When the story begins, its protagonist was a young officer in the Hungarian army, and according to the Gregorian calendar the year was 1956. For the sake of argument we’ll call him László, a name that renders him anonymous in Hungary, though truth be told he wasn’t just any László, he was that László. From a purely conjectural viewpoint, we might imagine him to be a man of around thirty-five, tall, thin, reddish-blond hair, gray eyes with a faint glint of blue. One might add that he was the sole heir of a family of landowners on the Romanian border, and in his household, they spoke German more than Hungarian, according to Habsburg Empire tradition. After the expropriation of their land, the family moved to Budapest into the large apartment they were granted by the Communist regime. Perhaps we could say our protagonist was drawn to the humanities at school, that he excelled in ancient Greek, that he memorized entire passages from Homer and secretly composed odes in the manner of Pindar. His teacher, the only person to whom he’d dared show them, had predicted for him a future as a great poet, a new Petöfi, something he himself hadn’t believed, an insignificant detail in any case, merely conjecture. The fact was his father wanted him to serve in the military, like he had when he was young, serving as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, and for the father, that the army now belonged to a Communist regime was altogether secondary, because Hungary came before anything else, it was for this land that people bore arms, not for some ephemeral government. Our László accepted the will of his father without protest; he was very much aware that he’d never be a new Petöfi and couldn’t stand being second to anyone, he wanted to excel at something, whatever that might be, he didn’t lack willpower, and sacrifices came naturally to him. At the Budapest Military Academy he was soon the best cadet, then the best officer-in-training, and finally the first-class officer who, at the end of the training, was entrusted with a delicate command post in a frontier zone.
At this point, a digression might be necessary that no longer belongs to the realm of conjecture but to the imagination of the teller of a story as heard by somebody to whom the story was told in turn. It is permissible to think that László, in the village where he spent his youth and where his father once owned the land, had left his first love yet remained faithful to her. Some emotional clarification is called for concerning our László, otherwise he might seem to be only a puppet in uniform consigned to a story that reckons on willpower and physical force but excludes the mysterious strength of the cardiac muscle. László had a sentimental heart, and to attribute feelings to him that we all feel in our hearts isn’t groundless conjecture, for László’s heart was also beating for a great love, and his lamented great love was a pretty country girl to whom, after an afternoon in a cornfield in his youth, he’d sworn eternal fidelity, and she in her father’s large house protected by a line of trees would have assured him a line of descent. But meanwhile László was there, in Budapest, with all the grand buildings in that city, the general chief of staff had taken a liking to him, the last Sunday of each month he gave a party and all those invited were in dress uniform, after dinner people danced, a pianist in a tailcoat performed Viennese waltzes, the general’s daughter, while dancing, was lost in his gaze, and who knows if she was really seeing László there or the most brilliant officer of the Military Academy as described by her father. But this is altogether secondary, the fact is that after a brief engagement they were married. It can’t be ruled out that for László, imagination was stronger than reality. He loved his wife, who was pretty and kind, but he wasn’t able to find the same love for her that he thought he’d betrayed, that is, the now-blurred image of a country girl with blond hair. So he went searching for that ghost in the brothels of Budapest, at first going with some of his brothers-in-arms, then melancholically on his own.
And meanwhile we’ve arrived at 1956, the year when the Soviet army invaded Hungary. The reason for the invasion, we know, was ideological in nature, but it’s not possible to establish if László’s response was along those lines or had other motivations: the education he had received at home, for instance, because this was Hungarian soil, and as his father had taught him, Hungarian soil came before any government; or was his reaction merely for technical reasons, so to speak, because a soldier must always obey his chief of staff and never question orders. It’s also true, however, that László, raised in a big family, had access to a large library, and this might allow for more specious conjecture, that he knew his Darwin, for instance, and thought that political systems, like biological organisms, have an evolution, and that Hungary’s system, somewhat coarse though rooted in good intentions, could, if headed by a man like Imre Nagy, lead to a better outcome. Or that he’d read Return from the USSR by André Gide, which all of Europe had read and which had also circulated underground in Hungary. Along with this second-level conjecture we can introduce something more: that he took comfort in the possible support of the communist parties of several European countries, and especially in the words of a young functionary of the Communist Party in a country he deemed important, a distinguished man who spoke perfect French and knew everything about the gulags, who at a cocktail party confessed that he was a migliorista communist, a term whose definition remained vague to him but which he’d believed analogous to his own ideas.
The night Soviet tanks crossed the Hungarian border, László remembered the migliorista, and since that young functionary had left him his phone number, he called him right before the Russians cut the lines: he knew that the symbolic support of a democratic country would have been more important against the Russian tanks than the small, poorly equipped army at Hungary’s disposal. The phone rang for a long while, then a sleepy voice answered, a maid, sorry, the onorevole was out for dinner, the caller could leave a message if he liked. László told her to say only that László had called. No one called back. László thought domestic servants couldn’t be trusted, but he wasn’t much concerned, because at that moment he had other things to think about, and then, two days later, when he heard on the radio that the foreign comrade, on behalf of his own party, had called the Hungarian patriots counterrevolutionary, he realized he hadn’t gotten it wrong. What László’s thinking now, instead, as he gazes out the window at the New York skyscrapers, is how curious things are, because he’s just read a poem by Yeats, “Men Improve with the Years,” and he asks himself if it’s really like this, if time actually improves men, or if this improvement actually means they’re becoming other men, because as time carries them along with it, what once was true now seems more like a mirage, and meanwhile he’s listening to Béla Bartók’s music, the sun is setting over New York, he has to take his constitutional up to Central Park, and he’s thinking of the time when he was the one who wanted to improve his era.