A Guest In My Own Country Part 8

The latent elegance of the city transcended all obstacles. You could still find white-haired watchmakers in nineteenth-century workshops and elderly, elegantly dressed Jewish salesmen in state-owned fabric shops. Waiters with prewar manners still served you in restaurants that still featured prewar pianists.

The only people in my neighborhood who could afford a car-a koda-were the saucy fas.h.i.+on designer and perhaps a writer or two or film director. The city still belonged to the pedestrians, a fact of which I took free advantage. To this day I have not learned how to drive.

We knew each other's habits in love: our lives were virtually open books. We were shut in together on the same stage, and love was our ethnography. We sought it out, then did what we could to escape its consequences so as to seek it out again. There were no girls in white boots leaning on their cars. Business pleasure and private pleasure were not yet distinct realms. If someone was in pain from, say, the infidelity (or, for that matter, the fidelity) of a partner, the chronicle of their heart's agony was met with sympathy rather than scorn. Everyone had a trusted friend to pour his heart out to; all secrets tended to become public knowledge.

Women in the center of town and at summer houses in the hills, women in every district, in little ground-floor rooms looking onto courtyards, women encountered in the night, women encountered in cafes staring back at you, letting their eyes rest on you, women looking down from the bend in the stairs above, entering a shop and pleasantly surprised to note the loyal perseverance of this still-unknown knight. Girls who hopped onto a tram, girls we hopped on after, and finally the embrace of unantic.i.p.ated intensity, as if we had set off explosives inside each other.

They were looking for something more, or less, than I was. They were curious, and so was I. The bolder ones took the elevator; the more timid tiptoed up to the sixth floor and hesitated before ringing the bell. Thighs twisted and curled; nails clawed the bed; b.r.e.a.s.t.s swayed left and right; l.a.b.i.a opened and closed, sopped and dried. You were good if you didn't toss her out, if you were willing to stick around, go for a drink, look at the falling snow, study the veining of a hand, hear out a family saga. They were psychologists and hairstylists, teachers and tapestry-makers, lawyers and medical a.s.sistants, opera singers and bookkeepers, ceramicists and bank tellers. What I like about many women is their two-sidedness: a woman without a hidden agenda is like a lily-of-the-valley without a scent. The lady comrade made it clear she disagreed with you in matters ideological, but demonstrated total agreement in matters s.e.xual. Leaning against the banister, the doorjamb, the mirrored bureau, on the ground, in the bathtub, in the pantry, in the most unorthodox places. Sailing over hurdles, getting back at prohibitions, ending up in new beds beside new bodies observed with the exhilaration of a teenager.

The bed is warm, the radiator cold. I can reach the nose of the white Rococo angel with my left hand. I give it a pat. All's well with the world. I have developed a lifestyle not particularly suited to a married man, but permissible for one in the process of divorce. I go to bed early in the evening and get up at three a.m. Then I climb into the bathtub and lie back cross-legged, the cold water splas.h.i.+ng over my chest. A goose-down comforter calls me back to its embrace in the unheated room. I deliberate whether to sanctify the day with a gla.s.s of tokay. (My sister eva has had a case of tokay delivered to me from America.) My birthday is coming up, a number substantial if not round: twenty-seven. It is the year of our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Sixty.

I begin my day earlier than the schoolchild, earlier than the factory worker. I go out into the still-dark city, wending my way to the Pipacs Bar. They let me in; they are open until five. The guests are drifting homeward, and the only girls are the ones the taxis have brought back. There I sit by the jukebox, absorbed in the work of Samuel Beckett, engulfed by the smell of dusty curtains, polished shoes, coffee, cigarettes, beer, hairspray, and the body odors of a city where only every other apartment has a bathroom.

"Looking for decadence?" asks the pianist, his hands prancing around the keyboard. Am I looking for decadence? More a state of fallenness, the hour where makeup on wrinkles smudges, when the collar pops open behind the necktie, when the belt gets loosened a notch or two. The Finnish amba.s.sador's son starts dropping gla.s.ses, but Gizi comes over and sweeps up the shards. "You just go ahead," she says. She gets a good tip for every sweep-up.

Out to the banks of the Danube, to the Pest abutment of the bombed-out Elizabeth Bridge! The little motorboat is not running yet, but I need to look at the water every morning from the steps that line the riverbank. It is not so long since we set out from here to a still backwater at the Tas locks, where the surface shone black and the waters lapped softly amid perfect silence. A factory owner whose plant had been appropriated by the state had survived the difficult Rakosi era by fis.h.i.+ng there for sturgeon every morning and selling the catch to the better restaurants.

Leaving the Pipacs Bar one morning in early summer, I have a few words with the Petfi statue: "Europe is quiet, Mr. Petfi, quiet again. We're keeping our mouths shut as we did after 1848, after your revolution, and at least no one is getting shot into the Danube. But as you know, Mr. Petfi, they hanged our Prime Minister, Imre Nagy, two years back. We were terribly broken up when the news was announced, and could think of nothing to say."

Ambrus Oltvanyi, our host that evening, made us excellent tea with a series of scything movements, a legacy of polio. Towering above us in bookshelves that reached to the ceiling was the intellectual history of the nineteenth century. We were overcome with the beauty of the view from his windows, but Ambrus tempered our enthusiasm. "Yes, it's beautiful all right, but beauty is a great thief of time."

Ambrus's father, Imre, was a great collector and patron of the arts, a former banker, a retired Minister of Finance, a great believer in civil society, and a translator of composers' biographies. He spent the worst years of communism in his bed in a silk robe, surrounded by teapots and ashtrays, the corner window darkened by a crimson velvet curtain. When his son speculated that the current regime might turn out a bit more liberal, Imre listened to him quietly as if he were a madman.

In 1961 I began a half-time job for Helikon preparing a ten-volume, onion-paper, leather-and-canvas-bound edition of Lev Tolstoy's collected works. My days pa.s.sed under the sign of Tolstoy. I read A Confession A Confession sitting on the bank of the Danube by the remains of the Elizabeth Bridge. sitting on the bank of the Danube by the remains of the Elizabeth Bridge.

It is a work unparalleled in its clarity of vision (particularly the first half), though lacking in personal humility in the face of the universe. It is an honest and pa.s.sionate compendium of every pessimistic, existentialist, life-denying philosophy. Once the mind breaks away from the superficialities of a mechanical will to live and daily tasks and responsibilities and rejects its ident.i.ty with its existence in time, in other words, once it begins to question life itself and has a good look at death (which it had previously lacked the imagination and freedom to know), it suddenly feels that mortal existence is distressingly pointless, repellent, and humiliating and that it is pointless to seek a goal or mission or anything higher into which one's individual existence may meld and find peace. Science is valid only when it deals with nature, which has no mind; it loses its validity the moment it tackles the human element. We have no goal, no future other than the pursuit of our own annihilation. The mind is incompatible with life. Consistent and logical thought leads to suicide.

The only way to keep suicide at bay, Tolstoy tells us, is to develop modes of behavior that skirt the issue. The common people, fettered by workaday struggles, are too dull to devote their lives to seeing things as they are. People surprised by death with a blow to the back of the head may be left out the equation. One pure type is the hedonist, who revels in intense pleasure, who does nothing but eat, drink, and make love; another is the scar-picker, who debases life instead of confronting death, who looks towards death half-crazed, with endless whining.

Then what sustains life? asks Tolstoy. What pulls a person through despair? What makes suffering worth the price? What pacifies the soul of the people? What structures our civilization? What in history transcends the personal?

Faith, answers Tolstoy. He first settles on religious faith, then searches for something personal. Faith and intelligence are unrelated. One cannot use the one to verify or support the other. After intelligence has done its work, faith demands its rights at the outer limit of our helplessness. (Faith and not G.o.d, Who is a consequence of faith, faith as one of the vital functions.) The concept of infinity does not arise from the circle of the finite. Faith carries us beyond the limits of the finite to a state of humility in the face of the infinite, a humility that releases us by undoing our very selves.

At this point his train of thought gives way to an apostolic brand of speech, which I did not follow in its stark moralizing tendencies, its idealization of the peasants and the poor, its depiction of the landowners' guilt, and its romantic opposition to civilization.

My own experience with the poor-manual laborers, people who have received the short end of the stick-has not borne out Tolstoy's claims. As I see it, we must all pa.s.s through the thinking man's stages of development. I can testify that Budapest's Chicago, Elizabeth Town, has developed a kind of raw, barroom variety of existentialism, the lives of its inhabitants subject to the same insoluble questions and same loneliness and consternation affecting those of us who are relatively well educated.

I would like to think I will never curse life, not even if I develop a serious illness. This is something I wrote forty years ago in the Kisposta Cafe. I prize what is what is with all its fortune and misfortune. I have no desire to break with this world or merge with it. For the time being I hope the world and I will keep staring each other down. with all its fortune and misfortune. I have no desire to break with this world or merge with it. For the time being I hope the world and I will keep staring each other down.

All I can a.s.sume about the future is that human life on earth will eventually disappear. This likelihood offers me no moral choice. I have always been amazed at how simpleminded religious concepts of the afterlife and communist-inspired (or other invented) utopias tend to be.

Both earthly and heavenly utopias presuppose a rejection of the world, of the here and the now. Any exaltation of the future entails a vilification of the present. Whatever my present existence may be like, I cannot wish for something radically and elementally different, because I do not believe in the possibility of such a thing. In fact, I find promises of theoretically good alternative states as repulsive as common lies.

Are we capable of living here in our bounded present, rejoicing when we can manage it, suffering when we are in pain, keeping the prospect of death before us, yet rejecting fear of the next time round, the other side?

Human beings are travelers, on their way somewhere. Once there, they are travelers no longer. Amidst all the suffering en route they naturally think of how nice it will be to get there, the way an exhausted person thinks of falling asleep to blank out everything. But it feels good to wake up the next morning too.

We live with three problems: the vexations of our daily existence, the uncertainty of our knowledge of the world, and the certain knowledge of our deaths. The believer says that G.o.d, the only truth, compensates for all this. Even the nonbeliever can hope for a friendly obituary or, in rare cases, a memorial tablet on the house where he lived. But some people require no compensation: they accept the problems and are unshaken by the ultimate uncertainty of their knowledge of the universe. How can one have certain knowledge of the universe when one can say nothing certain about one's nearest and dearest?

In this part of the world, people eat and drink a lot, buy ugly clothes off the rack, and watch television nonstop. They don't execute the opposition, because there is no more opposition. There are no happy and unhappy people; there is really nothing and no one at all. Our society is sometimes tedious, sometimes delirious. Having had it with uniformity, it is receptive to disorder of every kind. It is a glutinous heap, incapable of taking things seriously or knowing where to draw the line.

If you are looking for an elaborate, sublime apparition here, you are in for a disappointment. But if you feel you absolutely must have a genuinely local article, then try this: shapeless battles abandoned before they begin. All you can find here are the jumbled by-products of existence. Everyone is a snail, a caterpillar, a worm. We are strong on flesh, weak on spirit. People die of fatty degeneration of the heart. There is no slaughterhouse; it is all do it yourself. Premature debility carries you off.

I have tried to wring the self-pity out of my prose.

When I first met Julia Langh, who would be my wife from the autumn of 1960 to the autumn of 1976, she had floated into the Kisposta Cafe trailing blond hair and a rustling black raincoat and wearing a white blouse with a turned-down collar. She had just come from the university-where she had been accepted thanks to her perfect gimn.a.z.ium gimn.a.z.ium record and a captivating articulateness-and entered the cafe, a first-year student in French and Hungarian, suppressing her timidity and wondering, "My G.o.d, what happens now? Who is that old man, that twenty-seven-year old?" She was not quite eighteen. record and a captivating articulateness-and entered the cafe, a first-year student in French and Hungarian, suppressing her timidity and wondering, "My G.o.d, what happens now? Who is that old man, that twenty-seven-year old?" She was not quite eighteen.

I would show up at six a.m. with notebook, pen, and ink, as if punching a time clock. It allowed me to watch the rendezvous, generally hurried, that took place before work.

Her overcoat unb.u.t.toned, Juli sweeps in on the wind. It is better not to stand in her way, because she can bowl you over. (This gives a hint of things to come: while you gape at her in wonder, she has put breakfast on the table and talked Miklos into finis.h.i.+ng his story some other time and Dorka to stop covering Miklos's mouth with her hand. But that is all a few years down the road. First she had to go through the university.) Her entrance does not go unnoticed. The waitress gives an approving glance to her inky-fingered regular: "Others have been pretty, true, but this one has the energy to match." Juli even has a ma.n.u.script in tow. The elderly gentleman emits a satisfied "Hmm." (She wrote well then, as she did forty years later, carrying our youngest grandchild in her arms on her way to the car, where our daughter-in-law sat at the wheel and our son Miklos sat calming his son Janko, the three-year-old swooping eagle, as he spread a s.h.i.+elding wing over his three-month-old brother, who, he tells all and sundry, "is going bald.") From that morning on, Juli and I saw each other practically every day for sixteen years. I could always be a.s.sured of stories: she is the kind of person whom elaborate things happen to, or who can make them happen. For her part she did not appear to find the stories of the aging welfare officer and part-time proofreader tedious and had no qualms about putting the necktied knight in his place when the stories turned into a.n.a.lyses. She was obviously free of all dishonorable intentions.

It was days before the first kiss, when her head leaned back just a bit. Then lips fused and bodies coupled to the point of exhaustion, leaving not a fingernail-sized patch on the other uncultivated-a mutual cultivation that continued until I checked two fabulous personalities in swaddling clothes out of the hospital across the street and put them in a cab.

Who are you? As we looked at each other, I tried to sail through her eyes to the harbor of the enigma. And who are those two figures in the slatted bed carrying on a mysterious conversation, sister supplying little brother with imaginative stories and he turning to her, the nearest authority, with his questions. Everything a family needed-except that I was not really there. The marriage cla.s.sifieds of the day used to end: No adventurers need apply! They made me shudder.

During our courts.h.i.+p Juli would tactfully remind me to remove my arm from her shoulder when we neared her home, because the eyes in the windows had known her from earliest childhood and expected of her the sort of behavior befitting a young lady. Juli's grandmother asked her permission to leave the family's t.i.tle of n.o.bility hanging on the wall when her youngest granddaughter's suitor came to call, though she ultimately resigned herself to the fact that, though a polished gentleman to all appearances, he was (no use mincing words) a Jew. Jews can be decent, can they not?

There followed roughly sixteen years of cohabitation and submission to a common judgment-the children's gaze-confident as we were of the strict but fair verdict of Anna Dora (1965) and Miklos Istvan (1967) and hopeful as we were of their mercy.

The Case Worker appeared in 1969, the darkest book to come out during those years. I could not believe it was permitted to appear, so strongly did it call the regime's official self-portrait into question. No matter from what angle I read my words, I could find no hint of uplift, the hero and narrator of the novel merely handling his cases as best he can, trudging on, ever downward. appeared in 1969, the darkest book to come out during those years. I could not believe it was permitted to appear, so strongly did it call the regime's official self-portrait into question. No matter from what angle I read my words, I could find no hint of uplift, the hero and narrator of the novel merely handling his cases as best he can, trudging on, ever downward.

After 1956 many of us were in that situation. Our lives would straighten out only if the regime changed. But that did not seem possible. At best, change would be slow in coming. In the meantime we pulled our hats over our eyes.

In the morning I would report to my new job but soon abandoned it for the cafe on the corner, the Alkotas (Creation). Even so, I managed to get more done than those poor old fogies who run panting from tram stop to office. Signs of work flourished on my desk-charts, texts, slide rule (it was a planning bureau with liberal pretensions)-but the morning still belonged to me as it had in my earlier days as a welfare officer. I had begun to grow into the city. My person and my name were now recognized here and there.

It was in this context that Ivan Szelenyi and I did our first extensive urban sociological study in Pecs and Szeged. We used approaches current at the time. Walking into my first computer room I felt I was entering a temple: How does a system of settlement relate to the structure of society as a whole? How do people move in social s.p.a.ce? How do they get where they are? I traveled the country using a flexible system of optics: at times a microscope, at times a telescope. I combined close-ups and long-distance shots within a single sentence. I had put politics on the back burner, my concern now being how we might put up with one another in a time that pa.s.ses slowly.

I roamed about in search of useful conversation partners, walking the streets as if they were the stacks of a library filled with books I had never heard of. I sniffed around doorways and courtyards, copied out stairway and toilet graffiti (both offers and requests), and knocked about as if snuggling up to a woman with a boundless body.

The large hopes had gone up in smoke, but small hopes remained. At the time any celebration of life would have seemed a self-compromising form of kitsch, but love still served to counteract the constrictions of life. Amid so many prohibitions it felt good to eat forbidden fruit, break rules. The one-night stand had its honor.

And there was literature. Literature had remained an adventure. Who can tell what events will filter into our storytelling? The number of tellable tales far exceeds the number that can be put down on paper, and what we choose to put down on paper is arbitrary. You pull something out of the spectrum; you reject the rest. That is the karate of saying no.

The aim of a story is to be hard to forget. We writers take over selves we have never before inhabited. We look into the heads, and beds, of others. Can you be other than what you are? Once the child who needs no stories comes into this world, we must all start to worry.

As a child I would lie on my stomach in the darkness as it rolled in from the window in treacherous waves, pressing my fists into my eyelids to call up unforeseen images, images over which I had no control, withdrawing my will to let them flow where they pleased. Once they begin to flow, I told myself, let them happen, let them follow their own secret logic.

Later I would put off decisions, letting myself be swept into marriages (and jobs) and entrusting the progress of my life to happenstance. I felt that by doing something, I learned more about it than by not doing it. I felt a constant devilish temptation to escape the pa.s.sage of time.

In 1973 I finished my second novel, The City Builder The City Builder. Although the head of the Magvet? Publis.h.i.+ng House liked it, he felt he had to reject it because of its dark view of the world. (It was ultimately published in Hungary in 1977, minus certain pa.s.sages, after it had come out in German and French, without official permission, in violation of the law.) Also in 1973-during a trial for incitement mounted against my friend Miklos Haraszti, the accusation centering on his superb essay "Piece Work"-the political police declared me a suspect and carried out several searches of my apartment, confiscating my diaries, firing me from my job, and depriving me of the right to travel abroad for three years.

In the spring of 1974, Ivan Szelenyi and I rented a peasant house in Csobanka, a mountain village not far from Budapest. The "s.e.xton's house" was part of the parish priest's residence and led to a friends.h.i.+p with Father Zsigmond, a Benedictine monk. It was in this house that Ivan and I wrote The Intellectuals on the Road to Cla.s.s Power The Intellectuals on the Road to Cla.s.s Power in secret. We planned to publish it abroad. in secret. We planned to publish it abroad.

On New Year's Eve in 1974, a large group gathered in the one-and-a-half room studio apartment of the painter Ilona Keser?. We were surrounded by her colored arcs depicting female bodies, birds, and gravestones along with her engraving equipment and other tools. There was a mood of excitement in the air. It was reminiscent of sixty-eight. Our cultural region was preparing for something new. A subculture, in the broadest sense, had formed. There were alliances of friends in every possible field: everybody knew everybody else, and we met regularly. There were rival schools as well, and the tribal chiefs cast jealous glances at one another in the Young Artists' Club. The secret police cast their own glances, so as to prepare a precise description of the age in all its color. The Counterreformation was in full swing.

Having lost my position as urban sociologist the previous year, I was working as an a.s.sistant nurse at a work-therapy mental inst.i.tution in the countryside. I directed story readings and excursions and chatted with the patients. My experience in the mental inst.i.tution was indispensable for the novel I had just begun, The Loser The Loser. I learned a lot from both staff and patients. Rationality was part and parcel of our state culture, or had at least come to be absorbed into it, while critical att.i.tudes-dissident att.i.tudes, if you will-depend on transrational transrational decisions. They may be matters of faith, they may result from a quick blow, but they are inevitable. You follow the path open to you, risk or no risk. But why? Is it intellectual gratification? A command issued by the hedonism of thought? It was sheer pleasure to think through the possibilities. decisions. They may be matters of faith, they may result from a quick blow, but they are inevitable. You follow the path open to you, risk or no risk. But why? Is it intellectual gratification? A command issued by the hedonism of thought? It was sheer pleasure to think through the possibilities.

Friends of mine, superb minds and personalities, would poke a finger to their foreheads if we met on the street and ask me if I had lost my mind. "Have you no idea where you are living?" they would ask Ivan and me. The simplest explanation for our (to them) incomprehensible acts was that we had understood something and written it down just because we felt like it.

Early one summer morning thirty years ago the doorbell rang and five men burst into my apartment brandis.h.i.+ng a search warrant. The Major looked over my papers, sat down at my desk, and said, "I'll crush you like a leaf." He was a nervous, pedantic man who bragged he would clean up the mess I had made in my filing cabinet. He told me that if I kept my keys in a leather pouch as he did they would not pull my jacket pocket out of shape. He instructed my children not to tangle up the ta.s.sels on the rugs. (At his house they had a special brush for keeping them straight.) He then informed his wife he would soon have done with the suspect and would hurry home so they would not miss the movie. That was how I found out that I was a suspect.

I asked him how I could have incited anyone to hate the basic inst.i.tutions of the Hungarian People's Republic with my diary entries, when I kept them locked up in a filing cabinet. Nothing could be simpler, he said. If I had a visitor and went into the kitchen to make coffee, he could hop over to the filing cabinet, take out the diary, and read it. That was all it took, and there you had your criminal act, with me as criminal, my seditious diary as corpus delicti, and as victim-my curious but ideologically innocent guest who, during the time it took me to brew him coffee, had made his move. I always invite my guests to the kitchen when I make coffee, I told him. "The kitchen?" he asked, concerned, as if this would const.i.tute an affront to my guest. Yes, I told him mildly. That's where coffee gets made. I also told him my friends didn't do things like poke through my ma.n.u.scripts. The only people I knew who engaged in such warped practices were your people. Professionals, in other words, who were not susceptible to being incited to hate the fundamental inst.i.tutions of the Hungarian People's Republic.

"Your daughter is eight years old. She She can read her father's notes. The moment she lays eyes on them the conditions for regulation 127/b have been satisfied. In fact, I don't even need to establish the fact of her having seen them, only the possibility that she has. If the key is in the lock, the crime can take place-a can read her father's notes. The moment she lays eyes on them the conditions for regulation 127/b have been satisfied. In fact, I don't even need to establish the fact of her having seen them, only the possibility that she has. If the key is in the lock, the crime can take place-a criminal act criminal act, mind you. Because what you think is your own business, but once an enemy thought acquires objective written status, that is no longer a private matter."

I imagine he had just recently learned the phrase "acquires objective status." The Major liked sounding scholarly. "Besides, the key to the file cabinet is not on your key ring." This was hard evidence-of which he was duly proud.

The next day he sent a police car for our son Miklos's nanny. Erzsi had instinctively a.s.serted that the Engineer's filing cabinet was always locked and she had never seen the key. The Major barked at her to stop lying. Erzsi blushed, then rose. A retired textile worker, she was a model proletarian and a member of the Workers' Guard. The young man had no right to call her a liar. She had worked her entire life in the same factory, lived in the same house. He could ask her coworkers or her neighbors whether she was a liar or not. (When she retold the story recently, she gave a little laugh and said, "The fact of the matter is I fibbed a little.") In any case, the Major was unimpressed. When the Department of the Interior rescinded my right to travel abroad for three years and the Major personally saw to it that I was dismissed from my job (if I insisted on writing something that was bad for me, I must be suffering from a maladaptive disorder), their logic found support with certain friends of mine, all bright, decent people in their own right, who wished me well but took it for granted that challenging authority would elicit a stern response. Some thought me crazy, others devilishly clever-but I was really quite guileless. In any case, I was now a freelancer after eleven years in the employ of the state.

Not that I had ever wished for a public role, a podium under my feet. The Major had saved me from an inst.i.tutional career. If anything, my goal was internal emigration: a garden I would leave only to satisfy obligations I felt obliged to comply with. I had no desire to win or to lose, just to hold out a while longer. G.o.d forbid I should be the carrier of some first person plural. I shun the high ground that inspires envy. Even while under the employ of the state I managed to avoid having a single subordinate. I am at home only in groups where all are equal and speak in their own name-and feel free to tease one another. When required to speak or read on a stage, I slip back down as soon as possible.

After 1973 Ivan and I could be sure that every doc.u.ment ultimately reached them them, that they they read every sociological interview we made. We wrote; they read. Research became evidence: every fact became part of the case against us; every wiretapped word made it stronger. Words could sweep you away, force you into roles, set traps for you to fall into, turn against you; they could make you do things you never dreamed of. read every sociological interview we made. We wrote; they read. Research became evidence: every fact became part of the case against us; every wiretapped word made it stronger. Words could sweep you away, force you into roles, set traps for you to fall into, turn against you; they could make you do things you never dreamed of.

I first encountered Ivan Szelenyi at some meeting or other and found him standoffish, but then most of my friends are standoffish. He asked me from behind his pipe, "So you people are doing a survey too?" My answer came out a dilettantish jumble that only reinforced the wearily magnanimous superiority of the fellow, whom I judged to be five years my junior (about twenty-eight to my thirty-three). His jacket and tie were perfect. Everything about him bespoke the civilized young scholar, a rare bird in our context.

I was taken aback by the you people you people as well. So my office and I were a as well. So my office and I were a we? we? And he was with the Academy's Sociological Inst.i.tute. But we soon realized our inst.i.tutions could pool forces and create a new wave in Hungarian urban sociology. Our incipient friends.h.i.+p provided an added stimulus, but neither mentioned it explicitly: we were too bashful. And he was with the Academy's Sociological Inst.i.tute. But we soon realized our inst.i.tutions could pool forces and create a new wave in Hungarian urban sociology. Our incipient friends.h.i.+p provided an added stimulus, but neither mentioned it explicitly: we were too bashful.

Suddenly I was a young Turk reformer in a planning and research inst.i.tute of the ministry. Ivan and I-published professionals from Budapest, presenters at conferences where the most the local eminences could do was make a comment or two-mocked or disparaged things they still found interesting and respectable.

As I have said, Ivan taught me that walks are the sociologist's primary modus operandi: If you want to know what a city is like, walk its streets. Observe the rocking chairs along the narrow, sloping sewage gutters that go by the name of thoroughfares in Pecs's poverty-stricken Zidina neighborhood. Watch the grandmother telling stories to her grandchild. Note the mirror up by the window enabling the old woman to follow who is walking along the street, ensuring her a constant flow of fresh information from the outside world.

Ivan had an eye for such details along with a propensity for good dinners with our mostly local colleagues, who became our sources for gossip and local folklore. The morning after, they would take us to the Gypsy settlement or to the new row of elegant apartments they dubbed "Cadre Ridge." We also paid visits to any number of locals: council presidents, party secretaries, ancient barons, priests, schoolteachers, blacksmiths, gardeners, merchants, miners.

I would step out of my front door in Budapest at eight a.m., and by ten the propeller plane had me in Szechenyi Square in Pecs, where I began the day at a marble table at the Cafe Nador, watching the locals coming and going southern style, in waves. Then Ivan and I would set off, exchanging greetings with the people we met-men leaning on shovels in their gardens, women with net shopping bags, short-skirted, ponytailed girls whom we asked for directions.

We were the saccharine-smiled, arrogant sophisticates who had seen so much of the world. I had spent a total of maybe two months in the West; I had written in a cafe on the ile de la Cite, observed the blue-ap.r.o.ned peasants in a nearby village, and lain at the nearby seash.o.r.e in Normandy alongside the great transatlantique transatlantique, the France France. Ivan was a hopeless cosmopolitan who had spent a year in America on a Ford Foundation grant. When I asked him to describe New York, he said, "You're in New York and you're tossing and turning with insomnia because you have no lion. So you grab your wallet and out you go and before you know it you've got a lion on a leash."

"Hmm," I said to myself. "Why didn't this man go into literature?"

One night a good ten years later I had trouble sleeping in New York and went into the first grocery store I found to ask where I could get my hands on a lion. "Wouldn't you rather have a nice tongue sandwich?" asked the owner, a strapping fellow with a smile to match.

Which all goes to show that research and a sense of humor are not mutually exclusive and that you could do good work under the old system as well. The orange Volkswagen that was the vehicle for our merry pop-sociology, with our younger colleague Robert Manchin at the wheel, took us to one after another of the hundred-odd villages we had chosen at random. In a parsonage we devoutly touched the four-hundred-year-old desk on which the Calvinist preacher Gaspar Karolyi had translated the entire Bible from Hebrew and Greek. We would take large bags of children's clothes out to the Gypsy settlements, where kids ran out of their shanties naked through the snow, bombarding us with their "Money, Mister! Give us money!"

Sometimes we thought we would simply observe them and describe their social structures; sometimes we imagined that if we managed to define the situation reforms might come of it. But the system, the ultimate subject of our observations, searched our apartments one day, initiating what would become a long series of unpleasantries, probably under the impression that if they put us on strict notice and isolated us, others would learn from our example and we would either come to our senses or leave the country as our Russian, Czech, and East German dissident colleagues had. We were naive perhaps, but so were the authorities. We persevered.

We persevered with Ivan's peripatetic method, lugging the tape recorder up hill and down dale, discussing our subjects while perching on Serbian gravestones in Csobanka or a bench at the base of Oszoly Cliff. Then came the precise formulation beneath old brown rafters and bugging devices. We grew accustomed to pa.s.sing the narration back and forth, giving signals to one another, rewording sentences that, though perfectly fine to begin with, a.s.sumed added l.u.s.ter from an unexpected twist or transition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We told each other that come what may our efforts had been worth it, and agreed on a story: we had no idea whose ma.n.u.script it was or what it was. Disowning one's work was a remnant of an earlier time, when you could get years for partial authors.h.i.+p of a leaflet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Not at all," he acknowledged.

"Then why am I here?"

The Lieutenant Colonel lifted his arms skyward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That very afternoon, all three of us-Szelenyi, Szentjoby, and I-were released on probation. An official decree forbade us from publis.h.i.+ng the hostile doc.u.ment (the book) or even communicating its contents verbally. Any violation would result in criminal prosecution. Should we feel unable to adapt our activities to the laws of the Hungarian People's Republic, the authorities would countenance our emigration. We could even take our families with us. Ivan said he would give it some thought, but I told them, "No, I am a Hungarian writer."

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

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

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

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