Ádám Bodor

The Smell of Prison

Responses to Zsófia Balla

(Extracts)

Part 3. Conclusion

 

... After all that, how did you end up studying theology?

As a direct consequence of what I have just told you. It didn't even occur to me to apply to one of the faculties of the university; I had no chance at all of getting in. I could not deny my past, or my father's, for that matter, who after five years had just been released from prison. He was friendly with a number of prominent clerics, some of whom also taught at the theological seminary. So I jumped at the opportunity and decided in favour of the seminary.

Did you think of becoming a clergyman yourself?

No, not for a moment; it was the farthest thing from my mind, in fact. But I was always interested in the liberal arts. And given the political climate of the times, the theological seminary seemed the best place to pursue historical and philosophical studies. There the teaching of these disciplines was still free of Leninist interpretations. I confess I first thought that if I was admitted and got used to the place, I'd use it as a hideout for the next five years-something was bound to happen during that time. Then there was the army: the threat of the draft was always present. Enrolling in the seminary, in short, was a way to gain time. And while it seemed highly improbable by then that one bright morning American paratroopers would appear outside our doors, you could still pin your hope on the passage of time. The seminary for me was a last resort.

In an interview you said that it was also a place of intellectual refuge for you.

It really was. I still had the good fortune to study with renowned professors who also happened to be enlightened, open-minded scholars, impressively erudite Renaissance men. With their wide knowledge and captivating personality, they were able to inspire even the uninitiated dullards who wound up in their classes by default. I can honestly say that not since that time have I come across such commanding and impressive personalities.
Despite the many good things that happened, in matters of faith I remained a sceptic. Though both my parents were deeply religious, very little of that rubbed off on me. The gift of true faith eluded me. So much so, that I blithely skipped compulsory religious services. I might as well come clean: on Sundays, instead of listening to sermons, I went on outings under the sky's lofty canopy, in nature's cathedral. That, too, is a proper sanctuary for serious meditation, I thought. Still and all, an enduring part of my identity is that I am a Calvinist.
I should note that at this time theological seminaries became havens not only for social outcasts like myself; many would-be seminarians were without religious leanings or affiliations of any kind. Interestingly enough, some of these people, those who ended up inside the venerable walls by accident, as it were, did choose to serve later on. They may not have shared in the bliss of true faith, but the cloth did become their calling. While others, driven by blind faith and entering the seminary eager to do God's work, "sobered up" in due course, and later in life sought happiness elsewhere. In my own case, a halfway solution was found: as a graduate of the seminary, I worked as a civilian employee of the church, and therefore was never ordained.

What happened then?

Having been a top student, I was offered the job of arranging and cataloguing the archives of the Cluj diocese. The future bishop of the city, who as a member of the examining board was present at my oral exam in history, must have liked my answers, because he asked me right away if I was interested in working as an archivist. My task would be to plough through a huge body of hitherto untouched archival material. I'd have to bone up on the relevant historical periods of course, and the job also required a certain facility in writing. But I'd get paid as much as a practising clergyman. The records of the smaller, provincial diocese were just then transferred to Cluj, so the amount of material waiting to be gone over was enormous. The keeper of the church archives at the time was my beloved one-time literature teacher, the same man whose advice we had sought as fledgling conspirators years earlier, at a memorable outing in the woods. And for which, he was locked up for a good long time.
At any rate, I accepted the offer. And soon thereafter got down to the business of reading vast numbers of letters and other documents penned hundreds of years ago, and then preparing brief summaries of each one. The letters did not always refer to church-related matters or religious life, but often contained information about the private lives of individuals close to the church. A typical summary may have read like this: "May 2, 1824. The wife of Ádám B., assistant pastor in the village of Barót, caught her husband fornicating in a jasmine bush near the belfry. In this connection she asked to see rural dean Constantine Pussywillow." There were many such cases, involving tiresome parsons' wives, hot-blooded reverends, buxom servant girls-minor dramas, unhappy, incomplete stories devoid also-thankfully-of cathartic resolutions. A one-line summary on the back of the document, a catalogue number, and into the file box-this was my job. As an archivist, I didn't make intriguing dis-coveries, I couldn't get fully engrossed in my work; the joy of research was something I never experienced. And though I didn't consider what I did mere drudgery, a dispiriting waste of time, I never let myself believe that I had found my life's calling. What made the job bearable was that I worked in the company of two excellent scholars. Years passed, and the part of the bishop's promise having to do with my remuneration was as good as forgotten. I earned only half as much as a practising preacher. Let's face it: I lived in humiliating poverty.

While you were a theology student, did you ever conduct services? The reason I ask is that, knowing you, I cannot see you deliver a sermon you didn't seriously mean.

Yet deliver it I did. And not in jest or as a put-on, and not out of a cynical disregard for the faithful, either, but because every theology student had to deliver sermons. On the three major holidays, seminarians were sent to smaller congregations in the country to help out during those busy times. Traditionally, the arrival of these student ministers in the villages was an event in itself. There was no way you could get out of it. Besides, for third-year students, preaching was part of the curriculum. In the course of the academic year, each student had to compose a sermon and deliver it in the presence of worshippers at one of the regular services. On these occasions, I, too, had to prepare as best I could, trying to overcome, among other things, a speech impediment I've always had.
I also conducted services in Cluj, in the twin-tower church on Magyar Street. The event could not be kept a secret, the secular world got wind of it too. To my dismay, a number of my friends came to see me perform, budding artists for the most part, musicians, painters, and a few literature students from the university. They filled an entire row. It was pretty scary seeing them all together from the pulpit. The Securitate, as could be expected, was also represented, by two men who specialised in religious affairs. One of them, a pig-faced character named Onac, kept making the sign of the cross so as to appear devout, not realizing that among Calvinists this is not customary. For a while he looked straight at the pulpit, watching my every move, pretending to be all eyes and ears, but then, yielding to his professional instincts, he pulled out his little notebook and pencil, and began taking inventory of those in attendance. The other agent stood at the entrance, smoked one cigarette after another and, between puffs, spat on the floor. He was a rank amateur-he didn't even remove his hat. One of my friends, a composer, got up from his original seat, sat down in the first row, and with his head tilted sideways gazed at me with an exultant look in his eyes.
In the manner of screwy churchgoers, he assumed a super-pious expression, now shaking his head, now nodding in agreement. But he overdid it, so I had to rebuke him from the pulpit, saying that those who visit the Lord's house with frivolous intent and not because they seek genuine peace of mind ought to search their souls. The warning was also meant for the security agents present. But the services ended without incident. The agents left in a hurry, presumably to submit their reports, and I, after depositing my minister's cloak in the vestry, joined my congregation in a neighbourhood pub, which was located right next to the seminary and frequented by veteran porters, moving men-and theology students. After all that tension, we needed a quick drink. To act like a clergyman, pray in a real church, in front of a devout congregation that also included a bunch of undesirables-all this wasn't really for me. I may not be religious, but the profane has always been alien to me ...

... We began this conversation by referring to strange, unusual names. How do these invented place and personal names compare with real ones?

The connection is tenuous, indirect, and in most cases there is no connection at all. A mountain peak called Pop Ivan is the only name in my stories that can be found on a map. And more or less in the same area where my stories take place-the name is undoubtedly a tip-off about the approximate location of the Sinistra stories. I was so much taken by the fact that a mountaintop bore a person's name, I simply couldn't resist it. But something happened once, in connection with naming things, that's even scarier than the basket weavers' story. After The Sinistra District was published, some of my critics tried to puzzle out my naming techniques-a risky undertaking, surely. The place name Dobrin, they thought, derived from a Romanian family name. It's not very nice to reveal such secrets, and an author should be the last to do it, but this time I will. A long time ago, in my tender youth, while roaming through the Gyalu Mountains, I came across an elderly hiker, joined him, and we stopped to rest on a mountaintop, where we tried to recall the names of the surrounding heights. After we listed them all, he pointed far away, beyond the waters of the Jára, to a valley wrapped in mist, and said: "Over there is the Dobrin." You could see nothing of the Dobrin, but the name, because of its sound perhaps, stayed with me, and with the passage of time took on the elements of a mysterious, enigmatic world eternally shrouded in mists. For decades it was mystery itself to me, and remained so because I never got a chance to see it. The name, after lurking about in the back of my mind all that time, found its place in the fictitious geographical and historical environment of The Sinistra District. Sometime after the publication of that book, my friend the composer György Orbán presented me with an old military map of the Radna Mountains. I had owned this map myself, but during one of the house searches, a couple of overeager gentlemen took it with them-I missed it terribly for years afterward. Anyway, from a fair amount of internal evidence, one could surmise that-fiction or no-my stories were set somewhere in the northern Carpathians, in Maramures¸. One time I spread out this map and put my finger on a spot covering a radius of perhaps seven miles, which I said might be the geographical location of the Sinistra district. The word under my fingertip was-Dobrin, a totally insignificant local stream. I still haven't recovered from the shock of that moment. You spend all this time trying to be clever until finally you invent reality...

... But when I walk over to Majális Street in Cluj and look through the lattice gate of our one-time home, I see in miniature what has happened in so many places in the region. Over the past decades, our shady, verdant garden has been turned into a bleak, grimy, oil-stained yard with a broken-down garage made of sheet metal. It's as if between two acts, they had changed the scenery. There is no nostalgia here, no illusions. The picture is grim, sobering-emblematic of the direction in which that world is moving.
We've now stepped on strange terrain, where there is quicksand and bog, and truth lurks in troubled waters and cannot be sifted and made crystal clear. The whole issue is so emotional, it's too awkward to handle. Homesickness, always a very private matter, raises the crucial question of just where home is and what it is really like, so it's better not to go into it. This emotion has a very special place in the human heart, and it is also the purest of feelings, since the object of the affection, an indifferent landscape, can never reciprocate that painful yearning. And if that yearning now worms its way into my heart, and ever more disquietingly, this too must be part of my lot in life. I am an unsteady sort anyway. In my urban existence I always wanted to be closer to nature, and when up in the mountains, I pined for the city. I wavered between the native realm and the world at large. Now I have to contend with this belated nostalgia-but that's the risk of all getaways. Yet I still feel that whoever moves away from his homeland can live anywhere. This is certainly true of me. However much I feel its pull, I could never again live in that homeland in peace. After all, there is more to that land than its imposing beauty.

Looking out the window of our Széchenyi Square apartment in Cluj, I have often felt that in the forty-three years I had lived there, the city I knew so well had completely changed. The tiled roofs were replaced with concrete; spires have been concealed by housing projects that looked used up from the moment they were built. And in those lovely rose beds on Malom Street, all you can see nowadays are discarded beer and soda cans.

If I remember correctly, one of the nobler objectives of Leninist thinking was to obliterate the differences between town and country. In Romania this did indeed happen, right before our eyes, inasmuch as once tidy Transylvanian towns today look more like gigantic villages. As a result of forced industrialisation and migration, several hundred thousand landless peasants were moved to Transylvania from the Transcarpathian regions. But these masses of people never really became town dwellers, and between the new walls, which they hadn't built and which therefore intimidated them, they recreated, with considerable success, their own peasant culture. But we know that the moment those remarkable tillers of the soil step out of their culture and change the way they produce goods and earn their livelihood, they tend to lose their good taste, their quaint customs, their moral bearing. Our familiar, urban, middle-class way of life had disintegrated, but what replaced it was not something of equal worth, which we could have accepted and appreciated.
And in this regard, nothing positive has occurred in Romania since the historic changes of the early 1990's. In fact, it has become more and more dispiriting to think of that homeland. I, for instance, do not much enjoy walking down an avenue named after a fascist general. And I do not wish to relax under statues honouring his memory. It seems, to me at least, that at crucial junctures the job of remaking Romania did not fall into the best hands. And should I be right about this, then, surely, I am not the only one who stands to lose by it.
A Romanian native of Cluj, say, of my generation, may look around with the same sense of alarm, because for him, too, the once clear outlines of the same homeland seem to be fading. Even from a distance it is sad to see that those in control of Transylvania, this rich, varied region the size of a country, don't seem to know what to do with it; neither does the general population, with their newfound, relative freedom. The concept of home, cherished by members of minorities who never left, is becoming so warped and distorted that these ethnic minorities will, I am afraid, leave this place one day without much regret. Now that the beautiful churches of the German communities are all empty, it may be the Hungarian churches' turn to lose their worshippers. In the silence that will follow, no Romanian patriot will have reason to rejoice.
I grew up as a Calvinist, but I knew exactly when the church bells were rung by the Lutherans, the Catholics and the Orthodox. And as long as I can remember, I felt enriched by this knowledge. So I cannot imagine what unearthly happiness will await this land once people like us are gone. I have a feeling that after the solemn announcement is made that the last alien has quit the country, the promised wild celebration will not take place. Instead, silence will descend, the bleak silence of dismay, in between the empty churches and on those who will remain.

What kind of changes can we expect? Life there is as difficult as ever, though many things have changed, and conditions, especially compared with the previous decades, have improved.

Things have changed and improved somewhat, no doubt about it. But the spirit of the place, its moral demeanour, the directions in which its energies are focused haven't. What frightens me is not the spectre of wholesale assimilation, but the possibility that the society in which the Hungarians of Transylvania now live will one day go beyond petty politics and artificially fuelled emotions, and turn cold and hostile for real, and a new generation will find it natural to be insensitive and distrustful toward us. And when that happens, there is no way one can stay put. No one can live in a place in peace, and stand his ground, when he knows he is not wanted there. Dignified group survival in the long run can only be imagined under fair and balanced economic and political conditions, in a much more considerate partnership. Respect for one another's interests and values can develop only in harmony and stability, when an individual is happy enough with his lot to be receptive to his neighbour's different ways, and feel as good about that neighbour's closeness as he does about his own gifts. According to all indications, we are immeasurably far from this state. In fact, I detect processes that are moving things in the opposite direction. I see familiar, ancient apathy teaming up with latter-day intolerance to form an alliance that's full of danger. And time is running out. Little by little, Eastern Europe's desperate poverty and drabness, like a sick coating, is covering up this historical landscape; the precious relics underneath are barely visible anymore. We do not know exactly what is happening there, and know even less about what will happen. We can only surmise, from what we do know about the nature of the place and its general tendencies, that in the sluggish, concentric currents of indifference and apathy, as in a slow, whirling eddy, the mementoes of our lives there will gradually go under.

Translated by Ivan Sander