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

the demon who will take all our own demoniacality on his shoulders, an Antichrist bearing the Iron Cross, and will not insolently slip through our fingers to string himself up before time, as Stavrogin did. Yes, you see and label them as common criminal lunatics, yet from the moment one lays his hands on the orb and scepter you immediately start to deify him, reviling him even as you deify him, listing the objective circumstances, reciting what,
objectively
, he was right about, but what,
subjectively
, he was not right about, what
objectively
can be understood, and what
subjectively
cannot, what sorts of hanky-panky were going on in the background, what sorts of interests played a part, and never running short of explanations just so that you can salvage your souls and whatever else is salvageable, just so that you can view commonplace robbery, murder and trafficking in souls in which we all, all of us sitting here, somehow play or have played a part, one way or another, in the grand opera-house limelight of world events, I most probably must have said, yes, just so that you may fish partial truths out of the great shipwreck in which
everything whole has been smashed
, yes, just so as not to see before you, behind you, underneath you and at every turn the yawning chasm, the nothingness, the void, or in other words, our true situation, what it is you are serving and the prevailing nature of the prevailing régime, a dominating power which is neither necessary nor unnecessary but simply a matter of decisions, decisions that are made or not made in individual lives, neither satanic nor unfathomably and spellbindingly intricate, nor something that majestically sweeps us up with it, no, it is just vulgar, mean, murderous, stupid, hypocritical, and even at the moments of its greatest achievements at best merely well organized, I most probably must have said; yes, first and foremost,
frivolous
, because ever since the machines of murder have been uncovered here, there and in so many other places, ever since then it has been the end, the end for a good while, of any seriousness that might be taken seriously, at least in respect of the notion of domination, any sort of domination. And just stop once and for all, I most probably said, this “There is no explanation for Auschwitz,” that Auschwitz was a product of irrational, incomprehensible forces, because there is always a rational explanation for evil, it may be that Satan himself, just like Iago, is irrational, but his creatures are very much rational beings, their every action may be deduced, in the same way as a mathematical formula may be deduced, from some interest, greed for profit, indolence, lust for power and sex, cowardice, the need to gratify some urge or other or, if nothing else, then, in the final analysis, from some form of madness, paranoia, manic depression, pyromania, sadism, erotomania, masochism, demiurgic or other form of megalomania, necrophilia and what do I know which of the multitude of perversions, perhaps all of them at once, whereas, I most probably must have said, now pay attention, what is truly irrational and genuinely inexplicable is not evil but, on the contrary, good. That is precisely why I have long since had no interest in leaders, chancellors and other titled usurpers, however much you may be able to recount about their inner worlds; no, instead of the lives of dictators, for a long time now I have been interested solely in the lives of saints, because they are what I find interesting and incomprehensible, they are what I am unable to find merely rational explanations for; and even in this respect Auschwitz, however sick a joke this may sound, Auschwitz proved a fruitful enterprise, so however much it may bore you, I will tell you a story, and then you explain it to me, if you can. As I’m sitting in front of a roomful of old hands, I shall be brief, and if I say no more than
Lager
, and winter, and a hospital transport, and cattle