Strange as it may seem, everything did hang together. Something was brewing inside and around me, in my narrower existence and in the wider world. Political dominance, the so-called “year of decision,” lay ahead. A sense of being free had never before tapped me on the shoulder, and there, all of a sudden, I was free, albeit not in the best sense, as I had not yet been grabbed by my big, true, lifelong choice. What has been left in me from those three years, as a matter of fact, is an impression of intensive life, but as to whether that was an intellectual experience or rather the volatile vitality of incipient manhood — that I couldn’t tell you. Whenever I think of those times I am reminded of Talleyrand’s famous utterance: “He who did not live in the years before the revolution cannot know what the sweetness of living is.” What I vividly remember is being constantly in love, and I’m not referring to one love in particular (or several) but to my attitude to life itself. Reading a book was for me just as much an erotic experience as peeling a bra from a girl’s breasts or losing myself in the melancholy of undistrainable life or the unrivalled sweet happiness with which only the young are acquainted. But I get the feeling that I am starting to lift off into “poetic realms” that in all likelihood are of no interest to you.
How could they fail to be, especially when you talk about them with such relish? And I’m delighted to hear that your life also had such a period when you felt so supremely happy or, to be more accurate, when your life was not being controlled by coercion of one kind or another.
If one disregards the coercion of existing … it did not control my life, admittedly, but it had a strong influence on it.
You were still more or less a student, I suppose, and supported by your mother.
Yes, I was, and that entailed a lot of hassles, above all because I had no pocket money. Differences in our outlooks on life also started to become apparent.
In what respect?
In every respect. We squabbled like a young married couple, except it was not the same of course.
Would you be willing to say more? How did your mother manage to get through the war?
She escaped on two occasions: once from a marching column and the second time from the Óbuda Brick Works, which was a dispatch point for transports to Auschwitz. She told me how it was done, but I no longer exactly recall the details. In the end, she found a “secure” shelter in the Budapest ghetto. After the city was liberated in late January 1945, she learned that Laci Seres had last been seen in a death march that had set off toward Vienna: he had died. Mother was inconsolable, but the residence in Zivatar Street was still intact: a Hungarian officer in the Gestapo had picked it in the summer of 1944, before my mother moved to the “yellow-star house,” and he entered into a regular contract with her — something to the effect that he was taking over the house for purposes of looking after it, as it were — the sort of arrangement that could only have occurred with my mother, it goes without saying. As indeed the fact that it was returned to her in due order, just as it had been, down to the last coffee spoon, just before the man had to leave the country in a hurry. Faust made a pact with the Devil, my mother with a Gestapo officer, and she came off best. It may be that the Gestapo functionary was a decent man, as people used to say, though equally he may have been a mass murderer, but that side of things was of no concern to my mother. Not that you should think that was due to moral indifference on her part; no, it was just that as far as things that did not directly affect her were concerned she suffered from what was simply a form of colour-blindness. Not long afterward, an old friend of hers began to woo her — an engineer, an expert on vacuum technology, that’s as much as I know. Engineers are fairly dull people as a rule; Uncle Árpád (that’s what he was called) was certainly that unless the discussion was about vacuums, whereas that was not exactly the most gripping, from my perspective. My mother had another admirer as well, a piano dealer. He was a squat, plethoric, and humorous man; undeniably he was not as good-looking as the glass-tube engineer, but I always found I could have marvellous talks with him about music. I remember him trying to convince Mother that Bartók wrote extremely melodic music. Entertaining evenings they were. Mr. Kondor, the piano dealer, lived at the other end of town, somewhere in Zugló (the Fourteenth District in Pest). I well remember the freezing-hard winter of 1946–47. Mr. Kondor would come by foot to Buda across the one bridge that functioned at the time, and he would warm his hands up over a coke stove that had been hastily installed on the place of the tile stove. He would offer Mother some corn cakes: Mr. Kondor always brought some delicacy he had purchased on the black market. The talk would quickly turn to music, and I would try to whistle to Mother the main tune of Bartók’s Violin Concerto, amid brisk nodding from Mr. Kondor.
So, you were already then interested in music?
It looks like it. I can’t recall how I became a regular attender at concerts at the Academy of Music. The fact is I would turn up two or three times a week to see a well-known usher in the main hall.
“That exceedingly testy old man at the Music Academy, known to every student or student type, who, due to some eye defect, wore a perennial look of distrust …”
I can see you are leafing through The Union Jack. Carry on, do.
“… but for a forint or two pressed into his palm, [he] would let any student or student type into the auditorium, testily ordering them to stand by the wall and then, as soon as the conductor appeared at the stage door leading to the podium, would direct them in a harsh voice to any unoccupied free seats. It would be fruitless for me to muse now over why, how, and on what impulse I came to like music … it is a fact, therefore, that even then, as little more than a child, I would have been unable to tolerate that life, my life, without music.” Is that true?
It is. Later on, when I found myself in situations that made all reality, even my own existence, highly questionable in my own eyes, it was enough for me to softly whistle, let’s say, the second subject of the first movement of the Jupiter Symphony for life to be restored to me.
You said that was “later on.” When exactly?
When by mistake I set off as a newspaper reporter.
Let’s stay for the moment with Mr. Kondor’s approval of the young music-lover. We are in the interlude between two dictatorships and you happen to be enjoying the brief interval, or to be posh: intermission.
Not bad.
You’re involved in school, in the Communist Party, you go to the Music Academy in the evenings, then sit around in dives by night …
Put like that, it sounds great, and on the whole so it was. Except it leaves out the most important bit, the feeling that most of all dominated my life: uneasiness.
So things weren’t entirely all right, after all?
Who said they were? The air rarefied around me; a string of friends, classmates at school, left the country. I felt myself becoming a growing burden to my mother. I hadn’t the slightest idea about what I should do by way of setting about my so-called future. For the time being, I still had to take the school-leaving certificate; I used to get up during the night, shut myself into the bathroom, and by the light of the bulb write a universal drama that bore a striking resemblance to the Divine Comedy; in my play a man strays from the right path just as in the latter … in a nutshell I think that’s what it was about: just as in real life at the time, I lost my way. I had no role models to go by; at grammar school there slowly emerged a sort of elite who spoke in what, to me, was a foreign language. Those boys read Galsworthy and The Thibaut Family. With their supercilious intellects, they kept abreast with the mysteries of integral and differential calculus, of which I understood nothing. I acquired the hefty book by Martin du Gard and was bitterly disappointed to have to admit that I found it monumentally boring. What took my fancy, by contrast, were American thrillers, lighthearted Hungarian fiction, like the tales of Jenő Rejtő, Dezső Kosztolányi’s “Kornél Esti” short stories, the novellas of Sándor Hunyadi, and Remarque, but if I brought Arch of Triumph into a conversation, which I may have read as many as five times, it was to encounter pitying smiles. All in all, I was set to fail the more difficult subjects like math; in the eyes of the elite whom I esteemed so highly I counted as an uncultured clod; sometimes I would find my mother’s gaze looking me up and down uneasily and with impatient expectation. I was an exile, yet full of vivid and groundless hopes all the same.