The Union Jack (3 page)

matter of talent
, and that accorded fully with the totally absurd and totally unwitting fantasies I spun at that time about leading some sort of happy-go-lucky but still somewhat intellectual life. In some respects I soon forgot about the book but in others, never; I never re-read it, it never again came into my hands, and in the end the book itself went missing somewhere, somehow, and I never looked for it again. Later on, however, as a result of discreetly thorough asking around, I came to realise that the book could have been none other than one of the works of Ernő Szép; more than likely—though this is just an assumption, since I have not corroborated it for myself—his novel
Adam’s Apple
. And now that I had mentioned the book that influenced my life so profoundly, with the peculiar determinacy of dreams of a revelatory
nature, after some hesitation I also revealed to the friendly gathering where they had been urging me to tell the story of the Union Jack that the author of that book, Ernő Szép, without my being aware that he was the author of the book (by no means one of the most significant of his life’s works maybe, if indeed truly significant at all), around that time, that is to say when the disaster had not only long been undeniably visible, present and palpable, but nothing other than the disaster was visible, present and palpable, and, apart from the disaster, nothing else functioned, Ernő Szép was pointed out to me, a so-called “cub reporter,” on one or two occasions, in the erstwhile so-called “literary” coffee-houses and cafés which still operated at that time, albeit only as disaster coffee-houses and disaster cafés by then, of course, into which strayed only shadowy figures seeking some warmth, temporary shelter, temporary formulations. And on one or two occasions—perhaps even two or three—I, the “cub reporter,” was even introduced to Ernő Szép (who naturally never recalled my earlier introductions), purely for the sake of being able to hear him introduce himself with the phrase that has since attained legendary, nay, mythical status: “I
was
Ernő Szép.” At this juncture, I proposed a minute’s silence to the friendly gathering of my former students who
had been urging me to tell the story of the Union Jack. Because, I told them, as the years and decades pass not only had I not forgotten that form of introduction, it actually came to mind increasingly often. Of course, I said, you would have had to see Ernő Szép, you would have had to see the old chap who, before you would have been able to see him,
was
Ernő Szép: a tiny old chap who seemed to be relieved of his own very weight, swept along the icy streets like a speck of dust by the wind of disaster, drifting from one coffee-house to the next. You would have had to see, I said, his hat, for example, a so-called “Eden” hat, of a shade that had evidently once been what was called “dove grey,” which now teetered on his tiny bird’s head like a battle-cruiser pummelled by numerous direct hits. You would have had to see his neat, hopeless-grey suit, the trouser legs bagging on to his shoes. Even then I suspected, but now I know for certain, that this introduction, “I
was
Ernő Szép,” was not one of those habitual disaster jokes or disaster witticisms of this disaster city which, in the disaster era that had by then undisguisedly set in, were generally believed and accepted, because people could not believe, because they did not know or want to believe or give credence to anything else. No, that introductory
form was a formulation, and a radical formulation at that, a heroic feat of formulation, I would say. Through this formulation Ernő Szép remained, indeed became the essence of, Ernő Szép, and at the very time when he already only
was
Ernő Szép; when they had already wound up, liquidated and taken into state ownership every possibility by which Ernő Szép had once still been permitted to be Ernő Szép. Simply a lapidary formulation of the actual truth condition (the disaster), couched in four words, which no longer had anything to do with wisdom or lightheartedness. A formulation which lures nobody towards anything but with which nobody can ever be reconciled, and by that token a formulation with a far-reaching resonance—indeed, in its own way, a creation which, I will hazard a guess, may survive all of Ernő Szép’s literary creations. At this, my friends and former students started to mutter, some of them sceptically objecting that anyway the oeuvre was, so to say, “irreplaceable,” as they put it, and moreover Ernő Szép is at this very time gaining a new lease on life, at this very time people are starting to re-read and re-evaluate his works. I knew nothing, and in this instance once again don’t even want to know anything, about this, since I am not a literary man; indeed,
for a long time now I have not liked, and do not even read, any literature. If I search for formulations, then I usually search for them outside literature; if I were to strive for formulations, I would probably refrain from formulations that are literary formulations, because—and maybe it suffices to leave it at this; indeed, there is truly nothing more that I can say—literature has fallen under suspicion. It is to be feared that formulations that have been steeped in the solvent of literature never again win back their density and lifelikeness. One should strive for formulations that totally encapsulate the experience of life (that is to say, the disaster); formulations that assist one to die and yet still bequeath something to posterity. I don’t mind if literature, too, is capable of such formulations, but what I see increasingly is that only
bearing witness
is able to do this, possibly a life passed in muteness without being formulated
as a formulation
. “For this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth”—is that literature? “I
was
Ernő Szép”—is that literature? Therefore—and only now do I notice it—the story of my encounter with the adventure of formulation (and at the same time with the Union Jack) does not start, as I originally supposed, with Richard Wagner after all, but with Ernő
Szép; in either case, however, one way or the other, I have to and had to start with the editorial office. In the editorial office to which my fantasy, under the influence of Ernő Szép, had borne me—under external circumstances ready, as ever, to comply with steadfast fantasy—in that editorial office, then, on a briefer and more condensed trajectory, so to say, though of course without leaving behind an intellectual trail of any kind, I trod the very same path that Ernő Szép had taken, from the unwittingness of wisdom and lightheartedness up to the “I
was
Ernő Szép” type of formulation; all that I found on the site of the alleged erstwhile Budapest was a city that had tumbled into ruins, lives that had tumbled into ruins, souls that had been tipped into ruins, and hopes trampled underfoot amid those ruins. The young man about whom I am speaking here—I—was also one of those souls, stumbling around on the way to nothingness amid those ruins, although he (I) at the time still construed the ruins merely as some kind of film set and himself as an actor in a film—in any event, some splenetic, some acerbically modern film that was fraudulent in an acerbic and modern manner—a role that, being based entirely on the illusion seen from the auditorium, and oblivious to all disturbing circumstances
(that is to say, reality, or the disaster), he (I) formulated as “I’m a journalist.” I can see the young man on drizzly autumn mornings, the fog of which he inhaled just like the rapidly evaporating freedom; around him I can see the set, the blackly glistening wet asphalt, the accustomed bends in familiar streets, their dilatations into the void over which the swirls of thinning fog gave hints of the river; the dank smell of the people who waited with him for the bus, the wet umbrellas, the hoarding plastered with garish posters which concealed the wartime rubble of a ruined building, on a site where today, forty years later, another ruin stands, a peacetime ruin, the wartime ruined building having been replaced by a peacetime ruined building, a decrepit, eight-storey monument to total peace, corroded by premature death, patinated by air pollution, vandalised by every sort of squalor, theft, neglect, infinite provisionality and futureless indifference. I can see the stairway up whose stairs he will hurry before too long, with the same sense of security that delusion-driven people have which had impelled him (me) to declare “I’m a journalist”—with a certain sense of self-importance, in other words, which even the stairway in itself nurtured, that already long non-existing stairway, which hinted at a then unambiguous reality, the reality of
real
editorial offices,
late
journalists,
one-time
journalism, and the mood and reality which embraced all this; I can see the lame porter, the so-called “errand-boy” or, more accurately, office messenger, that singularly priceless person, who in those days was still so singularly priceless merely due to the singularly priceless services he rendered, limping nimbly between the rooms of the editorial office as he fetched and carried manuscripts and galley-proofs and performed trivial but indispensable errands as zealously as he was ready to act as a lender of last resort for cash loans (at low interest), if the worst came to the worst; a person who only later on turned into an all-powerful, implacable, unapproachable Office Assistant, wrapped in the pelt of his arrogance, of the sort familiar to us solely from Kafka’s novels and, to be sure, so-called
socialist reality
. On one such early-autumn morning, no, it was more likely forenoon already, most probably around the time of the gradual decrescendo from the clamorous chords of going to press, the “deadline,” in those languid moments of slackness deriving from a certain sense of what could be called satisfaction, it happened that one of the stenographers in the editorial office raised with me the question of which theatre I wanted free tickets for. The stenographer—I still remember him today: his name was Schaeffer, and
although he was at least fifty years older than I was, I, like everyone else, called him Wee Schaeffer, since he was a diminutive, exquisitely dapper little chap, with his neat suits, fastidious neckties, French-style footwear, one of those cast-off
parliamentary stenographers
consigned to oblivion in an era when Parliament had long ceased to be a parliament, and stenography was no longer stenography in an era of ready-made texts, off-the-peg texts, prefabricated, pre-digested and meticulously censored disaster texts—this stenographer, then, with his rounded little eunuch’s paunch, his bald egg-head, his face reminiscent of carefully ripened soft cheeses, his little eyes shifting anxiously in their narrow slits, therefore required especially tactful handling, all the more so as he was hard of hearing, something of a paradox, to put it mildly, for a stenographer, and as such—when in prisons and diverse penal institutions in the selfsame city, indeed just a few blocks away, the numbers of people standing in corridors, hands behind their backs, faces turned to the wall, were already starting to multiply rapidly, when summary courts were churning out their sentences at full blast, when everybody outside prison walls, everybody indiscriminately, could be regarded only as a prisoner released on indefinite parole—he
continually fretted that his deafness, which everyone knew about, might accidentally be exposed and he might be sent into retirement: this stenographer, then, was the one who used to keep a record of the claims and entitlements to free tickets of the so-called colleagues in that editorial office. I can still remember the ambivalent surprise that caught the young man, whom, as I say, I sustained and felt myself to be at the time, in the wake of the stenographer’s accosting me at all, for on the one hand, he (I) had no heart for going to the theatre, simply on account of the disheartening plays that were being performed in the theatres, while on the other hand, he was entitled to regard the mere fact of being accosted as marking the end of his apprenticeship, his coming of age as a journalist, so to speak, since free tickets were earmarked exclusively for fully qualified and paid-up so-called colleagues. I remember that we perused the miserable options for a while with honest, one might say fellow-suffering scepticism—he, an old man simplified to his trivial practical fears, and I, a young man with more complex and more general anxieties—during which our gazes, so foreign and yet so intimate, communed for a few seconds. There was one other choice: the Opera House. “
Die Walküre
is on,” he said.
At that time I did not know the opera. I knew nothing at all about Richard Wagner. All in all, I knew nothing about any operas, had no liking for opera at all, though as to why not, that would be worth reflecting on, but not here, not now, when I really ought to be telling the story of the Union Jack. Suffice it to say that my family liked opera, which may make it somewhat easier to understand why I didn’t like opera. What my family liked, though, was certainly not the operas of Richard Wagner but Italian opera, the pinnacle of my family’s taste, I almost said tolerance, being the opera
Aida
. I grew up in a musical milieu—insofar as I can call my childhood milieu a musical milieu at all, which I cannot, because I would call my childhood milieu any other milieu but a musical milieu—where the remarks that were passed about Richard Wagner, for example, were of the kind “Wagner is
loud
, Wagner is
difficult
” or, to mention a remark made in connection with another composer, “If it has to be a Strauss, then make it Johann,” and so forth. In short, I grew up in a milieu that was just as stodgy in respect to music as it was in every other respect, which did not leave my taste completely unscathed. I would not venture to state categorically that it was exclusively the influence of my family, but it is an indisputable fact that, up until the moment when I got my ticket to Richard
Wagner’s opera
Die Walküre
from the stenographer Schaeffer in that editorial office, I liked instrumental music exclusively, and I disliked any music in which there is singing (excepting the
Ninth Symphony
, and by that I mean Beethoven’s, not the Mahler
Ninth Symphony
, which I got to know later on, much later on, at just the right time, at a time when thoughts about death were manifesting, when I was making acquaintance with thoughts about death, indeed, what I would have to call a process of familiarising myself with, if not exactly befriending, thoughts about death), as if in the human voice alone, or to be more precise, the singing voice, I saw some kind of polluting matter which casts a poor light on the music. All the musical precursors of which I partook prior to hearing the Wagner opera had been purely instrumental precursors, chiefly orchestral, which I got to at best sporadically, primarily through the agency of that exceedingly testy old man at the Music Academy, known to every student or student type, who, due to some eye defect, wore a perennial look of distrust but, for a forint or two pressed into his palm, would let any student or student type into the auditorium, testily ordering them to stand by the wall and then, as soon as the conductor appeared at the stage door leading to the podium, would direct them in a harsh voice to any