I was a proper girl-about-town. I know men don’t understand this, but what I was most worried about during the siege was not being able to hurry over to my favorite old drugstore in Pest where they sold good peacetime-quality nail-polish remover. The psychiatrist who charged me fifty pengő per visit for the privilege of lying on a couch in his surgery three times a week and talking dirt—I did it simply because I did everything befitting a middle-class lady—he would most certainly have explained to me that it wasn’t filthy nail polish I wanted to wash away, but uncleanness of another sort, the dirtiness of my prewar life. Well, maybe, but all I knew was that my nails were black, not scarlet, and that I had to do something about it. That’s why I hurried over the bridge at the earliest possible opportunity. Once I reached the street where we used to live, a familiar figure hurried past me. It was the plumber, born and bred in the district, a decent older man. Like many others at the time, he had grown a gray beard so that he might look like a proper granddad, someone on his last legs, hoping this might prevent him being carted off to forced labor in Russia, as far as Ekaterinburg.
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