Parallel Stories

Margit Island

I’ve got another life.

Kristóf ran headlong into the bushes, flowery branches hitting him in the face.

Yes, he did have another life.

He was fleeing.

He heard the long, hurrying steps pounding behind him, the wild breathing of his pursuer; the tightly packed footpath through the trees and bushes reverberated under their feet.

I’ve gone too far, he whimpered to himself, much too far. He could not help going too far, no matter how much he admonished himself, because he was far from everything and everybody. He was playing with danger to feel he was alive, though his other self weighed everything soberly.

I stretched things past the breaking point, I truly got on their nerves.

In the fragrant darkness, in the balmy breeze, there was also the danger of muggers, pickpockets, possibly murderers or a police roundup. Let them kill me, I don’t care; that was not what he was dreading. He increased his excitement with the dangers of the night to the pleasure of intolerability. He had discovered this place four nights earlier, and though he’d returned home at dawn he could barely wait for nightfall to come again; he was spending his fifth night here. As if he were deep in ethnological research and was having difficulties finding his way among the tribe’s strict rules.

There was hardly any talking here; at most one could hear hisses and brief whistles. People suddenly appeared and disappeared. He could recognize some now familiar figures, shapes who looked for and followed him, or whom he followed, but the night would swallow them up without a trace.

There were too many of them.

They were on their guard, fleeting, sneaking, prowling, as if they could see in the dense darkness filled with little noises, sighs, moans. He discovered that he too could see in the dark and he especially enjoyed that. His mind recorded, gauged, established contact, combined data, and stored urgent questions; in short, it functioned at full capacity. After a while he understood or seemed to understand the intentions of those shadows and silhouettes, and he comprehended their passions, condemned to silence and mutual dependence. He was happy with his scientific discoveries. At the sight of different figures and the abundance of various desires, his lips, which he licked excitedly, became parched and his mouthy.

The younger man, the one with the mustache, will now make a wide detour, and, before one can get out of the park, with his enormous limbs he will block passage on the trail. Because sometimes he not only planted himself before him but roughly pulled him to himself, hugging him gently, and when this happened the first time he planted a kiss on his neck, so he remembered with his skin the touch of his limbs — and longed for it. He could anticipate this younger man’s grinning mug, his large meaty nose and the bushy Hungarian mustache overwhelming his lips; he felt his breath, with its commingling odor of alcohol and tobacco, a particularly repulsive mixture. Let him plant a kiss on his neck. He nearly fainted at the mere thought of it, the fear. The two worked as a team; he’d be caught between these two large-bodied men. Kristóf realized that the two used the older one as bait, because on this turf other men, mainly the young ones close to Kristóf in age, considered him more attractive. They fancied him; all their lives they’d dreamed of physical strength, of greater size and perfection, and with his sheer presence he embodied this dream. The two of them are waiting for him to walk unsuspecting into their trap. They’ve built their strategy on the physical perfection of the older one; regarding the temptation, there is total harmony between them. Neither of them wants to catch him alone, they want to do it together; and realizing this has made him suspicious of them. But he also realized that his continuing flight from them is part of the lure and serves to increase tension; he’s become a toy of his own permanent desire for greater physical perfection. Everything is preordained, and whatever he now discovers or foresees happens several times a night. There’s no longer any difference between the inner and outer worlds, everything was prepared during Creation, and now only the resolution, the cadenza, is lacking: the death rattle, or ejaculation. If he let them, they’d torture him mercilessly, tear his muscles apart with their sharp teeth and instantly devour his flesh.

That’s all he could think of; he could not imagine it any other way, or he did not want to imagine his pleasure any other way, the pleasure these two had treacherously been preparing for him.

The trembling darkness, mottled by lights from distant gas lamps, was full of hard-packed paths and trails. The men who stepped off the trails and headed into thickets were the ones who wanted to offer up their bodies as free prey, or who wanted someone who would mutely and willingly offer up his. This was one of the general rules of the place. Shortly after ten o’clock in the evening, when unsuspecting strolling lovers disappeared, naked limbs and other body parts flashed in the depths of the darkness that neither gaslight nor reflections of the city’s sky could penetrate. No one who must mature from being an unripe boy to being a ripe, full-fledged male could deny himself the curiosity, the urge to know what other men were like. Insanely, he tried to become like the others. He liked to imagine himself in their place as they offered themselves to anyone, or took possession of a total stranger’s naked body, though he kept telling himself he only wanted to watch, to see.

Mutual imagination became their aphrodisiac, and this made the darkness vibrate and tremble in a state of excited expectation that no mortal man could have gratified.

It was as if he had acquired forbidden knowledge, the city’s ultimate secret.

If he approached them very carefully, minding the slightest crackling sound, they would fly apart, continue elsewhere, and look for different partners for their games, or they’d call him, signal to him, gesturing and hissing for him to come and join them, be the third or fourth among them. It was all the same to them. They offered him their lips, opened for kissing or sucking, or their asses, or simply their erect cocks for a blowjob. They ridiculed the desire for married life or any sentimental notion about mating.

Anything could happen. And he was the one who had to bolt, frightened.

Yet they were not indifferent to everything and everyone, not always.

In general no one was faithful to anyone, nothing could be considered permanent, not even for a moment, every occasional relationship could be dissolved at any time because everyone possessed a certain amount of manliness, so it was always possible to make, with anyone or in any way, a defensive or offensive alliance based on the cult of manliness. But even these strict basic rules were constantly being rewritten and modified.

I can’t decipher it, that’s what he felt, and he went after them, dazed.

Some among them would suddenly find his one and only and leave with him, laughing happily. Some among these returned after a few minutes and, as if nothing meaningful had happened, would go back, indifferently or disappointedly, to searching for someone else. To be more conspicuous and provocative with their nakedness, some men hid their clothes among the ruins of the Szent Margit monastery,* some in the niches of statues, or in portal arches and jambs, or behind dismantled Gothic corbels; others made them into small packets that they strapped to their waists or lower legs. Formidable tribal warriors. He envied them, in his heart he felt great warmth for them, though they were the ones he had to be most chary of: they were wild, merciless, tough, and unpredictable. Sometimes they’d attack as a group. Hissing and snickering like children, they’d make stinging remarks, behavior that was artificial and, despite the manly display of muscles, very feminine. They left behind a scent of cheap cologne and the strong smell of sweat. Without a thought they kissed, sucked, and pummeled. They must have decided at some point to live their lives in this unrestrained and licentious manner.

But I could not decide.

I couldn’t imagine what role I could possibly have in such an insane game designed for more than two people. I wasn’t ready to make a decision about anything. First, I wanted to watch, to see everything with my own eyes, to see through these appearances; everything these men did with one another seemed like sheer humiliation or self-abasement to me, and I simply could not comprehend it. As if I were watching, repelled and estranged, my own inadequacy for submissiveness.

As if I were watching the readiness of someone whose life, despite ceaseless self-rebuke, was one long temporizing. It would have been better to decide right off, especially if this thing was hereditary anyway. But this someone had no idea what to do to bring about a decision. That is why he’d better stay on the trail.

Not step off it.

According to local custom, the trail provided a measure of safety, respite, and protection; staying on it meant, for the others, that I hadn’t yet decided. As if I were saying to them, hold your horses, I’m still searching, waiting for the great unknown, and I’d like not to be touched by you until I find my right to self-determination or voluntarily relinquish it.

I also feared stepping into shit, another reason it was dangerous to go off the trail.

There were others also, who, driven by unrealizable desires, roamed the trails endlessly, went away, and then came back — quite a few like that.

They searched in vain, all in vain; they found no one.

The reason was not necessarily their timidity but rather their squeamishness or their exceptional needs.

It was impossible to understand everything.

Perhaps this was one reason he’d have been glad to exchange his life for that of the bravest ones, so as to understand at least something of the indifference of those who didn’t care whom they were with so long as they could go on being with someone. If only he could accept every stranger’s approach and understand it; if only he could let them have his way with him but without his touching anyone. Which would mean remaining untouched himself.

If only he did not suffer so shamelessly from lack of bodily contact.

He could not touch himself, because here that gesture’s meaning was unequivocal: it meant that you were offering up your body as free prey, and your every move would be watched from every direction, just as he was watching others. One enticing signal was all that was needed for two men to fall on each other and quickly satisfy each other, or to engage in the act for a while, careful not to reach gratification, and then part — with a gesture a little like a thank-you or good-bye — and vanish without a trace into the very depth of the night, only to resume with others. As though they believed permanent attachments to be superfluous and mawkish. They were conspirators, ready to initiate him into their most jealously guarded and dangerous secrets, but only if he first swore to uphold their principles. He probably should have turned his body over then and there. But he could not find the required submissiveness or this kind of self-abasement in himself. Yet the situation was not unpleasant, even though he was excluded and inexperienced, because the fear and trembling kept him in a constant state of excitement. He’d have liked to become completely shut up in himself, but he had to keep himself open. It was important to behave as if he belonged with them, to show that if he wanted to he could give up this tenacious defense of his body’s integrity at any time. Otherwise they wouldn’t put up with him. His sperm kept on seeping. His erection referred not to just anyone but precisely to that someone who might pop up at any moment, that someone whom everyone here idolized and worshipped, that someone whom he too was looking for but hadn’t yet found. Or rather, though he did profoundly understand them, it would be better and he’d complete his knowledge if he sacrificed himself; but — and here’s the rub — he does not understand that here no one is looking for a real person; everyone is chasing his own imagination.

His desire was directed at all of them, almost all of them, but the moment one man stepped forward and approached him, his desire no longer focused on a single person; it focused on no one.

And that is why he would then flee.

He ran from the encroaching figures, from having to respond to this magical attraction; his feet pounding on the hard trail, he ran ahead of them like a wild animal, trusting himself to his sharpened senses, his feet carrying him blindly. Shrubs with branches like sharp arms hit him in the face and wrapped themselves around his body, cracking and snapping as he dragged them along and broke free of them. They were embracing him with their tendrils and tentacles, meaning to pull him back and punish him for refusing to surrender to reality as he must for even the shortest moment of gratification.

He found their roughness, avidity, and brutality frightening; in fact he was not so much frightened as painfully sober when near them. Yet he appreciated the insane bravery with which, if only for a moment, they offered up their entire ecstatic being along with their secret desires, or served other men’s ecstasies with their mouths, their attentive hands, or their carefully lubricated and open rectums.

Their freedom seemed beautiful and dazzling to him. He saw himself as tied down by tethers of convention.

He despised himself for his servility; he was repelled not by them but by himself. Yet he was the one who had done so much against himself, almost everything. He quickly realized that one couldn’t sink lower than this to attain freedom, or at least he hoped he wouldn’t have to sink lower. His heart, beating happily and anxiously, now almost exploded in his chest; from the inner tension of fear and stupefaction he nearly stopped breathing. He probably couldn’t have endured sinking deeper, though he knew that now there was no stopping, he was sliding ever lower. He couldn’t possibly touch anyone like that, not as the others did, he kept telling himself scornfully. He excused himself for not reaching a climax in such wretched circumstances; he couldn’t, even if he found out that every man did it this way. Because then he’d have to give up his frenzied search. He needs affection, he told himself. Out of cowardice he couldn’t accept the ecstatic affections, and he reproved himself for this. Or came to terms with the thought that there was no human being in the world he was looking for. No such man and no such woman either. Yet he couldn’t give up the notion of mating, he couldn’t relinquish the vain or naïve idea that, like a songbird, he’d find his mate, for his sentimental hope had not left him.

Very vaguely, timorously, he hoped that fate would summon someone here, the right person, just as it had sent him here, that fate would not abandon him here. At the same time, he felt that he, with his petit-bourgeois sentimentality, was ridiculous. To imagine that he would meet his total-stranger doppelganger, differing from him only proportionately. He couldn’t imagine this other person except as an exact likeness, which is why it couldn’t be a girl. But this person should be more perfect than he, rather like that giant from whom he’d been fleeing, but not so perfect as to humiliate him with physical and mental superiority.

He couldn’t imagine kissing the giant on the mouth; at most he went as far as envisioning the giant naked, to the point where one naked skin encounters the warmth and exhalations of the other’s naked skin.

Nor did he let the tribal warriors — those strange loud-mouthed beings, all his age or younger — distract him from what he envisioned in his mind. There should be somebody for him, and not just anybody. This is what he thought, even though he always lost his equilibrium when faced with the warriors. He had good reason to fear them, not only because they were quick to come to blows, but because they could see into his most secret intentions, even those still unknown to him, could see into an area he was not too keen to visit by himself.

Let the little prick get lost in a stinking cunt, they hissed when they saw him slinking along the same trail as before, coming closer yet still refusing to let them have their way.

He refuses everything.

Waiting for the knight of his dreams, the little darling, they laughed in a mock chorus.

Indeed, for them, nothing was sacred; the whole world was but a parody of itself, designed solely for their amusement.

You can’t be waiting for the gallant rear admiral Miklós Horthy, my sweetie, there he is on his great white horse, they lisped, giggling into his ear as he passed them.

In the very same tones ladies use in the fancy Café Gerbeaud.

Let him take you on his huge smoking cock, they yelled to his back.

Or maybe Jean Marais.

Boys, I think he is waiting for Mrs. Béla Kun.*

It was impossible to avoid them; still, he didn’t take them very seriously. He quickly discovered that no matter how powerful and fearless they might seem at night, in reality they were pariahs — servants of others’ pleasure, at everyone’s mercy — which is why he could not help loving them.

He was running from them.

He longed for their inner strength, their naked muscles, the nauseating smell of their face powders, their eyes decorated with artificial lashes, their unbridled parodies, their total boldness, but not for their vulnerability.

As he ran he lost his way in the complicated network of paths, lanes, and trails — nothing but the topography of senseless desires, the imprint of pampered fantasies and futile wishes on this filthy planet. Of course, if he could see everything, if he could observe the entire system of their existence, then he’d definitely understand.

And experience the other’s life without giving up anything of yourself, without touching him at all.

On the very first night, he’d decided to return the next day. In daylight, however, his nocturnal decision lost its validity. It was like returning in daytime as an ornithologist to a research area; the birds were screeching, singing, twittering, chirping, billing, and cooing, some of them offering impudent retorts. He might in daylight see into the secret chambers of a stranger’s conscience here, but he didn’t want anything to do with anyone or thing. The ones who had disappeared from his earlier experience were precisely those who in daylight might have guided him to some useful anthropological discovery, but in daylight no special interest linked him here, so he became a total stranger to his nocturnal self. Living his other life, he could make no contact with the requirements of this one. Or would have to exchange one of his lives for the other so that the totality of his existence would not be so intricately false, to turn the two lives into a single one. To attempt that, he felt, would be the end; he’d be playing with madness. Or perhaps he was already in this situation up to his neck and could no longer distinguish among different levels and planes of reality. Something was unavoidably happening, but it immediately and uncontrollably slipped through his fingers.

When he spoke to someone and at the same time made an effort to distract his own attention from the relentless inner speech within him, he did so with a resigned, permanent smile, which is usually enough for people to consider one endearing. But this is what made him aware of his madness’s reality. Not even with the help of his stronger, more reasonable daytime self could he soften the pain of his duality. With his polite daytime smile he promised more and forgot more than he could keep of his nocturnal promises. For a successful coordination of his selves, he’d first have to whisper to one of them which of the two was his other life. He did not succeed in this because neither the nocturnal nor the daytime life was more realistic or more improbable than the other.

In the meantime, it seemed sensible not to deny himself the nights on Margit Island. He would accomplish nothing by forbidding them to himself, anyway. But he’d stay strictly on the trails; he had to prescribe this for himself. To watch, to see, to observe, but not to mingle with those who meant to possess only his nocturnal self; to be on guard, to preserve his daytime self and, in the spirit at least of mating, to keep himself whole. If not exactly sane, at least on this side of insanity.

To trust himself to his sense of smell.

To discern in the darkness the buffeting and the waves of odors — of tobacco, shit, stale urine, sperm, the hostile or friendly emanations of bodies excited or cooling; these signals always steered him aright. Because of them, he became like an animal, following a scent and letting his feet carry him on. He felt more at home as an animal than as a human, because he recorded and preserved his need for objectivity with senses that worked only on an animal level. This smooth feeling of animality was one of the fascinating discoveries of the night — strong enough to absolve him, to neutralize his feeling of guilt and to erase his moral doubts. However, not even his feet or sense of smell could guarantee him total safety on the dark trails.

And it was not enough to be on guard with all of his senses.

Not far from the pebbled walk that separated the grove hiding the ruined cloister from the rose garden, redolent with aromatic and concentrated sweetness, were some polluted areas. During the day, people relieved themselves on its trails and brought their children and dogs, screaming, whimpering with impatience and stamping their feet, to pee and shit; women who needed to would quickly exchange their bloody cottons for clean ones. If in his excitement he did not lose his scent — that is, if an unexpected emotional agitation did not reduce his olfactory alertness — these smells warned him well in advance.

Not that way.

This is where I’ve got to, this is where I am now, he scolded himself in the conventional human way; I’ve immersed myself in the stench of excrement, perspiration, menstruation, and urine; I must discover my only, unvarnished reality while roaming around among shitty papers and bloody bunches of cotton.

Enjoyment of the search and of self-torture replaced pleasure, though he knew that with his constant seeking he was only trying to find a priggish sentimental way around his own brutality. Seeing others’ brutality, he wanted to conjure up his own. Not possible, his body grumbled, dissatisfied; it wouldn’t let him.

His beastly self worked in a system parallel to his emotional self.

The stench of others could not touch him.

At most, he would go not this way but that way. He would not give up discovering and understanding the functional principles of his own body on behalf of mere trifles; he could not relinquish his need to know. Now his beastly self, now his emotional one reported on its painful sense of something lacking, and he could not resolve questions of morality for either of them. He could not accept, could not take possession of something he did not know; yet how could he reject it if he did not even know whether it belonged in his personality, with which he was just becoming acquainted. And what could he do with his frigid self, which had nothing to do with either of his two lives, neither the emotional daytime self nor the bestial nocturnal self, for he had no appropriate sentiments for either, and about pleasure and suffering he remained as indifferent as he had been about generally accepted moral principles.

As if his thinking or his soul had characteristics that were outside his personality. Or characteristics that he sensed or perceived as having little to do with the struggles raging within him that, depending on their final outcome, would form the conditions of his personality’s life.

Hands reached after him from out of the darkness; unexpectedly they were thrust between his legs and thighs to feel the quality of his flesh, the state of his cock, and, mainly, the size of his cock. Somebody gently took hold of his wrist — he couldn’t see the man’s face because he was so close with his hot breath — and quite unexpectedly placed it in his palm while at the same time trying to touch him with his wet lips. He rejected this, quickly brushing everything and everybody off him. Yet he could not reject the surprising feel of the hot, unfamiliar cock — well proportioned, with its swelling veins, taut frenum, and foreskin jammed up before the rim of the bulb — or the intense, profound feeling that another human being had placed his pulsating fate in his hand just like that. Indeed, he grabbed it as a baby would grab a rattle. This he could not forget and therefore could not deny his awareness of the cock’s exceptional qualities or uniqueness either. He learned this from his own cautious, stiff, frightened little hands, and a few overbearing forceful men and happenstance sufficed for the lesson.

Every cock differs from every other cock the way men do from one another, though each cock is always surprisingly different from the man it belongs to. The memory of these oddities kept coming back to him, but he did not know what it meant to uncover them. It was impossible to forget these differences even among fully dressed people. From then on, he knew that clothing concealed something about which everyone wants vital information. As if with men’s cocks the philosopher’s stone had been placed forcefully in his hands but he did not know what to do with it because he was stupid. And it was no help that the very idea of touching a strange person, especially a man, filled him with disgust — touching his lips, his stubbly skin, the first, slippery drops of sperm oozing out after a prolonged erection and leaving stains everywhere. He also refrained from closely inspecting his own prick. While washing, he deliberately looked elsewhere. When erect, his prick became so sensitive that he could no longer separate pain from pleasure. Once, after an erection of several hours, it became stuck in his underpants and he had to pull it free.

Once he’d discovered the playing field, he could not resist returning to it, tempting and challenging the insurmountable disgust he had for his own body no less than for those of all other men. He had no such disgust for women’s bodies — these experiences did not affect his feelings for women — yet even regarding women he could not erase the knowledge culled from his new experiences. As had happened before, it was hard for him not to go down to the subway toilets during the day and not to pay close attention to everything while around him the men pretended to be only urinating.

He did likewise.

The truth is, I had two interrupted lives, he would say later of himself, one proved to be not enough, the other promised to be too much, and in both I felt very much like a stranger. But now I knew it was the end, while I was running from the enormous, athletic older man, his chest and shoulders almost bursting out of his checkered shirt, his fist like a hammer. I must get away from here at any cost, my other self kept repeating desperately to itself like a mantra. If I can get out of the yellow-flowered Japanese acacia grove and reach the riverside promenade, I’m saved.

He ran toward the lights, saw himself running toward the lights.

In no situation in his life could he have escaped this always-watching icy countenance. He will never come back here again, he promised this countenance. It cannot be that I’m repeating my mother’s life.

When he unexpectedly cleared the thicket.

He stopped at the end of the trail and panted, freely, aloud. He was safe.

He inhaled deeply the heavy fragrance of the river water; he had won. And once again he had to acknowledge that the moment contradicted his previous expectations. No one blocked his way and nobody kissed him on his neck. And this he regretted. He could be more ashamed of his ridiculousness, but he could not sink deeper in his shame than this. No one’s steps were heard on the path along the riverbank, packed hard with black slag. An ordinary night on the island, far from both halves of the city, between the two huge arms of the river; if only a huge flood would cover and carry away his body. His stomach, his testicles hurt. It must be very late. Once again long hours must have passed like minutes with meaningless activity; he could never properly gauge the relationship between time and action. He would stay another half hour, he said to himself, and then go home. There is no such thing as good expectations. Again, he’d go home with many experiences, many things lived through, but the repeatedly granted half hours quickly filled the entire night, and he failed to meet a single soul. I have nobody, and I’ll never find anybody either. He was thirsty, sweaty, and hungry, he should have gone to one of the drinking fountains because he was all dried out. One solitary human being, he prayed, begged, and implored, like a monk.

I really can’t go lower than this, he threatened himself.

Still, he could not give up the struggle whose purpose he could not know.

The gas lamps spread their mute and empty light over the deserted promenade. His fate cheated him again, or maybe he wanted to trick his fate. On the Pest shore, the lamps illuminated the empty pier in the same way.

On the Margit Bridge, seen in the cold blue light of distant arc lamps, a sluggish yellow streetcar was crawling upward.

Nobody followed him.

Instead, the older unknown man, who could not have been more than thirty, had followed him for a while, that was certain, he heard him panting behind him but then falling behind. And why shouldn’t he. What a hopeless character I am, really a stupid little prick. He was sorry they hadn’t caught him, wrestled him to the ground, and done it to him. And now here I am, feeling sorry about it. Torn to pieces and bloody, defiled by their sperm, he’d have been rolling in smeared excrement, but at least with his throat cut he’d be past everything, past this whole rotten hopeless life. The cops could have their turn. He had fought off the unknown man; he struggled with himself. It’s not enough that I was born a Jew, not enough that I’m an orphan, must I be a homo too. He did not understand his birth, and he knew he should part with his life for the sake of his happiness, since he couldn’t count on anything. And even this wasn’t quite true. His problem was that his life was stuck at the halfway mark. If only he had been born a Jew, but his mother came from a very Catholic family. If only he could have been an orphan — after all, the Communists had beaten his Jewish father to death — but his mother had simply abandoned her child.

That alone was reason enough to feel sorry for himself, but he thought he was better off without such a miserable mother.

This life he’d received at birth means nothing, and not only to him; it doesn’t mean anything to anybody. Never a better opportunity than the present, tomorrow will be too late, I have to do it today. For months, he’s been thinking that out of sheer humanity he should remove himself from among the living. If these shadows, emerging and vanishing in the night, were not around him, still their brutality and mercilessness appeared in his filthy imagination as something highly desirable, as the very last straw. Or they did not exist, not even now. He was not far from realizing that, given the painful lack of gratification, he should consider their existence as pure hallucination. Neither the dark-skinned, slow-moving, marvelous giant, who might be a Gypsy or half-Gypsy, existed, nor did his younger assistant, probably from the suburbs, with his messy hair and his Hungarian mustache hanging down on either side of his mouth; he was only running away from himself into the big empty world. Everything else is sheer imagination. He imagined the somber buildings with their tin domes on the other shore, which the weak lights of the Újpest docks barely illuminated. Lights were still on in some of the apartments, it seemed, and from the partly cloudy sky the city’s reflecting lights, rich in reds and yellows, were spraying down in a steady drizzle.

Scenery, that’s all it was, somber scenery; in reality, he stands alone on this empty island between the two waters.

Protected somewhat by his imagination.

A deluge that keeps overcoming and carrying him away but he’ll never have anybody, and that’s all human life is worth.

Breezes fingered his sweaty skin under the black shirt.

I don’t exist, he said half aloud, and I shall not exist either, he added.

If I want to stay alive, he added to himself, I have to get used to the idea that I don’t exist, he said again half aloud.

With long trembling lights on its back, the large, fragrant, swelling river rolled along darkly. It made no sound; the waves had subsided. The tiered riverbanks rose beyond the waves’ last laps. On steps under the water, clinging duckweed made bubbly sounds as it rocked back and forth. The two tugboats that had met here a little while earlier, both with dangerously low-floating barges and a grating din, were now far away, the sound of their horns fading in the distance. The puffing of one could be heard somewhere to the north, from behind the badly lit Árpád Bridge, that of the other from the opposite direction, perhaps from the wartime ruins of the Erzsébet Bridge.

The tugboats’ puffing in different registers lingered in the hazy air, and some of the oil fumes in their wake remained, trapped between the shores.

Sometimes he was convinced that his existence was nothing but hearing, smelling, and seeing — at which he took off after other people. Who perhaps also do not exist or, more precisely, who under the influence of contact instantly lose their dazzling corporeal existence.

The bodily magic of boys or adult males grew dim in the light of day, anyway; it dissipated at the slightest touch.

A rough, taut, resistant material remained in his hand; a strange feeling that soap would not wash off. The magic of girls or mature women lasted longer and penetrated more deeply because he had more confidence in them and this confidence was sanctified. He could even close his eyes so as not to see — with them he could cross the delicate border where body and soul meet — but when he did, he also sobered up. It happened when, after some reluctance, a kiss turned out to go on too long or when with tiny little kisses he returned to a woman only to be dragged back into the body-and-soul convention; but it never happened twice with the same female.

He played his part soberly, and this was painful to recall, or it would have been even more painful to return to its painfulness.

As if he had known in advance that he would trick them. While performing his duty in accordance with generally accepted requirements and rituals, which is to say while trying to discharge a duty about which he knew nothing, he looked with aversion at the female’s distorted features and quivering flesh. He fled from them when they approached again and asked for more of the same. As if he were grasping a peculiar substance that had little to do with oft-mentioned bodily desires and attractions; and the more aggressively they approached with their disgusting physical excitement, the stronger he felt this alienating substance.

From the moment of penetration, it was no longer he they wanted but something they could obtain from anyone with a sense of rhythm and a cock. And he could not even say what other idiotic men kept repeating, that women want only a cock, because in this regard women behaved, compulsively and politely, he had to admit, as if cocks didn’t even exist.

In fact only men dreamed of cocks, which made this whole thing impossible to understand.

He did not want to believe that people make a mistake about one another precisely in their intimate bodily contacts and vehement gratifications.

There was someone in him who with icy calm followed him in his every impulsive movement and sinful thought, but he did not believe this someone either.

Sometimes the presence of this someone was amplified, but it never spoke.

And he did not have enough strength to suspend the enormous gravity of physical existence.

He simply could not believe it.

In fact, he was struggling not with his double vision but with a special trinity. Even now, the third member of the trinity was with him, a little behind him and clinging to his side as he stood near the water thinking; for long minutes, taking cover in the deep shadows of the rowers’ white clubhouse, a boy, older than he by a few years, kept an eye on him.

From the moment he’d crossed the quietly squeaking promenade, sectioned by the pale haloes of gas lamps, still panting hard, he had been followed, naturally, by more than just the eyes of that older boy waiting patiently at his post.

At his arrival, the tips of excited cigarettes caught fire one after the other among the large trees on the promenade.

Four insane glowing tips, far from one another, above the jasmine.

These were all hungry for fresh meat.

The young man in the shadow of the rowers’ white clubhouse could instantly count his rivals and weigh his chances; his heart began to beat hard as the newcomer hesitantly stopped above the water.

He heard but did not understand the sentence said half aloud.

Something menacing radiated from him, and then, I’d rather not want him, he thought to himself. Must be a lunatic, he thought, wandering here aimlessly, mumbling to himself. Stupid little cockbeater, he thought.

One would like to seduce a stupid little cockbeater like him and then leave him alone with his madness. These little idiots think something important is happening to them. And he hadn’t yet decided whether to seduce the boy or let the others take him when, perhaps because of the boy’s back or his straight posture, he thought he recognized him.

That is Demén, Kristóf. And he so surprised himself with the name that he had no doubt as to the correctness of his discovery.

At the same time, something collapsed in him that quietly and unnoticed he had been putting together. This Kristóf is just as miserable as I am except he’s a beginner, and that means he’ll be just as hopeless in this as he’s been in everything else. He had not seen Kristóf for four years but often daydreamed about him, involuntarily and voluntarily. In his own life, an eternity had gone by during those four years. It would be impossible to talk about and he didn’t want to tell anyone about it, yet the first thing that came to mind was how lucky it was that he hadn’t told anyone. He’d always thought of Kristóf during those four years as someone he could trust with his disgusting secrets. Every time he rode by Kristóf’s house in the streetcar and looked up at the windows, he thought of going upstairs and opening up his soul to him; this was something he desired more than Kristóf’s body. He did not do it, because he was afraid of what might happen afterward.

One looks for a psychological garbage can, and then, it turns out, it always turns out, that all one has found is a prattling person; that had been his experience.

Kristóf was the only one in whose case he was still tempted; he’d be the only one, and realizing this made him shudder, but anyway this vain hope was now gone. He too was nothing but a stupid little homo. In fact there was really nobody to whom one could tell anything.

That night Kristóf was wearing a black shirt, black pants, black shoes, and, big idiot that he was, thought the older boy, probably black socks too. In the camp in Wiesenbad where they spent the summer of 1957 together, from his bed he had watched Kristóf’s fastidious dressing ritual every morning. His silhouette made him recognizable in the darkness, his unmistakable posture, bare neck, bodily proportions, and the outline of his shapely head.

He was dressed all in black not because of the latest fashion, though fashion had something to do with it, but because with an all-black outfit he’d prepared to be invisible in the night.

Which also belonged to this recently discovered animality.

The other boy remembered, however, that standing in front of his locker, Kristóf always picked colors to go with other colors.

Let nothing more than his hands and face at the very most show against his all-black outfit.

But the young man spying on him could not have thought of this, because he necessarily had different ideas about his own nights.

He wore clinging T-shirts, usually yellow or white, never dark ones, matched by exceptionally small, thigh-hugger shorts. He never put on underpants. He wore only the kind of clothes in which he could easily show himself, could offer himself up, and which, when the occasion arose, he could shed quickly and effortlessly. With rawhide sandals on his feet, hardly more than a few straps, he gave the impression of being practically naked. Nobody in his right mind would ever wear black here because everything makes visible stains on black.

He was deeply shocked at inadvertently seeing this shy upper-class boy in such a place, the boy he had taken under his wing from the moment he’d first seen him.

What sort of mess has he gotten himself into again, what a blockhead. Or maybe he’s really lost his marbles, and look, now he’s talking to himself again.

Could he have been so shy and peculiar back then, with madness already brewing in him. Suddenly he felt the urge to be rid of him, mad or not, he had to get this blockhead out of here. He had to prevent what was being prepared, or has always been in preparation, from becoming reality. To protect him from knowledge that has nothing to do with him and for which he is not cut out. He quickly realized that this idiot was experimenting with himself, and even if he dabbled with what was going on here, he’d still remain an outsider. The best thing would be to throw him into the Danube. Let him swim; he’d never be the real thing anyway.

Perhaps he thought of such a drastic solution so quickly because his discovery, instead of increasing, considerably decreased the value of his own life.

As if he were saying, no, it cannot be, Kristóf cannot be a faggot.

After all, he wouldn’t do it either if they hadn’t forced him to. Ultimately, the world functions normally, and this faggot life is only one of its aberrations, about which nobody should know anything except for the initiates. Shielding his cigarette with his palm, he took a long drag and then with the heel of his sandal ground the burning butt into the black dirt.

He didn’t want to give himself away ahead of time. Which is to say, he didn’t at all want to reveal himself to Kristóf.

Or only at the appropriate moment, when his action would bring him some profit. As if he had a ready-made plan for how to put the boy to work. The firm would be very grateful for it; what a great catch. They’d rub their hands together. This boy may be a baby in some ways, but he speaks several languages and there isn’t a book or encyclopedia he hasn’t read.

Of course, his current rivals hiding under the trees noticed the fall of the burning cigarette butt. Most of those who frequented this area knew one another by sight; fresh meat was very rare.

What’s the new consignment like, the new arrivals asked every night.

Even if they didn’t know one another, they still knew why the others did something and why they did it this way and not some other way. The abilities of the young man in the tight shorts were highly respected in other hunting grounds of the city: in People’s Park, the Népliget; in City Park, the Városliget; in the Little Flask, or Kiskulacs, Canteen; in the subway toilets, in all the steambaths, at the Old Parade Ground, Vérmező; or in the City Gate coffee bar, Városkapu Espresso. Whenever he appeared, they had reason to be anxious because with his devilish and merciless finesse he managed to knock out his rivals.

Now, with their cigarettes under the trees, they did not understand why Pisti wasn’t going after the boy.

Maybe he’d let one of them have this small-balled little angel.

He knew this was how his four rivals were interpreting his motionlessness, but it never occurred to him to step out of the shadow of the clubhouse.

Let them take him if they want to; let them deal with him.

He was waiting for Kristóf to make a move, any way he wanted to or with anyone, so he could follow him secretly. He wouldn’t let him get away. Not a cell in his body desired him anymore, even though during the last four years he’d thought of him frequently, and whenever he recalled his lips, his awkward nakedness, and his hard little ass, it was indeed a sweet feeling to rub himself to sleep against the background of these images. However, the object of the ritual and its real-life embodiment could no longer have anything to do with each other.

He turned icy cold toward him in the warm early summer night as he realized he had secretly loved him and still did. There was a possible life ahead of them that he would gladly spend with Kristóf.

He would make use of him.

He would wait until somebody else finished with him and only then would he talk to him.

When liberated and pursued by his own shame he would run home to his sweet little auntie.

It would be best to accost him on the empty bridge. He’d expose him, annihilate him. Even the tip of your black shoe shows jism, my sweet, that’s all he’d say. I just thought I’d call your attention to it, with your permission, of course. Because of the long wait and the anticipated excitement of betrayal, his beautiful naked thighs became covered with goose bumps. He had never hoped for so precious a prey at so late an hour. Glad of his discovery, he imagined himself rubbing his hands together in anticipation of huge profits. He wanted to take revenge on him immediately; and he had reasons.

He hated him from the depths of his soul exactly the way he hated himself, and that is why the other man’s vulnerability made him happy.

Now I’ve got you in my claws, you rotten little Jew.

In the meantime, Kristóf was unsuspectingly enjoying the deadly silence and wrestling with the different persons living within himself.

His other self living within him did not tell him to go down to the water, where on the grayly gleaming steps the rocking duckweed made bubbly sounds.

True, that self did not say not to go either.

It’s safer to jump from the bridge. Neither did his other self say he should hurl himself to the depths from the bridge, even though he picked a good spot on the bridge from which it would be most advantageous to jump. Without slamming into the pier while falling; that’s how he wanted to end it. The water would carry him away as it had carried away the dead and wounded shot into the river by Arrow Cross men.

Without a trace.

It may have been a third person thinking like this within him, this is no longer me, he thought, because this person had no empathy, even though at other times it mutely signaled what feelings it harbored for him in connection with anyone.

At any rate, for some time now he has suspected the presence of someone with some sort of design on him.

He did not look at his watch, even though he felt like leaving, not because he meant to keep things from happening tonight, or to keep the giant from luring him away, but because he felt that time was running short.

Quickly away from here and let him finally finish himself off.

He concluded at last that he did not need to wait any longer. In this other life of his, it was inadvisable to acknowledge the passage of time.

These nights could not end in glimmering semi-darkness because they had no dawns.

The Other Shore

Please, I don’t want you putting down roots, said Mária Szapáry quietly, and took the glass from Irma Arnót’s hand. Today it’s your turn to cut.

This made Elisa fall silent in the wheelchair, and Margit also understood Mária’s stern warning. She had to get ahold of herself. Wildly she began to look for her hairpins. First in the mass of her undone hair and then with her fingers searching blindly in the leather sofa’s folds and gaps. Now Izabella’s silk dress swished as she got up, almost as a response to Médi’s efforts, but before she left the room she tipped her head like a little girl, pretending to do it absentmindedly, and called back to them.

While I’m getting a washcloth, Médi will have time to apologize to Mária. Tout de suite, she said warningly, et pas d’histoires.

I can do that right away, of course, if you want me to, replied Margit Huber almost indifferently, and one after the other snapped up the found hairpins with her lips so that with her free hand she could pin up the crown of hair again. I beg your pardon, she said rather mockingly, speaking through hairpins and clenched lips. Je te demande bien pardon. But if you allow me, I’d love to have a repentant smoke.

Please, je t’ai pardonné il y a longtemps, answered Mária Szapáry. Go ahead, no problem at all.

Margit Huber had stood up from the leather sofa; they looked into each other’s eyes, long and cold, and did not know what to do with their mutual hatred. Everything turned cool. Médi kept herself busy with her hair, pinning it back with blasé nervous little movements, but she realized there weren’t enough pins; she was observing herself with Szapáry’s critical eyes. Her flame-red thick soft-leather belt was askew, her blouse had slipped out from under it, she had rumpled her snow-white petticoat, which somehow was stuck to the calico skirt, and with her tears she had smeared her makeup.

Before you tell me I look ridiculous I’ll go tidy up.

It won’t do you any harm, replied Mária Szapáry.

Médi, offended, hurried to the bathroom while Mária Szapáry and Irma Arnót remained, awkwardly, at the table. Elisa, hungry and jealous, was watching them. They could not know whose partners they would be in the card game or where they should sit. The spilled drink did not spread on the green felt table cover nor did the felt absorb it. It lay before them on the table, convex and opaque, like an antique cameo waiting to be worked on. This image occurred to Mária Szapáry because only a few weeks ago she had pawned her penultimate cameo and had been waiting for the mailman every day to see if they could make it on that money until the end of the summer. Now she has only one left, the most beautiful of her cameos. They neither said anything nor looked at each other. Elisa again injected a little whimper into their silence, slyly and quietly. Perhaps the tension in the wordless moments hurt her. Long minutes went by until Margit Huber returned and offered a cigarette to Irma, who smoked occasionally. On top of it all, Margit smoked Gauloises, and when people asked her how she could be so inconsistent she would answer, moving not a muscle in her face, that she did not have to sing, her students did, and she wasn’t teaching them with her throat — and she’d tap her forehead with her fingers. She’d obviously given herself only as much time in the bathroom as it took to tidy up her clothes and makeup. She did not want them to wait so long that they might have the impression she’d fought with Dobrovan in the bathroom.

Which, of course, she had.

Singers and dancers brought her Gauloises from distant cities and airports, sometimes from places where none of them had ever been or ever would be.

The two women lit up with great pleasure, both of them longing for the first deep puffs.

In the silence not only the clicking of the gilded leather-covered lighter could be heard but also the burst of its flame and then the crackling of the tiny tobacco embers. Mária Szapáry could not bear cigarette smoke, but every night she politely placed an ashtray on the tea trolley for the two neurasthenics. She glanced at the trolley and was surprised to see that a small Urbino dish used as an ashtray was still intact. If she wanted them to come to her house she had to be lenient in matters that were not quite to her liking.

Finally Dobrovan came back too, swishing in her silk dress, but she was equally silent. She held out a wet washcloth for Mária to wipe her sticky fingers on. When that was done, with quick, surprising, and unjustified agitation she blotted up the opaquely glistening cameo. In her swishing silks she hurried out with the washcloth. She walked as if carrying an important object. She heard the shout, as if hearing it again over the distance of several decades. The other women stared after her. Suddenly she felt herself inside the brilliant plum-blue silk costume with shoulder straps, her knees bare. She shifted her weight to the balls of her feet, then rose on point and with rapid little steps hurried forward and became blinded by the footlights. Pas de bourrée with the feet lightly alternating devant, derrière. She stretched her arms ahead of her; on turned-up palms she was carrying the bluebird of happiness. It took wing. Left her here on earth but with the strength of flight she was on her toes again. She’d love to fly away with it, how she’d love to. She gazed at her empty hands en désespoire. She did not understand how she could so sharply recall that shout of long ago, et c’est fini.

She was barely twenty-one years old when at a rehearsal for her first major role a loosened batten crashed down on her.

It happened that in those days she was with a man — who took care of her, of whom her family knew nothing of course, who taught her how to talk again, but whom she did not take seriously until this accident, or rather whose proximity she did not want to acknowledge. She took him for one of those people who hang around theaters, a very good-looking penniless nobody who attached himself to her as he would to someone else tomorrow, and until then she deigned to accept his services but did not think much of him. In the evenings, during longer breaks in rehearsals or on endless spring Sundays, it would have been devastating to remain alone in the huge city.

Loneliness had eaten away at her suppleness and the smoothness of her style.

And she couldn’t commit herself to this sad young man because she was always, hysterically, on guard lest he make her pregnant.

He or anyone else.

Not to get pregnant, not that, for God’s sake, and certainly not by this character. Let him have his gratification on his own account; let him squirt his fluids somewhere else, anywhere, in any way.

The small puddle usually wound up on her belly or became long stripes running down her neck, into her face, her hair; she didn’t care where.

He was a frail, sickeningly white-skinned, easily injured person whose dark hair, twisting in little waves and curls, continually fell over his shiny, large, pale forehead. She had never met anyone so poor as this man and listened to his stories with aversion, though this made her feel ashamed because a poor man was, after all, still a man. It seemed as if his poverty also meant that he had all sorts of venereal diseases. She was always anxious, worried about catching some of them, she constantly observed herself, stuck out her tongue in front of the mirror or, with the help of another mirror, studied the roof of her mouth, her throat, to ascertain that fatal blisters had not appeared. He might be Lithuanian, maybe half Polish, even Russian, she couldn’t tell. He’d run away from a Warsaw orphanage when he was sixteen, and except for his grandmother, who had raised him until he was ten, didn’t know anyone.

At most she loved his mouth strictly for aesthetic reasons, but she was ready to forgo his kisses.

She was afraid of minor infections, even the common cold, anything that might take her off her feet. She liked his eyes too, somewhat, his deeply melancholic countenance, a little disguised by his way of retreating under the protection of his eyelashes or by the unexpected vehemence of the movements with which he straightened the myriad curls of his hair. She looked for no lasting relationship with anyone because every little change disturbed her concentration.

Once a week she would wait for Médi in front of the Conservatoire, or the two of them together waited on the quai Malaquais for Médi’s love, another destitute young man, ramrod-straight, with a bad stutter, who was also Hungarian and studied painting in a studio at the École des Beaux Arts or was a model at other ones. Frankly, she didn’t want to see even these people, especially not Médi and her boyfriend, because their presence drew her attention to her lack of romantic feelings for anyone. Not even the man with whom she reached her gratification.

She was aware that her behavior was unusual or downright scandalous.

She had to be careful not to be conspicuous about it with her colleagues. Any reasonable girl would rather seek than avoid company; after all, she’d want to get married and would obviously adjust her conduct to her plans and intentions. But no, not she, not in the least. To some extent she had to keep her intentions a secret even from herself.

But this Korsakas managed to meet her most secret requirements. He satisfied her, nourished the suppleness and stylistic polish that otherwise loneliness would have consumed; and this was the most important thing for her career.

She practically begged his pardon when she too reached her climax.

And he did not want to rob Bella of all her time, because he worried about losing her. He did not demand her attention and did not even insist on penetrating her. Actually, there was something rather neutral in his behavior. And when he did penetrate her a bit, he did it carefully and with consideration, didn’t go too deeply, only filled the bays of the labia with his amazingly round bulb, which turned almost completely black with excitement. A powerful odor rose from down there, that’s where he stroked it and kept pulling it between the smells of the two of them, though in a way that let him yank it out anytime he wanted to.

With considerable effort she might have been able to deny herself the man’s body, but she always felt a renewed desire for his smell in hers.

Which was such a strange thought; as if she had said, yes, I caught a scent, and therefore I am a wild beast.

To suit their interests and needs, they developed a particular technique of communication, the sort of relationship that was not unusual in such a merciless big city. Bella did not ask herself about the source of the man’s polite neutrality. She had a cool calculation in her mind: this is what I give, this is what I get, neither more nor less.

I’m calculating and selfish, she told herself reproachfully, an egoistic beast, that’s what I am, she said to herself, as if waiting for someone to contradict her, but this was the truth.

Yet she felt that if things went on this way, if she failed to tame her egoism or relinquish her slyly extracted, selfish little gratifications, which differed from those produced in her own solitary smell and by her own hands, she’d become more and more like her father and mother, and her rebellion against them would be rendered meaningless.

She thought that she was deceiving the other person and that that was why her behavior was morally unacceptable, but she was only fooling herself, which made her very anxious, and she suffered greatly. Perhaps the man had more experience in making order of such calculations; he was ten years older than she.

Bella told herself that the business relationship would last as long as its benefit to her body remained greater than the loss or harm she might create with her infection phobias. She feared that frequent autoeroticism would leave some trace on her gestures and become obvious on the stage. She did not notice that the more efficient their calculations became, their techniques of gratification more studied and deliberate, the deeper they went into the areas where they became acquainted, in which case why would she belittle or disdain him.

She could not take seriously a body so poorly built as his, so crude and ill proportioned, and not in terms of professional considerations either. She would involuntarily close her eyes because she did not like to look at him naked. Perhaps that is why the image of what she did see remained so sharp in her memory. It was no use saying that the sight of a perfect body was boring and she’d had enough of it; for her it was as hard to accept this explanation as to accept its opposite. She would have withdrawn from the embrace of thin, long, weak arms, but the sharp sensation produced by sensitive fingers became more profound and more important than what she saw. What settled in her mind was the cautious encounter of their loneliness. And the man’s feet, his long legs and thighs, surprisingly well developed compared to the infirmity of his body as a whole.

Quite nice legs and thighs with thick black hair. All right, she didn’t love him, but she wished at least to accept his body a little.

She was most averse to his penis, which is to say she didn’t want to see it erect or withdrawn into itself, when with its dark round head it looked out of the thick pubic hair. She found his testicles positively ridiculous, undeveloped, like a child’s; she didn’t understand why a man like that didn’t sink into the ground for shame.

The man controlled the writhing of her loins, which she tried to restrain, with the convex edge of his fingernails, with the tip of his tongue, or with his taut shiny testicles. The latter, when excited, became a single red globe, with which he’d keep touching the woman’s labia very gently.

A maniac, she should really be afraid of him, the man is a maniac.

He kept on touching her organ, gently hitting and bumping it, maniacally, until she opened up, and from then on he seemed to be pounding inside, could even slide inside her, or at least that is what Bella felt, that is what she saw of him inside herself. As if he too had not testicles but a pair of labia, and the two meat-eating flowers, his and hers, were opening into each other, one devouring the other. And when she threw the washcloth angrily into the sink, she fondly remembered this too.

Along with her shame.

She felt ashamed and watched Médi; leaning out of her duplicity, she watched what was happening between Médi and her handsome stuttering Hungarian man to see if there was any similarity. She felt there wasn’t. No, what was happening to her was not legitimate at all. She thought Médi was untouched by these things, by all these raging abominations. She feared that her people at home might find out about her. She must not become pregnant. But the abomination was good. In the endless rhythmic pounding, the physical pain was wonderful, but certainly it would end. To strengthen her memory, with her loins she touched the hard ledge of the sink, a strange collision at the edge of her gently sloping mons veneris, twice in succession. Frugally she portioned out the sounds she produced, with which she also punished herself. She was afraid of breaking into hysterical screams. The man did not allow himself loud sighs or moans either, which helped deepen the feeling of their movements and shifting positions.

If this stranger’s exterior repelled or irritated her so much, she shouldn’t be loud when he helped her reach her climax.

This was the logic of self-punishment, and certainly without justification.

The man’s pitiable, almost hollow chest with its ridiculously short little ribs, and his awkward shoulders from which every little bone separately protruded, gave her a most disgusting feeling that she was not a grown woman but a little girl playing with a stupid doll. The stomach wall flattened by much starvation, and below it the childlike, protruding, somewhat puffed-up belly; I must be mad, she kept saying to herself, going to bed with a man like this when I could do it with much better ones.

But he was the one she went to bed with; others could not get this close to her. Which logically could not be comprehended. Why it was like this and not like that.

Or what about his pale bony little buttocks, which didn’t have enough flesh for its cleft to close properly under the volume and pressure of muscles; just touching it filled her with irritation.

She had no way of embracing or molding this body to her own. She kept telling this to herself, as if to apologize or accuse.

She chose to let happen what could not but happen, and in her stabbing, throbbing climaxes she considered herself deaf, blind, and dead.

Quickly she turned on the hot water, which instantly filled the bathroom with a sulfurous odor. She didn’t want to stay by herself for long, and she washed the washcloth so angrily it was as if she had to remove sperm from it. She was not comfortable about the physical characteristics of sperm. Given its consistency, she thought of it as snot. She was always surprised anew when it didn’t have little knots in it and its thick body easily dispersed in water; it was not snot after all, but an embodiment of her dread, anxiety, and fear that she’d ruin her life with her dissoluteness.

Fulfilling the prophecy of her parents.

Not to get pregnant.

Sometimes she left a strongly outlined, yellowish stain on the sheet, though she wasn’t sure that it was not copious vaginal discharge flowing out during orgasm. Because it was so dark, she took it to be the first sign of syphilis. There’s blood in it. Or it left a stain on the handkerchief she used to wipe it off; in worse cases stains were left on her clothes, or it dried and turned white in her black hair, which to her shame she noticed only in the rehearsal hall’s mirror.

She kept rinsing and squeezing the washcloth, as if worrying that she couldn’t get rid of the stains. After she hung it up and quickly, with a bad conscience, returned to the others, she still did not know what to do with her agitation; in Mária’s living room, everything appeared to be the way she remembered the hotel room to which Vladas Korsakas took her after her release from the hospital.

As if there had been no operation and no anesthesia, he was standing there before her, alive, warm, and real in his white corkscrew-patterned wool sweater. And it didn’t matter that so many things were happening in her head. The three women were still in the same positions around the table; their every little move made the layers of smoke around them flutter slightly. In his thick, white, high-necked sweater, Korsakas looked more athletic than he was, and he wore no shirt under the sweater. The bed, the heavy curtains on the window, and the Japanese sitz bath in the corner behind the screen were just as she had left them; the accident had caused no change in her hotel room. She saw no signs of joy, pain, or empathy on any of the objects.

Nobody had taken the glass from Elisa even though she’d been whimpering and begging for who knows how long, stretching out her arms to get attention, to demand something.

But the object of her wish was not easy to determine.

Beyond the open glass doors, above the petunias’ fluttering funnels, the urban night was dazzling, motionless. Wet tree branches were swinging icily in the wind; the maid had to be called in to put more wood on the fire, the room was too cold, and then to bring more hot water.

Elisa did not relinquish her glass; on the contrary she was signaling that she wanted something, and she kept pointing at another glass. Her eyes flashed wildly, she definitely wanted something, and her eyes, as Bella followed them with hers, were on Irma’s almost untouched drink.

She wanted — no, seemed to demand — that she be given it; give me what Irma hasn’t drunk. Obviously it wasn’t the drink she wanted so much; jealousy was raging within her.

In response Szapáry puckered her lips slightly and angrily shrugged her shoulders. What do I care, she answered Bella’s mute question. Let her get drunk if she wants to so much.

The empty glass clacked on the tea trolley.

They could still have talked, but at this phase of the evening they wouldn’t.

Dobrovan in her dark silk dress, amply gathered over her breasts and at her waist, stopped behind the empty chair, making the smoke flutter again in the air; the excitement froze.

This is what they had been waiting for.

The card game relieved them of the burdensome, highly responsible obligation of conversing, but it took a long time before their concentration on the run of cards made them forget what was constantly on their minds, what had been overstraining their nerves. Once again they reached the point where, despite their intentions, each woman found herself face-to-face with each of the others. Mrs. Szemző smartly tucked her cigarette into the corner of her mouth with her tongue and kept blinking because the smoke irritated her eyes. She picked up a deck, shuffled it, and then spread the cards on the table in a large fanlike arc.

Each of the four women picked a card, twanging it under her fingers as she flipped it. The value of the cards they picked determined the order of their turns, which also assigned their seating arrangement. To which they responded with little hisses, clicking tongues, giggles, sounds they could produce with almost-closed lips.

The sounds had different qualities, all of them filled with satisfaction.

Bella liked especially to make sounds with her lips because she could steal the kiss for herself across the years, the penetrating taste of the cock, its smooth slopes and strong rims, as it smacked her lips.

It was almost the other way around for Mrs. Szemző; for her it was an enormous effort to keep up appearances. As she giggled, she and her mates were being driven across the old bridge of Regensburg, in the spring snowstorm, stumbling and sliding on the slippery cobblestones.

Erna Demén’s daughter was no longer with her.

According to the value of the picked cards, Dobrovan is to be Szapáry’s partner, and Mrs. Szemző will team up with Médi Huber. With their sounds of approval they in fact reveal disappointment. Mrs. Szemző, however close she was to Szapáry, liked best to be partners with the soft-spoken Dobrovan, while Médi Huber and Szapáry, despite the loud conflicts punctuating their relationship, preferred each other as partners in the game.

Once again the cards had not complied with everyone’s wishes.

Quickly they changed places as was necessary and sat down again.

And those two in the maid’s room of the seventh-floor apartment realized that it had been quiet for a long time, that their bodies had been cooling off in the silence and that no more streetcar noises were coming from below.

Above their heads a draft was slowly swinging the window giving on the dark sky.

Tonight, luck arranged it so that Mária Szapáry again sat facing the terrace.

That was the place they all liked most.

Looking up from the cards from this position, one could see the pale dim lights of the gas lamps, like a flawed string of pearls along the promenade on the other shore of the softly rolling dark river, and the deep shadows of the Buda mountains, sliding in and out of each other above the flat block of the rowers’ clubhouse illuminated by reflected lights.

From here, of course, they could not have seen what was happening on the island, around the clubhouse, or under the gaslights, but in the city, people knew in general what kind of place it was.

It wasn’t proper to talk about things like that.

As if the promenade were empty.

Occasionally, however, one could see, even with the naked eye, solitary little figures stepping out from among the bushes and trees, waiting for someone or hurrying to escape someone else, all but fleeing on the promenade, and then, a few meters farther on, casting furtive looks about, disappearing into the sparse grove of yellow acacias and then returning to the trails cut in the meager undergrowth to the ruined medieval cloister, stinking with human excrement, where the gently swaying light of gas lamps could barely reach.

Over Izabella Dobrovan’s silk-clad shoulders Mária Szapáry glanced at the other shore.

It was like a victory that fell into her lap; she was waiting for her cards.

She was deliberately avoiding Elisa’s eyes. Neurasthenia was visible on the features of the other three women. Try as she might to appear as a person of democratic persuasion, she considered everyone below her rank neurotic. She always saw their exasperation showing through their disciplined behavior.

They were not free people.

They were not sufficiently self-disciplined; they could not provide an acceptable framework for a base emotion.

She despised them.

The three despised women, however, were busy wondering whether Elisa’s behavior truly left Mária Szapáry cold.

She seemed neither interested in nor touched by it, but merely to be waiting for the cards to be dealt.

The mutual anger lasted into the next day. After their friends left Mária severely reproached Elisa, though by then she had managed to calm herself down; she knew, idiot that she was, that she’d forgive Elisa. And that Elisa would throw a fit, slap at things, cry, rave and rant. I always forgive, she said to herself, as if hypnotizing herself to forgive, yes, forgive her, but it was becoming harder and harder to force forgiveness out of herself.

There will come a moment when the accumulated pardons will keep her from any further forgiveness.

She will kill her and then herself. But she laughed to herself about this, remembering she had another choice.

She could go to confession.

The question was whether to kill first and then confess or the other way around.

To confess and then not kill.

They all had a way of covering one illusion with another; a tiny bit of reality would show through only when they had lost their way among the illusions or failed to hide themselves in time behind another illusion.

Informed of Her Own Existence

I did feel it on my back.

They had been watching me, flaring up now here, now there with their cigarettes under the blooming trees. There might have been four of them altogether, maybe more.

I did not recognize them, though the older one might have been among them, the marvelous giant with his mustached assistant. Sometimes they pretended not to belong to each other. The older one is very excited in his gingham shirt that’s too small for his chest and his dark-blue, much-laundered overalls. When I walked past him, something exceptional emanated from him along with the strong odor of his sweat.

It reminded me most of hot tar.

They stood quite far apart from each other but about the same distance into the flowering grove.

From where they could see the wide promenade on the riverbank, who came or went on it, but where the darkness kept their figures incognito. No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t identify any of them. Something showed of their shirts, but the greens, yellows, and blacks of his shirt’s little squares I could of course only hope to see; this marvelous man had disappeared. There were those who always returned to the same places, like me, and others who appeared only once and then disappeared for good.

From the depths of the foliage’s shadows, strangers called out with the flaring embers of their cigarettes.

The night whispered with light breezes; the water made bubbly sounds on the stones.

What I understood of this was that they were intentionally revealing their presence with their cigarettes.

As if they were saying, pay attention to me, I am watching you, and at the same time they were competing with each other, watch me, I’m here. With their insistent glances they almost reached across the promenade, I almost understood their words on my body. More correctly, they weren’t talking to or reaching for just anybody above the jasmines, not at all. First, for a long time they observed everything from behind the mask of darkness, and when they finally selected someone, they took a brief drag on a cigarette. I’m here for you, that’s what that means. I’m waiting for you, come to me.

And if the other one replied to this signal with a signal of his own, then they took a longer, deeper puff, with which they prolonged the duration of the embers’ flaring and their faces glowed a little, and thus they strengthened the alluring promise of their devotion and fervent wishes.

These four, under the trees there, probably couldn’t even see one another’s silhouettess. The jasmine along the promenade covered lots of things; maybe they could see one another with their embers hovering above the white budding bushes. They took care, or so it seemed, not to signal simultaneously, to be understood each in his own language. One would make his cigarette flare up for me very briefly, another would do it rhythmically or lazily, or maybe in a more leisurely way. It was flattering to know that four of them were courting me at the same time. Because of that leisurely signal, I thought the older man was among them in his awful checkered gingham shirt that somehow looked good on him.

It’s possible that the cigarette flares signaled something whose meaning I did not grasp. If they hid the embers in the palms of their hands, that meant they weren’t interested in contact. Get lost. In which case their mute signals had an offensive edge. Scram, skedaddle. Something that made a person stay away in his other life too. You’re ugly was the verdict.

What are you bothering me for with your puny prick.

Don’t spoil the air around me.

I’ll keep my secrets for somebody else.

I myself would never have risked smoking, because even the act of lighting up has a heavy meaning. Not even in my nervousness dared I light up, no matter how much I wanted the heat of the bitter smoke in my mouth and throat, because if I did I’d declare that it wasn’t by chance I was taking it deep into my lungs and heart but because of someone who happened to be watching me from somewhere, and I was watching him too, hungering for him. I did not urinate either, except in secret, and I walked far away from this dangerous place to do it.

Or it would have been like declaring that I’d finally come home, that I was at home among you, and what I wish is that someone, anyone, in any way and at any time will make me his own. Which I could not have declared, least of all to myself. Because it wasn’t true.

Sometimes, someone would stop me in the dark or I’d stop on my own because I saw his bare cock staring at me, and he’d ask in a whisper, what would you like. This was the conventional question. I couldn’t answer it or, if I wanted to be truthful, I would have said, don’t know, nothing.

They had two kinds of answer.

To suck you, they’d say, becoming emotional with excitement and the words melting in their mouths, or, for you to suck me, they would say, disinterestedly and dryly; and one kind of man, with the first answer, could not be mistaken for another with the second answer. Everyone dreaded rejection even though it was unavoidable. Very cautiously, they would say, if you want to, I’ll make an exception with you and let you put it in me. Or they said, if you love it so much, I’ll put it in you.

Or they said hoarsely, reaching in between each other’s legs, we’ll do everything, everything.

I could not have accepted this; thinking reasonably, I could not accept that contact between humans ultimately boiled down to a series of such primitive movements and crude gestures which I saw with my own eyes. But there was no doubt about the credibility of their actions. I could not take my eyes off them. I spied on them, I followed them, and because of them I became like a soft cat’s paw. The more hair-raising the sight, the more eager I became for newer and newer surprises.

I could not gauge the boundaries in the darkness.

It surprised me and filled me with abhorrence that middle-aged or older men almost without exception right away pursued me, followed me; it meant they must have found something attractive in me. These men with their dark faces, incredible outfits, and richly tattooed bodies were criminals thirsting for tenderness; there was one whose curly chest hair pierced through his purple lace shirt; there were superannuated sportsmen with still-trim figures, and sickly government clerks with their briefcases, who found no place to put the Panama hats they wore with their summer suits; you might also see some old-fashioned forever-finicky dandies ceaselessly pampering themselves, bursting with the sour dread of their loneliness, sporting heavy gold chains on their sunbaked skin and huge signet rings on their fingers; or burly, balding tradesmen in sweat-stained shirts worn outside their pants, their brand-new welted shoes creaking painfully, their faces prettified with thin mustaches and their heads with frizzled remnants of hair; there were also bums reeking of alcohol and tobacco, and aging catamites; and once, an army colonel showed up in his parade uniform replete with gold braiding; he stood among the ruins stinking with urine, indifferent to everything and everybody, his briefcase at his feet and his cock fully erect, marveled at by a veritable procession of admirers, many of whom took several turns because he let anyone hold it or suck it for a while, but he, rooted firmly to his spot with his red-striped pants lowered to his ankles, neither budged from his briefcase nor answered questions addressed to him by anyone about anything, and he did not seem to enjoy what was happening.

In the eyes of others, he must have been something like a devotional object promising healing and absolution to which people in large numbers make pilgrimages.

The men came and went, spied and hunted, kept searching, and, if they did not find a prey who pleased them, often settled for one another. For me, their hesitant yet aggressive approach was like a fatal stab, because in their eyes I was prey. I watched what they were doing and I fled. It seemed probable that they wanted their youth back for at least a few moments, to grasp my firm, pliant flesh, which had little to do with my personal traits. As if the very impersonal slumbering in me had set them on fire. I was longing for someone who would find my personality suitable, while they wanted anyone who with his body would satisfy their obsessions.

And I was similarly surprised that boys my age or a little younger steered clear of me. Of course, some of these boys made older men pay for the services they rendered, and they looked through me as if I were made of glass because I wasn’t going to pay them; but others must have smelled on my body’s scent that I was a complicated case. They gave me a wide berth or deliberately fished in the darkness for someone else, anybody, while making disgusting faces at me; in fact, they beamed with excitement as they made sure I watched what they were doing, in sheer revenge, right before my eyes, and this truly surprised me. I don’t know what I was supposed to see, but I saw that when they were having their pleasure with others for my sake, they were staying more indifferent to their own pleasures than to the pleasure they meant to provide for me.

The measure of things, the moral of their passions, was the most mysterious thing.

There was a square-built, very strong-looking boy with a large reddish boil on his neck who actually spat whenever we passed each other on the silent trail. He looked depraved, his nose and ears mangled; he might have been a boxer or wrestler. As we passed each other he said in a muffled tone that it was shit-faced guys like me whom he hated most, from the bottom of his heart. He said this even though he could barely have seen me in the dark. When we passed each other again under the flickering bluish-yellowish gas-lamp light, he spat again and asked me aloud how much time I had left of my working hours.

So maybe he thought I was a stool pigeon, and probably there were some real ones among us.

Don’t you worry; the guys will fix your mug but good.

I was rooted to the spot, but I also felt like laughing because hearing his threat it occurred to me that police informers here would have to show their pricks while on duty.

Without exception, every one of them showed a huge and insatiable interest in the others’ cocks, in their attributes and especially in their size.

I did too, but tried not to evaluate myself according to these standards.

However passionate the mutual emotional or bodily interest may have been, judging by what I saw I don’t think any relationship could develop without the introductory showing. This too was exactly the opposite of what happens with women. The men had to show a calling card, an invitation, some sign of the relationship’s preliminary condition. Perhaps they noticed that I wasn’t doing this, which would make me suspicious.

Cut the crap, come on, show it to me.

In most cases they offered it up in a stiff or at least semi-stiff condition — first from a respectable distance, then at a different location but a little closer — and only then was the fateful decision made. Sometimes I too tried to show it from a good distance, but it was no use because my heart wasn’t in it.

You see, I am showing it to you.

My knees would start to shake and I’d grow weak, unable to calm my fear. My hands shook so that my fingers couldn’t undo the concealed buttons in the fly of my well-tailored pants. My decision to do it, to let it happen that once, was in vain.

What the fuck are you waiting for.

Another reason I couldn’t do it was my tight-fitting, slippery wool pants. They used to call them tube trousers. The men begged me, they whispered from the bushes; with my tight pants and fumbling fingers, I must have raised hopes I couldn’t deliver on.

Here, you can grab hold of mine.

My senseless reticence made them impatient.

Then what in hell’s cunt do you want.

And they surprised me by how willingly and excitedly they showed them, how meticulously they prepared their cocks for the showing and, at the same time, how furiously and jealously they’d hide them from unwanted eyes. Everything that had to do with this particular activity sent shivers up and down my spine.

Don’t be afraid. You can show me your little one.

It was like a foreign language I’d never heard before yet understood from the first syllable, with all its phrases and expressions. It was also very surprising that I wanted to show mine too; maybe not like this, not to these men or not to everybody, but to somebody, not just anybody; it also was a surprise to me that all these penises, including mine, whether erect or semi-erect, seemed rather ungainly and repulsive. In all my searches I saw not one about which I could have said, now this, yes, let this be the one. And no less surprising was the most familiar, profound tolerance and empathy I had for them. As if I were saying, it’s all the same to me, it could be any one of them. Nevertheless, I had to realize I had no idea what to do with my insatiable curiosity.

Perhaps I was excited by the process of erection, the untraceable transformation of a cool body, which changes only with aging and then only imperceptibly. Erections kept surprising me with their inevitability as I continued to be motivated by the chance I might see yet another cock, no matter what kind, and compare its condition and substance with the sight of the man it belonged to. In my other life, it would have been inappropriate to imagine there were so many people as passionately curious about this as I.

They were practically treading on one another’s heels in the early hours of the night.

No wonder they’d trampled and sullied everything around the ruins of the Dominican cloister.

Although I understood their curiosity, its depth and pervasiveness still shocked me and had me in thrall; I felt I could never be free of it or conquer it. And because of this feeling, everything seemed to be the other way around in this life of mine — one of my two lives — the opposite of what I’d ever thought or should have thought, with a man’s cock more important than the man himself. Since a man’s cock was unlike the man or his body. I was surprised by the lack of conformity in the visible physiological marks; there was no sameness between body and cock. Every person is put together out of several people. I too differed from my cock; perhaps my penchant for humiliation and self-lacerating brooding originated in this shameful truth. Not to mention that the nature of my thinking differed substantially from the nature of my instinctual life; seeing so many different cocks gave me the impression that this extreme disparity characterized others no less than it did me. One person differs from all others physiologically, but one also carries distinguishing marks that show how one differs from one’s own self. It surprised me that I drew a conclusion from this multifaceted differentiation, which could be said to be general, but I don’t know what the conclusion was. As if it were the kind of knowledge which one can never get enough of or reach the end of. In the eyes of the men, the cock might have been the emblem of this knowledge of unknown character. Perhaps it meant that there is no I or, more correctly, that the I is only part of a larger, undiscoverable whole, or one might say that a man’s exterior, psychological makeup, way of thinking, or character won’t reveal what kind of cock he has, even though his cock is no less defining than his soul or mind. Of course, I can’t say what I mean by soul, or in what way exactly a cock would be defining, and mainly what could rationally justify men’s elementary interest in other men’s cocks if women and their procreative capacity were excluded from their considerations.

It surprised me even more that no matter what they did with their cocks and though I did nothing with mine, from the depths of my soul I approved of the way they did it and not some other way, and that they did it with one another and without initiating women into the business. And perhaps the reason I don’t do it is not because I’m not hot-blooded, impulsive, or implacably manly enough, but rather, in harmony with the dictates of my spirit, I am a woman because of my horrible mother. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I first saw — and even later it took my breath away, made me tremble helplessly with excitement — one man finally grasp another man’s cock, saw the two of them elegantly thrust their hips forward with their cocks sticking out of their hands, saw them lean on each other’s shoulders and, each staring attentively at the other’s cock and both of them rubbing against each other’s thighs and legs, almost coolly, seeking a common rhythm, bring each other off.

They would start slowly, but their sperm quickly spouted up.

With the men I would have loved, I’d have loved to do it too.

It happened that one of them, before the spouting started or bubbled up onto his hand, would duck down to take it into his mouth, caress it with his tongue, suck and swallow the lilac ugliness rearing before him with its purplish head. To eat it, devour it, retching deep down into the back of his throat; sometimes they spat out the sperm. Others, excited by mutual desire, would fall to the filthy ground already fouled by others — they didn’t care where they fell — and mutually took into their mouths the other’s cock. Two silent pieces of flesh. Writhing on each other’s body like epileptics. Heaving, gagging, hurrying and gasping for air. The last moment before the end of the world. They weren’t bothered if they rolled around in other men’s excrement. To save myself I pretended to be disgusted, and that’s how I became disgusted. But with my countenance gazing into the darkness, I approved. They kissed into the other’s mouth the other man’s sperm.

I nearly fainted but I approved.

Or what about the naked tribal warriors in the darkest thickets, with their clothes fastened to their waists or strapped to their legs, arching their butts upward, opening their star-patterned sphincters, free of humiliation, abjection, or servility, falling on their knees and letting themselves be pounded; reaching back very adroitly with tentacle-like arms to grasp the pounding body by its thighs or hairy ass lest it slip out, and even giving little counterthrusts, slyly, helpfully, until the other man, whose name they don’t know, withholding his screams, quickly and forcefully ejaculates into them.

There were those who pulled it out before their climax, wanting to see the gushing geyser sprinkle into the darkness, into something that could not be seen, into nothingness.

There may be people whom even shit won’t stop from screwing a stranger’s ass, because for them it’s nothing more than a bit of swallowing that nobody keeps track of or judges morally; anyway, I still wouldn’t want this to be my life.

With such loathsomeness in it.

All right, I watched it, I saw it, though I don’t know why I had to; I’ve done it, that’s all I know, I’m leaving. True, I went back the next day, couldn’t stay away. And again I stayed until dawn.

And not only that, but also my own sentimental self, longing for brotherhood, would not let go of me; that was my problem, being buffeted by these different intertwined selves that I could not separate. Because of my birth I wound up in a world where in certain cases yes might mean no or no could mean yes. Yet I simply couldn’t imagine or accept about myself that I might have anything to do with these repugnant characters and what I saw them do. I wished myself back in the time when I knew nothing of this. There must be some people fortunate enough to go through life without ever being aware of this world. And if this is the way things are in the end, and I’m too craven to admit that I’m just like these people and have been looking in vain for the real world behind the appearances, now that I’ve found it and see that every other kind of life is but a gross illusion of this ungainly reality, then I must opt for the bridge.

But if my desire is to grasp a cock, anybody’s I can, then why on earth should I kill myself, I asked, rattling and panting with carnal desire and self-hatred.

I would have preferred, with the same effort, to laugh at myself for being so ridiculous.

How ridiculous and ignoble, and willing to sink even lower.

I had no place where I could get away from tormenting doubt. I knew no one with whom I could share any of this. I could just as easily have taken it into my mouth, mutely, anyone’s, so that when the hot sperm was ejected from the depth of his body I could feel at least once what I’d be like as the other man. But I didn’t have enough power of imagination to think this thought through to the end. Even though I stated clearly why I would not want to do it. I did not want to be the way I was, as defined by my natural qualities.

Only God could see things correctly, if there was a God and if he could see. But the no stayed stronger in me.

Whether I reject or approve and adopt a life like that, I can’t endure it for long.

I had to get to that point from here.

Out of the darkness and onto the lit-up bridge. Let the cold of the water swallow me forever, and let no one ever find me either, being a person of such miserable birth. I cursed my mother, whom I did not know, of whom I barely had memories, who left me for a large, bony, pale, blond Frenchwoman. And because my father didn’t notice any signs of this in my mother’s behavior and because he did not keep her from leaving, I cursed him too, a man stupid enough to want to fuck a woman like that. But he was taken away one ordinary early summer morning, in unknown circumstances and for unfathomable reasons, maybe killed by mistake, so my curse could not settle on him as I wanted it to. I was the accursed one. Because I did remember what this dead man’s reproductive organ was like, how it rested on his testicles, I had the brains to remember a thing like that, what his belly was like and his pubic hair when the water rained down on him from the showerhead.

I remember the hair on his body, long and black, how it clung to the deep brown skin of that marvelous body; yes, I remember that very precisely.

By the time I grew up mine became just like that of the murdered man, even though I was blond like my mother and blue-eyed like a pure-blooded German. I wore a perfectly strange cock on my body; the skin had a different consistency and color, but the only real difference between our cocks was that for this brief transition called life I was not circumcised, so that I could reveal our sameness in the mirror only if I pulled back the dark foreskin from the bulb and in that state laid the hanging cock on the testicles, which appeared almost black under the blond pubic hair. All right, so I have a Jewish cock, though I always tried to console myself with the thought that my body at least was like my mother’s and completely Christian. The wrinkled beak of the foreskin remained very narrow because I did things like this only very rarely, preferring to stroke it through pajama pants or underwear, so that when I did pull it back, the pain was greater than the pleasure.

From this I learned that I too was condemned to a terrible death.

I wanted to follow him faithfully, so that it would happen as soon as possible.

I heard in advance the grating noise my footsteps would make. It wouldn’t make sense to waste more time on sentimental thoughts. I felt like a person who in his sleep has lost all his clothes and is now made to appear stark naked in public. I had no choice. My impending death did not upset me, it was like a fait accompli; what bothered me were stupid trivialities such as the question why I couldn’t stay with them now that I had turned around and noticed them trying to get my attention with the glowing embers of their cigarettes. In this place every movement and gesture, or their absence, had an agreed-upon order and meaning, and just as I could haltingly read and find my way among their signals after a few days, they could already read me fluently. It was impossible to avoid being an open book that the eyes of these men could read. It was exactly the opposite of what happened in my other life, where nothing was uncovered, where behind the appropriate concealment of customs and rules, within the flexible frameworks of appearances, a person was sustained by his or her intentions.

I shuddered when I realized that since I was unaware of my own intentions, I must be even less aware of other people’s.

In our other life, something must happen to us that slips through the cracks between obstinacy and dissembling. In fact, darkness must have lurked behind everything all along. In which case, however, reality made visible must also have something behind it, and I can’t get to the end of either one, I can’t see their boundaries. I can’t decide which of my two real lives, so trickily covering each other, is the more robust one. Everyone has another life that must be kept hidden, I knew that, but in the concealed background of a life hiding behind appearances or brutality there is yet another life, and that one I didn’t know. Because while what men did to and with one another was rough, common, and brutal, the language of their communication was exceedingly refined, more complex, civilized, and flexible than spoken language and at the same time very clear and practical.

I enjoyed their knowing more about me than, for lack of experience, I did myself. Whatever I did or didn’t do instantly became a decipherable signal for them, whether it was my silence or motionlessness; and therefore no matter how hard I might try, I stood before them more naked than I could have ever seen myself in my other life. If I understood anything of their language, I understood something of myself that I had once chastely concealed or covered with lies. Appearances could not cover my real being. Not only was I observing them, but I was beginning to see myself with the experienced eyes of those who listened constantly from their place in the darkness and, in accordance with their undisguised intentions, were keenly evaluating and grading my behavior.

To carry out my plan and gain the bridge, I had to walk along the creaky stretch of the promenade in front of the rowers’ clubhouse, or cut across the dense thicket with a few short steps and take the trail to return to the island’s lit-up interior, which at this hour was completely deserted.

Nothing moved.

Sometimes from the Pest shore, sometimes from the Buda shore, I could hear creaks turning into shrieks. Streetcar wheels make the metal rails shriek like that when they round a bend. And then there’d be nothing again, only the wind fingering the trees or a human step crackling in the thicket. One could tell by the sounds where a night streetcar on either side of the city happened to be. There were more places on the Buda shore where streetcars would shriek — in the great bend of Margit Boulevard or, farther on, at different points on Moszkva Square. On the Pest side, the number 2 streetcar might shriek before the Parliament or the number 6 on Marx Square, or it could be another night line, the number 3, making a wide two-part turn at Visegrád Street where it opens into Grand Boulevard to return to Váci Road.

Beyond the Árpád Bridge, where the industrial quarter of Angyalföld illuminated the vaporous nocturnal sky with its reflectors fastened above barbed-wire fences and brick walls, a steam hammer rumbled occasionally, would strike and pound; for a short while its battering would resound through the city, making eardrums, walls, and ground quiver, and then it would fall silent again.

I had been thirsty for hours, I felt completely dehydrated and slightly nauseated; I chose the latter route.

Under the giant plane trees was a quietly bubbling drinking fountain. If it hadn’t been for an occasional light breeze, I might have fainted; my knees had grown weak with exhaustion and excitement.

It bubbled among the stones.

If you leaned over and pushed a button, the water, flavored by rust, would shoot up to the roof of your mouth.

I couldn’t wait much longer with my urge to urinate.

I wanted to die, yet I had no place to run to from the eyes around me that hoped to discover my intentions. Unnoticed, they weaved through the night darkness and tore it to shreds; I had no tactics to outwit them with. Which made my decision laughable; it made me seem frivolous even to myself.

The place itself was tragic, yet many things here that were meant to appear very personal or tragic became comical in the eyes of an observer. If, for example, I chose the shorter route and with my suicidal intentions went along that irritatingly creaky section of the promenade between the trees and the echoing wall of the smooth white building, where ominous darkness seemed literally to be trapped and anything might happen, that would be construed as my reply to any of the men standing by, ready for anything, and would be interpreted as saying, come on, follow me, I want to be yours. That stretch of the promenade was an attention-grabbing area, where the tribal warriors did their business with their wide-open buttocks in the air and where the boys for sale sold themselves. Anyone going there had to count on the possibility of his own death. But if I went past them without signaling to anyone in particular, all four would follow me, each telling himself, let’s just go and see what happens, because they did not generally insist on doing it in pairs. That also made my jaw drop. In my other life I imagined that this was something impossible to do except in pairs. I’d have to shake them off, one after the other, before I could kill myself in peace. Or first I could drink to my heart’s content from the rusty water, then drown myself in the Danube.

And it would be embarrassing, too, if I simply swam out of the water.

And that is why about ten minutes before my planned death, when all of this occurred to me, I could barely restrain my jubilant good mood.

And indeed I failed to restrain it; the sheer idea of how the mind herds together so many opposing, disparate thoughts made me laugh out loud in the darkness, how far a decision is taken from one’s guiding instincts, how far the intent of an action from its pure effects. Out loud I laughed into the darkness, like a lunatic. Wildly, involuntarily, too loud, even though the reason I laughed was that I couldn’t have been more somber and sober.

And the response was whistles from various places.

Again I did not understand.

They could see from under the trees that the young gentleman in black, before taking off for anywhere, was frozen in his tracks and listening like an animal.

I saw myself as a young man gone crazy who nevertheless deliberately chooses death over his undisguised fate.

They warned one another of some danger with their whistles.

From the sinister darkness, from the depth of the shadow cast by the white building came the first whistle, but I didn’t see anyone there. Three of the four figures instantly vanished in the blooming grove. Or maybe they just withdrew into the thicket, I don’t know. As if, along with themselves, they had drawn their own whistling into some echoing space.

The silence thickened.

Anything might happen in it. These people were defenseless against one another.

Irresponsibly I hoped that the one man left was after all the marvelous giant who had pursued me, who despite the whistles did not take off and who stuck to his place. And a possible danger was the police too.

At the moment, no danger fazed me. I was ready to do great things.

I started toward the Árpád Bridge and I knew exactly why. I was in no hurry. I copped the method from them. And I stayed close to the water so that my leisurely steps would make no noise, on the narrow edge of the paved riverbank where the slag and whinstone strips met. One missed step would be enough for me to lose my balance and fall off the steep embankment, but I did not even look down at my feet. I had never felt my body to be so safe. As someone who has suddenly grown above himself. And sees the surrounding world from a higher viewpoint. The soles of my feet barely touched the creaking slag and uneven stones, my steps carried me rhythmically, almost melodiously forward. My neck lengthened too, the butterfly wings of my shoulder bones did not hold it back. I no longer had the feeling that I was not myself and that all this was happening to someone else. Still, I did have the peculiar feeling that there were people accompanying me. In fact, it was for them that I showed what I knew, how complete and light I felt my slender body to be. I became elongated in the waist, my shoulder blades and collarbones adjusted themselves, conformed to the new shape. Every one of my joints and muscles defied the dangers waiting for me. I showed my bodily safety to him, to the giant. I showed him my shirt, taut across my chest, clinging to my waist, my hard ass inside my shamelessly cut pants, and in the much-too-small underpants my semi-erect prick, shoved to the side at its base and adhering to the crook of the thigh, on which the too-tight foreskin now slid painfully back in all the excitement. In my way of walking I demonstrated all the good feelings nourished by my physical being.

With my walking I also showed him the sensation of the cool breezes as they pleasantly chilled my hot skin, and I showed this together with the taste of sweat. I showed it to the giant, who — with his massive, thick, and closely shaved neck, with his stubborn head and pitch-black hair, which kept falling on his forehead — was staying, I thought, under the trees where the trail and the promenade intersect.

What could this man be, I didn’t know.

One could guess the enormous configuration of his loins through his overalls; his powerful ass protruded abruptly. He had thick, dense eyebrows that met above his nose, his nose was short and strong, and on his jutting cheekbones the dark brown skin was so taut it seemed bluish. A navvy — this old-fashioned obsolescent word came to mind for him, the weight of dirt and its autumnal wet fragrance. Or perhaps a carpenter, a stonecutter, a cutter of wood or stone or something that must be grasped by hand. I couldn’t take my eyes off his head, his limbs, his face, his jaws, while we walked around or pursued each other on the trails. I could not forget, either, his suddenly flashing, suddenly vanishing smile.

It was a quick, mute smile.

I could even imagine that he was unable to read or write. I’d stay with him anyway; I didn’t care if he was illiterate. He must be staring at me now, with his dumb head, his partly open, fleshy lips and his eyes with their metallic luster, but in showing myself to him, I was also showing myself to anybody who was looking.

I knew what I was doing; I knew he understood, or several of them did.

I’ll go as far as the next lamp.

That was the second sentence in the mute language of attraction.

I resolved to speak their secret language. The gas flame imprisoned in its glass globe emitted a strong sharp light that turned from yellow to white and white to blue, but the moment the light left the globe it lost its blue, and its yellow grew tired as the night filled it with various hues of gray.

Between two gas lamps, one blended into the mist-filled dimness of the riverbank.

I could hardly wait to reach the next lamp and pronounce the second sentence of the secret language. If someone didn’t stop at the next lamp, that had a very different meaning. That was where I would cross over to the other side of the promenade, making my intention obvious. Then I’d slowly stroll back, and that would be seen as a confession, an advance on my body offered up in sacrifice.

In his excitement, he’s already stamped out his cigarette and stepped a little way out from the shadow of the trees. This would be his response. He’ll open the fly of his loose pants so I can see it: I’ve opened my fly for you.

I had a feeling it might not be him after all, that I had made a mistake. Just a figure partly concealed behind the budding jasmine. We no longer had doubts about each other; we understood each other. Even though I obviously couldn’t exchange more than two sentences with this marvelous man; what would we talk about anyway. He too should right away gauge the distance between us. So much comfort and reassurance emanated from him, such mute laughter, that I was ready to spend the rest of my life with him, no doubt of it.

Or at least my imagination had a comfortable niche in which this too seemed possible.

Until I return, he won’t whip his prick into an erection for someone else. As I approach, I can see on his shoulders and neck how brutally he is working at it under cover of the bushes. I stop at a respectable distance, turn my back to the water, the jasmine conceals me too, from everyone else. I knew how it would be, I wanted to do it the way they did it; there must be no misunderstanding between us. What we do should mean that we want each other and nobody else; for my sake, he should leave his mustached assistant too. I also open my fly, at last we can stare into each other’s face over the bushes hiding our bodies, I reach into my underwear and lift out my cock, which had shriveled, I felt, in my abject fear.

It happened exactly as I imagined it would, only it was not the older man standing on the other side of the bushes, not the black-haired giant in his ugly gingham shirt two sizes too small. I should have noticed earlier that this was a coarse sailor’s shirt with horizontal stripes. Sometimes one sees simultaneously what one sees and what one would like to see. Two darkly brilliant, frightened, slightly amazed little eyes in a bright face shone on me.

I could not leave, though in my disappointment I wanted to get away instantly.

As if he were still a child, at least his countenance was childish, but sharp dark grooves sat in his features; on his dented forehead two vertical grooves cut across three horizontal ones. His small lips, red and swollen with blood, fitted between two grooves that sliced his stubbly chin in two, and one sole groove ran across his thin face. As if his face were a surface on which two human beings had been drawn. His matted dark hair, divided in long individual curls, clung in waves to his forehead and fell in unkempt batches on the frail, childlike nape of his neck.

He undoubtedly captured me with his exterior, though I knew right away that I’d leave him on the spot for the giant.

He had a long thin nose, a powerful Adam’s apple, and in his excitement he kept swallowing. The long sleeves of his shirt were rolled up to the elbows of his strong, long arms.

It was not attraction but rather pity that I felt for him, but this feeling filled me completely.

I was still shivering a little with the animal excitement I felt for this older man, with my attraction for him, with fear of what he might do to me and whether he would accept me for a whole long life, but the boy on the other side of the bushes could notice none of this because I kept my agitation under control. The trembling did not get out of hand or become as vehement as it had been before. Stealthily I looked around again to see whether my man wasn’t nearby after all. I was actually glad that the trembling, which had to do with his size and beauty, no longer hindered me in what I was now ready to do.

With anyone and at any time.

If he wasn’t here, well, he wasn’t. He didn’t seem to be around anywhere. Either he willfully deceived me or my imagination had played a dirty trick on me. I felt my body drying out; when I blinked or swallowed, my eyelids and my esophagus literally clicked. My trembling for him was coursing through my flesh; though not strong, it was becoming permanent.

I could not see behind the bushes but I could discern that with his milk-white, thickly veined arm he was working more slowly now. His prick must have filled and become distended. With his arm movements he deliberately showed, or even exaggerated, the proportions of his member to make it seem even more imposing. Every man tried to show himself in the most favorable position so the one watching would imagine him as strong and mighty as possible. Actually, they hoped to captivate one another not as real humans but as parts of secretly nurtured fantasies, which is what ritualized their encounters. They knew what fantasies the others were nurturing.

They built their secret language with different dialects of their shared imagination.

He also wanted to see what I was doing with mine; that’s why he kept standing on tiptoe. It would have been terrifying to think that in this very instant everything would be decided. I was gripped by my empathy for him, but my burning excitement completely vanished because my interest was not directed at him. I had nothing more to do. It was enough to see how his arm and shoulder moved, to discover in the position of his white, fuzzy-haired neck the pleasure of his erection, and my imagination disloyally abandoned the older giant and willingly followed the boy.

It grew stone-stiff in my hand, rearing up impetuously, aggressively and painfully, I was holding the beak of the foreskin so as not to let it slip back in, for the sensitivity of the naked bulb would inevitably have resulted in an ejaculation. For the same reason, to hide it from him no matter how hard he tried to see it, I covered it with my other hand. Which was an exceptionally important expression in the ritual language. He was requesting an advance from me, so the sight of my cock would strengthen his erection, which my presence would make perfect when the most propitious moment arrived and he revealed his to me. I should feel the strength of my seduction in him, and be completely unable to avoid the perfection of his penis.

I was striving for unconditional mutuality, however, nothing else, and therefore imagined that the ceremonial introductions should occur not separately but simultaneously. I could not give him an advance that he might forge into a business advantage.

The lack of mutuality offended my taste. I wanted him to understand that.

Otherwise I was going to leave.

In the words of the sign language, the relationship would then still retain an exciting business condition. I would not budge from my position.

This in turn created a shared question: which of us could impose his will on the other, or, to put it in my terms, would my sentimental desire for fraternity prove stronger than my primitive curiosity. This turned out to be such a nerve-racking question in the motionless summer night — which of us would first show his to the other — that I could feel my suicidal intentions evaporating along with the black-haired, dark-skinned giant.

The hyperemia in my mind left no room for him.

I grew so weak it no longer mattered whether I showed it to him.

Look at that, look what a pecker he’s got, he cried enthusiastically, goodness gracious.

His reddish fleshy lips, a little offended and excited, trembled in amazement.

Jesus, he prayed, how lovely your pecker is.

His voice sounded as if it came, flutelike, from a third person trying to hum and sing in various falsettos.

His surprising adjective touched me because until then I’d never thought of anybody’s pecker as lovely, least of all of my own. As if he were speaking not to me but to a third person like me, perhaps standing behind me; or the whole thing wasn’t true at all, only flattery. Something crackled in the thicket, letting me know we weren’t alone, somebody else had also heard what had been said, somebody or somebodies had been spying on us.

Not only did he not reciprocate my confidence but he used the crackling sound as an excuse to hide his own instantly.

He was doing everything too fast. He stepped out from behind the bush while still buttoning his fly. His movements made clear that he was only a dumb little faker who couldn’t get it up.

He couldn’t possibly have put it away so fast if it had been stiff.

He whispered into my face that we should get out of here but quick.

His breath was as sweet as that of a suckling babe. These dumb fairies, he said, as I could hear for myself, won’t leave us alone, such a rotten bunch. I was eager to hide my own too, but it took some doing. He reached for it while sweetly whispering into my mouth, but I wouldn’t let him.

They’re so jealous, believe me. They always want what somebody else has. He laughed.

There was something explosive about him, merry and playful. I probably know that rotten jerk from Újpest — such a dumb fairy, he thinks he’s queen of the whole place. His name is Pisti. He must be the one who managed to wind up somewhere behind us, come on, hurry up, damn it. I think he wants to separate us. He always wants everyone to suck him off, but don’t think he ever comes.

And I mean never, he said indignantly, with nobody.

He asked me if I had a place to go to, which I did not immediately understand because I was having trouble buttoning up my fly. I did not answer him.

Because he had no place of his own, he added by way of explanation, he was only on leave. He did have a grandmother in Pestimre, but we can’t go there even if the streetcars are running. His grandmother found out about him a long time ago when she caught him with one of his buddies, and then he quickly added that with him I could do everything but absolutely everything I was used to doing with girls.

I was amazed, watching his face, his eyes and his lips; how would he know what I was used to doing with girls or whether I had done anything with them at all.

He liked Mohács more because there you just go to the upper sandbank or even by the lime-burning factory and somebody will pick you up. Several times his grandmother made a fuss, throwing things around, slapping and beating and breaking everything she could get her hands on. He wants no more scandals, and not because of the neighbors, they can kiss his ass, but the old girl really has nobody in the world except him. I should understand.

Unexpectedly he sniggered, interrupting himself to say he shouldn’t have told me the whole story, because at this time of night there isn’t a single rotten streetcar to take them to Pestimre. We could walk, but by the time we get there, his short leave will be over.

For some reason, this too he found irresistibly funny.

There I was with this total stranger in the middle of an early summer night, his sentences bubbling out cheerfully and I not believing a single word. And not because he was lying; he wasn’t. What was unbelievable was how convincing I found his whole being; yet I had to refuse him, and I would too.

As it turned out on that early summer night, I simply could not believe that this might possibly be my life, or that such a strange being as this boy could be part of either of my lives or share any part with me in any way, or that I could fit him into one of my lives just as he was, along with his entire life and his grandmother, without upsetting my other life. But neither could I imagine, nor was it morally acceptable, that I’d abandon this man just like that, when he’d shown such enormous confidence in me. Frankly, a man of this sort was all in all too much for me. Even if I decided to take him home to my room on the boulevard, how could I navigate him past Balter without being seen.

Balter would come out with his dislocated hip, open the gate, moaning aloud, checking out both of us; a single glance would be enough for him to assess the situation and seal my fate. My upbringing gave no instruction as to what one was supposed to do in a situation like that, but I did have instructions that the best thing to do with unusual situations was to avoid them. Hearing about his grandmother sent me reeling to the edge of madness, if only because of my own grandmother. I shuddered at the thought of two people meeting in a summer night who had never had and never would have anyone in this world except their grandmothers, and that this was far from a coincidence.

This thought hurt, and it also filled me with painful hope, but the hurt was stronger.

Standing before me was an entire man with his irresistible warmth, unfathomable indifference, intrusive odor, living grandmother, obviously unwashed hair, and everything else that was his, presenting me with his unbelievable exhortation that I should go with him because with him I could do everything I had ever done with girls, and I did not understand, it made no sense.

Perhaps all these things together in a single human being was what was too much for me.

I wanted to say something to him, something encouraging that would also help me extricate myself from the situation, but I couldn’t think of anything. According to social conventions, I needed to respond, so as to remain the master of my predicament. I felt my entire upbringing had been nothing but a framework that, although it specified the character of verbal responses to various events, hadn’t given specific instructions as to their true and genuine content. My grandmother was whispering to me even now, as she had until the last minute of her life, passing on to me and doing for me everything she could, though her words had made no sense when she uttered them. Not the least sense in the world. Neither her son nor her daughter took her seriously, though the pattern and structure of what she had to say enthralled me and never left me.

So I set off again on the creaky promenade; I had no idea what to do with such a strange human life as this boy’s.

For lack of direction I headed toward the Árpád Bridge, as if one could begin again at the beginning. Which the boy of course interpreted according to the rules of the secret language.

If you haven’t got a place, he said flatly, as he came along, keeping up with me like a sweet child, we can go to the water tower. Really. I know a nice little spot there.

He wanted to take my hand.

Whenever he has no other place to go to, because nobody has a rotten pad to himself, he holes up there with anyone until dawn.

Much as I wanted to, I didn’t give him my hand. He responded to this by putting his arms around my waist and coiling around me, holding back my hurrying steps a bit, steps that turned out to be very long, so we’d be like lovers strolling on clouds, so he could kiss me.

I felt an instant disgust when he looked up at me, his lips open in a circle, like one film star staring at another. He not only did something but overdid it, as if he wanted to announce, loud and clear, that he was doing this or that and doing it according to this or that model. I didn’t let him lean his head on my shoulder and I brushed off his arms too. My own cruelty hurt me. I didn’t want to see his falsities. He wanted to withdraw some emotional capital from me until we reached the place where he hoped we could really run wild, but I kept walking steadily, I’d had enough of this playacting, and how would he guess that I wasn’t letting myself be led anywhere.

He has to be back by six in the morning, that’s when his leave is over.

But what kind of leave, I asked in an unreasonably irritated tone, for God’s sake, from what place are you on leave.

He was quiet for a moment, looked at me, seriously wondering what I hadn’t understood or to what I was objecting so strongly.

Well, this is where they dock, he answered eagerly, his head motioning to the very spot.

He serves in the river forces branch of the army, stationed in Mohács, he’s reenlisted. Once a week they come up with their ships, sometimes twice, but instead of tying up at the flotilla docks in Újpest they tie up at that something-or-other square.

In other words they dock at some square.

He can find it from anywhere, but damn it, he always forgets the name of the fucking square.

I didn’t have a place to take him to either, no matter how much I pitied him, and that’s the truth. I should have realized I had no place here, in the city of my birth.

I asked him if it was Bem Square.

No, but the fucking square was on the Pest side.

The irritating noises our steps were making were not only too loud but also senseless, completely senseless.

Maybe the Belgrád pier.

Not really, that’s where passenger boats dock, you know.

Then Dimitrov Square, I replied, irritated, maybe Vigadó Square.

I hated the black sand under my dirtied-up shoes and all the drivel we were hurling at each other.

He has this thing with Dimitrov; it’s like doing a crossword puzzle. What pops into his mind every time he comes across the name is that the man was a Communist martyr. He grinned. Eight letters. He memorized it so he wouldn’t forget the name of the square, but then he forgets this fucking martyr. Every week he buys a copy of Füles, the crossword magazine.

Then his face became serious.

Do you do crossword puzzles, he asked.

I did not reply, but I felt insane willingness and devotion emanating from his body.

He was putting me through various tests, licking me all over with his words and gestures.

Actually he was behaving like a normal, lovable human being.

I was the one who wasn’t normal; never in my life had I solved a crossword puzzle; and he hadn’t yet realized that he would find nothing lovable about me.

He was easy, light, his words smooth and caressing; he altered his gestures and turned them all inside out yet remained helpless with me. I was rather intrigued as to why he’d put away his cock so quickly and what it must be like. Just as, in his eyes, I had won my exceptional position in the unfathomable hierarchy of the night with my cock. But it was senseless, completely senseless — the way I was making obnoxious sounds at the side of such a profoundly witless stranger. This depressing knowledge was stronger than my curiosity. I didn’t want to hear that our irritating jabber had anything in common. To my left I saw a path among the trees leading back to the thicket where I might find the giant with his mustached assistant. I can’t imagine what I wanted from the giant; he too probably had a disgusting life.

A little farther off I saw the paved promenade that would lead me, in a more civilized way, back to the interior of the island, where at last I could drink and urinate, but I didn’t think I could endure a long stroll with this loquacious little idiot by my side. I figured that at the next well-trodden but not too clear split in the trail, I’d lose him with a single fast turn.

As if fleeing I left him without a word because I couldn’t think of anything to say. After such a brief, odd acquaintance I didn’t know how to take my leave; I knew no formula for such an occasion. I turned at a virtual run into the dully thudding path, where the gas-lamp light still managed to penetrate the dark.

He followed me.

His lack of suspicion was unequivocal.

After a few steps I turned around to face him and tell him in no uncertain terms what I was thinking. He literally recoiled from my raging fury. He was somewhat shorter than I; our bodies nearly collided. He gazed at me with his bright childlike countenance — a person ready for anything, ready to do anything for me. Surprising myself too, I hugged him, he clung to me like a suction cup and I glued my reluctant body to his. A huge sigh escaped him, followed by numerous shorter, lighter, relieved sighs and moans. Our loins could not meet, but I thought I felt something of his warmth on my thighs. I planted my lips on his neck and on his nape covered with childlike fuzz, and I too held him as if, or almost as if, I had found what I’d been looking for. I’d have liked to find someone. Somewhere above his loins, he must have felt on his belly my cock restrained by the buttons of my fly.

I would have liked to feel the warmth of his loins or his hand taking hold of my cock.

Yet the feel of his body remained so strange and distant, its scent and tension so alien, that I thought it would instantly sober me up.

To make this happen, I pushed him away by his shoulders and looked into his face, close up. In the dappled lamplight his milk-white skin glowed, showing its dark and ancient grooves. There, before me, stood a railway man of Tiszahát whose fate had brought him to the city a hundred years ago and who begot several children with a servant girl from northern Hungary.

Forgive me, I said quietly, there is some misunderstanding between us.

Swallowing my shame, I got stuck.

Don’t be offended, but this is not what I had in mind, and please, I stuttered, let’s leave it at that.

How could he understand what I was talking about; if that was not what I had in mind, then what did I have in mind, what was I thinking of. I did not think of anything.

His face, radiant from the pleasure of our touching, looked up at me, terrified. I could also hear that I was speaking a foreign language, issuing from my body and in my own voice.

At his marvelous incomprehension, my heart filled with profound gratitude.

Unthinking, I bent over him, I wanted to thank him and take my leave; I kissed his sweet, milk-tasting lips.

He would have instantly opened them to me; in an incredibly short time he would have been unbelievably cruel with his lips, his teeth, tongue, and saliva.

For the first time in my life, I was filled completely with the fragrance of a male face, the fragrance of stubble, the fragrance of a man’s saliva, and the fragrance emanating from the coarsely woven shirt on the ill-groomed male body.

But I did not let him plunge his tongue into my mouth.

His legs tried to entwine me, his arms tired to clasp me, he was aggressive, with his experienced fingers he quickly explored, assessed, and then scooped up my ass; I was defending myself.

With an incredible feather lightness he pervaded my tense, stone-hard body, which resisted the fragrances and grew rigid in dread. His fingers raced in all directions. He was all lightness, and I raw fear itself. I would not let him; my muscles resisted him.

Which made him literally sob on my chest.

I should have realized earlier that I was not meant to be a human being, even though that realization would not have helped either of us.

You’re so sweet, oh, your body is so strong, he kept squealing, why don’t you let me. What should I promise you of myself, he asked, he begged, he flashed and sparkled.

Don’t promise anything, promise nothing of yourself because I’m not curious about anything, and sweet I’m definitely not, those were the words I wanted to throw in his unprotected face. But I could not deflect my feelings about him; he was the one who had declared feelings. Simply a sweet man, he was the sweet one, that’s what I thought. But without his words I wouldn’t have dared think such a thing of a male person.

I was sorry I couldn’t do it for him, sorry that he misunderstood me, but I couldn’t do it, because something like a team of horses was holding me back.

No matter how you protest, I want to be yours, he whimpered, and since he felt precisely what I was thinking, he smiled, and I will be yours, you’ll see.

And at that moment I believed it.

He reared up so our loins could make contact with both their heat and the sensitive sensation of hardness.

Can’t you see, he whispered, haven’t you noticed, I’ve been following you all evening, he asked. This surprised me greatly; if he had he must have done it very cautiously. More cleverly than I had followed others. His fingers were plowing up both my thighs, dangerously close to my groin.

I walked my feet off for you. I’m hustling after you and you just keep walking as if you were blind. He was cooing at me. You could have been inside me a long time ago, oh, he squealed, I can already feel your big cock, but all evening you kept running from me on your little feet.

He was talking nonsense and his words felt like punches.

My feet are not little, they’re positively large, and how could he have convinced me that I should take him for a woman when what I loathed and enjoyed so much at the same time was that such a sweet little man fell into my clutches, and that is why I felt so much tenderness and cruelty for him. This whole thing could not be understood by normal standards.

He overwhelmed me because he could allow himself to mouth these insanities, such as how I could have been inside him a long time ago, while I didn’t allow myself anything.

As if only half of my self understood what he was saying while the other half was buffeted by doubts that made it vulnerable.

There was a man in the night whom I learned to love, along with his stupidities, which made him even more precious. And I right away wanted to protect him, perhaps from his own dark obtuseness, even though I was the weaker one. I did not recognize myself in him but was instantly infatuated with his lightness, his daring, and his openness, traits I must have lacked and wished for. It would have been wonderful to live with these traits. I was envious of his terrible freedom, for which I did not have the courage or maybe not the talent. At least in the water tower I could have a secure little hiding place with him every night.

I foresaw that I would not forget for a long time to come the stormy presentiment of passion I was at once experiencing and restraining.

By tomorrow it would turn into pain and longing, regret and bitterness that would torture me terribly.

Yet something was carrying me onward. I had to turn him away, peel him off me.

Listen to me, I said, and he must have felt the tenderness in my voice because he did listen and his cheerful, happy-go-lucky, little-boyish, and ancient being opened up even more toward me; this is a fatal misunderstanding, I continued insistently and soberly. I shall now leave you, please don’t follow me again. Let’s leave this between us just as it is.

But what kind, he wondered, what kind of misunderstanding, he cried, alarmed; he grasped my arm, I could feel his animal-like strength. You must have lost your marbles. We didn’t even have time to ruin anything. He was looking at me but I did not respond. What have I done wrong, he whispered, enraged, because he had no patience for my silence. You think the world came out of your ass, he cried tearfully, is that what you believe. I didn’t imagine anyone could be so rotten.

Why are you ruining it, don’t, I begged him.

Me, ruining it; this shithead has the nerve to say I’m ruining it. He says I, I.

His wounded pride and his wrath set his words on fire; they lit up everything in the darkness and made him look like one of the furies.

He was right; I could not say he wasn’t.

I was afraid he’d hit me; he hypnotized me with his wrath. And this made me realize, unexpectedly again, that in fact we were not in my imagination but at a very dangerous place where I had done something to another human being.

Only a few paces from us an unbelievable figure was standing in the bushes, his pants half lowered.

In full preparedness, he was spying on us, waiting for us to continue, which would increase his excitement, a parasite, a voyeur. I could not ignore him. His arms were like huge hams, his short-sleeved shirt very tight on them and open to the waist, letting me see massive, hairy, rippling layers of fat hanging low and luminous in the darkness. With one hand he was holding up his pants on his enormous sausagelike thighs, with the other he was yanking something under his shiny belly protruding tautly from the layers of fat that luckily could not be seen for all the hair, skin, and darkness.

At the same time at the opening of the footpath a strange couple appeared among the bushes, partly penetrated by the light of the gas lamps.

They were exchanging excited words as they approached, yet something restrained them, so I could not make out what they were saying.

One was obviously a burden to his partner; he was one of the tribal warriors and I happened to know that his name was Robi Königer. He lived on Eötvös Street, in the house we reached after we had managed to break through the firewall, when the boulevard was on fire.

In our neighborhood most everybody treated him as a fool.

Robika is like this, Robika is like that; maybe he’s a little weak in the brain. Come on, sweet Robika, carry my basket for a spell, you won’t regret it.

He did not strip like the others; on the contrary, he was all buttoned up because he could not possibly put his shapelessness on public display.

He wore white surgeon’s trousers and a white shirt; he worked for the ambulance service of a clinic on Üllői Road. When he had no money, and everyone in our neighborhoood seemed to know what he spent his money on, he would go to the open market on Hunyadi Square and help housewives carry home their live chickens tied by the legs, their tomatoes to be preserved, or heavy sacks of potatoes.

His skin must have been bluish white to begin with, every little blood vessel close to the skin’s surface, yet he covered his face, I cannot imagine why, maybe because of some injury, with a thick, blinding white layer of powder. Dread sat on this strange, motionless face. That is how he roamed the streets, white and frightened; in the winter, he wore a black cape. Even in my childhood I had been frightened of him because of the way he carried the struggling chickens, tied together in pairs, Szófia Street reverberating with their squawking, and I could not help thinking that I’d wind up just like that for my secret sins. He was very tall, and because of the constant bending over, his back subserviently developed a hump; he gave the impression that he was forever being forced to go through doors too low for him. He was going through doors we could not see with our naked eyes. Whoever touches himself too much will develop a back like that because too much sinful pleasure eventually attacks the spinal marrow. He had to bend down to everyone he talked to. All his clothes were too small for him, his ankles showed under the cuffs of his pants, one could see he wore red or blue socks most of the time, white only rarely, and his shirtsleeves left not only his bony wrists but a good section of his lower arms uncovered.

The entire man was so thin it was as if he had no flesh on his bones, or as if his bones were made of glass.

The other man was coming faster toward me on the path.

Königer was following him, upset and mesmerized, and one could hear they couldn’t end the tune of their irritation. This other man wore short pants and very spare sandals on indecently naked and strong feet.

As they came along the darkening path, one could not tell which of them was telling the other the more important things, or rather, which of them disdained the other more, and which of them should have controlled his temper.

But this was enough for me.

Seeing their fast approach, I lost my self-control and was left with nothing but the will to get away.

I burst into the thicket without looking at what I was stepping into, at what I would come up against.

Branches slapped my face with their metallic-tasting flowers, I bumped against tree trunks, I scraped my skin, under my feet everything crackled, I also heard the sailor’s shouts.

Idiot garbage pail, he shouted into the softly fragrant mute night, and then in an even more mournful tone he yelled that I was a stupid little prick.

You are a big stupid garbage pail.

I did not have to run far to clear the trees, but I couldn’t stop running, I was pounding on the naked earth, clattering on paved and pebbled paths, and making grating noises with my fine, pointed, filthy black shoes.

The sailor was not talking utter nonsense.

The kid from Újpest who thought himself queen of the whole place — he wasn’t just anybody, he wasn’t some unknown person from Újpest whose name just happened to be Pisti.

I felt as if my soul had been stabbed.

I didn’t know by whom.

But I could see with my own eyes that it was indeed Pisti. The sharp pain and disturbing light of this unexpected discovery at least in retrospect illuminated many things I had not understood before.

Running was making my sides hurt because I paid attention to everything except proper breathing, but I kept running, which at least was familiar and felt good.

And then I collapsed and tripped over something, or maybe the other way around. I didn’t know where I was. The grass was dewy; I buried my face in it.

But I felt that something too warm was running down my leg.

Those Two

On the bed of the maid’s room in the apartment on Pozsonyi Road, neither of them remembered how and when they might finally have fallen asleep, or what had happened between them and when before they fell asleep.

And why they awakened at all in the unfamiliar night, when first they had to find their own limbs in the cooled-off tangle of flesh so that then they could feel the other’s limbs, distinguishing them from their own.

With their senses filled to the brim with each other, this is how they perceived their mutuality, though they did not realize how exceptional this moment was. They couldn’t have named the other person, whose body had soaked up and absorbed every iota of their self-image, and for a good while they remained ignorant of their own names as well. The other person’s intrusive self streamed into the place of their own self-image, just as the other body’s sensation and substance dissolved the shape and sense of their own body. They saw nothing but darkness and only darkness, nothing but darkness, while, submerged in the persona of the other, they sensed they should find their way back to certain characteristics of their own.

They each failed to conjure up their own individual memories.

The window, swinging slowly in a current of air, made squeaky little sounds.

Gyöngyvér spoke first. Quietly yet very excitedly, as if being informed of her own existence by her own strange voice. This surprises her. She still cannot understand herself, because someone else within her is thinking faster or, rather, is thinking ahead of what she will say.

Listen, she said, though she had no idea of another person there or who it might be. Now, listen to me very carefully.

But the other one did not understand the request — neither its content nor who was making it in the dark. The strangely exciting instruction was a mere acoustic experience. He wanted to absorb it, but he had no idea to whom the excitement belonged. A piece of knowledge was missing. As if he were reaching down into a painful darkness where once, a long time ago, all this had already happened. The way pain shoots into well-embedded roots of teeth.

I’ll tell you quickly what I’ve been dreaming, continued the female voice, full of suppressed excitement and whispering from very close up. Listen, please.

As if she were speaking out of the warm inside of the darkness and with this strange voice of hers managing to reach and stroke the cool surface of flesh. But she couldn’t have said whose flesh had cooled and in whose flesh she sensed the voice’s contact.

This time I have it, she exclaimed hoarsely, now I can tell you. Which also made the man wonder — no, alarmed him, he didn’t know — who was this person, within or without him, who either knew or wanted something so much.

And she felt that in the unfriendly outside world her exclamation sounded stupid. How could the other person understand, if she herself had no idea what it was she had. On the contrary, there wasn’t anything, nothing, there were only these cold walls, much too close, this rotten little room. Nothing palpable. After all, I’m dreaming all this. I only feel there’s something I should be able to tell, share with someone, a wish, an empty longing.

She saw all around her a diaphanous yet brilliant and unfamiliar view, glowing with lights, which she had seen before yet could not identify completely with what she was feeling, given the sight before her. Thoughts and objects were incongruous, and so were the objects of her thoughts; everything was a little out of joint. The other one now admitted her into him, or she admitted him into her; she definitely felt this. While with open eyes she observed that they were admitting each other, she saw out from between the disjointed parts, and she found herself alone at the bottom of the water; the water was moving, running, smoothing over her body, carrying it along as if it would tear it apart and rip off her clothes. She was admitted by an enormous, caressing hollowness suffused and seared by the vibrating, glittering, midday summer sun. Something ominous was pulling, dragging her downward, no matter how strongly she protested. She did not protest. She was overwhelmed by happiness. And she could say of this, with absolute certainty, that it wasn’t a dream; she always knew it wasn’t, not a recurring dream. Still, she couldn’t speak of it to the other person because every time she opened her mouth to say something, the water rushed in and she kept having to swallow it.

I don’t know, said the man, and he also didn’t know what it was he didn’t know. I don’t know when we fell asleep. Which sounded a little more like a question than a statement. But he wasn’t certain there was someone else in this darkness, someone he could ask. He had doubts; maybe he was dreaming all this. Or maybe he was dreaming that he was dreaming, and then it would make no sense to ask questions. I can’t, I don’t know what I’m dreaming, he added more loudly.

His own voice made him more awake.

But he couldn’t be sure it was his own voice. Nagging doubt persisted. He found nothing that could convince him of anything.

I think I’ve finally figured it out, listen, I think we’re in a whirlpool.

Well, that’s interesting.

I mean it, a whirlpool, pulling you down, Gyöngyvér continued loudly, almost shouting, which made the other one feel ill at ease. This is a whirlpool, I figured that out, it can’t be anything else. That is to say, I keep on dreaming it again and again, you know, you understand, I keep dreaming that the water is burying me.

And while she was talking, myriad parts of the shining silkiness of the water flooded her, and its enormous weight pressed down on her, and still she managed to speak.

Yet it was gratitude that gathered and hoisted her up from the depths of the water, a feeling that made her float, a feeling that she would carry the other person away within her. Fortunately she didn’t say this aloud. That would have been like announcing that she wanted to drown the other person within her.

Funny, you’re saying it’s a whirlpool, the man continued, and his tone was as if he were rushing into her. And you say it is burying you. He heard his questions, simultaneously understanding and resisting them. No, that can’t be, he said aloud. Or perhaps I’ve gone mad, but this he did not say out loud.

Whirlpool, yes, whirlpool, believe me, the woman insisted. The reason I can tell you about it is that — I’m telling you, you understand, I couldn’t tell it to anyone else — if I tell you, the water doesn’t come in my mouth when I talk.

What she heard echoing from her words was the gratitude she felt for the other person, and although she could see the outline of his face she did not remember exactly who he was, this person so close to her, so familiar. Which strengthened her gratitude and allowed happiness to grip her by the hair so strongly that she almost lost her breath. But this condition included all her insecurities.

She knew that now she’d be pulled out of the water. Everything grew dark and gaped before her. The sun shone into her face.

Interesting, this is indeed very strange and interesting, replied the other person in the darkness, a hoarse and familiar other voice. He remembered at last. Now I also know, he continued more loudly, using the strength of his own voice to convince himself. He was not dreaming, no. And he had not gone mad. They were telling their dreams to each other. I’ll tell you my dream too, what I’ve dreamed so suddenly.

No, don’t, the woman protested. If you do, I’ll wake up and then I won’t be able to tell you any more. I’ll drown then, she exclaimed desperately.

They were both startled at this, or rather, this too became part of their long, smooth, slowly unfolding awakening. They saw each other, heard each other’s laughter, noticed from close up the astonishment on each other’s face, and this calmed them both.

Hey, we’re completely nuts, laughed the woman. We imagine we’re dreaming when we just can’t wake up — or something like that.

I’m not clear about when we could have fallen so fast asleep, the man said, growing somber. I really don’t remember anything.

He was afraid that in his sleep he might have said something that betrayed him. Again he remembered the open garden gate as the powerful beam of his car’s headlights swept across it. I don’t understand when, he repeated aloud. And what was this strong buzzing, or someone’s loud shouting.

Laughter bubbled up from the woman. How can one shout and not be noisy. Maybe you dreamed of me shouting once. Oh, you’re so sweet, and how much I love you. But this made her laugh falter — it was the first time she’d uttered the phrase.

No, no, replied the man, as if not even registering the confession; he was like a gigantic engine coming ever closer.

How should I know what you dream. I don’t even know who I am or where I am.

No, I distinctly remember the buzzing, the man insisted, watching the woman’s features carefully, hoping to detect a telltale sign. He saw her enthusiasm and saw dread passing in front of her like a dark cloud. And on top of it all, he said, I’m sorry, forgive me for bothering you with this, but I have to pee; I’ve had to for hours, I really don’t know for how long.

Go then, my feet are quite cold too.

But where is the place.

And if that wasn’t enough, I feel mildly nauseated. Maybe I’m pregnant. I swear it feels like it. And as soon as she said this, not only did she instantly remember the man’s remark about how advantageous the position of their bodies was if he wanted to impregnate her, but she also realized she might forever have missed out on something when she failed to voice her wish, and by now she’d be trying the man’s patience beyond all limits, which meant she was messing things up again.

I startled you, the man giggled, I’m sorry.

I’m fucking it up again, the woman thought.

One feels nausea when forcibly startled awake, the man continued, as if he knew well what this woman reminded him of; but amply gratifying as they might be, such old-fashioned sentences had no validity. Which caused a sharp pang of fear to course through him. They might have no validity, but they might have abundant consequences, which women can feel after a few hours. No matter how much he had promised, he had not been careful enough. Not only had he been careless but he must have emptied himself of every drop of his sperm. It’s really mean to startle someone, he said aloud, and because the thought was depressing, his loud remorse sounded quite credible. You know, I also woke up because of shouting or something. And before that there was buzzing, he went on, it sounded like a big car coming closer, now I remember its headlights.

He indeed remembered the headlights of his car when they passed through the villa’s entrance gate hidden among tropical shrubs and trees, but he did not tell the woman that the reason he remembered was that he had had someone murdered in that villa, a person who happened to be a childhood friend.

To forget this, he’d need continuous strong stimuli. But ever since he’d been ordered home because of the murder, he’d found his surroundings unbearably void of stimuli, or rather, the unpleasant memory always surprised him precisely when he’d finally managed to find a bit of stimulus that might help him to forget. Murder seemed to cause a more powerful excitement than lovemaking.

You didn’t wake me up, not at all, said the woman, but she was influenced by her bad conscience, it was probably thirst. Believe me. That’s why I probably dreamed so much about water, I was dying of thirst and my feet were so cold. There was dead silence under the water.

Come on, let go of me, said the man.

But I’m not holding you, said the woman, amazed.

Their torsos barely touched; in fact, they were leaning away from each other, keeping each other captive not with their hands but with their strong thighs.

The realization was strange in this darkness stabbed through with reflected darts and specks of city light while they stared at the dim outlines of each other’s features, lengthening along with the shadows.

As if they were late in becoming aware of their bodies’ existence. Or as if they couldn’t properly match the sensations of their bodies with the sight of them or with their words. Only now did they notice that they were lying almost crosswise on the bed, all but falling off under the weight of their numb, intertwined lower parts. One of the man’s legs, hanging down to the floor, was supporting their combined weight, the entire mass resting on his heel. This meant that in their sleep they’d had to find their balance by holding on to each other at the edge of the bed. They couldn’t understand how they had done that. With one hand the woman grasped the painted bed frame.

Their cool skin glimmered in the draft; on the intricately convoluted surfaces of their noses and ears their zeal cooled off.

It now became clear that they must have fallen asleep in the middle of a semi-consciously executed involuntary movement.

The man felt that he was not merely pressed against her but in fact still inside her; he had, by chance, with righteous indifference, overstayed his welcome. Humiliating. Frightened at having been unconscious, his entire body shuddered. The woman realized he was still stiffly inside her not because of the movements that rippled through her body but because of his odor. As if for the duration of their sleep she had sinfully forgotten the acrid fragrance of the man’s body, now permeated with the scent of his sperm intermingled with cooled-off exudations, saliva, and vaginal secretions. She was filled with them again. Which is what made her realize that the man was still taking up her inner space. She had not let go of him. She won’t let go of him. And she quickly promised herself — very quickly because she feared she was losing her mind — that at the first opportunity she would seek out the source of this fragrance on his body, she would smell and taste every little pore, bend, and curve of it.

So we must have fallen asleep like this, but this is wonderful, she whispered rapturously, her voice expressing contentment. Something like this had never happened before. And she was frightened too, that with her enthusiasm she’d do something wrong, lose him.

It would be interesting, wait, don’t be in such a hurry, the man responded, though he’d have liked to withdraw himself, stand up, and at last go to the toilet. But that would have required his cock to set out on a long, complicated journey. I’ll just explain this one thing before I go.

He fell silent and did the opposite of what he wanted to do: he pushed and penetrated a little bit more deeply.

Which was part of his explanation. At least that was the impression he gave for the other person and for himself.

Yet he had no explanation. The strong sensation of his cock was disturbing him in many ways. Not so much the enduring pleasure, of which he had become aware a moment before, but the fact of his erection, for which he saw no reason or motivation. And this, in turn, reminded him of their profound gratification, left behind somewhere in the depth of time, which someone might even have heard when it occurred. He attributed his enduring erection to the need to urinate — the most convenient explanation — but it made him a little ashamed. Why was he lying to himself. Why was he defending himself, or going on the offense; why couldn’t he give himself over to the feeling that this is how things are right now and no other way, and his cock couldn’t be calmed down. And he was misleading the other person too, but certainly not intentionally. Put another way, he had an organ that had decided to be independent or at least was behaving unexpectedly. And contemplating this, he concluded that in all their playacting, the leading role had been assigned to a deceptive maneuver. Nothing surprising would ever happen again, everything would simply repeat itself. He made contact with the woman only at a tiny point, though he wished it were otherwise. He did not feel her on his cock, not even close to it, but rather at the spot where he should be feeling his cock; through a single point, he felt the entirety of the other person. Through the little point, no larger than the head of a pin, everything streamed into the other person. He was taking in everything from the other person that until now he could not have seen or felt or had sensed only dimly. But starting now, he would be aware of everything that had happened or was happening in the other person, including things of which the woman was unaware or about which she was not yet ready to talk.

He perceived her among her double-dealings, trickery, exaggerations, lies, sins, intrigues, infantilisms, indecencies, and painful inhibitions.

Wrapped in her dark velvety skin, untouched by these unfavorable disturbing characteristics, she stood before him.

The image glowed so brightly in his mind that it threatened to burn out the tiny point of contact. It hurt. He wanted to say that in his view they were now mutually dreaming each other’s dream into each other. One person’s dream is somehow penetrating or flowing or seeping into the other’s, because just a moment earlier, when Gyöngyvér mentioned her stupid whirlpool, he dreamed that water bubbling up was reaching the boiling point.

Except that he could not have said what sort of water was bubbling up. Because it was not water but Gyöngyvér’s passionate voice bubbling in his ear. And there was that crumbling: the moment the precipice opened and there was no place to reach out to anymore, nothing to hold on to. Or he might be dreaming what the woman was dreaming because he had to urinate and could barely hold it in anymore, and the woman’s thirsty cunt, this slippery, pale-blood-colored, loosened, and boundless interior space that nevertheless might be too narrow for him, would not let him. After all, he couldn’t piss in her. He knew what he had to do with her. Such a perfect being cannot fall by the wayside. He had to open her up, awaken her with a few movements. Save her from destruction. He felt himself to be a magician capable of freeing the other person from all sorts of burdens. At the same time, his fear did not leave him. He could not shake the thought that his erection had become permanent, would never subside, the blood in his penis had clotted, he had to get medical help. Indeed, he did not desire her anymore. His imagination was increasingly taken over by the image of this clotted, thickened blood. What more could he have wished for after such a gigantic gratification but to piss, to eat and piss. He would continue to open up, shape, and mold this woman until nothing strange, nothing false remained in her.

When you told me about the whirlpool just a moment ago, you know, he said too loudly, as if raising his voice over the volume of his inner monologue, I was just dreaming that water was bubbling up and coming to a boil. But I know, get this, I knew I wasn’t really dreaming this, that it was something that had happened to me before, that it was a memory. Maybe I told you about it yesterday, the crumbling, or maybe some other time. This was just a repetition.

It was a memory for me too.

But what kind of memory could this be for you if I am the one who’s telling about it, what kind of memory of yours is that, I don’t understand, said the man incredulously, as if Gyöngyvér was thwarting his plans. He was thinking, no, maybe I shouldn’t do this, I shouldn’t open anything. Maybe he should stop his stupid plans to reform people, because if he let the woman so close to him he’d be lost. This could work only if he were ready to reveal his secrets. Then I am lost. He could not have revealed his secrets retroactively to anyone. That was strictly forbidden. He could not do that even if he married her.

That was just what I wanted to tell you, that I really don’t remember anything about this water business, said the woman, a little offended and unsuspecting, but I should remember something. Something’s there, in my mind, but its essence is gone.

How do you know if it’s gone, asked the man, irritated, and knowing they were becoming entangled in a useless argument. After all, he couldn’t dispute what the other person did or did not remember.

I don’t understand, why are you so irritated.

I’m not in the least irritated.

You must not be hearing yourself.

That’s exactly why I’m telling you about this, Ágost continued, against his strongest conviction, because you don’t remember and I do. Maybe I’m irritated, but why aren’t you a little more patient.

I’m completely patient.

Well, I did tell you about the crumbling. I told you about it yesterday.

I do remember precisely that I was supposed to remember something, Gyöngyvér said, continuing her own argument, undaunted. Something terrible happened. Something that was good for me. But I can’t get to it, I can’t reach it. Whenever I feel I’ve reached it, that’s a sure sign I haven’t. Don’t you understand, she shouted, growing uncertain, desperate, as if realizing that despite all her efforts, despite all her hopes, the other person would never understand her.

Yet in the same instant that she pressed both her hands on the man’s chest, thrusting him away to show she didn’t need him if he was so incapable of understanding anything and instead kept bringing up his stupid memories, let him get the hell out of here, the man’s large hands grasped her shoulders and, evidently driven by a similar emotion, shook her angrily.

But that’s exactly what I’m trying to tell you too, he cried in wild anger, that I am remembering. But you don’t listen to me. Isn’t it enough for you that I remember? Can’t your little brain take in that what I remember is your dream, or I don’t even know what I wanted to say, because I’m so angry I feel like exploding.

Let go of me, shouted the woman, agitated.

I will not. I’ll flatten you.

If you don’t let me up I won’t be responsible for what I do.

Then you don’t understand, really don’t understand why I’m telling you things and why I can’t let you up. You just don’t understand.

Ágost was raging, like a child whose mother doesn’t understand him and whom only the act of murder can calm. Whenever he was upset, his accent grew stronger. He seemed to be speaking Hungarian words as if they were French. Not his senses but his awareness was running wild. He heard his own accent becoming more pronounced and he knew it was time to stop. He had gone too far. Coolly he asked his senses whether it was truly possible that this woman didn’t understand him and there was nothing left to do but to commit murder. Which, for him, was not a rhetorical question since he had already killed several people, though not in the heat of anger.

What do you want from me? What?

Gyöngyvér was shouting and shaking hysterically as if she were truly afraid of being murdered.

They pulled themselves apart simultaneously, neither of them could remain intertwined for another second with so unforgivably insensitive a partner, and as they slipped out of each other they lost their balance and fell off the bed.

Their bodies slammed together; with great thumps they fell on each other like sacks, and then they continued their tussle on the floor.

Helpless fury drove them both to the brink of tears, of childish bawling. Neither of them could accept defeat, or, more precisely, the strength of their rage rose in direct proportion to their urge to weep. The energy spent on suppressing their tears was terribly painful, and their need hurt them greatly as it gaped open with all the devastating experiences of their lost, horror-filled childhoods, compared with which the physical pain caused by falling out of bed was hardly noticeable; it only created incredible physical chaos — a head banging against the door, the warmth and softness of the blanket they yanked around them, hiding the treacherous cracks and splinters in the uneven floor, where skin grazed under the weight and pressure of the other’s body, jabs of salient body parts, hard angles of elbows, chins, and knees. No doubt something had happened, but it could scarcely reach consciousness via the senses. Compared to the pain of the soul, physical pain is but a sobering realization, calming in its simplicity. Its sobriety is short-lived. They both felt and sensed the blows and bruises, that is to say, they both comprehended instantly the complete senselessness of their attraction and their scuffle, summed up in the question, what am I doing.

Naked in the sunshine.

Yet they continued to scuffle because they didn’t know what to do with their feelings for each other. They wanted both to stay where they were and to peel away from the other one.

They could have gotten up; why not let go of each other; why not give up the insane attempts at uniting; why not just continue on with their lives where they had left off a few hours or days earlier. Ágost should really go home, or at least telephone his mother, so they wouldn’t wait for him in vain or look for him at his friends’, there was nothing to worry about, he had something to do. Again, he had gone out to do some senseless fucking; he’d be coming home soon.

The strictly confidential text he had been translating from the Italian remained by his typewriter just as he had left it when four days ago he got up and went to the swimming pool. To comply with regulations, he should have locked it up. And Gyöngyvér should go to sleep, she must sleep, because she had to get up at five in the morning to begin her work at the kindergarten at six. It would have been a lie to claim they didn’t see the sober, gray workaday life ahead of them. But they couldn’t deal with it correctly. To get up now because I have to make a phone call. Or to say, oh, I think I’d better get some sleep. When either of them said or did something, it was impossible for the other to abandon the rhythm created by the first one. Even though their physical proximity no longer had a calming effect but, rather, frighteningly increased their sense of frustration. And this indefinable something had no arms for hugging or lips for kissing. Nothing with which to soothe the raw pain of emptiness.

While busy with these thoughts, he felt the strange female body shivering in his arms; someone he had nothing to do with, whom he did not know and with whom he had no reason to become acquainted. It was as if he were pressing to or thrusting away from himself a helpless being, trembling from head to toe. He could not possibly do that. Now that he had ruined her. But if he did not thrust her away, his own muscles would take on the strange trembling. And he did not let that happen. Such gentleness would make him falter. He set his protective armor in place.

It wasn’t the first time that Gyöngyvér had trembled during that evening and night.

It seemed, rather, that the trembling kept sending her back to her more treacherous and unpredictable ways, squeezing barely audible little whimpers out of her.

My sweet, my darling, what have I done, I’ve ruined you.

As he uttered these tender and emotional words, surprising himself with them, and as he put his arms around the woman’s strong shoulders, he broke into a sob.

No, don’t mind me, he said, choking. I don’t know what this is.

The words came from the very depths of his chest, one might say from an unknown, primal time.

It was like two consecutive bellows from an animal. He didn’t hold back; he had neither the time nor the presence of mind for that. Perhaps his back muscles, or his tautening abdominal muscles, didn’t let it break free. The invisible armor under his skin would not let it out, would not allow others to penetrate him with their superfluous emotions, but also would no longer let him out. He must live and die locked into himself. Which, to his shame and without producing another sound, made tears burst from his eyes and flow down his face.

Which felt good.

Mortified, he felt he had to be ashamed of his muscles holding him back. He had had, once, a more vulnerable life, and that was the reason he’d told the woman so much about those ancient times, which he himself did not remember, no matter how much he looked for them, and which, even if he’d found them, he could never get close to. His hardness and much forgetting would not let him.

And this hurt more than anything else. He shuddered, but did not want to allow himself even that.

As if he were saying, no, I won’t allow anything.

Which made Gyöngyvér break down too, bubble over. As when at the sight of one another’s trembling shoulders, every girl in a boarding-school dormitory cries, under the covers.

She had never seen a man cry, and now, of all men, to see this one cry.

In her joy she accompanied him with tiny bursts of laughter, which is what brings on hysterical, happiness-filled bawling in a dormitory. She was grateful to him — after all, he was crying because of her — but this also frightened her. Her entire body trembled and her teeth chattered, as if she had a high fever. She mourned someone while laughing at her own sorrow. She mourned someone unknown who should have perished long ago. I will destroy my mother.

To tell the truth, you know, I have a twin, she said, sobbing inconsolably.

She had just invented this so as to have something to say.

Where is this sibling, how would I know you had one. You’ve never mentioned it, sniffled the man.

She invented the twin to avoid thinking of her mother. Who, truth to tell, should have perished long ago in her daughter. Otherwise the daughter cannot love this man either. Her mother was the deceased twin. These things were as clear to her as given elements in a formula.

Ever since I was born, she said aloud, I’ve been carrying this other one inside me. She’s the only one I love, nobody else. There are such things, you know, you can wonder all you want.

Forgive me, but you’re talking drivel, you’ve gone out of your mind.

One can feel this, believe me, I am never alone. It’s been proven scientifically that in the womb one ovum can absorb, digest the other one.

Oh right, that means I’m here not with one woman but with two, obvious, isn’t it, the only thing is I can’t see the other one with the naked eye.

Never, I am always two women; with me, you can never be with one woman, for that you must look for somebody else.

She alternated between using the thread-thin voice of a mischievous, affected little girl bent on embellishing her flowery text, and her natural register, the warm mournful alto; it was as her latter self that she giggled.

This reminds me, you’ll have to meet my two good friends, the man continued, sniffling with a pleasure that surprised him. You’ll love them, at least I’d like you to love them because they’re really good boys.

As if he were consoling the woman by saying, don’t be so afraid of yourself, I am not alone either; the three of us are one. Even though this time he felt that he’d never had and could never have anyone, and that made him feel sorry for himself. His self-pity became his sole consolation.

They both understood themselves; to some extent, they even saw themselves from the outside, but they did not understand each other.

They stared at each other; it would have been good to understand truly and profoundly the subject of their admiration and aversion.

Gyöngyvér instantly tried to lick and with her tongue spoon into her mouth the tears rolling down the man’s face.

To lower her tongue to their source.

At the same time, she saw how distorted, frightening, and coarse the man’s beautiful head had become.

But why are you crying now, really, please tell me.

I don’t know.

Then she began to cry too, she felt so sorry for the man.

At the same time she thought to herself, why did I lie to him, why do I have to lie to him, why must I be such a rotten whore.

I don’t know either, she wailed aloud, maybe because of you, maybe I am lying and I’m really crying for myself, because of me, but I can’t express anything either, nothing, believe me.

Her trembling made it hard for her tongue to find the tears rolling down the man’s distorted face.

Her tongue fluttered, slurped around on his velvety skin pierced with new stubble; she kept on licking, searching for tears.

They were sitting on the wrinkled bedcover, tucked in many layers under their limbs. They yanked at each other but could not budge. Ágost was sitting on his pulled-up legs so as to support the woman with his tight thigh muscles, while his arms were around her shoulders; she had her arms around his neck.

Their torsos did not touch, the woman was trembling and shaking and her breasts with their gigantic nipples shook. Tears and mainly the inner expansion that came with the flow of tears seemed to have loosened up the man a little.

He loosened up enough to try with his tight-skinned full lips to catch the tongue hovering in front of his nose or at least the woman’s trembling lips.

Their bodies slipped over each other; they sought support with their tongues in the hot hollows of each other’s mouth.

The heat, the smoothness, the delicately nuanced aroma of the strange hollow opened another entrance before them.

As the woman kept on trembling and did nothing but tremble, all of her being, everything, trembling with her, evenly and unstoppably.

The man understood the trembling to mean that he could never satisfy this woman; perhaps it was impossible. Parallel to this realization, there appeared to him André Rott’s thin body with its hard long slabs of muscle and sinew, with the dark fountains of hair on his belly and chest. Because Ágost was convinced that with André no woman could ever wind up in such an embarrassing situation. André was the only man Ágost considered better than himself, and therefore wanted to make love to him or at least to find a woman as good as he. No matter how carefully and tenderly he tried to absorb the woman’s frightful trembling with his lips on hers, they could not gain new entrance. Or maybe for once he’ d like to be a woman so he could try out a man like his friend.

They collided painfully; the edges of their teeth clicked comically.

Which would mean that they were trying in vain. They’ll never get to the end of anything.

Maybe if I licked it for her.

André would have done it a long time ago, for sure.

Not in this order either; he would have started with that.

That’s how I’ll do it, I’ll work on her clit. I’d have gotten further if I hadn’t always tried to stick my rotten prick in. André is better because he doesn’t need women at all. He doesn’t need anybody, and every woman is hooked by his indifference.

He doesn’t need to pay attention to himself, André needs no self-discipline, he has no reason to gratify himself.

He held the woman while considering whether he needed the whole circus that would come about with a new relationship, with the proximity of a complete stranger like this.

But no, he could not let the trembling in, just as his musculature would not allow him out anymore. As if he were experiencing the other person’s pains only with his soul.

What does anymore mean.

Never, he thought suddenly.

Women, however voracious or hungry they may be, can sometimes be satisfied. I am one of these satisfying machines, but nobody has ever satisfied me. No reason not to confess that the only time I get a little bit of it is when I make these stupid women scream. That’s the truth. I am sitting in my own jail and I can count, at most, on the fingers of one hand. He found this thought very amusing, but it made him feel even sorrier for himself. As if he realized that not the other person but he was the greatest obstacle to his own existence. He was deeply moved by the thought that he was at the mercy of his own body and, as if this had given him a new idea, perhaps he should share this woman with André.

I’d get my satisfaction while he would take care of her.

Gyöngyvér thrust him away with her tongue, as if she understood every one of his insidious thoughts; she shoved him out while at the same time clinging hard to him.

Something important, I want to tell you something important, she whispered between the man’s lips, articulating clearly in synchrony with her trembles, while their lips and tongues touched again, went on the defense, tried to calm the other, and slurped about.

At times like this, one depends on one’s pores and nerve endings to help understand the other person. And the voice of the other person reaches one more slowly than usual.

It was occurring to him that he was only playing a role, only pretending to be impersonal while André really was impersonal. Soaping each other in the shower, he felt through his fingers no emotions emanating from that hard, stringy male body.

The uric acid poisoned me, Gyöngyvér whispered, I’m sure that’s why I’m shaking, you understand, because the uric acid simply poisoned me.

Where do you get such asinine, idiotic ideas.

I should pee too, you know, take a leak, she added and laughed. Don’t get scared, I’m letting it out now.

Her laughter was ugly, though she retained a warm timbre in her voice.

No, don’t, you’ve gone mad, the man shouted, alarmed.

He shouted as if he were unable to decide whether to give voice to admiration or to dread.

But, but, the woman replied in her deepest register, why shouldn’t I, and the voice she used now needed no support at all.

Don’t, the man protested, but he hadn’t finished saying the one word before he felt it on his thigh, spreading and warming his skin.

You do it too, do it for me. She moaned with pleasure, I’m letting mine out already.

They heard its strong trickle and flow, now hitting the hard floor, now piddling on the wrinkled bedcover tucked under them. With her spread loins on his thighs, she kept trembling and trembling. The man felt somewhat relieved; if it were this easy for him, he too would have let it out, but it was not that simple: nothing was coming.

The bladder would have allowed this but the urine was stopped up because of the enduring mild erection in the urethra.

Gyöngyvér reached in and got hold of his member.

That’s how you do it for the little boys, eh, Ágost asked.

Indeed, Gyöngyvér saw a strange boy whom she did not know, and Ágost saw his dead sister.

When I want them to make peepee, Gyöngyvér replied, exactly like this, you’re right. Boys have to be taught.

Every day.

No. Several times a day.

You take out their little weenies and give them instructions.

I help them.

With your nails you seduce them, ruin them for life.

Their open, hot lips touched.

Her lips were of the same temperature as her amply dribbling urine.

You’re jealous of them, I can hear it in your voice.

On the contrary, I’m happy to share you with them. You don’t yet know this side of me. I’d be happy to share you, he thought. I swear I’ll do it, he said out loud. As he thought to himself, the three of us might be able to satisfy you.

Above their kiss, they did not let go of each other’s eyes.

While they do it, I whisper to them, she whispered later into the man’s ear, when the dribbling continued intermittently, growing now weaker, now stronger; psh, psh, psh, my little one, that’s what I whisper to the little boys.

Again, their lips had to make contact, this time more strongly and for a little longer.

And what do you whisper into the ears of little girls, Ágost asked, excited by the sound of the dribbling urine.

Just a few words.

But what, how, what exactly.

Well, that right now we’re tinkling, little one, tinkle, tinkle, that’s what I say, that’s all. That’s enough for little girls.

I’m jealous of them, said the man and moaned deeply.

There you are, shouted the woman.

The urine spouted up as if from a fountain.

And since with their foreheads touching they were gazing, bewitched, at what might be happening down below, it almost reached their faces.

Instinctively they yanked their heads away.

The yellow stream fell back into itself, flooded the penis’s bare bulb, as if an invisible hand had turned off a faucet.

When in a short while it gushed forth again, bursting through the widened urethra, it reached the woman’s chin. She thrust her torso toward it; she wanted to feel it on her breasts. And she opened her mouth wide to swallow it, but this wish was frustrated. Let it soil the area between her breasts; she wanted to enjoy the warmth of the soiling, as if encountering something very precious.

Whimpering, she turned him over her.

Now it was coming in a big thick stream, steadily, and now it wouldn’t stop.

They looked at it, they whimpered, they moaned and gaped along with the spurt, biting each other’s lips. They felt they were experiencing a great, mutual victory.

And then silently.

They kept nibbling, biting each other’s lips and sliding them around on their flowing saliva.

Until it stopped.

This brought them to the other side of a barrier whose existence neither of them had known about before. They literally submerged themselves in the unfamiliar fragrance of fresh urine and, holding on to each other, spread out in it. As if the sweeter scent of the woman’s urine had overcome the man’s more pungent and bitter one.

They remained lolling in it, awed and motionless, for a long time.

Ilona’s Rice Chicken

I felt nothing in the first few seconds, but then it hurt terribly, I was grabbing my leg, wriggling in the dark. The pain of the tibia reached my brain; I was writhing helplessly.

It was blood, of course it was blood.

And in that case, everything was perhaps over after all, and in a way other than I had planned, I’d bleed to death. Blood was smeared on my fingers, I was writhing, with my knee drawn up to my chest, my whole body swaying on the lawn, soaked wet with the night’s dew, as if I were swinging the pain on my spine.

I still had the presence of mind to listen, from behind the pain, for any noise.

Was somebody coming after me, should I continue to flee; I did hear some very strange clattering on the road.

It seemed to be coming from a different direction, not the one from which I’d have expected the sailor if he had picked up my trail and followed me. But judging by the sounds, it had to be a monster. No human could make such noises. His stride was irregular and the footsteps kept unexpectedly breaking off. It sounded as if somebody were flinging pebbles into the night in short, quick, sharp bursts, then stopping for a while, then starting up again unpredictably.

The black-haired giant had turned into a monster.

I might as well give up hope of his following me, of all people.

I had tumbled over the wrought-iron fence that separated the plane-tree-lined promenades from the enormous smooth lawn behind the Grand Hotel of Margit Island. How could I have forgotten it. The neo-Baroque fence imitated the tendrils, the winding, twisting stems, flowers, and huge round buds of plants. I had banged into the flower petals and the bud knobs with my shin. If only I could bleed to death quietly. I’d weaken and gradually lose consciousness, or blood poisoning would unceremoniously finish me off in a few days. This wasn’t a hopeless wish, since scales of rust were wedged into the leg wound; I felt their edges as my fingers groped around in the pain and slipped in blood.

The ground-floor terraces were empty, the striped sunshades were folded above the tables, and all the windows were dark.

Not a single hotel guest seemed to be awake.

What a strange feeling — that it had to happen at this place. It was as if I were observing, with my old views, from behind the dark window of the corner room on the fourth floor, and saw myself writhing on the lawn in the deep shadow of the plane trees.

Every year during the autumn housecleaning my grandparents would move here from Stefánia Boulevard, always renting the same suite.

It was an exceptional place where nothing ever changed over the years. Always the same breeze in the loose foliage of the plane trees, bringing the smell of the river and carrying the wavering light of the gas lamps; and whenever a stronger wind blew, the branches banged and the heavily veined, five-pointed leaves noisily rubbed and slid over one another. Rain pattering on them sounded like drops falling on stretched leather.

In those years, my grandmother’s women friends still thought that everything should be maintained and well preserved until the Americans came, when the Russians would clear out and life would return to its old routine.

The white funnels of petunia blossoms hanging from the carved clay pots were swinging gently on the rain-beaten balustrades.

Slowly the pain began to subside.

The insane reflected light of the city fell from the cloudy sky like a fine yellow drizzle.

With my writhing on the lawn, my black shirt and pants had gotten wet, but the coolness of the dew eased the pain somewhat. I no longer cared how I looked. I must have looked shocking, but that wouldn’t stop me from getting home somehow. If I hadn’t had to urinate and if I hadn’t been so thirsty, I might have lolled around on the lawn for a while. It was pleasant to hear again the city’s familiar noises and thuds, its closer or more distant shrieks. I felt protected by the night, as if lying under the giant shade of the plane trees I was invisible.

It turned out that nobody was coming down the promenade, neither human nor beast; my ears must have deceived me earlier.

I should have decided to leave as soon as possible and, because of Pisti, never come back again. I’d seen what he was up to; he was indeed at home here. I couldn’t get over this, because he was certainly the darling of girls and women if anyone was. And having seen him here, and not only that other boy, Königer, and I did see him with my own eyes, then I’d never understand anything about what was happening around me, and who knows whom I might meet here tomorrow.

Just about everybody is doing it.

I never imagined that in the nocturnal multitude I’d run into somebody I knew.

I couldn’t tell him that I had wound up here by chance and opened my fly by accident.

But the threatening image of this never come back again, which took hold immediately, was like a hardly feasible self-mutilation.

How can I restrain myself when I see that what I hardly dare dream about, others extravagantly indulge in every night.

Something had revealed itself: a realm of unfamiliar activities and secret compulsions that for the sake of rationality I should have locked up in the world of unfamiliarity forever. It’s over, that’s what I should have yelled. I shall ignore it. Since until now I had had no idea what men did under the cloak of night, I could easily forget it or pretend to know nothing of it.

Nobody’s presence should ever remind me of this again during the day. I’ll walk back to Pest not on the Margit but on the Árpád Bridge, and that way I might get away with it without being exposed.

Never again, never, I kept promising to myself. Maybe one last time I might still get away with it.

That would be the only reward for my self-punishment: that I’d get away with it. A reward one does not receive physically. If somehow one received it in one’s hands and carefully unwrapped the fine rustling paper, one would find something threatening and ominous, something one had managed to avoid or that had avoided one only by accident.

The worst did not happen.

And what sense would it make to wind up in an embarrassing situation because of such a loathsome adventure. Now I knew about Pisti, but maybe he didn’t yet know about me. I couldn’t risk more than that. And not only I but he couldn’t explain this away; nobody could. I went on lying in the cool darkness, full of warm currents. I closed my eyes to listen to the mysterious rustling of leaves and to recall something of the night’s emotion-filled occurrences, which I should have loathed. And to make my escape a certainty, in my imagination I made my crossing between the blackened facades of tenements on the poorly lit, deserted side streets of Pest. Nobody I knew should see me in such a state, especially not Pisti. I quickly planned my route and directions.

It was as if I were constantly crossing to another side of the street, even though the street had only two sides.

I was wading into the deserted jungle of the city, and there was no way back. Because I ardently wished that there would be no way back.

And I probably dozed off as the pain eased, because I awoke to the sound of its stinking panting and the distinct feeling of its presence next to me.

It is panting and puffing right into my face.

I see its black mug with its long, dangling, rhythmically slipping-and-sliding tongue as it stares at me. Its eyes were flashing as it stood above me, dark and colossal.

My first thought was that the black-haired giant had metamorphosed into a black dog, Satan’s dog, which would mean I had gone mad indeed.

Its polite and patient waiting showed that it presumed I’d wake up.

Not much time could have gone by, I told myself, alarmed. I felt I had to account for the wasted time, but at least I knew where I was, which made me crash back into my real life. The period of summer exams had begun, the first two exams toward my doctorate were behind me, and I did not think that, once awake, I owed an explanation to anyone about anything. But somebody inside me kept shouting that for days now I’d been doing nothing but useless things.

It was a smooth-haired stray dog.

Quickly it sniffed into my ear and my hair, all four feet stamping with excitement; then the panting suddenly stopped as it rushed to my feet, its short tail joyfully wagging very fast as if to say, at last I’ve found my master in the empty night, the one I’ve been looking for; it smelled my shoes for a long time, found them familiar, then licked my wound and, if I hadn’t yanked my leg away, it would have lapped up the blood; it sniffed all around my groin very thoroughly, then my hair; I let it, though its long, dangling ears and mustache tickled me. It would have sniffed my eyes too, and the prospect seemed to make it very happy. With a motion of my hand, I shoved it away. It wouldn’t back off, wanted to sniff my mouth, which made me laugh, and I shoved it again, harder than before.

The dog stank; it must have eaten human shit.

Ever since my childhood, the proximity of animals has always set my gums and palate on edge, so that for long minutes I couldn’t swallow properly.

The dog did not wait for the end of my shove; it jumped back instead, its body taut, ready to attack.

I jumped up too, but not because I was afraid of it. Perhaps I felt secure with animals precisely because I could never lower myself to their level.

It was a nice young male, a black, skinny but large-bodied vizsla, probably a crossbreed; under his filthy short hair, his skin was full of sores new and old. Though he bared his teeth, I told him it was all right and patted his hard head, which he let me do, though not the way a dog used to kindness would but resignedly, neutrally attentive. In the meantime I tested my injured leg to see if it would function; the dog put his forelegs on the ground, raised his butt playfully in the air, shook it, and this time showed me not only his full set of teeth, his two terrible fangs, but also his naked frightening gums. Emitting short, angry, and, I’d like to say, ironic grunts, he seemed eager to tell me something that I did not understand.

Truth to tell, I needed this dog more than he needed me, but I did not realize that then.

I set out with him toward the service entrance of the hotel, limping heavily, with the dog snapping at my ankles. Thus we crossed the enormous, dense, close-cropped lawn.

I started in that direction because I thought that with a bit of luck I could feed the starving dog.

And as if he knew what my plan was, he kept running ahead and coming back to me.

There was a big lump on his skull where he must once have been badly hit on the head. His snarling was his laughter; he demonstrated his great joy and trust in me by showing his fangs, though he mightn’t have minded taking a bite out of my ankle. Nevertheless, I couldn’t be sure of what I was doing, so I told him right away to be still, let’s see how things turn out, just come quietly with me but don’t count on anything.

I found the waste bins in exactly the same place they had been ten years earlier. The old system was still working.

The steps leading down to the service entrance were at the end of the left wing of the large building. Garbage collectors or delivery people had to get off the road and back down a fairly steep, ribbed platform all the way to the cellar level. This was the staff’s turf, where produce was carried in and bales and bundles were taken out through strictly separated openings, and where garbage was taken outside. Not only my shoes but also the dog’s feet and toenails made noises on the ramp, noises that echoed between the walls. Occasionally I stopped and the dog did too, raising his head; we both listened and watched, and he stayed at my side.

It became incredibly quiet in the night, all life and labor had fallen silent. In the cool breath of the river I could feel more strongly the sweet scent of the petunias and the smell of gasoline trapped between the walls by the entrance.

There was very little chance of someone noticing us or asking me what I was up to.

Although the lamp above the service entrance was lit, the glass-paned revolving door behind the iron grating had been secured in a safe, entrance-blocking position, and this entrance had no night porter.

It would be opened at exactly 5:30 in the morning for the scullery maids’ noisy arrival.

They’ll be coming from Dömös, Kisoroszi, and Tahitótfalu with the first produce-carrying steamer, getting off on the Buda shore under the Margit Bridge, bringing along all sorts of delicacies and sweet tidbits in small baskets, jars or kerchiefs tied smartly at the corners. They’ll bring sweet cream, strawberries, tarragon, raspberries in little baskets woven from dry corn husk, curd cheese, small bunches of thyme, mushrooms of the season, and everything else the forests and fields can provide, fragrant wild strawberries in enameled containers, quail eggs in crates lined with willow, blackberries, dogwood, rose-hip jam in glazed jars, elder blossoms and chamomile wrapped in kerchiefs. They will hand all this in at the storeroom, the directress will count or weigh each item, enter the data in the large ledger, so that each week, in addition to their salaries, the scullery maids will be paid for what they have brought.

It was they who lowered the heavy corrugated iron shutter over the storeroom entrance. They will raise it when the milk wagon arrives and the white bottles clinking in the iron crates are unloaded wordlessly. Even before this job is done, the bread man will make his delivery. The rear door of the wagon, cushioned on the inside, is opened and the warmly fragrant breads and bakery products are carried into the storeroom.

The workers whistled while they worked, so I assumed that early-dawn bread delivery must be a joyful thing.

I didn’t even have to remember the various tastes of fresh unpasteurized milk, of warm croissants or sweet brioches to distinguish between the hotel’s night and early-dawn activities or to know what sorts of things happened in the morning or in the afternoon. The scullery maids began every day with cleaning vegetables and disemboweling chickens. At 12:30 they turned their freshly whipped cream over to the pastry cooks, who could then complete their cakes and desserts; next they wrapped in blotting paper and then in kitchen towels the evenly sliced potatoes, later to be made into chips, and after that the girls were done. Their return boat would leave the Bem Square station at 1:30. It arrived in Tahi at 4:00, Kisoroszi at 4:40, and Dömös at 6:30, and every day of every year they made the same routine to-and-fro journey until the river became dangerously icy and boat traffic came to a halt.

That was when all the weddings took place in the villages and the young women no longer came to work in the hotel. Barely adolescent girls had to replace them.

Leaning on their baskets and against one another, they slept in the deafening dark bowels of the big paddle steamers.

The staff of the Grand Hotel had specific instructions on how to deal with the children of guests. Very decisively but always kindly and politely, no matter how difficult this might prove to be. Except for me, it was very rare for children to be in the hotel in the early autumn. I was well behaved, polite, and managed quite well in the red-walled living room, empty but for the record player and my picture books for company. I knew what was allowed and what was not; and that described my reputation. He is a nice quiet boy, the adults would say, able to keep himself busy. They had no idea how I abused their trust and confidence. They thought they didn’t have to worry that I might get into an accident or do mischief. The chambermaids, bellboys, and cleaning women competed for my favors; they liked to have me along or waiting for them while they did their chores.

Of my own secret mission, of course nobody knew anything.

I loved to follow the different hotel workers along the corridors on the soft, dark red carpets, which absorbed the sound of footsteps, go downstairs with them via the rear stairwell, then take the elevator, glittering with its cut-glass windows, all the way to the top floor, doing all this to discover the hotel’s secrets. I realized early on that one should not say no to anything. The more willing and polite I was and the more reliably I behaved, the more communicative people became; ultimately grown-ups are rather careless with their secrets.

It never occurred to anyone, for example, to lock the external door of the garbage bay from the inside.

Beggars also had their place and hour; nobody imagined that the beggars might assault the garbage bins. They were supposed to line up just before the kitchen closed. They came one by one out of the night with their worn bags and frayed satchels, waited before the basement window, bathing in the light that filtered through it, in the kitchen stench streaming outward at and in the weakening preclosing kitchen clatter.

If it rained, they stood under umbrellas.

At most they would make courteous little gestures, well understood by others in the line: but of course, go on, your grace; oh no, don’t even mention it. And the chambermaids never ceased boasting that here, fortunately, we hardly have any real beggars. The directress takes this very seriously; she can’t abide smelly or filthy persons and will not suffer Gypsies or drunken louts. As far as she’s concerned, that kind of person can just stand in the rain or snow; she won’t give them a morsel.

One wasn’t to speak of people in this line as beggars. The directress did not want to see a beggar who looked like one. She could not bear such human wrecks. Nobody could tell her that a person couldn’t wash in cold water.

Watch it, little girl, I hear beggar from you again and I’ll rap your mouth for you.

She’d do it too, there’s good reason to be afraid of that big ring of hers, because these people are decent ladies and gentlemen, and every person is entitled to respect. Poor war widows, disabled pensioners, victims of some family disaster. Some of them come for food to take to their gravely ill relatives. These people have been truly robbed of everything. God forbid someone should speak ill of these poor beings or humiliate them. If anybody, the communists should be ashamed of themselves.

Everything’s all right so long as one is healthy and can work.

Anybody can lose his job and wealth, anybody, it’s getting them that’s hard.

You can believe me: nobody’s fate is assured.

Enough misfortune awaits one in this life, may the Virgin Mary or the Lord Jesus protect you.

Szidónia Oltó was the name of the chambermaid who from the very beginning took me under her protection. Because she was also an orphan, she knew what that meant. There was a certain woman among those poor beings, she explained to me, who once had been a permanent guest of the hotel and whose orders had not been easy to carry out. How could one possibly predict the course of one’s fate; one plays the big shot while one can. Such people usually want everything, no matter what it is. And they never run out of orders to give — don’t put it over there, put it here, and how many times do I have to tell you the same thing, and she won’t eat that, won’t touch it at all; what she wants is what’s being served at the next table.

The wheel of fortune is always turning, little boy, don’t ever dare think of humiliating anyone.

And she showed me who that certain woman was.

I was in love with Szidónia Oltó and not only because she said interesting things but also because the skin on her elbows and knees was rough and scaly and she liked it when I rubbed them for her.

The smell coming from her white blouse was quite strong whenever she held me to her breast, saying I was her little son.

That poor thing lost everything, and I mean everything she had, except for that rabbit-fur coat, she’d whisper excitedly while we waited for a snack to be prepared for a guest on the third floor. The collar of that coat is pretty shabby too, look at it. You won’t believe this, but this woman, careful, she’s looking at us, every Easter she and her husband used to spend two weeks here, on the first floor.

They’d take no place else, in the same suite used by Cardinal Pacelli and by the Prince of Wales.

We thought that the man who at the same time was staying in room 11 was her lover, but it turned out that he too was her husband. That’s right, you heard me. There wasn’t another woman in the whole world as cunning as this one. Believe me. Now, of course, she’s drinking like a fish and has to hold on to a railing when she moves. She had to take the interior staircase up to her second husband, who’d wait for her there. Look how she’s wound up. Still, when you look at her today, you see the wife of General Pechl, yes, to this day, but she’s also the widow of Major Bertolini. Today, nobody wants her. When people found out about it, it was all covered up very nicely, even though they published news of the bigamy in the papers.

This husband of hers sent the major to the front line so he’d be killed and there’d be peace and quiet at last. He was right to do it.

You can take their supper for them, that slut.

If her other husband hadn’t done what he did, she’d have rotted in jail.

Put a little lettuce on the bottom, Danika, it looks so pitiful like this.

You can believe me, there’s no justice in the world. But now, it doesn’t matter any more, no point blaming her. The Lord Jesus or the Virgin Mary, if they wanted to, would forgive even someone like her.

I shouldn’t bother my head about their problems. I’d better stop talking about it altogether.

The beggars were given not leftovers exactly but prepared food that guests had not accepted and the waiters, having no alternative, had returned to the kitchen virtually untouched.

You can’t imagine how much I know.

If guests didn’t ask to have the food they’d rejected packed for them, then it was packed for these wretches, but just as carefully as if they were guests. The directress saw to it that this was done properly. Spoiled food was not allowed in any of the packages, at worst only something that would not hold over for the following day.

They owed this not only to notions of Christian charity but also to the hotel’s good name. And the directress would have done it exactly the same way even if her reward had been only the recipients’ gratitude, but, of course, one should have faith in providence.

In the short lulls between the rushing waves of service to the guests, the cooks tossed these choice leftovers onto trays lined with wax paper, nimbly arranged the food to make it look attractive, and then covered the trays with more wax paper. Later scullery maids packed this untouched food not in decorative wrapping paper bearing the hotel’s logo, as they would have done for a guest, but in newspaper, and then handed the parcels out through the barred window.

Not to just anybody.

When they came at night, appearing for a moment with their broken shadows in the slanted beam of light behind the window bars, they had to bend down low to get the packages, which were simply handed out, one after the other. Nobody knew what his or her package might contain.

Maybe even a whole cake.

The packages disappeared into satchels, threadbare leather bags, and no matter how great the directress’s mercy and satisfaction, the recipients carried them as a burning sign of their shame. All the other food that guests left on their plates was thrown into the pig swill. The staff was forbidden to lick, nibble, or try to eat anything on the sly; tasting was the sole privilege of the chef de cuisine, and they could take nothing home. The directress’s view was that generosity had no place in this because to allow any filching would only make the staff greedier.

If you capriciously permitted something today, tomorrow they’d take everything and be insolent about it; the day after tomorrow they’d filch your eyes out of their sockets.

The scullery maids, among whom were the beginners called handy girls because they prepared things to be within reach of their superiors, separated what would be thrown in the liquid pig swill, such as water in which noodles had been boiled, from solid leftovers, within which they further separated out the bones. The dishwashers were supposed to receive completely cleared dishes and plates. However, one could always hear a few disgruntled shouts from the chefs.

Panni, my sweet, have you got a little rice or potato on that tray.

You’d hear something like this whenever something went missing from the paper-lined trays prepared for the beggars.

The most important thing was not to mix solid leftovers with bones or liquids, not for the world. They were to be put in three different barrels, and the barrel lids had to be well clamped down to contain the smell and prevent spilling during transport. Sauces, gravies, and dips had separate regulations. All mustards and leftover horseradish or sour-cherry sauce served with Viennese boiled beef and Alföldi ham went into the liquid slop; gooseberry cream, mayonnaise, and cheese or ham béchamel went into the barrel with the solids. Cranberry served with venison, along with rose hips from the bottom of the sauce bowl, had to be sorted with the liquids, while dill sauce and tomato sauce went into the barrel for solids.

I hope, Jucika, you haven’t forgotten that we don’t put cucumber sauce with the solid leftovers. You can’t be that forgetful.

Oh, please excuse me.

It’s not your movements you should be frugal with, you know.

It wasn’t intentional.

If your head wasn’t wandering elsewhere, your hands would know what to do.

The fat from roasts was collected separately in a large, wide enameled saucepan, and fresh fat was always added to and melted with it, but I don’t know what happened to it. The dregs of the saturated fat in which meatballs, Wiener schnitzels, or breaded chicken legs had been fried didn’t even have a chance to cool off completely; as it was thickening it would be scooped out with slotted ladles and put right in with the solids; they’d snap it up and knock it in hard; it sizzled and spluttered. The burned oil in which they fried fish or doughnuts, lángos, apples in blankets, various croutons and croquettes, marinated elder blossom, palacsinta, or differently sized and shaped soup noodles was definitely thrown into the liquid slop.

And so was salad dressing and all scraps and remnants of vegetables.

The barrels were taken away not by the sanitation people but, every other day, by people from the pig farm in Nagytétény.

I found the black door of the garbage bay ajar or, more precisely, found that it could no longer be closed properly because of the thick layers of grime on it.

In this frightening underground passage, tiled to the ceiling and stinking of chlorine, the light was always on.

It was on now.

Deep inside was another door, but it could be opened only from within the basement. It was considered an emergency exit and the staff was forbidden to obstruct it in any way. This is where they pushed out the barrels and where the various kinds of garbage were brought from the upper floors. Inside, there was not even a knob on the door, only a button. It was locked now. No stranger could enter the building unseen, but when I wanted to leave the building secretly, I could always use this exit.

I could go down to the basement on the staff staircase, where yellow coir matting silenced my foosteps. Sometimes I’d rouse myself in the middle of the night, sometimes at dawn, to carry out my mission; sometimes I wouldn’t even want to go to sleep but I’d wait until the Gypsy band finished playing in the dining hall, until only the soft, caressing dance music in the casino could be heard, until everything slowly closed and quieted down. Out on the terrace the waiters quickly turn over the chairs and place them on the tables, roll in the awnings and fold the sunshades. The last guests take leave of one another, titters and harsh abrupt laughter mixed with bubbling chitchat; car doors slam loudly as taxis and limousines drive off, a tipsy voice is heard along with the creaking of paired footsteps on the pebbled promenade. And then long silence. Only the leaves rustle, which for quite some time one might take for whispering lovers and would like to understand but can’t; it’s only the night and its natural noises. One is free to go at last.

The reddish velour rugs silenced my steps in the corridors made insanely brilliant by the light of sconces adorned with crystals.

I had to be careful not to let the black steel door of the basement close, because then I could return to the building only through the main entrance and my foxiness would be discovered. I could not afford to expose myself. But all I had to do was put a box of matches, a piece of bark, or a pinecone into the crack of the door.

Though many things had changed since then, I still managed to feed the dog.

I was welcomed by the stench of putrefaction, disorder, and filth; grime was smeared on the tiled walls and high up on the lights, and the ceiling was covered with deep layers of cobweb on which dust had settled in clumps. I had barely opened the door when the dog began to bark infernally because with incredible hissing and spitting at least fifteen cats of different colors and sizes jumped out of the lidless bins.

The dog’s bark echoed hellishly along the cold walls.

The cats went sliding on their extended claws across the stone floor strewn with fallen and dug-out garbage and raced between our legs, fur standing up on their spines and vertical tails, out into the open. I smacked the dog’s lumpy head good and hard, but his quieting down must also have been because his fine sense of smell was overcome by the disgusting odor of rotting food.

The cats disappeared in a flash, jumping out over the side of the ramp planted with evergreens.

I listened for a few seconds, making sure we hadn’t woken one of the night watchmen. I could hear nothing but quiet puffing from the boiler room, deep in the ground.

Perhaps another barge was approaching on the Danube: there was a decided if muted trembling, a struggling motor echoing underwater. At times like this, the stokers would be lying on the warm iron bridge above the boiler and, for warm pillows, resting their heads on one another’s shoulders.

After the dog stopped bothering me and no longer cared what I did or didn’t do, and with his whole body trembling, his rear shaking, growling continuously and baring his teeth, he set about wolfing down everything I found for him in the solid-pig-swill barrel and managed with a piece of cardboard to scoop out: raw chicken heads with their forever-closed or forever-open fine-as-breath bluish eyelids, enormous pieces of bone both raw and cooked with invaluable shreds of beef still on them, and a whole plate of burned-at-the-edges potato chips. I quickly stepped outside.

He’d be busy for a long time working on those bones.

I closed the steel door behind me as best I could.

So he couldn’t follow me. Early in the morning, somebody would surely discover him and let him out, or call the dogcatchers on duty.

The filth was so thick in the hinges that I couldn’t close the door completely, no matter how hard I tried. Only a good cleaning, preferably with a strong jet of water followed by generous oiling, would do the job. I did not want the dog to follow me.

Or anybody; I wanted no living being who might cause me pain because I’d fallen in love with him or her.

Fallen in love, yes, I was able to love, no matter how hard I protested; I could fall in love in a minute, with any body or thing. I couldn’t get out of my head the marvelous giant who was probably illiterate. Or the odor of Szidónia Oltó’s armpits, Gyöngyvér Mózes’s fingernail polish, a little cloud in the sky, Ilona Bondor’s red freckles. And for this permanent weakness I despised myself.

Why am I so weak and foolish.

The rotten door closed tight enough for me to be sure the dog wouldn’t break out and follow me.

In the old days, two awful hags used to clean the basement. They came from Pest on the streetcar; they weren’t from the country. Heavy, large-bodied women, they wore rubber aprons and rubber boots and dragged their red water hoses after them everywhere. Wherever they appeared, they’d attach the hoses to a faucet and the ice-cold water went streaming over everything.

They hardly talked, but instead continually moaned and sighed, oh, Lord Jesus, oh, Virgin Mary, help me, save me now. If their bleach bucket tipped over or their thick, willow-twig brooms fell and splashed in spilled water, they would swear in long loops of curses.

The things they told each other were certainly not meant for children’s ears.

I was scared of these huge women. They did not return my greetings, and if I politely asked them something they looked through me as if I were made of air and neither of them replied. The hotel’s strict regulations that exhorted the staff from the ground floor up to politeness and familial courtesy did not reach to the basement. One could not count on them in the lower regions, and looking at things from down there, it seemed to me that what went on above ground level was not so much natural as, rather, exceptional. I had the impression that the world was one big basement with which I was not yet sufficiently familiar. Even in the kitchen one could count only on the personal favor of the cooks or scullery maids, or on the merciless indifference of the directress. The servants would not continue for very much longer to serve the masters on the floors above. And while the women in rubber aprons didn’t even look up from their work when I came near, as if they didn’t see or hear anything, they talked to each other loud and clear, and made sure I heard and understood what they were saying. The least of it was their calling me shitty little kid, snot-nose, little dwarf, and grumbling that I was always underfoot, always loitering. For a long time I did not understand this word loitering, just as I hadn’t understood bigamy, of which the drunken old woman in the rabbit-fur coat was supposed to have been guilty, or phrases like dirty Jew and filthy bourgeois, which referred directly to me and along with me to my entire tribe.

Shove the little bourgeois dwarf into the barrel, what the fuck is he loitering around here for; let the garbage man take him away.

The stokers weren’t exactly friendly either, but at least they didn’t mind if I stood at the top of the steel stairway and watched them work. Maybe they liked having at least one little boy in the world who truly admired their shiny bodies and the work they did.

With the two cleaning women, I tried to pretend I was admiring them, but I failed to convince or deceive them with the seriousness of my interest.

At the water fountain I first washed the wound and then drank a lot of water, I could hardly get enough of it. I had to balance on a brick because the fountain leaked, water trickling down even when no one pushed the release lever, and the drain in front was stopped up.

Shapeless puddles of standing water marked the swamplike vicinity of the fountain.

Bricks had been set down in some of the puddles so one could manage to approach the fountain, but from the wobbly bricks my feet slipped into the water several times. If I really wanted to walk home on the Árpád Bridge instead of taking the night tram, I had a hopelessly long and unpleasant trip ahead of me in wet shoes.

Maybe it would be better to put an end to my life.

The hard lump that had developed on my bruised shin was throbbing and turning blue, a tight pantleg was rubbing against the oozing wound, and I was limping badly.

Once on the other shore, to reach Váci Road, I’d have to make my way across Vizafogó, a jungle of worthless little proletarian housing projects that keep sinking into the sand. From there, the only routes lay along tall fences and cheerless planks of factories all the way to Lehel Square, where, amid a constant noise of shunting and switching, I’d cross the Ferdinánd Bridge over the railway tracks and continue on the endless, sooty Szív Street until I reached Andrássy Road. There, I could choose to go under the plane trees on the promenade lined with salvia, forget-me-nots, pansies, and daisies, where I might be somewhat exposed, or, remaining in the maze of houses, to approach Grand Boulevard from the cover of little side streets.

I hoped to find the main gate open and slip in without Balter’s noticing me.

But in the end I set out on the long trek with two parallel sets of calculations at work in me. It was also possible that I would be unable to hobble home at all.

Jumping off the Árpád Bridge, one could be much more certain of killing oneself than by jumping off the Margit Bridge.

The span between the piers is much greater, the bridge is simple and unadorned, and there’s no chance that one would knock against the steel framework or that the piers would be a hindrance. I wanted to reach the water unharmed. I needed only a single glance to get an idea of the width and depth of the whirlpools and of the current’s strength.

It would be nice this way; at any rate, this bridge was preferable.

But even if I were to go through with it, first I had to urinate. I could barely hold it anymore; I was hurrying, limping, anxious to reach the mysterious darkness of the chestnut grove below the boulders of the Japanese Garden, where I could finally relieve myself.

The promenade along the shore and the thicket around the Dominican cloister had kept me captive for four whole nights, so I hadn’t wandered this far afield, and I had no idea to what sort of place my urge to urinate would bring me.

But I knew the area from my childhood, and a few days earlier I had taken a stroll there with a slightly limping, very elegant young lady from Buda, who in her utter passivity mercifully wanted nothing from me. Whenever I joined her family for an opera or ballet performance at the open-air theater, or in the casino for five o’clock tea and a dance, before and after the event the two of us would go for a walk on the island to about this point. There was nothing interesting past the chestnut grove, except perhaps for the war-damaged ruins of the neoclassic Music Well, soiled and stinking of urine, and the barrenness of the paved ramp leading to the bridge.

An artificial waterfall poured over romantic rocks into a calm little pond.

This is how far we came.

The bodies of plump goldfish glimmered among the water lilies, and one could gaze at the fish even if one had nothing worth saying to one’s companion. The point always arrived when I had nothing to say to girls, or when they didn’t want to talk about Edith Piaf, Simone de Beauvoir, or Camus. I was not enthusiastic about their favorite topics. What they wanted to talk about was the cooing voice of sweet little Ákos Németh, along with all the gossip about him, which was of very limited interest to me. If they’d wanted me to grasp their breasts and stroke them while gazing into their eyes, or if they’d let my fingers wander under their skirts, there’d have been no problem at all.

But all they wanted was that I passionately return their kisses, nothing more, maybe put my arm around their waist but not slide my hand up the back of their sweater.

You’re doing this only to get me excited, I know. Men do this to make women lose their self-control.

Oh, how awful, how can you do a thing like that.

They’d slap my hand no matter where it sought contact with their bare skin.

Mean boy, they said sulkily; try as you might, I won’t let you do that.

It was quiet now because the taps of the waterfall had been turned off at ten o’clock sharp at the power station, though the steeply rising rock garden with its footpaths remained illuminated by floodlights all night long to make patrolling easier for the police.

Their aggressive lips desensitized mine, and I found no passion in aggressiveness. I wondered whether they had learned this aggressive kissing from one another, whether I should fall on them with the same aggressive vehemence.

Hurrying toward the dark grove, I discovered that the light was on above the urinal and the door had been left wide open. Normally, this should have been closed when they turned off the waterfall.

Inside it was dark.

As I carefully entered the place, which smelled strongly of tar and urine, expecting to step into muck or bump into something unexpected, the beams of floodlights coming through the narrow windows high up on the walls temporarily blinded me and made me stop.

A familiar stench and familiar human tension warmly pervaded the space.

I should have realized immediately that I’d fallen into a trap and would not easily escape; I was in a snare. But from that moment on I was once again standing outside my own personality.

I saw nothing, only heard and felt on my goose-bumped body that many men were standing in front of the tarred wall opposite me. Somehow they seemed to fill the place completely. It was as if the temperature had risen sharply, for it seemed feverishly hot. As if disturbed by my entrance, the men rustled their clothes and made little knocking and shuffling noises on the floor. I stared, opened my eyes wide, wanted to see what was happening, what they had so abruptly interrupted when I came in, but darkness and the light coming straight at me simultaneously blinded me. Then the dark silence became deeper and tenser, and I could hear in it, at arm’s length, directly behind the open door, the solitary dripping of a faucet.

This is how water drips into a broken porcelain sink.

I did not move from the doorway.

This somebody, whom I was observing within me, did not turn on his heels and take off, as he should have. In his terror he did not run away, rather he stepped out of the harsh light and into the feverish darkness that had always tempted him. Dispassionately and almost omnisciently, he glanced around in the new space, though he could not have seen much of it.

Tar and water formed a compound fragrance at once sharp, clear, deep, and dark; it devoured all other odors and threatened the sense of smell.

All the while his abandoned persona could not swallow, and his entire body was trembling gently, mainly in the knees, because of his shaking soul.

He found pleasure in this bodily fright.

He heard the sound of his footsteps, which told him that with his entire being he had once again become like soft cat’s paws on which he would rush to his doom. Although in the empty shell of his persona someone was dissatisfied and sending out danger signals, whispering you cannot do this, you must not do this. As if somebody was still there who could be convinced to do something.

The one now standing in the space abandoned by his corporeal reality was not strong enough to convince himself of anything.

He made his move to do it, for the first time in his life, in any way possible, and with anyone.

And if it is not I talking to myself in this way, to stop the other one inside from going on this risky adventure, and if I am not the other one either, who has already taken his first step, then what should this stranger be afraid of.

There’s good reason to fear pleasure, because pleasure puts one at the mercy of the other person’s pleasure, leaving both personalities defenseless by entrusting them to each other; however, if there is no I, no self, then there is no need for any persuasion, no need for any restraint.

Pleasure is probably one of God’s nicknames.

And personality is nothing more than a bundle of traits whose rich offering is to be used freely according to one’s needs and fancies. And in that case, it could not possibly have anything to do with that senseless struggle with which the stupid petite bourgeoisie, squeezed between prohibitions and obligations, try to ensure their existence, thereby expelling a certain amount of permanence, stability, and security from their bodies’ archaic reality.

I don’t want and do not need such false security.

As if he were saying that he did not need the rough, uncouth proletarian girls or the prim, lisping young ladies teetering on high heels around whom he had made his obligatory reputation as a skirt chaser. And he needed even less the experience-seeking school and college girls, though they permitted everything and in their great curiosity did many things themselves.

I don’t need them either.

I had no idea what was waiting for me at the bottom of this peculiar dark muteness.

With their interrupted frozen movements, the men stood close to one another.

In a solid line they stood, like somber Roman warriors.

Only their shoulders were visible, the lighter spots of their backs, maybe the arcs of their necks a little bit.

Ordine stat.

For the most part, the deep darkness of the pissoir’s tarred wall swallowed their shapes.

He belonged with them.

They all turn in his direction, heads tugged as if by strings, because they want to see him, who it is who’s come, is he really one of them, perhaps it’s someone whose leaving they’ll have to wait out silently and motionless. But they did not turn away from the tarred wall either, because they were not ready to give up their hard-earned privileged places. First the newcomer had to give evidence of where he belonged. He had to take his place among them. The darkness conveyed something of their movements and intentions but very little of their bodies and faces.

At most, the reflected light from above illuminated the edge of their profiles or skulls.

It wasn’t that there were no barriers between these somber, ready-for-anything men, that they had no inhibitions. On the contrary, at the sight of the newcomer they literally froze into their own inhibitions.

Yet they seemed to have been waiting for him as they would for no one but the Messiah.

Their hungry attention and wild imagination converged on the body of the newcomer. They waited for somebody to free them from their inhibitions so that in their mutual muteness they might make a first move. If at a time like this someone had urinated loudly into the common silence, with his clumsy dribbling he’d have had little hope to claim he belonged among these men. They all pretended they had just finished their business and were only shaking the last drops off their pricks so as not to wet their underpants.

Directly opposite the entrance there was a free space in the otherwise solid lineup.

He could step into it if he had the courage.

That spot had the most light, which is perhaps why it remained empty. The two ends of the lineup vanished in the deep darkness stinking of urine and tar.

That’s where he headed, straight into the darkness where, in the very depth of the night, water was dripping on enamel. He chose the more dangerous place, where he could disappear with the personal shame he felt before men but with his impersonal desires could appear before God.

He hoped that the warm darkness would protect him and in his pleasure he would not have to throw himself on the mercy of others, of anyone.

And then he noticed the giant’s mustached assistant in the lineup, with his big head and tousled hair among the other heads turning toward him. Unlike the others, the assistant turned somewhat with his body too, simultaneously presenting, as it were, the emblem of his cock.

The assistant had no doubt he belonged among these men.

He considered his cock as the last argument, in case I still hadn’t made up my mind. After all, one must decide how to shape one’s life. To see the emblem was like seeing an old friend.

And seeing it, icy, fiery dread coursed through him like homesickness; if things were going this well, then the tar-smelling giant with his hammerlike head and the high bare nape of his neck must also be in here somewhere.

The man with whom, he still hoped, he might spend the rest of his life.

He’d fallen in love with this man and was ready to do anything for this love, to step across the boundaries of his own person if need be, or even across the shadow of the gods.

It does not take long for one’s eyes to get used to darkness. He now noticed for the first time that the giant was indeed there, his legs spread casually apart in his insanely relaxed mood, his loosened worker’s pants fallen over his ankles, right next to the vacant spot in the lineup that would be so easy to step into.

The vacant place is his.

He had never been granted such good fortune. As if after long and arduous research he had just discovered an unknown element that, look at the miracle, people, fit perfectly into Mendeleyev’s periodic table. The marvelous giant’s suddenly flashing smile with his wetly glittering teeth illuminated the stinking darkness.

It was a summons, come on, a raw, animal promise of his goodness, a down payment, but at the same time he was exuding an ominous cold, the icy breeze of madness, because the summons meant that you could not avoid your fate in this snare.

Just by looking at this man, I knew I’d walked into a trap. That this was indeed predestined. One place in this dismal universe had been left vacant, entrusted to this marvelous giant, that he should guard it, keep it for me, and not only is it unavoidable, but his goodness and solicitude positively compel me to occupy it.

He listened, wanted to remain cautious, but no one inside him protested this compulsion. He knew he’d give in; still he looked about coolly to see if there were any signs of a conspiracy. A liquid does not protest either, when it slowly fills the cracks and depressions in a vessel, but it fills them slowly. He was afraid that these two were setting a trap for him or would simply make him a laughingstock, or even beat him up when he took their bait.

While his hesitation stemmed rather from the obligatory anxiety of a man in love.

Would this perfect human specimen, blessed with that marvelous smile, really accept my imperfection for an entire life, or am I but one of his many nocturnal adventures whom he’ll forget tomorrow.

Whatever the situation, his smile proved to be a fiat of destiny in the feverish darkness.

In the meantime his mustached assistant also kept watching me from among the heads turned in my direction.

Doubt was pointless if the giant’s proximity was worth any humiliation. At the sight of his checkered shirt, I could already feel the hot whiff of his wild body, his enormous strong limbs, or perhaps I was overwhelmed by the odor of the tarred wall.

Any humiliation, even my entire future, for a single touch from him.

Let it be that way, any way it has to be. I’d do it in front of everybody too. That’s what everyone was trying to see, where I was headed, whether I’d pick someone else, what I was going to do.

But at that moment — perhaps already the moment before, just as he set off to take his designated place in the phalanx of men about to go into the most secret war of the night and, as it were, to fill the gap with his presence during the waiting period — the lineup, as if moved by a gust of wind, began to disperse. Passionate whispering was heard from the far end of the urinal, words of indignation; somebody vehemently protested something that had been done to him, kept swearing, and at the same time a gray-haired old man appeared from the same area, his shirt outside his pants, his hard-on in his hand. His welted shoes squeaked weirdly and in a split second he closed the long line by taking the spot that fate had supposedly allocated and held reserved for the new arrival.

As it turned out, he took away from me what the black-haired giant could not give me after all, because it was destined to happen differently.

Only the loveliness and irony of an eternal promise remained, disappointment, longing, and a measure of consternation instead of an opportunity presented and missed. At the same time, others were also changing places but so quickly it was impossible to fathom what the prearranged plan was, what sort of strategy had brought about the new formation. The single possible vacancy was re-created at an entirely different location between entirely different individuals.

Now there were three men between us.

Actually, this was a characteristic of these nocturnal games: to make use of secret intentions and chance challenges lurking in the depths of the constant shifting of positions, in which one involuntarily lost rather than found and recognized oneself. There was nothing I could do but occupy the vacant spot.

At least that.

I don’t know how else it could have happened, and I understood even less the way it happened. The occurrence itself could be seen with the naked eye, yet the development of things went on being mysterious. Here we were, standing in this long, narrow space with our backs to the illuminated entrance. The lineup was now closed, man next to man. I was trembling among mobilized warriors waiting for orders, clenching my teeth to stop my trembling. It could have been a dream that one luckily forgets the next day, but it was not a dream. We pretended that all of us, precisely at this abandoned spot, precisely at this late hour of the night, were preparing to urinate or had just finished urinating and were ready to leave.

The silence spread once again; one could barely hear a few small unidentifiable noises.

I was staring at a tarred wall and my eyes were becoming more and more used to the darkness. Slowly I distinguished him in the blackness.

At least his mustached assistant is here very close to me, I consoled myself.

The giant must have been from the countryside and made a very strange impression in his blue worker’s overalls, but his assistant seemed to be from Pest, coming here from a distant suburb. Judging by his hands, he must have pursued a more refined trade, that of a turner or toolmaker. Behind his large, meaty nose and big Hungarian mustache, his features were positively childlike and delicate, though not his forehead or chin, which were thick, fleshy, and forceful. There was a tattoo on his lower arm, a coat of arms or bouquet of flowers, I could not make out which. I had stolen quick glances at it during the previous nights. A letter was tattooed on the hairy upper digit of every one of his fingers. Perhaps the letters of a favored woman’s nickname, perhaps of his own. Between us stood a nervous, blindingly blond, ungainly, idiotic-looking young man who once very carefully had approached me under the yellow acacias during one of the previous nights. He had something of the wild boar in him. Short light bristles covered his loins, his short stubby fingers, and his thighs. His hair stood up straight from his head, like gleaming stubble that couldn’t be combed. A disproportionately small, reddish pointy bulb glowed atop his misshapen, thick, short solid cock, swelling with veins and nerves.

He had sneaked up on me unnoticed, startled me, which in turn alarmed him, and he would have collapsed if he hadn’t leaned against the silky trunk of a thin tree and pressed his cock to it.

He pressed it against the tree so as not to come.

Now he alternated between watching the mustached assistant’s cock and mine, and he wanted to get his hand on mine. Then, by the tree trunk, he’d come with loud screams, his sperm shooting up incredibly high, and I’d run away through branches slapping my face. I did not want to look at his face now, either, or see any part of him.

Our shoulders almost touched.

One filled one’s place and became a captive of the somber lineup of men. I didn’t want to see who was standing on my other side. That man was very close to me too. I wanted to remain strictly with the impossible fiction to which all the others also clung.

We’re here to urinate, nothing else. Locked into this fiction, everyone stood there utterly alone.

Everyone was careful to avoid unwarranted glances.

However, everyone peeked out a little from behind his seclusion. Not to dispel solitude but to search for prey and gain some advantage; to keep an eye on the others lest they commit some incautious act. Being able to see someone else’s without showing one’s own was considered an advantage. Which allowed one to gauge and judge the members of others without submitting one’s own to a similar scrutiny. That would keep one’s place open in a virtual hierarchy. At first, most of the men relied on their peripheral vision. The mustached one showed his to me, but the boar-headed man could see it much better, which made him very aggressively proffer his own. The purpose of the jockeying was to see who could stimulate better and therefore emotionally surround the other one, who was the more adroit, the more cunning, the more attractive, the more competitive, who could exercise more power over the other and who would submit first to the secret hierarchy.

The more protracted the preparation, the higher the fever rose and the more general the tension became. Everyone received some of it and everyone helped increase it. It was enjoyed even by those who for some reason had been excluded from seeking a mate or didn’t want to participate actively and instead preferred to take larger gulps from the common source of pleasure.

With little tricks and a constant increase of tension, it was possible to compel a targeted person to leave his foxhole at last and submit to the potential verdict of the phalanx.

This was not an entirely new situation for me because I had conducted serious fieldwork in the subterranean urinals on Grand Boulevard, though I thought the results not quite satisfactory. I had worked there like a thoughtful ethnologist who had to keep a distance from the influence of observed forms of behavior. If one man felt confidence in another or, because of his deep attraction, lost patience and showed a small measure of initiative, it remained an open question whether the second man would be satisfied with what he saw and, abandoning the mutually nurtured polite appearances, reciprocate the confidence, and also who else might profit from this secret dialogue disguised as a chance occurrence, and as a third party might be induced, precisely by what he had seen, to interfere in the adventure.

At any rate, after a while it was possible to know who was or was not curious about someone, whom one feared, who might wind up as a third party, insinuating himself between the initial two and snatching away the chosen one, who was ready to flirt with anyone or everyone, what a person’s cock was like and whether it would fulfill the promise of the man’s body. Or, if it was impossible to answer these questions right then, because the chosen one was too far away and concealed by others, at least one could guess by their behavior where his place might be in the secret hierarchy.

One could also be aware that the subject, direction, and temperature of a person’s interest, despite every visual agreement, even despite the hierarchy, might change very rapidly and sometimes for no good reason.

What happened then was probably something other than what the men had expected even of themselves.

After another bit of time had passed in this seemingly motionless silence, one could sense who were the ones who had already managed to establish contact, how they were flooded by their mutual attraction, how they began to lose their inhibitions and find their way around obstacles. One could also spot the ones who remained hopelessly alone, or guess who’d be scrounging off the sights of developing reciprocity between others. Because there were men who wanted nothing more than to watch and follow others only with their glances. From the beginning these men behaved as if they had no interest at all in the busy activity around them. With their eyes and ears they followed and absorbed the smallest movement and coldly rejected any attempt to approach them. They refrained almost pathologically from direct bodily contact. They must have been satisfied with very little. Peeping was their profession and they had no shame about it. Persistently, for hours at a time, they’d stand in the same spot and, no matter what happened, their faces remained indifferent to everyone and everything.

Of course they never showed their own to anyone.

They took the rich nourishment of their sense organs with a certain reservation, which had a touch of gourmandise.

It was impossible to know when and with what they had their fill, but suddenly they’d button up their flies and, behind countenances transformed into masks with neutral gazes, they’d make their way from the depths of the urinal up the stairs to take home their daily booty.

Occasionally, though, they were denied even this small gain. Not everyone liked having others witness their pleasure. Some were angered or embarrassed by the presence of others, though some were indifferent to voyeurs or even liked the peepers’ quiet indifference, gaining an unexpected boost from the mute witnesses’ enjoyment.

Many things could be clarified in the motionless silence in which the tap kept dripping evenly.

It must have been leaking somewhere, because there were glistening spots of water on the flagstones.

The question of what one’s intentions were regarding the other was left open.

Among these men, intentions had well-defined genres, and they strictly observed the borders between genres. It was impossible to tell by another’s exterior what that person wanted to do, how reserved he was or how far in shamelessness he would be willing to go, where he would want to do it, whether he had a place of his own or would insist on staying here and doing it in front of the others, or what they might do with each other emotionally, whether this connection would last for only a few minutes or possibly for a lifetime, and what the others would make of all this, but, based on a certain amount of practice, everyone could have his own intuition.

There were many questions, but not one of them referred to an entire personality — only to its various characteristics and the ever-shifting basic situation. To how these characteristics could be made to speak without having to exchange a single word with the other man.

To make contact with the other man directly, without an intermediary, and somehow with all the others as well.

Even the most experienced ones kept turning around, like birds, because they feared being exposed and, in their fickleness, had to keep an eye now on this one, now on another one.

Without much effort, I too adjusted my behavior to these rules and open questions, and therefore caught myself doing everything the same way; in the name of pure sensory perception I was just as fickle as the others. Soon there was no situation I didn’t scrutinize and evaluate according solely to my senses, evading morality and reason.

The difference between the two kinds of knowledge became measurable during the night.

I learned continually from and with my sense organs, adding, as it were, to everything I’d learned earlier according to the scales and standards of reason so that I could put each item, sorted by moral viewpoint, in its proper place in my consciousness. But since everything was open, changing continuously, and continuing awkwardly to stay open, I could reach no final knowledge; the most I could do was notice the repetitions, or sense in the rhythm of recurrences vague signs of an elusive natural law. I did not realize it was impossible to find the underlying cause of anything by learning. At best I comprehended it as yet another situation; slowly accepted the reality of occurrences that appeared in parallel within and around me; resigned myself to the possibility that whatever happened within and around me would become a part of my life, after all; and as a result my knees even stopped their humiliating shaking.

But I did not believe we had reached the end of anything.

Several men in the long line showed an immediate interest in me, stretching a bit to see past some of the others, leaning forward, out of the line, but I had to pretend not to notice these summoning signals because I did not belong to these intrusive strangers. They could clearly see that I belonged to this black-haired navvy or stonecutter, to this I don’t-know-who, whose shoulders and chest nearly burst from his checkered shirt, and with whom I had practically nothing in common. I belonged to his mustached assistant also, and to nobody else. With my reticence and obstinacy I signaled to the others that they should expect nothing from me.

But I did not even have to look up to see the cock of the man on the other side of me.

It was exactly my obstinacy, reticence, and hesitation that made him turn in my direction and show me his, immediately.

He was rearing up with it.

He wanted to use his cock to jolt me out of my fickleness. I couldn’t have known what sort of man came with this cock, and he counted on my inability to resist the curiosity that lurks in every single man without exception. Carefully, I did take a good look at it. I decided he wouldn’t have a chance even if I hadn’t been waiting for the giant. Whose black hair falls so flamboyantly on his forehead, and who with his metallically flashing eyes probably follows my every move in the darkness, checking up on my very existence. I had to think quickly of something else to ward off any possible effect of the stranger’s cock on my curiosity. There were no more vacant places, and in the tense silence something had irrevocably ended. Nobody could fit in between the two of us; true, I did not see him and wouldn’t dare look at him by leaning either forward or backward, to see something of him between the strange bodies.

He towered above them all.

I should see his illuminating smile.

At the mere thought, at the mere fancy of the possibility of such proximity, my cock filled my hand and began to grow stiff.

Maybe I should urinate first.

I felt his domination on the nape of my neck, in the roots of my hair. His power gained strength in my hand, my body became the inevitable emblem of his power, and I entered into his service exactly the same way his mustached assistant had. As if my entire life until then had been nothing but a preparation for this nightmare, which caught me while wide awake, with its secret pleasures promising compensation for all my past and future suffering. In the phalanx we stood foot to foot, elbow to elbow, almost touching, shoulders on both sides rubbing against me occasionally, which naturally increased the promise of this unnamable community.

I had no idea how much time passed; it may have been growing light outside.

I had to violate this unnamable common activity because I could not abandon my urge to urinate. Curiously, they watched what I was going to do. For security reasons too, they wanted to know what the newcomer would do because it determined whether they’d continue the games among themselves that they had interrupted at my arrival. I could no longer use some ordinary dissembling to hide the real meaning of my behavior; my overstretched bladder could not relax under such tension, its functioning was also hindered by active waves of hyperemia. It would have been hard to avoid a complete erection. From my left the unknown man offered his own, from the right the blond idiot. Because of bladder tension, I should have avoided an erection and kept to a sensible sequence. Slowly, indulgently, holding their cocks at the root to make them visible in their entirety, both men kept pulling their foreskins over and off their bulbs to steady their strong erections or rather to keep them permanent. With which they not only held themselves in the daze of hyperemia but also showed off to the best advantage the tumescence of their genitals. They were competing with each other but also with the mustached assistant.

They offered a sight from which, theoretically, another man could not escape without excitement. At the very least his eyes would grow round, his pupils would enlarge to take everything in, as if injecting himself into the other man with his look, setting out involuntarily with his head to observe what it would be like to be that other man. And that causes the fragrance of the strange cock to invade his nostrils.

To take that bulb into his mouth, to eat it, to trigger and experience the other man’s pleasure.

The memory of mothers’ breasts surges in the mouths.

He won’t, he cannot do it; some men delay it, defer it throughout a lifetime, but the mere thought of the act makes them breathe faster and hear how the other man’s breath speeds up too. A few steps over, the mustached one was doing the same thing in his own way, while on the other side the gray-haired old man kept turning and busying himself, and next to him stood the giant, but I didn’t know what he was doing.

I didn’t dare look at him.

In a strong, large jet, as if bursting or erupting from me, urine began to gush out. I couldn’t have waited with it even if I had wanted to. It echoed as it hit the tarred wall.

The effect on the others was as if in some polite company I had committed the worst possible faux pas.

I had waited too long and that is why I became de plus en plus incommode.

The strong pressure of the liquid opened the urethra despite the mild erection.

I was making too much noise.

At the sound of so much churlishness, the men on both sides stopped what they were doing and hastened to conceal their erect pricks in the funnels of their palms.

I noticed only moving shadows between dark spots because, aware of my improper behavior and incompetence, I shamefully kept staring in front of me. I could see with my sense of hearing that they had indignantly given up on me and turned away. Hearing the splash of my urine, they right away had to look for different prey.

Sometimes, nothing wants to turn out the way it should.

With the unceasing searching and jockeying, everything stretches out indefinitely even though everyone strives to have things happen without delay. So that no one should have to wait another moment for the daily dose of pleasure. And nobody likes disappointing anyone, because he too might suffer the same disappointment.

Holding awkwardly his thick, short, swollen cock with the reddish, pointy little bulb at its end, the blond young man with his nervous, sometimes irritated movements turned unhesitatingly to the mustached one. Who at this very moment realized the possibilities in his dominant position, and probably made a challenging gesture that confused the fellow so busy offering himself.

These men, offering themselves to each other, often hissed or sent signals whose meaning an outsider could comprehend, if at all, only when seeing the resulting action in progress.

They quickly changed places and unexpectedly the mustached one was now next to me.

Something similar must have happened on the other side with the man who just a little while earlier had so startled me with his unruly erection that I hadn’t even wanted to see to whom his cock belonged. He too had been cheated. In his disappointment with me, and after looking through the gray-haired old man still gesticulating with his cock, and through the strange figure next to the old man, an underage, possibly crippled boy, as if they were made of air, he couldn’t turn anywhere but to the giant. He wanted to show it to him if he could not have me. The giant may have confused him, probably with some inviting movement, for he was showing himself not to this man but to me. Not only the giant’s cock but his entire loin was uncovered. Or so it seemed in the poor lighting provided by the thin beams of light filtering through the high windows. The crippled boy wore a platform-soled orthopedic shoe on one foot; his cane, which he could not hold, was leaning against the tarred wall. He was showing his to everyone, offering himself to anyone; a lit cigarette dangled from his lips.

I knew the exposed loins of the giant. And he knew their effect on me.

For five nights in a row, again and again, at different locations and in different positions he had offered me everything. Maybe his specialty was showing not only his prick but also his testicles, hair, belly, and top of his thighs. There was a certain merciless openness in this. The relief of his stomach, thighs, and loins, his head, and his entire splendid figure eerily reminded me of the man with anvil and hammer one can see on the twenty-forint bill. On each occasion, I had stupidly run away from him. To my shame, in the light of day I would take out the twenty-forint bill to see him and be with him. I couldn’t forget him. The only difference between him and his image on the bill was that on the latter the artist had used drapery to conceal the loins. It was because of the giant that I had returned every night.

Because of him, or because of my finally wanting to find someone, anyone, who would love me for my body.

Now, holding his cock, avoiding all other offers, he leisurely started toward me. With his other hand, he had to hold up his worker’s overalls, which had slipped down his thighs.

This did not make him look ridiculous. There was something flamboyant in the entire man, permissive and contented but not self-satisfied, or at least not petty. As if he had not bared the huge muscles of his buttocks intentionally, either, as if it just happened that way. But perhaps he wore no underpants. And that excited me extremely, every night.

Others quickly exploited the changing of places by these two and became active in the darkness. Again, it felt as if a gust of wind had blown across the landscape, only this time it did not pass on. I, or the person standing there in my stead, was the only one who could not move. However ill-mannered my behavior seemed in this company, I was very far from ending my noisy urination. As it kept pouring out of me in an ever larger and stronger spurt, my erection was gaining strength too.

In the meantime, I found myself flanked by the two men.

In my shame I glanced from one face to another. This seemed to them as if I were asking for their patience and their pardon for this unavoidable need of mine.

As if I could keep them away from me with meekness and alarm. Or from the somebody standing in for me. Who was hoping that some kind of distance could be maintained between people.

At any rate, I would be asking something from them, mercy.

They did not touch me, didn’t dare, not yet, but were standing so close that the emanations of our bodies, their heat and odor, flooded and penetrated all three of us. By turns, they watched my cock, the jet of my urine, and my mouth. From this close, the face of the mustached one affected me differently than before because he did not seem nearly so calculating or aggressive as he’d been when seen from a distance. Until now I’d feared some sly cruelty. Now, on the contrary, he seemed gentle, attentive, expectant, and self-controlled, careful not to ruin things with a wrong move or give me reason to flee again. He mesmerized me, as one does a dangerous wild animal. At the same time, there were signs of sadness on his childlike features hiding behind his meaty nose and deeply grooved forehead. Like a person who does not expect much good to happen to him yet cannot give up hope completely. Perhaps there was a chance. Maybe this very minute. Maybe with this complete stranger. Perhaps with him he could return to that elemental joy he had once received, then lost and could not find again.

Our proximity did not alter but rather deepened the beauty of the giant.

He was the same on one twenty-forint bill as on another.

As I turned my head toward him, I could immerse my soul in his real fragrance.

With his incredible smile, he expected nothing, did not hope for or count on anything; he was only giving something one rarely receives.

He gave it with his eyes, his lips, his amazing teeth.

He still had plenty of surplus happiness, he did not have to be thrifty, he could go on giving and giving, he would not exhaust his supplies.

I shouldn’t worry. I shouldn’t rush, should finish peeing at my leisure, he likes to see how I hold my weenie and let the gushing out in a large wide arc. It was not that he was waiting patiently for me; he was caressing me with his smile; he liked to hear it.

I should dribble for him; I should continue.

There’d be plenty of happiness left when I finished; he’d give me more even then.

From that moment, I couldn’t follow the course of events, probably because the sight of inexhaustible plenty completely overwhelmed me with its promise. Most likely my entire body must have relaxed and my consciousness grown dim because the moment he put his open palm into the urine’s strong jet, to my great surprise, I let out a short, loud fart.

No doubt about it, it happened.

Everything happened at once, all sorts of things happened, and they happened everywhere.

In the silence filled with tiny rustlings, several men broke into brief crackling and popping laughs, and then there was silence again. Undisturbed, the hand went on playing with the stream of my urine; the two men standing closest to me with bated breath were not laughing.

It was probably thanks to the promise of approaching happiness that anxiety left my body. These two did that to me, that’s why they had no reason to laugh. Then, from the depth of the silence full of scraping noises, somebody else responded with another fart. It was not as restrained and inhibited as mine; the sender played it with obvious pleasure, in long staccato sequences, as boys and young men do in boarding-school and barracks dormitories, where, for lack of other means, they entertain one another with sounds produced by the lower regions of the body.

There was general laughter, many echoing explosions of the original guffaws.

They did not even wait for me to shake the last drops of urine off my penis.

My penis had grown so stiff I could hardly shake it anyway.

The mustached one, now behind me, drew me to him with his strong bare arms, embracing my shoulders and back as if wanting to crush me. The giant bent over me, covered me, and grabbed it with his hand still wet with my urine.

They laughed loudly into my neck.

Their panting, their voices, their lips, all in one fell swoop. So much strength and novelty made me very weak, and I was surprised at the unfamiliar hardness of the male body. I laughed along with them. If the mustached one hadn’t supported me with his chest, I’d have fallen backward like a swooning lady in a nineteenth-century romantic novel. Not only was I no longer interested in the appearance of my own manliness, but I was positively amused by giving it up and surrendering myself. It seemed as if he wanted to twist my free hand behind my back; I did not understand why he wanted to do that. He planted a kiss on my eyes with his full mouth and then tenderly, very sensuously, he buried his face in my neck. I was left alone with him, for the giant quickly disappeared.

His lips were glued to me, he was childlike, as sweet as the past, and he swarmed over me with the strong multilayered smell of his hair, mustache, and mouth.

The pleasure coursing through my spine put an end to the laughter.

And then I felt what the giant was doing too. Thrusting his knees against mine, he found a different grip on my prick, let it go for a second, and then clung to it with the heat of his open loins, tapping and rubbing against it, gathering it together with his own, and this was painful. On my prick, I felt the well-proportioned, moist surface of his, the slippery rim of his bulb on my tautening frenum. Which, I believe, made me faint a little, or maybe I strayed over to an unknown otherworld. But he continued calmly to unbutton my fly to free me.

I thought they knew what they were doing and I could entrust myself to their common sense.

He wanted to get to it from a better position, uncover my loins, make me more like him, give me everything one gets when unclothed. While the mustached one placed his in my hand that was twisted behind my back. He was the only man I saw whose cock was of the same substance as his body. That must have been the reason the giant had accepted him as his assistant. In this one thing, he surpassed the giant’s perfection. But I scarcely had a chance to feel its strength and heat with my fingers, having barely closed it in my palm, when his mouth landed on mine. I leaned with him, with my head and entire back I gave myself to him. He absorbed the weight of both of us because the giant was leaning along with us. With his mustache he seemed to arrest and embrace my face.

He enveloped me.

I would have kissed him back, but with my cock freed from the pressure of my pants the giant was kissing it, and I felt the shock of this in my brain. He lightly pressed his tongue into my testicles, gently rooting in them. He roughly sucked one in, licked it all around while it was in his mouth, and then with his tongue quickly and mercilessly plowed the spine of my cock. With his teeth he pulled back the foreskin caught on my bulb. He pulled it down, nibbled it, and then in a single devouring suck made it disappear in the hot hollow between his lips and throat.

He deceived me a little.

Until then I hadn’t been thinking there were women in the world.

The way a man’s lips took possession of me suggested that I should possess myself, yet it felt as if I had wound up in the vagina of a woman.

This worried me; I could not allow the female and male principles to get mixed up, and fear of that happening led me back to this world.

But then, in the fluttering of his tongue I felt that no, no, we are in an entirely different place, and women have nothing to do with this.

From the sensations converging under the influence of abstract thoughts, my mouth would have been ready for a rasping shout, but the mustached assistant not only absorbed my physical exposure with his fleshy lips but also stabbed me with his stiff, hard tongue. In the taste of his saliva I could tell he smoked Munkás cigarettes, that the spritzers he drank were made of tart wine grown on sandy soil, that he had had someone else’s cock in his mouth before me, and before that had eaten something made with onion, maybe meat stew.

I hadn’t been at home for supper the previous evening, but now I remembered that the remains of Ilona’s rice chicken at the bottom of the pot were still waiting for me on the stove.

Unless Ágost had come home and gobbled it up.

I was tossing between their hands.

Nobody made better rice chicken than Ilona. She made it with chicken necks, livers, and wings, with tomatoes, and she always made a point of telling me, Kristófka, don’t forget, we’ll have rice chicken today.

I had never before had a stranger’s cock in my hand like this, nor my own in another man’s mouth.

Sometimes, without hesitation, Ágost would eat what was supposed to be my portion.

They had been looking for him in vain for three days; he disappeared with his great big cock, for which I’ve always envied him no end. He was just as voracious as his mother was.

They couldn’t find him anywhere.

It would have helped to know what to do with it, now that they bothered to put it in my hand.

I also thought of Pisti, of what would happen if he walked in and saw what I was doing.

I was grasping it, squeezing it as a baby would its rattle, though I thought that might not feel good for him.

I don’t know when, but they unbuttoned my shirt, along with my underpants they yanked my drainpipe trousers down below my knees and, grasping me by my ass, the giant lifted me into his mouth. They grabbed my nipples between their nails, twisted them until they hurt. I don’t know which one of them did what. I lost my interest in particular persons; to be more precise, other persons must have appeared, because my entire body had already accepted the giant and his assistant.

They knew everything about me; they could do with me anything they wanted; I no longer had to be busy with them.

I kept squeezing what was in my hand, because I did remember whose it was and would have liked to reciprocate. With rapid little grasps and squeezes the giant felt the tense muscles of my thighs and calves. At least I hoped it wasn’t somebody else doing that. I felt as if I were hovering in the air among their four hands. Occasionally, I felt his entire hot loin, his cool stomach, and his cock tightly held with mine, somewhere between heaven and earth.

Which would have made me scream, this whole thing they were doing to me; it spread me and stretched me out like a bow. I threw myself down from somewhere high into the depths, saw my own fall, but never reached bottom. There was no ground to absorb my weight. In my dread I must have opened my tightly clenched eyes, because I saw from very close up how he was leaning over me. I must have opened my eyes to be sure. I saw his crazy smile with his teeth and that told me it was he, after all, who was doing this to me, he was the one playing on my helpless body as on a musical instrument, and I also saw that this man was a lunatic. As if he had not only induced but with his entire being also followed every convoluted branch of my pleasure and thus increased his own joy.

And mine, mine.

I’d have screamed with this brute joy if the mustached one hadn’t thrust into my mouth — instead of his tongue, which was quick, slippery, strong, sharp, and pierced me like a spike — two of his long fingers. This hurt me, his nails bruised my tongue, I was choking. I had to bite him; I’d say that I didn’t do it consciously yet it was intentional. He wasn’t the only one who screamed; it hurt him and he enjoyed it, in my mouth his blood mixed with mine, but by then the darkness was full of these repressed moans, whimpers, wailings, and barely repressed shouts.

There were no intelligible words among them.

In the depth of the darkness, two intertwined bodies were shining, and it seemed to me that except for their pants down to their ankles they had nothing on. They were immersed in each other’s mouth and the heads of their cocks were peeking out from between their bodies pressed against each other.

But now the giant raised my ass even higher and with one of his fingers tried to enter my anus.

That scared me a lot.

Luckily, my sphincters would not let him.

Yet even the fear felt good because it made me feel as if I were looking back from the time when I was an infant.

And this strange countenance also saw something of what others were doing around it.

However, he could not tell when he wound up on the flagstones.

He could feel with his naked buttocks that he was lying in cool wetness and he could feel, through his wet shirt, that his back was in contact with the floor. Who did this. Maybe he was lying not in water from the faucet, which was still dripping behind the open door, but in piss, other people’s piss. This must have been his first thought when he regained something of his consciousness. Then he saw enormous shadows towering above him. He couldn’t have counted how many men were there, all of them making strange little sounds, as they went on slinging sperm onto his stripped body now lying on the stone floor.

The sperm landed on his belly and chest with soft splashes, warmly.

From this he finally understood that although he was neither aware of nor feeling anything, and although his perception was considerably delayed, he too must have reached his satisfaction earlier and the two men he loved so much, and who within a few short seconds had induced in him this now-dissipating pleasure, had already left him.

Had thrown him to the floor.

Had vanished in the night in search of other gratifications.

These two were really vampires, in which case he no longer had any blood, and they had also sucked the marrow from his spine and now death was happening.

Their black dog had been death’s harbinger.

The giant from the twenty-forint bill, with whom he wanted to share his entire life, had vanished.

Without an embrace, without a kiss, without either of them saying a single word to each other. He had no word for me, not a solitary word.

From now on an entire long life will have to be spent in death.

A Brand-New Civilization

When Ágost opened his eyes again — he could not tell when he had closed them, if he had closed them at all — what he saw was an opalescent surface on which he did not immediately find his bearings.

He was lying on his back on a drenched bedcover, above him the wide-open window of the maid’s room and beyond the window the empty nocturnal sky.

He was staring into this emptiness.

The sky of diffused yellowish red reflected the city lights. As if he were looking into a geometrically designed space whose dimensions he was unable to conceive, unable to conceive his own life. In the depth of the motionless summer stillness the distant Váci Road was knocking, hammering, clattering, booming, and whistling with all its factories working through the night, and nearby something clicked.

He concluded that the lights were carried on an invisible mass of air.

Gyöngyvér had just come back from somewhere.

This told him he was involved with a woman again or at least had come up to her uncomfortable rented room.

A few years earlier, when they had unexpectedly recalled him from his post abroad, he had found the city’s cramped interior spaces especially exciting.

Forced into such congested conditions, people here live in intimate proximity.

They must move more carefully, maintain the goodwill of others. They cannot be cold and distant with one another, since they see into one another’s lives and with their every movement interfere with them. But for quite a while now he has found this behavior compulsive, unfolding like a pointless irritation from which they should free themselves. But this narrow space had no exit.

Where did you go, he asked lazily and sleepily.

Meanwhile he was glad he’d finally found the correct spatial perspective.

Even though every wall was depressingly close. And it quickly occurred to him that the strange feeling matched perfectly his own fate.

If matter has no mass, it cannot appear in the physical space and its perspective cannot be experienced.

I took a shower, but there’s lots of hot water. I left plenty for you.

I got lost, he thought, I got lost in this woman, I must admit.

I should scrape myself out of her.

I could have one more day, though; all right then, I’ll give myself another day.

I don’t feel like getting up, he said aloud. If it’s all right with you, if I don’t bother you with my excretions, I won’t go anywhere.

You don’t have to worry about the old woman because I can hear her way before she gets to the door.

I’m perfectly all right without a shower.

If you want me to, I can stand guard in the hallway and won’t let her in.

What time is it.

I don’t know.

About.

Probably not enough time to sleep.

That sounds like a rebuke. I hope you’re not offended by my importunity.

At this, they both laughed.

I haven’t heard any streetcars. One thirty, two thirty, I really don’t know.

Did you open the window?

Who else. The first streetcar comes at three thirty.

Help me stand up, please.

What, you really want me to help you.

Out of love for a fellow human.

My God, how I must have exhausted you. How could I ever compensate you for your squandered energies.

Hearing this, the man began stretching pleasurably; he yawned a big yawn and pretended that down there on the floor he was struggling helplessly. Now he sat up, now he sank back on the piss-soaked cover, pressed and cracked his limbs and knuckles, and then drew his hands across his darkly shining, hairless chest.

Pay for it, he said from behind another yawn, that’s how you can, the simplest solution. Let’s see, I’ll be generous and not count the days, so just pay for the full four nights.

It would have been more honest if you’d told me this before. We could have clarified whether you wanted a separate payment for each round or a lump sum for everything, the woman replied equably. And we still have to talk about how much you want for special activities.

The idea appealed to her because, knowing herself, she might indeed have been willing to pay him.

With great pleasure, they submerged themselves in the sight of each other’s nakedness. The man thought a bit more about the price, but he had no doubt he’d accept it.

I’d be happy with, let’s say, three hundred per round.

They were peeling each other out of the darkness, less with their eyes than with their inner vision, and with a mutually seductive self-gratification that was also pleasurable to demonstrate: the abundant flesh and the light-minded irresponsible words.

Well, let’s try to add it all up.

Although they both felt that these words were becoming morally dangerous.

I don’t think we’d arrive at the same sum.

They might injure each other with words.

Of course, you’ll try to deny a few rounds.

Ágost’s hands, on his stomach, finally stopped moving.

This self-satisfied gesture flattered him with a renewed erection.

He countered it with another gesture; he had had enough of erections; he dug into his dense pubic hair with its trillion little curls, scratched it and kept scratching. Which in Gyöngyvér’s eyes was more comical than seductive, and rather beastly. His way of carrying on, his tossing and snuggling — dogs act like this when absorbing the odors of a newly arranged litter to sleep on or of strange feces. Then he slipped his hands between his thighs and reached for his testicles as if his hands were one large ladle.

And this brought to Gyöngyvér’s mind the image of reapers on their break, sitting on the ground, spooning hot thick goulash soup from a common bowl which a blond woman brought to them. She had to think about this woman, because she did not know where she knew her from and why the sight of her gripped her with fear.

Ágost raised his prick and his testicles, and Gyöngyvér had to turn away from this sight.

She could not understand why this strange woman kept walking around in her mind and what sort of reapers were lolling about in the shade.

His penis took a long time to shrink back to normal size after the protracted excitement.

Ágost was amazed how long the aftereffects of his lovemaking could last; sometimes he could hold on to it until the following night. The swollen, sensitive rim of his bulb now touched his arm, warning him: I am bare. Its injury would cause pain.

Still, he didn’t want to examine it in front of a woman whom he’d just happened to come up and visit. But he said this to himself only out of self-defense. He pulled the foreskin over the bulb so it would not seem so shameless and defenseless, and then with showy strokes he several times ran his fingers across the swelling spine of his cock.

Come here, he said softly to the woman, who, however, did not move.

Come here, please.

But this woman was thinking about something else.

Please come here, and stand above me. Please.

Now he really wanted to eat Gyöngyvér.

But the woman did not budge, did not respond to his offer with her body, perhaps misunderstood him.

You’re afraid of me, you don’t trust me, you’re not coming here even though I’m asking you. Maybe you think I’ll go away. How else should I beg you. You’re not even here. You’re terrified of me. Now I can see it clearly.

Where do you get such an idea, the woman wondered, because she was indeed terrified, but not of him, rather of the blond woman and the reapers. I don’t understand why you’re so conceited.

To find her clitoris in the tangle of furrows and hook his tongue gingerly into it.

And why should I be here for you all the time. What are you, a tyrant or a little boy.

He wanted to feel the woman’s tangle in his throat.

You can’t even imagine that I’m by myself. I don’t want anybody, and not you either.

As if pained by thirst, he wanted her with his entire oral cavity. The familiar taste of cunt, which nevertheless differs wildly as one goes from cunt to cunt. Impossible to devour it completely and for good. Only its disgusting strangeness remains, which one cannot dissolve in one’s saliva and make one’s own. Perhaps saliva does not even have its own taste, and that is why one wants to mix it or flavor it with something else.

The woman’s shape was nicely outlined against the white door, the strong lines of her hips and the thick, swollen peaks of her diverging breasts.

From the floor, he could not see her facial features clearly for they were partly shadowed.

She remained a woman.

Come on, you can admit it.

In response Gyöngyvér absentmindedly extended her hand to the man, but not as if she meant to admit anything. And not to help him up either.

It would never occur to me to be afraid of you, but if you want to, you may leave.

All right, I’ll leave, but first pay me.

Cut out this nonsense. Go on, leave. At least I’ll lose you now and won’t have to worry later.

As she spoke she squatted in front of him as if she had to examine him carefully from close up, to understand him better.

Then you can foresee your sad fate, after all.

She does not understand.

They held each other’s hands, almost indifferently, but they both tremendously enjoyed their new positions, which showed their perfect isolation and independence.

You can’t be serious when you say you’ve never been paid for it, the man said offhandedly, as an experiment, almost contemptuously.

And what if I told you that yes, I am always paid, I wouldn’t do it otherwise, I’m a registered whore. That’s obviously what you want to hear.

Suddenly in both their faces was a flash of some profound resistance or hatred.

And instantly they became emotional in this mutuality. As they went on scrutinizing each other’s features, words and gestures became too much. As if there were no gestures or words that would not provoke them emotionally.

Gyöngyvér saw him as more beautiful than she could endure; and Ágost saw her, as always, as a little more beautiful than his mental image of her.

I think you’re a pretty spoiled person, Ágost.

I think so too.

There’s very little chance of my continuing to spoil you.

That’s a decision you have to make. I won’t interfere.

But you want to force a bit more flattery and a bit more subservience out of me. You want me to be terrified of you and serve you while you’re allowed to brutalize me.

And what can I do about it. You tell me. I’m not a prophet, I can’t see into the future, but yes, things might turn out like that.

You could protest, you could be ashamed that you’ve been like this with every woman. You could promise me it won’t be like that anymore because, for my sake, you’ll pull yourself together and turn over a new leaf.

I’m sure that would work in a kindergarten, Gyöngyvér, but I beg you, I can’t disappoint you so much.

Disappoint me, the woman asked, shocked.

It would show you what a mistake you’ve made, how you’ve miscalculated everything.

What mistake have I made.

You’ve picked a spoiled man, and you wanted a different kind.

The woman did not reply; she was clearly pondering something very seriously.

You could start looking for another man right away, the man continued, one who’s not so spoiled.

Maybe you’re right.

I’m sure I am.

But of course I can’t forgive you just like that.

If you can’t, you don’t have to, replied the man, and brushing the woman’s hand off, he jumped up from the floor.

After all, you can take your revenge anytime, any way you want to.

And with that, he threw himself on the bed, lying on his back. With his legs spread wide apart, he enjoyed his victory like a child.

Surprised, Gyöngyvér remained squatting by the wet bedcover.

The bedcover was rather embarrassing.

There was a small balcony off the kitchen; she’d hang it out there to dry.

In the afternoon, in the evening, sometime, she’d have to wash it.

What you mean to say is that I’m a silly goose who doesn’t understand her own wishes, doesn’t have enough common sense to grasp her own situation.

I’ll think about what I meant, but in the meantime, dear, you could bring me a blanket, I’m cold.

Maybe a sheet, I probably won’t find anything else, Gyöngyvér replied hesitantly.

She was beginning to be anxious about what was happening.

What had they done; what lies would she have to tell; when would she have a chance to wash the blanket in secret.

Altogether, what had the two of them done here.

God, how could she make all the telltale signs disappear. I know where she keeps the bed linen, she said aloud, but I don’t know if I can find a blanket.

She wanted to deny him the blanket, because denial felt good.

She wanted to deny him warmth.

In an apartment like this I’m sure you can find a blanket, probably more than one, said the man, yawning contentedly. Please, don’t bring me a sheet, and bring a glass of cold water too.

Anything, before I dry out completely.

He turned to the wall and curled up in a ball. It would be so nice for me under a nice warm little blanket, he whimpered. All I want is a nice warm little blanket, nothing else. And water.

And then you too should come under the blanket. And don’t bring the water in a glass, let me drink from your mouth.

Without a word Gyöngyvér left with the wet bedcover and stayed away for some time.

She felt like weeping, though she couldn’t know why, didn’t know what to cry about.

She continued tasting for herself his humiliating words and his insane cadences.

I let somebody take advantage of me again, she thought. She was ashamed of going along with the game, especially since she did not believe the man had wanted it, though he was a beast and in retrospect she thought he wouldn’t be ashamed of anything. He had deeply hurt her self-esteem, with his self-confidence or maybe his shamelessness. He spoke as if he had free access to and was at home in many strange apartments.

Unlike Gyöngyvér, who could not get her bearings even in places she thought she knew.

I must not let anyone take advantage of me ever again, she kept saying to herself, her anger turning against herself.

She did not put the light on; she hopped around naked and barefoot on the parquet and the stone tiles.

First, with a single quick movement she spread the soiled bedcover out on the kitchen balcony and locked the door on it.

I’m a pig, she said to herself, not very convincingly since she enjoyed her body, its suppleness and its easy flow.

She felt as if during the night she had grown by at least five centimeters.

Quickly she took water to him and then quickly left him alone again, though it was nice to watch him slurping the water eagerly, the spoiled beast, whom she continued to spoil, stupid as she was.

She stopped in the hallway crammed with furniture and tried to imagine where this man would find the damn blankets he was talking about.

When they were sneaking into the maid’s room, the man couldn’t have had more than a quick glance at this hallway.

She had to be careful not to overwhelm this man with senseless rebukes and thereby further betray herself, making it easier for him to take advantage of her. She hastened across the hallway, on whose rustically sanded, pale gray bare walls only one sconce gave a cold, unfriendly, dim light. Mrs. Szemző obsessively believed that with this light she could scare off burglars or sneaky thieves.

In fact she could not shake the fear that in her own apartment she might find herself face-to-face with strangers or bump into living bodies in the darkness.

That is why this weak light had to be on all night.

For a while, the living bodies inside the sweltering cattle car supported the living dead.

According to regulations, the gendarmes* were to count off 90 Jews and jam them into each cattle car, but they crowded 116 into this one so as not to have to attach another car to the train at the Veszprém station.

This was duly recorded in the notebook of Chief Counselor Elemér Vay, whom His Excellency the regent of Hungary had personally appointed to observe the process of deportations throughout the country. Beginning in April 1944 and following the itinerary prepared for him by the Interior Ministry, the chief counselor traveled from city to city along the proposed deportation lines.

His verbal reports could not of course include such insignificant details as one overcrowded cattle car.

He did not want to talk and could not have talked about it to anyone.

During his three-month inspection tour he returned only twice to Budapest, where His Excellency received him in a more than friendly atmosphere, for tea with the family. At the conclusion of the tea and accompanied by His Excellency’s daughter-in-law, the always composed and cheerful Countess Imola Auenberg, he strolled over to His Excellency’s study, where he could briefly summarize the impressions he had gained on the inspection tour. The countess had been friends with Elemér Vay’s young wife in her youth, and it was at her recommendation that the retired counselor had been recalled for this special mission.

His Excellency was very pleased with the reports from this high-ranking civil servant, who on more than one occasion had proved more than competent in the execution of confidential missions and whose loyalty was unquestionable.

At the conclusion of their last meeting, he made the chief counselor promise that if there were incidents of atrocities or arbitrary actions taken by gendarmes during the evacuation of ghettoes around the country, the counselor would telegraph a report immediately, using the usual codes and addressing himself to the countess. His Excellency’s personal opinion was that within a few months a burning and weighty problem would be settled once and for all; arbitrariness and injustice were not commensurate with the chivalrous Hungarian character.

Ever since, Mrs. Szemző has wanted to see what the unavoidable moment might bring, the inevitable moment.

She told herself that the details would surely be of interest to a pathological anatomist or an expert in forensic medicine, and then she had to think about the person, identical to herself, who had the chance, for a few months in the Buchenwald camp, to work as an assistant to Professor Nussbaum, the prosector. Who had examined how, in a given situation, living bodies deal with the bodies of people who have fainted or died, in which case, according to popular belief, they are no longer aware of anything. It always seemed to her as if she had only read about these cases, rather than that she was remembering them as a real occurrence in her life. She also remembered Dr. Dénes Schranz, who could not have known in advance about this abomination when he wrote his book about the various and extraordinary phenomena of death.

Mrs. Szemző snickered at this notion.

Interesting in all this was that she couldn’t believe how many superfluous bits of knowledge she had.

Once the living and the dead were jammed in there together, the dead were stuck, inescapably and constantly, under the feet of the living, who went on thumping and jockeying; the living trampled and ground down all the soft or liquid tissue, which oozed through the gaps in the cattle car’s floor: blood, urine, eyeballs, excrement, even bone marrow.

A few had tried to do something about this but ultimately could change nothing, their shouts being insufficient; after a while she too lost her voice, no longer saying that things shouldn’t be like this.

She had to conceal from herself what her feet and others’ had done in the infernal heat and maddening cacophony, for days on end.

Her mind invented a fear with which to occupy her memory.

That she could no longer wear her medium-heeled shoes with their arch supports, or that she would have constant guilt feelings about the ankle boots of her two dead sons.

The sounds now echoing from her other life, the creaking of mucous, muscle fibers, tendons, and cartilage, were sounds that even that stranger, identical with her, could not have heard, theoretically, given the other constant noise and clatter, the crying, the clanking of the cattle cars’ buffers, and the frenetic, crazed altercations.

The light did not become much friendlier even when they turned on both sconces and the ceiling light for music practice.

The custom-made furniture that had originally given meaning to this sort of spare lighting were missing from the apartment.

Once, Mrs. Szemző stopped her accompaniment, laughing, and said that Gyöngyvér should not be an alto because she had the voice of a man who’s trying to sing contralto.

They giggled about this for quite some time, saying that Gyöngyvér must have been a eunuch in one of her previous lives and was now the reincarnation of Farinelli; they laughed, but the idea made them shudder, and neither of them could shake it off. Gyöngyvér thought of this later when she and her famous coach were grappling with problems of her voice sliding and gliding, and the need to clarify her timbre; it was at the tip of her tongue, but she never dared to mention the nightmare to Médi Huber.

Originally, simple lack of brilliance and sobriety free of illusionism characterized the light from those lamps, but for years the appropriate opal bulbs had been unavailable, so the original idea had become plain shabbiness.

One of Mies van der Rohe’s Hungarian pupils had designed the original interior, in fact had built some of the pieces with his own hands, skilled as he was in many crafts. But except for the sconces, little remained of this work because these unique objects had fallen victim to the Arrow Cross terror of 1944.*

The architect’s name was Alajos Madzar; his friends called him Lojzi.

He returned for a while to Budapest, but he had no intention of resettling there.

He planned to go to America, which he did as soon as he had completed his projects.

On the recommendation of friends, the Szemzős had commissioned him to design their villa on Dobsinai Road, including all the interiors, and almost as an afterthought had him design Mrs. Szemző’s clinic on Pozsonyi Road. The circle of friends in which the Szemzős moved had direct contacts with the two great schools of architecture of the era, the Bauhaus and De Stijl; their friends had friends who worked or studied in Weimar, Dessau, Leiden, and Utrecht, or with Alvar Aalto in Helsinki, or overseas in the great architectural firms of Chicago and Boston, even with Frank Lloyd Wright. With the psychoanalytical clinic on Pozsonyi Road, the young architect attracted considerable attention because domestic and international architectural journals often photographed and published articles about his projects.

The mainly young people at these journals, with their networks of interest and lively exchanges of ideas, captured half the contemporary world and documented every progressive change in it, however small.

The architectural attributes of the newly furnished apartment were, however, far from flawless. Madzar encountered serious issues at every turn. He had a good rapport with Mrs. Szemző and right away explained to her what he was objecting to. It would not be honest, what he was about to do, and therefore he couldn’t do it in good conscience. He was not objecting to the apartment’s architectural attributes per se. The world is the way it is, after all, but like Mrs. Szemző, he could not bear decoration for the mere sake of decoration. Yet he’d be forced to decorate because the fundamentals did not show any kind of original architectural idea but were mere imitation.

What was the sense in decorating an imitation. Simulation wouldn’t work either, or pretending not to notice the imitation.

With detailed architectural arguments he gave ample reason why he could not undertake the job in this unimaginatively and falsely constructed building on Pozsonyi Road, but then he decided to do it anyway.

A few days later he withdrew, however.

Mrs. Szemző did not protest and did not want him to change his mind.

She understood his arguments and found his dislike of the building persuasive.

But she could not invent for herself another street, another city, or another practice, so she was prepared to give the architect an elaborate, factual account of reality’s compelling power.

They began their conversation on the subject in the empty seventh-floor apartment, later went downstairs and out on the street to look for a café, and then, as if by chance, they strolled across the Margit Bridge and wound up on Margit Island.

Already this first long walk caused them some embarrassment.

They could not decide which was more important: the person whose work they were talking about or the historical and sociological subject of their conversation; put another way, neither of them was clear as to the connection between these two. After all, it was not enough for Mrs. Szemző to understand the young architect’s motivations; Madzar also had to understand why she wanted her psychoanalytical clinic precisely here and what work she would do, in these surroundings and in this clinic, for the people entrusted to her care.

As if both of them were saying they had to look for something amid the pathological or disadvantageous fundamentals in order to create new possibilities.

Madzar found it difficult to refuse the job for another reason: in Mrs. Szemző’s intentions he discovered an analogy of his own plans, so that unexpectedly the building’s inferior architectural quality became not an irritation but a challenge. His hands would create the new qualities needed for a brand-new civilization, and the places of creation, wherever they may be on this earth, would slowly interconnect. Like the best of his generation he was a devotee of this monastic utopia.

They all shaped their fate under its influence. They threw out their parents’ junk, freed themselves of superfluities, strove for transparency and simplicity in order to create pureness.

They accepted nothing less from one another.

Madzar wanted to take another half step in this radical direction. He did not care to go into finished situations; he wanted to confront others with a fait accompli. When standing under the huge plane trees on Margit Island, Mrs. Szemző understood the architect’s strictures and recognized in them the compelling force of her own attributes and inhibitions; she suddenly began to regret not being younger. Or more daring. She could not begin a new life with him, another life perhaps in another language and on another continent. As if she were discovering that beyond her real life she might have a more intense, ascetic one.

They felt the spray of the fountain on their faces.

His origins do not restrain this man in the kind of tight familial and tribal net that obviously had not let her go or did not let her go far.

She could not take her eyes from the young man’s hair.

Not only was its color, a deep bronze red, unfamiliar, but also its texture, the thickness of the individual hairs, as well as his quickly fluttering eyelids, suggesting nervousness, and his dense eyebrows, attesting to constitutional tranquillity. The roots of his eyelashes were transparently blond, the arc of the lashes darkening gradually to bronze red. His rapid blinks gave the impression that eyelashes and eyelids were unconnected, each fluttering independently.

A little enviously, almost longingly, she thought to herself that this man was heavier than bronze yet would soar. A most original man. Freeing himself from the burdens of the material world. With no apparent mythic bonds.

Mrs. Szemző was curious about the relationship between personal experiences and the characteristics of larger surroundings beyond the personal; about the personal and historical pasts, about everything that was mythical and magical in the historical past, everything beyond individual life that recurred as ritual in deeds and words. Ultimately, she and her friends were concerned with similar issues and occupied with similar matters. Mária Szapáry dealt with the relationship of the body to the fabric draping it, between the body’s nakedness and its exposure, a subject profoundly and thoroughly, yet no less falsely, documented and developed in the history of civilization. They both asked the same question: what was unique in the material they were dealing with, what was general, what was collective and what was individual, how did one fit into the other and how could one be comprehended, shaped, and expressed through the other. Perhaps Margit Huber’s profession was the classic exception, for which the other women rather disliked her. A dompteuse d’animaux. Dobrovan’s basic question was also similar; originally she had wanted to rescue her mere body from this extremely old false world filled with superfluous gestures that restricted her senses.

After her terrible accident, her sight remained her only tool, helped by her hand, her drawing ability, and her attraction to handicrafts.

She designed and wove fabrics and worked for fashion designers.

She learned her profession from her Lithuanian boyfriend, who had studied with an ancient Parisienne, and both of them had probably paid for their skill with reluctant love. She was searching for possible practical solutions to the problem of how, on what levels and by what means, the unique personal imagination can be reconciled with the demand of the masses, and in what way handicraft can be linked to mass production. Or, in the reverse direction, what higher standards might the nature and methods of industrial production, and its new technical achievements, offer the public. Although none of her woman friends knew Madzar — he was much younger than they — they all spoke the same language of ascetic functionality, albeit in different dialects.

They instantly understood and liked what he did on Dobsinai Road and what he designed for Pozsonyi Road.

The given was the seventh-floor apartment in a building erected only a few years earlier and designed on principles of functionality and modular coordination like other similar buildings in the Újlipótváros district. On closer inspection, however, especially by a person who worked or lived in these buildings, one noticed that their interior proportions were determined neither by the necessarily modest scale of individual need nor by the era’s architectural aesthetic, dependent on collective Puritanism and personal asceticism, but by the profit motive of petty, insignificant designers and investors shamelessly exploiting an architectural style.

In truth, the business egoism of the larger context left its repressive stamp all over this quarter of Budapest.

Writhing under the enormous weight of its ongoing collapse, self-satisfied feudal Hungary drags itself from one economic crisis to another, lugging along the antiquated customs, traditions, and inexhaustible wounded pride of its failed aristocracy, which keeps an iron grip even on those who do not share their hope for prosperity in an illusionary greater Hungary or their confidence in the historical mission of the Hungarian people, but who feel great social responsibility for rural wretchedness and urban poverty, yet nevertheless adjust their professions’ rules and demands to the generally accepted and all-pervasive laws of the corrupt gentry.

If one decides to build on illusions, it is not easy to break free of hypocrisy and the worship of decoration.

It showed through in the floor plans; it showed through on the walls.

Mrs. Szemző instinctively understood what Madzar was talking about and what he abhorred.

The ceilings and windows were lower than they should have been though not by much. Not by much, and everything was less spacious and airy than what could be called desirable for a balanced, individual lifestyle. Once again entire streets had been laid out so the sun could not shine into the buildings. In the absence of appropriate architectural demands, transparent geometry turned into rigidity and constraint. Empty style. Material and fittings of questionable quality. Showy but inferior facings that could easily be detached from the underlying constructs. On his first visit to the empty apartment, Madzar already had the feeling that he was not standing on but hovering over the floor. Something wasn’t right with the construction. As if he were hearing an echo of barracks architecture from the First World War. Most buildings in Újlipótváros had an improvised look. They lacked the elementary joy that the personality and sensuality of true artisanship offers. As if every building component, in its symbolic language, were saying, well, it’s true, there is peace now, the lost war is behind us, but industry has not yet recovered, it has not been modernized, therefore we are producing inferior goods.

The ceilings and walls were flimsy. Even the more generously proportioned or better-built apartments were unpleasant to go into because the stairwells and entrances were too narrow, and though there were spaces where one could step out of the apartments, what was the point of so many congested balconies and loggia if they felt like dovecots.

The other side of the street was too near.

These buildings with their crippled interiors could not even present their facades to the outside world. They did not have enough room to look at themselves from any angle, and they couldn’t see how inconsiderate they were of one another.

They wanted to show something other than what they could show.

They had no air.

They either pretended to be open or tried to conceal being locked in.

After a few hours in the empty apartment, Alajos Madzar realized there was no partition wall, door, or window that he did not want to change. Mrs. Szemző had claimed that although historical givens should not be altered, sometimes a single creative professional move, a kind of trick of the trade, was enough, at least in theory, to alter the inner conditions of functionality and to influence the surroundings strongly.

Hearing this practical comment, Madzar asked himself whether there was such a trick in the architectural trade.

Of the many outmoded light fixtures, only one gave any light at night.

And now there was nothing in the spacious hallway except the open, pitch-black piano.

It stood heedlessly in place, just as the movers had heedlessly put it down more than a decade earlier.

In the wake of the wartime devastations, no one analyzed the traces of destruction anymore; neither did anyone look for some trick of the trade when a job was to be done, not anymore.

In her search for a nice warm blanket, Gyöngyvér hurried past the piano like someone about to steal something. She had to go around the piano stool. The movers should be called again to move the piano from the stoppers placed under its rolling legs and shift it a little to one side. Mrs. Szemző had meant to call them, but she never got to the point of picking up the telephone.

Yellowish light from the street and bluish light from the rooftops opposite filtered into the hallway, and Gyöngyvér stepped back to the piano like a sleepwalker at the sight of an apparition.

Seeing nothing else and forgetting every other intention and danger.

The real apparition in these surroundings was her healthy, tanned, naked body and the restrained patter of her bare feet.

As if she and the apparition could not see each other.

She knew nothing of the missing objects or of the history of the house or of this section of the city; indeed, she knew very little. Although Mrs. Szemző had mentioned the night when Arrow Cross men opened every faucet and threw out the window all the furniture Madzar had made with his own hands, still, Gyöngyvér did not know much. She felt for the piano stool and sat down. But the strange apartment, the strange building, and the silence thick with the strange city’s history came crashing down on her.

Among the abandoned objects, the haunting soul of the missing objects spoke to her in the warm early summer night.

Exhaustion or happiness, she didn’t know which, was making her want to cry.

Everything of the past sat here with her in the night, trapped between the bleak walls, among the furniture that was temporarily staying in this apartment.

She completely forgot about the annoyingly handsome man in her room.

Her life was here with her, along with all her earlier lives and the memories of her earliest life. A life she had spent within strange walls, among strange odors and strange objects whose history she could not have known, or anyway whose remaining traces simply had no historical context for her.

She forgot about the blanket, whose proper name, in her own dictionary, would have been pokróc, a bedcover made of fur and coarse wool.

She could not properly learn the names of objects, therefore they signaled their existence to her as senseless obstacles. In her mother tongue, she could not comprehend why in certain life situations it would make sense to say blanket instead of pokróc, and sometimes the incomprehensible filled her with hatred. At this moment she sensed something of the world, however, enthralling in its incomprehensibility and beyond the objects’ material worth, usefulness, names, and existence, beyond all personal sentiments. Her bare feet made pleasant contact with the parquet floor, which produced a warm, ticklish feeling where the edges of the dried-out oak laminas pressed into her soles. She could not have known what sort of moistness had evaporated from the wood, but she had a definite notion about the history of drying out. Even Mrs. Szemző could not have known anything of that since she had escaped much earlier and by the time the event occurred she had been taken away along with her two sons. Gyöngyvér swiveled around on the piano stool, which Mrs. Szemző had bought from a junk dealer long after the war was over. She wanted to cry but the tears would not come, and therefore neither anger nor hatred could surface either. In the Szemzős’ villa on Dobsinai Road only those objects had remained that were not easy to move, which is why she still had the piano, but the piano stool that Madzar had designed later, along with all the other original furnishings, had disappeared.

Gyöngyvér was sitting on the piano stool made for young ladies which Mrs. Szemző had bought as a replacement, remembering the ones she knew in her youth. There were countless chains of causation in the world and they were not perceivable in sequence yet were not imperceptible either. At this moment, Gyöngyvér may not have known what her senses were registering, but, like other people, she felt something definite and therefore formed certain suppositions.

She instantly looked for a possible intonation in place of crying, a vocal passage in her own range reminiscent of shouting, beseeching, or praying; she accompanied her search by tapping two consecutive keys at a time on the piano. She was chasing after a single note or semitone but did not know what she was looking for, while the old piano stool creaked meekly on the well-worn parquet floor.

With her buttocks, she enjoyed the cool leather of the stool, though after a while the contact with the cool cowhide again revived in her bladder the urge to urinate. She had nothing more to let dribble out of her. Her bladder would have liked to inundate the leather on the piano stool.

She wouldn’t have budged but would have just let it all out.

The urine would first collect on the stool and then drip down from it.

She would listen to the trickling.

She saw it; she saw immeasurable amounts of fluid flowing out.

She became alarmed at the mere desire for a flooding.

She had to repress, squeeze back into herself the heat of her burning slit, which made her posture rigid.

She stared out into the night as if watching a movie about her frightened and irritated self.

A sliding glass-paned door opened from the hallway into the living room, whose own wide window, encompassing and framing the entire room, looked up at the empty sky.

Gyöngyvér could not imagine her own home, but wherever she lived, she always had to imagine it anew.

Except when she was singing.

A future home, the home of a famous opera singer, refused to take shape in her mind. Whenever she thought about this, what she remembered was an old, large, worn iron key and bluish-purple lilies on the silk wall tapestry ripping loudly under her hands. In the castle at Tiszadob* they had to tear all the silk tapestry off the walls, and in their enjoyment they screamed and yelled happily together with their instructors, along with the sound of ripping silk.

She could not shake the thought that their enjoyment had meant pain for the silk.

Together, they were busy girls and their instructors freeing this castle, where they lived and worked, from the dark tyranny of the sinister Countess Katinka Andrássy. The windows were closed because Mrs. Szemző was afraid of sudden storms. The pervasive fragrance of valerian in the stifling air may have been the same fragrance that had eaten into Mrs. Szemző’ s every belonging.

Here, in the heat trapped between the buildings, the night had no cool edge, yet she shuddered a little.

One of the tin-helmeted towers of Palatinus Mews planted itself in the empty sky and, as if pinged by the moonlight, glittered in the darkness.

Madzar used the soles of his feet to try to overcome or at least understand the strange floating of the apartment; he stamped, treaded, and trampled on the floor.

He was walking systematically back and forth across the well-laid parquet because he wanted to feel clearly what caused the sense of floating. He listened to the entire building, to how it rustled and made other small noises; without a stethoscope he auscultated the building’s heartbeat, as it were, listened to its echoes, the trembling of water pipes and the gurgling of drainpipes. He let out shouts of various lengths and strength. He did not find this pleasant. The otherwise attractive glass cylinder of the stairwell behaved like an ear trumpet, brutally amplifying the tiniest sounds, elongating them, repeating them individually. Given the interior proportions, the poor quality of the materials, and the lack of insulation, noises within the apartment were received by the cold reinforced concrete and reradiated back into the apartment in the form of imperceptible vibrations. The interior spaces therefore did not project a sense of proper enclosure, had no warmth, and did not provide a feeling of security.

A future tenant would be exposed to irritations for which there would be no remedy. A building might possess several characteristics that a person, though experiencing them, refused to acknowledge, and then it might seem as if the person was creating his frequent and serious bothers on his own, not realizing that the architecture was at fault.

If the ceiling had been higher by just twenty centimeters, the partitions by, say, thirty centimeters, the sound box would not have been so unpleasant. But neither the owners nor the builders had clarified the relationship of the interior to the exterior, which led to fatal disproportions. They had used the idea of functionality to hide their own wretchedness and their profit motive, and this infuriated Madzar.

As if they considered disproportion the incontestable reality of things.

He could think of no architectural statement more irresponsible.

Light was the only thing of any worth here. Strong saturated light whose sources were, of course, decipherable, and one would have to make a thorough examination of the surroundings. Direct light mingled with two indirect lights that had a completely improbable, unreal general effect. He could begin there. But no, he could not, because he would have felt he was merely doing something clever in an emergency situation of unknown proportions.

The problem remained: could he do the job with impunity. The light was indeed very good; he’d hate to give up on it.

I really can’t find it in my heart to do this job, he told the woman flatly.

And, to be honest, I am not very interested in this whole spiritual-poverty business, this whole emergency situation that has become permanent in this country and even put down roots.

Not my cup of tea, he said in English.

It presents conditions I don’t care to deal with, conditions I don’t know what to do with.

You’d rather not touch it at all, said Mrs. Szemző quietly but pointedly.

Unguarded contacts, of course, always have their peculiar hazards.

Maybe you’re right, said the architect, as a person with long experience in avoiding potential friction by being agreeable. I don’t like walking into an unknown. But even that doesn’t signify much, since I sense no danger.

Oh, go on, belittle it, continued the woman insistently. But don’t misunderstand me: you may walk away from the task as far as I’m concerned, I don’t want to force you to do anything. I probably wouldn’t have the talent to do so in any case.

Which made the man blush.

Still, he could not completely disregard the woman’s brazen manner.

Perhaps you’ll understand, he said more coolly, that this is not my egoism. I just can’t clarify other people’s extremely unclear situations.

But I do. Of course I understand.

I can’t poke around in it now, after the fact. The building is a finished thing, I can’t fix it. What I work with is only matter, nothing else, cold and indifferent matter, but it’s not like a hat or dress that one can alter according to one’s needs. What’s in a building — its organizational concept, Zeitgeist, and so on — isn’t as flexible as the soul.

He turned red in his anger.

What right has this pampered woman to make her pointed remarks.

His plebeian conscience was protesting. His exceptionally smooth white skin had a reddish tint that made him prone to blushing. Perhaps this was the only trait that showed his strong personality as vulnerable. Not only could he not stop himself from blushing, but he had no idea how to hide it. Which, unfortunately, he attributed to his low origins. The blushing would unexpectedly gnaw at his sense of security, ambush him, and then in successive waves thrust him deeper and deeper into embarrassment.

This is the first generation of architects since classicism, he said more loudly than was necessary, that does not define itself by representation or decoration. Architecture is not a style, but its practitioners here live in that delusion. The church and the aristocracy no longer stand in their way. This is tremendous, an irrevocable change for the better. The twentieth-century way of formulating and expressing itself is in systems and structures, a functioning system of interdependent parts like a living creature, an organism itself — which architecture must organize according to some concept, of course. The unfortunate bunglers who built this place, to use an historical example, should have solved the problem that the March Youth didn’t solve in 1848*: how to create personal proportions, how to complete the bourgeois revolution. For me, what was done here instead, please forgive me, is very heterogeneous and unclear.

Also impure. And I hope you understand that I’m not thinking primarily of moral conditions. I don’t accept your historical explanation either, because I’m interested not in history but in the substance and condition of things.

He pretended to be raising his voice against the wind, but in fact he was trying to suppress his anger. Once again, he had come up against a patrician woman, just as he had in Rotterdam. Who in her completed personality had indeed completed the revolution.

He was struggling against his blushing and broke out in a sweat, realizing that once again he had fished out for himself the same kind of woman.

If I understand you correctly, you draw a strict distinction between individuality and personality, or the person’s egoism. You hit the nail on the head. This is indeed a risky undertaking. You say that you must separate your own egoism even from your personal needs.

Absolutely.

You don’t consider any collectivism as valid.

I wouldn’t even ask whether I do.

Not the collectivism of egoism, then. For you, only personal agreements are valid.

Exclusively, replied the man, and this time he blushed in joy.

This woman understands him, after all; he’ll give it a try.

That is the only principle I can follow, this is the spirit of our time, I believe, the organizing principle. I must make it fit between the communal and the private, as much as possible with the help of the cleanest and clearest agreement between the concerned parties. In other words, I’d be satisfied with an offer. I propose a possible contract or agreement.

Luckily for him, another strong gust of wind blew in their direction, catching his heavy, full head of hair. Which gave him a reason not to twirl and crumple his hat, but to do something else with his suppressed joy and enthusiasm.

He grabbed at his hair.

Simultaneously Mrs. Szemző grabbed her hat, though the wind wouldn’t have swept it off. As if she were copying the other person’s diversionary gesture because she too had something to conceal. But this made her blush deeply.

Mainly because first came the gesture and only after that her realization of why she’d made it.

In each other’s eyes, they could not have been more exposed.

I think you go too far with psychology. I find it provocative but admit it’s on the right track, continued the man, smiling. His voice was warm and strong. But I may be thinking of these things that concern us both in a more simple, objective, and if I may say so primitive way.

This remark managed to arouse Mrs. Szemző’s anger.

No, no, she said, indignantly and almost harshly, when it comes to thinking, I tell you, everyone thinks the same way. At most, some people prefer their simpler thoughts, others their more refined ones when it comes to saying them aloud. But this has nothing to do with whether they think objectively or subjectively.

Now suddenly and mutually they were angry at each other for what they saw as the other’s lack of comprehension.

But they could not rid themselves of the pleasant feeling that they did not have to vent or experience their anger as enemies. It was as if they had to carry out the command of a strange power, but not with anything like the same conviction. Madzar obeyed as a courtesy to the strange power; Mrs. Szemző was guided by a sense of professional responsibility.

At the same time they also realized it made no difference that they were expressing themselves so politely, circumstantially, and very intellectually. The pleasure had grown so great that words could not stand in its way or curb it. They did not understand what was happening between them. In other words, they had to acknowledge that what was happening under the overcast sky in the spring wind was very different from what they had had in mind earlier in the morning, and also very different from what they were talking about.

As if they were slipping between mental and physical pleasure.

After all, thought the man, who hadn’t yet noticed that he was attracted to this woman. His lightly starched, carefully ironed white silk poplin underpants that came halfway down his thighs did restrain, though could not prevent, an erection. He had to admit that he found the woman quite ugly, though unusually intelligent and independent. But precisely for these reasons, a woman like this was not his type, or at least this is what he wanted to believe about himself. The underpants pressed his erect cock against his thigh, drawing the foreskin back from the tip. It will get caught like that. I won’t pay attention to it. I must not pay attention to this now, he thought.

It rarely happened to him that because of an erection he’d be confused about his own intentions.

Perhaps, if I were a revolutionary, Bolshevik, syndicalist, anarchist, or something of the sort, I could go on a little adventure like this, he said, laughing. In fact, with his laughter he was begging the woman’s pardon and showing her his strength and desire too, with a display of his full set of teeth. Then I could really get into it, obviously, because I’d want to change or save the world. Or wipe out and repair everything that others have done before me. I’m no communist. That’s not the way I think. I need clear frameworks. And supporting them in the background, of course, there must be unambiguous agreement. There is no urban plan that is not based on thousands of important pacts. What ensures the durability of buildings is not the stone or the concrete but the security of the world order. And if I can’t find these necessities here, or if they turn out not to be clean enough, then I’ll go someplace else.

That is why I decided as I did. I hope you understand.

From a distance, standing by the neo-Baroque fountain they seemed like a couple of those practiced lovers who break up for good at least twice a month. Probably neither of them noticed how unjustifiably close they were to each other. They were obviously trying to keep a distance.

Actually, they both leaned back, away from each other, yet their legs and hips remained too close.

This must have created a certain aura around them; on occasions such as this, the body releases incidental scents. Yet this is not why their situation had become so complicated. Their clothing, whose quality and character were comically similar, also reinforced the feeling of mutuality, which meant not that they were becoming similar but that they were finally realizing how similar they had been from the beginning.

It was preparing to rain on this overcast spring morning, but it did not.

They both wore sand-colored Burberry coats, designed for spring and autumn, which differed only in their cut, and they both had on dark hats; the man held his in his hand.

In those days, women’s hats were often worn low on the forehead, the brim pulled down so that the features of the face were taken into the protection and shadow of the hat. The woman bowed her head slightly and looked up from the shadow of her hat into the man’s pale-green eyes. As a protection, with both hands she pressed her pocketbook to her chest. What was considered fashionable in those days in a female figure was a slender, elongated, and overrefined silhouette. Irma Arnót was not beautiful, not even in her youth, but she had a beautiful silhouette, exactly as fragile and graceful as that era coveted.

The wind now swept away, now intensified the man’s scent. It had in it something of the cigar smoke of the Britannia, that old-fashioned hotel on Teréz Boulevard, also a barber’s shaving cream, along with lavender aftershave, and then among many unfamiliar shades the scent’s heavier, dominant, all-powerful central aroma, in which the skin’s nearness can be deciphered. They were already past the point where they listened to each other’s intentions and the secret signs signaling them. But at this stage it would have been inconvenient for either of them with a careless move to step out from behind their defenses and put their cards on the table. They would find that stupid and irresponsible, no matter which of them might propose it, very brutal and ill mannered. After all, one was not put on earth just to be in heat and to mate. Though they happen to have reached the age when many people might ask what other reason was there; does our life have any other conceivable and worthy goal besides this. Both protested instinctively against the emptiness of life, and therefore they were characterized not so much by what they did with each other but by what they denied themselves, by what they consciously renounced.

This is what made this moment so fulfilling, and they took away its grief and joy with them for the hours of loneliness.

At any rate, the man, younger than Irma, who had fled hastily to Budapest after a complicated love affair, did not ask, what made you sad so suddenly.

And it would never occur to them to address each other informally.

He despised overfamiliar amatory commonplaces, such as, what are you thinking about, what are you laughing at. Yet he was not interested in anything else and so, in his thoughts, began addressing her in the familiar. Why are you so overcast, what sorts of shadow are passing over your clever face. If he had asked and the woman had answered anything at all, his erection would have grown stronger. He did not want that. Although it had been in the air earlier in the day when, before leaving the Britannia, just to be sure, he wanted to gratify himself. To look at his erect cock in his hand, how the pleasure followed his movements. He was satisfied with his cock. Yet he had not done it — actually changed his mind halfway and left off with it. He could not embrace or press the woman to himself. And the woman did not ask the man, younger than she, though the question was on the tip of her tongue, from which of his parents had he inherited this maddening head of hair. What stupidities I’m thinking about. As if it makes any difference to me from whom he inherited it. She would have liked to say your maddening head of hair.

Maddening.

A word that would irrevocably show the wonder and amazement she felt for the other.

Neither of them wanted to go that far. Deep brown tended to appear in this kind of red; it was so rich, and undulating. Even with words, it could not be touched with impunity. Mrs. Szemző honestly hoped it would not show on her skin that her back, shoulders, and neck were shuddering. As a special armor, of course, he is defending himself against me, wearing a ritual hair helmet. No matter how she assessed it and kept looking at it, in addition to the brown and red she also saw purple, which seemed improbable. Where did you get the color of your hair, this is the way she would have preferred to ask him. While she was trying to talk herself out of it. I have two children, I’m a married woman, I cannot ruin my professional name with love affairs.

Their exertion was so great they could no longer have spoken in normal tones.

In her confusion, Mrs. Szemző shrugged her shoulders several times. Madzar became like a statue, motionless; even his miraculous eyelashes stopped glittering for a little while.

And then, somehow, they started together on the empty promenade that led along the stretch facing the Pest shore.

And then it became significant and meaningful that they had started out together. And if that wasn’t enough, their steps were in unison.

Which quickly irritated them both.

Some strange power pulverized their independence. It was the other one who did it; the other; there was another one; another one had appeared.

In their embarrassment they could do nothing else: they listened to the loud creaking of the pebbles under their feet. For the man every step was torture. This was not the first time they’d been silent, but until now they’d known what to do with their silences, until now their luck had not abandoned them, as the man put it, nor their upbringing, as the woman put it. Now they feared they had no more reserves and that something might crack, burst open. A situation well balanced until now would become awful. The man could not but think about what he would do with his cock once he was back in the hotel.

Ultimately, it was about a lot of money, about work, nothing else. But it won’t go like this. I cannot go to bed with the wife of every client. And nothing is really forcing me to take on this job. And I owe no one any explanation as to why I might not do it.

They kept telling themselves, enumerating to themselves, their respective reasoned and realistic arguments.

If he doesn’t want to do it, he shouldn’t. I’ll furnish it myself; after all, the building has its own tradition, so if won’t be hard. And that way it won’t cost much. I’ll put the sofa there, the desk over here, and that’s that.

Or maybe someone else can do it.

But that person will not be a man, that’s for sure. Belluka probably knows someone she can recommend.

Each summer the promenades on Margit Island were replenished with fine pebbles from the bottom of the Danube.

They sank into the pebbles, and because they weren’t paying attention water got into their shoes. They were both wearing strong shoes, medium-brown and welted, the woman’s with a raised, athletic heel, the vamps divided in the shape of a heart, the toes ornamented with an elegant twisting pattern. The woman’s coat was held together at the waist by a belt, the collar turned up to keep the wind away from her neck. He could not tell what she was wearing under the coat, but the grain-patterned wool of her dress seemed identical in quality and pattern to the wool of his English suit.

He could not see her silk-stockinged legs, but he thought they were too thin. She had no breasts at all. In a few years, she’d be like a board, like a poker.

The woman was struggling with the thought that although the man’s hands were not particularly handsome, still it would be nice to hold one of them and together dig into his coat pocket. Or to restrain the hand that kept mangling his hat, to hold it down. He might have habits like jiggling his legs, and he probably wasn’t well brought up as a child.

Their steps grew stiffer and stiffer. If one may say such a thing, the man’s hands were positively ugly, his fingers short and thick, his wrists too powerful. Still, she would have liked to feel them, to walk with their fingers intertwined and to keep on walking. To get away from here and go to America with him. They should have stopped to shake the pebbles out of their shoes. And neither of them could bear thinking about the long stroll stretching out before them. The farther they walked from the entrance to the island promenade, the more certain it seemed that once well inside the island, in spite of everything they would irresponsibly fall on each other.

A saving idea occurred to the architect.

They shouldn’t continue in this direction because there was too much wind on this side; they should cut across at the casino and take a look at the new covered hall for the high-board diving tower at the Sports Baths and how it had been marked out; he’d heard it would happen this week, according to the plans.

Maybe he would find the renowned architect Alfréd Hajós* there.

The woman understood the implication of this suggestion, and at the same time the enormous ache surprised her.

She felt in her throat and in her chest that although she would accept the man’s arbitrary decision, she wouldn’t get away scot-free with a surrender.

Because it hurt very much, she would not be free of this pain for a long time. She was suffering and she would continue to suffer.

Luckily, they found nothing and no one.

They found only traces of uprooted trees, a few abandoned ditches from which the designer must have taken soil samples, and a few stakes at various points on the neglected lawn. The construction had been halted for some reason. This gave them an excuse to talk about neutral topics, look around, roam about, linger and be silent, and then quickly turn back.

At the island’s entrance, which is one of the city’s most exposed spots, the wind stormed across their bodies, pushing them relentlessly.

They tried to resist, laughing loudly, they held on to their hats, kept on shouting, accidentally bumped each other, and then deliberately leaned against each other back to back and, holding on to each other, kept guffawing about how they were so enjoying themselves and how each successive gust took their breath away.

Or who knows what took away their breath.

There was nothing to be done about the wind; in the end, they took the streetcar.

In the empty car, they panted loudly, right in front of the conductor, flushed and wide-eyed. They behaved as if they had just saved their lives.

And if they already had, then they could quickly part company at the very first stop in Pest.

Which is the second-stormiest place in Budapest; here, tin gutters often become loose, rain pipes detach themselves from the walls, plaster and roof tiles take flight and crash to the sidewalks.

They parted on Lipót Boulevard as if they never wanted to see each other again.

Otherwise It Couldn’t Have Raged

I don’t know where I got the courage finally, valiantly, to spit it out. The sentence was bad, but I said it anyway. I’d like to have a date with her. It sounded like another person’s voice calling over into my own life.

Maybe today’s young people no longer say things like that, they say something entirely different, but back then that was the proper expression. Propriety, of course, did not make the declaration less shameless.

It wouldn’t have been possible to wipe out or remedy one of my shameful deeds with another.

Only nine months had gone by, I figured out quickly while standing by the rain-lashed living-room window, yet those events seemed to have receded into a calmer distance.

During the fall, there was one foggy evening when I ventured back to those places, but luckily I found not a single soul among the trees and bushes. Yet it seemed so useless to go on with everything as before when I could not help looking continuously into another life. Into a life running parallel to the one I was leading. I should have kept the secret even from myself. I needed more time, maybe the same length of time that has passed until now, this was my ascetic hope, and then I’d forget it completely. Though the best thing to do would have been to kill, that’s what I kept imagining, to kill everyone, leaving no one on earth who might remember those things.

Sometimes I even recalled the black dog, the way it stood over me, panting into my face, longing to lick my eyes.

With legs spread, hips thrust forward, there above me stood the men who knew everything better than I, did everything better than I, and wouldn’t miss a single opportunity.

The strange shadows of huge birds.

That is why I hesitated, helplessly mulling over every prepared sentence, that is why I waited for weeks for the right moment, and that is why I became so harshly determined with my dumb sentence when the right moment finally arrived that blustery March morning.

It was as if for the first time in my life I’d blurted out my wildest wish to a total stranger. Until then everything had been the other way around: I either rejected or expected crude invitations from others, which was much simpler. And I still did not have enough insight into the secrets of men, I still didn’t know exactly how they carried on the dangerous game of making overtures, even though I observed things very carefully, wanting so much to learn the ropes.

I probably should have appeared before a woman in the guise of an innocent, instead of presenting my wish as gloomily as I did when it finally burst out of me. My awkward sullenness made it awkward for both of us to begin like that. Her immediate response to my gloominess was a sadness of her own. As if she were saying to me, this is not what I’d expected from you. I should have been lighter, kinder, sweeter, and hidden my secret wish between two more innocent sentences. Shouldn’t have barged in like that, asking for a date. However, I was anything but innocent. Should have given her every opportunity to refuse without offending me, or to pretend she hadn’t heard right.

She wore a wedding ring, and seemed older than I was.

She shouldn’t have been able to humiliate me even if she rejected me.

Yet to my great surprise, she did not reject my proposition. But not because I played the role of seductive lover well. She must have had some other reason.

Maybe she enjoyed my ridiculousness.

She closed her eyes for a moment, I could observe her dejection, and then she opened them again and nodded. And by that time her sadness was gone. Maybe it had been neither dejection nor sadness but something quite different. I understood nothing; nothing made sense to me, least of all my own existence. Facing each other we were just as much strangers as we had been before, and she’d said not a word. We ran out of time as someone with a receipt headed toward her from the cash register. The key moment was over and we hadn’t even set a time or place for our date.

And we couldn’t, not only because of the approaching stranger but also because it was no longer clear why we should meet at all, never mind where or when.

I was unprepared for her sadness and unprepared for her acceptance, which like my proposition was unrefined and undisguised. If I’d had a way of knowing what she wanted from me, perhaps I’d also have known what I wanted from her. I had just enough experience to decide on having a little affair and I did take the first step, but then had no idea why I should take a second one if she wasn’t glad about the first. I figured that if others did this because they found joy in their amorous romping, then I too should learn how to do it. Something told me that without this knowledge I’d perish. If I get up every morning, I should know what other people do in the successive hours of their day. The thirst for learning urged me on, but the object of my study looked back sadly at me.

My fate had once been shaped by coincidences, but for some time now I had been gripped by decisiveness.

After voicing my awkward proposition, I hadn’t expected much beyond a sweet little laugh and then her telling me, come on, kid, what do you think I am. That would have been a game, something joyful. I had a prepared sentence for it too. And when it didn’t happen that way, it was precisely my calculated decision, nurtured over several weeks, that made me not know what to do. Not with her sadness, her resigned indifference, or my prepared sentences. I didn’t understand anything.

Why is it already turning out differently, why can’t it be predicted.

Other than what my eyes let me see, I knew nothing about her. I did not understand what complete strangers might possibly do with each other so suddenly. Or why they didn’t sink into the ground in shame if they wanted to start something together. I had entered into something that offended my sense of decency, though I’d expected it to turn quickly into liberating pleasure. When you live in a herd of juveniles or students, everything happens by itself, because one way or another everyone is familiar, everyone is driven by similar compulsions to a wild search. Now I was standing by the counter, bare and exposed, having stripped naked. This woman wasn’t a classmate whom I’d run into because of coincidences in our class schedules. It was as if I had said to her, very loudly, that I wanted her and that I wanted to realize this wish of mine as quickly as possible.

Which wasn’t true.

I didn’t even want her by my side. I liked looking at her; at most, I’d have liked to find a way not to have to observe her secretly. I didn’t even want to talk to her. What did she or I have to say to a complete stranger. And I definitely did not think of touching her.

What I wanted was something I always had to be alone with, otherwise it couldn’t have raged.

I thought to myself, all right, now we’ve tried this too. I’m free to go. As if again I had several persons within me, which was not at all surprising, and one of them has been incited by the others to commit this stupidity.

But now it was all over.

She wasn’t looking at me, as if I were no longer there or never had been. I was free to go, all right; nothing was stopping me. I kept standing there clumsily with my glass of coffee, undecided whether to put it down on the marble counter but remain flagrantly in place, or perhaps withdraw with it and watch her secretly in the mirror as I had done many times before, or put down the coffee, which was only an excuse for my staying, and simply walk out of the place.

On the rainy street, a bus pulled up and spewed out a cluster of people in overcoats, some of whom came inside.

On this blustery spring day, central heating was still going strong. The small establishment’s vaporous warmth was filled with the smell of coffees, teas, pastries, and wet coats.

It seemed unlikely that we could exchange any more words.

There are moments when one’s attention is so reduced that one sees only a single object, nothing else. At other times one’s attention may be so fierce that objects aren’t even visible. There was this big coffee machine with horn-handled levers and small towers of glasses on top placed inside one another, warming up. She grasped a lever with both hands, pressed it down, and kept her entire weight on it until the hoisting gear clicked across a buffer; only then did she let it go. She had to make a big effort because her body in her white work coat was incredibly light; I truly enjoyed watching. Her breasts or bra bounced against the robe, I could see the outlines, and her strong buttocks and hips made an equally good showing. The lever returned to its original position; out of the resulting steam she smiled at the older man who stopped before her, holding his receipt. It was as if I saw nothing but the irritating glitter of the heat-and-steam-producing metal cylinder and heard only voices in the distance.

You certainly came early this morning, Counselor.

They began to talk right away, speaking as if the words had no meaning, only a place and a role to play.

I knew this older man by sight, a lawyer and confirmed bachelor. He lived nearby, behind the boulevard, in Eötvös Street, very close to the noisy maw of the Hunyadi Square covered market, in the so-called Podmanicky Palace, which had once been a very grand building, but the neighborhood was now considered one of the least attractive in the city.

They were playing exactly the kind of game I should have learned. They said nothing that was not ridiculously simple. First, they talked about the coffee, whether today it should be stronger or weaker, that’s how the game began. They were inexhaustible even on this simple subject, not because they had something valuable or new to say about coffee but because they observed in each other’s words and eyes new possibilities opened up by their lighthearted, carefree expressions.

As if with their words they could coax out of each other’s mouth this special, this elusive and secret something.

Then came the weather: today it will probably be like this or like that.

The wind was howling, raging, and they readily agreed it was raging, sweeping water out of gutters, tearing off roofs; the wind uprooted trees, and they said that it uprooted trees. The red flags and national tricolor flags were soaked in the rain, and the wind slammed the drenched rags onto flagpoles and electric cables.

Somewhere, the aerial cable of a streetcar had snapped, the lawyer mentioned in a whisper, and had electrocuted a number of schoolboys. I understood this happened at the National Museum, the site of the official ceremony. The boys were being led across the street on their way to the Museum Garden. Nobody knew how many casualties there were, but the entire area had been closed off. The official ceremony had been canceled.

The police are on a general alert.

According to a reliable source this might be considered a counterrevolutionary provocation.

I would never have ventured to talk about a topic that did not interest me or that irritated me, and that’s why I’d never lose my clumsiness. And how could I be sure that a stranger might be interested in something that depressed me or made me happy. And if, protected by their lighthearted words, they played with each other so cleverly, why didn’t they arrange a date immediately.

I didn’t understand that either.

They kept playing with secret challenges. I had never reached this point, so in theory jealousy should have been eating away at me. He stepped closer to the woman, who very quietly asked him something, hissing between her teeth, as if I weren’t there at all.

They took me for air.

Who knows, replied the lawyer a little more loudly, but seeing that fortune’s wheel keeps spinning around, today at least we are free.

As he spoke he plopped his big briefcase on the marble counter, and this movement also had something homely about it. He placed his hat carefully on top of the briefcase. As if, in the proximity of the woman and for however brief a moment, he was allowed to set up house. A worn old briefcase a little heftier than a doctor’s bag, a hat made of water-resistant rabbit fur. Now I didn’t have room to put my glass down. At any rate, continued the lawyer confidentially, all court cases have been postponed with no prior notice. And I mean every trial. Well, this also has an advantage, I could see your pretty face earlier.

They should have had a titillating little giggle at this remark, but the smiles meant for each other had faded.

I didn’t exactly understand that.

The tragedy at the museum must have been too large and the pervasive police presence too dangerous for everyone.

The man glanced at me, his look lingering; I must have seemed familiar to him from somewhere. And if he knew me from somewhere he must have been asking himself whether he should say in front of me what he was about to say. Or maybe his eyes were wondering whether I was that other kind of man. Men’s eyes often tried to catch mine, and that’s the question they’d ask themselves. Sometimes they looked at me for so long that I got red in the face. Men are very curious about that question when they look at young men or their own sons.

Now of course I remembered exactly from where I knew him.

And now I was getting in everyone’s way; many people with their paid receipts were trying to reach her to be served. I had to retreat with my glass. Maybe that’s why he didn’t hesitate. Anyway the others couldn’t understand what he was talking about or pretended not to understand.

For security reasons, everyone preferred to pretend they didn’t notice what other people did or said.

Anyway, take a look out there, you’ve never seen so many wet policemen. They were called out on a first-degree alert. Now there’s no use dreaming about a long trip abroad, for example. Even I couldn’t get a travel permit for your sweet person.

They allowed themselves a careful little laugh, and again, what became important was that they were doing something secretive in public.

This did not hurt, did not even make me jealous; I was admiring them.

I took no more sips of my hot coffee, but I ate the lump sugar, first one cube then quickly the other. I shall wait for her. I must prove my faithfulness to her. No matter what happens, however humiliating it might be, I shall wait until everybody is gone again. I was waiting for a single glance from her.

She could not have forgotten her promise to me so quickly.

I had waited for her for more than two months. Ever since they reopened this shop. It’s not possible that I wouldn’t have another opportune moment with her. It did not occur to me that her seemingly credible indifference only made our mutual game more serious.

Because it couldn’t occur to me that I was playing.

On this badly damaged block, this was the first store that after five years had reopened. Young people don’t count the years.

One simply went along observing that everything was slowly changing from what it had been, or thinking that everything had somehow been restored. This side of the boulevard had been completely destroyed in a single night in 1956 by Russian tanks firing from Oktogon Square. The entire row of stores was gutted by fire; their ceilings and the floors above them crashed down. They first restored the ceilings and the second-floor apartments, but for a very long time nothing happened behind the boarded-up shop entrances. The situation remained unchanged for so long that it no longer reminded anyone of anything. The buildings’ facades were painted; later the scaffolding was removed. Streetcars were running. A shoe store, a drugstore, a flower shop, and something else, maybe a tobacco shop, and farther on a woman’s fashion shop — their absence didn’t seem to bother anyone. I couldn’t remember what kind of store had been there before. Who cared that there was nothing behind the boarded-up entrances. Life was not much fun anyway. Very few things remained that still had meaning. And when you remembered something, what came as a surprise were the many things you had managed to escape.

Sometimes this sort of fleeting feeling made my walking around feel unbelievable. It was not plausible that I could get from one place to another just by taking one step after another.

As if I couldn’t completely convince myself that I was able to put one foot in front of the other and, with this peculiar activity, carry my physical weight forward.

This, more or less, is what memory, or oblivion, consisted of.

Because no one could have thought seriously that holed up in some unfamiliar cellar one would survive the night.

By midnight, there was neither electricity nor water. As if the bowels of the earth were on the move, everything was quaking, rumbling, booming, and trembling all at once. Saltpeter was falling from the bare brick ceiling. The way this became integrated into my life was that afterward I never wanted to go down to the cellar, but when I did these memories did not surface; it seemed advisable to forget even the associated anxieties. Explosive blasts first sucked in the candle flames and then extinguished them. Still, somewhere, there was always a new-lit candle. Everyone went deaf, everyone screamed, yet people did not understand one another. They were stumbling around helplessly, groping in the dark, or running around berserk, driven by fright, pretending to have something urgent to take care of.

Someone must have thought that the cellar door should not be closed.

Men opened it and carefully barricaded the passage leading down to it.

Mildewed crates, ancient cupboards, ripped armchairs, and wobbly sofas were dragged out from the cellar’s deepest compartments. Not everybody helped, because some people were busy with themselves, with their crying children, with their families. The latter set up their own sections in the cellar, hoping that the wooden partitions would give them perfect protection. But neither laments and swearing nor the sound of running footsteps could be heard. I didn’t try to figure out why suddenly there were so many of us but instead kept watching the gaping and opening mouths set to scream in fright or hysteria. Still, news spreading in the cellar’s dark passages about contingencies and possibilities sounded sensible. However numb one may be in such a situation, one’s brain fills with speculations. Somehow, there were always more people who tied their feverish desire for action to the remnants of reason and some palpable hopefulness.

The problem was much too big.

It was a sensible idea to leave the cellar’s steel door open yet obstruct the entrance to it. Because if the house were to fall on us, rubble would make it impossible to move the door and we’d never be able to dig ourselves out. Who could count on outside help. Well, all right, the Americans were on the way. If the water main broke, on the other hand, having no exit, we’d drown in the water flooding the cellar. The earth was moving so violently that somebody must have thought of this too. We have no water because the main broke. And there was no way of knowing whether it was going to be over very soon or was just about to start in earnest. Through the flues opening into the enclosed courtyard, we could see that something was burning nearby. Two steep flues opened upward, not far from each other. The formidable sight before us was far beyond what could still be considered real.

Above the building’s high four stories, the red conflagration was reflected in the night sky.

It was like a gigantic shadow play, a licking of the sky.

While a few watched the mesmerizing reddish shadow of tongues of fire reaching into the sky, the cannons ceased for a while. Then one heard only one’s own deafness, which was perhaps more frightening than the noise. Later, from the depths of deafness, one heard machine-gun bursts, which was almost like peace returning.

And it seemed that the cellar walls were being pounded steadily.

The ones who ran out for fear of a burst water main began to smash the cellar’s rear wall in an effort to break through it in the direction of the buildings on Eötvös Street, parallel to us, which were less threatened. That night, people opened a veritable labyrinth under the city through the walls separating cellars, but I heard about this from Pisti only the following summer when we were at Wolkenstein House in the valley of Wiesenbad. The women remembered from the days when Budapest had been under siege in the Second World War, and they could tell the men where to break through the walls. Shortly, there was a huge explosion, and in the renewed cannon fire a fine coat of soot covered the faces of those standing under the flues, and then everything went dark as dense smoke filled the courtyard. It might have been the other way around, first the dense smoke and then the fine soot. In which case the cause of death would be not water but smoke, not drowning but suffocation.

Which is to say, backing away from suffocation. Fleeing from the bodies jostling one another.

And somebody must have thought about how and with what we should stuff up the flues before we all suffocated. Or that same somebody, while fleeing, must have found the right material. While it was still usable, while somebody was still able to do it. Newspapers arrived from the depths of the passageways. Everyone knew this made sense, even though it might not change the situation drastically. One hand passed it on, the other crumpled it, and somebody, in the ghoulish light of a flashlight, that revealed the serpentine streaks of smoke, holding her breath, grasping the grating and seeking the wall’s support, kept on stuffing and stuffing.

It was a tiny woman. I had never seen her in the building before and never would again. Such openings could not be stuffed up with newspapers. Until some thicker wrapping paper arrived, they made very little progress.

We were all gasping for air.

The coughing could not be heard, of course. As if not the smoke itself but the sharp odor of the smoke had torn the mucous membranes. There was no water to wet kerchiefs or rags with, which occurred to me just as it must have occurred to others too.

The ribbed wrapping paper with a waxy feel to it came from Diósgyőr and not in sheets; it had to be pulled off a large cylindrical roll on which one could read IGNÁC REICH, DIÓSGYőR; there was plenty of it, people were tearing and crumpling it. Newspaper was used to fill the smaller gaps. Of course, not to the point where all seepage could be stopped, that was impossible. Partly because everything was quaking, moving, and rumbling, and we couldn’t hold our breath forever. The paper rolls from Ignác Reich’s paper mill in Diósgyőr had been stolen from somewhere in the darkest days of the Second World War by Arrow Cross men, and then, just as senselessly, they left it in the building, in Balter’s care, whose daughters later used some of the paper for wrapping their schoolbooks and notebooks.

We’ll die of asphyxiation.

As if some sweetness had flooded my mouth, which the sharp stench nauseatingly rips open.

Someone stuck a flashlight into my hand when we first started to run away from the smoke, but then somebody found the newspapers necessary for a sensible defense. There was no longer any point in having a flashlight, yet everybody insisted that using it made sense. A small Bakelite lamp that fit one’s palm and produced electricity via rhythmically applied pressure. The longer and more steadily I kept pressing its corrugated metal plate, the sharper and stronger its beam became. Except it could no longer penetrate the smoke and, when it did, I couldn’t see because I was suffocating. Because of my fitful coughing, the light had not been hitting the spot where people doing the senseless work still insisted they needed it.

And then something peculiar happened.

Nobody wanted to escape from the cellar. The beam of my flashlight was jumping, flying in all directions, but somehow I managed to retrieve it, and it did produce some visibility when I kept pumping it. And there wouldn’t have been anywhere to escape to. It was only a matter of time before the smoke would fill every passageway.

Everybody was holding out, yet everybody was running at the same time.

One can hold out only until the last breath and not beyond that, and the physiological needs are uniformly unavoidable for everyone. I was only retching, but several people were vomiting.

The tiny woman also vomited.

She tore the checkered shawl from her neck as if it were choking her. My light slipped off her too, even though I stopped near her in the hope that at least the light would help her. While the light was on her, she could see that she had vomit on her pants and combat boots. Either she had vomited on herself or someone else had. If I’d continued to watch for another second as she wiped off the vomit with her shawl while still retching with only saliva coming out, I’d have thrown up too. I was fleeing with my own retches, though I empathized with her, wasn’t at all repelled.

The building held on decently too, it did not collapse on us. Actually, the buildings on the other side of the boulevard, which were being fired on, were the unfortunate ones, which was our good luck. Ours had to withstand only blasts produced by explosions. None of the survivors speaks of this needlessly, because they all know that no matter what, nothing happens the way one imagined it would.

I’ve never even asked anyone in the neighborhood what happened that night to the people on the other side of the boulevard.

Survivors are busy with themselves and I wasn’t interested in the lives of others either.

In the early afternoon hours, the shop became very busy and I knew there wouldn’t be another opportune moment. This woman not only made the coffee but also did the dishes and waited on customers.

One week she worked in the morning, the next in the afternoon.

When the lawyer finally made himself scarce, I managed to spit out that I’d wait for her after she finished.

Not here, she replied softly and quickly, as if she had to defend herself fiercely against me.

Luckily, she didn’t say that I shouldn’t wait for her.

Continuously, without letup, relentlessly, I thought of only one thing, that I had never seen such beauty and never would again if I left her even for a moment. Her eyes, the color of her eyes or her glance, I don’t know what, but it paralyzed me. Her scent probably had a part in this but I could reach only the edge of it because she took it with her, though sometimes she left thick clouds of it behind. Here eyes were not blue but not green either. As if I were looking down into the depths of unfamiliar waters. I did not understand the angry darkness, but the color of the water was throwing sparks at me. No human can have eyes of this color. There is no water of this color, no material of any kind. I didn’t even have a chance to ask her where, if not here, because her partner was looking at us anxiously, an older bespectacled woman with whom she always worked as a team, as she measured out candy, then fudge, and finally handfuls of jelly beans to an insatiable child.

It was very difficult to hide our cautious glances from her.

She listened as one who needed to know what was happening around her and mainly what transpired between the two of us.

Her thick glasses made it hard to follow her eyes. I’d say to myself, right now she’s not looking, and then she would be. On other occasions too. I could never, ever pretend that she was not a constant eyewitness. She very quickly discovered why I frequented the shop and what it was I couldn’t tear myself away from. This in itself couldn’t have been so conspicuous, and others too came to the shop just to see this woman or her beauty. There were always two or three of them hanging around the coffee machine, chatting, laughing, and not only men but often women of her age too. The older woman watched and observed; she watched everyone. Sometimes I had the impression that she knew everything before I did. More precisely, that she knew better than I how serious this was, while I presumptuously kept on deluding myself that it was merely a little adventure.

Because I didn’t think I felt anything for her. Or I might have thought that that’s how others did it, just take the risk and do it. Begin by just looking, without feeling anything, cautiously look at her, that’s something nobody can forbid. But this woman with her thick glasses right away needed to know what would develop from my interest. Maybe it was more than mere curiosity on her part. She was keeping an eye out for what should be forbidden. She was the boss in the shop, but that couldn’t have meant much in this context. Maybe the difference in their ages was what counted, or the woman’s old age, or her ugliness.

Perhaps she wanted to protect the beautiful young woman from random crazy annoyances.

This seemed unlikely, however, given their cool relationship, more friendly than hostile yet dealing with each other as if they had to avoid tension.

This tension was in the air. Clarissa, my sweet, she’d say to the young woman, or she’d call her my little Klári. And the other would reply, Terike, darling.

Perhaps their tension was just as passionate as the secret attention the young woman and I had been paying to each other. The boss might have feared that the other woman would slip out of her hands, a fear indicating a kind of jealousy, after all. There was a chance that their tension might explode one day, in which case I thought I should keep away from them.

When I turned my back to the counter and looked at them in the mirror, I was acting out of instinct. I must not be the cause of an explosion. Of course, the mirror also revealed to the boss the directions of our glances, but it protected us. It protected me from my self-accusation of being too forward and from the shame of being so crazy about her. Naturally, this act of mine was more forward than if I had turned to her face-to-face, more insane.

While searching for her countenance in the mirror, I saw her back, her shoulders, her naked neck, her hair caught in a loose bun. This was more than I had wished for. Because in the reopened store mirrors covered every wall, which was considered very luxurious since one could see everything from both sides and, from certain angles, the same thing multiplied many times.

Our lives were barely moving on; therefore, those many mirrors confused others too.

You barely stepped into the place and you were already facing yourself among the sweet aromas. And if you wanted to turn away from yourself, you saw at the edge of another mirror how, on the polished surface and in multiple copies, you were turning away from yourself, or how the waitresses, also multiplied, were waiting for your order. Even the ceiling was framed with a mirrored strip.

Of course, some people took to the mirrors immediately and were delighted to keep looking at themselves, or to preen and pose, though doing it as if keeping it secret from themselves. The walls behind the narrow shelves packed with merchandise were also mirrored, and there was another mirror above the sink. This woman named Klára, whom sometimes the boss a little mockingly called Clarissa, always splashed water on this mirror above the sink and then carefully wiped it off. Maybe to see me better. Because sometimes she pretended she had to rinse out the glasses and would turn away from me; I would also turn around, but we could still look at each other — all we had to do was raise our heads a little.

The boss noticed every little irregularity.

She was always complaining about the draft. It may have been too hot in the store, but the new entrance door did let in streams of unwanted air.

She’d be shivering near the door, behind the cash register, with the tip of her pencil following the long column of numbers, and if she raised her eyes a little behind her glasses, she could see in the mirror opposite what the two of us were doing with our glances. One could be exposed in all those mirrors, yet one could also say that’s not me, it’s only some reflection. It’s not the same as looking directly into someone’s eyes. We had some respite from her only when her husband showed up or, around noon, their pathologically overnourished son, a pupil in the nearby music school who allegedly played the violin as wondrously as Jascha Heifetz.

Even in those moments I cautiously looked back at Clarissa in a mirror, and not only because it excited me to know whether we were indeed safe.

January went by, and then February, and still I knew nothing of this Clarissa. Nor did I believe that such a beautiful young woman could be interested in me. After all, she did nothing but look. But this was a big thing because I could not discover anything about myself that would justify her looking. And I had no idea what to do with her first name or nickname either; I did not want to imprint it on my consciousness. I was a little ashamed of this, but it’s how I protected myself. I didn’t want to think that maybe in the future, thanks to some fortunate circumstance, I might wind up so close to her that I could call her by her name or that I too might address her, pompously, as Clarissa. This was completely shameful idiocy, but I had to maintain my distance.

Let this remain a minor novel that no one has ever written and no one ever will write.

I had no idea what beauty was or what one should think about it.

The eyes see something, and when they cannot not see this something it cannot be addressed with a common first name. I must not be interested in anything that has to do with her ordinary life. I did not understand how such a beautiful woman had wound up here, though I couldn’t have said where she should be. The questions cropped up because I was interested in everything. Or, why was she behaving so commonly with everyone. Or, if she was behaving so commonly why didn’t I believe that she was indeed common.

When the boss’s husband was in the shop, I watched her because I had no explanation for the enmity between her and the boss; I wondered what it really referred to or stemmed from. Or why did this Clarissa smile so politely at everyone, and if she smiled so politely why didn’t she go ahead and sleep with everyone. I thought my cogitating was ridiculous, since I wanted nothing from her. I told myself almost each time I left the shop that, no, I will no longer put up with this humiliation; but nobody had humiliated me. I’m not coming back. I won’t come back even if she’s waiting for me, even if she’s really missed me. But no matter how I formulated these firm decisions for myself I could never keep to them, not to one of them, ever.

They made the weekdays horrible because nothing was happening, and Sundays became unbearable, interminable.

Still, Sundays were better than weekdays because I had no idea where she might be, I didn’t know where she lived, and the store was closed.

But from one of the living-room windows I watched the closed iron shutters.

In the evenings, from the same window, I usually followed the shop’s intricate closing ritual.

The lights in the windows went off first, followed shortly by those inside; they came out of the shop with their coats on, but momentarily left the door open.

One could hear the bell of the church in Terézváros; it was eight o’clock.

With a long rod ending in a hook she’d reach up, fit the hook into a ring soldered to the side of the shutter, which she often missed or did not find. I observed their ceremony from the height of the third floor, between us trembled the bare crowns of trees on Teréz Boulevard, and on the cables stretched over the roadway the dim light of streetlamps was swaying. I saw mainly their shadows between the branches. Laughter usually accompanied their actions. If a lit-up streetcar happened to pass, it drew its yellow light across them.

From their movements I could tell they were laughing.

Now one, now the other tried her luck with the rod. When they managed to pull the shutter halfway down, they threw the rod back into the store, locked the door, and, holding on to the shutter together, pressed it down with their combined weight. The last centimeters were the hardest. When the upper ring clicked into the one at the bottom, they slipped a padlock through and the boss took the key; they stood facing each other. Two strangers in an empty street in the evening who nevertheless had to spend every blessed day together. The key was put into a steel box that, after it was locked, had also to be sealed. They usually fussed with this for some time in the cold. Then they said their good-byes. The boss disappeared into the lobby of the adjacent building to drop off the box with the concierge; the young woman moved on.

That’s how the day ended.

I often wondered what would happen if I waited for her downstairs and followed her when she went off by herself. I didn’t think of talking to her; I’d only follow her from a distance and learn where she went every evening. But only on very exceptional occasions did I bring myself to do this, because, to tell the truth, it was better not to. To watch her as she passed by the boarded-up store windows, walking on the empty sidewalk, then turned into the almost completely dark Szófia Street, and then ceased to exist until the next day.

But there were weekdays when I couldn’t resist going downstairs two or even more times. It was an achievement if I went to the shop only once. I had no money, either, could barely buy a double espresso. At other times I’d gain two full consecutive weekdays not going downstairs at all and not even looking out the window; I wanted to feel how strong I was. Now it’s really over, I’d say to myself, she no longer interests me. But it was at just those times I felt most strongly my loss and my ridiculousness. In fact, all I’d done was waste two days, and it would be even more ridiculous to waste any more.

Because when I went back to the store, she rewarded me with a glowing countenance. As if asking me, why didn’t you come if you wanted to see me. As though asking me, why are you playing this game. And the entire agony would begin anew if her countenance was overcast. I could not be certain about anything: was she telling me or asking me these things, did she reserve her maddening reticence only for me. Her face lights up at the sight of everybody. But I could be certain that she was even more beautiful than I had envisioned her in those endless hours when I wanted to forget her beauty and therefore pretended I wasn’t thinking about her.

This is how our story began.

I didn’t notice that it had already begun, because I was not daydreaming about what would happen if I could touch her. Rather, I was contemplating what would happen if I forgot her. If I could eject her from my mind. What would happen if I never went back, if I left her to her fate, if I could convince myself that I neither had nor could have any need for such escapades.

I should look for other kinds of adventures. As if I my old self still existed, the same person from whom I could expel this other self, or my attraction to her, or my insatiable interest.

I can’t say I made no efforts in these directions.

I thought it was some sort of sexual urge from which one could break free. But I could not satisfy this urge, because I longed for nothing and no one, or rather, I couldn’t make my usual fantasizing in this area work with her in mind.

Nobody else interested me, yet somehow I had to deny this.

I made great efforts to be at least interested in others, as they had to some extent interested me before, but any person I engaged in conversation instantly ceased to interest me. And this happened because of her, but I did not understand how and why such a light-minded little promise in my life had become so weighty. Attraction had not been an obstacle before; one should expect at least that much from attraction. But now it was as though it pricked me at my most sensitive point. I could not cope, no, no, with the temptation of waiting for someone else. I should evade or avoid the ominous experience I am about to acquire. Except I don’t know what to do with the insistent sense of urgency.

Neither did I know what to do with the threat that without this experience I’d forever remain alone and my wounded pride would destroy me.

Nothing was happening as I had imagined it would; I knew this too, of course. As if I had to tear myself away from the fatal conviction that I’d been born into a world in which what I wanted to have happen, what only I and no one else wanted to have happen, would simply not occur. A world in which every intention missed its target, every action went astray. As if, using my head, I had to break through a wall that I myself strengthened every day.

Naturally, I had no such thoughts, because what I’m talking about was neither a thought nor a way of thinking; it was just there, hanging in the air, like a zeitgeist. Hope did not vanish, it was somewhere else, impossible to know just where. Elsewhere. Helplessness coursed though the brain cells, and inevitably I had to believe it was my own helplessness. A birth defect or something I developed because my mother had abandoned me. Others are deserving of love and find each other, or from the start possess the ability to love, which I lack. I just stood there with the glass in my hand. She reached for it; I wouldn’t give it to her. All that was missing were six words. Where should I wait for you.

Without an answer, I simply couldn’t leave the store.

She wanted not a word. She waited, resisted, with both hands in the air to take my glass, but with her hand she forbade me to spit out my question.

Others drank their coffee and left their glasses all over the place. I always returned mine properly and put it down on the counter in front of her; otherwise, she’d have to go and collect it. Sometimes she came out from behind the counter, stacked the glasses into little towers, the plates into piles. Perhaps as early as during my second visit she noticed my consideration and responded in kind; she took the glass from my hand and we both nodded, tipping our heads a bit. Sometimes she said, oh, very kind, how nice, really nice of you. I didn’t understand why she had to make fun of me.

And the next day, in revenge, I wasn’t going to bring the glass back to her, but she stopped me with her voice.

You brought it back yesterday, why not today.

Perhaps she felt she was overstepping a boundary; after a while she wordlessly accepted the situation and watched as if to see whether I was really like that or only pretended to be and wanted her to like me, and was trying to deceive her.

And then even the small nod was abandoned.

I’d have liked to say in gratitude that today’s coffee was especially good. Or some such little foolishness, lightheartedly, as people somehow expect from one another. The glass wobbled awkwardly on the saucer and I didn’t say anything. Because it seemed as if my hand were shaking. I did not want the inapt sentence, I didn’t want other people’s sentences. My grandmother had, with the best of intentions, stuffed my head with all the commonplaces, and they would have worked well in appropriate situations, but I wouldn’t let them.

If she took the glass from me, the tips of my fingers involuntarily touched the tips of hers.

Sometimes she, sometimes I, successfully avoided this involuntary contact, the game being no longer about that but about the avoidance of it. As if both of us preferred the contact to be voluntary yet neither wanted to risk it. I couldn’t do it now, anyway. At the same time, it would have been impossible to stretch the moment out longer under the boss’s eyes, because Klára did not want anything like this to be happening in the shop. As if with her eyes she was asking me not to involve her in a dangerous situation in front of the wicked boss.

In that case, I preferred to take on my own humiliation again; all right, I’ll resign myself to leaving once again without the redeeming words.

I saw everything, I understood everything, I realized what I had to do, yet I did not leave.

The insatiable little child reached the end of his wishes and the three small bags filled with candy, fudge, and jelly beans were lined up next to the scale. The boss could openly raise her eyes to look at me.

She gazed at this lunatic for a long time.

Now I could only hope that a customer would come in and distract her so she’d turn away. Because she wouldn’t turn away to deal with the child, she let him stand there, in front of the counter, jingling the coins in his hand. The glasses the boss wore were small and round, and the thick lenses, when looked at from up close, enlarged her eyeballs. Her alarm was directed at me, but her gaze was always frightened, as if she feared everything and everybody. Her thin bony body was full of emotions. She sucked in her upper lip, the lower one protruding hideously as if she were ready to pucker it, her jaw set and taut. She wore a much-laundered yellow cardigan over her white work coat, perhaps to break the impression of a uniform, to be a little different from the other woman, and as we stared into each other’s alarmed eyes, the yellow of the cardigan particularly bothered me. Because of the emotional knots in her body, she pulled up her shoulders. Her voice was hoarse from heavy smoking, and the humorless edge of her words was at once a defense and an attack; a malicious woman.

She tempered her nastiness with exaggerated obsequiousness, or covered it with sugary tones when she felt compelled to defend herself.

She always had a cigarette burning somewhere; she would leave it anywhere in the store.

What she really needed was to light up and feel the pleasure of the heady first puff; after that, the cigarette was free to smolder as it pleased.

These first puffs left the imprint of her deep-red lipstick on the edge of the paper.

American Dream

A restless Madzar, on the very same day, returned to the building on Pozsonyi Road.

The wind had calmed down somewhat by then; it was around seven in the evening.

He walked up to the seventh floor and did not turn on the lights because he wanted to see the effect of natural light in the opalescent glass cylinder of the stairwell. Opal diffuses light, strengthening the insufficient and dimming the abundant. Which made twilight lighter inside than outside. When he reached the seventh floor he was surprised to find the apartment open, because he remembered locking it himself that morning.

Perhaps this was the moment that decided their fate.

Mrs. Szemző was standing by the window of the inner room, the one in which she would receive patients. Sufficient light remained within the bare whitewashed walls, where raw smells of fresh construction were trapped: planed wood, oil paint, and lime.

He saw a face of hers that no one had ever seen.

They both had on the same coats and hats they had worn in the morning. Time had not shifted; nothing had changed. Madzar was about to say something but he faltered halfway. Perhaps the woman had not heard his steps for some reason. She stood, stiffened, in a state of utter concentration, but it was not possible to know what she was looking at. She was looking out toward the darkening sky, but obviously she was listening inwardly. This sight, more alienating than exciting, made Madzar recoil.

And the woman still hadn’t noticed that someone had surprised her.

It would only lead to a hysterical outburst; this woman would love him madly, she would writhe, go wild, be like a bursting dam, he thought; she would sweep him away.

In the afternoon in the Britannia, he had tried to gratify himself so that he could forget about the nagging need and concentrate on his work, but he did not succeed, because he could reach satisfaction only if he thought of no one in particular. And he thought about this woman whom no one had ever awakened and should not awaken.

At the same moment Mrs. Szemző slowly turned toward the man, but just barely, only with her head, and a peculiar, desperate shout issued from both their throats.

I’m sorry, I really didn’t mean to frighten you, cried the man.

Good Lord, what are you doing here at such an hour, moaned the woman when she caught her breath, recovering from her fright.

I’ve got a job to do here, so I can easily explain myself, said the man, experimenting with a little laugh and some flippancy, but I’d like to know about you.

I wanted to check on what you had told me. I realized you were right. And if that’s so, I needed to see whether in fact you don’t have anything to do here.

You’ll laugh and probably think my fickleness ridiculous, but in the meantime I have changed my mind.

I’d put the sofa there, some kind of desk here, and that would be all. It was just a passing idea that we might come up with something together.

The man did not know how to respond to this.

You know, there’s an unrealized or uncompleted artist in me, and that’s why I always have an ambiguous idea instead of a concrete solution, the woman continued, as if making an obligatory apology, and quite aware of what she was doing. But now, to make an exception, I was thinking simply that we could take psychoanalysis out of the usual stifling dimness — not into sunshine, because it doesn’t belong there, it would go blind there — but at least to half-shaded light, into fresh air. It’s a nice, noble idea, in theory anyway.

Why do you speak so ironically about yourself.

That, at least, you should leave to me.

On the contrary, the man protested, I admit I was talking a lot of nonsense this morning. All I can say in my defense is that with the help of all that obstinate nonsense I managed to get closer. He wanted to say closer to her, I managed to get closer to you, but he stopped in time. He fell silent, but he had the sense that the woman knew exactly the words he had suppressed. Now I understand the nature of your work better, he continued indecisively. After all, you can’t abandon your patients, can’t take them with you anywhere for my sake.

This last sentence, fueled by powerful passion, had the effect of an involuntary confession.

Embarrassed silence followed.

As if he had just realized that he could not take the woman with him to America.

Although it had not occurred to him before that he might want to.

They could no longer rescind their desire. For weeks they had been trying to talk about a job that had to be done, and what they finally said meant something entirely different. His only excuse for himself was that his words had not been clearly understood.

I suppose I’m bringing you into this American dream of mine, he continued, because, he added quickly but still indecisively, I won’t find for myself there the kind of clean architectural situation I once dreamed of.

But in the empty twilight this meant that he might stay for the woman.

Mrs. Szemző hastened to help the man out of his discomfort. And I’ve realized, you know, that the structure and characteristics of our utopias may be similar, but their substances are different, and we mustn’t forget this. I don’t know, I must not, no, for me it is outright forbidden to transplant my problems elsewhere.

But that’s exactly what he had come to understand, the man responded gratefully. Your sense of reality must work more strongly than mine or, put another way, I’m still chasing ideas that somehow insulate me from the same reality that you cannot ignore. This is the actual difference. But it’s also possible that my profession is what gives me freedom. I’ve been thinking about that too, whether I can simply move on with my ideas. Perhaps I’m guilty of turning away too quickly from something or of turning my back on things.

Perhaps, the woman replied.

That’s the question I’ve been thinking about all afternoon, said the man, which of course was only half the truth.

Until now they had been standing motionless, speaking through the open door from one echoing empty room to the other. Madzar noted that the apartment’s lights seemed no less improbable in the twilight, and so he did not tell her about the theoretical question he had been brooding on in the afternoon. The lights occupied his full attention. As if his powerful passion for the woman were sliding into his professional passion for lights. Up above the nacreous sky was tending toward crimson, while below, closer to the street, yellow-beamed lamps were already shining through the loose green foliage.

Then it’d be better if I left you alone now, the woman said.

The man did not respond, because he felt he might stutter and somehow embarrass himself.

He had expected from himself something other than what happened.

That once again he was about to choose his work over a body.

But the woman was alarmed, sensing that it was not so simple to carry out her hasty decision. Perhaps it was only via the man’s body that she would find her way out of this apartment, which, after all, was her property.

Why should she have to part with it.

She caught herself observing the man’s attractive body, searching for an exit and at the same time repeating to herself the words my property, my property. She fell into a trap and felt ridiculous.

No, there was no exit anywhere, and she was procrastinating. She could not deprive her sons of their father, who, incidentally, constantly cheated on her.

Now, for the first time, she understood what it was that her husband could not resist.

This was too much, much too much, barely tolerable. No one could be expected to resist it.

And the man was so taken by their multilingual, and also mute, dialogue — in which their respective languages, so foreign to the other, along with their obstinate and disciplined silences, could neither be separated from nor substituted for each other — that he couldn’t speak.

Or say anything.

He was gripped by his old, adolescent fear that he could not give or say anything meaningful to a woman.

Now Mrs. Szemző had a saving idea.

She thought that the architect should divest her of her property; otherwise, she could not work with him. And that would be the same as divesting each other of their clothes.

And she tarried no longer because her new realization gave birth to a new rhythm of action in her. She started to leave, but for a single fleeting moment stopped next to the man and did something she otherwise would not have done in any circumstance: she dropped her gloved hand on his arm and squeezed it gently. With which she entrusted herself to his care and handed over her property; through his coat and her glove she absorbed the penetrating feel of his strong arm, but she also put an end to her unreal fantasies. So of course she felt a little sorry for herself.

Without a parting word, she hurried through the open door and out of the apartment.

Madzar did not move for a long time. The sudden absence left him breathless. As if he had lost his hearing because of a toothache.

He took in the space to which he had once been so averse. First, with his eyes he greedily felt his way around all the lights in the place as a sort of compensation, so he would not have to experience the woman’s sudden departure as a defeat and humiliation; then he immersed himself in the lights and, forgetting everything else, kept weighing and measuring them.

Although it had grown dark in the meantime.

The insane yellow of the street remained, though, and it transformed the shadows of the foliage.

During the day, in addition to direct light there were two indirect sources of light. This building on Pozsonyi Road stood opposite Palatinus Mews, over which one could look out on the Danube beyond. The lively, weightless reflection of water therefore permanently hovered on the ceilings; the rooms were also flooded and colored by the heavier light thrown back by the enormous, intricate, partially tin-covered roofs of the Finnish-style Palatinus buildings.

Of course, the effect was different on moonlit nights.

At twilight a third, indirect light joined the reflections. This was the multicolored reflection on the thinning green foliage created by the yellow-beamed streetlamps, swaying gently on cables stretched at third-floor level above the road, itself paved with insanely yellow tiles. These effects changed with the seasons and with the time of day. Even at night, there was never a moment without some interesting play of reflected lights. He should try to separate out the mutable elements in this milieu and then perhaps trap them somehow, in some material, so as to stabilize their effects permanently.

He forgot about the woman in an instant.

At most, a first little drop of sperm made the beak of his foreskin stick to his underpants, and he tugged it free.

They had come to an agreement earlier about having to lift the psychoanalytical clinic out of the classical, almost obligatory semi-darkness.

That meant dimming the direct light but without shutting off the outside world, bringing it inside, conveying the local rhythm of eternal changes.

He made the surface of the inner windowpanes into something like a loose quadrate net, having small squares of the glass chemically treated to become opalescent and then sprayed with the finest sand. The opposite procedure was applied to the outer surface of the windows, where the squares were untreated but the borders of the net were made opalescent. Neither vertically nor horizontally did the two systems of net exactly coincide, and this produced two important results. One could not see out of these double windows, but whoever passed or made the slightest move in front of them could see narrow slits of blue, gray, or cloudy sky, nothing more than unexpected flashes, glints of the unnamable outside world. And the outer net conveyed direct lights as shadow, as if filling the space between the processed panes with itself, and these shadows, intermingled with the sky’s reflections, continually played on the walls, left mostly bare.

He left the walls bare but not smooth; their speckled surface gave the walls an irregular texture.

He placed very few pieces of furniture in the available space.

Which opened up on the courtyard side, allowing light to enter, explore, and revive the dead and scandalously proportioned hallway. He did this by replacing the primitive doors to the kitchen and maid’s room with suspended sliding doors fitted with four-square, opaque-glass panes. Here he did not repeat the net motif, which on the double outside windows of the kitchen, maid’s room, and inner rooms formed strong elongated and multiple shadows on the walls, but he did suggest it with an unfinished frame around the glass. As if to say that although one couldn’t look into or out of just anywhere, in certain conditions the space was not baffling at all. The transparent frames, gaps, crossings, strips, and intersections might be helpful; there might be a system here that you’ll recognize.

The sliding door to the kitchen was generally closed, that of the maid’s room open, because that was where the clinic’s files would be kept, and this room became the receptionist’s permanent place.

Madzar built the furniture out of unpainted driftwood.

In the morning, more light came from the courtyard, in the afternoon from the street, and whether or not the sliding doors were open, at every hour of the day and in every minute of every hour intermingling lights moved and shifted the apartment around and changed its proportions.

The courtyard windows faced east, the street-front windows faced west, so from early morning until late evening the interior lived in a tension of lights emanating from opposite poles. When clouds blew quickly past or when the sky became clear or overcast, one could actually see the walls moving from and never returning to their original placement. Everything was in constant motion.

Psychoanalysis is a protracted, time-consuming, and unpredictable process in which both patient and therapist must cross over into a kind of eternity. In advance, they can only say they will repeat the ritual of their peculiar dialogue every week, but the end of the dialogue cannot be foreseen. You enter a castle with no exit. Everyone who has ever stepped inside receives a different image of the very same place. While one’s inner sense of space continually expands because of the treatment, and even if one learns nothing or very little of oneself, one gains a shockingly lively picture of the palpable surroundings.

As if it were not one and the same surroundings but three or four or countless different ones.

And this despite the fact that the patient arrives every week on the same day and at the same hour.

Mrs. Szemző was delighted to discover that, as she worked, her behavior and the tones of her voice involuntarily followed the events of light and shadow. This involuntary attention meant that she could not stick to a routine. Light became a factor that affected the proportions of inner and outer occurrences as well as the relationship between history’s past and present; with significant emphases it enriched, modified, and occasionally even directed Mrs. Szemző’s work.

Madzar also modified somewhat the height of the rooms.

This was a kind of architectural manipulation, Madzar later explained to Mrs. Szemző. I had to do something rather objectionable, but I couldn’t leave it as it was.

He raised the thresholds and covered the parquet floor with thick, matte, medium-gray linoleum.

I could raise the entire floor, he explained, but I won’t because it is laid very well. I’d rather just cover it. That way I’ll reduce the feeling of dreariness in the building, show how low these spaces are, and give some explanation for the hovering sensation; footsteps will sound softly and safely, I’ll mute the sounds, there won’t be much noise. It will also help dim the light. I repeat, it’s empty manipulation and I’d have nothing but contempt for someone doing something like this. A bit of fakery, no better than the illusionism of our grandfathers.

Look into the hole, little boy, see the rabbit jump.

They laughed loud and long at this, as if getting even with an otherwise elusive enemy.

Although these enemies had botched everything and, if they could, would continue to botch the whole world, at least now the two of them had outwitted the whole gang of dilettantes.

Tearing Up Everything

When they reopened the shop in early January, there was hardly anything on the shelves. Merchandise was stacked in large cartons behind the counter; people were unpacking. Everything was new, shiny, and good-smelling.

Outside, snow had been falling quietly for days. On the ceiling and in the mirrors the concealed yellow lighting spots mingled with reflections of the white surfaces everywhere.

The young woman stood on the ladder while the older one, sleeves rolled up to her elbows, handed her wine and liquor bottles.

Only my eyes registered the fact that this older woman was one of the branded people: below the crook of her arm, on the inside, was a series of tattooed numbers in blue ink. First a letter, followed by a short horizontal line, a kind of dash, and then the number itself, maybe six digits. These numbers, by the way, could of course be seen only when the men who had them wore short-sleeved shirts or the women sleeveless summer dresses. A stranger’s arm would reach up for the strap in the streetcar, and one could see what sort of fate had befallen this fellow human being. As if this had not been enough, now suddenly his or her life was on public display, could become anyone’s prey. Some had the numbers removed surgically, but the wrinkly or shiny scar left by transplanted skin became a telltale mark.

The streetcar was moving along, its speed allowing gentle breezes to blow through it, and whoever noticed the numbers, if anyone did, preferred to look out the window at the street sweltering in the sunshine. Later on, disabled veterans died or disappeared from the city, I don’t remember when, and they no longer had special reserved seats either, but back in those days many of them were still around.

Some with a leg missing, some with an arm; where once there had been limbs, the shirtsleeves or pants were fastened with safety pins or flapped freely on the stumps. Jacket sleeves were pinned inside jacket pockets. There were wooden legs ending in shoes, crutches fastened to stumps or waists. And scars and wounds, deformities and missing limbs, traces of burns and frostbite on hideous, horrifying faces. None of this needed explanation. I could never decide what was more merciful, to stare as if I saw nothing or to turn away immediately. I preferred turning away.

My shame and disgrace endured because I could neither look nor turn away unnoticed.

They knew why I turned away or pretended not to see anything.

In our neighborhood one often had to perform this hopeless mental exercise. Lack of compassion is insulting, but I didn’t know what to do with my compassion since my aversion and disgust were much stronger.

The most I could do was turn away very, very slowly.

Almost every morning I saw a man of whom nothing remained but a torso and two arms. He propelled himself among people’s feet, on a board fastened on four rollers. My father wouldn’t have been much older than this person, if he had stayed alive, even if in this condition. The man would roll out of Szófia Street, braking with a hand wrapped in a thick leather glove, and I, when I saw him, could not imagine him as anyone but my father. The sidewalk slopes down sharply in front of the pharmacy. I had no idea where he came from. At this time in the morning, people were hurrying along. He always said the same two sentences. The person he addressed was always a man; he waited for a man.

On this side of the street he could let the board plop down off the sidewalk, but then on the other side someone would have to reach under and lift it onto the sidewalk.

He pushed forward a little, and while he rose and held himself aloft on his fists, he let the board roll out from under him and slip off the curb. With an additional push, he heaved his amputated thighs back onto the board and at the same time braked hard with a gloved hand lest he roll out to the middle of the street.

What remained of him was clean, strong, and orderly. It may not have been because of the physical exertion, but his forehead and neck were soaked with perspiration. From the depths, the handsome face looked up at the pedestrians, his long, straight, deep-brown hair furled out and away from his soaked forehead, and he’d ask if the man would help him back on the sidewalk on the other side.

Not even his emphasis changed.

Please, if you could help me, but only on the other side. An unfortunately disabled veteran thanks you in advance for your help.

Generally, the addressed person would be embarrassed because he didn’t know what he was supposed to do, but the miserable man said not another word. He pushed and raised himself, plopped back down, and braked so fast that anyone seeing him for the first time could not properly follow the order of his precisely planned series of movements.

As he propelled himself across the street, the person he had appealed to would follow resignedly. The four little metal wheels made a terrible racket on the cobblestones.

I saw him often and followed him many times to find out where he went.

Men on two legs were seized by shame and abject terror. A childlike zeal, an incomprehensible shame, was expressed in their faces and comportment. If it hadn’t been the torso of an athlete who had asked them to follow him on their healthy legs, perhaps their backs wouldn’t have slumped like that. Making its own infernal din, the rolling board jounced, rattled, and clattered on the uneven cobblestones.

Cars stopped; sometimes the streetcar did too.

When he reached the other side of the street, the torso leaned forward and his two gloved hands found support on the sidewalk, the strong shoulder muscles tautened, and, as if performing an exercise on parallel bars, he elegantly and easily heaved himself up and held himself in the air.

The other person was then supposed to lift the board and place it on the sidewalk, awaiting the stump.

Everyone understood this; there was no need for words or explanations. Still, men with healthy legs would have liked to do something more demanding of their abilities and adroitness, as though they had to look for something else that might be truly helpful. But the torso asked for nothing more, nothing less, and as it rolled away on the smooth asphalt among the hurrying feet, the two-legged men were left, unsatisfied, with their shame.

I don’t know where he went, or, to be precise, I observed him from a distance and even followed him for a while.

There was also a two-legged, walking third-degree burn. Judging by her clothes, graceful movements, and well-chosen words, she was a young lady. Not a single lock or individual hair curled out from under her giant hat. The folded-down brim somewhat covered her forehead and shaded her face. There was an improbable dent on her brow. As if there had been a rending, a violent crushing or tearing along the seam of the frontal and cranial bones but no sign of external injury. Indeed, only on her dented forehead was the skin unblemished.

Scars, cuts, welts, crudely creased stitches all over her face. No nose, no lips, only a lipless gap, and two dark holes where the nose should be. Usually she wore dark silk clothes that covered every inch of her; she made her neck disappear in tightly wound silk scarves, and if the scarf slipped a bit, one could see that her neck was completely burned too. Probably her entire body was burned. She wore chamois gloves and improbably thick opaque stockings. Her breath wheezed, she spoke from her throat through the hollow of her mouth and she had no other means with which to shape words. Hers weren’t real words, in fact; rather, one understood the meaning from her articulation, from the way she divided her syllables. If we wound up standing together in a line at a store, I pretended I had other pressing business elsewhere. I could not bear her awful wheezing at such short range.

It was as if my eardrums would explode from the pressure of those sound waves, when in fact it was my heart that nearly broke, but I could not admit this to myself because what can a person do with another person’s broken heart.

Others may have been more indifferent or more patient with her, and she probably had become accustomed to this emotionless patience.

But this too could have been determined if she had had a face to reveal it.

Besides, she spoke like the ladies on the boulevard, used to giving orders, who took their maids with them when they did their shopping in the stores and markets.

Have you some Roquefort left? Very well, then let me have some bologna, but slice it thin, please.

No, not from that one, it seems stale. From the other, yes, the fresh one, yes, it’s very kind of you. And please, only a few slices.

I saw her last when the store ran out of bread.

One could not even get into the store; the selling was being done at a table in the doorway.

The curfew had been in effect until eight in the morning, but if one did not join the line at early dawn there was no chance of getting bread. The line was like a long serpent snaking along the sidewalk as far as one could see.

Almost every hour the radio reported that the belligerents had definitely come to an agreement about the terms of a cease-fire, but when the firing stopped in some places, it flared up at others and then spread throughout the city again. This had been going on for three days and very few people had supplies left.

Everyone was lacking something, and therefore everyone was on the move, going somewhere in the city as if the most important thing in the world was to obtain the necessities and to replenish and maintain one’s reserves. As if amassing these reserves was more important than one’s life.

From behind the table set up in the store entrance, the manager was screaming that he had run out of bread and there’d be no further shipments, because on government orders the bakery on Király Street was now working only for the hospitals. Some people screamed back that he should have told them that earlier, to spare them a long wait for nothing. Stay in line only if you want sugar, semolina, flour, or oil, screamed the manager. There’s nothing else, not even salt. And don’t ask him again from the beginning, because he didn’t have yeast or matches either. But at Glázner’s they’re planning to bake all day, and probably everyone can get something there.

The line quickly began to thin out.

On that occasion I saw the burned woman. She had on a short Persian lamb coat, pants, and military boots, and she was explaining something to an older man. We were all on our way to Glázner’s, on Szent István Boulevard.

This sort of thing happened often in those days, and nobody seemed bothered by having to walk to another store. It was not advisable to stay too long in one place anyway. Sometimes one heard, without any official announcement, that something valuable was still available elsewhere in the city, and then an anxious, smaller crowd would start toward a new uncertainty. No one complained. One couldn’t predict anything anyway, not even whether things would be safer or more uncertain somewhere else. There was no future; all that we had was the present moment. One surrendered to necessity, which made one anxious, but moving on to other places gave one some safety. At times it turned out that because of fighting on the streets one could not reach the desired destination, not even in roundabout ways; at other times the goal was reached but the store had closed, or had never opened, or perhaps had been blown to bits in the meantime.

Yet, somehow, something worthwhile always presented itself. And driven by the hope of this something, everyone worked out a strategy.

Everyone seemed to know which way to go and which way not to go.

It was no good to detach oneself completely from the crowd, because that kept one from benefiting from the flow of information, yet too many people all together was also dangerous. Everything was in constant flux. One shuttled back and forth between swelling and thinning groups. It was no easier during the day than in the dark, foggy dawn. Early dawn already had a wintry edge, though an autumnal smell remained. It appeared as if everyone followed their own noses, yet everyone watched closely where others were heading; maybe they knew something. And because of this strange feeling, which in peacetime usually divides a populace, people bunched together. Of course, this was not so good either. Because one guessed that maybe no one knew more or better than the others, were only talking through their hats, and it would be best to continue on alone. For a short time one might be armed with some actual information, or at least knew that others had a different view on the same permanent uncertainty yet were talking nonsense. But alone, one could not decide, for example, whether to cross a square or playground or to try a completely different route.

And the places where the fighting seemed to persist were not necessarily the most dangerous places. If bullets were being fired at a steady height, and if we could see where they were coming from and where they were going, then we’d bend down, duck behind a fence, cling to an upturned streetcar, wait out the pause between two bursts of firing and then run across, bent over, exactly as others had before us. As if there were always others one could follow.

Of course there were stray bullets too.

As if there was always someone, a first one, who had already tried it. But then, when almost everyone had made it across, that’s when the stray bullet might hit someone. Either the person who was shot was left there, or others crawled back and yanked him to cover.

And that meant that a person no one knew was wounded or dead on the spot.

Milk was not to be found anywhere in Budapest. One woman’s milk can took a direct hit. It happened during the day, with weak sunshine filtering through the light autumn fog. The woman had been running across the street toward us from the opposite direction. A few of us were still waiting for the chance to get out of the bullets’ range, and everyone’s faces were contorted, mouths open and eyes narrowed to slits. As if everybody were saying two sentences simultaneously. Do it now. Made it again. When bullets hit her milk can, the woman stopped, incredulous and shocked. Like a mask, her face remained with that expression on it as milk poured out of the can in two separate streams. This told us that somewhere there must still be some milk; somewhere milk was being distributed. Or had been. As if the spilling milk were more important. She did not topple over, only lowered herself on one knee and in her fury knocked the can to the ground, knocked it three or four times, not letting go of the handle. Other people were screaming, more and more of them, but they were late with their screaming.

Then victorious silence.

A dead square, a mute intersection where, ominously, nothing moved.

Closed gates, rolled-down shutters.

Whether it was light or dark, you could not scratch this silence with the noise of your steps. At its depth, something was being prepared. Something was in the air.

This sort of frozen dawn waited for us that day near West Station; not a light anywhere, not behind the windows or above the streets, no movement, no noise. It was cold, foggy, which we felt mainly on our skin and in our noses. We couldn’t see or hear anything. No, not in that direction, that’s for sure. Maybe cats or rats feel things this way. We were still far from the square; we could just barely differentiate between the gloomy sky and the bullet-riddled towers of the station. We had marched to this point like a group of high-spirited noisy tourists. Now it was clear we must be silent and give the square a wide berth. Quickly receding footsteps could then be heard, their echo bouncing back from the surrounding buildings.

Even cats and rats know which way they should go.

From here, it seemed that the upper section of Podmaniczky Street was open.

Others turned there too, because it was the only sensible option. Not together; we walked separately. You said to yourself, somehow I’ll make it to Bajcsy-Zsilinsky Road, and you didn’t ask what would happen then. I saw the picture of Kálmán Street before me, where in peacetime the trolleybuses ran; that’s where I had to get to. Figuring probabilities or weighing possibilities was valid only one step at a time. I wasn’t interested in knowing how I’d get to Kálmán Street.

Only the next step, always.

Never before or after did I feel how deeply the city lived in me. Some need would specify a place, and right away I’d see my situation as if under a magnifying glass. I’d know and see what was where, what sort of corner, stone, recess, or hiding place I could count on, what sort of danger I might expect. Like an animal that knows every trail. Now I must get to Kálmán Street and from there continue without going anywhere near the Parliament or the Defense Ministry. Alkotmány Street was a big question mark because it was so wide, and an even bigger question was how I would reach the other side of Szent István Boulevard. But right now, Kálmán Street was under the magnifying glass, and I didn’t ask what would happen once I made it there. Either something expected would happen or something unexpected, or maybe nothing.

During the day there was always rifle fire somewhere; shooting went on everywhere — close by, far away, much farther away. But only shooting in the street that one chanced to be in meant direct, immediate danger.

When that happened, you were really trapped, and you could only try to find a way out. But of course your success could not be predicted.

As I walked along, somebody asked me what was happening. Bread at Glázner’s, I replied. The street had just started to breathe a sigh of relief. A few buildings had their gates open; insurgents carrying things were going in and coming out. Lights were on in some of the upstairs apartments. The foliage was still rich and full of color; the light made the entire street seem as if the fighting was dying down. The streets looked like this whenever people had a chance to breathe sighs of relief, but nobody knew how long the respite would last. The boy who asked me his hurried question must have been the son of the super. I thought so, anyway, because out of a lit window above us, a woman called down to him.

Pistike, will they turn on the water soon?

He was carrying a long ammo box on his shoulder.

Fuck it, man, you can’t get through here, the boy said to me with obvious goodwill, and he did not answer the woman.

Can’t you see what’s going on?

I did see, of course I did, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if he despised me for not joining him. As if he were trying to tell me that I was nothing but a stupid civilian who understood nothing of what was going on. It wasn’t hard to acquire weapons. I could have asked him for almost anything. I had also seen them more than once handing them out from trucks.

It wasn’t fear that held me back, and I can’t say I had anything against the shooting. On the contrary, I approved. I couldn’t imagine it being otherwise. It was just. And where there is shooting there are dead bodies. But I was the one somehow who had to get bread and everything else, for the members of my family had escaped into helplessness. I found their fear truly disgusting.

We’ve already turned it on, madam. Please, go ahead and try it, please do, Pisti called to the upper floor.

I moved on. One didn’t think of saying good-bye to someone whom one had just spoken to. By the time I reached the intersection I found out from someone else that the Russians had pulled back to Szent István Basilica. And they had cannons. But the railway station remained in rebel hands. That’s where there was free passage to the other side. Only one didn’t know when the whole thing might start all over again.

There was a photo store at the corner, and in front of its bombed-out display window a familiar group was gathering again, or at least among the people coming together I could see familiar faces. Broken glass crunched under our feet. Someone should have made a move, should have decided to go in a definite direction toward a specific destination, but no one did. This one knew something, that one had different information, maybe we should do this or maybe we should do that. An interminable discussion was under way. Everybody was talking, but that wasn’t very interesting. What was good about the whole thing was that in this strange neighborhood one could see familiar faces. Somebody from your own street, your own district. People were looking at one another in the dark, explaining things, pointing at things. Some people were quiet, only listened, and the ones who first lost patience were mainly from this group.

This was not good.

I had to think hard about whom I wanted to follow or join. Any way you looked at it, it wasn’t good, but almost any situation had a chance of turning up something good, and once in a while you could gain a real advantage. In the end, everybody was waiting for his turn, but nobody wanted to be first.

Only a single damaged lamp was giving light above the street. The trolley’s overhead wire had slammed into its cable, the shade had been twisted under the weight and the glass broken, but the bulb was intact. Dead bodies lay among the piles of cobblestones the rebels had used as improvised antitank obstacles. At the corner of Kálmán Street smoke was swirling from a burned-out tank. From a distance it looked as if it were steaming. Maybe it had been trying to go around the piles of cobblestone when it caught on fire. It had run up onto the sidewalk and hit a tree; the crown of the tree had fallen on it, and branches and the tank were burned to a crisp together. The blackened branches stuck out of the tank like horns. Only one wall of the collapsed newsstand was intact. In the darkness the foggy air was leafing through white pages. Nothing else was alive. Occasionally the piles of these white, two-day-old newspapers rose and slipped sideways a little.

Even then, I saw that woman again.

Only her eyes, actually, because she held her scarf against her face. That early morning she wore not a hat but a turban. The cashmere scarf and the turban had the same color and pattern. In those days, the sight of such finery was not conspicuous; not even a Persian lamb or mink coat was. People wore many things that earlier they’d kept hidden and wouldn’t have dared to wear. As if they were in the midst of a permanent celebration, though these fine items did not fit the occasion. But she had her arm looped through a basket handle and her hand on the basket just as she always had when going shopping. And while the rest of the people were discussing things, she must have said something from behind her scarf to the man next to her, which he did not seem to understand. This man was wearing riding boots, also an item one hadn’t seen earlier. Then the woman started forward on the sidewalk. The man took a few steps after her, glass and rubble squeaking under their feet, but he did not follow her. She didn’t care; she stepped off the sidewalk and walked on with her basket on her arm. She did not run, did not hurry, and leaned her torso forward just a little.

Like someone going to a store.

The man remained on the sidewalk, which was not very clever because right at that spot the sidewalk protruded and turned like a panhandle.

He was standing on a panhandle with a dark sea of danger in front of him. He should have stepped back or started walking in one direction or other; he should have moved. The rest of us watched to see what he would do.

The woman reached the lit area under the streetlamp with no trouble, but from there the going was harder because of the bodies and the piles of cobblestones. Streetcar tracks poked out from the pavement like dead spines. The city was full of objects that had lost their meaning. Nothing was happening. She stepped between the tracks, where a veritable ditch was gaping under her. This wasn’t bad since she could use it as protection and duck down into it. We did not hear anything suspicious from anywhere in the darkness. At least twenty of us were waiting to see where all this was leading and were not even aware of one another’s breath, or maybe we were just paying no attention to things like that. Once she was across the tracks and out of the area lit by the streetlamp, we could see her break into a run.

If she has managed to get that far, we prayed, she shouldn’t perish now.

During those days it was possible to understand why people did what they did. This woman was saving her life. We saw her next when she reached the side of the building on the corner.

I saw her again at Glázner’s. By then it was light. She had gotten there much sooner than I, because she was already in line when I arrived. When I saw the line from afar, I felt I should just give up, but then where would I go for bread.

The moment one saw a line, one began to figure. This line was so huge that any calculation was doomed. While I was procrastinating — I walked to the front to ascertain that the line indeed was as long as I thought and to see what was happening, and I had to walk all the way to József Katona Street — many more people joined it. But there were other procrastinators too, who also did not believe their eyes; they too walked to the front or looked at the line from afar, pondering what on earth to do. One’s saved life was becoming hopeless. Senseless even in retrospect, as if having survived until now was pointless.

And the longer one weighed the situation, the more one’s chances dwindled, seeing others take the place one should have claimed by right of first arrival.

The end of the heavily populated line coiled loosely from Sándor Fürst Street to Lipót Boulevard. That’s where I had to go to join it. But then it went completely around the entire block, turning back on Imre Sallai Street to reach the bakery entrance on the boulevard. And it wasn’t moving at all. There was no bread. No one knew when a new batch would be baked. Some people had brought small chairs or stools with them. Others just kept standing, shifting their weight from one cold foot to the other, resting now and again by leaning their backs against the building. I no longer had doubts. Going back to take my place, I wondered what would happen if I walked all the way to Petneházy Street, to the bread factory.

Not that I had any forebodings.

Here, at least, things were calm, and perhaps that’s what stopped me from becoming independent. After my very long delay, I took a place at the edge of the curb on the boulevard. The person who came after me had to stand in the street. We could shuffle and edge forward a little, not because they were finally starting to sell bread but because silent impatience somehow compacted the line.

A half hour must have gone by when something happened in the store as a result of which things began to happen along the line too. At first only some restlessness, soft murmurs, people being pressed more tightly together. Everyone wanted to move forward, but there was no place to move to. Where would you like me to go, my dear madam.

In situations like this, everybody has to say something.

My dear sir, a little patience, please.

Well, if you think you know what will happen.

Then a helpless shuffling of feet and, in the hum of exasperation stretched to the limit, the first solitary shouts.

Everybody looks down on the shouters, and for good reason.

To push my way into the store, I’d first have to make way for those who happily, with their loaves in hand, were trying to leave it.

People unfamiliar with the psychology of a queue would think this the most natural thing; after all, it would be in my best interest. If people can’t come out, nobody can go in either. However, everybody has to put up with a number of different pressures simultaneously, and this simply cannot be done in a crowd no matter how well intentioned a person may be. Rationality, a sense of justice, and crowd pressure must fight it out, and no individual has control over these forces. Rationality becomes the most fragile of the three because the farther back one is in the line, and ignorant of what is happening at the head of the line, the greater the urge to move forward, that’s what one’s animal instinct dictates. But a move of even a few centimeters or millimeters unavoidably creates tension. Whether instinctively or deliberately, you shuffle forward, because if you don’t, someone else will, or others will goad you on impatiently, and then your sense of justice will suffer. No matter that one cherishes one’s rationality and sense of justice, there is no way to hold off with one’s back the will of so many people, just as one cannot stay balanced against the pressing weight of others. Suddenly everyone tries to resist and push back against some of the pressure, people in general being well intentioned and sensible, but no one can overcome the treacherous designs of his own animal selfishness. One can’t help it if one is weak and lacks the strength to withstand the beast who has climbed on one’s back, but if people don’t have the strength to close ranks and uniformly resist the pressure at their backs, then the small gap I can create with my own strength can become an opening for the weak and swept-away or, just as easily, for petty self-seekers, cunning foxes, leeches, and greedy profiteers.

Some people wait for just such moment. People differ in their physical as in their mental strength and their consideration for others. A person may have the necessary strength and can bravely stand up to any pressure applied to his back, but all he wants is to hold off the other person, keep him from getting what he wants for himself.

And everyone can find a reason for wanting this tiny advantage. He’s been standing here for two hours. It’s cold. He should be able to go to the toilet at last. His child hasn’t had anything to eat for two days. And if he can’t get into the store, if they run out of the last batch of baked bread just before he gets there, he’ll have to wait at least another hour. He can’t put up with that. It’s possible that indeed he truly can’t; after all, his blood pressure is high, he has cancer or heart trouble.

And what if they run out of flour.

Or the store gets a direct hit.

Or he is trampled by these crazy mean people.

Anybody can see that sense is no longer the master here.

With tooth and nail, he is groping for justice, yet all he really wants is that no one should be unfair to him.

And everybody is screaming and yelling.

He can’t help it, he is screaming too.

The ones who don’t even open their mouths are also screaming. The one who always knew that people were like this, but only now feels it necessary to liberate this knowledge. The one who’s surprised that people are like this and now screams his discovery to the whole wide world. This one didn’t know that his neighbor, with whom he’d been talking just a minute ago, was a wild beast. That one screams because he’s been jammed up against the store window. This one because he has been pushed out of the line. That one’s been stepped on; this one was kicked. There are children and elderly people. There are those who want to come out and those who are being shoved in; there are professional hysterics, and there are those who are truly suffocating. And there are many who can’t believe this is happening to them. Their souls scream, and even the ones who do not do this with their mouths have a peculiar fever wracking their bodies because they can’t resist the others’ yelling and screaming.

A very thin membrane is ruptured.

Most likely, I screamed too; everyone was screaming. At times like this, nothing remains but the grace of fate, luck, and chance. You are no longer responsible, nobody is, for yourself or for the other people, and even if you make it through the mess unscathed, you wouldn’t know who should get the credit. It’s also odd how quickly such a turmoil can subside in a crowd.

I don’t know what happened.

At any rate, the store’s window glass did not break. With bread loaves raised above their heads, the first few customers forced their way out. The crowd pressed against the entrance could not make way for them, yet they managed to push and shove themselves out.

One could see only straining shoulders, backs piled on backs in front of them; in situations like this people have no faces, memory has nothing to preserve.

I saw everything.

I was standing ten meters from them and still don’t know what happened. Backs, shoulders, the white patches of faces.

My hearing remembers.

Shrieking hovered over the congested human mass, but, standing at the very end of the line that went around the entire block yet no more than ten meters from where the bread was being handed out, where at any moment something terrible could happen, we did nothing but scream. As if screaming could remind us of the vestiges of rationality, of a rationality that was still possible.

That they should not be doing this.

Not like this.

And there was anger in this screaming pitted against the shrieking. The anger of self-interest and plain selfishness. If at the head of the line the inevitable happens, then I, here at the very end, won’t get my bread either.

The line in the street went crazy. As far as the eye could see. No one was leaning against walls anymore, people jumped up from their chairs and stools. They had no idea what might be happening, they were turning around, making noises, hoping to move forward. Maybe it happened in the cacophony, in the air, between angry screams and insane shrieks where the opposing currents of helplessness and willfulness clashed.

When the first customers with their bread finally pushed clear of the crowd and stood dazed and happy, or quickly hurried away before someone tore the warm loaves from their hands, the nerve-racking cacophony reached a peak. It couldn’t go on like this. It could not get any louder. Everyone could see that people were coming out of the store, and everyone strove to be among the ones to fill their places. And now they really didn’t let anybody out. Lava must feel like this when it has to crack the crust of the earth and the crust wants to stay at the edge of the crack but still caves in.

Later, an eyewitness could say only that the inner pressure had become stronger, though the outer one hadn’t weakened.

The loaves of bread exhaled hot fragrances.

And if someone inside had been so favored by fate as to get a loaf of bread at last, that person wanted to break out, while the fate of one who wanted to break in trembled in uncertainty. The latter acted so as to get bread. The one hoping to emerge safely with his hot bread acted to save his life. Although nothing had been sorted out properly, the shrieking and screaming somewhat diminished. The line began to move. Which did not reduce the cacophony, now a clamor of agitated indignation. No one was shouting but everyone was swearing wildly, imploring, explaining.

We shuffled slowly forward. In the soles of our feet we felt there was still hope.

And then I saw the woman. Sometimes only her turban, sometimes the vague profile of her burned face. Slowly the sun came out and we started to move quite rapidly. The light felt warm, and the smell of the nearby river was in the air. Nobody talked about what had just happened or what might have happened. Because, after all, nothing had really happened, and if we kept walking at this rate, very soon we’d have our bread. Within a few minutes we reached the corner of Sándor Fürst Street. The happy ones were coming out one after the other. As you moved forward, you paid attention to every little shuffle. Your situation changed drastically. You were no longer at the end of the line but well in the middle of it. You were alert, making sure that no one gained an unmerited advantage, and you were careful not to give the impression that you might jockey for one. The line is moving, everybody’s fine nerve endings are atremble, and everybody keeps their stings at the ready. Everybody is out to gain an advantage, even if only a centimeter or so, and everybody is trying to keep everyone else from gaining the same.

As if each person had put reins of morality on others while the reins holding him were in the others’ hands.

People restrain their own selfishness in one another. If I can’t get ahead of them, into a more advantageous position, at least I shouldn’t fall behind them. When the line moves, there’s no time for argument, and once it stops no one can change his position for a better one. Only now, while still moving. That centimeter and a half must be gained now. And it must be gained not as if I were driven by the dark intentions of selfishness, but as if other people’s slowness or clumsiness made my position more favorable than theirs.

When we reached the corner, the line came to a halt. It was still dark and cold in the narrow street. Only from the roofs did some sunshine drip down to us. And that little warmth and light hit only that small side street that connects Sándor Fürst Street with Pozsonyi Road.

When the line stops, it is a magical moment. Everyone has to acknowledge, alert as they might have been and hard as they might have tried, that they are not next to the people they started out with and not quite in the same relative position to them. Everybody’s efforts were directed to not letting anything change, yet everything did. The familiar coats and familiar faces are the enemy, because many of them are now in front of you. In the next few seconds, you have to establish new alliances with strangers. A bitter moment. This is when quarrels erupt and often become physical. Or suddenly a deadly silence prevails; there is no more hopeful feet-shuffling. In the silence chairs and stools make small noises; sighs are heard. Someone says something, somebody responds. Once again one has to set up residence forever on this one and only spot.

Trouble occurs only when one does not accept one’s place in the universe. Actually, this is not my place, you say to yourself, and, unguardedly, you give voice to your indignation. Most people are wary of this trouble.

Sometimes a common fear even stifles a quarrel that has already started.

Not rationality.

There was silence.

Everybody is afraid.

This could have been the silence of an ordinary autumn morning. There were no sounds of gunfire anywhere.

I got lucky and could lean my back against a wall. Of course, I did a bit of manipulative navigation to reach this position. One could still see on the building wall the damage left from the Second World War. Bullet pockmarks in the plaster had been blackened by soot. I grew up in this city and never thought that this should not be so. But our silence now was not a real silence, because it was touched by a uniform rumbling sound coming from far away.

By then I knew that in the bakery three ovens were working simultaneously, producing a new batch of fresh bread every thirty-five minutes. We figured that we could progress about thirty meters with each new batch. Provided the ovens could keep up the pace. If there was enough firewood and they didn’t run out of flour or received a fresh shipment in time. If they could manage the kneading and leavening as fast as the ovens did the baking.

This was not likely.

We also knew that as of last night, all the ground-floor apartments in this building had been taken over for the purpose of leavening the bread dough. Some people figured out that at such a pace we needed to wait for twenty-five baking sessions and we’d be done in the late afternoon. The question was not whether we could stick it out but whether we’d get our bread before nightfall. Or, if we didn’t reach the entrance by then, would they lift the curfew, giving us more time.

To violate the curfew was harder in the evening than at dawn. It was virtually impossible in the evenings because the city then swarmed with various patrols. The fighting always died down by dawn.

The rumbling steadily grew louder. After a certain point no one had any doubt that it came from an approaching column of tanks. Columns of tanks were not especially frightening. Tanks turned up from somewhere and then moved on to someplace else. Unless they stopped, there’d be no trouble. And it was unlikely that they would choose to come through this narrow street. They preferred the wider streets and avenues, moving at the edge of the road so it would not be easy to throw Molotov cocktails at them from the buildings. The rumbling came from the direction of Angyalföld, and we could guess from the noise that the tanks would have to pass through either Pozsonyi Road or Pannónia Street. And when in this maddening rumbling we could also hear the squeaking of caterpillar tracks, it was clear that they were rolling on the yellow ceramic pavement of Pozsonyi Road, on which every squeak sounded harsher and was more amplified than on regular asphalt. First, only the rumbling filled with squeaks took up the space between the buildings, and then, in the sunny junction of the small side street, we saw the tanks.

They kept an equal distance between them as they moved. One would disappear; the next one would appear. The faint sun grew blurry above the clouds of gasoline fume.

No one in the line moved. Those who could see into the side street paid close attention. But the stench of gasoline grew so strong, the noise increased so much, that everyone kept quiet; no one would have been heard anyway. It seemed the column would never end. The buildings picked up the trembling, as did the street and the sidewalk; I could feel in my limbs how the various tremblings blended into one. It wasn’t I who was trembling.

The rumbling and trembling increased as the tanks, squeaking and screeching ever more loudly, turned up on the ramp of the Margit Bridge, and now the entire bridge was shaking. We could feel the bridge in the soles of our feet. I’ve got a city; my city is split in half by a river, and now the familiar bridge over the river has turned into a sensation. The bridgehead took on the shaking of the bridge, the bridgehead’s shaking was taken over by the blocks of buildings around the bridgehead abutment, and I felt the trembling in my back also. Because of the trembling, one did not think of anything; at most one could listen to the trembling of one’s body.

I sensed no danger. And it did not sound as if anything was about to end.

After all, there were larger military operations for which the Russian troops regrouped, but the civilians did not bother too much with them.

In those days, it was not completely out of the question that the Russians might leave altogether. Leave the capital or maybe even the country.

From where I stood, I could see into the small street. I saw the tanks following one after the other in front of the Szamovár coffee bar. Behind the sunny glass of the display window hung a large photograph of Hedda Hiller, the aging, beautiful nightclub singer who had appeared there every evening until a few days ago. The coffee bar was open and full of people even now. Faces were glued to the glass, watching the passing tanks. Some people stood on the sunny sidewalk, watching the tanks from there. Then something happened that to this day I find it hard to make myself believe. Lazily, as if still thinking about it, one of the tanks seemed to change its mind, and it turned into this small narrow street, grazing the sidewalks with its tracks and making the curb throw sparks, scattering the people on the sidewalk. People ran into the coffee bar, some into the adjacent building. The street emptied out in a second. Only the smell of gasoline and the wide strips of sunshine pouring down from over the roofs remained. We, in the line, did not move. The tank was coming toward us, its barrel raised.

It occurred to me for a second that perhaps this tank was securing the safety of the moving column, in which case everything was all right. It advanced halfway down the small street, stopped but did not turn off its engine.

Nothing happened.

Then I thought that perhaps something was wrong with the tank and that is why it had left the column. But I felt that trouble was near. In the next instant the tank’s barrel moved gently downward. Nobody moved. It seemed to be taking aim at the building opposite or at the wide marquee above the entrance to the Danube Movie Theater. But there was nothing there; people in the bread line were waiting underneath it, motionless. It happened so fast my mind could not keep up. My eyes saw it. Still, I could not acknowledge that the flame bursting out of the barrel and the backward jerk of first the turret and then the entire tank meant that a round had been fired. And then another one.

Two mute pictures.

And a horrific explosion in between. And the next one slamming into the crumbling, collapsing chaos within the cloud of dust, also followed by an explosion.

Tearing up everything.

They Could Not Forget It

A few days later, Madzar was standing alone on the deck of the Carolina, the oldest steamboat on the Danube, and he felt very lonely in the spring twilight.

Under his feet, down in the deep bowels of the boat, the engine was working at a uniform rhythm.

The enormous mass of water absorbed the muted puffs rising from the hollows of the ship, not allowing them up to the deck.

The muted, delayed vibrations, the thrusts of the steam engine’s pistons, the metallic trembling of the hull, the gentle breeze that carried the scent of blooming as well as the cold, heavy fish smell of muddy water from the shore, all coursed simultaneously through his body.

Boarding this ship, which sailed regularly between Vienna and Belgrade, meant journeying back to his childhood. Already then, one of his favorite daydreams was to penetrate the immense universe that breathed like an animal and was, in every single one of its elements, suffused with the currents of existence. Let me see how every species of all living things, along with their functions, all the stars, internal organs, and snow crystals, pulsing bloodstreams, myriad details of bridges and cathedrals, how all of these are linked together.

The river was swelling.

His cosmic efforts led to no convincing result, of course, neither then nor later, and it would have been strange indeed if the little son of a shipwright from Mohács had succeeded in reconstructing the metaphysical structure of a pantheistic world.

He had the impression that he attributed significance to relationships and analogies that had none or, worse, that he was unaware of certain phenomena and overestimated the significance of others, which kept him from understanding them. He couldn’t understand, for instance, into what category he should put those of his own deeds he considered ungodly.

Yet he kept at it, began over and over again, buried himself in encyclopedias, ventured into the thick of phenomena and data, wandered off, fell into the depths. He tried to take inventory with his sense organs of every manifestation of every element in his environment and to assign them their possible positions. He realized with alarm that one prerequisite of this effort should be not to make arbitrary choices and separate individual objects from each other, but to know what belonged to what, to clarify the causality of their belonging together, to penetrate them with his imagination down to the last detail, and at the same time to remain outside and, aided by physical and cultural experiences, to establish relationships among all the things he observed, not only between them and himself. He should discern what in their functioning was similar to or different from human functioning, what was personal in the universe, what remained impersonal; by connecting the contact points of the various systems he ought to be able to map the construction, the higher mechanism that perhaps held all autonomous things together.

That was his guiding vision.

He would have liked to uncover how Creation’s objects fitted together; in return for this knowledge, he was ready to be burned alive like Giordano Bruno on Campo dei Fiori.

If they had told him what he was really doing, what he went on thinking about even as an adult and why he did it so compulsively, as if possessed, he would have replied, raising his somber eyebrows, come on now, balderdash, I am not looking for any kind of god.

He leaned against the railing, holding his visored Scottish cap of the same material as his suit, and lost himself in admiring the familiar river as its mute shores lined with silver gray willows floated by.

They were going downstream. The old steam engine scarcely had to work.

The nicely arched bow, ending in a long, broad prow adorned in relief with the bifurcated wavy hair of a mad mermaid, was noisily parting the golden yellow silk of the water. Metal sliced water. The rather high-pitched sound of this was steady, yet the water also made smaller, one might say more objective snaps, plops, and splashes around the prow, and these sounds seemed to link the two substances’ interwoven progress with the currents of the depths.

Madzar was going home to Mohács.

The wide paddle wheeler sank comfortably into the water as the river carried it on its murky back.

He could not stop himself from imagining that the woman was coming with him; he was taking with him her stranger’s breath, which reached him even here, at the railing of the upper deck; he carried the image farther, imagining they were going together back to his childhood. To share something that was close and unique and dear to him, something the woman did not know what to do with. They had not seen each other for days, did not want to, no, no, and the will remained mutual, and it hurt them both. Madzar had expected not to have hurt feelings himself because he considered jealousy or longing to be senseless, pointless, its complications old-fashioned.

So many things that should simply be eliminated from the modern world.

No psychic illness or emotional misery should darken the doorstep of his consciousness.

Since their talk about furnishing the clinic, however, a shadow had fallen on the demands he made of himself, and he was surprised to discover that despite his encyclopedic efforts and Gnostic passion, he had been unaware of it. Although the phenomenon of death could not elude his attention, he hardly paid attention to illnesses and ill persons. He himself had never had even a toothache; on occasion a mild head cold.

He was not aware of his own health.

Ill persons should be aware of their ruined fate; that’s the real reason her office must not suggest clinical sterility — so as not to strengthen this awareness of their illness.

As if the demands Mrs. Szemző made were at odds with every system his imagination had ever concocted, dangling incongruously from them, as it were. As if he were saying that one cannot see one’s fate for knowledge of one’s own illness. Or awareness of one’s own health. And in that case wasn’t everything other than direct personal experience missing from one’s thinking. I might be pathologically healthy. It gave him pause to think that perception of futile and unreasonable things might be missing from his consciousness because it did not fit with his strict empiricism.

I may be headed for big trouble, there is something I haven’t understood or keep misunderstanding.

He began to be afraid.

Mrs. Szemző, however, protested vehemently against his word usage.

I beg of you, she laughed, showing her frightening gums above her strong teeth, please stop talking to me about illness. What I deal with is not illness; it is not maladie but, at worst, malaise. We must keep the concept strictly in its social context; I insist on that, if you don’t mind. Each soul has its given nature and characteristics just as the body does. The people who come to see me, and this is what has to be considered, my dear architect, do not behave in conformity with conventions.

But that is not illness.

Or it may be exactly the other way around: they cling so strictly to conventions that they become ill. And then it’s clear that the illness has to be considered the consequence, not the cause.

Making himself even more ridiculous, he awkwardly protested against Mrs. Szemző’s protest, childishly repeating that he understood, of course he did, he had read enough psychoanalytical literature.

Mrs. Szemző interrupted the sentence she had begun.

With a glance she grasped that what he had said was partly true; he must have heard or read something on the subject. Then she flooded him again with her full-throated laughter, because she liked to hear the man stretching the facts a little, and under the weight of her glance Madzar once again showed his weak side, blushing deeply.

He watched the woman, envied her for her keen glance, wanted to avenge himself.

He imagined that a woman as self-possessed as she felt none of the pain or embarrassment he did but, head held high, went impassively about her daily tasks.

He couldn’t imagine this completely. After all, he was unfamiliar with the life and daily routine of a well-to-do, pampered Jewish woman of Budapest.

Instinctively he knew that she felt the pain, he could not have been so far off the mark; of course she did, she had to.

Still, he asked himself, why would anybody miss me. Because he was not thinking of a single woman in the cool twilight, but, parallel with Mrs. Szemző, he thought also of the rich Dutch woman from whom he had fled when he left Rotterdam behind. He was very familiar with that woman’s daily routine and deduced from it what Mrs. Szemző’s might be. He imagined the moment when the piano teacher says good-bye but would like his monthly payment before going, which these people always forget, and just then the other Szemző boy rings the bell, having returned from his language lesson. Mrs. Szemző feels that everything is in hopeless disarray again in the old downtown apartment from which, in a few months’ time, they will move to their brand-new house in the great green outdoors. Her husband, on the telephone with someone, is pointing at her and gesticulating about something, but she must change her clothes. And before leaving for the opera with her women friends, she must talk to the maid about next week’s menus and she didn’t want that discussion to make her late for Margit Huber and Mária Szapáry.

To hell with the piano teacher’s monthly fee.

Couldn’t we please do this next week, she asks peremptorily. Although the young man gives her a desperate look, she considers the matter closed. There, you see.

But in this series of pictures she resembles the slightly hysterical Dutch woman more than herself.

The breath of their indifference reached him from their fulfilled lives.

In the badly insulated, unheated street-front room of his parental home, in its pervasive mustiness, he will return to his illusions; he would still prefer to spend the night with the Dutch woman rather than with this one, whom he does not yet know and has already abandoned.

He did not understand anything.

Occasionally a dark object from the depths of the river surfaced.

He did not see how his life would settle down at the side of another person.

Which is usually referred to as resignation or calming down; perhaps he was waiting for America.

As the days passed he was continually occupied with looking for solutions to minor architectural problems, but this brought him no closer to an overall solution. Already in Rotterdam, the question of what his future should be, with whom he might share it, had become an insoluble problem. While the work-filled weeks rushed by he failed to give proper attention to this more general and clearly more significant question, and he could see that the weeks would grow into months and whole long seasons. He reluctantly acknowledged that, judging by his behavior, he put a certain amount of passion into his work, a need for emotional fulfillment that could be neither avoided nor dissolved or even annihilated by the joy of a job well done. He should share it with someone, but not just anyone. The crater of an absence grew deeper in his consciousness. And if he found the someone with whom to share his passion, then he foresaw life-organizing problems that one couldn’t solve with this person, maybe with someone else.

If he did not want to step into chaos, he had to step back, along with his passion, or move on.

How could he tell the wife of a Dutch industrialist to pack her things, dress her children, call a cab, and let’s be on our way. He had to step back — to his work and to nothing else. If he were to maintain the living standard to which these people were accustomed, within a week he’d have been unable to pay the hotel bills. Yet they had been planning earnestly, because they passionately wanted to escape from that doll’s house. In the midst of their fervent daydreaming about their future, Madzar realized the woman had no idea of the dimensions of poverty. She dreamed of ways to rescue her dowry from her husband’s business, but the distrustful look on her face showed that she wouldn’t like to entrust her money to a nobody like Madzar.

She didn’t dare reveal how much money she had.

As if Madzar were looking into a sanctuary of guileless honesty where petty and scheming dishonesty ruled.

Because hard as she tried, she could not imagine things in any other way but that a man would take care of her; after all, that was their obligation.

And with Mrs. Szemző, the whole misery would start all over again.

He had decent colleagues with whom he saw eye to eye on nearly every important professional question — structural engineers, mechanics, and civil engineers, many of whom supported his professional career because they shared his ideas about modernizing the technical and spiritual aspects of architecture — but he had no friends. They’d hardly get to the end of an exciting discussion when these men would hurry off; they had secret nets that supported their personal lives. He had no insight as to how others had managed to acquire a safety net; he seemed unable to do so. If only he had some friends. Or if he could give up his desires, his emotional preferences, which kept sending him into the arms of women who were complete strangers and whose unsolved life problems he was then obliged to take on. The only obvious solution would be asceticism. After all, it was all about the purity of lines drawn on a sheet of white paper, and for that he had to see his place and function in the entire human world of strangers.

And if this was not possible, then he should, at least in his personal life and in the interest of clear-sightedness, step out of the vicious circle of passions.

The water brought an object to the surface, spun it rapidly around, brought it closer, moved it farther away, let it drift with the current.

Sometimes the object showed more clearly, was fully exposed; at other times it plunged back into the water, perhaps to vanish forever. It was hard to guess what might happen next. He always feared that instead of a waterlogged tree stump, board, or spinning tree trunk, he’d get hold of a bloated corpse or blackened carrion, a pig or cow, or, worse, that his grapnel would not hold the target but would grasp something that would pop, squirt, tear, rip open, and spill guts everywhere. This fear, part of the risk in anything he undertook, accompanied him throughout his childhood.

Even in the summer after his last school year in Pécs, he continued with this insane sort of fishing, though he missed the great spring spate.

To have spending money, so he wouldn’t have to play poor boy next to the young gentlemen who, in fact, were poorer than he yet had to behave as though they were richer to comply with the demands of their social class.

He also did it out of some obsession.

When the water was high, they went in a flatboat or punt; at other times they would swim to get a tree stump or trunk, occupy it, steer it, ride on it. The struggle among the competing gangs was brutal. To possess a more valuable tree trunk they were willing to tear at one another’s flesh with their grappling irons. The higher and colder the water, the richer the catch was. They hit one another with shovels. He began as a member of the German-speaking gang, given his mother tongue, but on Sundays he would go to the Hungarian church, which in Mohács was what they called the Protestant church, located behind a stone wall on Calvin Street, so he wound up in the Hungarian gang.

He had never been forgiven for that.

And what he did could not be done alone; he had to betray someone, either his mother or his father.

And he was unable to repair this rift.

There was always need for an observer at the top of the willows; that’s where the smallest boys began their careers. There was also need for a boy who’d push off the flatboat or punt the moment the others were in, and another small boy who, though not yet proficient in rowing or steering, would unhesitatingly throw himself in to catch the floating prey, defying rain, wind, or ice-cold water. He did everything to make the Hungarians accept him. A floating trunk or stump could not always be caught with the grapnel; it would turn over and spin out of reach, slip away. The others were suspicious of him; after all, he had already betrayed the Germans. It made no difference that he had betrayed the Germans because of and for the Hungarians; the Hungarians did not want to understand the logic of betrayal, and the joy of betrayal remained a well-guarded secret. Someone had to sit by the fire night after night and guard the loot until the timber merchants came to pick it up and ship it away. In this, he had to agree with his mother, who always said that Hungarians were the biggest lamebrains in the world. Driftwood was a valuable commodity: the heavier trunks and the ones not yet water slogged were bought by the Serbian merchant Gojko Drogo; stump wood, assorted chunks, and less valuable pieces they sold to the Jew with a lumberyard below the pier on Halász Street.

Suddenly he could not remember the Jew’s full name, but he did recall that his first name was Ármin.

He did not have much time to think about the Jew because the ship’s bell was sounded, and shortly the captain sent for him with an invitation to dinner.

Look at that, Mayer, he called to the cabin boy who had come to fetch him, and leaning out over the rail pointed to the surfacing and disappearing object in the water, part yellow from the clayey silt and part gray with mud churned up by the wheels.

It was like a drowned woman in a short red coat.

The water kept spinning it; when it turned from its back to its stomach it became a tree trunk again.

From the moment he boarded the ship at the Franz Joseph dock, he crossed over into a former world, with different humidity and different air pressure; he stepped back into his earlier life from where he could look back to historical times, even to the time of the Turkish occupation of Hungary.

He breathed differently here and everyone was someone’s acquaintance.

The river would rise, the river would fall; the water flowed through everything and threatened everything.

Everything was becoming familiar — the smells, the immense gray sky with its sultry southern winds and harsh western breezes, the silver-gray shoreline, and, behind the calm shores, the tidelands that had given him the gifts of mystical experiences and charged silences. He had not forgotten them, which is why he did not believe they’d been mystical. Visions pervading his body and soul that to this day secretly directed his life. The whirling water along the body of the ship; the murky water with its two-tone surface, bubbling up from different layers of the riverbed, and the river’s unpredictable, wild currents.

He went home at least once every two weeks. He wanted to make use of his time before going to America.

The abandoned workshop and his mother were the ostensible reasons for his visits home, but he wanted to be near the water, the fog at dawn, the smell of fish, and to let their reality fill his life. Of all the ships on this route, he preferred the Carolina with its classically severe aesthetic, its reliability and comfort, for it brought something with it from the early nineteenth century that Madzar greatly appreciated: a sobriety and modesty in its proportions, as well as mechanical perfection.

This boy Mayer was from Paks, but the captain came from Mohács, and he was one of the most peculiar people Madzar had ever met; they had sat side by side as schoolboys at the school on Koronaherceg Street.

Mayer did not want to be impolite but he hardly looked at the object floating past them in the water.

That’s not a woman, sir, he yelled over the sound of the engine and against the wind.

No, but it wouldn’t hurt to drown women in water, the architect said, and smiled at the boy.

I’ll manage without them for my whole life, believe me, replied Mayer, yelling into the wind.

Madzar, taken aback, looked into the boy’s immobile, somber, dark eyes, at his thin lips and strongly protruding chin with its taut, stubbly skin.

He scrutinized him, hoping to see whether he was yelling the truth or even knew what he was saying.

But you can’t tell what that red thing is, can you, he yelled back in a friendly tone.

No, I can’t, sir, you’re right, replied the boy readily, but what he thought was, I don’t really care; his demeanor suggested that he was ready to butt and gore the whole world.

To charge anything or anybody.

They remained at the railing for another moment. Madzar wondered who could have hurt or insulted this Mayer boy so much, with what and why. They went on watching the object spinning in the water churned up by the paddle wheels, both of them perplexed and silent.

The red they saw was not a woman’s robe but a loincloth on the naked body of Jesus Christ. For a fraction of a second their eyes caught the crudely carved crucified figure on the surface of the water before it was submerged again.

Without a word, surprised by the red painted loincloth on the clumsily carved body, Madzar followed the young man, who in the tension of his body was proclaiming that it was irredeemable, the entire Creation was irredeemable. The end was near.

He knew Mayer’s father, mother, and grandfather; everyone knew they were Jehovah’s Witnesses and believed that earthly hell would soon be over: the Last Judgment would descend on the human world, possessed by Satan, and Armageddon was imminent. Their manners were harsh and unpleasant, like the boy’s, but he did not know what to make of the boy’s response. There were years when Madzar’s grandfather had built several rowboats and more than two flatboats for them; the Mayers of Paks did their fishing with many different people. This boy must have been the youngest son in a long line of children whom they sent, who knows why, to be a cabin boy. While making their way down the narrow steps to the lower deck, Madzar watched the close-cropped nape of the boy’s neck, his bony, tense shoulders, as if expecting that the body’s structure would explain things. Suddenly, on the lower deck, it was hot. The wide windblown corridor, whose white walls were vibrating with bright spots of light reflected from the water, was filled with the aroma of food cooking, perfumes, and tobacco.

The kitchen was sizzling, sputtering, almost bubbling over; each time its swinging doors opened and closed, waves of noise were released from clattering dishes and yelling cooks, waiters, and scullery maids. Light from sconces glittered on the highly polished cherry-red wainscoting in the commodious salon and somberly furnished dining room, while on the low-coffered ceiling the bright, reflected lights of the river swam in the opposite direction. It was as if he almost understood something, as if to a certain degree he comprehended something of the connection between the nature of reflexes and his own attraction to them.

Mrs. Szemző did not appeal to him. He could not even imagine her as somebody’s type. Yet he could not deny being attracted to her. When he had had the chance, he had searched Dr. Szemző’s face to learn whether he could harbor the same sort of feeling for her as the doctor felt for his spouse. This woman surely had a lot of money. An enormous inheritance. Perhaps the husband married her for her money. Which in his case must have been as persuasive as the light was in convincing Madzar to take on the job, those multiple reflections on the ceiling of the empty seventh-floor apartment created by the yellow ceramic pavement of Pozsonyi Road, the surface of the Danube, and Eliel Saarinen’s tin domes, reminiscent of conical caps. And he did not even want to think about the apartment’s interior. Well, one needs money. And the only thing the tin domes, or indeed the entire group of buildings, had to do with Saarinen was that Emil Vidor had followed Saarinen’s ideas for a few years.

One could say that Vidor stole his ideas from Saarinen.

Madzar also remembered the strange words with which Mrs. Szemző characterized the neuroses of her Jewish patients.

The tin dome cast a shadow on them in this brand-new quarter of the city, as did the memory of the Judenhut, the stigmatizing hat Jews had to wear in the Middle Ages. Nothing like that would have occurred to him, and he was surprised by what Mrs. Szemző was saying and how she said it.

The spray over the water often rose up to and swept across the wide low windows on the lower deck; occasionally, rebounding waves splashed the panes. Here one could hear the even seething and churning of the gigantic wheels, the axle’s empty, unexpected creaks. Below this lower deck carpeted in wine red, in the enormous engine room, the engine with its carefully oiled wheels and gears, valves and pistons, siphoned and pushed, squelched and clicked and snapped repeatedly. From the engine room spiral stairs led even farther below, all the way to the ship’s bottom, where two half-naked stokers, blackened by coal dust, worked in the red glow of the boiler and the noise of the puffing engine.

On the upper decks the passengers had to raise their voices a little.

The passengers were already seated at their tables and the din of the dining hall had increased, though on this late April day there were few people in first class — a number of German officers, egging each other on to louder and louder exchanges, and a little farther off, a couple of very constrained honeymooners from Pest, reminiscent of drenched birds. Obviously ill at ease, they held their aperitifs distrustfully in their hands. Perhaps a rich relative had paid for their tickets and they were unsure how to handle themselves. Beyond the couple and isolated from everyone else, at a table set for one, sat a very well-dressed man in his fifties, Elemér Vay by name, the government’s chief counselor, who, at the personal instruction of His Excellency the regent of Hungary, in the following weeks and without drawing attention was to inspect every port along the lower Danube. At the fourth and largest table, Serb hardware merchants sat in poorly tailored frock coats, Gebrocks, greasy and stretched by overweight bodies, badly in need of pressing, along with their massive, colossal, bejeweled, and painted wives in completely inappropriate evening dresses with plunging necklines.

Madzar had the impression, and not for the first time since his return from Holland, that here in the land of his birth, at some point in the past time had lazily come to a halt and now with its last ounce of strength was moaning softly, saying something like, why should I bother to go on ticking. He observed these people with a profound horror as if seeing different variations of himself in his own staid future.

No, not like this.

With the exception of the well-dressed lone gentleman, they were all extremely ridiculous and pitiful.

If Madzar were to stay, his fate would be no different; there was no ingenuity that could enable him to avoid the inevitable.

He would marry somebody, an attractive woman, probably, who would bear children and gradually, imperceptibly become like this, ever thicker, more obtuse, and louder.

Madzar was not dressed for the occasion; he wore simple traveling clothes, a so-called knickerbocker outfit — a six-buttoned, high-necked jacket decorated with a permanently stitched belt, facing pleats, and sewn-on pockets; a vest with buttons one could see above those of the jacket; loosely fitting, baggy knee pants. To match this outfit, he had picked thick, pale-green fishbone-patterned knee socks and thick-soled shoes; out of season such a minor violation of social etiquette was permissible.

Though he was a bit anxious about it.

Supper was served earlier than was customary in the regular season on a luxury ship like this.

It would have made no sense to rent a cabin for such a short trip. He traveled without luggage.

His coat and hat were taken from him by the old Viennese waiter who continually mumbled to himself in different languages; accompanied by the waiter’s purposeless words, he was escorted to Captain László Bellardi, who in addition to being a baron was also a Vitéz — a title given to valiant, heroic veterans of the Great War. Seeing them approach, the captain took his leave of the noisy Serbs.

Behind the protection of his charming smile, for long minutes now the captain had been waiting for Madzar, patient yet almost angry; where was he, he should come and relieve him of his burdensome duty, where is he tarrying.

Not that he needed anyone to relieve him, but he could not forgo an obligatory act without giving an excuse or having a pretext to dodge it. True to his upbringing, he held nothing higher than duty. Now he wanted to chat with his sometime friend rather than with Chief Counselor Elemér Vay, with whom he had a distant familial connection.

God, religion, homeland, the good fortune of every subject of the realm — these were among his duties. He could do nothing publicly unless in the eyes of the world the act had a conventional reason or at least a conventional explanation. All manner of social demands were made on him that were incompatible with his temperament, which, fickle and intuitive at its core, leaned toward arbitrariness and improvisation. He suffered from temper tantrums because he could not consider as his duty everything he could not help performing. And ever since his wife had left him, his body and soul had been held captive by sheer horror and dread. None of this could be seen on him, of course, not in his bearing and not on his face, though he grew somber as he approached Madzar.

As someone who, in the transition between playing two different roles, retains only the physical shell of his own body.

Under the heavy weight of the secret mental burden, his attractive lean visage caved in; bitterness sat on his lips.

But behind the appearance he could show only another appearance.

Moving from event to event, he systematically cobbled together a narrative of appearances that did not conform much with his inner life or most personal intentions, yet this external tale became his biography. When he completed something in accord with appearances, he would tell himself with a measure of self-satisfaction, well, we got away with it. He acted as if the supreme value of individual personal life was the survival of the impersonal life of the group.

As if his sense of I was ruled by the sense of we. He was coming toward Madzar as if he were being pulled by the weight of his head.

Until, between two swaying dancelike steps, he switched to another preprepared smile of his. With this smile he ceremoniously raised his head high, because it was not he who was smiling from behind the woeful mask or who made his feet move as if dancing, but the role he was playing. Right now, he is demonstrating his true attentiveness and genuine kindheartedness to those who eagerly watch the meeting of two friends.

This meant at best only the honeymooners, who followed the two men with their eyes; in their apprehension, they paid close attention to everything.

The strangers’ regard made Captain Bellardi grow taller, he needed the added stature as he needed air, it helped him give meaning to himself, to every one of his gestures. Thanks to the attention his mortal shell filled out with flesh and blood, with hunger and thirst for life.

Madzar felt uneasy at this revelatory spectacle, though he saw no more than what he had already known about the man.

Bellardi was playing a solitary game with himself. If he hadn’t been brought up halfway between small-town gentry and a sophisticated aristocracy, he could have easily spurned or cordially disregarded ordinary fellow human beings. But the duality of his upbringing did not allow him to use either approach, so he regularly disappointed himself. Thanks to his mother, his behavior was designed for a much larger stage than he could ever perform on or even have a chance to see. Yet he was not allowed to complain about the narrow-mindedness and unworthy conditions of the locales he moved in, as everyone else did in the great Austro-Hungarian monarchy. It was positively forbidden to blame others for anything. This was the traditional bon ton: to accept every situation without comment. He could not scheme, as everyone else did in the larger milieu of his life; he could not prattle, bear a grudge, or hate to his heart’s content. And he did not realize that in his obedience he relinquished vital mental functions, over and over again.

He believed he was exercising Christian humility, a very decent thing to do, a duty required by his rank as much as a patronly duty toward his church.

Or at least he offered the appearance of this virtue, deployed against the maladies of self-contempt and misanthropy that tortured his soul and irritated his mind, and that also sometimes led him to be carried away and gravely insult others. In their childhood, Madzar had enjoyed these excesses of Bellardi’s playful instincts, even though he shuddered in fear of them. Now he was rather shocked at what he had enjoyed years earlier. Though he joined Bellardi’s games up to a point, he enjoyed the extremes of Bellardi’s dangerous overrefinement and decadence as much as his hypocrisy and imaginative cruelty. Or the ominous size of his fury and his always brief temper tantrums.

But once, in a single instance, they both wound up on the other shore, from which, in the moral sense, neither of them could return.

Take everything easy, casually; you can possess only what does not touch you. Don’t bother with forgetting; within three days even pain loses its sting.

Who else in Mohács could say such a thing; given his behavior, nobody but he.

In company, a serious person does not burden his fellow humans with matters they should take seriously. Just touches on them, barely. When he turned serious, he made sure with his style and tone that either the joke or its calculated effect, like a snarl, would surface on cue, revealing his boldest interests or power-hungry aspirations.

Everyone could see what he was up to, and his impudence increased the impact.

Compared to his former condition, however, Captain Bellardi was visibly tired, had become almost dejected.

Because of his studies abroad and his completed projects, Madzar saw perhaps more clearly than others the realistic scale of Bellardi’s role playing. It was as if the other man had always broadcast his aptitudes and characteristics on two parallel programs. He probably did this out of self-defense. His upbringing suited neither his personality nor his actual social standing. But with a few playacting maneuvers he could permanently maintain the appearance of a person enjoying an exceptional, privileged status; and in this lawless, corrupt environment, saturated with hatefulness, insults, humiliations, and petty jealousies, others must have needed him to maintain appearances as much as he did. On one program, his upbringing progressed mechanically from its original source, the royal princess who was his mother; on the other program, his needful personality made headway in the same vacuous manner. And, as befits conditions in a monarchical police state, a third person supervised both mother and son: a secret-police agent.

To keep personality and upbringing from initiating a forbidden dialogue.

Above his white-and-dark-blue uniform glittering with gold braid, he presented a charming adolescent face that had been creased and probably quite tormented. Every time they met, this creased look hit Madzar in the heart; he loved Bellardi for it, and it conjured up their love-filled teenage years. Although time could not change the picture he carried within him, on Bellardi’s real face he viewed the end of his own youth. He also saw with his own eyes that Bellardi’s timeless face had grown stronger while his essential being had not changed at all. Except that in the meantime everything had been decided; the number of open questions had diminished, nothing was retrievable or reparable, and the interwoven links of Bellardi’s life’s deeds could no longer be integrated into his being.

There he was, abandoned, shivering, in the light of day.

Madzar saw this in his mind’s eye as the shivering of his own being.

The inner structure of their suffering could not have been very different, and this increased the aversion they felt for each other. Bellardi’s splendid marriage had collapsed miserably after a few weeks, and, Madzar thought, I cannot find anyone with whom to share my fate.

The difference is not so great, he thought.

As Bellardi approached him, he could see clearly that a humiliated, failing self showed through the eternal cheerfulness, and this aroused the suspicion that Bellardi had used this sort of illusory appearance much earlier, as early as their childhood, in order to conceal his raging suffering.

Nothing can remain a secret, but performing in public was one of Bellardi’s obligations, and so he had probably become accustomed to the possibility that people eyeing him, scrutinizing his features, were in possession of insidious information about him.

As if they were mutely asking what could have happened in Alexandria.

The news of the interrupted honeymoon had quickly reached Mohács, and when Madzar came home it was almost the first story he heard from his mother. The baroness Elisa had left behind only a one-line message when she abandoned Bellardi in their suite at the Hotel Prince de Galles on Alexandria’s Corniche. People dared to speak of what might have happened there only in vague allusions. They read the newspaper reports carefully but did not much enjoy the pervasive tittle-tattle that accompanied them. They would not venture to reinterpret the story with their customary animosity or deploy their eternal malice- and admiration-filled envy for high society. Yet they could not resist making embarrassing, deliberately equivocal insinuations. It began with the charge that before the wedding too much fuss had been made about the celebration, the young couple was too beautiful, there were many too many reports in society papers, and the couple’s fall was too fast and frightening. Had they discussed the matter frankly, the gossipers would have had to jettison their illusions about beauty and elegance and cancel their subscriptions to The Hungarian Ladies’ Journal or New Times; then they could have acknowledged their own viciousness and profound unhappiness. It wasn’t clear, though, how the Bellardis’ domestic peace was reestablished only a few weeks after the interrupted honeymoon in Africa, or who was to blame when the expectant young wife then left the couple’s new home in Buda. The society papers maintained a deep silence about these events.

In brief, somewhere, for some people, exciting things were happening, and therefore no one could resist talking about them.

In Mohács, women liked to talk not about complications like those in their own lives, but about poor Laci’s mother-in-law, old Baroness Koháry, who had such a peculiar nature that she could never warm to a man. Well, there’s no help for it, one must be careful when picking the family you marry into.

Beauty isn’t everything; a woman doesn’t have to be an international beauty like this Elisa.

It’s not for nothing that the saying goes, you may be looking at the daughter, but you’ll be marrying the mother.

People noted with some relief when this Elisa came to her senses and returned to her abandoned husband along with her baby; but their indignation was all the greater when three years later the news reached Mohács that she had entrusted her little son to the maid and, without a word, left her husband for good. To leave such a handsome, honest man.

And what a good son.

Madzar’s mother could not imagine how there might be so much evil in the world.

A woman like that should be drowned.

As if she knew exactly what she was talking about but didn’t want to say it out loud.

Drown her in water, as you would a cat, for a woman like that has no heart.

Of course, Mrs. Madzar meant this emotional remark only as a stern warning.

Think well, my dear and only son, think carefully about whom you want to marry.

She did not say this aloud, because she was afraid of her son, who often shouted her down, hold your tongue, Mother, stop buzzing in my ear so much. Even so, Madzar never forgot the warning.

As if he deliberately made it sink to lower, deeper layers.

Once he started roaming around the sunlit streets of the city of his birth again, under the round elms that gave so little shade, beneath closed windows and lowered shutters, past the massive gates and formidable fortresslike carriage entrances, his steps accompanied by the implacable frenzy of barking dogs locked in their courtyards and aroused by one another’s rage, Madzar could have no doubts about the local scale of unhappiness.

His interest in urban matters stemmed from the character of this peculiarly settled small town, yet when he had lived abroad he could recall only the broader picture, the ingenuity of the town’s structure, the twittering of swallows under the spacious sky.

The joy offered by a secure place in the world and by the freedom of soaring.

Each quarter of the city was surrounded by a wide, whimsically winding street. If a stranger wandered into this labyrinth of separate lives, following the path of a whimsically meandering street, he would be sure to reach the heart of the quarter — a marketplace adorned with a church. Along with its five different churches, five small squares remained in old Mohács. Looking at the town from the perspective given by his twelve-year absence, Madzar began to suspect that despite the liveliness of the city’s ingenious civic plan, despite the varying architectural styles strictly separated along religious and ethnic lines, creating a diversity within the unifying whole, and despite the harmonious tenements and rhythmically proportioned blocks of barns, granaries, and stables piled together, giving the whole cityscape a certain Mediterranean sobriety and lightness, these pleasant characteristics spoke of a warlike spirit that had been dead for centuries.

Mohács’s spirit is dead.

Its earlier spirit had penetrated its walls and topography, but ever since the Turkish victory* and occupation in the sixteenth century it had barely functioned, and ever since Serbia’s rule after the Great War probably not at all. No matter from whom the Hungarians had retaken the city, it never became theirs again. Today, the Hungarian town lived on solely in the houses’ closed yards, alive with yelping dogs. It was easy to say that the city still wore on its forehead the memory of the devastating defeat there, which over the centuries had become the symbol of the final hours of Hungary’s independent kingdom. But Madzar, returning from abroad, saw it the other way around: with the help of the historical baggage he had acquired, he carried within himself the preconditions of the ancient devastation.

The experience of the catastrophes in Mohács, the shock of them, had blocked the city from understanding what had led to its calamities. And because of this unawareness, the city was vulnerable despite the passage of many centuries, to every new shock. This realization was so powerful for Madzar that it was as if he had become frightened of himself. He felt he’d been carrying his city’s characteristics within himself all along, not just the sensation of devastation but its unconscious preconditions.

In its lovely setting, the city seemed at once threatening and threatened, not as if it were spiritless but as if its spirit were dead. It could never open its mouth to speak, it never closed its eyes, nothing was alive in it except the insane loneliness of its inhabitants; it had stiffened into alertness and rejection. Whether the city turned its personal or its historical face to him, it upset his utopian ideas about social mobility and a fair organization of society.

He dismissed the thought, as he had tried to dismiss all similar thoughts, because otherwise he’d have to admit not only that he saw something of his own mentality in this city but also that he might take a good part of this mentality with him to America, and surely he would not succeed there with an injured utopia.

When he and Bellardi had met up a few weeks earlier for the first time in many years, in his joy and surprise it hadn’t occurred to him to bring up the captain’s depressing marital story, just as the captain did not ask him whether he was still single. Yet he sensed that this familiar man was wearing many more masks than was necessary, and they were far from unfamiliar; and that the reason the captain did not ask him questions was probably selfish caution, not wanting to feel a gnawing jealousy on account of an unknown woman. With the horizontal wrinkles on his forehead, the vertical grooves in his cheeks, the puffed bags under his eyes, the radiant liveliness of his countenance, and the openness of his features, Bellardi seemed at once much younger and much older than he. These features of contrasting adult characteristics on his face, which Madzar remembered from their childhood as having been finely dovetailed, seemed to have been separated by a ruthless hand.

His spirits are dead, like mine and everyone else’s. As when saltpeter invades an old wall and betrays how and out of what material the wall was built, what its capillaries drew into itself from a badly insulated foundation.

Glancing at his own face in the mirror, Madzar tried to guess what he would take with him to the New World, to see whether he had similarly dangerous features.

I’d probably give myself away, he thought, though he could not tell what secret he might reveal on the other side of the ocean.

The social gap between them was so great that as a child it had never occurred to him, not even secretly, that Bellardi might become his friend. Yet today he realized that Bellardi was probably the only person who could have been his friend. If such a thing were possible between men. Or that Bellardi might be his friend today. But from Bellardi’s viewpoint, their relationship worked differently, and had even in their childhood. Bellardi tried to create the illusion that he could bridge social differences, and, to make everyone accept the reality of this desirable illusion, he referred to Madzar several times as his best friend. Of course, with this brazen statement he only strengthened his own social position, making it appear that his origins automatically entitled him to such an unequal friendship and that it would have been truly strange if he had lacked one. He once went so far as to declare, loud and clear, that Madzar was his bosom buddy, a friend in body and soul. The other boys looked at the two of them as if they were idiots. None of them understood what Bellardi’s phrase meant exactly. It was as if Bellardi had declared Madzar his serf, responsible for his master’s bodily comfort, whose entire being including perhaps his soul was ruled by his master. Which, in the eyes of the other boys, was equal to an accusation. For quite some time, they treated Madzar as a servant of the Bellardi family.

These boys avoided Bellardi lest he imperceptibly put them under the yoke of his family, which already ruled the entire town.

Although his privileged status was part of his birthright and could not be denied, nobody knew what to expect from him or how to prepare for what he might do, except by being very cautious with him.

Bellardi was oblivious to these complications, however, and after his initial declaration of friendship with Madzar felt no need to say more. Madzar could not possibly forget the confidence Bellardi had in him.

Madzar was a heavy man, with a soul filled to the brim, a man without secrets almost to the point of tedium.

He was looking at the captain and reassuring himself that his friend was indeed a good boy. He could not pretend he did not know the less favorable aspects of Bellardi’s character, and the captain must have known this though he pretended otherwise, satisfying his longing for appearances. Once, Madzar thought, Bellardi’s embarrassing characteristics had not been embedded so obviously and deeply in his features.

He had light-brown, confidence-inspiring eyes, a finely cut, well-proportioned nose, shapely, strong, full lips above which he sported a rakish little mustache.

My dear, dear friend, he shouted thunderously from a distance. My sweet, good old pal.

He was fond of exuding such phrases, for they befit a lively disposition, full of life’s energies.

The motive for these extreme appellations was his wish to express in a single gesture both his monumental sentiments and the social distinctions he was obliged to respect, and, with that, to designate unequivocally his position in any possible hierarchy. The two adjectival signal rockets he launched made a little pop, shed a little light, then fell into the void, and the Great Hungarian Plain grew dark again.

They had barely shaken hands when he changed his tone.

Welcome, he said gently in a low voice, as if withdrawing the tone he had just used publicly and implying that this low tone was his true timbre.

At times like this, he spoke with the impersonal love of a priest, ready at every moment to share with almost anyone his most heartfelt emotions for the Almighty. Of course he never shared them; he never shared anything. Perhaps he had nothing to share. To tell the truth, he whispered in a voice full of emotion, your arrival is most opportune for a number of reasons. Whenever Bellardi hit this tone, Madzar knew from his childhood that he should stay away from him, tolerate him if he had to, but keep contact to a minimum. Now, after all these years, he also realized that this tone was not Bellardi’s but that of the Franciscan priest who from time immemorial had been the Bellardi family’s confidant and the son’s spiritual guide. Bellardi allowed no time for sulking or reticence, because with another change of tone he put the previous dissembling one into a more desirable perspective. Very soberly, he added that later they would talk more in detail about all this, au coup; they would find time for everything.

I’m certain we shall, Madzar answered, no doubt about it, but he was aware only of standing there again, in front of Bellardi, awkward and clumsy, and this made his limbs feel heavy.

Yet he could not get enough of the playacting.

There was a crack through which he gained an image and some sense of his own heavy disposition.

It was as if he were saying to Bellardi, you never fail to amaze me, when in fact it was his firm intention to demand that he stop, leave off with these tiresome and superfluous appearances, this foolish masquerade. But Bellardi, encouraged by his success, did exactly the opposite of what his friend expected. First, he took a step not toward, but sideways before his guest, coming so close as to make Madzar inadvertently recoil, not unlike a horse held short by its bridle. And then he took another step, beyond the necessary or possible, thereby issuing a challenge, a provocation.

He could not let go of his friend, patting and squeezing his solid but helpless body, which made Madzar, who carried this body on his powerful soul, blush deeply.

Don’t even hope, my friend, that the masquerade will end. Be honest with yourself, just this once. You wouldn’t like to see it end either. You’d keel over with the boredom oozing from your Protestant soul. You like it when someone plays theater in your stead. I don’t have a real face, you can see that yourself, but if somehow you had a chance to catch a glimpse of it, you’d die of fright.

I am your representative in everything you are too craven to participate in.

Perhaps you won’t hold it against me, he said, smiling at Madzar with benevolent, charming, and ironic eye beams, that I’ve disturbed your solitude so impudently. I too long for monastic solitude above all, but I can’t get along without your company, he said loudly, as if he needed this big sound to make himself utter the words.

The captain took pleasure in filing away his cruel little victories in the records of obligatory modesty and politeness.

On the contrary, replied Madzar graciously, helped somewhat by the routine politesse, I would hate being a burden to you with my importunity, and he enjoyed his lie as much as if he had spoken the truth. It did not even occur to me.

Come, come, Bellardi shouted, his face darkening for real, what are you talking about, old pal. How can you say such a silly thing, Lojzi. How can you even think such a thing, he said, and then, after a minuscule pause that took the edge off his indignation, he quickly added, I am profoundly shocked. All the while his huge eyes were flashing kindly and tenderly in the pleasure of the performance. True, he expressed a bit more umbrage with that sentence than his acting could plausibly support.

And even this ambivalence seemed intentional.

What should I say, what would I most like to do with you, he said loudly. Of course, my first choice would be to get off with you at Mohács.

He burst out with a sudden laugh.

We’d let the old ship drift away all by itself and spend the remainder of our lives in a sweet duet in Mohács, my dear. We’d listen to the constant barking of dogs, and you know very well I’d never let you go to America, he cried in the voice of a scorned lover.

He kept laughing, as a child would go on tasting the sweetness of revenge, for his very expertise in concealment allowed him to see behind every possible human hiding place.

With Bellardi, compared to Madzar, everything was the other way around. Bellardi’s huge, weak body groaned under the crushing weight of his soul.

We’d expose the mass graves, or we’d — oh, whatever the hell it was, but we’d do it, we’d realize all our old plans, he exclaimed. We’d do something utterly useful and noble. We’d support the destitute. Let’s leave it at that, he added, growing somber at his own jesting, which he also intended as a sort of gift. And now, as a gift to my dearest friend, I shall offer up a sight of my soul’s sobriety. He seemed to have drawn enough strength from himself with his irregular, solitary dalliance and now was ready to repudiate, with genuine feeling, his own noisy sounds and to end the public interrogation.

Alas, I can’t leave the boat, he said like a good soldier summing up his life situation, but we shall consume our last supper together.

What makes you think it will be the last one.

How does one know when one’s life ends.

Not only did they say things to each other they didn’t mean, but they compelled each other to analyze continuously and in several ways their deeply disingenuous words.

Conventional logic was insufficient to cope with their secret language.

Madzar was taken aback by the captain’s offer to get off at Mohács with him, though he knew it was only playing with words or, at best, only a playful thought. The captain was playing with their shared memories, with the mass graves, reaching back into dangerous depths all the way to the sweet duet and the tragedies. He wondered in the meanwhile what the captain’s intentions were, where they would be seated, where was the table set for the two of them. He noticed no such table in the dining room. From which Bellardi instantly sensed the effect of his words; he could see he had nearly gained his friend’s confidence or at least made him anxious. Madzar also found it odd that the captain spoke of dogs barking in Mohács when in fact they could hardly have heard any barks in the Bellardis’ mansion on Városház Street. Even now, he has that devilish ability to read my mind, he told himself. And since he himself had been thinking similar thoughts only moments before, standing at the railing on the upper deck, he wondered once again whether or not he was in the presence of the most significant friendship of his life.

No matter what, Bellardi always knows what I’m thinking about.

Because Madzar has always harbored suspicions toward men, he rejects him for the second time.

Perhaps this time I should make an exception.

By the time the cock crows thrice, you will have betrayed him at least three times.

How could one take seriously the proposal of the two of them spending their lives together. In dialogue between men, there is always an intention to search for a firm hold that reveals the nature of the relationship. Should I strive for a favorable position in what I say or should I just tell him that I already occupy a favorable position.

Try as he might, he can’t keep up with me.

Nevertheless, the captain reminded him of the longing and promise that every little boy wants to make come true at least once in his life, and if not as a child, at least as an adult.

They could not forget it.

Where the river current had washed out a high section of the shore, the surprisingly intact ends of human bones stuck out of the sandy wall in thick layers — skulls, shins, pelvises, and toes that along with the sand crumble into dust in one’s hand. They happened on this scene, forgotten for centuries, south of the city, about two kilometers from the tip of Gypsy Reef, even though they knew that according to historians the battle had taken place at an entirely different location, at the foot of the Majs hills. If the desperate swallows had not been protecting their nests on the collapsing chasm so fiercely, they might have tried to dig out what they thought was there, in hopes of sharing a great discovery. They encouraged each other; they were both terrified of touching human bones. This was Madzar’s third time on the Carolina going back to his parental home, and on the two earlier trips he and Bellardi had already come to understand that the more they used the memory of the bones to preserve their common past, the stronger their disappointment in each other.

There was no limit to what they could have done, but their youth was gone; they could do nothing anymore.

It was not that nothing remained of the old attraction with which they could bridge the almost historical distance between them.

They had discussed everything thoroughly; they had revived their more innocent memories almost to the verge of boredom. They left everything else untouched out of mutual consideration, and as a result they always found themselves surrounded by issues of which they did not speak.

In complete darkness, they bumped into familiar objects.

They smelled each other’s fragrance, and as the captain yanked the architect close, on the surface of each other’s hard body they both could definitely feel rejection being expressed. The two of them were shocked that despite their now obviously weaker attraction to each other the mutual rejection was still so powerful. As if they were being reminded of a former rejection, as if even prior to that mutuality they had had a common life that designated their places next to each other and condemned them to mutual impassiveness. Moreover, even as a child, Madzar had found Bellardi’s smell repulsive, though his repulsion was coupled with a fierce curiosity. He had felt it most strongly when they came out of the water together; perhaps it emanated from Bellardi’s hair or skin, which was given to shivering even in summer. He’d decided that this was something peculiar to the bodies of rulers and princes; he was smelling the odor of history.

And now he was assailed by it again, along with the repulsion and curiosity. Stale earwax, which one scrapes out of the outer ear with one’s nail when it itches, smells like this.

The captain meanwhile, despite his own embarrassment, kept patting and squeezing the architect, gleaning some joy from the strength of his rejection. Let him feel that it was his privilege. This caused an embarrassment for the architect at least as great as the joy he elicited from the captain by recognizing the aversion.

And because of their shared past, they both had a rightful claim on these genuine sensations of aversion and repulsion.

Madzar remained mostly naïve about his own feelings and therefore had barely reached the threshold of his sensual compulsions.

The captain’s behavior was comparatively unembarrassed, though with his every word and gesture he followed the gentleman’s code of etiquette, the very code he poked fun at and sometimes attacked with other words and gestures. He brought attention to something, which he had no intention of doing, and Madzar, although he perceived this, did not understand or have any feel for it.

Or rather, he knew that while superficially Bellardi always seemed to accede to every request, there was always something else he wanted. To get away from this upstream area of the great river, he was sure to keep an eye on the great exit at the delta.

He had once organized an expedition to the South Pole, but he did not include Madzar in that plan, only boys from the better families. The two of them had gone on shorter trips of discovery, though, and once on a longer one. Anyone growing up near a great river is familiar with the desire to entrust one’s light human body to the current’s immense strength.

As everyone learned later, Bellardi had run away one summer with some Serb and Italian tobacco smugglers. He had told them he was an orphan. Gendarmes brought him back to Mohács. At his father’s order, he was taken to the town hall and, exposed to the view of passersby, made to stand in the huge echoing lobby, flanked by two gendarmes with bayonets fixed on their rifles, until his father was ready to receive him.

Stop thy trembling, his father snarled as he rose from his enormous carved desk, I will not lay a finger on thee, but be sure I shall have thee flogged.

He wanted to know exactly what had happened; he asked hard questions in the interrogation, set traps, his eyes penetrating more and more deeply, lighting up every dangerous corner, and all along maintained the formal address.

Then he had his son taken to the empty city detention cell, and the gendarmes beat him with a flagpole because they couldn’t find a stick, but it was a largely symbolic beating.

He was locked up for three days and given only bread and water.

The family’s extravagant lifestyle and chaotic finances allowed for nothing else but that the son too would become a municipal or district civil servant like his father, who had been for many years magistrate of the Mohács district and very popular, given his dispassionate fairness. The son’s other choices were the armed forces or the church. Since he took God no more seriously than anything else, the young Bellardi opted for the navy, where his career ended before it began: shortly after he received his commission, he had to leave because of some matter of honor of whose details no one seemed to know anything.

He was alleged to have stolen money from a fellow officer, but this was impossible to imagine about him.

Madzar kept shaking his head at this news as if he had water in his ears, gesticulating to his mother and warning her not to dare repeat it.

In the end, Bellardi fetched up on the only luxury liner owned by the First Steamship Company of the Danube, which was struggling with serious financial difficulties. Part of the reason for this move was that his future father-in-law had a major interest in the company. In fact, Baron Koháry liked the good-looking young man more than he loved his own beautiful daughter, whom he later sent on her way with a single suitcase.

The baron was a man unhappy to the very depth of his soul who had never shown any of his unhappiness to another human being. He viewed the penniless young man with a certain pity for letting himself be ensnared so haplessly by his daughter’s beauty and dowry. Bellardi would raise his only male grandchild, which Koháry approved of with all his heart. Nor did he fail to notice that Bellardi preferred to follow his example of stern paternal advice rather than that of his own father, his flesh and blood.

The steamship company, for undisclosed personal reasons as well as others, did not easily give up the old ship. At sessions of the board of directors they gave as reason for their expensive persistence the hope that when Hungary regained the territories that so unjustly had been taken from her, she would again have an outlet to the sea and, as a result, Danube shipping would flourish anew. After Viscount Rothermere made his unsettling declarations favoring a revision of the borders of Hungary,* no one had any doubt about the matter. The situation of the merchant fleet would change, shipping would become profitable again, and therefore in the interest of the future the beautiful old liner should not be sold.

You probably wouldn’t want to dine with these people, said Madzar, fighting his blushes, and with an awkward movement of his hands tried to return the captain’s sentimental hugs.

Ever since Serbia’s bloody rule after the Great War, the people of Mohács had feared Serbs.

That leaves Chief Counselor Elemér Vay as a possible table companion, you can see him right behind my back, said Bellardi, laughing, but I have a feeling you won’t mind very much if we skip him too.

On the contrary, replied Madzar, but the gesture of dismissal did not succeed, their hands slipped together, their fingers locked involuntarily.

Anyway, I have an important assignment to carry out, Bellardi continued, and because of it, I’ll have a table set for us upstairs. I must talk to you about something in absolute confidence. Josef, he called to the old waiter who had been standing close to them all along, wir essen oben, trinken zumal ein Burgogne Chardonnay.

Madzar, plausibly, was incredulous.

An assignment, from whom, about what.

More confidential than usual, said the captain, and laughed encouragingly.

And Madzar instantly felt that he had to defend himself and apologize; he said he really did not know anyone here, he had not been born into a good enough family to have any serious connections anywhere, and while he spoke he realized how revealing and ridiculous his fear must sound to Bellardi.

Across the bridge, they reached the captain’s salon, where Bellardi usually invited valued passengers for tea or coffee, or for the sheer enjoyment of watching the landscape swim by. The compact wainscoted room was at the highest point of the ship, its windows set in a semicircle. As soon as they came inside, the landscape offered itself to them. Water and air, nearness and distance; in the gentle rhythmic rocking, all outlines dissolved, everything blended together.

The captain reached for the light switch, but the architect put a hand on his arm.

With your permission, one more moment, please.

Of course, of course, laughed Bellardi, as if he realized he had forgotten something important, his friend’s aesthetic thirst, which he, Bellardi, considered feminine whimsy; please, sit down, right there. He pointed to the cream-colored, silk-upholstered cherrywood armchair. From here, you can see all this darkness more comfortably.

Madzar did not sit down.

Along the shores of the huge river, the infinite flatland dissolved in the cool mist of evening.

The darkness endures, giggled Bellardi behind his back.

They moved forward in the darkness, but that made no change in it.

What do you mean by that, asked the architect cautiously. The captain did not reply right away.

The sun had long since disappeared behind the western horizon, leaving wild lights in the air, mad colors piled on top of long, layered strips of clouds. Incandescent oranges, yellows, melting reds, hard purples, nacreous grays radiating from inside out, every shade of gray from white to black, while a thin slice of the moon was already shining on the steel-gray crystal surface of the eastern sky.

Which they kept approaching, the ship puffing and trembling, stuttering as it were, but which they neither reached nor came closer to.

It was my dear old father’s habit to huff and puff about how the universe is mutable and only its darkness is enduring, said Bellardi in an unusually quiet tone. It wasn’t his own wisdom, he added, laughing, he was only summarizing the contents of an old letter. There is an ancient letter, you know, in the possession of Mother’s family, the wisdom comes from that letter.

Madzar wanted to ask what sort of letter and what was in it, but the waiter and the cabin boy appeared, bearing everything needed for the dinner table.

They clattered with the dishes and utensils, exchanging short instructions as they worked.

An ivory tablecloth flew up, opened, flared out, and landed flat in the semi-darkness brightened with improbable lights and colors; the Mayer boy smoothed it out over the table.

The two men kept silent and immobile in their places.

When the old waiter and the cabin boy had disappeared into the steep stairwell, the captain, with two slender wineglasses in his hand, stepped closer to Madzar.

Tell me, Madzar asked in a serious tone, in the deepening twilight that promised to be overemotional, which frightened him, do you remember the name of the Jew who had the lumberyard below the pier.

Gottlieb, you dummy, Bellardi replied, and his voice grew hesitant, quickly taking him in another direction; he concealed his surprise by pretending that the recalled memory put him under the spell of a cheerful absentmindedness. Why on earth are you asking.

Funny, but I couldn’t remember it, Madzar replied, as if he had to apologize for his question. How laughable one can become with memory lapses.

Because of his carelessness, they each knew whom the other was thinking about.

About whom they would never speak again or, more precisely, about whom they had stopped talking even back then.

I never found out, the captain continued in his more cheerful tone, did finally anything happen between you and Marika Gottlieb.

I’m serious, he said, and held out his glass with the quavering gold-blond wine.

I liked her, no doubt about it, the architect replied and gazed pensively at the wine, but we were little children. I haven’t seen her since.

I don’t understand what you mean by that.

Even though he understood very well.

Because Marika Gottlieb’s thin face did appear to both of them, though neither of them was thinking of her. Madzar wanted to keep feelings at a distance, yet he was glad he had managed with his unguarded remark to remind Bellardi of something they wouldn’t speak of.

In fact, I liked her a lot, he added so that they would go on to talk about what they had been keeping to themselves.

Well then, here’s to it, God bless you, said Bellardi, raising his glass. No doubt about it, with Marika Gottlieb our manly life is complete.

They both laughed.

Madzar was embarrassed by their shamelessly shared laughter. This too he could not take back. It was too much for him that with the laughter, instigated by Bellardi, they were sealing their past complicity; with it, they were canceling their love.

Whatever happened, whatever is happening now, the captain continued, growing serious as he made his own reference to the dark story, which Madzar had just succeeded in suppressing with his reminder — and unexpectedly he cried out dramatically, you made me very happy, my dear friend, one might say you gilded my childhood. And I am very happy now that I can have you here for a little tête-à-tête, he added quietly. I must manfully confess that to you.

To keep the emotions generated by the confession from overwhelming him, he grimaced amiably.

Madzar looked at him as at a complete stranger whom he was seeing for the first time.

Why say things like that aloud.

Let’s drink to that, let’s, exclaimed Bellardi as if he understood Madzar.

You won’t believe this from such an arch pagan as me, but I am grateful for this gift even to the Lord, the one and only Creator.

They might have laughed at this remark, but there was only silence between them.

I’d like to know what you were thinking about, said Madzar after a pause, in a more severe tone, as if these frivolous words had briefly anesthetized him.

What does it matter what I was thinking about, replied the captain, pretending to be annoyed, his tone sober. What I think, you know, is that there will be a war and we, dictated by our interests, will join it. The Germans will devour everybody, that’s what I’ve been thinking. And I’m thinking about my scandalous life, about which I’m not going to give a report. All you civilians, pardon my language, haven’t the vaguest notion of what’s going on in the depths.

Madzar did not like this turn in the conversation. What is going on in the depths, he asked amiably.

We’ll only harm ourselves if we do something openly against it, but it would be very irresponsible to jump in blindly.

Water flows in the depths, my dear Laci, nothing else.

You’re putting it mildly, Bellardi said, laughing.

As one who knew more and was ready to divulge anything.

You want to put one over on me, my good man. Maybe we should talk of the blood that will also flow.

Which, of course, to spare the other man, he’d never say out loud.

Despite his resistance, Madzar had to admit to himself that Bellardi was steering their conversation in the right direction. Perhaps it was right to talk about politics and nothing else. It is better for the captain not to share his secrets. He nodded his heavy head with the hair like armor.

That’s the reason I want to go away, you see, and the sooner the better, far away from Europe, he answered heavily and then stopped abruptly.

Somewhere it’s still possible to work, he added by way of explanation.

The project you have agreed to do here, though, you will finish, won’t you.

Yes, I shall.

It’ll probably take you into the fall, said Bellardi in a tone implying that in the most sensitive depths of his soul he wanted to understand something of the other man, or that he was weighing something.

It will probably be winter by the time I finish it.

They clinked their stemmed glasses lightly; this too was part of their declared happiness.

Madzar was now belatedly overcome by panic. He couldn’t imagine a life in which every emotion was openly named.

As if the desire for transparency were dragging him toward bottomless depths. His psychological preparedness and architectural concepts made contact at this point but remained irreconcilable. He also didn’t understand how he could have gotten so far with Mrs. Szemző. Who should stop, and where, with this compulsion for transparency. Two mature men, ridiculous, he kept reassuring himself.

I’ll never take this ship again, not me.

I can put an end to this story, very simply.

Would it have any significance if he placed emptiness behind a glass wall.

They were looking into each other’s transparent eyes.

They sipped and inhaled the fine aroma of the wine, filled with the rich, mature, sweet autumnal fragrances of a distant land. Happiness was its aroma, a fulfillment, but its flavor was tart.

Again, he wanted to change the subject quickly.

You know, I’m making some of the furniture myself, he began to explain. That’s also part of the reason why I asked about old Gottlieb. If I found the right material at his place, I could stay home for a while. But in any case I’ll probably need a few weeks in summer just for the furniture.

A few weeks in summer, Bellardi repeated pensively, his voice trailing off into an intimate distance while he absentmindedly twirled the stemmed glass between his fingers.

I’d say about two months.

God, if I could have a few weeks of summer in Mohács.

You know, I’m very excited about being able to work in my father’s workshop, which was also my grandfather’s.

All the Hungarians of Mohács are lost, you’re the last one.

I’ll do something with their tools they couldn’t possibly have imagined. They’d have said it was impossible, forbidden, shouldn’t be done.

Won’t you be needing some help, Bellardi asked.

Madzar had no response.

Please, tell me, and this time the captain turned his head away, out of decency, this doctor in Budapest, his wife, the ones you’re working for, I assume they are Jews.

Bellardi evidently did not wish to break completely with the earlier subject of their conversation.

But Madzar didn’t want to return to it.

Yes, they are.

They took a few more sips of their wine.

As if they were quietly weighing the nature and character of the confidence they had in each other and as if this were the subject of their conversation.

To get into it or not.

But you still haven’t told me, said the captain from behind his glass, as though about to make a decision, was there anything with Marika or not. It hasn’t been more than two months since I last saw that female.

That means you were at home.

It was a sad occasion, to liquidate my aunt’s inheritance. What can I tell you, judging by the characteristics of her race Marika is very pretty.

You must be joking, what could possibly have been there between us, Madzar replied, irritated.

The old Viennese waiter was making his way up the stairs again, this time with the menu. Madzar was reluctant to be drawn into matters he had managed to avoid earlier. The waiter flapped open the menu’s hard covers and with a broad gesture spread it out before them.

I am curious about your confidential message, Madzar said.

First we order, my friend. Later we’ll deal with business and politics. The captain laughed hard, showing his strong white but uneven teeth, and he imperiously poked at the top line of the menu.

If I’m not mistaken, then, you wish to talk about business and political topics, remarked the architect.

First I wish to talk about entrées and mainly about our favorite soups, my dear Lojzi. Everything else will come later.

I can’t imagine what you want to ask of me, but frankly I sense some ulterior motives.

You may not believe it, but my motives are honorable. The sword is out of the scabbard. I shall lay it out for you. We’ll play with all the cards on the table. Or maybe we’ll first see the first-course dishes before deciding on the entrées. Bellardi looked at Madzar questioningly, boastfully.

Madzar did not reply; alternately they studied the menu to avoid seeing each other and then looked up into each other’s face; it would have been hard for them to break contact completely.

Or, even more important, they both wanted to keep the other’s countenance from gaining an advantage, from deciphering the unmasked face across from him.

Only the steady puffing of the liner was heard.

The old Viennese waiter had lighted the candles on the table, stopped muttering to himself in his several languages, and now stood expectantly in his enormous worn-out black shoes and baggy black trousers that shone at the knees.

Where is Mayer, why isn’t he here, asked the captain as if in passing but in a curious falsetto.

It seems, said the old waiter in German, he had to go down to the stokers again.

Bellardi let it go, but it was obvious he did not care for this answer. It made him restless.

The candles in the three-arm silver candelabrum were burning more brightly, slowly reaching their full intensity, thus deepening the approaching night outside.

I suggest, said Bellardi after a while, that we stay away from the more ordinary dishes. Let’s have a holiday meal.

If you tell me what you call ordinary, replied Madzar, drawing out his words — he was immersed both in the menu and in all those ambiguous feelings that Bellardi’s proximity and the liner’s puffing aroused in him — I’ll be happy to follow most of your suggestions.

As if the tremendous steam power were working itself into a night in which there was neither forward nor backward, as if all that enormous effort were exerted only to be standing still.

Could it be that this confusing sensation was what grown people think about when they claim that friendship is more important than love. His heart was filled with unfamiliar anxiety and dread.

Because only now did he comprehend completely what had happened twenty years earlier.

We’re not yet thirty, yet our lives might be over.

Bellardi’s probably right, a person does not change a bit, and without change, how can there be any progress in history. For there to be progress, one should be aware at least of one’s own direction. What has happened, what is happening to me. And if there is no progress, then why am I so severe. The two great paddle wheels on a single axle are spinning in place. He knows that, of course, because he sails now with the current, now against it; he has no other choice. With the same exertion, he might be a horse on a treadle or a streetcar conductor. If there is no progress, there is neither past nor future.

Man, like swine, lies down in the first puddle, bathing all the time. This is a dyed-in-the-wool miserable man, this Bellardi, who has always had this secret, dark little penchant for conspiracy and rebellion.

What a pleasure-filled mouth he has. Perhaps every emotion is pure illusion; illusion is other people.

In which case, my experiments to objectify everything in the extreme in that psychoanalytic clinic are in vain.

It’s not the women, they are overly realistic, but the men. We are good for nothing but reproduction. We might as well be breeding stallions or even rabbits.

How could I suggest anything, do you think I know what I have in mind, the captain responded whimsically after long cogitation, shaking his head for emphasis. Well, I definitely won’t have lobster, he said, still looking at the menu, not goose liver either, nor will I order buttered escargots with Provençal herbs, no sir, but don’t expect an explanation, and I won’t have frog’s legs.

It seemed as if he was trying to say that in the approaching warlike situation his own military high spirits would be at least as useless as the architect’s civilian austerity and seriousness.

At least this is how Madzar read the information.

The old waiter leaned closer and with his serving cloth began nervously to slap different parts of the table, which rudely disturbed the two men.

Please, stop that slapping.

Wir haben alles, müssen Sie mir glauben, wirklich alles frisch eingekauft. I swear to it.

Don’t swear to anything, Josef, said the captain, and raised his hand to cut him off. Today, I’d prefer something less refined, less cooked for a an appetizer. Let me call your attention to the fish-roe salad, he said, clicking his tongue, or perhaps champignons à la grecque. Yes, I’ll start with that.

Sehr wohl, sehr wohl, said the old waiter, bowing several times, ass you gentlemen vish.

His importune loquaciousness did not go well with the profound, genuine humbleness with which he kept bowing, always ready to be of service. The misshapen rebel whose time had not yet come but who already held all the strings in the conspiracy.

As if he were the one who controlled and guided Bellardi’s behavior.

Darf ich doch sofort nachgiessen, den gnädigen Herren, he asked nervously, and kept bowing with his entire body as though he had to correct his earlier mistake if he wanted to regain control of the situation.

That’s right, that’s right, answered the captain amiably and totally inattentively, die höchste Zeit, tun Sie das.

For the first time Madzar closely observed the waiter’s figure.

The enormous heavy body that all his life the man had been dragging up and down the stairs on legs riddled with varicose veins. As if despite all indications that he was unsuited for this profession, his parents had sent him to become a waiter, and he had spent his entire life using the same method of obligatory dissimulation that Bellardi and the other gentlemen he had to serve also used. Bowing low to fill their glasses, and with his free hand waving his serving cloth in all directions, he explained how the fish roe was prepared.

They take the roe of lean Danube fishes, this is important to know, not the roe of predatory fishes, never, as your excellencies must be aware, because they are much heavier. Their eggs often smell of silt, not pleasant, while the eggs of plant-eating fish have only a slight scent, sans odeur mauvaise.

The creased-up wrinkles that once had been plump with fat were now parched; they flapped and slapped on his neck and his face. He rehearsed the information in a bored nasal voice, and one could not be sure that he was not parodying with his accent the vocal mannerisms of mildly crazed Viennese aristocrats, which would have been a great impudence on his part. At any rate, he behaved as if he had no intention of imposing a decision on the fine gentlemen yet could barely disguise how bored he was talking to them.

Our chef — and the honorable architect must unconditionally understand this — is unerring in such delicate matters. He adds milt, you see, sir, I’m sure you know what I mean, not much, about a fifth of the roe’s weight; it is said to be beneficial for virility. Then he splashes it generously with lemon juice, adds a bit of grated lemon peel, lets it sit on ice for about an hour, while the sourness of the lemon tones down the harshness of the fish eggs, which is as it should be, gentlemen, bitterness sometimes settles on top of bitterness, as we all know from life, and then he sprinkles it with coarse-ground pepper, tosses in finely cut red onion, crushed garlic, salts it lightly, that’s important, not too much salt, and, while very slowly dripping olive oil into it, he stirs it until the last drop of oil is absorbed. I highly recommend it. We serve it with hot, caraway-seeded pumpernickel toast.

Bravo, Josef, well done, the captain cried. Go ahead, Josef, bring it. I don’t think you can choose anything else. I’ve already ordered the appropriate wine for it too, for I am nothing but sheer foresight, you see, he said, laughing, and of course I’ve just revealed that I tricked you.

He literally guffawed.

Madzar was not fully present in this moment; his attention was arrested by the intricately detailed words; he disregarded the subject of the speech, let it pass by his ears. He was watching Bellardi’s strong, crooked canine teeth, glittering in his guffaw, and he could easily imagine the man’s brutishness as he might tear into someone’s lips. The face itself was a trap. An empty surface on which the features may be rearranged, thus every moment gives the impression of novelty. And the almost yellow wine had a personality, a stratification. Despite its perfect dryness, it left a sweet memory on the surface of the tongue, while its spices widened and inundated the palate; its various flavors prepared one for the tasting.

You won’t regret it. Bellardi laughed, and this time it frightened Madzar. But he had no choice now. He was becoming lost among Bellardi’s many faces; perhaps the wine had gone to his head. Swimming in the wine’s multiple flavors, he had failed to gauge its strength.

As soon as they were served, with quick, eager little movements the hungry captain began to spread his Greek mushrooms on the toasted French rolls. Greatly enjoying watching each other eat, they kept spreading and then chomping on their various breads and drinking quite a bit in a leisurely but steady rhythm. Their chomping was rather noisy, not very proper; to make it a bit quieter Bellardi explained to Madzar how finely chopped onion was simmered in olive oil and then bombarded with mushrooms cut in small cubes. In the fall, and Madzar will have a chance to see this for himself, it is even more delicious because then they make the dish with cèpes, the woodland mushrooms Hungarians call the gentleman’s mushroom.

Which obviously meant he would want Madzar on board with him again in the fall, would like to chomp on bread in his company, talk to him with his mouth full, digest and drink with him; he kept pouring now, perhaps to get drunk, let out huge farts, never become sated; there was nothing to misunderstand here.

From the moment Bellardi had been hastily taken out of the school on Koronaherceg Street and hastily transported to Trieste, Madzar no longer had a bosom buddy, no one he could count on as his friend.

Bellardi’s absence turned into a very peculiar lack. Something was missing, which Madzar did not consider important.

Something of Bellardi returned every summer, a now strange figure who always had something to brag about, something to show off his exceptional qualities, and to whom, sometimes for whole days, sometimes only for a few hours, Madzar managed to find his way back. On these occasions he was glad he had never taken their friendship seriously, because he sensed ever more palpably the distance growing between them, and no matter how close they found themselves, this drifting apart was unforgettable. He lived with this estrangement as one fortunate enough to have escaped a great danger, because he no longer had time for puerility.

Now, because of Bellardi’s unguarded words about the future, that in the fall Madzar would have woodland mushrooms, the real pain felt at the long-ago loss returned.

He did not know what to think of this; for the first time in his life, it confused him to his core.

Maybe you don’t remember, he said loudly in a stifled, strange, trembling voice, as one calling back one last time from his childhood, desperately asking for help, I left my best leather slingshot at your house.

Something similar now happened to the captain too; it was very rare that something truly surprised him, but this was as if some rebuke or old rumor had caught up with him, accusing him of theft.

You forgot your what, he asked, shocked and threatening. I don’t remember a slingshot.

This hurt Madzar because he could see that Bellardi truly did not remember, the louse. But somehow he quickly awakened from his surprise that Bellardi couldn’t even remember this foul deed of his. He had the nerve not to return one of my best slingshots and he doesn’t even remember doing it.

Don’t be angry, I beg your pardon, it just happened to pop into my mind.

Sounds ridiculous, but I remember exactly, even today, where I put it that afternoon, he said, looking for his grown-up voice, placating.

You had a picture book, Hungarian Noblewomen, and I put the slingshot on top of it.

You mean I didn’t give it back, asked Bellardi with a modicum of obligatory remorse. It was as though he had a vague memory, after all, of Madzar putting his leather slingshot on the book. Just goes to show you that one always harms one’s fellow even though one is unaware of it, he said, indulgently self-critical.

What stupidity.

Madzar remembered well how he had to be on his guard against Bellardi at such junctures.

Bellardi’s lies were always convincing, he wove them out of modesty and arrogance, a fabric not familiar to Madzar; he was always late in realizing he’d been taken in again, and that it was best to be quiet about the whole matter.

You know, even if you did leave it with me, when I went home to Buda for my first vacation and not Mohács, I couldn’t find my old things in our new apartment. And I wouldn’t have dared ask about them. I imagine they simply threw it out along with my things.

Imagine, I could find none of my stuff. Nothing at all, he added after a short silence.

Forgive me, I really don’t know why I brought it up, why it popped into my mind.

Come on, what’s there to forgive, please don’t apologize.

You think you could offend me with something, he asked, flashing his teeth and pouring more wine.

This time only into his own glass, however, as if accidentally forgetting about the other man. There’s nothing in the world, you couldn’t offend me with anything. But when the mushrooms turn red, he continued relentlessly, they sprinkle them with lemon juice, salt them, throw in some bay and freshly ground pepper, a dash of saffron wouldn’t hurt either, that’s what makes it so crazily yellow.

Madzar was paying no attention.

Yet he heard that the dish was then cooked gently for ten minutes, uncovered, no lid. He was thinking about slingshots, that there were rubber and leather ones. It is cooled on ice, auf Eis sozusagen abgeschreckt. The leather ones were more valuable, and he saw Bellardi put the bottle back into the ice bucket. Of course, he preferred coarsely chopped black olives, he was saying.

He always needed some advantage, not a big one, just enough to feel a bit of gratification. It would suffice to drink more than the other man, even if only by one gulp.

For him, his life on the river is forever the Mediterranean, forever the Adriatic. The black olives are tasty too.

Forever, said the architect jovially, who began to pay attention when he heard this pathetic word.

Go ahead, laugh, my dear friend, forever, that’s right, forever, and I mean this seriously, said Bellardi, and his voice trembled. After all, he had deployed the concept of forever to regain Madzar’s attention, so that they could laugh together at his real sentimentality, which tied him to the other man and which, in this way, he was still willing to display.

Do you have any idea what a yellow night in Cyprus is like, he asked, growing subdued.

I’ve never been to Cyprus.

How would you know, even if you had been there.

Go ahead then, tell me about it.

You live in another world, a completely different world.

Perhaps that’s why I’m still curious.

You’re going home, let’s say with all due respect you are on your way home with your accidental Greek lover. What home. What you’ve got is a room, another fleabag hotel where everything is sticky and smelly. But at least on high the stars are yellow, the size of your fist. You’re only a lousy little sailor man, but that, my dear little Lojzi, with all your big ideas, you will never understand. A Hungarian who no longer has a sea, because they took his last lousy little sea away from the lousy little Hungarian.

You’re one big nobody. You have half an hour with your lover, and his arm has the fragrance of fried fish.

While he spoke, he kept staring at Madzar’s hand as it lay on the table. He looked at it as if his gaze was stuck to it.

And the cicadas are screaming in your ears, you can’t hear yourself think. That’s how things are, my friend.

As if he were waiting for the other man to raise a big fist and knock him down.

Madzar could see that on the gleeful face the long laugh lines had flattened out because Bellardi could not say what he wanted to say.

He had the feeling they were sailing into the empty night on Bellardi’s face, and he truly did not understand him. On the surface of his face, unfamiliar faces kept turning up, and Madzar could barely follow them. This is a given quantity, he thought, self-satisfied, as if he had indeed discovered something. He also saw what the other man was expecting from his fist. Bellardi’s expression was changing so rapidly that its various qualities were impossible to track. He could no longer weigh whether he should accept this behavior or not, whether what was happening would turn out well or whether he should reject it.

The essence of the other man was radiating directly into him.

I didn’t know stars were so important to you.

Now you do, Bellardi replied in a hostile tone, and he quickly lifted the wine bottle from the ice bucket.

To be proper, this time he refilled Madzar’s glass first.

What could be more important for a sailor than the stars.

From this point on, he could say anything at all, since he had that one-gulp advantage. He laughed bitterly, as if he were using his self-pity against the other man. But who’s a sailor anymore, he said. To you I don’t mind admitting I’ve become a common maître d’hôtel in a flea-bitten hotel.

I see the wine’s got to you, gone to your head. Or is it melancholy.

As much as you’d like to deny it, we Hungarians are a lost people, my dear Lojzi. You still believe, my pigeon, that you have something you can take with you to America and that’s how you’ll rescue yourself for the future. I don’t give a shit whether you go or stay, Lojzi, and don’t think I’m envious. You’ll pack your suitcase very nicely and discover when you open it that it’s empty. We are empty, my Lojzi, we’ve been drained of our blood. From here, you can take nothing with you except your emptiness.

Come on, you’re talking nonsense.

That’s what I was trying to tell you with those dumb yellow stars.

Maybe I’ll hire a guardian for you.

I shit on the stars too, including yours. You can take this as a manly confession, but I don’t give a shit about that either.

I really don’t understand what this is, maybe some kind of weltschmerz.

Their voices deepened and they spoke more and more quietly; the deepened voice of one made the other deepen his voice too.

Well, if you don’t understand, then you don’t.

After that, not another word.

They ordered different soups to keep their feelings for each other from being so alike. In small matters, being different means a lot.

The captain had the so-called pale fish soup that, true to its name, was given color only with finely grated carrots, turnips, fennel, and celery.

It looked back at him, pale bluish green, from the white soup bowl.

He can’t possibly think I’m complaining. An obdurate German like him is always more calculating and levelheaded than that.

Madzar ordered chicken soup for himself.

Na ja, das wird etwas deftiger, the old waiter clicked his tongue upon hearing the order. Unser berühmt, berüchtigter potage royale.

Bellardi, revived by his sense of gratification, explained as they spooned their soups that if this interests you, they make this famous, infamous soup by cooking a good-size hen on a slow fire, along with various vegetables, until it is very soft and tender. Our chef has a big pot of it on the stove from early morning on, which he moves to the edge to make room for other pots. When it’s done, they lift out the chicken and strain the broth until it’s clear; the meat on the chicken should be falling off the bones; they cut it in pieces and grind it up along with the vegetables. Then they put all of it back into the broth, along with a generous amount of slivered almonds, you can taste them in it.

He felt a kind of serenity, as though he had had a good cry on the other man’s shoulder.

Oh, so it’s the almonds, then, that’s right.

They also add a butter roux to it, and then simmer it for a bit.

Now all Madzar had to do was watch the other man struggle with his sobbing.

To look at the imposing uniform, the furrowed, strong face, the thickly drawn straight eyebrows, the traces left by the sun on translucent milky skin, the thin edge of the prominent long nose, and the way his face constantly changed in the hovering candlelight. The way he traced his explanation with his fine fingers, making it easy to see how familiar he was with culinary activities; the way he gesticulated, lost in the details, and explained things while holding back his impending sobs.

You’re not serious about this, are you, don’t tell me you know how to cook.

Why should I deny it, Bellardi laughed amiably. I could be a ship’s chef anytime, though in the first weeks I’d probably miscalculate the amount of ingredients you need to order.

You don’t have to deny it. It’s just that I’d never have guessed.

You mean because it doesn’t go with my manliness.

Nonsense, why would I think that, Madzar answered with a question, but he was thinking that within this mature man, considered very manly even as a boy, this man he had vied with to be most at home with the myriad details of the world, to know them in greater depth and objectivity, there surely dwelled a woman too. It seemed as if Bellardi were carrying all the Odescalchi duchesses within him, and not only with his contrived, polished manners. The face of Bellardi’s mother showed through in his face; he had his sister’s milky skin and sharp nose; and some of his manly features he inherited from his aunt. That aunt was an old maid, almost completely penniless, whom fate had sent to Mohács for a while but then she could not afford to move elsewhere. It was to her that Bellardi returned every summer from Trieste, until he started going to her parents in Buda.

The best chefs in the better hotels are all men, Madzar said.

If I can put your mind at ease, if you’d like me to put your mind at ease, replied the captain, laughing, I’ll tell you that I’m most comfortable preparing outdoor dishes. And you know yourself that that is truly man’s work.

If only because of the fire.

Roast beef, roast mutton, those are delicious dishes.

And so is slambuc, you know, noodles cooked in broth or water with potatoes, then baked, not to mention knuckle of veal, goulash, tripe, chowder.

Yes, chowder. Between you and me, chowder would be my main attraction.

They changed wine for the brandied snipe, listed on the menu as bécasse flambée.

It was getting late. The ship was to dock at Mohács at half past eleven in the evening.

Madzar did not want to look at his watch but he sensed the time approaching when Bellardi would have to leave the table to give orders preparatory to docking. And with that everything would be over between the two of them. Yet he no longer wanted these flat, embarrassing conversations. There didn’t seem to be time for Bellardi to carry out his confidential mission. While they had been dining, they could hear the helmsman’s commands as well as the shoveling of coal in the boiler room coming through the open brass cylinder of the communication flue; and those below could hear their conversation or at least snatches of it. Occasionally, Bellardi appeared to want to say something to the men. At the corner of his mouth and in the deep furrows on his forehead there played a kind of childlike or perhaps grown-up affected gravity; Madzar could see the high-minded, religious boy scout as well as the deeply disappointed man. He hoped this would break the icy silence between them, which could not be warmed with words. But he hoped in vain. The upright boy scout meant to do something good but did not do it. And the man who was disappointed in everyone did not make the confession of his life after all. The old waiter kept turning up to pour more of the simple Szekszárdi that, with its slight acidity and rough aftertaste, went well with the venison.

He came with his whistling breath.

The cabin boy did not return to help the old man collect the dishes.

With his whistling breath, he kept shifting the two men’s intended intimacy to different dimensions. Or he was busy with the desserts; in the end they both ordered baked peaches.

Large peeled and halved peaches, which out of season were fished out of a jar of preserved fruit, filled with finely grated gingerbread and, in a well-buttered pan under a thick layer of marzipan, cooked to a pale red.

Bellardi was going to order a third wine for this. Madzar parried the offer; he would stay with the Szekszárdi. Which was clearly not to the captain’s liking; it seemed to hamper his self-realization. He did not voice his dissatisfaction perhaps because by then they were both quite under the influence or at least pretended to be. They grew heavy, genuinely weary of words. They once again became rather bored with each other; or rather, they each gave this name to the icy calm from behind which they observed each other’s strangeness.

They pretended to be staring ahead or looking out into the motionless night in which the river gave signs of its existence only by sounds. The insult suffered by one of them inevitably offended the other, and so the muteness did not seem vacant.

By the Summer of ’57

It was as though I could hear again the faint, even banging on the rear walls of the cellars.

He was telling me about it as we stood on the platform at the end of our car in the speeding train; he told the story as I remembered it too.

There was cannon fire, with everything booming and trembling; mortars that made the ground heave; the impact of shells nearby, explosions far away or very close that seemed to make the building above us look as if it were shaking its head; blasts of explosions from which the walls seemed to lean away or somehow hide, while in the vaulted parts of the cellar the candles went out or their flames became eerily elongated; rattling and barking bursts of machine guns and submachine guns, now shorter, now longer; excited monologues and leisurely dialogues. Yet, easily distinguishable from these sounds and despite them or perhaps together with them, one could hear the continuous, regular sound of hammering as people wielding pickaxes, chisels, and hammers were breaking down cellar walls, simultaneously on both sides.

He told me how they managed to reach the Kilián Barracks, which was under constant fire. People broke through to our house from a cellar on Eötvös Street; from there, passing under several buildings, one could get to Szófia Street.

By dawn, we were out of the mousetrap.

This is how I learned — from him on the train, quite by chance, while the inrushing wind puffed up the unbuttoned shirt on his chest — that on that particular night not just in our building and not only in the neighboring buildings but all over Budapest people were opening up an underground labyrinth.

By the summer of ’57, however, one remembered nothing of this, or at least no one spoke of these matters. Everyone was responsible for erasing their personal memories. Or maybe I couldn’t or wouldn’t remember. It was strange to listen to him above the infernal clattering of the train wheels, and to stare through his open shirt at his razor-sharp lean brown body. But I’d probably have told others the story the same way as he was telling it to me, free of emotion, as if he were modestly defending himself from his own sentimentality or as if he were telling the story to himself, without self-pity. We were hurtling into an unknowable night. He must have known that I was familiar with the core of the story. A few words sufficed to remind us that we had met once before; a shy blink was enough to ascertain what the other thought of these things. This was the older boy who on that memorable early morning had stopped me on Podmaniczky Street and asked me where we were going, and I had told him to Glázner’s for bread, the one the nice woman called down to from the second floor.

She had called him Pistike.

When with the ammo box on his shoulder he had unexpectedly leaned toward me and was so close to my face in the darkness that he flooded me with his mild breath, I felt I had been caught doing something wrong.

We had exchanged only a few words.

His speech was not very refined. Still, I felt I should stay with him so I could fight too.

As if preparing for some peaceful celebration or festivity, bright lights were shining from the windows of the upper floors.

At the same time, the attraction frightened me, because it was as though I had a view of myself as another figure, more beautiful and more sharply drawn, and because of that I could not possibly part from him. Until then I had been but a shadow, but now I had before my eyes the body itself. As if staying with him depended not on my cowardice or courage but on his beauty. Despite the fact that in those days I was interested in many things but not in beauty. Somehow, it was easier then to look beyond people’s ugliness or beauty. In the general turmoil one’s eyes searched more for signs and peculiarities of character; that’s what seemed important. This boy was dangerous; one should be cautious with him, even fear him. It was as if I had to be afraid of myself. I did not want anything irrevocable to happen to me; I walked on; but after a few steps, I wanted to look back, and that is how my leaving became irrevocable.

Even though I too could have lugged ammo on my shoulder.

Which in the language of feelings meant that it would have been better, after all, for me to stay with him. The situation of the street could be gauged in a second.

Their ammo dump was in the onetime concierge’s booth in the building opposite; from there they carried the ammo up to the roof for the sharpshooters. For days people on the radio had been talking of snipers, who did not stop until the final cease-fire was established among the Russians, the government, and the rebels. The rebels chose firing positions that bullets from the street could not reach. Tank barrels could not be raised to such a steep angle, so from a roof the rebels could control an entire street. Buildings were destroyed by cannon fire from far away, or Russian tanks fired until every support beam and wall underneath had been blown out, when the roofs, along with the rebels’ firing positions, crashed to the lower floors.

Nevertheless, important transportation hubs remained in rebel hands.

Just such a battle must have raged here the night before, and the Russians, unsuccessful in their efforts, retreated with their cannons to the basilica. But I had barely reached the pillaged corner, where the contents of the former photo store with all its furnishing and equipment had spilled out on the sidewalk and glass mixed in the debris was creaking under our feet, when I was already forgetting my stupid wish to stay with that boy. I gave up the idea of fighting and with it I also gave up any moral superiority. I was on my way to get bread, and the more important question was how to cross the street and who’d have the courage to go first. Even without aiming accurately, from the basilica the Russians could fire into any part of Bajcsy-Zsilinszky Road; a careless step or movement in the early morning darkness would be enough to set them off.

By the summer of the following year, however, I couldn’t even remember on what day this happened and at first had no idea from where I knew this boy.

Maybe it happened on Sunday, but probably on Monday, at dawn on October 29.

For a short time, standing near the train toilet, we tried to figure out when we had met. Sunday, he exclaimed, because the bakers didn’t work over Saturday-Sunday night.

I already had my hand on the toilet door handle — that’s where we met again, on the speeding train, in front of the toilet.

Definitely not on October 30, because that day I’d never confuse with any other, not even accidentally. That was the day of lynching, with riffraff loose on murderous rampages everywhere in Budapest. And I don’t think he meant to remember or to remind me of anything in particular; he began to talk just to ease his embarrassment.

In fear that he might involuntarily have exposed himself to me and I might inform on him to the police.

Even among the rebels, most of them are sleazebags.

I didn’t quite understand why he called them sleazebags, but in fact I was an eyewitness; I could testify against him anytime.

That summer, normal people no longer talked about the events of the previous autumn, and certainly not about what kind of people the rebels might or might not have been. The rebels were no longer spoken of. For a while, I was grinning in embarrassment that I had initiated such a conversation right by the train toilet and was ready to listen to such an unpleasantly candid recitation. What did he want with this story. He was trying to figure out whether I was a provocateur and I was wondering whether he was an informer. At times like this you can feel in the corner of your mouth the unpleasant twitching of the other person’s distrust. True, we were talking in very low tones, the train was rattling underneath us, and we were on an open platform, children were asleep inside, piled on one another, and, their jaws open, the German nurses or whoever they may have been were dozing off in their compartments. We were in the charge of Sister Klára, an older woman with very observant eyes who paid particular attention to me. I could see she wasn’t watching me so much because I spoke a little German, but she watched me everywhere and whatever I was doing. I was anxious about her attention. These nurses wore gray uniforms with white collars and white aprons; the small gray caps on their heads had a large cross with red borders.

Nobody could hear what we were talking about.

Another reason it was inadvisable to talk was that it seemed better not to know about things that someone else knew. I had no way of knowing the things he didn’t talk about. And maybe that was the reason we couldn’t stop talking. With every word, our knowledge of each other accumulated, and that’s why we had no choice but to trust each other.

It was as if we were mutually forcing our secrets on each other.

Later, we urinated together, which he initiated.

He said, fuck, we were already buddies forever, weren’t we. Why would we be ashamed of showing our cocks to each other.

There was some profound truth in this because, thanks to our jabbering, we had instantly lost our independence.

Whenever he said something concerning which he counted on my confidence, I had to reciprocate by saying something with which I would gain his. I couldn’t tell him that I wouldn’t urinate with anybody and certainly not because of my cock. This was the hardest thing, to trust each other, to entrust him with something secret that would make life riskier than it already was. Because you had the feeling you were becoming somebody’s friend not of your own free will but because of a compelling necessity, and that is not a pleasant feeling at all. Or as if you were flaunting your own candor and confidence so that you could appease the other person or bring him to his knees with his voluntarily accepted vulnerability. This kind of chumminess could be nauseating. But now, the train and the insane journey had somehow lifted or torn us out of the conventional, shadowy world of compulsions and unpleasantnesses, had somewhat lessened the force of its strict regulations.

The train was taking us on a vacation so exceptional that we could not know in advance when it would end or even where exactly we would spend it. Everything would be decided in Dresden, where they might put us on a different train or not; some kids might be taken to the sea, others to the mountains.

Sister Klára talked of these things in big generalizations, as if she herself was not quite certain of them.

In brief, although the general emergency condition continued in uncertainty, no authority or person could come up with surprises, at least until we reached the border.

We were still clattering across the landscapes of our country; our train didn’t stop at any stations but sped through them, blowing its whistle, or stopped for long periods in open areas. A special train illuminated by pale lights in the sweltering summer night. We were truly free on the train.

When the train suddenly braked and stopped in an open field, the night around us, resounding with crickets, seemed to pulsate.

Or if we were not quite free yet, we would be somewhat free out there, beyond the border.

That year, the sizzling summer had burst on us suddenly just as the school year ended.

The official notification said that one should report at such and such a time to the departure hall of East Station; having to be in the departure hall was itself a good sign. Assembly at train number 2; length of stay abroad undetermined; group passport in conformity with ticket of participation. Didn’t understand a word of this. The only difference in our papers was that some had to report to train number 1 or 3; I had to go to number 2. But nobody knew what this meant or how a ticket of participation would turn into a group passport. I had never been abroad. It felt as if I were going to Paris to see my mother, who of course was not expecting me, was not in the least interested in me, and whom I did not even remember; I didn’t even know whether she was still living in Paris or if she was alive at all.

I yearned, I thirsted for the sea because abroad meant not only my mother but also infinity.

The two distant objects of my yearning had somewhat blended together the night before my trip, and because of that, like a child, I developed a temperature and fell asleep at the table, my head buried in my arms. As if along with the sea, I might have my mother again too. Or if I couldn’t, I’d be given an even larger body of water, one unknown to me but whose grandeur I would remember. Nobody knew of this pipe dream of mine, just as I had to keep secret that I had a temperature. They might have noticed, though, that I was paler and even more reticent than usual. Nínó felt my forehead. I was still shivering in the rapidly warming morning as we hurried to the railway station with Ágó.

In the huge, glass-covered sunlit station several thousand children and even more relatives were thronging and grumbling. Since my grandmother had died nobody had kissed me, nobody had touched me, nobody had hugged me. Beautiful Ágó and I could not stand each other. I did not have to fear tenderness from him; he would definitely not have noticed that I had a fever. He did not care much about anybody but himself. Just then he was preoccupied mainly with his ancient Mercedes Nürnberg, left parked in the blazing sun, which he claimed had been made especially for Pope Pius and in which for days the radiator water had been coming to a boil.

As soon as we set foot in the station, the sight of the crowd made him even crosser, he mentioned his car again, and my yearning had to subside, perhaps my temperature too. In the throng there was no longer room for promises made to individuals. I knew what I could expect; the collective dread would continue. Neither of us felt like wading into the crowd; I set down my suitcase at my side. It would have been better to be sick and stay home. Who could have known that the children’s vacation operation in East Germany would be so enormous. We were counting on being offered some privileges to cope with our problems.

Ágost kept looking around to see whom he could turn to in the crowd, wondering what he should do among so many disgusting human beings.

The glass-covered part of the station was completely empty that morning; the usual traffic had been redirected to the outer tracks. Only three long trains stood on the indoor tracks, but the police had cordoned off the way to them. Even the railroad workers couldn’t tell the hysterical relatives where these trains were going, or maybe they were not allowed to say. It seemed there was no information to be had from anyone. Ágost did not move; he stood like a statue. I asked people what was happening here, what was supposed to happen to us. Only people who had registered earlier could cross the police cordon, which meant people who had turned over their participant’s tickets at the table where the crowd bunched up and everybody was shouting. A child’s name would be looked up and checked off on a list, then the child’s papers would not be returned, and instead they gave the child a number, whereupon the boy or girl had to say good-bye to the accompanying adults.

The German sisters practically tore the smaller children away from their relatives or escorts and pushed and shoved them along with their luggage across the cordon, from where they staggered to their trains, mainly by themselves, while the sisters kept yelling after them in German, there, not that way, the other track. These were stern, disinterested women, though some gently smiling deaconesses were among them.

If you didn’t understand German, you couldn’t understand anything of the chaos, of the German commands echoing through the huge station.

The little ones were bawling, did not want to be taken from their families, did not want the language of this other chaotic world. Parents and relatives tried to explain things to the children, waved good-bye to them, and implored the shouting, impassive women who were urging the children on and trying to calm them, but no matter what they said or explained, the way the nurses stuck to their orders seemed ominous and incomprehensible in this emptied-out railway station.

From the railway people one could learn at least that the three long trains had arrived the night before from Dresden and would probably return, as they put it, to their home base. And there something would happen, they explained patiently, because passenger trains of this length usually did not run on domestic routes — they would be rearranged, we’d be transferred to other trains, some of the cars would be detached — and then we’d continue our journey. The adults were running around discussing things, showing their papers to one another; maybe somebody else could find some secret and decipherable sign or cull something intelligible from them, something promising. The excitement was understandable, given that the adults were being asked to relinquish small children in their care without knowing where the children were headed or for how long.

The echoing German words probably also contributed to the general excitement: that something like this was being done again by Germans, that Germans were once again free to do anything they pleased.

When we’d been given our participant’s tickets at school, they’d told us we’d learn all the necessary details at the train station. But the German nurses and sisters pretended not to hear the questions or did not understand what was being asked in this stupid foreign language. At best, one could presume they had good intentions toward the children; one certainly could not see it. And most people were rather afraid of asking the Hungarian policemen; when someone did, the policemen merely shrugged their shoulders, they didn’t know any more than the questioners. The trains were taking orphans and bombed-out children somewhere, though the official language no longer permitted these innocent words, just as it had been forbidden, since March, to utter, even by accident, the word revolution. Jails and internment camps were full, reprisals against the uprising of the previous autumn had entered their most vicious stage, and people were determined not to let their mouths betray them; if they had managed to survive until now, they weren’t going to make a wrong move and risk everything. Anyone talking to a policeman had to invent a whole other language, taking into account that the very act might be considered suspicious by people standing around. Everyone was still afraid that a misunderstanding might result in a lynching, as had happened to some secret policemen on the street in the last days of October and to anyone whom the riffraff declared was a secret policeman.

Newspapers were reporting that our sister countries, as part of their summer vacation campaign, had offered to take children who “live in broken families” or “whose housing problem is not solved.” What a laugh. Although one could appreciate that they were trying with these unnatural formulas to avoid certain locutions. The official version decreed that it was hostile propaganda and punishable slander to make any statement or allegation that the Russians had conducted air attacks against Budapest and had helped their troops fighting in Budapest’s streets with bombs. The mere suggestion that the Russians might have bombed the city would suggest that not only had they smoked out the rebels from their hiding places but, in complete disregard of international rules of warfare, had not spared the civilian population. Yet the high number of dead and seriously injured, or of destroyed apartments, couldn’t be denied, and the numbers passed by word of mouth could not be explained as having been caused by street fighting, the dimensions of which were known. This is why normal words could not be used when speaking aloud.

Nevertheless, when we children talked to one another, the first question we’d ask was always whether the other one was an orphan or one whose family had been bombed out of its home.

That way, one knew right away who had had help getting into the vacation program.

I said I was an orphan so that at least here I wouldn’t be looked on as a privileged child. I couldn’t tell anybody that my mother had abandoned me for a woman and my father had been done away with by his comrades.

While I was going around looking for information, I noticed a boy who seemed familiar to me, though I had no idea where in hell I’d known him from, picking up his suitcase.

It was similar to my yellow suitcase.

He started off as if resigned to throw himself into the crowd bunched up in front of the platforms. I saw why he did this. Earlier he had seemed determined not to; no, he would not cross the police cordon. As if that meant walking voluntarily into a trap. He’d rather not go on this vacation. Then he decided that in the end it was best to put the whole thing behind him as soon as possible. Nobody went with him. He hadn’t noticed me then, and I had no way of knowing what he was afraid of, or why he thought it better to get on the train. It was as though on his face and in his bearing I could follow all my feelings, all my disgust, all my fears and anxieties. Perhaps my relatives had insisted on my going on this vacation so they could at last be rid of me. I suspected that I’d wind up in an institution from which there would be no return. They’d take my name away again and this time I’d be given a German name. I did not understand what was waiting for me or why the grown-ups were so unsuspecting.

Maybe they were not unsuspecting but, rather, party to this lousy show.

Then it meant that we were being taken away the way the Turks used to take away rounded-up children to raise them to become janissaries. I so surprised myself with this association of ideas that I suddenly had to look up at Ágost, who was barely taller than I was, which I always forgot. For some time then, I had been made to wear his used clothes. His gaze passed absentmindedly over my face. I wanted to attract his attention with something, to say something quickly so I would see on his face whether there was a conspiracy or we were actually going on vacation, in which case I could get over my persistent anxiety. The station was reverberating with the insane hubbub of the children and their families, and an impassive female voice on the public address system went on repeating, probably for hours, the same few sentences.

Regularly scheduled trains depart from the outer tracks, outside the departure hall. Departure hall. Parents and relatives, relatives of children participating in the vacation operation, operation, are requested to leave the departure hall, departure hall, as soon as the children have reported in with the officials, officials. Cials. Your attention, please. Please. Ease. From tracks 3, 5, and 7, special trains are departing, trains are departing. Regularly scheduled trains depart from the outer tracks. Outer tracks. Racks. Acks.

I was racking my brain, where could I have known this boy from and from where could he have gotten a yellow suitcase just like mine. But I did not remember where I knew him from. Nothing came to mind. My suitcase might have been used more; its yellow cowhide had darkened more than his had. More precisely, even my suitcase wasn’t mine, or anyway I had nothing of my own. I had nothing and nobody, and that is why I didn’t feel I had something from which I could be torn away.

If they take me away, well, they’ll take me away.

I told Ágost he could leave me there, he could go, no point in waiting longer. He should go and change the water in his car radiator. I’d manage by myself. I meant this as some kind of bold, manly gesture but, in fact, the boy I knew from somewhere made me do it. Because of the earsplitting noise Ágost did not understand what I had said, and he answered something I didn’t understand. I was impatient, eager to take off after the boy.

Ágost was shouting that as a going-away present he wanted to give me his pen.

This stopped my breath. His offer strengthened my suspicion that I was facing a final farewell. The pen was an expensive one; he was searching for it in the inner pocket of his light summer jacket.

He wore incredibly fine things, the kind of clothes that in those years perhaps nobody else did.

But nobody had ever received anything from him.

Or he had always manipulated things so that whatever he might have bought for someone else or given as a gift would eventually always return to him or at least bring him some benefit. Ágost was not wicked but, rather, weak, insatiably greedy, and cruelly selfish. I felt ashamed, even to myself, of my contempt for his weaknesses. Perhaps my grandmother was the one who had instilled in me that bit of life’s wisdom according to which nothing is worth making a gift of except things we cling to with all our hearts. Ágost was rather far from such wisdom, yet now he was ready to make just such a gift. He was rummaging so energetically for the expensive pen that I had a feeling he wouldn’t have the strength to carry out his generous intention.

Not that he couldn’t find the pen; he was enacting for himself an entire scene created by himself about having to look for it.

Although he possessed exceptional mental abilities, Ágost was not taken quite seriously in the family. Probably Szilvia and Viola were the ones who began calling him Gézuka—Gay-zhoo-ka, they would say — which he vehemently protested. He was a very good-looking young man who with his sheer presence made the two girls very excited and threw them into no small confusion. He was also a highly skilled diplomat residing in some mysterious place abroad. But it was impossible to exchange three sentences with him without the infantile traits of his character rising to the surface. Because they were attracted to him, the two cheeky girls quickly took appropriate revenge. Renaming him, picking a particularly soft-sounding name and ending it with the diminutive given to a child, helped them to maintain a distance from him and consider him below their rank. They pumped him with questions, set traps for him, spied on him, ferreted out his weaknesses so that they could pick on him; they made fun of him and imitated him; and no sooner did he turn away from them than they’d mimic and ridicule him.

He had made his decision, but I could see that every moment that he could still possess the cherished object, every moment the expensive pen was still in his pocket, was precious to him.

Or he had gone mad.

I did not understand, I stammered and giggled like the girls that no, please, really. I wouldn’t dare dream of owning such a valuable thing; please, don’t embarrass me with it.

But he, mellowed by his own generosity, insisted, though he went on not being able to find it.

I’d look upon it as something borrowed, I said; he would merely deposit it with me for safekeeping.

I was given new clothes only if and when my aunt Irén tired of the family’s miserliness.

We’d go from store to store. Sometimes her anger was so great that she would dress me from head to toe and I was the one who’d have to insist on some balance, since in her fury she could pile all sorts of superfluous nonsense on me. Aunt Irén was an exceedingly careless woman, things dribbled through her fingers, she loved to spend extravagantly; sometimes she was simply gripped by an urge to splurge; but buying clothes for me also meant a chance to compete with Erna, which she obviously enjoyed doing. Erna hated unnecessary expenses and very strictly determined what was necessary and what was superfluous. In a mildly reproving voice, she would claim that Irén was weirdly similar to my mother in all her traits; I heard this with great alarm. And that the relationship between my mother and Irén had been exactly as intimate as that between my two cousins Viola and Szilvia, who were inseparable. I watched the girls as one who looks not only into his corporeal past but also into his possible future. With these insidious assertions, Nínó cautioned me that I would grow up in the world as irresponsibly as this nice set of females had, both of whom were probably lesbians. If I wasn’t on guard, if I didn’t resist the temptation of squandering and extravagance, inherited through the maternal branch of the family, I would wind up a big good-for-nothing.

However, she justified her son’s expensive tastes by saying that Ágost was a diplomat and having an elegant, smart wardrobe was part of his profession.

But Gézuka had no profession.

Ever since he’d been recalled from his position abroad, he had been working as an interpreter in an ordinary government office, and in his free time he translated stupid, boring political speeches and all kinds of strictly confidential diplomatic papers into foreign languages. I myself had no interest in this man or in his doings. I don’t know why, but my impression was that, compared with his father, he was an inferior mutation, and I found the old Hungarian Nazi more interesting. Irén called the lecherous old man, straight to his face, an old fascist or evil Arrow Cross man. She liked him, and he often slapped her behind; she drank much red wine with him; and because of Erna’s pettiness, she had only contempt for her. Her view was that, Jewish or not Jewish, what she looked for in a person was character. My husband is a Jew, so I can afford to hate the flaws in their character.

Believe me, I know everything about them, inside and out.

Still, I felt that everything was the other way around.

Because of her ruined marriage, Irén took her revenge on unknown people. In Nínó’s character flaws, she was looking for acceptable explanations for her own unbridled emotions. When we walked around the city, I had a chance to observe her close up, yet I failed to develop any liking for this strange trait of hers that was so intimately familiar to me, even though I sensed that my mother must have had the same trait if, as Nínó claimed, Irén and Mother had lived in a symbiosis like the one between Irén’s daughters.

Perhaps she abandoned me so heartlessly because I’m half-Jewish on account of Father’s side of the family. But then, why did both she and Irén choose to marry Jews.

The sight of our excitement and enthusiasm when we returned from one of our shopping sprees, flushed and talking loudly, throwing the packages down in the spacious hallway of the apartment on the boulevard, must have seemed to Nínó as a frontal attack on her personal convictions.

Her carefully, lovingly maintained apartment was flooded by a wave of confusing irresponsibility.

She’d say she couldn’t for the world understand why all this was necessary.

Shamming surprise, Irén responded, come, come, Erna, forgive me, but I couldn’t bear watching our favorite nephew walking around in outgrown rags any longer.

She was the only one who did not address Erna as Nínó.

Nínó was indignant, turned red, pardon me, what rags are you talking about.

His wrists are hanging out of his jacket sleeves and his ankles do the same from his pants. Maybe Erna hasn’t noticed how the boy has grown, and wasn’t she glad that suddenly he has turned into such a handsome lad.

I had been given Ágost’s best clothes, and my wrists and ankles could not have been showing or hanging out of the jackets and pants, for he was taller than I by at least by six centimeters. Unless I had suddenly grown since the previous Saturday morning.

Irén had a tendency to grow pale; she would never raise her voice, not for the world.

She said she had no intention of arguing but, sticking to the facts, she had noticed that my socks were wet. She had been noticing it for two weeks by then.

I slept in their house on Saturdays.

Which means you’ve let him walk around with holes in his shoes for two whole weeks. This wouldn’t be a problem in itself, no one would see the holes, but it’s autumn and it’s wet. On Sunday we couldn’t even go to City Park because of those shoes. And I don’t think there’s any point in hoping for a completely dry winter, either.

Then I have a suggestion.

Go ahead. I’m eager to hear it.

I see that you are dissatisfied with me.

I won’t deny it, sweet Erna.

I am ready to entrust the child’s care to you without further ado. If you take him to yourself, I’ll have no objection.

I assume you are willing to give me, along with him, the appropriate portion of the inheritance.

Frankly, I don’t know what you’re referring to with this sly insinuation. I am a sick woman, I’ve lived though a lot, and I don’t suffer baseless reproaches easily. Take it back. Please take back your last sentence.

I won’t take it back, but if you wish, we can discuss it in more detail.

Absolutely, but it would probably be better to pick another time for that.

The child has a right to know what we think and why, about what belongs to him.

Within a certain framework, absolutely.

Why can’t we talk about what your poor mother wanted to have happen.

Your aunt Irén is a very charming woman, Kristóf, but please, don’t be fooled. What is the meaning of this open accusation, she shouted. You slander me in front of the child, she shouted. I cannot imagine where this misleading information might be coming from, but if you insist on going on with it, I know what I must do.

Irén must have felt that she had gone too far.

I don’t insist on anything. I’m simply telling you.

Nínó, however, did not want to be told.

She must have feared that I was the source of the information, and that scared me too.

I’m not interested, she shouted. And if you have any doubt about my honesty, I’m sure the guardianship authority will be glad to be at your service. Nothing and no one will stop you if you wish to file a complaint, I can assure you. In a court of law, I’d be happy to account for everything down to the last penny, but not here in the hallway. And quite apart from any future decision of the courts, I’m ready to turn over to you the right to guardianship this minute.

Sometimes they carried on over the telephone, and that made me even more nervous because I could only guess what was being said at the other end of the line.

Irén saw she was losing, and she looked at me for help.

I’m afraid my principles of child raising and education would not be to your liking.

It was strange to hear these arguments taking place over my head. It was like a dream in which I could not see every detail and did not exist at all. Sometimes, in my excitement and nervousness, I’d get an erection, as a stray dog would when with different kinds of people among whom it hopes to find a master.

I did not help Irén; rather, I betrayed her. I kept standing there in my new clothes, saying nothing. I realized they were both lying while pretending to be telling the truth; if that was telling the truth, then that was what I was doing too.

We can find our way in the labyrinth of one another’s lies, and that’s what makes us one big family.

But we’re not talking about your principles of education, my dear Irén, you have accused me in front of the child that I made his inheritance disappear. In any case I want you to know that I have no child-raising or educational principles.

Well, dear Erna, that’s the difference between the two of us.

I beg you, Irén, let’s leave it at that.

As if they had said that nobody wanted me. And a few minutes later, as if nothing had happened, they were quietly having their tea, gingerly munching on Irén’s inimitable cream puffs.

They were talking of the rare cameos that during the past week Nínó had finally managed to acquire at a low price from someone’s estate and add to her large collection.

In fact, they were talking not about me but about themselves.

I was a burden to everybody.

I didn’t have to be a genius to realize that I wouldn’t have it any better with Aunt Irén. Word had it in the family that in addition to her husband she had plenty of passionate affairs, and what I saw was that except for discussing their clothes and dressing preferences, her attachment to her daughters was not very strong. She silently loathed her hairy, cross-eyed husband, who, to all appearances, idolized her. Irén not only accepted and enjoyed this but also knew that none of it was true. This short, bald, and very strong man who so enjoyed cutting up leather and fur with his big scissors that he had to stick out his tongue while doing it, and who had once told me I could not move in with them because with me there he’d be afraid for his daughters, was also playing a role, like Gézuka. He was certainly colder and more calculating than my aunt Erna, who was always flitting between emotional extremes but whom, when all was said and done, I loved more than anyone in the family. In the company of Irén’s husband, I froze. He believed the girls and I would have a mutually very bad influence. He gave me long penetrating looks as if he were seeing and silently enumerating all my secret sins. As if he knew what sort of person I would turn out to be.

You’ll never be a real man like me, he said, fixing me with his piercing cross-eyed look.

He glared at me as if expecting a full, penitent confession.

You will not spoil my two sweet little girls. I will keep you from that.

Which made me realize that my status would be even lower than that of the Jews, unless I restrained and disciplined myself.

Even they would have reason to scorn me.

As opposed to her husband and the others, however, my aunt Irén had an irrepressible curiosity, a kind of esthetic exultation, and because of that I could not deny her my affection. More precisely, my enchantment with her referred back to my mother’s icy silence. I sensed what might be blazing behind it. When Aunt Irén dressed me, she enjoyed finding connections between a person’s physical attributes and latent possibilities with which she might open up the essence. She enjoyed making somebody out of me whom I didn’t know. She told me it was always women, she had always dressed women, her little girls or her women friends and their little girls, yet the world, after all, was made not only of women, and this was now very different for her — a boy, she had now managed to get her hands on one, this was a novelty, a pleasurable break. The older I get, the greater the pleasure will be. Of course, with a boy she should be more levelheaded.

She was flattering me with her openness. I was attached to her.

Irén was beautiful, and I abhorred beautiful people. Her personality was considered colorful, and she never ran out of ideas, even if these ideas were very wicked.

As if her beauty were shackles from which she hoped to free herself and therefore every morning she hurled herself into the boring, gray multitude of ordinary people. This must have been the very opposite of how Ágost felt about people; he could derive no pleasure from observing that such-and-such a person was boring this way, another boring that way. As if people’s mere commonness and insignificance offended his good taste; or as if he were jealous of everyone and of everything anyone had; as if he would even have been glad to possess the ugliness of other people.

Perhaps this attitude too was the result of their obsession with frugality. It was hard for me to understand why these two people felt this way, while I felt nothing at all.

The two of them walked about in the world with an expression that suggested someone had just insulted them in some way but they were too genteel to acknowledge it. There’s no denying that their noses were pretty high in the air, always showing the world that they would not show what they felt. And if in accordance with their upper-class will and taste they picked something out of Ágost’s hand-me-downs and, having no choice in the matter, I wore it, Nínó was very happy, not because the clothes found a new wearer or because the clothes looked good on me, but because it pleased her that once again she could save some of the money she received as my orphan’s allowance. I was given favorable treatment because of my father’s disappearance; since his comrades could not account for his body, the sum, officially called a civil servant’s pension, which the government regularly transferred to my guardian for my support, was quite substantial. But the price of success was high; something had to be given in exchange, and Nínó considered this another offense she had to suffer in the world. The shadow of loss darkened the joy of the gain. At least Erna made herself believe that the gain was greater. But Ágost could not even give a farewell look to his used clothes. I saw that he had to control himself so as not to take them back right away.

He suffered a terrible loss; gift giving pained him.

No one but his mother understood the terrible pain he had about objects he might lose. And to reduce the pain, he treated the items given to me as gifts, as if they were still his.

Whenever he felt like wearing them again, he’d simply take them out of my closet, without a word. When I lived with them, I never knew exactly what belonged to me, what had been taken back; had they eaten my food before I had a chance to taste it, did they really use things they had already given me.

I barely remembered the years when I had lived with my mother and father. Thereafter, I had to learn quickly what my new caretakers wanted of me, with their strange intentions.

Sometimes I couldn’t find an item of mine that Ágost had no personal connection to. They just laughed. They also had a lot of fun when in their greed Ágost or Nínó gobbled up the lunch or supper that had been put aside for me.

Don’t tell me you’re going to whine about a lousy lunch. Ilona will scrape something together for you.

I watched and I observed this strange and beautiful man, this Gézuka, and I could not understand how he could be my cousin. He treated me as a lord of the manor would treat his servant; take this translation to such and such a place; bring me such and such a book from this other place. Sometimes he hurt me to the quick, sometimes he amused me, and I couldn’t figure out what sort of effect, and when, his tyranny might have on me. That’s why I was terrified of him.

Unknown emotions toward him arose in me. Sometimes I thought to myself, I will kill this man.

Ours was an unambiguous relationship.

I could stay with them so long as I behaved perfectly. With this premise, of course, they let themselves not only make all sorts of judgments about my good or bad behavior but also laid down for me, very strictly, exactly how and within what framework I might protest or rebel against them, what I might request or demand of them. In most cases, nothing. There was no humiliation I didn’t have to endure. And if I hadn’t been raised by my grandparents, this would have been much harder to bear.

Ágost could not relinquish anything of his, not with his eyes and not with his fingers. Let’s say he walked by me and, as if accidentally, pinched my shirt with his fingers. With an embarrassed little laugh, he’d remark that he’d probably never again have another shirt made of such excellent oxford cloth.

I felt I was burning up; my face was red; I was ashamed for him. And if I couldn’t stop myself from suggesting, for example, that perhaps I should return the shirt, he’d say innocently what a great idea, he could then wear it for a while longer. Actually, he liked these passed-on items. One does not like to wear brand-new things.

I wanted to tear off my skin — here, take it.

And now I didn’t care about him or his expensive pen, I didn’t care whether he stayed or went. I cared only about the boy I knew, I was sure, but still hadn’t figured out from where.

I felt that if I took my eyes off him, I’d miss something. I could still see his checkered shirt and yellow suitcase, but the crowd was swallowing him up. I wanted to stay with him; I wanted to run after him. But the thought embarrassed me. Ágost was proffering his stupid pen and shouting at the same time. That he was indeed going now, leaving me on my own, he really didn’t have any more time, and there was no point in waiting. Nobody had thought this departure would turn into such a disorderly mess. And I should use his pen in good health. Pleasant journey. When I arrive, I mustn’t forget to let him know my address. I should write him with his pen. He handed it to me ceremoniously, with both hands. I couldn’t tell what was more refined, his pen or his fingers, his gift or his gesture. He kept shouting that I should write, write, otherwise Nínó would be very anxious and I should know how dangerous that could be.

I shouted back that he might worry about plenty of things but not about my not writing. I most definitely would write, he could be sure of that.

Ágost looked like a Persian prince, as our great-grandfather did in photos from his youth, dark and with a martial bearing; his face thin, solemnly proportioned, almost somber, his hair thick and black. His darkly brilliant small eyes looked out from under heavy, tired-looking, half-lowered lids. His wrists were narrow, his hands delicate, his fingers improbably long, and his arched, nacreous nails seemed like a unique ornamentation, like jewels. It felt good to look at him even if you found him profoundly repugnant.

People in general don’t pay much attention to these phenomena or don’t sense them, but everything happens to us in the air.

Ágost was one of those people around whom nothing happens in the air because he did not emit anything, no feelings, no heat or light, perhaps a scent. I could not reach him with anything, and he did not reach me. The heavy gilded pen was a glossy black Montblanc, with the characteristic little white star shining at the tip. But there was something very advantageous in Ágost’s being unreachable and his not reaching anyone. He could not be deceived, perhaps, but there was no superficial emotional expression that, in the interests of his own comfort, he wouldn’t accept at face value. He was truly most content when he could remain indifferent, his face motionless and unsmiling.

Of the conspiracy I suspected in those moments there was no trace on his face. Or, if there had been a conspiracy and the family was now truly free of me for good, they must have kept it a secret from him too, and he had no idea of it. Perhaps he was giving me the pen so he could leave me there without any pangs of conscience. In the end, I don’t know why he did it; I didn’t understand it.

For a long time I thought I didn’t understand beautiful people because they could not be understood. I understood my grandmother and my grandfather, but they were small and could not have been especially attractive even in their youth. When I took family photographs out of my grandmother’s velvet box and looked at pictures of my father, I was reassured that he had not been beautiful either. Even as a small child I thought that people perceived beauty like some sort of medal or decoration, the grace of faith, when instead it should be considered as an elemental calamity whose painful consequences no one can prevent. My mother would not have abandoned me had she not been so very attracted to the beauty of someone else, or if her beauty had not meant a continued temptation.

I shouted all right, I’m going to register, he should leave and not worry.

I picked up my yellow suitcase by the handle. I had no place to put the pen because there was no pocket in my summer shirt. I kept holding it like a treasure; let him see that I value his gift. But I worried that with his fine, dry fingers he might touch my face.

Lightly, he raised his fist and yelled that I should forgive him but he couldn’t stand this terrible noise anymore; he shouted salut, bon courage.

Salut, I shouted back, and with that, we both turned on our heels.

The checkered shirt had already blended into the crowd gathered in clusters at the front of the platforms.

I took off on a run after him as fast as the throng and the suitcase bumping against my leg let me. As I ran I shoved the pen into my pants pocket. Perhaps this heedless gesture broke the last thin thread that tied me to my family. I sank into the universe, surrendered myself to a dangerous attraction, and no longer cared whether I was alone or not.

I enjoyed my enormous freedom without knowing what terrible dangers it had in store for me.

Our train pulled out late in the afternoon. An unexpected clink, a jolt, and very slowly we were moving, rolling.

At least the air moved in the stifling cars.

The heat was unbearable.

Everyone had long since devoured the food they’d brought from home; hours had gone by since we’d had anything to drink. My thighs and back stuck to the seat and I couldn’t move much because a little girl who had been entrusted to me was, in her sadness, alternately nibbling on my thigh and crying herself to sleep in my lap. Another little girl slept with her head on my shoulder. They were hungry and thirsty, as were we all, and I thought it better not to wake them. At age sixteen, I was the oldest one in the car and the rest of the children expected everything from me. The youngest ones were asleep, exhausted, or staring blankly out the windows.

Boarding the trains had ended around noon. We were given lemonade in green, buckle-lidded bottles. Everybody was still hanging out of the windows then, shouting and hoping to elbow their way to a good place for the trip. After the German conductresses closed and locked every door on the three trains, making a terrific racket, we thought we’d be on our way shortly.

The impassive, almost bored female voice coming from the loudspeakers kept repeating for long minutes that in compliance with the orders of the station inspectors, for security reasons the departure hall would be closed before the trains’ departure, therefore parents and relatives, tives, were asked immediately to vacate, cate, the railway station.

Tation. Tion.

But the crowd would not move.

Children hanging out the train windows were waving, yelling, and the long complicated sentence kept echoing, maddening and incomprehensible. The throng of excited parents and relatives was now packed into the open space between the entrance of the glass-covered departure hall and the end of the platforms; they stretched, waved, and screamed from there, though it made no sense to wait until we’d leave.

The loud bubbling of a dark mass.

Outside, Baross Square was sizzling in the sunshine.

Bullet marks on the facade of the glass-covered hall had been repaired in the first months after the fighting, but the station’s domed roof was still gaping with holes, and the hot sunshine pouring through them in enormous beams created a veritable curtain between us.

It was dazzling.

The little girl whose cardboard suitcase someone had thrust into my hands, I should take it for her, would not leave my side. She was whining that she couldn’t see outside, I should lift her up. If I gave up my place for even a second to satisfy her wish, the other children would have squeezed me out of my seat, for sure. There was her head, stuck between my stomach and the window, and from there she was screeching that I should lift her up.

Lift me up.

She was from the country and she used the formal address.

But I was not so much worried about losing my place as disgusted by the little girl’s smell. The unknown smell was emanating from her little dress, her skin, and her two heavy braids.

And then something happened that created a moment of frozen stillness in the station. The loudspeakers fell silent and we could hear loud commands being given, long reverberating and very aggressive.

As if someone would be hit immediately.

Only a few months had passed since the end of the fighting; what else could I have had as a first thought than that shooting would start soon.

But the policemen simply grabbed one another’s arms and formed a human chain that tautened against the fearful crowd. It all happened in a wink. The silence thinned, became ever thinner, and then snapped.

All hell broke loose, because as the chain of policemen began to move, the helpless crowd’s indignation soared, and the echoes reverberating in the hall sounded not like a mass protest but like an expression of dread and horror.

And then something else happened that I could not quite understand. The police officers were desperately shouting something that sounded like a ritual supplication, and the crowd responded with shouts of indignation, but there was no strength left in the indignation, the crowd’s resistance had no force at all.

Over the next few seconds, people squeezed through the two open gates and away from the glass-ceilinged hall like filling out of a sausage. The giant glass doors flapped, creaked, and then slammed closed; the mute hall echoed eerily and now the revolution was finally over.

Every Hungarian Was Lost

Next morning the landscape was dazzling.

For that time of the year, the sun was blazing very strongly above the small riverside town where houses were painted blinding white, gaudy blue, or burning yellow.

The silence was broken only occasionally by fish jumping in the river. The sky exhaled a fragrance of the water.

Every willow by the river was in bloom; horse chestnut trees lining the streets and round, deep-green ash trees all over were leafing out; and spilling out of closed yards, over fences, stone walls, and pickets, myriad purple and white lilac blossoms were about to open. Nobody was in the streets, no cart in sight anywhere.

The previous night, he’d fallen asleep very late in the cold room facing the street in the house of his birth.

He had drunk a lot of water.

He told himself that the water he had to drink after the roe salad was causing his insomnia.

He could not slake his thirst; he kept going into the kitchen and ladling more water out of the bucket that stood on a bench under the window facing the large moonlit yard. He drank, but the well water did not slake his thirst. In the midst of this ceaseless thirsting, waking and dozing, tossing and turning in bed, he saw his life as fruitless and empty. He dreamed of a dry riverbed; yes, his life was one big thirst, the scaly, odd-shaped segments of the dried silt made no noise under his feet, and there was nothing anywhere but barrenness, an infinite gray wilderness. Perhaps the fish eggs hadn’t been quite fresh.

The water became heavy in his stomach.

Yet his thirst remained unquenchable. Maybe he had gastric poisoning.

His stomach swelled, became hard as a drum. He walked outside and stood on the veranda steps, sweating in fear, worrying that he might not be able to cope with the pain. From the steps he urinated into the night, but took care not to let his stream reach the delicate leaves of the fledgling rosebush. He had on his dead father’s white nightshirt, and when he pulled it up with one hand the cold night touched and pleasantly cooled his lower body. Feverishly, his brain kept grinding away at his anxieties. I’ll drop dead like a poisoned dog. He enjoyed the damp coldness of the night on his thighs, spread legs, and testicles, and he was glad that in the last moments of his life he could still hold his penis, somewhat stiffened between dreams and wakefulness.

I’m going to die, he said to himself. I’ll die and leave this miserable existence without having found the person I’ve longed for all my life.

This is how they will discover me.

From the steps of the veranda he plunged into the bed of roses.

He appreciated his prick most when it was in this state, when it no longer lay shriveled on his testicles but, completely alienated from his own bodily reality, had not yet stiffened to the point of showing tense blood vessels. People will say he died among the roses with his cock in his hand.

Maybe I am a lost man; I haven’t found the one I’ve always longed for.

If only I could get back to America.

Dogs were barking, howling, and yowling nearby and far away; the moon was out, not too high yet, just over the roofs of neighboring houses, among the tips of the poplars; and with the air pulsating with barking he felt sure he was no different from the dogs. He envied the dogs their existence. If he were an honest man, if he didn’t keep deceiving himself, this is how he would howl into the night, every night.

Perhaps God was letting his body feel Jesus Christ’s suffering course through it.

If at the bottom of others’ suffering he feels his own, then his entire pantheism is a delusion; he has been mistaken. God does not reside in me; we are separate entities.

He could never resist the moon’s attraction, as if its light caused a cold shudder under his skin and pulled the hairs on his head skyward, individually.

There will come a time when I won’t be able to resist the moon; I will unite with it.

He listened and waited to see if he could detect the first sign of poisoning.

There was no person in the world in whom this sought-after someone might have taken shape. Everyone only resembled this possible person; more precisely, all too many people, both men and women, resembled this possible person. If at least he could endure loneliness; here he was, standing on the veranda steps in the midst of all this barking, and holding his penis, semi-erect from sleep, until all the urine emptied from him. What nonsense. What could be more boring than waiting for this to happen several times a day for one’s entire life. One would endure this only if there really was an independent self-interested God who, on hearing such skepticism, instantly struck one down or lifted one up. But this endless urinating was taking a long time; the urine had a strong inner pressure. As soon as a body is born it begins to function but without any reason, it merely functions; if, for example, it takes on liquid, it has to get rid of it. Or maybe physiological functioning is stronger than reason, in which case the universe is actually inert, making the reasonable labor of an entire life worth less than a farthing. The work of reason leaves no traces behind, in which case intelligence finds so little of worth in all of Creation that it might not even want to piss out whatever is superfluous.

Still, he has to piss it all out.

He could not step out of this vicious circle on the grounds that death was more reasonable or, put another way, that death appeared more valuable from reason’s point of view than existence did.

I miscalculated everything; funny, but now at least I comprehend it all.

He was deeply ashamed of having wrung some reciprocity out of himself.

Though he not only loved but downright adored this miserable Bellardi.

Out of sheer politeness he should not have reciprocated Bellardi’s confession with his own. Why did I do it; how could I have done it. Bellardi learned something I should have kept to myself forever.

And after he had urinated the superfluous quantity, he drank some more water, kept drinking, though in the mute kitchen’s cleanliness, more perfect than perfect cleanliness, he found the drinking mug unbearably smelly.

It’s possible that Bellardi is a lost man, but that doesn’t make me one too; why would I be a lost man. He struggled, protested against the idea that every Hungarian was lost, as Bellardi had claimed. All the while he felt the intense taste and scent of the Danube’s silt on his tongue and palate, and in his throat. At least Hungarians feel lost because the Turks took away their kingdom. I, however, am nothing but myself, nothing more. If I leave here, I can end this ineptness for myself. The Austrians at least recaptured what the Turks took from them. The Hungarians can’t even do that, they can’t do anything. If I leave here for good, I could at least end the constant stupid feeling of defeat and lack. Of this cursed pain that restrains the Hungarians’ stride, puts them at the mercy of Jews, of anybody, even of such idiotic has-been aristocrats as this Bellardi.

What have I got to do with them.

Bellardi hasn’t gone anywhere with his cock.

The bucket itself wasn’t smelly and neither was the mug — he had pointlessly nagged his mother about it, wanting her to wash them properly — which meant that throughout his entire childhood he’d drunk smelly water. In fact, the condition he cannot end is that of not being a Hungarian and not wanting to share the Hungarians’ painful helplessness and their permanent conspiracies and rebellions.

A place that one has grown used to for reasons beyond one’s control, that one calls homey.

It was always the water and not the mug that was smelly.

He won’t find out whom he should win for himself, for the sake of his peace of mind, or what he should end; and he won’t learn these things in America either.

He stood frozen in fear of himself.

The truth was that the last few minutes before the start of the docking maneuvers had profoundly exhausted and upset him.

When one is young, one does not realize that mental exertion means a substantial loss of general energy.

The wines and heavy food also did their share.

He had to admit that Bellardi deliberately timed everything so that he’d have no chance for a response, so that they’d both be drunk with the wine and each other’s presence. This too was a trick. With his dispassionate calculations, he could plow through everything. Madzar saw before him a view of life that made his own view seem distorted and inadequate. As if Bellardi in fact had not been acting at all but instead had transformed his intention to act into a clever trick and then waited for the results. Put another way, if Madzar wanted to hold on to his own view of life, he had to see Bellardi’s behavioral patterns as distorted and inhuman. He saw clearly enough what he had known about him since childhood, but he also saw clearly that his own thinking, desperately seeking escapes, kept manufacturing useless caricatures of either himself or the other man.

That is how I’ve transplanted into myself the eternal, hereditary mental anguish of the Hungarians.

Everything, but everything, about Bellardi — his sentimentality, his gourmandizing, his loyalty, his physical arrogance, even his recurring self-pity — is illusion; everything is an illusion. Either these Hungarians pace up and down in helpless anguish or they stamp on one another. Luckily, Bellardi can hardly cover up one illusion with another. Here is a man who makes everything genuine disappear among illusions.

Yet I can’t avoid him, for he bewitches me with his countless illusions, and he really sank his claws in me with his request.

But now he’s standing here in the middle of the night and can’t rid himself of the thought that in this part of the world people drink smelly water and don’t even realize it.

Madzar was one of those people who become incredibly sensitive and confused by all sorts of requests.

Of course he should have rejected this one, but then he could no longer conceal his extreme stinginess, which until now he had refused to acknowledge in himself and didn’t want to acknowledge in the future either.

All night long he struggled with the dogs’ barking, was tortured by thirst, and the next morning continued struggling because he was constipated; because of Bellardi’s request, he was still furious at midday.

He carried the shit inside him.

He did not understand how Bellardi allowed himself this sort of shamelessness, which is to say, he pretended to himself that he didn’t understand.

That way it would be easier to refuse the request.

No matter how poor they are, these Bellardis always swagger and consider everyone else as their servants.

But why is he taking it, and without a word of protest.

I probably take it without a word because in the depth of my soul I am their serf.

He was incensed.

Either I could be the servant of these rotten gentry or I could work for the dirty Jews, I certainly have choices, haven’t I. I should have taken the time to liberate myself. I want to be a Jacobin, a republican, he cried to himself, and his lips were moving as he walked. He could amuse himself with these sentences. Death to priests and aristocrats. He giggled. Hang your kings.

But these intimate little yelps failed to quell the fury he was directing at himself. That all my life I should be such a gullible fool whom anyone can seduce or play tricks on.

No, no, he argued with himself, chuckling and swearing as he walked on the deserted Upper Danube Row, I won’t stay here, I’ll go away. I will, so help me God.

But this was not the same God he’d thought about the night before; this was the fucking God who thrusts the world into misery, damn him.

He moved on, the sun burning on the back of his neck, in his much too hot knickerbockers, his visored cap in hand. He was going to Ármin Gottlieb’s lumberyard while asking himself how that little pederast dared present him with such choices. To claim that it was a matter of honor, that his wife was frigid. Out of the question. The handsome little lieutenant was kicked out of the navy because they caught him with someone like this little shithead the Mayer boy.

Instead of fucking his wife good and proper.

And just by looking at those two you’d never guess they suck each other’s dick.

Actually, he had been deeply deceived, and now he couldn’t delay the necessary decision any longer, but he also dared not admit his disappointment to himself. What should he do. Give them money for their stupid conspiracy or not give them a cent. Take on the work or refuse it. He couldn’t understand why he might be ashamed to say no. Not only did his paternal name and his religion show that in this multireligious small town he was Hungarian, but for some inexplicable reason he in fact felt himself to be profoundly Hungarian.

He felt more Hungarian and felt it more profoundly than those making a lot of noise around him. These show-off Hungarians disgusted him, and he already knew that because of them he would say no because he wanted nothing to do with them.

With anyone.

It’s not Hungarians who are alone; every Hungarian is alone, a Hungarian does not join anyone, and Bellardi is the last person he’d want to join.

Empty and thirsty, the disappointed lover walks under the sky supersaturated with beauty, he said to himself, while all sorts of murky, weighty actions with unpredictable consequences are demanded of him. He tries to provoke himself with sarcasm.

But it was unbearable to think that behind his back people unknown to him discussed him, came to conclusions about him, people with a secret world in the depths of which, mixed in with ordinary emotions, stifled pleasure was seething.

As he walked, dogs in the enclosed yards and behind the thick gates were awakened by his steps and hurled themselves insanely against the iron and wooden fences.

As if forbidden pleasure and conspiracy were mating at this unknown, hot, and secret depth, concealed from consciousness. Not only do they fuck each other in the mouth, they even penetrate each other’s asshole. It seemed that with the unavoidable and infuriating flight of fancy, he was saying to himself, I’m excluded from that experience.

And so as not to hear the dogs’ frenzy, he fled to the other side of the road.

For a while, he walked beneath the orbs of the ash trees.

From here, from the dam, he could see the water.

Actually, he didn’t want them to accept him.

And he had a glance, in the depths, of those dark underground rooms in which with white-hot iron tongs they tortured one another, and which it would not have been wise for him to enter. Until now it hadn’t been difficult to overcome his natural curiosity and envy.

But now he was seized by sorrow and dread.

The silent water was inviting him with its light, depth, and scent.

He could easily submit to this attraction.

Anchored fishing boats clanked and burbled against one another.

He continued on the shore, below the dam, by the old concrete wall green with moss where in his childhood the bare feet of boat-hauling day laborers had trod in the black silt. This almost two-kilometer-long old wall, considered to be one of Europe’s first significant concrete constructions, exuded the icy breath of winter, despite the sudden heat wave. Near the water, the silence was perfect. His day might already have been spoiled, but at least he wanted to hear the lapping and splashing of water, not barking dogs.

To inhale the scent of the swelling river.

When, the night before, the pale, vibrating lights of the Mohács coaling dock had appeared in the hazy darkness, the captain did not leave the dining table and go to the communication flue to call down to the stokers or talk to the engine room. Those men knew how to do their job without his instructions. On a big, time-tested ship like the Carolina, everything works by itself. In fact, the captain rose and with a single quick movement closed the communication flue. By doing it so decisively, he showed he needed every one of the remaining moments for himself.

He sat back down.

Holding his cigar, he leaned amiably across the table so he wouldn’t have to talk loudly. The crepitating, flickering candles illumined his eyes from close up. No trace of cheerfulness remained in the deep grooves and pits of his face, not even in the depths of his radial wrinkles.

Madzar had never before seen this face of Bellardi’s.

As I indicated already, he began quietly and with a bashfulness not easily concealed, my intention is to inform you of something in strict confidence. I’m not expecting an immediate response from you. But I do count on your complete discretion, otherwise I’d never even begin, naturally.

You do me honor with your confidence, Madzar replied guardedly.

Regarding the discretion, I would need some reassurance.

Forgive me, but since I don’t know what this is all about, what kind of reassurance could I give you.

I’m not asking for your word of honor because that would be too much. Bellardi laughed and looked at him warmly, but you could say, so help me God.

Madzar had the impression that the candlelight was pulling apart the other man’s features and shoving them aside so as to make his masks disappear.

The end is not yet near because this is still not him; he is only exchanging one unknown face for another.

My impression is, he said aloud, that you are asking too much. And we should leave the gods out of the game.

I cannot comply with your wish, he added very quietly, to emphasize his refusal.

Bellardi looked at him, amazed, being unprepared for this refusal; he did not accept it, and, as if putting down a deposit on what he was still intending to say, he broke into a demure, encouraging smile.

It’s not my own safety I’m looking out for, my dear Lojzi, or I should say not only mine.

The seriousness of his words was credited by his transparent, trust-filled, pale-brown eyes, lit by the candles right down to their dark depths.

Nevertheless, Madzar, keenly attentive, could not accept the words; he involuntarily suspected a lie, a deception, ulterior motives between the captain’s mouth and eyes.

He did not understand why this Bellardi thought that of course he’d be curious about secret matters.

I’ve got enough things to think about as it is, he apologized.

He found it abhorrent to give his word of honor blindly about anything. And what do these things have to do with any kind of god.

A word of honor would be too pathetic. Don’t be angry that I can’t do it. I’m much simpler than you think.

Growing indulgent under the influence of his own words, he began to understand Bellardi’s double-dealing, sentimentality, and love confessions. Everything up to now had served one purpose only: to prepare him, to soften him up.

That is why he’d wanted to cast a net over him, to keep him from saying no.

We’re deceiving each other with our childhood, what stupidity, he thought; as an adult with responsibilities on my shoulders, I can’t be playing the cub scout for him. After all, I build buildings that must stand, and the chairs I make cannot collapse when weight is put on them.

He could not deny that a desire to assert himself was rising within him, to tell the other man straight to his face, wait, wait, my friend, things are exactly the other way around; I’m interested first and foremost in visible and reasonable things, not in your bottomless obscurity and perfidious secretiveness. I deal in objects and materials and if for no other reason I feel no obligation to obey your rules of chivalry. Retroactively, as it were, I spit on your hereditary valor too. I don’t give a damn about any of your transparent secrets, yours and those of your kind. Among you, I wouldn’t want to be even a master builder. You’re all notorious parasites, every one of you; your sole vital element is destruction and self-destruction, and I’m happy to leave that pleasure entirely to you.

Of materials, shapes, concepts, building, and expert knowledge you have no idea at all.

And because he did not say any of this aloud, his mouth trembled, as did his nostrils and eyelids, which the candlelight now turned glittering red.

He leaned back on his chair, to be as far away from the captain as possible.

And the moment he got his distance, he grew alarmed.

But I still don’t know, he argued with himself, how could I possibly know what it is I don’t want to hear from him, or what exactly I consider so ridiculous or false in his request.

In his nervousness, he laughed.

And if this is indeed so, he continued in his thoughts, I must be struggling not with him but with my own cowardice, my own mistrustfulness and ridiculousness.

If you absolutely insist on it, he said, laughing, then all right, here it is, but without the inclusion of any capital-letter God, take my simple word of honor.

What does this kind of word of honor mean, anyway, he thought to himself, nothing.

What accounting do I owe these people. I owe them no accounting at all.

It was heartwarming to think he had deposited his money in a reputable private bank in Amsterdam. He had to laugh at himself, and he did, which quickly produced a small advance on the longed-for fulfillment. And nothing really matters except money. And then he saw that his supercilious laughter had offended the other man, and he regretted his own leniency.

Now they had to reassess each other’s situation. They hadn’t yet started anything; they were in the midst of a methodological introduction but already sagging under the weight of each other’s life.

Come on, out with it, he said aloud and brazenly, because he wanted to be free of this burden as soon as possible.

Well then, I am a member of a very old secret society that today, unnoticed yet most effectively, covers the entire country, Bellardi replied, no less forcefully. What’s more, going with the spirit of the times, we’ve crossed borders.

I’ve been given the task of informing you of the organization’s goals.

Madzar did not even nod at this; he was dumbfounded, reduced to silence.

The terrible hunch was coming true, Bellardi was indeed a zealous Catholic opportunist, just as he had suspected earlier, and a conspirator to boot; he was right. But it cannot be, things cannot be so simple, he kept telling himself, as the other man in turn fell silent to allow his friend to process what he had heard.

But he was slightly relieved, after all, that it was not money the other man wanted from him.

Our organization is a community of men of consequence and influence, Bellardi went on, his voice somewhat hoarse, and I want to reassure you right off that we do not recruit our members but rather, after a number of sounding-out conversations, invite them to join.

You mean, I should consider this as one of those sounding-out conversations.

If you wish, I can quickly give you the names of prominent men in our circles.

No, thank you, I’d rather you didn’t.

The less you know, the safer it is.

That’s what I think too.

Don’t think of it as a young men’s club in some village, but rather as a large family with many distant relatives, or an exceptional gentlemen’s club so special that neither its name nor its address is known to anyone. The society has no address or, more accurately, it has as many addresses as it has members. The name of the organization we do not say out loud. Or you can think of it as a freemasons’ lodge, but one in which nothing embarrassing or exceptional happens. Except for the admission process, there are no ceremonies. At most, we listen to scholarly lectures on topics of Hungarian history. Whenever we can, we do this outdoors, at places where our ancestors gathered. The invited speakers are not necessarily members of our community and often they are not even aware they are speaking before a family or even members of an entire national-ethnic clan. Lajos Bartucs, László Németh, and Dezső Szabó lecture regularly. We chat about the world’s situation, its destiny, I would say über Gott und die Welt. The last time, we heard a lecture by Professor Lehr, with whose work you are probably familiar.

Unfortunately, the name means nothing to me, but you know I’ve been living and studying abroad.

He plays a very active and authoritative role in the society.

Bellardi paused, as if with a knowing look he were signaling something like this: I know what I know, the professor is one of the society’s supreme leaders and I’m letting you in on this.

He lectured, I would say very edifyingly, on the relationship between Dutch methods of dike building and the images of nature in rural Dutch life. I mention this because he himself has lived and taught in Holland, where he is well known in academic circles. His fields of interest include ancient history, linguistics, and ethnography. If you’re interested, I can give you a summary of his lecture.

Madzar waited cautiously; he did not want to reply to anything.

I can also tell you that we do not have debates or arguments among us, Bellardi continued. At most, in the warm circle of his family, each member quietly strengthens his moral duties to the fate of the Hungarian nation. At the end of the conversation that follows the kind of lecture I’ve mentioned, everyone knows what to do for the foreseeable future. No need to talk about it much, no one gives orders to anyone; there are no lengthy voting procedures either. The nature of Hungarians is more suited to this quiet harmony than to noisy parliamentary democracy or anything like that. If a decision is needed, the supreme council can deliberate the question, and in matters of greater importance there is the tool of public acclamation. I can also reveal to you that our activities are approved by more than one important personality in the highest circles. In fact, many of them are active members of our community.

He fell silent again.

With his raised eyebrows climbing high on his forehead, and with his arms elevated above the table, he indicated that His Excellency the regent, gazing down from the summit of the hierarchy, silently supports their activities.

He is, perhaps, our greatest patron.

Of course he does not appear in person, he added in a whisper, almost as if in passing, but occasionally his elder son represents him, and Mihály is undoubtedly a most enlightened Hungarian gentleman.

Madzar did not respond to this either.

Seven percent of our annual income goes to a common pool, the captain added in the same whispery tone, again as if only in passing. The majority of this money goes for the university education, and study abroad if necessary, of young men with proven Hungarian patriotic feelings.

From this moment on, Madzar not only felt an aversion to Bellardi but could not concentrate on what he was saying.

He wants my money after all.

Which he did not understand, but his not understanding was as profound as if he had failed to comprehend not only the other man but Creation itself.

Only moments ago I was thinking of my money, wasn’t I.

He felt as if suddenly he had lost his way in the universe, and while he searched for it the universe made a big turn on its own.

No, it can’t be that Bellardi is a mind reader. The thought made him dizzy. Because he did have some money put aside, the money he made on jobs in Rotterdam with which he wanted to start his life in America. He could not touch that. He considered it a significant sum, but it was not so large as to allow for donations to charities from it.

True, he had gotten a goodly advance for his future projects with the Szemzős, and he had not transferred that money to the bank in Amsterdam; it was deposited in the General Savings Bank of Hungary.

On hearing Bellardi’s words, this worried him greatly. He felt that every possible trouble was crashing down on him.

Only a few hours earlier, an article in the Pester Lloyd he’d picked up by chance had informed him that Baron Koháry, Bellardi’s powerful father-in-law, sat on the board of directors of this bank. This information made everything as clear in his mind now as if he had solved a complicated crime. Aha, he said to himself, how obvious. As if the steam engine’s pumps and pistons were not working three decks below him but sucking and thrusting the blood in his veins, and the paddle wheels were rotating noisily not in the water but in his brain; in his agitation, his temples began to pulsate.

He reproached himself for his irresponsibility.

They’ll grind me up.

These people will take me and grind me up. Here, it seems to me, everybody is somebody’s relative and everything is connected to everything else.

And in that case this conversation is far from being a chance one; the coincidence becomes visible.

I should not spend so much time here; they will swallow me up.

But from this point on Bellardi did not fully listen to him, or rather, he did not notice how he had miscalculated the effect of his words.

Whenever he could talk to someone about this delicate subject, and those occasions were rare, he could not properly control his enthusiasm.

The mere thought that after centuries of discord and division, Hungarians might again join hands, and that he was telling this, very cautiously, to another son of Mohács — this exciting thought all but untethered him from the palpable world. Made him happy. After all, the other man knew as well as he did why every Hungarian in Mohács had become lost; he really did not have to explain this to him. As children, they had both wanted to uncover the mass graves, and thanks to the swallows and the powerful river current, they did find one.

He was filled with the happy feeling of liberty that he could build his case on something they both knew.

His activities in the secret organization gave him the only practical opportunity to open the door of his bodily cage and step outside himself. And it did not occur to him that Madzar might reject out of hand such an exciting human community. The liberating feeling that had brought him so close to others strengthened him in the profound conviction that being Hungarian was not a condition gained by being born as one, but rather a belief and worldview one had to earn with actions and reinforce with communal activity. The moment he touched on this subject, he was stepping onto the vast battlefield that had teemed with true Hungarians at the fatal dawn of the modern era. Because the Battle of Mohács was lost not by those who fought the Turks but by those who stayed at home in their warm dens. This clear feeling turned historical time into a mere second. There was no difference between the Middle Ages and modern times. He was watching the face of his childhood friend, with whom he wanted to share his happiness, and he did not notice that he was losing the other man’s physical presence.

His inner vision was held captive by the vision of this powerful community’s secret network. Its members trusted him and he trusted them. This trust controlled his entire sense of human responsibility. It was as if he were watching with their eyes to see where, in the net he had spread, he should tie up his friend, alive, what he might gain by this, and for what purpose and in what way the underground movement could make use of him.

All this had an alienating effect on Madzar, and not only because of the seven percent. The threatened secrecy of his bank-account number was only a practical symbol of his thinking. He could neither comprehend nor feel the impersonal enthusiasm that radiated from Bellardi’s being, so the other man’s fervor was painful to him. Not only did it not fill him with a sense of liberation, it affected him as a painful physical sensation; he experienced it as a rape committed by his beloved, as if several people at once had cornered him or shoved his body into a lair smelling of decay. In his shame, he bowed his head. His powerful chin nearly touched his breastbone and from there, head lowered, he looked across at Bellardi’s face shining with the power of the secret society, in a partly defensive, partly offensive attitude. In the fluttering candlelight his thick hair became like a specially wrought rubescent copper helmet. It made his skull invulnerable, it was an armor no one could penetrate.

Bellardi will not manage to get his money from him either.

And what about that seven percent.

These people know how much money he has.

Money he will not give to anyone.

He was dizzy, felt bad at the sheer thought of donating money.

Where on earth did Bellardi come up with the idea that he would give a single penny to anybody, for anything.

Not one, to nobody.

Meanwhile Bellardi was going on, saying that in the interest of a definitive solution of the Jewish question, Hungarians could not lay themselves open to the Germans, in other words could not endanger Hungarian interests because of the Jews. Waging war cannot be avoided, but the task is to cut off simultaneously the heads of both dragons, all fourteen of them. Only romantic patriots tend to forget that a weakened Hungary is not in the Germans’ interest today. German and Hungarian interests coincide at many important points. We cannot fight alone against Bolshevism. But, in the interest of the Hungarian race, we must oppose those endeavors that the German secret service, using Swabians and ethnic Germans in Hungary, has been promoting and financing for many years. The price the Germans are asking for the annexed territories* is so high we cannot possibly pay it. This is a fight for breathing space, for survival, for sheer existence, and he would very much want Madzar to understand that. The Germans are bent on acquiring more and more positions; they are taking over the police, the entire system of public administration, and the highest echelons of the armed forces.

That is why he keeps saying that civilians have no notion of what goes on deep below the surface. Like moles. Jewish and German elements have undermined the Hungarian state and gnawed it to pieces, and in a weak moment they would lay their hands on it.

This is a struggle, he cried out in frustration, for even these last words the beloved man’s face remained motionless.

Not a hopeless struggle, not at all, and don’t think, he exclaimed, that it’s happening only at higher levels or in higher circles. This needs truly deep Hungarian feelings, but not the sentimental kind. Public administration must be cleansed of German elements, commerce and industry of the Jews. In the interest of progress for the Hungarian race, we must be alert at every moment and acquire every position about to be vacated. In the service of Hungarian goals, we should engage both those who are already among us and those who are not yet with us.

And even those who cannot possibly be among us.

Lowering his voice to a whisper, he continued.

Listen, while we are peacefully talking about these things, the Mayer boy is trying to recruit my Swabian stokers into the Volksbund.* An enormous struggle for their souls, he whispered desperately. It is our job to talk the Swabian element out of this.

How could you possibly remain indifferent.

At this point Madzar interrupted Bellardi’s impassioned speech, his voice gentle.

But my dear Laci, you know that I myself am a good part Swabian.

Bellardi’s instant silence suggested deep surprise, his breath nearly stopped.

Oh, come on, you don’t know what you’re saying. I’ve always considered you a good Hungarian.

That’s only one side of the coin, what you’ve considered me to be.

Maybe you didn’t understand me correctly.

But what I consider myself to be is a whole other thing.

There is no better Hungarian than Professor Lehr. Even Dezső Szabó isn’t a better Hungarian than he is. And Ferenc Herczeg is a good Hungarian too.

Madzar laughed, not because he was in a good mood but because he was upset by what he had heard, so he laughed as if he thought that what Bellardi had told him was entertaining.

Before you tell me too much, before you tell me more than you want to, he said, still laughing, I’d like to warn you that Hungarian is not even my mother tongue. You couldn’t possibly have forgotten that you and the other boys found my accent in Hungarian a reason for constantly making fun of me.

Actually, even today he was reluctant to admit that being laughed at had hurt him.

My mother’s name is still Barbara Stricker.

His voice faltered, but he did not add that the boys had laughed at him especially because of his mother’s name.

And after so many years, he almost broke down over the old humiliations.

They were sitting opposite each other, painful seconds ticking away in their shared pain, the evenly puffing luxury liner continuing to slice the night in two.

Never again, he thought fervently, never.

As if they had been pulled apart for good and continued to keep their seats only out of tact and politeness. Madzar motionless, angry, his head down, his face raised to the captain’s, while his heavy fist, strong to the point of shapelessness and in an ominous state of readiness, lay on the cream-colored tablecloth. Bellardi floating in his state of surprise, oblivious to his cigar.

Hard as he exercised his mind, suddenly he could not return to his subject.

I don’t remember anything like that, he said very quietly and uncertainly, I don’t remember ever making fun of any of your traits or abilities. All my life I’ve admired you, my friend.

My one sweet pal, what are you talking about. He moaned as he said it.

It sounds rather improbable that you don’t remember.

Bellardi would have to return from his ideals and step back into reality.

He did not want to remember what he was being reminded of because he did not want to see himself in all his sinister narrow-mindedness.

He remembered the slingshot too, of course he did.

They were looking at each other’s tear-filled eyes, at each other’s struggle, but they could no longer read each other, could no longer see behind each other’s face.

In helpless anger Bellardi crushed out his cigar and kept squeezing and grinding it until it fell apart, leaving only dry, stinking debris.

Because even at this very moment he loved his old friend, adored him.

What makes you think I don’t know whom I’m talking to, he exclaimed finally in a suppressed, strangely threatening voice. In what other ways would you like me to woo you. You don’t think we checked your background thoroughly. How else might I convince you of my honest intentions.

He paused to control his emotions.

Do you think that such an extensive organization can be built and maintained without keeping a record of the people we think of as potential members and of how we size them up. It can’t be that I so misjudged this encounter, he thought to himself at the same time.

You’re deliberately misunderstanding me, and I also know why, pal, he said loudly. Don’t forget that whatever you know, I also know very well.

Nevertheless, all right, I admit, I’m not a great moral giant, and there was a time when I nastily betrayed you. All I have to say for myself is that I didn’t do it out of convenience. Maybe my conscience told me to do it.

He was shaking with emotion as he shuttled desperately between haughty rejection and sensible admission.

But you also know very well that I loved you more than anybody else and to this day I love you like a brother.

I didn’t love you any less, said the other one heavily.

Yes, I am a race protector, Bellardi bellowed, his voice now at top volume.

Because he could not help noticing that the other man referred to his love only in the past.

But that does not necessarily make me a racist.

Which I am not, he added.

He realized that with his statements quoting Professor Lehr’s words, so often repeated as self-reassuring commonplaces in the society organized for the protection of Hungarians, he had truly surprised his old friend.

It is not a prerequisite of membership, he continued somewhat more objectively, that both one’s parents be pure Hungarians. It is enough that the person’s father and paternal grandfather are Hungarian. Even if you tried not to, you could not help fulfilling this requirement.

He laughed briefly with these last words.

And another reason you should understand all this, he continued quietly, more sarcastic than angry, is that this is what you think too. Weren’t you the one who told me how the Jewish element was striving to control architecture all over the world, he asked.

Hearing so much explanation and self-justification astounded Madzar. As if he had suddenly seen the mechanism of the other’s soul and finally realized that in that gapless mechanism no room had been left for a sense of reality.

He became frightened of Bellardi and had to be on guard to maintain his self-control.

I’ve told you clearly what I am not. And a national socialist I definitely wouldn’t want to be because, unlike you, I do know what that means.

You mean that in your eyes I am a national socialist.

I make no judgments about you.

Ridiculous. Truly ridiculous.

For God’s sake, would you like to tell me then what’s the difference between German and Hungarian race protection. I don’t want to tear the world apart in the spirit of race protection.

In that case, Bellardi replied, our views are one hundred percent identical.

That’s the reason I’m going away, Madzar whispered passionately.

I too would prefer to be a humanist, Bellardi continued, if you permit me to share with you this guilty, mixed company. At least that’s what I still am because of my upbringing, and I will remain one too. I never gave you cause to call me a national socialist.

I did not call you anything.

But that’s what we’re talking about, about why Hungarians cannot let the Germans occupy Hungary by exploiting Hungarian racial interests. We must resist them, and who says resistance is a crime. In a life-threatening situation such as the current one, there is no other solution. Even the more reasonable Jews admit this and cooperate with us. You should really hear Lehr speak. His very beautiful wife is Jewish.

My dear Lojzi, I am not interested in your bloodline, and you know that very well.

If I took matters that seriously, I should reprimand you for working for a Jew, since that means you are strengthening them.

Or I could have said I wasn’t interested in the Hungarians’ cause because according to my bloodline and my name I am Italian.

He did not seem to be near the end of what he meant to say when suddenly Madzar’s fist rose as if he were going to strike the table.

But he did not.

He rose, kicked the armchair out from under him, and stood up.

You don’t imagine, I mean you don’t think, he said dryly, without emotion, that anyone has the right to tell me, or keep a record of, whom I could or should not work for.

The polite smile did not disappear from his face.

By now he had gained a reliable insight into the way the other man’s thinking and strategy dovetailed.

In response Bellardi also rose, but he took his time to tower over the table.

Nevertheless, putting my trust into good old common sense, I will continue, he said very quietly, almost amiably, as if free of disturbing emotion. Even though at that moment, because of his own sluggishness and lack of comprehension, he loathed and disdained Madzar with all the released force of his zeal; or perhaps it was himself he hated so much. He could not understand why he wanted so passionately to lure Madzar into something he knew was not right for him.

Who would not serve him.

And why doesn’t this servant serve him.

Fortunately, he managed to check his impending fury.

It’s a bit like saying that I’m giving you another chance to save your soul from damnation, he cried out with an unexpected laugh.

Believe me, I know your soul better than you do.

His teeth gleamed wetly.

Come on, what the hell do you know, whom do you know, the architect asked himself angrily. Yet the other man fascinated and enchanted him with his insistence and with his convinced inflexibility, which — along with his teeth and his laughter, false to the point of perfection — he had inherited from his mother and which made him very like her.

It also occurred to him that this was maniacal work, a work of madness, of being blind and deaf.

This cautionary thought, however, made him hesitate in his effort to defend himself at all cost from the threat of approaching chaos.

From crashing along with them.

Why didn’t the terrible beauty of chaos seduce him.

You know very well, he protested weakly, that I am going to set up my life in an entirely different world. It will be like going to the moon. I can’t see why, knowing this, you’re talking to me about these matters.

The little boy’s smile on Bellardi’s face now formed charming little dimples between the strong grooves and sharp lines.

Now you’re talking, he said, letting a chuckle shake his body, his pleasure made visible, this is exactly the point I hoped to arrive at, Lojzi, my precious.

Which, however, was no longer an innocent pleasure but a well-calculated obvious way to perform the latest act of the play that starred the two of them. They could not lose the game, had no reason to, and therefore had to do everything to save every single soul.

He could not be disappointed in himself.

Now, however, I must go below with you because we’re preparing to dock.

He gently grasped Madzar’s elbow and as he did so the ship’s horn wailed, long and desperate.

Madzar, to his shame, shuddered.

Our network is widening, looking for possible residents abroad, Bellardi shouted over the horn. We have people in many places already, including America. But it’s a huge continent, you know, and right now it’s brains like yours that we need.

He opened the door, and as they silently went down the dimly lit stairs, the ship’s bell sounded from the bridge and kept ringing until the engine stopped completely.

They could see the lit-up Mohács pier swim past them in the gloomy silence.

The currents were carrying them on with incredible force; only here, very close to the riverbank and under the enormous embankment, did their power become visible.

Moths and mosquitoes were hovering between the water and the floodlights’ beams, as if the light had torn them from the darkness.

And as the current carried them well past the docking bridge and the yellow docking station, festive with the white flowers of the wide-crowned horse chestnut trees, the noisily reversing engine once again made their bodies rattle. They were almost in line with the cold block of the darkened silk-factory building when, with the ringing of a small bell, the two paddle wheels began to rotate backward and the squeaky rudder turned sharply. Now they were moving in reverse, against the current, and the dark, great river gurgled, boiled, seethed, and churned under them until the enormous side of the Carolina bumped against the docking bridge.

Think about it, please, Bellardi said, almost derisively. But please don’t let it upset you. No point in making a drama of it, you’ve no reason to. What we are talking about, first of all, is that when the occasion arises you should join us. This is a simple invitation, friendly and respectful, nothing else. You can’t be so contemptuous of your race or, if not your race, of truth and fairness, as to refuse to join us. And after that, we’ll see. The whole summer is still ahead of us.

Anyway, I’d like to spend the summer with you, exactly as we did a long time ago.

At the right moment I’ll ask you for your response.

He spoke tolerantly and mockingly, as if he had managed to outwit his friend after all. Then he unexpectedly waved good-bye and, before Madzar had time to respond in any way, disappeared into a dark passage on the deck.

Madzar, who had forgotten his coat and cap, was about to step onto the dock when he heard the old waiter call, Gestatten Sie mir, then thrust the cap into his hand and helped him on with his coat.

And the following day, in Ármin Gottlieb’s lumberyard he found what he had been looking for, and the discovery wiped away his mental anguish and his agitation.

I have such luck. How damn lucky I am again.

He exulted inside.

Bellardi, with his bizarre stories, was the first person whom Madzar completely forgot about once he had found the wood.

More accurately, one emotional upheaval was exchanged for another.

The old lumber merchant did not recognize him.

He sat over his papers at his desk in the lumberyard office; there were papers and business ledgers everywhere on the table, on chairs, on top of the filing cabinets. With his whey-colored eyes, he looked up at Madzar from behind his thick glasses, which even in his childhood Mazdar had thought looked like fish eyes, and listened to him without making a sound.

As if waiting to see whether it was worth getting up from the desk at the visiting gentleman’s request.

Outside, birds were chirping, but the riverside swallows were not yet making their shrill sounds in flight, and suddenly Madzar missed them. They had not yet arrived from Africa. Gottlieb always had the boys put down the driftwood and stack it first and then paid them here, in the office.

If he paid, and if he didn’t say, please, boys, come tomorrow for your pay.

And then they had to hang around for a long time, stand firm on their demands for pay. The shrieking of the swallows was part of the protracted wait.

I see, I see, he said now, after a long while, though frankly he only guessed what sort of wood the stranger had in mind. It should be hardwood, preferably from a demolition site, healthy but old, very old if possible.

A few years back, somebody here made a very interesting big catch, he said warily but still not getting up from his desk and not even putting his pen down.

If it isn’t driftwood, I’d appreciate your showing it to me.

How did you know I was thinking of driftwood, asked the merchant suspiciously.

Saturated Sleepers

I am somewhat familiar with local conditions, Madzar answered, sounding not too friendly, to signal that he didn’t want to get into details.

He had no wish to chat.

Outside, sparrows went on chirping in the sunshine. Nothing had changed during the elapsed years, for birds chirping in the sunshine were always sparrows.

They scrutinized each other somewhat suspiciously for a long time, and then it seemed that Gottlieb, searching Madzar’s features and despite his own reticence, recognized the long-lost boy.

He laughed, quietly accommodating Madzar’s taciturnity.

He showed his old deformed teeth, atrophied gums, and bits of breakfast leftovers stuck in the grooves of the worn tooth enamel.

Every morning he ate goose fat spread on a slice of brown bread piled high with rings of red onion, which he considered very healthy, and drank coffee with it, no milk.

With his every word he exuded the smell of stale onion.

He said that without knowing what the wood would be used for, he was very sorry but could not tell the gentleman whether he had any.

He still hadn’t put down his pen. He meant this in jest; it was nothing but the peculiar curiosity of country folk: first he had to know who this man was, what wind had blown him this way, and whether his intentions were good or evil.

With your permission, I’ll take a look, Madzar said in the tone of one used to giving orders, even though he was shaken to the core by his joy in seeing the old man again.

His back and thighs were covered with goose bumps.

Though I see, he added, that you don’t have much wood at all.

Ultimately, this was an encounter with lapsed time at whose depths lay the disgraced corpse of the little boy cast out of the water, which Madzar and Bellardi along with the other boys had to look at.

They could not refuse; they looked at it as the other boys did.

Gottlieb, hearing the gentlemanly tone, put down his pen carefully and to be on the safe side closed the top of the ink bottle.

He saw the stranger’s face turn red, and, as if protecting his property against an anger of unknown origin, he rose, pushed the chair out from under him, though not too fast, and stood up. He was a robust man, and advanced years had made his shoulders stoop, but only a little; in the pocket high on his long dark-blue apron, one could see the tips of a slide rule, carpenter’s pencil, and folding ruler; he wore brown corduroy pants and had black elbow protectors on the sleeves of his striped flannel shirt.

With his knotty palms, used to moving and loading things, he blindly and absentmindedly kept touching things on the desk.

True, I can’t offer you much right now, he said with a helpful, almost humble mercantile smile, and then, as he continued to search for something, alarm showing in his eyes, he forgot to complete the sentence he had started.

Perhaps he’d find it on the blackened wood floor, swept every morning with oily sawdust.

Or perhaps on top of one of the open filing cabinets packed with receipts and account books.

Where is my hat, he asked half-aloud, as if in passing.

But the origin of this wood I’m talking about, he said, returning to the interrupted sentence absentmindedly and going on in a lively tone, I can verify for you. It’s the kind of material that I’m sure would meet all the gentleman’s requirements. I have never paid so much for driftwood, I have a witness too, I’ll show you now what I mean if you’d be kind enough to follow me.

Could I go without a hat, he asked himself half-aloud.

But if the gentleman does not care to see it personally, I’ll show you samples of everything else that is still available.

It’s not much, true, not that much.

Madzar did not understand what the Jew was talking about.

And then Gottlieb, unable to overcome his curiosity, interrupted his convoluted explanation, almost shouting, no matter how hard I look at you, sir, in my view you are not from these parts.

Madzar did not respond, he did not wish to fall into a trap or get involved in a complicated conversation, so he kept silent until Gottlieb finally started out with him toward the door.

They could hear the monotonous clatter of fulling machines in the nearby leather factory and, from farther away, a uniform thumping in the silk factory, as well as the engine of a military assault boat puffing and coughing on its way upstream.

There were so many new things in this world; behind the tall brick wall enclosing the lumberyard on the west, one could follow the noise of a horse and cart as it turned slowly into Farkas Street, where its creaking wheels began to squeak among the one-story houses with their pointed facades. Madzar could have sworn it was the cart of the horse-dealing Gypsies and that a foal was trotting alongside the near horse.

Everything was as if he had already lived through it once.

And only when they left the office did he notice that the Jew was indeed not wearing a head covering.

A sharp little breeze caught his thin graying hair and showed sickly shining spots on his scalp as they were going down the steps. Madzar had never seen him bareheaded. Abroad, he had come in contact and worked with many different kinds of Jew and for quite some time paid close attention to them, as if urging himself to notice at last what he was supposed to notice. Yet it never occurred to him that they were supposed to wear hats. He was seized by a childlike muteness. The Jew had violated the rules. As if noticing for the first time in his life that he had been doing everything that ritual demanded. Having returned to a once-familiar world in which nothing had changed, his childhood self had no idea what to do with a Jew whose scalp rarely saw the light of day.

When put this way, however, the question made no sense; he almost laughed at it aloud.

The ominous absence of the hat cracked the old-time magic.

At the sight of the pale spots and the tufts of sticky, oily hair, he felt aversion and repugnance. Still, he was able to behave according to the codes of his upbringing.

Or perhaps Bellardi had managed to confuse him with his damned chatter.

What the gentleman sees in the yard, Gottlieb was explaining artlessly, will all be taken away tomorrow, end of the week at the latest, because I’m making the final accounts and on Monday I close the whole business for good. Roheim will take over whatever is left, if you know who I mean. The gentleman may not believe it, but the firm Gottlieb and Company was founded eighty years ago.

And Roheim, as everyone can see, and I don’t begrudge him his success, has managed to stay in business.

Eighty years, that’s right, that’s how long the firm has been in business.

Madzar frequently thought that although he knew about different materials, had unconventional ideas and a good sense of space, and possessed a not bad sense of proportion, yet compared with his successful professional colleagues he was hesitant and came to his ideas belatedly.

The big doghouses were empty, he was late again; on the ground, richly dotted with barely sprouting chamomile and chickweed, the chains hanging off the runway wires were lying abandoned, just as they had been unclasped from the dog collars. He paid no attention to the Jew’s heavy remarks, not really; he was thinking about the komondors and about himself, busy with his own desperation.

Which meant that he could interpret existing conditions even in a strange environment but could not use them to foresee anything.

His vision was weak.

Of course he did not mean to lie, it would take two more years to make it a round eighty, but just the same, he will close the business his grandfather had opened, may his memory be blessed, it’s three generations after all, the work of three generations.

In that case, Madzar replied, half-aloud, I got here just in time.

Gott behüte, to say something like that or even to think it, the merchant responded with a scratchy little laugh and much waving of arms. Who knows when the last hour arrives, the gentleman can’t know either. Let’s not hasten it with anything we do.

At this point laughter helped him deflect the conversation. Out of caution, he did not tell the visitor that his son, with the same family name, was carrying on the firm’s work on Coney Island. He had two vehicles, two beautiful Fords, to deliver merchandise with.

After all, he doesn’t know who this stranger is, why would he tell him everything.

Madzar didn’t need much time to see he would find nothing useful here.

Under the rain roofs he saw mainly abandoned pallets and broken support beams, a bit farther away under the open sky a small pile of firewood or rough softwood timber. But one couldn’t stop the Jew; he was going on, hurrying, taking with him the aroma of the morning’s onion, limping a little, his weight shifting more to one leg than the other. Madzar felt like going instead to the Serb merchant who always had a rich assortment of material taken from demolished buildings.

At the railroad, they stack a hundred sleepers to a pile.

He paid no attention to what the Jew was saying.

As the gentleman can see from here, only two are missing to make it a full pile, Gottlieb said, and he smiled at him as if to say, I don’t care to go too far in our conversation, but let’s go as far as the pile.

I must keep the gentleman busy with my chatter until we get there.

But Madzar would have preferred to know what the Jew had done with the komondors, and immediately consoled himself that these could not be the same komondors. He did not want to ask, for that would reveal his identity and then it would be impossible to avoid a conversation burdened with their memories. He shuddered at the thought that he might wind up in intimate proximity to a Jew who didn’t brush his teeth in the morning.

Bellardi, with his theories, had surely made him sick to his stomach.

It even occurred to him that what he was doing now also justified Bellardi. Wherever he looks, he cannot free himself of Bellardi.

Perhaps the reason he had gone so far away was to be free of him. What’s the point of pushing back the Jewish element if the German one will push into its place. If a Gottlieb throws in the towel, there is always a Roheim to take over his business. It’s impossible to shake off the foreign element.

His men were very lucky, the merchant went on enthusiastically, they managed to fish out all but two of them, and sleepers of this quality the gentleman will never find anywhere.

He didn’t know whom he found more repugnant, Gottlieb or Bellardi — everybody, which could mean himself.

He might have killed his own dogs, he thought angrily, giving himself the impression that the Jew was repugnant and that thinking so proved his loyalty to Bellardi.

They’re from Stipiczka’s plant in Semmering, the merchant explained, hesitating slightly at the sight of the gentleman’s expression.

If that name means anything to the gentleman.

It does, of course it does.

But entrusted to this smooth-mannered Jew he felt his situation as even more lamentable in this damned provincial district where he saw the justification of thoughts he vehemently opposed. Away with all this. What was the point of hoping. Why had he come here anyway. He couldn’t go to Roheim because Roheim didn’t deal in this sort of material. How could this Jew be familiar with Stipiczka’s plant in Semmering. He couldn’t get free of — and in his thoughts he almost said of this louse. And the old man could have at least remembered him.

He tried to interject that he did not object to looking at Stipiczka’s sleepers but frankly did not need ninety-eight of them, in fact didn’t need a single one.

The Jew pretended not to hear this; he kept talking just to work his jaws.

Even though Madzar emphasized that he was not interested in waterlogged wood, which he could not use in his work.

Gottlieb did not give in; he enjoyed his own artful jabbering. He understands, of course he does; with a raised voice, he spoke a word to every one of Madzar’s, clear as day, unless he had misunderstood the gentleman. Because if we figure three hundred river kilometers, and we can’t figure less, then this wood had to have been sent downriver from Verőce, which took at least a week.

Well, now, how can you say such a thing, Madzar interjected angrily, as if he were in the mood to argue about this with a Jew. He did not understand why the Jew was exaggerating so shamelessly when the exaggeration was against his business interest. Even from Győr it’s not three hundred, how could it be more than two hundred from Verőce.

I wouldn’t want to argue with the gentleman, I’d probably wind up at the short end of the stick, but please take a good look, he said, and with his finger he pointed at the place they were approaching. Whether it’s two hundred or five hundred, on that wood the gentleman will see no trace of any damage or any alteration. Right next to the red stamp of the railway, the gentleman can see Stipiczka’s burn marks. He, Gottlieb, has a good man with the railroad who follows up and takes care of everything for him. In the end they agreed, he doesn’t mind telling the gentleman, that he’d pay the railroad a symbolic sum, they set it at ten pengös, which he paid properly, because according to railroad regulations the wood had been exposed to a natural disaster, and they’d have to chalk it up as a loss anyway.

And that the gentleman needs just this kind of wood borders on the miraculous. This is what happened. One of the piles, listen to this, dear sir, they didn’t unload it on the right side from the direction opposite to the train’s travel, as the engineer in charge had told them to do. Boggles the mind that such coincidences exist in this world, this is a miracle, a real miracle, this is; I don’t want to exaggerate, but the truth is they unloaded the pile on the left side. This is how this one pile wound up on tideland, but the water didn’t carry it away all at once, it nicely divvied up the labor, and Gottlieb laughed again, his mouth wide open, as if he were praising the water’s elemental force and the treachery of the current. Ten sleepers a day, it regularly lifted off the topmost row, at least that’s how my men caught them. But the last two never showed up, doggone it, he exclaimed unexpectedly, and then quickly offered an explanation. It’s possible that those two rows simply drifted right by their noses without their noticing them.

And they had not yet reached the woodpile, protected by a wide shingle roof on stilts from rain, spray splashes, and strong sunshine, when the sight emerging from the shade stopped Madzar in his tracks.

From that point on he dared to approach the wood only very cautiously, as if not meaning to go ahead at all.

He had never seen such sleepers. He could not believe his eyes.

He did not even know that such sleepers existed. He could not comprehend how sleepers could be so perfectly processed and finished.

Could he be lucky again, he asked himself, and he knew immediately that he was damn lucky.

How long has this pile been here, he asked gruffly.

For years, five years, let me see, I don’t want to lie to the gentleman. I know we repiled it twice and very carefully too, if that reassures you at all. But the mystery, my dear sir, is what these sleepers had been saturated with, go ahead, feel them, come on, closer. I don’t know who will take the secret with him to the grave, but they saturated these with something, that’s for sure. I mentioned that we repacked the pile because I myself became very curious to see whether this material was changing or not.

Madzar was now close enough to study the sleepers’ rougher, darker cut surfaces. He would have preferred to smell them then and there before deciding what the method of preservation had been. But he was bothered by the other man’s physical closeness and the suddenly created professional mutuality.

At first glance one would take them to be of a dark tropical wood, he thought. If these really have stayed like this for you for five years, he said aloud, then they won’t change, and again he shuddered at the idea of permanence and the thought that he had found the material for it.

You can rest assured of this, no need to lose sleep over it, he added gruffly. Bet your life on it.

I must be an idiot to praise his merchandise for him, Madzar grumbled to himself, overcome by a strange, gentlemanly emotion.

He hadn’t touched the wood, hadn’t properly assessed its qualities, and didn’t know for sure whether the unknown saturant had penetrated it fully.

This is what I’ve been looking for, he thought, remaining calm. And what might the preservative have done to the medullary rays, had it reached the wood’s medulla, he asked himself seriously. By then he had told himself that this was it, yes, this is what I had in mind. If he cut it into mirrors, and removed the medulla, which he might have to do, would it be the required size. As if from a secret source, he knew the answer, yes, yes, and was ready to decide immediately that this would be better than taking wood from demolished buildings or long-seasoned plum or cherrywood. He liked this wood precisely because of its perfect saturation of unknown origin and its purity; he only now realized that he couldn’t have done anything with the dry hollowness of wood taken from demolished buildings.

He kept calming himself, saying, take your time, take a closer look, don’t get excited for no reason. In his mind, question was chasing question: would the unknown material leave stains, will it have an unpleasant odor.

I’ve found it.

Don’t rush your decision; don’t rejoice in vain.

In his helpless joy he would have burst into tears if the stranger hadn’t been standing next to him.

It was as though he instantly felt the wood as part of his flesh and was living through the wood’s peculiar fate.

This was saturated right after they felled it, he said aloud, which leaves the question, saturated with what.

Gottlieb joined him in making little rhythmic sounds punctuating the logic of the thought.

And Madzar could not tell how the magic moment occurred, a moment not entirely the product of either chance or necessity but containing elements of both. Something like condensed precipitates. He must look into this, cannot jump blindly into the unknown. Destiny appeared before him as a convergence of old dirt roads coming from various directions under the open summer sky.

Sometimes the old dirt roads crossed, other times only touched one another; they were familiar or completely unfamiliar.

Events arriving from different points of the compass met on these abandoned dirt roads, and once the encounters were over they moved on, indifferent to one another. Perhaps Gottlieb was also luxuriating in the grandeur of the moment; he wasn’t chattering anymore, he grew silent alongside Madzar.

There’s no doubt these oak sleepers were used on secondary rail lines.

In size or material they did not differ from standard ones.

To prevent any possible disappointment due to the usual stickiness one feels when touching saturated sleepers, he hesitated to step closer and did not dare touch them right away.

Even though he could see plainly that he was not in for much of a disappointment. In his mind, he had already gone too far, figuring and calculating things; the disappointment would be unbearable. Two fifty, and he wouldn’t need longer ones than that, not even by a centimeter. But mainly he was shocked by their color. Although they had darkened considerably, the substance of the wood, as far as one could see, had not changed at all. Or perhaps they had steamed it too, and after the first saturation sort of washed out the tar oil with some kind of additive, dried it, and put it in the pneumatic boiler under high pressure, then saturated it again with, say, creosote and some other refined preservative. Not impossible. It might have been a vegetable oil. After that, the density and quality of its flesh could not change. It would not get moldy, it would resist fungal decay.

It has to be looked at in a radial section.

It could have been linseed oil.

Once, on behalf of Mies van der Rohe, Madzar had gone to order some material from the famous plant in Semmering where the modus operandi was true handicraft and nothing was mass-produced. He spoke to the ancient Stipiczka himself, and now, thinking back, he had the impression that he’d never gotten any information about the details of his work. With his drawn-out, reluctant emphases, his bulging, expressionless eyes, and in the blue work apron tight across his abnormally protruding belly, Stipiczka was for him like a peculiar idol one should not dare address. He either spoke so fast it was impossible to follow, as if he did not want to be understood, or he kept quiet. He must have been frightened of people his whole life, frightened of everybody and everything except perhaps wood. Because he feared that everything would be taken away from him. But to the wood, in contrast, he gave everything the wood had to have or could possibly wish for.

I won’t be able to get the information I need from him, if he’s still alive.

He tried to imagine the pleasant surprise that would greet him when with a power saw he opened the heavy, dark blocks of wood. Or painfully unpleasant surprises, one after the other. He drew his finger across the surface of one sleeper, lifted the finger to his nose, smelled, and very quietly asked Gottlieb if he knew the sleepers’ measurements.

Of course he did, Gottlieb replied in a similarly quiet tone, and quickly enumerated them, they wouldn’t have to measure, revealing to Madzar that his rough calculation had been way off the mark. The sleepers were a full ten centimeters shorter than he had guessed by his eyesight. In his embarrassment, Madzar leaned closer and now had the impression that his nose was registering something familiar that one usually smells several times a day, the odor of a common chemical.

The sleepers’ cross-section he found ideal, however.

He was making small approving sounds too.

It deviates from the standard, or I may not be remembering the standard measurements right.

He thought, pondered, mused, tried to recall and fix in his mind the smell of the familiar chemical, but from where. Another excitement on top of the others he’d been coping with. He tried to lift this smell away, as it were, from the smells of other compounds. Perhaps it is from an organic not inorganic compound.

Probably some formaldehyde derivative.

With this idea in mind, he started to go around the pile, but he moved away more to be alone with his sense of smell and freedom to touch, and also to keep telling himself, to be allowed to keep telling himself, how damn lucky he was.

Gottlieb did not follow; he did not wish to disturb the strange gentleman, whom he could not place by either his attire or his behavior.

He thought of belladonna, which ladies suffering from headaches drip on lump sugar in the depths of their darkened rooms, and of atropine, but he didn’t stay with either because of that sharp edge to the odor, so characteristic of organic compounds.

I never heard of Stipiczka manufacturing sleepers of any kind, he said irritably to the merchant when he came back around the woodpile.

If material of such quality lay around here for years, the question pricked him like a thorn, why did no one take it.

As if to say, you can’t put anything over on me, my friend, you’ve got to get up a lot earlier for that.

Stipiczka doesn’t make sleepers, why should he, answered the merchant, yielding, but my man told me these here were specially ordered from Stipiczka by the Hungarian State Railways. They could have had them done in Dombóvár, but extra demands cropped up, you see.

Correct me if I’m wrong, these measurements are for sleepers used on secondary lines.

That’s right, no need for me to correct the gentleman. You may not know, but between Verőce and Kismaros the railway has a branch for forestry work, and that was the one whose capabilities had to be strengthened, how should I put it, in order to make it possible to reach the new border station.

They turned Mohács too into a border station, he added, but then cut short the plaintive sentence.

Hold on a moment, Madzar said, that secondary line has a narrow-gauge track, which as far as I know would need two-meter sleepers. These here, according to you, are two forty.

If the gentleman does not believe me, we can measure them. But it’s not me who says it, I’m telling you what my good man told me, and the insulted merchant giggled a little, then went on in a whisper, my man at the railroad. For troop transports, the gentleman understands, the man said the line had to be suitable for transporting troops. And the job has been completed.

With his index finger, he pointed triumphantly to the sky, indicating that it was done at a higher command that saves us all from damnation, and then he silently spread his arms.

We put down larger and more durable sleepers than regular ones, but nobody could tell the difference.

I see.

They did not want to attract unnecessary attention, you see.

Well, then, that’s the explanation.

So the gentleman understands now. To avoid any accusations that we might have violated that part of the peace treaty.*

During the pause that followed, in which neither of them could think of anything but the injustice done to their country, its territory dismembered by the peace treaty, the architect, deprived of the last morsels of his distrust of the sleepers, thought it was going to be very hard to get through the next few hours patiently. He glanced at the elderly merchant with tenderness, affection, and almost as if asking for help. He had a good mind to have him cut into the wood. He wanted to slice off a piece at the end to see the cross-section, and then another piece lengthwise to look at the radial section. Perhaps Gottlieb had not dismantled the machines in his workshop; they might still be working. How could they be working, there was an ominous, bleak silence above the embankment precisely because they were not working. Anyway, one is better off alone with such ideas. In retrospect, he understood every word of the Jew’s meaningless jabber and saw through it, but he could not find the words with which to reciprocate.

He was as happy as a lark.

He was back at the reassuring feeling of bourgeois equality.

To rush forward with gratitude was not advisable since they had not talked about the price yet.

The price could not be too high, though the mere thought of it gave him a fright, again.

The Jew must have set a trap for him.

He asked whether Mr. Gottlieb could have one sleeper delivered to his workshop.

By all means, gladly, of course.

Now he thinks he will need all ninety-eight after all, but for the final decision, he would have to examine at least one of them thoroughly.

The gentleman doesn’t have to worry about price, said the merchant, his tone suggesting that suddenly he didn’t understand things.

What workshop could this stranger have here.

But of course he understands that the gentleman can’t buy a cat in the bag, the quantity is quite large for that, he nodded, and in a voice filled with profound distrust he asked where to send the sleepers, because he would send at least three for the test.

On hearing the object of his earlier curiosity, the familiar name and familiar address, no surprise showed on his face, because he was not surprised.

Although he no longer had hired help, he would fetch somebody to deliver the material to the Madzar house.

In his soul, Gottlieb was crestfallen.

As he covertly and incredulously observed the blue shadows on the other man’s delicate white skin, always ready to blush, and his strong, darkly red hair, he could not chase away the thought that red-haired people were always sly foxes and mean swindlers.

They exchanged a few words about what the price might be, paving the way, so to speak, for later bargaining.

The mind could not comprehend what the young man was doing and why.

This young man’s father and even grandfather had bought wood from them, not from Roheim or Gojko Drogo, and in an instant he recognized in the young man’s face the long-forgotten features of those two older men.

After all, this young man had been a classmate of Gottlieb’s own boy in the school on Koronaherceg Street.

And because of these useless thoughts and unappeasable indignations, his fate opened up, his everyday life came crashing down on him. He saw before him his little boy as a grown man, the unlucky, miserable little boy. Never mind, we’ll have him study a trade, he’ll be a watchmaker; that’s what they planned for him.

Which made his soul whimper.

He saw his beautiful, strong wife at a time when she hadn’t yet gone mad. She had been not quite right in the head even as a girl, but no one would have thought that as a woman she would go mad. Still, he blamed himself. He was feeling the threat of the final hours groping their way toward him, a total darkening of the spirit. He hadn’t recognized the Madzar boy. Not only can I not find my hat and to my greatest shame I’m standing here without a head cover at the sight of my Creator, may His name be blessed forever and ever, but I don’t even remember whether I put my own hat on my own head this morning.

His negligence confused him, the other man’s presence and incomprehensible behavior upset and hurt him, and he must not allow any of this to show on his face.

When he was finally left alone with his desperation, limping back to his office, going across the yard alive with the chirping of sparrows, he began to whistle, but with him this was a sign not of jollity but rather of unbearable tension.

All right then, this hour too has arrived.

He could console himself that at least he managed to sell the wood after all.

And the architect strolled along the embankment to the boat station. He sat down on a large stone by the ferrymen’s small kiosk and watched the arrival of the almost empty ferry from the island; creaking mightily, it slid up on the paved shore. Serbian Gypsies in snow-white shirts were the first ones off, leading three restless horses amid a loud pounding of hooves. There was no feature of the landscape that didn’t bring back something of the past. The sun was very strong, and nothing was left of the early-morning mist above the lively surface of the river; the water reflected the current-driven image of the sky in vanishing brown, blue, and white spots.

There were moments when the landscape made a profound turn, because he felt that everything, after all, was referring to Mrs. Szemző.

It was for her that he fantasized about the darkening color of the oak, but he did not understand the connection between her and the color.

As for Bellardi, well, the sooner he forgot him, the better.

And what about that certain deep purple visible on the densest part of the surface, on the knobs and knots, would he find it on inner surfaces exposed by cutting the wood. Among the women, whether on foot or with bicycles loaded down with packed baskets, gabbing loudly and cutting into one another’s words as they followed the horses to the shore, he did not see a single one with a bonnet on her head. But it was too early for his mother to return from the island; she never came back before four in the afternoon. These women were Hungarian, he could see that from afar; Catholics and Protestants wore their headgear differently, while the Slavic women, who used their white linen kerchiefs only during work, spread them taut across their foreheads and tied them not under their chins but at the back of their heads. The most fertile lands belonging to Mohácsians were on the other shore, along with shepherds’ and fishermen’s accommodations and the so-called bush farms, owned by rich German farmers who moved there with their households for the summer months. In his childhood Madzar had frequently experienced a strange anxiety at the thought that among the uniformly dressed, constantly chattering women he might not recognize his own mother.

Standing by the railing, he might lose himself in watching the ferry and would never find her. But in his dread he was not allowed to cry, not there among the horses, the carts piled sky-high, the bicycles and people. Look at him, a boy, and sniveling, some German woman laughed derisively, what kind of man will this one grow up to be, and then somehow his mother’s hand, the one with the ring, suddenly turned up from somewhere and slapped his mouth.

No kind, if you let him get away with everything, he won’t become a man.

He was still thinking about Bellardi, and he did not forget Bellardi’s lover either, whose arm had smelled like fish all night.

Nor did he forget that to Hungarians every German was a Swabian because their prejudices made Hungarians incapable of identifying any concept correctly. Although at this moment he could not have told Bellardi whether he was thinking of himself as a Hungarian or as a German. Was he lashing out at the Hungarian element in himself for the slipshod phrasing or was his German blood protesting the Grobheit. In which case it would be Bellardi speaking from him, after all.

The word of the blood.

As if without Bellardi such a thing could not have occurred to him, blood.

He used to be plagued by nightmares in broad daylight. He was especially frightened of Hungarian women wearing dark kerchiefs. Congealed blood clots.

He kept scaring himself with the notion that one fine day, if he failed to behave correctly, the German women with their ringed fingers would pummel him and thrust him from their circle and then the Hungarian women would take him in between their legs. The envisaged image was of the huge, fat great-grandmother with the pus- and blood-soaked bandage on her ulcerated leg as she lay on her pallet in the dark kitchen. Her leg would never heal. Because Hungarians wash only to their waist, it’s a good thing they wash at all, and they couldn’t wash out this bandage, he heard this complaint enough times; mainly on Sundays they slap some water on their upper bodies, and only at the well, and Hungarian women won’t even take off their vests or undershirts to do it. The blood stank. He’d never have dared to reach into the cleft of his buttocks while washing, not to mention his hole. It never occurred to him that his underwear wouldn’t be shit-stained if he cleaned his bottom properly. He did not have his mother’s permission for this, which caused him no small inconvenience in college.

Not even after graduating from high school did he receive permission to do what had to be done with his foreskin.

The fine deep purple, which only the most experienced eye would have detected on the oak’s dark gray surface, ran through with yellow streaks, also stood for a grave threat.

For a very long time, he used to turn away, ashamed even before himself, when he drew back the foreskin from the bulb of his penis. It could mean that water had somehow managed to make its way into the structure of the wood after all, and was still working into it. He was about to purchase some material, having fallen in love with it because of Mrs. Szemző, whose inner characteristics were unknown to him.

He tried to imagine the two of them in the empty apartment on Pozsonyi Road, what he could have done with the woman in the twilight had he not let her go. Good Lord, what couldn’t I have done, he kept saying to himself; as if the woman’s hand had left a trace on his arm, where with her touch she strengthened his awareness of the mutuality of their feelings, which he was now tearing asunder. He could have done everything with her. But he did not see anything there except the reflected yellow light on the ceiling. His wish now grew so strong while sitting on the stone that he did not know, or rather did not wish to imagine, what might have happened had he reached after her and held her back.

Don’t go away.

The more he tried not to imagine it, the more he reinforced his inability not to desire this woman.

He considered it scandalous on the part of nature that it had presented the human male with such a member. As if the demanding gods had turned his raw insides, so sensitive with their mucous membranes, out into the light of day, had denuded an inner organ with no aesthetics of its own commensurable with other surfaces of the body.

He could think of nothing else except that while groping in the dark, searching for the true inner structure of things, with his erection he was feeling Creation’s sole palpable instruction.

He was standing before God with his head uncovered, he remembered that too, and then he suddenly rose from the cool stone and started off after all, though he knew they wouldn’t be bringing the wood yet, no matter how much he wanted to hasten things. It was as if he had to reach the end of the world to complete his mission. He’ll wait at home for the wood to be delivered. And when he got home, first he opened both wings of the workshop’s enormous door as wide as they would go, to let light and warmth at last pervade the huge space where he might spend the next few weeks working. As he wedged open the heavy iron-framed oak doors, which would grow hot in the sunshine, frosty cold invaded him from the inside, which made the moment even more celebratory. As if he had released both past and present, letting them flow into each other. And he saw before him the morning a few days after the funeral when the assistants pushed the last completed barque out of the yard.

This time there were no loud cheers when the barque hit the water with a great splash, only the dogs barked and yelped in joy, being used to it with their master.

After that, the workshop became overgrown with the bare tendrils of woodbine.

He stood for a long time in the dead, spotless, and for many decades useless yard, waiting impatiently and helplessly and with a rising sense of ceremony for a knocking at the gate and delivery of the wood.

After that, two of their dogs were beaten to death.

But nobody was coming, because first Gottlieb, insensitive to his own forgetfulness, had to look in the office, helplessly and furtively, for his hat.

He had to do this before going to find somebody in the neighborhood, this he remembered, but, and this had never happened to him before, he even forgot what he was looking for. Yet instinctively he kept looking. He looked among his papers, under the furniture, and if he came upon it, he’d remember it. In the meantime he murmured fragments of a prayer designed for other occasions, about our God, who was one, as if he had to convince himself that he had someone he could trust. Our Lord is great, His name is sanctified and awesome, he continued in Hebrew, remembering it by chance, not praying consciously.

For years he hadn’t asked for anything, only given thanks for everything. When he asked for something for his daughter in Dombóvár or for his son in Coney Island, he simply recited what he had learned fifty years before in the heder, and had the nagging doubt that he’d never fully understood what he was saying. He saw no point in asking things from the Lord. Although he had fulfilled his obligations toward Him, his wishes and intentions had simply died away in him. The Lord has not heard my wishes, he said to himself in secret, somewhat reproachfully, even when He answers one. The Lord does not listen to wishes even though He is not deaf.

There is no causal relationship between the Almighty’s mercy and man’s appeals to Him.

A little later Madzar walked into the house; in the hallway, smelling of mold because of the cold winter, he opened the lid of the hope chest in which his father’s, grandfather’s, and their old live-in assistant’s oft-patched, clean work clothes were kept.

He found everything in the chest ironed and neatly folded. While he changed into work clothes, exposed to the pervasive smell of home-boiled soap emanating from the chest, no one came with the sleepers on his shoulder. Soap boiling was done everywhere in the autumn, when the golden yellow leaves fell from the poplars; sometimes Bellardi would go with him to help push the wheelbarrow home with the collected bones from the old granny’s house.

Driven by shame and restlessness, Gottlieb finally closed his office.

That was actually very nice of Bellardi, helping to push the stinking bones in the wheelbarrow; after all, his mother was a princess. It was very nice of him. And it was very nice of the Lord Jesus that he blessed both of them with the most deep-felt childhood love.

He was literally fleeing from the words of his prayer, was it holy or sanctified be Thy name, the angels sing Your praise each day, he was in a hurry and picked a detour along which he might meet the least number of acquaintances as he rushed along, uncovered, at the very nadir of his shame.

He wanted to avoid everything and everybody.

He hastened along the flood-blackened brick wall of the silk factory, and he kept on saying the words, shouting over the monotone booming and clatter of the machines, the metallic clangs of the combs, reciting the words to himself. With the fragments of the Hebrew prayer he displaced every Hungarian word so that his thinking would not be Hungarian, so that he would have no imagination, no Hungarian imagination either. Let us praise the exalted sanctity of this day. Terrifying and forbidding, Lord, what Thou hast given us today. May your realm and golden throne, resting on mercy, tower above all abomination.

There could be no living tie between the ancient text and Gottlieb’s practical thinking, since he no longer believed that people’s stupid wishes could touch Creation. He no longer believed; did not believe in his own faith that there was a god on whose terrible deeds anybody would build an empire, or that there was any other kind of god either. He imagined, keeping it a secret from himself, that the world was an empty vessel, completely empty, anything could be poured into it in any way, no matter what, since everything flowed out, spilled out, dripped away and scattered in the dust, dwindled and vanished. These were the kinds of thing he envisioned and thought about, though he continued to celebrate all the major and minor holidays, strictly observed the ritual rules and regulations. He concealed his own convictions from himself as if in his old age, supplanting his parents and taking over their role, he related to himself as if he were still a child. He must remain the same. Whatever happens, the world cannot change, and if his eyes saw far-reaching changes, he would not allow his mind to follow his eyes, lest his personal experiences improperly violate the depth of his faith or that of his skepticism.

Thus was Gottlieb riddled by the excruciatingly painful absence of God, about whose rapid withdrawal he would not talk to anyone, not for the world.

Gottlieb was not a stupid man.

To no one.

He should not be seen while crossing Halpiac Square, where at this hour the fish market was being cleaned and scrubbed by municipal sanitation workers, followed everywhere by cats, dogs, screeching seagulls, and beggars hoping to retrieve some scraps. He waited a little while and then managed, without having to greet anyone, to make his way across among the upended washbasins and tables glittering with water and leftover fish scales; hurrying under the spherical crowns of the elms, he fled from the familiarly functioning world along Szent János Street and the narrow, snaky Kígyó Street, and after he had crossed the wide and tranquil Szentháromság Road, lined on both sides with the severe-looking houses of the more prestigious Catholic families, their blinds rolled down and shutters closed, looking for all the world like two rows of citadels, he at last reached, at the corner of Zsidó Street, the old Israelite graveyard packed with uniformly pink tombstones.

Here he definitely had something to worry about without his hat.

The goyim could not know the meaning of the Almighty’s wrath and judgment; but there was no Jew who didn’t. The terrible promise filled him with the sense of a painful safety. He stopped in the shade by the tumbledown wooden fence to protect his bare head from the burning sun, and he regarded the street with the eyes of a stranger abandoned by God, his breathing heavy.

Between two breaths, he was still praying.

The bustle and shouting was great, somebody in front of him was pushing a handcart piled high with assorted junk. In the cacophony, it seemed improbable that he could reach his house unnoticed. Two unfamiliar rag-and-bone men were shouting at the top of their voices, their free hands spinning rattlers to attract attention. They both wore yarmulkes. We buy everything, they shouted into the noise they were making with their rattlers, everything you can find in your kitchen, your pantry, anywhere in your house. A few meters away, on the bank of the roadside ditch covered with wild spinach, a Christian kitchen maid was cleaning a chicken and singing loudly. In the dust, children were having a hoop-rolling competition; a farm wagon loaded with last year’s grapevines was just arriving, its wheels creaking and squeaking. Dishwater was hurled out of a window. From deep entranceways and echoing yards, the sounds of arguing voices, hammering, and grating were heard, which died suddenly at the unexpected slamming of a door. Then, along with the kitchen noises, the wound was opened again, and while a man’s voice begged and beseeched, two desperate and frantic female voices were shouting at each other.

A few weeks earlier, by mail, the Gottliebs had received the voucher from their son Jakab, according to which they were to board ship in Rotterdam for their overseas journey.

They already had their railway tickets to Rotterdam, and their son wrote to tell them to spend the night in a small old hotel near the dock, which frightened Gottlieb more than the long journey across the sea. What if there were no vacant rooms in that hotel. What would I do with your mother then. In response, Jakab wrote that there were many hotels, like mushrooms, near the piers. They didn’t have to worry about that. Robbers and drunkards are found in hotels at every port, Gottlieb knew that already; he already saw the corpse of his wife, frozen in its own blood, among the slashed eiderdowns in a ransacked little room. No amount of prayer could keep him from looking into the future, in which he too would be killed. One night he looked out the window because he thought someone was prowling, he heard voices. He could not get his head above the flesh of the murdered ones. The blood stuck to the feathers, no one bothered to bury their blood, and later no one could find out what jewelry had been stolen from them. And he could not write to Jakab about this either — that we are taking such and such pieces of jewelry with us — he could not put it in writing because he did not trust the letter, which might wind up in anybody’s hands. He did not reveal what pieces they were taking to Marika either; it had to remain a secret, otherwise a war of jealousy would break out between brother and sister, which never stopped smoldering anyway. That is how their terrible lives ended, for which he expressed his thanks in advance, bowing before the eternal throne.

The glory of Merciful God never ends; His rule is our beacon.

Actually, he couldn’t imagine that his own son would rob him, the son for whom he had made allowances, out of necessity, and to whom he had given more, after all.

He listened to ascertain where his wife was, who in a short while would be murdered mercilessly for her jewelry.

He most feared that their bodies would be mutilated and their blood left unburied. Their fingers would be cut off along with the rings. And as he suddenly opened the door, he saw the miscreants approaching in the silent night with their sacks open. By then he wouldn’t be able to get up, out of his cut-up flesh, to do the most necessary things for the soul. In the meantime, as if nothing had happened, all his hats were there, in a row, on the coat-and-hat rack in the dim hallway. The shiny wide-brimmed black hat he wore on high holy days, his richly embroidered kippa, the everyday black hat he wore in the city, and the oddly frayed, lusterless, greasy hat too, which he wore to work and which, after exchanging it for the yarmulke he wore at night, he should have put on this morning.

Like a thief, he lifted his own weekday kippa off the hat rack in his own hallway and hurried deep into his house.

At least a dozen times a day he made himself believe that just this once he could avoid the madness of his wife.

He opened doors carefully, trying to make as little noise as possible by tiptoeing on the softwood floor, turned gray and splintery after many autumn cleanings. There were a few spots that creaked badly no matter how careful he was, because the joists underneath had rotted away. As he made his way through the rooms and corridors, moving ever deeper into the unpredictable labyrinth of the commodious house, the emptiness became darker within the whitewashed walls, which echoed the tiniest sound.

The dark-brown folding shutters were closed everywhere, and only through cracks in the aged wood did some light come into the house.

Gottlieb put his yarmulke on his head and relaxed a little in the familiar dimness, in which white slipcovers on the furniture glimmered faintly and his transgressions reassumed their customary places. He also seemed to hear his ancestors, who opined that at least in our homes and synagogues we should remain free human beings in the sight of the Lord of Mercy. When on waking you cover your head, no matter what the day will bring you have spread the holy firmament over it. They have always lived in this spacious home, with its rooms opening one into another, hoping to please the Lord and to avoid eliciting His terrible wrath with their transgressions. There were only the most necessary pieces of furniture, beds, tables, chairs, that should suffice, and these were also made of the least expensive painted or wood-grained pine. Although there were more expensive carpets, they lay on the floor, carefully rolled up in wrapping paper, along the undecorated and empty walls. If, at the time of general cleaning or during high holy days, the folding shutters were opened, the covers removed from the cheap chandeliers and modestly dark furniture, the carpets rolled out, smoothed along the floor in preparation for receiving friends and relatives, then Ármin Gottlieb’s house positively flaunted its merciless cleanliness and cheerlessness.

Here lives a Jew, and Gottlieb was fond of this awareness, a Jew who displays nothing ostentatious, does not tempt fate, because he has not forgotten for a moment what he owes his Creator.

He would burst into loud sobs at the painful joy when, after the holidays, he was suddenly left alone in the sunny, bleak emptiness. But soon he would exchange his embroidered kippa for a plain one and, obeying the ancient duty of resignation, go from room to room carefully closing all the brown shutters again.

His house had one bright space: the wooden veranda framed in glass that faced the small, walled-in yard.

At the edge of the yard, where grass could barely survive at the base of the walls, stood a tall sumac tree, its widespread branches towering above the roofs, its trunk partially grown into an abutment of the brick wall; it was a Rhus hirta, the undemanding plant of Mediterranean and subtropical regions whose leaves, unlike those of the indigenous trees of Mohács, did not open completely until late June and whose acrid, velvety flowers emerged very slowly.

When he could be alone, Gottlieb liked to sit here, on a painted kitchen stool, and between two ritual devotions he either prayed or read one of his beautiful half-leather-bound books, either the six-volume Prayers for the High Holy Days or the eight-volume Weekday Prayers. This time, however, he had barely sat down and opened a randomly selected prayer book from which hundreds of small slips and bookmarks stuck out, both from the Hebrew text and from the pages printed and footnoted in Hungarian, and he had barely placed his elbow on the windowsill to create a reasonably comfortable position for reading, when his wife appeared in the dark frame of the doorway.

She appeared like a shadow slipping silently toward the light.

You think I don’t know, you really believe I don’t know why you’ve come home so early from your famous lumberyard, his wife said angrily, contemptuously, reproachfully, and then she almost broke down, barely able to suppress the tears of her bitterness.

But I know, I do. I could have known that you’d deceive me again and come home earlier.

If only once you came home on time, then I could breathe a sigh of relief.

Almighty God, I keep saying all day, the poor man really thinks he can hide his forgetfulness from me. Of course, he still has to wait for his lunch. I know very well what he forgot and left at home, but I shall never tell anyone what I know about you. How would I know, I don’t know what time it is, the kitchen alarm clock is broken again, and he hasn’t taken it to the watchmaker; but this time he had bad luck with his forgetfulness, didn’t he, leaving his hat home again — unheard of. He’s come home, let’s not talk about why, but his lunch is not ready. He said, I’ll be coming back late, Margit, didn’t he. And indeed, now it will be late for you, even though you hurried home early. Wretched. You’re a wretched man. You couldn’t possibly get done with your papers in such a short time. You can thank only yourself for all your troubles, because all your life you’ve been fumbling. Your famous lumberyard has always been more important to you, sawn planks are more important than your beautiful family.

You’re not a Jew.

You should be ashamed of yourself, you and all your papers.

She continued to talk very quietly like this, rather impassively, actually, using a barely changing falsetto, chanting a text that seemed alien to her, her head tilted a little mischievously and little-girlishly, her countenance suffused with hatred and contempt, her eyes narrowed and swollen with too much sleep. She was observing this despicable stranger who had wandered into her home, yet whom, according to the prescribed rituals, she should receive with a hot lunch, someone with whom, allegedly, she had lived in the happiest of marriages for more than forty years, giving him three beautiful children and raising them very well, yet her secret opinion about this man remained that although she knew him by sight, she wouldn’t marry him if she listened to her heart, because he was not a Jew. A Jew does not behave like this, and she hasn’t the slightest intention, there is not enough money in the world to convince her to marry him. She will dissuade her mother of blessed memory from insisting on this marriage, and she truly hopes that at least her adored father will reconsider his plans, because this wretched man will do nothing but deceive her, throughout an entire life will do nothing but mislead and deceive her.

They should look for somebody else.

I am the only one who can see through him.

Like through a sieve, that’s how I see through you.

You wretched man, you.

But if you dare do it anyway, and it’s obvious that you will, you shameless, vile man, and my dear beloved father will not want to keep me by his side, what can I do, that’s how it is, then you will go tell it to everybody on our street, you won’t spare yourself and go into every single house and tell them. What you’ve done to me, what you have done. And every Jew in Munkács will know what a wretched man he is.

What he did.

Such a wretch and yet what he dared to do.

He violated an innocent Jewish girl.

It was as if the empty dark house were the only house she had ever known, or as if she had recalled a long-abandoned snail shell, yet the street outside would not be a street in Mohács and the lapsed time had no meaning.

Keeping her dead alive.

It was not surprising.

However, the snail shell might have crushed under anyone’s careless step. All he had to tell her was that we’ve raised only two of your beautiful children, Margit, because the third one is long dead. Gottlieb wondered more than once how he or anyone else could remove themselves from this vast present, in which we eternally mourn, only mourn, while every event relevant to our person is still ahead of us.

We are still before the death of our loved ones.

One’s unlucky little son should not have died before one’s own death.

For a second he looked up at her, ascertaining the time in which, separate from everything and everyone else, he too lived in the eternal present time of his wife.

Margit was pressing a deep china bowl against her large, heavy, drooping breasts in a peculiar defensive posture, as if to protect both herself and the bowl, and with a wooden spoon she occasionally lifted and then disgustedly slammed back the dumpling dough, bright yellow from its many eggs, or with obvious boredom she simply stirred it. Over her pink, not quite clean nightshirt she wore a dark-blue apron patterned with tiny white flowers and, on top of that, a sweater filthy from work in the kitchen and from making fires in the large stove. When she spoke, one could see she was missing many teeth, which made her lips sink into the hollow of her mouth. Unruly clumps of thin, unkempt gray hair leaned stiffly in all directions; for more than a decade now she had refused to have her hair shaved as religious propriety would have required.

Threats, implorations, or explanations notwithstanding, no and no.

Until given away in marriage she would not sacrifice her beautiful hair.

She was even prepared to play the madwoman.

Her daughter tried once, but the moment she cut a large tuft the mother grabbed the scissors from her. They tussled vigorously for a while, until it became clear it was more than playacting; she first stabbed her own breast and then, with shouts of murderess, murderess, I’ve been murdered, she was ready to throw herself at her daughter, Marika.

She suffered a kerchief on her head only when she went out on the street.

The street was perhaps the only worldly authority before which she was willing to bow, or before which at least she forced her madness into different forms. On the street she played the kind of role that others could accept but that also suited her own adolescent daydreams. She transformed herself into a lady who, with exaggerated gestures, indicated how disgusted she was by the vulgarity of the world but who also knew at any given moment what this world owed her.

At home she wore no shoes, not even slippers. If in the winter she spent time in one place or just stood on the kitchen’s freezing floor, she’d keep shifting from one foot to the other and under the long nightshirt rub her cold soles on her calves.

She suffered from the cold.

Although she wore thick underpants, she struggled constantly with inflammation of the bladder and chills. Before going anywhere, she’d spend a long time picking her shoes and bags. Sometimes the careful preparations took days or even weeks. Because of her fine skin, her legs were sensitive, she explained to everybody, and with her fingers she’d point to and gently touch the fine skin on her cheeks and forehead, everything chafes and irritates it. If she went only so far as the marketplace, that would be the end of it, her feet turned into one big sore, sometimes her shoes filled with blood, and every shoe hurt, cut into her flesh, she has nothing to wear anymore because of your disgusting stinginess. I will not shove my feet into bloody shoes, yet she has to because this helpless man, whom even his children have left because of his terrible miserliness, they hate him, won’t talk to him, have nothing but contempt for him because he is mean, mean, and everybody always cheats him at the market too, sells him rotten fruit, he gets all the bruised ones and the ones full of worms, and no matter whether he looks at them or not, if the merchandise is cheap he doesn’t notice.

The meat already has a smell. Still, he buys it.

Shoemakers can’t help her anymore either. Once she had a decent cobbler, but who knows where he is now.

May his memory be blessed.

These cobblers can’t or don’t want to widen her shoes properly, if only they widened one pair, the one made of fine calfskin that’s flexible enough, because all her shoes are custom-made so they won’t chafe her instep or heels. She swears on the memory of her beloved father that she never suffered any pain comparable to this, and every week, when she goes to the market, that is her burden, that is what she has to endure. And not only is the cobbler wicked, treacherous, mean, and I don’t even know his name, but he’s worse than the goy cobblers, only the butcher is worse than this cobbler. The butcher is so mean, he’s a common criminal.

Mean.

Listen to me, man, that’s how I call him, who can remember the names of these cobblers, I’ll give you any money for a pair of proper shoes. God is my witness, when I try them on they fit, see how nicely you could fix them, you see, but by the time I get home, my feet are nothing but blisters.

And already yesterday I told you, she says now, that you’d have liver today.

But of course you forget everything. To you I’m air. I already told you yesterday what nice liver I bought for you, you wretch, was I talking to the air. I don’t eat any of it, not a bite, but once again I swore, I swore on everything dear to me that I’ll never go to that shoyhet again. I don’t care what you say, he is not a human being. Mean. You protect him only because you want me to go to him for your liver, but his stinking mouth is always dripping with hazeer,* she said all this in a uniformly high, almost bored falsetto, and then, as if obeying her body’s unknown passion, and with the passion of her sense of justice, she unexpectedly began to shout.

Can’t you see, she shouted, yanking the elastic dough out of the bowl with the wooden spoon, you don’t even have an eye for wickedness. Mean. You’re no less mean than all the rest of them. All right then, I’ll fry this liver for you, she added tenderly, stupid that I am, I always let you have your way, and the unexpected emotional turn was addressed not to her husband, this miserable man, but to the liver, because she liked to fry it and she liked to pronounce the word fry as many times as possible and always with the same gusto.

And to make her lips pronounce the word liver, while she envisioned the liver bursting with blood under the bluish-purple membrane, even though she would never have put it in her mouth.

I hope you’re happy to have liver for lunch.

Now I’ll fry it well again. And don’t worry about blood, not a drop will stay in it, don’t you worry.

All this time Gottlieb did not look up from his prayer book, not out of meanness but out of considered goodwill and self-defense. Ever since the woman’s condition had taken a turn for the worse, he let her have her way, he had to endure almost everything, while with carefully doled out indifference he protected himself, spared himself from emotional involvement to the extent that allowed him to remain by her side.

He did not love her, not even in their earlier lives, and the woman had not loved him, never; he had failed to love this woman for even a moment, and therefore it was incredibly hard for him to remain permanently indifferent to her. To find a solution for this problem throughout an entire, unpredictable lifetime, even though the solution consisted of unbearably long moments.

In the early years of their marriage, they had tried to accept each other’s bodily proximity, but they failed.

At most, he was fond of remembering her beauty. Of saying to himself, after each moment gained, see, you managed to bear it, and instead of rebelling, you steadfastly praised the Father of Mercy for all your tribulations; yet he knew that his perseverance had only its own value and no reward, and never would have, neither in this nor in the promised other world. To this day, it filled him with satisfaction that he had been granted a beautiful wife, though he had never succeeded in opening up this beauty, and had never been able to think about what might have happened between them in the sight of the Lord. He feared that if instead of praying as he should, he’d think long and hard about how unbearable it was to endure her indifference; then madness would seize him and hurl him into the depths. Once, during a prayer, he shuddered when he realized he should stay away from depths, should strive for heights, because this hapless woman had no one but him. Since then, consciously and guided by the greatest compassion, he forced himself to think only about shallow things. Thank God she had two healthy children, knock on wood; may the memory of our poor little dead one be blessed. But these children, her own blood, are not only indifferent about their mother but stranger than she is, because they take after her completely. He could see that they wanted to be free of their mother; they would unhesitatingly put her in the nursing home in Bonyhád, which the Transdanubian religious communities maintained for mentally deranged Jews.

What else can we possibly do with our mother, they would say.

He must not die while the woman lives.

He, the stranger, must take care of this strange woman.

He did not understand Creation, why it assigned strangers to live together.

But how could he comprehend His powers. And he no longer wanted to.

In the midst of his prayer he really had to laugh out loud at the Lord Almighty for his wild thoughts, and that made him shudder. Into the minds of people given to alienation, the Lord put thoughts of estrangement. He enjoyed immensely the sly tricks of the Lord, how He managed to reach into his thoughts.

He says, think of shallow things, and the shallowness turns out to be deep enough to be painful.

You’ve got me again, my Lord, I thank you, Thy will be done, as Thou had willed it once, now, and forever.

He understood how the Lord’s mercilessness could possibly remedy his joyless life.

Don’t reply, don’t even look up, whispered the sober thought, but with the prayer drive out the sparks and restless incitements of reason.

Actually, he could endure everything except for one thing.

When Margit screamed, can’t you see that I’ve raised three beautiful children for you.

Not that, not that third one.

Our third child, Margit, deformed and crippled, you can call it what you want, but not beautiful.

Hold your mouth. Give no cause for quarreling.

If they started to quarrel, because Gottlieb did not respond or because he did but could not reasonably control himself, which made their quarrel deteriorate, because he said out loud that they had buried their third child, we buried him, Margit, make a note of that finally, even then there was no room for reflection. Except that on those occasions it was not his goodness but his wickedness he had to relish to the last drop, and with it he had to part with his reason — no small physical and mental ordeal. His wife would repeatedly shout the name of the dead child, exactly as she had done when she was first told; she kept calling him to come home, where was he, just a minute ago he was still out on the street playing with the other children.

He was not, how could he be, we sent him away to the Strickers, Margit, for the whole summer, to the island.

I don’t send my child to anyone, to no kind of island. You gave him away. You did it. You. To the goyim. Only you.

She collapsed, writhing on the ground as if in her pain she would have to give birth again.

But Gottlieb’s silence might provoke her; at times, whether he behaved well or inadvertently did something incautious, it was impossible to keep on an even keel or escape without fits and outbursts; his wife’s monologues accompanied him in his waking hours and even in his restless sleep, sometimes inexplicably.

If she yelled out into the great big world, Józsika, Józsika, the whole neighborhood came running to the house and the doctor had to be called so that with the help of injections and tranquilizers she would calm down.

I’m glad, Margit, he said now, in the voice of a man who has tired of even the semblance of indifference and, in addition to his physical reality, is searching for emotional reserves with which to mold something into something else.

You know how glad I am about the liver.

This did not sound very convincing.

Why wouldn’t you be glad, you wretch, it was fresh when they brought it, I was standing by the counter for a whole day so it would be fresh for you, and on top of that I’ll fry it again for you. I can spend more time at the stove standing on my bad legs.

She did not always fry it a second time; this was unpredictable too — just as he didn’t know whether she’d address him in formal or familiar terms — and that made Gottlieb dread the possibility of blood spurting under the knife onto his plate; he always tried to hide it under the rice or potatoes. At least he should not see the abomination when, to ensure the mental calm of his wife, he silently ate the blood.

Because of his insane wife, once a week he eats raw blood.

Just fry the liver again the way you usually do.

For a change, today I’m making nice white rice to go with it, because I could eat a few grains too, the wife said pensively. For two days now I haven’t had more than a few morsels. With my stomach, I can’t cope with liver anymore, no matter how much I like it and would like to eat some. But I’ll peck at a few grains of rice with you.

I don’t like watching you eat the liver all by yourself all the time.

Only no blood should be left in it, Margit. You know that’s the most important thing.

He did not look up from his prayer book, signaling obsessively that he was calling out from his book between two sanctified thoughts and had neither time nor energy to waste on this liver story even if he was frightened of blood.

You know, Margit, how much I love to have the fried liver well done, you know very well.

And it doesn’t matter if it burns a little and becomes a bit crunchy.

Deathly silence followed; perhaps this was already too much, too many instructions and explanations for the woman.

For her, his words could mean that according to her husband she burned the liver and ruined his food. She paid no attention to anything; she could not be expected to fry liver properly, and, according to these facts, Gottlieb married a woman from Munkács who spoils the creations of the Creator.

Now something was again about to happen between them. Should she tolerate such nasty slander from this wretch from Mohács.

In the tense emotion-filled space, Gottlieb completely forgot he had come home because of his missing hat, and that Madzar must be waiting in vain for the three sleepers to be sent to his home.

He had developed a special ability in himself.

Within a split second, he was able to withdraw attention from his wife. Accompanied by the singsong high falsetto, he fell back into the sought-after text. In the prayer books, he liked checking those prayer fragments that involuntarily cropped up in his mind during the day, while waves of the senseless singsong words broke pleasantly above his head.

Even after several decades, he still did not think he knew the prayers by heart. How could he, when throughout his entire bitter childhood he had been beaten so much. His father of blessed memory beat him, his teacher lifted him out of his seat by his side locks, and her gentle mother shrieked as she pummeled him, because the raw matter in his brain instinctively protested against receiving verses whose sense, despite all his well-intentioned efforts, remained vague and elusive.

He knew nothing, though he should have been able to rattle off all the prayers by heart. There were constant complaints about him — that he was not paying attention, that he was always busy with some nonsense under the bench, his mind wandering elsewhere.

He fell asleep on the bench so he wouldn’t have to hear things of which he understood not a word.

They beat him.

Yet it seemed more pleasant to put up with the beatings than to absorb the Hebrew passages, because no matter how he had tried to follow them with his ears he could not catch them, let alone memorize or recite them by heart as the other boys did. When he was about to catch one verse, another was already pouncing on him. He did not understand how the brains of other boys coped with this speed. But he learned quickly enough that it was no use complaining about headaches. Even though the dreaded effort to somehow fit in the words of the hurrying Hebrew verses among the sounds of Hungarian and Yiddish words, and to fix them with their own meaning, had his head throbbing. The throbbing produced white circles through whose center he saw into a space of unfamiliar color. If he succeeded, if among the illuminated circles he managed to reach the inviting darkness, if past the dazzling of his own pupils he managed to glance into the red and green, then inevitably he awakened to being doused in water and beaten at the same time; and he knew that he would be beaten again at home, yanked and shoved around for a good long while.

He could not have said when all this became pleasurable, because neither before nor after this period did he know a parallel world in which things were or could have been some other way; yet he enjoyed it. The eternal obscurity never dissipated, and throughout his life his mind searched for certainties, whether or not he understood well or truly knew some things; and though he had been unable to obtain these certainties — he had not enough education for solid knowledge — he did enjoy the endless act of searching.

While he perused the Hungarian footnote on the Musaf prayer, which he had no problem locating and according to which the prayer’s origins were to be found in the written legacy of Rabbi Ephraim of Bonn, Germany, he did not acknowledge that his wife winced, slammed the dough angrily back into the bowl, insolent, how shameless, just keeps reciting to himself aloud, and I am frying liver for such an impudent character and then, with her mouth slightly open, stared at him.

As if asking whether such insolence was even possible.

For a little while Gottlieb also fell silent within himself, and he stared back at her.

Such an ungrateful, insolent man, brazen, and I didn’t just buy him a whole liver, bought him the nicest liver in the entire butcher shop, but I’m also making soup out of fresh, completely fresh mushrooms, she said after a long silence. But I did see that he left his hat at home, don’t worry, I did notice it, you wretch, you addle-brained old man, she shouted and then laughed. Her laughter echoed weirdly in the empty rooms. He left with his head uncovered, she laughed, this never happened before, but now he let that happen too. I said to myself, when I saw it happen, something like this could never happen in a normal Jewish family. What tsuris. He eats properly, just as he should, unselfishly I take good care of him. At least once a week I make him beef broth, still, he’s a complete idiot.

Then suddenly her laughter abandoned her.

At least I’ll cook the mushrooms for him, for this idiot, I’ll do that.

Expecting some kind of response, however brief or small, a word of abuse or thanks or just a yell, for all the sacrifices she had been making for her husband, she stopped talking. She fell silent as if to pray. I beseech you, I am begging you for anything. She would have been content with the slightest of signals, which throughout a lifetime she had been unable to force out of this man, insensitive to the marrow of his bones.

A little bit of compassion. Just a tiny bit, out of love.

She knew him well. He needed no introduction.

He had no secret she did not know.

I am making dumplings for you, with plenty of eggs, she added, and still you show such ingratitude toward me. Did I make them with a parsley roux, I certainly did, what more should I do for you. I’m telling you, I’ll moisten them with some beef broth. Don’t be afraid, one day I’ll tell everyone all your little secrets.

After a while, the emotional silence became dangerously loud and tense in Gottlieb’s ears, though it would not have been advisable to evoke, by silence, Margit’s thirst for revenge.

With his glance, therefore, he quickly returned to the first sentence of the footnote, though he was still unfamiliar with the end of the story.

In the city of Cleve, in that vast lowland where the Maas, the Niers, and the Rhein flow toward one another, there lived a rabbi named Ammon, he read the footnote out loud, and he smiled as if he had found a liberating, happy ending in his book. Listen to what I’ve found, Margit. I don’t think you’ve ever heard of this Rabbi Ammon. I know I haven’t.

And I’m telling you, you listen to what I am telling you. If once, just once, for a single moment you listened to what I say, what I say, I, responded the woman almost threateningly, surprised in her endless marital daydreams, not only liver, I’m telling you, how could I tell you more clearly, you mean, wicked, accursed man, that I’ve also bought sponge mushrooms for you.

Mushrooms, she said, pronouncing the word with her entire mouth, because not only did she like to take on her lips the image of liver swollen with blood, but it also felt good to pronounce the word mushrooms with big, long vowels.

I bought the morels from Jews, don’t worry. I don’t buy a single mushroom from the goyim. I should buy what they already touched and felt all over with their filthy paws. Wicked ones, they spoil everything. I don’t buy those mushrooms.

Gottlieb took one look at this complete stranger, this unkempt, desperately ill woman who was incurious about anything she did not already know. With profound conviction, she guarded her ignorance, yet occasionally she seemed to know surprising things. It may have been possible that she did in fact know the story of Rabbi Ammon. Her adored father of blessed memory, an ugly, rather mean and violent man, was cantor and schoolmaster in the service of the Munkács Jewish community, and thus, in her parental home, where the stable and the classroom both opened from the salon, Margit had picked up many things.

Gottlieb was literally beaming at her with his convincing smile, because just this once he really wanted to share the story with somebody.

And with that smile he slowly convinced the insane woman longing for understanding, or perhaps he deceived and bewitched her.

It says here about him, he looked back at his book quickly, that his wealth, enormous erudition, rare integrity, and piety made this rabbi first among his contemporaries. But his fame also reached the court of the prince of Jülich in Duseldorp, and if he or the princess happened to be in the mood, the rabbi was a welcome guest of theirs whenever they invited him.

Sit down, come, sit there, facing me, Margit, sit down with those miserable dumplings, let me read to you the whole story, he said, and with his book pointed impatiently to the other kitchen stool.

At about this time Madzar’s mother arrived home from the island, flushed and hot from work and riding her bicycle.

Madzar, standing on the veranda, wrapped in silence and invisibility, was observing how she pushed the bicycle to the shed, how she leaned it carefully against the wall, and how she slipped off the basket she carried on her back.

A solitary bird was chirping shrilly from the edge of the eaves.

The bird flexed its legs twice after each chirp, but did not fly away.

His mother had nothing in her back basket but her white petticoat, which she had taken off because of the heat, her black sweater, and a little freshly cut alfalfa for the rabbits. Her scythe was carefully hooked onto the upper rim of the basket. And the redstart nesting in the eaves had been sending its alarm signal because from among the roses or grapevines a cat was peeking out. Standing behind the veranda window, Madzar read a great many things in his mother’s dry features. Many things that earlier could not have reached his consciousness. He saw too much of the reality that consisted of simpleminded details, with which the foundation of his life had been laid. On her face, he saw again his own most intimate memories, which, precisely because of their commonness, one never scrutinizes closely.

How many things she must have learned while she waited for the ferry and during the short trip from the island to the town shore.

The excitement easily dissolved the dry features.

While on the ferry with the other women and on her way to her house, she gleaned much information that she had already learned from other sources in slightly different versions; and some details now became clear about which she could never have had an inkling.

Margit was irritated, cursed her husband, if he could take it outside, why can’t he take it back in, don’t you have hands. Why should I do everything.

Sometimes she cried because of the kitchen stools, but she would not take them inside herself.

Now she lowered herself to one of the stools, spellbound.

On the Gottliebs’ veranda, there was nothing but the two stools.

If you don’t bring it back here, don’t expect me to do it.

Never, you understand, never.

Maybe the wedding ring would fall off his precious hand if he did.

You are a base, mean man who does not wear his wedding ring so he can flirt with anybody.

The last person to tell her a story was her adored father. She did not sit on the entire stool, only on its edge, because she was afraid that this wretch, this shameless, this insolent, this mean man would deceive her with this new approach. He would deceive her by reading aloud to her. He is capable of anything. He would read something from his pious book that isn’t even in it. And I don’t want to hear it. She had a special contempt for the wretch because of his books. You don’t come up to the ankle of my adored father, you hear, you wretch, with your lack of education and your ignorance. Thinks he can fool anybody with his famous books. That people will look at him as a finer person, a scholar, they’d say, because his nose is always in books. Ridiculous. A hardworking peasant doesn’t eat as much as you stuff in your big stomach. And when it comes to sleeping, he really knows how to do that. And to snore, so I can’t sleep. Like a log, you sleep, while I only toss and turn on the sheet all night long. Your brain is as blunt as a log. Sharpen it all you want, with your books. You won’t deceive me, believe me. You only give yourself airs with your books and your great knowledge, while on the sly and quietly you keep passing them, one after the other, out here on the veranda.

If only he did it aloud at least.

And you make such a stink that I have to stop at the door. That’s your big knowledge, how to pass wind, that you know. So that my whole life, in my own house, I should smell it. Your stench, you shameless, treacherous, mean wretch, you are not a man. Your stink has eaten itself into the walls. I can’t even clean the window glass because of it. All the windows stink. Nobody else could live with you in the same house but me, and even I’m suffering like a dog.

I am suffering because of you, don’t you understand, suffering.

Why must I live in so much suffering with a complete stranger, that’s what I want you to explain to me.

It happened that on an early spring day Rabbi Ammon received another message, Gottlieb read aloud, as if he had not heard any of the woman’s words, inviting him to distant Duseldorp, which was the name of Düsseldorf back then. Maybe she had never heard of this. Jan Willem, the prince of Jülich, had moved his court there after several decades of warfare, and, based on what he had read, Gottlieb’s imagination created a special space in which to accommodate the action of the story. Once again, the prince wanted to hear the rabbi’s advice, Gottlieb read in his book so he wouldn’t hear the false sounds his wife was making. The messenger also revealed the subject on which the mighty prince had expected to hear Rabbi Ammon’s advice. Because then the guest would have a chance, during the journey to the palace, to contemplate the matter, turn it over in his mind. The messenger was also a nobleman, a large young man, his chin just becoming downy; he insisted on setting out immediately because the Rhine and the Maas had overflowed, not to mention the Niers, and there was a chance that they might merge and flood the highway. They rode in pouring rain, and because of the floods, a journey that should have taken only two days lasted more than five. On the low-lying meadows, above which the heavy-bellied rain clouds moved slowly, they continually had to search for passages of high ground in the water. They lost their way several times, had to put up in unfamiliar inns to feed their horses and rest them. Water, nothing but water as far as the eye could see. The horses’ hooves splashed in water. On the afternoon of the fifth day, they reached the Duseldorp castle, whose walls, in a merciless driving wind, were being lashed by the waters of the flooding river. But the prince had already adjourned the conference, attended by distinguished lords from Jülich, Berg, Pfeilen, Mark, Ravensburg, and, from the rabbi’s hometown, the count of Cleve himself. When Rabbi Ammon was led in, still drenched, the nobles were already seated at the table set for dinner and even the prince of Jülich would not have wanted to remember what he had hoped to hear from the rabbi.

It would not have been proper to revive the debate among the restless lords.

They let the Jew dry off, along with the dogs that burst in with him.

Do you hear, Margit, I hope you’re listening, Gottlieb interjected but did not even look up at his wife, who, with a confused little smile on her lips, was paying fairly devoted attention to him.

She had even lowered the bowl with the dumpling dough to her lap.

But she was on the alert; because of the always-stinking man she could not relax the tension in her body.

Occasionally, the noblemen would throw a bone or piece of meat to the dogs, who grew excited by the smell of food, but they forgot about the rabbi. The prince, who sat close to the rabbi but facing away from him so he could warm his aching back at the fireplace, turned to him only once.

If you ever blabber about my question to you, Jew, I’ll have your tongue cut out, and then I’ll have your head chopped off.

But nobody ever uttered, or ever would utter, the certain question or request that the rabbi might reveal to someone. No allusions to it have been found either in Rabbi Ephraim’s notes taken in Bonn, which, of course, is more than understandable.

However, they could not deceive the rabbi.

Because of the prince’s words, the drinks, the music, the dogs’ barking, and mainly because of the postprandial gratification coursing through their entire beings, the good mood kept rising among the noble lords.

The rabbi neither asked for nor received more than some fresh water.

He was still hoping somehow to get through this ill-omened visit.

Until the count of Cleve stood up and spoke for a long time directly into the prince’s ear. He spoke for about a quarter of an hour as if, in the midst of great giggles and guffaws, he were dripping poison in the royal ear. And Jan Willem, who was nicknamed the Wealthy because of his immense treasures, at first laughed at the deluge of words with which the whispering large-nosed count of Cleve inundated him; not until the count had stopped and, smirking under his large nose, contentedly strolled back to his seat did he summon the rabbi before him.

In the silence that fell in the great hall, the lashes of the flooding river could be heard.

Now, however, to everybody’s great surprise the prince addressed the rabbi by his name, as if the Jew too had a regular name like everybody else. He no longer needed his advice, the prince told the rabbi, and he could keep all his advice to himself, because he, the prince, had taken care of everything, he and the other lords had set the world aright. But just then Margit made a move on her stool and let out a painful moan.

I already put your mushroom soup on the stove.

Let your mushrooms be. Who’s interested in your mushroom soup now.

How could I let it be. The good mushroom juice will boil away, and I still have to thicken it with flour, and I haven’t chopped the parsley either, the woman whimpered, yet she seemed to be nailed to the stool.

Unless, with some luck, the fire’s gone out, oh, maybe I didn’t put in enough twigs.

We’re still very far from the end of the story, listen, Gottlieb said, and he looked up for a moment to ascertain whether he could continue.

Margit was of course paying very close attention not to the story but to him.

Here comes the terrible turning point, Margit, because the ruling prince says to the rabbi that along with his entire family, the rabbi should move to the court. The prince would be glad to have him as his permanent counselor, and he wouldn’t even have to give too much advice. What a great honor that would be, you see, and the only condition of receiving this position was, Gottlieb read on in his book, happy to see that with the bowl in her lap and her lips parted the woman was affected by the story and was leaning forward, that the rabbi abandon the faith of his ancestors.

Well, Margit, you can just imagine, that he should dress in civilian clothes, take off his hat to all the saints, and live his life with that name always on his lips and in his heart, the name of that big Niemand the goyim call their redeemer.

When he reached this point, Gottlieb laughed aloud with pleasure at how infinitely ignorant and stupid the goyim were.

Although Margit did not laugh along with him, the man’s joy did cause her some pleasure.

In his haste, Rabbi Ammon replied by asking for three days to think it over, and begged respectfully that he be allowed to spend the three days in his home.

Go, Jew, the ruling prince answered graciously and waved his hand as if, with this gesture, he had already forgotten what the count of Cleve had whispered to him. But he did not forget it, not by a long shot; when a week had passed, then another, and then a third, and the rabbi had still not returned, he sent after him.

The mean, the vile, the godless man, how mean can such a godless man be, Margit said, this time referring to the prince.

Don’t get excited, Margit, wait until the end. Gottlieb looked up again from his book.

In that year, the floods lasted a long time and it took the prince’s messenger a good week to reach the count of Cleve’s city, Gottlieb continued softly. But when the messenger finally got there, the rabbi and his family were not to be found, and nobody could tell him where they might be. In great secrecy, the rabbi and his family had moved to the town of Pfeilen.

Where in the world did they move to, asked Margit, irritated, and in her fear regarding the possible outcome of the story she pressed the bowl to herself even harder.

To Pfeilen, Gottlieb repeated the town’s name.

And where in the world is that. I’ve never heard of a town by that name.

After all these years, what difference does it make to you, Gottlieb replied, and he slowly closed his book.

It’s much more important that the Jews there dressed him in beggar’s clothes and he lived like that to the end of his life, enjoying the greatest respect of his people.

Margit laughed a light laugh of relief, and Gottlieb laughed along with her. Which was such an exceptional event in their lives that they kept laughing together for quite a while, guffawing with the pleasure generated by their own laughter. That on the same night the count’s soldiers burned down the synagogue of Cleve, along with the houses of the ghetto, Gottlieb chose not to tell Margit. And that they put to the sword every Jew they could find.

The Last Judgment

Interrupting the usual early morning music, the loudspeaker called him to the south gate.

Kramer to the south gate.

And it cannot be claimed that he did not know what that meant. The people they called to the south gate they put away for good.

The Niers flowed there, nice and slow.

By nature, he was the kind of man who rarely thought there was any problem he could not solve or avoid. He was breathing more heavily, or rather he had the feeling that with his body grown heavy he should be out in the fresh air. This time there was no way out. He could not avoid it. For days, he had counted on the water’s slow current to sweep him away. They could hear shots from the direction of the river; it was surprising they wasted bullets on people. And there was one fleeting moment when he still hoped. The person he loved more than his life, more than his long-forgotten wife, more than all his incidental lovers — and he did remember them all simultaneously during this long moment, all of them — the person he loved even more than his children was standing only two steps away from him at the deep-brown, empty table of the Blockälteste, in the harsh light. A pale, fragile, but strong and nimble young man whose ambition and energy had given him a stooped back and who could get away with nearly everything and could afford not to be completely bald like the others. His shapely skull was covered with maddeningly rich hair, curly, golden, and ruddy.

He was ordered to special details at least once a week. To sort clothing in the laundry building, which did not necessarily mean anything but sorting and loading clothes, though sometimes it could mean something else too. The camp had eyes for things like that, since close connections acquired a commercial value of their own. Eisele, an always well-dressed and very cruel man, the commandant’s deputy for supplies, personally managed the work in the laundry. At such hours, it was still dark outside. If the loudspeaker ceased, they could hear the intense bombardment. The potbelly stove was glowing red. Every breath of night dripped or cascaded down the small square windowpanes. He was chatting with someone, with Bulla, obviously doing business with him, explaining something very convincingly, his snow-white hands flashing in the lamplight.

The boy might get away with it, Kramer thought.

This was his first precise thought and perhaps the last hope of his life. He could not harbor resentment of the boy, because business is important for someone who has to live.

The morning cauldrons still had not been brought.

For more than two years now, he’d had no way of knowing whether members of his family were alive or not. Even political prisoners were forbidden to receive mail, and so it was all right if family members were alive and healthy, and it was even better if they were dead because an air attack had killed them all; they were easier to imagine that way, since he did not believe he would ever return to them. If God existed, he would have loved Peix more than God, but God showed himself neither in any person nor in any thing. He loved him enough as it was, did everything to love him even more, though he found no explanation for it and, as a result, could sometimes hardly suppress the disgust he felt toward the boy.

Kramer’s oldest son should in theory have been at the front, and this Peix was exactly the same age. What he did not like to think about at all was that his son might be serving the Nazis. And he could also love this boy because or especially because secretly he hoped, quite ashamed of himself, that he had a greater chance of surviving no matter where he was. The front was somewhere nearby, they could hear the British cannons and were somewhat familiar with the strategic situation. All the working radios had to be surrendered to the authorities, but guards in the area brought superannuated sets to be revived by one of his comrades. He also had occasion to listen to the English news in the orderlies’ room, the Schreibstube. They were forbidden to pass on information they heard, lest the Nazis discover it. Not to yell and shout to the world that they were coming, they’re here already, down by the gardens. The bombers carefully avoided the camp, which showed the British knew well that except for human flesh there was nothing worth destroying in the one- and two-story barracks among the low pine trees. However, the two nearest small towns, the Dutch Venlo and the German Pfeilen, received their daily dose almost every morning and every night. Prisoners disturbed by the explosions yelled and screamed, which aroused emotions that had been dormant for months or even years; they cried for joy.

When he looked at the boy, and he had been looking at him constantlessly for four years, eighteen hours a day, every one of his muscles, fibers, cells, and membranes told him, with a happiness that coursed through his soul, that this boy was his personal possession. This put him in the state of physical readiness one assumes when in love. Sometimes he wondered why, why was he not jealous or not more jealous, because when Peix came back from the laundry he felt no more than a dull thud or stab in his heart. No matter how exhausted he was, he wanted to start to wakefulness several times a night just to see the boy’s feminine face deep in sleep. Peix carried his mother’s face on his own, the face of an unknown woman, her milk-white skin and attractively ribbed full lips, and Kramer could not avoid the thought that he had known this woman. At night they often held each other, by chance and intentionally they would hug each other hard, pressing themselves to each other, or they gently touched and pressed each other’s hands. Kramer saw to it, took great care that they stayed together but never had to be squeezed into the same sleeping place. A night spent in deep sleep was one prerequisite for survival. He taught the boy more things than he himself could possibly have known. He realized that one creates not only one’s own sons, or that even if this boy was not the fruit of his loins, he would still make a man of him. And how could a man at the gate of some woman’s womb remember what he had done and when. He did not like remembering things like that; they had fallen out of his memory. He had been a prisoner for seven years; after the first long year in prison, this was the second camp he’d managed to survive in, along with Peix.

It was not that it hurt, that what was in him still hurt, but that he could not comprehend his own situation, that he should perish now when he was so healthy and well fed. They had taken an oath about what they would do if they both survived, that is what cropped up in his mind now, where they would go. They swore to each other what they would do if the other one did not make it. He would be the other one. He also knew that in these last days his death would greatly endanger his comrades. It would be like a signal, the criminals would know they had come out on top again. Unless the British got here sooner, or the prisoners weren’t taken away and slaughtered, which possibility always existed, the camp would slide back to the condition in which they had found it when they’d arrived two years before. The camp commanders knew they would get nowhere without the communists because only the communists had some consideration for others, yet it was in their interest that the criminals hold a superior position. Indeed, they smashed or weakened the secretly always-rebuilt communist cells in which it was virtually impossible to plant spies. It was just such a measure that was being taken now, Kramer knew.

It was not senseless, personal ambition that Kramer felt was ridiculous, not the eagerness of the will to survive, no, not that. One should stay alive at all costs, this he understood. He did not think the movement’s argument for breaking the criminals’ power was ridiculous, or at least for removing the threat of their superior force from the heads of many prisoners, ignorant men driven to bestiality. Surely reason allowed this much; at times he was even proud of himself. What he did find ridiculous was a man who, although identical with him, could neither comprehend nor avoid the last judgment. He and Peix could not go to Pfeilen to blow up the church whose tower they of course had never seen. They wanted to, so that those people could no longer ring the bell so peacefully and indecently every Sunday morning. He and Peix could not go to Paris together. Which they both had longed to do all their lives as ardently as small children wait for Christmas Eve. Maybe the little Huguenot, who in his former life specialized mainly in art treasures, would go there alone.

Success would also be denied because in his heart he had always kept a place for tenderness. Should blame no one but himself.

And then, dead silence in the barracks, for a brief moment, frozen stillness. The very same thing, although with a slight delay, in the noise of distant cannon fire that reached, separately, everyone’s consciousness.

That Bulla might have betrayed them.

Perhaps it was the low-hanging, heavy metal lampshades that were amplifying the fine humming of the strong lightbulbs. Several people had been beaten to death with these shades. The silence of about four hundred men; this too has considerable weight. During the last days, an even two hundred more had been let in, drawn from evacuees of one enemy-threatened camp or other; overall, there were now more than four thousand in the camp. Himmler ordered that these people be neither killed nor left behind to the enemy, an order that was impossible to carry out but from which one could deduce that the leadership was hoping for a favorable turn in the conduct of the war. There were so many dead that they could not be burned in the crematorium’s two small ovens. The bodies, like logs, were stacked in piles in front of the north gate. During the day when it thawed for several hours, the naked piles began to loosen and stink; the pale bodies slid and wobbled, while on-foot transports of exhausted people, screaming with hunger and filthy with dysentery, kept arriving. Kramer needed all his ingenuity and cruelty to ensure that they could stay together in the great congestion, at least in their sleeping places, and that they had something to eat; most likely, the kapos’ blows sealed the fate of several people who, unsuspecting, had wanted to crawl into those two sleeping places.

The newcomers fell silent together with the old-timers.

Many of them believed that König or perhaps Königer was the real name of the person who was now the focus of four hundred silent faces; even his orderly, who slept next to him, did not have to share his place with anyone. Some of them added the name Bear. Now they could see and hear that Walter Kramer was the name of this hulking, stentorian German who in the eyes of the camp’s veterans was king of the Pfeilen camp. Peix should have feared him too, because of his size and voice, but he did not.

A simple locksmith, a man like you or me or anyone else. A kind and dedicated communist whom the Gestapo had arrested in January 1939 in the brilliant snow-covered mountains. Since then he’s become completely gray. For four months, they kept him chained to a cell wall, his handcuffed hands tight behind his back. If it hadn’t been for his guard who out of mercy regularly loosened his rope for a few hours and took off the handcuffs, his arms would probably have had to be amputated. They arrested his wife, who, after protracted torture, asked him to end the nightmare by making a detailed confession. Hearing the request, what else could he have done: he banished from his heart the woman who had allowed herself to be instructed by his torturers. If he had acceded to her request, he would have had to betray more than a dozen men. Maggots settled in his festering wounds and by the time the prison doctor was willing to take a look, they had eaten a good-size chunk out of his shoulder and thigh. He had a barely perceptible limp and he could now not fully raise his left arm.

Of course they managed to get the information they needed out of other prisoners, his wife being one of them.

He had too much to answer for; he killed without giving it a thought.

By then he had been smuggling comrades across the Czechoslovak border, near Annaberg. These people had gone all the way to Prague or Moscow, or happened to be sent back from those cities with new assignments of illegal work. Kramer stayed mainly in Chemnitz and conducted operations from there, working with runners. He developed an entire network of smugglers and confidential collaborators whom he did not know personally but about whom he knew everything. It finally took a dozen agents to surround him and catch him. But not before he killed two of them. The last person he smuggled over the border was the young son of a Hungarian comrade of his named Kovách. He had to rescue him from the Wolkenstein hunting lodge, from a secret boarding school for boys well concealed in the Erzgebirge woods and used for genetic experimentation. He did not want to entrust this delicate operation to anyone else. But by then agents were following his every step. The child got across all right, a car was waiting for him on the other side, but Kramer was wounded in his shoulder and thigh.

He returned fire as he fell and could still see the car speeding away in the snow despite a damaged rear wheel.

But now he did not see how he could go on.

And he had accomplished so much in the camp with his incredible caution and implacably calm nature.

For a long time he had been considered the master of life and death in the Pfeilen camp. When he had been first called up, near the end of the Great War, he had completed his training as a medic, having seen typhoid fever, dysentery, tuberculosis, all manner of injuries and mutilations. In times of need, SS officers had him operate on them instead of prisoner doctors or, especially, the two SS surgeons, since one was an alcoholic whose hands shook terribly if he did not have something to drink every hour, and the other was probably a morphine addict with similar problems in getting his required dope — where to get it and how many milligrams to inject. But now, despite everything he had done, Kramer had to go to the south gate because of Peix.

At first they entrusted him only with disgusting, septic operations, out of convenience and because the two surgeons feared infection. Kramer became a specialist in purulent inflammations; every morning he had to open and expertly clean these terrible wounds by the dozen. After a year in the pathology section of Buchenwald, he knew no less about human anatomy than the learned physicians did. The pathology section was shared by the men’s and women’s camp — the only place where not only body parts of both men and women, kept in thick-walled glass vessels, came in contact on the same table but where prisoners of both sexes worked and ate together; some of them were well-known specialists. Life was comfortable and convivial; the men cooked for themselves, could bathe to their heart’s content and chat endlessly with their shaven-headed female colleagues. Kramer worked with an elderly Jewish pathological anatomist, a prosector, who had been the head of his department at the university in Prague. The furnishing, installations, and equipment of the two dissecting rooms met the requirements of the most modern medical technology. Every morning they had to select in the barracks, and then in the mortuary of the sick bay, the Krankenrevier, those bodies that showed some deformation of a hereditary character or bodily anomalies that might be considered exceptional. The corpses had to be those of Jews. Organs and limbs of scientific interest were severed and together with detailed, comprehensive autopsy reports were shipped to Berlin, to the famous Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics in Dahlem, on Ihne Street. The addressee was always a certain Prof. Dr. Karla Baroness von Thum zu Wolkenstein, and two large red stamps were always affixed to the package. One stamp called attention to the fragile contents and the other to the urgency and speed with which the shipment, of great military importance, must reach its destination. On each occasion, its arrival was duly acknowledged by Karla Baroness von Thum zu Wolkenstein, whom the laboratory workers in the camp imagined to be the feminine version of the famous former pathologist from Prague: short, round, and bespectacled. Sometimes she addressed brief questions to her colleagues, and these questions revealed her attentiveness and expertise. Professor Nussbaum never mentioned that the baroness had been his student in Prague, but perhaps he did not even remember her. At other times, in exceedingly warm words, the baroness expressed joy regarding the excellent condition or the professionalism of the autopsy findings.

All the autopsy material had to be stored in the refrigerator until permission came from Ihne Street regarding the exceptional cases.

On very rare occasions, there were instructions to boil a corpse down to the skeleton and then preserve it in a benzene bath. Or not to boil it but rather to dissolve the softer tissue in chloride of lime; this was the longer procedure. In any case, a collegial and friendly relationship developed between the camp laboratory and Ihne Street which neither their respective situations nor their tasks could begin to justify.

Later, in Pfeilen, troublesome aseptic cases were also assigned to Kramer, such as hopeless orthopedic operations and amputations. By then, Obersturmführer Eisele, who in the chaos of the approaching collapse had lost all sense of self-discipline, had been absent for more than a week. Nobody missed him and probably nobody held it against him that lately, with the help of SS physicians, he had been selecting many of the sick to be taken to the north gate, to the open area covered with snow. From the guard tower they shot only those who tried to crawl away; the rest stayed until their turn came. According to the criminals in the camp, Eisele’s wife and two small children had been evacuated in a lightning-fast action, before dawn, from the officers’ quarters in a suburb of the town. Peix had relayed this news to Kramer by the next morning. They both knew what danger awaited them. From the viewpoint of the communist cells, Eisele’s constant use of Peix offered considerable protection, but Eisele had reasons to maintain a tight and passionate relationship with the criminals too. In every possible and impossible secret hiding place, in the mouth and anus of every living and dead person he had been searching for gold, and proved to be very good at it. If he could be made to disappear, just like that, along with his accumulated gold, there was a good chance the criminals would make their own move against the now-defenseless Kramer.

What they really wanted, however, was Peix, alive.

This was such a threat to life in the camp that, to avoid it, the four hundred prisoners were ready to continue their panic-filled silence in the dark barracks for a long time, but the loudspeaker started to crackle, then play music. If this can happen, anything may happen is what people usually say in such cases. It was once again the famous entrance of Countess Maritza from the Kálmán operetta,* blasting at the prisoners from early morning until late at night so they could not hear the sound of cannons.

Kramer has to perish alone.

Nothing more terrible than this could possibly happen in the camp, because it would leave Peix on his own, with no one to restrain him, to keep him from doing whatever he pleased.

Döhring, the commandant’s new deputy, the younger and crueler of the two Döhring brothers, would surely use Peix differently from the way his predecessor Eisele had done.

Kramer might have been the only person to whom it never occurred that for other people real hell meant Peix.

Everyone was terrified of Peix.

A few days sufficed for newcomers to become terrified by the beauty of this healthy, strong person. Many of them would start coughing at the sight of him.

Past the pine forest, in the middle of a plowed field, Eisele had ordered a long, wide burning pit to be dug, seven meters wide and four meters deep, and for more than a week the living and the dead had been burning in it. A nice footpath led to the pit from the north gate. They set the fire with gasoline, applied generously, and when hair, skin, and fat were happily blazing with eager little flames, they kept on feeding the fire. This was Eisele’s last deed, which does not sound too good but, as people in Pfeilen then said, it was necessary to prevent epidemics; the pit smoked and sizzled. Brains and spinal marrow oozed from skulls and spines opening in the heat at the wide bottom of the pit and very slowly began to glow. Brain and spinal marrow become flammable only at a very high temperature. The high temperature was created by the corpses’ own energies. Easily flammable fatty and hairy parts continually ignited the burning mass. Even if people had wanted to, the fire couldn’t have been put out. After a while, the liquid brains acted as perpetual kindling. Of this, however, nobody spoke in either of the two small towns nearby or in the camp itself; all of them, unequivocally and despite the confusion, inhaled the stench of burning human flesh and bones, and had the impression that the smell had a material-like substance, something sticky, and that they were also eating it. It was impossible not to inhale it. The smell and taste in one’s saliva became a little like those of cheap church candles made of tallow. People coughed cautiously whenever the wind blew across the low pine forest, because after a cough one would have to inhale more deeply. Although they had grown used to everything, the knowledge that burning human flesh was what their sense organs were experiencing in this peculiar way and that tomorrow, in all probability, they too would be burning brought tears to their eyes and literally deprived them of air. Acrolein, which is nothing but unsaturated aldehyde, mildly polymerized at high temperatures, stinks like this; it irritates the mucous membranes whether or not one knows what sort of chemical and physical processes are taking place.

Big, strong young men were terrified of him no less than decrepit enfeebled old ones, who, perhaps because of their stupor and helplessness, might enjoy another happy half hour under the eaves of the Krankenrevier. But if Peix had a chance, he tortured these men too. They warmed themselves in the pale sunshine, together with the flies that dared emerge from the cracks in the dark-brown plank wall of the barracks. Icicles dripped happily. Squatting above the filth and stench of their own dysentery, these men waited for Kramer to perform a miracle and perhaps find room for them. The flies still had enough strength to crawl onto the men’s warm necks, where they became stuck or fell down and buzzed in the stubble-like growth that appeared in place of normal hair. If Kramer saw somebody persevering, he might have him sent to the sick bay, or at least the rumor among the prisoners was that he would find beds for them there. Until somebody else died in bed, they could lie on the cold stones in the warm, clean air and, in their fever-induced daydreams, stare at the snow-covered beautiful pine trees outside.

Kramer saw to it that, despite the congestion, there was silence and order in the two wards; this is what he kept Peix busy with all day, though during the chaotic last days it became impossible. It was not unusual in the midst of this quiet, resigned waiting that someone simply keeled over out of sheer weakness and without being pushed. His body would stay there in the mud, which, along with the excrement, vomit, and flies, would freeze again during the night.

Peix killed many people. He had them stand up, it was their turn, they can come in now, and when they managed more or less to rise to their feet in the drippy midday thaw, he shoved them back down. Mainly the handsome young boys had reason to fear him, the ones he took on as assistants in the sick bay, just as Kramer had taken him, back then. In the camp, people said he was a pervert, which in the prisoners’ lingo meant he did not use them even though he could. But he fed and pampered the pretty boys. He would sell one to Eisele in exchange for liver paste to feed another one. The boys did not have to do anything, they could just lounge around, and while Peix worked diligently all day for Kramer, he kept sending his laughs in the boys’ direction, his mouth wide open.

This was also something Kramer knew more about than anyone else: Peix’s hideously mute laughter.

But one fine day Peix grew tired of them, and no one asked himself why, or whether he would like another one. Kramer never let him keep more than two assistants at a time, which would have put an immeasurable burden on the sick bay’s population. These boys were mostly from the ranks of Russian prisoners of war or from Polish forced labor units who had been isolated from others because of capital crimes; they regularly killed for raw potatoes, for a frozen apple, anything. Peix himself had started his career as a common criminal. He was sixteen when he arrived in the Buchenwald concentration camp having committed a particularly cruel double murder. Kramer looked at his mashed and infected hands and then by chance looked at his face and said to himself, no, this boy may have committed murder, but he is no criminal. Peix eagerly affirmed that indeed he was not a criminal. He was not the one who had murdered the two old art dealers whose place he and his friend had broken into, he told Kramer, quickly realizing what Kramer wanted to hear from him. He and his partner had found the house empty. They knew where to find the two big Leistikow paintings they had been hired to steal; and the two old homos had probably been killed by their lover boys. Kramer took him along to the pathology section, a privilege for which, Peix assumed, he was to pay with his body. By the time they discovered the misunderstanding, they loved each other so much that they could not be separated.

Now they had to part, which evidently did not bother Peix, or at least he did not let it interrupt his important business. But it did bother Bulla, the trashy little Polish squealer: in the harsh light cast on the lower part of his face he pretended to be attentive to Peix while nervously blinking in the darkness at Kramer, wondering what would happen next. Bulla limped badly; his mates had once picked him up and thrown him from the second-story window of the laundry. They heaved him out so he would fall on his spine, but it did not happen that way. He was Eisele’s personal informer. If Kramer had not fixed his terrible open fractures and if Peix against his better judgment had not nursed him so devotedly, he would never have walked again. Peix wanted to kill him; he asked that Bulla be given a small dose of sedative, which in the language of the criminals meant enough to put the squealer out of his misery.

Peix also threatened: if Kramer was unwilling, he would do it himself.

Save it for others, for a worthier patient, Kramer said; his quiet self-assurance calmed the boy down even in the most critical situations. He wouldn’t have wanted to pick a fight with Eisele over such a senseless murder. Someone willing would come along and do it anyway. Informers could not support themselves for long; they never had more than half a year to squeal on people, though during that time they managed to have many prisoners put away. Peix also made his pretty boys disappear, one after the other, whenever they grew chubby and he became bored with them. He would tell them he had heard them coughing and tuberculosis was not a disease to walk around with, they should report to the sick bay, and there, within a few days, the SS doctors took care of them, without exception. Wherever Peix appeared, everyone tried hard not to cough. Strong, large men especially had much to fear. Kramer overlooked Peix’s ongoing manhunt, or he forced himself to pretend not to notice what his friend was doing. He overlooked many things he could not help noticing, in hopes that one day, with his help, Peix would come to his senses and realize who he really was. In the depth of his soul, though, he had long understood that, shameful as it was, all his apprehensions had come true. From this icily cool-headed boy he learned much about the lives of criminals and their ways of thinking; without these experiences the communist cell could not have taken up the struggle against them in the camp; but he had failed miserably with his own pedagogical strategy.

What the boy willingly took from him was never what he had wanted to give him.

But what was he to do if this boy was the only human being in the world whom he loved so much. Perhaps he loved him because of his irresponsibility and unpredictability. The boy was more levelheaded than anyone he’d ever met, but still, his soul was crumbling in the depths of madness. The truth was that Peix loved him even more than he loved Peix, Peix loved him immoderately, with all the inner turbulence of his madness. He usually feared robust, big men like Kramer. It was hard for him to get used to the knowledge that Kramer would never hit him or punish him. In Buchenwald, he jerked away his head if Kramer stepped closer to him or addressed him in a loud voice. Kramer managed to laugh hard when this happened, because he understood the boy well; and the boy was ashamed.

Kiss my ass, he yelled at him, get your kicks somewhere else, not with me.

And what would happen if he did hit him once, Kramer often wondered, would that be of any use. Because the jerking of his head meant that, except for being hit, the boy would not accept any other proof of love.

Lemme alone, already, Peix shouted, stop bugging me. Beat your meat, play with your cock, that’s what you should play with. Find something else to do. Get off my back.

Kramer laughed at Peix’s fits of rage; he kept laughing at him very loudly until Peix gave up.

You garbage, you shit, Peix would hiss, as if his teeth were being pulled; you pig swill, you shit, he hissed.

But why would he hit him.

He had never loved anyone like this, so senselessly, purposelessly, and unconditionally. As if he were wishing to redeem the other’s soul with his own. He loved him with every experience of his life, with his entire social wisdom honed on Marxism, with his messianic fervor; he loved the future in the boy. Then how could he possibly admit to himself that he had made a mistake. They should at least have killed Bulla. I made a big, big mistake, he said to himself. Although he could not acknowledge, not even to himself, that it was not a person’s circumstances that determined how that person would go. Not even birth was an influence strong enough to make a person good or evil. In Buchenwald he managed to convince his comrades with the same arguments he had used on himself, but here they reached the very end of the human world’s possibilities, and now he sees that there are no more possibilities, there is no future tense and there never has been one. Yes, here, in the very center of human misery and baseness, here, in hell, he wants to prove, he thundered to his comrades, that no one is born a criminal.

Where else, my dear sweet comrades.

But in the matter of criminality, the others had eyes too. They quickly called him to account about Peix, and he could expect the very worst.

He laughed at them lustily, at what they might have been thinking about him.

The comrades did not see how brazenly he was lying. But his comrades could see that a man who spoke and laughed like that was probably unaware of his own dangerous nature.

It was a very telling indicator that they called a meeting of cell leaders for Sunday afternoon without him. Bruno Apitz was there, in the bathhouse behind the laundry, and Fritz Lettow and Gustav Wegerer, and they sent for him only after they had made their decision about him.

They were going to withdraw him from circulation.

It was spring; the sun was warming everything.

A wondrous spring in the indecent woods of Buchenwald. A time when a man walking thinks, well, I’ve managed to survive this hard winter. And that he’s not alone. This is what he was thinking as he walked, because he really was not alone. Now only better things can happen. Birds were making a din, singing. A gigantic oak stood in front of the laundry. It had to be at least four hundred years old. The prisoners liked to think of it as Goethe’s tree under which he used to rest with Eckermann, who in some way must have been his friend, after all.* The way Peix was his. And when he thought of this, he somehow forgave Goethe too, which made him feel as if suddenly he’d found an explanation for nature’s terrible indifference.

Anyone going to the bathhouse had to pass in front of the laundry, but few people were allowed to walk freely on the camp’s roads and footpaths except for Kramer. The terrible bathhouse was an enormous white tiled hall, with more than two hundred showerheads in the ceiling, of which about two dozen were dripping, the sound of the drops echoing loudly. Through the multipaned windows, open on this Sunday afternoon, one could see the famous oak from a slightly higher angle; the woods were lower down and much farther away, vanishing into infinity beyond the electrified barbed-wire fence. The three men sat on a bench inside the bath, warming their backs and shoulders in the sun coming through the window.

He succeeded in convincing them that without the criminals they would not be able to win the battle with the criminals.

They asked him to wait outside while they made their next decision.

While they deliberated long and rescinded their earlier decision, Kramer waited in the wintry-cool shadow of the bathhouse, looking into the distance above the oak, above the woods. Until they called him back in, he shuddered slightly with fear, though he was not afraid of death. He was not afraid that his comrades would kill him. That would be more like a kind of mercy. There was no point in hoping or knowing that in the end his comrades would see reason. He was trembling a little. They can do nothing else, and he cannot do anything else. It was not his fear of death but his dread of life — that is what he feared so much, that they would thrust him out from among themselves, and then his entire life would become senseless retroactively and his death would be senseless too. All his activity until now would lose significance. There would not be an iota of sacrifice in his death.

But now he wanted to say good-bye to him; he was taking leave of his sensible life.

Gregor, he said quietly, and this was exceptional because in the four years when they lived in each other’s soul and physical proximity he had never said the boy’s first name out loud. In the barracks, the name sounded so scandalous that he instantly recalled the plank wall, warmed by spring heat, which even the fragrant cold of the woodland night could not quickly cool, where they, squeezed between two buildings, felt the warmth on their bodies. They were standing in the starless, deathly dangerous darkness with their pants pulled down, helpless and listening intently.

He knew a good place, Peix had whispered ten minutes earlier on his pallet. Kramer thought Peix meant a hiding place for something, like food, that he wanted to share; in a few minutes, he followed the boy. They carefully went around the latrines. Twice they had to wait for the searchlight’s beam to pass and then run quickly, one at a time, and then Peix led him here. Kramer followed the boy with alert attention and also with admiration; Peix had arrived only a few weeks earlier but was moving about as if he had lived at Buchenwald for years. As they stood trembling with emotion in the heat emanating from the two buildings on either side of them, Peix excitedly pushed his pants down and, shuddering with passion, groped after the cord of Kramer’s pants. It was as if they had washed the desire of pleasure into the sensation of danger and it was impossible to say which was greater. Kramer, surprised, rather felt, endured, or heard all this, but they could see nothing of each other in the darkness. Within the darkness was a more warmly outlined darkness, and this second quality of darkness was the other person. Which conquered them both, more than either of them had anticipated or wanted. Peix found Kramer’s hand and led it to himself, and for a while that sealed their fate, since from then on they could both justifiably believe that the other one wanted the same thing. Why would Kramer have resisted a kid in such a situation. From then on, the few significant moments of their lives were made up of hesitant, hasty movements like these, directed at each other, of which they were incapable alone and alone would not even have thought of, hasty, impatient movements that occasionally caused a bit of joy or evoked the memory of joy. These fractions of seconds thrust them close together, much closer than any closeness they might have known before. They were intent on fulfilling the obligation they imagined they owed each other, if that is how the other one liked it; neither of them wanted for himself the small amount of good every man’s body knows of the bodies of other men; they both wanted to give it to the other. But it all turned out badly; out of sheer consideration for the other, it became difficult to restrain their aversion, embarrassment, and urge to laugh, so after a while they stopped, giving up, at a loss. They stood in the hiding place, foreheads touching, hugging each other’s shoulders and waist as strongly and mercifully as possible. They were careful not to let their loins make contact again.

But now Peix was paying no attention to him, as if he actually neither saw nor heard Kramer.

Bulla turned to him, looking at Kramer with his wide, clever brown eyes, the man who had saved his life and who, because of him, must now go. If he didn’t want to go — he obviously had turned obstinate — they’d be there in a few seconds with their dogs and take him away.

Bulla thought Kramer might put up a fight.

Perhaps Kramer would approach them, embrace the little Huguenot, and then leave. Perhaps he would graze the nicely ribbed feminine lips with a kiss. Which would have irritated Peix extremely, as did almost any human contact or feeling.

Now he understood Peix’s intention, but this time he’d come too late.

He did not have time to shout or interfere, because Peix had already grabbed the low-hanging, heavy lamp, pulled it back as if taking aim, and with one staggering blow crushed Bulla’s skull. The skull opened from Bulla’s ears to his forehead, they heard something that might have been the beginning of a whimper, and for a split second the strong lamplight illuminated the soft, gleaming, pink, and motionless brain until, with a short thud, the body collapsed in the light.

Peix let go of the lamp, which, skirting sprays of blood and yanking its beam of light in all directions, swung back into place. While the Hungarian countess’s voice continued to crackle and soar, it kept swaying fitfully.

We can go then, Peix answered the loudspeaker, somewhat later, and in his joy he let out a loud neigh of a laugh. He rarely laughed aloud, but when he did he sounded like a whinnying horse. Kramer particularly liked his infernal laugh; it was as if he were shouting to someone, good job, man, well done. And that’s how it really was, they could go because at that instant the loudspeaker fell silent again.

Obersturmführer Döring, who had just called Kramer to the south gate, now simply said, Peix to the south gate.

Across the vast Appelplatz they could go side by side, heads bent sharply down; they never looked at each other, not for a moment. They looked like two mutually offended people parting in extreme anger though neither of them could have named the reason for it. On the other side they were waiting for them with their dogs; from there, they accompanied them farther but separately. Out the large gate that was always brightly lit by floodlights, both its wings, unusually, open. Along the darkly glittering asphalt road for a while, their wooden shoes clacking between the leather boots. They turned off the road where the floodlights faded almost completely. The sky was slowly brightening. Out here, the loudspeaker could not be heard clearly anymore. All one could tell was that somebody, a woman, kept singing the same thing over and over again. But they could hear the cannons more clearly and they could see, at the bottom of the lightening sky, the reflected lights on the western horizon that preceded the flash and blast of firing. For Kramer, these images made it clear that what they were doing to them was being done in the penultimate moment. The huge cauldrons would not be brought again; there would be no more turnip soup in the camp. That’s why today there had been no morning Appel, which usually lasted for hours. He was a bit amused that he’d managed to glean this bit of fateful information but could not pass it on to his comrades. They will kill the two of them and then, in orderly files, they will lead the entire camp out the wide gates and away from here. The Krankenrevier and the Karanten, together with the sick and the convalescing inside them, they’ll simply burn.

And that is how it happened.

But even Kramer did not imagine that they wanted to drown Peix in front of his eyes.

When Döhring raised his cane under his chin and the other man twisted his arms behind him, a position that, as the result of having been tied down for so many months, immediately caused him terrible nausea and involuntary retching, he understood this too. He could endure this much pain only if he could go on retching. Peix had to undress; no matter how badly they were beating him, the undressing progressed very slowly. His nakedness emerged from the darkness before Kramer’s eyes. He would have preferred to suffer Döhring’s blows to seeing what they were doing to Gregor. In his mind, he was praying for him like a child. By now no man could have held Kramer up. And Döhring could not at the same time prop up Kramer’s chin and hit him. Several men rushed to help him, the dogs were raging on their short leashes, and they beat him — but not so that he would lose consciousness.

He did not look.

No sound passed his throat either; he was retching silently.

That was all he could do; in his mind, though, he was shouting his prayers for Gregor, for him he was ready to address God and even call for His help.

No matter how hard they hit him, how loudly they yelled at him to open his eyes. The pain made him vomit. They had to leave off for a moment. They even let go of him. But he had to open his eyes and he saw what they were doing with Gregor’s body. They had to jump back to avoid his puking on them. Salivating bile, he kept yanking his head in their hands and felt his pain for Gregor as if, along with all his innards, his entire physical essence were turning inside out, pouring through his throat and mouth, and he no longer had air to breathe or a voice with which to speak. He ended on the ground. He barely felt the blows, they pressed his face into his vomit, but more strongly than anything else he felt the frozen ground and the rich wet fragrance of the grass. For a good while he could still see the green, only the green, a thunderous green, nothing else, such a lively, vivid green that he could never before, and particularly in that moment, have possibly seen.

They realized they were torturing a corpse only when Gregor was no longer breathing under water; with one huge heave they lobbed his lifeless body into the river.