Sándor Márai
Memoir of Hungary 1944-1948
(Excerpt)
For, I now learned that I had not really known my country until then. I had merely been born and had lived there, but knew her only the way a person "knows" his fated partner, the lifetime companion of his choice, or his close relatives. One just lives among and with them. And sometimes life slips by so that no real process of "knowing" takes place.
I cannot say how it began and what it actually was that began. I can't recollect the day, the occasion, when I first noticed that my relationship with the surroundings, the country, the people had changed. The ruins were being cleaned up, and people hustled to make a living. I didn't have any personal worries. A writer - who is he? There was a time when I believed he mattered, not just because, perhaps, "he can tell us" what people are thinking, but because the formulated, expressed experience sets off in individuals processes of thinking that ultimately turn into action. As a result, the way people live together changes, the principles governing human life alter, and then, through their transmission, the conditions of public life, of civilization are modified. This was the bombastic way that I conceived the duty of the writer, and perhaps there were periods when writers could exert influence on humans to this effect. But at those times institutionalized falsehoods were not yet stifling everything and everyone.
From the balcony of our temporary accommodations we could look down on Gül Baba's tomb and the gardens of Rózsadomb, and farther away, between two rows of houses, down below to the Danube. The country stretched along the banks of the river; it could not be seen from the balcony, but you could continually sense and smell, practically breathe it in the way you breathe in the ocean even when you don't live right on its shore. Suddenly, everything became closer, more palpable.
There are no names for such changes. I can't say it was as if "night had suddenly fallen." Rather, it was like the parts of the day when it is still bright, but the light which had till then illuminated the region cheerfully and vividly suddenly becomes more solemn, turns almost gloomy. People took notice and, like the light, like the landscape, they grew somber. But they didn't want to believe the time of change was here. Things will be different, they said. With mouth behind hand, they protested that the West cannot surrender Eastern Europe, give one hundred million souls to the Soviets. A decision will be made - an agreement, they hoped. This was what Western radio stations also promised. This was the time when opposition newspapers were still appearing. Book publishers and theatres had not yet been nationalized. The Communists were operating cautiously, with a stopwatch. They opened up the nation's body joint by joint, like a learned professor dissecting parts of a body for an anatomy demonstration. They still spared the more vital organs; they still didn't sever the more essential nerves, but they were already cutting and slicing the viscera with scissors and forceps.
No one knew how deep this dissection of living tissue would go. Sometimes it seemed as if the Communists themselves didn't know exactly how deeply they could reach into the living body with the scalpel. They received the order from Moscow; they also probably received the practical executive command for it; at the same time they were afraid that despite all the scrupulous conscientiousness, the final responsibility belonged to them, the specialists, those whom Moscow had dispatched to Hungary. If something went wrong, if the patient bled to death or screamed, they had to answer for it. For this reason they worked for a year and a half like the spider weaving its web. ("Like the spider feeling the web's vibration," writes Arany in Prince Csaba. So he characterizes the security structure of Attila's realm.) And this is what the Soviet structure was like, too: the Giant Spider in the Kremlin wove and spun the web, and when its victims moved, it felt the web vibrate.
It was a time when a spider's web seemed to cover everything. The web grew thicker and stickier every day. You couldn't always sense this directly and immediately, but the Spider emitted a thread every day - now the textbooks and schools, now a decree on public works. Then the house wardens, the official cobweb of ever smaller controlling zones, the control of private lives, the workplace, the garbage disposer, family life. One day the Communists made a man disappear, the next an old, tested institution. Or an idea. Every time "the web vibrated," the Spider and his little spiders glanced around. Will what they did work out all right? Did they do well? What is the temperature of the opposition? Suddenly they sniffed toward the East and the West. Maybe the West is not after all as deaf and indolent as they hoped it was. Maybe it will intervene, protest, and demand compliance with agreements. When nothing happened, they heaved a sigh of relief. The spider's web - invisibly but constantly spinning - thickened. And this Spider didn't pause to rest. It cast forth its threads unflaggingly.
Noone who hasn't experienced it can imagine what this spider-web technique is like. When emitting its smothering, all-enveloping threads, the Spider works silently. What was so natural yesterday - political parties, freedom of the press, life without fear, freedom of individual opinion - still existed the next day, but more anemically, the way the elements of everyday reality continue to live on more pallidly in anguished dreams during the night. (It was still possible to travel, but only a few did so.) The self-employed individual, the anonymous hero of the time, persisted in believing that he had the right to stay in his establishment and stick to his trade. The lawyer argued his case, the doctor waited in the consultation room for his well-paying patient, the aurea praxis. Things will be different for us, lisped the progressive intelligentsia, blinking. But the middle class, like the peasants hiding stores in pits during the war, began to prepare to defend themselves.
The intelligentsia, the "citizenry" - as they were sometimes called contemptuously, with belittling remarks - resolved to survive what was threatening them. Its members did not comprise a social, political organization. The same instincts were stirring in human beings as those found in the old Saxon towns where, with strength, strategy and cunning tenacity, the citizens tried to outlast the Turks, the pro-Austrian Hungarian soldiers, or the oligarchy. Or as did the lower nobility the Germans during the Bach period. This was not a "movement," it didn't have a slogan or party symbol, but it seemed as if the Hungarian intelligentsia had decided at an invisible "routine election" not to succumb. They wanted to survive what was threatening them.
Some shed tears for the china cabinet and the baubles that were destroyed by the rain of bombs or, during the siege, by the Mongol invasion. Others mourned the stocks and bonds, the memberships on boards of directors, the privileges of government counselors. But these were few. The vast majority of the intelligentsia did not mimic servility and flattery; they remained what they were, modest and self-respecting. They couldn't afford a new suit of clothes, but wore with conscious respectability clothing that had become threadbare during the war. Not to display their loss of a role or to conceal penury, but to remain individuals of standing, yes, a "citizen" even in tatters - this was their mission. Most of the modest, dismal bourgeois houses were destroyed or heavily damaged; for this reason the intelligentsia crowded together in one of the nethermost versions of the circles of Hell, one that not even Dante had dreamed of - the co-tenancy. Without a word of complaint they began living in some kind of outwardly half-bourgeois, inwardly half-prole life. (They didn't complain, because it was always only the "proles" and "ladies" who did so.) The intelligentsia went to the pawnshop, sold their gold teeth, the old silver-plated watches to buy food or medicine. Or a book. (They still bought books.) Not the worker, not even the peasant - the middle class, which had been stripped of everything, still bought books. They parted with their pocket watches more lightheartedly than with their books, when necessity finally forced them to sell those, for whatever price they could fetch.
The nimble-tongued, droll-mouthed, caustic-humoured inhabitants of Pest turned particularly serious. Everything that had recently still been a caricature changed. The behaviour of people, their relations with each other in the human sense altered. No one believed in "classless society" as advertised on posters, like a popular play from the nineteenth century. But a certain social layer understood that without them there can be no society. I couldn't say exactly how it happened and what happened, but I began to feel at home in Budapest, the way I had in Kassa long ago. As if I belonged somewhere. The "alienation" Marx predicted did not take place in Hungary precisely because of the Communist peril. Perhaps never, in any time of peril, was the Hungarian intelligentsia so deliberately cohesive as in these months, in the early stages of the Communist takeover.
No "social life" existed; after all, the indispensable home, job, and setting were lacking. Sometimes this "social life" consisted only of a handshake, a wink of an eye in passing. Individuals, half-strangers, approached each other with signals, without questions and explanations. Like living creatures generally, if danger threatened the tribe, they didn't inform each other about the danger in words and oratorical declamations but with shortwave messages. No one knew exactly to what precipice, dark labyrinth, or fetid pit the daily surprises were leading. But everyone knew they had to protect themselves. There were those who protected themselves by joining the Party, because they wanted careers. Some sort of indefinable, anonymous and silent summary court martial immediately passed sentence on those who did this. And the sentence was not subject to appeal; those who erred noticed that others wordlessly spurned and scorned them. There were those who joined the Party gloomily, with clenched teeth and downcast eyes, because they feared for their jobs and their families. People gave the weak the cold shoulder, but they not infrequently forgave them on the grounds that they acted not from their own interests but from dire necessity. In instances of common danger, every degree of protection was countenanced, as well as accommodation to circumstances and feigned acquiescence. They knew who was truly pretending when they acted in concert with the Communists, and if personal circumstances forced them to do so, they did not judge them severely. In times of great danger, human beings know about each other's secret intentions through a mystical radar. The Spider thought he knew everything about those he had lured into his web - and it is certain he knew a damned lot about them. But the intelligence of the victims was not inferior. If they sensed in someone that he submitted to the Communists with clenched teeth, for appearance's sake, they didn't pass sentence on him; sometimes they even encouraged and helped him with tactical advice.
But if they felt that someone really supported the Communists, they froze him out. Job, livelihood, school for the children - all this was overwhelmingly, truly in danger: he had to save whatever he could every day. And yet, there was something more important than a job, a livelihood. There is something that to most humans is more important in an emergency than anything they can lose when under tribulation: self-esteem. After the many mendacities, the shabby, tattered travesties, people now perceived the reality: the danger that some wanted to force something on them that they did not believe in. What was demanded of them was a sincere acceptance of something they despised. They wanted to take away the remaining human dignity, which is more important than a social role, a good life, a career: the right to be humans, human beings building and renovating society according to their own beliefs.
For this is what the Spider wanted: to suck from the victim everything on which human self-esteem is based, like the Nazis in death camps, where they forced their victims into a subhuman level, because they not only murdered and worked them but first, at the very least, attempted to make the victims lose their own human sensibility, their sense of human dignity in the course of tortures and humiliations. Ultimately the Nazis contented themselves - "modestly" - with the physical annihilation of their victims. The Communists wanted something more and different: they demanded that their victims remain alive and celebrate the system that destroys human sensibility and self-esteem in its victims.
Every caricature of the recent past evaporated: the snobbish hierarchy, the nasal "listen to me, my friend" manner of discussion, the sham haute bourgeois lack of culture, the hunger for honorific titles and social ranks. Sometimes even I didn't feel myself to be a caricature any longer. When one gets right down to it, a "middle-class writer" was a nobody, a nothing in this world. I thought the Communists forgot about me the way a piece of out-of-fashion, outmoded furniture is forgotten. I began to entertain hopes.
I went down to the swimming pool in the mornings and swam several laps conscientiously. I no longer went to Margaret Island to play tennis, because the siege, as if by magic, had turned the beautiful island into a romantic, exotic bower; the plants, running wild, luxuriated around the ruins, and the coach had vanished in the historical whirlwind just as my tennis racquet had and with it my other self who played tennis every morning. This was comforting to me. After the swim, I drank a cup of strong espresso in a café on Margaret Boulevard and lit a cigarette I bought in the corner tobacco shop; there were already cafés, coffee, tobacco shops, and cigarettes again. Then I strolled across Kossuth Bridge to Pest, where I had absolutely nothing to do. Along the way, I encountered acquaintances who didn't have anything particularly to do either. Not long before one of them had been a government minister, and now he plied the inner-city streets with a sack flung over his shoulder in search of cheap victuals. Another was a writer not long before, and now he roved the streets in anxiety, searching for someone who would believe he was still a writer, even when he no longer had the opportunity to write freely. The third was a woman not long before, and she once again strolled the streets in her war finery, painted and befeathered in search of someone who would believe she is still a woman and not a female impersonator. And the fourth and the others I met were all somebodies not long before, and now no longer were. This was how we knew each other. But rarely did anyone make accusations or complain.
That easy self-confidence which a settled and anthropomorphic system with all its imperfections denoted for the people slipped out from under them. No one knew for certain any longer what "class" they belonged to, because the notion of class became strangely muddied as eager-beaver snobs dug the titles of nobility out of family limbos of the past, and others flaunted the hastily unearthed locksmith grandfathers and weaver grandmothers. Like someone crawling on all fours in anguish during the moments of an earthquake and feeling his way with his palms, people searched for some kind of social security in their daily lives. The caricature evaporated, but the sardonic tableau of the New Class abruptly appeared in its place: the frock-coated sansculottes, the bureaucracy of pigtailed mercenaries.
I no longer wrote my "programme" for newspapers and journals; as radios put it at the moments when enemy planes approached during the war, I "went off the air." The clamour in the papers and journals was ear-splitting. I did publish a travel diary in book form and two volumes of the trilogy I wrote during the war also appeared. I wanted to depict the demonism of the philistine, plebeian anarchy of the Hitler period in the novel. The Communist press laid down a line of fire against these books. A Marxist philosopher1 who returned from Moscow - he was a renowned Communist man of letters, an international celebrity - was designated to write a lengthy treatise on the novel analyzing Hitler's world; this indignantly mud-slinging study presented the individual utterances of the novel's protagonists as if they reflected the author's opinions. At first reading, I found it difficult to understand what provoked the cool, supercilious Marxist critic to froth so bloodily at the mouth; but, in the end, the true significance of the venomous piece became translucently apparent. The condemnation of brute force, the analysis of the totalitarian mind-set infuriated the Communist critic, who applied what I wrote about Hitlerian savagery and totalitarianism to himself personally and took it all as an assault conducted circuitously against the Communists. It didn't deserve a reply, because the noted philosopher apparently heard only what he chose to, his own voice. (I didn't publish the third volume of the trilogy; it is still collecting dust in a desk drawer.)
I terminated my programme; I wrote for the desk drawer; thus I worked as I would have sometimes liked to in my days of caricature in perfect solitude, without reaction, and still close to a language community from which bitter disappointments and painful experiences had sometimes separated me in the past. I lived like a person who no longer has the opportunity to speak to someone, but finally has the chance to be silent with someone.
Not much time elapsed, and everything altered dramatically in social concerns, as if a society had begun a migration within its inner sphere. People quickly renovated their ruined houses but then did not find their place in the patched-together home. Others took up residence together, sometimes grotesquely in the comfortless hedgehog conditions of temporary emergency habitations; sometimes three families squeezed into a single flat, leading a social life in the living room and serving supper in the kitchen. Some were found among these changed circumstances who, feeling out the possibilities for the conditions under which the middle class subsisted, no longer had the real opportunity to salvage anything from their old way of life. No "social life" existed, but the middle class, with obstinate and systematic perseverance, tacked together a way of life in which it was possible to move only with elbows pressed against hips, but which, even in this state of cramped helplessness, provided the means for a small social community to preserve a consciousness of its function. The aristocrats vanished; change and time eliminated their role and lifestyle. The intelligentsia knew that the technological revolution would squeeze the peasants and the workers out of their workplaces and way of life; the peasants would leave their lands and become proletarians, the workers would leave their factories because automation would take the tools out of their hands, and the megalopolises the world over would receive new social strata whose resemblance to the old circles of influence was only on the basis of their affluence. The intelligentsia knew that they were indispensable. They just had to bide the time, from which they now were expelled with malevolent bullying.
They waited. They carried everything they could do without to the pawnshop, then whatever was indispensable. They ironed their shabby clothes mirror-bright again and again, because they were unwilling to dress as "proles" in the labyrinths of daily existence; they always wore bourgeois clothing. In what were travesties of apartments, next to the small amount of old essential, broken and glued furniture, they fiddled with furniture rescued somehow from their homes in Upper Hungary, Transylvania and Transdanubia, from the spotless rooms of vanished generations; and these worn bits of middle-class furniture preserved a cultural setting which was in its conservatism always only defensive, never offensive. The old customs of social intercourse, the polite address and the uncomplaining, benevolent change in voice also went with both the day-to-day stratagems of "having to survive" and the strategy designed for the long term. (They were courteous in ways different from the marquesses and duchesses waiting for the hangman's assistant in the cellar of the Conciergerie who, with the grotesquely distorted simpering of the Versailles lever, stood in a line before a bucket where in the morning, pretending to make their toilet, they could dip their fingers.) They were courteous like those who know that for them conservatism, the respect for tradition, was not only a day-to-day game of patience and healthy calisthenics, but the scope of their historical duty; if they did not plead for mercy or complain, if they preserved from their past, their beings, their culture that energy which tradition transmits and without whose driving power evolution cannot occur, then the system of violence will be forced to turn to them, because it needs them.
An educated Hungarian middle class had existed in Upper Hungary, Transylvania, and Transdanubia, most of whom, for all practical purposes, emigrated to Budapest and remained nearly invisible there. Now, when they were dismissed from everywhere, the emptiness they left in their place was blatantly evident. In every field of activity there was a quiet, very poor, barely visible intelligentsia whose expertise, integrity, and humanness the Communists were unable to replace through their cram-courses. They were the "consciousness" of the nation - not the "people," but an intelligentsia without titles, ranks and estates. They didn't belong to any sort of high-sounding political party, not in the past, not now either. They had no political clique. The only cohesive element for them was that culture which they inherited and loved, which they didn't display ostentatiously but, yes, concealed modestly instead. I knew their apartments; the apple smell of their dark vestibules lingered in my nostrils; I saw the homemade preserves in jars placed atop cupboards, and in their rooms the plush sofa and the inlaid oval table or pipe-holder with green beize cloth rescued in their exodus from Bártfa, Kassa, and Kolozsvár (my father had managed to keep a pipe-holder; it, too, was destroyed in the rubbish pile of the house on Mikó Street). Were they "progressives"? Yes, but in a way different than the supporters of radical change desired. They preferred to read Mikszáth rather than Zsigmond Móricz, but they knew that Babits was a greater poet than Gyula Vargha. They did not "progress" anything, they preserved something instead. They bought books, they purchased the inexpensive season tickets for the theatre, they subscribed to the newspapers. There weren't many of them, but without them no Hungarian culture was possible. The puffed-up "bourgeois" neo-baroque scenery concealed them, but now this scenery crumbled, and the time had come to test the fire-fighting equipment, now when it was possible to see the reality. The intelligentsia in Hungary never was a sharply discernible segment split into political parties and ideologies; they amounted only to a root layer. They were too few in number. Not many had answered the call of the right wing in the time following the senseless cruelty of Trianon (again, only this anonymous middle class actually paid the cost of Trianon in Transylvania and Upper Hungary) just as in Germany and elsewhere, it was the uneducated plebeian petty bourgeoisie who flocked into the extreme right-wing parties which had neither the tradition nor the education to reason objectively. In reality, in Hungary only two kinds of persons existed in the political sense: the liberal and the non-liberal. And this liberal Hungarian intelligentsia that remained from the Hungary of the nobility and was stripped of their privileges, a middle class reduced to professional penury, assumed a role without an ideological programme. They decided to bide their time until they would be needed, because without them despotic power was impotent. They wanted to help - first themselves, then the nation - without helping the Communists at the same time (like the best of the returned emigrants later.) But it was very difficult, sometimes practically impossible to draw that dividing line. (The Communists often derived benefit from this impossibility.)
For the time being, everything that was considered to be a parvenu excess in the past was destroyed, and the naked reality emerged in its place: poverty, just as in the West. I don't believe in the solidarity of the proletariat. On the other hand, zoologists know that mutual help exists even among crows. I believe in the solidarity of shared poverty. And now, when the tempest tore holes in all the fancy scenery, when society shed its buskin and costume, it made manifest the solidarity of poverty. Hungary, "the Canaan flowing with milk and honey," provided milk and honey only to a few; to the working intelligentsia it never gave anything more than the bread of charity. And this silent, uncomplaining middle class of poverty - readers, theatregoers, the educators of children in ways exceeding their material means, the decent Hungarian middle class inconspicuously preserving the traditions of social intercourse which was scornfully and superficially confounded with the gentry and the parvenu lout - this class did not take action either inwardly or outwardly. They did not lament, they did not complain. It seemed as if a cultural class of the nation, its intelligentsia, was serving notice that that debate was meaningless, that one cannot dispute with destiny. Destiny was now near, visible. What was this destiny? Loneliness.
No other people was still living in Europe that was as stifled by loneliness as the Hungarians. I don't know how our "relatives" the Finns feel. It is said that many depressed souls and suicides are found there, too. Some attribute this to the northern climate, to the dimensions of this vast and frightfully empty country of forests and lakes, to the geographical isolation: inhabitants live far from one another and sunlight is scarce. Perhaps this explains it. In Hungary, however, the loneliness was different: it was a shortness of breath, an asthmatic lack of air. For a thousand years, a people roaming in the vicinity of Europe sought someone it could speak to in confidence. It never found anyone. (There were fellow feelings: the Italian and the Pole sympathized with the Hungarian, but their good intentions never grew warmer.) For centuries Hungary's great kings and powerful statesmen, from St. Stephen to István Széchenyi - then its artists, from the Guardsmen poets to Árpád Tóth, searched for the road to the West. Sometimes the West seemed close; all one had to do was speak to it and it would answer. But in reality, it never did. That mystical link which in the political or constitutional sense calls peoples into solidarity never materialized. The consciousness that being Hungarian meant the same as being lonely, that the Hungarian language was incomprehensible and unrelated to other languages, that the "Hungarian" phenomenon of diverse races yet still typically Hungarian was also foreign to those who were our immediate neighbours and shared a common fate with the Hungarians for a thousand years. There was something benumbing in this consciousness. Sometimes, for a brief period, at times of shifting currents of civilization, hopefulness befogged this feeling of loneliness. But it did not last long. The Hungarian was constantly compelled to learn anew that there wasn't a people in Europe to whom he could speak in confidence, who was willing to undertake a joint responsibility with him. And now, when a hostile great power - the effeminate, pertinacious Slav - grabbed his dismembered country by the throat, he realized suddenly, in an alarming flash that there was no one, near or far, he could count on.
Maybe America, some said, stuttering in panic. Maybe the West, some mumbled in startling ignorance. (I had returned from the West, and I brought home in my nostrils and nerves that benumbing lethargy, impudent hostility, and arrogant superiority with which the West viewed the fate of Eastern Europe.) Slowly Hungarians began to realize there was nothing to wait for, nothing to hope for. Nowhere was there a people who were willing to gamble a diplomatic initiative, to utter a serious and true word in behalf of Hungarians. When this became clear to them, the feeling of loneliness engulfed everything, like the liana engulfs the floor of the jungle. And loneliness poses a great danger: the danger of turning karstic, of erosive marcescence threatens everyone - the individual and the people - in the loneliness.
Escape, if there was any, could occur only inwardly. As is always the case with loneliness, the "Hungarian" could only hope for an ally within himself, inward. And during these years, in this time of their consciousness of historical loneliness, something spoke up within the people. The loneliness will not make anyone "better." It is not true that loneliness "ennobles". Rather, the lonely person will be more frigid, colder though stronger at the same time. Loneliness is destiny. But it can unearth sources of strength unknown in times of self-deluding optimism and illusory hopefulness. I began feeling at home in Hungary because this loneliness spoke in everything and everyone - to me as to everyone else. And the "people," like the individual, knew that this loneliness could not be altered, because it was destined. And so they - the people and individuals - tried their hand at being lonely in a practical and methodical way.
"O beata solitudo," sang St. Francis. And then he added in a groan: "O sola beatitudo ." The saint, who in his own day, in his early years, was a "hippie" and only later became Saint Francis through complex transpositions, overstated the matter. Loneliness does not bestow happiness. But the loneliness of Hungary was a source of strength, an oasis in the European desert. With its fate, its good and bad characteristics, a people was left tragically on its own between the East and the West. This people listened to radio broadcasts from the West. Some continued to hope. Others were silent for long periods of time. Then, because they could not do anything else, they set about fashioning order in the loneliness.
Translated by Albert Tezla
Sándor Márai (1900-1989)
already with a considerable reputation as a novelist, left the country in 1948 in protest against the Soviet occupation and communism. He lived for many years in Italy before eventually settling in San Diego, California, where he continued to write and be published in Hungarian. Even when the Kádár regime mellowed, he refused permission for any of his works to be published in Hungary until the last Soviet soldier left the country. Not long before that actually happened, however, he committed suicide. The above is taken from his book Föld, föld, published first in 1972 by Vörösváry-Weller, Toronto. It is to come out in English, from Corvina, in association with CEU Press, Budapest, later this year under the title Memoir of Hungary 1944-1948, in Albert Tezla's translation.
