Die Walküre for the first time in my life. The book — Thomas Mann’s The Blood of the Walsungs—was about Die Walküre, as its very title divulged. I began reading it in the hope that I might learn something about Die Walküre from it, and I put the book down in a shock of amazement, as if I had learnt something about myself, as if I had read a prophecy. It all fitted: Die Walküre, the fugitive existence, the distraughtness — everything. I ought to note here that between first receiving Die Walküre, my first engulfment by Die Walküre, and my first engulfment by this little book, years — suffice to say, years full of vicissitudes — had passed; so, in order to clarify my assertion that “it all fitted,” I shall be obliged at this point to digress slightly, to give at least an outline of the circumstances in which I was living at the time, all the more so that I too may find a steady bearing in the weft of time and events and not find I have lost the thread of this story, the story of the Union Jack. This book—The Blood of the Walsungs—came into my hands after my wife-to-be and I, with the assistance of a good friend of ours, one fine summer morning traversed half the city, from the former Lónyay, then Szamuely and today once again Lónyay, Street with a four-wheeled tow cart on which were piled, to put it simply, the appurtenances of our rudimentary household. This happened in the nick of time, since the lodgings in Lónyay (or Szamuely) Street that my wife-to-be and I had been inhabiting had by then started to become unbearable and uninhabitable. I had become acquainted with my wife-to-be in the late summer the year before, just after she had got out of the internment camp where she had been imprisoned for a year for the usual reasons — that is to say, no reason at all. At that time, my wife-to-be was living in the kitchen of a woman friend from earlier days, where the woman friend had taken her in — for the time being — because somebody else happened to be living in my wife-to-be’s apartment. That somebody else, a woman (Mrs Solymosi), had taken over the apartment under extremely suspicious — or if you prefer, extremely usual — circumstances immediately after my wife-to-be’s arrest, through the intervention of exactly the same authorities who — essentially without any verifiable reason, indeed on no pretext at all — had arrested my wife-to-be. Practically the moment she learned of my wife-to-be’s release, that somebody else (Mrs Solymosi) immediately requested my wife-to-be (by registered letter) to instantly have the furniture my wife-to-be had unlawfully stored in the apartment that rightfully belonged to her (Mrs Solymosi) removed to the place where they were currently lodged (which is to say, the kitchen of the woman friend from earlier days who was taking her in for the time being). When later, thanks to a protracted legal action, but above all let us just say to unpredictable circumstances — let’s call it a stroke of luck — my wife-to-be got her own apartment back, we discovered, among some abandoned odds and ends, books, and other junk, pegged together with a paper clip, a bundle of paper slips covered with the pearly letters of a woman’s handwriting, from which I don’t mind quoting a few details here, under the title of, let’s say, “Notes for a denunciation” or “Fragments of a denunciation,” purely as a contribution to a legal case-study or even to an aesthetics of the disaster, as follows: “She has lodged various complaints against me at the Council and the police, that I illegally moved into the apartment and stole hers … She imagined she could scare me with her slanders and I would give up the apartment to her … The apartment has been allocated definitively; there is no space for her furniture in my apartment … Furniture: 3 large wardrobes, 1 corner couch, 4 chairs … She should put them into storage, I am under no obligation to keep them after what is already 1½ years …” There follow a few items of data that would appear to be reminders: “17/10/1952 application, 29/10 allocation, 23/11 apartment opened up, inventory taken, 15/11 move in, 18/11 ÁVH [State Security], Council = ÁVH, ÁVH 2x — no response, Rákosi’s secretariat … In September of 1953 Mrs V. [i.e. my wife-to-be] Mrs V. a.m.… Asked her by reg. letter to remove furn … Have to keep my own furniture in cellar because I’m looking after her stuff … Her wardrobes are crammed full of dirty clothes, under ÁVH seal, they can’t be aired … She claims she doesn’t have an apartment and is staying as a guest with somebody. Does that mean she doesn’t need the things in the wardrobe? The woman puts on a good act and is quite capable of sobbing, if required, but I’ve had enough of that and I won’t tolerate her furniture in my apartment any longer—.” So we had had to spend the disaster winter that lay before us, which was ushered in at the very start by temperatures of twenty to twenty-five degrees below zero, in various temporary shelters, including the aforementioned kitchen of the woman friend from earlier days, a spare room of distant relatives surrendered on a very explicitly temporary basis, an exceptionally charmless sublet room, made especially memorable by its ice-cold latrine on the outside corridor, and so on, until a miracle — admittedly, all too temporary as it turned out — in the shape of Bessie, a former snake charmer and her Lónyay (or Szamuely) Street sublet apartment, dropped into our lap. It doesn’t matter in the slightest now how and why this miracle occurred, although it would be wrong to leave out of this story — the story of the Union Jack — the earthly mediator of this heavenly miracle: a grey-templed gentleman, known as Uncle Bandi Faragó in the cafés and nightclubs around Nagymező Street, who, somewhat flashily for those times — the disaster time — and the occasion — the disaster — used to dress in an aristocratic green hunting-hat, a short sheepskin coat and English-style tweeds, whose face glowed with a permanent suntan even in the deathly pale winter, and besides that allegedly pursued the exclusive occupation of a professional conman and adulterer, as was indeed confirmed decades later when, from a newspaper bought out of sheer absent-mindedness (since the so-called news was of no real interest), I was silently and genuinely shocked to learn about his death in a well-known common prison, where, allegedly, a permanent cell, his slippers and a bathrobe were set aside for him even during the days that he spent on release; and who one afternoon, in one of those cafés around Nagymező Street, one of those cheap, noisy, draughty, gloomy and filthy cafés with music which, since the state, though holding them to be iniquitous, at least heated well and kept open until late at night, had become an illicit day-and-night shelter for outcasts and in which my wife-to-be and I were, so to say, temporarily residing much of the time instead of in our temporary residences, suddenly came up to our table, and, really without any prior or more direct introduction, declared, “I hear you’re looking for lodgings, my lad.” Then to my apathetic admission, which ruled out all hope in advance: “But why, dear boy, didn’t you come to me?” he asked in a tone of such self-explanatory, such deep and uncomprehending reproach that, in my shame, I was lost for words. Later, after we had gone to the imparted address in Szamuely Street, where the door was opened by a lady, getting on in years and — as Gyula Krúdy might have put it — of statuesque figure, with yellow forecurls peeking from under her green turban, the face slightly stiffened by heavy makeup, and wearing a curious silk pantaloon besprinkled with magical stars and geometrical designs, who, not content with a verbal reference, did not allow so much as a toe into the hallway until she had glimpsed the message written in Uncle Bandi Faragó’s own hand on Uncle Bandi Faragó’s own calling card; so when this lady led us, my wife-to-be and me, to the room that was to let, a spacious corner room with a bay window, the dominant furnishings of which were a decidedly oversized divan big enough for at least four persons, a mirror placed in front of it, and a standard lamp with a shade plastered with all sorts of obsolete bank notes (including the million- and billion-pengő denominations that had been in currency not so long before) that gave a mystic lighting effect, my wife-to-be and I did not doubt for one second the original purpose to which the room had been put, and it seemed most probable (and at once a clue to the miracle) that around that time, in that era of denunciations, the room’s intended purpose — who knows, perhaps due to a denunciation that just happened to be pending — did not, all of a sudden, to be concise, seem expedient. Things may have changed by the spring, but during that winter we had the chance to peek into our landlady’s past: we could see her as a young woman, wearing an ostrich-plumed silk turban, with a giant speckled snake coiled around her naked back, in some nightclub in Oran, Algiers or Tangiers, which there, in that Lónyay (i.e. Szamuely) Street disaster-sublease, struck one as indeed quite extraordinarily implausible, and we could handle and ritually marvel at a profusion of relics which were every bit as implausible; later on, however, the snake charmer became despondent, and it was apparent from her increasingly consistent demeanour that, above and beyond the hostile feelings towards people that naturally arise in one as time goes by, she was not guided so much by the random targets of that transcendental antipathy as by palpably down-to-earth goals: she wanted to regain her room, because she had other, presumably more lucrative, plans for it. I shall try to skip the details as rapidly as possible, for I can only relate those details in this spirit, the spirit of formulability, which is by no means the same thing, of course, as the real spirit of those details, which is to say the way in which I lived and survived that reality; and this nicely illustrates the iron curtain that rises between formulation and being, the iron curtain that rises between the storyteller and his audience, the iron curtain that rises between one person and another, and, in the end, the impenetrable iron curtain that rises between a person and himself, between a person and his own life. I woke up to all this when I read those words: “… he saw her love and distress, and he knew: so life must be to be creative.” Those words, all at once, awakened me to my life; all at once, I glimpsed my life in the light of those words; those words, or so I felt, changed my life. That book which, from one second to the next, swept away the haze of my formulations from the surface of my life, so I might see that life, all at once, face to face, in the fresh, startling and bold colours of seriousness, I discovered in the new (that is, repossessed) apartment — absolutely out of place, absolutely implausibly, in the manner, as I remain convinced to this day, of a miracle that spoke to me alone — among the forgotten odds and ends, the above-mentioned denunciation slips and, thumbed to tatters, several volumes of pulp, shock-worker, partisan and romantic novels, the latter of defunct imprints. That book, so I felt, marked the start of the radicalisation of my life, when my way of life and its formulation would no longer be able to stand in any sort of contradiction with one another. By then, the time when I had been a journalist, or even a factory worker, had already long gone; by then I had committed myself to my seemingly boundless, but also supposedly boundless and intentionally boundless studies, being able, thanks to a congenital ailment, to absent myself from my occasional jobs for months on end without running any immediate risk in the meantime that my mode of existence would, in all likelihood, qualify as a crime of so-called “publicly dangerous work-shyness.” At that time all this completely preoccupied me, producing in me a sense of exaltation, of