Kaddish for an Unborn Child Read Free Page B

contemplated nothing but this question, now by the blinding flashes of lightning, now in the darkness with dazzled eyes which, in the capricious intervals between the ragings in the atmosphere, seemed to be seeing this question flicker across the walls, so I must regard the sentences that I am writing down now, on this sheet of paper, as if I had written them down that night, although that night I experienced them rather than wrote them down, experienced them, which is to say was riven by sundry pains, most notably those of memories (I also had a half bottle of cognac), and I jotted down on the pages of one of the notebooks, exercise books or writing pads that I always have with me at best just a few muddled words that I was hard put to reconstruct afterwards, and even then didn’t understand, then later on I forgot the whole thing, and it was only after many years had passed that the night stirred into life within me once more, and again years had to pass until I can attempt to write down now what I would have written down that night, had I been writing, and were a single night, anyway, not too short, far too short, for me to have been able to write down what I would have written down. But then, how would I have been able to write, for that night was just the start, probably not the very first but at any rate one of the first steps on the long, long, who knows how lengthy path towards true clear-sightedness, or in other words, towards knowingly known self-liquidation, an initial scraping towards the grave bed which I am making for myself—there can be no doubt about it now—in the clouds. And this question—contemplating my life as the potentiality of your existence— proves a good guide, yes, as if, clutching me with your tiny, fragile hand, you were leading me, dragging me behind you along this path, which in the end can lead nowhere, or at most only to a totally futile and totally irrevocable self-recognition, and a path down which one may (why the “may”? even “must” does not begin to express it) set off only by removing the barriers and impediments that loom along it; first of all by removing, I would go so far as to say radically uprooting, my mediocre intellectual existence, even though in point of fact I adopt that pose merely as a prophylactic, as if I were a wary libertine moving around in an AIDS-infected milieu— or, to be more precise, as if I had been one, as it’s been a long, long time since I was a mediocre intellectual, or any sort of intellectual at all: I am nothing.
I was born a private person
, as J.W.G. once said, and I have remained a private survivor, I say; I am at most still a bit of a literary translator, if I am and have to be anything. As such, despite the threatening circumstances, in the end I radically removed from my path the ignominious existence of a successful Hungarian author, even though, as my wife (for a long time now someone else’s wife) told me, I have all the endowments it takes to be one (which slightly horrified me at the time), not that she was saying, my wife said, that I should jettison my
artistic
or any other principles, she was merely saying, my wife said, that I should not be
faint-hearted
, and the more that I was so, that is to say the less I were to do that (jettison my artistic or any other principles), the harder I would have to strive to realize those principles, which is to say, when all is said and done, myself, and hence to succeed, my wife said, since everyone strives for that, even the world’s greatest authors. “Don’t delude yourself,” my wife said, “if you don’t want success, then why bother writing at all?” she asked, and that is undoubtedly a thorny question, but the time is not yet ripe for me to digress on that; and the sad thing is that she probably saw straight into my heart, she was probably absolutely right, I probably do (did) have all the endowments it takes for the