Kaddish for an Unborn Child

“No!” I said, though as far as a Jewish no is concerned, there would be justification enough for that, too, since it was enough to imagine a distressing and shameful conversation, I said, let’s say, I said, to imagine a child’s cry, our child’s (your) screaming, let’s say, I said; the child has heard something and just happens to be screaming, “I don’t want to be a Jew!” let’s say, I said, since it is very easy to imagine and easy to justify, I said, that the child may not want to be a Jew, let’s say, and I would be hard put to respond to that; yes, because how can one compel a living being to be a Jew, in this respect, I said, I would have to go about with my head hung low before it (before you), because there is nothing I could give it (you), no explanation, no belief, no ammunition, since my own Jewishness means nothing to me, or to be more precise, in terms of its Jewishness nothing, in terms of the experience everything, as Jewishness: a bald-headed woman in a red negligee in front of the mirror, as experience: my life, my survival, the cerebral mode of existence that I live and maintain as a cerebral mode of existence, and for me that is sufficient, I am perfectly satisfied with that much; it is questionable, however, if it (you) would be satisfied with that much. And yet, I said, I am not saying a Jewish no , despite everything, because there is nothing more abominable, more shameful, more destructive and more self-repudiating than this kind of, so to say, rational no, this kind of Jewish no, there is nothing tawdrier than that, nothing more cowardly, I said, I have had enough of murderers and deniers of life proclaiming themselves to be for life, it happens far too often, I said, for it to rouse in me even so much as a rebellious squeak of defiance, there is nothing more appalling, more disgraceful than to deny life for the sake of the deniers of life, for children were born even in Auschwitz, I said, and not unnaturally this line of reasoning appealed to my wife, though I find it hard to believe she could really have understood, any more than probably I myself really understood. Yes, and it cannot have been long after this that I had to take a tramcar, to go who knows where, obviously going about my business, as if I still had any business now that all my earthly business has already been accomplished, and I was gazing out of the window during the rickety trundling, the unexpected halts at tram stops. We clattered along past frightful houses and the faint shrieks of sporadic scatterings of stunted vegetation and all at once, as in an onslaught, a family alighted. I forgot to mention that it was a Sunday, a discreetly dwindling Sunday afternoon going into the warmer time of year. There were five of them, the parents and three daughters. The youngest, barely out of swaddling clothes and resplendent in pink, blue and blonde, was dribbling and screaming tenaciously, perhaps because she was too hot, I thought. The mother, brunette, placid, exhausted, took her on her lap, her slender neck crooked over the infant in the semiarched pose of a ballerina at the opera. The middle sister stood sulking beside her mother as the latter cuddled the youngest, while the eldest girl, who I supposed was seven or eight years old, so to say in a gesture of conciliation and the wretched fellowship of outcasts, laced her arm around her younger sister’s shoulder but was peevishly shrugged off. The middle sister wanted her mother to herself but knew this was a forlorn cause, as was her weapon, the unbridled screaming that had now become the prerogative of the youngest. The eldest girl was now on her own; that pleasantly lit Sunday afternoon she was again experiencing the bitter pill of being ignored, loneliness and jealousy. Would that mature within her into a welcoming forgiveness, I wondered, or rather into a hide-in-the-corner neurosis, I wondered, while her father and mother browbeat her into some sort of shameful existence, I wondered, to which she will reconcile herself, I wondered, and comply shamefacedly, or if not shamefacedly, all the more shame on her and on all those who browbeat and reconciled her to that, I wondered. The father, a wiry, brown-haired, bespectacled man in summery linen shorts, sandals on his bare feet, Adam’s apple like a goiter, stretched out his jaundiced bony hand, the infant finally calmed down between his knobbly knees; and suddenly, like a transcendental message, an overarching similarity broke out on the five faces. They were ugly, harrowed, pitiful and beatific, within me vied mixed feelings of revulsion and attraction, horrific memories and melancholy, and written on their foreheads, so to say, as well as on the sides of the tramcar I saw in flaming letters a:

“No!” I could never be another person’s father, destiny, god,

“No!” what happened to me, my childhood, must never happen to another child,