Kaddish for an Unborn Child (7 page)

my freedom
, my independence of mind and as a matter of fact my independence from external circumstances under threat, under total threat at that, so that I had to set myself against that danger totally, or in other words, with my whole life. And actually I must admit that my wife was right, for after reconnoitering my circumstances at the time with searching tenacity and irresistible probing, accompanied by those plays of expression that were already then slowly becoming familiar and which, so I thought at the time, acted upon me like an ever-surprising and miraculous sunrise, she declared that meant I was imprisoning myself for the sake of my freedom. Yes, undoubtedly there was some truth in that. To be more accurate, that was precisely the truth. That, given a choice between the prison of acquiring an apartment in Hungary and the prison of not owning an apartment in Hungary, the latter suited me better, since there (in the prison of not owning an apartment in Hungary) I was better able to do as I pleased, better able to live for myself, sheltered, concealed and uncorrupted, until this prison—or, if one insists on making comparisons, I could perhaps better call it a preserving jar—suddenly, and undoubtedly through my wife's magic touch, sprang open, and my subtenant life all at once proved to be unsheltered, unconcealed, corruptible and consequently untenable, just like my subsequent and eventually my present life too, and just as, I suppose, every life proves to be untenable once it is contemplated in the light of our flashes of recognition, for it is precisely the untenability of our lives which leads to our flashes of recognition, in the light of which we come to recognize that our life is untenable—and it really is that, untenable, because it is taken away from us. Yes, I lived my subtenant life as if I were not quite living, diminished, temporarily, absentmindedly (taking only my work seriously), with that feeling, unclarified but sure, and therefore not standing in need of clarification, feeling, that it was, as it were, merely a waiting period of uncertain duration elapsing between my only two pieces of true business, that of my coming into being and that of my passing away, which I must somehow while away (preferably with work); yet this waiting period is my only time, the only time I can account for, though I don't know why and to whom I should account for it, perhaps to myself, above all, so that I may recognize what I still have to recognize and do what I still can do, but then to everybody, or to nobody, or to anybody who will be ashamed on our behalf and possibly for us, since I am unable to account for my time either prior to my coming into being or after my passing away, if these states of mine have anything at all to do with
the only time I have
—something (that is, that they could have anything to do with it) I find hard to believe. And now that, in the clarity of my night as it descends upon me, I contemplate my subtenant life at length and fretfully, with a cool expertise maybe, yet not free from certain preconceptions either, I suddenly believe I recognize its archetype, and more specifically believe I recognize it in my concentration camp life not so many years, though also an eternity ago; to be precise, in that phase of my camp life when my camp life was no longer real camp life, insofar as liberating soldiers had taken the place of the incarcerating soldiers, yet it was camp life all the same because I was still living in a camp. It happened precisely the day after this change in state (that is, that liberating soldiers had replaced the incarcerating soldiers) that I staggered out of the hospital barrack
Saal
, or room, in which I was then quartered, since I was, to put it mildly, ill, which in itself of course hardly constituted grounds for my being accommodated in the hospital barrack but, owing to a coincidence of certain circumstances which, in the final analysis, took the form of a piece of good luck only slightly more astounding than the accustomed bad luck, I nevertheless happened to be being accommodated in the hospital barrack, and the next morning I staggered out of the
Saal
, or room, to the so-called ablutions, and as I opened the door to the so-called ablutions and was just about to move towards the wash trough, or perhaps before that to the urinal, when my feet simply (and I am unable to come up with anything more apt than this tired cliché, because that was almost literally what happened) they simply became rooted to the spot, for
a German soldier was standing at the washbasin
and as I entered he slowly turned his head toward me
; and before fright could cause me to collapse, faint, wet myself or who knows what else, through the greyish-black fog of my terror I noticed a gesture, a hand gesture by the German soldier, beckoning me towards the washbasin, a rag that the German soldier was holding in the hand that was making the gesture, and a smile, the German soldier's smile; in other words, I slowly grasped that
the German soldier was just
scrubbing the washbasin
, while his smile was merely expressing his readiness to be of service to me, that
he was
scrubbing the washbasin for me
, or in other words the world order had changed, which is to say that it had not changed at all, which is to say that the world order had changed merely this much, and yet even just that much was not an entirely negligible change in that whereas yesterday it had been I who was the prisoner, today it was he, and this put an end to my sudden terror only inasmuch as it gradually tamed the immediate feeling into one of persistent and unshakable mistrust-fulness, matured it within me, one could say, into a way of looking at the world that my subsequent camp life (because I continued to live like this, as a free camp inmate in the camp, for quite a while) bestowed on my free camp life such a singular flavor and piquancy, the unforgettably sweet and tentative experience of life regained: that I was living and yet living as if
the Germans might return at any moment
, and therefore not fully living after all. Yes, and I have to believe (though it was probably as yet unknowing, allowing for the circumstances: the constraint of not owning an apartment that, in the final analysis, I prolonged this experience, the unforgettably sweet and tentative experience of my free camp life, into my subtenant life, this experience of a life before and after all flashes of recognition, unencumbered by any of life's burdens, least of all the burden of life itself, that I was living, but living as if the Germans might return at any moment; and if I impart to this notion, or way of life, or whatever I should call it, a certain symbolic significance, it immediately seems it is thus less absurd, for there is no getting away from it, in a symbolic sense, the Germans might return at any moment,
der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
,
sein Auge ist blau
, Death is a blue-eyed master from Germany, he can come at any moment, track you down anywhere, take aim at you, and he makes no mistake,
er tri ft
dich genau
. So that was how I lived my subtenant life, in a way that was not quite living and indisputably not quite a life, rather it was just being alive, yes,
surviving
, to be more precise. Obviously, this subsequently left deeper imprints in me. I suppose certain of my obvious peculiarities also have their roots in this. I suppose I ought to talk here about, for example, my relationship to property, the property that sustains everybody, mobilizes everybody, maddens everybody, about this relationship which is actually nonexistent, or at most existent merely as a pure negativity. I don't believe, and cannot even imagine, that this negativity is a congenital negativity, some kind of defect, otherwise how would I explain my rigid attachment to certain of my more trivial personal chattels (books) or, if it comes to that, to my most important chattel: myself, the fact that I have always sturdily, one might say radically, guarded the chattel I regard as most important (myself), on the one hand against any form of effective self-destruction that is not a decision of my own free will, and on the other hand I have always guarded it, and continue to guard it, indeed increasingly so, against the cheap and perverted seductions of any sort of communal idea (which, by the way, I could just as well list among the varieties of effective self-destruction), even if, of course, I am merely guarding it for another form of destruction; no, I have no doubt that this negative relationship of mine to property was shaped purely by the survival of my survival, by this so very singular and in a certain sense not entirely unproductive, though, of course, sadly untenable mode of existence, which demonstrated my subtenant life to be likewise self-explanatory. In the subtenancy into which I moved during the darkest of those years, which, in accordance with the twisted laws of hell, we were obliged to proclaim incessantly, aloud and in chorus, as the most glittering years, and where I was greeted virtually as a savior, since my presence seemed to protect the sole commandeerable, distrainable, expropriable, billetable, partitionable, requisitionable, etc., etc., room in what was, incidentally, a fairly pleasant apartment, tucked away in a secluded Buda side street, and for which, for that very reason, I had to pay only a virtually symbolic rent that was raised only equally symbolically in the course of subsequent years; as I say, in that subtenancy, neither then, when I could not yet even think about property, nor later, when I could (indeed, perhaps should) have thought about property, yet did not think about it at all, as I say, there I was not threatened by the hazards that are the concomitants of property, the desperate and distressing measures demanded by cracks in pipes, ceilings and elsewhere, the speculations that are the concomitants of property, as to whether or not the property is satisfactory, and ought one not to have at one's disposal more, or at least more satisfactory, property, while of course taking the best possible advantage (i.e., profit) from the existing, unsatisfactory property; no, an obsessional notion of changing could not possibly have occurred to me, that chafing impulse which might continually dangle before me the possibility of imaginary choices, incessantly pester me and hoodwink me into thinking that I could swap my being here for being somewhere else, that I could exchange my tower-block apartment—of course, at the price of the necessary running around, shelling out, official processing and other unforeseeable complications—for a more satisfactory one, when I don't even know what it is that would satisfy me more, since I am not even satisfactorily acquainted with my desires, and that is before saying anything about the insoluble worries over furniture, as a result of which my tower-block apartment even now, after so much time, is still not satisfactorily furnished, for I simply don't know how I should furnish my apartment, I have no conception of an apartment furnished for myself, not the slightest idea what sort of apartment I would like, what sorts of articles I would like to see it furnished with. In my subtenancy, each and every one of the articles was the property of the householders; they were already waiting for me to settle in among them, and in the course of the long, long years that I spent among them perhaps it did not so much as enter my head even to change the place of a single one of the articles, let alone exchange them for other articles or, perhaps, swell their ranks with newer articles purely because, let's say, I saw an article, wanted it and bought it (aside from books, my books, which I placed at first in a cupboard, then, when that was full, on the table, and then, when there was no more room there either, simply on the floor, until the householders themselves supplementally installed a low supplemental makeshift bookcase); no, as I say, I had no desire at all for, did not buy, indeed probably did not even look at articles, for nothing drives me closer to distraction than a shopwindow piled high with articles, those kinds of shopwindows quite literally dispirit, depress, even demoralize me, so, as I said, I do not look at them at all if possible, which is obviously a sign that I can hardly have any demands of this nature, in this realm (the realm of articles) I make do with the bare necessities, as they say, and probably I am most truly grateful to be placed in a ready-furnished setting where all I have to do is to accept, become acquainted with and grow accustomed to the constellation. I think I was born to be the ideal hotel resident, but because times changed all I could be was a resident of camps and subtenancies, I jotted down at the time in my notebook, from which I am now, decades later, copying into this other notebook, somewhat surprised that I was already then jotting down these kinds of things, which clearly shows that even then I was not living completely blind to my situation, to the untenability of this untenable situation and untenable life. Around that time, I remember, I suffered greatly from a feeling (in reality I might better to call it an ailment) which for my own purposes I termed a “sense of strangeness.” The sensation has been well known to me from early childhood on, essentially my constant companion in life, but around that time it haunted me in a manner little short of hazardous, not allowing me to work during the day nor allowing me to sleep at night, leaving me at once tense to breaking-point and enervated to the point of inertia. It's a well-defined nervous ailment, not a figment of the imagination, I at any rate believe that in its essence it has a basis in reality, in the reality of our human condition. Usually it starts with what is often an awe-some, but sometimes, especially back then, intolerably acute feeling that my life is hanging by a single thread; it's not a matter of whether I am living or dying, death has nothing to do with it, in fact it has to do with nothing other than life, and life alone, it's just that life suddenly assumes within me an aspect and form, or more accurately a formlessness, of the utmost uncertainty, so I am not at all sure about reality; yes, I am seized by total uncertainty about the extremely suspect experiences that are presented to my senses as is for reality, the
real