For me, however, that all-pervading roar is the authentic.
I don’t have a pipe to fiddle with to help me ponder enigmas. I do not even have a full tumbler of whisky on which to sip as I launch off on the mysteries. Prints of marvellous Impressionist paintings are hanging on the walls of the corridors, but it is certain that behind them there are no hidden doors behind which I might find reference maps.
Time loses its measurability. There is no point looking at my watch; I am walking in a broader space — time. I can hear scraps of conversation from the ground floor, words from behind doors. I descend the stairs, and the young doorman next to the reception desk greets me in Hungarian. He knows a few words in ten languages in which he can guide the hotel’s guests. Two cameras are being taken into the staterooms. Some people are carrying crates.
I go back to the first floor; someone steps out of each room, some complete strangers. Elderly ladies in straw hats, young men in jeans, polo-neck jumpers, two-pieces, Adidas trainers, stiletto heels. Ágnes appears in the doorway of room 10. My own is room 4, and I need to ask her when she first read Carl Lutz’s diary. Was it while her step-father was still living, and if so did she ask any questions? If so what were his answers?
I can’t see Ágnes, although only just now she was on her way downstairs.
I go back down the stairs and enter the main lobby.
On the left is some Flemish furniture. This may be where prime ministers drank their coffees in 1925. A piano near to a double glass door leading on to an enormous balcony. A twenty-something blonde girl in white shorts and a red jumper is standing in front like a statue. Two elderly gentlemen in armchairs covered with gold-coloured silk upholstery are in conversation, holding glasses full of mineral water, beside the huge oval negotiating table; one is wearing britches, the other white gaiters.
Ágnes is seated on a Thonet bentwood chair in the far corner; it is a long walk across the hall to reach her, with my path being blocked by a group of tourists that must have just arrived but already wish to see the historical paraphernalia and are obscuring Ágnes. By the time I reach the far corner I do not find her, so I go out and hurry along corridors, opening doors to look in rooms, imagining at each turning that I can see her in front of a door, but by the time I reach it she is nowhere to be found. It is as if I am wandering around a haunted castle, albeit one I’d been to before, although maybe I’d read about a castle like this, an enormous, incomprehensible building in which nothing is what it seems: the hotel’s walls extend beyond the park, the gravelled paths, the lake, the mountain peaks, as if the location were appearing on a screen and is inaccessible. It is reflected. As if my presence has also been manufactured.
A door slams behind me, another opens in front. Writing pad in hand, a continuity girl arrives in jeans, white blouse, a black waist-coat, blonde hair cascading on to her shoulders. We agree in English that the recording won’t be starting tomorrow morning but at two o’clock in the afternoon. Yes, of course, I can come in a leather jacket. Leone will pose the questions in French, Anna will translate my answers into Hungarian, and in the technical unit a Hungarian— Italian interpreter will relay a translation into Leone’s earphone.
I ask why all that is necessary. The master copy will be in Italian, she says, but Anna only speaks Hungarian and French, which is why Leone will pose the questions in French, which therefore — Understood, I say — Anna will translate for my benefit. The continuity girl takes me by the arm. There are now seven of those with whom I arrived sitting in the main hall and, of course, Ágnes. I don’t understand why I ever looked for her on the first floor. Leone, the editor-reporter, offers me a seat and tells us what he is looking for from those who have been invited. He is polite and gives advice. A camera operator studies our faces; he is also preparing for us, as if we were actors following the director’s instructions — as if everyone was obliged to re-enact what had happened to them, that’s what they are expecting from us. I am the youngest. Among us there is an 83-year-old woman who met Carl Lutz and has recollections of the meeting yet still ended up being transported to Auschwitz. He is going to ask about Auschwitz, Leone says, as solicitously as it is customary to ask a star actress to produce her own wonderful, inimitable style out in front of the camera.
It is no longer the eight of us survivors, as we are being called, who are listening to the instructions, preparing to meet the crew’s demands. I ask Anna straight away to go ahead and translate for Leone my interjection specifically that we not be considered survivors but witnesses. Leone nods and thanks me, but it seems as if he doesn’t get the difference. It may have been obscured in translation; perhaps the ground between the two categories is unbridgeable. Anyone can be a survivor, I say, both the victim and the executioner, whereas a witness is one who preserves, does not remember, does not accuse, does not defend, does not forget. Oui, oui, oui, oui, Leone nods. The director of photography is moving about between us. One of the ladies starts talking about how she was shoved into the line of people who ended up in the gas chamber at Ravensbrück, that she was able to avoid being gassed, and Leone would like her to stop her — better tomorrow, in front of the camera — but the words are now tumbling out of her. Anna is forced to translate, and I feel I have already read something similar to what the old girl is telling us — another elderly lady, not the one who was in Auschwitz. The story is familiar, much as if I had written it myself, so this evening I will put in a telephone call to Györgyi. Now it was me who has had to travel, but I will be back in Pest in five days’ time. Everyone is interrupting everyone else; everyone is recalling something from their own history; and Leone is forced to declare that we shall continue tomorrow in front of the cameras, but right now we have to move to the next room, where, one after another, we are sat in a big armchair: sound check; lighting check. We are puppet figures; it is not we who will be present with our fates, our stories, but what the moderator appearing on the screen will later refer to as history, and just as Leone is incapable of understanding the difference between a survivor and a witness it will also be left obscure to viewers. At Györgyi’s number only the answering machine picks up. I’m phoning from Locarno, I say to the machine. I see the elderly lady who is speaking about Ravensbrück and can’t be stopped, not even by Leone’s gentle hint. I see her very slowly raising her right hand — the gesture seems to take hours — defensively before her eyes. Is that because she is being blinded by the light, or she does not wish to see what she is remembering? A hand-held camera is working without instructions; maybe the cameraman already sees the picture on his viewfinder: an old lady screening her face.
An hour later I redial, and now there is another prerecorded message on Györgyi’s answering machine; perhaps she had come home in the meantime and heard mine. Thanks. I’ve read it. It’ll wait is the outgoing message, which can only be intended for me. I must have given her the telephone number of my hotel room in Locarno, although I can’t imagine why I would have bothered, as a telephone call would be expensive. I wonder where she has kept my manuscript — on a chest of drawers, next to her family snaps, or on the bedside table to be read before going to sleep, in nightshirt or pyjamas, or maybe she only keeps her knickers on, maybe she sleeps naked. Why do I suppose that she concerns herself with me at all? From the tone of her voice, I suppose, the recorded message she left was more than just those few words, as if they also denoted solidarity, curiosity, interest and not just the one to whom the text was addressed. Of course, why wouldn’t she be preoccupied with how I describe her.