Miklós Györffy
Apathy, Irony, Empathy

Árpád Ajtony: A birodalom elvesztése (The Loss of the Empire), Pécs, Jelenkor, 1998, 223 pp.

László Garaczi: Pompásan buszozunk! (What Fun We Have on This Coach Ride!), Pécs, Jelenkor,1998, 135 pp.

Gábor T. Szántó: Mószer (Nark), Budapest, Magvetoý, 1997. 244 pp.

An unusual collection of short stories has just been published by Jelenkor Kiadó, the Pécs-based publisher. Although all the pieces in it were written around the beginning of the 1970s and were published, if at all, in magazines, they have never been collected in a book. Then twenty-five or twenty-six years of age, Árpád Ajtony was a promising young talent. (I should perhaps disclose that he and I are of the same generation and that he was a good friend of mine.) At that time, young writers just starting out in their career had a hard time of it, as the cultural commissars were extremely suspicious of the generation which appeared on the scene in the 1960s, and whose response to the growing influx of Western influences was not in harmony with official expectations. One, almost paranoid, method of keeping the young troublemakers on a leash was to use every trick to procrastinate publication. They were allowed to publish in magazines and in anthologies—in a quarantine of some sort—but not in book format.

Árpád Ajtony was one of those whose book was just not to be. Whether it was for this reason or some other—perhaps he does not know himself—he left Hungary in 1973, and has lived in Paris ever since. To the best of my knowledge, he has not written a line since. For some time now, he has been teaching social psychology at a university near Paris, and has hardly any contact with his native country. After a delay of almost thirty years, The Loss of the Empire has finally come out, confirming in retrospect that his reputation as a talented writer had been well founded. The book evidently bears some features of the period in question, yet it strikes the reader as anything but outmoded. Like many of his contemporaries, Ajtony was influenced by the French nouveau roman, which might perhaps explain the dispassionate objectivity of his short stories, with their tedious accuracy in recording the visible and relatable surface of events and objective facts, yet refraining from suggesting comprehensive or symbolic meanings. The presentation could perhaps be traced to the cinema, which greatly influenced the nouveau roman itself. The cinema was very close to Ajtony personally: for a number of years he worked as a script writer, contributing to some of the experimental films made at the Balázs Béla Studio. Irrespective of all this, however, and quite in contrast with the declared principles of the nouveau roman, Ajtony’s short stories always have some mystery, which mostly cannot be revealed, even though they appear to be there in every little detail of the text. Floating these secrets was Árpád Ajtony’s exquisite speciality, which linked him to some of the Hungarian writers of the 1900s, called the "knights of mist".

The longest piece in the book, also entitled "The Loss of the Empire", was intended originally as a script, though never made into a film, and though distinguishable in form from Ajtony’s other writings. It is about a family of four: the mother, the father, a twenty-five year old son and their daughter named Zsuzsa, who all live in a house with a garden in Buda. Then there is Tamás, a seventeen-year-old schoolboy, who is a misfit and a drifter; although he has his own separate life and friends, through his friendship with Zsuzsa he is becoming more and more bound up with the family in the villa. Almost nothing is known of the girl’s mysterious brother, who scarcely sleeps at home and who has a gun, and about whom the family members disclose absolutely nothing. The locked attic of the villa is the "secret", his "empire". At the end of the story Tamás, more or less by accident and presumably in self-defence, shoots the unexpectedly returning brother; then he and the father bury the body in the garden. This not only strengthens his previously vague position in the family, it also robs him of something: the "empire" of the secret. This is an atmospheric short story with many secrets. It occurred to me that this "fugitive" boy of twenty-five could have been the personification of the 1956 Revolution’s memory, which had to be concealed and hidden, and finally killed, so that it could no longer haunt us. The motif of the gun supports this, along with a vague feeling that the boy is being tailed. But then the boy could equally be some kind of a prodigal son, and his secret the Alain Fournier secret of puberty, to which the prematurely aged and secretless Tamás could not relate and therefore had to rid himself of it somehow.

One of the finest pieces is the enig-matic story "Kázmér Rákóczi", which is about a decorous and scholarly teacher of Hungarian literature, one of the old guard, whose entire spiritual constitution and unsuspecting nature place him so much out of touch with the milieu in which he teaches, that he finally allows himself to be walled in under a cubicle in the ruined amphitheatre at Óbuda. It is almost as if his students had performed this act out of respect for the old man, and also as if his implicit wish had been fulfilled. "I Went to See Cselebi" is about a peculiar young man with a Turkish-sounding name, whom the school girls all have to visit at some point, allegedly to obtain forged papers to document their absence from school, but in reality to be initiated into the secret. The "secret" here is on the one hand obvious: the loss of virginity; on the other hand it remains unveiled: we never find out who this Cselebi is, what it is that he can do, and why the girls have to visit him. The hero of the short story "I Would Like to Make a Paper Shako"—made into a short film at the Balázs Béla Studio—is a clerk, who, on discovering that he cannot fold a paper shako impromptu, promises to his son to make one in the evening. During the day he learns how from one of his colleagues, but he is also humiliated by some young thugs while meeting his lover in the woods. Adulthood is the inevitable betrayal of the purity of childhood.

"Shopping for Porcelain", a story verging on the absurd, derives its grotesque character from the point that a secret is suggested here, too, when in fact there is none. The whole story is about how Róbert Kálmán and his friends are trying to come by bathroom "porcelains", rated as poor quality and therefore sold cheap, for his weekend house in Szentendre. The reduced realm of meaning of the short story anticipates the minimalist prose of a fashionable trend today. By contrast, in "Critical Timing", which is a powerful account of a two-day trip abroad by a man and a woman in stifling scenes, some secret is once again surrounding them, in the form of missing explanations: where and why did this man and woman travel together, and what is the connection between them? The objective lack of an explanation perhaps reflects the tormenting vagueness subjectively experienced in their relationship.

It is not that we would have to rewrite the history of Hungarian literature of the past few decades on account of Árpád Ajtony’s book. But the fact that he never became the writer he could have perhaps become makes another entry in the inventory of the irreparable damage wreaked by the cultural politics of the socialist era.

László Garaczi’s autobiographical prose What Fun We Have on This Coach Ride! takes place roughly around the time that Ajtony’s short stories were written, in the second half of the 1960s. The author was in his early teens at the time: the text variations written about his childhood, are subtitled "The Confession of a Lemur 2". The new book is a sequel to an earlier book Mintha élnél (As If You Were Living), which also contained the "confessions" of a reminiscing "lemur". Similarly to the earlier book, What Fun We Have on this Coach Ride! cannot be properly termed as a novel or a short story in the traditional sense, as it hardly has a story line starting out somewhere and moving in a concrete direction. Still, Garaczi, who had been one of the most radical exponents of the new prose, or, rather, "text" up to this book, and who had done everything in his power to undermine the traditional forms of narrative, has allowed himself certain "compromises" in this latest work. For one thing, he has provided a frame for his recollections: "In the afternoon they summoned me, and with some heavy rhetoric they handed me my school report book. I can’t bring myself to open it, nine lines of densely packed words, stamps and signatures, I’m going to faint. I’m going home, but my legs fail me, I’m just shuffling with my feet in one spot. It could even be that they know everything by now, the news spreads like fire: I shot the bird with the hairdo. I press a bloody handkerchief on my face. I’ll be lucky if they haven’t called the cops yet. If I shoot her in the eye, I’m off to the nick, Madame Justice rubs her palms, didn’t I tell you that the kid was a ruthless mass-murderer, a Mengele? She provokes me into getting another school reprimand, and I’ll be thrown out, I’ll become a bum and prison-meat, society will reject me, I’ll be fishing through dustbins, oh, God, why have I grown up?"

With one sling-shot, the narrator, who feels at the age of ten that he "has grown up", breaks an office window at Lignimpex, an export-import company, and hits a secretary. On the way home with the reprimand in his bag, he is in mortal agony, because he dreads parental punishment. The confessions are being made in this delaying situation caused by the anti-cipation of a beating, which is a mere literary fiction, of course: it represents a filter, through which the entire former life of the "kid" narrating the story shows up in a comprehensive and consistent manner, along with the preliminaries and consequences of certain motifs. Garaczi talks about his childhood not so much chronologically but thematically: one by one, he talks about his parents, his classmates, his teachers, the classes and the breaks between them, the street and the games, about the awakening of sexuality, the training sessions in the sports club and the school trips.

Yet, the book is not just about these banal themes—there is nothing wrong with banality in Garaczi’s opinion, anyway; it is about everyday life in the 1960s in general, and about the conversational mode which authentically conveys these childhood memories. The 1960s come in as facts. Garaczi’s apparent ambition is to conjure up, in a nostalgic manner and as accurately as possible, a period which now seems like history, with all its typical accessories and cheap gadgets that meant so much to children: among the things that come up in the book are the tiki-taki (a pair of plastic balls attached to each end of a piece of string, manipulated so as to collide in rapid succession), the biro with the stripping girl, the Jaffa ice-cream, "button football" (a cross between tiddly-winks and table football); these contemporary relics are recalled in a manner that can best be described as a textual orgy: "The chicks are running around with bags all frills and foams, except for the less well-off who are swinging plastic bags washable with a viscous sponge. In the stops of the trolley cars there are German-made vending machines in aluminium casing; now you can shop even after closing time, 2 x 2 forints and the cookie or the facial cream pops out, plus the change, 50 fillérs. Then there is the carriage of the street vendor selling pretzels, with the pretzels behind the glass and with a locker box at the bottom, all fitted on the wheels of a pram. There is a bear face made of neon tube on the façade of the café, bubbles of neon, while inside, on the walls, huge brown coffee beans are flying about in the Elite Department Store, ready-to-wear clothes for all occasions. That is not an anorak, Aunt Klári says, only dudes speak like that, it is a wind-cheater. A stool made of yellow- stripped imitation plush for phone desks."

Besides the clumsily outmoded objects, the confessions vividly recall contemporary life on the streets and in school, with the lunacies of the Pioneer movement, all this achieved, as the above passages demonstrated, with the help of a characteristic, multi-layered narrative. The narrator sticks to his childhood perspective only part of the time, slipping in and out of the perspective of reminiscing. The "lemur" confesses love to his childhood, to the bygone days, both by reverting to it and by distancing himself from it. This equally applies to the representation of the hero’s conscious mind and to the style of the narrative. Garaczi has a masterly way of switching between the direct and the indirect depiction of how children’s minds work. Sometimes he makes his characters speak in direct speech, and sometimes he presents them from an ironic distance, seen through an adult’s recollection, described in "adult words": "He already knew that for a raffle ticket offering a chance to travel to the World Youth Meeting, Ági Kun would show hers to him: what she has got, so what has she got, but then again, who cares. Why, you can see Kati Serey’s, the elastic band in her knickers expanded as she squats. A cunt. Serey is in the first class, that’s almost pre-school, you don’t talk to babies like that. From a fifth-former’s viewpoint, even a fourth-year is a ridiculous half-complete creature: Say hello to Uncle Bob! His father asks him before leaving: What would you like me to bring you from Karl Marx Stadt? Everything and a peg-top. It’s maddening to think that not so long ago he, too, was one of these little fellows with their embryonic consciousness. By the same token, the sixth-years loom large over the horizon as some kind of mythical giants, living the lives of the strong and the powerful, the secret initiates.

Next to them, he, a mere speck of dust of a fifth-former, can only hope that one day, through some divine miracle, he, too, will become strong and powerful, in other words, a sixth-year."

The book—whose title is a reference to school trips—remains faithful to text writing insofar as childhood and the workings of children’s minds have no symbolic meaning: they mean nothing but themselves. So, the book is driven by the ambition to express itself with the greatest possible "textual", narrative and psychological accuracy even when an adult perspective is being applied. There is no question, therefore, of a construction or a composition, in which childhood or puberty become the medium of a centralized narrative principle or a symbolic system of interconnections, such as is the case with Géza Ottlik and Péter Nádas, or even with Péter Esterházy, in recent Hungarian literature. At the age of forty-something, Garaczi can remember the world of his pre-pubertal experience remarkably vividly, and has a charming way of relating it. A similar originality in this respect has been demonstrated in Hungarian literature only by Frigyes Karinthy and Iván Mándy. Garaczi, like his two predecessors, is primarily attracted to the ironic and grotesque charm of childhood, to the absurdity of the world of adults when seen through the eyes of children. Real pain and suffering have no place in this jovial world with all its nonsenses. With his book, one of the best pieces to appear last year, Garaczi has accomplished something that very few people have achieved in this genre. He has written a thoroughly enjoyable and funny book. At the same time, like other virtuoso writers’ texts (for example, Lajos Parti Nagy’s prose), this book, too has a weak point: even in this relatively small volume, the reader rapidly has his fill of witticism, of constant sparkling.

Gábor T. Szántó’s Nark contains two short novels. The author was born in 1966 in Budapest, this is his fourth book, and the critics have paid little attention to his previous work. From a thematic point of view, there is a striking contrast between the two novellas: one tells of a moral crisis of a chief rabbi, which ends in his suicide, the other gives the confessions of a woman about her marriage and her acts of adultery, with an account of her sexual pleasures and humiliations, which verges on pornography. Still, certain similarities are also evident: both are written in the first person singular in the form of a divulgence, with the act of writing as one of the themes. On top of that, both portray a crisis, a trap, out of which there is no escape other than suicide.

The word "mószer" (Hebrew in origin) means informer. In the form of "bemószerol" it has made its way into Hungarian slang, with the meaning "to denounce somebody, put the blame or inform on somebody". Szántó’s elderly rabbi used to have charge of the Pest congregation; now he is a pensioner living alone. Once he taught at the rabbinical seminary. Now—we are in the mid-1990s—he holds classes for young people interested in studying the Talmud and Jewish history. On one occasion, a student tells him that next time they would like to learn about informers. The rabbi turns pale: he thinks it is a provocation, as he himself worked as an informer in the early days of communism. Up till then he has hoped that nobody knew about this, although ever since the political changes he has been living in fear, dreading that the truth would get out. It seems that it is no longer possible to keep it secret: in Germany a book was published on the relations between the Stasi and the Jews, and his involvement was mentioned in it, though not his name—yet in a way that allowed those who knew him to identify him. The German connection dated back to the 1960s, when, for four years, he worked in East Berlin in a dual capacity: as a rabbi and as an informer for the Stasi. Later he was posted back to Budapest, and now it appears that his students have found out and want to humiliate him.

The confessions written in the form of a diary can be read, according to the writer’s fiction, as the rabbi’s was sent, through an intermediary after his death, to the editors of the Jewish magazine Szombat (Sabbath) for publication. "I have neither added to, nor taken anything away from the story." Whether this fiction has any real foundation, or if it has, then what it is precisely, we do not know, but neither is it of any interest. It serves as a device of authentication for the reader, and since the author fully re-lives the rabbi’s crisis, we can accept this as the old familiar form of hiding. The diary is useful not only because it allows the rabbi to give a day-to-day account of his life—how he responds to the students’ provocation, how he tells them about the less than glorious incidents of informing in Jewish history on the basis of historical sources— but also because it reveals the entire life story of the rabbi. In this way he can explain why he accepted the role of an informer (he was more or less coerced into it), and we can find out how much damage he caused to others.

The most complex and most interesting part of the monologue is the list of his excuses, some of which are historical and some private. Having been through Auschwitz and having lost his entire family, the rabbi could not, and would not, reject communism wholesale, the regime that eventually brought him liberation. Besides, he firmly believed that by putting up resistance he would cause more damage than by cooperating with the authorities and furthering their trust for the Jews. Regarding his hero’s private excuses, Szántó very accurately portrays the wife, about whom we learn at one point that, out of moral weakness and without the knowledge of her husband, she herself might have been enlisted as an informer, and this suspicion poisoned their relationship for the remainder of their lives.

After the total collapse and a stroke, the rabbi discovers that the reason why he was able to do what had been expected of him over and over again was that he feared them more than he feared God. So he had no choice but to commit suicide.

The first-person-singular hero of the other novella "Me? (da capo al fine)" is a relatively ordinary young woman, who decides to write the story of her wrecked marriage at a time when her life hits the rock bottom. She has an interesting motive: her husband is a writer of some sort, the type who always has great plans but never actually writes anything; he regularly makes notes about his wife and their deteriorating marriage, in this way writing as a frustrated ambition itself plays a part in the failure of the relationship. Against such a background, and to some degree as a consequence of it, the woman decides to write her account: "…I would be lying if

I failed to admit that I was sometimes tempted to write pretending I was him. Sometimes this helped me to get away from my anxieties. It was my intention to write our story in such a way that, if he is honest, he himself could have written it."

So the woman’s compulsion to write is also a symptom of her dependency. The same is suggested by her confessions: regardless of the point that her husband is an insufferable brute who cheats on her and who humiliates her, taking revenge on her for his frustrations; and regardless of the fact that they have not touched each other for quite some time now, she cannot break free of him. If for nothing else, then to get her own back, to be able to see him suffer. This dependency is rooted in a gut feeling: whether she is in the act of committing adultery with a man, someone who can actually give her genuine satisfaction, or whether while masturbating, she always pictures this contemptible husband of hers in the process. She discovers while writing her confessions that no matter what she is doing or what she is feeling, in some strange way that also involves her husband. And while initially the husband’s treatment of her seems outrageous, the further we go on reading the notes (for example on learning the sordid details of the wild sexual debauches between the woman and her casual lover, and also on discovering how she uses this to rouse her husband’s jealousy, thus turning him into a pathetic and helpless figure, a "faithful" husband, in sharp contrast with his earlier brutality), the more we come to see her as both a vile monster and a victim of her hopeless situation. This is the "Ego" that the heroine of Én? (the Hungarian word for "I") discovers in herself. So finally, the whole thing could start all over again, since "if I want to be absolutely honest, I must admit that in a certain sense I am happy." Like Camus’ Sisyphus who has a task ("We should picture Sisyphus a happy man"), she has a "me" of some sort, and "somebody" to go with it.

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Miklós Györffy is our regular reviewer of new fiction.