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stopped by a house; I realized that a friend of mine resided there
too. I was mumbling and stammering for a while when I
managed to utter that there was a party coming up and I only
wanted to invite my friend too, or what. Luckily, the guy did
not show up and I could meet the beautiful girl again. She was
young, and I became infatuated with her, her age, her smile, her
timidity. We went out to Balatonakali to have dinner the next
day, to an ancient vineyard, the house that was built into the
hillside, from where you could have an enchanting view on
Lake Balaton. Still in springtime there had been a film being
shot in Balatonfüred, they were producing the movie “A veréb
is madár” (1968, translates as “The Sparrow is a Bird too”), in
which I was an extra, together with a friend. We were tasked to
gather boys and girls from the beach and from elsewhere for the
film. This same movie group spent a lot of time in the
aforementioned vineyard house, where there was a restaurant
operating under the table. Two dishes were available: a
complete and a half complete one, in other words, freshly fried
selection of sausages with salads or the half of it respectively.
There was lively gipsy music too: two gipsies played bravely
whatever they could, dressed in torn, white shirts and trousers.
The nights had all their beauty with candlelit tables. When I
went there with Kate in August, everything went by the book,
the gipsies wore new steel-blue suits, together with the usual
torn, white shirts, and everything was a size bigger than
necessary.
Three days after our initial meeting, we hopped into my
car again to gather the beach party from Balatonakarattya and
Balatonkenese. But God decided otherwise. We never found
them. We left Balatonkenese and headed towards Balatonfűzfő,
when all of sudden a Moskvitch (Russian made car) rushed in
from a byway, without even looking around. I sped up to finish
overtaking it, since I could not slow down, but I reached an S-
turn on high speed and another car was coming frontally. A
scream, Kate grabbed my right hand, and it was unavoidable to

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