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it. I was too preoccupied with writing the novel to reckon on the consequences. So there it lay before me, more than two hundred and fifty pages, and this pile, this object, was now demanding certain actions on my part. I had no idea how to get a novel published; I was totally unfamiliar with the business, I knew nobody; as yet no prose work of mine, as it is customary to call it, had been published. First of all, I had to get it typed, then I stuffed it into the one and only press-stud file I possessed, which I had acquired by not altogether innocent means during a visit to my mother at the head office of the export company where the old lady supplemented her pension by doing shorthand and typewriting for four hours a day. Then, with the file under my arm, I called on a publisher I knew was in the business of publishing novels by, as it was phrased, contemporary Hungarian authors, among others. I knocked on a door marked Secretariat and enquired of one of the ladies working there, who emanated that mysterious, so hard to define aura of being in charge, whether I might leave a novel with her. On her giving a positive response, I handed the file over to her and watched her place it among a stack of other files on a table at the back of the room. After that I made my way straight to the open-air swimming pool …
    “My God!” exclaimed the old boy.
    … straight to the open-air swimming pool, as I hoped—and was not disappointed—that the weather, being sunny but cool and windy, would deter the crowds from flocking to the pools that day, and I swam a twenty lengths with long, leisurely strokes in the cold water.”
    “My God!” exclaimed the old boy.
    Subsequently, a good two months later, I was sitting with a chap who was something or other at the publisher’s. I had already paid a visit on him a week previously since, according to the lady in the secretariat, “he will answer any enquires about your novel.” As it turned out, he had heard neither about me nor about my novel.
    “When did you submit it?,” he asked.
    “Two months ago.”
    “Two months is not so long,” he assured me. The chap was grey-faced, with a gaunt, harassed, neurotic look about him, and silvered sunglasses. On his desk there were piles of paper, books, an appointment diary, a typewriter, a manuscript bundle covered with scribbled corrections—manifestly a novel. I fled. For preference I would have gone straight to the open-air swimming pool …
    “My God!” exclaimed the old boy.
    … but now that it was the height of the heat wave I had no hope of being able to have a swim.
    On the next occasion he showed himself to be more talkative. By now he had heard both about me and about my novel, though he personally had still not read it. Heoffered me a seat. Fascism, (he turned toward me and away from his typewriter, in which I could see he had inserted a sheet of the firm’s headed letter paper) was a huge and ghastly subject about which there had already …
    “Aha!” the old boy exclaimed aloud as he started to rummage agitatedly in the file until he spotted a sheet of headed letter paper among his papers.
    It was an ordinary, neat business letter, with fields for date (27/JUL/1973), correspondent (unfilled), subject (unspecified), reference number (482/73), and no greeting:
    “Your manuscript has been assessed by our firm’s readers,” the old boy started to read.
    On the basis of their unanimous opinion … We consider that your way of giving artistic expression to the material of your experiences does not come off, while the subject itself is horrific and shocking. The fact that it nevertheless fails to become … the main protagonist’s, to put it mildly, odd reactions … While we find it understandable that the adolescent main protagonist does not immediately grasp what is happening around him (the call-up for forced labour, compulsory wearing of the yellow star, etc.), we think it inexplicable why, on arrival at the