Fiasco

by Imre Kertész

  However, the more vivid my memories, the more abjectly they were caught on paper. While I was remembering, I was unable to write the novel; but as soon as I started to write the novel, I stopped remembering. It’s not that my memories suddenly vanished, they simply changed. They transformed into the contents of some kind of lucky-dip tub into which I would reach, at the intervals that I deemed necessary, for a negotiable bank note. I would pick and choose among them: this one I needed, that one, not. By now the facts of my life, the so-called “material of my experiences,” only distracted, confined, and hampered me in my work of bringing into life the novel for which that life had originally provided the conditions for life and had nourished from first to last. My work—writing the novel—actually consisted of nothing else than a systematic atrophying of my experiences in the interest of an artificial—or if you prefer, artistic—formula that, on paper, and only on paper, I could judge as an equivalent of my experiences. But in order for me to write I had to look on my novel like every novel in general—as a formation, a work of art composed of abstract symbols. Without my noticing, I had taken a run-up and made a big leap, and with a single bound I had suddenly switched from the personal into the objective and the general, only then to look around me in astonishment. Yet there was no reason to be surprised; as I know now, I had already completed that leap as soon as I made the start on writing my novel. It was no use my trying to plod back to the intention, no use that my original ambition had been directed solely at this one novel and did not so much as squint at anything beyond it, did not extend beyond the pages of this manuscript: by its very nature, a novel is only a novel if it transmits something—and I too wanted to transmit something, otherwise I would not have written a novel. To transmit, in my own way, according to my own lights; to transmit the material that was possible for me, my own material, myself—for, overloaded and weighted down as I was by its burden, I was by now longing like a bloated udder simply for the relief of being milked, being interpreted … however, there was one thing that, perhaps naturally enough, I did not think of: we are never capable of interpreting for ourselves. I was taken to Auschwitz not by the train in the novel but by a real one.

  That’s right, I had failed to reckon on just this one small matter. Meanwhile, while I withdrew into my private, indeed most private, life (my “private affairs,” as my mother used to say); while I was shutting myself off from everything and everyone else in order to be able to grub around peacefully in my own world of thoughts; while I did my utmost to insure that nobody else would be able to interrupt me in my solitary passion, I had started innocently, and with a heartfelt diligence, to write—for others. Because, as I now see clearly, to write a novel means to write for others—among others, for those who reject one.

  Yet I could not reconcile myself to that notion. If that had been my goal, I had committed a huge blunder; I ought to have written something else, a more saleable commodity—a comedy, for example. But that had not been the goal, as I keep on asserting; it had only became that in the course of implementation, without my knowledge or consent, so to say, indeed without my even noticing at all. What did I care about those others for whom I may have written my novel but who did not so much as enter my head while I was writing it?! What kind of chance was it—and even as a chance, what kind of unforeseeable, inconsequential, idiotic chance—if our common business, my novel and their entertainment, happened to chime?! And however absurd, in practice—and purely in practice—that is precisely what I had been striving for; so now I have to declare that I did not achieve my goal—the goal that was never my goal. But in that case, what had been the original sense of my goal, my undertaking? I swear I don’t remember; it could be that I never thought about it; and now I shall never know, because that sense had become mislaid somewhere—who knows where—in the course of the undertaking.

  I get up from the table. Almost involuntarily, like an automatic reflex, my feet start moving around the apartment. I cross the room, through the wide-open door into the hallway, strike my right shoulder on the open-door to the bathroom, and reach the end of the apartment. Here I turn about, skirt the open door to the bathroom, strike my right shoulder on the hallway wardrobe, cross the room and reach the window, turn again. A distance of about 23 feet. Relatively commodious for a cage. Up and down, up and down; turn at the front door, turn at the window. This had once been a regular habit of that fellow, the novel writer, the chap with whom once, just a few months ago, I had been identical. Those were the times when his most notable ideas sprang to mind. I didn’t have anything to think about. Yet slowly something nevertheless was taking shape inside me. If I distinguish it from the mild dizziness caused by walking and from other contingent impressions, I discover a definable feeling. I suppose my state of affairs was materialising in it. It would be hard for me to put it into words—and that’s exactly the point: it settles itself in spaces that lie outside of words. It cannot be couched in an assertion, nor in a bald negation either. I cannot say that I don’t exist, as that is not true. The only word with which I could express my state, not to speak of my activity, does not exist. I might approximate it by saying something like ‘I amn’t.” Yes, that’s the right verb, one that would convey my existence and at the same time denote the negative quality of that existence—if, as I say, there were such a verb. But there isn’t. I could say, a bit ruefully, that I have lost my verb.

  I have had enough of my walk; I sit down. I snuggle down, nestle deep into the armchair, adopting a curled-up posture as if in some Brobdingnagian womb. Maybe I am hoping I shall never have to emerge from here, never go out into the world. Why should I? And then I am also a bit afraid of the stranger who will nevertheless struggle to his feet out of here in the end. In a certain sense, it will be someone other than the person to whom I have grown accustomed until now. Nor can it be any other way, for he has completed his work, fulfilled his purpose: he had flopped utterly. He had transmuted my person into an object, diluted my stubborn secret into a generality, distilled my inexpressible truth into symbols—transplanting them into a novel I am unable to read; he is alien to me, in just the same way that he alienated from me that raw material—that incomparably important chunk of my own life from which he himself had originated. I shall miss it, and perhaps … why deny it, perhaps I shall also miss the person who brought it all off. Yes, as I sit in the armchair a startling feeling suddenly passes through me: a bleak and chilly feeling of some irrevocable occurrence, a bit like the feeling when the last guest has gone after a big party. I have been left alone. Someone has departed, leaving an almost physical void in my body, and this very instant, with a malicious smirk on his face, is waving a final farewell from the far corner of the room. I stare impotently after him, I do not have the strength to detain him. Nor do I even wish to: I harbour a feeling of mild but firm resentment toward him—let him go to hell, he tricked me …

  “That he did,” said the old boy, “that he did, the numbskull!”

  “Did you get any work done?”

  “Of course.”

  New development in the bistro: the Old Biddy (the chief administrator, to give her her official title) had made a surprise assault on the bar counter and snatched away the order chits from the spike (checking up on the old boy’s wife) (as to whether, in point of fact, she had passed through the charges for all the meals on her tray) (as if, let us say, she was not always in the habit of doing so) (in proof of which postulate the risible) (and equally futile demonstration could end up showing nothing else than that the old boy’s wife had on this occasion) (as ever) (passed them through).

  “If I really wanted to steal,” the old boy’s wife said indignantly, “she could scrabble after my orders as much as she wants. I could carry off half the kitchen under her nose without her noticing it.”

  “I’m sure,” the old boy agreed. “So why don’t you do that?” he enquired almost absent-mindedly as he was spooning his soup.

  “I don’t know. Because I’m stupid,” his w
ife said.

  In any case (his wife said), that was evidently the sole result of today’s announcement (to the effect that from now onwards she too wanted to work in the evenings); and if one can perhaps also discern in it some explanation for the peculiar (yet for all that by no means logical) logic, as an outcome of her colleague, Mrs. Boda (whose first name was Ilona) recently taking, instead of greeting her, to looking the other way, for the harder (in fact, totally impossible)-to-understand reason why the Old Biddy (the chief administrator, to give her her official title) shared that grievance (unless, perhaps, the key to the mystery was to be sought in the bedlam of those wild hours when the Old Biddy would find urgent barrel-tapping and other tasks for the bartender to attend to in the cellar) (right at the height of the evening rush) (at which times, with obvious magnanimity and shrinking from no pains, she herself, in her white coat, would stand in at the bar) (like the captain of a ship at a hurricane-lashed helm) (at which times the colleague who was called Mrs. Boda was obliged, like her other colleagues, to pass through the orders for draught beverages directly to her) (if indeed she passed them through) (the only way of establishing which fact beyond a shadow of doubt would be to snatch the order chits right away from the spike) (the right to do which, however, was the sole prerogative of the Old Biddy—the chief administrator, to give her her official title).

  “So that’s why there’s a deficit,” the old boy commented (shrewdly). “They’re pilfering.”

  “That may well be,” his wife said.

  “I’m going out for a little walk,” the old boy declared later on.

  The old boy was sitting in front of the filing cabinet.

  It was morning.

  (Again.)

  He was translating.

  He was translating from German (German being the foreign language that he still did not understand the best, relatively speaking, as the old boy was in the habit of saying).

  antwortete nicht—the old boy read in the book (from which he was translating).

  did not answer—the old boy tapped onto the sheet of paper that had been inserted in his typewriter (onto which he was translating).

  “For Chrissakes …!” the old boy stretched out his hand, half-rising from his seat, toward the filing cabinet.

  “… That hairy ape of a tree-dwelling Neanderthal and all its misbegotten breed,” he (the old boy) said, stuffing the carefully formed plugs into his ears.

  “I ought to change these ear plugs,” the old boy mused.

  “They’re old,” he (the old boy) continued his musing.

  “Dried out,” he mused further.

  “They’re pressing too tight in my ear.” He fiddled with the plug in one ear.

  “But then if it doesn’t press tight enough I hear everything,” he chafed.

  “There, that’s it, perhaps …” the old boy stopped his fiddling.

  The old boy was sitting in front of the filing cabinet and listening out for whether he could hear anything.

  He couldn’t. (Relatively speaking.)

  “Wonderful.” His face beamed.

  “Come on now, this is no way to make a living.” His face darkened.

  The money for translations might not be a lot, but at least it was dependable (the old boy was in the habit of saying).

  By doing the translation he could kill two birds with one stone: he would earn some money (maybe not a lot, but at least dependable) and also he wouldn’t have to write a book. (For the time being.)

  Besides which, the old boy did not have so much as a glimmer of an idea, little as that may be, for the book he needed to write.

  … antwortete nicht.

  … did not reply.

  “That’s it,’ said the old boy approvingly.

  He had not looked at his papers for days now. Nor did he have any wish to look at them.

  He had tucked them away at the very bottom of the filing cabinet in order to avoid any chance of catching sight of them.

  Sein Blick hing an den Daumen, wie festgesogen.

  “Festgesogen,” the old boysaid, scratching his head.

  Der Blutfleck unter dem Daumnagel hatte sich jetzt deutlich vorwärts bewegt. Er war von Nagelbett abgelöst, ein schmaler Streifen sauberes neues Nagelhorn hatte sich hinterdreingeschoben.

  “What on earth is ‘Nagelhorn’?” The old boy would have reached for the dictionary (if he had known for which dictionary he should reach, as he had two of them) (or to be more accurate, three of them) (namely, the Concise Dictionary, at hand to the right of the typewriter, for which he scarcely ever had to reach) (but then it usually did not contain the word he happened to be after) (as well as the Unabridged Dictionary, in which he usually managed to find it in the end) (and thus pure considerations of economy would have advocated his reaching straight away for the latter) (except that this required him to perform an awkward twist of the upper part of his body, given that, alongside the book that was to be translated, the piles of blank as well as already typed paper, the typewriter, and the Concise Dictionary, there being no space left for the two volumes of this dictionary colossus, together weighing at least ten lbs., on the table) (to be more precise, the table, the only real table in the flat) (they found a place on the 1st-class special ply contraption of 1st-class sawn hardwood from the southeast corner of the room, which, its actual function being thus modified during periods of translating work, stood beside the old boy’s chair) (for which reason, when searching for a word, the old boy usually consulted both dictionaries) (if not all three volumes) (as he did on this occasion, when, having tried to find “Nagelhorn” first of all, hopefully, in the Concise Dictionary, then, more exasperatedly, in the first, A–L volume of the Unabridged Dictionary, he finally, and thoroughly incensed, picked up the second, M–Z volume—incidentally, without coming across it in any of them, after all, let it be noted) (which may have infuriated the old boy but did not succeed in embittering him, since the meaning of the word was perfectly obvious) (if he thought a little bit about it) (but until it was left as a last resort that did not enter into the old boy’s head) (most especially when he was in the middle of translating).

  Sein Blick hing …—the old boy read.

  His gaze—the old boy tapped—was fixed on his thumb as if

  “Festgesogen,” the old boy said, scratching his head.

  it were incapable of moving away.

  “Hardly inspired,” the old boy said, scratching his head.

  “And anyway not even accurate.” He kept on scratching.

  “His gaze held fast to his thumb as if transfixed to it,” the old boy deliberated. “That might be more accurate.”

  “The image is mixed up,” he deliberated further. “On the other hand, it’s more expressive—” he hesitated—“but then it’s rather forced,” he decided.

  “Anyway, I’ve written it down now.”

  “I ought to erase it and type over.”

  “Not worth it.”

  Der Blutfleck …

  The blotch of extravasated blood had visibly moved further forwards. By now it had separated from the nail bed and in its stead afresh, narrow crescent of clean nail was emerging from the root.