The Union Jack Read Online Free Page B

literature never again win back their density and lifelikeness. One should strive for formulations that totally encapsulate the experience of life (that is to say, the disaster); formulations that assist one to die and yet still bequeath something to posterity. I don’t mind if literature, too, is capable of such formulations, but what I see increasingly is that only
bearing witness
is able to do this, possibly a life passed in muteness without being formulated
as a formulation
. “For this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth”—is that literature? “I
was
Ernő Szép”—is that literature? Therefore—and only now do I notice it—the story of my encounter with the adventure of formulation (and at the same time with the Union Jack) does not start, as I originally supposed, with Richard Wagner after all, but with ErnőSzép; in either case, however, one way or the other, I have to and had to start with the editorial office. In the editorial office to which my fantasy, under the influence of Ernő Szép, had borne me—under external circumstances ready, as ever, to comply with steadfast fantasy—in that editorial office, then, on a briefer and more condensed trajectory, so to say, though of course without leaving behind an intellectual trail of any kind, I trod the very same path that Ernő Szép had taken, from the unwittingness of wisdom and lightheartedness up to the “I
was
Ernő Szép” type of formulation; all that I found on the site of the alleged erstwhile Budapest was a city that had tumbled into ruins, lives that had tumbled into ruins, souls that had been tipped into ruins, and hopes trampled underfoot amid those ruins. The young man about whom I am speaking here—I—was also one of those souls, stumbling around on the way to nothingness amid those ruins, although he (I) at the time still construed the ruins merely as some kind of film set and himself as an actor in a film—in any event, some splenetic, some acerbically modern film that was fraudulent in an acerbic and modern manner—a role that, being based entirely on the illusion seen from the auditorium, and oblivious to all disturbing circumstances(that is to say, reality, or the disaster), he (I) formulated as “I’m a journalist.” I can see the young man on drizzly autumn mornings, the fog of which he inhaled just like the rapidly evaporating freedom; around him I can see the set, the blackly glistening wet asphalt, the accustomed bends in familiar streets, their dilatations into the void over which the swirls of thinning fog gave hints of the river; the dank smell of the people who waited with him for the bus, the wet umbrellas, the hoarding plastered with garish posters which concealed the wartime rubble of a ruined building, on a site where today, forty years later, another ruin stands, a peacetime ruin, the wartime ruined building having been replaced by a peacetime ruined building, a decrepit, eight-storey monument to total peace, corroded by premature death, patinated by air pollution, vandalised by every sort of squalor, theft, neglect, infinite provisionality and futureless indifference. I can see the stairway up whose stairs he will hurry before too long, with the same sense of security that delusion-driven people have which had impelled him (me) to declare “I’m a journalist”—with a certain sense of self-importance, in other words, which even the stairway in itself nurtured, that already long non-existing stairway, which hinted at a then unambiguous reality, the reality of
real
editorial offices,
late
journalists,
one-time
journalism, and the mood and reality which embraced all this; I can see the lame porter, the so-called “errand-boy” or, more accurately, office messenger, that singularly priceless person, who in those days was still so singularly priceless merely due to the singularly priceless services he rendered, limping nimbly between the rooms of the editorial office as he