Kaddish for an Unborn Child (13 page)

public castration
staged for purposes of our intimidation,
with our cooperation
; in other words, with our cooperation they castrated one of our pals
in order to intimidate us
, or in other words, through the very ceremony itself they turned us into the ultimately perverted accomplices of an ultimately perverted act, I said to my wife, and it makes not the slightest difference, I said to my wife, whether they did this quite deliberately or merely out of habit, out of sheer
educational
habit
, the pernicious habit of a pernicious education. Or take, for instance, the
report
assembly every Saturday afternoon, I said to my wife. That, too, has to be pictured, I said to her. First of all, a number of long trestles were brought out of the dining hall and made into a single, endlessly long table, which they then covered. This was all staged in the games room. Only then were we pupils admitted, lining up to face this endlessly long, covered but empty table, not forgetting the row of chairs set up behind it. Anxiety would already be starting to weigh on us like some palpable substance. Then somebody, usually one of the lower-tutors, but it might be one of the higher-ranking members of the lower-ranking staff, brought in a large, black-bound book, the
report book
, and silently placed it in the middle of the table. A further period of waiting would ensue, a wait of ever-decreasing hopefulness in the face of the chairs, the table and that mute, evil, flat report book, sprawling in its blackness on the white tablecloth. At that moment, at the moment of all-around vacillation, sighs and, yes, total enervation, the
Headmaster
would enter at the head of the teaching staff. They would take their places. Deathly silence. A putting-on of spectacles. Some clearing of throats, creaking of chairs. And when the tension could be screwed no higher, the black book would be opened, like a Book of the Apocalypse. Everybody was in it, and everybody's every sin (and virtue). Each of us was individually addressed by name. On being called out, you would step forward and tremble alone in the space between the authorities ensconced behind the table and the warmth of the flock you had just forsaken. Keeping a rough idea of your merits and transgressions in mind, yet with growing uncertainty about even these, you would be prepared for any eventuality. The Head would silently read the week's entries about you, turn to the right, turn to the left, for a whispered consultation, with teachers bowing an ear or mouth towards him, and then the verdict would be pronounced. It might be a reprimand, praise or a tongue-lashing, you might be declared an example to the rest, or they might revoke your Saturday and even Sunday pass. But it wasn't that, it was the ceremony itself, the
procedure
, that was the essential thing, I said to my wife. I sensed that perhaps I should not be telling my wife all these things, at least not this way, speaking about nothing else for days and weeks on end, because it was likely that I was boring her, and quite certain that I was tormenting her with this, just as I was only tormenting myself too, albeit much less than her, of course; or to be more accurate, I tormented myself not just less but also differently, more productively, one might say, than I tormented her, and I already sensed this at the time, while I was talking, while I was telling my wife about my childhood, already then as I was talking I distinctly sensed a continual building-up, swelling and tensing within me of the long-gone carbuncle of my childhood, now suddenly reinflamed by a new threat and looking to rupture, indeed rupturing, so by talking I was admittedly tormenting myself, but at the same time I also found relief through talking, through this torment. The ceremony, I said to my wife, was just like a religious service, the way a corporal, let's say, might imagine it, I said to my wife; yes, the ceremony was like an
Appell
at Auschwitz, not for real, of course, just in fun, I said to my wife. I learned later that the Head, too, had gone up in smoke in one of the crematoria there, and if I cannot help perceiving this fact as an ultimate justification, so to speak, then most probably that is still a fruit of the successful education acquired from him, of the
culture
in which he believed and for which he equipped me pedagogically, I said to my wife. Out of this, after all, essentially cooler, more impersonal and thus actually more predictable world of pedagogical dictatorship, I then suddenly came under a warmhearted paternal rule of terror, for when I was ten my father took me back home, I told my wife. Around this time, I recollect, I made several attempts to set down in writing a picture of my father and my feelings towards my father, of the—what can I say?—fairly complicated relationship between my father and myself, an at least somewhat accurate, although of course not entirely true— because how could one be true towards one's father? how indeed could I be true even towards the truth itself? since for me there exists only one truth,
my own truth
, and even if that is a mistake, yes, my life alone, God help us!, only my own life can vouchsafe my own mistake as the sole truth—so anyway, I tried to create at least some sort of acceptable portrait, as I said, of my father and my feelings towards my father and my relationship with him, but this never succeeded, and now I know that it can never succeed, and I also as good as know, or anyway I have an idea, or at least an inkling, that I have been constantly trying to do exactly this ever since, and when all is said and done that is all I am doing right now, and, now as ever, doing it in vain. “I have to become capable of realizing how impossible it was for him to find the path to me . . .” I wrote, for instance . . . “Plainly, he was bound by a tense relationship to me as to himself, which he plainly called love, and believed to be that, which indeed it was, if we are ready to accept the word in all its absurdity and disregard its tyrannical content . . .” I wrote. At the school I had had dealings with a law, and though I may have feared it, I never had any respect for it, I said to my wife. In point of fact, it bore an aspect of fortune: it might come down hard on me or in my favor, but in neither case did it touch my conscience; only under the yoke of love did I become a real sinner, I said to my wife. This phase of my childhood pitched me into an unimaginably narrow-minded crisis; I lived in an animistic belief-world, like a caveman, my thoughts hedged about by so many taboos that I ascribed almost material powers to them, believing in their omnipotence, I said to my wife. Meanwhile, however, and undoubtedly under my father's influence, I also supposed there was an Almighty who would know my every thought at the moment of its inception and weigh it in the balance, but then I was often assailed by imponderable thoughts. It was one of my father's habits, for instance, to appeal to my better nature from time to time, I said to my wife. On such occasions, he found it impossible to avoid repeating himself; in other words, I said to my wife, I always knew what he was going to say next, secretly I was always ahead of him in the text that, like a catechism, he obligingly repeated after me: for a moment I would regain my freedom, though it also made my flesh creep, I said to my wife. Terror-stricken, I would try to cling on to something; it would be enough to notice his hapless, dog-eared shirt collar, the loneliness of his slightly trembling hand, the strained furrowing of his brow, his quite futile torment—anything to unnerve me and make me pervious as a desiccated sponge. Then at last I could inwardly intone the redemptive words, the words of brief triumph and at the same time hasty retreat:
Poor
thing
. . . The sponge would begin to swell, I would be moved to tears by my own emotions, and I thereby paid off some of the debt that continually weighed on me as a result of my father's intimidating love. As to whether, when all is said and done, despite everything, and mindful of all the ambiguities of the word, I really loved him, I answered my wife, who put the question to me at this point, I don't know; indeed, it would be exceedingly difficult for me to know, because, faced with so many reproaches and so many demands, I always knew and felt and saw, or I
ought
to have known, felt and seen, that I didn't love him, or at least did not love him properly, not
enough
, and therefore, because I was
unable
to love him, I indeed probably did not love him, I said to my wife; and in my opinion, I said to my wife, that was also as it should be, putting it somewhat radically, the way it was planned, I said to my wife, for that way, and only that way, we were able to produce an
ideally routinized structure of existence.
Domination is unchallengeable, unchallengeable the laws by which we must live, though we can never fully live up to these laws: we are always sinners before our father and God, I said to my wife. After all, my father likewise only equipped me for the same thing, the same
culture
, as the school, and he probably gave as little thought to his goals as I to my reluctance, my disobediences, my failures: we may not have understood one another, but our cooperation worked perfectly, I said to my wife. And even if I have no idea whether I loved him or not, the fact is there were many times when I honestly pitied him, with all my heart: but if, by sometimes making him ridiculous, and pitying him because of that, if by doing that—in secret, always in the greatest secrecy—I thereby overthrew paternal power, respect, God, it was not just that he— my father—lost his authority over me, but I myself became achingly lonely, I said to my wife. I had need of a tyrant for my world order to be restored, I said to my wife, but my father never tried to replace my usurpatory world order with another, one based on our common state of powerlessness, for example, in other words, one based on truth, I said to my wife. And in the same way, just as I was a bad son and bad pupil, so I was also a bad Jew, I said to my wife. My Jewishness remained an obscure circumstance of birth, just one of my many faults, a bald-headed woman in a red negligee in front of the mirror, I said to my wife. Of course, I said many other things too to my wife, I no longer recall them all. I do remember that I exhausted her very much, just as I became very tired myself and am still tired now. Later on, Auschwitz, I said to my wife, seemed to me to be just an exaggeration of the very same virtues to which I had been educated since early childhood. Yes, childhood and education were the start of that inexcusable process of breaking me, the survival that I never survived, I said to my wife. Even if my progress was not always with top marks, I was a modestly diligent party to the silent conspiracy that was woven against my life, I said to my wife. Auschwitz, I said to my wife, manifests itself to me in the image of a father; yes, the words father and Auschwitz elicit the same echo within me, I said to my wife. And if the assertion that God is a glorified father figure holds any truth, then God manifested himself to me in the image of Auschwitz, I said to my wife. When I finally fell silent, and after all the talking I stayed silent for a long while, perhaps days, my wife seemed to be in torment, but it was as if she had not grasped what I had been saying, or to be more precise, as if she had not grasped what I had been saying in the way that I said it, that is, as if she had not noticed that I, without any reason (to say the least of it)—and it was useless my being aware of it, of course—but without any reason, mercilessly, and in all likelihood merely because she had heard me out, I had in fact directed all my anger at her, and to avoid having to use the word revolt here, in this connection, where it truly has no place, what I am saying is that it was as if my wife perhaps supposed that now I had related all this, given vent to it, vomited it out of myself, I had in the process
freed myself
from it all; yes, as if I could have freed myself from all this, as if it were ever possible to free myself from it all—that may have been what she supposed, I supposed, noticing several, admittedly tentative attempts on her part to draw closer, to draw closer to me
by understanding.
By nature I closed myself off from that; by nature I was unable to bear any sort of
understanding
, for in reality that would only have served to sanction my powerlessness. But that was as nothing compared with the elemental force of the insight that probably sprang purely from
my procedure
, from the way that I treated my wife, or yes, in the final hours of my glittering night I ought to use the appropriate word for it, because it is the only cathartic word: so, from the way that I disposed of her. Yes, my being so merciless, so
intimately merciless
, towards her had, in the process, made her, it seemed, once and for all unacceptable in my eyes; in a certain sense, and what I am about to say is an exaggeration, of course, a big exaggeration, but in a certain sense it was as if I had killed her, which made her a witness to it, she had looked on, she would have seen me killing a person; and it seemed that I would never be able to forgive her for that. It is superfluous for me to reflect on that period here; for instance, on how much longer we lived, were able to live, like that, mutely alongside one another. I was deeply depressed, inert and lonely, this time to a degree that it proved impossible to compensate for; in other words, it did not bring
my work
any further forward, on the contrary, it totally paralyzed it. I am not absolutely sure if, while I was inwardly—naturally—in the very process of fabricating accusations, a whole web of accusations, against her, I was not secretly waiting for help from my wife; but even if this was the case, I gave no visible sign of it, in my opinion. One day, in the evening if I recall correctly, and late in the evening at that, my wife had just arrived home from somewhere, I don't know where, I didn't pry, I didn't even ask where, she was looking beautiful, and just for a passing moment, like a flash of lightning behind thick clouds, the thought briefly cleaved through me: “What a pretty Jewish girl!” naturally, shamelessly and sadly, as she entered, and it seemed that she was traversing a greenish-blue carpet as if she were making her way on the sea, and it was then, that night, that she, my wife, broke the silence, our silence. It was somewhat late, my wife said, but she could see I was still up, sitting and reading. She was sorry, my wife said, but some business had come up, though that was probably of no interest to me anyway. That I was sitting there and reading, reading or writing, reading