Imre Kertész
The Hungarian Quarterly is proud to make available short stories by and essays on Imre Kertész, Laureate of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature.

(See also The Hungarian Quarterly, Nos.163 and 168)

Imre Kertész
Sworn Statement
A true story

...And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil..

The ensuing statement is intended as a counter-statement to that other statement, by all means more official, if in no way more credible, that was taken down and, it goes without saying, entered into the records at a certain place, on a certain day, at a certain hour, which details we may dispense with here.
This statement is not being made out of any desire to set the record straight, to detract from or add to the facts, as if we believed, for instance, in the importance of the facts, perchance in the truth. We believe in nothing now, unless, perhaps, deaf and blind to truth and lies alike, it is solely in the power of confession, which makes us brother to our solitude and, so to speak, grooms us for our Ultimate Insight, whose frightful name it immediately transforms into the Lamb gambolling before us that-only now does it dawn on us-we have been following for so very long but this time, without our yielding a jot in our consequentiality, may actually catch up with.

*

One fine April day in nineteen hundred and something, the profitable idea struck me that I might spend a few days-two, perhaps, or at the outside three-in Vienna. Who could doubt the periodic necessity for such changes of place and air, for purposes of one's health, indeed, one's general creativity no less, that perpetual effort of the mind (motus animi continuus) which, at least with me, bursts out with renewed joy virtually the instant that I cross the frontiers of this country. Nonetheless, I was guided primarily by purely practical concerns. To put it briefly, I needed to pay a ceremonial visit on Dr U. at the Ministry of Culture, where my services in the domain of translating Austrian authors into Hungarian, truly modest as they were, had attracted a certain amount of attention, to which they were not averse to giving utterance; furthermore, to call on the Institute for Human Sciences, which, just a few days beforehand, had informed me of its intention to support my then-nascent Wittgenstein translation with a stipend to stay in Vienna-a decision that brought honour but also attendant problems of accommodation which, all in all, would best be clarified on the spot; and so on. I ought to add here, however, that the desire for mental renewal, that inclination, secretly dormant in each of us, sometimes even striking us as natural, to think of ourselves as a private person, indeed any sort of person, would not have been roused in me, out of its long and deep swoon, were it not for the promptings of those illusions of personal freedom whose source, unquestionably, is to be sought primarily in the impatient, the culpably impatient (and conspicuously sudden) needs of my own mind, albeit illusions of freedom-or illusory freedoms-that, indisputably, had seemed to be nourished by certain official manifestations and irresponsible pronouncements in recent times.
To that end, urgent telephone calls are initiated between Budapest and Vienna; clarification of appointments with ladies and gentlemen of the Ministry and Institute, room reservations at a cheap but trustworthy hotel, and so forth. Agonized deliberations over whether it is right for me to leave my sick patient back here, on her own, if only for a couple of days, since her condition, it seems, has just turned critical. I purchase a train ticket, and even a seat reservation, all the same. That very evening I develop a fluey temperature, on top of which one of my teeth becomes inflamed and my face swells up. That night I am granted a horrendous apparition. There is a ring at the door, and through the round spy-hole I glimpse a young man the very sight of whom sets me shuddering. My Saviour is visiting me, but in a quite different guise from when he first appeared to me, a good four years before, directly by and above my bed, as if descending from celestial heights and approaching me through the wall, which evidently posed no obstacle to him. Sporting a reddish-tinged beard, his narrow, blue eyes resting upon me with an expression of, beyond any shadow of doubt, unutterable meekness, by a gesture of his hand, clumsy as it was but clearly benedictory, he had approved of my existence; he had affirmed that I should live the way I was living and do what I was doing. He instilled this affirmation into me like a shining truth, the intense warmth of which my heart preserved for a long time afterwards and, from time to time, suffuses me to this day.
This young man at the door did not even vaguely resemble him; he looked like one of those homeless persons who have suddenly emerged from the apocalyptically seething lower depths of the city: the decrepit appearance of an alcoholic, his face covered with blonde stubble, and yet I had no doubt who he was. He could have saved himself the suspicious, unnecessary and confused allusions to the relationship he had nurtured with my sick patient, whom (but I already knew that) he had visited now and again as some sort of preacher and even sold a bible to. He was asking after her this time as well. I sensed that although he was telling the truth, not one word of what he was saying was true; most likely, he was testing me so as to adjust his behaviour to mine; and as an ignoble but increasingly ungovernable mistrust grew within me, he too transformed accordingly, although his face, his blue eyes, remained meek, as if he had not the slightest idea what his hand was up to in the meantime. For his hand had by then threaded itself through the spy-hole. I retreated in terror, first to the back of the hallway then out into the kitchen, but at the end of the arm stretching out after me like an elephant's proboscis or a giant snake was more a hydraulic grab than a hand, tracking me, probing after me with every step I took. I began to shout for help; since I had not let him in, I now saw him as my killer; our ineffable, other-worldly relationship had become a relationship of persecutor and persecuted, and the latter-me-was calling, in an incomprehensibly ludicrous manner, for the police to save me from him. My wife's shaking finally managed to awaken me, though whether it was from my dream or my life I frankly could not say, the difference being so wafer-thin, but in any event, or so I sensed, it seemed to require interpretation. And as so often before, as I always do by now, and yet do so all the more infrequently ever since (for want of better) making it my profession, I sought that in writing. But all that could come out of that was what was already clear: beyond a triggering that could be referred to the pain in my root canal, my irremediably bad relationship to myself, my lack of affection in general and towards myself in particular. Furthermore, a memento mori-and this time not as a reassuring solace, as on my better days, but as an oppressive and bleak threat. The Saviour, I well understood, was sending a message that he was in crisis, he had been neglected and was preparing to punish-indeed kill- me, which is to say himself. In a hasty scrawl, I scribbled the following on a page of my notebook: "So be on your guard; look for a link with the primal happiness, the creation that is concealed in the depth of all things. Write; yet also pay attention to those around me-seek solitude, even create it, but, if at all possible, without criminally demolishing everything as is your wont."
The next day, early in the morning, I was informed by telephone that my patient had died. She had died without me, and I myself was sick in bed. Was that a justification? An excuse? In any case, you're always partly to blame. Still feverish, I went to the dental surgery to have the tooth extracted. The day after that, out to the hospital where my patient had died, and a conversation with the marvellous, charismatic senior consultant L. "Now it is time we were going, I to die and you to live; but which of us has the happier prospect is unknown to anyone but God," he cites with a quiet smile. We have a long talk. I then pitch myself into the mill of a soulless yet, for all that, somehow sobering and thus, ultimately, salutary bureaucracy. I attend to obtaining a copy of the death certificate, take care of the funeral arrangements and, above all-pay, pay, pay.
On reflection, I decide to travel to Vienna after all. Renewed telephone calls, apologies, cancellations, new appointments. New seat reservations there and back. Quite unnecessary, the lady at the ticket office considers, the train is usually half empty. But then I like to travel without worries, safe and secure from all eventualities. By now I don't care that I am paying extra, which is anyway the rule of my life. I intend to make myself a gift of this trip, to give myself a surprise treat as my own bountiful, generous friend. I like travelling; at bottom, it is the one thing that I do like doing. I too have always been good at travelling and bad at arriving, as Bernhard asserts of himself. I like to be on the move, which is to say-nowhere. Four thousand schillings lie tucked away in my desk drawer; should I chance to have any of those friends whom I might apostrophize as "my constant readers", they will already know that two and a half years ago, in 1989, I was in receipt of a bursary to stay one month in Vienna. I may now reveal to them that I also purchased, as traveller's cheques or cash, the entire three-year foreign-exchange or currency-whatsit to which one was entitled (in general, I have no idea about these things and instantly drop off whenever I so much as look at a paragraph or statutory clause, all the more since, in the country in which it was determined that I should live, those statutory paragraphs and clauses, from the time I was born onwards, have always been conceived against me-often against my sheer physical existence-and even those which nominally might, perhaps, have served for my protection invariably turned out, in practice, to be implementable against me; consequently there is no reason to study them). I therefore simply stuffed the four thousand (4,000) schillings left over from my 1989 trip in my pocket. I am not travelling to Vienna in order to stint myself when I get there: if, on the evening of my arrival, I should discover a noteworthy concert is on at the Konzerthaus or Musikvereinsaal, then I will go to it; if I should feel like dining out, then I will dine out, and so forth.
I should not omit to mention in this Sworn Statement that on the evening before my trip I received a beneficent telephone call; the caller, dear in the most pristine and truest sense of the word, asked if I felt like hearing Verdi's Requiem, since there happened to be a spare ticket. So, the evening before my trip I heard Verdi's Requiem at the Opera House; on my way home, the shattering chords of the Libera me Domine de morte aeterna resounded in my head, whilst doubt and deep emotion wrestled inside me, as ever; I bow my head in all things but, to this day, I cannot warm to the thought of resurrection: "Then I don't wish to die, after all," as Marat is reputed to have said.
The reason for my failing to get a wink of sleep the whole night was not that, however, but travel nerves, that infantile neurosis which has dogged me since childhood, and even in the ripeness, or over-ripeness, of my years makes a child of me all over again. I am helpless against them, even though I tenaciously fight them as I do whenever I consciously catch myself indulging in any form of infantility; but as I said, I am helpless against them, and that is to say nothing of those stealthy poisons of infantility that imperceptibly pervade me, time and time again, holding my entire organism in their thrall, like alcohol or some indispensable narcotic.
I asked to be woken up at five o'clock but am already up and about by four.
I hate getting up early, but when I have to get up early then I get up even earlier. My poor wife, dropping from weariness, prepares breakfast and sandwiches for the journey, an orange, a bar of chocolate. At East Station it's like suddenly turning up on the banks of the Ganges at some Hindu festivity. Beggars with gangrenous legs, bawling vendors, shifty-looking drunks. I scurry straight ahead amidst them, arm pressed protectively against the bag dangling from my shoulder; I don't dare stand still, I give nobody anything, buy nothing from anybody, I am mistrustful, there is no affection in me. No affection in me. The train is there, my numbered coach there, my numbered seat there as well, a window seat. I am safe, by and large. The heating is on. The doors close automatically. The seat next to me is empty: I am happy that nobody will be sitting next to me, there is no affection in me. I unpack my journals. The daily paper sickens me with its news. The leader article on the inside page evinces some sense of morality but that only makes things worse: to be moral in an immoral world is in itself immoral. What am I to do? I don't know. Honestly, Katya, I don't know.
I fold up the daily paper and stuff it in the net at the back of the empty seat in front of me. Next I pick up the magazine 2000. From scanning the table of contents, I have a hunch that what will interest me most in this issue is Dalí's journal. Diary of a Genius-no hyperbole there, I have to go along with the title, even if it is a wee bit bombastic; from the word go I am bowled over, bludgeoned into submission, by the mark of genius, a curious blend of childlike lack of inhibitions and braggadocio, and in this stifling ambience I catch a breath of air only through the fissures left open for me, here and there in the text, by the hollowness of the lies. A brief, wry association: my own diary. What was the title I gave it? Galley-Boat Log. Over and above any labels and differences of magnitude, in this country a genius can only feel guilty at best. Who, in this East European hemisphere, would take it into his head to consider himself a genius, unless he were an Anti-genius, one of that handful of mass murderers and usurpers.
An acrid stench suddenly pervades the closed window, as if by way of atmospheric illustration of the scatological elements into which the text delves. I look up from my magazine: Tatabánya. A ravaged, lacerated, bleakly staring, apocalyptic landscape, smoking concrete monstrosities, piping, scaffolding that stretches straight across the sky, like a stern pen stroke deleting a bit of text, or a bit of life; nothing but naked exploitation, harsh expediency, rationality, ugliness. Die Wüste wächst, I reply to Dalí, a landscape without land, no longer gruesome-just dreary, like reality. My passport had already been checked earlier, now the carriage is suddenly swarming with men in grey uniforms. One of them steps up to me, a dark, brisk chap. Hungarian customs, he announces. He asks me for my passport in an impassive tone, modestly, like someone who attributes no importance to himself. And yet: as I get up a second time to fish out my passport from the inner pocket of my leather jacket, hanging from the coat hook, the thought flashes through my mind, quite inexplicably and just as irrationally as the sun shines outside: there is no affection in this man. The lingering impact of Dalí's diary, perhaps, an intuition of my own narcissistic child's and artist's soul, ever thirsty for love, rendered at once defenceless and vulnerable. In the meantime the man has evidently finished; he snaps the passport shut and is just about to hand it back when, still in the same impassive tone as before and yet somehow in a great hurry, from which it may only be my sense of hearing, freshly honed on Salvador Dalí, that picks out a hint of underhandedness-he asks straight out how much foreign currency (or exchange: I shall probably never learn to tell the difference) I am "taking out", as he puts it. One thousand schillings, I promptly rejoin, who knows why, without the slightest hesitation. The man reacts in a most unexpected fashion: "Too much, much too much," he mutters in rapid succession, as if to himself (as the stage direction runs in plays of earlier times). Why too much? I ask perplexedly. Because, he counters, the sum "is higher" than something that, offhand, I don't quite catch. Would I show him the one thousand schillings, he requests. I begin to be imbued by a sure feeling that I know all too well from my, at least in this regard, all too rich experience of life: in a certain sense I have forsaken the scene, and whatever transpires now is no longer happening to me. Inherent to this feeling is a sense of composure and total self-surrender. It is a compliance of the same kind as that with which one goes to meet one's doom, always with an unconditional confidence in time, in the next instalment, the meticulous moves, even as one is secretly aware-and maybe not even regretting-that the end is inexorable. The one thing we are not spared by the last residue of clear-sightedness that, as it were, substitutes for our being there at times like this: we perceive with absolute clarity that we have become part of a certain clockwork folly which is-or so we believe-totally alien to us, to our very essence, and that bothers us a little throughout; but we are, quite simply, no more capable of checking this self-propelled mechanism than the undignified, side-splitting movements of our diaphragms on viewing a low farce.
So I reach into my inside pocket again. My hand does not so much as tremble; it merely hesitates a fraction before, with the flourish of a conjuror forced to perform a trick at a highly inconvenient moment, I manage to fish out, from amongst the four bank notes, each neatly folded in half, a thousand-schilling bill. How much Hungarian money do I have on me, is the next question. Seven hundred forints, I answer. I should show him that too. I show him. We count, it tallies. And now would I empty out the contents of my pockets, runs the quiet but all-too-insistent wish. I empty them. A paper handkerchief, a tram season ticket, a jack-knife, an ash-baked scone. The detached observer that is much more me at such moments than the Chaplinesque clown who is fumbling in his pockets is all the while shaking his head with an uncomprehending but apologetic smile. Of course, my man is finally obliged to indicate, and with his index finger at that, the pocket that I have conspicuously forgotten all about. His intuition might have amazed me, but at this moment nothing amazes me, nor does it later, because I work out that his eye, small as it may be, is-in one respect at least-unerring: that customs-and-excise man's eye, which preserves thousands of years of experience and finesse, since the time when customs controls were first invented by the ancient Egyptians, Persians, Incas or Etruscans-that eye had long, long ago caught and registered the previous hesitation of my hand.
I therefore grope with an all but childish curiosity in the desired pocket and, well I never, what should come to light but-three thousand schillings! I am truly amazed. The customs officer, however, confiscates them on the spot. He also informs me: he is confiscating it because I had only "declared", his word, one thousand schillings whereas in reality he had found four thousand on me. That is true. What is true cannot be gainsaid. However, I don't yet understand what crime, apart from this deception, I have committed. After all, the money that he has found on me is my own, not someone else's, it's not stolen. Yes, says the customs man, but I should have asked for an "export permit". I am frankly surprised; I didn't know that. Nobody had told me. All I ever hear is that everything has been liberalized; anyone can freely deposit and withdraw his money at the bank, unlike in the days of state-ownership. I no longer even need to get my passport endorsed for each and every trip; it had never occurred to me that my money, insofar as it is real (which is to say, western) money, might still belong to the state. No matter, the man says, but on this note he collects from me the three thousand schillings as well as the passport.
With this the spell is broken: I come to myself with a jolt. I entreat him most emphatically not to do this; at twelve o'clock I have an appointment in Vienna with a ministry man; that afternoon another office is expecting me; a hotel room has already been reserved. I could not arrive in Vienna with empty pockets. I did not know an export permit was required. They could not put me in this sort of position. "Very well, Mr Kertész, take your seat, there is no time for this; we have work to do. I shall come back later," is word for word what the customs man says, and then he vanishes, along with my money and my passport.
I sit down. Apart from a certain annoyance, I feel nothing; only after some time has passed does it cross my mind that I had actually been publicly humiliated. Even that thought does not particularly disturb me, being somewhat seasoned in such matters. Still, I cast a fleeting glance around the carriage: the solitary woman in the pair of seats parallel to me, from whom I am separated by the fairly wide corridor between the seat rows, is immersed in her magazine; those sitting further away possibly noticed nothing; the whole thing can hardly have lasted more than two minutes; nobody besides me and my customs inquisitor- whose colleagues, moreover, were busy in the distance with the other travellers-can be aware of what really took place between us.
What can happen to me? "Am I to be decapitated in a public square in the name of the French people?" Obviously, they would have to return the passport to me before we reach the Austrian frontier. I will have to come to terms, however, with the loss of three thousand schillings, though I cannot claim this thought brings tears to my eyes. The fact is, my relationship to money could not be portrayed as one of frenzied passion. That may be a deficiency, from one point of view, but at this moment I reap its benefits. And then in Vienna I have friends who will gladly help me out of a jam, if necessary.
But why did I declare only one thousand schillings (which, all the signs suggest, represents just as great a misdemeanour as declaring the whole four thousand)? I don't know. I rack my brains long and hard over this yet find no answer. I just don't know. There was no affection in that customs officer, but then that cannot be the reason, and anyway show me the customs officer who entertains any feelings of affection for his clientele. Why, why did you fire at a dead body? Why didn't I immediately declare the entire four thousand? I don't know. I peer deep inside myself. I can boast of having some experience in matters of self-analysis. Still, I don't know. Honestly, Katya, I don't know.
I pick up my magazine and carry on reading Dalí's fascinating journal. I try to comprehend the close linkage that Dalí-and psychoanalysts too, as I learn-purports is demonstrable between faeces and gold. In truth, I don't understand this either, however much I rack my brains over it; on the other hand, my feelings are somehow responsive to the idea, unamenable as it may be to my reason, for they tell me that such a connection does indeed exist. Anyone who fathoms this connection, the close link between faeces and gold, and not only grasps it but also, with a cry of creative triumph, says Yes! to it, will become wealthy, as did Dalí. But it is equally obvious that this lucidity is completely independent from, if not diametrically opposed to, genius. Now, I would be really curious as to which of Dalí's truly genial canvases had been inspired, if I may put it that way, by his unsullied, pure genius and which by a covetous wallet that is linked to his bowel functions, constantly on the look-out for its evacuations. The fact is that, however much he may present his life as an unstrained triumphal procession, it cannot always have been entirely unclouded, I muse.
By now Komárom and Gyoýr are behind us, time is racing by; where can my passport be? I start to worry, albeit not as much as the competent person (or, perhaps, persons) plainly expects. At last my man re-appears. In more of a hurry than before and grim of aspect. He asks me for the remaining thousand-schilling note then, instead of giving me back my passport, informs me that I must alight from the train at the Hegyeshalom border crossing. I hear bewildered, fumbling protests. They are of no interest to him, and he says so quite frankly. Instead of the "declared" one thousand schillings he had found four thousand on me, he is sorry to say. At Hegyeshalom I should meet him in the rear carriage, he announces; but that is manifestly an order. On that he disappears.
For a bit, I sit there paralysed. Or more precisely: as if pole-axed. Then I suddenly jump to my feet. I sense blazing up inside me the fire that is the fuel of anger, of life, of aggression. I snatch my shoulder-bag down from the luggage rack and stamp noisily down the length of the train to the rear carriage. The men in grey are sitting in the very last compartment, behind the closed glass door. Clearly in high spirits. Straight away I glimpse my own man is there too. After a curt knock, I rip the door open. They fall quiet and dart looks of undisguised loathing: my sensitive heart is veritably cut to the quick. Being a practising artist, I prefer applause to hostility. This time, though, God help me, I am appearing in a rotten role. On top of that, I have the further handicap that I am incapable of arguing my case level-headedly and coherently in an unfriendly milieu; what is more, rage does not prompt my voice so much as choke it off.
I again gibber something about my commitments in Vienna: that is of no interest to him, the man repeats. I entreat him to return my passport and the one thousand schillings, offering to leave the remaining three thousand on deposit with him because, as my already purchased seat reservation proves, I shall be returning with tomorrow evening's train and we can clear up the matter then; but the three thousand schillings, and at this my man smiles (if not exactly sweetly), must be surrendered in any event, since they have been confiscated, along with the remaining one thousand and the passport; and he repeats the tiresome fact of the divergence that had arisen between the sum I declared and what he had found upon my person. I hit on nothing better than to congratulate him on his magnificent catch: he has succeeded in relieving me of 4,000 schillings when everybody knows that people craftier than I are shifting millions out of the country. Insofar as I have information about any such case, I should report it, says the man, but as it is I ought not to be going around casting aspersions on others because, after all, it was on me that they found three thousand over the "declared" amount. A worthy response, there was no denying it. I sense that I have drained the goblet to the dregs, not sparing myself a single drop. I wrench the door shut on them and, on the hindmost vestibule of the rear carriage, wait with mounting eagerness for us to reach Hegyeshalom.
Hegyeshalom! For decades a standing symbol: on the outward trip-in hoc signo vinces; inward bound, inscriptions along the lines All hope abandon, ye who enter here-Work redounds to every man's honour and fame-Work sets one free. As a reality, as a place, as a train station-a woeful, dusty hole. I traipse listlessly after the man in the grey uniform. I have to wait in a bare, whitewashed room, its rear part criss-crossed by crowd-control barriers of whose purpose I am ignorant. I am not alone; besides me, another man has also been pulled off the train, a big fellow of indeterminate age; potbelly sagging plaintively over the trousers, between belt and a ridden-up pullover; grey shirt, grey jacket, grey trousers, face podgy and unremarkable, nothing discernible behind steamed-up spectacles, least of all a look. Whilst a so-called statement is being drawn up, I hear that his occupation is some sort of "head of department". He puffs, sighs, clears his throat, directs his spectacles my way, flitting past me; to no avail, however, since I pay him no heed; I do not regard him as a fellow-sufferer, I have no wish to share my fate with him, his story is of no interest to me. I am dreadfully sorry. There is no affection in me. Notwithstanding which, I cannot help but notice the clumsy alacrity with which he diligently signs whatever has to be signed. Someone calls; he goes outside then a bit later returns, leaving the door ajar. In the unheated room a draught whisks round my throat and ankles, a colossal billow of petrol fumes swirls in; outside a train is being shunted. I ask him to close the door. He closes it but it does not latch and the wind blows it open again right away. I am just able to reach the door with my foot and give it a hefty shove. Unseemly of me, I admit, but then I don't perceive much seemliness in what is happening around me. I see the head of department is offended. Lest my boorishness cast him in an even poorer light, he hastily distances himself from me: What's done is done, tetchiness isn't going to help matters now, he chides. I am not the slightest bit tetchy, I retort, but I don't see why I should have to put up with sitting here in a draught and stomach diesel fumes from a shunting engine as part of my punishment.
I go back to immersing myself in Dalí's diary. His links to Nietzsche are provocative. The susceptibility of the Spanish to Germans struck me a long time ago: Ortega was likewise a follower of Nietzsche, and Unamuno would effortlessly win the title of Nietzsche's most boring disciple. "Nietzsche was a weakling who had been feckless enough to go mad, when it is essential, in this world, not to go mad!" This sentence from Dalí deeply incenses me. Does the chap not grasp that madness was precisely Nietzsche's most honourable and most consistent act? And that the anal gold-diarrhoea would never have gushed forth with such infinite bounty into his wide-open wallet had Nietzsche remained as "normal", that is, as sober and calculating, as himself, Dalí? After all, someone had to be nailed on the Cross for morality for others to be able to market it at such a good price...
But I cannot continue these musings as my name is called: "so he jumped up in order to follow the customs man into his office." They are all sitting there, the men in grey. "One was smoking a cigarette, the second leafing through some kind of documents, the third scrutinising him-they so fused together in his blurred gaze that, in the end, Stone saw them as a single three-headed, six-armed machine"-my own prophetic words from my novel The Failure. My man, the chief customs officer, puts some papers in front of me: I should read and sign them. What's this? The statement, he says. I start to read it. At the very first sentence, which takes up nearly three lines, I find myself gasping for air. At this moment a flash of clear-sightedness seizes, engulfs and enthrals me. At this moment I finally realize exactly what has befallen me. I could almost cry out Eureka! I see it all now, / Everything, everything, / Now I perceive it all. / I hear the whirring of your ravens' wings...-yes: those three lines state, in essence, that on the 16th day of April 1991, etc., having notified me of the relevant currency and foreign-exchange regulations, the upper limit to the amounts of money that may be exported and the obligation to obtain an official permit for the exportation of sums exceeding that limit, he, the custom's man, had enquired, etc. Yet the man had notified me of nothing. As far as enquiring goes, he had enquired, though certainly not in a proper manner, fully in accordance with the regulations, but effectively in the form of a snap cross-examination. With that the matter was decided, a specific mechanism was set in motion. For at least fifty years, ever since my country entered into war against the civilized world and, above all, against itself, ever since then-except for a break of, let's say, three years-every law of the land has invariably been unlawful. What my ears had picked out behind the customs official's deceitful question, with its automatic presumption of guilt, was the clatter of jackboots, the blare of political rallying songs, the dawn jangle of doorbells, and before my eyes had loomed barred windows and barbed-wire fencing. It was not me who had answered that question but a citizen who had been tormented and broken-in for decades, his consciousness, personality and nervous system damaged, if not mortally wounded-actually more a captive than a citizen. Even now, even here, even for this fraction of a second, I am stunned and stirred by self-pity, the realisation that I have lived my life the way I have lived it, and that this undignified and lethal life has scored its evil sign so deeply inside my instincts. The man-presumably without being aware of it himself-had impelled me, by his very manner, his comportment, to lie from the outset. Judgement does not come suddenly; the proceedings gradually merge into the judgement (Franz Kafka: The Trial). I almost regret that I am unable to let my man, the customs officer, participate in my enlightenment, to share with him our evident truth. For, in the end, he too is a human being, he too has instincts. And his instincts have been scored by the decades just the same as mine, merely with the opposite sign. But our relationship being what it is-official, to put it euphemistically, or in other words, one hundred per cent alienated-I shall never be able to explain this to him, not even if he might, perhaps, understand, though I find that hard to believe.
So I tell him that I am unwilling to sign the statement as it stands. Why not? Because it is not true that he informed me about the law before questioning me. But he did inform me. All right, I say, I will sign if I may add a comment of my own. What do I wish to comment on? That before his questioning he gave me no chance for deliberation, for thinking things over, so that sober reason might prevail over my gut reactions. The statement is to be signed as it stands or not all, comes his response. Then not at all, I retort. A slight, albeit irritated shrug of the shoulders. Whereupon a lower-ranking customs officer with blonde hair and moustache, beard pipes up to announce: "I am a witness; I was there when you drew his attention to it." The announcement does not surprise me, but now I have to fight back a distinct sense of nausea. I casually remark that, from the earliest trials in history right down to those of the most recent past, a witness is always found for everything. And as I get back my passport, along with a receipt for the confiscated 4,000 schillings, I add that it is going to be extremely difficult to get this country to believe it is free. I immediately regret saying this, however; the sentence is meaningless ontologically as well as semantically, and even in respect of strict practicality. But I was much more
preoccupied by what I might call the satisfying feeling that everything which had happened and was happening here was the product of my very own fantasy, that it had happened and was happening according to the laws of my very own fantasy. I address myself once more to my "constant reader", be there only one, and he, perhaps, myself alone: the scene can be read almost word for word in my prophetic novel. The same behaviour, the same procedure, the same nauseatingly stickling legalities as they plunder a person from head to foot and then toss him out, humiliated and besmirched with dark threats, beneath an unfamiliar sky. Like Stone, my strange alterego in the novel, I too had set off for the wider world only to end up at a godforsaken, filthy frontier station, where I am at home, wretchedly, fatefully, fatally at home. Life imitates art, to be sure, but only the kind of art that imitates life, which is to say, the law. Nothing is accidental, everything occurs for me and through me, and when my journey is over I shall finally understand my life.
I step outside into the open, the sun is shining. It occurs to me to call home. Partly to escape this scabrous, dry and grating domain, and at last hear again a loving human voice, but partly also to warn that, contrary to my announced plan, I would be dining at home this evening, after all. I can find no telephone.
I look in the waiting rooms, in the booking hall: none. Out of the station buffet, as indescribable in appearance as in its odour, totters a stocky, rubicund, elderly gentleman, tipsy with drink. I ask him where the telephones are but he doesn't know; his mood euphoric, his eyes red, a peaked cap on his head, his visage transfigured-he moves away. The woman in the buffet suggests I go out of the station then, past the level-crossing, turn right (or maybe left, I no longer remember), and around three hundred metres further on I would see a yellow building, the post office: there was sure to be a telephone there. I step outside the station building and, at the sight of the dusty road, the dusty sky, the dusty houses and the three hundred metres yawning before me, I know that I am not going to make that telephone call. Back into the booking hall to check how I can get back to Budapest most quickly. I ask the woman at the counter if the express train that I can see from the timetable board is due at around ten fifty-one actually exists. Yes, she says, but it is an international train. Good enough for me, I respond and, more in affirmation than as a question, add that my Budapest-Vienna return ticket is valid for it, isn't it. Yes, the woman replies, but as she had already said, it is an international train. I at once become suspicious: What does that mean? It means that it is forbidden to board it, comes the explanation. I refer to the fact that I have paid out two and a half thousand forints for an international ticket, the first half of which I had used only in part, the second half not at all.
I notice that my arguments make no great impression; the next train, so far as I can see, is a stopping train, which leaves in the afternoon and plods along for several hours before reaching Budapest. In the end, the woman at the counter gives me a good piece of advice, which is to ask the customs men for permission to use my valid ticket to board the express train for which I had purchased it.
Back to the customs post then. They are all sweetness and light. Not going to Vienna after all, inquires my man. I don't understand the question; I am in no mood for joking or familiarity. I ask him if he would agree to my boarding the international express with my valid ticket; as far as he is concerned, he has no objection, the customs man says, but his assent, on its own, is by no means sufficient: I also need to ask for permission from the border guard. I see several soldiers hanging around, one carrying a sort of bedside table-drawer on a white strap slung round his neck. I present my request. Speechless blank faces. I slowly lose confidence; the feeling creeps over me that I may inadvertently have struck up in Japanese or some other language that is unknown to me and, above all, to these soldiers. Finally, one of them blurts out that I must wait for the commander. A good quarter of an hour later, I spot a gaunt, more elderly officer with glasses and an administrative mien trotting beside the rail track, accompanied by a number of lower-ranking uniforms. I accost him and present my request. I sense that my dejection is beginning to show on me. But this officer seems to understand what I am telling him. "You had to get off the Vienna express?" he asks, diplomatically but sternly. Yes, I had to get off. All right, he says, giving me his permission; he sizes me up from head to toes with a curt, dispassionate, disparaging look and then carries on. Still, I sense quite distinctly that in this officer there is affection. In prisons, camps and other suchlike places there is always an officer or orderly who revives your faith in living. We place trust in this sort of officer; if he interrogates us, we do not lie, we long for his presence to comfort us, and even if he puts a bullet in our head, we know that he does not do it to amuse himself but because he has no other choice.
The train is here. I get on. I ask if I may take a seat in a second-class, non-smoking compartment. The gentleman and lady in the compartment, who plainly do not belong together, don't understand Hungarian-a fact that I find reassuring, particularly right now. The conductor comes by. I will have to pay a supplementary charge on my ticket, he informs me. How much? I ask very meekly, very politely. Because..., he starts to explain. I didn't ask why, I interrupt him very meekly and very politely, but how much, because it may be that I don't have enough money on me. Five hundred and forty forints, comes the answer. I am reassured and pay. The conductor supplies an explanation anyway; his efforts are futile, for although I very meekly and very politely hear him out, I don't understand, nor am I interested. The main thing is I don't have to get off again.
The train glides evenly, almost noiselessly. It is quiet. The gentleman is dozing, the lady reading. An English novel, as I see from the cover. I sit there motionless. With the train, my eyes skim along the skyline, just above the monotonous landscape; I am looking out but don't see, don't want to see anything. Slowly, very slowly, a sense of shame spreads through me; it starts in the toes, passes through pit of the stomach into the throat, and swirls towards the brain. I know that now I must reckon with days, weeks, perhaps even months of depression. Where had I got the idea that I could travel to Vienna? Why did I think that I could do something other than what I have done up till now? Up till now I have lived like a captive, hiding my thoughts, my talent, my essential being, for I knew full well that here, where I live, I can only be free as a captive. I knew full well that this freedom was only a captive's freedom, which is to say, an illusion; but at least-or so I believed-it was an honourable illusion, more honourable than my living as a captive in the illusion of freedom. I had clearly seen the dangers of such an existence, seen that a captive's life can also make one a captive too in the end; that it forces me deep below the cultural level of this century, narrows my horizon, wears down my talent. And yet this was how I had wanted to live, in the belief that this too is a life, after all-a life that somebody, possibly I myself, ought to formulate. Why, then, had I wanted to escape, or at least take off for a few days' vacation? Why had I thought I might be able to change anything in this life, which I have already long since regarded, long since treated, as not being my own life at all but some onerous duty that has been imposed on me, like an examination subject, and over which I retain a single privilege-or freedom, if you prefer: if it should reach the stage where it sickens me irretrievably, I shall put an end to it with two packs of sleeping tablets and half a bottle of crummy Albanian cognac.
At this point I come to my senses. We are passing Tatabánya again. In the meantime, my journey is over too, and see! I understand my life. Now, as ever, since I can do nothing else, I clutch greedily at the aggression that has been shown towards me, as at a dagger, and direct its blade towards myself; but the strength and bitter pleasure with which my thoughts, as it were, lay their hand on me this time almost shock me with their unfeigned ferocity. I see it all now, / Everything, everything, / Now I perceive it all. / I hear the whirring of your ravens' wings...-yes, the cup is full, I am unable, it seems, to sustain any more wounds. Six decades of varied, albeit monotonous dictatorships, now the as yet unnamed residue dictatorship of all that, have worn down an immunity that I had built up by my tolerance-pointless tolerance. On my riddled, mortally wounded body, now held together solely by the bundles of my nerves, there is no place left for a hypodermic needle, never mind a spear tip. I have lost my tolerance, I can be wounded no more. I lost. To all appearances I am travelling with this train, but the train is now merely transporting a corpse. I am dead. (For the final consummation and for me to feel less lonely, my last wish was that on my grave or my urn, or whatever should remain of me, if not as a sign of my rehabilitation then at least of forgiveness, a customs officer should lay a single flower stem...)

(1991)

Translated by Tim Wilkinson

---

Imre Kertész
The Union Jack
(Short story)

"before us fog, behind us fog, and beneath us
a sunken country"
(Mihály Babits)

If I may perchance wish now, after all, to tell the story of the Union Jack, as I was urged to do at a friendly gathering a few days-or months-ago, then I would have to mention the piece of reading matter which first inculcated in me, let's call it a grudging admiration, for the Union Jack; I would have to tell about the books I was reading at the time, my passion for reading, what nourished it, the vagaries of chance on which it hinged, as indeed does everything else in which, with the passage of time, we discern what, whether it be the consequentiality of fate or the absurdity of fate, is in any event our fate; I would have to tell about when that passion started, and whither it propelled me in the end; in short, I would have to tell almost my entire life story. And since that is impossible, in the lack not just of the requisite time but also of the requisite facts, for who indeed, being in possession of the few misleading facts that one deems to know about one's life, could say of himself that he even recognises right away his life, that process, course and outcome (exit or exitus) which is so totally obscure to himself, to himself above all; so probably it would be best if I were to begin the story of the Union Jack with Richard Wagner. And though Richard Wagner, like a persistent leitmotif, would lead us with uncanny sureness, by a direct path, to the Union Jack, I would have to broach Richard Wagner himself at the editorial office. That editorial office exists no more, just as the building in which that one-time editorial office was then (three years after the war, to be precise), for me, for a while, still very much in existence exists no more-that one-time editorial office full of gloomy corridors, dusty crannies, tiny, cigarette-choked rooms lit by bare bulbs, ringing telephones, bawling, the quick-fire staccato of typewriters, full of fleeting excitements, abiding qualms, vacillating moods, and later the fear, unvacillating and ever less vacillating, which seeped out from every cranny, as it were, to squat over everything, the one-time editorial office that had long since not conjured up long-bygone editorial offices, at which in those days I was obliged to turn up at some execrably early hour, something like seven o'clock every morning, say. With what sort of hopes, I wonder?, I mused aloud and publicly in the friendly gathering which had been urging me to tell the story of the Union Jack. The young man (he would have been about twenty) whom, through a sensory delusion to which we are all prey, I then considered and sensed to be the most personal part of my self I see today as in a film; and one thing that very likely disposes me to this is that he himself-or I myself-somehow also saw himself (myself) as in a film. This, moreover, is undoubtedly what renders tellable a story which otherwise, like every story, is untellable, or rather not a story at all, and which, were I to tell it in that manner anyway, would probably drive me to tell precisely the opposite of what I ought to tell. That life, that twenty-year-old young man's life, was sustained solely by its formulability; that life lumbered along, with its every nervefibre, every fitful effort, solely at the level of formulability. That life strove with all its might to live, and in that respect stood in contrast, for example, to my present striving, hence also my present formulations, these incessantly miscarried formulations, colliding incessantly against the unformulable, grappling-naturally, to no avail-with the unformulable: no, the striving for formulation, then and there, was actually aimed at keeping the unformulable-namely, the essence, which is to say this life, drifting, grinding and stumbling along in the dark, lugging along the burden of darkness-in the shadows, because that young man (I) could only live this life in that way. I made contact with the world through reading, that epidermis around the layers of my existence, as through some form of protective clothing. Tempered by reading, distanced by reading, obliterated by reading, that world was my fallacious but sole liveable, indeed, now and again, almost tolerable world. In the end, the predictable moment arrived when I became a lost cause for that editorial office, and thereby a lost cause for... I all but said for society too, but had there been a society, or rather if what there was had been a society, then I became a lost cause for what passed for society, for that horde which now whimpered like a whipped dog, now howled like a ravening hyena, always greedy for any provender that it could tear to shreds; I had long been a lost cause for myself, and I almost became a lost cause for life as well. But even at that rock bottom-at least what, at the time, I supposed to be rock bottom, until I got to know depths that were deeper still, ever deeper, depths that were bottomless-even at that rock bottom the formulability was retained, the camera setting, one might say: the camera lens of a pulp thriller, for example. Where I acquired it, what its title was, what it was about, I have no idea.

I don't read thrillers any longer, ever since, in the midst of reading one thriller, I suddenly caught myself being utterly uninterested in who the murderer might be; that in this world-a murderous world-it was not only misleading and actually outrageous, but also quite unnecessary for me to fret about who the murderer was: everybody was. That way of formulating it, however, did not occur to me at the time, some forty years ago, perhaps; it was not a formulation that would have seemed of any use to my strivings at that time, some forty years ago, perhaps, as it was merely a fact, one of those simple-albeit obviously not entirely insignificant-facts amongst which I lived, amongst which I had to live (because I wanted to live): it was much more important to me that the main protagonist, a man with an exciting job-a private eye, maybe-had the habit, before embarking on one of his deadly dangerous enterprises, of always "treating himself" to something, a glass of whiskey, or occasionally a woman, but sometimes he would make do with an aimless, headlong spin along the highway in his car. That detective novel taught me that a person needs pleasure in those rare intervals in one's torture sessions: until then I would not have dared to formulate that, or if so, then at best as a sin. In those times, deadly dangers were already menacing in the editorial office, deadly boring dangers, to be quite precise, but no less deadly for all that, ever fresher ones every day, albeit the same ones every day. In those times, after a short and utterly inexplicable temporary hiatus, food coupons were again in use, most notably for meat, though quite unnecessarily as it happened-most especially for meat-since there were in-sufficient meat stocks to justify the reciprocatory gravity of issuing coupons for meat. Around that time, next door to the editorial office they opened, or re-opened, the so-called Corvin Restaurant, which is to say the so-called Corvin Restaurant in the so-called Corvin Department Store, where (the store being under foreign ownership, or to be more punctilious, in the hands of the occupying power) they even served meat, and without meat coupons at that, although the meat was on offer at double price (in other words, they asked double the price that would have been asked for elsewhere, had meat been on offer anywhere else); and around that time, if the prospect of a fresher, deadly boring deadly danger lay in wait for me at the editorial office, usually in the form of one of those otherwise so splendidly styled "staff conferences", on such occasions I would "treat myself" beforehand to a breaded cutlet in this restaurant (very often out of an advance on my salary for the following month, since the institution of the advance, obviously as the result of some oversight, still remained operative for a while, everything else having long ceased to be operative); and how-ever many and whatever sort of deadly boring dangers to life I might have to confront, the awareness that I had 'treated myself' beforehand, the awareness of my foresightedness, my secret, even my freedom that inhered in the couponless breaded cutlet and in the advance on my salary that I had procured to pay for it, about which nobody besides myself could have known, except perhaps the waiter (but then he knew only about the breaded cutlet), and perhaps also the cashier (but then he knew only about the advance)-that helped me through every horror, every ignominy, and every infamy visited on me that day. For around that time the everydays, the everydays that stretched from dawn to dusk, were transformed into systematic ignominies that stretched from dawn to dusk, but how they were transformed into that, the formulation-or series of formulations-of that otherwise most certainly noteworthy process no longer figures amongst my remembered formulations and so, most likely, did not figure amongst my formulations at the time either. The reason for that, obviously, may be that my formulations, as I have already noted, served solely for the rehearsal of my life, for the bare sustenance of my life that stretched from dawn till dusk, whilst they looked on life itself as a given, like the air in which I am obliged to breathe, the water in which I am obliged to swim. Quality of life as an object of formulation was simply left outside the scope of my formulations, as those formulations did not serve to gain an understanding of life but, on the contrary, as I have said, to make life liveable, or in other words, to avoid any formulation of life. Around that time, for example, certain trials were grinding ahead in the country, and to the questions of the friendly gathering that had been urging me to tell the story of the Union Jack, the pressing, badgering questions of this gathering, mustered mainly from amongst my former students, and so from people mostly twenty to thirty years younger than I, though by that token no longer quite so young themselves, heedless to the fact that with their very questions they were interrupting and distracting me from telling the story of the Union Jack-so to those questions as to whether I, as it were, had "believed" in the counts of the indictments laid out at these trials, whether I had "believed" in the guilt of the accused and so on, I replied that those questions, and most particularly the question of the credibility or incredibility of the trials, did not even cross my mind at the time. In the world which surrounded me then-the world of lies, terror and murder, as I might well classify that world sub specie aternitatis, though that does not even begin to touch on the reality, the singularity, of that world-in that world, then, it never so much as crossed my mind that every single one of those trials might not be lies, that the judges, prosecutors, defending counsels, witnesses, indeed the accused themselves would not all be lying, and that the sole truth which was functioning there, and tirelessly at that, was not the hangman's, and that any other truth would or could function here except the truth of arrest, imprisonment, execution, the shot in the head, and the noose. Only now did I formulate it all so trenchantly, in such decidedly categorical terms-as if then (or even now, for that matter) there had existed (or exists) any solid basis for any sort of categorisation-now that they were urging me to tell the story of the Union Jack, and so I was obliged to tell it all from the viewpoint of a story, to attribute significance to something which has only subsequently acquired significance in the public mind-that bogus awareness raised to the status of generality-but which in the reality of those days, at least as far as I am concerned, had only very slight, or an entirely different, significance. For that reason I cannot assert, for example, that I would have felt morally outraged, say, in connection with the trials that were grinding ahead around that time:

I don't recall that I felt that, and I don't even consider it very likely, if only because I did not have a sense of any morality whatsoever-either within me or around me-in the name of which I might have been outraged. But all this, as I say, is to massively overrate and overexplain what those trials meant for me-for a self whom I now see only from a great distance, as on some faded, shaky and brittle film-because in reality they barely grazed my consciousness; they signified, let us say, a gelling of the constant danger, and with that, of course, of my constant disgust, a heightening of a danger that might not yet have been threatening me directly, perhaps, or to express myself poetically, a further darkening of the horizon, in spite of which, however, it was still possible to read, if there happened to be something to read (Arc the Triomphe, for example). What affected me was not so much the morality of the trials that were grinding ahead then, but rather the influences that ground along at the level of sensibility; hence, the reflexes evoked from me were not moral, but rather those acting at the level of sensory organs and neurological paths-mood reflexes, one might call them, like the aforementioned disgust, then alarm, indignation, fleeting scepticism, general disconcertment, and the rest. I recall it being summer at the time, for instance, and that summer had announced itself from the very onset with an almost unbearable heat. I recall that during that unbearably hot summer it had occurred to somebody in that editorial office that the "young colleagues", as it was phrased, ought to partake of some higher, theoretical indoctrination, as it was phrased. I recall that on one especially hot evening of that very hot summer, a bigwig in the editorial office-a party first-something, a party bigwig, a bigwig held in general terror, a bigger and more senior bigwig than the senior editor-in-chief himself, though, as far as his authority went, one who was held in a fair degree of hiddenness, if I may be allowed the Heideggerian paraphrase-imparted to us "young colleagues", as it was phrased, this theoretical indoctrination, as it was phrased. I even recall the room in which the lecture was held, the now no longer existing room, the vanished site of which is itself now built over, the so-called "typing pool", by which is to be understood the typewriters, the female typists who operated those typewriters with a furious clatter, the writing desks and ordinary tables, chairs, commotion, countless telephones, countless colleagues, countless sources of sound, all of which, that evening, had already been silenced, removed, tidied away, and transformed into a pious audience, duly seated on the chairs, and the lecturer who was indoctrinating them. I recall that the double-leafed balcony door was wide open, and how much I envied the lecturer for the frequency with which-by the end, virtually every minute-as if by way of punctuation marks to the lecture, he was able to step outside to cool off on the vast balcony, not stopping until he reached the balustrade, where, leaning out over the parapet, he would look down each time into the steaming chasm of the Grand Boulevard, and each time, in the stifling room, I too thought longingly of the dust-choked, leafy boughs of the roadside trees, perhaps just stirring in the twilight air, the passers-by sauntering beneath them, the dilapidated terrace of the Simplon (later Simpla) Cafe opposite, the clandestine streetgirls clacking by afresh, far from clandestinely, on their high-heeled shoes towards their beats in Népszínház or Bérkocsis Streets. It was all the more conspicuous, though only later did I attribute any significance to it, that at the end of the lecture this bigwig, face burnt red as a lobster, sweat pouring from his brow, and literally trembling-from the effort, I supposed at the time (if I supposed anything at all at the time)-was in no great hurry to get down to the street; quite the contrary, he was hardly able to tear himself away from us, addressing several of us individually, until at long last we were rid of him, and I too was able to step out onto the balcony and, with a sigh of relief, look down at the street where, at that very moment, the bigwig stepped out of the building and, at that very moment, out of a black car that was idling by the pavement jumped two ominously helpful men to assist the bigwig most eagerly, but perhaps a touch insistently, into the black car, whilst in that unexpected hush which sometimes falls for a brief moment, like a climax or an orchestral pause, to interrupt the din of the city in the settling twilight at the end of each unbearable day the nightmarish lights of the street lamps suddenly lit up. It will come as no surprise to you, mature, cultured people that you are, I said to the friendly gathering, mustered mainly from my former students, which had been continually urging me to tell the story of the Union Jack, to learn where that black car took its victim, or that the bigwig had been continually spying down from the balcony on the black car waiting down below, hoping, for a while, that the black car was not waiting for him, then as time passed-during the lecture-slowly ascertaining beyond any doubt that it was indeed for him that the black car was waiting, and after that ascertainment all he could do was spin out the time, that is, as far as he was able, delay the moment of departure, the stepping out from the entrance gate of the building; as for me, however, I hardly know what surprised me more, and of course more disagreeably: the encounter four, five or six years later, on what was then still a tree-lined Andrássy (and later Stalin, Hungarian Youth, People's Republic, etc.) Avenue, with a battered, half-blinded, broken old man, in whom, to my great horror, I recognised the erstwhile bigwig, or the "ad-hoc meeting", as it was called, that was convened in great haste at the editorial office the day following the balcony scene, in the course of which I was obliged to learn certain things, each more absurd than the last, about this bigwig, who, just the day before, had been a figure of general terror, general homage, general creeping and crawling. These absurdities were brought to our attention now by the hysterically twitching ravings of a pampered youth, now by the incomprehensible outpourings of rage from the senior editor-in-chief himself, a being who, in his mortal terror, had been reduced to some primeval human condition, a pulsating amoeba, a mere existential jelly, and had stayed utterly transfixed in that reduced state, yet who only the previous day, scared rigid, had kow-towed and smarmily crept and crawled in the presence of the selfsame bigwig. It would be utterly impossible, and utterly beside the point, for me to recall this man's choice of words, more absurd even than his absurd assertions: they consisted of a farrago of allegations and abuses, protestations, excuses, insults, pledges, threats and the like, expressed in the most extreme manner, not shrinking from the use of animal names, with the names of canine beasts of prey prominent amongst the abuses, for instance, and dragging in the language of the most bigoted religious sects amongst the pledges. Now, I would be very curious to know whether the friendly gathering that had been urging me to tell the story of the Union Jack was able, even dimly, to imagine that scene, as I asked them to do at the time, since I myself, sadly, do not possess the requisite powers of evocation or means of expression; however much they may have nodded, strained and tried, I am sure that, in the end, they were incapable of it, simply because it is quite impossible to imagine such a scene. It is impossible to imagine how a grown-up man, well into his forties, who eats with a knife and fork, wears a necktie, speaks the language of the educated middle-class and, as senior editor-in-chief, can lay claim to unreserved trust in his faculty of judgement, impossible to imagine how such a man, unless he were drunk or had suddenly gone off his head, could all at once wallow in the mire of his own fear and, amidst spasms of twitching, squawk streams of such patent nonsense; it is impossible to imagine such a situation occurring, or rather, since it did occur, it is impossible to imagine how such a situation could have occurred; and finally, it is impossible to imagine the situation itself, the scene and all of its details: that group huddled together facing the ranting buffoon, the group made up of us, grown-up men and women in their thirties, forties, fifties, and even sixties and seventies, reporters, stenographers, typists, technicians of every sort, who listened in consternation, with earnest-looking faces and without a single objection, to those near-meaningless ravings that belied all common sense, reason and moderation by their self-negating anger, their veritable paroxysm of self-negation. Let me reiterate: the question of the credibility or incredibility of the words and the accusations-words more fitting to a pulp thriller and accusations reminiscent of mediaeval chronicles of heresy, which went far beyond the orbit of critical judgemen-did not so much as cross my mind at the time, for who could have made any judgement there, apart from those who did the judging? What sort of truth would I have been able to perceive there, aside from the truth of that ludicrous and, in essence, childish scene; oh yes, aside from the truth that anybody might be carried off, at any time, in a black car, aside from that, in essence, again plain childish, bogeyman-truth. Let me reiterate: the only thing sensed by that stupefied, irresolute, twenty-year-old young man (I), torn between his unremitting horror and his unremitting itch to laugh, was that the person who only yesterday had still been a bigwig there was today fit only to be abused with the names of canine predators and to be taken off anywhere, at any time, in a black car-in other words, all that he (I) sensed was a lack of permanence. And now, before that friendly gathering which had been urging me to tell the story of the Union Jack, I was unexpectedly moved to declare that maybe morality (in a certain sense) is nothing more than permanence, and maybe people create conditions that can be designated as a lack of permanence for no other reason than to prevent a condition of morality from being established. If this declaration, which was uttered at the dining table, may of course seem exceptionally slipshod, and probably, indeed quite certainly, untenable under the much more considered circumstances of writing, I still maintain that there does at least exist a close connection between seriousness and permanence. Death, if we constantly prepare for it in the course of life as the true, indeed-as a matter of fact-sole task that awaits us; if we rehearse for it, so to speak, in the course of life; if we learn to see it as a solution, an ultimately reassuring, if not satisfying, solution-is a serious matter. But the brick that happens, by chance, to drop right on our head is not serious. The hangman is not serious. Odd, though, that even someone who has no fear of death fears the hangman. All I intend by all this is to describe, inadequately as it may be, my state, my state as it was then. The fact that, on the one hand, I was afraid, whilst, on the other, I was laughing, but above all, in some sense, I was confused, I might even say I reached a crisis point, lost the refuge of my formulations; my life, maybe due a quickening of tempo or dynamics, had become ever more unformulable, hence the sustainability of my way of life ever more questionable. Here I have to recall that professionally I was-or ought to have been-pursuing a formulation of life as a journalist. Granted, that a journalist should demand a formulation of life was a falsehood in its very essence: but then, anyone who lies is ipso facto thinking about the truth, and I would only have been able to lie about life if

I had been acquainted, at least in part, with its truth, yet I was not acquainted, either in whole or in part, with the truth, this truth, the truth of this life, the life that I too was living. Little by little, I was therefore recategorised in the editorial office from talented journalist to untalented journalist. From the moment that I slipped, for a while at least, out of the world of formulability, and thus the sustainability of my way of life, the events going on around me-and hence I myself as an event-disintegrated into fragmentary images and impressions. But the camera lens which captured the jumbled images, sounds, and indeed thoughts was still, agonisingly and irreducibly, me, only it was a me that was growing ever more distanced from my self. The diabolical wooden spoon had once again scraped the very bottom of the human soup in the cauldron of so-called world history in which we all stew. I see myself there, in depressed listlessness, at meetings that stretch out to dawn, where the hounds of hell yap, the whip of criticism and self-criticism cracks on my back, and increasingly I just wait and wait for when and whither the door will open through which I shall be ejected who could know where. Before too long I was to be stumbling around in rust-tinted dust beneath the interminable labyrinth of pipes of a murderous factory barrack-complex; bleak dawns smelling of iron castings would await, hazed daytimes when the dull cognitions of the mind would swell and burst like heavy bubbles on the tin-grey surface of a steaming, swirling mass of molten metal.

I became a factory worker, but at least it was possible, bit by bit, to formulate that afresh, albeit only with the vocabulary of adventure, absurdity, mockery and fear; that is, with a vocabulary congruent with the world around me, and in that way I more or less regained my life once more. That I would have a chance of regaining life fully, indeed that a full life might be possible at all-but now that I have already lived this life, now that what still remains of this life (my life) may also be considered as already lived, I must formulate it more precisely, indeed absolutely precisely: that a full life might have been possible-that is something I only began to suspect when all at once, after the formulations of adventure, I unexpectedly found myself, dumbfounded and fascinated, face to face with the adventure of formulation. This adventure to surpass all my adventures, however, I have to broach, as I remarked in my preamble, with Richard Wagner, but Richard Wagner, as I have likewise already signalled, had to be broached at the editorial office. When they first "took me on" at that editorial office, when I started going to work, day after day, at that editorial office, when, day after day, I telephoned in to that editorial office from the city hall (having been assigned to that column, the "City Hall column") the latest city hall news, indeed reports, I always formulated this aggre-gation of facts, and not yet entirely without reason, as "I am a journalist", since appearance and the activity that engendered that appearance, truly did permit me, by and large, so to formulate it. In my life that was the period of naive formulations, of unbiased formulations, when my way of life and its formulation did not yet stand irreducibly opposed to one another, or in an opposition that was reducible solely by radical means. What had carried me into that career, and therefore into that editorial office, was a formulation, a book I had read, that-above and beyond the necessity of making, so to say, a "career choice", and yes, above and beyond my irrepressible longing-I might cast off the shackles of parental harassments and a childhood prolonged by education. My stints as a commercial traveller in wines and in building materials having been brought to a close by laughable results, indeed quite simply with the result that I became a laughing stock, then attempts at the printing trade or, to be precise, typesetting, merely introducing me to the experience of futile torment and monotony, quite by chance-if such a thing exists, though I personally do not believe it (that is to say, chance)-a book came into my hands. This book was a formulation of the life of a journalist, a Budapest journalist, moving about in Budapest coffee-houses, in Budapest editorial offices, in Budapest social circles, pursuing relationships with Budapest women-more particularly, with two women, one a lady, referred to only by the name of her French perfume, the other a girl, a poor, simple, honest creature, palpably finer than the lady with the branded perfume, because she was endowed with spirituality but had been born to be oppressed, thereby evoking perpetual twinges of social and metaphysical conscience, so to say-a totally false and falsified formulation, but one that, if memory serves me right, was presented with genuine longing, and thus genuine force of conviction. The book told about a life, a world, that could never have existed in reality, or at best only in formulations, the sort of formulations for which I too was later to strive, for purposes of the sustainability of my way of life, formulations which draw a veil over a life that is unformulable, that grinds ahead in the dark, stumbling about in the dark, lugging the burden of darkness-in other words, over life itself. That book about that journalist, and thus also, to some extent, about journalism itself, had no inkling about journalism in the disaster era, or about disasters at all; the book was light-hearted and wise, or in other words, an unwitting book, but a book that exercised a fateful influence on me with the allure of unwittingness. The book may well have lied, but, as I recall, it certainly lied honestly, and it is highly likely that I needed just such a lie at the time. A person always lights upon the lie he is in need of just as unerringly and just as unhesitatingly as he can unerringly and unhesitatingly light upon the truth he is in need of, should he feel any need at all of the truth, that is, of winding up his life. The book presented journalism itself as a sort of happy-go-lucky pursuit, a matter of talent, and that accorded fully with the totally absurd and totally unwitting fantasies I span at that time about leading some sort of happy-go-lucky but still somewhat intellectual life. I soon forgot about the book in some respects, but in others, never; I never re-read it, it never again came into my hands, and in the end the book itself went missing somewhere, somehow, and I never looked for it again. Later on, however, as a result of discreetly exhaustive probing, I came to realise that the book could have been none other than one of the works of Szép; more than likely, though this is just an assumption, since I have not corroborated it for myself, his novel Adam's Apple. And now that I had mentioned the book that influenced my life so profoundly, with the peculiar determinacy of dreams of a revelatory nature, after some hesitation I also revealed to the friendly gathering where they had been urging me to tell the story of the Union Jack that the author of that book, Ernoý Szép, without my being aware that he was the author of the book (by no means one of the most significant of his life's works maybe, if indeed truly significant at all), around that time, that is to say when not only had the disaster long been undeniably visible, present and palpable, but nothing other than the disaster was visible, present and palpable, and, apart from the disaster, nothing else functioned, Ernoý Szép was pointed out to me, a so-called "cub reporter", on one or two occasions, in the erstwhile so-called "literary" coffee-houses and cafés which still existed at that time, albeit only as disaster coffee-houses and disaster cafés by then, of course, into which strayed only shadowy figures seeking some warmth, temporary shelter, and temporary formulations. And on one or two occasions-perhaps even two or three-I, the "cub reporter", was even introduced to Ernoý Szép (who naturally never recalled my earlier introductions), purely for the sake of being able to hear him introduce himself with the phrase that has since attained legendary, nay, mythical status: "I was Ernoý Szép." At this juncture, I proposed a minute's silence to the friendly gathering of my former students who had been urging me to tell the story of the Union Jack. Because, I told them, as the years and decades pass not only had I not forgotten that form of introduction, it actually came to that form of introduction, it actually came to my mind with increasing frequency. Of course, I said, you would have had to see Ernoý Szép, you would have had to see the old chap who, before you would have been able to see him, was Ernoý Szép: a tiny old chap who seemed to be relieved of his own very weight, swept along the icy streets like a speck of dust by the wind of disaster, drifting from one coffee-house to the next. You would have had to see, I said, his hat, for example, what was once called an "Anthony Eden" hat, of a shade that had evidently once been what was called "dove grey", which now teetered on his tiny bird's head like a battle-cruiser pummelled by numerous direct hits. You would have had to see his neat, hopeless-grey suit, the trouser legs bagging on to his shoes. Even then I suspected, but now I know for certain, that this introduction, "I was Ernoý Szép," was not one of those habitual disaster jokes or disaster witticisms of this disaster city which, in the disaster era that had by then undisguisedly set in, were generally believed and accepted, because people could not believe, because they did not know or want to believe or give credence to anything else. No, that introductory form was a formulation, and a radical formulation at that, a heroic feat of formulation, I may say. Through this formulation Ernoý Szép remained, indeed became the essence of, Ernoý Szép, and at the very time when he already only was Ernoý Szép; when they had already wound up, liquidated and taken into state ownership every possibility by which Ernoý Szép had once still been permitted to be Ernoý Szép. Simply a lapidary formulation of the actual truth condition (the disaster), couched in four words, which no longer had anything to do with wisdom or light-heartedness. A formulation which lures nobody towards anything but with which nobody can ever be reconciled, and by that token a formulation with a far-reaching resonance-indeed, in its own way, a creation which, I will hazard a guess, may survive all of Ernoý Szép's literary creations. At this, my friends and former students started to mutter, some of them sceptically objecting that anyway the oeuvre, as they called it, is "irreplaceable", as they phrased it, and moreover Ernoý Szép was at that very time gaining a new lease of life, at that very time people were starting to re-read and re-evaluate his works. I knew nothing, and in this instance once again did not even want to know anything, about this, since I am not a literary man; indeed, for a long time now I have not liked, and do not even read, any literature. If I search for formulations, then I usually search for them outside literature; if I were to strive for formulations, I would probably refrain from formulations that are literary formulations, because-and maybe it suffices to leave it at this; indeed, there is truly nothing more that I can say-literature has fallen under suspicion. It is to be feared that formulations that have been steeped in the solvent of literature never again win back their density and lifelikeness. One should strive for formulations that totally encapsulate the experience of life (that is to say, the disaster); formulations that assist one to die and yet still bequeath something to posterity.

I don't mind if literature, too, is capable of such formulations, but what I see more and more is that only bearing witness is able to do this; possibly a life passed in muteness without being formulated as a formulation. "I came amongst you to bear witness to the truth"-is that literature? "I was Ernoý Szép" -is that literature? Therefore-and only now do I notice it-the story of my encounter with the adventure of formulation (and at the same time with the Union Jack) does not start, after all, as I originally supposed, with Richard Wagner, but with Ernoý Szép; in either case, however, one way or the other, I have to and had to start with the editorial office. In the editorial office to which my fantasy, influenced by Ernoý Szép, had borne me-under external circumstances ready, as ever, to comply with steadfast fantasy-in that editorial office, then, on a briefer and more condensed trajectory, so to say, though of course without leaving behind an intellectual trail of any kind, I trod the very same path that Ernoý Szép had taken, from the unwittingness of wisdom and light-heartedness up to the "I was Ernoý Szép"-type of formulation; all that I found on the site of the alleged erstwhile Budapest was a city that had tumbled into ruins, lives that had tumbled into ruins, souls that had been tipped into ruins, and hopes trampled underfoot amidst those ruins. The young man about whom I am speaking here

(I) was also one of those souls, stumbling around on the way to nothingness amidst those ruins, although he (I) at the time still construed the ruins merely as some kind of film set and himself as an actor in that film-in any event, some splenetic, some acerbically modern film that was fraudulent in an acerbic and modern manner-a role that, being based entirely on the illusion seen from the auditorium, and oblivious to all disturbing circumstances (that is to say, reality, or the disaster), he (I) formulated as "I'm a journalist". I can see the young man on drizzly autumn mornings, the fog of which he inhaled just like the rapidly evaporating freedom; around him I can see the set, the blackly glistening-wet asphalt, the accustomed bends in familiar streets, their expatiations into the void over which the swirls of thinning fog gave hints of the river; the dank smell of the people who waited with him for the bus, the wet umbrellas, the boarding plastered with garish advertisements which concealed the wartime rubble of a ruined building, and on which site today, forty years later, another ruin stands, a peacetime ruin, the wartime ruined building having been replaced by a peacetime ruined building, a decrepit, eight-storey monument to total peace, corroded by premature death, patinated by atmospheric pollution, vandalised by every sort of squalor, theft, neglect, infinite provisionality and futureless indifference.

I can see the stairway up whose stairs he will hurry before too long, with that sense of security that delusion-driven people have which had impelled him (me) to declare "I'm a journalist"-with a certain sense of self-importance, in other words, which even the stairway in itself nurtured, that already long non-existing stairway, which at that time, however, hinted at an unambiguous reality, the reality of real editorial offices, late journalists, and one-time journalism, and the mood and reality which embraced all this; I can see the lame porter, the so-called "errand-boy" or, more accurately, office messenger, that singularly crucial person, who in those days was still so singularly crucial merely due to the singularly crucial services he rendered, hobbling nimbly between the rooms of the editorial office as he fetched and carried manuscripts and galley-proofs, and performed trivial but indispensable errands as zealously as he was ready to act as a lender of last resort for cash loans (at low interest), if the worst came to the worst; a person who only later on turned into an all-powerful, implacable, unapproachable Office Assistant, wrapped in the pelt of his arrogance, of the sort familiar to us solely from Kafka's novels and, to be sure, so-called socialist reality. On one such early-autumn morning, no, it was more forenoon already, most probably around the time of the gradual decrescendo from the clamorous chords of going to press, the "deadline", in those languid moments of slackness that derived from a certain sense of what could be called satisfaction, it so happened that one of the stenographers in the editorial office raised with me the question of which theatre I wanted free tickets for. The stenographer-I still remember him today: his name was Pásztor, and although he was at least fifty years older than me, I, like everyone else, called him Wee Pásztor, since he was a diminutive, exquisitely dapper little chap, with his neat suits, fastidious neckties, French-style footwear, one of those parliamentary stenographers who had been left discarded here in an era when Parliament had long ceased to be a parliament, and stenography was no longer stenography in an era of ready-made texts, off-the-peg texts, prefabricated, pre-digested and meticulously censored disaster texts-this stenographer, then, with his rounded little eunuch's paunch, his bald egg-head, his face reminiscent of carefully ripened soft-cheeses, his little eyes shifting anxiously in their narrow slits, therefore required especially tactful handling, all the more so as he was hard of hearing, something of a paradox, to put it mildly, for a stenographer, and as such-when in prisons and diverse penal institutions in the selfsame city, indeed only a few blocks away, the numbers of people standing in corridors, hands behind their backs, faces turned to the wall, were already starting to multiply rapidly, when summary courts were churning out their sentences at full blast, when everybody outside prison walls, everybody indiscriminately, could be regarded only as a prisoner released on indefinite parole-he continually fretted that his deafness, which everyone knew about, might accidentally be exposed, and he might be sent into retirement: this stenographer, then, was the one who used to keep a record of the claims and entitlements to free tickets of the so-called fellow workers in that editorial office. I can still recall the ambivalent surprise that caught the young man, whom, as I say, I sustained and felt myself to be at the time, in the wake of the stenographer's accosting me at all, for on the one hand, he (I) had no heart for going to the theatre, simply on account of the disheartening plays that were performed in the theatres, whilst on the other hand, he was entitled to regard the mere fact of being accosted as marking the end of his apprenticeship, his coming-of-age as a journalist, so to speak, since those free tickets were earmarked exclusively for fully qualified and paid-up so-called colleagues. I recall that we pondered the miserable options for a while with honest, one might say fellow-suffering scepticism-he, an old man simplified to his trivial practical fears, and I, a young man with more complex and more general anxieties-during which our gazes, so foreign and yet so intimate, communed for a few seconds. There was one other choice: the Opera House. "Die Walküre is on," he said. At that time I did not know the opera. I knew nothing at all about Richard Wagner. All in all, I knew nothing about any operas, had no liking for opera at all, though as to why not, that would be worth reflecting on, but not here, not now, when I really ought to be telling the story of the Union Jack. Suffice it to say that my family liked opera, which may make it somewhat easier to understand why I didn't like opera. What my family liked, though, was certainly not the operas of Richard Wagner, but Italian opera, the pinnacle of my family's taste, I almost said tolerance, being the opera Aida. I grew up in a musical milieu-insofar as I can call my childhood milieu a musical milieu at all, which I cannot, because I would call my childhood milieu any other milieu but a musical milieu-in which the sort of remarks that were passed about Richard Wagner, for example, were of the kind "Wagner is loud, Wagner is difficult," or, to mention a remark made in connection with another composer, "If it has to be a Strauss, then make it Johann," and so forth. In short, I grew up in a milieu that was just as stolid in respect of music as it was in every other respect, though that did not leave my taste completely unscathed. I would not venture to state categorically that it was exclusively the influence of my family, but it is an indisputable fact that, up until the moment when I got my ticket to Richard Wagner's opera Die Walküre from the stenographer Pásztor in that editorial office, I liked instrumental music exclusively, and I disliked any music in which there was singing (excepting the Ninth Symphony, and by that I mean Beethoven's, not the Mahler Ninth Symphony, which I got to know later on, much later on, at just the right time, at a time when thoughts about death started to present themselves, when I was making an acquaintance with thoughts about death, indeed, what I would have to call a process of familiarising myself with, if not exactly befriending, thoughts about death), as if in the human voice alone, or to be more precise, the singing voice, I saw some kind of polluting matter which cast a poor light on the music. All the musical precursors of which I partook prior to hearing the Wagner opera had been purely instrumental precursors, chiefly orchestral, which I got to at best sporadically, primarily through the agency of that exceedingly testy old man at the Music Academy, known to every student or student type, who, due to some eye defect, wore a perennial look of distrust but, for a forint or two pressed into his palm, would let any student or student type into the auditorium, testily ordering them to stand by the wall and then, as soon as the conductor appeared at the stage door leading to the podium, would direct them in a harsh voice to any unoccupied free seats. It would be fruitless for me to muse now over why, how, and on what impulse I came to like music; it is a fact, however, that around that time, when I was still not yet able to call myself a journalist, when my perpetually problematic life was perhaps at its most problematic, because that life was at the mercy of my family, a family that was already on the point of breaking up around that time, and subsequently, during the disaster era, broke up completely, to be dispersed into prisons, foreign countries, death, poverty or even, in the rarer cases, prosperity, a life from which already then, as ever since, I was constantly obliged to flee; it is a fact, therefore, that even then, as little more than a child, I would have been unable to tolerate that life, my life, without music. I think it was that life which prepared me, or in truth I should say rather that life which rehearsed me, for the disaster-era life which ensued not long afterwards, palliated as it was by reading and music, a life comprising several separate lives that played into one another's hands, each able to annihilate the others at will, yet each holding the others in balance and constantly offering formulations. In this sole respect, purely in respect of this balancing, the balancing of small weights, my seeing and hearing Die Walküre, being receptive to Die Walküre, being pounced upon by Die Walküre, undoubtedly represented a threat in a certain sense: it cast too big a weight onto the scales. What is more, that event-Richard Wagner's opera Die Walküre-had an impact like a street mugging, a sudden attack for which I was unprepared in every sense. Naturally, I was not so uninformed as to be unaware that Richard Wagner himself had written the librettos of his operas, making it advisable to read through the texts before listening to his operas. But I was unable to procure the libretto for Die Walküre, any more than Wagner's other librettos, a state of affairs to which the pessimism induced by my milieu, and my lassitude induced by that pessimism-a lassitude that was always instantly ready for renunciation of any kind-no doubt also contributed, though to be completely fair I should add that in the disaster era, which happened to be the era in which Richard Wagner began to interest me, Richard Wagner was actually classified as an undesirable composer, and thus his opera librettos were not available for sale, his operas were generally not performed, so to this day I don't understand and don't know the explanation for why Die Walküre, of all his operas, was being performed, and with a fair degree of regularity at that. I do recall that some sort of so-called programme booklet was on sale, the sort of disaster-era programme booklet which, alongside (disastrous) synopses of other operas, ballets, plays, marionette shows and films, also provided a five- or six-line synopsis of the 'content', so to speak, of Die Walküre, out of which I understood nothing at all, and which presumably-though this did not occur to me at the time-had been deliberately contrived in such a way that nobody should understand it; in truth, to hold nothing back, I was even unaware that Die Walküre was the second piece in an interlinked tetralogy. That was how I took my seat in the auditorium at the Opera House, which even in the disaster era was still an exceedingly agreeable, indeed splendid, place. What happened to me is what came next: "...the auditorium was plunged into darkness, and the overture commenced with a wild cadence down below. Storm, storm... Storm and thundery ardour, tumult in the forest. The bluff command of the God rang out and was reiterated, distorted by anger, with a compliant crack of thunder on its heels. The curtains whisked open as if blown asunder by the storm. The pagan hall stood there, the glow of its hearth in the dark, the towering outlines of the ash tree's trunk in the middle. Siegmund, a pink-cheeked man with a meal-coloured beard, appeared in the timber-framed doorway and leant, harassed and exhausted, on the door-post. His sturdy legs, swathed with animal pelts and thongs, carried him forward with tragically shuffling steps. The blue eyes beneath the blonde brows and the blonde curls of his wig fixed the conductor with a broken, almost pleading look; then at long last the music receded, paused, to allow the tenor's voice to be heard, which rang bold and true though dampened by his panting for breath... A minute passed, filled by the eloquent, singing, portentous stream of the music, a flow which surged onwards to the head of the events... Then Sieglinde entered from left-stage... which resounded low down as a profound, winding song. And again their looks became immersed in one another, again the deep melody unwound longingly down below in the orchestra..." Yes, that is how it was. Try as I might to follow it, straining my ears and eyes to the utmost, I understood not a single word of the text. I had no idea who Siegmund and Sieglinde were, who Wotan and the Valkyrie were, or what motivated them. "The end was approaching. A huge vista, a sublime purpose opened up. Every-thing acquired an epic solemnity. Brünnhilde slept; the God rose above the rocks." Yes, whereas I stepped out of the Opera House on to Stalin Avenue, as it happened to be called at that time. I shall not attempt-naturally, it would be pointless to do so-to analyse right here and now the so-called artistic impact or artistic experience; in essence-to resort, against my better judgement, to a literary simile-I went around in much the same way as the main protagonists in Tristan and Isolde (another opera by the same composer, Richard Wagner, which at that time I knew about only by hearsay) go around after they have imbibed the magic potion: the poison had penetrated deep within me, permeated me through and through. From then onwards, whenever Die Walküre was performed, as far as possible I would always be seated there, in the auditorium, for apart from the auditorium of the Opera House, and the sadly all too sporadic performances of Die Walküre, the only other refuge that I found where I might occasionally shelter myself, if only with an all too fleeting fugitiveness, around that time, during that period of general, which is to say both public and private, disaster, was the Lukács Baths. In those two places, immersed in the pure sensuality of the then still green, hot-spring water of the Lukács Baths and in the both sensually and intellectually very different ambience of the ruddy gloom at the Opera, every now and then, in lucky moments, I would become aware of a presentiment, unattainably remote of course, of the notion of a private life. Even if such a presentiment, as I have already mentioned, was fraught with a certain implicit danger, I could not help sensing its irrevocability, and I was able to place my trust in that solid sentiment as in a kind of metaphysical consolation: put simply, even in the lowest depths of disaster, and in the lowest depths of consciousness of that disaster, I was never again able to carry on living as if I had not seen and heard Richard Wagner's opera Die Walküre, as if Richard Wagner had not written his opera Die Walküre, as if that opera and the world of that opera did not subsist as a world in the disaster world. That was a world I loved; the other I had to endure. Wotan interested me; my editor-in-chief did not. The enigma of Siegmund and Sieglinde interested me; that of the world which was really around me-the real disaster world-did not. It goes without saying that I was unable to formulate all this for myself so simply at the time, since it was not, nor could it be, so simple. I suppose that I conceded too much to the terror of so-called reality, which thereafter appeared to be the inexorable reality of the disaster, the one and only, unappealable, real world; and although for my own part, of course, I was now-after Die Walküre, through Die Walküre-unappealably aware of the reality of the other world as well, knowing of it, as it were, only in secret, in some sense with an illicit, and thus incontrovertible, but nevertheless guilty, knowledge. I suppose I did not yet know that this secret and guilty knowledge was in fact a knowledge of my self. I did not know that existence always sends word of itself in the form of secret and guilty knowledge, and that the world of the disaster was in fact a world of this secret and guilty knowledge raised to the point of self-denial, a world which rewards only the virtue of self-denial, which finds salvation solely in self-denial, and which is therefore-however we look at it-in some sense a religious world. Thus I saw no connection of any kind between the disaster world of Die Walküre and the real disaster world, even though, on the other hand, I had unappealable cognisances of the reality of both worlds. I simply did not know how to bridge the chasm, or rather, to be more accurate, split consciousness, which separated these two worlds, just as I did not even know why I should feel it was my task-and a somewhat obscure, somewhat painful, yet also somewhat hopeful task at that-to bridge that chasm or rather, to be more accurate, split consciousness. "...He looked into the orchestra pit. The sunken space was bright against the auditorium and a hive of industry: hands busy fingering, arms bowing, swollen cheeks puffing, humble, assiduous mortals performing in the service of a work of great passionate force, this work which was manifested up above in childishly sublime guises... A work! How did one make a work? A pain stirred in his breast, a fervour or yearning, something like a cloying sorrow-for where? for what? It was so vague, so humiliatingly unclear. He sensed two words: Creativity... Passion. And whilst his temple throbbed fierily, a craved-for insight: creativity is born of passion and in turn assumes the form of passion. He saw the pale, exhausted woman clinging on the lap of the fugitive man, he saw their love and distress, and he felt: this was how life had to be in order to create"-I read those words like somebody who was reading for the first time in his life, like somebody who was encountering words for the first time in his life, secret words that spoke to him alone, interpretable by him alone, the same thing as had happened to me when I saw Die Walküre for the first time in my life. The book-Thomas Mann's Wälsung Blood-was about Die Walküre, as its very title divulged; I began reading it in the hope that I might learn something about Die Walküre from it, and I put the book down in a shock of amazement, as if I had learnt something about myself, as if I had read a prophecy. It all fitted: Die Walküre, the fugitive existence, the distraughtness-all. I ought to note here that between first receiving Die Walküre, my first engulfment by Die Walküre, and my first engulfment by this little book years-suffice it to say, years full of vicissitudes-had passed by; so, in order to clarify my assertion that "it all fitted", I shall be obliged at this point to digress slightly, to give at least an outline of the circumstances in which I was living at the time, all the more so that I too may find a steady bearing in the weft of time and events and not find I have lost the thread of this story, the story of the Union Jack. This book-Wälsung Blood-came into my hands after my wife-to-be and I, with the assistance of a good friend of ours, one fine summer morning traversed half the city, from the former Lónyay, then Szamuely and today once again Lónyay, Street with a four-wheeled tow cart, on which were piled, to put it simply, the appurtenances of our rudimentary household. This happened in the nick of time, since the lodgings in Lónyay (or Szamuely) Street that my wife-to-be and I had been inhabiting, had by then started to become unbearable and uninhabitable. I had become acquainted with my wife-to-be in the late summer of the year before, just after she had got out of the internment camp where she had been imprisoned for a year for the usual reasons-in other words, for no reason at all. At that time, my wife-to-be was living in the kitchen of a woman friend from earlier days, where the woman friend had taken her in, for the time being, because somebody else happened to be living in my wife-to-be's apartment. That certain somebody, a woman (Mrs Solymosi), had taken over the apartment immediately after my wife-to-be's arrest, under extremely suspicious-or if you prefer, extremely usual-circumstances, through the intervention of exactly the same authorities that-essentially without any verifiable reason, indeed on no pretext at all-had arrested my wife-to-be. Practically the moment that she learned of my wife-to-be's release, that certain somebody (Mrs Solymosi) immediately requested my wife-to-be (by registered letter) to have the furniture my wife-to-be had unlawfully stored in the apartment that rightfully belonged to her (Mrs Solymosi) instantly removed to the place where they were currently lodged (which is to say, the kitchen of the woman-friend from earlier days who was taking her in, for the time being). When later, thanks to a protracted legal action, but above all unpredictable circumstances-a lucky stroke let's call it-my wife-to-be got her own apartment back, we discovered, amongst some abandoned odds and ends, books, and other junk, pegged together with a paper clip, a bundle of paper slips covered with the pearly letters of a woman's handwriting, from which I don't mind quoting a few details here, under the title of, let's say, "Notes for a denunciation" or "Fragments of a denunciation", purely as a contribution to a legal case-study, or even to an aesthetics of the disaster, as follows: "She has lodged various complaints against me at the Council and the police, that I illegally moved into the apartment and stole hers... She imagined she could scare me with her slanders, and I would give up the apartment to her... The apartment has been allocated definitively; there is no space for her furniture in my apartment... Furniture: 3 large wardrobes, 1 corner couch, 4 chairs... She should put them into storage, I am under no obligation to keep them after what is already 11/2 years..." There follow a few items of data that would appear to be reminders: "17/10/1952 application, 29/10 allocation, 23/11 apartment opened up, inventory taken, 15/11 move in, 18/11 ÁVH [State Security], Council = ÁVH, ÁVH 2x-no response, Rákosi's secretariat... In September 1953 Mrs V." (i.e. my wife-to-be) "Mrs V. a.m.... Asked her by reg. letter to remove furniture... Have to keep my own furniture in cellar because I'm looking after her stuff... Her wardrobes are crammed full of clothes, under ÁVH seal, can't be aired... She claims she doesn't have an apartment and is lodging as a guest. Does that mean she doesn't need the things in the wardrobe? The woman puts on a good act and is quite capable of sobbing, if required, but I've had enough of that, and I won't tolerate her furniture in my apartment any longer either-". So we had had to spend the disaster winter that lay before us, which was ushered in at the very start by temperatures of twenty to twenty-five degrees below zero, in various temporary shelters, including the aforementioned kitchen of the woman-friend from earlier days, a spare room of distant relatives, surrendered on a very explicitly temporary basis, an exceptionally charmless sublet room, made especially memorable by its ice-cold toilet on the outside corridor, and so on, until a miracle-admittedly, all too temporary as it turned out-in the shape of Bessie, a former snake charmer and her Lónyay (or Szamuely) Street sublet apartment, dropped into our lap. It doesn't matter in the slightest now how and why this miracle occurred, but it would be wrong to leave out of this story-the story of the Union Jack-the earthly mediator of this heavenly miracle: a grey-templed gentleman, known as Uncle Bandi Faragó in the cafés and night-clubs around Nagymezoý Street, who, somewhat flashily for those times (the disaster times) and the occasion (the disaster), used to wear an aristocratic, green hunting-hat, a short sheepskin coat, and English-style tweeds, had a complexion that, even in the deathly pale winter, glowed with a permanent suntan, and besides that, allegedly, pursued the exclusive occupation of a professional conman and adulterer, as was indeed confirmed decades later when, from a newspaper bought out of sheer absent-mindedness (since the so-called news was of no real interest to me), I was silently and genuinely shocked to learn about his death in a well-known common prison, where, allegedly, a permanent cell, his slippers and a bathrobe were set aside for him even during the days that he spent on release; and who one afternoon, in one of those cafés around Nagymezoý Street, one of those cheap, noisy, draughty, gloomy and filthy cafés with music, which, though they had been run down by the state as immoral, were at least heated well by the state, and kept open until late at night by the state, had become an illicit day-and-night shelter for outcasts and in which my wife-to-be and I were temporarily residing much of the time, so to say, instead of in our temporary residences, suddenly came up to our table, and, really without any prior or more direct introduction, declared, "I hear that you're looking for lodgings, my lad." Then to my apathetic admission, which ruled out all hope in advance, "But why didn't you come to me, dear boy?" he asked in a tone of such self-explanatory, profound and uncomprehending reproach that, in my shame, I was lost for words. Later, after we had gone to the imparted address in Szamuely Street, where the door was opened by a lady, getting on in years and-as Gyula Krúdy might have put it-of statuesque figure, with yellow forecurls peaking from under her green turban, the face slightly stiffened by heavy make-up, and wearing a curious silk pantaloon besprinkled with magical stars and geometrical designs, who, not content with a verbal reference, did not allow so much as a toe into the hallway until she had glimpsed the message written in Uncle Bandi Faragó's own hand on Uncle Bandi Faragó's own calling card; so when this lady led us, my wife-to-be and me, to the room that was to let, a spacious corner room with a bay window, the dominant furnishings of which were a decidedly oversized divan, big enough for at least four persons, a mirror placed in front of it, and a standard lamp with a shade, plastered with all sorts of obsolete bank notes (including the million and billion pengoý denominations that had been in currency not so long before) that gave a mystic lighting effect, my wife-to-be and I did not doubt for one second the original purpose to which the room had been put, and it seemed most probable (and at once a clue to the miracle) that around that time, in that era of denunciations, the room's intended purpose-who knows, maybe due to a denunciation that just happened to be pending-all of a sudden did not, to be concise, seem expedient. Things may have changed by the spring, but during that winter we had the chance to peek into our landlady's past: we could see her as a young woman, wearing an ostrich-plumed silk turban, a giant speckled snake coiled around her naked back, in some night-club in Oran, Algiers or Tangiers, which there, in that Lónyay (i.e. Szamuely) Street disaster-sublease, struck one as indeed quite extraordinarily implausible, and we could handle and ritually marvel at a profusion of relics which were every bit as implausible; later on, however, the snake charmer became despondent, and it was apparent from her increasingly consistent frame of mind that, above and beyond the hostile feelings towards people that naturally arise in one as time goes by, she was not guided by the random targets of that transcendental antipathy, after all, so much as by very palpably down-to-earth goals: she wanted to regain her room, because she had other, presumably more lucrative, plans for it. I shall try to skip the details as quickly as possible, for those details can only be related in this spirit, the spirit of formulability, which is by no means the same thing, of course, as the real spirit of those details, which is to say the way in which I lived and survived that reality; and this nicely illustrates the iron curtain that rises between formulation and being, the iron curtain that rises between the storyteller and his audience, the iron curtain that rises between one person and another, and, in the end, the impenetrable iron curtain that rises between a person and himself, between a person and his own life. I woke up to all this when I read those words: "...he saw their love and distress, and he felt: this was how life had to be in order to create." Those words, all at once, awakened me to my life; all at once, I glimpsed my life in the light of those words; those words, or so I felt, changed my life. That book, which from one second to the next swept away the haze of my formulations from the surface of my life, so I might see that life, all at once, face to face, in the fresh, startling and bold colours of seriousness, I discovered in the new (that is, repossessed) apartment, absolutely out of place, absolutely implausibly, in the manner-I remain convinced to this day-of a miracle that spoke to me alone, amongst the forgotten odds and ends, the above-mentioned denunciation slips, and, thumbed to tatters, several volumes of pulp, shock-worker, partisan and romantic novels, the latter of defunct imprints. That book, so I felt, marked the start of the radicalisation of my life, when my way of life and its formulation would no longer be able to stand in any sort of contradiction with one another. By then, the time when I had been a journalist, or even a factory worker, had already long gone; by then, I had committed myself to my seemingly boundless, but also supposedly boundless, and intentionally boundless studies, being able, thanks to a congenital organic ailment, to absent myself from my occasional jobs for months on end without running any immediate risk in the meantime that my mode of existence would, in all likelihood, qualify as a crime of so-called 'publicly dangerous work-shyness'. At that time, all this completely preoccupied me, producing in me a sense of exaltation, of mission. I suppose it was then that I became acquainted with the experience of reading, reading for nothing in particular, an experience in no way comparable with the experience of reading as it is generally understood and designated, the sort of reading bouts, or mania for reading, which might overcome a person at best just once or twice in a lifetime. Around that time there also appeared a book by the author of Wälsung Blood, a volume of essays, in which there was the essay on Goethe and Tolstoy, whose chapter titles alone-"Questions of Rank", "Illness", "Freedom and Eminence", "Noblesse oblige", and the rest-were enough in themselves almost to dumbfound me. I recall that I read this book all the time and everywhere I went; the essay on Goethe and Tolstoy was tucked under my arm all the time and everywhere I went: it was with me when I boarded trams, went into shops, wandered about the streets- and so also, one especially fine early afternoon in late autumn, when I set off for the Istituto Italiano di Cultura per l'Ungheria, the Italian Institute of Culture, where, at the time, in my boundless thirst for knowledge, I was learning Italian, and during my passage across the city I registered, indeed, here and there, even participated, at least as an astounded spectator, in the intoxicating events of a day that was later to become memorable, a day that I or anybody else could hardly have guessed would turn into that particular memorable day. I was, I recollect, somewhat surprised when I turned off the Múzeum Boulevard into the otherwise normally deserted Bródy Sándor Street, hurrying towards the nearby palace of the Italian Institute, which had originally been built as the one-time Hungarian Parliament. The lesson, however, started at the due time. After a while, the street noise penetrated into the room, even through the closed window. Signore Perselli, the finicky, jet-black-moustached direttore, for whom, on his rare visits to lessons, it took no more than a blatantly clumsy pronunciation of the word molto to be excited into demonstrating how it should be done with Italian fluidity, with the initial o closed and the final o short, the intervening consonants being articulated with the tongue drawn back, almost like saying malto, on this occasion burst into the room, in genuinely frantic haste, to exchange a few no doubt diplomatically apprehensive words with our teacher before scurrying on to the other classrooms. A minute later, everybody was at one of the windows. In the slowly gathering dusk I could clearly see that on the left, towards the front, green rockets were being launched from the Hungarian Radio building above the heads of the darkly milling crowd of protesters there. At that very moment, from the opposite direction, three open-topped trucks turned into the street out of the Múzeum Boulevard; from above, I had a good view of the reaction unit, with the green markings of border guards, who were seated on the benches, rifles squeezed between their knees. On the back of the first truck, leaning against the driver's cabin, stood a lieutenant, evidently the commander. The crowd fell quiet, opened ranks, then roared out. It is quite unnecessary for me to evoke here the manifestly pathetically affecting words that they started to shout to the soldiers from down below, words which only at that given moment, that elevated moment of pathos, were able to exert an effect of genuine pathos. The trucks slowed down in the dense crowd, then came to a halt. The lieutenant turned about and raised his arm aloft. The last of the trucks now started to back out of the street, to be followed by the other two, amidst jubilation from the crowd. At this moment, we, who, from an Italian diplomatic viewpoint that held itself to be above and beyond all this, had no doubt suddenly become unwelcome guests, capable of who knew what sort of emotional or other manifestations, were ordered to gather downstairs, beneath the long, neo-Renaissance vaulting of the entrance-way. The heavy, two-leafed gate was bolted from the inside with iron bands. There we squashed together, between the sounds assailing us from outside and the security guards standing by behind us, until the Institute's burly porter, evidently on some signal being given, swung the iron bands back and swiftly threw open the gate, through which each and every one of the sixty to eighty of us, on a vigorous shove being applied from the rear, found ourselves, in a trice, deposited outside, on the by now twilight street, in a vortex of buffeting sound, swirling movement, ungovernable passions and inscrutable events that teemed amidst the buildings. In the ensuing days my attention was divided between the essay on Goethe and Tolstoy and the events that raged outside; or to be more precise, the cryptic and unformulable promise which inhered in the essay on Goethe and Tolstoy, in the gradual comprehension and eventual acceptance of it, was linked in my mind, in a strange but quite self-explanatory manner, with the equally unformulable, similarly uncertain, but at the same time wider-ranging promise inherent in the external events. I cannot say that the events that were stirring externally diminished my interest in the essay on Goethe and Tolstoy: to the contrary, they heightened it; on the other hand, I also cannot say that whilst I was totally immersed in the world of the essay on Goethe and Tolstoy, and the spiritual and intellectual jolts of that experience, I also absent-mindedly paid occasional attention to the events that were stirring in the street: no, that is not what happened at all, I would have to say instead, however strange it may sound, that the events stirring in the street vindicated the heightened attention paid to the essay on Goethe and Tolstoy; the events stirring in the street during those days thereby bestowed a genuine and incontrovertible sense on the heightened attention I was paying to the essay on Goethe and Tolstoy. The weather turned autumnal; several quieter days ensued; down below on the street, of course, but especially on looking out from the window, I could see how much the street had changed: detached overhead tramway cables snaking between the rails, dangling bullet-riddled sign boards, smashed windows here and there, fresh holes in the pealing stucco of the houses, dense throngs of people on the pavements of the long, long s