George Konrad - A Guest in my Own Country

He was a learned man and handsome, with snow-white hair, a slight limp, and a deep, powerful voice — a true gentleman, un homme de qualité . He was a major in the French Army, a hero of the Resistance, a master of conversation, an editor of Proust translations, and a fine translator in his own right. Later he worked as a proofreader at the prestigious Európa publishing house, where he was eventually promoted to head of the literature division.

Sometimes my wife Vera Varsa dropped in, and the three of us would sit in the heavy armchairs under a portrait of Kossuth and talk. I noticed that Gyuri’s warm and civilized way of addressing his words to her, looking into her face while deep in thought, was not a matter of indifference to her. She was also taken with his masculine modesty, his self-isolation, his kindness. She had a deep voice and would give serious thought to our conversation, lifting her upturned nose, wrinkling her brow, playing in her excitement with her thick, unruly bronze locks, opening her mouth as she followed the train of thought, then making an occasional comment expressing anger or enthusiasm. And there, in the typewriter room of the Parliamentary Library, just next to the Prime Minister’s office, our little band grew so close that Gyuri Szekeres, through the inscrutable will of fate (and of Vera), took over my role not long after.

Looking out of the Parliamentary Library window, I would spy the philosopher Miklós Krassó, true to form, still blond, not gray as he would be in 1985 just before his death in a London flat, where he was fatally burned by a gas explosion. In the spring of 1956 he was bubbling over with ideas, bounding about, waving his arms, having a grand old time. I would be riveted for hours by our conversations about politics and philosophy. We would go to the Dairy Restaurant, where the bread girl listened to him, fascinated, whenever he stopped her to take packets of sugar for his rice pudding from her wooden tray. He would lunge into copious detail about the madness inspired by Fichte and so transfix her with classical German philosophy that jealous cries of “Bread!” “Sugar!” rose up from all corners of the room.

Flitting past Vera and me on the Kossuth Bridge one day, he apologized for his rush by saying he had to drop Hegel and go back to Kant, because nothing existed outside of Kantian morality, though that wasn’t entirely possible, because you can’t ignore history and you can’t understand history without Hegel. Having spent years with Spinoza’s Ethics and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind , he was at home with the dilemma. As for myself, I was going on at the time about forked paths of consciousness and the simultaneity of events as an apology for my eclecticism (which I called pluralism). Why choose between Hegel and Kant anyway? There’s room on the shelf for both. Vera could not approve of my thinking in such matters, because for her it mirrored an inability to choose in love. This one is beautiful, you say, but so is that one. She noticed that when out walking I couldn’t help eyeing a woman if she was the least bit attractive.

How to gain, if not freedom, then at least free time, which is occasionally the same thing? One day István brought me the news that the Debrecen crematorium was looking for professional cremators. The crematorium was in operation only two days a week, but it offered terrific pay in exchange for the repulsion you had to overcome. Should we become professional oven-feeders, corpse-burners? We, of all people? At least in this case the bodies were going to the ovens voluntarily. We talked ourselves into it, fantasizing that we would fly to Debrecen and live in the Golden Bull Hotel, doing the work in white gloves and spending the rest of the week in the Parliamentary Library looking out over the Danube at the Castle in ruins. We wrote a dignified letter of application about how deeply interested we were in the job. We had heard the remuneration was excellent. Was this true? The director gave a polite response. They were indeed looking for employees and were delighted with the sincerity evident in our expression of interest. However, they felt it necessary to clarify one misconception, namely, the salary was one-tenth of the figure we had cited. The thought flashed through my then twenty-year-old mind that we might sell the corpses to the Institute of Anatomy. No need there. “You are a very cynical young man,” said Professor Kis, head of the Anatomy Department and coincidentally President of the Council of Free Churches. “Earn your bread by the sweat of your brow!” I could have unloaded freight cars, but instead decided to proofread and translate.

Those were the days of the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party and Khrushchev’s Secret Speech. After my third expulsion from university I was reinstated thanks to the intervention of György Lukács. A group of friends would congregate at our place to ponder historical portents, certain as we were that we stood at the very center of history: Austria had recently been pronounced neutral, and changes were imminent. István was convinced, citing classified information he had found at the Planning Bureau, that the country was bankrupt. He said he had enough material to depose Rákosi should the opportunity arrive.

On the morning of 23 October 1956, the day the Revolution broke out, I was sitting alone in a sun-drenched corner room of an Andrássy Boulevard mansard that served as the editorial office of the recently founded — and strongly oppositional — journal Életképek before an ever-growing pile of awful poems submitted by dilettantes, to whom I, as a neophyte literature teacher and editorial apprentice, should long ago have sent polite rejection letters. Instead I spent my time on the phone with friends and lovers, keeping up with political developments. The student demonstrations were banned at some points and allowed at others. It was all well and good that the students were marching, but demonstrations in and of themselves did not particularly attract me: I had done my share of compulsory marching on May Day with my schoolmates. When we assembled, I always tried to avoid having a flag pressed into my hand and to arrange things so I could slink away inconspicuously and go rowing on the Danube with friends. Foisting the flag off on someone else was a pardonable, if low trick. Things were different on that particular day in 1956, I concede, but even then I grabbed not a flag but the wriggling shoulders of a bright girl I knew from the university. I noticed her in the march, to which I had calmly taken the tram. We crossed the Margaret Bridge together.

Carrying flags along the street had been allowed only on official holidays, while saluting the Party leadership, but what had been forbidden yesterday was now suddenly permitted — simply because we were doing it. I was not so ardent as to cut the insignia of the People’s Republic out of the middle of the flag; there were plenty of volunteers for that. There are always plenty for everything. During an uprising they turn up on the perimeter of the march route on motorcycles or elbowing their way along or shouting a slogan or two at the crowd from a car outfitted with a loudspeaker and enthusiastically breaking into song. I knew a few at the gimnázium , ready to stir up crowds with forced enthusiasm.

That night, after leading my curious companion past the headquarters of the Hungarian Radio, where we heard shots and shouts (“Jewish murderers!” yelled a man who had carefully withdrawn into a doorway), I returned home and told my wife, as I listened from the balcony to bullets crackling in the distance, that I would not take part in the shooting. But as the government had as yet no halfway measures like rubber clubs and water cannons and the only choice was live ammunition or forbearance, escalation was unusually rapid. So in the end when a young poet ran through the university halls shouting, “Hey! Who wants a machine gun?” I told him I did, and soon I was propped on my elbows on the cabin roof of an open truck as a member of the student-organized national guard.