Kaddish for an Unborn Child (9 page)

decisive
as this recognition was in the series of my flashes of recognition, it was just as
fateful
, of course, from the viewpoint of my marriage, even if, from other points of view, coldly considered, without marrying I could never have reached this recognition, or at best could only have reached it through abstract inferences. Thus, there seems to be no escaping every accusation and self-accusation, the sole excuse that I have going for me being identical to the accusation that can be leveled against me: that when I contracted my marriage, which as I now see was undoubtedly out of motives and for the aim of self-liquidation, it was at least my belief that I was, on the contrary, contracting it under the badge of the future, of happiness, that happiness about which my wife and I had spoken so much and so timidly, yet also intimately and resolutely, as if it were some secret and almost grim duty that had been sternly laid upon us. Yes, that's how it was, and now our entire life, its every sound, incident and feeling, is something I see, or rather, however strange, hear, like some kind of musical fabric beneath which the main, great, all-embracing, one-and-only theme continually ripens and condenses in order that, bursting out and outblasting all else, it may assume its autocracy:
my existence viewed as the potentiality of your being
, and later:
your non-existence viewed as
the necessary and radical liquidation of my own existence
. It was just a pretext that straightaway that evening, in talking about “Teacher,” continuing with the lessons of “Teacher's” case, or more specifically his act, I laid bare and explained to my wife (who at that time was not yet and is now no longer my wife), as I say, I enlightened her as to the chances, or rather lack of chances, of deeds that are doable in such situations, that is, in situations of totalitarianism. Because, I said, totalitarianism is a mindless situation, hence each and every situation that supervenes within it is also a mindless situation, although, I said, and perhaps this is the most mindless aspect of it all, by very virtue of our lives, merely by sustaining our lives, we ourselves contribute to sustaining totalitarianism, of course insofar as we insist, I said, on sustaining our lives; and this is merely, as it were, a self-fulfilling, one might almost say primitive trick of organization, I said. Hypotheses of totalitarianism are, so to say, naturally based on Nothingness, I said. Selection and expulsion as well as the notions on which they are based, are all nonexistent, null and void notions, I said, and they have no other reality than their sheer naturalism—for instance, shoving a person into a gas chamber, I said. I fear all this could not have been too entertaining, and if I now reflect on whether there might have been some other aim to what I said, beyond what I said, to the best of my recollection there was not; as best I recollect it was just my anguish still speaking out of me, the same compulsion to speak that had also made me speak a few hours earlier at the gathering, as well as my impression, however odd or unusual it may have been, that the woman who was walking beside me, walking beside me on her clacking high-heeled shoes, and thus whom I could see only vaguely, from the side and in the gloom of the night, though I did not even try to look at her because I still carried within me the image of her as, barely an hour before, she had traversed a greenish-blue carpet towards me as if she were making her way on the sea, and thus this woman walking by my side was
interested
in what I was saying. In totalitarianism, I said, executioners and victims alike perform a total service in a single cause, the cause of Nothingness, though naturally, I said, that service is
by no
means an identical
service. And although “Teacher's” act was an act performed under totalitarianism, an act extorted by totalitarianism, and hence ultimately an act of totalitarianism, or in other words of mindlessness, the act itself was nevertheless an act of total victory over total mindlessness, precisely because only here, in a world of total termination and extermination, could the ineradicability of the ideal—or obsession, if you prefer—that was alive within “Teacher” transfigure into a
declaration
. She then asked whether, apart from what I had been made to suffer, I had suffered or was maybe still suffering perhaps from my Jewishness as such. I replied that I would have to think about that. There is no denying that I have known and felt since long ago, from the first stirrings of my thoughts, that some mysterious shame is attached to my name, and that I brought this shame with me from some place where I had never been, and I brought it on account of some sin, which, even though I never committed it, is my sin and will pursue me throughout my life, a life which is undoubtedly not my own life, even though it is me who is living it, me who suffers from it, and me who will later die from it; nevertheless, I suppose all of that, I said to my wife, does not necessarily have to ensue from my Jewishness, it may simply ensue from me, from my essence, my person, my transcendental self, if I may put it that way, or else from the general and reciprocal modes of behavior and manners of treatment shown towards me and practiced by me, or in plain language from the social conditions and my personal relationship to those conditions, I said, for as it has been written
judgment does not come suddenly, the proceedings gradually merge into the judgment
, I said. The subject of my “piece” came up as well, the particular piece of writing that she had read and which, as she said, she
absolutely
had to discuss with me. Which means that I too must speak about this particular piece of writing, to give a broad outline of what sort of piece it was. The piece was, in point of fact, an extended short story of the type that is usually described as a “novella,” which had been published around that time deep within the haystack of a bulky anthology of short stories and novellas, by no means without all sorts of denigrating and insulting precursory complications that I shall refrain from describing, because they bore and disgust me, besides which, in itself, it was merely a modest and, one could say, dispensable contribution to Hungarian literary life, that denigrating and insulting, and, above all else, shameless and shameful literary life, resting as it does on its exclusions, privileges, pre-and postdilections, its official and confidential commercial blacklisting systems always casting doubt on quality, always unctuously deferential to aggressive dilettantism as if it were genius, of which I was, and am, a now horrified, now astonished, now indifferent, but always merely external observer, insofar as I am and must be at all—oh, what do I have to do with literature, with your golden hair, Margarethe, for a ballpoint pen is my spade, the sepulchre of your ashen hair, Shulamith; yes, anyway, this short story or novella, so be it, is a monologue by a man, a man still on the youngish side. This man, who had been brought up by his parents in the strictest Christian faith, or bigotry, one might say, now finds out, during the days of the apocalypse, that the unsealed brand has been placed on him too:
in the spirit
of the so-called laws that suddenly come into force, he is classed as a Jew. Now, before they take him away to the ghetto, the cattle wagon, or to who knows (he least of all) where and what sort of death they will condemn him, he writes his story, “the story of decades of cowardice and self-denial,” as he writes (that is to say, I have him write). Now, what is noteworthy about the whole thing is that in his brand-new Jewish existence he finds a release from his Jewish complex, a general liberation, for he has to recognize that merely being debarred from one community does not automatically make one a member of another. “What do I have to do with the Jews?” he asks (that is to say, I make him ask): nothing, he realizes (that is, I make him realize), now that he is one himself. While he had been enjoying the privileges of a non-Jewish existence he had suffered on account of Jews, or Jewish existence or, to be more precise, the whole corrupt, suffocating, deadly and death-dealing suicidal system of privileges and discriminations. He had suffered on account of some of his friends, colleagues at the office, the wider community at large that he believed was his
homeland
; he had suffered from their hatred, their narrow-mindedness, their fanaticism. He had conceived a particular abhorrence for the inescapable debates that went on about anti-Semitism, the excruciating futility of all those debates, as if anti-Semitism, he realizes (that is, I make him realize), were not a matter of conviction but of temperament and character, “the morality of despair, the frenzy of self-haters, the vitality of devastators,” as he says (that is, I have him say). On the other hand, he had also felt a certain awkwardness towards Jews in that, try as he might to like them, he was never sure about the success of the attempt. He had Jewish acquaintances, even friends, whom he either liked or disliked; yet that was different, because he had liked or disliked them out of purely individual considerations or reasons. But how could one feel an active liking for an abstract notion like the notion of Jewishness, for example? Or for the unknown mass of people that was crammed into this abstract notion? To the extent that he succeeded, he succeeded somehow only by dint of liking them the way one likes a stray animal that one has to feed but about which one has no way of telling what it is dreaming and what it is capable of. Now he was relieved of this torment, his entire presumed responsibility. With a clear conscience he could now despise whomever he despised, and he no longer had to like those whom he disliked. He is liberated because he no longer has a homeland. All he has to decide is what he should die as. As a Jew or a Christian, as a hero or victim, possibly as the injured party of a metaphysical absurdity or of a demiurgic neochaos? Since these concepts mean nothing to him, he decides that at least he will not pollute the pure fact of his death with lies. He sees everything simply because he has won the right to clear-sightedness: “We should not seek meaning where there is none: the century, this execution squad on permanent duty, is now once again preparing for decimation, and destiny has decreed that one of the tenth lots should be cast on me—that's all there is to it,” are the last words he says (with my own words, of course). Of course, it wasn't all quite so spare, but here I have stripped it down to the essentials, leaving out the dialogues, the twists in the plot, the setting and the other characters, including that of the lover who leaves him. The last time we see our hero he is seated on the ground, rocking to and fro, bursting in an uncontrollable fit of laughter. “The Laugh” was indeed what I had intended to use as the title, but the director of the publishing house, who was widely known to carry a
service
weapon
at all times, even in his office (the publishing house), even though he was never to be seen in uniform and he did not even carry this
service weapon
, an automatic, in a service holster but tucked into a bulging hip pocket of his trousers; well anyway, this
director
rejected the title as being “cynical” and “trampling on the sanctity of memories,” and so forth, so how the story came to be published at all, albeit with a disfigured title, is something I have never understood to the present day, nor do I wish to understand, because I am repelled that I might understand and gain a glimpse into the inextricable web of ulterior motives which spares nothing at all, destroys everything, and even what it does allow to exist, it does so only for destructive motives; so, just like the figure I created, I too content myself with the fact that in the course of the decimation—though it was much more like a trisection—my story, somehow or other, happened to draw one of the lucky numbers. What had gripped my wife in the story was, as she put it, that
a person can decide for himself about
his Jewishness
. Until then, whenever she had read works about Jews or concerning Jews she had felt as if she was
once
again having her face ground into the mud
. Now, for the first time, my wife said, she felt that
she could hold her head
high
. On reading my piece, my wife said, she had felt what my “hero” had felt, for although he dies, before that
he is
accorded inner liberation
. Even if only fleetingly, she too had experienced that sense of liberation, my wife said. More than anything before, this piece of writing
taught her how
to live
, my wife said, and for the second time that evening the swiftly alternating ripple of expressions again flickered across her face, that—I don't know how else to put it— chromaticism of smiles which gave me the feeling I could melt and be transformed into anything. I soon became acquainted with the background to these statements, my wife's childhood and adolescence. Although my wife had been born after Auschwitz, childhood and adolescence had been spent under the mark of Auschwitz. More specifically, under the mark of being Jewish. Under the mark of the mud, to quote from my wife's aforementioned words. My wife's parents had both passed through Auschwitz: I was still able to make the acquaintance of her father, a tall, bald-headed man, with features that were guardedly austere in the presence of strangers but unreservedly harsh in the circle of his more intimate friends or family, but she had lost her mother early on. The woman had died of some disease brought back from Auschwitz, sometimes swelling up and at other times losing weight, sometimes suffering bouts of colic and at other times covered with skin eruptions, a disease that science proved effectively powerless to tackle, just as science also proved effectively powerless to tackle the precipitating cause of the disease, Auschwitz, for the disease my wife's mother had suffered from was, in reality, Auschwitz itself, and there is no cure for Auschwitz, nobody will ever recover from the disease of Auschwitz. Her mother's illness and early death had incidentally played a decisive part in determining that my wife should become a physician, my wife said. Later on, while talking about such matters, my wife cited a couple of sentences which, she said, she no longer knew where she had read but she had never forgotten since. Not immediately, but quite soon afterwards, it occurred to me that my wife must have read the sentences in one of the essays of