George Konrad - A Guest in my Own Country

From the street below came the rumble of trams carrying trunks of ammunition to the front, now just a few blocks away, and the voices of Germans shouting to one another. The Russians were getting close, but the Arrow Cross was still goring Jews and Christian defectors in the neighborhood. The word “gore” was on every public poster; it meant kill on the spot and leave the body behind. With weapons exploding in the street, documents meant nothing: only drunkenness and fear had meaning — and the sympathy or antipathy of the moment. The armed men in armbands had plenty of people to shoot, though they had begun to sense they couldn’t execute every single Jew. They may even have had trouble getting into the man-hunting mood day in and day out. Filling the ice-flow-congested Danube with old ladies and young girls was an art whose charm was intermittent. Even the defenseless people they killed — and they could have killed as many as they pleased — even they expressed a modicum of resistance in their eyes, reinforced by the gaze of passersby, who watched the quiet winter coats being led down to the riverbank with some degree of empathy. Of course you needed to make time for other things too, like drinking and getting warm. It must also have occurred to the men in armbands that if the Russians were at the outskirts of the city — and with plenty of artillery too, judging from the din — they would hardly stop but forge on into the center. If they occupied the entire city, Arrow Cross troops could expect anything but decorations, not a pleasant thought by any means. The mood for murder flared up and flagged by turns.

Shooting at Russians was dangerous; Jews were fish in a barrel. Life is a matter of luck, and death bad luck. You can do something for yourself, but not much, and sometimes pride keeps you from doing even that. Several people had been taken from the apartment the previous night. From the next room, not ours.

I watch the Germans. Can they really believe they will drive back the Russians, just five blocks away? Intelligent as they are, they have no idea what they are and are not allowed to do. The Arrow Cross, on the other hand, are the bottom of the barrel, the school dropouts. Their only talent is for torturing cats. A child has to grow up to understand just how underdeveloped adults can be. A fourteen-year-old kid with a gun accompanies unarmed people down to the bank of the Danube. Instead of grabbing the gun from his hand, they go where he orders them. Most victims call it fate, but fate should cause fear and stir them to self-defense whether the threat be sleet falling on their garden or death at the hands of an enemy. Yet people much like pets get used to seeing their companions cut down around them. You can’t feel outrage and empathy every half hour. Standing out on the roof terrace, we hear the occasional sputter of shots. Someone (armed) checks the papers of someone else (unarmed). The former doesn’t like the latter’s face or papers, stands him against the wall, and shoots him dead. The people taken down to the Danube have to stand in a row, their faces to the river. The shots come from behind.

Even so abundant a variety of violent deaths could not obscure the beauty of those dazzling winter mornings. In the shadow of our mortality bread became more like bread, jam more like jam. I gladly chopped all kinds of furniture into firewood. We even ventured down to the riverbank, where we chopped up a small pier. It was good dry pine that burned wonderfully with its white paint.

We knew that the Russians had come in great numbers with tanks and heavy artillery. They had relatively fewer planes than the English and Americans, whose bombers arrived mostly later, in the summer of 1944; in the winter it was still the Ratas that thundered though the sky.

Klára often stood out on the roof terrace, adjusting her black ponytail, tying and untying it. I would give it an occasional yank. She had a little birthmark at the base of her nose and a mole at the tip. In exchange for my services I was granted permission on that very terrace to plant a quick kiss on that mole. It was forbidden to tarry on the nose. Klára liked to speak of parts of her body without possessive pronouns, as if they were independent beings: “The nose has had enough,” she informed me. We spent a lot of time wrestling. It was no easy task to pin Klára down: one of us, then the other would end up on top. Once in a while I managed to pin her shoulders to the horsehair mattress on the floor and lie on her belly, but I would get such a bite on the wrist that the rows of teeth left a lasting mark. “Do you have what it takes to hold your hand over the candle?” asked Klára. I did, and got a burn mark on my palm. Klára kissed it. I carefully slid my fist into my pocket, as if holding a sparrow.

Klára could not stand being shut in and was incapable of spending the entire day in the safe house. The curfew for Jews did not apply to her. I would try to detain her. I was worried, but did not dog her heels. She would make the rounds of the neighborhood, then boast of what she had seen. When an officer asked for her papers, she lacked the nerve to answer his skeptical questions; she merely held her peace. They led Klára down to the Danube together with a long line of Jews. There she recognized one of her aunts and squeezed in next to her. The were all told to empty their pockets and stand with their hands up, facing the bare trees of Margaret Island, the freestanding piers of the bombed-out Margaret Bridge. Her aunt pitched forward into the river, but Klára was not hit. “You’re lucky my magazine ran out,” said the machine-gunner with a friendly laugh. “Now move it — and be good at home!” Thus did the junior (though no longer all that young) officer send her on her way.

I opened the street door for Klára, having recognized the sound of her footsteps through the planked-up door. “Let’s stand here a minute,” she said. “Hold my hand. And don’t let me out tomorrow. Stay with me all day. Don’t tell Mother they shot Sári dead right at my side.”

The next morning I squatted in the courtyard in front of a stove — three bricks and an iron grill — on which bean soup was cooking painfully slowly. My duty was to keep it well stirred, taste it from time to time to see if it was softening up, and stoke the embers with pieces of sawed-up chair legs. Klára stood next to me and talked about her first two years in school, when she couldn’t bring herself to say a word. She would do her work, but not utter a single syllable. She would have liked to say at least hello to the other children, but could not open her mouth. I was more interested in whether the soup was ready. I lifted the cover and stuck in a wooden spoon.

The roar of a Russian fighter plane. Klára pressed against the wall. When she screamed “Come here!” there was such rage in her voice that I spun around in astonishment. The fighter sprinkled the interior flagstone courtyards of the block with machine-gun rounds, hitting no one. The reason Klára was so angry was that I was always playing the hero, which was a decided exaggeration. Suddenly I heard the embers sizzling and looked down to see soup pouring out of a hole in the pot: a bullet had passed through the bottom of the large red enameled vessel. Had I not turned around, it would also have passed through my head, which had been bent over the soup. Finding another pot was no easy task.

“Why did you scream at me?” I asked Klára that evening.

“I don’t know,” she answered, unsure of herself by then.

We stood on the rooftop and heard a famous actress singing. Coming from the Russian military’s speakers, her voice took on a deep, threatening thrum. The goal was to plant fear in the faltering hearts of the Hungarian soldiers pointlessly defending themselves alongside the Germans: “You cannot run, you cannot hide. Your fate, it cannot be denied.” The Russians had entered the city and advanced all the way to the Angyalföld district. The speakers were just a few blocks away. A Stalin-candle shot up, illuminating the rooftops. Hand in hand, we watched, squinting. “It’s beautiful,” whispered Klára. We both laughed at her whisper.