Someone Else: A Chronicle of the Change

It is raining. A man at a restaurant table is explaining something to a woman, something inexplicable. He would like to abandon his ceaselessly miscarried attempts at finding happiness. He has had enough of chasing after pleasure down false trails of promises that lead nowhere. No, not another woman, not at all, God forbid. Freedom. Bobbing up for air from the confused maelstrom, one relationship after another, that has been swirling for years. He is fed up with discerning his own inadequacy in every relationship. The idea of a brief, intense, creative life flickers in his mind. A sullen observance of fidelity and duties, the fire that nourishes constant depression. That fire is cold, cold as ice, yet the flame of great satisfaction flares within him. "Was wüßten sie, wer er war"—nobody knows who he is, and what he wants is to be left alone with this secret. The woman's face as she listens. At this point she ought to get up and leave, head held high, her sobbing barely stifled. She doesn't move. So the man leaps up, kisses the woman, still tenderly but swiftly, on the eyes, then hurries out of the café. No, he doesn't: he beckons, pays the bill, they get up together. From behind the rain-spattered glass, one can see them as they step out into the street. The man opens an umbrella. They take a few paces like that, side by side, then the woman fastens on to the man's arm and, after some initial mutual bumbling, they coordinate their steps. From the door a slight draft ripples across the room, like a fleeting snicker of futility.

It is raining. Former party leaders are making statements on television. They had "believed" in the party. They "believed" that "errors," "mistakes," were being made, but they "believed," for instance, that "Stalin knew nothing" about any of it. And so forth. But that does not mean one has to suppose they did not confuse these clichés with their true contents, their so-called beliefs with real thoughts or feelings. The lesson to be drawn is that these people predicated their lives on a slipshod use of language. What is worse, though, they promoted that slipshod use of language into an effective consensus. And with their departure they have left behind them the walking wounded of their slipshod use of language, who are now in urgent need of ethical first aid, as if the devalued vocabulary of that slipshod use of language, like disintegrating shreds of paper, were suddenly revealing its moral lacerations. Wherever I look, there is a clattering of moral prostheses, a tip-tapping of moral crutches, a whirring of moral wheelchairs. It's not that they should forget the era as being a sort of nightmare, because they were the nightmare, so they would have to forget themselves if they want to live. In truth, no one has yet examined whether it is possible, or holds any appeal, to live anew after a prolonged death. Did anyone ever rise from the dead, not in order to proclaim miracles, but simply to carry on living a quiet life, in essence for exactly the same reason as before (for no reason), oblivious to the experience of resurrection? Can one imagine Lazarus playing Chaplin?¹

A dank, withering gust of tragedies is whistling. The ground keeps opening up, the sky keeps falling in. People suddenly alter, crumple, grow old. The whiff of hell whisks the color from their faces. Gray and white forms, corpses approach one on the streets. Metamorphoses of the apocalypse. Strolling in Vérmezœ Park past the statue of Béla Kun, bedaubed with Stars of David, I suddenly understood that what, in my younger years, I regarded as cowardice, stupidity, blindness and, in effect, a near-incomprehensible, tragicomic way of committing suicide was, in reality, a species of powerlessness that morphed into...