SANDOR MARAI

MEMOIR OF HUNGARY
1944-1948
Translated with an introduction and notes by Albert Tezla

CORVINA
in association w ith

C E N T R A L E U R O P E A N U N IV E R S IT Y PR E S S

Published b y Corvina Books Ltd., Vorosmarty tr 1,1051 Budapest, in association with Central European University Press, Ndor utca 15,1051 Budapest 400 W est 5 9 ^ Street New York N Y 10019 First published in Hungarian as in 1972 by Stephen V orosvry-W eller Publishing Co. Ltd., Toronto Reprinted in 1991 b y Akadmiai Kiad, Budapest First published in English as M em oir o f Hungary. 1944-1948 In 1996 Reprinted in 205 < DHeirs o f Sndor M rai 1991 Vorosvry-W eller Publishing Toronto Introduction, notes and English translation ) A lbert Tezla 1996 The poem s were translated by Selina Guinness

ISBN 963 13 3902 5 (Corvina) ISBN 963 9241 10 5 (CEU Press) Distributed in Hungary b y Corvina Books Ltd. Distributed in the United Kingdom and W estern Europe by Plymbridge D istributors Ltd., Estover Road, Plymoudi PL6 7PZ, United Kingdom All rights reserved- N o part o f this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system , or transmitted, in any form or b y any means, without the prior perm ission o f the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A C IP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library o f Congress Cataloging Data A C IP catalogue record for this book is available from the Library o f Congress

Table of Contents 5 21 Introduction Part One

115 Part Two 249 Part Three 399 Notes

INTRODUCTION
On February 22, 1989, the phone rang in the Budapest apartm ent o f Szegedy-Maszak, one of Marais few rem aining friends in Hungary. A t the other end o f the line was a San Diego reporter inquir ing about the very old m an w ho had apparently com mitted suicide the day before, and w hose ashes were to be scattered in the Pacific Ocean tw o days later. It should occasion no surprise that the caller from Am erica required inform ation about a Hungarian writer who had left his homeland forty years before, and had lived in several countries before settling into a reclusive life in his eightieth year in San Diego. But what m ay surprise readers outside H ungary is that, at the time o f his death, even in the land o f his birth, where he had once been a best-selling author, most readers im der forty had not read any o f his writings and, it is very likely, m ost o f those in their twenties would not even recognize his name. Before leaving Hungary for political reasons in Septem ber 1948, M ar ai had published forty-six books, mostly novels. He enjoyed a large readership among city dwellers and the middle class, and H ungarian critics and literary historians considered him to be the nations m ost in fluential representative o f m iddle-class literature be tween the two world wars. Moreover, he had, in the forty years since his departure, added sixteen titles to his list o f publications, all in Hungarian, though these works were read in H ungary only by an intellectual lite o f his own generation who were able to slip them past customs officials on returns from rare visits to the West. Mrai began his long w riting career when he was only fourteen w ith an article in a newspaper pub lished in Kassa, his birthplace, then a part o f Upper Hungary. By eighteen he was contributing feuilletons to the Budapesti N apl (Budapest Journal), a liberal

political daily. H e w as only eighteen when his first book o f poem s appeared, and twenty-one when his sec ond was published, also in Kassa, which by then had become a part o f Czechoslovakia by terms o f the Treaty o f Trianon. A t the sam e age, he issued a play in five scenes, com posed in German, in Berlin. Although he continued to increase his journalistic activities by serving on the sta ff o f jsg (The Journal) and Pesti Hirlap (Pest Daily), both newspapers claim ing to be in dependent politically, and by contributing to several W estern periodicals, and wrote poem s and plays and various kinds o f prose fiction throughout his life, the novel became his principal genre after 1924, the year in which his short novel, A m szros (The Butcher), ap peared in Vienna. Altogether, he published nineteen novels before he left Hungary and eight thereafter. The dom inant them e o f his belles-lettres is the decay o f the H ungarian m iddle class. Destiny, Mrai noted, rarely hands a w riter a great theme that is so personal as this was to him, one that the writer him self experiences and witnesses in its dnouement: This is the H ungarian middle class whose w ay o f life I w as born into, observed, came to know and scrutinized in all its featxires to its very roots, and now I see the whole disintegrating. Perhaps this is m y lifes, m y w rit ings sole, true duty: to delineate the course o f this dis integration. B y the tim e he registered this sense of com mitment in his journal during the devastation that the Second W orld W ar brought to Hxmgaiy, he had substantially accom plished this mission, one to which he dedicated the rem ainder o f his writings as well. His detailed explorations and analyses o f the decline o f the middle class also pervade the five published journals which, som ewhat in the m anner o f Jules Renard, whose posthum ous Journal: 1887-1910 (1925-27) Mrai reviewed in Hungary, trace his literary, politi cal and social view s as they relate to the turbulent events o f his life from 1943 to 1983. Fold, fold !... (lite-

rally Land! Land!...), the M em oir o f H ungary 19441948, which focuses on the events in postwar Hungary that eventually persuaded him to leave his homeland, also concerns itself with the role o f the m iddle class in Hungarys deterioration as a nation. Delineating the course o f the disintegration o f the middle class was not an easy task for Marai. In the 1968-1975 Journal, Mrai calls h im self a typical m iddle-class revolution ary, an antithesis that troubles him: I live in an archy, which I feel to be immoral, and I have difficulty bearing this state; and earlier, a character in A z igazi (The Right M an, 1941) m ay w ell be voicing Marais feelings about his dilem ma in preserving a harmo nious relationship w ith his social class: I am a bour geois. I am deliberately so, I acknowledge its destiny ..., I dont care for drawing-room revolutions. Human beings should rem ain faithful to those to whom their descent, upbringing and memories bind them . As that typical m iddle-class revolutionary, Mrai castigates the m em bers o f the Hungarian middle class for several m ajor shortcomings that had a detrimental impact on Hungarys future after the First W orld War, His indignation at their failure to rise to the historic challenge o f reconstructing the defeated nation is punctuated by recurring epithets: they were greedy, corrupt, boorish, smug, envious, lazy. Instead o f im ifying Hungary, they foolishly waged w ar against the Hungarian people, w hom they never even took the trouble to know, and whom they looked down upon; they lacked a responsible national conscience and cared only for the w elfare and fate o f their own class. Moreover, their obsession w ith com m ercialism and their vulgarization o f the news media, book publish ing, the fine arts and literature so dominated Hungar ian life that they gradually corrupted the populace. U l timately, the middle class prevented the nation from acquiring cosmopolitan cultural values and from de veloping the sense o f moral com m itm ent to com munity

that the H ungarian nation needed for it to solve the complex political and econom ic problem s produced by the breakup o f the D ual Monarchy. A n d he was es pecially unsparing in his assault on the members of the m iddle class for their right-wing political orienta tion, because, he was convinced, their adulation o f the Germans seduced the class into becom ing a tool o f Naz ism, thus sm uggling the viciousness and perversity of that m odem form o f dictatorship into Eastern Europe. Although H im garian society as a whole failed to op pose Nazism, the middle d a ss , he believed, was es pecially culpable for the depth to which Nazi doctrines took root in Hungary: between the two world wars, it m ade no effort to create som e form o f democratic so ciety, w hich was, in his opinion, the only social and political force that could have repelled German fas cism successfully; it did ju st the opposite to serve its own interests. In Mrais view, the triumph o f Naz ism and its depraved H ungarian version, the Arrow Cross Party under the leadership o f Ferenc Szalasi, w as the expected and direct consequence o f the pro found failure o f the m iddle class to foster the values of Europeanism in Hungary. Its members had, since the end o f the First W orld W ar, methodically weaned themselves from the hum anism and the democratic principles o f European civilization: the demanding criteria o f that civilizations educational institutions and culture and its high standards o f human excel lence. That fateful shunning o f these European values, he predicted during the Second W orld W ar, would bring about the collective fall o f the H im garian middle class. W hat is called the Christian order and the Christian H ungarian gentlem en, he insisted, would inevitably vanish from the scene: Christianity, they called it - and by that they understood a trade license to which they laid claim without any education in tech nology. Christianity, they called it, and by that they understood the intimidation o f every free thought and 8

expression o f individual opinion, are C hristians/ they said, and they held out their hands. M rai did not let the European middle class go unscathed either. To the contrary, he held it respon sible for the fact that the intellect had lost its exalted place and fundamental role in European culture dur ing the twenty-five-year period after the First World W ar and that, by doing so, the m iddle class had re jected humanism, which Mrai believed to be Europes great gift to mankinds dom ain, for it produced the Renaissance and the Reformation, tw o climactic periods o f intellectual change in the history o f Western civilization, events which, he hastens to point out, never transpired in Russia. W hile w alking the streets o f Zrich in 1947, during his first visit to the West since the end o f the w ar, he asserts that only in E u rope was humanism a living im perative shaping life, human destiny, intellectual attitudes and social re sponsibility, the belief that man is the m easure o f all things, a human attitude that does not hope for a supernatural reply to the problem o f death, nor expect solutions to human problems from supernatural powers, for man, a two-legged m am m al abandoned and shaped by blind accidental will in an indifferent and hostile im iverse ... is the only living creature who can find his w ay in the world independently o f his in stincts. The hum an was missing now. It was this that had perished in Europe. Marais definition o f man as the m easure o f all things in an indifferent and hostile universe resulted in neither a sentimental view o f the elevated status o f humankind in the scheme o f things nor a bathetic re sponse to the distressful condition in which humans are forced to w ork out their individual destinies. Rather, it imposed on the individual being a rigorous form o f behavior in the social com munity m ore rem inis cent o f M ores U topia than Rabelaiss Abbey of Theleme. Marais exem plar was the individual who ad-

hered faithfully to the cultural obligations imposed by a purposeful life, w hose ethical values are created by personal discipline and w hose first principle is the ful filment o f duty, a being who shapes his life by cre ative w ork in which, Mrai proclaim ed, the highest de gree o f pleasure bursts into flam e and who, despite all evidence to the contrary, continues to be enticed by the vision o f hum an perfectibility. It was the dnouement o f this hum anistic ideal which he believed h im self to be w itnessing in Europe and w hich gave him a deep sense o f estrangement. W eighing the degradation o f this historic hum anistic ideal by Europeans between the end o f the First W orld W ar and the appalling hor rors o f the Germ an concentration camps, Mrai won ders w hat factor could possibly still bind him to Eu rope: perhaps it was the consciousness that we were all guilty, Europeans, Easterners and W ester ners, because we lived here and tolerated, allowed everything to reach the point it did ... W e were guilty because we were Europeans and w e tolerated the de struction o f humanism in the consciousness o f Euro pean m an. To him, the tragic consequence o f this de struction is that Europe is now without its traditional sense o f m ission the consciousness that being born in Europe, being a European was not only a physical or political condition but a creed. Systems, he found, had replaced the exercise o f hum anistic values every where he looked; he was, he concluded, a stranger in that very Europe whose values had so definitively shaped his own world outlook. Nothing would ever as suage his anger at the m iddle class for this betrayal o f the traditional hum anistic values integral to the pres ervation o f a civilized Europe. It was, however, for Communism and its fellow travelers that Mrai reserved his m ost acerbic observa tions. H e bitterly opposed M arxist Leninism on the grounds that it w as an inhum ane system, and he agreed w ith M ilovan Djilas that it w as nothing more 10

than state capitalism under the dictatorial rule o f a priv ileged New Class without the capacity to convert the ethical ideals o f socialism into reality. For Europeans, he insisted, the issue o f Communism was not a politi cal, not even a question o f class power, but a question o f existence or non-existence. O f course, Russian occu pation o f and the exportation o f Com m unist ideology to postwar Hungary gave Marai an extraordinary ex perience w ith the tragic im pact o f Communism on the East European nations that were forced to accept it. Even as he had observed the rightist view in Hungary after the First W orld W ar culm inate in the seizure of power by the Arrow Cross near the end o f the Second W orld War, so did he witness from 1945 to 1948 the sick ening spectacle o f Hungarian agents and their adher ents im posing Communism on the Hungarian nation under the dictates o f Moscow. His views o f the Soviet Union and Communism are developed at length in M em oir o f Hungary. Let ii suffice here to say that Mdrai never forgave the H ungarian Communists who, trained in M oscow during their long exile, returned in the wake o f the Soviet Arm y to plot against and even tually to establish absolute control over all the institu tions o f the H ungarian nation. N or did he spare those Hungarians, especially the writers, who cooperated with them to advance their careers. Unlike so m any Hungarian writers-in-exile, M arai never returned to Hungary, not even for a visit, even after the political situation began to ease significantly in the late 1970s; in his case, the failure o f the 1956 Revolution made his decision permanent. Moreover, he refused to permit any o f his works to be published in Hungary. Asked by Piiski, a N ew York bookseller, for perm ission to ar range for the publication o f his w orks w ith the Academ y Publishing H ouse in Hungary on the grounds that dem ocracy was certain to be restored in his homeland, he replied on Decem ber 13, 1988: 11

It was forty years ago this sum m er that I left Hungary because the rights o f freedom were sus pended. I dont know whether I have the means o f waiting out the changes, but I would rather not have m y publications appear in Hungary. Thank you fo r y o u r kind recommendation, and I hope you r predictions will become a reality. Ten days later, ju s t two months before his death, he re corded his conditions for publication in Hungary on a note card: I am a H ungarian writer, and it will always be a g rea t honor fo r m e i f m y books are made avail able to H ungarian readers, but I shall agree to a new edition only i f the occupying Soviet military forces (in their entirety and with all their arm a ments) leave the country, and, follow ing this, a multi-party system is restored with the force o f law, and democratic, free elections are held with trustworthy foreign observers present. M rai perceived h im self to be a representative o f a graying civilization, an observer o f the last stage in the history o f Christianity and liberalism. Survey ing the span o f hum an history since the late 1930s, he notes in 1988, in the introduction to A Oarrenek muve {The Garrens W ork): Costumes and emblems have changed in the last half-century bu t the plot remains the same: dictatorship stifling the expression o f thought and enterprise and now and then resorting to wars because it hopes that that will free it from its in ternal and external problem s. Once again, he does not let the m iddle class escape unscathed, repeating a fa m iliar criticism about its degeneration: The middle class, w hich follow ed the bourgeoisie in the over crowded, technologically self-contained world, already does not create, it only consum es. Because civiliza 12

tion, having lost the fusive pow er o f a uniform culture created by the m iddle class, has devalued contem pla tive behavior and weakened faith in the intellect, everything is changing and disintegrating. The world is an empty and m eaningless place, and nothing in it more empty and m eaningless than M an him self. Even religion can no longer offer any consolation to human beings. Mrai, a Catholic w ho always prized hia early Catholic schooling and rem ained a hum anis tic Catholic, eventually decided that God no longer exists in the traditional sense, that Christ was not di vine but a philosopher with lofty ethical concepts worth adopting and applying to life, and, conse quently, that humankind confronts chaos without God. In the 1968-75 Journal, he calls religion an illu sion, adding that there is some m adness in every real ized illusion. Then, in an apparent echo o f the view of Erasmuss Folly, who insisted that Every individual is entitled to illusions, M rai chooses a religious illu sion from the Far East for his own consolation: Am ong the religious illusions. Buddhism is the most sympathetic to me, for it doesnt promise anything. M ore precisely, it promises nothing, Nirvana; thus it is candid. Elsewhere, in the 1958-67 Journal, he writes: St. Francis was com pelled to fear death because he was a believer. I, for example, dont believe in an after life; so I am not afraid o f death. His ultimate hope is that he will experience an absolute death, one that w ill spare him the threat o f resurrection: T o step out into the Silence, into the Darkness without prosthesis and hope, the last dignity to w hich Man has the right between two Voids: the Void before birth and the Void after death. In the course o f this passage between the two Voids, hum an beings learn that life has only one palpable meaning: mortality. These pessimistic responses to the state o f W est ern civilization and the hum an condition echo Speng ler, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Sartre; their atti 13

tudes but not necessarily their concepts. For if, accord in g to Mrai, hum an beings can no longer turn for sup port to the political, economic, social and religious in stitutions created by a once hum anistic m iddle class, then how can they possibly reverse the decline o f W est ern civilization and redeem the hum an condition amid the historical ruins characterized chiefly by a lost m or ality? Mrai is convinced that only culture can save the hum an spirit, only hum an spirit the culture. Find in g the ultim ate value in the activities o f the creative imagination, he claim s that the arts exist to keep us from falling into ruin, and the arts he has in mind are clear: It is absolutely certain that the issue [today] is not that o f a world w ar, not that o f an articial peace, but that o f Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Michelangelo, Goethe and Shakespeare. Everything else is interlude, and dull and indifferent in its horrors. Indeed, to hu manity only one kind o f freedom is possible: the cre ative individuals w ill when he bends over his work. A m ong the arts, Mrai singles out literature for him personally im aginative literature was a way o f life and an ethical vehicle for an especially crucial role in the restoration o f hum an content to life: Only literature keeps watch over hum an m eaning ... Even here, though, he felt anxiety about the ability o f literature to fulfill its mission. During the Paris visit recounted in the M emoir, he w as profoundly distressed about the de valuation o f the intellectual function o f books he was finding in the W est: ... the book (hence the literary form through which Europe spoke with its true voice) had changed in its essence, in its organic reality: it was no longer a Message, only an international m e dium, a com m odity. Politicians, he maintains, will or ganize the New Europe, pedagogues teach the ways o f hum an coexistence, but writers are indispensable to the creation o f the hum an bond:

14

Perhaps the poets. Perhaps one day a writer will speak up and again give humans the strength needed fo r the enormous duty they have to live together: he will provide m ore than social strength. Everything depends on this. St. Paul could give such strength at a transitional m o m ent sim ilar to todays divided world order, divided ways o f life - and later Dostoevsky . . . t o his people. I am waiting fo r a w riter who will begin singing in the public squares, and people will look up and abandon the words that had pum m eled their ears, and they will understand that som ething else is at stake. By the time the Second World W ar came, Mrai felt suffocated by the political situation under Regent Horthy and the growing presence o f German fascism. In the 1943-1944 Journal, he described his state of mind: In Hungary, one can live only in internal emigra tion. By turning completely inward, toward m y work, By emigrating into m y work. Fortunately, at the end of the war, the new atmosphere o f freedom produced an outburst o f literary activity. With censorship lifted and intellectual horizons unobstructed, all kinds o f writing, including socialist, were published. Experimentation commenced, and before long, as writers began acquaint ing themselves with fresh currents in Western lit erature, m any views o f life and forms o f literary ex pression, particularly in poetry and fiction, thrived side by side. This enormous surge in creativity was en ergized by many new journals that zealously advocated certain literary approaches, as well as partisan political viewpoints, and found, for a time, common ground in supporting humanistic principles. Although the rabid struggle among the several political parties often inter fered with literary activities, writers were vigorous enough to withstand the paralyzing effects o f the wor sening political situation and to set in motion various 15

literary trends so firmly that m any o f them managed to outlast, albeit in the desk drawer, the cultural policies pernicious to belles-lettres put into effect in 1948, when the Communist Party took control o f the nation. In this climate, Mrai, whose publication o f fourteen books dur ing the w ar years reflected his emigration into my work, published eight works in a three-year period, in cluding two novels, the 1943-1944 Journal, a play, a book o f feuilletons, and two books o f didactic prose, one entitled Eurpa elrabldsa (The Ravishing o f Europe, 1947). And yet, as he reports in his Memoir, he became conscious o f the painful fact that the turn o f events pro duced by the Hungarian Communists maneuvering their way into power would eventually deprive him of the right to emigrate into my own work, even worse, that the new order would deny him the right to silence with its insistence that all Hungarian writers contribute to the establishment o f a sociaHst state. Later, in his 1968-1975 Journal, he states: In critical times, the moment arrives for the w riter when he must decide whether he must re late what he has to say with perhaps corroded words in the linguistic sense but freely [in exile], or to lie in his pu re native language with gasp ing circumlocution. This is a grating, difficult moment. But it cannot be avoided. In his m ind, the tim e for a decision had arrived. So he began a forty-year odyssey. H e searched for a home first in Switzerland and then in Italy. Fol lowing several visits to the U nited States, he lived in New York City from 1952 to 1967, writing and work ing for Radio Free Europe, and became an American citizen in 1957, after the failure o f the 1956 Revolution in H ungary became certain. Then, finally, in 1979, in his eightieth year, he settled in San Diego, slipped into a reclusive life and wrote freely in the language which 16

he called his only homeland, in a country which, though it m ay be lacking the priceless ancient cultural reflexes o f a thousand years o f European civilization, produced, in his view, the opportunities for a desirable way o f life and is m otivated ideally by he spirit o f tolerance and disciplined collaboration among individ uals. But Mrai, the proverbial outsider, never felt at home anywhere. On leaving a rather primitive hospi tal in Italy after a four-week stay, he confessed to being a stranger in the world: W hen I step out into the ward, I perceive, to m y surprise, that this sty, this underworld stable o f the bodys dissolution gave me something. It was as i f through the course o f weeks I had belonged somewhere. In past years I had never felt this, neither in Hungary nor in Am erica. Though he continued to write to the end, he spent his last years in growing solitude. In 1986, his iso lation became nearly complete: This year Lola [his wife] died. She was followed by m y siblings, m y younger sister and my older brother, Gbor, and now my younger brother, Gza. I am a weary stray, I tarry as a straggler with the strength to take a few steps, I hobble after them in single file. His son, an orphan he and Lola had adopted during the war in Budapest, died in 1987, perhaps o f a heart attack, perhaps by his own hand, leaving a wife and three children, whom Mrai loved but to whom, according to reports, he never felt close. He became nearly blind, but brushed o ff all ef forts to lighten his burden, insisting he did not need any help. Considering his blindness and poor health to be strictly a private matter, he never complained to any one. In 1988, he wrote to a friend: Sometimes I feel like a thoughtless guest who has overstayed his welcome. The hosts entreat him amiably to stay on, but it hap pens that in an unguarded moment someone looks at his watch and shakes his head. Late in the last year o f his life, the thought o f suicide appeared in a telephone conversation with a friend o f forty years who was urg17

ng him to go to Hungary now that traveling there had become a civil and friendly prospect and accept trib utes: Look, say what is true, that my physical condi tion is so weak that I am unable to go out, and I am not in a position to make a visit outside the house. In a let ter to this friend, the thought o f suicide definitely enters his mind: I am beginning to lose m y patience. This erudite and astute observer o f the human scene, this intellectual in the richest European sense o f the word w ho had lived through three calamities suf fered by his country defeats in two world wars and Communist take-over in 1948 had throughout his life sought that solitude which he believed essential to a contem plative existence. Perhaps, during the long years o f inner exile that began in Hungary and proved to be so productive, Mrai experienced, at times, the consolation o f the personal N irvana that a character in his E g s fold (Heaven and Earth, 1942) describes: You com pletely serve human beings when you withdraw from their affairs... By throwing aw ay everything we have accumulated, p ro tected and carried, by still hearing the sounds o f the world but with h a lf closed eyes, like someone who has com e to rest at a foreign inn, sounds o f the city with which you are no longer really con cerned and whose jo y s and despairs, lechery and morality, legal system and interdictions no longer touch you, the transient, the foreigner ... by dropping everything we thought we could not live without, by forgetting ambition, arrogance, the parchedness o f carnal pleasure, the stress o f work - by forgetting the faces o f those we love the way one falling to sleep forgets their linea ments by day, by still hearing the world but no longer payin g attention to it, by still remember ing but sm iling because it no longer hurts, by taking o f f the ring, the watch, the clothing, the 18

titles, the responsibilities, by throwing away the body, too, this worn and suspect tissue, to extinguish every light, by being alone, no longer even shuddering, by falling asleep, and sleeping. Radical political changes sw ept away the condi tions that Mrai had imposed on permission for the publication o f his works in Hungary. In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev appeared on the world stage to loosen the Soviet U nions grip on the foreign and dom estic affairs o f the East European nations and, in time, to remove all armed forces from within their borders. Soviet inter vention no longer threatening them, progressive ele ments in Hungary inside and outside the Communist Party seized the opportunity to initiate the m any demo cratic reforms that by the fall o f 1989 culminated in a multi-party system and open elections monitored, as Mrai had demanded, by trustworthy foreign obser vers . Today his name is known to the latest gener ations in Hungary, and, once w ritten out o f the na tions memory, his works are now being reassessed by critics and literary historians. H e w as elected member o f the Hungarian Academ y o f Sciences on September 7, 1989. Academ ician Jzsef jfalussy said on that ceremonial occasion: This rehabilitation, as in other cases, represents more than a sim ple declaration; it also repre sents a hom ecom ing.... This hom ecom ing means that Sndor M rai can again be present at home, in the com mon consciousness o f the pu b lic, in the consciousness o f intellectuals, and in the circulation o f books. In the same year, he was also awarded the nations high est recognition for literature, the Kossuth Prize. And in 1990 an edition of his collected works began to appear. H is forty-two-year odyssey had ended. 19

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PART ONE

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.. A n d the world shrinks back as the war Unleashes its leaden throated roar A n d brute atrocities scorch all here On each front door the sign appears In blood o f Christian, Jew and European They have destroyed the worthy we believed in A ll the things worth living for. Odium A carcass in you r bed, a fetid cave you r home. B oth the lock and their faith in the skinners fist The gates have been opened to the Apocalypse A n d ritual slaughter shrieks down on the world. The one who kisses me today, tomorrow m e inters The one I em brace today, tomorrow will be sepulchred. Who rocks me asleep tonight will at dawn prove traitor . .. (Christmas 1944)

Nam e days in Hungary have always been con sidered convivial, hospitable tribal holidays. And so, as the Gregorian calendar ordained, this year, too - 1944, on Sndor day, M arch 18 - w e invited several relatives to dinner to celebrate the occasion. A s wartim e shortages dictated, the dinner was modest. But this year, too, friends living on the shores o f Lake Balaton sent us several bottles o f full-bodied wine produced by the fiery volcanic soil. The early spring night was crisp, cold, and it was pleasant to have not only the m eagerly stoked tile stoves heating the room s but also the serious spirits o f the wine warm ing our guests. W e were sitting in the old house in Buda, in the flat which had been m y hom e for nearly two decades. There are days when persons live w ith an intui tive certainty, as i f they have heard som e news or w ord that will directly intervene in individual lives. One cannot tell w h at it is, bu t a m om ent has arrived, there is a sm ell to it. The nam e-day gathering had this kind o f sm ell in m id-M arch 1944. W e did not know anything for certain, but everyone scented that a fun damental, decisive change w as brewing, indeed was close at hand. A t this time, in the blacked-out city, at the time o f Voronezh and other w ar tragedies, its inhabitants, who had till then been relatively spared, were not lead ing the social life they form erly had. Still, on this par ticular evening m y w ife arranged the nam e-day dinner ju st as she had in tim es when lye saw to our guests in peacetime. Our household had dug out o f the bottoms o f cupboards the fam ilys M eissen china w ith the onion pattern, set the table w ith the old silver, and lavishly lighted the table w ith candles in French candelabra in 24

place o f electricity. Eleven o f us sat around the oval table. After that evening, these eleven beings never again sat down together at the same table. N ow it is no longer possible for them to do so again, for several o f them have died. The intimate, ominous flickering o f candlelight illuminated the faces, the bourgeois interior, the old furniture. I never bought any furniture; everything we owned was inherited from the estates o f our two families, from two households in U pper Hungary. We didnt have any art treasures, but we didnt have a single piece o f store-bought furniture either. The tastes and habits o f our ancestors had selected every thing arranged in our rooms. The doors stood open between the rooms. Now, as 1 think back on this scene om inously lighted by the flickering candleflames, it all strikes m e as i f w e, the bouigeois progeny o f U pper Hungary and Buda, had re prised for ourselves the life o f our fathers for one last time. On this night, everything that form ed the props and scenery o f those bygone days cam e to life again. Conversation began perfunctorily, but the wine and the fam ily chatter o f old acquaintances helped us through the initial stiffness. After dinner w e remained at the table, o f course, and following H ungarian cus tom, we began chatting over wine and demitasse. Inevitably the m om ent arrived when the guests and hosts began to discuss politics w ith a passion. This evening was special and it rem ained m em orable both in light o f the events that occurred afterwards the se quel was nothing less than the total destruction and ex tinction o f an entire way o f life - and in another way as well: the mom ent had once again com e when human beings sensed their fate w ith their instincts at least as much as with their intellects and w ith inform a tion. Our guests, all relatives, w ith a single exception, were unequivocally anti-Nazis. But they all feared the end o f the war, and their w ary conjectures w ere de 25

livered in worried tones about w hat the immediate fu ture w ould be like, w hat the chilly spring would bring, how the m ilitary situation would work out, and how Hungary w ould fare in the cataclysm. The m ajority o f the disputants shared the con cern that w e could expect nothing good. But before long the relative w ho w as a friend o f the Nazis brought up the m yth o f m iracle w eapons. A t the time, the country w as full o f such tales; people were talking about a weapon that would freeze the enem y and about airplanes that flew w ith the speed o f lightning so that pilots had to be plastered into their cockpits to keep them from falling out. W e quickly dismissed such nonsense w ith a wave o f the hand. W hat could not be disposed o f so readily was fear, fear o f the reality that the final outcome o f the war w as near. W hen I stated that we must accept re sponsibility for the consequences and break w ith the Germans, m ost o f the guests agreed, though rather dif fidently but not the relative who had befriended the Nazis. H e now flared up. Tipsy, he pounded the table and repeated the preachments o f holding out and loyalty to the alliance appearing in editorials. W hen 1 took issue w ith him, he gave a surpris ing reply. I am a National Socialist, he shouted. You he pointed at m e cant understand this because you are talented. But Tm not, and that is w hy I need Na tional Socialism . The passionate words died away; the hotblooded relative had declared the truth o f his life, and, breathing a sigh o f relief, he now stared straight ahead. Several began to laugh; but the laughter was bitter, som ehow nobody was really in the mood to iaugb- W hen we suddenly caught the drift o f what he said, I answered that I dont put m uch trust in m y tal ent it is the kind o f talent that m ust be proven newly every day but I would not be a follower o f the 26

ideals o f National Socialism even i f I had no talent, which is not beyond question. The relative shook his head gravely. You cant possibly understand, he repeated mechanically and struck his chest. Now its about us, the untalented, he said, with strange self-confession, like the hero in a Russian novel. Our time has com e! ... Now we began laughing w ith relief and talked about other matters. Toward m idnight our guests said goodbye, for in the darkened city the streetcars ran only during cer tain hours o f the night. W hen I accom panied the last o f them to the vestibule, the telephone rang. I recog nized the voice o f a friend, a civil servant in the prime ministers office. He never phoned at night. For this reason I asked warily: W hats up? The Germ ans occupied H ungary tonight. H e said this in a very calm , natural voice, as if he were passing on a bit o f social news. He was an out standing, disciplined official. W e were silent for a time. I asked: W here are they? The Germ ans? Here, on Castle Hill. They are advancing in tanks. Im watching them from a w in dow Where are you now? A t the ministry. Can you make it down to m y place? Thats impossible now, he calm ly said. They w ont let m e pass between the tanks. But tomorrow, if they havent arrested m e yet, m aybe Ill com e down. Good night, I said, feeling w hat I w as saying was stupid. Good night, he answered gravely. He put down the phone. H e w asnt arrested on 27

the next day but on the third, and he was immediately taken away to a German internm ent camp. ... The m aid came in and began clearing the table, w earing w hite gloves, as she did when serving, because this was also one o f the rules o f the house. I went to m y room and sat down at the old desk. Before the windows, the city was silent in the spring night. Only occasionally did a tank rumble on its way to Castle Hill, carrying mem bers o f the Gestapo to oc cupy the offices. I listened to the clattering tanks and sm oked cigarettes. The room was pleasantly luke warm. I looked absent-m indedly at the books lining the w alls, the six thousand volumes I had gathered together in various places in the world. H ere was that Marcus Aurelius I bought from a second-hand dealer on the banks o f the Seine, Eckermanns Conversations, and an old H ungarian edition o f the Bible. And six thousand more books. From a w all m y father, grand father, and deceased relatives looked down at me.

I encountered m y first Russian soldier several months later, on the second day o f Christmas 1944. He was a young man, a W hite Russian, I believe; he had a typically Slavic face, with wide cheekbones, and blond hair, with a lock sticking out from under a fur cap pointed like a helm et and m arked by the Soviet star. H e galloped into the courtyard o f the villages parish hall, a submachine gun in his hand; in his wake rode two older, bearded, som ber-faced privates. H e leveled his weapon at m e and asked: W ho are you? A writer, I told him. W e stood in the snow, the horses exhaling their fatigue from their lungs in steamy puffs. Like Russian soldiers generally, this one rode m agnificently but did not spare his horse; when galloping, the Russian horseman does not raise his 28

body in the saddle, the entire w eight o f his upper body bears down on the horse, cleaving alm ost immovably to his mount. After galloping, the horses cam e to a dead stop, neighed and snorted. The young soldier didnt understand m y reply and repeated the question. Now - more distinctly, breaking the w ord into syl lables - I said: "pisatiel. I didnt know any Russian, but I had learned this word because the rum or was that the Russians do not harm writers, A nd, in fact, the youth did break into a smile. T he sm ile brightened up his young, proud, boyishly angry, ruddy-cheeked face. "K h ara sh o he said. "Idi dom oi. H e jum ped o ff his horse and rushed toward the parish hall. I understood he had dism issed m e and I could go home. His comrades paid no attention to me. I hurried across the snow-covered yard and started out on the highway for the village house on the edge o f a forest where I had been living for eight months. The house stood in a sort o f no-m ans land, in a large gar den, on the border o f a settlement m ade up o f ha If-vil lage and half-summer places. I lived with escapees and refugees throughout these eight months. The lodg ings on the forests edge proved to be a proper choice. A t this time, the Germans no m ore stuck their noses here than did the H ungarian Nazis and mem bers o f the new Arrow-Cross squads trained to conduct m an hunts. I hurried along the Danubes bank back to the abandoned house. The Danube w as full o f drifting ice floes. Two days earlier the Germ ans had withdrawn from the village and the entire area, unseen and un heard. On this day, the Russians had not yet com pletely encircled Budapest, and m odern weapons o f every type battled at the Danubes upper bend around Esztergom and then directly across on the other side o f the rivers bank. Russian artillery dubbed Stalin pipe organs and extraordinary and very effective mortars 29

poured out a torrent o f fire night and day. But it was relatively quiet on the right side o f the river. Occa sionally we caught a grenade, and sometimes a bomb, dropped absent-m indedly or m istakenly from some lost airplane, would dem olish a house in the village. The Russians had occupied the island in the middle o f the river days before. We observed them from the bank as they crawled around in the snow, building military positions, but on th e second day of Christmas not a single Soviet patrol had blundered into our village. On the m orning o f this day, rumor had it that a Russian outpost had - at a majors com mand moved several kilom eters farther on and occu pied a form er diplom ats house in the vicinity o f a little town nearby. The villagers thought it w ould be a good idea for a delegation to go to the regular Russian army - w ith poppy seed and nut brioche and brandy - and ask the major to station a professional military patrol in our village, too; perhaps this way we could avoid abuses at the hands o f loitering, looting bands o f sol diers. The major promised to dispatch a patrol by nightfall, and he ordered the delegation to gather up all the weapons in the village. I was in the act o f tak ing a hunting rifle to the parish hall when I en countered m y first Russian soldier. I trudged along the Danubes bank. It was grow ing dark. On the other bank o f the river, in the dusk, blue, red, yellow and green flares crackled up high, like skyrockets on a special national holiday - the sig nals o f the Russian infantry slowly advancing toward Pest w ith which they requested shellfire to cover their forward positions. The shellfire sounded close, and oc casionally a rifle bullet whizzed past m y ear. This whiz zing sound w as strange and unmistakable, but I had heard so m any o f them by this time that I paid no at tention to it. Village acquaintances passed by m e in the dark; they recognized and greeted m e in perturbed 30

tones. In this locality w ere strangely mingled the most impoverished peasantry w ho barely survived doing cot ters work and the sum m er residences o f well-to-do big city dwellers. On the hillside huts stood in rows; along the Danube, summer houses built after the First W orld W ar by the thriving middle class according to their diffuse tastes and in an odd hodge-podge o f styles m ade a resplendent display, like some eccentric am use m ent park. H ere were found Tyrolean houses, mansion-like summer villas constructed in gentry-empire style, imitations o f Normandy castles, and even Span ish garden homes rem iniscent o f South Am erican ha ciendas. Few persons lived in the houses o f the gentry; m ost o f the owners had gone to the big city for the siege, because conventional wisdom held that Buda pest will fall in a few days and in the city the in habitants will face field m arshals, w hile in the village corporals will govern, and that will be m ore dan gerous. In reality, one situation was ju st as dangerous as the other, but those who crowded into Budapest at the time o f the siege shriveled and baked in the cellars o f the beleaguered city and experienced every horror o f a large citys destruction. Many residents o f the mano rial houses in the village escaped to the W est, and their homes were the first to be ransacked by the Rus sians, ju st as they had been by the locals. Each and every person greeting m e confusedly in the dark belonged to the villages proletariat. Their confusion suggested that the great change, the histori cal moment did not evoke the experience o f libera tion in their souls. A people that had already lived in servitude for so long seemed to know that their lot was not going to change: the old masters had left, and the new masters had arrived, and they would remain slaves as before. The local shoemaker, who even for som e time past had the reputation o f being a Communist, hurried after me breathing heavily and began an emotional, 31

confused discourse. The fat man stood without an over coat in the biting cold and explained agitatedly to me that when the Russians m arched in and caught sight o f him at the edge o f the village, they shouted, Bour geois, bourgeois! and pulled o ff his leather coat, which he ju st happened to be wearing, shoved two hun dred pengds in paper m oney into his hands, patted the terror-stricken m an on the back, and galloped on. They thought I was a bourgeois, he explained in a w him pering voice, because I am fat and have a leather coat. And I w as w aiting for th em ... This was the first time I heard the voice o f disappointment.

The house was dark. W e had been without elec tricity for tw o days, and soon it wouldnt be available for months on end. W e still had some firewood; we had flour, fifteen kilos. I had buried lard in bottles in the vineyard, twelve o f them, and we still had soap and also some coffee. Extra clothing still turned up; I had hidden our rem aining m oney, four thousand pengds, in the attic under a m ain beam, in a flat Lucky Strike tin box so mice would not nibble them; at the time, this money was enough for tw o months. On that day I even had some cigarettes. The household w ent to bed. I brewed some cof fee and sat alone in the dark room before the slowly dying fire in the stove. I rem em ber this night sharply, more vividly and powerfully than many things that happened later. Som ething had ended, an impossible situation had dissolved into a new, equally dangerous but entirely different state o f affairs. The Russian sol dier w ho entered m y life today was, naturally, som e one other than a ruddy-cheeked Slav youth from som e where on the Volga. This Russian soldier - I had to think o f this - entered not ju st m y life this afternoon 32

with every consequence, but that o f all Europe as well. W e didnt know about Yalta yet. W hat we did know was that the Russians were here, the Germ ans had withdrawn, and the war w ould soon be over. I under stood this much about w hat had happened. And I also understood that we m ust now answer a question. I couldnt put the question into words, but on this particular night, when a warrior from the East entered a dark H ungarian village we understand only w hat we see and touch I felt in my bones that this young Soviet soldier had-brou gh t a question to Europe w ith him. A t the time, the world for nearly thirty years had pondered, loudly and silently, what Communism was, what its m eaning was. Those who replied gave very different answers, depending on interest, convic tion, political creed, great pow er positions. M any lied, exaggerated. But then I spoke w ith those who didnt lie and read books which - the authors person furnish ing the p roof - did not exaggerate. In any case, I lived in an atmosphere in which Communism was con sidered one o f the Seven Deadly Sins. This was w hy I. thought the mom ent had arrived for m e to forget every thing I had ever heard about the Russians and the Communists. A t the moment when in the snowy, dark courtyard o f the parish house I first en countered a Soviet soldier, there also began in m y life personally the great examination, the process o f ques tion and answer, the assessment o f the Communist and non-Communist worlds; but this examination com menced simultaneously in the W estern world as well. A power had appeared in Europe, and the Red Army was only the military expression o f this power. W hat was this power? W hat was Communism? The Slavs? The East? ... In the night, m uttering m en walked aroim d the house, came and left. The night loiterers spoke a foreign language. I sat in the dark room and decided 33

that, to the extent hum anly possible, I would purge m y judgm ent o f every bias and try to look at the Commun ists without any residual m em ories of m y readings and conversations, without any o f the preconceptions o f offi cial anti-Bolshevist propaganda. That afternoon I had personally undergone an event w hich the so-called intellectual had lived through as a sim ilar experience in Europe only twice up to then: in the ninth century, when the Arabs sud denly broke through to Autun and Poitiers, and in the sixteenth century, when the Turks transmigrated to Gy dr and Erlau. The Easterners were not allowed to advance farther into Europe then either. The m araud ings and conquests o f the Genghis Khans, the Timur Lenks, and the Attilas in the European plains were tragic but fleeting interludes, and one day, without so much as stopping to think, these hordes scurried home from Europe at some magical sign o f some Asiatic trib al calamity. The Arabs, on the other hand, launched an attack w ith an ideological, racial, and spiritual con sciousness against another ideological, racial and spiri tual consciousness, against Christianity, and when Charles Martel, the bastard, defeated them at Autun for good, they left in Europe not ju st the memory o f their looting but also the great questions o f Arab civi lization that dem anded answers. They brought with them not only astronomy, navigation, m edical science, new kinds o f ornamentation and the Eastern view o f nature, but also a num erical system that made techni cal thought possible when it banished the complex and cumbersome num bers o f the Greek and Roman numeri cal systems. They brought w ith them the self-con sciousness o f H ellenism , which by then was barely flick ering in the dim cells and encapsulated souls o f the M e dieval scholastics, when, finally, Gerhard o f Cremona translated several dozen Greek learned and literary works into Latin, including nearly all o f Aristotle. To this barbarian, to this first Eastern question, the 34

Christian world would give a good answer at Autun; it answered not only w ith cannon but with the Renais sance and Humanism, which would, perhaps, not have emitted sparks in the soul o f M edieval m an for cen turies without the impetus o f Arab civilizations H el lenistic, Aristotelian self-consciousness. The Renaissance was, in any event, a response to the first massive Eastern ideological invasion. On the occasion o f the second Eastern assault, at the powerful onslaught o f the Osman world concept and Eastern imperialism, the Christian world would again reply not only with weapons but w ith a great attempt at renewal, the Reformation. How w ill m y world, the W estern world, respond to this young Russian soldier who today arrived from the East and asked me, an un known European writer: W ho are you? I sat in the darkness, in this very strange dark ness, listening to the cannon-fire rum bling in the night with the monotony o f factory gear and destroying everything that, a few kilom eters away, was for m e not long ago still a home and a world concept; and I tried to figure out the tone o f the question that the healthy blond Slavic soldier w earing a quilted Chinese coat would address to m y world. I did not think about the answer, because I knew that such answers cannot be determined. The humanists didnt determine the Renaissance either, nor did Luther determine the Re formation; such answers ju st happen somehow. N one theless, I tried to figure out w hat the Russian soldier really wanted o f me. H e w ill, o f course, carry o ff the pigs, the wheat, the oil, the coal and the m achines; there w as no doubt about that. (At the time I didnt suspect he would take people away, too.) But w hat does he w ant besides the pigs, w heat and oil? Does he w ant m y soul and thus m y personality, too? N ot much tim e passed before this question resounded very pow erfully not ju st within m e in the night and in the secluded village house. We 35

came to know that he w anted to take away all these things and, on top o f it all, he wanted our souls, our personalities. W hen w e becam e aware o f this, the en counter took on a different meaning, one that ex tended beyond the fate o f a nation to that o f the whole world. V ast empires w ither away more quickly than tropical forests; history is replete with the skeletons of such mammoth hulks as the Seleucian, Nubian and Lib yan Em pires - they bloom ed for a few historical m o ments, then dust buried them all without a trace. Only a lunatic could believe that the fate o f thousand-yearold H ungary has any significance for the large masses o f peoples. I f H ungary stands in the way, they will trample it underfoot, without anger, indifferently. If they can make use o f Hungary for a moment, they will sign it on in som e sort o f subordinate role, ju st as the Germans signed it on yesterday, as the Russians will sign it on tom orrow. This is destiny, and a small na tion can do very little against it. But to the question that the young Russian Bolshevist brought into m y life - into the lives o f everyone raised in the life forms o f W estern civilization - one must answer without prejudgm ent and bias. I imagined I saw the strange, impassive young face in the darkness. It wasnt repug nant, but it w as frightfully strange. A t this m om ent, in this phase o f the war, I wasnt the only one to reflect anxiously on the Rus sians: a bourgeois H ungarian w riter in a house in a H ungarian village. The English, French and A m eri cans were also eyeing them w ith dubious expecta tions. A t the cost o f terrible sacrifices at Stalingrad, a great people turned around the wagon shaft o f world history, and I had this very day encountered an em bodim ent o f this great power. T o m any, to those perse cuted by the Nazis, this young Russian brought along a kind o f liberation, an escape from the N azi terror. 36

But he couldnt bring freedom w ith him because he didnt have any. A t the tim e, this was not yet widely known.

For two weeks they came random ly and sporadi cally, singly or in pairs. They generally asked for som e thing; wine, food, som etimes ju st for a glass o f water. After the initial anxiety, these encounters sometimes took place in a human voice, true, in a som ewhat theat rical and studied voice. Once the rudiments o f greet ings and communications were clarified, only scant conversational possibilities rem ained to us. Staying in the house w as a young wom an w ho com pleted her university degree in Prague and spoke the Czech idiom fluently. She w as our interpreter, and the Rus sians understood her for the m ost part. They entered the house night and day without ringing or knocking. During the first days and nights, we were sometimes taken aback when, at the m ost un expected moment, a Russian with a submachine gun stood before our bed or beside our table. But we be came used to that quickly, too. M ost o f them stayed for only a short time. Once three o f them arrived, two officer types, or kapitanoSy and a private. As we later learned, the of ficer rank started with majors in the Russian army; they had already com pleted the m ilitary academ y and had orderlies, and m ost o f them knew a little German. But below the rank o f major, the officer types w ith sev eral stars were not real officers. Also present were other ranks and relations between superiors and subor dinates that a foreigner could understand only w ith dif ficulty. There was the political officer who monitored the regular soldiers on assignment from the Party, but it could also be presumed that the political officer him self had a monitor within the army. Some years be 37

fore, at the beginning o f the w ar, I read a book pub lished in Switzerland whose author, a Russian named Basseneff, tried to draw a picture o f the Soviet Peoples A rm y. I now recollected this book, but I found the reality m uch m ore com plicated than the one this Russian m ilitary writer delineated. For instance, these three visitors held ranks hard to define in W estern m ilitary terms. They were young the private w as a doltish sleigh driver, the of ficer types were m ildly tipsy. They arrived about noon, and I tried to receive them politely, sociably, because I had already sensed that this way o f treatm ent pacified m y Russian guests the m ost effectively. I extended my hand, offered them a seat, treated them to m y remain ing cigarettes and brandy, and then waited to see what would happen. Sometimes the politeness, the external forms o f hospitality, affected the Russians favorably. Generally, they arrived w ith great hubbub to search for guns" and Herm anns, that is Germans, but after the first polite words and hospitable gestures, they grew tame. Thats w hat happened now. W hen I raised the brandy glass and toasted their health, all three stood up and courteously returned the greeting with glasses in their hands. Then w e sat around the crested tile stove and began conversing - exactly like billeted soldiers and locals during military exercises. Members o f m y fam ily m y wife and a little boy, who was stay ing in the house at the tim e, and the young woman who spoke a Slavic language - sat w ith the guests. The situation was strange and different from what we ex pected on the basis o f fugitives alarm ing tales. I began to hope. This hopefulness, at first, was not without cause. W e got along without extraordinary damage and tragic m ishaps with the officers and orderlies o f the regular army, especially i f they werent drunkards, and there was also a high m ilitary command nearby. In the first days, som e looters turned u p ,.b u t they 38

were more like pilfering sneak thieves in the night who arrived armed and demanded watches, liquor, and cologne, and prom ptly took to their heels w ith the booty. Clearly, the thieves had an uneasy conscience because they feared punishment by the local high com mand. But in the early days, regular soldiers, es pecially the officers, sometimes behaved considerately here in the little village, but differently in the big city nearby where open robbery and violent acts were au thorized undertakings. The three young m en sat sociably around the large earthenware stove. The driver was hopelessly stupid, but he, too, m ade an effort to be well-m an nered, visibly im itating the kapitanos" behavior. They related w hat occupations they followed as civilians one was a draftsman - and they asked m e w hat my profession was. This w as m y first lengthy conversation with Soviet men, and I again saw that the writer is a magical notion among Russians. A t the m om ent when I said I am a writer, they looked at me with great re spect and attentiveness, as i f I were some extraordi nary being. They looked around m y room, w hose m od est furniture some kind o f bungalow furnishing didnt really make a grand impression (the house wasnt mine, I had moved in eight months ago at the request o f friends), and they were visibly affected by everything they saw. The younger kapitano, the drafts m an, said he was very pleased to have the opportunity to m eet me because he likes persons like me. Then they wanted to know i f the house belonged to me. W hen I said it didnt, they began asserting enthusiasti cally w hat a splendid lot Soviet writers enjoyed; they kept saying that in the Soviet U nion I would have a house, a garden, and a car by now. The older kapitano waxed unduly enthusiastic and asked if I wanted to move into one o f the m ore splendid upper-class houses in the locality, because he w ould be glad to present it to me as a gift. Laughing, I turned down the offer. 39

A ll this was childish and strange, o f course, but I really didn't xmderstand this veneration o f writers. I did m y best to find out w hat they knew about Russian and world literature. To m y question they answered everything w ith voluble verbosity, because at home, in the Soviet Union, everybody reads. W hen I interro gated them and w anted to know details, one o f them ut tered Pushkins nam e, another Lerm ontovs. Later I noticed that m ost o f them had heard these two names, especially Pushkins, that for them the m em ory o f com pulsory readings in school rested in these names. They nodded on hearing the nam es o f Tolstoy and Dostoev sky, but it was apparent that these tw o names meant nothing to them. While we were talking, one o f them, the boozer, kept reaching for the young female inter preter; but at a single glance from m e he let go o f her hand, and his comrade, the draftsman, said something to him in a reproachful voice. Thereafter all three of them behaved properly. W e shook hands in farewell, and I saw them out to the garden gate - it still had one then and I stood there until they got into the sleigh. They were in good hum or and young; the green sleigh heaven knows w here they picked up this vehicle and the jingling harness o f the troika around the horse's neck: the whole scene looked like some serene engraving from the tim e o f the Napoleonic wars. They drove away am id infernal jingling, and at the turn at the bottom o f the garden, they began shoot ing wildly and firing their submachine guns into the air randomly. Teenagers, I thought, as the sleigh disap peared on the snowy road in a cloud o f fog: teenagers, juveniles. I went back to the house, and we discussed the strange visit in detail. Our anxiety abated. The Russians, it seemed, were not as dangerous as reputed ... we all shared this hope optimistically. I quoted what Stendhal wrote about them when they retreated from Kiev escorted by Napoleon: Cet ocan de barbarie puante." The reaty, 40

we hoped, would be different. True, these young men were uneducated, but why should the soldiers o f an Eastern army be particularly educated? Anyway, they were healthy, good-humored, and open-minded. In ad dition, they, too, respected writers. Lets not forget, I said to the members o f the household, that they come from the East, where at the time o f the Assyrians, of Hammurabi, writing had a god: N abu was his nam e. This was how we cracked jokes. In any case, the question o f w hy the notion of the writer was so magical to the Russians stirred my interest. One day, in the morning, a Russian field of ficer, a m^jor or a lieutenant colonel, arrived at our place with a large retinue o f officers; they wore leather coats, splendid boots, fur gloves, flat officers hats, and the gold-bar insignia o f rank on their shoulders. The major spoke German fluently. They didnt sit down; they came from the villa next door, where they had been treated to lunch. They heard there that a writer was living in the neighboring house and came over to take a look at this rare bird. The visit didnt last long, but it was intense. The major stood in the middle of the room in the semi-circle o f his officers, w ith his riding-whip in his hand. Binoculars hung on his chest from a leather strap, and he looked like a general in a school book. He asked m e i f I was the writer. Then he looked m e over. He motioned to one o f the officers to photograph me. M y typewriter stood on the table with a newly begun manuscript. Firm ly but courteously he asked i f I was at work and on what. I replied that under present conditions o f life I was not able to take on demanding literary tasks, but that I was working on m y journal, as before, in peace and war. He nodded as if he understood this perfectly and inquired whether I record everything I am now experiencing in m y journal. Not everything, I said, only what I con sider o f vital importance. Then record, he said gravely and firmly, that 41

an arm y officer cam e to see you and did not harm you. Also record that this Russian arm y officer saw Tol stoys residence in Yasnaya Polyana, which your countrys soldiers had com pletely turned upside down. Will you record that? he asked sternly. I prom ised to take note o f that, too. (It was not a situation in which I could start an argum ent with a Russian officer, and so I didnt tell him that last night Russian soldiers ransacked Zsigm ond M riczs garden house and trampled on the manuscripts scattered on the floor w ith their muddy boots. This is w hat war is like; it is always hideous, and muddy boots always tram ple on m anuscripts in a strange country.) He looked around for a while, then shrugged his shoulders, raised his hand to the peak o f his cap, sa luted gravely, turned on his heel, signaled his officers, and they left. I looked after them in astonishment. I now fulfill the prom ise I made then. This was different from w hat we expected, so com pletely different and surprising that I became cau tious, like someone who has lost his w ay in the dark and is unable to find the road sign. W hat kind of people are they? For, a short tim e later, a m aid from the neighboring villa ran over and reported that these very same Russian officers w ho had dined at their place ju s t a little while ago kissed the hand o f the lady o f the house, said goodbye graciously, came over to our house to look at a writer, and when they departed, they sent back the chauffeur armed w ith a subma chine gun from the highway to the villa, to their hosts, to dem and that the m aster o f the house hand over his gold wristwatch. The aggrieved man, who naively wore it and looked at it frequently during lunch in his guests presence, later confirmed the news. But then why did they kiss m y wifes hand? he asked, bewil dered. W e began to suspect that there was something astounding in the Russians. Several Jew ish refugees who lay hidden in the 42

village through the m onths the Germans and the Hun garian Arrow Cross persecuted the Jew s now ventured forth. A n old man and his family lived close by; he was a pharmacist, a well-to-do bourgeois who had escaped pursuit by the Arrow Cross. But the wom en in his fam ily were afraid o f the Russians. A t the tim e the first Russian visitor arrived, the old man he had a white beard and was a venerable patriarchal figure stopped solem nly in front o f him and disclosed he was a Jew. The scene that followed w as astonishing. On hearing the disclosure, the Russian soldier broke into a smile, rem oved the submachine gun from his neck, walked up to the old m an, and, according to Russian custom, kissed him gently - from right to left - on the cheeks. H e said he was a Jew, too. For a tim e he si lently and heartily squeezed the old m ans hand. Then he hung the submachine gun around his neck again and ordered the old gentlem an to stand in the corner o f the room with his entire fam ily and to turn with raised hands toward the wall. W hen the old man didnt understand the order immediately, the sol dier shouted at them to comply right away or he would shoot them dead. The wom en and the old m an stood in the corner o f the room, their faces turned to the wall. After this, the Russian robbed them slowly, at his leisure. H e was an expert. W ith the skill o f a wall-de molishing burglar he tapped the tile stove and walls from one end to the other and pulled out every drawer. He found the familys hidden jew els and all their cash, about forty thousand pengos. H e put everything into his pocket and left.

The Russian soldiers sniffed out wine like hounds pursuing wild game. They pounded the length o f the basem ent flooring with their rifle butts - in 43

many places vintners had buried their wine barrels, but the Russians quickly got the hang o f searching for them and they dug carefully where the flooring gave a dull thud until they found the wine. The momentum o f the Russian attack also stalled on two battlefronts: when the Soviet forces reached a wine district, their of ficers could only drive them on at the cost o f bringing in new troops. This was what occurred in the M^tra and Balaton wine regions, A ll their behavior showed this unpredictable quality. It occurred that the Russian who dropped by in the morning, conversed am iably w ith a family, showed pictures o f his own fam ily back home sentimentally, patted the heads o f the children present in the room and gave them candy and apples, departed and then re turned in the afternoon or late at night and robbed the very sam e fam ily he had m ade friends with in the morning. Since the power o f the hum an imaginative faculty was keyed up during these days and later, I naturally didnt believe all the stories circulating about the Russians behavior, and I am now recording only w hat I personally experienced or w hat I am con vinced actually took place. It is certain that the writer was a magical idea for m ost Russians - ju st as the actor, the doctor, sometimes the priest, too! - but it was equally certain that this magical w ord did not always carry magical pow er for them. A Russian officer who turned up one m orning dem anded flour from m e - naturally locals, neighbors sent him w ho knew we had a little flour stashed away and the argum ent that he had stum bled upon a writers house carried no weight at all. He found the flour and carried it off, muttering furiously. Not a single m orsel o f bread was to be found in the house around New Years. It was then I learned that need is m ore powerful than gold. A t daybreak I headed w ith a ferrym an and a dilapidated punt across the Dan ube full o f drift-ice to a place on the island ju st oppo 44

site, on the basis o f a rum or that the miller there sold flour for gold. I found the village Shylock - a Swabian with a bloated, purple-blue face - in the mill and placed before him without a w ord a sm all gold-plated womans Swiss wristwatch, one o f our last rem aining earthly treasures. The m iller understood not only flour but gold as well; he sprang open the cover o f the watch case with the technical deftness o f a jew eler and looked at the assay m ark o f the gold watch worriedly. It was fine gold, eighteen karats. H e sighed and handed it back with a scornful gesture. I have no flour, he said, spreading his arms helplessly. The Russians carried it o ff during the night. And we veritably stood there helplessly - the gold-hungry m iller and I, the flour-hungry writer - in the middle o f a world situation. I w ent hom e emptyhanded, and as the punt swam through the drift-ice to ward the other side - that m orning heavy cannonfire was sweeping along both banks o f the river, the Rus sians were heading toward Pest with a large force - I reflected on the strange life situation I found m yself in. In this moment I came to understand something about the gravity o f the life lived by ancient bourgeois pioneers. A good many o f exceptions cropped up, but in the first two weeks thanks to the presence o f the Rus sian high command that established itself in the vil lage - I very generally got along w ith the Russians who called on us. M ore often than not, a nice manner, an affable intonation won them over. The trust presented in advance, then the refusal, the adult into nation that o f an elder speaking to a young person mixing these w ith the resigned voice o f a defeated per son - all this som etimes affected them. N ot the meaning o f the words I could barely speak to them even with the help o f an interpreter it w as rather the tone only, the manner, the look that m ade an im pression on them. Sometimes, m aking them tractable 45

was exhausting, for they showed up day and night, singly or in sm all bands, on foot and on horseback. I would go into the vestibule and quite frequently find horses there peacefully looking around, while their masters, the Cossacks, bustled about in the kitchen searching for liquor or som ething to eat. Humans are resilient creatures, and I quickly learned how to show the uninvited guests to the door: I spoke abruptly, in the very same tone to the horses and the horsemen, and they not infrequently left. After such scenes, I felt like a dom pteur after a successfully executed lion act. But, actually, they werent lions or w ild beasts, ju st childlike, simple men. And since the Russian arm y was assembled from exceptionally numerous races, the differentiation appeared hopeless, and the generalization that in cluded under the generic term Russian all the hum an phenomena we came to know was irrespon sible. E ven to this day I cannot distinguish accurately between a W hite Russian and a Ukrainian, though, it is said, the temperamental, cultural and human dif ferences between them are significant. During these weeks, we became acquainted with the soldiers o f the Second Ukrainian Arm y, and this military organiza tion was made up o f astonishingly diverse elements: there were Easterners, slant-eyed yellow men with Chinese mustaches, Tartars and Mongols; there were gray-eyed blond Siberians. There were Cossacks, who also rode fabulously; I m yself watched two Cossacks ca sually ride up twelve garden stairs leading to the neighboring villa ... There were m any types: perplex ing, unknown and inexplicable. They were m ainly full o f surprises, a little like children and like a com pletely different human race whose reflexes and responses didnt make any sense. An old lady, the widow o f a m inister o f state, was liv ing in a nearby house w ith her servants. The cultured old wom an, the descendant o f a German reigning fam 46

ily, led a solitary life am id beautiful Em pire furnish ings. One o f her ancestors fought against Napoleon at the side o f Kutuzov, and this German general w as hon ored with a niche in the group o f statues memorializ ing Kutuzov and his w ar comrades in a Moscow square. In the first days o f the Russian occupation, the old lady based her future on this connection. In fact, one day, when a Russian colonel and his orderly were billeted in her home, she put on her finery, and w ith a picture showing the statues in her hand, she looked up her guest and requested protection. The colonel heard her out, examined the photo o f the Kutuzov statue closely, then ordered her to m ove into the kitchen with her servants because he, the colonel, wanted to reside alone in the inner rooms. The old lady did so, but she didnt take any offense at it. She ranked among the self-possessed; she settled in the kitchen on a servants iron bed. She read Chartreuse de Par me and received friends there regally and pleasantly in the mornings, like Marie Antoinette in the Congiergerie cellar. And so it happened that after the colonel left the old lady stayed on in the kitchen because she harbored the sus picion that the attacks w ould go on for a long time a private w ith a bad leg showed up at her place. H e ar rived toward night-time and asked perm ission to wash his leg and to sleep in the kitchen with the women. U n able to do anything about it, they m ade the best o f it. The night passed quietly. In the morning, the Russian thanked her for the hospitality and then demanded that she give him, the Russian, a confirmation, a bumashka in German! som ething in writing, that he had spent the night in the village house. Once again, writing was im portant to the Russian: the bumashka, that m ystical something, letters. T he old woman explained in vain that her verification would be worthless, that, indeed, it was hard to understand what sort o f defense or p roof an enem y nationals, an old womans acknowledgment, written in Germ an for a 47

vagrant Russian soldier separated from his company, could signify in the eyes o f Soviet authorities. But it wasnt possible to negotiate w ith the visitor; he in sisted on the w riting, which he received. Then he left, satisfied; as a token o f his gratitude he put several decagrams o f candy in a paper bag on the kitchen table in the astonished w om ens presence.

6
They were childlike, som etim es wild, sometimes edgy and melancholy, always unpredictable. Since I could not do anything else anyway, I decided to keep at my profession, and so, after the first surprises, I began ob serving them, and wrote down briefly w hat I experi enced. N ot long ago I read over these notes, and even after reading them, I can only repeat w hat I set down on several occasions at the time: there is something different about the Russians that someone raised in the W est cannot understand. I w ont pass judgm ent on this som ething different, I wont even assess or dis parage it. I shall sim ply establish what it is. W hen I com e face to face w ith som eone from the W est - a Frenchm an, Englishman, American or Ger man, say I can by and large figure out the primary re flexes ensuing from the situation and the moment within the situation itself independent o f his person ality. But I could never decipher the Russians primary reflexes and even less so those o f the second or third de gree. I wasnt the only one who looked at them with such ignorance, everyone in the W estern world who en countered them during this period did so, and they, too, the Russians, watched us closely. The Russians walked w ith piercing looks among us; a primitive people w ith powerful impulses watched us warily. T he m agic w ord writer wasnt always effec tual, and I couldn't entertain the hope that the sol 48

diers o f the Red Arm y hanging around during the siege o f Budapest would spend tim e attending literary seminars in m y room in an abandoned country house. But a Russian always turned up w ho looked at me with respectful, reverential regard when I introduced myself. And because I needed protection on the occa sions o f these visits that were not wholly without danger, and because the Russians w ere extrem ely sus picious and didnt believe I really was a writer, and I, secretly, in the depth o f m y soul, shared their doubt then and even more so since, I was com pelled to look for some kind o f certificate that w ould confirm m y au dacious claim to m y skeptical visitors. And because a trustworthy bum ashka verifying that som eone is a writer is issued nowhere in the world, I was glad to find a French edition o f one o f m y books in the small reference library o f the owners o f the house. M y name was on the title page, and on the back o f the book, the publisher fortuitously included am ong the advertise ments, in a list o f its publications, a noted Soviet writer named Ilya E hrenburg and the title o f one o f his novels. D uring our literary conversations at this time, I had already noticed that the Russians generally were not telling the truth when they boasted o f being widely read, but I also found that among Soviet writers it was the name o f this Ilya Ehrenburg they were m ost likely to know. I later learned that at this time he often wrote for the arm y in cam p newspapers officially dis tributed and also in other Russian publications, so that even those knew his name who hadnt read any of his bocks. One night toward dawn, a dishevelled, bearded, ill-tempered Russian arrived, a Kirghiz or some other Eastern type; he asked for something, wine or bacon, and when I didnt give him w hat he asked for, he began grum bling irritably. H e gripped his submachine gun and shouted unintelligible words in a threatening 49

voice. The situation was turning hostile. I decided to re sort to the last recourse o f defense: I introduced m y self. But the Russian was suspicious. W riter? he asked distrustfully and grumpily. W hat kind of writer? I took the French book o ff the shelf, showed him m y nam e, then pointed to myself, and said with the help o f the interpreter: Leave, because, as you see, you have got into a writers house by mistake. See, I wrote this book. Here is m y name. But thats not all, - I turned the book over - Fm not ju st an ordinary writer but one whose books were published at the same tim e as those o f a fam ous Russian writer. See, you can read Ilya Ehrenburgs name here. The short, bearded Russian w as still suspicious. H e bent over the book w ith the w eapon in his hand, spelled out the name on the back, and asked with a black look and skeptical voice: Ilya Ehrenburg? T e s , I said. H ow about that? H e looked m e over from head to foot. Then he flung out his arms, threw his head back, and shrugged his shoulders. Propagandist! he said contemptuously. H e turned and left the room. I stared after him with m y mouth open. This m an, it seemed, understood literature and had heard som ething about the dif ference between a writer and a propagandist. But this and other kinds o f encounters could not enlighten m e about that difference I sensed in the Russians: w hat it was that set them apart from the people o f the West. F or they were different, not like a H indu or a Chinese, but I am certain that a German peasant, an English repairman, a French veterinary or an Italian housepainter would reply differently from them to the prime questions about life in the attitudinal sense. W e watched one another closely, for the Rus sians also kept an eye on us. They watched us not only in the m anor houses. They didnt take a look at ju st 50

the accessories o f bourgeois life; they were interested in those, but they also looked around and observed the poor in their abodes, and it w as apparent that what they found there was not only unfam iliar but also as tonishing and am azing to them. W hat w as this dif ference? W as it the Soviet m an, actually, and thus a new, engendered and conditioned hum an breed who discerned and surveyed the world and hum anity from a different perspective? Or was the Russian simply someone who, not for the first tim e in history, but now, it seemed, emerged w ith all its consequences from his Eurasian hom e and headed for the w orld to prowl about a bit, w ary but curious? I couldnt com e up with an answer. O f course, they had the piglets and the flour carted away, but there was nothing rem arkable about this, not even typical. A t this time they also had the bi cycles on the highway carried off; they pedaled them for a while and then threw them away or gave them to someone as a gift. Their obvious penchant for collect ing watches couldnt be explained easily either. They actually demanded watches w ith a collectors passion; there were Russians who rolled up their coat sleeves and proudly put on their m ost recently stolen trophies next to the four or five wristwatches already on their arm. In the First W orld W ar, I was acquainted with some Russian prisoners o f war officers, peasants, and workers but not one o f them was so passionately interested in watches. W hat w as going on here, why did the tim e machine engage the Russians interest so fervidly? I recollected Spenglers observation, who as serted in his great pessim istic work that the people o f a harmonious and lively culture have no awareness o f recording, thus o f tim e measured in moments; the Chinese and the Greeks feel and think in large time perspectives, the Olympian being p roof o f this indif ference to time as a unit o f measurement, bu t when a culture comes to a period o f crisis, that civilization, in 51

short the principle o f utility, occasions the same feel ings o f panic in the souls o f hum an beings, and it is then that the anxious m easuring o f tim e commences. It is possible that Soviet industrial experimentation elicited this feeling for time. I couldnt say. It was more likely that there w erent enough watch factories in the Soviet Union, and the m uzhik developed a fancy for this special toy. O r m ore simply, the watch was the one valuable that could be bartered m ost easily. Since I am speaking about the Russians, I cant give a defi nite answer. Their com ing and going, visits, vanishings everything about them was baffling and unpredic table. Days passed without our seeing a single R us sian; then, unexpectedly, they would arrive en masse. They would pass through the village in m otor vehicles, but in other w ays as well, in wagons, disheveled, like Gypsies. It wasnt only the service corps that advanced like this; the infantry also had itself transported in countless wagons. Privates, officers, wom an soldiers, and boy soldiers, twelve and thirteen years old, in regu lar uniform s with insignia o f rank lay stretched out on the straw. I didnt see any chaplains among the troops, but its possible I ju s t didnt recognize them. The Germ ans always advanced with mech anized detachments, as i f the Krupp factory had sal lied forth; even the stacks o f their field-kitchens spewed smoke as i f cannon barrels had been converted to this purpose. The Russians had everything required to wage w ar; but w hat they had w as different, - not as mechanized and system atically regulated. It was as i f a monstrous, dreadful, enigm atic Eastern traveling circus had set out from the distance, from the dim re moteness, from the East, from Russia. This traveling circus was, in reality, one o f the largest military ma chines on earth. And those w ho led it did so incom prehensibly but m agnificently in the eyes o f for eigners: everything was in its place, everything func 52

tioned in the apparent confusion; m ysterious supervi sors and monitors gave tim ely signals about every thing to one another within the great machine. Their intelligence network, information service, transmission o f commands, and internal procedures could not be detected. But seemingly, everything in the Russian army happened in accord with some very ancient system; the warfare experiences o f the Gen ghis Khans, Tatars, and the Golden Horde manifested themselves in the systematic way they marched, moved on, ate, threw bridges across rivers, pitched tents and then suddenly disappeared at some mys terious signal. The warfare o f the ancient Magyars and Huns m ay have been like this; Scythian patrols galloped like tiiis, not sparing the horse, and every forty kilometers - so scholars say a garrison and fresh mounts awaited the horsemen, who tore open their tethered horses arteries, drank its blood for a brief time measured by an hourglass, and then quickly sewed up the horses wound and galloped o n ... These Russians were closer to nature than the soldiers in the Western armies: even as the diiefs o f the ancient Mon golian armies arrayed their forces galloping on white and different-colored horses by the course o f the moon in a certain eastern or northern line o f attack - heaven knows w hat sort o f streamlining w ar technique this was millennia ago! - so these later descendants o f the Mongols were still able to perceive a measure o f na tures power to support or obstruct. It is difficult for m e to speak about this because I cant substantiate it, but during th e months when I lived in the closest intim acy night and day w ith the Russians, I distinctly felt, perceived som ething o f this kind. All this constituted the difference. Morever, they were cunning, crafty and scornfully and mali ciously guileful; they were happy i f they could fool us, the W esterners. They were filled w ith childish jo y if they saw us taken in. I had m any dealings w ith the 53

Russians then and som etim es later as well, but not once did a Russian who asked m e for som ething and promised earnestly to return w hat he borrowed a tool, book, any worthless article - ever keep his word. And i f I called on them to fulfill the promise, they laughed happily and openly in m y face because, well, being smarter, they had outwitted me. I rem em ber som e strange characters: a young soldier who, on patrol, is riding a horse on the Dan ubes bank in the foggy January dawn, and the trot tin g and the face o f the M ongolian horseman - all this is com ing from so a great distance that I stop along the road and follow the apparition w ith m y eyes for a long time. This horseman clearly isnt different from the others, he isnt an individual. H e is the M ongolian horse man, and he has for m illennia trotted like this in his quilted Chinese coat on the banks o f the Volga or some other river, and he will ride his horse with the same im passivity i f one day he should be sent out on patrol in the Pyrenees. H e does not so m uch as glance at his surroundings; an absolute indifference is reflected in the M ongolian face. On another occasion, two strag gling horsem en are plodding along, a sort o f Zoro and H u m - one gangling, the other paunchy and stubby, like Sancho Panza. They are singing and making gloomy, ridiculous faces. Struggling and mimicking themselves, they am ble along the highway, and when they reach me, they howl whoops into m y face that sug gest the braying o f a jackass; then, shrugging their shoulders, they m ove on, tw o coim try buffoons. They liked to play, to act a lot. But their idea o f acting w as also different. It lacked any awareness o f homo ludens or the civilized reflex o f Commedia delTarte; in every one o f their impromptu amusements there w as a bit o f sorcery, som ething tribal, ritualistic and for this reason, they were som ewhat frightening w hen they started to play. Sometimes officers showed up w ith whom we 54

could converse at length and seriously, in German, too. Naturally, I didnt inquire about their life and lot at home, because they would have m isunderstood m y pur pose. Rather, it seemed m ost sensible for m e to nibble at the only topic o f conversation that I could check out - literature. They answered m y questions vaguely, sometimes stupidly, m ostly w ith m isinform ation, but then sometimes with am azing intelligence- Since many o f them tended to tell lies, I accepted as true only answers containing factual p ro o f that the person I asked knew w hat he w as talking about.

I took special pains to learn w hat had trickled down to them from that great Russian literature that could in the early decades o f the century so profoundly stir the Russian people and the entire thinking world. And so I wasnt content w ith m y visitors halting asser tions in which they claimed, like automatons, that they had read everything; instead, I pressed for de tails. A t such times, the m ost com m on answer was an uninformative hem m ing and hawing. Russian Comraunist propaganda persuaded the world to believe at least those som etimes well-m eaning sympathizers who fell for this line - that the revolution had changed the Russian common m ans demand for education. Cer tainly, such a transformation is a grand result; maybe, it isnt worth going through a revolution to achieve it, but a revolution can point to it w ith pride. I didnt understand the technical, strategic and hierarchical structure o f the Red Arm y, nor did I feel I had the right to draw conclusions about the psyche and world view o f the Soviet man from such occasional en counters. A great revolution that re-educates its popu lace for decades in accord with its own ideas and prac tices involves an exceedingly com plex process; in no 55

way could I, who w as at the tim e not fam iliar with the practices o f this Com m unist education through per sonal experience, rightfully reach conclusions about in tellectual conditions in the Soviet Union from the be havior and casual comments o f the systems pupils. But I did have a sm attering o f its literature. Russian literature had nurtured me, too; it gave me pleasure; it filled m e w ith doubts and rapture. And so I was now especially interested in finding out w hat the Soviet m an knew about his countrys literature - be cause I w as in a position to m onitor his answers. After the standard replies - in which the officer I was ques tioning proudly proclaim ed that in the Soviet Union everybody reads, I posed questions o f detail consis tently. W hen we w ent beyond identifying Pushkin and Lermontov, m ost o f them knew only their names and couldnt list w hat these great poets w rote... Using Tols toy and Dostoevsky, I tried to sound out m y visitors fam iliarity w ith the writings o f recent and contempo rary Russian authors. I was surprised how little these Soviet men knew about their own great literature. I w ont m ention the answers o f the simpletons now, but even those who, it could be verified, com pleted some kind o f Soviet secondary school, contented themselves w ith a repeating like parrots o f Mayakovskys name and then, to m y surprise, Chekhovs, despite his truly bourgeois voice and outlook. I understood from their replies only that they did read but superficially, and rather only what was put into their hands in official study groups. For instance, they clearly didnt know Dostoev sky. They were fam iliar w ith his works, the more edu cated even with the titles o f his minor writings, but, it seemed, Dostoevsky didnt belong am ong the pets o f So viet cultural policy. I never could learn why this was so. M aybe it was his nationalism, m aybe his m ysti cism, his explosive Christianity. I dont venture a con clusion about the matter. But it appeared that, accord 56

ing to the official cultural shamans o f party politics, Dostoevsky did not fall within the scope o f the ap proved line. They spoke o f Tolstoy w ith repeated nods o f appreciation. And everyone I questioned m en tioned Chekhovs name and works w ith enthusiasm. The great bourgeois writer from the end o f the cen tury, it seemed, was also officially an approved, fa vorite and popular writer o f the Soviet people. Later, literaiy scholars explained that Soviet cultural policy approved and supported Chekhov because his irony and m ocking attitude unintentionally presented a faithful picture o f bourgeois Russia. But I could never learn the truth about Dostoev sky. H e belonged am ong the nations saints, and for this reason, they didnt admit that, in effect, they were treating him as an undesirable element from an intel lectual point o f view; one could discern that they were trying to protect Soviet youth from the influence o f this great genius. They sanctioned Tolstoy, like an ancient monument, like Kutuzov's statue. I w as as tonished how knowledge o f the second vanguard o f Russian writers at the end o f the nineteenth century and the beginning o f the twentieth had vanished w ith out a trace from the consciousness o f these Soviet men. Ultimately, in addition to Dostoevskys and Tols toys works, Russian literature w as able to produce for the world a second literary frontline w hose notables were not literary geniuses by the standards o f world lit erature, but, it is certain, they contributed in their own day many significant and valuable w orks to the lit erature o f their country and the world. Naturally, I didnt ask Kirghiz cavalrymen, U krainian repairmen, or White Russian or Siberian trappers whether they had ever heard the nam es o f Osip Dym ov, Arkady Averchenko, Artsibashev, Kuprin, Ivan Bunin, Merezhkovsky and Leonid Andreyev; I asked, instead, every officer who was willing to engage in conversation with me. Am ong the officers I did not encounter a single one 57

w ho had ever heard the names o f these writers. They m urm ured in embarrassment, and when I began speaking o f the classicists, they stated w ith relief that they had read the fam ous w ork entitled Dead Souls and knew who Gogol is; they had heard o f Goncharov and proudly asserted that the writings o f the bour geois and W estern Turgenev are read and highly es teemed in the Soviet Union. O f course, Gorky was the great official author in all their eyes. M any knew about Fadeyev and M ar chenko, and, o f course, every one o f them had heard the name o f the previously m entioned Ehrenburg. But I was surprised how quickly the nam es o f several writers w hom we, both writers and readers, kept our eyes on in the W est had vanished from these contem po raries memory; for example, not one o f m y guests had ever heard o f Gladkov, the author o f Cement (and thus they didn't know when and how during the Stalin purges he disappeared, along w ith a good many com rades, never to be heard from again) and what was even m ore strange, they had barely heard the name of the im portant Soviet realist, Sholokhov. I dont want to generalize. I talked with only a few dozen R ed soldiers about Russian literature, and it is certain that m any living in that gigantic empire today know this great literature more thoroughly, m ore intim ately than m y visitors did. But it is also cer tain that the literature o f a great people and, what is more, such a rich and profound literature as the Rus sian - settles down as names and notions in the con sciousness o f everyone who knows how to read and write and speaks the language o f the literature. The Russians honored w riters and literature, but those I m et during these w eeks and later read surprisingly little. A ll o f them spoke o f culture reverentially - the narodnaja kultura, the national culture, belonged among the m agical words, and when a Russian acted the bully, he som etim es grew tractable when I cast in 58

his face that he was being unfaithful to the narodnaja kultura by behaving that way. But I became aware o f the fact that they had no notion o f what culture re ally is. During our conversations, they revealed that they mistook culture for som e kind o f professional, technical knowledge. Still, culture excited them, exactly the w ay writing did. Their felt and expressed interest in writing could also be accounted for by the fact that the written word always has magical significance at the beginning o f every great primitive venture. Script fixes some dim longing, som e mythic notion in primitive man; the m yth fixed in script is already history, thus a m ost re sponsible experience. These Russians were still far from viewing writing as a contest o f wits or - like writers in W estern civilization - often only as a com mercial com modity or a fashionable pursuit. For most o f them, the written w ord still was com pletely trust worthy. And that culture they spoke o f w ith such reverent intonation, w hat could it represent to men who were unquestionably uninform ed in the Western sense o f the word and had not lived through the two great shocks o f W estern civilization, the Renaissance and the Reformation? It took m e som e tim e to under stand that secretly, in the depths o f their souls, cul ture was for them synonym ous w ith the notion o f es cape. They still didnt know exactly what it was, but the prospect o f the escape that could be realized with the help o f culture excited and propelled them. Escape from what? Escape from the bleakness o f their lives. Like the early Christians, they suspected that only a spiritual solution could liberate them from the deep-rooted, hopeless dreariness o f their lives, their termite-like existence. They still did not exactly know w hat the escape that culture prom ised w ould be like, but they swarmed toward it like bugs toward light. They still did not know that culture is som ething other than getting a haircut or not spitting on the floor, 59

som ething other than listening to the gramophone, but this something, this prospect, already agitated them. This is w hy they honored the writer, the doctor, every one who, in their opinion, lived in the sphere o f cul ture. The quip m ade in Budapest, the city o f witti cisms, that Stalin made a mistake when he showed the Russians the way to Europe, and he made a mis take when he showed Europe the way to the Russians contains a measure o f truth. Those who attached farreachi ng expectations to this hypothesis probably erred; it is certain that the masses o f Russians return ing home from Europe took w ith them demands for a different life, a different culture into a native life spent at dreary forced labor (the fate o f Solzhenitsyn and m illions o f Russian soldiers returning home showed that Stalin carefully took this danger into ac count), but the rekindled dem ands could not dismantle the tough barbed-wire fences o f the system. Maybe, those who believed that these demands were a stimulus were not wrong; it is a different ques tion as to the tem po at w hich the stimulating force, this cultural dem and would progress along the Rus sian nerve track, scaled to slower reflexes. Long dec ades and constant intercourse w ith the W est are prob ably needed for this to take place. However, all such exchanges o f literary ideas and other encounters o f a similar nature convinced me that Russians w ho were about forty years o f age hence eight to ten years old before the revolution and still brought up w ithin the protecting, sheltering circle o f the fam ily - gave answers wholly different from those o f the Soviet youths, those from twenty to thirty who were educated on the premises o f pedagogi cal training institutions governed by the Marxist-Len inist world view. In fact, the latter differed from the wild and uninhibited H itler Jugend only in their physique. Their literacy level w as nil; their truculent manners and som etim es cruel and savage conduct and 60

ruthless actions proved that the reflexes o f the in herited culture were already crushed in their souls. (With the passing o f a little time, o f a b rief human span, a new Russian generation w ould demand boldly and loudly that it be given knowledge o f the world and told the truth by their leaders, but at the end o f the Second W orld W ar the m embers o f that generation were still in swaddling clothes.) The forty-year-olds had subsisted on the fundamental ideas o f the Russian versions o f hum anistic learning within their families: human solidarity, the written and unwritten law s o f mine and thine. In the forty-year-olds som etimes a sympathetic phenom enon glim m ered through the Bol shevik, the R ed soldier - the Russian hum an beingToward the end o f the second week, when I had tolerable practice in the peculiar rules o f dancing and deportment that prescribed how one m ust consort with the conquerors, two stray Soviet soldiers, disheveled and frightening in appearance, entered our home in the village one morning. I was alone; the wom en were away scavenging for food and firewood, The two weary, armed and bearded soldiers, worn out by the throes o f w ar and wandering, asked for water; then they sat down beside the m ildly heated stove and warmed themselves silently. I sat w ith them apatheti cally, waiting for them to leave. One im m ediately fell asleep. After a time, the other began talking. H e spoke to m e in Russian or a Ukrainian variant; he didnt look at me, he muttered into his beard. I didnt understand a thing he said, but som ething in his intonation prompted me to pay attention. Am ong the many kinds o f w orks about the Rus sians - both for and against the Communists that I read during these years, the echo o f a beautiful, passionate, and slightly m)fthically sounding book by a Baltic author his name was Schubart rem ained in my memory. It was called Europe and the Eastern Soul. It was published abroad during the w ar in a neu 61

tral country. I later learned that this Baltic writer, a friend o f the Slavs but an anti-Bolshevist, disappeared when the Russians m arched into the Baltic states. In his book he drew a curious profile o f the Slavs. Schu bart said, sometimes bombastically, that Western man is still Prom ethean, and thus a being op pressed by his experience with land ownership and lust for power, whereas the Easterner, including the Russian, is a St. Johnist, believing in redemption. In the years following, I sometimes recollected one o f his gloomy and bom bastic statements: Bolshevism is the ultim atum that God delivered to humanity. These are grand words, poetic and prophetic words. Politicians and generals wave their arms on hearing such grandil oquent utterances. But I, w ho am neither politician nor soldier, discerned that the echo o f this declaration rem ained in m y mind. Time and again I wondered dur ing this period, and later as well, how W estern man would respond to this ultimatum. Now, when this wild, hirsute little Russian, w ith his comrade snoring beside the crested stove, broke into a passionate soliloquy, Schubarts words came to m y mind. Is there, in fact, some kind o f role for the Russians - in the St. Johnist sense and is skeptical W estern m an unfit for this role which he doesnt understand, and doesnt even w ant to hear about? I listened to m y visitor. I didnt understand a single w ord he spoke, yet I som ehow really understood w hat he was saying. As in the Kosztolnyi story in which the Bulgarian conductor relates in the corridor o f the express train speeding through the night in Bulgarian, thus a language the traveler doesnt know at all - the great tragedy o f his life, and, in the end, the narrator and the listener em brace in brotherly understanding, so did I listen to the loquacious little Russian, and I thought that W ilde was right after all: sometimes Life im itates the vision o f Art, the concep tions o f writers ... 62

This little Russian gushing words evoked the m em ory o f still another literary character, the Russian shoemaker in War and Peace w ho explained to Pierre Besukhov, the powerful and w ealthy noblem an being held in prison, how sim ple and, perhaps, not entirely hopeless an undertaking intelligent hum an life was. M y guest w as explaining, too: he pounded his chest; he looked at the ceiling, shaking his head; tears streamed down his cheeks; he wiped his tearful eyes w ith his fist and talked and talked. I listened wordlessly. I under stood only that he was very miserable. For this reason, I put m y hand on his arm for a moment, and then he looked at me, his eyes swim m ing in tears. H e smiled, sadly, as i f asking m y pardon; he waved his hand as if ashamed o f his own weakness. Now, the woman I was sharing the place with returned, the interpreter. The declaim ing Russian roused his snoring comrade, and th ey started o ff in the foggy January afternoon toward the door, the garden, the firing line w ithout saying goodbye. A t the door, like someone rem em bering something, he stopped, turned around and asked what m y profession was. When the interpreter answered, this Russian said: Kharasho" like the first Russian soldier I en countered. I asked him w hy it is good i f som eone is a writer, w hat is especially good for him in this. He thought for a moment, then replied slowly, articu lately. It is good because i f you are a writer, then you can tell us w hat we are thinking, he said. W ithout looking at me, trudging, he headed off with his comrade. H e didnt look back. A literary career doesnt hold m any honors in store. But today I still treasure this reply like some special decoration.

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8
D uring these days the village and its environs got w edged between two battlefronts. Buda had still not fallen; m assive Russian forces had laid siege to the capital, but to the west, near Esztergom, the German high com m and had launched a counter-attack and re captured the town o f the Prim ate temporarily. Russian infantry and artillery passing through streamed through the village night and day. Casualties were being transported in open trucks to safer locations, and the wounded Russian soldiers, their heads swathed in bandages, lay in the trucks w ith extraordi nary unconcern among m attresses and comforters hastily tied together. The Russian was always a good soldier, especially in w ars waged in defense o f his homeland, and the Soviet U nions military training programs knew and exploited his courage and reliable disposition. It is not true that they fought fanati cally ; they fought prudently, they looked out for them selves. When wounded, they turned to everyone for help, but in the course o f battle as I observed up close several times - they held on to their positions grimly, bravely, gamely. And when their lives were in peril, they faced the threat w ith silent unconcern. One day, drifting ice sw ept along a group o f Rus sians row ing between the Danubes banks. Their boat began to founder and w ent under with its seven pas sengers, Russian soldiers, w ithin the sight o f specta tors on shore. Som e Russians were also am ong the on lookers. Nothing could be done to help them; the Dan ube surged violently, sweeping the struggling men among the ice floes. Later, every single witness said that these Russians condemned to death stood motion less in the boat; not one o f them shouted or bemoaned his fate. They didnt gesticulate. Wordlessly, with a kind o f awful, numb apathy, they awaited death in the icy water.

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Russian troops advanced trough the village night and day between the two battlefronts. Not a night passed without someone asking for lodgings at our house. In the morning, the ones we occasionally put up repaid us m ostly with thievery: they helped themselves to som ething a pillow, a pillowcase or comforter, a piece o f cutlery - but also clothing shoes, anything they could get their hands on. They werent at all choosy, and they never showed any curi osity at all as to whether the person they w ere robbing was a bourgeois" or som eone down at the heels. It seemed as i f they couldnt tell the difference between a bourgeois and a prole The three channels through which a large share of H ungarian national property oozed away in these years to the Soviet U nion - local pillaging after battles, then reparations and the factories and appro priated industrial enterprises from the join t Germ an-H ungarian holdings on the basis o f the Potsdam Agreement, these w ere the three channels - these were not yet organized during these weeks; only the looting, the industry o f pillaging functioned flaw lessly. They made o ff w ith everything they saw. With m y own eyes I saw them strip the villa next door in broad daylight. They loaded the furniture and furnish ings on trucks; they even rem oved the parquet flooring and tore the insulated tubes for electrical w iring out o f the walls; they left untouched only the books on the shelves. Before long, the village and residences in the vicinity soon resounded w ith loud, bitter complaints. The peasants rescued their valuables in ways as best they could: they buried the wheat, wine and po tatoes and hid the cows, pigs and horses in the woods. They blackened girls faces with soot; they masked, dis guised the younger attractive ones as staraja babas, or old women, ju st as the younger m en grew beards out o f fear and pretended to be starij papas," or old men, because the rum or was rife that the Russians

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were m ustering younger men and hauling them away. This rumor was true, except that they carried o ff not only the young but generally anyone they happened to come across. An acquaintance o f mine, a sixty-year-old man, w as hurrying across a street in Buda in oxfords and a tuxedo ju st after the lifting o f the siege, when a Russian called him away in a friendly way to do a little w ork; this m an, like so m any others, woke up in Yekaterinburg and returned years later. The Russian high com m and issued an order to assemble a certain num ber o f unreliable men in the liberated areas. Since Hungarian authority and in vestigation did not yet exist, Russian administrative bodies sim ply detained everyone w ho came their way. In their eyes, all o f H ungarian society was unre liable. Then when they rounded up the stucks this was the Russian technical term - and when the quota o f hum an pieces that they imposed on individual provinces was assembled, the Russians began herding their victim s toward the nearest reception camp. M ean while, many captives escaped in transit, and since the Russian guards were required to deliver the stacks, or pieces, by a total num ber to the reception camp, they simply replaced the m issing dead souls by picking up anyone approaching them from the opposite direction. A friend o f mine, a dentist o f Jewish descent, sent his eighteen-year-old son to fight on the side o f the Serbian partisans during that fateful summer. He happened to be captured by the Russians, who shipped him o ff to a reception cam p in Rumania. He repeatedly explained to no avail that he was an ally; the Rus sians listened to him w ith indifference. His desperate parents ran futile ly back and forth between Russian authorities; their son w as freed only when he came down w ith the symptoms o f acute tuberculosis, the galoppierende, and they then released the boy, agonized by tuberculosis, to his parents, only to have him pass away w ithin a few weeks. A t this time, the father hap

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pened to be treating a N KVD officer, and he asked him whether the Russian authorities didnt know that a Jewish boy who was fighting w ith the Serbian parti sans and, as a result, fell into Russian hands could not at this point possibly be anything other than a Rus sian ally. The NKVD officer, nodding, replied that, yes, the authorities knew this. But, he said, on the occasion o f such vast screening operations, one m ust naturally expect a certain percentage o f error. The boys father asked what the percentage o f such an error was ac cording to official Russian estimates. Twenty-five, re plied the Russian calmly. Actually, it w as greater than that. A t this time and for a long while afterwards - only good luck saved males in Hungarian areas from being hauled off to Russian forced labor camps, where by then several million hum ans already languished. Large numbers o f them were the left-over victims o f the Stalin purges that preceded the war; but as a consequence o f the postwar weeding out o f soldiers and civilians, masses o f victims inundated the camps who had seen the W est and were suspected o f carrying hom e criticism and nostalgia from the front or the prisoner-of-war camps. Later, I spoke w ith H ungarian prisoners o f war who somehow managed to make it back to Hungary from Russian screening and forced labor camps, and their individual accounts reinforced everything con tained in reports published in the W est years later about the large Russian prisoner-of-war camps (in some places these slave settlements constituted re gions o f the country). The Communist system o f auth ority feared no one m ore than those Communists who saw in the W est that som ething else existed, a more ef fective and m ore expeditious form o f social develop ment than Communism. During these days, one January morning, an of ficer-type turned up at our house w ith two armed pri vates in search o f som eone for w ork. N ot having the

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foggiest idea o f w hat he really had in mind, I replied that I w ould not go and work because I am not obli gated to do physical labor. I didnt make excuses, I didnt say I was sick, I didnt try to explain. I ju st said I wasnt w illing to perform physical labor. W e stood in the middle o f the room and stared at each other, the three Russians and I. M aybe this was precisely what spared me; i f I had whimpered, tried to hide or asked for sympathy, he probably w ould have taken me away. So the officer ju s t stared at m e he was a repugnant m an w ith a piercing look and the face o f a dogcatcher he stared at m e for a long time. Then they left without a word. I dont know w hat happened during those m o ments. But I learned a few hours later that this patrol had gathered together every able-bodied m ale in the village and the neighboring houses; the Russians ac tually put some o f them to w ork building an emer gency bridge nearby, but they transported many to a reception cam p in Rum ania and herded them from there to the Soviet Union. I talked with one o f them who returned hom e after three years; but I also know about some who languished, perhaps still vegetate there i f they are still alive. Later, when I learned what happened, I som etimes recollected this extraordinary moment. The peasants immediately, from the very first, knew the lesson the situation offered. It was as if memories o f the tim e after the Mohacs disaster, the one hundred and fifty years o f Turkish occupation, were living vividly in their consciousness. The peasant knew there was only one w ay a m an could protect him self against the conqueror from the East: with forests, pit-storage and concealment. T he H ungarian people fleeing into a life o f despair and anarchy from the pil laging, predatory Turks, the despoilers and kidnapers o f wom en and boys, preserved nerve reflexes from a hundred and fifty years o f m isery that did not alter

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when misfortune began in a new form. Earlier, the Ger mans robbed differently, institutionally; now, the Rus sians stole both institutionally and individually. The actual value o f their plundering cannot be establishedI rem em ber the first piglet that a Russian car ried o ff before m y own eyes from the hauler living nesct door. The owner, his face and lips drained o f blood, stared after the Russian carrying the pig. Later, this piglet grew fat. It had a hearty appetite, and when the Russians began feeding it with everything they col lected from Finland, Poland, the Baltic states, East Germany, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria and Austrias eastern territories, and they poured it all into its trough in the form o f loot, the piglet grew so mon strously fat as no other pig ever before in history. Only the naive could believe that the Russians w ould be will ing to relinquish the opportunity for this battening in exchange for some several billions in Am erican loans. For years and years on barges, trucks and trains, they hauled away from these rich lands the wheat, iron, coal, oil, lard, and also hum an resources, Germ an tech nicians and Baltic workers. The piglet the Russian of ficer carried o ff at this time before m y very eyes grew wonderously round in those years. It all began with loot from the village pigsties and caves; then it was continued in the brilliantly lighted ministerial halls of the captive nations, when in the presence o f photo graphers the emissaries o f Soviet com m erce signed the compacts o f reparation and trade they had trans acted with the captive nations. There are few examples in modern times resem bling this institution alized and entrenched extortion. The people defended them selves as best they could. The systems pillaging detachments scoured the country unmercifully; there was no other escape from them than hiding and hoarding. Later, those who, like lion tamers, had the capacity to m old others through

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psychic im pact rebuked H ungarian society for not hav ing a guilty conscience about its past regim es, the in hum anity o f the Nazis and their Hungarian accom plices, the cruelty and pillaging committed in the Ukrain ian and Russian villages. In truth, this guilty con science flickered only wanly in H ungarian souls be cause a people is never inclined to have a guilty con science; this can only be the test o f an individual. But i f there w as some kind o f guilty conscience because o f the past in H ungarian society, the Russians attitude and behavior extinguished its last faint glimmer. The Russians didnt care how the inhabitants received them; their system was concerned only with tangible results, thus with the pig, oil, iron, coal and the hum an m aterial that they laid their hands on. This lack o f inhibitions - later, this w as also the typi cal Russian behavior in world politics - was one o f their great weapons and strengths. In democratic coun tries, leaders are always com pelled to treat public opin ion carefully. The Russian totalitarian system wasnt even concerned about its own peoples opinion, so why should it care about the feelings o f subjugated peoples? W hen I first saw a Russian take a piglet away from a poor H ungarian peasant - and then later, when every one saw this piglet grow fat on the assets o f peoples held hostage I had to wonder whether this even tuality had ever occurred to W estern statesmen at Yalta and other meetings. The pig the Russians car ried o ff grew fabulously fat. And its appetite did not slacken. The peasants took the cows into the woods, bu ried the potatoes in pits, hid the women, ju st as in the time o f the Turks. In addition, they soon sensed that m ost Russians w ere not only rapacious and plundering marauders, but also corrupt, so they began to deal w ith them on the side. The Russians took the horse away, but next day a new caravan arrived. Moscovites thirsting for brandy were driving thousands o f stolen

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horses, but for a liter o f brandy - this was its price the peasants bought themselves another horse. After a year, persons were riding horse-drawn wagons who could never before afford such a vehicle. The stolen pig let caused much pain m any persons would sooner give up their ideals than their piglets - but as soon as the military situation permitted, the wom en in the vi cinity left on foot for distant counties and carried home a squealing young pig on their backs. During these days, I saw such rem arkable instances o f persistence and historical dexterity in handling problem s that I can never forget them. A t first, when the Russians were plundering them, people, gnashing their teeth, adm itted that all this was bitter, som etimes tragic for them, but, well, woe to the vanquished. W e have to survive, we kept saying. One day the Russians will go away, we will pay reparations, and we will commence som ething new, if possible something better, more humane ... However, when the people realized that this foreign pow er was seizing not only material goods but hum an rights as well, som ething incredible took place: a people went to the edge o f suicides precipice, to revolution, and at tacked tanks and submachine guns w ith bare fists, be cause they saw that the Russians wanted to destroy their humaneness, their spirit, their character, their individuality. In 1945, in the foggy w eeks o f January, no one was thinking about this, N ot even the Rus sians.

9
Serbs lived in a sm all town near our place, and some o f its inhabitants followed the Greek Orthodox faith. It was a charm ing old town, and during these weeks I occasionally strolled over to its popular bakery for bread. It was interesting to see how the Greek Or thodox priests responded to the Russians.

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This religious denom ination was among the es tablished, legally recognized denom inations in H un gary. Now, after the arrival o f the Russians, the bearded priests cam e and w ent contentedly in the town, speaking Serbian w ith showy loudness and fraternizing with them. The racial kinship, the aware ness o f the M oscow archbishops existence and the m ighty proxim ity o f the Eastern Church roused selfimportance in the local priests. These priests were not Communists, o f course, and daily contact w ith the Rus sians quickly soured them about w alking w ith chests thrust out under the cover o f their Slavic brothers arri val; but they were Slavic priests, priests o f the Eastern Church, and they now felt the mom ent had arrived when the Greek Orthodox Church, in such a mal formed version, would w ith Comm unist approval again be powerful within the meridians o f Chris tianity. These visits to the Serbian town, whose inhabi tants and priests disclosed their Slav consciousness during the early w eeks after the Russians arrived, called to mind, faintly but perceptibly, a crucial m o ment in Hungarys history. W hat glim m ered briefly in m y m ind was the question o f w hat w ould have hap pened i f H ungary, at the time when it renounced pa ganism and embraced Christianity, had opted not for the W estern Rom an church but for the Byzantine church instead ... About 900 A. D., when the Hunga rians converted to the Christian faith, Byzantium was the m agnetic, m ighty European power. A t that time, the rpds m aintained political, diplomatic and, in deed, fam ily ties w ith Byzantium. Bla, who severed Dalm atia from the Eastern Em pire after the collapse o f the Com nenian family, m ade peace w ith Emperor Isaac Angelus, After the death o f Stephen III, imbued with Byzantine culture, Bla returned to Hungary from Byzantium to become king. Irene, the wife o f E m peror Johannes, w as Saint Ladislass daughter. The

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list could go on ... The dynastic and political connec tions and cultural ties were strong. Still, at the de cisive mom ent when H ungarian statesmen had to seek a place in Europe, they set their com pass on the West, though Rome at the time w as only a shadow power. The Russians o f the Kiev Grand Duchy, the Bul garians who then ranked as a m qjor power, and most o f the peoples in the Danubian region sought the pro tection o f m ighty Byzantium and Eastern Chris tianity. Hungarians accepted an ideological, intellec tual and political alliance w ith the W est. And while I waited at the bakery for the slack-baked and covertly dispensed bread, freshly baked w ith c o m flour, bran and barley groats, and gazed through the bakerys glass door at the bearded, purple-sashed local Greek Orthodox priests strolling the streets o f the little town with ostentatious smugness and amiable but supercil ious smiles in the com pany o f Russian officers, I couldnt help but think that this Slav, this feminine power could affect H ungarians fatefully. A people, in awful isolation, com panionless am ong the peoples o f the world, already could have vanished in the Slavic melting pot, i f a thousand years ago the nations founder, K ing Stephen, had requested missionary priests and coronation em blem s not from Pope Sylves ter II but from that Byzantium which Slavic character istics had permeated by then. A t such a crucial time, when peoples and their highly com petent leaders must decide the future w ith its every consequence for the body politic - and this is w hat the mom ent w as like for Hungarians a thousand years ago when the choice had to be made between W estern and Eastern Christen dom - they act not only w ith their intellectual faculties but also with their instincts. A t the time, all rational reasoning steered Hun garians toward the Byzantine church. And still, the Holy Crown, which played such an extraordinary role in the turbulent history o f the H ungarian people for a

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thousand years and w as rarefied from a talism anic ob ject o f piety into a constitutional concept, arrived in Hungary from Rome. 1 cant say 1 considered all this com posed as a musical score while I waited for the slack-baked bread in the sm all-town bakery and gazed, meanwhile, through the glass door at Serbian priests fraternizing with Russian soldiers- But a person doesnt think ju st with his brains in danger zones, and now all b om as Hungarians were in danger, because the Slavs had ar rived, they were here. Up to this point, they were more like m yths, historical shadow clouds, som ewhere far away. Now they had arrived in a coxmtry inhabited by a people w hose language they didnt understand, who followed a different religion, pursued a different way o f life, were different in every respect - not Slavic but Hungarian. And there was som ething frightening in this - frightening for a reason other than the fact that the victorious enemy, the Communists, had come to the defeated country. W hat was frightening was the fact that the Slav had arrived. But who was he, ac tually? And w hat did he w ant in a country that wasnt Slavic, but lived in the b elief that it was W estern and Christian? W hen we finally came face to face w ith the Slavs, we all thought o f this, not with ideas com posed in a learned manner, but with our skin, our nerves. The Serbian priests quickly realized that they could expect nothing from their Slavic brethren, the Communist Russians. A t this time, the Russian high com m and strictly forbade the occupying troops from m istreating priests - priests o f any denomination! - or from causing any harm whatsoever to church digni taries. In the cities, the commanders m ade ceremonial calls on bishops and archbishops. But the Russian looter spared no one, and after a short while, the Ser bian priests also becam e acquainted with night visi

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tors who spoke Russian but did not respect the Slav kinship. However, during the first days after the Rus sian forces marched in, the Russian officers and Ser bian priests fraternized. In the little town a poster in the nations colors still clung to the door o f an aban doned blacksmith shop - directly opposite the bakery which declared in large letters that a Christian na tional business awaited the buyer and customer there. The shops owner, a notorious Arrow-Cross m em ber, fled to the W est before the Russians arrived. Then the locals and Russians hastily ransacked the place, but they left the Christian national sign on the front door. One morning, while I was w aiting in the bakery, I watched through the glass door as w ith animated movements o f his hands a Serbian priest showed the poster to an officer w earing a leather coat, translating and explaining the m eaning o f the text volubly. The frightful, malformed and ghastly nature of the recent historical past flashed for a mom ent on the wall poster. Those who drafted and printed the text and those who posted it - began by carrying o ff Jew ish property. They continued by hauling away and slaughtering hundreds o f thousands o f innocent, unfor tunate hum an beings o f Jew ish descent. Now the Rus sians arrived, and they continued the looting, the haul ing away and murdering. The Russian officer looked sternly at the ragged poster. H e didnt say anything; he swished his whip and moved on, w ith the little vol uble priest at his side. W hat did this Communist soldier think o f that Christianity out o f which a Christian regim e was formed in recent decades? W hat did he think o f this nation whose concept was used to advertise a busi ness? W hat did he think o f that W estern culture which dispatched hundreds o f thousands o f rightful Hungarian citizens to flaying cam ps in jam -packed freight cars and slaughtered them ? And w hat did he

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think o f the flaying-houses in his country where ju d g ment w as passed on classes: on millions o f human beings w ho w ere ju st as innocent as the others, the W esterners, the m illions who w ere sentenced to death because o f their lineage? I dont know w hat he thought. And it is not likely he had a guilty con science H e sim ply swished his whip and moved on. Oddly, the poster rem ained stuck to the door o f the Arrow-Cross blacksm iths shop for some time; it never occurred to anyone to scrape it off. Finally, the spring wind carried the paper scraps away. In the village there now began, as i f on signal, the looting o f the abandoned possessions. First to be ransacked were the hom es o f the savage fascists, that is, the bourgeois owners w ho had m oved to the capital or on to the West, These ventures were always carried out under the cover o f night; som etimes the Russians stole on their own, sometimes the local pi rates join ed them. Since practice makes perfect - and according to another saying, the more you eat the more you want - the villages neer-do-wells quickly no ticed that m any things occurring in the dark o f night could be put to the Russians account. This sportive diversion com m enced on M arch 18, 1944 - the memo rable nam e day - and it didnt stop even after the Rus sian armies had m oved on and Hungarian authorities resumed their duties. The powers-that-be issued the order to collect the fascist books in the homes o f the guilty, and the dem ocratic police, who executed the edict zealously, discovered, sim ultaneously with the fascist books in the hom es o f the guilty individuals, that there were also fascist silver candlesticks and fas cist china. O f course, they absconded with these ex hibits o f guilt as well.

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10
For two weeks this motley assortm ent o f hu mans lined up at the doors o f the houses in the village day and night; cannons roared, Russians w ith their Rata fighter planes launched attacks every hour on the residential sections o f the besieged capital; large trucks loaded w ith Stalin pipe organs rumbled be tween the two battle sectors, between Buda and the western bend o f the Danube. W e w ere living, it seemed to us, in the immediate reality o f the w ar and already knew to some extent w hat the Russians and Red Arm y were like. Actually, we hadnt seen anything yet. Everything we saw and experienced up to this point was only a congenial social call. The war in all its dreadful reality sw ept down on the village imexpectedly. During these weeks, a cer tain wary way o f life developed in the village houses stretching along both sides o f the several kilometerlong road. We all lived behind locked doors, we buried our valuables, w e tried to m ake our Russian visitors, the straggling military detachments in transit trac table with food and polite words. Now, from one hour to the next, billeting struck the life o f our village like hail. The battlefront cam e to a halt before the trenches o f nearby Buda, and the vast Russian forces prepared for the final, decisive assault on the belea guered capital. On a January afternoon, our village, which they had merely passed through earlier, became a key command post, one o f the operational bases for the nearby firing line. In practice, this m eant that every house filled up w ith Russians. A t the orders o f the high command, a bridge had to be throw n across the Danube between the island directly opposite and our village. They ordered us to dig places w ith pic kaxes in the m acadamized highw ay for the m ines they wanted to plant there in case they had to retreat later.

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Russians swarmed in every room. Like an arctic ice storm, they unexpectedly sm ote the village, which had till then known a relatively peaceful life. During the next three weeks, all o f us living in the village came to know the real structure o f the Red Army. In 1939, when the powerful m ilitary forces of the Soviet U nion attacked little Finland and the as sault advanced only slowly, m any held that the Rus sian high com m and had concealed its pow er in the Finnish w ar to mislead the Germans. Nobody knows whether this was so or not. But we now saw the Red Army in its true character, in its full-fledged might. During these weeks, the Russian high command didnt conduct concealed military operations on Hungarys soil; instead, it spared neither time nor effort in the struggle. Russian forces fought with all their might and m ain and with every weapon at its disposal. The magnitude o f their military might cannot be measured; ever newer com panies and w hole army corps arrived from invisible sources w ith all the requisites and equipm ent they needed. The might they displayed was fierce, imposing, frightening. Especially surprising were the m erciless energy and passion with w hich they seized everything they needed and the way they carried out orders; they always bore down relent lessly and ruthlessly on the line o f least resistance. They were ju st as ruthless to each other. Naturally, they didnt spare citizens either. In a few hours, the ap pearance and life o f the village were debased beyond recognition. One afternoon, we were sitting in Januarys murkiness, w ithout lights, in the darkened room, w hen all o f a sudden we were startled by the sound of axe blows w hacking at the gate post. W hen I went out side I saw a large num ber o f trucks in the yard. By then the soldiers had already toppled the lower gate together w ith its stone posts and fence, trucks loaded w ith barrels o f gasoline and machine tools swarmed

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over the yard, and several Russians, wielding their axes, were in the process o f taking apart the posts and fence o f the upper gate w ith earnest expertise. Within moments the path to the house was clear. A m otor ve hicle, a story high and shaped like a box car it was the conveyance for the electric generator - rolled up to the front door, and they began to install cables. Some kind o f officer came into the house, looked at the rooms and the w om en sharing the place w ith us, and ordered everyone then living in the house to w ithdraw into one o f the small side rooms. Then the officer engaged all the rem aining rooms and premises to serve as the mashtierskaia, as one o f the repair shops for the m ili tary forces passing through the village. B y evening the house looked like a factory. The Russians set up the welding shop in the bathroom; the w ork bench, the workshop o f the repairmen lighted by a gasoline lamp was established in the pantry. They prom ptly herded the women o f the village into the kitchen and also or dered m y w ife and our housemate to look to the peel ing o f the potatoes. They started the electric generator and set about repairing the vehicles, tanks, and Rata fighter planes lined up in the yard. W e locals stumbled about ignorantly in the noisy repair shop. There were three room s on the first floor, one on the second, and they all filled up with Kirghizians, Uzbeks, Russians, Ukrainians, Mongolians and Siberians. Every im agin able human breed cropped up am ong our guests. They took over the village ju s t as swiftly and re lentlessly. They never bothered to unlock gates any where, they simply chopped down the posts w ith axes and entered the house fully armed and on horseback. One time, m y guests needed a sm all piece o f board at night, so they prom ptly sawed up a bed upstairs, put the board to use, and threw the rest o f the bed on the trash pile. They sawed down, in a few hours, every tele graph pole in the village, every full-grown tree needed to string electric cable. They always set their sights on

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the essential, the immediate. They arrived in the after noon, and by evening they filled up every house, every room in the village, as i f the dust cloud o f an Eastern storm had enveloped our lives. In those first days, we walked gasping, groping in the dark am ong them. About thirty repairmen and drivers m oved into our house; toward midnight they were already asleep beside each other on the floor in the m iddle and side rooms, like lizards on the frozen paths o f a garden. They began w ork at dawn, at five oclock. They were kept unmercifully busy. The mecha nics toiled from five in the m orning till eleven at night, unflaggingly overhauling the broken-down war en gines under the supervision o f their slave drivers. A mechanical engineer w ho lived in the village was, like the blacksm ith, the carpenter and the locksmith, also pressed into service. These craftsm en confirmed that the Russian m echanics were hardworking but lacked technical flair. Somehow, tools fit their hands differ ently from the W estern workers, and this could have been true then, a generation ago. But afterwards, time delivered the extraordinary gift o f the m odern techni cal reflex to the Soviet worker. It is certain that everyth m g I saw during the fol lowing weeks, which were troubled, not without dangers, hectic and yet im com m only edifying - we in the village observed in those days up close the infra structure and regulations in the deployment o f the mammoth Eastern army - convinced me, like all laymen, that the R ed Arm y was an exceptionally po tent military force. It was sustained by almost inex haustible reserves; but at w ars end, these reserves were not so m uch a technical as a first-rate human re source. The German army was an organizational and technical m ihtary power; this Eastern army, on the other hand, gave the im pression o f som e instinctive bi ological pow er hum an variants o f ants or termites that had assumed a military shape. It seem ed as i f ter-

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mites were waging war incalculably w ith the mys terious capacities o f organic matter. They brought can nons, guns and ammunition with them from the Soviet Union; the Rata fighter planes, primitive but effective in city battles, were m anufactured in Russia - but otherwise all their tools, trucks and tanks cam e from America and were produced on the other side o f the ocean for them. This arm y o f termites has become mechanized in recent decades: Russian industry built the atom bomb, a navy, ballistic m issiles and new air planes. But at what a price and w hose help: domestic and kidnaped scientists, spies, at the sacrifice o f the forced labor o f an entire Russian generation? This is another question. But every invention o f the technical revolution added to the well-equipped and mechanized Soviet army. W hat is the quality o f this mechanized Red army? This is also a question. They lost out on the flight to the moon, and it is possible that the technical contrivances displayed in the w indow are, in reality, not as flawless as W estern equipment. The Hitlerites big mistake w as to underestimate Russian and Soviet pow er on the basis o f false information. It is possible that precisely the same kind o f mistake will occur in the future, when - probably again on the basis o f false information - Soviet pow er will be overestimated. But back then, in the w inter o f 1944 45, the So viet armys technical matriel did not amount to much without Am ericas help. The abundance o f humans made up for what w as lacking in technology. The way the soldiers pounced on a village, a house, a family, the way they destroyed everjdhing they needed or didnt need this was the m anifestation o f some blind, instinctive biological power. I watched their deploy ments from the end o f our yard, from a hillside, from a distance o f one and a h a lf kilometers; I watched their massive and bloody struggles on the opposite bank of the Danube. One time, I saw them lau n di Rata fighter planes from the plow in front o f our yard. I saw their

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weapons. Now, when I think back, I, who am not a mili tary expert, can only say that the infantry was out standing - brave, dogged, disciplined in com bat and on duty, laggard, shiftless, unruly when o ff duty - but it was, in its totality, a well-organized military force. M ilitary experts I spoke to at the tim e said that R us sian artillery w as ju st as outstanding, and those who werent military experts also noted how resourceful and resolute their high command and strategy were. Otherwise, back then, their technical readiness was mediocre, even inferior. But as in their personal relations, so in their strategy and political and diplomatic warfare - then and later - that strange, cunning and adolescent play fulness appeared itself in the way they constantly tried to take their adversary by surprise. The Russians knew how to take the measure o f their opponents and outwit them. They could laugh in their faces. As their war m achine overran the little village that night, as they sawed the beds apart, chopped down the gates and door posts and telegraph poles and dragged away every able-bodied male to build an emergency bridge on the Danube in three days with a senseless waste of m aterials - the village sacrificed m uch for this bridge which, as it soon becam e apparent, was not needed, the Russians didnt use it even once because they failed to take the drift ice into account, and a week later the ice carried away the w hole structure! - so did they overrun the propertied society o f Hungary with an outrage called land reform , perpetrated in a single night, and so did they nationalize all Hungar ian industry, banks and wholesale trades in a single night-maneuver. They prepared, too, to destroy with one fell swoop the authority o f the Church over the soul, and then to crash through the barricades o f edu cation and intellect. This uninhibited and ferocious w ill was always the reason for the success o f all their m anifestations, and this will did not recognize either

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moral or spiritual restraints- It recognized only goals and results. In their pursuit o f these, they worked the v il lagers ruthlessly. But their own m en, too. W ithin a few days the village became a clattering workshop, som e where between a factory, a caravansary-like lodging house, and a large office. This w as how we lived among our guests, the thirty, sometimes even greater num bers o f Kirghiz, Chuwash, U zbek and Russian mech anics and soldiers. O f course, after the first chaotic days as in all places w here people lived w ith the Rus sians in such a setting - a m ore intim ate hum an situ ation evolved. Human faces em erged from the chaos. The mashtierskaia was m anned by a trained military detachment; since Stalingrad, troops o f mech anics advanced in the wake o f the arm y driving the Germans back; they always worked directly behind the firing lines at great risk because artillerymen and truck and tank drivers took the repaired weapons and m otor parts right out o f their hands to the firing lines. Here I also experienced w hat I later detected in the po litical life imposed by the Comm unists, nam ely that there are no laurels and acquired merits in the Soviet system. Like the Soviet worker, the Soviet politician knows that it didnt m atter how reliable and distin guished a revolutionary he was at the beginning o f the revolution, at the tim e o f the barricades, or what merits he obtained when Soviet industry had to be re built; it didnt m atter i f som eone was an ace worker twenty years before. W hat always counted in the So viet system w as whether it could use a hum an being, the raw material, today, Thursday, at 4:30 p. m. I f it could, it used him; i f he grew tired or be came disabled, or he could no longer be trusted, the system tossed him aside mercilessly. I was living with Russians in close proxim ity for the first time, and I would have liked to form an understanding o f the kind o f school these men attended, their thoughts about

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things, and their relations w ith themselves and the world. These men had already lived through the Soviet periods o f great re-education and purges, the exter m ination campaigns conducted against the Narodniks, the rich peasantry, the Mensheviks, the Socialists and the Trotskyites, and the show trials. They knew that anyone the Soviet cannot or does not want to use disap pears in the casements o f forced-labor cam ps to the East. They were acquainted w ith a system one cant possibly bargain with. And later, when the Commun ists o f Hungarian birth, w ho were expertly trained in the Soviet U nion and were returned from Moscow, as sumed pow er in H ungary under the protection o f the Red Arm ys bayonets, signs o f this intimidation could be sensed in them, despite all their bom bastic self-con fidence: they also knew m uch more than did my m ashtierskaia workers w hat the Kremlin thought o f them. They knew, and they were afraid. I lived among the products o f this system during these weeks, and it did not require a particularly powerful imagination to envision w hat awaited us in Hungary, w hat awaited Europe and the world i f this system should some day expand its authority.

11
I w ould have liked to m ake out the kind o f supervision under which these men carried out their duties. In that confused, raw and dangerous situation, I adhered to m y resolve to observe the Soviet system without prejudice and preconception. O f course, the standard system o f m ilitary hierarchy and subordina tion was visible and perceptible: the repair unit had its chief, a non-com missioned officer who lived w ith his men; but while they slept on the bare floor, he bedded down away from them on the only rem aining bed, next to the wall. He roused the com pany at five in the morn

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ing, distributed the m ail and supervised their w ork in the daj^ime. H is name was Sedlachek; he hated Hun garians he said his m other was H ungarian - and he was an unusually bullying, brutal, stupid man. This Sedlachek carried a chim ing clock the size o f a child on his war travels - only heaven knows where he got hold o f it along the way and he hung on to it jealously. The clock stood under his nose on a book sh elf next to his bed, and he wound it carefully every m orning and proudly listened to it chime. O f course, the clock showed M oscow time, which differed from ours by two hours, and it was this different, Russian time that it struck. A long w ith this Russian reckoning o f tim e, they also brought Cyrillic letters and all that difference, that mysterious strangeness which W estern man never understands and which even this compulsory and very intimate living together could not dispel. We lived for weeks with the thirty men like animals in a cage; we ate from the same bucket, slept on the same straw, did their laundry, cooked their m eals and helped them w ith their work; but not for a single in stant did I feel there was som ething com m on between us. Circumstances that bring hum an beings closer to each other really were not lacking: war, misery and mutual privation impelled everyone, both victors and vanquished, toward interdependence. Nor can I say that these men and the others w ho continually w an dered in and out o f our house during the w eeks o f the siege - were one and all particularly malevolent and in humane creatures. Villains w ith natures baser than an animals turned up among them, o f course, but I en countered kind ones as well; som etimes I detected com passion in their eyes and words. But no degree o f shared living conditions could ever dispel the strange ness. W hen I came to know the m en a little better their tastes, longings, the w ay they, growling like

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dogs, jealou sly guarded from each other and ourselves that measly, sorry little quarry that they still pos sessed, the loot stuffed into their bags, the personal be longings, a toy they wanted to take hom e to a child, a broken therm om eter, everything that was an object, everything that could be held after exposure to these, I gradually came to understand that the inner most, the real reason for their widespread and endless looting was not rage directed against the fascist enemy but sim ply abject poverty. These Communist Russians were so impoverished, so miserably des titute, so hard up in war and peace, in their civilian lives, and the revolution and the Communist tyranny that followed had so com pletely stripped them o f every thing needed to make life m ore colorful, m ore humane that now, when they were set loose in the world after thirty years o f privation and drudgery, they threw themselves hungrily on everything that fell into their hands. During the last two decades, the very same m o tivating forces were, in general, observable behind the Bolsheviks strategy in world politics: the fear that they w ould be able to neutralize internal discontent only w ith com pulsory solutions, and the destitution, the indigence that som etim es forced them into con cessions, then into ever viler and brazen looting. W est ern highbrows who described the Communists cynical, greedy and cruel strategy as transitional errors most often awoke from their utopian dreams only when the Communist system grabbed them by the throat person ally. (Sometimes not even then.) As the men in the mashtierskaia flung themselves on shoes, clothing, toys and liquor, so the Soviet Union cast itself on the possessions o f the defeated nations, and so will it hurl itself some day on the im poverished o f the Far East to squeeze out som ething for itself from there, too, the forced labor adapted to drudgery, i f nothing else, and so will it throw itself some day on W estern Europe, i f it will have the opportunity to do so, and the liberal,

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bridge-building and coexisting W estern intelligent sia will have paved the way for the undertaking. I in creasingly believe that the class war is not the real reason behind this struggle; it is the abject poverty and indigence pervading the East, and then, too, the mutual interests o f the Djilas and the celebrated New Class. I lived among the men during those weeks, ob serving them and trying to fathom the hum an and mili tary structure o f the Soviet detachment. Sedlacheks immediate superiors were the engineering officers of the bridge-building squad; they cam e to our place day and night to monitor the work; they squabbled and gave advice; apparently they w ere better educated. They lived separately in the villas; they ate separately and had orderlies who took care o f them. But the worker-soldiers didnt pay much attention to them; they talked back to them, apparently not acknowledg ing them as real, almighty superiors. They behaved otherwise when the field officer arrived on a tour o f in spection. On those occasions, they chased us, the lo cals, out into the yard, the workers m ustered in a sym metrical semi-circle in the large room, and Sedlachek saluted stiffly and made his report. The high-ranked of ficer, wearing a leather coat and dressed in W estern style, his shoulders adorned with gold epaulettes, and white-gloved, listened to the report and conducted an inspection. From the standpoint o f the order o f rank, this system o f higher military com m and and attitude toward authority conformed w ith a similar hierarchy found in W estern armies. But the field officer departed and Sedlachek stayed, and I slowly learned that the real power, the ch ief authority did not rest in the hands o f field of ficers. I never found out who the political officer was among the men, and I knew even less who kept an eye on the political officer. I could only sense that dan gerous potentates constantly moved am ong us. Some

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times a GEPU officer, fur-capped and elegantly at tired, showed up; he was a young m an w ith a hand some face, sm elled faintly o f cologne, and had soft w hite hands; he was a kind o f dashing, spoiled dandy, like the Lenskys and Onegins in the great Russian poem. Before the w ar, he taught health exercises and calisthenics in Moscow. Our Kirghizians trembled in his presence. H e w as the head o f the local military police, the secret police accom panying the troop, and thus the master over life and death. W hen he entered the room or one o f the workshops, the cursing, yelling, lustily singing m en fell silent; not one o f them looked at him; they set to work with downcast eyes and bowed heads ... One night, an enterprising youth ferreted out the Lucky Strike tin box in which we kept our rem ain ing m oney; we discovered the theft at the very hour that the perfumed GEPU officer arrived for a visit. He noticed our pained countenances and asked us what was wrong. He w as a bit astonished by the answer; he stared at us uncomprehendingly, like someone who couldnt understand w hat was so extraordinary about the fact that his men, the Russian soldiers, stole every thing they laid their hands on. But then he shrugged his shoulders and offered to conduct a fierce interroga tion o f the soldiers, guaranteeing that the perpetrator - i f not the m oney would be found within a few hours. I talked him out o f it; I ju st didnt w ant to make any personal enemies among the men. H e said arro gantly that he didnt understand such fastidiousness, and he departed regretfully, like someone who would have gladly presented his own masterly performance o f an Eastern interrogation to us, the bungling W est erners. W hen he left the room everyone relaxed, the thief, too, who presum ably lurked in fright there in the house, and we, too, the aggrieved. However, I later saw the Lucky Strike box in the hands o f the local vil lage notary, who, earlier an Arrow Cross, now danced

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attendance on the Russians w ith bustling eagerness; one o f the Russians living under our roof gave it to him as a gift in payment for amorous services, the procure ment o f women. A fine-featured little fellow from the East cleaned and cooked for the detachm ent o f mechanics w ith the efficient and easy hand movem ents o f a sim ian; he sw ept and washed up after them. His name was Hassan, an Uzbek. He was from Tashkent, and slant-eyed and yellow-skinned; he shivered in the cold, kept silent, and didnt like the Russians, who looked down at him and spoke to him scornfully. Youre not a Russian, a good-natured, chubby teenager, Fyedor, the mess attendant, sometimes teased him, saying, Youre a Chink. A t such times, Hassan growled like a dog when it is being provoked. The Russians emphas ized in other ways that they were the superior race. There was a Jew among the mechanics, a cer tain Andrey, a young man who w as b om and raised in the Soviet Union; he was at home in the Jewish repub lic there and kept to h im self ostentatiously. H e bedded down separately in the kitchen and ate alone; in the morning he donned the trappings required for Jewish prayers, turned toward the wall, and prayed for a long time in that position. There was a Siberian, som e kind o f aristocrat, a gray-eyed, platinum blond, haughty and lonely man w ho looked down on everyone, including the White Russians and Ukrainians. Accustom ed to the splendid world o f nature and raised in the ancient craft o f fish ing and hunting, he lived among the unkem pt m e chanics with a grand and nonchalant arrogance, and the men respected his physical excellence and acknowl edged that he was better than the others. This Sibe rian associated with H assan, the Uzbek, like a hunter with his dog; sometimes he whistled to him and the little Asian, who otherwise avoided his companions, hurried to him and served him dutifully. W hen Has-

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San heard we had been robbed, he rushed up to the attic, looked around, and, after a time, crept down the stairs w ith the crestfallen look o f a cheated child: he in dicated w ith rueful hand movem ents that the thief had taken everything and no loot was left behind for him. I m ade friends with this Uzbek. H e told many stories about Tashkent, where it is always warm, the lights are always on, scalding hot water bubbles up from the earth, and the natives stroll about in colorful caftans. W hen I stated that we also had lived like that not long ago at home, in nearby Budapest - except we didnt w ear caftans - he listened w ith blinking suspic ion. Apparently, he didnt believe me; in this U zbek as in many o f his comrades, Russian and Chuwash, glim mered that com plex de supriorit Gide detected dur ing his visit to Russia. H e w as a well-mannered, strange little man from the East and also clean in his own way. I once saw him do up the dishes in the kitchen and then wash his hair in the dishwater.

12
A t noon there was a one-hour break for lunch; Hassan brought the food from the nearby cam p kitchen in a bucket. The m echanics sat down around the sole rem aining table or settled down on boxes and started to eat. I looked at this strange, only half-hum an pic ture for m any days and tried to distinguish what was a necessity, a hardship o f war and then w hat was Rus sian in this scene: the dreariness o f Russian life, the indifferent slovenliness o f the Russian man. There must have been som e sign o f consternation in the look w ith which I view ed the scene, for one o f the mech anics, a U krainian, an older m an, a foreman, already past forty, winked at me, and when he passed by me, he whispered amusingly: Russki Ivan!

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He waved his hand like one who knows more but isnt allowed to express it. Later I found out that Russki Ivan m eant som ething like our Joska Sobri, or Robin Hood ; that is w hat popular speech calls the folk highwayman, The U krainian foreman o f the ma chine shop ate alone in a com er; he w as always polite; he brought us soap and almost hum bly asked us to launder his underwear; he stole kerosene, sugar and bread for us. He once said: T o u still dont know the Russians! He looked around, putting his finger to his lips. Till then, I hadnt encountered a Soviet man w ho com plained about conditions at home. W hen I m uch later read a prophecy that cautioned the world about the Russians, the U krainians warning came to m y mind. (The prophecy w ent like this: W hen Russia builds upon the cowardice and fears o f the W estern powers, it rattles its saber and, to the extent possible, lists its de mands, so that it can later act as i f it were m agnani mous, when it is content with achieving its m ost im mediate aims. Is the danger past? No, only the blind ness o f the European ruling classes has reached its zen ith- To begin with, Russian politics is imm utable ... The methods, tactics, m aneuvers m ay change, but the polar star o f its politics, world rule, is a fixed star.) The author o f the quoted lines is Karl Marx. M y U krain ian visitor didnt know Marxs writings, but he did know the Russians. Hassan was more talkative than the Ukrai nian. In the evening hours, when he no longer had any w ork to do, I som etimes played chess w ith him. W e sat at the dirty table in the flickering light o f the oil lamp; motors and bombs rum bled outside, and the man from the East leaned over the chessboard w ith solem n intentness. A t such times, we also conversed, if the inter preter w as nearby. Hassan expressed an interest in the origin o f the Hungarians, but before I could reply,

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a voice unexpectedly spoke above our heads. This is w hat it said, calmly, w ith infinite scorn: The Hungarians have now demonstrated at Vo ronezh that they are o f A siatic descent. I looked up and recognized him: the gangly, reddish-blond-haired m aster bridge-builder from Moscow was standing behind m e w ith his pipe in his mouth, wearing a well-tailored short leather jacket and watch ing the game. This m an had stood out earlier, for he al ways walked alone and never spoke to anyone; he som ehow managed to rem ain alone and aloof even at com mon meals. In the m orning and afternoon he went out to the bridge construction site, issued orders; then he returned to the house, took out a newspaper or a book and read. Som etim es he wrote page upon page in a notebook in Cyrillic letters. I was pleased when he spoke up because up to now he had not shown the slightest inclination to converse; he lived among us like one who did not deem the m embers o f the bour geois household w orthy o f so much as a glance. I could only conclude that he held a distinctive rank in the de tachm ent, because it wasnt only the foot-soldiers but also the officers w ho turned to him w ith questions, and even the perfum ed GEPU officer addressed him with respect. H e always answered calmly and thoughtfully, put his glasses on his nose - he was the only Russian in the com pany w ho wore glasses, but even later I very rarely saw a bespectacled Russian - and issued orders with unm istakable superiority. This m an wore no insignia; he w as only a pri vate but in reality the sole authority in the company. Even the political officer feared him. I later learned that he w as a m em ber o f the Party, and this conferred some kind o f high rank; he was an old Communist, per haps the only true and faithful Communist I m et among the Russians. He had survived the massive purges, and he hated the Hungarians, Germans, and capitalists. Now he finally spoke up. H e sat down

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beside the table; with his pipe in his mouth, he pa tiently waited for us to finish and then offered to play a game. After that evening, we played chess and con versed every day or night for a week. On the first evening, I told him that in a war every man turns into a beast, that certain Hungarian soldiers behaved unjustly or quite savagely at Voro nezh, but that he should not pass judgm ent on Hunga rians, because, as a people, they are victim s o f terrible misfortunes. H e heard m e out patiently; then, reflect ing, he replied slowly and thoughtfully: Yes, he said, you are not free. You w ill not be free now either, he said, raising his index finger; later, I recalled these words; because we Russians can only liberate ourselves. Only the H ungarians, Bulga rians, and Rumanians can liberate themselves as well. He said he is a Com m unist and hates the bour geois. I asked him i f I am a bourgeois. No, youre not a bourgeois, he said, because you dont live on wealth or the labor o f others but on your own labor. But you are still a bourgeois and he looked at m e askance from behind the pipe smoke because you are bourgeois in your soul. You hang on to something that no longer exists. He made a sign indicating he was unwilling to go into the m atter in greater detail. I asked him what happened to the bourgeoisie in Russia. The revolution finished them off, he said gravely; the revolution killed a third o f them, a third emigrated and scattered, a third were slowly absorbed by the Soviet system and found their place there. I looked at this extraordinary, sensibly-speak ing man, and I suspected he also descended from the middle class. On one occasion, he said that it must be difficult to be a writer in the revolution, but no one can be considered to be a true writer who does not under stand that revolution is so gigantic an undertaking

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that it has the right to sacrifice that relative some thing called freedom. W hy is intellectual freedom relative? I asked him. Because intellectual freedom is not possible w ithout social and material freedom , he replied. It was hard to engage in an argum ent under the conditions in which we lived, so I didnt reply. Even when, as earlier and later, when I came up against bigoted, hidebound Communists and their fel low travelers, I noticed that this type o f individual is unwilling to perm it the argum ents o f their fellow dis putants to cross the threshold o f consciousness; he fears that everything within and around him that he stacked together so carefully and tenaciously with his hands m ight collapse. I could not tell the bridgebuilder from M oscow that culture is always mightier than despots and despotism, and that the intellec tually creative individual is in his own sphere o f activ ity absolutely independent o f the tyranny o f current snipers, whether political, ideological or com mercial in nature, and continues to create his work in the cata comb and in prison. The bridge-builder from Moscow would not have understood this anyway, even as the parasitical fellow-traveling dilettantes dont believe it either. This was w hy I didnt answer, ju s t asked, and I could tell he was happy he w as able to reply. I said, between two chess moves, that I have tried to look at the Russians and the Soviet system ob jectively, that certainly m uch about the Soviets has been distorted in past decades, and for this reason I was glad to le a m w hat he believed to be the truth. I asked him w hat the Soviet tax system is like. H e ex plained at length that about twelve percent is de ducted from a Soviet workers wages and an additional tw o percent for health insurance; the rest is his, and he can put it in a bank and receive three percent inter est on his deposit. I asked how a Soviet citizen gets hold o f the rest. Are the standards, the actual wages

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high enough, how m any hours a person in the Soviet must work before he earns, beyond daily necessities, what he needs for clothing, books, travel, thus the rest? This question made him uneasy and he changed the subject. H e said the present situation is abnormal. The war is on, ration cards are required for everjrthing, and the peasants have accumulated a lot o f surplus money; but once the war is over, a surplus will again develop for the workers. He related that there are priests in the Soviet Union, they are paid by the state, and those who want to go to church do so. H e once made a slip o f the tongue. I asked him w hat a tchervonietz is. His eyes sparkled. A tchervonietz is, he said, a gold draft. I f you are a foreigner or have a specialized skill, you can ask to be paid in gold. Then on the first you receive a tchervonietz-dra% in other words a gold check; you take it to the Soviet National Bank, present it, and they pay you with gold. This is possible, he said firmly, ^ u t it is not advisable, he suddenly added, He changed the subject, biting off his words. I wrote down m any things he said during our chess games, but I did not believe him. The details he reported were true, perhaps, but I had already learned that everything a Russian told m e, the foreigner, had to be taken with a grain o f salt, because they seldom told the truth. It was a great sport for them to fool us, the bourgeois W esterners. These conversations took place amid ear-deafening din. It w as not ju st the war machines that rumbled around the house - the siege of Buda had already reached its peak in these days not ju st the electric m achinery and w elding o f the repair shop that droned, but a gram ophone stolen along the way that squawked constantly. The soldiers had only one record, a U krainian childrens chorus, a kind of caterwauling, shrieking song, m ore racket than music. They played it night and day; Sedlachek roused his workers at dawn with it; during the day and at night,

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everyone who happened to pass by wound it up. At first this constant m iaow ing got on m y nerves, but later I becam e used to this, too. One afternoon I was calm ly playing chess with the Com m unist from M oscow when a smoking, flam ing figure, shrieking hideously, burst into the room; he threw h im self on the floor and howled, holding his flam ing leg to the sky. The room filled w ith the acrid stench o f burned flesh and scorched skin. One o f the mechanics in the welding shop had caught fire when a gasoline blowtorch exploded in his hand. This burning, sm oking mass o f flesh lay w ailing in the middle o f the room; his comrades gathered around him, sat down and watched him writhing in pain, waiting silently and m otionlessly for the arm y doctor to arrive. The rec ord on the gramophone kept screeching the song o f the Ukrainian childrens chorus. The taciturnity with which they regarded the hum an pain, the rattling sound in the m ans throat, the miaowing song all this m ingled very strangely. Once again, that dif ference stood out in their nature, in the attitudes that the rest o f us who are not Slavs cannot fathom.

13
A t this time, two w om en were raped in our vil lage. One attacker was arrested, I have no idea what happened to the other. N ews about the raping of wom en reached us only sporadically from the neighbor ing village; we heard o f m any more such episodes from the little town nearby, where after a few days women and girls hid in groups in the basem ent o f the local hos pital at night. But high com mands were billeted in the villages, and attackers were exceedingly visible and thus feared punishment. A year later, after the Rus sian arm y had withdrawn from the area, a truck stopped one afternoon in front o f one o f the houses on

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the outskirts o f our village; Russian soldiers got out cas ually, entered the house, and began to abuse the wife o f a village proprietor, and when he rushed to protect her, they shot him and took to their heels. I report this episode only because I personally saw the victim s body. Others related other, m ore terrible acts. No one ever heard anything further about the assailants. Dur ing this early period, in the first months o f the war and occupation, outrages in our village and its imm edi ate environs rarely occurred. Elsewhere it was other wise; news o f atrocities spread slowly but steadily. O f course, the Russians continually rutted around the wom en in our village, too. Our situation in the little house on the edge o f the village wasnt en tirely without danger; after all, I lived alone w ith tw o w om en for w eeks among Kirghizians, Chuwash and other savage men. Nevertheless, a kind o f constantly alert demeanor, the polite but firm tone o f rejection, the firmness o f inner resistance i f they got w ind of this in someone, they often grew docile. It happened that they turned to m e w ith incredible requests. One afternoon a Georgian nam ed Anatol, a mechanic in the mashtierskaia, turned up in the kitchen, where my wife, our female lodger, and h a lf a dozen wom en from the village peeled potatoes day and night for the Rus sians. He was a simple m an, young; he suffered from carbuncles and showed his carbuncular neck anxiously every morning, asking m e to paint the ulcers with iodine. Now this carbuncular Anatol darted toward the women in the kitchen in an acute fit o f sexual passion, and when he spotted m e, he stood in front o f m e and began im ploring me to get him a wom an! I replied that I do not engage in such matters, that he should turn to the village beauties and court them, and he will certainly find an understanding companion among them. But Anatol could not be contained. H e is healthy, he shouted, the regim ental doctor is here, he

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is willing to be examined. Look, he has money - and he yanked a thickly stuffed billfold from his jacket pocket he has a watch, he will give me everything, but I must get him a woman. The shouting, arm -waving Russian now started to cry. H e sobbed uncontrollably, like someone suffer ing from a great physical need, like someone starving or thirsting, who w as being denied a bite o f bread or a sip o f water. The w om en squatting on the kitchen floor gazed soberly, with interest at the w eeping Russian begging for love. The scene clarified som ething about the always som ewhat baffling characteristics o f the great Russian novels, the novels o f Tolstoy, Gorky and Dostoevsky, when the Baron Vronskys, the Artamonovs, the M itia Karam azovs explode in the heat of sexual passion and behave foolishly, unintelligibly. I assisted the w eeping Russian to the vestibule. H e left in low spirits, like someone who is bewildered and past consolation. I returned to the kitchen and found the wom en in an embarrassed state o f mind. In their view there was absolutely nothing to laugh about in the sex ual need o f this Russian raging and wailing like a teen ager. They peeled the potatoes in silence, reflecting on w hat they had witnessed. On another evening, I had an even m ore un pleasant encounter w ith a Russian in an amorous mood. This lad w as hunchbacked; he tended to his ap pearance w ith the fond aspiration found in men with deformed bodies, often summ oning the village barber, who he was also a hunchback! - groomed the vain cripples hair gently. One night the two o f them got hold o f som e wine, and after work, toward midnight, when we, the household residents, had retired for the night in the lair assigned to us, the hunchback in his tipsy mood and am id the endless vexation o f the Uk rainian childrens chorus knocked on our door and shouted: Ilonka, com e out! It w as not difficult to imagine w hat this de

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mand meant. Ilonka was the interpreter, and we had noticed earlier that the hunchback was ogling and hanging around her with a contorted grin. I put on my robe and passed through the adjacent room between the tipsy and lustily singing Russians. I felt like the lion tamer when he has to enter a cage o f restless wild beasts. I closed the door leading to our room behind me and stopped directly in front o f the hunchback. I threw m y back against the door and stood there w ith arras folded, motionless and silent. The hunchback w as grin ning; he bent down slightly as i f preparing to leap and looked up at m e and growled, still grinning: Ilonka, come out! Drunken Russians sat on the floor and benches next to the wall, waiting silently to see w hat would happen. Their besotted, oafish faces reflected the sort o f curiosity seen when the circus audience watches the trainer handling a rebellious beast. And actually, at this mom ent I felt this in m y w hole body I knew that everything depended on m y attitude and intona tion; i f I revealed any inner weakness, i f I showed fear and began pleading with the inebriated cripple, I w ould cause incalculable trouble. This is why I did not move; I ju st stood at the door and looked him in the eyes. He approached slowly, stealthily. W hen he stood before m e I extended m y hand, touched his shoulder and said som ething to him. I spoke in H unga rian quickly and quietly. Seriously, w ith ste m intona tions I said som ething like: w hat he is planning to do is inhuman. And I touched his shoulder. The moment that followed seemed endless. Suddenly the hunch back turned away and, grum bling furiously, went to the door and slam med it shut behind him. The others began to applaud the w ay spectators extol the lion tam er after accom plishing a daring feat. There was no trouble later; that night and those follow ing passed without threat to the wom ens safety.

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Nearly all the Russians were gentle and kind w ith children. Som ehow it w as in this, their feelings about children, that they preserved their inner bent for humaneness. An eight-year-old lived in our house, a little boy who had fled to us from the Germans and the Arrow Cross. The child whiled away the days con tentedly in the historical chaos; he romped happily am ong the m achines, the dirt and the foreign men; he was glad there w as no school and didnt have to wash up, and he did his bit diligently in the general circle o f thievery that erupted like a neurosis among the men o f the village, too. E very instructive reprim and was fu tile; he ambitiously looted tools, nails, mostly worth less objects from the Russians, and stuffed them into his own little robbers lair in the attic. Sometimes the Russians caught the little fellow red-handed, but they never hurt him. They waved their hands, struck his back, pulled his ears, then gave him an apple or a piece o f bread. A Russian boy-soldier also arrived w ith the com pany; he was twelve years old, a handsome, bright eyed little fellow. H e wore a regular arm y uniform and strutted around in it; it even had some kind o f insig nia. According to every indication, this boy could have been a bezprizornik, a nobodys child dressed in a uni form, the kind that roam ed Russia at the time o f the revolution by the hundreds o f thousands in gangs, threatening public safety; they wandered over the Rus sian plain, cut o ii from all hum an ties. W hen he passed by m e and I looked at him in a friendly way or spoke to him drolly, he raised his fist, swished his w hip, indicating I should beat it; he sized m e up with eyes shining w ith hatred and motioned for m e to move on. To him I was the ancient enem y it was not proper to fraternize with. I w ould have liked to learn whether I was such an ancient enem y to the adult Russians as well. After all, I was the bourgeois. The mess chief, a cheeky,

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skirt-chasing young man from Leningrad - he said that in peacetime he was the bath secretary at one o f the spas in the Crimea - would call out any m om ent to one o f the wom en peeling potatoes: Run over to the bourgeois and get tw o kilos o f onions. I was a bour geois in their eyes, i f different from the one who lives on his own wealth or on the labor o f others ; I was a bourgeois because I preserved som ething in m y soul. (Later, I often recalled this characterization. The So viet system, I quickly learned, wanted to take away from me precisely what I preserved in m y soul.) I tried to find out whether these men hated me. After all, in their eyes I belonged to the enemy, the Hunga rians, the middle class. I would have liked to know whether these Russians were truly Communists and how a Communist viewed me, the foreigner, the nonCommunist. Sometimes I recollected a statem ent of the aged Freud, who in one o f his last books heaved a sigh and said: the Communists took away private ownership from man because, in their opinion, it in cites him to aggression, but Bolshevik society re mained aggressive without the ownership o f private property. This, I now saw, was true. In addition, these men hung on openly and childishly to their own paltry and m eager personal pos sessions. And what was even m ore surprising, they largely respected the well-dressed, well-mannered, thus different individual. Good deportment, proper outward appearance, and the white hand exerted an influence on them. Before the Russians arrival m ali cious oracles urged the bourgeois class to spin a rough, milled screw in their palms all day, because the Russians would do away w ith everyone whose palm is not rough, - bu t in reality, there were m any Russian snobs who conspicuously sought out the com pany of well-mannered, well-groom ed, thus different individ uals. M y guests found a dog-eared copy o f an old pre

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war Am erican periodical, the illustrated Esquire, on the bookshelf in the living room. This American m aga zine was constantly in their hands; they thumbed through it in their spare tim e; Russians also came from neighboring houses and snatched the crumpled issue away from their fellow lodgers. They bent eagerly over the text and pictures printed on shiny, heavy paper. O f course, they were not reading the stories - they didnt understand a single w ord o f Eng lish they were not even looking at the humorous car toons. It was the advertisem ents that fascinated our fellow residents and callers: the advertisements that gave information about electric refrigerators, m ens suede shoes, the latest line o f tennis rackets, trouser belts cut out o f chamois leather and distinctive jew elry; the superfluities o f an aphrodisiac civiliza tion (this is Bergsons expression). An experience with selection and quality was w hat they were getting to know through the tattered Am erican magazine. The Soviet system, which took everything from them in the tremendous devastation o f the revolution, invented for the Russians, through the course o f thirty years, not ju st the Stalin organ or the turbines re quired by the Dniepropetrovsk power plants; it slowly and reluctantly invented and put at their disposal bi cycles, galoshes, gramophones, and other not exactly essential appurtenances. They spoke o f this proudly. But now, when they saw in the American picture m aga zine w hat is possible beyond necessities, they clearly fell into deep thought. Then these reflecting Communists thought even further about what they saw when they returned to the Soviet U nion from the W est, and Stalin gave several millions o f these daydream ers the opportunity to digest behind bar be dwire fences w hat they had seen. But, I repeat, I did not nor do I now attach the far-reaching reveries to these meditations. D id they hate me, the different kind o f human

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being, the bourgeois? ... W hen they spoke o f hatred, they repeated memorized texts; they parroted lessons; they rattled o ff the sem inary text dutifully and read ily. Were they Communists? But w hat is a Commun ist? During these weeks, I m et only intimidated, over worked and alienated m en w ith atrophied souls. The filth which their presence spread throughout the house w as truly Asiatic; it exceeded proportions caused by the hardships o f wartim e conditions. This was the barbarie puante. W hen I was alone I tried to recover from the days experiences. And som etimes, in amazement, I sensed that beyond the aversion their persons and behavior inevitably aroused in me, too, I felt sorry for them.

14
In this situation privacy was the great, the only luxury; still, in the wild mechanical and m ilitary tor rent that flooded our house and the environs, I som e how managed to create a daily routine w ithin whose scope I could make notes and even read during the day time for a few hours in our own separate lair. In the room next door, the Ukrainian childrens chorus miaowed and screeched, the Kirghizians and Chuwashes yelled, slam med doors and made their ma chine tools groan; I nevertheless succeeded in rem ain ing alone behind the wall, in oq r lair, for a few hours every day. I read Spengler during these hours. I didnt choose to read his book; there sim ply was no other work worthy o f attention at hand. This noted, pessim is tic work was a strange one to be read in our life situ ation. I last came across it ten years before, and I re tained no cogent recollection o f it. Back then, the Nazis began their onslaught, R osenberg was shouting his suspect sermons about the new myth from the

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housetops, Nietzsche was prompting somewhere be hind the scenes, Fichte w as m urm uring his dangerous preachments even deeper in the m urky recesses o f the Teutonic soul, and ten years earlier, Spenglers book also served the Nazis aims. W hat Spengler calls the Faustian spirit is a spirit fraught w ith suspicion and danger; already ferm enting in it is everything that later fatefully stirred the Germans in the plebeian m anner in the Nazis interpretation. The Stoa and Buddhism , thus the Eastern attitude, became so I mused - views not to be dismissed as lightly as the Faust-spirited Spengler thinks; both provide a mode for creation, and thus for evolution. And Goethe, the poet o f Faust, is truly the suprem e p roof that an Apol lonian spirit can be as valuable a creative force as the Faustian personality constantly fleeing to the deed can be. The Nazis I had to think o f them while read ing in m idst o f m y Kirghiz ians - could thank Spengler for some things. But in the m idst o f m y suspicion and reading, several statements o f his famous book struck m e anew. W hat Spengler wrote about the difference be tween the deed and work - deed is a hum an ideal, Svork only a social responsibility - now, when in the next room and a world ravaged everywhere around me by the Russians the figures o f a society reared for work, actually for an institutionalized and fixed drudgery were present - at this moment, when I was reading the book for the second time, the distinction seemed to m ake sense. I have felt at other times, too, that in lifes critical situations an invisible hand, select ing fatefully, puts that reading into our hands which in one w ay or another, som etimes in a roundabout way - responds to the problem s o f the particular moment. Somehow, that was w hat happened now, during the strange w eeks when I re-read Spenglers great pessi m istic work. For, while the men o f a society reared for

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work - work and drudgery are synon 3onous in Russian - prepared tum ultuously for som ething in the next room - and this enterprise involved not ju st the capture o f Buda but som ething greater and different: the appearance o f a System on the world stage, Speng ler convincingly proved his own om inous thesis about the simultaneous fading o f the great cultures and the abrupt disappearance o f their form s o f expression. W hat the German philosopher o f history wrote about the death agony o f chilled and rigid cultures, the mega lopolises, and the cycles o f im perialistic w ars was somehow being enacted before m y eyes even as I read. It was difficult to deny the anguished truth when the second chapter o f the cycle o f im perialistic w ars was a palpable, bloody reality, a tangible illustration of exactly what I was reading, And no extraordinary imag inative faculty was needed for contem poraries to see loom ing behind the recent adversity the third phase o f the cycle : in reality, the w inter epoch had also ar rived. During these weeks, very few elements o f the palaeoanthropic conditions were really m issing in our lives. Nevertheless, a question could be heard above the mixture o f m y reading and the experience parallel ing it. Then and later, I kept asking myself: do these men and the system that bred them actually represent only the end o f something, the end o f the concept of Christian humanism, or is there som ething com m enc ing in this dismal, clattering, earsplitting din? The Chuwashes, the Kirghizians, the Russians, the entire Eastern caravan left the Soviet U nion to crush, with the help o f the Anglo-Saxons, the w ar m achine o f Ger man imperialism and to defend their homeland. In ad dition, it was the task o f this gigantic arm y to estab lish the future security o f the Soviet Union, to seize hostages and pawns under the R ed Arrays flags, and, to the extent possible, to spread the Soviet system throughout the world. This was the political meaning

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o f everything that turned into reality before our very eyes during those weeks. But is there an additional m eaning to, the Soviet army? Spengler, accom panied by the singing o f the Ukrainian childrens chorus, convincingly proved that the Christian-hum anist culture o f the W estern Empire had reached the season o f decay, o f cooling. W as it possible that the men from the East in the adjoining room were not only destroying but instilling something w ith the first, barbaric gestures o f a new attitude toward life?... M any have written splendidly about the course o f a cultures destruction, and Spengler is only one o f m any who have chanted a dirge over our cultural epoch. B ut up to now, no one had written about how a culture begins. Is it conceivable that this barbaric army wants not m erely to destroy and loot but to bring som ething for the W est from the East som e d a y ? It appeared as i f this was the question the young Russian soldier on that foggy Christm as afternoon addressed to me, to every hum an being, to everyone living in this critical stage o f W estern civilization. This is how I rum inated while, during the bloodiest days o f the siege o f Buda I read Spengler for lack o f som ething better to read and listened, meanwhile, to the earsplitting racket o f m y guests. The ensuing years answered this question, it seemed. O f course, not w ith a definite, not with an absolute answer; that kind o f answer requires much time, possibly centiories. Those years replied only to the moment, and the answer, as I understood it, did not sound, in m y view, as i f the East could give impetus to W estern culture. The great strength o f these people, the Easterners, is that their dimensions are different. The Soviet system is the only aggressive system that can perm it itself to step back i f it has ventured too far forward: it has space to withdraw to. The Russian expanse, then the second dimension, Russian misery which can still accom modate much m ore suffering

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and finally Eastern mans pliable sense o f time: these are the dimensions within which the Eastern dictator can freely move, even when he executes retreats. Hit ler and his fellow dictators in the W est were always forced to m ove forward; to them backing down or even standing still was synon)mious w ith annihilation. But the Russians - then the Chinese and the Orientals gen erally have inner dimensions where it is difficult to pursue them. This is the source o f their strength but also their weakness. The men I cam e to know during these weeks and observed later in m any different guises were, on the surface, exactly like the W ester ners, but their awareness o f their own personalities did still not correspond to W estern m ans individual self-con s ciousn e ss. This Pjotr, this Fedor, this Anatol underscored their personalities with pride and self-respect, but there was around and within them some kind o f slack ness and formlessness in which their fateful aware ness o f their individuality was not so absolutely estab lished as in the consciousness o f W estern m en. They were individuals and personalities, but less so than the volatile Swabian miller in the neighboring village or the gardener who was a true-born H ungarian and thus came from the East and had lived in H ungary in a different kind o f self-consciousness for a thousand years, and thus he w as much more resolutely Jdnos and Pista than these Russians. Eastern m an always exudes som e sort o f impersonality, and that is ju st as much a dimension into which he can submerge him self, into which he can retreat as he can into time and expanse and Eastern misery. Contem plating these men, I recalled all I had once read in a leisurely period about the teachings and practices o f the Buddhist m ys tics, the famous yogas and munis. These Eastern Bud dhist mystics profoxmdly scorned miracles, the heal ings, because they saw nothing extraordinary about humans creating a connection w ith their inner organs

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under the control o f some fakirs practice, directing their heartbeat and sending messages to their endo crine glands, They found the m agnificent and final end in the dissolution o f the personality, when a human transcends his individuality and m ingles with the world rhythm . To me, to the W esterner, this attitude truly sounds Chinese or Hindu, because i f I relin quish m y individualit}^ this strange obsession I have abandoned the m eaning o f m y relations with life. Eastern man doesnt feel that way. And now, when I observed and experienced directly this differ ent consciousness o f the personality, this looser, less confined dim ension for individuality, it sometimes seemed I would comprehend that only in the East could a large collective social experiment be realized which attempts to strip the individual o f an ever criti cal consciousness o f his own personality and hoist him into the dimension o f com m unity consciousness, the social personality . Mingling, dissolving in the crowd can be euphoric for W estern m an, too, but the attempt to achieve it cannot be the object o f his life. This is w hat I experienced, w hat I came to see am ong the Rus sians. I think that this was for m e the only real obser vation during these weeks and the several years I spent in the system and the com munity o f Eastern men. M y own f a i vecu" was exceedingly inconsequen tial in these days and later as well. It wasnt worth mentioning. But the chasm I glanced into this chasm yawned between Eastern and W estern mans con sciousness o f the personality - was indeed an adven ture. D uring these days, I sometimes exchanged words w ith a man who got stuck in the village for the duration o f the w ar em ergency w ith his family; earlier he had been the ch ief editor o f a Catholic daily. A severe physical handicap afflicted him: he was totally deaf, and in the afternoons, when we would occa

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sionally m eet on the bank o f the Danube, we passed on, at the top o f our lungs, our m ilitary secrets, our radio news to each other amid the roaring Russian can nons and rum bling engines o f w ar, the w ay one has to speak to a d ea f person. H ungarian police arrested him in the weeks following the siege (four years later he was to be sentenced to ten years in prison at the M ind szenty trial, in which he was one o f the accused). There were no grounds for the charges against him, but he was the chief editor o f a Catholic newspaper, thus suspect in the eyes o f the Peoples Democracy, and for this reason he was im prisoned for several months. First he spent several weeks in the infamous house at 60 Andrssy Road, in the cellar o f the Com m unist State Security Police, and then one morning the Russians loaded him on a truck and transferred him to a ja il in a villa o f the GEPU, the Russian m ili tary and political police. H e spent weeks there. The police interrogated him several tim es but did not un cover any evidence or docum ents whatsoever against him, and eventually they set him free. H e lived for sev eral years in dire poverty but without restrictions, until he finally disappeared from the scene during the Mindszenty trial. This fellow-writer related that w hile he was in the hands o f H ungarian authorities, in the cellar of that notorious jail, the voices that spoke to him were harsh, the fare was wretched, and in the prisons the crowded conditions were suffocating, and the dirt was appalling; but he, the hum an being, the personality, felt all along that even in this deplorable state he still existed. Somewhere there was a document, a file num ber was legible on it, and this num ber represented him in the world, personally. His predicam ent worsened from the m om ent he got into Russian hands. In their jails, the Russians did not abuse him personally; the guard occasionally gave him a cigarette, and every thing he participated in was casually routine. Still,

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while he w as a Russian prisoner, he could not escape for an instant the fear that in this Soviet system he had ceased to exist, had disintegrated as a person, that he was only a speck o f dust being whirled along in an endless dust cloud above the gray Steppes. Others who returned home from the Russian camps also expressed this same feeling. This is how we lived on, eyeing each other, the Russians and the different kind o f hum an beings.

15
They disappeared from one hour to the next, exactly the way they had arrived. For tw o days the can non fire and the rain o f bombs were not as deafening. One evening, Sedlachek packed up his grandfather clock, and our guests began gathering up their things; they stuffed their loot into their duffel bags, their filthy packs. This loot consisted m ostly o f their sad and pitiful belongings, a beggars pouch could have accom modated them, and at dawn they set out. D uring the night, H assan cooked an oxhead in the kitchen for them. H e rounded up a few chickens in the village and served them chicken soup in several buckets for breakfast. They ate the soup and oxhead. The dirty floor o f the room w as covered w ith feathers, like after a demonic, witch-like all-night ball when the dancers shed their feather costumes. The detachment moved out without so much as a word. W e, the resi dents, looked on in surprise at the Russians departing without saying goodbye, for we had, after all, lived under the same ro o f for weeks and gone through trying conditions, and we had also happened to ex change hum ane words. But it did not occur to any one o f them to nod to us in farewell. W e were standing in the empty room in the dim light o f the sm oking oil lamp, when one o f our guests

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entered through the open door warily. It was the Ukrai nian who always spoke to us courteously and once said scornfully: You dont know the Russians yet! The m otor car in which he was assigned a place was al ready rum bling in the yard, but he had still returned to us for a moment. We thought that the forty-year-old bald and sympathetic Ukrainian ju s t wanted to say goodbye. H e stopped in the m iddle o f the room and looked around cautiously, m aking sure everyone had left and we were alone. Then he beckoned to the inter preter and said confidentially, in a hushed voice: Tell him - and he pointed to m e i f I knew languages I would not go back to Russia, I w ould stay in the W est. The interpreter translated softly. W hy wouldnt you go back? I asked. Because - and he raised his forefinger things are not good at hom e. These words o f farewell interested me. I asked the interpreter to get him to explain w hat is not good back home. The U krainian readily replied: It is not good because you have to work very hard and you dont get fair rew ard for your labor. Besides, there is no freedom. We dont study languages because they dont w ant us to read foreign languages. You can read only w hat they put in your hands. Books are m y life, he said unexpectedly, and I cant read w hat I want to. This is not good, he said soberly, sternly. He fell silent, and then all o f a sudden he said: M y father was a Social Democrat, but they shot him to death-1 want you and he pointed at me again - to know this. He stood wordlessly for a m inute it w as a very long minute and looked at us in the light o f dawn, blinking. His eyes reflected a strange weariness and sadness. Then he bowed and w ith a waggish, mocking

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motion presented m e w ith a gold-bordered pictiore of Stalin, the kind the soldiers carried with them every where on their military campaigns. W ith a scornful and reverential m ovem ent as i f presenting a saints picture or icon as a gift - he handed m e the Stalin pic ture and made the sign o f the cross. Then he left. A fter the Russians departure, the house and the yard showed the shambles o f a general battlefield scene, a slaughterhouse, and a ruined machine fac tory. H ere lay a disem boweled diesel motor, there an oxhead. About noon we heard that the Germans had surrendered Buda. During the night, w e bundled sacks up, and m y w ife and I set out at the first glim m er o f the follow ing dawn on the twenty-kilometer road to Budapest, back to the city to find in some cellar m y mother, brothers and sisters, and friends, w hat ever w as left o f the old life. As we neared the Buda sec tion o f the city, the picture changed at every street cor ner: the fam iliar area was a barely recognizable heap o f ruins. W e seem ed to be passing through excava tions. W e wandered about in the wake o f the Russians, identif3dng the old dwellings. The path was open. But we did not yet know where it led.

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I found only som e firewalls o f m y home stand ing. D uring the siege, it took three bomb hits and more than thirty grenades. I som ehow climbed up to the sec ond floor on the rubbish pile that rose from the rubble, the rem ains o f the stairs, and the furniture fragments where the staircase once stood, and I caught sight of my top h at and a French porcelain candlestick on the top o f the m ushy pile o f ruins that was once m y home. Photographs were strewn about in the rubbish, includ in g the one which long time ago, before the siege, hung above m y w riting desk and depicted Tolstoy standing

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w ith Gorky in the garden at Yasnaya Polyana. I put this photograph in m y pocket and looked around to see what else I could take as a keepsake. I m ade m y way through the obstacles to the room w here m y books had lined the shelves. I w ould like to have found the bilin gual Marcus Aurelius, then Eckermanns Conversa tions and an old H ungarian edition o f the Bible. But it was difficult to get m y bearings in the chaos. The blasts had, like some paper mill, ground the books into a pulp. Still, one book w ith an undam aged title page lay on the rubbish pile right next to m y top hat. I picked it up and read the title: On the Care o f a Middle-Class Dog, this w as its title. I stuck the book in m y pocket and cautiously climbed down from the rubbish pile to the ground floor. A t this m om ent - I later thought about this a lot - I felt a strange sense of relief.

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PART TWO

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...T hat which the palm erw orm hath left hath the locust eaten; and that which the locust hath left hath the cankerworm eaten; and that which the cankerworm hath left hath the caterpillar eaten." (Joel, 1.4.)

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I did n ot im m ediately understand what lay be hind this sense o f relief. But then, I didnt really have the tim e to rack m y brains about its meaning; I had m ore pressing m atters to tend to than the analysis o f m y m uddled feelings. I had to find a roof for our heads, a bed and a table. Like Robinson Crusoe when a wave tossed him on the island after the shipwreck, I returned to the sunken ship w ith a raft - a two wheeled handcart - to salvage the necessities for liv ing. Everyone w as engaged in this task: residents rum m aged through the ruins in the big city day and night. It seem ed as i f rubbish rem oval were perpet ually going on, but also as i f some grotesque land set tlem ent were under way. People reported boastfully that in the rubbish m ound it had been their home some weeks before they had found an old hall clock or a bathtub. Others unearthed Persian rugs, not al ways their own and not even at their own places. W hen the siege ended, months o f grim beauty befitting a rom antic novel followed. I put several damaged, broken pieces o f furni ture into a tem porary accom m odation in Buda and moved in w ith m y fam ily. I lived in this flat very si lently but not exactly discontentedly for three years, from M arch 1945 to August 1948, when I left the country. Goethe said that when someone spoke to him about the annihilation o f a nation, he began yawning because he knew that w hat he heard was only a plati tude. But when he heard that a peasants hom e in the neighborhood had burned down, he slept restlessly be cause he knew that w hat he heard was a real tragedy. During these years, I had similar thoughts. Much was being said about the nations destiny and about how everything will now be com pletely different. I only

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saw that no one cared about the nation, because everyone rushed to get a typhus inoculation and to re place broken windowpanes. A n d there w as something encouraging to be found in these ferreting, disgrun tled, bustling activities. People surmised that the na tion would also benefit i f they replaced broken windowpanes in their homes. Everything bellowed as history became insignificant, while the days news - where one could get bread, shoes, m edical help - was real his tory. This is how we lived then, in bom bed-out BudapestThe com er carpenter eventually glued the broken furniture together. Right after the siege, crafts men like him - the vanguard o f later private entrepre neurship were conquering heroes. M ost o f them worked only on their mettle for inflated pay, hence al most for nothing, considering that within days, later within hours, the great swindle, the paper leprosy, the inflation chewed up the jancsibanko they were paid with for their work. Despite this, some who took on work did turn up: the carpenter who pieced together a bed, a table and a wardrobe with broken slats, the gla zier who installed glass in the window fram es, the elec trician who lighted up the citys darkened houses. A l most all these conquering heroes and m anual cru saders o f odd jobs were old craftsm en reared as Social Democrats who learned in a Hungary w ith the casinos honor codes and the arrogant displays o f assumed su periority that there is another kind o f honor, that the honor o f labor is the m ost valuable and hum an o f all forms o f honor. W ithin a few months after the siege, these craftsmen pasted together out o f the ruins a Bu dapest where town life could once again be led. R us sian patrols with bayonets m arched about on the st/eets. Soviet soldiers and roughnecks stole and stripped clothes o ff people. B ut in the ruined flats as in the Middle Ages and at the beginning o f modern times, the epoch o f religious wars - residents were

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again leading the lives o f hum an beings, secretly, be hind closed doors. This w as how I threw together some sort o f roof over our heads when we lugged our belongings from the village to Budapest. W e occasionally w ent to our demolished apartment, b u t the visits soon nauseated us. To plant ourselves in front o f the ruins, like Jews at the foot o f the W ailing Wall and bemoan our lost hom e - this was an uninviting task. Once the most es sential practical articles had som ehow turned up in the rubble, w e abandoned the eerie visits. True, I did not gladly leave our books there to mildew. It w as a re lie f to stum ble upon a neighborhood bookseller who undertook to sort out the slightly dam aged volumes from the jum ble o f the filthy, crumbly rubbish pile. We agreed that he w ould w ork for shares, and it turned out to be a good deal, for he rescued several hundred valuable H ungarian and foreign books for me and kept the rest and sold them as he could. Fortunately, he took many I was glad to get rid of; in short, the fashion able literary works publishers had burdened me with during the last decade and a half. This was a relief to me. W hen we divided the books between us, I got a complete Janos Arany, then a gaptoothed Jkai series, lexicons, French and German books. W hen I placed them in order on the shelves, there was again, it seemed, a room in the tem porary quarters where that strange and suspect profession could be pursued which Robert M usil characterized as gutgehende Schriftstell e r e if or a flourishing literary career. The dear mas ter could sit down at his desk and write i f he chose to. The only question was: for whom ? (And the other ques tion, one I form ulated only later, however: why? ...) In any event, I consoled m yself w ith the thought that I had reason to feel contented. I was again living in a room where I saw books lining the walls. The country lay in total ruin, so people said, but that was merely a flowery expression. In reality, the

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country had not perished; to the contrary, it began to live very vigorously. There were those w ho complained because the flat, the villa, the m agnificent furnishings, thereafter the bank deposit, the upper-class lifestyle, the w hole factitious hierarchy, the neo-baroque snob bery had been obliterated. Others expected the A m eri cans to com e and chase the Bolshevik Russians back to the Soviet Union, and then everyone will get every thing back again: the house ow ner the house, the lan downer the land, and the nim ble-penned, prolix writer the easy success. Everyone expected som eone else to help. The peasants sniffed covetously at land distribu tion; at the same time, they were suspicious because they knew from a thousand-years experience that what is handed out can also be taken back. Their w ari ness was justified. On the w hole, however, everyone waited for the tem porary situation to end and then, in the true Hungarian way, in accordance w ith local fashion, the good old life will again com e to exist in Hungary. The Communists winked and, in the beginning, maneuvered cautiously. Later, they repeated this wary maneuvering o f the sniper in world politics. Sometimes they took a step, then looked around and watched silently to see what effect it produced. I f they suspected serious opposition, they stepped back prudently, in order to take two steps forward at the next turn. This w as how m atters proceeded for two years, to the spring o f 1947. Then the m aneuvering ac celerated. The Kremlin decided that the Yalta agree ment could be put into effect and the Soviet Union take possession o f the countries bordering the West. When the Krem lin made this decision, the Hungarian Communists sent home from M oscow set about their work in earnest. It was possible for us to Hve in our temporary quarters, and I could even write w ith a m easure o f selfdiscipline. In the first year after the siege, I submitted

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tw o novels - I had w ritten them during the war, but at the time there was no opportunity to publish them and I occasionally wrote diary notes for a liberal daily. I beguiled m y self w ith the notion that I would live and work under the changed circumstances ju st as I had be fore. Old friends em erged one by one from the ruins. Still, som ething in m y life had basically changed. Then one day I realized why I had felt that sense o f re lie f when after the siege I again saw the ruined apartm ent house where I had lived for a decade and a h a lf and w here everything that m eant some thing to m e personally was destroyed: memories, at mosphere. I shall recount this as best I can. But before doing that, I would like to write down som ething at this point.

I dont know how it is w ith others, but when ever I think o f a city, no m atter whether Hungarian or foreign, I dont see a picture first, but hear a certain musical beat. Be it New York or Paris, Kolozsvar or Berlin, w henever some notion, some chance associ ation o f ideas flashes a citys name across m y mind, I hear music. It seem s as i f to m e a melody, a musical beat conveys the citys meaning. For example, i f some one mentions New York in m y presence, it isnt the panorama o f M anhattan as seen from the one-hun dredth floor o f the Em pire State B uilding that appears to me; instead, I hear for an instant some beats from Gershwins Rhapsody in Blue, several measures from this w ailing and howling, doleful and delightful neur otic composition. I dont know the cause o f this melodic recollection o f a city; after all, I dont ever hear a m usi cal signature when I think o f hum an beings or land scapes. A m ong the phenomena o f consciousness, in my view, the really frightful and mysterious are the ones that trigger the key action o f remembrance; and this

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rhythmic and m elodic synchronism that the mention o f a citys name flashes in m y consciousness is ju s t as incomprehensible as the enigm atic character o f the storing and summ oning up o f m em ories in general. It seems that to m e a m elody is the tradem ark o f a city, and I cant measure the tim espan o f this melodic cue; visual images imm ediately follow the cue without melody on the conveyor o f recollection. These cityscapes are always in shades o f gray in m y recollection, never in color, ju st as I never see color in m y dreams and always dream in black and white. Budapest is the only city w hose m em ory does not conjure up a m elody in m y consciousness. It evokes lines o f verse instead. For instance, som etim es it auto matically coupled with this wailing, despairing line from Babits: What concern o f m ine are the sins o f the world?" Thus did Jonah cry out in the beautiful poem by the great H ungarian poet when he learned that Providence did not exist, only facts. This line som e times flashed across m y mind when I thought o f Buda pest. It spoke to m e like a text fixed on the sound-sensi tive ribbon o f a tape recorder. But other verses are also registered on this tape which, in m y case, reflexively begin speaking, acti vated by the mention o f cities nam es, including those I m yself wrote long ago, when I still turned out a verse every now and then. During the siege, I did strum a few lines o f verse in rhyme. I am not a poet; m issing from m y sensibility, from m y consciousness, is that dis tilling power which poetry is and which, w ith magical, sometimes demonic energy, catalyzes in a single word the elements o f emotion and reason, the w ay that the nucleus o f the atom catalyzes protons and neutrons. But occasionally I did write som e rhythm ic lines, and occasionally the barbaric jew el, the rhyme, clanged at the end o f a line. Am ong them were some that looked like verse, but the dense and potentially explo

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sive tensile pow er o f poetry was missing. And without such a charge, there ju s t isnt any poetry. Just the same, these hom e-m ade verses did som etim es speak up when I thought o f Budapest. And a still photograph em erging from the repository o f my m em ories im m ediately followed these verses: a Buda pest street corner or a hum an face. It was as i f the lines were the text for a picture in an album. Budapest and everything pertaining to this idea survived in miniature stills for me: a series o f memories in photo graphs, m any m iniatures in an album that I leafed through periodically. These photographs did not show action like a film reel, but fixed, rigid pictures. And even as a medieval city w ith its sharp contours, battle ments, churches, scaffolds and gabled houses, and gar rulous residents loitering in a tiny square fit into the miniatures o f the Flem ish masters, so everything I lived through in three years, from the end o f the siege to the time o f m y voluntary exile, rem ained palpable to m e in the narrowly framed stills. They didnt move : history is always a still photograph because whatever has happened is dead. I look at, regard m y mementos o f Budapest as i f I were scrutinizing the bespectacled, stony-eyed, slightly com ical, slightly frightening coun tenances o f deceased relatives and acquaintances in a family album. Twenty-five years, a brief generation, rolled by from the tim e I last saw Budapest. During these twenty-five years, rare w as the day when I didnt look at som ething in m y special album; it rarely happened that I didnt think o f Budapest. And the pulse o f soli darity always throbbed in my consciousness whenever I thought o f this beautiful, extraordinary city. But there wasnt a single day during this quarter o f a cen tury when I thought o f Budapest nostalgically. And every time I dream t that I returned home, that I was at hom e again in Budapest, the dream was always painful and distressing. And w aking up was always a

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great relief because it had all been ju st a dream. For a quarter o f a century, in a strange land, sometimes in the middle o f a chilly indifference and a sea o f apathy, it was once again a relief to know I had had the strength to leave and did not have to live through all that happened there in the course o f these twenty-five years. Sometimes I thought that this relief* that fol lowed the awakening from m y nightm are w as an act o f cowardice; I was happy because I had the strength to leave the danger zone in time, and I did not - involun tarily, recalcitrantly, but through the sheer fact o f re maining there becom e an accomplice in everything that took place. But this was an easy, evasive explana tion. The reality was different. A t the bottom o f every thing I thought, felt and dreamt in connection w ith the homeland and Budapest glim m ered the m em ory o f the m om ent when I understood w hy a sense o f relief flooded m y consciousness, like a burning, bloodrushing giddiness, when on the way from the village I saw the pile o f ruins that rem ained o f our flat. I frequently rec ollect this moment. I never sym pathized w ith the con noisseurs o f ruin; I never understood Gandhi who, on seeing the splendid palaces o f N ew Delhi on a moonlit night, murmured: W hat beautiful ruins they will make. W hat I saw was not beautiful.

"... beware, now y o u r feet will sink in blood, here at the mud-dazed Bulwark, the scattered dead y e t gaze a t the Heavens Smoke signals swirl up from the depths to the firm am ent F or som ewhere 6c/oa; Krisztina town blazes

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A ll traces o f zith er and Gypsy have been blown From the B road a xef filled now by shadows and stench alone A n d side by side in the castle church lie corpses O f dead princes and slaughtered horses..."

These lines w ere not a poetic hyperbole: in the m orning in the light o f cold M arch - artillery still rum bled in Transdanubia, the forces o f Soviet Marshal Tolbukhin w ere fighting the Germans and the Hungarian A rrow Cross retreating toward Vienna - 1 actually saw two dead horses abandoned in front o f the tombs o f princes on the stone floor o f Matthias Church in Buda. This episode occurred in the spring o f 1945 hence a year after that m em orable name day when our fam ily last sat together. Leaning on m y elbows on the railing o f the Bastion promenade, I could clearly see the scene below: the change that had taken place in a years time. T he only reason I w ent to Castle Hill on this M arch day w as to look for someone. I didnt find him; he had died. A t the time, telephones were still not functioning in Budapest, and the only way one could know anything for certain about the living and the dead was to look them up on foot. The house where the person I w as looking for lived before the siege was also destroyed. O f the six thousand residents o f Castle Hill, only six hundred rem ained in the district; the rest had died or fled. I w alked along the narrow streets o f Castle Hill between w hat w as left o f the m oderately grotesque little mansions o f the Hungarian Faubourg Saint-Garmain. This stroll resem bled that o f Ulysses when he looked down into the pit o f Hades. A t the end o f the promenade a h a lf dozen old cannon barrels stood in place; the M useum o f M ilitary History displayed these

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long bronze barrels saved from Turkish tim es. A w arn ing sign stood guard next to them w ith this text: Please do not touch the cannon barrels. This concern for a museum piece had surprised m e some time ago, when I passed this w ay nearly every day on a stroll. One could understand why an official agency would warn civilians against cannons, but nowhere else, in any foreign country, did I ever see civilians warned against touching cannons. I w alked the length o f the Bastion, stopped at the top o f the Granite Stairs and looked down into the depths through the balustrade. The librettists o f official Com m unist propa ganda called this point in time, the conclusion o f the Second World W ar, The Tim e o f Liberation. They spoke o f this juncture as i f it w ere a new basis for the computation o f time, the new Before Christ and After Christ. They believed that the H ungarian people were liberated from the N azi terror and now quite able to bear the Com munist terror. A n d there were many who, because o f their lineage or beliefs, had been hounded in the recent past. To them, the arrival o f the Soviet arm y was synonymous w ith liberation - until the time came when they learned that they were now free to rot in prison in the Soviet colonial empire. Others, the majority o f the countrys population, did not feel that what occurred constituted liberation. The Hungarian language is terse, but its spirit is prone to rhetoric and expressions o f pathos; it is succinctly rhe torical, and for this reason, the population defined what materialized in the wake o f the Soviet armys ar rival thus in realistic wording: After the Siege and Before the Siege. I personally didnt feel any sort o f liberation. I didnt even have any wounds to display; others had suf fered and lost immeasurably. But now, when from the height I caught sight o f the ruins where I had lived not so long ago, I understood that in the depths amid the destitution and devastation on the rubbish heap o f his

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tory, not only had m y hom e been destroyed, a carica ture had also died. There was no liberation to be found anywhere, neither within m e nor in the sur rounding w orld, but there was a deliverance, because ultim ately the caricature was annihilated. A t least, that w as what I supposed then, I didnt yet know that the law o f the conservation o f energy prevails not only in physics but also within the dimension o f human destiny: the phenomenon who form s personality beyond organic reality never dies completely. During his lifetime, m an not only acts, speaks, thinks and dreams; he also keeps silent about something. Throughout our entire lives we keep silent about who we are, about the one only we know and can not reveal to anyone. But we know that the one and w hat we rem ain silent about is the truth: we are w hat we keep silent about. But w hat do we keep silent about so anxiously, w ith tightly clenched teeth? In one o f his works, Mal raux when he wrote it he was no longer a Court W riter, a parvenu Eminence in de Gaulles household spoke about how during his life man believes he is standing guard over som e Great Secret. This is a mis conception: man is not A secret, the North Cape, an oddity, as A dy lamented, but the sum total o f little se crets fit for the hollow o f the hand, a tiny, grimy bundle. H e guards those rotten little secrets with spas m odic and idiotic devotion, but it is not worth standing guard over this satchel o f secrets, because shortly, at the instant o f death or sometimes even sooner, it becomes apparent that there was n o Great Secret o f any kind in life. W e have only residual, minute secrets which could have been disclosed to others and were not worth conceahng. Secrets o f the Role, secrets of Ambition, E nvy and Family. Secrets o f Sexuality ... in Protean form, as psychoanalysts, the Talmudists of the abdomen, would have put it. W as all this worth concealing? ...

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I now believed that the grotesque figure whom I was up to that point had perished in History, written with a capital H : . And w hom I had to own up to be cause I was indeed a caricature, too. And this carica ture concealed the one who could not, dared not reveal himself; after all, man is not m erely the what he is but always the caricature o f h im self as well. The cari cature isn't humorous, genial, but always bitter, mean, vindictive. I supposed that at last the bourgeois writer, then the urbane writer, or the dandy, had perished. And I couldnt deny that I actually fit the traits the caricature displayed and tagged. I couldnt assert that another person existed behind the carica ture who had nothing to do w ith the dandy or the bourgeois writer, then later w ith the neurotic hunter o f experiences pursuing adventures, w ith the writer gamely turning out books, plays and news articles, with the rakish creature, the m aniacal itinerant jou r neyman. Just as in a game o f hide-and-seek in the nursery rhyme, I couldnt cry out that your finding me doesnt count, because I was this and something else as well. But for a moment - true, it w as a histori cal mom ent - I believed that finally this personal mis conception, the caricature had perished. I could finally be what I am. This is what I supposed, for a moment- It w as a beautiful, xmforgettable moment, as is every moment when one lies mitigatingly and openly to someone: to oneself or to someone else. I had not yet learned that man never frees h im self com pletely from the miscon ception that takes form regarding his own persona: he cant do so because there is also some truth in the mis conception?; the caricature that the world mirrors is Just as much him as the other that he has been tight-lipped about throughout his life. For this reason, I didnt start screaming w ith the fury o f the Old Testa ment and Ezekiel from the height o f the Bastion Promenade; I looked down without any self-accusation

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at the ravaged graveyard below, where everything that gave com pass and content to m y life until now had vanished. Instead I thought: at such great cost, but it had happened at last! In the depths, am ong the ruins below, the bour geois that I w as lay - so I imagined dead, moldering. Humans w ho belonged to the bourgeoisie were crawling in the cellars o f demolished houses, imder the roofs w ith gaping holes. Not so long ago, that sun lit em ptiness in the depths had been m y hom e, where T lived m y bourgeois life. It wasn't a mansion, but som ething else, the hom e o f a bourgeois writer; it be longed to us like the w ell worn, expertly tailored gar m ent one gladly puts on because it isnt subject to changes in ones tim e o f life or in fashion. We had lived in this airy em ptiness that had been m y home for fif teen years after our return to H ungary from a six-year stay in Paris. (Now, for a moment, that rush o f blood again: M aybe it w as a m istake to return. The im medi ate reply: It was not a mistake, because I can write only in Hungarian.) W ithin the dimensions o f this emptiness, in the hom e now gone, I wrote four dozen books, then thousands and thousands o f articles, sketches, colorful verse-like things. H ere I acquired {lege artis... This way, so as to ...) and honed m y craft. I had every reason to weep, because everything w as de stroyed that held together and sustained from the out side who and what I was. And the mom entary giddiness again - I couldnt feel genuinely and overwhelmingly sorry for what was fittingly destroyed in the depths. I couldnt howl and m oan like a prophet in the desert over what had perished, because there was som ething in the depths below that I did not like. There was much o f value, much beauty, m any precious illusions. But noth ing was really w hat it appeared to be, what I believed it to be. In fact, everything was really out o f joint. I was a bourgeois then (even though a carica

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ture); I am one today, in m y old age, in a foreign country. To me, being a bourgeois was never a matter o f class status - I always believed it w as a calling. In m y view, the bourgeoisie was the best hum an phe nomenon that m odem W estern culture produced, be cause it was the bourgeoisie who created m odern W est ern culture; when a senile social hierarchy w as annihi lated, it was the bourgeoisie who created balance within a universal order toppling in a handstand. The human breed cannot live w ithout lan in the social sense either; i f hum an beings are deprived o f the lan o f nation or race, they m ust be given the lan o f class or o f something else. They cannot survive without this element. Lenin didnt believe in the class conscious ness o f the proletariat; he knew that the proletariat was not class conscious, and so the m yth o f the Party had to replace the myth o f class. But this Party was not the assault squad o f class-conscious proletarians; it was a plebeian grouping which proclaimed the end o f the coupon-clipping bourgeoisie, o f the class m onop oly o f profits and the means o f production (and this was true) but said nothing about the new role o f the bourgeoisie who had built cities, created culture and constructed Europe - that o f elevating the amorphous masses into the realm o f the bourgeois way o f life. For this is w hat occurred everywhere in the W est. H awk ings about the new, progressive role o f the bour geoisie were already being heard in the Hungarian publications that passed for the press at the time. The Communists knew that they were helpless without the intellectuals, and so they began strum m ing a love ditty on the mandolin about the progressive liberal bourgeoisie who had now finally attained their true role in the wake o f the reactionary bourgeoisie who had lost theirs. The unsavory jok e in P est lived o ff sus picions that these troubadours w anted to compensate for their own incompetence when they lured the bour geois into the Party, declaring that it w as not only

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som eone w ith a grandfather who was a docker that could become a doctor. There were some intellectuals who suspected that the bourgeois now needed not trou badours but Savonarolas who would shake them out of their torpid dismay, B ut there was no such bourgeois Savonarola to be found anywhere. I continually quarreled w ith this class, this bourgeoisie. I, the bourgeois offspring o f Upper Hun gary, never felt at hom e in that bourgeois house and in that sphere o f activity in Buda which now vanished amid the ruins. W hat w as it that I felt was missing? The atmosphere. The sustaining, the lively bourgeois atmosphere. (It was never lacking in Kassa. A m ong the Kolozsvrians I never felt this gasping for air, this lack o f atmosphere.) But everything surround ing m e in Budapest - the chief counselor o f the govern ment, the H onorable Sir, the servant-tormenting madam, the plutocrat o f Liptvros (he was the best sort in this panoptikon o f heterogeneous pseudo-bour geoisie in Pest) all this was not, to me, a lively bour geois atmosphere; indeed, it was, like myself, only a caricature o f the m em ory that I brought from Kassa and guarded faithfully. I now realized that I never felt at home in this setting, in the circle o f flourishing writers. I was searching for something, something that w as continually missing, But w hat? To breathe my own air in m y own world. This is w hat I missed, and perhaps this is why I took off from Hungary during these years whenever I could, at every opportunity for decades. But, I thought, now I am finally back. And I looked attentively at the airy nothing that survived.

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Here now rest yourself, sit down on the pavem ent H ere where Granite row is collapsed in the basement Below the windows at which y o u used to write you r novels A s chestnut boughs shifted in the clear sunlight On that sum m er m orning - then the seconds Passed out as the sky sw ung open Here you were a poet, you lam ented in the heat Look around carefully. This was once M ik S treet..."

And there was much worth taking a look at. In addition to the cubic meters o f air that rem ained o f our place, the m ushy pile o f rubbish that used to be the writer and poet Kosztolanyis home, formed a hump nearby in the immediate neighborhood. It w as a small one-stoxy Buda house, maybe w ith four rooms. The poets study opened to the right o f the entrance. This room was, o f course, stacked w ith books to the ceiling, ju st as the gentle reader expected o f a poets study; but the poet who lived in it did not use books as room dcor and had, instead, presum ably read every one of them. Am ong European writers, those in Him gary were, I believe, the m ost diligent readers. In Hungary, reading was a voluntary task for writers, an even more im portant one than writing, because the Him garian language had not yet sunk into the layers o f literary consciousness as densely as the German, or Italian, or French language had in their homelands. These Euro pean languages constantly received nutriments from the languages in their border regions, Teutonic, Latin

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and Slavic. Other sources did not stock the Hungarian language anywhere; for m ore than a thousand years its vocabulary had to be assembled from loan words sometimes alien to its spirit. The Hungarian poet, when he dug up the deep layers o f his consciousness, didnt always find perceptive concepts and appropriate words for the new phenomena; it seemed as if the lan guage were day-dream ing, languishing some centuries further back. In the twentieth century, H ungarian writers were still reading ju s t as avidly, inquisitively and co vetously as individuals w ith an urgent mission. They had to make u p for the failures o f a thousand years of seclusion, silence and asthmatic suffocation, because they had suffered from such a paucity o f words - too few to im part to them selves the Great Secret, the Hungarian, and then the discoveries o f culture. W ith other peoples, the ideas o f culture occurred si multaneously; ideas constantly rose, mingled and con densed in the large linguistic regions. The Hungarian language rem ained w ord poor. Shakespeare, it is said, had 30 000 words for his use; I wonder how many words could Balassi, Pzm ny or Zrinyi have had? For this reason, w hen Hungarian writers wrote in every period, the Guardsmen writers even as the poets versi fying in Pest cafs, Csokonai in wheezy pipe smoke even as Zoltn Som ly in acrid cigarette smoke - they hastily sm uggled foreign nutrim ents into the anemic, skeletal language, sometimes cam ouflaging loan words beyond recognition, som etimes tastefully. Every thing was scarce. The beautiful, secluded Hungarian language not only had to be protected, weeded and cleansed; through reading, it had to be replenished w ith the stim uli o f other languages. (It had only one relative in the world, the Finnish, but no one other than linguists specializing in Finno-Ugrian com prehended this relative.) Hungarian, which, even after a thousand years o f language practice in Europe,

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still thirstily im bibed foreign nutrim ents, had to be fed vitamins. A Czech writer, i f he felt the lack o f an ex pression while composing, reached absently into the vest pocket o f neighboring Russian, Polish or Southern Slav dialects and prom ptly found w hat was missing. But where could H ungarian writers turn? They fed this anemic intellectual m etabolism by reading. It was over there, there to the right that KosztoIdnyi read and wrote. Let us cast a glance to the right. We can see w hat rem ains o f the poets study. The tribes that carried the roots o f the language when they left the marshy region o f Lebedia, crossed the Carpa thian Mountains, and slowly descended into the valley o f the Danube and Tisza rivers brought few words with them, and they didnt read. A t the time when the Hungarian tribes set out across trackless primeval forests, other peoples - the Greeks, Chinese, Hindus were already reading so prodigiously that m any kinds o f words had worn away in their consciousness. On the other hand, the Hungarians, so linguists say, w ere at the time o f their departure still in the higher state of savagery. They didnt have enough words to recount in Europe all they had experienced and thought up to that point. They couldnt make them selves understood by those who already possessed a copious vocabulary, including hackneyed and tired words; they couldnt ex change ideas. A n idea requires words; without words there is no exchange, only a sensation in the conscious ness, like an ant crawling on the skin. And the H unga rians had numbers for only one hand, for four or five fingers. And they werent in a hurry to create words any more than they were in a hurry to occupy a country, because they didnt have a map or a set desti nation. They werent searching for a hom eland, they were seeking grazing lands. It was poets who later made a country out of the grazing lands. It is always poets who make coun tries out o f grazing lands. Ezra Pound was right when

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he declared that everything a people wishes for ob tains its verification in poetry, for instance, as did Benedek Virg, here in the neighborhood, in one o f the rotten hovels o f Vzivros, where he scrawled love songs w ith a goose quill. (Kosztolnyi wrote this about him.) Kosztolnyi recorded how independent o f Time and Space, w hich dont exist for the Spirit any m ore than they do for astronauts in the Void - he w ould one m orning go from Krisztinavros to V zi vros and call on the H oly Elder. H e would read his poems to him aloud, and the old poet, praising the power o f poetry, w ould hand m e an apple for my verses. No one in H ungary gave poets anything any w ay, other than som etimes one poet an apple to an other poet. Kosztolnyi, like Benedek Virg, like every Hungarian poet, knew that he had only one real home land amidst the Slavs and Germans: the Hungarian language. A ll else was at all tim es foggy, flickering and mutable: the borders, the population. The lan guage endured like a diamond. And it always had to be ground anew to make it sparkle. This is what Kosztol nyi did. This is w hy, bespectacled, he read day and night in the room now reduced to a pile o f rubble. And while he read, this urbane writer and homo aestheticus like a pickpocket wearing tails at some upper-class gathering he had slipped into (this upper-class gathering was world literature) - con stantly purloined som ething for the Hxmgarian lan guage. The H ungarians crossed the passes o f the Car pathians on horseback or in horse-drawn carts, in twowheelers, in covered wagons. Later, it was flaunted that Hungarians are an equestrian people. Perhaps they still were in V irgs day. But in Kosztolnyis they no longer were, no m atter what those w ho played polo or m aintained racing stables said. In this period, w hose debris now lay scattered about, Hungarians no longer rode horses. T he equestrian nation had split the

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roles in two: those who rode horses and those w ho ate them. There were m ore o f the latter. B ut the Hungar ian Conquest had to be completed, a language had to be created, a language whose lum inous and expressive power would give m eaning to the landscape, cattle and man. To this end, poets constantly read throughout the centuries. (Ancient H ungarian runes did not con stitute writing, ju st as poetry and novels could not be written w ith Toltec, Aztec and M ayan gljqjhic script. Just as there is no Egyptian literature, because the figures are rigid, do not m ove like letters it is im possible to write the following w ith hieroglyphics: Oh, fly slowly and sing a long while. This deficiency the letters with which words can be put together - had to be urgently met, because until this occurred, every thing would rem ain meaningless to H ungarians, and Himgarians would remain m eaningless to the world; they were the stam m ering nomads o f the intellect, brutish vagabonds. For this reason, it w as imperative for them to write with letters. This is w hy the whiskered Berzsenyi, the touchingly quixotic Kazinczy, the dis guised revolutionary Arany wrote. O r the pipe-sm ok ing, paunchy, delightful Jend Heltai. Or the breath lessly whistling and wheezing, feverish and inspired Babits. Or the cooing Ernd Szp. The Attila Jzsef fle eing into Gauginish ornamentation. The magnificent old teenager with the unrestrained flatus, Ldrinc Szab. They not only wrote out o f rapture, they also read pantingly. They read from every period, in every accessible language. They translated Persian epi grams from German, Chinese lyric poem s from E ng lish. They cultivated everything, for they had to fill the Hungarian language up w ith superfluous words be yond w hat were essential. They knew that literature begins with the superfluous. And the nation w ith lit erature. Like every H ungarian writer, Kosztolnyi down below, there in the m ushy vegetation that re

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m ained o f his home - fed and purged the Hungarian language like a doctor o f contagious diseases a desper ately ill hum an at a time o f infection.

A t this time in the year after the end o f the Second W orld W ar countless books appeared in the W est about the writers obligation to be committed. M ost o f them examined the purpose o f literature and the w riter in tim e o f class war from a M arxist view point. One o f them reached Buda. Sartre wrote it. I found out from this book that I was not free because the classless society had not yet becom e a reality. The book made edifying reading at the time. The Com m unists hastened to announce in Hungary that m ost o f the literary works the public, hence a middle class possessing m onopolistic dominion, read in the present century was noxious literature . Sartre didnt say this. He recognized that the bourgeois cen turies - hence the nineteenth and twentieth centuries com pelled m any great writers to speak up, but they, so he held, w ere not free, because their public de manded that they present the illusions o f the bour geois system in their realistic, naturalistic or romantic works. For w hom did they write? Sartre asked with scornful, rhetorical emphasis. The question resonated in the consciousness o f a generation o f disillusioned in tellectuals w ith ominous intimidation. And really - the question w as timely above the ruins o f Kosztoln 5ds house for whom had Hunga rian authors w ritten in the present century, m ore pre cisely between tw o w orld wars, in the Hungary o f Tria non? W ho m ade up the public? For instance, for w hom did Kosztolnyi write? The writer did not have a public so Sartre ex pounded - until the end o f the seventeenth century, be-

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cause, as a social phenomenon, the w riter wrote for a Maecenas until the passing o f the feudal system: for a prince, or a bishop, or a few bibliophiles. Back then, the writer was classical; he only had the opportunity to create according to rigid and severe hierarchical rules. In the eighteenth century and then in the nine teenth, the writer did have his public:" the middle class, whom Sartre and M arxist intellectuals por trayed w ith perverse consistency as monsters pos sessed by the monomania o f class rule, the sole owners o f the m eans o f production, and the ruthless coalition o f userers driven maniacally by the profit motive. Now, the writer, so they maintained, could write only i f he served the ideas and interests o f his new master, the middle class. No doubt, there were such writers in every period. But what they failed to m ention was that the writers who broke out o f the straitjacket o f feudal classicism were, in the end, so unfettered in the middle-class hierarchy that they could herald the En lightenment, the ideals o f the French Revolution. Their public, the bourgeoisie, not only emboldened them to do so, it also expected the words o f liberation to come from them. There is a hitch som ewhere in this line of thought in other ways as well. The w riter had a pub lic before the invention o f m oving type; it was not only the privileged w ho applauded at the premieres of Greek and Roman dramatists, the anonymous public also filled the theaters; not only educated bibliophiles who already knew H am let in a folio edition were pas sionately fond o f Shakespeare, but also the misera plebs, the nobodies in the peanut gallery, the illiterate rabble. W riters gained a public above class at the m o ment when book-printing w as invented and the book ceased to exist as an object o f art, as a m ysterious devo tional article. A hundred years after Gutenberg, Cer vantess novel became a bestseller. Erasmus published his satire on Folly, and, according to notions o f that

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time, multitudes bought and read it. The book was hailed everywhere in the world where the middle class had assum ed the governing role in society. The social fact o f this bourgeois role was acknowledged, but the Marxists denied its legitim acy. A generation o f twen tieth-century intellectuals perceived the future o f the liberated w riter to lie in a classless society. Only a very few turned up w ho suspected that in the class less society som ething that does not exist, never did and never can, because without classes there are only masses, not a society - writers, for whom the masses never feel any need, quickly wind up in the limbo o f so ciety. But for whom did Kosztolnyi write? And Babits? A dy and M oricz? In any event, not for the arro gant gentry, nor for the lout who had feathered his nest, Good writers, who felt literature conveyed an evangelical message, often wrote without a response, always amid modest, som etimes wretched living condi tions. But for w hom ? Over and above the list o f success ful readable and cozy literature o f the petty bourgeois there was also a H ungarian literature o f high quality. W ho read it? The peasant didnt read. The lite level o f the working classes in the city raised under Social Democ racy did read, but w hat? W ere their literary standards higher than those o f the petty bourgeois? They read Jkai, and rightly so, for even today there isnt any thing m ore genuine, m ore beautiful and better to read in the H ungarian language. Next they read, thanks to cheap publications, to paperback ventures, sometimes w ith the Partys help, w hat the progressives among the middle-class intellectuals put into their hands: that W estern literature which presented the works of writers Zola, W ells - w ho pled the case o f the work ing masses. But they were not ready for books demand ing higher intellectual effort. For the writer, a veil o f m ist enveloped the

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reader who understood Kosztolnyi and his exacting contemporaries. Generally, w om en read m ore sensi tively and considerably more than m en o f their own so cial class. Not ju st girls in their teens or bluestockings infatuated with literature, but wom en as a class, as i f women readers were hoping that the writer can tell them w hat the reader is thinking. University stu dents read: in those days the young had not yet flocked to technical specialties; there w as still an interest in humanities courses, i f not so deep-seated as when I was in secondary school at the beginning o f the cen tury, when - far exceeding the list o f required read ing for the literary and debating society we sixthgraders vied with each other to read everything that reached us from world literature, sometimes in faulty, crude translations. In U pper Hungary and Transylvania, in the an nexed parts o f the country, lived an intelligentsia for whom - as a national minority in the Trianon decades the good Hungarian book was an affirm ation o f life. (During this period, the Jew ish com m unity in Upper Hungary and Transylvania spent more on Hungarian books than the entire land-owning class between the Danube and the Tisza.) There w as then in H ungary a silent, impoverished, petty bourgeois intelligentsia, set tled in civil service, w ho preserved literary culture in dilapidated mansions in the provinces or in inferior housing in the cities. They were not great in number, but they had a calling, a stim ulating role. These shy Hungarian readers were alm ost invisible. The wall par tition at the National Institute for Social Insurance hid the real social condition o f the nation. After the Compromise o f 1867, the aristocracy no longer shoul dered its role o f preserving culture; m ost o f them com ported themselves as i f the nation were a piece o f en tailed property and a hunting ground. The literary standards o f the pushy gentry and the role-starved louts were deplorably low. But the H ungarian and

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foreign books lining the glass-doored bookcases in my fathers library in Kassa were not a room ornament, and many m ore such libraries w ere to be found in the provinces than in Pest. Readers existed somewhere. But H ungarian writers did not see their readers faces. A w riter needs to be familiar w ith his readers face. H e doesnt w ant to see this face at the display booth o f the authors night, but otherwise: the way a m edium sees the outlines o f the summoned personage in the materialized plasma. A literary w ork is not merely w hat the w riter (and the book) is saying, not even the m anner o f presentation; it is, above all, the at mosphere encom passing the work. The book will be alive in this atm osphere; otherwise, it will be like the cold celestial bodies that shine but have no life on them. This atmosphere does not cease to exist at the m om ent o f a writers death. Just as in real life, there are literary personalities who die slowly, and when they do die, som ething always remains o f their essence that springs from the atmosphere pervading their works like the distinctive hair or fingernail o f a de ceased. Thus is Tolstoys personality alive, thus is Proust alive. Kosztolnyi wrote for the moment, he pro duced atmospherically, but after his death, a mini ature m asterpiece enough for a lifework remained in the discarded little pieces. In order for a w ork to remain alive, the writer m ust know i f this special being, the reader, this dialec tical phenom enon that is both an ally and an enemy exists som ewhere in the present or in the future, this phenom enon that invites and at the same time spurns. There is som ething sensual in this phenomenon, som e thing inviting and threatening. The reader is the part ner, like the wom an in the love relationship. And the publisher, this m idwife and procurer when did he drop out o f the picture? During Kosztolnyis creative years, this hazy personal relationship between the writer, publisher and reader still existed. Today, it no

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longer does. In the W est, com m ercial and industrial civilization demands bulk products from the writer to satisfy mass tastes and in the East political dry goods, ideological standards measured with a yardstick. Kosz tolnyi didnt live to see the day when for publishers literature became only som ething extra that they added as a bargain to their schedule o f lip-smacking trashy novels and pseudo-scientific technical books, the way the butcher slams a fat piece o f m eat to the pickings. H e didnt live to see the day when the liter ary w ork that found a publisher became suspect, be cause readers rightfully sniffed out that it wasnt the book that had reached the publisher but the writer through Mafioso-like tactics. The day when dilettantes wrote books for a stipend about the lives o f creative writers by the job and, meanwhile, quacked away in their pompous excitem ent before the public, like ducks laying eggs. The day when, instead o f belles-lettres, more books were written about books than books that were beautiful and literary. H e didnt live to see all this, because he was a lucky fellow when, a decade ear lier, he died o f throat cancer over there opposite on the hill, in St. John Hospital. Kosztolnyi did not live to see the day when lit erature - which is also som ething m ore and som ething other than books and writers, ju st as religion is som e thing more than ceremony and priests dropped from sight through Tim es trapdoor. Kosztolnyi and his con temporaries still perceived som ething different under the entry-word Literature than do those writing today. For them literature w as still simultaneously play and ritual, conspiracy and craft, Eleusinian rite and complicitous compact sealed w ith blood. Kosztol nyi no longer saw the readers face clearly either, but he still believed that he existed somewhere. A statue to the Nam eless Writer, to Anonym ous, had been raised somewhere in Budapest. The Anonymous Reader had not yet been so honored. H e would be de

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serving o f a statute. It ju s t isnt possible to carry on a dispute in the dark. A hundred years ago, Flaubert and M aupassant knew exactly who their readers were, the ones for w hom they wrote their masterpieces. They w rote for the French m iddle class. A h a lf century later, M auriac and Proust still wrote for the middle class. In post-Trianon Hungary, the H ungarian writer no longer saw the eyes o f the reader, the eyes o f his mys teriously remote, yet tangibly present collaborator, his inquiring or unsym pathetic glance, Perhaps this was so because a middle class no longer lived in Trianon H ungary in the same sense as in U pper Hungary or Transylvania. The readers sensibility was not granted a perm it to cross the frontier to look the writer in the eye; they knew about each other, but they sent mes sages from afar via shortwave. The relationship was distant and unfamiliar. Kosztolnyi didnt know exactly for w hom he was writing. Still, when he completed the daily read ing that w as more mandatory than the writing,*he quickly wrote som ething down - in green ink hur riedly. H e wrote a lead article every day, a piece o f dra m atic criticism, a short essay, polished a couple of rhymes for a poem he was working on, and wrote a manuscript page for the new novel. O r he translated. Every H ungarian w riter who knew a W estern lan guage felt duty bound to translate. (Jkai, Mikszth, and Krdy didnt translate, because they didnt know a foreign language.) The generation o f Arany, Voros marty, and Petdfi translated with the same scrupulous sense o f duty as the N yugat generation did, because they knew that the act o f translation was an exacting task involving more than the intellectual conversion of words into the Hungarian language. They knew that translating is like an undertaking in which someone deciphers a secret writing, a code. Indeed, in every lan guage, it is not only the writer who writes but also the language, the language that interrupts the writers

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teict with shouts and grimaces. This practically un translatable code is at the base o f every foreign lan guage. Foreigners - writers or travelers - coexist with another language; sometimes they already think they know its secrets and can safely say something, for example this: I was in the city this m orning. But pos sibly the native hears it like this: I w as in the fortifica tion at early dawn. And he nods politely and grins bewilderedly. Every translation is a distortion. Still, H un garian writers translated, Kosztolnyi, too, even though he knew that only m eaning could be trans lated, never the hint, the cue. The French, the English writer knew his public; he wrote in a jargon; he spoke to readers from a class culture leveled o ff by com plicity, and he knew they w ould understand him even through hints, or at least not m isunderstand him. The Hungarian writer didnt know for certain what the reader would make o f the tacit inner content o f the text, which in the language o f the theater, dram a turges call an overtone. (Toward the m iddle o f the century, it was advisable to put every ironic allusion within quotation marks; the reader had to be notified that the writer wasnt explaining what he w as saying word for word, but only playing w ith an idea.) Kosztolnyi knew this, too. H e knew that one can write only in a state o f unconsciousness, in a trance as it were, and, at the sam e time, w ith such res olute awareness o f everything, like a mathematician constructing a linear equation. H e wrote that a master piece must be executed like a heinous deed. H e com mitted such a lesser or greater foul deed every day. And he hurried because when he wrote he w as not only saving the nation but saving himself, too; indeed, he had to live immediately, that very day - with fam ily, friends and lovers - on w hat he wrote. A t the same time, he knew that this craft w ith which he made his living was also the kind o f undertaking in which som e one conveys thoughts through frequencies and oscilla

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tions, instead o f words. H e knew that when he pre pared an article for a daily, he had to write in several w ays simultaneously: as St. Paul taught us when he sent w ord to the Corinthians: I will sing with the soul, but I will sing w ith the understanding also. When someone sings w ith the soul, that is poetry; when he sings w ith the m ind, that is prose with the strength o f radium. H e sang w ith his heart and mind. And he sang urgently because he needed the money. Pew writers turned up in W estern literature who could make their livelihood by publishing feuille tons and featured articles. A hundred years ago, Tho phile Gautier wore his hair down to his shoulders like Drer in his self-portrait, or M ichelangelos M oses, or the hippies. A n d he did m ake a living by writing feuille tons. But this rarely happened. Gautier spent a lot of money; he m aintained a carriage w ith red spokes and w hite ponies in Paris, and he m ade his m oney by writ ing feuilletons and travel accounts for French news papers. There w ere years when he wrote a newspaper article nearly every day. His contemporaries couldnt understand how it was possible for him to write lofty verses and good books alongside such trifles. It seems it is possible. Kosztolnyi w as the H ungarian example dem onstrating that it is. H e didnt keep a carriage, he lived m odestly, but for thirty years he, too, wrote a feature article nearly every day for the dailies. Now, when the ruins o f his house could be seen clearly - all that re m ained o f this effort in tangible reality - one could examine more closely the trem endous deception o f the s e lf and the world present in the way Hungarian writers coyly concealed the secrets o f their livelihood. Kosztolnyi wrote a little masterpiece every day be cause he had to m ake a living. H e didnt make much through these endeavors, ju st enough to earn his daily bread. (Brioche, you rascal, brioche! he shouted with grotesque self-reproach when he called h im self and

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the world to account for the writers opportunities for a livelihood in one o f his pieces.) W hat he wrote hur riedly with his left hand w as always perfect. It w asnt ju st the great flatus that prodded him not to publish a slipshod piece o f writing; the daily com petition forced him not to show any m oments o f weariness or w eak ness. Whatever he wrote in this fashion, hurriedly, was possibly perfect because he didn't have the time to polish w hat wound up in his hands. He knew the type setter was w aiting for it. And, m ost im portant o f all, he hoped the reader was also waiting for it. That reader had no face, but som ewhere this mysterious being lived who responded dem andingly when he was addressed demandingly. Only the shallow writer be lieves that the secret o f success lies in having the writer descend to the readers level. Like every good writer, Kosztolnyi tried to rise to the readers level. And he hurried because he had to m ake ends meet. No one in Hungary cared about w hat a writer was living on. This unconcern was institutional. A writer who could scrape together enough for a modest house in Buda was as great a rarity in H ungary as i f it was discovered that a m endicant Franciscan friar se cretly played the stock m arket and m ade profits. In the shabby literary cafs in Buda and Pest, sallow and agitated writers discussed w hat one or another o f them was living on. A trip abroad w as a cause for sus picion, a summer holiday in Abbazia or the Ttras a pretext for a charge o f ritual libel. Pal, youve eaten, your teeth are bloody! the hungry wolves called out in the Central Caf when the revolving door spun around once and a writer or a poet entered in a new suit. Everyone knew w hat everyone else was making it on. Attila Jzsef never reached two hundred forints a month . Babits w as a teacher, like Mallarm, thus poor, and everyone let the m atter rest there. Dezsd Szab w as a teacher, too, but then he retired, and because he had no money, he bad-mouthed the state

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and publishers and dem anded m oney from those he constantly vilified in his writings. Krdy barely kept body and soul together on his incom e from tabloids, and swayed in the wind. W hen Kosztolnyi brought Lord Rotherm eres legendary one-thousand-pound gift hom e from Ix>ndon, a rebellious m ood actually flared up in the literary cafs. In the end, Kosztolnyi, re signedly and with the gesture o f K ing Solomon, split the prize equally between Moricz and K nidy; and the w riters hungry and teeth-gnashing fury forced him to step down as president o f the H ungarian writers' branch o f the Pen Club. H e did so cheerfully; after all, he did receive letters o f consolation from his readers, from the provinces: from wom en who felt sorry for him because he lost his presidential post in the dead of winter, One ju s t could not make a living from books. And everyone was suspicious o f anyone who made a live lihood independently o f the dailies and wrote books. Zsigmond M oricz had some kind o f household plot w ith a garden in Lenyfalu, but that also aroused sus picion. H ow could h e...? Now Kosztolnyis house lay in ruins in the depths, a pile o f m oldy debris; this was the m ost a H ungarian writer could acquire in years past through respectable literary work. The sun was shining; it w as spring, and the ruins glittered in the light o f the M arch afternoon like a pile o f manure w hen bright sunlight falls upon it. Flaubert, in Rouen, had the time, Proust, in Paris, in the cork-lined room, had the leisure to pursue vanished tim e; he was a man o f property. Valry had the time; he didnt own any property, but he was a civil servant in the A lpine Agency. Gide had an estate in Cuverville. Initiates m entioned these examples with resignation in the literary cafs in Pest. Few o f them knew that the living conditions o f W estern writers were rarely more favorable than those o f Hungarian writers. But the H ungarian writer, like the impover

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ished nobleman, was som ehow always asham ed to talk about poverty. W riters in the W est displayed their dire straits more courageously. In the end, the writer does have to make a liv ing. Apparently, Shakespeare w asnt asham ed o f the fact that he needed money when he wrote dramas, be cause he had to pay the actors and property men every Saturday. Otherwise, i f not enough revenue accumu lated from the weeks performances o f H am let to pay salaries, he was beaten to a pulp. And so he, too, wrote hurriedly because he didnt have tim e; he interlarded his masterpieces with inserts; he wrote the gravedig ger scene and the play-within-the-play into H am let be cause he had to draw the rabble and soldiers into the theater. The writer in the W est boldly admitted that he wanted to make money from his writings in every age, Cervantes ju st like Hemingway. In Hungary, noth ing w as said about the writers poverty; officialdom said nothing, publishers said nothing they had good reason not to and the writers said nothing. There was a time in the second h a lf o f the previous century when the publisher was still a true collaborator who not only mediated between the writer and the public, but assisted with the writing, took part in the creative process directly. In Kosztolanyis lifetime this relation ship had already become nebulous. Not a single H ungarian writer could m ake a liv ing on the income from his books. Jkai was a prince; he lived extra-territorially, and his books were looked upon as a national institution. Even so, he lived m od estly, simply. Even he couldnt m ake ends m eet on the hundred volumes, on the lifework; he needed the news paper proprietorship, then the Parliam entary member ship, the membership on the board o f directors. Koszto lanyi was neither a mem ber o f Parliam ent nor a m em ber o f a board o f directors. That is why he wrote fea ture articles for newspapers every day. A writer ju st

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could not m ake ends m eet in Hungary without contri buting to newspapers. W hen Kosztolnyi finished his writing stint for the day, he jam m ed his narrow-brimm ed knickerbocker hat on his head, wrapped the soft shawl around his neck, clutched under his arm the attach case bulg ing with manuscripts, periodicals and books borrowed or intended for lending, and quickly fled from home, away from his flat. H e was very tall, and as he hurried along, his gangling figure attracted attention on the streets o f Buda. He never looked at anyone; he walked w ith his head held slightly to one side; a poets lock of hair fell onto his forehead from under the brim o f his hat. He wore a shoestring, brightly colored necktie, and he strode along hurriedly on the cobblestone road way. This was how he m ade his appearance before the world, like an actor when the curtain rises and the foot lights flash- H e had greenish-gray eyes; he knew how to squint affectedly, and he rolled his rs when he negotiated with publishers and as the situation called for it. In short, he was a writer from head to toe; he played Kosztolnyi like a distinguished actor. (M ean w hile, alone, hence in the wings, he poked fun at him self and at those he performed for, because he knew that there isnt a single em inent person who isnt ri diculous, and that a hum an impresses others only if self-m ockery shines through the m ask he wears.) With unsteady, theatrical steps, yes, the steps o f a romantic lead, he rushed down the slope o f Miko Street beneath the boughs o f the chestnut trees. He turned in at the gate o f the adjacent house, where I was living. H e wasnt com ing to m y place writers dont like to visit each other. Only the gentle reader or the dilettante thinks that writers enjoy spending time in each others company. No one is as jealous of, as fiercely curious about a colleagues life, character and attitudes as are writers about the se crets o f another writers inner life; but they dont like

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to visit each other, because they know the other writer is ju st as curious about them. And the possibility that something about them will also be found out is a fear ful prospect. The fact that though they are gifted, they havent been successful and, for this reason, have sworn an oath to alien flags that promise them suc cess. Or the fact that they dont believe in their talents and gloss over this agonizing doubt with their behav ior. Kosztolnyi had successes, and talent, too, but he didnt like to visit writers. I didnt either. W e did occa sionally call on each other. W e were guests for lunch or dinner at their place, or they at ours. On those occa sions, we sat at the dinner table solem nly and with strained formaUty, but we avoided talk about lit erature as much as possible. These get-togethers sel dom occurred. On one such occasion, he read a poem he had written to m y wife. It wasnt a long poem and didnt belong am ong his more im portant poetry. For example, another poem called Dawn Intoxication , in which he prophesied in a feverish vision that one day the houses in which w e lived, our neighborhood, every thing would be ruins and carrion, was a m ore pulsat ing verse. (M y wife thanked him for the short poem and put it away as a keepsake.) W hen he passed by the front o f our house, he en tered the porters lodgings. H e sat down, hat on his head, shawl wound around his neck and attach case under his arm. He sat like this, at times for hours. Everyone in the neighborhood knew about this. The porter lived with his wife in a room full o f kitchen smells. H e w as a locksmith. H is w ife was a slender wom an from Transdanubia. H e belonged to the Hungarian gentry; he was a peasant from the banks o f the Tisza, and given to hysterics. H e couldnt pass the trade associations examination; he couldnt obtain a plum bers trade license. This caused the child less couple the greatest distress. Kosztolnyi com forted them. Periodically he looked up m em bers o f the

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5caminaton board and presented them with copies o f his new book in w hich he wrote friendly dedications in an attempt to influence them. But the porter kept fail ing the examination. Dear sir, he once said to me, his eyes moist, do something. I promise, i f I pass the examination. Ill hang a toilet bowl, a snow-white one, on the street corner on the second floor under your w in dow, so everybody can see it! W hen he said this, a baleful light glittered in his eyes, the way the pos sessed speak, the prophets o f Progress, in a trance. But I could do nothing. Kosztolnyi was also power less. The pipe dream rem ained ju st that; the porter eventually turned bitter, and when Kosztolnyi died, he m oved to the provinces with his wife. I never heard anything about him again. H is wife also vanished without a trace. She served as the m odel for Anna des. And the house w here the novel takes place was our apartment house. Kosztolnyi seldom w ent past it, com ing or going, with out dropping in at the porters. They sat there, the three o f them; they didnt eat or drink anything, they ju st talked. W hat kind o f loneliness, inner banishment was he escaping from at the porters lodge? H e was a writer, a stylist; later the pure writer was called a formalist. It was in this period that style began to be disparaged. Every dilettante who feared the achievement o f effort, every half-educated scribbler in literature, theater and publishing who didnt know there is no such thing as a new thought, only a new expression, an expression which, i f it brims with the stylistic power o f the personality, gives new ten sion to the old thought; every stripling with a fountain pen took a stab at the stylist They ordered him to take a stand. Kosztolnyi shrugged his shoulders be cause he knew there is only a single espousal in lit erature: the effort w hose pow er will turn the Word into Flesh and the Flesh into the W ord again even as the W ord and Flesh, the world and the spirit create

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each other. Possibly, this is w hat he talked about at the porters lodge, w ith the porter and his wife, the model for Anna des. Afterwards, he developed a novel from those conversations - the only Hungarian social novel that registered class w arfare as it should be, without social realism, in all its disastrous hum an reality. That is where Kosztolnyi lived. H e set o ff from there every afternoon for town, but first he dropped in at the porters. W hat kind o f propensity, curiosity took this pure writer, this homo aestheticus into the base ment flat? He w as a poet, he wrote love poem s to the Hungarian language, to Hungary. Every day he presented Hungary w ith the gift o f a tasteful blend o f words, with a nuance o f expression, w ith a biting or touching remark. H e wasnt the m em ber o f any Party. When he wrote he did not count on the Classless So ciety that would one day understand him. H e didnt be lieve in the People. H e ju st wrote. And he really felt at home only in the porters flat.

8
This flat on the ground floor, in the basement, rem ained undamaged in the bom bed-out apartment house. During the war, a different porter lived in it: Lajos Balazs, who was a typesetter at the state print ing office. H e was the best kind o f hum an being in the sense o f humane and social - that I knew in Hun gary. During the siege, without being asked, he car ried the belongings o f absent occupants down to his basement flat - our clothes and bedding, too and took care o f these m eager belongings to the very last day. H e stood guard over the odds and ends with the devoted loyalty o f a soldier defending a ragged, bullettorn flag in a stronghold under siege. F or this apart m ent house was the last building in Buda, where, in

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the cellar and around the house, the Germans were still fighting in February 1945. W hen the Russians ended this battle, too, the w ar was over in Budapest. Balazs lost his life on the last day when he dashed out o f the house to help a wounded woman on the com er o f the Vermezd. H e died on the spot, on the street com er; one o f the last bullets fired in Budapest pierced his dxest. There w as no doctor nearby, so he bled to death on the street. His wife buried him in the Vermezd, in the only w ay it was possible to bury any one in those days: a twenty-centim eter layer o f muddy earth covered the dead man. The day I first walked up to Castle H ill to locate another deceased acquaintance, Balazss widow invited m e to look at the place in the Vermezo' w here her husband was so hastily buried. Earlier, she conscientiously showed me the bale in the cellar corner in which her husband had packed our things. She spoke about the circumstances surroimding his death without any w eeping or wailing. She couldnt cry, ju s t as m any forget to cry when it comes to light that life has no m eaning at all. Humans weep and wail only while they believe life has som e kind of meaning. There are some who die believing this. It is these w ho find salvation; this is w hat religion teaches. Mrs. Balazs didnt cry. Theres no use shedding tears over w hat is fated, Theseus says. Mrs. Balazs never read the Greeks; she simply didnt understand w hy her husband, whom she worshiped, died - this is how she put it shyly, musingly, m ore as i f to herself w hy he died on the last day o f the w ar when dying was no longer a patriotic duty. She stood silently before the hastily dug grave. I didnt say anything either; I couldnt com e up with the mot ju ste: that certain word that shows reality in a picture, the word that discloses everything the Imagists dream of. There are situations when there are no words suitable for a reply. And she didnt expect any kind o f answer or explanation. She stood for a long time in front o f the slat stuck into the

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ground in place o f a gravestone. Those who buried him wrote her husbands name and the date he fell in the Second W orld W ar on brown wrapping paper: Lajos Balzs, typesetter, he lived 38 years There was noth ing for us to say to each other; so we stood around for a while in front o f the makeshift grave. I dont know what Mrs. Balzs was thinking. I was thinking that maybe her husband was a hero. (But, I remember, I thought this morosely, since at the tim e - and even more so later - every word like Hom eland or H ero or Sacrifice had turned banal and bitter in m y con sciousness.) Still, it is possible that Balzs w as a hero. There are many kinds o f heroes. Euripides, for instance, m aintained - I didnt think o f this at the time when I was standing before the twenty-centimeter-deep grave; it comes to me now as I write about heroes twenty-five years later - Eu ripides maintained that according to the Greeks general tastes, Androm ache was a heroine, because she let h erself be dragged o ff to a Greek bed and meanwhile suffered having the Achaeans fiing her child against a wall. True, she couldnt do anything about it, but still, what was heroic about this? Human evaluation is strange. There is a notion which claims that a hero is som eone who does only w hat is in accord with his character. For example, there was the baker in our neigh borhood, at Zerge Stairs and the corner o f Attila Street. True to his trade, he baked bread for the m ili tary in his ground-floor flat. H e wasnt a Nazi, but he feared the Communists, and so when he had to declare his position, he joined some wondrous stag group. He knew doing so would subject h im to surveillance and get him into trouble when the tim e o f identity check ar rived. Yet, when m any left Budapest because the bridges over the Danube were blown up and artillery rumbled in Ujpest, this baker did not go anywhere; he stayed in his shop in Buda. Apprentice bakers had

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been conscripted, or they had fled, W hat will a baker do at the end o f the Second W orld W ar when he real izes that for him the war was lost? He pondered the m atter and, like M ontaigne, m ade his decision: he stayed in his shop and continued to ply his trade. This was what he did. W hen the Russians were approaching Castle H ill and Krisztinavros around Christmas, this H ungarian baker o f Swabian descent stayed in his place with his wife and baked bread. He had flour and fuel; there were still some potatoes and salt in his shop. Fighting was going on in Tabn, some five hundred meters farther on. In the morning, the baker heated the oven, untied the flour sack, kneaded dough, pushed the brown army dough into the oven with his long-handled paddle and baked bread from m orning to night. During the last week, he also worked at night. When it grew dark and the Ratas stopped bomb ing for a few hours, people from the neighborhood cau tiously crawled out o f the cellars o f the adjoining houses w ith their water ju gs and crept away to the courtyard o f one o f the tenements on Attila Street, w here a fountain from prehistoric times rem ained as a m onument, and they drew water from it, because the water system was no longer functioning. Then, before crawling back to their basem ent caves, they went over to the bakery and bought a lo a f o f baked bread. The baker gave everyone bread for paper money at the offi cial current price, practically free. But he asked every purchaser for a bread card in February 1945, at the end o f the Second W orld W ar in Buda! He carefully cut a coupon from it w ith scissors and pu t it away. On the last morning, when the Germans and Hxmgarians had moved on and given Buda up, the baker took o ff his w hite w ork apron, extinguished the fire in the oven, sat down beside the kneading trough, leaned the long-handled paddle with which he pushed the loaves into the oven against the wall, rolled a ciga

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rette and lighted up. H e waited for the Russians thus. They arrived at noon and prom ptly hauled him away, because a zealot living in the neighborhood denounced him as a war criminal. This notion w as easily ex tended, and in the early days after the wars end, large numbers o f people who survived were called w ar crim i nals. The finger-pointing lasted for years; the baker had time in Yekaterinburg, w here he was taken from his shop, to reflect on whether he was really guilty or not. It is not easy to determine the truth in the bakers case. N or in the cases o f the writers, kidney surgeons and shoe-top stitchers who survived a lost war. Pos sibly everyone is guilty, the entire hum an race. For this reason, it is best to win, because the victor gains a statue. The one w ho loses is hanged or hauled o ff to Y e katerinburg. Aladar Schopflin - he also lived in the vicinity o f the rubbish pile where m y home had been not so long ago definitely did not take part in the war. More bricks remained o f his home than ours, but he and his family were also driven away by the turbulence o f the war. Later, during m y roll call, I located Schopflin in an inner-city flat. H e had suffered a stroke; he spoke with a stammer but was able to m ove one o f his hands. So he held a book w ith it and read. Struck by apoplexy, he read, ju st as the baker baked to the last moment; he read because reading was his profession. H is m ind re mained unimpaired, and D on Quixote, he said, was the m ost beautiful o f all the books he had read in his life. This was imderstandable, because Schopflin - yes, I can now clearly m ake out the house in the depths where he lived - did him self seem like a Don Quixote who had become a school commissioner. W hen he ac knowledged that Don Quixote was his ideal, he smiled humbly, uneasily, the way persons sm ile whom some physical defect has excluded from the society o f the healthy this is w hy they are arrogant but feel ashamed, too.

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Schopflin was also a member o f the middle class; he belonged to this little middle-class world in Buda that now lay shattered. H e trod like a soldier, back straight; he kept his bristly hair cut short and sat in the Philadelphia Caf as i f he w ere in an office read ing documents. H e sat alone with a stern bearing and drank a sm all glass o f plum brandy. I always rejoiced at seeing him. H e read in the caf, too, and seldom spoke; instead, he ju st mumbled under his breath, He knew that in lifes dreadful chaos there is no other es cape than the we 11-crafted sentence: everything else is merely p eiju ry or humbug. His profession was to write book reviews for periodicals. H e pondered these re view s devoutly and then wrote with the conscientious absorption o f a ju dge from an ancient world rendering a vitally im portant decision. But first he read the books he w as w riting about. Later, this point o f view and practice changed; blackguards seized pens and, under the pretext o f criticism, disposed o f lifeworks w ith flitting, flippant fragm entary sentences. Perhaps Schopflin was a hero, too, because he was faithful to his profession and to his convictions. The basem ent o f our apartment house wasnt damaged, and the workshop o f Mr. Kovcs, the devout carpenter, rem ained intact in the cellar at the front of the building facing Mik Street. H e and his family van ished in the chaos o f the siege, never to reappear. Per haps they are still living only in that droll little book I w rote in m y heedless youthful years about Mik Street, Krisztinavros, m y snappish Puli, nam ed Csutora, and all the lunatics and eccentrics who at one time lived down there in the depths in those de molished houses, in that family m yth now collapsed into rubble. This w as m y world, and this was m y own myth, and so I wrote about it. Proust wrote about French aristocrats and upper-middle-class snobs. I w rote about Mr. Kovcs, and I now looked around to see i f I had left anyone out.

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I had forgotten to include the corner pharm a cist and his wife in that book, m aybe out o f tact or maybe only out o f cowardice, because Kosztoldnri, who read the book and knew the two and four-legged char acters in the little episode, advised me after its publica tion that it might be a good idea for m e to repair to the provinces for a while, because news about the book was m aking the rounds o f the neighborhood residents - they didnt read it, they ju st heard about it and it wasnt out o f question that one day one o f the novels heroes will lie in w ait and stab m e in the back w ith a pointed file. Possibly, I was afraid to w rite about the pharmacist because the residents in the Krisztina dis trict were a laconic but logical sort, and I had reason to fear that i f I wrote about him , the pharm acist would exact his revenge by m ixing a laxative into the pow ders for vascular spasms that I som etimes bought from him. I didnt write about the pharmacist, and I was now glad to see that the pharm acy itself had not been damaged in the infernal, brutal chaos o f the siege. It stood on the opposite corner, facing the Vermezd. T o ward the end o f the war, all kinds o f things were avail able in his pharm acy even veal and warm wool stock ings but hardly any medicine, because soldiers and profiteers bought up m ost o f the medicinal herbs and concoctions. The pharmacists wife w as a maniacal dog-lover, and she suffered a grievous loss at the end o f the Second W orld W ar: her dog died o f old age in bed among pillows. Rusnya [Uglyl, w as a fat old pug, and the pharmacists wife m ourned him with undi minished grief. W henever I w ent into the pharm acy to buy powders for the vascular spasm s, or veal or warm underwear, the wom an, seated at the cashiers desk, al ways pointed out to m e that next to the desk stood in a silver fram e her favorite photograph o f the dear de parted. Please look, she said, her tears flowing, I al ways see his eyes. I f I wake up at night, I see his eyes

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looking at m e from the great beyond. But he looks as if he were still w ith us. H e passed away. And she wept. She never said the dog died, she always sighed: He passed away. H er suffering w as genuine. H er outlook wasnt social; indeed, possibly, given the historical crisis we w ere living in then, she seemed unfeeling. A t the time, empires were collapsing, humans were suffering and dying am id horrible torment, cities and civilizations were being eradicated. Everyone everywhere mourned for a loved one, a husband, a son, a father, a sweet heart. But in Krisztinavros, the pharmacists wife m ourned over her dog. Now, when the pharm acy that survived could be seen - only its store section rem ained - and no sign o f the pharm acy couple, like the dog, was left - all those who had lost unutterably m ore and things more precious w ould w ith justifiable indignation demand that stones be cast at the m em ory o f a person who could grieve for a dog when hum anity was suffering. But it is extrem ely difficult to pass judgm ent justly over hum an beings. Later, I read that in the days when the Germans m arched into Paris and the people o f the French capital began their exodus thousands flooded the national highways in flight from the Ger mans Lautaud, the distinguished French critic, took to the road w ith two dozen Parisian dogs in the company o f his old girlfriend; he w as saving them from the Germans, because he feared the Nazis w ould harm them. W as Lautaud inhum an? H e lived among dogs and cats because he did not trust hum an beings. (Is it possible to trust hum ans? Is the pathei mathos true, that suffering ennobles us? Or is it only happiness that instructs us? Does pain simply drive us m ad or abet cruelty? I dont know.) Lautaud w as a friend o f lit erature and an animal lover among his animals under conditions resem bling a rubbish pile, but sometimes special flam es shot up from this rubbish-pile environ

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ment. This maniacal little Frenchm an, for example, could, am id the world conflagration, take an interest in literature and animals w ith identical intimacy. W ithout lunacy there is no intellectual energy. Nor is it possible to love and m ourn w ithout madness. A n d in the middle o f a world war, it alm ost makes no dif ference whom or w hat we love or mourn. The pharmacists w ife certainly w ent too far w hen she m ourned over her dog. B u tin the frightful lone liness o f life, humans dont choose rationally when they must love, or hate. Now I looked around from the height o f the Bastion and saw people am ong the ruins who hadnt learned a thing from suffering. I hadnt learned an 5fthing either, except possibly caution when passing judgm ent on the pharm acists wife, on others, on m y own self. A statue at the base o f the Granite Stairs sur vived. Opposite Kosztolnyis house, the bust o f a H un garian epic poet from the past century, K roly P. Szakmry, stood on a pedestal. In the vicinity Castle Hill and Krisztinavros - it was the only undam aged m onu ment among mostly inferior statues still standing. Not a soul living in the neighborhood knew w ho this Szakm ry was, what he wrote, and why he w as com m em orated with a statue. I didnt know either. I once looked him up in a lexicon, and now I faintly rem em bered he wrote a verse tale titled Etelka. Probably by now it is hard to find this work on the dusty shelves of libraries. But in this world situation, it was an encour aging sight, assurance that literature is m ore powerful than history, though neither has any meaning. The epic poem outlasts everything: Etelka, like the Odyssey or the Cid, is immortal. Near the statue still stood the house where a countess lived who occasionally published tales under the pseudonym Szikra [Sparkle]. I never read this neighbors works, though everyone in the Krisztina District spoke appreciatively about what a brave soul

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she was; she w as a countess, and still she wrote. The native inhabitants o f Krisztinavros m entioned such matters, nodding gravely; I doubt very many o f them read, but surprisingly large num bers o f individuals wrote here, because it was a literary neighborhood. W hat else was there? The chestnut trees that form ed a line in front o f our place w ith their story-high foliage w ere destroyed in the war. The Rata-bombs and cannon shells tore o ff their branches as i f forces more horrible than all windstorms together had en gaged the thick-trunked chestnut trees in battle. They could be seen from the height, and they were, perhaps, the only things am ong the sights below that stirred any emotion in the observer, nam ely myself. They were lovely, luxuriant trees; in the spring they pinned on their snow-white and pink candles, in the summer their dark-green leafage com pletely shaded the w in dow o f the room where I resided and lived. There was a decade when this street, neighborhood, people and leafy chestnut trees had substance and m eaning for me. There w as som ething profound, complete and lively in this part o f the street. The warm breath o f youthful years, manhood, intrigue and love, ambition, disillusionm ent and contentm ent infused the dense leaves. But o f this nothing remained. It w ould now seem appropriate for m e to set the scene engagingly in the closing lines o f this section. Thus: the w riter has returned to the scene o f the Deed (what was the Deed? Life, the fact that I was alive; som ehow this is always unforgivable); he looked down from the height at the ruins where one phase o f his life and his vain and deranged literary activity occurred, and decided that he personally was only a caricature in this m ajestically alms-bag-like, pseudo-bourgeois setting in Buda. And he is already moving on; he is leaving the ruins o f hom e for another world in ruins, where perhaps there are some illusions, but it is cer

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tain that there is no longer a home for him there either. It is possible that the staging, the setting - the writer is bidding farewell to a past fallen into ruin - is deplorably romantic. W hat I wrote about the fare well was romantic, but there w as also reality in it all, because there actually was such a M arch day and fare well. And this is entirely a device and mache, as lit erature always is when the writer cannot keep his mouth shut and says as much as a single w ord exceed ing the facts. The w riter who in the m idst o f destruc tion and misery, which is the general hum an condition in peace and w ar, exculpates him self and protests that he sincerely feels what he is w riting about forgets the law o f his profession, according to which no such thing as sincere literature exists. In literature, as in life, only silence is sincere. As soon as someone starts speaking to the public, he is no longer sincere, but a writer, or an actor, hence a hum an being wriggling his hips. The written word, the belles-lettres are al ways a bit o f clownery; the painted soul, daubed white and red with colorful words, brings to mind the clown with such a dappled m ug w ho speaks o f funny and m is chievous things in the circus ring. A t the end o f a world war and presum ably before new wars, the writer who has spoken o f m atters other than statisti cal data cannot be sincere. But there is no escape for the writer, because he cannot remain silent. H e has to speak from the worlds rubbish pile, he still has to spout o ff from the mass grave. The hope that a shock more powerful than anything else will bring to writers (and the hum an race) the day when they can be gen uinely sincere, because they already are only writing and m umbling w ith root words - that is a vain hope. Even so, the writer can do nothing m ore than daub paint on his soul and, with nice root words, tell every thing. And the them e that he speaks about in every

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age, on every rubbish pile is always the same one: the N ekyia, or the journey in the world o f the dead and, the Adventure, after the Iliad the Nostos, the return Home. The journey to the dead took place, I believe, in these pages. The return Home cannot, because I no longer have a hom e. (It is a question whether I ever really had one. O r w as everything that perished in the flimsy setting a caricature?) After all that took place, to w hat extent did the Homeland remain home for others, the ten million w ho speak Hungarian? And can one write about this sincerel}^? One cannot write sincerely about anything. In any event, for the sake o f roundness and unity of mood, I shall, nevertheless, write down w hat I saw along the w ay when I left the scene o f the Deed and w ent back to the city.

I crossed Disz Square, which was now as empty and desolate as Pom peii in winter after the tourists have departed. N ot a trace remained o f the splendor of the Royal Palace, and w hat still stood stirred bad memories in the stroller. The palace was as tastelessly m assive a structure as m ost royal palaces in Europe are, and now, in ruins, it wouldnt have appealed even to Gandhi, because its outlines, proportions, every thing about it w as extravagant, pompous and dreary. The palace showed it had been built in a grand style but not as a labor o f love. Franz Josef, the monarch who first lived in it, rem ained in the general conscious ness o f history as som eone who stepped nimbly and then inquired about w hat the crop was like. Accord in g to com mon knowledge, the Regent, who was aidede-camp to Franz J o se f before he h im self moved into

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the Royal Palace, chatted affably w ith visitors and then went about ruling the nation. Now, when nothing rem ained o f all this except the ruined palace, the waxworks o f this kingless king dom appeared to m e faintly for a moment. Visible be hind the wrought-iron gate w as the apparition o f the Regent in an admirals uniform m ounted on a white horse. And then the eminent priests, barons, states men in gala attire and the national hierarchy o f per sonnel dressed in various, m ost often tasteful uni forms: ministers, lord lieutenants, fire chiefs, on down to stationmasters. (Why, I thought as I was standing before the wrought-iron gate o f the ruined palace why was it that I always experienced a crawly aver sion and grumpy antipathy whenever some trouble some official business forced m e to ring the doorbell at the gate o f a Hungarian em bassy in a foreign land be tween the two world wars, through tw o decades abroad, during m y years o f vagabondage? W hy?... After all, everyone received m e politely. A n d they al ways gave m e the help I needed at the time: O f course for you, Mr. Editor, with special dispatch. Y es, they took care o f matters, but that condescending pseudo courtesy w ith which the doorman, the clerk and the ambassador welcomed m e - as i f everybody w earing a lustral sleeve protector w as an integral part o f Saint Stephens cope nauseated me, and I was glad when I was outside on the street again... W hy?) The Regent M iklos H orthy resided in the pal ace; he didnt live in it, he resided in it, because the neo-baroque gentry etiquette that replaced the Span ish etiquette o f Franz J osef insisted upon such finely shaded distinctions. And he ruled from the palace not governed but ruled. H e was always affable. Down below and everywhere in the neighborhood, great personages stood around in the show windows o f offices with a dem eanor com m anding respect, indeed reverential recognition, like the local saints at the festi

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val in M^riapbcs carved out o f wood and painted in m any colors at which the devout crowd marveled agape. Behind the Regent, barons, keepers o f the crown, prelates, m inisters and lord lieutenants rallied the second fighting-line o f the social order built upon the remnants o f the half-feudal system o f large landed estates: county officials, notaries, gendarmes, stationmasters and track watchmen - everyone who hoped to obtain m olasses to fatten piglets, or a railroad car dur ing the waterm elon season or the co m harvest, or man orial fuel in w inter in the nick o f time from the big land owners in the region. And this dependency, this in digence, this com plicated, unrelenting and narrow m inded and ever m ore entangled coalition o f interests cast its net over all society. This w as the real power structure o f the nation. N ot only the cotter and the day laborer, w hose ephemeral life depended on the benev olence o f the landowner or the estates steward or the overseer, blinked w ith fear at the landowner with more than a thousand acres; so did the local notary, who indulged in the fancy that the landowners stew ard would place the notarys som etimes half-witted, sometimes highly gifted but always destitute kid in patched trousers in the high school o f the neighboring town without having to pay tuition. The gendarme who hoped to get free feed for his stock from the estate - everyone knew that his personal good fortune and the future o f his dependents, every vital interest depended lock, stock and barrel at least as much on the landowner as on the power o f the state. W hen these lords came to Pest from the village to take the cure, or to politicize, or to enjoy a social life, some o f them lived in these streets on Castle Hill. The houses, now skeletons, were fam iliar to them. Their friends and close or distant acquaintances lived in m ost o f them: some were aristocrats who at this time already felt obliged to invite writers and artists to their drawing rooms and dining halls. High-ranked

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civil servants and so-called decent individuals fond o f seclusion, the atmosphere o f old homes and pieces o f fine furniture lived in the Austrian-style baroque houses. This self-contained section o f the city already felt at this time - between the tw o w orld wars - the duty to entertain intellectual persons as guests from time to time. B y then, however, only a few true aristocrats existed in Hungary. The few families - w ho God knows on what basis o f classification and selectivity - con sidered themselves aristocrats at this time had thrown open their drawing rooms to the so-called more renowned o f middle-class society. And this so cial set was not the worst one in H ungary; it was cer tainly different from the parvenu boors who had feath ered their nests, the good old boy oligarchy o f the prime ministers councilors. A fter the destruction of the monarchy, this society urgently and grotesquely concocted an adulterated hierarchy and etiquette, but missing from this concoction w as not only the rigid sense o f the black and gold rank and proportion of Spanish etiquette; it also lacked that tact, moderation and sense o f duty and taste that to some degree per vaded the drawing room, bureaucracy, private citizenry and every social institution at the time of Franz Josef- Already this w as merely an ersa/z-hier archy and a m inf-etiquette - artificial, hence lamen table and laughable. (But is it possible to pass ju d g ment on a society that foreign powers exploited and mauled for centuries? The Turks, the Austrians, then yesterday the im perialistic Nazi Teutons and today the imperialistic Slavs - always foreign arm ies in the country and foreign will in public life, always the con straint o f compromise to com e to terms with foreign forces, and thus the inevitable corruption. And Tria non in between, the millions o f hum ans torn from the nations body. The tragedy o f H ungarian society can not be explained by inner structural shortcomings.

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This was a profoundly tragic fate, and rare was the time when the nation could recover, in its history, from its destiny o f standing entirely alone, its tempera ment, its own moral reserves. This was how I seethed not then on Disz Square but later, and not ju st once.) But now I was strolling here, on the Bastion. Let us cast a glance behind us and one ahead o f u s... The members o f the ruling class resided here, here and in some old houses in the Inner City. (In reality, they had not ruled for a long time; they ju st gave themselves airs.) For decades, every day at noon, the honorable undersecretaries o f state, their excellencies the m inis ters and the generals in accordian trousers w ith red-co lored stripes took a stroll under the leafy saplings of the old promenade. A ll o f them were friendly, jovial. Everyone greeted the other Honorable and Excellent one courteously. Perhaps there were a few more generals than were absolutely necessary; in Franz J osefs time, for instance, a lieutenant general was a rarity, but in Horthys arm y this high-ranked military dignitary w as found by the thousands. Am ong the promenaders, a fat old duchess in riding clothes she had grown out o f also passed by, and everyone bowed deeply to the grandiose woman, those also who didnt know her personally. But it was m ostly acquaintances who strolled and sunned themselves here every noon: a large fam ily, kinsfolk, social groups, family members held together by the Hungarian class compact sealed w ith blood. These few streets - around the Royal Palace, Prim e M inistry and high state offices - they were the piano nobile o f H ungarys social structure. Now, when nothing o f this illustrious tier remained any longer, nam es and faces came into my mind. Through the m iss ing casem ents o f fam iliar little palaces belonging to the fortress, I could see into the room s where once, at a time before history, the favored o f Hungarian society lived. The atm osphere o f snobbishness flowed from the

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rooms like mustiness from a badly aired clothes closet. Still, this snobbishness in the drawing room s behold, here lived the prince who owned m ore than two hun dred thousand acres, the countess who collected jade elephants as hobby, the baron who wanted to be a writer at all costs and did not understand w hy this well-intentioned venture did not succeed this prepos terous snobbishness also represented a dem and, and it was an enzyme. I walked about the Bastion in the March sunshine, I looked into some o f the familiar rooms, and I thought that these H ungarian upper ten thousand were no worse than the privileged castes in other countries. They were no worse than the French or English upper ten thousand were in the twentieth century; they were ju st more absent-minded they for got to pay taxes.

10
... And this was the crux o f the problem , for the inhabitants o f Castle H ill in Buda and then the na tions wealthy living elsewhere, these cultured ladies and gentlemen w ith the refined tastes, forgot to pay their taxes. Oh, they paid something, but not as really and truly as in the W est and only for appearances sake. For a while, they tried to ju stify themselves by holding that their ancestors som etim e long ago, be fore general com pulsory m ilitary conscription - paid by donating their blood in defense o f the homeland. This was true up to the Battle o f M ohcs. But in 1848 there were also som e honorable exceptions then the aristocrats were no longer shedding their blood; the foot soldier, the com mon people were doing that. The aristocrats survived that cataclysm unscathed, and in their absent-mindedness they forgot about what the privileged in France, England and then America had already been com pelled to accept with

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gnashing teeth in this century: they did not pay the progressive real inheritance tax (which, i f they paid, would send their heirs packing within the lifetime of two generations); they did not pay the full income tax (which, i f they paid, would, at least in principle, equalize the unseemly contrasts between grand and m odest ways o f life); and, m ost o f all, they did not pay progressive real wages. A t dawn the young herdsman drove the cattle to pasture, while the landowner lis tened contentedly to him singing full-throatedly. This is what the boy sang: M y pay is three forints twenty pennies / a young herdsm an lives on that. But oddly enough, the neer-do-well did not m ake ends meet; in stead, he w ent to Am erica, to the mines. And, to all ap pearances, everything in H ungary stayed as i f the rul in g and ostentatious social class had the God-given right to forget their duty to pay taxes, a duty that had become a reality by law not only in the distant West but also in neighboring Austria and Czechoslovakia. They did not pay in full the taxes which the wealthy o f W estern societies - always groaning, sometimes com plying with the laws o f peaceful evolution, sometimes as a consequence o f revolutionary coercion were al ready paying nearly everywhere else. They did not pay this obligatory philanthropic charge, and the lords who lived in these houses sat out first the Arrow Cross and then the distribution, - but they did not pay real taxes. They didnt w ant to acquiesce because there was no middle-of-the road available; it was either real taxation, or anarchy and Bolshevism. For in stance, in this beautiful house now in ruins the owner, the bearer o f a historical name, was an extra ordinarily cultured and courtly m an; he collected paint ings o f the French im pressionists and the tusks o f the Central-African rhinoceros this owner knew pre cisely that som ething ought to be done, and, w ith a rare tusk in his hand, he often expounded his m odem

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social views in the presence o f visitors from other classes. But, in the end, he didnt pay his taxes, be cause the members o f his own class, the landowning lords, then the wealthy plutocrats and governmental authorities would lock him up in a m adhouse i f he began paying full taxes on his own initiative. H e also realized that this role o f a thousand years was over, and so when the Russian troops appeared in the country, he didnt start hobnobbing and dickering with the Communists because he had read Chateaubriand he had a beautiful library, I rem em ber the French classicists who lined its shelves and learned that the pow er that degrades itself and begins to bargain with its enemies never receives m ercy from them in the end. The better elements o f this historical class tried to bear their loss gracefully; at least they did not stand w ith hat in hand, soliciting some leftover trifle from those who had done them out o f everything they owned. This social class resided here and perished po litely and elegantly in any case, w ith a sense of greater dignity than those boors who sniffed the possi bility o f a role in the system which proclaim ed that its duty was to eradicate the function o f the bourgeoisie. The aristocrats m ounted the scaffold sullenly - m ost often only in the figiirative sense, because it is not only counts but also Communists who are inclined to snob bishness, and they, with surprising indifference, allowed the aristocrats who didnt ask for a handout after the distribution to die out. Few o f them went to the West; even fewer begged for a role from those who had stripped them o f their position. In the French Rev olution, at the time o f the Terror, when Sanson, the ex ecutioner, beheaded counts and m arquesses by the dozens every day on the scaffold in the Place de Grve, the condemned were seated on sm all benches on the high platform o f the scaffold with hands tied behind their backs, awaiting their turn. It was recorded that

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the pressing mob, the bloodthirsty wenches below the high platform urged the aristocratic wom en awaiting their turn to throw down to them their lovely shoes, for, after all, they wouldnt have any need for footwear in a few seconds, and that the aristocratic ladies, who could not pull o ff their shoes with their bound hands, flicked them o ff their feet one after the other with deft movements o f their sharp-toed shoes and then kicked them o ff the platform into the hands o f the beggars. One can face loss this way, too. It doesnt have much meaning, but at any rate, it is more inviting, for example, than having someone accept a literary prize from those who had previously beheaded him by di vesting him o f literatures sole significance and requisite: the free expression o f his thoughts, the free dom to write. Here had lived the countess who was the wife of an immensely rich French jew eler; not much remained o f their im posing house, only its faade stood undam aged. A fter the Second W orld W ar, pessim ists en dowed w ith im aginative power likened Europe to such a ruined house w ith an unscathed faade. They as serted that Europe is a house in ruins whose faade is invariably lofty and engaging, but anyone who enters its portal w ith intellectual and m oral concerns finds nothing m ore than grim y debris. Truly, nothing m ore rem ained o f the countesss house on Disz Square than its faade. A m ong the room s showed the Versailles wall covering in the din in g room, the boiserie and also a rubble-covered spinet, w hose strings bomb blasts had snapped off. In 1942, the countess flew from here to Am erica because they heat better there (and she was absolutely right about this; in Am erica they did heat better, in 1942, than in Budapest). She took her golf clubs along and a cham bermaid, a peasant girl from the Alfold; this, too, was a proper decision, well-thought through historically, because w ithout the g o lf clubs one is used to one cant

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play golf well, and the chambermaid w as already fa m iliar w ith certain dressing and groom ing habits of the countess, and it would have been a pity to ex change her for a Negro girl in Am erica. So she flew away w ith g o lf clubs in her hand. W ise old Colette, to ward the end o f her life, said in one o f her writings: Either love or cohabitation. Cohabitation w ith a human being is difficult; cohabitation with a country is very much more difficult. Possibly, the countess was in love with Him gary and feared cohabitation. Is this why she flew away? One cannot know, because she did not have time to confess this; after all, she died soon after in America. A friend o f hers, another countess, did not fly away. The painter who was hopelessly in love with this countess he lived there on the other side o f the Vermezd, but now a dungheap o f machines and ani mals on the carrion m eadowland hid the window o f his studio from view watched in vain for her favors with the glowing devotion o f a Saint Francis or a Saint John o f the Cross and finally became so embittered that he fell ill with lung cancer. W hen the medical diagnosis left no doubt, the countess noblesse oblige called on her dying lover in the studio one afternoon. I am w rit ing this down because everyone w ho had som ething to do with this melodrama has passed away by now - the countess died, and naturally, shortly after the visit, the painter also died, because being a gentleman, he didnt like to receive a gift without reciprocating im mediately.

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...T h is used to be the bridge. You rode out here at fu ll moon. Halfway across the hansom cab p u t on the brakes.

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It was built by A dam Clark in the A g e o f Reform A bove the arches seagulls used to oscillate. Then so m any suicidal leant against the railings N ow the suicidal lie below w ater with the balustrade. A cold wind cuts through the Tunnel A n d its fingers stroke the hair o f the d ea d ...

12
... B ut ju s t as I w as about to descend the Gran ite Stairs to return to the world in ruins below, an other m em ory suddenly dawned in m y mind. I looked around, and I was astonished that I had, here and now, forgotten about this sm all still photo. True, it w as no longer a miniature; it w as m ore like the tiny fram e o f a m icrofilm that accom m odates large build ings, visions and, yes, H ungary on its minute memory surface. I saw, first, an editorial room on a floor o f a large apartm ent building in Pest, A liberal newspaper w as being edited in the place, and I w as w riting ar ticles for it at the time. On that afternoon it, too, w as a M arch day in 1938 I w as preparing to write such om nium -gatherum when the door opened and a colleague from the newsroom next door an older m an - stopped in the doorway. H e was bald and hacked continually because o f chronic laryngitis. For this reason and because he w as a great Hungarian, the passionate backer o f the K ossuth Danube Con federation his facetious name in the editorial depart ment w as Krkczi. H e coughed slightly now, too, and said quietly: The plebiscite w on t take place. W ith a cigarette between m y lips and a lighter in m y hand, I looked at m y visitor uncomprehendingly. The w hirr o f historys wings seldom brush the contem

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porary in a state o f historical readiness; sometimes we learn that som ething is irrevocably over while were in pajamas or shaving. The little bald m an was markedly pale, but only now did I see that his face was chalk white. Schuschnigg has resigned, he added, and hacked. For a time he stood in the doorway, confusedly, as i f he were asham ed o f h im self for som e reason. He gazed at the floor, at the toes o f his shoes, puzzled. Then he shrugged his shoulders and left, closing the door quietly behind him. I rem ained alone, and - I sometimes thought about this later I, too, felt, faintly and confusedly, that I was asham ed o f m yself for some reason. One is always ashamed when one finds out he is not a hero but a dupe: a dupe o f history. That day, I arrived hom e late in the evening. It was a starry, warm, early spring night. The Chain Bridge was still standing then. W hen I drove across it toward two in the morning, the glaringly floodlit w in dows o f the prime m inisters mansion shined up high. A t other times, only on occasions o f official proceedings was the beautiful edifice illum inated in this way. From the bridge this spectacle struck m e as i f on this day, too, the lights o f a special celebration were shining on high. W hen I reached the garage in Buda, three dustcovered cars bearing Austrian registration plates were standing in a row before the gate. W om en and children were taking their time getting out o f the cars. A man was bickering w ith the garage owner. It doesnt need washing, he said hoarsely. We are moving on in the morning. They probably have not stopped m oving on to this day. I waited for the refugees to drive into the ga rage. I w as the last one in after them. Then I did not yet know that I, too, had got into the single file that the fleeing Austrian family was heading. It took m e

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ten years to becom e aware o f this w ith all its conse quences. I w en t hom e and turned in. I slept soundly. Much transpired while I was asleep. Ten years later I read in ChurchilVs m em oirs that on this very night English Prim e M inister Chamberlain and his wife en tertained Germ an Foreign Minister Ribbentrop and his wife as guests at 10 Downing Street in London. A fter dinner during w hich Ribbentrop was in singu larly good hum or and chatted in an easy m anner with his table companions Chamberlain was handed a telegram. In this telegram the German government re ported that German armed forces had crossed the A us trian border. In the m orning I read the papers, which gave news o f Schuschnigg*s resignation and Plebiscite Post poned in large headlines. The radio station in Vienna was o ff the air; local and foreign announcers, unin formed and alarmed, cleared their throats hoarsely. Later, the Vienna radio began broadcasting music, play ing snappy m ilitary marches and m erry Schubert melodies alternately. I w ent to the garage. The A us trian refugees had already moved on, but other dustcovered cars w ith Vienna and Graz registrations stood at the entrance. I drove to the im iversity library and took out a book available only there and then went to M argaret Island to play some tennis. The coach was an older man. H e didnt like to run, and so he served the balls very carefully, as if the m ain point o f tennis w as for players not to tax their hearts needlessly. Please dont run, he shouted from the other side of the net, from the edge o f the court. Ill place the ball so you wont have to do any running. This therapeutic tennis w ent on for an hour. Then I drove to the swim m ing pool and took a hot shower. The massager, Emil (this ^ a s only his stage nam e, as his fellow massager said; he was actually named Karoly), gave m e a vig orous rubdown. I swam several hundred meters, and,

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m y spirit relaxed and body refreshed, I set o ff for home, where work awaited me. Thus w ent the daily ceremony attending a prospering literary career, (We did live this genteelly. I did live this genteelly.) By now all this glimmers through the m urkiness o f the im per fect tense, and for this reason, it would be proper for m e to sprinkle ashes on m y head and pound m y chest for not having cast m yself on the social barricades of the times, for not wearing threadbare and patched clothes and going hungry. In fact, I played tennis and lived damned well, I am, however, incapable o f this form o f repentant self-reproach. W hat I regret is that I did not live even m ore gaily and com fortably while I still had the means o f doing so. For this was nothing more than a life o f keeping up appearances, not just m y life but the life o f the entire Hungarian middle class. Actually, there wasnt a single m onth o f m y life when I didnt have to worry about a hundred pengds, but what I needed the hundred pengos for was another matter: the paym ent o f an installm ent on the car or the occasional support o f an ardent woman reader, be cause this was also a part o f the prospering literary career, which really wasnt prospering. I started out for home, but first I listened to the latest news on the radio at the entrance to the swim m ing pool. An orotund male voice w ith the same scat ter-brained jabbering that radio listeners are informed about sports events reported to the world that Ger man forces had already reached Vienna and that the Fhrer w as on the w ay to the land o f his birth. Then music again followed. This m usicalized history which served notice via waves o f ether accom panied by rever berations o f swaying waltzes and snappy m arches that a country had tem porarily ceased to exist as an histori cal idea, and a city had perished, over hundreds o f thousands o f human beings filled with a sense o f mass doom this history became a routine m atter in the dec ades to come. It is likely that when Carthage fell or

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Belisarius m arched against Rome, no music was as yet played in those cities. But Vienna now played music; the bumm-burara-bumm o f German military music blared from the radio, and the loudspeaker o f history screeched to the w orld, accompanied by melodies o f rousing and snappy marches, that A d o lf Hitler had en tered the capital o f the Habsburgs at the head o f his troops, standing and waving from a large automobile, his arm thrust upward in that grotesque Caesar-like salute. Before going home so that the dear m aster could - dutifully - com plete the daily stint for a novel or a newspaper article, I drove up to Castle Hill and w alked the length o f the Bastions promenade. A s on all days at noon, the Bastion w as crowded with habit ual visitors, w ith dignified and gracious strollers. They walked back and forth on the promenade, lined by chestnut and plantain trees, with the mechanical cere moniousness displayed by the figures o f a droll clock work. On this early spring day, an alm ond tree had burst into bloom along the promenade o f the citys old historical section in front o f the graceful mansions. W hile walking, I looked at this tree closely, w ith an in tentness proper to world events, since it is not only w hat radios screech that constitutes a world event. However, otherwise nothing had changed on the Bas tions prom enade since yesterday. Acquaintances greeted each other with grave courtesy; the dogs of counts and barons rom ped under the chestnut trees ju s t breaking into leaf. In the lim pid light, brightly polished fine furniture w as visible through the open windows o f the mansions. Friendly hands waved and extended greetings. The pensioners o f B udas precincts, Krisztinavros, Vizivros and Naphegy, undersecretaries o f state, minis ters o f state, and generals in trousers with colored stripes were taking the air and sunning themselves ju st as calm ly on this day as on every day before.

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Everyone knew everyone else in the vicinity, i f not per sonally, then by hearsay and sight. A short, bespec tacled man, wearing a Polish fur coat w ith braids and a Tyrolese hat w ith a chamois tuft, approached, ac knowledging greetings absent-mindedly; one could see he was worried and absorbed in other matters. In his look and deportment there w as always a kind o f per plexed and abstracted pseudogravity, and a shyness appeared in his demeanor, in his schoolmasterish, af fectedly grave m ien. H e was a geographer, politician, enthusiastic scoutmaster, prime m inister and scion of an ancient Transylvanian fam ily. His hands clasped behind his back, he trudged with quick, short steps on the Bastions promenade. Presum ably, during his walk he was thinking, as he was getting ready for his duties, that behind the Buda hills, som e hundreds o f kilometers beyond them, H itler was now entering Vienna in pomp. And since he was not only a prime minister but also a geographer and cartographer, he was probably also thinking that m aps will now also have to be redrawn, not ju st Austrias but other maps as well. This was w hy he looked directly ahead so care laden and returned greetings only ofihandedly. And since humans know destiny not only through the intel lect but through the viscera, perhaps he already sus pected dim ly and gloomily that the day was not too dis tant when he specifically - the geographer, boy scout and prime minister as a consequence o f w hat oc curred on this day, would, during the night o f an equally lovely early spring day, blow out his brains be cause Hitlers troops violated Hungarys sovereignty by crossing Hungary on the w ay to Yugoslavia. But that night still loomed in the distance. Strollers com ing from the opposite direction greeted the bespec tacled and slightly built man politely and casually, as if everything were the same as yesterday and the preceding decades. In the Royal Palace at this hour, as on other

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days, the R egent was receiving petitioners and rul ing the country. And the country, what was it doing on this day? A n d the caricature that I was (and all the other caricatures that surrounded m e and that we were), w hat did it know about w hat had really hap pened? W hat did the country know about its fate? That country lay som ewhere beyond the balustrades o f the Bastions cleanly sw ept promenade and behind the foggy panoram a o f Jnos Hill: a reality that was not a caricature. And on this day in March 1938, this reality underwent the kind o f change that occurs when a tec tonic quake shakes the inner structure o f a region. In its first m om ents such a tremor is barely perceptible; only the lam p sways in the room, a glass tumbles off the table, one notes and looks around anxiously be cause som ething he doesnt understand and doesnt see is happening, som ething without color, sound and smell. It is ju st happening. Something happened on this m orning not ju st to those strolling on the Bas tions promenade. Som ething happened in the of fices, in the Royal Palace, then down below, in Buda pest and, through a capillary-like network, in the rest o f the country. The sam e imperceptible and soundless event happened everywhere, that colorless, odorless trem or against which there is no defense and which ge ologists call a tectonic m ovem ent and historians H is tory. But som ething happened not ju st in the na tions organism, its viscera and glands, but also far ther away in the neighboring states. Then everjrwhere in the W est, in Europe. Paris, Rome and W arsaw re mained in place on the map and in the reality o f geo graphical location. But Europe in its entirety did not remain fixed in that cohesion in which it had congre gated after the First W orld W ar, when som ething for m erly called Europe was crudely cut apart and so off handedly pieced together. It was no longer w hat it for m erly w as because A d o lf H itler had marched into Vienna at the head o f his troops. Hungary was still in

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its place, on the m ap and in reality, but at this m o ment the country already w as no longer clearly visible. Suddenly everything was covered by a fine fog, as when someone begins telling lies. I looked around, and som ething I learned in school popped into m y m ind for an instant, dim ly as in a moment o f danger, when sick with an acute fever, one links loose and fast-moving images. Once there was a country which nomadic figures from Eastern tribes belonging to the U ralic-Altaic fam ily o f lan guages and related to the Finno-Ugrian and TartarTurkish sub-tribes occupied a thousand years ago on the way from the slopes o f the Urals, from Lebedia. Then they Christianized it, founded and fashioned it into a state. During the course o f centuries, the H un garians society was augmented by Swabians, Slavs and Jews. This country, which generals, statesmen, poets and hundreds o f millions o f anonymous individ uals built, was a reality on this day, too; it loomed from an airplane or in a poets soul. It was a beautiful country, and remained so after its recent dism ember ment, even without the Carpathians, Transylvania, Upper Northern H ungary and the South, and Fiume. It possessed wheat, oil, coal and all kinds o f foodstuffs. It had poets. On this day, too, several poets were sit ting in Budapest cafs; a copy o f Apollinaire or Rilke lay on the marble-topped table; they were translating a poem at that very moment, or arguing and jealou s o f each other. Then suddenly, to m y surprise, I sensed that something was lacking. Like the asthm atic who all o f a sudden doesnt get any air. I felt som ething w as m iss ing from these images like experience from the chok ing breath. The truth was missing. On this day - and in the short years following - it became clear that everything surrounding me was only an illusion; the in dependence o f a sm all people, the right to national self-determination all this was only a mirage. Later,

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I read that Bukharin, Rosa Luxem burg and Radek de scribed the right to national self-determination as bourgeois idealism . (This awakening on the Bastion resem bled ones passing his life with someone and the moment com ing when he recovers his senses because he doesnt really know who and w hat the person he spent his life with was truly like. And with a sudden eager, passionate curiosity he w ould like it if the one who kept continually silent about it - about what? the realitjr w ould finally, finally, in the last minute, speak his mind. He kept silent about his own reality.) I would have finally liked to know w hat Hungary was really like. In that moment o f realization, I sensed for the first time, and later m any times in terribly alien set tings, that I did not know. There was and is something eerie in this ignorance. On that day, Lon Blum, who, at the head of the Peoples Front, constantly voted down military ap propriations in the French assembly for years, pro tested indignantly. Cham berlain was silent because England was unprepared and the wind had to be let out o f the sails. M ussolini posted a guard at the Alps w ith his rifle at rest; in short, he did nothing. Roose velt was also silent; he w as far from the scene. Stalin certainly was thinking about som ething on that morn ing, but he was already a famous and excellent lis tener. And because everyone was silent, only the Vienna radio spoke. H ungary was also mute. That morning, there down below, the apart ment house in which I lived was still standing. It was time for m e to go back on this day as on others - to engage in writing for a few hours, thus to write an ar ticle or a novel under the misconception that doing so had some sort o f meaning. As i f the words, no matter whether beautiful or ugly, could alter anything going on in the world. Nevertheless, I shall write whatever I write in the hope o f success; I shall give success a

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wink, though I know that the fermenting, gratifying feeling that constitutes success is, in reality, never more than a misconception or, m ore often, a wretched deception. Just the same, I shall write som ething on this day, too, because I am a writer, in H ungary in 1 9 3 8 .1 know fairly precisely what I w ant to say, what I am thinking when I write. But w hat does the country want and think? W hat else was down there? One could see in the depths the church where the greatest Hungarian, Istvn Szchenyi, vow ed eternal faithfulness to his wife, Crescentia Seilern, but this m arriage, in the opinion of the residents o f Krisztinavros, where there was much gossip, was not com pletely harmonious. I still saw all this that morning for an instant. The W eltanschauung stood before me sharply and clearly: the reality. I could not know in advance w ith m y intellectual fac ulty, but I thought I heard a voice w ith another, inter nal organic microphone, saying: everything I was see ing would on this very day begin to dissolve, disinte grate, becom e amorphous, as chem ists say, because forces were exerting an im pact on this solid mass which it could no longer resist cohesively. And in a little while, ever 5fthing I saw w ould no longer exist. Not a single person o f importance w ould rem ain in place. The Regent in the Royal Palace, the prim e minis ter in the mansion, and the others, the aristocrats, the citizens, the anonymous, all o f us would abandon our way o f life and lifestyle, and, yes, m ost o f the dwellings would also crumble into dust. Everything and every one still in their places at this mom ent w ould disinte grate into nothing, or begin to jerk , like the Clown and the Hunter and the Soldier in the shooting gallery when a clumsy champion accidentally hits the bulls eye and all the figures suddenly begin to m ove with a mechanical, clattering, grotesque jerking. I didnt know this through m y intellect that m orning on the Bastion, but it seems I suspected something, because

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otherwise the microfilm would not have preserved the image w ith such extraordinary fidelity. This day, when I first walked on Castle Hill after the siege, was the last time I visited the old sec tion o f the city. I never went that way again. And be cause it was almost noon, it w as tim e to go home m ore precisely, to return to the ersatz home that would never again be hom e, no m atter where I would rent cubic feet wrapped in cem ent in the world. For this rea son I walked down the Granite Stairs w ith the cau tiousness o f a mountain climber, avoiding the dan gerous obstacles that had been the walls o f dwellings not long ago. I hurried as fast as I could because Lola had already cooked t h e prosza or the sterc (at the time, some weeks following the siege, we ate disgusting meals w ith such sinister names because there wasnt anything else to eat). It was time to go home; after all, I had seen the Bastion, which unfortunately was de stroyed; I saw the bust o f Karoly P. Szakmary, which unfortunately survived; and I had seen the Royal Pal ace, where no one ruled any more. I had seen once more the piano nobile, the sm all mansions where no one lived any m ore because in the end here, too, time had solved the problem o f pajdng a progressive real tax in a practical way. Taxes no longer had to be paid because there wasnt anything for the taxpayers to pay on. In the end, everything was taken away from every one. So the question o f taxation was finally solved more fundam entally in H ungary than in the W est I thought o f this, too, but only incidentally. I understood that I was not the only caricature in the milieu be tween the two world wars; there was, instead, some kind o f caricature in Hungarian life, in the institu tions, in the w ay people looked at things, in every thing. This com forted me. It is always good to know that one is not alone.

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13
A specialist who professionally investigated the habits and attitudes o f people inhabiting areas that had been struck by earthquakes reported that in such places - in the vicinity o f Naples, in Sicily and then in Japan, Persia and the Aleutian Islands - they dont like to lead a continuously sedentary way o f life. They sit down but then im m ediately get up and start pac ing. Terror - the terror o f an earthquake, the complete lack o f protection and the hopeless vulnerability con tinues to affect their nervous systems like a condi tioned reflex. They dont dare to sit around confidently because they fear that at any m oment they will have to spring up and run out into the open; the ceiling m ay very well fall on their heads and the ground give way under their feet. These were the kinds o f ebbing and flowing, signs o f restless com ing and going that w ere evident in Budapest in the period following the w ars end. The earthquake that shook the world concept above its in habitants heads and under their feet wasnt merely the precariousness o f their society and existence after the lost war. People, knowingly or unknowingly but in large numbers, believed that the very certitude on which their parents and then they them selves and their children had built their every concern, ambition and hope had been destroyed. This was why they im m ediately looked about for things requiring urgent action. W ith the passing of the first earthquake, the fact o f military occupation and the presence o f grim but, for the tim e being, still warily m aneuvering Communists prodded people into frenzied activity. There was as yet no trace o f that apathy, that state o f mind when an individual re sponds with indifference to permanent danger o f high voltage, because indifference is, in calam itous situ ations, one form o f courage. This listless indifference

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set in only later, when people realized that everyone had left them high and dry, and they could expect noth ing. Then apathy abruptly heated up to a revolution ary feverishness, but during the first two years there was still no sign o f such a hysterical change in atti tude. The day at hand w as m ore exciting than the con cern about w hat the future might hold. Every morning, m any people began the day like fire insurance assessors trying to estim ate and evalu ate the dam age after a horrible conflagration. The Royal Palace w as kaput, as they said in the days ja r gon, but the Parliam ent escaped damage. M ost o f the buildings in Krisztinavdros had collapsed, but some sort o f government agency was already functioning in several rooms on the floor o f an inner-city bank, and handwritten signs w ere hanging on the doors: Prime M inister or U ndersecretary. A ll the magnificent bridges over the Danube, the work o f a hundred years, had tumbled into the river, but already the word was that a pontoon bridge linked Pest and Buda. Only a pile o f rubble rem ained o f the fam ily hom e, but Jend had returned from the concentration camp. The firm where the m anaging clerk had worked for thirty years w as gone, bu t grandm a was found in quite good condi tion in a Pesterzsebet cellar. Bomb blasts had blown o ff the sliding shutters, but the form er m anaging edi tor o f a once liberal daily undertook to obtain new shut ters for dollars. The Com edy Theater was in ruins, but the National Theater was presenting performances. Its current repertory offering was Ban Bdnk, and so one had to wait for the people to get fed up w ith this play, and then it w ould be possible to present some thing else. Only black bread was available, but luxury cars hastily im ported from Am erica were already wending their w ay through streets o f rubble, and in the fall o f 1945 it was announced in a newspaper that the time had come again to hold a car show in Buda pest.

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Some individuals discovered that m ore oppor tunities were available to them among the ruins than in the past, when everything w as still in place. A third-rate journalist who never rose higher than repor ter at a daily prom ptly join ed one o f the political par ties and found, w ith happy surprise, that he could become an undersecretary in the near future. Dishon esty spread like the bubonic plague. Law and justice did not exist anywhere, but Peoples Tribunals were al ready operating, and political executions afforded daily entertainment to the unemployed rabble, as in the time o f Caligula in Rome. The Taban District had been destroyed, but confirm ed old alcoholics set out on their emotional pilgrimage, the rumor being that the wine shops in Obuda were not damaged. The poet who had escaped from a concentration cam p appropriated on his own and without a twinge o f conscience an aban doned villa on a gentle slope in Buda w hose owner had died o f starvation in a Nazi flaying-house (he was bourgeois, so you didnt have to feel sorry for him) or had escaped to the W est (he was a fascist, so you didnt have to feel sorry for him either). Variations of the written and unwritten law s o f mine and thine be came grotesque conversational puns. But merchants, who som ehow m ade it home from the concentration camp or staggered out o f a cel lar, had by m orning raised their shutters, obtained and sold merchandise. That private enterprise which the Communists condemned to death was, even in its primitive forms, such a productive and distributive force that the system could not do w ithout it tem po rarily. Doctors and lawyers hung out their shingles on house fronts, Starving workers ran electricity into Bu dapest. Am idst the tremendous gasping, hectic human diligence, ignominy masked its real intentions with specious words. The Purchasing Sections, the Com mission for Abandoned Property and other such enig matic outfits pillaged zealously and shamelessly. Con

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com itant signs announcing Acts o f Justice in the name o f land distribution conjured up bewildering, grotesque hum an phenom ena. T he poet o f the people, panting ecstatically at this distribution, strode around the country blow ing his trum pet like someone filling the role o f the nations archangel, o f the nations ser aph. However, it quickly became apparent that he was, in reality, only the m instrel splitting fifty-fifty with the bands o f looting guerrillas. Telephones w ere still not functioning, and at this time the curious opportunities for social inter course from past centuries were revived: as in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when not ju st the aristocrats led a social life regulated by elegant ceremonies, but Colberts class, the bourgeoisie, at the encouragem ent o f the Sun K ing shaken by the aristo crats revolt, also m im icked the snobbery attending the customs o f visiting, so in Budapest, w ith the pass ing o f the first year after the siege, callers dropped in without invitation or prior notice. Such fam iliarity was understandable i f relatives, friends or close acquaint ances were living with one, but it was surprising when perfect strangers knocked on the door simply because we happened to be in the neighborhood or we heard you had made it, too, and so weve stopped by. The as sumption that visiting is proper only according to ac cepted social com pacts never occurred to the callers be cause they reckoned that the time had already arrived w hen everything will be different from the old days and vexatious proprieties no longer existed between hum an beings, nor a social catechism. The society w hose code used to differentiate between the seated guest (who was invited) and the standing guest (who dropped in uninvited and so was not seated) al ready belonged to the past. So thought the uninvited visitors. During the first m onths o f our resettling in Buda, we not infrequently experienced such visits. A b

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solute strangers dropped in early in the m orning or late in the evening without invitation or notice; they ar rived w ith the interest o f the casual zoologist who goes to the zoo after the siege because he wants to know whether the puma or the tapir was still alive. In this fam iliarity and the absence o f tact - there was some thing Russian and hum an. W e were, o f course, happy to see everyone, and i f in our confusion we didn't offer a seat to our visitor, we didnt have to rack our brains about how to handle the situation because the guest, slipping in uninvited, sat down cheerfully and comfortably, sometimes staying longer than we first hoped. We reassured and consoled ourselves with the thought that there was som ething good in this, that social leveling was beginning to take shape, that the classless society was not an em pty promise. But after the first surprise visits passed, we becam e aware that it wasnt a well-meaning interest that prompted unexpected visitors to knock on the door o f a strange house. The real reason for the visit quickly became apparent from the chattering conversations: it was hatred, Later, when collective m isery and terror drew people closer to each other - in the sham solidarity o f fear - this psychosis o f hatred abated. But in the ear liest years after the siege, hatred erupted w ith its nox ious and searing breath from and against human beings during conversations, ju s t as when one, un guardedly careless, opens the door o f a hellishly over heated furnace. W hy this hatred? Because the other one had survived. Because the other one hadnt suf fered as much or in the same way. Because he who had suffered didnt receive recompense immediately. Hatred because everything w as inadequate, every pun ishm ent and every recompense. Because the punish m ent this world deserves could not be dispensed ruth lessly enough. Because the hoped-for compensation could not be plentiful and abundant enough. Because

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others received more, or they stole. And there was the hatred stem m ing from not finding in the ruins - nor later after the ruins w ere cleared away - the one they were searching for or w h at they were foraging for. A c tually, w hom were they searching for? Our visitors som etim es disclosed this, sputtering and stammering. Those divulged this to us who had already returned to their homes, or becom e an undersecretary, or opened a shop, or got M ariska back. They stated that this hatred, like the addicts thirst for opium, doesnt slake, cant be sated. Because everyone was waiting for someone to return, and the one they were waiting for did not com e back. They were waiting for the one most im portant to them, the one and only. That person meant m ore to them than the house, ambition, mission, pleasure, revenge. The one they kept expect ing to return m attered m ore to them than anything else in the world. It was as i f there w as a one-and-only com panion in everyones life - not a parent, wife, lover or friend but secretly the one-and-only to w hom the chrom osom es responded w ith a special biochemical en ergy and everyone realized that that single person, who was perhaps a child, perhaps a lover or a wife, no longer existed. N ot even i f that person escaped from various hells, if, shabby and infested, he hobbled back home. N ot even when he came back w ith a guilty con science (he had a guilty conscience because he had es caped with his life), and fell on his knees to express his gratitude. There was no one for them to expect to re turn, because the very one they thought to be in limbo, the one they expected to return from Gehenna, never did com e back. H e died in the labyrinths descending into Hell. H e died even when he escaped physically. Be cause the one who did survive H ell and cam e back was no longer the person they had been waiting for. An individual suffering such a disappointment starts to hate. After the first sobs and embraces, the m om ent cam e am ong mothers and children when they

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would look into each others eyes in dism ay and then begin talking about other matters. M arried couples, lovers and the m ost mysterious o f all hum an relation ships friends, would rush toward each other with arms spread wide. Later, the outspread arms would often sag because very close family members and, yes, lovers and friends would suspect and scent with shock, sometimes w ith indignation that the other did not hate enough w hat they themselves hated. This was the overwhelming question in the crucial moments in the examination o f private and social life: Do you hate what I hate, or are you indifferent and tolerant? And i f someone did not hate enough, people begin to hate him, Everyone, it seemed, had someone who had disappeared. And the one who returned, emaciated or fat sometimes wasted away to the bone - was chari table about w hat had happened or else w as bent on revenge. O r he was dead-tired and indifferent. But som ething had happened to him, too, to everyone, and society, it seemed, realized it had w aited in vain. It had waited in vain not only for an individual but also for the other, the changed and m ore hum ane social order which people believed would now become a re ality. This waiting for is the true, the hidden act o f life. Beckets inspired pantomim e w as still unknown at the time, but after the war everyone w as waiting for Godot. And Godot never came. W here did he die? In a concentration cam p or on a battlefield or in a cellar? Or in the chambers o f betrayal, in the foul, putrid caves o f cowardice? ... People realized, there w as no one and nothing to w ait for. And they began to hate. Inflation served as com bustible m atter to the glowing embers o f hatred, like a shovel o f shavings on a sm oldering fire. A t first it appeared soundlessly, in sidiously, like hem ophilia, the bleeders disease. The peasants, the sharks and Party parasites became paunchy and prosperous. Everyone else lost blood. The

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gray beards o f the intellectual, working, and bourgeois classes languished and withered day by day, like con sumptives. For a short tim e, ju n k still turned up to sell item by item : an old pocket watch, a bracelet, a gold tooth from a grandfathers inheritance, a wedding ring. People thought they would survive the paper plague w ith such synthetic victuals. But they quickly discerned that during inflation they not only lost w eight without experiencing any physical pain but their rem aining, limited energy also dried up. The peasants knew their time had come. They could not delay taking advantage o f their oppor tunities. A t the very tim e when they were getting rich by trading a water-bloated, fattened pig for a piano, for Napoleon gold pieces on the m arket in Pest, intel lectuals, w orkers and civil servants waited every day, m ore pale, m ore hungry and more hopelessly, to find out what kind o f bizarre hocus-pocus they would have to go through on the next day, w hat the value o f money w ould be. In the few hours o f the morning, the paper rags that then passed for legal tender changed hands w ith value o f inexpressible billions, in the form o f as tronomical digits. In the morning, the housewife dashed to a part-tim e extortionist, to a moneychanger; she sold a few grams o f the wedding ring she had de posited w ith him , and bolted at a run for the market hall where the voucher could be exchanged for food stu ff until twelve noon - the time o f the noon closing exchange rate on the m oney m arket was the magical boundary line when that days valuation o f money ended, because the dollar or gold was worth several thousand m illion or billions m ore in the morning, at the opening m om ent. Already, no one could pronounce the numbers: Give m e tw o blues with the yellow and you can take the duck, said the wom an at the market stand, and the housewife, despairing, kept haggling: I wont give you any blues but Ill give you another green. People once again perceived that at the bottom

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o f hum an enterprises there is som ething anti-intellec tual that is m ore powerful than the reasoning o f the mind. During the months o f inflation, m ost Budapest inhabitants became as skeletally thin as the sketches o f the hum an structure found in anatom y books, w ith out any flesh and fat. In these months the vast m a jority o f hum ans passed through more dreary and har rowing physical hardships than during the siege, when everyone set food aside and the com pulsion o f the solidarity created by the com mon danger prompted the prudent and the selfish to share their limited ra tions w ith their fellow sufferers in the cellars. No longer was there any trace o f this em pathy present amidst the misery o f inflation. Since it wasn't sheer life but money, possessions, the tangible that had to be rescued, people responded with more heartless selfish ness to the em ergency than they had to the perils of the siege. This pallid hemophilia, inflation, stirred the em bers o f the psychosis o f hatred. Now the course o f the great dispute surged, not between the workers and the bourgeoisie but between the peasants and the nonpeas ant classes o f the population. An insidiously inflam m a tory myth did its utm ost to m ake the general public in Hungary believe that the peasantry com prised not ju st a social class but a mystical fount o f energy, a legend ary and ancient reserve o f consciousness, the profound foundation o f national existence. But the greater part o f society could see nothing m ore in the peasants than Hungarian citizens who worked in the agricultural sec tor. Their rights could not be separated from the rights and duties o f the other classes o f society. (The Com mission o f Hum an Rights was already established, but no one said a word about the Com mission o f Human Duties.) The Communists, w ith ironic magnanimity, of fered land distribution to the peasants and, smirking, waited for the mom ent when, holding a pizzle, they

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would ask the peasants to leave their portion o f the land, exactly the w ay they had earlier ousted the land owners. The great dispute turned into a cynical, gro tesque political tactic. The thousand-year-old dispute - the vital dispute about the destitute, outrageously re m unerated cottier peasants - had to be concluded, in Hungary, too, as earlier everywhere in Europe. The Communists, rubbing their hands, played the role o f a Santa Claus handing out gifts, knowing that the dis tribution was not a conclusion but the first step in a new brutal serfdom rivaling ever 3fthing that had preceded it. The peasants were suspicious. They accepted the land not always w ith the greedy eagerness the distributors expected - and waited to see how this fabulous distribution, like a fantastic gift bought at a fair, would turn out. In any event, the peasants under stood that the inflation was a transitional period dur ing which they could m ake their potential energy felt with ruthless consistency. The moment had arrived when they could demand from consumers not only a ju st return for their labor and products, but, on top it all, also the piano, the pocket watch, the family jewels, every shiny object that glittered along the roadway and on the social rubbish pile. A t this time Hungary was like a m an whose leg was amputated and his blood was draining away. The Soviets stole the pro ducts o f its heavy industries under the guise o f repar ations; everything else food and manufactured goods drained into the conduits o f inflation. The hatred that this overwhelming misery kindled was an autotelic, even spontaneously ac tive force - thus were these phenom ena called in the execrable jargon o f m odern days. People did not look for excuses to hate; they hated on their own, independ ent o f the intellect. The Hymnus, the national an them, cant be sung on an empty stomach, wrote a con sumptive pam phleteer, Dezsd Szab; the m om ent had

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arrived when people realized that the Internationale cant be sung on an em pty stomach either, that it w asnt possible to speak about acts o f social justice on a growling stomach. Books analyzing the phenomenon o f the morality o f hatred w ere published. This w asnt a strictly H ungarian phenom enon. The psychosis of hatred, built on the ruins o f the sham m orality o f nine teenth-century liberalism and hum anism and on con taminated racial form ulas, spread inflam mation in all directions. The colored hated whites, every white per son worldwide. Proletarians hated capitalists; peas ants rebelled against landowners - in Mexico, China and everywhere in South Am erica - and mem bers of the intelligentsia hated political economists and so ciologists, these horn-rim m ed analysts who saw statis tical raw material in hum an beings and agricultural production because they didnt believe in humankind and life but in m ethods and material results. In Hun gary, the reddish reflection o f inflation illum inated the artificially befogged reality o f the relation between so ciety and the peasantry- The Communists saw to it that, not much later, the peasantry would also wind up in the losers camp. Two profiteers chom ping with bulging cheeks remained on the scene: the Partys parasites and the backslapping intellectuals who signed a pact w ith the Communists. But at the tim e o f this inflation everyone hated everyone else. It wasnt only the peasants who were despised. The workers and the intelligentsia saw the displays o f French champagne and perfum e, Stras bourg go os e-liver paste, English books and Am erican cameras in the shop windows on Vaci Street. C h ief gov ernmental counselors moved back into the abandoned villas on the Rzsadomb, renovated the room s and, amidst the Faustian legerdemain and chaos o f infla tion, argued with the upholsterer about w hat kind o f pastel-hued covering he was to put on the walls o f mi ladys dressing room. During early m orning hours,

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owners w ho had again moved back from houses marked w ith the yellow star o f David or from safe havens in the provinces could be observed - confor m ing to V oltaires advice in the gardens o f Pasaret: they cultivated their gardens with an amiable earnest ness and w alked among the fuchsia with a sprinkling can. The hungry who walked past the fence knew that they w erent watering the fuchsia but the Napoleon gold pieces they had buried in the family garden before the Arrow Cross came. Notorious evil men walked dili gently in the Farkasreti Cemetery to pay tribute at friendly graves where they had buried the family jew els under the wooden crosses. Elderly speculators in the stock m arket discovered dom estic inclinations in themselves and concealed dollars wrapped in onion skin paper in canning jars, steam ing and then sealing the jars w ith wax. Sometimes they forgot where they had buried their treasure; then, wheezing, they dug at m idnight, because experts also resided in the neighbor hood w ho prom ptly began digging the next night where they suspected some traces o f digging at dawn. The moral im peratives o f a society had been destroyed. And everyone hated everyone else. The wounded, scarred, scabby, ruined city did not complain like Job on the rubbish pile; rather, it smoldered w ith hatred. W hat we call the action of life - the film strip, the experience o f swiftly consecu tive picture squares - broke for m e on the day when I came to understand there was no longer anyone to wait for. The picture album I occasionally le a f through remained. The pictures, as in a pagan Biblia pauperum , are sketchy, prim itively tinted squares of memory. I dont have to shut m y eyes to see this pic ture album across seas, continents and the oceanic vista o f old age, I see the little pictures sharply.

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This hatred spawned astonishing by-products. For instance, the Jewish police officer who entered the Emke Caf on the Boulevard on a night in December 1945. A t that m om ent o f historical change, this caf resembled the nostalgic hallucination o f a fever-ridden patient suffering chills, his teeth chattering; in unheated, frigid Budapest, on the Boulevard, where the insides o f m any houses hung out, and am ong the loiter ing Russian looters, the toughs o f Pest and the patrols o f Russian infantry pretending to m aintain public order, a peacetime caf, the Em ke, opened a few months after the siege in all its synthetic and nickelsilver splendor- Festoons o f electric bulbs glittered in the lukewarm restaurant; artificial palms flaunted their imitation oriental luxury; the proprietors wife sat enthroned in the buffet, surrounded by silver m ir rors; waiters in shabby black uniforms and napkins stuck under their arms rushed flat-footed between tables, setting them with snow-white damask, im ita tion silverware and cheap china. Artificial flowers gath ered dust in table vases, and the Gypsy orchestra set tled down in the com er fully ready to play: the primds, the violist, the bass fiddler, the cymbalist, the piccolo player. As in the past, they, the waiters and the Gyp sies, waited for the merry guests who w ould have the pensive and lively dance m usic played for them. Owing to some freakish chance, not only was the building un damaged, but all the peacetim e fixtures o f this old caf on the Boulevard had also escaped: it wasnt ran sacked, everything was spared. The proprietor bustled and wheeled among the tables, inquiring about the wishes o f his esteemed guests. The revolving door lead ing to the kitchen turned continually, the waiters carr 3dng out the costly meals listed on the extensive menu on nickel-silver platters. Ever}fthing in the starv-

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ing city could be had here, everything that its inhabi tants had by then spoken o f for months only in hushed recollections: heaps o f meat, savory sauces, vintage wines cooling in silver-plated buckets. This is what the Emke was like in Budapest in Decem ber 1945. A t the tables, in the lukewarmness redolent of the scent o f food, sat the surviving specimens o f the regular customers from the neighboring boulevard cafs who som ehow rode out the horrors, escaped and returned from captivity or hiding: merchants, lawyers and doctors, the so-called petty bourgeois intelligent sia o f the Boulevard. They dined here with their families because their w ives had already discovered that some beauty shops had opened in the Inner City; seamstresses taking on work only in their homes had also turned up, and so they hurried to evening sessions to get fitted properly. The Gypsies played softly; the cutlery and the porcelain plates provided the familiar clatter o f peacetime. The waiters recorded the orders on the bill w ith the old routine words o f the trade (pickles, yes; fried, yes;) the wine steward, cigar ven dor and bread girl hovered around the well-laid table, where, next to the regular customers that turned up quickly and surprisingly intact, dark Kirghiz and Chuw ash occupied places, the shirkers attired in the pointed fur cap and the quilted Chinese coat o f the oc cupying army, w ith the ladies whom they had recently become acquainted w ith on the chilly com ers o f the Boulevard. This m ixed company - the regular cus tomers and the new kind o f guests took stock o f each other w ith stealthy glances. The great changing o f the guard, the whirlwind o f history tossed this gathering together. It was an odd hodgepodge, and the old waiters o f Pest served the Chuwash, their ladies and the shoe store owners o f the neighborhood impassively and stolidly, w ith the same sleepy and wise, disdainful indifference as they had the ch ief governmental coun selors o f a snobbish society in a tim e o f peace.

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This was the half-historical, half-prosperous situation that the Jewish police officer entered. He was a distant relative o f mine. H e had been a bank offi cial, and in times before H itler and the Arrow Cross, he drank coffee and played cards in the Emke every afternoon with other Jewish petty bourgeois. His fam ily, I knew, perished in the holocaust, his m other and younger sister at Auschwitz, and his younger brother failed to return from a concentration camp. Recogniz ing me, he greeted m e politely, his hand touching the brim o f his hat. H e stopped at the revolving door, and the checkroom attendant hurried to help him remove his brand-new leather coat, and took the gloves and riding-whip from his hands. Every article o f his cloth ing was new and cut to measure: the laced top-boots, the gold-braided cap embellished with a colonels insig nia. The bank official vanished in the whirl o f the fancy masked ball; in his place appeared an all-power ful official personage. The proprietor and the waiters hurried to find a nicely located table for him , and the police officer walked slowly and m ajestically between the tables. H e sat down w ith easy, leisurely m ove ments. Everyone w as watching him. And he knew that at that moment he w as the em inent figure in the estab lishment. In this situation, at this time in Budapest, this Jewish police officer held sway over life and death. At a wave o f his hand, the myrmidons o f the summarily organized national security squads carried o ff to no torious cellars everyone he pointed to. H e did what ever he wanted to. A t present, he wanted to have din ner. W ith knitted eyebrows, worried expertise, and the peacetime gourmets lip-sm acking knowledge o f the subject, he selected and ordered delicious morsels; perch from Lake Balaton, spongy tenderloin broiled in a net, choice garnishes. After long consultation, the wine steward opened a cobwebbed bottle o f wine for him. The waiters - like m usicians in an orchestra

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when a renowned conductor takes the baton into his hand - were all astir. The obliging coming-and-going never ceased around the noted guest. They placed the cooler with the wine glass near the table, and they also immersed a bottle o f Pardi m ineral water in the ice cubes. The Gypsy prm s played, transfigured and softly, melodies from old operettas, and the scene was completely like the one occurring when, at the time of the changing o f the guard in society, the members of the new parvenu class rush o ff to the opera because they w ant finally to see and hear Trauiata or Cavaliere Rusticana which in the old days they didnt have any opportunity to hear even from the peanut gallery. This Jewish police officer now perform ed for him self the great scene o f the old, peacetime pseudo-splendor of the Budapest boulevards. H e was the Em peror o f the caf, as the rare guest was called in the underworld ja r gon o f the m usic halls, hence, the overseer from the Alfbld who m ade enough on fattening pigs to make an ex cursion to Budapest once a year and play the count at the m usic hall. The Chuwash and Kirghiz also kept their eyes peeled, their machine-guns resting in front o f them on the table, next to the wine glasses. There was some thing in the scene from a Dostoevsky chapter, the trashy atmosphere o f the Karam azovs orgies, or from the erratic com portm ents o f Gorkys Artamonovs. For this tepidly heated, spuriously grand caf in Pest, with its guests, the Jewish police colonel above all, was a com pound o f volatile explosive matter. The women with their armed escorts, accidentally here from the distant Steppes, watched the figure o f Power Incar nate raptly and anxiously. The guests at neighboring tables pretended to converse without restraint, but, in reality, all blinked around restlessly, for, after all, everyone was hiding something: a cental o f rancid but ter for the black market, a cigar box stuffed with bits and pieces o f gold, or some crime. And no one could

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know whether or not the police colonel was keeping a record o f anonymous denunciations in his notebook, the accusatory documents o f vengeful attempts to settle old or more recent grudges. But for the moment, the powerful guest took no notice o f the setting. The reverently attentive waiters served w ith the ardor of altar boys this potentate who truly celebrated the sup per the w ay a priest did the rites. He ate and drank as i f everything were natural and normal. After the savory m eal, the waiter served the aro matic machine-percolated coffee, the cigar vendor hur ried to select a spotted trabukd and lighted it, and the police officer blew out the sm oke with a full stomach and contented facial expression. Like the guests, the proprietor noted the dangerous officers m ien w ith a smile o f relief. Everyone breathed freely again; the police officers cordial behavior and civil dem eanor dis pelled the suspicion that he w as about to cause some trouble. A n d truly, the powerful m an, gorged, smoking his cigar and, according to all signs, relaxing in the serene state o f pleasant digestion, felt fine and was amiable; he smiled, raised his glass o f wine toward the table next to his to the beautiful wom an sitting in the company o f some regular guests from the Boulevard without intruding, with genial gallantry and then, holding his lighted cigar between his fingers, he sig naled the prim ds to com e closer. The G ypsy - handkerchief at his neck, violin and bow in his hand, hovering w ith an obsequious and overfamiliar grin and plying an old trade w ith the flair o f a supernumerary, like someone nosing out that the eminent guest had properly m ellowed and the moment for requesting a tuneful and m erry m elody had arrived - bowed hum bly before the police officer, who whis pered his request into his ear. The Gypsy nodded en thusiastically, hurried back to the band, said som e thing in the Gypsy language to the cymbalo player and the violist, set his violin on his shoulder and raised the

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bow high w ith spirited feeling. Reverential silence reigned in the caf. In this church-like silence and stifled expectation, the m em ory o f a peacetime and al ready forgotten and improbable tribal celebration also smoldered; thus did the H ungarian lord in olden times celebrate, so we once lived in Odessa ... the scene called this to m y mind. The guests waited with uneasy curiosity for the orchestra to start playing. W hat did the Jewish police officer request? The Internationale or a Zerkowitz song? The prm s bent his head over the violin, plucked the strings once with his fingertip, and the band followed the intonation in pianissimo. And in the church-like silence in Budapest, in December 1945, in the Emke Caf on the Boulevard, at the command o f the Jewish police officer, the band struck up w ith the specious irredentist folksong titled and beginning T o u are lovely, m ost beautiful, Hungary/More lovely, per haps than the whole world which was already con sidered earlier in H ungary, between the tw o world wars, to be not a folksong but a song by a composer and now, in the present setting, it w as such a strident ly false and ridiculously business-like expression of phoney patriotism that it roused nausea in the lis teners. But the Gypsy played with feeling. The guests listened, alarm ed and aghast. The waiters stopped serving. The police officer quietly placed the lighted cigar in the ashtray, folded his arms, leaned back and closed his eyes. This m an had every reason to hate. To hate the Hungary that was possibly more lovely than the w hole w orld but w hose officialdom had murdered his mother and siblings, hum iliated him and wounded his hum an dignity, a Hungarian citizen bom in Hungary. W hat did he have in m ind when, in the completely al tered social and power situation, he had the Gypsies play the jingoistic irredentist song in the caf on the Boulevard? W as he being sarcastic? ... W e looked at

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the Jewish police officer w ith his eyes closed, and all who had assembled in the silver-m irrored caf lis tened. The Chuwash stared w ith stupid facial ex pressions; they did not understand the scene at all. But everyone sensed that som ething beyond the per plexing situation was taking place: a man wanted to ex press something, to pay for something, to reply. No m atter how infernally, derisively grotesque the scene, everyone sensed that now it wasnt only m usic being played, som ething else was also going on in the caf: a man was attaining something that perhaps he had longed for all his life but had never had the oppor tunity to realize in the totality he always yearned for. Many things had to happen before this man changed his costume and role to have played for him in the caf in Pest this pseudo-patriotic, provokingly com mercial song, alm ost foolishly sentimental in its con tent- It took Hitler and Auschwitz. It was necessary for m illions o f Am erican, English and Russian young men to die in the European, African and Asian theaters o f war. It was necessary for a great power, the German Reich, to be torn into pieces and for a social order and the view s attending it to be destroyed in a small country, in Hungary. A ll this was necessary, so that this man could finally have the Gypsy play the phony, and mawkish irredentist song. I f this m an, several years earlier, w hen he was a bank official in Pest, had one night blundered into the Em ke and requested *Tou are lovely, H ungary from the Gypsy, it can be presum ed that som eone w ould have turned up am ong the C hristian guests tarrying in the caf w ho w ould think: W hats this Jew playing the patriot for? And it is possible that one or another o f the Jew ish regular guests would think: Really, w hy is this Jew bein g so jin goistic? But he didnt w an t to play the patriot; rather, he w anted once in his life - to have played in the Emke the song that spoke o f H ungary as being his native

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land as w ell - even i f he, the Jew w hose m other tongue w as H ungarian, w hose closest kin were killed, w h o w as hum iliated and hounded to death, w as de prived o f property and rights by H ungarian society. But now the m om ent had arrived w hen he could order the son g from the G ypsy in such a w ay that it never crossed anyones m ind in the caf to sm ile scorn fully. And no one asked: \Vhat does this Jew w ant here? For this is w hat happened. It showed in those listening to the song that they didnt com pletely under stand what w as going on. But they listened, and no one sm iled, neither scornfully nor any other way. The police officer w ith the lethargy and closed eyes o f a di gesting Buddha - listened to the m usic without m ov ing. W hen the last obscenely lachrymal and drenching, diaphragm-shaking part faded, everyone rem ained si lent and m otionless. The guest signaled for the bill. The waiters jum ped and brought him the exorbitant bill on a plate, which he paid without checking it with a w ad o f vouchers from an inch-thick supply he drew nonchalantly from his ja ck et pocket. M oney gushed forth like a blessing; the waiters, the Gypsy, the wine steward and the cloakroom attendant received greasy banknotes. Everyone bowed and scraped, The police of ficer donned his leather coat, tugged at the service belt at his waist, pressed the flat hat down on his forehead, took his gloves and riding whip in his hands and walked in deep silence w ith slow steps to the exit. He stopped at the revolving door and looked around. Everyone w as w atching him to see i f he would say any thing in farewell. H e looked serious but didnt say a word. H e raised two fingers to the brim o f his hat in a salute, and wordlessly, he went out the revolving door. H e had settled his account.

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D ont slacken, my heart! Do not forget! Lest You blur the offense with thin tears o f forgiveness Do not let despair and tepid apathy Dilute you r vitriol with the w ater o f purity Burn like an oil derrick on fire Spouting ravenous flam es which the sly breeze cannot tire Crackle, expel sparks, live coals burn on Unappeased, burn on, a wild, fiery beacon.. "

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This bank official who unexpectedly put on the uniform o f a police officer was not such a rare phe nomenon in the winter o f 1945. Suddenly there ap peared in Budapest and on the streets o f provincial towns a familiar and at the same tim e an amazingly grotesque figure: the Man in Uniform. In the first year after the siege, very few H ungarian officials po licemen or soldiers - showed up on the street in Buda pest, cities and villages. The few w ho by and by did ap pear still wore their old uniforms. A t this time, an army officer would think twice before w earing his uni form. The kingless kingdom had undergone a transfor mation: it became a republic. (Giraudoux, shrugging his shoulders, said that when a nation changes its form o f government, it is like a person undergoing a sex change, a female being m ade out o f a male, a male out o f the female, but in fact, as a rule, only a herm aph rodite is created by the process.) The special police o f this republic received new uniforms, and suddenly, with am azing swiftness, the city swarmed with service-capped and -belted po licemen and soldiers dressed in brand new uniforms.

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This m ania for uniforms didnt break out in police force personnel only. One day, in the spring o f 1946, 1 received an invitation to go to the Parliam ent Building because the Council for Social Reconciliation was hold ing a m eeting there. It would be discussing the ways of healing the horrible wounds H ungarian Jew s had suf fered. W riters, politicians and sociologists attended the session. And also two clergymen: one was the chief rabbi o f the Reform ed Israelite Congregation in Buda pest, the other the Catholic Chaplain General o f the armed forces. The ch ie f rabbi wore a generals uni form, the Catholic bishop a uniform bearing chaplains insignia. A t the Social Rehabilitation meeting, the in vited Jew s present quarreled am ong themselves pas sionately. A m ember o f the orthodox congregation shouted vehem ently that the only practical option open to social reconciliation was to hang every antiSemite. The Reform ed rabbi in the generals uniform opposed this proposal because, he said, even i f every anti-Semite w ere strung up, the success o f social recon ciliation w ould still not be ensured; after all, the sur viving mem bers o f the hanged anti-Semites family would presum ably view this solution with revulsion, and so real peace w ould not prevail in the nation. But the opposite side threatened the rabbi, charging that he was betraying the cause o f reconciliation by even ut tering such a thing, and an Orthodox Jew with a re spectable exterior, sporting a w hite beard and looking like a patriarch, shook his fist at the rabbi and shouted: W ait for the com ing elections!" The meeting ended in ill humor. N othing m ore remained in my memory o f this attempt at reconciliation than the figures o f the rabbi in uniform and the bishop with in signia on his sleeve. In m id-winter o f that year, posters calling up certain age groups for conscription appeared- No one understood why. The war was over and the armed

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forces were disbanded; so it ju s t wasnt possible to com prehend why anyone in H ungary should still have to be drafted. Nevertheless, on the occasion o f one o f these special conscriptions some ill-informed citizens o f the age groups reported to the barracks w here they had form erly mustered. They stripped naked and waited, shivering, to get the baffling process over with. The old sergeant, still soldiering on, puttered about in the unheated chamber, but the officers in charge o f the conscription didnt appear. A fter a short time, one o f the draftees stripped to the bare skin said: Bath at tendant sir, its cold in here, were going hom e. The others, their teeth chattering, agreed angrily and began dressing. The old sergeant said apologetically: You gentlemen are right. I dont know why the colonel is so late; he must not have been able to catch a tram. Please do go hom e. The draftee-in-spite-of-him self who later recounted this scene to me, understood only afterwards what a profound change had com e to pass in Hungarian public life in the course o f a year. It was unimaginable the year before that a recruit called up for conscription would address a sergeant as bath at tendant. But now that, too, was possible because it was not ju st the recruit who feared conscription but the sergeant and the colonel also did. As yet no one felt any fright when the doorbell rang; after all, m any homes didnt have doorbells. But people had begun to disappear; a few reappeared after a few weeks, others later, som e never. The Terror gave a growl, then lay low and, like the puma in the jungle, sniffed out the direction in w hich the wind was blow ing. For the tim e being, accusations - against individ uals, then generally because o f H ungarians participa tion in the war - were uttered along with the cautious clearing o f throats. People pricked up their ears. What is the extent and the nature o f an individuals responsi bility i f the state o f which he is a citizen com mits acts that violate moral laws? The citizen is responsible for

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his state only i f he actively supports the amoral acts. His prim ary responsibility, at all times, is to save him self and the m embers o f his family; he does this, how ever, not at the cost o f ca n y in g out commands which his conscience rejects as unlawful, but rather, with the help o f any form o f mim icry possible, he stays alive without assisting w ith m urder when tyranny sinks to that level and without going fifty-fifty when it stoops to crimes against humanity; nor is he willing to be a well-paid favorite where collusion is the price for pref erential treatm ent. People came to their senses and began to understand that the principle o f collective guilt is an im m oral deception because one can sharply ju dge and distinguish between the guilty and those m erely present when others committed crimes: they w ere present because they had no choice. A s yet, no one felt any fright when the doorbell rang, but already there was sometimes some knocking at night and in daytime on house doors. In one o f his essays, On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth, de Quincey noted that he could never understand why this knocking affected him so balefully and terri fyingly. Perhaps it was, so he wrote, because after a heinous deed executed with all its consequences the witness feels sym pathy not only for the victim but also for the m urderer . (The old staretz says something similar in the Karam azov. In English, sympathy sig nifies not ju st fellow-feeling but also understanding. It must have been a rom antic age when a contempor ary still found it possible to hearken to the knocking at night w ith understanding.) Can cruelty be humane? The conjecture does sound absurd. But the cruelty that one individual com m its against another is still al ways hum an cruelty; it contains surprise and horror, and also the possibility o f a catharsis. The human pro pensity for cruelty didnt alter an iota with the chang ing cultural periods; there isnt a qualitatively distinc tive Asian, nor ancient, nor m odem , nor Euro

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pean form o f cruelty. There are only mom ents when the inhibitions - only God knows why are sometimes stronger than the propensity for cruelty. (Five thou sand years ago, the Assyrians created a highly refined civilization; they stood at the front o f the world stage in the footlights; peoples watched and applauded them. Their legislation surpassed later Rom an law in their hairsplitting legal reasoning; their art was sweep ing in its scope, rather their architecture, and thus dec lamatory. They w erent much concerned about details and the im m ortalizing o f the character o f individual ity, but their chess-like moves in international politics, their social structure, and their concepts o f divinity were completely m odern; they were the ventures o f a people observing the present and future, the human and superhuman w ith a broad horizon. And mean while, the Assyrians, too - like the Chinese, the Ro mans, and later the French, English, Germans and Russians - were cruel in a beastly w ay.) Cruelty can not be viewed as a phenom enon tied to a specific period it is a phenomenon above time and history. The Assyrians were great rulers; the Tiglathpilesers, Ashurnasirpals and Shalmanesers were first-rate builders o f canals and churches, carvers o f divine im ages and patrons o f the arts, but they all agreed that gouging out the enem ys eyes, cutting out his tongue and chopping o ff his hand were natural and hum an en terprises. Ashurnasirpal II had chiseled in black marble the recorded m em ory o f the trium phant and wise act by which he had Ahijababa, the prince o f Aram, flayed alive in Nineveh and his relatives im paled, and then had the m em bers o f his retinue de capitated and their heads stacked into a pile, and girls and boys incinerated. As in Auschwitz forty-five hun dred years later. A s in Katyn. A s...yes, in Budapest, at 60 Andrassy Road. W hat is the real cause o f hum an cruelty? Is it suppression? The basic stu ff o f organic life is protein

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and nucleic acids. M illions o f years are needed for a m olecule to stand in the line o f evolution on a planet w ith a biosphere and becom e a com plex organism. The m olecule itself is not cruel. But this very same mole cule is, in its developed, hum an version, cruel. Why? N o other organism is disposed to cruelty, only man. Is the panic resulting from the consciousness o f death the cause o f cruelty? W e know nothing; all w ho live are sentenced to die; w e are inm ates on death row sum m oned by heedless, blind chance to live in an indiffer ent and dark universe. The overcrowded world devised new form s o f torture in addition to personal, cunning, humane cruelty; such are official torture, cruelty by edict, governm ental harassing o f private life and statu tory crippling o f the nattiral rights o f man. This institu tional cruelty isnt m ore lenient than the individual, the bureaucratic or the personal. Bureaucratic, m e chanical, impersonal cruelty debases a hum an being, while personal cruelty m odestly contents it s e ir with causing pain. And now - once again in uniform cruelty appeared in Budapest. The characters w ho m arched around in the new uniforms were the very same ones who did so not so long ago, at the time o f the Nazis, the greenshirts and the brownshirts. Only the colors o f their uniforms had changed. The characters w earing the uniforms were the very sam e ones because they did the same thing: they produced Terror expertly. Just as when a pipe bursts in the street o f a big city, a cloaca splits open and a noisome stench spreads on the streets and spills into the houses, so the word spread that Terror w as again afoot in the city. A t first, the machinery o f Terror functioned discreetly. Those who operated it knew that persecution, police harass m ent and torture never quashed mass movements. Just as persecution strengthened Christianity, and as police, political and social persecution could not wipe out the underground nor later the above-ground move

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ments o f Socialism and Communism, so an invisible battle line gained ground in Budapest when the news got around that the Monster, the Terror was afoot in the city, This was not a counterrevolution; it was, rather, a disposition, an atmosphere, an instinctive mien. People understood w ith loathing that in the name o f the One True Ideal, everyone who did not be lieve in the Ideal was again going to be persecuted; and so the persecuted, or the persons w ho fell into the potentially dangerous zone o f class - intellectuals, peasants, self-respecting workers - stiffened into a battle line that did not seek m artyrdom but neither did it retire into a cow ards foxhole. The Terror organization knew that every terror has its high point, its Therm idor, when not only Robes pierres head falls, but the turn o f the headsm an and the headsmans assistants also comes. Cruelty, how ever, is a narcotic w ith which no one can be sated once he has tried it. The dosage o f cruelty has to be con stantly increased in order to provide gratification, like doses o f morphine or heroin. The U niform ed Man ap peared in the streets o f H ungarian cities and in the of fices. The uniformed o f the Peoples Republic, dressed stylishly in flat hats, tunics and service belts, resem bled the gaudily appareled soldiers o f South Am erican republics who carry out operetta putsches under the authority o f dictators o f the moment. There was som e thing exotic, grotesque and ludicrous, at the same time frightening about the sprouting o f these uniforms. One afternoon it m ay have been in spring 1946 - 1 w as walking along the avenue once called And rassy Road when on one o f the balconies o f the infa mous house numbered 6 0 ,1 observed several youths o f a state security detail who had recently donned their uniforms. It must have been after a day o f w ork well done - or during it for they stood grinning on the bal cony w ith hands on hips, and laughing boisterously, ob served people walking worriedly, wearily on the side

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walk. They stood there self-confidently, cockily, like persons w ho knew that complete power rested in their hands; w ith a w histle they could order any o f the ped estrians into the building with the execrable reputa tion, w here they could do whatever they wanted to people in torture cham bers without anyone holding them to account - for the time being for the cruelties they committed. Their faces were appallingly familiar; they were the very same faces seen on the very same balcony the year before, when the Arrow Cross was quartered there; only their nam es had changed: Brother Szappanos changed his clothes and become Comrade D ogei or som eone like that. They guffawed domineeringly, with open mouths and hands on their hips. Whatever human cruelty could devise all came to pass in this building: in the cellars, in the interrogation rooms on the floors with windows protected by bars. Here the Arrow Cross had interrogated and murdered. Now the V marched here in smartly tailored uniforms. Here they organized the Terror as the only possibility o f extending the means until then - o f imposing an anti-human out rage on the people, the pure fraud o f so-called Commun ism, disguised Socialism with violence and trickery. Like some horrible apparition in a nightmare, Terror reappeared in the city. It w as as i f an unexpect edly fetid, life-threatening gas had pervaded the air and life. W hat hope was left i f these chaps could once again stand in uniform s on the balcony o f the house of torture? A fireman can't be made out o f a pyromaniac; it is futile to m ake a policem an out o f a thief, to retrain a murderer as a butcher or surgeon. Experience has taught that all pedagogy is hopeless, that it is futile to gloss over the natural propensities o f mankind, cruelty for example. The person inclined to murder remains a murderer even when he puts on a political uniform. These uniform ed experts looked down at passersby from the balcony o f the flaying-house called 60 And-

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rassy Road and grinned contentedly because they had obtained the greatest satisfaction that persons of this sort can dream of: the right to be cruel and the re assurance that they w ould not be held responsible for the horrors they com m it since, after all, they did what they did in behalf o f the people. They were the Re ality, the prop and pillar o f the System. (Hungarian poets turned up who egged them on in eloquently re sounding verses to do their duty. Perhaps de Quincey was thinking o f this: is a hum an being obliged to feel sympathy for a fellow hum an being who has lost his hum an qualities to so great an extent that he undertakes this kind o f role?) W ho, what sort o f person w as now putting on the uniform ? The sadistic prole not the proleta rian, not the one belonging to the class o f the hum il iated and dispossessed, but the individual living at the fringe, the prole. H e put on a uniform and grabbed a blackjack, and this phenom enon w as at least as m uch a ghastly character in a novel as it w as a fright ful reality. This is the sort o f person w ho doesnt feel, ruminate, struggle; he practices his trade w ith busi ness-like im passivity even in extraordinary situ ations, like the hangm an adjusting the noose around the condem neds neck w ith scrupulous objectivity. Those A VO s on the balcony o f the Haying-house, they were the uniform ed proles; no other sociographic des ignation fits them. There isnt a m ore miserable, m ore degraded enemy than the prole. A t least the gunm an who com mits heinous crimes on his own initiative accepts per sonal responsibility for them. The prole never. He ap pears on the historical scene only i f he can function without responsibility, at the prom pting o f superiors. A t such times, he puts on the fancy uniform, licks his lips, rolls up his shirt sleeves and goes to work content edly and deliberately. This w as how he appeared the year before on the balcony o f this house in a green

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shirt. This w as how he now stood on that very same balcony in a spanking new field-gray uniform. He looked down on the crow d contentedly and cockily, like the expert who has at long last obtained work appropri ate to his character and capacities, and can say: God bless an honest trade.

17
Presum ably, progressive intellectual highbrows also turned up in the crowd rushing by below the bal cony in the late hours o f the radiant spring afternoon, But when they passed by below the balcony, they did not look up; at m ost they cleared their throats and then hurriedly talked about som ething else. They acted like someone who doesnt know that there is no Communism without Terror, because a system with out any hum an dim ension can be forced on human beings only with inhumane methods. They acknowl edged that there were still some initial errors, but then quickly, volubly - they spoke o f other matters. Communists w ere rarely found among progres sive intellectuals. Rather, they were well-read, well-in formed and educated individuals who saw in Commun ism nothing m ore than the chance to gain oppor tunities for themselves. A m ong them, the cynical toady who asked to be admitted into the Party was a rarity. The one who behaved in this manner invariably belonged to the m ore inferior type: the writer w ith the shallow talent and dubious character who, snuffling, made known to the Party Committee that he wanted to become a m em ber and, with supercilious confidence, asked that they scrutinize his past and establish w ith an objective consistency o f principle whether he was deserving o f this honor. The Party Directorate hastened to m eet his request with scornful politeness; in the early days, they awaited w ith open arms every

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one they could put to use. The writer w ith shallow tal ent and inferior character prom ptly obtained a role from the Party, and he could now stroll about in the lit erary arena with condescending, affable majesty; blink ing, he basked in the warm th o f the assumption that now he was the new W riter Prince like d w arf Zoli the clown in the circus when he puts on a top hat and plays the giant. The Communists, the out-and-out scoundrels namely, the Hungarians who returned from M oscow gazed w ith serene contentment upon the neophytes el bowing their way to curry favors. The progressives be haved as i f they didnt know w hat Communism really is. It was as i f they hadnt read the books for example, Gides recollections o f Russia - the countless documents that disillusioned W estern highbrows had published in the past decades on their experiences in the Soviet Union. The Communists, the real ones who knew what the reality was they had, after all, spent bitter decades in constant peril o f their lives in the Soviet Union invited them in, rubbing their hands. Alongside and among the cynical toadies were also found some old writers, artists and intellectual ex perts who at some time, thirty or even more years ear lier, believed that Communism represented the con summation o f the socialist idea. One o f them - he was an outstanding writer, he wrote short prose pieces, bit ing sketches and immortalized the disgusting perver sities o f the streets in Pest, the cafes, the capitalist, petty bourgeois atmosphere w ith the sharp-sightedness o f a Goya drawing cam e toward m e one fall morning in 1946 on the Boulevard. He was a neurotic, bald man. He could never m ake a living from his w rit ings; his bitter hum or rather repelled than attracted readers. Already an old man, he opened a bookstore on the Boulevard and barely managed to subsist on the in come. It now seemed that the hour o f personal gratifi-

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cation and com pensation had struck for him, too. This was why I was surprised when he said: There is trouble. W e werent friends. But I always respected him because he w as an outspoken, honorable man. I asked him w hat the trouble was. H e looked around appre hensively and whispered hoarsely: The C hief has com e home. They are now unex pectedly checking on everyone. They are asking what people did while they, the C h ief and his staff, the Mos covites, were away. Look, he said confidentially, with bitter candor, you have nothing to worry about. You are a bourgeois. I f you wish, theyll put you on display, like an art relic. But I was a Communist, and I did nothing for twenty-five years. I sat in the Bucsinszky Caf on the Boulevard, and sometimes, among inti mates, I w ould say in whispers that things arent good the way they are. Now the day o f reckoning has ar rived. Its very dangerous being a Communist, he said worriedly and then sighed. I asked him w hy he thought that now, when the Communists are here, it is dangerous to be a Commu nist. He replied soberly: Didnt you read about it in the paper? The Com munists announced that the time for social solidarity has come. Dont you see? The Communists will round up and throw into prison everybody they are down on in society. This is w hat they call social solidarity. Im not happy about this, he said and sighed again. N ot all o f the progressive intellectuals were as foresighted. They scurried to jock ey for positions be cause by now all obstacles to success had vanished; all they had to do was to w ait im til the Russians marched out o f the country, and then they, the progressives, would assum e the leading role in the nation; they would become m inisters, undersecretaries, ambassa dors, ch ief editors, haloed writers, villa owners, and they w ould have automobiles. To the W est, the

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staunch border guard protected them they com posed verses to this, too. O f course, it would be good to leave some reliable Russian arm y corps on the border and to be able to summon Russian tanks into the country at the signal o f a revolving door as soon as signs o f ephemeral disturbances appeared. But other wise, they, the progressives, after the liquidation o f re actionaries and the withdrawal o f the Communists, would receive the country as a gift. Am ong them some turned up who were not taken with this prospect because they didnt trust the Russians. But m ost o f them, after initial indecision and hesitation, presented them selves at a ministry and asked for a department because they knew better what and how matters should be handled than the longtime members o f the sta ff did. They appeared in the university lecture hall, on the professors platform, to rear, at last, the backward country in the progres sive M arxist spirit. They w ent to the National Bank and assigned the allowance from the sparse reserve o f foreign currency to serve the aims o f literary propa ganda channels abroad. W aving the flam ing torch, they had put on the stage o f the National Theater the cheap pamphlet, wrapped in popular silver paper, on whose title page they had had printed that it was a drama. This was the time o f the careerists striptease, the peoples masked ball, the witches sabbath termed Socialism the age o f weird changes, o f undressings and dressings. It is im possible for m e to recollect w hen I first heard the definition o f the conceptual category these applied to them. It was before the time o f fear at the ringing o f the doorbell, this is certain. The coalition still existed, and opposition newspapers were being published. Free enterprise was still functioning; splen did shop windows made a display on V aci Street; wellheeled guests dined at the level o f peacetime in Buda and Pest restaurants. There w ere political parties, in

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eluding Communist subsidiaries rigged out with labels o f independence, parties waving the shibboleths o f na tion and peasant. The leader o f one o f these newly organized special parties was a peasant from the Alfbld who years before had looked m e up several times in the editorial offices o f the liberal newspaper and ex pounded his political philosophy to m e at great length. A t that tim e, he evoked m y sym pathy because his origins lay in abject poverty and because he was intelli gent and sincerely wanted to help the poor who were landless and wasting away in m enial positions. He w rote articles and books, and he wasnt without talent. But he was pathologically voluble; in his writings, as w ell as in his conversations and speeches, he could, w ith the facility o f a prayer wheel, mutter for hours marathon-like sentences until his listeners grew giddy. This m an had now gained a position: he became one o f the staunchest mamelukes o f the governments land distribution program , and the Communists cod dled him because he served them, the Communists and the occupying Russian forces, with equal zeal. N ear the end o f 1946, I saw him once again, and for the last time. I didnt recognize him im mediately be cause he had changed extraordinarily in his physical appearance. H e had got fat; amidst the general wretch edness he had grown rotund, and he dressed him self up like a farm er, w earing his ja ck et thrown over his shoulders and sporting welted top boots and a jerkin, looking like Kalman Rozsahegyi when he played the bogus peasant in the National Theater on Sunday afternoons. In this costume, he took it upon him self to create the post o f W ar Minister, the formation o f this ministry taking even the progressives by surprise. Later, when the w agon ride became bumpy, he turned less bold, and toward the end o f his life, in one o f his longwinded speeches, he said w ith a sigh with the nostalgic em phasis o f lately acquired knowledge - that literary creativity requires soul and talent.

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The realization that these were more dan gerous than those who joined the Party and pinned on its button burst from a people regaining their consdousness like a spark from gun wadding. W hat was the real motive behind this stampede? A French writer, Raym ond Aron, called M arxism the opiate of the intellectuals, Just as the Com m unists proclaimed that religion is the opiate o f the m asses, so for the in telligentsia everything they brought together under the catchword M arxism constituted some kind o f indi gestible opium concoction. Com m unism was a fact. Communists were a reality. But what about these? Some later got o ff the dreamboat. They went to the West and explained there what it was that the Com munists were doing badly. B ut m ost o f them stayed at home and accommodated them selves to oppor tunities opening up... People perceived that the Com munists looked upon these as hired help, and they spoke w ith biting contempt about the auxiliary person nel o f the Great Change. Certainly, well-m eaning ones cropped up among these, individuals w ho had suf fered and lost much. And an individual cant be denied the right to ask for restitution when times change and the means o f restitution are present. In Hungary, the caricature was ripe for criticism ; but in a defeated and occupied country w here the agents o f a foreign power hustled, in behalf o f that foreign power, to scrape together everything that was plunder for Mos cow, the bustling readiness o f the neophytes to help was m ore repugnant than the official zeal o f the Com munists. Individuals who were persecuted for their lin eage in the recent past, who w ent through every hell o f hum an torture at the time o f the Nazis and the Arrow Cross and som ehow m anaged to escape w ith their lives, who in the idiotic and revolting gyration o f the se lection o f the least fit from the Right and Left over two decades caught the worst o f it - these individuals be

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haved like hum ans when they now sought a place in so ciety for themselves. Those who behaved in this fashion were not always among these. Persons dif ferentiated between the two w ith an extraordinary sense o f sm ell and keenness o f sight. During the first two years, the years o f Transition, I talked w ith many friends w ithin four w alls, confidentially. It was surpris ing how m ost o f those I put the question to - among them colleagues who, because o f their lineage, had suf fered brutal persecution, traversed the Nazis sites of torture and som ehow managed to escape with their lives but w hose closest fam ily mem bers perished in that mass m urder beyond all im agination - knew pre cisely that w hat these kept denouncing was the re ality but, at the same time, som ething different. True, the reality was horrible and unforgivable, but along side the horror and the terror there was always som e thing else as well: hum aneness and solidarity. Those who returned from H ell behaved m ore moderately and passed judgm ent more im partially than these, who m ost often only caught the edge o f the storm and es caped more cheaply. Gorky wrote this about them: A m ong our intel lectuals are m any w ho constantly flaunt their sulki ness, like som e business firm. They w alk about with the m ien o f som eone to w hom hum anity owes one ruble and fifty kopecks and doesnt want to discharge the obligation. H e wrote this in Sorrento, where he lived from 1921 to 1930 in voluntary exile because he had becom e aware o f the anti-human character and substance o f Bolshevism. Later, he returned to Russia because he w as a Russian writer and could not bear life abroad. H e died in the Soviet Union in 1936; his contem poraries had reason to think that Stalin did away w ith him because this inspired witness was a thorn in his side. I f one carefully reads the short stories Gorky wrote in exile, he doesnt feel that their supposition is preposterous. Official Soviet iconog

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raphy displays Gorky among its saints, wreathed with a red halo, and calls him the grand m aster o f socialist realism. But this revolutionary fled to Sorrento from the results o f the revolution. Gorkys flight was not caused by the panic o f an offended and frightened intel lectual struck w ith horror because the reality was dif ferent from what he imagined it would be. Gorky was indeed a realist; he didnt have any illusions about the essence o f the revolution, o f Socialism neither earlier when he helped to realize it nor later when it was real ized. H e knew the limits o f his talent: he did not have Dostoevskys imagination, nor Tolstoys epical power, nor Chekhovs ear for irony, but he could de scribe reality faithfully and w ithout self-deception. He had a thorough knowledge o f his countrym en, the Rus sians, He quotes Turgenev in one o f his stories; The brain o f the Russian always slips askew. (He under stood slips askew in the sense o f a hat on a tipsy fel lows head.) In a story entitled Karam ora, also writ ten in Sorrento between 1922-1924, Gorky introduces a revolutionary who recognizes the true face o f the in tellectual romantics, the revolutionary toadies, and fi nally join s the czars police as a spy; not for vengeance, not even for money or from cowardice, but sim ply be cause it made him aware o f the fact that man could also be vile. The revolution erupts, his form er com rades imprison the inform er and condem n him to death: he records his thoughts before his execution. He wrote this, for example: I knew m any Socialists to whom Socialism truly rem ained always something foreign. These individuals resem bled calculators to which it m ade no difference w hat num bers they were using in their calculations. The final result was always correct. I will put up with this body politic while it is to my advantage. But once it is no longer so, I strike out on m y own and say: Have a good time, com rades! Another comrade, w hom the hero o f one of

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Gorkys stories forces to hang h im self because the Party doesnt trust him any longer, says to the execu tioner before the forced suicide: Wherever war is waged, heroes are found on both sides. Later, Gorky wrote the following in Sorrento: Perhaps the time has now com e when it w ill be possible to com mit every form o f vileness and depravity, so that people will fi nally come to loathe and turn away from the wicked in horror and loathing and then suddenly all evil will end. The one who w rote this and then went back to Stalins Russia saw clearly and knew w hat awaited him there, but he shouldered this destiny ju st as the hero o f the story had his forced suicide. The intentions o f hum an beings, the feelings that motivate them cant be known perfectly. After all, m ost o f them - m ost often - dont themselves know w hy they are behaving exactly as they are,.. Jules Renard wrote: The big m istake o f judges occurs when they take for granted that the accused behaved logi cally. It is possible that among these were also some who saw purpose and m eaning beyond opportunities for mom entary advancem ent in what cam e to pass in the occupied and bloodstained country. A t this time in 1946 and the succeeding years - Stalin and his colla borators Beria, Khrushchev and the others - had al ready begun the new tide o f purges in the Soviet Union. They interned in forced labor camps, penal col onies and prisons m illions o f those w ho had fought in the war in defense o f their hom eland, and thus, having served in the W est and seen something different, they were presum ably discontented when, returning home, they com pared conditions there w ith those in other civilizations, other systems. M ilitary distinction, distinguished arm y records, w ounds ail this did not save the returning, discharged Russian citizen from falling victim to the new purges. Did these writers who were w alking about affably and serenely in coun tries occupied or bolshevized by the salami technique

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or some other w ay know w hat w as going on in the So viet Union? In Czechoslovakia - in the only European country to opt for Communism through a democratic, secret election the Czech and Slovak writers re quired twenty years to compose the m anifesto entitled 2000 W ords and adm it that the system going by the name o f Communism does not serve the interests o f working people, intellectuals and peasants, but always only the advantage and defense o f the Party and its fa vorites and pimps. The Ivan Denisovitches were al ready languishing in prisons by the m illions - they were suffering sentences o f ten, twenty, twenty-five years - when the cynical favorites - the these o f East European intellectuals in the Soviet and then in the Hungarian, Czech and other colonies - composed odes and novels lauding the Soviet in naive voices, de claimed on the radio, and, hoarse w ith zeal, asserted to the people at public meetings that prosperity would spring forth from social production. M aybe these didnt read the writings o f the exiled Gorky, but they must have known about the reality, the anti-human character o f Communism; after all, it w as there right before their eyes, in its palpable, daily version. But they didnt want to know about anything else, only about the moment that brought advantage to them. They kept repeating the phrase doing justice like par rots. It seems they hadnt read Nietzsche either, who, amidst the throes o f his calculations, acknowledged that the one who seeks justice vociferously and obdu rately doesnt really want justice but revenge. But the engineers o f the soul believed that the Soviet - disregarding the initial errors allotted them a role that the people w ould also gratefully ac knowledge. W riters are popular in the Soviet - thus did the publicity o f the intelligentsia trum pet - the So viet people read gladly and much and are grateful both the system and the readers to the writers who tell what the people are thinking, as one o f m y Rus-

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si an visitors at the time o f the siege had put it. But this was the case because the people bearing the mis ery o f Soviet life really expected answers from the en gineers o f the soul answers to the painful problems o f their lives. Before long, disappointment replaced their expectations. Tw enty years later, in 1966, a de ported Russian, a certain Marchenko (he wasnt a writer and possibly this was only a pseudonym) es caped after six years o f cam p life and two years o f a prison sentence and wrote a book in which he re counted the sorts o f experiences he garnered in the penal camps after Stalins death, hence in the liberar and hum anized tim e o f Khrushchev. The book deserves attention because it wasnt w ritten by a writer: it resem bles a court deposition set down in shorthand. It tells w hat things are like when a lib eral system com mits atrocities. The Nazi camps were the institutionalized and systematized enterprises for hum an destruction o f the preceding and subsequent Communist penal colonies, and the writers who some times lauded the system in enthusiastic and naive tones and com posed odes to Stalin sometimes elatedly, with almost sexual ardor, and breathlessly eulogized the systems charms - didnt these writers know about these anti-hum an institutions? Did the automobile, the apartment, the trips abroad, the splendid rake-offs o f favoritism, the Role granted by the Party blur their awareness o f what was going on in the Soviet U nion? Marchenko set down that in 1966, thirteen years after Stalins death and years after Khrushchevs downfall, Yuli Daniel was shipped to the cam p where M archenko had already been held captive for six years, the Russian writer whom the So viet court had sentenced to five years o f forced labor, together w ith his associate, Siniavsky, because they had slandered the Soviet system. The news that a writer had arrived in the camp roused excitement among the deported, am ong whom were the political

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prisoners in short, the brave men who loudly criticized the Soviet and the martyrs from the nation alist opposition, the Ukrainians and the Baltic citizens, and also common criminals. The deported who were made up o f such various characteristics and different convictions responded with unusual emotion to the news that a real writer had finally come among them. The inmates o f the camp hated writers, Marchenko writes, word for word. They hated them because the engineers o f the soul, during the h a lf century o f Com munist rule, were, with rare exceptions, silent about the horrors that characterized the internal regulation o f Soviet life. It wasnt only the Ehrenburgs, the official well-paid propagandists who kept silent but also all the others who, after Stalins death, during the time of the thaw, began, at official prompting, to criticize with timid throat-clearings and cautious shakings o f the head what they had endorsed until then, but they knew that what had transpired could not be changed by subsequent poundings o f the chest. They acted as if they didnt know that a system that can survive only if it deprives individuals o f their freedom o f private ownership, enterprise, choice o f employment, ex pression o f opinion, writing and political attitude can not renounce despotism, because this is the only way despotism can hold on to power. When the talk turned to this, the engineers o f the soul cleared their throats, smiled self-consciously and changed the subject. But camp inmates, M archenko notes, hated and scorned these writers. They also received Daniel in the camp w ith this expected hatred and distrust. This writer and his colleague, Siniavsky, had spoken their minds and protested the charges against them at a public trial. For propagandistic reasons, Brezhnev and his comrades thought, in 1966, that they would not have sentence passed on the two writers behind closed doors; they would, instead, stage the farce o f a public trial for them. The cam p inm ates, however, didnt be

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lieve in anything o f this sort. In the Soviet Union, they said, there is no public trial because all such ar ranged trials are frauds; the accused are brought be fore the ju dge after due preparation, and judgm ents about them are made in the presence o f an invited audience. Daniel later told his fellow victim s that his trial was also such a Potem kin arrangement; only care fully selected journalists and a few family members and acquaintances were adm itted into the hall, and the real, im partial public w as excluded. Daniel was a Jew, and since anti-Semitism was, according to M ar chenko, ram pant in the camp, the inmates were wait ing with m ounting hatred for the time when someone from among these w ould finally arrive in their midst - in the m idst o f those, the victims o f the system that these helped make into a reality w ith their eloquent pens and w inged words. Daniel arrived, and his behav ior was so decent, sincere and hum ane that the anti pathy toward him im m ediately abated and, yes, com passion enveloped him. Old politicians and weather beaten thieves protected and helped him against the cruelties and villainies o f the merciless system. And in this moment Daniel w as no longer a Jew but one of the m any w ith whom all felt solidarity. But the Daniels are a rarity at all times. In 1946, in Budapest, these behaved like someone who didnt know w hat the Soviet reality was. Later, in their anxiety, they came to and began to criticize cir cumspectly not Communism from which everything stemmed, not the Idea, but the individuals and methods that put the Idea into effect. People kept their eyes on them, glanced at each other and, shrugging their shoulders, said only: These!

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Am ong the Communist writers w ho returned home from Moscow was one - an elderly m an, a poet with whom I once had the opportunity to exchange views frankly. H e was a capable writer, thus a gentle man in Pascals sense o f the word, because, so Pascal believed, a gentleman does not undertake something he is not competent in. This old poet was proficient in writing, but during the long decades o f his exile in Mos cow, he didnt write anything significant. It was gen erally surprising how few im portant literary works emerged from their hiding place in the desk drawers at the moment when the written word no longer had to be kept concealed and the writer could stand before the world with what he thought and wrote in the years of relegation, oppression and banishment. The H ungar ian writers who came home from exile in Moscow didnt carry any worthwhile creations whatsoever in their intellectual luggage. This old poet didnt bring home anything o f value from Moscow either. B ut he had his intelligence with him; he rem ained a critic. And the only long conversation I had w ith him lived on in m y memory like a gift. A t the beginning o f our conversation, rattling on and bored, he muttered the parrot text he learned in Moscow. The paltry Communist vocabulary makes you yawn w ith boredom. Like the casual missionaries with the conditioned holy scriptures, he parroted the line that literature, art, intellectual creativity are never m ore than the product o f social circum stances. I asked him how then would he explain the origins of those classical and half-classical m asterpieces which, despite the ideas and tastes o f an age and social and of ficial censorship, m aterialized independently o f the so cial provisos prevailing in their tim es? The artist, in every age, could always be stronger than the social con ditions in which he lived... The Com m unist writer de-

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nied this. The creative being can respond w ith creative w orks only at the stim ulation o f social forces, he re peated obstinately. H e didnt say what the Soviet bridge-building soldier had told m e in the village, that revolution is so great a venture that the w riter can re nounce intellectual freedom, but listlessly and re signedly, he repeated the well-known, tedious dogma o f the H oly Text. This w as how our dialogue began. But there are some dialogues that begin nor m ally, and then the topic under debate inflam es the platitudes. A fter a little while, we both sensed we were no longer conversing but squaring an account about something. A n d both o f us felt it urgent for us to settle that account finally: the writer back from exile, the victor, and I who lived at home during the years he spent in exile. For this reason, we were suddenly talk in g about basic issues, like persons rejoicing at finally coming across a partner worthy o f engaging in this reckoning. We spoke about how exile presents writers, not only w ith danger but in times and situations that re pudiate liberty and justice w ith an opportunity as well. In such periods, one must go into exile volimtarily because only thus is it possible to express the truth. Otherwise, w riting has no meaning. The old writer agreed: exile is an enorm ous trial but also a source o f energy, a point we affirmed repeatedly. We cited examples. Lenin in Switzerland w ith unflagging inner energy and conviction am idst m iserable circum stances. V ictor H ugo in Jersey for thirty years, Marx in London and Voltaire in London, Potsdam and Ferney for thirty years. I rem inded him that Voltaire w rote in F em ey, where he w ent into exile from Paris, that the w riter can live only in a free country; other wise, he has to resign h im self to becom ing a timid slave whom his fellow slaves eye jealously and en viously and denounce to the tyrant. H e endorsed this view, and we agreed that there could be no literature

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without freedom, and the returned exile gravely as serted that this is true, this was, after all, w hy he went to the Soviet Union a quarter o f a century ago; only there could a Communist freely express his opinions in writing. This blunt statem ent took m e by surprise be cause by then there was knowledge abroad about the freedom o f writers as it was interpreted in the Soviet. I didnt want to offend him, and so when he flung out this statement in a monotonous tone, a short silence ensued. In sum, I replied that Soviet freedom could be a reality for someone who is a Com m unist but that freedom can be only absolute and indivisible - thus true freedom - i f it also applies to those w ho dont hap pen to be Communists. For instance, w hat is the truth to him m ay not be the truth to me. This phase o f our conversation remained in m y m em ory because we both said the same thing but from opposite banks o f the same river. W e agreed that advocates o f various violent sys tems can hedge on whatever they wish; those w ho are unwilhng to pay the enormously great price o f freedom and rem ain under tj^anny - under w hich they are granted, at most, only a sort o f tactically circum scribed, illusory freedom becom e crippled in that world. H e said - quietly but w ith the em phasis o f a truism - that he had paid this enorm ous price. Inas much as - at that time - 1 had not yet paid the price, I was silent. But he stubbornly returned to the subject o f freedom. Because it disturbed him ? Because he knew that the enormous price he had paid - he left the sphere, the atmosphere o f his mother tongue, the high est price a writer can pay went for naught he didnt find freedom in exile? In the end, this H ungarian poet returned from thirty years o f exile in the Soviet Union and had experienced the reality there: that so-called freedom which the Communist system granted him. He hadnt com e to know Communism through books

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as had some o f the local H ungarian literary highbrows w ho when the political dam burst after the siege - for getting their peacetime pedagogical, explanatory read ings - scurried breathlessly to push the Communists wagon. This man lived through the purges, he saw his com rades-in-exile disappear in cam ps and places o f ex ecution. Y et now, when our conversation heated up, he persisted in asserting that freedom for the writer lies in Communism hence, not Just in the sense that he can freely extol the Idea or freely criticize those who err in tactical versions o f the m ethods o f the Idea, but free because Com m unism liberates mankind from the slavery o f social class differences, and finally, when the Idea has m aterialized, the State disap pears, and a free classless society exists. Our conversation w as interesting to m e because he was a poet. W hen he shouldered the mendicancy of exile, he w asnt seeking a career for himself; he wanted to be a poet expressing his poetic individuality freely. (Lenin read a book o f poetry by Mayakovsky, w ho com mitted suicide, and then, whispering and shrugging his shoulders, he said to Trotzky: I like Pushkin better.) This poet, the exile, had experienced the pedantic acts o f terror that suffocate intellectually creative individuals in the Soviet Union. W hat had happened to this man who came from yonder? Why was he afraid to adm it that there is no freedom for the intellectually creative being in the Soviet Union? Why did he keep m outhing and reiterating the ideological dogm a? Now, when for the first and last time I not only chatted w ith som eone who came from yonder, but, it seem ed, we talked candidly, I would have liked to find out w hat he w as afraid o f when his replies were so doctrinally and distinctly in harmony with the Party line. Clearly, the conversation interested him, too; it was the jo y o f a starved person who, after ideo logical Yeshiva, finally com es upon a partner, a debat ing colleague who asks and answers candidly. He was

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old; every illusion o f life had leached from him (he died in the third year following our conversation.) Did he fear that the invisible but ever hearkening, snooping Soviet inquisition would some tim e call him to account for this conversation, too? Did we discuss literature? W hat literature is? The pulse o f mystical palpitation that Novalis spoke of? The Goethe an harm ony in which everything blends together, m atter and spirit, in blissful alchemy? The tension, the passion that grows m ore and more refined through work, through expression? H e said the time is past for the writer, too, when a contem porary still had the means o f turning against social change adroitly, rationally or artfully. In reply, I said som e thing like this: m aybe in this overcrowded world, the nationalization o f industrial energy is necessary, and maybe the nationalization o f the means o f distributing the benefits produced by w orkers hands is also essen tial. But what cannot be condoned is the nationaliza tion o f hum an beings. W hat is intolerable is the nation alization o f the spirit. The poetic, literary vision affects the subject matter, society, too; it is reflected in the theme, in the experience: it is not the experience that comes first but the vision that reacts upon life and gives shape to it. H e said, but w ith an unsteady voice, that this was a romantic, a pre-socialist assumption. W hen I cited Renans view that only the truth can be revolutionary, he took note. For a m om ent the hoary scribe, the poet, looked at me. Every poet is a mystic; otherwise he is not a poet, only a rhymster. But there are mystics who dont have a god (Valry w as one). And they long eternally for a divinity w ho signifies in telligence in the Universe. The gleam that flashed in his eyes at the men tion o f truth quickly flickered out. Again the disci plined, dialectical man spoke about how Communism is the absolute truth and every other partial truth fol lows from it. I asked him whether he didnt think that

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now, when the Soviet stood before the world in the triumphant security o f a great power, the time o f which H uizinga speaks had also arrived for writers and artists when in the w aning o f the Middle Ages, the artist wants to see the truth, the many-hued re ality o f the world in place o f scholastic visions. (Our conversation took place at the end o f 1945, hence the period when the w aning o f the Middle A ges was dawning w anly in the Soviet U nion; after all, the ideo logical terror o f Stalin and Zhdanov was still rife.) He didnt answer the question, he began speaking o f some thing else. Com m unism is a revolution, he repeated, and a revolution m akes mistakes, has its victorious and difficult phases; but the Communist revolution will not cease to exist as long as the world fails to per ceive the verity o f the consolidated revolution that Lenin promulgated. I asked him whether it was possible for a per son to rem ain silent in the Soviet Union. In the long run, silence is also one o f the rights o f freedom wher ever freedom exists. H e looked at m e distrustfully and answered warily. In the Soviet Union no need for silence exists, he said, and, besides, the reason why someone is silent is not vitally important, only what he is silent about. To the question o f whether he believed in the possibility o f hum anizing the revolution, he re plied that this is not the task o f the revolution, that the greatest transitional phase o f humanization can be foxmd in the consolidated revolution itself which, like the ocean, continually decontaminates itself, no mat ter w hat is thrown into it. W e got no further; the con versation started to bog down in stagnant dialectical banalities. I began to suspect that the poet had withered away in him. The retired revolutionary remained, the sansculotte en retraite, the superannuated veteran who returned home after m any hardships and wanted to spend his twilight years in peace and comfort. This

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was understandable, but a poet cannot renounce for a pension handout that restlessness which gives signifi cance to his life and work, that com pulsion to give voice to the truth in artistic form. W e said goodbye. The discussion no longer had any meaning. But the memory o f this encounter som etimes recurred because this old Communist poet was the only one o f the retur nees whom the standard classification o f exile did not fit. Later, after tw o decades, when the great relig ious schism built bonfires in the W est, and it was not ju st sensation-starved magazines that proclaim ed on colorful covers that God is dead, there som etimes ap peared a rare and fascinating hum an phenom enon in the procession o f heretics, sectarians and apostates: the atheistic priest. The priest who does not divest h im self o f his clerical garb, resign from the denomination, or preach atheism. He remains a priest, performs his clerical duties correctly, gives confession and holds mass, preserves the secrets o f confession and delivers ser mons. And thus, without any sign of conflict, he lives out his life in priestly status, takes extreme unction and goes to his grave with the blessing o f the church. Why? Because he once swore to uphold something. And then, when he learned that the God to w hom he made his vows is nowhere to be found, he could not ab ju re that vow. H e rem ained a priest. Something o f this sort is also present in the Communists im m anent theological system. There are faithful Communists w ho one day find out that the di vinity in whom they had placed their belief does not exist anywhere. Their response to this staggering dis covery varies. Some perform the melodram a beginning with spit in m y face, friend, and m ake confessions in keeping with the standard norms o f Russian novels. Others becom e exes who look on their disappoint ments as existential reassurance, cross over to the op posite shore, and there teach w ith diligent zeal what

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w as evil in w hat they did when they were Communists to those w ho never were Communists. The exes never understand the atheistic Communist who doesnt believe in anything but stays in place, though he already knows he erred when he took his vows. (Be cause there are individuals who take an oath only once in their lifetim e.) For this reason he stays in the Party, discharges the Party duties entrusted to him and doesnt cast blame on the methods or persons, and when he becomes an atheist, he doesnt disparage any one - he disparages m ostly himself, because he cant ever forgive h im self for not having had the strength to create the God who - he now knows - doesnt exist any where. There have always been individuals who be lieved they were chosen to create God, and then sometimes astounded, sometimes shuddering - real ized that they didnt have the power to do it. They dis covered that Com m unism can become a reality only by evoking an imm anent, false image o f God. Just as reli gions, when they identify themselves with prevailing systems o f power, tried to curb the stimulus for the free generation o f opinions dangerous to them, so are the current econom ic and political power systems the enemies o f free thought in the age o f the masses Com m unism or the post-industrial consum er civilization when they have done everything to keep the human masses - as religions did earlier, in a state o f puerility by conditioning them w ith the m ethods o f terror or those o f technical civilization. There always were founders o f religion w ho m ade people believe that God created m an in H is own image and did not acknowl edge that in reality, m an created God in his own image. There are such atheistic priests. And there are also such Comm unists. Perhaps not ju st a few ... I saw one o f them.

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The expertly trained Hungarian Communists who arrived on the hay racks o f the Russian w ar w ag ons - there wasnt a single atheist am ong them, all of them being selected orthodox party mem bers em barked on their work w ith ironically amiable polite ness. They had learned in the Soviet U nion that ideo logical passions do not operate in Bolshevist politics; instead, a cool, calm grand plan m oving tectonically forms rings. Somewhere in the Kremlin, in its in numerable offices, there was a H ungarian bureau, ju st as there was a Bulgarian, Rum anian, Yugosla vian, Finnish, Germ an bureau and naturally a Korean, Indo-Chinese, Indian and Chinese bureau, and on the floors more to the rear an Italian, French, Norwegian and South Am erican bureau. Extraordinarily well-trained officials sat in these of fices, Soviet tchinovniks who w ent to the office in the morning and, yawning, pulled out some draw er o f a fil ing cabinet, took out a document, and, pencil in hand, began to work. One day it was the Bulgarian conspir acy that had to be disposed of; and when the official in scribed the m ark on the docum ent with a red or blue pencil, it took on life in the world, and a w eek or a year later, Petkov was hanged. Hungarian land distribution or the nationali zation o f industries, banks and commerce was such a document on file in one of the offices; the Kremlins offi cial prepared the docum ent and dispatched it to the registrar, which was then, when its time came, for warded to Budapest, where another official took it over and passed it on - with orders for execution - to the previously posted Hungarian-speaking Commun ists, who, at the proper tim e, set about putting the plan into force. And H ungarian society, which was waiting for the end o f the transitional period w ith op timism, one day read in the newspaper that, in accord-

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anee w ith a Cabinet Decree, they no longer owned the estates that their ancestors had cultivated, the in dustrial com panies that their grandparents had cre ated; that they no longer owned the houses in which they lived, had no right to the positions they secured w ith a diploma, ability and diligence, and that their opinions w erent theirs because their souls w erent theirs either. W hen H ungarian society also found this out the Kremlins official drew the docum ent on the nation alization o f the soul out o f the drawer last - it went into a panic, for it is not possible to live in a system that destroys the hum an conscience. The official in the Krem lin nodded at this news because this possibility was anticipated in the bundle o f documents ju st as every other possibility the hum an brain can conceive was pulled the act out o f the secret drawer and reas signed it as urgent. Then he sent this document to Pest, too, precisely as the executive order stipulated; later, the appropriate officials also attended to this one. The individuals sent to H ungary from Moscow behaved at first amiably, later cynically, always con sistently - like m issionaries carrying out their task in a wild region: they were sent to Hungary to force a pagan people to repent and accept the only redeeming, victorious w orld religion, Communism. Historiography knows that a thousand years ago, when the news spread that the Hungarians received baptism, droves o f official and exceedingly m ore unofficial missionaries overran Hungary. M any o f them came from the city o f Mainz, where, in the ninth century, a deacon named Benedict the Levite organized the irregulars o f the p ro paganda fid e o f the time who smuggled into the m issions territory not only the fixed religious statutes o f the Catechism but also the statutory provisions o f the Frankish Empire. They didnt bring much else, be cause the m ajority o f them were rabble, destitute ad

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venturers; priests im bued w ith a sense o f calling did, o f course, turn up among the m issionaries, but the bulk were a dirty lot who saw the opportunities for ad venture, begging and thievery in the m issionary enter prise. A thousand years later, this m issionary work was repeated in a heathen version, w ith the difference that no one summoned the Communist m issionaries ar riving belatedly from Moscow in Hungary. They ar rived in the wake o f the Red Arm y, slovenly, sta ff in hand, their only luggage a little bundle. They began by pum ping hands. W e have ar rived, they said, grinning broadly and greeting every one with drastvuitye. They were hungry and shabby. They spruced up quickly and began to eat, smacking their lips, and to drive cars, showing off. W ithin a few months after their arrival, they were already living as puffed up as they had never dared to dream during the decades spent in the dire poverty o f Communism. They moved into abandoned m iddle-class dwellings; they took over key positions. One o f them proselytized Socialist workers to unite w ith the Com munists, an other the peasants by dangling the carrot o f nationali zation called land reform in front o f them. These missionaries - as special agents had the alien-spirited, alien-minded regulations o f the Collectio CapitulaHum a thousand years before - sm uggled the promises o f mendacious illusions into the general consciousness o f Hungarians. They knew w hat land reform meant in Soviet reality; after all, they were eyewitnesses when, on orders from the Kremlin, the requisitioning squads slaughtered the Germ an settlers along the Volga and the Kulaks everywhere in the vast em pire; they knew everything from personal experience, they observed the tragedy o f the conversion o f the peasants on the spot. Others o f them evangelized university students; they appeared uninvited on university podiums and expounded the dogma that philosophy, literature and aesthetics, everything the

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hum an spirit created in the W est through two thou sand years w ould now be com prehensible only through the M arxist way o f view ing things. They knew what V iktor Chernov, one o f Lenins associates in the Revol ution, later formulated, that Lenin loved the proleta rian but w ith the same despotic, unmerciful love as centuries earlier Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor, did the Christians he sent to the stake to save their souls. They evangelized and not without success w riters and journalists. They re-educated staff mem bers o f the Socialist newspapers in coiirses o f instruc tion for papers edited in the spirit o f Communism. A ged Socialist journalists diligently attended classes and listened to the tenets expatiating for them how M arxism becam e le n in is m . To m iss a sem inar con stituted a grave error, and the legitim acy o f the ab sence had to be supported by a medical permit. A t first, these spiritual exercises in ideology enraged long-standing Socialist pen-pushers, but they very soon broke down and gave up, because they came to understand that the Doctrine had taken their rebel ling into account, and they were helpless. To the ques tion o f w ho the lecturers were, an old pupil replied sadly: B ocher types . (Just as there were types of shoes, types o f meals.) It didnt take long for H ungarian society to see that the m issionaries, the hypocritical, evangelizing newcom ers were, in reality, the harbingers o f col onizers: as had already so frequently occurred in the history o f colonization, the power intent on taking a territory under its control by force and intrigue first dispatched m issionaries there who carried the Cross around, prom ising Divine Grace. Then, without warn ing, the arm ed colonizers appeared in the wake o f the missionaries and began looting ruthlessly. Here and now, the colonizing Eastern pow er was subsisting on the very same methods. H ungarian society understood that the State

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had turned into a hostile pow er against which the people had to protect themselves in every way possible. This so-called State that the Communists threw together with panting zeal was not the reality in the cohesive sense o f the word; everything was fluid, nothing had a backbone; everything w as gelatinous, sphere and function. Laws and regulations no longer had actual validity, and law can exist only where law provides protection, not ju st attack. People saw that law no longer protected them; it ju st issued an order and took away w hat belonged to them. This was why they began living in a state o f constant self-defense. They defended themselves against the State as best they could, because it was evident that society had reached the epoch o f institutionalized banditry. People saw the m issionaries gathering up the books that the system considered undesirable and lock ing them up in cellars; the m om ent inevitably follows when the authors o f the undesirable books are also locked up in cellars. And then come the readers who read undesirable books and so on, very logically. But during the first two years, the missionaries were still cautious, because they knew that this evan gelistic colonization, this lucrative fieldwork could be conducted only while they enjoyed the R ed Arm ys pro tection. In any event, they hurriedly began to imitate everything that was repugnant in the old social hier archy. For instance, they started to hunt. Now, hunt ing is an ancient, m anly pursuit, but w hen the news appeared in the papers that the Communists who re turned from M oscow had organized a battue in the Bakony and the Matra, H ungarian readers took note, be cause the super-baroque battue-hunt was a m ark o f the N ew Classs conquest. And this New Class as sumed the privileges o f the Old Class with meticulous, pompous formality. The use o f thou, for instance. The H ungarian use o f thou was one o f the peculiar, distorted oddities o f a past society. The peasants didnt

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use the thou am ong themselves, ju s t the old with the younger ones; workers didnt use it either. The gen teel used the thou ; indeed, am ong them it was an af front i f one gentlem an didnt address another totally unknown gentlem an as thou. Naturally, middleclass Christians theed and thoued differently, and so did the Jews, bu t it did happen that the Jewish ch ie f councilor to the prim e minister, who lived in an apartment house w ith Christian councilors to m inis ters, was all ears in the elevator, on the way to the of fice, in case a thouing or theeing dropped on him be tween tw o floors, enabling him to report the office: I presented to m y friend, His Lordship X, m y plan for the electrification o f Veszprm , and do you know what he replied? H e said, Thou art right, Rezsd. Ill call His Excellencys attention to thy plan. The significance of the fam iliar pronoun w as that the one who used it and the one so addressed both belonged to the Privileged Class. But when it cam e to the janitor, who some tim es was as fine a hum an being and H ungarian as the ch ief councilor to the prime m inister and the minis terial councilor, not one o f them thoued him because, well, there w as no reason to. H e didnt belong to their class. The m issionaries o f the N ew Class thoud and theed and called each other by nicknames; they pub licly called each other M atyi and Zoli. The so-called 100 000 persons, whom Czech intellectuals desig nated as the business federation allies o f the Commun ists in a famous m em orandum twenty years later, hur ried eagerly to fraternize with the couple o f hundred who arrived from M oscow w ith the mandate, in addi tion to other item s on the agenda, to organize this trustworthy cadre. (Possibly, the num ber is not quite accurate; but it is likely that the estimated component is largely correct. Alw ays even in societies with a large population - the number o f those w ho are by no m eans Com m unists but who attach themselves to

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the Communists for rake-offs and favors, out o f hunger for a position, out o f vanity, greed or desire for revenge amounts to about 100 000. And everywhere they are permitted to dip into the m eat pot.) W ho were these proselytes? Three characteris tic types could be detected. First o f all, the Faithful Progressives, who believed in the Idea. N ot even all the lessons o f several decades o f Soviet history con vinced them that the Idea was obsolete and anti human, that new systems o f production, distribution and ownership had since developed in the world which were able to help the working masses m ore quickly and fairly than the hundred-year-old Idea dictated. They, the single-text individuals, believed in the Idea with a tenacious, shortsighted and anti-intellectual ob stinacy; they did not want any debate or counter-argu ments; they turned away i f someone held up to them the reality proving that in the age o f mass growth, in dustrial revolution, and earth-shaking technological changes, Communistic theory, responding to the phe nomena o f the preceding century o f m onopolistic capi talism, was obsolete and meaningless. They didnt want to know about anything that materialized with such uncanny rapidity in the twentieth century be cause they wanted to believe in the H oly Scripture o f outworn parchments sm uggled through the nine teenth century, in the Idea. These spiritually impover ished who took it for gospel that the Kingdom o f Heaven was theirs were not great in num ber but, in the long run, imbeciles are always found everyw h ere, and they can be dangerous when they cast their lot with Authority. Then there were the cynical, overbearing fellow travelers w ho w erent imbeciles when they admitted: I know what this banditry is; I know its not for the benefit o f the working masses that they deprive men o f the rights to private ownership and free enterprise and political and intellectual freedom ; it is, rather,

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through this pretext that they bring into existence the prim itive econom ic system which provides the oppor tunity for a cjoiical and overbearing minority to live well w ithout any exertion o f character or talent on their part. Possibly, it will come to a bad end because the undertaking is inhum ane, but it will do for me. W ell then, davai, com e, Ill join them . These w ere m ore num erous than the imbeciles, but they didnt make up the majority either. The great bulk o f the auxiliary arm y o f the hundreds o f thou sands who join ed up w ith the Communists - not just in countries the Com m unists attacked w ith armed force or som e arbitrary stratagem but in other places and everywhere in the free W est - consisted o f neu rotic intellectuals who never dread anything more than the danger o f being com pelled to remain alone w ith their neuroses in the maelstrom o f radical change. The neurotics who repair to the Party because they cant and dont dare to remain alone, who have to belong som ewhere, w ho relax only when they can wrap them selves up in a piece o f the m agic cloak and don the current social and ideological uniform. Just as there are neuropaths given to fits o f fury who im medi ately calm down when they can dress in the nurses white sm ock or put on the soldiers uniform or a monks cowl, so do they relax because in the moment w hen they are protected by a secular or monastic uni form, they are no longer alone w ith the fearsome re sponsibilities o f the hum an personality. The neurotics w ho push themselves forward whim peringly because belonging som ewhere is their sole source o f relief form ed the bulk o f the auxiliary arm y o f the hundred thousand. The old, orthodox, trained Communists knew this, and they encouraged the auxiliary forces affably, egged them on and kept in viting them in, theeing and thouing them. Later, during the gang wars, they cut the throats o f m ost of them because dictatorial systems dont trust anyone,

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and they arent so relentless, so merciless w ith anyone as they are with those fellow travelers who did not pay into the account in the past but show ed up later, w anting to cash in and achieve their goals. The union that the Communists tendered - the opening round in the extermination o f the intellectual and leadership echelon o f the Social Dem ocrats - this trap was one o f the logical transm ittals o f their ruthless hatred. The workers looked on aghast as an intim i dated or pushily role-hungry group o f Social Dem o crats agreed to the castration o f the only organization able to defend the workers, the trade union. The united New Class had already begun to ap pear before the public socially its m embers gave par ties, they put them selves on display in proscenium stage-boxes at gala perform ances at the Opera House. Air bombs and shells had pulverized the National Ca sino, that citadel o f unhappy memories for the Hungar ian aristocracy; but the N ew Casino shortly opened, whose members came from the upper two hundred chosen from the hundred thousand, hence the Com munist lite and the Socialists who united w ith them and then writers, journalists and artists who didnt dare to turn down the gracious invitation or elbowed their way for admittance into the New Casinos cham bers, which were abundantly packed w ith everything good and delightful. Quickly, within ju st a few months, the new cari cature materialized in the wake o f the caricature o f the old social hierarchy that had been destroyed: the Exclusive Party Casino took the place o f the National Casino, and the puffed-up, m ooching arrivistes, the pocket-sized undersecretaries and the minipotentates supplanted the lazy counts and the swaggerers o f the idle plutocracy. A dy ridiculed the privileged class of old Hungary as the hom unculi o f the moment; these new notables greedily hurried to participate, to stuff their pockets and bellies because they w ere only men

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o f the second w ho knew it is expedient to measure the time span o f their prospects w ith a stopwatch. They knew that the Lent o f the Red Carnival could arrive for them at any instant: they feared not their adver saries o f the destroyed past but their patrons, the Com munists. The fellow traveler w ho with his upholding o f principle but his splitting the take w ith the Mafia is, in the end, always the first to be put out o f the way when the M afia no longer needs him. And Mafia battles are frequently m ore bloody and ruthless than regular clashes. I was talking w ith one o f these fellow travelers on the m orning when - in the spring o f 1948 - the Red radio in Pest first began blasting T itos chained dogs. H e looked m e up at m y hom e. H e was pale. This is the worst disaster that could strike Socialism, he stam mered. The great break, the schism in the Communist world would becom e public on this day. Stalin issued the com m and to com mence a w ar o f extermination against T ito and everyone who wanted to be free and independent o f M oscows supremacy, o f its despotic authority. M y visitor had behaved admirably during the Nazi period when, because o f his lineage and con victions, he, too, had shared the fate o f the persecuted: he courageously rescued innocent victim s, and now when the tim e came, he w as helping, ju st as bravely and hum anely, everyone in the danger zone o f the Red terror who needed his assistance. H e was a Social Democrat, and was entrusted w ith the editorship o f a Socialist daily. W hen the Communists announced the union, he could not protect h im self from the terror; gnashing his teeth and filled with loathing, he stood on the platform and united. H e knew this undertak ing was a form o f oral suicide, but he could not shield him self against it. T h is is a tragedy, he stammered. I accom panied him to the street. A sign was posted at the com er; it depicted Tito, the bemedaled, fat-chested Balkan general in a dress uniform who a

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few w eeks earlier had visited Budapest and was w el comed w ith a big parade. W e looked at the weather worn w all poster, I asked him w hat he thought, w hat are the Communist furnishings shipped hom e from Moscow like? Are there any gentlemen am ong them? My visitor, an intelligent m an, im mediately imderstood what I was driving at. The gentlem an is a rare human phenomenon in every society - not the escutcheoned, monocled, grandstanding club m em ber but the one who, regardless o f his social position, knows the motto o f the Prince o f W aless coat-of-arm s: Ich dien. And he has heard o f the Samurai rule that commands: Keep your word even i f you have given it to a dog. (This kind o f gentleman is always rare, but some turned up in Hungary, too.) M y acquaintance re flected. Then, gloomily, he declared: Gentlemen? A m ong these? Not a one. He stated this as categorically as Mencken, the American essayist who in the thirties bitterly asserted in one o f his studies that you cant work with the Com munists because there isnt a gentlem an among them . I asked him , i f this was true, then w hy did he collabor ate with them? Because I am a politician, he said. And you cannot conduct politics with gentlemen. H e went away palely, back to the editorial offices o f the Social ist paper, to unite. Shortly afterwards, at the time o f the Rajk case, he w as arrested, and the Communist court o f martial law sentenced him to seven years in prison.

20
... Like the gam bler who has lost at poker Searches fo r a gun in the pocket o f his dress trousers

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To p a y a gentlem ans debt, when a voice cries: N o t yet!../ Sit back, reflect upon the world. What is left? The moon, China, the fjords Threadbare and dying, Saint Francis was happy You lost, stand up and take y o u r leave. Once again y o u can lift you r eyes to the star..."

21
But w here w as this Star? I saw no guiding star either in the heavens or on earth. Many things hap pened every day. A n d one day I sensed w ith shock that som ething was happening to me, too: I sensed I w as apathetic. A pathy is very dangerous. It is amoral and anti-life. U ntil then I had never in m y life been apa thetic. I lived through one thing and another in my own way. B ut I never knew apathy. I looked at myself, then I looked around and wondered what had hap pened to me. Only later did I understand I was apathetic be cause a generalized depravity, a stupid and mulish lack o f integrity encompassed me. Nothing is so apa thetic as sin. Satan est p u r," wrote Maritain. Yes, Satan is pure because he doesnt lie: the only thing he wants is Sin. But Sin is stupid and apathetic.

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PART THREE

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"There is a grain o f madness in every separation" Goethe

A n invitation from abroad in the w inter o f 1946 presented m e w ith the opportunity to travel to Switzer land and from there to Italy and Paris. It w as a group invitation at the time it w as difficult for ordinary mortals to go abroad in any other way - but I accepted it because I felt an urgent need for a change o f air. Six o f us traveled together, one less than the seven wicked: m y companions consisted o f two painters, a sculptor, a folk poet, and a cultured, literature-loving college teacher. In Switzerland, the mem bers o f the party split up, each heading o ff to find his own, per sonal Europe. For me this journey w as a cold, shivery ordeal. In the second year after the war, Europe had a snar ling guilty conscience. In Switzerland, the choleric abundance induced the traveler venturing forth from the ruins o f Eastern Europe to retch. The Swiss border guard scrutinized our H ungarian passports with very hostile suspicion, as i f every traveler com ing from that region was a spy, currency sm uggler. Communist agent or drug trafficker. (Or m ore sim ply, a disease carrier, and sometimes there w as some truth in this mistrustful supposition.) Yet, once again here was Switzerland, the abundance o f a m agically spread table, in tangible reality: the brightly lighted streets, the artistically designed watches in the shop windows, the bicycles parked heedlessly along the sidewalks... and the traveler arriving from the other side o f the Iron Curtain was forced to think about w hat a Russian would give to catch a glimpse o f the opportunities for looting that this fabulously lavish display presented. This was the neutral Switzerland that stood fast with honor amid great dangers and temptations, and the traveler who came from over there listened, hemming-and-hawing, to the Swisss confidential render ing o f accounts, to the effect that everything and

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everyone here wasnt as above reproach as it appeared on surface, that those who dickered w ith the Nazis w ere found here, too. But how could that m atter when this little country as a w hole rem ained faithful to neu trality and the ideals o f national autonom y so bravely and consistently? I strolled the streets o f Zurich and Geneva and occasionally glanced around, blinking re spectfully: Y ou see, it is possible for a sm all nation to stand fast honorably in a grave geopolitical situation. Still, everything considered, there w as some thing im probable and wonderful about this trip. Here I w as in W estern Europe again! I had survived the war, crawled out o f the pit, out o f the shame, and, despite it all, I was in W estern Europe once again! As long ago, I was traveling again at every opportunity; and it came to me that there was a tim e when I, conceitedly, m ain tained that the real significance o f traveling lay not in the arrival but in the journey. (Now, after the histori cal detention, m om ents cropped up along the way w hen I felt that the change o f place was not important, nor even the arrival, nor when the train is departing and what its destination is, b u t solely w hat sets out within us during the journey. A t the same time, a cer tain quandary, a sickening ignorance accompanied me on this trip, and never left me along the way: W as it worth setting out once again to tam per with, to disturb that extraordinary indifference, that quietude o f sev eral years into which m any things that formerly seemed im portant had already sunk?) Like water in a puddle reacting to the course of the wind w ith quickly ruffling waves, I sometimes shivered and strolled w ith a goose-pim ply repugnance the lovely, clean Swiss streets undam aged and lined w ith every w orldly good. It was gratifying to encounter the businessm an again; I doffed m y hat to him, be cause at hom e I already missed the presence o f this phenomenon. Every social system thus the so-called socialist system , too is helpless without the business

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man, and the biggest mistake o f Eastern Socialism oc curs when it declares a m ilitary crusade against the profit-hungry businessman, excludes the independ ent middleman o f business from society, and wants to replace him with state employees w ho are bureau crats, lazy, often corrupt, and always laggardly and in competent because they cannot foster dem ands in the consum ing masses, and without demand social devel opment cannot take place: the typical businessman who forces the buyer to accept typical goods is not a businessman, he is a general retailer. But now, here at last, face to face stood the sm iling and courteous Swiss businessman who didnt want to force shoddy goods on the uninform ed customer; he offered quality and va riety instead. I made m y selections from the stack o f goods, and incidentally but respectfully thought about the ancestors o f the businessman, about the Venetian merchants who launched the barter-in-kind modern chains tore at great risk and thus with large mark-ups, about the Lbeck businessm an who invented the bill o f exchange and no longer trotted o ff personally to the Novgorod fair. After the spasmodic rigidity o f the Scho lastic M iddle Ages, it was not only the humanists burned at the stake but also the businessmen who helped to make the new Europe a reality. Behind the tragically contorted face o f Giordano Bruno appeared, in the European sphere, the w ily visage o f Jacques Coeur, the businessman in Bruges, as he pottered about behind the counter. A n d now this visage once again looked at the customer w ho happened to wander into the shops in Zurich and Geneva. I reciprocated the gracious offering with grateful readiness and quickly bought an electric razor. I didnt feel at hom e in Switzerland. A t the same time, flashes o f consciousness constantly re minded m e that som ething still bound m e to this sterile, cadaverous-smelling, so to speak, formalinized Europe. D ostoevsky vociferously urged his

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countrjnnen not to em brace Europe because sooner or later they would contract an infection from a corpse. Well, now they are embracing, I thought w ith mordant satisfaction. (When he visited Stalin in Moscow, a Swiss m inister nam ed Schuman noted that during their conversation, the Russian dictator examined a m ap o f Europe and Asia, then laid his palm on Europe and said regretfully: How sm all Europe is!... He didnt say this sarcastically, but rather in an earnest, business-like m anner.) W hat w as it that drew, that bound me here, the fringe European? (And was 1 truly European, like a Swiss? A Frenchman? A German? W asnt there distrust and caution in our European nos talgia as we lived at home beyond every approach, be yond the struggle o f som etimes valiant generations?) W hat binds m e here? I thought, and I bought m yself a ballpoint, a new type o f fountain pen. Memories o f a civilization dying out? These are mere words. But perhaps it was the m em ory o f collective crimes - the consciousness that w e w ere all guilty, Europeans, East erners and W esterners, because we lived here and tol erated, allowed everything to reach the point it did. In this realization there was also a sense o f being an ac complice, m ore real than every other feeling and illu sion; we w ere guilty because we were Europeans and w e tolerated the destruction o f humanism in the con sciousness o f European man. For so I felt then and often thereafter - this was Europes great gift to m ankinds domain: human ism. The concept had an ideological flavor, it gave off the smell o f libraries. There were great cultures, rem ote civilizations that created moral and metaphysi cal concepts o f the universe, but only in Europe was hu manism a living im perative shaping life, hum an des tiny, intellectual attitudes and social coexistence. W hat is hum anism ? The m easure o f man. It holds that the individual is the m easure o f all things. The in dividual is the significant elem ent o f development. (If

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indeed there is such a thing as development if it is at all possible for man to rule over the instincts he brought with him from the cave.) The hum an attitude which does not hope for a supernatural reply to the problem o f death and does not expect solutions to human problems from superhuman powers: a twolegged mammal abandoned and shaped by blind, ac cidental will in an indifferent and hostile universe, man is the only living creature who can find his way in the world independently o f his instincts. The hum an was m issing now. It was this that perished in Europe. {Where did it perish? In the gas chambers at Ausch witz, in the mass grave at Katyn, in the hell o f Russian and Germ an prison camps, or in the ruins o f Dresden and Coventry, in the thickets o f the M aquis? All such questions are rhetorical, purely nominal questions.) But the feeling that som ething w as m issing was real. W alking the well-swept Swiss streets adorned with resplendent displays I felt like som eone who had been robbed. As i f I should check m y pocket to see i f it was still there ... but what? The humanism that is not a classical-philosophical, cultural-historical facti tious concept. Now, when I again traveled to the West, this is w hat was m issing in everything in the reality, the books, the questions and answers o f individuals. (The concept was form ulated here four hundred years ago, and the two intellectual earthquakes which pro duced a cultural complex from tongue o f Asiatic land in Europe - the Renaissance and the Reform ation first appeared in the hum anists consciousness.) The Russians never experienced the Renaissance, nor the Reformation, because they were not hum anists; the Russian philanthropist never sought the hum an measure, but always the extreme, the im moderate, the inhuman - this, too, came to m y m ind on the streets of Zurich during m y strolls through the incidental associ ation o f ideas. (W ell, this died out, I thought abstrac tedly, the humanist died out in Europe like the bison

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in the Polish forests. In Europe everyone who believes in man is suspect: w hat is he really after when he still professes a b elief in man?) W hat the hum anists - Erasmus, Pirckheimer, Thomas M ore and a host o f others proclaimed, that great m essage no longer exercised any influence, I thought o f this, too. (Pirckheim er and the names o f the others didnt occur to m e on the streets o f Zurich; I only now write them down at a later date out o f a desire for precision.) But w hat did they really want four hundred years later, those who believed they are humanists because they are Europeans writers, friends o f the people, occasionally a specialist who desired som ething beyond the exact, something that could be termed developm ent? They didnt want the System to be the measure no m atter w hat sort o f re ligious or political, econom ic or social System it was but M an himself. This didnt succeed, I thought, looking around. I saw only System s everywhere. Switzerland had a pre cise system. Trains were already running on time in Europe. But toward the end o f the second week, I was wandering the streets o f Zurich in an acute nervous crisis. The hotel was well-heated; but nothing around m e warm ed m e from the inside. I thought about cut ting the trip short and heading back early to chilly, oc cupied Budapest stagnating in destitution. But I stayed on, and I consoled m yself with the thought that for m e Europe represents not only humanism, which no longer exists, but also everything w hose m em ory oc casionally flashed dim ly in m y mind even in the par alyzed languor o f the w ar: the inform ed passion. There once existed a passionate Europe when humans didnt ju st want to know, they also wanted to be passionate. Passionate for w hat?... For Illusions, thus for God. Or for love, because they saw creative energy in love. Or for the erotic harm ony o f Beauty and Proportion. And what did they search for? N ot ju st the Truth, but the

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noble and lively adventure that Passion incites, be cause they wanted Erudition, and erudition is not possible without passion. The adventure that will turn into art or tragedy. The salon tipsiness o f the spirit and the thoughts formulated w ith crystalline lam bency. The wisely, harm oniously aged and magnificent cities where people lived who wanted not only to reside but live in their houses, who didnt believe that chem i cal fertilizer was ju st as im portant as counterpoint, and who didnt list genius on the stock market, like cattle for slaughter when the price o f m eat rises, measuring it instead by the opposition that genius so excellently conjures up. To put it plainly, there once was another Europe. I must search for it, I kept urging myself. And I left well-heated, neutral Switzerland for unheated, untidy and defeated Italy. The train reached the Italian border after m id night, and it took some time before the officials allowed it to m ove on. Everyone was suspect then, every train, the passengers and also the baggage. But the Swiss border guard, as if sensing that staying out o f something can be a heroic deed or a dishonor able act, was politely perfunctory when he looked into the compartment. Dont be ashamed you stayed out, I thought when he closed the door. There are shocks and endeavors that carry hum anity forward and higher - charm ing Switzerland locked am ong peaks, where people always lived in a state o f historical short ness o f breath and moral claustrophobia, did not become higher, but safely rem ained w hat it was. And ultimately survival is ju st as heroic as the suffocating search for truth. There are controversies which can be won only at the higher level; during the past century, this little island o f Europe clung tenaciously and con sistently to the possibility o f victory in a higher-level case. Dont be ashamed you stayed out o f it - this is what I mumbled soundlessly but with conviction after the Swiss border guard - It is enough that I was

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there and couldnt help. Dont be ashamed that with distrust and a bad conscience you guard the craggy bor ders o f a little country where a people had the courage to say no whatever the consequences. And dont be ashamed either that you live under capitalism, under a system called by this sort o f old-fashioned, lavenderscented word, because, above all, this system functions in a m anner producing contentm ent noiselessly and visibly. Everywhere well-paid beings do their work and no one plunders. Dont be ashamed you arent a hero this was w hat I thought in the dark. And I looked out the window because the train had finally started and crossed from neutral Switzerland into de feated Italy. I heaved a sigh o f relief. Everything was fam iliar here, more hum an and open than in Switzerland, where the inhabitants passed the history examination w ith distinction. A t least the Italians did not insist they were innocent. Naturally, everyone w ith whom I exchanged w ords was a resistance fighter, but, at the same time, m ost o f them readily admitted that for twenty years nearly all Italians with few exceptions were Fascists. Moreover, they were poor; the tat tered poverty o f the lost w ar shrieked on the streets and in the hom es, and it was perhaps precisely for this reason that they were cordial and human. I traveled to Rome, from there to Naples. The sun shined on Posillipo. The m em ory o f this sunshine accom panied m e on the rest o f m y journey; it came home w ith m e to H ungary, to shine there in the dark times that were to follow. On m y journey in the West, the Posillipos sunshine w as the only inviting, conciliat ing reality. I later thought back on this radiance, on this invitation, and when I again set out by then never to return again - I traveled directly here. I plunged headfirst into the Posillipos radiance, like the suicide w ho throws away his life belt after long hesita tion and leaps into the Niagara. Into the Light, the

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pure Light, after the darkness, the idiotic dimness; back into the Light where one cannot deceive and it isnt worth the trouble to lie, where everything radi ates, the true and the false; to face the Light which sometime long ago emanated from here to a dark, primitive Europe. A decade later, I thought o f the vivid light o f the Posillipo in the New York night, in the shivering neon lights. But one can only bathe in the Light, as in the ocean - hum ans cant live in it perm anently because they will be dazed by it. One can live only in half-light - live, hence formulate, and then act. F or this reason, I lengthened m y stride with closed eyes on the Italian hilltop and departed for Paris. A t the French border I was almost put in ja il because the customs officer wor riedly undid every piece o f m y threadbare clothing and wanted to know whether I was sm uggling an3rthing in but what? I didnt know. W hat those who travel from the Light into the darkness generally smuggle?

The train arrived in the City o f Light late at night. Paris was dark, and it felt cold. Everyone was terrifyingly polite to me. It seem ed everyone was con tinually and constrainedly speaking about something else. Everyone asserted he w as without blam e and vic torious. About the reality, that Europe, in its entirety, had lost the war, and a victorious Europe no longer existed - about that no one spoke a word, i f possible. Not even the relentless logic o f the French language could transm it its shafts o f light through the uneasi ness o f our constrained, awkward greetings and the murkiness o f our conversations. Seeing Paris again turned out to be a dreary courtship, nothing more. The memories, the hazy scenes o f m y youthful years o f wandering, the nostal

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gic encounters returned dimly. This surprised me be cause it w as in Paris that I underwent everything that w as a decisive, essential experience in m y life. I had lived the years o f ray youth here: the time w hose m em ory later seem s like the vision o f a robbers adventure, and one can never exactly tell who was the victim and w ho the robber in this robbers adventure. I was young in Paris, and the m em ory o f youth is al ways like a dress rehearsal for a strange tragicomedy. N ow I felt m y way through the dilapidated settings: I w ent to the Rue Dem ours and looked at the house where Lola and I had lived for years; the house, as in all o f Paris, was grim y but escaped undamaged. I en tered the staircase, w here a door opened behind which Mr. H enriquet lived, the superintendent who was a mortician in his spare time and scrutinized the resi dents w ith an expert look, like someone certain that, sooner or later, w earing black clothing and a top hat, he w ould escort them to perm anent accommodations. I went to the Left Bank, to the beginning o f the Rue Vaugirard where, at the corner o f St. M ichaels road, still stood the run-down hotel where, beside the entrance, w orn gold letters engraved on a black enamel plate an nounced that the great invention o f the century, elec tricity, w as already available in the student hotel. Electricity, the engraving proclaimed, and this pre historic find called to m ind the illumination o f youths deep waters, its atmosphere, its smells, that tattered and troubled trance w hich we later think o f as the good and happy tim e. (It wasnt that.) I stopped in front o f a gate and recalled that som ething I believed to be vitally im portant had crossed m y m ind here. (It w asnt that.) I sat down in a caf w here I used to meet or say goodbye to som eone. In reality, I encountered only the years o f m y youth here, and then I bade fare w ell to them as well. Still, here I w as in Paris again, where in the thick sm ells, in the air steeped with the fum es o f

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frying oil, aperitifs and the sm oke o f coarse tobacco, memories o f the pirate world o f youth whirled around me. I roamed the streets o f the Left Bank, and many restless and bad memories o f m y youth flashed dimly in m y mind, the longings and the disappointments, and always the uncertainty beneath it all. It wasnt an idyllic situation for young people to be in Paris after the First W orld War. A t that tim e, when young as now gray-headed - I hoped to obtain an answer from Paris, an answer to doubts persisting at home. People in the W est know m ore because they have lived in hu m anistic culture longer than our part o f the world has. I f not w ith these very same words but w ith the same meaning, whispering, we thus encouraged ourselves at home. And now, when one returned after a long ab sence and great ordeals, he hoped to receive an Answer. But in Paris no one and nothing answered or had changed. It seemed as i f the great city had sur vived the war in a state o f benumbed lockjaw. It seemed - in Paris and everywhere in the W est that people wanted to pick up life where they had left o ff before the war. The very same num bing cus toms, decayed outlooks and ossified obsessions bared their teeth everywhere. The greatest m isfortune to strike the human race to this point, the Second World War, this catastrophe, apocalyptic in its dimensions and vertical devastation, seem ed not to have touched the conscience o f the West. N ot a trace o f m oral reckon ing was to be found anywhere. Like the generation be fore, peace treaties were being drafted in Paris, and, like the generation before, m aps were again being cut up w ith scissors w ith headstrong and intractable short sightedness; historical units, historical econom ic and cultural com munities were being disposed o f on the basis o f skewed statistics. The W est again wanted se curity at any price because no one had learned and no one wanted to know that security cannot be created by

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force and by the deliberate distortion o f facts. And no one mentioned that the great stream o f history had al ready passed by the shores o f Europe. (Everyone knew it had, i f not with their m inds, then with their guts; but no one talked about it.) The m aps were redrawn, and again the West sought revenge, not justice. Some W estern politicians had disappeared - in the concentration camps, through em igration or on the scaffold - but otherwise and generally, the old set o f hum an furnishings swag gered, swarm ed and m outhed the same old slogans everywhere. Settling o f accounts and reckonings were scream ed and stam m ered in parliaments, newspapers, mass meetings and cafs, as if the W est didnt know that a powerful world concept still centered in Europe before the Second W orld W ar was completely finished. I conversed w ith the French, some English and Am ericans. A m ong them , not one turned up to point out to m e - the w riter from Eastern Europe who was in the W est by chance - the fact that the w hite mans four-hundred-year dom ination o f the world was at an end, that w hat w as now beginning in the world could not be secured through artificially drawn treaties. Later, when I thought back in Am erica on these troubling encounters in Switzerland, Rome, and Paris, I perceived som ething eerie in the ingenuousness that W estern M an and uncom m only well-educated per sons reflecting w ith wide perspectives who turned up among m y conversational partners - did not know, or did not w ant to know about the change beyond all con ceivable importance and speed that had, in a short time, after tw o decades, materialized in the world. Every one o f them had already half-heard something about new inventions and instrum ents and processes in progress; but in the period imm ediately following the Second W orld W ar very rare was the informed indi vidual who suspected that the forms and possibilities for human coexistence known to that time would

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perish in the technological revolution. The atom bomb had already exploded, and hum an beings looked with horror and hope at the mushroom cloud in which the specter o f global annihilation swirled but in which an energy prom oting a new, peaceful existence for a boundless expanse o f tim e also pulsated. Radar, radio and penicillin were already commonplace, but no one dreamt that new inventions - television, the computer, jet-powered airplanes and antibiotics alongside the m odem symptoms o f over-population and aging, the globally instantaneous com munication, the production and distribution, and the wondrous and dreadful para phernalia o f post-industrial civilization, were no longer the visions o f technicians and biologists, but a formulated and implemented reality. No one spoke about the fact that this new civilization, so completely different from any that had gone before, would materi alize not sometime in the distant future but in the pres ent. Change was always occurring, but while man moved from four legs to two, then switched from the horse to the wagon w ith wheels, from the w agon to the steam engine, then the exploding motor, centuries, sometimes millennia passed, giving mankind the means and the time to adapt, to become accustom ed to the change. Now, no one surm ised that the future, the change, like the arrow o f God, would strike unexpec tedly and abruptly in the slothful and m oldy present. Only the specialists, the initiates in the labora tories knew about this; they knew that the till then un surmised, unsuspected possibilities o f transportation, communication and increased industrial and agricul tural production never m aterialized in a finished or half-finished condition in any period o f developm ent but no one spoke about the consequences. (And today the contemporaries the beneficiaries and the van quished o f the new civilization, the criminals respon sible for the polluted fresh waters, oceans filled with swill and other outrages against a w ithering nature,

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what do we know, w hat do we surmise about the fu ture, which is already here and will become reality in the lifetime o f a generation?) Sluggish propeller-driven planes flew above the ocean, rockets were frequently mentioned, like the w ar ju n k o f bad memories, but no one thought that in a few years these rockets would transport m an to the moon. N o one suspected that a civilization had ended, and that w hat had already ma terialized in peace was not an alteration o f civilization but a new world concept to which mankind would not have the time to adapt. For this reason, we ju st sat around on the terrace o f the Parisian caf, in February 1947, friends and acquaintances, and I heard them say that the tim e had irrevocably com e to create order in Europe. Back home, in the hovels o f the w ar and m ili tary occupation, a m em ory o f Paris had appeared vaguely to me, a place w here people lived more closely to w hat is m odern, where they formulated ideas m ore quickly and precisely than w e did. Then after the w ar, so we hoped, we would find in Paris w hat was al ready flickering in our own regions or had actually gone out: the courageous and precisely composed selfcriticism, the m oral reckoning unlike the humiliating stammer wrested from one with the instrum ents o f the police by despotic systems but the voluntary showing o f ones true colors from which cleansing and catharsis ensue. Perhaps in Paris, so I hoped, som ething o f the fearless, uninhibited sincerity o f youth would once again reappear. A great people, the French, overcame horrible ordeals; they could respond to this severe trial only with deliberate self-criticism. In the future, the French will, perhaps, be proud instead o f vain, act m ore than talk, be m ore considerate o f strangers and m ore critical o f themselves. I roam ed about Paris, searching not so m uch for a lost time, the past, as for the present. But this present was pedantic, regressive, illiberal, intractable. And no one mentioned the fact

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that the future was already knocking on the door and that everything they wanted to resuscitate from the ob sessions o f the past was pitifully outmoded. People hadnt learned anything (when do they ever?;) - this was how I consoled myself; m aybe the books had! The encounter with the books o f the West! - for m e this was the real significance o f m y journey. In H ungary - during and follow ing the war, we re garded western books as precious and rare contra band. H ere in Paris, two years after the weapons fell si lent, printing presses were operating at m axim um rev olutions per minute. I stood longingly in front o f the displays o f long-established booksellers and eagerly en tered the Parisian bookstores. Behind the counters stood the fam iliar proprietors, the old guardsm en who not only sold books but sometimes read them, and some recognized the returning prodigal son and greeted m e w ith affable deference. W hen I asked them for advice and inform ation after the protracted shortcircuiting o f m y intellect about where I should com mence m y re acquaintance w ith books, one or other o f them, shrugging shoulders, acknowledged that books are abundant but that nowadays there was something wrong w ith them. There were too many books, they said, grum bling w ith professional discontent. W hen I began leafing through books and decid ing which ones to buy, I understood the reason for their complaining. During m y studious turning o f pages, m y suspicion that some affliction had befallen books in the W est grew. Apparently, som ething else had also happened, not ju st that W estern book pub lishing, liberated from the wars straitjacket, tetanic isolation, censorship and scarcity o f raw materials, had, in jittery and greedy haste, flung on the market everything that asked for permission to speak up at long last, that wanted to reach light from darkness no, something had happened to the book as a literary form. It seemed as i f the book no longer sprang from

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ideas, nerves, m em ories and mu sings but from ersatz materials; ersatz products o f the intellect proliferated, hunched, piled up in the shop windows. It was not trash ; it was som ething else. Trash has always existed, but at least it was open about what it was, it never covered the true face o f literature. This para-literature now gushing forth like an intellectual tidal wave inundated everything, including the critical col umns o f newspapers and periodicals. To m e, French literature was w hat opium was to the addict, the sober stupor o f the intellect. A t this time, im m ediately after the W orld W ar, technical lit erature w as still not suffocating bellesdettres as it w ould ten years later; a belles literature still existed that wasnt asham ed to be beautiful. But the suspicion that people were no longer expecting answers to their problems to com e from im aginative literature spread atmospherically in the bookstores and libraries. I still rem em ber the expectant excitem ent o f youthful years those o f the centurys and m y own concurrent youth when, some decades before, the evangelical good news spread that a great work was being prepared in a writers study: a great writer was at work in England, Italy, France or Germ any crowning his lifework. And this was truly good new s, an evangelical message. A generation still believed in literature; its members were still confident that books could m inister to their needs. The great generation o f French writers was still living- Im m ediately following the w ar, the rumor was that great literary works were being written. But the roster o f names did not convince one that the crisis of the book could be staved o ff forever. The great names prom ised nothing that encouraged anyone to hope that books could still furnish answers. W ho was still on the scene after the Second W orld W ar? Who had survived the past quarter o f the century? Valry was still living, and his sowing the sparks o f his genius on the Mediter

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ranean shore occasionally glittered. Gides honesty, that concentrated intellectual solution w ith chemical strength, still had an impact. The one-book Camus (The Rebel, this was his book) asked to speak, but he didnt have enough time left to put down w hat he wanted to say. Giraudouxs fireworks had already ex ploded repeatedly, and Martin Du Gard moved into the Pantheon o f m iddle-class literature, receiving a place alongside Flaubert and M aupassant, where like the engraving on the base o f patriotic statues the blurb warns the public that urinating on the m onu ments is forbidden, defense d uriner. M alraux was al ready debating whether he should remain a writer or strike out as a condottiere w ith pension rights in the procession o f a paranoid dictatorship covered with a fig le a f M ontherlant invariably asserted that he is in the full vigor o f manhood, potens. A t least this was amusing. And in the background, in a mythical dim en sion, Prousts shadow grew; this powerful, frightening and prodigious inferno whirled whose sulfurous smoke also enveloped the social horrors o f the century Prousts work, the conclusion and consum m ation of everything the great generation and French literature created. But the book itself, so it seem ed, no longer held that place o f trust which not long ago still gave it decisive say and power. And there w as something frightening about this. Later, I recollected this first shock, and I com forted m yself by thinking that m y stupefaction was naive, shortsighted. But the next tw o decades proved I had instinctively surmised the danger: the book changed in its essence. Books proliferated abnorm ally (as did the individuals who read and the writers who wrote), and the mass book for mass m an was merely an expedient, like vitamins, the radio or the auto mobile. Everyone owned books, but increasingly fewer persons looked to them for answers. They expected knowledge or entertainment or astonishment, scandal

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or lurid experience, but only a few hoped for answers. And not only because in the paper boom following the w ar profit-greedy m iddlem en threw print paper on the m arket by the truckloads, but because for humans the liturgy o f reading changed not only in content but in lit erary form. People adapted themselves reluctantly to different, pagan liturgies; a picture civilization re placed print civilization so w ise m en later diagnosed the phenomenon- (And the picture doesnt have to be understood, its enough ju st to look at it, with gaping mouth, w ithout intellectual effort.) Truth existed in everything. But it wasnt this that was frightening. Ever m ore books streamed from book factories; writers, in increasing num bers and works, wrote by the job; new genres came into existence: the industry o f posthum ous letters and biographical Stahanovism flourished. But ever fewer persons had faith in the book. And without faith there is no literature. Pascal still believed that the hum an heart is one o f the supreme organs o f the cognitive faculties, like the intellectual faculty and those o f seeing, hear ing, touching and tasting. Man discovers the meaning o f phenom ena and m ass not ju st w ith his intellect but also w ith his heart - this is w hat he believed. Pascal w as a great poet, not ju st a m an o f learning; he also reasoned w ith his heart when he investigated num bers and their infinite principles. M y long-awaited reunion w ith books in the W est after the war was like that o f someone encounter ing after a long absence a dear acquaintance who, he knows, lived through storm y times in comparative safety. And now, at the m om ent o f the encounter, he senses reluctantly that the good friend has suffered some misfortune. There is som ething unfamiliar, strange in his look, manner, bearing. W hat happened to him? Is an illness brewing in his body, perhaps a cancerous, ulcerous process that has not yet mani fested itself, bu t his assaulted constitution is already

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showing signs o f the crisis? W hat did this reunion signiiy? I bought a few books more out o f courtesy than real need with the readiness o f a reflex action; after all, it was finally possible for m e to select freely and to buy W estern books again. But m y anxiety did not lessen the concern that the book (hence the literary form through which Europe spoke w ith its true voice) had changed in its es sence, in its organic reality. It was no longer a Mes sage, only an inform ational medium, a commodity. I began to suspect I wouldnt find in the W est what I came for and perhaps it would not be fruitless for me to return to the place where people still believed in the Book.

After several weeks o f shivery sightseeing in Paris, I decided on the night before m y departure to make a pilgrimage, for the last tim e, to Montparnasse, the artists quarter, where twenty-five years earlier I had lived for years that troubled period o f life not pre cisely definable in calendar terms which people later give the name o f youth. The fam ous bohem ian cafs, the Dme, the Coupole and the Rotonde, still re mained; the hooded iron stove still warm ed the regu lars settled beside the round tables from the wintry streets; the waiter, w ith the unvarying rudeness o f Paris, served the national coffee, that grayish-brown wish-wash which passed for coffee in Paris and which, like everything labeled national, roused the suspi cion that it wasnt w hat it w as called but only resem bled the real thing. Now, too, the guests languished on the terraces of the cafs o f a literary-historical charac ter at little tables piled high w ith saucers, but not a single fam iliar face appeared in the rancid, acrid to bacco smoke o f the caporale. The place, the circumstances, everything was

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extrem ely fam iliar and, at the same time, ominously strange - like a quarter o f a century before, when I was a daily regular at the Dme. There had been six years in m y life - and then w ith recurring rhythms, sometimes even m onths, often w eeks when I, too, hung out at the Dm e nearly every night. Looking around, I now felt the sensation that one experiences in the anxiety at the illusion o f the Bergsonian dj vu: all this I lived not ju st once, but I am reliving it now in the present, in simultaneous reality. Twentyfive years ago, after the First W orld War, we camped here exactly like this: the emigrated, the voluntarily exiled generation separated by opinion and nation ality but still related in tribal complicity - a wild and exotic crowd. Here at the adjoining table sat Una muno, who feared death and hated Primo de Rivera, the faded general in the picture gallery o f Spanish dic tators. Here am ong the tables strolled Pascin, the Bul garian painter who chose his models from the obese residents o f the neighboring bordellos, and afterwards hanged him self in one o f the grim y studios on a street close by. H ere muttered Tihanyi, the Hungarian painter who w as deaf-and-dum b in four languages. H ere hung about Derain and Picasso, w hose names then even the professionals heard only w ith h a lf an ear. H ere sat every evening the chief steward o f the Dada m ovem ent, the monocled Tristan Tzara, with the formal dignity o f a croupier and a pagan priest. Here Ezra Pound gyrated in a red-bearded Buffalo Bill mask, the Quaker offspring, the American poet who came to Europe after the First W orld W ar and de clared that he was a humanist because history is made by hum an beings - for this reason he created a m yth and later built into the Pound myth many ele ments w hich prom inent figures capable o f thought said and wrote som ewhere in some language because hum an utopias flower jointly in literature and art simultaneously, hence without epochs. W orld lit

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erature so Pound believed here in M ontparnasse and later on is an established discourse above place and time between persons w ith the highest talents. (Babits also held this view.) H e produced an epic poem, and like Hom ers, Virgils, and D antes epic poems, Nekyia was the dimension o f Pounds own epic, thus the visit o f the living to the world o f the dead, the search for an answer. Twenty-five years before, Pound was a regu lar in Montparnasse: now his figure materialized, and could not be ignored. He w as always smiling, and there was som ething maniacal and idiotic in that redbearded smile. Later, the Am ericans, literally, locked him in a cage because he delivered war speeches on Mussolinis radio; he spoke against the usury which was a history-making force in the single com bat be tween the Powers o f Light and Darkness. Later, he was taken, shackled, to W ashington and committed as a war criminal to a mental hospital; there, for fourteen years, he walked about w ith his red beard, smiled among the lunatics, and wrote the Cantos, and his wife, Dorothy Shakespear, visited him every day. On his release he returned to Italy, to stroll, smile and listen. A h yes, Pound. H ere in the Dme he discovered the secret o f im age, the secret o f the language o f ges ture and key symbol o f E ast A sian and Japanese poetry: the Poet should not speak in poetry, it should be the Image which the Poet m akes perceptible with words, so that the Poem , at the im pact o f the Image, materializes in the reader. H e stated that a Chinese writer said long ago: The poet who cant say in at most twelve lines what he wants to say would be wiser if he did not write. He translated constantly (like the Hungarians); his knowledge o f languages was gen erally superficial and limited, but still he translated ob stinately from Hebrew, Chinese, Latin, Greek, and Provence because he believed that literature was in terdependent. H e believed that our tim es provide a

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powerful stim ulus and opportunity to literature be cause contacts could be discovered with things that humans only dream t o f earlier; he talked about D is ney, who scented the possibility o f this contact every w here in everything - in animals, beneath the sea, everywhere. Experience is the greatest stimulus o f the vision o f poetry; thus he believed (like Goethe), and he cited Alexander the Great, who commanded the fishermen to relate to Aristotle everything they ex perienced about the life o f fish. H e frequently men tioned Frost ( 0 God, pay attention to m e...!) - this is how one m ust pray, bu t this is also how one must w rite poetry. H e hated the terror o f luxury, ju st as he did the terror o f a m ajority in a democracy. And here in M ontparnasse he w as revising Eliots manuscript, The Wasteland. Pound and Gertrude Stein were the hom eless Am erican writer-generations nursemaids, midwives, patrons and sick-nurses in Paris twentyfive years ago. Now w hen his figure appeared before me, I was disposed to rise from where I was sitting and doff m y hat. Possibly the lunatics were num erous among them (and us). The way Pirandellos H enry IV went m ad playing the role o f the madman. It is certain that Pound was the m ost three-dimensional among the genius m onsters o f that time in Montparnasse. H e be lieved he w ould condense in the Canios-cycle the ancient culture, the experiences innate in all man kind. H e saw the purport o f poetry in the W ord, in the Verb, which is sim ultaneously Flesh and Word. I didnt know him personally, but I saw him every day in the Dm e or Coupole; those who are m oving in a time toward som ething together and simultaneously som ehow never know each other. A contemporary doesnt have a historical face. H ere the young Am erican writers tossed down cheap brandy. Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway with his toothbrush mustache, and m any more who fled

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from dreariness, from com m ercially pseudo-Puritan America to Montparnasse, and learned in Gertrude Steins sem inar on the Seines left bank that literature is the w ord which m ust be repeated so that it will have rhythm and hence turn into energy. (Like the Negro beating the drum? Like that, yes, but the poet not only drums, he is also rem em bering meanwhile.) In 1923, all the expatriates in Montparnasse, in this gypsy settlement were leftists, and not one of them really knew what the true motives o f left-wingism were. In it were disillusionment, lack o f self-con fidence (no one trusted the "m ot ju ste any longer, some other potentially explosive W ord had to be found to replace it); in it were vanity, insatiability, the uncer tainty about role and talent, but som ething else as well- In the tim e after the First W orld W ar, every writer and artist felt that a world had com e to an end around them which they could speak to and believe in, and a measureless nostalgia seduced writers and art ists into belonging somewhere. Left-wingism was the utopian country to which it was possible to be long. (Like today.) H ere tottered Joyce, holding on to his cane, half-blind and penniless, and he blew up words and ideas because he couldnt blow up anything else. Everyone was in pain because a world had col lapsed. The Americans who then (as now) fled across the ocean were ju st as stateless as we, the provincials who left countries closer by; we didnt belong any where either any more. Later, we dispersed. Pound re turned to Italy, from where he wrote to his publisher, Miss Monroe, that here poverty is decent and respect able... unlike America, where poverty is constantly in sulted and scorned. Here, in M ontparnasse he saw that in America poverty is not only an unfavorable so cial condition, but also a form o f anti-American behav ior - society punished the one who is poor; i f not other wise, then by throwing him a monthly welfare check.

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(Because it is possible to punish poverty this way, too - M ade in the U.S.A.) Here T, S. Eliot sauntered along; the poet scur ried among the tables. H e stood out in a way different from Pound. H e didnt grow flam ing red hair; he shaved, had a stove-pipe hat and an umbrella; he dressed unostentatiously and glanced around bespec tacled and nearsighted and in sham efaced alarm, like an Episcopalian divinity student who, having strayed onto forbidden territory, feared that i f seen, he would bring h im self into disrepute with the congregation. He was poor, too, like Pound, but he was poor in a neatly pressed, polished, and polite way. He trod warily among Tristan Tzara and the bulging hirsute of Dada, like a m issionary am ong savages. And actually - it later em erged - that is w hat he was, a missionary. The manuscript he was carrying in his pocket - first drafts o f The W asteland and Four Quartets, from which Pound ruthlessly cut h a lf the lines - converted a gener ation o f poets to a new faith. After E liots verses it was no longer possible to write poetry - not in Montpar nasse or anywhere else either - the way it was at the time o f M allarm and Valry. Dante was his master when, blinking and nearsighted, he created the idea of the m etaphor; he believed Dante was the best school for poets, a Poet who ascended to the Lofty and descended to the Low with a penetrating power like no one else, and could recount w ith the utmost economy w hat he saw in Hell and Heaven. Eliot was also a be liever, but a believer according to his temperament, not conviction; he quoted Pascal, w ho was a Jansenist, from cowardliness because he did not have the strength to reject the supposition that Grace the Grace o f St. Augustine, which is more efficacious than intellect and character - answers everj^hing. And Eliot also knew (he wrote it about Dickens) that there is no drama without melodrama. (As Valry knew it was not possible to write a novel without a sentence

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like this: The marchioness left her home at five in the afternoon, or som ething sim ilar.) In Eliots poems there was some kind o f gravely vibrating lyre behind the text and, at the same time, there w as in his poems an almost journalistic slipperiness and banality as if he were attempting the first writing o f pop poetry. In one o f his poems he spoke o f the edge, o f the moment when the Timeless encounters Time. (The poem came to m y mind because this, too, w as such a moment, twenty-five years later. This encounter is the boundary line: it is the m om ent o f birth and death. That which was formless in the Tim eless receives form in Time, and that which once receives form im mediately begins the process o f decay, o f turning into formlessness, Like everyone then on the ten*aces of the Montparnasse cafs but elsewhere as well, eter nally - the generation sitting here was waiting to re ceive form. Fitzgerald m ost often sat in H em ingways company- He didnt have time to receive form because he drank h im self away and died young. Pound, Eliot, and Joyce lived on loans and sm all grants, but there was another generation of Am erican writers who, like Fitzgerald and Hemingway, m ade thousands o f hard dollars from American m agazines that included stories fashionable at che time, and they squandered the large sums o f money with jaun ty extravagance, and were al ways up to their ears in debt. (But at least this gener ation was capable. Today, fashionable American writers make millions with wretched trash.) This generation sat here and waited to receive form. An Am erican woman said this about Pound, who may have been forty at the time: H e is an interesting man, but we must w ait until he grows up. The entire generation waited for him to grow up. In the literary menagerie o f Parisian expatriates, Pound was an un forgettable phenomenon. H e and m any others be longed to the griffin band o f the m yth o f the youthful years. This was their time, after the First W orld W ar -

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the rebellious, fugitive, protesting period o f a gener ation. And this was m y tim e as well. They got lost: some to success, others in trench es, gas chambers, or to alcohol. The generation van ished but left an atmosphere behind, the way great works do. Now, after the Second W orld W ar, when every barbarian and dolt was the Very sam e as twenty-five years before, I looked around the Domes terrace and searched for who and what cam e in the place o f the Vanished Generation. The feeling o f some thing lacking aroused in m e by this revisiting o f the W est was fiery and stomach wrenching: W hat was mis sing in this ravaged, pillaged W est? Humanism? I sus pected that the m agic had also evaporated from this il lusion; its m eaning had burned out as it had in every thing else. Great Frenchmen, Chateaubriand and many others, accused the French o f lacking the pro pensity for humaneness. After all, the vanished gener ation did believe in som ething given the nebulous and vague name o f hum an. This vanished generation re belled and protested against everything that was calci fied in literature, art, and coexistence. W hat kind o f re bellion was replying now to shame and horror, to the hum anity-denying sneer o f the Second W orld War? I ordered a brandy because I needed a pick-meup. And I bought an evening paper from the vendor who was ju st shuffling by. I began reading the head lines printed in large type. Then the front page com pletely, lengthwise and crosswise.

It m ade interesting reading. There are days when everything, personal and worldly, intermeshes. W hen History becom es a private matter, a palpable personal reality. The evening issue o f a popular Pari sian journal reported in large headlines that on this

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day - February 10, 1947, in the m orning - exactly two years after the signing o f the Yalta Agreem ent) - the said dictates o f the peace treaty, the coercive docu ments for Hungary, Finland, Bulgaria, Rumania, and Italy were signed in one o f the resplendent chambers o f the French foreign ministry. Since the Hungarian peace treaty interested me, I read it first, word by word. The camouflaged propaganda o f the Benes fac tions petty-bourgeois, nationalist democracy had triumphed again; as twenty-five years before, dictates restored the national boundaries that existed prior to 1938. My birthplace, fair and noble Kassa, wound up in Czech hands again. W ithout being asked and against their will, true-born Hungarians in Upper Hungary were delivered to Czech and Slovak mini-imperialism. Several sanctimonious declarations about the right o f peoples to free self-determ ination could be read in the peace document, but they were only the dust-covered flowers o f rhetoric. The reality, that these peoples would again not be able to participate in shaping their own fate, doubled back in a quarter o f a century turning o f a wheel, and everything remained as had com e to pass after the First W orld War. Facts are m ore valuable than dream s, sighed Englands prime minister, Churchill, during the trying hours. Facts spoke up on this day. Transylvania, Upper Hungary and Lower Hungary were separated from their national com munity o f one thousand years. (A new color on the palette was the exchange o f popu lation, which recomm ended the reciprocal and volun tary relocation o f Hungarian and Slovak minorities.) The amount o f reparations was set at 300 million dol lars 200 million for the Soviet Union and 50 million each for Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia and this trib ute was heaped atop the robbery, looting, expropria tions, goods forcibly removed, plunder, which com prised a high multiple o f dollar value in amount; after all, the country paid not w ith hard currency but with

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goods devalued at the sacrifice o f unfair estimates, A single hope shined through the peace terms: the Soviet U nion could keep its armed forces in Hungary only until the peace pact was signed w ith Austria, and then the joint Soviet military forces had to be withdrawn from the countrys territory. I f this took place, perhaps it would be possible to attempt what the Communists had twice thwarted in 1919 and 1945 a more mod ern, more humane social coexistence in Hungary. This was the night when one thinks he can see destiny m ore clearly for having undergone many er rant and bitter experiences: the personal opportunities and the prospects beyond the personal, the reality be tween two obscurities. I am thinking back to that night, and this expectation now seems grotesque: it has an ancillary sound like the enthusiastic rhymed tag in Jeno' H eltais poem: Today is a different day, today is a different day from another time/ Because today come to an end, because today the Dark Middle Ages come to an end. (Nothing cam e to an end; in stead a new darkness began, a neonlit darkness.) Nevertheless, this w as the night when, without any personal compelling, urgent m otive but with histori cal perspective, I had to decide whether to return to Budapest from the W est or not. (As a generation be fore, when after a long stay in Paris, I had to make the very same decision.) Reason and reflection play only a slight role in this kind o f decision. A decision has to be made about life, about our personal, sole and irre deemable reality, about our individual destiny - not about our country, not even about the extent o f our com munity with the nation. The night was foggy. Paris glowed coldly in the frosty fog. W hat awaited m e at home, in Hungary? A dis membered Hungary drained o f its blood. A Russian m ilitary occupation that perhaps would end som e day. But w hat about until then? A society shattered in its structural foundations that would require a long time

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for a new, more humane hierarchy to develop, A lan guage spoken by ten million people and not under stood by anyone else. H aving done the homework, I knew that about seventy languages are spoken in Eu rope and that ninety-five percent o f these languages are o f Indo-European origin. M y mother tongue be longed to the rem aining five percent, the M agyar of Ural-Altaic origin. W hat awaited m e in the W est i f I did not go back? A Europe that the W esterners construe differ ently than did we /a-6as (as the W esterners often called us superciliously and w ith condescending arro gance). M y individual lot could w ork out pleasantly, but this would not alter the fact that here I would al ways be only a tolerated, humored, harbored foreigner. For me personally and truly w hat did the notion Eu rope mean? (Like the desecrator, I swallowed in alarm: Is one free to ask such a thing?) W asnt Europe everything, the meaning o f life? I f yes (and through a lifetime I believed it was to m y very marrow), then why this shivering, recoiling, resisting? W hy didnt I stay abroad at the time? W hat did Europe actually and personally mean to m e? W hat did this notion still represent to me, to the person? The H ungarian? (This was the moment - as sometimes before and frequently afterwards - when the rattle from B abitss throat rasped once again? M y voice shouts, m y poem de clares AVhat is m ost painful to decIare/That we are not nobodies and nothings ...) Like the m usic box when a farthing is inserted into it, the consciousness ground out mechanically the exam ination theses: Greek and Roman culture, Christianity, humanism, the Enlight enment. But now I had no desire to get a top mark from Europe. W hat I would have liked to know was: what was still the extra for me, the European reality - without deceptions, without rote and conditional token words - the residue that formed a living reality, other than som ething to w onder at in the exhibition

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hall o f a petrified and obsolete civilization? W hat was m issing in Europe for m e personally? A sense of m ission? The words flashed and struck. There had once been som ething in Europe sometimes I, too, stated and wrote it down some thing that was, perhaps naively, called a sense of mission . The notion is pompous. Still, for my gener ation, too, there was some kind o f diluted reality in it; the consciousness that being born in Europe, being a European was not only a physical or political condition but a creed. But this sense o f mission was not percep tible in anyone, in an 5fthing any longer. Wise old politi cians were already speaking about the need to create an econom ic com m unity in Europe against and above national interests. But an econom ically united Europe without a sense o f m ission could not be a world power, as it was for centuries when it believed in itself and its mission. And so m any lies were told about this exactly at this time, in the century I matched in age. The Nazis lied when they talked about their European sense of mission and set out on their marauding venture. Politi cians and statesmen lied when they patched power sys tems together and fluttered the slogans o f the Euro pean sense o f mission above the barriers. They sang the grand aria about the European sense o f mission in editorials and parliaments, on platforms and barrel tops. But what kind o f m ission awaited me, the wan dering traveler, the provincial newcom er after the war in the W est? Where w as the Idea, the evangelical Good News that is more and som ething other than words prom oting an eroded, parched civilization? There was a culture - the European - which those who dwelled in it believed in for thousands o f years: a mission. Now they converted it into an export commodity: Made in Europe. But w ho wanted this export? (European civi lization loses som e o f its quality w ith every new period ... M ichelangelo was, after all, better than Picasso,

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Malraux sighed decades later.) Possibly Toqueville was right, who a century ago prophesied here in Paris that Europe will come to naught between two great magnets, Russia and America. I f this was true (and everyone who set out in Europe experienced a measure o f the reality o f this om inous anxiety), there will be only one kind o f Euramerica, and some sort o f Eurasia will remain, but that which will rem ain without a mission will no longer be Europe. Stirrings o f pow er ful forces could be sensed everywhere in Europe, forces that repelled and those that attracted- But what were they heading toward? Everyone preserves a different Paris in his soul, everyone who was young in this extraordinary and magnificent city. I searched for m y own Paris, but the great city and, yes, the great people made m e feel ill at ease on the occasion o f m y return. (I didnt feel this un easiness in Italy for an instant; the generous hu manity o f the Italians remained unchanged even amid the ordeals o f war.) The French with whom I spoke re tained their spirit and judgm ent; they clearly and sharply perceived their countrys place in the world and asserted that the present was only a time of crisis; a great people, the French, were bound to find their role in the world again. The intellectual spirit of this people was for centuries the prim ary m entor o f Eu rope; its logic and sense o f proportion, its analytical ca pability and form -creating aptitude taught peoples and generations to feel, see, think, and create in the European manner. But this people whose spirit shined now, too, the educator o f Europe was already search ing restlessly for its role in the world, this anxiety res onating in every friendly chat. (Not ju st the French. Europe was also searching for its world role,) Pessimistic philosophers o f history like to feel out the fateful shadow-line, the peripheral line of fate, when large collectivities - em pires and conti nents - near the frontiers o f their existence and role in

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world history, and then those frontiers becom e shad owy and blurred because their role has ended. Beyond attempts at creating a com m on market, was there still a trace o f European consciousness in art and lit erature? Was it possible that the civilized conscious ness o f the W est had already moved farther from this part o f the w orld, passed beyond the ocean? (After the war - personally and with every consequence - I thought about this in Paris for the first time. There was som ething in this conjecture that made me shud der.) And w as it possible that Am erica has already had its fill o f this im ported European civilization - it wants som ething else and is creating in its place a new civi lization which is w hat it is but is already peculiarly its own, no longer a copy o f European culture? (Possibly I should follow after this emigrated European sense of mission ju st as occasionally someone sets out nostal gically to see again som ething from his childhood or youth. Go to the distant beyond, beyond the Seven Seas and breathe in the gentle breezes o f a new civi lization, its stim ulating currents o f air. Possibly the Americans, like the Russians, are commencing some thing.) W ords, words, words. I ordered a glass of brandy. French brandies are excellent. They simulta neously warm the brain and ganglions thoroughly, ig nite the consciousness, like the electric spark the com bustion engine. This Arm agnac was also excellent. I tossed down a pony and ordered another one. The waiter, w ho stood beside the table expertly and ob served the effect, approved o f the idea. At the kindling o f the second shot, the two decades that had elapsed be tween the m using reflection on such a night in M ont parnasse and the present moment brightened. These twenty years constituted that period o f my life when I wasnt operating on a battery (as I am now, as I write this), but on vigorous energy, on a dynamo. This was the time o f ambition, passions, learning to write, ac

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quiring knowledge. (Then I still didnt know that there is a fuller human period: the tim e o f oblivion.) What had I become acquainted w ith in these years between the two world wars? The realization touched m e gently like a musty smell darting up from a draw er randomly pulled out. It was falsehood. This was the tenor o f this time between the tw o world w ars in Europe. Violence and compassion, heroism and cowardice, inhum anity and tolerance were always present. But falsehood had never before been such a hi story-making force as it was in these years. They lied in Europe easily, automatically, unc tuously, impeccably the press, the radio, the book publishers, and then the new forms o f communication media, every kind o f printed matter, the paper litter with which they stuffed W estern m ans consciousness. Falsehoods reeked out o f everything the way the nox ious fumes o f spontaneous combustion steam from a manure pile. In this century, the W est lied to itself and to the world. It lied perpetually: it lied that it was a country and trum peted some sort of raspy sentim en tality along with it; but this, too, was only a falsehood, because the cliques who owned the countries saw the possibilities for limited ownership in them. It was a re ligion; they professed and lied because they did not de m and vision from art. Vision has the power, the cre ative energy to reflect back on reality, not like the mass products, the com mercial or political ju n k that can be offered and purchased. They spoke o f human rights and permitted systems degrading everything hu mane to gain ascendancy. W esterners lied with the spoken and written word; they even lied with music from which they leached m elody and harm ony, replac ing it with hysterical, writhing, epileptic caterwauling. This West lied, this W est which I had called to mind in the pit o f war like a good Samaritan. W hat could we Hungarians expect from this W est which falsehood had so thoroughly contam inated? Never help and soli

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darity. There was no help for us, collectively or individ ually, only time. Yes, French brandies are excellent- They set off a warm rush o f blood in the cerebrum, dilate the capil laries; under their impact, the blood, pum ping oxygen, the nutrim ent o f consciousness, reaches the cerebrum more swiftly. Where do I belong? In the burned-out, stupidly lying W est? O r shall I go back to Hungary? W hat awaited m e at hom e? The Native Land? I had no desire to keep vow ing constantly, to beguile m yself with promises. I did not believe that the Native Land was waiting for me. B ut there are moments in life when - utterly quietly - we hear an answer, a mes sage. This was that kind o f moment. And the answer (as twenty years earlier in a similar situation) was now also a quiet one. I must go back to Hungary where no one awaits me, where there is no role or mission, but where there is something that to m e con stitutes the only significance o f life: the Hungarian lan guage. I understood this - once again, with all its con sequences. Because, when young and then with hoary h air after tw o world wars, I never was interested, truly and constitutionally, hide and hair, in anything else: only in the H ungarian language and its highest embodiment, H ungarian literature. A language under stood by ten m illion among the billions o f human beings, and no one else. A literature locked into this language which, despite generations o f heroic efforts, never could speak to the world in its true reality. But to m e this language and this literature represented the life o f full value, because in this language I could relate what I wanted to say. (And only in this lan guage could I keep silent about what I wanted to keep silent about.) For I am I only when and while I can formulate in H ungarian what I am thinking. For example, the realization on the night o f February 10, 1947, that for m e there is no other country, only the

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Hungarian language. For this reason I must rush back to Hungary. To live there and w ait until it is again possible to write freely. (To write? About what?) The books I took home from m y W estern trip said no to everything that was and is in disparate tones but une quivocally. But what is the yes? A holy crusade against Bolshevism? This is again a no, a negation, the lack o f something. Christian democracy? A democracy doesnt have a religion or denomination. Socialist hum anism ? As soon as a system is made out o f Socialism it can no longer be hum an because every system is anti-human. Then what will I write about in freedom i f it is possible to write at home again? I glanced around the Dom es terrace, as I had two decades earlier; I tapped the bottom o f the brandy glass on the metal table; I called the waiter because I suddenly felt it urgent to pay and be on m y way. The train was departing early in the morning: to where? Back to the Hungarian language. I hurried to return to the hotel, pack up, and, in the morning, go to the Gare IEstre quickly and not miss the train that would take me back to m y native language. W hile the taxi was rushing along on its w ay to the hotel, a voice spoke up in the Parisian night, asking im patiently (it later appeared in m y travel diary and I also published it): Oh, when will that train be heading for the East? The train started o ff on time. Then slowly, huff ing and puffing, it slowly made its way across frozen, destitute Europe. During the journey, I had the oppor tunity take account o f what I w as actually carrying from this trip to the W est back to m y home in the East. No and again no, said W estern literature obdurately and obstinately to the Right and the Left. But I would have liked to take som ething else hom e as well from m y travels, something that constituted the W ests answer to the East. The train was poorly heated and

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stopped frequently. It stopped for long periods at the snow-covered stations. A t the boundary line marked by the bridge over the Enns, at the edge o f the Russian occupation zone, a member o f the Soviet patrol entered the compartment and asked for passports. Here, on the threshold o f the line dividing Europe in two, a R ed soldier dressed in parade uniform examined the passengers with mili tary meticulousness - grimly, strictly but courteously. He looked at m y passport, scrutinized m y photo, and eyed its subject thoroughly- Then, wordlessly but with out discourtesy, he returned the passport, raised his hand to the brim o f his peaked cap, saluted, closed the door behind him, and moved on. I looked after him and thought o f the fact that this soldier was an enemy. He has com mitted many horrors in Hungary, and it was possible he w ould bring m any cruelties down on us in Hungary in the future, too. But it was certain that this Russian soldier w ould rob, perhaps even kill me, the Hungarian, but he would not look down on me. (In the W est recently, very politely but in some manner, every one looked down on m e, the Easterner.) To him I was a W esterner he will bring to ruin but will not look down on. This wasnt much o f a gift from a journey to the fair, but still, it was something.

....O n ly in H ungarian does I love y o u truly touch you So ^szeretlek, my angel, butterfly, star and swan Only in this tongue do such words become more than idiom And ju st this difference has proved deadly to you The whole world shines, so why hasten To an em pty home with such bewildering speed?

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The language called and in its rhythm s spoke destiny Let not you r mother wait with open arms in v a in .."

6
It did not wait in vain: I w as greeted with news about the conspiracies on m y arrival. It was a strange homecoming. W hen in February 1947, on a piercingly cold night near the end o f w inter - glass panes were already being installed in the iron roofing over the tracks - I felt w ith relief that it was right for me to return home, I belonged here. The yes must be attempted - w ith the very m odest instrum ents and flawed methods o f a writer - the yes m ust be framed (for my own sake) in the H ungarian language. It was more a feeling than som ething conscious when I thought the answer w as still som ething that could be called humanism. (And I felt this to be a ridiculously urgent matter.) O f course, I wanted to take a bath and change clothes first. I ordered a taxi - taxis were al ready operating in Budapest - and w ent home to Buda, to that hotel-like slum that I w as cram m ed into after the siege. By then people had for days been rounded up and hauled off to the prisons o f the state police. This was the m om ent when many awakened from the illu sion created about the rose-colored dem ocracy. This was the signal when the Com munists, after tw o years of democratic scene-shifting, lying and exploratory preparation, received orders from M oscow to com mence the complete, absolute Bolshevization o f H un garian society. One o f the accused in the first conspiracy (he was a serious, poor mid die-cl a ss official, a neighbor of mine on Mik Street in Buda, I often saw him in the morning on his way to the office standing on the cor-

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nen waiting for the bus) - he was condemned to death after a short hearing by the people's tribunal. The m orning paper reported that the President o f the Re public a Protestant m inister - denied the plea for clemency, and the brains behind the conspiracy was hanged. A journalist w ith whom I had worked on the editorial staff o f a liberal newspaper before the war wrote an account o f the passing o f the sentence and mentioned that the accused - m y neighbor in Buda Svore a braided fur coat at the hearing, and thus had to be a counterrevolutionary and conspirator. This jou r nalist w as not a particularly bloodthirsty man; he was a petty bourgeois from the cafs in Pest. But the subor dinate clause giving w ord o f the braided fur coat could have been written by M arat - or a stones throw ahead in time, by the Germ an Streicher, the editor o f the infa mous anti-Sem itic hate sheet. The so-called conspirators were put to death; others, who, I was certain, were not fascists, ju st not Communists and thought about the development o f Hungarian dem ocracy exactly as I did, began to disap pear single file into the systems dungeons. Near my fiat in Buda there was an old swimming pool, where I w ent regularly. Every m orning the members of a group form ed over a long period o f time swam in the sulfurous, exhilarating water. In these days one or an other o f m y m orning companions o f a decade began fail ing to show up at the pool. A t first I thought the one missing had caught a cold. But the midday newspaper reported that he had not caught a cold but had, in stead, been arrested the night before as a conspira tor . A second, and then additional conspiracies shortly followed the first one. In the fall o f 1947, the Communists drove into exile the prime m inister o f the coalition government who attained his office following constitutional elections and put in his place a cynical, good-for-nothing, politically loitering knight-errant

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who, during an inebriated, confidential conversation, admitted to his table companions with the disarming frankness o f a hoodlum: You can imagine the condi tion this country is in i f I am its prime m inister! By now the Communists tolerated in the governm ent only corrupt and role-hungry clim bers who were willing to support the Communists ancillary ventures. Nat urally, the conspirators never dreamed about taking up arms against a system protected by Russian tanks and machine-guns on the countrys own territory. They did not have secret stockpiles o f weapons; they had absolutely no weapons; not even the false charges and the special judges o f the martial law courts, who were called the peoples prosecutors, and who were often m ore bloodthirsty than the professional public prosecutors, could prove the accusations made against them. The accused did nothing more than what citizens in the W est, in democracies (from where I had ju st now arrived post-haste), dem anded loudly and openly at political meetings and then in the press and parliament: they were weaving plans about how and in what spirit, with what kind o f measures the countrys political, social and economic situation could be reorganized, A s elsewhere, individuals appeared on the scene in Hungary who wanted to liberate the country from a system they disapproved of. Their plans agreed with the will o f ninety percent o f the H un garian people. The Hungarian people did not want Communism, and as long as they had the opportunity to exist under the right to self-determination and free elections, they rejected it. W hat was a right in the West, indeed a citizens duty a nations right to free self-determination - constituted a conspiracy in the East according to the Communists interpretation and called for the rope.

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A revolution can be a source o f law. Not ju st constitutional law recorded on parchment and con firm ed by a seal. Classical revolutions in modern times - the English in the seventeenth century (this revol ution was officially contented w ith a kings head, though actually it also shed much human blood), the French and the Am erican in the eighteenth century, the movem ents for independence in Europe about 1848, and finally the Russian revolution in the twen tieth century all these proved that revolution is a source o f law. A t the end o f the First W orld War, the Russian people elim inated the czar system o f govern ment, and in this peoples revolution o f overwhelming force, the Communists coupled the Communist seizure o f power arbitrarily and violently; they appropriated the revolution which the Russian people did not under take in the behalf o f the Communists. After all, the people and not even the m ajority o f the revolutionaries really knew w hat Communism was. But it is certain that w hat w as intolerable in human coexistence, the social injustices, underwent a change in these revol utions. W hatever rem ained from the past mingled or ganically w ith the new, w ith the demands o f the revol ution. But a revolution, even when it has an idealistic and moral substance, is always bloody, cruel and un just. It is not only the revolutions targeted enemies who bleed to death on the barricades; often the ideal of the revolution does, too. Fortunate are the peoples who can realize social development without revolution. For tunate are the Scandinavians, the D utch... But this idyllic roster soon comes to an abrupt halt- And inas m uch as revolution is not only bloody but often also cor rupt, larcenous, and perfidious (the Hungarian revolution of 1956 is a far-radiating historical rarity, for few examples with its moral purity turn up in history).

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human beings, to the extent possible, defend them selves against it. In Hungary in 1945 there wasnt an iota o f incli nation for revolution. No one can regret that such a revolution did not occur. Barricades appeared on the streets only decades later, when the H ungarian people rebelled against Communism. In the decade preceding 1956 there were times w hen the social situation in Hungary and in neighboring countries reduced to a similar fate brought to m ind the inner structure o f the ancient Inca empire. It was as i f everything were being repeated in the world. The Inca rulers sent away the untrustworthy tribes from home (as did the Commun ists the large masses o f intellectuals at the time o f re settlement) and settled them in foreign places, They specified the standards o f job performance strictly, and those who met them received a certain amount o f food, articles o f clothing, and tools. All the land belonged to the state; more precisely, to the God-king embodying the state. A worker could toil only one third o f the time in his own and his fam ilys behalf; he spent the remain ing time performing contract-work for the state and its echelon, the priesthood and the ruling house. Eating was permitted only at an open door, and everyone re ceived the same food, hence the standard meal. Like Lycurgus in Sparta and Mao on the collective farm, of ficials distributed the products m ade by potters, weavers, smithies and carpenters am ong the people. There was no freedom to m ove i f someone wanted to migrate to the neighboring village; to do so, he first had to obtain official permission. All this was eerily present in the decade when the Com m unists set about carving up Hungarys social and spiritual core. No one wanted a revolution in Hungary in 1945, but the Soviet Union would not have assented to a revolutionary action to eliminate what still remained obsolete from the past. Stalin didnt like revolution aries. H e had his reasons for executing the romantic

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Spanish partisans, then all those among his confeder ates who, like Trotsky and m any others, believed in the catharsis-fom enting energy o f revolution. Stalin preferred subservient officials and blind and deaf ro botic humans; everyone else roused his suspicions. Op portunely, in 1945, the Russian high command was not interested in a H ungarian social revolution either. Since the high command, following ancient Eastern precepts, did not dispatch matriel essential for the conduct o f the war and then later for the military occu pation, such as rations, diesel oil and livestock - in short the bulk o f fresh supplies but laid up stocks found in the occupied territories instead and requisi tioned them with merciless, w ily precision, it was not in the interest o f the Russian m ilitary forces to lose track o f goods rem aining on H ungarian territory after the withdrawal o f the Germans and the Arrow Cross in the chaos a revolution would produce. After a brief time, the Communists wanted to make the H ungarian people believe that they had brought revolutionary achievements to their society without the blood sacrifice o f a revolution. They confis cated the land and real estate; they nationalized in dustry and commerce; they took possession o f state pow er in the name o f the working class; they took over the schools, the press, and intellectual life on the pretext o f revolutionary ideology. They appropriated private property, and since Communism regards indi viduality as private property, they one day set about appropriating individuality as well. W hen a vast ma jority o f H ungarian society in a two-fold election, the first o f which was absolutely free, rejected this system, the Communists declared with bitter discontent that H ungarian society is hopelessly reactionary. And since not only the Hungarian ruling class that had lost land and power was discontented with the change but also the large masses o f the peasants and workers, the Communists described this unfavorable attitude of

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the majority of the Hungarian people as a fascist leg acy with terror and every intim idating branch o f the police state. We delivered land to the peasant and the factory to the worker, and we delivered the oppor tunities o f socialist success to the intelligentsia, and what thanks do we get? They vote against us in elec tions, carry on sabotage in public and private life, wait for the imperialist enemy, and place their hopes in a new war that will do away w ith the Comm unists, they complained. This com plaining was frequently heard, The com plaint was justified. Except, the Com munists did not say why the majority o f H ungarian so ciety was so ungrateful to the Com m unist system. They did not say that the people didnt feel that every thing that occurred was the consequence o f their own enterprise, because everything took place not in the in terest o f the Hungarian people, but that o f the Soviet Union and the small detachm ent o f hired M afia sent to Hungary - thus that o f the Party. A revolution that a society brings into being through its own will can be bloody, ruthless, and corrupt, but this kind o f revol ution, it is certain, is an ordeal which the people ex ecute in their very own interest. H ungarian society re jected everything devised by individuals who acted at the command o f a foreign power, and when forced to choose between the interests o f Hungary and those of the Soviet Union, they chose the Soviets uncondition ally and slavishly. W hen som eone cast this charge in the Communists face - and occasionally it was possible to do so in the first two years o f the occupation - the Communists, shrugging their shoulders, replied that this was true, but, according to their belief, the in terests o f the Hungarians and the Soviet U nion would, after fifty years at the very latest, be com pletely identi cal. People began to turn defensive. They didnt de fend themselves by conspiring but w ith their beha

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vior. ('om m unist tactics prescribe that those who are not Communists but are useful from the systems view point in some field o f work must be compromised. Thus, position, role, and honors or other such bones must be tossed to them w ith lures and promises, and then they m ust be used as long as they are needed, or they must be broken in to serve submissively, without grumbling, in the camp o f the mamelukes. (M am e luke is a Turkish w ord m eaning a purchased slave.) If they dont toe the line, such persons must be buried in the dungeons o f social annihilation, o f declining liveli hood. Or they must be forced to go into voluntary exile, And the individual who cant be bought, bullied, or forced into exile must be physically destroyed. These are the practical directions for use in the Communist handbook. But during the time o f the first round, only a few succumbed to the strategic and logistical troop movements o f the Com m unists guerrilla war. I arrived home in a hurry because I didnt want m y countrys open arms to wait in vain. But immedi ately, abruptly, I had occasion to be amazed at how little we, the contemporaries, had prepared for the timely crim inal attempt- After all, when you come right down to it, if one is compelled to go to Sumatra and live there, it makes sense for him first to read up on the history o f Sumatra, buy a map, and get familiar w ith the archipelagos geography, hydrography and cli mate. I f someone is forced to live in the kind o f system w hich the implem entation of Communism threatens, he behaves rationally when he familiarizes him self w ith the rudim ents o f Communism and its tactics. A technical book A H istory o f the Communist Bolshevik Party, published by the Foreign Language Publishing H ouse in M oscow - reveals w ith astonishing candor w hat the Communists are actually up to. It was sur prising how few in Budapest read this book, though the Communists distributed at a really low price; I be lieve it cost three forints. It was prepared for ordinary

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people, and it disclosed with clear, m atter-of-iact rea soning w hat Communism wanted and how Commun ism was to be put into practice. It was like a technical book on agriculture. It instructs contem poraries on how to eradicate fellow travelers - these are Lenins own precise words - in other words, the Girondists, the revolution ary intellectuals or specifically those tending to an archy, the Narodniks, the Mensheviks, and the Social Democrats. It duly prescribes the tim etable when the plutocracy and, in general, private ownership are to be done away with, then the schools, the kulaks, and the resistance taking shelter in religious sentiment. W ith simple objectivity, the calendars give information about the prehistoric era o f the Russian workers and peasants movements, those o f the 1870s and 1880s, the role o f the legal M arxists, the first Socialists, and the romantic bourgeois intellectuals - from the very first Lenin maintained that the true enem y was not the capitalist but the com promising Socialist - and one m orning newspapers announced that the H ungar ian Social Democratic Party had dissolved, it had merged with the Communist Party. It was surprising that the book prescribed the en active directives at a slower tempo than that with which they took place in the captive countries. In those countries. Communist agents injected Communism into the body o f society in dosages as i f they were con ducting experiments on animals. In Russia, thirty years were needed for what was portioned out in Hun gary in three years. Im m unology predicates that a large dose always precipitates antibodies; this is how the constitution protects itself against excessive injec tions o f vaccines. (In political-technical term s, the Com munists called this antibody a reactionary force ; it was a re-action, an answer to an action.) In general, everyone was considered suspicious who w as possibly a bacterial host, the carrier o f the bacterium o f liberty

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in his consciousness, because anyone who had already resisted the Germans aroused the suspicion that he was also objecting to another dictatorial system. Com munism. For this reason, the Communists ruined the live lihood o f those who were suspect. O r they hauled them o ff to prison and exterminated them. They accelerated the dosages because the system did not w ant to evoke sympathy for those it had decided to ruin. In Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania and Bulgaria - as in the Baltic states earlier - the Communists did not care about the sympathies o f the inhabitants. The plans which carried out the dictatorial undertakings in ac cordance with orders adhered to the same model with monotonous tedium. The official who worked out the enacting clauses in M oscow reckoned that what was ex pedient in W arsaw worked ju st as effectively in Buda pest or Sofia. The diversity o f hum an beings, the var iety o f types, languages, cultural complexes and ways o f life did not interest those who drew up the plans for the Bolshevization o f the occupied territories. Some times the very same decree appeared in Hungarian newspapers, then in the Czech, Bulgarian and Rum a nian Com m unist press. The Grand Plan which the spe cialists in the Kremlin formulated into a masterpiece did not have the time to concern itself with fine dif ferences in details.

8
This was the tim e when two new concepts were first voiced in the jargon o f contem porary history: the Iron Curtain and the Cold W ar. A fine stylist, Church ill, com posed both o f them, and he knew what he was talking about. After all, he was the one who in Moscow wrote on a scrap o f paper and handed over the particu lars for the sharing o f pow er in Eastern Europe on a

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percentage basis. Later, diplomatic diagnosis deter mined that the cold w ar was the product o f Stalins imperialism, which sought to upset the balance of power in Western Europe. And the rooter, the anony mous European citizen observing the turning-points of the great match from the sidelines o f history, must ac knowledge that this plan was not entirely without hope at the time. The Stalinists wanted to foist Com munism onto Western Europe, so that, whenever and however possible, they could control the sources of this continents industrial and technological power. Later, Stalin wanted to penetrate into the M id-East in order to realize a centuries-old Russian dream o f establish ing a key position in the Mediterranean (Stalin didnt live to see it, but this grand plan becam e a partial re ality a decade later) and then expanding it farther to ward Africa and the Far East. W hen Am erica began to demand that free elections be held in the countries of Eastern Europe, Stalin feared that the security zone which, so the Communists believed, these Bolshevized vassal states symbolized for the Russians would slip from M oscows control. (This fear on the part o f the Russians was not entirely without justification, be cause they had twice suffered heavy attacks from the West in the present century.) In addition, a Messianic obsession drove the Russians: to spread Communism beyond Soviet borders. W hen Am erica once under stood this, the political and ideological defense collec tively called the cold war commenced. So the sages said later. But at the time I, along with a hundred m illion o f my East European contempo raries, did not understand these tactics. W hen the Communist imperialism of Stalin and the Stalinists provoked what was at first an intellectual, moral, and later, here and there, physical opposition (as in Po land, East Germany, and Hungary), they behaved in comprehensibly in the eyes o f contemporaries. Presum ably, they would have achieved greater successes with

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Communist tactics that were non-aggressive and dis guised as Socialist in the satellite countries and then in the W est and other places as well than with the tactics o f com pulsory Communism carried out with terroristic methods. After the Second W orld W ar, the moral and material collapse was deep and elemental everj^ h ere in Europe. People understood, cynically or fearfully, that the illusion coated w ith the thin hum an istic glaze called Christian culture was actually the code-name for the sadistic absence o f inhibitions. This staggering realization com pelled not only the Marxist opium smokers but also those whose descent upbring ing and class background induced a critical attitude to ward Communism to take stock. A t this time every where in Eastern and W estern Europe there were well-m eaning individuals who assumed that after a purgatorial, initial period, Communism, with all its symptomatic flaws, would provide the opportunity to create a new, more hum ane civilization. Moscows ag gressive im perialist policy quickly sobered up the hope ful and also the uninformed. The detachments o f Sta linist terror stayed in place, as did its guerrilla bands o f looting m ercenaries who, voracious, sometimes boastfully volunteering, som etimes perverse and ca pable o f anything, cast their lot with them. B y this time a few enlightening books on the Stalin purges had already appeared in the West. W it nesses who fled to the W est from the show trials, from the clinic-like, pathologically public confessions ^ am ong them Communists who supplied information about the inhum aneness based on direct observations wrote books, and these publications produced a reac tion. Official Com m unist propaganda, o f course, angrily disparaged this documentary literature, deni grating the authors as apostates, paid renegades and scribblers hired by the im perialist powers. But as time passed, the suspicion arose that the Stalinists then too, as later secretly rejoiced at these exposs be-

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cause the books not only occasioned the indignation of fellow travelers in the W est but roused fear in the masses. Witnesses spoke in them with convincing proof, broken individuals who at one time believed in Communism and then had to see what the system is in reality. And they testified that Communism will not put up with any criticism, deviationism, liberal revi sionism. It has no need for idealistic, passionate fol lowers who later suffer disappointment because the reality disenchants them, and it crushes mercilessly and systematically all those who conceive the reality of Bolshevism differently from the way the orthodox Party demands and construes. These exposs were use ful to the Communists, who plan with sound strategy and large perspective. For, to the man in the street, they asserted with reliable evidence that opposition is futile. It is not possible to put up a stout defense against the methods and instrum ents o f the system. The Communists knew that this system could be made to function only in an atmosphere o f perpetual fear, and for this reason they loudly reviled but, secretly rubbing their hands, approved o f these books that in formed the large masses o f the reality and irresistible power o f the terror. They did not want and could not even hope that a person o f sound mind would appear who would come to know the reality o f Communism and then still remain enthusiastic about it; they were content with the trustworthy documents, with the threat that generated fear in the victims. This w ay did well-meaning anti-Communist writings have tables turned on them, and Com munist tactics were aware of this. They were not afraid o f not being loved- They feared only that som eone w ho did not fear them might turn upThe messianic Slav obsession can only partially be the cause of the ruthless, aggressive Bolshevist tac tic deployed with the swiftness o f lightning that pro voked the Cold W ar. Actually, the Communists did not

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fear the W est, which they considered to be corrupt, spent, and m aniacally hungry for security (and they were often right about this); they were not afraid of the fascists either, w ith whom, i f times changed, they could always com e to some understanding; rather, they feared their own system, Communism. They knew that a social system brought into existence through deceit and violence can only be sustained if the deceit and violence are perpetually maintained. A nd for this there is never any other way, only the per manent threat o f terror. They felt trepidations about the dom estic situation in Russia, which changed fun damentally after the Second W orld War; after the first three decades o f total ignorance and isolation ensued the period when masses o f soldiers returned home from the W est, having seen that other systems and methods can create the good life and conditions worthy o f humans m ore quickly and successfully. The intelli gentsias restlessness that materialized in this thaw ing, m ore inform ed atmosphere was only an external symptom; the Com m unists could suppress the dissatis faction o f writers, scholars, and artists disenchanted by the Com m unist system with police instruments. In effect, the Com m unists feared that pressure might be exerted from below in the Soviet Union. (As happened in Hungary in 1956.) This kind o f pressure was irresis tible, like a natural catastrophe, like an earthquake. This was why they m ade haste everywhere in Hun gary, too - to im plem ent Communism. Time was on their side, they knew, only as long as they could stir fear in the masses. They were afraid that one day people would stop fearing fear (in terrors schedule this moment has a designated tim e) and begin to pro test. The Communists were ruthless, and they made haste, am ong other reasons, because the battery radio made its appearance in history. The role o f the radio as a shaper o f history has really not been assessed.

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The battery radio, which inform ed everyone simulta neously in the remote regions o f great realm s about what was happening in the world at that moment was a historical force. One o f these radios could expose shabby lies within a m oment for example, that the thoroughly obsolete and untim ely assumptions o f a uto pia formulated a hundred years ago could be put into effect in behalf of the working masses a hundred years later. The Communists brought Nazis to trial at special courts o f martial law called peoples tribunals, and executed the Nazis who defended themselves by claiming that they were only following orders; or if they happened to have a need for men without inhibi tions, they commuted their sentences and drafted them into the cadres o f the Communist police force. Since they, the Communists, dem anded o f the little man the same thing as the Nazis - the unconditional, uncritical compliance with orders they also feared those who complied because perhaps the proselytes suspected that blind service to the system o f ruthless ness could also turn against them in critical periods of the Communist system. They were afraid o f everyone, and panic is always the squalid offspring o f fear. Panic showed in their glances, their conditioned official discipline and their manner o f speaking. Above all else, they were afraid o f their em ployer, the C hief Inquisitor and his staff, because they knew that terror follows from panic, and terror has an upper limit, when humans become indifferent to fear. A t such a time the C hief Inquisitor needs a scapegoat, and so he first gets rid o f those who subserviently carried out the heinous deeds he had ordered them to perform. And so, unable to protect themselves against fear by any other means, the Communists resorted to the only pro tection available to them - terror. I lived in this atmosphere for a year and a half. I set it down because I came to know this atmosphere

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not from hearsay, not even from books, but from every day experience- I returned home from the W est be cause I wanted to write in Hungarian freely, I quickly learned that there was no longer a way to do this. I de cided to rem ain silent and bide m y time until I But then I learned that Tim e cannot be counted on with certainty either; in vain are the Russian forces with their tanks withdrawn one day the distance o f a few ki lometers; they rem ain at Csap and will return on call to help the Communists in a scrape, who now have re ceived the order to turn the country into a colony and Bolshevize it for Moscow. The gong sounded, the per formance began. N ot the intermission, but the drama itself. Still, I did not w ant to leave Hungary. I contin ued to live in Budapest for a year and a half. These eighteen m onths form ed the strangest, most enigmatic period o f my life. In this year and a half, I became ac quainted with Hungary.

For, I now learned, I did not really come to know my country until then. I had merely been born and had lived there, but knew her only the way a per son knows his fated partner, the lifetime companion o f his choice, or his close relatives. One ju st lives among and w ith them. And sometimes life slips by in a way that no real getting acquainted takes place. I cannot say how it began and what it actually was that began. I cant recollect the day, the occasion, when I first noticed that m y relationship with the sur roundings, the country, the people had changed. The ruins were being cleaned up, and people hustled about to make a living. I didnt have any personal worries. A writer w ho is he? There was a time when I believed he mattered, not ju st because, maybe, he can tell us w hat people are thinking, but because the formu

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lated, expressed experience sets off conceptual pro cesses in individuals that ultim ately turn into action. As a result, human coexistence changes, the principles governing human life alter, and then, through their transmission, the conditions o f public life, o f civiliza tion are modified. It was in such a bom bastic way that I conceived the duty o f the writer to be, and perhaps there were periods when writers could exert influence on humans to this effect- But at those times institution alized falsehoods were not yet stifling ever 5fthing and everyone. From the balcony o f our tem porary accom moda tions we could look down on Gl Babas tomb and the gardens o f Rozsadomb, and farther away, between two rows o f houses, down below to the Danube. The country stretched along the banks o f the river; it could not be seen from the balcony, but one could continually sense and smell, practically breathe it in the way one breathes in the ocean even when he doesnt live right on its shore. Suddenly, everything became closer, more palpable. Such changes dont have names. I cant say it was as i f night had suddenly fallen. Rather, it was like the parts o f the day when it is still bright, but the light which had till then illum inated the region cheer fully and v m d ly suddenly becomes more solemn, turns, so to say, gloomy. People took notice and, like the light, like the landscape, grew somber. But they didnt w ant to believe the tim e o f change was here. Things will be different, they said. W ith hand over mouth, they protested that the W est cannot surrender Eastern Europe, give one hundred m illion souls to the Soviet. A decision will be m ade an agreement, they hoped. Western radios also promised this. This was the time when opposition newspapers were still ap pearing- Book publishers and theaters had not yet been nationalized, The Communists were operating cautiously, with a stopwatch. They opened up the na

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tions body join t by joint, like a learned professor dis secting parts o f a body at an anatomical, demonstra tive examination. They still spared the m ore vital or gans; they still didnt sever the m ore essential nerves, but they w ere already cutting and slicing the viscera with scissors and forceps. No one knew how deep this dissection o f some thing alive would go. Sometimes it seemed as i f the Communists them selves didnt know exactly how deep ly they could reach into the living body with the scal pel. They received the order from Moscow; probably they also received the practical executive command for it; but at the same time they were afraid that despite all the scrupulous conscientiousness, the final responsi bility belonged to them, the specialists, those whom M oscow had dispatched to Hungary. I f something went wrong, i f the patient bled to death or screamed, they had to answer for it. For this reason they worked for a year and a h a lf like the spider weaving its web. (Like the spider feeling the webs vibration, writes Arany in Prince Csaha. This is how he characterizes the security structure o f Attilas realm.) And this is w hat the Soviet structure was like, too: the Giant Spider in the Krem lin wove and spun the web, and when its victim s moved, it felt the web vibrate. It was a tim e when a spiders web seemed to cover everything- The web grew thicker and stickier every day. One couldnt always sense this directly and immediately, but the Spider em itted a thread every day - now the textbooks and schools, now a decree on public works. Then the house wardens, the official cob web of ever sm aller controlling zones, the control o f pri vate lives, the workplace, the garbage disposer, family life. One day the Communists m ade a man disappear, the next an old, tested institution. Or an idea. Every time the web vibrated, the Spider and his little spiders glanced around. W ill w hat they did work out all right? Did they do w ell? What is the temperature of

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the opposition? Suddenly they sniffed toward the East and the West. M aybe the W est is not after all as deaf and indolent as they hoped it was. M aybe it will inter vene, protest, and demand com pliance with agree ments. W hen nothing happened, they heaved a sigh of relief. The spiders web - invisibly but constantly spin ning - thickened- And this Spider didnt pause to r e s t It cast forth its threads unflaggingly. Anyone who hasnt experienced it cannot im a gine what this spider-web technology is like. W hen emitting its smothering, all-enveloping threads the Spider works silently. W hat was so natural yesterday political parties, freedom o f the press, life without fear, freedom o f individual opinion - still existed the next day, but m ore anemically, the w ay the elements o f everyday reality continue to live on more pallidly in anguished dreams during the night. (It was still possible to travel, but only a few did so.) The self-em ployed individual, the anonymous hero o f the time, per sisted in believing that he had the right to stay in his establishment and stick to his trade. The lawyer ar gued his case, the doctor waited in the consultation room for his well-paying patient, the a urea praxis. Things will be different for us, lisped the progressive intelligentsia, blinking. But the middle class, like the peasants hiding stores in pits during the war, began to prepare to defend themselves. The intelligentsia, the citizenry - as they were sometimes called contemptuously, w ith belittling remarks - resolved to survive w hat was threatening them. Its mem bers did not comprise a social, political organization. The same instincts were stirring in human beings as those found in the old Saxon towns where, with strength, strategy and cunning tenacity, the citizens tried to outlast the Turks, the pro-Austrian Hungarian soldiers, or the oligarchy. O r as did the lower nobility the Germ ans during the Bach period. This was not a m ovem ent, it didnt have a slo

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gan or party sym bol, but it seemed as i f the Hungarian intelligentsia had decided at an invisible routine elec tion not to succumb. They wanted to survive what w as threatening them. Some o f them shed tears for the china cabinet and the baubles that were destroyed by the rain o f bombs or, during the siege, by the Mongol Invasion. Others m ourned the stocks and bonds, the member ships on boards o f directors, the privileges o f govern m ent counselors. But these were few. The vast ma jority o f the intelligentsia did not mimic servility and flattery; they rem ained what they were, m odest and self-respecting. They couldnt afford a new suit of clothes, but wore w ith conscious respectability cloth ing that became threadbare during the war. Not to dis play their loss o f a role or to conceal penury but to re m ain individuals o f standing, yes, a citizen even in tatters: this was their mission. M ost o f the modest, dis mal bourgeois houses were destroyed or heavily dam aged; for this reason the intelligentsia crowded together in one o f the nethermost versions o f the circles o f Hell, one that not even Dante had dreamed of - the co-tenancy. W ithout a w ord or com plaint they began living in some kind o f outwardly half-bourgeois, inwardly half-prole life. (They didnt complain, be cause it w as always only the proles and ladies who did so.) The intelligentsia went to the pawnshop, sold their gold teeth, the old nickel-silver watches to buy food or m edicine. O r a book. (They still bought books.) N ot the worker, not even the peasant the middle class, which had been stripped o f everything, still bought books. They parted w ith their pocket watches more lightheartedly than with their books, when necessity finally forced them to sell those, too, for what ever price they could fetch. The nim ble-tongued, droll-mouthed, caustic-hu mored inhabitants o f Pest turned particularly serious. Ever 5rthing that had recently still been a caricature

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changed. The behavior of people, their relations with each other in the hum an sense altered. No one be lieved in classless society as advertised on showbills, like a popular play from the nineteenth century. But a certain social layer understood that without them there can be no society. I couldnt say exactly how it happened and w hat happened, but I began to feel at home in Budapest, the way I had in Kassa long ago. As if I belonged somewhere. The alienation M arx pre dicted did not take place in H ungary precisely because o f the Communist peril. Perhaps never, in any danger zone, was the Hungarian intelligentsia so deliberately cohesive as in these months, in the early stages o f the Communist takeover. No social life existed; after all, the indispens able home, job, and setting were lacking. Sometimes this social life consisted only o f a handshake, a wink o f an eye in passing. Individuals, half-strangers, ap proached each other with signals, without questions and explanations. Like living creatures generally, if danger threatened the tribe, they didnt inform each other about the danger w ith words and oratorical dec lamations but with shortwave m essages. No one knew exactly to what precipice, dark labyrinth, or ietid pit the daily surprises were leading. But everyone knew they had to protect themselves. There were those who protected themselves by join in g the Party, because they wanted careers. Some sort o f indefinable, anony mous and silent summ ary court martial immediately passed sentence on those who did this. And the sen tence was not subject to appeal; those who erred no ticed that others spurned and scorned them w ord lessly. There were those who joined the Party gloom ily, w ith clenched teeth and downcast eyes, because they feared for their job s and their families. People gave these weak chaps the cold shoulder, but they not infrequently forgave them on the grounds that they acted not from their own interests but from dire

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necessity. In instances o f com m on danger, every de gree o f protection was countenanced, as well as accom modation to circumstances and feigned acquiescence. They knew who was truly pretending when someone acted in concert with the Communists, and i f personal circumstances forced him to do so, they did not judge him severely. In times o f great danger, hum an beings know about each others secret intentions with a mysti cal radar beam. The Spider thought he knew every thing about those he had lured into his web - and it is certain he knew a damned lot about them. But the in telligence o f the victim s was not inferior. I f they sensed in som eone that he submitted to the Commun ists with clenched teeth, for appearances sake, they didnt pass sentence on him; sometimes they even en couraged and helped him with tactical advice. But i f they felt that someone really supported the Communists, they froze him out. Job, livelihood, school for the children all this was overwhelmingly, truly in danger: he had to save whatever he could every day. And yet, there was som ething more impor tant than a job , a livelihood- There is something that to most hum ans is m ore im portant in an emergency than everything they can lose in a severe test: self-es teem. After the many mendacities, the shabby, tat tered travesties, people now perceived the reality: the danger that some w anted to force som ething on them that they did not believe in. They wanted them to ac cept sincerely som ething that they despised- They wanted to take from them their rem aining hum an dig nity, which is m ore im portant than a social role, a good life, a career: the right to be humans, human beings building and renovating society according to their own beliefsFor this is what the Party wanted: to suck from the victim everything on which hum an self-esteem is based, like the Nazis in death camps, where they forced their victims into a subhuman level, because

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they not only murdered and worked them but first, at the very least, attempted to m ake the victim s lose their own hum an sensibility, their sense o f hum an dig nity in the course o f tortures and humiliations. Ulti mately the Nazis contented them selves - modestly with the physical annihilation o f their victims. The Communists wanted som ething more and different: they demanded that their victim s remain alive and cel ebrate the system that destroys human sensibility and self-esteem in its victims.

10
Every caricature of the recent past evaporated: the snobbish hierarchy, the nasal listen to me, my friend manner o f discussion, the sham haute bour geois lack o f culture, the hunger for honorific titles and social ranks. Sometimes even I didnt feel m yself to be a caricature any longer. W hen one gets right down to it, a middle-class writer was a nobody, a nothing in this world. I thought the Communists forgot about me the way one does a piece o f out-of-fashion, outmoded furniture. I began to entertain hopes. I went down to the swimming pool in the m orn ings and swam several laps conscientiously. I no longer went to Margaret Island to play tennis, because the siege, as if by magic, had turned the beautiful is land into a romantic, exotic bower; the plants, running wild, luxuriated around the ruins, and the coach had vanished in the historical whirlwind ju st as my tennis racquet did and with it m y other se lf who played tennis every morning. This was com forting to me. After the swim, I drank a cup o f strong espresso in a caf on Margaret Boulevard and lit a cigarette I bought in the corner tobacco shop; there were already cafs, coffee, tobacco shops, and cigarettes again. Then I strolled across Kossuth Bridge to Pest, where I had absolutely nothing to do. Along the way, I encountered

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acquaintances who didnt have anything particularly to do either. N ot long ago one o f them was a govern ment minister, and now he plied the inner-city streets with a sack flung over his shoulder in search o f cheap victuals. Another was a writer not long ago, and now he roved the streets in a fright, searching for someone who would believe he was still a writer, even when he no longer had the opportunity to write freely. The third was a wom an not long ago, and she once again strolled the streets in her war finery, painted and befeathered in search o f someone who would believe she w as still a wom an and not a female impersonator. And the fourth and the others I m et were all somebodies not long ago, and now no longer were. This was how we knew each other. But rarely did anyone make accu sations or complain. That easy self-confidence which a settled and anthropomorphic system with all its imperfections denoted for the people slipped out from under them. No one knew for certain any longer what class they belonged to, because the notion o f class became strangely muddied as eager-beaver snobs dug the titles o f nobility out o f family lim bos o f the past, and others flaunted the hastily unearthed locksmith grand fathers and w eaver grandmothers- Like someone crawling on all fours in anguish during the moments of an earthquake and feeling his way with his palms, people searched for some kind o f social security in their daily lives. The caricature evaporated, but the sardonic tableau of the New Class abruptly appeared in its place: the frockcoated sansculottes, the bureau cracy o f pigtailed mercenaries. I no longer wrote m y program for newspapers and journals; as radios put it in moments when enemy planes approached during the war, I went o ff the air. The clamor in the papers and journals was earsplitting. I did publish a travel diary in book form and two volum es o f the trilogy I wrote during the war also ap

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peared. I wanted to depict the dem onism o f the philis tine, plebeian anarchy o f the Hitler period in the novel. The Communist press laid down a line o f fire against these books. A M arxist philosopher who re turned from Moscow - he was a renowned Communist man o f letters, an international celebrity w as desig nated to write a lengthy treatise on the novel analyz ing Hitlers world; this indignantly m ud-slinging study presented the individual utterances o f the novels pro tagonists as i f they reflected the authors opinions. At first reading, I found it difficult to understand what provoked the cool, supercilious M arxist critic to froth so bloodily at the mouth; but, in the end, the true sig nificance o f the venomous piece became apparent with translucent phrases. The condemnation o f brute force, the analysis of the totalitarian m ind-set infuriated the Communist critic, who applied w hat I wrote about Hit lerian savagery and totalitarianism to h im self person ally and took it all as an assault conducted circuitously against the Communists. It didnt deserve a reply, be cause the noted philosopher apparently heard only what he chose to, hence his own voice. (I didnt publish the third volume o f the trilogy; it is still collecting dust in a desk drawer.) I terminated m y program; I wrote for the desk drawer; thus I worked as I would have sometimes liked to in my days o f caricature in perfect solitude, without reaction, and still close to a language com munity from which bitter disappointments and painful experiences had sometimes separated m e in the past. I lived like a person who no longer has the opportunity to speak to someone, but finally has the chance to be si lent with someone. N ot much time elapsed, and everything altered dramatically in social concerns, as i f a society had begun a migration within its inner sphere. People quickly renovated their ruined houses but then did not find their place in the patched-together home. Others

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took up residence together sometimes grotesquely in the comfortless hedgehog conditions o f emergency habi tations; som etimes three families squeezed into a single flat, leading a social life in the living room and serving supper in the kitchen. Some were found among these changed circumstances who, feeling out the possibilities for the conditions under which the middle class subsisted, no longer had the real oppor tunity to salvage anything from their old way o f life. No social life existed, but the middle class, with obsti nate and system atic perseverance, tacked together a way of life in which it was possible to move only with elbows pressed against hips, but which, even in this state o f cram ped helplessness, provided the means for a small social com m unity to preserve a consciousness o f its function. The aristocrats vanished; change and time elim inated their role and lifestyle. The intelligent sia knew that the technological revolution would squeeze the peasants and the workers out o f their workplaces and way o f life; the peasants would leave their lands and becom e proletariats, the workers w ould leave their factories because automation would take the tools out o f their hands, and the megalo polises the w orld over would receive new social strata resembling old spheres o f action only on the basis o f af fluence. The intelligentsia knew that they were indis pensable- They ju st had to bide the time, from which they now were expelled w ith malevolent bullying. They waited. They carried everything they could do without to the pawnshop, then also whatever was indispensable. They ironed their shabby clothes mirror-bright again and again, because they were un willing to dress as proles in the labyrinths o f daily existence; they always wore bourgeois clothing- In what were travesties o f apartments, next to the few old essential, glued broken furniture, they fiddled with furniture rescued som ehow from their homes in Upper Hungary, Transylvania and Transdanubia, from the

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spotless rooms o f vanished generations; and these worn bits o f m iddle-class furniture preserved a cultur al setting which was in its conservatism always only defensive, never offensive. The old customs o f social in tercourse, the polite address and the uncomplaining, benevolent change in voice also w ent w ith both the day-to-day stratagems o f having to survive and the strategy designed for the long term. (They were court eous in ways different from the marquesses and duch esses waiting for the hangmans assistant in the cellar o f the Conqiergerie who, with the grotesquely distorted simpering o f the Versailles lever, stood in a line before a bucket where in the morning, pretending to make their toilet, they could dip their fingers.) They were courteous like those who know that for them conservat ism, the respect for tradition, was not only a day-today gam e o f patience and healthy calisthenics, but the scope o f their historical duty; i f they did not plead for mercy or complain, i f they preserved from their past, their beings, their culture that energy which tradition transmits and without whose driving power evolution cannot occur, then the system o f violence will be forced to turn to them, because it needs them. A H ungarian intellectual m iddle class existed in U pper Hungary, Transylvania, and Transdanubia, m ost o f whom, for all practical purposes, em igrated to Budapest and rem ained nearly invisible there. Now, when they were dismissed from everywhere, the em pti ness they left in their place was blatantly evident. In every field o f activity there was a quiet, very poor, barely visible intelligentsia whose expertise, integ rity, and humanness the Communists w ere unable to replace through their cram-courses. They were the consciousness o f the nation - not the people, but an intelligentsia without titles, ranks and estates. They didnt belong to any sort o f high-sounding political party, not in the past, not now either. They had ao poli tical clique. The only cohesive element for them was

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that culture which they inherited and loved, which they didnt display ostentatiously but, yes, concealed modestly instead. I knew their apartments; the apple smell o f their dark vestibules lingered in m y nostrils; I saw the homem ade preserves in ja rs placed atop cup boards, and in their room s the plush sofa and the in laid oval table or pipeholder with green billiard cloth rescued in their exodus from Brtfa, Kassa, and Kolozsvar (my father still had a pipe-holder; it, too, was destroyed in the rubbish pile o f the house on Mik Street). Were they progressives? Yes, but in a way different than the supporters o f radical change desired. They preferred to read Mikszth rather than Zsigmond M oricz, but they knew that Babits was a greater poet than Gyula Vargha. They did not prog ress anything, they preserved som ething instead. They bought books, they purchased the inexpensive season tickets for the theater, they subscribed to the newspapers. There w erent many o f them, but without them no H ungarian culture was possible- The puffed-up bourgeois neo-baroque scenery concealed them, but now this scenery crumbled, and the time had come to test the fire-fighting equipment, now when it was possible to see the reality. The intelligent sia in H ungary never w as a sharply discernible seg ment split into political parties and ideologies; they amounted only to a root layer. They were too few in number. N ot m any had answered the call o f the right w ing in the time following the senseless cruelty o f Tria non (again, only this anonym ous middle class actually paid the cost o f Trianon in Transylvania and Upper Hungary); ju s t as in Germ any and elsewhere, it was the uneducated plebeian petty bourgeoisie who flocked into the extrem e right-w ing parties which had neither the tradition nor the education to reason objectively. Truly, in Hungary, only two kinds o f persons existed in the political sense: the liberal and the non-liberal. And this liberal H ungarian intelligentsia remaining

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from the Hungary o f the nobility and stripped o f their privileges, a middle class reduced to professional pen ury, assumed a role without an ideological program. They decided to bide their time until they would be needed, because without them despotic pow er was im potent. They wanted to help - first themselves, then the nation without helping the Communists at the same time (like the best o f the returned emigrants later.) But it was very difficult, sometimes practically impossible to draw that dividing line. (The Commun ists often derived benefit from this impossibility.) For the time being, everything that was con sidered to be a parvenu excess in the past was de stroyed, and the naked reality emerged in its place: poverty, ju st as in the West. I dont believe in the soli darity o f the proletariat. On the other hand, zoologists know that mutual help exists even among crows. I be lieve in the solidarity o f shared poverty. And now, when the tempest tore holes in all the fancy scenery, when society shed its buskin and costume, it made manifest the solidarity o f poverty. Hungary, the Ca naan flowing with milk and honey, provided m ilk and honey only to a few; to the working intelligentsia it never gave anything m ore than the bread o f charity. And this silent, uncom plaining m iddle class o f poverty readers, theatergoers, the educators o f children in ways exceeding their material means, the decent Hun garian middle class inconspicuously preserving the traditions o f social intercourse which w as scornfully and superficially confounded with the gentry and the parvenu lout - this intelligentsia did not take action either inwardly or outwardly. They did not lament, they did not complain. It seem ed as i f a cultural class o f the nation, its intelligentsia, was serving notice that debate was meaningless, that one cannot dispute with destiny. Destiny was now near, visible. W hat was this destiny? Loneliness. No other people was still living in Europe that

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was as stifled by loneliness as the Hungarians. I dont know how our relatives the Finns feel. It is said that m any depressed souls and suicides are found there, too. Some attribute this to the northern climate, to the dimensions o f this vast and frightfully empty country o f forests and lakes, to the geographical isolation: in habitants live far from one another and sunlight is scarce. Perhaps this explains it. In Hungary, however, the loneliness was different: it was a shortness of breath, an asthm atic lack o f air. For a thousand years, a people roam ing in the vicinity o f Europe sought some one it could speak to in confidence. It never found any one. (There were fellow feelings: the Italian and the Pole sympathized w ith the Hungarian, but their good intentions never grew warm.) Hungarys great kings and powerful statesmen, from St. Stephen to Istvn Szchenyi then its artists, from the Guardsmen poets to Arpad Tth, searched for the road to the West for centuries. Som etim es the W est seemed close; all one had to do w as speak to it and it would answer. But in reality, it never did. That mystical link which in the political or constitutional sense calls peoples into soli darity never m aterialized. The consciousness that being Hungarian meant the same as being lonely, that the Hungarian language was incomprehensible and unrelated to other languages, that the Hungarian phenom enon consisting o f diverse races but still typi cally H ungarian was also foreign to those who were next-door neighbors and shared a common fate with the Hungarians for a thousand years. There was some thing benum bing in this consciousness. Sometimes, for a brief period, at times o f shifting currents o f civiliza tion, hopefulness befogged this feeling o f loneliness. But it did not last long. The Hungarian was constantly compelled to le a m anew that there wasnt a people in Europe to w hom he could speak in confidence, who was willing to undertake a join t responsibility with him. And now, when a hostile great power - the effemi

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nate, pertinacious Slav - grabbed his dismembered country by the throat, he realized suddenly, in an alarming flash that there was no one, near or far, he could count on. Maybe America, som e said, stuttering in panic. Maybe the West, some mumbled in startling ignor ance. (I returned from the W est, and I brought home in my nostrils and nerves that benum bing lethargy, im pudent hostility, and arrogant superiority w ith which the W est viewed the fate o f Eastern Europe.) Slowly Hungarians began to realize there was nothing to wait for, nothing to hope for. Nowhere was there a people who were willing to gamble a diplom atic initiative, to utter a serious and true word in behalf o f Hungarians. When this became clear to them, the feeling o f loneli ness engulfed everything, like the liana the ground in the jungle. And loneliness poses a great danger: the danger o f turning karstic, o f erosive marcescence threatens everyone the individual and the people in the loneliness. Escape, i f there was any, could occur only in wardly. As is always the case with loneliness, the Hungarian could only hope for an ally within him self, inward, And during these years, in this tim e of their consciousness o f historical loneliness, something spoke up within the people. The loneliness will not make anyone better . It is not true that loneliness en nobles. Rather, the lonely person will be m ore frigid, colder though stronger at the sam e time. Loneliness is destiny. But it can unearth sources o f strength un known in times o f self-deluding optim ism and illusory hopefulness. I began feeling at home in H ungary be cause this loneliness spoke in everything and everyone - to me as to everyone else. And the people, like the individual, knew that this loneliness could not be al tered, because it was destined. And so they the people and individuals - tried their hand at being lonely in a practical and methodical way.

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O beata solitudo," sang St. Francis. And then he added in a groan: 0 sola beatitudo.*' The saint who in his own day, in the beginning o f his career, was a hippie and only later became Saint Francis through com plex transpositions, overstated the matter. Loneli ness does not bestow happiness. But the loneliness of Hungary was a source o f strength, an oasis in the Euro pean desert. W ith its fate, its good and bad characteris tics, a people w as left tragically on its own between the E ast and the West. This people listened to radio broad casts from the West. Some continued to hope. Others were silent for long periods o f time. Then, because they could not do anj^hing else, they set about fashion ing order in the loneliness.

11
.. Unstable as you are, beware, for Order itself is precarious The stag has gone mad in the maple grove Anarchy peers but through the dark foliage Drops o f blood seep down from the eaves M usic, geom etry and civil law N o longer keep the world in order Tonight the wanderer prow ls in a trenchcoat Sharply the wildcat screeches and the flowers shudder../

12
Troubles w ith civil law were observable; seem ingly, m usic and geometry continued to maintain order in the world w ith their old authority, but not for long. The Communists laid their hands on music, too; they rated it. The Euclidean laws o f geometry also wobbled, because the Communists w ere in a hurry to replace everything quickly; som etimes it seem ed as if

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counterpoint and the truncated pyramid were not the same as they were in the past. They wanted to make everything disappear, or to refashion, to kneed w hat ever reminded anyone o f the past into som ething new fangled. Lysenko announced the new genetics, and ever3fthing seemed possible through this M arxist mode o f scientific observation, including the transformation of human nature by means o f environmental in fluences, or the squaring o f the circle. They announced the arrival o f the New Order. Possessing a disorderly nature by temperament, I took notice, because I knew from experience that order quickly turns into system, and this is dangerous. Bridges were constructed. Streetcars stopped obediently at the terminal, and the conductors walked with the handbrake from the back o f the car to the front to resume the route. Hangover-like weekdays fol lowed the euphoric anarchy o f the tim e after the siege. In that period, when there was no state or agency able to act, people, oddly enough, found their bearings through some sort o f personal, subjective statute. No system existed anywhere, but the signs o f a personal, functional capacity appeared. Everyone did only what came to their minds and w hat was possible. People dis covered without obtaining a trade license that they could resole shoes, repair plum bing and m ount w in dow shutters, that the structure o f living together, though without the seal o f authority, functioned none theless- That strange propensity for anarchy that lurks behind sclerotic civilizations like a pum a in a jungle did occasionally let out a snarl. This period of time didnt last long. After a few months the official System commenced; statutes glared from the walls, police strolled the streets at night (sometimes they were more dangerous than those whom the powersthat-be entrusted w ith their supervision); a Tax Office, Land Registry and Auditors Office were set up. But

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there was no longer a viable human order. The system asked for leave to speak. Bells were installed on house doors, and phones rang in the houses. Both rang frequently: the compul sive spasm o f hatred eased, people wanted to get close to each other again. Our phone rang and the Great A ct ress chirped away at the end o f the line: she cooed, twittered, whim pered, whispered the latest news into the phone. And she invited us to dinner. (Gizi was per fect on the telephone, better than on the stage: in physical projection, she never conveyed self-con fidence, but i f she could hide behind the folding-screen o f the telephone, her voice was plastic, airily self-pos sessed, and affected every nuance w ith perfect intona tion.) Yes, they have already found a flat. And Tibor, her husband, finally obtained that post at the clinic and is now a regular university professor- W hat would we like for dinner? Is there anything particular we want? Because she, Gizi, can arrange everything with Rdkosi ju st as she had yesterday with Horthy. No, we didnt w ant anything special, but we accepted her invi tation- The actress had pasted together an apartment in the Inner City; she had hastily furnished a tempor ary three-room fairy castle out o f ruined discards. It w asnt a real apartm ent or hom e; it was, rather, a stage set, because to a capable com edian the home is al w ays also a stage w ith wings. A man in a white jacket served the dinner, and we drank French champagne w ith cottage-cheese and noodle dessert. During the din ner her husband - a taciturn, genteel and engaging being and an excellent physician went over to the surgery in the adjoining room and removed a childs tonsils, but returned in tim e for the demitasse and sat silently am ong us and with the attentiveness o f a per fect host saw to it that his guests enjoyed themselves. (Tibor is happy now, said the actress confidentially in a low voice while her husband was at the surgery, he has finally achieved everything he ever longed

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for.) Tiber returned, poured brandy into the glasses, smiled and listened. The actress was a perfect hostess, too. But at the same time she was a consum m ate ac tress and behaved like someone who is in a new part: yesterday she was the am ulet o f the conservative world; now the new masters, the Communists, were here and so she was perform ing for them. H er hus band was silent, like someone who was h im self a guest in the lovely flat hastily thrown together. There was a moment when the smiling, courteous and disciplined man looked me directly in the eyes: in his look shone such an unexpected and surprising question, an al m ost despairing w ink o f the eye that it rem ains fixed in my memory. Like that o f someone who wanted to say something, to cry out, but then he turned away, looked at someone else and changed the subject. Later, they returned our visit- Again, Gizi chirped and cheeped away, again Tibor was silent. Then they left Budapest and I never saw them again. Two years later I read in a newspaper at an Italian railway station that Tibor poisoned Gizi, who died im mediately. Then Tibor committed suicide, but he al m ost came o ff badly, surviving for a few hours. Fortu nately for him, doctors were unable to revive him, and he, too, died at dawn. Apparently Gizi was mistaken when she said Tibor is happy now - the apartment, the hospital were not enough; he wasnt completely hsppy after all. And that look, the unexpected, ag gressive, shouting glance that he fixed on m e during the conversation was revived in m y memory. Order was established by now, but m any could not bear up under the Order well. One night the tele phone rang again and the wife o f a physician friend of mine was calling for me to go im mediately to Rokus Hospital, because her husband, a noted neurologist, was dying: he had injected h im self with ten cubic cen timeters o f scopolam inic morphine, and though the doc tors tried in vain to revive him, even by slapping his

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face; there was little hope o f saving him. It was near dawn, but I m anaged to get hold o f a taxi and went to the hospital, where m y friend lay unconscious in bed with upturned eyes. B y noon his eye reflexes were func tioning. The next night he was already talking. This doctor didnt have to worry about m aking a living. The Communists treated doctors circumspectly, prudently; they needed com petent specialists. They didnt exact a profession o f loyalty from m y friend either. He was the head physician o f a hospital and an adjunct lecturer; he had a highly reputable private practice, and his house was not damaged during the siege. To the day of his attempted suicide, he tended to matters at the hos pital, issued instructions, kept him self busy appar ently contentedly and, yes, cheerfully. He lived the old life, subscribed to foreign periodicals, bought and read Hungarian and foreign books with fastidious selectiv ity. His father was a highly respected judge in Upper Hungary, a descendant o f the Hungarian middle class which upheld strict order and guarded status. I asked him w hy he attem pted suicide. Two days had passed since he had been pulled back from deaths door; he was already in possession of his faculties and spoke composedly. I could sense in his voice that he spoke willingly about his attempt at suicide; he felt the need to confess. (And it evoked sym pathy that even on the edge o f the abyss he rem ained a medical specialist and could speak about his own cata strophe without self-pity. He spoke with a dreamy, re laxed voice, the way wom en do after orgasm, when they are sated and before falling asleep they murmur a few words o f gratitude. Possibly, there is in suicide this kind o f orgasmic gratification also.) He said: I was afraid. I asked him what he feared. W ith closed eyes, as i f he were speaking h a lf asleep, he said: Do you rem em ber the Oxford Program ? I faintly remem bered it- Then in m y m ind flashed a recent conversa tion o f ours when m y neurologist friend asserted what

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he had ju st read in a W estern periodical: in England, after the war, the highbrows discovered the only solu tion, the Oxford Program, in short, the well-meaning, idealistic English pipe dream which cherished a so ciety where individuals have the means o f retaining their freedom opposite a state desiring only slaves, to retain freedom which makes it possible to preserve ones personality intact while in the service o f social justice. I now remembered that we had argued about this issue not long ago. But I didnt understand w hy he was reminding m e o f this argum ent when, deathly pale, he lay in a bed in Rokus Hospital. I asked him what the Oxford Program had to do w ith his getting here. H e replied reluctantly he underlined every syl lable that he was afraid because humanism no longer existed. I took issue w ith him. A person doesnt attempt suicide to make someone aware that there is no humanism , W hen and in w hat life experience was humanism ever found in tim es past? Strong individ uals also lie to themselves and to the world when they are afraid. I didnt believe w hat he said. H e repeated with fixed lips: I was afraid. And then he began talk ing w ith eyes closed. H e already believed, so he said, that he had passed through the choc, the perturbation of the war and the siege. Already everything around him was again in order, he was living as before. Then one night (he was listening to a Mozart record, he was a passionate mlomane) suddenly, without cause or pretext, he felt fear. H e began to fear that in this world he was no longer w hat he had been, because he had lost something- He said this like the writer and news paper editor who one day was struck w ith horror in a cellar prison among the Russians because he perceived that in this system he as a separate person no longer exists; the individual dissolves. This was how he spoke, and then he suddenly fell silent, like someone who feels ashamed o f himself. W ithout a word I left the private ward.

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The doctor on duty approached m e in the corri dor and escorted me across the suicide section toward the exit. In this ward lay in long rows o f beds those who swallowed lye, who tried to string themselves up, who jum ped o ff a bridge, who opened gas taps, the everlasting cripples in the tragedy o f the big citys re fuse who, independent o f the historical time, wander single file toward daily, voluntary destruction. The doc tor reported that now there were m ore suicides than during the war, m ore than in the period immediately following the siege, in the first months o f the Russian occupation. (A few years later, Hungary headed the list o f suicides in Europe.) He said that earlier, before the siege, it was possible to make a diagnosis with tolerable certainty: the social situation, stereot37pical changes o f fortune determined who, when, and why suicide would be attempted. The disappointed lover, the person potentially powerless in the fisticuffs o f so cial success, or the one who sought revenge when he tied a rope around his neck or turned on the gas - not long ago these tragedies were still being repeated with monotonous obstinacy. But now, the doctor said, many suicides, when asked w hy they wanted to make a geta way - this was how he put it, using the hoodlums re m ark o f the Rokus Hospital - replied m ost often that they felt they couldnt take things any longer because they were afraid. And not one o f them could say pre cisely w hat they were afraid of. Fear seeped into the consciousness o f people like odorless, tasteless asphyx iation- The suicides in Rokus Hospital, when they opened the gas tap or climbed up to the eagle on Francis Joseph bridge, did not fear for their jobs (after all, m ost o f them were unemployed beggars) or for their social position or sweetheart. W hom and what did they fear? Som ething happened to them - to every one - w hich they did not understand- And this incom prehension was so frightening that many escaped it through death.

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One day I traveled to the small baroque town in the provinces where formerly, during the w ar, when it wasnt possible to leave the country, I found a bit o f that urbanity o f Upper H ungary which was lacking in Budapest. The small town was famous for its good wines and for the fact that, being the seat o f the bishop ric, the priesthood held all social and econom ic power in its hands. Internal social changes in Hungary had terminated this unhealthy situation independently of the Russians and Communists: lands, vineyards and estates were taken away from the archbishop and des titute families were moved into the long row o f lovely baroque canonical houses. I was struck, though, by how slightly the archbishops power could be reduced. I arrived on a holiday celebrating the Virgin M ary and found people preparing with great zeal for the arrival o f Cardinal Mindszenty. They had gathered for three days in the little town by train, wagon and foot. They hung out on the steps o f the cathedral, bartered goods from knapsacks, then struck camps on bare ground everj^ h ere in the town, and families slept under the open sky. Presumably, those were not m istaken who in sisted that in these days about a hundred thousand pil grims from every province o f the country flocked together around the cathedral. The population o f the town tripled for several days. I walked around in the crowds and looked at them closely. M ost o f them were beggar-poor peasants, men and wom en w ith children without shoes and boots. I saw feet which had altered after the long tramping in the dust o f the highway, rem inding me, rather, o f some animals hooves, a rhinoceross hooves. The massive crowd squatted silently around the cathe dral, munched w hat they had brought from home, and waited. They waited for Mindszenty. A t this time the cardinal from Esztergom one year after the conspir acy - was as prom inent a figure in the country as were the priest princes in the old days; one could sense

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in the bewildered excitement o f expectation that i f this priest would raise his hand and give the signal, the fa natical crowd would attack the carbines o f the police and sweep everything away before it. But the arch bishop did not give the signal, and he could not do so. H e arrived and the vast crowd kneeled down. He began to preach - he spoke about the melodious hills in a priestly m anner - he stood high above the crowd, and the m ajority had a hard tim e understanding the symbols o f the speech sprinkled w ith pontifical embel lishments- W hat they did understand was that they were afraid, and that the cardinal was also afraid. W hat were the hundred thousand impover ished, barefooted pilgrims afraid of? And the other cot ters, the million who stayed at home in their hovels? The Communists beguiled them with the promise that they would give them land; using propagandas every form of argumentation, they instructed them that now everything was taking place to serve the interests of the poor w orking people. Still, they were afraid. Were they afraid o f the Slavs? The Communists? Did they fear for their pigs, for the grain they stowed away in pits? W ere they afraid o f the inspector o f the flour mill, the controller o f threshing, the policeman who ap peared in the place o f the plumed gendarme and m oni tored the peoples mode o f life and conduct with pre cisely the same relentless rigor as their predecessors, the gendarmes, had? One cannot know for certain w hat they were afraid o f But they huddled together and kneeled on the pavement and gazed up at the priest as if, by way o f the cardinals robe, a demand had become incarnate in a man. As i f they felt that time had thrust an extraordinary platform under the priest: a m an had resolved to proclaim a demand, the right to freedom o f conscience. Perhaps the crowd that was afraid felt this. They fell on their knees, moaned and invoked God. A hundred thousand souls felt that the moment o f the great test had arrived, when they

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had to confess that the only thing rem aining to them was the hard-to-define idea to which religious and phil osophical systems give various names but call the soul in the vernacular. (And very few turned up among the hundred thousands and then the millions who could determine what the soul is - the idea to which the Greek pneum atologists gave another meaning, and Dewey still another, the Am erican phil osopher and pedagogue w ho said: The soul is the Word.) It is im possible to im agine what the kneeling pilgrims at the Eger fair understood by soul and freedom o f conscience. It was only certain that their voices faltered and moaned because they were afraid. Perhaps they were also afraid o f w hat was con stantly dinned into their ears through loudspeakers from the Central Office: now every day o f life was no longer an ordinary Monday or Tuesday but lasting his tory. No one knew exactly what history is, but there was something sinister in its threat. Toynbee, in his eightieth year, maintained that the future cannot be inferred from the study o f history, because it is not cer tain that what human beings did under identical condi tions in the past will also m aterialize under identical conditions in the future. H um ans must resign them selves to the fact that history is unreliable and arbi trary, like everything that m ankind produces. For this reason people began, instead, to pay attention to the weekdays. And behind the humdrum , current interpre tation o f history the other, the true history loomed.

13
Lola related it like this; Dudras gave m y grandm a a m assage every morning at six oclock. Everyone in the house in Kassa was still sleeping; only the servants hustled about in the kitchen, kindling a fire, washing the dishes left

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over from the late supper and setting the large extend able table in the dining room for breakfast. Sometimes this table rem ained spread for twenty-four hours. The used dishes were rem oved and the crumbs brushed off the table-cloth, but there were times when someone al ways ate, breakfasted or had a snack at ten, lunched, took tea, or had supper, because the family was large and, besides, there were those who belonged to the fam ily sem i-officially and ate at our place, dropping in at unpredictable times. For this reason it w asnt always worth resetting the table, However, the servants set it early in the morning, always for at least twelve, some times for more. Dudras was an old woman, and her daughter did sewing at the m anor houses. Dudras came at six, while the house was asleep. She tiptoed the length of the rooms. The house had many rooms, because it for m erly was the office o f the Court o f Appeals, and any one who didnt know his way about could get lost among the rooms, doors, and alcoves. Dudras was at hom e; she didnt lose her way and went directly to Grandma, w ho was snoring under the down comforter. She didnt wake her up; she pottered around in the semi-dark room, put the bottle o f alcohol next to the bed, took a swig from the bottle, and then, without a greeting, she reached under the comforter and began m assaging Grandmas abdomen w ith alcohol on her hands. This w as the alarm clock. Grandma woke up and called out from under the comforter: Dudras, dont drink, she said sleepily. And she slept on. T w ont, m adam , said the masseuse hoarsely. But this w asnt true; everyone knew she drank. Sometimes she poured a little alcohol on her hand, sometimes she took a sw ig from the bottle. She was called Dudras be cause she spoke grouchily and mumbled; after all, she got soused before her arrival - she stammered slightly, in short, she d u d rd lt But she massaged expertly,

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and actually Grandma woke up only later under the comforter when Dudras was already finished with her abdomen and turned her over in bed, because she began pummel in g her back and thighs, This took h a lf an hour. Then came only the sort o f dietetic pre-break fast that Grandma - still in bed - could quickly gulp down, to help her regain her strength after sleep and the pummeling and so should feel like getting up. This wasnt simple to do as you might think. Grandma was a heavy person, and even Marienbad didnt help with her weight; she w ent to bathe in B ohe mia in vain; she always returned fatter than when she left. But she was a finely built, stately obese person. She was beautiful even in old age. True, she took care o f h erself That is w h y she began the day at dawn with the masseuse. When Dudras finished with the different parts o f her body, Grandma got out o f bed, put on her ngli ge and sat down at the dressing table, because the hairdresser was already on her way. The hairdresser didnt drink like Dudras, but she talked incessantly, While she combed, curled and scented her hair, while she readied the Einlage, the newspaper with which she tested the hot curling iron - there were two kinds o f curling irons, a wide one which crim ped her hair in soft waves from her forehead to her nape and a narrow one which curled her bangs - she talked constantly. Hairdressers know everything, and Grandm as hair dresser was no exception. But she also set about things. While preparing the Einlage for Grandma and curling up her lovelocks, she had to tell her about everything that happened in the neighborhood and possibly also that which didnt but could happen. When she finished. Grandma sat before the mirror with her dressing gown over her shoulders in full fancy coiffure like Victoria, the English queen, when she opened Parliament. Grandma consumed her second breakfast, the

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real one, in her room also. Servants brought her a china cup and a pot o f coffee and m ilk, fresh rolls and jam and butter on a silver tray. And the Neues Poli tisches Volksblatt, on whose front page an illustrated drawing showed the latest horror, the victim in his blood or the derailed express train. Grandma always suspected that she was not the first one in the house to get the N eues Politisches Volksblatt in her hands in the morning, because living next door was another, a foreign old wom an who was poor and couldnt sub scribe to the paper, and so the servants, in complicity, sometimes secretly lent the new Volksblatt by seven in the m orning to the grandma next door, who glanced through it avidly and then handed it back with a sigh for them to take it to the subscriber with the breakfast tray. Grandma still grew up with a respect for private property, and when she found out that sometimes someone looked at her newspaper before she did, she w as indignant- But this was only a passing, morning vexation. Grandma enjoyed her breakfasts. On the whole, she enjoyed eating. After the massage and the coiffure, she sat down comfortably to breakfast. With spectacles on her nose and wearing a pretty lacy morn ing wrapper, she ate and read inquisitively; she alter nately took a bite from the buttered roll and one from the newspaper. O f course, the servants also put francs in the coffee, no m atter how m uch the residents o f the house grumbled - one cannot depend on servants not to put a spoonful o f francs in freshly brewed coffee. W as this an act o f prole revenge, or superstition? It surpassed understanding. Grandma had already wea ried o f constantly having to call someone to account for it, and she acquiesced to having francs in her coffee. This was how she breakfasted; she read slowly and w ith interest about who had been murdered. After breakfast, the chambermaid came in, carrying a large pitcher o f hot water. Mademoiselle sometimes also helped to wash and dress Grandma.

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Mademoiselle had been with us for a decade, and after the First W orld W ar an Italian officer one doesnt know why, but before the Czechs arrived, the Italians also occupied Kassa - took French language lessons from her and then left without saying goodbye, which produced sad consequences- But no one spoke about this. Mademoiselle belonged to the fam ily, at least that was w hat we children were told - unlike the serv ants who belonged to the household; indeed, according to Grandma, they were hired en em ies/ though they lacked for nothing, After Mademoiselle got over the Ita lian officer, she stayed on w ith us for a long time and we shared her grief. Then she returned to France and vanished the way Fruleins and m ademoiselles gen erally do when they complete their m issionary assign ment in barbaric foreign countries. The purpose o f the mission was for Mademoiselle to teach us, the wild young ladies, French and W estern proprieties, and for this she received very little pay but belonged to the family. In reality, we, the wild young ladies, whose up bringing our parents entrusted to her, didnt learn French as w ell as she did Hungarian; and in the end, it wasnt we who became French but Mademoiselle who became Hungarian. W hen the servants began to dress Grandma in the morning, M ademoiselle m ost often also came into the room, because the task was not a simple undertaking and required an assistant. Sometimes, already, we children were per mitted to enter Grandmas room for the dressing, which m ade us extrem ely happy because the sight was a grand to-do. Grandma kept up with fashion, but in the twentieth century she still retained som e o f the odd ities o f the nineteenth. She always dressed ceremoni ously, not only when she expected to receive callers at home, but at other times as well, for instance, when she went out for a walk, because she felt she had to keep up appearances. Grandpa was the ch ief medical officer o f Kassa, the free royal city, and o f Abaujtorna

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County, and when he passed away at the beginning of the twentieth century, Grandma felt she had to main tain her rank in her external appearance, in her attire out o f respect for Grandpas memory. Since Grandma had twelve children in her day wom en did not take pills but constantly gave birth - the garments she wore were m ade from out-of-date patterns, like the uni forms o f soldiers, w ho do not change styles, because, after all, they must always be ready to go to war and die. Grandma, likewise, was always ready - not for war but for life, thus to give birth imm ediately to a new child in place o f the one that died, and so she never changed dress patterns. W e, the children, if we were admitted, would sit on the sofa and watch hap pily as they laced up Grandma, because that was as good as a m atinee at the theater. Grandma always dressed elegantly, even in the morning, but she was conservative. The cham berm aid and Mademoiselle grunted and sweated while they dressed Grandma. They had great difficulty with the corset because Grandma had a large w aist; for this reason, the chambermaid and Mademoiselle tugged at the corset cord from the right and the left respectively, while Grandma stood in front o f the large m irror and groaned commands in a choked voice. W hen they had laced her up, they had to pull on her shoes, but this w asnt easy either. In her corset Grandma was already like a statue; she couldnt bend down to pull on her shoes herself. So the chambermaid struggled w ith the shoehorn, while she som ehow man aged to force Grandm as foot into the shoe; then she buttoned up the three shoe buttons with great diffi culty with a hook, because Grandma preferred threebutton oxfords. She always bought a beautiful hat with a feather, if possible, and a veil, and it had to be fastened on her head w ith a hatpin. The point o f the pin poked through to the other side o f the hat, and M ademoiselle fastened a protective cone on this tip,

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out o f humanitarian concern. The entire dressing proc ess was complex and ceremonial, ju st as the morning ceremony in Versailles may have been in the time of Madame de Maintenon. By the time they were done, every one o f them was gasping for breath, M adem oi selle, the chambermaid and Grandma, too, Only we children on the sofa were happy, because the occasion was all such great fun for us. But they were most often finished, in spite of everything, by ten oclock, and then Grandma pulled on crocheted half-gloves reaching her elbows, hung a reticule on her arm and headed for town. She de scended the stairs slowly, like a battleship leaving the harbor, and we watched her through the balustrade like contemporaries an historical figure. W hen she emerged from the gate, passersby and then shop keepers in the neighborhood greeted her with low bows and doffings o f hats, because there was a liturgi cal solemnity in Grandmas bearing. She walked slowly, she couldnt have walked any other way; she smiled graciously, returned greetings w ith an inclina tion o f her head, and everyone was pleased because such a splendid grandma was w alking along the street. People in the town still rem em bered Grandpa, the doctor whom everyone respected. On the chest of drawers in Grandmas room the fam ilys pictures were lined up in a semi-circle, first those o f the living and de ceased children, then those o f the sons- and daughtersin-law and grandchildren, including the picture of Papa and Mamas engagement: Papa in a first lieuten ants uniform w ith two stars on its collar patch, be cause at the time o f their betrothal he was still an ac tive army officer and only later resigned his com mission, when he m arried mother, but they couldnt put down the peacetime marriage security, the thirty thousand Francis Joseph solid silver forints, because it was a lot o f money at the time. And there, in the middle, enlarged, stood Grandpas picture in an ornate

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frame, showing him dressed for the silver wedding an niversary in a silk-faced frock coat, an open starched collar, a black bow tie, a gold chain hanging at his chest, bearded and sm iling as is proper for a good doc tor, the family physician who knew and was ac quainted with the citys fam ily and physical secrets, the mysteries o f laxatives and heart drops, everything hidden under the frocks and corsets o f men and women. In Grandpas time, doctors still did not wear w hite coats when they received patients; rather, they dressed in black frock coats and draped gold chains across their stomachs. Grandma, when she appeared on the street, stirring so much respect, evoked memories o f Grandpa. Before she w ent to the W om ens Society, w here she was president, she dropped in at the local butchershop, Freudenfelds, and standing and wear ing her gloves, she ate a serving o f ham with a but tered roll. Eating ham w as one o f Grandm as w eak nesses. Like a drug addict, she couldnt break the habit when she passed in front o f the butchershop. This m outhful o f ham at ten oclock was her w eak ness, this unneeded but soothing narcotic. We spoke about this in the fam ily with sighs; indeed, everyone knew that argum ent, adm onition w ere futile, ju st as the dope addict cant be broken o f the opium habit with sound reasoning. The butcher knew this and grinned broadly when Grandma entered his shop and stopped in front o f the counter in gala attire. Nothing had to be said. A large sign above the entrance to the store proclaimed that This is the ch ief outlet for Kassas gammon. Most passersby didnt know exactly, and neither did Grandma, w hat the difference was between gammon and ham , but those who entered Freudenfelds w erent interested in semantics; they only wanted ham , fresh ham . And they got some, some superb ham. For Grandma, old Freudenfeld cut a fresh gammon

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every morning, and while his assistant quickly sliced a roll in two and buttered it, the butcher trim med with the point o f his knife the excess fat from the tip, from the end o f the ham and placed the tasty, pale pink, mildly cured, and tenderly cooked end slices between the rolls two halves. Grandma - standing in place, in gala attire and gloved, hat with feather and pin on her head - devoured the ham and roll. She didnt sit down to it; rather, she hurried, knowing there w as som e thing in her mania for ham that wasnt quite decorous. W hen she swallowed the last bite, she sm iled coyly, like someone ashamed o f her weakness but unable to do anything about it; the passion was more powerful. The butcher watched her contentedly as she stuffed herself with ham in the early morning, flung the door wide open, and bowed deeply. This w as her snack every day on the way to the W om en Society. Grandma walked down Main Street and re turned greetings with a gracious smile. She stopped oc casionally the way a battleship slows down during a naval review - exchanged words w ith acquaintances, but only briefly, because at the W om ens Society were waiting for her the ladies with whom she walked over to the Peoples Kitchen to serve lunch to the poor. Every m orning after the ham she went to the Peoples Kitchen and pretended to taste the lunch for that day. But she didnt do much else for the poor because unfor tunately, Grandma had a very low opinion o f them, She believed the poor were lazy, didnt w ant to work, and, in addition, told lies and stole. As in m any things. Grandma was possibly right about this. However, she suppressed the antipathy she felt for the poor and went every noon to the Peoples Kitchen, where the row o f ladies had already cooked the m eal for the poor, soup with millet, and added a slice o f bread. Hatted and half-gloved, Grandma dipped a spoonful o f soup from the large pot and pretended to taste it, because she had a social conscience; only, she was social in

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ways different from Marx. She praised the soup, and then she m agnanim ously inquired how the poor were doing and whether they needed anything. The poor, in their characteristic way, always needed something, but at the same time they knew that her friendly inquiry must not be taken too seri ously, because they wouldnt get anything m ore than soup and bread anj^way. So they ju st groaned, rolled their eyes, kissed her hand, and acted as i f they had no need for anything m ore out o f life than the soup that they received through the generosity o f Grandma and the other ladies o f the W om ens Society. Grandma lis tened to the poor, and she also heaved a sigh, because she knew from experience with a long life that the poor rarely tell the truth and that, in general, it is very diffi cult to help humanity. She served several ladles of soup into bowls, and then, like one who has done her duty, she said goodbye graciously and headed home ward. In the m eantim e, she sometimes stopped in front of the M egay confectionery and ordered a cake for a birthday, wedding, or nam e day. The family and the neighborhood were so populous that seldom did a week pass when someone wasnt born, didnt marry, graduate, or go on a long trip and then return from abroad... A cake w as always needed. (On Grandmas seventieth birthday, the piano was loaded with gift cakes, and later, w hat was left over was, w ith social in tent, sent to the poor.) W hen she finished with that, too, she went home. In her room, now alone - because the chambermaid, the general servants and Mademoi selle were bustling about in the dining room - she removed her hat, pulled o ff her half-gloves, washed her hands, put rice pow der on her face, and meanwhile looked at one or another o f the framed family portrait gallery lined up on the chest o f drawers in front o f the mirror: Frici, who fell in the First W orld War; Rucsi, who was a lawyer and died young; the portraits of

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daughters who got m arried in America. She sighed be cause it was sad that these dead and the far-removed would never again sit down around the dining table at noon. But then she nodded repeatedly, because she was wise, as grandmas generally are, and entered the dining room, where the family had already gathered and waited until they could sit down to the well-laid table. Not only Papa, Mama, we children and those o f Grandmas still living children who happened to be home - not only the clan had lunch at our place, but also the private tutors, teachers, and also occasional guests who were the needy m embers o f the middle class, whom Grandma invited to lunch out o f charity. One could never know exactly how m any would be present for lunch, but the extendable table was so long that it could always accommodate one or two addi tional guests. After greetings, Grandma took her place at the table, and we, the m em bers o f the household, and the guests hurried to sit down, because in those days no one dieted and everyone was ravenously hun gry at one in the afternoon. The cham berm aid and the general servant together carried the large soup tureen in from the kitchen, and Mademoiselle serv'ed the soups into dishes with a ladle. Grandma sat at the head o f the table. Papa and M ama to her right and left respectively, then the rest o f us by rank, the clan and the little newcomers. W hen every dish was filled with the steaming, savory golden-hued meat-soup which also contained liver dumplings - Grandma looked around sternly to see i f everything at the table w as in order. Then like a choir master, a spoon in her hand, she gave the signal, and we hurried to clutch our spoons. A t such a time, there was, for a moment, a de vout silence in the large room. Grandma imm ersed her spoon in the soup dish, and we all suddenly imitated

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this cerem onia! m ovem ent o f her hand. W e began to eatW e thought we were having lunch. Later we >5 ) realized that it was History.

14
M y father, i f he were still living, would have a Jewish identity card, said Kriidys son, when, directly after the siege, I encountered him in the Rudas steam bath. The building itself, with its cupola dating from the time o f the Turkish Pashas, was undamaged; only bomb blasts shattered into splinters the tinted glass panes slitting the cupola - the fissures through which the sun poured red, blue, yellow, and green shafts o f light into the steam ing water o f the swim ming pool. The shapes soaking in the mist, like crocodiles on the stewed-fruit bank o f a tropical stream, were phantoms o f a m}d:h: they rem ained here, in the Rudas bath, from the m ythically blurred depths o f recent Pest. Then on the bank, in the taverns in Obuda. In the sour-sm elling cafs o f Pest. Everywhere where one could rem em ber that another Hungary once existed. Krdyism, without any premonitory signal, un expectedly flared up in Pest. It spread like a fashion able opiate. Those who had never read Krdys writ ings, didnt even know his name also availed them selves o f it. M ost o f the taverns in Buda and buda es caped unscathed. Perhaps the Voros Postakocsi, the Red M ail Carriage, the star o f taverns, stood watch over these one-storied, pagan sanctuaries, the star that Krudy wrote about, the one that guided the home less in the direction o f the haunts o f reconciliation and assuagement. There was a period o f fifty years when Hungarian writers wrote in the cafs with full aware ness what they, languishing, had such nonsensical dreams about in the taverns, because they didnt have

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a home in the same sense as in the W est. The tav erns and cafs were the H ungarian Parnassus -- som e times quite literally, as in M arch 1848, when a March poet-youth wrote about the Pilvax that the caf be came the temple o f liberty. This sudden, widespread Krdy-sectaranism was the kind o f mania that a narcotic produces. People became addicted who had never gone to a tavern be fore then, didnt drink wine, and didnt trudge to a steam bath toward dawn to mope, to get rid o f their tip siness there by soaking, and, under the hands o f m as seurs, in this sweaty, stained sensuousness, to get ready for the miserable banks o f the nirvana in Pest, where - on the shabby couch in the chiropodists cham ber they slept through the m orning and kept putting o ff the time when they would have to step from the stu por into the sphere o f everyday dreariness. lrdyism was an escape, an awakening and a torpor simulta neously. It became evident that m any fled deliberately and methodically from loneliness and hopelessness into Krudys world. H e was the writer who thoroughly scrutinized and then conscientiously described this other Hungary. And in Communist Budapest nostalgia for the other Hungary broke out am ong the people. For there had been another Hungary. Not the swaggering manorial lord, not the beggar, the adobe shack- N ot even the bourgeois bogus gentleman class o f Pest, where - if Mriczs novels could be believed actually, the m inisters councilor was only a middleclass prole; after ail, at night, after attending the theater, when he got hungry, he went into the kitchen and scraped the solidified fat o ff the bottom o f the frying pan with the point o f his pocketknife and spread it on bread... Krudys H ungary w as different from the one Jokai and M ikszth described. In another region of the world, his landscapes w ould have been called sur realistic in modern technical terms, but m ost o f his

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readers did not have the faintest notion o f what sur realism was, and in all probability he didnt either. He sim ply wrote and created a surrealistic world where another kind o f H ungarian lived differently from the w ay the world knew. So, when the trashy agents of a foreign pow er set out to disperse everything that rep resented the old H ungary, people looked around in alarm and thought they had found a refuge. This was Krdyism. A t this time, the legend surrounding Krdys life and death had already turned into a myth. Invet erate rakes bragged that they knew him, that they were sitting w ith him at the tavern table when he ut tered one or another o f the famous Krudy sayings: W hat can four decis be like? or the deceased has no tobacco. M ost often, such a claim was merely boastful ostentation, because not every nonentity o f a part-time journalist or com pliant, huckstering man o f letters could sit down to Krdys table as a kibitzer. In Krdys day, the hierarchy in the writers world was more rigid than the one at the Spanish court: everyone had a fixed title and rank that only the initiated knew, who then punctiliously honored this rule and didnt vi olate it. Krudy had a court like a pagan prince, and those in this household granted the right to appear at court carefully stood on guard to make certain that no stranger intruded into the m ythical circle. In the writers world, success, renown, social position have no meaning; there the order o f rank is more rigidly fixed and scrupulously guarded. W hen Krdy died, there was no longer any electricity in the ground-floor flat on Templom Street, because he couldnt pay the bill. In his clothes closet were found a threadbare suit, shirts w ith frayed cuffs, and a few dozen o f Jkais works. He had nothing else. During his last years, he lived in ab ject poverty, gravely ill, in the last stage o f alcoholism. (In H ungarian literature, the pathologically sick alco holic, in the clinical, constitutional sense, was rare.

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Csokonai, maybe, Vorosmarty, maybe during the last years o f his life. Afterwards Ady, Cholnoky and Kriidy. Gza Csath was addicted to m orphine, Kosztolanyi to cocaine in his last days. The rest ju st tippled.) Krudys alcoholism was incurable. His doctor, a learned physi cian at the Jewish Hospital, struggled w ith him affec tionately and hopelessly. The hut in b u d a where he died remained a typically Hungarian pillory. Krudy al ways received shameful honoraria- He could never make money with his books, he had no interest in the theater, newspapers paid beggars fillrs for his excel lently written short stories and news headings. He couldnt handle money; the little that he obtained he spent on hansom cabs and taverns, and no one wanted to heed the fact that one o f Hungarys greatest writers was living in a ramshackle hovel in Obuda. Bourgeois-capitalist H ungarian society (not the intelligentsia, to which K n id y also belonged) gave the cold shoulder to the fate o f genius w ith more un friendly self-centeredness, m ore idiotic indifference than the aristocrat formerly had, who, haughtily and peevishly, or ju st fashionably, did som etim es spend money on literature. The aristocrat, in the interest of realizing a way o f life for himself, made rake-offs on the people with cynical selfishness, but he was not in terested in profit as an end in itself- The bourgeoiscapitalist, when he achieves pow er during some course o f the free enterprise system, is greedier than the deca dent and gorged aristocrat. (Then comes the time when the wheel turns and the trade unions raise greedy and unlawful demands in the name o f the prole tariat that has achieved power. N ot one o f them cares about the lot o f the writer, the artist in society. But Krdy did not live to see this course o f events.) No one ever gave him anything. Through his lot it also becomes apparent how really poor twentieth-century Trianon Hungary was: everyone wanted, to the extent possible, profit from the extortion o f labor, both the

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state and the employer. And no one paid respectable wages for work. Krudy published his last works at his own ex pense, and unemployed, m ooching pseudo-joum aiists hawked his books in the provinces. When - in the presence o f a few night companions, writers and jou r nalists he was lowered into his grave, his lifework was also dead. A ll the m ore marvelous, then, was its re vival ten years later, The phenomenon can be ex plained only by the nostalgia that suddenly broke out in a period suffocated by cobwebs: people understood and discovered that this writer knew and preserved an other H ungary that was m ore enigmatic, more hu mane, sometimes m ore frightening and paradoxical than the real one, but it was different In his lifetim e, Krudy was not a popular writer, but writers respected him because they sus pected that beside the puzzling, baffling conditions, a being lived in the nocturnal cafs and taverns who cre ated som ething without precedent that was misunder stood, and unique ju st as it was. But the public and publishers, on the other hand, tolerated it squeam ishly and patronizingly, like some oddity that has color, character but m ust not be taken seriously. Then suddenly, ten years after his death, readers came to their senses. The harp sounded Krdys voice, and spoke o f som ething different. W hat did he write about? In Seven Owls an old man moves back into the room o f his youth rented by the month to experi ence the scene one m ore time and m eet up, even i f he is old, w ith those w hom he had som ething to do w ith in some way or other during his youth and the readers took note because in this retrospection hum an beings saw not ju st their personal youth but also that o f the Budapest for which everyone was yearning. Krdy proved that this kind o f eerie retrospection can be something other than loathsome and disillusioning, (The old M auriac wrote that bodies make faces in the

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State o f senility, but Krudy demonstrated that familiar faces invariably shine behind the grimaces, that there was and is something at the base o f our experiences that not even tim e can alter.) Forty or fifty years ago Krudy wrote his m aster pieces for the newspapers o f Budapest and the boule vards for fillrs. After fifty years, when his works begin to speak again, his literary power and greatness are almost past comprehension. This alcoholic doesnt have a single tired line, feeble simile. W hen he was twenty-five to thirty years o f age, he w as writing with the same unsurpassable assurance and somnambulant resoluteness as he did twenty years later, near the end o f his life. He saw humans, dreams w ith an eerie power; he saw the other Hungary. In The Countr 3w om a n s Prize, the protagonist is a funeral di rector who mistakenly finds h im self at a wedding and then in a brothel; there, in a schizophrenic scene he en counters his other self, Mr. lom (Dream) and the two figures, a frightening set o f twins, together roam about the beginning-of-the-century Budapest o f the living and the dead. Suddenly Krdy could speak about the mjfthical, about the surrealism that envelops reality, the actual, like interstellar, cosmic dust the planets. Few in world literature could so vivify the mythical in reality, The woman who gives birth to a child in a dogs den in the brothels air shaft and lives her whole life over again while she is in labor - the perverts, the hopeless, the romantics, then the H ungarian land scapes in Pest and the provinces, the houses, the con tents o f clothes closets, the monomaniacal whims o f human beings, the incomprehensible passions, the foods, the customs; and in these writings the refrac tion o f his style illuminates everything, that nacreous fine mist that clouds the canvas in Turners paintings or in Monets paintings o f irises. H e never heard o f so cial realism, but he came as close to reality as Flau bert, Maupassant and the great French realists. His vi

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sions are mysteriously rich, like Prousts remem brances o f tim es depths. His plants and animals are colorful and authentic; he rivals much that important contem porary English and French writers wrote. W hen people finally dug him out o f oblivions rubbish pile, they behaved like the hero in one o f his novels, the eccentric in Buda in Golden Age who guards the m em ory o f a love and searches the cellars o f Buda for the Rothschilds stolen jew els. (The sibyl, the hysteri cal damsel o f Buda are like a charcoal sketch, a Ho garth, fearsom e, alluring phantoms, an atmosphere so dense w ith muggy-tropical fragrance that it could no longer be intensified.) In The Tem plar, one o f his strangest writings, K rdy conjures up figures from the time o f the Mongol invasion w ith the visionary power o f necrom ancers describing the dead putrefying in salt peter pits. Around the love o f the knight templar and the nun are depicted the cannibalistic Hungarians and Hungarian landscapes laid waste by Mongols; human flesh is roasting everywhere, and this cannibalistic orgy is, in Krdys narrative, com pletely natural, al m ost a casual spectacle. W ith a few pencil strokes he draws apocalyptic scenes about sex, flesh, human cruelty and hopelessness. A man had walked the streets o f Pest, w ith his head turned sideways, cane on his arm and almost always tipsy, and he saw every thing that was H ungarian in the past and present. His words were so magically accurate, as they matched the force o f very great poem in which words express m eaning beyond reality. Decades after his death, a society intellectually famished and spiritually trapped in mess-kit fare reached for books as avidly as at a time o f great intel lectual, ideological starvation when human beings ob stinately begin to demand the W ord that will become Flesh. They wanted to read about something differ ent, a different Hungary which - behind everjrihing was always there in the background - not the roman

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tic Hungary but the Hungary specifically distinct from any neighboring country. (M ost readers m is understood Krudys romanticism: he wrote about chiming clocks, about pathways on the Taban, about women who strolled in the Inner City prim ly and shuff lingly, as if they were still wearing the bustle fashion able in nineteenth-century stories the little pillow they placed under their dresses back at hip level - as if women were still flirting from behind a fan, but all this was only a folding-screen, his way o f glossing over sanguine reality.) U nder the title W oman Robber in Pest, he wrote about how in the eighties o f the last century a young widow named Mrs. Kecsegi, who lived on Arany Street in Pest, lost her panties in the Ser bian Church on the Taban. This incident was attended by significant consequences, not ju st in the heroines life but also in literature, because Kriidy set it down in writing and people, fifty years later, noted it amid their national anxieties and for a m om ent forgot their troubles and sorrows and happily sipped the story with its high alcoholic content and couldnt get enough o f it. His sardonic and fastidious narration, knowledge o f the world, high-minded and m oody cynicism, the growl o f his double-bass tone, this male voice, mutter ing and grumbling and at the same tim e raucously cocky, comforted, soothed, dispelled illusions and con ciliated- I f there is such a thing as H ungarian loneli ness, it is the loneliness o f Krudys protagonists, and in the coldness and bleakness o f Bolshevized Hungary, people paid heed to this humanely lonely voice. It was as i f everyone wanted to hear once again about the other Hungary, the magical one where Mrs. Kecsegi lost her panties and then (and m eanwhile and through a thousand years, sooner or later) one thing or another happened that a foreigner does not understand, H e wrote arrogantly, and the reader gratefully accepted this gift: the fact that only he, the chosen Hungarian reader, understood and shared this arro

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gance. (In 1916 Krdy wrote: It would be good to be living fifty years from now.) It happened. The liveli ness, the bloom o f his Pest and Buda commentaries, musings, and bits o f gossip did not lose their fresh ness; they did not fade even under the wear and tear of h a lf a century. He got so close to w hat he was describ ing - a street corner, a contemporary article o f fashion, a hum an face that he seemed to be sitting in the room and talking personally to his readers. This is the secret o f all great writing- His resurrection in the criti cal period o f a fettered Hungarian literature was one o f the m ost extraordinary phenom ena to occur in the country. In the early afternoon hours o f the Sunday that followed M arch 18, 1944, the doorbell o f m y flat in Buda rang. Poldi Krausz stood in the doorway, pres sing an album wrapped in a newspaper under his arm. The Gestapos cars were already making their rounds o f the streets in Pest and Buda and picking up targeted Jews and individuals considered suspect by the Nazis. In one o f the neighborhood houses, BajcsyZsilinszky had in the m orning already fired at a Ges tapo officer who came to arrest him. Poldi Krausz was the owner o f the Deep Cellar on the Tabn. This ta vern w as one of Krdys drinking haunts; Poldi was the bartender, a friend o f Krdy and other writers. He was a stubby chap, slightly built, stoop-backed, with a long mustache hanging down each corner o f his mouth; he spoke H ungarian with the full flavor o f the plains in Northwestern Hungary, He had pulled his cap down over his forehead and was standing like that in the doorway- H is call surprised me because he had never before come to m y place. I was often his guest on wintry nights in Buda. Hide it, he whispered hoarse ly, handing m e the package in newspaper. Someone turned m e in. They are com ing for me. Put it away, take care o f it, guard it. His hand shook when he handed the album to me, his lifework, his only treas

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ure. In the album bound in oilcloth, writers, journal ists, artists, night people, the knights-errant o f Buda pests intellectual world wrote som etimes humorous, sometimes serious lines for him. The itinerant jo u r neymen o f letters and hom elessness, this loyal society more faithful than any political or religious sect these were Poldis, the Deep Cellars customers- Poldi wasnt crying but his mouth w as trem bling under his mustache. Gyula also wrote in it, he said huskily. Hide it. A t least this will survive. There is something unique in every life. Som e thing on which one works his w hole life, which one nurses, whittles, fondles. Sometimes it is an indi vidual. Sometimes it is an obsession. This album was the masterpiece o f Poldi K rauszs life, o f the humble and penurious, always jovial, grousing wine-serving life o f the tavern keeper on the Taban. Now, on the threshold o f annihilation, this is w hat he wanted to res cue. We leafed through the album. The signatures of the dead passed before us, then o f those w ho were still living but who were in these hours already getting ready for deportation or death. And capriciously ar rayed on the pages were the entries o f the ancients, the classicists o f the nights o f the Taban who had moved away. Krudy had written h a lf a page in the album in small, round letters (his hand never shook while writing, not even i f he was tipsy). And others, an entire generation. I had written a few lines in it, too, and I now found the page. I asked Poldi to take the album to som eone else, because it wouldnt be safe at m y place. (It was not a gratuitous request; the next day we left the house and went into the country, and when, after a few months, we trudged back to Buda after the siege, the pile o f ruins greeted us in place o f the apartment, in which books and documents lay about reduced to pulp. Arrow-Cross police, who broke into the room s, tram pled the manuscripts under foot; they used the pic-

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tures and furniture for target practice, and they fired additional bullets into Lolas clothes closet, shredding her clothing.) I m entioned two addresses where per haps the album would be m ore securely guarded. Later, I learned he didnt look up either one, and the album was destroyed w ith him when before long he was taken away together with his wife, Aunti Poldi, to the brick factory in U jlak and then from there to the death camp in Poland. Later, even from an enormous distance, from the rem oteness o f oceans, the memory o f this m om ent sometimes appeared dimly before me: Poldi Krausz as he is going down the stairs with the album under his arm. H e stops at the landing, looks up at me, standing a floor above and watching him. Then he heads down the stairs and vanishes. That was the last time I saw Poldi. And that w as the last time I saw Krdys handwriting-

15
That grain o f madness which Goethe talks about manifests itself differently from schizophrenic choc. When the split becomes reality, there is no im mediate sign o f it in the consciousness. It is like an ex tremely powerful electric shock pervading the system; the constitution doesnt reel it at the instant it strikes. Only later do we realize that som ething catastrophic and unalterable has occurred. So, too, with the grain o f m adness. The realization that the time for the great sep aration has come dawns only slowly. W hen someone who has been m ore im portant than anything else dies, we dont im m ediately understand what has happened, All kinds o f other activities have to be engaged in: one has to m ourn, talk w ith people and go to the funeral. And one has to live, eat or telephone. In the meantime, there is constantly som ething missing. (But this is

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not yet the madness. ) The consciousness still resorts to subterfuge and defends itself, ju st as hum an beings shy away ail their lives from the realization that death is an absolute certainty. As if one could still hope that something will take place. W hat that som ething might be is inconceivable, but still, it is something. A new medicine will be discovered. The Security Council o f the United Nations will pass a resolution. Then sud denly a person finds that he is old, and abruptly he becomes conscious, with all its consequences, o f the fact that he is mortal. I dont rem em ber the m om ent when I realized finally, with its every consequence that I must leave Hungary. Nothing special happened. The institution alized deprivation o f rights and ownership, the nation alization had not yet been put into effect. W ith a friendly office clerk, my publisher, which was still pri vately owned, sent me weekly the envelope, the roy alty income for my books sold during the week, on which we lived modestly but without want. N ews papers still published columns in which literaiy criti cism appeared. Hungarian literary critics o f the recent past had already fallen silent; no need for their opin ions existed- Critics appointed through Party au thority spoke up in their place, among them som e rot ters, blackguards walking the streets w ith ideological medical cards who disparaged the lifework o f meri torious writers, painters and composers before the general public and sullied intellectual creations pre pared with lofty effort and greatest sacrifice in the sub ordinate clauses they spit at them. No one demanded to extend the classification as amateurs to the au thority o f literary criticism and the criticism o f intellec tual works in general. Ultimately, a shoe can be made only by one who was first a shoemakers apprentice and later a Journeyman shoem aker and who then passed the m asters examination. Someone can remove a corn only i f he gets through an examination

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administered by a bathing association in the presence o f a physician- A person can become a physician, a law yer only if... and so on. But now, as earlier in the time o f the Arrow Cross, every bungling good-for-nothing felt he had the right to deprive general literary know ledge o f the works o f poets and writers in insolent, irre sponsible and dishonest indictm ents that they called literary criticism. The rabble bayed in the agora. New authorities appeared, the M arxist critics who like the bishop who chances to enter a brothel and sol em nly dispenses blessings on the girls - insisted that literary evaluation now had new norms. Incompetent bunglers who never proved with any kind o f original w ork that they knew the real m eaning and task o f lit erature, the great, sometimes heroic willpower that even the creation o f a flawed literary work requires these incom petents spat on the author and the work without restraint and sense o f shame. And no one asked them by w hat right they dared to judge, no one spoke about the responsibilities o f intellectual criti cism. They considered literary criticism to be casual labor, like the washing o f sausage casings to which everyone who happens to find the tim e has the right without special education. Occasionally, as in the time o f the Nazis and the Arrow Cross, they aimed some pois oned arrows at me, but it was not worth paying atten tion to them. I heeded som ething else; I sensed that now and then, on the street or among company, I was looking at objects and individuals like someone saying goodbye. W hen som ething calamitous, irreversible over takes us, we dont cry out, we dont wail, we dont even regret w hat occurred. (At such a tim e we dont feel sorry for ourselves either.) Facts are never sentimen tal. I had rushed hom e from abroad because I wanted to live where people spoke Hungarian. I was resigned to the fact that for a certain time there would not exist the atmosphere for m e to write for the public, I was no

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longer publishing anything in newspapers and jo u r nals. I didnt miss the journalistic profession (it had been m y bread and butter for decades, yet I was never fond o f it), but I did m iss writing pieces for newspapers - that mystical propinquity w hich makes it possible in a newspaper colum n within the dimensions o f a twenty-four-hour eternity for the writer to tell the reader immediately, in that very instant, the notion, the playful interjection, the lyrical m editation that is currently troubling him. Eclectic w riters look down on writing for newspapers. They retreat to their books with their messages, to journals issued in limited copies for a narrow reading circle; from there they ad dress the faithful from the pontifical height with the preeminence o f a shaman. The Parnassians and Pur ists want a hygienic atmosphere for w riting in which the sterile thought reaches the sterile reader in a ster ilized physical state. And there is in this demand som e thing o f the artistic ambition o f the stone-cutter or classical Greek tem ples who carved the capitals in the dark side aisles o f temples into m asterpieces with the same care to details as they gave to the facial linea ments o f the caryatids in the faade: they created the invisible, the incidental, the concealed with the same reverential precision as the conspicuous, the sonorous. There are always two kinds o f writers: the one who cre ates his own public, the other w ho is created by his public. (In great, vita! cultures, the writer and his pub lic created the W ork together; the one summ oned the other, the writer the public, the public the writer, both o f them the W ork itself. In Athenian theaters it was not only the sophists, philosophers and playwrights who applauded Sophocles, but potters and weavers also.) But literature is a musical instrum ent with many pipes. Those light genres - the special article, the news heading, the colorful description o f some sort o f grotesque, frightening or cheerful phenomenon of the day, this instantaneous utterance, lighter than a

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treatise but heavier than a report - are not as light as the reader or the purist m using in the ozone o f the Parnassus thinks. It is light in a different way: like the feat o f an athlete lifting a heavy object with the tip o f his finger, as if it were weightless. W riting for the newspaper was this kind o f bravura o f genre in the H ungarian press, the artistic exhibition o f splendid writers: they held up with completely easy movements the commonplace, the transitory which, at the same time, has fateful weight, and then suddenly it was evi dent that there was som ething magical, profound, and eternal in the transitory. I missed contributing to newspapers because this genre in the H ungarian press enticed writers to compose ephemeral m asterpieces whose perfection similar literary genres seldom attained in other liter ary quarters. In the cafs, the writer o f special articles, the craftsman o f colorful headings wrote little mas terpieces between tw o cigarettes that sometimes gave news about the m oment with such sparkling refrac tions o f color and tonal strokes as did the classics of Great Literature, the Great Poem s, the real ones hence not rhymed, versified, diligent exercises, but Poetry. This possibility o f distilling a literary form was also latent in the colorful literature composed for the newspaper. (The story, the anecdote, the debris o f the Hungarian literary industry, the shoddy self-confes sionals presented with convivial geniality appeared in the newspapers as by-products.) But the colorful, the mischievous com m unication o f a few lines when writers related, in the m orning or evening paper, in a distilled, m iniature form what he didnt have the op portunity to express in a novel or drama provided a great education and an excellent artistic opportunity for writers. D uring the first h a lf o f the present cen tury, it was possible for the feuilleton to become a little masterpiece in the Viennese and Budapest press, like the figures o f the Tanagra in the Greek marketplace.

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And the writer knew whom he was addressing; he was writing for the reader who for ten pennies contracted with him for a mom ent to discuss together something with the complicity o f a sorcerer, to fly into a rage or fall into a reverie about something. The colorful piece appeared and the phone was already ringing, the m ail man brought letters, and readers on the street, the trams, in the cafs - acknowledged the daily exchange o f views with winks and shouts. In this com plicity was something atmospherically stim ulating and provoca tive. There were thirty years in m y life when I wrote several o f these colorful pieces for dailies nearly every day. This was m y profession. I once dreamt I was standing on a platform in a hall packed with people. I was dressed in a frock coat and held a top hat and a magic wand in m y hand. I asked the esteemed audience for its kind attention, raised the magic wand, and with a single stroke chopped o ff m y head, put it into the top hat, and then, serenely, with easy movements, I scratched the inside o f the top hat with the m agic wand, pulled out my head and put it back on m y neck. I said: Voila!, I bowed and applause exploded. This was the dream. (Literary journalism was like this sleight o f hand. Is it possible that lofty literature is also this kind o f dar ing feat? It is a desecration to utter it, but sometimes I am tempted by this dream.) But I thought that i f this was the price o f stay ing in the proxim ity o f the H ungarian language (deaf, dumb, but close), I m ust pay this price as well. I did not lack invitations to speak up. N ewspapers and jo u r nals - not ju st the surviving, low-circulation, bourgeois-complexioned print m edia, but the recent party-line newspapers and journals com ing out with resounding political party labels urged m e not to be silent but to speak out, to write anything whatsoever as before, ju st so I wrote. The tem ptation, the persua sion was vigorous. W riting for the desk draw er was al

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ways a form o f paralysis. Even as the actor cannot play alone in his room because without an audience he is not playing but m aking faces in the m anner of a madman, so the w riter cannot write for posterity. He has to have a reaction, immediately, even that very day. (Gide, when he determ ined that in the fu ture he w ould be w riting posthum ous works, quickly discerned that he had absolutely no desire to write.) I sensed som ething sim ilar, when at this time, as for merly, I sat down to the desk m ade from four-inch fir beam s w hich was once a goat-footed canteen table in a cloister in Szepes. W rite to w hom ? W riting to a noth ing is an exertion, much as if a m ute were gasping for breath, turning pale without a voice. (The desk was damaged during the siege; a shell fragm ent grazed the thick top o f the fir-tree construction, and this piece o f dam aged furniture always directed m y atten tion to the fact that som ething was w rong w ith Hun garian literature.) Still, I wrote notes in m y diary and outlines o f novels for the drawer. I didnt show w hat I w rote to anyone. I wrote as I had imagined I would that night on the terrace of the Parisian caf: like someone w ho had the means o f w aiting until the Rus sian forces were w ithdraw n from the country, until people spoke, w rote and behaved freely. I dream t like this because hum an nature is weak. I came to under stand that I w as living in a kind o f country where not only the freedom o f speech and writing are forbidden but also the freedom o f silence. Am id the other urgent items on their agenda, the Communists began to keep watch over those writers who - without com pelling cause, voluntarily rem ained silent- This om inous attention scrutinized me, too. In the Bolsheviks timetable, the lot o f the bourgeois writers was ju st as dearly prescribed as that o f other citizens in countries sentenced to conver sion into colonies in their timetable for social, religious and political reorganization. They gave lenient sen

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tences to those writers who, in the recent radical rightw ing period, voiced the fallacies in the spheres o f thought labeled Fascism; and, forgiving them after they spent a short time in purgatory, they recalled them to participate in a range o f activities permitted by Communistic cultural policy. A t first, they put the bourgeois writers, m yself included, under quaran tine, believing that the threat o f starvation would force us into self-criticism. But not m uch time passed, and they caught on to the fact that they were unable to put anjfthing in the place o f the muzzled bourgeois lit erature - nothing that the reader was inclined to pick up on his own and gladly read. The Partys gibbering orthodox literature, the com missioned trash o f Party policy, the panting dissertations called socialist real ism did not appeal to the reader. In vain did they intro duce Russian Com munist plays in the theaters that had supposedly enjoyed great success in the Soviet Union; spectators could not be dragged to such produc tions with a rope, and the theaters rem ained empty. The theater is yours, you are perform ing for yourself, the actor said mockingly, when the Party-minded play presented on official command was staged in an empty theater, Propagandistic literature gathered dust in the basements o f hastily reeducated publishing houses; they couldnt find readers. Just as the Communists began to lure the professional intelligentsia back to the m ost important workplaces, so, after a short while, they also lured back the bourgeois writers to start speaking up. They kept inviting me, too. It didnt re quire a particular perspicacity for m e to understand the m eaning o f the amiable prompting. I should sup port the system without em phasizing the symbols of Communism heavily. I, the bourgeois, the non-Party writer, should certify by speaking up that Communist power is now perm anently established. The criticism o f initial errors was not banned, it was possible to criticize individuals and institutions; it ju st wasnt per

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missible to ju d g e w ith even a single w ord w hat every thing was the result o f - the Soviet system, Commun ism. In order to produce the illusion o f good faith and spontaneity, they had need for toothless, innocuous criticism, too. This was the time when I realized I w ould have to leave m y country; I had to leave it not ju s t because the Communists w ould not let m e write freely, but m ainly and even much more so because they would not let m e be silent freely. In this system, i f a writer does not repudiate everjfthing into which he was born, in which he grew up, in which he believed his class, cul ture, m iddle-class and humanist outlook, the demo cratic version o f social developm ent - i f he does not re pudiate all this, the Communists sometimes m ake a living corpse, sometimes - as they did out o f Russian writers who refused to subm it a real corpse out of him. Those in the sphere o f violent systems cast the intellectual w orker - the writer, the scholar, the art ist - in an extraordinary role. In the chronicle o f every such system comes the m om ent when the intellectual w orker confers confirm ation on the system with the mere fact o f his presence. He withdraws, remains si lent in vain; nor does it help if everyone, including the systems sleuths and summ ary court judges, knows that in his soul he rejects the experiment o f the violent system. The fact o f his presence vindicates the vi olence. This is the moment when it is not enough to be silent - the no must be categorically declared with all its consequences, not only with words but with ac tion. This is the moment when the contaminated area must be abandoned. This no is a very difficult word; it is accom panied by the kind o f sacrifice that no one can demand o f another. The intellectual worker can demand this sacrifice only o f himself. In Crito (the little book escaped destruction, and I took it o ff the sh elf and leafed through it) Socrates says that every citizen has the right to leave his country if he does not

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want to participate in acts which he does not consider suitable to the interests o f his country. Thoreau, the solitary and heretical sage o f the North Am erican forests - I dont know whether he ever read Crito, be cause he lived without books on roots and wild honey said something similar in Civil Disobedience: i f you are unable to protect yourself against guilt in any other way, then you must leave your country. Every one has this right who doesnt w ant to become an ac complice in an evil deed. Babits was not the first (nor the last) to murm ur angrily that the silent ones are ac complices in guilt. A t such a time, speaking out loudly is not a right but a duty. Many, great and small, had already exercised this right - and m any did not. Those who rem ain at home will not through that fact become the accom plices in the outrages com mitted against humanity. A people can never commence an exodus. N or, failing that, can it be demanded o f hum an beings that they be heroes for decades - and the hero is m ost often the hero o f fuiie en dvant. The writer, his educational situ ation, is different. But all this is a m atter of indif ference i f the writer who decides to take the w an derers staff in hand thinks o f the ten m illion or more who stay at home and, no m atter w hat happens, must survive everything happening there. W hen the writer departs, he is forever accountable to his abandoned people because he is a writer only in the language his people speaks. I f he crosses the border, he will become a cripple who always lurches about the continents on artificial crutches sometimes on extraordinary pro theses but, for all that, always crutches, w ith the help of devices supporting cripples. An Englishm an, a Frenchman, an Italian or a Germ an cannot fathom what it means to be a writer in the world in the lan guage o f a companionless, solitary people. I had to take this into account also. And many other matters as well: for example, the fact that liberty exacts a very

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high price. The em igrant is not welcom ed anywhere; at best, he is tolerated. Anyone who is not willing to pay this great price would be wiser to stay at home. For as soon as he leaves that special situation which, despite all the danger, still signifies protection, which forms the solidarity o f hom e, leaps from the frying pan into the fire. All this must be taken into account intellec tually and instinctively - but a voice outshouted every thing, a voice which was now ju st as unequivocal as the one that had shouted at m e in the Parisian night to go home and write and live in the Hungarian lan guage- The voice now said som ething else. It said I m ust leave m y country because in it one can no longer be silent freely. This was the m om ent when I still bartered in m y own mind. Leave everything behind? The Hungar ian language, H ungarian literature? The strange, im palpable and yet real solidarity o f the language com munity? W hat would happen (I haggled) i f I attempted to stay at home? All is fair in love and war: w hat would happen if I wore a mask, m y best face, and nodding oc casionally, bought opportunities for solitude, retire ment, and silence? Terrorist systems offer such oppor tunities. Terror is dangerous because it knows fear. I f it senses that people fear it, it is sometimes possible to force through a compromise. Fellow travelers, who had the need for others to compromise themselves, too, re assured m e privately and confidentially that excep tions were also found in the Soviet Union, that there they didnt dispose o f everyone who wasnt a writer fol lowing the Party line; writers like Pasternak and a good many others lived in a frontier-like, peripheral tolerance, an indulgent indifference. (Until one day they flew into a rage and vilified Pasternak, too, to death. But at the tim e fellow travelers did not mention this,) W ith us everything will be different, so they reas sured us, and this reassurance w as more nauseating than intimidation. They wanted m e to emasculate m y

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self voluntarily, and then I could take m y place as a singing eunuch in the chorus o f castrated writers. W hat awaited m e if I stayed? I would become a tol erated and pathetic figure to w hom they would throw the bread o f charity. (O r the brioche o f charity, which would be worse.) You dont have to join the Party, ju st practice a bit o f self-criticism, acknowledge that you had erred when you were born and turned into what you had become, and promise to re-educate yourself in the future; you m erely had to relinquish the criminal obsessions o f bourgeois hum anism and becom e one of the correspondent members o f the progressive Social ist intelligentsia. No one expects anything more than this from m y sort o f person. I could stay under such conditions; then in the Partys H oly o f Holies they w ould decide whether to publish one o f my books or to release paper for a new release o f one o f m y old books. I could occasionally go abroad (subject to certain guarantees o f returning home); I could participate at governm ent expense in lit erary meetings, proving with m y presence that intellec tual freedom exists in Hungary; after all, I, the writer who is not a Communist, could appear and speak at the intellectual gatherings o f the free world. In place o f temporary lodgings, the Party would assign m e a lovely flat in the house o f some bourgeois, now dead or driven into exile. In exchange for all this, they would ask nothing more o f m e than from time to tim e to kick persons condemned to death, thus not only counter revolutionaries, but also such Com m unists as Rajk, for example, for whom the Communists no longer had any need and so would get rid o f (There were some who did this.) I should urge the H ungarian worker, if he can no longer bear the forced pace o f labor in Social ist work-competition, the starvation wages o f Stahanovism, to go to Stalins bronze statue, look up at the image o f the Peoples Headm aster, and then he will suddenly understand the purpose and m eaning o f com

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pulsory piece-work. (Someone turned up to write this.) Or I should agree when they are preparing to evict in tellectuals w ith their families from their homes and drive them to bam s in the provinces and confirm that from an ideological viewpoint this is the proper course o f action. (This was published.) Or I should be the thirty-fourth to say som ething in the presentation volum e in w hich thirty-three Hungarian writers and poets celebrate the sixtieth birthday o f Matyas Rakosi. (The book appeared four years later, in 1952.) These anti-Welsh bards who recomm ended the album to the beloved leader o f our people w ith transports o f de light in verse and prose had by then already observed the leaders activity in daily proximity for the seventh year. When the book appeared, the Communists had al ready executed Rajk, they were already herding the peasants into collective farms with pizzles after land distribution, and eyewitnesses slowly straggled back who reported w hat had happened to Bela Kun and his comrades and then to the millions who vanished be fore the Second W orld W ar in the pits o f the Stalin purges, even as after the Second W orld W ar they be came lost in the forced labor cam ps and mass graves of newer purges. W hen the book was published the free press was gone, and so was free book publishing and free theater. The stubby shadow o f the leader beloved by the people had darkened everything. And the very same poets and writers who sporadically hurried to fondle Rakosi with nearly sexual elation, four years later, in 1956 - out o f that com mon sense so character istic o f H ungarians reviled with chest-pounding rattles the tyrant they had celebrated in orgasmic ec stasy four years earlier. Choking with sobs, they vowed that they will never again be willing to lie, and, with literary prizes in their pockets, they cursed in somberly showy verses the tyranny in whose im plementation, on the strength o f the evidence in the presentation album they saw, ju st a short while ago, a

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hero, a personality, or precisely a father. They wrote all this when the Russians, too, had already m ade up their minds to bundle the nations overly-zealous leader out o f the country. And the people themselves were getting ready to go to the brink o f suicide in pro test against Rakosi and his regime. In the summ er o f 1948, it was not possible to foresee this with factual exactness. But ever 3rihing and much else exuded an odor: a suffocating, acrid odor, which resembled the sm oke o f a manure pile when spontaneous com bustion occurs, could be smelled everywhere. Shall I enlist as a runner in that literary contest where the engineers o f the soul trotted with sweaty metrical feet and ran the festive relay with panting ardor? Violent regimes have always existed, and poets and scribblers have turned up to cel ebrate the tyrant slavishly. But there is no instance in the history o f violent regimes - indeed, there isnt one example in Hitlers Reich and in the frightening life in the Soviet Union following the Stalin purges - o f a writer generation celebrating a tyrant w ith a choral song choking with so much rapture. Sit this out? Shall I be silent w ith stifled breath when those dare to preach about freedom who live and play the bully to deprive a society o f its right to freedom? Is it worth pay ing this price to stay at home? W hat kind o f home will this be that I am buy ing at this price? Is there anything - a country, a people, a nation - that is worth m y surrendering the demand of freedom ? And w hat is freedom ? Babits exclaimed passionately: Freedom! they say and the earth sprouts gallows-trees. Montesquieu (I ask for the book, there on the top shelf, third from the right) said that freedom is the m ost profound element in human history: it is the enduring desire, the battle and aspiration against despotism, the obstinate march ing in history toward freedom . Freedom is simply

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this: the perm anent yearning to be free. Is this true? Does m ankind really desire freedom? During this debate, memories of m y trip to the W est returned. W here in Europe today do people want to possess freedom in all its consequences? I f people truly desire freedom, why do they put up so willingly w ith every kind o f servitude? Individuals, like peoples, are happy only if, in keeping with their na tures, they can live in freedom , so teaches Monsieur Montesquieu; despotism desires the good in vain; the people do not want this good if they do not choose it of their own free w ill. Would he write down this lofty philosophy today? Like Plato and Socrates, Aristotle (I ask for the book, there next to the Crito) believed that not every hum an being is born free by nature. These philosophers believed that there are types born free, nature endowing them with the demand for freedom, and then there are others in whom the chromosomes, the genes are o f a different nature. And this type does not really w ant freedom; this sort is not willing to pay the high price that has to be paid always and every where for freedom. H ow could I know what freedom means to several hundred million Chinese? Or to the Hindus? Or to the Slavs? (The book can be put back on the shelf.) But right next to it is the other, the explana tory handbook that the Communists published, the tex tbook that explains the kind o f freedom Communism promises: it states the thesis in simple, unambiguous words, as i f a traveling salesman were explaining the workings o f a vacuum cleaner. Thus: Communism is that social order replacing Capitalism in which the basis o f production conditions is the social ownership o f the m eans o f production. This sounds fine and simple. Reality, in practice, is m ore complex, but the textbook is not obligated to know this. Lets turn some pages: In Com m unist society the hostility o f class divi sions ends between the city and the village as well as between intellectual and physical work (is this cer

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tain?) and the development o f production power at tains a level at which everyone can work according to his capability and receive according to his needs from the produced benefits. (This m ust be reality; after all, it is here, in print.) True, there w ere always contrary opinions. A t the end o f his long life, in his eightieth year, Chateaubriand (the book is not at hand; a beauti ful copy o f Memoirs From Beyond the Tomb stayed in the rubbish pile, but I rem em ber certain statements he made) still summarized everything he experienced and observed up close, hence the collapse o f the world o f the Bourbons, the French Revolution, Napoleon, the restoration, the downfall o f the new Bourbons: W ith out private ownership there is no freedom . 1 com mitted this to memory. It was disturbing: I f I remain, I may one day no longer rem em ber this sentence. Herein lay the rub, not in the dangers. It was not the excruciatingly laughable role that the Com munists would give me, the ^bourgeois writer, with friendly winks. Nor was it that they w ould force m e to accept degrading honors, that clenching m y teeth, I would have to put literary awards in m y pocket and en dure the pinning o f Red Star decorations on m y chest. They would force m e to accept these from persons who sponge on the property o f the H ungarian people, on the public weal without the mandate and authority of the Hungarian p eop le... But what could I possibly do if I did not accept this role? Should I begin an intellec tual hunger strike? They would force-feed me. W riting is an organic undertaking; otherwise, it is meaningless and immoral. Or should I take refuge in dead genres, be silent in hexameters? The real danger lay else where. It was more dangerous than anything else for me to stay here and then not rem em ber the other I who not so long ago still had the strength and desire to protest. The m om ent would com e when I would not be able inside myself, not even m utely to cry out against something I knew to be hostile to human

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beings, contrary to the interests o f the people, and in human. Then I would die more m iserably than the vic tims in the camps, w ho at least to the last moment hated those who tortured and killed them. I f I stay... For me, too, will begin the m ys terious technique o f brainwashing which is more dan gerous than the eradication o f consciousness executed with chem ical and physical instruments in prisons and torture chambers. They will force m e to eradicate vol untarily the protesting F within myself. Because this is what they want. Their m ethods - the finely tuned versions o f coddling and threatening, o f slighting and enticing - are efficacious: anyone they take aim at in this manner can, one day, no longer perceive reality or his own lot. The m oment arrives when he is not only apathetic, deathly weary, and hopelessly skeptical the moment arrives when he believes that all is exactly as it ought to be. Freedom is not a realized, stable condition; it is, rather, a continual striving to ward something, and brainwashing eradicates this striving in the consciousness because the person they handle in this m anner wakes up one day not wanting to be free. Then he explains to him self that he re nounces his personal freedom in the peoples interest and accepts the comfortable partiality o f belonging to the New Class in the nations interest, (There are thieves who unexpectedly receive clemency after a long imprisonm ent, but commit suicide at the moment o f their release because they dont dare to leave the ac customed security o f the prison.) A moment also comes in this internm ent when the personality has already become not only a trained, conditioned prisoner in a vi olent regime, but also a willing ally and accomplice, be cause the last spark o f consciousness o f the necessity for liberation has died out in him. This is the moment w hen som ething suddenly darkens and brightens up: the grain o f madness, hence destruction, or the m o ment o f the great separation. (Roger Martin du Gard

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- m ore airily, more in the French m anner than Goethes said thus: It is not perm itted to hate, but it is permitted to divorce.) To m e this was the moment when I realized I had to leave Hungary - uncondition ally, without bargaining, without any hope o f return ing, leave while I still had the strength to protest from within. I had to pay the price for denying them the op portunity to corrupt me, my personality. In these times, som etimes a pair o f lines from one o f Karinthys poems crossed m y mind recurring like the snatch o f a melody (like mouches volantes on the retina) clinging to consciousness. The lines went like this: T d rather be eaten by verm in, than eat ver min. Years later, I recollected these lines on foreign continents.

16
In life there is (rarely) a situation (it cant be measured in time, som etimes it takes only moments) that Saint John the Cross calls The Dark N ight o f the Soul. I dont understand mystics; every m ystic is alien to m y mental frame. I can sense the wondrous only in hefty earthly reality; I can view the supernatural only as a by-product o f Nature. There is such a dark night in life, however. One cannot express it in words; indeed, subsequently one cannot even sense its signific ance. The forces that had till then preserved balance in life - consciousness, experience, the disciplinary power o f the I - lose their impact, and so the com pul sory agreement between intellect and instinct is upset. This is w hat the Dark N ight is like. All I know is that I lived through som ething like this; I dont remember the circumstances, nor can I describe w hat it was like. Just like the mystics - Saint John o f the Cross, Pascal, Swedenborg - who cannot relate w hat happens on that particular night. Only the consciousness o f its con

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sequences rem ains: that the individuars relationship with him self and the world has altered. It is then that the farewell ensues. It was not to the Fishermen^s Bastion that I had to bid farewell, N ot even the dawn on Lake Bala ton. Not Jancsi and Juliska o f Hungarian folk tale. I had to say goodbye to that 1 who was not a carica ture; it was, rather, the real I behind the distorted portrayal, and only here in m y native land was it the kind of F that I recognized- (Valry, in one o f his finger exercises, waxed enthusiastic about the human body: he said that we have three different kinds of bodies; the one which others see and know, another that we see and know, and the third, the invisible one that, behind the outwardly perceptible and tangible body, is com posed o f cells, ligaments, and millions and millions o f indescribably complicated components as an inner, visceral body which we do not know, the sur geon being the only one who sees som ething o f this third body during the identification o f a corpse or an operation.) Som ehow it is like this with the I, too: there are several kinds o f F independent o f the per sonality about which we know nothing certain, we only suspect that it speaks up and enunciates the decision in fateful moments. I f we think o f our bodies, the F does not identify with it; after all, this is how we speak o f it: the body I have. There is a separate I and this F has - to a certain extent - a body. But no one says m y F because the I does not belong to anyone, not even to the consciousness, In a case like this the neuro pathologist would think o f schizophrenia, but Id rather call it the consciousness o f the conscious. In this kind of moment, the F detaches itself, it becomes inde pendent o f the body and the soul. This is the sort of thing that appears vaguely in the Dark NightA t a time like this, one must say farewell to the F bound to the native land. (Lola promised she would com e with me, and this pleased me, because one can

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have confidence in the promise. A man falls in love with a wom an twice: first when he com es to know her, and a second time twenty-five years later in the period following the silver wedding anniversary. W hat takes place in-between is m ost often confusion and without any significance from an emotional point o f view.) I didnt say goodbye to individuals, because I had al ready learned that when som ething o f great import ance happens in our lives, they cannot be made to understand it. They dont believe that a vital decision has no other significance than the compulsion o f the conscience; they suspect that a wait-and-see policy, a plan peering into the distance, is the reason for the act. It is not possible to persuade any man living o f the fact that someone has rejected disinterestedly and undesignedly something from which possibly he, too, could derive some profit. Thats why it is w iser to be si lent at such times. I didnt say farewell to regions and places either, because the only region that (then and later, too) tempted m e abroad and in m y dreams was far away, beyond H ungarys borders: these regions were the cities, forests, and glades o f U pper Hungary, the Tatra mountain chain. And I never w ent back to this region, where foreigners were once again dwell ing. It took a year for the day o f departure to follow the Dark Night (or whatever it was). D uring this year I was constantly saying goodbye without this leave-tak ing being a plan, desire, or conscious act. In the morn ing I would go into town, where I had no particular business and absentmindedly w alk the streets where there was nothing surprising, except that at a bend, a street corner, a gate, I would think, abstractly and in cidentally but distinctly: I shall never see this street again. And I would walk on. A man would come to ward m e whom I hadnt seen for a long time, with whom now when I was about to depart, I would shake hands and think: Funny, I am seeing this m an for the

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last time, I am never going to shake his hand again. And when I thought this, I wouldnt feel any kind of sentimental regret. The details became blurred be cause I was saying farewell to all. Sim ultaneously there was in this continual, si lent, unspoken leave-taking a persistent admonition: I didnt w ant to leave m y native land without taking som ething w ith m e for the long journey. Something that I would never again find elsewhere (where?... on the other side). Sentim ental, inconsolable persons, when they emigrate, take sepulchral mounds with them, a lum p o f native earth wrapped in a white hand kerchief. Others take a photograph or keepsake, a lock o f hair, a restaurant menu. And then, many years later, they blanch in a foreign land because they chance upon a lock o f hair o f someone who died long ago, or they keep swallowing eagerly because they read such words on the old menu as Esterhzy cutlet or sponge cake w ith curds flavored with vanilla and raisins. And all this represents the homeland to them. But I didnt feel any need for such a tangible keepsake. I only knew that quickly, before m y train departed, I had to find and then take with m e something that later I would not run into abroad again. But this wasnt a sim ple task, because I didnt know what that something was that I wanted to take with me. I only knew that it was missing; it was m issing now, even be fore the train set out. In tim es preceding drought disasters, people for w hom drought is synon 3Tnous w ith fate protect them selves with extraordinary measures, The drought is, in Natures household, an enigmatic, inexplicable catas trophe. No one knows w hat causes it and w hy it occurs precisely w here it does and not somewhere else. People attribute it to the cycle o f sunspots, but this is mere conjecture. One day an idiotic and merciless power parches areas as large as a country. This doesnt happen overnight. First birds begin to migrate,

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then other animals, and finally hum ans flee the drought. Those who dont escape, because dire fate - li neage, vocation - binds them, becom e restless and at tentive. W ater levels in wells fall, puddles dry up, river banks look as i f they had been planed smooth, watering places waste away. Vegetation protects itself: it has been noted that in the period before drought cycles certain trees and plant species grow long roots searching the depths for moisture rem aining in the soil. When the drought reduces plants and animals to ashes - in Brazil, Africa - the shepherd and the herds man lie flat on their stomachs on the ground burned bone-hard to smell the water, sn iff the m oistness seep ing into the deeper layers o f the soil and sticking there a bit longer. I f the water has a smell, men and animals gouge the parched earth in search o f the water. I did som ething like this instinctively during m y last year in Budapest. In truth, I did nothing else but read. During this time, I didnt open books by foreign writers. I read the works o f H ungarian writers. But not the known, honored and beloved classics the works o f Arany, Vorosmarty, and Jokai not even the great generation o f our own century, the writings o f Moricz, Kosztolanyi, Krudy, and Babits, but those o f the less noted, in part already forgotten poets and authors who became lost in the literary competition, lagging behind the commercialized, fashionable, and spotlighted names. It began when, during a stroll and browsing, I found a little book by Gyula Szini on one o f the bookshelves in a secondhand bookstore on the Boulevard displaying booklets published w ith great technical care by two Hungarian printers in the prov inces who devoted heroic attention to details o f their task, Kner in Gyoma and Tevan in Bekescsaba. The Clowns, this was its title. I bought it for a few fillers, took it home, and began reading it, as i f it were some oddity. And I kept sampling this pure, powerful prose like someone who has stum bled on a buried cellar

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where he discovers a barrel filled with an old vintage and noble beverage. I had known Szini; he was a slight, professorial-m annered, bespectacled man; he parted his hair in the middle; he almost always sat alone in the Balaton Caf on Rkczi Road; his brief case, bulging w ith French and literary newspapers and journals, lay on the marble-top table. Newspapers published his writings, but only i f there didnt happen to be some m ore urgent, m ore marketable manuscript available. H e w as a splendid writer: shy, quiet, and, at the same time, strong and plucky. He spoke in his every line about vital matters, about the humane, the poetic, the childlike, the enchanting, the magical. This little book o f his reminded me o f the eerie vision o f the young Joyces classical stories, T/ie Dubliners: he re counted memories, and the fire and power o f vision en nobled those memories in the short writings. This is how it began. Suddenly, like fauna and flora during the drought, the moisture clinging to the deep layers o f the earth, I began to search the works of the second set o f H ungarian writers for what I wanted to take with me, because I knew I would never again find any trace o f them abroad. It wasnt easy for m e to get m y hands on these books at home either; occasionally a book o f poems, a collection o f stories turned up on the dust-covered shelves o f secondhand bookstores faded, yellow print ings, m ost o f them already having been discarded by li braries. And only very few were living who still remem bered Gyula Szinis name which once, thirty years be fore, had brought luster to columns o f the feuilleton; at the time, however, the sophisticated reader knew that he was receiving a m asterfully fused gift. This second set, these very capable but little-known Hungarian writers and poets w ho got lost in the pandemonium of the literary hubbub w ould not allow themselves to cre ate som ething inferior. In their time there was still a literature evaluated by the strict standard o f the cen

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turieS'Old Western m eaning o f the word. The writer was still not afraid to run into a conflict with the masses in order to preserve the uniqueness o f his indi viduality against the consumer standards o f mass taste (as he fears today that he will perish i f he gives up the uniqueness o f his individuality and yields to the mass market). These writers still wrote for the few, Like heretics, they addressed the sect with secret words. The works o f the great writers, o f the famous, celebrated figures quickly fill up with banalities be cause the success, then time, life, the m onotony of repetition make w hat was once astonishing in their work particularly colorless. This happens to m any good writers. But the writer w hom only a sect reads will not becom e bland with the passage o f time. Szini did not enjoy any success whatsoever the man, his works were invisible, he rem ained on dusty shelves but he stayed lively, H e did not frequent society - not he nor his companions, the Hungarian writers wander ing in the m iserable solitude, the monastic dreariness as i f they had accepted La Bruyeres counsel, who warned writers about the social life because this is how he put it - the wise man is wary about visiting so ciety frequently: he fears he will be bored therii. A generation existed: Szini, the French-inspirit, bespectacled narrator o f few words; Tomorkeny, who painted the lonely lot o f the people on the banks o f the Tisza river with Chekhovian watercolors and evoked Asiatic rem embrances and destinies in each o f his sketches; Lovik, the equestrian who seemed to write elegant, foppish and deeply m elan choly tales in a pair o f britches with a riding-whip in his hand; in regions recalling the rusty autumn hues o f the great artist o f the Barbizon School o f painting, Laszio Paal, cantered the hero o f the Lovik tale, the solitary horseman who heeded the distant sound of the horn and the death screeches o f spent emotions in the solitude o f the forest and literature. And these ro

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man tic Lovik figures were not grotesque; they had a gen uine impact, an attitude toward life. The melancholy o f people from another time smoldered in the lines of Lovik stories. Cholnoky, that inebriated Don Quixote w hose writings portrayed destinies and landscapes re calling the visions o f the paranoid, the inspired Csontvary; and Geza Csath in w hose head the golden light ning o f m orphine flashed - Kosztolanyi, already deathly ill on his hospital bed, wrote this line, which also befit his nephew, the short-story writer escaping into morphine and self-destruction. Like one who becomes the victim o f a strange passion and searches fervidly for enhancem ents, I began leafing through old periodicals and was gratified to discover a Tam^s Moly story in which a successful writer with a bad con science looks up a forgotten colleague who was more faithful to the deeper m eaning o f writing; a Sandor Terey verse in which the poet recounts his recollection o f a rendezvous o f fifty years before and confesses this about his companion: the slight down-at-the heels girls o f Pest/ How they bloom after a kiss/ In their eyes, though y o u n g / Burns that baleful, half-mad, wild gleam / W ith which they call one to kill and to em brace, and he ends it w ith this Boucher-like stroke of the brush: To keep her new, silken dress from slip ping down/ She put her legs on the bed. W hen Terey wrote this poem, the girls were not yet wearing mini skirts. I w ent to the library in the National Museum and searched the fiction columns o f old, bound news papers for the works o f dead or half-dead contempo raries. The Hungarian short story for the feuilleton sec tion, in which the writers, ignored and scraping along without publishers, audience and theaters, distilled the great them e, because they didnt have time to do a novel or a play - w hat a great genre it was! What m ust have been burned up in the alchemists work rooms o f this quiet generation, while out o f the large

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amount o f raw material so prodigally burned up, occa sionally a drop o f gold ran out! For this was also the other Hungary the cre ative, shyly emaciating Hungary living quietly behind the bulging faade. I read the works o f forgotten H un garian writers for year. The surrounding world did not give these writers the oxygen without which an in tellectual life cannot exist: the summons, that lan guage o f gesture which also gives strength to unsuc cessful writers in the general language areas. M ost of them got lost in publicism or taverns. W hen this gener ation was writing, literary criticism w as still found in Hungarian newspapers; writers paid attention to the opinions o f Ambrus, Pterfy, RiedI or Schopflin be cause these critics did not w ant to slaughter but to nur ture and help them; they cleared the trash and ram pant weeds out o f H ungarian literature the way the farmer scrapes o ff with a prod the mud stuck to the life-planting plow at the end o f the furrow. The publi cist was still a belletrist and he was a publicist principally because the call was not strong enough for him to be anything other than a belletrist. There were many o f them, Laszio Lakatos, the sadly elegant jou r nalist o f the streets o f Pest, wrote m uted stories, liter ary essays shyly, so to say, with apologetic humility. In time the lead dust o f standing type covered his name and modest, huskily passionate works. Like the maned prophets in the desert, poets howled their words o f reproof into the hubbub o f the literary world from the gallery o f the New Y ork Caf. A m ong them were those who were only good for a verse apiece, like Menyhrt Szasz who scribbled blearily, shortsightedly in the cigar smoke o f the Fium e Caf on Museum Boulevard, writing hopeless love poems in a deep male voice; like Artur Keleti who disguised h im self as a m e dieval hooded monk in his poem s and, so attired, chanted the grief he felt at the imperfections o f the human and divine order to the world; like Istvan

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Szegedi who, using the sim plest means and watercol ors, wrote pure poesy, words tied into a bouquet o f wild flowers, and not a trace o f him remains. Zoltn Somy w as m ore fortunate: the accursed poet in a wine-red vest with metal buttons, his pitch-black fore lock disheveled by ten fingernails, composed poems of such high temperature about women, love, misery, and loneliness that they rivaled the choice lyrics o f his great contem poraries, but the m an and his works al ways trudged along on the edge o f the asphalt side walk, never getting farther than the number o f echoes his caf com petitors granted him. For a year I tracked the traces o f this generation with the passion o f a col lector but also like one who is preparing for an expedi tion and w ould like to take som ething with him that he wont find at all in the distance, in the perilous re moteness. A trace o f this generation existed only here, in some shop o f an antiquarian booksellers on the Boulevard, and in the dusty halls o f public libraries in Pest. These forgotten, unsuccessful, extraordinary writers gave m e rich provisions for the journey in solitude, for the heretical life in a cave. Through their works I saw more truly what I would lose if I left m ore truly than in the masterworks o f the great con temporaries which the wanderer ultim ately finds abroad also. The true greatness o f Hungarian lit erature loom ed dim ly in the background, in the per spective o f the faint, faded second set ; the demand under which these writers wrote in an undemanding age was heroic. I spent a year collecting marks o f this demand for exactness- It was this that I wanted to take with m e in the form o f recollections from my read ings. I had to hurry because the Party was also in a hurry. The Communists did everything to condition the general knowledge o f literature, purge from the m em ory everything that called to mind the recent de mand for exactness, this middle-class legacy. They

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did not want to hear what the writer thought, only what the Party thought. They didnt know, or didnt want to know, that the artist - the writer, too, i f he is an artist - can never be anything other than an aristo crat; and this aristocrat is never asocial, because he has a role which he shoulders and fulfills. The writer who was silent - mute but resisting - quickly sensed that the Communists were treating him as the Inquisi tion had the heretics- They decided at this time to de molish the untimely m onum ents: they rushed to raze everything that reminded Hungarians o f the achieve ments o f their bourgeois past. To the Communists, the Hungarian literature springing from the earth o f the bourgeois intellectual was also such an untimely monument. It was not only we, the H ungarian writers and readers who lived in this climate, who felt this strange atmosphere o f intellectual bleakness, this listlessness, gasping asthmatically, but foreigners as well. N at urally, not those Western tourists whom the Com m un ists invited from time to time, so that, in return for the warm hospitality and beribboned gifts, they could ad mire and go into raptures out in the world over the achievements o f the peoples dem ocracy, but the ob jective and clear-eyed foreigners. A t this time, one o f the representatives o f a great W estern power looked m e up. H e had arrived re cently; he had the official assignment o f observing the symptoms o f H ungarian intellectual life, W e quickly understood each other; we got our bearings with phrases. He spoke five languages. W hen I handed him Babitss translation o f The Divine Comedy, he recited several tercets in good Italian, and he asked me to read from the Hungarian text. He said that such a translation could be attained only in a great literary culture but that he had to admit that everything re lated to literature which he was now experiencing in Hungary was completely barren and shallow. I reas

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sured him that Hungarian intellectual life was now truly bleak, but I asked him to look around in our li braries, w here he w ould find the H ungarian transla tions of the im portant works o f world literature. I saw he was skeptical, and so I began to prove it to him. I took him over to m y bookshelves where the volumes I had pulled out o f the rubble o f m y demolished house were arranged and showed him a Hungarian Goethe series that had taken a shot in the back o f its neck dur ing the siege: a Shakespeare edition whose insides hung out a bit but was, in this historically worn condi tion, still Shakespeare; a copy o f Castigliones The Courtier, who, though flayed, produced an impact grandly - and I handed him these w orn objects o f piety one by one. I showed him the complete Dante - one o f our poets, I explained, translated it for ten years, the very same poet who, though dying o f throat cancer, was still revising his translation o f Sophocles - Babits. I handed him the Hungarian Aristophanes transla tions, Jnos Aranys m asterly translations, the Euripedes translations, the Odyssey, which several trans lated. I noted for him that Arany and his generation began to translate the complete Shakespeare one hun dred years ago, and it is still being translated; every generation o f poets added their own artistic attention and dusted o ff this w onder o f the world- A complete Shakespeare? m y guest asked in a dubious voice. The complete, I showed him, even the Sonnets. Then I asked him not to inspect these damaged remnants but to go w ith m e to the University Library or the Academ ys w here I can show him, in undam aged condition, the several hundred volumes that preserve in H ungarian translation the m ost signifi cant works o f ancient and m odem classicists for the Hungarian reader. I told him that Hungarian writers and poets had com pleted this enormous task in just under tw o hundred years. He could find m ost o f the sig nificant works o f Russian, English, French and Ger

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man, Italian and Spanish literature in the Hungarian language in our libraries, The worthiness o f the trans lations varies, o f course, but the w hole together really presents a picture o f world literature in the isolated language o f a little nation. M y guest reflected, yielded to m y invitation, and the next day I was able to prove the truth to him in the libraries- M y foreign visitor put on his glasses, looked through the card catalogue, handled and leafed through the books he wanted to examine, and finally said quietly that he had not known about all this and was now looking at Hungar ian intellectual life with entirely different eyes. I thanked him for his kindness and went back to my room in Buda, picked up Gyula Tbroks novel, The Ring with the Green Stone, and continued saying fare well to Hungary. This was the kind o f leave-taking that occurred when I w ent up to the floor at the Academ y where, in his office, Gza, the General Secretary like the com mander o f a castle with a watch tower and drawbridge after a lost battle was guarding, arranging and tend ing what remained o f Hungarian literature with w or ried solicitude. W arily - as if the enemy had to be kept from seeing the secreted treasures and plundering a Vqjda poem or a Vorosm arty simile he took Janos Aranys surviving manuscripts out o f a drawer and showed them to me. The atm osphere in the General Secretarys office felt as i f a fierce hurricane had howled across the world and left no im pact here. A part o f the Arany papers had been destroyed during the siege, but in this room, where Arany him self had served as General Secretary, the atm osphere o f a great intellectual endeavor w as truly palpable. Gza showed me the manuscript o f ToldVs Love. This m anu script was written in pencil and contained many revi sions, but the poet, after m aking the revisions, most often restored the first wording in the final text. Arany wrote a thick copybook o f historical, documentary

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notes to ToldTs Love, short studies on apparel and legal customs. Geza asserted that m ost often only a single epithet from the notes found their way into the manuscript o f the epic poem. Toward the end o f his life, Janos Arany, his eyes enfeebled, was unable to read, and his wife and son read to him . But he could al ways write, groping in the dark. H e committed every word o f Toldi's Love to paper. W e spelled out the words in the manuscript: the words with meticulously en graved and disciplined letters looked back at us from a span o f m ore than h a lf a century. I think this was the hour when I bade farewell to H ungarian literature.

17
The cold Star burns; awaken, homeless one A n oth er country calls, Prospect is its name With bare head and in a light coat The west wind roams to adventure with you Lava already cotters you r bathroom, But the ocean calls, plunge in, naked: Em erge from the fam iliar into the boundless A rise from dead patterns a liv e...

18
The Communists who returned from Moscow and were trained there constructed nationalization perfectly- Just as three years earlier, in 1945, land dis tribution had severed the driving nervous system o f the aristocracy and gentry class, so nationalization, in 1948 severed the tendons and muscles o f the entre preneurial echelons o f the Hungarian citizenry. With the nationalization o f industrial enterprises, the Com munists, w ith a single stroke, extinguished in the country that neon-bright dawning which till then dis

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tinguished Hungarian cities from the flickering lack of light in its neighboring countries. This lights out oc curred overnight; no one had any prior knowledge o f it; the owners o f the companies did not have any more presentiment o f what was going to happen than did the new com pany directors: mostly untrained workers without up-to-date managerial knowledge who were hastily appointed, who did not suspect that on the next day they would be directors o f companies where only the day before they had been employees, or workers. In the morning, the old owners could not enter the factories that, not infrequently, two or three gener ations o f a family had built up. Or i f they had their flat in the factory, they had to leave the building and could not take anything m ore than the clothes on their backs with them. This happened to the owner and ch ief edi tor o f the printing firm and liberal newspaper who was driven in the m orning from the building where his father and grandfather had created a large, well planned and operated institution that provided a liveli hood and occupation for several hundred printers, white-collar workers and journaiists. The owner and editor, a quiet, disciplined, som ewhat taciturn man, complied wordlessly with the expulsion order. The new company director accompanied him to the gate, where he ordered the porter to frisk his m anager to see whether he was taking w ith him any valuables con cealed in his pockets - money, bonds, in short som e thing he still owned the day before - whether he had taken som ething from his own property. The porter, an old peasant from the Alfdld with his mustache waxed into sharp points, who had served at the com pany since he was little more than a child, complied with shaking hands. H e searched the owners pockets, but during the act his hands grew lame and he began to cry. Since this was conduct against the people, the factory director rebuked the porter severely and then

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completed the search h im self The owner stood motion less in the gateway, waited for permission to leave, and then without a word stepped out into the street and left the building where his family had built an im portant firm w ith a hundred years o f work, Such pub lic interludes were com m on occurrences. O f course, all this was simply one o f the stages in the timetable: after the nationalization o f indus trial enterprises came the confiscation o f the w hole sale businesses and the free intellectual professions, then later still, the enterprises o f the kulaks and small shopkeepers. The tempo was swift. M y publisher was also nationalized; a Communist deputy took over the firm. On a day after its nationalization, I w ent to the publisher for a farewell visit. The building stood on one o f the quiet streets in Liptvros, where here also w ith a hundred years o f work the capable progeny o f a fam ily in P est had built up an enterprise significant in scale not only according to Hungarian but also to different, international standards. A lexi con was prepared in this house; it was a modern press, bookbindery, lithographer. H ere were printed the works o f Jozsef Eotvos, M r Jkai, and Kalman Mikszth, as well as the works o f many m ore recent writers. First I went to the storeroom , where its head showed m e the stock o f m y books with self-conscious eagerness. (My last novel, the second volum e o f a cycle planned as a trilogy had recently appeared, and on that very day, one o f the vigorous critics o f the Com m unist press organ, the daily called Szabad Np, had characterized m y entire life work as noxious lit erature. This determination could not be taken lightly at the time.) The first volum e o f the novel was already sold out, but the Central Planning Office (or whatever its nam e was) refused to allot paper for a new edition. Likewise, the firm had not received permission to re print certain o f my old books that were also sold out. Several thousand copies o f my books lined the store

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rooms shelves, books I had w ritten in the past two dec ades. This rem ainder m ore than thirty titles - com prised what is som ewhat grandiloquently called a lifework. (The rest - perhaps running to a hundred books - consisted o f articles, sketches, and stories I had w rit ten on contract for newspapers and periodicals in thirty years.) I looked at the stock . I had never before seen my books together in such a stack, and face-to-face with them, I felt an uneasiness, uncertainty and repug nance. Here, at the scene o f the deed, the question arose: really, what was the m eaning o f all this effort? Man is a talking animal. The being evolving out o f this animal will be hum an only in his proportion to his ability to express ideas. But w hat does an individual want to say when he maniacally expresses his thoughts in writing? When he wants to tell stories? Or to teach? O r ju st to entertain? O r to persuade and per turb? He wants all this, but perhaps he would like to say something else as well. I could not formulate what I had wanted to say with all these m any books. That certain it is here on the tip o f m y tongue loom ed in my consciousness. It was certain I wanted to say som e thing else when I wrote - not ju st to tell a story, to convey an observation- (And I would have hked to learn something else when I read books but what?) Now facing the stock, I felt I had written too much less would have been more. Now when it seem ed prob able that m y lifework w ould perish, the painful ques tion posed itself. It would have been w iser not to have written many things. Perhaps I w ould have been wiser not to have written m any things. Perhaps I had to write many things, but it would have been m ore pru dent o f m e not to publish them and, instead, to leave them to dry up in m y desk drawer. Just as in life we see and know in critical mom ents that there were many things we should not have done, better not to have uttered at all. But then the m oment o f remorse

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passes, and there rem ains - w ith all its fortuities and failings, along with its guilt - the w hole which is what it is because it cannot be anything else. And, in the end, we are responsible only for the whole; the de tails dont count. A ll these books that I had written with a facile hand, often without thought, sometimes out o f pure sport, haphazardly, were what they were because they couldnt be som ething else. And now the whole was destroyed. The head o f the storeroom accompanied me to the exit, and squeezed m y hand the way a distant relative bids farewell to the head o f the mourning fam ily at a funeral. As I was going up the stairs leading to the next floor, I caught sight o f a big sign that had been posted in the stairwell during the night: The fac tory is yours, you are toiling for yourselfl blared the timely propaganda. Typesetters and lithographers hur ried up and down the stairs, the m em bers o f the na tional all-star team selected from the high intellec tual and ethical level o f the Hungarian working class, the workers at the publishing houses. Everyone of them greeted m e cordially, indeed with the salutation o f solidarity. Not one o f them acted like someone who was now working for h im self because he owns the fac tory. They knew this was all fraud and coercion. I shook hands with the literary editor in the di rectors office. Saying farewell didnt require many words; we both knew w hat had taken place and what could be expected: the work o f a hundred years had come to naught overnight. In this beautiful old build ing nothing more w ould remain o f this effort than the walls and symbolically the copyrights. I f I stay here, m y books will be dumped, sold at a loss. I f I leave the country, the entire inventory o f m y books will be sent to a paper mill and ground into pulp. Actually, som ething else happened; I left the country but they didnt send m y books several thousand copies of novels, stories, dramas, and colorful sketches - to the

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paper mill, but first, at the advice o f a Com munist fi nancial genius, they carried m y hfework - as they did the books o f other noxious writers - into the base ment, then sold them later for hard currency in H un garian bookstores in the W estern world, and, o f course, also nationalized the respectable sums thus received. Later, when I reflected on this, it gave m e sat isfaction that at least in this indirect way I had the op portunity - i f modestly - to do m y bit to popularize Hungarian literature abroad, because this hard-currency income also helped the Communists to translate the works o f writers faithful to the line and principle into foreign languages, to pay for the translations with hard currency, to finance the foreign editions in part or whole, and perhaps even leaving a few dollars or marks to defray the expenses o f certain Hungarian authors propagandistic trips abroad. This was paltry compensation for me, but then I thought there were writers who paid not w ith their so-called lifework but with their lives for wanting to write freely. A t such a time I grew ashamed o f m yself because I had paid the cheaper price. I left the publishing house where m y books waited in the storeroom to wind up in the secondhand market- It was, I remember, a sunny morning. I walked the length o f the downtown street and took a stroll on the arrow-straight avenue leading to the City Park. Pest had already applied the renovative makeup to the faades o f houses that had been furrowed by wor ries and the siege like the wom en o f Pest who no longer made up their faces like stary babas (as they had defended themselves in the dangerous period after the siegel but hurried along the streets, sm iling and smartly dressed. I walked absentmindedly, racking my brains about w hat this m ania was. W hat was the meaning o f a thriving writing career? W hat was it that I wanted to say w ith all those books and the other forms o f writing? But everything that came into my

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mind was a factitious, tortuous line o f argument. Then past the KorPnd, suddenly like the cardplayer who has lost and unexpectedly finds a gold coin in his vest pocket this entered m y mind: Man is a possi bility. A t first glance this sounded pompous, as when H err Professor lectures on som ething commonplace w ith a raised forefinger. But it also seemed as if some one or som ething had drawn forth this determination from that m ysterious computer that comprises the sum total o f the brain cells. I had been writing for dec ades about things o f every description - about the amusing and the horrible - but meanwhile, I always struggled to say som ehow that man -- this very young mammal who, during the course o f organic evolution, perhaps as a consequence o f some accidental muta tional variation from the blow o f a cosmic ray - re ceived the stim ulus to diverge from the cerebrum of other organic living creatures and increase the dimen sion o f the cerebrum - that man is something more, som ething different from what or whom his actual be havior indicates. I wanted to write that there is an el ement in man which not even the horrors and contin gencies evolving from his own nature can modify: he is not better than he is but always, beyond every hor ror, he is som ething else - a possibility. Existential ists believe that man is not what he was born, but w hat he will become. It was only dim and unformu lated, yet I did believe that man is not w hat he was b om , not even w hat he will become, but always and above all a continuous possibility. I cant say I thought this way word-for-word on that morning when I left m y publisher, when m y lifework had ju st begun to rot, and I was walking along a sun-drenched street in Pest. But I rem em ber that abstractly, smoldering, I muttered som ething like this to m yself I shall try to describe w hat happened. I was walking somewhere in the vicinity o f the Kbrond. In front o f the house at 60 Andrassy Road, I looked up at

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the windows o f the floors on which iron grates had been installed by the secret police to prevent the ac cused from leaping out during interrogation. The house had a severe look about it, as if it had ju st been repainted. Behind the barred, closed windows conscien tious officials were conducting, in successive shifts, clearly serious, technical work. I rem em ber I also thought that man is a possibility in this way, too. I moved on, and then this happened: I stopped at a street corner and suddenly, like someone fainting, I didnt know any longer in which direction to go. I could go straight ahead, out to the City Park. O r I could change direction and head for the Danube via the Okto gon, so that I could go from there to Bud a on one o f the new bridges. There was no obstacle to any o f this. It simply had no meaning because I no longer knew which w ay to go; after all, every route took m e to the same place: to an expanse where no freedom existed. A space where the very same tripping device lay in wait at every street corner: brute force and deception, I could enter a shop, but they were not conducting busi ness there; instead, reluctant employees were, on or ders, engaged in an official deception. A n acquaintance passing by on the street might speak to me, but while we exchanged words, I would suspect that he wasnt say ing w hat he wanted to but reeling off som ething warily and then looking around because, for all we knew, what he was saying confidentially could be overheard. I could go right or left in a city whose inner and outer map I knew tolerably well, but now a shadow en veloped ever 3fthing fam iliar to me in the city. It took m e aback because, for the first time since I returned home from the West, a suspicion dawned in m e which had not occurred to m e before. I began to suspect that what surrounded m e was som e thing worse than the brute force present. I began to suspect that what surrounded m e was not ju st or ganized terror but an enemy more dangerous than any

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thing else, an enem y against which there is no defense: stupidity. W hat would happen - and I became sincerely frightened when this possibility dawned on me - w hat would happen if suddenly someone would declare that everything being planned and put into ef fect is not m erely greedy and brutal but also pro foundly, hopelessly unnecessary and stupid? This per spective blinded me. Until then I had never dared to think about this. I was living am ong individuals who learned by rote and parroted breathlessly that the One Idea is eternal, and indivisible. The person who bases his b elief on one book is always dangerous; he is the type who approaches the problems of life without inner flexibility, with previous and rigid assumptions. I moved, listened or argued am ong people who were willing to bash in others or their own heads but unwill ing to make concessions until they reached a deadend street with their inflexible and obdurate theories. And no one dared to shout that the emperor had no clothes. No one dared to shout that everything that must be changed in the country everything that survived from the past, that was false, past its time and unjust - could not be altered in the middle o f the twentieth century in accord with the catechism o f a theory from a hundred years before. And anyone who clings to the Letter o f a Hundred Y ears is stupid because life is not a letter but a process o f change. But no one dared to speak about this. The hidebound, grinning, stubborn orthodoxy - as feudalism could in the century follow ing the French Revolution transplanted M arxism into the changed present: that raging and idiotic ego ism which wanted to force a society, a people, to live in a way contrary to hum an nature. I had never before thought about this. The Com munists, the faithful believed m ore fanatically in the Idea - at w hich experience had already thum bed its nose - than the scholastic monks believed in the dogma o f the m edieval Church, for example, in its

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dogma o f the Immaculate Conception or the Ascension of the Lord into Heaven. It is not possible to debate with fanatics if, on top o f it all, they are stupid, I walked along the sun-drenched street in Pest, and fol lowing me cam e the suspicion that no m atter which di rection I took, the shadow o f a great danger crept after me. Stupidity was the danger that cast a shadow on every step I took. I stopped, I remember, on the corner o f Sziv Street. This was the m om ent when I understood that I did not have to go away from som ething here but to ward something. It was like an infarcation. But it lasted for only a moment. Goethe (I dont know why, but Goethe somehow always speaks up in m y critical moments) said: Man must experience his own destiny - not a factual des tiny forced on him by History, bu t the nonrecurrent, his very own. Perhaps this was possible a hundred years ago. A t the tim e o f the French Revolution and also o f the Napoleonic Wars, an individual still had the means of turning against the collective destiny adroitly, cunningly. H e could hide or build emergency dams hastily in his soul. And a hundred years ago when someone mounted the scaffold or fell on the bat tlefield, he knew that what was then being consum mated personally was his destiny. But today? There is no longer a personal destiny; there are only statisti cal probabilities. One cannot feel it to be personal des tiny when an atom bomb explodes or when a dictator ship enunciates an outmoded, stupid judgm ent on a so ciety. This is why I m ust go som ewhere from this place where, perhaps, it will be possible for m e to live my own destiny for a time. Because here I have already become only a piece o f data in a category. Thus did Goethe once again interject him self on the com er o f Sziv Street. And suddenly it seemed ur gent for me to set out not for the City Park, not even for Buda, not even for the Hungarian language, not for

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the solidarity o f the fam ily hearth, but farther on. I had to leave the beautiful, sad, wise and colorful city, Budapest, because i f I stayed, I would becom e en meshed in the aggressive stupidity surrounding me. And I had to take som ething along with m e that is, per haps, an obsession; the I, the personality o f which there is only a single instance. This F is not better, not even different; indeed, possibly it is worse and m ore inferior than the F o f others; but for m e it is the only one. And no Idea, no Aim can recompense m e if I should lose this I, i f I should give up that different kind o f homesickness that now permeated m e like the emotion o f love in the time of youth or the excitement o f aspiration. To go from here toward something, This was like a strange inverted homesickness. (Later, abroad, I never felt hom esick.) Actually, w hat spoke up was not a longing for home but a longing for the Earth. And this attraction was precisely the same kind o f nostalgically painful restlessness as the one going by the nam e o f homesickness. The longing to see the Earth - the infant, I read, is only four and a h a lf bil lion years old to view this provincial, tiny planet from a perspective different from the one I had viewed it from so far, m ore closely and distantly at the same time, if possible. For the moment the recollection of the Posillipo Light flashed again in my consciousness to lie for a time with closed eyes in that sunshine, to see that Light once again after so much groping in the fetid, rotten darkness, the mendacious darkness. To smell, touch and taste the Earth, its fruits and meat, to gorge m yself on sm ells and colors, to see the oceans and the distant, rem ote ports where wild men live who have boomerangs and refrigerators, cars and fetishes, totems and atom bombs, and are thus both frightening and laughable at the same time - to see them actually and not ju s t in m y dreams. To see the crumbling shores and the poles o f ephemeral, unique and inexplic able Life. To see w hat the boy sailor saw from the

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crows nest o f Columbuss ship when, toward dawn, he began shouting excitedly and hoarsely: Land, land! (It is possible that this shouting boy explorer abides in us eternally, in every human being; only he sometimes falls asleep in the crows nest. Columbus and his crew were still sleeping when land was already loom ing in the Light.) I crossed to the other side o f the Korond and quickened my pace. How soon would that train depart for the Earth, for land.

19
It was again an invitation to Switzerland that gave me the opportunity to cross the border. Using the pretext o f a literary conference, I received an invita tion for m e and m y family to spend several weeks in Switzerland. (I was delighted by the invitation; the prospect that I would have to participate in a literary conference depressed m e because there isnt a m ore te dious, m ore deplorable, sillier, social get-together than a literary conference.) In the summer o f 1948, it was al ready not an easy matter to obtain a passport. But it w a ^ o t as difficult as I imagined either. The exodus from H ungary after the Second W orld W ar, when hundreds o f thousands left the country, occurred in three phases: the first in 1945, when those who had pressing reasons to do so fled from the approaching Soviet arm y and the Com m un ists. The second took place in the summ er o f 1948, when - ju st before the Rajk case - the Iron Curtain was still porous: the Communists already occupied every agency, but there was still a coalition govern ment, many o f the officers o f the democratic parties still occupied their posts, and m any m atters could be settled in government bureaus that becam e impossible a few months later, because the Com m unists scrapped

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the gam e rules sustaining the democratic comedy and seized pow er with naked brutality, The summ er of 1948 provided the last opportunity for those who wanted to leave the country (and held no political inter est to the Com m unists) to obtain a passport. During these weeks, writers, artists, scholars, teachers and many o f the form er owners o f nationalized companies traveled abroad w ith legal permission. The third phase o f the exodus followed after 1956, when hun dreds o f thousands fled under dram atic circumstances. Then, for several years, only those whom the Commun ists ejected or who fled could depart. Up close, everything was different. When I sub mitted m y request, w ith the invitation from Switzer land appended, to the passport bureau, I could not posi tively know w hat the decision would be. A t any rate, I had decided that I would make the trip only i f I ob tained the passports without conditions attached. It took two months for the reply to arrive. During those two months, no one wanted to talk to me about the matter o f the passports. The officials did not tie their issuance to any political or other conditions. I did not have to prom ise that w e would return from abroad after the validity o f our travel documents had expired (they were valid for six months and two countries, Switzerland and Italy). No one asked m e what I planned to do abroad, whom I wanted to meet. Later, I heard that the powers-that-be conferred over m y ap plication one o f the Com m unists committees and the big-wigs o f the coalition parties - and sent it on to a council, w hose mem bers, after a dispute, decided it would be best if I did not disturb the domestic literary atmosphere w ith m y presence and instructed the bureau to issue the passports. The System decided that I was superfluous and o f no interest to it. An acquaintance - the very same one who stated that there are no gentlemen among the Communists and who then, not much later, w as sentenced to seven

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years in prison during the R ajk case, looked into the matter o f our passports and said it was surprising with what shoulder-shrugging indifference the auth orities treated his inquiry. A fter the lapse o f two months, they informed me to stop by and pick up the passports. The fidgety clerk - he was a bespectacled, punc tilious m an, not really friendly but not discourteous either - accepted the fees and stamped the documents. The passports were in sm all booklets bound in dark blue plastic and highlighted by the K ossuth coat of arms. I looked at m y passport closely because I sus pected that this was the last docum ent that w ould cer tify with an oificial seal that I am Hungarian, Since I had no other official matters to tend to, I stood up and headed for the door. Now som ething surprising hap pened: the bespectacled clerk also stood up. He es corted me to the door. There, he bowed and quietly looking at the floor meanwhile said: Goodbye. He lifted the latch and let me go ahead- Then he shut the door behind me. Several days later m y doorbell rang and an of fice messenger handed me a prosecutors sum m ons, A t that time, this document was not a welcome invita tion. I w ent to Marko Street; the porter directed me to the attorney on duty. People were nervously pacing the corridors of the large, sinister, notorious building: lawyers, witnesses, and jailers who delivered prisoners in shackles to the courtrooms. Through the open windows could be seen the buildings w ell for light where executions were carried out. The young at torney on duty looked up w ith interest when he read m y name on the summons. I couldnt tell w hat was im pending. Snipers can lie in wait in every bush. The at torney assigned me an office messenger and directed him to escort me to the record office, where the perti nent document would be issued to me. After a brief search, the record keeper - an older man, a sad, m il

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dewed officer o f the court - produced the prosecutors petition: an investigation was launched against m e for the circulation o f counterfeit money. The charge was true. Several weeks before, I wanted to pay m y bus fare o f w hat was then a new one forint piece with a two-forint coin, and the conductor, an insolent prole, called a policem an, forced me o ff the bus, and sent me to the police station because the coin was an jpest product and counterfeit- A t the police station the facts were taken down - at the time counterfeit forints were circulating briskly in the city, the police were bringing in hourly individuals sim ilarly charged - and I was shown what to w atch for in the future i f I am paying with a two-forint coin (the reticular grooves o f the counterfeit coins edge-ring were different from the original coins) and I was let go. But the document had passed from hand to hand, and the record keeper, who registered the docum ent and then handed it to me, shook his head- Are you getting ready to go abroad, sir? he asked loudly. T o u are right, get out. Sir, there is filth here, there is such filth - and he spread his arms and pointed to the shelves stacked to the ceiling with dirty dossiers - such filth ... He did not charac terize the am ount or the kind o f filth in greater detail. H e spoke in a loud voice. The office messenger - un shaven, his chin stubbled, his face tormented by mis ery, dressed in shabby clothes, wearing tennis shoes stood m utely beside me. Then he escorted m e back to the district attorney. The procedural disposition took only a short time. The yoim g attorney leafed through the docu ments, laughed to himself, stamped on the sheet of paper that he dropped the charge, and shook hands. Are you getting ready to go abroad. Editor? he asked, as the record keeper had. Then quietly: T o u are right. Its time to leave, to breathe the air o f the W est. He said this calmly, as i f it was not the district attorney of the Peoples Republic speaking but an extraterritorial

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person. See the Editor o u t/ he said to the messenger. We stopped at the door, I took out a small banknote. I dont accept m oney from a writer, the sad and m iser ably dressed man said gravely. H e turned his back to me and left me at the door. I watched him for a time, the banknote in m y hand. On one o f m y last nights at home, I encountered a man who created outstanding works in the intellec tual sphere, and I knew he thought as I did about many things taking place in Hungary and the world. We had dinner in a Buda restaurant- O f course, this man knew as did the System and every acquaintance I met at this time that I was not going on a literary pleasure jaunt but into voluntary exile; already, at this time, no person o f sound judgm ent turned up at home not even a Communist who assumed that anyone who rejected the legitim acy o f the System would return from abroad if he once got beyond the bor der. Now this friend, in the quiet hour o f farewell, began to speak in a bitter voice. H e did not blame me for leaving. He, too, believed that a writer had to take a position in a system which already prohibited not only the freedom to speak and write but also the free dom to be silent. As for him - this was how he put it he trusted that he would be able to take refuge behind the folding screen o f laboratory work and not have to speak up; he was staying home for this reason. This acquaintance had rejected National Social ism ju st as he did Communism, and now he looked upon the blossoming o f the polarized obsession with the same consternation. Just as a few years earlier the obsession o f the leading social strata was that Fascism was the only defense against Bolshevism, so now the guiding personalities o f Communist society proclaimed that Bolshevism was the only defense against the - ac cording to them - reviving im perialist-fascist peril. Still, m y friend said, lets explore in all its consequences what actually happened in Hungary dur

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ing these years. M any o f us in the past thought that Hungarys social and economic arrangements and in tellectual world concept were ripe for radical change. W e bourgeois hum anists were unable to shout this conviction to the world with adequate emphasis be cause the individual proclaim ing the human measure in a passionately disunited period always generates discontent: the man in the m iddle - even the indi vidual o f the Aristotelian mean - always remains a left-winger to right-wingers and a suspected right winger to left-wingers- But we bourgeois humanists wanted m any different things: an equitable and ju di cious land reform that with com pulsory laws o f true taxation - would terminate the deep-seated lord-andservant situation in Hungarian society. W e wanted those versions o f Socialism protecting workers that had already becom e a reality in the West. We wanted a humane Hungary in place o f the hierarchical aristo cratic Hungary. W e wanted all this, but we werent strong and consistent e n o u ^ to put our intentions into effect. And one day the Red Arm y appeared, and the Communists following in its footsteps set about turning the country into a colony. Meanwhile, they prom ised to institute everything in which we believed but for the attainm ent o f which we the liberals, hu manists, dem ocrats w ere not strong enough or brave enough. W e did not create the humane Hungary. Well then, w hat do we really w ant? W e examined this extraordinary balance sheet for a long time. W e even debated whether we were not the deceived, yes, the despairing, because it was not our class, the bourgeois intellectual class that was put ting into effect w hat was ripe for change in Hungary. But regardless o f how we put questions to ourselves, the answer was always the same: we cannot accept Communism for social solutions because the attempt is not anthropom orphic and in its ultimate aims serves

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not the purposes o f Hungary but the colonizing goals o f Soviet imperialism. During the peaceful hour in the deserted gar den o f the Buda restaurant on this sultry summer evening, on this night when I savored for the last time the sweet flavors o f m y homeland - the bread, the meat, the fruit, the wine - I felt the m om ent had ar rived when I could ask m yself in all sincerity: W hat is the true meaning o f this gigantic dispute? W hat is Bol shevism? For a hundred years the Communists had laid down the M anifesto; for decades this threat has smoldered in the consciousness. Now I recognized something about reality - what the m eaning o f all this is. It is nothing more than the reign o f terror, the viol ent, merciless, extorting terror o f a small band hungry for power and plunder. Is it possible that this system can amend human wretchedness? M y friend said that in his view Bolshevism is in its true m eaning nothing more than the absolute m anifestation o f Slav imperial ism. But this is merely an advance kindling o f a role that now has fatefully received a form: Communism slowly or swiftly outlasts its way o f looking at things and its practices, but a modernly prepared great power remains, the Slavs, and they will have to be reckoned with in the following hundred years, even if one day they will no longer be Communists. We agreed that the Russian people took the Cross o f Revolution upon themselves and that this great sacrifice has some kind o f m eaning for the world. W hat can this m eaning be? The appearance o f St. Johns man on the world stage, as Schubart m ain tained - thus the venture o f m essianically inclined East ern man appearing in the wake o f the Western, Pro methean man smitten with land ownership who looked at the world as a messianic territory, as had white men looked to Cameroon in the past? O r the ul timatum that Bolshevism signifies to society, the ulti matum o f ju st social action? We observed the Russians

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and Communists from up close, but we did not en counter any m essianically inclined individuals among them. And in place o f ju st social action, they brought nothing other than new er forms o f exploitation. Is it possible to hope that the Ultimatum will affect Eu rope like a catalyst and, over and above the tw o great powers that appeared on the world stage after the Sec ond W orld W ar - the U nited States and the Soviet Union - it will create a more hum ane Europe which can be the reservation for humaneness in the frighten ing vista o f industry and militarism and, in the proc ess, prove that the W hole is greater than the sum of its constituent parts? W e said all this, and then we fell si lent because we did not know the answer. We said goodbye at the street com er, in the night. In farewell, we asked each others pardon: he for staying at hom e, I for leaving it.

20
The A rlberg Express left Budapest in early afternoon and reached the Enns bridge after midnight. The Russian soldier again entered the compartment and asked for the passports. He examined the seals, re turned the documents and closed the compartment door in diffr ntly. The night was still. The train started up sound lessly. After a few moments, we left the bridge and traveled on in the star-studded night toward the world where no one was w aiting for us. In this moment - for the first tim e in m y life I really felt fear. I realized I was free. I began to feel fear.

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NOTES

These notes provide information about less familiar historical events and persons and literary figures, particularly Hungarian and Russian, less commonly known details about more familiar happenings and prominent figures, and translations of foreign expressions. Indebtedness is grate fully acknowledged to the edition of the Memoir published by the Academy and Helikon presses for the first time in Hungary (1991) for the identification of several Hungarians whom Marai did not name and for particulars about events that occurred in Hungary during and immedi ately after World War II and the individuals participating in them, 24 Voronezh: The Second Hungarian Army suffered the nations worst military defeat at Voronezh in January-February 1943, near the Don Rivor, where it was sent in July 1942 to secure the northern fiank of German forces laying siege to Stalingrad. Attacked on January 12. 1943 by Soviet units launching their counter-offensive, the Hungar ians began a retreat, during which an estimated 7,000 troops froze to death. The Germans then ordered the Hungarian units into battle to ensure their own escape. About 40,000 Hungarians lost their lives, and about 70.000 wounded and nearly frozen men became Soviet prisoners of war. 27 The Germans occupied Hungary tonight: the night of March 19, 1944. my first Russian soldier: The Red Army closed the ring around Buda pest on December 26, 1944.

28

29 pisatiel: writer, *K harasho: its all right *Id i dom oi: go home, 30 the Russian infantry slowly advancing toward Pest: The assault of the Second and Third Company of the Ukrainian Front began on De cember 16, 1944,

33* We didnt know about Yalta yet: The conference at which Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin decided the future of Europe, including that of East European nations, was held at Yalta February 4-11. 1945. 36 Stalingrad: The battle for Stalingrad raged from August 20, 1942 to February 2,1943. A major turning point of the war, it marked thedeep-

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est German advance on the eastern front and the beginning of a suc cessful Russian counteroffensive. 38 Base^eneff: According to the 1991 edition of the Memoir published in Hungary, Marai xnay have in mind B. Bazhanov, Stalins secretary, who fled to the West and whose book on Stalin appeared as The Red D ictator in German and as With Stalin in the Kremlin in French. 3 'bungalow" furnifihing^: the kind found in small weekend houses in rural areas. 40 M ikhail Lermontu (1814 1841): I^ermontovs reputation, second in Russia only to Pushkins, rests on the lyrical and narrative works of his last five years. His caustic wit earned him many enemies, and, like Pushkin, whose death in a duel in 1837 he protested in an in flammatory poem, he was also killed in a duel. *Cet ocan de bar barie puante: that sea of foul barbarity. 42 Zuigmond Moricz: {1879 1942), the most important realistic writer of his generation, was the first to write about Hungarian peasants in great detail, showing their poverty but often also the lighter side of their lives with genuine humor, 43 Arrow Cross: the Hungarian National Socialist Party, beaded by Fe renc Szalasi (1897-1946) since October 1, 1940. Szalasi took over the government from Regent Miklds Horthy, who surrendered his office under German pressure. Wearing the title "the Nations Leader," Szalasi established a totally fascist regime and began the reign of terror with his Arrow-Cross gangs in the limited territory under his control that brought about Hungarys complete ruin. In 1946, he was sentenced to death by the People's Tribunal of Hungary and ex ecuted. 46 dom pteur: subduer, vanquisher, tamer. 47 M ikhail Kutuzov (1745-2813) is the Russian general who fought Na poleon at Austerlitz in 1805 and led the czars forces against Napo leon at the battle of Borodino in 1812. 49 The siege o f Budapest began on January 22, 1945 and led to its liber ation on February 10, 1945, except for Castle and Gellrt hiils. It took the Russians 49 days to capture the capital, Ilya Ehrenburg (1891-1967) wrote novels but is most not*id for his articles about the two world wars. Much of his later journalism was highly critical of the United States.

50

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54 Zoro and H um were two Danish comedians who were very popular in early European films, Zoro was tall and thin, Hura short and fat. Their original names were Fy and By. but they became Pat and Patachon in Italy, Long and Short in England and Zoro and Huru in Hun gary. Zoro was played by Carl Schenstrom (1881-1942), Huru by Haraid Madsen (1890-1949). homo ludens: the playful, frolicking man. 56 Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930) was not only a pre-eminent poet of the 1917 Revolution, but a leading lightof Russian futurism. Disil lusioned with Bolshevism and unhappy over a love affair with a mar ried woman, he shot himself to death. Osip Dymou (1878-1959), a very popular Russian writer of stories, plays and humorous pieces, emigrated to the United States in 1913, Arkadi Averchenko (1881-1925): a humorist whose satirical weekly was the most popular journal in Russia from 1908 to 1913. After the 1917 Revolution, he fled to Constantinople and finally settled in Prague. M ikhail Artsibashev (1878 1927), a short-story writer and novelist and major participant in many literary and critical disputes in tlie years preceding World War 1. emigrated to Warsaw in 1923, where he edited an anti-Soviet newspaper. Aleksandr Kuprin (1870-1938). a novelist and short-story writer, left Russia in 1919 and lived mostly in Paris for the next 17 years. Gravely ill, he re turned to his native land in 1937 and died there the following year. Ivan Bunin (1870-1953): a novelist and poet and a last representa tive of classical Russian realism. A political reactionary and an im placable foe of the Revolution, Bunin left Russia in 1919 and settled in Grasse, a city in Southern France near the coast. Dmitri Merezkkovsky (1865-1941), a novelist, poet, dramatist, critic and religious and social thinker, was forced into exile temporarily in 1905 because he supported the Revolution and permanently after 1920 because ho openly opposed Bolshevism, which he attacked in The Kingdom o f Antickrist (1921) and other works. Leonid Andreyev (1871-1919): a Russian prose writer and dramatist. The social protest in his early stories attracted Gorky's support, but his open opposition to Bolshe vism ended their friendship. When the Bolsheviks seized power, he went to Finland, where he died in 1919.

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58 N ikolai Gogol (1800-1852), the author o iD ea d Souls (1842), was the father of Russian realism. This novels chief character, Chichikov, buys the names of dead serfs from landowners in order to mortgage 1891) wrote Oblomov them as property. Ivan Goncharov (1812 (1838), a realistic and satirical novel portraying the indolent noble man so common in the Russia of his lime. Oblomovism" was coined to describe the lassitude typified by its central character. Maxim Corky: See pp. 221-223 for Marais discussion of his attitudes. *Aleksa/ulr Fadeeyev (1901-1956), a novelist, fought in the 1917 Revol*

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ution. In 1953, at the beginning of de-Stalinization, he was relieved of the chairmanship of the Writers' Union. With his role diminished and deeply depressed by the decimation of literary professionals dur ing the Stalin purges, he committed suicide. *Anton Marchenko (1888-1939), a teacher, social worker and educational theorist, suc cessfully organized in 1920 the (}orky Colony for the "bezprizorniks," the children made homeless by the Revolution. A B ook for Parents (1954) is A guide to child-rearing presented in the form of fictional case studies. Marchenko maintained that the family as a unit must cast oft bourgeoisie, patterns of aristocracy and exploitcition and become a collective unit dedicated to the larger socialist society. Fyodor G ladkov (1883-1958); His Cement (1925) portrays the na tional effort at reconstruction in the Soviet Union following the 1917 Revolution and the accompanying Civil War. M ikhail Sholokhov (1905-1984), officially regarded as the greatest Soviet prose writer, gained international fame with the epic novel of his native land: The Silent Don (1925-40), translated as A nd Quiet Flows the Don (1934), and The Don Flows Home to the S ea (1940), the classic portrayal of the 1917 Revolution and the Civil War and their impact on the lives of the Don (!)ossacks, Sholokhov, the first Soviet poet laureate and the recipient of the Stalin and Lenin prizes, won the Nobel Prize in 1965, the first Soviet author so honored. 60 H itler Ju g en d : the Nazi Partys youth organization (1926-1945), and the only such organization in Germany after 1936, Beginning in 1939, every ten- to eighteen-year-old youth had to become a mem ber. 62 the Kosztoldnyi story: The episode about the Bulgarian conductor takes place in E sti Kornel (1933), See pp. 134-154 for Marais per sonal recollections of Kosztolanyi. near Esztergom. the German high com m and h a d launched a counterattack: The Germans attempted to break the Russian encirclement of Budapest from January 1 to 26, 1945, They temporarily retook Esztergom, situated on the Danube near the Czechoslovakian bor der, on January 6. Yekaterinburg is the last resting place of Czar Nicholas 11, his wife, Alexandra, and three of their five children, who were assassinated on Ju ly 17, 1918, galoppierende: the sprinter," the virulent."

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67 NKVD: Russian acronym for Peoples Commissariat for Internal Af fairs (1934-43), which was responsible for all places of detention and the regular police in the Soviet Union.

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66 the M ohacs disaster: On August 29. 1526, Louis II of Hungary and Bohemia and his army of 28,000 were crushed by Suleiman I of Tur key and his army of 200,000, The king and nearly 25,000 of his troops were killed in the battle; the rest were taken captive and be headed. The defeat produced more than 150 years of Ottoman domi nation in Hungary. A dramatic memorial marks the site in honor of the slain, whom Hungarians have ever since the disaster regarded as martyrs to Christianity and Hungarian independence, 71 sm all town near wir place: Szentendre, on the Danube, which was liberated on December 25, 1945.

72 B la: Bla III, who reigned from 1173 to 1196, also seized Byzan tiums two border strongholds, Baranch and Belgrade, *Stephen II! ruled from 1162 to 1172- Saint Ladislas, or Lad is las I, reigned from 1077 to 1095. 73 the Bulgarians... sought the protection o f mighty Byzantium, and Eastern Christianity: The king of Byzantium won a major victory over the Bulgarians in 1014, and Bulgaria ceased to exist in 1018, Byzantium expanded its rule to the Balkans and became Hungarys neighbor until 1187, when Bulgaria freed itself of Byzantium's rule, King Stephen I (c. 975-1038) ruled Hungary from 1000-1038. Stephen crowned himself as Hungarys first Christian king with a crown sent to him by Pope Sylvester II. Stephens crown remained the sacred symbol of Hungarys national existence through the cen turies. It came into the possession of the United States after World War 11, was kept in a secret place, and was returned only on January 8, 1978 as a gesture of good will toward the Hungarian people. Its return was long opposed by Hungarians in America, par ticularly migrs,

77 Stalin p ip e organs, launchers mounted on trucks that fired sixteen rockets simultaneously. 78 the powerful military forces o f the Soviet Union attacked little Finland: The attack on November 30, 1939 was prompted, according to the Russians, by the need to protect their borders. Despite fierce Finnish resistance, Soviet troops achieved victory ic February 1940, and the peace treaty was signed on March 12. Finland's heroic defense against overwhelming forces aroused worldwide sympathy and admiration. 79 inashtierskaia: a workshop. 81 otherwise, a ll their tools... cam e from America: Beginning in October 1941, the United States began shipping tanks, airplanes and other

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armaments to the ports of Murmansk and Archangel, as well as food, clothing, industrial products and other supplies. 84 N arodniks: Russian populists, adherents of an agrarian socialist movement active from the 1860s to the end of the 19th century who tried to adapt socialist doctrine to conditions in Russia. Men sheviks: "members of the minority" who opposed the organizational principles proposed by Lenin, who headed the Bolsheviks, members of the majority, preferring a loosely structured mass party to Lenin's small, disciplined one. They believed that Russia could not pass directly from its backward state to proletariat rule, but must first develop an intermediary bourgeois regime. Tyotskyites: fol lowers of Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), whose theory of permanent rev olution held that in Russia a bourgeois and a socialist revolution could be combined and that a proletarian revolution would then spread throughout the world. Stalin ordered him to leave the USSR in 1949. After asylums in Turkey, France and Norway, Trotsky set tled in Mexico City in 1937, where he was assassinated in August 1940. 87 M ilovan Djilas (1911-1995), a chief adviser to Marshal Broz Tito and outspoken critic of Yugoslavias becoming a Soviet satellite, was once considered a possible successor to Tito, but in 1954, he was ab ruptly dismissed from the presidency of the Federal Assembly's Advi sory Council ju st as he was about to assume the post. His support of the 1956 Hungarian uprising led to his imprisonment, and his term was extended in 1957 on the publication in the West of The Neu> Class: An Analysis o f the System, which characterized the Commun ist oligarchy as a new group of privileged and parasitical tyrants. Re leased in 1961, he was rearrested in 1962, then finally free<l in 1966. 88 CEPU. or GPU: Successor, in 1922. to the Cheka (Russian acronym for All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for the Suppression of Counterrevolution and Sabotage), its functions were transferred to the NKVD in 1934. Lenskys a n d Onegins in Ike great Russian poem : Aleksander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1831), a verse novel of contemporary Russian society.

90 Andr Gi<U (1869-1951) was controversial for his espousal and sub sequent rejection of Communism after a visit to the Soviet Union. Filled with hope in Communism before his 1936 visit, he expressed his disillusionment at the conditions he observed in Return from the USSR (1936) and Afterthoughts on the USSR (1937), The former work was published in Hungarian in November 1936, the latter in June 1937.

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91

The prophecy went tike this: The quotation is from the introduction to the 1882 Russian edition of Marx and Engelss The Communist Manifesto, according to the 1991 edition of the Memoir published in Hungary. tchervonietz: a five or ten-i uble gold coin and a Soviet ten ruble bank note in the 1920s, which also served as a monetary standard.

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108 f a i vecu: I stayed alive," A remark by Emmanuel Joseph Sieys (1748 1836), a clergyman whose concept of popular sovereignty guided the French bourgeoisie in their struggle against the mon archy and nobility early in the French Revolution and helped to bring Napoleon Bonaparte to power in 1799. During the Reign of Ter ror, he withdrew from the political scene, and later epitomized that act in this manner. 109 the th ie f editor o f a Catholic newspaper: Laszlo Toth (1889-1951), editor and editor-writer of Nemzeti Ujsdg (People's News) from 1922-44, was sentenced to ten years in prison at the 1949 Mindszenty trial. Cardinal Jdzsef Mindszenty (1892-1975), was arrested on December 23, 1948, on charges of criminal activity, espionage and illegal monetary transactions. He was sentenced to life imprison ment on February 8, 1949, by the Peoples Court in Budapest. He was released from prison in 1955 because of ill health but kept under strict surveillance. Freed during the 1956 Revolution, he re ceived sanctuary in the American Embassy when the Russian Army crushed the uprising. He refused to leave Hungary unless the Kadr government rescinded his conviction and sentence. He left the em bassy in 1971 for the Vatican when the Hungarian government and the Vatican reached an agreement. He shortly left the Vatican to settle in Vienna. Hoping to improve church relations with Hungary, Poi>e Paul VI removed Mindszenty as primate of Hungary in 1974, 60 Andrnssy R oad: The building was formerly occupied by the Arrow Cross. From 1945 on, it was the headquarters of the V, Hungarian acronym for State Security Department, the feared and hated police of the Rakosi government, 120 jan csiban k: Johnny notes," a wage voucher or draft money, or val ueless paper. Formerly, they were vouchers issued to workers that could be redeemed in stores maintained by the factory owner. They were banned in 1884 by law but continued to be used in many places until World War I. 124 "What concern o f mine are the sins o f the worlds": The quote is from Book o f Jo n a h (1939) by Mi haly Babits (1883-1941), one of the lead ing lights of 20th-century Hungarian literature. Learned and ver satile. he is most noted for his lyric poems. He also popularized the

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discursive essay and translated numerous works from English, French, German, Greek, Italian and Latin. 127 Fyodor Tolhukhin (1884 1949) was the commander of the 57th Army at Stalingrad and the 3rd Ukrainian Front from May 1944 to June 1945. Faubourg Saint-Germ ain: the old aristocratic quarter in the suburbs of Paris, renowned for its Bourbon palace with its li brary painted by Delacroix and the Palais-Biron housing the Rodin museum. 128 The Time o f Liberation: April 4, 1945, the date that the Red Army drove the last German forces out of Hungary, after 194 days of battle, it was declared a national holiday on April 2, 1950 by the Rakosi governxnent. 129 us Ady lam ented: Endre Ady {1877-1919), one of Hungary' greatest poets, is the undisputed precursor of early Hungarian modernism. He is a Symbolist, but he draws on the biblical and rural elements of earlier centuries and embraces themes on all aspects of Hungarian life and issues. 131 lege artis: according to its form and manner. 135 Bdlint R alassi (1554 1594) was the first to wrote distinguished lyric poems in the Hungarian language. His love poems, comprising his best writings, blend the love poetry of European humanism with many elements of Hungarian folk poetry, Pter Pzmny (1570-1637) a Catholic prelate, elevated to cardinal by Pope Urban VIII in 1629, is regarded as the best prose writer of the Hungarian Counter-Reformation for his masterly baroque style. Ilis works show the influence of European cultural and artistic developments, and his use of his native language in his writings anticipated the fu ture of Hungarian literary prose. His most important work is a twovolume collection of Sunday sermons published in the year of his death. Miklos Zrinyi (1620-1664), a poet, writer on military science, statesman and general, was a towering figure in baroque lit erature and a major contributor to the development ofHungarian lit erature. Peril at Sziget (1651), the best epic of its time, celebrates his great-grandfathers defense of the fortification at Szlgetvar in 1566 against the forces of Suleiman II, who was on his way to lay siege to Vienna, The Hungarian defenders launched an attack from the flam ing ruins of the fortification, and every one of them fell in armed com bat. the Guardsmen writers: Hungarians who served in Maria Theresas Royal Hungarian Guards in Vienna in the last quarter of the I8th century. Becoming acquainted there with the ideas of the French Enlightenment, they led efforts to revive forms of literary ex pression in Hungary, including the enrichment of the Hungarian Ian-

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guage. *Mihdly Csokonai VUa (1773 1805), who used mainly the ro coco style, was the best lyrical poet of Hungarys literary revival. The versatility and artistry of his versification were new in Hunga rian poetry. Zoltdn Somiyo (1882-1937). called the poet of solitude, expresses the pains of loneliness and the feolings of love, and gives a major place to a bohemian anarchism and an attitude of "art for arts sake in his poems. Finno-Ugrian: a subdivision of the Uralic sub family of the Uralic-Altaic languages. It contains two subgroups: the Finnic of Eastern Europe, which includes Finnish, Estonian and Lapp, and the Ugric, such as Hungarian, its principal member, and Vogul. Its grammar is agglutinative, especially in its mode of adding several suffixes to a single unchanging root or stem to indicate such features as case, number, person, tense and mode, 136 Lebedia: a plain between the Lower Don and the Lower Volga where the ancient Hungarian tribes pitched thoir camp in the mid-9th cen tury before continuing their westward migration. Apparently, it ob tained its name from an ancient tribal chieftain. Benedek Virog (1754-1831), a member of the Classical School in Hungarian lit erature, is often called the Hungarian Horace, whose works he translated. His contemporaries thought of him as the father of Hun garian literature, and many young writers sought him out. He lived in poor economic circumstances in the Taban district In Buda for more than thirty years, subsisting on a small pension and the secret help of his friends. 137 homo aestheticus: a person focused on pure contemplation and reverie. 138 Ddniel Berzsenyi (1776 1836), a poet with a strong current of roman ticism in his writings, used Greek and Latin verse forms and assimi* lated them into Hungarian poetry more successfully than did mem bers of the Classical School. Ferenc Kazinczy (1759-1H311 was a major force in Hungarys literary revival at the turn of the 19th cen tury with his numerous translations, voluminous correspondence, original works and unflagging efibrts to sha] literary developments and tastes in his times, JdnoH Arany (1817-1882) is Hungarys greatest narrative poet and a creator of a realistic poetry grounded in folk traditions. He wrote lyric poetry, but his epic poems, presen ting the legendary and historical past as taking place in his own times, are bettor, especially his ballads. His vast knowledge of Euro pean culture is reflected in his writings, and his translations of Shakespeare and Aristophanes (see the note for p. 377) are land marks in the history of translation in Hungary, Jenn H&ltai (1871-1957), a prose writer and playwright, was a meticulous port rayer of Budapest and Parisian life in a romantic-ironic vein. His hu morous writings are playfully critical of society, man and ideas. Un

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conventional in his use of words, he introduced many new ex pressions into the Hungarian language. Erno Szp (1884-1953). a poet, writer of fiction and dramatist, is regarded by many as the best representative of Impressionism and the Decadent School in Hunga rian literature. He shunned contemporary problems as themes, preferring to celebrate nostalgic longings for youthful purity and a better world for humanity, and painted vivid portraits of Budapest life and ordinary people, *Attila Jo z s e f (1905-1937) is one of the most significant poets in 20th-century Hungarian literature. Human ism and the desire to unite with the world around him pervade his poems. He translated many authors a well as European and African folk poetry, flatus: breathing, puffing, Lorinc Szab (IJIOO^ISS?), a poet, experimented with a broad range of forms and literary prin ciples, but was basically a member of the Decadent School. His poems are concerned with the individual's struggle in an indifferent cosmos and pessixnistic in their outlook. A prolific translator, his translations include the works of Shakespeare. Coleridge, Omar Khayyam, Baudelaire, Villon, Goethe, Pushkin and Mayakovsky. 139 iSarire wrote it: in his What s Literature f (1947). 1 4 ! Afdr J k a i (1825-1904). Hungarys most successful author of roman tic fiction, established the novel as a genre in the nations literature. His novels and short stories, filled with exotica and fantasy from all ages and regions of the world, depict an ideal world and cultivate an optimistic view to sustain the hope of Hungarians for a better life, 142 the Compromise o f 1867: the historical agreement between Austria and Hungary long after the failure of the 1848-1849 Revolution which created the governing structure of a dual monarchy between the two nations and established internal independence for Hungary but installed common ministries for foreign affairs and defense, each under a joint mixiister. 145 Trio if on Hungary: the Hungary after the Treaty of Trianon (1920), which broke up the Austro-Hungarian Empire and disposed of Hun garian territories. Rumania received Transylvania; Czechoslovakia Slovakia and Ruthenia; Yugoslavia Croatia, Slovenia and part of the Bant, thus depriving Hungary of two-thirds of its territory, along with some of its most valuable natural resources, and transferring about three million Hungarians to these three countries. Today, Hungarians form the largest minority in Europe, aside from Rus sians in former Soviet republics: 2,2 million in Rumania, (11 per cent of the population), nearly 600,000 in Slovakia (7 per cent of the population) and 385,000 in Serbia, significant numbers for a nation with a population of 10.4 million. Kalm an M ikszth (1847-1910) is one of the foremost figures in Hungarian prose fiction. His novels

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and short stories delineate the life of peasants, the inhabitants of small towns, the landed gentry and the proprietor class satirically and ronically in a style between romanticism and realism to begin a new period in the Hungarian novel, Gyula Krdy (1878-1933) is one of the most significant writers in 20th-century Hungarian prose fiction. His recollections of his early life and experiences in Budapest form the basic material of his writings. His special quality lies in the evocation of moods and sentiments that create a dreamworld from which reality is viewed. See Marai's discussion of Krudy, pp, 339-349, MiItaly Vordsmarty (1800-1855), the most important writer in Hungarian romanticism, translated Shakespeares Ju lius Caesar, King Lear and part of Rom eo a n d Ju liet. Sdndor Petdfi (1823-1849). whose poems had a major impact on the developments in Hungarian poetry, translated Shakespeare's Cariolanus. r/ie 'Nyugat" generation: Hungarian authors who followed the literary tenets and intellectual and social orientation of the Nyugat (West, 1908 1941), the most influential literary and critical periodical jo 20th-century Hungarian literature, which cultivated the impression ist-symbolist forms of modern West European literature in its pages and transmitted much knowledge of liberalism and contemporary West European literature, especially that of France, to Hungarian literature and culture. Among its members were the alreadymentioned Endre Ady, Mihaly BabiLs, Jeud Heltai, Dezsd Kosztola nyi, Zsigmond Moricz, Zoltn Somlyo and Ernd Szp. Mrai is him self counted among the members of the second Nyugat generation. 148 DezsfJ Szab (1879-1945). His novels and writings on current affairs greatly influenced young intellectuals between the two world wars, Szab. determined to reform Hungarian society, was strongly didac tic in his imaginative writings. He looked u{)on the qualities of the peasant as the basi.s on which to preserve and develop Hungary as a nation. Already ill, he died of starvation during the siege of Buda pest, 149 H arold Sidney Harmsworth Rothenncre (1868-1940), the English publisher and politician who in the 1920s advocated the revision of the provisions of the Treaty of Trianon, a position that made him ex tremely popular in Hungary. Kosztolanyi, who was president of the Hungarian PEN Club, interviewed him in London in November 1931, and at the end of their conversation, Rothermcre gave him 1,000 forints to award to the translators of two outstanding works, Kosztolanyi's presenting the awards to Gyula Kriidy and Zsigmond Mricz provoked so much invective that he resigned from the presidency of the literaiy organization. 151 Knickerbocker hat: a hat made of a wool and cotton cloth fabric re sembling tweed,

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153 Anna des: the title of Kosztolanyis novel, which was published in 1926. 156 wandrous stag: According to the Hungarian myth on the origin of the Hungarians, a stag with magical and shiny antlers led two young princes into the Maetian marshes in the vicinity of Persia and then vanished. The two hunters were named Hunor and Magor, the Iluns being the descendants of the former and the Magyars (the Hungar ians) of the latter, the bridges over the Danube were blown up: The three bridges connecting the center of the city with Buda were all de stroyed: the Margaret Bridge on November 4, 1944, the Chain and Elizabeth bridges on January 18, 1945. 158 A ladr Sehpfin (1872-1950) was a highly regarded literary histo rian and translator, and a leading critic for the Nyugai from the time of its founding in 1008, 161 p a tk ei m athos: the myth of suffering, Men shall learn wisdom by af fliction schooled." - from Aeschylus's Agamemnon. 162 Kdroly Pterfalui Szakm dry (1831-1891), His nearly thirty novels, mostly historical, have left no trace of his literary character in public readership. In his later years, he turned to the events of the 1848-1849 Hungarian Revolution against Austria, in which he had fought and been taken prisoner, E telka, which was written by Andras Dugonics (1740-1818) and not by Szakmary, was significant even in Hungarian preromanticism in its turning to the nations past and in its unquestioning support of the nation and its people. *a countess.,.w ho occasionally published...under the pseudonym "Szikra. Mrs, Sndor Teleki (1864-1937), whose very popular novels depicted the lives of the aristocrat^ and gentry. She was co-president of the Hungarian Writers Circle, which she helped to found in 1924. Her best known novel is The immigrants (1898). 164 Die M ache: make-believe, window-dressing. 166 the Regent: Mikloa Horthy (1868-1957), who governed Hungary from 1920 to 1944 as head of state and was a nationalist with strong rightist leanings, allied Hungary with (jermany in 1941, but when Russian troops entered Hungary, he sent an armistice commission to Moscow and announced Hungarys surrender in October 1944. The Germans forced him to rescind the order of surrender and sent him to Bavaria, where he was later freed by United States troops. He was a witness at the Nrnberg war trials and settled in Portugal in 1949, where he died eight years later. 168 decent: proper, decent.

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171 they d id not pay the progressive real inheritance tax: The tax system developed in Hungary after the 1848-49 Revolution greatly favored the owners of medium and large landed estates. 175 a Uberai newspaper: Mrai contributed regularly to the jsg (News) and the Pesti Hirlap (Pest News), both independent political dailies and the latter the publisher of writings by the established writers of the time, including (besides Mrai) the already-mentioned Mikszth, Heltai, Krudy, Moricz and Kosztolnyi. Ac Kossuth Dan ube Confederation: the plan of Lajos Kossuth (1802-1894), the hero of Hungary's 1848-49 rebellion against Austria and recognized as a symbol of revolutionary nationalism, to unite Hungary. Croatia, Ser bia and Rumania into a federation, the plebiscite: on the question of Austria's uniting with Germany, which was postponed at Hitler's de mand and aborted by the entry of German forces into Austria. *10x1kczi: a portmanteau word blending krkog (to hawk, hem or hack) with Rkczi (Ferenc Rkczi II, 1676-1735). prince of Transylva nia, who led a rebellion against the Habsburgs for an independent Hungary from 1703 to 1711. 176 Kurt von Schuschnigg (1897 1977) was the chancellor of Austria from 1934 to 1938, the last four years of republican Austria, Facing a massive German invasion and knowing he could not depend on foreign support, Schuschnigg yielded to Hitlers demands at Berch* tesgaden on February 12, 1938, On March 9, hoping to restore the in dependence of Austria fully, he announced his plans to hold a plebi scite on the issue on March 13. On March 11 Hitler demanded its postponement and Schuschniggs resignation. The chancellor met the demands, but the German army, with Hitler at its head, invaded Austria and entered Vienna on March 12, 180 a short, bespectacled man: Count Pi Teleki (1879-1941), prime min ister from 1920 to 1921 and 1939 to 1941. Appointed to that post by Horthy. Teleki engineered the ratification of the Treaty of Trianon, having served at the Paris Peace Conference (1919-1920) as the offi cial geogra]>hic expert in the Hungarian delegation. He then retired from politics. Recalled in 1939, he signed the Berlin Pact (1940), which made Hungary a member of the Axis, headed by Germany, Italy and Japan and founded a military alliance that now included Hungary. Rumania, Bulgaria. Slovakia and Croatia. Teleki also con cluded a mutual-assistance treaty with Yugoslavia, and when in 1941 he realized that Germany would force Hungary to invade Yugoslavia, he committed suicide during the night of April 2-3, 1941. 182 Guillaume A pollinaire (1880-1918), leader of the avant-garde in Paris during the first two decades of the 20th century, introduced

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Cubism in his book The Cubist Painters (1913). His only play, The Breasts o fT iresia s (1918), mistakenly subtitled Surrealist instead of Sumaturalistic Drama" by his publisher, is one of the earliest examples of Surrealism. Rainier M aria Rilke (1875-1926), a Ger man poet and novelist born in Czechohslovakia, achieved hia first real fame >vith Poems from the R ook o f Honrs (1905), which treated God as <in evolutionary concept. He became widely known in Hun gary through a 1919 translation of selected poems by Sandor Remenyik (1890 1941), who lived in Rumania between the two world wars, and whose early poems dealt with the injustices suffered by Hungarians living in Rumania because of the Treaty of Trianon. Ni kolai Bukharin (1888-1938) participated in the Bolshevik Revol ution in November 1917 and became a leader in the Comintern, the editor of Pravda (later Izvestia) and full member of the Pohtburo in 1924. He lost his major posts in 1929 because he opposed Stalin's policies. In 1938, he was tried publicly and executed, 183 R osa Luxemburg (1870-1919), a German revolutionary of Polish origin, helped to form the Spartacus Party in Germany during World War I and edited its organ, R ed Flag. Ajresled for her role in the Spartacist uprising in Berlin, she was killed by soldiers while being transported to prison. Karl R adek (1885-1939?), a long-time inter national Communist leader and journalist, became a leading mem ber of the Comintern, His influence began to decline because the Comintern failed to bring about a Communist takeover in Germany. In 1924, he lost his seat on the Partys Central Committee. Expelled from the party in 1927, he recanted and was readmitted in 1930, He was an editorial writer for izvestia from 1931 to 1937 and also a co-author of the 1936 Stalin constitution. Accused of treason during the party purges of the 1930s, he confessed at the so-called Trial of the Seventeen in 1937 and was sentenced to ten years' imprison ment. He is believed to have died in a prison camp under unknown circumstances. Hungary was also mute: On March 15, 1938, three days after German troops entered Austria, the Hungarian ambassa dor to Germany extended his governments congratulations to the foreign office in Berlin at the reunification" of Germany and Aus tria. 184 Count Istvdn Szechenyi (1791 1860), a forceful advocate of econ omic, social and intellectual life who stimulated liberal thought in Hungary, fell in love in 1824 with Countess Crescentia Seilern, the wife of Count Karoly Zichy, and waited to 1836 to marry her after she became a widow. They were wed in the church on Krisztina Square, where a memorial tablet commemorates the occasion. 185 prdsza: spdsz," a sweet dish made of flour browned in lard. - sterc: a dish made of potatoes or flour in lard and onions.

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187 Ban B ank (2822), a classic tragedy by Jozsef Katona (1791-1830), and one of the first significant plays in Hungarian, deals with a con spiracy at the court of King Andrew II (1205-1235). Tt was set to music by Ferenc Erkel (1810-1893) and became Hungary's most popular opera. 194 The Commission o f H um an R ights was established by Chapter 10 of the United Nations Charter, as a result of the horrors perpetrated during World War 11, to protect basic human rights under its Econ omic and Social Council, Its draft, Universal Declaration of Human Rights," was formally adopted by the General Assembly on Decem ber 10, 1948. 197 B ihha pauperum : books of the poor. Medieval picture books, often using Latin inscriptions that Cook the place of the B ible outside cleri cal circles, 198 prim ds: the leader of a Gypsy band, who plays the first violin, 200 Auschwitz: Most Hungarian Jews sent into forced labor were killed in this German concentration camp. 202 trabukC: a kind of cigar. 203 What d id the Jew ish police officer request!: Bela Zerkovitz (1882-1948), Jewish composer, is one of the best known and most as sailed representatives of light music in Hungary. He always wrote his own lyrics for his songs and music hall ditties, and composed sev eral highly successful operettas. *a song by a com poser: as opposed to a folksong, 207 the Council fo r Social Reconciliation was established in Budapest in April 1946 to monitor signs of anti-Semitism still present in Hun gary and to reconcile the antagonisms between Jew s and Hungar ians. *The c h ie f ra66i w ore...the Catholic bishop: In Hungary, all de nominations had their own military chaplains with officer rank until 1950, after the Riikosi government came to power. 209 staretz: an old Greek Orthodox priest. 210 Katyn: The Germans announced, in 1943, that they had unearthed the remains of thousands of Polish officers in the Katyn forests, near Smolensk, and claimed that evidence suggested the Soviets had mas sacred them. Moscow denied the charge and asserted that the Nazis were responsible for the atrocity. Only recently has the matter been cleared up. Mikhail S. Gorbachev first admitted Soviet responsi bility, in April 1990, but it was President Boris N. Yeltsin who, on

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October 13, 1992, released two folders of secret documents from the Communist Party Central Committees archives disclosing that the extermination of the Polish officers was directly organized by the Partys leaders. Their decision read; Transfer to the USSR NKVD the papers concerning 14,700 former Polish officers, officials, land owners, policemen and gendarmes, held in camps for prisoners of war, as well as the papers concerning members of different subver sion and espionage organizations, former officials and former clergy men, arrested and held in jails in the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus - a total of 11,000 people, whose cases must be con sidered in keeping with a special procedure and who must be subject to the supreme punishment execution by a firing squad. The con sideration of the cases must be carried out without summoning of the arrested people to the court and without presenting them with in dictments." - from The New York Times, October 14, 1992, 216 One o f them ..,an outstanding writer: very probably Lajos Nagy (1883-1954), one of the most important writers of prose fiction be tween the two world wars, and now looked upon as a realistic writer with a socialistic outlook who influenced authors of the generation after 1945. He supported the Revolutionary Government of 1918-19. During World War II, he opened a small bookstore and joined the Communist Party after 1945. 217 Ducstnszky Caf: Among its habitus were such leftist writers as Gyrgy Balint (1905-1943), a distinguished Hungarian leftist critic and publicist between the two world wars, Attila Jzsef, Antal Szerb, a gifted literary historian and critic, Lajos Nagy and mem bers of the Hungarian Theater. The fates of Balint and Szerb call for further attention. Balint, a Jew, was ordered into a forced labor camp but soon discharged. Arrested in April 1942, he was confined to a military prison. He escaped but was recaptured and sent to a labor camp and then shipped off to the Ukraine, where he died in a labor camp. Szerb, also a Jew, was pressed into a labor camp twice during the war, and, starving, was beaten to death by the Arrow Cross. 218 Waving the flam ing torch: a reference to a play. Flam ing Torch (1953) by Gyula IIlyes (1902-1983), one of the most influential poets in 20th-century Hungarian literature and an especially gifted trans lator. 219 The lead er o f one o f these newly organized special parties was a p eas ant from the Aifold: Pter Veres (1897-1970), whose novels and short stories delineate the lives of peasants and villagers in a realis tic style, at times satirical and humorous. Often arrested for his pol itical activities, he was sent to forced labor camps on three occasions

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during World War II. He was president of the National Peasant Party from 1945 to 1949, minister of defense from 1947 to 1948 in the coalition government, and president of the Writerss Union from 1954 to 1956. The Allbid is the Great Plain, the rich agricultural re gion of Hungary. *K lm n Rzsahegyi (1873-1961), a celebrated rep resentative of realistic acting and a member of the National Theater, was renowned for his character roles. He played the gravedi^er in Hamlet and the madman in L ear and Twelfth Night, Ragenean in Rostand's Cyrano and Jacob in Molirca The Miser. Raymond Aron (1905'1983) a sociologist, philosopher and political commentator, was well known for his skepticism of ideological orthodoxies. Once Sartres close colleague, Aron criticized Sartre and Marxists for their unquestioning support of the Soviet Union in his Opium o f the Intel lectuals (1955). 220 Religion is the opium o f the m asses: a part of Karl Marx's criticism of Hegel's system as it was interpreted in the post-Hegelian circles of the Left. 221 He wrote this in Sorrento: Gorky, the father of Soviet literature and the founder of the doctrine of socialist realism, exhausted by his work as the director of the State Publishing House and bouts of tuberculosis, and disillusioned with the Soviet Union in its first years after the Revolution, sought rest abroad, mainly in Sorrento, Italy, from 1921 to 1928, 224 In Czechoslovakia - in the only European country to opt fo r Commun ism through a democratic, secret election: Since the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia won ju st 50 per cent of the vote in the elec tions of May 26, 1946, the other political parties tried to end the Communists dominance in the fall of 1947, but the Communists, threatening a general strike after several ministers stepped down, succeeded in persuading the head of state, Eduard Benes, to appoint a new coalition cabinet. Klement Gottwald became prime miniater. The Ivan Denisovitches: a reference to Aleksander Solzhenitsyns One Day in the Life o f Ivan Denisovitch (1968), a grim account of life in Soviet forced labor camps. * a deported Russian, a certain Mar chenko: Anatoly Marchenko (1938-1986), the son of an impoverished railwayman and not a professional writer, was often imprisoned and sent to work camps on various charges, such as high treason, pass port violation and anti-Soviet defamation. He died on December 8, 1986 of a brain hemorrhage in the sixth year of a 15-year prison term during a hunger strike he hoped would gain amnesty for all pol itical prisoners. The book Mrai discusses is entitled My Testimony (1966), an account of the penal conditions Marchenko endured. It was published in Russia for the rst time in 1991.

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225 after Khrushchevs dow nfall: He was forced out on October 15,1964. Yuly Daniel (1925-1988), Andrey Siniavsky (b. 1925) were both tried for publishing works under the pseudonyms "Nikolai Arzhak" and Abram Terts, respectively, in the West which allegedly slan dered the Soviet Union. Tliey became symbols of the oppnssed art ist and the most famous prisoners in the Soviet Union, Daniel, who permitted some of his short stories to appear abroad, was arrested on September 12, 1965, and charged with publishing "anti-Soviet short stories abroad" and circulating them among friends, Siniav* sky, a short-story writer and recognized literary scholar, had an ironical analysis of socialist realism and several stories published in France under his pseudonym from 1956 to 1965, Finally identified as Terts," he was arrested on September 8, 1965. Their trial pro duced outcries from Communist leaders in Britain, France and Italy and in the Soviet Union, where students demonstrated outside the courtroom and 63 Soviet writers signed petitions of protest. They were sentenced on February 12, 1966: Daniel to five and Sinyavsky to seven years of hard labor, Daniel, released on September 12, 1970, was not allowed to return to Moscow and settled In Kaluga, where he continued to work as a translator and to publish under a pseudonym. Siniavsky was released on June 8, 1971, and given leave in 1973 to emigrate with his family. He is working as a profes sor of Russian literature in Paris and continues to use the pseudo nym "Terts" for his prose writings. 226 Brezhnev a n d his com rades: Leonid Brezhnev (1906-1982) became general secretary of the Communist Party in 1966. The president of the Soviet Union was Nikol<\j Podgorny (1903-1983), the prime min ister Aleksey Kosygin (1904-1980). Potemkin arrangement: derived from the name of Grigory Potemkin, a Russian statesman and a fa vorite of Catherine the Great who once had impressive fake villages built along a route the queen was to travel: thus the name Potem kin" has come to signify a faade or display designed to obscure or shield some undesirable fact or conditions from someone. 228 an elderly n\an. a poet: probably Bla Balzs (1884-1949), who was also a short-story writer, novelist and noted film aesthetician. He held a number of posts in the 1918-19 Hungarian Soviet Republic. After the failure of the Communist government, he emigrated to Vienna, where he participated in the literary activities of Commun ist writers, and from there to Berlin in 1927, where he published some of his works but spent most of his time directing motion pic tures and writing movie scripts. In 1931, he settled in Moscow where he taught at the Russian Film Academy, directed several films and wrote movie scripts, and played an important role in publishing Hun garian periodicals and in the Organization of Revolutionary Writers.

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He returned to Hungary in September 2945. where he helped to re vive the Hungarian motion picture industry, 230 thirty years o f exile: As shown in the note for p. 227, Balazs lived 14 years in the Soviet Union after he left Hungary in 1919. 231 Yeshiva: An orthodox rabbinical seminary or academy of advanced Talmudic study for 13- to 18-year-olds who have completed the "hedor, a Jewish elementary school in which students aged 7 to 13 are taught to read the Pentateuch, the Prayer Book and other books in Hebrew. 233 Andrey Zhdanov (1896-1948) was a Communist leader and general and a loyal supporter of Stalin, He was largely responsible for the ex treme nationalism and the strict control of intellectuals in the post war world, including those in the satellite nations, through the en forcement of policies that severely restricted Soviet cultural acti vities, including literary, imposing, for example, the tenets of social ist realism, which sought be an instrument of propaganda for the Communist state. Jo 1932, the Union of Soviet Writers, in defining the role of literature, proclaimed socialist realism as the compulsory literary practice. The product of Stalin, Zhdanov and Gorky, it pre scribed an optimistic view of socialist reality and the development of the Communist revolution; literature was to educate readers in the spirit of socialism. The doctrine is marked by absolute adherence to Party doctrine and the conventional style and techniques of realism. Sansculotte is a general term applied to the lower classes in France during the French Revolution, who wore long trousers instead of knee breeches. It was usually the name given to the extreme republi cans of Paris connected with the Jacobins, who instituted the Reign of Terror under Robespierre. 236 tchinovniks: civil servants, Petkov was hanged: After Bulgaria was proclaimed a Peoples Republic in 1946, Georgy Dimitrov (1882-1949), the premier, began to eliminate potential opponents. Nikola Petkov (1893-1947). leader of the Agrarian Party, was ac cused of treason on June 6, 1947, and sentenced to death on August 16. land distribution: The coalition government issued the decree eliminating large estates and granting land to those who cultivated it in 1945. The landed property of traitors and fascists and all es tates exceeding 1,000 hold (1 hold=1.42 acres) were appropriated. Also distributed were lands belonging to banks and big business in terests, but not properties less than 200 hold owned and actually being farmed by peasants for their livelihood. The reform affected 35% of the country's arable land. Those who shared in the distribu tion were: 100,000 former agricultural workers on the large estates, 261,000 other agricultural workers, 214,000 holders of land insuffi

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cient fot* their livelihood and small peasants and village craftsmen, with the average share of land per person amounting to 5.1 hold. The number of owners of 5-25 hold, the small and middle peasantry, increased by 1,200,000 nationalization o f industries, banks and commerce: The nationalization of industries began in May (946, that of remaining industries in December 1946 and of banks and commer cial properties they owned in November 1947. In March 1948, the government nationalized all business enterprises with 100 or more employees and then, in December 1949, those with 10-100 em ployees and those owned by foreign nations, except the Soviet Union; In effect, all means of production in the hands of the bourgeoisie be came state property. At the same time, wholesale trade was also na tionalized. private retail trade severely restricted, and new credit and commercial organizations rapidly set up. The structure of agri culture was also being radically transformed. Begun in late 1948, the organization of holdings into cooperatives accelerated in 1950 and 1951. The changes since 1948 reflected the growing power of the Communist Party, which assumed control in May 1949 under the headship of Matyas Riikosi. 237 When the news spread that the H ungarians received baptism: Prince Gza (ruled from c.970 to 997) adopted Christianity but tolerated pa ganism. He began to establish the kingdom of Hungary by building harmonious relations with neighboring countries, cultivating con tacts with foreign dynasties and settling Christian clerics and knights in the country. Benedict the Levile: "Benedictus Levitua is actually the assumed name of an unknown 9th*century compiler to whom is ascribed the third group of the Qollectio Capitularum, a massive set of false acts or ordinances c.850 intended by a group of anonymous French authors to shore up the bishops' position and to rectify the poor condition of ecclesiastical-state affairs through falsi fied and forged texts attributed to the popes and the C^irolingian princes, in reaction to a German law that viewed dioceses, churches and monasteries as lucrative properties subject to confiscation even by fraudulent means, propaganda fid e: missionary work, the Congregatio de P ropaganda Fide, the College of Propaganda, a commit tee of cardinals established by Pope Gregory XV in 1622 to supervise the foreign missions of the Roman Catholic Church and train priests for them, 238 drastoujtye: how do you do; how are you 239 bocher types: Bocher" is bahur, a student in a Talmudic academy. 241 in a fam ous memorandum : probably a reference to the Carta of 1977, the manifesto of the movement for civil rights in Czechoslova kia, framed in January 1977.

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245 / ivas talking with one o f these fellow travelers: Probably Pi Justus (1905-1965), a sociologist, poet and translator who participated in the workers' movement since age twenty and became secretary of the Social Democratic Party in 1945. He was imprisoned in 1949 on trumped-up charges. Released during the 1956 Revolution, he worked a t the Corvina Publishing House from that year on. the R ed radio...rst began blasting Tito's chained dogs": Anti-'Tito propa ganda commenced in June 1948. At a conference held in Bucharest, Rumania on June 28. the Cominform denounced him for defying So viet supremacy. The acronym stands for Communist Information Bureau, which was founded in 1947 to reestablish information ex changes among European Communist Parties and consisted of the Communist parties of Bulgaria. Czechoslovakia, France, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Rumania, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. 'The Com inform was dissolved in 1956 as a gesture of reconciliation to Tito. it depicted Tito: Tito headed a delegation that arrived in Budapest on December 6, 1947 to sign an agreement of Hungarian-Yugoslav friendship, cooperation and mutual aid, 246 the R ajk case: See the note for p. 361, 252 Six o f us together, one less than the seven w icked: Based on a Hunga rian folk-saying which claims that the number seven signified bad luck. 'Thus the portent for the journey is favorable. 261 the years o f my youth here: 1923 to 1929. Mrai left Hungary in 1919 and lived in Germany until 1923, studying journalism at the Univer sity of Leipzig and philosophy at the Universities of Frankfurt am Main and Berlin. He continued to study philosophy while in Paris. 262 Like the generation before, m aps were again being cut up with scis sors: a reference to the 'Treaty of Versailles, June 28, 1919, conclud ing World War I and to the treaties of Paris between the Allies and Italy, Rumania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Finland, February 10,1947, 279 As a generation before... I h a d to m ake the sam e decisiom Mrai left Hungary in October 1919 and did not return until 1929, 280 In-6ns: there, over there, 288 I was greeted with news about the conspiracies": The director of the Headquarters of the State Police in Budapest issued an arrest war rant on December 31, 1946 against former Colonel-General L^os Dlnoki Veres, accusing him of conspiring against the Republic. On January 5, 1947, the Ministry of the Interior claimed it had un covered a plot by several prominent Hungarians to restore the Horthy regime by military force. The trial began on February 27,

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and sentences were handed down on April 16, One o f the accused in the first ' conspiracy: General Dalnoki Veres, Gyorgy Donath and Sandor Andras were sentenced to death, but the Court of Appeals allowed the death penalty to stand for Donath (see the note for p. 289) and reduced the sentences of tho other two to ten years of forced labor. 289 President o f the Republic: Zoltn Tildy (1889-1961), filled the presidency from February I, 1946 to July 30, 1949, having served as prime minister from November 1945. During the 1956 Revolution, he was Minister of State in Imre Nagys government. For that activ ity he was sentenced to a six-year prison term by the Supreme Court but released in 1959, The so-called conspim tors were put to death: Oyorgy Donath, who was parliamentary representative of the Hun garian Life Party from 1939 to 1944 and a member of the conserva tive Hungarian Community Organization, which was reestablished after 1945, was executed on October 27, 1947. the Communists drove into exile... a n d put in hw place: Ferenc Nagy, on vacation in Switzerland, reported to the Hungarian Embassy in Bern on May 30, 1947 his resignation from the premiership and presidency of the Independent Smallholders' Party and his refusal to obey the govern ment's summons to return to Hungary, He was replaced on May 30 by Lajos Dinnys, also a member of the Smallholders Party, who was serving as Minister of Defense. 295 A History was published in Hungary as a short course of study in 1945. 296 one morning newspapers announced that the Hungarian Social Democratic P arty...had m erged with the Communist Party: On June 12, 1948, the 4th Congress of the Hungarian Communist Party and the 37th Congress of the Social Democratic Party announced their merger into the Hungarian Working People's Party and the conven ing of its 1st Congress on June 13. 297 In Hungary. Poland. Czechoslovakia, R um ania a n d Bulgaria: In 1947, the Communists wore moving into positions of power in other East European states. In Poland, the Democratic Bloc was victorious in the elections held on January 19 and formed a leftist coalition gov ernment. In Bulgaria, the two-year plan for rehabilitation had com menced, and the Petkov trial was under way. In Rumania, the leader of the Peasant Party was sentenced to life at hard labor for "anti-democratic activities, the king abdicated on December 30, and a Peoples Republic was declared. The next year in Czechoslovakia, on February 5, 12 Communists became cabinet members in the new government, and Eduard Benes, after reluctantly approving the new regime, resigned in June, claiming poor health, and refused to sign

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the new constitution. * a scrap of paper: Churchill recounts the trans action he conducted with Stalin on October 6, 1944 in Moscow; So far as Britain and Russia are concerned, how would it do for you to have ninety percent predominance in Rumania, for us to have ninety percent of the say in Greece, and go flfty-fifly about Yugo-slavia?" While this was being translated I wrote out on a half-sheet of paper: Rumania: Russia 90%, the others 10%; Greece: Great Britain 90% (in accord with USA), Russia 10%; Yugoslavia 50-50%; Hun gary 50-50%: Bulgaria: Russia 75%, the others 25%, I pushed this across to Stalin, who had by then heard the transla tion, There was a slight pause. Then he took his blue pencil and made a large tick upon it, and passed it back to us. It was all settled in no more time than it takes to set down. After this there was a long silence. The penciled paper lay in the center of the table. At lengtli I said, Might it not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed of these issues, so fateful to mil lions of people, in such and offhand manner? l>et us burn the paper. No, you keep it," said Stalin, - From The Second World War: Triumph a n d Tragedy, Cambridge, Mass., 1953, V. 6, Bk 1: The Tide of Victory." 298 physical opposition (as in Poland, E ast Germany and Hungary): Mrai is referring to the opposition the Communists faced in the three countries: the uprising in East Germany June 16-17. 1953, the events that began in Poland on June 28, 1956, and continued until Gomuika was named prime minister, and, of course, the 1956 Revolution in Hungary, October 23 November 4, when the Revol utionary Workers' and Peasants government was formed under the leadership of Jnos Kdr and the liquidation of the Revolution begun with the help of Soviet armed forces. 304 G Baba's tomb: A Turkish warrior, or, according to more recent views, the Mohammedan chief priest who fell dead on September 3, 1541, while celebrating victory in the Church of Our Lady (Matthias Church) on Castle Hill, which had been converted into a mosque. He had come to Budapest with the armies of Suleiman the Magnificent, who began the Turkish occupation of the nations capital which was to last until 1686. In that year, an international army of the llabsburgslaid siege to Buda on June 21 and recaptured it on September
2.

306 the au rea praxis: from the proverb "Aurea praxis, sterilis theoria," or Practice is golden, theory sterile." *during the Bac7i period: The period from 1849 to 1859 was named after Alexander Bach (1813 1893) who served as Minister of the Interior and became the

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main figure in the ministry on the death of Prince Schwarrenberg in 1852. He instituted the Bach System of bureaucratic control in the Habsburg Empire. Its chief objectives were centralization and Ger* manization, which Bach sought to achieve through stringent control by the secret police, 312 A Marxist philosopher w ho returned hom e from Moscow: GyOrgy Lu kcs (1885-1971), one of the leading critics in modern literature, combined Marxist social theory with aesthetics and humanism and set forth the links between creative work and social struggle. Having served in the cabinet of the Communist Bla Kun in 1919, Lukcs fled Budapest when the Hungarian Soviet Republic fell, and lived in Berlin until the rise of Hitler, when he went to Moscow. He returned to Budapest in 1945, became professor of aesthetics and played an in fluential role in the Communist Party and Hungarys intellectual life. He was eventually attacked, however, for his sympathetic view of Western literature, and he lost all political impact after the 1956 Revolution. 314 lever: the reception of visitors on rising from bed by a regal person. 316 Gyula Vargha (1853-1921) published his first book of poems in 1881, which was followed by 23 years of silence while he wrote fre quently on issues of economics and translated many literary works, including the writings of Friedrich Schiller, Victor Hugo, SainteBeuve and Thophile Gautier. His poems are simple and pessimistic in their political outlook and often concerned with old age. 317 A rpd Toth (1886-1928), an important lyric poet and critic, shaped the literary principles of the Nyugat school with Its orientation to the literature of the West. One of the best translators of his day, he accompanied all his translations with critical studios, including those of Milton. Keats, Baudelaire, Maupassant and Chekhov. 320 Tro fin Lysenko (1898-1972) was the scientific and administrative leader in Soviet agriculture, the head of the Soviet Academy of Sciences Institute of Genetics, He belonged to the Soviet school of genetics which rejected the genetic theories held by most geneticists, supporting, instead, the doctrine that characteristics acquired through environmental influences can be inherited. 321 the Great Actress: Gizi Bajor (1893-1951). one of the most distin guished actresses of the Hungarian stage and a life-long member of the National Theater, had, by the end of the Twenties, established herself as one of Hungarys most celebrated artists. She also ap peared in many films from 1918 to 1941. Tibor Germn, her third husband, and a very successful noso. ear and throat specialist, fear*

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ing that his wife was threatened by deafness, a brain tumor and a painful death, poisoned her on February 12, 1951, and committed suicide. A year after Bajor's death, a memorial museum was opened in her villa in Buda. 323 the Oxford Program: This international movement, founded in 1921 in reaction to World War I by Frank Nathan Daniel Buchmann (1878-1961), is variously called the First Century Christian Fellow ship, the Oxford Group and Moral Rearmament. Its evangelistic work for personal and national spiritual reconstruction stressed ab solute honesty, purity, love and unselfishness, and was conducted in formally and intimately in groups assembled in educational institu tions, churches and homes to share personal spiritual experiences, 324 mlomane: music lover, 334 the peacetim e m arriage security: At the time, officers were required to place a deposit with the army as evidence that the couple would be able to maintain a way of life suitable to an officers social posi tion. 339 Krdyism: a form of writing using impressionistic moods and typical portrayal of characters in which the chief character is, to aU intents and purposes, the author himself, 340 A March poet-yauth: Sndor Petfi (1823-1849), one of Hungarys greatest poets whose ])oetic activity merged directly with the revol ution of Hungary against Austria in March 15, 1848. On that day, Petofi and his fellow revolutionaries assembled at the Pilvax Caf, in the inner city of Budapest, at news of the revolution in Vienna to form their own plans for revolution. On the next day, the group marched to the universities and through the streets of Pest with the 25-year-old poet reciting his recently composed poem National Song" at several places along the way. Petdfi fell on July 31, 1849 in a battle between the Hungarian revolutionary army and the Rus sian forces that had intervened on the side of the Austrians. His body was never recovered. 341 When Krudy died: May 12, 1933. 342 Lszl Cholnoky (1897-1929), a former journalist who tried to make a living writing fiction, is counted among the important Hungarian writers in the first quarter of the 20th century for his psychological insights and lyrical style. He committed suicide, possibly because of his extreme poverty. Geza C sh (1887-1919), a prose writer, liter ary and music critic and neuropathologist. Severely wounded in World War I, he became addicted to morphine. While being treated

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for the addiction, he escaped, shot his wife to death, took poison and cut his veins but survived. Wanting to enter a clinic in Budapest, he escaped from a hospital in Szabadka, and when arrested by the Yugoslav border guards, he took poison again and died. The grot esque, deranged, tormented world of the neuropath or ncar*neuropath agitates his stories, which arc sometimes nearly clinical in their analysis, A selection of his stories was published in English translation in 1980; The Magician's Garden a n d Other Stories, Corvina Books, Budapest. 347 Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky (1886 1944), a leader and politictan in the struggle for an independent Hungary during World War II, opposed the Hungarian government's foreign and domestic policies friendly to Nazi Germany and called for Hungary's withdrawal from the war. The Gestapo who came to arrest him on March 19, 1944, captured him only after wounding him in a fierce gun battle. Freed on October 15 at the request of the Hungarian government, he soon formed and became president of the Liberation Committee of the Hungarian Na tional Uprising to lead the struggle against the Germans. Captured again, he was sentenced to death by a Szalusi court and executed on December 6, 1944. He was formally buried with solemn funeral pomp on May 27, 1945. 353 feuilleton: the section of one or more pages (usually at the bottom of a newspaper set aside for light literature, criticism, short stories, etc.) 359 B oris Pasternak (1899-1960), long a hero to Russian intellectuals for his resistance to the Communist state, is best known in the West for his novel Dr. Zhivago, which was published first in English in 1958 and then in Russian in the United States in 1959, Its repudiation of Communist society and its Christian idealism offended the Soviet government. Faced with an antagonistic Soviet press, expulsion from his native land and possible exile, Pasternak was compelled to turn down the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. Expelled from the Writers Union, he lived in virtual exile in an artistic community near Moscow until his death. 361 the presentation od u m e: its translated title: Hungarian Writers and Poets on Mdtyds R dkosi (1952). *the Communists h a d already ex ecuted RajA: Laszlo Rajk (1908-1949), active in the Hungarian Com munist Party in the 1930s, served with the Hungarian Battalion of the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. On the conclu sion of the war, he was interned in France but escaped in 1941 and returned to Hungary, where he was again interned, l^lcased in Sep tember 1944, he became secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party's Central Committee and a leader of the Home Front, The

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Arrow Cross arrested him again and eventually shipped him to Mu nich. Returning from there on May 17, 1945, he again played a lead ing role in Party activities until 1949, On May 31, 1949, he was tried on false charges by the Rakosi government, sentenced to death, and executed on October 21, 1949, He was rehabilitated on March 27. 1956, and buried with solemn ceremony on October 6, the day in 1849 on which the leading generals of Hungarys War of Indepen dence, the Martyrs of Arad. were executed by the Austrians. B ela Kun (1896-1938) an agent of the Bolsheviks, founded the Hungarian Soviet Republic on March 21, 1919, when the coalition government headed by Mihaly Karolyi collapsed. His government fell on August 1, 1919, when the Rumanian army marched into Hungary, Forced to flee, he went to Vienna and then to Russia, where he lived until he became a victim of the Stalin purges in the 1930s. 362 the Russians, too, h a d already m ade up their minds to bundle the nafion's overly-zealous lead er out o f the country: The anti-Stalinisls removed Matyas Rakosi as first secretary of the Hungarian Working Peoples Party on June 21, 1956. He went to the Soviet Union in Oc tober 1956, where he lived until his death in 1971. 366 mouehes volantes: motes in the eyes, floating specks. 370 Gyula Szini (1876-1932), a journalist, his major interests lay in lit erature and the arts. In his own novels and short stories, he was a symbolist rather than a realist. His fellow authors held his ability to construct narratives and his lyricism in high regard, but he never en joyed great popularity with general readers. 372 Istvan Tomorkeny (1874-1915): a short-story writer and ethnologist. His stories portray realistically the life and problems of peasants on isolated farms and of workers in the Szeged area. Kdroly Lovik (1874-1915), a writer and journalist, wrote successful sketches al most effortlessly. He knew the Hungarian gentry well and viewed them with a disillusioned eye. His contemporaries, recognizing his great talent, considered his lifework the prototype of an author squandering his gifts. Ldszlo P adl (1846 1879), was one of Hun garys most important painters of the 19th century. From 1872 on. he worked in the village of Barbizon. from which the Barbizon School derived its name, 373 Viktor Cholnoky (1868-1912), a writer and journalist whose stories and publicist writings, many of them characterized by great erudi tion and unmuddied political insight, quickly became popular. His stories, using romantic colors and, often, fantastic episodes evoked memories of the distant past and blended elements of ancient cul tures, old tales and superstitions. T^vadar Csontvdry Kosztka

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(1853 - 1919 ) : His visionary paintings are ch aracterized by bri li ant col

ors and symbolic power. They have been frequently and successfully exhibited abroad, Tomdif M oly: ( 1875- 1957) , was the first to write detective and adventure stories in Hungary. His second subject was the life of artists and the world of the theater. His novels were very popular between the two world wars, * Sandor Trey Kathy ( 18861955 ) ; Contemporaiy critics widely praised Kuthy's poetry. At age thirty, however, his interest increasingly turned to translation, and among the writers he translated were Baudelaire, Villon, Ver laine and Aragon, 374 Zoltn Ambrus (1861-1932), a central literary figure of the 1880s, was the first to write about big-dty life in detail in Hungarian lit erature. depicting in his novels and short stories the changes occur ring in Hungarian society in the decades after the Compromise of 1867. He helped to create a new Hungarian drama criticism by sepa rating it from the academic outlook. Jen d Pterfy (1850-1899), one of the most important essayists and critics in Hungarian literature, is looked upon as a master stylist of analytical and critical prose. Frigyes R iedl (1856-1921), a highly esteemed literary historian and essayist, served from 1877 on as the regular book reviewer for the Budapest Revue, a learned and literary journal publishing aca demically oriented studies and critiques and original literary works. Laszlo Lakatos (1882-1944), a writer and journalist, criticized the Hungarian upper middle class in satirical stories in which paradox and aphorism play a major role. His plays were successfully pro duced abroad. Menyhrt Szasz (1893 1939), a poet and journalist, is best remembered for his anti-war poems. Artur Keleti (1889-1969), a poet and translator, revived the feeling of the Middle Ages in his best poetry. His works were issued in beautifully illus trated editions. Istuan Szegedi (1886-1944), a poet, whose writings appeared in progressive literary journals. His most successful work is his autobiography, written in tercets. 376 Babits's translation o f The Divine Comedy: His translation oi Inferno appeared in 1913, Purgatory in 2910 and P aradise in 1923, Babits also published an introduction to The Divine Comedy for readers in 1930. 377 the very sam e poet who. though dying...w as still revising his transla tion o f Sophocles: Babits was revising his translations o f King Oedtpus and Oedipus at Colonus at the time of his death. They were published in 1943, two years after his death, Ja n o s Arany's m as terly translations: Arany translated eleven of the Aristophanes comedies, the Odyssey, w hich several translated: Eight Hungarian translations of the epic have appeared, the first in 1780 and the latest in 1947.

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378 Gyula Trok (1888-1918), was a major contributor to the develop ment of realistic fiction in Hungarian literature. His novels are criti cal of the gentry, The Ring with n Green Stone (1918) relating Its de cline during the years after the 1867 Compromise through the story of a family. Gza, the General Secretary: Gza Voinovich (1877 1952), a literary historian and aesthetician, was general secretary of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences from 1935 to 1949. ToldVs Love: Arany worked on this poetic tale from 1863 to 1879. 381 Baron Jo z s e f Eotuos (1813-1871): Besides works on politics and law, Eotvos wrote dramas, poems and novels. He created the realistic novel in Hungary by giving it social purpose as an instrument of agi tation and political propaganda, S zabad N p (Free People), a politi cal newspaper which was the illegal organ of the Hungarian Com munist Party from February 1 to May 1942. Police seized its press and editors, but the paper reappeared in September 1944, After the liberation of Budapest, it resumed publication legally on March 25, 1945, as the voice of the Communist Party. It became the main news paper of the Hungarian Working Peoples Party, and continued as N pszabadsg (Peoples Freedom) in November 1956.

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b l a n k page

Printed and bound in H ungary, 2005 Akad^miai Printing House, Martonv^sdr

A seamless combination of the political, literary and personal history of postwar Hungary

This scathing, at times humorous, and always insightful memoir by exiled Hungarian novelist Sndor Mrai provides one of the most poignant and humanly alive portraits of life in Hungary between the German occupation in 1944 and the solidification of communist power in 1948. Both a fervent anti-fascist and anti-communist, Mrai draws a vivid portrait of the Hungarian peasantry and middle class during this period, while delivering a telling indictment of the communist system from which he fled. Witty, aphoristic and psychologically clear-sighted, this memoir depicts the tragedy and pathos of a crucial period in the postwar history of a nation which has been central to both the communist and the postcommunist history of our times.

A chronicle of political, social, and also spiritual change in the capital as the Communist Party tightened its grip on all phases of life... The forced propinquity of the tall, elegant Middle European who spent his free time absorbed in Spenglers Decline of the West with Russian, Kirghiz, and Buryant peasant boys was an eye-opener to both sides. The New York Review of Books

About the author Sndor Mrai (1900-1989) published 46 books, mostly novels, before leaving hungary for political reasons in September 1948. He was considered to be Hungarys most influential representative of middleclass literature between the wars. After leaving Hungary and settling in the United States, he continued to write prolifically. He died in 1989, apparently taking his own life, and in the same year was awarded the Kossuth Prize, Hungarys highest award for literature.