The periodical
of The Federation to Maintain Jewish Culture in Hungary
[Are you a Jew?]
Gábor Németh
Grunting and heaving, they hoisted the slab. A water shaft. I had to feel around underneath for the soft swarm of slugs. The stomach: a small filthy knot. They scrunched up a snotty tissue. How did I get here? Leanyfalu, in the sixties. That can’t be right: none of them having faces. It must have been summer, if I was already going to school, if I had time to go camping. So why do I remember cold, damp, slimy autumn? An eight-bed room. For a while there was some coloured paper saying I came third in the singing contest. I wonder what on earth I had to sing about? There was some fat boy who swallowed an insect every lunchtime for a dare. A glass of water on the waxy tablecloth. Nobody can be that lonely. There was water still in the pool, water and frogs, and one of them pulled one out and cut up its mouth with a knife. Frogblood. They stuck it head first into the mud, just the glassy legs hanging out, standing up out of the ground. Protruding and twitching. I was the smallest. I can’t ask if I can pull it out – that would only make it worse. When I’m already a laughing stock. / Rest-hour. To give the hour this name. We had to lie down on beds. No-one in charge. They didn’t sleep. Nor did I. I never sleep by day. I didn’t even in the nursery: their answer was to disallow it. I had to watch over the others. I had to watch over their dreams. That was long ago. Here nobody slept. They pulled down their tracksuit bottoms and pulled out their willies. Which isn’t allowed, I don’t think. It’s disgusting. And then someone started counting and the rest did something, but I don’t know what because I couldn’t watch. Not that I couldn’t because I wasn’t allowed, I just couldn’t. I looked at the ceiling. Like it was a competition. Like they were competing. I’ve never been so scared since. That there is some common knowledge which I know nothing about. That they’re all doing something which is good and natural and forbidden and horrible all at once, and I never knew anything about it until that moment. / Terrifying afternoons. / I want to go home. / Sometimes we go for a walk around the perimeter, in pairs of course, holding someone’s hand of course. There’s a red postbox nearby. Maybe I tossed in a letter. These people are made of different stuff from me. I want to be taken home. They came and didn’t take me home. Or they took me, but too late, and so I punished <They’re no longer alive. Not one of them is alive. How does he punish them?> them with bogus memories. Probably I mumbled something at them, but I can’t talk about that. / There were teachers there too. But at an unreachable distance. Their heads are at least a meter higher up. From there you can’t see how life works. From there you can want all sorts of things, but you can never know what it is that you want, what it turns into, what will become of it. Teacher’s table. They eat lunch and try to figure out how they can be even nicer. A long-jump competition, say. Or the children should be brought to the cinema. The little camper kids. / They were showing the old man and the sea. The title looks suitable from up there of course. Very mythical: it must be some kind of fairy tale film. I try to imagine what they imagine: an old fisherman, kind-hearted with a white beard, one net, three wishes, a goldfish and streets paved with gold. And the sea. That’s no less kind-hearted – white foam: that goes with the beard. But it was already evening when we started out. A bedtime story. / We went by the red post-box. I should have hid inside it. / Coarse blankets, cold seats, gravel under our feet. Projections on a wall. A white-painted stone wall. A screen painted on a wall. The old man and the sea didn’t start straight away. A short film was shown first. In black and white. Stringy rain sprinkled the tormented celluloid. Four tonnes of spectacle frames, a hundred thousand empty trunks, dry hair-stacks in wire cages. Bulldozers scooping unintelligibly skinny men and women into muddy pits. <“Lets start with the fading shadow of his childhood, those duties – licentious of course – which the little gombeen performed for the Jerusalem temple priests; then he disappears from view for fifteen years, during which time the little monster corrupts his soul with countless fallacies of the Egyptian school, he spreads the same contagion in Judaea too, later on. When he reappears in his hometown his incipient madness is already striking: he proclaims that he is the son of God in the image of his Father: a further phantom who associates with this alliance he calls the Holy Spirit, and he asserts that these three individuals are in fact a single entity! The more this ridiculous mystery resists reason, the more beautiful it is, the more dangerous to ignore it, the young fool insists… God became flesh in the form of a human child in order to redeem us all, the simpleton claims, and these miracles from Narnia which he will shortly perform, will convince the world in time. / … / He was given a tortuous death which he suffered impotently. His good father, almighty God, who he insolently alleged was his blood kin, wouldn’t lift a finger and afterwards they treated the guy as they’d treat the worst bastard, who was rightly their leader.> I didn’t understand why we didn’t stand up. / Elegant men on the screen in uniforms. They smile and sometimes look at the camera. / We also watched the Old Man through to the end. I was really expecting someone to come now. Someone to come and bring me home. / I was paying no attention to Spencer Tracy. For two or three years I didn’t really pay attention to anything. Apart from two questions. Why didn’t they ever say that I was what they said those dead people were? I had still never heard that word. / Why didn’t they say I was a Jew? / The other question was when will what was shown in the film happen? / I was deeply ashamed of my Jewishness and I dreaded it. I never spoke of the shame or of the dread. To anybody. The shame and the dread were deeper than speech. Just as the horror was deeper. Horror of the crime, which, clearly, we had committed. Since there is surely no punishment, there can’t be, without a crime, and I dimly sensed too that the connection between the extent of the punishment and the gravity of the crime was lawful and truthful. Which is why our crime – and therefore my crime – must be horribly big, unthinkably big. My imagination proved scant for the task of evoking the hidden crime. And the size of the crime simply increased as I witnessed daily how we all, my father, my mother, my grandparents, (my accomplices) acted as if we weren’t Jews. Their silence was not the silence of guilt, but that of pretended carelessness. I would have understood profound quietude, but this feigned harmony not at all. I tried to touch on it with timid questions. / The subject of conversation could not of course be the secret itself. I couldn’t picture myself walking up and simply asking why they had concealed the truth. No, that was impossible. So my questions were about religion and God, because I knew that our being secret Jews had something to do with Him. / I expected them to turn pale. I was counting on hot irrepressible sobbing, so that finally they’d share this shame and dread with me. / Nothing happened. / They said I was baptised a Roman Catholic like my father. That my mother was Calvinist, and so I was baptised into my father’s faith because that was the custom. But I shouldn’t take it too seriously: it was really just to keep my grandmother happy. As communists we don’t believe in God, we don’t need Him. What we need here on this Earth is to live in truth, peace and love. Of course we shouldn’t deride religious people. We must show respect for other beliefs. / I knew they were lying. / It wasn’t that the story about my baptism was a lie, but of course they knew, and the essential thing remained unaltered, that in fact we were Jews. It was terrible that I had to consider them liars, but it was even more terrible how I felt that lying was surely the essence of our Jewishness and of the crime that somehow we had committed. Probably the greatest crime was that we acted as though we were innocent. I was mulling this over into the semi-darkness of an afternoon when I overheard my grandmother in the next room telling my father about a distant acquaintance, her voice dropped a little and she let the word out with an ineffable inflection: Jew. They don’t know! They don’t know! They don’t know! a voice screamed in my heart <Tsss!> Everything was hot, horrible and miraculous. Miraculous because I could forgive them, horrible because I was finally left all alone with the secret. <Hollywood. Only don’t make it Hollywood. Don’t.> / Some years passed. I learned new words. I learned that they hadn’t lied. We’re not Jews. And I am not Roman Catholic and I am not communist. I see an empty sky, but hell does exist <he’s exaggerating now> and seems to work reasonably well. / Still, if someone were to ask me, are you a Jew? I can only answer with this story.
