Fiasco

by Imre Kertész

  “And who are you?” At which Köves started slightly: he was suddenly beset by a vague feeling that his negligence could land him in trouble, even though he had no idea what act of negligence he may have committed—besides being there, of course.

  In the manner of someone in whom resentment at being intimidated finally prevails over the fear in itself, he flung his reply back at the Customs man in such a way that he himself was unsure whether he was on the attack or defence, or simply telling the truth:

  “Who am I? Nobody!” He was just about to add that it was sheer chance that he had stepped out of the door at that moment, but, even though it fully accorded with the truth, he vaguely felt that would be a form of betrayal vis-à-vis the old fellow, as if he were meaning to say that he, Köves, had nothing to do with the whole business, though as far as that goes it was again no more than the truth, of course.

  He therefore said:

  “My name is Köves.” Tossing in, with an added disparaging edge: “A worker,” even though he himself did not know what the reproach covered, or to precisely whom it was addressed, so that in all likelihood it went unnoticed.

  After that Köves was further held up on the steps for long minutes while he fumbled uncertainly in his pockets, as if he were searching for something that he just could not lay his hands on—his cigarettes, perhaps, although of late he had given up smoking—and in the meantime the whole stairwell around him was filled up with quiet rustling: it may have been his fraught imagination playing tricks on him, but Köves fancied he could pick out a quiet clicking of keys in locks, a cautious clumping of windows being shut, until he heard from the street the dull thuds of suitcases being tossed up onto the back of a truck, followed by the rumble of a truck engine, at which Köves was finally able to scurry down the stairs and sneak out of the entrance hall, and warily at that, lest the janitor notice him and happen to suppose he had seen something.

  Accident. Girlfriend

  That morning, Köves made his way alone along a by now deserted street from the tram toward the steelworks; at the gates, the head gatekeeper asked him sternly, as if he had never seen him before (which might have been the case, of course, given the number of workers in the factory), who he was looking for, while Köves, perhaps in the irrational hope that he might sneak past without attracting attention, tossed out while he was still in motion:

  “A worker from the machine shop,” flashing toward the gatekeeper the entry permit with his photograph that he had been given not long before.

  “You’re late, you mean,” the gatekeeper stated, blocking Köves’s path and taking his card away from him so as to note down the details for the report he would have to file on Köves’s late arrival, whereas Köves—well aware that lateness was treated severely, almost more severely, in his experience, than work itself, as if some general inclination (or its lack) could be deduced from it—tried pleading, albeit without much conviction:

  “Not by a lot,” which only obliged the head gatekeeper to look at the clock.

  “Three minutes,” he said, stepping into his glass box and sitting down at the desk, whereupon Köves, who remained standing in the doorway and rested against the frame as if he were already tired out, badly and massively tired, though the day had not even started, remarked, more due to his overwrought state than in any hope of pulling a fast one on the head gatekeeper:

  “It wasn’t my fault,” though he immediately regretted it, because in response to the head gatekeeper’s question:

  “Whose then?” he was not really in a position to give an answer that would have dispelled any doubt. There is no denying that at that moment Köves would have been hard put to say whose fault it was that he was late: perhaps himself most of all, since, from the head gatekeeper’s point of view, he, Köves, should undoubtedly have been honour-bound to push aside—whether politely or rudely, but in any event citing the punctuality expected of him—all those standing in his way, shake them off, cut his way through them, and set off for the factory, having given deeper weight to the thought that the head gatekeeper was hardly going to appreciate the emotions that had nonetheless been surging through Köves to detain him in the stairwell. What weighed still more heavily in the scales was the fact that Köves felt he was unable to set forth his reasons, would simply have been unable to relate to the head gatekeeper that morning’s events, at least the way they happened—there, by the head gatekeeper’s desk, where everything was impelling him to the crucial and the rational, Köves suddenly saw that this story was simply untellable. If he were to come out with it all the same, he would probably lose the thread, being forced into all sorts of evasions in the course of which his true feelings would come to light (those feelings now appeared to Köves as if it were not he who was feeling them and they were only importuning him like some evil-minded gang in order to make him their accomplice, although Köves was guilty of nothing, of course, unless of being late), so what he said in the end was:

  “I got caught in a traffic jam,” but fortunately the head gatekeeper did not notice his discomfiture (he had very likely had a shrewd idea what the answer would be, having heard a more than a few excuses of that kind over the years), and now that he had finished writing, he got up from the desk:

  “You need to be prepared for that. The next time set off half an hour earlier,” he advised Köves and handed back his pass.

  Not much later, Köves was standing by a workbench and trying to file the upper surface of a lump of steel level, filing—so it seemed—being the key concomitant of the machine fitter’s craft, for Köves had signed on at the steelworks as a machine fitter, even though he was not a machine fitter, and if he were to be a worker, he had no wish to be a machine fitter; Köves had his own notions about that, until of course he came up against the reality of it. In his mind’s eye, Köves had seen a big, clean space and, in a well-lit place at one of the workbenches, himself, possibly in a white overall, surrounded by minute tools and tiny precision machines, where, possibly with a magnifying lens in one eye (the spectacle of Pumpadour, whom he had seen so many times in the South Seas, may have been somewhat instrumental in this), as he fabricated some tiny device that would then move, tick, whirr, or spin. It turned out, however, that it was useless his hankering after that sort of work, the factories in the city were mostly steelworks, and a steelworks devours manpower, so they were always taking people on, and at the employment office Köves was advised to sign on as a machine fitter. Köves was none too eager, on the grounds that if there were fitters, what was the point of a machine fitter, why not a locksmith, who—Köves imagined—produced locks, keys, fastenings, that kind of thing, and for whom a day would come when he could set off on a stroll round the city, or so Köves imagined, and from time to time peep into the entrance to an apartment block, maybe even walk round the outside corridor, and have the modest satisfaction of being able to tell himself that he had made this or that lock, or whatever, but there they were: those were objects that preserved, albeit anonymously, a trace of his handiwork. Köves had barely any idea about machine fitting, or at most no more than he had acquired once, a long time ago—long, long ago, it seemed to Köves, when he was still a small child—at a railway station, that having been a time when Köves took an extraordinary interest in locomotives, and at the station two black men (everything about them was black: their clothes, their tools, their faces, and their hands) had banged on the wheels of a locomotive with big hammers, prompting Köves to ask his companion (no doubt one of his parents) who they were and being told: machine fitters, and henceforth whenever machine fitters crossed his mind (and of course they rarely did cross his mind) he would visualize them as, so to say, fairytale monsters of that kind, a sort of cross between a giant and a devil. It soon became clear, though, that this was the only opening on offer at the employment office: what had been brought to Köves’s attention at his first word, as a piece of good advice, proved, as such, to be more of a command for him, he only had to sign a bit of paper that—to Kö
ves’s amazement—was already waiting for him, completed, as if the office had already been counting on his coming by: of course it is possible that it was just some impersonal form onto which they would subsequently enter the precise particulars (Köves did not see clearly what they thrust in front of him then snatched away immediately after). Afterwards, he even haltingly brought up the objection that he knew nothing about the craft: never you mind, they had replied, they’ll teach you within six weeks. Köves had left the office with mixed feelings (he was supposed to report early the next day at the steelworks); he felt a degree of incredulity over the notion that within six weeks he would become proficient in all the ins and outs of a craft which could hardly be simple, on top of which he shuddered at the thought that he might have to serve an apprenticeship among trainee kids.

  As luck would have it, there was no question of that; the people around Köves learning the machine-fitting craft were all adults, some learning for one reason, some for another (in most cases the exact reason never emerged, and making enquiries, for which Köves had neither the time nor the inclination, seemed to be frowned on there), but in any event next to Köves a slim man with a moustache and a pleasant outward appearance was filing, engrossed in his work and silently, in shirtsleeves and a peaked cap of a kind that at most Köves might have seen abroad, had he been interested in equestrian sports, as well as gloves that an expert eye would have been able to recognize, despite the wear and tear, the stains and holes, as being made of buckskin. Had he been fired from somewhere? Or was some guilt burdening his conscience (like Köves’s, too, in all probability), and had he become a machine fitter as a punishment or, for that matter, out of clemency? Or had he perhaps originally had an occupation which had now simply lost relevance, become unnecessary, like that of the sluggish, slightly burly figure who was filing away a bit farther off, whose closer friends would sometimes, within earshot, call “Mr. Counsellor?” Köves had no way of knowing.

  People of all sorts were there, though, from the mysterious to the simple, from those who were upright to the more slovenly, indeed uncouth; there were even a few female machine fitters—on Köves’s other side, for instance, there was a girl filing away, and highly competently too: Köves would occasionally watch enviously, yet at the same time with a tinge of smiling acknowledgement, how in her eagerness her lithe body would quiver all over, her headscarf would slip away from the glossy black hair, tiny beads of sweat would appear on her upper lip, and the girl would sometimes catch him looking, smiling the first time secretively, later on more boldly, and by now sometimes throwing out the occasional remark to Köves, to which Köves, his attention wandering, yet still like someone withstanding the challenge, would toss back some repartee. At other times, he would fasten his gaze on a pair of identical men—at any event both were stocky and balding, both were wearing brand-new blue overalls, which in Köves’s eyes unaccountably looked like the external mark of some resolve, not unlike new penitents who don a monk’s cowl yet, out of old habit, still get it made by their own tailor, filed away with dour assiduity: they were there in the morning, they disappeared in the evening, and they spoke not a word either to others or to each other; Köves heard that they had been dismissed from somewhere, but they considered that this had been a blunder and were now waiting as machine fitters for light to be cast on that blunder, and the reason they were so guarded was that they were afraid a fresh blunder might befall them, or even that they themselves might commit one.

  In short, Köves was making do there (to some extent, being present as if he was not present at all, or as if it was not he who was present: an illusory feeling, since it was he after all), and he had already been touched to cheery wonder by the obscure minor delights of a worker’s life: those of the lunch hour, the end of the shift, even of a job of work well done, though the latter was not entirely unalloyed, given that, to tell the truth, Köves had little success with the file; he would never have believed that to smooth a lump of steel immaculately level could be so beyond his powers. Köves regarded filing as almost a matter of honour, and it had got to the point that he now dreamed about it: he stood transfigured at the workbench, iron filings falling from under the file in a flurry of grating, scraping noises, but to no avail, as the foreman—a stout, flaxen-haired man who walked up and down good-naturedly, though somewhat lethargically, among the people bent over their vises and from time to time, with a gesture that was patient but showed little in the way of encouragement, would make an adjustment to the way Köves was holding his elbow or hand—with the aid of a tiny, gallows-like measuring tool was always able to point to some bump or hollow, disfigurement or crookedness on the lump of steel on which Köves had laboured with such furious care.

  Köves derived some solace from drilling: that went well for him, one might even say splendidly, as unlike others he never snapped the bits, while he was also able to look forward to plate-shearing with definite confidence—they had tried it out that afternoon, with the gentleman-rider taking a turn at the metal shears before Köves and the girl after him, with the girl calling something across to him with a smile (Köves did not understand it: it sounded as though it were meant to encourage or spur, even urge him on, but in any case Köves had thrown back some facile comment while he set the metal plate in position, then gave a self-confident heave on the steel handles of the shears, heard a cry and was astonished to see the girl’s horrified expression, only after which did something warm pour down his forehead: it seemed he must have stood the wrong way at the machine, and as he had heaved it toward himself the handgrip had banged on his head.

  As to what happened to him and around him after that, Köves was only able to follow it with a docile absent-mindedness, like someone who has laid down his arms and allows himself to be swept along by events (which are none too important anyway). Out of the hubbub which arose around him he could again clearly pick out the girl’s appalled yet almost boastful exclamations of “it’s my fault it happened, my fault for telling him to get a move on,” after which a white handkerchief was held to his forehead—more than likely that too was the girl’s. Köves stained the handkerchief quite profusely with his blood, then they lay him down on a bench to staunch the flow, and after that they got him to his feet after all, when they decided that he needed to be taken to the factory’s doctor. As well as he could remember, Köves did not see the girl among those who accompanied him, having sought her in order to return the handkerchief, so he stuffed it in his pocket, even though in doing so he had no doubt daubed blood all over his pocket. They crossed various courtyards before finally reaching the surgery, where the factory doctor pronounced that, the shock aside (though he was not in the least bit of shock), there was nothing seriously wrong with Köves, at which the escort (somewhat disappointed, he thought) left Köves to himself with the doctor and the nurse working alongside him. With rapid, skilled movements, they carried out several procedures on his head (Köves caught the pungent smell of disinfectant and felt some stinging), as a result of which a plaster, rakishly slanted and not too large, ended up on Köves’s brow, directly under the hairline. The doctor told him that he had “stitched” the wound and, enunciating clearly so that Köves, being a simple worker, should be able to understand him, made him promise not to touch the plaster and to come back for it to be treated in three days’ time. He could return to work the next day, he added; the wound did not justify his being put on the sick list. Köves was then allowed to lie for half an hour on the surgery’s couch, and by the time the half hour was up, the shift had also ended.

  Köves nevertheless went back to the locker room, partly in order to change, but mainly so as to get a shower: he was able to wash down every day in the steelworks shower room, and there were times when he was in low spirits and felt that the only reason it had been worth getting a job there was for the sake of its shower room, though now of course he had to twist his head about so as not to get the wound wet. While he was dressing, several people patted him chummily on the back,
after which he was soon joining the human flood pouring out of the factory.

  At the gate, or maybe even before (he was unsure), Köves found that the girl had appeared beside him. Everything that happened to them after that Köves accepted, without any particular surprise, assent or dissent, as a well-organized and self-explanatory process, as a fact that had long been decided and only needed them to recognize it so they might submit to it, even though to some extent that still depended on them, and to that extent Köves might have been mistaken all the same. It began with some teasing (what lodged most in Köves’s memory was the girl’s opening remark: “What an elegant plaster!”), after which somehow neither of them boarded the tram but instead they wandered around in what, for Köves, was the unfamiliar realm of the outer suburbs, where they came to some sort of park, then all of a sudden Köves found he was strolling with a good-looking, dark-haired girl under the leafy boughs of an avenue of trees, and from far away, with a somewhat astonished yet indulgent smile he was beholding a strange and unfamiliar thing happening to him—precisely the fact that he, Köves, was strolling under the leafy boughs of an avenue of trees with a good-looking, dark-haired girl. He was nagged by a vague anxiety, perhaps a presentiment of imminent danger, but defiant urge kept welling up in boiling waves to give way to her and perish.

  “Don’t you have a home to go to?” the girl asked, and Köves, coming round from his dreams as it were, could only echo the question:

  “Home?” as if he were surprised by the savour of the word, as well as the thought that he ought to be going home to somewhere. “No,” he then said, and the girl, averting her eyes as though she were not even addressing the question to Köves but to the trees lining the street:

  “Don’t you have a wife?” she asked; that, it seems, is what interests girls everywhere and at all ages equally.