“No!” I said instantly and at once, without hesitation and virtually instinctively as it has become quite natural by now that our instincts should act contrary to our instincts, that our counterinstincts, so to say, should act instead of, indeed as, our instincts; and my wife just laughed, as if that
“No!” had not been a decisive enough
“No!” or as if she had been sure of my inconsistency. She understood me, she said later, she knew what depths that
“No!” must have burst forth from within me, and what I would have to subjugate within myself for it to become a yes. I responded that I believed I in turn understood her, what she was thinking, but the
“No!” was a
“No!” and not the sort of Jewish no that she was probably thinking; no, I was quite sure about that, as sure as I was unsure about exactly what kind of a
“No!” it was, it was just a
“No!” I said, though as far as a Jewish no is concerned, there would be justification enough for that, too, since it was enough to imagine a distressing and shameful conversation, I said, let’s say, I said, to imagine a child’s cry, our child’s (your) screaming, let’s say, I said; the child has heard something and just happens to be screaming, “I don’t want to be a Jew!” let’s say, I said, since it is very easy to imagine and easy to justify, I said, that the child may not want to be a Jew, let’s say, and I would be hard put to respond to that; yes, because how can one compel a living being to be a Jew, in this respect, I said, I would have to go about with my head hung low before it (before you), because there is nothing I could give it (you), no explanation, no belief, no ammunition, since my own Jewishness means nothing to me, or to be more precise, in terms of its Jewishness nothing, in terms of the experience everything, as Jewishness: a bald-headed woman in a red negligee in front of the mirror, as experience: my life, my survival, the cerebral mode of existence that I live and maintain as a cerebral mode of existence, and for me that is sufficient, I am perfectly satisfied with that much; it is questionable, however, if it (you) would be satisfied with that much. And yet, I said, I am not saying a Jewish no , despite everything, because there is nothing more abominable, more shameful, more destructive and more self-repudiating than this kind of, so to say, rational no, this kind of Jewish no, there is nothing tawdrier than that, nothing more cowardly, I said, I have had enough of murderers and deniers of life proclaiming themselves to be for life, it happens far too often, I said, for it to rouse in me even so much as a rebellious squeak of defiance, there is nothing more appalling, more disgraceful than to deny life for the sake of the deniers of life, for children were born even in Auschwitz, I said, and not unnaturally this line of reasoning appealed to my wife, though I find it hard to believe she could really have understood, any more than probably I myself really understood. Yes, and it cannot have been long after this that I had to take a tramcar, to go who knows where, obviously going about my business, as if I still had any business now that all my earthly business has already been accomplished, and I was gazing out of the window during the rickety trundling, the unexpected halts at tram stops. We clattered along past frightful houses and the faint shrieks of sporadic scatterings of stunted vegetation and all at once, as in an onslaught, a family alighted. I forgot to mention that it was a Sunday, a discreetly dwindling Sunday afternoon going into the warmer time of year. There were five of them, the parents and three daughters. The youngest, barely out of swaddling clothes and resplendent in pink, blue and blonde, was dribbling and screaming tenaciously, perhaps because she was too hot, I thought. The mother, brunette, placid, exhausted, took her on her lap, her slender neck crooked over the infant in the semiarched pose of a ballerina at the opera. The middle sister stood sulking beside her mother as the latter cuddled the youngest, while the eldest girl, who I supposed was seven or eight years old, so to say in a gesture of conciliation and the wretched fellowship of outcasts, laced her arm around her younger sister’s shoulder but was peevishly shrugged off. The middle sister wanted her mother to herself but knew this was a forlorn cause, as was her weapon, the unbridled screaming that had now become the prerogative of the youngest. The eldest girl was now on her own; that pleasantly lit Sunday afternoon she was again experiencing the bitter pill of being ignored, loneliness and jealousy. Would that mature within her into a welcoming forgiveness, I wondered, or rather into a hide-in-the-corner neurosis, I wondered, while her father and mother browbeat her into some sort of shameful existence, I wondered, to which she will reconcile herself, I wondered, and comply shamefacedly, or if not shamefacedly, all the more shame on her and on all those who browbeat and reconciled her to that, I wondered. The father, a wiry, brown-haired, bespectacled man in summery linen shorts, sandals on his bare feet, Adam’s apple like a goiter, stretched out his jaundiced bony hand, the infant finally calmed down between his knobbly knees; and suddenly, like a transcendental message, an overarching similarity broke out on the five faces. They were ugly, harrowed, pitiful and beatific, within me vied mixed feelings of revulsion and attraction, horrific memories and melancholy, and written on their foreheads, so to say, as well as on the sides of the tramcar I saw in flaming letters a:
“No!” I could never be another person’s father, destiny, god,
“No!” what happened to me, my childhood, must never happen to another child,
“No!” something screamed and whined within me, it is impossible that this, childhood, should happen to it (to you) and to me; yes, and that was when I started to tell the story of my childhood to my wife, or maybe it was to myself, I don’t rightly know, but I told the story with the full prodigality and compulsiveness of my logorrhea, told it unrestrainedly for days and weeks on end, as a matter of fact I am still telling the story now, though since long ago not to my wife. Yes, and not only to tell the story, for around that time I also started to roam about, and the selfsame city in which I had been going about in the relative security of relative habit now began, around that time, to turn again into a trap for me and periodically open up beneath my feet, so I could never know upon which unspeakable location, pervaded with agonies and ignominies, I might unexpectedly stumble, or what summons I was yielding to, for instance, when I would sneak into a side street, dozing like some illustrious patient between the tiny, crippled, dream-wreck palaces, or steal between the shadows of turreted, weather-cocked, lace-curtained, steeply gabled, blind-windowed fairy-tale houses, along the black railings of vile front gardens in which everything was now as ransacked, as bare, brazen, shoddy and rational as a deserted excavation site. Or, on yet another occasion, how I ended up in the—how can I put it?—entrails of the city, to which, by the way, I have come back again as a resident, through a twist of fate, if you like, or through ineptitude, if you like that better, but let’s rather say through a twist of fate, now it makes no difference and inasmuch as one may detect one’s fate even in one’s ineptitude, if one has the eye for it; yes, maybe at that time I believed (or, to be more precise, deluded myself) that I had fetched up here inadvertently, in the selfsame place, the bowels of the Józsefváros city district, where they abut the bowels of the Ferencváros district, that is to say roughly where I still live today, though the prefabricated apartment of my prefabricated tower block could then only have been a misbegotten draft on a misbegotten blueprint. It was a dusk towards the end of summer, I remember, the street suffused with overripe smells, its small-windowed houses tottering squint-eyed, tipsy and unwashed along the sidewalks, the sinking sun pouring like yellow, sticky, fermenting grape must all across their walls, the gates murkily yawning like scabs of impetigo, and, feeling dizzy, I clung to a door knob, or who knows what, as I was suddenly grazed by—oh, certainly not by a sense of transience, on the contrary, by the mystery of continuance; yes, a murderer must feel this, I supposed then later told my wife, and why I should happen to have supposed that of all things may not, I suppose be logical but is understandable, I must have supposed it on account of the dead, I suppose, I told my wife,
on account of my dead, my dead childhood and my absurd—at any rate absurd when set against my dead and my dead childhood—survival; yes, a murderer must feel this way if, let’s say, I supposed and later told my wife, having long forgotten his deed (which is conceivable, nor is it such a rarity at that) decades later, let’s say out of forgetfulness or maybe just by mechanically reproducing his former habits, suddenly happens to reopen the door on the scene of the crime, and he finds everything there unchanged: the corpse, though it has decomposed by now into a skeleton, the tawdry props of the furniture, not forgetting himself, and no matter how obvious it is that by now nothing and nobody is the same as it or he was, it’s just as obvious that after the brief interlude of a generation everything is nevertheless exactly the same as it was, indeed even more so. And now he knows what he needs to know, that it was by no means chance that led him back, indeed, that perhaps he never even got out of there, because this is the place where he must atone. And don’t ask, I said to my wife, why he must, because crime and atonement are concepts between which only being brings a living link into being, if it brings anything into being of course, and if it has already brought something into being, then being in itself is quite enough to qualify as a crime, el delito mayor del hombre es haber nacido, somebody wrote,2 I said to my wife. I also told my wife about one of my dreams, a recurrent old dream that I had not dreamed for quite some time but which had unexpectedly come back again in those days. It takes place there, yes, always there, on that spot, in that corner house. I can’t see the neighborhood, it’s true, but I know this for sure. It may be that the walls permit that conclusion, the thick, ghostly-grey walls of a decrepit house. Along with the tobacconist’s, with a flight of steep, uneven steps leading up to it. At the top it was as if one were opening the door on a rat hole: decaying gloom and a putrefying stench. But on this occasion the tobacconist’s has been placed farther over, on the corner of the corner house. I have no reason at all to enter. I enter. This is not the tobacconist’s, it’s a bit more spacious, a bit brighter, much drier and warm, like an attic. There they sit, on an ancient couch set on the concrete floor, opposite an indeterminate source of light beams—a skylight, perhaps?—that sets the thick clouds of dust sifting down from above dancing. All the signs suggest that they have just sat up, whereas beforehand they could well have been lying down, waiting for my now decades-overdue visit, a visit from their uncaring hope-butcher of a grandson. An old couple in the dusty light, full of reproaches. So weak they hardly move. I hand over the ham that I have brought with me. They are pleased, but with an undiminished rancor. They speak, but I don’t understand what they say. Grandfather bends his grey, bristly face over the ham, which he is holding in his hands, having meanwhile undone the wrapping paper. Livid cadaveric spots can clearly be seen on my grandmother’s face. She complains about the eternal stabbing pains in her head, the buzzing in her ears. About being made to wait; that they have been waiting such a long, long time now. It is borne in on me how the ham is next to nothing for them. They are desperately hungry and abandoned. I make a few futile gestures, like a schoolboy trying to apologize. My heart feels as heavy as the stones of the steps. Then everything sinks, lifts and disperses like a shameful secret. Why must we live with our face perpetually turned towards some scene of shame? I noted down at the time. It was around the same time that my still-growing collection of quotations was started, a bundle of paper slips held together by a clip, which even now is lying about on my table, among the rest of my paper slips. My friends, we had it tough when we were young: we su fered from youth itself as from a serious illness, I read on one slip. Families, I hate you! I read on another. Surrendering ourselves to childhood as a cause of death, I read. Already as a child . . . I often considered, I read, that the word domination, like domination, like the notion of domination, invariably signifies a domination of terror, and appended to this quotation (from Thomas Bern-hard), I read a remark of my own: “And the domination of terror in all cases signifies a paternal domination.” After that, all I read on the slips are my own observations, such as: “The task of education, to which I could never be reconciled . . .”; “To influence someone else’s dreams like a nightmare, to play a role, the paternal role, and thus a fatal role, in someone else’s life is one of the true horrors, the terrifying aspect of which . . .”; “That (in my childhood and hence ever since) everything that signified myself was always a sin, whereas it was always a virtue if I acted in such a way as to deny and kill myself . . .”; “My grandmother’s mouth always had a stale taste. Really: her breath smelled of mothballs. The reek of her Józsefváros apartment. The anachronistic reek of the Monarchy. The darkness of her apartment, like the darkness of that period, the thirties, inherited, and in the process of inheritance exacerbated into a disease. The dark furniture, the tenement block with its outside corridors , lives played out in front of one another, milky coffee for supper, matzos crumbled into a mug, the prohibition against turning the lights on, my grandfather reading the newspaper in the dark, the alcove in whose mysterious corners some dark, musty and deadly thought constantly seemed to be lurking. The nightly bedbug bloodbath . . .”; “I would gradually fence you in with all these stories, which you actually have nothing to do with, yet over time they would tower up around you like an insurmountable barrier . . .”; “What a misery childhood was, and how impatient I was to grow up, because I believed that grown-ups had a secret alliance, that they lived in perfect safety in their sadism-girt world . . .”; and so forth. Those mornings, I told my wife. Those rainy mornings, rainy Monday mornings, when my father took me back to the boarding school for yet another week. Every Monday morning lives on in my memory as a rainy Monday morning, which is absurd, of course, but indicative, I said to my wife. I recall that on just such a rainy Monday morning I suddenly made up my mind, dropping everything, dropping my work, and set off for that affluent suburb or, to be more precise, the suburb that had once been an affluent suburb, or which I remembered as a formerly affluent suburb, a neighborhood of turreted, weather-cocked, lace-curtained, steeply-gabled fairy-tale houses, where, as one of those turreted, steeply gabled, weather-cocked fairy-tale houses the boarding school was located. Folding my umbrella, that shining symbol of our earthly grotesqueness, the man who stepped into this subsiding house of my troubled torments and even more troubled pleasures must have been a slightly greying fellow of comfortably-off appearance, in a checked cloth cap, with dripping umbrella, I related to my wife that evening. Is that a triumph or a defeat? I wonder how I would have greeted that fellow, I joked that evening to my wife, would I have noticed him at all? If so, maybe I would have taken him for some sort of school inspector, an accomplice of the school governors, the powers in charge, I related to my wife that evening. Perhaps for a disagreeable violin teacher. Obviously, I would have noticed straightaway a certain awkwardness about him as well, something ridiculous which would immediately strike one, for instance, in the way he speaks to children in the measured, fastidious manner of a sex killer, I related to my wife. Nothing, nothing, nothing at all about this outlandish, botched figure fits the dreams that I wove about my adulthood; at most I might envy him his superiority, little suspecting how much it is merely an adult’s superiority, in other words, lending the appearance of superiority to non-superiority, I said to my wife. I also wrote a few lines about the visit in my notebook, a few of which I am copying across into this notebook. “I was at the boarding school,” I wrote. “It lies in ruins, like everything else, houses, lives, the world,” I wrote. “A commemorative plaque on the wall utterly flabbergasted me. It says: Here lived and wrote, and so on. The headmaster. The Head. Fat Nat (as we boys used to call him). Who would have believed he was a scholar? Yes, general bungling passes as scholarship in this century . . . The garden in ruins, laid to waste. The boarding school converted into an apartment house. The ceremonial stairway with its broad stone balustrade that was such fun to slide down, where so many furtive events took place, most especially in the evenings,
when, jostling with one’s fellow boarders, one trudged upstairs to bed, and the sleepiness that settled on one’s eyes like a carpet of snow, braking, stifling, muffling every sound, experience and desire (the time when I suddenly developed a high fever one evening, and Szilvási, a peasant lad some ten years older than me, carried me up in his arms, and when he asked which dorm do you sleep in? I was unable to reply because at the age of five I had never heard the word dormitory before and so didn’t know what he meant): this stairway was, well, squalid, let’s just leave it at that . . . The row of dormitories chopped up, one rental unit piggybacked on the other . . . The headmaster’s apartment. The Head’s rooms. The frightful, silent and silencing apartment that prompted and impelled one to go on tiptoe. In place of the gleaming brass doorknob an aluminum handle, like a triumphant kick in the backside . . . The study rooms on the mezzanine. The second-class juniors and the muchenvied seniors once bent over their books here during the quiet hours of afternoon prep. The teacher on duty for that day supervising the devotions. The grave, awe-inspiring esotericism of algebra problems. These rooms now provide homes for several families. Family lives full of bustle, noise, savory smells . . . disintegration and decay of every rigid form. Communality as a disintegrating force, ultimately as death . . . The basement. The dining hall, the cooler, the games room (Ping-Pong). And above all, the assembly hall for reports. Entry is barred. A notice board announces: Film club, tickets, and so forth. Fine, then I’ll just have to imagine the dining hall. It’s better that way, so-called reality (their reality) won’t get in the way. In that vast basement hall, lit by high-set windows, long parallel rows of tables spread with white table-cloths. The breakfasts! The one cherished ceremony of the day (except the meal after Saturday report), austere but still the stuff of fantasies. The breakfast setting at my designated place, my serviette stigmatized with a Roman ‘one’ in a serviette ring stigmatized with a Roman ‘one’: that was my number here, just like other numbers I have acquired in other places at other times (nowadays an eleven-digit number runs around as my proxy somewhere in the nooks and corners of unknown labyrinths as my shadow life, a second, enigmatic me about which I know nothing, even though I am answerable for it with my life, and what it does, or what is done to it, becomes my destiny). But this Roman ‘one’ was a truly stylish start, charming and auspicious, like the dawn of civilizations. Because I was the youngest boarder at the school . . . etc. We stood at our places freshly scrubbed, radiant, alert, famished. (I was always famished, all the time.) At the head of the table, a teacher; at the head of every table, a teacher. He would mumble a grace, a succinct, cautious, one might say diplomatic form of prayer. Care had to be taken that it was tied to neither the Jewish nor any of the Christian liturgies, that it should be both Jewish and Christian, to the uniform gratification of all gods. Give us this day our daily bread, let’s say (I’m not sure, but something like that). At bedtime, on the other hand, I said my prayers in German (Müde bin ich, geh’ zur Ruh! . . . etc.). I didn’t understand a word but learned quickly and with that the soothing monotony of prayer, the duress of repetition, that singular hygiene the occasional omission of which would inflict a more severe wound on my soul than omitting to brush my teeth . . . Recalling the strong, compulsive and idiosyncratic religiosity of my childhood, which at first was essentially animistic, later associated with an all-seeing, invisible X-ray eye, though that, if I rightly recollect, was only after I was ten, when it was chiefly my father who took over my education . . . Onwards. The cooler . A dark lumber room full of insects. I was locked up in there once. I viewed it rationally. The love of solitude. The love of illness. The raptures of fever. Early signs of decadence, or just a well-founded loathing of people? To loll about alone in languid bliss in the big dormitory, watching how the sun reaches the apex of the chestnut tree standing in the garden while a cat, with its inimitable gait, curling up the tip of its tail, prowls along the indescribably adventure-packed roof opposite, with the intricate hiding places of its chimneys and turrets. The sudden cramping of guts in the evening, when what had been knotting the pit of the stomach the whole afternoon happens anyway: footsteps on the stairway, a clatter of steps in the corridor. The others. They’re coming, I whispered wanly to myself, as if it were news of a disaster. The whole thing with the stomach cramps. It was linked to the extra milk in the morning, for my anemia . . . (The charm of the old milk bottles which, as it transpired, was just as delicate and transient as the pearls of moisture on those slim bottles with the fluted edges and closely scored smooth facets, so pleasingly bumpy to the touch.) It had to be drunk. My stomach ached for ages afterwards. The sphincter of my stomach. I would be bent double as if I had been KO’d . . . In the cooler self-pity overcame me in the end, after all. It came in handy, as I knew that I would have to put on a distraught face later on, when the key scraped in the lock and they let me out; let them enjoy the presumed torment they had inflicted on me. (Did I know about these little tricks instinctively, out of an inborn cunning, or did I merely acquire them very early on, the fruits of a successful education?) . . . By that time I had long been wise to just how foul a place the world is for a young child (little did I know that this would not change later on unless I myself were to change) . . . And the headaches. One can’t help remembering them. Migraines, to give them their proper name. That’s what they were. I was unable to move, the throbbing from the light on my eyes. I never dared mention them to anybody. I didn’t believe that I would be believed, that others could believe, that it was believable. I believed they too were just a sin that was my secret alone, and therefore to be kept secret like the other things, like everything else. In the end, I did not even believe my own head when it was aching. This, likewise an educational success . . . Just consider the chances of surviving the whole thing, from the age of five to the age of ten. Almost inconceivable: how? Obviously, like others, like everybody else, by dint of massive, irrational, sledgehammer blows to my rationality. By dint of madness, the madness that separates (or, for that matter, unites) slavish madness from domineering madness. The first irrational determinant: my father’s and mother’s divorce, which was of interest chiefly in that its consequence was the school. When I nagged them for a reason for their divorce, the answer, both my father’s and my mother’s, was always: Because we didn’t understand one another. How could that be? Both of them speak Hungarian after all, I thought to myself. I just could not comprehend why they would not understand when they plainly did understand one another. But then that was the final word, the clinching argument, a blank wall: I therefore suspected that behind it lay some weighty complicated and presumably nasty secret that they were foisting on me. It bore a resemblance to a nemesis: I had to accept it and the more (because it was all the more a nemesis) the less I understood it. The second irrational determinant was a certain tram journey that I regularly took with my father. Where we went, to whom or why, I no longer recollect. The whole matter was a lot more insignificant than the divorce. All the same. The stop where we always got off and after that a long walk in the same direction as the tram. I ventured the remark that from the next stop we would only have to go back a few paces. The response was: I don’t go back. Question: Why? Answer: Because I don’t go back. Question anew: But why not? Answer anew: I’ve already told you: because I don’t go back. I sensed the enormous profundity of this obduracy, only I could not puzzle it out. Total, crushing perplexity of my intellect, as if faced with some revealed secret. In the end, all I was able and indeed had to deduce was some inscrutable but incontestable principle that my father represented, and the power he wielded over me. “Neurosis and coercion as a system of exclusive types of relationship, accommodation as the sole possibility of surviving, obedience as drill, lunacy as final outcome,” I wrote. The earlier culture crumbles into a heap of rubble and finally a heap of ashes, but spirits will hover over the ashes, that too is on one of my slips of paper (Wittgenstein), “. . . and as I was standing there, under my umbrella, and as I was brushed
by the stifling secret of this establishment, this well-healed private institution, this former State Lic. Boarding School, a stifling secret which even today flutters about in the damp autumnal air, just as a malevolent silence bangs around the burial vaults of antiquity, all at once—how should I put it?— I was little short of pervaded by this earlier culture , this paternalistic-culture, this worldwide father-complex as by the all-pervading damp . . . ,” I wrote. On coming across descriptions of private schools, seminaries and military colleges in the course of my subsequent reading, I occasionally fancied I recognized “my school,” though of course that was different all the same, more genial, more absurd and, on the whole, even more perverse, though I was only able to recognize this fully, in the mirror of all-consummating shame, after many years had gone by, I said to my wife. In reality, it was based on simple principles, the principles of respect and authoritarian paternalism, I said to my wife. It simply replicated the principles of the outside world, and whether out of habit or comic miscalculation, or through habit that slid into comic miscalculation, it regarded those principles as its title to domination, I said to my wife. On the wall of the classrooms a picture of Hungary’s father-usurper of the day: among the imperial and royal highnesses, secretary-generals and first secretaries of state, was a half-length portrait of the man honored as His Serene Highness the Regent, resplendent in his admiral’s cap and baffling shoulder-tasseled uniform, I said to my wife. Thus, looking back on it, I said to my wife, I am beginning to suspect that the boarding school’s administration may well have been influenced by Anglo-Saxon administrative and Anglo-Saxon educational ideals, with some leavening of Austro-German, no, Austro-Hungarian, no, Germano-Austro-Hungarian-assimilated-Jewish-minority elements, by virtue of the genius loci; albeit, I said to my wife, with the difference that here they were not training the elite of a world empire, but members of Budapest’s middle, lower middle and even lower bourgeoisie. Spartan principles were evident at most in the inadequate catering; under the influence of scholarly and Anglo-Saxon ideals, the school management stole the food from the boys, obviously by virtue of the same genius loci, I said to my wife. I also mentioned the commemorative plaque to my wife, and how greatly it had astonished me. If I wanted to, I said to my wife, I could undoubtedly find out more about it, the commemorative plaque, that is, the reason for it, and so on, but for my part I don’t have any desire to know anything. True enough, that man, the headmaster and also proprietor of our school, was invested with immense authority, but that authority carried not the slightest trace of any esteem for higher things: as befits such authority, his too was based only on well-organized terror, I said to my wife, even though he himself was a rather ridiculous figure (at this point I mentioned the nickname that we boys gave him: Fat Nat), a diminutive man with a long, bushy, drooping, yellowish-white mustache, an artistically sweeping forelock of white hair, his paunch, almost a separate body part, swelling like a huge watermelon under his grey waistcoat. Otherwise, that’s all there was to it; don’t imagine anything more, I said to my wife, no brutal acts, no rough words to inspire our terror. But then terror, my dear, I said to my wife, operates by multiple transference, and by the time it becomes consolidated into a world order it is often little more than a superstition. The teachers feared him, or at least acted as if they feared him. He served as a fixed point of reference for them, his approach accompanied by whispering, hissing, a general snatching-up of things. The Head! The Head’s coming! Only rarely did he come. His orders and messages, indeed often undeclared wishes that were merely attributed to, one could say anticipated from, him arrived from his apartment on the second floor like from a citadel on high. We lived under the badge of that citadel, our gazes constantly raised to it, eyes peeled but taking on a shifty look in its shadow. Solemnity reigned, the well foundedness no one doubted in the least, an oppressive solemnity that simultaneously bore a touch of official heartiness. A spirit of playing by the rules of the game and of sportsmanship, a spirit of the seniors’ approaching examinations and graduation. A spirit of modernity, yet replete with classical traditions. Along with nationalistic curriculum, nationalistic declamations, nationalistic mourning, nationalistic avowals. I recall the legends, I related to my wife, that circulated among us about the dishes that were hauled from the kitchen in the basement up the back steps that led directly to the citadel; there was always someone around who just happened to have seen what they had carried up for the Head and his family’s lunch or dinner while we picked at four slices of sausage, cut into a plate of watery, paprika-spiced potatoes, or at the five biscuits served with the suppertime mug of tea. But as we know all too well, my dear, I related to my wife, privilege only bolsters authority, and the awe tinged with hatred with which we subordinated beings perceived these demonstrations very much fitted in with the general ambiguity of our lives. Although, I related to my wife, the solemnity did sometimes collapse, creaking and groaning, and tumble into some abyss, ringed by obscene sniggering, from which the demented whooping of the resident demons would drift up on these occasions but out of which the old regime, the citadel, order, would always reemerge, battered maybe, like a battleship raised from the ocean bed, but triumphant even as a wreck. Scandal, I related to my wife, that’s what they called these irresistible, always unexpected plunges into licentiousness, so to say, which you should imagine, I said to my wife, as somewhat like when an inebriated gentleman, having kept a strict hold on himself for a good while, suddenly yields to temptation and falls flat on the ground in relief, yes, these derailments were like that, with the added remark that the gentleman’s sobriety itself is nothing other than a derailment and loss of footing, the sobriety merely a heightened inebriation, I said to my wife. I told her the story of one such scandal. One of the most characteristic ones. When that ass “Black Jack,” an aging, heavy-handed tutor, stormed through the dormitories one morning to discover that one of us was missing, a senior, a seventeen-year-old boy whose white teeth, animated face, long brown hair and laugh I can call to mind even today, I said to my wife. At the same time (or it may have been earlier), he discovered that the small room which opened onto the end of the corridor could not be opened, that is to say, it was locked, and what was more, locked from the inside. At the same time (or it may have been earlier), the kitchen reported the “new girl” as missing, and I can still remember the girl as well, how she served at the tables in her housemaid’s apron, though in truth all I can remember are her blonde curls and a rather typical, I might say archetypal, smile. Allegedly, they had locked themselves in the evening before then gone to sleep. “Black Jack” was now pounding on the door. After a hesitant rummaging and stifled whispering no further sounds could be heard on the outside. They did not open the door. “Black Jack” beseeched the culprits, and so on. Not long after, along came the Head. His face flushed, his mustache and forelock flouncing, his paunch wobbling up and down, with us malicious underlings flattening ourselves against the wall to let him through. He tugged at the handle like the Gestapo, hammered on the door with both fists like the cuckolded husband in a low farce. Then all I recollect is the public expulsion (the girl, of course, was kicked out instantly), the artful, unctuous and treacherous text, the fact that everyone of us took the side of the senior, and also every one of us remained silent. Only natural, you might say, I said to my wife. I now know the basis of my sense of guilt, my guilty conscience, my terror and my shame, the choking sensation that I felt during the whole procedure; I now know what sort of ritual it was that I witnessed in that paternalistic, father-usurping institution: I witnessed a public castration staged for purposes of our intimidation, with our cooperation; in other words, with our cooperation they castrated one of our pals in order to intimidate us, or in other words, through the very ceremony itself they turned us into the ultimately perverted accomplices of an ultimately perverted act, I said to my wife, and it makes not the slightest difference, I said to my wife, whether they did this quite deliberately or merely out of habit, out of s
heer educational habit, the pernicious habit of a pernicious education. Or take, for instance, the report assembly every Saturday afternoon, I said to my wife. That, too, has to be pictured, I said to her. First of all, a number of long trestles were brought out of the dining hall and made into a single, endlessly long table, which they then covered. This was all staged in the games room. Only then were we pupils admitted, lining up to face this endlessly long, covered but empty table, not forgetting the row of chairs set up behind it. Anxiety would already be starting to weigh on us like some palpable substance. Then somebody, usually one of the lower-tutors, but it might be one of the higher-ranking members of the lower-ranking staff, brought in a large, black-bound book, the report book, and silently placed it in the middle of the table. A further period of waiting would ensue, a wait of ever-decreasing hopefulness in the face of the chairs, the table and that mute, evil, flat report book, sprawling in its blackness on the white tablecloth. At that moment, at the moment of all-around vacillation, sighs and, yes, total enervation, the Headmaster would enter at the head of the teaching staff. They would take their places. Deathly silence. A putting-on of spectacles. Some clearing of throats, creaking of chairs. And when the tension could be screwed no higher, the black book would be opened, like a Book of the Apocalypse. Everybody was in it, and everybody’s every sin (and virtue). Each of us was individually addressed by name. On being called out, you would step forward and tremble alone in the space between the authorities ensconced behind the table and the warmth of the flock you had just forsaken. Keeping a rough idea of your merits and transgressions in mind, yet with growing uncertainty about even these, you would be prepared for any eventuality. The Head would silently read the week’s entries about you, turn to the right, turn to the left, for a whispered consultation, with teachers bowing an ear or mouth towards him, and then the verdict would be pronounced. It might be a reprimand, praise or a tongue-lashing, you might be declared an example to the rest, or they might revoke your Saturday and even Sunday pass. But it wasn’t that, it was the ceremony itself, the procedure, that was the essential thing, I said to my wife. I sensed that perhaps I should not be telling my wife all these things, at least not this way, speaking about nothing else for days and weeks on end, because it was likely that I was boring her, and quite certain that I was tormenting her with this, just as I was only tormenting myself too, albeit much less than her, of course; or to be more accurate, I tormented myself not just less but also differently, more productively, one might say, than I tormented her, and I already sensed this at the time, while I was talking, while I was telling my wife about my childhood, already then as I was talking I distinctly sensed a continual building-up, swelling and tensing within me of the long-gone carbuncle of my childhood, now suddenly reinflamed by a new threat and looking to rupture, indeed rupturing, so by talking I was admittedly tormenting myself, but at the same time I also found relief through talking, through this torment. The ceremony, I said to my wife, was just like a religious service, the way a corporal, let’s say, might imagine it, I said to my wife; yes, the ceremony was like an Appell at Auschwitz, not for real, of course, just in fun, I said to my wife. I learned later that the Head, too, had gone up in smoke in one of the crematoria there, and if I cannot help perceiving this fact as an ultimate justification, so to speak, then most probably that is still a fruit of the successful education acquired from him, of the culture in which he believed and for which he equipped me pedagogically, I said to my wife. Out of this, after all, essentially cooler, more impersonal and thus actually more predictable world of pedagogical dictatorship, I then suddenly came under a warmhearted paternal rule of terror, for when I was ten my father took me back home, I told my wife. Around this time, I recollect, I made several attempts to set down in writing a picture of my father and my feelings towards my father, of the—what can I say?—fairly complicated relationship between my father and myself, an at least somewhat accurate, although of course not entirely true— because how could one be true towards one’s father? how indeed could I be true even towards the truth itself? since for me there exists only one truth, my own truth, and even if that is a mistake, yes, my life alone, God help us!, only my own life can vouchsafe my own mistake as the sole truth—so anyway, I tried to create at least some sort of acceptable portrait, as I said, of my father and my feelings towards my father and my relationship with him, but this never succeeded, and now I know that it can never succeed, and I also as good as know, or anyway I have an idea, or at least an inkling, that I have been constantly trying to do exactly this ever since, and when all is said and done that is all I am doing right now, and, now as ever, doing it in vain. “I have to become capable of realizing how impossible it was for him to find the path to me . . .” I wrote, for instance . . . “Plainly, he was bound by a tense relationship to me as to himself, which he plainly called love, and believed to be that, which indeed it was, if we are ready to accept the word in all its absurdity and disregard its tyrannical content . . .” I wrote. At the school I had had dealings with a law, and though I may have feared it, I never had any respect for it, I said to my wife. In point of fact, it bore an aspect of fortune: it might come down hard on me or in my favor, but in neither case did it touch my conscience; only under the yoke of love did I become a real sinner, I said to my wife. This phase of my childhood pitched me into an unimaginably narrow-minded crisis; I lived in an animistic belief-world, like a caveman, my thoughts hedged about by so many taboos that I ascribed almost material powers to them, believing in their omnipotence, I said to my wife. Meanwhile, however, and undoubtedly under my father’s influence, I also supposed there was an Almighty who would know my every thought at the moment of its inception and weigh it in the balance, but then I was often assailed by imponderable thoughts. It was one of my father’s habits, for instance, to appeal to my better nature from time to time, I said to my wife. On such occasions, he found it impossible to avoid repeating himself; in other words, I said to my wife, I always knew what he was going to say next, secretly I was always ahead of him in the text that, like a catechism, he obligingly repeated after me: for a moment I would regain my freedom, though it also made my flesh creep, I said to my wife. Terror-stricken, I would try to cling on to something; it would be enough to notice his hapless, dog-eared shirt collar, the loneliness of his slightly trembling hand, the strained furrowing of his brow, his quite futile torment—anything to unnerve me and make me pervious as a desiccated sponge. Then at last I could inwardly intone the redemptive words, the words of brief triumph and at the same time hasty retreat: Poor thing . . . The sponge would begin to swell, I would be moved to tears by my own emotions, and I thereby paid off some of the debt that continually weighed on me as a result of my father’s intimidating love. As to whether, when all is said and done, despite everything, and mindful of all the ambiguities of the word, I really loved him, I answered my wife, who put the question to me at this point, I don’t know; indeed, it would be exceedingly difficult for me to know, because, faced with so many reproaches and so many demands, I always knew and felt and saw, or I ought to have known, felt and seen, that I didn’t love him, or at least did not love him properly, not enough, and therefore, because I was unable to love him, I indeed probably did not love him, I said to my wife; and in my opinion, I said to my wife, that was also as it should be, putting it somewhat radically, the way it was planned, I said to my wife, for that way, and only that way, we were able to produce an ideally routinized structure of existence. Domination is unchallengeable, unchallengeable the laws by which we must live, though we can never fully live up to these laws: we are always sinners before our father and God, I said to my wife. After all, my father likewise only equipped me for the same thing, the same culture, as the school, and he probably gave as little thought to his goals as I to my reluctance, my disobediences, my failures: we may not have understood one another, but our cooperation worked perfectly, I said to my wife. And even if I have no idea whether I loved him or not, the fac
t is there were many times when I honestly pitied him, with all my heart: but if, by sometimes making him ridiculous, and pitying him because of that, if by doing that—in secret, always in the greatest secrecy—I thereby overthrew paternal power, respect, God, it was not just that he— my father—lost his authority over me, but I myself became achingly lonely, I said to my wife. I had need of a tyrant for my world order to be restored, I said to my wife, but my father never tried to replace my usurpatory world order with another, one based on our common state of powerlessness, for example, in other words, one based on truth, I said to my wife. And in the same way, just as I was a bad son and bad pupil, so I was also a bad Jew, I said to my wife. My Jewishness remained an obscure circumstance of birth, just one of my many faults, a bald-headed woman in a red negligee in front of the mirror, I said to my wife. Of course, I said many other things too to my wife, I no longer recall them all. I do remember that I exhausted her very much, just as I became very tired myself and am still tired now. Later on, Auschwitz, I said to my wife, seemed to me to be just an exaggeration of the very same virtues to which I had been educated since early childhood. Yes, childhood and education were the start of that inexcusable process of breaking me, the survival that I never survived, I said to my wife. Even if my progress was not always with top marks, I was a modestly diligent party to the silent conspiracy that was woven against my life, I said to my wife. Auschwitz, I said to my wife, manifests itself to me in the image of a father; yes, the words father and Auschwitz elicit the same echo within me, I said to my wife. And if the assertion that God is a glorified father figure holds any truth, then God manifested himself to me in the image of Auschwitz, I said to my wife. When I finally fell silent, and after all the talking I stayed silent for a long while, perhaps days, my wife seemed to be in torment, but it was as if she had not grasped what I had been saying, or to be more precise, as if she had not grasped what I had been saying in the way that I said it, that is, as if she had not noticed that I, without any reason (to say the least of it)—and it was useless my being aware of it, of course—but without any reason, mercilessly, and in all likelihood merely because she had heard me out, I had in fact directed all my anger at her, and to avoid having to use the word revolt here, in this connection, where it truly has no place, what I am saying is that it was as if my wife perhaps supposed that now I had related all this, given vent to it, vomited it out of myself, I had in the process freed myself from it all; yes, as if I could have freed myself from all this, as if it were ever possible to free myself from it all—that may have been what she supposed, I supposed, noticing several, admittedly tentative attempts on her part to draw closer, to draw closer to me by understanding. By nature I closed myself off from that; by nature I was unable to bear any sort of understanding, for in reality that would only have served to sanction my powerlessness. But that was as nothing compared with the elemental force of the insight that probably sprang purely from my procedure, from the way that I treated my wife, or yes, in the final hours of my glittering night I ought to use the appropriate word for it, because it is the only cathartic word: so, from the way that I disposed of her. Yes, my being so merciless, so intimately merciless, towards her had, in the process, made her, it seemed, once and for all unacceptable in my eyes; in a certain sense, and what I am about to say is an exaggeration, of course, a big exaggeration, but in a certain sense it was as if I had killed her, which made her a witness to it, she had looked on, she would have seen me killing a person; and it seemed that I would never be able to forgive her for that. It is superfluous for me to reflect on that period here; for instance, on how much longer we lived, were able to live, like that, mutely alongside one another. I was deeply depressed, inert and lonely, this time to a degree that it proved impossible to compensate for; in other words, it did not bring my work any further forward, on the contrary, it totally paralyzed it. I am not absolutely sure if, while I was inwardly—naturally—in the very process of fabricating accusations, a whole web of accusations, against her, I was not secretly waiting for help from my wife; but even if this was the case, I gave no visible sign of it, in my opinion. One day, in the evening if I recall correctly, and late in the evening at that, my wife had just arrived home from somewhere, I don’t know where, I didn’t pry, I didn’t even ask where, she was looking beautiful, and just for a passing moment, like a flash of lightning behind thick clouds, the thought briefly cleaved through me: “What a pretty Jewish girl!” naturally, shamelessly and sadly, as she entered, and it seemed that she was traversing a greenish-blue carpet as if she were making her way on the sea, and it was then, that night, that she, my wife, broke the silence, our silence. It was somewhat late, my wife said, but she could see I was still up, sitting and reading. She was sorry, my wife said, but some business had come up, though that was probably of no interest to me anyway. That I was sitting there and reading, reading or writing, reading and writing, it was all the same, my wife said. Yes, my wife said, it had been a great lesson for her, the whole thing, our marriage, that is to say. Through me, my wife said, she had come to understand and experience everything that she had not understood, and had not wanted to understand either, based on her own parents’ experiences. No, because to have understood everything, she knew now, would then, when she was a young girl, simply have killed her. Secretly, my wife said, in the depths of her soul, she had believed she was a coward, but now she knew—and I, along with the years spent with me, had helped her significantly in this—well, now she knew that she had simply wanted to live, had to live. And now also, my wife said, now also that was what everything within her was saying, she wanted to live. She was sorry for me and, above all, sorry that she was so powerless in feeling sorry for me; but then she had done everything within her power to save me (I kept quiet, but her choice of words surprised me). Even if purely out of gratitude, my wife continued, for I had shown her the way, though it was me, of all people, who had subsequently been unable to keep up with her along it, because the wounds that I carried within me, and from which I might, perhaps, have been able to recover but, it seemed—or at least so it seemed to her, my wife said—I had not wanted, and still did not want, to recover from, were tougher than my mind, and that had carried over into our love and our marriage. She said again that she was sorry for me, she said others had destroyed me, but I had also destroyed myself in the process, though that had not been the way she had viewed it at first, on the contrary, at first what she had admired in me was that, while others might have tried to destroy me, I had nevertheless not been destroyed, as she had seen it then; she had been wrong about that, my wife said, but that would not have been a problem in itself, and it had not given rise to a sense of disappointment, though she had undoubtedly suffered on that account, my wife said. She repeated that she had wanted to save me, but the fruitlessness of all her attempts, her affection and her love had slowly killed any love and affection she had towards me and had left her just with a sense of fruitlessness and futility and unhappiness. She said that I had always talked a lot about freedom, but the freedom to which I was constantly in the habit of referring did not, for me, in reality, signify freedom in my vocation as an artist (as my wife put it), indeed in reality was not freedom at all, if by freedom one means expansive, strong, receptive, to which commitment, yes, love can also be added, my wife said; no, my kind of freedom was, in effect, a freedom directed against something or somebody, and somebodies or somethings, my wife said, fight or flight, or both together, and without that my kind of freedom did not actually even exist, because—it would appear—it could not exist, my wife said. And so, if these “somebodies or somethings” were not to hand, then I invent and create dependencies of that sort, my wife said, in order that there be something for me to flee from or confront. And I had thereby, for years now, mercilessly and cunningly allotted to her this appalling—or, to be honest just for once: this shameful—role (to use one of my own expressions), my wife said, but not in the manner a lover seeking support would use to his lov
er, nor even a patient to his doctor; no, my wife said, I had allotted this role to her (to use one of my favorite words again) like a hangman to his victim, my wife said. She said that I had bowled her over with my mind, then aroused her sympathy, then having aroused her sympathy, had made her my audience, an audience for my appalling childhood and my horrific stories, and when she had wanted to have a part in these stories, in order to steer the stories out of their maze, their rut, yes, their mire, and guide me to her, to her love, so that together we might extricate ourselves from the swamp and leave it behind forever, like the bad memory of an illness—then all at once I had let go of her hand (as my wife expressed it) and started to run away from her, back into the swamp, and now she no longer had the strength, my wife said, to come after me a second time, and who knows how many times more, to lead me out of there again. Because it seemed, my wife said, that I don’t even want to make a start on fumbling my way out of there; evidently, for me there was no way out of my appalling childhood and horrific stories, whatever she might do, my wife said, and even if she were to sacrifice her life for me, she knew, she saw, that she would be doing it only fruitlessly, to no avail. Yes, when we had bumped into one another (that was the phrase my wife used), it had seemed to her that I might teach her how to live, and then she had been horrified to see how much destructive force I had within me, and that next to me what was in store for her was not life but destruction. The cause, my wife said, was a sick intellect, a sick and poisoned intellect, she repeated over and over again, an eternally poisoned and poisoning and contaminating intellect which, my wife said, had to be brought to an end; yes, my wife said, one just had to free oneself, detach oneself, from it, if one wanted to live, and she had decided, she repeated, that she wanted to live. At this juncture my wife fell silent for a moment, and from the way she stood there, her shoulders slightly hunched, arms folded, lonely, alarmed, pale faced, her lipstick smudged, I was suddenly—or, let’s say, unavoidably—struck by a solicitous concern that maybe she was feeling cold. And then, swiftly and drily, as if it were some unpleasant news that would, however, immediately lose its unpleasant flavor as soon as she was able to announce it, she went on to say that, yes, there was no point in hiding it, there “was someone,” someone whom she was thinking of marrying. And he, she added, was not Jewish. It is interesting, perhaps, that it was only now that I spoke up, as if out of all that my wife had said I felt aggrieved by just this one point. What did she take me for, some sort of negative race preservationist? I bawled at her. I didn’t need to have been in Auschwitz, I bawled, to learn about this age and this world, and not deny any longer what I have learned, I bawled, not to deny it in the name of some curious—albeit, I admit it, exceedingly practical—interpretation of the principle of life, which is actually just the principle of accommodation; all right, I bawled, I have no objections to it, but let us see clearly, I bawled, let us see clearly that assimilation in this instance is not the assimilation of one race—race! don’t make me laugh!—to another race—don’t make me laugh!— but a total assimilation to the extant, the extant circumstances and existing conditions, I bawled, circumstances and conditions which may be such or such, it’s not worth ranking them according to their qualities—they are the way they are—the only thing that is worth ranking, but then it is our bounden duty to rank it, is our decision, our decision to carry out total assimilation, or not to carry out total assimilation, I bawled, though probably more quietly by this point, and then we should, indeed it is our bounden duty to, rank our capabilities as to whether or not we are able to carry out total assimilation; and already in early childhood I could see clearly that I was incapable of it, incapable of assimilating to the extant, the existing, to life, and despite that, I bawled, I am nevertheless extant, I exist and I live, but in such a way that I know I am incapable of it, in such a way that already in early childhood I could see clearly that if I were to assimilate, that would kill me sooner than if I did not assimilate, which actually would likewise kill me anyway. And in this respect it is absolutely irrelevant whether I am a Jew or not a Jew, though Jewishness is, undeniably, a great advantage here, and from this perspective—do you understand? I bawled—from this unique perspective alone am I willing to be Jewish, exclusively from this unique perspective do I regard it as fortunate, even especially fortunate, indeed a blessing, not to be a Jew, because I don’t care a hoot, I bawled, what I am, but to have had the opportunity of being in Auschwitz as a branded Jew and yet, through my Jewishness, to have lived through something and confronted something; and I know, once and for all, and I know irrevocably something that I will not relinquish, will never relinquish, I bawled. I soon fell silent. After that we divorced. And if I do not recall the years that succeeded this as years in the desert of total barrenness, that is purely thanks to the fact that during these years, as always— since then, before then and naturally during the period of my marriage as well—I worked; yes, it was my work that saved me, even if in reality, of course, it has only saved me for destruction. During those years I not only arrived at certain decisive intuitions, during these years I became aware that my intuitions were in turn tightly interwoven, knot to knot, with my destiny. During those years I also became aware of the true nature of my work, which in essence is nothing other than to dig, dig further and to the end, the grave that others started to dig for me in the clouds, the winds, the nothingness. During those years I dreamed anew the task and secret hope that had been dreamed before, and now I know it was a dream based on “Teacher’s” example. During these years I became aware of my life, on the one hand as fact, on the other as a cerebral mode of existence, to be more precise, a certain mode of existence that would no longer survive, did not wish to survive, indeed probably was not even capable of surviving survival, a life which nevertheless has its own demand, namely, that it be formed, like a rounded, rock-hard object, in order that it should persist, after all, no matter why, no matter for whom—for everybody and nobody, for whoever it is or isn’t, it’s all the same, for whoever will feel shame on our account and (possibly) for us; which I shall put an end to and liquidate, however, as fact, as the mere fact of survival, even if, and truly only if, that fact happens to be me. During those years it happened that I came across Dr. Obláth in the woods. During those years I started to write my slips of paper about my marriage. During those years my wife looked me up again. Once when I was waiting in the usual coffee house, hoping for more prescriptions, she led in two children by the hand. One was a dark-eyed little girl with pale spots of freckles scattered around her tiny nose, one a headstrong boy with eyes bright and hard as greyish-blue pebbles. Say hello to the gentleman, she told them. That sobered me up completely, once and for all. Sometimes I still scurry through the city like a bedraggled weasel that has managed to make it through a big extermination drive. I start at each sound or sight, as if the scent of faltering memories were assailing my calloused, sluggish senses from the other world. Here and there, by a house or street corner, I stop in terror, I search around with alarmed looks, nostrils flaring, I want to flee but something holds me back. Beneath my feet the sewers bubble, as if the polluted flood of my memories were seeking to burst out of its hidden channel and sweep me away. Let it; I am ready for it. In one last big effort to regain my composure, I have produced my still fallible, stubborn life—I have produced it so that I may set off with the bundle that is this life in my two upraised arms and, for all I care, in the swirling black waters of some dark river,