A Guest In My Own Country Part 7

A reporter had heard that the Soviet tanks were pulling out. Another had heard precisely the contrary: railway workers had sent word that they were rolling in on wheels. He said the Old Man-meaning Imre Nagy-had just waved his hand at the news.

In the cafe on the corner of my building I heard a man in a Persian-collared overcoat a.s.suring all and sundry that Konrad Adenauer was on his way, though the bearer of glad tidings had added "on a white horse," which turned them into a moronic fairy tale. The neighborhood's high-cla.s.s wh.o.r.e, a former language teacher and genuine polyglot, was outraged that the swimming pool she visited daily had been closed. She also asked in stentorian tones whether anyone at the cafe had read Virginia Woolf's Orlando Orlando, because she had not yet decided whether she cared for it or not.

Before I could open my door, two other doors popped open, and that era's masters of information retrieval, the concert violinist and the filling station attendant, stormed me with their questions. Theirs was a resplendent new friends.h.i.+p. One moment they would feel the flush of victory, the next they would predict a house-to-house roundup, the men beaten and the women raped. And what would they collect now? Wrist.w.a.tches again, as during the war?

Late on the evening of 4 November the art student-her name was eva Barna-and I were standing guard with machine guns at the University's Humanities Division. Once in a while a tank came rumbling down Vaci Street. That was the ba.n.a.l part. The important part was eva's beauty, her striking, deep voice, and, most of all, what she said. She had read Camus' Mythe de Sisyphe Mythe de Sisyphe in the original; I had not. A mean-spirited jealousy moved me to make some ironic remarks about Camus. eva emigrated that December and eventually met Camus and corresponded with him. Between eva and Camus stood only travel expenses; between eva and me the Iron Curtain. in the original; I had not. A mean-spirited jealousy moved me to make some ironic remarks about Camus. eva emigrated that December and eventually met Camus and corresponded with him. Between eva and Camus stood only travel expenses; between eva and me the Iron Curtain.

Vera made some phone calls. What she heard was enough for her. She had no desire to see the fallen, burned, or hanged sons of whatever nation; she longed only to leave and live among more reliable peoples: she would go to Paris to teach English and Russian, giving us something to live on; she would rent an apartment, set everything up, and I would follow. She said I should stop being so difficult.

On 11 November, after the defeat, Miklos Kra.s.so and my cousin Pal Zador told me they were leaving the next day and asked me to go with them. They had a.s.sured my pa.s.sage. They showed me my name on the doc.u.ment. Their story was that we were going to persuade others to return home.

I refused. I said it couldn't be as bad as before. I would hold out. I would outlast the leaders. I had no wish to be swept into the great outflow; I wanted to know what was going on here, in these streets. It was an unfinished story, and I refused to tear myself away from it.

Among Biblical heroes I found Jeremiah particularly appealing: he knew in advance what would be-he prophesied the fall of the Hebrew commonwealth-and all he asked of the victor was that he be allowed to mourn his city and his people on its ruins.

I had no desire to look for clever ways out. I wanted a normal, simple life: the same stairways, the same cafes, things as they had been. Even if hundreds of thousands were leaving, millions stayed, and if I had friends and lovers among those leaving, others would come along. My books were here and the sky and the balcony overlooking the Danube and the hills of Buda across the water.

And if I did go, where would I go to? People were wandering off in different directions, but this was still the place where I'd find the most speakers of Hungarian; I'd have the easiest time finding my way around, around the streets, the words, the customs.

Yet I sanctioned their going because I suspected they would be in greater danger here than I. They would be less able to get on here because they were more active, more inclined to speak out, more lively, more pa.s.sionate, more important than I. I who was just a kibitzer, an armed onlooker. Besides, my parents were here, and if no uniformed compulsion separated us now should I be the one to separate us just to make the life that was best for me? I did not feel any danger looming here. So what if they locked me up. I had heard plenty of prison stories from former inmates: you can have a life in there too. Behind bars I would still be myself. Or so I thought.

What about taking my parents with me? And be dependent on charities? Start my student career anew, on scholars.h.i.+ps? No need for me to waste away in the cla.s.sroom. Every morning I could sit down to my notebook at any number of tables, since I would still have the money for an espresso at Budapest's myriad coffeehouses. I would always be able to find work to cover the absolute necessities: I could translate, I could edit. I had no desire to be rich. I had been rich once. It was no great shakes.

Looking around me, I saw nothing but strategists. How did they deal with the issues, the obstacles? The patterns they a.s.sumed, born of compulsion, appealed to me, comical though they were. Every social type, after all, is a complex of cliches. Caricature needs recurrent elements. Life here abounded in provocations and hards.h.i.+ps directly traceable to schematic thought. Psychic sprains were never far from our door.

What interested me was how thinking becomes reality not from habit or sober practicality or tradition but from the exertions of the willful mind, from bold dreams, from seeking the truth and then announcing it-how the n.o.ble turn base, ideals become a h.e.l.l, and how, in the end, we will survive it all anyway because we are stronger, we everyday, pedestrian people capable of work, wonder, and contemplation.

If Istvan had stayed, he might have been sentenced to death. Besides, who was I to judge my friends? Everyone who left was right, as was everyone who stayed. Everyone tried to heed the prompting of fate. My advice to myself was: As long as you are not in mortal danger, sit tight. Keep going, but don't rush. All your problems come from impulsive decisions. Just keep working quietly, steadfastly, inconspicuously, ceaselessly.

They searched Gyuri Kra.s.so's apartment and took in Gyuri, Tamas Liptak, and Ambrus Oltvanyi. But not me, because, true to form, I was late. We were to meet at ten; I arrived at twelve. Gyuri's mother told me what had happened. They didn't find the mimeograph machine, which had been well tucked away. They let Ambrus and Tamas go, but later took Tamas away again.

That they didn't arrest me was a lucky break, suggesting that they had not found the list containing the signatures of the people who had received machine guns. Besides, I had never been particularly active, never stayed in one place too long. I observed things, but made no speeches, didn't belong to the elite of the youth organization calling for reform (I had long since been expelled), didn't even use its language or style. To my good fortune I was insignificant.

So my concierge did not report me after all, though he had seen me come and go with my machine gun and never displayed signs of sympathy. I buried it in the corner of a then still vacant Pannonia Street lot with Vera, my coconspirator (or rather lookout). Two or three years later a large apartment building went up on that site, and who knows what happened to my well-packed and well-oiled weapon.

One day I ran into my philosophy professor, pacing the Ring in the company of a cla.s.sical philologist. He had joined the new Sovietophile patrol force and was carrying a machine gun and wearing the requisite gray overcoat. He was extremely well-read and capable of reconciling his professional interest in Kierkegaard with his duties as a Party soldier, which included efforts to reeducate me. He wanted me to eliminate all traces of the bourgeoisie from my person, toss them off like old clothes, to steer clear of my old friends and to marry a woman of working-cla.s.s extraction, a Party member. He himself had done as much: his stern, solidly built wife was unsparing in her theoretical criticism. When all was going well, she called him comrade, but whenever any ideological tension arose between them she addressed him as sir. (There was an a.n.a.logous practice in the public sphere: at the workplace we could be comrades, but under police investigation we were inevitably sir.) I merely nodded, seeing from his uniform how far he had gone in his intellectual odyssey, and he merely returned my reserved nod: he had no wish to make friends or trouble, which was fine with me. A weapon makes an eloquent sartorial accessory.

After the second coming of the Soviet tanks-this time in greater numbers and ferocity than on the eve of the uprising-that is, after 4 November, two hundred thousand out of ten million Hungarians left the country, young people for the most part, including half of my cla.s.smates, most of my friends and lovers, and my cousins and sister.

Fifty-sixers? After a brief stint of valor they had a choice: to go or to stay. Those who could go did, fleeing either the previous state of things or the future revenge. They trudged through snow and ice over the spottily guarded border. Just before Christmas Vera set off too with my sister eva. They made it to the border and crossed in a midnight snowstorm, trudging on in the dark along roads marked with Austrian signs. Then they saw Hungarian signs again: they had probably walked around the same hill twice. My sister tried once more the next morning and made it across.

Vera came back on the evening of Christmas day and was a little impatient with me for not having bought a Christmas tree. We went down and managed to find a small one and some decorations. There were gifts and an improvised supper, candlelight and family happiness.

I did not leave in 1956. Every time the opportunity presented itself, I sat down at my desk and wrote. Whenever the time came to make a particularly important decision, I desisted, letting things happen as they would. The more dynamic ones left; the rest of us stuck it out, hardening into shape. When I think of them from a distance, I like them; when I meet up with them, I do my best to slip away.

Though I stayed, I well knew that the dark bell jar of reality and nightmares, the s.p.a.ce where anxiety looked itself in the face, would close around me again soon enough. It was time to learn to cohabit with angst, yet ensure that it did not become master of the house. After 1956 people no longer tacked their thoughts up on trees. The spirit of fifty-six turned to the wall and pulled the blanket up over its ears. Most memories died out, there being no profit in keeping them alive.

The furniture in my sister's room had once been my parents' bedroom set. A carpenter at the beginning of the century had replicated Maria Terezia's bedroom, and I had angel faces gazing down on me from the head of the bed and from the wardrobe. Two naked angels held up a mirror that had once stood atop a dressing and makeup table with its many drawers, some locked, others not, depending on their contents. When I was a child, sweets, condoms, and a pistol were locked up, while more boring things like photographs, locks of hair, and milk-teeth were not.

This bedroom set survived the most extreme vicissitudes. In 1944, when both the German and Soviet command posts had abandoned the house, the poor of the village came and took away everything they could carry. The large three-doored wardrobe was the one thing they could not manage; they did not even smash the mirror, though they did their best to destroy all manner of other things. So the wardrobe was the only piece that stood there in one piece, a monument of sorts in the refuse-strewn house, a harbinger of a restorable order.

By 1960 the wardrobe had moved to the inner room of our sixth-floor Varmegye Street apartment with my bicycle on top. The makeup table served as my desk, though the angels holding the mirror had been disposed of by history, which at this point tended to resemble a collective disaster. When you get hit in the head, you stay down for a while before initiating the long struggle for restoration. We should be players in the match, not victims (or so I would tell my friends at our regular coffeehouse table).

In the early morning hours sometime in 1960 a drunk hacks below my window. I am sympathetic: we are the only ones up. We are surrounded by the kind of silence that amplifies snores, angry whispered words, the screeches of distant trains, the moans of trams rolling out of their yards. There is a flood of stimuli in Budapest, but I can only take in small bits of it. In the hours before dawn we need not contend with the a.s.sault of distracting sounds, calls, and obligations that demand attention and dull us into indifference. Perhaps I am not a city person after all.

When I go out to do field evaluations as a children's welfare supervisor, my job requires me to enter the living quarters of complete strangers as if I were in my own home. Within a couple of minutes I discover I am in fact at home.

"It's the man from the Council!"

A kitchen chair is shoved under my behind.

"Well, sir, you see, what happened was..."

The words gurgle up like water. I hope I can keep from nodding off.

Rezs? Rajnai sleeps in the cellar wrapped in his coat. He sleeps only till dawn, when his drunkenness wears off. The cold wakes him up.

A police officer tries to throw his weight around. I might be able to take him down a peg or two. This I do with a secret pa.s.sion.

A Jehovah's Witness spends his life being jealous of his wife. She could have him inst.i.tutionalized permanently, but keeps having him released at her own risk to protect him from the stress. She brings him home; he tortures her some more.

The wife of an obstetrician's best friend gives birth while the friend, a cripple, waits outside in the hallway for the good news. The doctor reaches into the infant's eyes instead of his r.e.c.t.u.m, blinding it. A surgical error. He goes home and poisons himself.

I have a bad chill. My bones ache. I may have a fever. I had a fish soup at the Golden Pheasant for lunch, which helped me put the "House of Lords"-a rundown vagrant shelter where all my dealings are with toughs-out of my mind. Still, one stern word from me and the beating of sensitive hearts is immediately discernible under the threatening sh.e.l.l.

A woman's husband dies: he was standing on the sidewalk when a bus. .h.i.t him and killed him on the spot. The woman gets a hefty pension to replace her well-situated husband. A year and a half later, the late husband's best friend leaves his wife and moves in with the widow. They marry. As a result, the widow loses her pension, which was larger than her salary. She has a kindergarten-aged son from her first husband, but finds little time for him. I ask her why they got married. They were already living together, weren't they? The woman smiles and blushes. I blush too, then take my leave.

An old woman who sold newspapers walked into the main distribution center and asked for her quota. In those days people were reading Nepakarat Nepakarat (The People's Will), but they foisted (The People's Will), but they foisted Nepszabadsag Nepszabadsag (The People's Freedom) off on her. She went out and sold almost all of them. Three young men, armed, were walking quietly along Rakoczi Street when they spied her with a (The People's Freedom) off on her. She went out and sold almost all of them. Three young men, armed, were walking quietly along Rakoczi Street when they spied her with a Nepszabadsag Nepszabadsag, tore it from her hands, fell upon her, and kicked her as she lay on the ground. As the woman was dragging herself away, one of them said, "Finish her off, why don't you."

"What for?" one of the others said. "She won't dare hawk that trash anymore."

The old woman's skull was fractured. She was blinded in one eye and has had neuritis ever since.

Now on to six more addresses, six new kinds of despair. But first I sit and pray on a bench in Bethlen Square. There is a synagogue nearby.

Now off to the darkest heart of the district. Mrs. Alabardos and her daughter. She wants the girl to respect her. The girl will not. So she is cruel to her.

Then I grant absolution to a widower who has committed incest. His daughter forgives him as well. If I had him locked up, what would they live on?

I look in on little Lajoska Musztafa. His father, now dead, was Turkish. His mother has remarried. Her husband is a locksmith named Bogyi. The handsome young boy was proud of his Turkish roots and mourned his father. When they studied the Turks in school, however, Lajoska heard bad things about them. His fellow pupils started eying him, so he asked to take Bogyi's name. After which Lajoska Musztafa (or, rather, Bogyi) stopped mourning his father.

A young typist goes out to obuda for rowing practice. It is winter. The training grounds are empty, nothing but fields and gardens. Four kids attack her. Screams. All four rape her.

"I know what you look like! I'm going to report you!"

So the boys poke out both her eyes.

An old man sits down next to me on the bench. His face is soft but stubbly; he has few teeth; he wears his winter overcoat even in the sun; he smells. An old woman with a pointy nose sits down with us. Her speech and movements are sprightly, her legs wrapped in bandages under her stockings.

Woman: "What's for lunch?"

Man: "Tea, and bread with lard."

Woman: "Don't you cook?"

Man: "No, I don't."

Woman: "Kids?"

Man: "I had a son. He was executed."

Woman: "So you live all alone?"

Man: "With my bedbugs."

Woman: "But you must have a nice little pension."

Man: "Six hundred forints. I drink it up pretty fast. Then I don't eat, just the leftovers they give me."

Woman: "Where do you live?"

Man: "I've got a nice apartment, two rooms plus kitchen."

Woman: "Why don't you rent out one of your rooms?"

Man: "I did, but my tenant went crazy. He stopped paying."

Woman: "You should get married."

Man: "Yes, but I can't find a woman I like. If she's young, she might not take care of me, and if she's old I'll have to take care of her. So I'm picky."

I stop for a gla.s.s of milk. A wheezing old man underpays by twenty fillers. He walks with two canes. When the woman at the counter calls after him, he pretends not to hear. Every day he underpays by twenty fillers.

A woman is called into a police station and asked about a man they have arrested. He abandoned her not long before. She is either afraid or cannot bring herself to lie, and testifies against him. She is the main incriminating witness.

An electrician has recently lost his wife. Every evening he lays out a table setting for her, then eats alone. He can't stand television. He goes over to the wardrobe and takes out his wife's clothes one by one. "She wore this one on such and such a day and that one on another." That is how he spends his evenings.

The welfare officer has grown thick-skinned from his work. The office madness and his wife's nerves box him in. Unable to sleep, overworked, he learns to put a stern face on things.

The heavy iron chairs on the playground are screwed into the ground. In January 1945 I looked into the corner coffeehouse through the broken gla.s.s. It was crammed to the ceiling with the bodies of Jews shot dead in the ghetto. That was the day we went looking for Aunt Zsofi's mother in the ghetto hospital and found her alive but with a bullet in her face. Now the new wallpaper has a sunflower pattern. An energetic woman greets all comers, apologetically bemoaning the lack of one or another item on the menu as if conveying the news of a dear one's death.

Little shops are opening in the courtyards of the old apartment buildings, and people are withdrawing into them. Here in Elizabeth Town everything is cavelike. There is no pretense about the place; it is full of life and people-friendly. I am no stranger here; I understand everything muttered in its most distant corners. I know the crocheted cloths under the clay pots with dried flowers, the bursts of cackling women, the heavy clank of the iron doors. That tall, attractive girl reading a magazine has probably knitted her midthigh-length white sweater herself. Comfortable oldies emerge from the depths, the espresso machine clatters, and spoons and saucers clink. The man making the coffee never takes a break. The guests know him and make small talk. "Ate the flowers, dammit!" Who Who ate them? ate them?

During my gimn.a.z.ium gimn.a.z.ium years Budapest's Elizabeth Town represented the heart of things, a magic place, the place where I could find anything I might wish for. The population density is highest there, and as they used to leave the main gates open I would catch whiffs of the human smells wafting out of open kitchen windows into courtyards. I would walk along the hallway-like balconies lining the courts as if looking for someone. years Budapest's Elizabeth Town represented the heart of things, a magic place, the place where I could find anything I might wish for. The population density is highest there, and as they used to leave the main gates open I would catch whiffs of the human smells wafting out of open kitchen windows into courtyards. I would walk along the hallway-like balconies lining the courts as if looking for someone.

I used to trade books by weight with the blind antiquarian bookshop owner on Harsfa Street. All that mattered to him was that what I brought in weigh more than what I took away.

"How is it you never go broke?" I asked him.

"You're still a pipsqueak, young man," he said. "You lack all understanding of the profundities of human stupidity and stochastic processes. You suppose that everyone brings in junk and takes away the good stuff, but the opposite holds just as often. Besides, what const.i.tutes junk is a highly relative issue."

On the way to and from school I did some urban sociological field research, if we accept my friend Ivan Szelenyi's definition. Years later, when during a trip to Pecs for a study of urban society we spent the first three days simply walking around and I guiltily suggested we were wasting time, he responded no, we were doing genuine fieldwork. This put my concerns to rest. But the only time I did fieldwork in the strict sense of the word was from 1959 to 1965, when I visited Elizabeth Town families as a youth welfare supervisor for the Public Guardians.h.i.+p Council and wrote reports on their living conditions.

All I could do was set down my impressions, but the great consistency of those impressions gave them the weight of objectivity, and the recommendations I made led to measures affecting the lives of children. My beat was the area between the Ring and Gyorgy Dozsa Street, and I saw six to eight families a day. There was hardly a building I did not pay at least several visits to. Most of the time I spent in apartments facing the inner courtyard rather than the street, so it was the less fortunate aspect of the area I came to know. Sometimes it seemed hard to sink any lower.

What has changed over the past forty years? Poverty is lasting; only the faces change. But poverty is more than a condition; it is a blow, a disaster, a pit you fall into. How can you expect a person in dire straits to have the patience of a saint? When the well-to-do go off the rails, they may or may not pay a price; the poor have no choice: they kick, they scratch, they torture one another.

Reviewers found the world of my first novel, The Case Worker The Case Worker, h.e.l.lish. I found it quite normal: one's imperfections make one mortal, hence real. Moral philosophy must be built on human frailty, and our acceptance of it. Behave outlandishly and you scare people. They take you for a criminal or a lunatic who belongs in a prison or asylum, as if humans were cars and could be taken to the shop for repairs. Crazy people exist, but most of them get by on the outside; only a few give up and entrust themselves to inst.i.tutions. Weakness and abandonment require a.s.sistance.

The more moneyed and better educated a country, the more it confronts issues of weakness, a condition that fosters a frightened, dependent, and childish relations.h.i.+p with body and mind, with sickness, fear, and sorrow, with intimations of mortality. People are frightened by portents of death, having had no training in dealing with their problems and pain. If something is not entirely as it should be, they are in a bad way. Yet the zone between a perfect state of affairs and a wretched one is where most of life plays itself out.

My workdays were full of decisions, and everyone I met was a challenge. Each of my clients required some kind of action. Some people need more than a cordial nod. But how far are you willing to go when an entirely helpless child enters your charge?

It was worthwhile to spend time in the kitchens of those one- and two-room apartments: each kitchen was interesting in its own way. It is only when you hear a hundred versions of the same story that you begin to understand and feel it. I had a daily wish to combat my overwhelming feeling of superficiality which, even as I flattered it by acknowledging its existence, I found stultifying. "They are all of them just like me," I said to myself every evening on the brightly lit tram after leaving my charges.

A yokel gawking at urban life, I was never blase. I studied the metropolis, wanting to write about everything, taste everything through my words. Asking my questions and giving my curiosity free rein, I felt an infectious bliss. Budapest was an endlessly juicy tidbit. Even in twenty years a voyeur from the provinces could not get enough of it.

At the time I was also editing Tolstoy's diaries. Tolstoy would begin each morning with a vow and end each evening with a guilty conscience; he broke every vow: he drank, wh.o.r.ed, brawled, played cards, and picked fights. I did not brawl or play cards.

One day I got up early, read some Tolstoy proofs, and went to the Magyar Helikon Publis.h.i.+ng House where I edited Hungarian translations of Russian and French cla.s.sics. The head of literature called me in. He wanted to appear in high spirits, but the stories he told were not happy ones.

F. had intended to marry a working-cla.s.s girl designated by the Party when his "bourgeois" girlfriend informed him she was pregnant. Abortion was out of the question in those days. Socialist morality took the side of the girl; his fallibility took him to his girlfriend, a cla.s.s enemy. The child would be born, but he could not simply leave his bride-to-be because of an ideologically and otherwise problematic woman. Like the poet Attila Jozsef, F. lay down on the train tracks in front of a locomotive. The train sliced off both his legs. The policeman who arrived on the scene established that his nice trousers were salvageable. His fiancee visited him every day at the hospital. F.'s first question when he came to was: "Did you find my party members.h.i.+p card?" Two weeks later his bourgeois girlfriend came in and confessed that she wasn't pregnant; she had merely wanted him to marry her. In 1956 the miners got word that a Party bigwig lived on the fourth floor. F. was no Party bigwig, but he did happen to live next to the Party's district office. The miners stormed his apartment intending to take him off, then noticed his artificial legs. They knocked them together, enjoying the noise they made.

He was my boss at the publis.h.i.+ng house. My fellow proofreader Tamas Katona and I would carry him in the elevator in our intertwined hands. Though somewhat embittered, he was unfailingly alert when it came to ideological matters. Yet by playing on his sentimentality, I managed to trick him: I published Isaac Babel and Bruno Schulz.

I would look at women with the alert hunger of a hunter. In those days I felt there was no simpler way to get to know people than by lying naked with them in the same bed. Conversation is better afterwards; it is permeated with reciprocal grat.i.tude and openness. The girl who sold bread and the hairdresser, the girls studying at the university and the women colleagues teaching there, the soprano who lived across the way, the pediatric nurse-they all were frightfully interesting to me, every one different in her own way, miraculous in her uniqueness.

I would go to the station and pick out a train, then get off at a small-town station, take a room in a hotel, and look out onto the main square. The constricted undulations, the slow pa.s.sings were all so many offerings of meat, in hiding until they burst into the public eye. I turned around as a woman with a nice body pa.s.sed by, paused a moment, abandoning my original purpose, and set off after her. We entangled, then fell out of each other. A housewife babbling to her baby was a font as precious as old diaries discovered in the attic or the ferocious rancor of a divorce court.

I phoned a woman at the number she had slipped into my pocket among mutual friends. I canceled all my plans, went to the address she gave me, and tried to guess as I walked up the stairs what she would have on: underwear or armor? How did she arrange to be alone? What would her smell be like from up close? I go and sit down beside her, listen to her talk about all kinds of things. I have never yet heard a story that was entirely dull. And what will be the situation that gives rise to the quick embrace that encounters virtually no resistance? What is the touch that will make her s.h.i.+ver and whimper like a child? And what will happen afterwards? Will she phone me back or show up unexpectedly at impossible moments?

At sixteen we are awkward because our bodies are complete but our understanding still childlike. At twenty-seven we are ill at ease because our minds are adult but our blood still childlike.

I have a job, but a tiresome one. I should be a Confucian at the Guardians.h.i.+p Council and a Taoist at home. I laugh at the thought. Who could pull it off? I have a contract with the publisher for a book on Stendhal, but am not writing it. I have a love, but am nervously repelled by the idea of marrying again. I have friends, but know what they are going to say before they say it. In fact, I sometimes fear I know what I will be thinking the day after tomorrow. I have reached the point where each successive birthday only reminds me of what I have failed to accomplish during the stupid five years since the Revolution.

At our regular coffeehouse table I made some antideterministic remarks, unable to reconcile myself to the idea that I am the way I am as a result of the effect on me of others. I insisted there was someone inside me making complex decisions at every moment, though I didn't know exactly who it was. My decisions were not influenced by my father's wealth or my childhood s.e.xual fantasies, I a.s.serted in opposition to fas.h.i.+onable contemporary views, reverse determinisms I found tasteless and morally questionable. This is a land of sloughed-off responsibility, a land where people justify their acts, whatever they are.

In the library catalogue room a former professor of mine mentioned that he had been hearing identical antigovernment theories from various students of his and that when quizzed they all turned out to have talked to me recently. My teacher, who was in direct contact with the highest echelons, shook his head and said no good would come of this. I should think carefully about what I said. And to whom.

After the fall of the Revolution, in the "consolidated sixties," I encountered the touchiness of tyranny wherever I looked. The police captain and the concierge were the state's patron saints. They were granted practically nothing else but the right to high-minded rage and to vengeance on their fellow citizens in the name of the state. Do not imagine that people who appear intelligent, good-natured, and civilized will not go wild when presented with a chance to take umbrage in the name of the state. And there is no one they despise more than the person who exposes the vanity of their everyday treacheries, for that person denies their very raison d'etre. Who is the traitor's most natural enemy if not the non-traitor?

I had a cla.s.smate whose mother happened to see her son standing on a chair in his room delivering an address. He was denouncing his friends, one by one, to the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikolai Sergeevich Khrushchev. On and on he went, his voice rising in intensity, until he fainted and fell off the chair.

It was always cause for celebration when we happened upon islands of terra firma in the ocean of verbiage. Reading substantive works during the years of censors.h.i.+p was a form of refuge, a suspension of the falsities that had elbowed their way into house and home. One good book in my bag was recompense for all the cliches that had to be endured. We can use literature to be hard on our fellow humans, but if we truly learn to read we can use it to forgive them and revel in their beauty. Since my gimn.a.z.ium gimn.a.z.ium days I have believed that the constant discussion of substantive texts is what keeps humanity going. days I have believed that the constant discussion of substantive texts is what keeps humanity going.

From spring to autumn I sought out garden spots. There were still outdoor restaurants with tables decked in red-checked cloths, and I deemed it a mark of distinction to lunch in the garden of the Feszek Club with writers older than myself, the prize of the day being the chance to measure my mind against theirs and thereby establish I had a rightful place at the table. There would always be someone in the company who had just been abroad-to Paris, naturally-and would speak of it to the provincials, for whom Paris is as far off as the moon. But just as we had no desire to pop up to the moon, we could do without Paris. We had refined the art of determining who all and what all we could do just fine without.

You could still play foot-tennis with a soccer ball in the street. Little girls still chalked hopscotch squares. You could still find mossy ruins and nooks for love trysts. It was still the fas.h.i.+on to carve arrow-pierced hearts and initials into tree trunks. There were still hideaways where a poet and his paramour could settle into a room on the basis of his verses.