His voice strikes me as hard and rasping; so does Dezső Ernster’s. He was forty-five. He set off on his globetrotting career from Germany in 1923. Until Hitler’s accession to power he sang in Berlin, then after that, until the Anschluss, in Graz, then ‘for a few years he lived in Budapest’, it says in the Encyclopaedia, whereas from 1945 he was on the staff of the New York Metropolitan Opera.
We stumble between stacks of chairs piled on top of one another. The stage curtain is ripped.
Time relays the voices; it contracts, expands, has dimensions, raises barriers, constructs channels, prepares an open road to Lendvai’s rasping baritone, to Ernster’s soft-grained bass and to stage and screen actor Oszkár Beregi’s ‘to be or not to be’, so let us leave time-related questions, they make no sense, because time is always present tense; in the past present of the past tense many past presents are superimposed on top of one another, and in the present of writing down I hear these voices together with the sound that, holding Vera’s hand, I hear as I push ahead in the dark. I shall have something to say later to Vera and Mádi about these singing voices, sensed as being pursued, among the broken fragments of chairs that are piled up in the corner, but for the time being I try to get my bearings in the enormous space of the Great Synagogue. Everything is dark except for a few candles flickering by the Ark of the Covenant.
There are several hundred of us: men doing forced-labour service, immobilized older people, children of five or six. Everyone is searching for someone; everyone is calling out names. Those doing forced labour will be sent on further tomorrow morning — perhaps to western Hungary, perhaps Germany. Doctors are allowed to pull on Red Cross armbands. The dying are laid beside the walls. The candles in front of the Ark of the Covenant burn down. I enquire from some of the men on forced-labour service about my older brother and uncle, occasionally shouting out their post-box number. Everyone has heard something. My uncle’s unit had boarded railway freight cars at Rákosrendező Railway Station, which used to exist in the XIVth District, but it was possible that this train could not be sent off because Russian troops had closed the lines. My brother’s unit had set off on foot three weeks before from Bustyaháza, heading for Germany, and some of them managed to escape at Kassa. Vera would like to sleep. A man over by the Ark of the Covenant asks for quiet. Next to him is a military officer who fires a pistol shot in the air. The man distributes unfilled Schutzbriefe among the forced-labour servicemen.
Someone says it is Carl Lutz.
A rabbi joins them, the shadow of his figure in his vestments falling on the Ark of the Covenant.
I can see that shadow now better than the fourteen-year-old boy could in the dark. I close my eyes in order to seek him out, although, of course, it is not possible to write with eyes closed. It eases his position that he is able to vanish in a crowd; his movements are not weighed down by my acquaintances. He cannot know that around that time, maybe even on that very night in early November 1944, the last group of Jews was gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Germans began systematic elimination of all traces. The last 204 men of the Jewish Sonderkommando, or Special Detachment, who had been working in the gas chambers and crematoria were shot so that no witnesses would be left.
It could not have been Carl Lutz who stood in front of the Ark of the Covenant that evening.
It is as if someone were watching.
As if it were not just me making this journey of discovery but also someone else.
As if while I were searching for the tracks of the fourteen-year-old boy someone was accompanying my steps.
That there were three of us.
It gives a new dimension, let me put it that way, to this chronicle of the investigation.
I walked from the Praktiker DIY Store to Vörösvár Road. I wait at the terminal for the number 1 tram. Someone has been following me since I set off from the store.
Although the reason for my making the journey is because I am supposed to be the tracker.
I have encircled in my imagination the places where fifty-eight years ago, if memory serves me right, I once lined up, stood about or sat down on my knapsack; in my imagination I could chalk around the places where I had been present, in the same way as detectives mark the position of a corpse on the asphalt or the cobbles of a car park. I might as well mark the whole city and not just the traces of the steps with which, by now there is no doubt about it, someone is following me. I check behind but can see nobody. There may be more than one of us sleuthing, and someone is more cautious than me and I cannot identify them. If I were writing a story I might make so bold as to venture that the fourteen-year-old boy is watching, whose presence I have just recorded at various crime scenes in my imagination. There is room in a story for that, too. We create each other, the describer and the described, it’s just a matter of which one is which. In a story they may even be interchangeable, but now it is not about an event, at best the story of a reconnaissance, and even if the fourteen-year-old boy and the person making their way to the terminus of the number 1 tram do correspond with each other, the event and its reconnaissance are nevertheless not the same.
More puzzling than that, someone really is following me.
Why did I have the feeling that it was the schoolmistress, even though presumably she took her customary route home from the school?
Still, it is worth noting that in that case she, too, must have tramped from Praktiker to Vörösvár Road on foot. I had paced what amounted to the distance between two tram stops because I wanted to note a few bits of information about the houses and shops on either side of Bécsi Road, but why did she not, lugging a full bag with one arm as she was, take a number 17 tram to get to Vörösvár Road?
We get on the number 1 together. I find a free seat near the rear platform. She is further off in front of me. She does not look behind her.
At Thököly Road I get down at the back; she at the front. She stops. Waits.
It is as if both of us had been charged with following the other. Might we truly be simultaneously observers and observed?
She is around forty. White blouse, close-fitting jeans. With her free hand she sweeps her shoulder-length auburn hair aside from her brow. It could be that behind me her husband is approaching. This is where they meet for him to take the full shopping-bag from her. Or maybe she spotted an acquaintance, and that’s why she’s waiting. Maybe her lover — this is a spot where they can rendezvous for a few minutes. I don’t look behind me. I stand beside her. She does not look behind me; she looks at me.
You don’t remember me, do you?
I am at a loss for words.
She tells me her Christian name; says that she is only telling me that because that was how she introduced herself the last time we met.
The single-storey house in which I met Luca twenty-six years ago had been in ruins. Four cats. As if nobody had cleaned the room for years. As if Luca had smeared powder and lipstick on the make-up she had worn as a girl. As if she were wearing her mother’s moth-eaten cardigan.
She introduces her daughter as her girlfriend: Luca was sixty-five; the girl eighteen. A freshly ironed white blouse, a pleated skirt with a floral pattern. She was seated on the divan like someone who was afraid to get up because she would be unable to locate her place again on the same hollow between the protruding springs when she wanted to sit back down. I had been talking with Luca for a hour, and no longer about the time she made the acquaintance of the poet Attila József, where the three of them had strolled with his mother, a painter, whom I supposedly told in the Óbuda Brickworks, so Luca said, which row to she should move to. The eighteen-year-old girl in the white blouse finally gets up, with the springs in the divan twanging, and she goes out, presumably to the toilet.