A Guest in my Own Country

by George Konrad

  It was days before the first kiss, when her head leaned back just a bit. Then lips fused and bodies coupled to the point of exhaustion, leaving not a fingernail-sized patch on the other uncultivated—a mutual cultivation that continued until I checked two fabulous personalities in swaddling clothes out of the hospital across the street and put them in a cab.

  Who are you? As we looked at each other, I tried to sail through her eyes to the harbor of the enigma. And who are those two figures in the slatted bed carrying on a mysterious conversation, sister supplying little brother with imaginative stories and he turning to her, the nearest authority, with his questions. Everything a family needed—except that I was not really there. The marriage classifieds of the day used to end: No adventurers need apply! They made me shudder.

  During our courtship Juli would tactfully remind me to remove my arm from her shoulder when we neared her home, because the eyes in the windows had known her from earliest childhood and expected of her the sort of behavior befitting a young lady. Juli’s grandmother asked her permission to leave the family’s title of nobility hanging on the wall when her youngest granddaughter’s suitor came to call, though she ultimately resigned herself to the fact that, though a polished gentleman to all appearances, he was (no use mincing words) a Jew. Jews can be decent, can they not?

  There followed roughly sixteen years of cohabitation and submission to a common judgment—the children’s gaze—confident as we were of the strict but fair verdict of Anna Dóra (1965) and Miklós István (1967) and hopeful as we were of their mercy.

  The Case Worker appeared in 1969, the darkest book to come out during those years. I could not believe it was permitted to appear, so strongly did it call the regime’s official self-portrait into question. No matter from what angle I read my words, I could find no hint of uplift, the hero and narrator of the novel merely handling his cases as best he can, trudging on, ever downward.

  After 1956 many of us were in that situation. Our lives would straighten out only if the regime changed. But that did not seem possible. At best, change would be slow in coming. In the meantime we pulled our hats over our eyes.

  In the morning I would report to my new job but soon abandoned it for the café on the corner, the Alkotás (Creation). Even so, I managed to get more done than those poor old fogies who run panting from tram stop to office. Signs of work flourished on my desk—charts, texts, slide rule (it was a planning bureau with liberal pretensions)—but the morning still belonged to me as it had in my earlier days as a welfare officer. I had begun to grow into the city. My person and my name were now recognized here and there.

  It was in this context that Iván Szelényi and I did our first extensive urban sociological study in Pécs and Szeged. We used approaches current at the time. Walking into my first computer room I felt I was entering a temple: How does a system of settlement relate to the structure of society as a whole? How do people move in social space? How do they get where they are? I traveled the country using a flexible system of optics: at times a microscope, at times a telescope. I combined close-ups and long-distance shots within a single sentence. I had put politics on the back burner, my concern now being how we might put up with one another in a time that passes slowly.

  I roamed about in search of useful conversation partners, walking the streets as if they were the stacks of a library filled with books I had never heard of. I sniffed around doorways and courtyards, copied out stairway and toilet graffiti (both offers and requests), and knocked about as if snuggling up to a woman with a boundless body.

  The large hopes had gone up in smoke, but small hopes remained. At the time any celebration of life would have seemed a self-compromising form of kitsch, but love still served to counteract the constrictions of life. Amid so many prohibitions it felt good to eat forbidden fruit, break rules. The one-night stand had its honor.

  And there was literature. Literature had remained an adventure. Who can tell what events will filter into our storytelling? The number of tellable tales far exceeds the number that can be put down on paper, and what we choose to put down on paper is arbitrary. You pull something out of the spectrum; you reject the rest. That is the karate of saying no.

  The aim of a story is to be hard to forget. We writers take over selves we have never before inhabited. We look into the heads, and beds, of others. Can you be other than what you are? Once the child who needs no stories comes into this world, we must all start to worry.

  As a child I would lie on my stomach in the darkness as it rolled in from the window in treacherous waves, pressing my fists into my eyelids to call up unforeseen images, images over which I had no control, withdrawing my will to let them flow where they pleased. Once they begin to flow, I told myself, let them happen, let them follow their own secret logic.

  Later I would put off decisions, letting myself be swept into marriages (and jobs) and entrusting the progress of my life to happenstance. I felt that by doing something, I learned more about it than by not doing it. I felt a constant devilish temptation to escape the passage of time.

  In 1973 I finished my second novel, The City Builder. Although the head of the Magvet? Publishing House liked it, he felt he had to reject it because of its dark view of the world. (It was ultimately published in Hungary in 1977, minus certain passages, after it had come out in German and French, without official permission, in violation of the law.) Also in 1973—during a trial for incitement mounted against my friend Miklós Haraszti, the accusation centering on his superb essay “Piece Work”—the political police declared me a suspect and carried out several searches of my apartment, confiscating my diaries, firing me from my job, and depriving me of the right to travel abroad for three years.

  In the spring of 1974, Iván Szelényi and I rented a peasant house in Csobánka, a mountain village not far from Budapest. The “sexton’s house” was part of the parish priest’s residence and led to a friendship with Father Zsigmond, a Benedictine monk. It was in this house that Iván and I wrote The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power in secret. We planned to publish it abroad.

  On New Year’s Eve in 1974, a large group gathered in the one-and-a-half room studio apartment of the painter Ilona Keser?. We were surrounded by her colored arcs depicting female bodies, birds, and gravestones along with her engraving equipment and other tools. There was a mood of excitement in the air. It was reminiscent of sixty-eight. Our cultural region was preparing for something new. A subculture, in the broadest sense, had formed. There were alliances of friends in every possible field: everybody knew everybody else, and we met regularly. There were rival schools as well, and the tribal chiefs cast jealous glances at one another in the Young Artists’ Club. The secret police cast their own glances, so as to prepare a precise description of the age in all its color. The Counterreformation was in full swing.

  Having lost my position as urban sociologist the previous year, I was working as an assistant nurse at a work-therapy mental institution in the countryside. I directed story readings and excursions and chatted with the patients. My experience in the mental institution was indispensable for the novel I had just begun, The Loser. I learned a lot from both staff and patients. Rationality was part and parcel of our state culture, or had at least come to be absorbed into it, while critical attitudes—dissident attitudes, if you will—depend on transrational decisions. They may be matters of faith, they may result from a quick blow, but they are inevitable. You follow the path open to you, risk or no risk. But why? Is it intellectual gratification? A command issued by the hedonism of thought? It was sheer pleasure to think through the possibilities.

  Friends of mine, superb minds and personalities, would poke a finger to their foreheads if we met on the street and ask me if I had lost my mind. “Have you no idea where you are living?” they would ask Iván and me. The simplest explanation for our (to them) incomprehensible acts was that we had understood something and written it down just because we felt like it.

  Early one summer morni
ng thirty years ago the doorbell rang and five men burst into my apartment brandishing a search warrant. The Major looked over my papers, sat down at my desk, and said, “I’ll crush you like a leaf.” He was a nervous, pedantic man who bragged he would clean up the mess I had made in my filing cabinet. He told me that if I kept my keys in a leather pouch as he did they would not pull my jacket pocket out of shape. He instructed my children not to tangle up the tassels on the rugs. (At his house they had a special brush for keeping them straight.) He then informed his wife he would soon have done with the suspect and would hurry home so they would not miss the movie. That was how I found out that I was a suspect.

  I asked him how I could have incited anyone to hate the basic institutions of the Hungarian People’s Republic with my diary entries, when I kept them locked up in a filing cabinet. Nothing could be simpler, he said. If I had a visitor and went into the kitchen to make coffee, he could hop over to the filing cabinet, take out the diary, and read it. That was all it took, and there you had your criminal act, with me as criminal, my seditious diary as corpus delicti, and as victim—my curious but ideologically innocent guest who, during the time it took me to brew him coffee, had made his move. I always invite my guests to the kitchen when I make coffee, I told him. “The kitchen?” he asked, concerned, as if this would constitute an affront to my guest. Yes, I told him mildly. That’s where coffee gets made. I also told him my friends didn’t do things like poke through my manuscripts. The only people I knew who engaged in such warped practices were your people. Professionals, in other words, who were not susceptible to being incited to hate the fundamental institutions of the Hungarian People’s Republic.

  “Your daughter is eight years old. She can read her father’s notes. The moment she lays eyes on them the conditions for regulation 127/b have been satisfied. In fact, I don’t even need to establish the fact of her having seen them, only the possibility that she has. If the key is in the lock, the crime can take place—a criminal act, mind you. Because what you think is your own business, but once an enemy thought acquires objective written status, that is no longer a private matter.”

  I imagine he had just recently learned the phrase “acquires objective status.” The Major liked sounding scholarly. “Besides, the key to the file cabinet is not on your key ring.” This was hard evidence—of which he was duly proud.

  The next day he sent a police car for our son Miklós’s nanny. Erzsi had instinctively asserted that the Engineer’s filing cabinet was always locked and she had never seen the key. The Major barked at her to stop lying. Erzsi blushed, then rose. A retired textile worker, she was a model proletarian and a member of the Workers’ Guard. The young man had no right to call her a liar. She had worked her entire life in the same factory, lived in the same house. He could ask her coworkers or her neighbors whether she was a liar or not. (When she retold the story recently, she gave a little laugh and said, “The fact of the matter is I fibbed a little.”)

  In any case, the Major was unimpressed. When the Department of the Interior rescinded my right to travel abroad for three years and the Major personally saw to it that I was dismissed from my job (if I insisted on writing something that was bad for me, I must be suffering from a maladaptive disorder), their logic found support with certain friends of mine, all bright, decent people in their own right, who wished me well but took it for granted that challenging authority would elicit a stern response. Some thought me crazy, others devilishly clever—but I was really quite guileless. In any case, I was now a freelancer after eleven years in the employ of the state.

  Not that I had ever wished for a public role, a podium under my feet. The Major had saved me from an institutional career. If anything, my goal was internal emigration: a garden I would leave only to satisfy obligations I felt obliged to comply with. I had no desire to win or to lose, just to hold out a while longer. God forbid I should be the carrier of some first person plural. I shun the high ground that inspires envy. Even while under the employ of the state I managed to avoid having a single subordinate. I am at home only in groups where all are equal and speak in their own name—and feel free to tease one another. When required to speak or read on a stage, I slip back down as soon as possible.

  After 1973 Iván and I could be sure that every document ultimately reached them, that they read every sociological interview we made. We wrote; they read. Research became evidence: every fact became part of the case against us; every wiretapped word made it stronger. Words could sweep you away, force you into roles, set traps for you to fall into, turn against you; they could make you do things you never dreamed of.

  I first encountered Iván Szelényi at some meeting or other and found him standoffish, but then most of my friends are standoffish. He asked me from behind his pipe, “So you people are doing a survey too?” My answer came out a dilettantish jumble that only reinforced the wearily magnanimous superiority of the fellow, whom I judged to be five years my junior (about twenty-eight to my thirty-three). His jacket and tie were perfect. Everything about him bespoke the civilized young scholar, a rare bird in our context.

  I was taken aback by the you people as well. So my office and I were a we? And he was with the Academy’s Sociological Institute. But we soon realized our institutions could pool forces and create a new wave in Hungarian urban sociology. Our incipient friendship provided an added stimulus, but neither mentioned it explicitly: we were too bashful.

  Suddenly I was a young Turk reformer in a planning and research institute of the ministry. Iván and I—published professionals from Budapest, presenters at conferences where the most the local eminences could do was make a comment or two—mocked or disparaged things they still found interesting and respectable.

  As I have said, Iván taught me that walks are the sociologist’s primary modus operandi: If you want to know what a city is like, walk its streets. Observe the rocking chairs along the narrow, sloping sewage gutters that go by the name of thoroughfares in Pécs’s poverty-stricken Zidina neighborhood. Watch the grandmother telling stories to her grandchild. Note the mirror up by the window enabling the old woman to follow who is walking along the street, ensuring her a constant flow of fresh information from the outside world.

  Iván had an eye for such details along with a propensity for good dinners with our mostly local colleagues, who became our sources for gossip and local folklore. The morning after, they would take us to the Gypsy settlement or to the new row of elegant apartments they dubbed “Cadre Ridge.” We also paid visits to any number of locals: council presidents, party secretaries, ancient barons, priests, schoolteachers, blacksmiths, gardeners, merchants, miners.

  I would step out of my front door in Budapest at eight a.m., and by ten the propeller plane had me in Széchenyi Square in Pécs, where I began the day at a marble table at the Café Nádor, watching the locals coming and going southern style, in waves. Then Iván and I would set off, exchanging greetings with the people we met—men leaning on shovels in their gardens, women with net shopping bags, short-skirted, ponytailed girls whom we asked for directions.

  We were the saccharine-smiled, arrogant sophisticates who had seen so much of the world. I had spent a total of maybe two months in the West; I had written in a café on the Île de la Cité, observed the blue-aproned peasants in a nearby village, and lain at the nearby seashore in Normandy alongside the great transatlantique, the France. Iván was a hopeless cosmopolitan who had spent a year in America on a Ford Foundation grant. When I asked him to describe New York, he said, “You’re in New York and you’re tossing and turning with insomnia because you have no lion. So you grab your wallet and out you go and before you know it you’ve got a lion on a leash.”

  “Hmm,” I said to myself. “Why didn’t this man go into literature?”

  One night a good ten years later I had trouble sleeping in New York and went into the first grocery store I found to ask where I could get my hands on a lion. “Wouldn’t you rather have a nice tongue sandwich?” asked th
e owner, a strapping fellow with a smile to match.

  Which all goes to show that research and a sense of humor are not mutually exclusive and that you could do good work under the old system as well. The orange Volkswagen that was the vehicle for our merry pop-sociology, with our younger colleague Róbert Manchin at the wheel, took us to one after another of the hundred-odd villages we had chosen at random. In a parsonage we devoutly touched the four-hundred-year-old desk on which the Calvinist preacher Gáspár Károlyi had translated the entire Bible from Hebrew and Greek. We would take large bags of children’s clothes out to the Gypsy settlements, where kids ran out of their shanties naked through the snow, bombarding us with their “Money, Mister! Give us money!”

  Sometimes we thought we would simply observe them and describe their social structures; sometimes we imagined that if we managed to define the situation reforms might come of it. But the system, the ultimate subject of our observations, searched our apartments one day, initiating what would become a long series of unpleasantries, probably under the impression that if they put us on strict notice and isolated us, others would learn from our example and we would either come to our senses or leave the country as our Russian, Czech, and East German dissident colleagues had. We were naive perhaps, but so were the authorities. We persevered.

  We persevered with Iván’s peripatetic method, lugging the tape recorder up hill and down dale, discussing our subjects while perching on Serbian gravestones in Csobánka or a bench at the base of Oszoly Cliff. Then came the precise formulation beneath old brown rafters and bugging devices. We grew accustomed to passing the narration back and forth, giving signals to one another, rewording sentences that, though perfectly fine to begin with, assumed added luster from an unexpected twist or transition.