Chance Wanderings
Konrad, George
What happened to us between 1956 and 1989? Not much, only our time passed by. We did go back to see the more tepid and longer version of the same old show. Restrictions on our freedom of...
...For the paralyzing anxiety of the past half century did we have time...
...TRANSLATED FROM THE HUNGARIAN BY IMRE GOLDSTEIN SPRING • 1990 • 191...
...Today, however, I do not find the resulting turmoil to be tiresome...
...Because I am skeptical about everything human, about our collective self...
...Nothing is decided yet...
...If you do your job the way you're supposed to, you won't have time to meet many people...
...Here, I calm down, I am relaxed, almost happy, and wish for nothing extraordinary...
...Every moment of your life you are standing at crossroads facing a million possibilities...
...Bliss is a journey of selfrevelation into free space, into the light," said a blind photographer who even in the summer months used to walk around in a black hat and a red scarf...
...A woman in the same company replied sarcastically, "Why do you think that multiplication is a more mystical course of action than division...
...they tell you about their lives, about the irreparable injuries done to them...
...During the last few months I have been rushing about, trying to cope with many obligations...
...travel and movement are only memories...
...I have that now...
...I, however, also insist on gravity and earthly weights...
...There are still hearts pierced with arrows carved into the mossy bark of tree trunks...
...The blind photographer said, "Both knowledge and pleasure are multiplications, existence multiplied by infinity...
...My fellow passengers are skeptically attentive...
...I feel like moving on...
...From the veranda I see the waning moon...
...The blind photographer lifted his face into the light, and the grimacing lady, glancing in all directions, noticed the red summer apple in my hand that I was about to offer to her...
...I cling to a ground-floor point of view that can well distinguish between black and white...
...When schizophrenic outsiders become selfsatisfied insiders, you can be sure that a bird has flown out the window...
...it has green shutters and in the back a large veranda looking out on the depth of the garden...
...Hoping to lose them, I left them in the hotel room...
...What don't we have time for...
...When viewed from Budapest, ours seems to be a nervous little country, but not so from here, from the lake shore...
...Sounding like an old typewriter, an experienced woodpecker is constantly at work in the garden...
...In the morning I ride my bike to get fresh milk and rolls...
...At the moment everything is history...
...This house is old and beautiful...
...we participate in a conference at which we prepare yet another conference...
...A white sailboat crosses the scene way upstage...
...All these years the communist cultural machinery was unable to swallow you up...
...This time the Hungarians are obviously not in a raging mood...
...The far shore is shrouded in a nacreous vapor...
...I am waiting for a sentence to appear...
...The BALATONSZEMES, SEPTEMBER 1989 fashionable figures of the previous regime are anxious...
...yes, Lord, soon we'll be flying...
...Whenever I want something, or am afraid of something, I know I am in bad shape...
...Their small daughter lowers her feet into the water, then quickly withdraws them...
...Who would have thought...
...Confidently I look up...
...We have returned from our adventures...
...the last time we got them was back in fifty-six...
...These fiery and attentive club members are rather peculiar individuals...
...The sun deck, this wooden island in the lake, is filling up with more and more blond bodies...
...they're all obsessed...
...I am sitting on a massive, white bench in VermezO...
...For a few moments, but only for a few moments, you are blessed with the perfection of being in your proper place...
...their activities make every one of our days eventful...
...on the lawn a sunbathing woman forms a five-pointed cross...
...Last night one thousand East Germans crossed the border, legally, showing their passports...
...let the water trickle between two words on the pebbles of the shore...
...And how will this issue be taken care of, how will that problem be treated?, suspicious and anxious people are asking each other on the field of great consumption as they throng among the wine and beer tents...
...Restrictions on our freedom of expression and movement were rather exhausting...
...In times of revolution, the erstwhile depressed masses swing over into fanaticism...
...Perhaps there is in us—as the master who conjures pictures out of light claims—a captive bird that longs to soar...
...I'm not in a hurry, that's why I have time, and my nervousness is gone, too...
...That no person can have an objective view of another...
...Because in human thinking I recognize no obligations or taboos...
...The sunbathing wife removes the top of her bathing suit...
...Why am I a liberal...
...It's not important that everyone should have power over some other people, but it is SPRING • 1990 189 European Revolutions important that everyone be able to speak his or her mind...
...Yesterday we were still in Budapest...
...From time to time I catch myself saying things that I know in advance will please my audience...
...Things are beginning to work...
...I prefer chance meetings to prearranged ones...
...I do not wish to leave this tranquility for any turmoil...
...Only what has turned into fairy tales can survive...
...Not surprisingly, only what's been pent up in them can be pouring out of them now...
...I walk out on stage, face a few hundred people, and speak...
...And look how normal this walking in and out of counties has become in a short month...
...I've been to several meetings lately...
...Only for this little freedom we don't have time...
...I often hear that we've missed the boat, that we've no time left...
...I can go back to my desk...
...Quietly the spinning wheel goes round and round...
...In a little while we will become relics of a bygone era, reminiscing veteran codgers...
...You say that human desire and human truth are inseparable...
...now we are all O.K., like equal members of a jazz band...
...Our time spent under communism has become an object of humor, nicely framed and ready for viewing...
...I was also given some of these prickly bits of wire, looking like bizarre flowers...
...Friends come to visit, they all tell their own stories, giving it everything they've got...
...Listen to the ones who only two years ago kept wisely silent...
...Children climbed up into the watchtowers, old gentlemen produced wire cutters from their briefcases to snip away bits of the iron curtain...
...Maybe there is a bird in me, as you say, but I know that there is also a dust-eating serpent inside me...
...Letting yourself be sucked into it, you immediately become a prey of the cultural machinery...
...there was plenty of mutton stew and goulash, improvised wine stands, tents set up by the Democratic Forum as well as by the Free Democrats, lots of speeches from several platforms, manifestoes in different languages, problems of translation...
...there are a lot of angry people around...
...our books, printed a few years ago and considered illegal at the time, are now shown on the television screen...
...Equestrians are riding around and around...
...Before the speech I avoid talking to anyone, merely mumble, make noncommittal sounds, have something to drink, and then take the microphone into my hand...
...The scene is full of respectable characters burning with ideas and fixations...
...Any of my writings can now be published, and our dissident past has been put into the perspective of an ironic fairy tale...
...Writing can also be slowed down...
...they listen to me with interest...
...For a long time now I've been planning to buy a country 190 • DISSENT European Revolutions house, but I always wind up renting one...
...today, at every chance they get, they rattle off the entire repertory of the opposition...
...because for me there are no institutions, persons, or concepts that are sacrosanct or above criticism...
...I don't want to convince anybody...
...Success is more exhausting and more detrimental to good work than failure...
...On the shore of Lake Balaton, out on the veranda, we're having supper...
...I'm not the owner type...
...This faith of yours in a liberating flood of light, my dear photographer, is for schoolchildren...
...That not by an iota does raging hatred diminish the verity of brotherly love...
...everyone is given a chance to perform his or her solo while the rest are listening...
...I can see a healthy ambition and thirst for power in the new politicians: pure morality and service to the community are driving them to reach for the highest shelves...
...slowly I spin the yarn...
...The democratic opposition has made its way from underground literature to the television screen...
...Yes, I believe that he longed to be in the light...
...Strange how the spatial flitting of the mind results in two-dimensional lines on paper...
...lots of handshakes, milling around, confusion, questions from behind hand-held cameras...
...They all want something strange and particular...
...Nothing is more distasteful to me than urgent business...
...One German politician suggested that the Hungarian people be recommended for the Nobel Peace Prize...
...On several occasions I've been the moderator of discussions at the Liberal Club...
...I was in Sopron on August 19 when the East Germans, carrying champagne bottles and Hungarian flags, streamed through that dilapidated gate—it would have seemed more in place in an old farmyard than at the East-West border—sweeping aside the border guards, who only shrugged their official shoulders...
...I demand freedom even among my circle of friends...
...Neither depression nor fanaticism is a desired state...
...We're enjoying the ZOldszilvdni wine of Balatonboglar...
...Walpurga Hapsburg brings her father's democratic greetings...
...I'd like all my necessary possessions to fit into two travel bags...
...I try to survive the journey through my own verbal labyrinths...
...still, we are of the same mold...
...I, for example, do not court the love of known gods...
...I am interested in clarifying the rules of the game and not in the replacement of the players...
...the husband is surprised momentarily, then tries calmly and for a long time to look at the smooth surface of the water...
...the water is still cold...
...soon it will be legal...
...a zealous attendant found me and made me take them...
...At dawn in my hotel room I was turning the radio dial, the mass border-crossing was the lead story on several stations...
...With their eyes sparkling, my two young sons are eating and lavishing royal praises on Jutka, my wife...
...Five minutes earlier I had no idea what I was going to say...
...In public forums we speak for the sake of speaking...
...a Schwarzenberg prince is also indescribably democratic in his views...
...We were compelled to waste too much time on pseudoproblems...
...I am observing the latest, reemerging kitsch...
...I don't know...
...When the world is rational, one is not angry and does not fight...
...Slowly I amble away...
...I'm in no hurry...
...Here, in this borrowed garden, all ties peel off me...
...The great silence that has settled about the veranda is broken occasionally only by the sound of a falling walnut...
...I don't know what the next word will be...
...For me, liberalism is, first of all, a style: worldly, civilized, personal, ironic...
...We had a Pan-European picnic: wearing folk costumes and riding outfits, the Austrians came in droves...
...they know that this is the time to be on summer vacation...
...now you'll let the democratic one do it to you...
...Is the truth of his statement weakened or strengthened by the fact that he was blind...
...then there is no task left but the pleasant maintenance of our daily lives...
...The bicycle is the only vehicle still in harmony with human dignity...
...A pigeon is bobbing its head, a dog is flapping its dark beard...
...The water hurls itself against the rock, not angry, only lashing at the smooth surface...
...We're not used to such emotional and touching Kudos...
...Unlike them, I do not wish things to turn out in one particular way or another...
...I'd like to know...
...rumor has it that these small fragments are now being sold in America for a dollar a piece...
...Look at our iron curtain, how full of holes the poor thing is...
Vol. 37 • April 1990 • No. 2
