by Imre Kertész
“In the end it may yet transpire that I do, indeed, have some talent for writing, which would make me truly sorry,” writes the Old Boy in Fiasco, “since I did not start writing because I have talent; on the contrary, when I decided that I would write a novel, evidently I also decided, by the bye, that I would become talented. I needed it; there was a job to be done. I had to aim to write a good book, not out of vanity but in the nature of the thing, so to say.”
Well, yes, but at that point in time, at rock bottom, I couldn’t have known that I was going to be so wise thirty years later.
If you didn’t realize it, you have still not answered my earlier question as to what, in fact, happened to you in the L-shaped corridor.
Let’s just accept that not every question has an answer.
“There comes a moment in the lives of men when they suddenly become aware of themselves and their powers are freed; from this moment onward we can reckon to be ourselves, this is the moment when we were born,” you write in Galley Boat-Log.17
One can hardly go further than that. I recollect an ecstatic moment that I could only capture here and now with rather vacuous words.
All the same, that was the moment that determined the further course of your life.
That is undeniable.
Which forced you to the writing desk, which held you prisoner among your papers—is that what you call “existential angst”? What sort of text was it that you were in fact struggling with? Was it a novel, a short story, a diary, memoir?
Let me put it this way: a longish short story.
One that, as you said, refused to assume any shape. What happened to it in the end? Did you discard it?
Fortunately, no. The better passages from it found their way, thirty years later, into the novel-in-the-novel of Fiasco.
With appropriate alterations, no doubt.
Without changing a word.
Surely you don’t mean the novel that Berg reads out to Köves under the title “I, the Executioner”?
Yes, I do.
Staggering authorial economy! And incidentally, it does not show the least trace of thirty years of dust. However, I do now begin to see how you worked out the path that would lead you to Fatelessness.
I’d quite like to know myself.
You sought atonement for what you lived through in prison, only in doing so you amplified your problem into one of global dimensions. The only possible solution was a novel—in your case, at least, since you were born a writer.
I don’t know; one is not born for anything in particular, but if one manages to stay alive long enough, then one cannot avoid eventually becoming something … and incidentally what you refer to as the path to Fatelessness I experienced as a continuous deficiency, and the fact that I gave myself to writing Fatelessness I intended as a fulfilment of that disaster, as a kind of self-punishment. Because I found I was just getting nowhere with fiction writing. “At least you are familiar with the material,” I told myself with a degree of healthy scorn, planning to write it in a couple of months.
When was that?
In 1960.
And the couple of months became thirteen years, if I’m not mistaken. But that is to depart from the chronological sequence … when did the incident in the L-shaped corridor take place?
Precisely when, I couldn’t tell you myself. I’d put it somewhere around … late 1955. I recall it was autumn and it was raining. By then I was trying to get by as a “freelance”—a form of life that did, indeed, lead to some rather tight spots at times when it came to making a living. Anyway, around then one or two of my friends were working for the Magyar Nemzet [Hungarian Nation] newspaper, and the editor of one column or other asked me to write a piece on why the trains were running late. As a result I found myself in an L-shaped corridor in one of the Hungarian State Railway offices—somewhere near the Eastern Railway Terminal, I seem to recollect.
Hang on a moment! The last time we had a glimpse of you was in uniform, as an army conscript. First of all, you had to be discharged … as far as I know, you got involved in a fairly risky venture to that end.
You could call it that. But it’s anecdotal, so let’s keep it as short as possible.
You fainted in public at one of the morning parades, didn’t you?
Yes, I did. Beforehand, I had borrowed several medical texts from the library to study, above all, the various species of neurosis with particular regard to fits and the catatonic state. I collapsed and went into a crying fit, which was followed by muscle rigidity and so on. The main thing was to remain consistent.
As best I know, you were even admitted to the hospital.
I’ll spare you the details. The doctors didn’t know what to make of me.
“After all, everything depends on the firmness of our will, and in my experience a person can cross over into madness with terrifying ease, if he wants that at all costs,” Köves writes in Fiasco.18
That’s right.
When did all this happen?
In the summer and autumn of 1953.
If what you say in your book Someone Else is accurate, you became acquainted with your first wife, Albina, that same autumn.
Yes.
The story goes that the long hot summer of that year was followed by a mild autumn.
That’s how it was.
One fine evening in September you were strolling lazily down Andrássy (then Stalin) Avenue towards Nagymez? Street, dropping in on the cafés that were on your way. In what was then nicknamed the “Sissi”18 bar at the Moulin Rouge there was just one couple sitting in the semi-gloom into which it was plunged by the burgundy plush of the stools and the dark purple of the wall hangings: a tow-haired, broad-shouldered water polo player with whom you had a fleeting acquaintance and a strange woman. They invited you to join them at their table.
Yes.
The woman was not pretty to your way of thinking, but very alluring. Her quirky humour struck you immediately. What was it she asked?
“Can a person doss at your place?”
“Doss”?
Stay, get a bed, in the slang of those days.
You were somewhat surprised at the unforeseen familiarity, but you instantly replied that one could. As far as I know, the main tenants were on a summer holiday at their bungalow by Lake Balaton, so the apartment was empty and you were seized by the excitement of what gave every promise of being an easy adventure. A light was on behind the garden gate at Logodi Street, so you couldn’t evade the beady eye of the concierge, but then all your earlier expectations were dashed.
Yes.
The woman really did want a place to sleep. She had only come out of inland security-service detainment a week before; others were living in her apartment. A woman friend had taken her in but had only been able to squeeze her into the kitchen, and the woman had felt that she couldn’t spend another night jammed in “at the foot of the cooker,” as I understand she said.
Yes.
Why should I be telling the story?
I couldn’t tell any more myself.
True, it’s a tale you’ve told many times now. It was on her that you based the waitress in Fiasco; she is also recognizable in The Union Jack; and you take final leave of her in some harrowing passages in Someone Else. How long was it that you lived together?
Forty-two years.
More than a generation … “She has gone, and she has taken with her the greater chunk of my life, the period in which creative work started and was completed, and also the period when, living in an unhappy marriage, we were so much in love with one another,” as you write in Someone Else. A strange sentence …
Go on, carry on.
“Our love was like a deaf-mute child scampering with laughter on his face and arms outspread but whose mouth slowly crumples into sobs because nobody understands him and because he cannot ascertain the purpose of his scampering.”19 A truly sad metaphor, and even sadder is a short passage that is to be found somewhat earlier in that volume: “A mild late
summer with A. [Albina] … to the Traunsee. Balcony above the lake. However one looks at it (even out of season), this is a first-class hotel, a loving gift to A. made possible by the astounding twists my life has taken and the opportunity they have created. She accepts it warily, with a melancholy of something coming too late, an incorruptible reserve demanded by fidelity to the bitterness of all the irreplaceable years; and I am seized over and over again with terror because I have an almost palpable sense of something irrevocable (perhaps what is commonly called destiny) and for a person finally to yield to this recalcitrance of things is to tempt a decline …” When was that remark recorded?
The summer of 1994.
In the following year, in 1995, she died … you yourself read out an oration to those of your joint friends who were present at the funeral.
Since a priest or rabbi was out of the question, whereas a civilian official would only have parroted fatuous commonplaces …
Let’s turn back to Logodi Street to try to understand what it was that brought the two of you together. After all, an uncomfortable night does not obligate one in any way, and all that you write about her says more about the differences between the two of you than the common ground: “I was twenty-four, she was thirty-three,” you write in Someone Else. “I had come back from the Nazi concentration camps, straight from the Endlösung, and then the cheerless abyss of the harsh ‘Fifties’—all of which, though there was not yet the slightest sign of it at the time, was to have an inspirational rather than a deleterious effect on me. She too had come from war, as a refugee, her family exterminated, the family fortune—her inheritance—carried off. She had made a new start; her husband had been locked up at the outset of the show trials, her money and belongings confiscated. She started over, then eventually she herself was arrested and spent a year in captivity in prisons and internment camps. All that turned her against herself, broke her confidence in the choices she made. Every choice she made—including me, most especially me—was a self-punishment for an arcane transgression she had never committed.” An interesting analysis, and if one bears in mind Jean Améry’s lost Weltvertrauen …
I don’t believe it was that complicated. Both of us were lonely and forlorn; we needed each other. Later on we simply stayed together even when the absolute need may have disappeared …
How did she end up in prison? What was the reason for arresting her?
You have some very droll questions. We are talking about 1952, the baleful height of the Rákosi era. Why did they arrest anyone during that period? Simply because the sphere of authority of those who made the arrests was unlimited and so they could arrest anyone at any time. A citizen living in a dictatorship who happens not to be in prison at that moment is merely a prisoner released on bail. In that context, the case itself, the “charge” on the pretext of which a person is arrested, is an anecdote of purely secondary importance.
And just as one fine day she was arrested, so on another fine day she was released.
In the wake of a speech made by Imre Nagy in July 1953, during his brief first period as premier, when the internment camps were opened up and deportees were released from the compulsory places of residence that were assigned to them.
Where did you yourselves live?
In rented accommodations, but it’s not worth going into the story at this nadir. A rough and very boring period ensued that was preoccupied mainly by the foolish cares of sheer survival.
Until, one fine summer morning you “traversed half the city … with a four-wheeled tow cart,” as one reads in The Union Jack.
It so happened that through some staggering bureaucratic marvel the authorities handed back to Albina the apartment that had been unlawfully sequestered from her. We piled the scanty appurtenances of our household onto a handcart and set off from the rented place on Lónyay Street in the Eighth District of Pest to take possession of the apartment on Török Street.20
The same as the one in which, roughly twenty-five years later, the “Old Boy” stood before the filing cabinet and thought.
Exactly. Of course, the filing cabinet was the product of an organic development over the ensuing decades.
A fairly intensive development if one considers merely the metamorphoses of the timbers, which had originally served as the linen drawer of a former divan-bed, then as a bookcase put together from that, as one can read in Fiasco. But let’s get back to the chronological order.
That won’t be easy.
Why?
Because it doesn’t signify anything, The device of a sequence, of linearity, won’t allow us to capture that darkest yet also most productive period of my life in the trap of narratability.
That is the period about which …
About which, as you yourself remarked not so long ago, I am unable to give an account in the language of rationality.
So, we are still stuck at the question of what happened to you in the L-shaped corridor.
No, we’ve already covered that. Like a sleepwalker I followed an inspiration that lured me further and further from the everyday and about which I could have no idea where it would lead ultimately. I stepped outside my history and was alarmed to notice that I was on my own. It did not make things any easier that around this time we were living off Albina’s earnings alone.
I can roughly understand your anxieties. “I always had a secret life, and that was always the real one,” you write in Galley Boat-Log.21 Much earlier you recorded more impassively, even a little bit cynically: “The idea that anyone at all might understand my secret occupation and the way of life it entails is so alien to me that I am quite capable, even unprompted, of joking about myself to anybody else without feeling in the least ridiculous.”22
Yes, after a while one toughens up. On top of that, I had to settle in for the long haul.
It’s interesting that right from the start you pictured yourself as a sort of “outlaw writer.” As someone living in a hostile environment and engaged in a secret activity. What’s the explanation for that?
Quite simply the fact that I was living in a hostile environment and engaged in a secret activity.
Don’t you think that your general distrust may have been founded on a lack of self-confidence?
It’s possible. Whatever it was founded on, I could not have imagined, and even today could not imagine, a “legal” art which was on harmonious terms with its social milieu.
Which makes it quite superfluous for me to pose the question: Did it never occur to you to get going on what is regarded as the “regular” route of publishing shorter-length stories to begin with in order to enter literary life, so-called, and generally just get your name more widely known?
That is, indeed, a prototypically superfluous question … I can’t even say that I didn’t wish to enter so-called literary life; the idea of entering it, that I could enter or might enter, simply didn’t cross my mind … indeed, it didn’t even cross my mind that what I was engaged on at home, between four walls, was what is called literature, and that literature had an organizational structure: the Writers’ Association, the Ministerial Literary Department or Section, the Book Publishers’ Administration, the Party artistic and literary … OK, I’ll leave it at that. All I wanted to do was indicate that I was nevertheless well aware, incidentally, that we were living in a totalitarian state, and that had its own characteristics that it does no harm to think through if one is going to write a novel … indeed, that novel-writing will stall until one does think them through. All the more so, as it was precisely those characteristics that I wanted to write about, and right there one comes up against the first big question: Is that at all possible?
If I understand you right, it’s a matter of one’s world-view.
Precisely. And that is the way in which it presented itself to me: If power is totalitarian, and the accommodation to it is total, then for whom is one to portray man dominated by totalitarianism? And why should one portray him so dismissively, so negatively? For what kind of mysterious
entity would the novel-writer work? Who would be left and be in a position to judge outside of the totality; indeed, this being a novel, who would derive amusement and learn from the work, and what is more, draw from it the conclusions about works that were to come? Who would be that personified or divinely abstract Archimedean centre of mass? The absurdity lies in the fact that since God died, there has been no objective gaze; we live in a state of “panta rhei”: everything is in flux, there is no foothold, and yet we still write as though there were, or rather as if, despite all appearances, there still existed a viewpoint sub species aeternitas, the divine standpoint, or the “eternal human” where the resolution of this paradox lies.
I begin to understand why you said that you needed time, more time, in fact a great deal more time.
Yes, it’s not sufficient simply to pose these questions; you first have to get to them.
I note that the unfavourable reality did not seem to have any influence on your intellectual activities. From The Union Jack, for instance, we learn that in the midst of living with the vexations of rented accommodation and all the other difficulties your life was turned upside-down most of all by a book that you found by complete chance among the bric-a-brac left behind in the Török Street apartment. Indeed, you go so far as to say that the book a person has need of almost unfailingly comes to hand, whether by design or fortuitously.23 That was how you came across The Blood of the Walsungs …