Photo. Erdelyi, Budapest.
The streets and squares are now darker than ever. A new order has been published that shops are to be closed at five, and so the shop-windows are dark after that hour. I passed in front of a Kinematograph, where big coloured posters near the entrance “featured” Tisza’s death. An actor was made up as Tisza, and an actress represented Countess Tisza: Denise Almássy too was impersonated. The manager had had the reel staged on the authentic spot of the murder. Did he get the murderers to play their own parts, I wonder?
As I passed, I listened with disgust to the remarks exchanged by people coming out from the performance. All Pest is whispering about a sailor who boasts everywhere that it was he who killed Tisza. It is also said that Countess Almássy, while dining at the Hotel Ritz, recognised with horror one of Tisza’s murderers. She asked, “Who is that man?” And somebody answered: “The President of the Soldiers’ Council, Joseph Pogány.” But it was only an invention, for Denise Almássy has never been in town since the murder. All sorts of rumours get about. It is said that at the War Office the Government has paid out hundreds of thousands of crowns to suspicious individuals who have rendered great service to the revolution. The members of the first Soldiers’ Council have received considerable amounts, nobody knows why. But Károlyi probably knows, and if he cared to look into matters he might find Tisza’s murderers among them.
We live in a quagmire and around us Bolshevism is organising more openly every day.
I went home along the banks of the Danube. A small lighter towed a long raft down stream. A man sat on the stairs of the embankment, and his head was bowed between drawn-up knees. A child passed me, its bare feet wrapped in bits of old carpet and the ends of the strings with which they were tied up dragged behind him in the mud. The shops were already closed and the streets were in darkness. At the edge of the footpath a queer little figure was alternately stooping and standing up. As I got nearer I saw that it was an old woman, clothed in an old-fashioned cloak of beadwork and with a shabby bonnet on her head, who was searching among the garbage in the dust bins that stood by the side of the street. A little basket hung on her arm, and she was collecting putrid bits of food.
This town is haunted by strange sounds. Foreign money rings, banknotes rustle, and one cannot see who gives or takes. But the recipient sells his services for the foreign money and then whispers something broadcast in the streets. The cloaked woman among the garbage boxes, the despairing man on the stairs, and the child whose feet protrude naked from scraps of carpet, they all hear it.
A crowd gathers, no one knows whence, and soldiers and sailors appear. Suddenly someone jumps up on a box and begins to make a speech.
“It is all the fault of the gentle-folk, the counts, the priests and the bourgeois! They ought to be knocked on the head, every one of them!”