PAUL NEUBURG
as human beings is expounded, and
In
the morning, thirty minutes
before work starts, they'll
be
drawn into a circle
to
read the party
paper together and clarify the issues of the day. Ideology will
be
in
-the
air, and everything in people's lives, from the loss of a job to
free sports facilities or the boredom ,of didactic art
to
the doorbell
buzzing at dawn, will have to do with daily or transcendent politics,
and will be understood that way. And though outwardly much of
this
has changed, the basic pattern, and the pattern of thought, persists.
A woman queuing for block-ice or milk still blames the government
if the stuff runs out before she's got any. Quite rightly, too. Having
put itself at the center of life, having replaced Chance and God (not
to mention such smaller dignitaries as the owner of the block-ice
plant), the government must shoulder all responsibility. And with a
visitor like myself, whose very existence as a visitor, an outsider, is
the result of the last political upheaval in the country that has
mattered, the subject will be in everybody's mind and soon rise into
the conversation. The Good Soldier Schweik hasn't a chance.
Politics is there even before the border. The road from Vienna is
busy as it leaves the city, traffic is normal, as if the world tw were
normal and no division ran through it a bare forty miles away. Then at
junction after junction cars tum off. In the end, approaching Nicklesdorf,
the last Austrian village, the road is empty. I am the only thing going.
An unease takes my throat. This is it, the real thing, for the
first time in ten years. Not the distant country about which I've been
asked and been talking till it became no more tlhan a myth, but the
one in which I grew up and which has lived on without me. The one
there, the fact, containing friends, parents, the city, the language and
the party and the police
too.
The landscape is flat and familiar, some
of the clouds must already be hanging in Hungary. I try to figure out
which, then I give up. I'll soon be there. As if by fateful courtesy, the
Viennese radio is playing Bart6k.
In Nicklesdorf I fill the tank. Hungarian petrol has a ghastly
reputation. I have a coffee, and muse over the thought of starting a
diary.
So
much is going to happen. But a
diary
in what language?
And how do I know they won't want to read it on the way out at
the border? Would be useless if I had to self-censor it for that. Facing
me on the wall there's a large poster advertising a village dance.
An·
other next to it, with pictures, warns about the
types
of Hungarian
mines floating in the stream that divides the
two
countries. Let's go.
Near the Austrian checkpoint I meet a whole row of tiny cars,
