George Konrad - A Guest in my Own Country

At noon on the third day we took them lunch. Even food was now a political statement, an expression of solidarity and protest. But there was no longer anyone to deliver the food to. At first we were glad to see that the doors to the holding area were open, but it turned out to be empty. One of the gendarmes told us they had been taken to a place near Debrecen, and next day we learned from the Chief Constable that they were on a farm that had been converted into an internment camp. He advised us not to go there, however, as we would not be allowed in. We took the roast home and nibbled at it, then put the rest away for dinner and played ping-pong all afternoon. At the camp the gendarmes questioned my father about the location of our valuables. He said that he had none, that all his capital was in the business. I don’t know what they did to him, but by sticking to his story he saved our chances for starting over, at least in part. That gold, which he would trade for nails, wire, and pots when peace came, was for him what a last manuscript is to a novelist. They did manage to get information out of Uncle Béla, however, so they came to the garden and pulled the steel box out of the well. I remember hearing the water they pumped out gurgling into the street.

They were packed eighty at a time into cattle cars. My mother got hold of some Ultraseptil for my father, who was weakened by a fever, and whenever the train stopped she would help him off. They did the work they were required to do on the property of the Dreher brewing family in Schwechat under guards who were strict but not particularly cruel. They were lodged in a long barn. Nearly all the local day-laborers had been conscripted, so the group hoed the fields for potatoes, sugar beets, onions, and beans, occasionally slipping some under their shirts or into their pockets. They worked until winter, huddling together in the cold and keeping each other’s spirits up.

In December they were taken to Vienna to clear rubble. They lived in a school building in Floridsdorf on the left bank of the Danube, but worked in the center of the city, climbing over mounds of bombed-out houses to set the rubble into piles. Most of the Viennese pretended not to notice them, though a music publisher gave them buttered bread wrapped in paper and invited them in the evening for hot tea amidst carved mahogany music stands.

Laci encouraged my parents to stay in Bucharest for a while and rest. My father could eventually join his firm, Laci said, but first they had to shore themselves up physically and mentally. He probably made a few disparaging remarks about Berettyóújfalu: Why would my father want to go back after all that had happened? What was left for him there? As long as he was starting over, why not go into a more serious line of business? My father nodded, though to himself he must have been saying something along the lines of “Just keep talking, cabbage head.” To his mind Laci was a megalomaniac.

So my father would return to his hardware business, for this was his trade and there was no one better at it in all Bihar. All he wanted was to be the person he had always been and greet the first customer who came into the store that summer. Things would have to be put in order. He would start with a few goods on a shelf or two over in the right-hand corner. Then he would expand gradually until ultimately the entire store, basement included, was stocked. The authorities would leave him alone. He still had a few friends in the village.

As for Mother, she had her heart set on Budapest, where the children had managed to stay alive. She rejected the notion that Berettyóújfalu was the place to start over. Everything had been split into separate nationalities. What had been was no more, nor would ever be again. Better to forget what cannot be restored.

But her Józsika was too stubborn to be dissuaded. He went on about his father and his grandfather and the fact that he knew virtually everyone in town by name. The madness had passed, and it was time to get to work. He took possession of his house, had it cleaned out, had new locks put on the doors. All he wanted was to be at home in his own house, to live where he had made his reputation. The fact that everything had been taken from him, that he himself had been taken off, was a passing insanity and could not happen again. No question about it. He would be stocking the finest English merchandise.

My mother kissed him on the forehead. “Oh, Józsika!”

I put my hand on his. He squeezed it and said, “That’s how it will be, won’t it, son?”

“Of course, Father, if that’s what you’ve decided.” Újfalu, naturally, yes.

But Újfalu proved a less than feasible option. First of all because only four years later my father ended up having everything taken from him again, this time in the name of the proletarian dictatorship, but also because retreating into the familiar little nest and longing for days of peace in the village — days that had never existed or existed only in Father’s imagination — was little more than an obstinate, sentimental dream. Yet I have no trouble understanding my father’s naive attachment to the village where he was born, the home of his parents and grandparents.

Laci was a bit annoyed at us for not accepting his offer. He had come to like us and regard us as his own; he had prepared for the day when we would become his children, and knew that to give us back to our parents was to lose us. Why shouldn’t we all stay in the same city? In those days it was still possible to imagine Romania turning into a good country, and it was no fault of his that it did not. Neither did Hungary for that matter.

As a department head in the Ministry of Foreign Trade he negotiated with German and English clients who came to Bucharest, but since his colleagues did not understand the conversations they were in no position to write the requisite reports to their superiors. They suspected Laci of making secret deals with his visitors. The moment he received the slightest gift or sign of attention from them, they had him hauled before the political police for interrogation. He was trailed on the street; his house was searched. When he took sick leave, they moved a woman into the apartment as a cotenant, a woman who irritated Iboly no end with her transparently insincere coquettishness. Later, when Laci escaped from it all into a sanatorium, they moved an informer into the room’s other bed. Posing as a patient, he would go through Laci’s pockets as soon as he left for the toilet. Once Laci scribbled something on a slip of paper, then tore it up and tossed the shreds into the waste-paper basket. He came in from the corridor to find his roommate bent over the trash, retrieving the bits of paper to fit them together. They wanted him to know that he was surrounded, that the authorities needed more than a loyal expert who remained a political outsider. They needed all of him.

He became a truck driver instead: he had the physical strength to carry huge baskets of bread on his back. One day while he was making a delivery, a shopkeeper happened to hear him whistling “Yankee Doodle.” Before the scandal got out of hand, Laci moved back to the sanatorium, grew a beard, and spent his days standing around the garden in pajamas or dishabille watching the leaves falling, silent for long stretches of time. Thanks to the intervention of a kind doctor he had access to recordings of classical music. Once they allowed him and his family to emigrate, he left everything behind. He would have done anything to remove his loved ones from that insane country.

Everyone could see that my father with his humble smile was the mainstay of the family. Though the fifth of the six siblings, he was the only son. The financial situation of his sisters was more precarious, and the younger generation disparaged his bourgeois decency, sense of proportion, and self-knowledge. I could sense my cousins’ arrogance, the arrogance the intelligentsia feels in the face of middle-class stability.