George Konrad - A Guest in my Own Country

Many years ago my mother tried to give me my deceased father’s wedding ring; it did not fit onto my finger. Even during my first marriage, the moment I walked out of the door I slipped the new ring into my pocket. One day I forgot, and an entire class at the girls’ gimnázium gave out quite a buzz.

From that day on they thought Daisy and I were married. During her last year at the university she demonstrated her outstanding pedagogical gifts in the same school where I was a teacher in training. I used to observe her from the back row and unsettle her with mocking glances. They could have seen us in the golden spring of 1956 after the earthquake and flood or before the Revolution, strolling arm in arm through the neighboring streets.

Later, they could see me with Vera, my wife, as we walked the length of the Parliamentary Library (an afternoon home for many) along the thickly bound issues of parliamentary minutes of earlier days, then turned off into the last of the so-called research rooms, which were glass-walled and lined with colorful panels. From there, a heavy door opened into a corner room: the sanctum sanctorum , a room reserved for us, the chosen ones permitted to keep a typewriter, György Szekeres and me. He was forty, I twenty-three. Through the thick, heavy window behind my enormous desk I had a stunning view of the Danube, the chestnut trees lining the promenade on the Buda side, and behind them the six-story palazzi in various states of disrepair, towering with lordly dignity, with the placidity of the beautiful who know they are beautiful, even if the man in the street kicks up a fuss, even if bombs start falling, even if people are lined up along the embankment and get shot into the breaking ice floes, even if excursion boats thrum about on the green-gray water. But there is nothing thrumming about now, only the sound of a piano and drums from the boat by the Hotel Dunapart, whose nightclub stays open until four in the morning. Couples coming together in the bar can rent little furnished cabins.

I usually took the number two tram to get to the Library of Parliament, whose entrance, tall and fitted with brass doorknobs, faced the Danube. You had to pass by the guards. I would nod to them with respect. After all, they were guarding the gate that led to the very summit of our country. Going up and down the steps, students would report to one another on the subjects discussed in the colloquia that went on there. Girls from humanities departments would be sitting side by side beneath bronze-stemmed lamps, future scholars with double fields (French and Hungarian, History and English, Psychology and Folklore) gazing at the current scholars, the higher caste, the chosen ones permitted to do their work in the four-man “research rooms,” which were separated from the large reading room by wooden-scrolled doors with panes of colored glass, their large windows looking out over the Danube and the Castle.

Girls in the humanities were generally in love, or wanted to be, and could be quite dramatic in their breakups. They would tell their girlfriends they had just poisoned themselves in their grief, that cruel animal having told them it was all over. In a quiet little Buda bar, while everyone was dancing, that … that cad had said it would be better to put an end to it now rather than later. But the truth is, it’s no good putting an end to it ever, sooner or later. So now, when her head fell to the table, he would quake at the humiliation of it all. But her true-blue girlfriend would abandon her own private students and drag her off to the hospital as her mother had done before, and later that scoundrel would sit on the blonde angel’s hospital bed, and she would open her eyes and fix her gaze on him, and they would rejoice in each other, shedding tears of gratitude, both of them forgetting all that stupidity: the boy that their love was over, the girl that her life was over as a result. Now nothing was over, and the library would be open again the next day from nine to nine.

Libraries were places of refuge, asylums furnished with things of lasting value. In the library of the Institut Français I found books that spoke openly and open-mindedly of things taboo here at home. I had access to journals in sociology and psychology. There were art books as well, and novels by the latest authors. At the Parliamentary Library I was granted a pass to the research rooms — white instead of pink — which gave me access to even the classified publications of the Telegraph Office. I shared space with some odd birds involved in mysterious research and horribly boring types who used their white passes to take notes on textbooks of Marxist literature, that is, to extract meaninglessness out of meaninglessness. They looked at me suspiciously, since everything I read inspired alienation in them. Still, I was tolerated and felt at home there; in fact, we were a large caste, the merely tolerated yet still comfortable.

I glance out of the window at the Danube: Vera is coming to pick me up. We loaf a bit, our arms around one another’s waists under the arcade, or sit on the embankment steps if the weather is nice. This is an appropriately humble spot: compared with the contents of the library, my knowledge was zeropoint-zerozerozero and remained so for a long time to come. I stare longingly at the tugboats on the Danube. They had a cabin at the stern where the captain lived with his family, and in the morning his wife would hang his freshly washed shirts out to dry. Watching the lazy tugboat pull those white patches along with six barges attached to its stern, I would fantasize about learning the captain’s craft and, after seeing to my daily tasks, sitting in a reclining chair and reading or indulging in free-flowing ruminations.

I had a typewriter at home and one in the library, old, black portables. Gyuri Szekeres at the next desk and I would out-clack each other by turns. I wrote without restraint on my Triumph, whose handle had come off, though I rigged up another from an old belt. My machine clattered like a cannon, though no more loudly than my colleague’s, who had been sitting at the next table since his release from prison. In front of me, on a table covered with crimson felt and standing on lion-legs, lay books by Albert Camus, Raymond Aron, Emil Cioran, István Bibó, László Németh, and Miklós Szentkuthy that I was entitled to borrow for in-house use with my white researcher’s card, obtained through recommendations from the Writers’ Association and the monthly Új Hang (New Voice). Without the card the librarians would have spent a long time debating whether to lend me a book of suspicious orientation; with it they gave me most of what I asked for. The rare refusal, with the explanation that a special permit was required for the work in question (for which I would have to pound the pavement and work out some clever tactics), came not from some repressed, balding employee with a puffy mustache in a white smock but from a stunning (though white-smocked) blonde wonder, her every movement — like her voice and gaze — wispy and smooth. She had a large, vulturelike nose, and the corners of her mouth were sensuous and arch though she never smiled. She seemed enveloped by a silvery bell jar, and much as I toyed with the idea I made no particular effort to break through it: by gaining her, I would lose the library, because I would eventually leave her. This made librarians holy and untouchable.

Szekeres would tell us stories about university life in Paris, stories of right- and left-wing radicals alike. He told us about the time when during the German occupation he had been caught in a raid and patted down. He happened to have had a revolver on him, a revolver wrapped in a newspaper, so he held the newspaper over his head while they searched his pockets and found nothing. Hearing about this brilliant stroke of heroism, all we twenty-three-year-olds could do was blink. We had a good laugh when he told us about the time in prison when the inmates suddenly took heart because despite the horrendous political situation the food situation had improved substantially, then lost heart when the political situation started looking up but the old slops returned. It turned out that a highly reputed cook had been arrested when times were bad and released when they got better. So the bad food didn’t mean the regime was cracking down; it meant the old cooks had come back. He didn’t go into detail about the interrogations. All he said was that realism lacked the means to depict them. He told us to read Kafka, because only his overarching metaphors could approach our reality and he did not consider himself up to the task. We used to compete to be the first to read the latest issue of the Nouvelle Revue Française . I knew that the French secret police had delivered Gyuri to the Russian secret police on Glynecke Bridge, the Bridge of Melancholy, near Potsdam, because he had refused to return home or tell the French Secret Service about his role as a Hungarian operative in Rome, their price for a residency permit. As a result, he had to choose between becoming a traitor and spy or being handed over to the Communists, who had ordered him home from the embassy in Rome (he had protested against the Rajk trial in a letter) and eventually sent him to prison.