A Guest in my Own Country

by George Konrad

I promptly stood and headed out of the classroom, a remnant of the grin still on my lips. Few of my classmates expressed their solidarity. They tended to be “serious” and were therefore inclined to have me expelled from the youth organization of the Communist Party. The majority thus raised their hands in favor of expulsion. A few abstained. Only two protested, but they were on the outs as well.

  The most ardent supporter of my expulsion—the gifted recipient of a Soviet scholarship, a member of the board of the Students’ Youth Association, and a past master at shaping the general mood ex cathedra (he is today a professor of social science)—established with painful gravity that I was fundamentally alien to the people. As I later learned, his diary exhibited a bloodthirsty animosity to Communists and Jews, though he never took part in the battles when the time came and in fact never left the small room Miklós Krassó provided him as a reward for his inquisitive mind. I am familiar with the contents of his journal because the room’s primary tenant—Miklós’s grandmother, who was then over ninety but still enjoyed the life-extending properties bestowed by curiosity—had dipped into the notebooks lying there on the table. She was curious about what that odd boy could be writing: not only did he fail to set foot outside the flat during those stirring times; he put his jacket on over his bare skin, because he never washed his shirt.

  Miklós’s grandmother immediately noticed the frequent appearance of the word “Jew.” Though born a Presbyterian, she was perhaps particularly attuned to that sequence of letters since her parents had converted in the nineteenth century, the better to move freely among the other landowners and doctors. Seeing all the filth her lodger appended to that word, she took the first opportunity to turn him out. “Be gone, you miserable Tartuffe! How can you despise me so and live under my roof!”

  She still called Russians by their pejorative Hungarian name, muszkák, and when she heard Trotsky mentioned in connection with her grandson—Miklós had given a successful lecture on him in London—she kept calling him Tolstoy: Tolstoy meant something to her, Trotsky did not.

  Her grandson Miklós, though getting on in years, was constantly on the move, and I could only marvel at the whirlwind of energy that secured him a truck and the papers to carry out his plan. He managed it by making a scene in the chambers of the Revolutionary Council of Intellectuals, which had responded to revolutionary demands rather docilely by collecting information, assembling credible-looking reports, and weighing strategies. The inner sanctum was kept under guard, but Miklós broke through. What moronic impotence, he screamed. The intellectuals’ place was in the street, in the armed insurrection! And he explained in detail what needed to be done. After putting up with him for a while, the Revolutionary Council of Intellectuals asked him what he would take in return for leaving them in peace. A truck and driver, replied Miklós, and a document stating they supported his recommendation for consolidating workers’ councils.

  Was that all? They were happy to get rid of him so cheaply.

  So Miklós drove from factory to factory, gathering up emissaries of the workers’ councils, and that very day saw the formation of the Greater Budapest Workers’ Council in Újpest. At the founding assembly Miklós made liberal references to Marx, Heine, Shelley, and Ady, but before he had finished they thanked him for his efforts and begged him to let them pursue their own ideas. Miklós was not in the least offended.

  When, eight years later in Paris, I asked him about those events, he reminisced with amiable humor. After leaving the workers, he tried to bring György Lukács, the philosopher, together with Imre Nagy, the democratic Communist prime minister, hoping the symbolic collocation of their names would be a message in itself. I believe Lukács was named Minister of Culture, and I reminded Miklós about Lukács’s previous stint as Minister of Culture during the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. When Lukács held the post in 1919, he ordered the pubs closed, a move that did nothing to increase the popularity of the regime. Another reason the move bewildered me was that the philosopher enjoyed a good tipple.

  Rum played the primary role in my consumption of alcohol. I would take it with a double espresso at the Saint Stephen Ring Casino Café, where a full-breasted baroness made the coffee, a former Social Democrat MP recently released from an internment camp let you grab his unusually long earlobes for a forint, and an occasional click of heels came from one of the corner tables (a monarchist message immediately following a Polish émigré’s references to Dr. Otto Habsburg, rightful heir to the Hungarian throne).

  For a day or two I served as bodyguard to the psychologist Ferenc Mérei, then patrolled the public squares of Budapest with my machine gun at the ready and visited a few editorial offices. I would hang up the long, heavy, dark-blue coat I had bought for a pittance at a consignment shop and use the next hook for the machine gun, as if it were an umbrella. Freed from this double burden, I enthusiastically presented plans for the revitalization of our journal.

  Stopping at a café for something strong—the woman at the piano had an absolutely perfect, towering, platinum-dyed hairdo, as if these were the most halcyon of days—I watched a group of people rush past, a man out in front, the others in pursuit. They gunned the man down on some cellar stairs.

  Walking through the halls of the university, I ran into Miklós Bélády, a beloved teacher of mine. We stopped for a moment face to face.

  “Humanists with machine guns?” he said.

  “These are changing times,” I responded. “Better to be on the safe side.” It was unclear to either of us what I meant. I had read Marx’s thoughts on “realistic humanism.” One protects one’s family and oneself if one must.

  I headed home to listen to the radio and read Erasmus and Tolstoy. In front of the Horizont Bookshop I had found a copy of Tolstoy’s Childhood, Boyhood, Youth in the trash and removed it from the other books, most of which had been burnt to ashes.

  It had not taken long for piles of refuse to accumulate in the streets. The streets were also full of posters demanding the immediate withdrawal of Soviet troops in the strongest terms. Nor was it enough for them simply to leave the country: they were to ask the pardon of the heroic Hungarian people, which they had ruthlessly dishonored with their recent invasion and unjustifiably extended stay, recalling in our memory the havoc wreaked by Russians in 1849.

  On my way home I stopped off at the Writers’ Association, where things were buzzing. You could feel a sense of importance emanating from the directorship as they prepared a public statement. It had to be at once brassy and silky, sonorous and deathly—a masterpiece, in other words.

  Trucks coming in from the countryside had brought a bit of nourishment for the intellectual leaders, the conscience of the nation, behatted men who were good at pressing against wall or fence the moment they heard a burst of fire. In any case, a nice little package slid into my bag. Down in the restaurant writers were debating how far back to go: 1949? 1948? 1947? 1945? Even further? The day the Germans marched in? Was there an acceptable starting point? Or perhaps this day of revolution marked the dawn of a new era. This very day, with its giddiness, its swagger, its display of the dead. Liberation goes hand in hand with murder.

  A stocky fellow made a triumphant entrance, his face flushed with glory: he had managed to shoot two Soviet soldiers and write two stories. His boyish pride suggested he now considered himself a man: he had gone from student to killer.

  A reporter had heard that the Soviet tanks were pulling out. Another had heard precisely the contrary: railway workers had sent word that they were rolling in on wheels. He said the Old Man—meaning Imre Nagy—had just waved his hand at the news.

  In the café on the corner of my building I heard a man in a Persian-collared overcoat assuring all and sundry that Konrad Adenauer was on his way, though the bearer of glad tidings had added “on a white horse,” which turned them into a moronic fairy tale. The neighborhood’s high-class whore, a former language teacher and genuine polyglot, was outraged that the swimming pool she visited daily ha
d been closed. She also asked in stentorian tones whether anyone at the café had read Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, because she had not yet decided whether she cared for it or not.

  Before I could open my door, two other doors popped open, and that era’s masters of information retrieval, the concert violinist and the filling station attendant, stormed me with their questions. Theirs was a resplendent new friendship. One moment they would feel the flush of victory, the next they would predict a house-to-house roundup, the men beaten and the women raped. And what would they collect now? Wristwatches again, as during the war?

  Late on the evening of 4 November the art student—her name was Éva Barna—and I were standing guard with machine guns at the University’s Humanities Division. Once in a while a tank came rumbling down Váci Street. That was the banal part. The important part was Éva’s beauty, her striking, deep voice, and, most of all, what she said. She had read Camus’ Mythe de Sisyphe in the original; I had not. A mean-spirited jealousy moved me to make some ironic remarks about Camus. Éva emigrated that December and eventually met Camus and corresponded with him. Between Éva and Camus stood only travel expenses; between Éva and me the Iron Curtain.

  Vera made some phone calls. What she heard was enough for her. She had no desire to see the fallen, burned, or hanged sons of whatever nation; she longed only to leave and live among more reliable peoples: she would go to Paris to teach English and Russian, giving us something to live on; she would rent an apartment, set everything up, and I would follow. She said I should stop being so difficult.

  On 11 November, after the defeat, Miklós Krassó and my cousin Pál Zádor told me they were leaving the next day and asked me to go with them. They had assured my passage. They showed me my name on the document. Their story was that we were going to persuade others to return home.

  I refused. I said it couldn’t be as bad as before. I would hold out. I would outlast the leaders. I had no wish to be swept into the great outflow; I wanted to know what was going on here, in these streets. It was an unfinished story, and I refused to tear myself away from it.

  Among Biblical heroes I found Jeremiah particularly appealing: he knew in advance what would be—he prophesied the fall of the Hebrew commonwealth—and all he asked of the victor was that he be allowed to mourn his city and his people on its ruins.

  I had no desire to look for clever ways out. I wanted a normal, simple life: the same stairways, the same cafés, things as they had been. Even if hundreds of thousands were leaving, millions stayed, and if I had friends and lovers among those leaving, others would come along. My books were here and the sky and the balcony overlooking the Danube and the hills of Buda across the water.

  And if I did go, where would I go to? People were wandering off in different directions, but this was still the place where I’d find the most speakers of Hungarian; I’d have the easiest time finding my way around, around the streets, the words, the customs.

  Yet I sanctioned their going because I suspected they would be in greater danger here than I. They would be less able to get on here because they were more active, more inclined to speak out, more lively, more passionate, more important than I. I who was just a kibitzer, an armed onlooker. Besides, my parents were here, and if no uniformed compulsion separated us now should I be the one to separate us just to make the life that was best for me? I did not feel any danger looming here. So what if they locked me up. I had heard plenty of prison stories from former inmates: you can have a life in there too. Behind bars I would still be myself. Or so I thought.

  What about taking my parents with me? And be dependent on charities? Start my student career anew, on scholarships? No need for me to waste away in the classroom. Every morning I could sit down to my notebook at any number of tables, since I would still have the money for an espresso at Budapest’s myriad coffeehouses. I would always be able to find work to cover the absolute necessities: I could translate, I could edit. I had no desire to be rich. I had been rich once. It was no great shakes.

  Looking around me, I saw nothing but strategists. How did they deal with the issues, the obstacles? The patterns they assumed, born of compulsion, appealed to me, comical though they were. Every social type, after all, is a complex of clichés. Caricature needs recurrent elements. Life here abounded in provocations and hardships directly traceable to schematic thought. Psychic sprains were never far from our door.

  What interested me was how thinking becomes reality not from habit or sober practicality or tradition but from the exertions of the willful mind, from bold dreams, from seeking the truth and then announcing it—how the noble turn base, ideals become a hell, and how, in the end, we will survive it all anyway because we are stronger, we everyday, pedestrian people capable of work, wonder, and contemplation.

  If István had stayed, he might have been sentenced to death. Besides, who was I to judge my friends? Everyone who left was right, as was everyone who stayed. Everyone tried to heed the prompting of fate. My advice to myself was: As long as you are not in mortal danger, sit tight. Keep going, but don’t rush. All your problems come from impulsive decisions. Just keep working quietly, steadfastly, inconspicuously, ceaselessly.

  They searched Gyuri Krassó’s apartment and took in Gyuri, Tamás Lipták, and Ambrus Oltványi. But not me, because, true to form, I was late. We were to meet at ten; I arrived at twelve. Gyuri’s mother told me what had happened. They didn’t find the mimeograph machine, which had been well tucked away. They let Ambrus and Tamás go, but later took Tamás away again.

  That they didn’t arrest me was a lucky break, suggesting that they had not found the list containing the signatures of the people who had received machine guns. Besides, I had never been particularly active, never stayed in one place too long. I observed things, but made no speeches, didn’t belong to the elite of the youth organization calling for reform (I had long since been expelled), didn’t even use its language or style. To my good fortune I was insignificant.

  So my concierge did not report me after all, though he had seen me come and go with my machine gun and never displayed signs of sympathy. I buried it in the corner of a then still vacant Pannónia Street lot with Vera, my coconspirator (or rather lookout). Two or three years later a large apartment building went up on that site, and who knows what happened to my well-packed and well-oiled weapon.

  One day I ran into my philosophy professor, pacing the Ring in the company of a classical philologist. He had joined the new Sovietophile patrol force and was carrying a machine gun and wearing the requisite gray overcoat. He was extremely well-read and capable of reconciling his professional interest in Kierkegaard with his duties as a Party soldier, which included efforts to reeducate me. He wanted me to eliminate all traces of the bourgeoisie from my person, toss them off like old clothes, to steer clear of my old friends and to marry a woman of working-class extraction, a Party member. He himself had done as much: his stern, solidly built wife was unsparing in her theoretical criticism. When all was going well, she called him comrade, but whenever any ideological tension arose between them she addressed him as sir. (There was an analogous practice in the public sphere: at the workplace we could be comrades, but under police investigation we were inevitably sir.) I merely nodded, seeing from his uniform how far he had gone in his intellectual odyssey, and he merely returned my reserved nod: he had no wish to make friends or trouble, which was fine with me. A weapon makes an eloquent sartorial accessory.

  After the second coming of the Soviet tanks—this time in greater numbers and ferocity than on the eve of the uprising—that is, after 4 November, two hundred thousand out of ten million Hungarians left the country, young people for the most part, including half of my classmates, most of my friends and lovers, and my cousins and sister.

  Fifty-sixers? After a brief stint of valor they had a choice: to go or to stay. Those who could go did, fleeing either the previous state of things or the future revenge. They trudged through snow and ice over the spottily guarded border. Jus
t before Christmas Vera set off too with my sister Éva. They made it to the border and crossed in a midnight snowstorm, trudging on in the dark along roads marked with Austrian signs. Then they saw Hungarian signs again: they had probably walked around the same hill twice. My sister tried once more the next morning and made it across.

  Vera came back on the evening of Christmas day and was a little impatient with me for not having bought a Christmas tree. We went down and managed to find a small one and some decorations. There were gifts and an improvised supper, candlelight and family happiness.

  I did not leave in 1956. Every time the opportunity presented itself, I sat down at my desk and wrote. Whenever the time came to make a particularly important decision, I desisted, letting things happen as they would. The more dynamic ones left; the rest of us stuck it out, hardening into shape. When I think of them from a distance, I like them; when I meet up with them, I do my best to slip away.

  Though I stayed, I well knew that the dark bell jar of reality and nightmares, the space where anxiety looked itself in the face, would close around me again soon enough. It was time to learn to cohabit with angst, yet ensure that it did not become master of the house. After 1956 people no longer tacked their thoughts up on trees. The spirit of fifty-six turned to the wall and pulled the blanket up over its ears. Most memories died out, there being no profit in keeping them alive.

  The furniture in my sister’s room had once been my parents’ bedroom set. A carpenter at the beginning of the century had replicated Maria Terézia’s bedroom, and I had angel faces gazing down on me from the head of the bed and from the wardrobe. Two naked angels held up a mirror that had once stood atop a dressing and makeup table with its many drawers, some locked, others not, depending on their contents. When I was a child, sweets, condoms, and a pistol were locked up, while more boring things like photographs, locks of hair, and milk-teeth were not.