A Guest in my Own Country

by George Konrad

  With Gábor Péter at the helm of the State Security Agency, the Andrássy Boulevard facilities embarked on a visually dazzling expansion, gobbling up the large and lordly buildings around it one by one. No sooner were the inhabitants expelled than industrious stonemasons set about making it fit for the uses of the Agency. Red geraniums bloomed in a flowerbox outside every window, but guards carrying machine guns stood in every doorway and on every corner, and no one would have dreamed of playing games with them.

  Soviet Pobedas, light brown and gray, and large, black American cars with curtains in the windows rolled out of the driveways. The next block was also part of the picture. The windows of the Lukács Pastry Shop on the corner—once a showcase of cakes and liqueurs, of glass chandeliers, velvet draperies, and marble tables—had been replaced by glass bricks impenetrable to the eye: it had become a club for State Security officers.

  I later learned that prisoners who had signed confessions were assembled there among the Art Deco decorations to learn their show-trial roles. Since the baker and his masterpieces had been kept on, the prisoners got pastries for reciting their canned self-accusations by heart. By then they had gone through the preliminary phases of confession and torture. Most people proved capable of slandering themselves, even condemning themselves to death. All bets were off once the prisoner found himself alone in the cellar, crawling into his cell on all fours like an injured animal. As soon as you signed the papers and redeemed yourself, you got a hot bath. Now all you had to do was play your part. And this was theater at its most imaginative. You were spirited up from the cellar to the vanilla-scented paradise of golden angels and chandeliers and garlands and whipped cream, where a clean change of clothes and a dignified stroll along the slightly sloping marble floor could put you in the mood for any role. Down below, all relationship between the ego’s visible and invisible aspects had been severed, the visible (and thrashable) part doing what it must, the invisible part looking on, astonished.

  In 1949 I did not know much about what was going on in the cellar, but from the BBC I learned that the accused in show trials would say all sorts of things to incriminate themselves, that they were mere puppets, their will having been broken with beatings and chemicals. This seemed plausible, as they spoke like automatons, reciting more than repenting, as if meaning no longer mattered.

  The cameraman father of a boy I knew told his son that the proceedings were filmed without the knowledge of the accused. Moreover, the trial was staged more than once, and the accused never knew which the “real” one was. The final film version was spliced together from several takes. Could the whole procedure have been just for the sake of the film? The director supposedly had friends among the accused.

  A bit further up Andrássy (soon to be Stalin) Boulevard there was a private lending library that was taken over by the state in 1949. It was intoxicating for me, at fifteen, to take out novels by Steinbeck, Hemingway, Martin du Gard, and Malraux. The same neighborhood also boasted a respectable private house of assignation run by Madame Clarisse on the second floor of a neoclassical apartment building. By the end of the year it was all over: the private library, the private maison de rendezvous, and everything else private, including the private individual. Nor were we left in peace at school: we had to sing hymns of praise to the working class after each ten-minute break. Sometimes we slipped in a dirty rhyme or two.

  When in the early sixties the State Security Agency moved out and the space reopened as Specialty Pastries, I would drop in after long afternoons spent investigating the living conditions of people on file at the Public Welfare Authority. I would sit with friends in velvet-upholstered chairs beneath the chandeliers’ gold curlicues and Venetian glass and surrounded by blue-silk walls and gold-leaf friezes as trolley buses, the pride of Soviet technology, rumbled by. I was always on good terms with the old ladies in the cloakroom. I had many dates there, dates with beautiful women and odd women, with clever women and madwomen: I had just divorced my first wife. Those women are dead by now, or elderly.

  Late in November 1983, when I was on a fellowship at the New York Institute for the Humanities, my wife Jutka and I rented an apartment on the corner of Fourth Street and Avenue A, four blocks from St. Mark’s Place. One morning while walking along the latter we came upon a street fair. There were bands playing and a woman prancing around on stilts, enticing children to dance. We bought a table lamp for two dollars, and the seller wanted to prove to us it worked. We walked into a precinct house to look for an outlet. “Your honor is at stake,” the policemen told him, smiling as they pointed to an outlet. The lamp did not light. They had a good laugh, black and white, men and women alike—then took pity on the salesman and pointed him to a working outlet. The lamp was fine. Filled with a sense of dignity, the salesman then told us that his mother was Hungarian and that he was happy to have us here in this part of town, properly called the East Village, not the Lower East Side.

  I am standing at a Tarot reader’s shop front surrounded by iron pipes, iron plates, and iron gratings. The mustachioed old fortune-teller likes to snooze in a rickety armchair in the window. The next two shops are bookshops. My novel The Loser is available in both. Back home it had to be published in the utmost secrecy, which bestowed an aura of heroic transgression on the publisher, Gábor Demszky. Here in America I ran into a samizdat plain-white-cover edition. It is so tightly spaced that the whole novel fits into two hundred pages instead of four.

  Iván Szelényi and I also single-spaced our typescript of The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power. The fewer the pages, the easier it was to smuggle it outside the country. That accomplished, I could turn back to my novel. But one day Biki (Tibor Hajas—poet, essayist, photographer, body-artist, film director, watchman, and warehouse worker) told us there had been a house search at Tamás’s (Tamás Szentjóby—poet, painter, film actor, and Fluxus artist). They had been looking for pornography, but discovered our manuscript instead. They suddenly lost all interest in pornography. No, they had a 132-page typescript dealing with ideological issues and containing all sorts of seditious ideas. “Looks like 127/b is your genre: incitement against the state,” said the good-humored, portly lieutenant colonel entrusted with my arrest and interrogation.

  Now here we were, nearly ten years later, our consternation having shriveled to a series of comical anecdotes, standing in St. Mark’s Place, looking over the offerings on the sidewalk. People put out anything with the slightest chance of selling, trusting to the market gods to make the proper match. Nor did the market gods let them down. For among the pulp novels and one or two good books were two familiar-looking soft-cover volumes—red on top, yellow underneath—with a Hungarian title: Társadalmi Szemle (Review of Society), the theoretical journal of the Hungarian Communist Party, November and December, 1949. Stalin, then celebrating his seventieth birthday, was on the cover.

  I picked up one of the yellowed volumes. Now the young black man proffering it was certain you could find a paying customer for anything under the sun. Supine on a New York sidewalk the generalissimus was none too imposing, but in the autumn of 1949 the whole world was sending him gifts, including a trainload assembled by the grateful Hungarian People with enough material—a sea of miniature locomotives, machine tools, and children’s drawings—for an exhibition. What is more, there was a statue of him in every shopwindow. In butcher shops, for example, the wisest leader in the history of mankind was rendered in frozen lard, the artist’s honorarium being paid in kind: fatback.

  Suddenly there was a vacant flat on the first floor of the Andrássy Boulevard building. Its former inhabitant was the son-in-law of the President of the Republic, a self-assured squat little man with an equally self-assured and squat spouse. In the autumn of 1949 the shutters were rolled down. The son-in-law of the President of the Republic had been appointed ambassador to Cairo and moved there with his family. Then he was ordered home, denounced as a spy, condemned to death, and executed. It didn’t take long. The large American car s
topped coming for his wife. The movers came and took all their possessions heaven only knows where.

  The year 1949 was the year of the Great Change, the great new rigor, as peace-loving, progressive mankind prepared for the seventieth birthday of the Lighthouse of the Peoples. The brass band of the Hungarian State Security Agency, as part of peace-loving and progressive mankind, had recently moved into the spacious apartment of the freshly executed Hungarian ambassador to Cairo, and there they rehearsed the Stalin Cantata. I was forced to listen: I lived on the opposite side of the courtyard. They rehearsed it bar by bar, playing each one hundreds of times, boring it into my head. “Stalin is our battle, Stalin is our peace, and the name of Sta-a-a-lin will make the world a better place.” (The last line had slight meter and rhyme problems, but was ideologically pure.) Sometimes a booming chorus would sing along. It was all very festive.

  In 1949 Stalin thought there would be a war with the West, so the eastern half of Europe needed to be unified according to the Soviet model. The Soviet model meant trials. They started by sentencing Archbishop József Mindszenty to life. Then came the tall, handsome, and popular Foreign Minister (previously Minister of the Interior) László Rajk, who was selected for the role of arch criminal and duly tortured until he testified against himself. The BBC called him a victim of the very methods he had introduced.

  People were no longer as they had been. A kind of rigid intoxication seemed to have infused their faces. The fear radiating from the walls of 60 Andrássy Boulevard seemed to grow stronger as the geraniums in the windows grew redder. Every afternoon a million sparrows perched on the lindens and plane trees, turning the street into one great vibrating river of chirping. Might there be some ruse lurking deep in the innocence of sparrows? Like the newly refashioned puppet theaters waiting to receive jackbooted kindergartners with machine guns?

  The brief period of normal civil life that followed the Germans’ collapse was over now, I realized. Gone were the days of burning class records, of back-talk, of speechifying about Hugo and Apollinaire, Ady and Babits. My gimnázium days enabled me to experience the whole city, its swimming pools as well as its libraries, or visit my sister, or sit in a café with a boy who could really play the saxophone, or admire the classmate sitting behind me, who could belch the whole of Rhapsody in Blue, or hire his neighbor to drive off every teacher from my vicinity with his farts and thereby let me read in peace (though of course I had to smell as well as pay).

  My Hungarian literature teacher encouraged my readings, inviting me to his apartment and lending me books. When he opened his glassed-in bookcase to me, it was as if a beautiful woman had undone her robe. Those were the days when I discovered manifold meaning in every line and found profound wisdom in clichés.

  I was sixteen and entering my next-to-the-last year at the gimnázium. I walked into the room on the first day to find two students standing by the window. The others were sitting at their desks, looking stern and singing songs of the workers’ movement with great enthusiasm. They scrutinized the latecomer with lowering anticipation to see what he would do. Would he take a seat and sing with us? One class, one community, one heart, one soul. If not, he could go and stand by the window with the other two and pretend not to know that standing there made him conspicuously suspicious, dead to the ideological and political unity that flexed its muscle in common song! There they stood—Pali Holländer and Laci Endrényi, the most sensitive boys in the class. Tall and thin, learned, dripping with irony, inveterate concertgoers, readers of Hemingway’s Fiesta and Huxley’s Antic Hay, and, as Junior Tacituses, fully equipped to enjoy the historical transformation in all its vulgarity.

  But the brightest student in the group was sitting in the back row near the window, bragging that he had traveled to the border in a State Security car as a volunteer to denounce his Zionist schoolmates’ escape. He had always been malicious, but his sarcasm was grounded in power now: he was a high official in the student association. Though he still had to attend class, he would seek out other student officials in the corridor, where they would discuss important, confidential issues of the Movement under their breath. No outsider could come near. And he was the one who gave the speech on the occasion of Stalin’s birthday in 1949. He spoke of a Golden Eagle, of an unshakable will that pursued its goal ruthlessly, without mercy. On the first day of classes he read aloud a passage from The Road to Volokolamsk about how cancerous meat had to be hacked out of a body or the body would rot. He then spun a pretty little speech on the topic, repeating the word “rotten” several times while glancing my way.

  When József Révai, a member of the Politburo, condemned the harmful delusions of the philosopher György Lukács in a page-long analysis, I was the only one in the class who stood up for Lukács. It was intolerable that a gimnázium student should disagree with the Party leadership. I was summoned to a disciplinary committee chaired by a student my age. His name was Ferenc Fehér and we later became friends. He despised Lukács at the time, but later saw the light. In a required paper on the Three-Year Plan I wrote that for me it meant the state takeover of my father’s business and house, for the tired worker I used to see on the stairs it means long hours of work for low wages. My literature teacher could not bring himself to grade the paper (“There is nothing I can do for you, son; I have no jurisdiction in such matters”) and passed it on to the headmaster. It wasn’t long before I was expelled from the student association.

  What I really wanted was to be expelled from the school. “You have outgrown this place,” the literature teacher told me. “You are intellectually over-age.” Which was flattering enough, though I couldn’t tell whether he just wanted to avoid the unpleasantness that came from having me around.

  My friend Pali and I once invited him to come rowing with us on the Danube. Sitting in a bathing suit on the coxswain’s thwart, he displayed a fairly large belly, but also the broad shoulders to match. Now that we were à trois and on the water, he confided that he could not make his peace with Marxism and expected difficult years to come. “Terror,” I said ambiguously, “is history’s sacrificial festival.” My teacher did not completely understand. Perhaps I did not either.

  That summer, the summer of 1949, Budapest played host to the World Youth Assembly, and young Communists flooded in from the Soviet Union, China, and the countries of Eastern Europe. After the trial that condemned László Rajk and his associates and led to their execution the city was brimming with a vibrant energy. It might have been said that the only people not yet arrested were the ones whose trials the authorities had lacked the time to arrange. They were scheduled for the following year.

  “This ice cream represents the penitence of the alienated mind,” I said one day on the way home at an Italian gelato stand that had not yet been appropriated by the state. Pali gave a good laugh. His violin teacher had called Kant the only respectable thinker, so he was primed to appreciate my Hegelian quips.

  Soon the Weltgeist gravitated to the brothel. We set our elbows on a piano covered with a large embroidered cloth and peered down from the balcony at the Ring sinking into shadow. We set out on a hunting expedition. We stepped through the door of that neoclassical apartment house with its spacious courtyard, its pale pink marble staircase, its slightly dirty red carpet. The bell gave out a restrained buzz behind the heavy brown second-floor door. First a servant girl, then Madame: “Do you want Éva again?” Yes. Éva was thin with small, pointed breasts and an indecipherable, lovely scent. Her hair was red—everywhere—and she had an identification number from Auschwitz tattooed on her left arm. She was nineteen, I sixteen. “Explain the Rajk affair to me,” she ordered, because I had always been able to make things clear. Her breasts got goose pimples. “I don’t want to be tortured!” She had a fur, and on occasion there was a car waiting for her. Sometimes she took my money, sometimes she didn’t. When she did, I paid with the proceeds from books I had sold from my library.

  Pleasant as it was to sit in the brothel kitchen, all those thig
hs together tended to dispel illusions. Later, when they closed the public houses and socialism retrained the girls as taxi drivers, the only one left leaning on her elbows in the second-story window was Madame. She underwent a second flowering, because the drunk and disenchanted men whose feet mechanically took them her way were happy with her for want of anything better. Her neck was wrinkled, but the skin lower down on her body was smooth. She would bend over the lace bedspread dramatically and spread her legs passionately. The lips of her sex were large and swollen. She kept it shaven and screamed in the soprano register.

  Be it by cart, bike, or train I would go home to Berettyóújfalu for holidays whenever I could, but once I began my studies in Budapest I became a city boy. The story of my village boyhood was over—if a story can ever be truly over.

  This was my last summer in Berettyóújfalu. On the hot weekday mornings the daughters of the town’s proper families would lie out by the railroad bridge. When I was fifteen, I had sat with Marika by one of the hot pylons, a veritable box seat for viewing the daughters of the pharmacist and chief physician, district court judge, and Calvinist priest rubbing oil into their thighs down on the sandy riverbank. Whenever the train rumbled past, I would put a protective arm around my girlfriend.