George Konrad - A Guest in my Own Country

Once Laci had more or less emerged from mourning, he and Iboly went to the Konzerthalle every week. He read all the major German-language newspapers and lunched in Mr. Kardos’ restaurant not far from Technicomp. Every morning he crossed the City Park on the way to the office until one day he collapsed on a bench, having lost all desire to reach the leather armchair behind his enormous desk. Frau Reisner, his aged secretary, did not understand what had put Herr Kun into such a catatonic state, though according to Frau Kun it had happened once before: he had been interned in one of the better mental institutions in Bucharest, where he would stare at the puddles in the courtyard and give the tersest of answers to her questions. Here in Vienna it was the brick wall of a stolid public building from the previous century that he saw across the street, though he was not inclined to look out of the window.

In time he managed to pull himself together and make another go of it. The work intoxicated him again. He took up with a woman named Edit, a good match: elegant, intelligent, svelte, tanned at the pool by early spring, now a citizen of South America, originally a Nagyvárad Jewess. He enjoyed her witty, malicious pinpricks like a good massage. With ever-increasing momentum he traveled the world — America, Japan — putting together complicated deals for his clients. He often came to see his cousin Gyuri Gera and me in Budapest, paying amicable court to our young wives, until the secret service called him in and tried to get him to report on his domestic and foreign business associates and his burgeoning circle of friends. If he refused, there was not much chance of his doing business, as they could revoke his multiple-entry visa. “What can these people be thinking?” he asked us, as if his own experiences back in Bucharest had not made it perfectly clear to him what these people were thinking. They were thinking that if he did what his character dictated (and what I respected so much) we would not be seeing him in Budapest in the foreseeable future.

We were sad to see the end of our cousin, though thereafter it would have been more disturbing had he been allowed to visit. He wasn’t, and our meetings were suspended for a long time. Laci lost his taste for Vienna as well. After seeing to his wife’s funeral, he remarried in America and lived near his daughter Kati. Later he moved to Florida and from there to the world of shades.

I have presented these developments to give the reader a sense of the future trajectory of the man who sat to my right in the front seat of the car. In the back sat my sister and two women we knew, whom Laci had taken along as a favor. Behind their heads was the sack containing the heavy strongbox. Coming into Ploieşti, the driver swerved off the road and hit a milestone. The box flew into the air and hit the head of the woman who talked the most and loudest. The Chrysler ended up in the ditch below with the milestone on its roof. A Soviet military truck had veered towards us out of the opposite lane — its young driver may have fallen asleep — and the queen’s chauffeur had skillfully yanked the wheel to the left. As a result there were no serious injuries — except for a bump on the head of the talkative lady.

We were picked up by a truck in the pouring rain. Laci sat in the open back, wrapped in a waterproof tarpaulin; we sat in the cab, where it was dry, with our lady guests. The entry into Bucharest was less triumphant than the departure from Nagyvárad.

Crossing rainy boulevards, we arrived at a fin-de-siècle boyar villa. Deep in the garden stood a three-story Bauhaus building completely overrun with woodbine. The garden also boasted a sandbox, a swing, and a small pool. Standing perfectly straight in the doorway of the third-floor apartment, wearing a soft camel-hair robe and exuding a faint scent of lemon, was the broad-shouldered Iboly. We found in her a good surrogate mother, mindful of her obligations, from meals to bathing to clean pajamas. Everything fell into place more or less as at home, before 1944: I had a bed and a desk, we had lunch at lunchtime and dinner at dinnertime, we were to be civilized at table, and we were to toss our underwear daily into the hamper, because a clean change was waiting in the wardrobe. After the morning bath I was allowed to go to the garden or shops with my two-and-a-half-year-old cousin Kati, who served as my interpreter: What I said in Hungarian, she repeated in Romanian. Invigorated by our team spirit and well-matched roles, we dutifully accomplished our appointed tasks, garnering praise from Iboly and Viorica the cook, a loud, amusing, passionate woman who called me a Dacian savage when she was dissatisfied with me. Laci’s baby son Stefan, tossing and turning in his little bed, was the only other male in the apartment, because Laci left home early and returned late and was often away on long business trips.

While the Queen’s Chrysler was being repaired, Laci drove around in a red Škoda sports coupe that was requisitioned out from under him somewhere between Torda and Kolozsvár by the Soviet soldiers who were always standing around in groups by the side of the road. Laci expressed his outrage, insisting on speaking to the commander and having the case officially recorded. The sound of the word protokol got the soldiers’ dander up. They gave Laci a shove in the chest and jumped in the car. Laci, always one to do things by the book, found this an unorthodox procedure, but was still capable of laughing at finding himself once more in the back of a truck in the pouring rain.

Born under the sign of Aries like myself, he saw adversity as adventure and was unable to stay angry for long. He merely moved on to the next item on his to-do list, earning the money for a new car and accepting from the outset that it would turn out a losing proposition like the last. In those days luck was an ephemeral guest if it came at all, glittering in one spot for a spell, then evaporating just as quickly. He had two good years after the war, then four more after emigrating, but the last time I saw him — we were walking along Fifth Avenue looking for a certain tobacconist’s where he had seen a cherrywood pipe in the window that had caught his fancy — I realized he had resigned himself to the pensioner’s view of the world: he spoke highly of walks by the sea and had stopped making plans.

My father was unsuited to prosecutorial statements. Instead he would reflect, “What is this fellow trying to pull out of himself?” as if everyone had a few extra characters lurking inside, like suits in a closet. I imagined him saying to me, “And you, my boy, what do you want to pull out of yourself?” “Nothing, Father. I’m just waiting for the bell to ring in the front hall. Maybe I’ll go down to the garden with Kati, but I’ll always be where I can see you in case you come home.”

One day Laci phoned from Nagyvárad to say that our parents were alive. They were at home in Berettyóújfalu, and we would be seeing them soon. How soon? Soon . He refused to go beyond the essentials. Our parents were probably as thin and sickly as other returnees. I didn’t relish imagining what their fate had been given what I had heard of concentration camps.

In the meantime I hunkered down in that apartment so little like home. Everything exuded normalcy, yet things could have worked out much less favorably. In the last year of the war two English pilots had hidden out in the room where I was staying. Their plane had been shot down, and the resistance network brought them here. One evening during dinner the concierge rang the bell and asked who was living there besides the immediate family. “No one,” said Laci. The concierge wanted proof, but Laci would not let him in. When the concierge tried to push his way in, Laci gave him a punch in the face that sent him tumbling down the stairs. “You won’t regret keeping quiet about this,” said Laci, helping him to his feet.