Imre Kertész - Kaddish for an Unborn Child

we must at least have the will to fail , as Bernhard’s scientist says, because failure, failure alone, is left as the sole fulfillable experience, I say, and thus I too have the will, if I must have a will to anything, and I must, because I live and write, and both are willings, life being more a blind willing, writing more a sighted willing and therefore, of course, a different kind of willing from life, maybe it has the will to see what life has the will for, because it can do nothing else, it recites life back to life, recapitulates life, as if it, writing, were itself life, though it is not, quite fundamentally, incommensurably, indeed incomparably not that, hence if one starts to write, and one starts to write about life, failure is guaranteed. And now, in my bottomless night, rent by lights, sounds and the pains throbbing inside me, I seek answers to the final, big questions, knowing full well all the while that to every final, big question there exists just a single final, big answer: the one that solves all things because it stills all questions and all questioners, and for us, ultimately, this is the sole existing solution, the final goal of our willings, even if ordinarily we take no notice of it and don’t in any way have the will for it, for then we would have no will at all, though speaking for myself I don’t see what purpose might still be served by quibbling; nevertheless, while I am recapitulating my life here — God help us! — this life here, and I ask myself why I bother, apart from having to work, maniacally, with lunatic diligence and without a break, because associations of mortal seriousness are sustained between my continued sustenance and my work, that’s perfectly obvious, all the same, recapitulating my life here, I am probably driven by some surreptitious hope of my surreptitious will, namely, that I might one day become acquainted with this hope, and I shall probably keep on writing, maniacally, with lunatic diligence and without a break, until I have made its acquaintance, because what reason would I have for writing after that? And when later on, as the pair of us roamed the dingy and not so dingy streets, my wife (to-be and ex-) asked what name I would give, all the same, to that particular pure concept, untrammeled by any foreign matter, about which I had spoken earlier, at the gathering, in connection with “Teacher,” who, incidentally, she declared was “a very moving figure” and she hoped she would encounter him again in one of my pieces, she said, a remark to which I turned a blind eye, so to say, as to a physical blemish which should not be allowed to disturb the magic, at least for the moment while the magic still is magic, and without hesitation I rejoined that that concept was, in my opinion, freedom, and freedom primarily because “Teacher” did not do what he ought to have done, that is, what he ought to have done according to rational calculations of hunger, the survival instinct and madness, and the blood compact that the dominating power had entered into with hunger, the survival instinct and madness, but instead, repudiating all that, he did something else, something that he ought not to have done and that no rationally minded person would expect from anybody. At that my wife (though not yet that at the time) fell silent for a while, then suddenly — and I recollect her face upraised to me in the dancing lights of the night, both soft-grained and glassily opalescent and glistening, like a 1930s close-up, and I recollect her voice too, which trembled with the emotion and agitation of her audacity, or at least that was what I supposed at the time, and maybe it was so, though why would it have been since nothing is quite what we suppose or would like to suppose, the world not being a notion but a chimera of ours, full of unimaginable surprises — suddenly declared that I must be very lonely and sad and, for all my experience, very inexperienced to be so lacking in faith in people, yes, to need to be producing theories in order to explain a natural (yes, that’s what she said: natural), a natural and decent human gesture; and I recollect how much these words upset me, a remark that was so utterly amateurish and so beguiling in its very untenability, I recollect, yes, just as I also recollect the smile that followed, timid at first but turning quizzical, then rapidly confidential, a play of expressions that I have tried to conjure up so many times subsequently, because in a certain sense it always entranced me, to start with pleasurably, later, when I no longer managed to conjure it up, painfully; or in other words, to start with its reality, later on its lack, and still later on just its memory, the way it usually is and, it would seem, has to be, as it is never any different — I recollect all this, my emotions suddenly compacting, becoming almost uncomfortably immanent and confused, and even more the question she asked as to whether she might take my arm. “Certainly,” I replied. But at this point it would be fitting for me to relate roughly how I was living at the time so that I may understand and recognize what I need to understand and recognize, and that is in what respect this moment differed from other, similar moments in which, just as in that moment, it was decided that I would soon be going to bed with a woman. And I put it this way, “it was decided,” because even though it is true — and what could be more natural, naturally — that I myself always play a goodly part in such decisions, even to the extent of taking on the role of prime mover, or at least an appearance of that, nevertheless this practically never presents itself to me as a decision; on the contrary, it presents itself to me as an adventure which renders impossible even the possibility of there being a decision, like a vortex opening at my feet, when my blood is seething inside me like a waterfall, stilling all other considerations, and at the same time I am perfectly clear, well in advance of the usual outcome of the adventure, so that as far as a decision is concerned, if it were to lie within my power, I would hardly decide to commit myself to adventures of this kind. But maybe it is precisely this which attracts me, this contradiction, this vortex. I don’t know, I just don’t know. Because this has happened to me more than once, the selfsame thing, the selfsame way, so I have to infer from this constant repetition that some sort of pattern is stealthily actuating and guiding me: a woman with a timid smile and scurrying movements, in the archaic guise of a loose-tressed, barefoot serving wench as it were, quietly and modestly asks permission to enter — how shall I put it in order to avoid having to utter the banality that I shall nevertheless utter, because what else could I say, if the cheap trick has proved itself since time immemorial, and splendidly at that? — asks permission to enter my ultimum moriens , my ultimate failure, in other words my heart, whereupon she takes a look around with a charming and inquisitive smile, delicately touches everything, dusts down one thing and another, airs the musty crannies, throws out this and that, stows her own stuff in their place, and nicely, tidily, and irresistibly settles in until I finally become aware that she has completely squeezed me out of there, so that boxed in like an outcast stranger I find I am steering clear of my own heart, which now only presents itself to me distantly, with closed doors, like the snug homes of others before the homeless; and very often I have only managed to move back in by arriving hand in hand with another woman and letting her lodge there instead. I carefully thought it all through in this much detail, or this plastically I might say, as only befits my profession as writer and translator, after one of my longer-standing, almost painfully and interminably long-standing relationships had come to an end, a relationship that at the time, or so I believed, was taking a fairly heavy toll on me and, seeing it was thereby threatening the freedom that was absolutely necessary (not just necessary: indispensable) for my work, I was induced to prudence yet at the same time to further reflection as to what would follow. That was chiefly because I couldn’t help noticing that regaining my long-yearned freedom by no means conferred the stimulus to work that I expected from this turn of events; indeed, I disconcertedly had to admit that I had worked more energetically, I might say more angrily, and thus more productively, while I had merely been struggling for my freedom, indecisively now breaking up, now getting back together again, than I was working now,when I was free again, to be sure, but this freedom only filled me with emptiness and boredom; just as a good deal later, another sort of state, to wit the happiness that I experienced with my wife during our relationship and then at the beginning of our marriage, likewise taught me that this state, to wit that is to say happiness, also has an adverse effect on my work. So first of all I took a hard look at my work, as to what it really is and why it creates demands that are so oppressive, or at any rate tiring and often frankly unattainable, virtually suicidal; and even if I was then still groping far away — God, and how far — from true clear-sightedness, from a recognition of the true nature of my work, which is in essence nothing other than to dig, to keep on digging to the end, the grave that others have started to dig for me in the air; at any rate, I recognized that as long as I am working I am, and if I were not working, who knows, would I be? could I be? so in this way the most deadly serious associations are sustained between my continued sustenance and my work, one precondition of which, it seems, must be, I supposed (because, however sadly this may reflect on me, I was unable to suppose otherwise), unhappiness, though not of course unhappiness of the sort that would immediately deprive me of even the possibility of my working, such as illness, homelessness, poverty, to say nothing of prison and the like, but rather the sort of unhappiness that women alone can confer on me. As a result, and especially since at the time I happened to be reading Schopenhauer’s speculation “On the Apparent Deliberateness in the Fate of the Individual,” which can be found in one of the volumes of Parerga and Paralipomena , a set of which I latched upon as plunder in an antiquarian bookshop during the period of library liquidations following the country’s great ethnic upheavals and wave of emigration, moreover so cheaply that even I was able to afford the four bulky black tomes, survivors of censorships, book burnings, pulpings, and all manner of other book-Auschwitzes, as a result I could not entirely rule out the possibility that, to avail myself of that most obsolete expression in wholly obsolete psychoanalysis, I am possibly subject to somewhat of an Oedipus complex, which, after all, taking into account the not exactly orderly circumstances of my younger days, would be little wonder, I supposed now, the only question I asked myself was whether the influence (albeit not the sole determinant, for the mere possibility of this self-analysis was in itself more than encouraging, I supposed) came from the father-son or the mother-son relationship, and the answer I gave myself was that it was most likely the role of the mother’s son, the mother’s rejected son, that manifests itself now and again in my behavior. I even went so far as to construct a hypothesis around this, as the jottings I made at the time testify. According to this, the father’s rejected son inclines more towards a transcendental problematic, whereas the mother’s rejected son, and that is what I had to postulate myself as being, tends towards a more sensory, pliable and impressionable material, towards plasticity, and I supposed ready examples of the former were to be found in Kafka, and of the second in Proust or Joseph Roth. And even though this hypothesis probably rests on an extremely shaky footing, and these days I would know better than not only not to write it down but even to bring it up as a topic for a flagging late-night discussion, all the more because it simply no longer interests me (oh, I’ve moved on a long way since then), and if I still have any recollection of it at all, then it is just as a brief, still aimless and hesitant step on the long, long, who could know how protracted path to true clear-sightedness, or, in other words, conscious self-liquidation; at any rate, it is a fact that the — how shall I put it? — benefit of this complex flowed from me into my work, its harm from my work into me, so I was able to deduce from the apparent deliberateness manifested, if not exactly in my fate, then at least in my behavior at the time, that I furtively produce, verbally create, the situation and role of the mother’s rejected son, presumably on account of the accompanying very singular — and, were I not a little ashamed, I would say gratifying — pain, which, from the viewpoint of my work, it seems I absolutely require (naturally, along with freedom , which is my prime requirement). Yes, because it appears that in my pain I end up hitting on creative forces, no matter what the price, and no matter that it may just be ordinary compensation finding an outlet in creativity, what is important is that it nonetheless finds an outlet and that through the pain I live in some sort of truth, and if I did not live in it, perhaps the simple truth might — who knows? — leave me cold; as it is, however, the notion of pain is intimately and permanently interwoven within me with the aspect of life, the (I am quite certain) most authentic aspect of life. And in this I then also spotted an explanation for the phenomenon that I was talking about previously, namely, why, when I am in possession of my complete freedom, my stimulus to work is reduced, whereas when I am in the thick of fighting for my freedom and in all sorts of mental turmoil, it is increased, for obviously the way the neurosis induced by my complex (or which induces my complex) affects me is that, if it is in its receding phase, then my desire to work also subsides, but if some new trauma arrives to rekindle the neurosis dormant within me, my desire to work is also ignited. That’s perfectly clear and simple, so now one might think all one needs is to provide for continual triggers to keep the fires of my work incessantly burning — and I formulate it in this pointed manner precisely in order to underline its absurdity to myself, because as soon as I had completed this self-analysis I also squared accounts with my complex, indeed, I instantly took a natural aversion to it, or to be more accurate, not only to my complex but also to myself for building up the complex even as I was concealing it from myself and playacting, precisely this idiotic infantile complex, attesting to intellectual immaturity and betraying inadmissible vulnerability, when there is nothing I hate more than infantilism. I was thus cured at least of that particular complex, or to be more precise, I pronounced myself cured, not so much in the interests of regaining my health of course but more my self-esteem, so that when, not long after that, I entered into a relationship with another woman, I laid down the possibly harsh-sounding but nevertheless highly practical condition that the word “love” and its synonyms should never be uttered between us, or in other words, that our love could last only as long as we were not in love with one another, whether mutually or unilaterally was neither here nor there, because the moment that this misfortune should happen to overtake either or, perchance, both of us, we would have to terminate our relationship instantly; and my partner, let me put it that way, who also happened to be recovering from a fairly severe amatory mishap, accepted this condition without demur (at least so it seemed) though the untroubledness of our relationship, I don’t doubt it, evidently soon troubled her and would have eroded our relationship had I not in the meantime made the acquaintance of my ex- (or at that time still future) wife, which in the end (at least for me) represented the radical solution. Around this time, moreover, I was still living in a sublet room, which undeniably seemed absurd, so to say, under the circumstances of a consolidation that by then was heading into its second decade, at a time when— albeit usually at the cost of myocardial infarcts, diabetes, chronic gastric ulcers, psychosomatic breakdowns, moral and financial ruin or, in the better cases, merely the total disintegration of family life — nearly all my friends and acquaintances or whatever I might call them had acquired their own apartments, as for me, I didn’t think about it, or to the extent that I did think about it I thought that I could not entertain the thought of it, simply because it would have required me to live in a different way, under the badge of money and, above all, of moneymaking, and that would have entailed so many concessions, misconceptions, compromises and, all in all, so much inconvenience , even if I were to have lulled myself into thinking that it was all just temporary , purely a means to an end, because how can we live even temporarily in any way other than the way we must permanently and generally live without its bitter consequences rebounding on our normal life, that is to say, more or less the life that, after all, we have stipulated for ourselves, in which we are, after all, the masters and legislators, and I was therefore simply unable, and did not even wish, to take upon myself all these absurdities, the absurd inconveniences of acquiring an apartment in Hungary, which first and foremost would have put my freedom , my independence of mind and as a matter of fact my independence from external circumstances under threat, under total threat at that, so that I had to set myself against that danger totally, or in other words, with my whole life. And actually I must admit that my wife was right, for after reconnoitering my circumstances at the time with searching tenacity and irresistible probing, accompanied by those plays of expression that were already then slowly becoming familiar and which, so I thought at the time, acted upon me like an ever-surprising and miraculous sunrise, she declared that meant I was imprisoning myself for the sake of my freedom. Yes, undoubtedly there was some truth in that. To be more accurate, that was precisely the truth. That, given a choice between the prison of acquiring an apartment in Hungary and the prison of not owning an apartment in Hungary, the latter suited me better, since there (in the prison of not owning an apartment in Hungary) I was better able to do as I pleased, better able to live for myself, sheltered, concealed and uncorrupted, until this prison — or, if one insists on making comparisons, I could perhaps better call it a preserving jar — suddenly, and undoubtedly through my wife’s magic touch, sprang open, and my subtenant life all at once proved to be unsheltered, unconcealed, corruptible and consequently untenable, just like my subsequent and eventually my present life too, and just as, I suppose, every life proves to be untenable once it is contemplated in the light of our flashes of recognition, for it is precisely the untenability of our lives which leads to our flashes of recognition, in the light of which we come to recognize that our life is untenable — and it really is that, untenable, because it is taken away from us. Yes, I lived my subtenant life as if I were not quite living, diminished, temporarily, absentmindedly (taking only my work seriously), with that feeling, unclarified but sure, and therefore not standing in need of clarification, feeling, that it was, as it were, merely a waiting period of uncertain duration elapsing between my only two pieces of true business, that of my coming into being and that of my passing away, which I must somehow while away (preferably with work); yet this waiting period is my only time, the only time I can account for, though I don’t know why and to whom I should account for it, perhaps to myself, above all, so that I may recognize what I still have to recognize and do what I still can do, but then to everybody, or to nobody, or to anybody who will be ashamed on our behalf and possibly for us, since I am unable to account for my time either prior to my coming into being or after my passing away, if these states of mine have anything at all to do with the only time I have —something (that is, that they could have anything to do with it) I find hard to believe. And now that, in the clarity of my night as it descends upon me, I contemplate my subtenant life at length and fretfully, with a cool expertise maybe, yet not free from certain preconceptions either, I suddenly believe I recognize its archetype, and more specifically believe I recognize it in my concentration camp life not so many years, though also an eternity ago; to be precise, in that phase of my camp life when my camp life was no longer real camp life, insofar as liberating soldiers had taken the place of the incarcerating soldiers, yet it was camp life all the same because I was still living in a camp. It happened precisely the day after this change in state (that is, that liberating soldiers had replaced the incarcerating soldiers) that I staggered out of the hospital barrack Saal , or room, in which I was then quartered, since I was, to put it mildly, ill, which in itself of course hardly constituted grounds for my being accommodated in the hospital barrack but, owing to a coincidence of certain circumstances which, in the final analysis, took the form of a piece of good luck only slightly more astounding than the accustomed bad luck, I nevertheless happened to be being accommodated in the hospital barrack, and the next morning I staggered out of the Saal , or room, to the so-called ablutions, and as I opened the door to the so-called ablutions and was just about to move towards the wash trough, or perhaps before that to the urinal, when my feet simply (and I am unable to come up with anything more apt than this tired cliché, because that was almost literally what happened) they simply became rooted to the spot, for a German soldier was standing at the washbasin and as I entered he slowly turned his head toward me ; and before fright could cause me to collapse, faint, wet myself or who knows what else, through the greyish-black fog of my terror I noticed a gesture, a hand gesture by the German soldier, beckoning me towards the washbasin, a rag that the German soldier was holding in the hand that was making the gesture, and a smile, the German soldier’s smile; in other words, I slowly grasped that the German soldier was just scrubbing the washbasin , while his smile was merely expressing his readiness to be of service to me, that he was scrubbing the washbasin for me , or in other words the world order had changed, which is to say that it had not changed at all, which is to say that the world order had changed merely this much, and yet even just that much was not an entirely negligible change in that whereas yesterday it had been I who was the prisoner, today it was he, and this put an end to my sudden terror only inasmuch as it gradually tamed the immediate feeling into one of persistent and unshakable mistrust-fulness, matured it within me, one could say, into a way of looking at the world that my subsequent camp life (because I continued to live like this, as a free camp inmate in the camp, for quite a while) bestowed on my free camp life such a singular flavor and piquancy, the unforgettably sweet and tentative experience of life regained: that I was living and yet living as if the Germans might return at any moment , and therefore not fully living after all. Yes, and I have to believe (though it was probably as yet unknowing, allowing for the circumstances: the constraint of not owning an apartment that, in the final analysis, I prolonged this experience, the unforgettably sweet and tentative experience of my free camp life, into my subtenant life, this experience of a life before and after all flashes of recognition, unencumbered by any of life’s burdens, least of all the burden of life itself, that I was living, but living as if the Germans might return at any moment; and if I impart to this notion, or way of life, or whatever I should call it, a certain symbolic significance, it immediately seems it is thus less absurd, for there is no getting away from it, in a symbolic sense, the Germans might return at any moment, der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland, sein Auge ist blau , Death is a blue-eyed master from Germany, he can come at any moment, track you down anywhere, take aim at you, and he makes no mistake, er tri ft dich genau . So that was how I lived my subtenant life, in a way that was not quite living and indisputably not quite a life, rather it was just being alive, yes, surviving , to be more precise. Obviously, this subsequently left deeper imprints in me. I suppose certain of my obvious peculiarities also have their roots in this. I suppose I ought to talk here about, for example, my relationship to property, the property that sustains everybody, mobilizes everybody, maddens everybody, about this relationship which is actually nonexistent, or at most existent merely as a pure negativity. I don’t believe, and cannot even imagine, that this negativity is a congenital negativity, some kind of defect, otherwise how would I explain my rigid attachment to certain of my more trivial personal chattels (books) or, if it comes to that, to my most important chattel: myself, the fact that I have always sturdily, one might say radically, guarded the chattel I regard as most important (myself), on the one hand against any form of effective self-destruction that is not a decision of my own free will, and on the other hand I have always guarded it, and continue to guard it, indeed increasingly so, against the cheap and perverted seductions of any sort of communal idea (which, by the way, I could just as well list among the varieties of effective self-destruction), even if, of course, I am merely guarding it for another form of destruction; no, I have no doubt that this negative relationship of mine to property was shaped purely by the survival of my survival, by this so very singular and in a certain sense not entirely unproductive, though, of course, sadly untenable mode of existence, which demonstrated my subtenant life to be likewise self-explanatory. In the subtenancy into which I moved during the darkest of those years, which, in accordance with the twisted laws of hell, we were obliged to proclaim incessantly, aloud and in chorus, as the most glittering years, and where I was greeted virtually as a savior, since my presence seemed to protect the sole commandeerable, distrainable, expropriable, billetable, partitionable, requisitionable, etc., etc., room in what was, incidentally, a fairly pleasant apartment, tucked away in a secluded Buda side street, and for which, for that very reason, I had to pay only a virtually symbolic rent that was raised only equally symbolically in the course of subsequent years; as I say, in that subtenancy, neither then, when I could not yet even think about property, nor later, when I could (indeed, perhaps should) have thought about property, yet did not think about it at all, as I say, there I was not threatened by the hazards that are the concomitants of property, the desperate and distressing measures demanded by cracks in pipes, ceilings and elsewhere, the speculations that are the concomitants of property, as to whether or not the property is satisfactory, and ought one not to have at one’s disposal more, or at least more satisfactory, property, while of course taking the best possible advantage (i.e., profit) from the existing, unsatisfactory property; no, an obsessional notion of changing could not possibly have occurred to me, that chafing impulse which might continually dangle before me the possibility of imaginary choices, incessantly pester me and hoodwink me into thinking that I could swap my being here for being somewhere else, that I could exchange my tower-block apartment — of course, at the price of the necessary running around, shelling out, official processing and other unforeseeable complications — for a more satisfactory one, when I don’t even know what it is that would satisfy me more, since I am not even satisfactorily acquainted with my desires, and that is before saying anything about the insoluble worries over furniture, as a result of which my tower-block apartment even now, after so much time, is still not satisfactorily furnished, for I simply don’t know how I should furnish my apartment, I have no conception of an apartment furnished for myself, not the slightest idea what sort of apartment I would like, what sorts of articles I would like to see it furnished with. In my subtenancy, each and every one of the articles was the property of the householders; they were already waiting for me to settle in among them, and in the course of the long, long years that I spent among them perhaps it did not so much as enter my head even to change the place of a single one of the articles, let alone exchange them for other articles or, perhaps, swell their ranks with newer articles purely because, let’s say, I saw an article, wanted it and bought it (aside from books, my books, which I placed at first in a cupboard, then, when that was full, on the table, and then, when there was no more room there either, simply on the floor, until the householders themselves supplementally installed a low supplemental makeshift bookcase); no, as I say, I had no desire at all for, did not buy, indeed probably did not even look at articles, for nothing drives me closer to distraction than a shopwindow piled high with articles, those kinds of shopwindows quite literally dispirit, depress, even demoralize me, so, as I said, I do not look at them at all if possible, which is obviously a sign that I can hardly have any demands of this nature, in this realm (the realm of articles) I make do with the bare necessities, as they say, and probably I am most truly grateful to be placed in a ready-furnished setting where all I have to do is to accept, become acquainted with and grow accustomed to the constellation. I think I was born to be the ideal hotel resident, but because times changed all I could be was a resident of camps and subtenancies, I jotted down at the time in my notebook, from which I am now, decades later, copying into this other notebook, somewhat surprised that I was already then jotting down these kinds of things, which clearly shows that even then I was not living completely blind to my situation, to the untenability of this untenable situation and untenable life. Around that time, I remember, I suffered greatly from a feeling (in reality I might better to call it an ailment) which for my own purposes I termed a “sense of strangeness.” The sensation has been well known to me from early childhood on, essentially my constant companion in life, but around that time it haunted me in a manner little short of hazardous, not allowing me to work during the day nor allowing me to sleep at night, leaving me at once tense to breaking-point and enervated to the point of inertia. It’s a well-defined nervous ailment, not a figment of the imagination, I at any rate believe that in its essence it has a basis in reality, in the reality of our human condition. Usually it starts with what is often an awe-some, but sometimes, especially back then, intolerably acute feeling that my life is hanging by a single thread; it’s not a matter of whether I am living or dying, death has nothing to do with it, in fact it has to do with nothing other than life, and life alone, it’s just that life suddenly assumes within me an aspect and form, or more accurately a formlessness, of the utmost uncertainty, so I am not at all sure about reality; yes, I am seized by total uncertainty about the extremely suspect experiences that are presented to my senses as is for reality, the real existence of myself and my surroundings altogether, an existence that, as I have already said, at the time of such experiences or what I might perhaps better call paroxysms, anyway at the time of these paroxysmal experiences, is connected by just a single thread to life, my own and that of my surroundings, and that thread is my reason alone, nothing else. But then, not only is my mind mistake-prone and, to put it mildly, a far from perfect instrument or sensory organ, or whatever I should call it, on top of that it usually functions sluggishly, haltingly, fuzzily, indeed at times hardly at all. It only follows my actions like someone in bed with the flu does another’s bustling about around him, registering almost everything only after the event, and though one tries to direct this stranger’s rummaging and activity with the occasional listless word, if the latter pays no attention, or happens not to hear, with a resigned impotence one gives up bothering anymore. Yes, this is the “sense of strangeness,” a state of total estrangement which contains not even a slight hint of the fantastical, the astonishing, or an unbridled imagination but just torments one with the tedium of the routine, the commonplace; yes, an utter homelessness, though it neither knows nor gives cognizance of any home, either abandoned or waiting for me in the way that, for example — and this is a question that I have often posed myself in such states — death would be a home, for example. But then, I have replied to myself on such occasions, I ought to believe in the other world, but the snag is precisely that I cannot believe in this world, least of all when in these states, where I am reduced to addressing such questions to myself and when I hold the existence of another world (to wit, the other world) to be just as much an absurdity as the existence of this world; that is to say, I don’t hold it to be at all inconceivable, nor yet conceivable, of course, that another world (to wit, the other world) may exist, only that even if it does exist, then it certainly does not exist for me because I am here . That is, barely here at that; I am only more or less alive, and that fills me with a sense of some unnameable sin. At such times I often tried (try) to sober up, as it were, but in vain; it seems that it is possible for me to connect with life solely in the form of some sort of logical game, like playing chess or making calculations on a piece of paper and, by inscrutable ways and means, all at once some sort of reality derives from the abstract result — in the way (and this was one of my favorite examples at that time, I even noted it down on a pad, from which I am now writing it down here), so in the way, I wrote, let’s say, one holds two wires together, screws them down, inserts the other end into a hole in the wall, presses a button, and the lamp burns; what has happened is an entirely conscious calculation of probabilities, I wrote, the result is the expected one but nonetheless amazing and, in a certain sense, incomprehensible, I wrote. Everything, but everything, is mere deduction, conjecture and probability, no certainty anywhere, no shred of proof anywhere, I wrote. What constitutes my existence? Why am I? What is my essence? For all these questions, I wrote, it’s common knowledge that it is hopeless for me to seek not the answer so much as merely reliable signs; and even my body, which sustains me and will eventually kill me, is strange, I wrote. “Maybe if for just one moment in my life, just a single moment, it were given to me to live in step, so to speak, with the detoxifying actions of my kidneys and liver, the peristaltic movements of my stomach and intestines, the inhalatory and exhalatory movements of my lungs, the systole and diastole of my heart, as well as the metabolic exchanges of my brain with the external world, the formation of abstract thoughts in my mind, the pure knowledge that my consciousness has of all these things and of itself, and the involuntary yet merciful presence of my transcendental soul; if, for just a single moment, I might see, know and possess myself in this way, when there could be no question of course of either possessor or possession, but my identity would simply spring into existence, which can never, ever come into existence; if just one such unrealizable moment were to be realized, maybe that would abolish my “sense of strangeness,” teach me to know , and only then would I know what it means to be. But since that is an impossibility, it being common knowledge that we don’t know, and can never know, what causes the cause of our presence, we are not acquainted with the purpose of our presence, nor do we know why we must disappear from here once we have appeared, I wrote. I don’t know why, I wrote, instead of living a life that may, perhaps, exist somewhere, I am obliged to live merely that fragment which happens to have been given to me: this gender, this body, this consciousness, this geographical arena, this fate, language, history and subtenancy, I wrote. And now that I am noting down what I noted down then, one of my nights then is suddenly revived within me, a dream of mine or, to be more accurate, a waking state of mine, or perhaps a waking dream or a dreaming wakefulness, I don’t know which, but anyway I recall it in extraordinary detail, as if it had occurred only yesterday. I was woken, or plunged into a dream (I don’t know which, and it doesn’t matter at all), by a quite unusually acute “sense of strangeness” such as I had never felt before. That too was a brilliant night, like my present night, glistening velvety-black and pervaded by a motionless, mute, but imperturbable consciousness, and I suddenly realized it was virtually a complete impossibility that this incisive, passive consciousness should all of a sudden simply cease to be and disappear from the world. Yes, and it was as though this consciousness were in no way my consciousness, more a consciousness of myself , and thus while I may know about it, I cannot have it at my disposal, as if, like I say, it were an ever-and omnipresent consciousness not belonging exclusively to me, from which I simply cannot free myself and which, quite fruitlessly and to no purpose, torments me personally to death. On the other hand, I sensed with absolute clarity that this passive consciousness was nonetheless actually not an unhappy consciousness, and that even if I, though only as a subject of that consciousness, were to be unhappy at this moment, that was more a consciousness of my own impotence in relation to that consciousness, in relation to that pitiless, eternal, tormenting, but for all that, as I said, by no means unhappy consciousness; thus, on fully awakening, or plunging fully into my dream (as I said, it really doesn’t matter which), it was subsequently impossible for me not to draw inferences as to the mystery, or rather impossible not to reflect at least that this consciousness is a part of something that encompasses me too within itself, that it is not of my body yet is not completely of my mind either, even though it is mediated by my mind, that it is therefore not exclusively mine, and in truth this consciousness may be the ultimate kernel of my being, which created and evolved this whole thing (my being, that is to say). It was impossible for me not to suppose, therefore, that this consciousness implied a duty, and that even if I were only postulating this duty, its commandments were nevertheless inviolable or, to be more accurate, they could, of course, be violated, but only with the feeling that one has violated the commandment, in other words with a guilty conscience; yet at the same time, and as far as I am concerned, this is the most peculiar part of it, this commandment is not exclusively — how shall I put it? — a moral commandment; no, it also contains an element, requirement, indeed demand, calling directly on one’s handcrafting talents, so to say, that the world “must be constructed,” “must be described,” “must be studied,” and at a time of its own choosing one must be able to demonstrate— it doesn’t matter why, it doesn’t matter to whom: to anybody who will be ashamed on our account and (possibly) for us — that one’s religious duty, totally independently of the crippling religions of crippling churches, is therefore understanding the world; yes, that when all is said and done, it is in this, in understanding the world and my situation, and in this alone, that I may seek my — and again, how shall I put it in order not to say what I am bound to say? — my salvation; yes, for what else would I seek, if I am already seeking something, were it not my salvation? Then again, I also supposed that all this is merely the sort of thought that one is bound to think; in other words, that a person thinks these sorts of thoughts as a result of his condition, because he is compelled to think these sorts of thoughts as a consequence of his condition, and since a person’s condition, at least in certain respects, is a condition that is prescribed and predetermined from the outset, a person is therefore able to think solely predetermined thoughts, or at least ruminate and ponder solely on matters, subjects and problems that are prescribed and predetermined from the outset. For this reason, I supposed, I ought to be thinking thoughts that I don’t have to think, but I no longer recollect if, after that, I did indeed ponder on such thoughts, apart from pondering at all, of course, which I didn’t have to do, and becoming a writer and literary translator, which there was all the less reason for me to have to become, indeed, which I was only able to become in spite of circumstances, by outwitting and deceiving circumstances, by incessantly hiding away and escaping into the labyrinth of circumstances, out of the path of the bullheaded monster whose galloping feet, only in passing as it were, trampled on me now and then, even so, in spite of the monstrous and devastating circumstances, which did not brook thought in any form except in the form of slave thoughts, which is to say not at all; circumstances which glorified, exalted and celebrated slave labor alone and under which I was able to live, be and exist at all practically only in secret, by denying myself out loud and shielding fearfully and mutely within myself my velvety-black night and hopeless hope, which perhaps first slipped past my lips, many, many, many years later, that evening when — taking note, from time to time, of a woman’s gaze that was fixed on me as if seeking to tap a source from within me — I spoke about “Teacher,” that there is a pure concept, untrammeled by any foreign material, whether our body, our soul, our wild beasts, a notion which lives as a uniform image in all our minds, yes, an ideal which (and I did not say this, though I secretly thought it), which perhaps I too will be able to stalk, get closer to and one day even succeed in capturing in writing, a thought that I suppose I don’t have to think but think independently of myself, as it were, and think even if the thought speaks against me, even if it annihilates me, indeed perhaps truly then, because that is perhaps how I would recognize it, that may perhaps be the measure of the thought… Yes, so that was the way I was living at that time. And now that I am relating all this, I do indeed roughly understand and recognize what I need to understand and recognize. As to whether this moment might have differed from other, similar or not even the slightest bit similar moments of mine that initiated a relationship or affair, I can only answer: yes, indeed, it differed radically from them. Just as, at least in a certain sense, I myself also differed radically from myself. For to sum up my subtenant life at that time, my thoughts, my inclinations, my motives, my whole sub-tenanted survival state at that time, I have to conclude that all the signs are that already then everything stood ripe and ready within me for a change of state . I am surely not imagining it when I suppose that I started to speculate, mistakenly, and thus untenably and intolerably, about my life. That I should not look on my life merely as a series of arbitrary accidents succeeding the arbitrary accident of my birth, because that was not just an unworthy, mistaken, and thus untenable, indeed intolerable, but above all, useless —at least for me, an intolerably and shamefully useless — view of life, which I ought to and wish to see much rather as a series of flashes of recognition in which my pride, at least my pride, can take satisfaction. Consequently, the moment in which it was decided that I would soon be going to bed with a woman, that is, with her , who was to became my wife and later my ex-wife, that moment could not have been an accidental moment either. Because it is absolutely clear that everything I have written down here, and which, as I said, stood ripe and ready within me for a change of state was now, as it were, summed up in this moment, even though by the nature of things, I myself could not have been aware of it as yet, yes, even though all I can recollect is her face upraised towards me in the dancing lights of the night, soft-grained and at the same time glassily opalescent and glistening, like a 1930s close-up. Who would have believed where and what I would be enticed to by the promising gleam of this face. And if I add that, as it later became clear, everything likewise stood ripe and ready for a change of state within her too, my future (or ex-) wife, then I may also submit that our meeting was not only not accidental but manifestly a fated meeting. Yes, not much time passed before we were talking about our shared life, though in reality we wanted a fate, both of us our own fate, since that is always individual, unlike anybody else’s, and cannot be shared with anybody else’s. Whatever we talked about, therefore, was all just talking beside the point, pretext and equivocation, albeit undoubtedly not deliberate talking beside the point, pretext and equivocation, or in other words, not lying. Because how could I have known, as today I know better than all else, that everything I do and which happens to me, that my states and occasional changes in state, altogether my entire life — my godfathers! — serve for me merely as means to recognition in the series of my flashes of recognition — my marriage, for instance, serving as a means towards the recognition that I am unable to live in a married state. And decisive as this recognition was in the series of my flashes of recognition, it was just as fateful , of course, from the viewpoint of my marriage, even if, from other points of view, coldly considered, without marrying I could never have reached this recognition, or at best could only have reached it through abstract inferences. Thus, there seems to be no escaping every accusation and self-accusation, the sole excuse that I have going for me being identical to the accusation that can be leveled against me: that when I contracted my marriage, which as I now see was undoubtedly out of motives and for the aim of self-liquidation, it was at least my belief that I was, on the contrary, contracting it under the badge of the future, of happiness, that happiness about which my wife and I had spoken so much and so timidly, yet also intimately and resolutely, as if it were some secret and almost grim duty that had been sternly laid upon us. Yes, that’s how it was, and now our entire life, its every sound, incident and feeling, is something I see, or rather, however strange, hear, like some kind of musical fabric beneath which the main, great, all-embracing, one-and-only theme continually ripens and condenses in order that, bursting out and outblasting all else, it may assume its autocracy: my existence viewed as the potentiality of your being , and later: your non-existence viewed as the necessary and radical liquidation of my own existence . It was just a pretext that straightaway that evening, in talking about “Teacher,” continuing with the lessons of “Teacher’s” case, or more specifically his act, I laid bare and explained to my wife (who at that time was not yet and is now no longer my wife), as I say, I enlightened her as to the chances, or rather lack of chances, of deeds that are doable in such situations, that is, in situations of totalitarianism. Because, I said, totalitarianism is a mindless situation, hence each and every situation that supervenes within it is also a mindless situation, although, I said, and perhaps this is the most mindless aspect of it all, by very virtue of our lives, merely by sustaining our lives, we ourselves contribute to sustaining totalitarianism, of course insofar as we insist, I said, on sustaining our lives; and this is merely, as it were, a self-fulfilling, one might almost say primitive trick of organization, I said. Hypotheses of totalitarianism are, so to say, naturally based on Nothingness, I said. Selection and expulsion as well as the notions on which they are based, are all nonexistent, null and void notions, I said, and they have no other reality than their sheer naturalism — for instance, shoving a person into a gas chamber, I said. I fear all this could not have been too entertaining, and if I now reflect on whether there might have been some other aim to what I said, beyond what I said, to the best of my recollection there was not; as best I recollect it was just my anguish still speaking out of me, the same compulsion to speak that had also made me speak a few hours earlier at the gathering, as well as my impression, however odd or unusual it may have been, that the woman who was walking beside me, walking beside me on her clacking high-heeled shoes, and thus whom I could see only vaguely, from the side and in the gloom of the night, though I did not even try to look at her because I still carried within me the image of her as, barely an hour before, she had traversed a greenish-blue carpet towards me as if she were making her way on the sea, and thus this woman walking by my side was interested in what I was saying. In totalitarianism, I said, executioners and victims alike perform a total service in a single cause, the cause of Nothingness, though naturally, I said, that service is by no means an identical service. And although “Teacher’s” act was an act performed under totalitarianism, an act extorted by totalitarianism, and hence ultimately an act of totalitarianism, or in other words of mindlessness, the act itself was nevertheless an act of total victory over total mindlessness, precisely because only here, in a world of total termination and extermination, could the ineradicability of the ideal — or obsession, if you prefer — that was alive within “Teacher” transfigure into a declaration . She then asked whether, apart from what I had been made to suffer, I had suffered or was maybe still suffering perhaps from my Jewishness as such. I replied that I would have to think about that. There is no denying that I have known and felt since long ago, from the first stirrings of my thoughts, that some mysterious shame is attached to my name, and that I brought this shame with me from some place where I had never been, and I brought it on account of some sin, which, even though I never committed it, is my sin and will pursue me throughout my life, a life which is undoubtedly not my own life, even though it is me who is living it, me who suffers from it, and me who will later die from it; nevertheless, I suppose all of that, I said to my wife, does not necessarily have to ensue from my Jewishness, it may simply ensue from me, from my essence, my person, my transcendental self, if I may put it that way, or else from the general and reciprocal modes of behavior and manners of treatment shown towards me and practiced by me, or in plain language from the social conditions and my personal relationship to those conditions, I said, for as it has been written judgment does not come suddenly, the proceedings gradually merge into the judgment , I said. The subject of my “piece” came up as well, the particular piece of writing that she had read and which, as she said, she absolutely had to discuss with me. Which means that I too must speak about this particular piece of writing, to give a broad outline of what sort of piece it was. The piece was, in point of fact, an extended short story of the type that is usually described as a “novella,” which had been published around that time deep within the haystack of a bulky anthology of short stories and novellas, by no means without all sorts of denigrating and insulting precursory complications that I shall refrain from describing, because they bore and disgust me, besides which, in itself, it was merely a modest and, one could say, dispensable contribution to Hungarian literary life, that denigrating and insulting, and, above all else, shameless and shameful literary life, resting as it does on its exclusions, privileges, pre-and postdilections, its official and confidential commercial blacklisting systems always casting doubt on quality, always unctuously deferential to aggressive dilettantism as if it were genius, of which I was, and am, a now horrified, now astonished, now indifferent, but always merely external observer, insofar as I am and must be at all — oh, what do I have to do with literature, with your golden hair, Margarethe, for a ballpoint pen is my spade, the sepulchre of your ashen hair, Shulamith; yes, anyway, this short story or novella, so be it, is a monologue by a man, a man still on the youngish side. This man, who had been brought up by his parents in the strictest Christian faith, or bigotry, one might say, now finds out, during the days of the apocalypse, that the unsealed brand has been placed on him too: in the spirit of the so-called laws that suddenly come into force, he is classed as a Jew. Now, before they take him away to the ghetto, the cattle wagon, or to who knows (he least of all) where and what sort of death they will condemn him, he writes his story, “the story of decades of cowardice and self-denial,” as he writes (that is to say, I have him write). Now, what is noteworthy about the whole thing is that in his brand-new Jewish existence he finds a release from his Jewish complex, a general liberation, for he has to recognize that merely being debarred from one community does not automatically make one a member of another. “What do I have to do with the Jews?” he asks (that is to say, I make him ask): nothing, he realizes (that is, I make him realize), now that he is one himself. While he had been enjoying the privileges of a non-Jewish existence he had suffered on account of Jews, or Jewish existence or, to be more precise, the whole corrupt, suffocating, deadly and death-dealing suicidal system of privileges and discriminations. He had suffered on account of some of his friends, colleagues at the office, the wider community at large that he believed was his homeland ; he had suffered from their hatred, their narrow-mindedness, their fanaticism. He had conceived a particular abhorrence for the inescapable debates that went on about anti-Semitism, the excruciating futility of all those debates, as if anti-Semitism, he realizes (that is, I make him realize), were not a matter of conviction but of temperament and character, “the morality of despair, the frenzy of self-haters, the vitality of devastators,” as he says (that is, I have him say). On the other hand, he had also felt a certain awkwardness towards Jews in that, try as he might to like them, he was never sure about the success of the attempt. He had Jewish acquaintances, even friends, whom he either liked or disliked; yet that was different, because he had liked or disliked them out of purely individual considerations or reasons. But how could one feel an active liking for an abstract notion like the notion of Jewishness, for example? Or for the unknown mass of people that was crammed into this abstract notion? To the extent that he succeeded, he succeeded somehow only by dint of liking them the way one likes a stray animal that one has to feed but about which one has no way of telling what it is dreaming and what it is capable of. Now he was relieved of this torment, his entire presumed responsibility. With a clear conscience he could now despise whomever he despised, and he no longer had to like those whom he disliked. He is liberated because he no longer has a homeland. All he has to decide is what he should die as. As a Jew or a Christian, as a hero or victim, possibly as the injured party of a metaphysical absurdity or of a demiurgic neochaos? Since these concepts mean nothing to him, he decides that at least he will not pollute the pure fact of his death with lies. He sees everything simply because he has won the right to clear-sightedness: “We should not seek meaning where there is none: the century, this execution squad on permanent duty, is now once again preparing for decimation, and destiny has decreed that one of the tenth lots should be cast on me — that’s all there is to it,” are the last words he says (with my own words, of course). Of course, it wasn’t all quite so spare, but here I have stripped it down to the essentials, leaving out the dialogues, the twists in the plot, the setting and the other characters, including that of the lover who leaves him. The last time we see our hero he is seated on the ground, rocking to and fro, bursting in an uncontrollable fit of laughter. “The Laugh” was indeed what I had intended to use as the title, but the director of the publishing house, who was widely known to carry a service weapon at all times, even in his office (the publishing house), even though he was never to be seen in uniform and he did not even carry this service weapon , an automatic, in a service holster but tucked into a bulging hip pocket of his trousers; well anyway, this director rejected the title as being “cynical” and “trampling on the sanctity of memories,” and so forth, so how the story came to be published at all, albeit with a disfigured title, is something I have never understood to the present day, nor do I wish to understand, because I am repelled that I might understand and gain a glimpse into the inextricable web of ulterior motives which spares nothing at all, destroys everything, and even what it does allow to exist, it does so only for destructive motives; so, just like the figure I created, I too content myself with the fact that in the course of the decimation — though it was much more like a trisection — my story, somehow or other, happened to draw one of the lucky numbers. What had gripped my wife in the story was, as she put it, that a person can decide for himself about his Jewishness . Until then, whenever she had read works about Jews or concerning Jews she had felt as if she was once again having her face ground into the mud . Now, for the first time, my wife said, she felt that she could hold her head high . On reading my piece, my wife said, she had felt what my “hero” had felt, for although he dies, before that he is accorded inner liberation . Even if only fleetingly, she too had experienced that sense of liberation, my wife said. More than anything before, this piece of writing taught her how to live , my wife said, and for the second time that evening the swiftly alternating ripple of expressions again flickered across her face, that — I don’t know how else to put it— chromaticism of smiles which gave me the feeling I could melt and be transformed into anything. I soon became acquainted with the background to these statements, my wife’s childhood and adolescence. Although my wife had been born after Auschwitz, childhood and adolescence had been spent under the mark of Auschwitz. More specifically, under the mark of being Jewish. Under the mark of the mud, to quote from my wife’s aforementioned words. My wife’s parents had both passed through Auschwitz: I was still able to make the acquaintance of her father, a tall, bald-headed man, with features that were guardedly austere in the presence of strangers but unreservedly harsh in the circle of his more intimate friends or family, but she had lost her mother early on. The woman had died of some disease brought back from Auschwitz, sometimes swelling up and at other times losing weight, sometimes suffering bouts of colic and at other times covered with skin eruptions, a disease that science proved effectively powerless to tackle, just as science also proved effectively powerless to tackle the precipitating cause of the disease, Auschwitz, for the disease my wife’s mother had suffered from was, in reality, Auschwitz itself, and there is no cure for Auschwitz, nobody will ever recover from the disease of Auschwitz. Her mother’s illness and early death had incidentally played a decisive part in determining that my wife should become a physician, my wife said. Later on, while talking about such matters, my wife cited a couple of sentences which, she said, she no longer knew where she had read but she had never forgotten since. Not immediately, but quite soon afterwards, it occurred to me that my wife must have read the sentences in one of the essays of Untimely Meditations , the one titled “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” and this reinforced my belief that the sentences we have a need for seek us out sooner or later, because if I didn’t believe that, I don’t understand how those sentences could have reached my wife, who, to the best of my knowledge, never showed any interest in philosophy, least of all in Nietzsche. The exact sentences, which I soon tracked down in the disintegrating, red-bound volume of Nietzsche that I had seized upon once in some dark corner of an antiquarian bookseller’s, read as follows, albeit not in my own translation: There is a degree of sleeplessness, of rumination, of the historical sense, which is harmful and ultimately fatal to the living thing, whether this living thing be a man or a people or a culture . After which, or before it, I couldn’t say offhand: … He who cannot sink on the threshold of the moment and forget all the past, who cannot stand balanced like a goddess of victory without growing dizzy and afraid —and from here on my wife knew it by heart— will never know what happiness is — worse, he will never do anything to make others happy . My wife was made aware of her Jewishness, and all that was bound up with this, in early childhood. There had been a time—“my ponytailed, freckle-faced little-girl period,” my wife called it — when she had imagined that the other children would have to love her a lot on account of all that. Now that I come to write down her words, I suddenly see her, the way she laughed when she said that. Later on her Jewishness became equated for her with a sense of futility. With defeatism, despondency, suspicion, insidious fear, her mother’s illness. Among strangers a dark secret, at home a ghetto of Jewish feelings, Jewish thoughts . After her mother died, an aunt of her father had moved in with them. “She has such an Auschwitz look,” she had immediately thought, my wife said. Seeing only a former or future murderer in everybody. “I don’t know how I still managed to grow up into a more or less healthy woman.” Leaving the room the moment that Jewish matters were mentioned. “Something turned to stone inside me and resisted.” Hardly spending any time at home. Studying was an escape as later on were medicine and lovers, several brief and passionate affairs. She had had two “most awful experiences,” my wife said — both, she remembered, when she was around sixteen or seventeen years old. On one occasion she had spoken heatedly about the French Revolution, saying it had been little better than the Nazis. Her great-aunt responded by saying that she, being a Jew, had no right to talk about the French Revolution in that way, because had there been no French Revolution the Jews would still be living in ghettos today. After this rebuke from the great-aunt, so my wife remembered, she had not spoken a word at home for days or maybe even weeks. She had felt that she herself no longer existed, that she had no right at all to lay claim to her own feelings or thoughts, that solely because she had been born a Jew she could have only Jewish feelings and Jewish thoughts . That was when every day they ground her face into the mud had been formulated and she had declared it to herself for the first time. The second experience: she is sitting with a book in her hand, a book about atrocities, with photographs of atrocities, a vacantly staring, bespectacled face behind barbed wire, a young boy with a yellow star, hands raised in the air, his peakless cap slipping down over his eyes, on either side an escort of armed soldiers; she is looking at these pictures and a cold chill of malice, from she herself takes fright, creeps into her heart, and exactly the same thought occurs to her as my “hero” had thought in my short story: “What has this to do with me? I’m a Jew myself,” my wife said. But until she had read these and other similar thoughts in my story, she had only been able to think them uneasily, and afterwards had felt guilty for having them. That was why, after reading my story, my wife said, she had felt she could hold her head high . And she repeated, and more than once at that, that I taught her how to live : that beside me, my wife said, she felt herself to be free . Yes, in this dark and all-illuminating night of mine these are the sounds, images and motifs that now stand out from the jumble of those few lightning-fast years that were my marriage, until I suddenly see ourselves at a window, the window of our apartment, again at night time, a no-longer-winter-but-not-yet-spring evening when the city’s noxious vapors were pervaded now and again by a scent that came, like an otherworldly message, perhaps from distant plants that were stirring anew, out of habit as it were, seeking to live anew, out of habit as it were, and on the other side of the road three half-drunk men were stumbling homewards from the nearby bar, the white fur collar on the sheepskin coat one of them was wearing gleamed up towards our window and, holding on to each other, they were singing in subdued voices, the last traffic in the street had just sped by, there was a moment’s silence, then, as in an orchestral pause, their voices too carried up to us, and we could hear clearly what they were singing: We’ve just come from Auschwitz, there’s more of us than before , the sound drifted up into the night, and at first I did not actually hear it, but then I did hear it. But what does it have to do with me, I thought, so-called anti-Semitism is a purely private affair that, even though I personally may die from it anywhere, at any time, even today, after Auschwitz, I reflected, nowadays that would be a sheer anachronism, a fallacy in which, as H. would say, not H., Leader and Chancellor, but H., philosopher and head butler to all leaders and chancellors, the World-Spirit is no longer present, in other words, a provincialism, nothing more, a genius loci, a local idiocy; and if they want to shoot or beat me to death, I reflected, they will say so in good time, I reflected, the way they have generally always given prior notice. Only then did I look at my wife, cautiously, because she was suspiciously quiet, and in the cold light from the street and the warmer light that was filtering out from the room behind us I clearly saw the tears streaming down her face. There will never be an end to it, my wife said, there is no escaping this curse, she said, and if only she knew what it was that made her a Jew, given that she was simply incapable of religious faith and, possibly out of laziness or cowardice, or as a result of other predilections, she was simply unacquainted with the specifically Jewish culture of the Jews, and also incapable of showing any interest in it as it simply did not interest her, she said, so what was it that made her Jewish, if in fact neither language, nor lifestyle, nothing, nothing at all, singled her out from others who lived around her, unless, she said, it was some sort of occult, atavistic message hidden away in the genes that she herself did not hear and therefore could not know about. At which point, dispassionately, callously, and almost calculatedly, as with a well-directed dagger thrust or a sudden strong embrace, I told her that was all a waste of time, her searching for presumed causes and pseudo-explanations was futile, just one thing made her Jewish, nothing else: The fact that you were not in Auschwitz , I told her, and at this my wife fell silent, first like a scared child, but then the features very quickly changed back into her own, the features of the wife I knew and of someone else whom I only now discovered in my wife’s familiar face, a discovery which, so to speak, shook me; and our by then not so torrid nights were rekindled once again. Because, yes, by then the contradictions in my marriage were already starting to show, or to be accurate, my marriage had begun to show itself for what it was: a contradiction. In recollecting those times, I recall most of all certain reflexes of mine which kept me in a state of constant tension and internal agitation, in much the same way, perhaps — at least this is how I imagine it — as beavers, those actually rodent-like small creatures, must be driven by instinct to construct and model their complicated systems, veritable strongholds, of dams, escape passages and chambers. Around that time, besides of course literary translation, the stacks of translations that enabled me to put bread on the table, I was preoccupied by a plan for a more ambitious literary work; a novel, the subject of which, skipping the details here, was to be a soul’s path, the path of a striving from darkness to light, a struggle to attain joy, engagement in this struggle as an obligation, happiness viewed as a duty . At that time I talked a great deal (no, that is an understatement: at that time I talked almost incessantly) about this plan with my wife, who visibly took the greatest possible pleasure in these discussions, and above all in my plan as such, because in it she saw, and of course not entirely without reason, a monument to our marriage as it were, and therefore I could never tell her enough about it, describing the plot, sketchy at first, of course, but later plumped out from day to day, the proliferating and solidifying and ramifying motifs and ideas, to which, amid a flicker of chromatics suddenly brightening then swiftly fading across her face, she would attach her own timorous comments, to which every now and again, and precisely in hope of that chromaticism of the play of features, I would give approving assent, encouragement and appreciation; we raised this plan together, so to speak, nursing and coddling and petting it as if it were our own child. Looking back, of course, it was all a mistake, no doubt, a mistake to allow my wife to encroach upon this most sensitive, most secret, most unprotected sanctum of my life, my existence, which in a word is my work , a sanctum that, quite to the contrary, I have to protect and defend, as I had done before and have done ever since, so to say surrounding it with a barbed-wire fence against all unauthorized intruders, against the very possibility of intrusion, any sort of intrusion, by anybody; just as it is an indisputable fact that I did indeed sense the danger in the intense interest on my wife’s part, embracing and reaching into my whole life, fierce and yet at the same time achingly tender, while on the other hand, I did not in all honesty wish to forgo that interest either, just as one does not wish to forgo the warming sunshine that suddenly bursts upon one after the long dark days of winter. For when it came to my setting out to realize my plan, to actually write the novel, it turned out that the concept was unrealizable; it turned out that the material oozing from my ballpoint pen, as from an infective pustule, into the entire tissue of the plan, each and every cell of it, was such, I would say, as to pathologically alter that tissue, each and every cell of it; it turned out that it is impossible to write about happiness, or at least I can’t, which in this case amounts to the same thing after all; happiness is perhaps too simple to let itself be written about, I wrote, as I am reading right now on a slip of paper that I wrote then and from which I am writing it down here; a life lived in happiness is therefore a life lived in muteness, I wrote. It turned out that writing about life amounts to thinking about life, and thinking about life amounts to casting doubt on life, but only one who is suffocated by his very lifeblood, or in whom it somehow circulates unnaturally, casts doubt on that lifeblood. It turned out that I don’t write in order to seek pleasure; on the contrary, it turned out that by writing I am seeking pain, the most acute possible, well-nigh intolerable pain, most likely because pain is truth, and as to what constitutes truth, I wrote, the answer is so simple: truth is what consumes you, I wrote. Naturally, I could impart none of this to my wife. On the other hand, I did not want to lie to my wife either. As a result, therefore, we came up against certain difficulties in the course of our time together and our discussions, especially when the subject of my work, and most especially the achievements that could be expected from my work, was brought up: writing as literature , the to me remote, unimportant and infinitely uninteresting issue of likes or dislikes, the question of the meaning of my work, questions that, in the end, mostly debouched into the shameful, squalid, insulting and humiliating topic of success or the lack of it. How could I have explained to my wife that my ballpoint pen is my spade? That I write only because I have to write, and I have to write because I am whistled up every day to drive the spade deeper, to play death on a darker, sweeter string? How could I be expected to complete my self-liquidation, my sole business on this earth, while fostering within myself some seductive ulterior motive, the seductive ulterior motive of achievement, literature , or maybe success ? How could my wife, or anyone else, wish for me to put to use my spectacular self-liquidation and, what is more, put it to use so that I might thereby sneak, like a thief with a skeleton key, into some sort of literary or other future from which I have already been debarred by reason of my birth, and from which I have anyway debarred myself, and to accomplish work founded on that future with the selfsame strokes of the grubbing hoe with which I must dig my grave bed in the clouds, the winds, the nothingness? It is questionable whether I myself saw my position as clearly, as distinctly, as I am now describing it. Perhaps not completely, but the aspiration, not to speak of the good intention, was undeniably there within me. As to what I might have been thinking then, and with what sorts of feelings I might have been grappling, a good indication is given by a fragmentary slip of paper that I found when searching through the fragments of my marriage. Evidently, it was a slip that I had intended to place beside my wife’s tea cup, as I was accustomed to doing at times when, due to my work having stretched late into the night, I did not get up for breakfast. This is what it says: “… That we should be able to love one another and yet still remain free , though I am well aware neither of us is able to evade the lot of a man and the lot of a woman, and thus we shall be party to this torment that a mysterious and, in truth, none too wise Nature has apportioned to us; in other words, that the time will come again when I shall reach out my hand for you and desire you, and all I shall desire is that you be mine; yet at the same time as you too reach out your hand and finally become mine, I shall still place bounds on you in your submission in order that I may preserve what I imagine to be my freedom… ” So much for the fragment, and since I found it among my writings, a slip of paper mixed up among my other slips of paper, it is certain that I did not prop it up against my wife’s tea cup but must somehow have mixed it up together with my writings and slips of paper, but it is also certain that is secretly what I thought, and I lived in accordance with my thoughts, indeed directly lived those thoughts, inasmuch as I always did have a secret life, and that was always my real life . Yes, it was around then that I started to construct my escape passages, my beaver stronghold, to hide and shield things away from my wife’s eyes and hands, so that from time to time — and, I have no doubt, on account of my defensive barriers — I fancied that I detected a lurking resentment in my wife’s behavior, and this observation grew into a reciprocal resentment and later into a persistent anguish within me that portrayed, or sought to portray, my wife’s shifting mood as a much more serious resentment than it really was, since it would not have taken much effort on my part to appease my wife, little more than a single appropriate, timely and well-chosen word, even one such gesture, would have done the trick, yet I clung to my anguish, obviously because I perceived my state of rejection in it, while the intolerable feeling of rejection sought compensation, and lonely compensation in turn manifested itself within me once again as creative force; in other words, it ignited my neurosis, my love of work, my fever and rage for work, haughtily carrying all before it but only necessitating newer and still more strenuous defensive reflexes, in short, re-activating the whole diabolical mechanism, the deadly merry-go-around, which first dips me in my anguish only to raise me aloft, but solely in order to quickly hurl me back, ever deeper… And certainly, quite certainly, this too played a part in the rekindling of our nights, on one of which darkly glittering nights, whose dark, velvety light nevertheless differed so much from the dark, black lights that lose themselves in the darkness of my present night — on one of our darkly glowing nights my wife said that to all of our questions and answers, those questions and answers that touch upon our entire life, we can only respond with our lives as a whole, or to be more precise, with our entire lives, because every question we pose from now on and every answer we give from now on would be an unsatisfactory question and an unsatisfactory answer, and she could imagine fulfillment only one way, because, for her at least, no other fulfillment could substitute for that sole, undivided, genuine fulfillment, or in other words, she wanted a child by me, my wife said. Yes, andЧитать дальше