The Tropics on Love and Loyalty in Gyorgy Konrad's The Loser [Volume: 7(1988), pp. 270-294]

LOVE AND LOYALTY
291
of skis. Three days later they nailed his death warrant on trees around
the village. One of his crimes was that he had absconded with army
property: an overcoat, a cap-the list included drawers and a footcloth,
and closed with mention of his earflaps. We were greatly amused by
his death sentence, all the more since the murderous corporal, who
had betrayed his homeland, one of the bastions of the European
theater, wrote on the proclamation four days later that he, too, passed
a sentence of death on the members of the military tribunal, and
it remained to be seen who was going to carry out which sentence
first (30).
Irony requires that the writer distance himself from his object. Still
it is 'engaged writing' because his aim is corrective. Thus the opposite of
irony is empathy: his compassion requiring the author to come nearer to
his subject. Accordingly, the same war, the same places, are depicted by
Konrad with compassion when describing the suffering of the forced laborers
or the meaningless deaths of hundreds of thousands of young Hungarian
soldiers sacrificed at the Eastern front by the German army (118).
The German soldier whom the hero meets during the war predicts
that T. will yet become a murderer. The German has no loyalty to his
government. He is an agronomist: his loyalty is to the earth tormented
barren by tanks, trampled by soldiers (210). His prediction soon comes
true when a company of prisoners (sharing collective guilt) drown a brutal
sergeant in human excrement (120). Just as T. has a German 'mirror' image,
Dimka, the Soviet commissar, tossed about by his own country's history, is
T.'s Russian counterpart (151-7).
The enigma of human behavior is exemplified in the inconsistencies
displayed by the liberating Soviet army:
They cried when they threw punches and cried when they embraced
us. They burned up bookcases but spared the books. In one convent
they raped the nuns, in another they posted a guard (172).
As in The Case Worker, in The Loser too there are numerous ministories, entire human fates condensed in a single paragraph:
The hairlipped waitress unburdens herself: last night she opened
the window on her mother, in the hope that she catch pneumonia.
They have only one room, and her boyfriend can't visit her. She is
already running a fever, but her mother doesn't even have a sniffle
(104).
Or in another micro-biography: