But he writes that he saw them.
Do I have to accept that notwithstanding?
I look at the left-hand wall of the entrance hall. The corners are fairly mucky.
Could this have been where they played?
I am not in a position to learn anything about them and, as for Carl Lutz, merely that he listened to them playing their music. That’s not much, but the minute during which I think of that not-knowing-much is time experienced, possessed. It is likely that the two faces, the black-lensed glasses, the white canes, the ripped raincoat, the black overcoat with its fraying sleeves were lost as far as Carl Lutz was concerned, but the sound had remained, and this evoked these memories in him, feelings he wanted to cling to.
He arrives at Westbahnhof. He sees no soldiers at the station. He strolls along Mariahilfer Strasse; at the Ring he turns left. He looks dumbfounded at the passers-by.
He walks on to Heldenplatz. He knows that this was where the Jews, elderly people, women and children, were assembled before deportation. Now schoolboys are throwing snowballs, and one even hits Lutz.
Following his steps I, too, saunter across the square. I don’t know where he stood, but I can be quite sure that he would not have seen the Holocaust memorial opposite.
Across the way is a statue of Lessing.
I am strolling among tourists with coloured skins.
We are progressing in the same story, the layers of time slip by each other, propelled by their own energies.
That evening he arrives in Berne. At eight o’clock the next morning he enters the office of the head of the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, who hears him out then nods. He offers him a drink. He is also listened to in two other offices. We all read your reports, says Dr Edmund Rothmand, who is in charge of Police Services, as he, too, offers a drink. Gertrud will ask me later, Lutz thinks to himself, why I travelled to Berne when I knew I could not count on getting any attention? Already the couriers were bringing the same message to Budapest that I am hearing in these offices. Wait a while. The situation is confused now. I watched them, he tells Gertrud later, and I felt relieved. Gertrud does not understand. The reason Lutz smiles at his wife is that I am on the other side of the glass wall that they have pulled in front of themselves.
His notes break off.
I shall pick up from where they continue later on.
The morning after that he is back in Keleti Railway Terminus. There is still the same confusion on the platform. This is not Berne or Zürich, not even Vienna, he thinks as Arrow Cross patrols check his papers twice over.
The two musicians are not in the entrance hall leading to Kerepesi Road. Next to the wall where they had been standing two MPs are carrying out checks. Lutz shows his diplomatic passport for third time.
They were almost certainly not blind, says Gertrud, almost certainly …
What do you mean by if we see anything suspicious we’ll move on? Vera asks a second time on Amerikai Road … Where to?
IV
Numbers 74, 76 and 78 Amerikai Road were all built in 1927. Number 74 is a two-storey villa, number 76 four-storeyed and number 78 single-storeyed; big rear gardens and trim front gardens. Number 76 was designed by Lajos Róbert, a friend of my parents, and the villa at number 78 he had built for his own family. We moved into one of the rooms there in June 1944, when we had to hand over our own home at number 74 to those in charge of the German military hospital opposite.
A common night descends on the three houses. Vera and I stand in front of the gate of number 76. The windows of the apartments are blacked out with blue paper; behind us, on the ramp up to the hospital, is a machine-gun post.
Five months earlier two white-gloved Wehrmacht officers had rung on the bell of our home. They were accompanied by an NCO with a tommy-gun. We saw them as they strode with slow steps across the road. Mother speaks German.
The officers raised their hands to their service caps in salute. They inspected the rooms and found the house suitable for use as an office. They instructed the concierge and the caretaker and his wife to prepare an inventory; we were given twenty-four hours to move out. The Róberts are already waiting for us, says Father when they leave.
I still preserve that inventory in an old file. I have read through it many times over in the course of the past sixty years, and now I read it over three times more. I can move around my old home using my mental picture of the listed objects. By the third read-through I can smell our things; everything is palpable. The Adox folding camera with its f/2.8 45-mm lens, which I keep in my writing desk, is on the list. It was fixed in position by a learner’s violin — that was my elder brother’s. I also have a clear memory of the bookcase, and it can also be discovered from the inventory that we had 250 books, and the next line records that there were 250 kilograms of kindling wood and coal in the house. Surprisingly, my father had a tailcoat, although I never saw him wear it. Then the wedding photograph flashes into my mind. In that case, right … a tailcoat. Six cooking pots … six saucepans …
Everything cleared out of the cupboards.
Mother types on her Olympia portable what the warden of the house dictates. The concierge stands behind him with hands thrust in the pockets of her apron.
I hardly ever use the Olympia portable typewriter, but it’s still close to my writing desk.
Let’s wait, I say to Vera at the gate.
It would have been better not to come here after all.
But we had nowhere else to go.
After sixty years I pick one of the unknown names from those listed with the doorbells.
I would like to get a view of the stairwell, I say. But why? … Sometime, anyway.
We are let in.
The old lilac tiling.
I’ll ring, I tell Vera, but I hesitate.
We hear steps coming from the basement. Vera lets go of my hand.
Mrs Linnert, the concierge. If we happen to bump into her we address her as ‘Auntie’ Linnert, and if we speak about her we use ‘Mrs’ Linnert, just as we have heard our parents do.
Lord above … Can it be you …?
She was more scared than we were, says Mádi sixty-nine years later; everyone was afraid of everyone else, of the bombing, of the front, of getting into trouble for helping.
Mádi was no longer with us by then, so how could she have any recollection of Mrs Linnert’s trepidation? Is it possible that all three of us stood at the gate after all? Or perhaps she recalls my telling her once about our return? Or had I perhaps once told her about the fear that I had seen written on Mrs Linnert’s face? Yes, perhaps she recalls my memory, but it cannot be completely discounted that her memory is more accurate. At any rate, the fear written on Mrs Linnert’s face is not a small matter. Her face is not a single monolithic face; it’s not a face, really, but a feeling. It hides in objects, conceals itself in the depths of homes. It’s as if the arc of the valley around the Óbuda Brickworks is encompassing the whole city, and thus the city itself is all part of one big crime scene.