On 16 October President Miklós Horthy, following due constitutional ceremonies, charged Ferenc Szálasi with forming a government.
Jews were required to remain in houses designated with a yellow Star of David.
On 26 October an amendment was made to the preceding order whereby one family member, wearing a yellow star, would be permitted to shop between the hours of 10 a.m. and midday.
On 27 October a speech by Ferenc Rajniss: anyone wishing to be called civilized must now fight. The sole refuge from fighting is to die …
On 4 November it is decreed that all Jewish property has devolved to the state.
On 10 November it is decreed that any activity by Jews on the street is forbidden on the 10th, 11th and 12th.
On the day on which our column reaches Margit Quay in the early afternoon hours US forces breaks through the German line of defence at Metz.
The Battle of Jászberény in east-central Hungary commences.
On Szálasi’s orders a unit of anti-tank volunteers of between eighteen and twenty-two years of age is deployed.
The Hungarian branch of the Swedish Red Cross officially declares that for the time being it will discontinue the issuing of safe-conduct letters.
I am not the only one who is trying to catch the voice of a boy panting from the quick pace of marching, because it is as though he is himself trying to get me to hear what he is saying, but, although I hear it, I hear it only as though it is being filtered to my ear from the depths of a sea that has turned to glass.
I had read those few words two years ago. My own name appeared under the lines.
There was a sense of satisfaction at having fashioned time into language. Before long I would have to deny the fact that, although my name appeared beneath the lines, I was not the author of those words.
It was a palimpsest: the motto of a novella by Sándor Balázs that he had dedicated to me. He said it in one our conversations, which used to stretch out into the early hours of the morning, not long before he died. I can hear his voice as if it really was being filtered in time from a distance that had turned into glass. We had been talking about it on that particular morning.
I helped him across his apartment into the room overlooking Mexikói Road. After midnight we made an infusion of the special herbs that he always had about him in little tins, and, glancing at the distance in the steam floating up from the cup, I said that if he were to look out of the window then he would just be able to make out where, fifty-six years earlier (relative to the time of the conversation), I had set off in the procession from the sports ground on the next block, at the corner of Queen Erzsébet Avenue in the XIVth District.
I couldn’t bear the look he gave me.
He stepped over to the window. He pulled back the curtain, which had been set swaying by the touch of his hand. The windowpane misted over from his breathing. He then turned back with the air not so much of someone who had spent such a long time looking and had got tired as of someone who had seen something.
As if my finger, which just before had been pointing downwards, had been directed at his approaching fate, about which he no longer had any doubts, because he had insisted that his doctors speak frankly with him.
As I said, I found it hard to bear the look he gave me, yet when, on reading the poems he had written about his imminent death, I glanced up from the text, we were able to look at one another at length, as if it were the poem that carried the weight of our gaze.
He turned back towards the window. I moved beside him. We looked at the emptiness of the barely illuminated Mexikói Road, at the skeletal arabesques of the trees at the side of the railway embankment, marvelling as he looked down like someone who could see to the very end of the fate which was unfolding before his eyes — further than any point I had ever reached.
But was that point before me or behind me?
And that sense of indefinability helped me to recapture the look with which I made my way down here at the age of fourteen.
Notwithstanding, my two looks cannot have met, since as I was making my way in that column I could not have lifted my eyes to the window of the house from where everything was now presented to my sight, because then I was looking at the backs of the necks, knapsacks and boots of those stumbling along in front of me. But only by following his look did I feel I had a chance of approaching the crime scene, as I called it, and, if I managed that, of preserving what had happened there, provided I was able to arrange a meeting between what I saw then and what I see now.
The point at which the investigation is directed is also a landscape, only an internal one, deeper than I have ever reached before — the point where, while I step into a space created by memory, everything is presented in the incorruptible continuity of how it had once happened.
The line of his mouth, mute, supercilious, is as if it were asking, Have you any idea where you are treading? What is this empty street down below that we are looking at together? What city are you living in? But he didn’t ask, so who knows what he was thinking then, whereas it is easier for me to ascribe to him questions which, it seems, I did not dare, either then or since, to ask as my own, although all my life I had been waiting to ask them.
At all events, I had taken the first step in the interests of the investigation. I figured that in order for it to work I had to learn how to see and hear as my fourteen-year-old self at the same time as myself now.
I stepped over to the stereo.
I put on a record of old waltzes that he owned.
It is a waltz that I hear when the column — which is proceeding along Mexikói Road with the Home Guard lieutenant and a gendarme NCO at its head and the submachine-gun-toting Arrow Cross duty functionary as rearguard — reaches Thököly Road.
Two hundred metres from the outdoor Erzsébet Ice Rink, on the corner with Kolumbusz Street, the loudspeakers crackle. There was always a crackling, even back then, every time I leaned forward as I skated to trace a large circle in the ice.
Red scarves; short fur coats; crocheted caps with tassels; the surface of the rink cut up by the blades of ice-hockey players; the burning-hot iron stove at which they warmed themselves.
Father took over my backpack first on Hungária Outer Circle, the third and outermost of the concentric roads around the Pest side of the city.
The cobblestones on Thököly Road are the same today. They are changed every twenty to twenty-five years with another surface of the cobblestones’ six sides being turned uppermost each time the street undergoes a routine repair.
Shortly before the waltz is heard I can also hear the crack of the shot.
I also hear the ring of the alarm bell before the crack of the shot.
It’s six o’clock. Father is seated on the edge of his bed; Mother watches with her head tucked under her pillow; Grandmother doesn’t open her eyes.
We are living in the home of the Róbert family. Sixteen square metres. Four sleeping places, a wardrobe, two seats, a small table.
Father gets dressed on hearing the bell.
I can hear Misi’s voice out in the hallway; I bring the keys. He’s eighteen, deserted from his forced-labour brigade a month ago. He’s lying low. At night he would hide at his parents’ place.
Six armed men burst in. The commanding officer is in an officer’s green raincoat, holster open; the others have submachine guns. All of them are wearing Arrow Cross armbands. We are given half an hour. The old woman can stay, the officer says, pointing to Grandma. She will die later in the ghetto. Grandma is now sitting on the side of the bed, searching for her slippers with her feet.