No, no! Not even my sister and brother are interested in such things. Even today they see nothing more in my studying than the investment of retained capital, which should bear as high an interest as possible. Father and mother, sister and brother, relatives and friends, acquaintances and strangers, they all have one notion: school is a place where a person is prepared for usury. No one knows really where or from whom the profit should be taken or can be taken, but everyone thinks they know that you go to school only so that one day you will earn as much as possible for as little effort as possible. Moreover, everyone has a strange presentiment – originating from who knows where or when, you could even say from a strange dream – not only that people who’ve been to school earn a lot of money for easy work, but that their school attendance affects the welfare, prosperity and abundance of their fathers and mothers, sisters, brothers, relatives, friends, and even their steers, heifers, piglets and chickens. They too all want to earn more for less effort, they too can start to eat and drink better, so that none of them will ever even dream of hunger and privation again.
The ancient story of the bizarre tragedy of the world was repeated. People spoke of education as some sort of Redeemer or Messiah, leading us to some higher and more ideal kingdom, but everyone was expecting an earthly Canaan, running with milk and honey. The world has surely always been that way, talking of one thing and thinking of another. And that is surely because nobody is content with what they have, they always want more, as if eternally gnawed by hunger or feeling anguish from privation. Somewhere far in the south there live tiny little white ants which wander indiscriminately from place to place, destroying everything organic in their path. They chomp up hundred-year-old furniture into pulp, and one fine day a person finds they are not sitting on a chair or sofa but a pile of dust. That’s what white ants are like, but do they differ that much from humans? Haven’t they also wandered for centuries from country to country and from continent to continent, and haven’t their pathways been littered with destruction? The ant is driven by hunger, but the human? The human driving force is hunger, which it has endured from the lands where its history is known. Even today, people confront people and nations confront nations, beating their breasts and trying to scream to outdo each other with proof that they are hungrier than others, and thus they have a greater right to wander around like the tiny white ants, seeking food and turning to ash and dust everything that happens to be in their path.
And so the idea settled down in me as I smeared butter as thinly as possible on a piece of bread, as I’d decided that a hundred grams should suffice for at least four meals. Evidently the natural tendency to save and stretch things out, inherited from my parents, was unconsciously at work in me, because I knew, as they did with their piglets, that a long and slighter hunger is better than a brief and horrible one. But until today I had never thought about it. None of us who went to school thought about it. At least we never talked about it among ourselves. Somehow we did our schoolwork, mostly making a face that said that we were doing it for someone else, not ourselves. We needed to play, have fun, go somewhere, look at or listen to something or simply wander around town, especially at forbidden times. We were all of the opinion that what was expected of us was pointlessness or senselessness invented by our parents, and pursuit of the forbidden was the only right and proper task in life. For if this wasn’t the case, why did those who no longer went to school go to those places we were forbidden to enter? Places frequented even by those who were supposed to monitor our walks, amusements, activities and acquaintances.
You could almost say that we were forced into something that we didn’t want or need and which everyone was trying to dodge, and they tried to take away from us everything that pleased us, tempted us and attracted everyone who wasn’t under the supervision we were. Even the cinemas couldn’t advertise themselves, they had to always stress that they were forbidden for young people. So why couldn’t we change our caps or simply hide them away so that our monitors couldn’t identify us as schoolchildren? Why couldn’t we change into apprentice tinsmiths, painters or joiners, so that we could get to see what was forbidden?
Those forbidden things could be necessary, that I don’t dispute, because I still don’t have a certain yardstick to measure when this or that food or drink, play or film, game or amusement is harmful to a person, when it is useful, when it is indispensable. But one thing I do know for certain: we didn’t believe a word of what we were told about the harm or benefits of things, substances and amusements. We didn’t believe it because those who taught us mostly didn’t live according to their teaching. And those few who acted according to their teaching mostly became targets of other people’s; they were quite simply ridiculous.
The same thing happened to our classmates when they tried so hard to bear in mind all sorts of prohibitions and restrictions: they were sissies, mother’s boys. More than that, they were suspected by the teachers of cringing, of telling tales, of all sorts of meanness. Nobody believed that any of us would be unaffected by such circumstances and things which day by day increased our passion – our peculiar hunger. Over the years we came to the conclusion that what they were doing was nothing less than irritating and enticing us with something sweet and tasty, but instead of giving it to us just saying, “You’ll have to wait.” But the others didn’t wait.
If anyone had asked us directly what was driving our hunger, we would have been at a loss for an answer, or at best would have answered: everything. And by “everything” we would have meant the glittering entrance of some cinema, or the door of a theatre with people pouring in, some rude novel, some ambiguous or obscene ditty somewhere in a poetry collection, an advertisement for a pub in a newspaper, a string of pearls glittering under furs around the neck of a fine lady, lips painted bright red, the laughing mouth of a woman approaching on the street, jazz music and dancing and some kind of nightclub, known by whispers to only two or three people. These were what surrounded us and what assailed our eyes and ears with every step, even though they were banned. This gnawed away at us day after day. This was what nurtured our hunger for something almost nameless, and yet we longed for a time when we could start to slake our hunger. We were waiting for that time in the same way perhaps that our fathers’ and mothers’ steers and heifers did, when in spring they bellowed in front of a half-empty fodder rack and they itched to get to a pasture and fill their mouths with as much of the last tussocks as would fit in their stomachs.