The colonel salutes and sets off to the neighbouring wing of the dining hall.
Gizi had not noticed before, but now it strikes her eye that sitting at the corner table is a writer whom she knows by sight; indeed, she obtained a signature from him a few years before at one of the Book Week tents. The writer has just finished his dinner and has taken out a notebook in which he starts to write.
‘I pick my way between trestles carrying coils of barbed wire to dine at the Gellért Hotel,’ writes Sándor Márai in his Diary.
The saloon bar was destroyed a few days ago by a bomb from an intruder aircraft; more than a few guests died, but nobody speaks about the death toll; in the grand upper restaurant tables are laid with immaculate linen tablecloths and napkins, tasty and not all that expensive dishes are served noiselessly on silver platters by superbly trained waiters. For twelve pengő I can dine in a peacetime setting with electric lighting; well-dressed people are seated at the tables, the waiters’ dickies are dazzlingly white. From the window I can see a big gun guarding the bridge and the hotel’s entrance along with several barbed-wire thickets, which will be used to defend Gellért Hill when it comes to close combat. A group approaches in the street: older and younger women with headscarves, children — Jews being sent to some site for deportation. Two policemen with rifles are steering the group; not one word of comment from anybody in the splendid, warm, well-lit dining-room.
Gizi watches the writer making notes and sees that he is about to leave. She also sees an SS colonel enter the dining-room, halt in front of a Hungarian general and salute with a raised arm, although the general seems not to notice that the colonel misses out Hitler’s name with the Heil! but hurries on and extends a hand to greet Carl Lutz.
Gizi always got out of the old Opel Kadett when they encountered a column on the highway to Hegyeshalom.
SS Obergruppenführer Hans Jüttner, coming from Vienna, got out from his car the first time at Abda, just outside Győr. When he glanced in the Opel’s window and with a smile enquired after Gizi’s accommodation, standing beside him had been SS Standartenführer Kurt Becher.
Becher is waiting at Carl Lutz’s table. Smiling. He has thick, dark eyebrows, thick lips. He kisses the hand first of Gertrud then Gizi. Although she recognizes him, Gizi cannot tell whether he recognizes her.
On the highway Gizi had on a Red Cross armband and a starched white cap. The Colonel takes a long look at her. Gizi tidies her hair behind the ear with a single gesture.
Becher links arms with Carl Lutz and they set off towards the adjoining room.
Gertrud tells Gizi, says Mother, that the Colonel had behaved as if something were gong on between you, and you yourself looked flirtatiously at him as if there had been something on which to look back — rather exciting, I must say, darling.
We did meet, Gizi says to Gertrud but she does not say where or that when SS-Obergruppenführer Hans Jüttner and SS Standartenführer Kurt Becher got back into the military Adler on the highway from Hegyeshalom she had got out of the car to look along the ditches to see whether one of the bodies might be Bőzsi, and Károly had to pull her back to the car.
SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann steps down from his armoured automobile at the gate to the ghetto in Dohány Street in the city centre. The sentries — two policemen with rifles and two Arrow Crossers with submachine guns — salute.
He passes by the synagogue garden, casting a glance at the dead bodies piled on top of each other at the foot of the iron railings. It is sleeting. He turns up the collar of his cloak and sets off for the parallel road, Wesselényi Street, turning down the connecting road of Síp Street. He checks the readiness of the tanks parked in front of the Jewish Council’s building. A first lieutenant with an Arrow Cross armband presents himself, awaiting instructions. Eichmann gives orders that within a few hours, at a time-point to be communicated by the Reich’s Chancellery, they should make a start on liquidating any survivors. Nothing is lost, he says; the Führer’s new weapon is being readied for deployment. The first lieutenant reports that he has been given orders to attack the Swedish and Swiss Embassies at six o’clock the next morning. He accompanies Eichmann back to the ghetto gate. The SS Rottenführer who is the driver of the armoured car is smoking and chatting with the sentries. On the arrival of the first lieutenant they stub out their cigarettes on the palms of their hands.
The car is driven back to headquarters. In the Majestic Hotel Eichmann calls Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda and Plenipotentiary for Total Mobilization, on a direct line. Himmler is sojourning at some unknown place; a deputy relays his order that the planned action in Budapest should be agreed with Eichmann’s immediate superior, SS Standartenführer Kurt Becher. Eichmann seeks Becher by telephone and is informed that he cannot be reached; he is in discussions at the Gellért Hotel.
I walk past the railings of the garden of the Dohány Street synagogue, reading on the memorial plaques the list of names of those who perished. I step into the yard.
Whose tracks am I following up?
My own? Adolf Eichmann’s?
I walk to Dob Street, the next block on from Síp Street. The entrance to number 4 now looks exactly the same as it did ten years ago at the time I learned from the Register of Births, Marriages and Deaths that my maternal grandfather was born there in 1871 and took a walk round the area. Back then the vaulted entrance had given me the impression that in the nineteenth century a horse and cart might well have been able to stop in the gateway, and I get the same impression now, although the dustbins would probably have got in the way.
I find among old family photographs a small advertisement, clipped from a newspaper, about the dedication of Grandfather’s gravestone. I don’t know which newspaper that would have been, perhaps the Esti Kurir (Evening Courier), as that was what Grandfather used to read. That black-framed announcement was all Mother kept.
Last year I had a stone cover made for my grandparents’ grave, as we had always had to weed it once a year, and I don’t want my daughter to be left with that chore. The gravestone itself is a fine marble block, and Mother had Grandmother’s name incised under Grandfather’s, with other names being added since.
I file away in the appropriate folder the newspaper announce ment about the dedication of the gravestone. I clip out of a documentation volume a portrait shot of Adolf Eichmann and slip that, too, into the same file. I note that Eichmann was born on 19 March 1906, so that in 1944 he was thirty-eight years old and an SS Ober sturmbannführer. His line of duty was the racial purification of Europe, the total eradication of Europe’s Jewry. In the photograph his right eye is squinting slightly, the left one even more, the way he holds his head not exactly military.
I take a number 49 tram to Gellért Square. I had arranged to meet Györgyi in the hotel’s tearoom.
I get there half an hour early, which gives me enough time to walk around the ground which, while it was not my footsteps that have left traces there, I still regard as being part of my exploratory journey.