He was afraid his wife would make thirty-eight minutes out of the eight she had promised, he said. She had a knack for it, for taking her time. She’s happy when she can make you wait for her. So now he’d leave me to myself and go upstairs, just to be sure she wouldn’t take even longer.
Every one of his words insulted me. I did not want to converse with him about his wife; I did not want to agree to it. Not in the tones he used, and not in any other tone. He was looking for a cheap way to squeal on his wife. To make her out as just a woman who always makes you wait. That made me even more ridiculously stubborn; I kept asking him insistently whether they lived in that second-floor apartment where my piano teacher had been.
And how long had they been living there.
But it was as if he hadn’t heard my questions.
Affably he said that he wouldn’t lock the car door. Should I change my mind and decide to leave — he saw I couldn’t make up my mind — would I first honk the horn briefly but nice and loud, to call him. The car shouldn’t be left unguarded for too long. And with that he let go of the car door and it slammed shut. He left me there; I was very confused.
I was cursing because I really couldn’t decide what to do. His words were like a coup de grace. He let me know that he had read everything on my face. If I left now, my defeat and humiliation would be complete. But it wasn’t going to be different if I stayed. His gait was beautiful, with long, smooth, and very decisive steps. He disappeared into the dim lobby, and then I heard his running steps echo in the stairs. Without thinking much about whether it was appropriate, I took off after him. As if I were claiming, completely unreasonably, that I was the one who was entitled to this building — but by building I did not mean the building.
And I certainly wasn’t going to guard his car.
Not even a bright summer day could chase away the terrible dimness from this lobby. I wanted to find out which floor he was going to, where he kept the woman captive. I already had seen how he did it, and with what. As if I could diminish the extent of humiliation I had inflicted on myself, I clung to this knowledge.
The moment I stepped into the lobby, stinking with cat urine and a musty exhalation from the basement, I froze. As if some vestige of bashfulness was stopping me.
I’ve no right to do this. Or perhaps the memory of an old fear.
With their claws sliding on the stone floor, grating and scratching, two cats disappeared down the steps leading to the basement, a dark and a lighter flash in the semidarkness. In the light of the single naked lightbulb, a black cat was chasing a red angora one.
I could hear that he did not stop on the second floor, but just then the number 5 bus rolled across the cambered cobblestones in front of the building and its noise blasting into the lobby overwhelmed the echoes of his receding footsteps. Over the racket, I could just make out a soft slamming of a door somewhere. It might have been on the third or even the fourth floor. Which again reminded me of the little girl from the fourth floor, Ilonka Weisz, and she in turn reminded me of a room in their apartment, facing the courtyard, its curtain drawn against the bright summer sunshine. Of my shame, which I haven’t been to tell anyone since then, and of the afternoon sunshine’s indifference to my shame. As I was looking at the familiar patterns of these walls in the pale light of the single bulb, I could be sure of one thing, that Uncle Pálóczky was no longer alive; only in his absence could everything become so filthy.
And then there was quiet, the light went out in the stairwell, but above the empty, yellow courtyard glittering in the wetness the wind was making great noises. There was another naked lightbulb in front of me; this one, above the list of tenants, was always lit; otherwise, darkness everywhere. Had old Pálóczky been alive, there would have been order and cleanliness, and a shade for the bulb. And the garbage cans wouldn’t have been standing like this next to the entrance either, uncovered and stuffed to overflowing. I felt as if they could not humiliate me because I wouldn’t fall into their trap. And as if the senselessness of this evening was not happening to me. Or, could I be in a different building, after all. As a child, I hadn’t noticed how seedy and run-down the place was. In the interim, the proportions changed, and the building seemed to resemble another one that was, who knows why, very familiar from a long way back.
Only ten years have gone by since then.
Or it was as if someone had told me the story of his life, from which I’d know that there was a building like this, with a piano teacher in it, where a little girl, with her little red skirt swishing on her buttocks, lured a little boy to the fourth floor, where that terrible thing happened. Just as the present evening was a useless and unavoidable disgrace. Where ten years ago he first had to pass by the foul-smelling entrance to the basement and no matter how carefully and quietly he came through the main gate, he’d still startle the cats stalking each other just as I saw them now. The red cat wasn’t familiar, but the black one was, as if the Pálóczkys’ black cat were still alive.
Strangely enough, I was the one who had these images, which that other someone hadn’t thought about since then, and if he had, he thought it best to forget them quickly.
Now too I had to reach those six steps that led up to the ground floor. In this building, because of those six steps, the ground floor was not called the ground floor. From the list of tenants, I wanted to ascertain whether my piano teacher still lived there. Or I was deceiving myself with this transparent alibi. As if I had some business there. I shouldn’t be doing this, I’ve no right, I’m ridiculous. Still, I won’t go away, I’ve nothing to fear, nothing to lose, whispered my unappeasable imagination.
One could get to the courtyard, paved with insanely yellow ceramics, from between two squat pilasters, and on one of them, on a white enamel plaque in old-fashioned blue letters, there was my childhood’s most mysterious word: mezzanine.
No doubt about it now, this was the building. A memory of quiet anxiety filled with anticipation was attached to this place.
It became a star-marked building; my piano teacher had to move out of it. When Budapest was liberated, she could move back in because it was no longer star-marked.* I never dared ask anyone what the star mark meant. I sensed from the adults’ voices that this too was part of the profound horror we had just survived and in which many had perished. Just as I didn’t dare ask what mezzanine meant. I wanted to be a famous pianist and did not want to reveal my ignorance to the adults; I was also afraid that because of my awkward question I might hear other terrible things. From certain signs, I concluded that mezzanine did not mean ground floor. Because sometimes my piano teacher asked me to go down to the Pálóczkys’ before we began the lesson and give him the piece of paper on which she had written what she wanted from the Garay Square market. When I cautiously asked her if she wanted me to take the note to the ground floor, she looked at me incredulously, not understanding what I hadn’t grasped, and asked, where else could you possibly take it, my angel, if not to the ground floor. But other times she didn’t say ground floor and didn’t say what was written on the enamel plaque, but something similar; luckily, though, she didn’t notice how bewildered I was. I wanted to learn what mezzanine was but also to be clever about avoiding the great horror.
Before you go, would you drop this key at the Pálóczkys’ on the mezzanine, she asked me once. These Pálóczkys are really angels, just angels. If he’s not there, you’ll be sure to find him in his workshop in the basement, and don’t be afraid of the cats, my angel. This mezzanine sounded almost like what she shouted when she wanted me to play a little stronger, a little softer; listen to me, my angel, this is mezzo forte, listen, this is mezzo piano now, my angel. Or should I have dropped off the key on the pianino. I was constantly looking for some acceptable solution, how to get to know more about the meaning of things without letting the horror — with all its details appearing unexpectedly — touch my skin. Uncle Pálóczky stayed in the star-marked building because concierges had to be real Christians, not converted ones. That I managed to understand from the hints. Another real Christian, my piano teacher, had to move out, but only a real Christian could be concierge, and therefore Uncle Pálóczky had to stay with the Jews. That I didn’t understand. There was this word in the building that almost meant ground floor and yet seemed to refer to the strength of a musical sound or an unknown musical instrument. Uncle Pálóczky, as he himself told it, became a living witness to how the old Weisz couple was taken away. Probably everyone but me understood the connections among these things.