The Stranger Behind the Counter

Cross the Széchenyi Chain Bridge on a breezy evening, and Budapest smells faintly of caramelised sugar and cinnamon.

Yet this is also the birthplace of Gloomy Sunday (aka Hungarian suicide song). The city carries a heavy, subterranean gloom in its bones, flowing beneath the surface like the dark waters of the Danube under Buda Castle.

I stood on the street corner by St. Stephen’s Basilica, watching the woman behind the charcoal grill baking Kürtőskalács (chimney cake). Her hands were dusted with flour as she wrapped dough around wooden spits, rolled them in sugar, and turned them over the coals. The heat flushed her face, but her eyes remained utterly neutral. Eyelids slightly heavy, she gave change, handed over cakes, and motioned to the next tourist in line.

I stood in the queue, watching her through an invisible partition. A wave of unease and void washed over me. Internally, I was experiencing a quiet emotional collapse; externally, she was anchored in an unbothered reality.

In that moment, the lines from Sinéad O’Connor’s Drink Before the Warclicked into place:

“Listen to the man in the liquor storeYelling: ‘Anybody want a drink before the war?’”

Then came the stiff discomfort Fernando Pessoa described in The Tobacco Shop, watching the shopkeeper Esteves step out onto the Lisbon street:

“I look at him with the discomfort of a twisted neckand the discomfort of a soul poorly understanding.He will die and I will die.He will leave his shop sign, I will leave my verses.”

Reading these works initially, you look for a handhold: some secret to surviving the void that shopkeepers, bartenders, and bakers seem to possess.

But in reality, none of them has a secret at all. They do not drift into emptiness simply because they do not need to look for meaning in metaphysical realms. “Life” itself is their entire anchor.

They have something to offer, while I only have those useless lines of words like this article.

Edward Hopper used a glass window in Nighthawks to separate the routine of a diner server from the isolation of the street. Raymond Carver wrote of the silent baker in A Small, Good Thing, to whom personal tragedy mattered far less than hot bread coming out of the oven on time. Even Charles Bukowski’s liquor store clerk:

“the guy behind the counter at the liquor storedoesn’t care about your poetry or your broken heart.he just wants the green paper...”

It is brutal, but oddly redeeming. Modern life leaves us suspended halfway, unable to land fully into the mundane, grounding weight of routine, yet unable to find peace in endless mental tugs-of-war.

I took the cake from the vendor, sugar-scented heat mingling with the summer air against my face. Turning into the crowd, I bit into the sweet pastry. In that moment, I realised these metaphysical doubts hit in a sudden wave, then recede just as quickly. The emptiness doesn’t vanish, but what else is there to do? Life goes on.

Just like what Albert Camus wrote: one must imagine Sisyphus happy.

So I gathered up all that void and emo, wrapped in the sugary heat of the night, and turned and jumped headfirst into Budapest’s glowing and golden lights.