The houses opposite and the front gardens are as they were. The roadway is clear. I try to make out the spot where I stood in the column as it was about to set off.
On 18 December 1944 the ICRC moves the occupants of the Jewish boy’s orphanage into the empty rooms. An agreement is reached with the commander of the 1st Battalion 13th Regiment Military Police that it will provide defence if that becomes necessary.
I was left alone in the room. My companion wanted to leave me to myself. I go down into the coffee room, draw up notes and order a Cabinet brandy.
I wait twenty minutes. A waitress then approaches me to ask what my name is; there is a telephone call for me at reception.
It’s a madhouse here, says Györgyi. I’m dreadfully sorry, but one hour ago I was told that I would have to replace a colleague who has fallen sick and should have been on a study tour with one of the classes. The train leaves this evening for Germany, so right at the moment I don’t know whether I’m coming or going, and I am packing right now. They knew that I have a valid passport. Madhouse, or what? I shall get in touch as soon as we arrive.
I order a coffee and ask the waitress if she could bring me a few sheets of writing paper. The request comes as a surprise, but she is accommodating. She comes back after a long delay, apologizing that she had to go up to the office to fetch the paper.
Above, on the second floor, is the former room from the window of which I would be able to see the section of the road where Vera lines up with Edo and Judy.
I write down that on one of the two photographs Györgyi sent me two sixteen-year-old girls are standing in the gate of a two-storey villa with a front garden. Each has an arm around the other’s waist. One of them is fair-haired, slim, long-faced, freckled and is smiling; the other is dark, the hair shoulder-length, the face oval and with a serious expression. They are not familiar to me, but the house is — I don’t know how, but I have a feeling that I once went there. It has big balconies and large corner windows, a wrought-iron garden gate, a house gate most likely of brown oak, with a glittering brass door handle clearly visible. There is a kennel in the front garden with an enormous watchful retriever.
The dog is my handhold.
For several weeks during the summer of 1944 I used to visit this house to play the accordion. Five minutes from number 74 Amerikai Road, the second building along from Erzsébet Királyné Road also in the XIVth District. That is where I learned ‘Tango Bolero’, which I had also played for Vera.
The message of the photograph is a renewed attempt by Györgyi to try to rescue something from a fading time. This opens the way for me to recall deeply buried memories, because recognition of the house located the two girls in front of the garden gate to the tram stop at the corner. A number 67 is approaching from Róna Street. I am coming from Amerikai Road, the two girls from the opposite direction. The number 67 has already set off from the stop at Uzsoki Street, and we take our places. I always get on by the back platform, they get on by the front platform, and we travel to St Domonkos Street, get off together at the church, me trailing behind and marvelling at them. I am thirteen; they are around sixteen. I enter the gates of the Boys’ Gymnasium building as they proceed further to the Abonyi Street entrance of Girls’ Gymnasium.
Sometimes I am able to find a seat on the tram, sometimes they do. They talk. After a while we exchange greetings. They usually converse in such a way that the slim, fair-haired freckled girl does most of the talking, and the serious-looking brunette nods. As if she were meanwhile thinking of something other than what they are speaking about and only stirring when the freckled girl laughs. The laughter is provocative, and the other girl looks around to see who heard it; I snatch my own gaze away so that she doesn’t see I am looking at them.
I recognize them from the window in the corridor at school when there is a girls’ handball match in the schoolyard for their PT class; they are in the same team. The freckled girl is the nimbler and has a more powerful throw; the serious-looking girl draws her eyes together in seeking out her playing partner, and she passes the ball accurately. Quite a lot of my classmates are standing by the window when one of the players in the opposing team hits the fair-haired freckled girl below the stomach, and one boy says that for her that must have felt as if she were being screwed. You dopey twit, says another classmate, that’s quite a different feeling; it hurts her in exactly the same way as it would you if a ball accidentally hit you in the same place.
She has to stretch out on the ground. Her friend runs across, bends over her, massages the spot and makes her exercise.
The next day the boy who had been ticked off arrives panting to report that he has found a hole in the wall of the shower room next to the gym hall. He had stacked one jumping board on to another and stood on those, and the fair-haired freckled girl and the serious-looking brunette were in there naked, scrubbing each other’s backs, and when they turned their behinds had been touching. Get lost, says the other classmate, who had reproved him the previous day. Your arse would touch mine if there were a number of us taking showers.
I order a second glass of cognac. If Györgyi has set me off on a track she will have to deal with the consequences, although everything had made me unsure of myself; the bodies of the two girls under the shower, in a tight space, squeezed against one another. Ági, the freckled girl, liked to run cold water immediately after the hot. Klári opens the door. The aisle is empty. She pulls a towel off the bench she had put there previously and begins to rub herself dry. Her skin is flushed from the change of temperature, and unexpectedly she starts whispering about her boyfriend. Both dry themselves. Ági, prompted by an urge incomprehensible to Klári, spreads her arms. They have often taken a shower together, even compared breasts, but Klári still feels Ági’s body has changed, and she does not understand why Ági is looking so intently at her breasts. Both feel embarrassed and would rather not look one another in the eye, but they are driven by some unknown feeling. Ági speaks, and her breast swells. It happened yesterday evening, she says. What? Klári asks, even though she has no doubt what happened. You know — that, Ági whispers, with Miklós. But where? At his place. They had never used the kinds of words by which some of the other girls in the class liked provocatively to speak about it, so it had always been that. Ági stretches, her breasts quiver. Klári pats her hair and kisses her shoulder and both giggle.
All the people from yellow-star houses in the XIVth District were assembled at the KISOK football ground. Maybe Ági, too, as well as Klári’s mother and grandmother had been sent to the brickworks in the same column as us, but, being over sixteen and the grandmother nowhere near sixty, in which batch had they been dispatched towards Hegyeshalom? Luca even told me that Klári had seen when Ági and her mother lined up in the group headed for the gas chamber and had run after them, but a German kicked her back. I had seen photographs of skeleton-thin naked bodies queuing up and setting off for the whitewashed rectangular buildings between armed men and dogs; maybe that was why I had suppressed in myself what Luca told me about it, the reason she was recounting it to me. But now I have to make an effort to see through Klári’s eyes the shaven heads and napes of the neck and then later recall the nape of Ági’s neck, the nape of her mother’s neck, the spectacle of the two chimneys of the crematorium. It’s rather as if the roll of film had been exposed to light: they vanish, but the memory of the necks, the armed men and the dogs remains. The picture may be of even poorer quality with the passage of years, but there are times when everything is sharply visible, usually while dreaming. And, on waking, the Christmas tree on the Appellplatz, the soldiers are kicking two escapees. The gallows have been erected next to the Christmas tree, and everyone is driven out of the barracks. While the hanging is in progress the candles are lit on the tree. Ági’s body was as filthy and smelly as her own; she did not want to smell her mother’s body. The stools are kicked away from under the legs of those on the gallows.