I am in luck as I am holding a fresh strand in my hands.
It is well known that private eyes like to keep one step ahead of the official machinery of the police in order to uncover things that might be impeded, or even forbidden, by the ‘higher powers’. In such cases an opportunity may present itself to discover how the barriers are constructed; how false minutes or reports come into existence; and how an investigation can be sidetracked. In such cases the wider context may become clear, and anyone inclined to search for the structure of universal order in individual cases may satisfy his ambition.
Let anyone who wishes to try come forward, a voice prompts me.
Enough of that. As we’ve already said, let us drop questions that relate to time.
I have also suspected all along that I am both following and being followed. Ever since I met Györgyi. This is not hard to spot if one looks back over one’s shoulder at the right moment. More interestingly, I am following myself, the follower.
As if there were more than one me.
Without any of them I am not who I am. I am transformed. In all likelihood I live in the transformations brought about by encounters with the insoluble.
As if my own shadow were able to alter its shape. Sometimes that terrifies me, and the only thing that sets my mind at rest is that I try to follow my own alterations.
So then, who is it who is drinking a coffee now on a terrace of the Muralto Hotel?
From Ágnes Hirschi’s look I see that at first that is precisely what she wishes to know, but since we have been talking for half an hour I start to get the feeling that she is curious about something else. About herself.
What would be the most natural is for me to be grilling her, but she keeps asking more questions. Her mother married Carl Lutz two years after the war was over, while she herself was just six years old in 1944. I had supposed that she knew about everything that I did, but it seems that again I was mistaken. The unfailing curiosity of her gaze betrays that she would like to hear about what was happening around her at the time because a six-year-old girl’s memories are unable to retain it all.
She pulls the sleeves of her black pullover up to her elbows. Her forearms are suntanned — she and her husband go skiing at this time of the year. Her white blouse is open-collared; her auburn hair is flecked with many strands of grey and cropped short like a boy’s.
It is then that I note that Carl Lutz’s chauffeur was called Charles; he had a six-year-old son.
We used to play together a lot.
I think she is telling me that in order to get me to understand the sorts of memories she has mostly retained.
I came across a photograph, I say, of Carl Lutz sitting in a wicker armchair with you on one knee and a little boy on the other. I have that photograph, she says. You know, we used to play together a lot, but I can’t recall the name of Charles’s son.
A hundred people, or maybe more, line up at number 7 Szabadság Square in front of the non-functioning US Embassy building, where at present the Swiss Legation’s Department of Foreign Interests has its offices. After a long wait a woman steps out of the queue; she is around thirty. It is November, it is raining, but she is not wearing a hat. She is strong and is sporting a thickly applied purple lipstick. A policeman standing in the entrance tells her to get back in line. My daughter is a British citizen, she says. We have the right to prompt treatment. She has shoulder-length black hair; her eyes are almond-shaped. She takes out some documents. She is towing a young girl by the hand after her.
A boat puts in to the harbour. Its passengers take photographs and buy postcards.
Ágnes asks for a tea.
In 1938 my parents decided to travel to relatives in London. It was my father’s idea. Well, that was where I was born. I’m a British citizen. Not long after I was born we returned to Budapest.
The black-haired young woman leads the little girl by the hand up to the first floor.
Half an hour later they are able to step into Carl Lutz’s office.
My mother later told me she felt that because she had managed to get Lutz’s attention regarding the fact that I am a British citizen it no doubt helped, she said, and even if that hadn’t been the case we were just on the point of returning home; my mother had packed; my father already had false papers and a place where he could hide away. We went back to Szabadság Square, and my mother was given a job, so when Lutz went to Buda we went with him. Then the house was hit by a bomb, and we moved down to the cellar — that was where we slept. I remember it. All that separated the sleeping areas at night was a sheet, with Lutz and Gertrud on one side and my mother and me on the other.
I have to tell her about my own meetings with Carl Lutz; she is gathering recollections about her stepfather. In return I learn that Carl and Gertrud said affectionate farewells to each other in 1946, which was also when Ágnes’s mother and father likewise said their affectionate farewells.
I first saw him at the Óbuda Brickworks, I say, though, of course, I had no idea at the time who it was I saw.
Ágnes sits on Carl Lutz’s knee.
She is playing with Charles’s young son.
She is looking over the unruffled surface of the lake and asks for another cup of tea.
They lugged iron bedsteads down into the cellar. I didn’t want to go down there. I kept bumping into beds— knocked my knee, I did. It was dark; I remember the darkness most of all. My mother washed our underclothes in a bucket.
She jots down everything she learns about her stepfather, I imagine in an attempt to populate the blank spaces in her memories.
I ask whether the things she is told awaken any memories — faces, maybe experiences? She says there was a time when that was so; something would flash into her mind, it but would vanish straight away. Many’s the time she would read over what she had noted down about what others had said about her stepfather. That makes it easier for her to accept that it all really happened, and she was there as well, she played a part, that’s how she puts it. I accept it, she says, but I can’t understand it.
What can’t you understand?
That what happened could have happened.
Her look is just like that of the little girl sitting on her stepfather’s knee in the photograph. The little girl is alert and pouting.
The skin of Ágnes’s face is bronzed even without any make-up.
Of course, what with all the mountain air.
I ought to make a note myself about her skin colour, the mountain air as well — that kind of thing I all too easily forget. Later, when I get back to my room.
My room on the first floor overlooks the lake. I learn that among the trees and bushes to be found in the natural park are comparative rarities such as the sweet gum, the Serbian spruce and the Atlas cedar. There is a flight of stairs on both the right and left of the lobby, the red carpet being held in place by glistening brass stair-rods. The central candelabra has eight arms; the one above it, at the level of the first floor, has six; and the wall lamps are all from the same family of light fittings. The flooring is of white-and-red marble tiling with a lily-ornamented pattern in the centre, the lettering of which says Hotel Locarno. Double-leafed glass doors lead into an inner hall, which gives on to conference rooms. Over the central door is a marble table. Under the caption ‘Conférence de Locarno’ is the date, 5–16 October 1925. Nations taking part in the conference: Belgium, Great Britain, France, Italy, Poland, Czechoslovakia.
I take a snap of the table.
Under that search term my Larousse encyclopaedia does not list Poland and Czechoslovakia as being among the signatories of the Locarno Treaties,10 but it does list Germany.
The marble table therefore says something different from the historical record and the encyclopaedia entry something different from the historical record: