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.
How did you come to be at the Shell Oil refinery in the summer of 1944?
In what I might call a quite natural way. I presume you know a bit about the Levente movement.10 Anyway, at the start of the 1943–44 grammar school year — I was thirteen and in Year 3 then — that still appeared to be just some stupid phooey. Once a week we had to line up in the schoolyard under the supervision of Csorba, the gym teacher whom I mentioned earlier. On these occasions, the boys of stream B received what I may safely call an introductory course to Auschwitz. Not that it was called that, of course, and I dare say that even gym master Csorba was not fully aware of the reality, although he needed to do no more than think through where the logic of his activity was leading to. Allow me at this point to wheel out my favourite Kafka quotation, a sentence from The Triaclass="underline" “Judgment does not come suddenly; the proceedings gradually merge into the judgment.” The system of terror in Germany was forceful, whereas in Hungary — even before the German occupation in early 1944—it was simply unpredictable. But the proceedings had already started and were steadily moving ahead along the designated route. For the Levente lesson, a B-stream pupil would slip on a yellow arm band that his mother (or auntie or the chambermaid) had sewed for him at home and learned that he was to be addressed as “Master Ancillary Trainee,” which he would then discuss in guffaws with his companions as the expression was incomprehensible and truly ridiculous. On these occasions gym teacher Csorba would strut around in some sort of officer’s cap: “Trainee Corps, fall in!” he would bawl. The Levente lessons had to be taken seriously because they were compulsory. In Hungary under the German occupation, however, after the schools were closed early for the summer vacation, every “Master” over fourteen who was liable to do Levente service had to possess an officially verified workplace. I had received from the borough council a communication to the effect that I could either pick such a workplace for myself or they would assign one. I elected for the latter and obtained the Shell Oil refinery, and the rest you know. I hope I’m not expected to go over again the story of how I was picked up by the police, the gendarmes, the brickyard …
That is the story of the year that we know about from Fatelessness.
Maybe we should pick up again on our chat regarding the distinction between fiction and an autobiographical novel …
I wouldn’t set my heart on it. There’s just one question that I would like to ask, but that one in any case. How should I put it, then? To what extent does György Köves resemble the person who you were? To continue that line of thought: to what extent were you, Imre Kertész, helped to survive, or to what extent was it made more difficult, by your sad childhood, that alienated way of life, lacking in all intimacy, on which some light has been thrown by our conversation so far?
A good question, and one it is worth contemplating, although I feel it is something I have always been thinking about. The question reminds me of one of Jean Améry’s essays, in which he broods on whether culture, or education, was of any assistance to intellectuals in Auschwitz. He comes to the conclusion that it wasn’t; indeed, educated people had a harder time of it in the death camps than did ordinary, uneducated people. Now that may well be true in practice, but — being in possession of that culture — if one thinks a bit more profoundly about Auschwitz, about the establishment and running of the death camp, then one has to concede the necessity of those institutions. Yes, indeed, if you consider one line taken by European history and analyze it with your post-facto knowledge of the way in which, for centuries now, mankind has been thinking and acting, the way in which he has been living, then the setting-up of the machinery for the extermination of European Jewry is no big surprise.