Dossier K: A Memoir by Imre Kertész

remain in Hungary or leave, because those were the arguments that flew around in 1946 and ’47 during the “shindigs” that would evolve out of tea parties into rum drinking at the homes of those of my classmates who had bigger places or at least their own rooms. By then the tidy order of the B stream had broken down; several of my Jewish friends had been lost—they perished during the war or they did not go back to school—or pupils asked for permission to transfer from the crowded A stream, or new boys enrolled. The world had changed. One gorgeous morning in September 1945, when I turned off the Grand Boulevard into Barcsay Street in order to pick up my schooling at the Madách Gymnasium where I had left it before Auschwitz, an edifying scene played out before my view: gym master Csorba, moustache twitching, his face terrified, was hurrying toward the Grand Boulevard with a pack of pupils at his heels, the leader of whom was yelling with his fist raised in anger: “Lousy Fascist! The brass neck of you coming back to the school as a teacher!” That student, incidentally, went on later to become a well-known film director. We happened to meet at some reception in the early ’90s, and I reminded him of that long-past scene. He looked at me in amazement: he had no memory of it.
    Really?
    I can’t say if he really had forgotten, but at all events fifty years later, after another historical turning point—the fall of Communism—he was unwilling to accept that identity. But then again, I think that generation—my own generation—has had to endure too many such wrenching turning points for its identity to remain continuous and intact.
    And has your own, I wonder?
    There are times when I delude myself into thinking it has, but then at other times I recollect certain periods of my life as though a stranger had lived them, certain actions of mine as if they had not been my actions. But being a writer I am constantly working on my identity, and as soon as I come across it I lose it straight away, because I confer it on the protagonist of one of my novels, so I can start the whole process from the beginning all over again. It’s not always easy to be in full possession of ourselves. “Not everyone who is born is in the world,” writes Dezső Szomory in that marvellous 1934 novel of his,
Mr. Horeb, the Teacher
.
    But you not only were in the world, you also wanted to change the world. You joined the Communist Party
 …
    Not with the aim of seeking salvation for the world, though.
    Driven by
ressentiment,
perhaps? György Köves comes home from Buchenwald concentration camp, and to the question put to him on the tram by the reporter as to what he was feeling about being back home again and seeing the city he had left, he replies: “Hatred.”
    That is one of the most misunderstood, or perhaps better: misinterpreted sentences in
Fatelessness
.
    So, let’s put it in its proper place
.
    No, let’s not. It’s a good thing for a novel to have certain words that live on in readers like a blazing secret.
    There are lots of words like that in
Fatelessness:
“happiness,” for instance, or “homesickness”
 …
    Words that only gain their full import in their immanence—in the dramatic effect lent to them by place, moment, and the reader’s conspiratorial rapport. In a novel certain words can change their ordinary meaning; just as bricks are needed in the construction of a cathedral, but in the end what we marvel at is the steeples and the building that has taken shape through their agency.
    So it wasn’t salvational zeal that took you into the Communist Party, then, or vengeance
.
    Much more simple decency, I would say.
    Decency? I don’t follow
.
    You might do so better if I were to talk about the necessity of the sense of “belonging somewhere,” which people find so self-explanatory. I realized fairly quickly that this need had hoodwinked me and led me into a trap. I tried to believe in something that ran