A Guest in my Own Country

by George Konrad

  Our primary theme was how the regime was being ground down through conflicts among parties of opposing interests. The table of contents was as clear as a Christmas tree; only the ornaments were wanting. But Iván’s main concern was the relationship of trunk to branch, while I was more interested in content and improvisation. Every time our exhaustive conversations helped us to make a point more clearly, we earned a refreshing hike up the Oszoly Cliff. We fleshed out my old idea that history was the locus of the intellectual, the knight of totality, the poet of thoughts, explanations, principles, and nightmare scenarios, the elevating force and the force of outrage. Look to the words, for in the beginning was the word. Look to the modelers of sentiment, the confectioners of feeling. Look to their own rhetorical gumbo. Before long it dawned on me that our exchange of ideas was beginning to intrigue me more than socialism’s miseries and even socialism’s prospects.

  One day we heard there had been a search in the Ágnes Heller–Ferenc Fehér household. Their agenda being dissident like ours, we grew more cautious. A few times we wrapped the typescript in a plastic bag, placed it in a box, and buried it, though in less careful moments we simply hid it in the coal bin under the coal. That every room in the bell tower had a bugging device in a saucer-sized porcelain holder recording our every snore or key stroke or love groan—of this we had no inkling. We did not consider ourselves important enough. True, we had heard of Solzhenitsyn’s deportation to the West, of exiles domestic and foreign; we had heard that Andropov, the former ambassador to Budapest, was now at the head of the Soviet Secret Police and shaking things down, purging the resistance counterculture, but it never occurred to us that our Hungarian counterpart would resort to similarly coarse measures. Before long we had to accept the fact that they were doing so: I had told my wife that there was a key in the silver sugar-cube container in my mother’s glass cabinet, and the next time they raided the house, that was the first place they went.

  From then on, whenever we needed to discuss anything to do with writing and manuscripts or politically sensitive encounters, we wrote it out on slips of paper we then flushed down the toilet. It also became second nature to look for nooks and crannies the size of the typescript. What we wanted to conceal most was how far along we were. I was afraid the manuscript would be seized as soon as it was completed, so I always denied any progress. When asked on the phone, “Are you working?” I would answer I was just pottering around.

  “You are an intellectual resister,” said one of my interrogators. Until then I had not thought of myself as such, but I liked the way the police officer put it. I grew more sensitive to the police lexicon. I spotted the eye watching me from a little hole scratched in the paint of the window of a shop in our building, a shop that was never open. I sensed that two faces were following me from two windows in the building across the street. I started recognizing the men in cars that rolled slowly past me and the old man leaning on his elbows in the courtyard and the people behind me whose footsteps never let up and the car parked by the front gate. I had the clear feeling that the policeman who came to the bell tower to check my papers and ask what I was doing in the town was an integral part of the machinery whose charge was to ensure the survival of the Great Lie.

  Since we paid little attention to either communist or anticommunist ideologies, we befouled the self-images of the unofficial and official intelligentsias alike. Feeling insulted in the name of the intelligentsia, even our opposition friends took issue with Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power. What had happened, we concluded in the book, was that the intelligentsia was ensuring that the system functioned effectively by refraining from calling the power hierarchy into question, while perceiving itself as an abused victim and thereby absolving itself of responsibility.

  One hot Sunday afternoon my friend the film critic Yvette Bíró brought a sad and skeptical Czech film director to the garden at Csobánka. Iván and I felt an immediate intellectual affinity with him and graced him with our most precious thoughts, but all he did was shake his head. “You’ll be behind bars before you finish. And such bright people!”

  One sunny morning my friends Gabriella Hajós (Zsabó) and György Jovánovics came out to Csobánka with me. While Zsabó stood watch down below, the sculptor took before-and-after photographs: first of what those ugly, old-fashioned bugging devices looked like in situ in the loose clay, then of what the loose clay looked like without them. I had ripped them out like carrots. Not knowing what to do with them, I tossed them into the kitchen cupboard along with the other trash. That evening, as usual, I took the bus and commuter train back to Budapest. The next day, when I reentered the Csobánka house, I noticed that my treasure was no longer in the kitchen cabinet. I was not such a free spirit as Václav Havel, who hawked his bugging devices at the flea market.

  We did not intend to publish our book in Hungary; we wanted it to come out in normal countries, that is, in the West. I imagined it my duty as a citizen to see to the publication of the book, after which whatever happened did not much matter. My wife helped us to type it up, and we asked a friend of mine, Tamás Szentjóby, to photograph it page by page, the few photocopy machines in the country being under the supervision of the political police.

  Walking along Péterpál Street in Budafok, where a row of houses once belonging to vintners ran up the hill, I was reminded of my hometown. We are so fatefully shaped by the place we lived before the age of ten that only in a similar setting can we feel at one with our perceptions. I kept returning to the second chapter in my novel, the one on childhood and the family. Life, for me, was beautiful, and to the question “How are you?” I generally answered—strange as it might seem to an outsider—“Great.” This feeling dates from my days at the gimnázium, when all it took to make me happy as I left the house in the morning was the knowledge that I had no obligations for the day and could go off by myself.

  One day, out of the blue, another friend, Tibor Hajas, came to say that Tamás had been arrested: searching his apartment for pornographic literature, the authorities had come upon our manuscript. The couple necking constantly by my front gate turned out to be police officers. Ambulances and taxis would follow our steps, as did all sorts of conspicuously average-looking men and women—or odd-looking men and women, if they wanted to be noticed. Since things like this could happen solely with the permission of or on the orders of Party Headquarters, we could only deduce that our own arrests were not far off.

  We told each other that come what may our efforts had been worth it, and agreed on a story: we had no idea whose manuscript it was or what it was. Disowning one’s work was a remnant of an earlier time, when you could get years for partial authorship of a leaflet.

  Iván’s wife Kati and I saw him off to the Belgrade train. He still had a valid exit visa for Yugoslavia. Naturally he was taken off the train and sent back. We were green at the game of resistance.

  One day two men followed Iván into the sauna at the Csillaghegy pool with orders to arrest him. They sweated it out there on either side of him for three-quarters of an hour, taking his arm only when the three of them stepped out of the pool’s main entrance together.

  I had a desire, undoubtedly childish, to give them the slip, throw off their calculations, spoil their game. At least I could gain time. Once word got out, the decision-makers might come under pressure from writers or even their children. I asked my first wife Vera to put me up for a while.

  I doubt I had been in Vera’s seventh-floor apartment for more than two days—reading, watching the birds in the gutter and the slow-working roofers on the building across the street (who were watching me as well, since they were not real roofers) when the officers of state security knocked on the door. It was 23 October 1974. They had first gone for Vera at her school, bringing her with them as a witness, but all they wanted was me. They did not even bother to ransack the place. I thanked Vera, shoved a toothbrush into my pocket, and followed the plainclothesmen out of the house.

  Lieutenant Col
onel Gyula Fehér, who politely asked me to forgive him for taking up so much room in the back seat, was my interrogator. He told me he had suffered a great deal reading our work, unaccustomed as he was to such vocabulary and train of thought. Despite doses of strong coffee he had fallen asleep more than once over it.

  “So the study did not particularly provoke you,” I said.

  “Not at all,” he acknowledged.

  “Then why am I here?”

  The Lieutenant Colonel lifted his arms skyward.

  The handwriting sample established the corrections to the typescript to be in my hand.

  “Is this your work?” I said it was, thus breaking the agreement I’d had with Iván, who stuck to the story that we’d had nothing to do with the manuscript. I thought they would be unable to bring formal charges against us, because no one had seen the text besides its authors; in other words, they had jumped the gun. I decided they wanted to annihilate the book by confiscating every copy.

  I found confinement tolerable: getting up early, swabbing the floor in the cell, eating bean soup and potatoes with noodles. The prison library supplied readable books, and the authorities allowed me to sign an authorization enabling my wife to pick up the royalties I had received from the American publication of The Case Worker. The Lieutenant Colonel regularly recited his favorite scenes from Hašek’s Good Soldier Švejk. We did not speak about the book itself, only about the other copy. The expert had determined its existence, based on the confiscated copy, whose cover showed the traces of carbon paper.

  One morning I woke up sensing I had gained a perspective on the matter. I would suggest they put it out as an in-house publication alongside Trotsky and Djilas. They might think me an idiot, but there was no harm in that. The point was to nip this in the bud or at least before it entangled others. Friends were bound to have their apartments searched and be summoned and questioned as witnesses. We needed to gain time. We would publish the book once things calmed down. (Iván had hidden the “real” second copy and the working manuscript.) I would work on my next novel, The Loser, and find a safe place for it.

  In the meantime, we would give the authorities the feeling their work was not in vain. I would let them have the third copy, which could not possibly have carbon marks on the cover. They would have obtained a manuscript with some police value and could hope, for the moment at least, that the book existed nowhere else. I decided to let them have it on two conditions: that they release us both immediately and that the person in possession of the manuscript suffer no ill consequences.

  Such was the line I gave them the following day. A few hours later the Lieutenant Colonel, acting on the authority of his superiors, accepted my terms. I took a seat with him in the police car, and off we drove to the flat of my sister-in-law, Zsuzsa Lángh, and her husband Ern? Sándor, who had done some fancy driving to ditch the car trailing them, get the manuscript to their place, and hide it in their tile oven. Both were at home. Pale and stunned, they acceded to my request that they turn the manuscript over.

  That very afternoon, all three of us—Szelényi, Szentjóby, and I—were released on probation. An official decree forbade us from publishing the hostile document (the book) or even communicating its contents verbally. Any violation would result in criminal prosecution. Should we feel unable to adapt our activities to the laws of the Hungarian People’s Republic, the authorities would countenance our emigration. We could even take our families with us. Iván said he would give it some thought, but I told them, “No, I am a Hungarian writer.”

  Then our case received a bit of attention in the Western press—Kissinger had supposedly asked about us—and we both decided to emigrate together with our families and proceed with our work at a university in the West. We would need job offers and visas and an exit passport, all of which we pursued through official channels.

  Although life in the academy abroad seemed feasible, I had trouble picturing myself as a grateful émigré and (if all went well) university professor: I would tire of it; it would seem a waste of time. On days when something kept me from writing, I would be nervous and grumpy and get the urge to escape to a spot where I could go out into a garden for some air, where no one would bother me.

  I was an enthusiast, yet infantile. On my first day in a new city—east or west, large or small—I could imagine spending the rest of my life there. This would be my window and so on. Yet walking through town the next day, I had the urge to move on, generally homeward. To Csobánka, perhaps, where, surprisingly, no one searching the house had ever lifted the table-top in my bell-tower room, where the notes for my novel lay untouched.

  I settled back into my routine, writing in small lined notebooks in Budapest cafés. A button-eyed observer often watched me ply my trade. When there is danger, when the crowds stampede, stand still. I would abandon plans to emigrate, I wrote to György Aczél, the Party official in charge of cultural affairs, if they published my novel The City Builder, called off the police harassment, and let Szelényi leave. The way I put it, my decision to remain in Hungary was a sacrifice, a gift, though in fact it was the desire to continue the life I had led hitherto, a life I considered neither fruitless nor disagreeable. Aczél replied that no one could prescribe conditions to him but that he did not find my requirements outlandish.

  It was painful to both Iván and me when I informed him we would not be a team writing in the West. You could stay too; we’d get by somehow, I thought. And he: You promised to come, and now you’re going back on your word. Do you really think you’ll be able to write your books, publish them in the West, and continue to take your constitutional through the streets of Budapest? Yes, that’s exactly what I thought. And that’s what happened. Thus began the decade and a half of my life as a banned, underground writer.

  Children are smart. When I was arrested and Juli found her hands full, she took our seven-year-old Miklós to stay overnight with Feri Fehér and Ágnes Heller, who had a son about the same age. Miklós played with him all afternoon, but when evening came he took Feri aside and asked him with a touch of an aristocratic intonation, “Are you a good person?”

  Sensing what he meant, Feri answered, “Yes Miklós, I believe I am.”

  “Good,” said Miklós. “Then I’ll sleep at your place.”

  Influenced by tendencies I observed in myself and those around me at the mental institution where I began to work at the time, I tried to view mental illness as a behavioral strategy, an individual concept of the world. The patient may act strange, but he sees himself as an innovator. Such might be well be a description of my type of dissident, I thought. The hero of my novel was committed to an asylum. Confiscated copies of the novel were condemned to destruction by court order as “hostile material.” Not me, just a few years of my work.

  Ultimately the mental institution is a reflection of state power. The illnesses there are fed by that world, which provides its causes and its symbols. Rationality was part and parcel of our state culture (or at least claimed to be), while critical attitudes—dissident attitudes, if you will—depend on transrational decisions. You follow the path you believe in, risk or no risk. But why? Intellectual gratification? The hedonism of thought? It was sheer pleasure to think through the possibilities.

  After being dismissed from everywhere at the age of forty-three, I no long needed to put up with nerve-racking types (though I had always handled them fairly well), so I exiled myself to a garden, where, relaxed, I had plenty of time to sort things out. Enough money had come in from my writings to keep us going for a few more months. But our lives were not without risks—the aforementioned house searches, bugging, surveillance, and the three-year travel restriction—and my wife Juli was banned from the radio, where she had been giving insightful and refreshing book reviews every morning just before eight.

  Writing counts as action only in unusual circumstances. Throughout most of the twentieth century writing had a chance to become action here in Hungary. All it had to do was go beyond the norm. Almost
any statement was an opportunity for anti-state agitation.

  Just after I lost my job a thick-browed colleague stuck his head into my office and whispered, “You sealed your own fate.” But I despised the idea of begging my way back into the fold. Officially sanctioned normality contains all the symptoms of neurosis. Only the free are healthy, and the healthy are their own masters. The sick are directed by others: they are dependent, they cannot take care of themselves, stand on their own two feet, make decisions, see things as they are. They see what they want to see—or what they fear.

  Excluded from regular employment, I recognized my condition as consistent with the logic of the centralized party state. Hence it did not enter my mind to make the rounds of the editorial offices. I knew they had no choice but to reject my work out of hand. And yet I occasionally experimented with submitting an article. The weak-willed did not even respond, while the stronger wrote something to the effect that they did not dare publish me. Ultimately I let up: I was ashamed to have put them in such a position.

  I was now convinced I was not cut out for steady jobs in the East or West. Much as I respected all those who sawed and sanded, taught, or examined patients, I was thrilled to be released from it all, and viewed my life as an endless holiday. Only the typewriter’s thump lent a touch of respectability to my activity—after all, typists were considered workers—but in fact, thanks to the generosity of the system, I was a pipe-smoking rocking-chair adventurer.

  Too lazy and inept to handle the organization that went with oppositional activities, I did not get much involved, especially since political activism started early in the morning—my best time of day—which I never would have considered giving up. I stuck to formulating and distributing antipolitical texts.

  It was hard for insiders in the old system to imagine that anyone would leave their ranks in the state power apparatus for civilian life. But representation, respect, and remuneration I needed like a hole in the head. Some make time to do what they like; others do not. The Gypsy nailsmiths from the outskirts of Csobánka had time to go into the woods and gather mushrooms whenever it rained. If a CEO headed for the woods on a workday morning, people would think him insane. I admired artisans supporting their families from their homes and gardens, oblivious of professions requiring them to report to the boss at a fixed time every day.