Imre Kertesz - Dossier K - A Memoir

With appropriate alterations, no doubt .

Without changing a word.

Surely you don’t mean the novel that Berg reads out to Köves under the title “I, the Executioner”?

Yes, I do.

Staggering authorial economy! And incidentally, it does not show the least trace of thirty years of dust. However, I do now begin to see how you worked out the path that would lead you to Fatelessness.

I’d quite like to know myself.

You sought atonement for what you lived through in prison, only in doing so you amplified your problem into one of global dimensions. The only possible solution was a novel — in your case, at least, since you were born a writer .

I don’t know; one is not born for anything in particular, but if one manages to stay alive long enough, then one cannot avoid eventually becoming something … and incidentally what you refer to as the path to Fatelessness I experienced as a continuous deficiency, and the fact that I gave myself to writing Fatelessness I intended as a fulfilment of that disaster, as a kind of self-punishment. Because I found I was just getting nowhere with fiction writing. “At least you are familiar with the material,” I told myself with a degree of healthy scorn, planning to write it in a couple of months.

When was that?

In 1960.

And the couple of months became thirteen years, if I’m not mistaken. But that is to depart from the chronological sequence … when did the incident in the L-shaped corridor take place?

Precisely when, I couldn’t tell you myself. I’d put it somewhere around … late 1955. I recall it was autumn and it was raining. By then I was trying to get by as a “freelance”—a form of life that did, indeed, lead to some rather tight spots at times when it came to making a living. Anyway, around then one or two of my friends were working for the Magyar Nemzet [Hungarian Nation] newspaper, and the editor of one column or other asked me to write a piece on why the trains were running late. As a result I found myself in an L-shaped corridor in one of the Hungarian State Railway offices — somewhere near the Eastern Railway Terminal, I seem to recollect.

Hang on a moment! The last time we had a glimpse of you was in uniform, as an army conscript. First of all, you had to be discharged … as far as I know, you got involved in a fairly risky venture to that end .

You could call it that. But it’s anecdotal, so let’s keep it as short as possible.

You fainted in public at one of the morning parades, didn’t you?

Yes, I did. Beforehand, I had borrowed several medical texts from the library to study, above all, the various species of neurosis with particular regard to fits and the catatonic state. I collapsed and went into a crying fit, which was followed by muscle rigidity and so on. The main thing was to remain consistent.

As best I know, you were even admitted to the hospital .

I’ll spare you the details. The doctors didn’t know what to make of me.

“After all, everything depends on the firmness of our will, and in my experience a person can cross over into madness with terrifying ease, if he wants that at all costs,” Köves writes in Fiasco. 18

That’s right.

When did all this happen?

In the summer and autumn of 1953.

If what you say in your book Someone Else is accurate, you became acquainted with your first wife, Albina, that same autumn .

Yes.

The story goes that the long hot summer of that year was followed by a mild autumn .

That’s how it was.

One fine evening in September you were strolling lazily down Andrássy (then Stalin) Avenue towards Nagymez? Street, dropping in on the cafés that were on your way. In what was then nicknamed the “Sissi” 18 bar at the Moulin Rouge there was just one couple sitting in the semi-gloom into which it was plunged by the burgundy plush of the stools and the dark purple of the wall hangings: a tow-haired, broad-shouldered water polo player with whom you had a fleeting acquaintance and a strange woman. They invited you to join them at their table .

Yes.

The woman was not pretty to your way of thinking, but very alluring. Her quirky humour struck you immediately. What was it she asked?

“Can a person doss at your place?”

“Doss”?

Stay, get a bed, in the slang of those days.

You were somewhat surprised at the unforeseen familiarity, but you instantly replied that one could. As far as I know, the main tenants were on a summer holiday at their bungalow by Lake Balaton, so the apartment was empty and you were seized by the excitement of what gave every promise of being an easy adventure. A light was on behind the garden gate at Logodi Street, so you couldn’t evade the beady eye of the concierge, but then all your earlier expectations were dashed .

Yes.

The woman really did want a place to sleep. She had only come out of inland security-service detainment a week before; others were living in her apartment. A woman friend had taken her in but had only been able to squeeze her into the kitchen, and the woman had felt that she couldn’t spend another night jammed in “at the foot of the cooker,” as I understand she said .

Yes.

Why should I be telling the story?

I couldn’t tell any more myself.

True, it’s a tale you’ve told many times now. It was on her that you based the waitress in Fiasco; she is also recognizable in The Union Jack; and you take final leave of her in some harrowing passages in Someone Else. How long was it that you lived together?

Forty-two years.

More than a generation … “She has gone, and she has taken with her the greater chunk of my life, the period in which creative work started and was completed, and also the period when, living in an unhappy marriage, we were so much in love with one another,” as you write in Someone Else. A strange sentence …

Go on, carry on.

“Our love was like a deaf-mute child scampering with laughter on his face and arms outspread but whose mouth slowly crumples into sobs because nobody understands him and because he cannot ascertain the purpose of his scampering.” 19 A truly sad metaphor, and even sadder is a short passage that is to be found somewhat earlier in that volume: “A mild late summer with A. [Albina] … to the Traunsee. Balcony above the lake. However one looks at it (even out of season), this is a first-class hotel, a loving gift to A. made possible by the astounding twists my life has taken and the opportunity they have created. She accepts it warily, with a melancholy of something coming too late, an incorruptible reserve demanded by fidelity to the bitterness of all the irreplaceable years; and I am seized over and over again with terror because I have an almost palpable sense of something irrevocable (perhaps what is commonly called destiny) and for a person finally to yield to this recalcitrance of things is to tempt a decline …” When was that remark recorded?

The summer of 1994.

In the following year, in 1995, she died … you yourself read out an oration to those of your joint friends who were present at the funeral .

Since a priest or rabbi was out of the question, whereas a civilian official would only have parroted fatuous commonplaces …

Let’s turn back to Logodi Street to try to understand what it was that brought the two of you together. After all, an uncomfortable night does not obligate one in any way, and all that you write about her says more about the differences between the two of you than the common ground: “I was twenty-four, she was thirty-three,” you write in Someone Else. “I had come back from the Nazi concentration camps, straight from the Endlösung, and then the cheerless abyss of the harsh ‘Fifties’—all of which, though there was not yet the slightest sign of it at the time, was to have an inspirational rather than a deleterious effect on me. She too had come from war, as a refugee, her family exterminated, the family fortune — her inheritance — carried off. She had made a new start; her husband had been locked up at the outset of the show trials, her money and belongings confiscated. She started over, then eventually she herself was arrested and spent a year in captivity in prisons and internment camps. All that turned her against herself, broke her confidence in the choices she made. Every choice she made — including me, most especially me — was a self-punishment for an arcane transgression she had never committed.” An interesting analysis, and if one bears in mind Jean Améry’s lost Weltvertrauen …