Imre Kertész: Fatelessness

On my way back to the stairwell, a familiar door brought me to a stop. I rang, and before long a stout matronly figure came into view. She too, in a manner I was now getting accustomed to, was just about to close the door when from behind her back there was a glint of spectacles, and Uncle Fleischmann’s gray face emerged dimly in the gloom. A paunch, slippers, a big, ruddy head, a boyish hair-parting, and a burned-out cigar stub separated themselves from beside him: old Steiner. Just the way I had last seen them, as if it were only yesterday, on the evening before the customs post. They stood there, mouths agape, then called out my name, and old Steiner even embraced me just as I was, sweaty, in my cap and striped jacket. They led me into the living room, while Aunt Fleischmann hurried off into the kitchen to see about “a bite to eat,” as she put it. I had to answer the usual questions as to where, how, when, and what, then later I asked my questions and learned that other people really were now living in our apartment. “What else?” I inquired. Since they somehow didn’t seem to get what I meant, I asked “My father?” At that they clammed up completely. After a short pause, a hand — maybe Uncle Steiner’s, I suppose— slowly lifted and set off in the air before settling like a cautious, aging bat on my arm. From what they recounted after that, all I could make out, in essence, was that “unfortunately, there is no room for us to doubt the accuracy of the tragic news” since “it is based on the testimony of comrades in misfortune,” according to whom my father “passed away after a brief period of suffering… in a German camp,” which was actually located on Austrian soil, oh, what’s the name of it, dear me…, so I said “Mauthausen”—“Mauthausen!” they enthused, before recovering their gravity: “Yes, that’s it.” I then asked if they happened by any chance to have news of my mother, to which they immediately said but of course, and good news at that: she was alive and well, she had come by the house only a couple of months ago, they had seen her with their own eyes, spoken to her, she had asked after me. What about my stepmother, I was curious to know, and I was told: “She has remarried since, to be sure.” “To whom, I wonder?” I inquired, and they again became stuck on the name. One of them said “Some Kovács fellow, as best I know,” while the other contradicted: “No, not Kovács, more like Futó.” So I said “Sütő,” at which they again nodded delightedly, affirming just as before: “Yes, of course, that’s it: Sütő.” I had much to thank her for, “everything, as a matter of fact,” they went on to relate: she had “saved the family fortune,” she “hid it during the hard times,” was how they put it. “Perhaps,” mused Uncle Fleischmann, “she jumped the gun a little,” and old Steiner concurred in this. “In the final analysis, though,” he added, “it’s understandable,” and that in turn was acknowledged by the other old boy.

After that, I sat between the two of them for a while, it having been a long time since I had sat on a comfortable settee with claret red velvet upholstery. Aunt Fleischmann appeared in the meantime, bringing in a decoratively bordered white china plate on which was a round of bread and dripping garnished with ground paprika and finely sliced onion rings, because her recollection was that I had been extremely fond of that in the past, as I promptly confirmed I still was. The two old men meanwhile recounted that “it wasn’t a picnic back here either, to be sure.” From what they related I gained an impression, the nebulous outlines of some tangled, confused, undecipherable event of which I could basically see and understand little. Instead, all I picked out from what they had to say was the continual, almost tiresomely recurrent reiteration of a phrase that was used to designate every new twist, turn, and episode: thus, for instance, the yellow-star houses “came about,” October the fifteenth “came about,” the Arrow-Cross regime “came about,” the ghetto “came about,” the Danube-bank shootings “came about,” liberation “came about.” Not to mention the usual fault: it was as if this entire blurred event, seemingly unimaginable in its reality and by now beyond reconstruction in its details even for them, as far as I could see, had not occurred in the regular rhythmic passage of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months but so to say all at once, in a single swirl or giddy spell somehow, maybe at some strange afternoon gathering that unexpectedly descends into debauchery, for instance, when the many participants — not knowing why — all of a sudden lose their sanity and in the end, perhaps, are no longer aware of what they are doing. At some point they fell silent, then, after a pause, old Fleischmann suddenly asked: “And what are your plans for the future?” I was mildly astonished, telling him I had not given it much thought. At that, the other old boy stirred, bending toward me on his seat. The bat soared again, this time alighting on my knee rather than my arm. “Before all else,” he declared, “you must put the horrors behind you.” Increasingly amazed, I asked, “Why should I?” “In order,” he replied, “to be able to live,” at which Uncle Fleischmann nodded and added, “Live freely,” at which the other old boy nodded and added, “One cannot start a new life under such a burden,” and I had to admit he did have a point. Except I didn’t quite understand how they could wish for something that was impossible, and indeed I made the comment that what had happened had happened, and anyway, when it came down to it, I could not give orders to my memory. I would only be able to start a new life, I ventured, if I were to be reborn or if some affliction, disease, or something of the sort were to affect my mind, which they surely didn’t wish on me, I hoped. “In any case,” I added, “I didn’t notice any atrocities,” at which, I could see, they were greatly astounded. What were they supposed to understand by that, they wished to know, by “I didn’t notice”? To that, however, I asked them in turn what they had done during those “hard times.” “Errm, . we lived,” one of them deliberated. “We tried to survive,” the other added. Precisely! They too had taken one step at a time, I noted. What did I mean by taking a “step,” they floundered, so I related to them how it had gone in Auschwitz, by way of example. For each train — and I am not saying it was always necessarily this number, since I have no way of knowing — but at any rate in our case you have to reckon on around three thousand people. Take the men among them — a thousand, let’s say. For the sake of the example, you can reckon on one or two seconds per case, more often one than two. Ignore the very first and very last, because they don’t count; but in the middle, where I too was standing, you would therefore have to allow ten to twenty minutes before you reach the point where it is decided whether it will be gas immediately or a reprieve for the time being. Now, all this time the queue is constantly moving, progressing, and everyone is taking steps, bigger or smaller ones, depending on what the speed of the operation demands.

A brief hush ensued, broken only by a single sound: Aunt Fleischmann took the empty dish from in front of me and carried it away; nor did I see her return subsequently. The two old boys asked, “What has that got to do with it, and what do you mean by it?” Nothing in particular, I replied, but it was not quite true that the thing “came about”; we had gone along with it too. Only now, and thus after the event, looking back, in hindsight, does the way it all “came about” seem over, finished, unalterable, finite, so tremendously fast, and so terribly opaque. And if, in addition, one knows one’s fate in advance, of course. Then indeed one can only register the passing of time. A senseless kiss, for example, is just as much a necessity as an idle day at the customs post, let’s say, or the gas chambers. Except that whether one looks back or ahead, both are flawed perspectives, I suggested. After all, there are times when twenty minutes, in and of themselves, can be quite a lot of time. Each minute had started, endured, and then ended before the next one started. Now, I said, let’s just consider: every one of those minutes might in fact have brought something new. In reality it didn’t, naturally, but still, one must acknowledge that it might have; when it comes down to it, each and every minute something else might have happened other than what actually did happen, at Auschwitz just as much as, let’s suppose, here at home, when we took leave of my father.