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the boys brought along their fantasy-heroines from the skating rink and the dancing school, but the teacher producing the play, an extremely clever young priest who hated women, didn’t find any of them suitable. I somehow mentioned the fact in Éva’s hearing. From that moment she would not rest. She felt that this was her chance to begin her career as an actress. Tamás of course wouldn’t hear of it. He thought it grotesque and degrading that she should begin in the context of school, such an intimate, almost family setting. But Éva positively terrorised me until I took the matter up with the teacher in question. He was very fond of me, and told me to bring her along. This I did. She had barely opened her mouth before he declared, ‘You must have the part, you and no-one else.’ Éva plucked up the nerve to raise the subject with her puritanical, theatre-hating father and pleaded with him for half-an-hour until at last he consented.
    “Of course I don’t want to talk about the performance itself just now. I’ll just observe in passing that Éva, generally speaking, was not a success. The assembled parents, my mother included, found her too forward, insufficiently feminine, a little common—in a word, somehow not quite the thing. Or rather, they sensed the rebellion latent in her, and even though there was nothing objectionable in her acting, her costume, or her general behaviour , they took exception to her morals. But this didn’t make her a success with the boys either, despite the fact that she was so much more beautiful than the heroines of the skating-rink and the dancing school. They conceded she was very attractive, ‘but somehow …’ they said, and shrugged their shoulders. These young bourgeois types already carried the germ of their parents’ attitude to the unconventional. Only Ervin and János recognised the enchanted princess in her. Because they too were rebels by this time.
    “János Szepetneki you saw today. He’s always been like that. He was the best verse-reader in the class. In particular he was a great hit in the literary and debating society as Cyrano. He carried arevolver about with him and every week shot burglars dead in the middle of the night, trying to steal secret documents from his widowed mother. While the other lads were still laboriously treading on their dancing partners’ toes, he was having wild adventures. Every summer he went off to the battlefront and took up the rank of second lieutenant. His new clothes would be torn within minutes—he always seemed to fall off something. His greatest ambition was to prove to me that he was my superior. I think it all started when we were thirteen. One of our teachers took up phrenology and decided from the bumps on my head that I was gifted, whereas János’s skull showed he wasn’t very bright. He never got over this. Years after we’d left school he was still going on about it. He had to be better than me at everything—football, study, intellectual things. When later on I gave up all three he was really at a loss and didn’t know where to turn. So then he fell in love with Éva, because he thought that Éva was in love with me. Yes, that was János Szepetneki.”
    “And who is this Ervin?”
    “Ervin was a Jewish boy who’d converted to Catholicism, perhaps under the influence of the priests who taught us, but more probably I think following his own inner promptings. Earlier, at sixteen, he’d been the brightest of all the clever and conceited boys: Jewish boys tend to mature early. Tamás really hated him for his cleverness, and became thoroughly anti-Semitic whenever he was mentioned.
    “It was from Ervin that we first heard about Freud, Socialism, the March Circle. He was the first of us to be influenced by the strange world of what later became the Károlyi revolution. He wrote wonderful poetry. In the style of Ady.
    “Then, practically from one day to the next, he changed completely . He shut himself off from