Imre Kertész: Detective Story

Out with it! In short, I couldn’t respond to her desire — me, who had been waiting for this very moment for weeks! I just lay beside her, impotent. She embraced me. I could feel her trembling. Then the trembling passed. She just caressed me with a now cool hand, like a nursery schoolteacher. I didn’t dare look at her. Then she spoke. She said she was grateful to me. I could have taken her, made her my own, but it was her I wanted, not the opportunity and chance. She would never forget that, she said. She snuggled up contentedly — her body was cool by then — and kissed me, on both eyes and my brow. Then she got up and started to dress, meanwhile looking at me all the time and smiling. I reached out for her. She sat down beside me, at the edge of the couch. Now it was she who leaned over me. She started to caress me. Such a light and soft touch! She stroked me until … Then she again discarded her underwear. Very slowly and deliberately, meanwhile looking at me and smiling. I almost lost my senses! Finally, she lay down beside me. And then …

Later on we went out to a bar. We laughed the whole evening, laughed and laughed!

I turn the page:

Happiness makes you lose your mind. That doesn’t matter, but then happiness paralyzes you. I forget about everything else. I’m living as if I had a right to live; I’m living as if I were really existing. I make plans, dream of the future, build a life for the two of us, want to marry her — as though no one else but us were alive. Meanwhile I sense how absurd this all is, as there is no future, only the present, a state, a state of emergency.

I turn the page:

I talked it over with her. I let her know what I am thinking. She understood; she agreed on every point. I felt inexpressible gratitude and relief. I gripped her hand. And then all of a sudden she began talking about the wedding and how we would furnish the home.

I turn the page:

I can’t stand it anymore. I’m an idiot; I myself don’t know what I want. I have to decide finally: her or … And what about both? No, that’s impossible … But nevertheless, what if? … I can’t see clearly; the trouble is that I don’t see clearly. In point of fact, I am now beginning to grasp — dreadful feeling — that I don’t really know her. And not just her but myself, or at least not enough. I have to know what I want. I have to get to know both her and myself. But how? Talking is not enough; words don’t clarify anything. I’ll have to hit upon something, but what?

He hit upon driving.

So I’ll have to describe that car trip. Not that it will be difficult, as I am familiar with every detail. Enrique put down an outline in the diary, but I also spoke to him in person about it. Whatever gaps were still left, Estella filled in, or rather let’s stay with just Jill.

We interviewed her too at the time. We didn’t make much use of her. We accepted her statement that she had been embroiled in the case unsuspectingly. So that was how it went: we didn’t look to Jill for anything. But then order is order. A transcript has to be made of everything. In this case we could again point to a transcript, which again merely corroborated the all-embracing thoroughness of our investigations and their impartiality.

I felt a sort of respect for Enrique at that time. His fate was already assuming a definite shape; his sentence appeared to have been sealed in the course of the proceedings. Jill was his fiancée, and that can be embarrassing for one at times.

I only got to meet her again six months later. Enrique was no longer alive. I was starting to get a proper perspective on the whole story. I was being assailed by my headaches around then, excruciating, unrelenting headaches.

So I looked Estella up (or rather let’s stay with Jill). She was married by then, to a certain Anibal Roque T., a highly reputable entrepreneur. I asked to have a chat with her in the morning. How scared she was, the lambkin! And how amenable once she was over the big relief! …

I am mulling over what could have drawn Enrique to Jill. Something irresistible, some kind of compulsion. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I understand nothing about what makes the mind tick, my own least of all. I sensed one thing only, but that I was sure about, which is that everybody would have a price to pay in this case, everybody. I therefore had to enlighten her too that she would not get out of it scot-free. Maria was grieving; she had to pay in a different way. Jill was aware of that, don’t think she wasn’t, or why would she have agreed? Maybe out of fear primarily — I gave her reason enough, there’s no question. But not solely out of fear — I’d be willing to swear to that whenever you wish. Jill was crafty: she tried to give our relationship the appearance of blackmail, and she could have come up with a pretext for it, as I say, but she never managed fully to convince me of this. As for herself, that’s a good question. Did she perhaps wish to make amends in the way that I sought an accomplice in her? Did she pity me or despise me? I considered that was her business, but the case would not permit anyone to remain clean who had played any part in it, and Jill too must have learned that, I suppose, whatever she might have dreamed of when she hastily got married.

A sweet yet anguished relationship it was, inexcusable, I admit it. But in all likelihood that was precisely the attraction. Some crazy compulsion once drove me to the point of reading to her from Enrique’s diary. That wasn’t out of meanness, please believe me. What I mean is that I didn’t read it to her in order to torment her, or so that I might — how the devil should I put this? — get a kick out of it. No way was there anything sexual in it. It was just that Enrique’s shade was settling on me, and I felt it was too massive. I wanted it to settle over both of us. I had that right, whatever you may say, I had the right, since we owed each other. Enrique’s shade settled on both of us. I wanted us to carry it together, to go around together beneath it, as if we were under a huge, monstrous umbrella, two lost souls in a storm …

It was a silly thing to do! She became upset, threw herself onto the bed, and screamed. She called us all murderers: me, Enrique, all men, life as a whole.

“Murderers!” she screamed.

“And you?” I ask. “What about you? You’re a whore, an out-and-out tramp!” And believe it or not, I suddenly caught myself accusing her of treachery, and reproaching her for not having swung from the same rope as the accused, which is to say Enrique. I, who am supposed to be a flatfoot, after all.

Yet I understood Jill well: she was a woman, a woman first and foremost.

…

Anyway, there was this highway that led to the coast — you know, to the bit where the peninsula pokes out into the bay. Anyone traveling to the Blue Coast has to use that road. That day Enrique and Jill drove to the Blue Coast. They wanted to bathe. And Enrique was also looking for someone at the beach.

He found who he was looking for — I’ll be damned if he didn’t. That’s where they all gathered, those shaggy-haired weirdos. It was a shrewd choice: it’s a big beach, and they picked a secluded spot on it. They set down their transistor radios, which put an end to our listening devices. We photographed them, ten dozen rolls: they let us do that, they were aware that they were known to us anyway. We could have cracked down on them, sure we could. But then what? They were pros; they weren’t doing anything. We wouldn’t have dragged a word out of them; what we would have been able to get from them we knew anyway. It was all window dressing. They didn’t run many risks: it wasn’t they who undertook the actions. So what the hell were we supposed to do? We kept them under observation until events caught up with them. Then they all disappeared as if they had been swallowed up by the earth. A confounded line of work ours is; I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.