This bedroom set survived the most extreme vicissitudes. In 1944, when both the German and Soviet command posts had abandoned the house, the poor of the village came and took away everything they could carry. The large three-doored wardrobe was the one thing they could not manage; they did not even smash the mirror, though they did their best to destroy all manner of other things. So the wardrobe was the only piece that stood there in one piece, a monument of sorts in the refuse-strewn house, a harbinger of a restorable order.
By 1960 the wardrobe had moved to the inner room of our sixth-floor Vármegye Street apartment with my bicycle on top. The makeup table served as my desk, though the angels holding the mirror had been disposed of by history, which at this point tended to resemble a collective disaster. When you get hit in the head, you stay down for a while before initiating the long struggle for restoration. We should be players in the match, not victims (or so I would tell my friends at our regular coffeehouse table).
In the early morning hours sometime in 1960 a drunk hacks below my window. I am sympathetic: we are the only ones up. We are surrounded by the kind of silence that amplifies snores, angry whispered words, the screeches of distant trains, the moans of trams rolling out of their yards. There is a flood of stimuli in Budapest, but I can only take in small bits of it. In the hours before dawn we need not contend with the assault of distracting sounds, calls, and obligations that demand attention and dull us into indifference. Perhaps I am not a city person after all.
When I go out to do field evaluations as a children’s welfare supervisor, my job requires me to enter the living quarters of complete strangers as if I were in my own home. Within a couple of minutes I discover I am in fact at home.
“It’s the man from the Council!”
A kitchen chair is shoved under my behind.
“Well, sir, you see, what happened was …”
The words gurgle up like water. I hope I can keep from nodding off.
Rezs? Rajnai sleeps in the cellar wrapped in his coat. He sleeps only till dawn, when his drunkenness wears off. The cold wakes him up.
A police officer tries to throw his weight around. I might be able to take him down a peg or two. This I do with a secret passion.
A Jehovah’s Witness spends his life being jealous of his wife. She could have him institutionalized permanently, but keeps having him released at her own risk to protect him from the stress. She brings him home; he tortures her some more.
The wife of an obstetrician’s best friend gives birth while the friend, a cripple, waits outside in the hallway for the good news. The doctor reaches into the infant’s eyes instead of his rectum, blinding it. A surgical error. He goes home and poisons himself.
I have a bad chill. My bones ache. I may have a fever. I had a fish soup at the Golden Pheasant for lunch, which helped me put the “House of Lords”—a rundown vagrant shelter where all my dealings are with toughs—out of my mind. Still, one stern word from me and the beating of sensitive hearts is immediately discernible under the threatening shell.
A woman’s husband dies: he was standing on the sidewalk when a bus hit him and killed him on the spot. The woman gets a hefty pension to replace her well-situated husband. A year and a half later, the late husband’s best friend leaves his wife and moves in with the widow. They marry. As a result, the widow loses her pension, which was larger than her salary. She has a kindergarten-aged son from her first husband, but finds little time for him. I ask her why they got married. They were already living together, weren’t they? The woman smiles and blushes. I blush too, then take my leave.
An old woman who sold newspapers walked into the main distribution center and asked for her quota. In those days people were reading Népakarat (The People’s Will), but they foisted Népszabadság (The People’s Freedom) off on her. She went out and sold almost all of them. Three young men, armed, were walking quietly along Rákóczi Street when they spied her with a Népszabadság, tore it from her hands, fell upon her, and kicked her as she lay on the ground. As the woman was dragging herself away, one of them said, “Finish her off, why don’t you.”
“What for?” one of the others said. “She won’t dare hawk that trash anymore.”
The old woman’s skull was fractured. She was blinded in one eye and has had neuritis ever since.
Now on to six more addresses, six new kinds of despair. But first I sit and pray on a bench in Bethlen Square. There is a synagogue nearby.
Now off to the darkest heart of the district. Mrs. Alabárdos and her daughter. She wants the girl to respect her. The girl will not. So she is cruel to her.
Then I grant absolution to a widower who has committed incest. His daughter forgives him as well. If I had him locked up, what would they live on?
I look in on little Lajoska Musztafa. His father, now dead, was Turkish. His mother has remarried. Her husband is a locksmith named Bogyi. The handsome young boy was proud of his Turkish roots and mourned his father. When they studied the Turks in school, however, Lajoska heard bad things about them. His fellow pupils started eying him, so he asked to take Bogyi’s name. After which Lajoska Musztafa (or, rather, Bogyi) stopped mourning his father.
A young typist goes out to Óbuda for rowing practice. It is winter. The training grounds are empty, nothing but fields and gardens. Four kids attack her. Screams. All four rape her.
“I know what you look like! I’m going to report you!”
So the boys poke out both her eyes.
An old man sits down next to me on the bench. His face is soft but stubbly; he has few teeth; he wears his winter overcoat even in the sun; he smells. An old woman with a pointy nose sits down with us. Her speech and movements are sprightly, her legs wrapped in bandages under her stockings.
Woman: “What’s for lunch?”
Man: “Tea, and bread with lard.”
Woman: “Don’t you cook?”
Man: “No, I don’t.”
Woman: “Kids?”
Man: “I had a son. He was executed.”
Woman: “So you live all alone?”
Man: “With my bedbugs.”
Woman: “But you must have a nice little pension.”
Man: “Six hundred forints. I drink it up pretty fast. Then I don’t eat, just the leftovers they give me.”
Woman: “Where do you live?”
Man: “I’ve got a nice apartment, two rooms plus kitchen.”
Woman: “Why don’t you rent out one of your rooms?”
Man: “I did, but my tenant went crazy. He stopped paying.”
Woman: “You should get married.”
Man: “Yes, but I can’t find a woman I like. If she’s young, she might not take care of me, and if she’s old I’ll have to take care of her. So I’m picky.”
I stop for a glass of milk. A wheezing old man underpays by twenty fillers. He walks with two canes. When the woman at the counter calls after him, he pretends not to hear. Every day he underpays by twenty fillers.
A woman is called into a police station and asked about a man they have arrested. He abandoned her not long before. She is either afraid or cannot bring herself to lie, and testifies against him. She is the main incriminating witness.
An electrician has recently lost his wife. Every evening he lays out a table setting for her, then eats alone. He can’t stand television. He goes over to the wardrobe and takes out his wife’s clothes one by one. “She wore this one on such and such a day and that one on another.” That is how he spends his evenings.
The welfare officer has grown thick-skinned from his work. The office madness and his wife’s nerves box him in. Unable to sleep, overworked, he learns to put a stern face on things.
The heavy iron chairs on the playground are screwed into the ground. In January 1945 I looked into the corner coffeehouse through the broken glass. It was crammed to the ceiling with the bodies of Jews shot dead in the ghetto. That was the day we went looking for Aunt Zsófi’s mother in the ghetto hospital and found her alive but
with a bullet in her face. Now the new wallpaper has a sunflower pattern. An energetic woman greets all comers, apologetically bemoaning the lack of one or another item on the menu as if conveying the news of a dear one’s death.
Little shops are opening in the courtyards of the old apartment buildings, and people are withdrawing into them. Here in Elizabeth Town everything is cavelike. There is no pretense about the place; it is full of life and people-friendly. I am no stranger here; I understand everything muttered in its most distant corners. I know the crocheted cloths under the clay pots with dried flowers, the bursts of cackling women, the heavy clank of the iron doors. That tall, attractive girl reading a magazine has probably knitted her midthigh-length white sweater herself. Comfortable oldies emerge from the depths, the espresso machine clatters, and spoons and saucers clink. The man making the coffee never takes a break. The guests know him and make small talk. “Ate the flowers, dammit!” Who ate them?
During my gimnázium years Budapest’s Elizabeth Town represented the heart of things, a magic place, the place where I could find anything I might wish for. The population density is highest there, and as they used to leave the main gates open I would catch whiffs of the human smells wafting out of open kitchen windows into courtyards. I would walk along the hallway-like balconies lining the courts as if looking for someone.
I used to trade books by weight with the blind antiquarian bookshop owner on Hársfa Street. All that mattered to him was that what I brought in weigh more than what I took away.
“How is it you never go broke?” I asked him.
“You’re still a pipsqueak, young man,” he said. “You lack all understanding of the profundities of human stupidity and stochastic processes. You suppose that everyone brings in junk and takes away the good stuff, but the opposite holds just as often. Besides, what constitutes junk is a highly relative issue.”
On the way to and from school I did some urban sociological field research, if we accept my friend Iván Szelényi’s definition. Years later, when during a trip to Pécs for a study of urban society we spent the first three days simply walking around and I guiltily suggested we were wasting time, he responded no, we were doing genuine fieldwork. This put my concerns to rest. But the only time I did fieldwork in the strict sense of the word was from 1959 to 1965, when I visited Elizabeth Town families as a youth welfare supervisor for the Public Guardianship Council and wrote reports on their living conditions.
All I could do was set down my impressions, but the great consistency of those impressions gave them the weight of objectivity, and the recommendations I made led to measures affecting the lives of children. My beat was the area between the Ring and György Dózsa Street, and I saw six to eight families a day. There was hardly a building I did not pay at least several visits to. Most of the time I spent in apartments facing the inner courtyard rather than the street, so it was the less fortunate aspect of the area I came to know. Sometimes it seemed hard to sink any lower.
What has changed over the past forty years? Poverty is lasting; only the faces change. But poverty is more than a condition; it is a blow, a disaster, a pit you fall into. How can you expect a person in dire straits to have the patience of a saint? When the well-to-do go off the rails, they may or may not pay a price; the poor have no choice: they kick, they scratch, they torture one another.
Reviewers found the world of my first novel, The Case Worker, hellish. I found it quite normal: one’s imperfections make one mortal, hence real. Moral philosophy must be built on human frailty, and our acceptance of it. Behave outlandishly and you scare people. They take you for a criminal or a lunatic who belongs in a prison or asylum, as if humans were cars and could be taken to the shop for repairs. Crazy people exist, but most of them get by on the outside; only a few give up and entrust themselves to institutions. Weakness and abandonment require assistance.
The more moneyed and better educated a country, the more it confronts issues of weakness, a condition that fosters a frightened, dependent, and childish relationship with body and mind, with sickness, fear, and sorrow, with intimations of mortality. People are frightened by portents of death, having had no training in dealing with their problems and pain. If something is not entirely as it should be, they are in a bad way. Yet the zone between a perfect state of affairs and a wretched one is where most of life plays itself out.
My workdays were full of decisions, and everyone I met was a challenge. Each of my clients required some kind of action. Some people need more than a cordial nod. But how far are you willing to go when an entirely helpless child enters your charge?
It was worthwhile to spend time in the kitchens of those one- and two-room apartments: each kitchen was interesting in its own way. It is only when you hear a hundred versions of the same story that you begin to understand and feel it. I had a daily wish to combat my overwhelming feeling of superficiality which, even as I flattered it by acknowledging its existence, I found stultifying. “They are all of them just like me,” I said to myself every evening on the brightly lit tram after leaving my charges.
A yokel gawking at urban life, I was never blasé. I studied the metropolis, wanting to write about everything, taste everything through my words. Asking my questions and giving my curiosity free rein, I felt an infectious bliss. Budapest was an endlessly juicy tidbit. Even in twenty years a voyeur from the provinces could not get enough of it.
At the time I was also editing Tolstoy’s diaries. Tolstoy would begin each morning with a vow and end each evening with a guilty conscience; he broke every vow: he drank, whored, brawled, played cards, and picked fights. I did not brawl or play cards.
One day I got up early, read some Tolstoy proofs, and went to the Magyar Helikon Publishing House where I edited Hungarian translations of Russian and French classics. The head of literature called me in. He wanted to appear in high spirits, but the stories he told were not happy ones.
F. had intended to marry a working-class girl designated by the Party when his “bourgeois” girlfriend informed him she was pregnant. Abortion was out of the question in those days. Socialist morality took the side of the girl; his fallibility took him to his girlfriend, a class enemy. The child would be born, but he could not simply leave his bride-to-be because of an ideologically and otherwise problematic woman. Like the poet Attila József, F. lay down on the train tracks in front of a locomotive. The train sliced off both his legs. The policeman who arrived on the scene established that his nice trousers were salvageable. His fiancée visited him every day at the hospital. F.’s first question when he came to was: “Did you find my party membership card?” Two weeks later his bourgeois girlfriend came in and confessed that she wasn’t pregnant; she had merely wanted him to marry her. In 1956 the miners got word that a Party bigwig lived on the fourth floor. F. was no Party bigwig, but he did happen to live next to the Party’s district office. The miners stormed his apartment intending to take him off, then noticed his artificial legs. They knocked them together, enjoying the noise they made.
He was my boss at the publishing house. My fellow proofreader Tamás Katona and I would carry him in the elevator in our intertwined hands. Though somewhat embittered, he was unfailingly alert when it came to ideological matters. Yet by playing on his sentimentality, I managed to trick him: I published Isaac Babel and Bruno Schulz.
I would look at women with the alert hunger of a hunter. In those days I felt there was no simpler way to get to know people than by lying naked with them in the same bed. Conversation is better afterwards; it is permeated with reciprocal gratitude and openness. The girl who sold bread and the hairdresser, the girls studying at the university and the women colleagues teaching there, the soprano who lived across the way, the pediatric nurse—they all were frightfully interesting to me, every one different in her own way, miraculous in her uniqueness.
I would go to the station and pick out a train, then get off at a small-town station, take a room in a hotel, and look out onto the main square. The constri
cted undulations, the slow passings were all so many offerings of meat, in hiding until they burst into the public eye. I turned around as a woman with a nice body passed by, paused a moment, abandoning my original purpose, and set off after her. We entangled, then fell out of each other. A housewife babbling to her baby was a font as precious as old diaries discovered in the attic or the ferocious rancor of a divorce court.
I phoned a woman at the number she had slipped into my pocket among mutual friends. I canceled all my plans, went to the address she gave me, and tried to guess as I walked up the stairs what she would have on: underwear or armor? How did she arrange to be alone? What would her smell be like from up close? I go and sit down beside her, listen to her talk about all kinds of things. I have never yet heard a story that was entirely dull. And what will be the situation that gives rise to the quick embrace that encounters virtually no resistance? What is the touch that will make her shiver and whimper like a child? And what will happen afterwards? Will she phone me back or show up unexpectedly at impossible moments?
At sixteen we are awkward because our bodies are complete but our understanding still childlike. At twenty-seven we are ill at ease because our minds are adult but our blood still childlike.
I have a job, but a tiresome one. I should be a Confucian at the Guardianship Council and a Taoist at home. I laugh at the thought. Who could pull it off? I have a contract with the publisher for a book on Stendhal, but am not writing it. I have a love, but am nervously repelled by the idea of marrying again. I have friends, but know what they are going to say before they say it. In fact, I sometimes fear I know what I will be thinking the day after tomorrow. I have reached the point where each successive birthday only reminds me of what I have failed to accomplish during the stupid five years since the Revolution.
At our regular coffeehouse table I made some antideterministic remarks, unable to reconcile myself to the idea that I am the way I am as a result of the effect on me of others. I insisted there was someone inside me making complex decisions at every moment, though I didn’t know exactly who it was. My decisions were not influenced by my father’s wealth or my childhood sexual fantasies, I asserted in opposition to fashionable contemporary views, reverse determinisms I found tasteless and morally questionable. This is a land of sloughed-off responsibility, a land where people justify their acts, whatever they are.
A Guest in my Own Country Page 22
