Kaddish for an Unborn Child by Imre Kertész Page B

adolescence. Although my wife had been born after Auschwitz, childhood and adolescence had been spent under the mark of Auschwitz. More specifically, under the mark of being Jewish. Under the mark of the mud, to quote from my wife’s aforementioned words. My wife’s parents had both passed through Auschwitz: I was still able to make the acquaintance of her father, a tall, bald-headed man, with features that were guardedly austere in the presence of strangers but unreservedly harsh in the circle of his more intimate friends or family, but she had lost her mother early on. The woman had died of some disease brought back from Auschwitz, sometimes swelling up and at other times losing weight, sometimes suffering bouts of colic and at other times covered with skin eruptions, a disease that science proved effectively powerless to tackle, just as science also proved effectively powerless to tackle the precipitating cause of the disease, Auschwitz, for the disease my wife’s mother had suffered from was, in reality, Auschwitz itself, and there is no cure for Auschwitz, nobody will ever recover from the disease of Auschwitz. Her mother’s illness and early death had incidentally played a decisive part in determining that my wife should become a physician, my wife said. Later on, while talking about such matters, my wife cited a couple of sentences which, she said, she no longer knew where she had read but she had never forgotten since. Not immediately, but quite soon afterwards, it occurred to me that my wife must have read the sentences in one of the essays of
Untimely
Meditations
, the one titled “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” and this reinforced my belief that the sentences we have a need for seek us out sooner or later, because if I didn’t believe that, I don’t understand how those sentences could have reached my wife, who, to the best of my knowledge, never showed any interest in philosophy, least of all in Nietzsche. The exact sentences, which I soon tracked down in the disintegrating, red-bound volume of Nietzsche that I had seized upon once in some dark corner of an antiquarian bookseller’s, read as follows, albeit not in my own translation:
There is a degree of sleeplessness, of rumination, of the historical sense, which is harmful and ultimately fatal to the living thing, whether this living thing be
a man or a people or a culture
. After which, or before it, I couldn’t say offhand:
. . . He who cannot sink on the threshold of the moment and forget all the past, who cannot stand
balanced like a goddess of victory without growing dizzy
and afraid
—and from here on my wife knew it by heart—
will never know what happiness is—worse, he will never do
anything to make others happy
. My wife was made aware of her Jewishness, and all that was bound up with this, in early childhood. There had been a time—“my ponytailed, freckle-faced little-girl period,” my wife called it—when she had imagined that
the other children would have to love her a lot
on account of all that. Now that I come to write down her words, I suddenly see her, the way she laughed when she said that. Later on her Jewishness became equated for her with a sense of futility. With defeatism, despondency, suspicion, insidious fear, her mother’s illness. Among strangers a dark secret, at home a ghetto of
Jewish feelings, Jewish thoughts
. After her mother died, an aunt of her father had moved in with them. “She has such an Auschwitz look,” she had immediately thought, my wife said. Seeing only a former or future murderer in everybody. “I don’t know how I still managed to grow up into a more or less healthy woman.” Leaving the room the moment that
Jewish matters
were mentioned. “Something turned to stone inside me and resisted.” Hardly spending any time at home. Studying was an escape as later on were medicine and lovers, several