George Konrad - A Guest in my Own Country

One day two men followed Iván into the sauna at the Csillaghegy pool with orders to arrest him. They sweated it out there on either side of him for three-quarters of an hour, taking his arm only when the three of them stepped out of the pool’s main entrance together.

I had a desire, undoubtedly childish, to give them the slip, throw off their calculations, spoil their game. At least I could gain time. Once word got out, the decision-makers might come under pressure from writers or even their children. I asked my first wife Vera to put me up for a while.

I doubt I had been in Vera’s seventh-floor apartment for more than two days — reading, watching the birds in the gutter and the slow-working roofers on the building across the street (who were watching me as well, since they were not real roofers) when the officers of state security knocked on the door. It was 23 October 1974. They had first gone for Vera at her school, bringing her with them as a witness, but all they wanted was me. They did not even bother to ransack the place. I thanked Vera, shoved a toothbrush into my pocket, and followed the plainclothesmen out of the house.

Lieutenant Colonel Gyula Fehér, who politely asked me to forgive him for taking up so much room in the back seat, was my interrogator. He told me he had suffered a great deal reading our work, unaccustomed as he was to such vocabulary and train of thought. Despite doses of strong coffee he had fallen asleep more than once over it.

“So the study did not particularly provoke you,” I said.

“Not at all,” he acknowledged.

“Then why am I here?”

The Lieutenant Colonel lifted his arms skyward.

The handwriting sample established the corrections to the typescript to be in my hand.

“Is this your work?” I said it was, thus breaking the agreement I’d had with Iván, who stuck to the story that we’d had nothing to do with the manuscript. I thought they would be unable to bring formal charges against us, because no one had seen the text besides its authors; in other words, they had jumped the gun. I decided they wanted to annihilate the book by confiscating every copy.

I found confinement tolerable: getting up early, swabbing the floor in the cell, eating bean soup and potatoes with noodles. The prison library supplied readable books, and the authorities allowed me to sign an authorization enabling my wife to pick up the royalties I had received from the American publication of The Case Worker . The Lieutenant Colonel regularly recited his favorite scenes from Hašek’s Good Soldier Švejk . We did not speak about the book itself, only about the other copy. The expert had determined its existence, based on the confiscated copy, whose cover showed the traces of carbon paper.

One morning I woke up sensing I had gained a perspective on the matter. I would suggest they put it out as an in-house publication alongside Trotsky and Djilas. They might think me an idiot, but there was no harm in that. The point was to nip this in the bud or at least before it entangled others. Friends were bound to have their apartments searched and be summoned and questioned as witnesses. We needed to gain time. We would publish the book once things calmed down. (Iván had hidden the “real” second copy and the working manuscript.) I would work on my next novel, The Loser , and find a safe place for it.

In the meantime, we would give the authorities the feeling their work was not in vain. I would let them have the third copy, which could not possibly have carbon marks on the cover. They would have obtained a manuscript with some police value and could hope, for the moment at least, that the book existed nowhere else. I decided to let them have it on two conditions: that they release us both immediately and that the person in possession of the manuscript suffer no ill consequences.

Such was the line I gave them the following day. A few hours later the Lieutenant Colonel, acting on the authority of his superiors, accepted my terms. I took a seat with him in the police car, and off we drove to the flat of my sister-in-law, Zsuzsa Lángh, and her husband Ern? Sándor, who had done some fancy driving to ditch the car trailing them, get the manuscript to their place, and hide it in their tile oven. Both were at home. Pale and stunned, they acceded to my request that they turn the manuscript over.

That very afternoon, all three of us — Szelényi, Szentjóby, and I — were released on probation. An official decree forbade us from publishing the hostile document (the book) or even communicating its contents verbally. Any violation would result in criminal prosecution. Should we feel unable to adapt our activities to the laws of the Hungarian People’s Republic, the authorities would countenance our emigration. We could even take our families with us. Iván said he would give it some thought, but I told them, “No, I am a Hungarian writer.”

Then our case received a bit of attention in the Western press — Kissinger had supposedly asked about us — and we both decided to emigrate together with our families and proceed with our work at a university in the West. We would need job offers and visas and an exit passport, all of which we pursued through official channels.

Although life in the academy abroad seemed feasible, I had trouble picturing myself as a grateful émigré and (if all went well) university professor: I would tire of it; it would seem a waste of time. On days when something kept me from writing, I would be nervous and grumpy and get the urge to escape to a spot where I could go out into a garden for some air, where no one would bother me.

I was an enthusiast, yet infantile. On my first day in a new city — east or west, large or small — I could imagine spending the rest of my life there. This would be my window and so on. Yet walking through town the next day, I had the urge to move on, generally homeward. To Csobánka, perhaps, where, surprisingly, no one searching the house had ever lifted the table-top in my bell-tower room, where the notes for my novel lay untouched.

I settled back into my routine, writing in small lined notebooks in Budapest cafés. A button-eyed observer often watched me ply my trade. When there is danger, when the crowds stampede, stand still. I would abandon plans to emigrate, I wrote to György Aczél, the Party official in charge of cultural affairs, if they published my novel The City Builder , called off the police harassment, and let Szelényi leave. The way I put it, my decision to remain in Hungary was a sacrifice, a gift, though in fact it was the desire to continue the life I had led hitherto, a life I considered neither fruitless nor disagreeable. Aczél replied that no one could prescribe conditions to him but that he did not find my requirements outlandish.

It was painful to both Iván and me when I informed him we would not be a team writing in the West. You could stay too; we’d get by somehow, I thought. And he: You promised to come, and now you’re going back on your word. Do you really think you’ll be able to write your books, publish them in the West, and continue to take your constitutional through the streets of Budapest? Yes, that’s exactly what I thought. And that’s what happened. Thus began the decade and a half of my life as a banned, underground writer.

Children are smart. When I was arrested and Juli found her hands full, she took our seven-year-old Miklós to stay overnight with Feri Fehér and Ágnes Heller, who had a son about the same age. Miklós played with him all afternoon, but when evening came he took Feri aside and asked him with a touch of an aristocratic intonation, “Are you a good person?”

Sensing what he meant, Feri answered, “Yes Miklós, I believe I am.”

“Good,” said Miklós. “Then I’ll sleep at your place.”