THE CASE WORKER

Konráds narrator speaks as a case worker, which is what Konrád himself was during his younger years in Budapest. This case worker, as we soon come to know him, is a fairly decent and competent bureaucrat whose job it is to record the pleas, the lies, the confessions of his clients, and then to send them to some home or office, or back to the street from which they came. The case worker is also a policeman, he tells himself, regulating the traffic of suffering. Who can cope with the battalions of misfits, the hordes of victims? My interrogations make me think of a surgeon who sews up his incision without removing the tumor. For something lies embedded in the nature of things that is radically terrible, not so much evil in purpose as gratuitously malformed. The case worker does his job in Communist Budapest, but except for the apparent absence of drugs, it seems very much like capitalist Manhattan. - From the Introduction by Irving Howe