George Konrad - A Guest in my Own Country

We persevered with Iván’s peripatetic method, lugging the tape recorder up hill and down dale, discussing our subjects while perching on Serbian gravestones in Csobánka or a bench at the base of Oszoly Cliff. Then came the precise formulation beneath old brown rafters and bugging devices. We grew accustomed to passing the narration back and forth, giving signals to one another, rewording sentences that, though perfectly fine to begin with, assumed added luster from an unexpected twist or transition.

Our primary theme was how the regime was being ground down through conflicts among parties of opposing interests. The table of contents was as clear as a Christmas tree; only the ornaments were wanting. But Iván’s main concern was the relationship of trunk to branch, while I was more interested in content and improvisation. Every time our exhaustive conversations helped us to make a point more clearly, we earned a refreshing hike up the Oszoly Cliff. We fleshed out my old idea that history was the locus of the intellectual, the knight of totality, the poet of thoughts, explanations, principles, and nightmare scenarios, the elevating force and the force of outrage. Look to the words, for in the beginning was the word. Look to the modelers of sentiment, the confectioners of feeling. Look to their own rhetorical gumbo. Before long it dawned on me that our exchange of ideas was beginning to intrigue me more than socialism’s miseries and even socialism’s prospects.

One day we heard there had been a search in the Ágnes Heller — Ferenc Fehér household. Their agenda being dissident like ours, we grew more cautious. A few times we wrapped the typescript in a plastic bag, placed it in a box, and buried it, though in less careful moments we simply hid it in the coal bin under the coal. That every room in the bell tower had a bugging device in a saucer-sized porcelain holder recording our every snore or key stroke or love groan — of this we had no inkling. We did not consider ourselves important enough. True, we had heard of Solzhenitsyn’s deportation to the West, of exiles domestic and foreign; we had heard that Andropov, the former ambassador to Budapest, was now at the head of the Soviet Secret Police and shaking things down, purging the resistance counterculture, but it never occurred to us that our Hungarian counterpart would resort to similarly coarse measures. Before long we had to accept the fact that they were doing so: I had told my wife that there was a key in the silver sugar-cube container in my mother’s glass cabinet, and the next time they raided the house, that was the first place they went.

From then on, whenever we needed to discuss anything to do with writing and manuscripts or politically sensitive encounters, we wrote it out on slips of paper we then flushed down the toilet. It also became second nature to look for nooks and crannies the size of the typescript. What we wanted to conceal most was how far along we were. I was afraid the manuscript would be seized as soon as it was completed, so I always denied any progress. When asked on the phone, “Are you working?” I would answer I was just pottering around.

“You are an intellectual resister,” said one of my interrogators. Until then I had not thought of myself as such, but I liked the way the police officer put it. I grew more sensitive to the police lexicon. I spotted the eye watching me from a little hole scratched in the paint of the window of a shop in our building, a shop that was never open. I sensed that two faces were following me from two windows in the building across the street. I started recognizing the men in cars that rolled slowly past me and the old man leaning on his elbows in the courtyard and the people behind me whose footsteps never let up and the car parked by the front gate. I had the clear feeling that the policeman who came to the bell tower to check my papers and ask what I was doing in the town was an integral part of the machinery whose charge was to ensure the survival of the Great Lie.

Since we paid little attention to either communist or anticommunist ideologies, we befouled the self-images of the unofficial and official intelligentsias alike. Feeling insulted in the name of the intelligentsia, even our opposition friends took issue with Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power . What had happened, we concluded in the book, was that the intelligentsia was ensuring that the system functioned effectively by refraining from calling the power hierarchy into question, while perceiving itself as an abused victim and thereby absolving itself of responsibility.

One hot Sunday afternoon my friend the film critic Yvette Bíró brought a sad and skeptical Czech film director to the garden at Csobánka. Iván and I felt an immediate intellectual affinity with him and graced him with our most precious thoughts, but all he did was shake his head. “You’ll be behind bars before you finish. And such bright people!”

One sunny morning my friends Gabriella Hajós (Zsabó) and György Jovánovics came out to Csobánka with me. While Zsabó stood watch down below, the sculptor took before-and-after photographs: first of what those ugly, old-fashioned bugging devices looked like in situ in the loose clay, then of what the loose clay looked like without them. I had ripped them out like carrots. Not knowing what to do with them, I tossed them into the kitchen cupboard along with the other trash. That evening, as usual, I took the bus and commuter train back to Budapest. The next day, when I reentered the Csobánka house, I noticed that my treasure was no longer in the kitchen cabinet. I was not such a free spirit as Václav Havel, who hawked his bugging devices at the flea market.

We did not intend to publish our book in Hungary; we wanted it to come out in normal countries, that is, in the West. I imagined it my duty as a citizen to see to the publication of the book, after which whatever happened did not much matter. My wife helped us to type it up, and we asked a friend of mine, Tamás Szentjóby, to photograph it page by page, the few photocopy machines in the country being under the supervision of the political police.

Walking along Péterpál Street in Budafok, where a row of houses once belonging to vintners ran up the hill, I was reminded of my hometown. We are so fatefully shaped by the place we lived before the age of ten that only in a similar setting can we feel at one with our perceptions. I kept returning to the second chapter in my novel, the one on childhood and the family. Life, for me, was beautiful, and to the question “How are you?” I generally answered — strange as it might seem to an outsider—“Great.” This feeling dates from my days at the gimnázium , when all it took to make me happy as I left the house in the morning was the knowledge that I had no obligations for the day and could go off by myself.

One day, out of the blue, another friend, Tibor Hajas, came to say that Tamás had been arrested: searching his apartment for pornographic literature, the authorities had come upon our manuscript. The couple necking constantly by my front gate turned out to be police officers. Ambulances and taxis would follow our steps, as did all sorts of conspicuously average-looking men and women — or odd-looking men and women, if they wanted to be noticed. Since things like this could happen solely with the permission of or on the orders of Party Headquarters, we could only deduce that our own arrests were not far off.

We told each other that come what may our efforts had been worth it, and agreed on a story: we had no idea whose manuscript it was or what it was. Disowning one’s work was a remnant of an earlier time, when you could get years for partial authorship of a leaflet.

Iván’s wife Kati and I saw him off to the Belgrade train. He still had a valid exit visa for Yugoslavia. Naturally he was taken off the train and sent back. We were green at the game of resistance.