But for László, this was not the case at all. How could he look back when there was only shame to look back on? What pride could he take in consummate failure? No. He did not want to remember. He wanted to forget. To forget for ever. Yet each year the effort of it was suddenly inadequate, and the past overwhelmed him, though rarely so thoroughly as during the previous winter when, with much reluctance, he took part in the fortieth anniversary celebrations in Paris. He had always managed to avoid these get-togethers, taking care to be out of the city, and telling whoever bothered to ask that he was allergic to nostalgia. But on this occasion he had received too many pressing invitations to have stayed away without causing offence, and so he had gone with Kurt in the Citroën to Père Lachaise cemetery to stand at the empty ‘grave’ of Imry Nagy, and then on to the hotel by the Gare de L’Est where, between wedding receptions, the veterans had the use of the banqueting hall.

All around László were men and women in the vigorous last third of their lives, many of them with the manner and aspect of professionals, all of them highly respectable. Greying, a little overweight, dressed in suits and dresses from French department stores, these were the freedom fighters who had flung Molotov cocktails into the engine grilles of T-34s; who had fought pitched battles at the Corvin Passage, at Szena Square, and Csepel, and seen friends, fellow workers, neighbours slain in shell-bursts or mown down in a food queue by a passing armoured car. The stories they told, the same they must have been telling each other for decades, they told again as if for the first time, and with the earnestness of people who must explain the whole truth in a single charged anecdote, or risk losing their dead a second time, burying them not in earth, but in silence.

‘Jancsi was on Villanyi Ut when the tanks came. He lived for an hour. We didn’t even have a coffin for him ...’

‘We found Éva by Szabadsag bridge. She was sixteen. She still had the gun in her hand. Someone had covered her face with a coat...’

‘Ádám was at school with me. We started work at Egyesült Izzó electrical plant on the same day. They arrested him in December at his uncle’s house. We never saw him again...’