George Konrad: A Guest in my Own Country

“An East European might say that George Konrád’s adventures through two terror regimes and a major revolution have been what one would expect from someone unfortunate enough to have been born in that part of Europe. In reality, Konrád’s autobiography reveals much more than that: great tragedies, fabulous escapes, a complex personality, a great writer and beyond that, dignity and courage in the worst of circumstances.” —ISTVÁN DEÁK, Professor Emeritus of history at Columbia University; author of The Lawful Revolution: Louis Kossuth and the Hungarians, 1848–1849

“Konrád takes you into another country. Another world. His words allow you to feel his world. In intimate and luxuriant detail. The world of childhood, the world of war, of politics, of hatreds. The world of words and of longing. In illuminating his country, his world, Konrád illuminates our world.” —LILY BRETT, author of Too Many Men

“Konrád’s prose was never so luminous as in these moving yet clear-eyed and forthright recollections of his wartime childhood, his youth and early manhood under Communism, and of his life as a writer in the ‘soft dictatorship’ and after.” —IVAN SANDERS, translator, literary critic, and Adjunct Professor at Columbia University

“Emerging from the pen of a premier Hungarian intellectual, and spanning several turbulent decades, this vivid, unsentimental, candidly intimate memoir gives us an invaluable view of a complex history, and of a very Eastern European fate. Konrád’s affectionate recollections of his childhood; his astonishing account of growing up precociously at war; and his sharply etched vignettes of repression and dissidence, poverty and pleasures thereafter, are marked by grace amidst turbulence, honesty without bitterness, and by an admirable balance between skepticism and deep attachments. An important, illuminating, and ultimately hopeful book.” —EVA HOFFMAN, author of Lost in Translation and After Such Knowledge

FEBRUARY 1945. WE ARE SITTING ONa bench in a motionless cattle car. I can’t pull myself away from the open door and the wind whipping in off the snowy plains. I didn’t want to be a constant guest in Budapest; I wanted to go home — a weeklong trip — to Berettyóújfalu, the town our parents had been abducted from, the town we had managed to leave a day before the deportations. Had we stayed one more day we would have ended up in Auschwitz. My sister, who was fourteen, might have survived, but I was eleven, and Dr. Mengele sent all my classmates, every last one, to the gas chambers.

Of our parents we knew nothing. I had given up on the idea of going from the staircase to the vestibule to the light-blue living room and finding everything as it had been. I had a feeling I would find nothing there at all. But if I closed my eyes, I could go through the old motions: walk downstairs, step through the iron gate, painted yellow, and see my father next to the tile oven, rubbing his hands, smiling, chatting, turning his blue eyes to everyone with a trusting but impish gaze, as if to ask, “We understand each other, don’t we?” In a postprandial mood he would have gone onto the balcony and stretched out on his deck chair, lighting up a long Memphis cigarette in its gold mouthpiece, looking over the papers, then nodding off.

For as long as I can remember, I had a secret suspicion that everyone around me acted like children. I realized it applied to my parents as well when, not suspecting us of eavesdropping, they would banter playfully in the family bed: they were exactly like my sister and me.

From the age of five I knew I would be killed if Hitler won. One morning in my mother’s lap I asked who Hitler was and why he said so many terrible things about the Jews. She replied that she herself didn’t know. Maybe he was insane, maybe just cruel. Here was a man who said the Jews should disappear. But why should we disappear from our own house, and even if we did, where would we go? Just because this Hitler, whom my nanny followed with such enthusiasm, came up with crazy ideas like packing us off to somewhere else.

And how did Hilda feel about all this? How could she possibly be happy about my disappearing, yet go on bathing me with such kindness every morning, playing with me, letting me snuggle up to her, and even occasionally slipping into the tub with me? How could Hilda, who was so good to me, wish me ill? She was pretty, Hilda was, but obviously stupid. I decided quite early that anything threatening me was idiotic, since I was a threat to no one. I was unwilling to allow that anything bad for me could possibly be an intelligent idea.

For as long as I can remember, I have felt like the five-year-old who ventured all the way out to the Berettyó Bridge on his bicycle and stared into the river, a mere eight or ten meters wide in summer, twisting yellow and muddy through its grassy channel, pretending to be docile but in fact riddled with whirlpools. That boy was no different, no more or less a child than I am today. In spring I watched from the bridge as the swollen river swept away entire houses and uprooted large trees, watched it washing over the dike, watched animal carcasses floating by. You could row a boat between the houses: all the streets near the bank were under water.

I felt that you could not count on anything entirely, that danger was lurking everywhere. The air inside the Broken Tower was cool, moldy, bat-infested. I was frightened by the rats. The Turks had once laid siege to it and finally taken it. This is a wild region, a region of occupations: myriad armies have passed through it; myriad outlaws, marauders, haiduks, and bounty hunters have galloped over its plains. The townspeople take refuge in the swamps.

My childhood recollection is that people had a slow way of talking that was expansive and quite cordial. They took their time about communicating and expected no haste in return. The herdsmen cracked the whip every afternoon as they brought the cows home. Then there were the Bihar knifemen: cutting in on a Saturday-night dance could mean a stabbing.

With my long hair curling at the sides and suspenders holding up my trousers, I step into the living room. The upholstery is blue, blue the tablecloth. The living room opens onto a sunlit balcony, where cheese pastries and hot cocoa stand waiting. I am well disposed to everyone and aware of the many who have been working for me that day, making my entrance possible. The bathroom heater and the living-room tile stove have been lit, the cleaning done. Sounds of food being prepared travel in from the kitchen.

I cock an ear: it might be the diminutive Mr. Tóth, bringing buffalo milk and buffalo butter. On my way to Várad in summer I would see his herd from the train window lolling in a big puddle, barely lifting their heads above water. Mr. Tóth wasn’t much larger than I. He was very graceful when he unrolled the bordered handkerchief he used for carrying money, including our monthly payment for the milk, curd cheese, and sour cream he brought, all as white as the buffalo were black.

I would have liked to be big and strong and gave our driver’s biceps a hopeful squeeze. They had a nice bulge to them, and I wanted mine to be just as tan and thick. András and his horse Gyurka would bring water from the artesian well in the gray tank-cart. Women waited their turn with two pitchers apiece. I remember András and Gyula, and Vilma, Irma, Juliska, and Regina from the kitchen, and Annie, Hilda, and Lívia from the nursery.

The fire is still crackling in the tile oven. There is no need to close the oven door until the embers start crumbling. I rub its side and take my seat at the table, where a booster pillow rests on the chair. It is nine o’clock. My father went down to the store at eight; his assistants and errand boys awaited him at the door. I will have to eat breakfast without him in the company of my sister Éva and my nanny. Mother will join us later if she can spare the time. She will set her keys down on the blue tablecloth. Opening and closing the various doors and drawers takes a long time.