But that wasn’t the whole story. At first sight it seemed everyone was dizzy with the drink the Nazis had stored in the cellars of hotels and restaurants and had no time to drink on their stampede to the west. You’ve heard the stories survivors tell of major airplane disasters or shipwrecks, how they find themselves marooned on some mountaintop, then, after three or four days, the supplies run out? Soon everybody — all those ladies and gentlemen with proper manners — is sizing each other up, speculating on each other’s edibility. You know the film The Gold Rush, where that little funny man with the toothbrush mustache — Chaplin, I mean — is being chased round and round the cabin in Alaska by that enormous prospector because the big man wants to eat the little man? There was that kind of madness in people’s eyes, the way they looked at things, the way they talked about there being a bit of food here or there. That was because they had made up their minds, like the survivors of a shipwreck, that one way or the other they would stay alive, even if it meant eating other people. They stowed away whatever could be stowed, wherever they found it.
I had a glimpse of reality after the siege. It was like having a cataract peeled away with a penknife. It took my breath away for a moment, it was all so fascinating.
The Bastion was still alight when we staggered from the cellar. Women were dressed like crones, in rags, covered in soot, hoping to escape the attentions of the Russian soldiers that way. The smell of death, the corpse smell of cellars, rose from our clothes, from our very bodies. Everywhere you went, however near or far, great fat bombs lay by the sidewalks, belching smoke. I walked down the wide avenue past corpses, fallen masonry, and useless, abandoned armored cars. I saw the frail skeletons of wingless Rata planes. I made my way through Krisztinaváros toward the green at the Vérmező. I wasn’t quite steady on my feet, because I was dizzy with fresh air, with winter sunlight, with simply being alive … But I plodded on like ten or twenty thousand others, because there was already an improvised bridge over the Danube. It was a hump of a bridge, a camel’s back. The Russian military police had rounded up a group of workers to build the bridge in under two weeks, under the direction of Russian engineers. At last, we could move between Buda and Pest again. Like everyone else I rushed to cross the bridge to Pest, because I had to get to Pest at any price. I could not stand being where I was anymore, not the way things were.
What was it I couldn’t stand? Was I desperate to see my old house? Of course not. I’ll tell you what.
The first morning the bridge was up, I rushed to Pest because I wanted to buy nail-polish remover at my favorite old drugstore in the city center. No, I’m not mad. It was just as I told you. Buda was still in flames. The tenement blocks of Pest were full of gaping holes. I had spent two weeks rotting in a cellar in Buda, along with a crowd of men, women, and children, with people starving and screaming around me, where one old man died of fright, and where everyone was filthy because we had no water. But in all of that, in all those two weeks, nothing tortured me so much as the thought that I had forgotten to bring my nail-polish remover into the shelter. When the last air-raid warning sounded and the siege began, I moved into the cellar with my nails painted bright red. And there I stayed with scarlet nails for two weeks, while Buda was falling around me. My scarlet nails had gone quite black with dirt.
You should know that even back then I had scarlet nails. I was a proper girl-about-town. I know men don’t understand this, but what I was most worried about during the siege was not being able to hurry over to my favorite old drugstore in Pest where they sold good peacetime-quality nail-polish remover.
The psychiatrist who charged me fifty pengő per visit for the privilege of lying on a couch in his surgery three times a week and talking dirt — I did it simply because I did everything befitting a middle-class lady — he would most certainly have explained to me that it wasn’t filthy nail polish I wanted to wash away, but uncleanness of another sort, the dirtiness of my prewar life. Well, maybe, but all I knew was that my nails were black, not scarlet, and that I had to do something about it. That’s why I hurried over the bridge at the earliest possible opportunity.
Once I reached the street where we used to live, a familiar figure hurried past me. It was the plumber, born and bred in the district, a decent older man. Like many others at the time, he had grown a gray beard so that he might look like a proper granddad, someone on his last legs, hoping this might prevent him being carted off to forced labor in Russia, as far as Ekaterinburg. He was carrying a big parcel. I was delighted to recognize him as he was passing. Then suddenly I heard him shout to the locksmith who was living in a bombed-out house on the other side of the street:
“Jenő, run down to the Central Market Hall, they still have stuff there!”
And the other man, the lanky locksmith, shouted back, croaky with enthusiasm:
“Glad you told me. I’ll get straight down!”
I stood at the edge of the grass of the Vérmező for a while, gazing after them. I saw the old Bulgarian wino who used to supply the richer houses with firewood for the winter. He emerged from another bombed property and carefully, almost ceremonially, lifted up a gold-rimmed mirror the way the priest raises the host when we celebrate the resurrection. The mirror flashed in the sparkling late-winter light. The old man was proceeding along reverentially, raising the mirror in such awe, you’d think the good fairy had given him the finest present of his life, the thing he had secretly longed for ever since he was a child. It was obvious he had just stolen it. He walked through the ruins in perfect peace, the one great winner in the lottery of life, spotted in the very moment the prize was announced. His stolen mirror made him the luckiest Bulgarian in the world.
I rubbed my eyes for a second, then an instinct took me over to the ruined building he had just left. The door was still there, but instead of the stairs a pile of rubble rose toward the next level. Later I heard that this old Buda house had been hit by over thirty bombs, shells, and grenades. I knew some people who lived there — a seamstress who occasionally worked for me, a vet who looked after my dog, and, on the first floor, a retired high-court judge with his wife, with whom we had sometimes had tea in the Auguszt, the old Buda patisserie. Krisztinaváros, unlike the other Budapest districts, was always more like a small provincial Austrian town than a suburb. People spent years there in cozy security or moved there in search of cozy security. Once there, they made their quiet, gentle vows — vows without any ulterior motive or even meaning — to be respectable members of the class of pensioners and middle-class families who had struggled their way to this haven of modest prosperity. Those who found their way here from below adopted the restrained, respectful manners of the older residents, including the plumber and the locksmith … Krisztinaváros was one big law-abiding, well-spoken, middle-class family.
The people who lived in that house, the house from whose ruins the Bulgarian emerged clutching his stolen mirror, were like that. He hurried from there, just as the plumber and locksmith had done. They were all encouraging each other to get busy, because the party wouldn’t last forever, because, for now, Buda was in flames and there was no police, no order. And somewhere down at the Central Market Hall there might still be something that hadn’t been pinched by the Russians or the rabble.
“Glad you told me. I’ll get straight down!” The words rang in my ear. It was like a song, like the voice of a street urchin or a cry from some seething underworld. I entered the familiar house, climbed the pile of rubble to the next level, and found myself in the apartment where the judge and his wife had lived, in the middle room, the parlor. I recognized the room because my husband and I had once been invited by the old couple for tea there. The ceiling was gone, a bomb having fallen through the roof, dragging the upstairs apartment’s parlor with it. It was an utter mess — roof beams, tiles, fragments of window frames, a door from the apartment above, bricks and plaster … then pieces of furniture, the leg of an Empire table, the front of a cupboard from the Maria Theresa period, a sideboard, lamps, all swimming in a shallow dirty liquid.