Or else it was your first encounter with a religious experience.
No, I don’t think it was a religious experience; mystic, but not religious. Incidentally, I feel the same way about these things to this day: I’m prone to mystic experiences, but dogmatic faith is totally alien to me.
But surely the purpose of religion is precisely to mediate mystery in order that one partakes of the mystery.
You may well be right, because religious feeling in my view is a human necessity, regardless of whether a person is religious or not, whether or not one is a member of a religious community; indeed, whether one believes in god or not.
And do you, for instance, believe in god?
On the spur of the moment, I can’t give you an answer; not that it matters, because I harbour a natural religious sentiment the same as others; after all, one feels obliged to be thankful to somebody for this life, even if there happens to be no one who would be able to acknowledge those thanks.
I would gladly dispute that, but let’s move on. The …
Forgive me for cutting in, but I never finished what I was going to say about the Nellies. There was another Nellie who was very fond of taking me out in the free air, though now that I think back on it, that was more than likely on account of a suitor of hers. I seem to recall some sort of uniform that would pop up in the background, then hastily vanish before Nellie took my hand to set off home, though I couldn’t say if it was a tram conductor’s, a policeman’s, or a soldier’s. That took place somewhere behind the grounds of the Ludovika Military Academy, in Népliget — the People’s Park. As we neared the fairground booths, my ears would be assailed from a long way off by the crackle of music coming from the loudspeakers that were slung up from the enormous trees. They would pour out the hit songs of the day, like “In Toledo two times two is four / To be in Toledo you just have to adore …,” or “Fine-cut is a top-notch pipe t’baccy / My chum won’t smoke anything that’s wacky …,” and the like. In front of the puppet show there would be a row of rough-and-ready benches on which would be perched a similar audience, many children, too. I was quite capable of watching for hours as László the Valiant beat the Devil about the head with an enormous frying pan, so it was no problem for Nellie to slip away from beside me. My other favourite was Susie Cabbage, who would tell jokes on a tiny stage nearby, but rumour had it that she was actually a man, which rather put me off. That, anyway, was how those afternoons in the People’s Park were spent.
What strikes me listening to you spinning these yarns is how it seems to have been a never-ending summer in the vicinity of Tömő Street, except for the one wintry afternoon when one of the Nellies took you to church.
That’s an astute observation. And the reason it may appear so, to you as to me, is because over the summer holiday I used to spend half the time with my father, as I have already said, and until he married Katie Bien, he lived with my grandparents. They, for their part, were in their businesses all day long, my grandparents in their shop, my father in his lumber store.
Your mother and father had divorced by then …
Maybe not as yet, but they had separated.
How old were you at this point?
Four or five, but even later on I used to spend half the summer with him up until I was ten, when my father found a place on Baross Street, still in Józsefváros, at the corner with what was then Thék Endre and is now Leonardo da Vinci Road.
And you have no memories of the holiday weeks you spent with your mother?
Of course I do. Mother always took me out of the city to some bathing resort. My strongest memories are of Erdőbénye and Parádfürdő.1 It’s hard to believe now, but those were then well-heeled, upper-middle-class spas with first-rate hotels that after the war were converted into “trade union holiday centres” and other institutions serving functions of that ilk, and then they were run down to the ground. Once, when we reached Erdőbénye, Mother had something still to sort out at the travel agent’s, and I spotted the dried-up bed of a stream nearby. I was curious about what there might be there and, broken loose from my mother’s proximity as I was, I started to run, then I slipped on a rock and slid down the steep bank into the channel of the stream and the rocks lining it. That limited our diversions, because for at least a week my cuts had to be dabbed regularly with iodine and the dressings changed. But look here, these anecdotes can be of no interest to anyone, me least of all.
In that case, let’s cut back briefly to Tömő Street, because you have said nothing about your grandmother.
No, I haven’t, but then there’s not much I can say about her, poor thing. By the time I came into the world, the youngest of the Hartmann girls had become a cantankerous old biddy. She was fat, hard of hearing, had trouble with her blood pressure and she continually complained either about her health or how they had “come down” in the world, with reference to the “palmy days.” Grandfather endured that without a word, even though it must have been most depressing; however, he would occasionally chide her with a “Zelma, you’re always groombling” — like that, pronouncing the “u” as “oo.” She would sometimes be overcome by bouts of lovingness when she would be all over me, smothering me with kisses, after which, as I recall — children can be horrid — I would wipe my face.
So, let’s pass from Tömő Street to Molnár Street and your maternal grandparents.
I never actually visited the place in Molnár Street; I only know the address because I heard about it from Mother.
In what connection?
She would sometimes bring up the subject of her young days; Molnár Street must have been a nightmarish memory for her. It was the crampedness of the space above all that stayed with her like some sort of claustrophobic memory.