Ágnes protested, fearing she could not express herself well in Hungarian. She was eight years old when Carl Lutz married her mother and moved away from Hungary. As she listened to what I had to say to her it was like she was listening to an incredible story, since the recollections that had stayed with her from when she was six had been preserved more like a nightmare, an endless cellar gloom, an endless series of detonations, an endless night is what she called it, and although even as a young girl she had then heard from her mother and later from Carl Lutz many things about what happened, as she put it, that was a quite different matter to having a conversation on the terrace of the Muralto Hotel about fate and history, about the eternally recurrent phrase in Lutz’s diary of I never could comprehend how it happened. Ágnes did not herself put it in this way; I helped her to find the words. She protested again, but it pleased me that I was able to find a way for her to express her own fate, having lost her Hungarian over the years. It was important for her to know what happened to me — as she put it, I want to understand my life. Simple words, I thought, and it was not just through lack of practice in Hungarian that she had been unable to say it that way — quite possibly she would be unable to express it so even in German — how she realized that she wanted to understand her life.
Anna must be in her forties: an oval face, harassed features, notebook and pen constantly in her hands. Although she rarely writes anything down, she translates fluently. Leone sits next to her, opposite me, near to the camera. Leone reads out his questions leaning towards her ear; she seldom asks him to repeat and concentrates on the questions that are to be interpreted, yet I still get a feeling she is more interested in what I say and as if what interests her more than my answers is how I look, just as I am more interested in the way Anna, and Leone behind her, look than in the questions that are being asked.
Anna’s glance oscillates in the time that opens up during her task: it is too big a gap for it to be navigable without effort, as if she could see only what just happens to be being spoken about at the moment. Only what just happens to be being spoken about at the moment, I note down on the balcony in the afternoon light after the first shoot. The shadows are lengthening on the sward of the park. Only what just happens to be being spoken about, I write, underlining the only in retrospect.
I write speedily, not always employing all the accents and punctuation marks which are called for in Hungarian.
Two figures are strolling hand in hand on a path separating the tennis court from the park. The man has on a pair of ducks and a polo-neck jumper of flame red with blue stripes, the woman a white linen skirt and flame-red jumper; they are emerging from under the leafy boughs of the park. The woman opens her yellow-and-white-striped parasol; a gardener in a straw hat is sprinkling the lawn.
I ask Anna to repeat the last question once more, and that request throws her into confusion. She may think she did not translate it accurately as she looks back and consults with Leone, but the thing is I understood what she said perfectly well and simply wanted to gain time before answering. I can see the other members of the crew are paying attention; they sense that the sudden pause might be of significance, and the man with the hand-held camera sets off towards me. Anna repeats the question. In what way does the figure of Carl Lutz live on in me. Would I try to describe it?
Now the followed and follower swap places inside me.
In no way. I make an effort to ensure my facial muscles do not betray the fact that I feel a degree of triumph.
Leone confers again with Anna. Anna says that Leone told her I mentioned earlier I had met Carl Lutz several times. That’s true, I say, only at the time I did not know it was him; someone said he was an envoy from some neutral country, that was all that was said about him at the brickworks and also in front of children’s home on Mihály Munkácsy Street and later at Pannónia Street. I also recalled his car as being a military Adler, but I had just now heard from Ágnes Hirschi that it was a Packard, and I would be correcting that in hindsight in the manuscript of my novel. What he is asking, says Anna, is that I try to evoke my recollections of the person about whom I found out in retrospect was Carl Lutz.
The game is now in my hands.
I pretend to be deliberating at length.
The hand-held camera is turning, no doubt trying to catch my features as I attempt to evoke the figure of Carl Lutz.
It is impossible to accomplish that, I say as I watch Leone’s face, because I have seen such a great many photographs, and I am familiar with the descriptions of him, so inevitably my picture of him is built up on that basis. At times like this one’s memories are also changed; the original is lost and what dominates is what others have fixed in position — it may resemble the original, but really it is a copy. I am taking care with my every word; that requires more concentration than is needed for the evocation of memories. I set out my position. One summons the private detective; one wants him to tell one what he knows. What has he found out that officialdom does not yet know? That is one of the problems, I say. One has to free oneself from the received image; one has to try to look into the unknown and find out what lies behind the obvious.
I sense that my tone, albeit involuntarily, is provocative. I hope the unseen synchronous interpreter who is speaking my words in Italian into Leone’s ear is not driving that home with its emphases. Leone is nodding.
Anna says that Leone understands what I am saying, so let’s move on. The next question, says Anna, is how do I imagine the final meeting between Carl Lutz and Adolf Eichmann went? A scene in the screenplay deals with that meeting, and actors will play Lutz and Eichmann.
For me, too, that posed an insoluble problem in writing the novel, I say. According to the information at my disposal it was years later when Lutz himself recalled the meeting, so in other words even his own diary cannot be considered a truly authentic point of reference, because even that diary was written by someone who was looking back; one has no idea of what sort of mood he was in or what he knew on the evening he wrote that entry, but as to who Adolf Eichmann was in reality, it is quite certain that when they met Lutz cannot have known about Eichmann’s past record, no way. Eichmann had the advantage: he knew more about Lutz than Lutz did about him, but there is no doubt that it was a case of two thoroughly professional officials confronting each other.
Anna says that Leone does not understand this and asks me to explain it more fully.
There are a lot of people standing behind the crew, but who are they?
One is the official of death, another of life, I say, and both of them understood their jobs very well.
It is as if what we try to evoke always gets lost. As if everything ends up under the dominion of the present, and remembering is not remembering, the attempt to evoke something not an attempt to evoke something. As if everything that happened was annihilated by precisely the attempt to evoke it.