We make a left turn into Pannónia Street towards the city centre. A block further south, at the junction with Csanády Street, a German panzer is approaching; behind it assault paratroopers are fanning out. I am familiar with the military terms. For years I’ve been reading in newspapers about what artillery emplacements, salvo fire, flexible disengagement, house-to-house combat and carpet bombing are. Previously I have only ever seen paratroopers behind tanks in cinema newsreels. The caterpillar tracks rattle two to three metres away from us; the soldiers, with their MP40 submachine guns ready to fire, pay us not the slightest attention.
What would have happened if it had been me and not the physicist who was made to unbutton his fly?
The older of the Riegler boys told me at the Red Cross home on Mihály Munkácsy Street that there was one occasion when he had once been ordered to unbutton his trousers. A kid no older than me, he said. He had never seen anyone’s cock but his own. Maybe he had just heard that this was what had to be done when checking someone’s identification. What happened? What happened, Riegler guffawed, was that I told him, have a good look, Sonny Jim, because never before have you seen anything as fine as this. And then? I pulled it out. I’m right, aren’t I? You’ve never seen anything as fine as this before? At which he told me to bugger off, said Riegler.
A corpse is lying on the ground at the corner of Pannónia Street and Károly Légrády Street. With one arm sticking out of the snow, it seems his last gesture was a wave.
Father tells the physicist that the Red Cross will guide us to a place of refuge. I don’t understand why he is talking to a stranger. Admittedly the physicist did indicate caution with his look when the Arrow Crosser had made him unbutton his fly. And Father had told him I was his son. He introduced me while we were on the move, but I don’t understand why this was important to him. He didn’t introduce Vera, possibly because on the spur of the moment he is unable to say ‘my daughter’. I do not hear what Father might have said, only that the physicist rejoins, That’s the way it is, you see. They saw everything, knew about everything, but now they behave as if they knew nothing, if you please, as if they had been blind.
Maybe I noted the comment because of that ‘as if they had been’.
Do you remember, I ask Vera twenty years later, what the physicist said about the people who were standing in doorways and on the pavement in Pannónia Street?
Vera only remembers the rats on the steps of the stores and the fact that she repeatedly asked Auntie Gizi (that’s what she ended up calling her) where her mummy might be, and the third time she asked Gizi had replied that she had no idea where she might be either. And I didn’t understand, says Vera, why she said it that way: she had no idea where she might be either.
Several blocks on, by now only a block away from the Grand Outer Circle, we reach József Katona Street.
I had never walked down Pannónia Street. It must have been near the Vígszínház comedy theatre on St István Outer Circle where I had been twice. Last year I went to see the musical Fekete Péter (Black Peter) with my parents, and we also saw Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. In front of the red velvet stage curtain actor Artúr Somlay, playing the Stage Manager, introduced the story and its setting, and when the curtains opened he strolled in among the characters, who, some seated, some standing, were chatting among themselves. I later understood that they were playing dead people, and they were remembering their lives.
On the gateway to number 5/a Tátra Street, the next street leading off the Outer Circle, a Swiss letter of protection is framed next to a yellow star. A policeman is standing in front of the house. Gizi shows him her identification; the policeman salutes and calls for the warden of the house. He says he is not permitted to let anyone in. There is no more room and yesterday ten rooms had to be vacated because, in line with an agreement between legations, they were supposed to admit people under Swedish protection. Father shows him the family’s letter. The warden spreads his arms and says there isn’t room to fit anyone else in, even in the corridors. New people have been coming for hours; it’s not just us he has had to refuse.
Vera says I should ask Mother if she has anything to eat. The warden closes the gate. Vera does not repeat that she is hungry but asks whether we have got to Buda. That would have to mean we crossed the Danube, I say. On those planks again?
The physicist says something to Gizi. We turn back for Pannónia Street. A German tank again approaches, probably the same one we met earlier, the soldiers behind it likewise holding their MP40 submachine guns ready to shoot.
Father reckons the physicist told Gizi that his cousin lives at number 36 Pannónia Street, and as far as he knows he is the warden there. Number 36 Pannónia Street also figured on Gizi’s list, but according to the Swiss Legation we should only try there as a last resort, she says, as there were so many already there.
The physicist goes ahead and rings at the gate. On the pavement over on the far side of the road two Arrow Crossers are racing after the German tank. A tall woman comes out and embraces the physicist. They enter into a conversation with Gizi. The woman raises her hands in a declining gesture. The physicist unwinds the strip of sacking from round his head. The woman tells him, Laci, you would be best advised to go elsewhere because you’ll be taken for a Jew, and you’ll be taken away any time they line the people here up.
The physicist asks his cousin why they had stayed in the house if the situation was that risky. Gizi later recounted, says Mother, that the woman simply said that this was where they had lived for thirty years, and Berci had not wanted to move. He had become the warden, he had army contacts, you know, he was a sergeant in the Great War, at which the physicist said that he had wanted to be admitted to his university department, but it seems that had been impossible. There was just one bed for him, the woman responded loudly. One place can be found, Laci, but only one. This is a whole family here, good friends of mine, with two children, says the physicist. Gizi holds her papers under the woman’s nose. They have a Swiss safe-conduct letter that’s valid for all four of them, she says. Carl Lutz, the chargé d’affaires at the legation, referred them to this house.
The woman goes inside and comes back a little later. Gizi beckons. Father takes me by the hand; Mother takes Vera. Three soldiers are approaching from the corner, one of them an officer. They come to a halt in front of the gate. The woman pulls back into the stair well while Gizi speaks with the officer. The soldiers hurry away. The stairwell is dark; the blue-painted electric bulb is providing light on the third or fourth floors. The entrance is spacious, with marble inside and wrought-iron banisters on the steps. The steps wind to the right in a semicircle to the first floor. We step over those sitting on the landings; children are asleep on mattresses. Father introduces himself to the warden, who is a tall man wearing a leather coat and an old-fashioned officer’s cap. He looks at the fancy braiding on my coat and checks the paperwork. I’ve got two days of rations for 234 people, he tells Gizi. We’ve acquired two field kitchens and set them up in the yard. The womenfolk have to work around those. The menfolk have to chop wood, and every day a group of four goes out to fetch bread during the hours outside the curfew that are permitted for those wearing yellow stars. That’s risky as they might get picked up by an Arrow Cross patrol looking to take people off to the bank of the Danube, as they so charmingly put it.