Inside Outside

by Andrew Riemer

  Hungarian, like most other European tongues, possesses an elaborate system of address which draws subtle distinctions between the familiar and the respectful. Like Italian and German, but unlike French, it uses third-person forms where circumstances demand a polite mode of address. Children may use the second-person to address other children, close members of their family and, perhaps most significantly, servants. All other adults must be addressed obliquely in the third-person. The point at which adults may pass from the third-person to the second is determined by the same conditions that allowed people to be on ‘first-name terms’ in English-speaking societies before the days of the ubiquitous Christian name. Significantly though, Hungarian permits the use of first names at much earlier stages of a relationship than English does, always with the proviso that such a liberty must be accompanied by the formal or respectful use of third-person forms until a degree of intimacy is achieved. To employ the second-person any earlier would be deeply offensive. A deliberate policy of the Germans and of their Hungarian henchmen during the war was to shout commands in the second-person at groups of people they had rounded up for transportation to Auschwitz, or else to line them up on the banks of the Danube (often where the famous and much-patronised cafes were located) to be sprayed with machine-gun fire. Political and physical brutality inevitably found its mirror in language.

  This characteristic of Hungarian is accompanied, moreover, by an elaborate system of social usage which ensures the maintenance of rigid distinctions between the child and the adult, the servant and the master, the powerful and the weak. Well brought up children are expected to address their elders in terms faintly reminiscent of the elaborate ceremonies of the Sun King’s court. In my childhood, you were expected to say that you wanted to kiss grown-ups’ hands whenever you met them, even though to kiss someone’s hand, at least in my parents’ circle, would have been considered precocious and offensive. That privilege was reserved for grown men when they met ladies of their acquaintance; it was at times accompanied by the loud clicking of heels.

  Children would, in turn, be addressed by adults in the most cloyingly endearing of terms—with liberal use of second-person pronouns and verbs, whereas children were obliged to use the formal third-person mode in their dealings with their elders. Hungarians commonly fawn over children, commenting on and drawing attention to their physical attributes, intelligence, sweetness, the rate of their growth, the condition of their hair and all kinds of other marvels, in much the same way as some Australians and many British people go into ecstasies over household pets. There is something basically shaming and demeaning in these rituals of fawning and petting, as if you were an object rather than a human being. These performances would almost always be addressed to the world at large (‘How he’s grown, look at his lovely eyes, show me your teeth—what wonderful teeth! and so clever!’). And they would inevitably carry disturbing overtones—the conviction grew on you as these public inspections continued that their direct opposite was intended, that the kind adult thought you were an unbearable brat who should have been drowned at birth.

  There was a time when such rituals formed a normal part of my life. You played the game that everybody played. But the laconic games of Australian society threw these practices into an intolerable relief. They may have been very well for a world peopled by his Excellency, the retired town clerk, whose very existence, even in his censorious rages, was governed by a set of highly conventional rules. They were appropriate to a society that had carried the practice of obliqueness and innuendo to the status of a high art. No doubt the relationship between the Ursuline nuns who had taught my mother and those privileged visitors whom they received in their elegant salon was governed by elaborate rules of evasion, by a structure of hypocrisies to which both parties willingly consented. These would not, however, do in a world where the wonderfully impersonal ‘you’ is employed in all relationships, where the equally non-committal ‘Mr’, ‘Mrs’ or ‘Miss’ replaced all those Uncles and Aunties whose hands you were expected to offer to kiss. The culture of prewar Central Europe could not be transplanted into Australia’s much drier, more matter-of-fact soil. I could not therefore reconcile the contrary demands made on my social behaviour. It was much easier to pretend that I had forgotten the language. I had come to realise instinctively what linguists were to teach me in later life: that a society’s essence, the rules that govern its conduct, and the aspirations that provide its vital energies all find their subtlest yet most powerful expression in language, that complex instrument for preserving and celebrating a unique way of life.

  I had to unlearn or suppress—it comes to much the same thing—our old way of life in my attempt to become assimilated, that is to say, to assume the forms, rituals and habits of a very different culture. I cannot say which direction the primary impulse took: whether the desire to unlearn fuelled my attempts to acquire English, and along with it the social forms it embodied, or whether my eagerness for acceptance by Australian society made the preservation of the old life insupportable. All I know is that the career of a parodist and mimic on which I embarked some little time after our arrival in Australia—a career I have pursued ever since—consisted as much in discarding as in adopting. My past had to be eradicated. I tried to lock away in an inaccessible compartment of my personality the experiences of my last months in Budapest in that spectral world of Venice, the Midget Theatre and the Opera, as well as the years of the war, and the mythology that had accumulated around my family, in short the whole network of influences, emotional and social legacies that define and in a sense create an individual.

  The consequences of such major emotional and cultural surgery are, naturally enough, extremely grave. The attempt to remake myself resulted in the many years I spent in an emotional vacuum, or, to find another image, inside a cocoon I had spun around myself until I felt ready to emerge with my new being. But in the way that victims of amputation continue to feel the presence of ghost-like limbs long after they have been removed, so the complex influences which go into the formation of a personality during the early years of life insisted on making their presence felt. Retrospect tells me that during the years of deliberate forgetting and denial—when I went as far as saying to some of my Australian acquaintances that I could remember nothing of the past—those suppressed and despised influences contrived to enter into my emotional life in wholly surprising ways. Initially, though, the more immediate task of learning English had to be addressed.

  The beginning of that process was not auspicious. By the autumn of 1947 my parents could no longer justify keeping me away from school. We had been settled in our rented rooms in Hurlstone Park for some weeks, and an attempt had therefore to be made to introduce a measure of normality into what had been a markedly vagrant existence for a child. For the first time, a month or so after my eleventh birthday, I began attending school regularly. I was enrolled at Canterbury Public School, a few minutes’ walk from where we lived. My first days there provide some of my most bizarre memories of our early months in Australia.

  My appearance in the potholed school playground on a stifling morning in late March caused a sensation. This was due largely to the clothes my mother considered it appropriate for me to wear. In New York, where we spent a few weeks on our way to Australia, she had stocked up at Macy’s New Year sale. Her choice of items was probably governed by those Carmen Miranda fantasies that my parents had entertained about life in Australia. On this particular morning she rigged me out for school in a coloured summer shirt, a pair of blue cotton shorts, and brightly-striped socks worn with sandals. The socks, especially, made me the centre of an incredulous circle of onlookers. I was a garish parrot amidst a flock of drab sparrows.

  In the late forties Hurlstone Park and Canterbury represented the quintessence of working-class Australia. The rows of mostly single-fronted cottages in the streets of our neighbourhood were separated at the back by rusting sheets of corrugated iron and at the front by flimsy picket fences. At weekends
sallow-complexioned men wearing sparklingly clean cotton singlets sat for hours on brown-stained front steps, with bottles of beer perched beside them, addressing the odd laconic remark to their counterparts next door. On weekdays, as they were leaving for the factory or the railway yards where many of them worked, their wives were already out the front, clad in faded dressing-gowns, their heads wrapped in scarves, watering the inevitable hydrangeas that grew beside the steps of most of these houses. Before they had finished watering, their children would be leaving for school, the boys in heavy grey woollen shorts, their hair, like their fathers’, brutally ‘short-back-and-sides’ (as in the terrible indignity suffered by the central character in Patrick White’s story ‘Clay’), the girls in equally inappropriate blue serge tunics. Girls usually carried Globite schoolcases; the boys considered them too prissy—their books and sandwiches were often conveyed in mustard-coloured shoulder bags which you could buy at disposal stores. My parents never allowed me to have one of those badges of manliness—I had to be content with a sissy Globite.

  The bemused boys who surrounded me on that first morning, staring in wonderment at an overcoloured scarecrow, were all lean and sinewy, their faces old for their years, many of them barefooted, their clothes crumpled and dirty. Small eyes looked suspiciously out of freckled faces; thin lips were pursed in disapproval. Even the girls, separated from us by an inviolable cordon sanitaire, had become aware of my presence: they stood in little groups inside the white line painted across the playground, craning their necks to see better. The teachers—all male, I cannot remember a single woman teacher at that school—were equally curious, stealing surreptitious glances at me as they strolled around the playground ostentatiously in pursuit of their arcane supervisory duties. They wore heavy, shabby suits, some with a waistcoat, reeking of tobacco and sweat. They had the gnarled, hollow-cheeked look of our neighbours who spent their weekends sitting on doorsteps slowly pouring beer into thick glasses.

  Almost no communication was possible; my knowledge of English in those early days was limited to the few phrases I had picked up during our weeks in America and on the three-week voyage of the Marine Phoenix. I was isolated in the middle of a circle of curious faces, an outsider even though I was standing in the middle of that circle. Several well-meaning boys and teachers attempted to engage me in some form of conversation, but it proved futile. I had no comprehension of what they were saying apart from the odd word. Like myself, these words were so surrounded by sounds I could not comprehend that they could provide no basis for communication. It was then, I think, that I began to recognise an aspect of Australian culture which I did not acknowledge fully until many years later, at a time when I began to think a good deal about the differences between cultures and about the impact of an unfamiliar culture on the outsider. It was this: Australians, at least the children and adults of the inner western and southern suburbs of Sydney in the 1940s, employed a very restricted repertoire of gestures—body language, in the jargon of the seventies and eighties. The faces staring at me, even those that attempted to draw me out of that circle of isolation, were impassive, their hands immobile. You could not ‘read’ their intentions, especially if you were the product of a culture which habitually employed exaggerated gestures, smiles and other facial expressions. Those sinewy children and gnarled middle-aged men were inscrutable in their curiosity, just as I, no doubt, proved incomprehensible to them in my brightly coloured parrot-garb.

  At length a boy pulled on the school bell. I was shown where to stand for assembly while we saluted the flag, promised to honour the King and to obey God—though I understood none of that at the time. We marched into a classroom where someone showed me where to sit. My education had begun.

  I cannot adequately describe the sense of total desolation that descended on me during those first days. I can state my condition: I understood almost nothing of what went on around me—none of the instructions the teacher seemed to be giving; nor the significance of the map he unrolled in order to explain something; nor the radio broadcast to which we had to listen. These things may be stated; but I find it impossible to convey the experience of living in a state of almost total incomprehension, of being cast into a group governed by elaborate rules and mechanisms which you cannot comprehend. I was surrounded by a world where things happened, where things were done, where certain actions had consequences, without possessing any ability to discover what was expected of me. What was the strange chant that the class took up at one point? Why did one of the boys get called out to the front to receive a couple of whacks with a stick? What was the point of the teacher’s joke that sent the whole class into gales of laughter? Of course there was some trickle of understanding: I realised that the chanting had something to do with numbers; I knew that the boy got whacked because he had been making a great deal of noise. The joke, on the other hand, remained totally incomprehensible—like many migrants and aliens, I was beginning already to nurture a healthy crop of paranoia: was I the butt of that joke?

  At the end of the day, as for many days to come, I was in a state of exhaustion. The demands of the relentless but futile struggle to find a chink of understanding in the wall of words, instructions and admonitions confronting me all day had an enervating and unsettling effect. Sometimes I could catch the tone of what was happening. I knew when the teacher was angry, when sarcastic and when placatory, but I had not the least inkling of the circumstances that generated these signals. Perhaps some of Beckett’s carefully engineered series of non sequiturs afford a vague analogy to the sense of disorientation I endured that day. When Vladimir and Estragon discuss, with the earnestness of rigorously methodical philosophers, propositions that will not yield any conventional sense, the combination of discomfort and irritation the actors generate in the audience suggests, though only faintly, the quality of my absurdist experience. And I, unlike that audience, had to come back each day.

  I was treated with sympathy and a degree of kindness, apart from one or two roughnecks who jeered at me and mocked my prissy ways. People were well-meaning but bemused; they did not know what to do with me. They had been called on to deal with a kind of deaf-mute in striped socks. Their solution to the problem I posed was, in the circumstances, understandable, though at the time it produced much distress and anxiety. I remained in that limbo for a couple of weeks, growing increasingly isolated behind a wall of incomprehension. At least the bright socks had been retired and my road to assimilation had begun. My parents had mustered enough precious clothing-coupons to buy the thick woollen shorts and other heavy gear children wore in that humid, stifling autumn.

  Finally, a note addressed to my parents was handed to me one day. At home, with the aid of a dictionary, we deciphered its message: I was to be transferred to a ‘Special Class’, which everyone at the school, teachers and pupils alike, always referred to as the Idiots’ Class. It consisted of a group of thirty or so children of widely varying ages and uniformly abysmal intellectual capacities who were sequestered in it until they reached school-leaving age. What became of them afterwards was, clearly, no concern of the authorities.

  My classmates were a collection of largely amiable children, most of them far too handicapped and individual in their freakishness to be conscious of my difference. Several had obviously insisted on wearing clothes as idiosyncratic as mine had been during my first days at school. In retrospect I see them as an oasis of individuality in that undifferentiated, conformist world. They were able to evade the iron rules of convention because, in a sense, they were beyond the bounds of social norms, just as I, in my alienness, fell outside such confines.

  Their eccentricities and disabilities revealed themselves in spectacular ways. One large girl spent most of the day sitting impassively at her desk without the least trace of a response or reaction to anything that went on around her, except when an attempt was made to teach us arithmetic. That brought her to life with a dazzling and vivacious display of mental-arithmetic skills. She was a virtuoso in reeling
off answers to complicated sums in a clear, high-pitched voice wholly devoid of inflection—or so I got to learn in my last weeks in that class, when I had achieved a degree of understanding. One small boy would occasionally suffer convulsions; people rushed to place a solid object between his teeth once he started writhing and wriggling. A great hulk of a boy who sat next to me—his name was Clive—dribbled constantly from his gaping mouth. Another child threw up at least once a week. Others proved incapable of controlling their bladders; a squeal would, from time to time, go up in the classroom: ‘Sir, Neil’s wet himself again!’

  This chaotic world was supervised by a particularly clapped-out old man. He was even more decrepit and moth-eaten than the other teachers at the school, all of whom had obviously stayed on during the war years, getting older and older, more and more passive, incompetent and irresponsible, refusing to move aside for the hastily trained ex-servicemen who were clamouring for the right to be employed. The old teacher’s attempts to suppress the frequent bouts of anarchy that periodically shook the classroom were purely ceremonial. The scene was Dickensian in its exaggerated grotesquerie. The teacher—I have long forgotten his name—would threaten the most dire and bloodcurdling of punishments if we didn’t cut it out this moment, immediately. No-one paid any attention because many, like myself at first, did not understand much of what he was saying. He would wait with resignation for that mysterious moment when, as if by common consent, the uproar ceased, and the class was again seated quietly at its desks as models of exemplary behaviour. In those brief periods of truce, he would make an attempt to instruct us.

  His pedagogic ambitions were, quite understandably, modest. He tried from time to time to teach us to chant the simpler tables, but only the silent girl was able to master their intricacies. He made occasional attempts to teach us how to spell some of the words in the thin, grey-covered primers in use at the time, or to get us to read in chorus a page from The School Magazine. None of his attempts met with much success; most of our days were taken up with various manual tasks—endlessly marbling sheets of paper, producing miles of French-knitting and hundreds of pom-poms in brightly coloured wool. We enjoyed that hugely; these were always the happiest and most peaceful of times. Sometimes we made simple wooden figures by gluing clothes pegs together, or coloured in crudely stencilled shapes on sheets of yellowing paper. From time to time he tried to teach us a few songs: ‘Ho-ro my nut brown maiden’ and ‘The Maori’s Lament’. Occasionally he would give up, staring vacantly through the grimy windows of the classroom at the powerlines outside, until the rising tide of anarchy made him leap to his feet to threaten us with the most fearful thrashings, which he never carried out.