Iván Sándor - Legacy

Do you play chess?

Ruy Lopez, the Spanish opening?

Are you familiar with the big Maróti book?

Yes, I am.

He is jotting down the positions in an end-game. He says it’s much more interesting to figure out the moves backwards, to work out how a checkmate has been reached. In that way you can see what moves should have been avoided, and it may be that even with a Spanish opening one ought not to make the most conventional sequence of opening moves. Understood?

Vera comes across, so I give her my seat on the sack of potatoes. The physicist closes his pocket chess table. We’ll play a game sometime, he says. He extends a hand to Vera and introduces himself. Call me László, he says. All right, Uncle László, she says uneasily, and before introducing herself she glances at me. I can see her worrying about accidentally revealing her actual name, so I quickly drop in the family name. My younger sister, I say. She’s called Vera. He takes a long look at me and then at Vera, as if he were weighing up how a brother and sister could look so different. Several people are now demanding that he douse the candle; there’s enough light coming from the two lights at the back. He moistens the thumb and index finger of his right hand before snuffing the flame. Idiots, he says. They didn’t take in a word of what I explained before.

Light the candle! Contact has been broken. It’s impossible to see the map! Follow orders at the double!

I do not know who is shouting behind my back.

At ease, First Lieutenant, sir, says the man who just now had insisted that the physicist extinguish the candle, at ease; we’ll busy ourselves with the maps later on, meanwhile we’ll maintain contact in other ways.

A character is squatting beside me. Officer’s cap, trenchcoat — the officer’s cap seemingly the same as the one I had seen on the warden. The physicist stands up, and the man takes his place on the sack of potatoes. At times like this those who have stayed alive have to be placed back to back with each other in the trenches, he says, everyone has ten rounds, the squad’s leader has a hand-grenade. On the Italian front we were completely surrounded; the section leader planned the break-out, but I passed out the order that the men should hold fire until the Eyeties showed up and were thirty metres from the trenches, then we fired a volley. Bam! Bam! Bam!

Vera goes back to Mother.

One has to prepare for all-out defence. My section leader was right about that; bought a bullet in the middle of his forehead. I was left with enough time to kiss the bullet’s entry wound — it bloodied my lips — and then out with the hand-grenades! We surprised the Eyeties with the grenades. They were advancing on the left flank as well. Fix bayonets! I shouted from the trench.

The doctor brings a tablet and a glass of water and holds the man’s head until he has swallowed the medicine.

A hush falls on the cellar like none I have ever previously experienced since coming there n0r since. Even the warden talks quietly. May I have the cap, First Lieutenant? If it’s for a sortie, son, then take it, the man says. How are you armed?

The physicist relights the candle. Listen, people, he says, for the next hour we are going to provide light here, so turn off the lamps at the back. The doctor is helping a man to lie down on a mattress. He’s of no danger to anyone; it’s just that he doesn’t know where he is and what’s happening to him.

I ask Mother if Gizi will come back. She will if she can, I’m sure, she says. She lays out a linen napkin then cuts four slices of bread and opens the last tin of liver pâté. We divide 200 millilitres of water between the four of us, with Mother wiping the rim of the mug after each of us has had a drink.

Vera is in the mood to play at compiling menus: let us order tomorrow’s dinner. Father recommends fish soup rather than grilled bratwurst, and we go along with that. For me what springs to mind is schnitzel, and for the dessert all of us vote for Vera’s choice, Dobos torte.

The next morning I search for Baritone and ask him his name.

Everyone is asleep. Every minute someone starts up, everyone is sighing or snoring or asking for water. Father goes out, saying he is off to the guard on the gate, although his stint is in the morning, and he is almost certainly doing it to give us more space. Mother also goes out, so we tuck Vera up. I can now stretch out and promptly fall asleep.

I awaken to the sound of shouting. One of the lamps is burning. The doctor is called for.

The physicist is asleep on his feet, his hands in his lap, chin on chest. He has a thick and wavy head of hair, which is greying. I stagger outside. Mother is seated on the steps at the front gate. I send her inside. There is room next to Vera. She should sleep.

The physicist is now awake and, prowling around, going up to the first floor then back down and outside into the yard. I tag along behind him. A patch of sky can be seen as it crossed by searchlight beams. An aircraft is caught, tracer fire roars up and hits it and it comes down somewhere near the Ferdinand Bridge, over the railway tracks just outside the Nyugati Railway Terminus.

The barrage of artillery fire from the north-east is continuous.

They’re coming, says the physicist. Listen. From the interval between a bang and the shell striking you can work out roughly how far away they are. They must be just beyond the north-east of Pest near Rákospalota.

I ask him when he reckons they will get as far as here.

That depends partly on Guderian. I have an idea who Guderian is but don’t know exactly, so I ask. He’s a good soldier, smart, well equipped; he’s already taken part in a fair few blitzkrieg campaigns. He says it as if he were explaining a mathematical equation and wants his listeners to follow what he is saying, so he speaks slowly and puts an emphasis on the word he considers to be the most important, and at that point rises his right arm; he does not lower his voice at the end of the sentence but drops his raised arm. The day before yesterday he had listened to the BBC from London; it’s from there he has heard that Guderian sees no point in defending Budapest any further and has sent Major-General Walther Wenck to Hitler to ask that the German forces be permitted to break out. But Hitler, according to the BBC, still refused to consent to this. It now depends on those smart generals whether another forty or fifty thousand lives will be sacrificed, ourselves included, he says.

We have water for two days, I say, and we also have two more days’ bread rations.

That won’t be enough, he says, because these clowns are going to carry out their orders.

So, how many days in that case?

It’s impossible to predict, just as it is whether Wallenberg and Lutz will succeed in preventing everyone from being taken from the protected houses to the ghetto.

Us, too?

Us, too.

I ask who Wallenberg and Lutz are. I ask him if this is something else he has learned from the British radio broadcasts. He says they are diplomats, brave men. London says nothing about them; he has heard about them from friends, and there is also a young man here who is a singer in the OMIKE chorus, and he was close to Carl Lutz — he had heard about them from him, as well.

Baritone, I think to myself. I know the bloke myself. We had a chat yesterday. I went to the OMIKE concerts.

The physicist again resorts to waving his hands around. Superb, absolutely superb the performances they gave. What voices: Ernster, Lendvai, Gabi Relle, Annie Spiegel.

I thought Uncle Laci wasn’t Jewish, I say.

Poppycock, he says. No one ever said that only Jews could attend.

The next morning two corpses were carried out. I stand in front of Vera so she should not see them.