A Guest in my Own Country

by George Konrad

  On other evenings I would listen to the admonitions of the blacksmith’s son, who provided me with sexological advice—for example, which notorious women in the village were best avoided. He had plans of becoming a mechanical engineer in Budapest. Laci Nyúl wanted to stay in the village and made us swear to vote for the Smallholders’ Party, because if the Communists won he’d have to, as he put it, kiss his meat-packing plant goodbye, and my father his house and business. The Russians, not the Americans, would be giving the orders then. On dark winter afternoons he brought along a book of poetry. We had managed to trade up from a petroleum lamp to a gasoline one with a pump of its own, the white mantle growing taut and burning with a crackle when the flame caught it.

  I would cut tobacco and stuff it into cigarette papers (I no longer remember who paid for it, though I’m afraid it was my father); I had fashioned a spinning wheel out of a bicycle wheel and would spin the long, white fur of angora rabbits for my mother to knit sweaters with; or I would move off somewhere to read. My time was my own. I spent summers on my bike, riding with my cousins to the swimming area or down to the Berettyó, where we would climb the pylon of the railroad bridge.

  One day I found myself next to Marika on its sun-drenched concrete surface. Because she was four years older than I, it was an honor for me to lie next to her. Soon thereafter the activity repeated itself on the sofa of a cool room whose blinds had been lowered. Leaning on my elbows as she lay there on her back, I tried to reach under her skirt and stroke her thigh. Her resistance was mild, and as I touched her skin I had the impression she was not entirely lacking in interest. We both held our breath. Marika’s aunt would leave us alone together for long stretches.

  On days like these I should have been reeling off Latin declensions and conjugations for my blonde yet dull private tutor. When she phoned my father, he took me aside and asked whether I was going to my Latin lessons. “Of course I am,” I said. “Most of the time.” My father’s gaze darkened, and he walked away. I wanted to spare my tutor, but I can’t deny that I always took pleasure in skipping classes.

  Inflation brought chaos. My father was not good at riding such waves or, rather, he could not do it at all. After the billions came the unfathomable trillions and then the period of barter, when customers brought wheat and bacon in exchange for his merchandise. My father having no use for wheat and bacon, they went moldy in the cellar. It was beginning to look as if commerce were utter nonsense, but my father kept at it, and once reliable money was minted in 1946 it began to accumulate. Whether he could keep his business, however, was unclear. The reassuring announcements being made could be interpreted in many ways. But then the Communist Party in its passion for state appropriation was moving from large companies to small businesses, with the result that after five years of a second flowering my father’s hardware business was taken over by the state, which then turned him out of house and home with no reparations. Such was the law. The Smallholders’ victory meant nothing: the Communists took over anyway. But he had reckoned with losing everything again. At least now they did not want to kill him.

  Laci Nyúl’s dreams remained just that. He enrolled at the Technical University in Budapest and went to work at a slaughterhouse to earn his keep. One day he fell asleep in the bathtub and the gas flame in the water heater went out. The gas poured noiselessly over him, and the exhausted Laci Nyúl slept on, forever.

  In August 1947, when the last parliamentary elections were being held, I would ride my bicycle to the town hall in Berettyóújfalu, where they posted the results on a large board the moment they were phoned in. During the preceding weeks I had attended the campaign assemblies of every party and found something stimulating about each. I was fourteen and had completed a year at the Debrecen Calvinist Gimnázium with highest honors.

  The previous September my parents had taken my cousin Pál and me to the four-hundred-year-old institution in a cart, together with our fees in the form of a chest full of food—because over and above the fees for room and board payment was required in staple goods: flour, sugar, bacon, smoked meat, beans, eggs, and preserves.

  Debrecen was a big city in my eyes, unfamiliar and inscrutable. After lurching along the wide Market Street, the cart arrived at the entrance to the student dormitory, where bronze heads commanding respect stared out at us. An inscription on the interior facade admonished all that this was a place for prayer and study.

  On the third floor a bleak, pave-stoned hallway led to sleeping quarters packed with iron beds. This room also served as the study area. The daily schedule specified that silentium was to be observed from three until five in the afternoon, during which time we were all to sit studying at the common table. The wake-up bell rang at six in the morning, when we ran laps around the courtyard. At the filthy sinks we could wash only down to the waist. A cowbell would summon us down to the cellar dining room, where a roux–thickened soup with cumin awaited us every morning.

  We stood behind our chairs in silence while the others mumbled grace: “Dear Jesus, be our guest today, and bless what Thou hast granted us … He who food and drink hath given, let His name be blessed in heaven.” I could have said the Jewish blessing “Blessed art Thou, Eternal God, King of the Universe, who bringeth forth bread from the earth,” but I was not the praying type in those days.

  The serving spoon would make the rounds from room monitor (whom we were bound to obey) down, according to age. The prayer did little to dampen the abuse of rank. The serving order went by class, the oldest class going first, the youngest last. If there was a big steaming bowl of goulash in a big porcelain tureen, it was only natural that the highest class should spoon out the most meat for themselves and all that was left for the “little buggers,” those of us under fourteen, were the potatoes at the bottom. As a member of the fourth class I was in the lower school and therefore subject to commands like, “Bugger, bring me a glass of water!” A raw sense of fun made the vulgarity of it all seem natural. Endless jokes about farts filled the dormitory.

  Pali was in the first class, at the bottom of the pecking order, while I, in the fourth, belonged at the top of the lower school and was thus ripe for rebellion. I put up with the hazing as long as I could. I even put up with the prank they called the star-kick, which consisted of sneaking up to a new boy at night and sticking strips of twisted paper between his toes, then lighting them. When the flame reached the skin, the victim would make huge kicks in the air and bolt up in alarm to see the flaming paper wafting through the room. Something to snicker at. (Even the little buggers had their established order, whereby one might end up sniggering at one’s best buddies’ misfortunes—or one’s own.) I put up with the fact that packages coming to me from home were opened with the room monitor’s approval and devoured without consulting me. (I was familiar with his type—a “cackler”—and as I will relate I eventually put my foot down.) Otherwise we got on well enough. I was good at my studies and let them play with my four-grooved Cossack dagger, which they would throw at the doorpost. My classmates, sons of village schoolteachers, priests, choirmasters, artisans, and farmers, wavered between intimations of justice, lording it over newcomers, and submitting to the authority of older boys. After lights out a Psalm was read. It was followed by witticisms about jacking off. I didn’t know what that was.

  One classmate shared the homesickness that came over me each evening, and we counted the days together. He told me that to get to his village from the station he had to cross a forest. There were wolves in the forest, he said, so occasionally he needed to sling a huge cudgel over his head. During the previous Christmas break he had set a whole pack running. I would have liked to believe my new friend.

  Our house was thirty kilometers from the dormitory, which was doable by bicycle, though occasionally a friendly Russian sergeant, the polyglot who had accompanied us to Nagyvárad, would come and ask if I felt like going home: my mother was willing to certify a made-up illness for a few days. He was an interpreter at the headquarters in Ber
ettyóújfalu and knew his way around the markets and the world of exchange in general. I traded him our kitchen alarm clock for a Cossack hat and that four-grooved dagger. We rode in his jeep, with me in back, my legs hanging over the side. He worried that I would bounce out: his driver drove at a hundred kilometers an hour. I was thrilled by the speed.

  But it was also a pleasure to climb onto an ox-drawn cart with my mother, the driver perched listlessly on his plank and the two oxen taking their time, letting me have a good close look at every house and tree along the road. The familiar, thirty-kilometer trip between Debrecen and Újfalu would take a good six hours.

  In my simplicity I was happy with any pace: all that mattered was that I was going home. And it was with a heart of stone that I watched the truck that served as the bus to Újfalu pull away from the Golden Bull Hotel in Debrecen with my mother aboard after three days in Debrecen, time mostly wasted in a group shopping tour to buy shoes for my sister Éva and cousin Zsófi. They would try on pair after pair, first in shops that seemed to hold promise, then in ever-more disappointing establishments. My mother was patiently respectful of the process, but I was bored and did not pass up the opportunity to express my scorn when the girls ended up with the shoes they had tried on in the first shop. My remarks were received with cool disparagement and labeled barbarian. My original inclination, to go into the first shop and buy the first thing that more or less appealed to me, remained unshaken.

  This philosophy of random choice guided me in other areas as well: “God is good, and what he gives is good.” My life has been shaped by chance meetings and telephone calls: the best dinner is always at the nearest restaurant; my first woman—I was fifteen at the time—was the nearest one in the raft of women lining up before me in the salon of the old-fashioned house of assignation. The approach probably had something to do with hunger: I barely grew at all that year. You had to take what there was.

  Like Debrecen, for example. It was the closest of cities (with good schools) to my parents’ house. The dormitory destroyed a few illusions perhaps, but I had excellent teachers.

  My favorite place was the library. Whenever school got me down, I would go straight there. No one would ask me whether I had permission to be there or was just skipping class. Good as the classes were, I enjoyed reading more, so I often found myself at its entrance, a flight of wide, sloping wooden stairs worn down by many thousands of feet. I had to stretch to reach the handle on the door and was immediately captivated by the smell of floor wax and old books.

  One day, while reading a light novel whose spine I had seen earlier on my mother’s bedside table, I felt a tactful hand land on my shoulder. I turned to see our class advisor, Dr. József Salánky, who taught Latin and History and inspired both respect and fear.

  “If my suspicions are correct, you, young man, should be in class right now. Is that not so?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  We were face to face. I could deny nothing.

  “I hope you are reading something worthy at least.”

  He had a look at the book by lamplight in the November darkness.

  “This one is hardly worth missing class for,” he said disparagingly.

  I felt reduced to near nothingness but had to respond somehow.

  “And what would be worth missing class for, sir?”

  It was a cheeky question, but by saying “this one” he had given me a lead-in. He looked at me and said, “Wait!” He had access to the library’s inner sanctum, forbidden territory to students. While he was on his mission there, I found it hard to return to my novel. He reappeared with a stack of books, set them down on the librarian’s desk, and said to him, “If this boy comes back, give him these to read in the building.” He winked at me and left. The librarian called me over with a glance and set the top book before me. It was Crime and Punishment. Later, in the school corridor, Dr. Salánky remarked to me that it didn’t matter if I understood only a little of what was in those books. Whatever I did understand would be worth more than all of a bad book that was easy for me.

  Eventually I had to leave the dormitory. What led to my expulsion was the practice of our being allowed out into the city after lunch (though we had to be back by three, which was the beginning of silentium, when we were expected to do our lessons, not play with jigsaw puzzles or tops or that wooden figure whose little red peanut would pop out when you pulled on a string). On one sunny November day I was on duty, which meant I was responsible for taking the key to the common room when we left for lunch and being there to open it for those who preferred the dormitory to town, perhaps because they felt insecure and needed to stick to their nests or because they wanted to study or simply because they were lazy. After a less than glorious lunch I forayed into town. I may have bought a jam roll from one of the glassed-in stands or a cluster of the grapes sold on corners. At any rate, I completely forgot about the damned key. In thrall to the pleasures of sights and tastes I got to the door of our common room to find ten pairs of eyes glowering at me. I arrived in a lighthearted mood, giving the boys a warm hello and making a casual apology. No one said a word, but I got a good slap in the face from the room monitor. Taking a step back, I charged into his belly with my head, which landed him on his behind. When they pulled us apart, he said I would regret what I had done.

  The regulated life was no longer for me. I asked my cousin Zsófi whether Pali and I could move into her rented room, and she said yes. The next day the three of us were living in Zsófi’s room in the Bishop’s Palace. It had a fine view of the Great Church together with Market Street and the Golden Bull Hotel, where the Municipal Philharmonic Orchestra played Mozart and Liszt in the Blue Salon under the inspired direction of Dr. Béla Pukánsky, director of the Academy of Music.

  In the fall of 1947 I moved from the ponderous Debrecen Calvinist Gimnázium to the lively Madách Gimnázium in Budapest. I rented a room in the flat of an elderly couple. I was a village boy, unsophisticated and starry-eyed, but Budapest was much to my liking. And this time I could wander the city as I chose, with no yellow star on my coat and no worries about danger lurking everywhere.

  The school was nearly as interesting as the city. It had its own parliament and government, two newspapers, and a court with a judge and jury, prosecutors and defense counsels, and all sorts of cases, serious and otherwise, awaiting adjudication. There was a student representative at all grading sessions, and if he disagreed with the mark the faculty wanted to give to one or another of his classmates he had the right to veto it.

  Politics was in the air, and there were Communists among the student body, although the boys generally preferred to play historical roles: Danton would observe that Robespierre, sitting at one of the desks in the back of the classroom, had a glowering countenance. Chénier was a kind, light-haired Jewish boy. We used to walk together on Margaret Island, reading Dante in the Babits translation. He would soon escape over the border, which in 1949 was no longer easy, and emigrate to the newly founded state of Israel to become general of a tank division. There was a good deal of role-playing in our class and a tremendous number of debates. I defended Mallarmé against the great Romantic Victor Hugo and the aforementioned Danton, who later became director of the Opera. (His fondness for spectacular effects was already in evidence.) We read a lot in those days: the second or third time I admitted to my friends that I hadn’t read this or I hadn’t ever heard that name, one of my friends called me an ignorant country bumpkin.

  Yes, this was an age of politics, even at school. When was it permissible to kill? That was a burning question. Or should boys like us, fifteen or sixteen years old, go to a brothel (and if so, which one?) or go out with a girl? A girl? From a girls’ school? What would you talk about? Your homework? One opinion was that you were better off talking to your Latin master. Ours was a wise man, though anarchy held sway in his classroom. (A translator of Plato does not get bogged down in discipline.) Mr. Kövendy would sit in the last row, and whoever gathered round him could drink in
what he had to say while the rest went on with their racket.

  The couple I boarded with was Arnold Konta—a former wine wholesaler and rowing and walking champion, then past eighty—and his wife. They could not afford to heat their large apartment, which was crammed with carved mahogany furniture, Shakespeare in English, Goethe and Schiller in German, Flaubert in French, plaques in black glass cases, ponderous paintings all over the walls, and bronze statuettes in every spot not taken up by something else. I found it all very depressing. At fifteen I detested the fin-de-siècle style and its eclecticism, and even the Jugendstil (or Secession, as we called it); I loved the cubism of modern architecture.

  Mr. Konta was a short man; his wife Elza was quite tall. Every Sunday morning the natty old gentleman reached up and took his wife’s arm (her shoulders were higher than his head), and they walked to the Museum of Fine Arts in Heroes’ Square. He used to say you could look at a good painting a hundred times. He read some Faust every evening. Before sitting down to his desk, he murmured a short Hebrew prayer. His face was pink and jowly and fragrant from shaving. He took his meals in a housecoat redolent of tobacco and tied with a rope.

  I would be walking along the Ring, and who would step out of one of the noble old buildings, each forming a quarter-circle, but Zoltán Kodály, white beard and all. (Whenever he appeared on the balcony in the hall at the Academy of Music, the house would give him a standing ovation.) I would bow my head as we passed, and the old man would nod. The garden and red sign of the Stück Pastry Shop filled me with melancholy. This is where I had sat with my father before accompanying him to the Nyugati Station whenever he visited me at the end of one of his buying trips. Much as I enjoyed sitting with him, I smiled to myself more than once at his naive but well-intentioned notions.

  Every morning I would feel compelled to step off the sidewalk as I walked along Andrássy Boulevard two blocks down from the Ring: the building at number sixty, with its gravitas—and the heavy chains that bound its concrete pillars—would order me down into the roadway. In the last year of the war it had been called the House of Loyalty, the headquarters and torture chamber of the Arrow Cross. Anyone taken there had little chance of coming out alive. There had been concrete-walled torture rooms in place in the cellar by then, but the setup was not modern enough: the new regime dug deeper. Buildings outlive regimes, and this formerly upper-middle-class apartment building was home to the political police of the new system. The reconstruction was the idea of Gábor Péter, once a tailor, then a librarian for a fashion magazine, then head—general—of that police force. A major sat on either side of the padded door to his office, effective advisors no doubt. After 1956 they became official humorists, writing hilarious Christmas radio and TV programs.