HUNGARIAN NOTEBOOK

A journal essay

HUNGARIAN NOTEBOOK

Michael Daley

from WAY OUT THERE: LYRICAL ESSAYS (Aequitas, NYC, 2006)

Today we rode the bikes we bought last fall, before ice and snow, the worst winter Hungary had seen in twenty years. On icy mornings my son and I waited at the tram stop, froze for the ten minutes it took the next tram to squeal around the corner near our street, an icebox crammed with children and gabby women from the open market, warming one another with thin smiles. But now it’s spring, and we get to ride bikes again. Some Hungarians biked in the snow, but I wanted to avoid another stay in the hospital. The bikes still new, mine is a beautiful, bright blue, Teddy’s silver and shiny black. As my bad pronunciation does, so do they set us apart as wealthy Americans. We rode to Szecenyi Ter, the park in the center of town—sycamore-lined lawns, statues from pre-Communism. Crossing tram tracks near the Posta, an imposing edifice where citizens wait in long lines to collect letters and packages or pay utility bills, I thought I saw Kovacs Peter and circled near the tram stop where he stood. I didn’t want to stare, but the man had his distinctive hooked nose, thin slicked-back white hair. His black suit, though open at the throat, was more formal than was Peter’s style—then again I’d only seen him in pajamas, and it had been all the long winter since our encounter. Slowing the bike as I approached, I realized my mistake; this was a different Hungarian, who also carried the 20th century on his back.

Twice since, I’ve seen him in windows of passing trams, and the second time he didn’t look well. Weeks after my stay at the Klinika, my doctor told me Peter was no longer a patient. He’d been there for a gastrointestinal disorder, the chief health problem among men, stomach cancer leading the causes of death. Not that I worried. As an Angol Lector (English conversation teacher), I was more concerned with the future of Hungary, a term I meant as endearment toward my students, but which may have puzzled or challenged them when I spread my arms and asked, “You, the Future of Hungary, what will it be like here in fifty years?”

In this southern border city, many of the adults remember shelling a few years ago. I met a man who barely survived the bombing of his apartment, and was smuggled out of his country without wife, children, and aging parents because he would have been called up for service in the Yugoslav military the day his employment as manager of the television station ended, the day it was fire-bombed by the United Nations. One polyglot from Yugoslavia struck me in particular during interviews of incoming freshmen. The teachers want candidates who will not only learn English but make positive contributions to the class. As she listed languages she spoke—English, Slavic or Yugoslav, Russian, Hungarian (the teacher said no, she will have to learn Hungarian as well as improve her English)—she couldn’t remember the name of that other language “just like English.” Everyone looked puzzled. “Oh, German! I speak that too.”

Kovacs Peter would still know some Russian and perhaps German for the tourists, but all in all he did not seem academic. I never saw him read while we camped out on adjacent hospital cots. Every second person I met in Hungary has a doctorate, but Peter was in the trades. He dressed impeccably, spent most of his life in our city, and was a manager when he retired. When the Russians went home, they left a debt and the deed to factories. No one stepped up with assistance, so the new government sold the factories to multinationals like Nestle, Coca-Cola, and Tesco. Kovacs Peter was disappointed at this drift of power but transferred into the new industries with a worker’s ageless despair: as in the past, the worst is inevitable. Most retired people are on state-assistance unwillingly and without tidy nest eggs. Many on the state dole have lost limbs, or are confined to wheelchairs due to workplace illnesses or injuries. A deeply felt national pride led them to hinder if not sabotage the plunder of Hungary’s resources. Even after the fall of the Soviet Union, can openers, hand tools, or small appliances might as well have been sabotaged—how quickly and consistently they come apart in the consumer’s hands. Before the Conservative Party was elected by a small majority in 1989, Viktor Mihály Orbán at a student protest in Budapest led thousands in chanting: “Russians Go Home!” The woman who told me so had been guiding her Russian tourists that day; they were vital to the Hungarian economy. She translated for her group; she said they all agreed.

Maybe Kovacs Peter was at that rally, but he would have been in his sixties. He may have ventured to Budapest to protest fifty years of Communism, cold war, and the iron curtain. He could recall the twilight of the Hapsburgs and the Holy Roman Empire from grandparents’ stories, which bitterly condemned the Treaty of Trianon, settled on Hungary in 1920. Even today it causes resentment on the streets; every anniversary graffiti decries its injustice. This was the moment many contemporary Hungarians see as the greatest betrayal. Croatia and Austria were beneficiaries to the east, Yugoslavia to the south, while the newly established Romania cut across Hungary’s eastern border and separated Hungarian families, no longer credited for Magyar heritage but ostracized, forbidden to speak their language or practice their customs. Hungary was predisposed in1936 to accept Nazi offers of original boundary restoration when a Communist dictatorship led by Bela Kun came to power in 1919, the Hungarian middle class resenting its mostly Jewish leaders trained in Russia.

As a youngster, Peter would have absorbed the culture of the Hapsburgs, and the warrior strain of the Magyars, fierce conquerors of the eastern plain. His family would have instilled the customs of the Dual Monarchy, whose seats were Vienna and Budapest. His educational opportunities, however, diminished when he turned nineteen as Hungary deepened its complicity with Nazi Germany. In 1939 it enacted anti-Semitic legislation to keep Jews from key occupations, and forbade sex between non-Jews and Jews, whose population numbered 825,000. After 1944 he witnessed mass deportations shrinking that number to 490,000; until then Regent Horthy had refused Hitler’s demands; Hungary was unwilling to liquidate its people or embrace the Final Solution. Peter’s generation experienced the influence of Habsburg royalists, the fascist rule of the Nazis, the totalitarianism of the Communists, and the present democratically elected government.

In journal entries I felt my way through a detritus of cultural stimuli, unraveling an onion at the core of which was a cloud. How I misconceive the world is how I conceive of myself. This is what I was doing in my notebook for my first three weeks in Hungary, my health quietly deteriorating up to September 11.

August 24, 2001

There is a bell ringing at the Dom, the votive cathedral, built to fulfill the promise to the Almighty for saving the city from the great flood of 1879, which wiped out most buildings, some of which were standing since 1267 when the city was incorporated by Bela IV. But in 2000, cyanide tailings from an Australian goldmine in Romania floated downriver and all the bottom fish filled the city with their stench, choked the banks of the Tisza, and clogged the slow straightened current on its stately course to Yugoslavia. My students believe the river will always be polluted. We saw a pig float downstream.

In Szeged, the last Hungarian site along the Tisza, the river passes on its way to Beograd (Belgrade) to join the Duna (Danube) and flow to the Black Sea as border between Romania and the Ukraine, the city streets are rings of a tree growing out from its center. There may be a way to estimate age by counting streets and tram or bus lines to ascertain how recently they were developed into livable parts of the city to accommodate the development that took place during the Communist regime. Szeged’s population grew during the Milosovic regime in Yugoslavia and is now close to 200,000. My students live in tall buildings, flats I’ve heard Americans call basements in the sky.

Hungary was part of the Ottoman Empire for a hundred fifty years and Prince Suleiman among other Ottoman rulers, wanted to extend his holdings into Austria. Hungary was the line in the sand for Western Civilization, who allowed Turks to advance no closer to the center of Christendom in Rome. This wasn’t the last time Hungary was hung out to dry, but the Turkish occupation from 1542 to 1686 begins a list showing Hungary was Western Europe’s first line of defense. The Turkish occupiers began to straighten the Tisza for defense purposes, but after the great compromise, which produced the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Count Szecenyi made it his business to continue the project so, that irrigation could foster arable land. Within ten years of completing his project, river Tisza flooded and two days later the city was destroyed.

August 26, 2001

We wander streets which place us in the last century, or late in the previous, and notice how close the buildings, how dark the vines, enclose what we would call, were we late 19th century French novelists, the narrow lanes as they abut the city walls. And whenever we enter a store down stone steps and approach the counter, beside which a small chain separates us from vegetables and fruit, greeted by the cashier—“jo napot kivanok,” and point at plums (sylvae), peaches (oszibarack), eggs and orange juice (I don’t know eggs, & narancia), each price written in a bold hand, my son likes to say we’re in for a spot of grocery-store pointing.

The buildings are massive structures of stone, architectural designs common in Western Europe. Streets are named after poets most often, though some for politicians or philanthropists as in America. The French helped with the design of the Dom, pride of Csongrad County, a daring architectural masterpiece, which on our first approach reminded me of Notre Dame. Victor Hugo Utca (street) lies in its shadow. Our building is in the grand style of the 19th century, a balcony in the rear hangs over clianthus trees and joins balconies of neighboring buildings surrounding them, a garden without cultivation, while plants and bonsai trees adorn the balconies. The flat itself, large and with high ceilings, exemplifies utilitarian design within the framework of the fallen Hapsburgs.

In many places the regime arranged to have one or two families crowd together. Yet families with two or more children in flats like ours got automatic qualification for their own flat, no rent. Nine-foot-high double doors connect and close off each room and shut to allow gas heaters more efficiency. But the manner of finishing plaster, or mudded walls, exposed pipes, the sturdy little stove, sinks, tub, water heater, fridge, tiny washing machine which I’ve dubbed “Stalin’s mother” for its bouncing on the cement floor and we apologized to the woman below: these all indicate choices as do the rugs, dressers, cabinets, based on practicality over aesthetics. It’s interesting to see how the purely practical is compatible and unable to overwhelm the entirely aesthetic choices made after 1879, to curve, for instance, the joint where walls rush up twelve feet to the wide expanse of ceiling in each large room and long hallway. In the stark stairway, wide enough for the once ornate woodwork of a spiral staircase, is now mostly very practical cement, dust from the neighboring construction site making us cough on the way upstairs, a huge heavy wood door requiring an antique key three inches long reminds us all day, on its chain as it rubs against the leg, you are in another place, from another time.

August 25? 26?

The days are going by, but it can’t be the 28th because school starts then. We need a calendar desperately, and American newspapers. Without enough language to take care of simple things, we have no phone, cable, no toaster yet, teapot, no internet. Is there a state you reach at the beginning of culture shock, even before week one is finished, where you don’t want to learn the difficult language, become tired of everything taking forever? Where you detest helplessness, especially helplessness, more than anything else? Where you want to get a few things done; somehow for me, one who prefers the minimal, in this culture where salaries never rise to meet a person’s even fabricated needs, I cannot just live Hungarian. I can’t happily do with less. Nice motto. All right I’ll forget about the toaster.

August 27

Hungarian is a one-of-a-kind language. Not spoken in other countries, it’s survived a couple thousand years. Everything is written in it—menus, postal notices, signs on my door downstairs that could mean anything—I hope not telling me be home tomorrow for a police inspection; we’ve had impromptu drop-bys of plain clothes officers who didn’t speak English, insisting they look inside to find out, presumably, if we were harboring unregistered aliens from Yugoslavia, Romania, and points southeast. These exchanges are so unlike being a glorified tourist, which is more or less what I’d anticipated. The closest aspect of communication has become easiest to neglect—talking with my family in our mother tongue, those precious and rare moments when we’re not too exhausted to talk, just talk, for the first time so foreign.

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I wanted to write what my students said about their country, so I asked them to prepare speeches about what an American should know to be happy. I forget what they said. Mostly they wanted me to see the sights. The river Tisza and its parks, the theater, everything I discovered by walking around town, or from guide books my wife wisely purchased before we left America. But when I asked the next question, all of them were more enthusiastic and gave extensive answers and asked questions. I asked did they like America, and would they want to go if they could? Yes, they liked it. “Of course,” they said, an expression used so often by English-speaking Hungarians I took it to mean, “Of course, you stupid asshole.” Did they want to go? All. Except one. And she was adamant about staying in her country. Why did they want to go? America is the land of dreams, no? Anything can happen. You can succeed, be what you want, have money, freedom, meet interesting exciting people. Have you met many movies stars? Do you know many famous people? Then they would ask did I know some Somebody I had never heard of—rap star, movie icon, model, futbol up-and-comer. And since I am from Seattle, how often do I talk to Bill Gates? I had tapped a nerve of American idolatry.

“Now wait just one cotton-pickin’ minute!” I said, holding up my hand. Puzzlement, befuddled expression on the face of the nerdy boy in the front row, big round eyes on the girl with the low-cut blouse. “Teacher, teacher, what means this codonepigging?” The teachable moment! Unbridled intellectual curiosity. These young people see, or their parents see, that good jobs, or trips to Hollywood and the Gold Coast of Florida at spring break, depend on the acquisition of this language which is continuously throwing them curve balls, such as “curve balls,” an expression necessitating an elucidation of the art of baseball including gloves, bats, trophies, books, hats, balls, and a makeshift game on the overgrown tennis court.

Then we got back to misconceptions, or so I thought. My patriotism is often tarnished by the imperial disregard of Americans abroad, or arrogance, as if Divine Right, of politicos who proclaim even on foreign soil that ours is the “greatest nation on earth.” I have felt it my duty to disabuse students of idealism. It isn’t fair. Opining their belief in utopian America is my misconception. I insisted on telling anyone who listened, Hungarians are freer than Americans strapped to their houses, dogs, yachts, cars, and debt to the eyeballs. To construe America as the land where anything can happen is not farfetched. I remember watching planes land in 1956 with Hungarian refugees in black and white TV news clips. A girl from Hungary, suddenly new in my fifth-grade class, was just as tentative about language and customs as my eager students today and just as horrified to offend. After that year’s November debacle near the Hungarian Parliament where Russian tanks growled through the now pleasant streets not a block from the Danube, where thousands were killed—the spray of bullets memorialized by bronze dots on the walls—Khrushchev’s violent totalitarianism shocked the world more than the horrors of Stalin he revealed, though Auschwitz would weigh more on the West for the balance of the century. In those days more than 200,000 Hungarians came to the West by way of Austria, but for the few weeks of the October rebellion, Hungarians assumed the United States would intercede, that our military would cross their borders and protect them from the Russian army, which suppressed the revolution on November 4th with 150,000 troops.

So, in fact, did Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz and Jewish leaders globally expect and encourage Roosevelt to strafe the ovens, though Nazi officers depended on the Geneva Convention, which forbade the bombing of concentration camps. The United States and United Kingdom had already refused to help Romanian refugees whose army had shot 60,000 people. When asked in Switzerland about the rising number of Jewish deaths in Europe, John Foster Dulles said it “doesn’t matter.” In 1944 and 1945 the Jewish council leadership, aware of the Holocaust, didn’t warn their communities; historians speculate they believed cooperation with Germany would protect people. Two thousand five hundred wealthy Jews, however, were evacuated from Hungary. In his movie, Amen, the controversial director, Costa-Gavras takes on the well-documented silence of Pope Pius XII. Like many patriotic Germans shown in the film, the Pope, his handlers, and the American ambassador seemed to find the staggering numbers and lightning efficiency beyond belief. A film made in Budapest, Goodbye, Mr. Wallenberg, gives these statistics regarding the Nazi deportations and executions in that city alone: “Adolph Karl Eichmann arrived with a staff of thirteen. Seven weeks later, 422,602 people were dead.”

Because deportations didn’t begin until late in the war and were mostly confined to those weeks in 1944, when Kovacs Peter would have been in his mid-twenties, and when Regent Horthy had abdicated his veto power, many Hungarian Jews lived who might otherwise have been gassed at Auschwitz or other death camps. The Russian liberators who gained control of Hungary were no better; The Black Book of Communism compares persecutions and exterminations between 1946 and 1989 with the ravages of Nazism. Perhaps those days were for Kovacs Peter the end of hope, his countenance fixed in acceptance. The future will be no better than the past, but we have these days, we have our health today if not tomorrow, children, our grandchildren—I saw it on his face in the hospital, and in the window of a passing tram, and repeated on faces of passengers, and on our street the plodding older men and women, or in the vigorous strides of those whose futures meant no change or dreams. I did not see it in my students’ faces.

I noticed everybody’s misconceptions but my own. I thought cultural difference exaggerated. Hungarian ways were Eastern Bloc solutions to problems already solved by other techniques. Magyarul, a member of the Finno-Ugric linguistic family, sharing some twenty words with the Finns, seemed an amalgam of Western languages, a made-up form. Hungarian cultural difference evaporated until I was left with problems and solutions. The architecture, transportation, cooking, art, music, even the educational system in which I was immersed struck me as not dissimilar enough to their counterparts in the West to be construed as a culture. I lived with this misconception of culture as something distinct from political difference for quite some time during my stay, until I came to see Hungary’s political history as simply the way this story goes. Culture itself abides in the people, generation by generation for over a thousand years. Not only problem solving, the measure of any political system, but celebration, loss, yearning, aspiration, and acquiescence make up a culture.

August 29

To register for the “Residence Permit,” a foreign national must go to the police station, and there meet perhaps a young woman who may not want to be a bureaucrat but such is her fate, and who suffers from allergies like many Hungarians and must pause frequently to blow her nose, and who speaks extremely fast as if terribly impatient with your not having known to provide each of the variety of receipts and written assurances the State requires her to assess. One can fume about the bureaucrats—how you could bank on their behavior, an exaggeration of U.S. bureaucratic scripts, perhaps made more intense by the fast foreign sounds, but paperwork itself may cause nastiness. What this young woman says zooms past me untranslated, papers whirl like pigeons in a storm. Maybe it’s frustration with stupid people, ignoramuses like those issuing the State’s requirements, or me. Nevertheless, it comes down to one person making choices.

I am a bureaucrat; endless paper shuffling makes me one. An iron door I need not explain, the state and the school demand demonstrations of knowledge: pass this test, receive a grade. Nothing to be done, Samuel Beckett’s Vladimir sighs, as do teachers. Yet the way things were done under Communists eleven years ago, as one Yugoslav boy said, is the way of embryonic capitalists in the new Hungary. The government can be replaced, but the system itself follows tried and true methods. Who represents the State has power, which demeans the subject, or so the subjective reaction might go, which of course means nothing to the State. The very term “Communist bureaucracy” implies layers of Kafkaesque evasions, which inevitably secure the power of the State, no matter what its philosophy. Kafka after all was a subject of the Empire, not the Proletariat.

Why shouldn’t a country like Hungary make it difficult for foreigners, specifically Americans, to come here? We were not all that helpful when multinationals bought the industrial plants and centers of power and business as the first non-communist government in 50 years denationalized its holdings to afford the cost of governing. Certainly, someone like me, whose travel expenses and living accommodations are the direct result of a parliamentary decree, may further devalue the Hungarian forint. Although I part with American bucks here, I could be taking employment and housing away from Hungarians, who could do the job better. Many teachers and students here have traveled to Amerika. Our movies and celebrities are everywhere, selling global products. The State mandates bilingual schools. They must hire people for whom English is their birthright. This grants a surprise dignity to millions of Americans for whom some however neglected expertise places them also in the category of “native speaker.” For some of us, no other language and literature has opened its heart quite so lovingly, yet we scramble to remember grammar rules and names of tenses dredged up from Latin class thirty-five years ago.

So why should the bureaucrat in the Residence Permit office look kindly on my application? Why shouldn’t she pull out all the stops and harangue me in shrill staccato? What am I but an importer of—and god forbid she’d still say it—capitalist falsehoods? What do I offer but “Angolul,” the value of which has already been proven; not world peace or its cultivation, but urban sprawl, slurred morality, dumb and dumber children, young adults, presidents, and addiction to the lazy grammar of greed?

Sometime in September

If I wanted to feel less self-important, I couldn’t have picked a better thing to do than make myself a foreigner. I don’t know how they know, but they do. Maybe it’s my features, my white hair, my clothes, posture, whatever— but they seem to know before I open my mouth I’m just a kid from Dorchester who found his way into a relatively fat salary and wound up here. It’s not only the limitations of language, though that all-pervasive factor humbles me. It’s the unfamiliarity—typical tourist difficulties with money, maps, grocery-store pointing, restaurant ordering and the giant tips I’ve given when I didn’t intend to; I won’t return for a month to give them time to forget my face or hire a new waiter. But the things I’d thought would give me prestige or an edge seem not to work. I am a poet (The Hungarian word is “kulto,” but I can’t pronounce it). Maybe later I’ll know that famous Central European respect for poets. The two anthologies I’ve read collect dead Hungarian poets, but it’s hard to know if the same awe extends to contemporaries. The former president was a novelist, and poets’ names become street names, names of schools, and the statues of the national poet Petofi and others abound and are graced with flowers as was the plaque to Gyorg Babits today; it’s still hard to evince whether respect for fallen heroes renowned for poetry is respect for poets, especially when Hungary embraces democracy and free-range capitalism. Within these political changes it may be that those voices speaking out against the repressions of democracy are overlooked, discounted as cranks, youthful protesters, or non-existent, and that poets of love, environment, friendship never measure up—even poets of protest or war—to those of the past in the view of the popular taste, sophisticated enough to admire Miklos Radnoti whose beautiful poetry rivals Neruda’s best work from the same period, the 1930s and ’40s.

September 8

We are not yet as homesick as the poor Hungarian Fulbright family in Nebraska who have already tied a rope with knots for every week away and keep a Sunday evening untying ceremony.

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I arrived late for my violin lesson—yes, violin; at fifty-five I’ve come to think it might be better to go down swinging—and sat outside on the bench while Gyorgy played inside the practice room. I might have thought a student was playing but for how complicated the piece was and how well played. After a few minutes he opened the door and invited me in. He was rehearsing for an upcoming performance here at the zeneiskola, the music school, in the recital on Women’s Day. I like taking lessons from him. The language difference has become less a barrier than a tool. He brings his dictionary to our lessons and sometimes I bring mine. When he wants me to relax my posture or nervous grip on the instrument or bow, he says, “Be lazy, lazy . . . .” At first I tried to correct him, but I prefer his expression to any other.

I assume Kovacs Peter plays an instrument, at least in private; at least he did once, and attended a school like this zeneiskola. Once he had a visitor, a girl of high school age. She must have been a granddaughter. She was very nice, saying hello to me and a few polite English phrases. Clearly, she was fluent in both languages, but didn’t want to intrude with a conversation. I was two feet away from them, trying to keep aloof.

September 11, 2001

Today was Women’s Day, when men give women flowers. The staff divided by silent command into males and females on either side of the room. Staff and students love the young principal, who speaks no English, and has such an elegant voice my son commented on it; he read a poem by the national poet, Jozsef Attila, the room instantly hushed. The rhythms of this language enchant us, the poem short, lilting. After reading it, he asked the male teachers to take the many potted geraniums arranged in circles on the tables and give them to the women teachers; then would everyone please have a glass of champagne. As they passed out the flowers, they kissed each woman on both cheeks. This was at noon, the students in the halls between classes. The teachers who still had classes went back and taught. I was done for the day and went off to buy my wife a flower.

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What if Peter was in the Arrow Cross? It is perhaps impossible to imagine the past of someone we respect to have been heinous or bereft of humanity. We think it highly unlikely, or out of character. We think he could never have done such a thing. We think his meek demeanor, his obvious kindness, even his facial expression, which we interpret as both acceptance of whatever suffering history may have in store for him, and regret for those he has survived, as indications of a character too compassionate to have rounded up and deported Jews in such vast numbers and with such speed as the Nazis and their Hungarian collaborators, the Arrow Cross Party. To imagine Kovacs Peter in that bleak uniform fitting him perfectly, his younger face framed in the regulation hat and tight gray collar and black tie, to imagine him in high boots and maybe gloves, one of which he might have had to remove writing down the particulars of an investigation: I cannot see him this way. My impression was of a man whose kindness was simply kindness, not the result of a character formed by committing horrific acts of bureaucracy such as taking names, listing items of entire households for storage, or as happened, shipment to other households where the stain of racial impurity could not diminish their worth. I cannot imagine it was his fate to enlist in Arrow Cross, though he may have been press-ganged to act as underling . Just as I can’t imagine he collaborated with the Communist Secret Police. The House of Terror, now a museum, the Terrorhaza on Andrassy Boulevard in Budapest, a few hundred yards from Octagon Square, is where people passed but heard no screams, or did and kept walking. He could not be the same man, so gentle, and have assisted torture. In the same building both Nazis and Communists destroyed or ended the lives of thousand. But isn’t it possible that a gentle person can be cruel? Isn’t it possible a gentle population has cruelty in its past? Can’t quiet citizens follow rules of etiquette and breeding and believe 400,000 must be exterminated?

As we waited in line outside the House of Terror, our tour guide couldn’t suppress her distaste for the newly elected socialist government. The House itself, I understand, was designed by a Hollywood set designer, so gimmicky I don’t think I was the only American who felt manipulated by music and atmosphere. How different from Auschwitz, which was more straightforward, offering evidence in the stark halls, cold cells, and gas chambers. No haunting music, no artistic renditions. Many in the new government are former Communists and some, I heard it rumored, may have committed atrocities the museum depicts. An American said they should simply acknowledge complicity in torture before taking elected office. Despite the manipulative atmosphere, I’m convinced many were guilty of crimes against humanity, and should be prosecuted and sentenced if found guilty.

Though the Arrow Cross was largely volunteer, they were excessively brutal. Peter, had he been among their ranks, might have supervised labor battalions. Many Jews were saved from deportation, only to be brutalized by the Hungarian military. Many were killed or maimed while clearing mine fields. No mass killings of Hungarians are recorded. I prefer to think that Peter, in whatever capacity he served during the war, was among those who helped Jews to hide or escape. Members of the Catholic Church, for instance, some members of the Arrow Cross, and famously Raoul Wallenberg, risked and sacrificed their lives out of respect for the humanity terrorized in their presence. Later, there were Communist collaborators who reported on their neighbors, or taped phone conversations of people in the next flat, because they were threatened with the withholding of a son’s or daughter’s university degree. A quiet people, a gentle people, even a polite people—of which Kovacs Peter seems the epitome—may face a grim deed in order for the next day, week, or month to arrive without disturbance, and do what they must, with seemliness and decorum.

No, I can’t believe Peter was in the Arrow Cross. Thousands protested on Castle Hill in Budapest the reelection of the Communists, as thousands waited days to get into the House of Terror. From his eyes, there could be no forgiving, nor remorse, nor vengeance or hatred. His face told me what most of his countrymen seemed to feel: the long road we are on has few surprises but beauty.

Klinika, Szegedi Union

I’m not sure of the name of this place. I don’t know where I am, or how, after all the best intentions and trying to be practical about the atrial fibrillation I am prone to, I have wound up in—though it seems a prison—a ward on the second floor of the hospital which services our district. I feel like a prisoner perhaps because for days now I’ve been frustrated in my attempts to get the Residence Permit, which seemed so all-important, which would give us a relative degree of freedom: phone, internet, cable, and library card. We’ve been here twenty-four days, and these last few days I think I know a little about what it’s like to live within a Communist regime. Deep in layers of behavior things move slowly or don’t change, or can’t, won’t, will always be thus, so get used to it, no matter the consequences.

My doctor tells me the arrhythmia began on September 11, an appropriate response to the devastation at home. I was affected by what I saw on Hungarian TV, but without numbers, proportions, or commentary in English, I couldn’t piece together the sequence or assign responsibility. Now I am imprisoned by chemicals that short-circuited my heart, and by my doctor’s schedule. American hospitals get patients out quickly; here rest is advised. My own thinking is that getting the hell out of here can’t be too soon. I am seething at fate. I should walk out—fourteen beds and all old men who shuffle past without a glance. I’m sure it would be rude to do so, but I’m craving contact with someone in a similar fix. In a ten-by-eight cell which I share with a man who hasn’t acknowledged me and who appears very sickly, about seventy, and snores, I’m cut off from my wife and son, from news of America where the entire earth has focused attention, where yesterday a three-minute silence was observed for the jihad victims in New York and D.C. and all over Europe as well. Cut off too from my family and friends in the U.S. Cultural difference, medical difference, politics, political history has led me to break habits of despair, and rebel against my unnecessary spirit of acceptance. Outside, horns blare because more young Hungarians got married; it must be Saturday.

I wonder if Kovacs Peter is among those who today deny the Holocaust took place. As in many countries there are those who view this horrifying epoch with extreme concern, and those indifferent or who deem statistics irrelevant to their country’s future, and those who claim it is a lie. Hungary’s right wing republished Nazi literature and Hitler’s diatribes. On the other hand, the Holocaust has been taught in the schools since 1989, and there is a scholarly debate about its significance for Hungarians. It is only the fringe groups who deny it ever happened, and, though I couldn’t speak a word to Peter, I cannot believe he would have denied it. I do, however, see that he would consider it less relevant than the Communist legacy which finally came to dominate every aspect of life, including marriage, parenthood, and honor, the essence in fact of totalitarian rule.

Is it racist to ignore or deny its significance? Hungarians seemed unwilling to indulge the depth of sadness, which must accompany such a discussion. In America, we cannot imagine such suffering. September 11th pales in proportion, and has already, for most of us, disappeared into the realm of doctrinaire politics, and mythological patriotism. We understand the abstract, the affront of being challenged and hurt on our own soil, but only those who have lost family seem capable of grasping the deep sadness such an event entails for the nature of humankind.

Racism in Hungary seemed to me widely acknowledged in the majority relationship to the Gypsies, a national issue which the society is seeking to heal. Hungary’s Gypsy population, like that of many European nations, was horribly victimized in the Holocaust, as it has been throughout history. Many may have survived because they entertained both Germans and Hungarians, Gypsy music is still a major cultural heritage. Yet racism toward Gypsies was strong among the Nazis and their supporters like Arrow Cross. The putative number of Gypsy victims, five thousand, was much lower than Jewish victims because they rarely registered.

I found it a touchy subject with some of my students, and one that, when I asked about it, started a vehement debate. There were Gypsy students in our school who passed for “white,” and went unnoticed, but Gypsies have their own schools, their own society. I found them on the streets or in the malls and subways of Budapest. Some could speak English and had tales of drunkenness and unemployment, crime and ill health.

September 15 Omanyi Egyetem Klinikai Szeged

Still arrhythmic. Lightning has passed over the town. It was a light and steady rain. Now will I sleep? The two most active patients are standing in their robes, talking on the other side of the ward. The most restless is beside the nurse’s station, a sink and table, the bold light bulb, towels, plastic things with blood on them piled up. The male nurse, who wears a protective facemask to ward off germs apparently, drips blood on my sheet when he removes the intravenous needle for the saline solution. There’s no toilet paper.

September 16 Klinikai Szeged 8.05 a.m.

Still fibrillated.

______________________________________________________________________________

On the morning of September 12 hardly anyone talked to me as I came into school, went to my desk, got the classroom key and met my students in the hall. A few other teachers and some of the students could tell me the latest estimates of the number dead, but no one knew much for certain. It was even unclear about the planes crashing into the towers. As their only American, I had to address my students in the first period. I don’t know if the doctor was right in saying my heart began skipping beats then, in that hour. The atrial fibrillation certainly is debilitating, and can be triggered by stress, cause difficulty breathing or walking around. Not a good physical problem for a presidential candidate; Bill Bradley quit the race against Gore because of it. Some said Gore must have felt relief on September 12, that the chads and the courts hadn’t swung his way. Though atrial fibrillation can make life difficult for a leader, in hindsight we might do better with someone whose mortality is more in the forefront. Bush, of course, is healthy as a horse, but Cheney, perhaps the only one in that administration with a serious heart problem, at least has a heart, albeit mechanical.

When I talked to my class, I told how upset and confused I was, but I also said that Americans will seek revenge and that it will be terrible. Perhaps Osama bin Laden had been blamed by then, but I don’t think so. This was several months prior to our noticing jets maneuver over Hungary in the direction of Afghanistan.

9.45 a.m.

The ward goes into its first round of activity at 5 a.m. Lights went on and the two nurses, one male, one female, emerged from the last cell, the curtain drawn, and began administering pills, injections, and IVs. I don’t think the nurse got to me until around 6. She injected me with some sort of blood thinner in the abdomen. Weird feeling.

There are ten men here including me. I’m younger and spryer than the rest. The room is wide open, dormitory style, broken into seven cells of two beds each. The glass brick walls allow light from the nurse’s station to glow into each cell all night.

I’ve only noticed one cell closed with a green curtain for a few minutes. No privacy. The ward, as my doctor predicted, takes me back in time several decades. “Centuries,” he joked, criticizing the slow progress. He spent a year at Johns Hopkins in the early ’90s and he thinks the Klinikai is not up to the American level even at that time. My father in the hospital back home was in a room by himself with a TV, a phone in his name, his mail delivered, and a private bathroom. Several nurses checked on him, bathed him, changed his bedding, and spoke in cooing tones in his own language, though he ranted and insulted them.

Maybe the biggest activity of the other nine is urination. Three men I can see from my bed need to use the bottle deposited in a rack below the bed. The bed is a solid metal frame less than one meter by three meters. My head and feet touch the boards. There are no springs, just a thin foam mattress on hard wire frame. Fortunately, the man next to me who has a sweet smile and generously offered a banana last night, doesn’t use the urine bottle. He gets up and walks around and seems to use the toilet. The toilet alone would violate U.S. health laws. It is repulsive beyond polite efforts to describe. The smell from labelled, half-filled urine sample bottles and toilets which don’t flush dominate the floor.

Smells: on top of the urine or mixing with it is the continuous wafting of cigarette smoke from somewhere. Patients smoke in the toilet: nurses, doctors, visitors, other patients past the entry to this ward. There is always cigarette smoke; wheeled through the emergency room, I smelled it. When wheeled into the radiologist, a striking blond woman whose English at first sounded good, her directions to hold my breath for the x-ray were the more literal translation or more primitive meaning of breath, as “pneuma” in Greek: “No smoking!” “No breathing?” I asked, and she corrected herself, but I like her version better. Medicinal smells, the smell of bread—three slices and a slab of breakfast spam— the clean soap Kathy used in the Stalin’s mother on the white T-shirt and shorts I’m wearing today because I don’t have old man pajama’s like the others— dark blue, pale blue, stripes with T-shirts at the collars. Good leather slippers.

There is camaraderie among them I’m unable to enter. I won’t be able to. Even beyond the language barrier, their compassion for one another has more to do with age and infirmity. They may know that I will be here a short time; my ailment is urgent, but I’m not the high risk of, did he say “Thrombus”? which I translate as “stroke.” Otherwise I am refusing to be sick and I have use of my motor functions. Compassion for someone with my symptoms—and a rich American – may be wasted or unnecessary. Instead, what I see, especially with my cell mate, Kovacs Peter, is the grace and ease with which he strolls about and chats with the two more talkative guys maybe ten years his junior. He’s friendly, though a little diffident, and more confident than they are, managerial. Last night before bedtime the very old man across the ward from our cell, who seems the weakest, shuffled off to the toilet, which took a long time in itself—getting up, putting on slippers, standing—shuffling seemed a bit faster than standing still, just—and didn’t return.

Thirty minutes later I understood little of what Kovacs Peter and the two younger men were saying, enough to know they were concerned about the older man. A few moments later Kovacs Peter was leading him back from the WC. They moved stately, both shuffling. He let him rest his hand in the crook of his own arm, and when they arrived at the man’s bed, Peter carefully unfurled the blanket, smoothed his sheet, helped him off with his slippers, helped him lift his legs into the bed, covered him over with the blanket so very gently, tucking the old infirm man into his bed as if he himself were a pillar of strength, and then went off to use the toilet which I assume he’d been waiting to do for an hour.

September 16, 9.03 p.m.

Still irregular pulse, I think, although now I feel somewhat weaker, maybe from all the blood thinning. I wonder, finally, if I have come here to relax. Only my recent bad attitude makes me qualify what we have continuously referred to as cultural difference here in Hungary. What is the generosity, after all? Kovacs Peter is a good example. Many people have offered their help, while many have kept their distance. Certainly, no cultural trait. It could be the product of politics. Peter and the men here in this ward are products of an array of cultural influences. A much older man who yesterday seemed hardly able to stand in the WC (pronounced Veetzee) and today walked off the ward, all dressed, dapper in his hat, wife grimly following, stopped before my bed and wished me good health. They all experienced the Communist regime, could describe October, 1956, the Change and the last decade and a half. Twentieth century political history, a product of cultural history, of choices leaders made, brought about success and failure which allow them to be either generous or standoffish, or perhaps shy and timid with Americans. I should at least try to converse. Why have I come here?

September 17 8.40 a.m., Klinikai Szegedi, Monday morning.

A test which sounds like echocardiogram, but they have to put something down my esophagus like the video camera the American doctors rammed up my ass to see if I had colon cancer. With this one, they want to be sure I don’t vomit on them while they search for signs of clotting. I wasn’t eating anything after I saw the young orderly, a handsome and active teenager, carry four filled urine bottles away without gloves. He served my first slab of dinner spam, so I decided not to eat if he served anything else. But it was a different guy this morning. That young fellow came on last night about six or seven. And his girlfriend sat on her bike outside, and waved to him for quite a while. I hope he washed his hands before touching her.

9.30 a.m.

Doctors walk around the ward with students and stop by each bed: this one has pulmonary dysfunction, this one bladder, this one gastrointestinal and this one has a writing problem which we will drain by bleeding twice a day, the stupid Amerikai.

10 a.m.

The doctor who just examined me seemed so careful. They all do. But this doctor’s English seemed judicious. He was tall and elegant, precise and articulate, although he spoke with exaggerated economy. And he seemed wealthy somehow—a gold pen and the clean aftershave smell on his hands. “You know you are programmed for today” was the last thing he said to me. And gave his half smile, somewhat mysterious, before he and the others took off on further rounds. “Programmed?” No, I didn’t know that, and had no time to tell him that I didn’t understand, and no one else to tell.

1.45 p.m.

On their rounds about ten students got to listen to the beat of my heart. Odd, their tentative laying on of stethoscopes to my bared chest. The curtain half closed, they can enter one at a time; like a sideshow circus freak, and I lay here with my little heartbeat, my shirt pulled up. They’re discussing now what they’ve heard and asking if there was a murmur. Sell tickets next time. Come one come all, the spastic heart boy. See him lie down, hear his silly thump.

The last time I saw him he was virtually invisible—he wasn’t in the scene. It was in the Dom Ter, that open square, almost an acre of rounded stones and surrounded by the cathedral, tall and imposing with its two towers and university buildings, statuary, sculpted figures lining the portico, busts of professors, musicians, poets, artists, and clergymen who over the centuries had earned the nation’s gratitude. Everything gray and people walking along the edges of the courtyard. It was a rainy day in the middle of February, about as bleak as it gets, but it must have been much worse in the middle of Communist winters when someone would come to this slab for solace. Kovacs Peter was walking along the stone perimeter, white hair slick as a skullcap, beige windbreaker, sensible shoes, his gaze turned down, furtive yet dignified. At the arch just as he entered Dom Ter, ready for the ringing of bells and the fifteen-minute dance of Saint Stephen and all his attendant saints and soldiers in the beautiful clock above the square, where their painted life-size sculptures emerge at 11:30 every morning in slow procession rolling into daylight when three doors open to music of bells out of tune. His serious face, a long and penetrating glare of compassion toward our little tragedy: these things happen, we move on, life has no resolution. He was the man who told the porter at the university building to call the ambulance for my son, who helped my son stand up, and carried the bicycle inside where the porter kept it for me. Couldn’t speak English, but luckily a doctor showed up and assisted with translation. The porter wanted me to describe the bike before he’d let me take it. He told me that a man had come in to say a little boy was outside bleeding from his head. The man stayed long enough for the ambulance to arrive and take my son to the children’s wing of the Klinikai, and then sauntered off through that arched entrance to Dom Ter. “Was he a tall man, white hair, combed back, sharp features, a bit frail, angular nose casting a look of profound resignation?” Yes, translated the doctor, but I already recognized the affirmative, Yes, Igen, Igen.

2.45 p.m.

It’s very disturbing to me that I can’t remember passing out in the office. A young woman, the anesthesiologist, sprayed something horrible too far down my throat and jabbed me in my arm. Later, something big was removed from my mouth, but I don’t recall getting back in the wheelchair, or being wheeled back except it was a shorter trip. They must have knocked me out.

3.50 p.m.

Dr Rostozi Janos tells me the drug has an amnesiac effect. Did the KGB invent it? CIA?

Teddy brought music he knows I like. The one that makes everything utterly right is “Birth of the Cool.” So I start to listen, and watch men saunter past, nurses and afternoon visitors. I must look odd, stretched on my hard bed with headphones and notebook on my lap, nodding to bebop, writing in trance. I really don’t care; the churlishness of a prisoner has set in, and I have begun to behave in ways conflicting with my dignified station in life, and slightly irrational. As I listen to “Deception,”

the whole room floats.

Buttons on a dress, deep blue and nonchalant:

With every kiss I throw

I know the wide boat on a sea of funny faces.

Laugh at me, boys,

I’m climbing up the string of broken sticks

to wed the scent of love.

Up up and up the New York windows

sail the walls of sound.

Nothing so pure.

Dogs bark.

They move their chains to stand around the table.

This feels true,

each time I know your face

rhythm of my heart, a music I don’t care how divine,

fills the hills with roses where can I go?

But I fall down, a tumble of cloth ending in one

plink of the keys.

So this is fullness.

9.03 p.m.

Slipped into regular sinus rhythm at about six tonight. I have to stay most of the day either because of the doctor’s schedule or I needed to rest, is what they’ll tell me. I hope I can say something to Kovacs Peter, at least goodbye—Viszontlataszra—and shake his hand before I walk out.

____________________________________________

I came back months later—the medicine didn’t take. I was within 24 hours of the arrhythmia, so they kept me overnight, but I woke still arrhythmic, and they took what I consider drastic measures—which they couldn’t do after 24 hours. They wheeled me into the Cardiovascular, where patients were dying inside clear plastic wrappers. They shaved my chest, knocked me out, and administered paddles as on every TV emergency show before losing the patient, someone’s brother, boyfriend, son, mother, me. I woke again with no memory moments later, my heart back to normal and two red marks on my ribcage like stains our small iron leaves when I use it on my shirts.