I stroke her eyelids with the palm of my hand and kiss her cheek.
That was a sibling peck, she says contentedly, eyelids closed. That was so nice, come on again, like that, more, more …
Ágnes occasionally makes notes while I talk about my memories of her stepfather, sometimes making notes even when I am not actually speaking. She takes it as natural for me also to make notes sometimes in the lobby on the diplomats’ table.
I note down that Vera experienced the joy of being able to forget when she was finally freed of the memory of her mother’s look. That’s what I tell Ágnes; yes, Vera and I were older than you and the chauffeur’s little boy. Vera was already having her periods.
She blushes.
Sorry, excuse me, I say. That truly does not belong to this discussion. Oh, goodness me! she says. Did her parents come back?
No, they didn’t …
What became of you two?
We were children … we drifted apart …
Vera’s only surviving relative was a great-aunt. She lived with her until she was twenty-one. I had to break free from her somehow, she says. She married her husband one week after meeting him.
She kneels on me. She moves slowly on me, then speeds up. She closes her eyes, I close mine.
Almost thirty years later Ágnes seems to be watching with interest as I make notes. After all, she is not exactly unfamiliar with what I am jotting down, how, at the time of meeting Vera again nearly twenty years after everything that had happened and sharing with one another what it was possible to share while we made love and clung to one another’s lips, we inhaled time into ourselves and sucked it out of each other, negated it. After all, Ágnes with her gentle smile is also wrestling with time, although in no way showing that for her, too, that was a struggle.
Thank you, Vera said again when she was lying beside me. I was dying to tell her how I had seen her body when she was a girl. Little beads of saliva appeared at the corners of her lips while she listened. My memories became part of her memories, the way we talked was as if she really did have an older brother and I a younger sister. The roles that had formerly been adopted out of necessity became a playground, even though both of us knew it was not that. When saying goodbye we had the feeling that everything repeats itself, although the fact that her mother’s gaze had robbed her of the chance of being able to find herself or that we should treat each other as siblings would not be repeated.
My first-floor room is in the left wing.
I stroll along red-carpeted corridors. In the hall are armchairs with plush blue covers, art deco mirrors and wall lamps.
The first shoot commences at ten o’clock tomorrow morning. There are seven of us from Budapest. Ágnes will be the last and would like to hear each interview from start to finish.
Without Carl Lutz those who will be recalling their memories in front of the cameras would not have been in a position to recall anything at all, although it would be wrong to keep the role of blind chance completely out of the picture — the unpredictable, perhaps the momentary hesitation of a black-jacketed submachine gunner. An example in my case is the fact that on seeing the two approaching submachine gunners on Francia Road I put my arms round Vera and pushed her against the wall as if there were no opportunity to snog anywhere else. What I gather from Ágnes’s expression on the terrace is although she, too, had been invited to conjure up her recollections, for her that was the least important aspect — it was more as if she were on a pilgrimage in our company.
We are called survivors. That was how we were introduced to the recording crew. While roaming the corridors the conviction grows in me that, although I was briefed that the moderator of the discussion was going to use that term, I have to object to it. It is not a role in which I care to be cast. I am not a survivor, I am a witness, and perhaps my role when I am in front of the camera is to say a few words about the difference between the two. I have a certain acquaintance with the ways in which any story can be shaped, including what we refer to as history, with the cooperation of primped and war-painted, generally platinum-blond moderators, with their striped neckties or black polo-neck pullovers.
Dust and silence.
The plush blue covers have a rather faded hue; the frames of the mirrors and wings of the doors are drab. It gives an impression that the Grand Hotel has very much the look of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A pair of eyes staring uncomprehendingly at those coming in through the door. I wonder what sort of stories befell its new guests in that future, in relation to which diplomats’ tables, ministerial fountain pens, dinner jackets, uniforms, ladies’ fans and the waltzes struck up at soirées signified a by-now irrevocable past.
As I see it, Ágnes is stuck at the same junctions as I am. Maybe she also feels that at times like these one has to decide which way to take. She knew her stepfather as a kindly, bespectacled gentleman. As his stepdaughter she lived with him for decades in a cosy, secure atmosphere, yet she may well be wondering what he was really like. On the terrace of the hotel she had mentioned that his diaries might probably be most helpful to those who had not lived in close proximity with him, had not seen him in family surroundings as she had and thus were not compelled to confront the picture that emerges from the texts of the diaries.
I think Ágnes was alarmed by everything that Carl Lutz wrote about the indifference of Swiss diplomacy, the transgressions that he had recorded, and for decades she was unable to bring order, in speaking about it, to what was fact and what might, perhaps, be attributable to Carl Lutz’s pique. Ágnes, as I see it, possesses moral readiness, and that spurs her to explore and preserve a past that might not be her own, it is true, but from which she cannot free herself, it being her fate to follow in its footsteps.
Carl Lutz cannot have been active at number 36 Pannónia Street at the end of December 1944, she says, because he was not in a position to undertake any trips to cross from his place in Buda to the Pest bank.
But he had to be there.
It is quite certain he could not have been there, she says.
Does Ágnes know about something else?
Was Gizi remembering something else?
I am standing on the first floor of number 36 Pannónia Street, haversack on my shoulders. Those who are forming up in lines before the house report back that a black Packard with a diplomatic licence plate from the Swiss Embassy had pulled up.
By then we were in the cellar, says Ágnes. Nor were the telephone lines working then.
I go back across the first-floor corridor of the Grand Hotel. At the time Ágnes was all of six years old, so how could she have such an accurate memory?
If I press the brass door handles down one at a time, step through the twin-leaved doors of each room and were to find no one in the rooms or the lobbies, the staterooms or perhaps even behind the reception desk, I seem to hear the noise of steps from all quarters, snatches of conversation, a humming coming through walls from left and right, up and down, that is similar to the roar from the old conch shell. I keep it on my bookcase, never did give it back to Uncle Róbert or even say a word to Mádi; indeed, it did not come to mind even when she visited my place last autumn, as it is now such an integral item among my belongings, its roar, even without lifting it to my ear, is like the noise of the city merging with that of the trees in the City Park, of the sound of the trees in our garden when covered for winter, not so much the sound, or even the sigh, that goes with my breathing — the noise I sense emanating from all sides is that kind of humming. There are eight of us guests, everyone with their own story, the members of the television crew handling them like Etruscan vases, finds stored in the depths of archives, fraying folios, with delicate movements of the hand, with the fingertips, eight of us out of the multimillions. I don’t know what the others think. I am aware that only the director, the editor-reporter, the two interpreters trans lating from Italian to French, the diligent camera operators, the sound engineer and the assistants think that anything can be authentically invoked only in the question-and-answer game.