Dossier K: A Memoir (11 page)

Writes the narrator of
The Union Jack
, whom you shouldn’t confuse with me, who is putting the words in his mouth. But what has that to do with Adorno?

Just that you insert an otherwordly, metaphysical element between Adorno’s sentence and your own sentences, or in plain language, you speak about God where Adorno only sees ignominy
.

You know, these are very ticklish matters …

OK, but then let me put it more simply: what is your response to Adorno’s famous—or maybe infamous—dictum?

Look here, I learned a lot from Adorno’s writings about music, when those were being published in Hungary, but that was all: I never read anything else by him.

You’re not answering my question. What is your opinion of Adorno’s renowned dictum “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”?

Well, if I may give a straight answer, I consider that statement to be a moral stink bomb that needlessly pollutes air that is already rank enough as things are.

That’s undeniably a straight answer. Would you care to justify
it?

I can’t imagine how as keen an intellect as Adorno could suppose that art would renounce portraying the greatest trauma of the twentieth century. It’s true, though, that the industrialized murder of millions cannot serve as the basis for aesthetic pleasure, as it were, but surely that doesn’t mean one ought to regard the poetry of, say, Paul Celan or Miklós Radnóti as barbaric? That’s a sick joke, there are no other words for it. And as far as aesthetic “pleasure” goes, did Adorno expect these great poets to write bad poetry? The more you think about that unfortunate pronouncement, the more senseless it becomes. But what I see as truly harmful is the tendency that it reflects: a preposterously misconceived elitism that incidentally runs riot in other forms as well. What I am referring to is the assertion of an exclusive right to suffering, the appropriation, as it were, of the Holocaust. Oddly enough, that tendency concurs with the attitude of the advocates of the
“Schlußstrich”
—the “finishing touch” stance—the people who would reject having anything to do with the Auschwitz domain of experience and would limit it to a narrow group of people; the people who, with the demise of those who survived the death camps, consider the experience itself as being a dead memory, remote history.

As a Judeo-German conflict that may be regarded as “done and dusted” with the payment of reparations and the erecting of memorials?

In other words, as a purely political issue, although that is not the point. It’s precisely what differentiates the
Holocaust (let’s stay with that generally accepted label) from all other genocides. I see only one serious problem that needs to be settled, which is whether the twentieth-century experience of concentration camps is a matter of universal or marginal relevance.

We know that you think it is universal, but are you aware that in so doing you are—how should I put it?—stepping out of one cultural area and entering another?

Could you be a bit clearer what you mean?

Universality is a concept from Catholicism
.

Oh, I see. A priest once said to me that God has no religion.

You say in
Someone Else
that there is no way of getting to grips with Auschwitz unless we take God as our starting point. Let me quote back to you: “If Auschwitz was to no avail, then God has failed; and if God has been made to fail, then we shall never understand Auschwitz.”

Yes, that’s the point. Now we shall never understand.

Because God has been made to fail?

Yes, because the world order has not changed even after Auschwitz.

Is that what
Liquidation,
your most recent novel, is about?

Yes. And if in
Fatelessness
—and my other books, too, I hope—I succeeded in turning Auschwitz into a universal human experience, then I must equally report on that failure as a universal human experience. A few critics in Germany did grasp precisely that.

What about here, in Hungary?

Let’s just leave it. For Hungary the view on my novel is blocked by the towers of Stockholm. I don’t wish to say any more than that.

I find that hard to believe, but we’ll come back to this later. What is of interest to me right now is how you managed to shake off the factory
.

Through an act of humiliating solidarity of the kind that sometimes appears almost as a memento at critical turning points of my life.

Why do you say “humiliating”
?

Because they are unmerited when they occur to me, and they leave me defenceless. I am always embarrassed when the world order is infringed.

What would you call the world order?

The banal spell of evil.

This is beginning to interest me. Let me repeat my question: How did you manage to get out of the factory?

One afternoon, the foreman said that a journalist was waiting for me outside, in the changing room. To be brief, it was Nándi Ordas, who was working on what was called the “Manufacturing” column for my old newspaper (which had long ceased to be called
Világosság
but was named
Evening Budapest
instead, on the lines of some Soviet model). He was a young chap from the provinces, twenty-five or thirty years old, burly and fresh-faced, though he was fonder of a spritzer or two more than was good for him. We had hit it off from the start but more from a distance, simply not having enough time to become real friends. As “Manufacturing” reporter he had access to any factory and even some of the ministries. “I’ve wangled this job for you,” he said in elation as I entered the changing room.

Had you asked him to sniff around?

Not at all! I wasn’t even sure whether he had noticed I had been kicked out. I hadn’t had time even to say farewell. “Just go along to the Ministry for the Metallurgical and Engineering Industries and ask to see the head of the press office, Márton Fazekas. He already knows everything.” That’s how it was. Next morning I was seen by a gentleman (or rather “Comrade”) of around fifty, wiry, on the short side, a very soft-spoken chap wearing a snazzy sports jacket, a hint of melancholy on his well-groomed moustachioed features …

A flower adorning the buttonhole of his jacket
 …

How do you know that?

I’ve read
Fiasco.

Oh yes, right you are. But the figure you meet there is not the real Márton Fazekas but a semistylized, I might almost say mythical mutant of him. True, the real Marci Fazekas also wrote poetry that, every now and again, he would read to me in confidence, under a huge map of Korea that hung on his office wall.

What has that to do with the poems?

What do you mean?

The map of Korea
 …

In those days there was a map of Korea pinned up in every office, workroom, and workshop in the country, everywhere. There would be pins with red flags to track the victorious advance of the North Korean forces: the pins would have to be reset every day in accordance with the military situation, accompanied wherever possible with a picture or article cut out of one paper or another that showed the South Korean army in full retreat and/or General MacArthur and his threats to launch an atomic bomb attack.

Yes, of course, the Korean War
.

You weren’t even born when that was in progress. To be brief, we lived in an intoxicating succession of unbroken Korean victories until, all of a sudden, with the invasion
and battle of Inchon, the maps of Korea were removed from the walls overnight. We then started to send missives to the American president (whether it was Harry Truman or Eisenhower, I don’t rightly recall). “Dear Mr. President,” the letters proclaimed, “We, employees of the Press Office of the Ministry for the Metallurgical and Engineering Industries, demand the immediate termination of American involvement,” and so on, with the letters all signing off “Hands off Korea!”

Madness!

Yet there was method in it, as Hamlet says.

Which prompts me to note that we are flitting about fairly erratically. So, Márton Fazekas took you on as a colleague at the ministry. When was that exactly?

In the early spring of 1951.

What were your duties, strictly speaking?

If only I had known … the biggest trouble, though, was that I couldn’t care. In principle, I should have been putting together pieces along the lines of a newspaper article, but I had already been kicked out of the newspaper because I was incapable of writing material like that.

Yet all the same, Fazekas didn’t kick you out
.

His bad luck was that he had taken a liking to me. He
soon realized, however, that I was only using the job as a cover against the hostile world outside, but he looked on me as a sort of “young talent” who needed to be supported.

Did you mention your literary ambitions to him?

It could be … At the time I, too, was giving the co-authorship mode of existence a trial. You’re no doubt familiar with Iván Mándy’s scintillating book,
Lecturers and Co-authors
.

You bet! Did you use to go to his regular haunt, the “Darling” café?

No, I used to frequent the espressos along Andrássy … oops! Stalin Avenue, the former “Broadway” of Budapest. You know, ten or twenty years ago I was able to spout one anecdote after another about that period, which the now legendary Pál Királyhegyi probably got nearest to nailing: “One of these days, I’m going to write the story of my life under the title
My Happy Days of Being Bored to Tears by Terror,”
as he was in the habit of saying. The pristine flavour of those ridiculous and yet horrific times has been lost.

Fortunately, you managed to retrieve some of that in the extraordinary menagerie of your novel
Fiasco.
But let’s get back to Fazekas
 …

In point of fact, Fazekas was a very civil fellow; he
mildly chided me on a few occasions, but in his own mind he rationalized what was, at root, a paternal sense of responsibility towards me which, in some way or other, involved literature and an unspoken Jewish solidarity.

Did you ever talk about that?

I think Fazekas was aware that I had passed through Auschwitz.

That was it?

It was something that never came up openly in conversation between us. If he did know, it could only have been from my so-called “cadre,” or Party-worker, record card—the secret document that followed one around, like an invisible shadow, from office to office.

I would really like to push you further about that, but I have to confess that the subject makes me, as a non-Jew, rather uneasy
.

One of those “tricky topics,” right?

Sadly, that’s still the case in Hungary. I don’t know if it’s a question that it is in any way legitimate to pose
 …

Pose it, then I can either choose to reply or not.

I would like to ask you about that Jewish solidarity.
Obviously, in a dictatorship that cannot have operated overtly; what I mean is that no one was able to define himself as a Jew
 …

Unless you went to the rabbinical training school, and provided the regime did not define you as a Jew, as was the case two years later, when the trial of those accused of involvement in the Jewish doctors’ plot got underway in the Soviet Union.

I understand. But did you, for instance, instantly identify Fazekas as being Jewish?

That’s a good question. In all probability: yes, but not in a conscious fashion. In other words, I wouldn’t have said to myself that this fellow Fazekas is Jewish, but I would have sensed that I could have a certain degree of trust in him.

Because he was Jewish
.

Because we had similar … it would be hard to say what. Not faces or ways of thinking … I think that the only thing two Jews have in common is their fears; that’s how they can be distinguished most accurately, at least in Central and Eastern Europe.

That seems to run counter to the fact that Rákosi, Ger?, Farkas, in short virtually the entire Stalinist leadership in Hungary at that time, were themselves of Jewish extraction. Is that something you have thought about?

No. I was aware of the fact, of course, but it’s not something that preoccupied me in any way at all. Did the fact that Szálasi and the entire leadership of the Arrow-Cross Party in Nazi Hungary were Christians give you any pause for thought?

Touché
.

Look, the most destructive passion of the twentieth century was the relinquishment of the individual and the levelling of collective accusations against whole populations and ethnic groups. If we are going to start analyzing the degree to which I, as a Jew, bear responsibility for the deeds of a total stranger purely on the grounds that he, too, was born Jewish, then that is tantamount to accepting that way of thinking and crossing into the realm of ideology. Only in that case, I don’t know what we would have to talk about; I feel I am doing far too much explaining as things are.

I agree, but all the same, people do have various prejudices, out of which it is possible to forge political capital
.

Undeniably, but the understanding the two of us had was not that we were going to talk about the sick aberrations of politics.

I won’t push it any further, because I made it clear from the start that I wanted to broach a touchy subject. I hope that you don’t take it amiss and I can count on your continued assistance
.

Now we have started, I’m not going to leave you in the lurch.

In that case, let’s resume with fear. You said that the most two Jews have in common is their fears. To what extent did fear shape you?

I wasn’t afraid. To that extent, Auschwitz truly was a great school. What made me Jewish was the Holocaust, and that is a new phenomenon in Europe. Of course, I would not have been able to formulate it as clearly as that at the time. But later on I set myself a task in life that required me to clarify for myself the quality of my Jewishness, if I may put it like that. For instance, I would have a hard job discussing Jewish metaphysics, Jewish culture, or Jewish literature with you because I am not acquainted with these things. In that sense I am not Jewish at all. Yet that is of no interest to anyone the moment I am taken off to Auschwitz, or made the main defendant in a show trial. Then you are struggling for sheer survival and are no longer able to say that you believe you are not Jewish …