George Konrad - A Guest in my Own Country

We had an unexpected visitor at the safe house: Nene. She brought a small aluminum medallion of Mary on a chain. Nene asked us to wear it around our necks. She wanted us to convert to Catholicism. If we did — or merely declared our willingness to do — she would take us to a convent where they protected and hid converted Jewish children. We thanked Nene for her offer, but told her we would rather not.

We children had agreed on a plan in case we were driven out in a large group, which would most likely end with our being shot into the Danube: we would drop our knapsacks at the corner of the park and run off in different directions. Even if they shot at us — and plenty of guards would be on hand if hundreds of Jews were turned out of their building — some might make it.

The next morning four or five Arrow Cross men and gendarmes burst into the room, screaming at us to get dressed and turn over all weapons, including kitchen knives and pocketknives, plus anything of value, and then line up obediently and quietly on the sidewalk in front of the building. They had a rabbi with them, who gently counseled us to obey and specifically recommended that we hand over all necklaces, mementoes, and engagement rings. I took my time putting my socks on.

Down in front of the building Rebenyák’s red hat stood out. Rebenyák was the house’s bad boy. He would have liked to belong to our gang, but we never let him in. He speculated that the rabbi would get his cut of the items, assuming they didn’t shoot him. We looked at one another inquisitively, wondering whether this was the time to implement the plan and whether we should let Rebenyák in on it, when two loud-voiced men came along, one wearing a gendarme’s uniform, the other a German officer’s. They were shouting — not at us but at the Arrow Cross men and the two gendarmes with us — and ordered us back into the building. They might have been communists in disguise or two Jewish actors. The better actor played his role less effectively; the worse actor was more convincing. Soon we were back in our room again, still in our overcoats, clueless.

The lobby was our clubhouse. Kids would alternate looking out while the rest of us slid down the marble ramp along the bottom flight of stairs. Rebenyák showed up in his red cap. He was fourteen or so and was always pestering me with his stamps, knowing I had brought my stamp album from Újfalu. I always traded smaller, more valuable stamps for larger, nicer-looking ones. I had trouble understanding him: his language was full of city-tough words. Instead of “piss” he would say “drimple,” or “wankle,” or “slash.” He spoke obscurely of some pussy or other, by which I finally realized he meant the sexual organ of one of the older girls. He would punctuate his sentences with “You dig, buddy? No? Then suck my dick!” Klára said he was just throwing his weight around; she had more brains in her shoelaces than Rebenyák under that red hat of his. He liked to boast he could no longer even look at the broads, the tomatoes, the merchandise — in short, at women — who were supposedly all over him down in the cellar. Klára reviewed my trades, checking the stamps’ value in a catalogue. “That lying bastard is constantly getting the better of you. Don’t you mind?” I didn’t really. Ultimately I gave Rebenyák my entire stamp album for a hunk of bacon which, when roasted with onion atop a dish of peas, became the envy of the apartment house. Rebenyák had pinched the bacon from under his mother’s bed in the cellar and crept back with it, weasel-like. He slept in the same bed as his mother, a strong-smelling corpulent woman with hair sprouting from her chin.

I ran into Rebenyák decades later. He was lame and living in a cellar again: he had ceded three apartments to three wives, who would come home with lovers more muscular than he and announce that for the time being Rebenyák would be sleeping in the next room. In his basement flat Rebenyák bought and sold girls from orphanages to rich tourists, instructing the former to steal the latter’s passports. Rebenyák delighted in the possibilities: Swedish, Brazilian, Australian …

In the safe house Rebenyák would venture upstairs despite his mother’s warning that fire was more likely to hit the building there: he was attracted by our cosmopolitan ways. Longingly, he would study the Rosenthal soup cups we ate beans from at the long black table, holding them up to the light: translucent. He stole one.

“Don’t be a creep,” I said. “They might shoot you tomorrow.”

Rebenyák was superstitious, and my remark got to him. “Know who they’re going to shoot tomorrow? You , you wooden-dicked Újfalu crybaby!”

Klára twisted his arm. “You take that back!” She was superstitious herself.

“Just see if your wooden pussy ever gets my jism!” But after whimpering a while in his agony, he brought it back.

More shots penetrated the apartment. Shards of glass made the beans in the Rosenthal cups inedible. The iron stove, whose exhaust pipe we had aimed out of the window, was buckled over like a man kicked in the stomach. Machine gun fire ricocheted off the outside wall. Klára suddenly turned childlike, sitting underneath the table and directing a sumptuous wedding of a clay lamb and a wooden mouse. Rebenyák crouched under the table next to her. I made him nervous.

“Are you really in love with that dodo? I mean, he doesn’t even know the difference between allegory and paregoric.”

“What’s … allegory?” I asked suspiciously.

Rebenyák changed the subject to the pot with the hole: “You saved that hick’s life. Isn’t that enough? Now fall in love with me.”

A depraved smile appeared on Klára’s face.

“Fine. Just give me your stamp collection and fill my hat with sugar cubes.”

Rebenyák blushed, but did not reach for the hat, whose wheat-blue tassel had dangled before my eyes from morning to night.

That night a young fellow named Mário, who lived in the next room, came back from the Danube. The shot had hit him in the arm, and he’d managed to swim out. The only hard part was to free himself from his father, to whom he had been tied. His father had been hit in the chest and held him fast for a while, but finally let go. Clinging to a block of ice, Mário had drifted down the Danube under the bridges. He was afraid of being crushed between blocks of ice. Ultimately he had climbed out onto the stairs at the foot of the Elisabeth Bridge and made his way home, wet and bloody. He was stopped on the way, but was by then indifferent to everything.

“Shoot me into the Danube again if you want.”

“Jews are like cats,” said an old Arrow Cross man. “They keep coming back to life.” He sees it all the time. That’s why they’re so dangerous. Here he’s hardly out of the river and he gets cheeky. When it’s all over, they’ll have the nerve to blame it all on us. “Hey, weren’t you our guest once?”

Yes, he had been — he and his father. They had grilled him about his younger brother, who had taken part in a weapons heist. His father didn’t know anything. They said that if he didn’t tell them they would take care of his other son, Mário. The father gave a false address. The Arrow Cross men came back enraged, then shot someone else instead of the brother they were after. As long as they had him there, they subjected Mário’s testicles to their boot heels. Finally a gendarme officer came into the Arrow Cross building and dragged them off. A good thing.

Dr. Erdős and a group of other elderly Jews had been pulled out of 49 Pozsonyi Avenue to build a cobblestone barricade on the corner: the younger Jews had long since been taken away. Six stones high and four deep, the wall was impenetrable. The T-34 tanks that had made it all the way from Stalingrad would certainly be stopped dead here.