In Europe (90 page)

Meanwhile, György Konrád – acting as bodyguard to a professor – trotted around town carrying a sub-machine gun. At the time he was also on the staff of a literary journal. ‘I decided to pay a visit to the director of the state publishing house, to ask him for a bigger print run for our magazine. I asked him for 30,000 copies. “Of course, make it 50,000,” he said. I didn't grasp at the time that his reaction had everything to do with my sub-machine gun hanging on the coat rack.’

A certain degree of order was restored during the final weekend of the uprising. The man who had led the lynch mob at the party headquarters was arrested. The strike ended.

In Moscow, however, the mood changed after Nagy's announcement that Hungary would leave the Warsaw Pact. Britain and France had invaded the Suez zone that week, and the Soviet leadership felt that it would be a mistake to tolerate too many ‘capitalist’ successes.

György Konrád: ‘At night I heard the first shots. I turned on the radio, like everyone else. Very early the next morning I went to the university, with my sub-machine gun. There were Russian tanks in the streets. I knew that a number of students were armed as well, and I hoped we could defend the buildings together. But we never fired a shot. They didn't shoot at us, so we decided not to shoot at them.’

On Sunday morning, 4 November, the Russians rolled into Hungary with considerable numbers of men and material. Within a day Budapest was theirs, within a week the uprising had been crushed. A new regime was installed under the leadership of party secretary János Kádár, a former associate of Nagy who had gone over to the Russians. There was, ever so briefly, a general strike, and then winter settled in.

According to the most reliable sources, approximately 600 Soviet soldiers and 2–3,000 Hungarians were killed in the fighting; some 22,000
proven or suspected rebels were sentenced to work camps or prison, and approximately 300 – including Imre Nagy – were executed.

Konrád: ‘We were cowardly or prudent, I still don't know which it was, but we surrendered the university. The next decision was whether to stay in the country, or flee. About 200,000 Hungarians left after 1956; journalists, writers, intellectuals – it was an enormous brain drain for the country. Most of my friends left, my cousins went to America. I stayed. Then there was another decision to be made: to work with the regime or not. I didn't. I accepted a marginal existence, the only goal of which was to keep the culture alive, to expand it if possible, to save what had once existed. Which brings us to the boring story of the period after 1956.’

The Hungarian summer of the final year of the twentieth century was slowly fading. There were no storms, no mists, in late September the days were still warm, the trees heavy with foliage. I had driven to the home of my friends in Vásárosbéc, across the endless plains south of Budapest. The road was full of Trabants and Warburgs, it looked as if half the rolling fleet of the former DDR had washed ashore in Hungary. Forty kilometres later the first horse and wagon appeared, close to Pécs there were dozens of them. A tanned, bent man struggled along the concrete gully beside the road, pushing a bicycle and two full canvas bags. Here and there roadside hookers in elfin skirts stood twisting a high heel in the dirt. Along the way I found myself at a little horse market, a stretch of grass beneath the trees beside a crossroads. Wagons and pairs were trotting about everywhere, showing their stuff, often with a few foals in tow. The horse traders all had bottles of beer and were knocking them back furiously. For sale a little further along were fish and sausages, cheap watches and hairpins. A drunken trader began beating two skinny horses in front of a customer, until they dragged the cart along with the brake still on. The wheels slid over the grass; blood trickled on the horses’ flanks.

In the café in Vásárosbéc, Lajos (b.1949) and Red Jósef (b.1937) were talking about the way things used to be. Right after the war there were 1,600 people in the village, at least a hundred farmers, every patch of ground was cultivated, but they still died of poverty. Today there are fifty
families and only one real farmer, the mayor. In 1956, they tell me, it did not take long for people here to hear about the revolt in Budapest, and all the farmers withdrew their cattle from the collective right away. ‘But that didn't last long!’ Lajos shouted. In another village the farmers had fought, but here things had remained peaceful. Communism, that was other people's business. ‘Here we just tried to survive and make our own lives a little better, year by year, and that was all. There was one man in the café who was always talking politics, he had a big mouth; after 1956 he left for Germany.’

The village did have one minor source of diversion: the local cinema. Lajos: ‘A man lived here, you still see him in the café now and then, he was the postman for thirty years. Every week he brought the film here from the city, on foot, summer and winter, for thirty years.’

The collective remained intact until summer 1999. ‘All the ground has been given back now. But the young people have left and the older people can't start all over again. There's a big landowner who's buying everything up now. That man is going to be filthy rich. It's too late.’

And all the Dutch people and the Swedes who buy houses here? Red Jósef approved: ‘They're not Gypsies, and they help to fix up the village.’ Lajos said: ‘Just sell the whole thing. Today is today, that's life. The cemetery is patient, it will wait for all of us.’

A Gypsy woman came in to ask if she could call the vet. Her pig was sick. We went with her to have a look. The woman stood beside the pig – her entire capital for the winter – she scratched and petted the animal, whispered in its ear, begged it to live on for just a little while. A couple of men stood off to one side. ‘You mustn't feed it any more,’ one of them said, and she clumsily swept the leftover feed out of the trough. She had tears in her eyes, she wiped her fingers on a dirty cloth, and then on the bristly pig itself.

Later we went to visit Maria, the church organist. Every Sunday she sat at her harmonium and played a series of notes, higgledy-piggledy, and sang along loudly. Now she was sitting on the bench beside her house, clutching two flowers, while her daughter sewed a pair of leather gloves with neat little stitches. A lot of women in the village did that, for a glove factory in Pécs, to earn a little pocket money.

Maria was, as she put it, ‘forty-seven years old, but then the other way
around,’ and she lived in a constant state of infatuation. She caressed my friend, grabbed his hand, hinted at wild and promising events from a misty past. She served us the first wine of the year from a plastic cola bottle, it was still murky, little more than grape juice. ‘
Trink, trink, Brüderlein trink!
’ Maria sang, rocking back and forth with her glass. She was one of the last few of the elderly here who still understood a few words of Swabian, a German dialect brought here by immigrants 200 years ago and pretty much ground back into silence in the last century by Hungarian nationalists. She did not actually speak the language any more, but there were still a couple of German songs living in her head, ones she had learned on her father's lap, a long time ago. The air in the village was autumnal, smoky, sour and pungent.

Two days later I drove on, heading for the Austrian border. Along the way I picked up a hitchhiker, Iris, a little woman with lively eyes and a thin face. She spoke German and English fluently, she had once been a civil engineer, she said, but the state-owned company she worked for had shut down. After that she and her husband had started an advertising agency, then her husband died, and now she helped out at a stable. Her bicycle had been stolen a month ago, she did not have enough money to buy a new one, so now she had to walk three hours to work each day. ‘They're good creatures, horses are,’ she said. ‘They comfort you.’

On 19 August, 1989 she had taken part in the Pan-European Picnic, a bizarre event held on the border close to Sopronpuszta, where Hungarians, Austrians and East Germans demonstratively broke open the Iron Curtain for the first time. ‘When it came right down to it, the notorious border was only a wooden gate with a sliding bolt,’ she tells me. ‘We had it open in no time. Fortunately the border guards understood that there was no way to stop that crowd.’ Even then she had been amazed by the East Germans and the way they left everything behind: Trabants, family photos, teddy bears. ‘I remember thinking: these people have brought their last, cherished possessions with them here, and now they are leaving even those things behind in order to cross the border.’

Together we went looking for the spot again, in the rolling fields behind the border town of Sopron. Today there is a small monument to the famous 1989 picnic, and an unmanned gate for bicyclists and
farm vehicles; you can walk right into Austria there. It was the first time she had been back since 1989, she was a little sad about the way her life had gone. ‘Capitalism was much less charitable than we ever realised,’ she said. ‘Back then we thought: now everything is going to be all right.’

‘
I HAD RIDDEN OUT TO ZAANDAM ON A BICYCLE WITH WOODEN TYRES.
When I got back, there was a car waiting in front of our house: the queen wanted to talk to me. It was May, Holland had been liberated only two weeks before, Kathleen and I were living in a little attic room for students along the Amstel in Amsterdam. We were dumbfounded, but we climbed in and were driven to the south of the Netherlands, which had been liberated for a long time already. Queen Wilhelmina had her residence there, at Breda. It was like a dream for both of us: we were put up in a hotel, in Breda the street lights came on at night as normal, you could buy strawberries in the market, the sheets were white instead of yellow. The next morning the queen asked me to be her private secretary. Which is how Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands became my first boss.

‘The Dutch government at that time applied the following rule of thumb: if you hadn't been bad, you were good. The queen saw it precisely the other way around: if you hadn't been good, you were bad. I remember the first time she came back to her Noordeinde Palace in the Hague, hopping mad, and how the mayor and the aldermen of the city were all standing there in a row. Queen Wilhelmina walked up to the first one, and the only thing she asked him was: “Which concentration camp were you in?” And she asked the same question of everyone who was there that day. I didn't have the faintest idea what those people had actually done in the war, but it became awfully quiet in that reception hall.

‘Look, this is a photograph of my father, he's the big, handsome fellow with the beard and the aristocratic air. Philip Kohnstamm, physicist, later professor. Due to all kinds of family complications, he grew up in the home of his uncle, the Amsterdam banker A. C. Wertheim, completely
immersed in that atmosphere of assimilated Judaism. My father was a man of exceptionally broad interests: he was a private tutor of philosophy, he was deeply interested in theology, and later in educational theory, and of course in politics, both national and international.

‘He was born in 1875, my mother in 1882. Her father was J. B. A. Kessler, director of the Koninklijke Nederlandsche Petroleum Maatschappij (KNPM), which later became the Royal Dutch/Shell Group. But when my mother was still young, the family was not at all wealthy. In those days the KNPM was only a small company with an oil concession in North Sumatra, for the production of kerosene for lanterns and things like that. My grandfather would go into the jungle and come back with a couple of barrels of oil, that's what it boiled down to. Petroleum was only a troublesome by-product, they couldn't earn anything with it, “that terrible stuff that's always bursting into flames” as he wrote in one of his letters. He brought Henri Deterding into the venture, and together they salvaged the firm. He himself was always travelling back and forth to the wells in the Indies, he was a real jungle hand, but it ruined his health. And when he would get home – you can detect that in his letters as well – it was always a bit of a disappointment. A tragic life.

‘My mother was crazy about him, though. When she turned sixteen, he gave her a bicycle. She was furious with him: “You shouldn't do that, you don't have the money for it, you have to work so hard for what you have.” But when he died at the age of forty-nine, he was one of the richest men in the Netherlands. The first cars had begun to appear around 1900, and “that terrible stuff” became a highly valued commodity.

‘My father first met the Kesslers in summer 1899, during a holiday at Domburg on the North Sea coast. I still have a picture of them, on the hotel tennis court. My mother was seventeen then, my father seven years her senior. They married, that hundred-per-cent Jewish Kohnstamm, and that Kessler girl from the Hague's wealthier business circles. Mixed marriages like that were quite rare then. But I never heard of there being any fuss about it. My parents remained very close all their lives.

‘The nineteenth century lasted in our home until 1940. Our whole neighbourhood in Amsterdam was dominated by the narrow, somewhat impoverished and entirely Jewish Weesperstraat. I remember the commotion from early in the morning till late at night, the tram edging its way
through the quarter. And then the silence on Saturday, the men in their high hats and the neatly dressed boys walking to the synagogue. Did people discriminate? People told jokes sometimes, and because he was Jewish my father wasn't allowed to join one of those elitist clubs, which he wasn't interested in anyway. But there was no real sting in it yet. The tone it took on in the 1930s and 1940s, the thing we all see before us now when we think about it, that wasn't yet there.