| I do not know the language of my father, my mother, or my ancestors, not any of their languages. I recognise no soil or tree, no soil was ever mine in the way people mean when they say ‘that’s where I’m from’. There is no land where I would ever feel a sudden longing for childhood, no place for me to write who I am. I do not know what sap I fed upon, the word ‘native’ does not exist for me, nor the word ‘exile’, though even so, it’s a word I think I know, but that is false. I don’t know any music for beginnings, no songs or lullabies; when my children were small I rocked them to sleep in a language I’d invented. Where my father came from my father himself could not say – Tashkent, or Samarkand, which he had never seen, Moscow, where he was born, or Germany, where he learned his first language, later forgotten. He came from nowhere he could speak of, or whose trace he had retained anywhere but in his body, his eyes and the abruptness of certain ways he had of doing things. I saw my mother’s city, I heard my mother’s language, there’s a country called Hungary that was hers, of which she told me nothing and which is nothing to me. I can’t dress a table the way my mother did – my mother never dressed a table. I don’t know how to do the things that mothers do, learned from their own mothers in their tradition. I have no tradition, I have no religion, I don’t know how to light candles or arrange any kind of celebration. I don’t know how to tell the story of our people, I didn’t know I had a people. I like the names of French regions, Creuse, Vendée, Haute-Marne, Franche-Comté and other names too, realms of land with names that are more distant than countries, and which exclude me. I have no house, from time to time I dream of having one, not a holiday home but a house to bury myself in. I do not want well-being but austerity, I dream of refuge, I want hills and woods to walk in. That is what France is and has always been – place names, the names of communes, those unattainable havens, burial grounds to generations. I have no roots, no soil has ever lodged itself in me. I have no origins. When I read in the newspapers Iranian, Russian, Jewish, Hungarian, these are only words I’ve said. There are no images, no lights, smells, nothing. There aren’t even any photos. I found photos that Marta Andras took of Veronka Ligetti and me at her place in nineteen-ninety. I am moved by these photos, in which we never stop laughing, we are laughing from exhaustion – Marta never pressed the shutter, she only complained about our lack of spontaneity. Marta died one year later, I don’t know what became of Veronka Ligetti. But what moves me most about these photos is Marta’s flat, a stateless flat with stateless china, paintings, elephants, Buddhas, teapots, lamps – even the flowers are stateless – and the pale wispy print of the settee which cried ‘from now on, I want things clean and new and upbeat’. She was my agent and my friend until she died, I talk about her in Hammerklavier. The first time we met she said, I’m in no hurry, think it over, take your time, I don’t want to rush you. She gave me an orchid, which sat waiting for me on her desk. I left in the night with the flower, my head spinning with excitement. The next day at first light, on the phone, Well? she sighed with her Hungarian accent, more Hungarian than my mother’s, which I never hear, What’s going on? What have you decided? Why do you take so long? Yes, yes, Marta, I replied, forgive me, I realise it’s been long, absurdly long, yes, let’s be quick because I don’t know where we’re going, or whether it’s far or near or high or low. Questioned by me about her childhood, my mother says at least ten times during the conversation, which bores her, we must turn the page. Turning the page comes up again and again without my ever getting to see the page. She says, we cannot dwell on what we used to be; she says, it’s absurd to feel nostalgia for a world that no longer exists. In a hallway of my childhood there was a picture, a painting of her playing the violin. My mother was a violinist, I never heard her play. Still, I wrote ‘violinist’ in the blank where you wrote your parents’ occupations, at school. The violin was abandoned in a cupboard at the back of a high shelf, I only saw it with my own eyes as an adolescent. Not long ago, she decided to sell it, just to get it out of the house, it wasn’t worth anything. In the end, she gave it to a young Portuguese guy without saying anything to us. I do not regret. There’s nothing that I miss. When it comes to places I have been, there isn’t even one I miss, no real specific place, I think as I’m writing this. I miss only times and spaces I don’t know. I can feel the most violent nostalgia for places I’ve never been. To my amazement, I discovered this passage in I-Another, the journal of Imre Kertész: ‘I’ve never analysed the significant fact that my favourite reading as a child was The Ugly Duckling. I read it many times and wept over it diligently every time. I thought of it often, on the street, in bed before I fell asleep, etc., as a type of consolation that takes revenge on everyone for everything. Perhaps it does a much better job of illuminating my life’s secret guiding principle than the grand readings of my youth that I took to be the fundamental turns of my fate and determinants of my perhaps straying path.’ How many times, over random readings, have I told myself, ‘I’d have loved to have written that’, or, ‘I could have written that’? But when a person says, I could have written that, it’s the idea they’re referring to, the phrasing almost never. The excerpt from Kertész strikes me word for word as something that could have been written by me. I don’t think I’ve ever come across such a close resemblance, which is all the more uncanny when you consider that it’s a private reflection, a confession. Perhaps the only difference lies in this last point. Of my own devices, I’d have never written it down. Without Kertész, the connection with The Ugly Duckling would have remained buried in my memory with other covered-up and silenced things. The way in which Kertész relates it, word for word in the way I might have done myself, had I dared transform it into matter, compels me to disclosure. I cannot stand idly by and allow another person to exhume a part of my existence. There is a hard piece of earth, trod upon for years, in which, if I have the strength and daring, I may one day have to dig. For a time in my childhood that was short and which I don’t remember, my father filmed us with an 8 mm camera. In those few films discovered in adulthood I see myself leaping, spinning, moving in the most chaotic way – flailing alone in front of the lens in every film in which I appear. I thrash about on a beach or in some other place, and no sooner have I stopped moving, or run out of breath, than I start right up again. Watching this crazy child, I can hear my father cry: move, move! To confirm the magical function of the camera, the subject had to move. Me, I moved to make him happy. Other children were more natural, more defiant or indifferent. Me, I moved absurdly. I knocked myself out to make him happy. All I have in the way of animated relics of the past are the images of that electrified little puppet; it may have been better not to have seen anything at all than to see all that anxious breathlessness. I have no memory of the places we were in the photos. I’m even quite amazed to see I’d been on a beach. We didn’t go to the seaside, or I just don’t remember it. You could not say that these are images of joy. In the eyes described as sparkling, and in spite of the wide-open mouth showing all its teeth – for my father must not have just said move, move, but also laugh, laugh – I see not only the desire to please, and to do it well, I also see uncertainty. I’d like to know where we were. I’ve not a single memory. |
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