I wasn't offended. In his place I would have said the same thing. Prém was a very poor student. Year after year he barely passed his finals. And his family was dirt-poor. Of course, we weren't rich either; we, too, ate mostly beans, peas, and rotten potatoes, but in a pinch my mother could sell a rug, an old piece of jewelry, or some silver. We were friends; the unbridgeable social gap between us was fully calculated into our friendship. In our war games I was always the officer and he the private. He wouldn't even be corporal or sergeant, for the in between rank would hurt his pride. So this unpleasant little interlude didn't stop us from restoring the old order a few days later. And his eagerness to hear more didn't seem to embarrass him. He had me recount the story of the visit several times a day. I obliged him, and even the first time I gave him a rather imaginative version of it, which I kept embellishing as time went on. It would have been unthinkable to admit that what we had treated as a profound mystery until now, a secret worthy of a reconnaissance mission, was in reality something infinitely boring, colorless, dreary, and mundane. I held the secret in my hand and did not believe my eyes. I couldn't have known then that no secret was drearier than the secret of despotism.
Everything did go just the way the strange man had told us it would. In this secret there is no room for contingency. At nine in the morning we had to show up, in our Pioneer uniforms, without hats, scarves, or coats, at the Lorant Street gate. They stuck two bouquets of carnations in our hands. Maja got one, I got the other. It was a bright, snowy morning, at least ten below freezing. We must have looked pitiful, though, because our parents, quite correctly, wouldn't let us leave the house in white Pioneer shirts, as the instructions prescribed, and made sure we put on lots of warm underthings. We all looked stuffed and bulky, and after we'd moved around awhile, all sorts of things were sticking out from under our holiday outfits. Of course, this detail I didn't mention to Prém. Instead, I told him that on the other side of the gate was this well-concealed structure where they searched us. And to make it sound even more alluring, I added that the girls were stripped to their birthday suits. And that's where they gave us the bouquets, I told him, to prevent us from hiding poison or explosives in them. Actually, one of the guards brought the flowers from his booth. All right, children, who is giving the speech? I couldn't reconcile the terrifying thoroughness of the preparations with the sloppiness of the execution. So I embroidered my tale to fit my harrowing expectations. Our little troupe marched down the road that cut across the forbidden territory, where the snow hadn't been cleared away, just as it hadn't been in the rest of the streets of the city. Against my will, my eyes made the incomprehensible observation that there was no appreciable difference between the two places. But according to my report, the road was heated by a secret underground radiator, so not only was there no snow but the pavement remained bone-dry. On the left, among the trees and quite far apart, were two shabby villas. There was nothing on the right. Snowy woods. And then an ugly house in the woods. In my story, it was a white mansion and we drove up to it in a black limousine. Two armed men guarded the entrance, and we were led into a red-marble hall.
During the last days of October 1956, members of the newly formed national guard removed the barriers to the place. And the following day newspapers reported that the compound was no longer a restricted area. Yet Prém did not reproach me. I did lie to him, but he wouldn't have known what to do with the real facts either. I told him what he wanted to hear. Or rather, I said what our mind's eye had to see in order to understand what otherwise defied understanding.
If in what follows I should discreetly amend or correct some of the statements made by my deceased friend, I do so not out of a burning desire to establish the truth. What I'd like to do is examine our common life experiences from my own particular perspective and for my own sake. Whatever we may have shared can be approached via not only similarities but dissimilarities. In fact, I take the position of the most extreme moral relativists, making no qualitative distinction between truth and lies. I maintain that our lies prove as much about us as do our truths. Yet, when I concede that my friend was perfectly justified to speak of his life as he saw fit, I ask for the same consideration: that I be allowed to lie in my own way, to fantasize, to distort, to hold back, and, if it suits my purposes, even to tell the truth.
I read on pages 492 and 493 of his manuscript that after much struggle I finally got into a military academy, and that we happened to be in Kalocsa on fall maneuvers when news of the October uprising reached us, which resulted in our abrupt dismissal. And after I had related to him the adventures of my journey home, I took my leave, walking off into the twilight, and we never saw each other again.
I'd be no doubt more respectful of his memory if I left his version unchallenged. I can't do it. I can't accept his story as the only one, the exclusive one, because right next to it there's my own. The substance of our story was identical, but in it we moved in totally opposite directions. Thus, from my perspective, of his three seemingly innocuous statements I must judge the first as too simplistic, the second as totally erroneous, and the third as an emotional distortion that simply does not square with the facts.
My friend's father, if he was his father, I met very rarely. As a rule he ignored me. He barely returned my greeting. This much I can remember, but very little else. His face, his build, I can hardly recall. I was afraid of him. I couldn't say why. My fear wasn't unfounded, after all he was among the most ruthless men of the era, although I had no specific knowledge of that until after his suicide. And that late October afternoon I did take my hasty leave, for when I saw this much respected and feared man climbing over the fence, I knew I mustn't witness such an odd homecoming. If I'd stayed, I would have humiliated my friend, and I didn't want to do that either. I did say goodbye to him, but exactly eleven years later we met again.
Eleven years later, in late October 1967, I had to travel to Moscow. It wasn't my first visit there. I had accompanied my immediate supervisor twice during the previous year and three times that same year.
Each time we were put up at the Hotel Leningrad, near the Kazan railroad station, in a palatially spacious suite with a foyer, a reception room, and a bedroom complete with silk-draped four-poster beds. No ordinary mortal could possibly fill the dimensions of these rooms. My boss spoke Russian rather poorly, while I reveled in my knowledge of it. I seized every opportunity to use it and to improve my vocabulary. In my free time I roamed the streets, rode the metro, made friends, even had an affair. The pervasive, sugary, choking smell of gasoline was no longer a novelty for me; it drifted up to the thirteenth floor of our hotel, blew through the parks, filled the metro tunnels, got into your skin, your hair, your clothes, and made you smell like a Muscovite. I found myself a fasttalking blonde; returning to her for the third time was a real joy. She lived on the Pervomayskaya with her mother and sister and a niece who had recently moved there from the country. The powerful voices of these large women and their unbridled sentimentality just about burst the walls of their tiny flat. It became my secret home. I admit timidly that neither before nor since have I seen such delectably firm and enormous female thighs. In the summer they rented a dacha somewhere near Tula, and we made plans for me to visit them the following year. We'd swim, gather mushrooms, and pick blackberries to flavor our tea with, come winter. At that time my resolve to make it to the Uriv region one day, to Alekseyevskaya, was still very much alive. We discussed this plan in great detail, too. In the end nothing came of it.