I walked home slowly as if I’d drunk a little too much last night and was having to tread very carefully in the morning. One deliberate step, then another deliberate step. I went straight to my pad on Klauzál tér, the square where I’d been living six months. It was a joint tenancy, because in my situation, I couldn’t afford a pad alone. The guy I shared the bed with did day shifts from early in the morning, going out to Rákos on the shuttle service. The bed was empty and I lay down with my clothes on. I felt like the life had been kicked out of me. I stayed there till dark.
It all came back in pieces. It was like when you take a pill to make you sick up what you don’t need. When they invited me into the room I imagined I’d find some huge, barrel-chested goon there just itching to beat me to a pulp. But that’s not how it turned out. It was not some crude hulk but a guy with withered legs, quite old, with horn-rimmed glasses. He wore no uniform, just plain clothes, and he spoke quietly and politely, smiling all the way through. He offered me a chair and a cigarette, just as they do in thrillers, like a detective before a grilling. I saw my cadre papers lying on the desk in front of him, and noticed how he’d leaf through them now and then. But it wasn’t a close examination — he was just picking up a point here and there with his finger. It seemed he’d already read and mastered it all. He softly asked me to tell him, if I didn’t mind, what I was doing in ’44.
I had to think quickly. Keep your cool, I thought, let him see you’re no chicken. I took the papers I’d prepared from my pocket — they were all officially stamped with the proper stamps. All I said was that I’d never been disloyal to my nation.
He seemed to be happy with that answer, nodding, as if he expected no less of me. Then, still gently, in a thin little voice, he asked me if I knew anyone in Budapest who had served in the Arrow Cross, the fascist militia.
What?! I gasped. Me? Know militia? What kind of militia? Like a police force? Like the Wild West?
He saw I was no fool and started reassuring me. Fine, he said, fine, he won’t ask me any more about that, since he could tell I was sensitive about the militia. But he’d still like to know if I knew anyone in this beautiful cathedral city of ours who might have escorted people of a different religion down to the Danube at dawn in the winter at the end of ’44. Women, children, old people?
He looked at me so hard it was like being stabbed in the eye with an old lady’s knitting needle.
Well, I really sweated then. I took a gulp and told him straight that I was in Zala at the time and I didn’t even know where exactly the Danube was then. And, I added, quietly and modestly, yes, I’d heard that there were regrettable excesses in Pest at the time.
When he heard this he opened his mouth and watched me the way a shortsighted hen looks for grain. He said nothing for a while, just blinked a few times. Then he cheered up. He looked so cheerful he was like the virgin whose tits have just been tickled.
“You’re a wise man, Ede,” he nodded. He gave a sigh and added, by way of acknowledgment, “ ‘Regrettable excesses’ is good. You have a way with words, Ede.”
I confessed that Ede was just my professional name, that I was Lajos at home. He waved that aside as if to say it didn’t matter. “Ede or Lajos, you are a man respected among your peers,” he said. I could tell he was sincere. I felt the guy was respecting me. He clicked his tongue and rubbed his palms together; then he threw away his cigarette and spoke in a changed voice. He was still gentle, but his horn-rimmed eyes never left mine. It was no longer knitting needles but proper needles squeezed under your nails.
He lifted up my cadre papers, waved them about, and said he was no fool, either. Did I believe him when he said he was no fool? Of course I believed him, I said. In that case I should think over very carefully what he was about to say. The bar where I was a drummer was a classy place, he said. Lots of people go there, mostly decent democratic people, but not just them — others too. The People’s Republic needed citizens who were loyal to the people, because the place was crawling with enemy agents. He lit a cigarette at this point but didn’t offer me one. He carried on staring right through me. There was no shining a desk lamp in the eyes, the way they have in the books when they grill a guy. There was nothing, just a desk and a man. And there were iron bars on the windows in case the visitor should feel nervous and take a fancy to leaping through the window for a stroll in the sunshine. And on the other side of the door there was always that strange shuffling. And the smack of boots on the stones below. And, occasionally, a word of encouragement when some visitor was too slow in answering. That’s all.
Then he started speaking to me like he was the smart kid in a school full of idiots. He had the spiel off by heart. What he said was that music, night, and drink loosened tongues. So while I am drumming I should listen hard. He was very patient in explaining this. But, fact is, it was like a lesson learned at school. He told me what to look out for. He was wise to how people behaved in bars. I was to keep my eyes on any relics of the old world, the world of the gentry — guys who still had cigarettes and appetite enough to console themselves with drink. Then I was to look out for the new sort, the sort who aren’t Commies but just pretend: pigs desperate to stick their snouts in the trough, people who waste no time sticking on all the right badges. He taught me patiently, almost lovingly, the way teachers in kindergartens teach the kiddies. He went on to say there was a whole new society out there, and it included all sorts of people. Honest, sons-of-the-soil rulerists, smart city-avenue turbanists,[1] highbrow writers the lot of them, “progressive” horn-rimmed-glasses types with pipes in their mouths, the sort who sit on the fence cheering on old-style proper Communists, encouraging them to finish their dirty work for them, to do away with the old world and get the new one ready … And when they do get rid of the old world, the rulerists, the turbanists, and the horn-rimmed-glassesists are all there, waving them a cheery “do-si-donya” and “well done,” adding, “now fuck off back to the Urals.” Then they get off the fence, and politely, cleverly, take over anything of value that still remains in this pretty little country, and stow it away in their ample pockets. But in order for them to do that, the old-style Commies have to fuck off back to the Soviet Union first, those that are still alive, anyway — that is, after Uncle Joe had finished buggering the comrades about, maybe because they weren’t the best of buddies, not the way they should have been — not, at least, how the boss pictured it — or simply because, like the fools they are, they wormed their way into the affections of the Father of the People, and took jobs that did for them later. Or they were Trotskyists. Or Spanish Civil Warists. And while the old guard are still feeling the backs of their necks just to make sure their heads are still there, they, the rulerists, the turbanists and the rest, all the “progressives,” start putting it about that there is a different, neater, better way of being a Communist. But the Party begs to differ on that matter — I noted the glint in his eye as he said this — because these educated wise guys who want to set about teaching the masses scientific Marxism don’t have a clue that the masses despise them and don’t believe a word they say. You have to have rotted five years down the mines with them, a long way underground, before they believe you. Then you have to have worked your way out of the mines and spent the next five years at a bench with a vise screwed into it, snips and hacksaw in your hand, cutting sheets of metal. If, after all that, you do start talking about Marxism and Leninism, they might just listen to you. But people who sit on the fence and shout encouragement to the masses, telling them to struggle on because the time will come when they, the progressives, will teach them the finer points of Marxism — well, they’d get a few dirty looks, I promise you, he said. You want to look out for this type, he said, because that’s the sort of people you find in bars now. You could tell from the way he said it what he thought of those who were desperate to dip their snouts in the trough without ever having worked down a mine or in a labor camp … he despised them as much as he did the gentry. He had it all off pat, the way you learn things in school.
1
This is a joke impossible to translate directly. Ede / Lajos is mispronouncing the names of the two leading, opposing schools of Hungarian writing in the twentieth century: he says