by Imre Kertész
I beg your pardon, but that’s one of Arthur Koestler’s similes. Arrow in the Blue was the title of one of his volumes of autobiography.
Thank you for reminding me. I’ve read the book, of course, so my simile may be the product of subconscious Freudian brainwork, but then Koestler, too, was a Jew from Budapest, and he, too, was in conflict with his family, with the bourgeois mode of existence, with Communist salvationism, and ultimately with himself.
As best I know, you, too, became one of Communism’s “captive minds,” if I may allude to the title of Czeslaw Milosz’s celebrated book.
Naturally; it would have been a wonder if I hadn’t. On my return from Auschwitz I fell in with an interesting group of people among whom I soon had to make my first clear choices: for instance, whether I was to remain in Hungary or leave, because those were the arguments that flew around in 1946 and ’47 during the “shindigs” that would evolve out of tea parties into rum drinking at the homes of those of my classmates who had bigger places or at least their own rooms. By then the tidy order of the B stream had broken down; several of my Jewish friends had been lost—they perished during the war or they did not go back to school—or pupils asked for permission to transfer from the crowded A stream, or new boys enrolled. The world had changed. One gorgeous morning in September 1945, when I turned off the Grand Boulevard into Barcsay Street in order to pick up my schooling at the Madách Gymnasium where I had left it before Auschwitz, an edifying scene played out before my view: gym master Csorba, moustache twitching, his face terrified, was hurrying toward the Grand Boulevard with a pack of pupils at his heels, the leader of whom was yelling with his fist raised in anger: “Lousy Fascist! The brass neck of you coming back to the school as a teacher!” That student, incidentally, went on later to become a well-known film director. We happened to meet at some reception in the early ’90s, and I reminded him of that long-past scene. He looked at me in amazement: he had no memory of it.
Really?
I can’t say if he really had forgotten, but at all events fifty years later, after another historical turning point—the fall of Communism—he was unwilling to accept that identity. But then again, I think that generation—my own generation—has had to endure too many such wrenching turning points for its identity to remain continuous and intact.
And has your own, I wonder?
There are times when I delude myself into thinking it has, but then at other times I recollect certain periods of my life as though a stranger had lived them, certain actions of mine as if they had not been my actions. But being a writer I am constantly working on my identity, and as soon as I come across it I lose it straight away, because I confer it on the protagonist of one of my novels, so I can start the whole process from the beginning all over again. It’s not always easy to be in full possession of ourselves. “Not everyone who is born is in the world,” writes Dezső Szomory in that marvellous 1934 novel of his, Mr. Horeb, the Teacher.
But you not only were in the world, you also wanted to change the world. You joined the Communist Party …
Not with the aim of seeking salvation for the world, though.
Driven by ressentiment, perhaps? György Köves comes home from Buchenwald concentration camp, and to the question put to him on the tram by the reporter as to what he was feeling about being back home again and seeing the city he had left, he replies: “Hatred.”
That is one of the most misunderstood, or perhaps better: misinterpreted sentences in Fatelessness.
So, let’s put it in its proper place.
No, let’s not. It’s a good thing for a novel to have certain words that live on in readers like a blazing secret.
There are lots of words like that in Fatelessness: “happiness,” for instance, or “homesickness” …
Words that only gain their full import in their immanence—in the dramatic effect lent to them by place, moment, and the reader’s conspiratorial rapport. In a novel certain words can change their ordinary meaning; just as bricks are needed in the construction of a cathedral, but in the end what we marvel at is the steeples and the building that has taken shape through their agency.
So it wasn’t salvational zeal that took you into the Communist Party, then, or vengeance.
Much more simple decency, I would say.
Decency? I don’t follow.
You might do so better if I were to talk about the necessity of the sense of “belonging somewhere,” which people find so self-explanatory. I realized fairly quickly that this need had hoodwinked me and led me into a trap. I tried to believe in something that ran radically counter to my nature and lifestyle; in truth I did not have trouble so much with the object of my “belief”—with Marxism or my “salvational zeal,” as you put it—but with “belief” per se as a style—I don’t know how else to express it. Because it soon became clear that it was useless my trying to close my eyes and explain the world from the viewpoint of a theory of some kind: the truth kept on pushing itself forward and plunging me into unpleasant situations. To begin with I merely found myself at odds with my well-founded doubts, but after the so-called “year of decision” of 1948 the terror set in, and I was astounded to notice that I found myself irredeemably on the wrong side as a result of my own zeal.
Did the realization shock you? Did it change your life?
I don’t think so. It was more just a matter of me finding my proper place, if I may put it like that. It put me in touch again with the feeling in which I recognized my life, the feeling that in a certain sense guided me home, and that was a sense of life’s absurdity, the simple and inexorable truth of being able to do nothing and being defenceless. In a certain sense it was a completely satisfying feeling that was later to save me from further brooding and posing the wrong questions.
I’m trying to guess what is hidden behind those words. A sixteen-year-old boy who had been in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, goes back to school and prepares to take his school-leaving examinations. Who is still tortured by nightmares …
I wasn’t tortured by nightmares. Every now and again it would happen that I was woken by an anxiety that that I had missed Appell, the morning muster, but—how to put it?—my “internal clock,” that mysterious mental chronometer, was soon reset. I can see from your face that you weren’t expecting that. Would you have preferred to hear something a bit more morbid?
I don’t appreciate the black humour quite so much on this occasion. I hardly think you would be downplaying the seriousness of experiences you acquired in the death camps quite as much if you hadn’t written your works.
But that has given me the right to be totally frank. Look, the fact is that we are having this conversation now, and not in 1946 or ’47. That is to say, in the meantime I have written my books, and that has obviously altered my memories: they have acquired another character, I might say, maybe even faded, irrespective of the time that has passed. But the fact that I later became a writer in itself presupposes a singular nature. What I have in mind is that more than likely I stand in a different kind of metabolic relationship to reality than do others. What torments most people as an indigestible thought in my case proves all of a sudden to be the raw material for a novel, and as it gains shape I am rid of it. It’s not a conscious act, of course; in my younger days it must have been working quite instinctively inside me. As it is now, looking back on myself from sixty years later, what I see is a fundamentally cheerful young man, who is greedy for life and will not allow anyone or anything to put him off. Of course, he remembers everything that happened to him, but he fits that into the natural order of things. He doesn’t feel any self-pity; he doesn’t ask, like so many others, “why me of all people?”; if asked about his experiences he talks about them with complete detachment: it’s not that he brags about them, but he’s kind of proud of them, if you see what I mean. More than that, I’ll tell you something even more curious: he calls on their help for the remainder of his life.
Is that what you are referring to in Galley Boat-Lo
g when you write that the Stalinist dictatorship saved you from feelings of major disappointment, indeed from suicide?11
Yes, that’s probably so.
There is something that we have not yet clarified. Before you spoke about the sense of belonging, you said that you were carried into Communism by decency. What exactly do you mean?
That one had to take sides. As I mentioned, young people at the time were galvanized by heated debates. The country was in the grip of a great creative zest in the immediate post-war years; at the same time the prevailing conditions were very chaotic. In late 1945 the depreciation in what was then still the unit of Hungarian currency, the pengő, got underway, which over the next six months grew into what is still on record as the greatest hyperinflation in history. Pengő denominations became first “million pengő” then “billion pengő” denominations, with one billion pengős as the basic unit, and even that not for long. Shops would hourly alter the price tickets they displayed. In the spring of 1946, on the terraces of the Budapest cafés such as the “Jeep,” the “Liver Fat,” the “Moulin Rouge,” and the like, customers paid in broken gold for their coffees and whiskeys. The head-waiters carried around tiny scales in their pockets, which they would pull out when the bill was settled and hide away in terror when there was a “raid.” An Economic Police force was set up, which not infrequently found itself in pitched gun battles with smugglers and “black marketeers.” A person couldn’t live from regular wages: factories and offices—including the Budapest-Salgótarján Engineering Works, where my mother worked—paid wages in “kind,” giving employees potatoes or flour instead of money. Otherwise, an exultant sense of freedom reigned. A true democracy began to emerge in Hungary for the first time in the country’s history, and on the basis of the population’s free vote, what’s more. But look here! It’s not my job to dish out history lessons, but let me mention the alleged testament of the international jurist István Bibó that made the rounds many years later among Budapest intellectuals: “When I die,” he is supposed to have said or written, “carve on the headstone of my grave: ‘Here rests István Bibó, flourished 1945–1948.’” That says something about the age, wouldn’t you agree?
You observed all that from a school desk or the Liver Fat café?
That’s a good question. I didn’t spend the bulk of my time on the school bench, that’s for sure. How could I have? The cinemas were full of viewers for American films, old and new ones alike: Lewis Seiler’s Guadalcanal Diary; Billy Wilder’s Five Graves to Cairo with Erich von Stroheim; Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca. I devoured war films; I couldn’t get enough of the German defeat; it’s more than possible that I gave vent to my ressentiment toward the film screen. Yet I equally enjoyed films like Broadway Rhythm with George Gershwin’s magical soundtrack—to list them all I wouldn’t know where to start. Then again, not far from the school was Pollack’s Table Tennis and Billiard Room. We would meet up at eight o’clock in the morning at the school, but by nine or ten o’clock our gang would be either in a cinema or at the ping-pong table, or possibly in the steam bath at the Hungária Hotel. And it was at afternoon teas then that I suddenly discovered girls …
Plus the Communist Party.
Well yes, there must have been some slight connection between the two. Life so had it that I came across mainly girls from well-to-do middle-class families, but I was in the painful position that I never had enough money to pay for them. Our group would engage in vitriolic debates about the meaning of life and the vulgar role played by money: I would win the arguments, but not the girls. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was what started my interest in class struggle. But then again, let’s face it, society was still full of discredited Fascists. At the time, “Holocaust denial” was as yet an unheard-of concept, of course, but tendencies of that kind had already started to crop up in the press and in private conversations. On the other hand, I was not able to identify with the strictly “Jewish” arguments, either: I was not drawn to Zionism, I was repelled by Jewish self-pity, I had no interest in religion, and I was irritated by a suspicion that I should be seeking out the anti-Semite in everybody. A classless society seemed to me to be truly the best solution, but the very first time I appeared at the “district,” I hit the major snag of finding myself face-to-face with a concierge who had been a well-known Fascist in our area. How did he come to be there? Oh yes, he grinned; when the war was over he instantly joined the Party. I had a word with someone—possibly the district Party secretary himself. He then proceeded to explain to me that yes, indeed, Fascism had duped many members of the proletariat, they had to be enlightened—or “re-educated,” as he put it—but this was a matter of proletarians who were “capable of progress” and had to be set on the correct path. That rather upset my in any case sensitive stomach, but however averse I was to the concierge and the Party secretary it did nothing to alter my attraction to radical social solutions. After Auschwitz, I felt the correct thing to do was not to base my relationships on personal feelings but on the principles of social progress.
Hmm!
Yes of course! It was bloody stupid of me, as I soon realized.
How did that hang together with all those American films, the billiard hall, the school-leaving exams, and the afternoon teas?
Strange as it may seem, everything did hang together. Something was brewing inside and around me, in my narrower existence and in the wider world. Political dominance, the so-called “year of decision,” lay ahead. A sense of being free had never before tapped me on the shoulder, and there, all of a sudden, I was free, albeit not in the best sense, as I had not yet been grabbed by my big, true, lifelong choice. What has been left in me from those three years, as a matter of fact, is an impression of intensive life, but as to whether that was an intellectual experience or rather the volatile vitality of incipient manhood—that I couldn’t tell you. Whenever I think of those times I am reminded of Talleyrand’s famous utterance: “He who did not live in the years before the revolution cannot know what the sweetness of living is.” What I vividly remember is being constantly in love, and I’m not referring to one love in particular (or several) but to my attitude to life itself. Reading a book was for me just as much an erotic experience as peeling a bra from a girl’s breasts or losing myself in the melancholy of undistrainable life or the unrivalled sweet happiness with which only the young are acquainted. But I get the feeling that I am starting to lift off into “poetic realms” that in all likelihood are of no interest to you.
How could they fail to be, especially when you talk about them with such relish? And I’m delighted to hear that your life also had such a period when you felt so supremely happy or, to be more accurate, when your life was not being controlled by coercion of one kind or another.
If one disregards the coercion of existing … it did not control my life, admittedly, but it had a strong influence on it.
You were still more or less a student, I suppose, and supported by your mother.
Yes, I was, and that entailed a lot of hassles, above all because I had no pocket money. Differences in our outlooks on life also started to become apparent.
In what respect?
In every respect. We squabbled like a young married couple, except it was not the same of course.
Would you be willing to say more? How did your mother manage to get through the war?
She escaped on two occasions: once from a marching column and the second time from the Óbuda Brick Works, which was a dispatch point for transports to Auschwitz. She told me how it was done, but I no longer exactly recall the details. In the end, she found a “secure” shelter in the Budapest ghetto. After the city was liberated in late January 1945, she learned that Laci Seres had last been seen in a death march that had set off toward Vienna: he had died. Mother was inconsolable, but the residence in Zivatar Street was still intact: a Hungarian officer in the Gestapo had picked it in the summer of 1944, before my mother moved to the “yellow-star house,” and he entered into a regular co
ntract with her—something to the effect that he was taking over the house for purposes of looking after it, as it were—the sort of arrangement that could only have occurred with my mother, it goes without saying. As indeed the fact that it was returned to her in due order, just as it had been, down to the last coffee spoon, just before the man had to leave the country in a hurry. Faust made a pact with the Devil, my mother with a Gestapo officer, and she came off best. It may be that the Gestapo functionary was a decent man, as people used to say, though equally he may have been a mass murderer, but that side of things was of no concern to my mother. Not that you should think that was due to moral indifference on her part; no, it was just that as far as things that did not directly affect her were concerned she suffered from what was simply a form of colour-blindness. Not long afterward, an old friend of hers began to woo her—an engineer, an expert on vacuum technology, that’s as much as I know. Engineers are fairly dull people as a rule; Uncle Árpád (that’s what he was called) was certainly that unless the discussion was about vacuums, whereas that was not exactly the most gripping, from my perspective. My mother had another admirer as well, a piano dealer. He was a squat, plethoric, and humorous man; undeniably he was not as good-looking as the glass-tube engineer, but I always found I could have marvellous talks with him about music. I remember him trying to convince Mother that Bartók wrote extremely melodic music. Entertaining evenings they were. Mr. Kondor, the piano dealer, lived at the other end of town, somewhere in Zugló (the Fourteenth District in Pest). I well remember the freezing-hard winter of 1946–47. Mr. Kondor would come by foot to Buda across the one bridge that functioned at the time, and he would warm his hands up over a coke stove that had been hastily installed on the place of the tile stove. He would offer Mother some corn cakes: Mr. Kondor always brought some delicacy he had purchased on the black market. The talk would quickly turn to music, and I would try to whistle to Mother the main tune of Bartók’s Violin Concerto, amid brisk nodding from Mr. Kondor.
