A timber merchant’s, if what you write in Fatelessness is an accurate guide.
Fairly accurate. It was a spacious cellar property in which timber planks were stockpiled in a certain order. There was an “office” consisting of a glass cage at the foot of the steep flight of steps, but in Fatelessness I made it sound a bit posher than it was. There I describe the family as very middle-class, whereas we were much more like lower-middle-class, petit-bourgeois. Father was not able to pay for the stock that he held, so he received the planks “on commission” from the wholesaler, a man by the name of Mr. Galambos, who had a lumberyard somewhere in Újpest9—an enormous open-air area with wisps of fog swirling over endless stacks of timber, as I saw when Father took me once on a visit. It must have been in the autumn, and the autumn had much the same coloration as Mr. Galambos. He seemed to be made up of the most diverse shades of grey: his suit was grey, he wore a dove-grey hat and, likewise grey, a genuine pair of spats with little buttons on the side. Even his eyes were grey. as was his extraordinarily neat and elegantly groomed moustache. And he always carried on him, who knows where from, a bag of bonbons or boiled sweets to offer one, in much the same way as one man will offer another a cigarette or cigarillo. That was also the way he shook hands with me, like one man with another, without any hint of a condescending smile or gesture of that kind. I rather think he assisted Father in his business affairs, although I know nothing for sure. In any case, my blood would freeze the instant I heard the word “business.”
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 …