George Konrad: A Guest in my Own Country

My ancestors lived out their lives as Jewish middle-class Hungarians. My father was the primary taxpayer in the town’s ambit of some twelve thousand people. As such, he was given membership at the gentleman’s club, the “casino,” though he never went there. Nailed to the right side of the street entrance to his business was a mezuzah, a parchment roll in a mother-of-pearl case containing a handwritten text of the “Sh’ma,” the central Sabbath prayer: “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” Only He, and no other: no pagan godhead in animal or human form.

On the doorpost below the mezuzah was a small metal plaque showing the outline of the historical borders of Hungary in 1914 and within it, painted in solid black, the 1920 territory, chopped to thirty percent of its original size and the slogan “No, no, never!”—meaning that we would never accept the loss. The members of my family thought of themselves as good Hungarians and good Jews. The two did not come to be viewed as separate until World War II.

The Hungarian government took up arms on the German side with the aim of recovering part of the lost territories, and it was willing to send half a million Jews to German camps in exchange. It was a bad bargain, because in the end they lost not only the Jews but the territory as well, and were left with the shame of it all. True, not everyone feels this way: there are those who feel that while many Hungarian Jews were killed in Auschwitz the number was too small.

The Hungarian flag in the middle of the village flew at half mast, and as one piece of territory or another rejoined Hungary it was raised a bit higher. On 15 March, the holiday of the 1848 War of Independence, the children of the Jewish elementary school would march before it in ceremonial step sporting white shirts and dark blue shorts.

My father took part in the reoccupation of Ruthenia and its principal cities, Ungvár and Munkács. He had an artilleryman’s uniform with a single white star on it, signifying the rank of private first class, but with the red arm braid that marked those who had graduated from the gimnázium . On weekends he would don his uniform and boots and meet my mother at the hotel in Ungvár.

I advanced one rank higher in the military order, becoming a corporal. (My son Miklós did not carry on the tradition, never advancing past private in the French Army; in fact, they tossed him in the clink for talking back to his commander.) I was interested in military events from the age of seven and prayed for General Montgomery to defeat General Rommel in Africa and for the Allies to take Tunis and Bizerta. I was a patriot who could be moved to tears for Hungary, but at the same time I was for an Allied victory. Based on what I heard and saw in the newsreels, I tried to imagine the battles of Stalingrad, Smolensk, and Kursk as well. Lying prone in the dark under the net of my brass bed, I would press my thumbs lightly to my eyes and on would come the newsreels, my own versions of the Hungarian and German products, all tanks and heavy artillery and air battles fading into the starry night.

The sky is bigger beyond the Tisza, the roads muddier than west of the Danube. This is the eastern end of the country, where you would once have found the highest concentration of people going barefoot and old men standing before their house doors in dark blue burlap aprons. It was a picture as constant as the buffaloes grazing in their lake.

Coming to Berettyóújfalu by train, I make my way over red slag between the tracks, then pass the green iron-tube railing onto the platform with its yellow-brick paving. The red-hatted signalman salutes me with his signal disk, the telegraph machine jingling away behind him. It is some time in the seventies, and I am lying in a room at the Bihar Hotel, a few steps from my childhood home. There is no hot water, and the door to the W.C. does not close: you have to hold the handle. Even though the flies land all over me, I do not swipe at them. I have drunk a lot of pálinka in the heat. The bus motors at the station produce a constant rumble. In the cinema across the road the Gypsy kids make the same smacking sound when kissing as they did before the war, but nowadays it is no longer permitted to spit pumpkin and sunflower husks onto the floor.

I take a close look at our house, ambling over the cracked sidewalk by the hapless shacks that seem to survive all events. A couple emerges from the courtyard that was one of my old haunts. The little girls who used to play with dolls are old now; they look like their mothers, the boys like their fathers. Faces peering through the fence. The indifference of the stares.

I go to the marketplace too. Nearly everything is different there now: trucks and tractors stirring up dust, the young scooting around on motorcycles. What has not changed is the rumpus of the women, the clamor of geese and ducks, the long baying of the oxen, the fresh scent of horse manure, the mounds of apricots and new potatoes. The merry-go-round is still there, as are the cotton-candy vendor and the table covered with jackknives. You can still get a little wooden rooster that clacks its wings. All but gone by now, though, is the bench in front of a house where one or two old men would pass the hours smoking a pipe, and the bright light unwrapping all the objects to reveal their slow decay.

I think I wanted to make up my mind about something. One hot afternoon, after lolling for a while on a sweaty bed in a hotel room the size of a coffin, I wandered down the main street and through the soccer field. No one said a word to me. Sometimes I had the feeling I was being watched. In a side-street bar, smelly and raucous, a drunkard launched into a song, then gave up and stared out of the window.

An old man, wearing nothing but a jacket over his bronze, tattooed torso, told me of a time when I liked to sit with him on the coach-box and he would pass me the whip. It was András, our former coachman, he of the large, reverie-inspiring biceps. András was the one who polished the linoleum in my room by skating on waxed brushes, the one who brought the firewood upstairs, who lit the fire in the cast-iron stove in the bathroom so I could have warm water for my bath when I got up. His horse Gyurka pulled the water tank, and András filled it, bucket by bucket, at the slow-gurgling artesian well in front of the post office and behind the national flag in the park. As likely as not, András had never had the experience of lounging in a bathtub. The servants bathed once a week in the galvanized tin tub in the laundry room. Just so I could step in the tub, the servant girl would have to keep the fire going while my nanny set out my ironed whites. The washing-soap smell was part of a larger picture: the servant girl had a servant smell, the valet a valet smell.

The servant girl would not simply take her pay from my mother’s hand; she would seize her hand and kiss it. My father would shake hands with his employees when handing them their pay envelopes. I don’t remember the coachman or the woman who was our cook ever sitting down in any of our rooms — in the kitchen, yes: András would sit there on the stool, stirring the thick soup the cook ladled straight from the kettle into his bowl with an enameled spoon. No kettle was ever put on the dining table, only a porcelain soup server and a silver spoon for serving. The servants would spend whole afternoons polishing the silverware.

Was I religious? Since I prayed, I was religious. But children are hedonists and enjoy some aspects of a religion while rejecting those that deprive them of pleasure. The wine I enjoyed, though I got it only on Seder evening, when I was allowed to dip my little finger into the wineglass and lick it. The horseradish on the table represented bitterness, the bread dipped in honey good fortune. After presiding over the ritual, my grandfather would listen to my doubts and say that there are many images of God, but that He is greater than any image, for God always transcends what is portrayed.