BUDAPEST LETTER
ALL QUIET ON THE EASTERN FRONT
When I set out on my return visit to Hungary, the first in
ten years, I decided I'd behave like the Good Soldier Schweik. I would
not get obstreperous whatever happened, and if asked for my opinion
I'd tell them everything was just beautiful and anyway I was there
by mistake. Let them talk. Though traveling on a British passport, I
had been warned by the Horne Office th'at under Hungarian law I
was still a Hungarian citizen and once inside the country I could
expect no consular protection.
If
I got into trouble, that was my
worry. There'd be no diplomatic noise, no reprisals, no H.M. destroyers
steaming down the Danube on my behalf. Then I'd heard blood–
curdling stories about provocation by secret policemen, and even worse,
about a gulf of unease that had grown between those who had left
and those who had stayed 'after 1956. Apparently, even in the circle
of closest friends, if the visitor was enthusiastic, he was taken for a
fool; if he found fault, he was made to feel that having left the
country he'd lost his share and thus his right to criticize. As 'a dilemma,
this was enough to strike anyone dumb. Especially in a country where,
I was convinced, law had lost its sanctity and had become a matter of
dialectical synthesis between the situation and its interpretation, without
the possibility of appeal to an absolute beyond.
As it turned out, during my six weeks there I talked and listened
to enough politics to merit a lifetime in the saltmines under Stalin.
Inevitably. Politics, always a national pastime, prime occasion for
humor, lament and conversation in general, had become pervasive in
the life of the people in the last twenty years. When an elite in govern–
ment sets about turning the country (:and the whole world, for that
matter) upside down, the rQOt cause of every effect will stick in the
air, to be highlit or shrouded in verbal mist by those in power, but
never to be ignored. People will be pressured to attend evening seminars
where the new view of history, economics, morals and of themselves
