Györgyi also looks back. I make no mention of what I had just imagined, as I sense from her look that something is being brought to mind for her as well, albeit something different. We owe each other the courtesy of at least leaving the past the way in which it lives on.
At the Erzsébet Bridge, the next bridge upriver, I remark that it was across here that the column we were in was driven — I deliberately choose the word, smiling meanwhile — to the Óbuda Brickworks. It’s possible that her mother and grandmother were also in it. This was where Father had ticked me off for looking right because the Arrow Crossers were bawling at us not to look, meaning not look at the blown-up statue of Gyula Gömbös.
The Danube is grey; there are no lights. Still, the Parliament building is easily visible upriver on the opposite bank, looking like a piece of the décor, as does the string of hotels on the Pest riverbank. Their roofs slip on to the roofs of the houses behind, the city being concentrated on a single spot as if the buildings were their own replicas. As if I were not seeing the city in which I have lived my whole life, a city whose streets and squares are well known to me, but a stage set, one viewed from the wings rather than the auditorium. Maybe my eyesight is changing, as not long ago I was knocked down near here by a cyclist, I say. Györgyi is clutching the file that I passed to her in the tearoom under one arm. When she starts to read it at home she will get to the part that describes that it was exactly where we were standing, perhaps fifty metres from the Buda end of Margit Bridge, that the procession from the brickworks that was destined for the Dohány Street Synagogue was driven on to the footbridge erected over the swirling river after the old bridge had been blown up. Perhaps she will think about where her mother and grandmother and mother’s friend can have been in the column at the time when it was sent off towards Hegyeshalom.
She remarked during the walk that she still meant to drop into school, but already two number 17 trams had departed from the terminus without her getting on.
Was it a good idea for me to make that journey?
It is almost as if that was the question she were posing to herself, but it seems to me that it is important she does so in my presence.
She prepares to say farewell and yet allows a third tram to depart.
She was ashamed that when they came away from the Appellplatz she was preoccupied more with her umbrella, because it chose there, of all places, to misbehave, is the way she puts it.
I quite understand, I say; it was also rainy when I went there.
We are standing quite close to one another at the tram stop. She gives me a grateful look for also speaking about the rain.
In a dream the packet of snaps bought many years ago at the entrance to Ravensbrück is stolen from my room, which I had locked myself from the inside. Györgyi shows up and together we search my drawers, together open and close my accumulated files. Györgyi meanwhile reads a number of my notes in an old letter; we cannot find the pictures, and their loss makes me see the freshly whitewashed walls and two chimneys of the crematorium more sharply.
I write the dream down after waking up at dawn. I continue that I am standing with Györgyi at the terminus of the number 17 tram. She will later read the typescript I passed her and go out to her mother’s grave in the cemetery where she had also had her grandmother’s name inscribed on the gravestone. Her mother, I write, had not wanted her mother’s name to be preserved on the memorial to the martyrs, and she had never explained to Györgyi why not, but before she died she had asked that when it came to setting up a gravestone for herself then let her grandmother’s name also appear on it. She had specified: ‘Here is preserved the memory of Mariann Rajna, 1906–1944, killed at Ravensbrück’. Györgyi does not, however, have her father’s name carved on the gravestone, as she knows nothing about him, and he might still be alive somewhere abroad.
I hope that what she reads about herself will not be without interest to her. I sense that she wished to have herself seen by another’s gaze. While she reads about herself, I write, she will also encounter another story.
For weeks I have been looking in music shops and secondhand bookshops in search of a book on or guide to Schubert’s chamber music. Unsuccessfully. I listen to the ‘Allegro’ passage of the C major Quintet. The music is also a story. I am seeking a similarity between the story that can be voiced and the story that lives in me. It is not to be found in the sublime, although the more times I hear it the more strongly I doubt as to whether this is really true. The radiant sorrow of the ‘Allegro’ can master an inability to remember, gliding over the crevasse of the past by filling it with a sense of boundlessness, and it comes to mind that Carl Lutz noted down something similar.
I shall make a trip to the cemetery and look for the grave of Györgyi’s mother. Does it resemble my description?
It is possible Györgyi was present at Luca’s funeral, although I didn’t recognize her. Four, five years ago, would that have been?
Ten degrees below zero. January. There would have been around twenty of us in the unheated mortuary. It is quite a long walk in deep snow to the freshly dug grave. I can’t see any familiar faces; she might have been there. Warm shawls and black fake-fur coats; hats pulled down over foreheads. Luca’s daughter looks older than her mother had done.
We stand speechless in the snow. I see everyone looking as lonely as Luca had been. The bare trees are lonely, the snow-bound gravestones, too.
I walk across to my parents’ grave. I don’t normally come out to the cemetery in winter. I sweep the snow off the gravestone with one hand; I would like to clear the lettering at least. Two steps away is the grave of my maternal grandparents. Black marble with gold letters. Under my grandfather’s that of Grandmother: 1874–1945. It does not say that it was January. The date, too, I was told by Mother. My grandmother died on 6 January in the ghetto, in the cellar of a house on Dob Street, maybe a hundred metres from the house where my grandfather was born in 1871. Next to their grave is Gizi’s. There are many inscriptions on the stone. Alongside Józsi’s rank as a military officer it is also inscribed that he died of poor health following an injury during the First World War. After my father died Mother used to bring flowers for all three graves; now, since Mother’s death, I also place a stem on my grandparents’ and Gizi’s gravestones.
The three graves are within six paces of each other. I step into the footsteps of those stepping in the footsteps of Grandmother, Father, Mother, Gizi.
How many times have I made those six paces?
Gizi left nobody. Mother had her name incised on her gravestone.
She would now be one hundred years old, if she were alive. Her husband was young when he died, her daughter was young when she died, her lover and her friends were young when they died, Bőzsi was young when she died. Apart from me, there is now no one who can remember Gizi. As regards her story, the story of others on the basis of her story, the once-fourteen-year-old boy is the only one who has any knowledge, only he is able to write such words.
I can see in the way Mother looks that she is unable to separate in her own mind Gizi’s various expressions.
The two young girls are strolling in Kálmán Tisza Square.7 One is six years old, the other seven. Both are wearing white lace gloves as they stroll. A third girl, no older than them, is coming from the direction of the Városi Színház.8 Hey, do you want to come and play with us? Gizi hails her. Mother repeats the question. The young girl sets off to play with them.
Decades later they can still giggle about it.