Dossier K: A Memoir by Imre Kertész Read Free Book Online

my heart over, if not my mind, andthis ambivalence shadowed me later on as well. But let’s stay with my father. On returning home from his daily skirmishes, in the evening he would complain about his worries and his stomach pains. To stand his ground he would have needed to put on a bit of weight. Every now and again he would haul out a billycan of goose dripping that was being kept for the winter. Have you seen the sort of thing?
    You mean one of those blue or red enamel cans with a lid that was locked with a fastener
.
    Blue: our billycan was blue. That contained the goose dripping, which had a pale-red tint from the paprika with which it had been roasted, and there would also be occasional limp onion rings dotted about in it. Father ate the dripping by the spoonful like Genghis Khan. He was also very fond of cocoa, with garlic on toasted bread: that was Sunday breakfast for him as long as he lived on Tömő Street. My grandmother would bring it to him while he was still in bed, and he would crunch it loudly between his healthy teeth. As a boy of four of five, I would sit beside him in the bed and enjoy the sound of his crunching, the way the aroma of garlic would spread around the bed and through the whole room. I would marvel at him in the barber’s shop when he had his blue bristles shaved. He would throw his head back and the razor-blade would work all around his neck. He had a huge Adam’s apple that would jiggle up and down under the razor; I would hold my breath as I watched to see the outcome. On Sunday mornings he would take mefor a walk: we would stroll to the Oktogon and back. Those walks were very dispiriting for me; I would be bored to tears and feel dizzy, dazed by all the passersby, the Sunday crowds of people. Budapest was a truly fine city in those days; it still is today, but then it was clean as well. The elegance of those Sundays! The ladies’ hats! The Changing of the Guard up at the Castle in Buda! The promenades alongside the Danube! In springtime Father would take me on a pleasure steamer, the
Sophia
. I would race to grab seats in the “bows.” Father would produce a miniature chess set from his pocket and pin the tiny pieces into the holes by their little pegs. At every turn some surprise would be in store, with adventures lying in wait at every street corner. On the Grand Boulevard, the outer ring road, a bulldog man would put in an appearance every Sunday, sauntering stiffly as he led five or six identical-looking bulldogs on a multiple lead, with an identical pipe dangling from the jaws of the identical-looking bulldogs. Odd characters like that existed in Budapest in those days. Sandwich-board men would pass us by with their slowly plodding steps. In a shop window of the Paris Department Store a chef with a white hat tossed pancakes up in the air from his frying pan. He would always catch them and fry them, and they cost only ten fillérs apiece, 7 except that my father would not always have ten fillérs on him. Then I would be most indignant, whereupon he would explain: “I’m stony broke. Business just isn’t going well.” That would crush all arguments, on top of which I had no idea what he meant: where was business supposed to go from Koszorú Street, 8 which was its normal place?
    A timber merchant’s, if what you write in
Fatelessness
is an accurate guide
.
    Fairly accurate. It was a spacious cellar property in which timber planks were stockpiled in a certain order. There was an “office” consisting of a glass cage at the foot of the steep flight of steps, but in
Fatelessness
I made it sound a bit posher than it was. There I describe the family as very middle-class, whereas we were much more like lower-middle-class, petit-bourgeois. Father was not able to pay for the stock that he held, so he received the planks “on commission” from the wholesaler, a man by the name of Mr. Galambos, who had a lumberyard somewhere in Újpest 9 —an enormous open-air area with wisps of