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mother in the slums of Budapest, had time to bequeath his daughter was an ancient method for hunting fleas. One strips naked and stands on something large and white - a tablecloth, a quilt cover - holding a cake of moistened washing soap. The flea becomes confused or perhaps a little chilled and hops down on to the white surface -whereupon one whacks him with the soap, impaling him on the sticky surface.
    We had finished supper. I was sitting by the window, drinking my coffee. Upstairs in the attic, thumpings and poundings indicated the progress of the hunt. Then there was a shriek, the sound of running footsteps, and Nini appeared in the doorway, wrapped in a towel.
    ‘Oh, quick, Frau Susanna. Quick, quick – bring your opera glasses and come upstairs!’
    I fetched the glasses and followed her.
    Nini’s attic is almost level with the top floor opposite. They must have moved the piano: the shutters were open, the lamp had been lit.
    I put the glasses to my eyes.
    I’ll never forget what I saw, framed in the circle of the lenses as if on a lighted stage. The piano, bare, black, with the lid propped up, two candles in the sconces… No other furniture that I could see: no pictures on the wall, the gas mantle uncovered on its bracket.
    My eyes travelled across the piano and down… further down than one would expect, to take in the thinnest, the most pathetic-looking creature you could imagine. A boy, scarcely ten years old, perched on two battered books. His black hair fell across his face, his skinny legs hung down towards the pedals that were out of sight. And all the time as I watched, this miniature creature’s hands moved with undiminished vigour across the keys.
    I handed the glasses to Nini. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I see. That explains it. That’s why he suddenly breaks off. There are places where he just can’t reach.’
    ‘It’s a shame!’ said Nini indignantly. ‘It’s exploitation. It’s worse than sending children down mines, shutting him up like that all day.’
    ‘Can one
make
someone do that? From the outside?’
    But I too turned from the window with a frown. It was too vivid, that image: the meagre undernourished child carrying like a hump his arbitrary talent.
    Long after Nini had gone to bed I went on adding imagined details to what I had seen… The child’s frail neck rubbed by the rough collar of his blouse; the dusty neglected room; the sad man with the sideburns, shouting, correcting… The pressure, the obsession… the total absence of a woman in their lives.
    A child should grow up slowly, peacefully, in an unemphasized happiness. Poor little Count of Monte Cristo. His seemed a desperately unenviable fate.
    After this, the waters closed over my head.
    I don’t know the name for these attacks: depression, despair, panic… I only know that there’s nothing to be done; they just have to be lived through. I used to curl up under my quilt, trying not to exist, but now I walk. I walk all day through the city and out of it and by the evening the worst of it is over.
    Nini knows by now. She looked at me sitting on the edge of my bed and said: ‘I’ll cancel the Baroness Leitner. The others I can deal with’ – and I nodded, and put my clothes on and went.
    Where I go seems to be arbitrary for I’m hardly aware of what I’m doing yet I never find myself in the old city passing beautiful churches or lovely parks. Nearly always I cross the Danube Canal and then the Danube itself, tramping on through the ugly industrial suburbs, and turn to the east.
    Everything that was bad for the city came across this desolate Eastern Plain. The Huns came to pillage and slaughter, and the Turks to pitch their tents before the city walls. The wind here blows straight from
the pusztas
of Hungary; there are no romantic taverns as there are in the Wienerwald; no packs of cheerful hikers tramping through the beeches. The people here are poor and incurious, harvesting their maize, keeping their geese. I could