On our return journey to Bela Crkva we make a very long detour which takes us into Hungary and thereafter into Jugoslavia, to Subotica, because Grandma Anka has stated that if I am going to get any idea of those regions I simply have to see it. Unpredictable, improbable, it appears to be a city of fascinating falsifications and infractions. At the beginning of the fourteenth century Gabriel Szamléni, confidential clerk to King Sigismund, conferred on it a patent of franchise laden with royal seals. This was later declared to be a forgery, along with other similar documents, and the clerk ended his days at the stake. Shortly before it fell into the hands of the Turks, in the sixteenth century, Subotica was for a brief period the residence and domain of the self-appointed Czar Iova, the Adventurer.
Made a free city by Maria Theresa, the place has that fiscal-cum-melancholy air of the architecture of her time, overlaid in the early years of the century, and perhaps overladen, with unbridled Art nouveau. The houses shriek out in notes of blue and yellow, they look like sea-shells, fretted with decorations and extravagant ornaments, crowns which look like pineapples, putti but with enormous breasts, gigantic bearded caryatids whose lower limbs become those of lions, which in turn dissolve in a formless swirl.
An abandoned synagogue appears to have popped out of Disneyland, with its swollen domes, glaring colours, fake bridges hanging between broken windows, steps overgrown with grass. The Town Hall is an orgy of stained-glass and staircases, a medley of friezes. This is a place where Art nouveau turned all the taps on. It is a distillation and superimposition of incompatible elements, as if each and every one of the aldermen, returning from Vienna, or Venice, or Paris, had sketched out a piece of what he had seen, and the Town Hall was the sum total of all this. Broch denounced the fin de siècle eclecticism of Vienna as an aesthetic representing a total lack of values and hidden behind sequins, which is to say kitsch; here he would have found a truly scandalous example of such kitsch. Fakery seems to be the poetry of Subotica. In the imagination of Danilo Kiš, the bewitching chronicler of the place, fakery becomes not only the appalling falsification of life brought about by Stalinism but also the clandestine split personalities of the revolutionaries who, to escape from the powers that be, change, multiply, disguise and lose their identities. The characters in A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, one of the most significant books in present-day Serbian literature, are figures in a world history which is entirely a gallery of fakers, victims and butchers.
One wonders why this kitsch broke out at Subotica in particular. In nearby Sombor the Committee building is the essence of composed and geometrical order, standing for the solidity of a town occupied with studying and planning the canals which linked the Danube to other rivers. Near Sombor lived the Schokatzi; at Subotica, on the other hand, were the Bunjewatzi, who had come in the course of centuries from Herzogovina, and of whom it is said in a book dating from the end of the last century that unlike the Magyars, who loved women to be round and rubicund, they had a preference for slender, pallid beauties. Being near the Hungarian frontier, Subotica is a border-town, lively and many-tongued. Sometimes, for an instant, one forgets whether one is in Jugoslavia or in Hungary. In Kidriceva Ulica, on a corrugated-iron fence erected because of roadworks, some careless but enamoured polyglot has written, “Jai t’ame.”