Kaddish for an Unborn Child Read Online Free PDF Page B

do nothing else: if I write, I remember, I have to remember, though I don’t know why I have to remember, obviously for the sake of knowing, remembering is knowing, we live in order to remember what we know, because we cannot forget what we know, don’t worry, children, not out of some kind of “moral duty,” no, come off it, it’s simply
not at our discretion
, we are not
able
, to forget, that is the way we are created, we live in order to know and to remember, and perhaps, indeed probably, indeed with almost total certainty, the reason why we know and remember is in order that somebody should feel shame on our account if he has gone so far as to create us, yes, we remember for the one who either is or isn’t, it doesn’t matter, because either he is or he isn’t: in the end it comes down to the same thing, the essential point is that we should remember, know and remember, that somebody—anybody—should feel shame on our account and (possibly) for us. Because as far as I am concerned, if I were to set off from my privileged, my ceremonial, I nearly said my sanctified memories, but then, I don’t mind, if we are going to use grand words, then so be it: from my memories, sanctified and, indeed, consecrated at the black mass of humanity, then gas would start to leak, guttural voices would croak
Der springt noch auf
, the final
Sh’ma Yisroel
from
A Survivor from Warsaw
would be whimpered, and the tumult of world collapse would raise its din . . . And after that a gentle drizzle of surprise, daily renewed that, would you believe it, I leapt up and so to say concealed again after all,
ich sprang doch auf
, indeed I’m still here, though I don’t why, unless it was pure chance, the way I was born, I’m just as much an accomplice to my sticking around as I was to my coming into this world—all right, I concede, a grain more shame attaches to hanging around, especially if one has done one’s utmost to hang around, but that’s all, nothing more: I wasn’t willing to be taken in like other suckers by the general passion and breast-beating clap-trap about sticking around, God help us! and
in any case
you’re always partly to blame
, that’s all there is to it, I have stuck around and therefore I am, I thought; no, I didn’t even think, I just
was
, simple as that, like a Survivor from Warsaw, like a hanger-on from Budapest who sets no store on his hanging on, who feels no need to
justify
his sticking around, to attach notions of
purpose
to his having hung on, yes, to turn his having hung on into a triumph, however quiet, however discreet and intimate, yet essentially still the only
genuine
, the only
possible
triumph, as the prolonged and propagated perpetuation of this hung-on-to existence, namely my own self, in descendants—in a descendant: you—would be (would have been); no, I didn’t think about that, I didn’t think that I needed to think about that until this night overtook me, that all-illuminating yet pitch-black night, and the question arose before me (or, to be more precise, behind me, behind my long spent life, since, thank God, it’s too late and will now always be too late), the question, yes—as to whether you would be a brown-eyed little girl, with the pale specks of your freckles scattered around your tiny nose? Or else a headstrong boy, your eyes bright and hard as greyish-blue pebbles?—yes, contemplating my life as the potentiality of your being, contemplating it at all, strictly, sadly, without anger or hope, as one contemplates an object. As I said, I didn’t think of anything, even though, as I said, I ought to have. Because surreptitiously some kind of mole work was going on here, a grubbing and a machinating that I ought to have known about and, of course, did know about, I just took it to be something other than it really was, though what exactly, I don’t know— perhaps some kind of