The man glanced at me, his look lingering; I must have seemed familiar to him from somewhere. And if he knew me from somewhere he must have been asking himself whether he should say in front of me what he was about to say. Or maybe his eyes were wondering whether I was that other kind of man. Men’s eyes often tried to catch mine, and that’s the question they’d ask themselves. Sometimes they looked at me for so long that I got red in the face. Men are very curious about that question when they look at young men or their own sons.
Now of course I remembered exactly from where I knew him.
And now I was getting in everyone’s way; many people with their paid receipts were trying to reach her to be served. I had to retreat with my glass. Maybe that’s why he didn’t hesitate. Anyway the others couldn’t understand what he was talking about or pretended not to understand.
For security reasons, everyone preferred to pretend they didn’t notice what other people did or said.
Anyway, take a look out there, you’ve never seen so many wet policemen. They were called out on a first-degree alert. Now there’s no use dreaming about a long trip abroad, for example. Even I couldn’t get a travel permit for your sweet person.
They allowed themselves a careful little laugh, and again, what became important was that they were doing something secretive in public.
This did not hurt, did not even make me jealous; I was admiring them.
I took no more sips of my hot coffee, but I ate the lump sugar, first one cube then quickly the other. I shall wait for her. I must prove my faithfulness to her. No matter what happens, however humiliating it might be, I shall wait until everybody is gone again. I was waiting for a single glance from her.
She could not have forgotten her promise to me so quickly.
I had waited for her for more than two months. Ever since they reopened this shop. It’s not possible that I wouldn’t have another opportune moment with her. It did not occur to me that her seemingly credible indifference only made our mutual game more serious.
Because it couldn’t occur to me that I was playing.
On this badly damaged block, this was the first store that after five years had reopened. Young people don’t count the years.
One simply went along observing that everything was slowly changing from what it had been, or thinking that everything had somehow been restored. This side of the boulevard had been completely destroyed in a single night in 1956 by Russian tanks firing from Oktogon Square. The entire row of stores was gutted by fire; their ceilings and the floors above them crashed down. They first restored the ceilings and the second-floor apartments, but for a very long time nothing happened behind the boarded-up shop entrances. The situation remained unchanged for so long that it no longer reminded anyone of anything. The buildings’ facades were painted; later the scaffolding was removed. Streetcars were running. A shoe store, a drugstore, a flower shop, and something else, maybe a tobacco shop, and farther on a woman’s fashion shop — their absence didn’t seem to bother anyone. I couldn’t remember what kind of store had been there before. Who cared that there was nothing behind the boarded-up entrances. Life was not much fun anyway. Very few things remained that still had meaning. And when you remembered something, what came as a surprise were the many things you had managed to escape.
Sometimes this sort of fleeting feeling made my walking around feel unbelievable. It was not plausible that I could get from one place to another just by taking one step after another.
As if I couldn’t completely convince myself that I was able to put one foot in front of the other and, with this peculiar activity, carry my physical weight forward.
This, more or less, is what memory, or oblivion, consisted of.
Because no one could have thought seriously that holed up in some unfamiliar cellar one would survive the night.
By midnight, there was neither electricity nor water. As if the bowels of the earth were on the move, everything was quaking, rumbling, booming, and trembling all at once. Saltpeter was falling from the bare brick ceiling. The way this became integrated into my life was that afterward I never wanted to go down to the cellar, but when I did these memories did not surface; it seemed advisable to forget even the associated anxieties. Explosive blasts first sucked in the candle flames and then extinguished them. Still, somewhere, there was always a new-lit candle. Everyone went deaf, everyone screamed, yet people did not understand one another. They were stumbling around helplessly, groping in the dark, or running around berserk, driven by fright, pretending to have something urgent to take care of.
Someone must have thought that the cellar door should not be closed.
Men opened it and carefully barricaded the passage leading down to it.
Mildewed crates, ancient cupboards, ripped armchairs, and wobbly sofas were dragged out from the cellar’s deepest compartments. Not everybody helped, because some people were busy with themselves, with their crying children, with their families. The latter set up their own sections in the cellar, hoping that the wooden partitions would give them perfect protection. But neither laments and swearing nor the sound of running footsteps could be heard. I didn’t try to figure out why suddenly there were so many of us but instead kept watching the gaping and opening mouths set to scream in fright or hysteria. Still, news spreading in the cellar’s dark passages about contingencies and possibilities sounded sensible. However numb one may be in such a situation, one’s brain fills with speculations. Somehow, there were always more people who tied their feverish desire for action to the remnants of reason and some palpable hopefulness.
The problem was much too big.
It was a sensible idea to leave the cellar’s steel door open yet obstruct the entrance to it. Because if the house were to fall on us, rubble would make it impossible to move the door and we’d never be able to dig ourselves out. Who could count on outside help. Well, all right, the Americans were on the way. If the water main broke, on the other hand, having no exit, we’d drown in the water flooding the cellar. The earth was moving so violently that somebody must have thought of this too. We have no water because the main broke. And there was no way of knowing whether it was going to be over very soon or was just about to start in earnest. Through the flues opening into the enclosed courtyard, we could see that something was burning nearby. Two steep flues opened upward, not far from each other. The formidable sight before us was far beyond what could still be considered real.
Above the building’s high four stories, the red conflagration was reflected in the night sky.
It was like a gigantic shadow play, a licking of the sky.
While a few watched the mesmerizing reddish shadow of tongues of fire reaching into the sky, the cannons ceased for a while. Then one heard only one’s own deafness, which was perhaps more frightening than the noise. Later, from the depths of deafness, one heard machine-gun bursts, which was almost like peace returning.
And it seemed that the cellar walls were being pounded steadily.
The ones who ran out for fear of a burst water main began to smash the cellar’s rear wall in an effort to break through it in the direction of the buildings on Eötvös Street, parallel to us, which were less threatened. That night, people opened a veritable labyrinth under the city through the walls separating cellars, but I heard about this from Pisti only the following summer when we were at Wolkenstein House in the valley of Wiesenbad. The women remembered from the days when Budapest had been under siege in the Second World War, and they could tell the men where to break through the walls. Shortly, there was a huge explosion, and in the renewed cannon fire a fine coat of soot covered the faces of those standing under the flues, and then everything went dark as dense smoke filled the courtyard. It might have been the other way around, first the dense smoke and then the fine soot. In which case the cause of death would be not water but smoke, not drowning but suffocation.