B: What was that?

G: When he was killed he had headphones on. He was listening to a Walkman. Deaf. There wasn’t much left of it, the Walkman I mean, when . . . when they gathered up all the pieces of him. But the cassette remained intact. I listened to it, but it was totally blank. A standard cassette, with nothing on it.

B: Do you still have it?

The manuscript ends here. From this point on, we only publish the notes of Márton Kopaszhegyi-Kézi. The reason for writing on paper instead of typing on a computer is unknown, as is the factuality of the text. Maybe everything he writes is speculation. In any case, the cassette existed, according to Júlia Nagy. After the sale of the publisher and the termination of their book contract, Júlia Nagy immediately started to look for new employment, and she didn’t reach out to her co-author for a while. “I will never forgive myself for that,” she writes. The widow of the deceased writer hardly recognized her husband in his final years. He listened to cassettes obsessively, often going missing for days, until one night he didn’t come home at all. These are his final notes.

Balázs paid fifty thousand forints for the cassette. TDK, sixty minutes, transparent blue plastic. It had been rewound. He listened to it all the way through. Only the sound of the empty tape. Emptiness still comforted him. When side A ended with a sharp snap, Balázs shivered. He flipped the tape over. He took out the interviews that he had already transcribed and printed and read through them. Finally he closed his eyes. He thought of the city that couldn’t be his. He thought of Brigitta whom he always loved, not for what she was but for what she represented to him. He thought about the drinks he never drank. The girls he never kissed. The nights that eluded him.

He heard a noise from far off. Something was on the tape after all, it was like the thousandth copy of a copy on minimum volume. It wasn’t music, only noise, a shapeless, soft clatter. The more the things he hadn’t lived through took shape in Balázs’ head, the clearer the sound became too.