Kaddish for an Unborn Child (11 page)

my work
having stretched late into the night, I did not get up for breakfast. This is what it says: “. . . That we should be able to love one another and yet still remain
free
, though I am well aware neither of us is able to evade the lot of a man and the lot of a woman, and thus we shall be party to this torment that a mysterious and, in truth, none too wise Nature has apportioned to us; in other words, that the time will come again when I shall reach out my hand for you and desire you, and all I shall desire is that you be mine; yet at the same time as you too reach out your hand and finally become mine, I shall still place bounds on you in your submission in order that I may preserve what I imagine to be
my freedom . . .
” So much for the fragment, and since I found it among my writings, a slip of paper mixed up among my other slips of paper, it is certain that I did not prop it up against my wife's tea cup but must somehow have mixed it up together with my writings and slips of paper, but it is also certain that is secretly what I thought, and I lived in accordance with my thoughts, indeed directly lived those thoughts, inasmuch as
I always did have a secret life, and that was always
my real life
. Yes, it was around then that I started to construct my escape passages, my beaver stronghold, to hide and shield things away from my wife's eyes and hands, so that from time to time—and, I have no doubt, on account of my defensive barriers—I fancied that I detected a lurking resentment in my wife's behavior, and this observation grew into a reciprocal resentment and later into a persistent anguish within me that portrayed, or sought to portray, my wife's shifting mood as a much more serious resentment than it really was, since it would not have taken much effort on my part to appease my wife, little more than a single appropriate, timely and well-chosen word, even one such gesture, would have done the trick, yet I clung to my anguish, obviously because I perceived my state of rejection in it, while the intolerable feeling of rejection sought compensation, and lonely compensation in turn manifested itself within me once again as creative force; in other words, it ignited my neurosis, my love of work, my fever and rage for work, haughtily carrying all before it but only necessitating newer and still more strenuous defensive reflexes, in short, re-activating the whole diabolical mechanism, the deadly merry-go-around, which first dips me in my anguish only to raise me aloft, but solely in order to quickly hurl me back, ever deeper . . . And certainly, quite certainly, this too played a part in the rekindling of our nights, on one of which darkly glittering nights, whose dark, velvety light nevertheless differed so much from the dark, black lights that lose themselves in the darkness of my present night—on one of our darkly glowing nights my wife said that to all of our questions and answers, those questions and answers that touch upon our entire life, we can only respond with our lives as a whole, or to be more precise, with our entire lives, because every question we pose from now on and every answer we give from now on would be an unsatisfactory question and an unsatisfactory answer, and she could imagine fulfillment only one way, because, for her at least, no other fulfillment could substitute for that sole, undivided, genuine fulfillment, or in other words, she wanted a child by me, my wife said. Yes, and

“No!” I said instantly and at once, without hesitation and virtually instinctively as it has become quite natural by now that our instincts should act contrary to our instincts, that our counterinstincts, so to say, should act instead of, indeed as, our instincts; and my wife just laughed, as if that

“No!” had not been a decisive enough

“No!” or as if she had been sure of my inconsistency. She understood me, she said later, she knew what depths that

“No!” must have burst forth from within me, and what I would have to subjugate within myself for it to become a
yes
. I responded that I believed I in turn understood her, what she was thinking, but the

“No!” was a

“No!” and not the sort of
Jewish no
that she was probably thinking; no, I was quite sure about that, as sure as I was unsure about exactly what kind of a

“No!” it was, it was just a

“No!” I said, though as far as a
Jewish no
is concerned, there would be justification enough for that, too, since it was enough to imagine a distressing and shameful conversation, I said, let's say, I said, to imagine a child's cry, our child's (your) screaming, let's say, I said; the child has heard something and just happens to be screaming, “I don't want to be a Jew!” let's say, I said, since it is very easy to imagine and easy to justify, I said, that the child may not want to be a Jew, let's say, and I would be hard put to respond to that; yes, because how can one compel a living being to be a Jew, in this respect, I said, I would have to go about with my head hung low before it (before you), because there is nothing I could give it (you), no explanation, no belief, no ammunition, since my own Jewishness means nothing to me, or to be more precise, in terms of its Jewishness nothing, in terms of the experience everything, as Jewishness: a bald-headed woman in a red negligee in front of the mirror, as experience: my life, my survival, the cerebral mode of existence that I live and maintain as a cerebral mode of existence, and for me that is sufficient, I am perfectly satisfied with that much; it is questionable, however, if it (you) would be satisfied with that much. And yet, I said, I am not saying a
Jewish no
, despite everything, because there is nothing more abominable, more shameful, more destructive and more self-repudiating than this kind of, so to say, rational
no
, this kind of
Jewish no
, there is nothing tawdrier than that, nothing more cowardly, I said, I have had enough of murderers and deniers of life proclaiming themselves to be for life, it happens far too often, I said, for it to rouse in me even so much as a rebellious squeak of defiance, there is nothing more appalling, more disgraceful than to deny life for the sake of the deniers of life, for children were born even in Auschwitz, I said, and not unnaturally this line of reasoning appealed to my wife, though I find it hard to believe she could really have understood, any more than probably I myself really understood. Yes, and it cannot have been long after this that I had to take a tramcar, to go who knows where, obviously going about my business, as if I still had any business now that all my earthly business has already been accomplished, and I was gazing out of the window during the rickety trundling, the unexpected halts at tram stops. We clattered along past frightful houses and the faint shrieks of sporadic scatterings of stunted vegetation and all at once, as in an onslaught, a family alighted. I forgot to mention that it was a Sunday, a discreetly dwindling Sunday afternoon going into the warmer time of year. There were five of them, the parents and three daughters. The youngest, barely out of swaddling clothes and resplendent in pink, blue and blonde, was dribbling and screaming tenaciously, perhaps because she was too hot, I thought. The mother, brunette, placid, exhausted, took her on her lap, her slender neck crooked over the infant in the semiarched pose of a ballerina at the opera. The middle sister stood sulking beside her mother as the latter cuddled the youngest, while the eldest girl, who I supposed was seven or eight years old, so to say in a gesture of conciliation and the wretched fellowship of outcasts, laced her arm around her younger sister's shoulder but was peevishly shrugged off. The middle sister wanted her mother to herself but knew this was a forlorn cause, as was her weapon, the unbridled screaming that had now become the prerogative of the youngest. The eldest girl was now on her own; that pleasantly lit Sunday afternoon she was again experiencing the bitter pill of being ignored, loneliness and jealousy. Would that mature within her into a welcoming forgiveness, I wondered, or rather into a hide-in-the-corner neurosis, I wondered, while her father and mother browbeat her into some sort of shameful existence, I wondered, to which she will reconcile herself, I wondered, and comply shamefacedly, or if not shamefacedly, all the more shame on her and on all those who browbeat and reconciled her to that, I wondered. The father, a wiry, brown-haired, bespectacled man in summery linen shorts, sandals on his bare feet, Adam's apple like a goiter, stretched out his jaundiced bony hand, the infant finally calmed down between his knobbly knees; and suddenly, like a transcendental message, an overarching similarity broke out on the five faces. They were ugly, harrowed, pitiful and beatific, within me vied mixed feelings of revulsion and attraction, horrific memories and melancholy, and written on their foreheads, so to say, as well as on the sides of the tramcar I saw in flaming letters a:

“No!” I could never be another person's father, destiny, god,

“No!” what happened to me, my childhood, must never happen to another child,

“No!” something screamed and whined within me, it is impossible that this, childhood, should happen to it (to you) and to me; yes, and that was when I started to tell the story of my childhood to my wife, or maybe it was to myself, I don't rightly know, but I told the story with the full prodigality and compulsiveness of my logorrhea, told it unrestrainedly for days and weeks on end, as a matter of fact I am still telling the story now, though since long ago not to my wife. Yes, and not only to tell the story, for around that time I also started to roam about, and the selfsame city in which I had been going about in the relative security of relative habit now began, around that time, to turn again into a trap for me and periodically open up beneath my feet, so I could never know upon which unspeakable location, pervaded with agonies and ignominies, I might unexpectedly stumble, or what summons I was yielding to, for instance, when I would sneak into a side street, dozing like some illustrious patient between the tiny, crippled, dream-wreck palaces, or steal between the shadows of turreted, weather-cocked, lace-curtained, steeply gabled, blind-windowed fairy-tale houses, along the black railings of vile front gardens in which everything was now as ransacked, as bare, brazen, shoddy and rational as a deserted excavation site. Or, on yet another occasion, how I ended up in the—how can I put it?—entrails of the city, to which, by the way, I have come back again as a resident, through a twist of fate, if you like, or through ineptitude, if you like that better, but let's rather say through a twist of fate, now it makes no difference and inasmuch as one may detect one's fate even in one's ineptitude, if one has the eye for it; yes, maybe at that time I believed (or, to be more precise, deluded myself) that I had fetched up here inadvertently, in the selfsame place, the bowels of the Józsefváros city district, where they abut the bowels of the Ferencváros district, that is to say roughly where I still live today, though the prefabricated apartment of my prefabricated tower block could then only have been a misbegotten draft on a misbegotten blueprint. It was a dusk towards the end of summer, I remember, the street suffused with overripe smells, its small-windowed houses tottering squint-eyed, tipsy and unwashed along the sidewalks, the sinking sun pouring like yellow, sticky, fermenting grape must all across their walls, the gates murkily yawning like scabs of impetigo, and, feeling dizzy, I clung to a door knob, or who knows what, as I was suddenly grazed by—oh, certainly not by a sense of transience, on the contrary, by the
mystery of continuance
; yes, a murderer must feel this, I supposed then later told my wife, and why I should happen to have supposed that of all things may not, I suppose be logical but is understandable, I must have supposed it on account of the dead, I suppose, I told my wife, on account of my dead, my dead childhood and my absurd—at any rate absurd when set against my dead and my dead childhood—survival; yes, a murderer must feel this way if, let's say, I supposed and later told my wife, having long forgotten his deed (which is conceivable, nor is it such a rarity at that) decades later, let's say out of forgetfulness or maybe just by mechanically reproducing his former habits, suddenly happens to reopen the door on the scene of the crime, and he finds everything there unchanged: the corpse, though it has decomposed by now into a skeleton, the tawdry props of the furniture, not forgetting himself, and no matter how obvious it is that by now nothing and nobody is the same as it or he was, it's just as obvious that after the brief interlude of a generation everything is nevertheless exactly the same as it was,
indeed even more so
. And now he knows what he needs to know, that it was
by no means
chance that led him back, indeed, that perhaps he never even got out of there, because
this is the place where he must atone
. And don't ask, I said to my wife, why he must, because crime and atonement are concepts between which only being brings a living link into being, if it brings anything into being of course, and if it has already brought something into being, then being in itself is quite enough to qualify as a crime,
el
delito mayor del hombre es haber nacido
, somebody wrote,
²
I said to my wife. I also told my wife about one of my dreams, a recurrent old dream that I had not dreamed for quite some time but which had unexpectedly come back again in those days. It takes place there, yes, always
there
, on that spot, in that corner house. I can't see the neighborhood, it's true, but I know this for sure. It may be that the walls permit that conclusion, the thick, ghostly-grey walls of a decrepit house. Along with the tobacconist's, with a flight of steep, uneven steps leading up to it. At the top it was as if one were opening the door on a rat hole: decaying gloom and a putrefying stench. But on this occasion the tobacconist's has been placed farther over, on the corner of the corner house. I have no reason at all to enter. I enter. This is not the tobacconist's, it's a bit more spacious, a bit brighter, much drier and warm, like an attic. There they sit, on an ancient
couch
set on the concrete floor, opposite an indeterminate source of light beams—a skylight, perhaps?—that sets the thick clouds of dust sifting down from above dancing. All the signs suggest that they have just sat
up
, whereas beforehand they could well have been lying down, waiting for my now decades-overdue visit, a visit from their uncaring
hope-butcher
of a grandson. An old couple in the dusty light, full of reproaches. So weak they hardly move. I hand over the ham that I have brought with me. They are pleased, but with an undiminished rancor. They speak, but I don't understand what they say. Grandfather bends his grey, bristly face over the ham, which he is holding in his hands, having meanwhile undone the wrapping paper. Livid cadaveric spots can clearly be seen on my grandmother's face. She complains about the eternal stabbing pains in her head, the buzzing in her ears. About being made to wait; that they have been waiting such a long, long time now. It is borne in on me how the ham is next to nothing for them. They are desperately hungry and abandoned. I make a few futile gestures, like a schoolboy trying to apologize. My heart feels as heavy as the stones of the steps. Then everything sinks, lifts and disperses like a shameful secret. Why must we live with our face perpetually turned towards some scene of shame? I noted down at the time. It was around the same time that my still-growing collection of quotations was started, a bundle of paper slips held together by a clip, which even now is lying about on my table, among the rest of my paper slips.
My friends, we had it tough when we were
young: we su fered from youth itself as from a serious illness,
I read on one slip.
Families, I hate you!
I read on another.
Surrendering ourselves to childhood as a cause of
death,
I read.
Already as a child . . . I often considered,
I read,
that the word domination, like domination, like the
notion of domination, invariably signifies a domination of
terror
, and appended to this quotation (from Thomas Bern-hard), I read a remark of my own: “And the domination of terror in all cases signifies a paternal domination.” After that, all I read on the slips are my own observations, such as: “The task of education, to which I could never be reconciled . . .”; “To influence someone else's dreams like a nightmare, to play a role, the paternal role, and thus a fatal role, in someone else's life is one of the true horrors, the terrifying aspect of which . . .”; “That (in my childhood and hence ever since) everything that signified myself was always a sin, whereas it was always a virtue if I acted in such a way as to deny and kill myself . . .”; “My grandmother's
mouth always had a stale
taste
. Really: her breath smelled of mothballs. The reek of her Józsefváros apartment. The anachronistic reek of the Monarchy. The darkness of her apartment, like the darkness of that period, the thirties, inherited, and in the process of inheritance exacerbated into a disease. The dark furniture, the tenement block with its
outside corridors
, lives played out in front of one another, milky coffee for supper, matzos
crumbled
into a mug, the prohibition against turning the lights on, my grandfather reading the newspaper in the dark, the
alcove
in whose mysterious corners some dark, musty and deadly thought constantly seemed to be lurking. The nightly bedbug bloodbath . . .”; “I would gradually fence you in with all these stories, which you actually have nothing to do with, yet over time they would tower up around you like an insurmountable barrier . . .”; “What a misery childhood was, and how impatient I was to grow up, because I believed that grown-ups had a secret alliance, that they lived in perfect safety in their sadism-girt world . . .”; and so forth. Those mornings, I told my wife. Those rainy mornings, rainy Monday mornings, when my father took me back to the boarding school for yet another week. Every Monday morning lives on in my memory as a rainy Monday morning, which is absurd, of course, but indicative, I said to my wife. I recall that on just such a rainy Monday morning I suddenly made up my mind, dropping everything, dropping
my work
, and set off for that affluent suburb or, to be more precise, the suburb that had once been an affluent suburb, or which I remembered as a formerly affluent suburb, a neighborhood of turreted, weather-cocked, lace-curtained, steeply-gabled fairy-tale houses, where, as one of those turreted, steeply gabled, weather-cocked fairy-tale houses the boarding school was located. Folding my umbrella, that shining symbol of our earthly grotesqueness, the man who stepped into this subsiding house of my troubled torments and even more troubled pleasures must have been a slightly greying fellow of comfortably-off appearance, in a checked cloth cap, with dripping umbrella, I related to my wife that evening. Is that a triumph or a defeat? I wonder how
I
would have greeted that fellow, I joked that evening to my wife, would I have noticed him at all? If so, maybe I would have taken him for some sort of school inspector, an accomplice of the school governors, the powers in charge, I related to my wife that evening. Perhaps for a disagreeable violin teacher. Obviously, I would have noticed straightaway a certain awkwardness about him as well, something ridiculous which would immediately strike one, for instance, in the way he speaks to children in the measured, fastidious manner of a sex killer, I related to my wife. Nothing, nothing, nothing at all about this outlandish, botched figure fits the dreams that I wove about my adulthood; at most I might envy him his superiority, little suspecting how much it is merely an adult's superiority, in other words, lending the appearance of superiority to non-superiority, I said to my wife. I also wrote a few lines about the visit in my notebook, a few of which I am copying across into this notebook. “I was at the boarding school,” I wrote. “It lies in ruins, like everything else, houses, lives, the world,” I wrote. “A commemorative plaque on the wall utterly flabbergasted me. It says:
Here lived and wrote
, and so on. The headmaster. The Head. Fat Nat (as we boys used to call him). Who would have believed he was a scholar? Yes, general bungling passes as scholarship in this century . . . The garden in ruins, laid to waste. The boarding school converted into an apartment house. The ceremonial stairway with its broad stone balustrade that was such fun to slide down, where so many furtive events took place, most especially in the evenings, when, jostling with one's fellow boarders, one trudged upstairs to bed, and the sleepiness that settled on one's eyes like a carpet of snow, braking, stifling, muffling every sound, experience and desire (the time when I suddenly developed a high fever one evening, and Szilvási, a peasant lad some ten years older than me, carried me up in his arms, and when he asked
which dorm do you sleep in
? I was unable to reply because at the age of five I had never heard the word dormitory before and so didn't know what he meant): this stairway was, well, squalid, let's just leave it at that . . . The row of dormitories chopped up, one rental unit piggybacked on the other . . . The headmaster's apartment. The Head's rooms. The frightful, silent and silencing apartment that prompted and impelled one to go on tiptoe. In place of the gleaming brass doorknob an aluminum handle, like a triumphant kick in the backside . . . The study rooms on the mezzanine. The second-class
juniors
and the muchenvied
seniors
once bent over their books here during the quiet hours of afternoon
prep
. The teacher on duty for that day supervising the devotions. The grave, awe-inspiring esotericism of algebra problems. These rooms now provide homes for several families. Family lives full of bustle, noise, savory smells . . . disintegration and decay of every rigid form. Communality as a disintegrating force, ultimately as death . . . The
basement
. The dining hall, the cooler, the games room (Ping-Pong). And above all, the assembly hall for
reports
. Entry is barred. A notice board announces:
Film club
,
tickets
, and so forth. Fine, then I'll just have to imagine the dining hall. It's better that way, so-called
reality
(their reality) won't get in the way. In that vast basement hall, lit by high-set windows, long parallel rows of tables spread with white table-cloths. The breakfasts! The one cherished ceremony of the day (except the meal after Saturday
report
), austere but still the stuff of fantasies. The breakfast setting at my designated place, my serviette stigmatized with a Roman ‘one' in a serviette ring stigmatized with a Roman ‘one': that was my number here, just like other numbers I have acquired in other places at other times (nowadays an eleven-digit number runs around as my proxy somewhere in the nooks and corners of unknown labyrinths as my shadow life, a second, enigmatic me about which I know nothing, even though I am answerable for it with my life, and what it does, or what is done to it, becomes my destiny). But this Roman ‘one' was a truly stylish start, charming and auspicious, like the dawn of civilizations. Because I was the youngest boarder at the school . . . etc. We stood at our places freshly scrubbed, radiant, alert, famished. (I was always famished, all the time.) At the head of the table, a teacher; at the head of every table, a teacher. He would mumble a grace, a succinct, cautious, one might say diplomatic form of prayer. Care had to be taken that it was tied to neither the Jewish nor any of the Christian liturgies, that it should be both Jewish and Christian, to the uniform gratification of all gods.