George Konrad - A Guest in my Own Country

Together with my fellow writers, all in their twenties, we could have taken over the editorship of our monthly literary-political journal from the old guard, who were in their thirties. My editor-in-chief had traded his post for the mayoralty, and a multiparty system was in place. We had withdrawn from the Warsaw Pact, and the Soviet troops were beginning to withdraw from Budapest.

Then, suddenly, they reentered, four thousand tanks strong, first aiming their cannons at spots where they had spied machine-gun fire, then at spots where no one was shooting at all, just to be on the safe side or because the soldiers felt like it. There was a general strike, a nonstop holiday. The city was one big theater with audience participation. When you found yourself holding a machine gun or a stretcher, you didn’t think about the future; you lived a concentrated version of the present with no thought of praise or prison. Bravest among the fighters were the miners, freshly released from jail and sometimes still in their striped uniforms, and wards of the state, boys and girls alike, back in the city from their institutions.

Fifty-six was the most memory-rich year of my youth, the year when unforeseen bravery replaced fear. Furs or jackets with astrakhan collars or gallooned overcoats or old Hussar uniforms — you could see all kinds of outfits in the mayor’s antechamber. Loden coats too, of course, which were all the rage at the time. Everyone wanted to meet my editor-in-chief and obtain signed and sealed documents enabling them to found new parties and appropriate state-owned assets for their headquarters. The now armed young editorial colleague stowed his machine gun under his chair and waited patiently to see the official inside to discuss his literary journal. While the men set off with their official stamps, the student noted the brand of rhetoric that went with each style of coat. But without the daring of those young toughs out in the square the gentlemen in the antechamber would have had no hope. The family men setting out for the factories had gone through a lot to join the ranks of street fighters. It was a time when half-naked, brutally bruised or bulleted and spat-upon bodies were hanged by their feet in front of Party Headquarters. The victims of these lynchings came chiefly from the State Security Agency. Such was the price they paid for their terror. But when I looked into the dead men’s faces, considerations of that sort seemed senseless. Walking home sporting a National Guard armband and toting a machine gun, I was asked by more than one woman if I would be kind enough to rub out one or another neighbor — you know, the one in the fourth-floor corner flat. I did nothing to appease the popular demand for murder.

It would be a wild exaggeration to say that I was an obsessed freedom fighter. What was I doing with a machine gun? It was an adolescent whim, a remnant of the war. Once in a while I imagined an armed group stomping up the stairs to eliminate us. (What would be the best corner of the front vestibule for me to shoot from?) I was a pretty good shot: I had earned the title of sharpshooter during my brief training as a soldier. I was also a political commissar, because when our commander once asked who knew when Das Kapital was published, the student soldiers in our regiment guessed either wrongly or not at all until I chimed in: 1867. At last! He praised me and appointed me commissar for one of the company sections.

At the time we had no live ammo, the First World War — issue bayoneted rifles we carried coming only with five rounds of blanks. The reason, perhaps, was to keep us from using our weapons otherwise than intended. Which is just what happened two years later, late in October 1956, when students in my cohort disarmed the Baja garrison officers and moved on Budapest in army trucks. (I was unable to take part in the operation, having been forcibly removed from the community of officers-in-training.) This was in keeping with the spirit of the times, when the word “revolution” felt good. Every revolution got the highest marks: the French, the Russian, the Hungarian. Our 1848 War of Freedom was the very epitome of all that was beautiful and good: the poet falls in battle for his homeland; only the rootless scoundrel lacks the courage to die when his time comes.

A young painter said she would be ashamed all her life if she did not go out to the garrison at Újpest and get herself shot. We had to go, said the excited envoy who came for us, because people were being shot. Were they shooting back? I asked. No, he said. They were being shot with mortar fire, all the way from Gellért Hill; they couldn’t shoot back. “So why go?” “Just to be together.” It was all I could do to hold the young painter back, thereby laying her open to a lifetime of shame.

The reason I missed out on my classmates’ military operation was that during our theoretical training at the university I had smiled impertinently when a captain was at pains to describe how horrible the enemy was.

“You there!” he bellowed. “Yes, you, with the long hair! On your feet! You see, comrades? That’s what the enemy looks like! Look at him, grinning at our worldwide struggle for peace. I order you to leave the room!”

I promptly stood and headed out of the classroom, a remnant of the grin still on my lips. Few of my classmates expressed their solidarity. They tended to be “serious” and were therefore inclined to have me expelled from the youth organization of the Communist Party. The majority thus raised their hands in favor of expulsion. A few abstained. Only two protested, but they were on the outs as well.

The most ardent supporter of my expulsion — the gifted recipient of a Soviet scholarship, a member of the board of the Students’ Youth Association, and a past master at shaping the general mood ex cathedra (he is today a professor of social science) — established with painful gravity that I was fundamentally alien to the people. As I later learned, his diary exhibited a bloodthirsty animosity to Communists and Jews, though he never took part in the battles when the time came and in fact never left the small room Miklós Krassó provided him as a reward for his inquisitive mind. I am familiar with the contents of his journal because the room’s primary tenant — Miklós’s grandmother, who was then over ninety but still enjoyed the life-extending properties bestowed by curiosity — had dipped into the notebooks lying there on the table. She was curious about what that odd boy could be writing: not only did he fail to set foot outside the flat during those stirring times; he put his jacket on over his bare skin, because he never washed his shirt.

Miklós’s grandmother immediately noticed the frequent appearance of the word “Jew.” Though born a Presbyterian, she was perhaps particularly attuned to that sequence of letters since her parents had converted in the nineteenth century, the better to move freely among the other landowners and doctors. Seeing all the filth her lodger appended to that word, she took the first opportunity to turn him out. “Be gone, you miserable Tartuffe! How can you despise me so and live under my roof!”

She still called Russians by their pejorative Hungarian name, muszkák , and when she heard Trotsky mentioned in connection with her grandson — Miklós had given a successful lecture on him in London — she kept calling him Tolstoy: Tolstoy meant something to her, Trotsky did not.

Her grandson Miklós, though getting on in years, was constantly on the move, and I could only marvel at the whirlwind of energy that secured him a truck and the papers to carry out his plan. He managed it by making a scene in the chambers of the Revolutionary Council of Intellectuals, which had responded to revolutionary demands rather docilely by collecting information, assembling credible-looking reports, and weighing strategies. The inner sanctum was kept under guard, but Miklós broke through. What moronic impotence, he screamed. The intellectuals’ place was in the street, in the armed insurrection! And he explained in detail what needed to be done. After putting up with him for a while, the Revolutionary Council of Intellectuals asked him what he would take in return for leaving them in peace. A truck and driver, replied Miklós, and a document stating they supported his recommendation for consolidating workers’ councils.