by Imre Kertész
When I got home, I found my father and stepmother already at the table. While she busied herself with my plate, my stepmother asked if I was hungry. “Ravenous,” I said, on the spur of the moment, not thinking about anything else, since it was the case anyway. She heaped up my plate too, but barely put anything on her own. It was not me but my father who noticed this, and he asked her why. She replied something along the lines that her stomach couldn’t tolerate any food right now, which is when I immediately saw my mistake. True, Father disapproved of her doing that, reasoning that she should not neglect herself now, of all times, when her strength and stamina were most needed. My stepmother made no response, but I heard a noise, and when I looked up I saw what it was: she was crying. It was again highly embarrassing, so I tried to keep my eyes fixed just on my plate. All the same, I noticed the movement as my father reached for her hand. A minute later I could hear they were very quiet, and when I again took a cautious glimpse at them, they were sitting hand in hand, looking intently at one another, the way men and women do. I have never cared for that, and this time too it made me feel awkward. Though the thing is basically quite natural, I suppose, I still don’t like it, I couldn’t say why. It was immediately easier when they started to talk. Mr. Süt again came up briefly, and of course the box and our other lumberyard; I heard that Father felt reassured to know that at least these were “in good hands,” as he put it. My stepmother shared his relief, though she returned, if only in passing, to the matter of “guarantees,” in that these were based solely on word of honor, and the big question was whether that was sufficient. Father shrugged and replied that there was no longer any guarantee of anything, not just in business but also “in other areas of life.” My stepmother, a sigh breaking from her lips, promptly agreed: she was sorry she had brought the matter up, and she asked my father not to speak that way, not to brood on that sort of thing. But that set him wondering how my stepmother was going to cope with the major burdens that she was going to bear the brunt of, in such difficult times, all alone, without him; my stepmother answered that she was not going to be on her own, since I was here by her side. The two of us, she carried on, would take care of one another until my father was back with us once more. What’s more, turning toward me and cocking her head slightly to one side, she asked me if that was how it would be. She was smiling, yet her lips were trembling as she said it. Yes, it would, I told her. My father too scrutinized me, a fond look in his eye. That somehow got to me, and in order again to do something for his benefit I pushed my plate away. He noticed, and asked why I had done that. I said, “I’m not hungry.” I saw that this pleased him: he stroked my head. At that touch, for the first time today, something choked in my throat too, though it was not tears, more a kind of queasiness. I would have rather my father had no longer been here. It was a truly lousy feeling, but it came over me so distinctly that it was all I could think of, and right then I became totally confused. I would have been quite capable of crying right then, but there wasn’t time for that because the guests arrived.
My stepmother had spoken about them just beforehand: only close family, was how she put it. Seeing my father make a gesture of some kind, she added, “Look, they just want to say good-bye. That’s only natural!” No sooner was that said than the doorbell rang: it was my stepmother’s older sister and their mama. Soon Father’s parents, my grandfather and grandmother, also arrived. We hastened to get grandmother settled on the sofa straightaway, because the thing with her is that even wearing spectacles with bottle-thick lenses she is blind as a bat and just as deaf to boot. For all that, she wants to join in and have a hand in what is going on around her. On these occasions, then, one has one’s work cut out, because one has to constantly yell into her ear what’s happening while also being smart about stopping her joining in, since anything she might do would only throw things into confusion.
My stepmother’s mama arrived wearing a distinctly martial, conical brimmed hat that even had a diagonal feather on the front. She soon took it off, however, which was when her gorgeous, thinning, snow white hair with the straggly bun came into view. She has a narrow, sallow face, enormous dark eyes, and two withered flaps of skin dangling from her neck, which gives her the appearance of a very alert, discerning hunting dog. Her head had a slight continual tremble to it. She was delegated the task of packing up my father’s knapsack since she is handy at those sorts of jobs, and she set to work straightaway, following the list that my stepmother provided her.
That left nothing for my stepmother’s sister to do, however. She is a lot older than my stepmother and doesn’t look like a sibling at all: diminutive, plump, and with a face like an astonished doll. She prattled on endlessly, sobbed, and hugged everyone. I had trouble freeing myself from her springy, powder-scented bosom. When she sat down, all the flesh on her body flopped onto her stumpy thighs. And not to forget my grandpa, he remained standing beside my grandma’s sofa, listening to her grumbles with a patient, impassive expression on his face. To begin with, she was in tears on account of my father, but then after a while her own troubles started to displace that worry to the back of her mind. Her head ached, and she moaned about the rushing and roaring that her high blood pressure produced in her ears. Grandpa was well used to this by now; he didn’t even bother to respond, but neither did he budge from her side throughout. I didn’t hear him speak so much as once, yet whenever I glanced that way I would always see him there, in the same corner, which gradually lapsed into gloom as the afternoon wore on, until just a patch of subdued, yellowish light filtered through onto his bare forehead and the curve of his nose, while the pits of his eyes and the lower part of his face were sunk in shadow. Only from a tiny glint in the eyes could one tell that he was nonetheless following, unnoticed, everything that moved in the room.
On top of that, one of my stepmother’s cousins also came by with her husband. I addressed him as Uncle Willie, since that is his name. He has a slight limp, for which he wears a shoe with a built-up sole on one foot; on the other hand, he has this to thank for the privilege of not having to go off to a labor camp. His head is pear-shaped, broad, bulging, and bald on top, but narrowing at the cheeks and toward the chin. His views are listened to with respect in the family because before setting up a betting shop he had been in journalism. True to form, he at once wanted to pass on some interesting pieces of news that he had learned “from a confidential source” that he characterized as “absolutely reliable.” He seated himself in an armchair, his gammy leg stretched stiffly out in front, and, rubbing his hands together with a dry rasp, informed us that before long “a decisive shift in our position is to be anticipated,” since “secret negotiations” over us had been entered into “between the Germans and the Allied powers, through neutral intermediaries.” The way Uncle Willie explained it, even the Germans “had by now come to recognize that their position on the battlefronts is hopeless.” He was of the opinion that we, “the Jews of Budapest,” were “coming in handy” for them in their efforts “to wring advantages, at our expense, out of the Allies,” who of course would do all they could for us; at which point he mentioned what he regarded as “an important factor,” which he was familiar with from his days as a journalist, and that was what he referred to as “world opinion,” the way he put it being that the latter had been “shocked” by what was happening to us. It was a hard bargain, of course, he went on, and that is precisely what explained the current severity of measures against us; but then these were merely natural consequences of “the bigger game, in which we are actually pawns in an international blackmailing gambit of breath-taking scale”; he also said, however, that, being well aware of “what goes on behind the scenes,” he looked on all this as essentially no more than “a spectacular bluff ” that was designed to drive the price higher, and he asked us to be just a bit patient while “events unfold.” Whereupon Father asked him if any of this might be expected by tomorrow, or was he also to regard his own call-up as “mere bluff,” indeed, should he may
be not even bother going off to the labor camp tomorrow. That rattled Uncle Willie a bit. “Ahem, no, of course not,” he answered. But he did say that he was quite confident my father would soon be back home. “We are now at the twelfth hour,” was how he put it, rubbing his hands all the more. To that he also added, “If I had ever been so sure about any of my tips as I am about this one, I wouldn’t be stone broke now!” He was about to continue but my stepmother and her mama had just finished with the knapsack, and my father got up from his seat to test its weight.
The last person to arrive was my stepmother’s oldest brother, Uncle Lajos. He fulfills some terribly important function in our family, though I’d be hard put to define exactly what that was. He immediately wanted to talk in private with my father. From what I could observe, that irked my father, and though phrasing it very tactfully, he suggested they get it over with quickly. Uncle Lajos then unexpectedly drew me into service. He said he would like “a little word” with me. He hauled me off to a secluded corner of the room and pinned me up against a cupboard, face-to-face with him. He started off by saying that, as I knew, my father would “be leaving us” tomorrow. I said I knew that. Next he wanted to know whether I was going to miss his being here. Though a bit annoyed by the question, I answered, “Naturally.” Feeling this was in some way not quite enough, I immediately supplemented it with, “A lot.” With that he merely nodded profusely for a while, a pained expression on his face.
Next, though, I learned a couple of intriguing and surprising things from him. For instance, that the time of my life that he said was “the happy, carefree years of childhood” had now drawn to a close for me with today’s sadness. No doubt I had not yet considered it like that, he said. I admitted that I hadn’t. All the same, he carried on, no doubt his words did not come as any great surprise to me. They didn’t, I said. He then brought to my attention that with my father’s departure my stepmother would be left without support, and although the family “would keep an eye on us,” from now on I was going to be her mainstay. To be sure, he said, I would be discovering all too soon “what worry and self-denial are.” It was obvious that from now on my lot could not go on as well as it had up till now, and he did not wish to make any secret about that, as he was talking to me “man-to-man.” “You too,” he said, “are now a part of the shared Jewish fate,” and he then went on to elaborate on that, remarking that this fate was one of “unbroken persecution that has lasted for millennia,” which the Jews “have to accept with fortitude and self-sacrificing forbearance,” since God has meted it out to them for their past sins, so for that very reason from Him alone could mercy be expected, but until then He in turn expects of us that, in this grave situation, we all stand our ground on the place He has marked out for us “in accordance with our strengths and abilities.” I, for instance, I was informed, would have to hold my own as head of the family in the future. He inquired whether I sensed the strength and readiness within myself to do that. Though I did not quite follow the train of thought that had led up to this, particularly what he said about the Jews, their sins, and their God, I still grasped somehow what he was driving at. So I said, “Yes.” He seemed contented. Good lad, he said. He always knew I was a clever boy, endowed with “profound feelings and a deep sense of responsibility,” which in the midst of so many afflictions, to some degree, represented a solace for him, as was clear from what he had said. Grasping my chin with his fingers, the uppers of which were covered in tufts of hair and the undersides slightly moist with sweat, he now tipped my face upward, and in a quiet, slightly trembling voice said the following: “Your father is preparing to set off on a long journey. Have you prayed for him?” There was a hint of severity in his gaze, and it may have been this that awakened in me a keen sense of negligence toward my father, because, to be sure, I would never have thought of that of my own accord. Now that he had aroused it within me, however, I suddenly began to feel it as a burden, like some kind of debt, and in order to free myself of that I confessed, “No, I haven’t.” “Come with me,” he said.
I had to accompany him over to the room on the courtyard side. There we prayed, surrounded by a few shabby pieces of furniture that were no longer in use. Uncle Lajos first placed a little, round black cap with a silky sheen on the back of his head at the spot where his thinning gray hair formed a tiny bald patch. I too had to bring along my cap from the hall. Next he produced a black-bound, red-bordered little book from the inner pocket of his jacket and his spectacles from the breast pocket. He then launched into reading out the prayer, while I had to repeat after him the same portion of text he had preceded me with. It went well at first, but I soon began to flag in the effort, and besides, I was a bit put out by not understanding a single word of what we were saying to God, since I had to recite to Him in Hebrew, a language unknown to me. In order somehow to be able to keep up, I was therefore increasingly obliged to watch Uncle Lajos’s lip movements, so in actual fact out of the whole business all that remained with me of what we mumbled was the sight of those moistly wriggling, fleshy lips and the incomprehensible gabble of a foreign tongue. Oh, and a scene that I could see through the window, over Uncle Lajos’s shoulder: right at that moment the older sister from upstairs scurried home along the outside corridor, on the far side of the courtyard, a floor above ours. I think I got a bit mixed up over the text as well. Still, when the prayer had come to an end Uncle Lajos seemed to be pleased, and the expression on his face was such that even I was almost convinced we had really accomplished something in Father’s cause. When it comes down to it, of course, this was certainly better than it had been before with the weight of that nagging sensation.
We returned to the room on the street side. Evening had drawn in. We closed the windows, with the blackout paper stuck over the panes, on the indigo-hued, humid spring evening. That entirely confined us within the room. The hubbub was by now tiring, and the cigarette smoke also started to sting my eyes. I was driven to yawning a lot. My stepmother’s mama set the table. She had brought our supper herself, in her capacious handbag. She had even managed to procure some meat on the black market. She had made a point of relating that earlier, on arrival. My father even promptly paid for it from his leather wallet. We were already eating when, without warning, Uncle Steiner and Uncle Fleischmann also dropped by. They too wanted to take leave of Father. Uncle Steiner launched right away into a “don’t anyone mind us.” He said: “I’m Steiner. Please, don’t get up.” As ever, he was in fraying slippers, his rounded paunch poking out from under his unbuttoned waistcoat, the perennial stub of a foul-smelling cigar in his mouth. He had a big, ruddy head, the childlike parting of the hair giving him a distinctly odd impression. Uncle Fleischmann was utterly unnoticeable beside him, being a diminutive man of immaculate appearance, with white hair, ashen skin, owlish spectacles, and a perpetual slightly worried air on his face. He bowed mutely at Uncle Steiner’s side, wringing his hands as if in apology for Uncle Steiner, or so it seemed, though I’m not sure about that. The two old codgers are inseparable, even though they are forever bickering, because there is no topic on which they can agree. They shook hands in turn with my father. Uncle Steiner even patted him on the back, calling him “Old boy,” and then going on to crack his old quip: “Chin down! Don’t lose our disheartenment!” He also said—and even Uncle Fleischmann nodded furiously along with this—that they would continue to look out for me and the “young lady” (as he called my stepmother). He blinked his button eyes, then pulled my father to his paunch and embraced him. After they had gone everything was drowned by the clatter of cutlery, the hum of conversation, and the fumes of the food and the thick tobacco smoke. By now all that got through to me, separating themselves out from the surrounding fog as it were, were disconnected scraps of some face or gesture, especially the tremulous, bony, yellow head of my stepmother’s mama as she served each plate; the two palms of Uncle Lajos’s hands raised in protest as he refused the meat, since it was pork and his faith forbade it; the pudgy cheeks,
lively jaw, and moist eyes of my stepmother’s older sister; then Uncle Willie’s bald cranium unexpectedly looming pinkish in the cone of the light’s rays, and fragments of his latest blithe anatomization; on top of which, I also recollect Uncle Lajos’s solemn words, received in dead silence, in which he invoked God’s assistance in the matter of “our being able, before long, to gather together again at the family table, each and every one of us, in peace and love and good health.” I barely saw anything of my father, and all that I made out of my stepmother was that a great deal of attention and consideration were being paid toward her— almost more than toward my father—and that at one point she complained of a headache, so several of them pressed her as to whether she would like a tablet or a compress, but she didn’t want either. Then again, every now and then, I couldn’t help noticing my grandmother and how much she got in the way, how she had to be guided back to the sofa time and time again, her umpteen complaints, and her blind eyes, which through the thick, steamed-up, tear-smudged lenses of her glasses looked just like two peculiar, perspiring insects. A moment came when everyone got up from the table. The final farewells ensued. My grandmother and grandfather left separately though, somewhat before my stepmother’s family. What stayed with me as maybe the strangest experience of that entire evening was Grandfather’s sole act to draw attention to himself when he pressed his tiny, sharply defined bird’s head for no more than an instant, but really fiercely, almost crazily, to the breast of my father’s jacket. His entire body was racked by a spasm. He then hastened quickly to the door, leading my grandmother by the elbow. Everyone parted to let them through. After that I too was embraced by several people and felt the sticky marks of lips on my face. Finally, there was a sudden hush after all of them left.
