Dossier K: A Memoir by Imre Kertész Page A

the best of my knowledge, was the one true love of my mother’s life. He was the managing director of some big company until he was forced into retirement by the Jewish laws. Needless to say, I was none too well disposed to him, though over the years that antipathy vanished bit by bit for the verysimple reason that he never tried to win me over. On the whole, my mother and those around her handled the embarrassing position I was put in after the divorce a good deal more elegantly than did my father, who—Auntie Kate here or there—emerged the clear loser and did not spare me any of his ironic bitterness. For instance, every week Laci Seres would give me a shiny silver five-pengő piece. “Tell the fat-head you don’t need any money!” my father would urge. That says little for his big-heartedness, but it did at least bring me closer to Father—you remember Cato and the conquered one, don’t you?…
    Would it be fair to say that for you there were two separate worlds that you somehow had to balance?
    That’s exactly how it was. To make that even more definitive, my mother and her husband moved to Buda and leased a house at the foot of Rose Hill in the Second District. To live in a place in Buda counted as a very genteel thing in those days. Paradoxically, the prospect of war ushered in a building boom, with the empty plots on Convent (now Rómer Flóris) Street and Zivatar Street being built on one after the other. I liked the little modern apartment that my mother and Uncle Laci had on Zivatar Street. The stairway still smelled of new building materials, while the bright kitchen overlooked the outside dining tables of the Nardai Restaurant on Kút Street. Of an evening a discreet rattle of tableware and scraps of laughter and Gypsy music would drift up from the lantern-lit garden. Decades later, when Mahler’sNinth Symphony had a huge impact on my life, that passage in the first movement where, all of a sudden, a nostalgic motif—a Proustian snatch of melody—sounds on a single violin, each and every time I had to recollect the Gypsy music at the Nardai Restaurant. And you know, even today I am convinced that Mahler may have taken that mood away from one of his regular eating haunts during his period as musical director at the Royal Opera House in Budapest. Anyway, yes, you’re right, my father and mother did represent two different worlds in my life. On arriving at Mother’s place from distant Baross Street, I would usually have to take off my clothes and put on some more elegant outfit that was more to her taste. She would have me bathe in the gleaming bathroom, even washing my hair with foaming shampoo, and in a way that was all the more eloquent, for her saying nothing would give me to understand exactly what she thought of my father; and that, when it came down to it, was every bit as painful as having to swallow my father’s cutting remarks.
    So, you were living a double life, and the two worlds were pretty divergent. Didn’t that push you into an identity crisis of any kind?
    No, and all the less so in that I had no identity; I didn’t need one. What would I have done with one, anyway? I needed adaptability, not an identity. And anyway, that double life was far more entertaining than if I had had to get by purely on the monotony of Baross Street. At Zivatar Street, by contrast, it was the dominance of LaciSeres that made me feel ill at ease. He was an intelligent man, and the way I saw it he didn’t think too highly of me. I can well imagine, indeed readily appreciate, how discomfiting the child of Mother’s previous marriage must have been for him, turning up every week from a foreign world to spoil the afternoon. It was only the two of us, however, who were in the know about my superfluousness; Mother noticed nothing. It was a bit like a mute alliance between the two of us for the sake of my mother, and that at times led to almost mutual cordiality. It was a tolerable life. I had certain games that