[Christine Arnothy narrates some incidents from the days she spent hidden in a cellar in Budapest when the city was occupied by the Germans before the Russians liberated it. She writes in her diary:]

We have no food and no water, and someone has to risk going out in the streets where the Germans shoot at anyone they see, in order to get something for us to survive day by day. Our hero is Pista, a cheerful and daring young man who manages to get out every day and always brings something to share between all.

Eva and Gabriel are a young couple that has come to take refuge with as since their homes have been destroyed and they have lost their families. We make room for them in a corner, but an old tenant objects to their sleeping together as they have not yet married. What else can they do in the circumstances? One morning we ask Pista to go to a parish church, about half an hour away, to fetch a priest to say holy mass for us. Pista has the reputation of been bullet-proof as though he wore a talisman that keeps mines and bombs away from him in the battlefield the city has become.

Our wish was fulfilled earlier than we expected. Hardly two days had gone by when the lad told us we would have mass in our cellar on the next morning. (It did sound strange to hear words like ‘tomorrow’, ‘morning’, ‘evening’, as in the perpetual darkness of our cellar our bleary red eyes in the yellowish light of the tallow candles could not measure the hours or the days. The only fixed moment in our timetable was the night bombing that ended its destructive rides at about four in the morning, and since then there was relative silence till about six.)

The great day has arrived. Everybody is up since three thirty. It has snowed during the night and so we can freshen up a little using the snow in the patio. In the centre we have placed a table with the only clean sheet we have found. We all notice a remarkable happening: Mr Radnai, the atheist, has shaved and has tied a rather colourless tie round his collar. The banker’s widow is carefully arranging her locks, and Ilus dresses her baby in a clean shirt. The previous day Pista had found six candles in a store. They were as big as an arm, and they turn out to be a great treasure.

A few minutes after four comes the old priest. He is bringing along the sacred vessels and the wine for the mass in a bottle. A corner of our cellar has become the confessional. We have placed a chair for the priest and a folded blanket on the floor for the penitents. We line up one after another, and confessions begin. Mr Radnai, the atheist, is also in the queue with his head down. The doorkeeper and his wife are also there, dressed up as though they were going to high mass in their village. Eva does not let go of Gabriel’s hand. The lawyer has a forty degree fever, is delirious, and is going to be given the last sacraments. Esteban lights the candles over the improvised altar, and the cellar is filled with a golden light. Shadows with bent heads cross in front of me to go and kneel down for confession. Pista smoothes out the folds on the altar cloth and then comes to the queue.  

When my turn comes, I feel my hear beating heavily. ‘I don’t want to die, father’, I tell him weeping. ‘I am only fifteen and I am horribly afraid of death. I want to live on.’ I don’t know what he tells me. Through the tepid veil of my tears I see the glow from the candles reflecting the colours of the rainbow. Shaking voices sing softly a canticle, and a feeling of pure joy sweeps through me. It is only later that I come back to reality and I see Eva and Gabriel kneeling down before the altar. The priest is marrying them. That was an unforgettable sight: their vow of fidelity to each other being pronounced at the footstep of eternity under the shadow of death.

The priest left at seven in the morning in the midst of a terrible bombing. It looked as though that day would be worse than any. Our house was much ruined, and part of the third floor fell over the courtyard. All wanted to present something to the newlyweds. Mr Radnai offered them an orange he had kept during almost five weeks and had almost dried up. He had kept it for harder days still to come. The doorkeepers brought them a glass of wine. We all shared in their joy. /// Pista decides to go out and get a bride’s veil for Eva. He seems to remember a cloth shop in the outskirts where such clothes were sold before the Germans came to the city. In the showcase there are not now feather hats but a bomb that has not exploded, but Pista feels sure he can find a bride’s veil inside. We try to dissuade him, but he laughs, and his beautiful white teeth shine in candle light. He keeps repeating obstinately, ‘I want this day to be an unforgettable one for Eva.’ Resides, he’ll bring milk for the baby and a medicine for the sick lawyer. He doesn’t go alone, as the doctor wants to go with him. Hunger is to acute now that we all welcome his decision. We know he is very skilful with a knife, as he is a surgeon: outside he’ll surely find some dead horse and will bring back to us bits of its flesh to eat so that the wife of the restaurant owner will prepare a good soup for us and a meat course. Pista and the doctor go out. 

‘It’s seven o’clock’, says Mr Randai, ‘and Pista is not yet back.’ Our uneasiness increases. Ilus, above all, is in anguish, since, if the young man doesn’t come back, her baby will have nothing to eat the next day: that last tin of milk powder is empty. My father squeezes my arm as I have just now uttered a loud cry: an explosion very close to our place has shaken all of us. The door of our cellar slams as though pushed by a bomb. The doorkeeper comes in. He is white in the face and his trembling lips can hardly pronounce the words: ‘Come, come, they have just brought him…’. I ask: ‘Whom? Pista?’  A terrible foreboding oppresses my troat. We run along the corridor pushing one another. The doctor lets down Pista’s body from his shoulder. Both are covered in blood, as though painted with red paint. ‘Is he unconscious? asks a deep voice from the end of the corridor. ‘Quite dead’, answers the doctor shyly, as though apologising. ‘We had reached quite far, and a mine hit him square. The explosion threw me against a wall. When the dust and the smoke settled down I saw he was dead.’

Ilus breaks into tears. ‘Here is his bag’, the doctor goes on, ‘it contains something for you.’ He hands over the bag and Ilus takes it with a weak hand. She takes unending minutes to untie the cord but nobody comes to her help as we all are frozen with horror. She bends over her task and gets stained in blood up to her elbows till she succeeds in opening the bag. Her trembling hands take out three tins of condensed milk. She laughs hysterically: ‘Mill for my baby! He will not starve to death! O my God, it is milk for my child, for my poor little child!’ It takes quite a while for her to calm down. Then she takes out the medicine for the lawyer. She searches in the bottom of the bag and takes out a beautiful white veil. ‘The bride’s veils’, says Mr Randai with a choked voice, while out in the street the gun thunders again. Eva covers her face with her hands and shakes her head again and again: ‘I don’t want it, I don’t want it.’

Ilus takes the veil, comes close to Pista’s body and covers it up with the fine white veil. Hers is a mother’s gesture, gentle and loving, as though she was covering a sleeping child. ‘Thank you…’, she keeps murmuring, ‘thank you…’. The narrow corridor has become a funeral parlour. We all kneel down, and Eva recites a prayer. The white veil gets slowly soaked in blood, and outside the guns boom without ceasing.

That night the bombing raged all night. By noon we had drunk all the water that was left. Now there is no more water. Not a drop. And no Pista. What will become of us?

[The day finally comes when they can leave the cellar. They leave Budapest and try to escape to Austria. But there were still months of anguish for them, and she writes about that period:]

I felt cheated and betrayed all the time. I had left the cellar full of an ardent expectation that remained unfulfilled. The girl in me had died. Now I had to live as an adult. I would have expected somebody to feel happy at my existence. But the men thought only of themselves, and the sun caressed my thin arms and my pale face as indifferently as though I were a length of grass. I spent my time looking at the lake, waiting for an unknown man to come and love me. But nothing happened. Only the seasons came one after another. When my parents told me we were finally going to cross the frontier, a new ray of hope shone on me. Maybe at last I was going to begin my life.

(Christine Arnothy, Tengo quince años y no quiero morir, Barril & Barral, Barcelona, 2009, p. 45, 95)