George Konrad - A Guest in my Own Country

My father was not at all receptive to communist slogans, always returning to the principle of free elections and rejecting the revolutions taking place all over the globe. “In an election you have many choices, son. That is all I know.” He listened to the BBC during the war and after. He would also spend hours with Radio Free Europe, delicately turning the knob to minimize the jamming.

The trip back from Bucharest was a long one and mostly in trucks. Anyone with any kind of vehicle set up benches on it and became a chauffeur. There were about twenty of us seated in a very old contraption. Speed was out of the question, but limping along in a group made the trip easy to bear. I was interested to know who was sitting next to me and across from me. Who were these people with whom I got off occasionally to stretch? Opposite me was a Romanian girl about my age who ran down from the embankment at the edge of a wood and gave a shout of joy: Vai, ce frumos! (Oh, how beautiful!), though there was still plenty to worry about and many dead to mourn.

In Brassó we again visited Uncle Ern? the hotel manager, stocky, polite, relaxed, though sometimes reticent. Before the war I had spent long summers with him in the woods belonging to my grandfather’s family. He lived then in a large, wooden house in the snowcapped mountains of Máramaros, where he had been delegated by his family to plant trees and produce lumber. The company had a sawmill and a train of its own chuffing merrily up and down the mountainside. I felt on top of the world at five or six riding that little train hauling stripped tree trunks over the wide mountain tracks. My grandfather traveled all the way to and from the mill in his own upholstered passenger car.

I can see them now — sturdily built men, broad-shouldered, tight-bellied, and mustachioed: Uncle Ern? my mother’s older brother, and one of her brothers-in-law Pista, a misanthrope who, once the passion for cursing Jews had seized him, could be calmed only by the application of leeches to his back. Whenever I was a guest at their house, he heckled me after lunch, mocked me by saying I attended a cheder , a Talmudic school, which I did not — we simply lived near it — but old Pista was not one for fine distinctions. He was angry because his attempt at settling in Palestine had failed, and he was tired of constantly being a Jew. He loved the woods and fishing for trout in icy creeks. He loved feeding the pigs growing fat in their sties, and giving them a friendly kick in the rump, sprinkling groats for the chickens and decapitating them with a swing of the axe. Once he took me up to a part of the mountain where they burned wood for charcoal. He bought wild strawberries in glazed pots from the Gypsies. That rascally girl was there, the one who would frighten me by laughing and rolling her eyeballs so only the whites showed. I wanted to touch her, but lacked the courage. No one could top Pista at lighting campfires or roasting meat, and no one knew the crevasses and waterfalls better than he. It was a joy to help him skewer the bacon, chicken legs, onions, and peppers. And we had a good laugh wolfing down all traces of bacon as soon as we heard the chuff-chuff of the locomotive, which at this hour of the evening could only be carrying grandfather in his personal car.

The old gentleman liked to sit out on the porch of the wooden forest house, where his papers would be delivered to him, always a bit late. He would leave it only to accompany us to a small town in the Carpathians, where next to a lovely square stood the local prison. On Sunday afternoons the inmates would reach through the bars to sell their handiwork: wooden whistles and pipes, clacking roosters, birdcages. Their cells were their workshops. We would stroll along the tree-lined gravel path, watching them whittle. One of them had killed a man, we were told. He made slippers.

Grandfather, a cousin of the head rabbis of Trier and Manchester, read the masters of modern Jewish scholarship. He had been president of the Nagyvárad congregation at one time. He did not much bother himself with the details of the lumber industry.

When imaginary bats fluttered too thickly around Uncle Pista in the dining room, his head would grow so red that my great aunt Ilona had no choice but to bring out the pickle jars holding the thin, balled-up, wriggling leeches. Aunt Ilona would have her husband straddle the chair backwards and take off his shirt. Then she would set the leeches on the vast expanse of Uncle Pista’s back — it was almost as wide as the dining table — one by one, in rows. They would set to work — pumping assiduously, growing thick and fat — and suck the red right out of Uncle Pista’s head. Within a quarter of an hour Uncle Pista would reach the point where he lost all interest in the Jewish question: it was nonsense either way.

If I was in the mood, the two of us would cross the creek on a narrow plank, then proceed stone by stone across its other branch and arrive at a clearing where we could watch the deer walking along the path. When they caught sight of Uncle Pista, they would flinch and give a start, but he would just blink his eyes innocently and they would go back to their grazing or have a drink from the stream and move on along the path in a group. I very much enjoyed having Uncle Pista take me along on these excursions. He even forgave me for wetting the bed after a big lunch. Since I was already five, my mother would have punished me for such slovenly behavior by canceling all afternoon entertainments, but Pista would sneak me out of the house to the ice-cold creek, where, standing still as a statue he would reach into the water and in a flash grab a silver trout. Then we would settle down on a mossy outcrop, where Pista checked the brandy flask to see whether there was still some marc left, for what else can one do at dusk if one’s feet are cold but have another pull from the flask.

In May 1944 Pista tied three trunks to his landau, took his seat on the driver’s box in front of his wife and son, and like the other patriotic Jews in the region drove to the Nagyvárad ghetto. A freight train took them northward. Uncle Pista and Aunt Ilonka, my mother’s favorite sister, were soon turned to ashes. Their son Gyuri Frank, my most kind cousin, died of typhus a year later in Mauthausen. He had taught me how to make world-champion soccer players out of overcoat buttons using a file and some pitch.

My uncles did not do a good job of analyzing future prospects when they conferred in the Golden Eagle Café in Nagyvárad. My mother’s oldest brother Imre had held various jobs: he had been a croupier and a maître d’, going from table to table with a friendly word to everyone. He always kept a table for his current girlfriend, a strawberry blonde, like all the previous ones. Imre had broad shoulders, a dark-brown tan, and a pin-stripe mustache, but he was bald and short. Sometimes he mounted the orchestra platform and took the leader’s violin from him. Grandfather was less than enthusiastic about all this and steered clear of the café where his son Imre wasted his time with such madness.

Uncle Pista and my two Uncle Ernős would go there to see Uncle Imre, and the four of them would put their heads together and take counsel about how to survive the war. The most successful solution was the one Uncle Ern? Schwartz came up with: a coronary. No more did he hop into his smooth-riding Citroën and have his chauffeur take him on one of those sometimes mysterious trips of his. Whenever he was ferried to the kind of woman who made demands on him — the kind that gossiped to her girlfriends about who gave her the new ring or fur — Uncle Ern? had no choice but to stand in the doorway of Aunt Margit’s room, rest his brow against the doorjamb, and complain to her about how low the human race had sunk: “Just imagine, my dear, they’re going on about me again! This time about X and me!”