She hands it to me. I hold the letter in my hands something like twenty or thirty years after I wrote it. No, it can’t be as much as thirty; Mother was no longer alive then.
Gizi came in that day, Mother says, leaning back in the brazilwood easy chair. That brazilwood easy chair no longer has gold silk upholstery; that got ripped during the war. Now she is sitting in a brazilwood easy chair with pea-green upholstery two or three years before she died. She hands me my letters. She had said nothing about them for quarter of a century. Which drawer did she keep them in? Most likely the cherrywood chest of drawers which used to belong to my grandparents. Did she take them out from time to time? Unfold them, fold them back again? As she hands them over my fingers touch hers. On the day that Jolán Bors brought me the letter in the hospital Gizi also showed up. The reason she can remember what happened on that particular day is that Gizi had also gone to the hospital to report on her meeting with me. You’ve grown up so much, Gizi said about me.
She was nicely made up and looked very swish in her fur coat, Mother said. Gizi had style in what she wore, she learned that from being with Józsi — my word, how smart Józsi looked in his first-lieutenant’s uniform with his First World War medals. That was when Gizi learned how to carry herself off so well. When she was young she had been a daddy’s girl, and Uncle Henrik left everything just lying all over his study, flicked his ash on the carpet, and he would look for his notes with his wife and with Gizi when all the time they would be on his writing table. So there was Gizi in her fur coat, Mother tells me twenty-five years later. She was wearing a Red Cross armband and had on bright-red lipstick. But that day she was as scatterbrained as she had been as a girl — she parked her handbag on the mattress and a minute later could not find it. She began asking us about Bőzsi. Your father and I just looked at each other, didn’t say a word, when she mentioned Bőzsi a second time, that she was going to see if Dr Temesváry, the head physician, if he knew anything about her, so I said that we had already asked that earlier that day and he had heard nothing about her — although actually we hadn’t asked, we were just worried about Gizi throwing a fit. We didn’t want that to happen there; there were people who were dying on the mattresses, even some who were dead only they hadn’t been taken away because the morgue was full. That was when they started digging graves in the hospital courtyard. It was a slow business because there were hardly any men around, and those who were there were so weak they were barely able to lift a spade.
The whites of Mother’s eyes seem damp even though she was not crying. It’s of no significance, says the doctor; it’s the sort of thing that comes with age, you know, says Mother, after Józsi’s death and even more so after little Eva’s death, Gizi really had only Bőzsi left, what with Uncle Henrik and her mother already having died before the war.
When Mother was speaking about Gizi that’s what she always called him, Uncle Henrik, but she never mentions Gizi’s mother by name. Is that because she didn’t like her? Did Gizi, too, dote on her father? I had forgotten that Gizi’s daughter, little Eva, died two years after Józsi was buried.
I unfold the squared paper of the letter:
Dearest Mother and Father,
We took our leave thinking that day we would going to the Red Cross with the children, but we had to stay in the brickworks another two days, and after that in the Dohány Street Synagogue. We went from there to Vadász Street, but we didn’t want to stay there. Vera and I went back home without wearing a yellow star. We had to leave Amerikai Road, we were in the workshop for two days, and from there we came here. Girls and boys are kept separated. At first I was very bitter about ending up in a pig-awful place, but then it turned out fine. I have two friends as well, the sons of Riegler the paperman.
I describe the daily fare.
Breakfast: awful BB packet soup and a dried-up slice of sour bread.
Lunch: BB soup or some crummy soup with pasta or, if we get lucky, hard beans.
Supper: BB soup or unsugared tea.
We were originally allowed to defer return to the ghetto until 15 December, which has now been postponed to the 20th.
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The thing is, we are not going to the ghetto. It was rumoured that everyone between fourteen and fifty years of age was to be taken to the ghetto. But where to? I heard from Jolán Bors that you are trying to acquire papers. It’s not just a birth certificate but Levente papers, an identification card and maybe a registration or deregistration form as well. If you can, send blank papers urgently with Jolán, because I have now acquired a Levente messenger’s pass.
If possible, please get hold of papers for Vera as well. For her a birth certificate will be enough. She has had no news of her mother; it is said that Uncle Seidel has been taken off to Germany. She doesn’t want to be left alone, and I don’t want to leave her here either.
Dearest Mother and Father, write in detail what the situation is. Are you going to leave or stay? How long can you stay? Where would you go? Can you send me the papers? Write to tell me how you are. If you can send Jolán, she should bring a shirt, socks and underpants from the workshop.
Send food if it’s possible and most urgently of all send as much money as you can. I am now down to 20 pengő.
I have received the things you sent so far. Many thanks for those! I hope you are both well, dearest Mother and Father.
Many kisses, Iván.
PS If there is any way of doing so, please send papers for Vera as well!! Try to get Jolán to have a look what can be retrieved from 76 Amerikai Road.
I tap on the glass door to the second-floor corridor. I open the door. There are girls sitting at the bend in the corridor. Vera does not come up to me; just waves. She has a tot holding on to both hands. I recognize them as her cousins. I wasn’t aware they were already here, nor was Vera. Edo has passed his sixth birthday, Judy is going on five. They don’t know what has happened to their parents, says Vera. They met yesterday evening. They were permitted to go into the room I’m in, she says, so we were able to sleep together.
She’s telling a fairy story. Judy has an oval head; her features follow the story. She blushes and knits her brow.
I have to get back to my room.
Soproni comes.
Could I lend him my windcheater? He is going to disappear for a day or two, but I shouldn’t tell anybody. His overcoat is long and heavy; it would be easier to move about in a windcheater. You’re taller than me; it will be tight for you. He tries it on. Yes, it’s bit of a squeeze, but no matter, he says. It’s good because it has four pockets. He’ll give me his own coat to keep until he gets back. He brings a Halina duffel coat the colour of milky coffee. That appeals a lot as I never had a coat with fancy braiding. He says it came from Transylvania. It’s a shame it is so heavy and just a bit too long for me.
We check that the spot where the yellow star on my windcheater used to be is no longer visible. It’s fine, he says. He can wear it safely on the street. Don’t worry. I’ve got really good papers. I’ll bring one for you when I come back.
It is cold in the room, so at night I spread the coat over the blanket. The older Riegler says that Soproni also has some hand-grenades.
I dream that I’m walking in the street wearing the duffel coat. An Arrow Cross patrol is coming the other way. They admire the coat. We hail each other with the fascist greeting ‘Kitartás!’4 They are driving along a yellow-star group, and I turn away in case I am recognized by anyone in the column. On the pavement two men and a woman break out laughing. The laughter echoes louder and louder as if the whole city were resounding, as if it were not just three people but many thousands. Vera steps beside me, bringing Edo and Judy, and we are going to our workshop on Francia Road; Vera does not ask where they are but takes off her knickers. We lie down on the big trestle table. She sits up, leans forward and cups her chin in the palm of one hand before lighting up a cigarette, exhaling blue smoke through her nostrils, spreading her naked thighs apart, well aware that I can see. She blows the smoke, and I am startled awake by the sound of the window being opened. I can see the moon from where I am on the palliasse. The lad who pretended to be wanking is standing by the window. I get up and also go over. I don’t know what he is called, but in the moonlight his face looks like that of a clown covered in flour. A policeman is strolling in the snow at the front entrance, hands in the pockets of his cape, the collar turned up.