Speaking of war (Knowledge production)

So, ‘London is the capital of Great Britain.’ These days it’s called it the UK, for Great is a bit much.

This is where my dear old friend lives. I don’t know his name. I don’t mean the name he lives by. What I don’t know is the name he was born with. I’ve never asked – I guess I could never come up with a good enough justification.

My old friend arrived here as a child. A refugee child of a suppressed revolution. He was born to parents who had survived the death camps a mere decade before. Survived the return too. Let’s suppose I can comprehend.

I picture them in their downtown Budapest flat (suppose, they still had it, suppose strangers did not move in, or suppose they left when those Jews returned). I imagine them watching that livid, ashamed, brutalised society move on, watch post-war life roll on like a tank in that gorgeous, bombed-out city. My city. Rubble is cleared away, people cross the river on makeshift bridges, ex-Nazis try to blend in, pretending nothing happened.

Then the new carnival of violence, the stolen elections, show trials. Communism. So-called. A new assault on language. Our own mini-gulag. Years of double speak, poverty. As the Soviet tanks put a bloody end to the 1956 revolution, my old friend’s family left Budapest. Let’s not suppose I can comprehend.

The old last name, whatever it might have been, was gone when they took British citizenship. By then, my friend was a lanky teenager with a shock of black hair. And he got to choose the new name. His choice was perfectly English.

The new name masked them well, covered up the Other: the Jew, the refugee, the Eastern European migrant. With that name, the boy who arrived young enough to speak without a foreign accent, who was white with blue eyes, got a second chance to live a normal life. So-called normal life.

He slid into Englishness without noticing, he once told me.

His was the second generation, where children grow up too early. They help find jobs for the parents, sort out their taxes. They shield them from this new, incomprehensible universe. Kids ashamed of how mother’s cooking smells, ashamed of standing out. They badly want to blend in, to be invisible. A ghost, even.

Their own children will go back ‘home’ to the mother country, as they call it, with a recorder in hand. They will go to dig up roots, to look for traces of their own face in the features of distant relatives. Secretly they will pity those cousins who stayed. They will speak their sort-of mother tongue with a foreign accent. They will look for the void their family left. But there is no void, just distance.

Back home, those kids will try on the rags of that long-lost otherness, they will show it off. By then, it will have lost its risks. This would be my children too, I suppose. But let’s not rush ahead.

My old friend says he cannot fathom what could have happened upon their arrival. They were not closed in camps. There were no traffickers, no barbed wire, no humiliating check-ups. English families took in many of these Hungarians.

The story of their arrival was a rare exception. My friend took it as kindness; he believed in the moral high ground his hosts said they stood on. It must have helped to turn the new home into a refuge. I think it helped him want to be English.

Then it took a lifetime to stomach it was simply luck.

A generation after Churchill and his allies threw our part of the world under the truck of Moscow in Yalta, it was just an opportune combination of white skin and geopolitical sympathies.

He knows, of course he does. Hostile environment is what they now call that fever dream, the so-called policy that is meant to manage migration. Manage, here, means cut. Hidden behind that name, those blue eyes, not many can guess the story of this elderly gentleman.

He never calls himself a refugee, mind you. None of the refugees I have ever met do.

We rarely speak of his childhood. His is not a family story to chat about, and he is not a kind of person who believes words could bring relief. He adores words, he has worked with them all his life. Maybe this is precisely why he does not want to take them to where they do not belong.

I visited him after Russia invaded Ukraine. We took a walk under a pale, impostor sun.

Somewhere a few miles away London buzzed with its tidal waves of traffic, instructed people to mind every gap, report every incident, (see it, say it, sorted!), assaulted their senses with flashes and beeps. Ads. London. Whiffs of smoke, rotting leaves, burps of energy drink and ale, the lingering, plasticky scent of too much fabric softener.

In our quiet suburb it was just us. He was holding the weekly paper that declared the generic end of the world as we know it. Yet again. It was an end so casually put, so vague in its shape or scale, in its violence, you almost didn’t notice it. Even among those who did, nobody paid much attention anymore.

I cannot take it, he mumbled. As we walked, he often stopped, startled, as if the ground had opened in front of him, as if trying to recall something. He winced at the sun, holding onto my arm. He cannot take it, just cannot accept it, he repeated.

The child refugee of that sad country, my country, and I, the immigrant who grew up with the fairy tale that all this, the detention camps, the barbed wire, the humiliating checkups were a stuff of the past, even though they were just the stuff of elsewhere. Stuff of an infrastructure that was not meant for us.

Him, fully clad in Englishness, me, hiding behind my attempted politeness, my good education, as we walk slowly in that quiet suburb, on our way to the Turkish bakery, we are invisible. We won’t be suspected to wince when they whisper there are too many of us, that it has gone too far. We have gone too far.

I cannot take it anymore, he sighs, not because it is happening again, but because it has never stopped. Because amidst glimpses of hope and humane arrivals, the old saga of humiliation and blind arrogance keeps going on.

He steadies himself and turns to me: tell me about Ukraine.