Dossier K: A Memoir

by Imre Kertész

  Or else it was your first encounter with a religious experience.

  No, I don’t think it was a religious experience; mystic, but not religious. Incidentally, I feel the same way about these things to this day: I’m prone to mystic experiences, but dogmatic faith is totally alien to me.

  But surely the purpose of religion is precisely to mediate mystery in order that one partakes of the mystery.

  You may well be right, because religious feeling in my view is a human necessity, regardless of whether a person is religious or not, whether or not one is a member of a religious community; indeed, whether one believes in god or not.

  And do you, for instance, believe in god?

  On the spur of the moment, I can’t give you an answer; not that it matters, because I harbour a natural religious sentiment the same as others; after all, one feels obliged to be thankful to somebody for this life, even if there happens to be no one who would be able to acknowledge those thanks.

  I would gladly dispute that, but let’s move on. The …

  Forgive me for cutting in, but I never finished what I was going to say about the Nellies. There was another Nellie who was very fond of taking me out in the free air, though now that I think back on it, that was more than likely on account of a suitor of hers. I seem to recall some sort of uniform that would pop up in the background, then hastily vanish before Nellie took my hand to set off home, though I couldn’t say if it was a tram conductor’s, a policeman’s, or a soldier’s. That took place somewhere behind the grounds of the Ludovika Military Academy, in Népliget—the People’s Park. As we neared the fairground booths, my ears would be assailed from a long way off by the crackle of music coming from the loudspeakers that were slung up from the enormous trees. They would pour out the hit songs of the day, like “In Toledo two times two is four / To be in Toledo you just have to adore …,” or “Fine-cut is a top-notch pipe t’baccy / My chum won’t smoke anything that’s wacky …,” and the like. In front of the puppet show there would be a row of rough-and-ready benches on which would be perched a similar audience, many children, too. I was quite capable of watching for hours as László the Valiant beat the Devil about the head with an enormous frying pan, so it was no problem for Nellie to slip away from beside me. My other favourite was Susie Cabbage, who would tell jokes on a tiny stage nearby, but rumour had it that she was actually a man, which rather put me off. That, anyway, was how those afternoons in the People’s Park were spent.

  What strikes me listening to you spinning these yarns is how it seems to have been a never-ending summer in the vicinity of Tömő Street, except for the one wintry afternoon when one of the Nellies took you to church.

  That’s an astute observation. And the reason it may appear so, to you as to me, is because over the summer holiday I used to spend half the time with my father, as I have already said, and until he married Katie Bien, he lived with my grandparents. They, for their part, were in their businesses all day long, my grandparents in their shop, my father in his lumber store.

  Your mother and father had divorced by then …

  Maybe not as yet, but they had separated.

  How old were you at this point?

  Four or five, but even later on I used to spend half the summer with him up until I was ten, when my father found a place on Baross Street, still in Józsefváros, at the corner with what was then Thék Endre and is now Leonardo da Vinci Road.

  And you have no memories of the holiday weeks you spent with your mother?

  Of course I do. Mother always took me out of the city to some bathing resort. My strongest memories are of Erdőbénye and Parádfürdő.1 It’s hard to believe now, but those were then well-heeled, upper-middle-class spas with first-rate hotels that after the war were converted into “trade union holiday centres” and other institutions serving functions of that ilk, and then they were run down to the ground. Once, when we reached Erdőbénye, Mother had something still to sort out at the travel agent’s, and I spotted the dried-up bed of a stream nearby. I was curious about what there might be there and, broken loose from my mother’s proximity as I was, I started to run, then I slipped on a rock and slid down the steep bank into the channel of the stream and the rocks lining it. That limited our diversions, because for at least a week my cuts had to be dabbed regularly with iodine and the dressings changed. But look here, these anecdotes can be of no interest to anyone, me least of all.

  In that case, let’s cut back briefly to Tömő Street, because you have said nothing about your grandmother.

  No, I haven’t, but then there’s not much I can say about her, poor thing. By the time I came into the world, the youngest of the Hartmann girls had become a cantankerous old biddy. She was fat, hard of hearing, had trouble with her blood pressure and she continually complained either about her health or how they had “come down” in the world, with reference to the “palmy days.” Grandfather endured that without a word, even though it must have been most depressing; however, he would occasionally chide her with a “Zelma, you’re always groombling” — like that, pronouncing the “u” as “oo.” She would sometimes be overcome by bouts of lovingness when she would be all over me, smothering me with kisses, after which, as I recall—children can be horrid—I would wipe my face.

  So, let’s pass from Tömő Street to Molnár Street and your maternal grandparents.

  I never actually visited the place in Molnár Street; I only know the address because I heard about it from Mother.

  In what connection?

  She would sometimes bring up the subject of her young days; Molnár Street must have been a nightmarish memory for her. It was the crampedness of the space above all that stayed with her like some sort of claustrophobic memory.

  Was that where she spent her childhood?

  No, that was just a temporary residence to which they pulled back after fleeing from Cluj-Kolozsvár to Budapest.

  When was that?

  In 1919, after the Romanian forces occupied the city.

  So up till then they lived in Kolozsvár. Can you say anything more about that? Do you know anything at all about your mother’s side of the family?

  In truth, not a lot. My grandfather was a bank official at the Franco-Hungarian Bank in Kolozsvár. He was called Mór Jakab; he was an elegantly dressed, quiet, and handsome man with a silky moustache and a melancholy smile. He carried around with him the pleasant fruit scent of the nitroglycerin lozenges that he had to take for his heart disease and that he kept on him at all times in a graceful little box in a jacket pocket. I never knew Mother’s mother; after bringing her fourth daughter into the world she died from the physical exhaustion of childbearing, and Mother never forgave Bessie (the fourth girl) or, in practice, my grandfather for that, because Grandmother had contracted TB and the doctors forbade her from having any more children after the third.

  That’s sad, but the poor girl could hardly be blamed for that …

  That’s what I said to my mother.

  And …?

  Her response was that she also had other bad qualities.

  Was she being ironical, or …

  She steered well clear of irony; she didn’t have a spark of humour. On the other hand, she was deeply attached to her mother and took great exception to the fact that my grandfather remarried, though he did that precisely in the interests of the four girls; for him to have raised them on his own would undoubtedly have been beyond his energy, which was far from abundant.

  In this case, unlike with your other grandfather, I am starting to get the feel of a likeable but slightly dissolute male figure.

  You are probably not too wide of the mark. Piecing together all the things I heard from my mother, I also formed the impression that in the marriage between the two of them, the grandmother whom I never knew was most likely the dominant partner, only I have such a hazy grasp of the facts … There you are, a person is sick of family history all his life, and then just when it becomes important, he is left grubbing around in a
n unfamiliar past.

  I have gathered from your writings that you’re not a great fan of stifling family secrets, or family life in general.

  “Families, I hate you!” André Gide wrote. “Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessions of happiness.” Yes, there was a time when I thought that the source of all psychological illnesses, and nearly all illnesses are psychological illnesses, was the family, or stifling family life, as you put it: the big, soft, musty marriage-bed which suffocates all life.

  But you no longer think that way?

  Look, my second wife, Magda, has a son, and he has a very nice wife, and the two of them have a little girl and a little boy …

  And that’s forced you to take an easier-going approach.

  There’s no denying it.

  And now you regret not having taken a greater interest in the grandma you never knew.

  All the more because among the relatives of that grandmother there were a lot of interesting people, one or two of whom left their stamp on university life in Cluj-Kolozsvár to the present day.

  Who are you thinking of?

  György Bretter, first and foremost, a philosopher and lecturer in literature who met an untimely death and may well have been a second cousin and in any case was almost certainly a kinsman. My grandmother’s name was Betty Bretter. Zsófi Balla, the young ethnic Transylvanian Magyar poet who now lives in Budapest, completed her university studies at Cluj-Kolozsvár and was a student of Professor György Bretter. When I brought up the matter of a family relationship, she said that the way I speak, my gestures, my whole “phiz” reminded her a little of György Bretter.

  Did you ever try to establish any sort of contact with him?

  Never. At first I shared André Gide’s opinion, and now I’m too late. As I said, he died when he was still young, and as far as I know he, too, died of TB, just like my Bretter grandmother. Incidentally, my mother also contracted a so-called “infiltrating” tuberculosis, of which she was fortunately cured around the mid-Thirties at the Irén Barát TB Sanatorium in Budakeszi. By then she had long been divorced from my father, but he still took me along to visit her on the “Magic Mountain” of Buda. We got on the cog-wheel railway in the Városmajor, a long way from Tömő Street, then on the way back we went for a walk on Swabian Hill into town. My father loved going on walks.

  So, your maternal grandfather remarried, then at the end of the First World War the family … fled, was that, to Budapest?

  That was how they saw it, I reckon.

  Your grandfather abandoned a sure livelihood, his post as a bank official—there must have been some pressing reasons compelling him. How old was he?

  I’m not absolutely sure about that. He would have been about forty years old. It’s perfectly conceivable that the bank would have gone belly-up even without Romanian help. I’m more inclined to think that Hungary’s loss of the war hit my grandfather a bit too close. He may well have viewed it as a personal failure; he identified with the collapse and lost his footing in the panic of defeat. Of course, that was an unconscious process, but it happened to a lot of people. At such times one bad decision follows another; people give way to mass psychosis and either slip into deep depression or join the crowd in baying for revenge. It’s curious that no one in Hungary has properly analyzed this phenomenon, although the interwar period in Hungary in particular—along with Germany, of course—produced by the barrel-load the sort of psychoses that prepared people to accept the most dreadful dictatorships and the catastrophe of the Second World War.

  You say that people in Hungary haven’t properly analyzed the phenomenon, but have you read about it anywhere else?

  I seem to remember that Sebastian Haffner, a superb German writer and journalist who fled to London from Hitler, deals with the subject in his books.

  But I don’t suppose your grandfather was among those who bayed for revenge.

  All the less so as he was Jewish, and the sharply anti-Semitic line that dominated Hungarian public life between 1919 and 1924 must have been very trying for him, since he had fled from the Romanian occupation of Transylvania to what was referred to as the “mother country.”

  Did he speak about that?

  Never. And anyway, even if he did, he would not have done so to his grandson, who was just a child. To be quite frank, no relation of confidence ever developed between us, nor could it have done, as we saw each other only seldom. It could be, therefore, that everything I have said about him is purely speculative, but I cannot explain the aristocratic restraint from behind which the lethargy of defeat was perceptible. When I was a young boy I regarded that as an extraordinarily moving trait, though I wouldn’t have been able to give it a name at the time, of course. At all events, he was not a great intellect; when he went into retirement, out of his own resources and with help from the family he purchased a modest two-room house in Rákosszentmihály,2 where he lived with his wife, who I only found out later was not my “real” grandma. Every now and again, my mother’s side of the family would get together in that small Rákosszentmihály house on a Sunday evening. By then the Second World War was already in progress. My grandfather would gather the menfolk and usher them into the second room and, brows furrowed by concern, his voice almost a whisper, he would ask, “Now then, what’s new? What have you learned? What’s going to happen?”

  I daren’t ask “what did happen?”

  Both of them were murdered in Auschwitz. From the window of the cattle truck they were able to throw a letter card addressed to my mother: “We’ve been stuck on a train, we’re being carried off somewhere, we don’t know where”—that, roughly, is what it said.

  Does the letter card still exist?

  My mother had it for a long time. I still remember today the downward-sloping two lines scribbled in pencil on the grey-coloured paper.

  And how did the letter card reach the addressee?

  Some kind-hearted soul must have found it, put a stamp on it, and posted it. My mother was still at her own address, but during the forced “clustering” of the Jewish population she moved into a “Yellow Star” house in Gyöngyhaz Street.3 As you no doubt know, before a ghetto was set up in Budapest, there was an ordinance that decreed that several Jewish families were to move in together into single properties. The resulting houses of mass lodgings were then referred to as “Jewish houses” and a yellow star was nailed up over the entrances. I myself was living in a house like that before … how should I put it: before I was “arrested,” specifically with my stepmother at 24/B Vas Street,4 where her entire family “moved in.”

  Let’s go back a little to Budapest before the war. Your father and mother had divorced, and meanwhile they had put you in a boarding school for boys as a full-boarder. When was that?

  Around 1934. I was five and the youngest pupil at the institution. I completed the four years of my elementary schooling there. “Let’s leap to it!” says old whatshisname in Zsigmond Móricz’s Faithful Until Death …

  Póslaki.

  Yes, of course: good old Mr. Póslaki!

  Do you like that book?

  I was fond of Misi Nyilas, the poor lad. And also of Nemeček and the rest in Ferenc Molnár’s The Paul Street Boys. And Winnetou and loads more, but most of all C.S. Forester’s Captain Hornblower book.

  I’m not familiar with that.

  Marvellous book! Solace for my sick soul. Incredible as it may seem, the book was published in 1943, right in the midst of the war! I was given it as a present by my governess, Auntie Susie (I called her Auntie even though she can only have been in her early thirties and incidentally the favourite target of my amatory awakening and sexual fantasies, of which the lady in question would have known nothing), who came to the home in Baross Street twice a week to cram a bit of Latin grammar and mathematics into my dim-witted head. I was thirteen then, and the book was a bar mitzvah gift. You know what that is, don’t you?

  Sure. A coming-of-age initiation on a boy’s thirteenth birthday, rather like Confi
rmation for Christians.