Night was already falling and it was still there. ‘This one’s very stubborn,’ I thought to myself. And then to my horror I noticed it was growing in size, that just ten centimetres remained between me and the brink, and that slowly, slowly, it was approaching my foot. A few more minutes and I would be done for: I’d fall in. I clung grimly on to the safety railing.

“And then the whirlpool actually reached me. The ground opened under my feet and I hung there in space, gripping the iron bar. ‘If my hand gets tired,’ I thought, ‘I shall fall.’ And quietly, with resignation, I began to pray and prepare for death.

“Then I became aware that Tamás Ulpius was standing beside me.

“‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, and put his hand on my shoulder.

“In that instant the whirlpool vanished, and I would have collapsed with exhaustion if Tamás hadn’t caught me up. He helped me to a bench and waited while I rested. When I felt better I told him briefly about the whirlpool thing, the first time I had ever told anyone in my life. I don’t know how it was: within seconds he had become my best friend, the sort of friend you dream about, as an adolescent, with no less intensity, but more deeply and seriously than you do about your first love.

“After that we met every day. Tamás did not want to come to my house because, he said, he hated being introduced, but he soon invited me to his place. That’s how I got to know the Ulpius ménage.

“Tamás’s family lived in the upstairs part of a very old and run-down house. But only the outside was old and run-down: inside it was fine and comfortable, like these old Italian hotels. Although, in many ways, it was a bit creepy, with its large rooms and works of art, rather like a museum. Because Tamás’s father was an archaeologist and museum director. The grandfather had been a clockmaker—his shop had been in the house. Now he just tinkered for his own amusement with antique clocks and all sorts of weird clockwork toys of his own invention.

“Tamás’s mother was no longer alive. He and his younger sister Éva hated their father. They blamed him for driving their mother to her death with his cold gloominess when she was still a young woman. This was my first, rather shocking, experience of the Ulpius household at the start of my first visit. Éva said of her father that he had eyes like shoe-buttons (which, by the way, was very true), and Tamás added, in the most natural voice you can imagine, ‘because, you know, my father is a most thoroughly loathsome fellow,’ in which he too was right. As you know, I grew up in a close-knit family circle. I adored my parents and siblings, I worshipped my father and couldn’t begin to imagine that parents and children might not love one another, or that the children should criticise their parents’ conduct as if they were strangers. This was the first great primordial rebellion I had ever encountered in my life. And this rebellion seemed to me in some strange way endlessly appealing, although in my own mind there was never any question of revolt against my own father.

“Tamás couldn’t stand his father, but conversely, he loved his grandfather and sister all the more. He was so fond of his sister that that too seemed a form of rebellion. I too was fond of my brothers and sister. I never fought with them very much.