February, Budapest had fallen. One of the Hungarian privates, a boy barely out of adolescence who was carrying a fiddle in his duffel bag, was already good and drunk, even at that early hour. He wasn’t used to the strong liquor, in which he had been drowning his fear and comforting his soul. They had been drinking it for several days on end. He stood up from the wooden bench and cried out that his Budapest had turned red. The snow, which had come down in great heaps in February and covered Buda and Pest in white – he explained, gasping for breath – was now, after the invasion of the Red Army, red with blood. Blood was falling from the sky. Saying this, he took another long draught of the liquor and then spat on the floor.
‘Play for us, István, play something,’ his mates started shouting. The boy pulled the fiddle out of the duffel bag and, with full concentration, as if instantly sobering up, he began to play. All of them – the Sóbota recruits, the Hungarian soldiers, the train driver, the fireman – everyone knew this sad Hungarian melody. It spilled from the creaking carriages into the dewy morning, somewhere between Sóbota and Beltinci.
They sang like a chorus of condemned men whose necks had just been sliced through. The train whistled on towards Beltinci station, where a new contingent of frightened boys, with unshaven cheeks and forcibly shaven heads, were waiting.
‘So where are we supposed to put them?’ the train driver yelled, with a cigarette pressed between his lips and his hand on the brake. The song and the plaintive wail of the fiddle had by now reached the approaching station. But the sound was blurred and no one could say if this was a song of despair, sadness or joy.
5
At the last possible moment, Franz Schwartz stepped across the tracks. The smoke and dust had still not settled by the time the train was approaching Beltinci. Then a shot rang out. Followed by a short burst of shooting. The sudden gunfire, which pierced the deafness of the morning, could be felt all the way to the town. Franz Schwartz heard it, too, as he ran towards the Catholic church and then, gasping for breath, turned at the intersection, right next to Bajlec’s house, into Church Street. He stopped for a moment opposite the Naday house, where some barrels of wine were being unloaded from a cart. That’s when the echo of a second burst of gunfire reached Sóbota. The Hungarian private lay dead on the floor of the carriage, his liquor glass under his neck. The fiddle, surrounded by hobnailed boots, was still reverberating beneath the bench.
Although one of the Hitlerites yelled that they should chuck the fiddle out of the window and the fiddler with it, no one could bend down and reach it because of the crush in the carriage. For it was then that the hapless train stopped and the new herd of recruits pushed their way on.
The plain stretched in long, evenly spaced ribbons from the creaking locomotive to the horizon, and across these taut furrows, like a bow across strings, the Pannonian river slithered and weaved. The earth was ringing, groaning and in slow, muted, minor chords, receding into the universe.
Although it had been nearly a year – from the end of the previous April to late March 1945, when Franz Schwartz returned to the town – everything was the same as always. It was as if during those eleven months, when he was walking on the brink of hell, which he had previously heard only the most fervent, God-fearing Catholics talk about, nothing whatsoever had happened here. Now he could assure those virtuous, pious men and women that everything that had been preached to them out of books was true. The only thing he could not understand was why their priests would be spared all this misery. For he had seen things that perhaps would never be written in books.
The tall, two-storey houses of the local elite, with commercial spaces and workshops below and residential quarters above, were still standing peacefully in a row. Nothing had been either destroyed or renovated. The façades with their tall windows and half-drawn blinds looked down on the empty streets with a weary and rather absent, almost musing, gaze.
The boys who were wrestling with the heavy barrels, which were filled with the highly valued wines of Lendava and Filovci, took one look at the ghost and fled into the cool corridors of the Naday house, leaving the merchandise in the street.
The only change here, which the newcomer noticed at once, was the sign above the door, which said: Mura Valley Wine Merchants – Proprietors J. Benko, A. Faflik, L. Bac.
Franz Schwartz, proprietor of a general store, property owner and building materials wholesaler, remembered these respectable gentlemen very well. Clearly, they had done excellent business during the time he was gone. That came to him quickly, as if he had cracked open a door no one had used in a long time.
He also had no trouble recognizing the Cvetič textile factory, which looked especially dreary. From its yard you would always hear the shouts of the supervisors driving the women to work faster. Clearly, the sewing machines were not rumbling today, devouring miles of sharp thread.
He walked on. Brumen’s shop on the corner was also closed. He glanced down Court Street; it was completely empty. He hurried past the courthouse and stopped in the middle of the big, wide intersection. Large teams of horses could easily make turns here. To his left he saw the Bac Hotel, whose owner was the same gentleman mentioned on the earlier sign. Not a living soul was in sight. Even the wine barrels were still sitting abandoned in the street.
What day is it? he wondered.
Days, months, almost years – he had long ago stopped counting them. At first, the Jews who were together in the internment camp had tried at least to remember which days were Saturdays, but in the labour camps the Germans and Hungarians soon managed to erase all sense of time. During the day they were transported in dark cattle wagons from worksite to worksite, where at night they dug trenches and moats. Later, they were often abandoned to the mercy and cruelty of the Allied bombers dropping bombs left over from the raids on Budapest. Muddy and hungry, they would lie there sometimes for days on end. After each air raid, the trenches were like poorly dug graves that needed to be reopened again and again. They were suspended between sky and earth, their feet in the graves, their heads among the stars. Days and dates lost all meaning. Living corpses, repeatedly buried and exhumed, as if rising from the dead and lying down with the dead, they now observed only the phases of the moon. At night in the ditches, they would watch its waxing and waning. But the moon, too, was often obscured by clouds, smoke and mortal weariness.
In the end, it was time that remained, duration without rhythm. Time, like a long, liberating but also destructive silence after music. A silence that opens into the interior.
6
The cold, gaseous sphere hung motionless over the town. The houses, the plane trees and poplars that lined the streets, the bell towers, the man – all were left without shadow. The sharp, blinding light had painfully imprinted an image of the morning on the consciousness of Franz Schwartz. In a succession of short exposures, one after the other as if he was blinking his eyes, the pages of a large photo album were being turned inside him. He stood in the middle of the intersection, entirely alone. He looked down Horthy Street, the former Main Street, past the rows of tall plane trees, behind which stood coffee houses, a pharmacy and shops. His eye reached all the way to Main Square, where he could see the green of the chestnut trees in front of the Hotel Dobray. He felt he could see even further, past the compact row of Jewish shops, as people called them. He knew every one of them; how could he not? His inner eye reached all the way to Lendava Road, beyond the bend on the right. The Hartner house was still standing on the corner, next to Kirbisch’s pub, and on the other side of the road was Benko’s meat factory and, a little further on, the synagogue. He knew all these houses and their occupants, every last one of them, all the way to Benkič’s pub and the Ledava Bridge.
He had crossed that bridge countless times coming into town. In good weather he had liked riding into town on his new motorcycle, to show it off; Mr Steiner had ordered it for him from Germany. Most often, however,
