by Imre Kertész
“So you will have to arrange to be deregistered,” his mother said.
“Fine,” said the old boy.
“As soon as possible; not the way you generally arrange your affairs,” his mother added.
“Fine,” said the old boy.
“You surely can’t be expecting me to do without in my old age.”
“God forbid,” the old boy said.
“It’s not my fault,” his mother carried on, “You ought to have ordered your life differently.”
“No question about it,” the old boy acknowledged.
“I wanted to leave the apartment to you.”
“Don’t worry about it, Mama,” said the old boy. “Was the coffee all right?”
“Your coffee is always too strong for me.”
“Well, that’s my day gone already,” the old boy thought to himself after his mother had left.
“I ought to change that rubber seal on the coffee percolator,” he continued his train of thought.
“But where the hell are the seals?” he then puzzled (not finding them in their usual place) (that is, the place he imagined to be the usual place for the seals).
Thus it was that the old boy came to be standing in front of the filing cabinet and holding in his hands a flat, square-shaped piece of wood.
This chunk of wood, about 3 × 3 in. in size, rough on one side and on the other covered with a layer from multiple daubings of white paint (which had yellowed over time), had come to light from one of the old boy’s two cardboard boxes in which he kept a miscellany of objects (both necessary and unnecessary), among which, or so he imagined, he might chance upon the rubber seals needed for the coffee percolator.
Instead of them, however, he came across the remaining original piece of one of the two ungainly, disparately-sized wardrobes which had once stood there, long defying the steadfast antipathy of the old boy’s wife (and noteworthy for the wax seal that was visible on it) (though the inscription on the wax seal had been rendered almost illegible by the yellowish-white layer of paint from repeated decoration).
“So much for their saying care would be taken to spare the wax seal,” he fumed (mentally).
For which reason, at this point in our story—as the old boy was standing in front of the filing cabinet and holding in his hands a piece of wood (noteworthy for the wax seal which was visible on it)—out of the group of letters arranged in a circle only the fragments SE, ST, and, in front of that, a dot-shaped nubble, as well as—further on, with a bit of imagination—TY could be made out from the original inscription (SEALED BY • STATE SECURITY AUTHORITY), the purpose of which inscription, as its sense suggests, was to keep the doors of the hallway wardrobe under seal (not, however, ruling out the possibility that the plywood sheet which formed the back of the hallway wardrobe might be prised open) (which, incidentally, is what happened) (because, whatever the subsequent, by then patently obvious evidence, what else would have explained the fact that when, one summery evening, the old boy’s wife) (at a time when she was not yet the old boy’s wife) (and the old boy was not yet old) (indeed, they had not yet met each other) (anyway, on that summery evening the old boy’s wife-to-be had tried fruitlessly to open the door to her own apartment with her own key and thus, since she saw a light on inside, was reduced to ringing the doorbell) (what else would have explained the fact that the unknown, short, stocky, somewhat piggish-looking woman who opened the door to the ringing was wearing a dressing gown, shortened and altered to fit her own figure, which belonged to her, the old boy’s wife-to-be—a fact which did not escape the old boy’s wife-to-be even in the brief minute while she introduced herself to the unknown woman, who then, after an indignant exclamation) (“What’s this?! You’re still alive?!”) (immediately slammed the door in her face) (in consequence of which, there being nothing else she could do, the old boy’s wife) (who at that time was not yet the old boy’s wife) (and as far as meeting him goes first met him only somewhat later) (faced with the unappealing prospect of spending a summer’s night on the street) (and an even more uncertain tomorrow) (before long returned to the place whence she had set off for her apartment) (that is to say, the State Security Authority) (where she was obliged to ask the officer who had released her earlier, accompanied by the official paper, to provide her with accommodation for the night—if nowhere else, then in her old cell, where the old plank-bed and blanket were certainly still waiting) (a request that it turned out to be impossible to fulfil now that she had been released, accompanied by the official paper) (so that the officer had only been able to offer the leather couch in the corner of his room, while he himself went off duty for the whole night, accompanied by the official papers, and in the morning) (worn out, dehydrated, gaunt, and nicotine-stained from his whole night off-duty) (like one of the countless cigarette butts which had overflowed his ashtray in the course of off-duty nights) (set off with her to the housing office of the competent local authority in order to discover how they could have allocated an apartment that the State Security Authority had sealed off) (a matter that in itself was to be treated as a state secret) (consequently there were grounds for suspecting that behind not just the procedural irregularity, but also the very leaking of the address there no doubt lay a criminal act of bribery) (though in the end no light was ever thrown on that) (and only after a year of litigation was the apartment itself restored to the rightful ownership of the old boy’s wife) (whom we may now refer to as the old boy’s wife without reservation) (even if the old boy was not at all old at the time) (and his wife was not yet his wife) (but by then they at least knew each other) (indeed, they were sharing a household) (insofar as their joint household could be called a household, that is).
This, then, was the reason why even today, at this late point in our story, the old boy was fuming that—contrary to all the advance warnings he had given—care had not been taken to spare the wax seal (which the piece of wood in his hands preserved).
“After all, a memento is a memento,” he continued to fume.
“And this piece of wood is the only thing that’s left of it all,” he carried on fuming.
“It was rather embarrassing,” his face suddenly brightened (as if touched by some memory) (a memory which was evidently bound to the humorous) (yet rather embarrassing) (though the two are by no means mutually exclusive) (indeed their simultaneous presence is the spice of all genuinely funny episodes) (assuming one is capable of valuing the funny side of a rather embarrassing episode) (as when it turns out, for instance, that one actually has no objective proof of any kind for an event that one has held to be so decisive in one’s life, and thus it exists purely in one’s unverifiable memories) (so in short, the brightening of the old boy’s face was evidently bound up with this episode which was simultaneously humorous and rather embarrassing).
For in point of fact, years later—and now years (many years) before the present moment—the idea had struck the old boy that his wife should in any event (and here the word should be understood in the strict sense, which is to say an event that may be pure supposition, but it does no harm to be prepared for it) (if it holds logical water to be prepared for something we haven’t the faintest idea about), so in any event should apply to get her name cleared (as is only right and proper) (if we do not wish that the mere fact of our having been punished is to be held against us as a crime that we have committed).
They were visited by a detective.
He introduced himself.
He sat down (not in one of the armchairs placed to the north and west of the tile stove) (since those armchairs did not yet exist at that time) (but presumably in the rush-bottomed chair, the rush strands of which were severed at the wooden frame, which, along with two backless seats with similarly severed rush bottoms and a stripped-wood colonial table, two sofas) (one of them padded out with books at its centre, where the spring had gone) (and two blankets, as carpeting on the floor, constituted the apartment’s furnishings at that time).
He asked to
see the release paper.
This was when the abovementioned simultaneously humorous and rather embarrassing episode ensued, which was characterized by the helpless glances of the old boy (who was not yet old at that time) and his wife, a hasty pulling out of drawers, an agitated rummaging under bed linen until it was discovered that the sole authentic proof of release (and above all the committal to detention which had preceded it)—namely, the release paper—had, every sign indicated, been mislaid in one subtenancy or another (or perhaps along one of the routes from one subtenancy to another).
No problem, said the detective (a burly but kindly chap in a raincoat), he would look into the matter and track down the files.
A few days later he (the burly but kindly chap in the raincoat) duly turned up: he had found the files.
He sat down.
He was troubled.
“Madam,” he said, “it looks like you were innocent.”
“Of course,” the (as yet not old) old boy’s wife agreed.
“There isn’t even a record of any interrogation,” the detective continued, “only of regular extensions of the period on remand. They never laid charges against you.”
“No,” the (as yet not old) old boy’s wife agreed.
“Not even, if I may put it this way … well, not even false charges.”
“No.”
“To say nothing of any sentencing.”
“No.”
“But that’s where we have a problem, madam,” fretted the detective (a burly but kindly chap in a raincoat). “Because … how can I put it?… We can only clear someone’s name if a trial, sentencing or at least a preferment of charges has taken place. But in your case … please try to understand what I am saying … in your files there is no trace of any of that, you aren’t suffering any consequences, you don’t carry a criminal record … in other words, there is simply nothing to be cleared.”
“And what about that one year?” the (as yet not old) old boy’s wife asked.
The detective spread his arms and lowered his gaze: it was evident that he took the issue as a matter of conscience.
He sat for a short while longer on the rush-bottomed chair with the rush strands severed at the wooden frame.
“We had trouble consoling him,” the old boy cheered up (mentally) at the memory.
… 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 the assessment at that. I should have pushed on further to a final conclusion which brooked no going back. If I had grasped and embraced the role inherent in the situation, I would never have got to where I am today. For a writer there is no more ornate crown than the blindness that his age displays toward him; and it carries yet one more gem if that blindness is coupled with being silenced. But then, although I had written a novel, and meanwhile would have been unable to entertain the idea of my having any other occupation, in reality I never thought of it as my occupation. Even though that novel was a greater necessity for me than anything else, I never succeeded in persuading myself that I was necessary. It seems I am incapable of going beyond the bounds of my nature, and my nature is temperate, like the climatic zone I inhabit. My feelings recoiled from the precarious glory of failure. All the more because that place was already occupied by something else, a feeling which proved a good deal more determined than any enthusiasm of a purely abstract kind: the guilt I felt when I also showed the letter to my wife.
“Perhaps that bit ought not …” the old boy winced.
… This shift was so unexpected that even I was surprised. I couldn’t decide where it came from. Did I have a guilty conscience because my novel had been rejected, or because I had written a novel in the first place? In other words, to be more precise, would I still have had a guilty conscience if the publisher had happened to inform me that my novel had been accepted? I don’t know, and now I never shall find out; but I was taken aback that subversive processes were under way in some deep recess of my brain, as if battle positions were being drawn up behind which ramifying arguments were being concentrated in order to swing onto the attack at a designated point in time. But my wife, with wordless self-control … I know that little, silent smile of hers … No whisper of an assuaging reproach that … I felt the importance of every novel and publisher in the world, as well as my own self-justification, fading away. I was deeply offended; dinner was consumed sullenly.
It could be that already then I suspected what I had lost. Now, with the benefit of a wider perspective, I can measure more precisely not just how right I was, but my comfort too. As I say, it all depended on whether I would grasp or repudiate the role inherent in the state of affairs. To repudiate it would have been at once to repudiate destiny by opening the door to time and ceaseless wonderment. While my destiny was with me—which is to say, while I was writing my novel—I had no experience of these kinds of concerns. Anyone living under the spell of destiny is liberated from time. Time still marches on, of course, but its duration is irrelevant: its purpose is solely to accomplish that destiny. One is not left with much chance: all that’s needed is to know how to be ruined and to wait. And I knew. Once I had received the letter, it should just have become even easier for me: my time was up—if you like, there was nothing further for me to do. Destiny—since that’s its nature—would have robbed me of any future which was definitive and thus could be contemplated. It would have bogged me down in the moment, dipped me in failure as in a cauldron of pitch: whether I would be cooked in it or petrified hardly matters. I was not circumspect enough, however. All that happened was that an idea was shattered; that idea—myself as a product of my creative imagination, if I may put it that way—no longer exists, that’s all there is to it.
Yet that is not the way I had planned it. Oh, the plan was simplicity itself; I saw nothing irrational in it. If I have now regained my freedom, I want to pass judgement on my novel myself, to decide its true quality, good or bad—that was what I thought. The exercise seemed practicable enough. The next morning, when my wife had set off for work, I took out the press-stud file and set it down in front of me then, brimming with cheerfully disposed and somewhat ceremonial expectations, I opened the cover to read my novel. After about an hour and a half of resolute struggling, I had to admit that I had taken on an impossible task. To start with, I was pleased at each well-fashioned sentence, each apt epithet. But all too soon I caught my attention wandering, and my having to leaf back incessantly because my eyes were just grinding through pages that were divested of sense, devalued into emptiness. I reproved myself, tried to concentrate, but perversely I relaxed, made myself a coffee, took a break. Nothing helped; I was overcome by irresistible bouts of yawning. I had to admit that I was bored: at every line I knew what would follow on the next; I could anticipate every twist, knew in advance every paragraph, every sentence, indeed every word, while the train of thought offered nothing new for me, nothing surprising. One can’t read a novel that way.
Since then I have racked my brains a lot over this phenomenon. I fell into a trap, there is no question. In order to make an objective judgement, I would have needed to see with a stranger’s eyes, so I tried reading it with someone else’s eyes—without even a thought that this other, imagined scrutiny was just my own. I tried cheating, but it didn’t work. It seems I am unable to trick myself into soberly examining, with adequate detachment, the shadow that I cast on the reaches beyond me. Which means I shall never know whether my novel is good or bad. Fine, I can live with that. In truth, I came to realize, it doesn’t even matter to me. The novel is the way it is, and it’s that way because it could be no other way—that much, at least, I had understood while I was reading: it is the way it is, and in that capacity is a finished and ready article that I am unable, and probably it is not even possible,
to alter any more.
The big stumbling block, though, is why is that article no longer mine? To put it another way, if I am incapable of looking at it with a stranger’s eyes, why am I unable to read my own novel with my own eyes? Within the novel, for instance, a train is moving toward Auschwitz. Crouched in one of the wagons is the subject of the story, a boy of fourteen and a half. He gets up and in the crush squeezes a place for himself by a window slit. Just at this moment the summer sun climbs red and balefully into the periphery of his field of view. While I was reading, I recalled precisely how much difficulty and racking of brains both this as well as the passage which follows it had caused me. Somehow the events of that sweltering summer morning just would not unfold under my hand onto the paper. It was abnormally gloomy here inside, in the room, as I toiled over the text; from the table I looked out on a foggy December morning. There must have been some traffic disturbance on the roads, as the trams were constantly rattling by beneath my window. Then all at once, with astonishing suddenness, the sentences fell into place and enabled the train to arrive and the subject of the story—the fourteen-and-a-half-year-old boy—finally to leap out of the stifling gloom of the cattle truck onto the blazing hot ramp at Auschwitz. As I was reading this passage, these memories came alive within me, and at the same time I was able to verify that the sentences fitted together in the organic sequence I had envisaged. That was all very well, but why had not what existed before those sentences, the raw event itself, that once-real morning in Auschwitz, come to life for me? How could it be that those sentences for me contained merely imaginary events, an imaginary cattle truck, an imaginary Auschwitz, and an imaginary fourteen-and-a-half-year-old boy, even though I myself had at one time been that fourteen-and-a-half-year-old boy?
So what had happened here? What is it what the publisher’s readers had referred to as “your way of giving artistic expression to the material of your experiences”? Yes, what had happened to “the material of my experiences,” where had it vanished to off the paper and from within me? It had existed at one time, indeed it had happened to me twice over: the first time, improbably, in reality, the second time, with much more reality, later on, when I recollected it. Between those two time points it had lain in hibernation. It did not so much as cross my mind at that certain moment when I knew I had to write a novel. I had laboured with various types of novels, only to scrap them one after the other; not one of them had turned out to be a possible novel for me. Then all at once it had popped up within me, from some obscure place, like a brain wave. I suddenly found myself in possession of a body of material which at last offered a definite reality to my agitated, but until then constantly disintegrating, vision and which, solid, pliant, and shapeless, started forthwith to ferment and swell within me like a yeasty dough. A strange ecstasy took hold of me; I lived a double life: my present—albeit halfheartedly, reluctantly, and my concentration-camp past—with the acute reality of the present. My readiness to immerse myself in it almost scared me; even now I could not give a reason for the voluptuous feeling which attended it. I don’t know if memory itself is attended by that delight, irrespective of its subject, since I would not say that a concentration camp is exactly a bowl of fun; yet the fact is that during this period the slightest impression was enough to hurtle me back into my past. Auschwitz was present here, inside me, sitting in my stomach like an undigested dumpling, its spices belching up at the most unexpected moments. It was sufficient for me to glimpse a desolate locality, a barren industrial area, a sun-baked street, the concrete pilings of a newly started building, to breathe in the raw smell of pitch and timber, for ever-newer details, input, and moods to well up with something like the force of actuality. For a time, I awoke each morning on the barrack forecourt at Auschwitz. It took a while for me to realize that this perception was evoked by a constant olfactory stimulus. A few days before, I had bought a new leather strap for my wristwatch. At night I put the watch on a low shelf directly by the bedside. Most likely that characteristic smell, reminiscent of chlorine and a distant stench of corpses, had lingered on the strap from the tanning and other processes. Later on I even used the strap as a sort of sal volatile: when my memories flagged, lay low inertly in the crannies of my brain, I used it to entice them from their hiding places—smelling them to pieces, so to speak. I shrank from no means and no effort in waging my battle with time, wresting from it my due right. I crammed myself with my own life. I was rich, weighty, mature, I stood at the threshold of some sort of transformation. I felt like a wild pear tree which wanted to bear apricots.
