Libraries were places of refuge, asylums furnished with things of lasting value. In the library of the Institut Français I found books that spoke openly and open-mindedly of things taboo here at home. I had access to journals in sociology and psychology. There were art books as well, and novels by the latest authors. At the Parliamentary Library I was granted a pass to the research rooms—white instead of pink—which gave me access to even the classified publications of the Telegraph Office. I shared space with some odd birds involved in mysterious research and horribly boring types who used their white passes to take notes on textbooks of Marxist literature, that is, to extract meaninglessness out of meaninglessness. They looked at me suspiciously, since everything I read inspired alienation in them. Still, I was tolerated and felt at home there; in fact, we were a large caste, the merely tolerated yet still comfortable.
I glance out of the window at the Danube: Vera is coming to pick me up. We loaf a bit, our arms around one another’s waists under the arcade, or sit on the embankment steps if the weather is nice. This is an appropriately humble spot: compared with the contents of the library, my knowledge was zeropoint-zerozerozero and remained so for a long time to come. I stare longingly at the tugboats on the Danube. They had a cabin at the stern where the captain lived with his family, and in the morning his wife would hang his freshly washed shirts out to dry. Watching the lazy tugboat pull those white patches along with six barges attached to its stern, I would fantasize about learning the captain’s craft and, after seeing to my daily tasks, sitting in a reclining chair and reading or indulging in free-flowing ruminations.
I had a typewriter at home and one in the library, old, black portables. Gyuri Szekeres at the next desk and I would out-clack each other by turns. I wrote without restraint on my Triumph, whose handle had come off, though I rigged up another from an old belt. My machine clattered like a cannon, though no more loudly than my colleague’s, who had been sitting at the next table since his release from prison. In front of me, on a table covered with crimson felt and standing on lion-legs, lay books by Albert Camus, Raymond Aron, Emil Cioran, István Bibó, László Németh, and Miklós Szentkuthy that I was entitled to borrow for in-house use with my white researcher’s card, obtained through recommendations from the Writers’ Association and the monthly Új Hang (New Voice). Without the card the librarians would have spent a long time debating whether to lend me a book of suspicious orientation; with it they gave me most of what I asked for. The rare refusal, with the explanation that a special permit was required for the work in question (for which I would have to pound the pavement and work out some clever tactics), came not from some repressed, balding employee with a puffy mustache in a white smock but from a stunning (though white-smocked) blonde wonder, her every movement—like her voice and gaze—wispy and smooth. She had a large, vulturelike nose, and the corners of her mouth were sensuous and arch though she never smiled. She seemed enveloped by a silvery bell jar, and much as I toyed with the idea I made no particular effort to break through it: by gaining her, I would lose the library, because I would eventually leave her. This made librarians holy and untouchable.
Szekeres would tell us stories about university life in Paris, stories of right- and left-wing radicals alike. He told us about the time when during the German occupation he had been caught in a raid and patted down. He happened to have had a revolver on him, a revolver wrapped in a newspaper, so he held the newspaper over his head while they searched his pockets and found nothing. Hearing about this brilliant stroke of heroism, all we twenty-three-year-olds could do was blink. We had a good laugh when he told us about the time in prison when the inmates suddenly took heart because despite the horrendous political situation the food situation had improved substantially, then lost heart when the political situation started looking up but the old slops returned. It turned out that a highly reputed cook had been arrested when times were bad and released when they got better. So the bad food didn’t mean the regime was cracking down; it meant the old cooks had come back. He didn’t go into detail about the interrogations. All he said was that realism lacked the means to depict them. He told us to read Kafka, because only his overarching metaphors could approach our reality and he did not consider himself up to the task. We used to compete to be the first to read the latest issue of the Nouvelle Revue Française. I knew that the French secret police had delivered Gyuri to the Russian secret police on Glynecke Bridge, the Bridge of Melancholy, near Potsdam, because he had refused to return home or tell the French Secret Service about his role as a Hungarian operative in Rome, their price for a residency permit. As a result, he had to choose between becoming a traitor and spy or being handed over to the Communists, who had ordered him home from the embassy in Rome (he had protested against the Rajk trial in a letter) and eventually sent him to prison.
He was a learned man and handsome, with snow-white hair, a slight limp, and a deep, powerful voice—a true gentleman, un homme de qualité. He was a major in the French Army, a hero of the Resistance, a master of conversation, an editor of Proust translations, and a fine translator in his own right. Later he worked as a proofreader at the prestigious Európa publishing house, where he was eventually promoted to head of the literature division.
Sometimes my wife Vera Varsa dropped in, and the three of us would sit in the heavy armchairs under a portrait of Kossuth and talk. I noticed that Gyuri’s warm and civilized way of addressing his words to her, looking into her face while deep in thought, was not a matter of indifference to her. She was also taken with his masculine modesty, his self-isolation, his kindness. She had a deep voice and would give serious thought to our conversation, lifting her upturned nose, wrinkling her brow, playing in her excitement with her thick, unruly bronze locks, opening her mouth as she followed the train of thought, then making an occasional comment expressing anger or enthusiasm. And there, in the typewriter room of the Parliamentary Library, just next to the Prime Minister’s office, our little band grew so close that Gyuri Szekeres, through the inscrutable will of fate (and of Vera), took over my role not long after.
Looking out of the Parliamentary Library window, I would spy the philosopher Miklós Krassó, true to form, still blond, not gray as he would be in 1985 just before his death in a London flat, where he was fatally burned by a gas explosion. In the spring of 1956 he was bubbling over with ideas, bounding about, waving his arms, having a grand old time. I would be riveted for hours by our conversations about politics and philosophy. We would go to the Dairy Restaurant, where the bread girl listened to him, fascinated, whenever he stopped her to take packets of sugar for his rice pudding from her wooden tray. He would lunge into copious detail about the madness inspired by Fichte and so transfix her with classical German philosophy that jealous cries of “Bread!” “Sugar!” rose up from all corners of the room.
Flitting past Vera and me on the Kossuth Bridge one day, he apologized for his rush by saying he had to drop Hegel and go back to Kant, because nothing existed outside of Kantian morality, though that wasn’t entirely possible, because you can’t ignore history and you can’t understand history without Hegel. Having spent years with Spinoza’s Ethics and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, he was at home with the dilemma. As for myself, I was going on at the time about forked paths of consciousness and the simultaneity of events as an apology for my eclecticism (which I called pluralism). Why choose between Hegel and Kant anyway? There’s room on the shelf for both. Vera could not approve of my thinking in such matters, because for her it mirrored an inability to choose in love. This one is beautiful, you say, but so is that one. She noticed that when out walking I couldn’t help eyeing a woman if she was the least bit attractive.
How to gain, if not freedom, then at least free time, which is occasionally the same thing? One day István brought me the news that the Debrecen crematorium was looking for professional cremators. The crematorium was in operation only two days a week, but it offered terrific pay in exchange for the repulsion you had to
overcome. Should we become professional oven-feeders, corpse-burners? We, of all people? At least in this case the bodies were going to the ovens voluntarily. We talked ourselves into it, fantasizing that we would fly to Debrecen and live in the Golden Bull Hotel, doing the work in white gloves and spending the rest of the week in the Parliamentary Library looking out over the Danube at the Castle in ruins. We wrote a dignified letter of application about how deeply interested we were in the job. We had heard the remuneration was excellent. Was this true? The director gave a polite response. They were indeed looking for employees and were delighted with the sincerity evident in our expression of interest. However, they felt it necessary to clarify one misconception, namely, the salary was one-tenth of the figure we had cited. The thought flashed through my then twenty-year-old mind that we might sell the corpses to the Institute of Anatomy. No need there. “You are a very cynical young man,” said Professor Kis, head of the Anatomy Department and coincidentally President of the Council of Free Churches. “Earn your bread by the sweat of your brow!” I could have unloaded freight cars, but instead decided to proofread and translate.
Those were the days of the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party and Khrushchev’s Secret Speech. After my third expulsion from university I was reinstated thanks to the intervention of György Lukács. A group of friends would congregate at our place to ponder historical portents, certain as we were that we stood at the very center of history: Austria had recently been pronounced neutral, and changes were imminent. István was convinced, citing classified information he had found at the Planning Bureau, that the country was bankrupt. He said he had enough material to depose Rákosi should the opportunity arrive.
On the morning of 23 October 1956, the day the Revolution broke out, I was sitting alone in a sun-drenched corner room of an Andrássy Boulevard mansard that served as the editorial office of the recently founded—and strongly oppositional—journal Életképek before an ever-growing pile of awful poems submitted by dilettantes, to whom I, as a neophyte literature teacher and editorial apprentice, should long ago have sent polite rejection letters. Instead I spent my time on the phone with friends and lovers, keeping up with political developments. The student demonstrations were banned at some points and allowed at others. It was all well and good that the students were marching, but demonstrations in and of themselves did not particularly attract me: I had done my share of compulsory marching on May Day with my schoolmates. When we assembled, I always tried to avoid having a flag pressed into my hand and to arrange things so I could slink away inconspicuously and go rowing on the Danube with friends. Foisting the flag off on someone else was a pardonable, if low trick. Things were different on that particular day in 1956, I concede, but even then I grabbed not a flag but the wriggling shoulders of a bright girl I knew from the university. I noticed her in the march, to which I had calmly taken the tram. We crossed the Margaret Bridge together.
Carrying flags along the street had been allowed only on official holidays, while saluting the Party leadership, but what had been forbidden yesterday was now suddenly permitted—simply because we were doing it. I was not so ardent as to cut the insignia of the People’s Republic out of the middle of the flag; there were plenty of volunteers for that. There are always plenty for everything. During an uprising they turn up on the perimeter of the march route on motorcycles or elbowing their way along or shouting a slogan or two at the crowd from a car outfitted with a loudspeaker and enthusiastically breaking into song. I knew a few at the gimnázium, ready to stir up crowds with forced enthusiasm.
That night, after leading my curious companion past the headquarters of the Hungarian Radio, where we heard shots and shouts (“Jewish murderers!” yelled a man who had carefully withdrawn into a doorway), I returned home and told my wife, as I listened from the balcony to bullets crackling in the distance, that I would not take part in the shooting. But as the government had as yet no halfway measures like rubber clubs and water cannons and the only choice was live ammunition or forbearance, escalation was unusually rapid. So in the end when a young poet ran through the university halls shouting, “Hey! Who wants a machine gun?” I told him I did, and soon I was propped on my elbows on the cabin roof of an open truck as a member of the student-organized national guard.
Together with my fellow writers, all in their twenties, we could have taken over the editorship of our monthly literary-political journal from the old guard, who were in their thirties. My editor-in-chief had traded his post for the mayoralty, and a multiparty system was in place. We had withdrawn from the Warsaw Pact, and the Soviet troops were beginning to withdraw from Budapest.
Then, suddenly, they reentered, four thousand tanks strong, first aiming their cannons at spots where they had spied machine-gun fire, then at spots where no one was shooting at all, just to be on the safe side or because the soldiers felt like it. There was a general strike, a nonstop holiday. The city was one big theater with audience participation. When you found yourself holding a machine gun or a stretcher, you didn’t think about the future; you lived a concentrated version of the present with no thought of praise or prison. Bravest among the fighters were the miners, freshly released from jail and sometimes still in their striped uniforms, and wards of the state, boys and girls alike, back in the city from their institutions.
Fifty-six was the most memory-rich year of my youth, the year when unforeseen bravery replaced fear. Furs or jackets with astrakhan collars or gallooned overcoats or old Hussar uniforms—you could see all kinds of outfits in the mayor’s antechamber. Loden coats too, of course, which were all the rage at the time. Everyone wanted to meet my editor-in-chief and obtain signed and sealed documents enabling them to found new parties and appropriate state-owned assets for their headquarters. The now armed young editorial colleague stowed his machine gun under his chair and waited patiently to see the official inside to discuss his literary journal. While the men set off with their official stamps, the student noted the brand of rhetoric that went with each style of coat. But without the daring of those young toughs out in the square the gentlemen in the antechamber would have had no hope. The family men setting out for the factories had gone through a lot to join the ranks of street fighters. It was a time when half-naked, brutally bruised or bulleted and spat-upon bodies were hanged by their feet in front of Party Headquarters. The victims of these lynchings came chiefly from the State Security Agency. Such was the price they paid for their terror. But when I looked into the dead men’s faces, considerations of that sort seemed senseless. Walking home sporting a National Guard armband and toting a machine gun, I was asked by more than one woman if I would be kind enough to rub out one or another neighbor—you know, the one in the fourth-floor corner flat. I did nothing to appease the popular demand for murder.
It would be a wild exaggeration to say that I was an obsessed freedom fighter. What was I doing with a machine gun? It was an adolescent whim, a remnant of the war. Once in a while I imagined an armed group stomping up the stairs to eliminate us. (What would be the best corner of the front vestibule for me to shoot from?) I was a pretty good shot: I had earned the title of sharpshooter during my brief training as a soldier. I was also a political commissar, because when our commander once asked who knew when Das Kapital was published, the student soldiers in our regiment guessed either wrongly or not at all until I chimed in: 1867. At last! He praised me and appointed me commissar for one of the company sections.
At the time we had no live ammo, the First World War–issue bayoneted rifles we carried coming only with five rounds of blanks. The reason, perhaps, was to keep us from using our weapons otherwise than intended. Which is just what happened two years later, late in October 1956, when students in my cohort disarmed the Baja garrison officers and moved on Budapest in army trucks. (I was unable to take part in the operation, having been forcibly removed from the community of officers-in-training.) This was in keeping with the spirit of the times, when the word “revolution” felt g
ood. Every revolution got the highest marks: the French, the Russian, the Hungarian. Our 1848 War of Freedom was the very epitome of all that was beautiful and good: the poet falls in battle for his homeland; only the rootless scoundrel lacks the courage to die when his time comes.
A young painter said she would be ashamed all her life if she did not go out to the garrison at Újpest and get herself shot. We had to go, said the excited envoy who came for us, because people were being shot. Were they shooting back? I asked. No, he said. They were being shot with mortar fire, all the way from Gellért Hill; they couldn’t shoot back. “So why go?” “Just to be together.” It was all I could do to hold the young painter back, thereby laying her open to a lifetime of shame.
The reason I missed out on my classmates’ military operation was that during our theoretical training at the university I had smiled impertinently when a captain was at pains to describe how horrible the enemy was.
“You there!” he bellowed. “Yes, you, with the long hair! On your feet! You see, comrades? That’s what the enemy looks like! Look at him, grinning at our worldwide struggle for peace. I order you to leave the room!”
A Guest in my Own Country Page 20
