Life (and the universe and everything, to borrow from Douglas Adams) is intent on giving us second chances. From what? Well, from life, the universe and everything – from mistakes, from illness, from choices made. From natural disasters and other acts of God. Inevitably, an installment of this calendar would deal with recovery, since one of the reasons behind ‘Then gently the world began anew’ was for it to be a breast cancer charity project.
Among the most extraordinary passages I’ve ever read is the ending of Imre Kertész’s 1979 autobiographical novel Fatelessness. A teenage boy Gyuri survives three concentration camps, including Auschwitz, to return home to Budapest. His friends there hadn’t shared his experience; they can only think about the terror, telling him to forget about the whole thing. Yet Gyuri wants to focus on the happiness he found in the experience. Despite nearly dying from a lice and pus-filled leg infection, having to sleep next to a dead body he pretended was alive to get more food, despite trying to eat sand, he’d found there were moments to cherish — such as what he called that “special hour” between the finish of the day’s labor and the evening mustering, an hour when the prisoners were free to mingle, to joke, complain, conduct their business and gossip. He makes it sound like a boy at summer camp, not a concentration camp.
This is an excerpt from that closing passage.
“I am here, and I know full well that I have to accept the prize of being allowed to live. Yes, as I look around me in this gentle dusk in this square on a storm-beaten yet full-of-thousands-of-promises street, I already begin to feel how readiness is growing, collecting inside me. I have to continue my uncontinuable life. …
There is no impossibility that cannot be overcome, naturally, and further down the road I know now happiness lies in wait for me like an inevitable trap. Even back there in the shadows of the chimneys, in the breaks between pain, there was something resembling happiness. Everybody will ask me about the deprivation, the terrors of the camp. But for me, the happiness there will always be the most memorable experience, perhaps. Yes. That’s what I will tell them the next time they ask me about the happiness in those camps. If they ever ask. And if I don’t forget.”
In an interview, when Kertész was asked if he would change anything of his past life, he said no; when the interviewer pressed and asked, Not even Auschwitz? he replied, “Auschwitz is my greatest treasure. The closeness to death is unforgettable. Life was never so beautiful as in this long moment.”
There’s an old Elizabethan melody called “The Sick Tune”. No one really knows why it’s called that. A theory goes that it’s linked to a Scottish ballad “Edom o Gordon” about the grisly massacre of an entire castle’s inhabitants, ordered by a rogue sea captain enraged when a lady remaining faithful to her missing husband refused to submit to his demands. Some say the tune is by John Dowland but it’s most certainly not. Some say it is what Shakespeare alludes to in a couple of brief lines given to Hero and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing.
My music is a ‘division’ composed on “The Sick Tune”. A division is an Elizabethan word for ‘variation’; my variation is the second chance, the convalescence. Like Gyuri seeing the special hours amid the terror of Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Zeitz, I also hear a saving beauty in this music that otherwise describes something sickening, possibly a massacre. I composed a music that agrees that Kertész’s ‘inevitable trap’ of happiness lies further down the road.
“There is one aspect of human nature that, I had learned at school, is also a person’s inalienable right,” says Gyuri in another passage from Fatelessness. “It is true that our imagination remains free even in captivity. I could, for instance, achieve this freedom while my hands were busy with a shovel or a pickaxe … I myself was simply not there.”
This reminded me of another piece of holocaust survivor writing, Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning — “… everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
