A Fidelity

 

I confess to having no political allegiance. For me it's hard enough trying to understand my neighbour without having to try to understand a game played without compassion. To me, anything that veers to the right or the left is suspect.
So then, I've found Tibor Dery's 'Niki - the story of a dog', published in English by Secker and Warburg in 1958. 
A Hungarian from a prosperous background, the author sympathized with Communism up to a certain point in the 1950s when he began to satirize it. From what I can gather, he'd been both a popular figure in Hungarian culture, and then its outcast.
"On November 13th, 1957, the Supreme Hungarian Court pronounced sentence against four leading Hungarian writers, accused of "hostile activities during the events of November 1956 and subsequently aiming at 'overthrowing the order of the state.' "

Communism, like Fascism, equals death to me. Both of them are a sickness of the mind and the feelings. You see the author above. It would seem that Tibor Dery had humanity sufficient to write this story, a story of a man and his wife befriended unreservedly by a stray.

"The imprisonment of Dery and his fellow-writers brought protests from all over the world." 
I'm still reading this marvelous book, capturing, as it does, the paranoia and restrictiveness of a police state. The corrosion of the regime can only have occurred because some among the oppressed remembered to love, and remembered to report that love.