You may be right. It may be worth considering how my life might have worked out if I had stayed with my father.
Well, how?
Just the same, I suppose, only at the price of yet more grueling fights. Father would obviously have insisted that I take on a “respectable” occupation of some kind, whereas I would have slipped back in a psychosis of permanent rebellion. But if I think about it more carefully, it’s possible that I did that anyway, except that I continued my fight against Father without him, which in the absence of his robust presence led to a transcendence. Like an arrow that misses its immediate target and vanishes into the distance.
I beg your pardon, but that’s one of Arthur Koestler’s similes. Arrow in the Blue was the title of one of his volumes of autobiography.
Thank you for reminding me. I’ve read the book, of course, so my simile may be the product of subconscious Freudian brainwork, but then Koestler, too, was a Jew from Budapest, and he, too, was in conflict with his family, with the bourgeois mode of existence, with Communist salvationism, and ultimately with himself.
As best I know, you, too, became one of Communism’s “captive minds,” if I may allude to the title of Czeslaw Milosz’s celebrated book.
Naturally; it would have been a wonder if I hadn’t. On my return from Auschwitz I fell in with an interesting group of people among whom I soon had to make my first clear choices: for instance, whether I was to remain in Hungary or leave, because those were the arguments that flew around in 1946 and ’47 during the “shindigs” that would evolve out of tea parties into rum drinking at the homes of those of my classmates who had bigger places or at least their own rooms. By then the tidy order of the B stream had broken down; several of my Jewish friends had been lost — they perished during the war or they did not go back to school — or pupils asked for permission to transfer from the crowded A stream, or new boys enrolled. The world had changed. One gorgeous morning in September 1945, when I turned off the Grand Boulevard into Barcsay Street in order to pick up my schooling at the Madách Gymnasium where I had left it before Auschwitz, an edifying scene played out before my view: gym master Csorba, moustache twitching, his face terrified, was hurrying toward the Grand Boulevard with a pack of pupils at his heels, the leader of whom was yelling with his fist raised in anger: “Lousy Fascist! The brass neck of you coming back to the school as a teacher!” That student, incidentally, went on later to become a well-known film director. We happened to meet at some reception in the early ’90s, and I reminded him of that long-past scene. He looked at me in amazement: he had no memory of it.
Really?
I can’t say if he really had forgotten, but at all events fifty years later, after another historical turning point — the fall of Communism — he was unwilling to accept that identity. But then again, I think that generation — my own generation — has had to endure too many such wrenching turning points for its identity to remain continuous and intact.
And has your own, I wonder?
There are times when I delude myself into thinking it has, but then at other times I recollect certain periods of my life as though a stranger had lived them, certain actions of mine as if they had not been my actions. But being a writer I am constantly working on my identity, and as soon as I come across it I lose it straight away, because I confer it on the protagonist of one of my novels, so I can start the whole process from the beginning all over again. It’s not always easy to be in full possession of ourselves. “Not everyone who is born is in the world,” writes Dezső Szomory in that marvellous 1934 novel of his, Mr. Horeb, the Teacher.
But you not only were in the world, you also wanted to change the world. You joined the Communist Party …
Not with the aim of seeking salvation for the world, though.
Driven by ressentiment, perhaps? György Köves comes home from Buchenwald concentration camp, and to the question put to him on the tram by the reporter as to what he was feeling about being back home again and seeing the city he had left, he replies: “Hatred.”
That is one of the most misunderstood, or perhaps better: misinterpreted sentences in Fatelessness.
So, let’s put it in its proper place.
No, let’s not. It’s a good thing for a novel to have certain words that live on in readers like a blazing secret.
There are lots of words like that in Fatelessness: “happiness,” for instance, or “homesickness” …
Words that only gain their full import in their immanence — in the dramatic effect lent to them by place, moment, and the reader’s conspiratorial rapport. In a novel certain words can change their ordinary meaning; just as bricks are needed in the construction of a cathedral, but in the end what we marvel at is the steeples and the building that has taken shape through their agency.
So it wasn’t salvational zeal that took you into the Communist Party, then, or vengeance.
Much more simple decency, I would say.
Decency? I don’t follow.
You might do so better if I were to talk about the necessity of the sense of “belonging somewhere,” which people find so self-explanatory. I realized fairly quickly that this need had hoodwinked me and led me into a trap. I tried to believe in something that ran radically counter to my nature and lifestyle; in truth I did not have trouble so much with the object of my “belief”—with Marxism or my “salvational zeal,” as you put it — but with “belief” per se as a style — I don’t know how else to express it. Because it soon became clear that it was useless my trying to close my eyes and explain the world from the viewpoint of a theory of some kind: the truth kept on pushing itself forward and plunging me into unpleasant situations. To begin with I merely found myself at odds with my well-founded doubts, but after the so-called “year of decision” of 1948 the terror set in, and I was astounded to notice that I found myself irredeemably on the wrong side as a result of my own zeal.
Did the realization shock you? Did it change your life?
I don’t think so. It was more just a matter of me finding my proper place, if I may put it like that. It put me in touch again with the feeling in which I recognized my life, the feeling that in a certain sense guided me home, and that was a sense of life’s absurdity, the simple and inexorable truth of being able to do nothing and being defenceless. In a certain sense it was a completely satisfying feeling that was later to save me from further brooding and posing the wrong questions.
I’m trying to guess what is hidden behind those words. A sixteen-year-old boy who had been in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, goes back to school and prepares to take his school-leaving examinations. Who is still tortured by nightmares …
I wasn’t tortured by nightmares. Every now and again it would happen that I was woken by an anxiety that that I had missed Appell, the morning muster, but — how to put it? — my “internal clock,” that mysterious mental chronometer, was soon reset. I can see from your face that you weren’t expecting that. Would you have preferred to hear something a bit more morbid?