Iván Sándor - Legacy

I cannot find my parents, even after having looked in the fourth ward.

A fat man arrives. Behind him are, no doubt, doctors.

He asks me who I am and how I managed to get into the building. Have I got a permit or some kind of safe-conduct paperwork?

I show him my ARP messenger’s papers.

You came here with that?

That’s right.

He says something to one of the men in white smocks to take a note of my name. I also dictate Vera’s name. The man says that the people who were brought in from Hegyeshalom may be in the basement corridor.

We go back to the entrance. One of those with a Red Cross armband takes us across to the basement. Vera stumbles on the steps in the dark.

We move about deep down with only a flickering candle.

I have to bend forward in order not to bump my head against the pipes that run under the ceiling.

I keep bumping into into beds and mattresses on the floor.

There is not room for us to go side by side, so Vera follows behind me, and I reach back to hold her hand.

I only spot Mother when she is standing right in front of me. She hugs me tightly to her. She is terribly thin, but I never felt her hug me more fiercely. The skin of her face is burning. She does not smell sweet or of cigarette smoke like sometimes, and she does not smell sweaty; it’s more as if she were bringing it from very far away, from a very great depth, as if she herself were the mysterious smell. She embraces me at such great length that I am able to identify the odour wafting from her body; it is like the smell I sensed a few minutes ago from the corpses in the wards.

Vera stands forlornly behind me.

Mother takes me by the hand and pulls me after her, while I, in turn, pull Vera.

By now I can see quite well in the dark.

Beds on both sides with mattresses between them. The many bodies seem to become one enormous body trailing off into the dark infinitude of the corridor.

I lean over Father. His smell is familiar; it’s rather as if the skin of his face had preserved something of the sharply fresh aroma of his shaving soap, even though my lips touch a bristly stubble. He finds it difficult to raise his arms from under the blanket, which is pulled up to his chin; his embrace is feeble. I sit on the edge of the bed and watch Mother help him to struggle up. He is in his winter coat and Mother in a warm housecoat. Jolán Bors brought it, she says. Father grins. I can’t see much of his face, but I can see the grin and the grey of his stubble. It’s not at me but Mother that he is smiling. A foot fishes for his shoes; suddenly he gets up with ease. He takes a few steps and sees Vera, takes her by the hand, leads her to his bed, sits her on it and wraps his blanket round her. A white-smocked man comes, shining a flashlight. He hands out doses of medicine. Already all the better for seeing your son, aren’t you, Uncle Béla, he says to Father. For an instant the torch flashes light on his features. He’s an elderly man; he must be at least ten years older than Father.

Vera enquires what became of her mother; she knows she isn’t here, in the hospital, but where might she be? We are given some bread from Mother’s haversack on to which she spreads margarine. That, too, was brought by Jolán Bors. Police raid, it is announced by the guards at the entrance. I get into bed next to Father, Vera next to Mother. Beams of light sweep over the basement. Men in black uniforms are holding a flashlight in one hand and a submachine gun pointed at us in the other. Making his way ahead of them is the same podgy white-coated man that I saw in the corridor on the first floor. Father pulls me down further under the blanket. That’s Dr Temesváry, the head physician, he whispers. They stop at each bed. At each the head physician takes the pulse, and in each case he reports that the patient is not in a fit condition to walk. Marasmus. Moribund. Pneumonia. Plenty of Latin terms. Thrombophlebitis, he says as he leans over Father. I can see from his look that he has recognized me. Severe infective hepatitis; he indicates me. I feel hot. I am probably running a fever. Maybe I had picked it up on the road or even back at Nagyfuvaros Street.

The armed men come back from the far end of the corridor, three men jostling before them. There are rats scuttling under the beds.

The dead were carried out on stretchers in the morning.

Father struggles to his feet and takes me by the hand; we set off. We leave our outer garments on the bed. He wraps himself in a blanket, I in the duffel coat. Ten minutes we get to wash, he says, we have to hurry, and it takes three or four of the ten minutes for us to reach the ground-floor showers. There is soap and a towel. He washes his groin, his chest and armpits; he says I should do the same. I had never seen him undressed before. He had lost so much weight that the skin on his arms and legs is wrinkled. He scrubs my back and I scrub his.

Vera is sitting on Mother’s bed, and Mother is cutting her hair with a pair of scissors. Vera looks at me, and I say that short hair suits her. She says she had wanted for ages to have it cut in the French fashion, like a boy, but her mummy had never allowed her. Mother reports that while we were taking the shower Gizi had popped in on a visit, and she had asked her to get Vera’s name added to our Swiss safe-conduct pass under our family name, saying it quietly so that Vera does not hear. Gizi had said she would try.

That was already the third or fourth visit Gizi had made to the hospital, says Mother. The first time she came she, too, had searched for us by torchlight, and the second time she knew where we were. The first time she came, I remember, she had a photograph of Bőzsi, and she was shining the torch on it, going over to each bed and asking if they had seen her. She brought bread and she brought apples, and after she had gone right along the whole corridor with Bőzsi’s photograph she came back to us, and your father sat her down beside him and tried to set her mind at rest. So I just let it be; there are times when a few words from a man can have more effect, says Mother.

That evening I have to gather my things together and make tracks. Dr Temesváry says that an Arrow Cross patrol can drop by at any moment, and he cannot give any guarantees for the safety of anyone who cannot prove he is incapacitated. Vera can stay as maybe they are not after young girls, but you, he adds, are tall enough to look older.

I am pleased that he treats me as a grown-up, using the polite form of ‘you’; maybe that’s down to the duffel coat. He says I can hide in the nurses’ home, the single-storey block out at the back, next to the fence. I pack my haversack, and we take leave of each other. It’s not far away, Dr Temesváry tells Mother.

The yard is dark. A nurse leads me by the hand; we dodge around the heaps of snow. Just show me the way, I say, and I’ll find it by myself. So she points it out. There are several single-storey buildings in the yard; it’s the last of those I need to aim for. Corpses are lying by the wall of the first building. When will they be buried?

Yesterday I leafed through some old books. It was at one of the lines of the Passover Haggadah that the features of the rabbi on Nagyfuvaros Street flashed through my mind: ‘As for the one who does not know how to ask, you must initiate him.’

The nurses’ home is dark. There are six beds on each on side. I pick one. No, that one, says a young nurse who is undressing by the last bed — not telling me to turn around. She’s in a white petticoat. It is from under the blanket that she then tells me to try to get some sleep; she will have to get up at midnight, which is when her relief comes. Are you cold? I am. Me, too, she says. Rub your feet together under the blanket, she advises. The duffel coat helps. I wonder if Soproni survived his wound. If he didn’t then was he buried in my windcheater?