He is singing Papageno’s aria from The Magic Flute — that was another opera I saw performed by OMIKE, and very interesting it was, too. Fair-haired and with an oval face, the little girl is entranced as she listens to the singing. I can see many bearded faces. Father has not shaved for a long time now, but he is not sporting much of a beard. He said yesterday that even as a young man he did not have much growth at a time when other boys would be wearing a moustache at the very least. One joke that the other lads played on him in Kiskunhalas was to assure him that he needed to rub chickenshit on his upper lip to make it grow better.
Baritone clutches his hands to his heart and bows deeply. A few people applaud. The fair-haired girl is laughing.
We go out into the stairwell, and I tell him that we have not yet introduced ourselves. I am Gyuri, he says, so I, too, tell him only my given name.
You sang wonderfully.
His eyes are glowing. Now I don’t see them as being dark so much as coal-black.
Papageno was a role Andor Lendvai sang. But there were only two performances. The very last two performances.
I was lucky to catch it, then; I had no idea it was one of the last two performances they gave.
I have lost any desire to talk about the revolver.
The warden and Uncle Laci are still playing chess in the bathroom.
Our roommate, the little girl’s mother, has obtained a jug of drinking water and asks who would like a drink. Uncle Laci says put it away for the children.
The doctor whom I had got to know in the cellar comes out from seeing Évie and says something to Aunt Klári. He reports to Évie’s father that things are fairly quiet in the cellar. There have been no more deaths; the amnesiac is an ex-first lieutenant. You know, he says, he has now withdrawn completely. All he says to anyone is Who are you? and has given his medals away to children.
That’s perfectly in order, says Uncle Laci. At least he’s honest and doesn’t hide the fact that he recalls nothing. The whole country is suffering from amnesia; here no one ever remembers anything, but they put on this act of knowing everything. When he is feeling irascible his words become bitty; his teeth are bad, with some black and quite a few missing. His glasses have only one arm, and he flails them around in his hand.
The doctor returns to the cellar. He says he will give the morning’s injections; he still has two days’ worth of supplies.
Uncle Laci declares checkmate. He says it could be seen to be coming three steps before; it was bound to happen, having the castles in that position was impregnable even if two lesser pieces were brought into play. He picks up his notebook and lists for the warden’s benefit the bad moves he had made, telling him that he himself had been looking at sequences three moves ahead. If you commit an error, then you should be working out the moves from there, he says. You assessed your position badly, so your sequence of moves was also bad.
The warden says that the game was still open up to the pen-ultimate move.
Poppycock, says Uncle Laci. You didn’t see what led to the pen-ultimate move; you have to look for where the mistake began. If you don’t locate that, then that means you’re heading for the end from the very start.
This isn’t physics, Laci, it’s chess, says the warden.
Rubbish, my friend. Of course, it’s chess. If it were physics you would long be dead. Rematch?
They set up the pieces again.
We have a hard time getting to sleep. The little girl on the other bed is crying. She is hungry.
I dream that I go up to the fourth floor in a trio with Gyuri and Vera. Gyuri steps over to the window, looks down and says, The city is miraculous, like a stage, and there seems to be artificial snow falling, see. He points down to a piece of scenery with a river painted in blue. I’m singing Papageno. Vera undresses and catches cold; she will be ill. I can’t leave her and I clasp her to me. She loops an arm round my neck and presses her pubes against mine. More, that feels so good, she whispers in my ear.
I awaken to hear the girl crying again. Her mother gives her a biscuit. I am alone on the couch; Vera is lying beside Mother. I can’t see Father anywhere. My underpants are wet. Everyone is looking at me. Mother, the little girl’s mother, the little girl herself, only Vera is turning away. I go out into the bathroom and rinse my underpants.
Morning arrives.
The warden and Uncle Laci are again playing chess.
XIV
I tell Györgyi on the telephone that perhaps it’s best if I leave a copy of the most recent section of my manuscript at the porter’s lodge at the school as I am going that way anyway.
She is silent.
Does that suit you?
Do you want to go over the area yet again?
Now it is me who does not reply.
We’re good at falling silent together.
Like being connected.
I am making progress alongside the block of memories. When I read through the draft for the first time I made notes on the text, but I don’t know why I note things down again.
I decide to search out the first set of notes and place the current ones next to that. The gap between the two dates may reveal something about the difficulties of storytelling. While I think this, it seems to me that the interval between the two dates is more important than the actual date of 1944 that I again note down while transcribing the text.
Clearly, though, it does not exactly make my situation easier that the importance of telling this story forces itself out in front of the story itself.
I hand over the large envelope to the school porter.
The teacher had already mentioned it to him. He’ll pass it on to her straight away.
I continue on my way towards the Praktiker DIY Store. Just before the sun was still glowing red, but now the valley is getting dark.
I board a tram and travel as far as the corner of Bem Quay and Halász Street where the cyclist had knocked me off my feet. I take a stroll upriver as far as the Erzsébet Bridge where I board a number 7 bus. I glance at my watch in front of 76 Amerikai Road then go on towards the old KISOK football ground, the underground tram depot. I did the journey in eight minutes according to the clock at the next corner between Dorozsmai Street and Dorozsmai Lane, although my own watch says a different time.
The wristwatch used to belong to Father. Mother gave it to me after he died in 1953, and I have worn it ever since.
The route we took was Mexikói Road then Thököly Road.
I note down the time shown by the main clock at Keleti Railway Terminus.
Again there is a disparity of two minutes when compared with my watch.
Yet more clocks are to be seen in the shop windows, billboards and the hotel entrances in Baross Square in front of the station — each one points to a different time.
I can well remember that the big clock on the corner of the Outer Circle, in front of the National Theatre by the number 6 tram stop, was visible from the marching column.
The clock in that position now is smaller. According to the hands on the clock the time disparity is growing; by the time I get down to Lajos Kossuth Street on my way to the Pest end of the Erzsébet Bridge it has changed again, now decreasing.
The clocks’ mechanisms cannot be reconciled with what the hands are showing.
I go into a watchmaker’s, who checks the watch for two days. He says that over that time it has gained five minutes. He resets it.
I set off again.
I try to conjure up within me the bygone feelings of that bygone route. It does not work. It is not what was experienced in the past that preoccupies me but once again the disparity between the times on different clocks.
I am travelling around the city in a time that is not appre hensible in the act. Fő Street under Buda Castle. Bécsi Road. I take a number 1 tram upstream as far as Árpád Bridge and the corner of Váci Road, at the Pest end of the bridge in the XIIIth District. At the József Attila Theatre I take a taxi then from the Pest end of Margit Bridge. I go on foot to the Dohány Street Synagogue. I have a look to see which office has its signboard by the side entrance in the entrance doorway to the OMIKE hall of yesteryear, not far from the memorial to Carl Lutz.