A Guest In My Own Country Part 6

I would be walking along the Ring, and who would step out of one of the n.o.ble old buildings, each forming a quarter-circle, but Zoltan Kodaly, white beard and all. (Whenever he appeared on the balcony in the hall at the Academy of Music, the house would give him a standing ovation.) I would bow my head as we pa.s.sed, and the old man would nod. The garden and red sign of the Stuck Pastry Shop filled me with melancholy. This is where I had sat with my father before accompanying him to the Nyugati Station whenever he visited me at the end of one of his buying trips. Much as I enjoyed sitting with him, I smiled to myself more than once at his naive but well-intentioned notions.

Every morning I would feel compelled to step off the sidewalk as I walked along Andra.s.sy Boulevard two blocks down from the Ring: the building at number sixty, with its gravitas gravitas-and the heavy chains that bound its concrete pillars-would order me down into the roadway. In the last year of the war it had been called the House of Loyalty, the headquarters and torture chamber of the Arrow Cross. Anyone taken there had little chance of coming out alive. There had been concrete-walled torture rooms in place in the cellar by then, but the setup was not modern enough: the new regime dug deeper. Buildings outlive regimes, and this formerly upper-middle-cla.s.s apartment building was home to the political police of the new system. The reconstruction was the idea of Gabor Peter, once a tailor, then a librarian for a fas.h.i.+on magazine, then head-general-of that police force. A major sat on either side of the padded door to his office, effective advisors no doubt. After 1956 they became official humorists, writing hilarious Christmas radio and TV programs.

With Gabor Peter at the helm of the State Security Agency, the Andra.s.sy Boulevard facilities embarked on a visually dazzling expansion, gobbling up the large and lordly buildings around it one by one. No sooner were the inhabitants expelled than industrious stonemasons set about making it fit for the uses of the Agency. Red geraniums bloomed in a flowerbox outside every window, but guards carrying machine guns stood in every doorway and on every corner, and no one would have dreamed of playing games with them.

Soviet Pobedas, light brown and gray, and large, black American cars with curtains in the windows rolled out of the driveways. The next block was also part of the picture. The windows of the Lukacs Pastry Shop on the corner-once a showcase of cakes and liqueurs, of gla.s.s chandeliers, velvet draperies, and marble tables-had been replaced by gla.s.s bricks impenetrable to the eye: it had become a club for State Security officers.

I later learned that prisoners who had signed confessions were a.s.sembled there among the Art Deco decorations to learn their show-trial roles. Since the baker and his masterpieces had been kept on, the prisoners got pastries for reciting their canned self-accusations by heart. By then they had gone through the preliminary phases of confession and torture. Most people proved capable of slandering themselves, even condemning themselves to death. All bets were off once the prisoner found himself alone in the cellar, crawling into his cell on all fours like an injured animal. As soon as you signed the papers and redeemed yourself, you got a hot bath. Now all you had to do was play your part. And this was theater at its most imaginative. You were spirited up from the cellar to the vanilla-scented paradise of golden angels and chandeliers and garlands and whipped cream, where a clean change of clothes and a dignified stroll along the slightly sloping marble floor could put you in the mood for any role. Down below, all relations.h.i.+p between the ego's visible and invisible aspects had been severed, the visible (and thrashable) part doing what it must, the invisible part looking on, astonished.

In 1949 I did not know much about what was going on in the cellar, but from the BBC I learned that the accused in show trials would say all sorts of things to incriminate themselves, that they were mere puppets, their will having been broken with beatings and chemicals. This seemed plausible, as they spoke like automatons, reciting more than repenting, as if meaning no longer mattered.

The cameraman father of a boy I knew told his son that the proceedings were filmed without the knowledge of the accused. Moreover, the trial was staged more than once, and the accused never knew which the "real" one was. The final film version was spliced together from several takes. Could the whole procedure have been just for the sake of the film? The director supposedly had friends among the accused.

A bit further up Andra.s.sy (soon to be Stalin) Boulevard there was a private lending library that was taken over by the state in 1949. It was intoxicating for me, at fifteen, to take out novels by Steinbeck, Hemingway, Martin du Gard, and Malraux. The same neighborhood also boasted a respectable private house of a.s.signation run by Madame Clarisse on the second floor of a neocla.s.sical apartment building. By the end of the year it was all over: the private library, the private maison de rendezvous maison de rendezvous, and everything else private, including the private individual. Nor were we left in peace at school: we had to sing hymns of praise to the working cla.s.s after each ten-minute break. Sometimes we slipped in a dirty rhyme or two.

When in the early sixties the State Security Agency moved out and the s.p.a.ce reopened as Specialty Pastries, I would drop in after long afternoons spent investigating the living conditions of people on file at the Public Welfare Authority. I would sit with friends in velvet-upholstered chairs beneath the chandeliers' gold curlicues and Venetian gla.s.s and surrounded by blue-silk walls and gold-leaf friezes as trolley buses, the pride of Soviet technology, rumbled by. I was always on good terms with the old ladies in the cloakroom. I had many dates there, dates with beautiful women and odd women, with clever women and madwomen: I had just divorced my first wife. Those women are dead by now, or elderly.

Late in November 1983, when I was on a fellows.h.i.+p at the New York Inst.i.tute for the Humanities, my wife Jutka and I rented an apartment on the corner of Fourth Street and Avenue A, four blocks from St. Mark's Place. One morning while walking along the latter we came upon a street fair. There were bands playing and a woman prancing around on stilts, enticing children to dance. We bought a table lamp for two dollars, and the seller wanted to prove to us it worked. We walked into a precinct house to look for an outlet. "Your honor is at stake," the policemen told him, smiling as they pointed to an outlet. The lamp did not light. They had a good laugh, black and white, men and women alike-then took pity on the salesman and pointed him to a working outlet. The lamp was fine. Filled with a sense of dignity, the salesman then told us that his mother was Hungarian and that he was happy to have us here in this part of town, properly called the East Village, not the Lower East Side.

I am standing at a Tarot reader's shop front surrounded by iron pipes, iron plates, and iron gratings. The mustachioed old fortune-teller likes to snooze in a rickety armchair in the window. The next two shops are bookshops. My novel The Loser The Loser is available in both. Back home it had to be published in the utmost secrecy, which bestowed an aura of heroic transgression on the publisher, Gabor Demszky. Here in America I ran into a samizdat plain-white-cover edition. It is so tightly s.p.a.ced that the whole novel fits into two hundred pages instead of four. is available in both. Back home it had to be published in the utmost secrecy, which bestowed an aura of heroic transgression on the publisher, Gabor Demszky. Here in America I ran into a samizdat plain-white-cover edition. It is so tightly s.p.a.ced that the whole novel fits into two hundred pages instead of four.

Ivan Szelenyi and I also single-s.p.a.ced our typescript of The Intellectuals on the Road to Cla.s.s Power The Intellectuals on the Road to Cla.s.s Power. The fewer the pages, the easier it was to smuggle it outside the country. That accomplished, I could turn back to my novel. But one day Biki (Tibor Hajas-poet, essayist, photographer, body-artist, film director, watchman, and warehouse worker) told us there had been a house search at Tamas's (Tamas Szentjoby-poet, painter, film actor, and Fluxus artist). They had been looking for p.o.r.nography, but discovered our ma.n.u.script instead. They suddenly lost all interest in p.o.r.nography. No, they had a 132-page typescript dealing with ideological issues and containing all sorts of seditious ideas. "Looks like 127/b is your genre: incitement against the state," said the good-humored, portly lieutenant colonel entrusted with my arrest and interrogation.

Now here we were, nearly ten years later, our consternation having shriveled to a series of comical anecdotes, standing in St. Mark's Place, looking over the offerings on the sidewalk. People put out anything with the slightest chance of selling, trusting to the market G.o.ds to make the proper match. Nor did the market G.o.ds let them down. For among the pulp novels and one or two good books were two familiar-looking soft-cover volumes-red on top, yellow underneath-with a Hungarian t.i.tle: Tarsadalmi Tarsadalmi Szemle Szemle (Review of Society), the theoretical journal of the Hungarian Communist Party, November and December, 1949. Stalin, then celebrating his seventieth birthday, was on the cover. (Review of Society), the theoretical journal of the Hungarian Communist Party, November and December, 1949. Stalin, then celebrating his seventieth birthday, was on the cover.

I picked up one of the yellowed volumes. Now the young black man proffering it was certain you could find a paying customer for anything under the sun. Supine on a New York sidewalk the generalissimus generalissimus was none too imposing, but in the autumn of 1949 the whole world was sending him gifts, including a trainload a.s.sembled by the grateful Hungarian People with enough material-a sea of miniature locomotives, machine tools, and children's drawings-for an exhibition. What is more, there was a statue of him in every shopwindow. In butcher shops, for example, the wisest leader in the history of mankind was rendered in frozen lard, the artist's honorarium being paid in kind: fatback. was none too imposing, but in the autumn of 1949 the whole world was sending him gifts, including a trainload a.s.sembled by the grateful Hungarian People with enough material-a sea of miniature locomotives, machine tools, and children's drawings-for an exhibition. What is more, there was a statue of him in every shopwindow. In butcher shops, for example, the wisest leader in the history of mankind was rendered in frozen lard, the artist's honorarium being paid in kind: fatback.

Suddenly there was a vacant flat on the first floor of the Andra.s.sy Boulevard building. Its former inhabitant was the son-in-law of the President of the Republic, a self-a.s.sured squat little man with an equally self-a.s.sured and squat spouse. In the autumn of 1949 the shutters were rolled down. The son-in-law of the President of the Republic had been appointed amba.s.sador to Cairo and moved there with his family. Then he was ordered home, denounced as a spy, condemned to death, and executed. It didn't take long. The large American car stopped coming for his wife. The movers came and took all their possessions heaven only knows where.

The year 1949 was the year of the Great Change, the great new rigor, as peace-loving, progressive mankind prepared for the seventieth birthday of the Lighthouse of the Peoples. The bra.s.s band of the Hungarian State Security Agency, as part of peace-loving and progressive mankind, had recently moved into the s.p.a.cious apartment of the freshly executed Hungarian amba.s.sador to Cairo, and there they rehea.r.s.ed the Stalin Cantata Stalin Cantata. I was forced to listen: I lived on the opposite side of the courtyard. They rehea.r.s.ed it bar by bar, playing each one hundreds of times, boring it into my head. "Stalin is our battle, Stalin is our peace, and the name of Sta-a-a-lin Sta-a-a-lin will make the world a better place." (The last line had slight meter and rhyme problems, but was ideologically pure.) Sometimes a booming chorus would sing along. It was all very festive. will make the world a better place." (The last line had slight meter and rhyme problems, but was ideologically pure.) Sometimes a booming chorus would sing along. It was all very festive.

In 1949 Stalin thought there would be a war with the West, so the eastern half of Europe needed to be unified according to the Soviet model. The Soviet model meant trials. They started by sentencing Archbishop Jozsef Mindszenty to life. Then came the tall, handsome, and popular Foreign Minister (previously Minister of the Interior) Laszlo Rajk, who was selected for the role of arch criminal and duly tortured until he testified against himself. The BBC called him a victim of the very methods he had introduced.

People were no longer as they had been. A kind of rigid intoxication seemed to have infused their faces. The fear radiating from the walls of 60 Andra.s.sy Boulevard seemed to grow stronger as the geraniums in the windows grew redder. Every afternoon a million sparrows perched on the lindens and plane trees, turning the street into one great vibrating river of chirping. Might there be some ruse lurking deep in the innocence of sparrows? Like the newly refas.h.i.+oned puppet theaters waiting to receive jackbooted kindergartners with machine guns?

The brief period of normal civil life that followed the Germans' collapse was over now, I realized. Gone were the days of burning cla.s.s records, of back-talk, of speechifying about Hugo and Apollinaire, Ady and Babits. My gimn.a.z.ium gimn.a.z.ium days enabled me to experience the whole city, its swimming pools as well as its libraries, or visit my sister, or sit in a cafe with a boy who could really play the saxophone, or admire the cla.s.smate sitting behind me, who could belch the whole of days enabled me to experience the whole city, its swimming pools as well as its libraries, or visit my sister, or sit in a cafe with a boy who could really play the saxophone, or admire the cla.s.smate sitting behind me, who could belch the whole of Rhapsody in Blue Rhapsody in Blue, or hire his neighbor to drive off every teacher from my vicinity with his farts and thereby let me read in peace (though of course I had to smell as well as pay).

My Hungarian literature teacher encouraged my readings, inviting me to his apartment and lending me books. When he opened his gla.s.sed-in bookcase to me, it was as if a beautiful woman had undone her robe. Those were the days when I discovered manifold meaning in every line and found profound wisdom in cliches.

I was sixteen and entering my next-to-the-last year at the gimn.a.z.ium gimn.a.z.ium. I walked into the room on the first day to find two students standing by the window. The others were sitting at their desks, looking stern and singing songs of the workers' movement with great enthusiasm. They scrutinized the latecomer with lowering antic.i.p.ation to see what he would do. Would he take a seat and sing with us? One cla.s.s, one community, one heart, one soul. If not, he could go and stand by the window with the other two and pretend not to know that standing there made him conspicuously suspicious, dead to the ideological and political unity that flexed its muscle in common song! There they stood-Pali Hollander and Laci Endrenyi, the most sensitive boys in the cla.s.s. Tall and thin, learned, dripping with irony, inveterate concertgoers, readers of Hemingway's Fiesta Fiesta and Huxley's and Huxley's Antic Hay Antic Hay, and, as Junior Tacituses, fully equipped to enjoy the historical transformation in all its vulgarity.

But the brightest student in the group was sitting in the back row near the window, bragging that he had traveled to the border in a State Security car as a volunteer to denounce his Zionist schoolmates' escape. He had always been malicious, but his sarcasm was grounded in power now: he was a high official in the student a.s.sociation. Though he still had to attend cla.s.s, he would seek out other student officials in the corridor, where they would discuss important, confidential issues of the Movement under their breath. No outsider could come near. And he was the one who gave the speech on the occasion of Stalin's birthday in 1949. He spoke of a Golden Eagle, of an unshakable will that pursued its goal ruthlessly, without mercy. On the first day of cla.s.ses he read aloud a pa.s.sage from The Road to Volokolamsk The Road to Volokolamsk about how cancerous meat had to be hacked out of a body or the body would rot. He then spun a pretty little speech on the topic, repeating the word "rotten" several times while glancing my way. about how cancerous meat had to be hacked out of a body or the body would rot. He then spun a pretty little speech on the topic, repeating the word "rotten" several times while glancing my way.

When Jozsef Revai, a member of the Politburo, condemned the harmful delusions of the philosopher Gyorgy Lukacs in a page-long a.n.a.lysis, I was the only one in the cla.s.s who stood up for Lukacs. It was intolerable that a gimn.a.z.ium gimn.a.z.ium student should disagree with the Party leaders.h.i.+p. I was summoned to a disciplinary committee chaired by a student my age. His name was Ferenc Feher and we later became friends. He despised Lukacs at the time, but later saw the light. In a required paper on the Three-Year Plan I wrote that for me it meant the state takeover of my father's business and house, for the tired worker I used to see on the stairs it means long hours of work for low wages. My literature teacher could not bring himself to grade the paper ("There is nothing I can do for you, son; I have no jurisdiction in such matters") and pa.s.sed it on to the headmaster. It wasn't long before I was expelled from the student a.s.sociation. student should disagree with the Party leaders.h.i.+p. I was summoned to a disciplinary committee chaired by a student my age. His name was Ferenc Feher and we later became friends. He despised Lukacs at the time, but later saw the light. In a required paper on the Three-Year Plan I wrote that for me it meant the state takeover of my father's business and house, for the tired worker I used to see on the stairs it means long hours of work for low wages. My literature teacher could not bring himself to grade the paper ("There is nothing I can do for you, son; I have no jurisdiction in such matters") and pa.s.sed it on to the headmaster. It wasn't long before I was expelled from the student a.s.sociation.

What I really wanted was to be expelled from the school. "You have outgrown this place," the literature teacher told me. "You are intellectually over-age." Which was flattering enough, though I couldn't tell whether he just wanted to avoid the unpleasantness that came from having me around.

My friend Pali and I once invited him to come rowing with us on the Danube. Sitting in a bathing suit on the c.o.xswain's thwart, he displayed a fairly large belly, but also the broad shoulders to match. Now that we were a trois a trois and on the water, he confided that he could not make his peace with Marxism and expected difficult years to come. "Terror," I said ambiguously, "is history's sacrificial festival." My teacher did not completely understand. Perhaps I did not either. and on the water, he confided that he could not make his peace with Marxism and expected difficult years to come. "Terror," I said ambiguously, "is history's sacrificial festival." My teacher did not completely understand. Perhaps I did not either.

That summer, the summer of 1949, Budapest played host to the World Youth a.s.sembly, and young Communists flooded in from the Soviet Union, China, and the countries of Eastern Europe. After the trial that condemned Laszlo Rajk and his a.s.sociates and led to their execution the city was br.i.m.m.i.n.g with a vibrant energy. It might have been said that the only people not yet arrested were the ones whose trials the authorities had lacked the time to arrange. They were scheduled for the following year.

"This ice cream represents the penitence of the alienated mind," I said one day on the way home at an Italian gelato stand that had not yet been appropriated by the state. Pali gave a good laugh. His violin teacher had called Kant the only respectable thinker, so he was primed to appreciate my Hegelian quips.

Soon the Weltgeist Weltgeist gravitated to the brothel. We set our elbows on a piano covered with a large embroidered cloth and peered down from the balcony at the Ring sinking into shadow. We set out on a hunting expedition. We stepped through the door of that neocla.s.sical apartment house with its s.p.a.cious courtyard, its pale pink marble staircase, its slightly dirty red carpet. The bell gave out a restrained buzz behind the heavy brown second-floor door. First a servant girl, then Madame: "Do you want eva again?" Yes. eva was thin with small, pointed b.r.e.a.s.t.s and an indecipherable, lovely scent. Her hair was red-everywhere-and she had an identification number from Auschwitz tattooed on her left arm. She was nineteen, I sixteen. "Explain the Rajk affair to me," she ordered, because I had always been able to make things clear. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s got goose pimples. "I don't want to be tortured!" She had a fur, and on occasion there was a car waiting for her. Sometimes she took my money, sometimes she didn't. When she did, I paid with the proceeds from books I had sold from my library. gravitated to the brothel. We set our elbows on a piano covered with a large embroidered cloth and peered down from the balcony at the Ring sinking into shadow. We set out on a hunting expedition. We stepped through the door of that neocla.s.sical apartment house with its s.p.a.cious courtyard, its pale pink marble staircase, its slightly dirty red carpet. The bell gave out a restrained buzz behind the heavy brown second-floor door. First a servant girl, then Madame: "Do you want eva again?" Yes. eva was thin with small, pointed b.r.e.a.s.t.s and an indecipherable, lovely scent. Her hair was red-everywhere-and she had an identification number from Auschwitz tattooed on her left arm. She was nineteen, I sixteen. "Explain the Rajk affair to me," she ordered, because I had always been able to make things clear. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s got goose pimples. "I don't want to be tortured!" She had a fur, and on occasion there was a car waiting for her. Sometimes she took my money, sometimes she didn't. When she did, I paid with the proceeds from books I had sold from my library.

Pleasant as it was to sit in the brothel kitchen, all those thighs together tended to dispel illusions. Later, when they closed the public houses and socialism retrained the girls as taxi drivers, the only one left leaning on her elbows in the second-story window was Madame. She underwent a second flowering, because the drunk and disenchanted men whose feet mechanically took them her way were happy with her for want of anything better. Her neck was wrinkled, but the skin lower down on her body was smooth. She would bend over the lace bedspread dramatically and spread her legs pa.s.sionately. The lips of her s.e.x were large and swollen. She kept it shaven and screamed in the soprano register.

Be it by cart, bike, or train I would go home to Berettyoujfalu for holidays whenever I could, but once I began my studies in Budapest I became a city boy. The story of my village boyhood was over-if a story can ever be truly over.

This was my last summer in Berettyoujfalu. On the hot weekday mornings the daughters of the town's proper families would lie out by the railroad bridge. When I was fifteen, I had sat with Marika by one of the hot pylons, a veritable box seat for viewing the daughters of the pharmacist and chief physician, district court judge, and Calvinist priest rubbing oil into their thighs down on the sandy riverbank. Whenever the train rumbled past, I would put a protective arm around my girlfriend.

Once a group of sweaty, dusty Cossack soldiers galloped down to the water from the embankment. They rubbed their horses down stark naked and, once the hides were s.h.i.+ny, splashed and tumbled and pushed one another under the water until, suddenly cold, they emerged, their bodies stark white atop the dark brown, wet beasts. The young ladies averted their eyes. Then the soldiers slapped on their red felt hats and rode in ever tighter circles around the tanned young ladies, whose hair peeked out from under swimsuits barely reaching their thighs. The sun shone fiercely. Then from nowhere came a whistle followed by a command. The soldiers s.n.a.t.c.hed up their uniforms and boots and galloped off as quickly as they had come.

In the summer of forty-nine I often lay on a sofa under a crimson Persian rug in the Berettyoujfalu dining room reading Remembrance of Things Past Remembrance of Things Past and and Doctor Faustus Doctor Faustus. I would lift Marika onto my bicycle and take her to the Berettyo for a swim. Those were the days of first love. Marika was a couple of years older than I was and sat in front of me in neatly ironed white clothes. I was honored. I rode down from the dam to the riverbank and came to a stop with a nice tight turn, which I always executed just so, with a hard brake and a tail skid. Once, though, under the weight of the two of us, we rolled into the water, still on the bike. This little accident did not do our love any good. Soon thereafter a guest of ours, a saxophone player, asked me whether I had serious intentions about Marika. When I pointed out I was a bit young to be thinking about marriage, he told me that his his intentions were serious indeed. With an eye to Marika's domestic happiness I generously let her go. The saxophonist had tricked me: his intentions had nothing to do with marriage. intentions were serious indeed. With an eye to Marika's domestic happiness I generously let her go. The saxophonist had tricked me: his intentions had nothing to do with marriage.

When I was fifteen and entering the sixth year at the gimn.a.z.ium gimn.a.z.ium, I moved with my sister and cousin into a narrow street in the middle of the city, Varmegye. I lived in the servants quarters in flat number five on the sixth floor. Entrance to the booth of a room-it was barely big enough to house a table, a bed, a wardrobe, an armchair, and a bookstand-was from the vestibule. I was free from adult supervision, but received a monthly allowance from my parents, which I husbanded as I could. Once in a while my friend Pali Hollander and I took lunch at the Astoria Hotel. We would discuss the offerings on the menu in detail and even order a Napoleon brandy after dessert. The waiter did not ask young gentlemen their age. Certain practices had remained alive.

By the end of the month, however, I would be eating at the Astoria's stand-up restaurant on the corner of Lajos Kossuth Street and the Museum Ring. If I had enough cash, I would get layered cabbage for 3.50, if not, then bean soup with beans for 1.10; and if even that was too expensive, then the 70-filler bean soup without beans, which, cheap as it was, came with bread. But then there were the terrifying moochers who came and stood in front of me, mumbling, hacking, whining, showing their toothless gums, fixing their eyes first on my plate, then on me. Sometimes I could make a deal with them: "I'll leave you half. Just don't stand right in front of me, please. Move over there!" But they never went far; they just watched, anxiously, to see whether I would keep my part of the bargain.

I knew the Astoria inside and out and had even stayed there in earlier days on one of my father's trips to Budapest. It had the smell of that special cleanser I had enjoyed sniffing at the Hungaria. My father's lifeline had been cut, while mine was just beginning. With everything still before me it seemed natural to be starting from zero. That I lived in a cubicle of six square meters and needed electric light to read even in the afternoon, that all I had-and needed-were a bed, table, wardrobe, and bookcase, none of this was humiliating; it was uplifting. I liked having my own room, a bell jar where I could hide away, where another world was constantly in the making inside my head. I could easily step from one world to another, for a book was as much another world too as the strip of sky I could see from my window.

On the other side of narrow Varmegye Street stretched the yellow county hall, a large, ancient structure with an irregular roof that made me nervous, because workers nonchalantly clambered up and down it gnawing on snacks of bacon. "Parisian style," said people who had never been to Paris. No one lived directly opposite, so I could gaze out over the roof to the antennas, towers, cupolas, siren horns, and clouds.

Below us lived the wife of Baron Villy Kohner, and on the next floor down Baron Tivadar Natorp. I took a liking to the baroness, a lithe, tanned woman who went around in sporting clothes, and to the baron, stooped over, examining the ground before him with a cane. Both were forcibly relocated in 1951, as was a beautiful woman with a deep voice, a smoker who wore plaid skirts and let her thick and (naturally, I believe) red hair tumble carelessly down. She worked at the Turkish Emba.s.sy, where she was arrested. Yet another neighbor, a banker, was resettled outside of Budapest. A Council chairman, a former gimn.a.z.ium gimn.a.z.ium teacher, moved in below us. The young son of a military officer on the fourth floor came upon his father's pistol one day and shot the daughter of the postman on the seventh floor while playing with it. teacher, moved in below us. The young son of a military officer on the fourth floor came upon his father's pistol one day and shot the daughter of the postman on the seventh floor while playing with it.

I can still picture the friends who turned up in my apartment, sitting in the unupholstered armchair across from the bed or stretching out on the bed. Istvan would speak of his comrades in the Movement and those dull, official rooms where they discussed how to make everyone just like them, the "new men." Actually Istvan himself was somewhat "new" for me in this phase of his, different from what he had been (and would later be, when curiosity would drive him to chase the elusive tail of a truth that was just beginning to take shape). Now his words were more judgmental and at times directed against friends in the name of Party justice. The Party's logic was enough for him. For a year or two.

But he could also speak respectfully of a girl's hair or artistic talents or mock his colleagues for their human weaknesses, to remark of a great thinker that "It wouldn't hurt for him to bathe more often." He said the most intelligent things about the crisis of the planned economy, making his points with hard statistics. As part of his professional training, he was permitted to work in the State Planning Bureau and would smuggle out data on sc.r.a.ps of cardboard, holding them in his hand like Aladdin's lamp or a kind of theoretical miracle weapon to condemn the system in revolutionary language as retrograde. At twenty he realized that the market exists and can be done away with only at the cost of lunacy. My eyes grew wide as I meditated on how Uncle Bela's business ac.u.men had resettled into his son, though Istvan was interested in the market merely as a theoretical construct and had no intention of taking part in it.

I was a boy from the provinces in one of Budapest's best schools, the Madach Gimn.a.z.ium. I was a cautious young man whose accent and dress betrayed his country origins. Mr. Toth, the tailor from Berettyoujfalu, made my suits with golf trousers, which none of my cla.s.smates would be caught dead in. But what I yearned most for was a pair of what were then called "ski boots," shoes with a double leather sole, a strap on the side, and a buckle. I believed they would give me a more forbidding, masculine air. Ski boots were for making an exit, giving the slip, taking a powder, the kind of footwear that wouldn't tear up your feet or fall apart on you if you were being pursued.

I loved films with chases and never identified with the pursuers. I used to flesh out stories of friends' escapes over the border in my imagination, taking them through creeks and mined bogs. Pali and I had plans to row down to the southern border and suss out the possibilities for crossing, but the motorboat border guards never let us get close. We still fanaticized about swimming out underwater using a reed as a breathing straw or strapping a motor-powered propeller onto our bellies, even to the point of wondering whether the propeller would harm our private parts.

Yet when emigration became a realistic topic of conversation, when Hungarian Jews, too, could move to the newly founded state of Israel, even take all their possessions with them in large chests, when our parents asked us whether we would be willing to emigrate, my sister and I said no. Everyone we had feelings for, everything we enjoyed was here. I had by then a good few years invested in Budapest and had learned to take the bad with the good. I held fast to the places where both had befallen me.

"We'll stay," I said.

"What for?" said my father, and with reason, since he had been forcibly removed from everything he had created for himself. Although he never could understand the point of it, he acknowledged its reality and went on to earn a pittance by managing a hardware store in one of Budapest's side streets. As ashamed as he was to tell his customers day after day that he was out of this or that, he rejected with disgust the under-the-table deals made by his subordinates. He took a dim view of state-directed commerce. "Tell me, son. What's the point of all this?"

Since he was nothing if not insecure in the conceptual universe of scientific socialism, there was no use in my telling him what he should say the next day if it was his turn to discuss the Party organ's daily, Szabad Nep Szabad Nep (Free People), at the half-hour ritual morning meeting, when basing their comments on the previous day's issue, the store's employees would condemn the web of deceit spun by the imperialists to destroy the cause of the working cla.s.s. Neither my father nor the imperialists were up to the task. (Free People), at the half-hour ritual morning meeting, when basing their comments on the previous day's issue, the store's employees would condemn the web of deceit spun by the imperialists to destroy the cause of the working cla.s.s. Neither my father nor the imperialists were up to the task.

"I'm no good at speaking," he would say, though in fact he had the gift of gab. Once retired, he would go shopping at the Great Hall and spend the entire morning chatting up both sellers and buyers, then stop on the way home to hear out his concierge.

I never spoke to my family about wanting to be a writer. All anyone saw was that I read a lot, pounded the typewriter, and published a few book reviews during my university years. My diploma qualified me to be a teacher of Hungarian literature. Mother would have been happier to see me in medical school, but I would never have been accepted, given my bourgeois background. I had an "X" by my name, which meant, in communist terms, that I was more than a cla.s.s outsider: I was a cla.s.s enemy.

I had applied for a concentration in French and Hungarian, but was rejected. I could count myself lucky to gain entry into the Russian Department, which was soon renamed the Lenin Inst.i.tute, its purpose being the education of reliable cadres with a strong Marxist-Leninist background. But we "X's" never lasted long anywhere, and during my second year, two weeks after Stalin's death, I was barred from the university during the general mourning period. Once Imre Nagy came to power, the Ministry of Education allowed me to continue my studies in the Department of Hungarian Literature, but I was expelled again after Nagy's fall in March 1955. It was only through the intervention of my professors that I was permitted to re-enroll and complete my studies.

After receiving a degree in Hungarian Literature in the summer of 1956, I did indeed become a teacher, but also a member of the editorial board of a newly founded (though not yet circulating) journal eletkepek eletkepek (Pictures from Life). I did not have much time to enjoy those positions: my fellow students were fomenting a revolution. We got hold of some machine guns and formed a university national guard regiment that tried to defend the university against what proved an overpowering force. In the end, we surrendered. (Pictures from Life). I did not have much time to enjoy those positions: my fellow students were fomenting a revolution. We got hold of some machine guns and formed a university national guard regiment that tried to defend the university against what proved an overpowering force. In the end, we surrendered.

I have mixed feelings looking back on those five years of study. I feel the same ambiguity I feel whenever I visit a university anywhere in the world to lecture on literature, give a sociology seminar, or simply talk to faculty members and their enthusiastic students. Gaining an overview of an entire field of study, having the chance to study all day (a chance that may never return later in life), agonizing in preparation for examinations, recognizing personal capacities and limits, wors.h.i.+ping some professors and disparaging others, thinking through the strategies for turning knowledge to use, living the excitement of first love, conversing with friends deep into the night, entering ignorant and exiting relatively well educated-no, we didn't waste our time. But even these memories are tinged with irony: I see the faces trying on various masks; I see an army of fresh self-images marching along a road of careers. Looked at one way, it is an arrogant new elite, but from another angle it is a nest of newly hatched eggs. Yes, it is a diploma factory, but then there is the masterstudent relations.h.i.+p, dramatic and elegiac for both.

Clearly politics deeply permeated my years at university, permeated them so deeply that it was a permanent backdrop for both professors and students. Being locked in and locked out, dealing with weapons inside and out (machines guns within, tanks without) is anything but normal. Any normal student role soon went by the boards. But even at the height of the Revolution I had no desire to shoot anyone: in the face of the armored units' overwhelming advantage I deemed speech to be the opposing force that would prove decisive in the long run, a conclusion I arrived at through concerted contemplation with all those who did not stream across the temporarily opened border to the West.

Half my cla.s.smates left, most of them becoming professors, mainly at American universities. We, the more recalcitrant ones, went underground, thinking that if we couldn't have it our way now we would provide the spirit of freedom with a mantle of disguise while we consolidated and reinvigorated the culture. As long as we were locked in, we might as well get to know our city, our country. Compulsion breeds intensity. The plan was to learn from people of experience, to spend part of our days in the library and part in tenements and back courtyards trying to save the lives of neglected children.

As for our evenings, we spent them in the literary cafes. Our post-university lives were thus a continuation of our university lives: the same circles of friends and lovers, a few professors, and the literary crowd. Word got out who was who. Everybody knew everybody else. It was a world with the intimacy of confinement about it, with the air of a guild. The university was merely a relatively brief interval in a lifelong course of study, though arguably it was the most stimulating, because everything was new: first exams, first serious writing, first apartment (or room at least), first lovers' cohabitation, first public role. These win out ultimately in the contest of memories, as their smells and colors are stronger than those that follow, perhaps because of the great hunger that precedes them. Who can possibly digest all that food, those books, those bodies, those experiences. Once the student years have pa.s.sed, the marvelous hunger dissipates. My university career, deformed as it was by political vicissitudes, nourished my hunger for reality. I envy today's students their freedom, because politics does not stand between them and knowledge and they are spared the many senseless obstacles that affected our lives so harshly. At the same time, given that we can learn from the provocations and shocks of fate, no matter how unwelcome, I have no regrets that such was my lot.

Many years ago my mother tried to give me my deceased father's wedding ring; it did not fit onto my finger. Even during my first marriage, the moment I walked out of the door I slipped the new ring into my pocket. One day I forgot, and an entire cla.s.s at the girls' gimn.a.z.ium gimn.a.z.ium gave out quite a buzz. gave out quite a buzz.

From that day on they thought Daisy and I were married. During her last year at the university she demonstrated her outstanding pedagogical gifts in the same school where I was a teacher in training. I used to observe her from the back row and unsettle her with mocking glances. They could have seen us in the golden spring of 1956 after the earthquake and flood or before the Revolution, strolling arm in arm through the neighboring streets.

Later, they could see me with Vera, my wife, as we walked the length of the Parliamentary Library (an afternoon home for many) along the thickly bound issues of parliamentary minutes of earlier days, then turned off into the last of the so-called research rooms, which were gla.s.s-walled and lined with colorful panels. From there, a heavy door opened into a corner room: the sanctum sanctorum sanctum sanctorum, a room reserved for us, the chosen ones permitted to keep a typewriter, Gyorgy Szekeres and me. He was forty, I twenty-three. Through the thick, heavy window behind my enormous desk I had a stunning view of the Danube, the chestnut trees lining the promenade on the Buda side, and behind them the six-story palazzi in various states of disrepair, towering with lordly dignity, with the placidity of the beautiful who know they are beautiful, even if the man in the street kicks up a fuss, even if bombs start falling, even if people are lined up along the embankment and get shot into the breaking ice floes, even if excursion boats thrum about on the green-gray water. But there is nothing thrumming about now, only the sound of a piano and drums from the boat by the Hotel Dunapart, whose nightclub stays open until four in the morning. Couples coming together in the bar can rent little furnished cabins.

I usually took the number two tram to get to the Library of Parliament, whose entrance, tall and fitted with bra.s.s doork.n.o.bs, faced the Danube. You had to pa.s.s by the guards. I would nod to them with respect. After all, they were guarding the gate that led to the very summit of our country. Going up and down the steps, students would report to one another on the subjects discussed in the colloquia that went on there. Girls from humanities departments would be sitting side by side beneath bronze-stemmed lamps, future scholars with double fields (French and Hungarian, History and English, Psychology and Folklore) gazing at the current scholars, the higher caste, the chosen ones permitted to do their work in the four-man "research rooms," which were separated from the large reading room by wooden-scrolled doors with panes of colored gla.s.s, their large windows looking out over the Danube and the Castle.

Girls in the humanities were generally in love, or wanted to be, and could be quite dramatic in their breakups. They would tell their girlfriends they had just poisoned themselves in their grief, that cruel animal having told them it was all over. In a quiet little Buda bar, while everyone was dancing, that...that cad cad had said it would be better to put an end to it now rather than later. But the truth is, it's no good putting an end to it ever, sooner or later. So now, when her head fell to the table, he would quake at the humiliation of it all. But her true-blue girlfriend would abandon her own private students and drag her off to the hospital as her mother had done before, and later that scoundrel would sit on the blonde angel's hospital bed, and she would open her eyes and fix her gaze on him, and they would rejoice in each other, shedding tears of grat.i.tude, both of them forgetting all that stupidity: the boy that their love was over, the girl that her life was over as a result. Now nothing was over, and the library would be open again the next day from nine to nine. had said it would be better to put an end to it now rather than later. But the truth is, it's no good putting an end to it ever, sooner or later. So now, when her head fell to the table, he would quake at the humiliation of it all. But her true-blue girlfriend would abandon her own private students and drag her off to the hospital as her mother had done before, and later that scoundrel would sit on the blonde angel's hospital bed, and she would open her eyes and fix her gaze on him, and they would rejoice in each other, shedding tears of grat.i.tude, both of them forgetting all that stupidity: the boy that their love was over, the girl that her life was over as a result. Now nothing was over, and the library would be open again the next day from nine to nine.

Libraries were places of refuge, asylums furnished with things of lasting value. In the library of the Inst.i.tut Francais 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 pa.s.s to the research rooms-white instead of pink-which gave me access to even the cla.s.sified publications of the Telegraph Office. I shared s.p.a.ce with some odd birds involved in mysterious research and horribly boring types who used their white pa.s.ses 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 s.h.i.+rts 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, Istvan Bibo, Laszlo Nemeth, and Miklos Szentkuthy that I was ent.i.tled to borrow for in-house use with my white researcher's card, obtained through recommendations from the Writers' a.s.sociation and the monthly uj Hang uj 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. (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 Francaise Nouvelle Revue Francaise. 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 emba.s.sy 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 qualite un homme de qualite. 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 Europa publis.h.i.+ng 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 Miklos Kra.s.so, 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 cla.s.sical 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 Ethics and Hegel's and Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind 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 Istvan 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 Inst.i.tute 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 Gyorgy Lukacs. 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 p.r.o.nounced neutral, and changes were imminent. Istvan was convinced, citing cla.s.sified information he had found at the Planning Bureau, that the country was bankrupt. He said he had enough material to depose Rakosi 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 Andra.s.sy Boulevard mansard that served as the editorial office of the recently founded-and strongly oppositional-journal eletkepek eletkepek 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 a.s.sembled, 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. 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 a.s.sembled, 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 leaders.h.i.+p, 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 gimn.a.z.ium gimn.a.z.ium, 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 editors.h.i.+p 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 partic.i.p.ation. 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 inst.i.tutions.

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 doc.u.ments enabling them to found new parties and appropriate state-owned a.s.sets 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 t.i.tle 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 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 c