Imre Kertész: Detective Story

I boiled up. “I know,” I burst out. “It only has to be accepted temporarily — temporarily, but every day afresh. And every day ever more. Temporarily. Until we have lived to the end of our temporary lives, and one fine day we temporarily die. Well, not for me, Dad! No and again no!”

“What do you want, Enrique?” he asked.

“Something definitive,” I answered. “Something solid and permanent. Something that is me.” And all of a sudden I came out with it: “I want to act. I want to change my way of life, Dad.”

He seemed to wince, but why worry about that! I heard only my own voice as it came out at last with my innermost desire, so categorically that at a stroke I felt everything had become simple and clear. I had nothing more to say, I wanted to get up and leave the room. Then I heard him speaking:

“This is all just a figment of your imagination, Enrique. But a figment that at any moment can turn into a bloody reality.” I don’t know what sort of gesture I made, but he raised his hands and pinned me to the chair with his fingertips. “I heard you out,” he carried on. “I expect you now to hear me out.”

He was right, and I decided to do that. I would do whatever he might say. I would listen to him as calmly as possible, then answer his presumably dreary, predictable questions.

He duly began probing me, as if to test my patience and tenacity. As though he were trying to extract a confession. How was I to know that’s what he was actually doing?

“Enrique,” he began, “let’s be serious. Maybe you will consider me cynical: I don’t mind. But I’m your father, and my worries give me the right to speak. And anyway these are questions that you are going to have to face up to if, as you say, you wish to take action.”

He paused. He pushed the cigarette box over to me. We lit up.

“You do realize, don’t you,” he kicked off, “that there isn’t a single rational reason for someone who is called Salinas to be in the resistance?”

“It’s not clear to me where you draw the bounds of rationality, Dad,” I riposted.

“At realities, Enrique. Only ever at realities.”

“Money, in other words.”

“Yes, money too, among other things. But not just money.” He pondered, as if he were searching for the most apposite word. “Let’s just say at the means of earning a livelihood,” he eventually declared. “We have the means to live. Or to put it another way, we have the means of surviving: that is what I wanted to say in essence.”

“Yes,” I said, “there’s no doubt about that!”

“You do realize, don’t you,” he went on, “that we not only have the means to live but, more than that, to live in security? … Wait!” He raised a hand before I had a chance to respond. “Do you know what uncertainty is?”

I had to think about that. “Yes, I do,” I eventually said.

“How do you know?”

“I learned today, on the highway. When that cop brushed me with his boot tip. If I weren’t called Salinas, they would have beaten me to a pulp, I think.”

“Indeed.” He nodded. “I wasn’t in a position to refer to that. I’m glad you got wise to that of your own accord, Enrique. You do realize then, don’t you, that if you risk your neck, you’ll be doing so for others, not yourself?”

His question again gave me pause. “Within the narrow bounds that you’ve set, I have to concede that that is so,” I said at length.

“The bounds are always narrow.” He leaned toward me from behind the desk. “If a person resolves to fight, he ought to know what he is fighting for. Otherwise it makes no sense. A person usually fights against a power in order to gain power himself. Or else because the power in question is threatening his life. You have to acknowledge, though, that in our case neither of these holds true.”

“Sure, I acknowledge it,” I said. The game was beginning to intrigue me. A ghastly game it was, in point of fact; I felt a strange chill around my heart. I can’t define it more precisely than that. I felt that he was right, that every word he was saying was right, and yet my entire innermost being protested against that truth. I feared that by the end of the conversation I would have no choice but to loathe my father, whom I loved. And I was afraid of that fear, a hundred times more afraid of that than I was of the truth of his arguments.

“You do realize, don’t you,” I heard his voice continue, “you do realize that every faction with a sense of purpose needs its unsuspecting tools. Who are tools even though they are called heroes, and even if statues are erected to a few of them — only ever a very few — in public places.”

“I know,” I mumbled hoarsely.

“You do realize, Enrique, you do realize, don’t you, what you’re putting at risk?”

Again I had to think about it.

“My life,” I eventually said.

“Your life!” he exclaimed. “You say that as if you were a child throwing aside a rag doll that you’re fed up with! Enrique, wake up to the fact that you’re living among mere concepts and thinking in terms of empty words. You’re putting your life at risk, you say, but you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. Try to grasp the fact that your life is you yourself, as you are sitting here, with your very real past, a possible future, and everything that you mean to your mother. Look at this evening, look down at the street, look around you in the world, and imagine it all being here no more. Grab your body, pinch your flesh, and imagine all that being no more. Can you imagine it? Do you have any idea what it means: to live? How could you know? You’re still young for that, and healthy … You’ve never been at death’s door and come back from there to rediscover life with wonderstruck joy … But do you at least realize that you were lied to at school? Do you realize that there is no afterlife, nor any resurrection? Do you realize that just this one life is given to us, and if we lose it, we also lose ourselves? Do you realize …”

I listened, flabbergasted. His words were spellbinding; I had never seen my father like this. I would never have thought him to be a coward. How was I to guess the purpose of his probing?

“I know,” I said, striving to hold myself in check, though something was quivering inside me.

“Well, if you know,” Father asked, “what more do you want? What’s the point of fighting if you have no reason to fight? Why risk your life, if it’s not in danger?” He got up from his place and came around to me. He leaned over me, grasping my shoulders with both hands. They were strong, very strong. “Why?” he entreated. “Tell me why. I want to know. Tell me!”

So I told him. I shook his hands off my shoulders and spilled it all out. Jill was still dancing in my nerves and lurking in my words. I told him that my life was not in danger, it was just that I could not be reconciled to it. “I would rather not have it,” I said, “than live it like this.” I talked about my itch to throw up, my abomination of everyday life. How I hated everything around me, everything. I hated their policemen, their newspapers, their news. I hated going into an office, a shop, even a café. I hated the furtive glances around me, the people who had been despised yesterday but were celebrated today. I hated the sufferance, the self-interest, the hide-and-seek, the perpetual one-upmanship, the privileges and the lying doggo … Also the patrolman on the highway, who didn’t have the guts to kick me, simply because my name is Salinas: I hated him more for that than for touching me with his boot. I hated the blindness, the bogus hope, the algal life, the stigmatized who, when they get a day’s break from the lashes of the whip, immediately start to sigh about how good life is … And I hated myself too, myself above all, merely for being here and doing nothing. I was well aware that I too was stigmatized, for the time being at any rate, and the longer I did nothing, the more I would be so. Jill appeared before my eyes again, the nauseatingly seductive life that she offered me.