George Konrad - A Guest in my Own Country

There are times during childhood, times of inspiration, when we know what we do not know even though we do not particularly need to know it, because merely existing, walking along the river or a row of shop windows or a peristyle is joy enough.

I make my way by smell in my grandfather’s house, seeking a cupboard, an oak tree, a dining cabinet covered by a lace cloth, the porcelain figurines in a glass case easily penetrated by a bayonet. The inner turns of the garden remind me of dinners under the arbor. To live well you need more than means; you need a certain lightness, but most important, you need to stay alive. You need to give the beef broth and the coffee and the cigar each its proper due. There used to be a life in which everything had its time and place, with tasks to be done that stacked up neatly like ironed shirts in the wardrobe: a time to read and write letters, a time for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and the Pester Lloyd and the government and opposition papers of the capital and provincial cities, a time to nap, a time for the café, for a walk, for the theater. There used to be a life in which there was no reason for grandfathers to hang their jackets on any but the same coat rack before changing into a tobacco-colored camel-hair housecoat.

In those earlier days of the late thirties there was plenty to talk about at table — once I was old enough to weigh the adults’ words, that is. The rebellious sons of the bourgeoisie traveled to Paris and London, not Vienna or Abbazia. They did not go to Moscow. They were leaving Berlin. They would make impatient declarations at supper, eating with silver cutlery whatever the housemaid (or, in more modest households, the cook) served them when the kitchen buzzer rang, its button built into the table (or, in more modest households, hanging above it) to send the message that she could clear and bring the next course.

A serene permanence seemed to abide in the weekly menu and starched caps worn by the house staff. Even if faces changed from Juliska to Piroska, from Erzsi to Irma, from Regina to Vilma, there was little change in the preparation and serving of food. The younger members of the family were at a loss to explain what intolerable problem lay behind a change in staff, as they were satisfied with all of them, from Juliska to Vilma. They all married properly, with a proper dowry. Nor could the younger generation understand the odd new relationships being forced not only on themselves, but on everyone around them. More than one of the well-provided for heirs made the case for cohabitation.

Now those days were gone too. I stood on the balcony in an overcoat, watching the spits of foam jostling on the rocks: the Körös was a sweeping mass of water even when low. I went to see Six Hours After the War with its images of camp prisoners and the unforgettable inside-left soccer star: every day an armed policeman in one uniform or another would take them to clear rubble. Once I had spent the requisite amount of time with the baby and the plump women in the warmth of the second floor, I would go up to my room and read or close my eyes and concentrate on the river’s thrum, gripping the armrests of my chair and waving my head back and forth until I was dizzy and could no longer think.

My month there passed quickly, even though I visited the bureau for returned deportees every morning. Camps began to be liberated at the end of April and the beginning of May. The men and women would arrive in their striped uniforms or various combinations of striped and civilian garments. They were gaunt, and their voices seemed to emerge from the bottom of a well. Their eyes were on constant alert, anticipating the next blow. The clients — the deportees — gathered in a large hall. Behind the windows at the counter, clerks would refer to a list that might shed light on who was alive and who dead. They also distributed civilian clothes. Many departed carrying the striped garments; others left the camp uniform there, better forgotten.

I asked the none-too-friendly woman behind the window whether she could tell me anything about my parents, which she could not. Leaving her our present address, I sat down on a chair in the hall and waited for them to come, because here they would receive not only civilian clothing but also a bit of money and information about where we were. And where would they go if not here? My mother, who was from Nagyvárad, would naturally come here: everyone went to the city of their birth. And it was from Nagyvárad that her older sisters and their children and grandchildren had left for the gas chambers. Someone might come back, though not the children. They would most certainly not be coming.

I tried to imagine my parents entering the hall, stepping up to the window, and asking after us, imagine myself dashing over to them and touching them. I wondered whether they had changed much, whether we would spot one another easily. Returnees showed us photographs of faces looking out at the camera with candor. The intervening year had carved the knowledge of death and mourning on one and all, even the most ordinary. One told me my parents’ chances of survival would be better if they happened to have ended up in Austria rather than Auschwitz, though nothing was yet certain. So I found myself hoping that my parents were in what was still German-controlled territory — in other words, in constant mortal danger — because it would have been worse to imagine them in liberated Auschwitz.

I had heard about what had happened there. Since no other Jewish children from Nagyvárad and the surrounding region had survived, I was the only child waiting for parents at the bureau. The women sitting on the bench next to me explained that the Polish — Jewish inmates would take the children from their hands and pass them to a grandmother or other old woman: they wanted to save the younger women from having to accompany their children to the gas chambers if so directed by Dr. Mengele. The doctor must have particularly hated children if he sent young women and others still capable of working to be gassed just for holding the hand of a child: the children had to die, immediately, unconditionally. Children and those in physical contact with them were motioned by the doctor to the right the way you snap your hand over a mosquito buzzing around you in summer on the terrace. He saw my coevals as pests, not children. He saw the children’s faces, yet did not see them, his eyes cataracted over with words, an officer, intelligent and imperious, carrying out his command to the letter. And since the command was to exterminate every last trace of them, there was no place for individual consideration: each Jewish child was a mere speck in the mass. It did not matter what sort of children they were; all that mattered was that they were Jewish. People said the doctor was no more than a vain young man with a handsome face, more interested in twins — that is, his scientific career — than in his anthropomorphic guinea pigs. What a nice gift for the Führer if medicine could help Germanic — or preferably just German — mothers to give birth to twins and limit the propagation of others. In a short time Europe would be teeming with fertile Germans.

At any rate, I was a real curiosity at the bureau. Some parents would not look at me; others looked at me and cried. One wanted to give me something I didn’t accept; another shook me, then cried like the others. It was too much in the end. They had my address; they could find me. I stopped going.

I recently had a visit from a Berettyóúfalu acquaintance, the writer Tibor Tardos, who is now seventy-eight. For me he will always be the legend, the big boy. His father, the lawyer Henrik Tardos, was a friend of my father’s who died of diabetes at the age I am now. I remember his bald pate as if it were yesterday. A clear-sighted man, he sent Tibor to Paris, where he preferred chasing women and tennis balls to studying: he wanted to be a writer. Bored with politics, he would not have thought of leaving on his own, but in 1938, after Munich, his father realized that the Allies would not protect Eastern Europe from Hitler — in other words, that our fate was sealed. He was a tall, affable man. He dressed well and thought straight. Not one to fall for rhetoric, he sensed the interests behind the words. He presented the county health officer with a gold cigarette case, and Tibor was released from military service and allowed to return to Paris. There he wrote surrealist books that his father would proudly show me, though he understood not a word. When he sent his son a telegram, he would ask my mother to translate it, since she was the only one in his circle of acquaintances who more or less knew French. After the war I stood before their bookcase as his father took down Tibor’s books like relics. And relics they were.