book from the inner pocket of his jacket and his spectacles from the breast pocket. He then launched into reading out the prayer, while I had to repeat after him the same portion of text he had preceded me with. It went well at first, but I soon began to flag in the effort, and besides, I was a bit put out by not understanding a single word of what we were saying to God, since I had to recite to Him in Hebrew, a language unknown to me. In order somehow to be able to keep up, I was therefore increasingly obliged to watch Uncle Lajos’s lip movements, so in actual fact out of the whole business all that remained with me of what we mumbled was the sight of those moistly wriggling, fleshy lips and the incomprehensible gabble of a foreign tongue. Oh, and a scene that I could see through the window, over Uncle Lajos’s shoulder: right at that moment the older sister from upstairs scurried home along the outside corridor, on the far side of the courtyard, a floor above ours. I think I got a bit mixed up over the text as well. Still, when the prayer had come to an end Uncle Lajos seemed to be pleased, and the expression on his face was such that even I was almost convinced we had really accomplished something in Father’s cause. When it comes down to it, of course, this was certainly better than it had been before with the weight of that nagging sensation.
We returned to the room on the street side. Evening had drawn in. We closed the windows, with the blackout paper stuck over the panes, on the indigo-hued, humid spring evening. That entirely confined us within the room. The hubbub was by now tiring, and the cigarette smoke also started to sting my eyes. I was driven to yawning a lot. My stepmother’s mama set the table. She had brought our supper herself, in her capacious handbag. She had even managed to procure some meat on the black market. She had made a point of relating that earlier, on arrival. My father even promptly paid for it from his leather wallet. We were already eating when, without warning, Uncle Steiner and Uncle Fleischmann also dropped by. They too wanted to take leave of Father. Uncle Steiner launched right away into a “don’t anyone mind us.” He said: “I’m Steiner. Please, don’t get up.” As ever, he was in fraying slippers, his rounded paunch poking out from under his unbuttoned waistcoat, the perennial stub of a foul-smelling cigar in his mouth. He had a big, ruddy head, the childlike parting of the hair giving him a distinctly odd impression. Uncle Fleischmann was utterly unnoticeable beside him, being a diminutive man of immaculate appearance, with white hair, ashen skin, owlish spectacles, and a perpetual slightly worried air on his face. He bowed mutely at Uncle Steiner’s side, wringing his hands as if in apology for Uncle Steiner, or so it seemed, though I’m not sure about that. The two old codgers are inseparable, even though they are forever bickering, because there is no topic on which they can agree. They shook hands in turn with my father. Uncle Steiner even patted him on the back, calling him “Old boy,” and then going on to crack his old quip: “Chin down! Don’t lose our disheartenment!” He also said—and even Uncle Fleischmann nodded furiously along with this—that they would continue to look out for me and the “young lady” (as he called my stepmother). He blinked his button eyes, then pulled my father to his paunch and embraced him. After they had gone everything was drowned by the clatter of cutlery, the hum of conversation, and the fumes of the food and the thick tobacco smoke. By now all that got through to me, separating themselves out from the surrounding fog as it were, were disconnected scraps of some face or gesture, especially the tremulous, bony, yellow head of my stepmother’s mama as she served each plate; the two palms of Uncle Lajos’s hands raised in protest as he refused the meat, since it was pork and his faith forbade it; the pudgy cheeks, lively jaw, and moist eyes of my stepmother’s older sister; then Uncle Willie’s bald cranium unexpectedly looming pinkish in the cone of the light’s rays, and fragments of his latest blithe anatomization; on top of which, I also recollect Uncle Lajos’s solemn