George Konrad - A Guest in my Own Country

“Your daughter is eight years old. She can read her father’s notes. The moment she lays eyes on them the conditions for regulation 127/b have been satisfied. In fact, I don’t even need to establish the fact of her having seen them, only the possibility that she has. If the key is in the lock, the crime can take place — a criminal act , mind you. Because what you think is your own business, but once an enemy thought acquires objective written status, that is no longer a private matter.”

I imagine he had just recently learned the phrase “acquires objective status.” The Major liked sounding scholarly. “Besides, the key to the file cabinet is not on your key ring.” This was hard evidence — of which he was duly proud.

The next day he sent a police car for our son Miklós’s nanny. Erzsi had instinctively asserted that the Engineer’s filing cabinet was always locked and she had never seen the key. The Major barked at her to stop lying. Erzsi blushed, then rose. A retired textile worker, she was a model proletarian and a member of the Workers’ Guard. The young man had no right to call her a liar. She had worked her entire life in the same factory, lived in the same house. He could ask her coworkers or her neighbors whether she was a liar or not. (When she retold the story recently, she gave a little laugh and said, “The fact of the matter is I fibbed a little.”)

In any case, the Major was unimpressed. When the Department of the Interior rescinded my right to travel abroad for three years and the Major personally saw to it that I was dismissed from my job (if I insisted on writing something that was bad for me, I must be suffering from a maladaptive disorder), their logic found support with certain friends of mine, all bright, decent people in their own right, who wished me well but took it for granted that challenging authority would elicit a stern response. Some thought me crazy, others devilishly clever — but I was really quite guileless. In any case, I was now a freelancer after eleven years in the employ of the state.

Not that I had ever wished for a public role, a podium under my feet. The Major had saved me from an institutional career. If anything, my goal was internal emigration: a garden I would leave only to satisfy obligations I felt obliged to comply with. I had no desire to win or to lose, just to hold out a while longer. God forbid I should be the carrier of some first person plural. I shun the high ground that inspires envy. Even while under the employ of the state I managed to avoid having a single subordinate. I am at home only in groups where all are equal and speak in their own name — and feel free to tease one another. When required to speak or read on a stage, I slip back down as soon as possible.

After 1973 Iván and I could be sure that every document ultimately reached them , that they read every sociological interview we made. We wrote; they read. Research became evidence: every fact became part of the case against us; every wiretapped word made it stronger. Words could sweep you away, force you into roles, set traps for you to fall into, turn against you; they could make you do things you never dreamed of.

I first encountered Iván Szelényi at some meeting or other and found him standoffish, but then most of my friends are standoffish. He asked me from behind his pipe, “So you people are doing a survey too?” My answer came out a dilettantish jumble that only reinforced the wearily magnanimous superiority of the fellow, whom I judged to be five years my junior (about twenty-eight to my thirty-three). His jacket and tie were perfect. Everything about him bespoke the civilized young scholar, a rare bird in our context.

I was taken aback by the you people as well. So my office and I were a we? And he was with the Academy’s Sociological Institute. But we soon realized our institutions could pool forces and create a new wave in Hungarian urban sociology. Our incipient friendship provided an added stimulus, but neither mentioned it explicitly: we were too bashful.

Suddenly I was a young Turk reformer in a planning and research institute of the ministry. Iván and I — published professionals from Budapest, presenters at conferences where the most the local eminences could do was make a comment or two — mocked or disparaged things they still found interesting and respectable.

As I have said, Iván taught me that walks are the sociologist’s primary modus operandi: If you want to know what a city is like, walk its streets. Observe the rocking chairs along the narrow, sloping sewage gutters that go by the name of thoroughfares in Pécs’s poverty-stricken Zidina neighborhood. Watch the grandmother telling stories to her grandchild. Note the mirror up by the window enabling the old woman to follow who is walking along the street, ensuring her a constant flow of fresh information from the outside world.

Iván had an eye for such details along with a propensity for good dinners with our mostly local colleagues, who became our sources for gossip and local folklore. The morning after, they would take us to the Gypsy settlement or to the new row of elegant apartments they dubbed “Cadre Ridge.” We also paid visits to any number of locals: council presidents, party secretaries, ancient barons, priests, schoolteachers, blacksmiths, gardeners, merchants, miners.

I would step out of my front door in Budapest at eight a.m., and by ten the propeller plane had me in Széchenyi Square in Pécs, where I began the day at a marble table at the Café Nádor, watching the locals coming and going southern style, in waves. Then Iván and I would set off, exchanging greetings with the people we met — men leaning on shovels in their gardens, women with net shopping bags, short-skirted, ponytailed girls whom we asked for directions.

We were the saccharine-smiled, arrogant sophisticates who had seen so much of the world. I had spent a total of maybe two months in the West; I had written in a café on the Île de la Cité, observed the blue-aproned peasants in a nearby village, and lain at the nearby seashore in Normandy alongside the great transatlantique , the France . Iván was a hopeless cosmopolitan who had spent a year in America on a Ford Foundation grant. When I asked him to describe New York, he said, “You’re in New York and you’re tossing and turning with insomnia because you have no lion. So you grab your wallet and out you go and before you know it you’ve got a lion on a leash.”

“Hmm,” I said to myself. “Why didn’t this man go into literature?”

One night a good ten years later I had trouble sleeping in New York and went into the first grocery store I found to ask where I could get my hands on a lion. “Wouldn’t you rather have a nice tongue sandwich?” asked the owner, a strapping fellow with a smile to match.

Which all goes to show that research and a sense of humor are not mutually exclusive and that you could do good work under the old system as well. The orange Volkswagen that was the vehicle for our merry pop-sociology, with our younger colleague Róbert Manchin at the wheel, took us to one after another of the hundred-odd villages we had chosen at random. In a parsonage we devoutly touched the four-hundred-year-old desk on which the Calvinist preacher Gáspár Károlyi had translated the entire Bible from Hebrew and Greek. We would take large bags of children’s clothes out to the Gypsy settlements, where kids ran out of their shanties naked through the snow, bombarding us with their “Money, Mister! Give us money!”

Sometimes we thought we would simply observe them and describe their social structures; sometimes we imagined that if we managed to define the situation reforms might come of it. But the system, the ultimate subject of our observations, searched our apartments one day, initiating what would become a long series of unpleasantries, probably under the impression that if they put us on strict notice and isolated us, others would learn from our example and we would either come to our senses or leave the country as our Russian, Czech, and East German dissident colleagues had. We were naive perhaps, but so were the authorities. We persevered.