I abandon any idea of finding any logical correlation between the various times. I have made notes on the disparities between clocks in the street and the shops, made notes of the discrepancies between what the hands of my own watch show in the John Bull Pub on Vadász Street, the Andrássy Hotel on Mihály Munkácsy Street, in Nagyfuvaros Street, at the porter’s lodge of the hospital on Szabolcs Street and at the corner of Pannónia and Csanády Streets.
Using fibre-tipped pens of different colours I map out the route that lives in my memory and the routes I have covered over the last three days. Each colour signifies a different time zone. The lines are layered upon one another, and that modifies the original colours.
In this way the different times form a shared space. That shared space is my city, able to accommodate the gazes of both cyclists, Mother’s gaze as she waves from the column leaving the brickworks, Vera’s long unseen face, even my old duffel coat, the face of the watch-maker as he says about Father’s wristwatch, It’s still a marvellous Tissot watch to this day, sir. As far as I can see it’s a series made right after the war or more likely pre-war, I’d say. The space of unsynchronizable times also includes Györgyi’s gaze as she reads what I have written and no doubt feels what I felt when I wrote her into the story. I note down that I am not going to go to the Ruszwurm café. I shall not order a coffee, so I can more easily conjure up Gizi’s gaze as she brings the coffee in person and sits down for a few minutes next to Mother.
I shall have Bőzsi’s name added to the memorial wall in the Jewish cemetery next to the New Public Cemetery on Kozma Street, out to the east of Pest or else on a plaque in the garden of the Dohány Street Synagogue or else among the many thousands of names in the Holocaust Museum and Memorial Centre on Páva Street — that’s what is left for me.
My city is constricted to a labyrinth mapped with coloured fibre-tipped pens, even though in my sensations it is expanding. As the drawing is completed I see edifices that have become ruins behind their magnificent façades, empty streets in the cover of an Outer Circle crawling with people, drains stuffed full of corpses in the shadow of splendid underground stations, hordes of rats in place of cars. I find it interesting that my sense of being at home is not changed.
I note that there are facts, documents and sources that represent real resources: my preserved letters. After fifty-eight years it would be fitting to study what I had to say — those really are the words of a fourteen-year-old boy. The written form might also provide an opportunity for drawing conclusions, but I am well aware that the interpretations of sources in themselves raise matters of the interpreter’s point of view, the methods of archiving and the drawing of conclusions.
Györgyi telephones. Her voice is unsure. I have a feeling she has found some pretext for calling off our meeting, but she does not consider it to be an appropriate pretext, and while she is holding the telephone receiver she is trying to dream up something else.
When I called her from Locarno I supposed that perhaps she was unable to separate herself from the written simulacrum of her or what she imagined about her mother’s history from the way I had written it nor me even from the fourteen-year-old boy.
When and where can we meet?
Whatever suits you, I say. It could be the Andrássy Hotel, the one you couldn’t make last time.
She gives me her own address as her preference.
Perhaps that was what had made her sound so hesitant, the thought of what I would have to say about that.
The gates to Miklós Radnóti Teachers’ Training Gymnasium can be seen from a second-floor window of the house on the corner of Abonyi Street and András Cházár Street. I attended the school there for eight years, when it was called the Jewish Gymnasium, but after the First Jewish Law of 1928 tightening the Numerus Clausus of 1920, which restricted the university entry of Jewish students, many, myself included, chose to call it the Abonyi Street Gymnasium.
Even now I can smell the sweaty reek of the sawdust-strewn gym hall as meanwhile I watch a Volkswagen Beetle driving where, in December 1944, Vera and I, hand in hand, stealthily slipped from Francia Road towards Mihály Munkácsy Street.
While I was drawing my various routes with the coloured fibre-tipped pens I felt the same sense of being at home at most points of my city, but I am not satisfied with that way of designating it — it lacks a sense of how a feeling of being at home and not being at home can go together.
In Györgyi’s hallway there is no man’s hat or slippers. It would not be right for me to go through things in her bathroom to check whether there were two toothbrushes on the shelf.
Györgyi is wearing jeans, a white polo-neck and a denim waistcoat. There are a lot of photographs on a chest of drawers. An oval table and six chairs, large and small sideboards, glass cabinet on the wall between two windows. I don’t ask if the furniture had been her mother’s; that would be superfluous. Dining-room suites like that aren’t produced any longer.
On one of the photographs are her mother and father standing in a garden with arms around one another’s waists. Her father is taller than the snap taken on the terrace by the lake in City Park: he is in a freshly ironed shirt, white trousers and white shoes, as if he were getting ready to play tennis. It seems she obtained two copies of the photograph of her mother and grandmother standing in the gateway of a house in winter coats marked with yellow stars. I can now see that her mother at the age of sixteen looks older than in the other photograph, which must have been taken at least five years later.
She brings my manuscript in from the other room, carefully closing the door behind her as if she were safeguarding there something of herself that she keeps fenced off from others; there is no entry there, not so much as a crack left in the door. That is presumably where she read my manuscript.
She would like to ask me about several things but not now. She feels it is not yet time for that, she says.
I can relate to that as I feel the same. With some things one has to wait for the right moment, I say. I can see she surrounds herself with photographs.
It is a tactless challenge, my voice is even a touch aggressive, but she smiles. She does not find it hard to say, in a voice that mimics my own aggressive tone, Yes, with photographs, but you knew that already. You could have been ready for that, given what you wrote about me.
What she was thinking of, she says after a slight pause, is that she was coming out of school. It was hard to bear passing in front of a block of memories on a daily basis. Every day she went to the tram stop along the road on which her mother and grandmother had been made to line up.
I can’t understand why she is laughing. It is not a hysterical laugh.
I ought to forget it, she says. The time has come for that, hasn’t it? There are times when it does not come to mind even if I am beside the stone block, but then what comes to mind is precisely the fact that it is no longer coming to mind. She ought to be relocated to a school in, say, Zugló. Yes, that would be more practical from the point of view of travelling if she were to teach in a nearby school. Of course, it might be, she repeats, that getting transferred would not alter anything, but it might be a solution all the same. What did I think?