Detective Story by Imre Kertész (translated by Tim Wilkinson).
Title: Detective Story.
Author: Imre Kertész (translated by Tim Wilkinson).
Genre: Literature, fiction.
Country: Hungary.
Language: Hungarian.
Publication Date: 1977.
Summary: As readers, we are accustomed to reading stories of war and injustice from the victims' point of view, sympathizing with their plight. In this novel, the tables have been turned, leaving us in the mind of a monster, as the author plunges us into a story told by a man living outside morality. Now in prison, Antonio Martens is a torturer for the secret police of a recently defunct dictatorship. He requests and is given writing materials in his cell, and what he has to recount is his involvement in the surveillance, torture, and assassination of Federigo and Enrique Salinas, a prominent father and son whose principled but passive opposition to the regime left them vulnerable to the secret police. Preying on young Enrique's aimless life, the secret police began to position him as a subversive and then targeted his father. Once this plan was set into motion, any means were justified to reach the regime's chosen end-the destruction of an entire liberal class. Inside Martens's mind, we inhabit the rationalizing world of evil and see firsthand the inherent danger of inertia during times of crisis. A novel of justice railroaded by malevolence.
My rating: 7.5/10.
My review:
♥ One day he turned to me with the surprising request that I secure the authorization needed for him to write in his cell.
"What do you wish to write about?" I asked him.
"About how I have grasped the logic," he replied.
"Now?" I was flabbergasted. "You mean you didn't understand it during your actions?"
"No," he replied. "Not during them. There was a time beforehand when I understood, and now I have understood again. During one's actions, though, one forgets. But then"-he gave me a dismissive wave-"that's something people like you can't understand."
♥ Do not be surprised by his way with words. In Martens's eyes the world must have seemed like pulp fiction come true, with everything taking place in accordance with the monstrous certainty and dubious regularities of the unvarying dramatic form-or choreography, if you prefer-of a horror story. Let me add, not in his defense but merely for the sake of the truth, that this horror story was written not by Martens alone but by reality, too.
♥ I wish to tell a story. A simple story. You may ultimately call it a sickening one, but that does not change its simpleness. I wish therefore to tell a simple and sickening story.
♥ I completed the course; they brainwashed me. Not enough, though, not by a long chalk. All sorts of things were still left in there, much more than I would have any need for, but then they were in a tearing hurry. Everything was screamingly urgent. Order had to be created, the Consolidation had to be pushed for, the Homeland saved, upheaval polished off; and it all seemed to come down to us. "We'll see about that," people would say if something were giving them a headache. I'm damned if I learned anything, but the work interested me. And the pay even more.
♥ "You crackpot!" I said to him. "There can't be more than a few hundred, or maybe a thousand, in the whole country."
"I couldn't care less," he says. "Anyone who wants something else is Jewish. Otherwise why would he want something else?" I just looked at him dumbfounded. Rodriguez had his logic, and no mistake. But once he had set off on the path of his logic, there was no stopping him. "Why?!" he bellowed in my face. "Why do they resist?"
"Because they're Jews."
♥ "They're still resisting! Why? What for? Why?!"
A tricky question, indeed, as far as I was concerned. Seriously, why? I didn't know. I still don't know, not I. To be honest, I wasn't much interested either. I have never given any thought to motives; I've made do with the idea that there are criminals on the one hand and criminal investigators on the other. As far as I was concerned, I belonged to the latter category. In the CID that had been perfectly adequate; any speculations would have been a waste of energy. But with the Corpsmen, of course, it's different. There you need a philosophy, as Diaz put it, or a moral worldview, as they taught in the training course. I had neither..
♥ It was getting into the afternoon; we were just taking a bit of a break, and the mood seemed cordial. At such times, it does one good to chat, even with the boss.
So I dug a little further. "You mean the police of hostile states as well?"
At that he raised a finger. "Nowhere and at no time," he said, "are the police hostile."
♥ "It's just... how should I put it... I mean, I actually thought we were serving the law here."
"Those in power, sonny boy," Diaz corrects me. My head started to ache. Oddly, it was actually Diaz who made it ache, not Rodriguez.
To that I say, "Up till now I thought the two were the same."
"Fair enough," Diaz conceded. "Only you shouldn't lose sight of the order."
"What order is that?"
"Those in power first, then the law," Diaz says quietly with that inimitable smile of his.
♥ "He'll be back home."
They then fell silent. Each sank into an armchair. Salinas blew fragrant smoke rings. He stretched out his long, muscular legs, his black patent-leather shoes gleaming in the twilight. He undid the buttons of his impeccable suit jacket and loosened his fashionable necktie.
Maria was sitting with a straight back, hands resting in her lap.
They waited. They were waiting for Enrique, both of them-for the Enrique whom we had already entered into our records and for whom they were anxiously longing as for their destiny.
♥ Surprised, are you? Why? I can tell much stranger tales than that one. If I were to get going, there'd be no end to them-all manner of things happened in our setup. After all, the people working for the Corps are only human. People everywhere are only human, and of all sorts, what is more.
♥ Nonexistence. The society of the nonexistent. In the street yesterday a nonexistent person trod on my foot with his nonexistent foot.
♥ I dropped in on a café, flopped down on the terrace. I was boiling with anger, the heat, and impotence.
♥ They agreed that life was getting better as the consolidation was taking hold. They were pleased to establish that distinct signs of life were detectable in the business sphere. Conditions were improving-that was Baldy's view. A mood of optimism sprang up. They ordered another round of refreshers. With the greatest of pleasure I would have tossed a bomb among them.
♥ The idea of suicide surfaces, regular as clockwork, as the evening draws in. That is when it is the most alluring. As the sun goes down, a woman's seductive power, and like some tropical sap it gets under my skin, softens up my muscles, loosens the innards, draws my head toward my guts, thaws the bones, fills me with a sickly-sweet disgust, to give in to which is a nauseating pleasure. One thing I can direct against it is my uneasy love for my mother.
♥ Of course, living is another way of killing oneself: its drawback is that it takes so horribly long.
♥ Under certain circumstances suicide is not acceptable. It shows a lack of respect for the wretched, so to say.
♥ I've had a bellyful of my life. Break with this inaction, emerge from the stillness!...Yes, muteness is truth; but a truth that is mute, and the ones who speak will be right.
I have to speak. More: to act. To make an attempt at leading a life that I shall try to make worth the trouble of living it.
♥ Finally the child sidled up to her. As soon as she was within reach, the newspaper woman grabbed her and started hitting her-with the tenacity of the wretched and the mercilessness of those who have had their hopes made a mockery of.
I am sick of atrocities, though these are now the natural order of our world. And I would still like to act!
♥ So on a few occasions we cracked down here and there. The price of drugs would go up. Ramón right then was left without a supply, and his eyes were even duller, even more steely-gray and vacant as a result. All he was left with were slander, fear, clearsightedness, and resentment.
♥ A restless spirit was Ramón, as you can see. He was looking for solid ground under his feet because he was afraid, afraid of himself and everybody else. He was afraid of society because-so he says-he is familiar with its murderous laws. And he was afraid of the police above all; he feared and loathed them. But if you want my opinion, Ramón simply needed fear, God knows why. Don't look to me for explanations; I know nothing about what makes the mind tick. I'm just a flatfoot, that's the profession I trained for. What I can say, tough, is that a guy like him was not exactly a big deal for us. We ave more than enough of his type. They fear in order to be ale to loosen up suddenly. They view everybody and everything as sordid so as to become sordid themselves. Apart from that, each of them individually is different.
♥ Yes, that too is Enrique's voice. Suicidal thoughts, confused street scenes, self-encouragement, hatred, and love. And all of it side by side, knotted together, jumbled up. Enrique was an adolescent, a child.
♥ Happiness makes you lose your mind. That doesn't natter, but then happiness paralyses you. I forget about everything else. I'm living as if I had a right to live; I'm living as if I were really existing. I make plans, dream of the future, build a life for the two of us, want to marry her-as though no one else but us were alive. Meanwhile I sense how absurd this all is, as there is no future, only the present, a state, a state of emergency.
♥ A sweet yet anguished relationship it was, inexcusable, I admit it. But in all likelihood that was precisely the attraction. Some crazy compulsion once drove me to the point of reading to her from Enrique's diary. That wasn't out of meanness, please believe me. What I mean is that I didn't read it to her in order to torment her, or so that I might-how the devil should I put this?-get a kick out of it. No way was there anything sexual in it. It was just that Enrique's shade was settling on me, and I felt it was too massive. I wanted it to settle over both of us. I had that right, whatever you may say, I had the right, since we owed each other. Enrique's shade settled on both of us. I wanted us to carry it together, to go around together beneath it, as if we were under a huge, monstrous umbrella, two lost souls in a storm...
It was a silly thing to do! She became upset, threw herself onto the bed, and screamed. She called us all murderers: me, Enrique, all men, life as a whole.
"Murderers!" she screamed.
"And you?" I ask. "What about you? You're a whore, an out-and-out tramp!" And believe it or not, I suddenly caught myself accusing her of treachery, and reproaching her for not having swung from the same rope as the accused, which is to say Enrique. I, who am supposed to be a flatfoot, after all.
Yet I understood Jill well: she was a woman, a woman first and foremost.
♥ We could have cracked down on them, sure we could. But then what? They were pros; they weren't doing anything. We wouldn't have dragged a word out of them; what we would have been able to get from them we knew anyway. It was all window dressing. They didn't run many risks: it wasn't they who undertook the actions. So what the hell were we supposed to do? We kept them under observation until events caught up with them. Then they all disappeared as if they had been swallowed up by the earth. A confounded line of work ours is; I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
♥ "You're a clever girl, Jill. I envy you. You don't groan under the iron fist of dictatorship, you purr," so Enrique. At least according to the diary, and Jill later confirmed it. "Why don't you take notice of it?"
"Because it doesn't interest me," she said. She was started to get nettled.
"Jill," he said, "you're talking as if you hated the people who are being kept over there, behind the fence."
"That's right," she confirmed. "I hate them, because they're standing between us."
♥ A bit of jostling is unavoidable. Then the frisking. Women's dresses are particularly suspicious-they have room for all manner of things. A lovely female body, for example. Jill carried a bruise on her breast for a long time afterward.
♥ "You mustn't forget about you future, Enrique."
"I'm living for the present, Dad."
"Ah!" He waved that aside. "The present is just temporary."
I boiled up. "I know," I burst out. "It only has to be accepted temporarily-temporarily, but every day afresh. And every day ever more. Temporarily. Until we have lived to the end of our temporary lives, and one fine day we temporarily die. Well, not for me, Dad! No and again no!"
"What do you want, Enrique?" he asked.
"Something definitive," I answered. "Something solid and permanent. Something that is me." And all of a sudden I came out wit it: "I want to act. I want to change my way of life, Dad."
He seemed to wince, but why worry about that! I heard only my own voice as it came out at last with my innermost desire, so categorically that at a stroke I felt everything had become simple and clear.
♥ "You do realize, don't you," he kicked off, "that there isn't a single rational reason for someone who is called Salinas to be in the resistance?"
"It's not clear to me where you draw the bounds of rationality, Dad," I riposted.
"At realities, Enrique. Only ever at realities. ..You do realize then, don't you, that if you risk your neck, you'll be doing so for others, not yourself?"
His question again gave me pause. "Within the narrow bounds that you've set, I have to concede that that is so," I said at length.
"The bounds are always narrow." He leaned toward me from behind the desk. "If a person resolves to fight, he ought to know what he is fighting for. Otherwise it makes no sense. A person usually fights against a power in order to gain power himself. Or else because the power in question is threatening his life. You have to acknowledge, though, that in our case neither of these holds true. ..You do realize, don't you," I heard his voice continue, "you do realize that every faction with a sense of purpose needs its unsuspecting tools. Who are tools even though they are called heroes, and even if statues are erected to a few of them-only ever a very few-in public places."
"I know," I mumbled hoarsely.
"You do realize, Enrique, you do realize, don't you, what you're putting at risk?"
Again I had to think about it.
"My life," I eventually said.
"Your life!" he exclaimed. "You say that as if you were a child throwing aside a rag doll that you're fed up with! Enrique, wake up to the fact that you're living among mere concepts and thinking in terms of empty words. You're putting your life at risk, you say, but you don't have a clue what you're talking about. Try to grasp the fact that your life is you yourself, as you are sitting here, with your very real past, a possible future, and everything that you mean to your mother. Look at this evening, look down at the street, look around you in the world, and imagine it all being here no more. Grab your body, pinch your flesh, and imagine all that being no more. Can you imagine it? Do you have any idea what it means: to live? How could you know? You're still young for that, and healthy... You've never been at death's door and come back from there to rediscover life with wonderstruck joy... But do you at least realize that you were lied to at school? Do you realize that there is no afterlife, nor any resurrection? Do you realize that just this one life is given to us, and if we lose it, we also lose ourselves? Do you realize..."
I listened, flabbergasted. His words were spellbinding; I had never seen my father like this. I would never have thought him to be a coward. How was I to guess the purpose of his probing?
"I know," I said, striving to hold myself in check, though something was quivering inside me.
"Well, if you know," Father asked, "what more do you want? What's the point of fighting if you have no reason to fight? Why risk your life, if it's not in danger?" He got up from his place and came around to me. He leaned over me, grasping my shoulders with both hands. They were strong, very strong. "Why?" he entreated. "Tell me why, I want to know. Tell me!"
So I told him. I shook his hands off my shoulders and spilled it all out. Jill was still dancing in my nerves and lurking in my words. I told him that my life was not in danger, it was just that I could not be reconciled to it. "I would rather not have it," I said, "than live it like this." I talked about my itch to throw up, my abomination of everyday life. How I hated everything around me, everything. I hated their policemen, their newspapers, their news. I hated going into an office, a shop, even a café.I hated the furtive glances around me, the people who had been despised yesterday but were celebrated today. I hated the sufferance, the self-interest, the hide-and-seek, the perpetual one-upmanship, the privileges and the lying doggo... Also the patrolman on the highway, who didn't have the guts to kick me, simply because my name is Salinas: I hated him more for that than for touching me with his boot. I hated the blindness, the bogus hope, the algal life, the stigmatized who, when they get a day's break from the lashes of the whip, immediately start to sigh about how good life is... And I hated myself too, myself above all, merely for being here and doing nothing. I was well aware that I too was stigmatized, for the time being at any rate, and the longer I did nothing, the more I would be so. Jill appeared before my eyes again, the nauseatingly seductive life that she offered me.
"And," I shouted, "in order to do more than just hate but bare my teeth as well, it's enough for me to think of myself dutifully taking my exams, starting a family and raising children, paying my taxes and tending flowers in my garden... In short, over time becoming a happy and well-balanced jailbird!"
♥ Everything is a matter of logic. Events per se mean nothing. Life itself an be regarded as an accident. The function of the police, however, is to bring logic to bear on Creation, as I heard Diaz say many a time. A wise man, Diaz was.
♥ I am unhappy talking about this, especially going into details. All the newspapers have printed enough bullshit about this sort of thing nowadays; everybody now knows how that sort of thing goes: roughly the way they can see in their idiotic movies, just a bit more to the point. And well, with the difference that everything is for real.
It's nasty work, I can tell you, but it's part of the job. We take away the offender's mind, shred his nerves, paralyze his brain, rifle through every pocket and even his innards. We slam him into a chair, draw the curtains, light a lamp-in short, we go by the book. We didn't make any effort to surprise the offender with some original twist. Everything happened in the way those ham-handed films would have prepared him for; everything happened the way he would expect; and precisely that was always the surprise-check it out if you don't believe me.
♥ This was all bluff, as you can see, to prepare the ground. We stun him with a deluge of questions. He has to feel that he is utterly alone, whereas there are a lot of us; that we are able to do with him what we want; and that we know everything, much more than he could suspect. But that we've got it all wrong, and he's the only one who can set us straight, if he wishes to improve his circumstances. It's a stale old number, but it usually works. If you know of a better one, say so.
♥ Everybody had their place with us, and if the Homeland's security was under threat, we weren't accountable to anyone.
♥ And then a strange thing happened. As Diaz was leaning toward him, Enrique spat a huge glob of phlegm in his face. A strange thing, that was. And not just strange: dilettante, I would have to say. Yes, that's what I would have to say. No one spits in Diaz's face. Not that Diaz doesn't give people a thousand reasons to do so; it's just that it's both futile and risky, and one doesn't run risks for something futile. It takes a profound bitterness, at the very least, or a profound ignorance. Whichever the case, no one who has any interest in living, real living, spits in Diaz's face. During my career nothing like that ever happened again.
♥ "Give me the slop at the very last moment, the rotten bourgeois."
"We're not fighting capitalism as much," Diaz reminded him.
"It's all the same to me." Rodriguez's eyes were smoldering. "Bourgeois, Jew, savior of the world-there's nothing to choose between them. Upheaval is all they want."
"And you?" Diaz inquired. "What do you want, Rodriguez, my son?"
"Order. But my order," said Rodriguez.
♥ Don't expect to learn what else happened that evening. It was no longer an interrogation but a poker game. I was still a new boy, as I have said; only then had I begun to see where I was and what I had taken on. I knew, of course, that a different yardstick applied in the Corps-but I believed there was at least a yardstick. Well, there wasn't: don't expect me to tell you what happened that evening.
♥ Later on, though, he just sat between us in his ripped shirt, his pomaded cheeks sunken, his fleshy lower lip drooping limply.
"I don't understand you, gentlemen," he mumbled. "I don't understand. What do you want from me? After all, the state places its trust in me!"
"That's as may be." Diaz nodded, almost like an elementary schoolteacher. "Only we don't place our trust in the state."
The notary just goggled at him with his tiny watery eyes. "I don't understand. I don't understand. In what do you place your trust then?"
"In destiny. Right now, though, we have taken on the role of destiny: so in ourselves." Diaz, one buttock on the desk, smiled his inimitable smile.
For me this was just like a message that Diaz had sent via the notary. I finally grasped his logic, or at least I believe I grasped it. I grasped that we had now cast away everything that bound us to the laws of man; I grasped that we could no longer place our trust in anyone except ourselves. Oh, and in destiny, in that insatiable, greedy, and eternally hungry mechanism. Were we still spinning it, or was it spinning us? Now it all amounts to the same thing. You think you are being very clever in riding events out, as I say, and then you find that all you want to know is where the hell they are galloping off to with you.
♥ Still, they live on in my memory, they live on and keep on spinning there. The tape is short now, just a tiny fraction of what it was originally, but memory is like that. It overlays voices, cuts out what is inessential, replenishes the fading sense, and implacably replays, over and over again, the bits that one might be happiest to delete.
Then there are the silences between the words. I care for those silences least of all. Because the silences are never complete. They are full of murmurs, characteristic flutters, sighs, groans. The real sounds of an imprisoned man. How many shades of sigh exist, for example? Only these spools know. Consider me mad, but as I say: I find these silences the most difficult to bear.
♥ "You amaze me, Dad! You're still living in hope, even now? But what do you want? What can you still want, after everything that has happened?"
Now there was a sound. A word that I didn't understand. I had to double the volume to make out the whisper. And even though I am unable to share in it, now that my own future has become decidedly dubious, I'm coming round to an understanding of the rapture that Salinas distilled into this one word:
"Life."
♥ Not that Diaz needed an hour and a half. I'll be hanged if anyone could have put together as speedily as Diaz a watertight investigational file on conspiracy to engage in criminal acts endangering Homeland security.
♥ Two hours later we were standing in a window bay with Diaz. It was a classical window bay, in one of the Headquarters' classical corridors. It overlooked a narrow courtyard. There was a line of posts on one side. The two Salinases, father and son, were tied up against two posts in the middle. Opposite them were two rows of guards: the firing squad.
"Uncivil." Diaz made a wry face. He was in a gloomy mood; it would sometimes come upon him in his idle moments. "Our line of work is hazardous," he mused. "Today you can be standing up here at the window, but then tomorrow, who knows? You may be down there, tied to a post."
At that moment the fusillade cracked. Did I jump? I don't know. Al at once I sensed that Diaz was looking at me.
"Scared?" His smooth face beamed with insolent curiosity. I would have been more than happy to take a swing at him. I already know then that, when the time came, he would make himself scarce, and it would be futile sending out an APB. He would never be captured. It is always me whom they catch-people like me, I mean.
"Of what?" I asked Diaz.
"Well." He nodded toward the courtyard where the two Salinases were sagging on their fetters like empty sacks. "Of that!"
"That." I shrugged. "I'm not afraid of that. Only the long road that leads to it."
After all, I was still just a new boy then, as I say.