Freezing halfway to his death, he allowed the stone to remain in his pocket while he walked slowly back to the körút, sustained only by the alcohol in his blood, to hail a cab. A gregarious and hirsute driver engaged him in a lengthy conversation he didn’t understand, or even hear above the Gypsy music rattling in the speakers behind his seat. “Igen,” Harkályi told him. “Tudom, tudom.” I know, I know.
9.
Even with the smoke and the grime scrubbed from his face and drained down into the belly of the city, sleep remained an impossibility. He lay down nevertheless to welcome the voices he knew to expect. He did not fear them now, in the gentle twilight of his unconsciousness. In a matter of hours, he would loosen on the world his new opera, The Golden Lotus. Again, he will take the songs of his family, of his people, of his fellow prisoners at Terezín, and share them with the fickle-minded public, who will purchase copies but, he knew, never really hear them.
He could already picture before him hundreds of thousands of shiny DVDs, and hear the corresponding number of dead souls calling, admonishing him, encouraging him. So much music had been lost, more notes than he could draw in this lifetime or in a hundred of them. The faces wanted Harkályi to speak for them, and it was a responsibility that weighed heavily, much too heavily, upon him. He must answer to them first, and only then to himself.
Harkályi had kept private, until then, only one final element of his being, but come the last measures of his new opera, even his parents’ lullaby will become another morsel for public consumption.
These half million compact discs were perfect reproductions of each other, but in the hands of his public they will reflect a half million different realities. Each will be unique, every spin through the home high-fidelity system a new event, a new experience for the listener. Recorded music changed over time, but nothing could exhume the spectral presence of a living performance. The concert hall had become a sacred place, as sacred in some ways as where he learned to compose music.
It had become impossible now to comprehend such a thing, but the hideous truth remained that it was Zoltán Kodály himself who suggested that Lajos, a thirteen-year-old violin prodigy, should wait out the remainder of the war in the Terezín ghetto. Better there, he had thought, than fending for scraps in the sub-basements of Budapest.
Almost 250 years earlier, Joseph II had ordered the construction of an outpost at the confluence of the Ohře and Labe rivers, the first line of defense protecting the Austrio-Hungarian Empire from the savage Germanic hordes. Across the Ohře from the small fortress, in which, more recently, the regicide Gavrilo Princip perished, stood the spa town of Terezín. The Nazis offered that village, Kodály had told him, to the Jewish population of Central Europe as a safe haven, sequestered from the general population. A former Liszt Academy colleague, immediately upon his arrival, had sent Kodály a postcard boasting of the vast and vibrant musical life that flourished under the protection of the administrative council of Jewish elders. Karel Ančerl himself conducted a resident orchestra. Wealthy Jews from all over Central Europe, denied their civil rights and freedom of movement at home, funneled toward Czechoslovakia.
Budapest was no longer safe. Lajos’s father had not been heard from since his departure for forced labor at a brick factory someplace beyond the city limits. With the blessings of their mother, Kodály made arrangements, at tremendous personal expense, to have Lajos and his brother, Tibor, smuggled safely to Vienna. One June evening, at dusk, they emerged from the cellar beneath Andrássy Boulevard, where they had been hiding from the Arrow Cross. His mother, always graceful, did not cry as they were hoisted into the bed of a horse-drawn wagon. She handed Lajos a sack of walnuts and a smooth, round stone he could use to break them open. He would not see her again, though her voice still rang in his ears. It would be her song that the world would hear decades later, in the afternoon. “Do not be afraid,” she had said. As they pulled away, she sang to them, and to herself, a gentle lullaby.
The boys hid for hours beneath a bed of straw and manure, stopping finally, before dawn, in Vienna. They had already eaten all of the nuts, three days’ worth, yet Lajos held fast to the stone and would continue to do so for more than half a century. In Vienna, or near it, they waited in lines that extended to the very horizon, until a small pack of bored German officers chose which among them to herd aboard two vacant boxcars. A soldier pulled the paperwork from his hands, and Lajos and his brother were permitted to join 150 others on Transport No. IV/14I from Vienna; a far greater number, most of them elderly and infirm, remained behind. The endless clip-clop syncopation of the locomotive disgorged from the passengers a hideous music of moaning and sobbing, of death itself, that could not be notated by human hands. It was hours or days — perhaps a month, or ten years, or a thousand — before they reached Terezín, a town that he and Tibor and so many others would come to regard as the anteroom to hell itself.
Harkályi rose from his soft bed, entirely unrested, and closed the bathroom door behind him. The joints of his elbows and knees ached; there was pain in his lower back. The steam of the shower warmed his naked body, the skin that hung loosely from his arms and belly, while he scrubbed the debris from one eye and then the other. His wooly, normally wild hair was shorn close and tame for the events of the day about to unfold before him.
10.
The faint daylight oozing through the ceiling of clouds made the temperature even more jarring. It felt colder that morning than it had in the middle of the night, when he had been drenched in sweat. Harkályi avoided looking at the picture of himself staring out at him again from the window of the record shop, which was not yet open for business. Perhaps it was closed in honor of Independence Day; it was difficult to say — everything was different now in Hungary. It felt like snow might fall soon.
The sidewalks of the körút were full of people, many of them already intoxicated. He had by mistake left his wristwatch in the room. Over at the National Museum, they were already reenacting Petőfi’s speech of March 15, 1848, when the poet spoke out against the empire and instigated a revolt that failed to gain from Austria the independence that Hungary so desperately desired and would not earn until the end of the Soviet regime. If even then. There were speeches, nationalistic hymns, a brass band. Children waved flags while men passed bottles of pálinka through the smoking crowd. Harkályi had seen the ceremonies on satellite television and had no desire to witness them in the flesh.
In the underpass beneath the Nyugati train station, a band of South Americans in colorful attire performed cheerful, primitive music in a circle, to the delight of passersby. Waves of people spilled from the metro’s escalators. The woman from whom he bought the hóvirág was not present, but in her place others sold onions and roasted pumpkin seeds. A pretty young girl sold wrinkled clothes from a laundry hamper. A freshly shaven youth attempted to hand Harkályi a religious pamphlet, but he recoiled from the boy’s reach.
He had time to waste before meeting Magda and wanted to take a stroll, to clear his head before the concert, an event lingering ominously at the furthermost poles of his thoughts; he knew it was there, yet refused, still, to bring it into focus. It was embarrassing — the pageantry and applause, the idolatry that conflated him, this tired old man, with his compositions. He could not wait to see his niece; she alone would relieve the tedium of public appearance.