by Peter Nadas
On December 31, I was summoned to school. They sent Livia's father to get me. There were six of us waiting outside the teachers' room, three very pale girls and three eager-looking boys. We didn't say a word to one another. The principal again received us in the company of a strange man and proceeded to deliver a little speech. He tried to make his voice sound appropriately solemn and emotional. An extraordinary honor had been bestowed on our school, he said. On the occasion of the new year, and on behalf of the Young Pioneers and the entire school-age youth of Hungary, we were going to deliver greetings to our nation's leader and wise teacher, Comrade Mátyás Rákosi, in his home. The stranger talked to us about the details. He told us exactly what was going to happen, how to behave, and how to answer any questions we might be asked. The ground rule was, he cautioned, that we mustn't say anything that might cause sadness. Surely we were familiar with the teachings of Zoltân Kodály. While singing, one should keep smiling. That was the next basic rule. After the greetings we would be served hot cocoa with whipped cream and cake. And if Comrade Rákosi's wife should graciously ask us whether we would like some more cake, we must answer no, thank you, because the visit mustn't last longer than twenty minutes. Maja Prihoda would deliver the greeting in Hungarian and I in Russian. He gave us the text, which, he said, we had to memorize and know perfectly by the next morning. No one must know about our mission until afterward, and he would strongly advise us not to show the text to anyone. The bouquets of flowers and further instructions would be handed to us at the gate on Lorant Street.
As soon as I left the others, the noiseless thunder of this last sentence propelled me to Prém. The gate would be raised, after all. He was playing cards with his older brother in their kitchen. Outside, we took only a few steps from the house and I told him right away that we could get in, after all. I made it sound as though we both would. He kept shifting his feet in the cold. The snow crunched under his shoes. And he kept blinking, looking confused, as if he thought I was making a bad joke. I was already pulling the piece of paper from my pocket. To show him the speech as proof. But he cut me off. He had a great hand, he said, he must finish the game, and anyway, I could kiss his ass.
I wasn't offended. In his place I would have said the same thing. Prém was a very poor student. Year after year he barely passed his finals. And his family was dirt-poor. Of course, we weren't rich either; we, too, ate mostly beans, peas, and rotten potatoes, but in a pinch my mother could sell a rug, an old piece of jewelry, or some silver. We were friends; the unbridgeable social gap between us was fully calculated into our friendship. In our war games I was always the officer and he the private. He wouldn't even be corporal or sergeant, for the in between rank would hurt his pride. So this unpleasant little interlude didn't stop us from restoring the old order a few days later. And his eagerness to hear more didn't seem to embarrass him. He had me recount the story of the visit several times a day. I obliged him, and even the first time I gave him a rather imaginative version of it, which I kept embellishing as time went on. It would have been unthinkable to admit that what we had treated as a profound mystery until now, a secret worthy of a reconnaissance mission, was in reality something infinitely boring, colorless, dreary, and mundane. I held the secret in my hand and did not believe my eyes. I couldn't have known then that no secret was drearier than the secret of despotism.
Everything did go just the way the strange man had told us it would. In this secret there is no room for contingency. At nine in the morning we had to show up, in our Pioneer uniforms, without hats, scarves, or coats, at the Lorant Street gate. They stuck two bouquets of carnations in our hands. Maja got one, I got the other. It was a bright, snowy morning, at least ten below freezing. We must have looked pitiful, though, because our parents, quite correctly, wouldn't let us leave the house in white Pioneer shirts, as the instructions prescribed, and made sure we put on lots of warm underthings. We all looked stuffed and bulky, and after we'd moved around awhile, all sorts of things were sticking out from under our holiday outfits. Of course, this detail I didn't mention to Prém. Instead, I told him that on the other side of the gate was this well-concealed structure where they searched us. And to make it sound even more alluring, I added that the girls were stripped to their birthday suits. And that's where they gave us the bouquets, I told him, to prevent us from hiding poison or explosives in them. Actually, one of the guards brought the flowers from his booth. All right, children, who is giving the speech? I couldn't reconcile the terrifying thoroughness of the preparations with the sloppiness of the execution. So I embroidered my tale to fit my harrowing expectations. Our little troupe marched down the road that cut across the forbidden territory, where the snow hadn't been cleared away, just as it hadn't been in the rest of the streets of the city. Against my will, my eyes made the incomprehensible observation that there was no appreciable difference between the two places. But according to my report, the road was heated by a secret underground radiator, so not only was there no snow but the pavement remained bone-dry. On the left, among the trees and quite far apart, were two shabby villas. There was nothing on the right. Snowy woods. And then an ugly house in the woods. In my story, it was a white mansion and we drove up to it in a black limousine. Two armed men guarded the entrance, and we were led into a red-marble hall.
During the last days of October 1956, members of the newly formed national guard removed the barriers to the place. And the following day newspapers reported that the compound was no longer a restricted area. Yet Prém did not reproach me. I did lie to him, but he wouldn't have known what to do with the real facts either. I told him what he wanted to hear. Or rather, I said what our mind's eye had to see in order to understand what otherwise defied understanding.
If in what follows I should discreetly amend or correct some of the statements made by my deceased friend, I do so not out of a burning desire to establish the truth. What I'd like to do is examine our common life experiences from my own particular perspective and for my own sake. Whatever we may have shared can be approached via not only similarities but dissimilarities. In fact, I take the position of the most extreme moral relativists, making no qualitative distinction between truth and lies. I maintain that our lies prove as much about us as do our truths. Yet, when I concede that my friend was perfectly justified to speak of his life as he saw fit, I ask for the same consideration: that I be allowed to lie in my own way, to fantasize, to distort, to hold back, and, if it suits my purposes, even to tell the truth.
I read on pages 492 and 493 of his manuscript that after much struggle I finally got into a military academy, and that we happened to be in Kalocsa on fall maneuvers when news of the October uprising reached us, which resulted in our abrupt dismissal. And after I had related to him the adventures of my journey home, I took my leave, walking off into the twilight, and we never saw each other again.
I'd be no doubt more respectful of his memory if I left his version unchallenged. I can't do it. I can't accept his story as the only one, the exclusive one, because right next to it there's my own. The substance of our story was identical, but in it we moved in totally opposite directions. Thus, from my perspective, of his three seemingly innocuous statements I must judge the first as too simplistic, the second as totally erroneous, and the third as an emotional distortion that simply does not square with the facts.
My friend's father, if he was his father, I met very rarely. As a rule he ignored me. He barely returned my greeting. This much I can remember, but very little else. His face, his build, I can hardly recall. I was afraid of him. I couldn't say why. My fear wasn't unfounded, after all he was among the most ruthless men of the era, although I had no specific knowledge of that until after his suicide. And that late October afternoon I did take my hasty leave, for when I saw this much respected and feared man climbing over the fence, I knew I mustn't witness such an odd homecoming. If I'd stayed, I would have humiliated my friend, and I didn't want to do that either. I did say goodbye to him, but exactly eleven
years later we met again.
Eleven years later, in late October 1967, I had to travel to Moscow. It wasn't my first visit there. I had accompanied my immediate supervisor twice during the previous year and three times that same year.
Each time we were put up at the Hotel Leningrad, near the Kazan railroad station, in a palatially spacious suite with a foyer, a reception room, and a bedroom complete with silk-draped four-poster beds. No ordinary mortal could possibly fill the dimensions of these rooms. My boss spoke Russian rather poorly, while I reveled in my knowledge of it. I seized every opportunity to use it and to improve my vocabulary. In my free time I roamed the streets, rode the metro, made friends, even had an affair. The pervasive, sugary, choking smell of gasoline was no longer a novelty for me; it drifted up to the thirteenth floor of our hotel, blew through the parks, filled the metro tunnels, got into your skin, your hair, your clothes, and made you smell like a Muscovite. I found myself a fasttalking blonde; returning to her for the third time was a real joy. She lived on the Pervomayskaya with her mother and sister and a niece who had recently moved there from the country. The powerful voices of these large women and their unbridled sentimentality just about burst the walls of their tiny flat. It became my secret home. I admit timidly that neither before nor since have I seen such delectably firm and enormous female thighs. In the summer they rented a dacha somewhere near Tula, and we made plans for me to visit them the following year. We'd swim, gather mushrooms, and pick blackberries to flavor our tea with, come winter. At that time my resolve to make it to the Uriv region one day, to Alekseyevskaya, was still very much alive. We discussed this plan in great detail, too. In the end nothing came of it.
The series of negotiations in which I participated concerned the details of a long-term trade agreement involving the sale of chemical products. The contract itself that we, representatives of various trading companies, had drawn up had to be signed by the appropriate ministers in December. We were nearing the last round of talks, there wasn't much time left. Everyone was nervous, the prices hadn't been fixed, though this in itself was nothing unusual. Even after they'd been set, prices could still fluctuate.
In socialist business dealings, prices are arrived at in a manner that has precious little to do with pricing as we know it in conventional trade relations. It's as if someone was trying to catch a mouse and ended up trapping the cat instead. We usually refer to this as the double-trap principle. The process begins with a socialist commercial firm asking for a price quotation not from another socialist firm but from a capitalist one, for a product which it has no intention of buying but which in fact it wants to sell. The capitalist firm knows exactly what is going on, so it quotes not a realistic price but a blatantly unrealistic one that does not threaten its own real trading partners. However, the socialist firm takes this for the real world-market price of the product in question and makes its own offer to its socialist trading partner accordingly. The partner knows of course that the so-called real price is not real at all and, just as arbitrarily, makes a counter-offer, amounting to perhaps one-third of the quoted price. As a result, they wrangle over two totally unrealistic prices that, during the course of negotiations, acquire an air of reality. If two people who do not believe in ghosts begin to talk about ghosts in a dark room, sooner or later a ghost will appear, though they won't be able to touch it.
The process continues with the seller trying through further negotiations to narrow the gap between the two unrealistic prices, knowing well that the considerable difference can be made up only with the help of a state subsidy. But the buyer also knows that if the deal is important enough for commercial or industrial-policy reasons, he too can count on state funds, so he eases off, which in terms of the bargaining process is tantamount to driving up the price. If he misjudges the situation, and the seller is not swayed by insurmountable political considerations, then either there is no deal or some compromise is worked out. But regardless of whether or not a bargain is struck, neither party will ever be aware of the true relationship between the price finally arrived at and the real value of the commodity on the international market.
My superior, ingeniously combining the teaching techniques of the peripatetic Greek philosophers with the habits of French kings, used his morning toilet to lead me into the mysteries of these negotiations. He was of the opinion that the Russians were the world's most unpredictable business partners. They could be unexpectedly flexible on one occasion and equally stubborn and immovable on another. Whether you deal with Swedes, Italians, Armenian-Americans, or Chinese traders, what drives the negotiations is the logic of mutual interest. Differences arise from different assessments of a given situation. If you're dealing with Russians, however, you can give logic a rest.
Later, having gained a certain amount of experience myself, I came to regard my supervisor's conclusions as an enjoyable myth. It would take too long to expound my own view, which differs greatly from popularly held beliefs. To put it simply, I think Russians view the relationship between reality and unreality differently from the rest of us. Whatever we might consider an unreal phenomenon—because by violating realistic value relationships it brings our inner order to a halt—from their point of view is something incidental and negligible, for their inner order, independent of the outside world, remains functional.
On the first day of negotiations my boss fell ill during lunch. To make sure he didn't notice my forbidden nocturnal absences, and to make sure, too, that I could wake him up at six in the morning, as he requested, and while he splashed in his tepid bathwater I'd be ready to listen to his always instructive musings on economic concerns, I had to get up at the crack of dawn in that flat on Pervomayskaya, far from the center of town. Also, that morning, I was too sleepy to make much of his complaint that he wasn't feeling quite right. Anyway, he was a big, robust man.
We had trouble getting down to business that morning. It was hard to find the right tone. If I abandoned my sense of humor and accepted what they considered a realistic position, then I myself became unrealistic; and if I didn't accept it and made light of things, then my position in our relationship would become unrealistic. These are the times one really feels how much flexibility, imaginative insight, and infinite patience it takes to function as a son of a small nation. In my days as an apprentice negotiator I often felt it was best to get past the table-pounding stage quickly; I was frustrated because my boss, with the experience of four years in Russian captivity behind him, preferred holding back, delaying, putting things off, turning evasive—but even with these tactics we made no headway.
After the morning session we had lunch with two of our local commercial representatives in the hotel restaurant, a cavernous affair, more like a grand hall of columns than a restaurant. At one point my boss slowly put his knife and fork down on his plate and said it might be a good idea to open a window. Considering the size of the place, the suggestion didn't make much sense, so we more or less ignored it. There is no air, he said. I never saw anyone sit so still. A few moments later he spoke again: we should get his medicine from his pocket. At the same time he opened his mouth, letting his tongue hang out a little. Beads of perspiration were forming on his ashen face. He said nothing more, he didn't move, his eyes stared vacantly, but the way he was sticking out his tongue clearly indicated that he wanted the medication placed under his tongue. As soon as the tiny tablet dissolved, he felt much better, let go of his knife and fork, wiped his face, and color began to return to his cheeks. But again he complained that there was no air, and as if groping for air in the air, he got up restlessly and went in search of more air. We tried to support him, but he took such forceful steps he didn't seem to need us. We let go of him. When he got to the lobby he collapsed. He was taken to a hospital. In a deep coma, he lived for two more days.
The talks were broken off. I called the director of our company to tell him what had happened. Hopes for recovery were slim, and the patient could not be moved. I asked him to notify the family. Conve
rsations with my boss had centered exclusively on professional matters, yet I imagined members of his family, whom I had never met, to be just like him: strong, agile, a little worn-out, but sturdy. My director's position was that the talks must resume without delay. He thought that all the wrangling had been mostly a show and therefore superfluous. The Russians' offer had to be accepted. He had given my boss—who always started fussing when there was no need—very specific instructions to that effect. He was authorizing me to lead the negotiations with these instructions in mind. He would telex his decision to the head of our trade office, who would then officially inform the Russians of the change in our delegation. If the whole thing weren't just a matter of formality he would send a replacement, but as things stood now, I could step right in. I should keep that well in mind, too. But it didn't happen that way at all. A senior member of our embassy's commercial section took over formally, but he let me handle the practical end of the negotiations, saying he hadn't been sufficiently briefed.
In the next two days I had a great many things to attend to. Feverish activity always generates more energy and the need for more activity, which is maybe why I couldn't stay put at night in my four-poster bed in the hotel, though I knew I should be there to receive a phone call. I went to sleep with a guilty conscience in the flat on the Pervomayskaya. In the embrace of a strong, calm female body I relived the death of my father, whom I now lost forever.
I had trouble falling asleep. Not even with making love could I get death out of myself. Hovering between sleep and wakefulness, I was drifting along a snow-covered highway. It was a scene deep inside me, often imagined, endlessly replayed.
More than two weeks after the enemy broke through the bridgehead at Uriv, on January 27, 1943, to be precise, my father set out by motorcar to make his report. That was the day their retreat began. They were not completely surrounded yet, but the Russians were closing in fast. There was a point in my drifting when I either fell asleep or had to start the scene over from the beginning. The only thing we knew for certain was that at 2030 hours the retreating battalion encountered the Russians and within half an hour suffered a defeat, losing 50 percent of its troops. But they did manage to break through the Russian lines. The car in which my father had left earlier that day was found about six hundred meters from the scene of the battle. It was riddled with bullets. Its doors were flung wide open. It was empty.
