mission. I suppose it was then that I became acquainted with the experience of reading, reading for nothing in particular, an experience in no way comparable with the experience of reading as it is generally understood and designated, the sort of reading bouts, or mania for reading, which might overcome a person at best just once or twice in a lifetime. Around that time there also appeared a book by the author of The Blood of the Walsungs, a volume of essays, in which there was an essay on Goethe and Tolstoy, whose chapter titles alone—“Questions of Rank,” “Illness,” “Freedom and Eminence,” “Noblesse Oblige,” and the rest — were enough in themselves almost to dumbfound me. I recall that I read this book all the time and everywhere I went; the essay on Goethe and Tolstoy was tucked under my arm all the time and everywhere I went: it was with me when I boarded trams, went into shops, wandered about the streets — and so also, one especially fine early afternoon in late autumn, when I set off for the Istituto Italiano di Cultura per l’Ungheria, the Italian Institute of Culture, where at the time, in my boundless thirst for knowledge, I was learning Italian, and during my passage across the city I registered, indeed, here and there, even participated, at least as an astounded spectator, in the intoxicating events of a day that was later to become memorable, a day that I or anybody else could hardly have guessed would turn into that particular memorable day. I was, I recollect, somewhat surprised when I turned off Múzeum Boulevard into the otherwise normally deserted Bródy Sándor Street, hurrying towards the nearby palace of the Italian Institute, which had originally been built as the one-time Hungarian Parliament. The lesson, however, started at the normal time. After a while, the street noise penetrated into the room even through the closed window. Signore Perselli, the finicky, jet-black-moustached direttore, for whom, on his rare visits to lessons, it took no more than a blatantly clumsy pronunciation of the word molto to be excited into demonstrating how it should be done with Italian fluidity, with the initial “o” closed and the final “o” short, the intervening consonants being articulated with the tongue drawn back, almost like saying “malto,” on this occasion burst into the room in genuinely frantic haste to exchange a few no doubt diplomatically apprehensive words with our teacher before scurrying on to the other classrooms. A minute later, everybody was at one of the windows. In the slowly gathering dusk I could clearly see that on the left, towards the front, green rockets were being launched from the Hungarian Radio building above the heads of the darkly milling crowd of protesters there. At that very moment, from the opposite direction, three open-topped trucks turned into the street out of Múzeum Boulevard; from above, I had a good view of the militiamen with the green markings of border guards who were seated on the benches, rifles squeezed between their knees. On the back of the first truck, leaning against the driver’s cabin, stood a lieutenant, evidently the commander. The crowd fell quiet, opened ranks, then roared. It is quite unnecessary here for me to evoke the manifestly pathetically affecting words that they started to shout to the soldiers down below, words which only at that given moment, that elevated moment of pathos, were able to exert an effect of genuine pathos. The trucks slowed down in the dense crowd, then came to a halt. The lieutenant turned about and raised an arm aloft. The last of the trucks now started to back out of the street, to be followed by the other two, amidst jubilation from the crowd. At this moment, we who, from an Italian diplomatic viewpoint which held itself to be above and beyond all this, had no doubt suddenly become unwelcome guests, capable of who knew what sort of emotional or other manifestations, were ordered to gather downstairs, beneath the long, neo-Renaissance vaulting of the entrance. The heavy, two-leafed gate was bolted from the inside with iron bands. There we squashed together, between the sounds assailing us from outside and the security guards standing by behind us, until the Institute’s burly porter, evidently on some signal, swung the iron bands back and swiftly threw open the gate though which each and every one of the sixty to eighty of us, on a vigorous shove being applied from the rear, found ourselves, in a trice, deposited outside on the by now twilit street, in a vortex of buffeting sound, swirling movement, ungovernable passions and inscrutable events that teemed between the buildings. In the ensuing days, my attention was divided between the essay on Goethe and Tolstoy and the events that raged outside; or, to be more precise, the cryptic and unformulable promise that inhered in the essay on Goethe and Tolstoy, in the gradual comprehension and eventual acceptance of it, was linked in my mind, in a strange but quite self-explanatory manner, with the equally unformulable, similarly uncertain but, at the same time, wider-ranging promise inherent in the external events. I cannot say that the events that were stirring externally diminished my interest in the essay on Goethe and Tolstoy: to the contrary, they height-ened it; on the other hand, I also cannot say that while I was totally immersed in the world of the essay on Goethe and Tolstoy and the spiritual and intellectual jolts of that experience, I also absent-mindedly paid occasional attention to the events that were stirring in the street: no, that is not what happened at all; I would have to say instead, however strange it may sound, that the events stirring in the street vindicated the heightened attention paid to the essay on Goethe and Tolstoy; the events stirring in the street during those days thereby bestowed a genuine and incontrovertible sense on the heightened attention I was paying to the essay on Goethe and Tolstoy. The weather turned autumnal; several quieter days ensued; down below on the street, of course, but especially on looking out from the window, I could see how much the street had changed: detached overhead tramway cables snaking between the rails, dangling bullet-riddled signboards, smashed windows here and there, fresh holes in the peeling stucco of the houses, dense throngs of people on the pavements of the long, long street, all the way up to the distant corner, and very occasionally a vehicle, a passenger car or lorry, tearing by at great speed, with some highly conspicuous distinguishing marks, the more garish the better. A hurtling jeep-like vehicle suddenly appeared, with the British red-white-and-blue colours, a Union Jack, draped over the entire radiator. It was scudding at breakneck speed between the crowds thronging the pavement on either side when, sporadically at first but then ever more continuously, evidently as a mark of their affection, people began to applaud. I was able to see the vehicle, once it had sped past me, only from the rear, and at the very moment when the applause seemed to coalesce, almost solidify, an arm stretched out hesitantly, almost reluctantly at first, from the left-side window of the car. The hand was tucked into a light-coloured glove, and though I did not see it close up, I presume it was a kid glove; probably in response to the clapping, it cautiously dipped several times parallel to the direction in which the vehicle was travelling. It was a wave, a friendly, welcoming, perhaps slightly consolatory gesture which, at the very least, adumbrated an unreserved endorsement and, by the by, also the solid consciousness that before long that same gloved hand would be touching the rail of the steps leading down from an aircraft onto the runway on arrival home in that distant island country. After that, vehicle, hand and Union Jack — all disappeared in the bend of the road, and the applause gradually died away.