George Konrad - A Guest in my Own Country

Mimi had a quick mind and a quick tongue and claimed to have read Les Thibault , a thick, two-volume roman fleuve , in two days. I had had a rather uncomfortable relationship with the book during the Budapest siege in the domineering presence of Aunt Zsófi: she made me hold a volume under each arm to keep my elbows at my sides and prevent me from leaning on the table “like a cow.” Though properly trained thanks to the efforts of my mother and governesses, I was nonetheless inclined to recidivism when it came to elbows on the table. “You’re not in a bar, you know!” was something I heard a lot. (“More’s the pity,” I would say to myself.)

In any case, my relationship with this ample novel, so filling and always ready to provide further nourishment, continued in Bucharest, because Iboly too had noted my pernicious propensity to rely on my elbows, to say nothing of fingering tumblers, as I had seen men do in the bars in Újfalu whenever I peeked inside. No sooner did I tell her about my grotesque connection to the Thibault family than she reached for the bookshelf and pulled down the very same edition. It had lost none of its heft in Bucharest. She tried to civilize me further by requiring me to lift buttered steamed peas to my mouth on the convex bottom of the fork rather than the top. (A decade or so later I wrote a long paper on Roger Martin du Gard out of chivalry perhaps or as a tip of the hat to that reliable master as I sampled proper bourgeois virtues after the intervening turbulence.)

The day I mentioned Aunt Zsófi’s pedagogical procedure to Mimi, provocatively placing my elbows on the table, she said, “Your family is a bunch of scoundrels!” and tousled my hair. Her nails were long and, of course, painted red, which one month before the end of the Second World War was, I would venture to say, an uncommon spectacle even in the Japort Pastry Shop. She asked after our family. Her own was largely gone and had not been all that extensive to begin with. Mimi was the product of a less than regular marriage and had decided as a girl to grow up rich and famous. She later amended this with another wish: to stay alive. She thought she looked like Magda, or vice versa. The two of them had been the prettiest girls at school and were often compared. They got over this by praising each other’s beauty. They never became close.

With her too, Laci refrained from speaking of his parents, victims of Auschwitz, but neither did he bring up the beautiful Magda, who never got there. “Thank God for that,” Mimi would have added. Even so, she had not had an easy time of it: she had fled to Southern Transylvania in Romania, where Jews were not being deported to Poland, only shot by the tens of thousands in their own land. Like many others Mimi was taken to an island from which there was no escape: all those who tried were shot, and by spring only their remains were left.

Still, you could slip through the cracks by means of a paper marriage or bribery or indifference on the part of the authorities: Mimi arrived in Nagyvárad not long after the Russians and watched over her mother’s apartment there, filling it with furniture of her well-to-do deported aunt, lighting the candles in silver candlesticks. She came to know Laci’s tastes and cooked his favorite meals, taking the edge off some and improving on others, getting hold of the ingredients through mysterious, semi-obscure supply chains. “That finicky cousin of yours is quite a gourmand. It’s begun to show on him. Have you noticed?” Mimi divulged that she had let Laci’s trousers out herself. A seamstress by training, she hoped to open a fashion salon in the center of Pest, Szervita Square, perhaps — yes, she had picked out a spot next to the Rózsavölgyi Music Shop. Laci would find her there after the war, assuming neither of them got shot. Mimi had reckoned with the possibility that Bucharest would not be enough for Laci, that he needed Budapest, Budapest and Vienna, where he had spent some good years. He had even divulged to Mimi what the name of his company would be: Technicomp.

“Like the sound of it?”

“Hmm.”

Laci would not have a partner because he liked making all the decisions himself. Maybe he would use her in the clothing factory as a fashion designer, Mimi said, though nowadays it was work clothes that were in demand. Well, they could be attractive too. Laci was supposedly stunned by her productivity: each time she came to Nagyvárad she showed up in a different outfit, designed and executed by her at astonishing speed.

“Your despot of a cousin does love novelty,” said Mimi, “but don’t worry, he won’t trade you in! He’s just a bit difficult and won’t let himself be loved. He doesn’t spoil me either, but you’ll be fine,” she added with a touch of envy, “because you’ll be able to have lunch and dinner with him every day, while he’s my eternal fiancé.” She talked with a dreamy sadness and fretted about having let her hair down, but she had divined that Laci enjoyed talking to me.

And so he did. Laci and I even talked politics. He asked me to pick him up a copy of Scînteia , the Romanian Communist Party newspaper. When I asked why he wanted that paper in particular, he told me the same thing I had heard in Budapest from my beautiful dancer friend Magda, a few years before she was shot in the back while trying to escape over the border. She had reasoned then that the Communists were the most determined enemies of the Nazis, the Arrow Cross, and the Iron Guard, so they were the ones she trusted most. I replied that this was only partly true, since I had heard stories in Újfalu about Arrow Cross people turning Communist — once a bigmouth, always a bigmouth. But Laci chose to believe that industry was about to pick up and finally usher in the age of enterprise. I told him stories about the Russians and their drunken shooting sprees, about how I’d pulled one of them back to save him from falling into the well in Uncle Imre’s courtyard while he was emptying his bladder.

Oh, of course, he said, he had stories of his own like that, but I should keep in mind that they were the liberators and I owed them my life. I acknowledged this, though I was a debtor on so many fronts simply for making it to twelve that I was growing lazy in matters of gratitude and felt that Laci’s optimistic generosity towards the Communists was overly hasty.

As did Bibi, his assistant manager in Bucharest, who said, “Les idées sont belles, mais le pratique, bon dieu, c’est tristement douteux .” He would phone early in the morning and announce in his piercing, somewhat impatient voice, “Bibi here!” He was amazed I could not pass on his messages in French to Laci. When I offered to do it in German, he thanked me and said he’d rather not, German being a language he was steering clear of for the time being. Bibi was not at all impressed that the Russians had commandeered ten thousand automobiles in Bucharest in a single day, and made his feelings known at the table where he often took dinner with Laci and his family and they conversed over cigars and cognac like proper capitalists.

But to return to the despondent Mimi: it became clear during our conversation in the pastry shop that she was not only waiting in vain for her eternal fiancé but would go on waiting even if she married another. “And if some day that cousin of yours leaves his clever stick of a wife, and says, ‘Come to me, Mimi,’ then crazy little Mimi will run as fast as her feet will carry her. She’ll dump her husband and family just to feel your precious cousin’s heavy hand on her head.”

A few lovely teardrops trickled down her nose, and she wiped them away with her scented handkerchief. I never met Mimi again despite her promise to visit me. I did see her once, however, though she did not notice me, or pretended not to. She had just come out of a building when a large, black Morris driven by a man in a crew cut, black glasses, and leather gloves pulled up. Mimi climbed in next to him and ran her hand through his hair. In light of what I had seen I considered Laci’s passion for Mimi a reckless investment of his energy, yet despite my moral ruminations I concluded that Laci’s putative infidelities did not make him unreliable as far as we were concerned.