by Imre Kertész
Yes, that’s the point. Now we shall never understand.
Because God has been made to fail?
Yes, because the world order has not changed even after Auschwitz.
Is that what Liquidation, your most recent novel, is about?
Yes. And if in Fatelessness—and my other books, too, I hope—I succeeded in turning Auschwitz into a universal human experience, then I must equally report on that failure as a universal human experience. A few critics in Germany did grasp precisely that.
What about here, in Hungary?
Let’s just leave it. For Hungary the view on my novel is blocked by the towers of Stockholm. I don’t wish to say any more than that.
I find that hard to believe, but we’ll come back to this later. What is of interest to me right now is how you managed to shake off the factory.
Through an act of humiliating solidarity of the kind that sometimes appears almost as a memento at critical turning points of my life.
Why do you say “humiliating”?
Because they are unmerited when they occur to me, and they leave me defenceless. I am always embarrassed when the world order is infringed.
What would you call the world order?
The banal spell of evil.
This is beginning to interest me. Let me repeat my question: How did you manage to get out of the factory?
One afternoon, the foreman said that a journalist was waiting for me outside, in the changing room. To be brief, it was Nándi Ordas, who was working on what was called the “Manufacturing” column for my old newspaper (which had long ceased to be called Világosság but was named Evening Budapest instead, on the lines of some Soviet model). He was a young chap from the provinces, twenty-five or thirty years old, burly and fresh-faced, though he was fonder of a spritzer or two more than was good for him. We had hit it off from the start but more from a distance, simply not having enough time to become real friends. As “Manufacturing” reporter he had access to any factory and even some of the ministries. “I’ve wangled this job for you,” he said in elation as I entered the changing room.
Had you asked him to sniff around?
Not at all! I wasn’t even sure whether he had noticed I had been kicked out. I hadn’t had time even to say farewell. “Just go along to the Ministry for the Metallurgical and Engineering Industries and ask to see the head of the press office, Márton Fazekas. He already knows everything.” That’s how it was. Next morning I was seen by a gentleman (or rather “Comrade”) of around fifty, wiry, on the short side, a very soft-spoken chap wearing a snazzy sports jacket, a hint of melancholy on his well-groomed moustachioed features …
A flower adorning the buttonhole of his jacket …
How do you know that?
I’ve read Fiasco.
Oh yes, right you are. But the figure you meet there is not the real Márton Fazekas but a semistylized, I might almost say mythical mutant of him. True, the real Marci Fazekas also wrote poetry that, every now and again, he would read to me in confidence, under a huge map of Korea that hung on his office wall.
What has that to do with the poems?
What do you mean?
The map of Korea …
In those days there was a map of Korea pinned up in every office, workroom, and workshop in the country, everywhere. There would be pins with red flags to track the victorious advance of the North Korean forces: the pins would have to be reset every day in accordance with the military situation, accompanied wherever possible with a picture or article cut out of one paper or another that showed the South Korean army in full retreat and/or General MacArthur and his threats to launch an atomic bomb attack.
Yes, of course, the Korean War.
You weren’t even born when that was in progress. To be brief, we lived in an intoxicating succession of unbroken Korean victories until, all of a sudden, with the invasion and battle of Inchon, the maps of Korea were removed from the walls overnight. We then started to send missives to the American president (whether it was Harry Truman or Eisenhower, I don’t rightly recall). “Dear Mr. President,” the letters proclaimed, “We, employees of the Press Office of the Ministry for the Metallurgical and Engineering Industries, demand the immediate termination of American involvement,” and so on, with the letters all signing off “Hands off Korea!”
Madness!
Yet there was method in it, as Hamlet says.
Which prompts me to note that we are flitting about fairly erratically. So, Márton Fazekas took you on as a colleague at the ministry. When was that exactly?
In the early spring of 1951.
What were your duties, strictly speaking?
If only I had known … the biggest trouble, though, was that I couldn’t care. In principle, I should have been putting together pieces along the lines of a newspaper article, but I had already been kicked out of the newspaper because I was incapable of writing material like that.
Yet all the same, Fazekas didn’t kick you out.
His bad luck was that he had taken a liking to me. He soon realized, however, that I was only using the job as a cover against the hostile world outside, but he looked on me as a sort of “young talent” who needed to be supported.
Did you mention your literary ambitions to him?
It could be … At the time I, too, was giving the co-authorship mode of existence a trial. You’re no doubt familiar with Iván Mándy’s scintillating book, Lecturers and Co-authors.
You bet! Did you use to go to his regular haunt, the “Darling” café?
No, I used to frequent the espressos along Andrássy … oops! Stalin Avenue, the former “Broadway” of Budapest. You know, ten or twenty years ago I was able to spout one anecdote after another about that period, which the now legendary Pál Királyhegyi probably got nearest to nailing: “One of these days, I’m going to write the story of my life under the title My Happy Days of Being Bored to Tears by Terror,” as he was in the habit of saying. The pristine flavour of those ridiculous and yet horrific times has been lost.
Fortunately, you managed to retrieve some of that in the extraordinary menagerie of your novel Fiasco. But let’s get back to Fazekas …
In point of fact, Fazekas was a very civil fellow; he mildly chided me on a few occasions, but in his own mind he rationalized what was, at root, a paternal sense of responsibility towards me which, in some way or other, involved literature and an unspoken Jewish solidarity.
Did you ever talk about that?
I think Fazekas was aware that I had passed through Auschwitz.
That was it?
It was something that never came up openly in conversation between us. If he did know, it could only have been from my so-called “cadre,” or Party-worker, record card—the secret document that followed one around, like an invisible shadow, from office to office.
I would really like to push you further about that, but I have to confess that the subject makes me, as a non-Jew, rather uneasy.
One of those “tricky topics,” right?
Sadly, that’s still the case in Hungary. I don’t know if it’s a question that it is in any way legitimate to pose …
Pose it, then I can either choose to reply or not.
I would like to ask you about that Jewish solidarity. Obviously, in a dictatorship that cannot have operated overtly; what I mean is that no one was able to define himself as a Jew …
Unless you went to the rabbinical training school, and provided the regime did not define you as a Jew, as was the case two years later, when the trial of those accused of involvement in the Jewish doctors’ plot got underway in the Soviet Union.
I understand. But did you, for instance, instantly identify Fazekas as being Jewish?
That’s a good question. In all probability: yes, but not in a conscious fashion. In other words, I wouldn’t have said to myself that this fellow Fazekas is Jewish, but I would have sensed that I could have a certain degree of trust in him.
Because he was Jewish.
Because we had similar … it would be hard to say what. Not faces or ways of thinking … I think that the only thing two Jews have in common is their fears; that’s how they can be distinguished most accurately, at least in Central and Eastern Europe.
That seems to run counter to the fact that Rákosi, Ger?, Farkas, in short virtually the entire Stalinist leadership in Hungary at that time, were themselves of Jewish extraction. Is that something you have thought about?
No. I was aware of the fact, of course, but it’s not something that preoccupied me in any way at all. Did the fact that Szálasi and the entire leadership of the Arrow-Cross Party in Nazi Hungary were Christians give you any pause for thought?
Touché.
Look, the most destructive passion of the twentieth century was the relinquishment of the individual and the levelling of collective accusations against whole populations and ethnic groups. If we are going to start analyzing the degree to which I, as a Jew, bear responsibility for the deeds of a total stranger purely on the grounds that he, too, was born Jewish, then that is tantamount to accepting that way of thinking and crossing into the realm of ideology. Only in that case, I don’t know what we would have to talk about; I feel I am doing far too much explaining as things are.
I agree, but all the same, people do have various prejudices, out of which it is possible to forge political capital.
Undeniably, but the understanding the two of us had was not that we were going to talk about the sick aberrations of politics.
I won’t push it any further, because I made it clear from the start that I wanted to broach a touchy subject. I hope that you don’t take it amiss and I can count on your continued assistance.
Now we have started, I’m not going to leave you in the lurch.
In that case, let’s resume with fear. You said that the most two Jews have in common is their fears. To what extent did fear shape you?
I wasn’t afraid. To that extent, Auschwitz truly was a great school. What made me Jewish was the Holocaust, and that is a new phenomenon in Europe. Of course, I would not have been able to formulate it as clearly as that at the time. But later on I set myself a task in life that required me to clarify for myself the quality of my Jewishness, if I may put it like that. For instance, I would have a hard job discussing Jewish metaphysics, Jewish culture, or Jewish literature with you because I am not acquainted with these things. In that sense I am not Jewish at all. Yet that is of no interest to anyone the moment I am taken off to Auschwitz, or made the main defendant in a show trial. Then you are struggling for sheer survival and are no longer able to say that you believe you are not Jewish …
What are you, according to your conviction?
Jewish—but a Jew who has nothing in common with any of the Jewish modes of life that were known before Auschwitz, neither archaic Jews, nor assimilated Jews, nor Zionist Jews. Or with Israel. That may be the hardest thing of all to say.
It took you half a century. In 2002 you wrote a travel diary to which you gave the title “Jerusalem, Jerusalem.”14 Nevertheless, let us stay for a bit longer on the time you spent with Fazekas. By then it was six years since you had got out of Buchenwald, you’re twenty-two; so, back then, in 1951, what did a Jewish identity mean to you?
Anecdotes, Jewish jokes, a certain protection with Fazekas—in other words, nothing, nothing at all, so I think there is little sense in using the term “identity” here. I didn’t have an identity, and I didn’t miss having one, either.
You already stated that when you were talking about your childhood.
In a certain sense I was still living my childhood then as well. Dictatorships make children out of people inasmuch as they do not permit existential choices and thereby deprive one of that wonderful burden of being responsible for oneself. At that time I lived in a fantasy world that was impossible to keep any check on, perfectly absurd; I was concealed in my insignificance.
The words ring a bell; they’re from Fiasco, aren’t they, but what do they mean, more precisely?
Total vulnerability to chance. I compared myself to a person who is cast this way by chance, like a light skiff by a swift current. Whereas I just gave in to physical appearances and considered myself to be a singularly nebulous person, whom I did not know at all and thus who served as a constant source of surprises.
It must have been a strange state.
Parlous in the extreme.
Is that how you judge it now, or did you perceive it as dangerous at the time?
I don’t know. The drawback of conversations like this is precisely the fact that one speaks self-confidently about one’s life in the sure knowledge of where it has ended up, but are you able to conjure up the person you were, your aimlessness? Can you feel under your feet the tightrope that you danced on? Did you even know that you were dancing on a tightrope? Years later, I came across that immortal adage from Duchamp: “There is no solution, because there is no problem.” Probably one has to evoke trivial details, though often even that proves futile. Not long ago, for instance, I mulled at length over what I ate in those days. What did I eat during a period when practically all items of food were only sold in exchange for ration coupons? Who washed my underwear, and how? I recollect that there used to be one of those posh, old-fashioned public lavatories in front of the EMKE café, on the corner of the Grand Boulevard and Rákóczi Avenue. There were steps that led down to it. A decrepit crone who was a leftover from the “ancien regime” was in charge of it as the WC attendant. One even got a bar of soap from her, which had to be given back after one had washed. Other than that, I used to go to the Lukács Baths to wash down and have a swim—I remember that well. There were times when I was only able to get to the swimming baths in the evening, when the green waters of the pool would be lit up by searchlights a bit like spotlights. Those years dropped out of my life like loose change through a hole in a purse; it would be useless to try to gather them together now. On a sunny but gusty winter morning not long ago, I took a walk through the Városmajor Park in Buda and cut over the tramlines to reach Logodi Street15 in order to look for the house where I had been a subtenant what is now a good fifty years ago. I have long since forgotten the house number, so I tried to recognize it from memory: it just didn’t work. I traipsed back home. I began to realize that I shall never again make sense of my young days: I don’t know what I did, and why, how and why I became the person I became.
For my part, though, I hope we shall learn something about this in the end. You mentioned Logodi Street, which suggests that you were no longer living with your mother in Zivatar Street.
No, my mother married the glass engineer, who had in the meanwhile been promoted to managing director of the factory.
For political reasons or engineering know-how?
I suppose it was as a reward for all his inventions; he wasn’t interested in anything besides vacuum tubes. My mother, on the other hand, was finally able to live in the style she had dreamed about since her girlhood. There was a car that went with the position, and at weekends they would go off on shoots for game, have a pig slaughtered in autumn for the hams and sausages … and as a result of some property deal they swapped the Zivatar Street apartment over my head.
Effectively, put you out on the street?
Only in principle; in practice they arranged a subtenancy for me “on a friendly basis” as the main tenant was some sort of senior employee at the factory that my stepfather managed.
In other words, more through bribery than “on a friendly basis” …
That’s quite possible, as we settled on a ridiculously low rent; but the main thing was that it was a rather neat room at the foot of Buda Castle Hill, with my window overlooking the dense leafage of a tree. Since this meant we were finally free of each other, the endless wrangles with my mother also grew less common.
What were the wrangles about?
Look, I’ve already told you that in matters of no direct concern to her my mother suffered from outright colour-blindness.
Both she and her husband pretended that we were living in a slightly wacky but otherwise completely normal world, in which a young person’s duty is to attend to their advancement and build a career. This was the summer of 1951. Every night, toward dawn, operatives of the State Security Office, the ÁVH, would go around the city loading onto trucks and transporting to their forced places of residence those people who had been sentenced to resettlement.
You mentioned earlier Iván Mándy’s book, Lecturers and Co-authors …
Yes, and that too was part of the total absurdity. At that time I was part of a small group of friends who would write humorous sketches and short radio plays, all kinds of nonsense, for the insatiable Hungarian Radio. We would take apart the elements of the plays of Ferenc Molnár in various dives and espresso cafés, quite convinced that we would soon become famous comedy writers.
In Fiasco there is a scene where Köves, getting on for daybreak, is making his way homeward along deserted streets and is hailed by a strange chap from a bench by the footpath …
The pianist, who didn’t dare go home, because he wanted to avoid being dragged away from his bed.
Is the pianist a figure you dreamed up, or is he someone you encountered in real life?
I could even tell you his name.
That scene, as it happened, you also wrote as a stand-alone short story under the title “The Bench,” which contains a very typical sentence about the nonexistent identity that you spoke of before. It runs: “In those days I could always be persuaded by anything if I came up against the necessary patience or robustness.”