George Konrad - A Guest in my Own Country

The women I stayed with longest were the ones I most feared to upset. The less fear I felt, the sooner I beat a retreat, the sooner I chose another to step into my room without knocking. Mere whim drew me to some, but it was no whim that I was attracted to Jutka’s voice, Jutka’s touch, smell, movement, speech, and way of thinking, all from the very first night, or that the feeling has stayed with me for some twenty years.

Delicate, restrained, cautious, gently laughing, humming, and proffering considered judgments, Jutka came to West Berlin with me in 1982 for my next stay there, having been my partner in Budapest for three years by then. She proudly announced that she could understand the radio in German and had no trouble with French; English was a foregone conclusion. She loved golden leaves, rye bread with gorgonzola, and a Macon burgundy.

After our return everything was as before. Once, in 1987, the border guard checking my documents at the computer screen disappeared and brought out another guard, who found and confiscated the manuscripts of some talks I was planning to give. The Department of Education would return them to me should it see fit.

“But how can I lecture without them?”

“That’s your problem.”

“Well, that’s the end of my talks,” I said.

He liked that.

But it was all just an experiment, a ruse: the text had been smuggled out and the German translation was waiting for me in the West.

Looking out of a car window in Berlin, I see a peaceful, clean, and ordered city. Everything works. Not almost everything, everything . What you see in the shopwindows is what you see people wearing, which suggests that people change their possessions frequently and hence have no need to grow too fond of them. If I lived here, my wish would be to acquire means with a clean conscience. I would worry about spiritual frigidity, surround myself with prudent formalities, and carefully plan my time.

Back home there is a purple fog in the streets: the exhaust of east-bloc cars. That summer Jutka finished a book on death and funerals in Budapest at the beginning of the twentieth century. Her mood was far from funereal, however: she was more concerned with diapers.

I refuse to cling to situations and refuse to run from them. I have pure chance to thank for every turn in my life, including my three wives. One day I happened to catch a glimpse of Vera’s hair in a classroom, though I had seen her a hundred times before. Juli plopped down on the arm of my chair at a happy gathering and stayed for sixteen years and two children. Jutka rang my doorbell one day in Paris — we were compatriots and lived on the same floor — and asked if I would like some coffee. The coffee never materialized, though a marriage and three children did. In the most traditional manner I have discovered the simplest purpose for life in my children and grandchildren, for whom I mean to stick around as long as possible.

Notes to myself: there is no point calling the attention of others to what I do not want or do not know. I have been shameless enough. No one wants to look at my bare chest anymore, so I’ll wrap a scarf around my neck instead.

Nothing I come out with is of any use for anyone. It might have been once, but those days are gone. The day is approaching when I shall no longer set my glasses on the nightstand or say good night to my wife before withdrawing to my room. It won’t be long now before my eyes are like two glazed chestnuts.

Every life is better than no life; every life, including the pain that goes with it, is good. True, getting through the daily grind is like wading through seaweed, but I can get through all sorts of things, therefore I am. And given the fact that I am alive, the question of why is as inane as fly droppings on a grape.

At twelve I survived National Socialism; at fifteen I saw Communism take over. Communism and I grew old together. Decades passed in active, disciplined resignation. Since I was fifty-six by the time the regime collapsed, I spent the best years of my life in the shadow of its stupidity. Still, I never watched my country from afar. I groped my way around in it.

Life was slow, which I did not regret, because there was so much of it. Humans are made mortal, hence real, by their imperfection; frailty and mortality are synonyms in the moral sense. Moral philosophy can rest only on frailty and our acceptance of it.

If every written description of human reality constitutes literature, then perhaps so does man himself. The novel’s main character may be a welfare lawyer or city builder or retired revolutionary, but these are just naive masks, for there are no welfare lawyers or city builders or retired revolutionaries who ponder their lives with such profundity when lying in bed or sitting on the bench of a mental institution. Interior monologue does not occur in complete sentences.

All my life’s more important choices have sprung from my decision as an adolescent to become a writer: I refrained from crossing the temporarily open border in 1956, chose jobs that required observation, became interested in people at the lower end of the social ladder (not that I was so high up myself, with my small salary, small apartment, and two or three changes of clothes), accompanying my former fellow student Tamás Csillag to the housing project at the Old Buda Brick Factory and spending the next seven years in Elizabeth Town as a supervisor of children’s welfare. Then I grew curious about Hungary as a whole, the outlying cities and villages, and took a position with an institute of urban studies.

It is summer. How little the people of Budapest try to cover up their bodies, whether beautiful or ugly! I put it down to the city’s sensuality and the survival of a pre-Christian, pagan lust for life. Budapest always goes whole hog: Stalinism, the Revolution, the compromises of the Kádár regime, you name it. It experiments with strategies of survival, grinding up the system to soften it, reviving old traditions — anything to curb the damage. Remember that Budapest was the first city in Eastern Europe to proclaim its freedom. The city is more enduring than the government; it has never let that pagan lust for life be taken over by ascetic delirium. There are plenty of upstanding cynics around here who do not think suffering is more moral than good cheer.

Even my internal emigration was basically a chance happening: one morning at dawn my doorbell rang, and in they came, picking apart my filing cabinet and dismissing me from all institutions. Then came the changes in 1989, and soon thereafter I had a phone call inviting me to be the president of International PEN. It was a serious offer, and it behooved me to accept it and do a good job.

Some authors love to play it tough; they are not satisfied until they have brushed with mortal danger and can recount it to their readers. I am not that type. I am of a more placid nature. But once in a while I run smack into fate’s outstretched palm.

The good things always come on their own, the gifts of fate (or Providence, if you will), but the bad too come randomly, unexpectedly: there it is, and that’s that. The ravages of fate are not something we can sense approaching or prevent. We make our way along a stairway of the gifts and accidents that constitute chapter divisions.

I do not like to be engulfed by the situation I happen to be in at a given time; I would rather look at it from the side or from above: I enjoy backing off and moving on. What is this compulsion, this current sweeping me on, this whistling wind, this gentle breath? The wish to slip the traps? To keep from being surrounded?

I was born in 1933. I was six when the Second World War broke out, eleven when survival meant the collaboration between fate and vigilance, particularly for Jewish children from the Hungarian provinces. When my parents were taken away in May 1944, my sister and I received an invitation to move to Budapest. Staying in Berettyóújfalu, waiting it out, would have been the normal thing to do. Had we done it, we would not be alive today. I owe my life to Budapest. It provided refuge for my sister and cousins and me; it kept us out of Auschwitz. All that mattered to me then about Budapest was its size: it let us be needles in a haystack. By May 1944 it was clear that people in the provinces would do nothing to stop the deportations, that they were following the dictates of a government that wanted to make all cities and towns judenfrei . The official culture around me has always been deceitful and, except for a few exceptional years, hostile to me. Although I had committed no crimes against it, I would eventually realize the time had come to start.