Kaddish for an Unborn Child by Imre Kertész Page A

them out of purely individual considerations or reasons. But how could one feel an active liking for an abstract notion like the notion of Jewishness, for example? Or for the unknown mass of people that was crammed into this abstract notion? To the extent that he succeeded, he succeeded somehow only by dint of liking them the way one likes a stray animal that one has to feed but about which one has no way of telling what it is dreaming and what it is capable of. Now he was relieved of this torment, his entire presumed responsibility. With a clear conscience he could now despise whomever he despised, and he no longer had to like those whom he disliked. He is liberated because he no longer has a homeland. All he has to decide is what he should die as. As a Jew or a Christian, as a hero or victim, possibly as the injured party of a metaphysical absurdity or of a demiurgic neochaos? Since these concepts mean nothing to him, he decides that at least he will not pollute the pure fact of his death with lies. He sees everything simply because he has won the right to clear-sightedness: “We should not seek meaning where there is none: the century, this execution squad on permanent duty, is now once again preparing for decimation, and destiny has decreed that one of the tenth lots should be cast on me—that’s all there is to it,” are the last words he says (with my own words, of course). Of course, it wasn’t all quite so spare, but here I have stripped it down to the essentials, leaving out the dialogues, the twists in the plot, the setting and the other characters, including that of the lover who leaves him. The last time we see our hero he is seated on the ground, rocking to and fro, bursting in an uncontrollable fit of laughter. “The Laugh” was indeed what I had intended to use as the title, but the director of the publishing house, who was widely known to carry a
service
weapon
at all times, even in his office (the publishing house), even though he was never to be seen in uniform and he did not even carry this
service weapon
, an automatic, in a service holster but tucked into a bulging hip pocket of his trousers; well anyway, this
director
rejected the title as being “cynical” and “trampling on the sanctity of memories,” and so forth, so how the story came to be published at all, albeit with a disfigured title, is something I have never understood to the present day, nor do I wish to understand, because I am repelled that I might understand and gain a glimpse into the inextricable web of ulterior motives which spares nothing at all, destroys everything, and even what it does allow to exist, it does so only for destructive motives; so, just like the figure I created, I too content myself with the fact that in the course of the decimation—though it was much more like a trisection—my story, somehow or other, happened to draw one of the lucky numbers. What had gripped my wife in the story was, as she put it, that
a person can decide for himself about
his Jewishness
. Until then, whenever she had read works about Jews or concerning Jews she had felt as if she was
once
again having her face ground into the mud
. Now, for the first time, my wife said, she felt that
she could hold her head
high
. On reading my piece, my wife said, she had felt what my “hero” had felt, for although he dies, before that
he is
accorded inner liberation
. Even if only fleetingly, she too had experienced that sense of liberation, my wife said. More than anything before, this piece of writing
taught her how
to live
, my wife said, and for the second time that evening the swiftly alternating ripple of expressions again flickered across her face, that—I don’t know how else to put it— chromaticism of smiles which gave me the feeling I could melt and be transformed into anything. I soon became acquainted with the background to these statements, my wife’s childhood and