Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

However silly this may sound, I'll say it: the moment I heard her, I was reassured that I wasn't alone in this crowd with my special personal and family history, that everybody was here with his or her unique situation, and these peculiarities could not challenge or doubt one another, for then all the feelings that had become common to us would have had to be challenged, too, so it didn't even occur to me to go over to her or to tell the others that I knew her, it remained my own pleasurable little secret and ultimate proof that I was at the right place; little Verochka— as my mother waggishly called this budding actress — was up there declaiming her poem and I was down here, one of the marchers; she was as much entitled to her place as I to mine, even if I refrained from shouting with all those who now had every right to shout, like Szentes, for example, who, knowing full well who my father was, had lit into me during an argument just a few weeks earlier — purple with rage and ready to strike, he screamed into my face that "we lived in a chicken coop, d'you hear? in a chicken coop, like animals!" — or like Stark, who lived near here, in Visegrádi Street, but was now choosing not to go home, who also a few weeks earlier had offered to let me use his drawing pen when the item was unavailable in the stores, but because their apartment was locked, we had to go to the synagogue next door to find his mother, a cleaning woman there, who came with us and opened the door of the ground-floor apartment where the table was already set for two, with only a tiny pot on the stove; my embarrassed protestations notwithstanding, I had to eat my friend's mother's lunch, because she let me understand, with infinitely refined humility, that she knew who my father was; nevertheless, we all got along, each of us carrying his own burden, and I had the right to feel what the others felt, especially since no one had challenged it; in any case, I earned this right, even if my own particular situation seemed to contradict it, because I most carefully distinguished between the concepts of revolution and counter-revolution and did so from the moment I recognized Verochka in that woman on the crate, and because I was neither uninformed, insensitive, nor stupid; I was sure, I knew, that this was a revolution, that I was in the middle of it, in the middle of a revolution which Father, if he were here, would surely recognize; and I also knew he couldn't possibly be here, I had no idea where he could be, he probably had to be hiding somewhere, much to his shame, but if he were here he would tell me that this was exactly the opposite of what I thought it was, he'd call it a counter-revolution.

The words "revolution" and "counter-revolution" occurred to me in their precise, clearly understood forms, guiding me through the thicket of emotional distinctions and identifications that until then had seemed terrifying, stifling, and hopeless, two words whose meaning, weight, and political significance I had learned so early, so precociously, from the conversations and debates among my father and his contemporaries, yet I want to stress that at that moment — and for me this was the revolution — I thought of these words not in their terms, not as a pair of antithetical political concepts borrowed from their vocabulary, but as something intensely personal, as if one of them was his body and the other my own, as if, each of us with his own word, we were standing at opposite ends of a single emotion generated by a common body; This is revolution, I kept repeating, as though I were saying it to him, uttering the word with dark vengeance, gratified to get even with him for everything, not quite knowing what, to which he could respond only with his own word, the very opposite of mine, and therefore I did not feel any distance between us, did not feel that he was removed from me but just the opposite: his body, caved in on itself, stooped, looking pitiful ever since my mother's death, that body the mere sight of which had evoked my fear of dreadful futility, his broken body in which — even after the previous June, after the public disgrace of being suspended for his role in some political trials— he had managed to find enough defiant energy to conspire with some suspicious characters he now called friends, that body was, strange to say, as close to me as it had been when as a small child I had climbed on his beautiful naked body, completely naked and pretending I was part of his dream, and, driven by a secret desire to discover our sameness, reached between his thighs; now I was more cool-headed, knowing well that, physical identity notwithstanding, differences were differences; and here I was, marching with these people I hardly knew yet felt to be brothers, for somehow they meant the same to me as Krisztián had, whose father was killed in the war, and Hédi, whose father was taken to a concentration camp, and Livia, who had to live on scraps from the school kitchen, and Prém, whose father was a drunken fascist, and Kálmán, who was branded a class alien on account of his father, and Maja, with whom I had searched for evidence of treason in Father's papers so that she and I, deceived by our innocence and gullibility, could immerse ourselves in the filth of the age, an abomination that could not be forgotten, something we must still try to put behind us; while marching with these people I presumed their fear, call it worry or concern because I knew what they might be up against, having read the faces of my father's friends gathering at our house; at the same time I also had to fear for Father's racked and tense body, which had grown wild with fever, had to protect it from the flood I was becoming a part of, but knew that I no longer could, knew that I didn't want to resist my own erupting emotions.

We pressed ahead, jostled our way out onto the boulevard.

Defining myself in terms of concepts — my grandparents' strict moral concepts that regulated emotions and passions to fit their middle-class way of life, my parents' more elusive ideological and political concepts — was a not unfamiliar exercise expressing well the kind of upbringing I had, and so it was natural that the self-definition with which I tried in this crowd to separate, indeed sever myself once and for all from my father, quickly changed me back into a small child, for my concern about him, the child's need to identify with him, sympathize with and understand him, proved to be the stronger bond, since ultimately it was with his concepts of myself that I had to justify being here, in this crowd, now, in this situation — or was it our shared grief over Mother's death? as we were finally thrust through the bottleneck and began to run to catch up with the people in front of us — the most elemental need in a crowd is to close ranks — my stuffed schoolbag kept knocking against my legs, my drawing board and long T-square flapping awkwardly from side to side, subtracting something from the revolution, reminding me of my helplessness and confusion, trying to make me admit that this was not for me; each tug and knock seemed to be tapping out this message as rhythmically as they had tapped out revolution just minutes earlier; I felt I had to get home, if only to be rid of these bothersome objects; no problem, I kept telling myself, we were moving in the right direction, I was running among people who did not appear to be bothered by thoughts like mine; I'll get across Margit Bridge somehow, I told myself, and then get on a streetcar, though I was sure I wouldn't find Father at home.

What also seemed reassuring in this plan was that my home was far away, well outside this area that was becoming dangerous even emotionally, up on the hill, far above the city.

And I guessed right: he turned up only a week later, and until then we had no news of him, not even a telephone call, nothing.

It happened on a late afternoon while I was standing with Krisztián in front of our garden gate; it was on the twenty-eighth or twenty-ninth of October, and we were discussing the makeup of the new government— no, it was the twenty-eighth, now I remember, because I had a loaf of bread under my arm, it was the day the bakeries reopened, a Sunday, the first time Kálmán's father's bakery had fresh bread again; Krisztián was telling me how he had managed to get back from Kalocsa, giggling nervously as he told the story, and I knew that the giggles were meant to cover up our efforts not to talk about Kálmán; the year before, after a long struggle, Krisztián had gotten into a military academy; his greatest wish had always been to become an officer, like his father; they happened to be in Kalocsa, on fall maneuvers, when the revolution broke out, and the cadets were simply let go, right in the middle of the field; of course, they had to get rid of their uniforms, because people kept mistaking them for members of the National Security Service, and it was right about then that suddenly Krisztián said, Look, there's your father! and sure enough, down by the hedges, where our garden adjoined the restricted area, Father was hurling himself over the fence.