“No!” that I had said, because it had become quite natural by then for my instincts to act contrary to my instincts, for my counterinstincts, so to say, to act instead of, indeed as, my instincts.
“No!” something within me bellowed, howled, instantly and at once, and my whimpering abated only gradually, after the passage of many long years, into a sort of quiet but obsessive pain until, slowly and malignantly, like an insidious illness, a question assumed ever more definite form within me: Would you be a brown-eyed little girl, with the pale specks of your freckles scattered around your tiny nose? Or else a headstrong boy, your eyes bright and hard as greyish-blue pebbles?—yes, contemplating my life as the potentiality of your existence. And that day, the whole night through, I contemplated nothing but this question, now by the blinding flashes of lightning, now in the darkness with dazzled eyes which, in the capricious intervals between the ragings in the atmosphere, seemed to be seeing this question flicker across the walls, so I must regard the sentences that I am writing down now, on this sheet of paper, as if I had written them down that night, although that night I experienced them rather than wrote them down, experienced them, which is to say was riven by sundry pains, most notably those of memories (I also had a half bottle of cognac), and I jotted down on the pages of one of the notebooks, exercise books or writing pads that I always have with me at best just a few muddled words that I was hard put to reconstruct afterwards, and even then didn’t understand, then later on I forgot the whole thing, and it was only after many years had passed that the night stirred into life within me once more, and again years had to pass until I can attempt to write down now what I would have written down that night, had I been writing, and were a single night, anyway, not too short, far too short, for me to have been able to write down what I would have written down. But then, how would I have been able to write, for that night was just the start, probably not the very first but at any rate one of the first steps on the long, long, who knows how lengthy path towards true clear-sightedness, or in other words, towards knowingly known self-liquidation, an initial scraping towards the grave bed which I am making for myself—there can be no doubt about it now—in the clouds. And this question—contemplating my life as the potentiality of your existence— proves a good guide, yes, as if, clutching me with your tiny, fragile hand, you were leading me, dragging me behind you along this path, which in the end can lead nowhere, or at most only to a totally futile and totally irrevocable self-recognition, and a path down which one may (why the “may”? even “must” does not begin to express it) set off only by removing the barriers and impediments that loom along it; first of all by removing, I would go so far as to say radically uprooting, my mediocre intellectual existence, even though in point of fact I adopt that pose merely as a prophylactic, as if I were a wary libertine moving around in an AIDS-infected milieu— or, to be more precise, as if I had been one, as it’s been a long, long time since I was a mediocre intellectual, or any sort of intellectual at all: I am nothing. I was born a private person, as J.W.G. once said, and I have remained a private survivor, I say; I am at most still a bit of a literary translator, if I am and have to be anything. As such, despite the threatening circumstances, in the end I radically removed from my path the ignominious existence of a successful Hungarian author, even though, as my wife (for a long time now someone else’s wife) told me, I have all the endowments it takes to be one (which slightly horrified me at the time), not that she was saying, my wife said, that I should jettison my artistic or any other principles, she was merely saying, my wife said, that I should not be faint-hearted , and the more that I was so, that is to say the less I were to do that (jettison my artistic or any other principles), the harder I would have to strive to realize those principles, which is to say, when all is said and done, myself, and hence to succeed, my wife said, since everyone strives for that, even the world’s greatest authors. “Don’t delude yourself,” my wife said, “if you don’t want success, then why bother writing at all?” she asked, and that is undoubtedly a thorny question, but the time is not yet ripe for me to digress on that; and the sad thing is that she probably saw straight into my heart, she was probably absolutely right, I probably do (did) have all the endowments it takes for the ignominious existence of a successful Hungarian author, the transparent refinements of which I saw through all too clearly, and the flair needed to carry it off is (was) certainly there within me, or if not, then I could acquire (could have acquired) it if I were to transmute my total insecurity and my total fear of existence into simple, blind, unrestrained, agitated and not so much captivating as at most somewhat eye-catching self-adulation, transform them into a moralizing paranoia and unremitting prosecutor of criminal proceedings against others; what is more, and even more dangerous, I had within me in even greater measure the flair needed for the equally ignominious existence of a Hungarian author who is not successful, indeed unsuccessful—and here again I find myself clashing with my wife, who again was the one who got it right, because once one steps onto the path of success then one will be either successful or unsuccessful, there is no third way, though certainly both are equally ignominious, albeit in different ways, which is why, for a while, I escaped altogether, as a surrogate for alcoholism, into the objective stupors of literary translation . . . And thus it was that when my wife’s words came to mind, my wife too came to mind, though it had been a long time since she had been wont to come to mind, as a matter of fact she does not even come to mind on those rare occasions when we meet, intentionally or unintentionally—more likely intentionally, and almost invariably on the instigation of my (ex-) wife, who, I suppose, must feel some sort of detached, totally groundless sense of guilt mixed with nostalgia towards me, as I see it, to the extent that I notice, and on such occasions I suppose she must be feeling, if anything, a nostalgia for her own youth and the few short years she squandered on me, whereas her totally groundless sense of guilt may be elicited by her awareness of being right—indisputable but then never in dispute and for that very reason gained without the requisite resistance, so to speak, or in other words, the fact that I had never accused her of anything; but then—God help us!—what would I, or could I, have accused her of anyway, except, perhaps, of wanting to live? So, while her words came to mind, she too came to mind, my whole ill-starred and short-lived marriage came to mind, it came to mind and I saw it before me as if it were laid out on a dissection table. And if I look it over, tenderly, lovingly, but in any case with a cool expert eye, the way that, when all is said and done, I prefer to look at everything, even the long stone-cold cadaver of my marriage, then I must guard against forging any cheap, grubby little victories for myself out of my wife’s above-quoted words, which as a spouse I undoubtedly listened to, how shall I put it, with irritation; however, on this all-illuminating night, when I see my marriage at such a remove from myself, and I comprehend so little that my incomprehension finally turns out to be quite simple and perfectly comprehensible, on this all-illuminating night, then, I am obliged to recognize that it was my wife’s instinct for life that drove her to utter those words, and her instinct for life needed my success to make her forget the mighty slice of bad luck that her birth had dealt her, the hated, incomprehensible, unacceptable, absurd bad luck that I myself noticed about her, instantly and, so to say, involuntarily—true, not as bad luck, on the contrary, virtually as a sort of halo, no, that’s an exaggeration, let’s just say as the nacreous, delicate scallop shell of an incarnation—the moment we first met in an apartment somewhere at a so-called gathering, when all at once she separated from the chattering group as from some hideous, formless, yet nevertheless, because it breathed like living flesh, perhaps kindred matrix, which rippled, expanded and spasmodically contracted as if in the throes of labor; so when she, as it were, broke away from there and traversed a greenish-blue carpet as if she were making her way on the sea, leaving behind her the dolphin’s slit open body, and stepped triumphantly yet timidly ever closer towards me, I, let me
tell you, instantly and so to say involuntarily thought: “What a lovely Jewish girl!” And even nowadays it still happens that when—albeit very rarely, and almost invariably on the instigation of my (ex-) wife—we meet somewhere, and I look at the way her head is bent forwards, the thick, lustrous hair cascading by her cheeks, as she fills out, on the small coffee-bar table, one after another, the prescriptions for tranquilizers, hypnotics, soporifics and stupefacients that allow me to stick it out for as long as I have to stick it out, and if I have to stick it out, then at least to numb me when seeing, hearing and feeling what I have to see, hear and feel; for—and I didn’t mention this before, but then why would I have mentioned it, as I know anyway, so why do I pretend that these jottings concern anyone else but me, though they do, of course—I write because I have to write, and if one writes, one engages in a dialogue , I read somewhere; as long as a god existed, probably one engaged in a dialogue with God, but now that He no longer exists most likely one can only engage in a dialogue with other people or, in the better case, with oneself, or in other words talks or mumbles, as you like, to oneself—anyway, I didn’t mention before that my wife (long since someone else’s wife) is a physician—well, not in a big way, because I could never have stuck that out, not even for a short time: she is only a dermatologist, though she herself takes it seriously, like everything else; yes, and while she is filling out my prescriptions (because I am devious and deceitful enough to capitalize on and profit from our occasional, entirely innocent rendezvous), even now I still sometimes think: “What a lovely Jewish girl!” Oh, but then how do I think of it now, languidly, feeling sorry, sorry for myself, for her, for everyone and everything, lamentably, no, not that way, not the same way at all as when I then thought “What a lovely Jewish girl!”; yes, this way, the way I thought of it then, naturally and shamelessly, my male member throbbing, like one of those male swine would think of it, a macho, a Jewbaiter, like all those other shameless bastards who think things like: What a lovely Jewish girl, What a lovely gypsy girl, What a classy black woman, French women, Women with glasses, old man, Great tits, Great ass, Small tits, but what a great ass, and so on and so forth. What is more, and had I been unaware of it before, then I was put wise to it that by no means just male swine, not at all, but female swine too think exactly, but exactly, the same way, or exactly the same way except in reverse, which, when all is said and done, comes to exactly the same thing, as I learned a good while ago in a coffee bar, lit like an aquarium, where I happened to be waiting for my (ex-) wife, and two women, two attractive young women, were talking at a nearby table, and the world all at once went into a spin for a split second, hurling and slamming me back in an almost literal sense with a sudden, gut-wrenching, free-falling sensation to my distant childhood and a long-standing obsession of mine, the origin of which was a sight that was—how can I put it?—startling, but startling because it elicited a lifelong startlement, a sight with which I later—who knows why? but then who could know the transparent secrets of the soul? and if one did know, who would not try to rid himself of them, for they are not just repugnant but also tedious—a sight with which I was later to identify myself so closely on occasions that, even if not in actual reality, to use that meaningless trope, all the same I almost felt I was being transformed into that sight, that I was the sight, just the way I saw it in that dusty Lowland village where I had been sent for my summer holiday. Yes, it was there that I lived for the first time among Jews, I mean among genuine Jews, not the kind of Jews we were, urban Jews, Budapest Jews, which is to say no kind of Jews, though not Christians either of course, but the kind of non-Jewish Jews who still fast on the Day of Atonement, at the very least up to noon; no, the “aunt” and “uncle” (I no longer remember exactly how we were related, but then why would I remember, they long ago dug their graves in the sky, into which they were sent up in smoke) were genuine Jews, with prayers in the morning, prayers in the evening, prayers before meals, prayers over the wine, but for all that decent people, albeit unbearably dull of course, for a young boy from Pest, their heavy grease-laden fare, goose, bean cholent, and larded, spicy apple flódni flatcakes: I think the war had already broken out, but here at home , everything was still nice and peaceful, they were still only conducting blackout drills and Hungary was an island of peace in a Europe in flames, what had happened and went on happening uninterruptedly in, let’s say, Germany or Poland, or in, let’s say, the “Bohemian Protectorate” or France or Croatia or Slovakia, in short everywhere all around, couldn’t happen here, no, not here, no way; yes, and one morning I carelessly opened the door to enter the bedroom then promptly turned straight back, not noisily, just screaming inside, because I had seen something repellent that struck me as an obscenity and that, purely on account of my age, I was simply unprepared for: a bald-headed woman was seated in front of the mirror in a red negligee. And time had to pass before my horrified and confused mind could reconcile that woman with the aunt whom at other times, and indeed right after what had happened, I had been accustomed to seeing with a head of oddly wispy and stiff but otherwise normal russet-tinted brown hair; I did not dare utter a squeak after that, let alone inquire about it, I hoped with all my might that maybe she had not noticed that I had seen her; I lived in a dark, heavy atmosphere of repulsion and secrets, the aunt stripped bare, with her shiny pate like that of a mannequin in a window display, summoned up in me an image now of a corpse, now of a great harlot into whom she transformed herself for the night in the bedroom; and only much later, by which time I was back home, of course, did I dare to raise the question of whether I had rightly seen what I did see, because by then I myself was beginning to have doubts about it and I was not reassured at all by my father’s laughing face because, I don’t know why, but I sensed his laughter was flippant, flippant and destructive, even if only self-destructive, though at the time—(I was only a child, after all) words like that were still foreign to my vocabulary, I simply found his laughter inane because he did not grasp my terror, my repulsion, the first big, spectacular metamorphosis in my life, whereby in place of the familiar aunt a bald-headed woman was seated in front of the mirror in a red negligee, no, he did not grasp the horror of it at all but instead crowned it with further horrors, admittedly in a very good-humored way, by explaining it all, and I understood nothing of the whole explanation except the unclean horror of the facts, or to be more precise, the naked, mysterious and inscrutable factuality of the facts, when he explained that the relatives were Poylish, and that Poylish women, for religious reasons, shave their hair off and wear a wig, or shaytl; then later on, when it started to assume increasing importance that I too was Jewish, since, as gradually became common knowledge, this generally carried a death sentence, probably just so that I should see this incomprehensible and peculiar fact—(namely, that I was Jewish) in all its singular oddity, or at least in a more familiar light, I suddenly realized that I now understood who I was: a bald-headed woman seated in front of the mirror in a red negligee. The matter was plain enough, albeit not pleasant and, above all, none too readily comprehensible, but in the final analysis, indisputably, it admirably defined my not pleasant and, above all, none too readily comprehensible situation, to say nothing of my kinship. In the end, as things turned out, I simply no longer needed it because I came to terms with the notion, that is, the notion of my Jewishness, just as I have come to terms, slowly and one by one, with a succession of other not pleasant and, above all, none too readily comprehensible notions, in a sort of crepuscular truce, of course, knowing full well that even these not pleasant and, above all, none too readily comprehensible notions will themselves eventually cease when I cease to be, until which time those notions are admirably useful things, including, in the front rank, the notion of my Jewishness—of course, solely as a not pleasant and, above all, none too readily comprehensible matter of fact, moreover one which now and again is also somewhat life-imperiling, but then, at least for me (and I hope, indeed am confident, that by no means everybody will
agree with me on this, while I suppose some will be offended at, indeed I sincerely hope will hate, me for this, especially Jewish and non-Jewish philo- and anti-Semites)—as I say, for me its utility resides precisely in this, this is the only way in which I can use it, no other way: as a not pleasant and, above all, none too readily comprehensible and, moreover, occasionally life-imperiling matter of fact that perhaps, purely for its perilousness, one must try to love, as we know, though speaking for myself I see no reason for it, perhaps because I long ago stopped trying to live as it were in harmony with other people, with Nature, or even with myself, and what is more, I would see that as nothing short of a form of moral poverty, the same sort of disgusting perversity as in an oedipal relationship or incest between two hideous siblings. Yes, so there I was sitting and waiting for my (ex-) wife in this coffee bar lit like an aquarium, hoping for a pile of new prescriptions and not even thinking about my not pleasant and, above all, none too readily comprehensible and, moreover, periodically life-imperiling existence, while two women at the nearby table chatted and I, virtually as a reflex, started to eavesdrop since they were attractive women, the one more of a blonde, the other more a brunette, and no matter how much and how often they dismayed me (to say no more than that), surreptitiously, if I pay attention, quietly and closely, to the circulation of my blood and my alarming dreams, as a matter of fact I am still, and even so, surreptitiously fond of attractive women, with an unshakable, incorrigible, I might say natural attraction which, for all it purports to be so banally understandable is nevertheless essentially mysterious, since it has almost nothing to do with me, and to that extent is even outrageous and in any event not so readily dismissed as, let’s say, my liking for plane trees, which I like simply for their sprawling, blotchy trunks, their splendid and fantastic branches, and their large, veined leaves, dangling as they do, at the right time of the year, like so many listless hands. And I had barely had a chance to join in, if only as a passive party, their conversation, the confidential, one might say stiflingly whispered tone of which instantly intimated a significant topic, when I heard the following words: “. . . I don’t know, but I could never do it with a foreigner . . . A black, a gypsy, an Arab . . .” At this point her voice broke off, but I sensed that she was merely hesitating, my sense of rhythm tipped me off that she was not yet finished, no way, there was something still to come, and I was almost beginning to fidget on my chair because, naturally, I knew very well what was still to come, and I was thinking that if she had to rack her brains over it this long, then I would prompt her myself, when finally she added with great bitterness: “. . . a Jew,” and all at once, yet quite unexpectedly, even though I had been counting on the word, waiting for it, watching out for it, almost insisting on it, well anyway, the world all at once went into a spin for a split second, with a sudden, gut-wrenching free-falling sensation, and I thought that if that woman were to look at me now, then I would mutate: I will be a bald-headed woman in a red negligee in front of the mirror, there is no escaping that curse, I thought, none, and I can see only one way out, I thought, and that is, I thought, to get up straightaway from the table and either slap the woman, I thought, or screw her. Needless to say, I did neither, just as I don’t do so many other things that I have thought, often with reason, that I ought to do, and this was not even one of those categorical imperatives over whose violation I could more justifiably shake my head; my temper had hardly flared up, so to speak, than it was snuffed out, beside which, like stray shadows, several nasty but familiar thoughts were in the offing: Why should I bother to convince either the woman or myself, since I have long been convinced about everything, I do what I have to do, and although I don’t know why I have to, I do it anyway in the hope, indeed the knowledge, that there will come a time when there will be no need to have to, and I shall be free to stretch out on my comfortable bed, after they have first made me work hard for it, of course, after they have whistled out the signal for me to dig a grave for myself, and at present, even though so much time has already passed—God help us!—I am still just at the digging stage. Then my wife arrived, and I, my feelings eased, instantly and, so to say, involuntarily thought, “What a lovely Jewish girl!” the way she traversed a greenish-blue carpet as if she were making her way on the sea, and she stepped, triumphantly yet still timidly ever closer towards me for she wanted to speak with me, because she knew that I am who I am, B., writer and literary translator, “a piece” of whose she had read which she absolutely had to discuss with me, my (then as yet future but now ex-) wife said, and she was still very young, fifteen years younger than me, though I was not yet really all that old either, but then already quite old enough, as ever. Yes, that is how I see her now, in this night of mine, in my big, all-illuminating, lightning-bright night and also in the dark night that descended upon me later, much later, yes: Sometimes I wonder why I spend a lonely night dreaming of a song . . . and I am once again with you, I whistle, amazed that I should be whistling, and “Stardust” at that, which is what we always whistled, even though I am now in the habit of whistling only Gustav Mahler, nothing but Gustav Mahler, his Ninth Symphony. But I suppose this is quite beside the point, unless anyone should happen to be familiar with Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, in which case they would be able to surmise from its mood, rightfully and with complete justice, my frame of mind, if they happened to be curious about it and were not willing to make do with the direct disclosures emanating from me, from which the necessary conclusions can likewise be drawn. When our love was new and each kiss an inspiration . . .