| 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. I often don’t know where I am in the photos in our albums. The scenery doesn’t ring a bell, nor do the people. I came across this story told by Klaus Mann about Stefan Zweig. ‘The last time I met him, he was coming towards me on Fifth Avenue. He didn’t notice me, he was, as they say, deep in thought . . . As he believed no one was watching him, he allowed himself a fixed unhappy gaze. No sign of the cheerful faces for which he was known. Moreover, he had not shaved that morning and his face looked strange and shaggy. I looked at him, the stubble and the dark lifeless eyes, and thought, “well, what’s going on with him?” I walked towards him. “Where are you going, why the hurry?” He stopped short, like a sleepwalker hearing someone speak his name. A second later he’d pulled himself together and was smiling, chatting, joking, as courteous and lively as ever.’ I’ve always written like a man of other people, the man who knows he’s being looked at. I’ve lightened up gloomy subjects and made them likeable. Is it possible to write like a man who doesn’t know he’s being looked at? Yet in Klaus Mann’s account, I see two sides of the truth, because the desire to behave in a courteous, lively manner reveals a person’s essence just as much, if not more than, a passing state of gloom. Where are you going? Why are you in such a hurry? Where are you going in such a hurry with your lifeless eyes? Going down that avenue, hurrying for what? ‘Yes, Marta, forgive me,’ I replied sixteen years ago, ‘yes, let’s hurry yes because I don’t know where we’re going, or whether it is close or far, or high or low.’ I’ve been hurrying without you for a long time, Marta. Wherever you are, you’ll know by now whether that place was far and high. Since you stopped wanting to live, I’ve been hurrying without you, and if no one is looking at me, you can see the way I really am. On my balcony is a plant that climbs a little whose name I do not know. From time to time, a stem with leaves at the tip shoots out and bends towards the outer wall; it retreats around the corner to hide. It has all the room it needs to stretch out elsewhere, but it doesn’t seek the sun. It goes off to hide, to be alone. I go after it and put it back in the sun. I’ve already mentioned Barthes’s poignant phrase, ‘to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love . . .’ A thing that one produces is like a piece of clothing, an element associated with oneself, an external attribute, inalienable but external, so that recognition, esteem and expressions of appreciation are of very slight importance. It is an illusion to believe that admiration can turn into emotion. Amongst my grandfather’s effects in New York, we found a photo of the Ugly Duckling. I’m fourteen, photographed full length on a lawn in Switzerland (I know because of the wooden railing in the background). I wear a white short-sleeved blouse, white shorts, a wide white belt with a gold buckle and black loafers, my hair hidden beneath a printed fichu, an outfit not at all suited to my age, and completely out of sync with the times. Still, there’s an attempt at elegance, though that may not be the right word, so graceless are the face and body. An attempt at elegance, lacking in conviction. I see it in the curled-up wrists, the slightly misaligned feet, the look of unhappiness. That body, that face and get-up are still inside me. They are scattered through the characters, dissembled on the pages, unbeknownst to all, unbeknownst to me as well – no one knows where they come from, the things we command words to do. Nothing to take from childhood. Writers return to childhood, sooner or later. I don’t return anywhere, there’d be nowhere to return to. Long walls walked along, long waits, the fallow lands of new suburbs, devoid of history. Buildings replacing houses, clusters of buildings that people called apartment blocks. Hallways, corners of the flat, a bedroom tidied ad infinitum. Certain landscapes. Certain events. If I applied myself, I’d find more, but it’s of no interest whatsoever. Josiane, on tour in the city of Lyon, writes: ‘In the neighbouring park where my father’s soul drifts about, the park where he came almost every day of his life to run, the first of all the joggers, and then to pedal when he could no longer run, I retraced the steps I took at every stage of my life. Once I saw my mother furtively pick acacia blooms and eat the petals. She who was so measured and so wise, a worshipper of reason, eating flowers whilst hiding from park wardens, before the eyes of her dumbfounded (young) children.’ My gardens are safe. I can walk past and even through them worry-free. There are no wandering souls. I am left in peace. A happy childhood is a useless burden for the future. Childhood period. No matter which childhood. Josiane retraced the steps she used to take between her father’s surgery and the family flat: ‘I did the walk, which as a child seemed to me a true journey, between the Surgery and the Flat. A five-minute walk. Sun in the street. My father so proud of having made it possible for us to live in that bourgeois district, near a beautiful park.’ She put capital letters on Surgery and Flat. So she retraces her steps and without her saying so, or without it becoming apparent (or maybe it is apparent in that wonderful detail), her heart grows heavy, I can feel it. In 1987, from a distance, with a single camera and no lighting, Didier filmed a performance of Conversations After a Burial at the Théâtre Paris-Villette. I no longer know why we did it. To begin with, things that seem natural to others are not natural for me. I’ve never felt it necessary to archive (awful word) a show. A few months later, I watched the tape, but only the beginning, the first few minutes, until the characters walk, enter, exit. We couldn’t see much, couldn’t see the faces in detail, but could hear the sound. I don’t mean the words, I mean the sound of the actors’ steps on the stage – a certain kind of footstep-sound on that wooden floor, to which I’d never paid attention but which, for some unknown reason, contained the soul of the play. With its uneven tones, it signalled distance and oblivion. That sound of steps which I will never hear again in real life provoked in me a savage, unquantifiable melancholy, related to both past and future. I could not keep watching the tape, and never viewed it again. Is this not the same melancholy people suffer when they run into their childhood again? On the side of the street the school was on, for a long time there was only a long wall that concealed a piece of undeveloped land. Most of the time I walked on the opposite sidewalk, which was even bumpier, but sometimes I crossed the street and walked by the wall. It was a street in progress that went up to our building. I asked my sister what had become of our room after I left at around age fifteen. I say, I have no memory of your room when you lived in it alone. She replies, it hasn’t changed, it’s just the same. I think about our room, eternally tidied, nothing left about, no toy or piece of clothing, not a single object of no immediate use. I say: same wallpaper? (columns of daisy bouquets) – Yes. – Desk? – Yes. – Did you put things on the wall? – No. – Did you like our room? – No. But I liked the chestnut tree out the window. I say that I don’t remember the chestnut tree. She’s astonished, yes you do, the nice horse chestnut! I suddenly think of Desolation and the character of Lionel, who every day in every season contemplates the chestnut tree outside his window, and I’m struck by an absurd idea, which I immediately reject: the invented chestnut tree at the corner of rues Laugier and Faraday could only be a transplantation of our chestnut tree from childhood, of which I have no memory, but I reject the idea. The chestnut tree of childhood has been erased and there have been many other chestnut trees since. It was not for me, nor mine, that tidy room in which I kept myself for years, now occupied by someone else looking out at the same square of outside world, at the tree if it still exists, the life of the railway, the freight trains and the little hill behind – a half-empty room facing north, a passageway with two doors on the diagonal that one abandons without regret to escape into the future. Once in a while, I think back on the short trip we took with my mother to Budapest. A return to her native city in her native land, a serenely detached journey, as if there were no such thing as a native city or a native land, as if those words to which I ascribe such weighty and even ancient meaning (one really wonders why) were nothing but literary phantasmagoria. Someone told me recently that he loved such-and-such a place because it was his country. People who can say ‘my country’ often mean a village, a neck of the woods. That’s what a country always is, anyway, an inaugural setting, a piece of earth – it cannot be too big. What’s the difference between people who have a neck of the woods and those who don’t? What’s the good of having a place, a soil, roots, because when all is said and done –? There have never been graves, no places of the dead. I had a little sister who died, I don’t know where she is. My maternal grandparents are ashes somewhere in New York, my mother doesn’t know exactly where. As for my father and his parents, I was the one who brought them into town before my father’s death so I wouldn’t have to inter him in the suburban hinterland next to the ring road, where he’d just buried his brother and would have buried his father and mother, repatriated from who-knows-where, in a plot that wasn’t even Jewish. One day, in the street, knowing he was sick, knowing he was done for, not to put too fine a point, I asked, ‘When you die do you want a religious burial?’ He stopped walking to properly take offence: ‘Of course, what a question!’ I said, ‘Grandma isn’t buried in a Jewish plot,’ he said, ‘Well that is a mistake.’ So now I know where he is, and I know where his father, mother, brother are, they’re in that Jewish section in the Montparnasse cemetery where by some miracle we got three spots, but the land is absolutely new, without any roots. Bodies are put there at random, with no connection to anything. I feel a sort of coming up in the world to have them there in the heart of Paris, next to famous people of French culture, like the nouveaux riches of death.
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Photograph courtesy of Kalpesh Lathigra, Bird of Paradise / Strelitzia
