by Imre Kertész
How is the Jewish Council’s decision to be explained?
It is inexplicable in my view. I could perhaps give your question the highly paradoxical answer that they wished to preempt a panic breaking out among the Jewish population.
A bitter paradox … What is most depressing of all is that, sadly, it is all too near the mark. So, you had no idea either where that train was taking you.
Nobody did. There were sixty of us in the cattle truck, and not one of us had heard the name “Auschwitz.”
That scene in Fatelessness when Köves spots a deserted railway station through the wired-over window slot of the carriage and picks out the name “Auschwitz” from the building—is that fiction, or did it happen in reality?
As true to life as could be, and yet it also served the novel’s fictional structure superbly.
So, in relation to that, no worry crossed your mind that it might be anecdotal?
No, because I couldn’t have dreamed up anything better if I tried. Besides which, I wouldn’t have dared to dream up something like that.
There, you see …
See what?
The fact that when it comes down to it you do feel bound by reality; you do set down real life, and lived reality at that. There’s the football pitch, for example. You write in Galley Boat-Log that you have a clear recollection of one at Auschwitz …
Birkenau.
Fair enough! Of the football pitch at Birkenau, and yet you did not dare to write that in your novel until you happened to come across a mention of it by Borowski.
In his short story This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. Tadeusz Borowski is one of those writers you can count on the fingers of two hands who in the death camps discovered something important about the human condition and were capable of expressing it. He wrote five or six powerful short stories in such a crystal-clear style and in such a brilliant, classical form that almost reminds me of the novellas of Prosper Mérimée. And then he too committed suicide. But tell me, now, why do you crow so much each and every time you catch me writing some true, actual detail, or “reality,” as you put it?
Because you blur reality with your fiction theory. You cut yourself out of your own stories.
There’s no question of that. It’s just that my proper place is not in the story but at the writing desk (admittedly, I didn’t yet have a piece of furniture like that at the time). Allow me to call on one or two great exemplars as my witnesses. Would War and Peace, for instance, still be a good book even if Napoleon and the Russian campaign had never existed?
I need to think about that … Yes, I think so.
But the fact that Napoleon really did exist and the Russian campaign was a reality, and what’s more all of it was written down with scrupulous precision, with the historical facts being kept in view—that makes the book even better, doesn’t it?
Yes, it does.
And if Fabrizio del Dongo, the young hero of Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma, wanders irresolutely and uncomprehendingly across fields and groves and continually stumbles into cannon and cavalry units, hears incomprehensible shouts and commands—that’s quite an interesting fiction in itself, is it not?
It is.
But if we know that he happens to be cutting across the site of the Battle of Waterloo, that makes it even more interesting, doesn’t it?
That’s right.
Now, if it’s something concerning the Battle of Waterloo, that constrains one to accuracy because the Battle of Waterloo is a historical fact.
I see where you’re heading, and I appreciate your Socratic method, but let me ask something in turn. You told me what lengths your mother went to once she knew you had got into police custody—and what a ludicrous expression that is in your case! You said nothing, however, about how she came to know what had happened, because to the best of my knowledge you were living with your stepmother at that time.
My stepmother wrote a letter to my mother in which she told her about my disappearance. What a letter, though! The style! “Dear Goldie (that was my mother’s name: Goldie), There is an unpleasant piece of news about which I have to inform you …” “Naturally, I made inquiries at once …” The word “naturally,” and the various euphemisms, I “filched” from my stepmother’s vocabulary and then made use of in Fatelessness. A ruinous personality she had.
What do you mean by “ruinous”?
I’m not really sure … There is a sentence in Gombrowicz’s novel Ferdydurke—I may be quoting it inaccurately, but it goes something like: “Have you ever known the sort of people inside of whom you dwindle in size?” Well, my stepmother was like that.
Which suggests you had a tough time with her.
And she, the poor soul, had an even tougher time with me. I couldn’t stand the … the … To be brief, I couldn’t stand her at all; her taste most of all. Just imagine, she had this medium-grey, or rather light-grey, two-piece costume, and to go with that she bought a little narrow-brimmed red hat, a red lacquer purse, and red shoes, and she thought that they made her look frightfully elegant. And she would go out like that with me for a walk—“bunk off a little” was the way she put it. It was dreadful; I could have died. On top of everything, she wanted me to call her “Momsie,” and my father backed up this fervent wish. Anyway, they tried and tried but no way did it work; the word simply would not come out.
It seems that already in childhood you were highly sensitized to words. In your most recent novel, Liquidation, you talk about the phobia you had about some words.
Yes, some nonsensical scheme was attached to language; the pronunciation of certain words elicited specific concepts, but that’s not what is meant in this case. Her grey two-piece suit and the red hat and the “Momsie”—for me all that elicited a horror for which I only later found a name; it was an apotheosis of the petit-bourgeoisie at which to this day I still shudder just the same way. However hard they tried, then, I stayed with the “Auntie Kate,” because that suited her, though she was a good deal younger than my mother. But let’s not get immersed in childhood memories; in the end you’ll want to see snaps of me in my infancy.
Just as you say, but let’s stay on the subject for the time being. I would be interested to know what your family was like, how your childhood was spent, and so on. You haven’t said anything about your father. A woman who was as interesting as you describe your mother to have been would certainly not have fallen in love with just anyone.
Eenie, meenie, minie, mo, falling in love. “What’s that?” Géza Ottlik has one of his characters ask in his novel Buda. At any rate, my father was in love, that’s for sure, and that was manifested most obviously in his frightful jealousy. My mother, by contrast, wanted to get out of the tight family home, her three sisters, her stepmother, and her father, and his struggles with his financial worries in the small place they had in Molnár Street in the Fifth, the inner-city district of Pest. At that time—and I’m talking about the 1920s—the road to freedom for girls usually lay through getting married. And through work, of course. My mother was just sixteen when she got a job with a firm working as a clerk, as they called it in those days.
You mean it was not a matter of marrying for love?
Look, it’s exceedingly difficult for a young child to judge his parents’ love life. Because I was their child, the relationship between the two of them took quite a toll on me.
Did they quarrel?
Not all that often, but when they did, like blazes. I have a recollection of a fine summer morning, for instance. By then we were living close to the City Park in the Fourteenth District of Pest, in a roomy and well-aired apartment—it may have been in Elemér Rod, though I don’t know if that’s still its name today. I must have been four or five years old; more likely five than four, as I have a clear memory of it. It was probably a Sunday, since both of them were at home. They were yelling at each other. What I picked out clearly was that it was about swimming baths: Father didn’t want Mother to go to the swimming baths. He pr
obably suspected that Mother had a rendezvous with someone there. What wasn’t at all clear was why my father didn’t go to the swimming baths with my mother. On account of “the child,” I suppose—that was me. Suffice to say, Father snatched Mother’s white rubber swimming cap and ripped it to shreds. Mother, for her part, got hold of a huge pair of tailor’s shears and snipped two gashes in the front brim of Father’s hat. I can see to this day his look of astonishment at the floppy hat brim; it was a green felt hat. I screamed at the top of my voice. In the end, Mother went to the swimming pool and Father took me with him to the shops to buy a new hat. Which makes me think it was more likely on a Saturday, since the shops were not open on Sundays.
Do you have a lot of memories like that?
One or two.
But then they divorced later on.
Again it was me who got the short end of that. I was placed in a boys’ boarding school as a full boarder.
Is any trace of that boarding school recognizable in Kaddish for an Unborn Child?
I certainly went to some trouble on that score.
Is it something you don’t care to talk about?
On the contrary! One is always happy to think back to one’s childhood, however rotten and tough a period it may have been.
How far back can you trace your family tree?
That’s a good question, only it’s something that never really interested me. Well, however I scratch my head, I get stuck at my grandparents. As far as I know, my forebears were ordinary town-dwellers or, in some cases, peasants of assimilated Jewish background.
Peasants?
Why? Does that surprise you? My paternal grandfather may have been Jewish, but he was just a poor farm labourer. Until he committed himself to see the world. Family legend had it that he walked barefoot to Budapest from the village of Pacsa, near Keszthely, at the southern end of Lake Balaton. That would have been at the end of the nineteenth century, the time when many big careers were made. When he was strolling along what was then called Kerepesi (now Rákóczi) Avenue, his attention was caught by an elegant haberdashery, as they called those shops at the time. He took a huge fancy to the way the shop assistants were bustling around the customers and the counters, so without further ado he entered the shop, and within no time at all he was taken on as an assistant himself. His subsequent life shaped up in much the way that fairytale stories of those days regularly do. He married the youngest daughter of Mr. Hartmann, who was the proprietor of the shop (and I know nothing further than that about this great-grandfather), and before long he set up in business on his own account and opened a haberdashery himself. “A posh emporium on Rákóczi Avenue, with mirrors and chandeliers and seven shop assistants,” as family legend had it. By the time I got to know him, though, the poor chap was living in a bedsitter on Tömő Street in darkest Józsefváros, in the Eighth District.
Did he go bust?
In the First World War: he put all his money, his entire wealth, into war bonds. He was very patriotic …
You mention somewhere that he Hungarianized his family name.
Yes, my grandfather was originally called Klein, and he Hungarianized it even before the first world war. As to why he should have chosen Kertész, of all names, heaven knows. “Adolf Kertész, Haberdasher. No credit”—that’s what I remember a sign hung up in the shop said. But that shop was in Prater Street in Józsefváros, with only my grandfather and grandmother serving the clientele, who were mainly housemaids from the neighbourhood. “Young Ma’am” or “Little Missy” is how he addressed them, and in the days leading up to Christmas he would give them a pair of silk stockings as a present. He kept his Western Hungarian dialect to the end of his days, so I remember, for instance, he would use the word “underdrawers” instead of “underpants.” He never visited a doctor in his life, he never took a tram, and he didn’t wear a winter overcoat. I could tell stories about him for hours.
Go on, then. What did he look like?
He was a tall, gaunt man; not a spare ounce of flesh on him. He shaved his head bald. He would sometimes bend down his weatherbeaten and always stubbly face in front of me so I should give him a kiss. He was immoderately proud of the fact that he wore size 10 footwear. I always saw him in the same suit, winter or summer. There were times when he had to go round the wholesalers to stock up on wares. In those days the wholesalers had their warehouses on what was then Kaiser Wilhelm (nowadays Bajcsy-Zsilinszky) Avenue in the Fifth District. I recollect there were grey, frosty days when he would tell his wife, “I’m going into town.” As I said, he never took a tram or bus; he didn’t wear a hat; he would thrust his hands in the pockets of his grey jacket, keeping the thumb sticking out on either side, turn silently at the door, and vanish in a puff of his own breath like a wizard.
You speak about him with such love …
Yes, and the funny thing is I’m surprised by it myself. It seems he had a greater effect on me than I would ever have supposed. Yet we hardly spoke to each other; now I sense that he treated me like one of the more fragile pieces of merchandise that has to be handled with care lest it is broken. I, on my side, was rather afraid of him. In truth he was a rather dour, taciturn man. He would occasionally crack a lame joke. “I know some Latin as well,” he would say. “Listen to this: adduc aqua cingo. A duck a-quacking go.” You had to laugh over that. He had only completed the six years of elementary school that were compulsory at that time. Very rarely, he would go off to synagogue on a Friday evening, but there were other times when he would take me to the Turkish baths in Dandár Street, since there was no bath in his place on Tömő Street, and for the WC one had to go out to the end of the outdoor corridor. There was a big rusty key to it, hanging up on a nail in the kitchen. He never went to the theatre or a cinema. He and Grandma would close up the shop and walk home together. Their supper was invariably the same: matzos crumbled liberally into a mug of milky coffee—you know what matzos are, don’t you?
You bet! A biscuit of unleavened bread.
Well, that’s what they ate every evening. The crumbs of matzo would soak up the milky-brown coffee to produce a sort of pulp of indefinable colour that would then be scooped up out of the mug with a spoon. After that, my grandfather would sit by the window so as not to have to turn the light on, and he would pick his way through a newspaper as evening drew in until it was dark. They went to bed early and got up early; a maidservant cooked them dinner and took it round to them at the Prater Street shop in a nest of blue enamel dinner pails.
You mean to say that even with their modest living conditions they employed a maidservant?
“Serving girl” as my grandfather said. There’s no need to be so surprised: remember, poverty was so rife in the country in those days that it was quite normal for girls to leave home and go into service in Budapest for bread and board and a pittance for pay. I well recall a long string of “Nellies” who served as maids for my grandparents. The dark “main room” had an extension in the form of a lighter annex that they referred to as the “alcove,” where my grandfather and grandmother slept in a vast marriage bed, with my father (until he remarried) at the other end, toward a window that overlooked the Botanical Garden, and me along with Father if I happened to be staying with him. There was a separate kitchen, and that was where the Nellies lived. I was fond of each and every one, and they were fond of me. One of them accustomed me to a taste for cigarettes of the Herczegovina brand, which were made of a light and bright tobacco and had a card mouthpiece. We would sit down next to each other, blowing smoke, at the bottom of the steps: I couldn’t have been more than five or six years old. It was the same Nellie who said to me one summer morning: “I’ll take the young Master off to the butcher’s, and there we’re going to buy some paprika-spiced bacon rind and pickled gherkins and you’ll find out just how scrumptious that is! You’ll be licking your fingers afterward! Only you mustn’t let out a peep about it to anyone.” My grandparents, you see, kept a kosher household, which simply amounted to forbidding thems
elves from eating any pork product or cooking with pork fat. So, this Nellie was embroiling me in sin, and she watched contentedly as, one after the other, I tucked into the “soldiers” that she sliced off with her own pocket knife and offered to me on its tip. That Nellie must have been rebellious by nature, I supposed, and she did not like my grandfather one bit: “the old skinflint,” was how she referred to him, to my great consternation, because I had no idea what I was supposed to do with such a massive secret. There’s no question that this confidence caused me an identity crisis for a while, because on the one hand I had no wish to betray poor Nellie, but on the other hand I was, after all, more inclined to take grandfather’s side. On top of everything else, she took me off on one occasion to a church service; it must have been some feast day or other, though that’s only now that I think about it, because at the time I had not the least suspicion about where we were going. The afternoon was already dark and sleet was falling. My hand was in Nellie’s, and she was clutching it tightly; she probably had the jitters. “The young Master will see!” I think we went along the Józsefváros end of Üllői Avenue, and we dropped into a church somewhere round there. I partook in the same sort of experience that I was later to recognize in the legend of Parsifal, because a mysterious door opened up before me as it did before Parsifal. I stepped into a dazzling space where a long row of trestle tables laid with spotless white tablecloths had been set up. Nellie and I sat down at one of these. We heard some music and ate something. A jingling priest in a spotless white robe came. I had no idea where I was or what was happening, but I was transfixed by a peculiar sense of wonderment and rapture; I was turned totally inside-out.