Dossier K: A Memoir by Imre Kertész Page A

said before that journalism at least looked interesting
 …
    It did to start with. That was in the summer of 1948. The country was still ruled by a coalition government, and each of the parties was printing one or two dailies. The various titles would hit the streets from the morning until the late afternoon hours; of course television of any kind did not exist. I was able to breathe the real smell of fresh printer’s ink, I would dictate the day’s “scoop” over a phone line before we went to press; I was acquainted with a few celebrated chief editors—the last of the Budapest journalists. I lived a pretty exciting life for those few short months. Together with my boss, the editor of the paper’s “City Hall” column, we would turn up every morning at City Hall and do the rounds of all the councillors’ offices, sniffing around for the latest news. I had a regular accreditation to the City Hall reporters’ club.The doyen of the club was an elderly journalist, Varjas was his name, who worked for the
Kis Újság
[“Small News”], the paper of the Smallholders’ Party. In early 1949, the journalists made bets as to whether or not Cardinal Mindszenty would be arrested. I remember word for word what Varjas said: “If they dare arrest Mindszenty, then I say anything can happen here.” I met him in the street several months later, and he was in a terrible state. He had forgotten to put in his false teeth that morning; the greying hair that poked out from under a battered deerstalker was matted. His newspaper had been closed down and he had been kicked out. He shook my hand gratefully: “Other people no longer recognize me,” he complained.
    In
The Union Jack
you recount an even more appalling encounter. I’m thinking of the passenger of a black limousine
.
    Forget it! That was horrible.
    “Before too long I was to be stumbling around in rust-tinted dust beneath the interminable labyrinth of pipes of a murderous factory barrack-complex,” you write
.
    Yes, I was very lucky. In those days dismissal notices were not one of the customary forms of the prevailing relationship between state enterprises and state employees; or at least in the case of intellectuals they generally had other ways of going about it. Firms would preferably fabricate some kind of political conflict, which would often end with the intellectuals being arrested. Bycontrast, I was handed a regular notice to quit the Szikra Publishing Co.: they would have no further need of my services after January 1st, 1951.
    What circumstances did you have to thank for that luck?
    My insignificance most likely. Nevertheless, if I was to avoid being liable to prosecution for the criminal offence of “work-shyness constituting a public threat,” I had to get a new job within three months. I became a factory worker; there wasn’t really any other option.
    What was the factory called?
    MÁVAG, the Hungarian State Iron and Steel Works.
    Ugly name
.
    No uglier than the factory itself.
    All the same, your text seems to glorify the ugliness
.
    Glorify it? I don’t get what you’re driving at.
    I’ll carry on the quotation, if you don’t mind: “… bleak dawns smelling of iron castings would await, hazed daytimes when the dull cognitions of the mind would swell and burst like heavy bubbles on the tin-grey surface of a steaming, swirling mass of molten metal.”
    What’s your problem with that?
    The fact that I gladly read it; more than that, I take a real delight in it. Meanwhile
The Union Jack
deals with reality and the aporia of the formulation of reality
.
    It doesn’t deal
just
with that, but I can begin to see what you’re driving at. I won’t duck the issue. Like it or not, art always regards life as a celebration.
    A carnival, or a memorial service?
    A celebration.
    But in your case it is precisely the difference that subsists between loathsome material and festal glorification that is so striking
.
    That’s a problem for a moralist, not a writer.