The Kindly Ones

But perhaps you really don’t care about any of this. Maybe, instead of my unwholesome, abstruse reflections, you would rather have anecdotes, spicy little stories. For my part I don’t know anymore. I’m quite willing to tell you a few stories: but then let me just dig at random among my memories and my notes; I’ve told you, I’m getting tired, I have to start bringing this to an end. And also if I still had to recount the rest of 1944 in detail, a little like I’ve done up to now, I’ll never be done. You see, I’m thinking of you too, not just of me, a little bit in any case, there are limits of course, if I’m putting myself to so much trouble, it’s not to make you happy, I will willingly admit, it’s above all for my own mental hygiene, like when you’ve eaten too much, at some point you have to evacuate the waste, whether or not it smells nice, you don’t always have a choice; but here, you have an irrevocable power, that of closing this book and throwing it in the trash, a final recourse against which I am powerless, so I don’t see why I should wear kid gloves. And that is why, I’ll admit it, if I change my method a little, it’s mostly for me, whether you like it or not, another mark of my boundless selfishness, certainly a fruit of my bad education. Maybe I should have done something else, you’ll tell me, that’s true, maybe I should have done something else, I would have been delighted to play music, if I had known how to put two notes together and recognize a treble clef, but there it is, I’ve already explained my limits in that field, or else painting, why not, that seems a pleasant occupation to me, painting, a quiet occupation, losing yourself that way in forms and colors, but what can I do, in another life maybe, for in this one I never had a choice, maybe a little, of course, a narrow margin for maneuvering, but limited, because of the weight of fate, and lo, we’re back just where we started from. But let us return to Hungary.