Dossier K: A Memoir (12 page)

What are you, according to your conviction?

Jewish—but a Jew who has nothing in common with any of the Jewish modes of life that were known before Auschwitz, neither archaic Jews, nor assimilated Jews, nor Zionist Jews. Or with Israel. That may be the hardest thing of all to say.

It took you half a century. In 2002 you wrote a travel diary to which you gave the title “Jerusalem, Jerusalem.”
¹⁴
Nevertheless, let us stay for a bit longer on the time you spent with Fazekas. By then it was six years since you had got out of Buchenwald, you’re twenty-two; so, back then, in 1951, what did a Jewish identity mean to you?

Anecdotes, Jewish jokes, a certain protection with Fazekas—in other words, nothing, nothing at all, so I think there is little sense in using the term “identity” here. I didn’t have an identity, and I didn’t miss having one, either.

You already stated that when you were talking about your childhood
.

In a certain sense I was still living my childhood then as well. Dictatorships make children out of people inasmuch as they do not permit existential choices and thereby deprive one of that wonderful burden of being responsible for oneself. At that time I lived in a fantasy world that was impossible to keep any check on, perfectly absurd; I was concealed in my insignificance.

The words ring a bell; they’re from
Fiasco,
aren’t they, but what do they mean, more precisely?

Total vulnerability to chance. I compared myself to a person who is cast this way by chance, like a light skiff by a swift current. Whereas I just gave in to physical appearances and considered myself to be a singularly
nebulous person, whom I did not know at all and thus who served as a constant source of surprises.

It must have been a strange state
.

Parlous in the extreme.

Is that how you judge it now, or did you perceive it as dangerous at the time?

I don’t know. The drawback of conversations like this is precisely the fact that one speaks self-confidently about one’s life in the sure knowledge of where it has ended up, but are you able to conjure up the person you were, your aimlessness? Can you feel under your feet the tightrope that you danced on? Did you even know that you were dancing on a tightrope? Years later, I came across that immortal adage from Duchamp: “There is no solution, because there is no problem.” Probably one has to evoke trivial details, though often even that proves futile. Not long ago, for instance, I mulled at length over what I ate in those days. What did I eat during a period when practically all items of food were only sold in exchange for ration coupons? Who washed my underwear, and how? I recollect that there used to be one of those posh, old-fashioned public lavatories in front of the EMKE café, on the corner of the Grand Boulevard and Rákóczi Avenue. There were steps that led down to it. A decrepit crone who was a leftover from the
“ancien regime”
was in charge of it as the WC attendant. One even got a bar of soap from her, which had to be given back after one
had washed. Other than that, I used to go to the Lukács Baths to wash down and have a swim—I remember that well. There were times when I was only able to get to the swimming baths in the evening, when the green waters of the pool would be lit up by searchlights a bit like spotlights. Those years dropped out of my life like loose change through a hole in a purse; it would be useless to try to gather them together now. On a sunny but gusty winter morning not long ago, I took a walk through the Városmajor Park in Buda and cut over the tramlines to reach Logodi Street
¹⁵
in order to look for the house where I had been a subtenant what is now a good fifty years ago. I have long since forgotten the house number, so I tried to recognize it from memory: it just didn’t work. I traipsed back home. I began to realize that I shall never again make sense of my young days: I don’t know what I did, and why, how and why I became the person I became.

For my part, though, I hope we shall learn something about this in the end. You mentioned Logodi Street, which suggests that you were no longer living with your mother in Zivatar Street
.

No, my mother married the glass engineer, who had in the meanwhile been promoted to managing director of the factory.

For political reasons or engineering know-how?

I suppose it was as a reward for all his inventions; he
wasn’t interested in anything besides vacuum tubes. My mother, on the other hand, was finally able to live in the style she had dreamed about since her girlhood. There was a car that went with the position, and at weekends they would go off on shoots for game, have a pig slaughtered in autumn for the hams and sausages … and as a result of some property deal they swapped the Zivatar Street apartment over my head.

Effectively, put you out on the street?

Only in principle; in practice they arranged a subtenancy for me “on a friendly basis” as the main tenant was some sort of senior employee at the factory that my stepfather managed.

In other words, more through bribery than “on a friendly basis”
 …

That’s quite possible, as we settled on a ridiculously low rent; but the main thing was that it was a rather neat room at the foot of Buda Castle Hill, with my window overlooking the dense leafage of a tree. Since this meant we were finally free of each other, the endless wrangles with my mother also grew less common.

What were the wrangles about?

Look, I’ve already told you that in matters of no direct concern to her my mother suffered from outright colour-blindness. Both she and her husband pretended that we
were living in a slightly wacky but otherwise completely normal world, in which a young person’s duty is to attend to their advancement and build a career. This was the summer of 1951. Every night, toward dawn, operatives of the State Security Office, the ÁVH, would go around the city loading onto trucks and transporting to their forced places of residence those people who had been sentenced to resettlement.

You mentioned earlier Iván Mándy’s book
, Lecturers and Co-authors …

Yes, and that too was part of the total absurdity. At that time I was part of a small group of friends who would write humorous sketches and short radio plays, all kinds of nonsense, for the insatiable Hungarian Radio. We would take apart the elements of the plays of Ferenc Molnár in various dives and espresso cafés, quite convinced that we would soon become famous comedy writers.

In
Fiasco
there is a scene where Köves, getting on for daybreak, is making his way homeward along deserted streets and is hailed by a strange chap from a bench by the footpath
 …

The pianist, who didn’t dare go home, because he wanted to avoid being dragged away from his bed.

Is the pianist a figure you dreamed up, or is he someone you encountered in real life?

I could even tell you his name.

That scene, as it happened, you also wrote as a stand-alone short story under the title “The Bench,” which contains a very typical sentence about the nonexistent identity that you spoke of before. It runs: “In those days I could always be persuaded by anything if I came up against the necessary patience or robustness.”

That is probably how it was in fact.

I rather feared as much. What, then, did it take for you to come to your senses from this, as it were, semidetached state?

Maybe by first getting fully immersed in it, then, later on, simply recalling it and being duly astonished by it.

As if by means of a time machine, you were to arrive at an unfamiliar—or perhaps familiar—place and uneasily watch what is happening to you?

If you’re referring to the second part of
Fiasco
, then you’re on the wrong track. Köves knows exactly what is going to happen to him; indeed, he himself provokes the events.

He is tormented by a Kafkaesque guilty conscience and forebodings
.

Not at all. I know that an interpretation along those lines was printed in a German newspaper …

Which claims that you are trying to amplify on Kafka, raising the question of whether that is in fact possible
.

That’s not the point; the real issue is whether it is possible, in certain circumstances, not to amplify on Kafka. And here I don’t mean Kafka’s incomparable genius, but the fact that history has vindicated Kafka, and that has left its mark on the literature of succeeding generations. The language of the second part of
Fiasco
caused me quite a headache, i.e., how it is possible to cast the ephemeral ideological constructs of merely transitory closed regimes and dictatorships into the more durable form of a novel. I was looking for a usable metaphor, and it finally occurred to me that totalitarian dictatorships, including the Stalinist one, speak in the language of religion. Nor can it be otherwise, since their world was not a realm of logic but of the absurd. As a result, therefore, a degree of Kafkaesque stylization seemed glaringly obvious, for one thing because
Fiasco
ultimately deals with something entirely different from Kafka’s marvellous novels; for another thing, because what else is the intellectual domain that we call literature other than the handshaking of writers with one another
ad infinitum
? But that would take it too far. As far as
Fiasco
is concerned, it is a novel based on a fundamentally amusing notion. A writer bogged down in the intellectual swamp of the Seventies, the Brezhnev era, awakes to the realization that he is working counter to his own interest, because a creative life cannot be squared with the time in which he is living. That is when he embarks on a novel, which is nothing more than a process of the
recapitulation of a fate: episode by episode, he recreates the existence of his young
alter ego
, Köves, looking more and more for where he lost his way, why he couldn’t disappear, submerge, into the anonymous mass of history. He is unlucky, however, and at the end of the book comes to the very same point—the L-shaped corridor—where he was once overtaken by his creative vision: the creative life proves to be an inescapable curse, its end product failure—the fiasco.

It may well be that I am lacking something in the humour department when it comes to this, but I can now clearly see that the plot of the novel-in-the-novel which is
“Fiasco”
is not in the least the dream parable that it is usually interpreted as being
.

I could only give a response if I knew what, precisely, you think of as a “parable.” Can you give an example?

Offhand, Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four
comes to mind as being a true parable
.

In that case,
Fiasco
cannot be one. It contains a different ratio of fiction and real life. Or rather, if one wants to see it as a parable, then it’s not a very good one. But there are other genres that
Fiasco
also does not belong to. To be brief and parabolic myself: it is not appropriate to use a nutcracker to peel a peach.

Witticisms aside, obviously what you want to say is that
the novel should be approached from the point of view of its own originality
.

Everything should be approached from the point of view of its own originality.

Despite the fact that it is no simple task to get to grips with
Fiasco:
it is surrounded by as many defensive systems as a fortification. The moment you have managed to struggle past one you find yourself face-to-face with another. You have to fight your way past one parenthesized barbed-wire fence after another, past ever newer crevasses of novels-within-novels … until it finally dawns on you that that is exactly what the novel is about: intellectual brackets and mental barbed-wire entanglements. Am I assessing that correctly?

The subject of the novel is enclosure, that’s for sure, and that has formal consequences. In essence, it’s a matter of a musical structure that is followed as a structural principle.

You assign a big part to music in the construction, or I should say the composition, of your novels
.

I don’t think that can be of interest to anyone except myself, but it’s true that I like to conceive of my novels in terms of a musical composition.

In other words, it’s not just a matter of the musicality of individual sentences
 …

No, of the whole, of the complete composition. With
Fiasco
, for instance, the beginning and end of the novel overlap, but this is achieved with musical tools: the images of the “enlightenment” and the L-shaped corridor are snapped twice by the text, then the third time they come true … but those are just my own distinctly dubious private amusements and can only be boring to readers.

Not to me, that’s for sure, because I would like to find my bearings in what is perhaps the most enigmatic of your novels. With
Fatelessness
you employed a simple linear technique
 …

That was not exactly simple, either, but in that instance the linear technique expressed some important ideas. With
Fiasco
, on the other hand, I made a deliberate effort to “transcribe” the time-planes onto one another, and, just like music, the novel, too, unfolds over time, and in that way a circular novel structure came into being.

A circle that encloses within itself both the Nazi concentration camp and the Communist jails
.

Yes, in the end I wanted to pluck out the
danse macabre
of the two regimes on a single string, despite the fact that I wrote and published
Fiasco
before the change in regime and therefore when censorship was still very much in force.

Toward the end of
Fiasco,
Köves sends a letter to Berg, who is one of the most mysterious of all the novel’s figures, in which he relates his strange experiences. In addition, this is where Köves, for the first and only time in the novel, speaks in the first person singular, which lends an air of confessional authenticity to the text
 …