by Imre Kertész
So, it was necessary to pick a rabbi to conduct the service. The done thing for a boy at the Madách Gymnasium in Barcsay Street5 was to pick the religious instruction teacher, a certain Itzak Schmelczer, who had a silvery moustache and a neat little goatee. I liked his Old Testament stories in which lords of the desert at the head of their flocks meet up and, as a token of good will, slaughter and roast a kid goat. My mouth would be drooling by the end. I thought the Hungarian word for kid (gödölye) had such a splendid ring that for a long time I thrilled in its sheer sound without having a clear idea of what exactly it meant. My father instructed me to ask him what his price was for a bar mitzvah. You want me to ask? Tell him your father asked you to. I shilly-shallied for days before I plucked up the courage to approach the teacher’s desk and ask: Oh, yes, my father said to ask the teacher what it costs for a whatsitsname, er … The world did not collapse around me, and the floor didn’t open up before me, as I was half-expecting it would; instead the rabbi responded: Tell your dad that I’ll take it on, and the price is a goose. I would have been happier if he had said gödölye. And just to be clear, that was 1943 and the black-market price for a goose was a hundred peng?—quite a substantial sum in those days.6 The bar mitzvah went ahead; the rabbi and packed congregation sang psalms, and during prayers the elders announced aloud the donations that were intended for the synagogue. I personally was present in my dark-blue, braided, Hungarian-style best suit, a so-called “Bocskai” suit. The utter absurdity of the situation was thereby complete, but evidently no one grasped that. Anyway, I didn’t particularly want to talk about that …
No, but about the English sea captain.
Captain Hornblower, the commander of the flagship, then of a frigate, and later still of a ship of the line, which participates in maintaining the blockade that was set up against Napoleonic France. He was a marvellous figure: plagued by an inferiority complex, he constantly doubted his own abilities, fell in love with the unattainable Lady Barbara (Susie for me: if she turned her face to the light a soft, ever-so-fine fluff could be seen on her upper lip, which drove me to distraction!)—a quite baffling figure for a Hungarian boy who had been used to the unimpeachable heroism of János Arany’s Toldi, John and Matthias Hunyadi, and the protagonists of Maurus Jókai’s tales; a fallibly human figure, who in the end wins his fights and is an implacable opponent of usurpers, of Corsican despots, as Napoleon is apostrophized in the book. Only a dunce could not tell that the latter stood for Hitler, whom the Anglo-Saxon powers would eventually defeat, because they had one attribute no dictator could call on, and that was humanity, the ability to admit weakness, which can be a fount of incredible strength.
You called the book a solace for your “sick soul.”
Yes. I think that I was dealing with a pretty sick soul at that time, and I don’t mean I was tormented simply by adolescence, the usual tortures of puberty. I hated those around me, hated myself, hated my school, I hated anyone or anything; I even hated having to climb out of bed in the morning. I hated even our home in Baross Street. The housing shortage started in Budapest during the war, you know; that was when the partitioning of apartments started, turning a single solidly constructed flat into two or three shoddily built flatlets. Ours, for instance, didn’t have a hallway, so one entered by stepping directly from the outside corridor into the living room, and for some inexplicable reason I took this to be a catastrophe that had been visited on us. It was useless my stepmother urging me to invite my friends round from time to time; I feared that they would burst out laughing the moment they stepped from the corridor into the front room. Apart from anything else the room contained my bed—an ungainly piece of furniture that was a sofa by day and a couch by night. My father and stepmother slept in the inner room, where there was a stupid clock perched on top of one of those obligatory display cabinets stuffed with all manner of china knick-knacks. The clock struck once on every half-hour and on the hour it would peal the Big Ben chimes. Sometimes I would awake early and lie there in torment, waiting for the hour to strike. If it struck just once I couldn’t tell from that what time it was; I had to wait for Big Ben. One, two, three … six—no, the pig would chime once more: seven o’clock, time to get up! I would cower mutely in bed. Two or three minutes later my father would start calling from behind the door. He would call my name at an ever-growing volume. Master Imre! Emmerich! Emerico! Grudgingly I would crawl out of bed. It was my task to light the gas ring under a kettle of water for the Planta tea. A tough life kids have.
You were going to grammar school by then.
As I said, the Madách Gymnasium in Barcsay Street. Around the mid-Nineties, when several of my books had been published in Germany, I was called on by a German TV reporter here in Budapest, and he wanted, among other things, to take a look at the “alma mater” where I had, so to speak, finished my secondary schooling. It was a boiling-hot summer day, during the school holidays. The school was undergoing some rebuilding work, and at the top of the entrance steps stood that singularly emblematic figure of all public buildings in Hungary: a cleaning woman with a bucket of water in one hand and a broom in the other. “Can’t you see there’s building work going on?!” she bawled. In the end, she hunted out the head of the school. She wasn’t much friendlier though. You say you attended this school? You’re a writer? What’s your name? Never heard of you. There were all sorts of famous writers who went to this school and they always send copies of their new books. Did you send any? No, I didn’t. Well, there you are, see! says the principal. The German journalist, of course, didn’t understand what all this was about and was getting increasingly edgy. “Do you mean to say that people here don’t know who Mr. Kertész is?” he said in German. Too right, they didn’t know who Mr. Kertész was; they didn’t even have a record of establishing separate streaming for Jews. The class registers for the years from 1940 to 1944 had all been lost, in the words of the principal. How odd, I remarked. We departed.
I have to tell you that in all honesty even I heard nothing about “Jewish classes.” I had no idea that children were separated on the basis of religion.
A racial basis, in fact. Hungary’s first so-called Jewish law was enacted in 1938, and either that one, or the second one of the following year, reactivated the so-called Numerus Clausus of 1920, which had been suspended in 1924. What that meant in practice was that institutions of higher education could only accept Jewish or “effectively Jewish” students to the percentage that they represented in the overall population, which as far as I recall was about six percent at the time; in other words, out of one hundred pupils only six could be Jewish. In that context the introduction of Jewish classes in some state grammar schools counted more as an advantage than a disadvantage, however ugly the terminology may sound. In schools that were so designated it was possible every year, from 1940 onward, to set up a separate Jewish class of forty pupils. These were the B stream, as opposed to the A stream, which was filled by children of impeccable pedigree. Now, in order to get into a B stream you needed to have gained an all-A-grade report at your elementary school. So, judge for yourself what clots these people were to set up a class of children who were the elite of the despised race, whereas the supposedly privileged class had to take the bright and not-so-bright alike. Is it any wonder that teachers secretly competed to be allowed to teach Jewish classes?
Did you encounter any discriminatory attitudes against those of you who were in the Jewish class?
To the school’s credit, I would have to say no. The only person who had any of the racist sentiments of the Arrow-Cross Party was a gym teacher by the name of Csorba. But we’re again in danger of slipping into dreary anecdotes, like frontline veterans (to use one of Jorge Semprun’s expressions), which is something I would prefer to avoid.
And all the more as there are barely any literary relics from that period.
Indeed, and that is rather surprising. As far as the period 1940–45 goes, I think first and foremost of the volumes of Sándor Márai’
s diaries, then the reminiscences that Miklós Szentkuthy had tape-recorded and later published under the curious title Frivolous Confessions, and along with that Béla Hamvas’s Carnival … What else? Would you add anything?
Ferenc Karinthy’s Springtime in Budapest.
Forget that.
Tibor Cseres’s Cold Days.
O.K.
Ernő Szép’s The Smell of Humans.
O.K.
Tibor Déry’s My Memoirs of the Underworld.
We can forget that.
Isn’t that a bit hasty on your part? After all, Tibor Déry is …
Yes, of course, of course. Look, I’m not setting myself up as a knocker, and I never had any time for literature of the official canon, let alone the Party-approved nomenklatura, but I am impudent enough to select my own reading according to my own taste. There was a time when I had a try with Tibor Déry, but that was a long time ago if ever …
That attempt obviously came in the post-war period, and although I would be curious to know what you read then, let’s stick to chronological order. You have hardly said anything about your father, for example.
My father was a cherishable, slim, handsome man with Levantine features and curly, jet-black hair that stubbornly resisted any attempt to comb it. He was a fighter who carried on a struggle that was unknown to me on some distant battlefield. He was usually on the point of losing with my mother. Even I must have noticed some of that during the short period when the three of us were together. Victrix causa deis placuit, sed victa Catoni—The conquering cause was pleasing to the gods, but the conquered one to Cato, the Latin saw goes. Well, the latter goes for a child as well. The failure he suffered against Mother totally won my heart over, if not my mind, and this ambivalence shadowed me later on as well. But let’s stay with my father. On returning home from his daily skirmishes, in the evening he would complain about his worries and his stomach pains. To stand his ground he would have needed to put on a bit of weight. Every now and again he would haul out a billycan of goose dripping that was being kept for the winter. Have you seen the sort of thing?
You mean one of those blue or red enamel cans with a lid that was locked with a fastener.
Blue: our billycan was blue. That contained the goose dripping, which had a pale-red tint from the paprika with which it had been roasted, and there would also be occasional limp onion rings dotted about in it. Father ate the dripping by the spoonful like Genghis Khan. He was also very fond of cocoa, with garlic on toasted bread: that was Sunday breakfast for him as long as he lived on Tömő Street. My grandmother would bring it to him while he was still in bed, and he would crunch it loudly between his healthy teeth. As a boy of four of five, I would sit beside him in the bed and enjoy the sound of his crunching, the way the aroma of garlic would spread around the bed and through the whole room. I would marvel at him in the barber’s shop when he had his blue bristles shaved. He would throw his head back and the razor-blade would work all around his neck. He had a huge Adam’s apple that would jiggle up and down under the razor; I would hold my breath as I watched to see the outcome. On Sunday mornings he would take me for a walk: we would stroll to the Oktogon and back. Those walks were very dispiriting for me; I would be bored to tears and feel dizzy, dazed by all the passersby, the Sunday crowds of people. Budapest was a truly fine city in those days; it still is today, but then it was clean as well. The elegance of those Sundays! The ladies’ hats! The Changing of the Guard up at the Castle in Buda! The promenades alongside the Danube! In springtime Father would take me on a pleasure steamer, the Sophia. I would race to grab seats in the “bows.” Father would produce a miniature chess set from his pocket and pin the tiny pieces into the holes by their little pegs. At every turn some surprise would be in store, with adventures lying in wait at every street corner. On the Grand Boulevard, the outer ring road, a bulldog man would put in an appearance every Sunday, sauntering stiffly as he led five or six identical-looking bulldogs on a multiple lead, with an identical pipe dangling from the jaws of the identical-looking bulldogs. Odd characters like that existed in Budapest in those days. Sandwich-board men would pass us by with their slowly plodding steps. In a shop window of the Paris Department Store a chef with a white hat tossed pancakes up in the air from his frying pan. He would always catch them and fry them, and they cost only ten fillérs apiece,7 except that my father would not always have ten fillérs on him. Then I would be most indignant, whereupon he would explain: “I’m stony broke. Business just isn’t going well.” That would crush all arguments, on top of which I had no idea what he meant: where was business supposed to go from Koszorú Street,8 which was its normal place?
A timber merchant’s, if what you write in Fatelessness is an accurate guide.
Fairly accurate. It was a spacious cellar property in which timber planks were stockpiled in a certain order. There was an “office” consisting of a glass cage at the foot of the steep flight of steps, but in Fatelessness I made it sound a bit posher than it was. There I describe the family as very middle-class, whereas we were much more like lower-middle-class, petit-bourgeois. Father was not able to pay for the stock that he held, so he received the planks “on commission” from the wholesaler, a man by the name of Mr. Galambos, who had a lumberyard somewhere in Újpest9—an enormous open-air area with wisps of fog swirling over endless stacks of timber, as I saw when Father took me once on a visit. It must have been in the autumn, and the autumn had much the same coloration as Mr. Galambos. He seemed to be made up of the most diverse shades of grey: his suit was grey, he wore a dove-grey hat and, likewise grey, a genuine pair of spats with little buttons on the side. Even his eyes were grey. as was his extraordinarily neat and elegantly groomed moustache. And he always carried on him, who knows where from, a bag of bonbons or boiled sweets to offer one, in much the same way as one man will offer another a cigarette or cigarillo. That was also the way he shook hands with me, like one man with another, without any hint of a condescending smile or gesture of that kind. I rather think he assisted Father in his business affairs, although I know nothing for sure. In any case, my blood would freeze the instant I heard the word “business.”
Why?
It had sinister implications. Either it was “not going well,” or it was a cause of “concern” for my father—in short, whenever the word “business” sounded that signalled the end of fun and games, and bleakness would take over.
So what part did the man you call Mr. Sütő play in all this?
None at all. Mr. Sütő is an entirely fictitious character who never existed in reality. In reality there was a chap called Uncle Pista, whom my father referred to as “the hand.” “The hand” would help out whenever a “truck-load” came, or in other words whenever a consignment of timber arrived from the wholesaler and had to be unloaded from the horse-drawn cart into the cellar. At other times the “hand” would deliver to our house the wood shavings that we used to stoke the tile stove, but that’s another story that is of no possible interest.
As far as I’m concerned, everything that throws more light on your relationship with your father is of interest. In Kaddish for an Unborn Child you wrote some truly terrible things about him.
One is always unjust in regard to one’s father. One has to rebel against somebody in order to justify our tribulations and our blunders. On one occasion when I was visiting Prague …
I’m sorry, but that’s just an anecdote. Please don’t dodge the question by taking refuge in Prague!
Well anyway, when I was there I saw a photograph of Kafka’s father.
So what?
He was a good-looking man, with a congenial face. Now read what Franz Kafka writes in the Letter to His Father.
I would rather cite something from your Kaddish: “We are always sinners before our father and God.” Then again: “I had need of a tyrant for my world order to be restored … but my father never tried to replace my usurpatory world order with another, one based on our common state of powerlessness, for exa
mple.” Also: “Auschwitz manifests itself to me in the image of a father; yes, the words ‘father’ and ‘Auschwitz’ elicit the same echo within me …”
Enough! Enough! Look, you’re quoting from a novel in which everything is tipped on its edge. The narrator is exaggerating, but because this is a novel every figure of speech has to be distorted to fit that exaggeration. On the other hand, if you really think about it, art is nothing other than exaggeration and distortion, and that is the source of family conflicts. Thomas Mann, for one, was severely reproached for his portrayal of certain family members who crop up in Buddenbrooks.
This time you don’t convince me. My sense is that behind the passages that I quoted lies a bitter truth, genuine rancour.
A person will always bear a grudge against his or her parents.
If that’s the case, what do you suppose is the reason for that?
Beyond any specific individual motivations, perhaps because although it is true that the parents were responsible for bringing one into the world, they also set you up for death.
Isn’t that just speculative? I don’t think many people think that way.
We know from Freud, however, that there also exists a subconscious world.
Allow me to return to concrete aspects. In the piece on “Budapest—An Unnecessary Confession,” which appeared in your essay volume The Exiled Language in 2001, you describe a scene in which you and your father hurried home. Let me quote the passage word for word: “A confused shouting could be heard from the boulevard. Father said we would not go home the usual way but with a bit of a detour. He guided me, almost running, along dark side-streets; I had no idea which way we were going. The clamour gradually subsided behind us. Father then explained that the German film Jud Süss was playing at a nearby cinema, and as they streamed out of the cinema the crowds would hunt for Jews among the passersby and stage a pogrom … I would have been about nine years old at the time, and I had never heard the word ‘pogrom’ before … But the essence of the word was revealed to me by [my father’s] trembling hand and his behaviour.” Since you have already mentioned Freud, that nightmarish scene surely carries some unspoken meaning, a reproach …