George Konrad - A Guest in my Own Country

People were no longer as they had been. A kind of rigid intoxication seemed to have infused their faces. The fear radiating from the walls of 60 Andrássy Boulevard seemed to grow stronger as the geraniums in the windows grew redder. Every afternoon a million sparrows perched on the lindens and plane trees, turning the street into one great vibrating river of chirping. Might there be some ruse lurking deep in the innocence of sparrows? Like the newly refashioned puppet theaters waiting to receive jackbooted kindergartners with machine guns?

The brief period of normal civil life that followed the Germans’ collapse was over now, I realized. Gone were the days of burning class records, of back-talk, of speechifying about Hugo and Apollinaire, Ady and Babits. My gimnázium days enabled me to experience the whole city, its swimming pools as well as its libraries, or visit my sister, or sit in a café with a boy who could really play the saxophone, or admire the classmate sitting behind me, who could belch the whole of Rhapsody in Blue , or hire his neighbor to drive off every teacher from my vicinity with his farts and thereby let me read in peace (though of course I had to smell as well as pay).

My Hungarian literature teacher encouraged my readings, inviting me to his apartment and lending me books. When he opened his glassed-in bookcase to me, it was as if a beautiful woman had undone her robe. Those were the days when I discovered manifold meaning in every line and found profound wisdom in clichés.

I was sixteen and entering my next-to-the-last year at the gimnázium . I walked into the room on the first day to find two students standing by the window. The others were sitting at their desks, looking stern and singing songs of the workers’ movement with great enthusiasm. They scrutinized the latecomer with lowering anticipation to see what he would do. Would he take a seat and sing with us? One class, one community, one heart, one soul. If not, he could go and stand by the window with the other two and pretend not to know that standing there made him conspicuously suspicious, dead to the ideological and political unity that flexed its muscle in common song! There they stood — Pali Holländer and Laci Endrényi, the most sensitive boys in the class. Tall and thin, learned, dripping with irony, inveterate concertgoers, readers of Hemingway’s Fiesta and Huxley’s Antic Hay , and, as Junior Tacituses, fully equipped to enjoy the historical transformation in all its vulgarity.

But the brightest student in the group was sitting in the back row near the window, bragging that he had traveled to the border in a State Security car as a volunteer to denounce his Zionist schoolmates’ escape. He had always been malicious, but his sarcasm was grounded in power now: he was a high official in the student association. Though he still had to attend class, he would seek out other student officials in the corridor, where they would discuss important, confidential issues of the Movement under their breath. No outsider could come near. And he was the one who gave the speech on the occasion of Stalin’s birthday in 1949. He spoke of a Golden Eagle, of an unshakable will that pursued its goal ruthlessly, without mercy. On the first day of classes he read aloud a passage from The Road to Volokolamsk about how cancerous meat had to be hacked out of a body or the body would rot. He then spun a pretty little speech on the topic, repeating the word “rotten” several times while glancing my way.

When József Révai, a member of the Politburo, condemned the harmful delusions of the philosopher György Lukács in a page-long analysis, I was the only one in the class who stood up for Lukács. It was intolerable that a gimnázium student should disagree with the Party leadership. I was summoned to a disciplinary committee chaired by a student my age. His name was Ferenc Fehér and we later became friends. He despised Lukács at the time, but later saw the light. In a required paper on the Three-Year Plan I wrote that for me it meant the state takeover of my father’s business and house, for the tired worker I used to see on the stairs it means long hours of work for low wages. My literature teacher could not bring himself to grade the paper (“There is nothing I can do for you, son; I have no jurisdiction in such matters”) and passed it on to the headmaster. It wasn’t long before I was expelled from the student association.

What I really wanted was to be expelled from the school. “You have outgrown this place,” the literature teacher told me. “You are intellectually over-age.” Which was flattering enough, though I couldn’t tell whether he just wanted to avoid the unpleasantness that came from having me around.

My friend Pali and I once invited him to come rowing with us on the Danube. Sitting in a bathing suit on the coxswain’s thwart, he displayed a fairly large belly, but also the broad shoulders to match. Now that we were à trois and on the water, he confided that he could not make his peace with Marxism and expected difficult years to come. “Terror,” I said ambiguously, “is history’s sacrificial festival.” My teacher did not completely understand. Perhaps I did not either.

That summer, the summer of 1949, Budapest played host to the World Youth Assembly, and young Communists flooded in from the Soviet Union, China, and the countries of Eastern Europe. After the trial that condemned László Rajk and his associates and led to their execution the city was brimming with a vibrant energy. It might have been said that the only people not yet arrested were the ones whose trials the authorities had lacked the time to arrange. They were scheduled for the following year.

“This ice cream represents the penitence of the alienated mind,” I said one day on the way home at an Italian gelato stand that had not yet been appropriated by the state. Pali gave a good laugh. His violin teacher had called Kant the only respectable thinker, so he was primed to appreciate my Hegelian quips.

Soon the Weltgeist gravitated to the brothel. We set our elbows on a piano covered with a large embroidered cloth and peered down from the balcony at the Ring sinking into shadow. We set out on a hunting expedition. We stepped through the door of that neoclassical apartment house with its spacious courtyard, its pale pink marble staircase, its slightly dirty red carpet. The bell gave out a restrained buzz behind the heavy brown second-floor door. First a servant girl, then Madame: “Do you want Éva again?” Yes. Éva was thin with small, pointed breasts and an indecipherable, lovely scent. Her hair was red — everywhere — and she had an identification number from Auschwitz tattooed on her left arm. She was nineteen, I sixteen. “Explain the Rajk affair to me,” she ordered, because I had always been able to make things clear. Her breasts got goose pimples. “I don’t want to be tortured!” She had a fur, and on occasion there was a car waiting for her. Sometimes she took my money, sometimes she didn’t. When she did, I paid with the proceeds from books I had sold from my library.

Pleasant as it was to sit in the brothel kitchen, all those thighs together tended to dispel illusions. Later, when they closed the public houses and socialism retrained the girls as taxi drivers, the only one left leaning on her elbows in the second-story window was Madame. She underwent a second flowering, because the drunk and disenchanted men whose feet mechanically took them her way were happy with her for want of anything better. Her neck was wrinkled, but the skin lower down on her body was smooth. She would bend over the lace bedspread dramatically and spread her legs passionately. The lips of her sex were large and swollen. She kept it shaven and screamed in the soprano register.