What Budapest Gives My Son Without Ever Teaching Him

The bridge in this video is the Szabadság híd, the Liberty Bridge, the green one at the bottom of the city where Pest runs out and Gellért Hill begins. My son has walked across it. He has no idea what it is, and that turns out to be the point.

Here is what it is. It opened on 4 October 1896 under a different name, the Ferenc József híd, and the emperor it was named for turned up and hammered in the last rivet, which was silver. It is 333.6 metres long, a cantilever bridge doing a convincing impression of a chain bridge, with turul birds standing on top of the towers. On 16 January 1945 the retreating German army dropped it into the Danube along with every other bridge in the city. It was the first one Budapest put back. Repairs started in the spring of 1946 and it reopened that August under a new name, Liberty. Wherever the old ornament could be picked out of the wreck, it was cleaned up and bolted back on.

None of that is available to a small boy holding your hand. What is available is the height of the railing, the noise a tram makes coming up behind you, the gaps in the boards, the river going the wrong way underneath. That is what he is actually taking, and it is the better deal. A city does not hand itself over as a lecture. It hands itself over as a floor.

A city that was assembled

Budapest is not an ancient thing that has simply always been here. It was put together. On 17 November 1873 three separate towns became one: Pest with roughly 200,000 people, Buda with 54,000, and Óbuda with 16,000, plus Margaret Island. Not two halves of anything. Three unequal pieces, and the oldest and smallest of them, Óbuda, standing on the Roman town of Aquincum, has been quietly dropped out of the sentence ever since.

So the city my son is growing into is 153 years old as a single thing, younger than plenty of the buildings standing in it. It was decided, then built, then flattened in places, then decided again. That is not a weakness in it. It may be the most Hungarian thing about it.

What he is actually collecting

Take the stretch of pavement in front of the Parliament. That building is 268 metres of neo-Gothic showing off, and it is 96 metres tall because 896 is the year the Hungarian story starts. He will not learn the number 896. He will learn that the building is too big to take in all at once, which is the same fact arriving by a better road.

Take the tram. Lines 47 and 49 cross Liberty Bridge and have been crossing it since 1898. To him a tram is not transport. It is the thing that makes the noise and then the river appears.

Take the language, which is the one that gets me. He already handles it better than I ever will. I work at Hungarian. He simply has it, the way you have a leg. Nobody sat him down and started him off. He picked it up off the floor of this city the same way he picked up the railing and the swing and the gap in the boards.

That is the real argument for raising him here, and it has nothing to do with schools or safety or the cost of living. It is that a place can hand a child something whole without either of you doing any work, and what Budapest is handing him is a country.

The rest of him

He is American as well, and he is Black, and those are not things a Hungarian pavement can give him. That part I bring myself, and gladly. Music in the house. Food. Names and faces and the people who are his. Going back often enough that America is somewhere he has been rather than somewhere he is from on paper. It is mine to hand over, and he will have all of it.

None of that competes with the Hungarian side. A child is not a pie chart. He gets everything, from wherever it comes, and the more of it that arrives without a lesson attached the better it holds.

What the bridge is for

Which puts me back at that salvaged ornament on the towers.

Nothing on that bridge survived by itself. It was destroyed completely, in a single morning. Somebody then went down to the wreck, picked the decoration out of the rubble, cleaned it, and bolted it onto a new structure, deliberately, because they decided it should carry forward. Continuity is not something that happens to a city, or to a family. It is a series of decisions somebody makes, usually at an inconvenient moment and usually without anybody thanking them for it.

Budapest has been making those decisions for 153 years, and my son gets the result for nothing, through the soles of his shoes. Whatever else he carries, I hand him myself.

Then he can go back to the playground.