George Konrad - A Guest in my Own Country

From age forty to fifty-five I was a nonperson in my country, a person whose very presence violated the regulations. My response to the prohibition against working and publishing? An unchecked, internal, authorial freedom. I distributed my work in samizdat, usually Gábor Demszky’s underground press. Not only did I receive no fee, I regularly contributed to the printing expenses, considering the dissemination of my works in Hungary a public service.

I could spend the day at my desk and the evening with people I wanted to see. There were a few I would rather not have seen, the ones who stood around on the corner or sat in a car by the door. They accompanied me everywhere, but kept a respectable distance, not really disrupting my solitude. Blacklisting and internal emigration were not so much blows dealt by fate as the result of a decision on my part, so it was my duty to cope with the vexations that went with them.

It was impossible to be normal here at home, and putting a good face on it was an unpardonable offense. The critical intelligentsia saw itself as a separate camp: us, with the police on our trail, versus them, bearers of the prevailing mindset and therefore police-free. People published all sorts of attacks on me, but I neither responded nor penned any of my own. I could never understand where their hostility came from. It took the utmost self-discipline and sense of humor to keep from going mad.

At eleven I was compelled to accept the reality that the spirit of the age was doing its best to have me shot and tossed into the Danube. Bad experiences made me suspicious earlier than most. Big words? Big words can turn people into child murderers.

As a banned author I had the luxury of being free from the expectations of others: I didn’t need to embrace local public prejudices; I didn’t need to be confident or outraged or despairing; I didn’t need to worry about the authorities taking umbrage at what I wrote. I required no future different from the present I was living in if for no other reason than that I did not believe in the possibility of a different future.

I am watching the Moscow May Day celebrations on television: a giant soldier extending his arms across the entire facade of a building, tight phalanxes lined up in Red Square. The flag-bearing gymnasts along the edge of each formation are dressed in white. Only the most distinguished — winners of workers’ competitions — are allowed to appear in the square. Under the pictures of Marx, Engels, and Lenin there are pictures of the current Party leaders, and beneath those the men themselves.

Every participant at the great assembly holds a little red flag in his hand. Filmed from above, the network of roads stretching through those human colonnades looks geometrically regular. Between the carpet of citizens (the first-string squad, as it were) and the complex of platforms (with Lenin’s mausoleum as its center) stands a wall of white-gloved policemen at attention; above them — the marshals, their medal collections clinking and flashing on their chests, along the parapet of the mausoleum — the leaders of the Party and the government, dressed in the state’s version of men’s fashion: a dark gray overcoat and a dark gray hat pulled down to eyebrow level. Dour old men waving at the crowds there to hail them.

Bugle fanfares. Brezhnev doffs his cap and steps up to the microphone. He struggles with a text written by others and full of long words. A face covered with the wrinkles and bags of arrogance. Behind him, gruff and motionless, the other leaders, their hands behind their backs now, jaded faces sunken inward, obviously heedless to his words. “Warm greetings, the struggle for the workers’ happiness.” The leaders turn their heads sternly, left, right. When the boss has finished, the two leaders standing next to him initiate the applause. The crowd takes it up. Once in a while the men on the parapet remove their hands from their pockets as if out of a sense of obligation and strike them together a few times. They have absent faces with no curiosity. Athletes on large platforms carry those faces past the parapet.

This is the seventies. I go out onto the highway, where a sign indicates that taking pictures is prohibited. Of what? A missile silo? A radar station? The forest entrance of an underground weapons factory, accessible by a high-quality cement road? The small hill sloping up to it could house a tomb. The miniature bugging devices manufactured there suffice for all Eastern Europe.

The surrounding fields are uncultivated; grazing is prohibited. Through the strips of forest that line the road I catch glimpses of gray concrete buildings, guard towers, targets, bunkers, all ringed by a concrete fence covered with furls of barbed wire. Officers’ housing is hidden behind a painted brick wall at the edge of the village. Children play ball behind barbed wire; husbands walk with their wives among the prefabricated apartment buildings; shaven-headed soldiers run back and forth along a beam three meters off the ground wearing full marching gear and carrying machine guns; little flags of indeterminate symbolism flutter atop the dusty hills; a jeep carrying two drums of milk pops out of nowhere.

Soviet troops — temporary guests in the country for thirty years now, athletic, pimpled kids smelling of sweat and foot cloths, staring through the fences of the garrisons where they were confined for months on end — wore the sad looks of sons separated from their mothers combined with a touch of arrogance. Guarding their armored vehicles and rocket launchers, they would gape with wild envy at the natives in colorful clothes walking and driving by. The only time they would be seen individually was on their way to the station for the Moscow express after their one- or two-year stint. Odd occupiers they were. Everything they had was beat up. Even the vehicles looked jerry-built.

A somber procession of trucks has been flowing past in an endless iron stream, each truck towing one out of commission, every second vehicle unusable. Only after two hours does it come to an end and we can go and buy our milk and bread.

I was always a bourgeois by nature and a dissident by compulsion. We inhabited a mad world in which the written word seemed to carry unfathomable weight, when in fact it did not. The most important structural component in the defunct political system was its thought, its texts, its curricula. That being the case, I sat down every morning to produce sentences that could pass for incitement against the state, and a good many people who deserved better dashed around spying to make sure a few warmed-over clichés did not see the light of day. My bag held neither bomb nor revolver; it held only a notebook. Just when I thought I was getting used to the situation, I ran into a young man who was being followed by three cars for having made copies of one of my studies. The cowboy-and-Indian games involved in publishing a few hundred copies of a dissident text unofficially kept both sides busy. No country house containing printer’s ink and thinner escaped police surveillance.

Here at home I led a muffled existence. Living in Eastern Europe meant being constantly prepared for defeat and backwardness but also to question what it is to be human. There was no real dictator, only a long line of downtrodden individuals, each imagining that everyone in front of them was an informer and everyone behind them a reckless anarchist. But once informing has become common currency — and the informer the model citizen — what is left to inform about? Where is the truth whereby we can recognize the liar?

“Waiter! The bill, please! And would you be kind enough to tell me where I might find God?”

“I recommend the golden noodles with vanilla sauce, sir.”

“In that case, could you tell me when things will improve?”