Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

I had never before attempted anything so crazy, and certainly don't intend to ever again. Yet whatever else my actions may have led to — joy, grief, happy resolution, or indecision — the group of emotions usually referred to as angst has become a permanent part of my psychic makeup.

And this in spite of the fact that until then I had never had feelings even remotely resembling angst. But I don't wish to dwell on them, not only because I am not clear on their origins, but because otherwise I appear to be a well-adjusted man with a cheerful disposition, and to me this genuine appearance is more important.

When one is asked to define family origins, one begins by making selections among one's ancestors. When I am asked that question, I usually say I come from a military family. As if all my forebears were professional soldiers, whether generals or privates. Which may be an impressive notion but does not reflect reality. It's a little like saying one comes from an old family. Every family is equally old. It's true, though, that the sons and daughters of different peoples climbed down from the trees at different times. For instance, the Incas and the Hebrews did it much earlier than the Germans, and in all probability the Magyars did it somewhat later than the English or the French. But from this it does not follow that a family of serfs of a certain nation is not as old as a prince's family in the same nation. And just as a nation distinguishes between racially identical families on the basis of social status, so does an individual when he begins to choose among the motley group of his ancestors, based on the personal evaluation of his own interests, desires, and ambitions. This peculiar mode of selecting one's ancestors — tailor-made for the person doing the selecting — is something I noticed in my friend's manuscript, too.

The only way he can maintain the equilibrium of his personality, splintered by extreme contradictions, is by observing himself, by continually scrutinizing the origins and causes of the unconscious forces raging within him. But for this all-important psychological self-analysis he needs the kind of balanced and sober perspective that, because of his unbalanced state, he does not have. He is trapped in a vicious circle. He can break out of it only if, for the duration of his self-analysis at least, he adopts the perspective of a person or group of persons in his surroundings who have the stability he needs. This is the reason for the decisive role his maternal grandfather plays in his life story, this liberal bourgeois who, even in very dangerous conditions, remained a model of moderation and self-discipline. And it is also the reason he views with mixed irony and affection that tenacious, stoic, and uncompromisingly respectable bourgeois woman, his grandmother. Through them he would like to identify with something to which his real-life situation no longer entitles him. Still, this is how he selects his origins. He chooses to trace this one line back to his past, though in principle he could have chosen a number of others. While I was reading the manuscript, it struck me that his leaving out his other set of grandparents couldn't have been completely unintentional. I'm not suggesting he did this because he was ashamed of them or because they weren't as important in his life as his maternal grandparents.

On weekends or summer mornings sometimes we would ride out on a streetcar to visit them in their home in Káposztásmegyer.

After completing my university studies I began working for a foreign trade company. For about ten years I traveled to many parts of the world. Yet when I think of travel, what comes to mind first is that rickety yellow streetcar and the two of us bumping along on its open platform. Sometimes, on long plane rides, I'd be wrapped up in some technical reading, and this old image would suddenly flash before me. And I'd feel as though I wasn't even flying but riding across the globe in that yellow streetcar. Rattling along old Váci Road, interminably.

The old man was a disabled veteran of the First World War who managed to retain his robust physique, despite his handicap; he had a booming voice, and his pockmarked nose was a blazing red from steady drinking. Though he was nearly seventy, his hair was just beginning to turn gray, and he still worked as a night watchman at the waterworks, where he also lived with his roly-poly wife in a basement flat. This grandmother had a habit of sending telegrams to her grandson: I am making pancakes today. Come for Strudel tomorrow. If I said it was these visits, this environment, that cemented and sustained our friendship, I wouldn't be far from the truth. If too long a time elapsed without anything happening, I'd ask him: Are we having apple fritters? To which he would respond: No, apple pie. Or he'd simply turn to me and say: Apricot dumplings. And all I had to ask was when. We developed a whole language of our own that no one else could understand. And it had to do with more than just delicious food.

In those days I got very excited about machines, things mechanical, anything moving, not to mention making things and setting them in motion, and nothing could satisfy these interests more than what I found at the waterworks. But my friend's enthusiasm was roused exclusively by my unquenchable curiosity. He must have known that with the promise of a visit he had an emotional hold over me and could even bribe me. All he'd have to say is nut roll, and I'd forget everything else and be off and running. The shop stewards, soberly dressed in shirt and tie, even their apprentices in their undershirts, were as inexhaustibly patient as I was infinitely curious. They showed and explained everything to us. It must have been tremendously gratifying for them to realize that in the final analysis most questions can actually be answered. The general overhauls were the most exciting times at the plant. On these occasions extra help was hired from the neighboring villages. Girls and women in rubber boots and hitched-up skirts got busy scrubbing and scraping the tiled walls of the emptied water tanks; greasy-faced men and pimply-faced shop boys cleaned and repaired the disassembled machines. There was a lot of laughter, horseplay, telling of coarse jokes, teasing, and pawing. As if they were all participants in some ancient ritual. They kept inflaming themselves and each other, men doing it to men, women to women, men to women, and women to men, as if this stimulation had as much to do with the work at hand as with something very different, something into which we, two young boys, had not yet been initiated. It was like some strange work song. To be able to do justice to their daytime labor, they had to sing out of themselves their nocturnal lyrics. But the two of us could wander about freely in the fascinating, outsize engine rooms built at the turn of the century, and in the pristine park planted around the giant wells, in the echoing halls of the storage tanks where everything was so spotless, so sparkling clean, we never dared do anything but stand and quietly watch the water level rise and fall, the surface remaining strangely motionless.

He has nothing to say in his manuscript about this very early, almost idyllic period of our friendship. I confess I first found this conspicuous omission so insulting I felt myself blushing every time I thought of it. For more than once we spent the night there, with the two of us sleeping in his grandparents' onion-smelling kitchen on a rather narrow cot. I once read in an ethnographic study that when in the cold of winter children of poor Gypsies cuddle up with each other on the straw-covered floor, their parents make sure that boys lie next to boys and girls next to girls. I don't think that this clinging brotherly warmth, which later my friend desperately pursued all his life, was something he intended to forget.