It was easy to find the house: it was intact, not a whit different from the other yellow or gray and somewhat ramshackle houses in the street — or so it seemed to me at least. From the dog-eared list of names in the cool gateway, I ascertained that the number also tallied and that I would need to go up to the second floor. At a leisurely pace, I climbed up the musty, slightly acrid-smelling stairwell, through the windows of which I was able to see the outside corridors and, down below, the woefully bare courtyard, a sparse patch of grass in the middle, then the usual disconsolate tree doing its best with its scrawny, dust-choked foliage. A woman with her hair in a net had just whisked out with a duster over on the other side; strains of music could be heard, and a child was bawling its head off somewhere. I was hugely surprised when a door opened in front of me, and after such a long time, all of a sudden, I again caught sight of Bandi Citrom’s tiny, slanted eyes, only now in the face of a still fairly young, black-haired, slightly thickset, and not particularly tall woman. She took a slight step backward, no doubt, I supposed, because of my jacket, and to avoid having the door slammed in my face I immediately asked, “Is Bandi Citrom at home?” “No,” she replied. I asked if he happened to be out just at the moment, to which she responded, with a little shake of the head and closing her eyes, “Not at all,” and it was only when she opened them again that I noticed a glistening film of moisture on the lower lashes. Her lips were quivering a little as well, so I thought it best to make myself scarce as quickly as possible, but then all at once a slight elderly woman in a dark dress and headscarf emerged from the gloom of the hallway, which meant that before I could go I had to tell her too, “I’m looking for Bandi Citrom,” to which she too said, “He’s not home.” She, though, took the line “Come back some other time; maybe in a few days,” but I noticed that the younger woman responded to that by slightly averting her head, in an odd, defensive, and yet somehow feeble movement, meanwhile raising the back of a hand to her mouth, as if she were seeking, perhaps, to suppress, stifle as it were, some remark or sound she was anxious to make. I then felt bound to tell the old woman, “We were together,” to explain, “at Zeitz,” and to her somehow stern, almost reproachful question of “So why didn’t you come home together?” almost apologize, “We got separated. I ended up somewhere else.” She also wanted to know, “Are there still any Hungarians out there?” so I replied, “Sure, plenty of them.” At that, in a tone of evident triumph, she remarked to the young woman “See!” then to me, “I’m always telling her that they are only now starting to return. But my daughter is impatient; she doesn’t want to believe it anymore,” and I was about to say, but then thought better of it and held my tongue, that in my view she had the clearer head, she knew Bandi Citrom better. She invited me in after that, but I told her I still had to get back home myself. “No doubt your parents are waiting,” she said, to which I replied “Of course.” “Well then,” she remarked, “you’d better hurry; let them be happy,” at which I left.
Since I was really starting to feel my leg by the time I got to the station, and since, among the many streetcars there, one with the number I knew from the old days just happened to be swinging in ahead of me, I got on. On the open platform of the streetcar, a gaunt old woman with a queer, old-fashioned lace trimming on her dress edged away a bit to the side. Soon a man in cap and uniform came along and asked me to show my ticket. I told him I didn’t have one. He suggested I buy one, so I said I had just got back from abroad and didn’t have any money. He inspected my jacket, me, then the old woman as well, before informing me that there were travel regulations, they weren’t his rules but had been brought in by his superiors. “If you don’t buy a ticket, you’ll have to get off,” he declared. I told him my leg was hurting, at which, I couldn’t help noticing, the old woman abruptly turned away to face the outside scene, yet somehow, I had no idea why, with such an affronted air it was as if I had insulted her personally. However, at that moment, with a commotion already audible from some way off, a burly man with dark, matted hair burst through the doorway from the inside compartment. He was in an open-necked shirt and light linen suit, with a black box slung from a strap on his shoulder and an attaché case in his hand. What’s all this, he was shouting, and then ordered, “Give him a ticket!” handing, or rather thrusting, a coin at the conductor. I tried to thank him but he cut me off and, casting a furious look around, said, “More to the point, some people ought to be ashamed of themselves,” but the conductor was by then passing into the carriage while the old woman carried on gazing out into the street. His face calmer, he then turned toward me. “Have you come from Germany, son?” “Yes.” “From the concentration camps?” “Naturally.” “Which one?” “Buchenwald.” Yes, he had heard of it; he knew it was “one of the pits of the Nazi hell,” as he put it. “Where did they carry you off from?” “From Budapest.” “How long were you there?” “A year in total.” “You must have seen a lot, young fellow, a lot of terrible things,” he rejoined, but I said nothing. “Still,” he continued, “the main thing is that it’s over, in the past,” and, his face brightening, he gestured to the houses that we happened to be rumbling past and inquired what I was feeling now, back home again and seeing the city that I had left. “Hatred,” I told him. He fell silent at that but soon volunteered that, sadly, he had to understand why I felt that way. In any case, “under the circumstances,” he reckoned, hatred too had its place, its role, “even its uses,” adding that he supposed we could agree on that, and he was well aware whom I must hate. “Everyone,” I told him. He fell silent, this time for a longer period, before starting up again: “Did you have to endure many horrors?” to which I replied that it all depended what he considered to be a horror. No doubt, he declared, his expression now somewhat uneasy, I had undergone a lot of deprivation, hunger, and more than likely they had beaten me, to which I said: naturally. “Why, my dear boy,” he exclaimed, though now, so it seemed to me, on the verge of losing his patience, “do you keep on saying ‘naturally,’ and always about things that are not at all natural?” I told him that in a concentration camp they were natural. “Yes, of course, of course,” he says, “they were there , but…,” and he broke off, hesitating slightly, “but… I mean, a concentration camp in itself is unnatural,” finally hitting on the right word as it were. I didn’t even bother saying anything to this, as I was beginning slowly to realize that it seems there are some things you just can’t argue about with strangers, the ignorant, with those who, in a certain sense, are mere children so to say. In any case, suddenly becoming aware that we had reached the square, still standing there, only a bit bleaker and less well tended, and that this was where I needed to get off, I told him as much. He stuck with me, however, and, pointing across to a shaded bench that had lost its backboard, suggested we sit down for a minute.