I pay regular visits to my mother. I sometimes hear her tell stories about a young woman who had a little boy. On these occasions I usually listen politely, discreetly hiding my boredom. Yet nowadays I find myself paying attention to her, even watching out for what she says; I listen as if I were increasingly expecting her to suddenly unmask a secret. For in the end, the child in question once upon a time had been me. As the saying goes, the child is father to the man. Maybe I shall manage to catch out this sneaky brat, so passively ready to adapt to every circumstance, expose a word, a deed, anything which would hint at his future activity — writing a book. Yes, that’s how far it has gone with me, how low I am stooping, if you will; I would make do with anything — my astrological chart at birth, the critical DNA sequences of my genes, the mystery lurking in my blood grouping, anything, I tell you, to which I might give a nod of assent, or at least reconcile myself that this was the way it had to be, this was what I was born to be, as if I were not perfectly aware that we are not born to be anything but, if we manage to live long enough, we cannot avoid becoming something in the end.
I take a book down from the shelf. The volume exudes a musty smell — the sole trace that a finished work and a completed life can leave behind in the air: the smell of books. “It was on the 28th of August, 1749, at the stroke of twelve noon, that I came into the world in Frankfurt on the Main,” I read. “The constellation was auspicious: the Sun was in Virgo and at its culmination for the day. Jupiter and Venus looked amicably upon it and Mercury was not hostile. Saturn and Mars maintained indifference. Only the Moon …” Yes, that is the way to be born, as a man of the moment — of a moment when who knows how many others were likewise born on this globe. Only the rest of them did not leave a book smell behind and so they don’t count. The cosmic constellation arranged the lucky moment for a single birth. That is how a genius, a great creative figure, sets foot on earth — like a mythical hero. An unfilled place longs yearningly for him, his advent so long overdue that the ground is practically moaning out for it. Now all that has to be done is to await the most favourable constellation, which will assist him just as much through the difficulties of birth as through the uncertain beginnings, the years of hesitancy, until that shining moment when he enters the realm of recognition. Looking back from the pinnacle of his career, there will no longer be room in his life for any contingency, since his very life has assumed the form of necessity. His every deed and every thought is important as a carrier of the motives of Providence, his every declaration pregnant with the symbolic marks of an exemplary development. “A poet,” he pronounces later, “should have an origin, he must know where he springs from.”
I suppose he is right: that truly is the most important thing.
Well then, at the time I came into the world the Sun was standing in the greatest economic crisis the world had ever known; from the Empire State Building to the Turul-hawk statues on the former Franz Josef Bridge, people were diving headlong from every prominence on the face of the earth into water, chasm, onto paving stone — wherever they could; a party leader by the name of Adolf Hitler looked exceedingly inimically upon me from amidst the pages of his book Mein Kampf; the first of Hungary’s Jewish laws, the so-called Numerus Clausus, stood at its culmination before its place was taken by the remainder. Every earthly sign (I have no idea about the heavenly ones) attested to the superfluousness — indeed, the irrationality — of my birth. On top of which, I arrived as a nuisance for my parents: they were on the point of divorcing. I am the material product of the lovemaking of a couple who did not even love one another, perhaps the fruit of one night’s indulgence. Hey presto, suddenly there I was, through Nature’s bounty, before any of us had had a chance to think it through properly. I was a healthy child, my milk teeth broke through, I started to burble, my intellect burgeoned; I began to grow into my rapidly proliferating materiality. I was the little son in common of a daddy and mummy who no longer had anything in common with one another; a pupil at a private institution into whose custody they entrusted me while they proceeded with their divorce case; a student for the school, a tiny citizen for the state. “I believe in one God, I believe in one homeland, I believe in the resurrection of Hungary,” I prayed at the beginning of the school day. “Rump Hungary is no land, reunified Hungary the heavenly land,” I read from the caption on a wall map outlined with bloody colour. “Navigare necesse est, vivere non est necesse,”1 I parroted in Latin class. “Shoma Yisroel, adonai elohenu, adonai ehod,” I learned in religious instruction. I was fenced in on all sides, my consciousness taken into possession: they brought me up. With a loving word here and stern warnings there, they gradually ripened me for slaughter. I never protested, I endeavoured to do what was asked of me; I languished with torpid goodwill into my well-bred neurosis. I was a modestly diligent if not always impeccably proficient accomplice to the unspoken conspiracy against my life.
But enough. It is not worth searching for my origins: I have none. I landed in a process that, thanks to my inborn sense of mistiming, I took for a beginning. Like everybody else, I have one or two anecdotes and a few personal memories, but what do they signify? At the right temperature, they dissolve without trace into the communal mass, unite with the inexhaustible material churned out in general hospitals and disposed of in mass graves or, in more fortunate cases, in mass production. In hunting for my origins I see nothing but a packed and never-ending queue, my century on the march. Blinded, now staggering, now breaking into a trot, I too stumbled along in the soporific warmth of the herd. But at some point — who knows why — I stepped out of the line: I did not go on further. I sat down beside the ditch and my glance suddenly fell on the stretch of the way I had put behind me. Could this be what literary men call “talent”? Hard to believe it. I had given no sign of any talent in a single act or word or other manifestation — unless it was in managing to stay alive. I did not dream myself into invented stories; I did not even know what to do with the things that had happened to me. Not once had my ears resounded to the biddings of vocation; the totality of my experiences could convince me only of my superfluousness, never of my importance. I was not endowed with the redeeming word; I was not interested in perfection or beauty, not even knowing what those are. I regard notions of glory as the masturbation fantasies of senile old men, immortality as simply risible. I didn’t start on my novel in order to have a verifiable occupation. If I were an artist, I would entertain or teach; my work would be of interest to me, not the reason why I had produced it.
Having got that off my chest, I can discern only one possible explanation for my stubborn passion: maybe I had started writing in order to gain my revenge on the world. To gain revenge and regain from it what it had robbed me of. Perhaps my adrenal glands, which I managed to preserve intact even from Auschwitz, are hypersecretors of adrenaline. Why not? After all, representation contains an innate power in which the aggressive instinct can subside for a moment and produce an equipoise, a temporary respite. Maybe that is what I wanted. Yes, to grab hold, if only in my imagination and by artistic means, of the reality that all too really holds me in its power; to subjectivize my perpetual objectivity, to become the name-giver instead of the named. My novel was no more than a response to the world — evidently the sole way of responding as best I can. To whom else would I have been able to address this response if, as we all know, God is dead? To nothingness, to my unknown fellow human beings, to the world. It did not turn out as a prayer but as a novel.