Kaddish for an Unborn Child (10 page)

Untimely
Meditations
, the one titled “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” and this reinforced my belief that the sentences we have a need for seek us out sooner or later, because if I didn't believe that, I don't understand how those sentences could have reached my wife, who, to the best of my knowledge, never showed any interest in philosophy, least of all in Nietzsche. The exact sentences, which I soon tracked down in the disintegrating, red-bound volume of Nietzsche that I had seized upon once in some dark corner of an antiquarian bookseller's, read as follows, albeit not in my own translation:
There is a degree of sleeplessness, of rumination, of the historical sense, which is harmful and ultimately fatal to the living thing, whether this living thing be
a man or a people or a culture
. After which, or before it, I couldn't say offhand:
. . . He who cannot sink on the threshold of the moment and forget all the past, who cannot stand
balanced like a goddess of victory without growing dizzy
and afraid
—and from here on my wife knew it by heart—
will never know what happiness is—worse, he will never do
anything to make others happy
. My wife was made aware of her Jewishness, and all that was bound up with this, in early childhood. There had been a time—“my ponytailed, freckle-faced little-girl period,” my wife called it—when she had imagined that
the other children would have to love her a lot
on account of all that. Now that I come to write down her words, I suddenly see her, the way she laughed when she said that. Later on her Jewishness became equated for her with a sense of futility. With defeatism, despondency, suspicion, insidious fear, her mother's illness. Among strangers a dark secret, at home a ghetto of
Jewish feelings, Jewish thoughts
. After her mother died, an aunt of her father had moved in with them. “She has such an Auschwitz look,” she had immediately thought, my wife said. Seeing only a former or future murderer in everybody. “I don't know how I still managed to grow up into a more or less healthy woman.” Leaving the room the moment that
Jewish matters
were mentioned. “Something turned to stone inside me and resisted.” Hardly spending any time at home. Studying was an escape as later on were medicine and lovers, several brief and passionate affairs. She had had two “most awful experiences,” my wife said—both, she remembered, when she was around sixteen or seventeen years old. On one occasion she had spoken heatedly about the French Revolution, saying it had been little better than the Nazis. Her great-aunt responded by saying that she, being a Jew, had no right to talk about the French Revolution in that way, because had there been no French Revolution the Jews would still be living in ghettos today. After this rebuke from the great-aunt, so my wife remembered, she had not spoken a word at home for days or maybe even weeks. She had felt that she herself no longer existed, that she had no right at all to lay claim to her own feelings or thoughts, that solely because she had been born a Jew she could have only
Jewish feelings
and
Jewish thoughts
. That was when
every day they ground her face into the mud
had been formulated and she had declared it to herself for the first time. The second experience: she is sitting with a book in her hand, a book about atrocities, with photographs of atrocities, a vacantly staring, bespectacled face behind barbed wire, a young boy with a yellow star, hands raised in the air, his peakless cap slipping down over his eyes, on either side an escort of armed soldiers; she is looking at these pictures and a cold chill of malice, from she herself takes fright, creeps into her heart, and exactly the same thought occurs to her as my “hero” had thought in my short story: “What has this to do with me? I'm a Jew myself,” my wife said. But until she had read these and other similar thoughts in my story, she had only been able to think them uneasily, and afterwards had felt guilty for having them. That was why, after reading my story, my wife said, she had felt
she could hold her head
high
. And she repeated, and more than once at that, that I
taught her how to live
: that beside me, my wife said, she felt herself to be
free
. Yes, in this dark and all-illuminating night of mine these are the sounds, images and motifs that now stand out from the jumble of those few lightning-fast years that were my marriage, until I suddenly see ourselves at a window, the window of our apartment, again at night time, a no-longer-winter-but-not-yet-spring evening when the city's noxious vapors were pervaded now and again by a scent that came, like an otherworldly message, perhaps from distant plants that were stirring anew, out of habit as it were, seeking to live anew, out of habit as it were, and on the other side of the road three half-drunk men were stumbling homewards from the nearby bar, the white fur collar on the sheepskin coat one of them was wearing gleamed up towards our window and, holding on to each other, they were singing in subdued voices, the last traffic in the street had just sped by, there was a moment's silence, then, as in an orchestral pause, their voices too carried up to us, and we could hear clearly what they were singing:
We've just come from Auschwitz,
there's more of us than before
, the sound drifted up into the night, and at first I did not actually hear it, but then I did hear it. But what does it have to do with me, I thought, so-called anti-Semitism is a purely private affair that, even though I personally may die from it anywhere, at any time, even today, after Auschwitz, I reflected, nowadays that would be a sheer anachronism, a fallacy in which, as H. would say, not H., Leader and Chancellor, but H., philosopher and head butler to all leaders and chancellors, the
World-Spirit
is no longer present, in other words, a provincialism, nothing more, a genius loci, a local idiocy; and if they want to shoot or beat me to death, I reflected, they will say so in good time, I reflected, the way they have generally always given prior notice. Only then did I look at my wife, cautiously, because she was suspiciously quiet, and in the cold light from the street and the warmer light that was filtering out from the room behind us I clearly saw the tears streaming down her face. There will never be an end to it, my wife said, there is no escaping this curse, she said, and if only she knew what it was that made her a Jew, given that she was simply incapable of religious faith and, possibly out of laziness or cowardice, or as a result of other predilections, she was simply unacquainted with the specifically Jewish culture of the Jews, and also incapable of showing any interest in it as it simply did not interest her, she said, so what was it that made her Jewish, if in fact neither language, nor lifestyle, nothing, nothing at all, singled her out from others who lived around her, unless, she said, it was some sort of occult, atavistic message hidden away in the genes that she herself did not hear and therefore could not know about. At which point, dispassionately, callously, and almost calculatedly, as with a well-directed dagger thrust or a sudden strong embrace, I told her that was all a waste of time, her searching for presumed causes and pseudo-explanations was futile, just one thing made her Jewish, nothing else:
The fact that you were
not
in Auschwitz
, I told her, and at this my wife fell silent, first like a scared child, but then the features very quickly changed back into her own, the features of the wife I knew and of someone else whom I only now discovered in my wife's familiar face, a discovery which, so to speak, shook me; and our by then not so torrid nights were rekindled once again. Because, yes, by then the contradictions in my marriage were already starting to show, or to be accurate, my marriage had begun to show itself for what it was: a contradiction. In recollecting those times, I recall most of all certain reflexes of mine which kept me in a state of constant tension and internal agitation, in much the same way, perhaps—at least this is how I imagine it—as beavers, those actually rodent-like small creatures, must be driven by instinct to construct and model their complicated systems, veritable strongholds, of dams, escape passages and chambers. Around that time, besides of course literary translation, the stacks of translations that enabled me to put bread on the table, I was preoccupied by a plan for a more ambitious literary work; a novel, the subject of which, skipping the details here, was to be a soul's path, the path of a striving from darkness to light, a struggle to attain joy, engagement in this struggle as an obligation,
happiness viewed as a duty
. At that time I talked a great deal (no, that is an understatement: at that time I talked almost incessantly) about this plan with my wife, who visibly took the greatest possible pleasure in these discussions, and above all in my plan as such, because in it she saw, and of course not entirely without reason, a monument to our marriage as it were, and therefore I could never tell her enough about it, describing the plot, sketchy at first, of course, but later plumped out from day to day, the proliferating and solidifying and ramifying motifs and ideas, to which, amid a flicker of chromatics suddenly brightening then swiftly fading across her face, she would attach her own timorous comments, to which every now and again, and precisely in hope of that chromaticism of the play of features, I would give approving assent, encouragement and appreciation; we raised this plan together, so to speak, nursing and coddling and petting it as if it were our own child. Looking back, of course, it was all a mistake, no doubt, a mistake to allow my wife to encroach upon this most sensitive, most secret, most unprotected sanctum of my life, my existence, which in a word is my
work
, a sanctum that, quite to the contrary, I have to protect and defend, as I had done before and have done ever since, so to say surrounding it with a barbed-wire fence against all unauthorized intruders, against the very possibility of intrusion, any sort of intrusion, by anybody; just as it is an indisputable fact that I did indeed sense the danger in the intense interest on my wife's part, embracing and reaching into my whole life, fierce and yet at the same time achingly tender, while on the other hand, I did not in all honesty wish to forgo that interest either, just as one does not wish to forgo the warming sunshine that suddenly bursts upon one after the long dark days of winter. For when it came to my setting out to realize my plan, to actually write the novel, it turned out that the concept was unrealizable; it turned out that the material oozing from my ballpoint pen, as from an infective pustule, into the entire tissue of the plan, each and every cell of it, was such, I would say, as to pathologically alter that tissue, each and every cell of it; it turned out that it is impossible to write about happiness, or at least I can't, which in this case amounts to the same thing after all; happiness is perhaps too simple to let itself be written about, I wrote, as I am reading right now on a slip of paper that I wrote then and from which I am writing it down here; a life lived in happiness is therefore a life lived in muteness, I wrote. It turned out that writing about life amounts to thinking about life, and thinking about life amounts to casting doubt on life, but only one who is suffocated by his very lifeblood, or in whom it somehow circulates unnaturally, casts doubt on that lifeblood. It turned out that I don't write in order to seek pleasure; on the contrary, it turned out that by writing I am seeking pain, the most acute possible, well-nigh intolerable pain, most likely because pain is truth, and as to what constitutes truth, I wrote, the answer is so simple: truth is what consumes you, I wrote. Naturally, I could impart none of this to my wife. On the other hand, I did not want to lie to my wife either. As a result, therefore, we came up against certain difficulties in the course of our time together and our discussions, especially when the subject of my work, and most especially the
achievements
that could be expected from my work, was brought up: writing as
literature
, the to me remote, unimportant and infinitely uninteresting issue of likes or dislikes, the question of the
meaning
of my work, questions that, in the end, mostly debouched into the shameful, squalid, insulting and humiliating topic of success or the lack of it. How could I have explained to my wife that my ballpoint pen is my spade? That I write only because I have to write, and I have to write because I am whistled up every day to drive the spade deeper, to play death on a darker, sweeter string? How could I be expected to complete my self-liquidation, my sole business on this earth, while fostering within myself some seductive ulterior motive, the seductive ulterior motive of
achievement
,
literature
, or maybe
success
? How could my wife, or anyone else, wish for me to
put to use
my spectacular self-liquidation and, what is more, put it to use so that I might thereby sneak, like a thief with a skeleton key, into some sort of literary or other future from which I have already been debarred by reason of my birth, and from which I have anyway debarred myself, and to accomplish work founded on that future with the selfsame strokes of the grubbing hoe with which I must dig my grave bed in the clouds, the winds, the nothingness? It is questionable whether I myself saw my position as clearly, as distinctly, as I am now describing it. Perhaps not completely, but the aspiration, not to speak of the good intention, was undeniably there within me. As to what I might have been thinking then, and with what sorts of feelings I might have been grappling, a good indication is given by a fragmentary slip of paper that I found when searching through the fragments of my marriage. Evidently, it was a slip that I had intended to place beside my wife's tea cup, as I was accustomed to doing at times when, due to