Imre Kertész: Fatelessness

For all that, I still climbed onto the rearmost platform of the last car of the streetcar as usual, in compliance with the pertinent regulation. It was getting close to eight when I reached home, and although the summer evening was still light, people were already starting to set the black- and blue-colored boards in some windows. My stepmother was also showing signs of impatience, though in her case that was more just out of habit, because I have the ID papers, after all. That evening, as usual, we spent at the Fleischmanns’. The two old codgers are well, still arguing a lot, but even they had been as one in favoring the idea of my going to work, in their case too due to the ID, naturally. In their enthusiasm, they still contrived to quarrel a little. With my stepmother and I not knowing the way out toward Csepel, we asked them for directions the first time we went. Old Fleischmann suggested the suburban train service whereas Uncle Steiner plumped for the bus, because it stops directly by the oil works, he said, but one was still left with a walk from the train — and that is, in fact, the case, as it turned out. We weren’t to know that then, however, and Uncle Fleischmann got extremely worked up: “It’s always you who has to be right,” he groused. In the end, the two fat wives had to step in. Annamarie and I laughed about them a lot.

As to her, by the way, I am now in a somewhat peculiar situation. The incident occurred the day before yesterday, during the alert on Friday night, down in the air-raid shelter, or to be more precise, in one of the deserted, dimly lit cellar passages onto which it opens. Originally, I only wanted to show her that it was more interesting to follow what is happening on the outside from there. But when, about a minute later, we heard a bomb actually go off nearby, she started trembling all over. It was really good, because in her terror she clung to me, her arms around my neck, her face buried in my shoulder. All I remember after that was searching for her lips. I was left with the vague experience of a warm, moist, slightly sticky contact. Well, and also a kind of happy astonishment, for it was my first kiss with a girl after all, besides which I had not been reckoning on it right then.

Yesterday, on the stairwell, it emerged that she too had been very surprised. “It was all because of the bomb,” she considered. Basically, she was right. Later on, we kissed again, and that was when she taught me how to make the experience more memorable by also doing certain things with your tongues.

This evening too I was with her in the other room to look at the Fleischmanns’ ornamental fish, because in truth we have frequently been in the habit of looking at them at other times anyway. This time, of course, that was not quite the only reason for us to go there. We made use of our tongues as well. Still, we returned quickly, because Annamarie was afraid that her uncle and aunt might suspect something was up. Later on, while we were talking, I learned one or two interesting things as to her thoughts about me: she said she would never have imagined “a time would come when I might mean something else” to her other than merely “a good friend.” When she got to know me, she took me, at first, for just another adolescent. Later on, though, she admitted, she had looked a bit closer, and a certain empathy toward me had sprung up in her, maybe, she supposed, due to our similar lot with regard to our parents, while from the occasional remark I made she had also concluded that we think about certain things in a similar way; yet even so, she had not suspected any more than that. She mused a little on how odd that was, and even said, “It seems it was meant to happen this way.” She had a strange, almost severe expression on her face, so I didn’t argue with her, even though I was more inclined to agree with what she said yesterday about it being because of the bomb. But then, of course, what do I know about anything, and anyway, as far as I could see, this other way was more to her liking. We said good-bye soon after that, as I had to go to work the next day, but when I took her hand, she dug sharply into my palm with her fingernails. I understood it was her way of hinting at our secret, and the look on her face was as if to say “everything’s okay.”

The next day, though, her behavior was decidedly odd. In the afternoon, having come back from work and first washed myself down, changed shirt and shoes, and run a wet comb through my hair, I went with her to visit the sisters, because Annamarie had in the meantime carried out her original plan of arranging to introduce me to them. Their mama too was pleased to welcome me (their father is away on labor service). They have a fair-sized apartment with a balcony, carpets, a couple of larger rooms, and a separate, smaller room for the two girls. This is furnished with a piano and lots of dolls and other girlish knickknacks. We usually play cards, but today the older sister was not in the mood. She wanted to talk to us first about something that has been preoccupying her recently, since the yellow star has been giving her plenty to puzzle over. In fact, it was “people’s looks” that had woken her up to the change, because she finds that people’s attitudes toward her have altered, and she can see from their looks that they “hate” her. She had observed that this morning as well, while she was out shopping for her mama. To my way of thinking, though, she was making a bit too much of it. My own experience, at any rate, is not quite the same. At the workplace, for instance, everyone knows that some of the bricklayers there can’t stand Jews but they have still become quite friendly with us boys. Not that this does anything to change their views, of course. Then again, the example of the baker came to mind, so I attempted to explain to the girl that they did not really hate her, that is to say not her personally, since they have no way of knowing her, after all — it was more just the idea of being “Jewish.” She then said she’d been thinking the same thing right before, because when you get down to it she doesn’t even know exactly what “Jewish” is. Annamarie, admittedly, said to her that everyone knows: it’s a religion. What interested her, however, was not that but its “sense.” “After all, people must know why they hate,” she reckoned. She confessed that at first she’d been unable to make any sense of the whole thing, and it had hurt her terribly that they despised her “merely because she is Jewish”; that’s when she had felt for the first time that, as she put it, something singles her out from those people, she belongs to some other category. That had started her thinking, and she had tried to find out more about it all from books and conversations, which was how she had come to recognize that they hated her precisely for that. It was her view, in fact, that “we Jews are different from other people,” and that difference was the crux of it, that’s why people hate Jews. She also remarked how peculiar it was to live “being aware of that differentness,” and that sometimes she felt a sort of pride but at other times more a shame of sorts because of it. She wanted to know how we felt in regard to our differentness, whether we were proud of it or rather ashamed. Her younger sister and Annamarie didn’t really know; I myself hadn’t so far been able to find a reason for these feelings either. Anyway, a person cannot entirely decide for himself about this differentness: in the end, that is precisely what the yellow star is there for, as far as I know. I told her as much, but she dug her heels in: the difference is “carried within ourselves.” According to me, however, what we wear on the outside is the more crucial. We argued a lot about this, though I can’t think why, because to be honest I didn’t see any of it as being all that important. Still, there was something in her line of thought that somehow exasperated me; in my opinion it’s all a lot simpler. Besides which, I also wanted to win the argument, naturally. At one point or another, it seemed that Annamarie wanted to say her piece, but she didn’t get a chance even once, as by then the two of us were not paying much attention to her.