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with stolen bits from stage sets; the armchair had once belonged to Lady Macbeth, the bed to Laura Lenbach, and the chest of drawers to Anna Karenina. Even the toilet seat came from a flopped play, and the golden pompom, now at the end of the flush-chain, from the rope of the iron curtain. I thought a few letters from my sister might help; the one thing I did not count on was that Mother might answer them. That she would begin to correspond with her daughter whom she had declared dead and buried so disgracefully. This would never have occurred to me, it wasn’t logical, and in those days I counted on logic as I would on a seeing-eye dog, or rather on a well-maintained wheelchair that would never let me down. I would have sworn that logic drove our deeds, I even made a drawing of the cause-and-effect chain of our lives until that time, illustrating what action would follow a particular sentence, what preceded a certain gesture; I did this because I obsessively believed in such things. I kept drawing my figures and writing my notes, taking into account everything from my sister’s emigration to her last postcard from Caracas; from the night nineteen-year-old Judit, taking only her violin with her, left her hotel in Belgrade and then two days later the whole continent, to the day Mother declared her daughter dead and arranged for the funeral in the far corner of the Kerepesi cemetery, among the children’s graves overgrown with creepers.
    .   .   .
    Then suddenly I found I could not write that I’d have an appearence in the Cologne Cathedral, and not because I didn’t have an appearance in the Cologne Cathedral but because after my third or fourth letter Mother began to reply to Judit.
    Please mail this letter for me, Son, she said.
    Sure, Mother, I’m going that way anyway, I said, and the blood froze inmy veins, and from then on, her unopened replies kept collecting in my desk drawer, because there was no reason for me to mail the envelopes addressed to nonexistent hotels and never-existed concert halls. I also knew I mustn’t read these letters, lest I find in them things I could not pass over without some response, and then Mother would learn that for months she had been corresponding with me, instead of the daughter she had buried alive.
    Once, on the way to the food store, I threw the letters addressed to Paris, Venice, and Cairo into the garbage can and was already turning the corner when I heard the garbage truck from behind the Museum Garden, and I ran back to rescue the letters from the rubbish.
    â€œWait!” I screamed at the man in the phosphorescent vest because he was about to hook the plastic garbage can on the hydraulic arm of the truck. He wasn’t too surprised; it probably happened often that someone tried to wrest from the maw of the crusher what only a few minutes earlier he or she had consigned to the rubbish.
    â€œYou got ’em all?” the man asked when I retrieved the envelopes covered with coffee grounds.
    â€œYes, I’ve got them all,” I said, realizing not only that I was unable to read my mother’s answers, but that I couldn’t even throw them away. I knew I had to stop the whole thing, it just didn’t make any sense; what does it matter that Judit writes almost every month if Mother doesn’t even open the window shutters.
    Then, in a few days, somebody was going to Cologne, and I was unable to write Esteemed Mother, I will be playing in the great Cologne Cathedral. In short, I wanted to put an end to these miserable lies already back then, but one night, with matted hair and lips bitten bloody, Mother tore intomy room and bellowed that I had better not steal her mail. She demanded I hand over immediately her daughter’s letters; I said, calm yourself Mother, Judit is probably in Sydney or New Caledonia, giving concerts, and the mail from those places is very slow. And in about ten days my sister wrote from