Fiasco

by Imre Kertész

  It was not this letter that exasperated Köves; he had completed the task he set himself, and—write to him whatever they liked—he was left with no doubts on that score; as to whether the novel stirred or didn’t stir the reader, Köves regarded that as no more than an exasperating and superfluous matter that they simply wanted to foist upon him, though it had nothing to do with him. For all that, a concept like “the reader,” along with the maniacal self-importance of the publisher’s letter on the subject of this by no means clarified, yet—for him at least—completely abstract concept gave Köves no rest, and in the end made him conscious of a strange circumstance that suddenly appeared before him in an aspect of forceful absurdity, namely that he was a writer. Up till then, that had never occurred to Köves, or if it had, then in a different form; certainly not in the way in which he now, in the light of the publisher’s letter, glimpsed himself, expelled from, and yet at the same time objectified in, this wretched line of occupation. There was no getting away from it, he had written a novel, but only in the sense that he would have flung himself out of even an aircraft into nothingness in the event of a terminal disaster, if he saw that as the sole possibility for survival; all at once it became obvious to Köves that, figuratively speaking, he could now only hit the ground as a writer or vanish into nothingness. This, though, awakened the most peculiar questions and thoughts in Köves. Before all else, whether this was what he had wanted, or to put it another way, whether it had actually been his goal, when he had set the task for himself as a result of the dawning of enlightenment, to become a writer? Köves no longer recalled; the years had washed away the memory of the moment, the experience of enlightenment had turned into wearisome effort, one might say a kind of slave labour, its purport continued to operate in Köves merely in the form of an implacable command spurring him on to accomplish his task. As a result, clarification of the question called for further reflection from Köves. He imagined, for instance, that the publisher had not written that letter, but exactly the opposite sort of letter. What was more—and Köves had heard that this sort of thing had happened in times past—the publisher’s readers, the editor in chief at their head, would turn up at his home around dawn to assure him they had spent the entire night reading his novel in one sitting, passing pages from one to the other, and that the reader was indubitably going to be stirred to the core, so that they were going to bring it out right away. And then?—a sour note of scepticism resurfaced for Köves. What did one book signify, bearing in mind that at least one million book titles were published annually across the face of the globe, if not more? What could a reader’s fleeting emotion signify (in his mind’s eye, Köves saw the deeply stirred reader as, in search of a fresh stirred feeling, he was already stretching out a hand absent-mindedly to the shelf for a new book) as compared with the years that he, Köves, had dedicated to his task as he ruined his life, drained himself, and tortured his wife? And finally, how could he be reconciled to the practical outcome of his all-consuming task: a pitiful fee—to get to the bottom of all this, Köves had recently been making enquiries to this end—that could be earned within a few months in any branch of industry which was useful, unquestionable, and not subject to assessment by any publisher’s reader?

  Nothing became clearer to Köves than the fact that he had reached a dead end; he had irretrievably frittered away his time, what was more. He grew sick of novel-writing for good; indeed, sobering up as it were from an unbroken drunken binge which had lasted ten years, Köves was now unable to grasp with a clear head how he could have gone in for such a crazy undertaking. If he could at least be acquainted with the reason, then—or at least so Köves felt—he might find some solace in necessity. Like everyone else, he had naturally heard that what supposedly swept a person onto the novel-writing path was talent. For Köves, though, that term had signified nothing tangible. It somehow struck him in much the same colouring as saying about someone that his face flaunted a charming wart. That wart could later, no question, develop into an ugly inflamed lesion, even a malignancy, or it could remain as an attractive blemish—that was obviously a matter of luck. Except that Köves had never discovered on himself any irregularity of that kind; he had never considered himself to be the owner, whether privileged or unfortunate, of any kind of proud, innate distinguishing mark. The fault had to be lurking elsewhere, Köves reckoned, somewhere deeper down; in himself, in his circumstances, in his past, maybe even—who knows?—in his character: in everything that had happened to him, in the whole course of his life, to which he had not paid sufficient attention. If he could at least have his time over again, begin again from the beginning, Köves had daydreamed, everything would work out differently; he would know now where he ought to correct and change it. All of which, as he had been well aware, was impossible, and that was when he had decided on the trip. Not that he wished to leave his wife, home, and homeland in the lurch, but he had felt that he was in need of new inspiration, that he needed to dip his toes in foreign waters in order to be rejuvenated: he longed to be far away in order to get closer to himself, so that he might discard all that was old and lay hands on something new—in short, in order to discover himself and so begin a new life on new foundations.

  Köves dreams. Then he is called for

  Köves was also spurred on by a dream—the sort of constantly recurrent dream which visits everybody from time to time. It began with floating: Köves in nothingness. It was a twinkling nothingness, with minute points of light all around, like stars, yet it was a nothingness, and the many tiny lights led Köves astray more than they set him in the right direction. That was followed by anxiety, a bitter consciousness of a sense of his own confinement in big spaces; yet he was not afraid of becoming lost, that he would, as it were, be dissolved and vanish into thin air: on the contrary, even in his dream Köves distinctly felt he was apprehensive of coming across something. He was looking for something, but did not wish to find it; or to be more accurate, he wanted to find something, but not what he was looking for. His uneasiness kept growing, then all of a sudden scraps of things were being cast in front of Köves, as if they had been thrown aloft by the invisible jets of a diabolical fountain: faces and objects that were familiar to him. A face he loved, an object he saw, or made use of daily, a belonging he wore every day. He tried, but failed, to touch them, take them in his hands; he felt the objects and faces were somehow reproachfully watching his forlorn clawing after them, which was why they had offered themselves to him, so as to force him to struggle and, as it were, demonstrate that he was unable to grab hold of them. Köves felt that their distressing helplessness, their slipping past him, their sinking back down and dispersion, was his own fault: yes, he felt it was a fault that he was struggling in vain for them, that he was unable to hold in his hands things, each and every one of which was longing for the warmth of his touch. Köves sensed that desire clearly, including the clumsy yearnings of inanimate objects, which was why he was fleeing from them. He finally left them behind, or they disappeared, whereas he entered some sort of cavity: a cave or tunnel of some kind. It was nice there, because the tunnel was safe, dark, and warm; it would have been nice to stay there, to hide in the gloom, yet Köves was driven by an involuntary momentum, over which he had no control, to carry on further, onward, toward the light glimmering in the distance. The tunnel widened out all at once, expanding into a circular area, and Köves could see flaming letters as a kind of mene, mene, tekel, upharsin on the wall opposite. At first glance, he was terrorstricken by them, but then he noticed it wasn’t so bad as all that; he was standing in a square that was well known to him—probably somewhere around the middle of the Grand Boulevard—and he was looking at the letters of a modern advertisement flashing in red, yellow, and blue neon, only these letters were varying their colours, indeed even their shapes, so quickly that in the end Köves, though he sensed they contained an extraordinarily important message of which everyone in the world, except him alone, was aware, was unable to assemble a single wor
d out of them. While he battled with growing irascibility to make sense of them, the letters seemed to have suddenly gone mad, first starting to spin at an ever-crazier speed, after which the coloured lights blurred hopelessly together and faded, so that in the end Köves could only see a barely glowing sphere somewhere far below his feet, with himself again floating in nothingness. Only then did he notice how greatly the sphere resembled the Earth, with some sort of outline showing on it, though not one of the continents or oceans—rather a tangled contour, a peculiar shade which kept changing shape like an indolent marine jellyfish, assuming ever more dreadful forms. Köves sensed with horror that this incessantly moving shadow, these continually transforming lines, must resemble something, or rather: someone, moreover an inexpressibly important being, to whom Köves could not say offhand whether he was bound by fear or attraction, but who—and he was quite sure about this, by contrast—was projecting the dark, amorphous blot onto this milky-white globe. He had to puzzle out who it could be; straining every nerve, he racked his brains, then all at once, but in a voice which was almost earsplitting, he heard his own name called.

  Only his dream could have intensified the voice so hugely, for it was the customs man calling him from the door, and in all probability he had been obliged to repeat the name twice or three times over until Köves at last grasped, with embarrassment, that he had fallen asleep while waiting, and he now leapt hastily to his feet in order to follow the customs man into the office.

  Customs inspection

  Although still slightly drowsy, Köves nevertheless noticed a number of changes inside the room. First and foremost, and it may have been an incidental circumstance, but it struck Köves with the very first breath of air he took, was that the room was now full of harsh tobacco smoke. He blinked in disgruntlement, the acrid air irritating him to cough: he was not used to tobacco like that—at all events, to something a cut better. Apart from that, there were now three people sitting facing him, with on each of the two outer chairs a customs man, one of whom was Köves’s acquaintance, the other and also another—Köves could hardly characterize them better than that, because although obviously differed from his colleague in respect of personal features, through his uniform and the indifference reflected on his face, he looked exactly the same, and he knew that his customs man was who he was from the fact that he had just seen him take his seat on the chair to the right. The person seated in the middle Köves would have taken, at first glance, to be a soldier had he not quickly established that nothing supported that assumption, apart from the fawn-coloured tunic and the shirt and necktie of military hue: he carried no insignia of rank, nor belt nor shoulder strap by way of trimming, and so, Köves concluded, could not be a soldier, after all. In the end he decided that he too was a customs man, though clearly a different type of customs man—some sort of chief customs officer. Before them, in the middle of the table, he saw his suitcase again.

  As he stepped into the room—on the principle that one should always be polite with customs men—Köves gave a friendly greeting of good evening, then waited attentively for their questions. Yet whether because they had not yet decided what to ask, or for some other reason of which Köves could not be aware, they asked nothing. One was smoking a cigarette, the second was leafing through documents of some kind, the third was scrutinizing him; they merged together in his blurred gaze in such a way that Köves finally saw them as a single triple-headed, six-armed machine, and it was obviously attributable to a brain confused by exhaustion that he suddenly caught himself on the point of racking his brains for an excuse, like somebody whom they had seen through and whose secret they had discovered—secret or offence, it came to same thing—which they were about to spring on him as a surprise, as Köves personally was not yet clear what it was.

  “I wasn’t given a customs declaration form,” he remarked in the end, rather brusquely, in order to restore a due sense of proportion and order as it were.

  “Do you have anything to declare, then?” the man in the middle said, immediately raising his head from his documents.

  “I don’t know what is dutiable here,” Köves replied with icy politeness. A number of articles were reeled off; Köves mulled them over conscientiously, even reciting certain items to himself, in the manner of a respectful foreigner, who is showing he does not overestimate the local authorities precisely by showing his esteem, indeed even permitting himself a degree of persnicketiness in order to emphasize his goodwill, but at the same time also his rights, before replying that to the best of his recollection his baggage did not contain any of the articles that had been enumerated. But, he added immediately, if they wished, they should convince themselves of the fact. Whereupon he was given the answer that it was up to him to know what was in his luggage, to which Köves inquired whether they wished to inspect his suitcase.

  “Should I open it?” he asked, and without waiting for an answer, with a strange zeal that even he sensed was excessive but was no longer able to keep in check, as if someone else were acting on his behalf, he leapt toward his case in order to snap open the locks. His efforts were superfluous, however: the case was already open. And when he hastily raised the top, although he found his belongings more or less in order, they were nevertheless not in the lovingly careful, painstaking order in which his wife had packed them for him.

  He stared in astonishment into his suitcase, as if something indecent had been concealed in it.

  “But you’ve already inspected it!” he exclaimed.

  “Naturally,” the chief customs man nodded. Without saying a word, he scrutinized Köves for a while, and Köves could have sworn he saw the shadow of a smile of sorts flit across the narrow, pallid face. “You are always acting as if you were surprised,” he added, and Köves noticed that he exchanged a quick glance with his own customs man: he had to suppose that the latter had already briefed his boss on how he, Köves, had conducted himself in the course of their earlier conversation.