It takes eight to ten seconds for the tram to rattle over the crossing, covering as it does so the figure of the first lieutenant on the far side of the Outer Circle and the policeman who is directing the traffic. Vera is still waving to Judy, and I am holding the other hand. I yank her after me and we step out of line.
I cannot see the Riegler brothers even past Hársfa Street.
I need to find a gap between the people standing on the pavement.
The air-raid siren starts up.
Suddenly everyone is running.
The tram had passed the crossing. The policeman directing the traffic snatches at his rifle. The pedestrians who had been standing on the pavement scatter. No one is paying any attention to us. By now we are on the pavement. We carry on towards Mussolini Square.6 I get the feeling that a man in a fur coat was thinking of setting off after us.
I stop in the middle where Király Street crosses Erzsébet Outer Circle, waiting until the traffic signal has turned red and the traffic coming from Lövölde Square has come to a standstill. I bend down for a few seconds to chalk out in my mind the spot where we stepped out of the column fifty-eight years ago. I pass my hand over the paving stones. Several pedestrians stare at me. A student even tries to help me up. Thanks, I say. I’m fine. Another boy hoots with laughter, meanwhile the traffic light has changed and a car driver is honking at me. Behind me is the shop front of a KFC outlet, in front a branch of the K & H Bank of the Kredietbank of Belgium, to my right the violet lights of an erotic show.
I often alighted from a trolley bus here in the seventies. There used to be a coffee bar where I would drink a coffee standing up; there were always several women at the tables, and I later learned that I was drinking in a place that prostitutes used to use. Some of the women were well into their forties, but they still cut good figures. It may have been that those working in the erotic show were daughters of those women. During the war they could well have been much the same age as me, and it’s not impossible their mothers had also been prostitutes. I have heard tell that there were a lot of men who had been called up for forced-labour service and deserters from the regular army who found a hideaway in the bordellos of Conti Street and Ó Street on the other side of Andrássy Avenue in the VIth District.
It is fourteen steps from here to number 5 Theresa Outer Circle. I look at the entrance and the stairs. I am not sure that this is where we came while the air-raid siren was sounding and everyone sought cover at a run. At number 7, though, everything is familiar: the entrance, round arch leading to the staircase, the wrought-iron banisters on the steps.
The man in a fur coat who has been keeping us under observation from the moment we stepped out of the column is coming after us. I do not fancy testing how well my ARP messenger papers will stand up. The gate to the house is open with whitewash arrows to indicate where the air-raid shelter is located. I wait until the man in the fur coat is caught up in the crowd before hastily moving further on.
The entrance to the next house is wide, and there are stairs leading in two directions. A man is shouting and directing women and children down towards the cellar while men stay there, sitting on the steps, so we edge our way in among them.
I want to stay near the exit.
Vera is freezing. Wiggle your toes! She can’t, she replies. Everyone there is a stranger to one another, which is to our advantage as we do not seem conspicuous. Bomb blasts can be heard in the distance; the sound of ack-ack guns is closer. A woman is sitting next to me and asks where we live. Zugló, I say. Have the Russians got there yet? No, I say, not so far. I spot behind a column the man who followed us from Király Street. It’s not a fur coat he s wearing but a hunting coat; his peaked cap is not an army one. He is setting off towards the man directing the flow of people, who is presumably the warden for the building.
Vera cannot grasp why I am pulling her after me, and I don’t have time to explain. I shoulder two men out of the way, which prompts one of them to take my mother’s name in vain. Once we reach the street I don’t look back, and we reach Mussolini Square. The air-raid alarm is still sounding; others are hurrying, some running. There are two ack-ack batteries in the square. Commands are bellowed. There are some people gawping from the pavement as the cannons attempt to keep track of the aircraft as they swoop down and unload their bombs over the Western Railway Terminus not far away. We turn into Andrássy Avenue.
A woman is lying on the ground in front of one of the houses. She seems to have slipped in the snow, so we help her to her feet. Vera hands her back her shopping-bag, which contains about half a kilogram of potatoes and a few apples. We lead her under the nearest doorway. She expresses her gratitude as we take shelter next to her. We wait there until the siren sounds the all-clear, and the woman takes her leave. We are standing at the corner of Eötvös Street; further up and on the other side of the road we can see the Arrow Cross sentries in front of number 60 Andrássy Avenue. We can’t go that way, I say; we can’t go back in the direction we came from so let’s head for Western Railway Terminus. Perhaps as an alternative we could go down the continuation of Eötvös Street to the right, but in two blocks that would bring us back to Király Street. With one hand Vera sweeps the snow off a bench at the corner and sits down. I tell her to get up, it’s cold. Which way shall we go? I don’t know, but get up, please. No, I shan’t, she says and says it quietly. I’m not getting up, and I’m not going anywhere. I sit down beside her.
The bench which is standing on the pedestrian precinct in front of the post office on Eötvös Street nowadays cannot be the old bench. I go down to the Király Street end of Eötvös Street. Last year I bought a black hat in the corner shop, and I said to the hatter that for my fourteenth birthday I was given a brown boys’ hat with a green band on it, since when I have never had one. They haven’t made a line of boys’ hats for a long time, he said.
In Király Street I try to find the exact spot from which I last glimpsed Judy’s face, which would mean that she had accomplished her task inasmuch as it is the business of the dead to find their way to those who have remained alive.
The tiny place that Vera and I occupy on the bench is ours. It is snowing more heavily. I stand up and ask, but she does not move, so I start off. Yet even now she will not come, so I stop.
I ought to pin down the date. I try to find points of reference. Mother has kept three of my letters, and I put in a call to Mádi in Paris. I try to match up dates. Where can the lost traces be leading? Back to Amerikai Road? Francia Road? Back to Mihály Munkácsy Street?
One of the letters bears a date from six days later.
We could not have sat on the bench on Andrássy Avenue for six days.
I go back to Vera and give her a hug. We set off.
We hear a burst of submachine-gun fire from number 60 Andrássy Avenue. An ack-ack gun behind us barks again; search lights sweep the sky.
On 8 December Soviet troops reach the town of Vác on the Danube bend, some thirty kilometres to the north. By 9 December the north-eastern perimeter of Pest is being pounded. Father Kun’s order to shoot a group who have been made to strip naked on the Pest bank of the Danube: ‘In Christ’ name — Fire!’ Captain Imre Morlin of the Artillery deploys the fourteen — eighteen-year-old military cadets who have been placed under his command, and they are joined by young men from the Ludovika Military Academy: ‘In accordance with your military-school training, every man will fight to the last bullet!’ Plenipotentiary Veesenmayer receives instructions from Berlin that all possible assistance should be given to facilitate the harshest procedures against the Jews. On 12 December those possessing Swiss or Swedish safe-conduct letters who have been detained in custody up until then are set off in columns marching west towards Komárom. Lieutenant József Klima’s unit breaks into the Divine Love Girls’ Institution. The women and young girls who had been hiding there are loaded on to trucks waiting at the Buda foot of the cog-wheel railway, taken over the river to the Arrow Cross building in Újpest, then from there to the bank of the Danube where they are shot. On 14 December Anton Kilchmann, having left Carl Lutz as the sole Swiss representative, arrives in Berne. During a subsequent administrative juridical investigation on 31 August 1945 he rebukes Chief Justice Otto Kehrli that on his arrival there was nobody to debrief him; the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was completely indifferent to what was happening to its officials in Budapest. From 15 December onwards Arrow Cross patrols constantly circle Carl Lutz’s office. That same day Pioneer Battalion 751 of the German regular army is deployed in battle.