I might just as well be a conscientious farm animal, giving regular milk and getting by on modest fodder. For the family I am not Mr. President; I am a simple smile at all the goings-on around the kitchen table. Who can tell how true to life my descriptions are? Even my mother is a product of the imagination when I write of her, as I am myself when I am my subject. Whatever is made of words is narrative, not reality.
In tonight’s joint panel discussion of the Berlin Academy of Art and Academy of Science we are to delve into the question of whether science and art are not mere luxuries. Of course they are. Almost everything human is a luxury: morality, religion, conversation, recreation, love, mourning—luxuries all. As it is a luxury whenever a person does not steal or cheat or kill the weak or denounce his competitor with a real or trumped-up accusation. Only in barracks, prisons, and concentration camps are there no luxuries.
I have been informed that I shall not escape the final agony, that I shall not be resurrected, and that on the other side there will be nothing at all. In response to this I shall call for a white horse and, taking a deep breath, a white widow as well, and make cynically merry in the dark of night when the rest of the family is sleeping. I do not acknowledge my sinfulness and expect practically nothing of others.
The narrator prepares: he has taken his medicines, lifted his weights, kept himself alive. If he obediently follows the path of his pen on the paper, he can invent and vicariously experience situations with the aid of his imagination. Today is the novel, the eternal today. The best hours are those in which nothing can happen unless he is the cause. The narrator’s freedom means life imprisonment. He even writes when no one encourages him to so do. What is he after? More days, more sentences, and the well-being of his dependents.
He is ignorant, helpless, and perplexed, with no choice but to look his decline in the face. Meanwhile his past, his fortune, has appreciated in value. Old photographs assure us we are the same people we were as children. Tell me a nice, boring story, my friend. We’ll fill in the gaps, go round and round, repeat ourselves.
I have been a spy for the writing profession in all my roles: welfare officer, urban researcher, dissident. (The things we get ourselves into!) With the political changes in 1989 I turned oracle for a while, a role that required some reflection. Does this mean I strayed onto the path of sin by selling myself to the devil of worldly vanities?
I get up. There is a cramp in my leg. I stumble, hopping from the table to the armchair and back. I lie down and groan: standing was better. Images from a sleepless night, a night too long. The only remedy is to sit at the desk and do what I usually do.
Every sentence is an independent entity, a freestanding unit, a closed circle, as if internal cohesion were drawing together a fistful of magnesium buckshot. Picture a pile of fish roe or a clump of bees stuck together on a tree branch after you shake it. More than once I have felt like vanishing unnoticed like a drop of water falling from the spout.
A brook is babbling under the wooden bridge. A neighbor’s hen has gone mad. It has rained a lot lately after a long drought. The grapes have begun to shrivel: the stalks have sucked them dry. We are sitting out on the terrace. The clouds are shedding tears, and moisture hangs in the air. Birds are chirping lazily, and the elders are blackening. A poplar begins to shimmer in the bloody disc of the sun, as if suffused with glass.
At the end of the dock I am struck by the suspicion that I have reached the very end of the end, that there is nowhere to go from here. As an adolescent I imagined one would have to sit at the end of the dock for hours before profound thoughts would come. Given that no such thoughts come to me now, I trudge up Saint George Hill to the sunlit garden stairway of the crumbling wine-press house. There is hang glider floating above, and the heavenly figure speeding in my direction brings a sudden shade and wind.
The woman who lives next door stumbled on her way back from shopping. We helped her home and looked in on her a few times, but after lying down for a while she was back at it: shaping her pretzels, adding a coat of egg white and a sprinkle of grated cheese. I look forward to munching on them and drinking her vintage. I smell ducks roasting behind her: her grandchildren are coming tomorrow.
In the afternoon I go out to where there are people and movement. I stare in wonder at the goods in market stands, holding up a wine goblet, buying a whistle and a string of beads for my daughter Zsuzsi, a jackknife with a carved handle for my son Józsi, and for Áron, the boy poet who disdains possessions, several portions of shish kebab. Jutka buys some red basil for her herb garden.
We visit the artists’ festival in the nearby village of Kapolcs. We see a wooden pig with gleaming eyes and a little screen in its mouth showing the slaughter—but in reverse order, from sausage to living animal—in copious detail. We hear its yelps and observe the details of its disembowelment projected large, as the eyes are removed and sliced and the blood stirred. We have the feeling we are eating one another, draining one another’s blood into a bowl to make sausages or serve it, steaming fresh, over browned onions.
Then comes a Punch whacking at ghosts, but once he has whacked them aplenty and they have whacked him back, once all those palacsinta sticks have been put to good use, the rain, till then only a drizzle, starts coming down hard and the show is stopped. Drums and cymbals fill the street. The bus can’t move. A slender girl takes her bows, the grotesque head on a wooden, collar-like apparatus on her shoulders bobbing up and down. A booted actor clacks his booted hands, then splits into a four-legged creature or, rather, two figures that have it out with each other, shaking blood- or flour-speckled skulls over their backs. The eye pops out of one of them like a tomato.
I became part of the cavalcade, standing there with an enormous green-and-white Dutch umbrella in my hand next to my sons as they bolt down one palacsinta after the other. The churches, sheds, and pubs all around are full of things to see.
The only sad note is Summer Santa pulling his sleigh, his cotton mustache drooping, melting off his face. He has lost his way and ended up in summer, inconsolable as he drags his empty sled over the gravel in search of a better world. Last year he was the Bad Boy of the Village, slapping the bottoms of the prettier women, tossing a bottle far away when he found he’d been given mineral water for his thirst, and sneezing gargantuan sneezes which fascinated Áron and Józsi. But he’s on his good behavior this year: after a few words he moves on, downhearted, never giving up hope of finding a nice world full of snow for himself.
In a pub we find a tableau vivant and cimbalom music, outside—trucks with actors jumping and sneering and screeching and stomping something fierce, little children searching for their mothers, balls rolling off, drivers yawning, beer, wine, and pálinka flowing. A robust fellow stops the cars asking people to taste his beer, which he has brought in a fire truck.
My sons liked the Summer Santa best of all and then the four-legged, two-headed wonder. Zsuzsi liked both of them best.
It will soon be 2000. I am sorry to trade in all those nines—svelte, swollen heads—for the potbellied zeroes. With its large, backward-looking head, the nine seems so intelligent, while the three zeroes signify self-satisfied achievement.
The millennium is over. It’s time to pay the bill. Here comes the waiter.
“I had a twentieth century,” I tell him. He pauses. I don’t see why. I’ve made it clear I intend to pay.
“What about the second millennium?” he asks.
“Must I pay for that as well?”
“Who else?”
“Fine. Add it to the bill.”
But the waiter shakes his head sadly. “What about the first millennium?”
I am seized with fear. “How far back do you mean to go? You can’t hold me responsible for everything, can you?”
“Who else?” he says, shaking his head again sadly.
This time I’m angry. “I want to see the owner, the Lord Himself!”
And what does God do? He appears on the balcony. In person. He po
ints a finger at me. I get up from the table, look Him in the eye, and point my finger at Him. We stand there for quite some time. Host and guest, father and son.
“I shall call for your mother,” He finally says.
“And I for your daughter,” I finally say.
The women come. The children have not yet had dinner. We are told to wash our hands, take our seats, and stop our bickering. “Stubborn old asses. Still pointing fingers.” We sit, nonplussed, the Old Man and I, waiting to be served.
After dinner the Old Man will not give up. “That bill of yours still wants paying.” We are about settle on a price. I hold out my hand. The Old Man’s hand rises. I wait for it to reach mine. Where does it stop? I do not know.
Where is home? Where I stand, inside a solar system. Where I sit, holding my pen tight. Here in the bed where I awake, where I set off for the bathroom, where I step out of the door and greet whomever I happen to meet.
Home is those few square kilometers where my paths come together. Home is the Jewish cemetery at Berettyóújfalu, unused for fifty years, my grandmother’s tall gravestone and my grandfather’s, just as tall, in black granite. (My great-grandfather’s, in white marble, is less than half their height.) Home is in the classroom I wanted so desperately to escape as I stared at the bakery sign across the way. (My schoolmates were murdered and the school torn down.)
Where is home? Where they don’t strike me dead. Where I know my children are safe. Where the individual and the word are held in high regard. Where being who I am and thinking what I think are granted the benefit of respect. Where there is a quiet kitchen nook for postprandial conversations over wine. Where the children play hide-and-seek and build bunkers. Where Jutka sits reading, feet up, in an armchair. Where I can stop for a glass of wine here and there on my way up the hill and, after the friendly invitations, prance my way down again.
Home is in the middle of the Elizabeth Bridge, where, coming home from my travels, I murmur, “How beautiful!” It is a house overgrown with woodbine, where I search for my key, climb panting to the third floor, a bag on each shoulder, and hear sounds within. Lively sounds. I have arrived.
A Guest in my Own Country Page 28
