Dossier K: A Memoir (6 page)

Why?

It had sinister implications. Either it was “not going well,” or it was a cause of “concern” for my father—in short, whenever the word “business” sounded that signalled the end of fun and games, and bleakness would take over.

So what part did the man you call Mr. Sütő play in all this?

None at all. Mr. Sütő is an entirely fictitious character who never existed in reality. In reality there was a chap called Uncle Pista, whom my father referred to as “the hand.” “The hand” would help out whenever a “truck-load” came, or in other words whenever a consignment of timber arrived from the wholesaler and had to be unloaded from the horse-drawn cart into the cellar. At other times the “hand” would deliver to our house the wood shavings that we used to stoke the tile stove, but that’s another story that is of no possible interest.

As far as I’m concerned, everything that throws more light on your relationship with your father is of interest. In
Kaddish for an Unborn Child
you wrote some truly terrible things about him
.

One is always unjust in regard to one’s father. One has to rebel against somebody in order to justify our tribulations and our blunders. On one occasion when I was visiting Prague …

I’m sorry, but that’s just an anecdote. Please don’t dodge the question by taking refuge in Prague!

Well anyway, when I was there I saw a photograph of Kafka’s father.

So what?

He was a good-looking man, with a congenial face. Now read what Franz Kafka writes in the
Letter to His Father
.

I would rather cite something from your
Kaddish:
“We are always sinners before our father and God.” Then again: “I had need of a tyrant for my world order to be restored … but my father never tried to replace my usurpatory world order with another, one based on our common state of powerlessness, for example.” Also: “Auschwitz manifests itself to me in the image of a father; yes, the words ‘father’ and ‘Auschwitz’ elicit the same echo within me
 …”

Enough! Enough! Look, you’re quoting from a novel in which everything is tipped on its edge. The narrator is exaggerating, but because this is a novel every figure of speech has to be distorted to fit that exaggeration. On the other hand, if you really think about it, art is nothing other than exaggeration and distortion, and that is the source of family conflicts. Thomas Mann, for one, was severely reproached for his portrayal of certain family members who crop up in
Buddenbrooks
.

This time you don’t convince me. My sense is that behind the
passages that I quoted lies a bitter truth, genuine rancour
.

A person will always bear a grudge against his or her parents.

If that’s the case, what do you suppose is the reason for that?

Beyond any specific individual motivations, perhaps because although it is true that the parents were responsible for bringing one into the world, they also set you up for death.

Isn’t that just speculative? I don’t think many people think that way
.

We know from Freud, however, that there also exists a subconscious world.

Allow me to return to concrete aspects. In the piece on “Budapest—An Unnecessary Confession,” which appeared in your essay volume
The Exiled Language
in 2001, you describe a scene in which you and your father hurried home. Let me quote the passage word for word: “A confused shouting could be heard from the boulevard. Father said we would not go home the usual way but with a bit of a detour. He guided me, almost running, along dark side-streets; I had no idea which way we were going. The clamour gradually subsided behind us. Father then explained that the German film
Jud Süss
was playing at a nearby cinema, and as they streamed out of the cinema the crowds would hunt for Jews among the passersby and stage a pogrom … I would have
been about nine years old at the time, and I had never heard the word ‘pogrom’ before … But the essence of the word was revealed to me by [my father’s] trembling hand and his behaviour.” Since you have already mentioned Freud, that nightmarish scene surely carries some unspoken meaning, a reproach
 …

That observation is not without merit. One’s origins are always a complex and mysterious affair in which one starts to show an interest already when a child. Every child plays with the idea of what if … if I wasn’t the person they say I am but, for instance …

A prince
.

Or pauper. Or both pauper and prince at once.

Mark Twain’s book must have made a deep impression on you, as you also refer to it in
Fatelessness.

If we were not analyzing me but you, then it would quickly become evident that you were ducking a question it may well be I have also never fully clarified for myself. You have singled out precisely that passage, which really does have all the essential features: a highly principled father’s downfall in the eyes of his terrified son, who, however, continues to be kept well away from the edge of the precipice rather than their looking down together and assessing its depth. The big question is whether my father for his part ever took a look over the precipice. I have no way of knowing whether he had a
guilty conscience about handing on his increasingly ominous heritage, or in plain language, for bringing a Jewish child into this unfriendly world. That he never verbalized it for himself—of that I am quite sure, but that would not necessarily have saved him from twinges of guilty conscience, for which he may then have compensated precisely by the show of infallible principle. As a result, I was more, so to say, ordered into my Jewishness instead of won over by argument that that was how the thing had to be. The difference may be small, but it’s important. There wasn’t anything for me to
shoulder
of my own accord, so I was deprived of any sense of responsibility; the most I could do was show my dissatisfaction, mutter to myself, or dream about a less nauseating situation. In point of fact, I think that was the origin of the psychological conflicts that eventually culminated in the form of Jewish self-hatred, a type that was particularly well known among Eastern European Jews as they rose into the middle classes, with Otto Weininger, or indeed Ludwig Wittgenstein, as typical highly cultured representatives. They are good examples of the fact that philosophical flair in itself offers no protection against misconceptions; indeed, quite the contrary. This is a big issue, and one under whose weight many have cracked up or, quite the opposite, turned aggressive and developed major character flaws.

You yourself, nevertheless, still managed to find another solution
.

I don’t think so. This has no solution; the problem
constantly follows one around, like one’s own shadow. I at most gave in to the temptation to be frank, but for that—if I may be permitted to express myself in a rather extreme fashion—I needed Auschwitz. Could we not find something cheerier to talk about?

That would call for a cheerier C.V
.

All in all, I’m on the side of cheeriness. My error is that I don’t elicit that feeling in others. But see here: I was able to win intellectual freedom fairly early on, and from the moment I decided to become a writer I was able to treat my cares as the raw material of my art. And even if that raw material looks fairly cheerless, the form is able to transform it and turn it into pleasure, because writing can only come from an abundance of energies, from pleasure; writing—and this is not my invention—is heightened life.

You only reached the pleasure, as you yourself pointed out, at the expense of suffering, and I can now see your relationship with your father more clearly: to put it simply, the relationship was not exactly one characterized by openness
.

No, there were undoubtedly things that we kept quiet about in each other’s presence: my father about the kind of fate into which he had helped bring me, and I about the fact that I did not accept that fate. Neither of us knew about this; we just saw the result, and that was painful. My defiance extended to everything; a distance grew up inside me instead of solidarity. I have already
said that I had no liking for myself in that destructive role; I would much rather have been a pliant but carefree little boy, a good pupil, with a clear conscience, honest, industrious, lovable, but whenever I tried to be that, I would be disgusted by myself. I learned how to lie early on, but I was incapable of self-denial. Now that I’m saying this, I’m seized by an unbounded love for my father: the poor soul, he was unable to grasp why he had such a hard time with me.

You seem to be trying to portray yourself as a devious, bad-tempered child
.

Bad-tempered, never; I found it easy to make friends, I was game for any escapade, any laughs. And sneaky only to the extent that I felt constrained to it by my situation. Like I said, I was unaware of my own problem, about which I would now declare pompously that it was an internalization of the Jewish question in semi-fascist Hungary.

Did that “situation” also throw a shadow on your relations with your mother? Or were you able to speak more frankly with her?

My mother had no interest at all in the Jewish question apart from its—how should I put it?—its technical side, and then later on the threat to life. My mother was high-spirited, a true epicurean, and she didn’t let herself be bothered too much by a few anti-Semites. Religion as such, as meditation, faith, inwardness, piety, spirituality,
and so on, was alien to her. In any event, because she was advised to do so by the people in her circle in the late Thirties, she converted to some other confession—the Reformed Church as best I recall, but that was a pure formality that subsequently, when it turned out that it would in no way give her any protection, she largely forgot all about. She had quite a hard job getting a divorce from my father, because in those days divorces came with a string of onerous legal stipulations. It was necessary to spell out, for instance, if the divorce was being granted on the grounds of the husband’s or the wife’s fault, and my father insisted on the condition that the divorce was being granted on account of my mother’s fault. That in turn meant that my mother had to renounce any rights over her son, and she had to agree to certain stipulations about “visitation,” which duly occurred. As a result, I was able to see my mother once a week, and during the holidays twice a week. After the divorce, she lived for a while in a boarding house in Pannónia Road in the Sixth (Terézváros) District, which I supposed was a terribly chic thing to do. Later on, at much the same time as my father took a second wife, she too remarried, a fairly comfortably well-off gentleman by the name of László Seres, who was known to me as Laci or Uncle Laci. He was a stocky, well-dressed, bald-pated fellow, an engaging upright citizen, who, to the best of my knowledge, was the one true love of my mother’s life. He was the managing director of some big company until he was forced into retirement by the Jewish laws. Needless to say, I was none too well disposed to him, though over the years that antipathy vanished bit by bit for the very
simple reason that he never tried to win me over. On the whole, my mother and those around her handled the embarrassing position I was put in after the divorce a good deal more elegantly than did my father, who—Auntie Kate here or there—emerged the clear loser and did not spare me any of his ironic bitterness. For instance, every week Laci Seres would give me a shiny silver five-pengő piece. “Tell the fat-head you don’t need any money!” my father would urge. That says little for his big-heartedness, but it did at least bring me closer to Father—you remember Cato and the conquered one, don’t you?…

Would it be fair to say that for you there were two separate worlds that you somehow had to balance?

That’s exactly how it was. To make that even more definitive, my mother and her husband moved to Buda and leased a house at the foot of Rose Hill in the Second District. To live in a place in Buda counted as a very genteel thing in those days. Paradoxically, the prospect of war ushered in a building boom, with the empty plots on Convent (now Rómer Flóris) Street and Zivatar Street being built on one after the other. I liked the little modern apartment that my mother and Uncle Laci had on Zivatar Street. The stairway still smelled of new building materials, while the bright kitchen overlooked the outside dining tables of the Nardai Restaurant on Kút Street. Of an evening a discreet rattle of tableware and scraps of laughter and Gypsy music would drift up from the lantern-lit garden. Decades later, when Mahler’s
Ninth Symphony had a huge impact on my life, that passage in the first movement where, all of a sudden, a nostalgic motif—a Proustian snatch of melody—sounds on a single violin, each and every time I had to recollect the Gypsy music at the Nardai Restaurant. And you know, even today I am convinced that Mahler may have taken that mood away from one of his regular eating haunts during his period as musical director at the Royal Opera House in Budapest. Anyway, yes, you’re right, my father and mother did represent two different worlds in my life. On arriving at Mother’s place from distant Baross Street, I would usually have to take off my clothes and put on some more elegant outfit that was more to her taste. She would have me bathe in the gleaming bathroom, even washing my hair with foaming shampoo, and in a way that was all the more eloquent, for her saying nothing would give me to understand exactly what she thought of my father; and that, when it came down to it, was every bit as painful as having to swallow my father’s cutting remarks.

So, you were living a double life, and the two worlds were pretty divergent. Didn’t that push you into an identity crisis of any kind?

No, and all the less so in that I had no identity; I didn’t need one. What would I have done with one, anyway? I needed adaptability, not an identity. And anyway, that double life was far more entertaining than if I had had to get by purely on the monotony of Baross Street. At Zivatar Street, by contrast, it was the dominance of Laci
Seres that made me feel ill at ease. He was an intelligent man, and the way I saw it he didn’t think too highly of me. I can well imagine, indeed readily appreciate, how discomfiting the child of Mother’s previous marriage must have been for him, turning up every week from a foreign world to spoil the afternoon. It was only the two of us, however, who were in the know about my superfluousness; Mother noticed nothing. It was a bit like a mute alliance between the two of us for the sake of my mother, and that at times led to almost mutual cordiality. It was a tolerable life. I had certain games that I played exclusively at my mother’s place, books that I only read when I was there.