Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

I didn't answer.

In a louder voice, almost rudely, he repeated the question in Hungarian.

I don't know, I said quietly.

Do you think you could be worthy enough to speak the Russian language, he asked, again in his mother tongue.

This made me think not all was lost. I was very anxious to win back his goodwill.

Yes, I groaned in Russian.

He said I could go.

Less than a half hour after they had left, word got around that those who had passed the test would get to go to Sochi, in the Crimea, on a winter vacation. I had never before begun a school holiday in such a foul mood. I squeezed that yes out of myself in Russian, yet I remembered my voice sounding rather decisive and soldierly. I would have liked to hear myself with their ears, because if I could be sure I did all right, then I could forget about my betrayal. I had no desire to go on any winter vacation, and anyway, as the days passed, the likelihood of that grew more and more remote. But I avoided Prém. I didn't want to play with him anymore.

On December 31, I was summoned to school. They sent Livia's father to get me. There were six of us waiting outside the teachers' room, three very pale girls and three eager-looking boys. We didn't say a word to one another. The principal again received us in the company of a strange man and proceeded to deliver a little speech. He tried to make his voice sound appropriately solemn and emotional. An extraordinary honor had been bestowed on our school, he said. On the occasion of the new year, and on behalf of the Young Pioneers and the entire school-age youth of Hungary, we were going to deliver greetings to our nation's leader and wise teacher, Comrade Mátyás Rákosi, in his home. The stranger talked to us about the details. He told us exactly what was going to happen, how to behave, and how to answer any questions we might be asked. The ground rule was, he cautioned, that we mustn't say anything that might cause sadness. Surely we were familiar with the teachings of Zoltân Kodály. While singing, one should keep smiling. That was the next basic rule. After the greetings we would be served hot cocoa with whipped cream and cake. And if Comrade Rákosi's wife should graciously ask us whether we would like some more cake, we must answer no, thank you, because the visit mustn't last longer than twenty minutes. Maja Prihoda would deliver the greeting in Hungarian and I in Russian. He gave us the text, which, he said, we had to memorize and know perfectly by the next morning. No one must know about our mission until afterward, and he would strongly advise us not to show the text to anyone. The bouquets of flowers and further instructions would be handed to us at the gate on Lorant Street.

As soon as I left the others, the noiseless thunder of this last sentence propelled me to Prém. The gate would be raised, after all. He was playing cards with his older brother in their kitchen. Outside, we took only a few steps from the house and I told him right away that we could get in, after all. I made it sound as though we both would. He kept shifting his feet in the cold. The snow crunched under his shoes. And he kept blinking, looking confused, as if he thought I was making a bad joke. I was already pulling the piece of paper from my pocket. To show him the speech as proof. But he cut me off. He had a great hand, he said, he must finish the game, and anyway, I could kiss his ass.

I wasn't offended. In his place I would have said the same thing. Prém was a very poor student. Year after year he barely passed his finals. And his family was dirt-poor. Of course, we weren't rich either; we, too, ate mostly beans, peas, and rotten potatoes, but in a pinch my mother could sell a rug, an old piece of jewelry, or some silver. We were friends; the unbridgeable social gap between us was fully calculated into our friendship. In our war games I was always the officer and he the private. He wouldn't even be corporal or sergeant, for the in between rank would hurt his pride. So this unpleasant little interlude didn't stop us from restoring the old order a few days later. And his eagerness to hear more didn't seem to embarrass him. He had me recount the story of the visit several times a day. I obliged him, and even the first time I gave him a rather imaginative version of it, which I kept embellishing as time went on. It would have been unthinkable to admit that what we had treated as a profound mystery until now, a secret worthy of a reconnaissance mission, was in reality something infinitely boring, colorless, dreary, and mundane. I held the secret in my hand and did not believe my eyes. I couldn't have known then that no secret was drearier than the secret of despotism.

Everything did go just the way the strange man had told us it would. In this secret there is no room for contingency. At nine in the morning we had to show up, in our Pioneer uniforms, without hats, scarves, or coats, at the Lorant Street gate. They stuck two bouquets of carnations in our hands. Maja got one, I got the other. It was a bright, snowy morning, at least ten below freezing. We must have looked pitiful, though, because our parents, quite correctly, wouldn't let us leave the house in white Pioneer shirts, as the instructions prescribed, and made sure we put on lots of warm underthings. We all looked stuffed and bulky, and after we'd moved around awhile, all sorts of things were sticking out from under our holiday outfits. Of course, this detail I didn't mention to Prém. Instead, I told him that on the other side of the gate was this well-concealed structure where they searched us. And to make it sound even more alluring, I added that the girls were stripped to their birthday suits. And that's where they gave us the bouquets, I told him, to prevent us from hiding poison or explosives in them. Actually, one of the guards brought the flowers from his booth. All right, children, who is giving the speech? I couldn't reconcile the terrifying thoroughness of the preparations with the sloppiness of the execution. So I embroidered my tale to fit my harrowing expectations. Our little troupe marched down the road that cut across the forbidden territory, where the snow hadn't been cleared away, just as it hadn't been in the rest of the streets of the city. Against my will, my eyes made the incomprehensible observation that there was no appreciable difference between the two places. But according to my report, the road was heated by a secret underground radiator, so not only was there no snow but the pavement remained bone-dry. On the left, among the trees and quite far apart, were two shabby villas. There was nothing on the right. Snowy woods. And then an ugly house in the woods. In my story, it was a white mansion and we drove up to it in a black limousine. Two armed men guarded the entrance, and we were led into a red-marble hall.

During the last days of October 1956, members of the newly formed national guard removed the barriers to the place. And the following day newspapers reported that the compound was no longer a restricted area. Yet Prém did not reproach me. I did lie to him, but he wouldn't have known what to do with the real facts either. I told him what he wanted to hear. Or rather, I said what our mind's eye had to see in order to understand what otherwise defied understanding.

If in what follows I should discreetly amend or correct some of the statements made by my deceased friend, I do so not out of a burning desire to establish the truth. What I'd like to do is examine our common life experiences from my own particular perspective and for my own sake. Whatever we may have shared can be approached via not only similarities but dissimilarities. In fact, I take the position of the most extreme moral relativists, making no qualitative distinction between truth and lies. I maintain that our lies prove as much about us as do our truths. Yet, when I concede that my friend was perfectly justified to speak of his life as he saw fit, I ask for the same consideration: that I be allowed to lie in my own way, to fantasize, to distort, to hold back, and, if it suits my purposes, even to tell the truth.