I go to the toilet.
On my return I ask for fresh sheets of paper from the waitress. She rushes off, no doubt again to the office, but this time she returns more speedily, and later I give her a double tip.
On the back of the two pictures Györgyi sent are captions. On the first is ‘Klári and Ági in 1943’; on the second ‘Mother and Father in 1945, not yet married’.
The setting of the second picture is easily identified as the terrace by the lake in the City Park. In the background is the flight of steps in front of the Műcsarnok, the Art Gallery, and the person taking the photograph must have had their back to the lake. One can readily discern a chequered tablecloth and two glasses of beer. Klári has quite short hair; not long before she would have still had a shaved head was my first thought on seeing the picture. Her face is angular, not oval as in the other picture. The shape of the chin is also changed, having slipped forwards and become more pointed. She has thrown herself back on the seat as if she wants to keep herself far away from the man sitting opposite her.
The man is tall and broad-shouldered. Short-sleeved shirt; taut arm muscles on display. He has a thick head of hair, dark and combed back with a wave at the front. The two are not looking into the lens of the camera nor at one another. I wonder who they asked to take the picture and, having asked that person, who they are not looking at, the camera or one another?
According to a note I made in the depths of one of my files, which has been hiding on the lowest shelf for nearly a quarter of a century, Luca said that Miklós was a very decent young man. Klári had brought him round once to meet her but that had been after they got married, maybe in 1956 or 1957.
In other words, something like ten years after the photograph was snapped.
‘Miklós is tall, athletic, black hair, used to live on the corner of Kolumbusz Street and Erzsébet Királyné Road,’ I noted. What I did not make a note of was that maybe around twenty-five years before I may have seen Miklós when we travelled together with the girls on a number 67 tram to the school because he was dating Ági at the time, so he would be bound to have known Klári as well. He must have known they were friends. He must have had a good idea that Ági had told her they had made love, even though both she and he had sworn that that would remain a secret. He must have had a good idea that Ági had shown Klári the letter he had sent when doing labour service at Bustyaháza, because on the cards he got in reply there was always written ‘Klári sends greetings’.
How could he have known that they were taken away together on 15 November 1944, first to the KISOK football ground then the Óbuda Brickworks? At that time he himself was being marched somewhere near Kassa on the way to Germany.
Forty kilometres a day.
The dead and dying in ditches at the roadside.
Luca told me a number of things about Miklós — not at times Györgyi had been present, perhaps later. She needed to talk to someone about things that had suddenly come to mind.
Years after that photograph of the two of them on the terrace at the lake had been taken, Klári asks Luca if she thinks it would be permissible for her to marry Miklós. All Luca says is that she had read — in my own notes that had been dug out to prepare for the meeting with Györgyi — that it was OK. This has very little relevance nearly quarter of a century after that note was made, I wrote a few days ago in fibre-tip pen next to my old note.
That was probably an error on my part.
From what I am trying to put together from the shards of the mosaic, one may presume the man and woman in the photograph do not just happen to be looking mutely at the same indeterminate point, where they see the same thing, but presumably they keep quiet about it because they had already discovered what, on studying their faces a half-century later, I would call an acquiescence to incom municability. One cannot read from the looks that that man would for years attempt to carry off the unspeakable spectacle and moreover that the woman knows this. And she also knows it when they embrace one another as a married couple and even at night she is unable to free herself from wondering whether the man, now her husband, made love just as vigorously with Ági. The spectacle of the shaven napes of both Ági and her mother still looms before her, and the man senses something of that; he is acquainted with what it is like to take silent leave of someone who has started on the death march. He carries on hugging his wife and meanwhile sees in his mind’s eye a pair of dead eyeballs. He is also familiar with the laborious process of straightening out a body with rigor mortis. On the farmstead near Kassa, while the front line sweeps over, he looks for a spade so he can dig a grave for his friend who has died of dysentery, but all he can find is a crowbar with which he spends a day scraping out a shallow pit then gathers a few handfuls of earth to sprinkle over the corpse.
For years after the first meeting, which is preserved by the photograph, Klári had no wish to meet Miklós again, nor he to meet her. Later Klári asks Luca whether it would be all right to marry Miklós.
She dare not ask her husband while they are lying with fingers clasped whether he had lain the same way with Ági; from the man’s silence she senses it was just the same. Had Ági also wanted to make love again as quickly as she did, and had he done so with her just as he had with Ági? That is something they never speak about. Klári stifles the question that is about to slip from her lips. Miklós senses what she must be thinking and is grateful that she says nothing, and nine months after this evening Györgyi is born. When Klári and Györgyi are wheeled out of the labour ward and Miklós bends over them their shared thought is that they have avenged themselves for everything by giving life to their daughter, and the fact that this is what they think about in the hospital corridor also means that, although both of them are well aware it is not a ‘normal state’ (they speak about it later in just those words), they are unable to suppress it, but still it is better not to keep on torturing one another with it.
Klári could not have claimed that the reason she was unable to discuss what happened in the camp with Györgyi was because she would then have had to say why her father and she could not stay together — or rather, the reason she could not speak about why they had been unable to stay together was because then she would have to speak about what happened in the camp.
She did not want to talk about dreams.
I thank the waitress for her assistance and leave her 300 forints as a tip.
This story is like good literature, I note down, full of doubts and uncertainties. I have lived the greater part of the years of my existence, and I can see that the reason I have devoted my life to writing is that I am trying to counter transience. I have to see things with the eyes of many in order that my own should remain sharp.
At reception the young man comes to meet me. He gives me two photographs. One is a shot he took of the second-floor room, the other from the window. He says he noticed to which part of the street I was paying particular attention.