way, he did not grow up in it. He does not live in fear and does not know this deep, elemental terror. For him, the coffee he sips according to his distinctly German or rather Bavarian ritual—each drop of its flavour locked away in human memory like a diamond kept in a vault—is an eternal moment, filled with pleasure and the feeling that life is beautiful. In the East we used to have this too, once, during the noble times of the Coffee House culture that made Budapest, Prague or Lwów great—enlightened even—and beacons of Western Civilisation. At that time, these cities did not seem so different from Vienna, Munich or Paris, shining on the horizon of an aspiring East.
Life is beautiful—a feeling I cannot live, I, the Eastern man, the slave whom the system graciously calls a working man, the labourer or the “proletariat” in the tongue of the Easterners. Because for me this is all just role-playing. I can act it the way that is expected of me, I can restrain myself from downing my espresso in a single gulp, in order to survive… because for me this too is about survival. So that I do not have to return to that hellhole. Even if here—in the West—I truly have no place. That sip of coffee does not mean joy to me. No. To me it is the symbol of that death which breathes down the neck of every Easterner, closely and without cease.
I often hear, “Oh! You Hungarians only ever see the bad in everything!” or the well-worn joke: “Do you know what it looks like when a Pole smiles? Exactly the same as when he doesn’t!”—because here it is believed that the Polish face is hard to read, since it looks just as grim when smiling as it does when in grief. Yes. We Easterners are like this. We are like this because our existence is constantly accompanied by death. And we know that this happiness cannot last forever.
Nevertheless, the West remains a lighthouse of hope… a fragile hope for the likes of me.
