Dossier K: A Memoir by Imre Kertész

cheerier C.V
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    All in all, I’m on the side of cheeriness. My error is that I don’t elicit that feeling in others. But see here: I was able to win intellectual freedom fairly early on, and from the moment I decided to become a writer I was able to treat my cares as the raw material of my art. And even if that raw material looks fairly cheerless, the form is able to transform it and turn it into pleasure, because writing can only come from an abundance of energies, from pleasure; writing—and this is not my invention—is heightened life.
    You only reached the pleasure, as you yourself pointed out, at the expense of suffering, and I can now see your relationship with your father more clearly: to put it simply, the relationship was not exactly one characterized by openness
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    No, there were undoubtedly things that we kept quiet about in each other’s presence: my father about the kind of fate into which he had helped bring me, and I about the fact that I did not accept that fate. Neither of us knew about this; we just saw the result, and that was painful. My defiance extended to everything; a distance grew up inside me instead of solidarity. I have alreadysaid that I had no liking for myself in that destructive role; I would much rather have been a pliant but carefree little boy, a good pupil, with a clear conscience, honest, industrious, lovable, but whenever I tried to be that, I would be disgusted by myself. I learned how to lie early on, but I was incapable of self-denial. Now that I’m saying this, I’m seized by an unbounded love for my father: the poor soul, he was unable to grasp why he had such a hard time with me.
    You seem to be trying to portray yourself as a devious, bad-tempered child
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    Bad-tempered, never; I found it easy to make friends, I was game for any escapade, any laughs. And sneaky only to the extent that I felt constrained to it by my situation. Like I said, I was unaware of my own problem, about which I would now declare pompously that it was an internalization of the Jewish question in semi-fascist Hungary.
    Did that “situation” also throw a shadow on your relations with your mother? Or were you able to speak more frankly with her?
    My mother had no interest at all in the Jewish question apart from its—how should I put it?—its technical side, and then later on the threat to life. My mother was high-spirited, a true epicurean, and she didn’t let herself be bothered too much by a few anti-Semites. Religion as such, as meditation, faith, inwardness, piety, spirituality,and so on, was alien to her. In any event, because she was advised to do so by the people in her circle in the late Thirties, she converted to some other confession—the Reformed Church as best I recall, but that was a pure formality that subsequently, when it turned out that it would in no way give her any protection, she largely forgot all about. She had quite a hard job getting a divorce from my father, because in those days divorces came with a string of onerous legal stipulations. It was necessary to spell out, for instance, if the divorce was being granted on the grounds of the husband’s or the wife’s fault, and my father insisted on the condition that the divorce was being granted on account of my mother’s fault. That in turn meant that my mother had to renounce any rights over her son, and she had to agree to certain stipulations about “visitation,” which duly occurred. As a result, I was able to see my mother once a week, and during the holidays twice a week. After the divorce, she lived for a while in a boarding house in Pannónia Road in the Sixth (Terézváros) District, which I supposed was a terribly chic thing to do. Later on, at much the same time as my father took a second wife, she too remarried, a fairly comfortably well-off gentleman by the name of László Seres, who was known to me as Laci or Uncle Laci. He was a stocky, well-dressed, bald-pated fellow, an engaging upright citizen, who, to