Dossier K: A Memoir Read Free Page B

the petit-bourgeoisie at which to this day I still shudder just the same way. However hard they tried, then, I stayed with the “Auntie Kate,” because that suited her, though she was a good deal younger than my mother. But let’s not get immersed in childhood memories; in the end you’ll want to see snaps of me in my infancy.
    Just as you say, but let’s stay on the subject for the time being. I would be interested to know what your family was like, how your childhood was spent, and so on. You haven’t said anything about your father. A woman who was as interesting as you describe your mother to have been would certainly not have fallen in love with just anyone
.
    Eenie, meenie, minie, mo, falling in love. “What’s that?” Géza Ottlik has one of his characters ask in his novel
Buda
. At any rate, my father was in love, that’s for sure, and that was manifested most obviously in his frightful jealousy. My mother, by contrast, wanted to get out of the tight family home, her three sisters, her stepmother, and her father, and his struggles with his financial worries in the small place they had in Molnár Street in theFifth, the inner-city district of Pest. At that time—and I’m talking about the 1920s—the road to freedom for girls usually lay through getting married. And through work, of course. My mother was just sixteen when she got a job with a firm working as a clerk, as they called it in those days.
    You mean it was not a matter of marrying for love?
    Look, it’s exceedingly difficult for a young child to judge his parents’ love life. Because I was their child, the relationship between the two of them took quite a toll on me.
    Did they quarrel?
    Not all that often, but when they did, like blazes. I have a recollection of a fine summer morning, for instance. By then we were living close to the City Park in the Fourteenth District of Pest, in a roomy and well-aired apartment—it may have been in Elemér Rod, though I don’t know if that’s still its name today. I must have been four or five years old; more likely five than four, as I have a clear memory of it. It was probably a Sunday, since both of them were at home. They were yelling at each other. What I picked out clearly was that it was about swimming baths: Father didn’t want Mother to go to the swimming baths. He probably suspected that Mother had a rendezvous with someone there. What wasn’t at all clear was why my father didn’t go to the swimming baths with my mother. On account of “the child,”I suppose—that was me. Suffice to say, Father snatched Mother’s white rubber swimming cap and ripped it to shreds. Mother, for her part, got hold of a huge pair of tailor’s shears and snipped two gashes in the front brim of Father’s hat. I can see to this day his look of astonishment at the floppy hat brim; it was a green felt hat. I screamed at the top of my voice. In the end, Mother went to the swimming pool and Father took me with him to the shops to buy a new hat. Which makes me think it was more likely on a Saturday, since the shops were not open on Sundays.
    Do you have a lot of memories like that?
    One or two.
    But then they divorced later on
.
    Again it was me who got the short end of that. I was placed in a boys’ boarding school as a full boarder.
    Is any trace of that boarding school recognizable in
Kaddish for an Unborn Child?
    I certainly went to some trouble on that score.
    Is it something you don’t care to talk about?
    On the contrary! One is always happy to think back to one’s childhood, however rotten and tough a period it may have been.
    How far back can you trace your family tree?
    That’s a good question, only it’s something that never really interested me. Well, however I scratch my head, I get stuck at my grandparents. As far as I know, my forebears were ordinary town-dwellers or, in some cases, peasants of assimilated Jewish background.
    Peasants?
    Why? Does that surprise you? My paternal grandfather may have