The ringing stopped and I heard only that meaningless buzzing at a distance. It lasted for some time while I stared through the window at the little ice-house in the garden. At last there was silence and I recognised the voice of my brother Géza. He spoke from town, enquired after mother, and asked how we had passed the night. In town they had been shooting all night long, and armoured cars had rushed through the streets. And then he said something I could not understand clearly. I felt a strange reluctance to understand. I began to be afraid of what was coming, of hearing something which, once known, could never be altered again. The presentiment of catastrophe took possession of me. “But what happened?” “Poor Stephen Tisza....” I still looked out into the garden at the reed-thatched roof of the ice-house, staring at a reed which had become detached by some winter storm. I stared at it till my eyes ached, as if I were clinging to it. It was only a reed, but now everything to which one could cling was but a reed. Suddenly the garden vanished. The window disappeared, and tears fell from my eyes. I heard the voice of my brother again. He concluded from my silence that I had not understood what he said, so he repeated it: “He is the only victim of the revolution. Soldiers killed him. They penetrated into his house and ... in the presence of his wife and of Denise Almássy they shot him dead.” “The scoundrels!” Communication was suddenly broken off. Poor human creature! Forsaken, lonely, deserted man! Nobody protected him. In his greatest hour, women alone stood by his side: it is always a woman who is at the foot of the rood. My awful presentiment of Tisza’s martyrdom came back to me in a shudder. How he must have suffered from the thought that his usefulness had gone, how his brilliant brain must have rebelled against annihilation, how his remaining vitality must have revolted. Stephen Tisza was dead! What an awful void these words created. Nobody was left to bear every burden in Hungary, to bear all blame, all responsibility. The weight of the responsibility which he alone bore falls to pieces with his death. Till now, one man bore them; will the whole country be able to bear the burden? Even whilst I asked this question I felt as if something which I had never felt before had fallen upon my shoulders: my share of the terrible, invisible load. Small legatees of a great testator ... I, others, every Hungarian. Poor Tisza! In his good qualities and in his shortcomings he was typical of his race. He was faithful and God-fearing, honest, credulous and obstinate, proud, brave, calumnied and lonely, just like old Hungary. In my mind his qualities were so tightly knitted together that I could not separate them.