Fatelessness

by Imre Kertész

  In the end, I brought up an example. I had already occasionally given some idle thought to the matter, which is how it entered my head. Then again, I had also read a book, a sort of novel, not long ago. A beggar and a prince who, leaving that one difference aside, conspicuously resembled each other both facially and physically, to the point they could not be told apart, exchanged fates with each other out of sheer curiosity, until in the end the beggar turned into a real prince while the prince became a real beggar. I asked the girl to try and imagine the same thing about herself. It was not very likely, of course, but then all kinds of things are possible, after all. What could have happened to her, let’s say in very early infancy, when a person is not yet able to speak or remember, it didn’t matter how, but suppose she had somehow been swapped or got mixed up with a child from another family whose documents were in perfect order from a racial point of view. In this hypothetical case it would now be the other girl who would perceive the difference and of course wear the yellow star, whereas she, in view of what she knew, would see herself—as of course would others—as being exactly like other people, and she would neither think about nor recognize any difference. As far as I could tell, that had quite an impact on her. At first she merely fell silent, then very slowly, but with a softness I felt as almost palpable, her lips parted as if she were wishing to say something. That was not what happened, however, but something else, much odder: she burst into tears. She buried her head in the angle of her elbow, which was resting on the table, her shoulders shaken by tiny jerks. I was utterly amazed, as that had not been my aim at all, and anyway the sight in itself threw me somehow. I tried leaning over to pat her hair, shoulder, and a bit on her arm, begging her not to cry. But she exclaimed bitterly, in a voice that choked as it went on, something along the lines that if our own qualities had nothing to do with it, then it was all pure chance, and if she could be someone else than the person she was forced to be, then “the whole thing has no sense,” and that notion, in her opinion, “is unbearable.” I was perturbed, given I was to blame, but I had no way of knowing that this notion could be so important to her. I was almost on the point of telling her not to worry about it, because none of it meant anything to me, I didn’t despise her on account of her race; but I sensed right away that this would be a slightly ridiculous thing for me to say, so I didn’t say it. Nonetheless, it bugged me not to be able to say it, because that was really what I felt at that moment, irrespective of being in the situation of not being able to say it freely. Though it is quite possible, of course, that in another situation I might perhaps see things differently. I didn’t know, and I also realized there was no way to test it. Still, the thing somehow made me feel awkward. I couldn’t say exactly why, but now, for the very first time, I sensed something that I suppose indeed slightly resembled shame.

  It was only in the stairwell, however, that I learned I had apparently upset Annamarie with this feeling of mine, for that is when she started to behave oddly. I spoke to her, but she didn’t even reply. I tried to put my hand on her arm, but she tore herself out of my grasp and left me standing on the stairs.

  I also waited in vain for her to appear the next afternoon. As a result, I couldn’t go to the sisters’ place either, since up till now we had always gone together, so they would undoubtedly have asked questions. Anyway, I was now more inclined to appreciate what the girl had said on Sunday.

  She did show up at the Fleischmanns’ that evening, however. She was still very stiff about talking to me, her expression only softening a little when, in response to her remark that she hoped I had had a nice afternoon with the sisters, I told her that I hadn’t gone up there. She was curious as to why, to which I replied, since it was only the truth, that I hadn’t wanted to go without her. I could see that this answer must have pleased her. After some more time, she was even willing to go and look at the fish with me, and by the time we returned from the other room, we had completely patched things up. Later on that evening, she made just one more remark about it all: “That was our first quarrel,” she said.

  THREE

  The next day I had a slightly odd experience. I got up that morning and set off for work as usual. It promised to be a hot day, and as ever the bus was packed with passengers. We had already left the houses of the suburbs behind and driven across the short, unornamented bridge that crosses to Csepel Island, after which the road carries on through open country for a stretch, between fields with, over on the left, a flat, hangarlike building and, over on the right, the scattered greenhouses of market gardeners, when the bus braked very suddenly, and then I heard from outside snatches of a voice issuing orders, which the conductor and several passengers relayed on down to me, to the effect that any Jewish passenger who happened to be on the bus should get off. Ah well, I thought to myself, no doubt they want to do a spot-check on the papers of everyone going across.

  Indeed, on the highway I found myself face-to-face with a policeman. Without a word being said, I immediately held out my pass toward him. He, however, first sent the bus on its way with a brisk flip of the hand. I was beginning to think that maybe he didn’t understand the ID, and was just on the point of explaining to him that, as he could see, I am assigned to war work and most certainly could not afford to have my time wasted, when all at once the road around me was thronged with voices and boys, my companions from Shell. They had emerged from hiding behind the embankment. It turned out that the policeman had already grabbed them off earlier buses, and they were killing themselves with laughter that I too had turned up. Even the policeman cracked a bit of a smile, like someone who, though more detached, was still joining in the fun to a degree; I could see straightaway that he had nothing against us—nor indeed could he have, naturally. I asked the other boys what it was all about anyway, but they didn’t have a clue either for the time being.

  The policeman then stopped all subsequent buses running from the city by stepping into their path, from a certain distance away, with a hand upstretched; before that he sent the rest of us behind the embankment. Each and every time, the same scene would be reenacted: the initial surprise of the new boys eventually shifting into laughter. The policeman appeared to be satisfied. Roughly a quarter of an hour passed like this. It was a clear summer morning with the sun already starting to warm the grass, as we could feel when we lay down against it. The fat tanks of the oil plant could readily be made out farther away, amid a bluish haze. Beyond that were factory chimneys and yet farther off, more hazily, the pointed outline of some church steeple. The boys, singly or in groups, turned up one after the other from the buses. One of these arrivals was a popular, very chirpy, freckled kid, his hair cropped in black spikes, “Leatherware” as everyone calls him, because unlike the others, who mostly come from various schools, he has gone into that trade. Then there was “Smoker,” a boy you almost never saw without a cigarette. Admittedly, most of the others have the occasional smoke and, not to be outdone, I’ve recently been trying it out myself, but I’ve noticed that he panders to the habit quite differently, with a hunger that verges on the truly feverish. Even his eyes have a strange, febrile expression. He’s more one of those taciturn, somehow none too sociable types, and is not generally liked by the others. All the same, I once asked him what he found so great about smoking so much, to which he gave the curt reply, “It’s cheaper than food.” I was slightly taken aback, since such a reason would never have occurred to me. What surprised me even more, though, was the sort of sarcastic, somehow almost censorious look he had when he noticed my discomfiture; it was disagreeable, so I laid off any further probing. Still, I now better appreciated the guardedness the others showed toward him. By then, another arrival was being greeted with a more unconstrained whooping: he’s the one known to all his closer pals simply as “Fancyman.” That name seemed to me to fit him to a T, given his sleek, dark hair, his big, gray eyes, and the congenial polish of his entire being in general; only later did I hear that the expression actually has quite another meaning,
which was why it had been bestowed on him, since back at home he was reputedly very slick in his dealings with girls. One of the buses brought “Rosie” as well—Rosenfeld actually, but everyone uses the shorter nickname. For some reason, he enjoys a degree of respect among the boys, and on matters of common interest we generally tend to go along with his view; he’s also always the one who deals with the foreman as our representative. I’ve heard that he is going through commercial college. With his intelligent, though somewhat excessively elongated face, his wavy blonde hair, and his slightly hard-set, watery-blue eyes, he reminds me of old-master paintings in museums that have titles like “The Infante with Greyhound” and such. Another who turned up was Moskovics, a diminutive kid, with a much more lopsided and what I would call rather ugly mug, the goggles perched on his broad snub nose having pebble lenses as thick as my grandma’s . . . and likewise all the others. The general opinion, which was more or less the way I saw it, was that the whole affair was a bit unusual but undoubtedly some kind of mistake. “Rosie,” having been egged on by some of the others, even asked the policeman if we would get into trouble for turning up late for work, and when in fact he intended to let us go on about our business. The policeman was not in the least put out by the question, but then again he replied that it was not up to him to decide. As became clear, he really knew very little more than we did: he referred to “further orders” that would replace the older ones, which were to the effect that until then, for the time being, both he and we would have to wait—that was roughly how he explained it. Even if this was not entirely clear, in essence it all sounded, as the boys and I thought, quite reasonable. In any case, we were obligated to defer to the policeman, after all. Then again, we found this all the easier in that quite understandably, safe in the knowledge of our ID cards and the stamp of the war industry authorities, we saw no reason for taking the policeman very seriously. He, for his part, could see—so it emerged from his own words—that he was dealing with “intelligent boys” on whose “sense of discipline,” he added, he could hopefully continue to count; as far as I could see, he had decided he liked us. He himself seemed sympathetic: he was a fairly short policeman, neither young nor old, with clear, very pale eyes set in a sun-tanned face. From a number of the words he used, I deduced he must have come from a rural background.

  It was seven o’clock; by now the day shift would be starting in the oil works. The buses were no longer bringing any new boys, and the policeman now asked if any of us were missing. “Rosie” counted us and reported that we were all present. The policeman reckoned it would be better if we didn’t hang around there, by the side of the road. He seemed troubled, and I somehow had the impression that he had been just as little prepared for us as we were for him. He even asked, “Now what am I going to do with you guys?” However, there wasn’t much we could do to help him on that, of course. We gathered around him exuberantly, giggling, as if he were a teacher on some school excursion, with him in the middle of our group, pensively stroking his chin. In the end, he proposed we go to the customs post.

  We accompanied him over to a solitary, shabby, single-story building close by, next to the highway; this was the “Customs House,” as a weather-beaten inscription on the front also declared. The policeman produced a bunch of keys and picked out from the many jingling keys the one that fit the lock. Inside we found a pleasantly cool and spacious, though somewhat bare, room furnished with a few benches and a long, rickety table. The policeman also opened the door to a considerably smaller office room of sorts. As best I could see past the gap left by the door, inside were a carpet and a writing desk with a telephone handset on it. We even heard the policeman making a brief call. Though one could not make out what he said, I suppose he must have been trying to hurry the orders along, because when he came out, carefully locking the door behind him, he said, “Nothing. Too bad, we’ll just have to wait.” He urged us to make ourselves comfortable. He even asked if we knew any party games. One boy—“Leatherware,” as far as I recollect—suggested paper, scissors, stone. The policeman, however, was not too keen on that, saying that he had expected better of “such bright kids” like us. For a while he swapped jokes with us, though meanwhile I had the feeling that he was striving at all costs to keep us amused somehow, maybe so we would have no time for any of the unruliness that he had already mentioned out on the highway; but then he proved fairly out of his depth with that sort of thing. Before long, indeed, he left us to our own devices, having noted that he had work to attend to. As he went out we heard him locking the door on us from outside.

  There is not much I could tell about what ensued. It seemed we were in for a long wait for the orders. Still, as far as we were concerned, we didn’t look on this as the least bit urgent; after all, we were not frittering away our own time. We all agreed it was nicer here, in the cool, than to be sweating at work. There was little shade to be had at the oil plant. “Rosie” had even managed to wangle the foreman’s permission for us to strip off our shirts. This did not exactly conform with the letter of the regulations, it’s true, since it meant the yellow stars would not be visible on us, but the foreman agreed all the same, out of common decency. The only one to suffer a bit had been Moskovics with his paper-white skin, as his back had turned red as a lobster in the blink of an eye, and we had a big laugh at the long tatters of skin that he peeled off it afterward.

  So we settled down on the benches or on the bare earth of the customs post, but I would find it hard to say exactly how we spent the time. Certainly, plenty of jokes were cracked, cigarettes were brought out, and then, as time went on, packed lunches. The foreman was not forgotten either, with people remarking that he must have been a bit mystified this morning when we didn’t turn up for work. Some horseshoe nails were also produced for a game of jacks. It was there, among the boys, that I learned how that goes: each player throws a nail up in the air and the winner is the one who can snatch the most from the nails still in front of him in the time it takes to catch the first nail. “Fancyman,” with his slim hands and long fingers, won every round. “Rosie,” for his part, taught us a song, which we warbled through several times over. The curious thing about the song was that the lyrics can be rendered in three languages using exactly the same words: by sticking an es at the end of the words, it sounds German; an io, then Italian; and taki, then Japanese. All this stuff was just silly, of course, but it kept me entertained.

  After that I took a look at each of the grown-ups as they came in. They too had been rounded up by the policemen from the buses in just the same way as us. That, in fact, is how I realized that when he was not with us, he was out on the highway, engaged in the same pursuit as in the morning. One by one, there must have been seven or eight of them who were collected that way, all men. I could see, however, that they were giving the policeman a tougher time, with their expressions of bewilderment, shaking of heads, explanations, showing of documents, and nitpicking questions. They pumped us too: Who and what were we? Later, though, they tended to keep to themselves; we gave up a couple of the benches for them, and they huddled on or hung around these. They talked about all sorts of things, but I didn’t pay much attention. They attempted mainly to figure out what could be behind the policeman’s action, and what consequences the episode might have for them; from what I could hear, though, there were about as many different views as there were men. On the whole, as far as I could tell, it depended mainly on what sort of documents they had on them, because as best I could make out, they too all had some paper giving them leave to head for Csepel, some on private business, others—just like us—out of public duty.

  I did, however, take note of a few more interesting faces among them. One of them, I noticed, did not join in the conversation, for instance, but instead merely read a book that, it seems, he just happened to have with him. He was a very tall, gaunt guy in a yellow windbreaker, with a sharp slit of a mouth stretching between two deep, ill-tempered-looking furrows in his bristly face. He had chosen a place fo
r himself at the very end of one of the benches, beside the window, legs crossed and back to the others; it was that, perhaps, which reminded me somewhat of a traveler who is so used to railway compartments that he considers every word, query, or the habitual introductory chitchat that accidental travel companions exchange a waste of time, enduring the wait until the destination is reached with bored indifference— that at least was the kind of impression he gave me.

  A somewhat older, elegant-looking man with silvered temples and a bald spot on the crown of his head caught my attention the moment he arrived, not long before noon, because he was highly indignant as the policeman ushered him in. He even asked if there was a telephone that “he might make use of.” The policeman made it clear, however, that he was very sorry but the device “is reserved purely for official purposes,” at which the man fell silent, an angry scowl on his face. Later on, from the answers, laconic though they were, that he gave to inquiries from the others, I gathered that he, like us, also belonged to one of the Csepel manufacturing establishments; he styled himself “an expert,” without going into further details. Otherwise he came across as very self-confident and, as far as I could tell, his take on things must have been similar to ours by and large, except that he seemed to be offended at being detained. I noticed that he was invariably disparaging, even somewhat contemptuous, in his pronouncements about the policeman. He said that the policeman, in his view, “may have some general instruction, it appears,” that he was probably “executing overzealously.” He reckoned, though, that obviously “the competent authorities” would eventually act on the matter, adding that he hoped that was going to be soon. I heard little more from him after that, indeed forgot all about him. It was only getting into the afternoon that he fleetingly attracted my attention again, but by then I was tired too and noticed little more than how impatient he must be, now sitting down, now standing up, now folding his arms over his chest, now clasping them behind his back, now checking his watch.