Journey by Moonlight

“In that instant the whirlpool vanished, and I would have collapsed with exhaustion if Tamás hadn’t caught me up. He helped me to a bench and waited while I rested. When I felt better I told him briefly about the whirlpool thing, the first time I had ever told anyone in my life. I don’t know how it was: within seconds he had become my best friend, the sort of friend you dream about, as an adolescent, with no less intensity, but more deeply and seriously than you do about your first love.

“After that we met every day. Tamás did not want to come to my house because, he said, he hated being introduced, but he soon invited me to his place. That’s how I got to know the Ulpius ménage.

“Tamás’s family lived in the upstairs part of a very old and run-down house. But only the outside was old and run-down: inside it was fine and comfortable, like these old Italian hotels. Although, in many ways, it was a bit creepy, with its large rooms and works of art, rather like a museum. Because Tamás’s father was an archaeologist and museum director. The grandfather had been a clockmaker — his shop had been in the house. Now he just tinkered for his own amusement with antique clocks and all sorts of weird clockwork toys of his own invention.

“Tamás’s mother was no longer alive. He and his younger sister Éva hated their father. They blamed him for driving their mother to her death with his cold gloominess when she was still a young woman. This was my first, rather shocking, experience of the Ulpius household at the start of my first visit. Éva said of her father that he had eyes like shoe-buttons (which, by the way, was very true), and Tamás added, in the most natural voice you can imagine, ‘because, you know, my father is a most thoroughly loathsome fellow,’ in which he too was right. As you know, I grew up in a close-knit family circle. I adored my parents and siblings, I worshipped my father and couldn’t begin to imagine that parents and children might not love one another, or that the children should criticise their parents’ conduct as if they were strangers. This was the first great primordial rebellion I had ever encountered in my life. And this rebellion seemed to me in some strange way endlessly appealing, although in my own mind there was never any question of revolt against my own father.

“Tamás couldn’t stand his father, but conversely, he loved his grandfather and sister all the more. He was so fond of his sister that that too seemed a form of rebellion. I too was fond of my brothers and sister. I never fought with them very much. I took the idea of family solidarity very seriously, as far as my withdrawn and abstracted nature would allow. But it wasn’t our way, as siblings, to make a show of mutual affection — any tenderness between us would have been considered a joke, or a sign of weakness. I’m sure most families are like that. We never exchanged Christmas presents. If one of us went out or came in, he wouldn’t greet the others. If we went away, we would just write a respectful letter to our parents and add as a postscript, ‘Greetings to Péter, Laci, Edit and Tivadar’. It was quite different in the Ulpius family. Tamás and Éva would speak to one another with extreme politeness, and when parting, even if only for an hour, would kiss one another lovingly. As I realised later, they were very jealous of each other, and this was the main reason why they had no friends.

“They were together night and day. By night, I tell you, because they shared a room. For me, this was the strangest thing. In our house, from the time Edit was twelve she was kept away from us boys, and thereafter a separate female ambience grew up around her. Girlfriends called on her, boyfriends too, people we didn’t know and whose pastimes we thoroughly scorned. My adolescent fantasy was thoroughly exercised by the fact that Éva and Tamás lived together. Because of it, the gender difference became somehow blurred, and each took on a rather androgynous character in my eyes. With Tamás I usually spoke in the gentle and refined way I always did with girls, but with Éva I never experienced the bored restlessness I felt with Éva’s girlfriends — with those officially proclaimed females.