A Guest in my Own Country

by George Konrad

  And suddenly who did we see but Zolti Varga, the Újfalu photographer, wearing a fur-lined overcoat and pelt hat with earflaps. Varga had taken pictures of us from the time I had entered the world. I had to lie prone on a platform at three months, practically without hair and clothed with only an angry look, my ankles the rolls of fat of the well-nourished infant. Then there is the picture from perhaps three years later in which I am sitting on my father’s knee in a sailor shirt, my hair long; my sister is sitting in my mother’s lap, her head flirtatiously cocked.

  Once Zolti Varga had stuck his head into that black, harmonica-pleated, waxed-canvas cone—the jaws of darkness, almost—we would wait (who could tell if the master’s head was even in there still?) for the promised birdie to pop out. We imagined it as a canary of sorts, but then all there was was a click and no bird at all, just Zolti Varga pulling his head from out of his glass-eyed box, like a magician who, slightly flushed and perspiring, rightfully expects applause for his trick.

  And now Zolti Varga stood before us. He gave us a hug and said how glad he was to see us safe and sound: How splendid. His wife and two children were with him, and he invited us to join them. I was pleased at Zolti’s kindness, though I seemed to recollect he had been expecting a German victory the previous year. After fleeing Újfalu for Budapest and sitting out the siege there—they did not go further west, as they wished to avoid the war—he and his family were homesick for the old house, no matter what shape it was in. My sister and I knew we would not find our mother and father at home, but we too looked forward to seeing our house and somehow beginning our old lives again.

  Our voluntary travel companion managed to squeeze my sister through a window into the baggage net of one of the passenger cars. He pressed me into a cattle car, where we were packed so tightly that an old man gave me a piece of his mind: “Stand on one leg, boy. You’re a kid, you can do it. There’s no room for both. Switch off.”

  That was my first long trip: it took a week. But it was no departure; it was a return. We were not fleeing; we were returning, returning to the scene of a questionable paradise lost. A house is always unfaithful: either it goes before you do or it survives you and offers shelter to anyone or anything. Who was living there now? Who had the key? I dared not imagine we would find things as they had been. Maybe the furniture had been rearranged; maybe the clothes would be gone; maybe it would be completely empty. There was one possibility that had not occurred to me, however: the filth. In my thoughts the house had always been so attractive it never entered my mind that my first view of it might be repulsive.

  Standing there on one leg in a cattle car with eighty others, shoved in not by guards’ rifle stocks but by my own free will, pressed among those bodies, I shut my eyes and conjured up images full of longing: How would I find my sister? How was Éva managing in the baggage net? How long would our beans keep or the two rolls we had bought from a young man squatting in a broken, empty shop window for an astronomical price? What would happen if the trip dragged on? Could Zolti Varga give us something to eat? Could he—and would he?

  Supposedly the Russians had commandeered our locomotive, but would provide another. The train was still standing at the Nyugati Station in Budapest, but I was a little more comfortable now, because a few people had grown tired of waiting and abandoned their travel plans. From the narrow window I could see the moon shining through the station hall’s now glassless ribs. The self-appointed big shots who got on and off and shoved their way through the crowd spread the word that we would leave at one in the morning, at five, at ten—yes, certainly by ten.

  I slipped down and peed between the wheels. The urine froze instantly. People were still sitting on the roof, back to back, but fewer than before. The more determined cattle-car passengers were putting up with each other now, and I managed to squat down behind a fat old woman. Though we had moved not an inch closer to our destination, it felt good to have had one long night on the train now behind us.

  Ultimately we set off at about two in the afternoon. It was stop and go all the way. Locomotives came and went (if we had the better locomotive, we would lose it), tracks needed repairing, military trains had right-of-way. After a while Éva and I were sitting on benches in the cattle car and getting bread and bacon from Zolti Varga to assuage our hunger. At one point we heard a round of machine-gun fire: stray soldiers frightening civilians. The usual heralds said they were going from car to car seeking women. The women got lumps of coal from somewhere and smeared their faces to make themselves look wrinkled and ugly. Even aging ladies rubbed coal under their eyes my sister and I noticed, smiling to each other. I put Éva in a corner and stood in front of her. The other women pulled their kerchiefs down to their eyes and sat hunchbacked. In came the five or six soldiers on their rounds. One of the soldiers must have been attracted to a woman even through the pitch, but when he moistened his finger and rubbed and the black came off he grew angry and spat in the woman’s face. The soldiers left the train in a ruckus of dissatisfaction.

  We came to a jerry-built bridge spanning the Tisza where the Allies had hit the old bridge with a bomb and what was left had been blown up by the Germans. The temporary stilts between the pylons would not have borne the train, so we crossed on foot to where another train was waiting, though without a locomotive. Eventually we were moving again, and eventually we stopped again, sitting out a February snowstorm at night in the snowed-over bins of an open coal car. The wind off the Great Plain, unimpeded in its mad rush, pounded us mercilessly. We could no longer feel our hands and had ice crystals hanging from our eyelashes. Glued shut, our eyes transported us to a happy place, and the cold came close to rapture. We stood out on the open track surrounded by darkness.

  We decided to strike out on a dirt road and ask for shelter at the first house we found. The wind practically knocked us on our backs as we made our way, dragging our clumsy bags, until at last a faint light flickered on the edge of the blue-white plain. I was frozen to an anesthetic purple by the time my legs had taken me there, stumbling through clods of ice. Obediently I stretched out on the straw covering the dirt floor, and my good will was restored when a young servant girl lay down at my side and told me to snuggle up, pulling my hand onto her belly to stave off my shivering. I pressed against her from behind and buried my face in her back to fit her bottom into my lap. We were entirely one. I realized that you can love someone whose face you have never seen and respond to a stranger as you would to your closest loved one. I held onto her as if I had long since chosen her as my one and only. In the morning I thanked the residents of the house for their kindness and expressed special gratitude to my sleeping companion.

  Given that the train was still standing the next day, I set out on a reconnaissance foray and came upon a flat, black, cube-shaped solid amid the tire tracks on an icy hillock not far from some horse manure. Detailed inspection revealed it to be a piece of Soviet military-issue bread, albeit hard as a rock. But as long as it was indeed bread, it could soak up the steady stream of lukewarm water from the bronze pipe of an artesian well to become soft enough to eat. My supposition was borne out, and I chewed contentedly on my find.

  A woman walked past, briskly tossing lumps of goat manure from a breadbasket over the snow, as if sowing seeds, left and right, making sure to cover the entire width of the street. Watching me paw at that wet bread, she held out her basket and said, laughing hilariously, “Have some meat with it. These last few I won’t sow. You’ll get a nice bleating in your belly.”

  “Where am I?” I asked her.

  “In Törökszentmiklós.”

  “What shall I do with the bread?”

  “Leave it here for the birds.”

  On 28 February 1945, the seventh day of our journey, we reached the Újfalu station. It had hardly changed over the year, as there had been no serious battles in the vicinity. We fumbled our way with our bags out of the first car, which had assumed the noble rank of passenger car since Püspökladány. It would have been nat
ural for Father to pick us up, as when we arrived with Mother and after a few words of greeting he hugged us on the yellow-brick platform and we told him our news: Just imagine, we skated on the lake in the park in Pest and fed the baboons apples in that terribly smelly monkey house and then saw a performance of Latyi Matyi at the Operetta (Latyi could hardly get a word in edgewise what with all the children laughing) and then touched the very rope the Regent would as he walked through the rooms of the Royal Castle and then there was an air-raid siren when we were still in the Castle district and we went down with everybody else into a deep stone cavern, a cave under the Castle, where a teacher standing next to us explained that there was a lake in the belly of the hill and, just imagine, he said you could row a boat on it. But when we alighted on the platform looking straight ahead, it was clear our father was not waiting for us. Nor was anyone else.

  Where fiacres had once offered their services to travelers coming from Budapest, there were now a few ox-drawn carts. The first acquaintance we saw was my former teacher at the Jewish school, Sándor Kreisler. Everyone in our class had been killed, as had all the pupils in our school, so our teacher was naturally deeply moved to see us. There he stood, a short, plucky man with a mustache. Seeing him was almost as unbelievable as it would have been to see my father.

  Sándor Kreisler had been a good teacher: reserved, but kind and fair. In addition to primary school science he gave me a few slaps with the cover of my pen-case, generally because of Baba Blau. Mr. Kreisler had been my teacher as early as the first grade, when I still had private instruction: he would come to the house and teach István and me in our living room afternoons from three till four, which was all we needed of book learning. The rest of the time was our own. Sometimes he came down into the garden with us, and once in a while he gave the ball a kick, but he never got involved in the game, being a young man and mindful of his dignity.

  His father was a fine tinsmith and went in for politics. He was a friend of my father’s. He came into our store every day in his work clothes, and they would stand at the oven and crack jokes. Yet I cannot recall his father ever coming to our living quarters, and where the father was not admitted the son could not feel at home. He told my father to send me to school: it would do me good to be together with other children. I got top marks but, as I have said, not a few raps on the knuckles as well. For rhythmically grabbing the bottom of the girl hopping in front of me when we squatted for the circle-dance that begins “The hare called his son out onto the green meadow.” Or for the usual reason: fighting. I gave as well as I got. We were three classes in one classroom. While the teacher was busy with the first graders, the second and third graders worked on a quiet assignment. I still find it a good idea to avoid focusing constantly on one group activity: we could lose ourselves in reading, drawing, or writing.

  Mr. Kreisler had returned from forced labor. His parents and siblings had been taken to Auschwitz, and all his pupils had perished there. He was as surprised to see us as we were to see him. He hugged us and kissed us, which he had never done before. He listened to Zolti Varga’s story, thanked him for bringing his two pupils home, and promised to testify to Zolti’s valor should he ever need it. Eight months earlier the act of taking us to Budapest had been a political scandal; now the act of bringing us back conferred political credit, which was not particularly pleasant either.

  Soon thereafter we encountered a leather-jacketed young man with a holster on his belt. “Sanyi,” he said, “make these kids into good communists.”

  “Fine,” said Sándor Kreisler, and the three of us walked on.

  After the war he had a distinguished career: he began as a primary school teacher in Debrecen and entered retirement as a commissioner of schools. On the day we arrived, he was primarily concerned with practical questions: where we would sleep that night and who would feed us. We were stubbornly drawn to our house. Our teacher recommended we wait until the next day. But why shouldn’t we sleep in our own home, move back in and wait for our parents?

  In a little main-street shop we were met by three friendly faces: Imre Székely, Márton Glück, and András Svéd. The first two were my father’s cousins. They had returned together from forced labor, each having lost a wife and two children. The three of them had united forces to open a small shop where you could get everything you might need, from brown sugar to a black woolen kerchief. The merchandise—for which they traded flour, smoked sausage, and wine—was brought from Várad and Debrecen by cart. There was jubilation when we entered. Then all three of those muscular men retreated, each to a different corner, and shed tears. When they returned, they did their best to put on smiles. Then they accompanied us to our house.

  There was filth everywhere, from the attic to the cellar: trampled books and photographs lay all over the floor; the bathtub, which had served as a latrine for the soldiers who had quartered there, was full of dried excrement. The only furniture left was a large, white rococo wardrobe with three doors, decorated with angels, its mirror still intact. It was probably too heavy for them to have carried off. At my feet lay a story I had written in school about a young fir tree that became the mast of a seagoing ship and engaged in conversation with the wind, an old friend from the mountaintop. There was a photo album scattered about in loose pages, the vanished faces, ourselves among them, stained and muddy. I turned to see the three men standing behind me. We were beginning to understand that what had been would never be again.

  “Let’s go to my place, then,” said Uncle Imre. His housekeeper cut thick slices of bread from an enormous round loaf, buttered and salted them, and set them down next to cups of tea. I rubbed my eyes. Only then did we realize what had happened. The men already knew, of course, though they themselves had been in forced labor digging entrenchments near the front, not in Auschwitz or the deportation camps. Their commander, a local landowner, had led them home when the Russians passed through the village. Most of the Jews left in the town were young men. Before the war approximately one thousand of Újfalu’s twelve thousand citizens had been Jews. About two hundred of them survived. They had been lucky in their commander, who had known them all from peacetime, having bought from their businesses and commissioned items from their workshops. He wanted nothing more than to return to peace, to his own house, together with his men and therefore with a clear conscience. The Soviet troops passed through after a big tank battle on the edge of the village on 20 October, and by November even the forced laborers had gone home. By the time we arrived, they knew what had become of their families and had read about the gas chambers in the Nagyvárad paper. The only question was whether their wives had been sent to the gas chamber or to work camps: they were strong young women, so their husbands could still hope that only their children had been lost. What they did not consider was that the Germans in charge wanted everything to run as smoothly as possible. Children were less likely to create noisy scenes and more likely to step naked into the showers if their mothers were at their sides. To keep the children from crying, they preferred to gas the young women along with them.

  It was not easy to accept the affection of those men, those hundred-odd widowers around us who had lost their children. They were kind to us, glad to see us alive, but I could not help thinking that my survival reminded them of the death of their own. One of them said to me, “You realize, don’t you, that you are living for the others, not only for yourself?”

  Uncle Imre, who looked after us and was actually my father’s second cousin, was a warm-hearted, frank, quiet man, with broad shoulders and a sense of humor. He waited in vain for his wife, Aunt Lenke, his daughter Panni, and his son Gyuri to return from Auschwitz, whereas I still had hope, knowing that my parents had gone to Austria, where the war was not yet over. Imre lived in just two rooms of his former house, sleeping in the old bedroom. I slept in the bed next to his—his wife’s.

  My sister and the housekeeper occupied the other room. Imre did not sleep much and smoked a lot. His lighter, made from a cartridge
shell, would flame up now and again. From the corner of my eye I would look at his face, illuminated by the cigarette’s glow. One time he cried, the way men do, the sobs welling up from his chest, through his throat, and he turned onto his stomach and pressed his face into the pillow, his shoulders shuddering, biting the pillow so I would not hear. I pretended to be asleep.

  I returned to the public school to which István and I had transferred from the Jewish school the previous autumn. The teachers and pupils were the same, except that István, who had remained in Budapest, was not sitting next to me. There was no military education, from which we had been excluded the previous year, so I was a full-fledged member of the class community. Neither the teachers nor the pupils knew quite how to deal with me. The homeroom teacher asked me where I would like to sit. No one was sitting next to little Bárczi, so I asked to sit there. He was the one who little less than a year earlier had said that now we Jews would get ours, in spades. Our Hungarian-geography-gymnastics teacher had once pulled his hair while slapping his face to make the slaps more effective. We pitched buttons together and shared our larded bread.

  “Where’s your father?” asked my classmates, but all I knew was that my parents had been deported. There was a boy in the class whose father had fallen at the front and one whose father was a prisoner of war and still missing. Rumor had it that there, abroad, civilians and prisoners alike were starving and the weak had frozen to death. I was not alone in my orphaned state. We came to accept one another again and avoided speaking of our families.

  We slid over icy paths on our boot heels and looted tanks that had been shot up. We collected cartridge shells. Once in a while we found a helmet or a belt or a cartridge bag with dum-dum bullets that explode inside your body, throwing their brass shrapnel everywhere. We would drill a hole in a plank of wood, force the brass shells in, and plant a sharp-tipped bullet in the tapered tube. Then we would hold a nail to the cap and hit it with a hammer to make it explode. A plank with a dozen or so bullets in it looked like a multi-barrel mortar. We used to say we were going out to fire the katyusha. There was plenty to shoot at, especially ravens, since the harvest had been bountiful in forty-four and there was plenty for them to pick at under the snow. It is a miracle we never hurt ourselves.