George Konrad - A Guest in my Own Country

This is perhaps my third birthday, a Saturday. The play of bright light off the synagogue’s yellow wall behind our house is dazzling. The chestnut and sour cherry trees in the garden are already in bud. The living room is quiet, but I hear rustlings coming from the dining room. I’m not looking forward to the door opening, because as soon as it does I will have to express my happiness openly. Once you have your gifts, you must play with them. How long can you sit on a rocking horse?

The big news is that the storks have taken their place on the tower next to the Tablets of the Covenant on the synagogue: the winter has not destroyed their nest. One tower is the family home, the other the sanctum of the paterfamilias, where, towards evening, having supplied his charges with treasures from the hunt, he would retire for meditation, leg up, bill tucked in.

A special smell emanates from the chest where the logs for the fire are kept. It mingles with the aroma of burning oak. From here we may proceed to my parents’ bedroom, where the scent of Mother’s dresser predominates, the ever-present scent of lavender, a moth repellent. Another exciting symphony of scents calls me to the kitchen, but can’t we put off eating for the moment (well, maybe just a cheese pastry to go with my café au lait): the smell of onions and bloody meat is just too much, nor am I ready for the sight of a fowl lying on a stone, the blood spurting from its neck onto a white enameled plate. (The servants let it coagulate, then cook it with fried onions for their morning snack.)

The breakfast is splendid. Now let’s make some serious plans for the day. We’ll go down to my father’s hardware store, a space ten meters by twenty, with a cellar below that serves as a warehouse. If it was made of iron, you could find it there — anything the people of Csonka-Bihar County could need. The reason it was called Csonka-Bihar, “Rum Bihar,” was that neighboring Transylvania, including its capital Nagyvárad (together with most of my family, Hungarian-speaking middle-class Jews), had been uncoupled from Hungary after the First World War and Berettyóújfalu had become the seat of what was left of Bihar County. Everyone came here to do the weekly shopping on market Thursdays, even from outlying villages.

On that day things would bustle starting early in the morning: bells chiming on horses’ necks, carts on runners in winter. Even closed windows in the children’s room could not seal out the beating of hoofs, the whinnying, the rumble of carts, the mooing. My father’s hardware store was filled with customers bargaining for goods, punctuated by bouts of hearty conviviality. His assistants, who knew most of them, followed suit, and old Aunt Mari and Uncle János held up their end as well. My father’s employees had all started out with him; they were trained by him from the age of thirteen. Before opening they would sweep the greasy floor and sprinkle it down in figure-eights. The assistants wore blue smocks, the bookkeeper a black silk jacket, my father a dark gray suit. The smell of iron and wood shavings wafted over me, then the oil used to grease the cart axles, then the oily paper used to wrap hunting arms. I could have told nails from wire with my eyes shut, by smell alone. The room smelled of men, of boots, of the mid-morning snack: bread, raw bacon, and chunks of onion inserted under mustaches on the tip of a knife.

Lajos Üveges can wait on three customers at a time, tossing pleasantries and encouragement this way and that, yet find time to ask me “How’s tricks?” He knows exactly what you need for your cart; there is no artisan in Berettyóújfalu whose craft is a mystery to Lajos Üveges. “Just watch how it’s done,” is his advice to me in life. I watch him rolling a cigarette with one hand, building a seesaw, repairing a bicycle. So that’s how you do it. He loves to work: smelting iron, fixing circuits, extracting honey from a beehive — for Lajos it is all sheer entertainment. He jokes with the old peasants in a way that does not exclude respect. His mustache exudes a pleasant smell of pomade, like my grandfather’s, the old man having given him some of his. If there is such a thing as an ideal mustache wax scent, this is it.

When my father’s business was taken over by the state in 1950, Lajos Üveges was named manager. By then it had twenty-two employees, had expanded into the second-floor apartment, and used the neighboring synagogue as a warehouse. Among the assistants he was the best man for the job, though not quite so good as my father.

The town crier shouts out public announcements to the festive sound of a drumbeat. A military band marches past. The drum major, generally fat, swings his long, striped staff in the ritual manner. Bringing up the rear, a diminutive Gypsy boy pounds his drum. The lyrics grow ever more unpleasant: “Jew, Jew, dirty Jew!” is how one begins. My father simply closes the door.

The smell of horse and cow manure fills the streets. No matter how much the main street is swept, the horse- and ox-carts leave their muck clinging to the cobblestones. Herds too file by, morning and evening, resourcefully splitting up to fill the small side streets. Cows and geese find their way home as skillfully as people.

To this day I can smell the pool, filled by slow bubblings from the artesian spring. Every Sunday night it was drained; only after it had been cleaned did the refilling, which lasted until Wednesday evening, begin. The well-water, with its aroma of iron and sulfur, surged up several hundred meters to lend the walls of the pool a rust-brown hue. It was our drinking water, arriving at the house in an enameled can and at the table in a glass pitcher. Water for washing was hauled from the well on a horse-drawn tank cart, poured into the cellar, then pumped to the attic. From there it came through the tap to the bathtub. It took the work of many to keep a middle-class household going. I can still hear the servant girls singing. We had an old woman cook, Regina, a gentle soul. When she lost her temper, her curse was, “May a quiet rain fall on him!”

I can hear the congregation singing “The Lord Is One.” The synagogue had a sour smell from the prayer shawls, and voices at prayer sometimes melted into a background of rumbling and muttering. I might have a scuffle with a goat in the temple courtyard, grabbing it by the horns and trying to push it back. It would yield to a point, then butt, and down I would fall on my behind.

My family was rural, mainly from Bihar County; some came from Nagyvárad, others from Berettyóújfalu, Debrecen, Miskolc, Brassó, and Kolozsvár. They were Hungarian-speaking Jews. Almost all are dead today. Five of my cousins were killed at Auschwitz and Mauthausen. My father’s three older sisters and both of my mother’s met the same end. One of my maternal uncles was shot in the head in the street by the Arrow Cross, the Hungarian Fascist party.

My father’s generation had a gimnázium education, while my own — including a textile engineer, a biologist, a chemist, an economist, a mathematician, and a writer — graduated from the university. The previous generation had been businessmen, factory owners, a doctor, a banker, a pharmacist, and an optician, all respectable members of the middle class until they were deported; my generation became intellectuals and critical spirits: a leftist engineer who organized a strike against his father, a medic expelled from school who organized a group of partisans, and rebellious humanists.

My mother’s family was more well-to-do, a result of the practicality and business sense not so much of my grandfather as of my grandmother. My maternal grandfather was more reader than businessman, but he had a son-in-law with a great flair for commerce, and through him the family was involved in a furniture factory, a bitumen and lime plant, and logging tracts. He was a religious man, if not strictly Orthodox, and read widely in Judaica. He belonged to the boards of both the Reform and Orthodox congregations in Nagyvárad. He had a taste for elaborate rituals, but also for the good life: working from nine to twelve was enough for him. Then came the family lunch, the afternoon café session, and, after dinner, reading — this in his own separate apartment, since by then he had had enough of the children and the commotion of family life.