Free Kaddish for an Unborn Child by Imre Kertész

friends and acquaintances or whatever I might call them had acquired their own apartments, as for me, I didn’t think about it, or to the extent that I did think about it I thought that I could not entertain the thought of it, simply because it would have required me to live in a different way, under the badge of money and, above all, of moneymaking, and that would have entailed so many concessions, misconceptions, compromises and, all in all, so much
inconvenience
, even if I were to have lulled myself into thinking that it was all just
temporary
, purely a means to an end, because how can we live even temporarily in any way other than the way we must permanently and generally live without its bitter consequences rebounding on our normal life, that is to say, more or less the life that, after all, we have stipulated for ourselves, in which we are, after all, the masters and legislators, and I was therefore simply unable, and did not even wish, to take upon myself all these absurdities, the absurd inconveniences of acquiring an apartment in Hungary, which first and foremost would have put
my freedom
, my independence of mind and as a matter of fact my independence from external circumstances under threat, under total threat at that, so that I had to set myself against that danger totally, or in other words, with my whole life. And actually I must admit that my wife was right, for after reconnoitering my circumstances at the time with searching tenacity and irresistible probing, accompanied by those plays of expression that were already then slowly becoming familiar and which, so I thought at the time, acted upon me like an ever-surprising and miraculous sunrise, she declared that meant I was imprisoning myself for the sake of my freedom. Yes, undoubtedly there was some truth in that. To be more accurate, that was precisely the truth. That, given a choice between the prison of acquiring an apartment in Hungary and the prison of not owning an apartment in Hungary, the latter suited me better, since there (in the prison of not owning an apartment in Hungary) I was better able to do as I pleased, better able to live for myself, sheltered, concealed and uncorrupted, until this prison—or, if one insists on making comparisons, I could perhaps better call it a preserving jar—suddenly, and undoubtedly through my wife’s magic touch, sprang open, and my subtenant life all at once proved to be unsheltered, unconcealed, corruptible and consequently untenable, just like my subsequent and eventually my present life too, and just as, I suppose, every life proves to be untenable once it is contemplated in the light of our flashes of recognition, for it is precisely the untenability of our lives which leads to our flashes of recognition, in the light of which we come to recognize that our life is untenable—and it really is that, untenable, because it is taken away from us. Yes, I lived my subtenant life as if I were not quite living, diminished, temporarily, absentmindedly (taking only my work seriously), with that feeling, unclarified but sure, and therefore not standing in need of clarification, feeling, that it was, as it were, merely a waiting period of uncertain duration elapsing between my only two pieces of true business, that of my coming into being and that of my passing away, which I must somehow while away (preferably with work); yet this waiting period is my only time, the only time I can account for, though I don’t know why and to whom I should account for it, perhaps to myself, above all, so that I may recognize what I still have to recognize and do what I still can do, but then to everybody, or to nobody, or to anybody who will be ashamed on our behalf and possibly for us, since I am unable to account for my time either prior to my coming into being or after my passing away, if these states of mine have anything at all to do with
the only time I have
—something (that is, that they could have