THE BED

    
          There was neither a telephone nor any electricity at the Kivadár estate, where I was farming our portion of land left to us in 1946 after the land distribution. I used my bicycle and later a horse-drawn carriage to go to the post office and attend to other errands at Nagyatád. I had exchanged the horse from a Russian for a demijohn of schnapps.
          That morning too I was heading to Nagyatád for something or other to do with grain-dealing, when I caught sight of a solitary figure some distance away on the deserted highway. He was sauntering in the middle of the road to avoid puddles. When he got closer, he gave the carriage a wide berth, stepping right into the squelching mud. That is when I saw that the itinerant was none other than my friend Walter wearing a rain-drenched flimsy overcoat and city shoes. Coming to my senses after this surprise, I reached out my hand to help him climb up on to the rattletrap. We turned around and hacked along the road back to Kivadár. During the ride Walter told me that his wife, Bianca, had died. They had been married barely a year. Left on his own in the empty flat, he had remembered my frequent invitations, walked to the station and boarded a train.
                    “You did the right thing,” I said, and we hardly uttered another word; anyway, the rain started up again.  I had met Blanka only in passing, but I knew that she had been pregnant. In lieu of a proper whip, I prodded my nag by a swish on its rump with a twig cut from the edge of the woods; I wanted to get home as soon as possible. We immediately put Walter to bed in the former parsonage, where I lived with my mother and dried his clothes and shoes. By evening he had dined with us.  The butler-cook couple, who looked after our household (Vendel and Irma) – whom we had ‘inherited’ from the decrepit count who had been evicted from his country-seat on the shores of the river Dráva – thought that he was far too thin and decided to fatten him up. Food was still scarce in Budapest and many people were starving.
          My friend soon recovered, and Mother immediately took to him. She questioned him about everything, as was her wont, and we soon found out how Blanka had died - in childbirth. She would have needed oxygen, but the hospital did not have any. A few weeks afterwards, the baby, a boy, died as well. I had become acquainted with Walter Endrei through Cini Karinthy[i] who were classmates in the German Gymnasium. We first met in Cini’s flat, where Walter was already familiar with the marks scored on the wall above the bed, cataloguing our friend’s gallant conquests. From then on we frequently got together amid our wider circle of friends, where young poets, future writers, linguists, art historians and musicians congregated on Sundays. When it transpired how well our guest spoke the language, Mother changed the conversation to German, and Walter enjoyed listening to her stories about Berlin, the scene of her youth. Now it was he who asked the questions, and Mother reminisced about my grandfather, about court and embassy receptions, diplomats, artists, politicians. Walter was a born collector, and he stored the anecdotes in the pigeon-holes of his mind the same way as he stored his manuscripts, etchings, figurines and old swatches on the shelves of his apartment and in his cupboards. His passion for collecting was fired by his polymath-sized knowledge and interest – one could never be bored in his presence
          He was particularly amused by Mother’s ‘sayings‘, which she spontaneously blurted out in the course of these conversations. For instance, when we discussed the destruction of Berlin and she, recalling the old imperial capital, put, with an almost girlishly mischievous defiance this fullstop at the end of her sentence: - Ich bin eine Berlinerin (pre-empting J.F.K.).
          On another occasion the topic of Michael Károlyi[ii] came up. He had returned from exile a little while ago, and was being feted. He had served in his youth at the embassy and had courted my mother unsuccessfully. ”He almost became your father”, Mother remarked one day. This ’(mis)statement‘ of hers was not frivolity, rather her idiosyncratic turn of phrase, by which she referred to an old (and innocent) flirtation. Father had long been dead when she said it.
          Károlyi was a taboo topic in Hungary during the interwar years, and he was officially branded a traitor. In our family he was mentioned merely as a deluded reformer, bested by politics. When he became prime minister in 1918, he offered my uncle the post of foreign minister. Uncle Jóska declined the invitation in a friendly letter, referring to his legitimist (royalist) sentiments. ”That is why he didn’t shake hands with Horthy[iii] either” (meaning my uncle Jóska), Mother added. Even though the two men differed about politics, they concurred on neither of them touching Horthy’s hand. Subsequently my uncle became the foreign minister in the Huszár government. ”When the government introduced itself in parliament, a patriot in the back rows audibly sighed: Poor Hungary”, Mother recalled.
          The days passed with conversations along similar lines in the little house, surrounded by dormant fruit trees, which before the war had been the abode of the almost hundred-year old local priest, Uncle Domokos.
          As early as the summer I had made up my mind to organize a theatre in the undamaged wing of our ruined mansion. It was the oldest wing of the house, and even its roof was intact. Of the two-storeyed wing only the framework was still standing; it was unusable. I bought the Zsigmond Móricz version of Fazekas’s Ludas Matyi. I showed it to the singers of my Sunday choir, and when I asked them whether we should perform it, they went along with the suggestion enthusiastically. I let Hantosi, our former bailiff, in on the plan as well. He was complementing his reduced income by running a grocery shop at the far end of his house, which had become a kind of meeting place for the local farmers. His three sons were also a drawcard for the girls, thus it was almost a given that he should have a hand in the casting and coaching of the actors.
          Together with Hantosi and the members of the new company we proceeded to reconnoitre the site. Two rooms seemed to be suitable. The dividing wall had to be removed and the ceiling shored up. Two long-handled hammers were tracked down from somewhere. Jóska from Kispuszta, a lanky blond youth, leant on one, while Pityu, the dark-haired, burly son of Hantosi, grabbed the other one. Somehow they perceived the uniqueness of the moment, and, fixing their eyes on me, waited for me to give the signal to start demolishing the wall.  I gave them the nod, and the hammers swung into the air. Silently we watched the two boys battering down the partition. When the gaping hole grew big enough for them to slip through it, everyone applauded and cheered. The theatre was open. All of us set our hands to clearing the rubble now.
          By the next day we were already rehearsing there. Hantosi proved to be an excellent director, and managed by his authority to smooth many a ruffled feather due to casting jealousies. One had to consider parental sensibilities as well if for instance, instead of the vintner’s or the forester’s daughter, the waggoner’s or the farm labourer’s offspring was given preference for a part. Democracy had not yet penetrated into the deeper levels of their community.
          I confined myself manily to the role of ’dramaturge‘. I took part in the rehearsals and, if the occasion arose, acted as an extra in the ’crowd scenes ‘; for instance, when squatting down among the wailing women, I wept with them to boost the effect. Anna tied a black scarf on my head to look the part. As they took to the whole thing, the talents of the ad hoc actors burgeoned, and they gained in confidence.  Ludas Matyi’s part was played by Jóska from Kispuszta. In the interval he stepped up to me and announced that he just could not bring himself to utter the greeting ’Szabadság‘ (freedom) as prescribed by the script, because he wasn’t a communist. (The communists had established the salutation, usually accompanied by a forcefully raised clenched fist.) The members of the company agreed with Jóska, and we replaced ’Szabadság’ with the old ’Hello‘, ’Good Day’ and some colloquial country greetings.
          We advertised the performance by hand-written invitations; the news was quickly spread by word-of-mouth. Many people came from neighbouring villages and it was a great success. The following weekend we gave two performances. The acors became more confident, and spiced up their parts with improvisations and local dialect. ”T’was worth me while to come here” and many in the audience agreed. We concluded the ‘season’ with a party.
          Recalling these lovely weeks, I asked Walter to give some talks to the members of our troupe and their friends. There was a largish room in the nearby bailiff’s quarters that was used for corn husking and community pow-wows. There was even a stove in it. Walter gladly undertook the task and conquered the hearts of the young people. He talked about time, about the moon, the sun and the stars that seemed so close and shone so brightly above us as we walked out into the wintery night. At other times the topic was clothing and the development of spinning and weaving techniques. The girls knew a bit about that too from their mothers and grandmothers.  Walter, as a textile engineer, was already then interested in the history of textiles and weaving. Later on he became a world authority on the subject. We studied, improved our knowledge and concluded the evenings in song. Walter diligently took note of the words of those folksongs that were new to him, while I did the same with the tunes. A good time was had by all, and Walter put on weight. But the time came for him to return to Budapest.
          Soon I too followed suit. After my eldest brother came home, there was no longer any need for me on the land, and my mother would not be by herself either.
         

          I rented a room from a widow in Bajza Street. She had lost her husband and relatives in the Holocaust and had returned to her home from the liberated ghetto. She insulated her room by stuffing the gap under her door and the keyhole with rags to prevent her imaginary pursuers from blowing poison gas into it.  She constantly aired the place, even in the coldest of weathers, to make sure that no smoke should get stuck in any nook or cranny. Our windows opened across the opposite vacant block onto the back wall of a building in the neighbouring street. At night one or the other bathroom or lavatory window would light up according to the needs of the residents on the various floors. My landlady firmly believed that the bursts of light were signals directing the work of her pursuers, and she pulled down the blinds. However, the noise of the street and the jingle of the tram, as it creakingly turned the corner, could still be heard in the flat, and the sobering sounds of everyday life occasionally soothed the woman’s terror. She would then knock on my door, bearing a scarf-covered plate of cakes or some other appetizing tid-bits. She always wore black.
          I furnished my room with the pieces that I had moved to my friend, János Bartók’s apartment when ours was hit by a bomb. Walter was a frequent visitor. We decided that, in the footsteps of  La Bruyère who had translated and added an appendage to Theophrastos[iv], we shall write our own Les Caractères, modelled on the newly emerging types. We read out our sketches to each other and fine-tuned them, sardonically anticipating the reaction of our friends – since we lampooned them too – whom we now regularly met on the Svábhegy in the home of Gábor Devecseri[v] and his beautiful wife, Klári. The highlights of these gatherings on the lawn, or in wet weather indoors, were the Epepe performances. The genre had been born in Cini’s brain when, during one of the pre-war gatherings, vying with the brilliant rhymes of his poet-genius friends, he recited his epoch-making poem, it‘s lines pulsating with the dynamically variant rhythm of the recurrent ep syllable. The elemental effect of his performance overawed his companions who, themselves creative, visualised a new dramatic style. In this manner the Epepe drama came into being, it‘s language consisting of the two letter gobbledygook which expressed everything. The impromptu action in the author-actors’ presentation unfolded just like the leaves and flowers of plants in a high-speed film. These comedies mocking our world, and ourselves, spared no one, neither did they hurt anyone. What manifested itself in them was the joie de vivre (the absurdity?) of the post-war years.
          As a result of the success of Epepe, Theophrastos was somehow put on the backburner, with Walter also losing interest in it. By then he already had a fulltime job at the largest textile factory, whereas I only worked 2-3 days a week in the Association of Hungarian Musicians in Bajza Street. I was the widely travelled, erudite chief secretary, György Enyedi’s secretary, with a small remuneration.  We were involved in the administrative and personal problems of re-emerging musical life, and with restoring and establishing foreign relations. My most memorable activity was organizing the visit of the French composer, Olivier Messiaen, at the time still unknown in Hungary.
          The victorious allies were vying with each other in sending their cultural representatives to us. In the musical field the British sent the composer Michael Tippett (in whose opera Sári Déry had a part, but not a singing one), the Americans Leonard Bernstein (who conducted Rhapsody in Blue from the piano), the Russians Emil Gilels, the pianist, and the French Oliver Messiaen. Messiaen was the most outstanding composer of the post-Debussy and Ravel generation. With his innovative use of harmonies, rhythms and incorporating birdsong into his works, he created an individual style. His music was virtually unknown in Hungary. He arrived by train with the pianist Yvonne Loriod, who later became his second wife. The Alliance Française, who were looking after them, put them up in the convent of the Sacré Coeur nuns, where two freshly tuned pianos awaited them in the girls’ high-school.
          The unique nature of Messiaen’s musical language opened up new vistas in the music of our time. After the horrors of the war, his Quatuor pour la fin du temps ("Quartet for the end of time"), which he composed while a prisoner-of-war of the Germans, and which was performed in the foyer of the National Museum, sounded like a revelation. His music exuded the spirit of St. Francis of Assisi and the kind of moral strength that permeated the works of Béla Bartók – whose death in 1945 distressed us all.
          The other highlight of the visit was the lectures he gave in the Academy of Music. On two consecutive afternoons, Messiaen analysed Debussy’s opera, Pelléas et Melisande. Teachers, composers, students listened as their French colleague teased out the delicate strands of it‘s music. (Barely a year later, more or less the same artists sat around the official Soviet aesthetes, who were explaining the musical requirements of socialist realism. After that not only Messiaen’s, but Bartók’s number was also up in Hungary – for a while.)
          Messiaen and his companion left for France from the Eastern Railway Station. I took leave of them with an aching heart, in the sleeping car of the Orient express. The next time I saw them was in Sydney in 1988, when the 80 year-old master remembered each and every piece of his repertoire in Budapest.
         

          Since I could not make ends meet out of my salary, I looked for another job, which is how I came to be in the editorial office of the Szikra publishers and printers. They needed someone to look after their sporadic musical editions. My job entailed 2-3 days’ work, so I could balance it with my work at the Association. I became a job-hopper. I prepared pocketbook shaped folk-music booklets and choral works for publication.  My job involved talking to composers, music engravers, illustrators, and looking them up in their homes or workshops - thus I spent only a little time in the office. The work was new to me, but it did not take me long to learn it, as my colleagues were very helpful. I shared my room with a chubby faced, enthusiastic clerk, who was short of quite a few teeth, and somehow also held his head oddly. He had been an illegal communist in the old regime, caught several times, and meted out a thorough pummelling by detectives. After the liberation he became a member of the land distribution brigade, pegging out arable land. He chatted away cheerfully about all sorts of things while he taught me how to calculate, and took me down to the printing shop to show me what was what. He did not harbour the least resentment for the miserable treatment he had received. He felt that it had been worth it, because now the gates Paradise had opened up to him.
          Despite all his kindness, it was he who tipped the scales, when I decided to leave the Party that had counted me amongst its members for a short while.
          While I was still half-unemployed, an unknown couple looked me up in my lodgings. They were door knocking to recruit new members for the Party. Well-dressed, middle-class people, they were probably neophyte party members themselves. They held forth about the coming election, arguing that a strong party was needed to bring the recently announced 3-year plan to fruition. (In the previous elections, held in 1945, the Communist Party received only 17% of the votes.) The pride of the Party, the minister of economics, was trying to prove with the 3-year plan that there was no need for American aid through the so-called Marshall Plan, which was giving a new lease of life to the war-torn western countries. The Gerő Plan held out the promise of restoring the pre-war standard of life with many billions of investments, which would be financed by impositions on the bourgeois economy. (That this would mean nationalisation, compulsory agricultural deliveries, as well as the liquidation of traditional peasant society, was obvious only to the previous generation.) The plan appealed to me, and I signed the membership application.
          In the new democracy there was pressure from all sides to declare one’s affiliations. I felt closest to the Peasant Party, which was where my favourite writers gathered, and I also liked their programme of small landed estates, cooperatives, Danube federation and democracy. We went to the party’s headquarters with János Bartók and had a chat with the secretary, a friend of János’s. He said something like:” we’ll see how the grain sil separate from the chaff.” I pondered – did he mean his party or did he mean me? For the time being I did not make a decision, but since several of my friends were joining the Communist Party, or had already been communists during the illegal times, I supposed that I would be in good company there.
          The Monday morning following the elections, my angelic-looking office mate was in raptures about how they had sped along from village to village, flags fluttering, on the Communist Party’s trucks, with a bunch of blue voting-cards in their hot little hands, to give their multiple votes and inflate the Party’s chances. His story set me thinking. During the night I woke with a start: something was very much amiss, and I would be a traitor if I stayed in the Party – I didn’t belong to them. After a few weeks’ of mulling over the problem, I wrote a brief note to my boss, the manager of Szikra, to inform him that I was leaving the Party. I drank a cup of tea with a double shot of rum before I went to work that day.
         

           I was given the heatproof Jena glass tea-set, together with the Jamaican rum by my brand-new girlfriend, Panni Kovács. The teapot was decorated with coloured circles, and when it stood on the table, it seemed to filled the whole room. Walter had known Panni for quite some time; she had just divorced her husband and lived with her two-year old little girl, Ancsi, in her Koháry Street apartment. At the time she was just in the middle of reading Spengler’s The Decline of the West and asked Walter to explain the work’s main theses. Walter was still heartbroken about the death of his wife and baby. “I’ll gladly explain Spengler to you”, he said, “if you’ll introduce one of your girlfriends to me.” “OK” replied Panni, “but as an added extra you must introduce one of your friends to me; I am craving some company.”  “It’s a deal, but my turn must come first”, concluded Walter.
          Panni worked in the prestigious Grill bookshop in Dorottya Street, where the cream of the Budapest intellectuals (by now called “white-collar workers”) greeted each other while leafing though the new publications that appeared after the wartime lean years. Her colleague, Vera, the owner’s girlfriend, was not happy. Led by his capricious, tyrannical nature, her much older, married lover acted out his sadistic inclinations in their relationship, and Vera wanted to rid herself of him. Walter turned up just at the right time. He and Vera soon made friends, and Spengler came off well too. The three of them debated the pessimistic philosopher’s notions in the nearby Gerbeaud patisserie or in Panni’s apartment. All that was missing was the added extra.
          It was Walter’s idea that we should go for an outing on May 1 to the Angolpark, the Budapest amusement park. We decided to set out from my place. I was sitting at the upright piano when the doorbell rang. My landlady opened the door with surprising agility to Walter, who shepherded Vera and her petite, bright-eyed girlfriend in front of him. I made coffee in the percolator, we drank it, and off we went. We got on the underground at the Bajza Street stop.
          Mingling with the festive crowd swarming in the park, we moved from stall to stall until we settled at the shooting gallery, where I easily disposed of the ducks and rabbits progressing on the conveyor belt, and we kept on winning prizes. At the ghost train my new acquaintance and I went ahead, but having visited the underworld we could notfind Vera and Walter. For a while we pretended we were looking for them, after which I suggested that we have dinner at Gundels – perhaps they too will turn up there. The garden restaurant was still the old Gundel, elegant, high quality and pricey. The last time I had been there was on the occasion of Emil Gilels’s concert – he had played Beethoven’s sonatas in the restaurant. The buffet served after the concert was almost as great a success as the artist’s performance. Panni recalled teenage Sunday lunches there with her father and his friends, and the waiters’ hustling-bustling around the respected guests.
          We started the dinner with Újházy chicken soup[vi]. Having read Krúdy’s[vii] writings, I somehow regarded it as obligatory; Panni was fond of it too. She was busily spooning the golden liquid with the finely cut noodles – I posed questions, we chatted. When it came to paying the bill, I realized I didn’t have enough money on me. My dinner-partner brushed aside my embarrassment with a suave gesture – took out her purse and paid up. She told me later that her mother – brought up in the United States – had taught her always to have money on her when going on a date. Her advice certainly worked this time, and the headwaiter didn’t bat an eye at the chivalrous role-change. I gratefully invited Panni for a cup of tea at my place and we alighted together at Bajza Street.
          The ‘agents’ had already begun their operations by the time we got to my flat, so I pulled down the blinds. My guest looked around but didn’t sit down. I asked her what was bothering her. I addressed her in the formal way; after all we hardly knew each other, and anyhow it came naturally to me since both my mother and sister always used that form of address with me, as I did with them.
          “The furniture looks so familiar”, she said and wandered around my bed, which was a fashionable sofa bed. I only used it as a bed and didn’t put the bedclothes away during the day.
          “I slept in it at János’s place”, she exclaimed, pointing at the cracks and scratches that she recognized.
          “How on earth did that bed get here?”
          We looked at each other almost askance: what sort of trick was life playing on us now, after all the unexpected turns, twists, and coincidences we all had experienced during the war.
          “You should rather ask how it got there”, I replied somewhat aloofly, and told her why at the time I had entrusted my furniture to my friend.
          It turned out that János’s wife, Gabi, was Panni’s old classmate and best friend, and she had found refuge at their place during the Hungarian Nazi regime.
          “János was captured by the Russians in the street after he had visited me following the siege. They took him away as a prisoner-of-war, although he had never been a soldier. I somehow feel responsible.”
          “He is coming home soon” Panni comforted me. “His wife has had news about him.”
          “Then we must have taken turns in that bed” I joked, “because that summer I too slept there occasionally. It was in this bed that I used to wake up to the twittering of the birds.”        
          “I slept well in it too”, replied my visitor, “although I was worried about the round-up raids and the bombing.”
          The water was boiling. I took the kettle off the spirit heater.
          “I wonder what it would be like to sleep in it together?” I posed the question more to the bed than to Panni. My nerves were atingle, yearning for an answer. I sat down next to her and embraced her. She looked at me, didn’t say a word, but when I kissed her, she returned it. We were only a step away from the bed. We threw ourselves on it, ignoring the mysterious light signals cast at us through the chinks of the blind.
          I had met our mutual host, János Bartók, at the Academy of Music. He had an awkward, almost catatonic posture and a stumbling gait. He was somewhat older than I and studying to become a musicologist, collecting folksongs just like his famous uncle. On our excursions to the neighbouring villages, I tried to learn the ins and outs of the way he used the phonograph. He dressed shabbily and looked scruffy, but when he got married he made more of an effort to look respectable and his demeanour too became less rigid. Their apartment on the Rózsadomb was a meeting place for painters and members of the village explorer movement. They formed an organization called – if my memory serves me – Hungarian Fellowship (Magyar Közösség) aimed at offsetting the pro-German political trend by social events, exhibitions, and the like. They met on the first floor of the café on the Oktogon, I used to join them, but I had never met Panni there and didn’t know about her association with Gabi.
         

         
          The boss read my letter without batting an eyelid, but his eyes flashed as he raised them toward me. We looked at each other intently for more than just a moment. He was a washed out-looking man, whose uninspiring books had practically no readership. "Have you considered what you are doing?", he asked. "Yes", I replied, relieved that I was over the hump. I hadn't really discussed my decision with anyone (not that I had when I signed up either), I had only mulled over the pros and cons, but even without these I knew that I had to spit the vile-tasting lump out of my mouth. Now that it had happened, my self-confidence returned (nor had the effect of the rum evaporated yet), and I watched the reaction, as if I had been an outsider. My boss behaved in a fair manner, replacing my letter into its envelope without any further comment. All he said, was that he would pass its contents on to the party committee, and wishing me good luck, let me go.  His secretary buttonholed me in the corridor soon after – she already knew what was in the letter. She was a slim, tall, darkhaired girl, not all that young any more. We used to meet sometimes after work and got on well with each other.  I had wanted to tell her first what I had in mind, but somehow there was no opportunity, since she was always in a rush to get home to her ailing mother. "Why?" she queried with wide open eyes. "I don't want to belong to any party", I replied, and with that I re-entered my room, never giving a thought what the consequence of my action would be.
          The alarm bell sounded only when I told my friend, Béla Tardos, what had transpired. He was the one who had recommended me for the job. He was a student of Kodály's, a composer, was leading a workers' choir, was fond of jazz, bohemian friends, good food and drinks. "You didn't do the right thing, they'll fire you." he warned. "The Szikra is a Party enterprise. You are cutting your own throat" he added gloomily, and I agreed, although in my opinion I would do so if stayed in the Party. "But never mind" and his face lit up, "I'll talk to X and tell him to disregard your letter."  I must confess, I got a fright. Béla was an old communist, he knew the ropes. I didn't argue with him, thinking that he would forget all about it.
          We met again a few days later. He had spoken to my boss, who had told him. ”The Party is not a passageway” - said Béla and punched me in the back. We had a good laugh.
          It was a big load off my mind. The response of my boss relieved me of having to face my own cowardice. It was as if he had given me back my freedom. Perhaps the flash of his eyes was a portent of that.
          In the evening I told Panni what had transpired. She was glad, because she already knew ‘what these people are like‘. As a reward for his resistance activities, the first post-war government had appointed her ex-husband, K., head of the Police Department. Panni involuntarily became a witness to the ’abuses of power‘. The post-liberation euphoria burst like a bubble in her soul when she caught sight of the warped features of violence in the face of her husband and his cronies. She had experience in this. In 1944 she had faced the Gestapo's henchmen, when she went to their headquarters at the Hotel Majestic on the Svábhegy where they were interrogating K. She spoke good German and argued with the officers. They let K. go next day. They were both members of a cell in the resistance movement where danger lurked everywhere for them. They often changed lodgings, printed and distributed leaflets, rescued the persecuted and each other. K. sheltered Panni from having to wear the yellow star, and she rescued him from the Germans.
          I must give credit to my employers for not sacking me. I carried on with my work undisturbed (for the time being). When my new room mate in the office, Ádám Réz, looked at me sometimes searchingly, it appeared to me that he had an inkling of what was going on, and perhaps even crossed his fingers for me. With his red hair, rosy cheeks, intelligent green eyes, he could have stepped out of an Evelyn Waugh novel, and his witty sense of humour refreshingly dispelled my anxiety. It was at that time that the translations of Thomas Mann's Dr. Faustus, and the novels of Sartre and other western authors were published, and we talked about them. Strangely, I seemed to discover the affirmation of my inner thirst for freedom in the existentialist philosophy of the communist-sympathizer Sartre.
          The folk-song booklets and our other musical publications turned out exceptionally well. Their attractive appearance was due to the work of the music engravers and the illustrator, Piroska Szántó. There were two engravers - father and son. Wearing their thick-lensed glasses, they were bent over the brass panel, onto which they etched the notes, the soaring legato staffs and the signs of rhythm and dynamics with their steel pens. I watched them working as each plate became a masterpiece. They lived in a one-storey house in Víg Street. This and the parallel street, Conti Street, were the city's red-light district, where work did not stop during the day either. I visited the music engravers every week and the girls soon came to recognize and greet me.
          Piroska Szántó's cheerful drawings animated the perfectly engraved notes, and the singer would only have to add his or her voice to make a song out of them. The painter lived on St. István Boulevard with her partner, the poet. When we were finished with the illustrations, I had a look at her paintings of cornfields. The melancholy of the pictures, depicting shrivelled leaves and dried stalks were a welcome counterpoint to the mood of those jostling and agitated times. Piroska Szántó talked with me in a very empathetic manner, and I left her studio with a refreshed soul.
         

         
          In the last years of the war, my brother Laci worked at the embassy in Zagreb. He was taken prisoner by the Russians a the consulate in Vienna. It so happened that the Soviet officer who interrogated him was of Hungarian origin, and had relatives in Budapest. Laci pledged that if he released him, he would pay them in gold coins, which is how he returned home. He regained his job in the Foreign Ministry, working on the international codes and living there, in an out of the way office. The doorman at the ministry used to work for our uncle. We knew him since our childhood – Laci took his meals with them. When I visited my brother, I did not announce myself by our regular name but used my mother's maiden name. I had changed my name in 1942, and from that time on, until I left the country, I was Béla Szőgyény. There was no male descendant on the maternal side, the family would have died out, and that was the reason I gave for the change, but in reality I wanted to assert my ’persona‘ and perhaps my opposition to what I had seen around me in the world. In today's parlance: I was searching for my identity. No wonder that the wider family raised their eyebrows at this manifestation of my self-interpretation, never reproaching but letting me do my own thing.
          My change of name brought me some advantages in this topsy-turvy world. No one knew me apart from my relatives and friends. Still, one could not wipe off with one fell swoop what had been written onto the imaginary tabula rasa from the moment of our conception. I soon realized this, which is why I felt so uncomfortable among the ’comrades‘ - feeling I was living a double life, or at least that I was living incognito.
          I never felt that way in the company of the composer Endre Szervánszky[viii]. I could not consider him my friend yet, but a certain mutual trust had developed between us. He was a man in constant turmoil. His music too was suffused by this nervous tension and feverish quest. He was trying to reconcile his belief in communism (he had been a party member since illegal times) with his religiosity and the cult of the Virgin Mary, seriously believing that this was possible.
          I kept in contact with the Party's cultural department on behalf of the Association of Hungarian Musicians. Its secretary, Mrs. Antal – a relative of our famous pianist – empathized with the musicians' problems and wherever she could, assisted in reviving musical life. Her office was in the Party's Akadémia Street headquarters, and Szervánszky took part in one of our conferences. I cannot recall what it was all about, only that Bandi was dead against it. Together we left the building, which was guarded by ÁVO-men. Bandi was walking beside me with his slightly waddling yet forceful gait. He was fuming, wanting to vent all that was still pent up with him. I was listening to him diligently, making sure meanwhile that we were going in the direction of Szabadság Square, where the Foreign Ministry was housed at the time. When we got there, I asked him, whether he minded if we interrupted our conversation for a few minutes as I had to see my brother and would he accompany me? Bandi was just talking about László Rajk[ix], hoping that the influence of Rajk and his circle would balance out the Muscovites' alienating politics. He said he wouldn't come with me, but prefers to wait for me in the fresh air.
          I was going to see Laci about money. Part of the land that we could retain, was woodland, which we had felled. We sold the timber to a Slovak timber merchant, Tuka, the mountebank nephew of the former Slovak president, who paid us in Napoleon gold coins. Later he borrowed back some of them from my brother, but never repaid him. Laci stored the coins in the safe where the cipher code was kept. Having‚tanked up‘ (from my share), I hastened back to Endre. He was sitting on the stone wall surrounding the flower beds, deep in thought. Perhaps he was composing his newest piece, which was fueled by the contradictions raging in his soul. He composed Bartók-inspired, avant guard music, experimenting with dodecaphony. It didn't take us long to find out that it was precisely this trend that Soviet ideology condemned and branded as ‚formalist‘ (just as the Nazis had branded it ‚degenerate‘). Our enlightenment took place at the meeting of the Soviet-Hungarian Friendship Society. Three representatives of the Soviet Composers Association acquainted us (drummed into us by way of an interpreter) with the official guidelines, which Zhdanov, the alcoholic secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had concocted. His doctrine lined up ‚social realism‘ imbued with a strong sense of nationalism, against the ‚cosmopolitan‘, ‚formalist‘ artists‘ aberrations. Zhdanov did not only divide art, but also the world into two camps: democratic and imperialist. The Soviet Union headed the former, while America represented the latter.  (Incidentally President Truman did the same by his doctrine – only the other way around. The USA saw itself as the defender of democracy by aiming to prevent countries falling into the Soviet sphere.) The deeper the Russian messengers delved into explicating the Zhdanovian canons, the gloomier became the expression on the assembled musicians' and critics' faces. An ominous presentiment wafted through their souls while listening to the Soviet inspired, bigoted aesthetics. Endre was also sitting among them. Looking at him I thought he would explode when the Soviet colleagues proffered Tchaikovsky's music as an example.
          "Gutter-music", he hissed, as we left the building. He was so incensed that he sat abruptly down on the curb, as if to demonstrate the weigh of his words. Perhaps Bandi did not really flare up because of the innocent Tchaikovsky, but rather because of his dismay at what would befall Hungarian music (and the country) under the Russian thumb.
          Now, though, not everything seemed lost. The optimists still hoped that it would be different in Hungary to the Soviet Union, and that a form of life and government would evolve where everyone could feel at ease. Nor were the communists in a hurry to dispel this illusion; pretending to abide by the rules of democracy. However, this state of affairs did not last for long. Stalin's hammer knocked the bottom out of the castles in the air, and the Hungarian party had to prove they could transform a majority into a minority. By using the so-called ’salami tactics‘, they disintegrated and crushed the parties of the coalition and the opposition from within slicing away at the salami of democracy, until only its rump remained in the hand of Stalin's butcher boy, Mátyás Rákosi[x]. In his other fist, he held the knife.
          As they say: ‘appetite comes with eating‘, and gorging themselves on salami was soon followed by the liquidation of the internal opposition and the Churches by the trials of Mindszenty[xi] Cardinal and László Rajk. Musical publications were terminated at the Szikra, and I was made redundant.  I moved from my room to Pasaréti Road. The son of my new (also widowed) landlady had emigrated and worked in Italy as the chauffeur of an American general. My brother also left the country. He had travelled to Ankara as a courier, when he heard the news that the leader of the majority Smallholders' Party, Prime Minister Ferenc Nagy had resigned. He was in Switzerland, but did not return home, because he feared for his freedom and for his life. On hearing the news, the ambassador recalled my brother from the border, and advised him not to go back. Laci travelled to Rome and on the invitation of a colleague who was pursuing his priestly vocation, found a safe haven in a seminary cell. Soon after he was employed by the IRO (International Refugee Organization).
         

          I was not unemployed for long either. When my colleague from the Academy of Music and the hostess of the Epepe circle, Klári Huszár, learned that I had lost my job (though I was still working for the Association of Hungarian Musicians), she suggested that I try for a position at the Magyar Radio. By then she was already working for its education department and promised to put in a word for me. My application was successful.
          I started at the bottom becoming a ’turner‘. The musical and spoken programs broadcast from records were handled by the turners in a studio specially set up for this purposes. We achieved the sequence and smooth transition of works extending over several records (before the era of LPs) by flicking the switch at the exact moment when the grooves of the two records – on two different turntables – sounding the last and first notes respectively, harmonized. This moment, requiring absolute precision, was the turners' pride and joy, and some of them flicked the switch with the same flourish as a piano virtuoso, who raises his hand sky-high after a particularly impressive chord.
          It was also the turners' task to choose and play the background music and sound effects for the radio dramas. The Radio received most of the sound effect records from the BBC. It was from these and the music records that we mixed and played the arrangements needed for the radio dramas and other productions. We marked the required parts with a wax pencil, just as we marked the wax records containing the interviews and reports that lent colour to the daily news. As a result the announcers also worked from this studio.
          The technical department of the Radio recorded every phase of Cardinal Mindszenty's trial onto wax records (there was no magnetophone yet). I happened to be on duty for the evening news. The announcer was just clearing his throat when the door opened and in came the newly appointed communist party secretary with the supervisor. He stepped straight up to me and handed me the day's transcript, from which he had deleted a few lines with a red pencil.  He asked me to omit those lines from the record as well. There was no time to think, I looked for the spot and with my wax pen marked the sections to be deleted from the cardinal's statement. When it came to playing the record, I falsified the recording by flicking the switch. The party secretary shook my hand and left fully satisfied. The next day our strikingly attractive blond announcer burst into tears when she was handed the report of the Mindszenty trial. Her older female colleague – left over from the old guard – took over from her, and there was no scandal.
          Simon – the young party secretary – hailed me as an acquaintance. He had been an iron worker and after the war repaired and sold kerosene heaters from a workshop in the courtyard of a building in Népszínház Street. He sang in the choir led by József Gát, which is where I met up with him. I needed a heater and bought one from him. I used to look in on Simon on my way to the music engravers in Víg Street to have a chat with him in his well-heated workshop. He had mentioned he was attending a political course in his free time. The shop closed in summer, and the next time I saw Simon was when, after his appointment, he visited the studios to introduce himself. "Hi! (Szervusz)", he blurted out, when he saw me. Both of us were surprised, and my standing in the eyes of my colleagues immediately grew (or declined). They were trying to guess what the new boy's role would be. It was soon evident already during the first days that he was not intending to play the part of an extra at the Radio.
          When I began there, cooperation between old professionals and various newly appointed administrators and department heads was disturbed only on the surface by the various political machinations. The head of our department, old Tóni Feszler, was a retired hussar officer assuring the smooth running of the broadcasts by his good-natured command of the army of announcers, turners and technicians. The announcers were also a motley crew, made up of the old and the new. Formal, middle-class pronunciation, Budapest slang, or provincial accents alternated. This variety was further enhanced by the fact that, during the late-night and dawn broadcasts, the turners substituted for the announcers. We presented the time, the weather, and often also chose the music program ourselves. At the time Edith Piaf's La vie en rose was a big hit, and on Panni's nameday I started the morning program with it as my tribute to her. She had set her alarm clock in order to listen to it. My colleagues also liked the song, and it became en vogue to slip it into the morning program. We wanted to see the darkening world through rose-tinted glasses.
          Zoltán Kodály had already made recordings of various regional and urban accents during the war years. Thanks to his insistence, prospective announcers were being vetted by a committee consisting of expert philologist-phoneticists and actors. The results were obvious. It was a pleasure to listen to the winner of the first competition, who made full use of the melodious nature and the resonant vowels of our language. At the same time the custom of the turners substituting for the announcers at dawn and during the night was also stopped.
          My announcer colleague, B., an old social democrat, liked his drink, which he did not deny himself even during working hours. All he needed to do was to cross the road to the corner pub for a throat-clearing glass. One morning, while the two of us were alone in the studio, he wanted to vent his spleen on me for having had to get up early. He told me that the workers were dissatisfied, and the news that he was reading on air had no basis in fact. He knew, because he lived in a working-class suburb from where he commuted every morning, not like I did from the Pasarét. It did not do him any good that we played La vie en rose; he did not see the world through rose-tinted glasses. "You are right", I replied, because I have never been to a factory, nor have I met any workers except in choirs; how could I have known? Our conversation was cut short by the broadcast, but we continued it in the pub. It was at that time that the Tito-Stalin conflict broke out. The hostile propaganda was announced in Serbian from our studio by a gargantuan ex-partisan and his female partner of similar girth. They hurled threatening abuse at their national hero Tito, the imperialists' chained dog and his ‘yelping‘ cohorts. "You see?" B. lectured me when this topic came up between two glasses of wine.
          Following the conversation, I thought to myself how strange it was that even now (after the war) I was still one of the privileged, and still living a double life. I had pangs of conscience about what had happened with the Mindszenty record, and especially the ease with which I had carried out Simon's instruction. I felt that, even though I had tried to distance myself from those whose methods I condemned, I was going to be their accomplice through my work. The problem was that I liked my work. I was promoted and became the musical director of the Education Department, moved up to the first floor. Now I had a desk.
         

 
          My new position made it possible for me to live a ‘normal‘ life: I got rid of the bothers (but also the advantages) of working the dawn and night shifts. Panni and I decided to move in together. After a short search we rented a top floor apartment in a villa on the Rózsadomb. The view from the large terrace of the house in Berkenye Street opened onto a well-kept garden and further away to the city – a veritable fairy-tale palace in our circumstances. The bachelor living downstairs was pretty harmless. Our housekeeper, Teri, was like a member of the family – she cooked. We enrolled Ancsi in the nearby kindergarten. It was obvious that we could not afford this lifestyle from my salary alone, but for the time being we did not give it a thought. We felt at home in the roomy apartment, and sometimes I even deceived myself into thinking that it was a recompense for my lost home. We even toyed with the idea of buying a car and visiting my mother. Nothing came of the purchase – we went to see her by train. Mother received her future daughter-in-law with open arms, but I could sense that the farm girls threw her questioning glances. We hurried back to our fairy-tale palace, and on my way to work next day I felt that I was happy. Panni worked too, no longer in the bookshop, but in an office where she could arrange her hours to be able to pick up Ancsi from kindergarten.
          We lived on a shoestring, without a thought for the future, not realizing in our naivety how uncertain it was. Four dray-horses pulled the cart up to the house with the coal that Panni had ordered already in the summer to make sure we would not freeze in winter. Some extra income came our way now and then from Kivadár, where some of the new landowners bought the occasional one or two acres from what had remained of our land to supplement the meagre lots that they had been given during the land distribution. Little did they, or we, know that the ’state‘ would appropriate the land left after the distribution, and force the new owners into kolkhozes (collective farms).
          But first the banks and large enterprises were nationalized. Panni's father owned a textile mill, which he had worked hard to rebuild and restart after the war. "First the Germans took it away, and now the communists", he said in Vienna, from where he did not return when he found out what had happened. He became an Austrian citizen, and Panni's mother left to join him.                                                                                                                           
          My brother Józsi decided to emigrate. He saw no sense in staying at Kivadár, where he was farming together with our elder brother Zsiga. He could not get a passport and was therefore planning to leave the country ’illegally‘ on a Russian-Austrian truck. Several of our acquaintances had already succeeded in reaching Vienna the same way as it seemed a safe route. Prior to his departure he came to Budapest and stayed with us. We had other visitors as well - two men from the economic police. They came in connection with Panni's father's block of flats; I no longer recall what their pretext was, a leaking roof, neglected maintenance or some such matter. They were searching for documents, harassed Panni, ransacked her desk and read her diary. The fact that the building was no longer owned by my future father-in-law (because of the nationalization) did not bother them one iota; they obviously wanted to fish in murky waters. I was at work, and my brother Józsi was crouching in my room. Panni had bundled him in there with the idea that if the men discovered him, she would say that he was the lodger. Luckily it never came to that, because when they realized that I worked at the Radio, the gangsters took off. Józsi ventured out of the room. If he had harboured any doubts so far about leaving the country, these had now evaporated. The truck was leaving in the morning, and we were certain that the next news from him would be about his safe arrival in Vienna the following day.
          It was not to be. The truck was stopped by Russian military police at Győr, who escorted it to Vienna. There they accommodated the refugees not in the Hotel Sacher but in the prison at the Russian headquarters. Józsi and his fellow escapees had discarded their jewels and gold coins en route because they believed that their punishment would be less severe if they did not have any valuables on them; smuggling carried extra penalties. Yet the Russian interrogating officer for whom Józsi translated, would have been willing to let him go in return for a large sum. This could not eventuate (if it ever could have), as the prisoners were taken back to Budapest, to the Russian headquarters’ prison in Vilma Királyné Road. From there Józsi was taken by the ÁVO to 60 Andrássy Road[xii], thence to the internment camp at Kistarcsa. He could not send any news, and it took us a long while to discover where he was being held.
          Fortnightly Sundays were visiting days. We travelled to Kistarcsa by HÉV (the local train service). Squeezed between passengers laden with food parcels, the wife of our neighbour, Guido Görgey with her few-months old infant in her arms, wasalso on her way to visit her husband, which is how we found out that he was also being held in the camp. Guido had taken an active part in the resistance during the German occupation, and had saved lives by the dozen – Jews condemned to deportation as well as deserters. He did his bit for me too, when I refused to retreat with my unit to the West. After the war he had worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He was arrested by the Military Political Department charged with spying.
          The camp commander was a one-legged lieutenant-colonel, nicknamed ’Dreifuss‘ by the prisoners because he was on crutches. He did everything to make the visitors feel uncomfortable. He took sadistic pleasure in surveying the queue of countesses, neatly-dressed burghers, women in scarfs, dandies, rag-tag gipsies. Limping up and down the queue, he criticized and disparaged the visitors of the people's enemies. He had an amazing four-letter word vocabulary, which probably came from his gravedigger past. The friends and relatives, clutching their parcels, did not dare to make even the slightest sound, except for Panni who gave as good as she got. "Why don't you let us in?", she shouted at him. "Why do you make us wait?" The ’Tower-keeper‘ (another of his nicknames) looked up with a start to see who had dared to interrupt him. He saw a young woman, and next to her a somewhat taller and more rotund mother with a baby in her arms. He flew into a rage, but as he momentarily did not know how to punish the spoilsport, heturned on his heels – as well as he could with his peg leg – and started off towards the building. He called out from the gate: "You talk back to me, you can end up in here as well! You'd better take notice, the old world is over!" That we had to agree with.
          A detailed list specified the permitted quantity of the various food items: sugar, butter, bacon, eggs, etc. If someone overstepped the margin, they confiscated the whole parcel.  We measured out the rations on the kitchen scales with Teri's help. Preparing the parcel took hours, and we never knew whether it would actually reach Józsi. In the visiting room a tall, densely woven screen separated the prisoners from their visitors, who, tightly pressed together, tried to make themselves heard above the babel of voices. I reassured Józsi that we were doing everything we could to get him out of there. And he set our minds at ease that he could bear up until then. We went back to our home crestfallen, almost ashamed of ourselves. We truly believed we could get Józsi out, or at least manage to have him before the court in a short while, where a good lawyer could arrange for him to get away with a light sentence for his escape attempt. When we saw that we were getting nowhere, we turned to a shyster who was supposed to have good ‚connections’. He promised Józsi's release as a certainty, but first we had to deposit the money. He was followed by other shady characters and we sold gold coins and other valuables to pay for the bribes andthe go-betweens' fees. Panni fought for Józsi's freedom like a Leonora, but to no avail.
          More-and-more soldiers of the ÁVO in their blue-tabbed uniforms appeared in the streets, on the buses and trams – tight-lipped rookies whom no one wanted or dared to engage in conversation. Late one afternoon I went for a walk with Ancsi on the Rózsadomb. From the top of the hill we could see the backyard of a new house. It was encircled by a brand-new shining wire fence and guarded by two ÁVO soldiers. The presence of the guards with their Russian-style service caps was a chilling sight amid the peaceful houses, and even Ancsi sensed this – she grasped my hand even tighter as we walked along. The soldiers were guarding the villa of a minister and eyed us suspiciously.
          The home of László Rajk on Szemlőhegyi Road was not guarded by soldiers. He was popular and slated as the Party's future leader. He could not guess that he would be hoist by his own petard by having established the ÁVO in his capacity of Minister of the Interior and organized the first show trials. The henchmen took him one early summer evening from the side of his wife and newborn son. The legendary communist suddenly turned into a spy, an agent of the ’imperialists‘ and of Tito, or so his own party claimed. He was indicted and hauled before the court. The radio broadcast the trial. There was no need for falsifying his testimony, because, encouraged (and tortured) by his comrades, the accused ‘confessed‘ everything. The ‘people‘ were not particularly concerned with facts or the accusation was true or not. Harvesting was under way in the country, and the townspeople were already rendered indifferent by the theatre of the earlier trials. No one dared voice doubts, and party members soothed their consciences (if they had any) by their trust in the infallibility of the leader of Party. K., Panni's ex-husband did not delude himself. Although he was studying at the Party's elite academy, and the principal held out the promise of a brilliant career, he feared he too would become enmeshed in the trap the Muscovite leader was setting. He decided to decamp. He came to take leave of us, and promised to help if we too decided to leave. Together with his police chief friend, he reached Vienna via Czechoslovakia.
          I did not mention my Sunday excursions at the Radio. The Rajk case intimidated everybody. Whom could I have trusted? Who could have helped me?
          My friend, who worked in the political department, the son of a prosperous upper-middleclass family, once expounded to me that the proof of total solidarity and dedication to the new regime was committing an act from which there was no turning back. The interest of the Party surpassed every ethical consideration. It was as he had said: "Soil your hands (lie, cheat, inform on people, etc.) and then you truly belong to us.” His twisted idealism was fostered – among others – by the figure of the nursemaid, who was worshipping the picture of Stalin, her liberator, in her servant's room. Did he want to egg me on or encourage himself? He only found out that at the time I was no longer a party member, when we met on my visit back to Hungary. From the café near the Danube he led me down to the lower embankment, where we talked. By then he was working for a newspaper, writing articles on the economy. We walked toward the Margaret bridge on thetrack along the grassy embankment, where no one could overhear our conversation. "The country is bankrupt", he said. "We are living on foreign loans." I was walking on his right, and I thought to myself, if I pushed him into the Danube, only the fish would be any the wiser. But that was only a fleeting flight of fancy. We sat down on the steps, and remained friends.
          After the Rajk trial, armed ÁVO guards were placed along the Radio building's corridors. We were provided with red-covered photo IDs, and could not move around the place without displaying them, even if the steely-eyed guard had seen our photo a dozen times. Visitors were given temporary identity papers. Even those more bohemian colleagues who had so far shrugged off any talk about politics were taken aback. The presence of the ÁVO guards poisoned the hitherto open atmosphere that had been taken for granted in the life of the organization that employed artists.
          Panni and I got married at the local council chamber in July. Panni's witness was an elderly family friend (whose son had left Hungary), and mine my friend, Emil Sóváry. I had met Emil at the Air Defence Artillery, where we had both served. He lived on the Rózsadomb in the family home and, following in his father's footsteps, chose to become an engineer. After the war he told me that ever since his university days he had been a member of the illegal communist movement. After the siege, his father got into an argument with the Russian soldiers ransacking their house which turned into a skirmish, and the Russians shot him. His eldest son, who hurried to his defence, was also shot. Emil buried them both in their garden. He dug the grave himself in the frozen soil. Afterwards he went to the Party's headquarters and handed back his membership card. Nonetheless, he had an outstanding career and received the Kossuth prize in recognition of his achievements.
          The final impetus for leaving Hungary was a letter that we received, informing us that we would have to share our apartment with a joint tenant. It was the beginning of the process that culminated in the deportations euphemistically called ’resettlement’. Apartments were divided, doors walled up, but the kitchen and bathroom had to be shared with strangers. We pre-empted this unpleasantness. Teri's boyfriend, who was a policeman,  registered himself at our address and they became our joint tenants.
          Another reason why we could not delay our plan to leave was because of Panni’s pregnancy. The Austro-Hungarian border was sealed off (I cannot say ‘protected’) by barbed wire fences and minefields and guarded by border guards. It was almost impossible to cross it without a guide. Panni’s parents were organizing everything from Vienna. Our arrangement was that a messenger would bring the news when to leave. In the meantime we were to get ready. The messenger would have a family amulet with him for identification.
          By now I was totally immersed in my double life. During the day I did my work, at night I conspired. We took some of our valuables to friends, and my upright piano to János Bartók (again). Friends of ours – both doctors – provided us with a mild sedative dissolved in syrup, in case Ancsi became restless during the trip.
          Meanwhile we were preparing for Christmas, when – as usual – the radio would transmitBeethoven'sNinthSymphony. Last year I was still turning it, but this year I would celebrate at home. Ancsi learned Gábor Devecseri's little poem by heart (from me?):
         
                                                “Full of troubles, I’m in the pits all this worry gives me the ... (fits)”
         
                                                („Tele vagyok gonddal-bajjal, Tele van a popszim vajjal.”)
         
          - which she declaimed in the kindergarten to the teachers' consternation and merriment.
          At the Radio we subscribed to the peace loan (which was in fact a form of indirect taxation), and no one talked about László Rajk's execution any more. Nor were the partisan announcers as angry as they had been. Superficially the equilibrium had been restored.
         

         
          My colleagues had already left, and I was sitting in the office, when the phone rang. "We have a visitor", Panni informed me. "I'm coming", I replied and put down the receiver. My heart was pounding as I looked around to see what to do before I left. The peace loan pledge list was lying in my desk drawer. I filled in the maximum amount and put it back into my desk together with my red ID; I rang for a taxi.  In the corridor I greeted the morose ÁVO guard with a friendly smile. Who knows, we might just meet again if I got caught.
          "I'm seeing you for the last time" - I took leave of the Margaret Bridge as we drove across it. A calm and collected young man awaited me at home in the company of Panni and Ancsi. The amulet was on the table. ”You have to leave the following day on the Győr-Sopron train”, the young man told us. He placed a stamped residence form in front of me to fill in. At the station exit border guards checked the passengers' papers, and with these we would be able to prove that we were locals.  I filled in the name that I had used as a deserter: Béla Szecsődi, occupation: secondary schoolteacher. A couple would wait for us at the station exit, they will have a bike with them, continued the messenger, they will escort us to the smugglers. We should take a minimum of luggage, more would hinder our hike. I knew what he was talking about - I had wandered a fair bit around that neighbourhood during my stint in the army at Eszterháza.
          Only a few of our friends knew about our plan. If anyone else were to ring us, Teri would say that we had gone to Kivadár. Whatever we left in the apartment, we bequeathed to her and her fiancé. József Gát lived in nearby Áfonya Street. I went to see him to say goodbye, but also to calm my nerves. "They shoot now", Jóska warned me, "they have orders, I heard it the other day." I had no doubts about his information, Jóska being the conductor of the ÁVO's choral group. I couldn't say that the news had set my mind at ease, but neither did it deter me. There was no turning back. I was determined to escape - again. This time from a future which had nothing to offer us.
          By the time I arrived home, Panni was ready. When she put Ancsi to bed, she told her we were going to visit my mother in the morning. Our daughter was the only one of us who slept peacefully that night. We were spending our last night in our home.
          The Győr-Sopron train was jam-packed, and Ancsi kept insistently bombarding us with her questions: Where does Grandmother live? Has she got any dogs and cats? The syrup had no effect whatsoever. Other passengers, including the dozing young border guard, paid not the slightest notice, but to me it seemed as if all eyes were upon us. Evening had fallen by the time we reached Sopron. A friendly looking woman sat opposite us. As we got off, she said with a telling glance: "You'll have a hard time".
          Panni was already outside when my turn came. The green-tabbed guard scrutinized my residence paper at length, but I acted as if I were following Panni, and pulled it from his hand. He did not reach for it, and I let myself be propelled out the gate by the crowd. We heaved a sigh of relief when we caught sight of the couple with the bicycle. We sat Ancsi in the bike's basket and the man pushed it. All our belongings were in a small bag. As we left the town we came to a forest, where fresh snow covered the trees. We saw four people in the clearing: a woman and three men. The woman and one of the men were also would-be escapees, the other two smugglers. Young, strong, mountain climbing types, they spoke German. Before our very eyes they pulled heavy calibre weapons from under a wood-stack.  "If the guards shoot, they will shoot back", explained the woman’s companion. "They had been SS soldiers during the war". The smugglers fished a thermos bottle out of their backpacks and offered us mulled wine. We settled on taking turns carrying Ancsi piggyback, else she would have disappeared in the snow. She was no longer asking questions. She watched our preparations with sleepy eyes – what was happening was a more exciting adventure than visiting Granny. Before setting out, the man – a dental technician by trade – took out his red-covered party card and, tearing it to pieces, tossed it theatrically into the air. "This is how one should defect!" he boasted. The bits of paper floated soundlessly down with the snowflakes.
          We started out in the knee-high snow. Panni, by then three months pregnant, felt the weight of her drenched sheepskin coat. She took it off, and one of the smugglers flung it over his own shoulders. Ancsi was riding on the shoulders of the other smuggler. When we came close to the wire fence, we dropped flat on our stomachs and waited. The smugglers kept looking at their watches, then one of them went ahead. We waited with bated breath. After a little while he made a hissing sound, and off we scrambled after him. We crawled under the wires, pushing Ancsi ahead. On the other side we took to our heels and didn't stop until we reached a clearing. "Now you can sit down", said the smugglers, pointing at some tree stumps. We cleared the snow off them, but Ancsi demurred: "It's dirty", she said, and we had a good laugh, but only quietly, and our insides were suffused with warmth: we have made it – we were in Austria.
          Leaving the forest behind, we headed for some lights in the distance. They were already waiting for us in the house at the edge of the village, and by the time we had a wash and took off our soaking wet shoes, dinner was ready: steaming hot gulyas soup. We got the bed with the doona, and slept like logs. For some reason the dental technician's partner shared the wide bed with us. In the morning a car, a Viennese taxi stopped in front of the house. We farewelled our hosts and our companions and got in the car. The smugglers accompanied us. In Vienna, we stopped in the street opposite the house where Panni's parents lived. One of our guides got out and entered the house. He returned a few minutes later and opened the car door. He had received the money, we were free to go. They both escorted us across the busy street and ’delivered’ us into the arms of the parents waiting in the doorway. A decorated Christmas tree stood in the sitting room. We lit the candles, even though Christmas Eve was still four days away.
         

          We thought of Józsi; we had left him in the lurch. We were already in Australia when my brother Zsiga wrote that he had been taken to a labour camp somewhere in the Mátra Mountains. That was all he wrote – letters were censored. At least he is in the fresh air, we thought naively. The place where they were banished to might as well have been in Siberia; neither Józsi nor his companions knew where they were being taken until the guards opened the cattle trucks at the Recsk-Parádfürdő railway station. An ÁVH[xiii] corps awaited them there, on foot and on horseback, with dogs. They were chased at the double to the half-finished camp some 4 ks distant, the corps kicking and beating stragglers. In the camp, stripped naked, they had to hand over the last bits of their meagre belongings. Their more valuable ones – watches, wallets, etc. – had already been taken from them at Kistarcsa. Seeing the machine guns turned at them, some thought of the German death camps, and believed that an execution squad would finish them off. However, instead of being mowed down, the fate that awaited them was being buried alive behind a triple barbed wire fence.
          Zsiga only found out by a fluke where Józsi was. Ernő Klausz from Kivadár and Hantosi's other son, Ferenc, worked in the Zabar state farm, in the neighbourhood of Salgótarján. Laci, Ernő's son (and the confirmation godson of Ferenc), spent his summer holidays at the farm with his father, who taught him to ride a horse. He spent his time riding around with his friends in the nearby woods and fields, when he caught sight of the quarry. Prisoners clad in red-striped clothing were working there with armed guards watching them. He could only watch them from afar and he did not dare venture any closer, because he was afraid of the guards. He told his father and his godfather about his experience, and they managed to find out on the quiet where the camp was and eventually that Józsi was there. Zsiga found out from them.
          The camp at Recsk, set up dictatorially by the ÁVH on the pattern of the Soviet forced labour camps, did not exist officially and did not show up in ministerial statements. The social composition of the close on 1,800 prisoners languishing in it, could well have been a cross-section of the country's population. Recalcitrant social democrats, disloyal communists, railwaymen accused of sabotage, peasants, public servants, doctors, teachers, engineers, army officers, aristocrats and the iconic poet, György Faludy were crammed together on the multi-tiered bunks with flea-ridden straw mattresses. If one of them turned, the whole row had to turn with him. Just as Józsi, most of them had been taken there from the Kistarcsa internment camp, without a trial, arbitrarily. The list of trumped up charges ran the gamut from illegal border crossing, espionage (e.g. a letter sent abroad) to sabotage and treason (say, someone defaced a Party's poster), and there was no one in the country who could not be arrested for something or other in the street, in their home or workplace.
          The prisoners had to quarry stone from the ‚Csákánykő‘ rock with their bare hands and primitive tools. Their clothing was deplorable, their provisioning totally inadequate. They were freezing and constantly famished. The guards, trained to torture, mercilessly drove the dehumanized prisoners, and those who did not fill the norm were punished by depriving them of food, tying them up in the most cruel manner so their circulation practically stopped, and confining them to sopping wet solitary cells. This debilitated them even more, and production also dropped off. This senseless mistreatment led the prisoners to think that they were in an extermination camp. They counted the weeks, the months until their certain death by starvation. The authorities must have had the same thought when they ordered a medical inspection. The doctor who arrived with a delegation (there were only prisoner medicos in the camp) selected the prisoners who were nothing but skin and bones by the ‘bottom test‘;  those whose skin stuck together on their buttocks because no muscle remained even there, were stood aside. Their comrades were certain they would never see them again. The ’eye test‘, on the other hand, was the prisoners' method by which they could – or so they thought – tell who was next. There were no mirrors, therefore they checked in each other's eyes for signs of an impending end.
          There were those who, by their willpower, by forcing their minds to work, fought off death. One of these was György Faludy, who ’kept up the spirit‘ of his fellow prisoners – by the force of words. A small group – among them Józsi – gathered around his straw mattress of an evening to listen to his stories derived from literature, history, his own travels, to listen to him reciting poems, both his own and those of others. This intellectual nourishment made them forget their physical hunger, the wounds and humiliation, keping them alive. Not a single one of this group perished.
          The guards too were aware of the inhuman treatment, one of them encouraged the prisoners in his charge by saying to them: "Men, if you behave yourselves, I'll treat you like human beings."[xiv] They often vied with each other in their cruelty. That was their accomplishment.
          During the camp's duration of three years one man, named Gyula Michnay managed to escape, achieving the virtually unachievable. His partners were captured, but he succeeded. He knew the names of several hundred prisoners by heart, and read them out over Free Europe Radio's microphone in Munich. Michnay's account reached not only Hungary but also the United Nations. No longer could the existence of the camps be kept hidden. The brutal repercussions of the escape gave place to somewhat milder treatment and (barely) improved food.  One person's ingenuity and courage saved the lives of many.
          Nor could members of my family who stayed at home evade their fate. The property remaining after the land distribution was expropriated, and Mother and Zsiga evicted from Kivadár. They moved to Bodvica in a sub-lease. They could not remain for long even there and were deported – euphemistically called relocated – to the Alföld (the Plains). The same lot befell my sister, her husband and their infant child. When the mother's milk dried up, she fed her son Miklós with the squeezed juice and flesh of boiled beans. He grew up to be a tall, strong man, savouring beans like others do chocolate. He too emigrated. As a memento, he kept a photo of the scene of his early childhood, the dilapidated, weed-infested Lenin-farm in his bedroom.
          Following Stalin's death, Rákosi lost power and Imre Nagy[xv] formed a government. The labour camps were disbanded. Józsi was freed and the relocated people could return home, if they still had one. Walter kept in contact with my mother, corresponding and visiting her several times – in place of me – when she moved to Budapest. After the Revolution, Józsi fled from Hungary and did not stop until he reached New York. Laci welcomed him at the airport. He was a quiet, taciturn man, who viewed the world with suspicion from behind his glasses. When I visited him in New York and questioned him about his experiences in Recsk, he handed me Faludy's book.[xvi] "Everything is in there", he said. I read all night and could not put it down, except when I slammed it down in shock and disgust.  Under my window Manhattan's ceaseless traffic rumbled and rattled, evoking the firstbars of The Miraculous Mandarin. Its composer, the émigré Béla Bartók did not live to see his ’famous little‘  country again.
         

          We docked in Melbourne in January of 1951, under a blazing sun, in a heatwave. By then there were four of us - we had an addition to our family, my son, Béla-József. The wharfies came on board and offered us bananas – as if to monkeys. They sat down on the hawsers, and, rolling their cigarettes in a leisurely manner, scrutinized the strangers, whom history's wind had blown onto their shores. We did not understand a word that they said – it was unadulterated slang. I was reminded of the Epepe games on the Svábhegy, and broke into laughter. It was contagious, Panni and Ancsi caught it, and even my little son began to smile in his bassinet. We had arrived.
         
          May 2007, Chatswood, NSW, Australia                    
         
          Translated from Hungarian by Anne Major.
         

[i] Ferenc Karinthy (1921-1992), novelist playwright.

[ii] Mihály, Count Károlyi (1875-1955), statesman, became President of the ill fated Hungarian Republic in 1919.

[iii] Miklós Horthy (1868-1957), Regent of Hungary 1920- 1944.

[iv] Theophastos (371-c.287 BC) Philosopher of the Peripatetic School. His book ”The Characters” contains outlines of moral types of the epoch he lived in.

[v] Gábor Devecseri (1917-1971), poet and translator of Classical Latin and Ancient Greek texts, Homer’s ”Odyssey” and ”Iliad”.

4 A chicken soup created by the actor Ede Újházy (1844-1915) for which he used only roosters.

5 The author Gyula Krúdy (1878-1933) immortalized this soup in his writings.

[viii] Szervánszky Endre (1911-1977). Professor of Composition at the Liszt Ferenc Academy from 1948.

[ix] László Rajk, (1909-1949), Communist Minister of Interior and Foreign Affairs. He was accused ofconspiracy w. Tito to overthrow the Hung. Government; tried and executed in 1949.

[x] Mátyás Rákosi (1892-1971), General Secretary ofthe Hung. Communist Party, de facto ruler of Hungary between 1948-1956.

[xi] József Mindszenty, Cardinal, Primate of Hungary, persecuted, tortured and imprisoned by the Communist regime.

[xii] Headquarter of the notorious State Security Department. It is a museum now, called ”The House of Terror“.

[xiii] On December 31, 1949, the ÁVO was transformed by an enactment of the Council of Ministers into the ÁVH (State Protection Authority). It became an organ independent of the ministries, directed by the the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

[xiv] Quoted by Dr. János Hoyos, Géza Böszörményi: Recsk 1950-1953, Interart Budapest 1990.

[xv] Imre Nagy (1896-1958), PM of Hungary on two occasions. After the failed Hungarian Revoution he was executed on charges of treason.

[xvi] George Faludy: „My Happy Days in Hell“, William Morrow & Co., NewYork, 1963. Gy. F. emigrated in 1938 and returned from the United States to Hungary in 1946, where he was arrested in 1949 and subsequently incarcerated in the Recsk camp. See also Zoltán Sztáray's work: Csákánykő, A recski kényszermunkatábor, Püski Kiadó, 1997.