I can’t tell you the whole story, friend, not all at one go. It was a bad time. A friend of mine, who used to live in the village, had gone up to the capital just as the bright sun of freedom was dawning on us. One day he wrote me a letter. He used to play the flute so it broke your heart. That was the time they started “confiscating” corn from the count’s granary. Chicks were mad for his flute playing. He wrote to say he now played sax in a people’s democracy bar in Budapest, and that it might be an idea for me to come and join him because they needed a drummer. The old man swore a lot, the old girl cried. It was hard leaving them, but I felt the call of art. So I left.
Wait, the guests are arriving. Yes sir, Two scotch on the rocks, sir. You are served, sir.
Those two scotches are rogues, the pair of them. That one there, the one with the waxed mustache, is a faith healer, Christian style. He knows his business. The other one, the one with the sideburns, is an embalmer. If the faith cure doesn’t work, you go on to the embalmer. He prepares the corpse the way the relatives want it. I could listen to them for hours when they talk about the next in line. Because there are various kinds of smile available. There’s the saintly smile. There’s the knowing smile. Then there’s the at-peace-now smile. The saintly is the most expensive. The at-peace-now is cheaper. It’s all done with paraffin, and there’s a proper tariff. They come in at midnight after work and regularly sink three scotches. They’re moderate, religious guys.
Back in Zala County where I used to live, washing corpses was done according to an old ritual. Here they do things differently … Pay them no attention, we can carry on our conversation. After midnight they’re not interested in anyone that’s still alive, it’s just their way of saying gut’abend. They’ll only be interested in you if you have paraffin to sell.
Where was I?
As I was saying, after ’47 I felt I had hidden my talents away long enough and took the train to Pest. There were four of us in the band: the saxophonist, the accordionist, the pianist, and me on the drums. I’m not exaggerating when I say that was a great time for me. The new democracy was still settling down. It was all a bit heady. I don’t even like to talk about leaving it: the thought’s like a vise round my heart.
Because it so happened one morning I got an invitation from the AVO, the security police. I should be at their headquarters in Andrássy út at nine, though the street was called something else by then. Go here, go there, go up the stairs, go to that numbered room. I was sweating when I read the letter, but then I relaxed, because I realized they don’t normally write letters to you, they just quietly come at dawn and ring. People, back then, were terrified of the doorbell. Bell-terror syndrome, we called it.
I gathered up all my papers: my certificate to show I was a qualified musician, and another to testify I was a faithful son of the people. Plus the local certificate to say my sympathies were on the good side in the war. I’d got these papers together in plenty of time. There were guys I worked with who could vouch for my sympathies, who themselves were on the good side. I had a clutch of other papers too, but those were from before, complete with stamps and photographs … I didn’t think this was the occasion for them. I flushed those papers straight down the john. I had an old revolver, a six-shooter, one of my brothers left behind when he went to “pursue his studies” in the West in ’45. I’d long ago buried that at the end of the yard. I thought it best it should rest there, because if the AVO did a search and found it, I’d be heading for the bone yard. So I put everything in as good an order as I could, then, one morning, set off in the direction of the Opera, to security HQ.
I passed the Opera and read on the posters that they were doing a piece called Lawherring or something that night, complete with orchestra. Well, brother, I thought, you’ll never get to see Lawherring if the AVO break you. It was a sad thought, because despite being a proper musician I’d never been to the opera. There wasn’t anything of that kind back in Zala — no one ever sang from a score. But there was nothing I could do about it, I just trudged on toward dreaded old number 60. It was with a heavy heart because no one ever said it was a breeze being invited to number 60. I’d never been there before myself, but I’d heard that the fascists used to call it the House of Loyalty. Well, kiddo, I said to myself, you might be walking into history right here. I had no idea what was waiting for me. Will they be thinking I’m clean, or has someone grassed me up? I was trying to work it all out. If I got six months, I’d manage fine. I swore to myself I wouldn’t panic and that I would watch every word I said, because nothing could be worse than dropping the wrong word at the wrong moment with these guys — it would be a bad mistake.
I had the feeling I was at the turning point of my life. A guy in a flat army cap was at the gate to check my summons, and he sent me upstairs. Another uniform told me to sit on a bench in the corridor. So I sat down meek as a lamb and looked around me, with a degree of curiosity, not so much as I thought would be noticed.
There was a lot to see. There’d been an early-morning change of shift — you could see it was an all-night job for the comrades. Everyone wore uniforms of the kind our soldiers did a few years back — say, three years before. The leather belt was the same, only the armband was different, that and the braid. The faces were familiar too, guys from really poor backgrounds … I thought I’d seen one or two of them before. But my stomach was all cramped up: it was like I was sleeping after a really heavy meal followed by a glass or two more than was strictly necessary. I gazed openmouthed, as it was the first time I’d seen something like this close-to, with my own eyes. What it told me was that that famous thing highbrows call “history”—well, things don’t really change: in fact they’re always exactly the same. I sat on the low bench taking it all in, glancing up and down the corridor, watching busy comrades going about exactly the same tasks as their brothers had done three years earlier.
The comrades’ job was to escort whoever was next in line to the right interrogation room. Some of them needed escorting because they couldn’t walk. It seemed they must have got a bad pain in their feet overnight in the middle of some official conversation. So they needed support, which the guards offered by grabbing them under the arms. There were a few who went on their own feet, but not many. It was, believe me, deadly quiet along the corridor, but sometimes you could hear noises, like the sound of a scream in the middle of a polite exchange of ideas. Even so, screams behind closed doors were better than silence, because silence might suggest that the conversation was pretty well over — that some poor guy had run out of debating points.
It was half an hour before they called me in, and it was another hour before I came out. They didn’t escort me; they didn’t need to support me under the arms. I went on my own two feet, head held high. An hour earlier I had no idea what was in store for me. I was a different man coming out an hour later. Believe it or not, I’d been given a job.