I need to think about that … Yes, I think so.
But the fact that Napoleon really did exist and the Russian campaign was a reality, and what’s more all of it was written down with scrupulous precision, with the historical facts being kept in view — that makes the book even better, doesn’t it?
Yes, it does.
And if Fabrizio del Dongo, the young hero of Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma, wanders irresolutely and uncomprehendingly across fields and groves and continually stumbles into cannon and cavalry units, hears incomprehensible shouts and commands — that’s quite an interesting fiction in itself, is it not?
It is.
But if we know that he happens to be cutting across the site of the Battle of Waterloo, that makes it even more interesting, doesn’t it?
That’s right.
Now, if it’s something concerning the Battle of Waterloo, that constrains one to accuracy because the Battle of Waterloo is a historical fact.
I see where you’re heading, and I appreciate your Socratic method, but let me ask something in turn. You told me what lengths your mother went to once she knew you had got into police custody — and what a ludicrous expression that is in your case! You said nothing, however, about how she came to know what had happened, because to the best of my knowledge you were living with your stepmother at that time.
My stepmother wrote a letter to my mother in which she told her about my disappearance. What a letter, though! The style! “Dear Goldie (that was my mother’s name: Goldie), There is an unpleasant piece of news about which I have to inform you …” “Naturally, I made inquiries at once …” The word “naturally,” and the various euphemisms, I “filched” from my stepmother’s vocabulary and then made use of in Fatelessness. A ruinous personality she had.
What do you mean by “ruinous”?
I’m not really sure … There is a sentence in Gombrowicz’s novel Ferdydurke—I may be quoting it inaccurately, but it goes something like: “Have you ever known the sort of people inside of whom you dwindle in size?” Well, my stepmother was like that.
Which suggests you had a tough time with her.
And she, the poor soul, had an even tougher time with me. I couldn’t stand the … the … To be brief, I couldn’t stand her at all; her taste most of all. Just imagine, she had this medium-grey, or rather light-grey, two-piece costume, and to go with that she bought a little narrow-brimmed red hat, a red lacquer purse, and red shoes, and she thought that they made her look frightfully elegant. And she would go out like that with me for a walk—“bunk off a little” was the way she put it. It was dreadful; I could have died. On top of everything, she wanted me to call her “Momsie,” and my father backed up this fervent wish. Anyway, they tried and tried but no way did it work; the word simply would not come out.
It seems that already in childhood you were highly sensitized to words. In your most recent novel, Liquidation, you talk about the phobia you had about some words.
Yes, some nonsensical scheme was attached to language; the pronunciation of certain words elicited specific concepts, but that’s not what is meant in this case. Her grey two-piece suit and the red hat and the “Momsie”—for me all that elicited a horror for which I only later found a name; it was an apotheosis of the petit-bourgeoisie at which to this day I still shudder just the same way. However hard they tried, then, I stayed with the “Auntie Kate,” because that suited her, though she was a good deal younger than my mother. But let’s not get immersed in childhood memories; in the end you’ll want to see snaps of me in my infancy.
Just as you say, but let’s stay on the subject for the time being. I would be interested to know what your family was like, how your childhood was spent, and so on. You haven’t said anything about your father. A woman who was as interesting as you describe your mother to have been would certainly not have fallen in love with just anyone.
Eenie, meenie, minie, mo, falling in love. “What’s that?” Géza Ottlik has one of his characters ask in his novel Buda. At any rate, my father was in love, that’s for sure, and that was manifested most obviously in his frightful jealousy. My mother, by contrast, wanted to get out of the tight family home, her three sisters, her stepmother, and her father, and his struggles with his financial worries in the small place they had in Molnár Street in the Fifth, the inner-city district of Pest. At that time — and I’m talking about the 1920s — the road to freedom for girls usually lay through getting married. And through work, of course. My mother was just sixteen when she got a job with a firm working as a clerk, as they called it in those days.
You mean it was not a matter of marrying for love?
Look, it’s exceedingly difficult for a young child to judge his parents’ love life. Because I was their child, the relationship between the two of them took quite a toll on me.
Did they quarrel?
Not all that often, but when they did, like blazes. I have a recollection of a fine summer morning, for instance. By then we were living close to the City Park in the Fourteenth District of Pest, in a roomy and well-aired apartment — it may have been in Elemér Rod, though I don’t know if that’s still its name today. I must have been four or five years old; more likely five than four, as I have a clear memory of it. It was probably a Sunday, since both of them were at home. They were yelling at each other. What I picked out clearly was that it was about swimming baths: Father didn’t want Mother to go to the swimming baths. He probably suspected that Mother had a rendezvous with someone there. What wasn’t at all clear was why my father didn’t go to the swimming baths with my mother. On account of “the child,” I suppose — that was me. Suffice to say, Father snatched Mother’s white rubber swimming cap and ripped it to shreds. Mother, for her part, got hold of a huge pair of tailor’s shears and snipped two gashes in the front brim of Father’s hat. I can see to this day his look of astonishment at the floppy hat brim; it was a green felt hat. I screamed at the top of my voice. In the end, Mother went to the swimming pool and Father took me with him to the shops to buy a new hat. Which makes me think it was more likely on a Saturday, since the shops were not open on Sundays.
Do you have a lot of memories like that?
One or two.
But then they divorced later on.
Again it was me who got the short end of that. I was placed in a boys’ boarding school as a full boarder.
Is any trace of that boarding school recognizable in Kaddish for an Unborn Child?
I certainly went to some trouble on that score.
Is it something you don’t care to talk about?
On the contrary! One is always happy to think back to one’s childhood, however rotten and tough a period it may have been.