I see you twenty years ago, in a colorless woolen sweater, cotton stockings wearing thin at the heel, and the dark blue, baggy Chinese linen trousers fashionable in the subculture of the time. You are lying in the grass reading Goethe’s memoirs when your head drops. A few minutes later, you lift it with a jerk. It is etched with the pattern of grass. You say you’ve had a good sleep because the book was so nice and boring.
Our daily lives melded, as did our memories. Silently we watched the shadows move. Most of our choices are in fact discoveries. Someone rings our doorbell and slips into our life, leaving the silk nightshirt bought at the flea market on our hook. If I wanted independence, why choose the dependency of family? Such was the question I asked myself before marrying for the third time. The following were my arguments against the move, which I put forth with ever weakening conviction: The man with a family is a prisoner: he can no longer assert he has nothing to lose. The married man is condemned to domesticity, the paterfamilias to simplemindedness. A wife is like the state: she is curious about everything you do and observes you in secret. Isn’t it enough to have the state listening in? (True, I do not generally kiss the bugging device.)
The women I stayed with longest were the ones I most feared to upset. The less fear I felt, the sooner I beat a retreat, the sooner I chose another to step into my room without knocking. Mere whim drew me to some, but it was no whim that I was attracted to Jutka’s voice, Jutka’s touch, smell, movement, speech, and way of thinking, all from the very first night, or that the feeling has stayed with me for some twenty years.
Delicate, restrained, cautious, gently laughing, humming, and proffering considered judgments, Jutka came to West Berlin with me in 1982 for my next stay there, having been my partner in Budapest for three years by then. She proudly announced that she could understand the radio in German and had no trouble with French; English was a foregone conclusion. She loved golden leaves, rye bread with gorgonzola, and a Macon burgundy.
After our return everything was as before. Once, in 1987, the border guard checking my documents at the computer screen disappeared and brought out another guard, who found and confiscated the manuscripts of some talks I was planning to give. The Department of Education would return them to me should it see fit.
“But how can I lecture without them?”
“That’s your problem.”
“Well, that’s the end of my talks,” I said.
He liked that.
But it was all just an experiment, a ruse: the text had been smuggled out and the German translation was waiting for me in the West.
Looking out of a car window in Berlin, I see a peaceful, clean, and ordered city. Everything works. Not almost everything, everything. What you see in the shopwindows is what you see people wearing, which suggests that people change their possessions frequently and hence have no need to grow too fond of them. If I lived here, my wish would be to acquire means with a clean conscience. I would worry about spiritual frigidity, surround myself with prudent formalities, and carefully plan my time.
Back home there is a purple fog in the streets: the exhaust of east-bloc cars. That summer Jutka finished a book on death and funerals in Budapest at the beginning of the twentieth century. Her mood was far from funereal, however: she was more concerned with diapers.
I refuse to cling to situations and refuse to run from them. I have pure chance to thank for every turn in my life, including my three wives. One day I happened to catch a glimpse of Vera’s hair in a classroom, though I had seen her a hundred times before. Juli plopped down on the arm of my chair at a happy gathering and stayed for sixteen years and two children. Jutka rang my doorbell one day in Paris—we were compatriots and lived on the same floor—and asked if I would like some coffee. The coffee never materialized, though a marriage and three children did. In the most traditional manner I have discovered the simplest purpose for life in my children and grandchildren, for whom I mean to stick around as long as possible.
Notes to myself: there is no point calling the attention of others to what I do not want or do not know. I have been shameless enough. No one wants to look at my bare chest anymore, so I’ll wrap a scarf around my neck instead.
Nothing I come out with is of any use for anyone. It might have been once, but those days are gone. The day is approaching when I shall no longer set my glasses on the nightstand or say good night to my wife before withdrawing to my room. It won’t be long now before my eyes are like two glazed chestnuts.
Every life is better than no life; every life, including the pain that goes with it, is good. True, getting through the daily grind is like wading through seaweed, but I can get through all sorts of things, therefore I am. And given the fact that I am alive, the question of why is as inane as fly droppings on a grape.
At twelve I survived National Socialism; at fifteen I saw Communism take over. Communism and I grew old together. Decades passed in active, disciplined resignation. Since I was fifty-six by the time the regime collapsed, I spent the best years of my life in the shadow of its stupidity. Still, I never watched my country from afar. I groped my way around in it.
Life was slow, which I did not regret, because there was so much of it. Humans are made mortal, hence real, by their imperfection; frailty and mortality are synonyms in the moral sense. Moral philosophy can rest only on frailty and our acceptance of it.
If every written description of human reality constitutes literature, then perhaps so does man himself. The novel’s main character may be a welfare lawyer or city builder or retired revolutionary, but these are just naive masks, for there are no welfare lawyers or city builders or retired revolutionaries who ponder their lives with such profundity when lying in bed or sitting on the bench of a mental institution. Interior monologue does not occur in complete sentences.
All my life’s more important choices have sprung from my decision as an adolescent to become a writer: I refrained from crossing the temporarily open border in 1956, chose jobs that required observation, became interested in people at the lower end of the social ladder (not that I was so high up myself, with my small salary, small apartment, and two or three changes of clothes), accompanying my former fellow student Tamás Csillag to the housing project at the Old Buda Brick Factory and spending the next seven years in Elizabeth Town as a supervisor of children’s welfare. Then I grew curious about Hungary as a whole, the outlying cities and villages, and took a position with an institute of urban studies.
It is summer. How little the people of Budapest try to cover up their bodies, whether beautiful or ugly! I put it down to the city’s sensuality and the survival of a pre-Christian, pagan lust for life. Budapest always goes whole hog: Stalinism, the Revolution, the compromises of the Kádár regime, you name it. It experiments with strategies of survival, grinding up the system to soften it, reviving old traditions—anything to curb the damage. Remember that Budapest was the first city in Eastern Europe to proclaim its freedom. The city is more enduring than the government; it has never let that pagan lust for life be taken over by ascetic delirium. There are plenty of upstanding cynics around here who do not think suffering is more moral than good cheer.
Even my internal emigration was basically a chance happening: one morning at dawn my doorbell rang, and in they came, picking apart my filing cabinet and dismissing me from all institutions. Then came the changes in 1989, and soon thereafter I had a phone call inviting me to be the president of International PEN. It was a serious offer, and it behooved me to accept it and do a good job.
Some authors love to play it tough; they are not satisfied until they have brushed with mortal danger and can recount it to their readers. I am not that type. I am of a more placid nature. But once in a while I run smack into fate’s outstretched palm.
The good things always come on their own, the gifts of fate (or Providence, if you will), but the bad too come randomly, unexpectedly: there it is, and that’s that. The ravages of fate are not something we can sense approaching or preven
t. We make our way along a stairway of the gifts and accidents that constitute chapter divisions.
I do not like to be engulfed by the situation I happen to be in at a given time; I would rather look at it from the side or from above: I enjoy backing off and moving on. What is this compulsion, this current sweeping me on, this whistling wind, this gentle breath? The wish to slip the traps? To keep from being surrounded?
I was born in 1933. I was six when the Second World War broke out, eleven when survival meant the collaboration between fate and vigilance, particularly for Jewish children from the Hungarian provinces. When my parents were taken away in May 1944, my sister and I received an invitation to move to Budapest. Staying in Berettyóújfalu, waiting it out, would have been the normal thing to do. Had we done it, we would not be alive today. I owe my life to Budapest. It provided refuge for my sister and cousins and me; it kept us out of Auschwitz. All that mattered to me then about Budapest was its size: it let us be needles in a haystack. By May 1944 it was clear that people in the provinces would do nothing to stop the deportations, that they were following the dictates of a government that wanted to make all cities and towns judenfrei. The official culture around me has always been deceitful and, except for a few exceptional years, hostile to me. Although I had committed no crimes against it, I would eventually realize the time had come to start.
Every word puts the writer in a new situation. He is carried onward by the throat-tightening intoxication of improvisation. If a person’s choices and actions count for anything, then this day, from the rising up unto the going down of the sun, is his constant pilgrimage. There is no line between everyday and holy acts.
The tactful pilgrim recognizes the possibility that dialogue with a saint is forever one-sided. He may spend his whole life speaking to someone who does not exist. Yet even if he never gets an answer, if the saint never reveals himself, he has no trouble addressing him, the eternal here and now.
On such secret, private pilgrimages we retrace the steps of a route long since traveled, reliving a past event, leaving the land of servitude and trudging the road of suffering to the cross. Our man brings the lamb, the most valuable offering of all: the son. He gladly offers his neck to the heavy blade. He appears before the godhead-in-hiding to offer It his life. So it is with books: a constant struggle with the angel fate has delivered us to; an eternal plodding, pinning down traces, making stations visible. The writer’s path as pilgrimage? The parallel is perhaps justified by the pursuit of the unattainable: writing the book after which no other books need be written, after which there is only the bell, the flash, and loss of consciousness. They put all they’ve got into that last book, thinking about it during every waking moment, living with it, a lover full of promises, yet ultimately elusive.
I would have liked to write the kind of book I could have been called away from at any moment, one that could never be finished, only stopped. One more glass, one more pipe, and nothing for me to be ashamed of.
Who is observing me? Who is the all-seeing guardian of my fate? Why not just say someone. If He has created me, He can watch me. Our dream is a universe that is made for us and looks after us. If we weave God into a story, He turns out like a person who is ever at our disposal, even if He does occasionally go into hiding. Our Father is a good deal like us. If He is equally Lord of Life and Lord of Death, then he is both good and evil, as we are, and He simply mimics the game being played on earth, uniting the mind and blind happenstance.
I used to hold sin to be fatuous and shallow: the sinful are impatient and scatterbrained, panic-stricken and hysterical. Could they have but imagined the consequences they might never have sinned in the first place. Lately I have been inclined to think that hatred and cruelty are independent passions and can fill a life, be it stupid or intelligent. Even the most determined relativist can distinguish between a decent person and a scoundrel, especially if he is affected by the behavior of the party in question. Our sense of whether a person is good or evil works instinctively, the way we blink when something gets into our eye.
I smile a lot. My father also had the gift of smiling. It stems from our simple natures. The smarter you are, the angrier you are. When asked whether I am happy, I respond: often. When asked whether I am ever unhappy, my answer is: rarely. Which goes to show how simple I am.
While I was studying in Berlin on a German fellowship in 1977, my mother was my main tie to Budapest. She was my only blood relative in Hungary. A terrible correspondent, I phoned her every week. I tried to keep her happy with gifts and alleviate her financial condition, and in the spring I invited her to Berlin for a month: a pair of warm boots is no substitute for a smile and long leisurely talks peppered with édesanyám—literally “my sweet mother”—which in its slightly antiquated Hungarian sounds perfectly natural, yet cannot be translated naturally into any other language.
When we part, I kiss her hand. The joints in her fingers have grown a little thicker, and she remarks with humorous regret that light brown spots have appeared on her skin. “Old age is ugly, my boy. Nothing nice about it.” By way of consolation I tell her that even an old face can be beautiful if it reveals a good soul. I have refrained from asking myself whether my mother was beautiful. That she never was. But her eyes have an oriental kind of mystery that has grown brighter and more meditative with age.
My mother was happy about my being a writer. She would read reviews of my works in German, French, and English with a dictionary at her side, looking up every word she did not know. She would say a few words of praise, then begin to worry whether the work in question would be published in Budapest and get me into trouble. No need to write about absolutely everything, she said. “You can write something that is good and still not provoke them, my boy.”
She would have been terribly gratified to see me on Budapest television and have her friends phone her the next day, to be congratulated by her old hairdresser or the young woman caretaker in the building or perhaps the neighbor with the friendly face, whose husband had been a prison guard known for his restrained behavior.
My mother was hardly surprised at my trouble with the state, as she herself had had less than pleasant experiences with the authorities. She felt her modest pension to be insufficient, but would have been perfectly satisfied with half again as much. At midday she ate a little soup with potatoes and an egg or two on the side. Listening to old man Kádár would put her to sleep. “You’ve had your say,” she would tell him, switching off the television.
At six in the morning she would drink a cup of coffee in the kitchen, then go back to bed and read or listen to the radio until eight, then spend an hour exercising and bathing. She never went to a private doctor, not wishing to spend the money; the free clinic doctors suited her just fine. She was overjoyed to get a two-week, union-sponsored pass to a medicinal spa every year. On those occasions she shared a room with her old friend Marika. Marika never married and was a touch crotchety, but Mother was used to her eccentricities. They would have espressos in the café and watch television in the common lounge. They might also indulge in a jigger of brandy of an afternoon (though a bottle of cognac could last half a year in my mother’s cabinet despite the fact that she offered it to guests).
I did not stay on in San Francisco in 1978, though I might have chosen to work for any number of causes: the American Indians, or the Catholics of Northern Ireland, or the gays of the Castro district, or tanning-room devotees protesting nuclear energy, or Australian Aborigines. I might have chosen South Korean CEOs, communards from the Pyrenees, instructors of bioenergetic analysis, Sufi gurus, levitating meditators, faith healers, or Jews for Jesus. I might have joined an African resistance movement, offered to help the developing world, or I might simply have stayed on, playing with films, holograms, videos, computers, visiting prisoners in jail, converting to homosexuality, or moving into the pink house where Janis Joplin committed suicide. But I didn’t. I could have landed a teaching job in some provincial city, where at this moment I w
ould be walking onto the main quad, past the bank to the café, where I would be ordering apple juice in a paper cup and looking out over the young men and women made angry and headstrong by trying to work their way upward. But I didn’t do that either.
The books on my shelf are alive, entreating me to look at them, take them out of the darkness, follow them. Boxes fill and pile up behind me, my abandoned writings pursuing me. I delay opening them and restoring lost time. So many faded pictures, names now just barely familiar. But when the heavens are kind, a chink opens up and something comes out of nothing.
My work goes better in the village than in Budapest or Berlin, where I spend most of my time. Since I live my life in both kinds of place, however, the extremes of pro- or antiurban cultural philosophy are alien to me. In fact, the tension between the two is my domain: I enjoy moving back and forth between density and sparseness, between the natural and the artificial; I have no desire to drop anchor at either end.
I dash out of the house into the meadow. You cannot see this spot from the village. I stop and turn around. The vast emptiness is refreshing—the surrounding hills, the ruins of a castle sacked three hundred years ago, the solitude. There is no one here in the bright noon light. It is no effort at all for me simply to be.
The years have come and gone, and I am still here at the Academy of the Arts in Berlin, stressing the first syllable of German words in my Hungarian way. I give the Germans what advice I have and make my umpteenth introductory speech. I’ve been reelected president. There were no other candidates.
I support my family as best I can and do my best to stay out of their way. I recognize (and accept) the fact that my wife is boss of the hearth, and I do everything in my power to obey her. I try to provide warmth and encouragement to the family, knowing they will have troubles enough—anxieties, failures, loneliness, sadness, losses—the extent of which a parent can never know. I am content to start each day with the patter of footsteps around me.
A Guest in my Own Country Page 27
