Kaddish for an Unborn Child by Imre Kertész Read Free Book Online

conspicuous, so startling, like an oversized artificial limb, in this ground-hugging neighborhood, but from my window I can at least peek over the (what a surprise!) still extant old fence, and see the pitiful secret of a paltry garden which was a constant source of excitement in my childhood but now excites me not at all, indeed distinctly bores me, as indeed does the thought that, due to certain circumstances (my divorce, my predilection for the worst yet not necessarily the simplest solutions, and then too the fact that the money doesn’t exactly roll in), so anyway due to certain circumstances I have ended up back here, in the place where I spent a number of miserable childhood summer and winter vacations, where I gained a number of miserable childhood experiences, so the thought that I am again living here, as long as I still have to live, fourteen floors above my childhood, and therefore inevitably, and now purely for my annoyance, sometimes assails me in the form of totally superfluous memories of my childhood, for surely these memories long ago fulfilled the function that they had to fulfill, their stealthy rat work, eroding everything, gnawing away at everything, they could safely have left me in peace by now. But to get back to . . . what was it? . . . to my opinion—God help us!—I most probably must have said that this statement, which is to say the statement “There is no explanation for Auschwitz,” is faulty in purely formal terms, since for something that
is
there is always an explanation, even if, of course, merely an arbitrary, erroneous, so-so kind of explanation; nevertheless, it is a fact that a fact has at least two lives, one a factive life and another, so to say, cerebral life, a cerebral mode of existence, and this is none other than an explanation, the explanations or, better still, set of explanations that overexplain the facts to death, which is to say ultimately annihilate or at least obscure the facts, and this hapless statement that “There is no explanation for Auschwitz” itself is an explanation, being used by its hapless author to explain that it would be better for us to remain silent about Auschwitz, that Auschwitz does not (or did not) exist, because, you see, the only thing for which there is no explanation is something that does not or did not exist. However, I most probably said, Auschwitz did—that is,
does
—exist, and therefore there is also an explanation for it; what there is no explanation for is that there was no Auschwitz, that is to say, it would be impossible to hit upon an explanation for Auschwitz not coming into being, for the state of the world being such as not to be reified in the fact we call “Auschwitz” (if I may be allowed at this juncture to pay my respects to Dr. Obláth); yes, there would be no explanation precisely for an absence of Auschwitz, from which it follows that Auschwitz has been hanging around in the air since long ago, who knows, perhaps for centuries, like dark fruit ripening in the sparkling rays of innumerable disgraces, waiting for the moment when it may at last drop on mankind’s head, for in the end what is is, and the fact that it is is necessary because it is: The history of the world presents us with a rational process (quotation from H.), because were I to see the world as a series of arbitrary accidents, then that world would have, well, a rather unworthy view (self-quotation), so let’s not forget: To him who looks upon the world rationally the
world
in turn presents a rational aspect: the relation is mutual—again something H. said, not H., Leader and Chancellor, but H., grand-scale visionary, philosopher, court jester and head butler of choice morsels to leaders, chancellors and other titled usurpers, who, I fear, was moreover absolutely right about this, all that is left for us is to examine closely the subsidiary question of
what
kind
of rational process it is of that world