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role of mentor. The ball ended with the band breaking into Gypsy tunes and launching a number of the dancers into the csárdás. One young couple, he with his hands on his partner’s hips and hers on his shoulders, threw themselves into it with a marvellously fierce and stamping brio, their hair flinging about like the manes of ponies. When all seemed over, I crammed with them, the stork-fancier, his beautiful partner, a girl I clove to called Annamaria, and several others, into a couple of cars and whirled downhill and across the Chain-Bridge to plunge into the scintillating cave of the most glamorous night-club I have ever seen. Did the floor of the Arizona really revolve? It certainly seemed to. Snowy steeds were careering round it at one moment, feathers tossing: someone said he had seen camels there, even elephants...A bit later, spangled acrobats were flying through the spot-lit cigarette smoke, joining, somersaulting, spiralling on their own axes, sailing with arms outstretched as timely rings flew to their palms from the temporary surrounding dark; and, finally, poised on the biceps of a sequin-studded titan, they built a human pagoda, skipping nimbly aloft over each others’ shoulders until, from the apex somewhere near the ceiling, a slim, frilled figure with a star on her brow was blowing kisses. There was something familiar about this blonde and smiling team...suddenly I recognised them: they were my old friends from those sketching forays in Vienna, Conrad’s and my indirect benefactors for a dozen himbeergeist , the Koschka Brothers! [1] There they were, pyramidally extant, glittering in apotheosis! (The friendly impact of their posters—A CSODÁLATOS KOSCHKAK!—kept hitting me in the eye for the rest of my stay.) After this, we drank some more in a house in the Werböczy utca, and when Annamaria showed me the way back to the nearby Uri utca, we were not surewhether it was the moon or dawn that cast our shadows on the cobbles.
    So it was no wonder that the reflected eleven o’clock sunlight, when it hit the side of the silver coffee-pot, detonated like silent shell-fire... The door flung open and a black Alsatian called Tim bounded in and leapt on the bed. He was followed by his owner, Micky (Miklós), the son of the house, a rather unruly and very entertaining boy of fourteen or fifteen in Tintin plus-fours. “Here,” he said, giving me a tumbler of water with one hand and a bottle of Alka Seltzer with the other, “My ma says you’ll probably need these.”
    * * *
    I had drifted into a noctambulistic set and my stay in Budapest was punctuated by awakenings like this. Life seemed perfect: kind, uncensorious hosts; dashing, resplendent and beautiful new friends against the background of a captivating town; a stimulating new language, strong and startling drinks, food like a delicious bonfire and a prevailing atmosphere of sophistication and high spirits that it would have been impossible to resist even had I wanted. I was excited by the famous delights of the place, especially by certain haunts like Kakuk (the Cuckoo) on the slopes of Buda, where, late at night, half a dozen Gypsies bore down on the guests like smiling crows bent on steeping everything in their peculiar music. Badly played, this can sound like treacle and broken bottles and the tunes may not be authentically Hungarian—Bartók and Kodály are firm about their Gypsy and thus non-Magyar origin—but they deceived Liszt and they enraptured me. In the slow passages, the hammers of the czembalom fluttered and hesitated over the strings and the violins sank to a swooning langour, only to rekindle with an abrupt syncope when the hammers and the bows broke into double time and the czembalist went mad as the leading violinist, with his fingers crowding the strings in a dark tangle, stooped and slashed beside one listener’s ear after another and closed in on hisinstrument like a