by Imre Kertész
Turning the page:
It’s not been possible to talk to the guys since the university was closed on account of the ructions. I know they’re up to something, though; I know they meet somewhere. I went out to the beach on the Blue Coast. There they were; I knew it. I tried to speak with C., but he laughed it off. He said they had come out to have a swim. They don’t trust me. It’s all because of my father, simply because I’m his son and I happened to be born into his fortune. Excluded from everywhere. How humiliating!
Turning the page:
The idea of suicide surfaces, regular as clockwork, as the evening draws in. That is when it is the most alluring. As the sun goes down, a woman’s seductive power, and like some tropical sap it gets under my skin, softens up my muscles, loosens the innards, draws my head toward my guts, thaws the bones, fills me with a sickly-sweet disgust, to give in to which is a nauseating pleasure. One thing I can direct against it is my uneasy love for my mother.
Then too the lack of means. Father’s revolver: but he keeps that in the safe. I let slip the chance to acquire one of my own; of late it has become fairly difficult. Yet that’s the most advantageous on account of its practicality, its cleanness, and the unutterably simple blast, after which I imagine there would be a profound stillness, then nothing more. Everything else involves work and fuss. Hanging: having to choose a rope and a good place on the ceiling, then tying the noose and trying it out—not to speak of having to kick the chair away from under one! Then the cracking—and here I can’t shrug off the spectacle, the inevitable lack of consideration that I would be showing to those I love. My poor mother! … Or jumping out onto the Grand Boulevard. But then the fall, the time it would take before hitting the ground, the sight of the asphalt rushing up to my eyes with a single jolt, and then the scream! Drugs sicken me.
Of course, living is another way of killing oneself: its drawback is that it takes so horribly long.
Turning the page:
Under certain circumstances suicide is not acceptable. It shows a lack of respect for the wretched, so to say.
Is that so? Something about these lines, I must admit, always brings a prickle to my eyes. Enrique was still young, very young. He had to have a reason for everything, even for living. That type is still a child, not yet a fully grown man. All the same, on account of lines like that I felt it was intolerable that Enrique’s diary should lie moldering in some archive. Even now it is a solace to me that I purchased it.
Turning the page:
I’ve had a bellyful of my life. Break with this inaction, emerge from the stillness! … Yes, muteness is truth; but a truth that is mute, and the ones who speak will be right.
I have to speak. More: to act. To make an attempt at leading a life that I shall try to make worth the trouble of living it.
Turning the page:
The accident yesterday: before my eyes a white automobile slammed into a motorbike rider. The shriek. The female pillion passenger was laid out by the curb. People stood around. Her blood slowly puddled on the roadway.
This morning the lame woman who sells newspapers … She has a daughter, a delightful child, quite clearly the newspaper woman’s only hope in life. She spends more than she can afford on clothing her, showers her with sweets. This morning the little girl ran away from her and came to a stop farther off in the traffic. The mother called, in vain: the girl teased her from afar, thumbing her nose, pulling faces. The lame newspaper woman kept coaxing her: “Come here, my child, there’s a nice girl. Eat your chocolate!” Finally the child sidled up to her. As soon as she was within reach, the newspaper woman grabbed her and started hitting her—with the tenacity of the wretched and the mercilessness of those who have had their hopes made a mockery of.
I am sick of atrocities, though these are now the natural order of our world. And I would still like to act!
Leafing on:
I met R. in the street.
Leafing on:
I had a chat with R. A possible friendship? Odd that at university we hardly noticed each other.
Leafing on:
R. came over. He confessed that at the university he hated me, taking me for a rich and carefree playboy. We had a good laugh. R. is poor. He has been attending university on a scholarship and has to work during the vacations. We then both spoke our minds. He thinks the same way about it all as me, but his bitterness is even more extreme—maybe even a touch too much. But then that is understandable, as he is making a bigger sacrifice to study, and now everything seems to be in vain. He admitted that he is very scared. He is constantly haunted by that feeling, yet he is ready for anything. It’s curious: I’m not afraid, yet I am cautious all the same. He says he must do something: true, it may not free him from his fear, but it would tie him to something for good. I asked him if he was planning anything, or maybe was already working for certain somebodies. (The stupid expressions that one finds oneself getting into!) He did not give a definite answer but smiled ambiguously. He too does not trust me. It rankled me.
R. was not much to Mother’s liking, incidentally. I asked her why. “He has strange eyes,” she said. What kind of reason is that! I had a good laugh and kissed her.
Leafing on:
R. came by. I told him that I might possibly be game to take part in something that made sense. He promised nothing. All the same, I somehow felt relieved to have finally broken my oppressive silence and caution. Now at least someone knows about me: I am no longer so much on my own. I must win his confidence. I am sure he is up to something.
I shall stop for now. I’m closing the diary. I’m sitting and musing—musing about Enrique, that child who was so thirsty for life, action, friendship, and love.
And I’m musing about R., in whom he sensed an unexpected possibility of friendship.
By then we were already well acquainted with R. He was Ramón; Maria’s remark precluded any other possibility. It was Ramón, yes: Ramón G., also known as Steeleyes.
How should I characterize him? Imagine, if you will, a leech, but a leech that is capable of ardor—and there you have Ramón. He was always sucking someone’s blood, tenaciously, persistently, devotedly. He had a special talent for making people talk. Damned if I know how he did it. But anyone he sank his sucker into started speaking almost immediately, as if some kind of serum had been inoculated into their body, along with his saliva. Guys like him seem to have one ploy: they somehow manage to arouse a person’s interest—then they immediately clam up. From then on they just keep quiet. Oh, and they always have time, of course. Those types look like lost souls who can be saved only by the victims, with their small talk and their advice, often with their money and, sometimes, their body. In regard to the latter, as far as Ramón was concerned it was just about the same to him whether it was a woman or a man. Indeed, he had a particular partiality for both at once, though it would be wrong to say that he insisted on that at any price. Ramón was modest and always had a feel for opportunities. When he had got his fill of someone’s blood, he would detach himself from that person and attach himself to another. At these times, however, he would recall the savor of all his previous prey, and the new victim would nearly always be delighted to learn that Ramón’s circle of acquaintances—which in each and every case would partly overlap with theirs—consisted of cretins, moral deadbeats, or contemptible lowlifes. Then the victims would gush words to present the opposite picture of themselves. Ramón would keep quiet. He encouraged them with his silence, egged them on with his understanding, tickled them with his humility or his admiration, set them on a pedestal above himself through his own abasement. And he would observe this victim, fixing his stern, totally reflective, lifeless, and slightly crazed eyes with greedy attentiveness on his victim, while his mind meanwhile was already working on the next.
Ramón was a good-looking young man, tall, gaunt, with dark hair, who looked good in the casual sportswear in which he was usually clothed.
It was just his eyes that Maria found strange. The Cor
ps’ narcotics experts would have conferred on them a more accurate term. At the time, that sort of thing was taken seriously—the Homeland’s moral subsistence rested on the Corps’ conscience. The Colonel placed great stress on that, wanting to see a clean people and clean souls. This was among the exceptional pronouncements that he would utter, with exactly the same emphasis, both in parliament and in the Corps’ premises. So on a few occasions we cracked down here and there. The price of drugs would go up. Ramón right then was left without a supply, and his eyes were even duller, even more steely-gray and vacant as a result. All he was left with were slander, fear, clearsightedness, and resentment.
Everything Ramón told Enrique was true. He had won a scholarship, he did have to work in his vacations, he was poor. By the way, he was not poor because his parents were poor: he had run away from home when he was seventeen. The devil knows how he managed not to acquire a criminal record, but we still knew about the things that were of interest to us. He ran off with Max, a well-known homosexual, who when filling out a form, in the space for occupation would write “philosopher.” Ramón then split up with Max and bummed around. He joined a commune that produced craft goods: they wove and sewed, a mix of men and women—in the nude. I’ll be damned if I know what the fun is in that. He left the commune and took up with a girl. He left the girl and took up with a woman who was ten years older. He left her … I won’t continue. A restless spirit was Ramón, as you can see. He was looking for solid ground under his feet because he was afraid, afraid of himself and everybody else. He was afraid of society because—so he says—he is familiar with its murderous laws. And he was afraid of the police above all; he feared and loathed them. But if you want my opinion, Ramón simply needed fear, God knows why. Don’t look to me for explanations; I know nothing about what makes the mind tick. I’m just a flatfoot, that’s the profession I trained for. What I can say, though, is that a guy like him was not exactly a big deal for us. We have more than enough of his type. They fear in order to be able to loosen up suddenly. They view everybody and everything as sordid so as to become sordid themselves. Apart from that, each of them individually is different.
Meanwhile this Ramón was attending the university. People there suspected almost nothing. He passed his examinations with flying colors. His knowledge earned him respect. His manner deceived his professors; he listened to them, and they talked to him. It was just his eyes … but then I have already touched on that. So, add it all up—that’s what kind of person Ramón was.
He fell into our hands by pure chance. That is to say, it was pure chance that he fell into our hands right then. It could easily have been any other time, but I have no doubt that sooner or later, whatever happened, he was going to fall into our hands. In this case, the occasion was offered by what Enrique’s diary refers to as “the ructions at the university.”
As ructions go, these ones were not such a big deal. We hauled in a few kids, but no one paid much attention. It was soon after Victory Day, and every prison and holding cell was packed, the detainees were crammed together in corridors like sardines. We were not given much time to clarify the workings of university democracy. A smack or two here and there, and Diaz would summarily release the bulk of them. His eye alighted on Ramón, however, and he had him stand up in the corridor, forehead and palms of the hands to the wall, as you’re supposed to do.
The day before we had worked through the night; I was fed up with the kids by then.
“What do you want from him?” I asked Diaz.
“I don’t know,” he replied. Diaz was indefatigable, and he had an infallible eye. We knew nothing about Ramón, except that he had no priors, which we learned over the telephone. Otherwise, nothing. It was still the early days, the Victory was still fresh, the records were as yet deficient. Tracking down an identity would take days. Diaz was in a hurry. We had things to do.
So he called him in from the corridor and sat him down. He fired a few questions at him, purely at random. Ramón held his ground well, but Diaz knew how to ask questions. About a quarter of an hour later Ramón started yelling. He couldn’t bear the tension any longer. When he told Enrique that he had to do something that would tie him to something for good, he hadn’t been lying. He was lucky that an eye had happened to spot this about him. And Diaz loved helping those in need.
As I say, Ramón started yelling. He dumped all his hatred on our heads. It was like someone throwing up. He called us character assassins, spinning nets to catch the innocent. Butchers, murderers, hangmen, and so on. Diaz listened with bowed head, elbows on the desk, hands covering his face. He was taking a breather. Then all of a sudden Ramón fell silent. Stillness descended, a long stillness. Diaz then got ponderously to his feet. He slowly made his way around, then popped one buttock on the front of the desk. His preferred position. He sat like that for a while, facing Ramón, then suddenly leaned forward. He didn’t overstrain himself, and took care not to leave any lasting marks. Rodriguez followed suit. Me being the new boy, I took down a record of the interrogation.
After that it wasn’t necessary to say a lot. Ramón took his seat again, and Diaz asked if he smoked. He did. Diaz offered him his cigar case. Rodriguez asked if he was thirsty. He was. Rodriguez set a glass before him and took the orange juice from the refrigerator. (We drank that deuced orange juice all day long on, amid all that diabolical work and heat.)
Diaz then briefly outlined what Ramón had to do, at what intervals, and through whom, and he explained in what form he was to make his reports.
It was from him that we first heard the name of Enrique Salinas.
I have to admit that up to this point I have skipped over some pages of Enrique’s diary. That was not a good idea. They tell an important strand in the story line leading to the fateful auto drive, so it was not clever of me to omit them.
Nor was it fair. But I am seeking to be fair: when better than now for me to be honest. Fair to Enrique, first and foremost, but also fair to Estella and to myself as well.
Let me leaf back through the pages, back almost to the beginning of Enrique’s diary.
That a mouth could have the shape (and movements) of a flower (a flower in a breeze) is quite incredible. And yet there is such a mouth.
I leaf further on: an empty page with just two letters on it:
E.J.
Estella Jill, or simply Jill. He preferred to use her second, English name. She was American on her mother’s side. Turning the page:
J. Like someone in whom the sun shines inside. I sunbathed the whole afternoon.
Yes, that too is Enrique’s voice. Suicidal thoughts, confused street scenes, self-encouragement, hatred, and love. And all of it side by side, knotted together, jumbled up. Enrique was an adolescent, a child.
I’m turning the pages. I leaf quite a bit further on, and then quite out of the blue:
How did it happen? I don’t know. All of a sudden I was holding her in my arms. I locked the door. I leaned over her, sank my mouth between her lips. We lay on the couch’s thick, Indian-weave blanket. We were naked and snuggled up to each other. I sensed that she desired me. Then a dreadful, stupid, and inexplicable thing happened. I have to write it down. The only way I shall shake it off is by writing it down. Yet even now I am overwhelmed by the hideous and, at the same time, ludicrous ordeal of those long, long minutes.
Out with it! In short, I couldn’t respond to her desire—me, who had been waiting for this very moment for weeks! I just lay beside her, impotent. She embraced me. I could feel her trembling. Then the trembling passed. She just caressed me with a now cool hand, like a nursery schoolteacher. I didn’t dare look at her. Then she spoke. She said she was grateful to me. I could have taken her, made her my own, but it was her I wanted, not the opportunity and chance. She would never forget that, she said. She snuggled up contentedly—her body was cool by then—and kissed me, on both eyes and my brow. Then she got up and started to dress, meanwhile looking at me all the time and smiling. I reached out for her.
She sat down beside me, at the edge of the couch. Now it was she who leaned over me. She started to caress me. Such a light and soft touch! She stroked me until … Then she again discarded her underwear. Very slowly and deliberately, meanwhile looking at me and smiling. I almost lost my senses! Finally, she lay down beside me. And then …
