A Guest In My Own Country Part 9

It was painful to both Ivan and me when I informed him we would not be a team writing in the West. You could stay too; we'd get by somehow, I thought. And he: You promised to come, and now you're going back on your word. Do you really think you'll be able to write your books, publish them in the West, and continue to take your const.i.tutional through the streets of Budapest? Yes, that's exactly what I thought. And that's what happened. Thus began the decade and a half of my life as a banned, underground writer.

Children are smart. When I was arrested and Juli found her hands full, she took our seven-year-old Miklos to stay overnight with Feri Feher and agnes h.e.l.ler, who had a son about the same age. Miklos played with him all afternoon, but when evening came he took Feri aside and asked him with a touch of an aristocratic intonation, "Are you a good person?"

Sensing what he meant, Feri answered, "Yes Miklos, I believe I am."

"Good," said Miklos. "Then I'll sleep at your place."

Influenced by tendencies I observed in myself and those around me at the mental inst.i.tution where I began to work at the time, I tried to view mental illness as a behavioral strategy, an individual concept of the world. The patient may act strange, but he sees himself as an innovator. Such might be well be a description of my type of dissident, I thought. The hero of my novel was committed to an asylum. Confiscated copies of the novel were condemned to destruction by court order as "hostile material." Not me, just a few years of my work.

Ultimately the mental inst.i.tution is a reflection of state power. The illnesses there are fed by that world, which provides its causes and its symbols. Rationality was part and parcel of our state culture (or at least claimed to be), while critical att.i.tudes-dissident att.i.tudes, if you will-depend on transrational decisions. You follow the path you believe in, risk or no risk. But why? Intellectual gratification? The hedonism of thought? It was sheer pleasure to think through the possibilities.

After being dismissed from everywhere at the age of forty-three, I no long needed to put up with nerve-racking types (though I had always handled them fairly well), so I exiled myself to a garden, where, relaxed, I had plenty of time to sort things out. Enough money had come in from my writings to keep us going for a few more months. But our lives were not without risks-the aforementioned house searches, bugging, surveillance, and the three-year travel restriction-and my wife Juli was banned from the radio, where she had been giving insightful and refres.h.i.+ng book reviews every morning just before eight.

Writing counts as action only in unusual circ.u.mstances. Throughout most of the twentieth century writing had a chance to become action here in Hungary. All it had to do was go beyond the norm. Almost any statement was an opportunity for anti-state agitation.

Just after I lost my job a thick-browed colleague stuck his head into my office and whispered, "You sealed your own fate." But I despised the idea of begging my way back into the fold. Officially sanctioned normality contains all the symptoms of neurosis. Only the free are healthy, and the healthy are their own masters. The sick are directed by others: they are dependent, they cannot take care of themselves, stand on their own two feet, make decisions, see things as they are. They see what they want to see-or what they fear.

Excluded from regular employment, I recognized my condition as consistent with the logic of the centralized party state. Hence it did not enter my mind to make the rounds of the editorial offices. I knew they had no choice but to reject my work out of hand. And yet I occasionally experimented with submitting an article. The weak-willed did not even respond, while the stronger wrote something to the effect that they did not dare publish me. Ultimately I let up: I was ashamed to have put them in such a position.

I was now convinced I was not cut out for steady jobs in the East or West. Much as I respected all those who sawed and sanded, taught, or examined patients, I was thrilled to be released from it all, and viewed my life as an endless holiday. Only the typewriter's thump lent a touch of respectability to my activity-after all, typists were considered workers-but in fact, thanks to the generosity of the system, I was a pipe-smoking rocking-chair adventurer.

Too lazy and inept to handle the organization that went with oppositional activities, I did not get much involved, especially since political activism started early in the morning-my best time of day-which I never would have considered giving up. I stuck to formulating and distributing antipolitical texts.

It was hard for insiders in the old system to imagine that anyone would leave their ranks in the state power apparatus for civilian life. But representation, respect, and remuneration I needed like a hole in the head. Some make time to do what they like; others do not. The Gypsy nailsmiths from the outskirts of Csobanka had time to go into the woods and gather mushrooms whenever it rained. If a CEO headed for the woods on a workday morning, people would think him insane. I admired artisans supporting their families from their homes and gardens, oblivious of professions requiring them to report to the boss at a fixed time every day.

But even as I sat in the small Gypsy pub in Csobanka looking deep into my golden-yellow marc, I had to admit it was better to walk in the sun in a foreign city than pace the same five steps up and down in a cell here at home. Why then did I cling to the homeland?

The white walls in the Csobanka s.e.xton's house and the dark wooden cross-beamed ceiling had not changed in over a hundred years. Beyond the gra.s.sy area at the kitchen door stinging nettles grew among the fruit trees. To the left of the door stood a marble table, once a tombstone. That is where I worked. The garden produced an abundance of fruit: sour cherries, walnuts, apricots, pears, and endless plums. In fat years a couple of the more tired branches would break under the weight of their yield.

A small lane arched upward past the house. It was called Red Army Boulevard and was sprinkled with white, gravelly sand and an occasional tuft of gra.s.s. On Sunday mornings the elderly, black-clad, kerchiefed and bonneted women of the village wended their quiet way up the lane clutching prayer books. Few people used the lane during the week, so I was a.s.sured of privacy. Only the parish priest might drop in of an afternoon, but he soon went his way. "Our humble respects for the fever of creativity!" he would say, leaving the memory of many smiles.

If I made a noise stepping out of the house, the deer at the end of the garden would p.r.i.c.k up its ears, slink behind my back, and b.u.t.t me gently with its peach-fuzzed antlers. The dog would bark, then fling himself prostrate while the deer rubbed its belly. But the deer's best friend was a feisty j.a.panese c.o.c.k that slept with it, burrowing under its belly to keep warm. The c.o.c.k's alliance with the deer reinforced its c.o.c.kiness, and it would bl.u.s.ter like a rowdy and give horrific crows with a voice as thin as its body.

I had set a few stumps in the gra.s.s for seating, but they had been taken over by ant colonies. If I gave one of them a kick, it shook their world like an earthquake, sending them pouring to the surface in a frenzy, saving eggs and crumbs and b.u.mping into one another in zigzag paths of panic. Desperate, tens of thousands streamed up from the depths, blackening the stump in a mad society that, seen from above, behaves not a whit more reasonably than our own. Once the danger (during which they occasionally bite off one another's heads in terror) has pa.s.sed, they will boast of their heroism and the trials they have suffered. I give the trunk one more kick and the ants swirl out in even greater torrents. May they enjoy the shocks of history. After chaos comes peace, when they will have to reorganize and depose the incompetent leaders. In the company of the deer, the dog, and the c.o.c.k I observe the ants coming to their senses, crawling back into the fissures of their shaken universe. The fickle G.o.d's wrath has faded.

Cloaked in my jaded and enigmatic cruelty, I, the Lord, head back to the house. Why should I, incorrigible scoundrel that I am, refrain from exerting my power as long as I have it?

The way I spent my time was my reward and my punishment. I concocted wiles to trick my congenital stupidity. If I was unpleasant, I had to put up with an unpleasant character. L'enfer, c'est les autres L'enfer, c'est les autres? What if it's me? Locked in a dark room, the only light from a screen: myself in an endless loop.

I enjoyed going back from Csobanka to the wild chestnuts along the bank of the Danube in Buda. I found something to my liking in almost every cafe and pub and did not mind the slowness of life. What comes of its own accord is enough.

From age forty to fifty-five I was a nonperson in my country, a person whose very presence violated the regulations. My response to the prohibition against working and publis.h.i.+ng? An unchecked, internal, authorial freedom. I distributed my work in samizdat, usually Gabor Demszky's underground press. Not only did I receive no fee, I regularly contributed to the printing expenses, considering the dissemination of my works in Hungary a public service.

I could spend the day at my desk and the evening with people I wanted to see. There were a few I would rather not have seen, the ones who stood around on the corner or sat in a car by the door. They accompanied me everywhere, but kept a respectable distance, not really disrupting my solitude. Blacklisting and internal emigration were not so much blows dealt by fate as the result of a decision on my part, so it was my duty to cope with the vexations that went with them.

It was impossible to be normal here at home, and putting a good face on it was an unpardonable offense. The critical intelligentsia saw itself as a separate camp: us, with the police on our trail, versus them, bearers of the prevailing mindset and therefore police-free. People published all sorts of attacks on me, but I neither responded nor penned any of my own. I could never understand where their hostility came from. It took the utmost self-discipline and sense of humor to keep from going mad.

At eleven I was compelled to accept the reality that the spirit of the age was doing its best to have me shot and tossed into the Danube. Bad experiences made me suspicious earlier than most. Big words? Big words can turn people into child murderers.

As a banned author I had the luxury of being free from the expectations of others: I didn't need to embrace local public prejudices; I didn't need to be confident or outraged or despairing; I didn't need to worry about the authorities taking umbrage at what I wrote. I required no future different from the present I was living in if for no other reason than that I did not believe in the possibility of a different future.

I am watching the Moscow May Day celebrations on television: a giant soldier extending his arms across the entire facade of a building, tight phalanxes lined up in Red Square. The flag-bearing gymnasts along the edge of each formation are dressed in white. Only the most distinguished-winners of workers' compet.i.tions-are allowed to appear in the square. Under the pictures of Marx, Engels, and Lenin there are pictures of the current Party leaders, and beneath those the men themselves.

Every partic.i.p.ant at the great a.s.sembly holds a little red flag in his hand. Filmed from above, the network of roads stretching through those human colonnades looks geometrically regular. Between the carpet of citizens (the first-string squad, as it were) and the complex of platforms (with Lenin's mausoleum as its center) stands a wall of white-gloved policemen at attention; above them-the marshals, their medal collections clinking and flas.h.i.+ng on their chests, along the parapet of the mausoleum-the leaders of the Party and the government, dressed in the state's version of men's fas.h.i.+on: a dark gray overcoat and a dark gray hat pulled down to eyebrow level. Dour old men waving at the crowds there to hail them.

Bugle fanfares. Brezhnev doffs his cap and steps up to the microphone. He struggles with a text written by others and full of long words. A face covered with the wrinkles and bags of arrogance. Behind him, gruff and motionless, the other leaders, their hands behind their backs now, jaded faces sunken inward, obviously heedless to his words. "Warm greetings, the struggle for the workers' happiness." The leaders turn their heads sternly, left, right. When the boss has finished, the two leaders standing next to him initiate the applause. The crowd takes it up. Once in a while the men on the parapet remove their hands from their pockets as if out of a sense of obligation and strike them together a few times. They have absent faces with no curiosity. Athletes on large platforms carry those faces past the parapet.

This is the seventies. I go out onto the highway, where a sign indicates that taking pictures is prohibited. Of what? A missile silo? A radar station? The forest entrance of an underground weapons factory, accessible by a high-quality cement road? The small hill sloping up to it could house a tomb. The miniature bugging devices manufactured there suffice for all Eastern Europe.

The surrounding fields are uncultivated; grazing is prohibited. Through the strips of forest that line the road I catch glimpses of gray concrete buildings, guard towers, targets, bunkers, all ringed by a concrete fence covered with furls of barbed wire. Officers' housing is hidden behind a painted brick wall at the edge of the village. Children play ball behind barbed wire; husbands walk with their wives among the prefabricated apartment buildings; shaven-headed soldiers run back and forth along a beam three meters off the ground wearing full marching gear and carrying machine guns; little flags of indeterminate symbolism flutter atop the dusty hills; a jeep carrying two drums of milk pops out of nowhere.

Soviet troops-temporary guests in the country for thirty years now, athletic, pimpled kids smelling of sweat and foot cloths, staring through the fences of the garrisons where they were confined for months on end-wore the sad looks of sons separated from their mothers combined with a touch of arrogance. Guarding their armored vehicles and rocket launchers, they would gape with wild envy at the natives in colorful clothes walking and driving by. The only time they would be seen individually was on their way to the station for the Moscow express after their one- or two-year stint. Odd occupiers they were. Everything they had was beat up. Even the vehicles looked jerry-built.

A somber procession of trucks has been flowing past in an endless iron stream, each truck towing one out of commission, every second vehicle unusable. Only after two hours does it come to an end and we can go and buy our milk and bread.

I was always a bourgeois by nature and a dissident by compulsion. We inhabited a mad world in which the written word seemed to carry unfathomable weight, when in fact it did not. The most important structural component in the defunct political system was its thought, its texts, its curricula. That being the case, I sat down every morning to produce sentences that could pa.s.s for incitement against the state, and a good many people who deserved better dashed around spying to make sure a few warmed-over cliches did not see the light of day. My bag held neither bomb nor revolver; it held only a notebook. Just when I thought I was getting used to the situation, I ran into a young man who was being followed by three cars for having made copies of one of my studies. The cowboy-and-Indian games involved in publis.h.i.+ng a few hundred copies of a dissident text unofficially kept both sides busy. No country house containing printer's ink and thinner escaped police surveillance.

Here at home I led a m.u.f.fled existence. Living in Eastern Europe meant being constantly prepared for defeat and backwardness but also to question what it is to be human. There was no real dictator, only a long line of downtrodden individuals, each imagining that everyone in front of them was an informer and everyone behind them a reckless anarchist. But once informing has become common currency-and the informer the model citizen-what is left to inform about? Where is the truth whereby we can recognize the liar?

"Waiter! The bill, please! And would you be kind enough to tell me where I might find G.o.d?"

"I recommend the golden noodles with vanilla sauce, sir."

"In that case, could you tell me when things will improve?"

"Never."

In 1976 I received a fellows.h.i.+p from the DAAD, the German Academic Exchange Service, for a yearlong stay in West Berlin. My three-year travel ban having expired, I wrote a letter to Premier Janos Kadar requesting permission for a one-year stay abroad. Unusual as it was in those days, not only I but my wife and two children received a pa.s.sport with the necessary stamp.

Given that Juli was a teacher of French and did not speak German, she decided to take the children to Paris. Nor had she any intention of returning: she had no wish to go on living in a police state. My feeling was that since I had started out as a Hungarian writer I might as well finish as one. This led to a divorce, my wife remaining in Paris with our children, who were entering their teens, and I returning home in 1979 after an extended, two-year stay in the West.

After walking Budapest for five days, I stopped being amazed that people were speaking Hungarian. My nose was no longer struck by the stench of unrefined gasoline. The dark gray buildings, the dusty shopwindows, the electrical wires sticking out near the staircases, the half-finished repairs in the courtyards, the pocks of bullets from the war and 1956-everything looked familiar again. I took down the things my mother had put up on the walls except for a photograph of my children. I bought the books that looked interesting, sat in each of my armchairs in turn, and spent time in apartments whose familiar decay did not surprise me. I took pleasure in the spreading boredom.

I tried to make out what had happened in my absence. A little more was permitted. The long-haired, self-styled avant-garde artists had had haircuts; the young women had learned to cook and were having babies. People who had longed to go abroad had come to grips with the idea of trying to be happy here at home. Young historians were proud to question the Party line about 1956 and surprised that it caused no great stir in the world. Political dissidents were becoming chief architects, theater directors, and editors-in-chief, buying better cars, taking trips abroad. There were jokes they could no longer laugh at.

I made a raw kind of peace with it all and with the somnolent pa.s.sing of time and things. I shrugged my shoulders. "Everything's fine with me. You're all fine just as you are." The apartment was full of silence and nights that were not always easy.

If I switched on the light and looked around, I was amazed to see where I was. Persian rugs on the floor, a matching (if improvised) set of furniture that had seen better days, an Empire table with copper inlay that bore a tea saucer's marks, and the library, in disarray, with shelves reaching up to the ceiling. The cracks in the once white, now gray walls sketched the face of a camel, which I used to scan to establish where I was. I never had the room replastered. My wish was to leave behind as few traces of myself as I could and intervene as little as possible in the lives of those around me. In spite of everything, this was the only place where I could speak without making grammatical errors, where I did not need to be embarra.s.sed every time I opened my mouth.

I ran into my former boss. Until the authorities ordered him to fire me, he had been kind and called me into his office for chats, but once the political police said the word he had dismissed me on the spot. He had trouble extending his right hand after transferring the dog's leash to the left one. He too had had a stroke. All he remembered was what good friends we had been.

Looking around on the boulevard, I would think that everyone was a Communist, everyone I saw there-not just the Party members or the flag-wavers, everybody. Even people who hated the system, because they could not stop thinking about it. Not just the coachman, the horse too. Everyone who lived here. Including myself.

From my childhood until 1989 I lived with the consciousness that anyone who followed his own path had to reckon with the possibility of ending up between guard towers. By shaping his own life, the iconoclast made it more likely that others-and less likely that his own self-neglect-would kill him. The anxious desire to make life last as long as possible is a form of suicide.

Sitting at the marble gravestone table in Csobanka, I even remembered things that had not happened to me. But whatever you remember did in fact happen to you. Since the life of a mortal lasts no longer than the fall of a raindrop, I cling fast to anything inhabited by time.

Back from my Csobanka hermit's lair to my Buda apartment I receive a telephone call from a friend in telephone code: Had I heard the news? We meet at the Angelika Pastry Shop with its view of the eclectic neo-Gothic Parliament, where representatives approved every single motion submitted. (We recognized the lady and two gentlemen who came in the wake of the phone call for the pleasure of seeing and listening to us.) Had I heard, he asked, that Gabor Demszky had been openly followed for days on end, and when they stopped him for not using his directional signals they found the ma.n.u.script of my novel The Loser The Loser. They'd hauled him into the district police station, confiscated the doc.u.ments, and taken minutes of the interrogation. Nine miniature bound copies of my novel were confiscated at the publisher's. That That again? again?

In idyllic Csobanka one tended to forget where one was living.

In 1982 I ent.i.tled an essay I wrote there "Antipolitics," given that everything was political. A few years later a panting Demszky dashed up to my place with a heavy bag over his shoulder-fresh copies of Antipolitics Antipolitics. Written and published in secret, it argued that the time had come for a peaceful end to the Iron Curtain and the missile dialogue. The matter should be handed over to the Europeans. After the attempts at freedom in Budapest, Prague, and Warsaw had been quashed and avenged, Moscow and Berlin were next. Send home the Russian troops! Bring on the Russian tourists!

Europe, and particularly Central Europe, has Berlin to thank for so much. Think of the millions of lives lost, think of the decades wasted because of Berlin's arrogance. Had Berlin not instigated a war, there would be no Soviet troops in Budapest shoring up a system in which the publication of an uncensored book turned into a midnight secret, a conspiracy, a criminal act ("the preparation and circulation of materials containing incitement to action against the state") that could get you as much as eight years.

From the armchair I had a view of the top of the cliff, and by standing I could catch a glimpse of Jutka's dark head and long thighs. She was inspecting the fruit trees one by one, while studying a useful little book called A Small Garden Is a Thing of Great Joy A Small Garden Is a Thing of Great Joy. She was planning to plant dill, asparagus, bok choy, and eggplant. There would be flowerbeds, a lawn, and perhaps a child as well.

We are both Aries. Once I tossed out an offhand remark, and she answered with something brusque. I left in a huff, and she hurled mugs and spoons and unseemly curses at me from the balcony. She told me to wait, then ran down and tore my s.h.i.+rt to pieces. I went home in tatters. The phone rang. It was the voice of a frightened girl telling me to come back. I changed s.h.i.+rts and returned.

I see you twenty years ago, in a colorless woolen sweater, cotton stockings wearing thin at the heel, and the dark blue, baggy Chinese linen trousers fas.h.i.+onable in the subculture of the time. You are lying in the gra.s.s reading Goethe's memoirs when your head drops. A few minutes later, you lift it with a jerk. It is etched with the pattern of gra.s.s. You say you've had a good sleep because the book was so nice and boring.

Our daily lives melded, as did our memories. Silently we watched the shadows move. Most of our choices are in fact discoveries. Someone rings our doorbell and slips into our life, leaving the silk nights.h.i.+rt bought at the flea market on our hook. If I wanted independence, why choose the dependency of family? Such was the question I asked myself before marrying for the third time. The following were my arguments against the move, which I put forth with ever weakening conviction: The man with a family is a prisoner: he can no longer a.s.sert he has nothing to lose. The married man is condemned to domesticity, the paterfamilias to simplemindedness. A wife is like the state: she is curious about everything you do and observes you in secret. Isn't it enough to have the state listening in? (True, I do not generally kiss the bugging device.) The women I stayed with longest were the ones I most feared to upset. The less fear I felt, the sooner I beat a retreat, the sooner I chose another to step into my room without knocking. Mere whim drew me to some, but it was no whim that I was attracted to Jutka's voice, Jutka's touch, smell, movement, speech, and way of thinking, all from the very first night, or that the feeling has stayed with me for some twenty years.

Delicate, restrained, cautious, gently laughing, humming, and proffering considered judgments, Jutka came to West Berlin with me in 1982 for my next stay there, having been my partner in Budapest for three years by then. She proudly announced that she could understand the radio in German and had no trouble with French; English was a foregone conclusion. She loved golden leaves, rye bread with gorgonzola, and a Macon burgundy.

After our return everything was as before. Once, in 1987, the border guard checking my doc.u.ments at the computer screen disappeared and brought out another guard, who found and confiscated the ma.n.u.scripts of some talks I was planning to give. The Department of Education would return them to me should it see fit.

"But how can I lecture without them?"

"That's your problem."

"Well, that's the end of my talks," I said.

He liked that.

But it was all just an experiment, a ruse: the text had been smuggled out and the German translation was waiting for me in the West.

Looking out of a car window in Berlin, I see a peaceful, clean, and ordered city. Everything works. Not almost almost everything, everything, everything everything. What you see in the shopwindows is what you see people wearing, which suggests that people change their possessions frequently and hence have no need to grow too fond of them. If I lived here, my wish would be to acquire means with a clean conscience. I would worry about spiritual frigidity, surround myself with prudent formalities, and carefully plan my time.

Back home there is a purple fog in the streets: the exhaust of east-bloc cars. That summer Jutka finished a book on death and funerals in Budapest at the beginning of the twentieth century. Her mood was far from funereal, however: she was more concerned with diapers.

I refuse to cling to situations and refuse to run from them. I have pure chance to thank for every turn in my life, including my three wives. One day I happened to catch a glimpse of Vera's hair in a cla.s.sroom, though I had seen her a hundred times before. Juli plopped down on the arm of my chair at a happy gathering and stayed for sixteen years and two children. Jutka rang my doorbell one day in Paris-we were compatriots and lived on the same floor-and asked if I would like some coffee. The coffee never materialized, though a marriage and three children did. In the most traditional manner I have discovered the simplest purpose for life in my children and grandchildren, for whom I mean to stick around as long as possible.

Notes to myself: there is no point calling the attention of others to what I do not want or do not know. I have been shameless enough. No one wants to look at my bare chest anymore, so I'll wrap a scarf around my neck instead.

Nothing I come out with is of any use for anyone. It might have been once, but those days are gone. The day is approaching when I shall no longer set my gla.s.ses on the nightstand or say good night to my wife before withdrawing to my room. It won't be long now before my eyes are like two glazed chestnuts.

Every life is better than no life; every life, including the pain that goes with it, is good. True, getting through the daily grind is like wading through seaweed, but I can get through all sorts of things, therefore I am. And given the fact that I am alive, the question of why is as inane as fly droppings on a grape.

At twelve I survived National Socialism; at fifteen I saw Communism take over. Communism and I grew old together. Decades pa.s.sed in active, disciplined resignation. Since I was fifty-six by the time the regime collapsed, I spent the best years of my life in the shadow of its stupidity. Still, I never watched my country from afar. I groped my way around in it.

Life was slow, which I did not regret, because there was so much of it. Humans are made mortal, hence real, by their imperfection; frailty and mortality are synonyms in the moral sense. Moral philosophy can rest only on frailty and our acceptance of it.

If every written description of human reality const.i.tutes literature, then perhaps so does man himself. The novel's main character may be a welfare lawyer or city builder or retired revolutionary, but these are just naive masks, for there are no welfare lawyers or city builders or retired revolutionaries who ponder their lives with such profundity when lying in bed or sitting on the bench of a mental inst.i.tution. Interior monologue does not occur in complete sentences.

All my life's more important choices have sprung from my decision as an adolescent to become a writer: I refrained from crossing the temporarily open border in 1956, chose jobs that required observation, became interested in people at the lower end of the social ladder (not that I was so high up myself, with my small salary, small apartment, and two or three changes of clothes), accompanying my former fellow student Tamas Csillag to the housing project at the Old Buda Brick Factory and spending the next seven years in Elizabeth Town as a supervisor of children's welfare. Then I grew curious about Hungary as a whole, the outlying cities and villages, and took a position with an inst.i.tute of urban studies.

It is summer. How little the people of Budapest try to cover up their bodies, whether beautiful or ugly! I put it down to the city's sensuality and the survival of a pre-Christian, pagan l.u.s.t for life. Budapest always goes whole hog: Stalinism, the Revolution, the compromises of the Kadar regime, you name it. It experiments with strategies of survival, grinding up the system to soften it, reviving old traditions-anything to curb the damage. Remember that Budapest was the first city in Eastern Europe to proclaim its freedom. The city is more enduring than the government; it has never let that pagan l.u.s.t for life be taken over by ascetic delirium. There are plenty of upstanding cynics around here who do not think suffering is more moral than good cheer.

Even my internal emigration was basically a chance happening: one morning at dawn my doorbell rang, and in they came, picking apart my filing cabinet and dismissing me from all inst.i.tutions. Then came the changes in 1989, and soon thereafter I had a phone call inviting me to be the president of International PEN. It was a serious offer, and it behooved me to accept it and do a good job.

Some authors love to play it tough; they are not satisfied until they have brushed with mortal danger and can recount it to their readers. I am not that type. I am of a more placid nature. But once in a while I run smack into fate's outstretched palm.

The good things always come on their own, the gifts of fate (or Providence, if you will), but the bad too come randomly, unexpectedly: there it is, and that's that. The ravages of fate are not something we can sense approaching or prevent. We make our way along a stairway of the gifts and accidents that const.i.tute chapter divisions.

I do not like to be engulfed by the situation I happen to be in at a given time; I would rather look at it from the side or from above: I enjoy backing off and moving on. What is this compulsion, this current sweeping me on, this whistling wind, this gentle breath? The wish to slip the traps? To keep from being surrounded?

I was born in 1933. I was six when the Second World War broke out, eleven when survival meant the collaboration between fate and vigilance, particularly for Jewish children from the Hungarian provinces. When my parents were taken away in May 1944, my sister and I received an invitation to move to Budapest. Staying in Berettyoujfalu, waiting it out, would have been the normal thing to do. Had we done it, we would not be alive today. I owe my life to Budapest. It provided refuge for my sister and cousins and me; it kept us out of Auschwitz. All that mattered to me then about Budapest was its size: it let us be needles in a haystack. By May 1944 it was clear that people in the provinces would do nothing to stop the deportations, that they were following the dictates of a government that wanted to make all cities and towns judenfrei judenfrei. The official culture around me has always been deceitful and, except for a few exceptional years, hostile to me. Although I had committed no crimes against it, I would eventually realize the time had come to start.

Every word puts the writer in a new situation. He is carried onward by the throat-tightening intoxication of improvisation. If a person's choices and actions count for anything, then this day, from the rising up unto the going down of the sun, is his constant pilgrimage. There is no line between everyday and holy acts.

The tactful pilgrim recognizes the possibility that dialogue with a saint is forever one-sided. He may spend his whole life speaking to someone who does not exist. Yet even if he never gets an answer, if the saint never reveals himself, he has no trouble addressing him, the eternal here and now here and now.

On such secret, private pilgrimages we retrace the steps of a route long since traveled, reliving a past event, leaving the land of servitude and trudging the road of suffering to the cross. Our man brings the lamb, the most valuable offering of all: the son. He gladly offers his neck to the heavy blade. He appears before the G.o.dhead-in-hiding to offer It his life. So it is with books: a constant struggle with the angel fate has delivered us to; an eternal plodding, pinning down traces, making stations visible. The writer's path as pilgrimage? The parallel is perhaps justified by the pursuit of the unattainable: writing the book after which no other books need be written, after which there is only the bell, the flash, and loss of consciousness. They put all they've got into that last book, thinking about it during every waking moment, living with it, a lover full of promises, yet ultimately elusive.

I would have liked to write the kind of book I could have been called away from at any moment, one that could never be finished, only stopped. One more gla.s.s, one more pipe, and nothing for me to be ashamed of.

Who is observing me? Who is the all-seeing guardian of my fate? Why not just say someone. If He has created me, He can watch me. Our dream is a universe that is made for us and looks after us. If we weave G.o.d into a story, He turns out like a person who is ever at our disposal, even if He does occasionally go into hiding. Our Father is a good deal like us. If He is equally Lord of Life and Lord of Death, then he is both good and evil, as we are, and He simply mimics the game being played on earth, uniting the mind and blind happenstance.

I used to hold sin to be fatuous and shallow: the sinful are impatient and scatterbrained, panic-stricken and hysterical. Could they have but imagined the consequences they might never have sinned in the first place. Lately I have been inclined to think that hatred and cruelty are independent pa.s.sions and can fill a life, be it stupid or intelligent. Even the most determined relativist can distinguish between a decent person and a scoundrel, especially if he is affected by the behavior of the party in question. Our sense of whether a person is good or evil works instinctively, the way we blink when something gets into our eye.

I smile a lot. My father also had the gift of smiling. It stems from our simple natures. The smarter you are, the angrier you are. When asked whether I am happy, I respond: often. When asked whether I am ever unhappy, my answer is: rarely. Which goes to show how simple I am.

While I was studying in Berlin on a German fellows.h.i.+p in 1977, my mother was my main tie to Budapest. She was my only blood relative in Hungary. A terrible correspondent, I phoned her every week. I tried to keep her happy with gifts and alleviate her financial condition, and in the spring I invited her to Berlin for a month: a pair of warm boots is no subst.i.tute for a smile and long leisurely talks peppered with edesanyam edesanyam-literally "my sweet mother"-which in its slightly antiquated Hungarian sounds perfectly natural, yet cannot be translated naturally into any other language.

When we part, I kiss her hand. The joints in her fingers have grown a little thicker, and she remarks with humorous regret that light brown spots have appeared on her skin. "Old age is ugly, my boy. Nothing nice about it." By way of consolation I tell her that even an old face can be beautiful if it reveals a good soul. I have refrained from asking myself whether my mother was beautiful. That she never was. But her eyes have an oriental kind of mystery that has grown brighter and more meditative with age.

My mother was happy about my being a writer. She would read reviews of my works in German, French, and English with a dictionary at her side, looking up every word she did not know. She would say a few words of praise, then begin to worry whether the work in question would be published in Budapest and get me into trouble. No need to write about absolutely everything, she said. "You can write something that is good and still not provoke them them, my boy."

She would have been terribly gratified to see me on Budapest television and have her friends phone her the next day, to be congratulated by her old hairdresser or the young woman caretaker in the building or perhaps the neighbor with the friendly face, whose husband had been a prison guard known for his restrained behavior.

My mother was hardly surprised at my trouble with the state, as she herself had had less than pleasant experiences with the authorities. She felt her modest pension to be insufficient, but would have been perfectly satisfied with half again as much. At midday she ate a little soup with potatoes and an egg or two on the side. Listening to old man Kadar would put her to sleep. "You've had your say," she would tell him, switching off the television.

At six in the morning she would drink a cup of coffee in the kitchen, then go back to bed and read or listen to the radio until eight, then spend an hour exercising and bathing. She never went to a private doctor, not wis.h.i.+ng to spend the money; the free clinic doctors suited her just fine. She was overjoyed to get a two-week, union-sponsored pa.s.s to a medicinal spa every year. On those occasions she shared a room with her old friend Marika. Marika never married and was a touch crotchety, but Mother was used to her eccentricities. They would have espressos in the cafe and watch television in the common lounge. They might also indulge in a jigger of brandy of an afternoon (though a bottle of cognac could last half a year in my mother's cabinet despite the fact that she offered it to guests).

I did not stay on in San Francisco in 1978, though I might have chosen to work for any number of causes: the American Indians, or the Catholics of Northern Ireland, or the gays of the Castro district, or tanning-room devotees protesting nuclear energy, or Australian Aborigines. I might have chosen South Korean CEOs, communards from the Pyrenees, instructors of bioenergetic a.n.a.lysis, Sufi gurus, levitating meditators, faith healers, or Jews for Jesus. I might have joined an African resistance movement, offered to help the developing world, or I might simply have stayed on, playing with films, holograms, videos, computers, visiting prisoners in jail, converting to h.o.m.os.e.xuality, or moving into the pink house where Janis Joplin committed suicide. But I didn't. I could have landed a teaching job in some provincial city, where at this moment I would be walking onto the main quad, past the bank to the cafe, where I would be ordering apple juice in a paper cup and looking out over the young men and women made angry and headstrong by trying to work their way upward. But I didn't do that either.

The books on my shelf are alive, entreating me to look at them, take them out of the darkness, follow them. Boxes fill and pile up behind me, my abandoned writings pursuing me. I delay opening them and restoring lost time. So many faded pictures, names now just barely familiar. But when the heavens are kind, a c.h.i.n.k opens up and something comes out of nothing.

My work goes better in the village than in Budapest or Berlin, where I spend most of my time. Since I live my life in both kinds of place, however, the extremes of pro- or antiurban cultural philosophy are alien to me. In fact, the tension between the two is my domain: I enjoy moving back and forth between density and spa.r.s.eness, between the natural and the artificial; I have no desire to drop anchor at either end.

I dash out of the house into the meadow. You cannot see this spot from the village. I stop and turn around. The vast emptiness is refres.h.i.+ng-the surrounding hills, the ruins of a castle sacked three hundred years ago, the solitude. There is no one here in the bright noon light. It is no effort at all for me simply to be.

The years have come and gone, and I am still here at the Academy of the Arts in Berlin, stressing the first syllable of German words in my Hungarian way. I give the Germans what advice I have and make my umpteenth introductory speech. I've been reelected president. There were no other candidates.

I support my family as best I can and do my best to stay out of their way. I recognize (and accept) the fact that my wife is boss of the hearth, and I do everything in my power to obey her. I try to provide warmth and encouragement to the family, knowing they will have troubles enough-anxieties, failures, loneliness, sadness, losses-the extent of which a parent can never know. I am content to start each day with the patter of footsteps around me.

I might just as well be a conscientious farm animal, giving regular milk and getting by on modest fodder. For the family I am not Mr. President; I am a simple smile at all the goings-on around the kitchen table. Who can tell how true to life my descriptions are? Even my mother is a product of the imagination when I write of her, as I am myself when I am my subject. Whatever is made of words is narrative, not reality.