George Konrad - A Guest in my Own Country

Influenced by tendencies I observed in myself and those around me at the mental institution where I began to work at the time, I tried to view mental illness as a behavioral strategy, an individual concept of the world. The patient may act strange, but he sees himself as an innovator. Such might be well be a description of my type of dissident, I thought. The hero of my novel was committed to an asylum. Confiscated copies of the novel were condemned to destruction by court order as “hostile material.” Not me, just a few years of my work.

Ultimately the mental institution is a reflection of state power. The illnesses there are fed by that world, which provides its causes and its symbols. Rationality was part and parcel of our state culture (or at least claimed to be), while critical attitudes — dissident attitudes, if you will — depend on transrational decisions. You follow the path you believe in, risk or no risk. But why? Intellectual gratification? The hedonism of thought? It was sheer pleasure to think through the possibilities.

After being dismissed from everywhere at the age of forty-three, I no long needed to put up with nerve-racking types (though I had always handled them fairly well), so I exiled myself to a garden, where, relaxed, I had plenty of time to sort things out. Enough money had come in from my writings to keep us going for a few more months. But our lives were not without risks — the aforementioned house searches, bugging, surveillance, and the three-year travel restriction — and my wife Juli was banned from the radio, where she had been giving insightful and refreshing book reviews every morning just before eight.

Writing counts as action only in unusual circumstances. Throughout most of the twentieth century writing had a chance to become action here in Hungary. All it had to do was go beyond the norm. Almost any statement was an opportunity for anti-state agitation.

Just after I lost my job a thick-browed colleague stuck his head into my office and whispered, “You sealed your own fate.” But I despised the idea of begging my way back into the fold. Officially sanctioned normality contains all the symptoms of neurosis. Only the free are healthy, and the healthy are their own masters. The sick are directed by others: they are dependent, they cannot take care of themselves, stand on their own two feet, make decisions, see things as they are. They see what they want to see — or what they fear.

Excluded from regular employment, I recognized my condition as consistent with the logic of the centralized party state. Hence it did not enter my mind to make the rounds of the editorial offices. I knew they had no choice but to reject my work out of hand. And yet I occasionally experimented with submitting an article. The weak-willed did not even respond, while the stronger wrote something to the effect that they did not dare publish me. Ultimately I let up: I was ashamed to have put them in such a position.

I was now convinced I was not cut out for steady jobs in the East or West. Much as I respected all those who sawed and sanded, taught, or examined patients, I was thrilled to be released from it all, and viewed my life as an endless holiday. Only the typewriter’s thump lent a touch of respectability to my activity — after all, typists were considered workers — but in fact, thanks to the generosity of the system, I was a pipe-smoking rocking-chair adventurer.

Too lazy and inept to handle the organization that went with oppositional activities, I did not get much involved, especially since political activism started early in the morning — my best time of day — which I never would have considered giving up. I stuck to formulating and distributing antipolitical texts.

It was hard for insiders in the old system to imagine that anyone would leave their ranks in the state power apparatus for civilian life. But representation, respect, and remuneration I needed like a hole in the head. Some make time to do what they like; others do not. The Gypsy nailsmiths from the outskirts of Csobánka had time to go into the woods and gather mushrooms whenever it rained. If a CEO headed for the woods on a workday morning, people would think him insane. I admired artisans supporting their families from their homes and gardens, oblivious of professions requiring them to report to the boss at a fixed time every day.

But even as I sat in the small Gypsy pub in Csobánka looking deep into my golden-yellow marc, I had to admit it was better to walk in the sun in a foreign city than pace the same five steps up and down in a cell here at home. Why then did I cling to the homeland?

The white walls in the Csobánka sexton’s house and the dark wooden cross-beamed ceiling had not changed in over a hundred years. Beyond the grassy area at the kitchen door stinging nettles grew among the fruit trees. To the left of the door stood a marble table, once a tombstone. That is where I worked. The garden produced an abundance of fruit: sour cherries, walnuts, apricots, pears, and endless plums. In fat years a couple of the more tired branches would break under the weight of their yield.

A small lane arched upward past the house. It was called Red Army Boulevard and was sprinkled with white, gravelly sand and an occasional tuft of grass. On Sunday mornings the elderly, black-clad, kerchiefed and bonneted women of the village wended their quiet way up the lane clutching prayer books. Few people used the lane during the week, so I was assured of privacy. Only the parish priest might drop in of an afternoon, but he soon went his way. “Our humble respects for the fever of creativity!” he would say, leaving the memory of many smiles.

If I made a noise stepping out of the house, the deer at the end of the garden would prick up its ears, slink behind my back, and butt me gently with its peach-fuzzed antlers. The dog would bark, then fling himself prostrate while the deer rubbed its belly. But the deer’s best friend was a feisty Japanese cock that slept with it, burrowing under its belly to keep warm. The cock’s alliance with the deer reinforced its cockiness, and it would bluster like a rowdy and give horrific crows with a voice as thin as its body.

I had set a few stumps in the grass for seating, but they had been taken over by ant colonies. If I gave one of them a kick, it shook their world like an earthquake, sending them pouring to the surface in a frenzy, saving eggs and crumbs and bumping into one another in zigzag paths of panic. Desperate, tens of thousands streamed up from the depths, blackening the stump in a mad society that, seen from above, behaves not a whit more reasonably than our own. Once the danger (during which they occasionally bite off one another’s heads in terror) has passed, they will boast of their heroism and the trials they have suffered. I give the trunk one more kick and the ants swirl out in even greater torrents. May they enjoy the shocks of history. After chaos comes peace, when they will have to reorganize and depose the incompetent leaders. In the company of the deer, the dog, and the cock I observe the ants coming to their senses, crawling back into the fissures of their shaken universe. The fickle god’s wrath has faded.

Cloaked in my jaded and enigmatic cruelty, I, the Lord, head back to the house. Why should I, incorrigible scoundrel that I am, refrain from exerting my power as long as I have it?

The way I spent my time was my reward and my punishment. I concocted wiles to trick my congenital stupidity. If I was unpleasant, I had to put up with an unpleasant character. L’enfer, c’est les autres ? What if it’s me? Locked in a dark room, the only light from a screen: myself in an endless loop.

I enjoyed going back from Csobánka to the wild chestnuts along the bank of the Danube in Buda. I found something to my liking in almost every café and pub and did not mind the slowness of life. What comes of its own accord is enough.