We don’t say goodbye at the gate.
The warden goes first.
Gyuri is carrying both buckets in his left hand, his right hand thrust in his pocket. The physicist seems to be explaining something to Father, gesticulating as is his habit, with the buckets dancing around in his hands. Father is nodding.
Aunt Klári gives Mother a kiss. Mother says we had better go up and not leave Vera on her own. Aunt Klári gives instructions to the guards in a voice that’s steelier than the warden’s. There are four guards on the gate, and their leader salutes her with a hand raised to his beret. Yessir! he says to Aunt Klári.
Vera is playing paper-scissors-stone and allowing the little girl to win occasionally and rap her on the knuckles. Clever girl! You win, she says. The little girl has a very serious face while she plays. She does not get angry if she fails to hit Vera’s hand; she is very attentive. She’s got good reflexes, says Vera, her voice like an adult’s.
In the vague hope of being able to see Father and the other three from the window I go up to the fourth-floor apartment that we vacated. I cannot see them. They may well have already reached József Katona Street, perhaps just turned into it. The roof of the Comedy Theatre is smoking. In Tátra Street the upper storeys of the houses are alight. A platoon of soldiers is drawing back from the direction of Csanády Street by St István Park. As far as I can see, a Hungarian officer is yelling orders to a mix of Germans, Hungarian regulars and Arrow Crossers. Two German panzers arrive from the Outer Circle, behind them a few SS with submachine guns, about half a company of police and gendarmes blazing away from gateways. The tanks are firing rounds of shells.
I go over to the other window of this corner apartment from which I can get a view of both Pannónia and Főnix Streets. A thin strip of the riverside houses is also visible above the rooftops. Far away in the distance, on the Buda side of the Danube, is the castle. One of its wings is in flames. It seems the entire city is smouldering. A fighter-bomber swoops in so low that I can see the pilot for a few seconds. It is being fired at from Margit Bridge and crashes after being hit.
I can’t tell if the underside of the sky is ruddy from fires behind Castle Hill or the sunset.
A dense cloud of smoke is floating above the Comedy Theatre and is spreading over the whole city.
The reddish light in the west is not caused by flames; it’s different. Flames flicker, whereas this light illuminates everything, casting a ruddy glow on the smoking house roofs and being reflected from the walls in the twilight. Burning roofs could not be playing in such a purple colour. Where is the sun? Where can that all-illuminating light over the ruins still be spreading from? I can hear the scuttling of rats from over in the corner of the room; they have come up a fair old way to get here; they have not contented themselves with the sewers, cellars and stairway passages. Sounds can be picked out better in the all-illuminating twilight, otherwise I would most certainly be unable to hear the scuttling of the rats for the detonations and rattling of machine guns. It’s as if everything were becoming brighter yet, meanwhile, the smoke is swirling more densely around everything and ruins are piling up on ruins, as if something I am seeing now that I had never understood was suddenly comprehensible; as if the piling up of ruins on ruins were the goal, which is incomprehensible and yet, if I nevertheless grasp that this is the point of it, I may perhaps make progress. This evening while we are playing chess, or even if there is no chess game, I am going to talk this over with the physicist. I would like to tell him that here, at the window, I have a feeling that I have seen a bit of what he said about the beginning and end of things meeting. He had been explaining something of the kind to the warden. In my mind I don’t call him Uncle Laci but the physicist. One has to begin at the beginning: I think that is what he was explaining. Although who can know? No one can know where the beginning is. So it’s not just me; others are also ignorant of where the beginning is. That does not set my mind at rest. There’s no point in seeing the end if I can’t find the beginning, only the fact that we are in it. If there were an opportunity I could say this nicely to the physicist; everything around me is so familiar, I am so much in it. The machine-gun barrel of the German panzer is rising, the turret revolving, the machine gunner cannot see up here. He fires a burst. A fragment from the wall bounces on to my hand, and my wrist starts to bleed, so I tie my handkerchief round it. It is not painful.
More than an hour has passed since they set off with the buckets.
I find no one in the apartment on the second floor; I dare not look in on Évie’s room, but Vera and the little girl are snuggling up to each other on the landing. Vera has cracked lips. The little girl is sucking a small piece of iron. She says she was given it by her mummy. Vera asks her for it, carefully wipes it on her coat, then she, too, starts to suck it.
The apartment was not unoccupied after all. Both Mother and Aunt Klári were in Évie’s room.
Two hours have passed since they set off with the buckets.
Mother gives me a hug;. I can’t see her face in the dark.
Aunt Klári suggests we should move down to the cellar, as the firing is very intense; she will stay upstairs with Évie.
Vera says that she would not like to go down into the cellar.
A lot of people are seated on the stairs.
There are yells for Aunt Klári from downstairs. I can hear thumping on the front door and race up to the fourth floor. Many houses in the street are on fire. I lean out and can see there are two Arrow Crossers pounding on the gate, letting a burst fly and running away towards the Outer Circle. I dart down to the gate. Aunt Klári is making her way up. I tell her that two Arrow Crossers fired at the door but ran away. She says fortunately no one was injured. I go back to the fourth floor.
There has been no news from the water carriers for three hours now.
I do not want to be near Mother. I do not want her to say something. I do not want to try to say something to her. Vera is getting on well with the little girl and the piece of iron which they are taking turns to suck.
Three hours is easily enough time for them to have returned with the buckets.
Three hours is easily enough time for them to have got back.
Three hours is three hours.
I am not alarmed.
Anything can happen at any time — that knowledge is part of me. No one can deprive me of it. I cannot forget it; it is so much a part of me that if I did then I would forget myself.
I need to look for Mother. It could be that she is already down in the cellar.
The house is under fire.
One of the walls of the house at the corner is collapsing.
Vera and the little girl will surely be sucking the piece of iron in turns.
Later on I’ll give the little girl the conch shell that is hidden in my haversack. It may appeal to her, and she will forget she is thirsty for a few minutes. Maybe she will sing into it. The little girl and her mother resemble each other. I noticed straight away when I first saw them that have similar countenances, but — how can I put it? — the mother’s face seems like a child’s and the little girl’s like an adult’s.
I can hear submachine-gun bursts coming from the Danube bank.
The blood has soaked through my handkerchief over the wound made by the splinter.
I lean out of the window.
Two people are running from József Katona Street, dangling buckets as they run. Only empty buckets swing as easily as that.
Two people are running towards our gate, not four.
I race downstairs and slip, knocking my knees. I limp. I kick an old woman who is sitting on the turn of the stairs. Beg pardon. There are yells at every hand, yelling on every floor, yelling at the cellar door.