Dossier K: A Memoir by Imre Kertész

discard everything on which man has been cogitating for five thousand years just like that, I questioned with my eighteen-year-old intellect? That seemed exceedingly unlikely. And then the books on Party tactics by Engels and by Lenin in particular—
One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (The Crisis in Our Party)
, or is it the other way round?—proved mind-numbingly tedious.
The Symposium
was highly refined poetry by comparison.
    In other words, you did everything in your power to saw off the branch on which you were perched
.
    Not
everything;
that only ensued later on. For the time being all I did was make my life more uncomfortable, but that is at least something.
    A step ahead?
    If I had known which way was backward or forward!
    You said just before that you became a newspaper reporter by mistake
.
    Everything I did was by mistake; all in all, I lived in complete error. Anyway, journalism at least looked interesting.
    How did it enter your head to become a journalist?
    Look, as I’ve already said, during the nights I was writing this blank-verse play. Admittedly, I abandoned it fairly quickly, but somehow I had been touched by the process of writing itself. It was around then that Zoltán Jékely’s novel based loosely on the life of the poet Endre Ady—
The Black Sail
may have been its title 12 —came into my hands. In this a poet seriously—and quite literally, one might say—seeks death in love, and suddenly there emerges from the perfumed murkiness of a bordello a girl, the bewitching carrier of poisoned kisses,
Hetaera Esmeralda
, as Leverkühn, the main protagonist of a later piece of reading matter, calls the fate insidiously lurking in his blood. 13 As you may be able to tell, I was an incurable romantic whom the world of existing socialism had at one and the same time clutched to its breast. What chance would I have had to get to know myself?
    All the same, journalism is rather far removed from romanticism, isn’t it?
    If you are familiar with it and that’s what you do, that’s no doubt true, but for me it was the way of life that attracted me, and here too it was through a book: Ernő Szép’s novel
Adam’s Apple
. A journalist crops up in that who plays the role of the
raissoneur;
wise and resigned, he knows what he knows, he sits in coffee-houses, watching the world bustle by in front of the window table, and every now and again he writes a newspaper article—well, that was exactly how I wanted to live.
    I’m not sure your interpretation of the novel is totally accurate
 …
    It doesn’t matter: that’s how I saw it. Writing as a way of life for me was linked with fatal love, on the one hand, and total idleness, on the other.
    Your career in journalism started, as far as I know, with a daily newspaper by the name of
Világosság [“Illumination”].
    Yes, it did, and I would find it dreadfully boring if we had to go into the details here.
    Fortunately for us you wrote it all down in your novella
The Union Jack:
“I was—or ought to have been—pursuing a formulation of life as a journalist,” you write. “Granted that for a journalist to demand a formulation of life was a falsehood in its very essence; but then, anyone who lies is
ipso facto
thinking about the truth, and I would only have been able to lie about life if I had been acquainted, at least in part,with its truth, yet I was not acquainted, either in whole or in part, with the truth, this truth, the truth of this life, the life that I too was living.” In other words, you were unable either to lie or to tell the truth
.
    That’s it precisely. I had hit rock bottom. I saw the lies just gushing from the lips of honest people, but I was incapable of doing that, either; to have been able to do so I would have had to withdraw from my existence. Not that that would have been entirely new to me, because in the concentration camp I lived in my dream world; I learned how to be there yet not present. One can do that in any dictatorship.
    You