George Konrad - A Guest in my Own Country

Seated at a large round table, I fixed my eyes on the front door of the Nagyvárad apartment belonging to György Pogány. Then city prosecutor, he had started out as a lawyer, but soon had to serve in the forced-labor service units for Jewish men. His entire family had disappeared. When my cousin László Kun from Bucharest made his entrance, it seemed as if my father had walked in, but a head taller, broader in the shoulders, larger in every dimension, and ten years younger. He was a self-assured and elegant man in a flawless suit. You could see he had made it his own.

The new arrival was more urbane than the locals and had been spared the humiliation of being sent to a camp. Former prisoners, happy to be alive, could not afford his generosity: all they had was what fit in their knapsacks. “The Swedish Lord” was what I called Laci to my sister, though fully aware no such thing existed. Laci sneered at lack of generosity in others and could sometimes be haughtily, curtly dismissive of people. His parents had been of modest means, and he had no wish to follow suit. It is hard to be small-time when you are over six foot three.

He asked few questions, wishing only to know whether I was satisfied with my circumstances, and he assured me that we would not be long in that apartment: he would return in under a month to take us to his family, a wife and two children, in Bucharest. Then we too would be his children whether our parents returned or not. That was the last time we discussed such intimate subjects. When I asked him what I should do until he came, he took a wad of paper money out of his back pocket and set it down before me, saying it was mine and my only task was to spend it. He assigned my sister Éva the same task.

After that I ate a lot of cream-filled pastries and went to see the Soviet film Six Hours After the War several times. I understood neither the Russian narration nor the Romanian subtitles, but after several viewings I could follow the action. A young woman once flashed me a kind smile from a window. I went back several times, but she was gone. I could deal with loss.

I was growing a little wild: I would unbutton my shirt, reach under my arm, and scratch. This did not escape the notice of Aunt Zsófi.

“Oh, Gyuri, what has become of you? How you’ve let yourself go! It’s only six weeks since we separated, and you’ve taken up such crude ways!” True, she smiled and may have been joking, but her words could be taken seriously.

A pair of brothers in transit sat at the dinner table, spilling the black humor they had picked up in the labor camp, where violent death was as common as seeds in a watermelon. They vied to win a smile from Aunt Zsófi, a smile whose unmovable reserve filled me with bliss.

Aunt Zsófi went her way early the next morning, while I walked up and down the Körös watching labor servicemen marching off to clean up rubble under the escort of an armed but shabbily dressed policeman. It would have been easy for them to escape, but apparently no one did. I looked for the house where my grandfather had lived three years before, and found strangers living there. They were not interested in my grandfather. They said they too had been bombed out of house and home. They offered me some rolls and jam, but didn’t mind when I declined the offer with thanks. There was a little girl drawing in a corner of the kitchen. During the few minutes I was there she raised her head no more than twice, but even so we had a good look at each other. After that I walked past the house a couple of times hoping to run into her on her way back from school, but those meanderings did not bring the hoped-for encounter, which I had even fleshed out with a bit of dialogue. In my head we had some very serious conversations.

Later I stopped walking down that street or even in that general direction, because I happened to run into my Aunt Gizu there. She gave me a kiss, but I extricated myself from her arms, unable to forgive her for having abandoned us in Budapest without notice at the beginning of the Arrow Cross regime. I made no promises to visit her. She had found her way here to Nagyvárad to take over the house and possessions of her relatives. I left her with a remonstrative smile, without telling her our address.

Our upcoming trip to Bucharest filled me with a powerful curiosity, heightened by a yearning to travel and the excitement of anticipation. I had heard there were more Hungarians living there than in the outlying cities of Hungary itself. We had a long road ahead of us in the big, black Chrysler Imperial that Laci had purchased from the Queen of Romania, chauffeur included. Now that he was allowed to work again, he was doing business everywhere between Bucharest and Transylvania, including Kolozsvár and Brassó, and we had family to stay with all along the route.

Looking back, I see that I climbed a few rungs on the cultural ladder that year, moving from rural petit-bourgeois to urban intellectual circles, the latter calling for an ironical style as opposed to the naive nostalgia of my family background in Berettyóújfalu. People smiled at me when I expressed a desire to return there. I said I belonged in the village and considered everything else a mere way station.

Both our guardians — Aunt Zsófi, a fashion designer and historian of fashion, and Laci, a textile engineer and wholesaler as well as Romania’s breaststroke champion and the assistant concertmaster of a distinguished amateur orchestra — would gladly have left their parents’ origins in obscurity. This I could not accept, since I loved Laci’s mother, the tall and robust Aunt Sarolta, who knew just how to make me happy. Whenever we visited them in Nagyvárad, she would sit me out on the terrace overlooking the Körös and, if a wind was blowing off the river, wrap me in a silky blanket. Then she would set down a chocolate pastry with strawberry jelly and an opera glass so I could watch the water gurgling over the rocks and the fish jumping clear out of it. I could spend hours on end there. Now and then Aunt Sarolta would replenish my supplies from the adults’ table and at my request give a brief summary of their conversation, which dealt mostly with the family and Laci’s marriage to the tall, blonde, elegant, and noble-spirited Iboly, who always knew best and may have exceeded even Laci’s ideal of perfection.

Iboly was from a good family in Kolozsvár, had attended university, played tennis, did gymnastics, spoke German, French, and a little English, and came with quite a nice dowry. She was unsurpassed in the theory and practice of manners. A movement at the corner of her mouth would register the faults in others’ upbringing. She never said a word, and she was forgiving, but she noticed all the same.

Her father-in-law, Uncle Dolfi, had like my father been in the hardware business, but both his shop and his stature were smaller than my father’s. I did not understand why Laci avoided mention of his parents killed at Auschwitz. Out of shame perhaps? Did he not want to look the horror in the face? Or perhaps he saw it all too well and found it unseemly to mention. Should all talk of humiliation and murder be taboo? My father had only the greatest love and respect for his older sister Sarolta, who had treated him with the utmost tenderness from earliest childhood: she always had something to give him — an apple, a spool of thread — and if there was uneasiness at home, if my grandmother got worked up over something (what with five children and a house full of people there could always be reason for pique), Sarolta would go into action and make so amusing a remark that my grandmother would turn red from cackling and her annoyance vanish — together with its perfectly valid basis. What is more, Sarolta had a perfect sense of judgment and proportionality. Witness her choice of the diminutive Uncle Dolfi out of all her suitors: he was the most human of the bunch. Uncle Dolfi looked upon his monumental wife in wonder. It probably never entered his mind to betray her, and Aunt Sarolta was the very embodiment of tranquil satisfaction, her only concern being for the children.