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22 The Vatican House
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132 22 The Vatic an House We picked up our backpacks, which held food for two days and a change of underwear. Mine also had a nightgown, two blouses and two skirts, one pullover, a biography of Bach, and the last two volumes of The Count of Monte Cristo by Dumas. We left the Funk pharmacy before evening. I remember it was still light, but I was terrified on the street, crowded with people. Erzsi had her arm around me as we walked, following my father, mother, and Iván. It must have been around 4:30 p.m. when we entered the Vatican house. Showing our papers to a man standing guard at the door, we entered the stairway. Erzsi went home. Our assigned apartment was located on the third floor. We rang the doorbell; somebody opened the door. The place was packed with large groups of the elderly, in addition to many younger men and women, and children. Several people were lying on the floor; others sat on the beds, on chairs, on sofas, everywhere. I saw bodies mingled with bodies; some looked as if they were lying on top of each other. There were no rooms among those we saw in the apartment that could accommodate even one more person. And we were a family of four! Standing in the middle of the entrance hall, while talking to a man calling himself “the manager of the apartment,” my father offered him money if he would make space for us. The man pointed to a door that opened from the corridor. My father entered the place; I snuck behind him, and we found ourselves in a tiny “servant’s room.” It had but a wardrobe and one bed, in which, apparently, nobody slept. It was like heaven to us in comparison to the overcrowded rooms where people The Vatican House 133 were lying on top of one another. Immediately my father signed the papers the “manager” had for him. For the next couple of hours I read. Later, we lay down. My father, my mother, and I slept in the bed, Iván, on the floor. We at least had a place to stay now. I woke up early in the morning. Something tickled my mouth. Wiping it off, I turned to the other side. But again, I felt something like a cobweb across my face. I sat up in bed, rubbing it off. It was dark outside. In the room everybody was sleeping. I lay down and fell asleep. When I woke up next morning, it was light. My eyes met Iván’s. He stood above me, on top of the bed, looking at me for a moment; then he tried to catch some thin, brown material hanging from the ceiling. It was waving in the air, as if blown by the wind. “What is that?” I asked. “It hung into my bed and bothered me all night.” “You don’t want to know,” he said. I stood up on my toes on the bed. It was some time before I understood what I saw. It was horrible. Nests of bedbugs hung from the ceiling on thin threads, embedded into one another. They appeared like a woven structure made of raisins and veils of dust. Thousands of bedbugs lived within them. It took Iván a long time to tear down the whole, uneven construction. This did not mean, of course, that we got rid of all the bedbugs. They never ceased sucking our blood while we lived in the “protected house of the Vatican.” We scratched our bodies all the time, our skin covered with itchy bites. Still, however disgusting , they were significantly less dangerous than the lice that overran us later, in the bunker, at our last “refuge” on Kisfaludy Street, at the “White Cross Hospital.” Although there were many children in the Vatican house—I counted twenty-four just in the apartment where we lived—there was no time or space to establish relationships, to get to know someone, or even to play a few of the old games we used to play with our friends at Abonyi Street. I made friends with two adults in the Vatican house, an [3.90.242.249] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:58 GMT) When the Danube R an Red 134 old woman who loved to read and a young one who was pregnant and loved music. Her husband was in the labor service. She...