Free Kaddish for an Unborn Child by Imre Kertész Page B

from it, in a symbolic sense, the Germans might return at any moment,
der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
,
sein Auge ist blau
, Death is a blue-eyed master from Germany, he can come at any moment, track you down anywhere, take aim at you, and he makes no mistake,
er tri ft
dich genau
. So that was how I lived my subtenant life, in a way that was not quite living and indisputably not quite a life, rather it was just being alive, yes,
surviving
, to be more precise. Obviously, this subsequently left deeper imprints in me. I suppose certain of my obvious peculiarities also have their roots in this. I suppose I ought to talk here about, for example, my relationship to property, the property that sustains everybody, mobilizes everybody, maddens everybody, about this relationship which is actually nonexistent, or at most existent merely as a pure negativity. I don’t believe, and cannot even imagine, that this negativity is a congenital negativity, some kind of defect, otherwise how would I explain my rigid attachment to certain of my more trivial personal chattels (books) or, if it comes to that, to my most important chattel: myself, the fact that I have always sturdily, one might say radically, guarded the chattel I regard as most important (myself), on the one hand against any form of effective self-destruction that is not a decision of my own free will, and on the other hand I have always guarded it, and continue to guard it, indeed increasingly so, against the cheap and perverted seductions of any sort of communal idea (which, by the way, I could just as well list among the varieties of effective self-destruction), even if, of course, I am merely guarding it for another form of destruction; no, I have no doubt that this negative relationship of mine to property was shaped purely by the survival of my survival, by this so very singular and in a certain sense not entirely unproductive, though, of course, sadly untenable mode of existence, which demonstrated my subtenant life to be likewise self-explanatory. In the subtenancy into which I moved during the darkest of those years, which, in accordance with the twisted laws of hell, we were obliged to proclaim incessantly, aloud and in chorus, as the most glittering years, and where I was greeted virtually as a savior, since my presence seemed to protect the sole commandeerable, distrainable, expropriable, billetable, partitionable, requisitionable, etc., etc., room in what was, incidentally, a fairly pleasant apartment, tucked away in a secluded Buda side street, and for which, for that very reason, I had to pay only a virtually symbolic rent that was raised only equally symbolically in the course of subsequent years; as I say, in that subtenancy, neither then, when I could not yet even think about property, nor later, when I could (indeed, perhaps should) have thought about property, yet did not think about it at all, as I say, there I was not threatened by the hazards that are the concomitants of property, the desperate and distressing measures demanded by cracks in pipes, ceilings and elsewhere, the speculations that are the concomitants of property, as to whether or not the property is satisfactory, and ought one not to have at one’s disposal more, or at least more satisfactory, property, while of course taking the best possible advantage (i.e., profit) from the existing, unsatisfactory property; no, an obsessional notion of changing could not possibly have occurred to me, that chafing impulse which might continually dangle before me the possibility of imaginary choices, incessantly pester me and hoodwink me into thinking that I could swap my being here for being somewhere else, that I could exchange my tower-block apartment—of course, at the price of the necessary running around, shelling out, official processing and other unforeseeable complications—for a more satisfactory one, when I don’t even know what it is that would satisfy me more, since I