“So you can imagine I was pretty sick in mind and body. I was anaemic, and subject to fits of terrible depression. When I was sixteen, after a bout of pneumonia, I began to have hallucinations. When reading, I would often sense that someone was standing behind my back peering over my shoulder at the book. I had to turn round to convince myself that there was no-one there. Or in the night I would wake with the terrifying sensation that someone was standing beside my bed staring down at me. Of course there was no-one there. And I was permanently ashamed of myself. In time my position in the family became unbearable because of this constant sense of shame. During meals I kept blushing, and at one stage the least thing was enough to make me want to burst into tears. On these occasions I would run out of the room. You know how correct my parents are. You can imagine how disappointed and shocked they were, and how much my brothers and Edit teased me. It got to the point where I was forced to pretend I had a French lesson at school at two-thirty, and so was able to eat on my own, before the others did. Later I had my supper kept aside as well.
“Then on top of this came the worst symptom of alclass="underline" the whirlpool. Yes, I really mean whirlpool. Every so often I would have the sensation that the ground was opening beside me, and I was standing on the brink of a terrifying vortex. You mustn’t take the whirlpool literally. I never actually saw it; it wasn’t a vision. I just knew there was a whirlpool there. At the same time I was aware that there wasn’t anything there, that I was just imagining it — you know how convoluted these things are. But the fact is, when this whirlpool sensation got hold of me I didn’t dare move, I couldn’t speak a word, and I really believed it was the end of everything.
“All the same, the feeling didn’t last very long, and the attacks weren’t frequent. There was a really bad one once, during a natural history lesson. Just as I was called on to answer a question, the ground opened beside me. I couldn’t move, I just stayed sitting in my place. The teacher kept on at me for a while, then when he saw that I wasn’t going to move, got up and came over to me. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked. Of course I didn’t reply. So he just looked at me for a while, then went back to his chair and asked someone else to answer. He was such a fine, priestly souclass="underline" he never said a word about the incident. But my classmates talked about it all the more. They thought I had refused to reply out of cheek, or stubbornness, and that the teacher was afraid of me. At a stroke, I had become a public character and enjoyed unprecedented popularity throughout the school. A week later, the same teacher called out János Szepetneki — the one you met today. Szepetneki put on his tough-guy face and stayed in his seat. The teacher got up, went over to him, and soundly boxed his ears. From that time on Szepetneki was convinced I had some special status.
“But to get onto Tamás Ulpius. One day the first snow fell. I could barely wait for school to finish. I gulped down my solitary lunch and ran straight to Castle Hill. Snow was a particular passion of mine. I loved the way it transformed the city, so that you could get lost even among streets you knew. I wandered for ages, then came to the battlements on the western side, and stood gazing out at the Buda hills. Suddenly the ground beside me opened again. The whirlpool was all the more believable because of the height. As so often before, I found myself not so much terrified by it as waiting with calm certainty for the ground to close again, and the effect vanish. So I waited there for a while, I couldn’t say how long, because in that state you lose your sense of time, as you do in a dream or in love-making. But of this I am sure: that whirlpool lasted much longer than the previous ones. Night was already falling and it was still there. ‘This one’s very stubborn,’ I thought to myself. And then to my horror I noticed it was growing in size, that just ten centimetres remained between me and the brink, and that slowly, slowly, it was approaching my foot. A few more minutes and I would be done for: I’d fall in. I clung grimly on to the safety railing.
“And then the whirlpool actually reached me. The ground opened under my feet and I hung there in space, gripping the iron bar. ‘If my hand gets tired,’ I thought, ‘I shall fall.’ And quietly, with resignation, I began to pray and prepare for death.
“Then I became aware that Tamás Ulpius was standing beside me.
“‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, and put his hand on my shoulder.
“In that instant the whirlpool vanished, and I would have collapsed with exhaustion if Tamás hadn’t caught me up. He helped me to a bench and waited while I rested. When I felt better I told him briefly about the whirlpool thing, the first time I had ever told anyone in my life. I don’t know how it was: within seconds he had become my best friend, the sort of friend you dream about, as an adolescent, with no less intensity, but more deeply and seriously than you do about your first love.
“After that we met every day. Tamás did not want to come to my house because, he said, he hated being introduced, but he soon invited me to his place. That’s how I got to know the Ulpius ménage.
“Tamás’s family lived in the upstairs part of a very old and run-down house. But only the outside was old and run-down: inside it was fine and comfortable, like these old Italian hotels. Although, in many ways, it was a bit creepy, with its large rooms and works of art, rather like a museum. Because Tamás’s father was an archaeologist and museum director. The grandfather had been a clockmaker — his shop had been in the house. Now he just tinkered for his own amusement with antique clocks and all sorts of weird clockwork toys of his own invention.
“Tamás’s mother was no longer alive. He and his younger sister Éva hated their father. They blamed him for driving their mother to her death with his cold gloominess when she was still a young woman. This was my first, rather shocking, experience of the Ulpius household at the start of my first visit. Éva said of her father that he had eyes like shoe-buttons (which, by the way, was very true), and Tamás added, in the most natural voice you can imagine, ‘because, you know, my father is a most thoroughly loathsome fellow,’ in which he too was right. As you know, I grew up in a close-knit family circle. I adored my parents and siblings, I worshipped my father and couldn’t begin to imagine that parents and children might not love one another, or that the children should criticise their parents’ conduct as if they were strangers. This was the first great primordial rebellion I had ever encountered in my life. And this rebellion seemed to me in some strange way endlessly appealing, although in my own mind there was never any question of revolt against my own father.
“Tamás couldn’t stand his father, but conversely, he loved his grandfather and sister all the more. He was so fond of his sister that that too seemed a form of rebellion. I too was fond of my brothers and sister. I never fought with them very much. I took the idea of family solidarity very seriously, as far as my withdrawn and abstracted nature would allow. But it wasn’t our way, as siblings, to make a show of mutual affection — any tenderness between us would have been considered a joke, or a sign of weakness. I’m sure most families are like that. We never exchanged Christmas presents. If one of us went out or came in, he wouldn’t greet the others. If we went away, we would just write a respectful letter to our parents and add as a postscript, ‘Greetings to Péter, Laci, Edit and Tivadar’. It was quite different in the Ulpius family. Tamás and Éva would speak to one another with extreme politeness, and when parting, even if only for an hour, would kiss one another lovingly. As I realised later, they were very jealous of each other, and this was the main reason why they had no friends.