The Soviet system was built only partly on electrification and collectivisation; the rest was distrust. The system snapped the apparently unbreakable bond between people, destroying it root and branch; it deposited people in unfamiliar places, shoved them into a labyrinth of secret reports, betrayals and blackmail until their trust in each other was utterly wrecked. If you didn’t know when or why your son, friend, lover or colleague was likely to report you to the authorities, there remained only doubt which ate away your soul. Hamlet doesn’t trust anyone: one by one the pillars of his existence crumble and he is left alone at the end staring at nothing. Then that nothing is occupied by a foreign power.
I met the Hamlet who trusts no one in Peter Brook’s production, when his company performed in Geneva in late 1998, the autumn before my father died. Hamlet loses everything: only words remain to him, and he tries to solve everything with words, although words are what he least trusts. Nevertheless his last wish is that Horatio should tell his story as though vanishing without trace was more terrifying to him than death itself. I watched the play I knew so well, breathless. Those several-hundred-year-old words of mourning, love, doubt and despair echoed deeply in my own tense body; it was as if I had spoken them myself. In great works of art human memory is conserved so that we don’t have to stutter when it is our turn to speak. The sudden nearness of anticipated loss sharpened my senses as I watched Ophelia. Ophelia is liberated through mourning. For the first time in her life she does what she wants and says what she thinks. As if grief … What? Is it possible to mourn Polonius, too?
One afternoon when I was on the metro on my way to the hospital, numbed by the constant daily emotional tension, I was whiling away the time studying the faces of my fellow passengers. Those prematurely aged, uncommunicative faces with their careworn expressions, the women with their painted nails and hairdos, the men with shopping bags quite sunk into themselves, normally filled me with such tenderness and sadness that I felt that, despite almost sixteen years of absence with just the occasional longer or shorter visit, it was the Budapest metro, not Geneva, not London, not California, that was my true home: these were faces that I could read and understand; I knew what lay behind them, or at least I could make a decent guess. But on this hot afternoon when everyone was pushing and shoving, I no longer had the heart for it. I pulled out my newspaper and buried myself in it. At Moszkva Square three gypsy youths and a girl got on. One of the boys sat down beside me and, impudently rubbing his thigh against mine, started reading over my shoulder. I didn’t say anything but hung on to the chrome-plated pole next to me, trying to make sense of Dezső Tandori’s piece in front of me, a text that swayed in harmony with the movement of the carriage. His poems which, in our youth, had offered us truths that were crystal clear and could cut like a diamond – that is, providing we could understand them – had over the years become an ever-more complex weave of textures. But maybe it was just that I was finding it harder to follow its various strands. Being a faithful reader, though, I was sticking to the task, working at it hard. Somewhere near Kossuth Square the boy spoke.
‘Who is Seneca?’
I looked at him in surprise. The title of the piece was ‘The Letters of Seneca’.
‘An old Greek philosopher.’
‘What’s a philosopher?’
I tried to explain as best I could.
‘And what happened to him?’
‘What do you mean, what happened?’
‘How did he die?’
‘They didn’t like him much, because he said what he thought, and eventually they gave him a glass of poison to drink.’
‘And he drank it?’
‘He did.’
‘Why?’
‘To show them he was right.’
At this point I had realised that in my surprise I had confused Seneca with Socrates, but it didn’t matter by then.
‘Was he a Jew?’ the boy asked, after thinking for a while.
‘Who?’ I replied, slightly on the defensive.
‘That Seneca, or whatever his name is?’
‘No, there were few Jews at that time. Or rather there were Jews but not like Jews today.’ I was growing ever more muddled.
‘Was he a gypsy?’
‘No. As I said, this happened many centuries ago.’
‘But you are still reading his letters?’ he asked, impressed.
‘That’s right,’ I said, but looked up and noticed I had missed my stop. When I stood up and he spotted the half-sized guitar case behind me his face lit up.
‘Are you a violinist?’
‘No, this is a child’s guitar and I need to change the strings,’ I replied quickly. ‘Bye now.’
As the train squealed to a deafening halt, I was for a moment filled with a sharp desire to lean over and stroke his face while he was still looking at me in that puzzled manner. But I managed to pull myself together and push my way through the door. In the crush of other passengers I turned and saw the startled expressions on the faces of the other two boys. Once I reached the surface, I was immediately struck by the strong sunlight, the noise, the heavy smell of summer in the city made up of the stench of exhaust, garbage and perspiring bodies. I stood for a few moments next to the escalator as if debating whether to flee back down the sticky stairs into the drumming darkness. Then I resolved to throw myself into the flow of city traffic. When, towards the end of the afternoon, I reached the hospital, I asked my father about Seneca and about why he wrote the Consolations. As will be clear by now, my philosophical education had not extended to him.
I have to get used to this new city, with its beggars searching through the rubbish, through the human wrecks boarding trams, the overwhelming flood of traffic, the characteristic trail of dog shit, the homeless people squatting by the entrances of elegant cafés, the subways turning into jungles haunted by the poor and piles of litter, the potholed pavements silently bearing the marks of hasty workmanship, the noise that follows you everywhere because there is no coffee bar, no supermarket, no newspaper stall that does not avail itself of a TV or a radio loud with continuous jokey banter occasionally interrupted by commercials. I have to decode and re-code new bus routes, not to mention the latest ideas. I have to get used to all those people on the street apparently talking to themselves, not all of them crazy as they were in my childhood; but they talk to someone on their brand new cell-phones, which means they can’t be, or don’t want to be, wherever they actually are. The elemental, unshakable reality of being ‘here and now’ is in the process of disintegration. Since it is possible to step out of it at any time, there is nothing that needs to be fully experienced. The playground is no longer a playground because in it the busy parents are chattering and doing deals. The tram is no longer a public place where passengers share space with those who happen to be in the same carriage: people constantly break the conversation, slip out of a theatre, or even duck briefly out of a funeral because of some urgent matter that cannot be postponed. The only problem is that whatever is happening in the conversation, at the theatre or the cemetery loses significance so everything turns into a constant background hum while space and time become ever more amorphous and indefinable. We can no longer tell clearly the difference between external and internal places and events; our life is becoming a grey mass out of which feelings and passions occasionally emerge, then quickly melt back into the dense tide flowing irresistibly towards the Great Funnel down which we are all, without exception, doomed to vanish.
‘It’s because the universe is speeding up,’ declared the saleswoman in the shop, with all the assurance of one who knows she is properly informed. I was buying fruit juice for my father. ‘That’s why everything is in a mad rush. The planets are accelerating. Matter is going to get ever denser and we’ll have a new Big Band. Of course, I’ll be long gone by then.’
She practically sang the last words. I nodded enthusiastically. When my countrymen are not at each other’s throats, they are busily engaged in conversation: in sho
ps, at the post office, on the street, in front of the phone booth. They still love to chat with strangers and share their preoccupations. There’s not much else they are prepared to share, but thoughts, accounts and remarks are still part of the common currency. Perhaps the need to communicate is all that remains of the rich vein of really-existing socialism in what was once the Eastern Bloc: that and a few ill-fitting doors, some dripping taps and those ever-draughty stairwells.
My father’s death visibly began in the summer of 1992 at the outbreak of the first Yugoslavian war. It might not be a coincidence that the happy innocent childhood I was lucky enough to enjoy came to an end with my father’s death and the break-up of Yugoslavia. Until then, despite all warnings to the contrary, I believed that people were essentially good, that truth would eventually win out, that evil would meet the fate it deserved and that we were all immortal. I thought that while a moral universe founded on solid values might occasionally find itself in conflict with reality, such conflicts could always be resolved. I could, if I so desired, explain away my father’s illness and his inevitably approaching death, and that helped me to accept it. It was becoming cruelly apparent that the new world that was just then coming into being was not going to accommodate my father and his beliefs. Looking at it from the other side, I might have added that he had no strength left in him. He had had to survive a great deal in the past and there were ever fewer sources of power he could use to recharge himself. He was always so absorbed in the service of the Cause that he never learned that you could supplement your store of energy with something as simple as a book, an excursion or just enjoying the company of another person.
But that other death that, two hours away from us, was wiping out entire families, streets, villages in such a hurry, that led old schoolfriends, neighbours and former wedding guests to cutting each other’s throats in the name of some obscure issue of ethnic belonging – that I couldn’t understand. Or, to be more precise, I didn’t want to understand. In this I was just like my father who, when confronted with all the negative evidence about really-existing socialism, hastily reviewed the accounts to find some excuse; and so I too refused to accept that the terrible scenes being played out before our terrified gaze by our country’s southern neighbours were in fact all true. I must have felt that if I accepted it, my entire world view – starting with my belief in the essential goodness of people through to my faith in the benign wisdom, or at least rational behaviour, of democratically elected governments – was not valid. Then humanity was indeed the sowing of dragon’s teeth. Which, in retrospect, also meant that the gas chambers of the Second World War and the initial indifference of Western governments to their existence were not part of a brief historical anomaly, but the norm, the logical result of a certain rationality. In other words, it could happen again at any time.
By the time we reached the seventh year of my father’s slow agony that had followed the course of the Yugoslavian bloodbath, I came to believe that anything was possible. Perhaps that is why my determination wavered in the dance around my father’s sickbed. However much I resisted the thought, I understood that events were not informed by our values and desires. All through the Yugoslavian horror I was arguing that each drop of blood spilt would be the last and that each act of wickedness would prompt a severe response. When the people of Bosnia voted overwhelmingly for a pluralist multi-ethnic democracy and Karadžić’s troops massacred the voters, when they bombed the crowded marketplace at Sarajevo, when they starved, murdered and tortured several thousands of prisoners behind barbed wire, when the barely armed peacekeeping troops allowed the men of Srebrenica to be led off and then piled into mass graves day after day, once I had overcome the shock, I was continually hoping that now at last the world would be sufficiently shaken to recover its conscience and intervene immediately to stop the killing. But the world’s conscience did not wake, or in any case it arrived posthumously, once the corpses were buried deep underground; and one weak, overdue flicker only served to generate some guilt.
While I was reluctantly backing out of childhood I was forced to admit that, going by the evidence, it wasn’t a desire for ‘freedom and love’ that made the world go round, and that in order to understand events one had to see them not only from the point of view of the humiliated victim but from the other side, too, because – again going by the evidence – it seemed that that was where events started. On that other side, however, I was horrified to observe that the lust for power was stronger than anything else. In the light of this unpleasant discovery, what happened in peace-time Cambodia, where one in seven of the population was murdered to the sound of socialist slogans, immediately became comprehensible. Not to mention events closer to home.
By the summer of 1992, when snipers were competing to see how many pram-pushing mothers, shaky old grandfathers or children running to fetch water they could hit from their positions in the hills surrounding Sarajevo, my father could barely move for the pain caused by the swelling in his head. By the time they ushered him from his university office without even a handshake to say goodbye, armed gangs were spreading fear all over Croatia and Bosnia. By the summer of 1999, when that Balkan Macbeth Slobodan Milošević, scenting defeat and full of bloodlust, decided to clear out Kosovo as though it were a gym that needed repainting, and to murder, burn or blow up anybody who got in his way, my father began to list to the left. He kept bumping into the furniture and one day he followed my mother to the bank veering from one parked car to another. He was determined that he, gallant knight that he was, must save my mother from the bandits of the market economy whose latest trick was to rob and kill old people tottering to collect their pensions.
The last passionate political arguments in the hall of the flat in Németvölgyi Road took place in the early spring of 1992, when my father tried to convince me that Milošević, the last bastion of the principle of socialist collective ownership, was facing an Islamic fundamentalist in the Bosnian leader Alija Izetbegović. While occasionally admitting his historical achievements, my father could never forgive Comrade Tito for becoming a running dog of imperialism and allowing the system that millions (including himself) had staked their lives on to collapse from within. In 1989, when Party official Milošević came to power in the by-then somewhat looser Yugoslavian Federation, my father recovered the hope that this hard-boiled apparatchik would save the sinking ship of socialism. It had been years since we had conducted any kind of political conversation but this storm of terrible events in a neighbouring country wrought such elemental passions in both of us that we were screaming at each other, red-faced, between the crowded bookshelves of the hall, just like in the good old days.
‘Mass murderer! Manipulator! I don’t care what Izetbegović wrote fifteen years ago! What do you mean socialism? What do you mean fundamentalism? Excuses!!! He is a power-obsessed psychopath!’ I was yelling, quite beside myself.
Poor Hegel, Gegel and Bebel were in a tizzy. They didn’t know whether to laugh or be seriously scared. They had forgotten that we used to have such screaming matches regularly. When we had done with the steam and smoke we went unwillingly to put on our jackets because my mother chased us out of the flat and told us to go for a good walk. Mother was, of course, right as usual. By the time we reached the corner of Pagony Street we had calmed down.
‘Lucky that Danilo Kiš did not live to see this,’ I said by way of reconciliation.
My father hummed in agreement. Not that he was exactly a fan of Kiš, but I did once shove a short story by Kiš under his nose, the one involving the murder of Rosa Luxemburg. He had hummed in exactly the same way then. I left the book for him in the hope that he would read the rest. When I asked for it back some weeks later, it turned out that it had vanished into the vortex of his study and I was obliged to buy a new copy.
In the early autumn of 1993 I received a call from an acquaintance to say that Zdravko was in Geneva and, if I had time, I should join them both for dinner. Zdravko taught history at the university
in Sarajevo and had been allowed out of the besieged city to take part in an international conference. Two years before, when we met at a similar conference in Prague, he had been a handsome young man who spoke enthusiastically about the possibility of a global civil society. This time a grey-haired old man with burned-out eyes faced me across the table. He had the same grey look as all those other men I had seen in documentary films about Bosnia. It was as if, irrespective of their ages, the brutal annihilation of their land had hung the sign of death over them. Zdravko didn’t say much, and said practically nothing about the city.
Screwing the thin white napkins into paper balls, I leaned against the cool tiles that covered the wall of the kebab restaurant where we were eating and listened to the conversation without saying anything myself. I was ashamed to be living in this calm and comfortable city, just two hours away from the massacre that was dealing a last blow to Europe, while also despairing about my father. Of course, my heart was heavy on account of Bosnia as well, but now, suddenly face to face with this prematurely aged young man, I thought it was wrong to feel such despair at my father’s single, not untimely, approaching natural death. The devastation leisurely working its way through my father’s cells was, after all, a natural and dignified form of last rite, something a man can feel a part of. Suddenly the whole thing seemed dwarfed by the devastation wrought beyond my country’s southern borders. My father’s approaching one-off death had cast a shadow over my life as though it were something unique, threatening the natural order of the world. Our neighbours’ reality involved the possibility of death at any moment, a possibility that people had had to learn to live with, much as they had learned to live with low water pressure or constantly late buses. Meaningless mass destruction was a legitimate part of our apparently orderly lives, something we could indeed live with. The fact that we could do so quite calmly raised doubts about the credibility of either reality.
The Summer My Father Died Page 12