If anywhere there is an eye that is bigger than life, then its gaze must be able to embrace the entire universe, all visible and invisible worlds, both good and evil at once; people say that a person can see the whole, can glimpse the truth compressed in a single second, only at the moment of crossing between life and death. But the question remains: are all these crossings, these final seconds, also captured in the gaze of that great eye? In other words, does it only see them or does it also remember them? Does the eye ever shut and recall?

A LULLABY

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A dull, hollow sky stretched down to the squat houses, which were wheezing shallow breaths into the damp, stifling air. These strange, colourless exhalations, rising from the dead earth and errant mists, had settled in front of the town – thevaraš – like a mighty ghost from the past which not even children believed in any more. The secret that once lingered in these parts had again had to flee. It could be felt in the strange murmuring that hovered above the open plain. Now, at the hour of its departure, a sticky emptiness was opening. Somewhere deep down only oil stains and pillars of rock salt remained. Hidden in dense fog, which no wind would disperse for a long time, lay the last evidence that life could be any different.

The shine had faded long ago from the silver coffee spoons, and the determined clack of chessmen on chessboards, once intermingled with fervent conversations, had fallen silent. In the background of this genteel and seemingly well-mannered play of words and wit, the town lived its other, secret life. One sensed it as a devious, dire, even incurable disease that was slowing eating away at the idyllic façade. Perhaps it was only the spirit of the age, about which there had been so much discussion, but everyone agreed that the golden years they had shared were passing, the days when on the street, in coffee houses or at the cinema, the people of this small world, hidden from the world outside, would meet and greet each other as in a big communal garden.

Sadness, inexplicable melancholy and staring at dark landscape paintings and faded photographs, long solitary daydreaming and, especially, sinking into silence – these were all signs of the chronic disease that had been gaining power over thevaraš.

At this hour, in late March, in the year 1945, all that could be heard from the cellar bars and illicit taprooms was an incomprehensible mix of half-drunken tongues struggling to keep up with the tuneless wail of violins and cracked drums. Now the only things in tune, playing with manful resolution, were the army bugles, which were summoning soldiers to the final march.

That night the story of good men and women could barely stand up to the devious wind dispassionately erasing the words on the faded monuments of the law. This mysterious force was stronger than the storms and deeper than the floods that were once talked about here. It came as a vague feeling, or a long, harrowing dream, which burrowed into people’s souls even before they fell asleep or drank themselves into a stupor.

All of this was pressing down from above on this forgotten, sleepy town, tired of contrived splendour and barren grandeur, too tired perhaps even to die, as hope had died – hope in the coming of the one who will judge by the letter of the law.

The wooden roller blinds on the tall windows of the middle-class houses and shops on Horthy Street were tightly shut; somewhere deep behind these windows, beneath the cool ceilings of drawing rooms, in sitting rooms that looked out on gardens still gripped by icy dew, words were few, wrenched out like a hacking cough for which no medicine existed.

‘Brandy taken with honey and bed rest – that’s the only thing that helps,’ people said on the street. But for timidity and especially the fear that comes from a chronic lack of will, there was no effective medicine. So the silence and the rare, awkward word uttere