Miklós Szentkuthy

Frivolous Confessions

(Excerpt from Chapter 19)

 

Miklós Szentkuthy (born Miklós Pfisterer, 1908-1988) was one of the great outsiders of twentieth-century Hungarian writing. Mobilizing a vast repository of knowledge of history, philosophy and the arts, his novels have been described in turn as unclassifiable, unintelligible and spellbinding. Their literary significance, however, is beyond dispute.
Between January 6 and May 7, 1983, in the study of Szentkuthy's apartment, the literary historian Lóránt Kabdebó of the Petőfi Museum of Literary History conducted twenty-seven interviews with the author for the museum's sound archives. Many of these sessions were recorded in the presence of a circle of friends including critics, literary historians, mathematicians, physicists, engineers, artists and students. The inspirational magic of the fleeting word only heightened Szentkuthy's famous outspokenness and his penchant for the grotesque.
The 700-page volume resulting from these interviews, Frivolitások és hitvallások (Frivolous Confessions, translated into French as La confession frivole; Phébus, 1999), includes scintillating portraits, incisive recollections from the years of Szentkuthy's literary apprenticeship and his later life and moments of ironical self-analysis and clownish self-parody. Most importantly, these confessions provide a key to Szentkuthy's oeuvre.
Based on the transcribed text of these conversations, which ran to 1500 pages, Mária Tompa, now Miklós Szentkuthy's literary executor, collaborated with him for four years on the final text of the volume, complementing the transcript with excerpts from other conversations, interviews and confessions.

...

Now that I look back on it, that ARP service was, I would say, for a while almost amusing. I was called up by the police, and from the very start that's where I belonged. Later on, it turned out that I also belonged to the fire service. Later on still, it turned out that I was also a member of the Hungarian army. Still later on, it turned out that I was also a member of the German Wehrmacht stationed in Hungary. By then I was a little bit giddy about what would be next. Would they rip me into pieces? As it was, since they were always saying four different things, I realised that the different orders could be played off against one another. Admittedly, that led to major chaos, although I didn't have to contribute here, since that developed quite nicely, automatically, of itself. The Nazis would say one thing, the Arrow Cross another, the fire service's pump squad leader something else, and the Hungarian army and the police something else again. God himself could not have made heads or tails of it, but there were possibilities in the set-up. Painful as the situation might have been sometimes, it could be exploited at others. One of the many authorities I came under was the fire service, which had its headquarters on Crown Warden Street near the St Christina Church - in the triangle of Arrow Cross and the Nazi Hooked Cross and the Christian Cross. I would sometimes have to do a duty shift down there. Immediately next-door was a girls' junior secondary school, which of course. well, anyway, a long time had passed since there were any girls there. There were horses, because the gym had been turned into a stable - hay, dung, the lot.
Now, I ought to note that we were put through a thousand training courses, but up till February 1945, we were never ordered to turn out, either during or after an air-raid. I lectured on the composition of bombs and the life and death of St Stephen. The platoon, for the most part, would swing the lead, and I would give leave to anyone I could, since I had the opportunity to do that. At the start of my service, I got to know a huge hulk of a chap who owned a wine cellar. He lived close to St Christina Church, between Castle Hill and Sun Hill, and that was where his cellar was, with masses of barrels and flasks. He came to me once.
"I'd like to have some leave, sir. Please give me time off, Dr Pfisterer!"
"No, I can't do that right now. So many have asked for leave already that someone is going to kick up a fuss about it."
"Lieutenant, my dear friend, of course, there will be something in return. You'll see, professor. I won't be ungrateful."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Come with me after the lecture, first lieutenant."
I dropped by. A reconnaisance. Afterward, he would regularly send me, via ARP conscripts, a clothes-basket of bottles of wine and spirits. I never saw the chap again in my life. "He went on leave." No one checked; armies were blasting away, bombs falling all over the place, so who the hell was going to bother how many were missing from my platoon?
Once, when two ARP conscripts brought a full clothes-basket to Derék Street, there was an air-raid in progress. No catastrophe, however. The wine arrived intact. Dolly was at home to take the delivery, and the skiving ARP men returned to Castle Hill in good order to listen to St Stephen's life as if nothing had happened. Like I said, I was also ordered out to the fire service on Crown Warden Street. I spent hours in the barracks tool-yard, among huge extension ladders and all manner of contraptions, which were never used by the firefighters and never ordered out to any incidents. For the author of Prae, the shaky lieutenant that I was, and a few loafing bakers and cobblers on bikes, clearing the collapsed dome of the Royal Palace would have been too much to ask. The next time I was ordered there, I took a volume of John Keats' poetry with me. I clambered up to the top of one of the implausible machines - a ladder, engine and vacuum cleaner for giants all in one - and there I was able to read in peace.

L. K.: Didn't you get into trouble for reading English?

A fat lot they knew! The local fire chief conducted a daily inspection. Even Napoleon at the height of his empire did not have a ceremonial dress as magnificent as this dancing-teacher Mars. With me having taken up a post ten metres above his head, on the top rung of the spindliest ladder, he could hardly rasp out to me his terrifying order of the day. But then the firemen didn't do anything, either. The telephone would ring to inform them - I don't know - that Újpest was being bombed, say. They would acknowledge. and record it.
So anyway, I ought to say something about why I didn't become a soldier. I was maybe in my first year at university when Miklós Horthy the Regent, that great warrior from Nagybánya (Baia Mare), carried out a secret conscription. It had to be "secret" because under the terms of the Treaty of Trianon, Hungary was only permitted an army that was totally ineffective. Even that was subject to control by the Entente, and the moment that it proved to be even the slightest bit effective, they would see to it that it remained an institution for half-wits rather than an army. But Horthy - the rear-admiral on the white horse who was later to do the job of reannexing Transylvania and Slovakia to Hungary all over again, a second Chieftain Árpád - carried out a secret conscription, and I was one of those who were notified to present themselves. Indeed, I also learned that if I were to present myself, then I would immediately, regardless of years of service, be commissioned lieutenant in a glorious patriotic war where we would be conquering Canada, America and Africa by a sleight of hand, a trifle for us. I told my father, and he melted like the proverbial snowflake on a stove. Just like Le rouge et le noir. If I wasn't going to be a bishop, at least I would be a lieutenant, marching into Vladivostok with Horthy on his white horse and with all his naval insignia, little anchors clanking on the horse's hindquarters.
Anyway, I reported for army duty. They found me unfit for service. I had no illness as such, but I was cross-eyed and scrawny, and this was a swish enlistment, if one may put it that way. They were only taking strapping, plucky fellows. So I was kicked out, but it was recorded that I had reported. That was my luck, because in Hitler's war I traded on that almost to the very end. This all happened at the Maria Theresa Barracks. That was where it was recorded that Miklós Pfisterer had displayed universal strategic impotence. So later on, each and every time I travelled abroad - between, say, 1930 and 1939 - I would take a trip beforehand to the Maria Theresa Barracks, where they would confirm that I had fulfilled my military obligations, so I could get lost as far as they were concerned. Then I would go off and look around Lincoln Cathedral.
This military classification held, even in the darkest depths of the Hitler period. But in the meantime, even as an ARP officer, it was scary; because even though I knew that I was a firefighter and getting by in the midst of Nazis and Arrow Crossers as a history teacher, platoon commander and honorary cretin at the Maria Theresa Barracks, it worried me that this was not right. There was going to be trouble. The whole thing was far from over.
I would keep an eye on the newly posted call-up announcements. Those born in 1906 were to report! Then those born in 1907! "Now then, Miklós," I thought to myself, "it's going to be your turn next. You'll be off to the battle line. ARP this or that, it won't make the slightest difference." Then the newest poster: those born in 1909, then those in 1910 to report! What relief, but only until the next posters appeared. Those born in 1911, then those in 1912. Had 1908 been overlooked, or was it just me who had not seen it? I was somehow wrapped up at the ARP, but it was just a tissue-paper wrapping that could easily be pulled apart. The balloon went up at the very end. Then everyone was supposed to go. There was even a rumour that we ARP men would be taken off to the German front so as to fall for our country in Hamburg.
Thank God, though, my oft-mentioned cousin Dymagd in the Ministry of Defence had many generals amongst her friends, and at the very last moment she managed to wangle some super-exemption. Even then it was not plain sailing, but Dymagd was very adroit and very pretty, and in the MOD the right hand often didn't know what the left hand was doing, so that was how I wriggled out of being called up. I remember the circumstances as well. Next to St Christina Church, at the foot of Sun Hill, was the Green Tree Restaurant, where I sat waiting apprehensively for the outcome. That was where Dymagd handed the blessed exemption chit to me.
The paper was valid, accepted by Arrow Cross officials, but then the Arrow Cross were the living exemplars of swinishness, garbage and trampishness walking on two legs. I should be ashamed, and indeed am ashamed, to use these worthless terms of "abuse", because when it comes down to it, all imprecations are banal formulae and trivial clichés. When matters of morality are in question, I am simply not going to be bothered by aesthetic subtleties, so let the expression of my curse be the most banal and trivial. I, a disciple of the prophets, Jesus Christ and all the saints don't give a damn for stylistic niceties and the prescriptions of artistic etiquette! When I speak with retrospective foresight about the most rotten social class of Hungary, the reason is that I have become fully aware of everything - of what humankind in general is like, and what our speculating patriots in general are like. Masses of Hungarians died at the Don Bend for Hitler's moustache, while back in Hungary, Arrow Cross pimps raced around the streets wearing a tin necklet, asking everyone why they were not in the army. Well, why weren't they in the army themselves? Fortunately, my papers proved legitimate. This ARP service was a very odd business. The headquarters were on Castle Hill, close to the Matthias Church, in the former Buda town hall. Below and behind this was a vast bomb shelter which was also where military casualties were placed. We won't talk about the horrors which everyone experienced, which everyone is familiar with. Despite the headquarters being on Castle Hill, I was always allowed to go home, and I accepted - looking back on it, I can't imagine how - that however many times a day an air-raid took place, I, as the platoon commander, would have to rush up into the Castle from my flat in Derék Street. I was permitted that luxury. Admittedly, there were taverns en route, so I was able to draw some courage.

L. K.: You mentioned that your elementary school was also up there.

I'll tell you that story as well. I was often on night duty - sometimes at the Attila Street Elementary School (I went there from the age of seven), sometimes at the one on Castle Hill (my very first year of elementary school was spent there). Indeed, I also had spells of duty at the Castle's presbytery, because the army had requisitioned even that building. In one of the bigger rooms there were bunk beds for the ARP men - or to be more accurate, plank-beds - on which the guardians of the homeland would sleep, snore and audibly emit the polyphonic ventings of their bowel functions in concert. At the time of those night duties, for understandable reasons, I was in a fairly restless mental state and, being unable to sleep among the harmonising plank-beds, I would go out into the corridor, where - and this was a presbytery, remember - a ceiling-high crucifix was set above the icecold fireplace. I would say prayers there, in front of that crucifix; hand on heart, I prayed with the greatest sincerity. This would be subject to continual interruption by the comings and goings of ARP men and soldiers, because the crucifix was directly opposite the lavatory. So, the platoon commander would pray, while the army either farted in its dreams or peed when it was awake.
Among the ranks there was a very amiable cobbler, Habdák, who was always going around on his bicycle, dashing into town. (and since I was playing the field a bit in those days, he took billets doux by bike to my various amoures.). Once, he was cycling past Baron Lajos Hatvany's mansion on Castle Hill (a huge building on what was then called Werbőczy Road, at the end nearer to the Matthias Church) at precisely the time when the ravages and plundering by the rabble of the Arrow Cross were at their revolting height. Since Hatvany was Jewish, they were indiscriminately tossing out of the doors and windows the finest items from his library and art collection. That was what defence of the realm meant for the Arrow Cross! That was why they were not being sent to the front. Anyway, this cobbler Habdák happened to be cycling by, and he knew that his platoon commander (me) was fond of books, so he picked up two volumes from the pile and brought them back. I still have them to this day. One is about the temple of Borobudur in Eastern Java - a bit old-fashioned, but it has marvellous photographs. The other is about the art of India, again an admirable collection of photographs. Look, here they are. These are what Habdák, the amiable cycling cobbler, brought me: L'art a Java: Les temples de la période classique indojavanaise by M.P. Verneuil (Edition G. Vanoest, Paris & Bruxelles, 1927) and The Glorious Hindustan by Dr Ernst Alfred Nawrath (Methuen & Co. Ltd, London, 1935). But then, as I've said, it was not only amiable cobblers and amiable wine-cellar proprietors who were in the ARP.
I recall one police captain. His skin was white as death or slaked lime or a ghost. He was a fanatic killer of Jews. He used to deliver horrifying talks about how, when an aircraft was shot down and the American crew who had baled out were taken prisoner, he was the person who had been charged by the Police Supreme Authority to determine which of the parachutists were circumcised. Well, my captain, this white-as-a-sheet ghost, somehow sniffed out that Dollykins was not one of the first Christians. They did not inform me. I only learned about it later, because he blackmailed Dymagd. If she slept with him, then he would not report Dolly. Dymagd did not allow herself to be blackmailed; she just kept on promising him, because by then we were keeping our eyes on the fighting and, with the Russians already at Csepel, the time was close when it would be he who needed to fear for his life, not Dymagd. It was typical that this is what preoccupied the Arrow Cross when the noose was already tightening round their necks!

...

Toward the end there appeared three or four drunk Arrow Crossers. By then everything around was literally going up in flames, but they were still stuttering deliriously, "Why aren't you in the army?" After I managed to get round that, oddly enough, it was the womenfolk whom they rounded up. And for what? To construct a brick fortification against the Russians. So the women - Dollykins, Dymagd and the rest - went off to build. I later saw the wonder work: a brick wall about two feet high, without mortar, so that it would have collapsed if a bumblebee had buzzed it. That's what they had to build to defend the homeland in late January 1945, like the women of Eger against the besieging Turks four centuries earlier. Human stupidity's Great Wall of China!
At the very end, an enthusiastic pair of Arrow Cross patriots, a young couple who were living in the house, brought news that relief troops had arrived. Can you beat that for fanaticism? I, too, had sniffed around outside a good few times, and what I saw was that the German troops were by then scattering and taking cover in shattered shop premises, with no hope - or rather, the only thing left to them was hope, nothing else - with their refrain of "Russki kaput!"
Zoltán Timkó, an attorney of the Crown, would sit around in the cellar on some tall chest, I recall. He looked like the chief rabbi of Kishinev with his bespectacled skeletal face and black silk cap to protect his bald skull from the cold. When the young Arrow Cross couple burst in with their budding promise of relief by spring, this paragon of Hungarian jurisprudence sceptically remarked in an undertone, "You'd do better to come into the cellar, young lady, and stay on your backside, because the relief troops you're dreaming of have gone down the drain." Here I really ought to recount how the house suffered a direct hit by a bomb when we were down in the cellar. The debris from the upper floors obstructed the door to the cellar and the windows. We thought we were going to suffocate on all the dust, but we somehow managed to scramble our way out. The house was wrecked, only my apartment on the ground floor was not demolished. As I said before, even my library was unscathed. On my writing desk there were two giant, big-bellied Venetian goblets - those, too, have survived to the present day.

L. K.: So why did you move?

You have to understand that the whole house was wrecked; in the middle of every room in my apartment, apart from my study, stood a huge pyramid of rubble, just like the excavations at Troy. The house had become totally unusable and was later demolished.
For the time being, though, we are still in the cellar, and along come the first Russians - a rather tense moment that.
It wasn't so much Russians who came by, but squads of Persians, Turkomans and Tatars. I remember once, when I was going around outside in the snow, up among the ruins on Sun Hill, I ran into a Persian-looking soldier who was humming a melody that bore a strong resemblance to the dance of the Persian women in Mussorgsky's opera Khovanshchina. That musical pleasure was instantly dampened by the eyesore of a six-ton gun beside us, with the humming Persian beckoning that I should pull it further over. I don't know any Persian, so by sign language I asked how he imagined I was going to do that. "Just pull it, pull it," he urged. Everything was in ruins with lifeless horses, lifeless houses, dead bodies, Hungarian, German and Russian corpses all around us - a splendid little collection dotted around, an audiovisual course in world history - a kind of department- store abundance on display of all that was war.
But why me? Where, in that diabolical ice and snow and cold, was I supposed to tug that solitary dumb gun, the word for which in Russian - pushku - existed also in Hungarian, but meant a rifle, though it was no smaller for that. I gripped it, and of course, it didn't budge. The soldier was standing beside me. I showed him that I didn't have the muscles for it. He then flew into a towering rage and was about to land a kick on me, but I took to my heels and managed to hop it. I could hear him as he carried on humming that dance of the Persian women.
The same scene repeated itself later on with another soldier, this one with a Chinese look about him. The same street, the same dead bodies, the same gun, but what this one was all worked up about was the fact that five yards away from the gun was some kind of truck full of shells, and I should hitch the gun to this, like a trailer. "Right," says I, "this is even better. I'm supposed to haul this fiveton gun with my left arm, the nine-ton truck with my right, then couple them together with a dirty great iron hook." He handed me a chain to secure the hook. Again I demonstrated my lack of muscles, again a fit of fury on the part of the soldier, again the danger of a kick up the backside, and again I managed to hop it. There came a time, though, when I didn't escape the kick. Alongside the railway track out of the Southern Rail Terminal was a stack of logs 70 to 100 feet long, each one of which must have weighed about five tons. These were being guarded by a Russian soldier. The whole thing was fairly weird, because he was diminutive, sported a beard and was about two hundred years old. He was hopping around among those logs like a tiny dwarf. I was walking past the Southern Rail Terminal - I wouldn't say unsuspectingly, because I was highly suspicious, but he had already started beckoning: "Davai, davai!" "Uh-oh," I say, "I've heard that before. What does he want?" Well, what he wants is for me to go to the other end of these logs, and then for us to carry the whole lot, one by one, from here to there. He demonstrated how he would take one end, while I should go to the other end, and we would lift the log together. It was a walk in itself just to get to the other end of the log. From there I could only make out the frightfully nice midget Santa Claus with the aid of a telescope. I heaved. I indicated that the log wasn't budging. It wasn't going to work, no way would it work. He thereupon set about cursing me roundly in some Chuvash-Volapük. He looked a bit like József Szinyei, my linguistics professor. What was I to do now? I would have hotfooted it, except that there was no way out at that end of the logs, so the only way I could escape was by running past him. En route, I was the recipient of a formal kick up the backside from that sweetest of all midgets.

L. K.: And would he have been able to lift a log?

How should I know! There's no telling with mythical creatures. He must have thought that he couldn't manage it on his own, but with a strapping young chap like me. He must have been disappointed.
Another time, also at the Southern Rail Terminal, Russian soldiers were loading huge rolls of paper into a goods wagon. A roll like that weighs a ton. Dolly and I happened to be walking by. They called us over to lift the paper. Well, for a start, that was out of the question; but still, ut aliquid fecisse videatur - so, to look willing, I lifted off as big a bundle of paper as well as I could, then with Dolly's help started carrying it toward the wagon. We spied out a way to reach it amidst the rubble - a low wall here, a higher one there - potholed here, but not there. We were just about to go round a wall when one of the soldiers bawled out that we should go another way, pointing to the middle of a wall. We didn't understand what he was getting at, whereupon he showed us what he had in mind. He raised a foot and kicked the wall, at which the citadel crumbled, the tower of Babel, in a cloud of dust, and a gap materialised. Here you are! A gangway, and no need to walk round. But that was low. The lifting required one to bend over double. Dolly had it a bit easier.
"Little things" like that.
In short, the war came to an end. Berlin was taken by the Russians - a superb strategic trick on the part of the Germans, the ultimate all-round defensive position. Hitler committed suicide in the flush of victory, along with Goebbels - a bacchanalia, thanks be to God!
The fighting in Budapest finished on February 13th. We went upstairs from the cellar into the apartment. Only my study was usable. Of course, there were no panes in the windows, so the frames had to be covered with paper. The waterguarding deserter hiding in the cellar - who, along with his promise of chickenand- jam, had been prophesying an imminent end to the war and a stunning victory - was by then prophesying nothing and filling his pants in terror. Jam sans chicken - so his prophecy turned out half right. There was still some water held in reserve in the cellar, but we were not allowed to touch that. We carried water in buckets from a long way off.
I have fond memories of a Russian soldier who was looking for a doctor.
I knew that there was one who lived in the neighbourhood, on Sun Hill, so I offered to go with him. He seemed a pleasant chap. So, I went with him to the nearby villa where the doctor lived. He thanked me profusely and opened the briefcase he was carrying. Inside was a pile of fob watches and wristwatches. He invited me to take any that appealed to me. It was a touching gesture, but I said, "No, thank you very much, but no." I was drooling, but no, I couldn't. "Take one," he repeated. "No, I really couldn't." At that he got so angry that he tossed all the expensive watches onto the floor. I had offended him when he had wished to give me a present out of affection. That was immensely appealing, and it also reminded me a bit of myself and my own mood swings. I can be all sweetness and light, none more so; but if that is not good enough for you, then drop dead, damn your hide to hell and back! Ever since then, whenever I suddenly flare up into a temper, Dolly reminds me of that incident, "You're a Russki, that's what you are, a Russki!"

That's how life "at home" started again. The apartment was uninhabitable, so as soon as we could, we moved back into the cellar, which was a luxury, because it was warm there and better protected. The apartment - that was awful, in the early spring, with no glass in the windows.
At one point a policeman turned up. I already knew him from the time when I had been called away from Uncle Csóka's tavern to join the ARP service. This time? I was to present myself on Paulay Street. I trotted off to search among the ruins, and who should I see? At my place in Derék Street, one nearby neighbour had been an appalling Arrow Cross gangster, and here he was mixing in the company of Russian soldiers - indeed, leading them. He was informing on others. "Oh, it's you, Pfisterer," he says. "You were a Hitler sympathiser, just go right in." He's telling me. Him! A person who just a few days before had been running round with an Arrow Cross insignia as big as a mill-wheel! Hungary restored, its wounds reopened.
I got it in the neck! I'd been a Hitler sympathiser! So, a spot of robot for me; I was taken off to work. Three days and three nights I was away, rebuilding the demolished Franz Josef - now Liberty - Bridge. With the very greatest respect, in the Soviet novel and Soviet aesthetics, the positive hero occupies a place of the very greatest significance. Well, the way I see us doing that bridge construction work then is as positive as heroes like that. We had to lug enormous girders in February temperatures of twenty degrees Centigrade below freezing, by night as well as by day, teetering on narrow planks, with the Danube milling below us, racing, and me in front with the greater part of the girder's weight on my shoulders due to my being so tall. Then we had to move in an L-formation with another ten men holding onto the other end of the same girder, so we had to turn in perfect synchrony on this narrow plank over the abyss. It was horrendous; we all thought we were going to die. Reckoning on every possible eventuality, hanging on a post about fifty yards away, in the light of a 25-watt bulb, a first-aid box was to be seen. In other words, we were saved by the spectacle of a promise held out by a tiny first-aid pack. After the first day and night had elapsed, we were dreadfully hungry. We somehow managed to wrangle getting fed. At dawn we were escorted up to the fourth floor of a wrecked hotel. (Why precisely the fourth floor, when every other stair was missing, I have no idea.) There were about fifteen of us bridge builders, and the soldier who was guarding us ordered us to sit down on the wrecked furniture. Then he brought three or four buckets full of slops made from lentils and groats. The buckets were set down before us, so we could eat. We gestured that it would be hard going without spoons, at which he disappeared in a huff, only to return shortly with a single small Meissen rococo platter that he had picked up in a nearby room. We were to pass that around and scoop the contents of the buckets with that. This was our spoon. Still, we tucked in. We made beasts of ourselves, so well did we stuff ourselves from those buckets. Only we had to watch out that we didn't fill ourselves too well as the floor had lots of holes in it, so it would have been easy to drop from that fourthfloor room down as far as the ground. Notwithstanding that, we partook of a magnificent intercontinental meal.
Only very reluctantly were we allowed to go home, when we were totally exhausted. But it was not so straightforward to get back home from the Franz Josef Bridge, because there were Russian soldiers on patrol, swarming all over the place. I could have very easily not have made it home and have been taken off for another stint of clearing rubble. Somehow I made it back home. Once there I discovered that my legs were covered in blood and sores. There was no medicine to be had, and any first aid would have been nowhere near as brilliant as it would have been back at the bridge. Just as I was pulling on my slippers in great pain, that former Arrow Cross scoundrel who had been rounding up all the men in the district - able-bodied or otherwise - put in another appearance. He threatened to have me taken away - this stripling who was now proclaiming himself to have been resistance fighter! And true to form, they came for me again.
I had to go another time, shuffling in the column, still wearing carpet slippers, my legs injured, limping, supported by my fellows in misfortune. I knew that I would be incapable of doing any work in this condition, teetering on that narrow plank again, bearing the brunt of a four-hundred-weight girder on my shoulders, keeping balance over the roaring, icy water. I resigned myself to my lot. We reached the Buda head of the likewise destroyed Elizabeth Bridge. It was bewildering to me that there were people walking quite freely beside us, carrying belongings or pushing carts. What was this, then? Was it only us who had to die, whereas others were running around the streets in their civvies, little short of top hat and tails? "Where's the justice in that?" I asked myself. "If that's the way things are, Miklós, then live or die, you have to try and escape." There was one chap going past the column who was pushing before him whatever belongings had been left him after the siege on a two-wheeled hand-cart. I stepped out next to him and whispered in an undertone that I would join him in pushing the cart, but let's get a move on. It worked, too, but the terror that it entailed. You see, it would have been easy for any of my fellow captives to squeal. Head bowed, I just pushed and pushed that barrow. At last the column beside me, which had an escort of Russian soldiers and callow Hungarian police recruits front and rear, came to an end. Callow, but their faces and clothes, their whole bestial behaviour, still bore gaps that revealed the lurid green of yesterday's Arrow Cross behind the wet, fresh coat of plastered-on red. That's when I may have been truly overcome by genuine sorrow for the homeland. When it came to matters of humanity, friendship, love and understanding, the victorious soldiers, without exception, towered beside my tattered fellow Hungarians, their obsequious mentality leading them to shift with the wind. They didn't notice me. I escaped. But then I again had the problem of getting back home. I was liable to be stopped anywhere, at any moment, and asked - let's say - to help in restoring the dome on the Royal Palace on Castle Hill. There would be a cigarette in it for me. I made it home. I wasn't taken away again. That was pure chance. I was lucky.