BKV: the Triumph and the Tragedy

In Paris, fare-hoping has become a popular pastime, as well as a form of civil disobedience; so much so that there is actually a group that – for a small monthly fee – will insure you against the monetary penalty of getting caught. Leave it to the French, who treat sticking it to the man like a national sport (and doing it with such élan!). There is no doubt that such a scheme would fail in Budapest, where – like in my home country – somebody would certainly shout “socialist!”. Being caught red-handed, without a ticket, can be a disconcerting experience. Despite directives against such behavior, the controllers can be a grabby, peevish bunch indeed.

Like many Budapesters I know, I pay most of the time, but bliccel (fare-hop) when economics deem it necessary. I don’t do this with zero pangs of conscious, but the pangs are small and easily chased away: more like pings. From a passenger’s point of view, it makes sense. Three hundred and twenty forints for a few stops up the Grand Boulevard (as the BKV’s site call it) makes common taxi banditry look chivalrous.

But what about the oft-investigated, fund-hemorrhaging public transport company BKV? It turns out, they also have high expectations of their passengers. Which brings me to the real point of this meandering post: the BKV web site. It’s fabulous, for no other reason than they have constructed a little testament of denial, certainly created by people who never ride public transportation. In this case, context is everything. I ask you to pause for a moment, and go to the BKV English language main page. Have a listen to the sound bytes: if you live here, you know these as the jingle the tram makes before the doors close. It is actually kind of a sweet little tune as public transport signals go (is that a harpsichord?). But in real life, having sweated a bumpy ride, the tune sounds nothing but mocking. Real life on the BKV rarely lives up to the site. For instance, in the Terms and Conditions page, it states that it is forbidden “to behave in a way which is scandalous, antisocial or breaches law.” This is clearly a case of double-speak, as one can only benefit from being as anti-social as possible on public transport. Perhaps the porn crew that appropriated the back of an in-service tram for a shoot had researched the BKV and considered what they were doing quite social.

Asking their passengers to refrain from being anti-social and scandalous is optimistic, but further down the accepted-behavior list reveals the authors of the BKV constitution to be delusional. One is forbidden to “travel in filthy clothes or in a drunken state.” Instead of checking tickets, I would dearly love to see controllers sniffing underarms, socks. As for traveling in a drunken state: anyone who has taken it knows that the night bus is not much more than a poor man’s booze cruise.

But the BKV reserves its best for handicapped passengers. It is not enough to arrive at a metro station in a wheel chair to use the lifts: you have to pass both “theoretical and practical exams” to prove your disability. A more motivated writer would uncover just what the ‘theoretical’ aspects of paralysis one must master before being allowed to use Budapest’s public transportation, but – in terms of the practical portion – I am guessing that this is an exam that you pass by failing. You do, however, have the bonus of being allowed to humiliate yourself at either the Mexikói station, or the more luxurious venue of the Széchenyi baths, where the practical exams are administered.

Not long ago, according to pestiside, BKV ran a survey, attempting to analyze exactly why locals fair-hop. The answer seems obvious to me: with their thuggish controllers and silly by-laws, they have created an ‘us against them’ mentality. Instead of just punching your ticket at the metro, you punch, and then submit it for inspection. There is a whiff of subjugation in this act, and from that springs the urge to resist, to bliccel. And anytime there is a dynamic where an individual stands against some monolithic entity – public transport companies included – I have to side with the outlaw. Ride in good heath, fare-hoppers, no matter what your motives, or how antisocial and smelly you may be.

Matt Henderson Ellis is a freelance manuscript editor and author coach working with writers who publish in print and digitally.

The Akara of Budapest

A short film by Mókus Patrol team member Nathan Kay.

If It Ain't Broke, Don't Suffix It: A Book Review

“It should be against the law to mock somebody who tries his luck in a foreign language.” So begins Chico Buarque’s novel Budapest. It’s a winning opening line, both disarming and knowing, especially when read by somebody who has tried to learn Hungarian, “the only tongue the devil respects.”

To learn a foreign language, especially one so different from English as Hungarian, takes a certain leap of faith, a willingness to participate in a mode of expression that appears to have been rearranged and, in many cases, dissected and reassembled. It takes a similar leap of faith to enjoy Buarque’s novel, in which stories unpack themselves like Chinese boxes, and realities and narratives are constantly shape-shifting, challenging and undermining whatever presumptions the reader has already anchored themselves to.

The story begins when the Brazilian narrator’s plane is waylaid in Budapest after a bomb scare. As a ghost-writer and linguist, he becomes immediately enchanted with the Hungarian language and Budapest itself. On the most simplified level, the story follows the path of the narrator, Jose Kosta, (Josef K?) on his path to fluency in Hungarian, after breaking with his wife and falling in love with his language teacher. But nothing is so easy in Budapest, as Kosta observes of the language, “he had no way of knowing where each one (word) began or finished. It was impossible to detach one form the next; it would be like trying to cut a river with a knife.”

Like Budapest’s körút(s), the language is circular: base words are stacked with suffixes and prefixes that hang off them like weights on an unwieldy barbell. The characters’ destinies run the same circular route: histories, texts, and relationships bleed into each other until the reader is not sure if Kosta can be trusted as a narrator, or if he is the narrator at all.

In one phantasmagoric sequence reminiscent of Victor Pelevin (who I have brought up before in this blog: he is the ‘thinking man’s’ Murakami), a night of drinking turns into a potential ménage-à-trois, then morphs into a game of Russian roulette, then a robbery, then back into a night of drinking. Buarque stays with the scene only long enough for us to think we have a grip on its reality before he pulls the rug out from under our feet. Buarque, a composer and writer, wisely keeps his actual observations and use of Hungarian to a minimum (which led me to suspect he doesn’t actually speak Hungarian, though perhaps he simply doesn’t want to confound the reader further with its utter strangeness). But then he floors you with an occasion description like the following, “Seeing Hungarian in words for the first time, I felt as though I was looking at their skeletons: ö az álom elötti, talajon táncol.” Or “I couldn’t distinguish the words, so I knew it was Hungarian.”

In the same way every New Yorker inhabits a different city, with its own individual, constantly changing landmarks and signifiers, Kosta’s Budapest is not to be taken too literally: he employs made-up names, cigarette brands, street names, literary societies, and hungaricum (perhaps accidentally-on-purpose referring to Tokaj wine as Tajok wine). We know to take it all with a grain of salt when Kosta is both ghost-writing poetry for a has-been Hungarian poet and correcting locals on their grammar. Kosta’s Budapest is not my Budapest, just as his story, in the end, is not even his story.

Because of Kosta’s occupation as a ghost-writer, ownership of the text is a theme that is constantly returned to throughout the book. Indeed, a writer for whom he has ghost-written a book uses that very book to seduce Kosta’s own wife away from him. Like Jim Crace’s Genesis, and to a lesser degree, Arthur Philips' Prague, or even better, like having a friend from out of town come visit, it is a thrill to experience Budapest through somebody else’s eyes, to see it reinvented, even if that invention does not conform to your own. Budapest is a pleasing, occasionally perplexing read: like the Hungarian language, it is potent and fluid, but then again, so is nitro-glycerin.

Matt Henderson Ellis is a freelance manuscript editor and author coach working with writers who publish in print and digitally.

Sign Language

There is something romantic, and totally Budapest, about the old store signs around the city, be they hand painted, neon, or graphic. They are artifacts of by-gone times, and are disappearing all too rapidly in this climate that only seems to value the new. Like the architecture, the old signs in Budapest have an elegance that ages well. They just look nicer when a bit faded.

There is a certain word lettering, that I have not yet been able to identify, that has a Bauhaus feel: blocky and modern, yet timeless, that is typical of the style of sign that brands the store as uniquely Hungarian. This flower-store sign is a perfect example:


I have been documenting as many old style signs as I can while they are relatively plentiful. Following are some of my favorites, mostly from central Budapest.

A timepiece seller:



A wine cellar:


A furrier:


A bookstore:


A women's hair-dresser:


Ham-radio hobby shop:


A beer hall:


A movie theater:



And, finally, the defunct baggage check at Keleti, the eastern train station of Budapest:


Matt Henderson Ellis is a freelance manuscript editor and author coach working with writers who publish in print and digitally.