Imre Kertész: The Union Jack

real editorial offices, late journalists, one-time journalism, and the mood and reality which embraced all this; I can see the lame porter, the so-called “errand-boy” or, more accurately, office messenger, that singularly priceless person, who in those days was still so singularly priceless merely due to the singularly priceless services he rendered, limping nimbly between the rooms of the editorial office as he fetched and carried manuscripts and galley-proofs and performed trivial but indispensable errands as zealously as he was ready to act as a lender of last resort for cash loans (at low interest), if the worst came to the worst; a person who only later on turned into an all-powerful, implacable, unapproachable Office Assistant, wrapped in the pelt of his arrogance, of the sort familiar to us solely from Kafka’s novels and, to be sure, so-called socialist reality . On one such early-autumn morning, no, it was more likely forenoon already, most probably around the time of the gradual decrescendo from the clamorous chords of going to press, the “deadline,” in those languid moments of slackness deriving from a certain sense of what could be called satisfaction, it happened that one of the stenographers in the editorial office raised with me the question of which theatre I wanted free tickets for. The stenographer — I still remember him today: his name was Schaeffer, and although he was at least fifty years older than I was, I, like everyone else, called him Wee Schaeffer, since he was a diminutive, exquisitely dapper little chap, with his neat suits, fastidious neckties, French-style footwear, one of those cast-off parliamentary stenographers consigned to oblivion in an era when Parliament had long ceased to be a parliament, and stenography was no longer stenography in an era of ready-made texts, off-the-peg texts, prefabricated, pre-digested and meticulously censored disaster texts — this stenographer, then, with his rounded little eunuch’s paunch, his bald egg-head, his face reminiscent of carefully ripened soft cheeses, his little eyes shifting anxiously in their narrow slits, therefore required especially tactful handling, all the more so as he was hard of hearing, something of a paradox, to put it mildly, for a stenographer, and as such — when in prisons and diverse penal institutions in the selfsame city, indeed just a few blocks away, the numbers of people standing in corridors, hands behind their backs, faces turned to the wall, were already starting to multiply rapidly, when summary courts were churning out their sentences at full blast, when everybody outside prison walls, everybody indiscriminately, could be regarded only as a prisoner released on indefinite parole — he continually fretted that his deafness, which everyone knew about, might accidentally be exposed and he might be sent into retirement: this stenographer, then, was the one who used to keep a record of the claims and entitlements to free tickets of the so-called colleagues in that editorial office. I can still remember the ambivalent surprise that caught the young man, whom, as I say, I sustained and felt myself to be at the time, in the wake of the stenographer’s accosting me at all, for on the one hand, he (I) had no heart for going to the theatre, simply on account of the disheartening plays that were being performed in the theatres, while on the other hand, he was entitled to regard the mere fact of being accosted as marking the end of his apprenticeship, his coming of age as a journalist, so to speak, since free tickets were earmarked exclusively for fully qualified and paid-up so-called colleagues. I remember that we perused the miserable options for a while with honest, one might say fellow-suffering scepticism — he, an old man simplified to his trivial practical fears, and I, a young man with more complex and more general anxieties — during which our gazes, so foreign and yet so intimate, communed for a few seconds. There was one other choice: the Opera House. “ Die Walküre is on,” he said. At that time I did not know the opera. I knew nothing at all about Richard Wagner. All in all, I knew nothing about any operas, had no liking for opera at all, though as to why not, that would be worth reflecting on, but not here, not now, when I really ought to be telling the story of the Union Jack. Suffice it to say that my family liked opera, which may make it somewhat easier to understand why I didn’t like opera. What my family liked, though, was certainly not the operas of Richard Wagner but Italian opera, the pinnacle of my family’s taste, I almost said tolerance, being the opera Aida . I grew up in a musical milieu — insofar as I can call my childhood milieu a musical milieu at all, which I cannot, because I would call my childhood milieu any other milieu but a musical milieu — where the remarks that were passed about Richard Wagner, for example, were of the kind “Wagner is loud , Wagner is difficult ” or, to mention a remark made in connection with another composer, “If it has to be a Strauss, then make it Johann,” and so forth. In short, I grew up in a milieu that was just as stodgy in respect to music as it was in every other respect, which did not leave my taste completely unscathed. I would not venture to state categorically that it was exclusively the influence of my family, but it is an indisputable fact that, up until the moment when I got my ticket to Richard Wagner’s opera Die Walküre from the stenographer Schaeffer in that editorial office, I liked instrumental music exclusively, and I disliked any music in which there is singing (excepting the Ninth Symphony , and by that I mean Beethoven’s, not the Mahler Ninth Symphony , which I got to know later on, much later on, at just the right time, at a time when thoughts about death were manifesting, when I was making acquaintance with thoughts about death, indeed, what I would have to call a process of familiarising myself with, if not exactly befriending, thoughts about death), as if in the human voice alone, or to be more precise, the singing voice, I saw some kind of polluting matter which casts a poor light on the music. All the musical precursors of which I partook prior to hearing the Wagner opera had been purely instrumental precursors, chiefly orchestral, which I got to at best sporadically, primarily through the agency of that exceedingly testy old man at the Music Academy, known to every student or student type, who, due to some eye defect, wore a perennial look of distrust but, for a forint or two pressed into his palm, would let any student or student type into the auditorium, testily ordering them to stand by the wall and then, as soon as the conductor appeared at the stage door leading to the podium, would direct them in a harsh voice to any unoccupied free seats. It would be fruitless for me to muse now over why, how, and on what impulse I came to like music; it is a fact, however, that around that time, when I was still not yet able to call myself a journalist, when my perpetually problematic life was perhaps at its most problematic because that life was at the mercy of my family, a family that was already on the point of breaking up around that time, and subsequently, during the disaster era, broke up completely, to be dispersed into prisons, foreign countries, death, poverty, or even, in the rarer cases, prosperity, a life from which already then, as ever since, I was constantly obliged to flee; it is a fact, therefore, that even then, as little more than a child, I would have been unable to tolerate that life, my life, without music. I think it was that life which prepared me, or in truth I should say rather that life which rehearsed me, for the disaster-era life which ensued not long afterwards, palliated as it was by reading and music, a life comprising several separate lives that played into one another’s hands, each one able to annihilate the others at will, yet each holding the others in balance and constantly offering formulations. In this sole respect, purely in respect of this balancing, the balancing of small weights, my seeing and hearing Die Walküre , being receptive to Die Walküre , being overwhelmed by Die Walküre , undoubtedly represented a threat in a certain sense: it cast too big a weight onto the scales. What is more, that event — Richard Wagner’s opera Die Walküre —had an impact like a street mugging, a sudden attack for which I was unprepared in every sense. Naturally, I was not so uninformed as to be unaware that Richard Wagner himself had written the librettos of his operas, making it advisable to read through the texts before listening to his operas. But I was unable to procure the libretto for Die Walküre , any more than Wagner’s other librettos, a state of affairs to which pessimism induced by my milieu, and lassitude induced by that pessimism — a lassitude that was always instantly ready for renunciation of any kind — no doubt also contributed, though to be completely fair I should add that in the disaster era, which happened to be the era in which Richard Wagner began to interest me, Richard Wagner was actually classified as an undesirable composer, and thus his opera librettos were not available for sale, his operas were generally not performed, so to this day I don’t understand and don’t know why Die Walküre , of all his operas, was being performed, and with a fair degree of regularity at that. I do recall that some sort of so-called programme booklet was on sale, the sort of disaster-era programme booklet which, alongside (disastrous) synopses of other operas, ballets, plays, marionette shows and films, also provided a five- or six-line synopsis of the “content,” so to speak, of Die Walküre , out of which I understood nothing at all and which presumably — though this did not occur to me at the time — had been deliberately contrived in such a way that nobody should understand it; in truth, to hold nothing back, I was even unaware that Die Walküre was the second piece in an interlinked tetralogy. That was how I took my seat in the auditorium at the Opera House, which even in the disaster era was still an exceedingly agreeable, indeed splendid, place. What happened to me is what came next: “… the lights in the auditorium went down and below their box the orchestra broke into the wild pulsating notes of the prelude. Storm, storm … Night and tempest … Storm, a raging tempest, in the forest. The angry God’s command resounded, once, twice repeated in its wrath, obediently the thunder crashed. The curtains whisked open as though blown by the storm. There was the rude hall, dark save for a glow on the pagan hearth. In the centre towered up the trunk of the ash tree. Siegmund, a rosy-cheeked man with a straw-coloured beard, appeared in the timber-framed doorway and, beaten and harried, he leaned against the door-post. His sturdy legs, wrapped round with hide and thongs, carried him forwards with tragically dragging steps. Beneath his blond brows and the blond forelocks of his wig his blue eyes fixed the conductor with an imploring gaze. At last the orchestra gave way to the tenor’s voice, which rang clear and true, though he tried to make it sound like a gasp … A minute passed, filled with the singing, eloquent flow of the music, rolling its waves at the feet of the events on the stage … Sieglinde entered from the left … They looked at each other with the beginning of enchantment, a first dim recognition, standing rapt while the orchestra interpreted in a melody of profound enchantment … Again their glances met and mingled, while below the melody voiced their yearning.” Yes, that is how it was. Try as I might to follow it, straining my ears and eyes to the utmost, I understood not a single word of the text. I had no idea who Siegmund and Sieglinde were, who Wotan and the Valkyrie were, or what motivated them. “His wrath roared itself out, by degrees grew gentle and dispersed into a mild melancholy, on which note it ended. A noble prospect opened out, the scene was pervaded with epic and religious splendour. Brünnhilde slept. The God mounted the rocks.” Yes, where-as I stepped out of the Opera House onto Stalin Avenue, as it happened to be called at that time. I shall not attempt — naturally, it would be pointless to do so — to analyse right here and now the so-called artistic impact or artistic experience ; in essence — to resort, against my better judgement, to a literary simile — I walked in much the same way as the main protagonists in Tristan und Isolde (another opera by the same composer, Richard Wagner, which at that time I knew about only by hearsay) go around after they have imbibed the magic potion: the poison had penetrated deep within me, permeated me through and through. From then onwards, whenever Die Walküre was performed, as far as possible I would always be seated there, in the auditorium, for the only other refuge that I found where I might occasionally shelter myself, if only with an all-too-fragile fugacity, during that period of general, which is to say both public and private, disaster, apart from the auditorium of the Opera House and the, sadly, all-too-sporadic performances of Die Walküre , being the Lukács Baths. In those two places, immersed in the pure sensuality of the then still green, hot-spring water of the Lukács Baths and in the both sensually and intellectually very different ambience of the ruddy gloom at the Opera, every now and then, in lucky moments, I would become aware of a presentiment, unattainably remote of course, of the notion of a private life. Even if such a presentiment, as I have already mentioned, was fraught with a certain implicit danger, I could not help sensing its irrevocability , and I was able to place my trust in that solid sentiment as in a kind of metaphysical solace : put simply, even in the lowest depths of disaster, and in the lowest depths of consciousness of that disaster, I was never again able to carry on living as if I had not seen and heard Richard Wagner’s opera Die Walküre , as if Richard Wagner had not written his opera Die Walküre , as if that opera and the world of that opera did not subsist as a world in the disaster world. That was the world I loved; the other I had to endure. Wotan interested me; my editor-in-chief did not. The enigma of Siegmund and Sieglinde interested me; that of the world which was really around me — the real disaster world — did not. It goes without saying that I was unable to formulate all this for myself so simply at the time, since it was not, nor could it be, so simple. I suppose that I conceded too much to the terror of so-called reality, which thereafter appeared to be the inexorable reality of the disaster, the one and only, unappealable, real world; and although for my own part, I was now — after Die Walküre , through Die Walküre — unappealably aware of the reality of the other world as well, knowing of it, as it were, only in secret, in some sense with an illicit and thus incontrovertible but nevertheless guilty knowledge. I suppose I did not yet know that this secret and guilty knowledge was in fact a knowledge of myself . I did not know that existence always sends word of itself in the form of secret and guilty knowledge, and that the world of the disaster was in fact a world of this secret and guilty knowledge raised to the point of self-denial, a world which rewards only the virtue of self-denial, which finds salvation solely in self-denial, and which is therefore — however we look at it — in some sense religious. Thus I saw no connection of any kind between the disaster world of Die Walküre and the real disaster world, even though, on the other hand, I had unappealable cognisances of the reality of both worlds. I simply did not know how to bridge the chasm, or rather, to be more accurate, schizophrenia, which separated these two worlds, just as I did not even know why I should feel it was my task — and a somewhat obscure, somewhat painful, yet also somewhat hopeful task at that — to bridge that chasm or rather, to be more accurate, schizophrenia. “… He looked down into the orchestra pit. The sunken space stood out bright against the darkness of the auditorium and was a hive of industry: hands fingered, arms drew the bows, cheeks puffed out, humble — all these assiduous mortals laboured zealously to bring to utterance the work of a master who suffered and created; created the noble and simple visions enacted above on the stage above … Creation! How did one create? Pain gnawed and burned in his breast, a drawing anguish which was yet somehow sweet, a yearning — whither? for what? It was all so vague, so shamefully unclear. Two thoughts, two words he had: creation, passion. His temples glowed and throbbed, and it came to him as in a yearning vision that creation was born of passion and was reshaped anew as passion. He saw the pale, spent woman hanging on the breast of the fugitive man, he saw her love and distress, and he knew: so life must be to be creative”—I read those words like somebody who was reading for the first time in his life, like somebody who was encountering words for the first time in his life, secret words that spoke to him alone, interpretable by him alone, the same thing as had happened to me when I saw Die Walküre for the first time in my life. The book — Thomas Mann’s The Blood of the Walsungs —was about Die Walküre , as its very title divulged. I began reading it in the hope that I might learn something about Die Walküre from it, and I put the book down in a shock of amazement, as if I had learnt something about myself, as if I had read a prophecy. It all fitted: Die Walküre , the fugitive existence, the distraughtness — everything. I ought to note here that between first receiving Die Walküre , my first engulfment by Die Walküre , and my first engulfment by this little book, years — suffice to say, years full of vicissitudes — had passed; so, in order to clarify my assertion that “it all fitted,” I shall be obliged at this point to digress slightly, to give at least an outline of the circumstances in which I was living at the time, all the more so that I too may find a steady bearing in the weft of time and events and not find I have lost the thread of this story, the story of the Union Jack. This book— The Blood of the Walsungs —came into my hands after my wife-to-be and I, with the assistance of a good friend of ours, one fine summer morning traversed half the city, from the former Lónyay, then Szamuely and today once again Lónyay, Street with a four-wheeled tow cart on which were piled, to put it simply, the appurtenances of our rudimentary household. This happened in the nick of time, since the lodgings in Lónyay (or Szamuely) Street that my wife-to-be and I had been inhabiting had by then started to become unbearable and uninhabitable. I had become acquainted with my wife-to-be in the late summer the year before, just after she had got out of the internment camp where she had been imprisoned for a year for the usual reasons — that is to say, no reason at all. At that time, my wife-to-be was living in the kitchen of a woman friend from earlier days, where the woman friend had taken her in — for the time being — because somebody else happened to be living in my wife-to-be’s apartment. That somebody else, a woman (Mrs Solymosi), had taken over the apartment under extremely suspicious — or if you prefer, extremely usual — circumstances immediately after my wife-to-be’s arrest, through the intervention of exactly the same authorities who — essentially without any verifiable reason, indeed on no pretext at all — had arrested my wife-to-be. Practically the moment she learned of my wife-to-be’s release, that somebody else (Mrs Solymosi) immediately requested my wife-to-be (by registered letter) to instantly have the furniture my wife-to-be had unlawfully stored in the apartment that rightfully belonged to her (Mrs Solymosi) removed to the place where they were currently lodged (which is to say, the kitchen of the woman friend from earlier days who was taking her in for the time being). When later, thanks to a protracted legal action, but above all let us just say to unpredictable circumstances — let’s call it a stroke of luck — my wife-to-be got her own apartment back, we discovered, among some abandoned odds and ends, books, and other junk, pegged together with a paper clip, a bundle of paper slips covered with the pearly letters of a woman’s handwriting, from which I don’t mind quoting a few details here, under the title of, let’s say, “Notes for a denunciation” or “Fragments of a denunciation,” purely as a contribution to a legal case-study or even to an aesthetics of the disaster, as follows: “She has lodged various complaints against me at the Council and the police, that I illegally moved into the apartment and stole hers … She imagined she could scare me with her slanders and I would give up the apartment to her … The apartment has been allocated definitively; there is no space for her furniture in my apartment … Furniture : 3 large wardrobes, 1 corner couch, 4 chairs … She should put them into storage, I am under no obligation to keep them after what is already 1½ years …” There follow a few items of data that would appear to be reminders: “17/10/1952 application, 29/10 allocation, 23/11 apartment opened up, inventory taken, 15/11 move in, 18/11 ÁVH [State Security], Council = ÁVH, ÁVH 2x — no response, Rákosi’s secretariat … In September of 1953 Mrs V. [i.e. my wife-to-be] Mrs V. a.m.… Asked her by reg. letter to remove furn … Have to keep my own furniture in cellar because I’m looking after her stuff … Her wardrobes are crammed full of dirty clothes, under ÁVH seal, they can’t be aired … She claims she doesn’t have an apartment and is staying as a guest with somebody. Does that mean she doesn’t need the things in the wardrobe? The woman puts on a good act and is quite capable of sobbing, if required, but I’ve had enough of that and I won’t tolerate her furniture in my apartment any longer—.” So we had had to spend the disaster winter that lay before us, which was ushered in at the very start by temperatures of twenty to twenty-five degrees below zero, in various temporary shelters, including the aforementioned kitchen of the woman friend from earlier days, a spare room of distant relatives surrendered on a very explicitly temporary basis, an exceptionally charmless sublet room, made especially memorable by its ice-cold latrine on the outside corridor, and so on, until a miracle — admittedly, all too temporary as it turned out — in the shape of Bessie, a former snake charmer and her Lónyay (or Szamuely) Street sublet apartment, dropped into our lap. It doesn’t matter in the slightest now how and why this miracle occurred, although it would be wrong to leave out of this story — the story of the Union Jack — the earthly mediator of this heavenly miracle: a grey-templed gentleman, known as Uncle Bandi Faragó in the cafés and nightclubs around Nagymező Street, who, somewhat flashily for those times — the disaster time — and the occasion — the disaster — used to dress in an aristocratic green hunting-hat, a short sheepskin coat and English-style tweeds, whose face glowed with a permanent suntan even in the deathly pale winter, and besides that allegedly pursued the exclusive occupation of a professional conman and adulterer, as was indeed confirmed decades later when, from a newspaper bought out of sheer absent-mindedness (since the so-called news was of no real interest), I was silently and genuinely shocked to learn about his death in a well-known common prison, where, allegedly, a permanent cell, his slippers and a bathrobe were set aside for him even during the days that he spent on release; and who one afternoon, in one of those cafés around Nagymező Street, one of those cheap, noisy, draughty, gloomy and filthy cafés with music which, since the state, though holding them to be iniquitous, at least heated well and kept open until late at night, had become an illicit day-and-night shelter for outcasts and in which my wife-to-be and I were, so to say, temporarily residing much of the time instead of in our temporary residences, suddenly came up to our table, and, really without any prior or more direct introduction, declared, “I hear you’re looking for lodgings, my lad.” Then to my apathetic admission, which ruled out all hope in advance: “But why, dear boy, didn’t you come to me ?” he asked in a tone of such self-explanatory, such deep and uncomprehending reproach that, in my shame, I was lost for words. Later, after we had gone to the imparted address in Szamuely Street, where the door was opened by a lady, getting on in years and — as Gyula Krúdy might have put it — of statuesque figure, with yellow forecurls peeking from under her green turban, the face slightly stiffened by heavy makeup, and wearing a curious silk pantaloon besprinkled with magical stars and geometrical designs, who, not content with a verbal reference, did not allow so much as a toe into the hallway until she had glimpsed the message written in Uncle Bandi Faragó’s own hand on Uncle Bandi Faragó’s own calling card; so when this lady led us, my wife-to-be and me, to the room that was to let, a spacious corner room with a bay window, the dominant furnishings of which were a decidedly oversized divan big enough for at least four persons, a mirror placed in front of it, and a standard lamp with a shade plastered with all sorts of obsolete bank notes (including the million- and billion-pengő denominations that had been in currency not so long before) that gave a mystic lighting effect, my wife-to-be and I did not doubt for one second the original purpose to which the room had been put, and it seemed most probable (and at once a clue to the miracle) that around that time, in that era of denunciations, the room’s intended purpose — who knows, perhaps due to a denunciation that just happened to be pending — did not, all of a sudden, to be concise, seem expedient. Things may have changed by the spring, but during that winter we had the chance to peek into our landlady’s past: we could see her as a young woman, wearing an ostrich-plumed silk turban, with a giant speckled snake coiled around her naked back, in some nightclub in Oran, Algiers or Tangiers, which there, in that Lónyay (i.e. Szamuely) Street disaster-sublease, struck one as indeed quite extraordinarily implausible, and we could handle and ritually marvel at a profusion of relics which were every bit as implausible; later on, however, the snake charmer became despondent, and it was apparent from her increasingly consistent demeanour that, above and beyond the hostile feelings towards people that naturally arise in one as time goes by, she was not guided so much by the random targets of that transcendental antipathy as by palpably down-to-earth goals: she wanted to regain her room, because she had other, presumably more lucrative, plans for it. I shall try to skip the details as rapidly as possible, for I can only relate those details in this spirit, the spirit of formulability, which is by no means the same thing, of course, as the real spirit of those details, which is to say the way in which I lived and survived that reality; and this nicely illustrates the iron curtain that rises between formulation and being, the iron curtain that rises between the storyteller and his audience, the iron curtain that rises between one person and another, and, in the end, the impenetrable iron curtain that rises between a person and himself, between a person and his own life. I woke up to all this when I read those words: “… he saw her love and distress, and he knew: so life must be to be creative.” Those words, all at once, awakened me to my life; all at once, I glimpsed my life in the light of those words; those words, or so I felt, changed my life. That book which, from one second to the next, swept away the haze of my formulations from the surface of my life, so I might see that life, all at once, face to face, in the fresh, startling and bold colours of seriousness, I discovered in the new (that is, repossessed) apartment — absolutely out of place, absolutely implausibly, in the manner, as I remain convinced to this day, of a miracle that spoke to me alone — among the forgotten odds and ends, the above-mentioned denunciation slips and, thumbed to tatters, several volumes of pulp, shock-worker, partisan and romantic novels, the latter of defunct imprints. That book, so I felt, marked the start of the radicalisation of my life, when my way of life and its formulation would no longer be able to stand in any sort of contradiction with one another. By then, the time when I had been a journalist, or even a factory worker, had already long gone; by then I had committed myself to my seemingly boundless, but also supposedly boundless and intentionally boundless studies, being able, thanks to a congenital ailment, to absent myself from my occasional jobs for months on end without running any immediate risk in the meantime that my mode of existence would, in all likelihood, qualify as a crime of so-called “publicly dangerous work-shyness.” At that time all this completely preoccupied me, producing in me a sense of exaltation, of mission . I suppose it was then that I became acquainted with the experience of reading, reading for nothing in particular, an experience in no way comparable with the experience of reading as it is generally understood and designated, the sort of reading bouts, or mania for reading, which might overcome a person at best just once or twice in a lifetime. Around that time there also appeared a book by the author of The Blood of the Walsungs , a volume of essays, in which there was an essay on Goethe and Tolstoy, whose chapter titles alone—“Questions of Rank,” “Illness,” “Freedom and Eminence,” “Noblesse Oblige,” and the rest — were enough in themselves almost to dumbfound me. I recall that I read this book all the time and everywhere I went; the essay on Goethe and Tolstoy was tucked under my arm all the time and everywhere I went: it was with me when I boarded trams, went into shops, wandered about the streets — and so also, one especially fine early afternoon in late autumn, when I set off for the Istituto Italiano di Cultura per l’Ungheria , the Italian Institute of Culture, where at the time, in my boundless thirst for knowledge, I was learning Italian, and during my passage across the city I registered, indeed, here and there, even participated, at least as an astounded spectator, in the intoxicating events of a day that was later to become memorable, a day that I or anybody else could hardly have guessed would turn into that particular memorable day. I was, I recollect, somewhat surprised when I turned off Múzeum Boulevard into the otherwise normally deserted Bródy Sándor Street, hurrying towards the nearby palace of the Italian Institute, which had originally been built as the one-time Hungarian Parliament. The lesson, however, started at the normal time. After a while, the street noise penetrated into the room even through the closed window. Signore Perselli, the finicky, jet-black-moustached direttore , for whom, on his rare visits to lessons, it took no more than a blatantly clumsy pronunciation of the word molto to be excited into demonstrating how it should be done with Italian fluidity, with the initial “ o ” closed and the final “ o ” short, the intervening consonants being articulated with the tongue drawn back, almost like saying “m a lto,” on this occasion burst into the room in genuinely frantic haste to exchange a few no doubt diplomatically apprehensive words with our teacher before scurrying on to the other classrooms. A minute later, everybody was at one of the windows. In the slowly gathering dusk I could clearly see that on the left, towards the front, green rockets were being launched from the Hungarian Radio building above the heads of the darkly milling crowd of protesters there. At that very moment, from the opposite direction, three open-topped trucks turned into the street out of Múzeum Boulevard; from above, I had a good view of the militiamen with the green markings of border guards who were seated on the benches, rifles squeezed between their knees. On the back of the first truck, leaning against the driver’s cabin, stood a lieutenant, evidently the commander. The crowd fell quiet, opened ranks, then roared. It is quite unnecessary here for me to evoke the manifestly pathetically affecting words that they started to shout to the soldiers down below, words which only at that given moment, that elevated moment of pathos, were able to exert an effect of genuine pathos. The trucks slowed down in the dense crowd, then came to a halt. The lieutenant turned about and raised an arm aloft. The last of the trucks now started to back out of the street, to be followed by the other two, amidst jubilation from the crowd. At this moment, we who, from an Italian diplomatic viewpoint which held itself to be above and beyond all this, had no doubt suddenly become unwelcome guests, capable of who knew what sort of emotional or other manifestations, were ordered to gather downstairs, beneath the long, neo-Renaissance vaulting of the entrance. The heavy, two-leafed gate was bolted from the inside with iron bands. There we squashed together, between the sounds assailing us from outside and the security guards standing by behind us, until the Institute’s burly porter, evidently on some signal, swung the iron bands back and swiftly threw open the gate though which each and every one of the sixty to eighty of us, on a vigorous shove being applied from the rear, found ourselves, in a trice, deposited outside on the by now twilit street, in a vortex of buffeting sound, swirling movement, ungovernable passions and inscrutable events that teemed between the buildings. In the ensuing days, my attention was divided between the essay on Goethe and Tolstoy and the events that raged outside; or, to be more precise, the cryptic and unformulable promise that inhered in the essay on Goethe and Tolstoy, in the gradual comprehension and eventual acceptance of it, was linked in my mind, in a strange but quite self-explanatory manner, with the equally unformulable, similarly uncertain but, at the same time, wider-ranging promise inherent in the external events. I cannot say that the events that were stirring externally diminished my interest in the essay on Goethe and Tolstoy: to the contrary, they height-ened it; on the other hand, I also cannot say that while I was totally immersed in the world of the essay on Goethe and Tolstoy and the spiritual and intellectual jolts of that experience, I also absent-mindedly paid occasional attention to the events that were stirring in the street: no, that is not what happened at all; I would have to say instead, however strange it may sound, that the events stirring in the street vindicated the heightened attention paid to the essay on Goethe and Tolstoy; the events stirring in the street during those days thereby bestowed a genuine and incontrovertible sense on the heightened attention I was paying to the essay on Goethe and Tolstoy . The weather turned autumnal; several quieter days ensued; down below on the street, of course, but especially on looking out from the window, I could see how much the street had changed: detached overhead tramway cables snaking between the rails, dangling bullet-riddled signboards, smashed windows here and there, fresh holes in the peeling stucco of the houses, dense throngs of people on the pavements of the long, long street, all the way up to the distant corner, and very occasionally a vehicle, a passenger car or lorry, tearing by at great speed, with some highly conspicuous distinguishing marks, the more garish the better. A hurtling jeep-like vehicle suddenly appeared, with the British red-white-and-blue colours, a Union Jack, draped over the entire radiator. It was scudding at breakneck speed between the crowds thronging the pavement on either side when, sporadically at first but then ever more continuously, evidently as a mark of their affection, people began to applaud. I was able to see the vehicle, once it had sped past me, only from the rear, and at the very moment when the applause seemed to coalesce, almost solidify, an arm stretched out hesitantly, almost reluctantly at first, from the left-side window of the car. The hand was tucked into a light-coloured glove, and though I did not see it close up, I presume it was a kid glove; probably in response to the clapping, it cautiously dipped several times parallel to the direction in which the vehicle was travelling. It was a wave, a friendly, welcoming, perhaps slightly consolatory gesture which, at the very least, adumbrated an unreserved endorsement and, by the by, also the solid consciousness that before long that same gloved hand would be touching the rail of the steps leading down from an aircraft onto the runway on arrival home in that distant island country. After that, vehicle, hand and Union Jack — all disappeared in the bend of the road, and the applause gradually died away. Читать дальше