You were going to grammar school by then.
As I said, the Madách Gymnasium in Barcsay Street. Around the mid-Nineties, when several of my books had been published in Germany, I was called on by a German TV reporter here in Budapest, and he wanted, among other things, to take a look at the “alma mater” where I had, so to speak, finished my secondary schooling. It was a boiling-hot summer day, during the school holidays. The school was undergoing some rebuilding work, and at the top of the entrance steps stood that singularly emblematic figure of all public buildings in Hungary: a cleaning woman with a bucket of water in one hand and a broom in the other. “Can’t you see there’s building work going on?!” she bawled. In the end, she hunted out the head of the school. She wasn’t much friendlier though. You say you attended this school? You’re a writer? What’s your name? Never heard of you. There were all sorts of famous writers who went to this school and they always send copies of their new books. Did you send any? No, I didn’t. Well, there you are, see! says the principal. The German journalist, of course, didn’t understand what all this was about and was getting increasingly edgy. “Do you mean to say that people here don’t know who Mr. Kertész is?” he said in German. Too right, they didn’t know who Mr. Kertész was; they didn’t even have a record of establishing separate streaming for Jews. The class registers for the years from 1940 to 1944 had all been lost, in the words of the principal. How odd, I remarked. We departed.
I have to tell you that in all honesty even I heard nothing about “Jewish classes.” I had no idea that children were separated on the basis of religion.
A racial basis, in fact. Hungary’s first so-called Jewish law was enacted in 1938, and either that one, or the second one of the following year, reactivated the so-called Numerus Clausus of 1920, which had been suspended in 1924. What that meant in practice was that institutions of higher education could only accept Jewish or “effectively Jewish” students to the percentage that they represented in the overall population, which as far as I recall was about six percent at the time; in other words, out of one hundred pupils only six could be Jewish. In that context the introduction of Jewish classes in some state grammar schools counted more as an advantage than a disadvantage, however ugly the terminology may sound. In schools that were so designated it was possible every year, from 1940 onward, to set up a separate Jewish class of forty pupils. These were the B stream, as opposed to the A stream, which was filled by children of impeccable pedigree. Now, in order to get into a B stream you needed to have gained an all-A-grade report at your elementary school. So, judge for yourself what clots these people were to set up a class of children who were the elite of the despised race, whereas the supposedly privileged class had to take the bright and not-so-bright alike. Is it any wonder that teachers secretly competed to be allowed to teach Jewish classes?
Did you encounter any discriminatory attitudes against those of you who were in the Jewish class?
To the school’s credit, I would have to say no. The only person who had any of the racist sentiments of the Arrow-Cross Party was a gym teacher by the name of Csorba. But we’re again in danger of slipping into dreary anecdotes, like frontline veterans (to use one of Jorge Semprun’s expressions), which is something I would prefer to avoid.
And all the more as there are barely any literary relics from that period.
Indeed, and that is rather surprising. As far as the period 1940–45 goes, I think first and foremost of the volumes of Sándor Márai’s diaries, then the reminiscences that Miklós Szentkuthy had tape-recorded and later published under the curious title Frivolous Confessions, and along with that Béla Hamvas’s Carnival … What else? Would you add anything?
Ferenc Karinthy’s Springtime in Budapest.
Forget that.
Tibor Cseres’s Cold Days.
O.K.
Ernő Szép’s The Smell of Humans.
O.K.
Tibor Déry’s My Memoirs of the Underworld.
We can forget that.
Isn’t that a bit hasty on your part? After all, Tibor Déry is …
Yes, of course, of course. Look, I’m not setting myself up as a knocker, and I never had any time for literature of the official canon, let alone the Party-approved nomenklatura, but I am impudent enough to select my own reading according to my own taste. There was a time when I had a try with Tibor Déry, but that was a long time ago if ever …
That attempt obviously came in the post-war period, and although I would be curious to know what you read then, let’s stick to chronological order. You have hardly said anything about your father, for example.
My father was a cherishable, slim, handsome man with Levantine features and curly, jet-black hair that stubbornly resisted any attempt to comb it. He was a fighter who carried on a struggle that was unknown to me on some distant battlefield. He was usually on the point of losing with my mother. Even I must have noticed some of that during the short period when the three of us were together. Victrix causa deis placuit, sed victa Catoni—The conquering cause was pleasing to the gods, but the conquered one to Cato, the Latin saw goes. Well, the latter goes for a child as well. The failure he suffered against Mother totally won my heart over, if not my mind, and this ambivalence shadowed me later on as well. But let’s stay with my father. On returning home from his daily skirmishes, in the evening he would complain about his worries and his stomach pains. To stand his ground he would have needed to put on a bit of weight. Every now and again he would haul out a billycan of goose dripping that was being kept for the winter. Have you seen the sort of thing?
You mean one of those blue or red enamel cans with a lid that was locked with a fastener.
Blue: our billycan was blue. That contained the goose dripping, which had a pale-red tint from the paprika with which it had been roasted, and there would also be occasional limp onion rings dotted about in it. Father ate the dripping by the spoonful like Genghis Khan. He was also very fond of cocoa, with garlic on toasted bread: that was Sunday breakfast for him as long as he lived on Tömő Street. My grandmother would bring it to him while he was still in bed, and he would crunch it loudly between his healthy teeth. As a boy of four of five, I would sit beside him in the bed and enjoy the sound of his crunching, the way the aroma of garlic would spread around the bed and through the whole room. I would marvel at him in the barber’s shop when he had his blue bristles shaved. He would throw his head back and the razor-blade would work all around his neck. He had a huge Adam’s apple that would jiggle up and down under the razor; I would hold my breath as I watched to see the outcome. On Sunday mornings he would take me for a walk: we would stroll to the Oktogon and back. Those walks were very dispiriting for me; I would be bored to tears and feel dizzy, dazed by all the passersby, the Sunday crowds of people. Budapest was a truly fine city in those days; it still is today, but then it was clean as well. The elegance of those Sundays! The ladies’ hats! The Changing of the Guard up at the Castle in Buda! The promenades alongside the Danube! In springtime Father would take me on a pleasure steamer, the Sophia. I would race to grab seats in the “bows.” Father would produce a miniature chess set from his pocket and pin the tiny pieces into the holes by their little pegs. At every turn some surprise would be in store, with adventures lying in wait at every street corner. On the Grand Boulevard, the outer ring road, a bulldog man would put in an appearance every Sunday, sauntering stiffly as he led five or six identical-looking bulldogs on a multiple lead, with an identical pipe dangling from the jaws of the identical-looking bulldogs. Odd characters like that existed in Budapest in those days. Sandwich-board men would pass us by with their slowly plodding steps. In a shop window of the Paris Department Store a chef with a white hat tossed pancakes up in the air from his frying pan. He would always catch them and fry them, and they cost only ten fillérs apiece,7 except that my father would not always have ten fillérs on him. Then I would be most indignant, whereupon he would explain: “I’m stony broke. Business just isn’t going well.” That would crush all arguments, on top of which I had no idea what he meant: where was business supposed to go from Koszorú Street,8 which was its normal place?