George Konrad - A Guest in my Own Country

Be it by cart, bike, or train I would go home to Berettyóújfalu for holidays whenever I could, but once I began my studies in Budapest I became a city boy. The story of my village boyhood was over — if a story can ever be truly over.

This was my last summer in Berettyóújfalu. On the hot weekday mornings the daughters of the town’s proper families would lie out by the railroad bridge. When I was fifteen, I had sat with Marika by one of the hot pylons, a veritable box seat for viewing the daughters of the pharmacist and chief physician, district court judge, and Calvinist priest rubbing oil into their thighs down on the sandy riverbank. Whenever the train rumbled past, I would put a protective arm around my girlfriend.

Once a group of sweaty, dusty Cossack soldiers galloped down to the water from the embankment. They rubbed their horses down stark naked and, once the hides were shiny, splashed and tumbled and pushed one another under the water until, suddenly cold, they emerged, their bodies stark white atop the dark brown, wet beasts. The young ladies averted their eyes. Then the soldiers slapped on their red felt hats and rode in ever tighter circles around the tanned young ladies, whose hair peeked out from under swimsuits barely reaching their thighs. The sun shone fiercely. Then from nowhere came a whistle followed by a command. The soldiers snatched up their uniforms and boots and galloped off as quickly as they had come.

In the summer of forty-nine I often lay on a sofa under a crimson Persian rug in the Berettyóújfalu dining room reading Remembrance of Things Past and Doctor Faustus . I would lift Marika onto my bicycle and take her to the Berettyó for a swim. Those were the days of first love. Marika was a couple of years older than I was and sat in front of me in neatly ironed white clothes. I was honored. I rode down from the dam to the riverbank and came to a stop with a nice tight turn, which I always executed just so, with a hard brake and a tail skid. Once, though, under the weight of the two of us, we rolled into the water, still on the bike. This little accident did not do our love any good. Soon thereafter a guest of ours, a saxophone player, asked me whether I had serious intentions about Marika. When I pointed out I was a bit young to be thinking about marriage, he told me that his intentions were serious indeed. With an eye to Marika’s domestic happiness I generously let her go. The saxophonist had tricked me: his intentions had nothing to do with marriage.

When I was fifteen and entering the sixth year at the gimnázium , I moved with my sister and cousin into a narrow street in the middle of the city, Vármegye. I lived in the servants quarters in flat number five on the sixth floor. Entrance to the booth of a room — it was barely big enough to house a table, a bed, a wardrobe, an armchair, and a bookstand — was from the vestibule. I was free from adult supervision, but received a monthly allowance from my parents, which I husbanded as I could. Once in a while my friend Pali Holländer and I took lunch at the Astoria Hotel. We would discuss the offerings on the menu in detail and even order a Napoleon brandy after dessert. The waiter did not ask young gentlemen their age. Certain practices had remained alive.

By the end of the month, however, I would be eating at the Astoria’s stand-up restaurant on the corner of Lajos Kossuth Street and the Museum Ring. If I had enough cash, I would get layered cabbage for 3.50, if not, then bean soup with beans for 1.10; and if even that was too expensive, then the 70-fillér bean soup without beans, which, cheap as it was, came with bread. But then there were the terrifying moochers who came and stood in front of me, mumbling, hacking, whining, showing their toothless gums, fixing their eyes first on my plate, then on me. Sometimes I could make a deal with them: “I’ll leave you half. Just don’t stand right in front of me, please. Move over there!” But they never went far; they just watched, anxiously, to see whether I would keep my part of the bargain.

I knew the Astoria inside and out and had even stayed there in earlier days on one of my father’s trips to Budapest. It had the smell of that special cleanser I had enjoyed sniffing at the Hungária. My father’s lifeline had been cut, while mine was just beginning. With everything still before me it seemed natural to be starting from zero. That I lived in a cubicle of six square meters and needed electric light to read even in the afternoon, that all I had — and needed — were a bed, table, wardrobe, and bookcase, none of this was humiliating; it was uplifting. I liked having my own room, a bell jar where I could hide away, where another world was constantly in the making inside my head. I could easily step from one world to another, for a book was as much another world too as the strip of sky I could see from my window.

On the other side of narrow Vármegye Street stretched the yellow county hall, a large, ancient structure with an irregular roof that made me nervous, because workers nonchalantly clambered up and down it gnawing on snacks of bacon. “Parisian style,” said people who had never been to Paris. No one lived directly opposite, so I could gaze out over the roof to the antennas, towers, cupolas, siren horns, and clouds.

Below us lived the wife of Baron Villy Kohner, and on the next floor down Baron Tivadar Natorp. I took a liking to the baroness, a lithe, tanned woman who went around in sporting clothes, and to the baron, stooped over, examining the ground before him with a cane. Both were forcibly relocated in 1951, as was a beautiful woman with a deep voice, a smoker who wore plaid skirts and let her thick and (naturally, I believe) red hair tumble carelessly down. She worked at the Turkish Embassy, where she was arrested. Yet another neighbor, a banker, was resettled outside of Budapest. A Council chairman, a former gimnázium teacher, moved in below us. The young son of a military officer on the fourth floor came upon his father’s pistol one day and shot the daughter of the postman on the seventh floor while playing with it.

I can still picture the friends who turned up in my apartment, sitting in the unupholstered armchair across from the bed or stretching out on the bed. István would speak of his comrades in the Movement and those dull, official rooms where they discussed how to make everyone just like them, the “new men.” Actually István himself was somewhat “new” for me in this phase of his, different from what he had been (and would later be, when curiosity would drive him to chase the elusive tail of a truth that was just beginning to take shape). Now his words were more judgmental and at times directed against friends in the name of Party justice. The Party’s logic was enough for him. For a year or two.

But he could also speak respectfully of a girl’s hair or artistic talents or mock his colleagues for their human weaknesses, to remark of a great thinker that “It wouldn’t hurt for him to bathe more often.” He said the most intelligent things about the crisis of the planned economy, making his points with hard statistics. As part of his professional training, he was permitted to work in the State Planning Bureau and would smuggle out data on scraps of cardboard, holding them in his hand like Aladdin’s lamp or a kind of theoretical miracle weapon to condemn the system in revolutionary language as retrograde. At twenty he realized that the market exists and can be done away with only at the cost of lunacy. My eyes grew wide as I meditated on how Uncle Béla’s business acumen had resettled into his son, though István was interested in the market merely as a theoretical construct and had no intention of taking part in it.

I was a boy from the provinces in one of Budapest’s best schools, the Madách Gimnázium. I was a cautious young man whose accent and dress betrayed his country origins. Mr. Tóth, the tailor from Berettyóújfalu, made my suits with golf trousers, which none of my classmates would be caught dead in. But what I yearned most for was a pair of what were then called “ski boots,” shoes with a double leather sole, a strap on the side, and a buckle. I believed they would give me a more forbidding, masculine air. Ski boots were for making an exit, giving the slip, taking a powder, the kind of footwear that wouldn’t tear up your feet or fall apart on you if you were being pursued.