Fiasco

by Imre Kertész

  So that is how it happened. Lacking in certainty to the degree that I was, I somehow had to convince myself that I existed after all. I responded to the preserved murder attempts—both real and symbolic—now with neurasthenic apathy, now with aggression. However, I recognized fairly quickly (I am a rational creature, after all) that I was more vulnerable than the outside world. In the end, out of weakness and impotence, as well as out of a certain desperation and a sort of vague hope, I began to write. That’s it, it’s done: here is the answer to my question. And here I could also bring these remarks to a conclusion.

  It is just that something inside me bristles against finishing. My remarks are at an end, but I carry on. I am running out of letters, and once again I shall be left standing at a loss for what to do with the seconds, hours, and days as they succeed one another. As you see, what should I pick again but exactly the same therapy, and again with exactly the same result as when I set to work on writing the novel. It’s not as if I were seeking a solution—I am well aware that there is no solution for life—but I find that a mere listing of symptoms is not enough. A medical report does nothing to help me: as the patient, it’s the pain that interests me. Not the diagnosis, but the process, the active disease. ‘The details. Above all, the details,’ as Ivan Karamazov, the instigator, says as he interrogates Smerdyakov, the killer. Just don’t finish, since nothing ever comes to an end: I have to continue, carry on writing, yes, confidentially and with sickening talkativeness, like two killers chatting. Yet what I have to say is as bleakly impersonal as a murder reduced to the soulless, to just another statistic which is just as super …

  “Teleph …?”

  “… fluous as writing a book …”

  “For the love of …!”

  “I was beginning to think you weren’t home!” the reproachful voice of the old boy’s mother drilled like a laser beam into mashed potatoes (a simile which cannot be said to be either graphically or logically apposite) (since what would a laser beam be doing drilling into mashed potatoes) (but in the heat of the moment that was what sprang into the old boy’s mind, and we have no right to concoct a better one in its place) (let alone a worse one) (insofar as we wish to remain faithful chroniclers of his story) (and what else might be our goal) into the plug of fusible wax.

  “Where else would I be?” the old boy snapped.

  “Who can tell with you?!… Guess what has happened. The little glass shelf on which I keep my cacti has broken. The pots fell as well, and one of them is smashed, the earth is all over the floor. What should I do now?”

  “Sweep it up,” the old boy suggested.

  “I’m not exactly clueless!” the next laser beam pierced the old boy’s skull. “What I want to know is, where I am going to find a new glass shelf!”

  “From a glazier,” hazarded the old boy.

  “A glazier! It’s not as if the neighbourhood is crawling with glaziers!… You wouldn’t happen to know of a good one, would you?”

  “No,” the old boy said.

  “Of course not. When did you ever know anything?!”

  “If you put it like that …” said the old boy indignantly.

  “Aren’t you even going to ask me how the accident happened?”

  “Yes, of course,” answered the old boy hurriedly.

  “I wanted to dust the picture which hangs above it, but I got up on the chair so awkwardly that my housecoat snagged on the corner of the glass shelf. I think that ripped too … I didn’t even look yet …”

  “You shouldn’t be climbing on chairs at your age,” counselled the old boy.

  “You don’t say!” a hand grenade exploded in the old boy’s auricle. “I don’t need others to tell me what I can and can’t do at my age … but since I’ve had my backache and can’t go into the office, I can only afford a cleaning lady once a week. It’s no use my asking you to come over and dust for me!”

  “You could be right about that,” acknowledged the old boy.

  “There you are! Did you arrange to be taken off the register yet?”

  “No,” quailed the old boy.

  “You’ve had so much else to do the whole week, I suppose?”

  “There’s been enough,” the old boy bristled. “I’m working to a deadline; I have a translation to do.”

  “You’re slipping lower and lower. You started off writing plays, then a novel, and now it’s translating.”

  “And I’ll be a typist before too long,” the old boy remarked in annoyance.

  “What you choose to make of yourself is your own affair, but you’re running out of time to decide. You’re not getting any younger either.”

  “That’s nice of you,” the old boy muttered.

  “But you have to get yourself off the register double-quick so I can get the maintenance contract signed.”

  “All right,” said the old boy.

  “I know your ‘all rights’ by now. You always put things off till the last possible moment. That’s exactly what got you where you are today,” was the parting shot from the old boy’s mother.

  “That’s today shot to pieces,” thought the old boy.

  “I ought to pack it in,” he pondered further.

  “The whole thing, I mean,” he continued to ponder.

  … I packed it all in …

  “There you are.” The old boy cheered up (a little).

  … I decided to go for a walk …

  “Very sensible,” the old boy approved.

  … which was how I came to be on Margaret Island …

  “Big mistake,” thought the old boy peevishly.

  … Who should I see at a table in one of the open-air restaurants, under the rustle of the languidly drooping leafy boughs, but Árpád Sas, with another fellow …

  “Worse luck,” muttered the old boy.

  … two exotically plumed male parrots under the horse-chestnut trees, two coloured shirts, two distinguished, elegant heads. I was about to give them a wide berth …

  “Uh-huh,” the old boy perked up.

  … but it was too late: Árpád Sas had already spotted me …

  “He would, wouldn’t he,” gloated the old boy.

  … invited me over to the table with an insistent wave of the hand:

  “Aha! the prince of life! Come on and join us, my archduke, the very man we were waiting for!”

  “Why don’t you go to hell?” I enquired in my friendliest fashion as I clambered over the flower tubs which enclosed the terrace. He did not reply to this but glanced in discreet triumph at the other fellow, who on my arrival had got to his feet by the table and was smiling broadly. He was tall and spindly, his hair flecked with grey, his spectacles round-framed, and at the sight of his yellowing big teeth between dark moustache and minute beard, long-deposited scraps of memory began sluggishly stirring within me, like grounds at the bottom of a cup of coffee.

  “So? So?” he enquired with a slightly foreign accent.

  “Hellfire and damnation!” as Jules Verne’s English sea captains say.

  “Mijnheer Van de Gruyn, the Dutch cocoa plantationer!” I exclaimed.

  “You idiot!” guffawed Gerendás Van de Gruyn, who was called Grün when he came into the world. “You haven’t changed a bit in seventeen years!”

  That was debatable but this wasn’t the right moment to point it out. Instead I emitted a medley of sounds, ranging from joyous amazement to chummy familiarity. I immediately slipped into my role as into a long-discarded and unexpectedly rediscovered pair of slippers. I played myself, or to be more precise the good old pal whose image Gerendás had sustained. God knows who he was; God knows what possessed me to try to live up to an old photograph that, even in those days, was probably not faithful: perhaps it was that permanent fear we have that our image will in the end fade away forever.

  Fortunately, I was not uninformed. Sas, whom I would run into every once in a while—in the street, at the cinema, at a bridge evening, but most often at the open-air pool—always kept me up to da
te: Grün’s success on Dutch television; the humorous articles Grün had published, one after the other; the West German production of a film with a screenplay by Grün; Sas, on the way home from a trip to London, stopping over at Grün’s villa in one of Amsterdam’s suburbs, where he cultivated tulips in his garden. Sas’s face at these moments displayed both pleasure and malice—the pleasure was meant for Grün, the malice for himself and, of course, no less for me. Sas had devised for himself a metaphysical view of life from which the metaphysics had been extracted, since he believed in consumer goods rather than in God. In his scheme of things, he himself lived in the Vale of Tears, albeit out of his own free choice, having condemned himself to it, probably through defeatism, but it comforted him greatly that, even if the chance had been blown for him, there nevertheless existed a more glittering other world in which he could have an occasional fling—whenever possible at the state’s expense.

  “Of course, you never travel,” he was in the habit of reproaching me.

  “Not I,” I would reply, sticking to the truth.

  “Why not?” he would enquire.

  “It’s not possible to get away from myself,” was one of the things I would say at this juncture.

  Or else: “One can learn about the world even in a prison cell; indeed, one learns most of all there.”

  Or yet again: “I don’t like it when the world from which we have been excluded is constantly portrayed as if it were ours.”

  “You’re talking double Dutch. And I say Dutch because that’s the only language I understand not one word of.”

  But I can see that he is nettled, and that’s enough for me. Sas, by the way, is a columnist for an illustrated weekly magazine, covering the major European languages as translator and discreetly, slyly, sensitively, and knowledgeably promoting the national line as feuilletonist and leader-writer for the inner pages. He had mentioned that Grün would be coming and wanted to see me as one of the relics of his former life. They had just happened to be discussing whether to call me by telephone.

  To their great delight, I ordered a black coffee. I then rattled off a string of questions that I supposed one asks on such occasions. Mijnheer Van de Gruyn affected modesty: he had achieved a thing or two, to be sure, but he was not yet what one would call a big name. Sas let out a sharp guffaw at that. Family? Yes, a wife and a five-year-old daughter.

  “Didn’t I tell you?” asked Sas.

  “Of course you did. Just checking,” I tried to extricate myself. I was dismayed to sense that I was starting to run out of questions. Fortunately, Grün took over: he had heard from Sas that I was having success writing comedies, so he would like to see one of them.

  “None of them is running at the moment,” I apologized.

  Well in that case he would read them, he said.

  “It’s not worth it,” I tried to talk him out of it. “They’re no good.” Grün let out a protracted guffaw at this and slapped me heartily on the back with his bony hand. He plainly thought I was joking.

  “He hasn’t changed a bit,” he gurgled happily.

  “There isn’t another person between the Yellow Sea and the Elbe who has sorted out his life as well as he has,” Sas bragged on my behalf with a paternalistic smile.

  “The same for yourself,” I offered no less charitably.

  “My dear chap,” Gerendás said, turning serious, “there’s a big demand for good comedies back in the West.”

  Only then did I realize that I was sitting right in the middle of a farcical misunderstanding.

  “I don’t write comedies any more,” I said.

  “What then?” enquired Mijnheer Peeperkorn. The devil knows what got into me, but it seems the wish to open up got the better of me. Maybe I did it out of perplexity; after all, I was sitting among colleagues. But it could be that what fleetingly crossed my mind was Goethe’s good counsel that in order to preserve our poetic works from starvation, it behooves us to converse with well-intentioned connoisseurs about their origins, thereby bestowing historical value on them.

  “I’ve written a novel,” I announced modestly.

  “Aha!” enthused Van de Gruyn.

  “And you didn’t say a word about it to me?!” Sas gave me an offended look.

  “When is it due to be published?” Gerendás put his finger on the practical aspect of the matter.

  “That’s just it: it won’t be published,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The publisher rejected it.”

  “Oh, I see, zo,” Mijnheer Gruyn remarked with a slight foreign inflection, his face meanwhile assuming a noncommittal expression.

  Sas, by contrast, seemed to liven up: which publishing house had rejected it, and why, he wanted to know. I replied that I didn’t know the reason, but I had received a preposterous letter from which it was clear that they had either not understood, or not wanted to understand, the novel because, I explained, it seems they ascribed any marks that it hit as down to pure luck, its audacity to clumsiness, its consequentiality to deviation.

  “What is the novel about?” Sas asked.

  Whatever the reason, there was no denying my embarrassment.

  “What any novel is about,” I said cautiously, “it’s about life.”

  Sas was not one to be thrown off so easily:

  “Let’s drop for once the high-flown philosophical expositions you normally give us,” he warned. “What I wanted to know is what, specifically, your specific novel is about. Is it set in the present day?

  “No,” I said.

  “Then when?”

  “Oh … during the war.”

  “Where?”

  “In Auschwitz,” I whispered.

  Slight silence.

  “Of course,” Van de Gruyn remarked with grudging commiseration, as if he were speaking to a half-cured leper, “you were in Auschwitz.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Have you taken leave of your senses?” Sas had recovered from his initial astonishment. “A novel about Auschwitz! In this day and age! Who on earth is going to read that?”

  “Nobody,” I said, “because it’s not going to be published.”

  “Surely you didn’t suppose,” he asked, “that they were going to fling their arms round your neck?”

  “Why not? It’s a good novel,” I said.

  “Good? What do mean by good?”

  “What else?” I stuttered. “Good means good. A self-explanatory whatsit … that is to say … good an und für sich, if I may put it that way.”

  “An und für sich,” Sas glanced at Gerendás, as if he were interpreting my words, then slowly turned his elegant, narrow, sharp-beaked head back toward me, his half-closed eyes and the yellowish sideburns framing his ruddy face reminding me of a sad and sleepy, widely experienced fox. “An und für sich,” he repeated calmly. “But good for whom? What is anybody going to make of it?! Where are you living? Which planet do you think you are on?” he asked with growing distress. “Not a soul in the trade has ever heard of you, and you go and send in a novel, and to top it all one on a subject like that …”

  “That Sas,” Mijnheer Gruyn attempted to smooth things over, “he hasn’t changed a bit. He was always such a … what’s the phrase … smart-arse, azes ponem,” he gleefully hit upon the words he had been seeking. “Do you remember when …”

  But by now there was no holding Sas back; me neither, for that matter.

  “In other words, I’m not entitled to write a good novel!” I heard the angry yelps of my own voice.

  “That’s it exactly.” Sas was jubilant. “I couldn’t have put it better myself. No one is looking for a good novel from you, old chap. What evidence do you have that you can write a good novel? Even if we suppose that it really is good, where’s the guarantee for it? No expert, my dear chap, is simply going to believe the evidence of his own eyes! Your name is unknown,” he kept count of the points on his fingers, “You have no one behind you, the subject isn’t topical, no one is going to
deal you the ace of trumps. What do you expect?”

  “But what if,” I asked, “someone were to submit a brilliant novel?…”

  “You’re obviously talking about yourself,” Sas pronounced.

  “Let’s suppose,” I conceded.

  “First of all, there’s no such thing as a brilliant novel,” Sas patiently enlightened me. “Secondly, even if there is, so much the worse. This is a small country; what it needs is not geniuses but honest, hardworking citizens who …”

  “Yes, all right,” Van de Gruyn took pity. “But now that he’s gone and finished a novel … Possibly,” he ventured cautiously, “you could give it to me … I’m staying for another two weeks, I might be able to zip through …”

  “That’s it!” I said, “You translate it and publish it in Holland!”

  Mijnheer Gruyn seemed thunderstruck:

  “I don’t have anything to do with translating,” he said, “I sometimes have need of help myself with the language.” In his agitation, his Hungarian was deteriorating. “That’s a complete … what’s the word … absurdity!… Anyway,” he rallied gradually, “even back in the West it’s no pushover for novels. There you have top pros, you see, and they know what’s what. To make money with a subject like that, well you need to have something! With Anne Frank the Dutch have already got that particular subject, what d’you call it …”

  “Sewn up,” I hastened to his assistance.

  “Not quite that, but if you can’t bring anything new … add something … and even back in the West a publisher’s rejection slip is hardly a letter of recommendation for a novel … unless of course,” a pensive expression appeared hesitantly on his face, “the author is the sort of personality who just happens …”