I took the idea of family solidarity very seriously, as far as my withdrawn and abstracted nature would allow. But it wasn’t our way, as siblings, to make a show of mutual affection—any tenderness between us would have been considered a joke, or a sign of weakness. I’m sure most families are like that. We never exchanged Christmas presents. If one of us went out or came in, he wouldn’t greet the others. If we went away, we would just write a respectful letter to our parents and add as a postscript, ‘Greetings to Péter, Laci, Edit and Tivadar’. It was quite different in the Ulpius family. Tamás and Éva would speak to one another with extreme politeness, and when parting, even if only for an hour, would kiss one another lovingly. As I realised later, they were very jealous of each other, and this was the main reason why they had no friends.

“They were together night and day. By night, I tell you, because they shared a room. For me, this was the strangest thing. In our house, from the time Edit was twelve she was kept away from us boys, and thereafter a separate female ambience grew up around her. Girlfriends called on her, boyfriends too, people we didn’t know and whose pastimes we thoroughly scorned. My adolescent fantasy was thoroughly exercised by the fact that Éva and Tamás lived together. Because of it, the gender difference became somehow blurred, and each took on a rather androgynous character in my eyes. With Tamás I usually spoke in the gentle and refined way I always did with girls, but with Éva I never experienced the bored restlessness I felt with Éva’s girlfriends—with those officially proclaimed females.

“The grandfather I did have difficulty getting used to. He would shuffle into their room at the most unlikely hours, often in the middle of the night, and wearing the most outlandish clothes, cloaks and hats. They always accorded him a ceremonial ovation. At first I was bored by the old fellow’s stories, and couldn’t follow him very well since he spoke Old German with a trace of Rhineland accent, because he had come to Hungary from Cologne. But later on I acquired a taste for them. The old chap was a walking encyclopaedia of old Budapest. For me, with my passion for houses, he was a real godsend. He could tell the story of every house on the Hill, and its owners. So the Castle District houses, which up till then I had known only by sight, gradually became personal and intimate friends.

“But I, too, hated their father. I don’t recall ever once speaking with him. Whenever he saw me he would just mutter something and turn away. The two of them went through agonies when they had to dine with him. They ate in an enormous room. During the meal they spoke not a word to each other. Afterwards, Tamás and Éva would sit while their father walked up and down the enormous room, which was lit only by a standard lamp.