As if she had been waiting for this, Luca quickly tells me that the girl’s grandmother was her friend, she was a doctor in the ENT Dept at the Charity Hospital on Amerikai Road; she knows it is now Neurosurgery, says Luca. Yes, I know, I say. Oh, of course you still live there, opposite the hospital, says Luca. In 1976, when I am sitting with Luca, I still lived there, at the time it had been for thirty-five years and after that for another twenty-five. The reason I know Luca is that from 1936 until 1945 she, too, lived there at 74 Amerikai Road with her mother, the painter, and her father, a magazine editor who died during the war. My friend worked there in ENT, says Luca, while the girl with the white blouse was outside in the loo; they, too, lived on Amerikai Road; they, too, had amused themselves with her daughter on the KISOK ground; just a minute, her daughter then, in 1944, must have been seventeen, I know that because Attila was still visiting us and still writing poems for me at the time when my friend’s daughter was born, so it was around 1927; anyway, they, too, were taken to the brickworks, my friend was no more than forty and her daughter was at least sixteen, which is why they both ended up in Ravensbrück. It was just pure chance that the over-sixties and under-sixteens were able to leave the marching column that day, I say. I know says Luca, in the same way as it was pure chance that I just happened to be in the wood cellar when the Arrow Cross came at 6 a.m., and I didn’t dare come out, and they forgot to take a look there, so they did not take me away, but they took Mother. Of course, it was equally pure chance, I say, that both I and Auntie Gitta were allowed to leave the column, and I said that to Luca in 1976, when I still knew nothing about Carl Lutz, as the schoolmistress and I are crossing Hungária Outer Circle, so she must be Györgyi, and the fact that I meet her is just as much a matter of chance. Yes, I distinctly remember that, while she was out having a pee, Luca says that the girl’s grandmother, her friend, was taken to the gas chamber, the girl, Györgyi’s mother Klári, saw how her mother was taken away, and Klári’s friend was also taken away, but she got back home to Hungary, she married the fiancé of that friend, gave birth to Györgyi and divorced. She had never told Györgyi what had happened to her and her mother, and she was telling me so that the child would not learn, she was unable to tell her, but she had to tell someone so she was telling me, I was her mother’s best friend, and she had forbidden her to say anything to Györgyi, but it slipped out of my mouth when Györgyi paid a visit last week that you were going to come over to talk about Attila. It slipped out that you were also there in the brickworks, that’s why you had come. Now, it is just possible she will try to ask you about things, but don’t tell her anything, I swore to her mother, what could I say, I didn’t know them then.
The girl comes back into the room.
We leave Hungária Outer Circle. She says nothing, just walks beside me.
You probably also don’t remember, she says at the corner of Mexikói Road, that we came away together from Luca’s, and I asked if you minded me tagging along at least until we were at the hospital where Granny worked.
In Ear, Nose and Throat …
With Pogány as the consultant in charge.
I don’t remember us going together as far as the hospital, but Dr Pogány was the consultant who took my tonsils out in 1941 or ’42, I say.
I need a rest.
I change fountain pens.
I put the Montblanc pen in its place and carry on writing with my Reform.
I write down that I am twelve. I am wheeled into the operating theatre. Blue lamps. I am strapped down. Faces lean over me: an oval bespectacled man’s face; a longish woman’s face. A gauze wax as a gag in my mouth. A narcotic anaesthetic is sprayed on it. The woman asks me to count to ten. A scalpel flashes. I make it as far as six. It is as if bells were ringing like in the ten-minute morning break at school. Where did my voice go while I was counting? I see blue lamps. The woman with the attentive face was that young woman’s grandmother, I think to myself on the corner of Mexikói Road with Thököly Road. That night I dream of the two of us standing on that corner; I also see the face of the lady doctor leaning over me. Cats slink about in Luca’s room. In my dream the girl with the white blouse is not eighteen but around forty, and she puts her full bag down beside Luca’s divan, unbuttons her blouse, unbuttons some more, steps out of her skirt, the hair falling over her eyes as she tilts her head slightly back, she sets it back behind one ear with the fingers of her right hand, the gesture being repeated several times, rather as if it were recorded on film, but in my dream it is repeated by one of the members of a gathering seated around a large oval table. I am sitting directly opposite; the faces of the others are shaded, the face of the person who repeats the gesture as well; I can see the fingers and the strands of hair very clearly, also a white blouse, only not who these belong to, who is repeating the gesture of smoothing the hair back. In one corner of the room a stove of heat-resistant glass is glowing ruddily. This is another room, not the one where they are seated around the oval table. Homespun tapestries on the walls; a set of folk-art furniture; Luca in seated in one of the armchairs; high up there is a blue lamp giving a light like that of the lamp illuminating the operating theatre — I can even sense a smell of ether, but I can see nothing except a leisurely gesture of the hand sweeping the long strands of hair behind one ear.
I even remember, says Györgyi, that when we came away together from Luca’s I asked you what you knew about my mother and grandmother, and you answered that you knew nothing.
I wasn’t acquainted with them, I say, there was nothing I could say. I understand, she says, but I didn’t understand back then. What? Why I could learn nothing about them. Or maybe I did understand, even back then, but I was still not able to resign myself to it.
What couldn’t you resign yourself to? She does not reply. I ask if it was just chance that she had been coming after me? Not at all, she says. I wanted to look for you on several occasions, ever since getting over the feeling that I couldn’t let it go I desisted, but when I saw you in front of the school I was reminded again …
Her look is bright and warm. Once again she throws her head back and tidies the hair from her brow.
Are you still living in this neighbourhood? I enquire. She did not remember seeing me, but I remembered that she had lived in this neighbourhood? After a pause I say that even I could not explain why, but it simply was the case that I distinctly remembered she used to live in the neighbourhood.
She lives in Abonyi Street. Am I familiar with the area, she asks. I don’t know what to say, and I say as much. She says she, for her part, does not understand. I offer to carry her bag, but she declines.
It could not have been Carl Lutz in the Great Synagogue that night. Someone else was distributing Schutzbriefe.
That evening of 10 November 1944 Carl Lutz was reading a report from Red Cross delegate Friedrich Born:
Old people, men and women, young men and girls, but also children staggered slowly on the old road to Vienna, starved, in their columns of thousands. Arrow Cross guards were driving the children along the side of the road. Already early on in this journey of more than 200 kilometres even the lightest baggage was dropped by the wayside … Sometimes shots were heard when overtired marchers were unable to continue. The Vienna Road became a road of dread, and it will probably remain engraved in human memory as the road of hatred. Forty columns of a thousand each were driven towards Germany to their deaths.