George Konrad - A Guest in my Own Country

From the wheel of the truck he reached down to shake my hand one last time. I stood in front of our house and waved as he pulled away, en route to the Holy Land. Holy, he said, because they had given their blood for it. The next year in Haifa he would be active in disabling or sinking English patrol boats so the passengers on immigrant ships could maneuver their rowboats to the shoreline.

I wanted my own space and took over my old room so as to escape the wheezing and snoring of others and have the freedom to turn on the light whenever I pleased. I needed a room where guests could sit and talk, but where no one could just come traipsing in. My craving for privacy came from a desire to know the terrain: if the dogs reacted to late-night passersby, I wanted to know what courtyard they were barking from.

Although the churchyard adjacent to the garden had once provided many playmates, I currently had only my cousins István and Pali and Zsófi Klein. Zsófi had returned from Bergen-Belsen thin but tenacious and with no other place to go. There were now five children in the house. It was never quiet. We cooked in enormous pots. Leftovers were unknown.

My father took it for granted that he should support us all. He enjoyed being back in the saddle, watching the stock gradually spread from one wall to the next and rehiring his shop assistants. Some of the old customers hugged him and squeezed his hand seeing him there again by the door. “My Józsika,” they called him, a form of address dating back to his childhood. He well recalled that there had been no hugs the previous year, but never mentioned it.

By the tile stove, which was still beechwood-burning in the winter of 1945–46, I listened to the conversations of the people who came to visit. A girl named Kati and I would cut holes in apples to remove the core and fill them cinnamon and molasses, sugar not yet having returned to the market. I was particularly interested in the opinions of Laci Nyúl, Kati’s broad-shouldered and obstinate cousin. He had returned from labor service a tough customer and later barely escaped imprisonment by the Soviets. He wore a short leather jacket and high laced boots. His family had owned the local slaughterhouse, and he helped out at the butcher shop, where kosher and non-kosher products now coexisted. Immersed in blood to the elbows, he sliced pork legs and chops all day long. On the way to our house he would rub cologne into his chin. He had dreams of sties housing hundreds of pigs and a thoroughly modern meat-packing plant, a dream he would punctuate with endless views of the great figures of Hungarian literature. He held Mihály Babits in the highest esteem, knew the poems of Attila József, and brought a number of living authors — Milán Füst, Lajos Nagy, Lajos Kassák, Tibor Déry — to my attention. My sister would see him to the door; I humbly retired. Their parting words seemed to take longer than absolutely necessary.

On other evenings I would listen to the admonitions of the blacksmith’s son, who provided me with sexological advice — for example, which notorious women in the village were best avoided. He had plans of becoming a mechanical engineer in Budapest. Laci Nyúl wanted to stay in the village and made us swear to vote for the Smallholders’ Party, because if the Communists won he’d have to, as he put it, kiss his meat-packing plant goodbye, and my father his house and business. The Russians, not the Americans, would be giving the orders then. On dark winter afternoons he brought along a book of poetry. We had managed to trade up from a petroleum lamp to a gasoline one with a pump of its own, the white mantle growing taut and burning with a crackle when the flame caught it.

I would cut tobacco and stuff it into cigarette papers (I no longer remember who paid for it, though I’m afraid it was my father); I had fashioned a spinning wheel out of a bicycle wheel and would spin the long, white fur of angora rabbits for my mother to knit sweaters with; or I would move off somewhere to read. My time was my own. I spent summers on my bike, riding with my cousins to the swimming area or down to the Berettyó, where we would climb the pylon of the railroad bridge.

One day I found myself next to Marika on its sun-drenched concrete surface. Because she was four years older than I, it was an honor for me to lie next to her. Soon thereafter the activity repeated itself on the sofa of a cool room whose blinds had been lowered. Leaning on my elbows as she lay there on her back, I tried to reach under her skirt and stroke her thigh. Her resistance was mild, and as I touched her skin I had the impression she was not entirely lacking in interest. We both held our breath. Marika’s aunt would leave us alone together for long stretches.

On days like these I should have been reeling off Latin declensions and conjugations for my blonde yet dull private tutor. When she phoned my father, he took me aside and asked whether I was going to my Latin lessons. “Of course I am,” I said. “Most of the time.” My father’s gaze darkened, and he walked away. I wanted to spare my tutor, but I can’t deny that I always took pleasure in skipping classes.

Inflation brought chaos. My father was not good at riding such waves or, rather, he could not do it at all. After the billions came the unfathomable trillions and then the period of barter, when customers brought wheat and bacon in exchange for his merchandise. My father having no use for wheat and bacon, they went moldy in the cellar. It was beginning to look as if commerce were utter nonsense, but my father kept at it, and once reliable money was minted in 1946 it began to accumulate. Whether he could keep his business, however, was unclear. The reassuring announcements being made could be interpreted in many ways. But then the Communist Party in its passion for state appropriation was moving from large companies to small businesses, with the result that after five years of a second flowering my father’s hardware business was taken over by the state, which then turned him out of house and home with no reparations. Such was the law. The Smallholders’ victory meant nothing: the Communists took over anyway. But he had reckoned with losing everything again. At least now they did not want to kill him.

Laci Nyúl’s dreams remained just that. He enrolled at the Technical University in Budapest and went to work at a slaughterhouse to earn his keep. One day he fell asleep in the bathtub and the gas flame in the water heater went out. The gas poured noiselessly over him, and the exhausted Laci Nyúl slept on, forever.

In August 1947, when the last parliamentary elections were being held, I would ride my bicycle to the town hall in Berettyóújfalu, where they posted the results on a large board the moment they were phoned in. During the preceding weeks I had attended the campaign assemblies of every party and found something stimulating about each. I was fourteen and had completed a year at the Debrecen Calvinist Gimnázium with highest honors.

The previous September my parents had taken my cousin Pál and me to the four-hundred-year-old institution in a cart, together with our fees in the form of a chest full of food — because over and above the fees for room and board payment was required in staple goods: flour, sugar, bacon, smoked meat, beans, eggs, and preserves.

Debrecen was a big city in my eyes, unfamiliar and inscrutable. After lurching along the wide Market Street, the cart arrived at the entrance to the student dormitory, where bronze heads commanding respect stared out at us. An inscription on the interior facade admonished all that this was a place for prayer and study.

On the third floor a bleak, pave-stoned hallway led to sleeping quarters packed with iron beds. This room also served as the study area. The daily schedule specified that silentium was to be observed from three until five in the afternoon, during which time we were all to sit studying at the common table. The wake-up bell rang at six in the morning, when we ran laps around the courtyard. At the filthy sinks we could wash only down to the waist. A cowbell would summon us down to the cellar dining room, where a roux — thickened soup with cumin awaited us every morning.