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more pressing
Swedish women to phone.
    It took a portly three hours to get through to Budapest and
she wasn’t at the student hostel. It was going to be hard work becoming a
streetsweeper in Stockholm.

December 1944
    The German soldier was trailing behind the others, clutching
in his left hand a good portion of the intestines spilling out from an
otherwise quite smart uniform. To Gyuri, he didn’t seem greatly distressed – it
was rather as if the unTeutonic untidiness of runaway guts was far more
troubling than any physical pain.
    Of course, fussing or expecting any sort of sympathy or
attention would have been a waste of time – like everything else sympathy and
attention were running out. The Germans, pedestrian or motorised, still
pretending that the war wasn’t over, were heading to the river and crossing
over to the castle where it was rumoured they were going to hole up and fight
it out with the rapidly approaching Russians. Gyuri had watched the Germans
arrive in force, months earlier, when they had helped themselves to Hungary’s
government. The Germans had poured in with their heroic motorcycles and other
items of snappy transport, swaggering around in beautiful leather coats.
    The Germans weren’t looking so confident now, the prospect
of getting mashed by the Russians not agreeing with them. It would have been
fun to watch if it hadn’t been for the fact that the mashing was going to take
place in Budapest. From the direction of the City Park Gyuri could hear the
distant rumbling of artillery, the mighty footfalls of the Red Army.
    Military training, even for fourteen year-olds like Gyuri,
had been stepped up since the Hungarian High Command, having lost one army, was
trying to get another to play with. Gyuri’s instructors had placed exclusive
emphasis on running around a lot in gas masks and then crawling back and forth
over some prime cow pats. ‘The Russians will be in big trouble if they try to
defend themselves with cow shit,’ one of Gyuri’s fellow soldiers had remarked.
    They were also shown the much-hailed ‘Panzerfaust’, the
shoulder-launched antitank missile that was the latest secret weapon from the
German scientists, and the piece of kit that everyone wanted to get their hands
on. Their instructor had taken the Panzerfaust out of its box and held it out
to them like some sort of talisman. ‘There it is, lads, the Panzerfaust,’ he
had said, packing it back into its box so it could be taken off to be exhibited
elsewhere and launching into a lengthy description of sundry hush-hush
techniques for getting a truly first-rate shine on your boots.
    Some of the duties were more pleasant. There had been a boom
in requisitioning, presumably on the premise of doing your looting while you
could. The notoriously stupid Hankóczy, who having made it to fifteen, was in
charge, had led them on a stripping tour of properties in the Jewish quarter.
    Supposedly searching for items that would help the war
effort, Gyuri and Dozsa had an exceptionally good pillage in a pharmacy,
recruiting lots of soap. Dozsa’s presence had been rather odd, since his father
was Jewish and had been issued with a yellow star and one evening had been
taken away. Gyuri had spotted him being escorted away, carrying one small
suitcase. But a day or so later, Dozsa’s father had returned, and although he
hadn’t been tap-dancing on the roof, he had been left alone.
    Coming out of the pharmacy, Gyuri and Dozsa had heard a
shrill protest from the other side of the street. From a fully-opened second
floor window, a diminutive, but vocally powerful old lady unleashed a savage
tirade against their appropriation of toiletries: ‘filth, termites,
bloodsuckers. Have you no shame? Stealing like this in broad daylight?’ The
woman had the appearance of being irritating on a full-time basis but Gyuri had
been startled by the vehemence of her denunciations, which were surprising:
against the background of wholesale export of Jewish