own troubles started to displace that worry to the back of her mind. Her head ached, and she moaned about the rushing and roaring that her high blood pressure produced in her ears. Grandpa was well used to this by now; he didn’t even bother to respond, but neither did he budge from her side throughout. I didn’t hear him speak so much as once, yet whenever I glanced that way I would always see him there, in the same corner, which gradually lapsed into gloom as the afternoon wore on, until just a patch of subdued, yellowish light filtered through onto his bare forehead and the curve of his nose, while the pits of his eyes and the lower part of his face were sunk in shadow. Only from a tiny glint in the eyes could one tell that he was nonetheless following, unnoticed, everything that moved in the room.
On top of that, one of my stepmother’s cousins also came by with her husband. I addressed him as Uncle Willie, since that is his name. He has a slight limp, for which he wears a shoe with a built-up sole on one foot; on the other hand, he has this to thank for the privilege of not having to go off to a labor camp. His head is pear-shaped, broad, bulging, and bald on top, but narrowing at the cheeks and toward the chin. His views are listened to with respect in the family because before setting up a betting shop he had been in journalism. True to form, he at once wanted to pass on some interesting pieces of news that he had learned “from a confidential source” that he characterized as “absolutely reliable.” He seated himself in an armchair, his gammy leg stretched stiffly out in front, and, rubbing his hands together with a dry rasp, informed us that before long “a decisive shift in our position is to be anticipated,” since “secret negotiations” over us had been entered into “between the Germans and the Allied powers, through neutral intermediaries.” The way Uncle Willie explained it, even the Germans “had by now come to recognize that their position on the battlefronts is hopeless.” He was of the opinion that we, “the Jews of Budapest,” were “coming in handy” for them in their efforts “to wring advantages, at our expense, out of the Allies,” who of course would do all they could for us; at which point he mentioned what he regarded as “an important factor,” which he was familiar with from his days as a journalist, and that was what he referred to as “world opinion,” the way he put it being that the latter had been “shocked” by what was happening to us. It was a hard bargain, of course, he went on, and that is precisely what explained the current severity of measures against us; but then these were merely natural consequences of “the bigger game, in which we are actually pawns in an international blackmailing gambit of breath-taking scale”; he also said, however, that, being well aware of “what goes on behind the scenes,” he looked on all this as essentially no more than “a spectacular bluff ” that was designed to drive the price higher, and he asked us to be just a bit patient while “events unfold.” Whereupon Father asked him if any of this might be expected by tomorrow, or was he also to regard his own call-up as “mere bluff,” indeed, should he maybe not even bother going off to the labor camp tomorrow. That rattled Uncle Willie a bit. “Ahem, no, of course not,” he answered. But he did say that he was quite confident my father would soon be back home. “We are now at the twelfth hour,” was how he put it, rubbing his hands all the more. To that he also added, “If I had ever been so sure about any of my tips as I am about this one, I wouldn’t be stone broke now!” He was about to continue but my stepmother and her mama had just finished with the knapsack, and my father got up from his seat to test its weight.
The last person to arrive was my stepmother’s oldest brother, Uncle Lajos. He fulfills some terribly important function in our family, though I’d be hard put to define exactly what that was. He immediately wanted to talk in private with my father. From what I could observe, that irked my father, and