Kaddish for an Unborn Child (6 page)

ought
to have done, that is, what he
ought
to have done according to rational calculations of hunger, the survival instinct and madness, and the blood compact that the dominating power had entered into with hunger, the survival instinct and madness, but instead, repudiating all that, he did something else, something that he
ought not
to have done and that no rationally minded person would expect from anybody. At that my wife (though not yet that at the time) fell silent for a while, then suddenly—and I recollect her face upraised to me in the dancing lights of the night, both soft-grained and glassily opalescent and glistening, like a 1930s close-up, and I recollect her voice too, which trembled with the emotion and agitation of her audacity, or at least that was what I supposed at the time, and maybe it was so, though why would it have been since nothing is quite what we suppose or would like to suppose, the world not being a
notion
but a chimera of ours, full of unimaginable surprises—suddenly declared that I must be very lonely and sad and, for all my experience, very inexperienced to be so lacking in faith in people, yes, to need to be producing theories in order to explain a natural (yes, that's what she said: natural), a
natural
and decent human gesture; and I recollect how much these words upset me, a remark that was so utterly amateurish and so beguiling in its very untenability, I recollect, yes, just as I also recollect the smile that followed, timid at first but turning quizzical, then rapidly confidential, a play of expressions that I have tried to conjure up so many times subsequently, because in a certain sense it always entranced me, to start with pleasurably, later, when I no longer managed to conjure it up, painfully; or in other words, to start with its reality, later on its lack, and still later on just its memory, the way it usually is and, it would seem, has to be, as it is never any different—I recollect all this, my emotions suddenly compacting, becoming almost uncomfortably immanent and confused, and even more the question she asked as to whether she might take my arm. “Certainly,” I replied. But at this point it would be fitting for me to relate roughly how I was living at the time so that I may understand and recognize what I need to understand and recognize, and that is in what respect this moment differed from other, similar moments in which, just as in that moment, it was decided that I would soon be going to bed with a woman. And I put it this way, “it was decided,” because even though it is true—and what could be more natural, naturally—that I myself always play a goodly part in such decisions, even to the extent of taking on the role of prime mover, or at least an appearance of that, nevertheless this practically never presents itself to me as a decision; on the contrary, it presents itself to me as an adventure which renders impossible even the possibility of there being a decision, like a vortex opening at my feet, when my blood is seething inside me like a waterfall, stilling all other considerations, and at the same time I am perfectly clear, well in advance of the usual outcome of the adventure, so that as far as a decision is concerned, if it were to lie within my power, I would hardly decide to commit myself to adventures of this kind. But maybe it is precisely this which attracts me, this contradiction, this vortex. I don't know, I just don't know. Because this has happened to me more than once, the selfsame thing, the selfsame way, so I have to infer from this constant repetition that some sort of pattern is stealthily actuating and guiding me: a woman with a timid smile and scurrying movements, in the archaic guise of a loose-tressed, barefoot serving wench as it were, quietly and modestly asks permission to enter—how shall I put it in order to avoid having to utter the banality that I shall nevertheless utter, because what else could I say, if the cheap trick has proved itself since time immemorial, and splendidly at that?—asks permission to enter my
ultimum moriens
, my ultimate failure, in other words my heart, whereupon she takes a look around with a charming and inquisitive smile, delicately touches everything, dusts down one thing and another, airs the musty crannies, throws out this and that, stows her own stuff in their place, and nicely, tidily, and irresistibly settles in until I finally become aware that she has completely squeezed me out of there, so that boxed in like an outcast stranger I find I am steering clear of my own heart, which now only presents itself to me distantly, with closed doors, like the snug homes of others before the homeless; and very often I have only managed to move back in by arriving hand in hand with another woman and letting her lodge there instead. I carefully thought it all through in this much detail, or this plastically I might say, as only befits my profession as writer and translator, after one of my longer-standing, almost painfully and interminably long-standing relationships had come to an end, a relationship that at the time, or so I believed, was taking a fairly heavy toll on me and, seeing it was thereby threatening the
freedom
that was absolutely necessary (not just necessary: indispensable) for my work, I was induced to prudence yet at the same time to further reflection as to what would follow. That was chiefly because I couldn't help noticing that regaining my long-yearned freedom by no means conferred the stimulus to work that I expected from this turn of events; indeed, I disconcertedly had to admit that I had worked more energetically, I might say more angrily, and thus more productively, while I had merely been struggling for my freedom, indecisively now breaking up, now getting back together again, than I was working now,when I was free again, to be sure, but this freedom only filled me with emptiness and boredom; just as a good deal later, another sort of state, to wit the happiness that I experienced with my wife during our relationship and then at the beginning of our marriage, likewise taught me that this state, to wit that is to say happiness, also has an adverse effect on my work. So first of all I took a hard look at my work, as to what it really is and why it creates demands that are so oppressive, or at any rate tiring and often frankly unattainable, virtually suicidal; and even if I was then still groping far away—God, and how far—from true clear-sightedness, from a recognition of the true nature of my work, which is in essence nothing other than to dig, to keep on digging to the end, the grave that others have started to dig for me in the air; at any rate, I recognized that as long as I am working I am, and if I were not working, who knows, would I be? could I be? so in this way the most deadly serious associations are sustained between my continued sustenance and my work, one precondition of which, it seems, must be, I supposed (because, however sadly this may reflect on me, I was unable to suppose otherwise), unhappiness, though not of course unhappiness of the sort that would immediately deprive me of even the possibility of my working, such as illness, homelessness, poverty, to say nothing of prison and the like, but rather the sort of unhappiness that women alone can confer on me. As a result, and especially since at the time I happened to be reading Schopenhauer's speculation “On the Apparent Deliberateness in the Fate of the Individual,” which can be found in one of the volumes of
Parerga and
Paralipomena
, a set of which I latched upon as plunder in an antiquarian bookshop during the period of library liquidations following the country's great ethnic upheavals and wave of emigration, moreover so cheaply that even I was able to afford the four bulky black tomes, survivors of censorships, book burnings, pulpings, and all manner of other book-Auschwitzes, as a result I could not entirely rule out the possibility that, to avail myself of that most obsolete expression in wholly obsolete psychoanalysis, I am possibly subject to somewhat of an Oedipus complex, which, after all, taking into account the not exactly orderly circumstances of my younger days, would be little wonder, I supposed now, the only question I asked myself was whether the influence (albeit not the sole determinant, for the mere possibility of this self-analysis was in itself more than encouraging, I supposed) came from the father-son or the mother-son relationship, and the answer I gave myself was that it was most likely the role of the mother's son, the mother's rejected son, that manifests itself now and again in my behavior. I even went so far as to construct a hypothesis around this, as the jottings I made at the time testify. According to this, the father's rejected son inclines more towards a transcendental problematic, whereas the mother's rejected son, and that is what I had to postulate myself as being, tends towards a more sensory, pliable and impressionable material, towards plasticity, and I supposed ready examples of the former were to be found in Kafka, and of the second in Proust or Joseph Roth. And even though this hypothesis probably rests on an extremely shaky footing, and these days I would know better than not only not to write it down but even to bring it up as a topic for a flagging late-night discussion, all the more because it simply no longer interests me (oh, I've moved on a long way since then), and if I still have any recollection of it at all, then it is just as a brief, still aimless and hesitant step on the long, long, who could know how protracted path to true clear-sightedness, or, in other words, conscious self-liquidation; at any rate, it is a fact that the—how shall I put it?—benefit of this complex flowed from me into my work, its harm from my work into me, so I was able to deduce from the apparent deliberateness manifested, if not exactly in my fate, then at least in my behavior at the time, that I furtively produce, verbally create, the situation and role of the mother's rejected son, presumably on account of the accompanying very singular—and, were I not a little ashamed, I would say gratifying—pain, which, from the viewpoint of my work, it seems I absolutely require (naturally, along with
freedom
, which is my prime requirement). Yes, because it appears that in my pain I end up hitting on creative forces, no matter what the price, and no matter that it may just be ordinary compensation finding an outlet in creativity, what is important is that it nonetheless finds an outlet and that through the pain I live in some sort of truth, and if I did not live in it, perhaps the simple truth might—who knows?— leave me cold; as it is, however, the notion of pain is intimately and permanently interwoven within me with the aspect of life, the (I am quite certain) most authentic aspect of life. And in this I then also spotted an explanation for the phenomenon that I was talking about previously, namely, why, when I am in possession of my complete freedom, my stimulus to work is reduced, whereas when I am in the thick of fighting for my freedom and in all sorts of mental turmoil, it is increased, for obviously the way the neurosis induced by my complex (or which induces my complex) affects me is that, if it is in its receding phase, then my desire to work also subsides, but if some new trauma arrives to rekindle the neurosis dormant within me, my desire to work is also ignited. That's perfectly clear and simple, so now one might think all one needs is to provide for continual triggers to keep the fires of my work incessantly burning—and I formulate it in this pointed manner precisely in order to underline its absurdity to myself, because as soon as I had completed this self-analysis I also squared accounts with my complex, indeed, I instantly took a natural aversion to it, or to be more accurate, not only to my complex but also to myself for building up the complex even as I was concealing it from myself and playacting, precisely this idiotic infantile complex, attesting to intellectual immaturity and betraying inadmissible vulnerability, when there is nothing I hate more than infantilism. I was thus cured at least of that particular complex, or to be more precise, I pronounced myself cured, not so much in the interests of regaining my health of course but more my self-esteem, so that when, not long after that, I entered into a relationship with another woman, I laid down the possibly harsh-sounding but nevertheless highly practical condition that the word “love” and its synonyms should never be uttered between us, or in other words, that our love could last only as long as we were not in love with one another, whether mutually or unilaterally was neither here nor there, because the moment that this misfortune should happen to overtake either or, perchance, both of us, we would have to terminate our relationship instantly; and my partner, let me put it that way, who also happened to be recovering from a fairly severe amatory mishap, accepted this condition without demur (at least so it seemed) though the untroubledness of our relationship, I don't doubt it, evidently soon troubled her and would have eroded our relationship had I not in the meantime made the acquaintance of my ex- (or at that time still future) wife, which in the end (at least for me) represented the radical solution. Around this time, moreover, I was still living in a sublet room, which undeniably seemed absurd, so to say, under the circumstances of a consolidation that by then was heading into its second decade, at a time when— albeit usually at the cost of myocardial infarcts, diabetes, chronic gastric ulcers, psychosomatic breakdowns, moral and financial ruin or, in the better cases, merely the total disintegration of family life—nearly all my friends and acquaintances or whatever I might call them had acquired their own apartments, as for me, I didn't think about it, or to the extent that I did think about it I thought that I could not entertain the thought of it, simply because it would have required me to live in a different way, under the badge of money and, above all, of moneymaking, and that would have entailed so many concessions, misconceptions, compromises and, all in all, so much
inconvenience
, even if I were to have lulled myself into thinking that it was all just
temporary
, purely a means to an end, because how can we live even temporarily in any way other than the way we must permanently and generally live without its bitter consequences rebounding on our normal life, that is to say, more or less the life that, after all, we have stipulated for ourselves, in which we are, after all, the masters and legislators, and I was therefore simply unable, and did not even wish, to take upon myself all these absurdities, the absurd inconveniences of acquiring an apartment in Hungary, which first and foremost would have put