George Konrad - A Guest in my Own Country

They lived in a spacious house just opposite ours. It incorporated a large clothing and shoe store. The salesmen cut fine figures in well-tailored suits of English cloth and liked to wave fabrics in the air with a flourish. They had a pleasant way about them, complimenting the women as they pivoted in front of the mirror.

Stepping into my father’s hardware store, you inhaled the reliable iron smell of nails, wire, cart-axles, ploughs, harrows, stoves, pots, bicycles, and hunting weapons. You could check the sharpness of a scythe with the tip of a finger, and should you wish to verify whether it was made of well-tempered steel, you would use a twenty-kilo iron weight that had done service since the beginning of human memory: you would knock the head of the scythe (without the handle) hard against the weight a few times and raise it to your ear to hear it ring.

It was an event for me whenever a load of goods arrived at the Berettyóújfalu station, the fruit of one of Father’s Budapest trips. András and Gyurka would cart the crates home, and I would sit up on the box, where I had permission to give Gyurka the commands to go ( Ne! ) and stop ( Ho! ). It was exciting to help unload the large crates of flame-red enameled pots nested amid thick beds of fragrant wood shavings.

These pleasures were alien to István, who paid little attention to his father’s business and rarely set foot in the store. He was none too comfortable playing the little son, hearing how much he had grown, suffering a pinch on the cheek. After one or two hellos he would retire to the innards of the house. Aunt Mariska, too, observed the store’s activity from a distance, leaving things to Aunt Etelka, her untiring mother-in-law, who — small, thin, and deeply wrinkled — kept an eye on everything from the most natural place, her perch at the cash register.

Uncle Béla would pace the store, dealing personally with a few preferred customers, but bilious and impatient as he was he soon retreated into the apartment, which opened onto the garden, and settled into his heavy leather armchair in the half-darkness of the study next to Aunt Mariska’s room. There he would read the ever-worsening news, later to discuss it with my father in our living room with concern, though not without hope.

Most ladies from the town’s upper stratum found items to their liking in Uncle Béla’s store. Aunt Mariska, though, did not — meaning that my mother, her friend, was under no obligation to buy her wardrobe from him either. The two would occasionally travel to Budapest.

Such a trip was inconceivable without a trunk and a hatbox, and they would be dutifully installed in a first-class compartment by András and the fiacre driver and the red-capped railway porter. At the Nyugati Station in Budapest the process was repeated in reverse, except that a taxi took my mother and Aunt Mariska to the Hotel Hungária on the Danube. They spent mornings at the finest tailors and evenings at the theater. When they returned, I would interrogate my mother about the best places to buy fabrics, whites, and shoes, just as I interrogated my father about the strengths and weaknesses of Budapest ironworks and Budapest wholesalers: everything in life had its place.

We all knew who the prettiest girl in the classroom was, who the biggest shrew. I will take this occasion to reveal that it was a true pleasure to grab the thick braids of Baba Blau, who sat in front of me, and give them a tug. Baba would laugh in a deep voice, then squeal on me. I would have to leave the room with the lid to my pen-case, which the teacher would use to slap my hand a few times. Once I had come back, Baba would stroke my hand and gaze up at the ceiling with a little sneer on her large, dark mouth. Then she would position her braids back within reach.

Aunt Mariska prepared all her life for something that never came. She loved clothes and dressed with originality and at great cost. She bought a great many books: modern novels for herself, Indian stories for the boys. But one day she went into the garden to rest under a camel-hair blanket in the whitewashed, rose-covered arbor and emerged all yellow, and yellow she remained. Only her gravestone is white, white marble.

István was left on his own at the age of five: after his mother died, his father grew melancholic. When Aunt Etelka died as well, Nene took over the household. Nene was unshakable in her knowledge of what constituted a proper diet: she was committed to whole-grain bread, creamed spinach, and boiled breast of chicken. Anyone who so much as cleared his throat at this fare was put to bed on the spot. She was a conscientious woman and a devout Catholic, but neither pretty nor happy. There were few signs of joy in István’s house.

We would walk up and down the main street wearing jackets, caps, and gloves. We needed to ask permission to take off our gloves or open the top button of the jacket. We were watched by peasant boys wearing poor-quality boots.

When we cranked the arm of the telephone, a young lady answered, “Operator.” “Give me 11,” I would say. “Give me 60,” said István. We did this many times a day. “Why don’t you just walk across the street?” the girl would ask. “Just connect me, please,” we said coolly, even at the age of seven.

Our fathers would hold onto our shoulders at the edge of the sidewalk until they felt we were old enough to cross the street on our own. An automobile was a rare and wondrous event, but there was no end of horse-drawn carriages.

We received one another in jackets, shook hands, showed our guests to their seats, and proceeded to speak of important issues. If we didn’t want others to hear us, we left the house for the autumn garden. It was a pleasure to feel the leaf-bed crunching under our feet.

István never uttered a word lightly, and his face would show irritation at any idle remark; I was interested in all sorts of things that seemed to bore the often distant István, and I tried to amuse him with my clowning. Coming from him, a yes or no had a real edge to it. He liked to draw the most extreme conclusions from his observations; I followed the path of his logic guardedly: I might see it differently tomorrow, by which time the now devastating train of his thought would have lost some of its force.

When the Germans occupied Hungary on 19 March 1944, I was eleven years old. What around the table we had merely feared had now come to pass: our island of exception was no more; something new was afoot. How simple it had all been! How comical everything that had happened now seemed! I thought back on the evenings I had spent listening to the men’s dinner-table strategizing about how the English would move in from Italy and Greece and initiate the western invasion, thereby giving our leader, Admiral Horthy, more room to maneuver and enabling him to jump ship and Hungary to begin its evolution into a neutral, Anglo-Saxon form of democracy. Until then our fathers could still run their businesses, medical practices, and law offices in peace. Jewish children could attend school in that sad, little one-story building with its dusty courtyard and beautiful prayer room without being humiliated by their teacher for being Jewish. On Friday evenings we could hear the shuffle of footsteps on the walkway by our house, where men dressed in black would make their way to temple under their broad-brimmed black hats accompanied by my wide-eyed schoolmates holding their fathers’ hands.

On the day of the occupation I sat with my father at the radio in his bedroom. There was no news of resistance: the Hungarian troops did not put up a fight. The regent, the government, and the country as a whole simply lay down before the mighty Germans. I did not much trust Horthy. I had had a lead soldier of him from my earliest boyhood. I surrounded him with officers and an entire leaden infantry. They were all in green, while Horthy sported a cornflower-blue admiral’s coat with gold tassels. I had a cannon as well. It could shoot miniature cannonballs a meter or so. The battlefield was the large, brown linoleum surface, where I would divide the armies and materiel in two. In the early days the winning army was always the one led by His Excellency the Regent. After we entered the war, cannonballs started knocking His Highness over, and from that point on, Horthy’s army was the loser. I would shoot him with the cannon; he would fall on his back.