The public reading of Szilárd Berda-Stern was to have the strangest consequences. When the Emperor’s troops occupied the town, the first task of Géza Ráth, county commissioner plenipotentiary, was to have the leading rebels rounded up. On this list next to the name Szilárd Berda-Stern was written the word conspirator.

It surpasses my comprehension still that I should be in prison, writing my farewell letter. What offense have I committed against the emperor? It must be such a small thing that he can hardly have felt it. But the commissioner wants to make an example of me at any cost. Now it has at last dawned on me that I did indeed see the future, for I stared many times down gun-barrels aimed at my chest, only I, misguided fellow that I am, believed I was reliving the last moments of Grandpa Czuczor.

He wrote separately to his son, daughter, wife, mother, and the Sterns, though what he had to say was by and large the same.

At first light, the duty guard looked in and gave a salute. “Last requests?”

“See that these are delivered to the addressees.”

“It will be done.”

“My last wish is that my gravestone should bear no word but Star.”

“Star? What for?”

“It was the fine Hungarian name of my earliest forebears.”

The guard nodded. Misguided fellow, he thought, imagining that the executed get some sort of tombstone rather than ending up in a ditch at the end of the cemetery. “You have an hour remaining!” he said with a click of his heels, and left Szilárd Berda-Stern to his thoughts.

The life of Szilárd Berda-Stern was extinguished on January 18, 1849 at six of the clock in the morning by a firing squad of four. Two aimed at his heart, two at his head. One bullet landed in an eye and drenched in red the kerchief with which his executioners had sought to save his sight. His body was rolled up in canvas and tossed into the ditch at the far end of the cemetery, bearing only a few spadefuls of earth and disinfecting lime.

Unfathomably, some hundred years later in the damp heart of the ditch a dozen or more potato plants began to sprout. Their tubers were caressed by the winds of the west. This, too, Szilárd Berda-Stern had sensed somehow. By no means rare in his visions were the pale sad flowers of the potato plant.

COOLING STREAMS OF AIR COME TO CLEAR THE LAND. The smell of burned leaf mold mingles with the more oppressive fumes from the fumigation of the wine casks and the raffish smell of mulled wine. The fermenting juice of the grape is quaffed all around, keenly watched for its head, an index of its quality. In the cellars the water in the glass piping on the back of the barrels bubbles up as the gases promoting the ferment gurgle their way through the slender tubes. Those who have finished the wine harvest can already hammer into this year’s vintage barrels the taps with their maize-husk seals. The landscape grows more barren by the day. The autumn paints pale, dull colors, steadily emptying the nests.

From his earliest childhood when he woke from a deep, restful sleep he could taste freshly picked, dew-dappled raspberries in his mouth, and his tongue retained the imprint of the cool fruit until morning coffee, which it had been his habit since he had grown to manhood to ask to be brought to his bedside. There was nothing he desired more than strong Turkish coffee, with plenty of sugar and that soft top of the milk which, like his mother, he called butterfroth. His servants and chambermaids, none of whom found his service congenial-they followed on one another’s heels almost monthly-brought the coffee into the bedroom at a fair gallop, as their master liked it boiling hot. But far worse than a cool cup was the spilling of its contents onto the silver salver, which was not an infrequent occurrence amid such haste; if this happened he sent it back with righteous indignation. He also noticed without fail if the amount of coffee used was incorrect and insisted that it be portioned out using the little copper kitchen scales: precisely one-tenth of a Viennese Pfund per cup. It often took three attempts to provide his morning beverage exactly as he desired. His servants got goosepimples down their backs from his monosyllabic interrogatives: “Napkin? Clean? Boiled? Fwoth? Stwong?”-he had trouble with his r’s.

There was only one person from whom Mendel Berda-Stern was prepared to accept his coffee irrespective of how it turned out: this was his younger sister Hanna, whom he addressed as Hami after a very early childhood attempt to say her name. After the death of their mother, Hami became the most important person in his life, the Ace of Trumps in his parlance.

His thirst for cards became evident while he was still a toddler. In his parents’ house they regularly leafed through the Devil’s Bible, the gentlemen playing Klaberjass or Mariage, the ladies gin rummy, though never for money. He was not yet four when-shortly before his father’s imprisonment-he made himself his own deck of cards, cutting out the 24 cards from a cardboard box; half had figures on them, the drawings having some resemblance to the members of the family.

“And what’s this?” his father asked kneeling on the floor beside him.

“Cawds! Show you how I play cawds!”

The little Mendel Berda-Stern shuffled the cards with some expertise and cut them, explaining the while, his father listening with his mouth open. The child had invented a brand-new game, distantly resembling Hungarian Tarokk, in which the rules were based on pure logic. The top trump was Mother, a kind of all-conquering Joker.

Mendel Berda-Stern drew his mother wearing a hat that looked like a fruit-basket, with the house and larder keys hanging from her neck. Among the cards with figures there also appeared his sister and the dog Morzsa, and the Sterns from Hegyhát, József and János, both with beards down to the ground. His father was assigned a value somewhat higher than the guard dog: he was recognizable only by the shape of his legs, just a little more X-shaped than in real life. At all events, his son’s deck of cards made him reflect whether he had been right to let his wife wear the trousers quite so much in the house. He had, however, little opportunity to reconsider this policy, as within a few weeks he had been arrested.

At first his mother insisted that the Daddy had gone away. Mendel Berda-Stern realized later, having discovered the truth and read the farewell letter intended in part also for him, that at about the time that Szilárd Berda-Stern was staring down the barrels of the guns, he had had a very strange dream. A well-built, rather rotund man, in the shadows of a tent, with a brown-skinned woman whispering in his ear. On the table, cards and a mysterious, crystalline ball. Mendel Berda-Stern could clearly make out the words of the woman: “Snow-white birds plunge into the fire and burn to death.”

The same man, in the company of other men, colorful cards in hand, crumpled banknotes before him in a huge pile.

A more substantial man, rolling around on the grass under God’s heaven, singing for all he was worth, his resonant voice echoing far and wide.

A child-sized man, on horseback, in a uniform of black and white, galloping alongside other gentlemen riders. The finishing-line marked by a line of white dust, he is the first to cross, the clatter of hoofs becomes hurrahs from the spectators.

Mendel Berda-Stern woke with aching limbs, as if he had been riding the horse. For years these dreams, which made no sense, kept haunting him.

That autumn, when his voice began to break, they moved to Homonna, because his mother was taking over the direction of the lace-making factory hitherto managed by her much older and long sickly sister. She had distinguished herself at fillet-work while preparing her bottom drawer, having picked up the skills from her grandmother, who had died relatively young. The factory made light lace, suitable for collars and trimmings, and heavier lace for the table or for furniture, both using designs from abroad. Mendel Berda-Stern reveled in the permanently damp atmosphere of the workshop and the rich variety of spider’s webs produced by the white strands of lace on the wooden frames. He liked especially to spend time playing with the giant set of scales used to weigh the yarns.