On my way home his last words kept coming to my mind. Among our old family papers there is a little scrap of a document dated 1848, addressed to my grandfather, Charles Tormay; it is a receipt for the silver he had delivered to the mint to cover the issue of Kossuth’s banknotes. My father once told me how on a certain day all the silver was heaped up on the dining-room table. He was a little boy at the time, and asked how he would be able to stir the sugar in his coffee if all the spoons were taken away? “With a wooden spoon,” his mother said. My father could not bear the idea of that, so he hung about the silver till he managed to steal a little spoon. Everything else was melted down, and that little spoon is the only thing that remains of our old family silver.
They gave it, and we would give it, but not to this crowd. I wouldn’t eat with a wooden spoon for the sake of the entire government.
November 30th.
A yellow fog has descended on the town. The houses have disappeared in it, and the rooms are dark, as if the windows were covered outside with mud-coloured blinds. Though it is forenoon, the lamps are burning in the houses, as if a corpse were laid out in every room in the town. I never saw a fog like this. It looks the very picture of our lives.
Fog ... clinging, dense fog. People choke as they walk, in an accursed land; they slip about in the sticky, heavy mud, and can neither halt nor run. A doomed city is our prison. The hearths are cold, we have no light, and all the doors are shut. Streets end in darkness, and at the street corners cold blasts strike one, coming no one knows whence. One cannot escape it. One has to go on, under dark windows, through the fog, across deadly alleys. Nobody looks out of the houses, and there is no sign of life about. The air seems to be a sloppy glue closing suddenly over one’s mouth like a horrible, gigantic hand, and stopping one’s breath. We shudder with discomfort and misery, and if we try to lay hold of something solid, the walls recede before our groping hands, and the doors move like ghosts. They are not locked, just ajar, and they open noiselessly inward. Behind them somebody stands and waits, waits with open eyes in the dark, conscious of some awful news impending: Hungary has lost something again.... In the next street, in all the streets about us, red ferocious beasts are lurking with soft noiseless steps, ready to pounce....
That is our present life. Fog, yellow, clinging fog, in which the town, with all its streets and houses, glides on mud towards a bottomless abyss.
Day by day more cockades of the national colours disappear from the soldiers’ caps, and as each one disappears it leaves a wound: a spot of blood ... red buttons take their place. In one of the main streets yesterday a red flag was displayed on a house. In the northern suburbs communists meet in shady little inns, and in the streets foreign-looking men harangue chance crowds from dust-bins or the tops of hand-carts. With sweeping gestures they declare: “Everything is yours! Take everything!”
These words are all over the town to-day, and Károlyi’s Government says it all the time, in every one of its declarations: “Everything is yours!” It says it to socialists, communists, radicals, Czechs, Roumanians, Serbians....
