246
ISE BALAsz-RAK6CZY
constitutes the soul of Ise's story.
When I decided to translate and publish the extracts that follow, I
sought out Ise's relations. Only one of her sons was alive, retired to
Corfu, and if not for the need to preserve anonymity, I would happily
thank him here, both for his generosity and for his kind permission to
publish his mother's work.
Stephen Kurtz
1. Count
R..
had a long, thin prick like a stylus. When we
Jucked
[in
English] it was as if he were incising the same lines over and over in a
language I did not know. Not that it was a poetic language like Rilke's
Samenworte - merely a strange one like Catalan or Welsh. The
handsome painter Z . was courting me at that same time. Why did I
refuse him? Was it really to explore the values of boredom? Or was I
waiting (it was a state of waiting), as
R..
went on scribbling his tedious
text, for some moment when the Word would explode upon me; when
that merely foreign drivel would become the outpouring of a....
Why have I written this? I think of that terrifying tale of Kafka's in
which a condemned man's sentence is inscribed upon his body over
and
over with a monstrous instrument - an instrument that eventually
kills
him. Torture horrifies me, although they do say I've torturers in my
blood. Yet it's not blood itself that disturbs me so much as the idea of
the inescapable: that whether through inheritance or first experience, a
sentence is passed that must be carried out. The promise of psychoanalysis
is that the chains of fate will be broken . But I wonder, could that be an
illusion? Might we, in the very process of becoming conscious, simply
be
following the line of fate in an alternative direction?
It is also true, I think, that I loved R., and that I proved my love by
bearing with the boredom he invariably produced. I remember when my
youngest son was two. He had a little horse on wheels we used to roll
back and forth on the nursery floor, back and forth between us. Some–
thing about that repetition was important to him - fascinating or com–
forting. It drove me mad. I could easily have left him in the care of his
nurse, but I forced myself to stay.
It
was a sacrifice, but not a self-sacrifice.
There is a difference.
2. S. bores me too. So much of doing analysis is boring so long as the
patient withholds his love. That seems horribly selfish and, of course, it
is.
But to withhold one's love is to withhold one's secret self, and since
