Eichmann takes leave of Kurt Becher with a salute and Heil Hitler! He does not go out through the door leading to the restaurant. A smaller door leads to a staircase going down to the hall. A few minutes later Becher also departs by those stairs.
Carl Lutz returns to the restaurant. A cognac or coffee? Gertrud asks. Gertrud and Gizi take cognac, Lutz a coffee.
Two hours later Adolf Eichmann climbs into the armoured car that is waiting for him in front of the Hotel Majestic. In a photograph preserved by the Military Archives Division of the German Federal Archives he is smiling as he leans on the vehicle. The caption states this is the last photograph of him to be taken in Hungary.
Three hours later Kurt Becher left Budapest in another armoured car.
Gizi was watching television yesterday, says Mother; she rang me up to pick her up at Ruszwurm. Once a month she takes her afternoon cup of coffee at Ruszwurm Confectionery on Szentháromság Street on Castle Hill in Buda. Gizi is the deputy manageress, and she brings my mother a coffee, sits down with her and they chat for half an hour every month.
She was looking peaky, says Mother. Which means she herself is looking peaky, if she says that Gizi was looking peaky, and she needs to moisten her cracked lips. She covers her mouth with the palm of one hand so that no one should see her as she gathers her spittle then passes her tongue first over the upper lip then the lower lip. I’m sitting in front of the television, Gizi tells Mother, and it is showing pictures from the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. You’ll never believe it, but I once saw him; I had a brush with him in the Gellért when I was with the Lutzes and he walked past the table. Mother takes the hand from in front of her mouth, her lips still cracked as far as I can see. I had to grasp Gizi’s hand and press it against the marble table; she was trembling, repeating over and over, you know, he walked right by me, right by me. Carl Lutz was pale-faced when he got back from the other room, says Gizi I don’t know who he’d been speaking to — with Kurt Becher, that much I knew, because Gertrud recognized Becher — but neither of us had known who Eichmann was.
After the coffee Gizi had served herself a glass of cognac, although it was forbidden to drink any alcohol while on duty, says Mother.
Adolf Eichmann was hanged in Jerusalem in 1962. He had maintained his innocence throughout the trial. Hannah Arendt wrote of the judgement that was handed down:
And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations — as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world — we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you.
With a report of what my investigation has uncovered tucked under one arm I walk down to the hotel lobby. The corridor off to my left leads to the tearoom. I pay a visit to the gents. After washing my hands I comb my hair. I then sit at one of the windows that looks on to the Danube, waiting for Györgyi.
IX
At the next table they are speaking in German — businessmen, no doubt. Grey and brown jackets — small-chequed and large-chequed — buttoned shirt collars, cross-striped light necktie, plain azure necktie, black leather folders. Hennessy brandy, plum brandy.
Györgyi called yesterday. In the hour since she arrived she has said not a word about where she had been, so we can meet now; she did not ask so much as state it, although I did catch a sense of familiarity in her voice that I had not on previous occasions. There was also a hint of restlessness hovering behind the personal manner of addressing me at the same time as there was determination.
Her voice thereby was as if it were a story in itself, or rather it expressed the influence that a story had exercised on her.
The German businessmen were just sipping their drinks when she reached their table.
Both of them paid attention.
Her white blouse was the same as she had been wearing when we alighted from the number 1 tram at Thököly Road. Yet maybe a new one, all the same; perhaps she bought it while on the trip, as the girls would have been travelling in brand-new gear, and she would not wish to be outshone.
She does not wait for me to get up but pulls out another seat with a vigorous tug and sits down. As if she were being pursued and had just managed to pull up the drawbridge in the gateway of the castle walls.
The two Germans now pay attention to me; Györgyi’s appearance has added to my stock in their eyes.
She asks for a coffee.
I get the impression she senses the looks she is attracting from the next table.
She drinks her coffee.
She fishes out a photograph from a minuscule straw purse and slips it in front of me on the table. A girl of about sixteen and a woman of about forty. Györgyi more closely resembles the older woman. A stretch of rainy street; both of them in raincoats, both with yellow stars. Both are looking into the lens of the camera. The girl is wearing a beret; the woman a knitted cap that can be pulled down to the ears. On both there is a curl of hair on the temple. They do not look sad. Or listless. There is no fear on their faces. It’s as if a prying eye were examining them through the camera lens, probing who you are, what you feel, what you are thinking, and they had decided that they were not going to give anything away. Let the person looking at them see they are as they are. They have nothing to own up to, nothing to hide. They would like to move on, it’s true, but they have no objection to having a record made of them.
Didn’t you see her?
No, I didn’t, I say. How would I have done?
On one of the display cases that have been installed in the recently renovated stations of the original underground line. The one by the Opera House on Andrássy Avenue. She had discovered it there by pure chance on the day her train was leaving. Her mother and grandmother in the autumn of 1944. She had made enquiries this afternoon as to where it had been found, who found it and how come it ended up in the display. It was found in some archive, the official in charge had said; one of several dozen photographs of its kind, and it was pure chance that this one been picked. All the same, you ought to have asked me. There were no names on the pictures, no text to refer to, the only guides being the yellow stars and the bare branches of the trees and rainy pavement. A huge number of photographs had been accumulated, all the people who could be seen in them anonymous; I’m sorry, we are terribly sorry, the official had said.
I ask if I can order her a drink.
No, thank you … Well, maybe a dry Martini.
I ask for a glass of vodka.
On one of the pictures that she had sent in the anonymous envelope one could see a house in Amerikai Road, I say. Was that why she had followed me on the tram?
I’ve already said that I recognized you.
She downs the Martini. She is past thinking back.
Thinking back to what?
She searches for the words. Well, the past, she says finally, saying it as if she were ashamed to designate all the things about which she had not thought for a long time with such a banal word. But now she was incapable of anything else, she adds. Already, quite a long time ago, a gap — that is how she puts it — had been left inside her; but, despite this, what, for a very long time may have filled that gap, were memories that she had thought of as hers but were actually those of her mother. But let’s not bother with explanations, she says in a frosty tone.
I think something must have happened, and it was not just that she had come across this new photograph.
I tell her that I had discovered, at the Opera metro station, a composite photograph of the class at the Israelite Gymnasium which passed the school-leaving examination in 1944, and among the portraits was one of an acquaintance who has long been living in Paris.