George Konrad - A Guest in my Own Country

Ultimately we set off at about two in the afternoon. It was stop and go all the way. Locomotives came and went (if we had the better locomotive, we would lose it), tracks needed repairing, military trains had right-of-way. After a while Éva and I were sitting on benches in the cattle car and getting bread and bacon from Zolti Varga to assuage our hunger. At one point we heard a round of machine-gun fire: stray soldiers frightening civilians. The usual heralds said they were going from car to car seeking women. The women got lumps of coal from somewhere and smeared their faces to make themselves look wrinkled and ugly. Even aging ladies rubbed coal under their eyes my sister and I noticed, smiling to each other. I put Éva in a corner and stood in front of her. The other women pulled their kerchiefs down to their eyes and sat hunchbacked. In came the five or six soldiers on their rounds. One of the soldiers must have been attracted to a woman even through the pitch, but when he moistened his finger and rubbed and the black came off he grew angry and spat in the woman’s face. The soldiers left the train in a ruckus of dissatisfaction.

We came to a jerry-built bridge spanning the Tisza where the Allies had hit the old bridge with a bomb and what was left had been blown up by the Germans. The temporary stilts between the pylons would not have borne the train, so we crossed on foot to where another train was waiting, though without a locomotive. Eventually we were moving again, and eventually we stopped again, sitting out a February snowstorm at night in the snowed-over bins of an open coal car. The wind off the Great Plain, unimpeded in its mad rush, pounded us mercilessly. We could no longer feel our hands and had ice crystals hanging from our eyelashes. Glued shut, our eyes transported us to a happy place, and the cold came close to rapture. We stood out on the open track surrounded by darkness.

We decided to strike out on a dirt road and ask for shelter at the first house we found. The wind practically knocked us on our backs as we made our way, dragging our clumsy bags, until at last a faint light flickered on the edge of the blue-white plain. I was frozen to an anesthetic purple by the time my legs had taken me there, stumbling through clods of ice. Obediently I stretched out on the straw covering the dirt floor, and my good will was restored when a young servant girl lay down at my side and told me to snuggle up, pulling my hand onto her belly to stave off my shivering. I pressed against her from behind and buried my face in her back to fit her bottom into my lap. We were entirely one. I realized that you can love someone whose face you have never seen and respond to a stranger as you would to your closest loved one. I held onto her as if I had long since chosen her as my one and only. In the morning I thanked the residents of the house for their kindness and expressed special gratitude to my sleeping companion.

Given that the train was still standing the next day, I set out on a reconnaissance foray and came upon a flat, black, cube-shaped solid amid the tire tracks on an icy hillock not far from some horse manure. Detailed inspection revealed it to be a piece of Soviet military-issue bread, albeit hard as a rock. But as long as it was indeed bread, it could soak up the steady stream of lukewarm water from the bronze pipe of an artesian well to become soft enough to eat. My supposition was borne out, and I chewed contentedly on my find.

A woman walked past, briskly tossing lumps of goat manure from a breadbasket over the snow, as if sowing seeds, left and right, making sure to cover the entire width of the street. Watching me paw at that wet bread, she held out her basket and said, laughing hilariously, “Have some meat with it. These last few I won’t sow. You’ll get a nice bleating in your belly.”

“Where am I?” I asked her.

“In Törökszentmiklós.”

“What shall I do with the bread?”

“Leave it here for the birds.”

On 28 February 1945, the seventh day of our journey, we reached the Újfalu station. It had hardly changed over the year, as there had been no serious battles in the vicinity. We fumbled our way with our bags out of the first car, which had assumed the noble rank of passenger car since Püspökladány. It would have been natural for Father to pick us up, as when we arrived with Mother and after a few words of greeting he hugged us on the yellow-brick platform and we told him our news: Just imagine, we skated on the lake in the park in Pest and fed the baboons apples in that terribly smelly monkey house and then saw a performance of Latyi Matyi at the Operetta (Latyi could hardly get a word in edgewise what with all the children laughing) and then touched the very rope the Regent would as he walked through the rooms of the Royal Castle and then there was an air-raid siren when we were still in the Castle district and we went down with everybody else into a deep stone cavern, a cave under the Castle, where a teacher standing next to us explained that there was a lake in the belly of the hill and, just imagine, he said you could row a boat on it. But when we alighted on the platform looking straight ahead, it was clear our father was not waiting for us. Nor was anyone else.

Where fiacres had once offered their services to travelers coming from Budapest, there were now a few ox-drawn carts. The first acquaintance we saw was my former teacher at the Jewish school, Sándor Kreisler. Everyone in our class had been killed, as had all the pupils in our school, so our teacher was naturally deeply moved to see us. There he stood, a short, plucky man with a mustache. Seeing him was almost as unbelievable as it would have been to see my father.

Sándor Kreisler had been a good teacher: reserved, but kind and fair. In addition to primary school science he gave me a few slaps with the cover of my pen-case, generally because of Baba Blau. Mr. Kreisler had been my teacher as early as the first grade, when I still had private instruction: he would come to the house and teach István and me in our living room afternoons from three till four, which was all we needed of book learning. The rest of the time was our own. Sometimes he came down into the garden with us, and once in a while he gave the ball a kick, but he never got involved in the game, being a young man and mindful of his dignity.

His father was a fine tinsmith and went in for politics. He was a friend of my father’s. He came into our store every day in his work clothes, and they would stand at the oven and crack jokes. Yet I cannot recall his father ever coming to our living quarters, and where the father was not admitted the son could not feel at home. He told my father to send me to school: it would do me good to be together with other children. I got top marks but, as I have said, not a few raps on the knuckles as well. For rhythmically grabbing the bottom of the girl hopping in front of me when we squatted for the circle-dance that begins “The hare called his son out onto the green meadow.” Or for the usual reason: fighting. I gave as well as I got. We were three classes in one classroom. While the teacher was busy with the first graders, the second and third graders worked on a quiet assignment. I still find it a good idea to avoid focusing constantly on one group activity: we could lose ourselves in reading, drawing, or writing.

Mr. Kreisler had returned from forced labor. His parents and siblings had been taken to Auschwitz, and all his pupils had perished there. He was as surprised to see us as we were to see him. He hugged us and kissed us, which he had never done before. He listened to Zolti Varga’s story, thanked him for bringing his two pupils home, and promised to testify to Zolti’s valor should he ever need it. Eight months earlier the act of taking us to Budapest had been a political scandal; now the act of bringing us back conferred political credit, which was not particularly pleasant either.