It was a lonely time, the autumn I moved down to New York. I was living out of my email then, frantic to fill any hour not already devoted to scraping together rent. Sometimes I saw my friends, but for the most part they were busy with their own lives. Other nights I tried to meet people, tried to go on dates or take part in reading groups, but with little luck.
So instead I walked. I would take the train into Manhattan and walk down the Hudson and then back up again, my face burning and my legs numb, until it was time to eat or leaf through the used book tables or return to my apartment, alone. My roommates thought me desperately lonely, and I’m sure they were right.
One of these nights, I was heading back to West 4th when I stopped before a small storefront in which a crowd had gathered. That winter was frighteningly cold, with news full of homeless men freezing to death on subway grates, and it would be accurate to say that I was drawn by the warmth. Only after I had opened the fogged-over door did I notice just how large the crowd actually was: every seat and spare bit of floor had been taken, as had the spots along the walls and the alcoves before the windows, and as I stepped in upon a blast of frigid air, every one of these resentful faces seemed to turn towards me. I forced the door shut against the draft, sidestepped to the windows, and tried my best to pretend that I belonged.
Up front were seated three men, framed on either side by hanging mobiles of children’s toys and broken glass. So fierce was their debate that they had not even registered my entrance. Though a few terms come back to me—invisible theater, productive alienation—I cannot piece together their conversation. Every word seemed couched in scare quotes, and I found myself lost in the jargon. I do remember the audience’s near-total focus as it fixated upon these three men, pausing only to applaud or to scoff.
I was able to make out several camps: one very large, in support of the youngest of the three men, who spoke decisively and dressed like a bike messenger; another, much smaller and composed mostly of young women, possibly students of the professorially balding man in the middle; and a nearly nonexistent third, which offered anemic support to the man on the left, whose crumpled and old-fashioned suit seemed to fit his speech, delivered haltingly and with a strong East European accent. The leftmost man would occasionally rouse as if about to deliver some decisive point, but the words never quite came. I felt an instinctive sympathy for this hesitant old man, so plainly out of time that he might have been a piece of art, displayed fondly but nostalgically to emphasize the gallery’s history. I longed to see him take hold of his voice, for his words to flow as if carried along by a vigorous and subterranean current, to burst out and overwhelm the room like one of those rivers lost for league after league amongst caverns and caves before it emerges at last to travel its final triumphant miles into the sea. I don’t believe he finished even a single sentence.
At home that evening, I searched for the gallery in which the event had been held, and discovered that I had inadvertently attended a discussion on “The Future of Revolutionary Drama.” It had been held to celebrate the youngest of the three men, who had just debuted an avant-garde piece of Epic Communist Acid Poetry, and had been hosted by a visiting NYU fellow whose most famous book, Post Lapsarian, Pre Revolution, covered “the possibility of Marxist organization among the Manitoban Mennonites.” If the talk was filmed, I have never found the video.
The old man’s name was Gyula F, and he seemed only to have been invited as a courtesy to the gallery owner. The two men had belonged in their student days to a thriving circle of artists in Budapest, a group of poets, playwrights, and painters who had pushed up against the constrictions of socialist realism in their drive for truly revolutionary forms. In their defining moment, the circle had put forth a manifesto in the heat of the revolt of 1956, demanding freedom for the people of their country. “The revolution demands that we be able to live our lives as free socialist subjects,” they declared, and were punished horribly for it.
The Soviets took Budapest and smashed the circle, scattering its members into various prisons and labor camps throughout the country. Some, including the playwright’s wife, had managed to flee the tanks, and after several hard years in prison Gyula F joined them in New York City. It seems he had been an influential and even quite popular voice in the émigré scene of the 1960s and 70s, penning in his native language a number of plays which were translated with the support of the Congress of Cultural Freedom. But as the memory of his ordeal faded, so too had his status in the theater scene, and it seems the cold warriors dropped him entirely. By the time I first learned of him, Gyula F was regarded largely as a revisionist, a crank whose works had fallen out of print and were never performed.
A month or two later, I was leafing through an East Village book store when I came upon a play titled Nights of Judgment and Days of Decision, by the very same Gyula F. I decamped to a nearby coffee shop and read the entire play.
Nights of Judgment was written in Gyula’s American exile. It takes place over three acts, each of which covers a different day within the Radio Budapest building during the revolution. Featuring many characters, its effect is polyphonic, voicing all manner of opinions, beliefs, hopes, and sorrows within its conceit of a fictional radio program, with one man at the center: Sándor, an idealistic student who is the first to storm the stage and the last to be silenced by the curtain.
Act one begins on October 23, when Sándor and his compatriots seize the microphones and bellow their demands at the audience: democracy; liberty; true socialism. They debate the proper ways by which these ends might be achieved, how Hungary can chart its own way in the world, and their own, more personal connections to these questions. Béla wants to write novels without censorship; Magda delivers a soliloquy on the suffering of the peasants; the teenaged Csilla just wants to cast a single vote.
Act two takes place at some point in the intervening days, when rumors of invasion run rampant throughout the capitol and the revolution feels more tenuous than ever. The revolutionaries have become jumpy, anxious. Their conversations are taken up with gossip, fear, and petty complaints: about the weather, the air inside the station, even the temperature of the coffee. Everything, it seems, but the revolution itself.
Sándor says very little during the second act, perhaps saving his words for the third. It is the early hours of November 4, with the Soviet tanks already rolling through the streets and the revolution nearly at its end. But all anyone in the station can do is bicker. They return to the petty grievances of the second act, spread gossip and rumors about the state of things on the streets. Will the Americans intervene? Will the UN? Everything is confused, nothing coheres. But then Sándor races onto the stage, “[a streak of blood and dust across his forehead],” and, with the revolutionary Prime Minister’s statement in hand, he wrenches the play in another direction. Where until now everything has been bewildering, undecided, Sándor sets it all to rights: the Soviets are here, the revolution is over. “But!” he thunders into the microphone: “We are at the mere beginning of our struggle!” What is history, he asks, but a vast panorama of defeats? And according to the laws of the world, so much defeat must lead, inevitably, eventually, to victory. The great powers of the world, drunk on their triumphs, cannot imagine a world other than the one which they have inherited. “But we the defeated, we the victims of history, know that our hopes oh so rarely line up with reality.” This, he announces, is the secret gift given only to the conquered: to realize that the world is never good enough, that it can be always be otherwise. “We will bear their victory, we will suffer under their heel, but we will never be cursed with their complacency. And when the tanks come again, we will mine the streets and blow up the bridges, and only once it is too late will they recognize that we who are first the victims of history must end our lives its masters!” And with this pronouncement soldiers storm out from the wings, the curtain drops, and the theater goes dark. The script calls for no bows. “Our applause will come,” the author notes, “when the revolution triumphs at last.”
I read this play again the next day, and many more times throughout that winter. I see today that the play’s political content must have escaped me entirely. I was so caught up in my own life at the time that I instead found consolation in this victory in defeat. Any failure can be managed, I realized, but only if given its proper place in the long arc of similar such failures. Misfortune muddles on for an eternity, but history points us to the emergency exit. Even the worst loss must eventually lead to victory. It’s embarrassing, I know, but, throughout those long, cold months, I subsisted on the shame.
No matter how many bookstores I trawled, I never came upon another play, and the online listings were beyond what I could afford. I loitered around many more events, some at the gallery, others held by associated groups, all in the hope that I might run into the old man again. But either he was not invited or the reading had been a fluke, or perhaps something much worse—regardless, I never saw Gyula F again.
I kept going, though, long after I should have given up hope. That July, in the middle of a heatwave that melted the blacktop overnight, I went to a party at a loft in Dumbo, to celebrate the launch of a Maoist quarterly. The white-shirted socialists sold marked up beer and mushy ice cream, and their debut issue was full of articles on maternal communism and the radical leveling power of Soundcloud rap. The AC was broken and everyone was sweating through their shirts, and they gave me suspicious looks every time I went to fill my water bottle in the hall.
The night began with a Q&A during which one of the editors suggested the reclassification of mental illness as class warfare, followed by a dance party, though everyone felt too oppressed by the heat to move. Perhaps seizing their moment, a group of people paused the music and strode to the center of the room. At their head was the Acid Poet, still in his bike messenger outfit, who announced their purpose: as the great comrade Gyula F had recently passed, they wanted to take a moment to read from his greatest work. I was taken aback. The old man? Dead? But before my shock could come to a rest, the troupe launched into act three of Nights of Judgment. They hit all the same beats, faithfully reading out Magda’s panic, Béla’s doubt, and Csilla’s descent into cynicism. But there was something off in their reading, a certain stilted hesitation, as if afraid of the lines. They flubbed the names, made no attempt to correctly pronounce any of the Hungarian interpolations. I could have provided a better recitation from memory. Their amateurishness began to irritate me. Hadn’t they practiced, hadn’t they prepared? I wanted to stand up and demand some respect for our dead prophet.
Only once Sándor entered the scene did I notice that the people around me were laughing. The Poet walked out with his chest puffed and his dark hair slicked back into a sparse pompadour, and delivered this monologue which had come to represent so many of my hopes over those lonely months—but as farce. He snickered through the proclamations, exhorting his comrades through a leadenly ironic veil. He deflated the stakes, and rendered their tragedy a joke. It was as if the man could not imagine the possibility of failure, let alone defeat. I could not even hear the final line for the howling around me. “For our lost comrade,” announced the Poet with a sneer. “That he may find victory in another life.”
I fled the party in disgust, and in shame. The air was boiling even in the middle of the night. Women sat by the mouth of the subway to catch the crossbreeze. I tried to wait for the train, but, my mind on fire, I left the tunnel and began to walk. I was humiliated. How could I ever have been comforted by something so absurd as victory in defeat? I realized, all at once, that I had been leaning on a column that was not even there.
I walked up from the river, past the Brooklyn Bridge inlet and towards the parks near borough hall. There were young people about, a homeless man collecting bottles, an old woman with her dog. My hope and my shame nearly boiled over, but who could I have told? The party, the poet, the old man: what were these things to anyone? What even were they to me?
I stopped before the war memorial, the statues looming in the globelight with their cloaks and laurels. “May their sacrifice inspire future generations and lead to universal peace,” I read upon the wall, and never before or since have I felt so ridiculous.
Over the following years, all of the bookshops of my first days in the city would close, and many of those from the party would twice pour themselves into a failed presidential campaign; the Acid Poet would be hired by an Ivy League university and quickly fired for sexual misconduct; it would come out that the magazine had been funded with the proceeds of a shale gas fortune, and one of the editors would be arrested near a dam in Oregon with a bomb in his trunk.
And, combing through the dead writer’s papers, a researcher would come upon a post-script for Nights of Judgment and Days of Decision, likely written towards the end of Gyula F’s long life. The stage is bare but for a scuffed wooden chair, from which Sándor addresses the audience. Many years have passed, and his life in Hungary has grown ever more despondent. He holds up his scarred hands, spreads broken fingers and counts down his sorrows. He has been exiled to a remote corner of the country, where he tends a decrepit plot on the collective farm. His friends are gone: some dead from the revolution, many others—Béla and Magda among them—disappeared into the West. No one will publish his work, and he rarely writes anymore.
He pauses a beat, and then picks up a refrain on these themes. “We continue to struggle—but for what? Even if a new world were possible, what would it be without ideals? Without friends, without words? Defeat is like a smashed mirror, in which we no longer see the least bit of ourselves. No, there is no victory for the defeated. What is lost,” Sándor concludes, “is lost forever,” and then he rises, and exits the stage.
In the margins, Gyula F had scrawled one final piece of direction. The stage is to be left as it is. There will be no curtain, no house lights, no music to mark the end. The audience can wait as long as it likes. Sooner or later, he writes, someone among them will see that it is time to leave.