Dossier K: A Memoir (13 page)

So, we’re again mooring by the unfathomable relationship between fiction and reality, yet we already covered that at the very start of our conversation. Only now I get the impression that you are not quite so sure of yourself as you were then.

Well, I’m frightened that you are going to tell the truth
 …

Never doubt it!

All right, then, let’s start off from the previous chapter of
“Fiasco”,
the novel-in-the-novel, where we learn that Köves has been in the army “because the same post as the dismissal letter from the ministry had also brought a demand that he immediately discharge his deferred military service.” When did that happen in your case?

In November 1951 I was called up for regular military service, and after the three months of so-called “basic training” it turned out that the military command had singular plans for the unit to which I had been posted …

“Yet what a filthy dream did I wake up to all at once! I
am standing in a room by a desk behind which is seated an obese, hormonally challenged bonehead, with matted hair, rotting teeth, bags under his eyes, and a sneer on his face: a major, and what he wants is for me to put my signature at the bottom of a piece of paper and accept a post as a prison guard in the central military prison.” What that sounds like is that Köves, on the model of many other literary figures, is about to enter a contract with the Devil
 …

It’s not a huge difference in principle.

If I look on it as a literary game. But here, as it is said in one of Wedekind’s plays, “we’re not playing but living.” So, why does Köves sign the paper?

Out of ignorance, curiosity, and, above all, existential apathy.

“… my existence went to sleep, or was paralyzed inside me, or at any rate it gave no twinge of unease to warn me of the importance of the decision,” writes Köves, or is that you?

I write “the Old Boy” who writes Köves, who in turn writes the letter addressed to Berg.

“That was when I raised my hand and struck a defenceless prisoner in the face”—who writes that?

Köves.

And Köves is who, exactly?

You can’t be serious. “I am Madame Bovary”—for any lesser risk it’s better if one doesn’t sit down to write a novel.

It seems that I’m not only lacking something in the humour department but in the horror department as well. I don’t know you to be the sort of person who would strike somebody in the face
.

You can’t know, just as Köves does not know himself: we spoke about that earlier on when we talked about him being concealed in his insignificance. Here you, the reader, step with Köves into a world where the aimlessly stumbling personality has no foothold, and if your “existence has gone to sleep,” it is easy to make—or let’s say rather: it can easily
happen
—the first and decisive step, from which there is no turning back.

If one accepts that argument, then it would be impossible to call any mass murderer to account
.

You are forgetting that as a writer I am not concerned with calling people to account but with accurate portrayal. In any case, I—and the “I” here is an unknown factor, a passivity—so, I was lucky and I was not exposed to any haunting moment like that.

Do you really think it is just a matter of luck?

I don’t know. On the basis of the experiences I gained in camps and dictatorships, the resilience of human
nature is inexhaustible. When I wrote that novel—almost thirty years after the fact—I certainly had to ponder the possibility of such a moment. In the last analysis, the imagination is also a kind of reality, and if I really wished to respond to the issues raised in the novel, then I had to carry out in my imagination things that had not happened in reality if only in order that the fictional Köves should experience the “definitive act” and place it at Berg’s disposal.

Before we began this conversation, I sat down to re-read
“I, the Executioner,”
the novel-in-the-novel-in-the-novel of
Fiasco,
which provides an apology for mass murder. Do I understand correctly that the state when a person is freed from his own personality and completely subsumes it to the executioner’s role is one that Berg calls grace?

Or that of the victim. “It might perhaps be pleasant to be alternately victim and executioner,” Baudelaire remarks in
My Heart Laid Bare
on the basis of who knows what earlier experiences he may have had. The essence of both roles is a complete release from the burden of personality—that is why Berg is searching for a “definitive act” that would set the executioner on the “salvational” route of mass murder.

What do you mean here by a “definitive act”?

It’s an act which does not ensue from the propensities, character, or individuality of the person concerned but solely from the situation, which commands the terrain
like a foreign power. The moment takes command, and you get out of it as best you can. You have to free yourself of the colossal tension: all of a sudden, you cave in and abandon any resistance—relinquish yourself to the line of least resistance, one could say.

Is this not the same thing as what elsewhere you refer to as fatelessness?

In essence the same thing; it’s just that the idiom employed in
Fiasco
is different.

There it is referred to as “grace,” and it is given a positive connotation. Why is that?

Because in Berg’s view, man has become superfluous in a dictatorship. The only way he can find the grace is by what he refers to as “service,” “serving the order.”

In the form of either villain or victim … If we did not have the written records that were left behind by the various dictatorships, I would venture to say that we would have no idea what this man was talking about. Even as things are, his figure is fairly shrouded in mist. Who exactly is he?

I suppose that in Berg’s figure I was constructing an imaginary representation of the “Old Boy” whom one gets to know in the frame novel. He’s a man of absolute theory, who is pondering “a plan for a dissertation, on a not-too-ambitious scale, concerning the possibilities for an aesthetic mediation of violence.”

In other words, the figure of the “Old Boy” is replicated, as it were, in the Köves novel?

Precisely—rather like a cinema film shot through a prismatic lens. The scenes with Köves and Berg, followed by Köves’s epistolary confession, are the culmination of the novel, the place where the entire burden of argument is brought to a terse climactic point around them.

One in which Berg goes mad, whereas Köves carries on and then suddenly finds himself in the L-shaped corridor … which is where he is overtaken by a moment of rapture
.

Of enlightenment.

My apologies for the loose language. In any event it is a matter of a mystical moment, an experience that one cannot recount in the language of rationality but which, one could say, abruptly changes one’s life. What in fact did happen to you in the corridor?

I have already said this several times, and I fear that I shall be guilty of repeating myself. Or rather I fear that I won’t be able to put it like … like for example …

Like you put it in Stockholm
.

Stockholm is several light years away from the place where we are holding this conversation. And it may well be that our path does not lead to Stockholm, anyway.

What do you mean by that?

That we have yielded to this flawed logic several times already. We are sitting here at total ease and safety at the endpoint of our story and contentedly chomping away about the splendid triumphal procession. We are divesting ourselves of any risk, because every step we take is another step toward the goal, and we can have complete confidence in each and every step: everything we do is correct, because we are progressing towards our goal. That is why we boarded the train that chuffed toward Auschwitz; that is why I was not shoved to the left by the doctor at the Birkenau selection; that is why kindly hands hauled me out from among the corpses at Buchenwald, and so on … in that way the story would come to pass, except it would not be a Job’s story of making atonement, as you might suppose, but of a vulgar kitsch, the career of a ridiculous buffoon. Every individual story is kitsch, because it evades the rules; every single survivor attests purely to a breakdown in the machinery that has occurred in an individual case. Truth belongs only to the dead, no one else.

But the dead keep their counsel … the truth belongs to those who speak out. You yourself said that; I read it somewhere in
Galley Boat-Log.
¹⁶
Let me put rather the following question: What was the immediate outcome, or consequence if you prefer, of the enlightenment you underwent in the L-shaped corridor?

That for weeks or months on end, or however long it was, I wrote and wrote a text that drove me to despair every day, because in no way would it assume any shape, coalesce into an organic whole. It bubbled out from somewhere deep inside me like scalding-hot lava and then spread out amorphously, destroying everything around.

That sounds pretty alarming—rather as though you were recounting being possessed by a deleterious passion
.

Precisely. Every day I would write something that, when I read it over at the end of the day, I would find dispiriting. The next day, despite my ever-growing sense of dismay, I would nevertheless start all over again …

What caused that “ever-growing sense of dismay”
?

The fact that I had to give way to the demands of the text. I had to recognize that the sentences that would appear under my hand would sometimes arrive unexpectedly: they knew more than I myself did; they would surprise me with secrets that I was unaware of; they would not tolerate my interventions but lived some sort of autonomous, alien life that it was up to me to understand rather than dominate … slowly the threatening thought dawned on me that I needed time, more time, in fact a great deal more time …

In order to prepare for your career?

The word “career” is totally out of place here. My so-called career is at best the product of a construct in hindsight—that’s if anyone should seek to slip in the fallacy of logic into processes that are otherwise spontaneous and inexplicable. Forget the career and try instead to imagine a completely bewildered young man who, not knowing why, started to write, sharpened pencils, and spread sheets of blank paper in front of himself while noting with horror that there was nothing to justify his actions—indeed, what he was doing was frankly nonsensical.

Despite that, every day you carried on with your apparently senseless experiments. Why?

Out of an existential angst that may have silenced everything else inside me.

Existential angst … could you label that any other way?

A compulsive psychosis … categorical inner imperative … the fulfilment of a task … how should I know?

Not a bad task. Did a sense of vocation awaken in you, perhaps?

No way! I have many faults, but I never felt a sense of vocation.

Maybe that was the way in which your talent manifested itself
.

Yes, talent is one of those words that is used, but no one knows what it means.

“In the end it may yet transpire that I do, indeed, have some talent for writing, which would make me truly sorry,” writes the Old Boy in
Fiasco,
“since I did not start writing because I have talent; on the contrary, when I decided that I would write a novel, evidently I also decided, by the bye, that I would become talented. I needed it; there was a job to be done. I had to aim to write a good book, not out of vanity but in the nature of the thing, so to say.”

Well, yes, but at that point in time, at rock bottom, I couldn’t have known that I was going to be so wise thirty years later.

If you didn’t realize it, you have still not answered my earlier question as to what, in fact, happened to you in the L-shaped corridor
.

Let’s just accept that not every question has an answer.

“There comes a moment in the lives of men when they suddenly become aware of themselves and their powers are freed; from this moment onward we can reckon to be ourselves, this is the moment when we were born,” you write in
Galley Boat-Log.
¹⁷

One can hardly go further than that. I recollect an ecstatic moment that I could only capture here and now with rather vacuous words.

All the same, that was the moment that determined the further course of your life
.

That is undeniable.

Which forced you to the writing desk, which held you prisoner among your papers—is that what you call “existential angst”? What sort of text was it that you were in fact struggling with? Was it a novel, a short story, a diary, memoir?

Let me put it this way: a longish short story.

One that, as you said, refused to assume any shape. What happened to it in the end? Did you discard it?

Fortunately, no. The better passages from it found their way, thirty years later, into the novel-in-the-novel of
Fiasco
.

With appropriate alterations, no doubt
.

Without changing a word.

Surely you don’t mean the novel that Berg reads out to Köves under the title
“I, the Executioner”?

Yes, I do.

Staggering authorial economy! And incidentally, it does not show the least trace of thirty years of dust. However, I do
now begin to see how you worked out the path that would lead you to
Fatelessness.

I’d quite like to know myself.

You sought atonement for what you lived through in prison, only in doing so you amplified your problem into one of global dimensions. The only possible solution was a novel—in your case, at least, since you were born a writer
.

I don’t know; one is not born for anything in particular, but if one manages to stay alive long enough, then one cannot avoid eventually becoming something … and incidentally what you refer to as the path to
Fatelessness
I experienced as a continuous deficiency, and the fact that I gave myself to writing
Fatelessness
I intended as a fulfilment of that disaster, as a kind of self-punishment. Because I found I was just getting nowhere with fiction writing. “At least you are familiar with the material,” I told myself with a degree of healthy scorn, planning to write it in a couple of months.