Farther along, a two-lane road ran between the parliament building and the river, but there was no sidewalk, so Harkályi stayed close to the small, stone ledge along which a guardrail prevented him from falling into the river. Three feet below him, driftwood and dead birds populated the crevasses of jagged boulders. Sentries in formal uniforms stood outside a pair of outhouse-like structures at either end of the white parliament building. They held machine guns, and eyed him even more ferociously than had the hustlers. The massive structure itself was difficult to see from this angle, but Harkályi remembered that it was every bit as spectacular as Notre Dame or the British parliament building, which was to say that it appeared simultaneously majestic and artificial, more a sculpture than a building that might be occupied. He could not comprehend the immensity of the detail; it was too much to look at, and he discovered that it could best be seen only peripherally, from the corner of his eye, in small chunks that, were they placed together, would dizzy him even further. “Frozen music,” as Goethe called architecture, was not quite the correct term. Music represented—it could be about something; architecture just was, and this building was even more so. The distinction embarrassed Harkályi in some way. He did not want to look at it; it was too beautiful, a monument to itself alone.
A flat transport ship appeared from beneath the Margit Bridge ahead of him, and he stopped to watch it pass. The sound of the engines was incredible, like an entire factory dedicated to the production of ball-peen hammers and garbage-can lids. It was lovely, really. Only a single, faint lightbulb illuminated the cabin, making the vessel all but invisible. The noise conquered everything around it, the city and its entire history; when it receded, he heard one of the parliament guards yelling at him. The young man approached, his machine gun drawn, and Harkályi pictured his own swollen body floating downstream, in the wake of this ship, to the grave of his grandparents. He did not understand what the soldier said, but interpreted the message, delivered by the angry motion of the gun’s barrel, and continued his walk upstream, more briskly this time. Half-expecting the sound of gunfire, he did not turn around.
Past the parliament building, an electric tram line followed the bank of the river. From the platform, a sidewalk continued to the Margit Bridge. On it, above his head, two underdressed ladies noisily made their way back toward Pest. They were on the körút, the very same road on which his hotel was located, only a few blocks away. He crossed through a small park situated under the base of the bridge, up a ramp to the road. The women had disappeared, mere ghosts. Sleep will not come tonight, he knew, not restful sleep at any rate, so instead he awaited the next passing taxi, which would take him to Dohány Street, to the synagogue.
7.
The synagogue was on fire. The realization descended upon him slowly, like an illness. The streets were emptied, the windows of the nearby apartments darkened. He assumed at first that the smoke rising from the triangular roof, between the Moorish domes, emanated from a chimney. He pictured a servant inside polishing the silver, mopping the floors, perhaps a zealous rabbinical student pouring through the library for the single arcane utterance, marginalized to some forgotten, dust-strewn alcove, that will help him make sense of his life, still so very young. Even when the first yellow flames danced into view, they appeared as an apparition, a flashback to the final days of his childhood in Budapest. Only the sound roused him: a violent crack like the report of a Luger aimed just centimeters above his head.
His shock — and it was shock now, not precisely fear just yet — found expression in a throaty scream, one unburdened by the demands of meaning. It was the sound, not entirely foreign to Harkályi, of pure terror. The noise carried through the expanse of buildings, down Dohány Street.
He did not know the Hungarian word for fire, so he yelled, “Fire!”
No reaction came from the blank wall of concrete and glass opposite the synagogue. It was the largest in Europe and occupied a parcel of land on which Herzl himself once lived. Flames climbed higher, fueled by the fierce March wind, and they chewed up a tile roof that one would not have expected to burn so readily.
Harkályi shuffled to the doorways across the street, pressed all of the intercom buttons at once, producing a melody of electronic burps and bleeps. “Fire!” he yelled. Surely those on the third and fourth floors could see that the roof was on fire, that fire was consuming the synagogue. The sound of it grew louder, steadily more vicious. He ran to the next doorway and pressed all of the buttons on the metallic interface until he found the word: “T
z!”
“Tz! Tz!”
He entered a glass Matáv booth, but the phone would not function without a pre-paid calling card and he was ignorant of the local version of 911. He smashed the receiver with all of his strength against the glass shell of the booth, but it refused to break. A pain carried through his arm and landed in his shoulder. Outside again, he removed the stone from his pocket and hurled it at the phone booth. The sound was amazing, like a crystal chandelier plunging, mid-performance, into an open concert-grand piano. He carefully rescued the stone from the rubble, wiped it off with his gloves, and returned to pressing random codes into the communication and locking mechanisms of the nearby apartment buildings. “Fire! Help!”
Lights finally blinked on in the windows above. Angry oaths landed on him as if from overturned chamber pots, until the fire became blindingly obvious. A chorus picked up the refrain of “Tz! Tz!” until the entire block was alight. Men streamed from the buildings in their blue-and-white MTK Budapest sweatpants. A groggy crowd formed. The sidewalk itself opened to reveal a storage cellar. The smell of the basement, identical to those in which he had once hid, caused Harkályi’s racing heart to stop for an instant. A ladder flew out, then was raced across the street and pressed against the façade of the synagogue, where the flames had spread to the columns supporting the domes.
With practiced efficiency, two dozen men got to synchronous work. One of them climbed the ladder, next to which five more men erected a scaffold with a pulley system to lift pails of water. A line formed across the street, into the foyer of one of the apartment buildings. Harkályi joined their ranks, dead in the center of Dohány Street. Heavy buckets of water came one after the other out of the building and were passed along the line. He took them in his right hand and twisted to deliver them to the next man, who rewarded him with an empty one traveling the opposite direction, slightly less fast, away from the burning building. Harkályi could not keep up. He could no longer breathe, and he slowed the entire chain, further endangering the synagogue he had traveled so far to visit. The air would not leave his chest; it expanded into a painful knot beneath his ribcage and he grew faint, staggered on his feet. The young man next to him said something he couldn’t understand. A woman appeared, took him by the arm, and led him to the curb, where he sat. The rescue operation continued seamlessly in his absence. The cold winter air found the perspiration that glued his clothes to his body and he started to shiver. The woman returned after a moment and handed him a tiny cup made of green ceramic. “Tessék,” she said, and he smelled the pálinka before she even poured it from a plastic bottle, its Coca-Cola label still intact.