CHAPTER TWOThe Portrait
1
Attila had been all of five when his aunt Tánti posed naked for her portrait in oil, yet he still remembered how she held her cigarette, how Endre Szabó said he liked how she held it when she smoked. Like she was brandishing the cigarette instead of just holding it, – and he liked that. The pose could not have been more fitting for the proprietor of Budapest’s most fashionable fitting salon.
Tánti smiled and blew smoke out of her nostrils while she continued her narrative about the siege of Budapest. The Russians had come down her street with their khaki tatters and burp guns, hoisting unwieldy posters of József Stalin garlanded with bright red paper streamers, the only color against gray rubble. The soldiers burst into her building and pounded on the cellar do
