THE LAND OF FABLES

To my old friend Dr János Beretvás to whom I can still turn to...

The end of the war began for me when I became a deserter from the Hungarian Army. Even today spelling out the word “deserter” fills me with an eerie shudder, since the relevant paragraph in the Service Regulations condemned the deserter to be put to the sword on the spot. It was said that the Regulations were drawn up by Ferenc Herczeg, a writer commended for his lucid style. I really do not know what gave me courage that dawn, at Christmas time in 1944, to cycle to the station at Eszterháza and board the Győr express. I was in uniform and carried only a small grip. I left my bike propped against the wall of the station entrance. My unit had been ordered to Germany, and I had no inclination whatsoever to go with them. The eastern part of the country was already in Russian hands, and the Red Army‘s ring was tightening around Budapest. Having fled to Sopron and the western border areas, the Arrow Cross puppet government in a belated but frenzied support of the German army looted the country, handing over factories, livestock and every movable thing, also establishing a ghetto in Budapest. That they were keeping ex-government ministers, anti-Nazi politicians and Church dignitaries captive in the Sopronkőhida prison, executing many of them, was known to us only by word of mouth.

I didn‘t plan my escape, but neither was it an improvisation. My fellow-ensign, by the name of Antauer had two sisters who lived alongside the River Mura and had contacts with Serb partisans. They came to visit their brother at Sarród, where we were quartered in the houses of well-to-do peasants. We used to gather and have dinner in the inn during the evening. My other colleague, Csáky, was an expert at organizing various parlour games and quizzes,. and when the two girls arrived on the scene, our evenings perked up. We chatted, danced and some of the local girls joined in as well. There was plenty of food, and we did not see a single German soldier, let alone Russians. It was during those evenings that we began to hatch our plans to team up with the partisans. The girls knew where to traverse the Mura and would show us the way. We continued our night-long deliberations in our quarters. One of the girls stayed till the morning, but even that left me none the wiser.

I decided to seek advice. The brother of our family lawyer, Benő Zalán, a major in the reserve, was in charge of the supply office at Kapuvár. The Zalán brothers were highly-decorated World War I veterans. For that reason, and because they had adopted Christianity, they were deemed “exempted Jews”, exempting them from labour service and deportation. They also retained their ranks and served in the army.

I cycled over to Kapuvár on Sunday, pedalling up and downhill in drizzling rain. By the time I arrived, I was soaked to the skin. Major Zalán listened with sympathy to my anxious contemplations, thinking perhaps how lucky I was to have only that problem. The Arrow Cross could bring his way of life to an end any minute by abolishing his “exemption.” He exhorted me to stay put as the Artillery School was not a fighting unit. I should wait and see. Neither of us knew – nor did my direct superiors – that for some time I had been under surveillance by the Military Intelligence. I only discovered the reason for it at the end of the war.

As an ensign in the reserve, I had been put in charge of the Anti-Aircraft Riflerange’s training centre. Our task was to evaluate with the help of theodolites the (mis) - hits of the batteries placed along Lake Fertő. The black sleeve targets were hauled up into the air by planes. Basic training was carried out in the Vilmos Barracks at Angyalföld (a rough district of Budapest), where I was performing my voluntary military service. The majority of the rank and file was made up of local lads; printers, technicians, young toughs - a quick-witted, cocky lot. They didn‘t need much elucidation on trigonometry and merrily constructed the coordinates on the drawing-table. While happy to serve the Motherland far from the frontline in the westernmost corner of the country, they were worried about their families. Their requests for short-leave became more and more frequent. I gladly signed their papers, trusting that they would return and not let me down. At first they kept to the rules of the game, but from the end of November onward they began to stay away, one by one, taking care that their disappearance should not occur in groups. It was an organized desertion with a labour movement background. They knew already then that they were under observation and were obliged to go underground. In the beginning it was still possible to cover up their absences by reporting them as transport difficulties. However, by December, seven of my men were missing. When we were given the order to move on, I too, hit the road  - in the opposite direction.

As I walked out of the station at Győr and stopped at the kerb, a German truck pulled up next to me. Its driver called out: “Wohin?”. I called back: “Budapest!”, and he beckoned to me: “Kommen Sie.” I clambered up into the cabin, and offered him my packet of Darling cigarettes that I kept in my revolver holster: “Take it, it’s yours!” He was a blond young man, not wearing his cap. He took out a cigarette, but gave back the packet: he would give me a lift anyway. He had no other passengers, so we lit up and got going.

The Vienna highway was teeming with people fleeing to the West; even the adjoining fields were full with those forced off the road by the military traffic. Crowds swarmed along on horse-drawn wagons, pushing and lugging handcarts and prams laden with household goods. Columns of Jews with yellow stars and tormented looks - old people, women and children - were herded by Arrow Cross louts,  aiming their guns at stragglers. I glanced at the German, but he said nothing, just put on his uniform cap and kept his eyes glued to the bomb-cratered road. Who knows what he was up to himself, driving the empty truck against the rushing tide of people. Arriving in Buda, he asked where I wanted to be dropped. “Where the hotels are, to the left of the bridge”  - I replied, not wanting to let on that I was making for the Hotel Ritz, called the Dunapalota. My Aunt Camilla spent her winters there since she became widowed, and I knew the concierge.

 “We have vacant rooms”, he said, masking his surprise with the detachment of a practised hôtelier, while taking the key from a departing German officer. “Most of them have already left” - he nodded at the back of him - “but they still come here to dine.” I had come to the right place, I thought, no military patrol would pay a visit here, I’d cheat the gallows after all.

I tidied myself up, and went out into the street, then called Mária Valéria Street.  Figures were slinking along the footpath, looking neither right nor left. The smell of food and people wafted out from the Hungária’s brasserie, but I continued on my way, almost as if in a dream.  No cars or trams were running; the insidious silence was broken only by the rumble of distant cannonade. But the piled-up debris barring Váci and Kossuth Lajos Streets issued a stern warning that this was but a momentary lull between the daily bombing raids. I rang the bell at Stefánia’s third-floor apartment in the building that (still) stood at the corner of Rákóczi Street, but no one answered. She might have moved to the country - I pondered - ambling back down the stairs, disappointed and hungry. The Holub was open, so I had dinner there.

On my way back to the Ritz I caught sight in the moonlight of a female figure with an unsteady gait. With buildings towering above her, the square, its statue, and the reflection of the bridge evoked de Chirico’s mysterious paintings. I approached the staggering shadow as if mesmerized. This figure turned out to be a slim girl, without a hat or coat. I thought she might have been a prostitute, kicked out from somewhere. She looked at me with startled eyes. I told her to come with me to the hotel as it was warmer there. She followed me in silence. I bade her sit down on the sofa whence my Aunt Camilla used to view the doings of the world while sipping her cafe noir.

The night porter came out from behind the counter, giving me a  reproving frown. I put him in his place with a gesture of my hand, and asked for a glass of water. If he was concerned for the elegant hotel’s reputation, he had nothing to worry about. The usually bright lounge was dark and deserted; the Germans were still having their dinner. We drank the water, and the woman regained some of her poise. She kept repeating that she could not go back home. “Stay the night here”, I offered, but she only shook her head. “Where do you want to go then?”, I asked. “To my girlfriend” - she replied hesitantly -  “she lives nearby”. I offered to escort her, but she kept quiet. Could she have only made up the story of a girlfriend? I did not pursue the matter.

After a little while she rose, straightened her dress and turned to me: “Let’s go”, she said and strode towards the door. The grumpy porter watched our departure with relief.

We walked in the direction of Vigadó Street. The flat opened from the inner corridor, but I held back watching from the corner, to see whether she would be admitted. I heard the opening of a door and a man’s voice. The girl looked towards me and disappeared inside.

I went up to my room alone and went to bed. Distributing my weight evenly, I lay on the soft bed, drifting between sleep and consciousness. Around midnight I woke to the sound of gunfire. Could it be the Russians, I pondered, and turned back towards the wall. In the morning I mentioned to the concierge that I had heard gunfire at night. He looked at me, and forgetting his habitual politeness, answered irately:  “They are shooting Jews into the Danube, Sir!” I was horrified. I did not know what to say. Then the sirens began to scream and we hurried to the air-raid shelter. I had sought refuge here previously, during the summer, when a bomb destroyed the roof of our apartment. This time it was not sheltering me from the British planes’ carpet-bombing, but from the ‘spatterings’ of the clacking, nippy Russian Ratas. How will I ever get as far as Andrássy Boulevarde? I agonized. I wanted to retrieve some civilian clothes and other things from the cellar of our house. My plan was to retreat indefinitely to the safe haven of my friend János Bartók’s apartment in the hills of Buda until...?

Barely did the all-clear sound and I had stepped out into the street, when the second wave of the attack hit. Leaping from doorway to doorway, following the fading and strengthening whirring of the planes, I ran towards my old lodgings. Away from the idyllic calmness of Eszterháza I now found myself in the hell of the siege, with bombs whizzing around me and roofs caving in. Anyone still in the streets was  gambling with his life. I wondered if the woman from last night was fleeing from the ghetto or from a group being herded to its death, and that the porter was only trying to warn me that even the Ritz was not immune from raids?

It took me all day until I returned to the hotel with my parcel. Recalling the aromas of the previous evening, I set out towards the Hungária Hotel’s souterrain bistro. It was jam-packed. People were gorging themselves on food, talking and shouting at the top of their voices, as though the front were not in this very neighbourhood but still at the Karpathians, miles and miles away. I heard my name being called in the hubbub. I turned and caught sight of John Beretvás, my classmate and friend. He was dining on paprika chicken in the company of another artillery officer and two women and beckoned me to their table. I immediately recognized one of the ladies: she was Sári Déry, the actress, who was blossomnig among them like a poppy. Next to her was her girlfriend, also called Sári, but a smaller and thinner figure. The other officer present, Géza Halász, was in charge of the anti-aircraft detachment deployed on Petőfi Square. He too was an actor, a handsome man, idolized by women. I told them about the previous night’s events, assuring them that I had not been dreaming. They listened to me dumbfounded.

 “Come to my place” - Jancsi exclaimed - “there’s enough room for you.” The girls also nodded. His apartment was in the modern building on the corner of Petőfi Square and Régiposta Street. I gave up my original plan and moved in with them the following day.

*

Sári D.’s friend was also a fellow artillery officer, also about to desert. Pending that move he felt it was wiser for his fiancée to live elsewhere, as she was well-known for her leftist sentiments. So Sári and her girlfriend came to stay at Jancsi’s place. He now had not only the two Sáris but also two batmen: Schooner and Midi, or Pityó and Janó by their real names. The batmen reported for duty by turns to their “boss”, whom they knew to be in deep trouble, but they stuck by him. Jancsi had refused to comply with the orders of the Arrow Cross, for which he was put into prison. An SS-man had taken him from there to the Southern station. Jancsi was aware that the trains to Germany departed from there. He had been concealing a hand grenade in the inside pocket of his greatcoat, which the jailers had not discovered because he had stuffed a scarf over it. When they reached a double tram stop, he jumped to the other side between the two trams, tossed the grenade and skedaddled. The Germans guarded all the bridges so he could not go that way in his dirtied and torn uniform. A lone boatman who refused any payment, ferried him across to Pest.

After that adventure Jancsi could no longer return to his unit. He had “disappeared” in the knowledge that his fellow officers would not betray him. My own existence was also extremely precarious. I needed a more reliable document than the furlough pass that I had concocted. The other Sári was a journalist, who knew a lot of people. That evening she took me to the Népszínház Street apartment of the journalist/historian Lajos Gogolák, where there was already quite a large gathering, but the host happened to be missing. He too had gone underground to escape the Arrow Cross.

The company was trying to guess where the frontline was, when Budapest would fall. One of them was sporting a Russian military belt, others were analysing the BBC’s newscasts and discussing the government being set-up in Russian-occupied Debrecen. János Radvansky, an aristocratic-looking young man was accurately mimicking how Mihály Károlyi rolled his rs, and also Churchill’s typical manner of speaking. He had also memorised about a hundred Ady poems by heart. If asked, he would gladly comply and recite from them:

Lightning-struck and grief stricken lies the Danube-scape

Pillory of shame for broken beings

And fragmented nation-states

Where clipped and crippled idle their wings

And gloomily drag on the evenings.

Our ears, tired from the Hitlerian tirades, appreciated the somewhat decadent cadences. No one thought about what it would be like to live under the shadow of another dictator. It was not the Russians we were afraid of, but the Hungarian Nazis; those wearing Arrow Cross armbands.

Cini Karinthy looked dashing in his ensign’s uniform, and when I told him about my problem, he pointed at two of his friends who had helped him and who would set me on the right course. I did not have to introduce myself, for they had been schoolmates of mine in the Jesuit College before becoming professional soldiers. They confided that they were hiding a Jewish doctor, an expert on feigned ailments, in the order’s convent, and I should turn to him for advice. The doctor received me in his cell, and suggested that I should eat nothing but raw meat for a few days. Once this regimen presented results, I should report for tests at the Garrison Hospital in Buda. The two angels were functioning there in cahoots with the doctors. Before I went there I was to swallow a pellet kneaded from bismuth powder.

It was lucky that I happened to run into Károly Kis, the proprietor of the Flóris bistro on Vörösmarty Square, who was also in the artillery. Without any further ado he lifted a raw ham off its hook. I consumed it diligently, swallowed the pellet and took myself to the hospital. The pellet showed up on the X-ray as an ulcer, and I received my exemption.

I hurried back to Petőfi Square. During lulls between the bombardments, masses of people thronged to Buda across the bomb-smashed bridge. The silence – broken only by the shuffling of feet, the grating noise of handcarts and the sound of invectives – was spectral. Traffic was one-way, with very few of us heading toward Pest. The ring around the capital was closed the following day. Our fates were sealed.

A Great Dane welcomed me in the doorway of Jancsi’s home. He introduced the beautiful animal: “This is Tiger. I found him in a doorway where I sought shelter from a bomb. When you no longer hear the bomb’s whining, that’s when you have to jump, but do it quickly” - he added. I had known about Jancsi’s knack for gaining the confidence of animals, especially dogs and horses. He patted them, and they followed him. He also possessed the animals’ instinctive intuition and good nose for things, a gift which came in handy when we were hiking on the Hargita Mountain. We had no maps, but he always knew which way to go. We called him our sniffer dog. I trusted him just as Tiger did.

Once again it was Karcsi Kis who came to our rescue. He had closed down his restaurant, and was distributing his stock. There was plenty available for us too. We stored the meat on the building’s roof terrace, which was where we fed Tiger.  All that was left to do now was the Christmas shopping. One of the members of the Gogolák circle had presented me with a Russian submachine gun, though there was no ammunition to go with it. I trailed along Váci Street on Christmas Eve in my uniform with the gun slung over my shoulder.

A few shops were still open. Most of them sold only left-overs, useless stuff. Among this I came accross some artificial poppies and a self-righting doll. I would give the poppies to Sári and the doll to Jancsi, because he always managed to land on his feet. I even found some “szaloncukor”1 also in one of the shops. The people of Pest were shopping in a frenzy. The batmen managed to procure a Christmas tree from somewhere and we decorated it as best we could, sang Christmas carols and drank a toast. To what? - I no longer recall; perhaps to the future. We did not know what it would bring, only what we were taking into it. 

When the air raids became unrelenting, the tenants moved permanently to the shelter. We held out in the apartment, as in the cellar we would have been more conspicuous. The skinnier Sári left, but we acquired another guest in her stead: Géza Halász’s girlfriend, the actress Lenke Szőnyi, whom Géza had been hiding a block away in Galamb St. because she was Jewish. But she could not remain there. Somehow the tenants did not like her; they said she was stuck-up. “She is afraid” - I thought - “that’s why she behaves like that.” Lenke‘s friend, the Regent’s son, had been kidnapped from the building next door by the Germans at the time of the failed capitulation attempt in mid-Octoer. Because of her unexpected mood swings Jancsi jokingly nicknamed her “Szörnyű2 Lenke.” Yet she got on well with Sári, and we protectively basked in the ambience of their personalities, undaunted by the bombing and shelling around us and the hateful Arrow Cross thugs.

The nightclub in Galamb Street was still operating. Sári and I went in for a drink. A few hostesses were hanging around the counter, suspicious characters sat in the booths. The pianist was wearily tickling the ivories. Around midnight a patrol came into the bar. There were three of them, all wearing the Arrow Cross armbands, moving from table to table checking the guests. One of them took his time examining my furlough pass, while the other two were ogling Sári. She got fed up with the to-do, pulled the paper from the fellow’s hand with a mischievous gesture, and gave it back to me. The ruffians took themselves off.

The batmen were Angyalföld toughs. By then it was impossible for them to return to their families. Most nights they sneaked out, and returned at dawn with all sorts of booty found under the ruins. I saw them with gold chains in their hands. Pityó got hold of a motorbike, and when the tobacco factory was bombed he returned loaded with cartons of cigarettes. Another time he “found” soap. This too turned out to be a successful currency, although there was no water any more except in the cellar and that too ceased flowing after a while. We were just discussing with Jancsi how to forbid their nocturnal roamings, which could be termed looting, when a bomb struck the building, shattering the large window and wrecking the staircase. Lenke left, and we moved into the entrance hall whose door gave us some shelter from the howling wind. Jancsi managed to board up the window. He had already previously removed the interior panes and stashed them behind the wardrobes to keep them safe. The two boys procured a little iron stove, and we no longer worried about disciplining them.

Only Sári and I remained in the entrance hall. Jancsi concocted a little nook for himself next to the bathroom where he dossed down. Sári slept on a bed and I on a mattress on the floor. One morning she bent down towards me: “Do you want a bit of chicken breast?” - she asked.  To which I, sleepily: “I prefer the thigh.” “You can have some of that too.”  And we had such a good laugh that Tiger settled himself between us, licking our faces in turn.

Eventually we could not avoid moving to the cellar. A courier came to pick up Sári and she accompanied him. We  guessed who had sent for her. The commander in charge of the building did not want to accept Tiger. ”What did we expect” - he protested - ”the tenants were eking out a living on dry beans - those who still had any. There is no room for the dog.” We reassured him that Tiger was vegetarian; we did not let on about the roof terrace.

We were living through the last days of the siege. The hotels on the banks of the Danube were aflame, shedding an eerie light and explosions kept rocking the building. Whenever this happened, Tiger would raise his head and glance at me askance, as if to reproach us: What‘s the good of this? Why are you doing it?” His eyes would interlock with mine, almost hypnotically, and I immersed myself in his gaze, entering his animal world, escaping from my miserable human existence. I put my arms around him, and he  nuzzled up to me. Like this, the noise of the blasts outside reached us only as faraway echoes.

On January 18 we woke to an enormous explosion followed by complete silence. We scrambled up on to the roof from where we could see the ruins of the Elizabeth Bridge. We clambered into the apartment to change our clothes. I threw my bundled up uniform into the building’s light shaft. Then came a second thundering boom which might have been the Chain Bridge. We decided to venture outdoors. There were four of us: Jancsi, Pityó, Kálmán and I. All we knew about Kálmán was that he was a refugee from Transylvania. A taciturn fellow in his mid-forties, he was looking after a friend’s apartment.

A few houses, or at least their shells, were still standing opposite the decaying debris on the western side of Mária Valéria Street. Pityó led the way – he was experienced. His flair certainly did not let him down now either: he promptly decided on the “pantry” on the ground floor of the corner house. It must have been the secret storeroom of a restaurant or bank. Driven by rumblings of our bean-fed stomachs, we wormed our way into the room, where we were met with the incredible sight of sides of bacon, smoked meats and blocks of lard on shelves, tables and hanging from hooks. How could all this have survived the siege? We didn‘t worry about it; our problem was how to take it all with us. And while we were stumbling about amid all this meat, I caught sight of the Mongolian soldiers in their padded tunics. Pointing their drum-magazined submachine guns ahead of them, they were hurtling among the ruins. Kálmán stretched out his hands toward them, babbling something in Russian, but they just kept running as if we were not there.

We hurried back with the news and the food. Was this the moment that I had been thinking of so often but which I could never imagine? We called Tiger, but could not find him. Had he tried to run after us? Or did someone let him out on purpose? There was no way of telling. We unloaded our treasure and left again to look for our dog. By then the Inner City was teeming with the Mongols and various other foreign-looking soldiers - blonde Slavs, walrus moustached Kirghizes, Cossacks and uniformed women. We also saw some sort of carts drawn by small horses, laden with multi-coloured junk, hats, pots and pans. We drew large breaths of the biting January air, and kept a lookout for Tiger amongst the Asian hordes. It was no consolation to us when someone said they had seen him chasing seagulls on the lower Danube embankment. Jancsi was convinced that the Russians had lured him away, since they liked dogs. 

It did not take us long to realize that they did not only like dogs, but watches, gramophones and everything in which they suspected some mechanism might be lurking, even if there was none in it.

Jancsi’s first idea was that he would go home to his father’s estate, Tetétlen, in the Great Plains. Kálmán held out the promise to him that he would organize a Russian truck, which would take him there - for a stiff price, of course. Jancsi made a deal with him, and awaited the transport. He put on several layers of clothing and stuffed his pockets. At the agreed time there was a fierce banging on the cellar’s iron door. We all ran towards it, with Jancsi in the lead. Some half a dozen soldiers thronged in. They stripped off our wristwatches and emptied out wallets. When I showed the Russian that my wallet was empty, he gave me back a few notes.

During the war years people purchased gold coins and Swiss watches, knowing that money would lose its value. They strung the watches on their arms (something the Russians were quick to imitate) and sewed the coins into the lining of their clothes. However, it was far more difficult to hide the women.

The bed of the minister’s wife, covered with a silk doona, stood inthecentre of the cellar. The tenants surrounded her full of sympathy, because her much older husband had been abducted by the Gestapo. We found out later that he had been taken to Mauthausen. The drunken Russian took a fancy to the large bed, lay down on it, forcing the woman with him. The children were marshalled to the farthest nooks of the cellar to save them the sight of the barbarian act. We took cover on the roof terrace, to which the Russians did not risk coming because of the ramshackle staircase. We watched from there to see when the drunken gang was leaving. There wasn’t anyone to go to save the honour of the minister’s wife.

Jancsi was waylaid by a Russian in the street. He did not know whether he was being taken to do some work or as a prisoner of war to Siberia. By then there were already some Hungarian policemen on duty in their rag-tag uniforms. Jancsi started to shout, and a policeman approached them to see what the matter was. He too was detained by the Russian. While they were arguing, Jancsi bolted. “Your prisoner is escaping!”, said the policeman to the Russian. While the latter readied his gun, the policeman also ran off.

During the siege, we had an altercation with T., a friend of the actress Bea Goll. They occupied the best spot in the cellar, close to the minister’s wife. At that time we were crowded together at the entrance, together with Tiger. Bea Goll was nibbling at some meat. Tiger went up to her, gently took it from her hand and swallowed it. Ever since then T. had it in for us, and it is quite likely that he had a hand in Tiger’s disappearance. After the siege he became a police detective. He accused Jancsi of theft and branded him a fascist. That stigmatizing expression was made fashionable by the Muscovites, tarring half the population with the same brush. I believe that T. wanted to blackmail Jancsi. He was also the one who was spreading the rumour that Sári was dancing on Marshal Voroshilov’s table.

We could not go back to the apartment because of the wrecked staircase. Jancsi joined the Red Army. His father told him he would be secure there. A few days later he was already on Mount Semmering with the “Revenge for Budapest” unit. They were hunting down Russian deserters in the forests. When the Germans surrendered, he came home and got discharged. He was allotted three hundred acres from the family estate, because he had resisted the Arrow Cross. The most that a peasant got were seventeen-eighteen acres. He grew beans and peas and fattened pigs for as long as they let him. 

Kálmán’s apartment on the second floor was accessible. He offered to put me up until I could find proper lodgings. He glazed the windows in one room and used an iron stove for heating. Five or six of us slept there. A young woman shared her bed with me. She had refused to go to the ghetto, and had been in hiding; she hadn’t seen the light of day for weeks. At bedtime she politely let me know that she could not guarantee that she was not infected, as the Russians had raped her too. Our exhausted bodies got on peacefully with each other on the sofa; it was heavenly after the cellar. In the morning the girl heated some water on the iron stove, stripped to the waist and had a good wash. I drew fresh strength from the sight of her perky breasts as if I were admiring spring-time buds. I was happy enough to wash her back.

By then Kálmán was already sporting a red armband marked with the stamp of the “Hungarian Liberation Committee.” He promised to get one for me too, as well as the papers going with it, but it would cost. I offered him my gold-trimmed cufflinks which had been a birthday gift, I think. They were decorated with miniature colourful pheasants under a convex glass. “That’ll do” - said Kálmán, pocketing them. Next day I was already wearing my armband in the street. Was it a protection? Or was I just plain lucky? I cannot tell. By then a lot of people were wearing armbands pertaining to their jobs. The Russians took absolutely no notice of them. They picked up men randomly in the street to augment their POW numbers. They tore up and threw away people’s identification papers. They snatched my friend, János Bartók, on Apponyi Square after he had visited me. He returned from a POW camp two years later, never having been a soldier.

I embarked on my project to go to Andrássy Boulevarde to fetch some coal from the cellar of our apartment, provided there was still some left. In the vicinity of the Opera House I ran into Béla Endre, a somewhat older musician colleague of mine, who was the chorus master of the Metropolitan Gas Company’s choir. He was about to visit our former teacher, Zoltán Kodály, in the Opera’s air-raid shelter. I told him where I was going and that I would be needing some sort of a wheelbarrow. “I’ll get hold of one for you” - said Béla, “but first let’s go and visit the Old Man, he might be in need of something.”

The artists, stage personnel, choristers of the Opera and their families were huddled together in colourful piles in the depth of the vaulted cellar. There in the centre of it all, shone the Maestro’s silvery prophet-like head. He was sitting on a low sofa – probably from the prop room – in the company of his wife, Madame Emma. Next to them, their friend, the baritone Imre Palló and his family had struck up camp. Kodály was jotting down something on music paper. Not one to waste his time even in a cellar, he was in the middle of composing a mass, and he was able to rehearse the parts with the country’s best singers there and then.

He was visibly pleased to see Béla, and also nodded a greeting to me, his unfaithful pupil. The last time I had seen him was in the summer of 1944, after the bombers had strafed Andrássy Boulevarde. He had entrusted me with three very old books of his. I managed to salvage them, together with the remaining furniture from our ruined apartment, by taking them to Kopaszhegy, where they had survived the war. When the Kodálys moved back to their apartment on the Körönd, Béla’s singer friend from the Gas Company installed gas in their kitchen. He did not accept payment for it. He had done it in appreciation of the joy that the singing of the Kodály chorals had given him.

I recalled this short visit, when years later I read that Kodály had begun his opening speech at an international conference held in Budapest with the following words:

“I welcome you in a country, which for four hundred years has lived among ruins; both physical and spiritual ruins.”3 The physical ruins were there around us at the time.

Béla lived opposite, in the street behind Andrássy Boulevarde. Some half a dozen friends of his were camping out at his place, a cheerful company indeed. We borrowed a wheelbarrow from the janitor and set out.

On Oktogon a crowd had gathered. Two men were being kicked around and dragged toward the lampposts. Some people turned their back on the scene in disgust, while others pushed forward noisily, women amongst them, eyes flashing. They were eagerly watching the crowd tearing the men to pieces. “They are hanging camp-guards” - remarked a man behind me. I had to lean against something; I felt faint. We found the coal and pushed and pulled it all the way back. I slept at Béla’s ‘doss-house’. There was lots of sheet music and books on shelves. I picked up a book. It was a history of the United States. I opened it at random, and started reading the chapter about the enterprises and lives of the oil barons and railroad magnates, and promptly made up my mind to become a capitalist.

I left some of the coal with Béla, and took the better part to Vadász Street, to Benő Zalán’s place. He was the lawyer member of the above mentioned Zalán brothers. His apartment also housed his office. The tough-mannered but gold-hearted Boriska kept house for him. Adjoining the office was the secretary’s room which was where they put me up. Boriska made up a bed for me, and I got into it shivering feverishly. For three days I did not even get up. The cumulative effect of hunger, cold and dread had come upon me in one fell swoop. Boriska looked after me, fed me, put compresses on me. She stuffed me with beans, made palatable with whatever flavourings she could get. How did that huge quantity of beans get to Budapest? Everyone ate beans, beans and more beans.    When I finally emerged, I got hold of a rucksack, and went in search of food. People were selling flour, salt, lentils, peas, lard and cream cheese from makeshift counters in doorways. Some vendors were already offering bread and jam-filled yeast dumplings, some even cooked vegetables. I returned with smoked meat and potatoes. Boriska had food to cook with at last, and Benő was pleased that he had taken me in. Due to his age and physique he was unable to engage in any self-preservation activities. When some acquaintances of his came to visit, they asked me to try and procure some bacon for them. I bought it, but they found the price too high. They had seen some cheaper on display in the street, and they suspected that I wanted to take advantage of them. They should have bought it when they set eyes on it. The black marketeers and middlemen, who emerged from the bomb craters, forced up the prices, and the money became devalued. Russian soldiers were also trafficking with their loot until this kind of receiving of stolen goods was officially prohibited, and the Russian-language bids had to be removed from the shopwindows. Not only did the money become “diluted” but everything liquid, such as glycerine and alcohol, which came into use as currency. The black marketeers were unbelievably resourceful in adulterating everything. It was even said that market women mixed milled paprika with powdered brick. When I returned to Kivadár, I bought a horse from a Russian soldier for a demijohn of (watered-down) schnapps - my first dubious step towards capitalism.

I ran into a former soldier of mine in the street, who was a printer in civilian life. He promised that he would visit me together with his ex-comrades. Much to Boriska’s consternation, a few days later five of them showed up. Once we finished reminiscing about the not so long past Sarród–Eszterháza days, they offered that if needed, they would testify to my “democratic” conduct during the war. Political screening committees checked on people applying for jobs, or making claims for an apartment or land - meaning practically everyone. Being a good lawyer, my host drew up a document and witnessed the signatures of my visitors. Two of them were members of the Communist Party and three were social democrats. No wonder that the Military-Political Department had kept my unit under observation. 

Appealing to the rumblings of empty stomachs, the parties lured the voters with soup-kitchens. The Communist Party was in the vanguard of this policy. In their headquarters they offered entertainment besides food. Tamás Major, Hilda Gobbi and other well-known actors appeared in matinée performances, inspiring the ‘consumers’ with revolutionary and patriotic poems. Obviously they got a good feed as well. The musical numbers and the Internationale were accompanied on the piano by my teacher and friend, József Gát. Happening upon each other eating our bean soups, we both rejoiced in the other’s survival.

Gát had been called up twice for labour service and both times he was demobilized. This meant in effect that he had escaped by the skin of his teeth. Being called up virtually meant having one’s death warrant signed, because the majority of labour servicemen became debilitated, succumbing to the inhumane treatment, scanty clothing and insufficient nourishment. A similar method of forced labour was later used by the communist regime, the difference being that victims were picked for class rather than race.

On the first occasion it was Paul Bethlen, member of the Upper House, who arranged Jóska’s release from the camp near the Danube. When Uncle Paul‘s daughter, the gorgeous Mária, our childhood playmate, found out from me what had happened, she asked her father to do something. He drove out with his daughter to the camp where it turned out that the camp commander, a reserve officer, was one of Uncle Paul’s former subordinates. Within days Gát was back in his apartment in Budakeszi, and back at his piano teaching. He lived there with his wife on account of his weak lungs. The second time he was called up to the Óbuda brickworks, and his wife was also taken away.

The minister of the interior in the German-sponsored Sztójay government was Andor Jaross. His secretary waa a namesake of mine. The soldier guarding the entrance of the ministry must have thought that I was joking when I gave him my name. Amongst the petitioners in the crowded anteroom one figure stood out: the famous author, Áron Tamási with his moonshaped face. I had met him through a carousing Transylvanian friend, and we had dined together on several occasions. We shook hands, but neither of us mentioned our reason for being there. I had a hunch that in his case it was because of his present wife or lady friend. I was ashamed that our great storyteller had to cool his heels in an anteroom on behalf (of the life?) of his lover.

My turn came quickly, possibly because I had made an appointment as one does with a doctor, or merely because of our relationship. I immediately got down to the crux of the matter: Gát was in the brickworks, his wife in a transit camp; could he help? Folding his hands under his chin, B. S. looked at the door, behind which a host of petitioners were waiting. He replied: “I can do something for one, but not for both.” All I could think of at the moment was that he meant: one or the other; you choose! And I answered quick as a flash: József Gát. “Alright”, said B., “I shall try.”

As I left the room it suddenly hit me that I would have the woman’s death on my conscience for ever. B. would have known what we only suspected, namely that the deported Jews would end up in the Nazi death camps’ gas chambers, and that the entrainment was carried out by the Germans. He would have no say in the matter. Gát’s wife never returned, but he was freed once again. He conducted the ÁVO’s choir, donned the uniform of a major, became a professor at the Academy of Music and remarried. Andor Jaross was executed.

There were times when I filled in for Jóska at the piano. There was no sheet music, so I harmonized the tune of the Internationale in different ways to avoid it becoming boring. Afterwards the Party members sang the Hungarian National Anthem as well to keep a fair balance. They wanted to feel good. It barely raised any eyebrows when during the course of the program two civilians walked in the door, and led a man way. One could only guess the reason for it. It was said that many Arrow Cross members had enrolled in the Party and became ÁVO-men. When the Leader of the Party was informed of this, he answered: “So what? They are proletarians too.”

Everywhere posters announced the rebuilding of Budapest. But first the debris had to be cleared away. People were assigned according to their domicile to perform public works. On the first occasion I was beavering away at the Buda end of Margaret Bridge, and later in the Vilmos barracks, where I had served during the war. Now the Russians were in possession of it, and we had to lug sacks of flour and sugar. Luckily I was entrusted with the latter, and soon enough one of the sacks got a hole in it. From then on at each lap I stuffed a handful of sugar in my mouth, and at the end of my shift I filled my pockets. The Russian saw what I was doing, but did not say anything.

 For want of telephones, postal service and public transport, chance encounters and haphazard visits were the only means of getting in touch with friends, colleagues and family members. Still, life got under way again. By these means in the Inner City, I ran into Bandi Prasszer, the son of our former chauffeur and my friend from adolescent days. He was engaged in repairing an abandoned truck, with which he would restart his father’s trucking business. He transported food to the capital, and on his way back hauled everything that country people needed. It was a risky and sometimes dangerous enterprise as Russian marauders were on the rampage on the roads. Bandi drove me to Kaposvár, from where I travelled to Kivadár in Somogy County.

Aunt Eszter had not left her home, and her house in neighbouring Kispuszta remained safe and sound, while she still enjoyed the best of health. I went to her place, because of our house, only the walls and the leaky roof remained. The area of Kivadár had been in the frontline, and what the Germans or the Russians did not seize, the people from the neighbourhood managed to “liberate.” The last lot billeted in the empty floorboardless rooms of our house were Bulgarian soldiers with their horses. After a few days of being pampered, I furnished a room for myself in the bailiff’s abandoned flat in Kivadár. I was the first one of our family to return.

The land of the new owners was already pegged out. The carving up of the estate had come to pass. The harvest was over, but the stooked sheaves of grain were still lined up on the stubbly field. Who would get the crop? It was the subject of discussion. Hantosi, the estate manager, was negotiating with the people in charge of the claims committee. They trusted him and the “distribution” went without a hitch. He came from an ethnic German family, but he was never bitten by the Nazi bug. When I arrived he was repairing the tractor with which those new farmers, who had neither a horse nor a cow, could plough their land. I buckled down to farming the remaining land until one of my two brothers who had studied at the Agricultural College could come and relieve me. My eldest brother and my brother-in-law had been taken prisoners of war, and we did not know their whereabouts.  Many men were missing from the outlying farms as well. Their women came to me, asking me to write letters trying to find out when they would come home. They brought their children with them, lest their reputation suffer.

Beyond the fence lived Anna, a very pretty nineteen year old girl. She used to fetch water from the artesian well and her path led under my window. Every time I saw her, my heart gave a leap, but I did not let on. She sang with her clear voice in the little choir at Sunday mass. I accompanied them on the harmonium. I was somewhat better at that than at farming. Once the tractor was working again, we saw to the threshing, and everyone got his share in proportion to his land (we too). The young people organized a dance in the wing of the manor that was still standing. There was music: two men played the fiddle while Hantosi hammered away on the cimbalom. I danced a lot, mainly with Anna, and we got to know each other better.

Around this time time the atom bomb exploded over Hiroshima, and we could now be certain that the war had finally ended all over the world. Those were beautiful days; peace reigned over familiar native soil, and perhaps also in our souls. One day I was in Tarany on some barter business. As far as the eye could see, the fields of our estate framed by woods were still intact. The new owners would have to divide them into lots when sowing time came. I was lying flat on my back in the grass, watching birds swimming along in the cloudless sky. But the all-enveloping silence was slowly rippled by a distant noise, a rumbling that grew louder and closer. I was wondering what it could be, when I caught sight of the cloud of dust billowing over the highway. By the time I got back home, the “Russkis” had infested the area. They had arrived in trucks and armoured cars even invading my little flat. Once again I was left with nothing but the shirt on my back and no roof over my head. Juliska, our former cook, put me up for a few days, after which I moved into the dirt-floored room next to the school. I had some books, and a petroleum lamp, I was satisfied. My neighbours were the school teacher and her sister – both of them spinsters. Once the Russian officers held their dinner party in their apartment, to which they invited me as well. They drank methylated spirits, ate pickles, sang away lustily, and asked me to play for them on the teachers’ upright piano. They were not interested in the Internationale, but became maudlin when I improvised Chopin. It was rather ironic that it was the Polish patriot’s music that touched their hearts. Perhaps those few chords were the only contact I had with them. I was lucky that the current of war never swept me into a situation where I had direct dealings for any length of time (in the frontline or as a POW) with the soldiers of the mammoth army pressing ahead from the Far East, many of whom trekked from Siberia or Uzbekistan – fighting and bleeding – to the River Elbe, driving the Germans before them.

Our visitors were from the engineering corps, repairing their machines, and just as suddenly as they had arrived, they left one day at the crack of dawn, without as much as a farewell. They didn’t give a damn about announcing their arrival or departure: they were the victors (and as it turned out soon enough: the colonisers), and we the vanquished. They certainly managed to strip my room. As I recall they even took the mattress, together with Father’s portrait painted by Rippl-Rónai.

It was already mid-autumn when we drove with Hantosi to Kopaszhegy. One hundred acres remained there too, tilled by the local foreman. Anna also came with us as she wanted to visit her relatives in Rinyaszentkirály. My plan was to offer the well tended Kopaszhegy manor house for the purposes of a ‘People’s College’4. It never entered my mind that I did not have any right to do so. Five of us siblings were my Father’s heirs, and I could only call one fifth of the house my own. And, of course, Mother’s right as usufructuary preceded our claims to it. All I really wanted to express with the idea of the offer, was something many of us felt after the war: that the time had come at last to set things right in our country by learning and the establishment of the kind of economy and life style I had read about in the writings of László Németh5, in which he referred to the Danish farmers’ small farms and cooperatives as examples. However, I never got as far as Kaposvár. Our elderly coachman became severely ill and feverish during the drive in the icy rain. We hurried back to Kivadár. I rushed at breakneck speed to get the doctor from Nagyatád. G. was lying in the poky little room of their workers’ flat like a tree torn from its roots; I feared that he would die. His wife and daughter (also a choir member) stood helplessly around his bed. “Pneumonia,” exclaimed Dr. Bors. He had come to Nagyatád after the war with his wife, also a doctor and we became good friends. He saw how worried I was. Next day he turned up with the new miracle medicine, penicillin, with which he saved G.’s life. At the time this medication was available only on the black-market.

As it happened, my offer did not take place until the following year during the county administratorship of István Tömpe, a former fighter of the Spanish Civil War, but nothing came of it. (In retrospect it seems possible that the Communist Party who, after grabbing hold of dictatorial powers, closed down the existing colleges, not sympathizeing with the idea of Popular People‘s Colleges.)

On the way back we picked up Anna. We kept each other warm on the back seat. Suddenly she turned to me and whispered in my ear: “I’ll  bear for you a son as beautiful as a melon!” - and I was suffused with an inner warmth, because no one had ever said anything that wonderful to me. Yet all I had ever done to her was to now and then  squeeze her hand in secret. For want of anything better, that’s what I did under the blanket again.

Anna’s  declaration expressed precisely the essence of the relationship between man and woman. The farm people’s needy life did not allow for beating about the bush. A girl could only give herself to her suitor in marriage, and whoever breached that canon, or (heaven forbid), made love to several boys, was written off as someone who had “used up” herself. Anna did not dilly-dally; she knew what was what, but I did not match her pure intent. Over the years I have often thought of her and her words.

There was a danger that swine fever would break out on the farms. To expand his diminished scope of activities, Hantosi had opened a shop at the end of his house. People from the village did their shopping there and came for a chat in the evenings. Hantosi managed to nose out that one could obtain the necessary vaccine from the Wander pharmaceutical factory. Payment had to be made in kind: with piglets, from which they manufactured the serum. The elders convened, made a headcount of the pigs and drew lots to determine who would contribute to the shipment. I arranged for a wagon with the stationmaster of Nagyatád. With the piglets in the freight car, Lajos Nagy, Hantosi and myself left in the evening in a third-class compartment, Our carriages were coupled to the Budapest train at Somogyszob. After a lot of shunting on arrival, we finally alighted in the grounds of the factory. Everything went as planned, but first we had to acquire an authorization from the Ministry of Agriculture. Off we went into the city, and we hung around in the corridor, when I caught sight of Péter Veres, whom I knew well from his books. He wore topboots and three-four people escorted him, brandishing papers in their hands. I told Hantosi that this was the minister, he was the one to speak to. We agreed, and as he came closer, I addressed him. He stopped, listening to us while taking stock of my two companions. They too wore topboots, and Hantosi boasted a moustache, like Péter Veres. Although my feet looked disreputable, clad in shabby laced-top boots, which no peasant would ever wear, it did not seem to worry Uncle Péter (as he was referred to at the time). He instructed his secretary to let us have the necessary papers. We returned to the factory and received the serum. Hantosi and Lajos went home that same day. I stayed on in Budapest.

*

I came across Stefánia on the lower Danube embankment. She was painting watercolours of the ruins. Next to her a young Russian officer was standing by his easel, paintbrush in hand.

“He attached himself to me” - Stefánia pointed to him - “work goes better this way, and he sees me home in the afternoon.” I asked whether they had spotted Tiger. They hadn’t, but the Russian promised to try and find him. With that he packed away his things, and I escorted Stefánia home. She informed me that she had become engaged, but her fiancé had gone West with the blackshirt panzers. The last time they had met was on the opposite banks of the River Leitha where they could only shout at each other across the water. That was the last she had heard from him, but as soon as it became possible to travel she would try and search him out. Would I accompany her? she asked. “Perhaps” - I replied - but first she would have to explain Leonardo da Vinci’s art to me, so I could write my essay by the time university reopened. Stefánia stretched out on the couch, unfolded her long blonde hair and promised to help me. She had already graduated, and her professor was holding out the hope of a job for her as his assistant.

The Flóris Cafe had reopened and we often met there. Black marketeers, journalists and would-be publishers milled around. The restaurant became popular with officers of the Allied Control Commissions, just as it had been with the Germans. Remembering Karcsi Kis’s earlier generosity, I put him in touch with Bandi, who was running a veritable shuttle service between Kaposvár and Budapest. He supplied the raw material for the kitchen of the Flóris, and I was able to relish the familiar tastes in the restaurant’s cooking.

It was a sopping wet, windy November day when Lee entered the restaurant. She was wearing baggy American camouflage pants, a camera hanging round her neck. When she saw Stefánia’s drawing portfolio, she sat down at the table next to us and ordered a dram of slivovitz. After a while we got to talking, in broken English and then in French. Lee told us that she had lived in France for three years and learned the language there. During the latter years of the war she worked for Vogue Magazine in England. She then enlisted as a war correspondent, and entered Paris with her compatriots, where she was able to meet up with her old friends. Sobered after the first flush of victory she had decided to have a look around Europe. Reaching Hungary via Germany, Denmark and Austria, she was now reporting to her paper on post-war fashions. “What fashion?”, snapped Stefánia, annoyed by the seeming jauntiness with which our new acquaintance told us about herself. Stefánia did not slavishly follow fashion, always dressing according to her own fancy - all colour and flashiness. “Women ‘celebrated’ the liberation” – continued Stefánia - “by wearing dowdy clothes, covering their faces with soot, and hiding their hair under kerchiefs to avoid being raped.  We made ourselves as unattractive as possible. That was the fashion, and now we wear whatever was left in the burnt out, looted homes.”

“In France it was the exact opposite”, replied Lee. “Having been accustomed to the puritan and practical way British women dressed during the Blitz, I was amazed when I saw the dolled up Parisian women in their hour-glass waisted, chic outfits, and the soldiers couldn’t take their eyes off them either. All that they had read about the Parisian women’s coquetry, now came true. As we found out, the French women hadn’t behaved in a cowed way during the occupation either. On the contrary, with their flared skirts, long hair and billowing scarves they were mocking the occupiers’ thickset women with their mannish haircuts and drab clothes. Swaying on high heels they were defying the wartime restrictions, and felt it their duty to be flamboyantly prodigal.”

By now Lee was consuming her second drink, and asked Stefánia to produce her  drawing portfolio. When she saw the sketch Stefánia had made of me, she told us that she had sat for Picasso. “If you were to see the painting, you wouldn’t recognize me, yet it still portrays me. I happened to be in Paris at the time as the avant-garde painter-photographer Man Ray’s model and later assistant. I learnt my craft at his side. I knew most of the surrealist artists. I consider myself a surrealist photographer.”

“Then you came to the right place here in Hungary,” Stefánia remarked. “Here everything is now topsy-turvy, the whole scene a nightmare. All you have to do is look out of the window.” Lee glanced through the plate-glass at the Soviet soldier loafing about under the shell-shattered trees on Vörösmarty Place, and then back at us. She had a fine head of fair hair and blue eyes, but her face emanated weariness and disenchantment. The severity of her mannish outfit was relieved by her sensuous feminine lips. She was older than us, close to forty, I think. “All I have seen on the way was the destruction and misery caused by the war” - she said. “Starving children, Auschwitz. And my kitten died too” - Lee continued despondently. “I had been protecting it inside my tunic, and when we reached Budapest, it jumped out of the car and got caught under the wheels.”

Even Stefánia did not know what to say to that, and I remained silent, although a host of questions swarmed in my head about the surrealist writers and painters, but somehow all that seemed very remote now.  A young man in uniform entered, making a beeline to Lee’s table. Seeing that she was talking to us, he introduced himself. He informed us that they were going to the Park Club. “What are you doing there?” - I asked. I knew the club well, I used to attend balls there. “There will be a press conference” - said John, who was a reporter for Time, “but we get together there at other times too.” “Hungarians frequent it as well” - added Lee. “Come along some time, and then we can meet again.”

Lee’s invitation confirmed what I had heard so far only on the grapevine. The exclusive club had become the meeting place and leisure centre for American officers, where they let their hair down, listened to jazz and consumed their whisky. The old staff no longer served counts and captains of industry, but well-heeled new customers. The Americans got their pay in dollars, and consequently were disproportionately better off than their allies, as rich as Croesus in this despoiled country, with whom the jeunesse dorée and the currency speculators soon established contact. They moved with familiarity in the wood-panelled rooms amongst English furniture (known to them from past balls and cocktail parties), chatting with the officers and journalists. The waiters did a brisk trade acting as go-betweens in the sale of family jewellery, and the erstwhile landowners’ sons organized shooting parties for the Americans’ amusement. This sport had also become a source of income in the meat-starved city. And the new landowners were pleased to entertain their former masters, conscious that one never knew when the tables could turn again, Lee enlightened us.                                                                       She had a keen eye: she knew when to click her camera. She sent an illustrated report to her paper about the ravaged city, which even with its ruins, she wrote “rose like a jewel-studded icon across the Danube”. She immortalized the scavenging crone on the Vérmező and the group of playboys and girls in the Park Club before the ornate maiolica fireplace, in overcoats, holding cognac glasses in their hands. Apparently fires were lit only for the Americans.

This was a time of waiting and of anxious misgivings: where are the missing family members? Are they alive? Survivors returned from prisoner-of-war and death camps. So did some refugees, who had escaped to the West. The latter were received and interrogated at screening stations set up on the border. New detention camps were established, prisons were filling up. Political leaders deemed to be war criminals were flown back by the Americans. Leaden-faced, manacled men in crumpled clothes got off the planes, and were directly taken to the Political Police. The building, formerly the headquarters of the Arrow Cross Party, was familiar to several of them. Only now they were not going to their offices, but to the cellars.

By now I even had an apartment. True, it was only temporary, as it and belonged to a ballerina, who had not returned yet. Once again I went to Andrássy Boulevarde, to have a look in the cellar of our apartment, whether there was anything usable there. There was a mass-meeting in progress on Heroes’ Square. The foreign-accented speech of the baldheaded Muscovite Party leader was blaring from loudspeakers fastened to lamp-posts. Suddenly an eerie sensation of déjà vu shot through me. My gut reaction was that nothing had changed. During the war the toothbrush-moustached dictator’s gravelly voice accosted the pedestrians, now it was another. Only the music had changed. Instead of marches, they used “rallying songs” to rouse the people. All of them made an ear-splitting racket. I was relieved when I reached the cellar and the obnoxious noise was left behind.

The Court was sitting in overcoats on the podium of the Academy of Music, where the case of László Bárdossy, former prime minister deemed to be a war criminal, was being heard. He had been brought back from Germany with the others. I got a ticket, and sat down, approximately where some years earlier I had listened to Béla Bartók’s farewell concert. The judges and prosecutors were facing the audience, the accused had his back to us. In front of him stood a small table laden with papers and a microphone. We saw his face only when he stood up to make his statement. He was a thin, nervous-looking type and edgy, aware of his fate. He explained himself tenaciously, polemicized with the political state prosecutor (a fiery tempered sociologist, social democrat journalist) and the presiding judge (the former court-martial assessor) – and it seemed he occasionally got the better of them. It was rumoured that the Party Leader had summoned the judge and told him: “You are not to argue with Bárdossy, because you’ll lose. Your task is to convict him.”

There were seven people’s judges, five of them representing the parties of the new democracy. There was barely any difference between them and the defendant. All were freezing. They were sitting on the podium, shivering in their overcoats, some of them keeping their hats on. The audience was shivering too, coughing, sniffling and brandishing their handkerchiefs.

It was mid-winter. Greyish-black clouds hung over the frozen city. During the nights robber gangs, “strippers”6 roamed the streets. In the cold apartments of the gutted buildings the citizens of Budapest tossed and turned fretfully in their beds.

On the day of the execution the Café Flóris was abuzz.  “What a disgrace: they hanged him like a common criminal, yet all he did was defend his country!” - some people remarked. “He was responsible for the death of our soldiers, the deportation of the Jews, the bombing of Budapest” - others contended. “He declared war on America!” - someone interjected, and the latter proved such a telling point that for a second everyone fell silent.

At this moment Lee entered, but as soon as the door closed behind her, the argument continued, degenerating into an ever louder hubbub. When she caught sight of me, she came to my table, where I was sitting in the company of Walter. Lee had already met him. He was an art collector and amateur photographer, who had been recording the city’s destruction since the very first aerial attacks. He had accompanied Lee several times on her local expeditions. She gave him films. We explained to her what all the racket was about.

“He’s been shot” - Lee piped up -  “not hanged.” The wise guys of Pest crowding around our table, knew better: “You’re wrong, he was hanged.” “He didn’t deserve it”, one of them said. “He did”, someone else protested, “he was a fascist.” Lee looked at them, and demonstrated with her hand that it had not been a hanging, but: ...puff... puff...

She did not utter another word until the waiter brought her a stiff drink of plum brandy. She drank it in one gulp, and promptly asked for another. She pointed to her camera: “I was there, I took photos. We went to the prison at dawn with John. There was no electricity. We kept vigil in the light of a broken-chimneyed, smoky oil lamp in a small chamber next to the condemned cell. The droning of voices and the stamping of feet could be heard from the yard where a crowd had gathered. There would have been at least two hundred people there. They made us wait for a long time. We couldn’t understand why, but it became obvious once they asked us to move to the corridor where we could look down into the yard. Dawn was just breaking. Instead of gallows (that had been dismantled), they were stacking sandbags against the brick wall. They had changed the verdict in the last minute and were going to give him the dignity of a firing squad as an act of clemency. They brought out a table. Three men entered, then Bárdossy was led in and stood against the sandbags. A priest wearing a white surplice followed the procession. He handed a cross to the condemned man, then stepped aside. The crowd surged forward and clambered everywhere to have a better view. After the verdict was read out, Bárdossy waved his hand refusing the blindfold, and the four gendarmes who had volunteered for the execution lined up facing him. B. threw back his head, and in a high-pitched rasp shouted: God save Hungary from all these bandits!” - said Lee. The riflemen were less than two metres from him. B. started to say something else, but the shots pre-empted him. He was dead before he could have heard the sound of the guns. The impact of the shots threw his body against the wall, and he pitched to his left in a pirouette, falling on the ground with his ankles crossed. The priest stepped up to him, knelt down, murmured a prayer and consecrated him. Someone shouted from the crowd: - Shoot him as well!7 When the priest finished, a prison doctor briefly examined the body. One of the shots had hit his chin. He covered him.

Others were listening to Lee’s account, and someone was translating on an off what she was saying. Even so, many stuck to the opinion that he had been hanged. Others were convinced that the firing squad had botched its job and that B. had ended his life writhing in agony on the stone floor. The rumours spread. People told each other in the streets, cafés, offices and their homes, innumerable variations, according to which B. was a martyr, a scoundrel, a patriot, traitor, etc.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if one day I’d be walking down a street named after him, to the execution of the present leaders” - exclaimed Lee, who was visibly worn out from her early morning job. “But now I am leaving; I‘ve had enough of your beautiful and horrible country, this land of fables. Just keep on telling your stories to each other - why do I have to listen to them?”

She looked at us wearily, dejectedly, but brightened up when she caught sight of John in the doorway. “Tomorrow we’re off to Romania” - she said as she was leaving. “In the mountains there, they still have gypsies with dancing bears that dance on the crooked backs of people – the Transylvanian variety of Chinese massage. Let the bear stomp the pain out of me too.

*

Only very much later, in Sydney, did I have occasion to see Lee Miller’s photos taken in Hungary. The Dougherty Gallery organized an exhibition of the world-famous photographer’s pictures. Lee’s son, Antony Penrose, came to Sydney for a few days to guide groups of visitors, expounding on the pictures and on his mother’s life and work.

After her trip to Romania, Lee returned to England and married her longtime lover and friend,  Roland Penrose, the British surrealist painter. Their son was born in London in 1947.

After the guided tour I went up to him and said: “I was there” - I told him - “I was there in Budapest when Lee took these pictures. I knew about her photo” - and I pointed at the picture showing László Bárdossy’s execution - “but this is the first time I have seen it.” In the picture B. wore the same plus-fours and ankle boots with white socks turned over the edges, in which the reporters had taken photos of him when he got off the plane. And yes, the picture with the bear was also there, hanging on the wall. The unwieldy bear is sitting on Lee’s hind quarters. Next to him was its handler with a busby on his head and a chain in his hand.

“You saw what Budapest was like then,” Tony said,  “just as Lee had seen it” and he handed me a copy of his book8, which he wrote about his mother. It included  a collection of her pictures and reports.

I ran into Jancsi in a Viennese patisserie the day after my escape from Hungary. I crossed the border with my family at the forests of the Lövér Mountains. He had swum across the River Leitha. He needed no a map. And again I wasn’t at all surprised when I caught sight of him on a Sydney beach with a puppy sitting next to him on the grass. Jancsi pointed at him: “Tiger.”

“Hello, Tiger”, I greeted him, and he looked at me, cocked his head slightly and pricked his ears, as if to ask what I wanted to tell him.

2006, Chatswood, NSW, Australia

Translated by Anne Major
Edited by Karen Barnes

1 Christmas Bonbon

2 A pun on Lenke’s surname (Szőnyi), meaning “awful”, “impossible”, etc.

3 At the sixth conference of the International Society for Music Education held in Budapest in 1964.

4 People’s Colleges were established in 1945 in order to provide education for talented peasant youths; they were closed down in 1949.

5 A leading writer and thinker with reformist ideas.

6 They actually stripped the clothes off people and exchanged them for food in the countryside.

7 I heard about this later.

8 Anthony Penrose: The lives of Lee Miller. New York, Thames and Hudson, 2002.