To These Hungarians, Freedom Is Just Another Word for Defeat

“Were those 40 years nothing but a mistake, a detour, a waste?” a character in “Stonedial” asks about people’s lives under the Soviets. “Didn’t they read or write anything worthwhile in those 40 years? Didn’t they ever find their sweethearts’ gestures endearing? Or have a decent cut of meat. . . ?”

The questioner is Janos Dragoman, a Hungarian Jewish writer and philosopher who has spent the years since 1991 wrestling with the Soviet legacy. He has traveled ceaselessly, hosting conferences and lecturing on the meaning of life before and after the Soviet Union’s collapse. The problem is, he’s not quite sure what it means.

That’s not Dragoman’s fault alone. The inability to wring some high-minded moral from the Soviet era is typical of all the characters in George Konrad’s novel. It is an inability that is partly their fault and partly the fault of their history; living on a piece of Central European real estate that has been trampled through the centuries has made his characters cynical about the promises of freedom.

“There is a new vocabulary, a new set of tricks, new people concealing old greed with new slogans . . . an underdeveloped country switching illusions in an attempt to catch up with the leaders of the pack. It can’t be done,” Dragoman thinks wearily of the changes brought by Western capitalism.

That’s a far cry from the familiar 1991 image of exhilarated crowds stomping on the Berlin Wall. Konrad calls this attitude “the melancholy of rebirth.” What? Freedom a cause of melancholy? Not for Americans, who see freedom as something that starts with a revolution and flows on without end. For Hungarians, however, freedom is only a gap of time in between conquerors ancient and modern--Tatars, Turks, Hapsburgs, Germans and Soviets.

“Stonedial” opens with Dragoman’s return to quaint, cobblestoned Kandor, the closest thing that this wanderer has to a hometown. He “has had his fill of writing, reading, traveling, meeting people,” Konrad writes. “After a time, roaming feels like running in place.” He wants to see old friends and take stock of the past; he finds that they have all become petty opportunists. The narrative moves between his past memories and present encounters with the likes of the mayor, Antal Tombor, a flatterer par excellence with an eye for spectacle and self-promotion; and Kuno Aba, the town’s revered university rector, whose “Circle of Memory” project aims to preserve Kandor’s history, minus his own role in the deaths of six students during the 1956 uprising. Dragoman’s arrival unsettles Aba because Dragoman knows what happened but has kept quiet, and this provides the only real plot tension in the story.

A past president of international PEN, Konrad suggests that a public intellectual like Dragoman faces another sort of corruption. Despite his graying hair and an air of culture, Dragoman has lost his passion, his sense of mission, in the act of bottling his memories for the consumption of audiences: “Retrieved memories are frozen in time, no longer nourished by fresh currents. He experiences his stories in the form in which he has recounted them countless times.”

The question that “Stonedial” raises, then, is how does one find permanence in this environment in which nothing, even one’s memories, seems rooted or nourishing for very long? The effort to find something lasting in this landscape varies, from one character’s hope of a Central European alliance with a Hapsburg descendant as its “ruler” to Dragoman’s own temporary tethering to the daughter and grandson he didn’t know he had. He lives with them, taking long walks in the countryside and pondering the meaning of the stonedial, a rocky plateau where pillars stand in a circle a la Stonehenge. An ancient timepiece? Konrad never explains, although its presence looms over the characters as they wrestle with the past.

If only the novel didn’t wander as much as Dragoman. A tangible plot structure is dimly perceived near the end, rising out of the murk of character sketches, politics and conversations. It centers on Aba’s secret, and an absurd shoving match between Aba and Dragoman that kills the rector when he stumbles and hits his head. Although it was an accident caught on video and with plenty of eyewitnesses, Dragoman is hounded by the police: “As far as your case is concerned,” a detective tells him, “your chances are excellent.”

That’s all Dragoman needs to hear. He packs and leaves. But even if it weren’t for this, one suspects that he’d leave anyway. There’s too much wanderlust in his blood. The answer to rootlessness lies not in objects or ideas, but in self-sufficiency. Identity is portable--it fits in a satchel along with a razor, underwear and some pencils. This view echoes Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert’s declaration that each man carries “the City within himself . . . he will be the City” but without the heroic tone. Post-Soviet life is a mess, “Stonedial” suggests, and people either grab for all they can or flee.