The Locarno Pact was entered into with the object of bringing lasting peace to Europe. Great Britain and Italy undertook to act as guarantors of the mutual recognition and inviolability of the borders of France, Germany and Belgium and placed the prospect of armed intervention in the event that Germany were to occupy the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland. Germany was admitted into the League of Nations. Belgium’s neutrality officially ceased.
During those very days Carl Lutz was working as a counsellor at the Swiss Legation in Washington, DC, and meanwhile acquiring a bachelor’s degree at George Washington University. He is tormented by uncertainty and fearful of the future, he writes in his diary.
During that period my own mother and father were celebrating their first wedding anniversary. I place wedding photographs in the same folder where I keep copies of the photographs that Carl Lutz took as a young man. This is also the place for a photograph of Gizi as a young girl, a photograph of the black Packard that I have from my documentation and also the shot I took of the marble table in the hall of the Grand Hotel in Locarno that documents the treaties.
Ágnes is entering the hall as I take the photograph. Almost imperceptibly she drags one foot.
I was familiar with it, I say about the photograph in which she can be seen with the chauffeur’s son, but I didn’t know who the boy was or even that the chauffeur was called Charles. Well, it’s of no interest how vivid my memories of Charles’s son are. He always wanted to hold my hand. I liked playing with him, but I would not allow him to hold my hand. She says, The young girl who lay in hiding with you, how old was she then? She was in her thirteenth year, I reply.
What would those days have been like for me had Vera not been there?
We sit down in the main hall. This is where prime ministers must have sat; here where they signed the treaties. Ágnes lays out a series of photographs on the table as if she were playing out her life before me: pictures of her as a girl, family pictures, one photograph with Carl Lutz, again a picture together with the chauffeur’s son, a portrait picture of her mother. The look on her face is as if she were seeing the snaps for the first time. Her left hand is placed close to the last of them. She runs her fingers over her mother’s face almost as if touching it.
As if I were not there.
The two of us stay together.
Perhaps what I told her is helping guide her in fingering the features of the face.
Her index finger circumscribes the lines of her mouth then reaches further up along the nose to the eyes.
At times I see a portrait of Vera’s mother as Vera ran her finger over the photograph in exactly the same way.
Ágnes says, Yes, it was good playing with Charles’s son. It made it easier to get through those days — well, then again, we were very small, whereas you were a bit older.
She does not say that we had slept in the same bed, which is what I told her on the terrace of the Muralto Hotel. I don’t suppose she was all that curious about what might happen during a night-time encounter between a boy who was in his fifteenth year and a girl in her thirteenth. Maybe a face from her own older girlhood comes to mind, maybe the touch of another’s hand; the gestures that live inside us can copy on to each other as we sit wordlessly looking at the trees of the park beyond the big terrace, she resting her elbows on the table as she exhales smoke.
Vera is smoking Kossuth cigarettes, her chin resting on cupped hands. We are sitting on a terrace of the Duna Hotel. It is the summer of 1963.
We come face to face in Kigyó Street, just near where the central thoroughfare of Lajos Kossuth Avenue leads on to the Pest end of Erzsébet Bridge. We had not seen one another for eighteen years. She had on a sleeveless blouse with a floral pattern and a light-blue pleated skirt. Her hair was cut short with a sun-bleached wave at the front.
Her eyes were not always so very blue, nor were lips so sinuous. She is not wearing a bra — when she leans forward one can see her small but nicely shaped breasts. She has a son, who right now is at a summer camp. Her husband, an engineer, is away representing his firm in East Germany. She is a secretary at some institution with a lengthy name, and she tells me what it is known for short as if that were any concern of mine.
In Kigyó Street our steps synchronize. The sun is shining directly ahead of us. On the terrace she asks for a Coke. She sets her chin on her cupped hands in exactly the same way as she did sitting by the piano when I tried to play ‘Tango Bolero’ on the keyboard. She lights a cigarette, blows out the smoke, places her elbows on the railing then sets her chin back on her hands.
No, I don’t smoke.
Your mother used to smoke, she says. Every morning in Pannónia Street when we read off a menu all the things we would like to eat and we got down to the Dobos torte at the end, she said that instead of the cake she would rather smoke two Miriam cigarettes.
I don’t recollect that, I said. I asked whether she wanted a dessert now.
Dobos torte?
It was me who asked, wasn’t it? runs through my mind. She exhales smoke and asks again. Dobos torte? That would be really good.
So, I’ll order it, I say. But only if you also have it, she says.
You found it very hard to get used to being my sister, I say.
Yes, it was hard.
Her laugh is shrill, just like when she was a young girl.
Now she is bent forward, stiffening up. She is not looking at me; I can tell that she is aware I can see down the front of her dress as far as her nipples.
You always did read right through the menu, I say finally.
Your mum made me practise the name so that I wouldn’t blurt out my own name if I was asked.
I was aware that Vera’s mother did not survive the war. Nor her father. My parents last saw her mother at Hegyeshalom.
We eat Dobos torte.
Dark clouds are scudding over the Danube from Buda. The waiters are dashing around, collecting the tablecloths before it starts to rain. We go over to a patisserie. A duo is playing, a pianist and a drummer.
Ten years later the Duna Hotel was demolished, or maybe it was only five years. The Intercontinental Hotel is thirty years old and now goes under the name of the Marriott Hotel.
We drink two sibling cognacs.
I can’t recollect which of us said that what we were drinking were sibling cognacs.
I do not dare take her by the hand; it is she who takes hold of mine. She guides it down under the table. Her thigh is skinny, her upper arm, too.
On the fourth floor at number 36 Pannónia Street we lie under the bedclothes in a cold room, the windows of which have been blown out. On the bedspread is Soproni’s duffel coat. We are not hugging each other; there is no room for my left hand so I place it on her thigh. Under her tracksuit trousers are a pair of Mother’s warm, long-legged knickers. Her mouth is by my ear. She is breathing heavily. The drone of an aircraft; it is in diving that the fighter-bombers let loose their bombs. The anti-aircraft batteries by the Comedy Theatre bark out their response.
We down the cognacs simultaneously. There’s something I would like to talk over with you, she says.
I pay the bill, and we set off.
She takes a bottle of Lánchíd cognac out of the drinks cabinet. There is a standard lamp in the corner and two armchairs. We drink the glasses of cognac standing — I would like a sibling kiss, she says. What makes her so purposeful? I wonder. All I see in her eyes is a bright blue. Our lips brush each other’s face.
Yes, Mother warned us to be careful. Someone had said that it was quite certain we were not brother and sister. While Mother was admonishing us I could not see her face in the dark cellar. Would it be better to stage rows? I retorted. Should we have a row twice a day? No, no, not that, Mother swiftly answered. She seemed to be at a loss. Already then she was ten years older than Vera is now.