In Hungary, coping with freedom: the capitalists are coming.

When I first went to Budapest as a Fulbright lecturer in 1981, the city did not seem wholly foreign, since any modern metropolis has the same general infrastructure, but the architecture, the culture, the life on the streets, the irony and quickness of the professors and intellectuals I met, and of course the fact that it was governed by a Communist regime made it seem very exotic. I enjoyed myself enough to think of Hungary as a second homeland, to value the friends I made, and to return, briefly, as a tourist in 1983 and as a Fulbright lecturer for the exciting days of fall 1989, when the Communist Party abolished itself and the red stars came tumbling down.

When I returned for my fourth visit in October 1996, a modified version of the party was in power, but Hungary seemed less foreign because of an entirely different incursion. Friends who know that I'm not Hungarian but, since they've gotten used to my reappearance, don't regard me as entirely American either, wanted to know what differences I saw. "More McDonalds," I said. "More English. And more toilet paper." Viewed symbolically rather than literally, this represents a truth, if not the whole truth, about what has happened since the events of 1989 that everyone refers to as "the change."

"McDonalds" is shorthand for the capitalist horde that has overrun Hungary. In the stores, American brand names do not dominate, but they have a strong presence. Billboards carry familiar names: Burger King, Samsung, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Daewoo. On the streets, Russian Ladas and East German Trabants have not disappeared, but they are almost lost among the West European, Asian, and even a few American cars. Suzuki has an assembly plant just south of Esztergom, the country's ecclesiastical center.

There are other indications that late capitalism has come to Hungary. Luxury goods have moved outside the tourist mecca, Vaci Street, the Hungarian equivalent of Rodeo Drive. Casinos offer an alternative to Lotto, so that rich people - who exist in larger or more obvious numbers - can gamble too. A third television channel has been added, and cable service offers broadcasts in English, German, Italian, and French. People complain about telephone service, but it is much more widely available and efficient than it was in 1981. And while some of the old heavy-cholesterol restaurants (Berlin, Sofia) have closed, new ones of all nations and ethnicities have sprung up. In 1989, the sudden availability of bananas was cause for excitement; now street stalls and supermarkets routinely offer foreign produce, so that diet does not depend solely on seasonal fruits and vegetables.

Diet and exercise play a much larger part in Hungarian life than they did under communism. At the beginning of the 1980s, another American remarked that, if you saw someone running, it was probably a Marine from the American Embassy. Now joggers, bicyclists, skaters, runners, and even marathoners are not uncommon, and there is a gym called "Arnold." Smoking is still more common and less stigmatized than in the United States, but Feri Takacs, my first Hungarian friend, quit several years ago and reports that people no longer smoke in academic meetings. He is more conscious of his diet and has taken to walking long distances to work and even paces less active friends in their circuit of a large park.

The park is less pleasant than it used to be, he reports, because it is now a refuge for glue-sniffers. They would not have been tolerated under the post-1956 Communist regime of Janos Kadar, which would also have suppressed evidence of petty street criminals and of what seems to be a whole new class of the destitute and even homeless people. Many of the latter have been displaced by the collapse of Hungarian heavy industry, which, like that in most of the former Soviet bloc, has been unable to make the transition to the free market.

Hungarians on fixed incomes or barely flexible incomes are only slightly better off because of inflation, and public-sector workers are underpaid and demoralized. When Hungarian currency was fixed, the exchange rate was 33 forints to the dollar in 1981 and in 1989 only 40 forints. Now free-floating, forints converted during my visit at just over 153 to the dollar. Prices have risen accordingly. At the most basic level, using a public toilet cost one forint in 1981 and into 1989, when the rate increased to five forints. Now it is twenty forints. (The restrooms in McDonalds are free, one reason not to repine at the advance of capitalism.) Tickets on public transportation, once a forint to a forint-and-a-half, are now fifty forints. Other prices have risen comparably, and, while goods and services are not expensive by West European standards, the bargains of the 1980s are gone.

On the whole Hungary is more comfortable for Anglophones than it was fifteen or even seven years ago, partly because of the official desire to increase tourism and partly because the Hungarians realize that English is the language of commerce and of the future, and they use it voluntarily, unlike the Russian that was for years required in the schools. The most startling evidence of the spread of English came at a restaurant in Eger, where I sat next to a group that included the mayor and his deputy and a delegation of businessmen from France - all speaking English.

While English is not yet universal, it is slowly advancing. In museums, broad explanatory signs are repeated in English, at least for the major exhibitions and on the first floor. Most restaurants, even in the provinces, have menus in English that are sometimes not very appetizing, as in "Lard goose with steamed cabbage," and sometimes surreal, as in "Nisp duck." (My Hungarian friends and I decided that this meant "crisp," but we never did figure out the meaning of the popular billboard legend, "Stool your image.") On the railways, first-class carriages have signs in English as well as Russian, German, and French; second-class carriages do not.

Nor do they have toilet paper. This is noteworthy because most other toilets do, a condition that did not prevail in the 1980s. Paper for other uses is now a good deal slicker, and the kind and amount of tourist information is greater in quality and quantity.

As for hard news and information about current events, monoglot Anglophones were almost entirely in the dark in the early 1980s, when the only source of local information was the state-produced Daily News, four pages evenly divided between English and German. Now there are at least three independent English-language newspapers in Budapest. All are weeklies, in tabloid format; all began publication in the 1990s; all, though they acknowledge the needs of tourists, are directed primarily to the growing and, by Hungarian standards, affluent expatriate community which includes those in business as well as those in the arts and less easily classifiable occupations. Budapest Week and Budapest Sun resemble the down-scale Village Voice imitations published in many American cities, and, though they devote a good deal of space to art and leisure, they take what my Hungarian friends seem to regard as at least inoffensive and at best serious and responsible positions on Hungarian politics and culture, including stories about the many political parties in - and out - of Parliament.

Budapest Business Journal, published by a company which has similar papers in Warsaw and Prague, is what one might expect: who's up, down, in, or out at various companies; the effect of government policies; financial difficulties and scandals in and out of government. To me the most interesting story was "Culture fund fights to keep state subsidy," partly for its effect on some of my friends and partly for what it reveals about the current climate in Hungary. The National Cultural Fund's largest source of revenue is a culture tax, with a much higher rate for "items featuring sex and violence." (This could account for the collapse of the Hungarian edition of Playboy, though the fact that Budapest is the porn capital of Europe is a more likely cause.) The Ministry of Culture and Education has been granting up to $2 million a year, just under 15 percent of the total, but the subsidy ended in March 1997. The effect on cultural institutions could be severe.

This struck me because the Petofi Literary Museum, once fully funded by the culture ministry, was the site of a conference sponsored by Hungarian P.E.N. and the Friedrich-Naumann Foundation on the topic "In the Jungle of Freedom: The Fragility of Our Civilization." Most of the speakers were from countries in the former Soviet Bloc or what used to be Yugoslavia; many had spent their most productive years under political and other constraints on their freedom to express themselves. Their testimony was moving and, to someone who has never had to face conditions anything like this, humbling.

Some writers had an enviably detached view of and energetic approach to their circumstances. But other delegates, especially the ones who had suffered longest and might be expected to rejoice in the new openness, emphasized the conference title's ambivalence about freedom. Yes, the undercurrent ran, Soviet repression was a terrible thing, and thank God it is over. On the other hand, for whatever motives and however grudgingly, the previous regimes did support culture and the arts, especially literature, especially the P.E.N. clubs, especially....

Since 1989, American governmental and foundation support of Hungarians has also narrowed to a trickle. For example, the number of Fulbright lecturers and scholars is down about 45 percent from the closing days of the cold war. My friends laughed, though not heartily, when I told them that what they need is another cold war so that America will launch a second cultural crusade.

Hungary certainly needs new money and new business as badly as it needs to move old business out of the black and gray markets and the streets and metro stations, where the spirit of free enterprise is alive if not exactly well, into the tax-paying daylight of international commerce. And since the tourist industry is at least a palliative for what Hungarians hope is the temporary loss of heavy industry, one has to guard against the attitude I've seen in Santa Fe, where residents of a few years complain bitterly about the incursion of tourists and other newcomers. But to someone who walked the nearly empty streets of Szentendre, the picturesque art colony north of Budapest that is the Hungarian equivalent of Taos, it is rather jarring to return and have to edge between racks of mass-produced souvenirs and packs of German and Japanese tourists, to hear the grating, familiar accents of other Americans, and to hope in vain that one won't be regarded as being anything like them.

Fortunately, even in Szentendre the museums and the streets north of the shopping district are not crowded, and in towns like Esztergom, Eger, Veszprem, and Kecskemet, the inhabitants go reassuringly about their normal business as if no tourists were within a thousand miles.

Better still, my friends go on with their lives as teachers and writers, producing and transmitting work that even in translation is moving and funny and more finely crafted than anything in the tourist stalls or in the boutiques on Vaci Street, pleased if Americans are interested but in no way dependent upon our approval.

My last full day in Budapest was All Souls' Day, a Saturday on which intermittent clouds finally dispersed and the wind died. Feri and I took a leisurely walk in the city where he has lived all his life: through the city park and the open-air flea market and back, after an ample lunch, past Embassy Row and his old neighborhood to what I still think of as Lenin Korut, now Terez Korut, a segment of one of the boulevards in Pest that begins and ends at the Danube. The sidewalks were full of people, moving more leisurely than on a week-day, even stopping to look at the displays in the stores.

Feri is usually even more sardonic than sanguine about political, economic, and all other conditions than most Hungarians, which is very sardonic indeed, but he softened under the influence of the day. His countrymen, he reflected, were not such a shabby people after all, and it was good to see them enjoying themselves.

I was reminded of the remark that Hungarians complain more than anyone else but at the same time seem to enjoy life more. Perhaps this results from the fact that during their 1,100 years in this homeland, they have been overrun so many times - by Tartars, Turks, Austrians, Nazis, Communists - that occupation has become a normal pattern in their history. Now the capitalist invasion has brought a new set of problems to supplement or supplant the ones imposed by the Russians. Hungary has survived its enemies. Now, I hope, it can survive those who claim to be its friends. So far, by various shifts and stratagems, Hungarian style and character seem to be surviving the capitalist invasion by adapting to it and by seasoning it with their own flavor.

Robert Murray Davis teaches at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of A Lower-Middle-Class Education (University of Georgia Press).