Mirage (academic autofiction)
Réka Krizmanics
The radio was clearly giving up on us, the signal was first sporadic then died entirely. We were driving through a forest somewhere in the vicinity of Braşov, which was a welcome escape from the sweltering heat—the air conditioner had not been working in our old car, and only nature could spare us from overheating. I was staring out the window, while Partner drove us to our next destination, a small museum about sixty kilometers away. We were on holiday, at least my body was while my mind anxiously calculated decision dates of university administrations, leaving little room for joy, despite the savory soups, the always comforting mămăligă,,and the breathtaking beauty of the surrounding hills.
Two sudden noises brought me back to the present. First, the radio signal came back announcing the date—August 13—and giving a thorough if somewhat detached account of the weather conditions. Second, my phone rang. I answered the call without checking the number although it wasn’t one of my contacts and prepared to take an official tone. It wasn’t necessary. The call lasted for about three sentences.
– Yes, I accept. I am delighted. I look forward to receiving the formal offer. – It wasn’t the administrator’s fault, she might have wanted to chat a bit longer, judging by her genuinely cheerful voice, and, as I came to learn later, she was truly caring for each and every student who went to the graduate school under her watch.
– I got accepted to CEU History – I turned to Partner with a PhD. – I was on the waitlist, but I got in at the end.
– You will have plenty of time to measure your worth to others and ponder merits – his response only half-sarcastic. After congratulating me, he suggested that we go to a party later in the evening, and I reluctantly agreed. I have no memories from the rest of the day, only that I was staring listlessly at the white bunny that was sitting on the rear mirror.
I knew I was supposed to celebrate. After five unsuccessful applications, I increasingly doubted that I would get accepted to a doctoral program. And I was exceptionally good at finding reasons why I would not be accepted. First, I did not have a straight record in history with my B.A. and interdisciplinary M.A.. Second, I had no role models to follow—I was already way out of my league with an M.A. in English that had prepared me for something very different than what traditional Hungarian academia demanded. Not that I had more ties to that one: my parents had a college degree in chemistry and went into proper, practical careers. Third, I had been warned multiple times about risks of the topic I chose as a potential doctoral project. Well, that was a tricky one.
A year before the Braşov road trip, I was sitting in one of the brightly-lit rooms of the Institute with three historians and the bunny on the neon lamp. I could not decide what was happening as the three men took turns speaking. Was I being overloaded with occasionally funny anecdotes about the Institute’s past or did they simply forget that I was in their company? After counting the roses on the curtain and reciting the day’s to-do list, I tried to catch Research Fellow’s eye. He was the loudest of the three, but his voice had a friendly warmth about it. After the punchline – “And there she was, missing the bus in Debrecen!” – it seemed like he had understood my silent plea and suddenly turned to me.
– Gentlemen, we have been enjoying ourselves far too much and we can continue this over lunch anyhow. But this young lady is here to discuss her research proposal with us. We shouldn’t make her listen to all this nonsense.
– But she is coming with us to lunch afterward, isn’t she? You are not sparing her from much – Research Associate took off his glasses and started to clean the lenses with a wet wipe.
– If she’s smart, she already took much from what has been discussed – said the Verbose Professor, who was able to transform into a Silent Professor as soon as someone else took over the conversation.
– Thank you for meeting me here, I really appreciate your time. Did you get a chance to skim through my proposal? I thought I would send you this brief version and then maybe summarize the rest…? – My voice was surprisingly steady, and I felt like I was slowly warming up. But when I noticed the disinterested looks and heard their muttering, I stopped speaking.
– Yes, I have read it – continued Research Fellow – and we also had a brief discussion before you came in. This sounds like a fascinating project. You want to compare how historians in Yugoslavia and Hungary worked during communism, right?
– Indeed, it has to do with how they worked…but I am equally interested in how “history was done” and written in academia and elsewhere. – I took his interjection as encouragement and decided to ignore the bunny that jumped off the lamp and started chewing on the heater.
– Elsewhere? I don’t recall those parts… Well, I am sure you know that when it comes to historiography, it’s not really the beginners who try to write about it. – For this, I had a tested retort.
– I would really narrow down the scope, selecting only several topics. And historiography proper would only take up one chapter in the dissertation, which I would only include because I cannot skip it entirely. I am much more interested in institutions, policies, and non-professional histories. And I think a comparison with Yugoslavia, or Croatia, more precisely…
Then Verbose Professor interrupted.
– Are you aware, young lady, that some of us are still working here? From that late socialist period that you want to research.
– Yes, I am. This is why I would like to interview as many people as I can – the bunny now seemed to have taken an interest in his chair, but I tried to keep looking into Verbose Professor’s eyes.
– Interviews! – he repeated – People can say anything they want in the interviews. And then, where is the proof?
– I will also go to the archives… – my voice now faltering. I saw my careful preparation going all to waste.
– The archives don’t have everything – the mocking tone more than obvious now. – If you insist on writing about this period, write a book on historiography. It will take you ten years perhaps, because you obviously underestimate the amount of literature that you need to go through, but then you’ll have a solid book. Knock on my door when you are leaving for lunch! – he left, silently followed by Research Associate. And then we were two. I decided to gather the remaining crumbs of my confidence and waited for Research Fellow to break the silence.
– This got a bit heated – he did not look surprised – but don’t take it to heart. He really thinks you should do pure historiography; he told me so before you came in. But don’t get me wrong. Should you decide to go ahead with this project, he would be happy to sit down with you and talk your ear off about his memories. He might withdraw his consent the moment before publication, but the old guy would certainly enjoy recounting his youth at the Institute.
– Based on what he said, I am not sure he had read the proposal. Maybe it should have been only one page long, not two – I still couldn’t figure out what he thought of my project, but I had a vague sense that if I were to have an ally, it would be Research Fellow.
- Don’t be silly, it has nothing to do with that. And be sure that he read it, as did all of us. But you know very well that he used to work here back then, and you need to understand what that means. He is not exactly fond of the idea of having tensions discussed, past or present. We have enough trouble here as it is – Research Fellow looked uneasy for the first time. This seemed like the perfect moment to redirect the conversation.
– I am very sorry to hear that the outside – I pointed vaguely in the direction of Parliament – is making your lives here increasingly difficult, I don’t want to cause any more distress. Honestly, what I need at this point is content-focused feedback because this is the second and last round when I am going to apply for graduate school. Is there something inherently flawed with the project? Should I abandon it and write something from scratch? If it can be fixed, I would need some specific suggestions, but if not, I can just leave it and try a different topic.
– Look – Research Fellow looked very serious all of a sudden – I cannot advise you to abandon a topic, this is not how things work. But I have to say that what you want to do is basically professional suicide. If you write this as your first book, it is as good as turning your back on Hungarian academia. Can I imagine it as a second book? Maybe.
– But the Croats…
– Nobody cares about the Croats – he raised his voice again – You can talk about as much comparison as you want. If you decide to go after historians who used to work here – he gestured toward the walls – you will lose a great deal of goodwill and you don’t want that.
– No, I most certainly don’t – I decided not to join the three men for lunch and took my leave, the bunny trailing after me. I felt strangely convinced that I needed to go ahead with the project as it was.
The PhD Lab, the shabby but homelike crowded office, witnessed much of my years-long rollercoaster ride of frantic revelations and utter desperation over incompetence. The bunny accompanied me there, too. On my bad days, it made itself comfortable in the office chair across my desk and was always in danger of tipping over as it waved its giant paws. The bunny, whom I affectionately named Alex McTwisp, made its first appearance when I was in third grade. I had a major role in a school play, and we prepared for giving a two-hour long performance on three consecutive nights. I was assigned the role because of my good memory—the Hungarian education with its focus on making kids memorize poems written in inaccessible language found an easy favorite in me. I was terrified to turn down the role, although my heart exchanged places with my stomach every time I thought of stepping on the stage in front of a thousand parents and schoolmates. And just like that, I befriended Alex, who came to the first rehearsal and wasn’t bigger than a hedgehog. By the opening night, it reached the size of a basketball. I was mesmerized by its presence, but my tongue did not slip once. I secured similar roles in the next five years, and the bunny followed me not only there but to classes, musical school, various competitions, and even home.
The bad days in the PhD had a similar choreography. I either struggled with the research—why are the archives of the Institute so disorganized?—or had to face my impossibly slow progress in learning Croatian. I was already accustomed to thinking and working in a language different from my mother tongue and spoke and understood a third one pretty well, but I couldn’t fathom why a Slavic language with a Latin script gave me such a hard time. As time went by and I stared hopelessly at the growing pile of literature and sources in Croatian, my mind kept playing my worst fears of failure in an endless reel.
The women in the lab were kind and encouraging in their own way.
– Learning your first Slavic language is always difficult. Give yourself time!
– Work on the Hungarian part and see how far it gets you. You might even drop the comparison and spare yourself more stress.
– You just need to find a good language teacher. That would put you on track! – this advice was the most to my liking, but the implementation was harder than I thought.
First, I had a friend of a friend, who had a Serbian father. He did not accept money and treated our appointments very casually. He had a good time talking in Serbian but could not really explain anything beyond the meaning of words. And one day he stopped answering my e-mails. Next came the enthusiastic native speaker colleague who was willing to practice source translations with me, but predictably, our conversation often segued into research-related topics in English, and this could not be considered an economic use of either of our time. My desperation grew as the first scheduled archival visit to Zagreb drew nearer, about six months ahead. Somewhat lost, I confided in Supervisor:
– I am not progressing quickly enough with Croatian; I think the project is in danger.
I still don’t know how I mustered up enough courage to tell him that. I felt so exposed that I was cold in the otherwise overheated, tiny office that always smelled of books and tea.
– You might want to read novels or poems, that is what I do to practice languages. And you should date a Yugo guy, that would solve your problem, we’ve seen that here before – he did not seem to mind my admission or the fact that he knew I was engaged to one of his former students.
If I felt like a failure when I entered his office, I was convinced I was a fraud when I exited. An imposter, someone who was big on proposals and promises but lacking in everything else. I even reprimanded myself for waiting for someone else’s – his – help. Alex was hiding under Supervisor’s desk during our conversation, and by the time I left, it grew so big that it barely squeezed through the door. Two weeks of utter desperation and self-loathing followed. I was terrified of going to Zagreb as an arrogant foreign researcher who barely mumbles the language while claiming that she will do good scholarship based on local sources.
The solution presented itself subtly. A dear colleague from M.A., a fellow Yugoslavia-enthusiast asked for a coffee and casually mentioned that if I was still searching for a language teacher, I might want to go to E.L. University, which I had attended before CEU, where the Department for Slavic Studies just had hired a new Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian instructor.
I arrived at the meeting with the teacher on an autopilot. I had vague expectations, knowing that she was a trained teacher, but I was deep in my thoughts trying to piece together sentences in Croatian to show her that I was sufficiently invested in the language learning process. I lost my way twice in the labyrinths of the old building that was located at a distant end of the campus. When I finally found Room 147/B, I still had about five minutes before our agreed time, so I decided to look around. The furniture resembled those from the History department, chipped, scratched, and inconvenient but surrounded with the air of belonging to the greatest Faculty of Humanities in the country. Alex played hide-and-seek, using the bottom shelf of a small cabinet with a missing door.
It was finally 3 PM but nobody passed me by, so I decided to enter the room. There she was, Dubrovčanka – this seemed a fitting name after I learned that she was a Dubrovnik native. She was reading Dubravka Ugrešić’s Muzej bezuvjetne predaje and wore a deep red overcoat.
– Bok, ti mora da si Réka. Voliš li Dubravku? – her voice sounded kind, reassuring, and genuinely interested.
– Nisam sve pročitala od nje, ali svidjelo mi se ono što sam pročitala. – This, admittedly, was not among my rehearsed sentences, and I surprised myself with how easily the words rolled out of my mouth.
– Dobro ćemo raditi zajedno – she nodded, and we quickly got down to business, switching to English when going through the particulars.
– And what do you think you will find in these thirty- or forty-year-old debates and writings? - she asked, following the summary of my dissertation project.
– I am very much an outsider to the world of historians, or to that of scholars, to be honest. I was raised by two chemical engineers in a western Hungarian town, and while they did not discourage me from trying my luck in academia and the humanities, they do resent me for becoming a different person in Budapest and in this intellectual milieu. In fact, my parents usually use the word “intellectual” with contempt. I have to know, you see. Is it worth the sacrifice? Can I really be happy doing research among my future colleagues?
– I am not sure I see the connection – Dubrovčanka interjected.
– I guess I put together the PhD project to understand what shaped the careers and scholarship of those historians who would now introduce me into the profession. To see what experiences they are building on as they respond to today's challenges, because now everyone seems to be an expert in history, especially in recent history. I need to know how they used to work in the 1970s and 1980s, and how it bears on their practices, reflexes now, you know, before deciding whether I wanted to commit myself either to them or to the guild of historians in general. – I gave her an uncertain look.
– So you are testing your commitment by making a years-long commitment, including learning a language? – She moved a little closer to me.
– Yes. I think that's the gist of it – I risked a short, nervous laugh.
– Interesting – her fingers never stopped, she was either scribbling without ever looking at her notebook or playing with the zipper of her black leather bag. – Still not sure about the comparison, though. You have a lot at stake in discovering what animated Hungarian historians, I understand and respect that. But why do you need our beloved Yugoslavia? – She mistook the moment of silence for my compilation of an exhaustive list.
– Oh, I am sure you have many obscure reasons – she smiled – but tell me something that even I can understand.
I smiled back at her – I make comparisons because I don’t believe in exceptionality, and if I write only one story, I am sure to end up with a curious, unique Hungarian case. – I pronounced the last four words exaggeratedly. – And I'd like to think that I'm studying state socialisms in the plural, as they were and as they were imagined, which can be nothing but a comparison.
– So tell me, how many of your brilliant historians are women?
In Dubrovčanka, I discovered a fellow feminist and literature enthusiast. Language learning is an incredibly intimate process. With a restricted ability to express oneself, the dialogues that are supposed to help practice and improve language skills in a complex way divulge topics that are closest to the learner. Family, hobbies, daily routines, or in my case, research; they formed the realm of the private and I, just like many others in my shoes, made them into objects of learning voluntarily. The setting of learning and the tendency to discuss private issues establishes a clear hierarchy between teacher and student. Yet, Dubrovčanka managed to make me forget about that from time to time as she let me in on her enthusiasm for teaching and the specific things she enjoyed in her regular job as a high school teacher. She frequently brought up her fascination with psychology, and we celebrated when she started pursuing this interest more seriously. But first and foremost, she was both a great teacher and colleague.
– How did you get connected with Emeritus, what did you say? – Dubrovčanka looked at my second draft of an outreach letter to a Croatian historian.
– We have never met, but a junior colleague of his is a good friend, and he told me that Emeritus would not mind. This is how I got the private email address as well.
– Then you do need to remain very formal in this letter – she crossed out some of her remarks on the margins of the printed page. – Are you sure that you don’t want to propose an interview? – she asked after a third reading. – You are going to meet many people when you go to Zagreb anyway.
I glanced at Alex, who had been playing silently in a tiny basket, and I suddenly felt as if I was watching a timelapse video as it rapidly grew to the size of a pig.
– That is out of the question – I answered slowly – it would look like a real interview, and I cannot possibly improvise in good Croatian. Talking to you in this sheltered space is one thing. And what if I froze during the interview? I would feel utterly incompetent.
– I thought that a retired person like him might appear less intimidating – Dubrovčanka explained – but don’t take this the wrong way. I’m only asking questions, you know. I am not your supervisor or anything.
– It has to be all or nothing. I either do interviews in Croatian with my interlocutors in a conversation or through correspondence, and I cannot see myself doing the former.
– You know what’s best for you – she smiled kindly.
– And I thank you for asking questions that no one else does – I added.
– Let’s get back to your letter then – Dubrovčanka placed the paper in front of me. – There are still some verbs left in there that are not in the right form, but other than that, it’s in really good shape. You should first figure out the right forms where you see the red marks and then we can move on to discussing the poems of Kiš. Let me know when you’re ready.
Before I found her, I had almost convinced myself that my brain was too old to truly absorb a new language. I was so happy to have been proven wrong. Dubrovčanka was a strict and methodical teacher who trusted me just enough to let me guide my own learning process while remaining in my student-seat. Alex only paid the occasional visit. My progress was not speedy but steady and clear. The Zagreb trip did not seem to be daunting or pointless anymore.
The autumn sun tempted every coffee drinker to spend hours at one of the terraces in downtown Budapest. I, too, left my overcoat in the PhD Lab as I hurried to one in a nearby street to finalize the preparation for my co-organized workshop scheduled for the next day.
– How was Zagreb? – asked Croatian Collaborator, who had been already there for some time, judging by the half-empty cup of cappuccino and the remains of what I guessed had been a marble cake. Alex started munching on the crumbs.
– Do we have that much time? – I laughed.
– We need to warm up first – he said and sent me to the counter to order.
– Well, I divided my time among three things. First, I attended Croatian classes daily for six weeks at the University of Zagreb. In the second half of my stay, I went to the archives and had meetings with colleagues, often seeing them for the very first time.
– Did you find anything useful in the archives?
– I cannot complain. The archivists were extremely kind and helpful. Following the predictable chaos of the first days, Senior Archivist decided to go over the list of materials with me that seemed relevant but obviously too much compared to the time I had. He helped me select and prioritize the sources, and, gallantly overlooking the daily limit of requests, he went above and beyond to make sure that I had the most productive stay.
– Archives and productivity? You must either have a very optimistic look on life or be the rare exception – joked Collaborator. – I hope you had some nice meetings as well. My colleague at the university told me that you talked to her too.
– Yes, I learned a lot from these encounters. My anxious expectations about “language tests” and quizzes about Yugoslav scholarship were completely unfounded. Even better, I could start writing.
– Now that’s great news. Sadly, the past months were not as eventful for me. Lots of waiting for peer reviews and proofs, and absolutely not productive weeks in the archives in Belgrade. It was the promise of our workshop that kept me going, seriously. Let’s get down to it then, shall we?
Pulling the cups and plates aside, we covered the table with printouts of the abstracts of our invited participants. We went through the schedule one more time, finalizing the details of coffee breaks and making a last-minute change in the sequence of the presentations, as one participant notified us of a potential flight delay.
– We have to keep the plural in the short concept piece – he agreed. – But do you think transnational is the best word to use? Shouldn’t we add comparative or even leave transnational out? Most of the people who are going to come are comparativists, and we don’t want to invite many more to write with us.
– Yes, but only a few of them present something more than a national case study. Also, I don’t think everybody you meant would think of themselves as comparativists.
– But when they are…! Anyway, we also need to talk to the person responsible for technical support. I am not sure there will be someone on our floor, because the academic year hasn’t started yet.
I added one more entry to the already long to-do list.
– Did you check the vegan options with the caterer? – he asked.
– Yes, it is already taken care of, and the posters are also in place. All that is left then is to discuss how we will introduce each other. All the participants sent their short bios, but we also have to say a couple of sentences.
– One step ahead of you – smiled Collaborator. – I already wrote mine, I am sending it over to you in a sec – he reached for his phone.
– Is it alright if I send you mine first thing in the morning? – I asked.
– You are the main organizer between the two of us – he shrugged. Schedule, catering, and tech support, all discussed. That means we can finally move onto gossiping, right?
– You bet – the sun lost all its warmth by the time we finished our last coffees. I was genuinely looking forward to the day ahead.
The next day I dropped the note on Collaborator’s pile of papers.
As a PhD candidate at CEU, I am nearing the end of my training as a comparative historian, focusing on the modern intellectual history of East Central and Southeastern Europe. My main case studies are Hungary and Yugoslavia, and I write about the late socialist period.
I was done.
