The Union Jack Read Online Free

above and beyond my irrepressible longing—I might cast off the shackles of parental harassments and a childhood prolonged by education. After stints as a commercial traveller in wines and in building materials had been brought to a close by risible results, indeed quite simply by my having become a laughing stock, then attempts at the printing trade or, to be precise, as a typesetter, had merely introduced me to the experience of futile torment and monotony, quite by chance—if such a thing exists (chance, that is to say), though I personally doubt it—a book came into my hands. This book was a formulation of the life of a journalist, a Budapest journalist who moves about in Budapest coffee-houses,in Budapest editorial offices, in Budapest social circles, pursuing relationships with Budapest women—more particularly, two women, one an aristocratic lady, who was referred to solely by the French brand name of her perfume, the other a girl, a poor, simple, decent creature, palpably finer than the lady of the branded perfume, because she was endowed with spirituality but was born to be oppressed, thereby evoking perpetual twinges of social and metaphysical conscience, so to say—a totally false and falsified formulation, but one that, if memory serves me right, was presented with genuine longing, and thus genuine force of conviction. The book told about a life, a world, that could never have existed in reality, or at best only in formulations, the sort of formulations for which I too was later to strive, for purposes of the sustainability of my way of life, formulations which draw a veil over a life that is unformulable, that grinds ahead in the dark, stumbles about in the dark, lugs the burden of darkness—in other words, over life itself. This book about that journalist, and thus also, to some extent, about journalism itself, held no inkling about journalism in the disaster era, or about disasters at all; the book was
lighthearted
and
wise
, or in other words, an unwitting book, but a book that withthe allure of unwittingness exercised a fateful influence on me. The book may well have lied, but, as I recollect, the lying was certainly honest, and it is highly likely that I was in need of just such a lie at the time. A person always lights upon the lie he is in need of just as unerringly and just as unhesitatingly as he can unerringly and unhesitatingly light upon the truth he is in need of, should he feel any need at all of the truth, that is, of liquidating his life. The book presented journalism itself as a sort of happy-go-lucky pursuit, a
matter of talent
, and that accorded fully with the totally absurd and totally unwitting fantasies I spun at that time about leading some sort of happy-go-lucky but still somewhat intellectual life. In some respects I soon forgot about the book but in others, never; I never re-read it, it never again came into my hands, and in the end the book itself went missing somewhere, somehow, and I never looked for it again. Later on, however, as a result of discreetly thorough asking around, I came to realise that the book could have been none other than one of the works of Ernő Szép; more than likely—though this is just an assumption, since I have not corroborated it for myself—his novel
Adam’s Apple
. And now that I had mentioned the book that influenced my life so profoundly, with the peculiar determinacy of dreams of a revelatorynature, after some hesitation I also revealed to the friendly gathering where they had been urging me to tell the story of the Union Jack that the author of that book, Ernő Szép, without my being aware that he was the author of the book (by no means one of the most significant of his life’s works maybe, if indeed truly significant at all), around that time, that is to say when the disaster had not only long been undeniably visible, present and palpable, but nothing other than the disaster was visible, present and palpable, and, apart from the disaster,