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names began to drop with a weary spattering, like rain from a passing cloud which has long ago spent its force: Mauthausen, the Don Bend, Recsk, Siberia, the Transit Centre, Ravensbrück, Fö Street, 60 Andrássy Avenue, the internal resettlement villages, the post-56 jails, Buchenwald, Kistarcsa . . . by now I was dreading it would be my turn, but fortunately I was preempted: “Auschwitz,” said somebody in the modest but self-assured tones of a winner, and the whole gathering nodded furiously: “Untrumpable,” as the host himself admitted, half enviously, half grudgingly, and yet, when all is said and done, with a wry smile of acknowledgment. Later on the title of a modish book of that period was brought up, a book with a sentence that was modish then, indeed is so to this day and in all likelihood always will be, that the author, after proper but, of course, quite futile clearing of the throat, in a voice still hoarse with emotion, declares “There is no explanation for Auschwitz”—just that, tersely, intensely, swallowing quietly, and I remember how, to my amazement, this gathering of, after all, for the most part hardheaded people accepted, analyzed and debated this simplistic statement, scrutinizing it this way and that, with eyes blinking slyly or hesitantly or uncomprehendingly from behind their masks, as if this declaration to nip all declarations in the bud was actually declaring something, though you do not have to be a Wittgenstein to notice that in point of linguistic logic alone it is flawed and reflects at most certain desires, a false or frankly infantile morality and sundry suppressed complexes but apart from that has no declarative value whatsoever. I believe I actually said so too, after which I just talked and talked, unstoppably, to the verge of logorrhea, taking note from time to time of a woman’s gaze that was fixed on me as if seeking to tap a source deep inside me; and, in the thick of my compulsive need to speak, what sprang fleetingly and quite possibly faultily, reflecting at most certain desires and sundry suppressed complexes—as I say, what sprang to mind is that it had been her, the woman who later on became my wife but before that my lover, whom I got to know only after that conversation, when, tired, embarrassed and forgetting all, I had been just on the point of departing unnoticed (“à l’anglaise,” as they say) and she traversed a greenish-blue carpet as if she were making her way on the sea. I don’t even recall what I said, though obviously I gave vent to my opinion, which obviously cannot have changed much since then, if indeed it has changed at all, which I find very hard to believe, except nowadays I am not much given to venting my opinions, whence perhaps my vague doubts regarding my opinion; but then to what end, and to whom, would I give vent to my opinion, and above all where, since I don’t lodge permanently in holiday homes in some mediocre mid-Hungarian hill range in order to cope with the nonpassing of time by giving vent to opinions in the company of Dr. Obláth and high intellects of his ilk—not at all, I reside permanently, or near-permanently, in a one-and-a-half room doodah, there, I nearly said it: apartment, God forgive me—my apartment—my now sun-baked, now wind-buffeted (and sometimes both together) lair on the fourteenth floor of a tower block, looking up from time to time into the brilliant air or at the clouds in which I am digging my grave with my ballpoint pen, diligently, like a forced laborer who is whistled up every day to drive the spade deeper, to play death on the violin with a darker, sweeter tone; here I would be able to vent my opinion, at best, to the thrumming water pipes, the rattling heating pipes and the howling neighbors, here in this tower block in the heart of the Józsefváros district of Budapest, or rather not its heart but its entrails, a block that is so