It would be wrong for me to leave her an escape route.
My stern voice sounds like a duty policeman who has brought a perpetrator to the station. It startles even me that my voice is like that; it startles her, too. It fills her with satisfaction, but then what sort of solution is she thinking of? Why does she presume that there is a solution to find?
The shape of her face also seems to have altered, acquiring angularity. The chin juts forward; the eyes are drawn together. I had never noticed she was that tall. She has a shrill voice as well. She thinks I don’t know a solution is not possible — thinks I don’t understand that it is not possible either for her or for that man about whom she is writing?
I ask her what makes her think that I and the person in the manuscript — whom I call the seeker — are different? She tells me to stop playing games; I know she is a specialist in literature and history.
She asks what I would like to drink, vodka or cognac? That’s all there is, she says in a still-sharp tone.
Whatever you’re having.
She pours out two cognacs. She downs her own drink with an unpractised action, a few drops are left on her lip and roll down to her chin, but she does not take out a handkerchief. Seeing that I have spotted the drops on her chin she wipes them off with her wrist.
She calls me over to the window and points down at the street. Opposite is the edifice of the old gymnasium that I attended, as did her mother — the boys using the entrance in what was St Domonkos Street,12 the girls an entrance in Abonyi Street. She says this is the apartment my parents lived in. That is the first time she has used the expression my parents. When only she and her mother were left, when she was a girl, she would stand at the window waiting for her mother to get back home. Since then, whenever she looks down at the street it passes through her mind that her mother is crossing the road and carrying two shopping-bags. She had been out at the cemetery, she says, visiting her mother’s grave. She had also had her grand mother’s name engraved on the gravestone with the year of her birth, the fact that she had died a martyr’s death in Ravensbrück with, as she puts it, the customary text: ‘Her memory is preserved here’. She had also paid a visit to Luca’s grave, which is badly neglected. She had bought another bunch of flowers at the cemetery gates and taken that back to place on it.
I tell her that I wanted to have Bőzsi’s name added but had not decided on which memorial site to have it engraved at.
We talk about Bőzsi as if it were about a common acquaintance.
She is sipping a second glass of cognac. She takes off the waistcoat and laughs. Her chest heaves; her breasts are bigger than I had imagined.
She asks if I really did meet Vera later on, and did what I described really happen.
I thought that would engage her attention. The two cognacs had helped her to ask the question.
Let’s be clear about one thing: it’s a novel.
So, do I exist, or did you just invent me?
I say that when we alighted from the number 1 tram at the corner of Thököly Road she had been like a shadow following me, although had it not been for her I would never have got as far as I had got.
That’s brilliant. I haven’t been a shadow before.
I look at her the way she is looking at me. Through her expression I see the face of the girl who, tears in her eyes, reports to her at the gates of Ravensbrück that, in the view of a fellow pupil, it had all been put up at a later date.
In other words, you did go to bed with Vera?
What are we talking about now?
In an impassive voice she says that, among their various traumas, it can surely come as no surprise, can it, that she had been troubled. Luckily she herself had never had problems with achieving orgasm, but it was not to be discounted that her mother might have, although of course they had never talked about that.
I ask her why she is telling me.
Maybe you need information like that as well.
That may be, but you are talking about it like when an assistant impassively but audibly reads out the case histories to a sex therapist and counsellor in the waiting-room.
Tell me, by what right are you sticking your nose into my life?
I get the vague idea that it was you who asked me to.
Only you are making things public.
I’m sorry about that, but the sort of thing I do is attended with that risk.
All the same, on what basis?
Why, are you not sticking your nose into my life? Anyway I have brought the photographs that you posted to me.
Keep them in case you still have need of them.
But from what you just said I got the impression that you didn’t want me to make certain things public.
So what if I did? I am more curious about why you kept very quiet about certain things that are very much my business.
That was a long time ago, and at the time Luca made me promise. I had forgotten all about my old notes, and I dug them out only when we met.
She goes to the bathroom. She has washed her face and applied lipstick when she comes back. In my gymnasium there was a physics master who was the spitting image (that’s what she says) of your physicist in Pannónia Street. Even down to the way he would gesticulate during lessons and the way he held his spectacles by one of the arms. And, by the way, I thank you for everything, she says.
What are you getting at?
Everything, like I said. I have tried telling my students that it is necessary not only to concern ourselves with what we don’t know but also with what we know, whether we really know it. Only now I think differently, and I am afraid.
Would you stick your nose in?
What I am afraid of is that someone who has an insight into ignorance and poor knowledge will be ostracized — whether they are Jewish or not. They don’t know why, but they sense that person has an insight and they are afraid of that, and what I am afraid of is that they are afraid of me. Aren’t you afraid?
Sure I am.
What do you do then?
I try to think that the worst thing is being afraid of myself.
I don’t understand you.
Well, when I forget something I don’t forget it, but I pretend I forgot it.
You don’t forget anything.
I’m not sure about that, but I see you are well read up on me.
I see you are surprised that I’m familiar with Hungary’s history.
What are you driving at?
That I know it is not just being a Jew that’s hard.
Her eyes were never tearful when she spoke about her mother and grandmother. I can well imagine that she would sing the national anthem along with her students at ceremonies to mark the start and finish of the school year and high days and holidays.
You may think it is nonsense, I say, but I also thank you for everything.
What in the blue blazes for?
For the blue blazes of being so trusting with me.
Is that what you sense from what I just told you?
From that, too …
Fair enough, but I suggest that we drink no more cognac.
Do you have any vodka?
At last she laughs.
I never thought of myself as being as you describe, and maybe I’m not.
I would be grateful if you would go to number 36 Pannónia Street and look at the old cellar.
So you don’t want to use me just as a shadow but as a tracker dog as well? Do we need to go together?
No, I would like you to go on your own. Everything vanishes. Even the cellar cannot be what it once was. Gradually everything vanishes: not just people but objects, memorials. I have faced up to that, and it would also do you good.
Her expression is mocking, like that of students who have heard her say the same thing umpteen times before.