He used to go with his father or Uncle Erno, sometimes with Péter’s family – a weekend treat – and it was in the bathhouse at the Gellart Hotel, the grandest of them all, that Péter had kissed him for the first time as they changed into their clothes at the end of the session, Péter’s Uncle Miklós dressing in the next cubicle, whistling folk songs. It was a kiss that fell like a splash of rain from a clear sky, breaking on to the back of his shoulder, transfixing him.

Nothing was said. What could be said with Miklós half a metre away, climbing into his flannel suit? But at the apartment that night, while János slept and the moon crossed the window right to left, László had sat up, feverishly trying to pass the moment through the machinery of reason, for already, at sixteen, he was condemned to be an intellectual, possessor of a mind that stared at itself. What had happened to him? He could not think of the moment as sexual: his understanding of such things was too shallow, too schoolboyishly vulgar. The kiss, he decided, must have been an expression of that ideal friendship Comrade Biszku spoke off in the Pioneers, and this soothed him for a while, tamped him down. But his daydreams of intense conversations, of epic chess matches and cross-country bicycle tours, had given way, in flashes, then in long sustained reverie, to the blatantly erotic; to the need for skin and hard breathing and intimacies whose names he trawled for in the pages of his parents’ medical textbooks, and later, more tantalizingly, in the cache of foreign novels they kept in a suitcase under the bed. Zola, Milosz, Thomas Mann...

And Miklós had had a further part to play, for it was in his apartment in District VII, more spacious than László’s or Péter’s, more private, that they at last lay down together, clumsy and furtive as a pair of apprentice house-breakers, unbuttoning each other on a bed with ruined springs and a coverlet of brown corded wool that smelled of the nineteenth century.

How much had old Miklós known? That bachelor and old-style liberal, with his card evenings, his tears at the first notes of Bartok’s ‘Rhapsody’. Did he spy on them? Was he excited by it? Well, he was long since dead, cutting the veins in his legs with a barber’s blade and dying in a bath of rose-red water the winter that followed the uprising in Prague. His housekeeper, Magda, had discovered the body, and László’s mother had telephoned László in Paris, and been surprised at his long silence, the weight of sorrow he could not keep quite secret from her.

After eating, he returned to the hotel.