To experience the magic of this men’s bathhouse you want to get there early (it opens by six). From the outside it looks like a diesel-powered electrical plant. Though centrally located on the Buda side of the city, it is hard to get to. (In Budapest pedestrians are generally maltreated. Though there are many busses, trams and subways which run pretty well during the daytime, the stops are few and far between and if you want to change from one bus or train to another, you first have to walk half a mile and then go through a reeking underpass before you reach your goal. Hardly a road can be crossed straightforwardly, as there are iron gates everywhere. If you climb one and risk the street you’re chased mercilessly by cars. So everyone plods the prescribed path without complaint, laden with plastic tote bags. The traffic plan seems to have been designed by a vengeful boy in a sand-box. So, the Rudas-Bathhouse is centrally located but not, consequently, easily accessible.)

If you arrive at daybreak, first you think you reached the wrong address. You enter a dank hall where homeless men sit on long benches smoking and drinking. In a corner a woman, barricaded behind a market stall, sells herbal teas, pictures of saints, plastic bath slippers, pink and blue shower caps, schnapps, bath gel, glasses and newspapers. Directly in front of you is a counter where you can buy coffee, beer and sandwiches. To the right stands a cashier’s booth like those at country fairs. You bend down  and call out. An elderly woman, visible only from the stomach down, appears at the window. She, too, bends down. When you ask whether she understands German or English, she merely shakes her head, writes on a piece of paper “1,000” and holds it out. You pay a thousand Forint, accept a receipt and receive a vague hand gesture for direction.

In the dim recesses of the hall a few steps lead down to where an old man in faded shorts peers at the receipt, then hands you a thread bare linen loin cloth shaped like a half-apron. Behind him lie a catacomb with rows of  white painted wooden cubicles. Every so often you sense a naked figure tottering past in the half light, you hear some splashing, gurgling and groans, the weak lights hum, doors squeak and bang, chairs groan and flesh smacks flesh. You pick an empty cubicle, undress and, after tying the apron, re-emerge in the echoing dimness, bare-assed and without a clue. Like a mythical figure the bath attendant re-appears. With chalk he marks the time on a piece of slate attached to the door, then locks the door and hands you the key. He locks it a second time, with a master key which he keeps. Like your safe-deposited treasures in the bank-vault, no one person can access your underwear. The attendant points to the number on the door, says “one and-a-half hour,” and walks away.  You follow the sounds past rows of cubicles and rusty, empty showers, past dripping walls and slippery floor tiles, past broken toilet stalls and underneath cracked skylights plugged with soggy newspapers. You emerge in a shower hall right out of a Russian mining camp photo shoot. A master baker washes under the wide stream, so you imitate him (a baker because he’s so pale and because the little apron dangles so masterfully under his majestic belly). The water is wonderfully hot and soft and smells faintly of rotten eggs. You follow the master baker and enter the bath, a cavern five hundred years old, supported by eight columns. It looks like a mixture of slaughterhouse, wine cellar and mosque. The dome is perforated; some holes are colored glass, others are left open so the steam can escape. Pale dawn-light cuts through the rising billows. A large pool in the center holds about a dozen men who lie, quiet, like water buffalos in mud during the mid-day heat. The master baker slides in, a rhinoceros on the move. He gently parts the waters on invisible steps. Finally he topples over, causing a giant bow-wake. He dives, stays under for several breaths, resurfaces snorting, rolls on his back and stops moving.

You emulate him. The water is lukewarm, the steps are smoothly rounded, velvety, a red stone polished by naked feet for five hundred years. Surrounding the main pool you can guess others, smaller ones. The walls are covered with enameled signs in Hungarian. The only notices you can decipher are the temperatures: there are six pools, from 15 to 42 degrees. Men are everywhere and you like to join them. They murmur quietly, droplets fall from the ceiling, fresh hot water gurgles from stone openings. The air is filled with strange sounds, a sort of melodious drone. Men climb from overflowing pools and disappear behind a door from which steam billows, others emerge from there and sink into a basin. Everyone has a different rhythm.

You follow the master baker into the steam room. Here and there you glimpse a shadow, upright, with closed eyes, barely breathing. When you get closer you notice skin the color of boiled crab. Another door opens and a veritable steam geyser erupts. Inside it’s boiling hot. When you move it becomes intolerable. Slowly you stumble back to the entrance hall under a shower. You cool down, open another door and find yourself in the dry sauna – and everywhere those standing and sitting men, old and young, fat thin tall and short, all covered with aprons – a delightful, extraordinary, an archaic picture.

At some point you decide to leave. You open the door to a smallish room, take off your apron and, from another ancient man, receive a linen sheet. You enter a sort of forensic autopsy room of rusting cots with mattresses where tightly wrapped mummies snore, gurgle and sigh. From a neighboring room comes the sound of groans and moans. Sometimes a door swings open and you glimpse a masseur on his way to a new client. After you have rested you look for the cubicle with your number and wait. The bath attendant appears, unlocks the door. You dress, turn in your linen sheet (you notice that another customer leaves a tip, so you copy him). Next to the exit hangs an old hair dryer on the wall, you blow dry, emerge from the underworld, cross the waiting room of the silenced train station, step into the street and are welcomed by the sun rising over the Duna.

Dawn is the best time to go, because of the combination of  customers: there are exhausted waiters, pale losers and glowing winners from the casino next door. There are business men, clerks, and blue collar workers on their way to work, there are the retired after a long sleepless night – they come from all directions and all classes, they come together out of the night and submerge in the soothing water to languish and dream, to startle awake, to be massaged. Then they leave the comforting womb, grab a snack of beer, sandwiches with herring or eggs, onions and mayonnaise with paprika, an espresso. And so, fortified, they begin another falsely promising day full of fatalism.

There are three such historic, Turkish baths. The “Rac” is closed at the moment. The “Kiraly” opens on alternative days for woman. Its grounds are smaller, more delicate, the temperatures are not as broiling. I went only once and ended up in the middle of some sort of company outing. There were about fifty elderly men, stacked tightly in the various pools, seemingly celebrating. In the smallest, hottest pool it appeared the colleagues were stacked inside each other. I hardly knew where to look. Hoping to find more space in the steam room, I wandered in. There were so many bodies,  the only way through was to slide among the slippery nakedness of corporate flesh. I braced myself, slithered from one corner to another until I ended up in the sauna, which seemed to be too hot and dry for most of them. There I dripped disconsolately, next to a book keeper near retirement who sadly contemplated our middle aged bodies while the heat rose until his face turned bluish.  Worried about becoming embroiled in an anonymous death, I skipped out. Later I wondered if this might have been one of the infamous orgies I’ve read about and to which I might, unwittingly, have been a witness. If so, I must admit, I imagined them  somewhat different.

Bathhouses of all types are among the specialties of Budapest. You don’t have to try them all. But if you like lounging in hot water you should, at least, visit a few basic types. Apart from the Turkish baths there are those built at the turn of the century, some of them splendid institutions with medical departments, healthful drinking fountains and therapeutic offerings.