Read Online Kaddish for an Unborn Child by Imre Kertész - Free Book Online

question she asked as to whether she might take my arm. “Certainly,” I replied. But at this point it would be fitting for me to relate roughly how I was living at the time so that I may understand and recognize what I need to understand and recognize, and that is in what respect this moment differed from other, similar moments in which, just as in that moment, it was decided that I would soon be going to bed with a woman. And I put it this way, “it was decided,” because even though it is true—and what could be more natural, naturally—that I myself always play a goodly part in such decisions, even to the extent of taking on the role of prime mover, or at least an appearance of that, nevertheless this practically never presents itself to me as a decision; on the contrary, it presents itself to me as an adventure which renders impossible even the possibility of there being a decision, like a vortex opening at my feet, when my blood is seething inside me like a waterfall, stilling all other considerations, and at the same time I am perfectly clear, well in advance of the usual outcome of the adventure, so that as far as a decision is concerned, if it were to lie within my power, I would hardly decide to commit myself to adventures of this kind. But maybe it is precisely this which attracts me, this contradiction, this vortex. I don’t know, I just don’t know. Because this has happened to me more than once, the selfsame thing, the selfsame way, so I have to infer from this constant repetition that some sort of pattern is stealthily actuating and guiding me: a woman with a timid smile and scurrying movements, in the archaic guise of a loose-tressed, barefoot serving wench as it were, quietly and modestly asks permission to enter—how shall I put it in order to avoid having to utter the banality that I shall nevertheless utter, because what else could I say, if the cheap trick has proved itself since time immemorial, and splendidly at that?—asks permission to enter my
ultimum moriens
, my ultimate failure, in other words my heart, whereupon she takes a look around with a charming and inquisitive smile, delicately touches everything, dusts down one thing and another, airs the musty crannies, throws out this and that, stows her own stuff in their place, and nicely, tidily, and irresistibly settles in until I finally become aware that she has completely squeezed me out of there, so that boxed in like an outcast stranger I find I am steering clear of my own heart, which now only presents itself to me distantly, with closed doors, like the snug homes of others before the homeless; and very often I have only managed to move back in by arriving hand in hand with another woman and letting her lodge there instead. I carefully thought it all through in this much detail, or this plastically I might say, as only befits my profession as writer and translator, after one of my longer-standing, almost painfully and interminably long-standing relationships had come to an end, a relationship that at the time, or so I believed, was taking a fairly heavy toll on me and, seeing it was thereby threatening the
freedom
that was absolutely necessary (not just necessary: indispensable) for my work, I was induced to prudence yet at the same time to further reflection as to what would follow. That was chiefly because I couldn’t help noticing that regaining my long-yearned freedom by no means conferred the stimulus to work that I expected from this turn of events; indeed, I disconcertedly had to admit that I had worked more energetically, I might say more angrily, and thus more productively, while I had merely been struggling for my freedom, indecisively now breaking up, now getting back together again, than I was working now,when I was free again, to be sure, but this freedom only filled me with emptiness and boredom; just as a good deal later, another sort of state, to wit the happiness that I experienced