A Guest in my Own Country

by George Konrad

  A year before, one of our teachers had plied us with anti-Bolshevik admonitions. He no longer did so now, though he said nothing against the Germans either. Privately he let one of his good pupils know that given their miracle weapons they might stage a comeback yet. Once the Russians had occupied Vienna, though, the teacher applied to be admitted into the Hungarian Communist Party. The previous summer the children still fantasized about those German miracle weapons, wailing like German dive bombers. One of the big kids was called Tiger, after the German tank. But by the spring of 1945 Germans had gone out of fashion, and the children’s imagination was taken over by the Cossacks and their red cloth caps with fur along the sides and gold crosses on top.

  The Cossacks could not sit still for a minute: they were like bad boys. They would burst in with eggs, onions, and a big hunk of bacon and ask us to fry them up. They would gobble it all up, wash it down with a tumbler-full of vodka, and munch on a whole red onion. They would get drunk and cry. We had to smuggle my sister out of the house through a side door.

  Once Duci Mozsár, a pretty, buxom girl of barely fifteen, was standing in front of her gate when a motorcycle with a sidecar came screaming by. The Cossack in the sidecar reached out for her, whisked her off the ground, sat her down in front of him, and shot off. They were next seen a year later, when the motorcycle came screaming back into town, and the soldier in the side car set down Duci Mozsár with a baby and a suitcase, then shot off again as if he had never been there.

  A whole squad of sharpshooters had their way with a peasant woman while two marksmen held machine guns to her husband on the porch to keep him quiet. There were times when they shot the woman and her husband if they resisted too strongly. They would drive up in trucks, bringing things, taking things. You could trade with them if you could make out what on earth they wanted. One of them just wanted us to look at a photo album he had found in the frozen mud. He had carried it with him ever since, gazing at the stranger grandparents in its pages.

  I had brought back a wounded patriotism from Budapest. There were things you could not speak of. That one year had become like a bell jar of silence between me and my Christian friends, since they had been normal children even during that year.

  “Why I Love My Fatherland.” Such was the title of a composition we were assigned in March 1945. What was I supposed to write? Things were far from simple. I believed my fatherland wanted to kill me. There have been cases of parents wanting to kill their children. If it wasn’t my fatherland that wanted to kill me, if it was only a few of its inhabitants, then what makes my fatherland different from the fatherland of those who ordained the killings and carried them out? They too spoke of their fatherland—all the time. If I am a part of my fatherland, then so is what happened to me since last year’s exams. None of this could I discuss in my composition.

  I was particularly attached to one image of my fatherland—our fatherland—and the place that gave me birth: the good place, the place where you felt safe and from which you could not be uprooted. But once you have been driven from your home and observed your fellow countrymen accepting it (indeed, rejoicing in it) then you will never again feel at home as you once had. Something has been destroyed, and your relationship to the place will never be as naively intimate as it was. My sister and I had wanted to feel at home again in the town after our weeklong return trip, but the house was empty, our parents gone, and there I stood, on the national holiday, 15 March, in the same square where I had once marched in formation to the national flag with my class.

  There was a stone podium where the speakers stood and behind it a flagpole where the red, white, and green tricolor had flown at half mast before the war to indicate, as I have said, the painful fact that the country was incomplete, three-quarters of it having been truncated after the First World War. The flag would never fly at full mast until the lost territories had been reannexed. We wore dark blue trousers and white shirts. I can even remember some bright spring mornings when shorts and short-sleeved shirts were warm enough. The Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish schools stood side by side.

  In my boyhood I was as unhappy as anyone that the flag was at half mast. I considered it unacceptable that the train should stop so long at the border, after Biharkeresztes, whenever we went to Nagyvárad to visit my grandfather and the tangled network of our relatives there, that one uniform should replace another, that we should have to go through passport control and customs. Once we crossed the border, we saw cement fortifications, as if war were imminent. From Berettyóújfalu to Nagyvárad is only thirty kilometers; from Berettyóújfalu to Bucharest is seven hundred. So Nagyvárad was more mine than the Romanian king’s.

  The family’s oral tradition embraced a number of cities. In addition to Berettyóújfalu, there was Brassó, Kolozsvár, Debrecen, Miskolc, Budapest, Pressburg, Vienna, Karlsbad, Fiume, Heidelberg, Trier, Manchester, and New York. Rabbi relations may have lived in those great distant cities, but Nagyvárad was the true center of things, Nagyvárad with its cafés and theater, with its riverbank where, from the balcony of one of my great aunts, I would watch events unfold on the surface of the Körös through an opera glass.

  If Nagyvárad was the sun, then the moon was unquestionably Berettyóújfalu, seat of Csonka-Bihar County. We had our county hall, our county prison, and our county satrap; we had balls and literary evenings at the Military Youth Center, sponsored by either the gentlemen’s club or the Jewish women’s organization. In elementary school we studied the geography of Berettyóújfalu and then of Bihar County, reciting in wonder how everything was to be found there: plains and snowy mountains, rivers, forests, mines, and—in the very center of it all—the modern city of Nagyvárad with eight hundred years of history behind it. I was a patriot of my region as well as of my fatherland and would jealously defend Berettyóújfalu against Derecske, its neighbor in the district.

  Noticeable changes cropped up in the speeches given on the national holiday in 1945. Recalling 15 March 1848, a speaker called it more than a war of independence; he called it a “revolution.” My position at school was that of polite outsider, and it continued to be so. The community that sang “Be unshakably faithful to your fatherland, O Magyar, for it is your cradle and some day your grave, nourishing you and covering you,” a community that loved pathos, could not expect my Jewish classmates, present only as ghosts, to join them, because the fatherland in question had no interest in their graves: they had been turned to ashes in a small town in Poland, those two hundred children whose lives I was living, if I was to accept the mourning father’s words.

  The townspeople had generally made no comment about the Jews’ being carted off. Some had even laughed at the sight of the old people struggling with their bags, and indeed they were laughable, thinking they would have need of their things, their familiar pillows and blankets, when what was awaiting them was the crematorium. The fact that they were loaded onto trains was met with the same indifference as news from the front or draft notices or the appearance of bombers over the town on a sunny morning: they were all so many historical events over which one had no control. It was the indifference that comes of an acceptance of fate mingled with fear and perhaps relief. “The town has become Jew-free,” the local newspaper proclaimed. Hungarian had found its equivalent for the German adjective judenfrei. Most people probably felt that with husbands and sons at the front they had enough trouble as it was: news of the fallen kept coming, the harvest had to be brought in, the shops they had always frequented were closed. Then there were those who thought that it was their turn to own the shops, that their little girl should play this piano, their little boy sleep in that brass bed, that they could make good use of the linen cabinet and its contents. There was a place and a new owner for every head of cattle.

  I was cold a lot in the early spring of 1945 in Berettyóújfalu. It still got dark early, and I would read by candlelight in the unheated living room, while the fat housekeeper, the wife of a delivery man, peeled potatoes and sorted pea
s by the light of an oil lamp near the kitchen stove. When her three-year-old son told his mother he was hungry, she unbuttoned an enormous, sagging breast and the child sucked. Either he climbed on the stool or she bent over. Nothing was real. There we were in Berettyóújfalu, though not yet home.

  Every day I walked past the lowered blinds of my father’s hardware store. Anyone could have gone up to the apartment through the side door and traipsed around in the debris, but it wasn’t worth the trouble. Sometimes I went into the courtyard and up the steps to the second floor, where I walked through the empty rooms and looked down at the carts making their way along the main street. A couple sitting straight-backed on a coachbox, each in a lambskin hat.

  I walked through my room wearing a heavy overcoat. The cold, dry smell of excrement emanated from the bath. The floor was still strewn with the assignments that had earned me the praise of my teachers and pages from photo albums: summers in the Transylvanian Carpathians, the peaks of Máramaros, my great aunts and cousins now gassed to death. I had not picked anything up off the floor or if I did I put it back. My previous year’s coat was not yet tight or short: I hadn’t grown an inch in a year; I may have shrunk. Standing in that pile of shame, that mockery of homesickness, I gazed at my astonished face in the surviving mirror and nodded at the little fellow who had found his way home after all.

  A woman captured my gaze: a naked woman’s body, a display-window mannequin. She was obviously a woman: she had breasts and inked-in pubic hair. Her eyes had been stabbed out with a dagger, her body riddled with bullet holes. Why did they shoot at her seeing she was a woman? I heard a rustle behind my back: Gypsy children were looking to see what I was after or had found, because there might be something in it for them too.

  Walking along the main street on those late-winter mornings. I would be invited into one shop or another. It was a nasty March: muddy, gray, inflexible. We were apprehensive, between destinations, yet found it natural enough to be there and have someone provide for us. This was the place we had longed to be. We had looked forward to taking over as adults, but we were just children after all. The wind blew through the family letters in my old room and the prayer-book pages in the synagogue.

  Our weakness was palpable: we could no more begin a new life than remove all the rubble; it was cold in our rooms and noisy in the kitchen, and the town had no library. I dawdled in the thinly stocked shops of the men back from forced labor as I once had in my father’s. Two or three of them would team up, one buying, the other selling. Friends from the camp. Having lost their families, they had nothing else to do. For a while money could buy processed sugar or flannel or hoes, but soon the only valid currency was eggs or flour. Still, the door would open and customers come in. The young widowed men began looking at women again, the Jewish women trickling back from the deportation camps and the Christian women of the area, former typists, nannies, and housekeepers. If a wife had been killed, her younger sister might still be alive. A woman would enter house and bed, and children be born by the year’s end. The loss of the original family was no longer a nightmare, rather a painful reality. If things worked out, you could mourn the dead in the company of a new wife and new children, though more in silence than in words.

  But in 1950, just as returnees were getting on their feet again—gathering goods to sell, furnishing houses, filling them with families—the People’s Government took over all businesses, all workshops, all houses, everything. You could see it coming. This was the second blow, the final blow to the Jewish community in Berettyóújfalu. The first had occurred in 1949, when a number of the men hung “Back Soon” signs on their doors, went out to the edge of town, and climbed into a truck, destination Israel. Jankó Kertész the shoemaker continued telling his juicy stories on a three-legged stool in Naharia in Hungarian: he had no lack of Hungarian-speaking clients. Jankó had lost his wife and two children.

  In November 1944, after the Soviet troops had passed through Berettyóújfalu and set up their headquarters in the district courthouse, Balogh the blacksmith, the strongest man in the village, was elected president of the National Committee. During the few weeks of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, he had been the president of the Directorate. He was a man people trusted in extreme situations, though there was nothing particularly pleasant about him: he was a terrible grumbler, a malcontent. Nor with the black scarred pits in his face where sparks had landed could he have been called handsome. Loose oilcloth trousers, black boots, and shovel-like paws tipped with dark nails completed the picture. He would lug things here and there in anarchic bundles, meting out justice by giving a poor farmer a rich farmer’s porker, though not doing himself any damage in the process.

  Anyway, one day this Balogh went to headquarters (the former county courthouse) to lodge a complaint with the potbellied colonel against a Soviet soldier who had gone to the woman next door with a goose he wanted cooked, and taken her eiderdown cover to trade for bad moonshine. The commander stood the guilty party in front of the smithy’s coal-cellar door. Then taking a running start, he gave the soldier such a kick in the rear that he tumbled down the stairs. There were no witnesses to what followed, but I heard that the soldier got nothing but water for three days, and when he was good and hungry, the colonel sent for him.

  “Do you regret your offense?”

  And how!

  He would get something to eat then.

  The colonel got on fine with the blacksmith, but the powers that be did not. Back in 1919 the gendarmes who took over after the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic had beaten Balogh the blacksmith black and blue, but he was still the strongest man in the village. In 1945 he again proved stubborn, and because he could not get along with the authorities he returned to his smithy. It was he in 1956 who led the demonstrations, carrying the national flag and becoming the president of the local Revolutionary Committee. When the old guard Communists came back to power, they, depraved weapon-happy drunkards that they were, dragged him out to the edge of the village and took care of him. He died soon thereafter.

  My sister and I remained in Berettyóújfalu for another month. I don’t remember how we got word that we would be going to Nagyvárad in a Russian truck, but László Kún, a cousin of mine who lived in Bucharest (the son of Aunt Sarolta, my father’s favorite sister) went there to pick us up. No one asked us if we wanted to go, but my father’s friends took it for granted that we needed to go where people would take us in for the long term. My cousin, a textile manufacturer and businessman, arranged for our lodgings in advance. The gray-green truck had a tarpaulin roof and benches in the back for passengers and was carrying so many packages of black-market goods that we had no place to put our legs. Behind the driver sat a sergeant who had learned the language of every country that the Soviets had moved through, and instantly found his place in each of their local economies. He sold me a Cossack hat and traded me a dagger for an alarm clock. (Today I still think warmly of that grinning sergeant. More of him later.) That autumn Nagyvárad and Berettyóújfalu had been in the same country, even the same county; by then, early April, they were in different countries. But by then it wasn’t Bucharest or Budapest giving the orders; it was the Russians, along with the local authorities that always seem to pop up.

  My sister Éva and I were taken to an address in Nagyvárad where some plump women were engaged in looking after a baby. My sister was happy to join them, while I gave myself up to pleasant solitude. I lived in an apartment one floor up, home to a forced-labor returnee who had lost his family. He was a prosecutor who traveled a lot on business and did not sleep at home, so the spacious apartment was virtually all mine. I would sit on the balcony sampling the liquors I found in the cabinet. It was perfect springtime weather, and I watched the fast-flowing Körös sweep everything away like paper boats. Lounging on the balcony with a book in my hand, I wanted things to stand still; I wanted to hold them as they were and protect them.

  There are times during childhood, times of inspiration, when
we know what we do not know even though we do not particularly need to know it, because merely existing, walking along the river or a row of shop windows or a peristyle is joy enough.

  I make my way by smell in my grandfather’s house, seeking a cupboard, an oak tree, a dining cabinet covered by a lace cloth, the porcelain figurines in a glass case easily penetrated by a bayonet. The inner turns of the garden remind me of dinners under the arbor. To live well you need more than means; you need a certain lightness, but most important, you need to stay alive. You need to give the beef broth and the coffee and the cigar each its proper due. There used to be a life in which everything had its time and place, with tasks to be done that stacked up neatly like ironed shirts in the wardrobe: a time to read and write letters, a time for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and the Pester Lloyd and the government and opposition papers of the capital and provincial cities, a time to nap, a time for the café, for a walk, for the theater. There used to be a life in which there was no reason for grandfathers to hang their jackets on any but the same coat rack before changing into a tobacco-colored camel-hair housecoat.

  In those earlier days of the late thirties there was plenty to talk about at table—once I was old enough to weigh the adults’ words, that is. The rebellious sons of the bourgeoisie traveled to Paris and London, not Vienna or Abbazia. They did not go to Moscow. They were leaving Berlin. They would make impatient declarations at supper, eating with silver cutlery whatever the housemaid (or, in more modest households, the cook) served them when the kitchen buzzer rang, its button built into the table (or, in more modest households, hanging above it) to send the message that she could clear and bring the next course.