Hébe-hóba (once in a blue moon), the wealthy American grandchild of a former Jewish villager turns up in the village of Kistúlzás. The wealthy American grandchild walks from house to house. He knocks on front and back doors, on fences, on barn doors. He wonders why nobody is home (not even barn animals are home). He wonders why there are no villagers on the roads, in the yards or in the square. He finds one old villager who will talk to him. He buys the thirsty villager a beer at the kocsma. The wealthy American grandchild explains (in his rudimentary Hungarian) to the thirsty old villager the purpose of his long dreamt-about “pilgrimage” to Kistúlzás. The beer-slaked old villager laughs (in his basic English). The wealthy American grandchild shows the laughing old villager some old photographs. The old villager has hysterics and falls off his beer stool. Suddenly, Kistúlzás is bustling. Villagers surround the surprised wealthy American grandchild. They all want to shake his hand, and they encourage him to feel free to unburden himself of his American dollars to buy them drinks. The old villager scrambles back up on to his feet to enjoy more of his favorite tipple, and the villagers tell old stories, none of which relate to the wealthy American grandchild’s grandparents. The stories are meandering, misleading, and from beginning to end neither here nor there. But the villagers laugh and slap the back of the wealthy American grandchild. They drink to the health of the wealthy American grandchild who has come to Kistúlzás only “to breathe the exotic air of his ancestral home,” and not (“Thank God,” whisper the villagers) to reclaim his family’s furniture and paintings. “Oh yes,” say the oldest villagers, they remember the grandparents of the wealthy American grandchild. They remember “good things,” they say coyly. They don’t remember “exactly” what those good things are, just that they are “only good things,” they say consolingly to the wealthy American grandchild, who is dumbfounded but on the brink of an epiphany (that is, a crucial disappointment). And the villagers recite for the wealthy American grandchild the poem, Italos ének ("Drunken Song"), which the poet, Miklós Radnóti (three-times forced laborer, hewer of modern eclogues, and corpse number 12 at the age of thirty-five), noted should be sung slowly and sadly and whose first line is “Yes indeed, my poor friend, we all die.”