Kaddish for an Unborn Child by Imre Kertész (translated by Tim Wilkinson). (2/2)
Title: Kaddish for an Unborn Child.
Author: Imre Kertész (translated by Tim Wilkinson).
Genre: Literature, fiction, Judaism, writing, philosophical fiction.
Country: Hungary.
Language: Hungarian.
Publication Date: 1990.
Summary: The first word in this mesmerizing novel is "No." It is how the narrator, a middle-aged Hungarian-Jewish writer, answers an acquaintance who asks him if he has a child. It is the answer he gave his wife (now ex-wife) years earlier when she told him that she wanted one. The loss, longing and regret that haunt the years between those two "no"s give rise to one of the most eloquent meditations ever written on the Holocaust. As the narrator addresses the child he couldn't bear to bring into the world, he ushers readers into the labyrinth of his consciousness, dramatizing the paradoxes attendant on surviving the catastrophe of Auschwitz. (Refer to PART 1 for rest of the quotes).
My rating: 7.5/10
My review:
♥ As to whether this moment might have differed from other, similar or not even the slightest bit similar moments of mine that initiated a relationship or affair, I can only answer: yes, indeed, it differed radically from them. Just as, at least in a certain sense, I myself also different radically from myself. For to sum up by subtenant life at that time, my thoughts, my inclinations, my motives, my whole subtenanted survival state at that time, I have to conclude that all the sings are that already then everything stood ripe and ready within me for change of state. I am surely not imagining it when I suppose that I started to speculate, mistakenly, and thus untenably and intolerably, about my life. ..Consequently, the moment in which it was decided that I would soon be going to bed with a woman, that is, with her, who was to become my wife and later my ex-wife, that moment could not have even an accidental moment either. Because it is absolutely clear that everything I have written down here, and which, as I said, stood ripe and ready within me for a change of state was not, as it were, summed up in this moment, even though by the nature of things, I myself could not have been aware of it as yet, yes, even though all I can recollect is her face upraised towards me in the dancing lights of the night, soft-grained and at the same time glassily opalescent and glistening, like a 1930s close-up. Who would have believed where and what I would be enticed to by the promising gleam of this face. And if I add that, as it later became clear, everything likewise stood ripe and ready for a change of state with her too, my future (or ex-) wife, then I may also submit that our meeting was not only not accidental buy manifestly a fated meeting. Yes, not much time passed before we were talking about our shared likes, though in reality we wanted a fate, both of us our own fate, since that is always individual, unlike anybody else's, and cannot be shared with anybody else's. Whatever we talked about, therefore, was all just talking beside the point, pretext and equivocation, albeit undoubtedly not deliberate talking beside the point, pretext and equivocation, or in other words, not lying. Because how could I have known, as today I know better than all else, that everything I do and which happens to me, that my states and occasional changes in state, altogether my entire life-my godfathers!-serve for me merely as means to recognition in the series of my flashes of recognition-my marriage, for instance, serving as a means towards the recognition that I am unable to live in a married state. And decisive as this recognition was in the series of my flashes of recognition, it was just as fateful, of course, from the viewpoint of my marriage, even if, from other points of view, coldly considered, without marrying I could never have reached this recognition, or at best could only have reached it through abstract inferences. Thus, there seems to be no escaping every accusation and self-accusation, the sole excuse that I have going for me being identical to the accusation that can be leveled against me: that when I contracted my marriage, which as I now see was undoubtedly out of motives and for the aim of self-liquidation, it was at least my belief that I was, on the contrary, contracting it under the badge of the future, of happiness, that happiness about which my wife and I had spoken so much and so timidly, yet also intimately and resolutely, as if it were some secret and almost grim duty that had been sternly laid upon us. Yes, that's how it was, and now our entire life, its every sound, incident and feeling, is something I see, or rather, however strange, hear, like some kind of musical fabric beneath which the main, great, all-embracing, one-and-only theme continually ripens and condenses in order that, bursting out and outblasting all else, it may assume its autocracy: my existence viewed as the potentiality of your being, and later: your non-existence viewed as the necessary and radical liquidation of my own existence.
♥ The woman had died of some disease brought back from Auschwitz, sometimes swelling up and at other times losing weight, sometimes suffering bouts of colic and at other times covered with skin eruptions, a disease that science proved effectively powerless to tackle, just as science also proved effectively powerless to tackle the precipitating cause of the disease, Auschwitz, for the disease my wife's mother had suffered from was, in reality, Auschwitz itself, and there is no cure of Auschwitz, nobody will ever recover from the disease of Auschwitz.
♥ Later on, while talking about such matters, my wife cited a couple of sentences which, she said, she no longer knew where she had read but she had never forgotten since. Not immediately, but quite soon afterwards, it occurred to me that my wife must have read the sentences in one of the essays of Untimely Meditations, the one entitled "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," and this reinforced my belief that the sentences we have a need for seek us out sooner or later, because if I didn't believe that, I don't understand how those sentences could have reached my wife, who, to the best of my knowledge, never showed any interest in philosophy, least of all in Nietzsche. The exact sentences, which I soon tracked down in the disintegrating, red-bound volume of Nietzsche that I had seized upon once in some dark corner of an antiquarian bookseller's, read as follows, albeit not in my own translation: There is a degree of sleeplessness, of rumination, of the historical sense, which is harmful and ultimately fatal to the living thing, whether this living thing be a man or a people or a culture. After which, or before it, I couldn't say offhand: ...He who cannot sink on the threshold of the moment and forget all the past, who cannot stand balanced like a goddess of victory without growing dizzy and afraid-and from here on my wife knew it by heart-will never know what happiness is-worse, he will never do anything to make others happy.
♥ After her mother died, an aunt of her father had moved in with them. "She has such an Auschwitz look," she had immediately thought, my wife said. Seeing only a former or future murderer in everybody. "I don't know how I still managed to grow up into a more or less healthy woman."
♥ But what does it have to do with me, I thought, so-called anti-Semitism is a purely private affair that, even though I personally may die from it anywhere, at any time, even today, after Auschwitz, I reflected, nowadays that would be a sheer anachronism, a fallacy in which, as H. would say, not H., Leader and Chancellor, but H., philosopher and head butler to all leaders and chancellors, the World-Spirit is no longer present, in other words, a provincialism, nothing more, a genius loci, a local idiocy; and if they want to shoot or beat me to death, I reflected, they will say so in good time, I reflected, the way they have generally given prior notice. Only then did I look at my wife, cautiously, because she was suspiciously quiet, and in the cold light from the street and the warmer light that was filtering out from the room behind us I clearly saw the tears streaming down her face. There will never be an end to it, my wife said, there is no escaping this curse, she said, and if only she knew what it was that made her a Jew, given that she was simply incapable of religious faith and, possibly out of laziness or cowardice, or as a result of other predilections, she was simply unacquainted with the specifically Jewish culture of the Jews, and also incapable of showing any interest in it as it simply did not interest her, she said, so what was it that made her Jewish, if in fact neither language, nor lifestyle, nothing, nothing at all, singled her out from others who lived around her, unless she said, it was some sort of occult, atavistic message hidden away in the genes that she herself did not hear and therefore could not know about.
♥ For when it came to my setting out to realize my plan, to actually write the novel, it turned out that the concept was unrealizable; it turned out that the material oozing from my ballpoint pen, as from an infective pustule, into the entire tissue of the plan, each and every cell of it, was such, I would say, as to pathologically alter that tissue, each and every cell of it; it turned out that it is impossible to write about happiness, or at least I can't, which in this case amounts to the same thing after all; happiness is perhaps too simple to let itself be written about, I wrote, as I am reading right now on a slip of paper that I wrote then and from which I am writing it down here; a life lived in happiness is therefore a life lived in muteness, I wrote. It turned out that writing about life amounts to thinking about life, and thinking about life amounts to casting doubt on life, but only one who is suffocated by his very lifeblood, or in whom it somehow circulates unnaturally, casts doubt on that lifeblood. It turned out that I don't write in order to seek pleasure; on the contrary, it turned out that by writing I am seeking pain, the most acute possible, well-nigh intolerable pain, most likely because pain is truth, and as to what constitutes truth, I wrote, the answer is so simple: truth is what consumes you, I wrote.
♥ As to what I might have been thinking then, and with what sorts of feelings I might have been grappling, a good indication is given by a fragmentary slip of paper that I found when searching through the fragments of my marriage. Evidently, it was a slip that I had intended to place beside my wife's tea cup, as I was accustomed to doing at times when, due to my work having stretched late into the night, I did not get up for breakfast. This is what it says: "...That we should be able to love one another and yet still remain free, though I am well aware neither of us is able to evade the lot of a man and the lot of a woman, and thus we shall be party to this torment that a mysterious and, in truth, none too wise Nature has apportioned to us; in other words, that the time will come again when I shall reach out my hand for you and desire you, and all I shall desire is that you be mine; yet at the same time as you too reach out your hand and finally become mine, I shall still place bounds on you in your submission in order that I may preserve what I imagine to be my freedom..." So much for the fragment, and since I found it among my writings, a slip of paper mixed up among my other slips of paper, it is certain that I did not prop it up against my wife's tea cup but must somehow have mixed it up together with my writings and slips of paper, it is also certain that is secretly what I thought, and I lived in accordance with my thoughts, indeed directly lived those thoughts, inasmuch as I always did have a secret life, and that was always my real life. Yes, it was around then that I started to construct my escape passages, my beaver stronghold, to hide and shield things away from my wife's eyes and hands, so that from time to time-and, I have no doubt, on account of my defensive barriers-I fancied that I detected a lurking resentment in my wife's behavior, and this observation grew into a reciprocal resentment and later into a persistent anguish within me that portrayed, or sought to portray, my wife's shifting mood as a much more serious resentment than it really was, since it would not have taken much effort on my part to appease my wife, little more than a single appropriate, timely and well-chosen word, even one such gesture, would have done the trick, yet I clung to my anguish, obviously because I perceived my state of rejection in it, while the intolerable feeling of rejection sought compensation, and only compensation in turn manifested itself within me once again as creative force; in other words, it ignited my neurosis, my love of work, my fever and rage for work, haughtily carrying all before it but only necessitating newer and still more strenuous defensive reflexes, in short, re-activating the whole diabolical mechanism, the deadly merry-go-around, which first dips me in my anguish only to raise me aloft, but solely in order to quickly hurl me back, ever deeper...
♥ "No!" I could never be another person's father, destiny, god,
"No!" what happened to me, my childhood, must never happen to another child,
"No!" something screamed and whined within me, it is impossible that this, childhood, should happen to it (to you) and to me; yes, and that was when I started to tell the story of my childhood to my wife, or maybe it was to myself, I don't rightly know, but I told the story with the full prodigality and compulsiveness of my logorrhea, told it unrestrainedly for days and weeks on end, as a matter of fact I am still telling the story now, though since long ago not to my wife.
♥ ..through a twist of fate, if you like, or through ineptitude, if you like that better, but let's rather say through a twist of fate, now it makes no difference and inasmuch as one may detect one's fate even in one's ineptitude, if one has the eye for it..
♥ It was a dusk towards the end of summer, I remember, the street suffused with overripe smells, its small-windowed houses tottering squint-eyed, tipsy and unwashed along the sidewalks, the sinking sun pouring like yellow, sticky, fermenting grape must all across their walls, the gates murkily yawning like scabs of impetigo, and, feeling dizzy, I clung to a door knob, or who knows what, as I was suddenly grazed by-oh, certainly not by a sense of transience, on the contrary, by the mystery of continuance; yes, a murderer must feel this, I supposed then later told my wife, and why I should happen to have supposed that of all things may not, I suppose be logical but is understandable, I must have supposed it on account of the dead, I suppose, I told my wife, on account of my dead, my dead childhood and my absurd-at any rate absurd when set against my dead and my dead childhood-survival; yes, a murderer must feel this way if, let's say, I supposed and later told my wife, having long forgotten his deed (which is conceivable, nor is it such a rarity as that) decades later, let's say out of forgetfulness or maybe just by mechanically reproducing his former habits, suddenly happens to reopen the door on the scene of the crime, and he finds everything there unchanged: the corpse, though it has decomposed by now into a skeleton, the tawdry props of the furniture, not forgetting himself, and no matter how obvious it is that by now nothing and nobody is the same as it or he was, it's just as obvious that after the brief interlude of a generation everything is nevertheless exactly the same as it was, indeed even more so. And now he knows what he needs to know, that it was by no means chance that led him back, indeed, that perhaps he never even got out of there, because this is the place where he must atone. And don't ask, I said to my wife, why he must, because crime and atonement are concepts between which only being brings a living link into being, if it brings anything into being of course, and if it has already brought something into being, then being in itself is quite enough to qualify as a crime, el delito mayor del hombre es haber nacido, somebody wrote, I said to my wife.
♥ There they sit, on an ancient couch set on the concrete floor, opposite an indeterminate source of light beams-a skylight, perhaps?-that sets the thick clouds of dust sifting down from above dancing. All the signs suggest that they have just sat up, whereas beforehand they could well have been lying down, waiting for my now decades-overdue visit, a visit from their uncaring hope-butcher of a grandson. An old couple in the dusty light, full of reproaches.
♥ Why must we live with our face perpetually turned towards some scene of shame?
♥ "To influence someone else's dreams like a nightmare, to play a role, the paternal role, and thus a fatal role, in someone else's life is one of the true horrors, the terrifying aspect of which..."..
♥ I recall that on just such a rainy Monday morning I suddenly made up my mind, dropping everything, dropping my work, and set off for that affluent suburb or, to be more precise, the suburb that had once been an affluent suburb, or which I remembered as a formerly affluent suburb, a neighborhood of turreted, weather-cocked, lace-curtained, steeply-gabled fairy-tale houses, where, as one of those turreted, steeply gabled, weather-cocked fairy-tale houses the boarding school was located. Folding my umbrella, that shining symbol of our earthly grotesqueness, the man who stepped into this subsiding house of my troubled torments and even more troubled pleasures must have been a slightly greying fellow of comfortably-off appearance, in a checked cloth cap, with dripping umbrella, I related to my wife that evening. Is that a triumph or a defeat? I wonder how I would have greeted that fellow, I joked that evening to my wife, would I have noticed him at all? If so, maybe I would have taken him for some sort of school inspector, an accomplice of the school governors, the powers in charge, I related to my wife that evening. Perhaps for a disagreeable violin teacher. Obviously, I would have noticed straightaway a certain awkwardness about him as well, something ridiculous which would immediately strike one, for instance, in the way he speaks to children in the measured, fastidious manner of a sex killer, I related to my wife. Nothing, nothing, nothing at all about this outlandish, botched figure fits the dreams that I wove about my adulthood; at most I might envy him his superiority, little suspecting how much it is merely an adult's superiority, in other words, lending the appearance of superiority to non-superiority, I said to my wife. I also wrote a few lines about the visit in my notebook, a few of which I am copying across into this notebook. "I was at the boarding school," I wrote. "It lies in ruins, like everything else, houses, lives, the world," I wrote.
♥ The breakfast setting at my designated place, my serviette stigmatized with a Roman "one" in a serviette ring stigmatized with a Roman "one": that was my number here, just like other numbers I have acquired in other places at other times (nowadays an eleven-digit number runs around as my proxy somewhere in the nooks and corners of unknown labyrinths as my shadow life, a second, enigmatic me about which I know nothing, even though I am answerable for it with my life, and what it does, or what is done to it, becomes my destiny).
♥ I didn't understand a word but learned quickly and with that the soothing monotony of prayer, the duress of repetition, that singular hygiene the occasional omission of which would inflict a more severe wound on my soul than omitting to brush my teeth...
♥ The cooler. A dark lumber room full of insects. I was locked up in there once. I viewed it rationally. The love of solitude. The love of illness. The raptures of fever. Early signs of decadence, or just a well-founded loathing of people? To loll about alone in languid bliss in the big dormitory, watching how the sun reaches the apex of the chestnut tree standing in the garden while a cat, with its inimitable gait, curling up the tip of its tail, prowls along the indescribably adventure-packed roof opposite, with the intricate hiding places of its chimneys and turrets.
♥ This, likewise an educational success... Just consider the chances of surviving the whole thing, from the age of five to the age of ten. Almost inconceivable: how? Obviously, like others, like everybody else, by dint of massive, irrational, sledgehammer blows to my rationality. By dint of madness, the madness that separates (or, for that matter, unites) slavish madness from domineering madness.
♥ "Neurosis and coercion as a system of exclusive types of relationship, accommodation as the sole possibility of surviving, obedience as drill, lunacy as final outcome," I wrote. The earlier culture crumbles into a heap of rubble and finally a heap of ashes, but spirits will hover over the ashes, that too is on one of my slips of paper (Wittgenstein), "...and as I was standing there, under my umbrella, and as I was brushed by the stifling secret of this establishment, this well-healed private institution, this former State Lic. Boarding School, a stifling secret which even today flutters about in the damp autumnal air, just as a malevolent silence hangs around the burial vaults of antiquity, all at once-how should I put it?-I was little short of pervaded by this earlier culture, this paternalistic-culture, this worldwide father-complex as by the all-pervading damp...," I wrote. On coming across descriptions of private schools, seminaries and military colleges in the course of my subsequent reading, I occasionally fancied I recognized "my school," though of course that was different all the same, more genial, more absurd and, on the whole, even more perverse, though I was only able to recognize this fully, in the mirror of all-consummating shame, after many years had gone by, I said to my wife. In reality, it was based on simple principles, the principles of respect and authoritarian paternalism, I said to my wife. It simply replicated the principles of the outside world, and whether out of habit or comic miscalculation, or through habit that slid into comic miscalculation, it regarded those principles as its title to domination, I said to my wife.
♥ Otherwise, that's all there was to it; don't imagine anything more, I said to my wife, no brutal acts, no rough words to inspire our terror. But then terror, my dear, I said to my wife, operates by multiple transference, and by the time it becomes consolidated into a world order it is often little more than a superstition.
♥ I recall the legends, I related to my wife, that circulated among us about the dishes that were hauled from the kitchen in the basement up the back steps that led directly to the citadel; there was always someone around who just happened to have seen what they had carried up for the Head and his family's lunch or dinner while we picked at four slices of sausage, cut into a plate of watery, paprika-spiced potatoes, or at the five biscuits served with the suppertime mug of tea. But as we know all too well, my dear, I related to my wife, privilege only bolsters authority, and the awe tinged with hatred with which we subordinated beings perceived these demonstrations very much fitted in with the general ambiguity of our lives.
♥ They did not open the door. "Black Jack" beseeched the culprits, and so on. Not long after, along came the Head. His face flushed, his mustache and forelock flouncing, his paunch wobbling up and down, with us malicious underlings flattening ourselves against the wall to let him through. He tugged at the handle like the Gestapo, hammered on the door with both fists like the cuckolded husband in a low farce. Then all I recollect is the public expulsion (the girl, of course, was kicked out instantly), the artful, unctuous and treacherous text, the fact that everyone of us took the side of the senior<>/i>, and also every one of us remained silent. Only natural, you might say, I said to my wife. I now know the basis of my sense of guilt, my guilty conscience, my terror and my shame, the choking sensation that I felt during the whole procedure; I now know what sort of ritual it was that I witnessed in that paternalistic, father-usurping institution: I witnessed a public castration staged for purposes of our intimidation, with our cooperation; in other words, with our cooperation they castrated one of our pals in order to intimidate us, or in other words, through the very ceremony itself they turned us into the ultimately perverted accomplices of an ultimately perverted act, I said to my wife, and it makes not the slightest difference, I said to my wife, whether they did this quite deliberately or merely out of habit, out of sheer educational habit, the pernicious habit of a pernicious education.
♥ Around this time, I recollect, I made several attempts to set down in writing a picture of my father and my feelings towards my father, of the-what can I say?-fairly complicated relationship between my father and myself, an at least somewhat accurate, although of course not entirely true-because how could one be true towards one's father? how indeed could I be true even towards the truth itself? since for me there exists only one truth, my own truth, and even if that is a mistake, yes, my life alone, God help us!, only my own life can vouchsafe my own mistake as the sole truth.. .."I have to become capable of realizing how impossible it was for him to find the path to me..." I wrote, for instance... "Plainly, he was bound by a tense relationship to me as to himself, which he plainly called love, and believed to be that, which indeed it was, if we are ready to accept the word in all its absurdity and disregard its tyrannical content..." I wrote. At the school I had had dealings with a law, and though I may have feared it, I never had any respect for it, I said to my wife. In point of fact, it bore an aspect of fortune: it might come down hard on me or in my favor, but in neither case did it touch my conscience; only under the yoke of love did I become a real sinner, I said to my wife. ..Terror-stricken, I would try to cling on to something; it would be enough to notice his hapless, dog-eared shirt collar, the loneliness of his slightly trembling hand, the strained furrowing of his brow, his quite futile torment-anything to unnerve me and make me pervious as a desiccated sponge. Then at last I could inwardly intone the redemptive words, the words of brief triumph and at the same time hasty retreat: Poor thing... The sponge would begin to swell, I would be moved to tears by my own emotions, and I thereby paid off some of the debt that continually weighed on me as a result of my father's intimidating love. As to whether, when all is said and done, despite everything, and mindful of all the ambiguities of the word, I really loved him, I answered my wife, who put the question to me at this point, I don't know; indeed, it would be exceedingly difficult for me to know, because, faced with so many reproaches and so many demands, I always knew and felt and saw, or I ought to have known, felt and seen, that I didn't love him, or at least did not love him properly, not enough, and therefore, because I was unable to love him, I indeed probably did not love him, I said to my wife; and in my opinion, I said to my wife, that was also as it should be, putting it somewhat radically, the way it was planned, I said to my wife, for that way, and only that way, we were able to produce an ideally routinized structure of existence. Domination is unchallengeable, unchallengeable the laws by which we must live, though we can never fully live up to these laws: we are always sinners before our father and God, I said to my wife.
♥ Later on, Auschwitz, I said to my wife, seemed to me to be just an exaggeration of the very same virtues to which I had been educated since early childhood. Yes, childhood and education were the start of that inexcusable process of breaking me, the survival that I never survived, I said to my wife. Even if my progress was not always with top marks, I was a modestly diligent party to the silent conspiracy that was woven against my life, I said to my wife. Auschwitz, I said to my wife, manifests itself to me in the image of a father; yes, the words father and Auschwitz elicit the same echo within me, I said to my wife. And if the assertion that God is a glorified father figure holds any truth, then God manifested himself to me in the image of Auschwitz, I said to my wife.
♥ ..I, without any reason (to say the least of it)-and it was useless my being aware of it, of course-but without any reason, mercilessly, and in all likelihood merely because she had heard me out, I had in fact directed all my anger at her, and to avoid having to use the word revolt here, in this connection, where it truly has no place, what I am saying is that it was as if my wife perhaps supposed that now I had related all this, given vent to it, vomited it out of myself, I had in the process freed myself from it all; yes, as if I could have freed myself from all this, as if it were ever possible to free myself from it all-that may have been what she supposed, I supposed, noticing several, admittedly tentative attempts on her part to draw closer, to draw closer to me by understanding. By nature I closed myself off from that; by nature I was unable to bear any sort of understanding, for in reality that would only have served to sanction my powerlessness. But that was as nothing compared with the elemental force of the insight that probably sprang purely from my procedure, form the way that I treated my wife, or yes, in the final hours of my glittering night I ought to use the appropriate word for it, because it is the only cathartic word: so, from the way that I disposed of her. Yes, my being so merciless, so intimately merciless, towards her had, in the process, made her, it seemed, once and for all unacceptable in my eyes; in a certain sense, and what I am about to say is an exaggeration, of course, a big exaggeration, but in a certain sense it was as if I had killed her, which made her a witness to it, she had looked on, she would have seen me killing a person; and it seemed that I would never be able to forgive her for that. It is superfluous for me to reflect on that period here; for instance, on how much longer we lived, were able to live, like that, mutely alongside one another.
♥ Secretly, my wife said, in the depths of her soul, she had believed she was a coward, but now she knew-and I, along with the years spent with me, had helped her significantly in this-well, now she knew that she had simply wanted to live, had to live. And now also, my wife said, now also that was what everything within her was saying, she wanted to live. She was sorry for me and, above all, sorry that she was so powerless in feeling sorry for me; but then she had done everything within her power to save me (I kept quiet, but her choice of words surprised me). Even if purely out of gratitude, my wife continued, for I had shown her the way, though it was me, of all people, who had subsequently been unable to keep up with her along it, because the wounds that I carried within me, and from which I might, perhaps, have been able to recover but, it seemed-or at least so it seemed to her, my wife said-I had not wanted, and still did not want, to recover from, were tougher than my mind, and that had carried over into our love and our marriage. She said again that she was sorry for me, she said others had destroyed me, but I had also destroyed myself in the process, though that had not been the way she had viewed it at first, on the contrary, at first what she had admired in me was that, while others might have tried to destroy me, I had nevertheless not been destroyed, as she had seen it then; she had been wrong about that, my wife said, but that would not have been a problem in itself, and it had not given rise to a sense of disappointment, though she had undoubtedly suffered on that account, my wife said. She repeated that she had wanted to save me, but the fruitlessness of all her attempts, her affection and her love had slowly killed any love and affection she had towards me and had left her just with a sense of fruitlessness and futility and unhappiness. She said that I had always talked a lot about freedom, but the freedom to which I was constantly in the habit of referring did not, for me, in reality, signify freedom in my vocation as an artist (as my wife put it), indeed in reality was not freedom at all, if by freedom one means expansive, strong, receptive, to which commitment, yes, love can also be added, my wife said; no, my kind of freedom was, in effect, a freedom directed against something or somebody, and somebodies or somethings, my wife said, fight or flight, or both together, and without that my kind of freedom did not actually even exist, because-it would appear-it could not exist, my wife said. And so, if these "somebodies or somethings" were not to hand, then I invent and create dependencies of that sort, my wife said, in order that there be something for me to flee from or confront. And I had thereby, for years now, mercilessly and cunningly allotted to her this appalling-or, to be honest just for once: this shameful role- (to use one of my own expressions), my wife said, but not in the manner a lover seeking support would use to his lover, nor even a patient to hid doctor; no, my wife said, I had allotted this role to her (to use one of my favorite words again) like a hangman to his victim, my wife said. She said that I had bowled her over with my mind, then aroused her sympathy, then having aroused her sympathy, had made her my audience, an audience for my appalling childhood and my horrific stories, and when she had wanted to have a part in these stories, in order to steer the stories out of their maze, their rut, yes, their mire, and guide me to her, to her love, so that together we might extricate ourselves from the swamp and leave it behind forever, like the bad memory of an illness-then all at once I had let go of her hand (as my wife expressed it) and started to run away from her, back into the swamp, and now she no longer had the strength, my wife said, to come after me a second time, and who knows how many times more, to lead me out of there again.
♥ After that we divorced. And if I do not recall the years that succeeded this as years in the desert of total barrenness, that is purely thanks to the fact that during these years, as always-since then, before then and naturally during the period of my marriage as well-I worked; yes, it was my work that saved me, even if in reality, of course, it has only saved me for destruction. During those years I not only arrived at certain decisive intuitions, during these years I became aware that my intuitions were in turn rightly interwoven, knot to knot, with my destiny. During those years I also became aware of the true nature of my work, which in essence is nothing other than to dig, dig further and to the end, the grave that others started to dig for me in the clouds, the winds, the nothingness. During those years I dreamed anew the task and secret hope that had been dreamed before, and now I know it was a dream based on "Teacher's" example. During these years I became aware of my life, on the one hand as fact, on the other as a cerebral mode of existence, to be more precise, a certain mode of existence that would no longer survive, did not wish to survive, indeed probably was not even capable of surviving survival, a life which nevertheless has its own demand, namely, that it be formed, like a rounded, rock-hard object, in order that it should persist, after all, no matter why, no matter for whom-for everybody and nobody, for whoever it is or isn't, it's all the same, for whoever will feel shame on our account and (possibly) for us; which I shall put an end to and liquidate, however, as fact, as the mere fact of survival, even if, and truly only if, that fact happens to be me.
♥ That sobered me up completely, once and for all. Sometimes I still scurry through the city like a bedraggled weasel that has managed to make it through a big extermination drive. I start at each sound or sight, as if the scent of faltering memories were assailing my calloused, sluggish senses from the other world. Here and there, by a house or street corner, I stop in terror, I search around with alarmed looks, nostrils flaring, I want to flee but something holds me back. Beneath my feet the sewers bubble, as if the polluted flood of my memories were seeking to burst out of its hidden channel and sweep me away. Let it; I am ready for it. In one last big effort to regain my composure, I have produced my still fallible, stubborn life-I have produced it so that I may set off with the bundle that is this life in my two upraised arms and, for all I care, in the swirling black waters of some dark river,
May I submerge,
Lord God!
let me submerge
for ever and ever,
Amen.