Free Dossier K: A Memoir by Imre Kertész Page B

fate, and in the novel this had to occur in the novelistic time and place that happen to be in the presence of the two old codgers.
    I have every respect for your detachment, and the fact that you manifestly prefer to hide behind your novel character rather than tell me what exactly happened to you in those days immediately following your return home to Hungary. Yet as you yourself have already pointed out, the world must have altered profoundly for you
.
    It is precisely those first days that I have little recollection of; all that’s stayed with me are fleeting impressions. When I stepped out of the Western Railway Terminal onto what was then Berlin (later Marx and now Western) Square the sun was dazzling, and a loudspeaker at the stop for the Number 6 tram was blaring out the hit tune “You’re the Light in the Night.” Next to me there was a fairly well-dressed man who was offering “corncakes” from a tray slung round his neck. I remember the news vendors, or hawkers as they were called, who would yell out newspaper titles or headlines that one could never make out. Those first days in general were ablaze with sunlight; it was summer. I was going around in a foreign world where I had suddenly caught a whiff of freedom, especially on the streets. At home people talked about sombre matters, took stock of their losses and weighed up the uncertain future that lay ahead. I couldn’t pay much heed to that. I recall the office of the Budapest-Salgótarján Engineering Works where I took my mother by surprise. Her female colleagues, whom I knew myself from the earlier days, all rushed out to hug me and were deeply moved. The news that I had “come home from the Lager” spread, and I was asked all manner of stupid questions. I would wake up at night tormented by an unbearable itching. I would switch on the light, convinced that lice were crawling over me, but they weren’t: my body was covered with red spots, I had an allergy of some kind. Mother took me to see the works doctor—a Dr. Bock, as I recollect to this day. He advised injections of calcium, and I was greatly moved when he took hold of my arm and carefully inserted the syringe in my vein: I had grown totally unused to people treating me that way. In short, I was ringed on all sides by surprises until everyday life was slowly restored.
    How did the news of your father’s death take you?
    You’re asking me an impossible question and forcing me to resort to banalities.
    Perhaps, but I’m still interested
.
    You may be right. It may be worth considering how my life might have worked out if I had stayed with my father.
    Well, how?
    Just the same, I suppose, only at the price of yet more grueling fights. Father would obviously have insisted that I take on a “respectable” occupation of some kind, whereas I would have slipped back in a psychosis of permanent rebellion. But if I think about it more carefully, it’s possible that I did that anyway, except that I continued my fight against Father without him, which in the absence of his robust presence led to a transcendence. Like an arrow that misses its immediate target and vanishes into the distance.
    I beg your pardon, but that’s one of Arthur Koestler’s similes
. Arrow in the Blue
was the title of one of his volumes of autobiography
.
    Thank you for reminding me. I’ve read the book, of course, so my simile may be the product of subconscious Freudian brainwork, but then Koestler, too, was a Jew from Budapest, and he, too, was in conflict with his family, with the bourgeois mode of existence, with Communist salvationism, and ultimately with himself.
    As best I know, you, too, became one of Communism’s“captive minds,” if I may allude to the title of Czeslaw Milosz’s celebrated book
.
    Naturally; it would have been a wonder if I hadn’t. On my return from Auschwitz I fell in with an interesting group of people among whom I soon had to make my first clear choices: for instance, whether I was to