Letter from Budapest: Dissident with nobs on: Frederick Baker meets the Hungarian writer Peter Esterhazy

WE AGREED to meet at the restaurant next door to the national museum. I'd never met him before. As I scanned the tables looking for one of Hungary's foremost writers, all I had was a name. In desperation I whispered it to a waiter and he pointed discreetly to the bushy mane of a tall, lean, bespectacled man intently reading the menu. His name was Esterhazy, a name straight out of the museum next door. Miklos Esterhazy, founder of the dynasty, converted to Catholicism and grew rich from the Habsburgs. The next Esterhazy, Miklos the Magnificent, spent the money on Haydn and building Esterhaza, the Hungarian Versailles. Pal Anton, who followed, turned on the Habsburgs in the revolution launched on the museum steps in 1848.

For Peter, the next in line, the situation is clear: 'I am no Earl, my father was an Earl, his father was one, and his father too, but I don't see any sign that I will become one.' In Hungary today he is more famous for his footballing brother than his noble ancestors.

'Earlier it was agreeable to belong to this family because it was a kind of resistance,' he said. 'It was possible to remind our people that our history didn't start in 1945.' A year after he was born in 1950, the family was sent into internal exile as 'class enemies'.

By 1968 Peter was allowed to go to Budapest University, but barriers still existed. 'I couldn't do literature,' he said. 'Had to do mathematics at university. Literature was a training for teachers, and would have been a dangerous influence on the youth of socialist Hungary.' He added, with glee: 'They didn't realise that I would teach the whole nation with my books.'

Mathematics has left its mark on his writing, as his book, Helping Verbs of the Heart (Quartet, pounds 6.95), written in 1985 and now translated into English, shows. It describes the death of a parent, the tactless medical staff and the grieving son, who in a final twist is then grieved for by his own mother.

The book is a collage of gutsy dialogue, moving poetic passages and astounding shifts of era and location through Central Europe in the style of Claudio Magris. Rumbustious anecdotes alternate between the days of the old Austro-Hungarian empire and the communist era. At the bottom of the page is a running commentary - quotations from authors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Peter Handke and Miklos Meszoly.

'I don't like to say this,' Peter said hesitantly, 'but I'll say it anyway. I don't see people. It's words not people that influence me. It's not true, but is correct to some extent as a self-caricature.' He has an eye for words and, like a magpie, he collects quotes to line the bottom of his pages with a parallel text of literary gems that become his own.

He is attached to the Hungarian language, and gets what he calls a 'lingustic rage' if he goes for more than three days without hearing Hungarian. For a man who plays with words like numbers, such a flexible language is ideal. 'There is a saying that Hungarian is a whore, because it does everything that one demands.' As well as being a mathematician, Peter was a dissident under a totalitarian regime when he wrote this book. People thought the regime was never-ending.

'If it is never-ending then you must of course adjust yourself. You must make your compromises. It was dangerous because you forgot what is normal. You described things as normal that were already degenerating. Because you couldn't change anything you described degradation as normal. That of course was a normal defence. I had this picture that people had two noses, four ears, four eyes. I'd say, 'Oh, that's what people are like, they have four eyes'.'

Written under these conditions, passages in Helping Verbs of the Heart that may seem surreal to a Western reader would have read differently for the Hungarian reader.

Three years after the collapse of communism, Peter has changed his view of his readers. 'Until now the reader was an accomplice. This is gone. Till now we were fellow sufferers, the losers, together hand in hand, lovers.' Parts of Helping Verbs of the Heart is like a fossil from which we can enter the lovers' private world, in which an insect can have a 'light green head, the same colour as the faded cover of Gyozo Hatar's Sterne translation in the 1955 edition' and everybody sniggers knowingly.

On leaving, Peter gives me a lift in his Trabant. The conversation returns to names. As we pass behind the looming bulk of the museum, Peter laughs and lets me in on another piece of the inside information from the old days in Cold War Budapest. 'This used to be Esterhazy Street, but the Communists renamed it after Pushkin. I don't mind though - Pushkin was a great writer.'

I too could snigger, knowing that, as this most mathematical of writers might say, Pushkin minus 48 years = Esterhazy.