CHAPTER NINE
We reach the end
though there is no end, because — as we know — nothing ever comes to an end: one has to carry on, onwards and onwards, confidentially, and with nauseating volubility, the way two murderers chat together. Even though what we have to say is as drably objective as murder is psychologically simplified to another statistic which is just as superfluous as, let’s say, the fact that years wore on and Köves did write his novel. He had it fair-typed too, and submitted, like a petition, to a publishing house. One fine day, the postman delivered a bulky package, and just from the feel of it Köves instantly recognized that it was his novel. Ripping it open, he found a letter appended to the manuscript bundle: it informed him in a few frosty lines that his novel had been considered unsuitable for publication.
Köves becomes of interest to us once more, and not for long either, at that moment, like a descent on a precipitous slope which plunges into darkness, in that caesura of his life. He is still standing there in the hall, novel in hand, an aggrieved but all-suspecting smile on his face: it is a grimace he usually maintains for destiny. He probably imagines that a severe, maybe irreparable blow has befallen him. For a short while, before resolving to step onto his downward path, to take a breather as it were, he draws back into his fiasco like a sick eagle to its nest, its wing broken but still with a sharp enough gaze to be able to scan the ravaged domain of truths and self-justifications for prey. Finally, the hour strikes, so to say, and he has to go. If he keep his eyes open, by the side of the road, he will, for all that, spot a few usable flowers which, even if they do not, of course, compete with edelweiss, he can nevertheless certainly pluck for himself. He tries to decide, first and foremost, whether the publisher might be right: Has he written a good or a bad book? He quickly realizes that from his own point of view (and it may be that it is faulty, but it is the only point of view from which he can look at the world), it’s all the same if he personally considers that the book was exactly what it could have been. Because, even more important than the novel itself, he comes to realize — and this realisation, to be sure, comes as an unexpected surprise — was what had been lived through by his writing about it. That was a choice and a struggle, and precisely the kind of struggle that had been given to him. Freedom had set against himself and his fate, strength had drawn from the circumstances, an assault which subverted necessity — what else was a work, every human work, if not that?…
The rest? A happy end is in store: by the time he gets to the bottom of the slough he will learn that they have decided to publish his book after all. He will then be pierced by a painful longing, and with the sorrow of nostalgia he will insatiably taste the sweet memory of his fiasco; the time when he lived a living life, when he was consumed by passion and nourished by a secret hope that a future old boy, standing before a filing cabinet and thinking, will no longer be able to share. His unique adventure, his heroic age, will have come to an end once and for all. He had changed his person into an object, diluted his stubborn secret into generality, distilled his unutterable reality into signs. What was for him the only possible novel will become a book among other books, which shares the mass fate of all books, waiting for the chance that the glance of a rare customer may fall on it. His life will become the life of a writer who goes on writing books until he has picked himself completely clean to leave nothing but bare bones, freed of all excess frippery. One must imagine Sisyphus happy, the tale runs. Most assuredly. Yet he too is threatened by grace. True, Sisyphus (and labour service) is timeless, but his stone is not immortal. On its bumpy path, through being rolled so many times, in the end it wears down and, all of a sudden, it occurs to Sisyphus that for a long, long time, whistling to himself as he is lost in thought, he has been kicking a grey lump of stone before him in the dust.
What is he supposed to do about that? Obviously, he bends down to pick it up, thrusts it into his pocket, and takes it home — it’s his, after all. In his empty hours (and now there are only empty hours in store) he will undoubtedly take it out from time to time. It would be ridiculous, of course, for him to buckle to rolling it uphill, onto the heights of the peaks, but with his senile, cataract-dimmed eyes he contemplates it as if he were still pondering the weight, the grip. He curls his shaking, numb fingers round it, and no doubt he will be clutching it still in the final, the very last moment, when he slumps down, lifeless, from the seat facing the filing cabinet.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
IMRE KERTÉSZ was born in Budapest in 1929. At the age of fourteen he was imprisoned at Auschwitz and later at the Buchenwald concentration camps. Upon liberation in 1945 he worked as a journalist before being fired for not adhering to Communist party doctrine. After a brief service in the Hungarian Army, he devoted himself to writing, although as a dissident he was forced to live under Spartan circumstances. Nonetheless he stayed in Hungary after the failed 1956 uprising, continuing to write plays and fiction in near-anonymity and supporting himself by translating from the German writers such as Joseph Roth, Freud, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. He remained little-known until 1975, when he published his first book, Fatelesseness, a novel about a teenage boy sent to a concentration camp. It became the first book of a trilogy that eventually included Fiasco and Kaddish for an Unborn Child. Subsequent titles include Liquidation, Union Jack, and The Pathseeker. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2002 for “writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.” He lives in Berlin.
TIM WILKINSON is the primary English translator of Imre Kertész (his titles include Liquidation, Kaddish for an Unborn Child, The Pathseeker, and The Union Jack) as well as numerous other significant works of Hungarian literature. His translation of Kertész’s Fatelessness was awarded the PEN Club Translation Prize.