Tortured by a loss of morals

Published on Friday 14 December 2007 18:32

Detective Story

by Imre Kertesz

Harvill Secker, 113pp, 12.99

IMRE KERTESZ WON THE NOBEL Prize in 2002, one of the more deserving recipients of that often eccentric award. A Hungarian and Jew, he survived Auschwitz, the experience of which went to the making of his remarkable novel, Fatelessness, published here a couple of years ago. Detective Story is a slighter work, but nevertheless compelling. You can read it at a sitting, but it deserves a second and slower reading.

Set in an unnamed Latin American country, it purports to be the memoir of Martens, a secret policeman, now on trial for his life after a revolution which dislodged the regime he served. It is introduced in a brief note by his defence lawyer, who tells us he was surprised on reading the memoir to find he "had not supposed that, with his being a lowly cog in a big machine and so having relinquished all powers of discernment and appraisal of a sovereign human person, that person might stir again in Martens and demand his rights. That is to say, that he would wish to speak out and make sense of his case." Martens, then, doesn't offer excuses for his participation in State-authorised crimes, but does seek to explain himself, how "during one's actions, one forgets" what it is to have a moral sense.

The story itself is simple enough. Martens is one of a group of three, charged with the identification and interrogation of "enemies of the State". He admires his feared chief, Diaz, for his calm intelligence and his awareness of the dangers they themselves run. "Our line of work is hazardous," Diaz says on the last page of the novella. "Today you can be standing up here at the window, but then tomorrow, who knows? You may be down there, tied to a post." But we know from the beginning of Martens's story that Diaz has escaped that fate. He has made his getaway, survived. His type always does: "I can assure you all that he is never going to be found."

The second of the group is Rodriguez, a sadist and "scumbag", already sentenced to death. Then there is Martens himself, whose work gives him headaches.

The case he goes on to describe is one in which they go too far, its outcome provoking the revolution that has landed Martens in prison. It concerns a father and son, Federigo and Enrique Salinas. Federigo is the proprietor of a chain of department stores "that are dotted all over our country"; Enrique is an idealistic young student, eager to find a way to join the Resistance to the regime, but unable to do so. From his diary, now in Martens's possession, we learn of his despondency, his thought of suicide, his alienation of his girlfriend. Enrique is innocent of all but intentions.

Federigo, who believes that he is safe, belonging to the "untorturable class", is alarmed by the dangers he believes his son to be running, and devises a plan to protect him while giving him the illusion that he is engaged in opposition activities. The plan backfires. First the son, then the father, is arrested. After attention from Diaz and Rodriguez, neither can be released.

The lawyer who introduces Martens's version of events concludes that in his client's eyes "the world must have seemed like pulp fiction come true, with everything taking place in accordance with the monstrous certainty and dubious regularities of the unvarying dramatic form … or a horror story," written "not by Martens alone but by reality, too".

The narrative is neat, lucid, written with admirable economy, all too believable. What chiefly interests Kertesz and constitutes the true horror of the story is what Martens calls "the logic" of their position, a logic which compels Diaz to "put together in less than an hour and a half "a watertight investigational file on conspiracy to engage in criminal acts endangering homeland security". Once the tools of a criminal regime are deep in the blood, they find, like Macbeth, that "returning were as tedious as to go o'er". And such a regime will always find tools; that, too, is the "logic" of the situation.