by Imre Kertész
We chatted something along those lines, and then I quickly forgot all about it. What did I find, though? He really didn’t want to eat. Neither at noon, nor in the evening.
I waited until lights out, and when the stillness of the night had descended on the prison—a special kind of tranquillity this is, a lit-up, timeless night, the everlastingness of the nether regions, filled with dull, mysterious, muffled hissing and bubbling underwater murmurs, so to say—I open up the solitary cooler rather like an inflamed wound, with a degree of indistinct hope. ‘So, tell me why …,’ I kick off, something like that, not really able to see his long, thin face, as it is covered by a long, wispy beard which ends in a long, wispy, ruffled tip (they’ll soon shear that off when they stick him over in a shared cell, I thought to myself with my supercilious prison-guard gloominess). He tosses out in a flip way something to the effect that his principles demanded it—and I very specifically recall him using the word “principles.”
“What principles are those, then?” I ask with a kind smile, because I had the feeling then that there was no principle on earth that I couldn’t refute. “That I’m innocent,” he snaps, and you see, I don’t even have to refute that, for which of us is not innocent, and anyway: what does it mean?
I said it out loud, or maybe only thought so to myself, I don’t know, but anyway I entered his cell, as it were dropping whatever prison-guard reserve I had. I soon had to realize, though, that my efforts were completely futile: he wouldn’t listen to my arguments, didn’t budge when I ordered him, indeed, did not utter a single word after that. He just kept running that dark, obdurate look of his over my face, like a blindly groping hand. Like someone who doesn’t allow himself to be deluded for one second by deceitful words, he searched about like a cornered animal which was ready to dive under the bunk or scurry away between my legs at the first suspicious sign. I could see he was ready for anything, looking on me as his enemy, or rather not even his enemy: a prison guard, a screw, a person with whom one does not enter a debate. His eyes were burning, with red blotches over his cheekbones; it was the second day that he had not eaten … I talked and talked; in the end I don’t know what annoyed me more: the look which obstinately banished him from the world of being understood and making himself understood, or the situation he had forced on me and which was slowly making a prisoner of me too, locking me in that cell, along with this prisoner, and all of a sudden, before I could escape, time would draw in on us and the night carry us away.
“Do you have the slightest idea what you can expect?” I asked him in the end—and, whatever the rules may say, I had long been addressing him in the familiar form, not out of any contempt, not at all, but driven purely by fraternal irritation, to be precise.
“You’re not eating?” I continue. “It’s just they won’t allow you that luxury here,” I laugh, though not out of any amusement. “You can starve, but only if they starve you. And if you don’t eat, they’ll make you, I can assure you. They’ll take you into the sickbay, push a tube down into your stomach, if possible scratching your gullet in the process—I’ve seen it happen,” I lie, though forgivably, as I had heard about what they did but, of course, had taken good care not to be party to such a spectacle. “And if you vomit it up,” I went on, “they run it in up your backside, or else they strap you down on a bed, stick needles into your veins, and push the nutrients in that way. And don’t go thinking that this somehow just happens, as if you were not there or not taking part in it. Or that you can sail through the whole thing without being tarnished by it. You’d be wrong, very wrong!” I exclaim, and perhaps even I am not aware what sorts of fragmentary memories my own words are reopening within me, or what images are welling up from the depths, as from the cellar of a ruined house when the wind whistles through them. “No one who is tortured,” I yell, “No one can remain untarnished—that’s something I know all too well, and don’t ask me how. Afterwards you won’t be able to speak of innocence any longer, at best of survival. And if you should have a wish to die, that isn’t permitted either. You think they’ll feel any pity for you? They’ll bring you back from death’s door seven times over, don’t worry! Dying can only happen in the permitted manner: with them killing you.”
That’s how I spoke, and my words appeared to be ineffectual. “Is this what you want?” I had another go. “You are doing nothing more than inviting them to commit these outrages, don’t you see?”
All of a sudden, something came to mind; I don’t understand how it had not occurred to me before, or could it have been precisely this that was secretly guiding me all along?
“Apart from which,” I carried on, “you’ll be dragging others into disgrace along with yourself. I’ll have to write a report on you,” slipped from my mouth before I had a chance to think better of it. “Do you give any thought to other people’s innocence?!” I can hear my own reproachful voice. “Here, I’ve never lifted a finger against anyone …,” I stutter and, for all that I’m a prison guard, I might even have got round to begging the prisoner had something not pulled me up. What was that? Now, pin your ears back, or keep your eyes open, because you’ll hear, or rather read, the most disgusting and, at the same time, most obvious thing, I might well say a flash of genius took wing here. Anyway, the beard covered up a lot, of course, but it seemed to me as though I spotted a scornful smile flitting over the prisoner’s face, at least briefly.
I have tried any number of times soberly to analyse that moment, and may I say in my defence that both analysis and sobriety have always turned out to be my downfall. The way I would like to remember it, the smile infuriated me to the point that I suddenly flew into a temper. However hard I try, however, I don’t recall that I was overcome by anger, especially an anger that would have deprived me of, or even just clouded, my judgement. No, all I felt was disgust, sudden despondency, resentment, and again disgust, which included this gaol-breathed prisoner, with whose, for me, all at once so extraneous wretchedness I had been locked together by the moment, through an equally extraneous series of causes, just as it included me. It was all, all, sweeping me toward the simplest solution, of course insofar as I can consider it a solution, to rid myself of that moment, with panic-stricken haste, and in the simplest possible way, as it comes. But I sensed a resistance, a stubbornly aloof, last-ditch, irrational resistance which is incomprehensibly and unfairly standing straight before me, when all I want is the light of reason, I am undoubtedly right as well; and then, abstractly as it were, I also sensed the disparity of incommensurable forces which pertains between a convict who is being stubborn and a prison guard, who, with the sleeves of his shirt rolled up to his elbows, shoulder belt running diagonally across his chest, pistol dangling on his haunch, and trousers thrust into soft top boots, may be the very image of high-handedness and terror, should his whim so will it.
For whatever reason, I took a step forward. A tiny little step only, and I immediately stopped again. Clearly, though, the prisoner may well have misunderstood—or, as I preferred to think at the time: misinterpreted—the movement, because he instantly flinched. But there wasn’t much room, and his leg was immediately caught against the bunk, so he could only lean his upper body farther back, and that was how he faced me. That was when I raised my hand and struck a defenceless prisoner in the face, causing him to drop onto the bunk, from where he looked up at me, not without a trace of fear, yet still with a smack of satisfaction, if I wasn’t mistaken, indeed, so it seemed, even a touch of surreptitious defiance.
I no longer paid him any heed. I backed out of the cell, with my trembling hands locked the door with great difficulty, then slowly, as if I were trooping to the dead march at an execution, I set off down the corridor to my room.…
That, then, is the letter as you may wish it. The “crystal-clear act” (I remembered that right, haven’t I?), the wound that never heals.
If you wish, by the way, it may even open up the route to the 30,000 corpses.
Purely for the sake of order a
nd continuity, I would add that as far as I am concerned, the following morning, at that breathtaking sublime moment when general orders are being read out, I simply fell down flat on the floor, then for weeks and months on end, even in my dreams, I stubbornly hung on to a new being, summoned up out of some illness which was no doubt not properly pinpointed, whom I became, or wished to become. It was a madman, no question about it, the sole refuge available to me at the time—the other, so that I might, so to say, provoke my arrest, and I don’t know if that was not what I really wanted, even if only in secret, so even I would be unaware of it, as I can’t have wanted that, after all. I will spare you the details of how many jails I did time in, how many punishments (I almost wrote humiliations, as if I could have been humiliated still further) I was subjected to, until in the end, I landed in hospital where my games, arbitrary as they may have been, but still following a definite logic, were now carried on under the crossfire of expert eyes. After all, everything depends on the firmness of our will, and in my experience a person can cross over into madness with terrifying ease, if he wants that at all costs. I had to see, however, that I could not consider this a solution. Not that I thought it was cheap, more because my normal life was no more foreign to me than madness. Then the investigations suddenly came to an end, and for a while they left me in peace, and then, on some spurious pretext, I was released from hospital and discharged from the army—thanks to the changes, as I hear from all sides nowadays.
So, now here I stand (or more specifically, sit) with my story, which I shall hand over to you, not knowing what to do with it myself. When all is said and done, nothing irremediable happened: no one was killed, and I personally did not become a killer; at most, all links broke down, and something—maybe I do not even know precisely what—has been left lying in ruins. I am striving ever harder to crawl under those ruins so they cover me completely. What else can I do? I was unable to set off down the path to grace that you denoted; all I was capable of is what I have told you, and in the end my strength cracked doing even that. I know there is the other possible path, but I can’t truly pull even that off, I have missed the opportunity, so to say, at least for the moment. At this protracted, difficult moment, I am obliged to notice, destiny is taking a rain check. As a result, I live concealed in the crowd, in protected—I almost said: happy—insignificance. I write newspaper articles and light comedies; if I try hard, I can undoubtedly make some sort of success with that. I can tell no one else what has happened to me: either they will considerately excuse me or sternly condemn me for it, though I need neither, because they will do nothing to move what is immovable. Something else is needed, and again all that comes to my mind is a word of yours, though not in the least in the sense you use it: grace. But I feel that is farther from me than anything else. From time to time, the dull, rummaging rustling of my perplexity is drowned out within me by the savage voice of fear. It is not fear of fear or cowardice, but rather something else, and occasionally I feel that my fear is all I can rely on, as if that was the best thing about me and might, in time, lead somewhere—no, I’m not putting that well: which might lead me out of somewhere, even if it leads nowhere …
But that is of no interest to you. You have simply got the upper hand over all this with a judgement and have locked yourself, with an eerie sense of familiarity, into the world of constructions, from which you deny every living thing every living way out in the name of the sole possible grace, which in reality, of course, is some form of damnation, and which, I admit, you are absolutely right about, even if, from another angle,, you are not right, because it is not as easy and simple as that, even if from yet another angle it really is that easy and simple …”
At this point Köves suddenly stopped writing, as he may well have felt he was becoming bogged down in a confused line of thought from which he would have a hard job extricating himself at present (he was probably a little tired, on top of which his patience suddenly failed him), and he remained sitting for a while longer, bent over the filled sheets of paper, as if he were pondering whether to run through it again, but then he swiftly gathered the sheets, folded them in two and hesitantly looked around as though searching for an envelope (fruitlessly, of course) before finally stuffing them into his pocket and setting off from home in a hurry.
Köves was getting close to his target, having decided that he would slip the letter in person under the addressee’s door, when something in a narrow, busy street brought him up sharp. Neck craned, he was looking for a gap in the crowd: as he had thought, making her way along the other side, was a woman who was neither young nor old, her clear, agreeable face, long unseen, creased by two deep, tragic furrows. Beside her, or in fact more behind her, constantly falling back, a robust man: his bald, oval head, his fleshy face—of course Köves recognized him instantly, and yet somehow he did not recognize him but just stood, rooted to the spot, motionless. For something was missing from the face, precisely the thing that had made him so recognisable and unmistakable, but as to what that deficiency was it took several seconds for Köves to mutter to himself, his lips chilled in alarm: intelligence.
At that very moment, the man suddenly came to a standstill before a shop window (it was some sort of bakery, with a display of sweet pastries, cakes, and petits-fours adorning the window). The woman took another pace, and only when she must have sensed that she would be unable to drag the man along any farther did she stop and turn round. Köves saw her saying something and also nodding—maybe encouraging him to come on, but the man perceptibly dug his heels in, squatted and, arm extended like a child, pulled the woman back toward the shop window, until she finally relented and, with a mild shake of the head, entered the shop with him.
Flabbergasted, Köves stood at the kerb for a brief moment longer in the bustle and then quickly turned on his heels and, devastated, bewildered, shot off toward the city as if he were hoping that perhaps somewhere in the streets he would be able to rid himself of the spectacle, as of some burdensome and unpleasant object, but meanwhile the feeling pressed in him that, on the contrary, he ought to preserve it and bring it out from time to time in order to come to understand its import.
The letter stayed in his pocket.
L
Köves was given an assignment to make enquiries and write an article about why the trains were running late: the trains always ran late, but it seems they only found it unusual now, when everyone had, at long last, got used to it, though Köves, who knew very little about railways (he was not even in the habit of travelling, so the fact that the trains ran late was to him, no denying it, a matter of some indifference), was by now on the second day of trotting from one office to the other in order to collect the basic information needed for the article lest, when the time came for him to come forth clad in the expected superiority and irrefutability, he should find himself accused of not being fully informed. He had even put in an appearance in the inner offices of one of the railway stations to inspect with interest exceedingly complex point- and signal-switching apparatus, listen somewhat dozily, but with encouraging nods, to various high-ranking railway officials, who expounded on the state of rolling stock, the difficulties of freight transport, and the like, apologetically as it were, then finally found himself in the office from whose rooms, they explained to Köves, they directed all the trains that sped along (or, if it came to that, were held up) on the distant rails, and since the high-ranking official with whom Köves was due to talk happened, at that moment, to be right in the middle of directing, among various complicated charts and audio-visual devices, numerous trains, Köves was asked to be so kind as to wait a little until they called him.
It seems, though, that they must have forgotten all about him, or possibly unforeseen problems had cropped up inside while they were directing the trains, but in any case Köves had spent long enough time strolling up and down a deserted, windowless corridor, illuminated by no more than the nightmarish light of neon tubes (at one end the corridor ran into a blank wall, whil
e at the other end made a right-angle turn into a passage which promised to be quite a lot longer than the one he was in, so it was likely that Köves was located on the shorter limb of an L-shaped corridor) himself to have forgotten (or at least not to have thought about for a long time) what he was actually doing there, for whom and what he was waiting, even whether he was actually waiting or simply happened to be there, in the same way that he might be anywhere else. Besides which, Köves was in a somewhat strange mood: at once lively and pensive, inattentive and keyed up—like everyone nowadays, so it seemed to Köves. He had hit the road that morning from the South Seas (he had a big breakfast beforehand), and there he had been welcomed straight away with excitement and a babble of voices: at the Uncrowned’s table (even that early he had taken his seat at the head of the table in person) they were in the middle of unrolling some fabric or other, a long sheet of the kind which is secured at both ends to poles and held up high (that was what they were trying out at that moment: it was embellished with the words WE WANT TO LIVE! in fancy, coloured embroidery), so that one of the waiters was obliged to hasten to the table and on behalf of the manager (who had no time to go himself and passed on well-disposed greetings) asked the gentlemen “for the sake of everyone’s comfort to please be so kind as to avoid making any stir.” While he was subsequently making the rounds of the offices, Köves’s ear had been caught, every now and then, even on streets which seemed to be a bit busier than normal, by the slogan that he had first come across in the South Seas, but signs of excitement were also being manifested by the high-ranking officials, who, despite the rather disquieting nature of their thoughts as far as the subject matter went, would crack an occasional smile while making their expositions, would lose the thread of their thinking or fall silent for a moment, all ears to the street sounds that would drift in through the window from time to time, and even if it could not have been put into precise words, all that had an effect of Köves, of course.
