by Imre Kertész
I laid Ilse Koch’s photograph aside. I shall never know what she herself thought about her own life as ‘Kommandeuse.’ Since she kept silent about it, she barred herself from interpretability. I shall not become acquainted with her mundane experiences and grey everydays among the bondsmen of murder. I shall be unable to discover whether it was libido or boredom, fulfilled ambition or irksome minor frustrations which preponderated in her emotional balance, unable to unravel her wholly personal neurosis, her compulsive psychosis—in a word, the secret of her personality. I can view her as a humdrum sadist who found a home for herself in Buchenwald and was at last able to give free run to her repellent instincts. Or, if I want, I can also imagine her to have been a more complex being: perhaps she only tried to order her unexpected and incomprehensible state of affairs with even more unexpected and incomprehensible gestures simply to make it cosier, more habitable for herself, and see the proof, day by day, of how it is possible to live the unliveable, how natural the incredible …
None of this is a bit important. Ilse Koch fits a mean that can be extracted between her and her state of affairs, a formula in which she herself is not necessarily present. Yes, her character is only interpretable if we abstract her, look at her separately, so to say, from herself. The greater we imagine her significance, the more we downgrade what surrounded her: the reality of a world equipped for murder, because the essence that we would be attributing to her could only be abstracted by taking it from that reality.
Perhaps it is this, I speculated, this lack of essentiality, which is the tragedy. Except that, from another angle, this dashes to pieces any attempt at interpretation which insists on imposing figures. Because tragic figures live in a world of fate, and tragedy’s perspective is infinity; the world of violence of totalitarian systems, by contrast, is a circumscribed and insuperable world, whereas their perspective is merely the historical time for which they happen to endure. How, then, could one hope to interpret an experience that cannot, and does not even wish to, transmute precisely as experience because the essence of their states of affairs—states of affairs that are at once all too abstract and all too concrete—is an inessential and at any time exchangeable figure which, in relation to the state of affairs, has no beginning, no continuation, and no analogy of any kind—and in relation to reason is thus improbable? Perhaps, I mused, one should construct a device, a revolving machine, a trap; the characters who fall into its grasp would scurry about ceaselessly, just like electronic mice, on tracks that look labyrinthine but are actually always unidirectional, pursued by a single automaton. Everything would be wobbling, rattling, everyone trampling on one another, until the machine suddenly explodes; then, after a pause for startled, dazed astonishment, they would all scatter in every direction. That still leaves the secret, figuring out the principle on which the machine operates, which is both too simple and too humiliating for them to listen to, and that is the mechanism for the pursuing automaton utilizes the energy derived from their own rushing about …
But I had better break off here before my pen runs away with me, as they say. Why am I poking around, anyway, in those exercise books which I put aside long ago, that impressive-looking pile of dog-eared notes? Why am I copying out the outline of this never-to-be-completed essay? As a symptom, a characterisation of my state at the time. I had just then started to think these things over, but to publicize the mere fact that I was thinking had never even crossed my mind until then. Obviously, I had written my novel out of some sort of conviction, but not with any aim of convincing anyone about anything. I had written my comedies without any conviction at all, yet was paid money for them. But now a theoretical work: to pore over things, to form an opinion with knowing superiority and self-confidently step forward with that opinion—to do that I also had to possess the added conviction needed to convince others. And so I have to suppose that after finishing my novel some sort of change has taken place within me, or at least the proclivity for such a change was present within me.
Yes, carefully disguising my goal, bit by bit, cunningly and surreptitiously, I set about making definitive preparations for a delusion. I can discern a motive for it, in the end, if I think about it. Plainly, I wanted to forge some necessary consequence from a now irremediable act—the writing of a novel—that had swallowed up irreplaceable years of life, but meanwhile I had quite overlooked the possibility that my very uncertainties might have brought the novel itself into existence through me. I have the feeling I was almost beginning, at least secretly, to consider my destiny as a writer’s destiny; even if I did not overtly reckon with it, I was almost beginning to invest my thoughts with some kind of property which sustained an unconditional need for their communication by me and for their reception by others.
Who could know where all this would have led. During that period I may have felt myself ready to regard my future life as an inexhaustible source of ideas for public display; to set down the fruits of my reflections straightaway onto paper; to call on editorial offices and publishing houses with duplicate copies of this triumphant act; and to watch out for signs on people’s faces, or even in their lifestyle, of changes wrought by the influence of those ideas. Amidst a deafening fanfare of portentous pronouncements, authoritative views, and unappealable opinions, I too would have blown on my own toy trumpet. Once released on the mirror-smooth surface of paper, my hand would have glided at breakneck speed on the skate-blade of my ballpoint pen. I would have written as if I were seeking to avert a catastrophe—the catastrophe of not writing, obviously. In other words, I would have written for fear that, God forbid, I wouldn’t write; I would have written so as to kill every minute of time and to forget who I am: an end-product of determinacies, a maroon of contingencies, a martyr to bioelectronics, a reluctant surprised party to my own character.
The old boy was sitting in front of the filing cabinet and doing nothing.
He was not thinking.
He was not even reading.
“It was stupid of me to get those papers out,” he eventually thought to himself.
… In this respect, and in just this one respect, the letter I received two days after the last visit I had paid to the publisher chap arrived at a fortunate moment.
“Aha!” the old boy exclaimed, picking up the ordinary, neat business letter (with the firm’s letterhead and fields for date—27/JUL/1973, correspondent—unfilled, subject—unspecified, reference number—482/73, no greeting) that he had already once picked up and scanned cursorily, but which we too, bending over his shoulder, as it were, may now read in full:
Your manuscript has been assessed by our firm’s readers. On the basis of their unanimous opinion we are unable to undertake publication of your novel.
We consider that your way of giving artistic expression to the material of your experiences does not come off, whereas the subject itself is horrific and shocking. The fact that it nevertheless fails to become a shattering experience for the reader hinges primarily to the main protagonist’s, to put it mildly, odd reactions. While we find it understandable that the adolescent main protagonist does not immediately grasp what is happening around him (the call-up for forced labour, compulsory wearing of the yellow star, etc.), we think it inexplicable why, on arrival at the concentration camp, he sees the bald-shaven prisoners as “suspect.” More passages in bad taste follow: “Their faces did not exactly inspire confidence either: jug ears, prominent noses, sunken, beady eyes with a crafty gleam. Quite like Jews in every respect.”
It is also incredible that the spectacle of the crematoria arouses in him feelings of “a sense of a certain joke, a kind of student jape,” as he knows he is in an extermination camp and his being a Jew is sufficient reason for him to be killed. His behaviour, his gauche comments repel and offend the reader, who can only be annoyed on reading the novel’s ending, since the behaviour the main protagonist has displayed hitherto, his lack of compassion, gives him no ground to dispense moral judgements, call others to account (e.g. the reproaches
he makes to the Jewish family living in the same building). We must also say something about the style. For the most part your sentences are clumsy, couched in a tortuous form, and sadly there are all too many phrases like “… on the whole …,” “naturally enough,” and “besides which …”
We are therefore returning the manuscript to you.
Regards.
… The letter at least granted me a morning charged with emotions; I recall it even today with a certain sense of nostalgia. If I was surprised, it was no more than the way a person is surprised to bang his head on a protrusion in the wall he had long ago noticed was too low, and he would undoubtedly bang his head on it sooner or later. At least I would encounter a certain amount of passion and perspicacity, albeit only the perspicacity of anger and injustice—at any rate sentiments and senses worthy of the subject!
Then, as I recall, I was exceedingly amused, for instance, by the gesture, that self-assured, firm dismissive wave of the hand, with which the purpose of an endeavour I had undertaken, for motives which were problematic, and far from clear even to myself, was being expropriated, so to speak, only to be immediately destroyed; because the letter presumed, if I was following it correctly, that my sole reason for writing the novel was for it to end up in a publisher’s office where decisions are taken about these sorts of commodities. The comic aspect of this absurd loss of proportions was enough to set even my diaphragm aquiver. For I could not deny it, in the end I had taken my novel to the publisher. But that had been intended purely as a temporary resting place in a whole chain of events, which since then had already been overhauled by time and further events occurring within that time—such as this letter that had been delivered to me. “And so?” I ask myself, “Does that somehow obliterate what I have accomplished?” On the contrary, it has set a seal on it, because—and this fundamental factor had not escaped my watchful eye—that dismissive motion is, at one and the same time, also the first real, one might say, authentic proof that my novel actually exists. Yes, I may have told myself, the unstructured time which now lies behind me has gained its definite outlines precisely in the light of this letter; until now I have never seen my situation so simply—as one that, in point of fact, can be summarized in a single clear sentence: I had written a novel, and it had been rejected, presumably through ignorance and lack of courage, as well as evident spite and stupidity.
It may be—indeed, as I now know, it is quite certain—that I made a mistake when I left …
“Was that the doorbell?”
The old boy loosened the pliable wax plug in one ear.
“I already rang once before!” the old boy’s mother complained indignantly as she traversed the east-west axis of the hallway with brisk (and somehow martial) steps which belied her advanced age and, after swerving to avoid the hammered-glass door (which was now, as always, open, in view of the airlessness of the hallway), popped up in front of the filing cabinet (with due regard, naturally, to the previously described surroundings) (which it would therefore be superfluous to describe again here) (so let us merely make it clear that when we say the old boy’s mother popped up in front of the filing cabinet, this should be taken to mean that although she was, indeed, facing the filing cabinet, she actually popped up in front of the table—or, to be more precise, the table, the only real table in the flat) and (exchanging her street glasses for her reading glasses in a lightning-quick movement) was reading.
The old boy didn’t like it when other people started dipping into his manuscripts.
“I don’t like it,” he said, “when other people start dipping into my manuscripts.”
“Why?” the old boy’s mother asked. “Are they secret?”
“Well as a matter of fact …” the old boy scratched his head.
“I can see you are busy again with your private affairs,” his mother declared.
“Yes,” the old boy conceded.
“Did they reject your novel?” his mother enquired, no doubt more out of stringency than malice.
“I haven’t even written it yet,” the old boy muttered.
“But I see here that you wrote a novel and they rejected it!”
“That was another novel. Wouldn’t you be more comfortable in an armchair?” the old boy ventured.
“And what’s this?” The old boy’s mother picked up from the edge of the grey file the likewise grey (albeit a darker grey) lump of stone that served as a paperweight, so to speak.
“It’s a lump of stone,” said the old boy.
“Even I can see that; I’m not senile yet, thank God. But what do you need it for?”
“I don’t exactly need it, if it comes to that,” the old boy muttered.
“Well then, what’s it for?”
“I don’t know,” said the old boy, “It just is.”
The old boy’s mother was seated in the armchair situated to the north of the tile stove, behind the 1st-class special ply contraption of 1st-class sawn hardwood (child’s mini-table) (which in regard to its actual function was more a kind of tiny smoker’s table):
“There are some things,” she said, “I could never understand with you.”
“Would you like a coffee?” the old boy ventured.
“Yes, I would. For instance,” his mother swept a glance around the room, from the bookcase-filing-cabinet centaur (if such a catachresis may be entertained) standing in the southwest corner, which had been created from a bookcase assembled from the base of a former linen drawer, across to the (relatively) modern sofa occupying the northeast corner, “you are capable of giving up every demand you have just to avoid having to work.”
“But I do work,” the old boy remonstrated (though not with an entirely clear conscience) (since he should have sat down long ago to writing a book now his had become his occupation) (or rather, to be more precise, things had so transpired that that had become his occupation) (seeing as he had no other occupation).
“That’s not what I mean,” said his mother, “But why don’t you find yourself a proper job? You could still easily go on with the writing.”
“But I’m no good at anything; you forgot to get me trained in some well-paid profession.”
“You always were the comedian,” his mother said.
“There was a time when that’s what I lived off,” the old boy reminded her.
“Why don’t you still write comedy pieces now instead?” his mother asked
“Because I don’t want people to laugh. It makes me envious.”
“That rubber seal needs to be changed,” the old boy thought to himself as he was percolating the coffee.
“Aren’t you going to ask why I came?” his mother asked.
Indeed, the old boy’s mother was not in the habit of calling at his place; rather it was he who was in the habit of visiting her (more specifically, once a week, between seven o’clock and half past nine on Sunday evenings) (the weekly intervals being complemented by daily telephone conversations during which the old boy was able to keep abreast of his mother’s state of health as well as the) (important or not so important) (but in any case significant) (events which had happened to her) (as well as to her personal belongings or household objects) (which current events gained significance precisely because it was to her) (or her personal belongings or household objects) (such as water heater, wall hangings, kitchen tap, etc.) (that they happened).
“Well, anyway,” the old boy’s mother continued, “I finally got a serious response to my advertisement.”
The old boy’s mother had, in fact—as may be gathered from this announcement—placed an advertisement in the newspaper.
Through the advertisement she had dangled the prospect of a room (a big room, however, in the green belt and with all mod cons) in exchange for an undertaking to look after her.
For the old boy’s mother had to make ends meet (or rather, to be more accurate about it, she was unable to make ends meet) from her pension.
To supplement her pension, the elderly lady did shorth
and and typewriting for four hours a day at the head office of an export company.
But now, with the passage of time, not only the old boy but also his mother was getting old (albeit more slowly, to a lesser degree, and more reluctantly, than the old boy) (although she had been forced to acknowledge its symptoms nevertheless) (such as the backache she got while typing) (on account of which she had given it up—the typewriting, that is to say).
Nevertheless, the hard fact of the matter—namely that the old boy’s mother needed to find an extra two thousand forints a month (to supplement her pension)—remained unchanged.
And the old boy did not have two thousand forints a month extra (indeed, there were times when he was that much short).
Which was why, through an advertisement, and in exchange for an undertaking to look after her, she had dangled the prospect of a room (a big room, however, in the green belt with all mod cons) (which is to say the apartment where the old boy was registered, by right of being an immediate family member, as a permanent resident, though he never lived there, not even temporarily) (and from which he would now have to transfer to the apartment where he had been temporarily registered, by right of marriage, even though he had been permanently resident there for decades) (thereby yielding place to a caregiver who, by right of being the caregiver, would be permanently registered but, on the basis of the agreement, would not reside even temporarily in the old boy’s mother’s apartment) (patiently waiting in his or her present place of residence, which presumably did not meet his or her requirements, for the ultimately inevitable fact that the old lady, for all the hopes she would carry on to the extreme limit of human life …) (in short, on being left vacant as a consequence of this ultimately inevitable event, the apartment would pass on to him or her) (which for both of them, caregiver and cared-for alike) (after careful weighing up of the expected costs and the number of years that might come into consideration) (and bearing in mind the end-result, might yet prove, on human reckonings, to be a rational and mutually profitable business transaction).
