Kaddish for an Unborn Child (14 page)

and
writing, it was all the same, my wife said. Yes, my wife said, it had been a great lesson for her, the whole thing, our marriage, that is to say. Through me, my wife said, she had come to understand and experience everything that she had not understood, and had not wanted to understand either, based on her own parents' experiences. No, because to have understood everything, she knew now, would then, when she was a young girl, simply have killed her. Secretly, my wife said, in the depths of her soul, she had believed she was a coward, but now she knew—and I, along with the years spent with me, had helped her significantly in this—well, now she knew that she had simply wanted to live, had to live. And now also, my wife said, now also that was what everything within her was saying, she wanted to live. She was sorry for me and, above all, sorry that she was so powerless in feeling sorry for me; but then she had done everything within her power
to save
me
(I kept quiet, but her choice of words surprised me). Even if purely out of gratitude, my wife continued, for I had shown her the way, though it was me, of all people, who had subsequently been unable to keep up with her along it, because the wounds that I carried within me, and from which I might, perhaps, have been able to recover but, it seemed—or at least so it seemed to her, my wife said—I had not
wanted
, and still did not want, to recover from, were tougher than my mind, and that had carried over into our love and our marriage. She said again that she was sorry for me, she said others had destroyed me, but I had also destroyed myself in the process, though that had not been the way she had viewed it at first, on the contrary, at first
what she had admired in me
was that, while others might have tried to destroy me, I had nevertheless not been destroyed, as she had seen it then; she had been wrong about that, my wife said, but that would not have been a problem in itself, and it had not given rise to a sense of disappointment, though she had undoubtedly suffered on that account, my wife said. She repeated that she had wanted to save me, but the fruitlessness of all her attempts, her affection and her love had slowly killed any love and affection she had towards me and had left her just with a sense of fruitlessness and futility and unhappiness. She said that I had always talked a lot about freedom, but the freedom to which I was constantly in the habit of referring did not, for me, in reality, signify freedom in my vocation as an
artist
(as my wife put it), indeed in reality was not freedom at all, if by freedom one means expansive, strong, receptive, to which commitment, yes,
love
can also be added, my wife said; no, my kind of freedom was, in effect, a freedom directed
against
something or somebody, and somebodies or somethings, my wife said, fight or flight, or both together, and without that my kind of freedom did not actually even exist, because—it would appear—it could not exist, my wife said. And so, if these “somebodies or somethings” were not to hand, then I invent and create dependencies of that sort, my wife said, in order that there be something for me to flee from or confront. And I had thereby, for years now, mercilessly and cunningly allotted to her this appalling—or, to be honest just for once: this
shameful
—role (to use one of my own expressions), my wife said, but not in the manner a lover seeking support would use to his lover, nor even a patient to his doctor; no, my wife said, I had allotted this role to her (to use one of my favorite words again) like a hangman to his victim, my wife said. She said that I had bowled her over with my mind, then aroused her sympathy, then having aroused her sympathy, had made her my audience, an audience for my appalling childhood and my horrific stories, and when she had wanted to have a part in these stories, in order to steer the stories out of their maze, their rut, yes, their mire, and guide me to her, to her love, so that
together
we might extricate ourselves from the swamp and leave it behind forever, like the bad memory of an illness—then all at once I had let go of her hand (as my wife expressed it) and started to run away from her, back into the swamp, and now she no longer had the strength, my wife said, to come after me a second time, and who knows how many times more, to lead me out of there again. Because it seemed, my wife said, that I don't even want to make a start on fumbling my way out of there; evidently, for me there was no way out of my appalling childhood and horrific stories, whatever she might do, my wife said, and even if she were to sacrifice her life for me, she knew, she saw, that she would be doing it only fruitlessly, to no avail. Yes, when we had bumped into one another (that was the phrase my wife used), it had seemed to her that I might teach her how
to live
, and then she had been horrified to see how much destructive force I had within me, and that next to me what was in store for her was not life but destruction. The cause, my wife said, was a sick intellect, a sick and poisoned intellect, she repeated over and over again, an eternally poisoned and poisoning and contaminating intellect which, my wife said, had to be brought to an end; yes, my wife said, one just had to free oneself, detach oneself, from it, if one wanted to live, and she had decided, she repeated, that she wanted to live. At this juncture my wife fell silent for a moment, and from the way she stood there, her shoulders slightly hunched, arms folded, lonely, alarmed, pale faced, her lipstick smudged, I was suddenly—or, let's say, unavoidably—struck by a solicitous concern that maybe she was feeling cold. And then, swiftly and drily, as if it were some unpleasant news that would, however, immediately lose its unpleasant flavor as soon as she was able to announce it, she went on to say that, yes, there was no point in hiding it, there “was someone,” someone whom she was thinking of marrying. And
he
, she added, was not Jewish. It is interesting, perhaps, that it was only now that I spoke up, as if out of all that my wife had said I felt aggrieved by just this one point. What did she take me for, some sort of negative race preservationist? I bawled at her. I didn't need to have been in Auschwitz, I bawled, to learn about this age and this world, and not deny any longer what I have learned, I bawled, not to deny it in the name of some curious—albeit, I admit it, exceedingly practical—interpretation of the principle of life, which is actually just the principle of accommodation; all right, I bawled, I have no objections to it, but let us see clearly, I bawled, let us see clearly that
assimilation
in this instance is not the assimilation of one race—race! don't make me laugh!—to another race—don't make me laugh!— but a
total assimilation
to the extant, the extant circumstances and existing conditions, I bawled, circumstances and conditions which may be such or such, it's not worth ranking them according to their qualities—they are the way they are—the only thing that is worth ranking, but then it is
our
bounden duty
to rank it, is our
decision
, our decision to carry out total assimilation, or not to carry out total assimilation, I bawled, though probably more quietly by this point, and then we should, indeed it is
our bounden duty
to, rank our capabilities as to whether or not we are able to carry out total assimilation; and already in early childhood I could see clearly that I was incapable of it, incapable of assimilating to the extant, the existing,
to life
, and despite that, I bawled, I am nevertheless extant, I exist and I live, but in such a way that I know I am incapable of it, in such a way that already in early childhood I could see clearly that if I were to assimilate, that would kill me sooner than if I did not assimilate, which actually would likewise kill me anyway. And in this respect it is absolutely irrelevant whether I am a Jew or not a Jew, though Jewishness is, undeniably, a great advantage here, and from this perspective—do you understand? I bawled—
from
this
unique
perspective alone
am I willing to be Jewish, exclusively from this unique perspective do I regard it as fortunate, even especially fortunate, indeed a blessing, not to be a Jew, because I don't care a hoot, I bawled, what I am, but to have had the opportunity of being in Auschwitz as a branded Jew and yet, through my Jewishness, to have lived through something and confronted something; and I know, once and for all, and I know irrevocably something that I will not relinquish, will never relinquish, I bawled. I soon fell silent. After that we divorced. And if I do not recall the years that succeeded this as years in the desert of total barrenness, that is purely thanks to the fact that during these years, as always— since then, before then and naturally during the period of my marriage as well—
I worked
; yes, it was my work that saved me, even if in reality, of course, it has only saved me for destruction. During those years I not only arrived at certain decisive intuitions, during these years I became aware that my intuitions were in turn tightly interwoven, knot to knot, with my destiny. During those years I also became aware of the true nature of my work, which in essence is nothing other than to dig, dig further and to the end, the grave that others started to dig for me in the clouds, the winds, the nothingness. During those years I dreamed anew the task and secret hope that had been dreamed before, and now I know it was a dream based on “Teacher's” example. During these years I became aware of my life, on the one hand as fact, on the other as a
cerebral mode of existence
, to be more precise, a certain mode of existence that would no longer survive, did not wish to survive, indeed probably was not even capable of surviving survival, a life which nevertheless has its own demand, namely, that it
be formed
, like a rounded, rock-hard object, in order that it should
persist
, after all, no matter why, no matter for whom—
for everybody and nobody
, for whoever it is or isn't, it's all the same, for whoever will feel shame on our account and (possibly) for us; which I shall put an end to and liquidate, however, as
fact
, as the mere fact of survival, even if, and truly only if, that fact happens to be me. During those years it happened that I came across Dr. Obláth in the woods. During those years I started to write my slips of paper about my marriage. During those years my wife looked me up again. Once when I was waiting in the usual coffee house, hoping for more prescriptions, she led in two children by the hand. One was a dark-eyed little girl with pale spots of freckles scattered around her tiny nose, one a headstrong boy with eyes bright and hard as greyish-blue pebbles.
Say hello to the
gentleman
, she told them. That sobered me up completely, once and for all. Sometimes I still scurry through the city like a bedraggled weasel that has managed to make it through a big extermination drive. I start at each sound or sight, as if the scent of faltering memories were assailing my calloused, sluggish senses from the other world. Here and there, by a house or street corner, I stop in terror, I search around with alarmed looks, nostrils flaring, I want to flee but something holds me back. Beneath my feet the sewers bubble, as if the polluted flood of my memories were seeking to burst out of its hidden channel and sweep me away. Let it; I am ready for it. In one last big effort to regain my composure, I have produced my still fallible, stubborn life—I have produced it so that I may set off with the bundle that is this life in my two upraised arms and, for all I care, in the swirling black waters of some dark river,

May I submerge,
Lord God!
let me submerge
for ever and ever,
Amen.

Endnotes

1
Translation by Michael Hamburger (Selected Poems of Paul Celan, Anvil Press Poetry, 1995; Penguin Books, 1996)

2
Man's greatest crime is to be born (Calderón:
Life Is a Dream
)

Books by IMRE KERTÉSZ

Fatelessness
Liquidation
Looking for a Clue
Detective Story
The Failure
The Union Jack
Kaddish for an Unborn Child
Galley-Slave's Journal

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, OCTOBER 2004

Copyright © 2004 by Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York.
Originally published in Hungary as
Kaddis a meg nem szvületett
gyermekért
by Magveto
, Budapest.
Copyright © 1990 by Imre Kertész. This translation published by
arrangement with Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL.
Published in Germany
by Rowohlt Berlin Verlag GmbH, Berlin.
Copyright © 1992 by Rowohlt Berlin Verlag GmbH.

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Kaddish for an Unborn Child
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eISBN: 978-0-307-42649-9

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