Dossier K: A Memoir

by Imre Kertész

  The two may be closely interlinked.

  In what way?

  We have already spoken about the paradox that God may be found readily in a dictatorship, whereas in a democracy there is no longer any metaphysical excuse: the individual in his own right struggles with his freedom.

  You are not suggesting that man is transcendent, his non-worldly life is a mere political issue, are you?

  The issue is not political, but you pose it in two different ways in the two political systems—in the one as the sole option, in the other as one of the options.

  You have used the word “myth” twice in connection with Auschwitz, and in a different sense on both occasions …

  Spuriously so the second time; I noticed that myself.

  By “myth” one usually denotes some fraudulent ideology, doesn’t one?

  I use the word in its original signification, in the sense of a total loss of values, in the way in which the mariners of ancient Greece on an island heard a harrowing cry of “Great Pan is dead!”

  You clearly heard Nietzsche’s call of “God is dead!”

  It’s true, we have to start all over again, from the beginning.

  Is that really what Liquidation is about?

  That is what all my works are about, isn’t it?

  And now that the trilogy of novels has expanded into a tetralogy, do you feel that your work is complete?

  Trilogy, tetralogy—those terms say nothing to me. I just wrote the novel that had to be written, which always seemed to me just as fragile as my own stamina, even my own continuance. To employ an Adornoesque paraphrase: “To write a novel cycle after Auschwitz is barbaric.”

  So how did the term “trilogy”—designating by that the novels Fatelessness, Fiasco, and Kaddish for an Unborn Child—become quite so commonly employed?

  I have no objection to it, whether it’s a trilogy or tetralogy—that doesn’t change anything. The truth is that with my work everything is connected with everything else, but those connections arise by an organic process without my having made them fit some premeditated literary box of tricks. They come out so unintentionally that I often surprise myself. Those are the rare lucid moments when one suddenly becomes aware that every line, every sentence one writes is operating in the force field of some sort of coherence from which we are able to surmise the presence of a more solid reality, of our genuine existence, lurking at the very bottom of our existence. That’s sufficient for me to turn my back on the trilogy with a shrug of the shoulders.

  Liquidation is anyway the first of your novels to be written in its entirety after the change in regime, indeed to use that as its subject.

  It chose freedom as its subject.

  Yes, but its world is still very much a typical late-Kádárera world, I’d be interested to know where you drew your material from, given that you were then living very much in seclusion, not known in intellectual circles and, to my knowledge, you played no active role in the “democratic opposition,” not putting a signature to any of the protest letters of the period …

  They didn’t get to me: it wasn’t just them who didn’t know me, but I didn’t know them either.

  So you would have signed them?

  Most likely.

  Out of sympathy?

  Out of cowardice; so they would not consider me a coward.

  That’s a good one! Would you not have agreed with them?

  Well, as far as their pragmatism was concerned—not at all. I was no fan of the reform Communists because I never thought that Brezhnev could be reformed, whereas there was no way I could imagine “socialism with a human face” when there were still “Soviet units temporarily stationed in our country.” Whether it has a human face or not, socialism is malformed and repulsive. And then on top of that—and this is where it gets pickier—there was an overripe … an overripe playfulness, what I might call a latent cynicism, about the whole thing, as if people on both sides were respecting, as it were, well-known “rules of the game.” The regime, the “establishment,” displayed its amenability—the fact that it was at least respecting a liberal minimum—to advantage. Equally, though, the totalitarian power could have switched to “harsh methods” at any time. The chance that a person may be demeaned and become a scummy tool of the authority during the tortures, however, is for me a disproportionately high price for nothing.

  And if I were to probe you on what your political convictions are, or do you in fact hold any such views …

  Certainly I do. The trouble is just that its reality has passed, like that of, say, the Jasperian species of democracy or the liberal conservatism of an István Széchenyi.

  Is it possible you are really sympathetic to conservative ideals?

  Why not? If God existed, I would be pious. What is more, if there were a genuine conservative party in Hungary—which would probably constitute an even greater miracle than if God were to exist—I would be a sincere supporter.

  Are you sure about that?

  No, but I am sure that the prerequisites for a completely normal political life in Hungary are still only at an early stage.

  What do you mean?

  That the country needs, at long last, to get over the trauma caused by the change in regime: it needs to accept freedom—or more than that, rejoice in it.

  Perhaps it’s not as easy as that. After all, the new citizen in you crumbled the instant you caught sight of a customs officer’s cap …

  You’re referring to my short story “Sworn Statement.”

  Yes, and that reminds me of several non-literary questions that I am unable to keep to myself. For instance, did you ever think … no, I need to take a longer run-up. You, as a person who survived Nazi concentration camps through “the trust you placed in the world”; who spent the Stalinist era in a horrific nightmare state; who—as Galley Boat-Log attests—during the decades of the Kádár regime came to know the depths of depression—did you imagine that the occupation of Hungary jokingly termed “socialism” would ever come to an end and you would regain complete personal freedom?

  There’s no need to take such a deep breath! In my opinion this conversation would not be worth anything if it had not become clear by now that in essence, if not explicitly, this was exactly what I was thinking of every day.

  Literally?

  Let’s say subcutaneously so; unbrokenly in at least a tacit sense … as if something were continually prickling me.

  So you weren’t surprised by the change of regime?

  If that’s what you infer, then my answer was not good, or at least not clear enough. I lived as if the regime might come to an end at any time—and I was quite sure about that, by the way, because life will only temporarily tolerate its own denial—it was just that I couldn’t be sure that I myself would live to experience it. At the time, I had a favourite saying from Kafka: “There is plenty of hope, no end of hope, only not for us.”

  Couldn’t you find anything more reassuring?

  It very much suited the daily spiritual exercises.

  Would you care to relate how, as an inhabitant of Budapest, you lived through your second liberation?

  Not so very differently from the first one, in Buchenwald. Liberations almost always run along much the same lines. There are certain signs, then all at once the skirmishing of struggle is picked up, then eventually, after a momentary lull, someone shouts out “We’re free!”

  Were you surprised? Or did you marvel at it? Or …

  Both delighted and incredulous. A gigantic empire soundlessly imploded like a huge oak tree that has been eaten up inside by worms … well anyway, then the problems of survival that at first no one—myself included—had taken account of began to emerge.

  Despite your seemingly inexhaustible experiences of dictatorship?

  No, and I’m not ashamed to admit it, either. I am one of those childishly gullible beings who at the time democracy was restored to Hungary supposed that with the cessation of abnormal living conditions everything and everybody
would suddenly be normal. As I result, I fainted from one consternation to the next: lies, hatred, racism, and stupidity erupted around me like a carbuncle that had been swelling for forty years and was finally lanced by the surgeon’s scalpel.

  We have already mentioned “Sworn Statement,” which in point of fact was the novella with which—how should I put it?—you took to the ring of public combat, being transformed at one fell swoop from an author of abstract novels to a public figure. I imagine that was not quite what you had in mind when you wrote the story.

  Not in the least; all I wanted to do was free myself from the shame of the experience.

  In any event, “Sworn Statement” burst like a bomb: already in 1991, the year when it first appeared, the actor and writer Mihály Kornis was performing it in the form of a monologue on the literary stage of the Katona Theatre in Budapest; Péter Esterházy wrote a matching novella entitled “Life & Literature,” and the two novellas were soon published together in a slim printed volume, both in Hungarian and in German translation, and a bilingual cassette had also been brought out as a so-called spoken book. It may well be that you conceived it as a disaster story, but it turned out to be a decisive success story.

  Yes, which crowned the misunderstanding, and on top of that, in the mirror of the political constellation of the time, it also gave an impression of the taking-up of a moral stance, which indeed it was.

  Didn’t you intend it to be?

  If you had asked me that question then, I would have given you a different reply from the one I would now.

  I’m interested in the one you would give now.

  If I were to reclaim it from the topical sphere and fit it into the series of my works, then I would have to call this story the beginning of my regaining of consciousness.

  Your first astonishment.

  You might also see it that way.

  Nevertheless, “Sworn Statement” struck me much more as a self-examination than as a piece of social criticism, as if you were probing whether the survivor of dictatorships still had enough strength to accept freedom.

  Tricky question, big subject …

  But the narrator of The Union Jack poses essentially the same question, though admittedly late in the day—he has already loused up his life; there is even a touch of perverse Schadenfreude in the way he hitches his own crushing to that of his country.

  That’s an unconventional reading of it …

  Wrong?

  On the contrary, a very empathetic one.

  And a good ten years later, when the book appears, it turns out that the main characters in your novel Liquidation are also wrestling with the same question.

  It may be the major issue of the day. People are now furtively glimpsing into the chasm—not the one that is lying there ahead of them but the one that is gaping behind them. That chasm is their own life.

  Put so that’s a fairly graphic image. Man struggles for his freedom, but when he wins it, or it is presented to him, he suddenly finds himself in a vacuum. Did the question as to where next never arise for you?

  Of course it did, and more particularly almost vying with the pangs of “homesickness,” as I could not know to what extent the pressure under which I had to live and write was of value for my works. Under healthy conditions, books like Fatelessness and Fiasco might possibly never have come into existence. If I wanted to be utterly merciless, I might say that in a dictatorship you can “enjoy” the run of the madhouse, but in a democracy a consensus exists, a genuine literary responsibility, which can restrict the profligate bent of your imagination within constraints.

  Though a Kafka or a Beckett, for example, was not disturbed by freedom …

  True: one can find one’s prisons anywhere, but in the event that you should be wavering it does no harm to know what roots your art draws on.

  Isn’t that the real problem with your book Someone Else?

  “Is it really just these deadly circumstances that offer me a hidden source of energy? I have no way of knowing, because the source of energy was always supplied by depicting those deadly circumstances, in the midst of those selfsame deadly circumstances,” you write around the middle of the book. All the same, Someone Else is also a novel of liberation, of gaining a wider perspective, since it is now that you make your first trips to western Europe: “with M. and I taking turns to drive and the Waldstein Sonata resounding triumphantly …,” you write about a starry July 4th in 1994.

  Yes, we happily zipped around the highways of Europe in a hired car.

  And yet, like a hidden leitmotif, the thought unexpectedly resurfaces as an unresolved question: “Afternoon tea in the Chamonix valley. Evening was drawing in and the air was chilly … and fragrant … amid uninhabited forests, valleys and hilltops … With a rock for a table, we ate the Brie cheese and biscuits left over from yesterday, accompanied by a local rosé. I was freezing and M. gave me her pullover; she herself was enjoying the cool, her face was radiant. While eating we mulled over how far we still had to go and where we should stay for the night. The shadows gathered and took on ever darker hues while up on the mountain summit the trees were still in sunlight. I didn’t think about it, but I suppose I was happy. It was a feeling that through a trip like this, here at the foot of Mont Blanc, my forty years of being shut in, my prison life, was attaining a fulfilment rather than becoming problematical. Arriving at the threshold of another way of living, I understood that the dividing line is so sharp, the yawning gap between the two ways of living—between myself and myself—so deep, that it can only be bridged with the most strenuous effort. It is like standing at the edge of a devastating forest fire and having to assess the losses and the gains—to assess what I have accomplished so far, and where I should look to for a source of future creative energy.”

  Yes, yes! A fine evening, exquisite concerns …

  What do you mean “exquisite”?

  Well, for instance, that we didn’t have to worry about how we were going to pay for the supper.

  That was already how things stood, and still you had exquisite concerns.

  That’s true.

  It is striking that both The Union Jack and “Sworn Statement” bear a 1991 date; Kaddish for an Unborn Child appeared in 1990, Galley Boat-Log in 1992 … work was simply bubbling out from under your hand. For a while you were also a member of the editorial board of the literary magazine Holmi.38 Then around the end of the Nineties, your name suddenly vanished from the magazine. I would have expected some kind of explanation to be given as to the reason for your parting …

  Me, too. Just to print my letter of resignation, for example, as would befit the better sort of places. Or even to inform readers how glad they were to be rid of me, or whatever. Let’s move on, though.

  Where to? I have a feeling we have come to a standstill, or that the high spirits are at an end. To back up to the point where, in your own words, you begin to regain consciousness and take a first look around in this new situation, your eyes immediately cloud over, if I may be permitted to extend the metaphor. You publish articles and diary entries which concern political deformations, neo-anti-Semitism, historical amnesia and the like, then in 1997 you publish the book Someone Else, which elicited widespread dislike in critical circles …

  I was drummed out of the nation like a relapsed troublemaker from a tinpot boarding school.

  But what did you do to elicit the fury of a press that, up to that point, had behaved fairly amicably toward you?

  How should I know? I think you are overestimating the importance of so-called literary critics. Works of literature—genuine ones, that is—lead their own lives.

  That may well be, but nevertheless I’m not going to make do with that pearl of wisdom. Your speculative pieces, the essays and lectures, are almost uniformly rejected by the Hungarian public.

  They still exist … In truth it’s just the old game being carried on: I am a nuisance in Hungary, in the organic extension of the Kádár regime, a dissonant voice in a convention
of self-deception which by common consent is sustained through gritted teeth.

  What do you mean more precisely by “convention of self-deception”?

  Keeping one’s mouth shut. As a result of which the continuity of the past has been interrupted. The 1989 change in regime did not arise from the Kádár regime but arrived from “outside,” from somewhere remote where real history grinds ahead. It was again necessary to adjust to the new situation, as so many times before, and that was much more urgent than looking back to see where we had come from. People supposed that the muck of the Kádár regime could be quickly scraped off the soles of our shoes. It can’t, and all kinds of frustrations derive from curtailed memories. One of them is fear and self-hatred as reflected in nationalism; another is lack of direction or nostalgia for the Kádár regime. In that context, it matters little that my essays are not to the taste of superannuated literary veterans wreathed in cigar smoke on their pseudo-Olympus or of the neo-conformist careerists of university faculties who parrot the gobbledygook of literary scholarship … I myself am even less to their taste. I never asked for access to the amenities of the Hungarian intellectual and I have therefore remained an outsider …

  As a tiresome stranger?