Free Kaddish for an Unborn Child by Imre Kertész Page A

anything to do with it) I find hard to believe. And now that, in the clarity of my night as it descends upon me, I contemplate my subtenant life at length and fretfully, with a cool expertise maybe, yet not free from certain preconceptions either, I suddenly believe I recognize its archetype, and more specifically believe I recognize it in my concentration camp life not so many years, though also an eternity ago; to be precise, in that phase of my camp life when my camp life was no longer real camp life, insofar as liberating soldiers had taken the place of the incarcerating soldiers, yet it was camp life all the same because I was still living in a camp. It happened precisely the day after this change in state (that is, that liberating soldiers had replaced the incarcerating soldiers) that I staggered out of the hospital barrack
Saal
, or room, in which I was then quartered, since I was, to put it mildly, ill, which in itself of course hardly constituted grounds for my being accommodated in the hospital barrack but, owing to a coincidence of certain circumstances which, in the final analysis, took the form of a piece of good luck only slightly more astounding than the accustomed bad luck, I nevertheless happened to be being accommodated in the hospital barrack, and the next morning I staggered out of the
Saal
, or room, to the so-called ablutions, and as I opened the door to the so-called ablutions and was just about to move towards the wash trough, or perhaps before that to the urinal, when my feet simply (and I am unable to come up with anything more apt than this tired cliché, because that was almost literally what happened) they simply became rooted to the spot, for
a German soldier was standing at the washbasin
and as I entered he slowly turned his head toward me
; and before fright could cause me to collapse, faint, wet myself or who knows what else, through the greyish-black fog of my terror I noticed a gesture, a hand gesture by the German soldier, beckoning me towards the washbasin, a rag that the German soldier was holding in the hand that was making the gesture, and a smile, the German soldier’s smile; in other words, I slowly grasped that
the German soldier was just
scrubbing the washbasin
, while his smile was merely expressing his readiness to be of service to me, that
he was
scrubbing the washbasin for me
, or in other words the world order had changed, which is to say that it had not changed at all, which is to say that the world order had changed merely this much, and yet even just that much was not an entirely negligible change in that whereas yesterday it had been I who was the prisoner, today it was he, and this put an end to my sudden terror only inasmuch as it gradually tamed the immediate feeling into one of persistent and unshakable mistrust-fulness, matured it within me, one could say, into a way of looking at the world that my subsequent camp life (because I continued to live like this, as a free camp inmate in the camp, for quite a while) bestowed on my free camp life such a singular flavor and piquancy, the unforgettably sweet and tentative experience of life regained: that I was living and yet living as if
the Germans might return at any moment
, and therefore not fully living after all. Yes, and I have to believe (though it was probably as yet unknowing, allowing for the circumstances: the constraint of not owning an apartment that, in the final analysis, I prolonged this experience, the unforgettably sweet and tentative experience of my free camp life, into my subtenant life, this experience of a life before and after all flashes of recognition, unencumbered by any of life’s burdens, least of all the burden of life itself, that I was living, but living as if the Germans might return at any moment; and if I impart to this notion, or way of life, or whatever I should call it, a certain symbolic significance, it immediately seems it is thus less absurd, for there is no getting away