In the file I place a picture with the caption ‘Wedding of Carl Lutz and Gertrud Frankhauser’, also from the ETH. They are passing before a whitewashed building, almost certainly a chapel; only the windowsill can be seen, the wedding guests in the background. The sun is shining. Lutz is in a black suit with a white bow-tie; he’s holding a top hat in his left hand. Gertrud’s dress, a string of pearls and veil are all white; she is carrying a bridal bouquet in her right hand.
The file is filled within a few days.
The fountain between the Lukács Baths and the Danube promenade near the Buda side of Margit Bridge. Lush vegetation. I took the snap in the autumn of 1943 with an Adox Sport folding camera which had a 1:4.5/105 lens. I was given it as a birthday present by one of Father’s friends. There are bright lights on the little pool around the fountain; the luxuriant tropical vegetation hides the building of the baths, but a few of the balconies are visible. I am among those who tied for third position in a national photographic competition for secondary-school students. I accept the certificate for that fourteen months before the crowd pins Vera and me to the side wall of 29 Vadász Street.
I put that photograph in the file as well.
Scissors, folds.
I buy some more files.
I clear a shelf for them and clear another one for still more.
I buy a photocopier.
I make a pile of books from which I have yet to cut out photographs.
I work carefully in libraries, checking before cutting a picture out from a book. One afternoon I can’t escape the gaze of a little boy. I hastily thrust what I had snipped out into my folder, but I see that he has caught me in the act. I put an index finger to my lips. He grins and stands up. Could it be that he is going to report me?
I don’t leave home without a folder.
After a while I also start to carry a briefcase.
I nick photographic picture books from bookshops, a different store each time.
I clear a whole room so that the document folders piled on top of each other will fit in.
I begin to be selective with my material.
My memories are blurring together with the secure sights.
I make sketches from memory.
I make photographs of earlier sites that can be seen in documentary photographs.
I learn how to scan.
I place the more recent photographs on top of the old ones, the old on top of the newer.
I want to spy on the woman with the Opel I saw at 29 Vadász Street. I have to wait for days. In the meantime, while waiting, I drink beer in the John Bull Pub on Podmaniczky Square.
Finally I spot the Opel. I catch it with my camera. The woman leaves the gate open this time, too.
I find an archive photograph of the yard of the Glass House, jammed full of people, and superimpose the Opel on it.
I make my way to the first floor of the building directly opposite it. I ring the doorbell of one of the apartments overlooking the street and say I’m a Belgian photojournalist and ask if they will permit me to take a photograph from the window of the façade of number 29. There’s a taxi parked in front of the house. I superimpose the taxi on the crowd that can be seen in the archive pictures.
I have no need of memory.
I have no need of forgetting.
I clear out another room for the folders.
It runs through my mind that there is no difference between the old and the new photographs; the two belong together. The one cannot exist without the other. By dint of years of labour I have produced a special pair of glasses that frees me of the need to actually take photographs: the glasses allow me to see the present streetscape in old photographs and the old views in recent pictures. I test what happens if I concentrate all my efforts on making everything old vanish both from the pictures and from my memory. That doesn’t work, so I’m on the right track is my thinking. On files containing old material I write today’s date, whereas as on more recent ones I write the dates of former times, and by the next day the original year adorns the files, I read Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, cutting up the pages with scissors, putting each leaf in a file. I still have to superimpose the maps on each other — 1903, 1943 and 2003 — but my table is not big enough for that. I get a new one made, which means I shall have to empty a room; in a continuation of my dreams I dream that perhaps I shall have room in the Óbuda Brickworks for the new files, but then that is where the Praktiker Store is standing.
Vera’s lips are blue, her face white. She always took care that a lock or two of her blonde hair should flutter free from under her beret, even when going to school, and she would adjust the beret that way even in the brickworks, but now she pulls it down over her ears like a helmet. There is a cold sore on her chapped lower lip. She links arms with me, snuggles up to me. Her body does not warm me.
I don’t see Mádi. She said she had come across an acquaintance, a friend of her parents.
It is snowing again. The man in front of me says that he, too, must wait till tomorrow morning for his Schutzbrief. We are going to head off. Where? Home. You’ll have to stay here, he says. The two-hour period for which the curfew is lifted each day has passed. If you try to cross the city wearing a yellow star a patrol is going to catch you; you’ll be taken to the banks of the Danube and shot.
We back our way out of the scrum. I take my knapsack off and we cram it into Vera’s little suitcase. I rip the yellow star off both of our overcoats, with Vera picking out any threads of the stitching that remain. We set off on the route along which we were taken that morning to bring us here from the yard of the synagogue. We do not hurry — that would be too noticeable — nor do we go slowly, as that, too, might draw attention. We don’t look at anyone.
Everyone is clutching something, including those coming towards us and those who hurry past. It’s as if everyone were afraid something could be taken off them; as if everyone saw in the other a person who is tracking their steps and checking out what they can steal from them, whereas, in fact, it’s the other way round. On one of the posters:
Fear of being punished by summary courts is holding some individuals back from answering the call to present themselves to join up. In order to facilitate the return in a manly fashion of those who are inclined to fulfil their duty, without causing loss of honour to the military personnel who have been deeply offended by this absenteeism, I assure total exemption from punishment to those who present themselves by 24:00 hours on 2 December 1944.
Minister of Defence Beregfy
We get on a number 44 tram at the corner of Rákóczi Avenue. I have tokens to use on public transport. We don’t go inside, but embrace each other on the platform, keeping our gazes outwards from the tram. The sole illumination in the carriage is provided by a single blue-painted bulb. The platform becomes crowded, and I’m squeezed between two youths wearing caps of the Levente movement; I can’t see their faces, only feel their bodies pressed up against me in the crush. The passengers inside sit mutely on the wooden seats with the blue lamplight on their faces making them look like wraiths. A Home Guard officer is sitting among them. His face is also blue; he, too, is hunched up with a bandage wound round his head under his shako. What is presumably blood that has congealed on his left temple looks dark blue. At the corner of Stefánia Road a sentry with a submachine gun is standing guard in front of the Arrow Cross’s district HQ. The street lights had still been on in Baross Square before we reached there, but only a few are on after Aréna Road,1 between the two, then from Hermina Road onwards the tram proceeds in darkness. At the corner of Hermina Road I can no longer see the board of Mr Zsilka’s hairdressing salon, nor do I see the barrier at Francia Road. No one gets on or off. The tram driver speeds up, the conductor shouts out the stops and before we know it we are at Amerikai Road, and I call out hoarsely, as if it was important that nobody should recognize my voice, This stop.