George Konrad - A Guest in my Own Country

A thin young couple at the next table ordered osso buco, which they knocked against their plates to dislodge every last nugget, concentrating fully on the process to the exclusion of each other and lifting the marrow on toast to their excited mouths.

The long-limbed, slightly tipsy waiter gave the waitress a kiss on the neck. She recoiled. The hostess behind the old-fashioned cash machine drummed her fingers while studying the varicose veins in her legs. A row of cars decked in flowers pulled up, and guests poured in, half-happy, half-drunk, taking their seats around the long tables. The waiter started bringing out the brandy; the music was not far behind. Men in thick furs, leather jackets, and boots breathed in the aroma of the hot stew and cautiously bit into the pickled peppers. The guests discussed the trend to smaller portions. “They’re looking out for our figures,” said one. An enormous young butcher in a bloody apron danced into the kitchen with half a pig over his shoulder and flirted with the cook, while her apprentice, in a carefully ironed and folded white cap, extricated herself from the strident din.

A squat gentleman on our left, his ring digging deep into the flesh of his finger, was courting one of his lady colleagues. They had left headquarters for a fact-finding investigation, and now that the meetings were over there was time for a little celebration. Young workers on sick leave arm-wrestled. A crumb quivered on the mustache of a thick-armed Gypsy fellow, his broad fist hanging motionless. The walls were adorned with woodcuts of distant wars of independence. The waiter said the best thing to drink with wild-boar sausage was genuine Bikavér, Bull’s Blood, which he poured from a special bottle. A salesman pulled a little bag of bicarbonate out of his pocket, removed a pinch with the tip of his pocketknife, and mixed it into his soda water.

A bearded young man who had gone through his cutlet and buttered peas was looking disgruntled, though there was nothing for it. He was telling a blond schoolteacher with a narrow face that knowledge is not the basis of love, because the more you know someone the more relative that person becomes.

“You mean the better you know me the less you’ll like me?” asked the teacher.

This is not what the bearded young fellow meant: he was thinking metaphysically.

“I see,” said the teacher, relieved. “Only metaphysically.” (Why couldn’t the fellow relax and stop pulling her leg?)

“The road to familiarity leads to exalted regions, the realm of icy peaks. Only a greengrocer would suppose that we find warmth among great minds. Chill breezes blow about us, perchance the indifference of sanguinity.”

“You mean from your icy peaks I look common to you?”

This is not at all what the bearded young fellow meant. “We do not love the one who deserves our love, but the one that we in fact love.”

Now what was the teacher to make of that?

The young man raised the ante: “God must needs be a believer, but the God He believes in cannot be He himself. If God knows of God, then he cannot be one with himself, but must then be as divided as I myself. In short, God must have another God. And so on, ad infinitum. Better not to think of it.”

Tóni took a pill that, he claimed, sliced off the cerebral cortex. He washed it down with beer. In a short time he felt a bombing raid approaching and asked to go down to the bomb shelter. He spotted an emergency exit along one wall, but as it was blocked by a table of four corpulent guests he went over to them and said, “Please follow me through the emergency exit to the bomb shelter!”

The four large guests looked at him quizzically. “Where is it?” Tóni pointed to the blank wall.

“Leave us in peace, will you, Comrade?”

Tóni gave up his evacuation plans. They can bomb us if they want. A few years later he blew up his heart with drugs and vodka.

The next day I continued my solitary walks. My legs knew automatically where to turn. A schoolboy waited in a window.

“Who are you waiting for?”

“My parents.”

This is where the domestic would lean on her elbows, waiting for the lady of the house to ring, while over in the next window the daughter leaned on a pillow, taking refuge from her French lesson. As a child, I knew who lived in all these houses, but by now the names were unfamiliar. The only familiar names I found were in the cemetery. A row of children’s hats and women’s legs in boots filed by, and faces stared through the fence waiting for what was to come.

In 2000 I accepted an invitation to Berettyóújfalu from City Hall (it was a city now, not a town). I was to give a reading to an audience of local citizens in the building that had once housed Horthy’s Military Youth Organization. The reading and the discussion that followed were a bit on the somber side, whereas my hosts would have preferred that I be more emotional in my nostalgia: nurture warm memories, express my love for the old Berettyóújfalu. They wanted my heart to beat faster whenever I saw it rise on the horizon, this town that all three of my wives unanimously dubbed a dusty hole, but that made my heart quicken, that I found beautiful, the town of towns with the most intelligent arrangement of space. Approaching the former community building and national flag on the former Erzsébet Street, with the Calvinist church and school on the right and our house, somewhat higher than the rest, on the left, I had the sense of being at home. How many times had I experienced this sight on sunny afternoons, heading home on my bicycle from the river. I was sad to see the artesian well gone and the cinema disfigured, but at least the post office was its old self. I had a framed picture of the past inside me that overlay what I was now seeing, but even with the best of intentions I was unable to portray it with anything like the sweet reverie my audience expected.

I could not veil the deportation of the Jews or the plunder of the survivors by state appropriation with sentimentality. The town had deported its Jewish citizens and viewed all their possessions as its own, moving strangers into their houses. At the time my father called it highway robbery, and I agreed. Today the town is coming to see that my father and the others did it honor and were model citizens in their way. The vanished Jewish citizens are becoming a venerable tradition.

I found my grandmother’s and grandfather’s tombstones in the abandoned Jewish cemetery. My great-grandfather’s tombstone had probably had another inscription carved on it. The hospital director, an intelligent man, told me the cemetery serves more than a hundred villages in Bihar County. Sometimes elderly visitors come from Israel and walk out to it. These children of émigrés are sober, naive, and cordial and take a hand in preserving the monuments, as does the town itself. The black-haired women with prominent cheekbones look familiar. The woman who is deputy mayor, a local and very kind, told me how much the town had looked forward to my coming and mentioned that her parents had known mine and me as a child. I felt my Bihar County roots that day. When something during my visual inventory caught my fancy, I felt the pleasure of one who belongs. True, they have filled in Kálló Creek, and the garden where we played soccer among the cherry trees is gone, as is the walnut tree by my window; indeed, the window itself is gone, filled in. And the synagogue is still an iron-goods warehouse.

ON A DAZZLING SUMMER DAY INthe last year of the twentieth century I had the opportunity to watch the world change colors and sink into gray darkness from the porch stairs of a crumbling wine-press house on Saint George Hill.