George Konrad - A Guest in my Own Country

Sarolta’s daughter, Laci’s sister Magda, was the most beautiful girl I knew as a child. Once she summered with us in Hajdúszoboszló, where my passions included nuzzling up to her in the early morning to trade purrs and inhale her scent. For the most part I was the one to wake her, though she was not always in the mood, sometimes whimpering for me to wait and stop squirming under the blanket. But once her eyes were open, she had strange things to say.

She would say, for example, that only bad people amused her and that she would like to meet a pirate some day or at least an adventurer. She wanted to have a look at an honest-to-God decadent seducer, because the only people she encountered at the Nagyvárad theater or the pastry shop or the women’s club ball or in the synagogue garden on Jewish high holidays were well-intentioned young men. The ones who looked interesting to Magda all left town for the big cities. Her own brother Laci had outgrown Nagyvárad and felt at home only in Vienna or Bucharest. He had so many girlfriends he couldn’t count them on his fingers and toes combined.

Laci’s visits were red-letter days for Magda. Together they would go down to the public bathing area on the Körös and show off their backstroke, breaststroke, and crawl, sinking their arms deep into the water and gliding gracefully forward. In Nagyvárad Laci generally appeared in the company of Magda, who was not beyond the occasional acerbic remark should any of her friends show conspicuous interest in her brother. Though I did not lay eyes on him until I was twelve, I had heard a lot about Magda’s fabulous brother and seen him looking dashing — decked out in a riding jacket or tennis shorts — in photographs. I had also heard that Laci once gave such a slap to a young man for an undignified remark directed at Magda that the fellow tumbled backwards over a bench in a park square.

Magda let me in on her suspicion that her brother was not truly in love with his wife but she would at least give the children an excellent upbringing. I found it odd that Laci would use the familiar pronoun te with Iboly while she would address him with the impersonal maga , but they made a fine couple at evening events. In 1942 Magda made the acquaintance of a man twenty years her senior, broad in the shoulders and tanned to a copper hue. He was balding somewhat and working on a paunch. Now here was someone whose state of decay had a certain mystery about it. The interesting thing about bad people, she said, was that they were good anyway, in spite of themselves.

His surname was Flóra, and he ran rackets, or at least that is what my governess Livia informed my mother. This Mr. Flóra came for Magda at the Gambrinus Hotel in a Steyr Puch sports coupe and took her for long drives. This made both my mother and my governess uneasy. After lunch Magda would disappear, not to return until after dinner. He fancied unusual dishes like breaded chicken shaped into sticks; I was less drawn to such innovations. Once I saved one of the chicken sticks for Magda, but she didn’t seem interested. She said she had eaten marrow custard at the Golden Bull Hotel in Debrecen. That turned my stomach.

Once an incandescent Magda and I were sitting on the terrace at the Gambrinus Hotel when Mr. Flóra took a seat with us.

“How old are you, sir?” I asked.

I saw that he did not appreciate the question. Magda tried to skewer me with her gaze, but gave up. We sat in silence, letting Ákos Holéczy’s Jazz Band and his singer Stefi Ákos move us, probably with a song of farewell. I despised that old coot with the woman’s name — Flóra — and tried to trip him up.

How did he like the Alföld region? If he was less than enchanted, his goose was cooked. And so it was. He came up with the dullest of criticisms: it was flat and empty, there was too much distance between the one-horse towns, the cobblestone roads connecting them were hard on his roadster. I grew more pleased with his every word. If this fellow is so stupid, Magda won’t be long in turning him out. But this was not to be. To my silent horror Magda happily concurred, even raising the ante: she understood him completely, this Flóra, this ape who lived on Budapest’s fashionable Gellért Hill and skied in the Tyrol. She was of mountain stock herself — in spirit anyway — living, as she did, close to the Bihar Range. So it was the two of them against me, the Alföld yahoo. (Can you really be conspiring with him —you and he a we , and I just a you to you now?) This little roly-poly of a Flóra will come to regret his little fling, and you’ll see what a slug he is! He’ll make you retch! That very year proved me right: Magda, pregnant and abandoned, failed to cough up the sleeping pills she swallowed, and closed her eyes forever. Lying on the bedside table next to her, tied with a silk ribbon, were the letters she had written to Flóra. He had returned them.

Laci’s arrival was a real event. He would rise up tall out of the back seat to greet everyone scurrying to meet him, then get a full report from each member of the family and its employees, dispensing praise and a few witticisms to point up our intellectual debility. You could never be sure on what grounds he would disapprove of what he heard. I sensed there was a sensitive instrument, quivering to every stimulus, working inside him, consigning everything clumsy, excessive, or petty to the black zone. I suspected he used his pipe to keep him from answering too quickly, and although the remark would have had more bite had he come right out with it, the contemplative pause carved veritable epigrams out of the smoke. There was no reason to take his words to heart, but if he trained all the power that was in his eyes on you, you were done for.

Laci was nothing if not talented, particularly when it came to starting good-sized businesses. When Austria aligned with Hitler in 1938, he had to make a quick exit from Vienna, where as successful executive and exquisite equestrian he had gained entrée into high circles. His quips and sparkling, intelligent smile, his flawless decorum would have sufficed to keep him there, but he also had a dignity, a power that drew others to flock to him: he was the kind of man upon whom people danced attendance, for whom they put their best foot forward. It was not easy to win the boss’s approval, but they kept trying.

By the time Laci returned to Nagyvárad just under a month later, we had set our hearts on his becoming our guardian. Perhaps the reason I trusted him was that he so strongly resembled my father. He was a good man even if Mimi, one of his girlfriends, was more often unhappy without him than happy with him.

One day a well-dressed young woman called to me on the street, asking my name with a lilt, suspecting who I was, based on Laci’s description and our physical resemblance. I nodded. “Yes, I’m the one.” I was amazed at having such a sweetly scented beauty in furs recognize me or even find it worth her while to do so. She removed her hat in the Japort Pastry Shop, let her dark golden hair tumble down her back, and ordered a tea. She placed her elbows on the marble table, rested her chin on her fists, and had a close look at me. Then she smiled as if to say, Let’s get to it then!

I had been there several times and religiously ordered the cream pastries (scented vanilla, which had been my favorite at Petrik’s in Berettyóújfalu as well), but this time, to make my new acquaintance happy, I responded enthusiastically when she pointed to the pastry case and said, “It’s all yours!” This led me to conclude that the lady was inclined to excess. Mimi inquired about Laci and the family, wanting to know everything because, according to her, he was so taciturn and irritated by anyone’s curiosity. “I will listen to what anyone tells me, but I won’t ask anyone a thing,” he once told me after I had barraged him with questions.