“Memories of this little play returned to trouble him three times in his later life. The third and last was in 1952, when they began to question him at the start of his disciplinary hearing. Blanka was seated close by, in a corner of the room. Instead of attending to the questions, his mind, in something of a daze, somehow dredged up the lines Blanka had spoken that day. After a long pause, and to the amazement of the party official present, he returned not the sort of answer that was expected but a line of verse: “I shall attack you, I shall vanquish you, I shall chop your arms and legs to pieces.”
The first occasion when it came back to him was ten years after it had taken place, on the day Henriette died. On his return from the hospital that night a tearful Mrs. Temes had led him outside to a chair she had placed beside the fence, so that he could use it to look over. Standing on it he saw the girl lying on the gravel path in the moonlight. Her neck was twisted to one side, just as it had been in that moment in their childhood when she had keeled over at Irén’s feet.
The memory returned again shortly afterward, when he was taken prisoner during the siege of Budapest. As the line of captives moved off he suddenly thought of Irén. By then she was his fiancée, though she had no idea what was happening to him, and the Irén that came to his mind was not the slim, serious-minded university student but a vision clad in a white dress with a waistband of gleaming stones and the crown of St. Stephen on her head. The Russian guard had no idea what was passing through his mind when he suddenly came to a halt and stood there, his face buried in his hands, until they prodded him to keep moving. The guard could not have known that in his mind’s eye Bálint was seeing himself in that scarlet Hussar’s costume, with his little sword, the busby on his head, and also the Major, who was now dead, and the Helds, who had been taken away, and Henriette, who had been killed. He was trying to think where the Arrow Cross “fanatics might have taken the crown of St. Stephen.
