George Konrad - A Guest in my Own Country

At this point his train of thought gives way to an apostolic brand of speech, which I did not follow in its stark moralizing tendencies, its idealization of the peasants and the poor, its depiction of the landowners’ guilt, and its romantic opposition to civilization.

My own experience with the poor — manual laborers, people who have received the short end of the stick — has not borne out Tolstoy’s claims. As I see it, we must all pass through the thinking man’s stages of development. I can testify that Budapest’s Chicago, Elizabeth Town, has developed a kind of raw, barroom variety of existentialism, the lives of its inhabitants subject to the same insoluble questions and same loneliness and consternation affecting those of us who are relatively well educated.

I would like to think I will never curse life, not even if I develop a serious illness. This is something I wrote forty years ago in the Kisposta Café. I prize what is with all its fortune and misfortune. I have no desire to break with this world or merge with it. For the time being I hope the world and I will keep staring each other down.

All I can assume about the future is that human life on earth will eventually disappear. This likelihood offers me no moral choice. I have always been amazed at how simpleminded religious concepts of the afterlife and communist-inspired (or other invented) utopias tend to be.

Both earthly and heavenly utopias presuppose a rejection of the world, of the here and the now. Any exaltation of the future entails a vilification of the present. Whatever my present existence may be like, I cannot wish for something radically and elementally different, because I do not believe in the possibility of such a thing. In fact, I find promises of theoretically good alternative states as repulsive as common lies.

Are we capable of living here in our bounded present, rejoicing when we can manage it, suffering when we are in pain, keeping the prospect of death before us, yet rejecting fear of the next time round, the other side?

Human beings are travelers, on their way somewhere. Once there, they are travelers no longer. Amidst all the suffering en route they naturally think of how nice it will be to get there, the way an exhausted person thinks of falling asleep to blank out everything. But it feels good to wake up the next morning too.

We live with three problems: the vexations of our daily existence, the uncertainty of our knowledge of the world, and the certain knowledge of our deaths. The believer says that God, the only truth, compensates for all this. Even the nonbeliever can hope for a friendly obituary or, in rare cases, a memorial tablet on the house where he lived. But some people require no compensation: they accept the problems and are unshaken by the ultimate uncertainty of their knowledge of the universe. How can one have certain knowledge of the universe when one can say nothing certain about one’s nearest and dearest?

In this part of the world, people eat and drink a lot, buy ugly clothes off the rack, and watch television nonstop. They don’t execute the opposition, because there is no more opposition. There are no happy and unhappy people; there is really nothing and no one at all. Our society is sometimes tedious, sometimes delirious. Having had it with uniformity, it is receptive to disorder of every kind. It is a glutinous heap, incapable of taking things seriously or knowing where to draw the line.

If you are looking for an elaborate, sublime apparition here, you are in for a disappointment. But if you feel you absolutely must have a genuinely local article, then try this: shapeless battles abandoned before they begin. All you can find here are the jumbled by-products of existence. Everyone is a snail, a caterpillar, a worm. We are strong on flesh, weak on spirit. People die of fatty degeneration of the heart. There is no slaughterhouse; it is all do it yourself. Premature debility carries you off.

I have tried to wring the self-pity out of my prose.

When I first met Júlia Lángh, who would be my wife from the autumn of 1960 to the autumn of 1976, she had floated into the Kisposta Café trailing blond hair and a rustling black raincoat and wearing a white blouse with a turned-down collar. She had just come from the university — where she had been accepted thanks to her perfect gimnázium record and a captivating articulateness — and entered the café, a first-year student in French and Hungarian, suppressing her timidity and wondering, “My God, what happens now? Who is that old man, that twenty-seven-year old?” She was not quite eighteen.

I would show up at six a.m. with notebook, pen, and ink, as if punching a time clock. It allowed me to watch the rendezvous, generally hurried, that took place before work.

Her overcoat unbuttoned, Juli sweeps in on the wind. It is better not to stand in her way, because she can bowl you over. (This gives a hint of things to come: while you gape at her in wonder, she has put breakfast on the table and talked Miklós into finishing his story some other time and Dorka to stop covering Miklós’s mouth with her hand. But that is all a few years down the road. First she had to go through the university.) Her entrance does not go unnoticed. The waitress gives an approving glance to her inky-fingered regular: “Others have been pretty, true, but this one has the energy to match.” Juli even has a manuscript in tow. The elderly gentleman emits a satisfied “Hmm.” (She wrote well then, as she did forty years later, carrying our youngest grandchild in her arms on her way to the car, where our daughter-in-law sat at the wheel and our son Miklós sat calming his son Jankó, the three-year-old swooping eagle, as he spread a shielding wing over his three-month-old brother, who, he tells all and sundry, “is going bald.”)

From that morning on, Juli and I saw each other practically every day for sixteen years. I could always be assured of stories: she is the kind of person whom elaborate things happen to, or who can make them happen. For her part she did not appear to find the stories of the aging welfare officer and part-time proofreader tedious and had no qualms about putting the necktied knight in his place when the stories turned into analyses. She was obviously free of all dishonorable intentions.

It was days before the first kiss, when her head leaned back just a bit. Then lips fused and bodies coupled to the point of exhaustion, leaving not a fingernail-sized patch on the other uncultivated — a mutual cultivation that continued until I checked two fabulous personalities in swaddling clothes out of the hospital across the street and put them in a cab.

Who are you? As we looked at each other, I tried to sail through her eyes to the harbor of the enigma. And who are those two figures in the slatted bed carrying on a mysterious conversation, sister supplying little brother with imaginative stories and he turning to her, the nearest authority, with his questions. Everything a family needed — except that I was not really there. The marriage classifieds of the day used to end: No adventurers need apply! They made me shudder.

During our courtship Juli would tactfully remind me to remove my arm from her shoulder when we neared her home, because the eyes in the windows had known her from earliest childhood and expected of her the sort of behavior befitting a young lady. Juli’s grandmother asked her permission to leave the family’s title of nobility hanging on the wall when her youngest granddaughter’s suitor came to call, though she ultimately resigned herself to the fact that, though a polished gentleman to all appearances, he was (no use mincing words) a Jew. Jews can be decent, can they not?

There followed roughly sixteen years of cohabitation and submission to a common judgment — the children’s gaze — confident as we were of the strict but fair verdict of Anna Dóra (1965) and Miklós István (1967) and hopeful as we were of their mercy.