In the midst of his daydream the door was opened, and from the dark of the hallway two Persephones emerged with their shopping baskets. They eyed him suspiciously – this pale, dapper little man – then crossed the road to catch the number 2 tram, which was arriving with a tap-tapping of the overhead wires, like a giant yellow grasshopper rubbing its steel legs together. The door swung shut and he turned away. He needed somewhere cool to sit, somewhere that didn’t press upon him with the past, and retracing his steps he found a restaurant in the square south of the Basilica, with wooden booths and cotton tablecloths and not a tourist in sight. He took a table by the window and ordered his old favourite – goose livers in sour cream with mashed potatoes and onion – and while he waited he flicked through an edition of the previous day’s Hirlap, trying to take an interest in the antics of the government, though it was the same game of musical chairs he had grown so weary of everywhere. In the middle pages, however, two items caught his attention. The first was a short article about the Balkans, warning of a coming storm in Kosovo, where Serb abuses had become more outrageous. Milšsević, argued the journalist, survived by the manufacture of crises, and was in need of another war. Any war, even a disastrous one, would serve him better than a peace in which his enemies would have time to organize. There was a photograph of the militia leader, ‘Arkan’, in beret and black fatigues, machine-pistol over his shoulder, chin jutting, a real people’s hero. Looking at him, László found that the voices of doubt in his head were momentarily stilled. Arkan made questions of right and wrong, for and against, seem simple: one was instinctively opposed to such a man – no special virtue was required – and if the money in the bag hurried this gangster on the road to hell then so much the better. It was an end that justified a great deal.

The second article, ostensibly comic, concerned a minor scandal in one of the old bathhouses – a local government official caught in flagrante delicto at the Király on Fo utca, with one of those anonymous, hollow-eyed young men who go on the prowl in such places. It was a grubby story, somewhat sad, but reading the piece László was drawn irresistibly back to his own adventures in the bathhouses, those softly dripping worlds, relics of Ottoman times that survived into the heart of the People’s Utopia like orchids in a commissar’s lapel. And there he was again! A skinny boy hunched on the slatted bench of a steam room, surrounded by the old men with their sagging balls, their starbursts of purple veins, their damp newspapers...