Page 64 - Microsoft Word - 01_A MÁSIK OLDAL English.doc

DIPLOMACY

As an occasional summer tour guide, I was sometimes
employed as an interpreter - in various public, protocol
environments - during my summer teaching leave. I found it
strange that an outsider could gain insight into certain sensitive
state issues in this way. The authorities were already confident
to such an extent by the seventies that they apparently did not
deal with such occasional cases. Later I tried to keep my
distance, they probably found out at the right place what kind of
background I had, and got off my back and stopped calling me
again. In this my chief also helped me at the university when
saying “Mr Biró should decide whether he is an interpreter or a
teacher”.
In the first half of the 1970s, one summer, the prime minister-
in-waiting of a large Western European country arrived in
Hungary on his way home after visiting a neighbouring country
to the south. As a second interpreter, I was assigned to him. The
future prime minister, who personally came up with the idea of
a zebra crossing in his youth, was very offended that the
protocol in Hungary did not allow him to meet the country's
leader at the time in person. Only subordinates were available to
him.
- Everything only at the right level - they told him, making him
feel that he was not prime minister yet. As far as we know, the
elections in the great western country were not as clear as they
were in this part of Europe, in the Soviet bloc. Here things
worked and were made to operate. The organization was at a
high level. But the expectant soon became the British Prime
Minister. The Hungary of the time had an inextricable sense of
the complicated world of foreign policy. This was visible in the
country.
In the east, west, north and south, the satisfaction of our
neighbours with our foreign policy 'ability', as we managed our
affairs, was clearly felt. The Hungarians living there had no

64