A Book of Memories (99 page)

To clarify what I have in mind, let me confess that the events of that freezing day in March which were so fateful in his life, my memory simply tossed away. I was there, and I've no doubt it happened as he described it. The overwhelming joy and terrible fear evoked by the tyrant's death, our own long-lasting but uneven attraction to each other, and the deadly fear of being discovered and betrayed
—all these were within me, too; I felt them more or less the same way, and I said so. But I never thought about them again. I must have felt that that kiss settled something between us.

And I did say, while urinating, that the old train robber finally croaked. Or some such silly thing. It gave me such pleasure, like the body's pleasure, to be able to say a sentence like that out loud. Afterward I was terrified he might report me. In those years we lived under the constant threat of being evicted from the capital. Of all the houses of our neighborhood right next to that notorious restricted zone, we were the last original residents. Every official-looking envelope made my mother tremble with fear. Maybe our house was too small or too run-down; to this day I don't know why we were spared.

My mother I loved with the tenderly domineering, overly solicitous, forgiving yet controlling love that only a fatherless son can have for a mother struggling with loneliness and terrible financial problems, a widow mourning her husband unto death. For her sake I was ready to make any concession, be open to the most humiliating compromises. That's why I hoped we could avoid that reporting business. And if it had already happened, I wanted to know what to expect. I am not inclined to humility, as I've said, but when it comes to compromises I'm willing to go to extremes, even today.

What should be understood from all this is that no event in my later life could induce me to think that that kiss was really a kiss and not simply the solution to an existential problem I had at the time. I couldn't allow myself to be caught in dangerous psychological predicaments, I had all I could do to ward off tangible external dangers. I came to appreciate the advantages of psychological self-concealment, and with the years I continued to avoid ambiguous situations and judgments that didn't square exactly with my wishes or interests.

Now that I'm aware of how he perceived me, and what a lasting impression I had made on him
—which I never could have sensed—I feel rather sad. As if I had missed out on something I couldn't possibly have wished for. And that, of course, is flattering to me. He could allow himself the luxury of being hypersensitive. And that, of course, is something for which he is to be envied. At the same time, my sadness is free of any kind of reproach, accusation, self-accusation, free of any kind of guilt. I must have been more interesting, more attractive, and also more slippery, rougher, meaner, and altogether more sinister as a child than I am as an adult. It had to turn out like that. I had to push and cajole and continually twist arms just to secure the bare necessities of life, and in this unrelenting struggle, in this ruthlessly pragmatic personal cold war, I must have appeared more resourceful, more pliable, and more versatile than I did later on when, wearying of the struggle for basics, I could finally carve out what seemed like a secure niche for myself.

By the age of thirty he turned into a dangerously open person and I into a dangerously closed one, though we both became vulnerable. He found a love he hoped would fill a painful gap in his life, and this hope compelled him to tread on unfamiliar ground. I, on the other hand, recovering from the weariness of constant struggle, had to realize that in my hopelessness I had chosen the most common route to escape my miseries, and having run as far as I could, I was just short of turning into an alcoholic. He told me once, not long after our reunion, that men stuck in their assigned sexual roles were prone to grow fetid, both physically and spiritually.

Looking at the course of my life and career, I don't feel out of place in this country. If my friend was the exception, then I am the norm; together we make up the rule. And I make this distinction not to flaunt my own ordinariness, my limited perception, my poorly functioning memory, and in this way, somehow, still to place myself above him whom I've called exceptional; no, with my description I don't mean to label either one of us, to shift the blame for my insensitivity and obtuseness; all I want to do, in my own way, is to take a good look at our common life experiences.

I am an economist, and for the last few years I have been working in a research institute. My work in the main consists of gathering data, analyzing recurring and, on occasion, atypical patterns in one particular sphere of the national economy. I try to isolate the unique features of a specific set of phenomena. I'd like to do the same regarding this manuscript. Creative writing is not my forte. I never tried my hand at poetry. I played soccer, I rowed, I lifted weights. Ever since I stopped spending my evenings drinking, I run considerable distances every morning. The only kind of writing I do is occasional articles for professional journals. I suspect that as a consequence of my social origins and upbringing, my life, from earliest childhood, has been guided by a desire to examine given peculiarities most painstakingly, with the greatest degree of detachment.

Already as a young child I had to think carefully about the ways of thinking, or rather to be careful and not necessarily really think the things I said out loud. The reason I don't describe this intellectually demanding self-manipulation in terms that would suggest any kind of emotional involvement is that I am quite aware that concealed behind my perceptiveness and discernment
—developed in circumstances I mentioned above— lie a good deal of resignation and self-discipline, all dictated by necessity.

When young, all living things are passionate, and their passionate hope of mastering the world is what makes them attractive. How passionate that hope is, how and to what extent it is realized, is what determines the distinction they make between what is ugly and what is beautiful, and how they call the good beautiful and the bad ugly. By now, however, nothing in me would make my view of things an aesthetic one. Whatever I see or experience, however intimate, I do not judge as beautiful or ugly, for I simply do not see them as such. At most I feel a quiet gratitude, reminiscent of warmth, for things I find favorable, but even that feeling cools very quickly.

I may have been filled with passion at one time, and it may be gone now. It's possible that something is already missing, gone from me forever. And it's also possible that this missing trait, or its excess, for all I know, is what made me appear cold and aloof even as a child. I can't claim that too many people love me, but most consider me a fair-minded person. Yet in view of my friend's poignant analysis, I am compelled by fair-mindedness to ask whether I may not appear to be fair-minded because I always manage to keep my distance from my own endeavors as well as from the people who love me, so that I can avoid having to identify with them while still retaining my control over them.

I am not fortunate enough to be the ideal embodiment of any one life principle. I might have become a most vicious cynic if not for the continually recurring absence or surfeit of emotions from which I suffer terribly.

A few days before my high school final exams, I decided to demolish the tile stove in my room, and I did manage to take it halfway apart. I got home from my girlfriend's house very early in the morning. I always had to sneak out of her place to make sure her unsuspecting parents would know nothing about my being there all night. I was alone in our house; my mother had gone to visit relatives in Debrecen. That stove had been bothering me for a long time. I felt it was in the wrong place, and I didn't really need it. At night it poured all its heat on my head, and I couldn't open my door all the way because of it. So I took a big hammer, and could have also used a chisel, but all I could find was a cramp iron, which served the same purpose. I began to take the thing apart. The broken tiles I threw out the window into the garden. But dismantling the stove's inside ducts proved to be more complicated than I had thought. And since I had made no preparations at all for this messy job, my room began to fill up with dust, debris, and soot. Soon everything was covered: the carpet, the upholstery, the books, my notebooks, and my carefully worked-out answers to previous finals that were lying on my desk. When I stopped for a while, coming out of the hypnotic pull of my feverish activity, and looked about, I couldn't see the mess around me as an inevitable natural by-product of this kind of work; I saw it as sheer, repulsive, unbearable filth, the boring filth of infinite emptiness. This feeling assailed me as suddenly as had the idea of dismantling the stove. I was staring into the sooty, stinking, mangled body of a once useful man-made structure. I must have been halfway through when I stopped. I thought I was sleepy and tired. I closed the window, threw off my clothes, and climbed into bed. But I couldn't fall asleep. I tossed and turned for a while, tried to curl up, but I couldn't roll or fold myself up, couldn't make myself as small as I would have liked to. I don't remember thinking about anything else. And I don't know if I'd call my awful wish about shrinking a thought. I had to get up, because it was impossible to lie there awake without being able to fulfill this wish. And without giving myself time to weigh the situation properly, I began to swallow, almost indiscriminately, the pills I found in my mother's medicine cabinet.

I needed a lot of sleeping pills and tranquillizers. After a while I could no longer swallow without water.

Today it seems that I may be the one remembering the incident, but not the one it happened to. First I drank the water from a vase, then from the little trays under the houseplants. Why I didn't just go into the kitchen is still beyond me. I was overcome by nausea. And dry retching. As if I had no more saliva in my mouth. I would have been afraid to throw up on my mother's furniture. I fell on my knee, and with my hands clasped on the back of my neck I laid my head on the edge of the sofa. I tried with all my strength to calm my heaving stomach. I don't remember anything else. If my mother, prompted by an odd premonition, had not returned a day earlier than planned, I wouldn't be here to talk about this. My stomach was pumped, the tile stove reassembled.

I had never before attempted anything so crazy, and certainly don't intend to ever again. Yet whatever else my actions may have led to
—joy, grief, happy resolution, or indecision—the group of emotions usually referred to as angst has become a permanent part of my psychic makeup.

And this in spite of the fact that until then I had never had feelings even remotely resembling angst. But I don't wish to dwell on them, not only because I am not clear on their origins, but because otherwise I appear to be a well-adjusted man with a cheerful disposition, and to me this genuine appearance is more important.

When one is asked to define family origins, one begins by making selections among one's ancestors. When I am asked that question, I usually say I come from a military family. As if all my forebears were professional soldiers, whether generals or privates. Which may be an impressive notion but does not reflect reality. It's a little like saying one comes from an old family. Every family is equally old. It's true, though, that the sons and daughters of different peoples climbed down from the trees at different times. For instance, the Incas and the Hebrews did it much earlier than the Germans, and in all probability the Magyars did it somewhat later than the English or the French. But from this it does not follow that a family of serfs of a certain nation is not as old as a prince's family in the same nation. And just as a nation distinguishes between racially identical families on the basis of social status, so does an individual when he begins to choose among the motley group of his ancestors, based on the personal evaluation of his own interests, desires, and ambitions. This peculiar mode of selecting one's ancestors
—tailor-made for the person doing the selecting—is something I noticed in my friend's manuscript, too.

The only way he can maintain the equilibrium of his personality, splintered by extreme contradictions, is by observing himself, by continually scrutinizing the origins and causes of the unconscious forces raging within him. But for this all-important psychological self-analysis he needs the kind of balanced and sober perspective that, because of his unbalanced state, he does not have. He is trapped in a vicious circle. He can break out of it only if, for the duration of his self-analysis at least, he adopts the perspective of a person or group of persons in his surroundings who have the stability he needs. This is the reason for the decisive role his maternal grandfather plays in his life story, this liberal bourgeois who, even in very dangerous conditions, remained a model of moderation and self-discipline. And it is also the reason he views with mixed irony and affection that tenacious, stoic, and uncompromisingly respectable bourgeois woman, his grandmother. Through them he would like to identify with something to which his real-life situation no longer entitles him. Still, this is how he selects his origins. He chooses to trace this one line back to his past, though in principle he could have chosen a number of others. While I was reading the manuscript, it struck me that his leaving out his other set of grandparents couldn't have been completely unintentional. I'm not suggesting he did this because he was ashamed of them or because they weren't as important in his life as his maternal grandparents.

On weekends or summer mornings sometimes we would ride out on a streetcar to visit them in their home in Káposztásmegyer.

After completing my university studies I began working for a foreign trade company. For about ten years I traveled to many parts of the world. Yet when I think of travel, what comes to mind first is that rickety yellow streetcar and the two of us bumping along on its open platform. Sometimes, on long plane rides, I'd be wrapped up in some technical reading, and this old image would suddenly flash before me. And I'd feel as though I wasn't even flying but riding across the globe in that yellow streetcar. Rattling along old Váci Road, interminably.