‘A little,’ said László. His shirt was stuck to his back, and from his chest he thought he could hear a distinctive wheezing, like those poor asthmatics he sometimes came across in the street or the Metro, fumbling in their pockets for an inhaler. More of them all the time, it seemed. A sly epidemic.

Tibor started the engine. The air-conditioning came on. ‘Where to?’ he asked. ‘Back to the hotel?’

‘No,’ said László, after a pause. ‘Drop me by the Gellért. I’ll walk the rest of the way. It’ll do me good.’

‘You’re the boss,’ said Tibor, and he bounced the car on to the road, the rear wheels kicking up a cloud of dust that hung for several seconds in the air behind them.

By the terrace café outside the Gellért Spa, László settled his fare, then set off towards Petofi bridge, turned right on Lajos ut, and entered the grounds at the back of the Technical University, where students, relaxing in the sunshine, sat on wooden benches, or lounged in small groups on the grass, reading, talking, flirting.

It was here that Péter had studied in his first year of training to become an electrical engineer. László had often visited him, and had memories of tall green corridors, the smell of soldering irons, the whirr of the machinery in the demonstration rooms. Péter had even tried to persuade László to join him at the school, but László had had quite different ambitions. A sharp-looking, sharp-minded young man, vain and shy and talkative, he had harboured immoderate dreams of artistic glory. He thought he might be a great film director (he was a regular at the Corvin Film Palace), or some kind of Hungarian Picasso. He wanted to live freely, have a lakeside villa at Balaton, perhaps even work in Hollywood like Mihaly Kertesz. For that one summer of his life – before anything had been attempted, anything failed at – everything felt possible. Why not? He was seventeen, fired by love, and all around him, as though history were rooted in the excitements of his own heart, his country, frozen for so long like a kingdom in a fairytale, was beginning to thaw.