George Konrad - A Guest in my Own Country

Women in the center of town and at summer houses in the hills, women in every district, in little ground-floor rooms looking onto courtyards, women encountered in the night, women encountered in cafés staring back at you, letting their eyes rest on you, women looking down from the bend in the stairs above, entering a shop and pleasantly surprised to note the loyal perseverance of this still-unknown knight. Girls who hopped onto a tram, girls we hopped on after, and finally the embrace of unanticipated intensity, as if we had set off explosives inside each other.

They were looking for something more, or less, than I was. They were curious, and so was I. The bolder ones took the elevator; the more timid tiptoed up to the sixth floor and hesitated before ringing the bell. Thighs twisted and curled; nails clawed the bed; breasts swayed left and right; labia opened and closed, sopped and dried. You were good if you didn’t toss her out, if you were willing to stick around, go for a drink, look at the falling snow, study the veining of a hand, hear out a family saga. They were psychologists and hairstylists, teachers and tapestry-makers, lawyers and medical assistants, opera singers and bookkeepers, ceramicists and bank tellers. What I like about many women is their two-sidedness: a woman without a hidden agenda is like a lily-of-the-valley without a scent. The lady comrade made it clear she disagreed with you in matters ideological, but demonstrated total agreement in matters sexual. Leaning against the banister, the doorjamb, the mirrored bureau, on the ground, in the bathtub, in the pantry, in the most unorthodox places. Sailing over hurdles, getting back at prohibitions, ending up in new beds beside new bodies observed with the exhilaration of a teenager.

The bed is warm, the radiator cold. I can reach the nose of the white Rococo angel with my left hand. I give it a pat. All’s well with the world. I have developed a lifestyle not particularly suited to a married man, but permissible for one in the process of divorce. I go to bed early in the evening and get up at three a.m. Then I climb into the bathtub and lie back cross-legged, the cold water splashing over my chest. A goose-down comforter calls me back to its embrace in the unheated room. I deliberate whether to sanctify the day with a glass of tokay. (My sister Éva has had a case of tokay delivered to me from America.) My birthday is coming up, a number substantial if not round: twenty-seven. It is the year of our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Sixty.

I begin my day earlier than the schoolchild, earlier than the factory worker. I go out into the still-dark city, wending my way to the Pipacs Bar. They let me in; they are open until five. The guests are drifting homeward, and the only girls are the ones the taxis have brought back. There I sit by the jukebox, absorbed in the work of Samuel Beckett, engulfed by the smell of dusty curtains, polished shoes, coffee, cigarettes, beer, hairspray, and the body odors of a city where only every other apartment has a bathroom.

“Looking for decadence?” asks the pianist, his hands prancing around the keyboard. Am I looking for decadence? More a state of fallenness, the hour where makeup on wrinkles smudges, when the collar pops open behind the necktie, when the belt gets loosened a notch or two. The Finnish ambassador’s son starts dropping glasses, but Gizi comes over and sweeps up the shards. “You just go ahead,” she says. She gets a good tip for every sweep-up.

Out to the banks of the Danube, to the Pest abutment of the bombed-out Elizabeth Bridge! The little motorboat is not running yet, but I need to look at the water every morning from the steps that line the riverbank. It is not so long since we set out from here to a still backwater at the Tas locks, where the surface shone black and the waters lapped softly amid perfect silence. A factory owner whose plant had been appropriated by the state had survived the difficult Rákosi era by fishing there for sturgeon every morning and selling the catch to the better restaurants.

Leaving the Pipacs Bar one morning in early summer, I have a few words with the Petőfi statue: “Europe is quiet, Mr. Petőfi, quiet again. We’re keeping our mouths shut as we did after 1848, after your revolution, and at least no one is getting shot into the Danube. But as you know, Mr. Petőfi, they hanged our Prime Minister, Imre Nagy, two years back. We were terribly broken up when the news was announced, and could think of nothing to say.”

Ambrus Oltványi, our host that evening, made us excellent tea with a series of scything movements, a legacy of polio. Towering above us in bookshelves that reached to the ceiling was the intellectual history of the nineteenth century. We were overcome with the beauty of the view from his windows, but Ambrus tempered our enthusiasm. “Yes, it’s beautiful all right, but beauty is a great thief of time.”

Ambrus’s father, Imre, was a great collector and patron of the arts, a former banker, a retired Minister of Finance, a great believer in civil society, and a translator of composers’ biographies. He spent the worst years of communism in his bed in a silk robe, surrounded by teapots and ashtrays, the corner window darkened by a crimson velvet curtain. When his son speculated that the current regime might turn out a bit more liberal, Imre listened to him quietly as if he were a madman.

In 1961 I began a half-time job for Helikon preparing a ten-volume, onion-paper, leather-and-canvas-bound edition of Lev Tolstoy’s collected works. My days passed under the sign of Tolstoy. I read A Confession sitting on the bank of the Danube by the remains of the Elizabeth Bridge.

It is a work unparalleled in its clarity of vision (particularly the first half), though lacking in personal humility in the face of the universe. It is an honest and passionate compendium of every pessimistic, existentialist, life-denying philosophy. Once the mind breaks away from the superficialities of a mechanical will to live and daily tasks and responsibilities and rejects its identity with its existence in time, in other words, once it begins to question life itself and has a good look at death (which it had previously lacked the imagination and freedom to know), it suddenly feels that mortal existence is distressingly pointless, repellent, and humiliating and that it is pointless to seek a goal or mission or anything higher into which one’s individual existence may meld and find peace. Science is valid only when it deals with nature, which has no mind; it loses its validity the moment it tackles the human element. We have no goal, no future other than the pursuit of our own annihilation. The mind is incompatible with life. Consistent and logical thought leads to suicide.

The only way to keep suicide at bay, Tolstoy tells us, is to develop modes of behavior that skirt the issue. The common people, fettered by workaday struggles, are too dull to devote their lives to seeing things as they are. People surprised by death with a blow to the back of the head may be left out the equation. One pure type is the hedonist, who revels in intense pleasure, who does nothing but eat, drink, and make love; another is the scar-picker, who debases life instead of confronting death, who looks towards death half-crazed, with endless whining.

Then what sustains life? asks Tolstoy. What pulls a person through despair? What makes suffering worth the price? What pacifies the soul of the people? What structures our civilization? What in history transcends the personal?

Faith, answers Tolstoy. He first settles on religious faith, then searches for something personal. Faith and intelligence are unrelated. One cannot use the one to verify or support the other. After intelligence has done its work, faith demands its rights at the outer limit of our helplessness. (Faith and not God, Who is a consequence of faith, faith as one of the vital functions.) The concept of infinity does not arise from the circle of the finite. Faith carries us beyond the limits of the finite to a state of humility in the face of the infinite, a humility that releases us by undoing our very selves.