George Konrad - A Guest in my Own Country

I loved films with chases and never identified with the pursuers. I used to flesh out stories of friends’ escapes over the border in my imagination, taking them through creeks and mined bogs. Pali and I had plans to row down to the southern border and suss out the possibilities for crossing, but the motorboat border guards never let us get close. We still fanaticized about swimming out underwater using a reed as a breathing straw or strapping a motor-powered propeller onto our bellies, even to the point of wondering whether the propeller would harm our private parts.

Yet when emigration became a realistic topic of conversation, when Hungarian Jews, too, could move to the newly founded state of Israel, even take all their possessions with them in large chests, when our parents asked us whether we would be willing to emigrate, my sister and I said no. Everyone we had feelings for, everything we enjoyed was here. I had by then a good few years invested in Budapest and had learned to take the bad with the good. I held fast to the places where both had befallen me.

“We’ll stay,” I said.

“What for?” said my father, and with reason, since he had been forcibly removed from everything he had created for himself. Although he never could understand the point of it, he acknowledged its reality and went on to earn a pittance by managing a hardware store in one of Budapest’s side streets. As ashamed as he was to tell his customers day after day that he was out of this or that, he rejected with disgust the under-the-table deals made by his subordinates. He took a dim view of state-directed commerce. “Tell me, son. What’s the point of all this?”

Since he was nothing if not insecure in the conceptual universe of scientific socialism, there was no use in my telling him what he should say the next day if it was his turn to discuss the Party organ’s daily, Szabad Nép (Free People), at the half-hour ritual morning meeting, when basing their comments on the previous day’s issue, the store’s employees would condemn the web of deceit spun by the imperialists to destroy the cause of the working class. Neither my father nor the imperialists were up to the task.

“I’m no good at speaking,” he would say, though in fact he had the gift of gab. Once retired, he would go shopping at the Great Hall and spend the entire morning chatting up both sellers and buyers, then stop on the way home to hear out his concierge.

I never spoke to my family about wanting to be a writer. All anyone saw was that I read a lot, pounded the typewriter, and published a few book reviews during my university years. My diploma qualified me to be a teacher of Hungarian literature. Mother would have been happier to see me in medical school, but I would never have been accepted, given my bourgeois background. I had an “X” by my name, which meant, in communist terms, that I was more than a class outsider: I was a class enemy.

I had applied for a concentration in French and Hungarian, but was rejected. I could count myself lucky to gain entry into the Russian Department, which was soon renamed the Lenin Institute, its purpose being the education of reliable cadres with a strong Marxist-Leninist background. But we “X’s” never lasted long anywhere, and during my second year, two weeks after Stalin’s death, I was barred from the university during the general mourning period. Once Imre Nagy came to power, the Ministry of Education allowed me to continue my studies in the Department of Hungarian Literature, but I was expelled again after Nagy’s fall in March 1955. It was only through the intervention of my professors that I was permitted to re-enroll and complete my studies.

After receiving a degree in Hungarian Literature in the summer of 1956, I did indeed become a teacher, but also a member of the editorial board of a newly founded (though not yet circulating) journal Életképek (Pictures from Life). I did not have much time to enjoy those positions: my fellow students were fomenting a revolution. We got hold of some machine guns and formed a university national guard regiment that tried to defend the university against what proved an overpowering force. In the end, we surrendered.

I have mixed feelings looking back on those five years of study. I feel the same ambiguity I feel whenever I visit a university anywhere in the world to lecture on literature, give a sociology seminar, or simply talk to faculty members and their enthusiastic students. Gaining an overview of an entire field of study, having the chance to study all day (a chance that may never return later in life), agonizing in preparation for examinations, recognizing personal capacities and limits, worshiping some professors and disparaging others, thinking through the strategies for turning knowledge to use, living the excitement of first love, conversing with friends deep into the night, entering ignorant and exiting relatively well educated — no, we didn’t waste our time. But even these memories are tinged with irony: I see the faces trying on various masks; I see an army of fresh self-images marching along a road of careers. Looked at one way, it is an arrogant new elite, but from another angle it is a nest of newly hatched eggs. Yes, it is a diploma factory, but then there is the master — student relationship, dramatic and elegiac for both.

Clearly politics deeply permeated my years at university, permeated them so deeply that it was a permanent backdrop for both professors and students. Being locked in and locked out, dealing with weapons inside and out (machines guns within, tanks without) is anything but normal. Any normal student role soon went by the boards. But even at the height of the Revolution I had no desire to shoot anyone: in the face of the armored units’ overwhelming advantage I deemed speech to be the opposing force that would prove decisive in the long run, a conclusion I arrived at through concerted contemplation with all those who did not stream across the temporarily opened border to the West.

Half my classmates left, most of them becoming professors, mainly at American universities. We, the more recalcitrant ones, went underground, thinking that if we couldn’t have it our way now we would provide the spirit of freedom with a mantle of disguise while we consolidated and reinvigorated the culture. As long as we were locked in, we might as well get to know our city, our country. Compulsion breeds intensity. The plan was to learn from people of experience, to spend part of our days in the library and part in tenements and back courtyards trying to save the lives of neglected children.

As for our evenings, we spent them in the literary cafés. Our post-university lives were thus a continuation of our university lives: the same circles of friends and lovers, a few professors, and the literary crowd. Word got out who was who. Everybody knew everybody else. It was a world with the intimacy of confinement about it, with the air of a guild. The university was merely a relatively brief interval in a lifelong course of study, though arguably it was the most stimulating, because everything was new: first exams, first serious writing, first apartment (or room at least), first lovers’ cohabitation, first public role. These win out ultimately in the contest of memories, as their smells and colors are stronger than those that follow, perhaps because of the great hunger that precedes them. Who can possibly digest all that food, those books, those bodies, those experiences. Once the student years have passed, the marvelous hunger dissipates. My university career, deformed as it was by political vicissitudes, nourished my hunger for reality. I envy today’s students their freedom, because politics does not stand between them and knowledge and they are spared the many senseless obstacles that affected our lives so harshly. At the same time, given that we can learn from the provocations and shocks of fate, no matter how unwelcome, I have no regrets that such was my lot.