George Konrad - A Guest in my Own Country

He was my boss at the publishing house. My fellow proofreader Tamás Katona and I would carry him in the elevator in our intertwined hands. Though somewhat embittered, he was unfailingly alert when it came to ideological matters. Yet by playing on his sentimentality, I managed to trick him: I published Isaac Babel and Bruno Schulz.

I would look at women with the alert hunger of a hunter. In those days I felt there was no simpler way to get to know people than by lying naked with them in the same bed. Conversation is better afterwards; it is permeated with reciprocal gratitude and openness. The girl who sold bread and the hairdresser, the girls studying at the university and the women colleagues teaching there, the soprano who lived across the way, the pediatric nurse — they all were frightfully interesting to me, every one different in her own way, miraculous in her uniqueness.

I would go to the station and pick out a train, then get off at a small-town station, take a room in a hotel, and look out onto the main square. The constricted undulations, the slow passings were all so many offerings of meat, in hiding until they burst into the public eye. I turned around as a woman with a nice body passed by, paused a moment, abandoning my original purpose, and set off after her. We entangled, then fell out of each other. A housewife babbling to her baby was a font as precious as old diaries discovered in the attic or the ferocious rancor of a divorce court.

I phoned a woman at the number she had slipped into my pocket among mutual friends. I canceled all my plans, went to the address she gave me, and tried to guess as I walked up the stairs what she would have on: underwear or armor? How did she arrange to be alone? What would her smell be like from up close? I go and sit down beside her, listen to her talk about all kinds of things. I have never yet heard a story that was entirely dull. And what will be the situation that gives rise to the quick embrace that encounters virtually no resistance? What is the touch that will make her shiver and whimper like a child? And what will happen afterwards? Will she phone me back or show up unexpectedly at impossible moments?

At sixteen we are awkward because our bodies are complete but our understanding still childlike. At twenty-seven we are ill at ease because our minds are adult but our blood still childlike.

I have a job, but a tiresome one. I should be a Confucian at the Guardianship Council and a Taoist at home. I laugh at the thought. Who could pull it off? I have a contract with the publisher for a book on Stendhal, but am not writing it. I have a love, but am nervously repelled by the idea of marrying again. I have friends, but know what they are going to say before they say it. In fact, I sometimes fear I know what I will be thinking the day after tomorrow. I have reached the point where each successive birthday only reminds me of what I have failed to accomplish during the stupid five years since the Revolution.

At our regular coffeehouse table I made some antideterministic remarks, unable to reconcile myself to the idea that I am the way I am as a result of the effect on me of others. I insisted there was someone inside me making complex decisions at every moment, though I didn’t know exactly who it was. My decisions were not influenced by my father’s wealth or my childhood sexual fantasies, I asserted in opposition to fashionable contemporary views, reverse determinisms I found tasteless and morally questionable. This is a land of sloughed-off responsibility, a land where people justify their acts, whatever they are.

In the library catalogue room a former professor of mine mentioned that he had been hearing identical antigovernment theories from various students of his and that when quizzed they all turned out to have talked to me recently. My teacher, who was in direct contact with the highest echelons, shook his head and said no good would come of this. I should think carefully about what I said. And to whom.

After the fall of the Revolution, in the “consolidated sixties,” I encountered the touchiness of tyranny wherever I looked. The police captain and the concierge were the state’s patron saints. They were granted practically nothing else but the right to high-minded rage and to vengeance on their fellow citizens in the name of the state. Do not imagine that people who appear intelligent, good-natured, and civilized will not go wild when presented with a chance to take umbrage in the name of the state. And there is no one they despise more than the person who exposes the vanity of their everyday treacheries, for that person denies their very raison d’être. Who is the traitor’s most natural enemy if not the non-traitor?

I had a classmate whose mother happened to see her son standing on a chair in his room delivering an address. He was denouncing his friends, one by one, to the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikolai Sergeevich Khrushchev. On and on he went, his voice rising in intensity, until he fainted and fell off the chair.

It was always cause for celebration when we happened upon islands of terra firma in the ocean of verbiage. Reading substantive works during the years of censorship was a form of refuge, a suspension of the falsities that had elbowed their way into house and home. One good book in my bag was recompense for all the clichés that had to be endured. We can use literature to be hard on our fellow humans, but if we truly learn to read we can use it to forgive them and revel in their beauty. Since my gimnázium days I have believed that the constant discussion of substantive texts is what keeps humanity going.

From spring to autumn I sought out garden spots. There were still outdoor restaurants with tables decked in red-checked cloths, and I deemed it a mark of distinction to lunch in the garden of the Fészek Club with writers older than myself, the prize of the day being the chance to measure my mind against theirs and thereby establish I had a rightful place at the table. There would always be someone in the company who had just been abroad — to Paris, naturally — and would speak of it to the provincials, for whom Paris is as far off as the moon. But just as we had no desire to pop up to the moon, we could do without Paris. We had refined the art of determining who all and what all we could do just fine without.

You could still play foot-tennis with a soccer ball in the street. Little girls still chalked hopscotch squares. You could still find mossy ruins and nooks for love trysts. It was still the fashion to carve arrow-pierced hearts and initials into tree trunks. There were still hideaways where a poet and his paramour could settle into a room on the basis of his verses.

The latent elegance of the city transcended all obstacles. You could still find white-haired watchmakers in nineteenth-century workshops and elderly, elegantly dressed Jewish salesmen in state-owned fabric shops. Waiters with prewar manners still served you in restaurants that still featured prewar pianists.

The only people in my neighborhood who could afford a car — a Škoda — were the saucy fashion designer and perhaps a writer or two or film director. The city still belonged to the pedestrians, a fact of which I took free advantage. To this day I have not learned how to drive.

We knew each other’s habits in love: our lives were virtually open books. We were shut in together on the same stage, and love was our ethnography. We sought it out, then did what we could to escape its consequences so as to seek it out again. There were no girls in white boots leaning on their cars. Business pleasure and private pleasure were not yet distinct realms. If someone was in pain from, say, the infidelity (or, for that matter, the fidelity) of a partner, the chronicle of their heart’s agony was met with sympathy rather than scorn. Everyone had a trusted friend to pour his heart out to; all secrets tended to become public knowledge.